Are You Ready To Spend More Time On What You LOVE? A Conversation with Gay Hendricks

In this episode we explore how to unleash and live in your genius. How do you discover what your genius is? How can you spend more and more of your time doing what you love? We discuss how you can unlock the incredible potential within yourself and avoid the traps that may stop you from getting there. We share the lessons learned from working with more than 20,000 people to help them on their own journeys to genius - and give you the exact strategies and tactics to create a positive upward spiral of genius for yourself with our guest Dr. Gay Hendricks. 

Dr. Gay Hendricks is the president of the Hendricks Institute and has been a thought leader in the fields of relationship transformation and body-mind therapies for over 45 years. Gay earned his Ph.D in counseling psychology from Stanford and taught at the University of Colorado for 21 years and has conducted seminars across the globe. He is also a multi-bestselling author, having written more than 40 books most recently The Joy of Genius which was released earlier this year!

• The 2 big issues that human beings face

• Upper limit problems 

  1. Living in your genius 

• People get used to operating at a certain level of success, happiness, etc - we often trip these fears that cause us to sabotage back to the levels we feel we deserve

• Lessons from working with over 20,000 people and 5000 couples 

• Almost everyone, no matter how successful you are, has a lot of potential left to be developed 

• We all have remaining potential left on the table in the form of our “Genius"

• Many of us get stuck in one of three boxes

• Incompetence

  1. Competence

  2. Excellence (the most dangerous) 

• All of these boxes prevent us from getting to the most important place - the place of Genius 

• You need to make a commitment to bringing forth your genius. You have absolutely no idea how much potential you have left inside of yourself. 

• It doesn’t matter how bright you are - it’s about making an inner commitment to bringing your genius out. That inner commitment is the first starting place. 

• How Gay went from spending 10% of his life doing what he loves - it took him years to get to 30%, years more to get to 50% - until 20 years later he spends 90% of his time doing what he loves 

• Every time you expand into more and more of what you love to do, it invites and brings in more energy 

• The first thing you need to do is find out if you’re courageous enough to make a heart felt commitment to living in your zone of genius 

• Simple Mantra - “I Commit To Bringing Forth My Genius No Matter What It Takes"

• Say that to yourself and mean it sincerely 

• You must find 10 minutes per day committed to finding your genius

• Ask yourself in a wondering way - “What is my Genius?"

• Genius is addictive and its contagious - the more you do it, the more you want to do it , the more you inspire people with your genius, the more people who get inspired 

• When you make a commitment to your own genius, you’re starting to inspire others to get in touch with their own genius as well 

• What is the genius Move? How can you do it ever day?

• What’s a Genius Moment? We are confronted with them every day. 

• A genius moment may look like a problem at the surface, but it’s often actually an invitation to spot your genius 

• When you come up with something that’s outside your control, that you don’t know how to control 

• There are some things you can control, and some things you cannot control 

• What often makes miserable is focusing on things that we don’t have control over whatsoever 

• None of us have any control whatsoever over the past - the only reason to think about the past is to identify something in this moment that you can do differently 

• Whenever you are worried about the past or worried about the future - that is an opportunity for genius

• Let go of the baggage and radiate into the presence - open up new space for your genius to emerge 

• True creativity is when you’re expressing your own genius - and when you’re doing it in a way that is inspiring others around you

• “All of humanities problems stem from not being able to sit quietly in a room” - Blaise Pascal

• Homework: Sit for 10 minutes quietly living with the question of “What is my genius?"

• If you already know what your genius is - ask yourself “ How can I bring forth my genius in a way that inspires me and other people I interact with?"

• How and why you can use “Wonder questions” to discover your life’s purpose 

Thank you so much for listening!

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

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [Book] The Joy of Genius by Gay Hendricks PH.D.

• [Website] Hendricks Institute

• [SoS Episode] How You Can CRUSH Self Sabotage with Dr. Gay Hendricks

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] 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 three million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries.

In this episode, we explore how to unleash and live in your genius. How do you discover what your genius is? How can you spend more and more of your time doing what you love? We discuss how you can unlock the incredible potential within yourself and avoid the traps that may stop you from getting there. We share lessons learned from working with more than 20,000 people to help them on their own journeys to genius and give you the exact strategies and tactics to create a positive upward spiral of genius for yourself with our guest, Dr. Gay Hendricks.

Do you need more time? Time for work, time for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our e-mail list. It’s called How You Can Create Time for the Things That Really Matter in Life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the e-mail list at successpodcast.com.

You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our e-mail subscribers. We recently pre released an episode in an interview to our e-mail subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience. That had tremendous implications, because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first.

With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live exclusive interview just for e-mail subscribers. There's some amazing stuff that's available only to e-mail subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the e-mail list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the home page.

Or if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you're on the go, you don't have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44-222. That’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we explored how you can confidently be yourself even if you're afraid what other people may do or think. We discussed how your obsession with niceness and people-pleasing is often a problem and shared specific strategies you can use to overcome it. We talked about the power and importance of saying no and the right way to do it, so that you can move away from approval seeking and step into bold authenticity with our previous guest, Dr. Aziz Gazipura. If you want to stop being afraid to be yourself, listen to our previous episode.

Now for our interview with Dr. Hendricks.

[0:03:03.2] MB: Today, we have another incredible guest back on the show, Dr. Gay Hendricks. Gay is the President of the Hendricks Institute and has been a thought leader in the fields of relationship, transformation and body mind therapies for over 45 years. He earned his PhD in counseling psychology from Stanford and taught at the University of Colorado for 21 years. He's conducted seminars across the globe and is a multi-bestselling author of over 40 books, most recently of which is The Joy of Genius. Gay welcome back to the Science of Success.

[0:03:31.4] GH: Thanks a lot Matt. It's really great to be back with you and your audience.

[0:03:35.3] MB: Well, we really enjoyed the conversation the first time around and obviously you've got this new book coming out, which is the sequel to The Big Leap, which is a phenomenal book and really transformational book personally for me. I'd love to start with just rehashing some of the key themes and ideas, because what you write about in Joy of Genius really builds on the work from Big Leap. Tell me a little bit about the core ideas around Big Leap and this notion of upper limit problems and how we often self-sabotage and reset our happiness.

[0:04:05.2] GH: Yes. Well, The Big Leap is really about two big issues that human beings face. One of them, I gave the name for it many years ago. I started calling it the upper limit problem. What happens is that people get used to operating at a certain level of success, or a certain level of feeling good, or a certain level of flow of intimacy in their relationships. Then upper limits come up where certain fears get triggered inside ourselves and cause us to sabotage ourselves and bring us back down to a more familiar level. That's one thing The Big Leap is all about is how to spot your upper limit problems and how to handle those four or five key fears that are underneath the upper limit problem.

For example, many people as they get more successful, they trip an old fear inside of feeling unworthy, or low self-esteem and that causes them then to sabotage themselves. Other people trip a fear of outshining other people and that causes the upper limit problem to fall into place on them. The Big Leap is about the upper limit problem. It's also about genius and what I then called the zone of genius, I now call it the genius spiral in the new book. Because I began to feel that zone is a little limiting in itself and that it applies that it's an enclosed space.

I decided to come up with a new image and I call it now the genius spiral. I'll explain that in a moment, but genius is all about finding out what you most love to do inside. It also coincides with what you are most productive and contributive with. What I've found from working with people over the years, I think we've worked with about 20,000 people now in our seminars and about 4 or 5,000 couples in our relationship seminars, what we found is that almost everyone, no matter how successful you are, has still a lot of potential left to be developed.

I've worked with some of the best executives, I used to consult with the top team at Dell computer and I've worked with all sorts of different very bright people and I've never met one including myself that didn't have some remaining potential they were leaving on the table in the form of their genius. What happens is that many of us get stuck in one of three boxes. One is the incompetence box, where you're doing things that you're not very good at and complaining about it a lot. Number two is the competence box, where you're doing things that you're pretty good at but somebody else could do them just as well.

The third box that people, especially very bright capable people get stuck in is the excellence box where you're doing things that you're really good at and you get good feedback at and probably make good money at too, but it's not really what you want to be doing down in your heart and soul. What I say is that human beings need to make a commitment to bringing forth their genius, because people I've worked with, including myself and my wife and others right around us here come back later and think, “Wow, I had no idea I was leaving so much of my potential on the table unexpressed.”

Once you begin to look for and express your genius, I say you have absolutely no idea what miracles you can contribute in your life. The new book, The Joy of Genius builds on The Big Leap, because it's about soaring higher and higher on the genius spiral. It has its own set of moves and ideas in it, including the one you mentioned the genius move. I want to spend time talking to you about those kinds of things, but I wanted to give a little background in The Big Leap first.

[0:08:06.6] MB: What a great idea. I love this concept that even the most successful people have potential left on the table.

[0:08:14.5] GH: Yes, absolutely. In fact when I started thinking about this, I always tell people when they ask me how long did it take to write The Big Leap? I said, “Well, I thought about it for 30 years and then it took about a year to write it.” In thinking about it in the 30 years before I wrote The Big Leap, I discovered first of all in myself that I was only spending about 10% of my work time doing things I really love to do.

Here I was. I was a PhD from Stanford, so I oughta have known better. That's why I say it doesn't matter how bright you are, or how many PhDs are MDS or anything you have, it's all about making an inner commitment first of all, to bringing forth your genius. When I first started thinking about it I said, “Wow, I'm leaving 90% of my potential on the table.”

I began to first of all, make a commitment to it and then choose activities in my life that were based on things I love to do. My first goal, I just wanted to get from 10% up to maybe where I was spending a third of my time doing things I really loved to do. It took me a while to get there. I'm not saying this is an overnight thing. This sometimes takes – it took me a couple of years to get from 10% up to 30% of my time. Then it took me a couple more years to get up to 50% of my time.

After a few years I realized, “Hey, I'm spending half my time doing things I love to do. The rest of my time I'm spending time doing things I have to do, or promise somebody I’d do. They're not necessarily my genius, but I'm spending time on them.” I set the goal of doing 70% of my time in my zone of genius on the genius spiral. That took me a little while longer.

Now for the past 20 years or so, I spend 90% of my time doing what I most love to do, including what you and I are doing right now, Matt. I really enjoy, even though I've done hundreds and hundreds of interviews, every single one of them is a new opportunity for me to help people understand how to invite forth their genius. I can tell you from having lived my life over the past many years, there's nothing more satisfying than accessing your own genius and also inspiring the genius of people around you. To me, that's life at its best and that's what I want everybody that reads the joy of genius to learn how to do.

[0:10:42.8] MB: You bring up another really important conclusion in that story, and it's the idea that this is not a quick fix. It's not an overnight thing. It's about a slow building up of that genius muscle. I mean, I think it's such a great image. It took you years to go from 10% of your time in your place of genius to 30% of your time and years more to get to 50%.

For people listening, you think that you're going to get this magic answer that's going to instantly snap you into living your best life all the time, but the reality is it takes a lot of energy, it takes a lot of presence, it takes a lot of focus to every single day just expand and expand and expand and it's hard work.

[0:11:21.0] GH: Yeah. It's essential work. Though it took me a while, but it wasn't really hard in the sense that every time I expanded into doing more and more of what I most loved to do, it invites up more energy. Every time you make a bigger commitment to your genius, you get a bigger wave of energy that you can ride, so life always gives us exactly what we need. A lot of times, we're leaving on the table what we really want. What I really want people to do first and foremost is find out if they're courageous enough to make an actual heartfelt inner commitment to bringing forth their genius.

In The Joy of Genius, the new book I give some specific ways you can do that, but let me just give you a simple example, a 10 second example. It only takes 10 seconds to say to yourself, “I commit to bringing forth my genius, no matter what it takes.” I think it takes that commitment to doing it. You need to do whatever it takes to bring forth your genius. If you just said that simple sentence to yourself and meant it sincerely, “I commit to bringing forth my genius, no matter what it takes,” that simple commitment gets you into the game.

Even when we're working with super top-of-the-line Fortune 50 executives, we always start the same way. We ask them to make a commitment to bringing forth their genius. Then we ask them to make a commitment to spending at first 10 minutes a day focusing on it. No matter how busy somebody is, they can always find 10 minutes a day. Sometimes if people don't know what their genius is, we ask them to simply go in a room for 10 minutes and ask the question in a wondering way, “Hmm, what is my genius?” Take a notepad in and just jot down things that come forth. You might have to ask that a dozen times before anything comes.

Even if you spent the whole 10 minutes just saying, “Hmm, what really is my genius?” That would be valuable time spent, because you would be opening up to a very essential question that all of us need to answer.

If I may tell a quick story, my wife and I actually while we're doing this interview this month, we're having our 37th wedding anniversary this month. We've been married – we got married in Colorado and at our wedding which was up on the top of a mountain, in the middle of us saying our wedding vows, two beautiful hawks came way up in the sky above us and circled around and around riding wind currents up into the sky, higher and higher. It were such a beautiful metaphor that we actually got a picture of it on our wedding day and we think about that oftentimes and I think about that a lot when I was writing The Joy of Genius, because that's where I got the original idea for the genius spiral.

I noticed that those hawks as they were soaring higher and higher riding the wind currents and going around and around in this spiral, they were doing it absolutely effortlessly. They weren't working hard at it. They weren't flapping their wings wildly or anything. They were just making these little subtle adjustments that allowed them to ride higher and higher on the wind currents. I thought, “What a beautiful metaphor for how your exploration of genius can go, that it doesn't really need to be hard painful work. It's just a matter of committing to it and then staying in the flow of it.”

We ask people to begin with the 10-minute exercise, but what we know is that that 10 minutes is going to soon be 20 minutes. Because genius is addictive and it's contagious, the more you do of your genius, the more you want to do of your genius. The more you inspire other people with your genius, the more people get inspired. When I first started, I talked about these ideas first with a little group of six professionals and executives. From that, grew another group of 30 of them. After a while, I was talking to 500 people at a time about the upper limit problem and the genius spiral. Then it spiraled out to a few million people after I wrote The Big Leap.

What I'm telling people is that when you make a commitment to your own genius, you're also beginning a process that inspires people around you to be more in touch with their genius. That to me is the real joy of genius is when you feel it inside and you see it on the faces of the people that you inspire.

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[0:18:24.5] MB: How does this relate to what you've called the genius move?

[0:18:28.5] GH: Yes. Well, the genius move is something that happened, that you have the opportunity to do throughout the day. In The Joy of Genius, I describe what I call the genius moment. If you think about it, we're confronted with genius moments throughout the day and the genius move is what you do in that moment. Let me tell you how to spot a genius moment first; a genius moment may look like a problem on the surface, but what it really is is an invitation to calling forth your genius.

Here's a quick way to spot a genius moment; it's when you come up against something that is outside your control, that you don't know how to control. You probably know in the 12-step world and places like that, there's a tremendous emphasis on letting go of focusing on things that you don't have any control over and opening up to the real magic of the present moment. I want to give you a quotation from somebody from 2,000 years ago. There was a great philosopher named Epictetus.

The first line of his book says it all. I quote this in The Joy of Genius. Epictetus said, “The secret of happiness is knowing that there are some things you can control and some things you cannot.” If you think of the moments that go by during your day, a lot of the things that make us miserable is when we lock in and start obsessively thinking about things that we don't have any control over whatsoever.

I've worked with so many people that get all caught up in their minds about what other people think of them. If you think about it for a moment, none of us have any ability to control what other people think of us. It's a total wasted use of our mental abilities to obsess about that. Whereas, if you bring yourself into the present, into right now, there is probable something that you could do that's positive that would make people think well of you.

A lot of us don't get around to that, because we get all consumed with the activity in our mind and thinking about all the people we have to be responsible to, jamming up our minds with a real traffic jam of thoughts about things that we don't have any control over. Or here's another classic example; we work with people all the time here who are caught up with something that happened in their past. They can't let go of something that happened before; some bad thing they did, or some unpleasant event that happened, or some very painful event from early in their life.

If you think about for a moment, you realize that none of us have any control whatsoever over the past. There's only one reason to think about the past and that's to identify something in this moment that you can do differently. For example, if you're caught up in thinking about some relationship that was painful that happened some years ago, even if the person is dead, not even living, what we do here is we have people take an action in the present that gets them out of the past.

For example, there was a person once that I realized one day that I still owed some money to, a $160 to then I borrowed from this person to complete my graduate program at the University of New Hampshire in 1968. Then I got mad that this person. We got into a hassle and I ended up quitting my job. I guess, I used unconsciously the excuse that I was mad at him as an excuse not to pay him back. Some years later, that came into my mind and I said, “Wait a minute, that's an incompletion. I still owe him – I owe him more money now if I include a little interest.” I'm using in my mind the fact that I was angry at him to not keep an agreement that I made. I realized, that's such an unhappy making thing to do.

I got in touch with him and tracked him down. He was living 3,000 miles away by then, but tracked him down and was able to pay him money back and his money back and a little extra. I really, at that moment, I felt a relaxation inside that I'd never really felt before. That's an example of how to do something in the present that completes the past.

Whenever you find yourself thinking about the past, or worried about the future, that is a genius moment. Because in that moment, if you can use the genius move from The Joy of Genius, where I show you how to let go of all of that and radiate and illuminate the present to open into that beautiful big space of the present, the moment you learn how to do that with the genius move, you open up new space for your true genius to emerge.

When you're not caught up in thinking about the past, or not caught up and worried about the future, you will be amazed at how much genius, how much natural genius you have access to in that big open space called the present. What I try to do in The Joy of Genius is I wrote the book, so it's like just you sitting here in my office with me. If you buy the audiobook, particularly it's really like me talking to you in your ear. If you get the electronic book, you can always turn on the whisper sync and hear the audio in the background.

I'm very interested in creating the atmosphere in the book that people have here in my office. That's the value of The Joy of Genius. It gives you that real intimate approach where you can bring forth your genius in the quiet of yourself and by doing that, begin to inspire people around you in a way that maybe you've never inspired them before.

[0:24:43.9] MB: I think that's a great example and really provides a meaningful way to think about that in any moment when you're encountering a problem. How can you open yourself up to the present and really let your genius flow into that?

[0:24:55.6] GH: Yeah, it's absolutely crucial, because the thing is that I think if you look down inside yourself you personally, as well as folks that are listening to the podcast, if you check down in yourself, I bet you'll find as I did that there's a way you're never going to be quite satisfied in life, unless you're bringing forth your true genius.

I make a distinction in The Joy of Genius between ordinary creativity and true creativity. True creativity is when you're expressing your own genius and you're doing it in a way that inspires other people around you. That's the difference between true creativity and ordinary creativity. Ordinary creativity is when you're using your creativity to meet somebody else's goals, like through a regular job. You need to bring your creativity to it, but in a way you can't feel ultimately good about that because it's not your own creativity that you're using to develop your own life. I want people to have that intimate conversation with yourself.

There's a great philosopher 400 years ago, I think, now named Blaise Pascal. Blaise Pascal, I don't know too much about him, but I wrote down one thing that he said which just knocked my socks off some years ago. Here's the gist of what he said, he said, “All of humanity's problems stem from not being able to sit in a room by ourselves for 10 minutes doing nothing.” I thought that was such a genius statement, because if you think about it, what most of us need is a good 10 minutes a day of deep communion with who we really are and what we really want to bring forth into the world? What is my specific individual genius? What are my unique abilities? What do I love to do more than anything in the world?

As we begin to bring those forth, as you begin to invite that out into the world, it's just like miracles start to happen all around you. I wouldn't have been able to say this 30 or 40 years ago, because it felt I was breaking new ground in myself. When I started seeing the results around me, when I started working with executives and telling them about my journey and inviting them to open up to their true creativity and their true genius, it turned on lights in a lot of people that they had never experienced before. That ultimately led me to write The Big Leap.

What I've been working on in the nine years since The Big Leap came out was The Joy of Genius and how to put this thing called the genius move and the genius moment into something where people could actually hold this little book in their hand. When I say little yeah, I think it may be one of the shortest books I've ever read. It's only a 120 or 30 pages. You can literally read it on an airplane trip, like I got an e-mail yesterday from a guy executive back east who'd said he'd read it on the trip from Chicago back home to New York. He said, “I cannot write this down. I have to write you this fan letter.” He sat down in the airport when he got there and wrote this e-mail.

That's exactly what I want for the book is if you give it even 10 minutes and read the first chapter, I predict it's going to change your whole thinking about who you are and what your genius is. Then give it another hour, the commuter time from Chicago to New York, or New York to Washington, or LA to San Francisco, or Austin to Dallas and get that book out and just commit those commitments to memory that I give you in the book. They will really save your bacon on more than one occasion when times get tough.

I consider it my own personal handbook for healthy conscious living. It's the last one of these type of books I intend to write, because it really has everything I really think it's important to say about human transformation in it. I really invite everybody to take it and make it theirs. I appreciate you Matt for bringing forth what you're doing, because I appreciate the work that you do on helping people bring forth their genius every week through your – I've seen other people that you talk to and other conversations you have, and I really want to appreciate you for the quality of the conversations you're bringing into the world. You're obviously operating on the genius spiral yourself.

[0:29:40.2] MB: You're very kind. You're very kind. It's people like you helped me along my own journey of thinking about how I can tackle up or limit problems and try to bring forth my genius more frequently.

[0:29:51.9] GH: Well good. It's been a real pleasure talking to you. I would love to come back on sometime after the book’s been out for a few months and have everybody that's read it join us again and we'll go a little bit deeper on it.

[0:30:03.8] MB: Awesome. Well, I know you're short on time and you have to run. For one quick final question, what would be one action item you'd give to listeners other than checking out the book, as a piece of homework they could do to start bringing forth their genius?

[0:30:17.5] GH: I'll give you the same assignment I've given to billionaires here in my office or their offices, which is let's sit together for 10 minutes first. Just living in the question of what is my genius? If you already have a sense of what your genius is, ask another question, which is how can I bring forth my genius in ways that inspire me and people I interact with? How can I bring forth my genius in a way that inspires me and other people I interact with?

Take 10 minutes. Let's take Blaise Pascal's advice and go in a room by yourself, or with a coach for 10 minutes and just spend time asking that question. What we call them are wonder questions, because you're not trying to beat yourself up with the question like – you're not saying, “Oh, why can't I think about my genius?” You ask it in a wonder sense, “Hmm, what is my genius and how can I best bring it forth?”

[0:31:17.7] MB: Well, thank you once again for coming on the show. It's great to have you back on here. A huge fan of you and your work and we're so glad that you could join us once again.

[0:31:25.3] GH: Thank you very much, Matt. I appreciate you and what you're doing in the world. Thanks to all our – my Big Leap readers and the readers of the new book, I really appreciate you.

[0:31:35.1] 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 e-mail 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.

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Stop Being Afraid To Be YOU - The Power of Bold Authenticity with Dr. Aziz Gazipura

In this episode, we explore how you can confidently be yourself - even if you’re afraid of what other people may do or think. We discuss how our obsession with niceness and people pleasing is often a problem and share specific tools you can use to overcome it. We also talk about the power and importance of saying no - and the right way to do it so that you can move away from approval seeking and step into bold authenticity with our guest Dr. Aziz Gazipura. 

If you want to learn to be boldly authentic, crush anxiety, and stop people pleasing be sure to check out Dr. Aziz’s Confidence U by clicking here!!

Dr. Aziz Gazipura is a clinical psychologist and founder of The Center for Social Confidence, which is dedicated to helping others break through their shyness and social anxiety. He is the author of the #1 Amazon best-seller Not Nice: Stop People-Pleasing, Staying Silent, & Feeling Guilty... And Start Speaking Up, Saying No, Asking Boldly, And Unapologetically Being Yourself. Aziz’s work has helped thousands of people through workshops, coaching, media appearances, and more.

• Do you struggle with people pleasing and being afraid to say no to people?

• Should you stop being nice to people?

• What’s the difference between being nice and behind kind?

• Is the opposite of being nice being mean?

• Niceness is rooted in fear, not in love and connection

• Niceness is rooted in the idea that you want people to love you. 

• A lot of the behaviors that we think are nice often come from fear, obligation, or guilt 

• The opposite of niceness is BOLD AUTHENTICITY

• Niceness is a way of being that is focused on “damage control”- being in a place of “safety mode” 

• When we are focused on being nice our #1 priority is to focus on avoiding possible danger - making sure everyone is pleased 

• If you didn’t care at all what people thought of you - would couldn’t have any relationships - you would be a sociopath

• You don’t want the approval-seeking to dominate your actions and behaviors 

• The “MVP Question” that can change your life

• What do you want out of this situation?

  1. Not what you THINK you should do - but what YOU want to do

• “Nice conditioning” - is a pattern that is conditioned into us from an early age. We’re systemically told not to trust our own desires and to instead “do the right thing” and “be nice” 

• Is it selfish to ask “what do I want?"

• Why we’ve lost the ability to ask “what do I want” and how that is dangerous

• We need to move away from the toxic message that what you want is inherently bad or wrong 

• There is a big distinction between feeling and doing

• Clear the negativity away from asking what you want. 

• When you’re more in touch with what you want, it’s better for everyone 

• The classic example of being nice creating problems “I dunno whatever you want” (when picking food, movies, etc) 

• You gotta take some time to clear the fog and figure out what you really want 

• People watch an average of 11hrs/day of screen time in 2018 

• It’s really hard to figure out what you want when you’re compulsively externally focused (constantly on your screen, constantly on social media) 

• Why you should be more selfish

• Selfish is not binary - it’s not A or B - its a subjective label that you put on something 

• Selfishness is a spectrum - you can definitely go too far, but most people are way too far on the other direction of being too self-sacrificing

• Intense self-sacrifice might be essential in a time of crisis - but if you operate that way all the time 

• Excessive niceness is not benign - it’s coming from a place of fear, insecurity, and feeling threatened - and when you’re constantly in that space you are much more likely to experience symptoms of stress, anxiety, sickness, pain and more - TMS - Tension Mytosis Syndrome - from living in  place of chronic stress 

• First become AWARE that it’s OK to say no and that we need to say no

• To retrain from niceness to authenticity - it’s about being uncomfortable and discomfort training 

• How do you say No to people? 

• You live in a cloud of stories and dramatic fantasies about what will happen when you say no - TEST THE ASSUMPTION and see what happens. 

• Usually, nothing happens

  1. Even if someone has a negative response, you can handle it

  2. But it might be uncomfortable 

• Facing your fears and facing discomfort is like strength training 

• Make a commitment that you will say NO twice this week, and start saying no to more and more things 

• How do you say no? “Just start practicing and you will figure out how to do it” 

• Step One: Give yourself complete and total permission to say no. Remind yourself that you have permission to say no and that it’s healthy. 

• Step Two: Minimize and remove all qualifiers and explanations. 

• Step Three: Be willing to sit with the No. Don’t say anything or overcommit to anything else. 

• When saying no: It’s not that bad and you can deal with it even if it does get bad. 

• What are street shenanigans?

• You can be silly, you can be outrageous, you can say weird things, and you will be OK no matter what

• Doing pushups on a street corner, howling at strangers, and being awkward? 

• Why you should do a “social fitness” “warm up” to get out of your comfort zone. Friendly greetings to strangers is a great strategy for this. 

• The world is a friendly place. 

• There is a social “critical velocity” - overcoming the gravity of social anxiety - the more you break through the more velocity you generate and it becomes easier and easier to do things that used to be scary and uncomfortable.

• It’s like launching into orbit - after a few tries, you reach a breaking point where you “pop” into zero gravity and you’re no longer being held back. 

• Niceness is not serving you, it’s not who you are, it’s a safety pattern.

• You can’t just read or listen to this - you have to DO the behaviors. Get in the “social gym” and get uncomfortable! 

• This is how you STOP BEING AFRAID TO BE YOU

• This is how you tolerate someone else’s disapproval 

• Ask BOLDLY for what you want. (But first, you have to figure out WHAT that is)

• Find 2 opportunities per week to specifically ask for what you want. Then build that muscle, start asking for things that are edgier and edgier and edgier for you. 

• “Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear” 

• Keep lifting up the “weights” and getting in your “reps” around the things that scare you - build the muscle and keep expanding your horizons - just like discomfort training 

• If we have a parent or friend or partner or boss who we are especially scared of disappointing or triggers these feelings of people pleasing within us - are there any special strategies for dealing with them in particular? 

• Don’t stop at the top of the mountain. You can’t lift that weight yet. Do all the baby steps first, get more comfortable with it first - do the 5 lb weights first. 

  1. Look at the dysfunctional patterns with that parent or boss - work on them elsewhere first 

  2. Work on it elsewhere first. 

  3. Your parents and your family are at the epicenter of this. 

• Homework: Make a fundamental decision that you don’t want to be as nice anymore. Write out a short paragraph about why it’s no longer serving you to be the nice and that you are going to do something different. 

• Without that fundamental decision, the underlying story you have about niceness will win out

• Homework: Pick one thing - what’s the one thing that will be the easiest for you to do that would benefit you and change your life the most? 

Thank you so much for listening!

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

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [Website] Confidence University

• [SoS Episode] Break Your Phone Addiction (& Your Other Bad Habits) With Charles Duhigg

• [Book] Not Nice: Stop People Pleasing, Staying Silent, & Feeling Guilty... And Start Speaking Up, Saying No, Asking Boldly, And Unapologetically Being Yourself by Dr Aziz Gazipura

• [Book] The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers

• [Book] Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis

• [Wiki Article] Tension myositis syndrome

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

• [SoS Episode] Your Secret Weapon to Becoming Fearless with Jia Jiang

• [SoS Episode] Embracing Discomfort with Matt Bodnar

• [Video] Dr. Aziz Street Shenanigans - How To Be Confident And Overcome Social Anxiety

• [Website] Social Confidence Center

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[00:00:11] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than 2 million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries and part of the Self-Help for Smart People Podcast Network. 

In this episode, we explore how you can confidently be yourself even if you're afraid of what other people may do or think. We discussed how our obsession with niceness and people pleasing is often a problem and share specific tools you can use to overcome it. We also talk about the power and importance of saying no and the right way to do so, so that you can move away from approval seeking and step into bold authenticity with our guest, Dr. Aziz Gazipura. 

Do you need more time; time for work time, for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our email list. It's called How You Can Create Time for the Things That Really Matter in Life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the email list at successpodcast.com.

You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our email subscribers. We recently pre-released an episode in an interview to our email subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience. That had tremendous implications, because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first. With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live exclusive interview, just for e-mail subscribers.

There's some amazing stuff that's available only to email subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Or, if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you're on the go, you don't have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222.

In our previous episode, we discussed a highly counterintuitive approach to learning that flies in the face of the way you think you should learn and how it just might transform your learning process. We explore several powerful evidence-based learning strategies that you can start to apply right now in your life. We explained why you should focus on getting knowledge out of your brain, instead of into it, and what exactly that means. We share a number of powerful memory strategies you can use to supercharge your brain and much more with our previous guest, Peter Brown. If you want to become better at learning, listen to that episode. 

Now, for interview with Aziz. 

[00:02:59] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Dr. Aziz Gazipura. Aziz as a clinical psychologist and the founder of the Center For Social Confidence, which is dedicated to helping others break through their shyness and social anxiety. He's the author of the number one Amazon bestseller Not Nice: Stop People Pleasing, Staying Silent, & Feeling Guilty … And Start Speaking Up, Saying No, Asking Boldly, And Unapologetically Being Yourself. Aziz's work has helped thousands of people through workshops, coaching, media appearances and much more. 

Aziz, welcome to The Science of Success. 

[00:03:32] AG: Thanks, Matt. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. 

[00:03:34] MB: We’re were super excited to have you on the show. I think this topic is so relevant, and for me personally, as somebody who has sort of a constant battle with people pleasing and not wanting to say no to people and all of these things, I really want to get into the meat of a lot of this stuff. But let's just start with a really simple question which I'm sure you get all the time, which is you wrote a book about not being nice to people. Why is that?

[00:03:57] AG: Yeah. Well, it’s so funny that you just said this is something you relate to. I cannot tell you how many people just around regular conversations, social gatherings, whatever, when they find out what I do and then we start talking about the topics. How many people will instantly identify with that and say, “Oh yeah, I have a problem with niceness. I deal with that to.” I think is the vast majority of people. I think it's sort of like epidemic proportions. All the things that I create, they come first through my own experience. I struggle with this heavily for many years and I think it's an ongoing, lifelong learning process. So it’s by no means done. But not only did I struggle with it, but then I turned around and saw, well, a lot of people need this. So this is an extremely relevant topic and I think something that almost everyone, especially in our culture, in Western culture, can relate. 

[00:04:45] MB: And I think an initial thing to kind of get off to sort of square off on before we get into the meat of it, I'm sure a lot of people hear the idea of not being nice and they think about being rude or being mean to people. But you sort of make this distinction between being nice and being kind. I’d love to explore that a little bit so that listeners can understand that this isn't necessarily about being rude, but it's about something much deeper. 

[00:05:08] AG: Absolutely. The title of the book is meant to be a little bit provocative. In fact, the topic itself is provocative, because it’s the first thing people go to and say, “What's the opposite of nice?” Well, the opposite of nice is mean, is harsh, is rude, is impolite or something like that. But actually when you start to dig into what niceness really is and where it comes from, niceness is actually very different than kindness, love, generosity, giving. These are pro-social qualities that we actually want to have. They enhance our relationships in our lives. 

Niceness though, as I define it in the book, is really rooted in fear rather than love and connection, and behind the niceness is a need to make sure that everything's okay, make sure that you didn't disturb anyone, upset anyone, that everyone is not bothered by you and therefore approves of you. Hopefully loves you, but at the very least tolerates you, and so you get to avoid all conflict. That's really the core of where not a lot of niceness comes from.

So a lot of the behaviors that we consider “nice” might look like they’re kind, or generous, or giving, but really they're coming from this place of fear, or obligation, or guilt. So I have to say yes to that person. I have to give to that person in small and big ways. In a conversation with someone, I don’t want to talk too much, because I don't want them to be bothered by me. I’ll just listen and smile and nod to bigger things, like, “Yes, I'll give more in this relationship.” “Yes, I'll give more of my time at work without setting a boundary,” and so on and so forth. 

So that's really the root of niceness, is that fear. Whereas his kindness and generosity and these more positive virtues come from a place of choice, and you can choose. Do I want to get to this person or not? Do I want to give in this way? Then if the answer is yes, then it’s coming from a more centered place. So I think that's a big distinctions. The opposite of niceness isn't rudeness. It’s not mean. The opposite of niceness is actually bold authenticity. It’s truly being you, and then from that place being able to choose how you want to behave. 

[00:07:06] MB: I love that idea, bold authenticity, and I want to get into that, but before we do, there’s so many other pieces of this to unpack. When you talk of fear and guilt and obligation, even at such a small context I think about somebody emails me and the thought, almost the subconscious pattern races through my head of, “I don't want to be rude. What if this person – What if there's a business opportunity? What if they know somebody who knows somebody that ends up negatively impacting me and my work?” There're so many kind of scenarios that play through my head, and I'm sure you had a similar experience with that. How do you start to understand sort of breakthrough that, that fear and those patterns?

[00:07:45] AG: That’s a great question. I think it's so pervasive. It can show up when you check your email. It can show up in a conversation with someone you just met. It can show up with a stranger. It can show up on a date. It can show up at work. Really, this is not just an occasional occurrence. This is actually almost like a personality that we adopt. It’s not your true personality. It’s not who you really are, but it's this way of being in the world. 

Really, what it is, it’s damage control, it’s safety mode. It’s like, “How do I get through life? How do I get through my day staying alert to all possible dangers and do whatever I can to avoid them?” That’s the sort of program that's running in your mind subconsciously as you’re checking your email, because it’s, “Oh! Someone wants something, or someone asked for something,” and your initial gut response is probably like, “Nah! Whatever. I don’t want to –” “I don't even want to respond,” maybe is your natural gut response. 

I really dealt with this a lot is. I felt this compulsive need to respond to everything, which worked okay and when I had my personal life, whatever, that as I started to grow in my reach and reach more and more people and email started come in more and more and more, that became a major problem, and I had a lot of anxiety similar to what you're describing about getting back to people late, not being able to accommodate what they wanted, or worse, as time went on, just not being able to get back to people at all. 

Now I have a bigger team and people can actually at least get some response, but there's this fear. When we’re in that safety damage control mode, we’re kind of scanning the day, like, “I hope nothing bad happens,” and we’re always looking for the ways that it could be problematic, and then our number one priority is to avoid those possible dangers. Usually, the dangers are rejection, disapproval of some sort. Our mind magnifies it as if there's going to be real, almost threat to our livelihood or something, like, “Well, if someone disapproves of me, then I'll lose customers, or I won’t get any more business, or I'll be fired,” and we create these pretty unrealistic, dramatic scenarios. They’re part of that safety programming that says, “Hey, number one is just make sure everyone is pleased.” 

Behind that email pattern you’re describing and behind all these stuff, it comes back to the approval seeking. The idea that if I can make sure that no one feels anything negative around me, then I'll be safe. And that's how the nice person lives their life. 

[00:09:54] MB: Let's get into this approval seeking, because I think it's something that I definitely deal with and I’m sure many listeners deal with. Where does it come from and how can we start to mitigate it?

[00:10:06] AG: Sure. It’s a great question. I think that to some degree, approval seeking, wanting the approval of people you interact with is normal and is human and is part of bonding and attachment connection and whatever, makes us human and survives as tribes in groups. So sometimes I work with clients or other people and they’ll say like, “I want to not care at all what people think of me,” and I get that sense. I felt that way too. We spend so much time being so worried about what other people think, that there’s a part us that’s like, “I just want to not care at all.” 

It’s like, “Well, you didn’t care literally at all. I wish I have a relationship. I wish I have a friendship, or a marriage.” You become a sociopath. We don’t want to go that far, but what we want to do is we want to not have the awareness, that social awareness about maybe someone might like this or not. We don’t want to have that dominate our choices, our actions, our emotions. We don’t want to create panic or anxiety or extreme guilt. We want to just tone it down to be able to get to a point where you can say, “Okay. What do I want to do in this situation?” and that is the MVP question. I noticed I’m already answering the what we can do about it. So I’ll get to first where it comes from and then we’ll dive into the what we can do about it, because I love that second part, the liberation. 

But the MVP question is; What do I want in this situation? Do I want to respond to this email or not? Do I want to ask this person this question or not? Do I want to say yes or do I want to say no here?” Once we got that internal awareness of ourselves and not alienated from ourselves and operating from some outside awareness of what should other people think I should do? We’re really rooted in ourselves. What do I want? Then we could make a choice of what we’re going to say and what we’re going to do. 

Here’s the thing, and this goes back to where it all comes from. Most of us are not connected with ourselves. We learn – I call it in the book nice conditioning. From a very young age, this is an early upbringing, all throughout out childhood and it starts in the family. Whoever raised you; parents, grandparents, extended family. It continued on heavily in school, which is we are systematically told to not trust ourselves, to step outside of yourself. They do the right thing. What the “right thing” is depends a lot on the family you grew up in, but [inaudible 00:12:15] nice conditioning, the right thing is be nice, share your toys, don't be upset, don't be aggressive, don't be disobedient, do what I say, do what I want you to do. When you don't do that, I don't care why you don't want to do it. Just do it. It bothers me when you disobey me. That's kind of the message we get. 

I'll say it now, because I say it in the book too. I want to be clear. I’m a parent, and I get how hard it is at times. So this isn’t about blaming parents or something. It is very challenging, and good God, I sure want my kids to be obedient and compliant all the time, but I know there's a cost of kind of demanding that enforcing that, and that's what a lot of us grew up in. The result is we’re not connected to ourselves. We don't even know what we want. We think a lot of our feelings are bad and unacceptable. So that if someone says, “Hey, do you want to come to this thing or do you want to ask something,” and our inner response is no, “No, I don’t want to date you. No, I don't want to go to that thing.” 

Even before we open our mouths to say that, we feel bad, “I’m going to hurt this person. Oh!” All those are signs of our nice conditioning. It really comes from early childhood, and we can talk more about the way out too. 

[00:13:18] MB: It’s funny – I mean, this is getting at sort of some of the solutions to this, but you've identified another major challenge and major problem, which is in addition to this whole sort of architecture of niceness. At the core of it, many people don't know what they want, and that's I feel like a major problem in our society. I had a listener email me literally today asking about how to sort of resolve that and try to figure out what they want out of their lives. That’s a big question, but how do we start to answer that and really sort of chip away or kind of clear the fog that’s preventing us from seeing what we truly want to do. 

[00:13:54] AG: Yeah. I love that question, because it's so important and I highlight it so much in the book. What do I want? It’s a way of coming back to your yourself, really. I love that phrase you used; clearing the fog, because I think the issue is – First of all, most people don’t even realize that that's a very important question. They either think that it's selfish, “How dare you even think about what you want in this situation when so and so sick, or so and so wants more of you?”

I remember I was speaking with a client recently, and he’s not – He’s being overworked, really. It's pretty intense environment, and he needs to make some shifts or he’s going to burnout. But his primary concern is, “Yeah. But if I reduce my hours, if I asked her to say I need to change something, other people there are going to have to take on more work.” There’s this huge inner conflict and fear and how much he’s going to be hurting all these people. Not seeing, “Well, the employer could hire someone else,” or that’s not your responsibility to burn yourself out to help everyone else. But what do I want is its lost in that fog, or it feels bad and unacceptable to even ask. I see there’re some relationships too. What do I want romantically? What do I want sexually? It’s bad. 

The first thing we need to do is we need to clear the toxic message that what you want is inherently bad or wrong. I go in-depth in the book about this, “No. You must turn that around to what I want is inherently good.” At first, for some people, because of their conditioning, that sounds like blasphemy or something. What a terrible – I’m just going to go out of control. 

I make a big distinction between feeling and doing. So we want to just start to uncover, just because you ask what do I want doesn't mean you’re going to run out and go force the world to give it to you immediately. It's part of connecting with yourself. First is clear the negativity around it’s bad to have what I want, or ask for what I want, or even think about what I want. I’ll say one more thing about that, because I know some people might intellectually think that's a good idea but don’t know how to do it, which is to realize that when you're more in touch with what you want, it's not only better for you. It's better for everyone. Because let me give you this quick example. 

Have you ever been on a date or out with a friend that’s romantic or platonic? It doesn’t matter. You’re hanging out with that person and you're like, “Okay. Cool. We’re going to go to a movie and let’s get a bite to eat.” You’re like, “Hey, what interests you for food?” They’re like, “I don’t know. Whatever you want.” “Are you sure? Do you have any plan?” “No. No. Whatever you want.” You’re like, “Okay.” So you pick Mexican food and you’re like, “Okay. Great. Now, let’s go see a movie. What are you into? There’s an action movie to watch. There’s romance.” They’re like, “I don’t know. Whatever you want.” 

How enraging is that to be around someone that doesn’t just say what they want? It’s a detriment to people around you when you don't say what you want, or you don’t even know what you want. Because it bothers them and it gives them nothing to work with, because it’s a lie too. It’s false, because the truth is you do – Some part of you does want something. Some part of you does prefer a certain food even if you think you're super flexible. It doesn't mean you can't go different ways, but there's a part of you that does want a certain kind of – Like something most. There’s a part of you that likes a certain kind of movie the most and something sounds best to you, and people want to know that. When they know that, you can work together. It could be on the table, and you can actually create better choices as a group. So people benefit when you know what you want. 

Then last way to actually start to find what it is, is you got to take the time to do it. You mentioned that fog. I was just doing some research on this for my next book, which is why we’re so against ourselves. Why do we turn to ourselves so critical? Of course I was thinking about media and what media has to do with that. 

I was looking up, “How much TV are we watching these days?” The stats are always crazy. The average American watches five hours of TV a day. I was looking up what they currently are. Here’s the most recent statistics from the Nielsen in 2018. These are just my best memory right now, but it's four hours a day of live TV, about 45 minutes a day of recorded TV, like with TiVo and stuff. But when you add in all source of screen time, including social media, cellphone, tablets, streaming on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, all that stuff, people are watching a screen 11 hours a day as of the first part of 2018. 11 hours a day, and that’s not including work time. 

That means basically every waking moment that we’re not at work, we’re probably at a screen at work too. We’re hooked on the screen. We’re insanely addicted to it. So it is very hard to find out what you want when you're compulsively externally focused. You’re not like externally focused on a flower. You are externally focused on something that jamming huge amounts of input into you, trying to influence what you want and saying, “You want this. Don't you? You want that. Don't you? You should want this.” 

Whether it’s a certain body image, or a certain kind of partners, or a certain lifestyle, or a certain object, or a car, or whatever, we’re in this cloud. To find out what you want, you got to unplug for at least a little bit of a time, and the more the better in a lot of ways. Then – So go for a 30-minute walk with no headphones and ask yourself that question, “What do I want?” Ask it not with like, “Okay. I got 28 minutes. Let we find out what I want for my whole life.” No. Just ask yourself that question, “What do I want in this moment? What do I want today? What do I want in my job?” You just ask it and maybe find some answers that they may be not. If you had a practice at that where you did that walk – I don’t know, three times a week, you would find so many answers so quickly once you unplug and really start to tune in with. 

[00:19:10] MB: It's funny, I think the question that obviously comes to bear on this that you addressed in some ways, but I'm sure listeners are thinking and asking themselves, and I'm honestly asking myself this even though I know intellectually that this is true. But when you come back to it, is doing what we want selfish? 

[00:19:28] AG: It's so good. I'm glad you’re asking that and invoicing that, because it is in there. That is part of our training, and the truth is it can be. I have a chapter in the book called be more selfish. Again, controversial title. I thought I’d make it spicy. But that is actually true. We do need to do that. It's just that there is a – Selfish is not binary. It’s not A or B. It’s not like you're selfish or you're not. Selfish is a subjective interpretive label that you put on something. 

If someone says, “Hey, can you give me a ride to the airport?” and you say, “No. I can’t do that. I’m sorry.” Is that selfish? It’s actually a complex calculation. It’s in the eye of the beholder, because what if the friend that asked you for the ride never does anything for you at all and refuses all of your requests? Then is it selfish? Most people would say, “No. No.” What if that friend is a lot for you? Then is that selfish? People will say, “Yeah.” There’s this social accumulation of data people are assessing. 

So it's not binary. It's much more complex than that. It’s much more nuanced, and there's a spectrum. I have this in the book. There's a spectrum of selfishness. On one side you can go too far. You can just be totally self-absorbed, self-interest, egomaniac like just give me what I want. I don't care about you at all. I’m going to use you like a chess piece, like the tool to get what I want. There are people that operate in the world that way, and that is destructive to relationships, to companies, to them ultimately even if they don't know it. 

But that doesn't mean that the opposite of that is actually any healthier, because the opposite of that, the extreme opposite, the other end of the spectrum, is self-denying, self-sacrifice. That’s like – It doesn't matter what I want. My needs don't matter at all. Whatever you need or want or whatever, here I am. For me to say no just because I don't want to or because it feels too overwhelming or stressful or just feels like too much for me to say yes to that, it doesn’t matter. That’s bad. 

What we want to do is we actually want to –A lot of people that are nice kind of live towards that end of the spectrum. So we want to move up the spectrum towards more selfish into the healthy self-interest range. That can be described as, “Okay. You have needs and desires, and I have needs and desires, and both of them matter, and I need to figure out in this moment what’s going to be right for me.” So sometimes I’m going to prioritize my own needs, because that's part of the balance. That’s what I need to do. So no I can’t give you that ride, because I have these seven other things that I'm doing and that’s going to tip me over the edge. 

Or sometimes I’m going to prioritize your needs. I have a family and wife and kids and so a lot of the times I do prioritize what they might need over what I might need. But I can still do the opposite and sometimes prioritize myself. So that’s the secret, is that balance, and that only comes when we have the nuance to understand that it's not just you’re either selfish or not, good or bad, and it's really okay to uncover and decide case-by-case. 

[00:22:21] MB: I think bringing the idea of a spectrum to it really shines light on how to think about it more intelligently, and it reminds me of a quote from one of my favorite books of all time; The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell, and he's talking to Bill Moyers about this book by Sinclair Lewis called Babbitt, and the quote as, “I've never done a thing I wanted all my life,” and that's from the Sinclair Lewis book. But Joseph Campbell then goes on to say, “Basically, don't be that person.” Don't be the person who's never done a thing they wanted all their lives, and yet so many of us spend so much more time on the self-sacrificing side of the spectrum. I think the word that you used that puts it in sort of a new light is to seek balance. 

[00:23:03] AG: Mm-hmm. That’s really what it is. 10 self-sacrifice might be essential in a time of crisis. Someone’s sick or you spend the night at a hospital. It doesn’t matter if you're tired or you’re not at work or whatever. Sure, we want to be able to do that. That's part of life. But if you operate that way – And I think a lot of – When we’re in that a nice mode, we are kind of operating that way, because we're treating everything like a crisis. If that person who emailed me doesn’t hear back, that's a crisis. If I say no to this friend who wants me to go to this thing this weekend, that's a crisis. 

Underneath that, there is a threat mode happening, and this is super essential for everyone to understand, that niceness is not – Excessive niceness and the problems around it is not benign. It's not like, “Okay. Well, maybe it's hard and it makes me not have the life I fully want, but I’m least I’m doing the right thing. Darn it!” It's actually not that, because what happens is when you're in that kind of state of fear and threats that’s underneath niceness, you are much more prone to experience all kinds of symptoms as a results, and these symptoms can range from physical symptoms, G.I. symptoms, stomach problems, all kinds manifestations of back pain, shoulder pain, neck pain, the term that's been coined by many doctors as TMS, tension myositis syndrome or tension myoneural syndrome. 

There's a phenomenal author named Dr. John Sarno, who is a pioneer in this field, but most people don’t realize how many of their aches and pains and physical problems and even things that they think are injuries are actually the results of living in this kind of chronic stress, fearful state. One of the biggest contributors is actually niceness. I think it's so important to realize that you're not only not living life that you want, which might make you feel more depressed or dissatisfied, but you're also literally harming your body by remaining in this overly nice mode for years. 

[00:24:51] MB: I want to transition and look at some of the other manifestations of this. One of them –These are outcroppings of the same theme and idea, and so the underpinnings are going to be very similar. But you talk about saying no and the importance of saying no, and that's a particular area of niceness that I personally really struggle with. But I'm curious how we can start to think more effectively about that and really start to say no more often in the right contexts. 

[00:25:16] AG: Great. I love that question. I think the conversation we’re just having is a perfect prelude about selfishness, because one of the reasons we don't say no is, well, that’s selfish. So really getting clear that, at times, to support that balance, you’re going to need to prioritize your own needs, and that's not bad. That’s not wrong. That’s not malevolent or something against other people or harming people. That's healthy. It’s part of a healthy relationship. So to that end, sometime when we’re prioritizing on our own needs, we need to say no. How do you know if should say yes or no? Well, it start with, “What do I want?” So I really encourage people to ask that question not just as like a soul-searching journey once in that 30-minute walk or something. I mean, moment to moment, and it's so important to start asking that question. You might even want to like write it on your hand or have it on a sticky note on your desk or your computer, especially if you’re – Maybe that’s where you’re checking your email and there’s a lot of responses where you are saying yes or no to things, because the conditioning to say yes can be so fast. 

I've had clients I’ve been working on this with who they set the intention to say no and talk about strategies, which we can talk about in just a moment about how to do it, how to be ready to do it. They’re all primed and here they go. The next thing they know, they have said yes three times without even realizing that it happened. It just came out. It's so conditioned. 

First we got to be become aware that it's okay to say no and we need to say no and that we want to do it more. Once that stage is set and having those reminders to help you remember to do it, and then it's a matter of actually just practicing it and saying no like many of the other forms of retraining, from niceness to authenticity. It's all about discomfort tolerance, really. If you're willing to experience discomfort in the short term, you will gain much more benefit in your life in the long term, because in the short term saying no to that person can be uncomfortable. 

It can also be fascinating though, because when many people who are trapped in the cage of niceness almost never say no. Unless it’s like, “Oh my god!” There’s a clear overwhelming reason. If it’s not, they’ll just say yes. What they do is they live in a cloud of stories of what could happen if they said no, “Oh! This person can get upset.” This thing that you were talking about, so and so is going to tell so and so and that's going to negatively reflect me, and I’m not going to have guest interviews, or whatever, stories we come up with. But we never test it. 

So what I love is working with people and watching them start to really test it. Hands down, two things almost always happen. One; the dramatic fantasy that they created in their mind about what was going to happen doesn't happen, and we all know that, and hearing that on this podcast is one thing. But to actually viscerally experience that in your own life, like, “Wow! I was making myself bonkers, and that didn’t even happen.” That’s a powerful lesson that we all should benefit from experiencing. 

Doing it, testing it and seeing, A, it doesn't actually happen most of the time; or B, that if someone does have a negative reaction or gets upset, that we can handle it. That's even a more empowering part, is you can tell yourself for months, “I can handle it. I can handle it,” but nothing shows you you can handle it like going through it. But here's the thing; handling it might be uncomfortable. Saying no might be probably uncomfortable at first. You got to face those fears, face that discomfort. 

What I love to liken it to strength training or building any sort of physical strength, whether it’s running or weightlifting. If you go to the gym and you're never uncomfortable, you’re probably not growing in strength at all. I don’t know what you’re doing. You’re just stretching, hanging out. Even in stretching you can be uncomfortable, right? We got to lean into that edge, and that's exactly what we know. Just like a muscle, your capacity to saying no grows. So if you made a commitment right now, and anyone listening made a commitment now, say, “I’m going to say no twice this week. I’m going to look for two opportunities to say no.” Then you do that again next week, and then again next week, and maybe even upped it said no to more things. Within, literally, 3 to 4 weeks, you'd be in a very different place than you are now. I mean, it can start to happen that fast just like you start to build muscle that fast. 

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[]00:31:24 MB: I love this, this notion of facing discomfort, and we’ve had a number of episodes on the show and interviews where we’ve gone really deep into how to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, and we’ll throw those into the show notes for listeners who want to dig into that. But I want to come back to some of the specific kind of tactical strategies for saying no. How do we actually do it in the moment?

[00:31:45] AG: Yeah, that's great. A lot of people want to be like super smooth at it. I would say think of like an instrument or any other skill. Just start playing it and you’ll get there. First and foremost, just play it inconsistently. Play it as we’ve been talking about, face that discomfort. But there are ways to refine our skill. This is actually a surprising one, is inner game. It's complete and total permission to say no, because what happens is people start just, “Okay. Okay. I’m going to say no. I’m going to be less nice. I need to do it. Here I go,” and they’re really nervous, and there's a lot of mixed messages inside of them that says, “What I'm doing is bad.” 

Therefore, their communication is very murky and muddled. It will come out as very apologetic, “Oh! I can't. I’m so sorry. I'm so sorry, I can't drive you to the airport. Ah! I’m so bad.” It'll come across this self-effacing or they’ll talk about why they’re bad. It’s amazing people say this. Or they’ll have a very elaborate explanation. So they really get across why they totally would do it, except for here's my seven reasons why. 

What I encourage people to do is first and foremost remind themselves they have complete permission to say no and it’s healthy. The second step is going to be to say no and to minimize, remove actually, all qualifiers and then minimize the explanation. You can give a short sentence or two if it's relevant. For example, instead of saying, “No, I can't get that to you by then because I have this and I got to do that and this and that.” Just say, “Okay. You want that by Friday? I’m not going to be able to do that. I have several things before then that I have to get done, but I’m not going to be able to get to you on Friday. Let’s figure out what else we can do.” 

It’s short, it's tight, and then be willing to sit in the no. This is another super important part, is then as people will say it, and they’ll immediately actually overcommit to something else. I don’t know if you’ve done this. This was the worst. We say no, “No, I can't have you at this time,” or “No, we can't do that.” “But how about on this time, or how about this, or how about these other seven things that I can give you?” Now we’ve overcommitted to something else. 

So sitting in the no and say, “I’d love to, I can’t.” “Thank you for the invitation. I’m not going to be able to make it,” and just be okay to sit in that, whether it's a text. Just let it lie or face-to-face or over the phone and be in that discomfort. Here's the thing, and I talk about this a lot with my wife, because we all are overcoming our niceness. But one of her triggers is saying no to a friend or someone she's building a relationship with. Saying no to their invitations, especially if it’s like the second time in a row for whatever reason. She has this fear. She’s like, “Well, if I say no to someone twice, especially too close together, they’re not going to want to be my friend anymore.” 

What I often remind her is, “Let's test that out.” I actually think that if you say no twice, but you're warm and you even offer other alternatives, that people want you more and become a slightly higher demand. You're not so available. Not as a game, but it doesn't – It’s not going to ruin relationships. So sit in the no. Trust that it’s not all over. The building won’t crumble. Then practice it again and again and again. 

[00:34:44] MB: I think the idea of getting the reps in and sort of doing the work of building that muscle is such an important mental model to apply to developing the skillset of being less nice, of saying no. This is sort of a segue, which we’ll go kind of far away from where we are but then we’ll come back to it. But you have amazing YouTube videos, which we’ll put in the show notes as well, where you kind of do street shenanigans. 

One of the things that I thought was really interesting at the beginning of that with street shenanigans, which you can kind of explain to listeners what that is, but was you did a bunch of, as you call them, I think warm-ups for your social fitness at the beginning of that, which is another great example of sort of the same idea of getting those reps in and sot of building that muscle. 

[00:35:24] AG: Yes, street shenanigans. We just had a lot of viewers in YouTube Channel or whatever asking me to demonstrate things and I was like, “Okay. I’m going to go out in the street.” One of the big things is a lot of people are dealing with social anxiety. So my key goal with that video was not to do the smoothest, [inaudible 00:35:40] stuff in the world, but to show, “Hey, you can just do whatever you want kind of and it doesn't matter.” You can be silly, you can be outrageous, you can say weird things. You're okay no matter what is what I really wanted to convey. 

I sent a message out to my list and said like – And the YouTube channel, like, “What do you want to see me do so?” It’s kind of like a dare kind of thing. You got all these ridiculous things that I had to sift through, and I picked the ones that would make me the most uncomfortable as long as they weren’t socially aggressive. Some of them were. It’s like, “Nah. We’re not going to do that.” So we would picked the ones that were affirming, positive experience for everyone, but are uncomfortable. That was the goal. 

But before you jump into that – And a few might ask, “”Why on earth would you want to do that?” Discomfort tolerance, your ability to going into something uncomfortable and do it is transferable. If you can do push-ups on a street corner, then you are actually going to be much more able to approach someone you're attracted to. It might seem like totally different things, but one of the biggest things that stops us from approaching someone we’re attracted to is the fear of embarrassment, the fear of being judged by that person or by witnesses around, or friends watching. It’s our ego. It’s like, “Oh! I’m going to not look as good.” 

Well, if you go out and do pushups on a street corner or flex in a store window, as someone asked me to do, you get over yourself. It's okay to be embarrassed. You can tolerate that embarrassment, that social – People watching you. Then therefore you're able to go do something that’s a real value to you. But whether we’re going to go talk to people we’re attracted to or do something of literal value or just these exercises to build that muscle, you start with a warm up, because it is so much like fitness. 

I’ll just walk on the street and do what’s called friendly greetings. Just say hi to people a dozen times in a busy street, and it's amazing. I have seen this again and again out in the world with people where they go from a place of like, “I can’t talk to anyone. I feel uncomfortable right now. I'm scared. I’m nervous. I’m self-conscious.” Then we scale it back to some friendly greetings, maybe even have them walk up to a of couple people and say, “Hey, do you have a restaurant recommendation. It’s lunch time, we’re curious to get – Where we’d get some food.” Some low-risk question where they’re probably not going to get rejected.

I've seen this literally happen a number of times. One guy I’m thinking of where he did a couple of friendly greetings, did that twice, asked for restaurants. Then the next thing I know, literally, he was – There is a woman he wanted to talk to who was walking down the street and she was pretty far away and he ran to catch up to her and jumped – Not jumped, appropriately walked around her to get in front of her and started this like long extended conversation. From 0 to 60, which would've been impossible, literally 10 minutes earlier. The warm up, I’m a big believer in that and I've seen it work wonders. 

[00:38:14] MB: The funny thing is this stuff is really fun and enjoyable once you kind of get into it. I mean, when you watch the street shenanigans video, I was laughing and smiling within probably one minute of it starting. Even just a friendly greetings were hilarious. Then some of the other stuff is even more funny. But Austin and I, the producer of the show, we were in Minneapolis recently for a speaking engagement and we had some extra time to kill before I went on stage, and we went to Mall of America and just decided that we we’re going to do rejection therapy for the whole evening. We had a blast. We were laughing. We got some free cookies. We get discounts on stuff. We were just goofing around and doing all these things. But it seems so sort of scary, but as soon as you start to build that muscle and flex that and get comfortable being uncomfortable, all of these kind of exciting, fun, wacky, ridiculous opportunities open up and you start to realize that the world isn't that scary of a place. 

[00:39:10] AG: Yes. You’re speaking my language. That’s why we have a banner in my live events and it says, “The world is a friendly place,” and that’s a complex topic. You could debate philosophically about. But in one way, it’s trying to highlight exactly what you're saying, which is when we step out – There’s like this thresholds. It’s like – What it’s called? Critical velocity? When like a spaceship is trying to take off and it reaches some distance and speed from the Earth's gravitational pull or something and it blasts out? There are some process I found that’s like that socially, where there’s all these gravity kind of holding us inside of ourselves. We can’t even look at people. We can’t even make eye contact, like, “Oh my god! I can take out my ear pods right now.” 

Then if we push that edge and we start to build that – The rocket starts going, which are to move outside of ourselves, at first it's really scary and really uncomfortable. But if we just keep doing it – I don't mean keep doing it over years. I mean, literally over the course of like 10, 15 minutes. What happens as we reach this like breaking point where we just pop into no gravity and all of a sudden – I’ve seen this happen so many times at people, especially at live events. Because at live events, we take everyone out. It’s like we’re not just going to sit in a room and talk about this. You’re going to go do it and then we’re going to watch you. 

What I’ve seen happen again and again is all of a sudden they’re like, “Whoa! I think I can do like anything and I’m okay.” Because once embarrassment or rejection are no longer intolerable experiences and you can kind of say what you want and do what you want. 

I remember one guy I was working with who's almost like, “No. Give me something else that’s going to make me really scared. What's the next thing? Give me something else.” I was like, “I don’t have anything else. You can do whatever you want right now. You’re liberated in this moment.” That's what we’re going for. 

I love how you described that, the story with you and Austin, because that’s’ what I want people to experience, is to get on the other side of that and feel what it's like to be socially free, to be liberated and then they can just be who they are and really enjoy that and have fun.

[00:41:01] MB: One of my favorite quotes is “everything you've ever wanted is on the other side of fear”, which perfectly squares with that. We kind of came far away, but I want to come back. This really comes back to once you overcome this niceness and the fear and the insecurity that underpins that, how do we start to ask boldly? That’s one of the sort of promises that you make in the headline of the book, and start unapologetically being ourselves?

[00:41:26] AG: Yeah, I love that. The unapologetically being ourselves comes when we have first seen that niceness is not serving us, that it actually it’s not who we are. It's a safety pattern. Then we start to take the risks and face the discomfort to say no to, in some way, figure out what we want and then ask for it. We start to do the behaviors. We can’t just read about it and think, “Oh, yeah! That sounds good one day.” But literally do it. Get in the gym as it were. Lift those weights. Get uncomfortable. Then the byproduct of that is you stop being afraid to be you. You build this inner power that allows you to tolerate someone's disapproval, “Okay. I know that they might not like this, but this is what I want to do, or this is important for me to say, so I’m going to say it.” You have that freedom. You have that choice, and that's where that unapologetic comes from. It's like, “No. This is okay for me to be me.” 

One of the other things to practice in addition to saying no to get there is the asking for what we want. So step one is what do I want and really discovering it. Step two is ask for or it, or state it, or request it. Again, there's just a lot of fear behind this, fear of rejection, fear of upsetting the other person. Fear, fear, fear. As you just said, which I love, is everything you want in your life is over that fear, around that fear, through that fear. 

So much of the time people approach fear as if it's like this brick wall, but really it's like a thin curtain and you can literally walk right through it. The only thing stopping us is the physical discomfort in our own nervous system. So when we move into it – And just ask for what we want. So that’s another practice. Very simply, just like, “No.” say no is asking for what we want. So, “Hey, I like to do this,” or Can we do this?” or “It will be important for me if we could do that,” and finding, again, two opportunities a week to specifically ask for what you want. Just like you want to strengthen yourself by lifting more systematically overtime or running further or faster, or whatever your goals are physically, you want to ask for things that are edgier for you. So maybe at first you literally just ask – I don’t know, just ask the server for check at a restaurant, because normally you’re so nice that you just wait for them to give it to you even if you're in a hurry. 

Maybe you ask, say, “Hey, listen. I’m in a hurry. Can you rush my order?” today at the restaurant. Those are simple things, and maybe that's the weight that you can lift right now, because even that feels uncomfortable. But eventually as you do it more, you start to ask more vulnerable things. Ask for something in a close friendship, or ask for something in a conversation with a friend or a sibling and say, “Hey, listen. There’s something I want to talk with you about and I love to just have your attention for like 10 minutes as we talk about something that's important to me.” If you never request that, maybe that feels so selfish or edgier. So that will be the next level to lift up. 

Then, of course, in your romantic relationship, being able to ask more authentically for what you want, whether it's time together, or something around your sex life, “I would love if we could do this.” Or similarly, what do you do not want, “I want to do less of this. This is uncomfortable for me when we do this,” and not uncomfortable in a good kind of way like I should do it more. I wish we didn't do this. All of that is going to come from taking those risks. That's why I call it boldly asking for what you want. It’s because it's scary, it's edgy, it feels like a risk. We need courage. We need boldness and we want to do so with that owning of ourselves. 

[00:44:51] MB: If someone has a parent, or a boss, or a friend who they’re specially scared of disappointing or that triggers a stronger feeling around some of these insecurities and put them into sort of the shell of niceness. Are there any particular strategies that you would recommend or that you seem work for dealing with those kinds of dynamics?

[00:45:11] AG: Yeah, absolutely. I would say don't start there. That's the top of the mountain, because – Think about overweight. It’s too heavy of a weight. So people will sometimes be down on themselves or beat themselves up about it, and that never works. We cannot beat ourselves into confidence or any new behavior long-term. What you want to do is do all the stuff that we’re talking about in this episode, the small weights, the 5-pound weight. 

Look at what your patterns are, your dysfunctional patterns are with the parent or that boss, “Oh! I can't say no to him or her, or whenever they make a comment about me, I just feel – I believe everything they say and I feel terrible about myself.” Okay. Well, those are signs of things that you want to work on, but start working on them elsewhere, because it's very unlikely that you are totally aware of what you want. You built up a lot of muscle and being able to say no and act in your healthy self-interest in every single instance of your life, in all your relationships except your boss, or except for your dad or your mom. You’re probably doing it everywhere. It’s just more intense with them. 

Work on it elsewhere, and I’ve seen this again and again, especially people that are in my group programmer where we work together for years, and there’s even two or more. The first year, it’s all – They’re interacting with strangers, or colleagues, or even dating and stuff. But then in the second year it’s more like, okay, with her longer-term relationships with their spouse, with the family, with their parents and they’re kind of surprised, like, “Wow! this is so hard to do with my dad or my mom.” It’s like, “Yeah, that is the epicenter.” That’s where the nice conditioning was first transmitted to you. So of course it’s going to stir up the most discomfort. I’d say work your way up to it. 

[00:46:44] MB: Great piece of advice. For listeners who want to concretely implement some of these ideas, and I think we’ve touched on a number of these, but what would be one or two pieces of homework that would be simple action items they could start with right away to put some of these ideas into practice?

[00:47:01] AG: Great. Absolutely. The first thing would be to make a fundamental decision that you don't want to be this nice anymore. That might seem kind of obvious, or like, “Oh, yeah. I’m already there.” No. Really sit down and write out just a short paragraph. You could do it on your phone or in a laptop or write it on a cocktail napkin. It doesn’t matter. Why it's no longer serving me to be this way, to be this nice, and I'm going to do some different. 

Because without that fundamental decision, there's still this story in us that it's better to be nice and it's bad to hurt other people's feelings, and, “Oh! I can’t upset anyone. That’s so wrong.” That will undermine any tactical or strategic attempt to change this. Because as soon as you do it, you'll feel guilty or uncomfortable and say, “Oh! That was the wrong thing to do.” We need to be an environment that supports this so that when you take that action and you feel guilty, the environment tells you, “Yeah, you feel guilty, but you didn't do anything bad. This is actually healthy.” 

I designed the book to hopefully be an environment for people. Obviously, in my world when I work with people in workshops or my groups, we create that culture so that people can get that affirmation. But in the absence of all of that, just at write out the commitment, the decision to yourself. 

Then second thing will be just to pick one thing. We talked about a lot of things and sometimes people are like, “Okay! I’m going to do it all.” Well, that's kind overwhelming. Just pick one thing. So what's the one that is either the easiest for you to do or the one you feel like, “Oh man! That would benefit my life. I need that the most.” Maybe that’s saying no. Maybe that’s asking yourself what do I want and discovering it. Maybe that's practicing, asking for what you want. Maybe that's the more slightly higher up on a selfishness spectrum and putting your own needs first sometimes and some of the other things we talked about as well. 

Picking one of those things and then just setting a very specific small goal, like, “I’m going to say no twice this week,” or “I’m going to practice putting my own needs first once this,” or, “We didn’t get into boundaries in this call,” but maybe you need to set a boundary with someone by saying – Asking for what you want or saying no or telling them something needs to be different. Maybe you set a goal to do that. 

Here's the thing, it's like any sort of training, you want to start where you can just keep leaning into that edge. You’d be amazed overtime, in a period of 3, 6 months, what can radically transform if we consistently do this sort of thing. 

[00:49:19] MB: For listeners who want to find you and your work online, what's the best place for them to do that? 

[00:49:24] AG: Sure. The website that kind of captures everything is my main website, which is socialconfidencecenter.com, socialconfidencecenter.com, and you can find out about my book and YouTube with live events and all those things in the podcast. So that's kind of like the hub. 

From there, you can see what you want to take in. We have a lot of free stuff with the YouTube and podcast, or if you want to get immersed in an environment, there're live events. Year-long mastermind program, all kinds of great ways to really take these ideas from intellectual to actually reprogramming yourself, because it's uncomfortable and – I don't know. I didn’t make very much progress in my fitness in my entire life until two years ago. I'm 35 now. So from 33 to 35 I made more progress in my fitness in my entire life, and that was in two years that I joined like a gym with a trainer and have that accountability of that group. So that’s next level. You really want to make these changes. 

[00:50:14] MB: Well, Aziz, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing all these wisdom. This is a topic that's very personal for me and I think really, really relevant. I have a post-it note, one of my baby steps. I got a post-it note that says say no and ask boldly sitting right next to my monitor now. So that'll be at least one little action step reminder. Again, thank you for coming on the show and sharing all these wisdom. 

[00:50:35] AG: Beautiful. I love that. I love that you’re applying that. You're most welcome, and I think it’s going to be a really cool experience. When you do that, you say no or you ask boldly and it’s uncomfortable, and then you get on the other side and see like, “Whoa! Nothing terrible happened that I couldn’t handle,” and then, boom! You just grow in power. So I love it. 

[00:50:55] MB: Did you enjoy this episode? Do you want to step into bold authenticity and stop being afraid to be yourself? Go to successpodcast.com/confidence to check out Confidence University. Our guest on this episode, Aziz Gazipura, has an incredible course offering here that you should definitely check out. Again, that successpodcast.com/confidence. If you want to step into the bold authenticity of being yourself and stop being afraid of what other people think about you. 

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 e-mail 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.

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

You’ve Been Learning All Wrong - Making Knowledge Stick with Peter Brown

In this episode we discuss a highly counter-intuitive approach to learning that flies in the face of the way you think you should learn and how it might transform your learning process. We explore several powerful, evidence based learning strategies that you can start to apply right now in your life, we explain why you should focus on getting knowledge out of your brain instead of into it (and what, exactly, that means), we share a number of powerful memory strategies you can use to super charge your brain - and much more with our guest Peter Brown. 

Peter Brown is a best-selling author and novelist. He is the author of five books including Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Peter’s work turns traditional learning techniques on their head and draws from recent discoveries in cognitive psychology to offer concrete techniques for becoming a more productive learner. His work has been featured in The New York Times, American Public Radio, The New Yorker, and more!

• As a novelist - how did you come to write a book about applications of cognitive psychology to learning?

• What teaching and learning strategies lead to better retention of material?

• The non-intuitive approach to learning that flies in the face of the way you think you should learn

• Most of us think that learning is about getting knowledge and skills into the brain - that’s wrong

• The way to get knowledge to stick is to get learning OUT of the brain! (What does that mean?)

• The act of wrestling with knowledge and material is what actually builds learning that sticks

• 3 Big ideas from Brian’s research 

• (1) It's about getting the knowledge out of your head, not getting it in

  1. (2) When learning is easy it doesn’t stick. You have to challenge yourself.

  2. (3) Intuition leads us astray. We think that simple repeated practice makes it easier to learn, but that may not be the case. You can’t rely on learning that feels constructive. 

• Your brain continues to work on and consolidate knowledge while you sleep. 

• How does memory get stored? How can your lack of understanding about this lead to worse learning strategies?

• The more connections you make to existing knowledge, the more you are likely to remember something 

• When you’re learning something new, you want to engage with something enough to let the brain process it, consolidate it, and connect it to other information networks within the brain 

• Associate memories with other memory cues if possible 

• The more you know - the more you can know 

• The more complex knowledge that you build and develop the more you can develop complex mental models for explaining and understanding reality

• Visual markers, memory palaces and mnemonic devices can be very powerful memory techniques 

• They are not about learning, but rather ORGANIZING what you’ve already learned 

• The key to learning is to put ideas in your own words, to digest them, play with them, and think about the application of them - not just to review the text or information you’ve already read. 

• Pulling an all-night is a terrible study strategy for long term retention 

• Highly effective learning strategies

• Put it in your own words

  1. Space out your learning and repetition 

  2. Mixing up your practice is also a highly desirable learning strategy 

• Spacing out learning is very powerful for helping connect various things you’re learning to each other

• The “forgetting curve” is a mental model that helps interrupt your pattern of forgetting things - and remembering them at just the right time  

• Mass practice vs mixed practice - and why the feeling of improvement may be misleading your learning efforts 

• Transfer of skills is greatly improved when your practice involves mixed challenges instead of practicing the same thing over and over again and then moving to the next thing 

• The idea of “mixed practice” can help improve your abilities whether they are motor skills or semantic knowledge 

• How does the research around “mixed practice" interact with distraction and research about multi-tasking and the cost of “task switching”?

• The key is to dedicate your working memory to one task at a time, but switch those tasks frequently 

  1. The point of studying lots of information at once isn’t leaving, but it’s coming back to the material and forcing yourself to retrieve “what was going on here?”

• What does a study about micro-surgery have to do with learning and retention? 

• Letting your subconscious focus on something and digest it leads to greater retention 

• “Desirable difficulty” is essential for learning 

• We often get in our own way - push until it’s challenge and then move into something else, then come back! 

• Mental effort and persistence towards a learning goal help build deeper memories - literally change the physical structure of your brain and lead to better and richer memories 

• Don’t feel discouraged about difficulty in learning - it’s a key part of the process 

• Homework: Look back at your own life and the things that you’ve tackled that were a struggle, and yet you became good at it - use these as examples for how this strategy can work 

• Homework: Read about the science of learning in general

• Homework: Create flash card sets or quizzes for things you want to memorize (even if you aren’t a student)  in order to TEST yourself. Practice retrieving information, over and over again. The retrieval is key! Only by doing it can you be confident you know how to do it. Self testing, space it out, and come back later to do it again. 

Thank you so much for listening!

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

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [SoS Episode] Brain Scans Reveal The Powerful Memory Techniques of Memory Champions, Greek Philosophers, and SuperLearners with Jonathan Levi

• [SoS Episodes] Creative Memory Episodes

• [ResearchGate Profile] Henry Roediger

• [Faculty Profile] Profile on Henry Roediger

• [Wiki Page] Forgetting curve

• [App] Anki

• [Website] Quizlet

• [Journal Article] The Biology of Memory: A Forty-Year Perspective by Eric R. Kandel

• [Video] Sea slug brain chemistry reveals a lot about human memory, learning - Science Nation

• [Video] Eric Kandel-The Biology of Memory and Age Related Memory Loss

• [SoS Episode] Research Reveals How You Can Create The Mindset of a Champion with Dr. Carol Dweck

• [Book] Make It Stick by Peter Brown

• [Book Website] Make It Stick

• [Website] Retrieval Practice

• [Website] The Learning Scientists

[00:00:19.4] 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 three million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

In this episode, we discuss a highly counter-intuitive approach to learning that flies in the face of the way you think you should learn and how it might transform your learning process. We explore several powerful evidence-based learning strategies that you can start to apply right now in your life. We explain why you should focus on getting knowledge out of your brain instead of into it and what exactly that means. We share a number of powerful memory strategies that you can use to supercharge your brain and much more with our guest, Peter Brown.

Do you need more time? Time for work, time for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our e-mail list. It's called How You Can Create Time for the Things that Really Matter in Life.

You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the e-mail list at successpodcast.com. You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our e-mail subscribers. We recently pre-released an episode in an interview to our e-mail subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience and that had tremendous implications, because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first.

With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live exclusive interview just for e-mail subscribers. There's some amazing stuff that's available only to e-mail subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the e-mail list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Or if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you're on the go, you don't have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44-222. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we discussed the incredibly important thing that everyone, including you gets wrong about presence. We explored how to prime yourself for the best performance in the moments of pressure and high-stakes situations where other people are watching and judging you. We looked at the results from thousands of experiments over the last few decades to uncover the fascinating truth about power and powerlessness.

We shared the exact strategy you can use to shift your brain into the mode that allows you to view the world as more friendly, helps you feel more creative and makes you into someone who takes action. We dug deep into all of this and much more with our previous guest, Dr. Amy Cuddy. If you want to face the hardest moments of your life with a sense of power and confidence, listen to that episode.

Now, for our interview with Peter.

[0:03:13.0] MB: Peter is a bestselling author and novelist. He's the author of five books, including Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning. Peter's work turns traditional learning techniques on their head and draws from recent discoveries in cognitive psychology to offer concrete techniques for becoming a more productive learner. His work has been featured in The New York Times, the American Public Radio, The New Yorker and much more.

Peter, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:36.9] PB: Hey, Matt. I’m really happy to be here with you. Thank you.

[0:03:39.6] MB: Well, we're very excited to have you on the show. Obviously, you chose a great title for the book, being very similar to the title of the podcast. As somebody who's a novelist, I'm really curious how you came to write a book about the applications of cognitive psychology to learning.

[0:03:56.1] PB: Yeah. It seems an odd choice, but I've always been a guy who was interested in learning new things. I was between writing projects and meeting with my brother-in-law who’s name is Roddy Roediger, Henry Roediger. He’s a internationally acclaimed cognitive psychologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

He was getting at the end of 10 years leading a group of his colleagues at different universities in a series of empirical studies into what teaching and learning strategies need to better retention of the new material. Roddy's filled his memory. He was telling me that what they had found over this decade of research, which of course is built on prior research and so forth was non-intuitive. It suggests that most of us go about learning in the wrong way if we follow our intuition.

He just caught my attention. He said, “We're trying to figure out how to get this research out to a broad audience.” We decided to collaborate. The third author is one of his colleagues and other cognitive psychologists at Washington University in St. Louis, Mark McDaniel. The three of us set out to capture the findings from this large body of scientific research in a form that was highly anecdotal and engaging, so we could get it to a broad public audience. That's how I got into it.

I think Jerry Jeff Walker once said, there's some driveways in life you just have to back out of with your lights off. I wasn't sure when I got into this writing this science book if this might be one of those driveways for me, but actually it turned out well. That's how I got into it. I had to learn the science well enough to be able to elaborate on it, describe it and so forth. It was a great opportunity for me, both to learn about learning and to actually experience it again in tackling something unfamiliar.

[0:05:51.5] MB: Let's begin with the two or three biggest ideas that came out about learning and then we'll dive into each of those and do a little bit more deep digging.

[0:05:59.9] PB: Yeah, that's a great idea. Most of us intuitively think that learning is about getting knowledge and skills into the brain. If you weren't learning to stick, really the challenge is practice at getting learning out of the brain. When you encounter something new, it takes hours or days for that new knowledge to move into your brain and get consolidated into long-term memory. That process, if you could cause that consolidation to happen from time to time, it really pulls forward the most important information that connects it to what you already know.

The act of wrestling with the material by trying to explain to someone else, retrieving it from memory, that's what builds learning that sticks. The big idea number one is, about getting it out and not about getting it in. Correspondingly, a second really big idea in this book is that we want to try to make learning easy, we want to make material very clear, easy to understand. It turns out that when learning is easy, it doesn't stick. You think it will, because it seems obvious, but there are some kinds of difficulties that feel like they slow it down and you feel like I'm not getting it.

They cause you to wrestle with the material in ways that actually strengthen its connections to what you know and deepens your grasp of it and makes it stick. That's a second big idea that some kinds of faculties are desirable. Not all kinds, but some kinds and I could talk more about that. For me, at the end of several years of working through this, the third big idea for me is that intuition leads us astray.

When we go to the golf course and try to hone our 20-foot putt, we hit that 20-foot putt over and over until we feel we've got it, we made it stick. When we're reading a chapter on preparing for an exam, we reread that over and over and memorize the phrases and so forth. Even if we do well on an exam, shortly after in both of those examples, the learning doesn't stick. It builds on short-term memory in the case of golf – the golf course, it hasn't been consolidated, but your intuition says, “I've got it. When I come back, I'm going to be able to do well.”

Whereas, if you mix up your 20-foot putt with other strokes and then have to come back and try it again and recall from memory what was it about this 20-foot putt, that effort, your performance is clunky and you walk off the course thinking maybe you're not getting it. When you come back actually, you have more improvement because that retrieval practice and mixing up a practice has caused the learning to be consolidated better.

You cannot just rely on what feels constructive if you're either in athletics, or any motor skills, or semantic learning, the kind that we do in classrooms. That's a problem, because students often end up, or any learner often ends up with faulty judgment of what they know and can do.

[0:09:10.8] MB: The upshot of that ideas is this notion that oftentimes what feels like we're learning the most can actually be sabotaging, or learning, or that we're not learning as much and yet, when we often feel we're not learning because it's challenging or difficult or we're doing lots of things at once, we may actually be building richer and better memories. Is that correct?

[0:09:31.3] PB: That's exactly correct. Anybody who spent a length of time in a foreign country struggling to master a language they're not familiar with in various settings, in getting that panicky feeling and embarrassment, ultimately will find themselves in an unexpected situation where they're speaking rather fluently. They’re maybe using some idioms that didn't even know they knew, because of this ragged, patchy, difficult way of wrestling with the problem.

One of the great things about being a human being is the brain is wired to wrestle with this stuff once you've engaged it in the problem. When you attempt something that's difficult, your brain will continue to work on that problem while you sleep. The big issue is to engage in it in a way that's mentally rigorous. Then to give your brain some time to work on it and come back to it at another time and that's up. It's not intuitive, but it is highly effective.

[0:10:29.7] MB: Before we dig into each of these buckets a little bit more, I want to understand how memory is created and stored. Can you tell me a little bit about that process, how it goes from short-term memory to long-term memory and how the hippocampus gets involved and how our lack of understanding of that can often confuse what we think is effective learning from what really is?

[0:10:49.6] PB: Right. Yeah. The hippocampus is the portion of the brain where memory is formed, but it's stored in various parts of the brain depending on whether it's a motor skill, or semantic learning, that the actual physiology is something that neuroscience is helping us understand that right now. I mean, there's a tremendous amount yet to be learned. The cognitive psychologists know from the evidence of the studies if you do this, the following things will happen.

How it happens in the brain, we're still learning. It seems to be like this that you encounter some new knowledge or skill, the experience of it is laid into your hippocampus and what's called traces, memory traces. The brain tries to make sense of those traces. It fills out gaps, tries to figure out how it connects to what you already know. Any new learning can't be learned if you can't connect it to something you already know. That's part of this process of rehearsal that goes on in the brain with new information and the movement and connection of that into other parts of the brain.

Now memory has a couple of components; one component is the knowledge of skill is connected through your neurons, to other pieces of knowledge that you have. The more connections you can make to current knowledge, the more thoroughly embedded the new skill or knowledge will be in your brain.

There's another aspect to memory and that is your ability to find it later when you want to recall it. There are many things that have happened to you in your past from addresses you've lived at, or phone numbers you have that you can't bring up quickly. Given the right prompt, some of these things will come to the floor in your mind. That's the fact of the memory still being in there, but the retrieval cues not being there.

When we're learning something new, what we're trying to do is engage with the material enough so that this help the brain figure out what are the key ideas and go through, give it time over night, over days to consolidate and get connected to other stuff, elaborate on it, how is this like, what I already know and so forth.

Then to try to connect it as broadly to current knowledge and associate with it other vivid memory cues that might be visual cues. There's times perhaps when you've been talking with a friend and you wanted to remark on something you heard from another friend and you're trying to place where it was, who was that. Then you'll see it was in a such-and-such restaurant and boom, that visual of being at that table in the corner brings back, “Oh, that was Larry who told me this and Larry such and such, so he's an authority.” Anyway, if you get my drift there, it's the idea of attaching to new learning, the kinds of cues that will help bring it forward later.

[0:13:52.1] MB: That reminds me of one of my favorite quotes about learning in memory, which is the more you know, the more you can know, right? There's this idea that our brains don't get full of knowledge. In fact, the more information you have, the more relevant connections you can connect different pieces of information and actually make recall easier, make it easier to understand and plug into existing frameworks and mental models that you have for understanding other spheres of influence and knowledge.

[0:14:18.4] PB: You have that exactly right, Matt. I mean, you can think of it in your own life building Lego blocks, or playing Scrabble, or getting involved in a new sport, biking and learning how to fix your bike. The more you know, the more you can add to that knowledge. One of the great things about complex sophisticated knowledge is you begin to construct these mental models, which you'll become almost unaware of.

For example, when you start out learning to drive a car, I have to learn about adjusting the mirrors, you have to learn about adjusting the seat and your seatbelt, of course and how you start it and where you look when you pull away and signaling your turns, all that stuff. Actually, it's a very complex set of things you have to remember to do, but after a while, you never give it another thought. You hop in the car, you do those things, off you go, your mind’s on where you're going and what you're going to do when you get there. That's a mental model, that driving is a mental model.

Now if you land in another country where they drive on the other side of the road, you suddenly become aware again of all these things that you're doing without thinking about them that have to be done differently. The idea here is as you say, building these mental models, adding more knowledge to them, understanding how they relate, it opens the world to other learning.

[0:15:42.3] MB: You also touched on visual and spatial memory and how that can help enrich our memories and make things more memorable. I've done a lot of work and research around that area personally and implemented some of those strategies in my life. I'm curious if in your work you came across things like memory palaces, mind maps, visual markers, any of these strategies and what you uncovered or discovered about them.

[0:16:04.2] PB: Yes. My co-author Roddy Roediger actually heads up a competition among super memory athletes, in which has been sponsored by pharmaceutical company doing research into memory. There is in the book Make it Stick chapter, that talks a lot about these mnemonic devices.

The main idea here is that a mnemonic advice, a simple mnemonic device is for memorizing the Great Lakes is Homes, H-O-M-E-S. It gives you here on Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior. An even better one I learned from a friend in Australia, he was taught as a child how to know the North American Great Lakes in geographical order from east to west. Old elephants have musty skin.

The idea is is it's a way of organizing what you already know. Mnemonic devices can be very sophisticated, very complicated. They are ways of helping you remember a grocery list, or in the case of the competitions that Roddy does, you can memorize a random deck of cards in something like 30 seconds. I mean, it's just astonishing how these tools can be used. They're not about learning. They're about organizing what you learn and being able to draw it up again later.

Memory palace is a great example. Memory palace, what you bring up is something that's a useful tool. I've wrote about that in the book regard to a psychology professor in England who was helping his students prepare for their A-levels and how the students would go to a cafe and sit there and say, “Okay, on this particular topic I might have to write about in my A levels. Here are the big ideas. I'm going to pretend if that topic comes up, then I come to this front door and I go through this cafe in the following sequence. The big plan in the front door is going to be associated with this idea.”

They develop these associations, so that when they sit down with a test not knowing which of these things they’re going to have to write, when one pops out, they know, “Well, that takes me over to the such-and-such café. I walk in that door or these with the things.” It helps reduce the anxiety about being able to recall it later and give you a way, a metal filing cabinet for it. Very successful.

[0:18:32.5] MB: I think that's a great distinction, which is this idea that it's not necessarily a learning strategy, but rather a way to organize knowledge that can be really effective. Let's come back to some of these big ideas and I want to start with a simple notion that you talk about in the book and you've spoken about, this idea that the way we think we should learn and the classic example of a college student reading the textbook, taking notes, when you're studying for the exam, you pull out your notes and you reread them and you study them over and over again. In many cases, that's a really flawed strategy and I'd like to hear a little bit more about why that is.

[0:19:03.8] PB: There's a couple reasons; one, when you read a text, unless you put it aside and ask yourself what were the big ideas in this text? How would I winnow this down? How does this connect to what I already know? Let's just say you read it and you try to remember it and you read it again, you underline lots of passages, you highlight passages, you have taken down verbatim notes from the lecture and you spend a lot of time rereading that material before you go in to the test. You haven't really digested it and blended it down to the main ideas and put them in your own words and explain them to yourself how these things relate to what you already know, so that you can draw them up in an exam and apply them, if you will.

The most surveys of college students of rereading is far and away. The most common study strategy far better is to read it a couple of times and then put it aside and quiz yourself on it and then go back and check to see whether you've got it or not. Then put it aside and come back to it another day and say, “Can I still recall this stuff?” That act of retrieving it from memory after you've gotten really rusty with it, but before you've forgotten it completely, has a very strong effect of strengthening the retention, because the learning becomes plastic again in your mind, if you will. The mind reconsolidates it, saying these are the key ideas, this is how they connect to what I already know and you've got it much better then.

This notion of focusing on rereading, underlining, highlighting, rereading, you spend a lot of time and you sweat a lot, you think you've really done your homework, but you haven't done yourself much a favor come exam time.

Now it's true if you pull an all-nighter. You can do probably pretty well the next morning on a test, but there's some really powerful research showing that a week later, you have lost most of what you had that morning after an all-nighter. Whereas, those who had studied by quizzing themselves have retained most of it.

[0:21:20.6] MB: This comes into the next key point that you made is this idea when you say that learning is about not getting knowledge in your head, but rather getting it out of your head, that might confuse listeners, or make people turn their heads. What do you mean when you say that and how do we think about applying that to our lives?

[0:21:36.3] PB: Sure. You've got to be exposed to the new material. You've got to read the text, hear the lecture, go out on a course and try whatever it is you're doing and maybe have a coach, or whatever you're trying to learn, sit in front of the computer with your computer game and give it a shot. If you want that learning to stick and you want to be able to build on it, then the real trick there is to do the things I've described here of trying to identify what were the big ideas, put them in your own words and practice retrieving them later.

There's several strategies that are very potent from this research for learning. One is you do as I just said; you try to put in your own words what it is you learned and relate it to what you already know. The second thing is very effective is to space out over time your learning of a skill, or a subject. You're not trying to do this thing this week and that thing the next week and another thing the third week. You want to start the third week, stop right up in week number one with the other things, get an exposure to it, try to learn some of it and come back to it again later. 

Spacing out learning is very powerful for helping connect various things you're learning to each other and for challenging your brain to come back to something that you've engaged in a little earlier because of the benefits of that retrieval, of that self-testing, flashcards, what have you, whatever it is that helps you try to come back to something earlier. Retrieval, practice, spacing it out.

Another difficulty that's desirable is to mix up your practice. If you're trying to learn to find the volume of several geometric solids and you spend, you solve 8 or 15, the volume of 8 or 15 spheres and then you do 8 or 15 wedges and you do 8 or 15 cones, you do very well in your practice because you've learned the formula and you practice applying it. During the learning phase, you do extremely well.

If you're tested on that a week later, you don’t do nearly as well as you did during the learning phase, because the problems are thrown at you at random order and you have to figure out which formula goes with which problem and then apply the formula. Whereas, if when you're learning it, you learn each of those three formulas and then you take your practice problems and you put them in a bag and shake it up and you draw them out at random.

Your performance during that learning phase, during that practice will be more ragged. You won't feel like you're getting it as well. Come the test a week later, you're going to be far better, you're going to do far better at identifying the right formula for the problem that gets presented at random and applying it successfully.

This notion of interleaving or mixing up the problems during practice again as one – it's a difficulty and a difficulty that does and feels counterproductive, because I don't see my performance being that impressive, but the benefits are potent.

[0:24:52.4] MB: I'd love to dig a little bit more into this idea of space repetition. That's another thing that I've encountered in doing a lot of homework and studying around effective learning strategies. Have you come across or seen a forgetting curve in this idea that you should?

[0:25:06.6] PB: Yes. The ebbing house forgetting curve comes from the late 19th century, which shows that when you're exposed to something new very, very quickly, you will lose about 70% of it. Then the last 30%, you forget more gradually, but you forget it. It's the human condition. Forgetting is the human condition. That's why you've got to find a way to interrupt the forgetting and this idea of retrieving from memory as a way to tie them up and to keep that memories. Anything you want to be able to recall later, periodically has to be recalled from memory in order to make it stick.

[0:25:43.2] MB: From the research I've seen around forgetting curves, it's this idea that there's actually a pattern of the first time you learn something if you review it, these might not be exact, but you reviewed a day later and then you review it three days later, then you review it a week later and then you review it a month later. The idea is that over a certain curve of spaced repetition, you can essentially retain fully whatever knowledge you've learned as long as you review it at the right increasingly lengthy intervals.

[0:26:05.9] PB: Yeah. That's a great point, Matt. There was a guy named Lightner, I think of German, who invented a little box for the flashcards. The first part of the box are all the cards that you don't know very well. When you've answered it correctly, you should keep mixing them up and then when you've answered one correctly a couple of times, you put it in a second box, which is maybe I'm only going to practice that every third day. When those do well, you put it in the next box, which is maybe you're going to practice that every two weeks. It's notion of when you're on top of it, when you can retrieve it, let some time go by, let yourself get a little rusty, but don't ever stop retrieving it every so often, in order to keep it fresh.

[0:26:48.3] MB: Earlier, you touched on an analogy that I think is a really important way to illustrate this from the book, which is you subtly said tie the knot on your knowledge. You used an example of a string of cranberries. I'd love to just share that analogy with the listeners so they can understand the importance of pursuing the right strategies when it comes to learning and really truly retaining knowledge.

[0:27:07.7] PB: Thanks. I like that one and I don't know exactly how that came to me, the mysteries of the mind when you start wrestling with something and the mind starts making connections to other experiences in your life that might be relevant. It's one of the gifts of metaphor that writers experience.

In this particular case, I've thought of for some reason, of a child putting cranberries on a thread and going to hang them on the tree and discovering they were falling off the other end of the thread, because there was no knot. If every cranberry is some learning that you want to make sure you hang on to, is like a string of pearls, you need to knot every one of them. You need to practice each of those periodically to make sure it stays there. I think I wrote that we're all losing our cranberries eventually. If it's important to you, you need to continue to put in another knot there behind that thing that you want to hang on to.

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[0:30:18.5] MB: You also shared and touched on earlier this example of practicing a golf putt,  say 20 times in a row or for an hour or two. How does that tie into this notion, this big idea you talked about before of mixed practice and versus what we traditionally look at as you call it mass practice?

[0:30:36.5] PB: Yeah. There's mass and walked. Mass practices, this notion where you would keep hitting that putt over and over again. You do get better. You see the evidence of your improvement. That improvement leans on your short-term memories as I had said. What you really want to do is practice it a couple of times and then and do some other putts, or do some other golf strokes and come back to it later, this idea of retrieving it and trying to, if you will, download from your memory what you did earlier is a very powerful way of reactivating this consolidation process.

I was chatting with a friend of mine while I was working on this book about this idea of mixing up your practice. He said, “Oh, we do that in basketball all the time.” He’s a basketball coach. He said, “We run these drills all around the basketball court. You go over here and you do this and you go over there and you do that, so forth and so on, so we get it all mixed up.”

I was chatting with my co-authors about this and I say, “Well, that's like the old LP album. When you heard this song, you knew exactly what was coming up next. It really wasn't mixed up. It was you knew at each juncture what you were expected to do next.” Mixing it up would be randomly on the court, which move you do, which play you make. The golf putt, the football plays the solid geometry, the language lesson all of those will come to a habit your mind and be connected broadly in your mind.

When you encounter them from a new angle, or somewhat unexpectedly what the scientists call transfer of a skill from one setting to another setting is greatly improved when the practice involves mixed challenges, the interleaving of different problems. New situations is like putting a pilot in a flight simulator and that throwing some emergency at the pilot and the pilot having to recall quickly what the proper steps are, even before you get out your flight manual just to stabilize the aircraft.

This notion is really one of challenging yourself to perform the maneuver, or deliver the knowledge, or explain it in a situation that's a little different each time. It makes you much more versatile in your mastery of that information. It broadens its connection to the other things you know and can do. It's easier to find again later, because it's been associated in different contexts with other kinds of knowledge.

[0:33:19.4] MB: In the book. you talk about how this idea of mixed practice can apply both to physical motor skills and also to semantic knowledge as well.

[0:33:28.0] PB: Right. Yeah, exactly. The research seems to run parallel. It's pretty exciting. One of the things – well there's this one study I particularly liked and involved grade school children tossing beanbags into baskets. I think it was for over 12 weeks in gym class, and some of the kids tossed their bean bag into four-foot baskets every time. Other students tossed into either a three-foot or a five-foot, depending on what they were asked to do, but they never tossed into the four-foot basket. The end of the 12 weeks when they were all tested tossing into a four-foot basket, the kids who did best were the ones who hadn't tossed into the four-foot basket, but they tossed into the three and the five-foot baskets.

The theory is that they developed a more sophisticated ability to judge distance and respond accordingly. That that more complex motor skill, this again is a theory about explaining this is encoded in a part of the brain where more complicated motor skills are stored, versus the simplistic repetitive movement against one target.

[0:34:37.5] MB: I've even heard this idea applied from a bigger picture perspective, that instead of reading one book at a time, it actually can behoove you to read multiple books at once, so that you have all kinds of rich different context and examples of knowledge that can help you form deeper and richer memories.

[0:34:55.6] PB: I'll say, my experience writing a historical novel, that was definitely the case, because I could read things from the period from different points of view, I can begin to hear my characters talking about the news of the day. I began to understand the places, how the places in the events of the time interconnected. I would say I don't know of any research that would say you should mix up your reading of your mathematics with the philosophy with something else.

I can't say it's good or bad. I would say, my intuition tells me you need to be able to hang on to the thread of each of those books, so that when you come back to it, you can maybe don't have this problem I do. Often, I've got a book – I've got several books on my nightstand. I pick one up and I see that I’m between chapters. I'm right in the middle of something and think what was going on before this page and I had to back up a couple pages to re-capture the thread.

I think that's an important thing if you're mixing up your reading that you don't go to the point where you lose the thread, or lose the plot as they say. You want to be able to hang on to it. Then the mixing up might be beneficial, but I can't say that I've seen any studies on that.

[0:36:05.9] MB: How does this notion of mixed practice interact with some of the research around the dangers of multitasking, or the cost of task-switching and the cognitive penalties that you suffer from switching between different activities?

[0:36:20.1] PB: Well, that's just a really good question. In multitasking, the notion is that you've got – it's like a juggler with several balls in the air and you keeping track of all of them at one time. That's taking your working memory. We all are limited in how much working memory we have at any given moment. It's why the telephone numbering system, seven numbers, I mean, was originally seven numbers before area codes, because that's about what you can hold in memory, working memory long enough to go from the phone book to the phone and dial it up, or going to the grocery store. You can remember a certain number of things. If you use some mnemonic, you can probably remember a few more, but there's a limit to it.

Multitasking is not supported by the research as an effective way to study or learn if it saps you your focus, your ability to focus on the problem at hand. When I talk about interleaving and mixing up and that thing, I'm saying you're going to focus on this now, then you're going to focus on this other thing and then you're going to focus and you're going to come back to this again later and you're dedicating your working memory to that particular task, but you come back to it after having dedicated your working memory to something else. When you come back to this one that you'd looked at earlier you have to say, “Okay now, what was that? How do I come back to that?” Does that make sense to you, the difference there?

[0:37:39.9] MB: Yeah. I think that totally makes sense. The idea is basically that in order to almost merge these two ideas that may seem conflicting, the notion is you dedicate your whole working memory to one task, but you want to be juggling or switching those tasks relatively frequently to generate the benefits of enhanced learning and mixed practice.

[0:37:59.0] PB: Right. The point of moving on isn't really leaving this. That's not the point. The point is coming back to it after having focused on something else, because when you come back, that's when you have to ask yourself where was I? What is this? How do I do this? Oh, yeah. There's this great study in the medical profession where the doctors were learning to tie tiny little, or microsurgical dots to repair vessels.

The typical way the doctors learn is they go away for a Saturday and they see a video about how to do this micro-surgery and then they're given something called a Penrose drain, there's a little rubber tube that's often used to drain surgical sutures after a surgery. Then they're supposed to tie together two pieces of this rubber. Then they give in another video and then some synthetic tissue and they try to do the same thing and then there's a third video where they're given a turkey thigh and they repair some tiny vessels.

There's four videos, four practice sessions, one day, boom, you've got it, you're now a micro-surgery expert. That's the typical way it's done. On this study, half of the docs did it that way and half of the docs did all the – say four steps, but there was a week between each one. They went in the first week, they saw the video, they got the Penrose drain, they did the repair, they went back to their office to do something else.

A week later they came back for the second video and the synthetic tissue. Well, I can imagine they go back to second week and they're thinking, “What was that last week?” I can imagine their pulses were raised a little bit, tried to recall it, because they only had that little bit of exposure. They did the second one, went away for a week, came back did, the third and so on.

A month after completion of the training in each case, they were tested on expert measures, expert microsurgical instructors who would watch them do the stuff and how well they did. Then as a surprise, they were each given a rat that needed to have the aorta reattached, a live rat. In all the expert measures and in the surgeries, the doctors who had had exactly the same training but it was spaced out week-by-week, that’s over four weeks did far better than the other doctors.

Simply the fact of letting your brain wrestle with it, coming back, that added effort of remembering and then building on that remembering with another effort and going away, it is a desirable difficulty, that spaced practice and mixed up with the other things they spent their time doing in the intervening week.

[0:40:41.5] MB: Did you come across the term creative incubation at all in your research around this phenomenon?

[0:40:48.3] PB: I'm not familiar with the term. No.

[0:40:50.4] MB: It's basically this idea that it's the similar notion applied to creativity, which is basically the idea of feed information into your subconscious, then step away from the problem for an hour, or a week, or several days and then come back to it and you'll often generate new breakthrough insights.

[0:41:07.3] PB: Oh, Matt. Yeah, I believe in that big time as a writer. I'm married. My wife likes to get out first thing in the morning, otherwise we're not going to get our exercise in. Well, you go ahead. I find if I'm working on something difficult, writing something, I'm much better off struggling with that until, I don't know, 10:30 in the morning, or 2:30 in the afternoon. Then I get on my bike and go like hell, because my mind is just wrapped up in the stuff.
When I get on the bike and I push up the hills and cruise along and think about something else, “Oh, I get these ideas. I get these breakthrough thoughts.” I think it's what you're describing, what you call creative incubation, is to me I'm prying to my brain and then I let my body go and I start getting back, this incredible stuff.

[0:41:56.1] MB: It's fascinating. I think the common thread between these two notions is that you input knowledge in your brain and then by consciously doing something else, you're allowing the subconscious to recombine, to look at new alternatives, to process then and store the knowledge. It seems like whether it's the context of learning or creativity, this same notion is really powerful.

[0:42:15.8] PB: I think it is. I think this is what the brain does best. When we get nervous about whether it's working is when we get in our own way. It’s better when we just really push for the challenge and then go on and do something else and let it along and come back to it later.

[0:42:32.3] MB: That brings up a point that I want to come back to, which is the idea of embracing difficulty and how mental effort is really important for encoding and retrieval of information.

[0:42:42.9] PB: Yeah. Eric Kandel is a neuroscientist Nobel Laureate, who's really trying to understand the biology of memory. There's this really wonderful video, which is available on Nova if you go online, if you Google Nova Kandel, K-A-N-D-E-L and sea slug, maybe put the word memory in there, you'll probably find it.

He discovered that sea slugs, they have few but very large neurons in their brains. That he demonstrates that – well one thing about sea slugs is if you touch a sea slug siphon with a stimulus, it'll close down. It's like if you're at the sea and you touch – I can't even think of the sea animals, but when you touch them, you see them closing up. Then they open up again when you go away. This is true of the sea slug siphon as well.

If you have just a tiny little electric current in that probe, it closes and stays closed much longer. He demonstrates how he creates a memory in the sea slug, in the neuron between a regular touch with a probe, which is a short closure, versus when it has a slight current in it, which is much longer closure. The sea slug remembers that long closure. Then he shows you with a video in a slide, the neurons reaching out to form a connection with other neurons, which is the physiological aspect of memory. Memory is physiological, actual physical changes in the brain. This is what's so compelling to me about this video of Kandel’s.

If you think of learning that way, it helps them to understand why it's true that mental effort and persistence toward a learning goal, if it feels difficult, well you're actually changing your brain, you're actually creating new connections and new synapses. Yeah, it is difficult. If you interpret the difficulty as I'm not getting it, I don't have what it takes, that's too bad because you could say I'm not getting it yet. Dr. Carol Dweck, who is well- known for this theory of the growth mindset has shown that if you understand that your intellectual abilities aren't just fixed by the gift of your genes, but to a large extent can be increased by building these connections in the brain by building mental models and increasing your knowledge, you are actually increasing the wiring in your brain, then it's worth persevering.

It's one strategy to learn something doesn't work, you try a little different strategy, but you carry on forward. You don't interpret the difficulty as failure, or interpret as knowledge and as the effort that's involved in doing the important work of mastering whatever it is you're after.

[0:45:49.2] MB: For listeners who want to concretely implement some of the themes and ideas that we've talked about today, what would be one piece of homework that you would give them to really take action on these ideas?

[0:46:00.4] PB: Well, I think that it stumped me there Matt. I mean, Make it Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Harvard University Press would be a great way to start. Whereas, where we've taken all this research and laid it out with examples and a reader-friendly explanation.

I would say one of the things to do is to look back in your own life the things that you've tackled maybe for fun that were a struggle where you surprised yourself and actually discovering you became good at it. I mean, I don't know whether it's riding a bike, or what it is, but we all from the moment we got off of all fours and started walking have had these experiences of trial and error leading to success.

One thing to do is to inquire of your own life where you have had these challenges and been surprised at your success in learning something, using strategies that felt ragged, slightly random. Rather than this idea of masked or blocked practice.

The other thing is to read the science of learning. There's some great stuff on the web, there's some really fantastic books that are coming out that take these fundamental discoveries about learning and animate them through stories and examples. One other thing that's also available, broadly available are new tools to create flashcard sets, or quizzes that will come into your phone on something where you're trying to memorize stuff. This is big in medical school, but in many different fields. There's Quizlet, there's Anki, there's others, there's many different – now slide decks, or what have you that you can use to begin to test yourself.

That's the fundamental issue is to practice retrieving, practice performing and space it out, mix it up, practice doing it. Only by doing it whatever it is, answering the flashcard or pedaling the bike, only by doing that can you really be confident that you know how to do it. Not by reading about riding the bike, or reading the flashcards, or what have you. It's by self-testing and spacing that up and coming back to it again later and aha, I do know it.

[0:48:20.4] MB: We’ll make sure to include a lot of these resources in the show notes. Anke is a personal one that I’ve loved and use. It's a free piece of software that you can use to space out and it actually bakes in these forgetting curves as well. Peter, where can listeners if they want to do some more homework, they want to find you, they want to find your work, what's the best place for them to do that online?

[0:48:37.2] PB: Well makeitstick.com is the website. The website has got a fair amount of information on it. There are a couple others that I would mention. There's one called retrievalpractice.org, which is – and another one called learning scientists, that's plural scientists, learningscientists.org. Those are geared mostly to teachers and mostly in the K-12 range, or post-secondary. Those are great sources.

There's a lot of stuff out there. We have some links at makeitstick.com as well. If people want to be in touch by e-mail, or e-mail addresses there, it’s authors@makeitstick.net and own dot-com for a while, now we do, but either one works. Authors@makeitstick.net is an e-mail address.

[0:49:27.9] MB: Well Peter, thank you so much for coming on the show for sharing all this knowledge and wisdom with listeners. I'm a huge fan of many of these learning strategies that you've shared. I think it was a great conversation.

[0:49:38.2] PB: Matt, I loved it. Thanks very much for the opportunity.

[0:49:40.9] 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 hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail 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.

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Your Secret to Feeling Powerful In Life's Toughest Moments with Dr. Amy Cuddy

In this episode we discuss the incredibly important thing that everyone (including you!) get’s wrong about presence, we explore how to prime yourself for the best performance in moments of pressure and high stakes situations where other people are watching and judging you. We look at the results from thousands of experiments over the last few decades to uncover the fascinating truth about power and powerlessness. And we share the exact strategy you can use to shift your brain into the mode that allows you to view the world as more friendly, help you feel more creative, and make you into someone who takes action. We dig deep into all this and much more with our guest Dr. Amy Cuddy.  

Dr. Amy Cuddy is an American social psychologist, author, and speaker. She currently lectures on the psychology of leadership and influence at Harvard University and she and her work have won several awards including being named one of “50 Women Who Are Changing The World” by Business Insider. She is the author of the 2015 best-selling book Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges and her 2012 TED talk is the second most viewed talk of all time. Her work has been featured in TIME, Wired, Fast Company, NPR, and countless academic journals.

• The incredibly important thing that everyone (including you!) get’s wrong about Presence 

• Presence - what is it and why do you so often misunderstand it?

• Presence is not a permanent state that you achieve if you go to enough meditation retreats

• No one can be present all the time, no one can be present all the time

• Presence is a momentary state - its when you are attuned to and able to comfortably express your authentic best self

• What is does it mean to be your “authentic best self?"

• How do you bring your best self to your least likely situation when you’re least likely to be present and most likely to be distracted by your fears?

• Let yourself off the hook about being your best self and being present all the time - it’s impossible 

• How does the expression of the "Best Self" interact with the concept of FLOW?

• Presence is about moments of pressure that come from human interaction - people judging us, high stakes situations throwing us off our games

• Being focused on the outcome, feeling that you’re being judged, feeling like you’re in a high stakes situation often shuts us off from moments of real presence 

• When are not present it reveals itself to others - it often triggers “deception queues” in your nonverbal communication 

• When you lie you’re suppressing the words and emotions around the story - we often might get the words right but we often get the emotions and nonverbal wrong

• When you are present you become aligned, you become synchronous, you aren’t getting in the WAY of yourself you’re BEING yourself - you believe your story and people hear, feel, and see that in your verbal and nonverbal communication 

• The people who do the best on Shark Tank are the ones who clearly buy what they are selling - there is no reservation, you can hear their belief and their conviction 

• When you’re authentic and you bring your best self forward you believe that self - authenticity is a HUGE and KEY piece of this 

• Synchronous words and nonverbal

  1. You believe your own story

  2. When you’re present you communicate confidence, not arrogance 

• Arrogance is associated with fragile high self-esteem - confidence is a tool that invites people in - arrogance is the opposite

• Non-zero-sum power - personal power 

• People who feel powerful are much more likely to be present 

• When you look at the results from thousands of experiments over the last few decades - you see a fascinating pattern about power.

• Feeling powerful affects your feelings, thoughts, behaviors, and physiologies 

• When you’re in a place of feeling Powerful - you see the world as more friendly, you’re more creative, you’re more likely to take action - you view the world from the “approach” system

• Why don’t bystanders intervene when they see a clear emergency? 

• Power lets you EXPAND into situations and TAKE ACTION 

• The vital difference between what Amy calls PERSONAL POWER and what many people’s traditional understanding of POWER might be.

• Make peace with the idea of Power - its OK to feel powerful. Power is not just power over others or power over resources - its about feeling that you control your own resources, your own destiny, your own life.

• How do we lose power? How do we start to feel powerless? 

• You want to feel powerful - you want other people to feel powerful - power is a HUGE piece of your general wellbeing. As you start to feel less powerful, as you start to feel less control, you begin to flip into the “Inhibition System” 

• When you start to hide, when you start to make yourself feel small, when you start to feel like you are lesser than, when you start to collapse and contract - do TWO KEY THINGS

• (1) Notice what TRIGGERED the feeling of powerless 

  1. (2) Start to physically expand, slow down, open up, take some deep expansive breaths. Pausing and slowing down 

• What makes people feel powerless?

• Focus on feelings of expansiveness and try to prepare yourself before getting in high-pressure situations 

• Ways that you can EXPAND and create more Power in your life and in your toughest moments:

• Slow your speech

  1. Breathe more deeply

  2. Physically expand 

  3. Sit up straight 

  4. Movement 

  5. Carry yourself in an expansive way

  6. Carry yourself with a sense of pride and purpose 

• Often times “Mind-Body” Interventions are MUCH more effective, especially when we’re anxious, than “Mind-Mind” Interventions

• If the body is acting like it’s not being threatened, the mind will often follow into the same pattern 

• In moments of anxiety - remember that you are an animal - and changing your body can often result in changes to your mind 

• How does Imposter Syndrome play into feelings of powerlessness? 

• At Harvard Business School 75% to 80% of students feel imposter syndrome. You’re not alone, everyone feels imposter syndrome at some point in their lives 

• Men often feel that they aren’t capable or able to share their weaknesses, fears, and vulnerabilities 

• Things that make you feel like an imposter are often things that send social signals that you’re actually less likely to be an imposter 

• Homework: Before you go into a stressful situation - prepare by using expansive postures, in private, have good posture, carry yourself with a sense of pride, mind your posture. Notice when you slouch and make yourself small. 

• Homework: Change how you’re holding your phone - sit back and hold your phone up over you

• Homework: Pay attention to other’s posture. Presence invites presence from others. 

Thank you so much for listening!

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [SoS Episode] When the Impossible Becomes Possible - The Secrets of Flow Revealed with Steven Kotler

• [BioMotionLab Profile] Niko Troje

• [Study] The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention by Pauline Rose Clance & Suzanne Imes

  • [Article] IMPOSTOR PHENOMENON (IP)

• [Amazon Author Page] Neil Gaiman

• [Twitter] Amy Cuddy

• [Personal Site] Amy Cuddy

• [Personal Blog] Where Are the Grown Ups? by Amy Cuddy

• [Amazon Author Page] Amy Cuddy

• [Book] Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges by Amy Cuddy

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] 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 three million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

In this episode, we discuss the incredibly important thing that everyone, including you, gets wrong about presence. We explore how to prime yourself for the best performance in the moments of pressure and high-stakes situations where other people are watching and judging you. We look at the results from thousands of experiments over the last few decades to uncover the fascinating truth about power and powerlessness.

We share the exact strategy you can use to shift your brain into the mode that allows you to view the world as more friendly, helps you feel more creative and makes you into someone who consistently takes action. We dig into all of these and much more with our guest, Dr. Amy Cuddy.

Do you need more time? Time for work, time for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our e-mail list. It’s called How You Can Create Time for the Things That Really Matter in Life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the e-mail list at successpodcast.com.

You’re also going to get exclusive content that’s only available to our e-mail subscribers. We recently pre-released an episode in an interview to our e-mail subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience. That had tremendous implications, because there was a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first.

With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live, exclusive interview just for e-mail subscribers. There’s some amazing stuff that’s available only to e-mail subscribers that’s only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the e-mail list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Or if you’re driving around right now, if you’re out and about and you’re on the go, you don’t have, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44-222. That’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

Do you feel uncomfortable and conflict with others? Do you experience fear and anxiety when dealing with tough situations? Most negotiation tactics and strategies assume you’re already a master negotiator with nerves of steel, but that’s the wrong starting place.

In our previous episode, we discussed how you can get comfortable with having tough conversations and build the foundation to become a real master negotiator, using a simple and easy-to-apply framework. We discussed how you can deal with tough situations and conflict from a place of poise, curiosity and conflict with our previous guest, Kwame Christian. If you want to feel more confident in the toughest situations of your life, listen to that episode.

Now, for our interview with Amy.

[0:03:20.2] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Dr. Amy Cuddy. Amy is an American social psychologist, author and speaker. She currently lectures on the psychology of leadership and influence at Harvard University. She and her work have won several awards,  including being named one of the 50 women who are changing the world by business insider.

She’s the author of the 2015 bestselling book Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges. Her 2012 TED Talk is the second most viewed talk of all time. Her work has been featured in Time, Wired, Fast Company, NPR, countless academic journals. Amy, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:55.5] AC: Thanks so much for having me, Matt.

[0:03:57.2] MB: Well, we’re very excited to have you on the show today and to dig into the meat of some of these – some of the work that you’ve done. I’d love to start out with presence. It’s something so simple and yet, people often view it as the wrong way, or misinterpret it. I’d love to understand when you talk about presence and its importance, what does it mean to you?
[0:04:17.0] AC: Yeah. I think when people hear the word and it is used a lot these days, especially when people are talking about things like mindfulness. It’s not well-defined in those context and discussion, so people are left to define it on their own. What I find they come to in their own process of defining it is that it must some permanent state that you get to if you do enough meditation retreats. It’s like a state that you get to where you’re always present and that’s not the way it works at all.

Presence, it is inevitably fleeting.  No one can be present all the time. It’s a momentary state. It’s not a permanent state. It’s the state in which you are attuned to and able to access and comfortably express your authentic best self. Now, authentic best-self, there is another phrase that I think is used all the time and not well-defined. Let me just take a moment to say by authentic, I don’t mean unfiltered, right? I mean, there are times where we need to be mindful of who we’re speaking with and be respectful in our interactions and you could still be authentic.

I’m talking about the person that you are in the best moments of your life. If you think back, over the last say two or three years, think about the very best moments. These moments would be times when you feel totally connected, you feel – is probably an interaction with other people, you feel like that connection is real and deep. You feel odd, you feel seen, you feel hurt and you feel that you’re seen in hearing them and you feel happy and relieved.

That’s your authentic best sell. The question is how do you bring that person to your most challenging situations where you’re least likely to be present, right? Because you’re so distracted by all of your fears. How do you bring that authentic best self, which probably happens in the moment of your life when you’re with people who you know and care about and love and trust? How do you bring that into interactions with new people, where you’re maybe pitching something, or interviewing or giving a talk? How do you bring it into those situations?

[0:06:37.0] MB: That’s a great fundamental question. I want to dig into it. Before we do, I want to just come back to something. I think you pointed out a really important major misconception that a lot of people have about presence. Tell me more about this idea that we can’t be present all the time and that it’s a fleeting state.

[0:06:54.6] AC: We’re human, right? There are always thoughts and distractions that are poking their heads in and pulling this away. That’s okay. We would be artificial intelligence if we were able to do that. I think that we have to let ourselves off the hook a bit around expecting ourselves to be present all the time. Even if you’re in a really engaging, say talk, or you’re watching a great movie. The things that still fully engage you, you’re still going to be distracted at moments. You might have to go to the bathroom. I’m just giving you a really simple idea that distracts you from being present, right? To let yourself off the hook that you just can’t be present all the time. It’s impossible.

[0:07:39.3] MB: How does this idea of the authentic best self interact with the concept of flow?

[0:07:46.0] AC: I think there’s a lot to it. I guess, I would say flow is a supreme state of this that lasts also a bit longer. It might be – certainly people are present in those moments, but they also may not be interacting with other people when they’re in a flow state. The presence that I talk about usually involves human interactions and the pressures that come from human interaction, like the feeling that people are judging us, or the feeling that the stakes are really high in this situation, and that throws us off from being able to hear what the other person is saying. Flow I do think lasts a bit longer. It’s like an extreme form of presence.

[0:08:30.9] MB: I like that distinction, the presence you’re talking about is about situations where we’re interacting with other people where the stakes are high, where we feel like we’re being judged. How do we bring presence to those types of situations and what prevents us from being present in those high-stakes environments?

[0:08:48.6] AC: Well, I think the key is that we feel powerless in these moments. Feeling that you’re being judged and being very focused on the outcome as opposed to the process. Again yeah, feeling that the stakes are very high make it really hard for us to even remember who we are, well enough to be able to access that person and present that person.

The interesting thing is that when we're not present, it reveals itself to others, right? In some ways, not being present which is the same as not bringing your authentic self to the situation, it looks like deception. I get into the lie detection work, which I think is really a fascinating piece that fits in here. When people are lying, so when they're intentionally deceiving, there are these tells, right? There these signs that not everyone, but most people inadvertently send signals that they're not telling the truth. The main one there is not eye contact. Eye contact is actually a very poor signal of lying, because people learn very different things from their parents about whether you should make eye contact when you're being questioned. They learn different things in different cultures. Men and women might differ on that. Introverts and extroverts differ.

What you are looking for are asynchronous between the words the person is saying and the body language the person is using, because when you're lying, you are suppressing one true story and you're telling another different false story. Each of those stories comes with a set of emotions. You're basically not only suppressing the story and you're good at doing that with words, but you're also suppressing the emotions that go with that story and you're trying to fake another story with words and also get the body language right to go with that. It's almost impossible for us to do that.

What happens is that we see these asynchronous between the emotions that go with the words and the emotions that are leaking out through people's body language. When you're nervous and not authentic, the same kinds of things happen. People seem asynchronous. They seem off. Their words don't quite match what they're doing with their bodies, because you have too much to think about and not enough cognitive bandwidth to be telling the story and also matching your nonverbals to it. That's too much choreography.

When you are present, the opposite happens, right? You become aligned and synchronous, your words match your body language, you're not getting in the way of yourself, you're being yourself. That's one thing that comes across to other people.

Another is that you believe your story and people hear that and see that, right? You buy what you're selling. If you think about the show Shark Tank, which is I think a guilty pleasure for many of us. I love a psychologist and body language person. I love analyzing what's happening on that show and trying to predict who's going to do well and who's not going to do well.

What I find is that the people who do the best and this is really clearly backed up by a lot of research, which I'll talk to you about in a minute, but is that the people who do the best are the ones who clearly buy what they're selling. There's no reservation. You can hear their conviction, their belief about what they're selling. That is so important. That's an important cue, right?

If you're not going to eat the cookie that you're selling, why would anyone else eat the cookie that you're selling? When you're present and bringing your authentic best self forward, you believe that self, right? That's what's happening. What the research shows is that that is a really important variable, this this authenticity variable. In studies that I’ve looked at, VC pitches, or job interviews that people who are – how conviction about who they are and belief in their story do much better. Then so I would say the third piece, so you now have synchrony between words and nonverbals, you have believe in your story.

The third and I think this is so important, because people often conflate these two concepts; when you are present, you communicate confidence, not arrogance. Arrogance is often seen as a sign of confidence. It's not. In fact, it's more closely related to what we would call fragile high self-esteem. It's people who report they have self-esteem, but they really don't. It can be punctured really easily. Confidence is a tool that invites people and it's appealing. People find it attractive.

Arrogance is exactly the opposite. It's a weapon. At the very least, it's a wall that you build to prevent people from challenging you, to intimidate them. No one likes arrogance. No one likes arrogance. They may not challenge you, but that's not because they believe you. It's because they want to get rid of you, right? Confidence is what you're going for, not arrogance. When you're present, you're able to be confident and really fully grounded in who you are. For that reason, you don't feel defensive when people challenge you, or push back. You feel like, “Huh, that's an interesting question and I want my idea to be as good as it can be, so let me try to engage with that.”

When you're arrogant, you're not going to be able to receive that pushback in a constructive way. Those three things together are great predictors of outcomes in things like hiring decisions and investments. They're not false signals. If you look down the road six months later after those people are hired, or after someone invests in them, these are the people who actually are doing better. They work harder, they are more creative, they're more likely to inspire people around them, they stay at the job longer.

[0:14:47.3] MB: I love this idea that we might get the words right when we're maybe being not as genuine as possible, or not as authentic as possible and we're not being our best selves, but it's often the nonverbals that creep in and communicate a different story. That's why people may feel something is off about a speech, or presentation, or a performance in a high-stakes moment when on the surface level, things seem fine. Tell me a little bit more about the science behind that and behind all these phenomenons.

[0:15:16.2] AC: Well, let me say a little bit about what's happening. First of all, the studies that I was talking about what's happening, I mean, the way that they're figuring out what is mediating the relationship between the person and the outcome is by having experts code the videos of these interactions on these variables that I listed; the confidence and authenticity and synchronous body language.

It's not that the people who are making the investment decisions know that's why they're doing it. They're not quite aware of why they like this person better. It's not something that they can quite articulate, which I think is really very interesting. What it comes down to is that people who feel powerful and by powerful, I'm not talking about power over other people, but power to do, power to bring that best self forth, belief in yourself, self-efficacy, agency. That's what I'm talking about; nonzero-sum power, which I call personal power.

People who feel personally powerful are able to be present and people who feel powerless are just not able to be to be present. When you look at the research on power, which is – and I'm not just talking about power posing. I'm talking about a much, much bigger, much broader area of research that it includes literally thousands of psychological experiments from the last couple of decades.

What you see is this really fascinating pattern. The pattern is this; when people feel powerful, it affects their feelings, their thoughts, their behaviors and even their physiology. When they feel powerless, it also affects those things, but in the opposite way. Let me describe it this way, when you feel powerful, it activates what we call the behavioral approach system. You feel more optimistic and more happy and more confident. You think more openly, more creatively. You do better on cognitive tasks. You generally see the world as a place that's filled with opportunities, not threats.

You see new people not as potential predators, or competitors. You see them as potential allies and friends. You are much more likely just to take action. When you feel powerless, you don't act. You freeze, or you flee, right? You don't take action when you feel powerless. When you feel powerful, you do. Including power on behalf of others. Think about all of the research on bystander non-intervention. Why do bystanders not intervene when they see a clear emergency?

When you look at some of this research on adults, you find that one of the strongest predictors is that people don't intervene, they don't act because they feel powerless. People who feel powerful are much more likely to step in and help a victim. This is not just a selfish, or a self-serving outcome. The last is that it affects your physiology in exactly the same way. People feel stronger, they feel less stressed, but you also see that their cortisol levels are lower, so that's one of your stress hormones. Their cortisol reactivity is less strong. In other words, when something stressful happens, their cortisol doesn't spike as high as it does for somebody who feels powerless. They live longer. They have a lower rate of stress-related illness.

All of that together, again think of as power allows you to expand and approach the world, right? The world becomes bigger and friendlier to you. Powerlessness does the opposite. When you feel powerful, you can be present. When you feel powerless, it absolutely blocks you from being present.

[0:19:05.0] MB: Hey everyone. I wanted to take a quick second and tell you about this episode's incredible sponsor, Brilliant. Brilliant is a Math and Science enrichment learning platform. Brilliant is unique in that it teaches you these concepts to solving fascinating and challenging problems. We'll be featuring a new sample problem to our e-mail subscribers every week as part of Brilliant’s support for the show, so be sure to check those out.

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[0:21:16.8] MB: Before we get too much deeper, I think it's worthwhile to dig into the difference between what you call personal power or power and what many people might have as a traditional understanding, or colloquial definition of power.

[0:21:32.1] AC: Yeah. It's funny, when I ask people if we’re doing a free association and I say the word ‘power’, what's the next word you think of? The word that comes up most often is corruption.

[0:21:45.3] MB: That's what I thought of.

[0:21:47.0] AC: Yeah. Did you? Right. That's fascinating, right? Because what that says to me is wow, the people have one definition of power. They think of power as political power. They think of it as hierarchical power. Then the cases that are most salient to them are those where you see a powerful person behaving in a way that involves corruption. The truth is that power does not corrupt. Power reveals. Power reveals who you are. Power only corrupts when it's interacting with other forces like certain personalities and all kinds of societal and economic pressures and structures that facilitate corruption.

The first thing is to make peace with the idea of power. It's okay to feel powerful. The second is to realize that power is not just power over others. It's not just controlling others, or controlling resources. It is again, it's about you feeling that you control your own resources, right, your own inner resources. The feeling that you have some control in your life, that you're not being controlled by other forces, that you're making those decisions and that you have this intrinsic feeling of motivation and control. Yeah, that's the power that I'm talking about. That power certainly doesn't corrupt.

Generally, I think it's good for all of us to feel that way and for you to want the people in your organization to feel that way. This is again, not zero-sum, it's not hierarchical. Everyone in your organization, people who work for you can feel powerful and it's taking nothing away from anyone else. It's only contributing to their ability to be present, to be passionate to show up to do their best.

[0:23:29.6] MB: Tell me more about the approach system and this idea that we expand into the world when we feel powerful.

[0:23:36.8] AC: I really think of it in this – I imagine this person stepping forward and opening their arms. Well, this sounds totally corny and I never thought of it this way, but the scene from Titanic where Leonardo DiCaprio and they were there standing at the front with their arms open. I mean, that's a moment of feeling really powerful, like very confident and connected and having a sense of agency and freedom, right?

Think of it as a power liberates you to be who you are. It frees you. That's really what the approach system is about. It’s about not going into you're terrified, fight, flee, or faint mode. It's the opposite of that. What happens in these stressful situations, say let's just use job interview, which is a stressful situation that almost everyone will encounter at some time in their lives.

Job interviews feel – they basically activate that fight, flee or faint system. The thing is that's adaptive. If you are actually being chased by a tiger, right? That's what you should do. You should run. When you're in an interaction like a job interview, that system doesn't help you at all, right? It's a flaw in the way that we're wired. What you got to figure out is how do you get in there and turn off that response? Instead, respond as someone who is – has composure, has confidence, has this feeling of power, knows that no matter what happens in this situation, they're not going to die, right? They're not going to die if they don't get the job.

[0:25:11.6] MB: I want to look at the flip side of this and start to understand why don’t people have power, why do people lose power, why do people feel powerless?

[0:25:22.0] AC: One thing is that when we begin to feel powerless, we consent to that feeling. We don't notice it as something that we should resist. We do just allow ourselves to fall into it. One of the things that I would love to do in the world is to get people to understand that people's psychological well-being, their subjective well-being is not just about happiness and lack of stress, because that's how people generally think of it.

When they think about like how well do you feel, they think well, “I'm happy and I'm not very stressed.” Those two things are important. I think there's now quite a bit of research on the importance of feeling a sense of purpose, so there's discussion about that. What I don't often hear people talk about and what ends up being a really important predictor of thriving is that people also feel that sense of agency. They feel they can get things done.

Think about if you were trying to improve, increase the well-being of a struggling society and you wanted to measure the long-term outcomes of that. You wouldn't just want to make them feel happy and less stressed, you'd also want to make them feel powerful, right? You want them to feel that they can change their situation, they can get things done. Not just continue to live as they are, right?

Power is such an important piece of your general well-being. As you start to feel less powerful and again, personally powerful, note that. Start to pay attention to the moments when you collapse. When do you start to slouch? When do you start to lower your eyes and maybe wrap yourself with your torso with your arms? Think about what people do when their team is losing, or when they are on the losing team in sports.

Sports has so much to teach us about these things. I'm a huge baseball fan, so I just finished watching the World Series and my team won. Go Red Sox, but it was very fun to watch what was happening in the stands, because you see as your team is struggling, everyone all of a sudden they have their hands on their faces. They're covering their eyes. They're touching their necks. They're doing all kinds of contractive body language. That's a sign of feeling powerless. 

It's what animals do when they don't have power. They're hiding themselves. They're making themselves invisible. They're making themselves small. That's a sign of feeling powerless, so when you notice that you're starting to do that, two things; try to figure out what was the stimulus that led you to react that way. What caused you to react that way? Because that gets you to know yourself and what are the cues that you should you get in touch with to understand when you're losing that sense of power, but also don't allow yourself to collapse. That's exactly when you actually need to physically expand.

Say you're giving a talk and you start to realize that you're doing nervous things like touching your arm with your opposite hand, or touching your face, or maybe you're speaking very quickly, which is another way of contracting. Instead of doing those things, slow down, open up your shoulders, take some deep expansive breaths and all of that will reset you. It triggers a relaxation response. It allows you to collect yourself, collect your thoughts. It certainly does not signal powerlessness to an audience, because pausing and slowing down does exactly the opposite. It signals power. All of those things are ways in which you can resist collapsing into that feeling of powerlessness.

[0:29:04.3] MB: From a larger perspective outside of just moments of powerlessness, what causes people to be or feel powerless in their lives?

[0:29:14.2] AC: Well, lots of things. I don't want to dismiss all of the structural and institutional and real things that make us feel powerless, like systemic prejudices and for all kinds of unfair inequalities. Illness, right? Losing a job. In fact, chronic unemployment is the strongest predictor of unhappiness and powerlessness, especially for men. That's a very strong predictor of long-term power, feelings of powerlessness and depression.

There are a lot of things that can do it, and I'm not saying that it's easy to make yourself feel powerful, but you have to try. You have to at least resist that urge to contract and hide and go into the fetal position.

[0:30:00.8] MB: I think my perspective on it at least and I'm curious what your perspective is, the most effective strategy if you're in a tough situation like that is to try and create agency for yourself, try and create action, try and create results and having the mindset of or being in a place of powerlessness is often the most counterproductive thing you can do in those types of scenarios.

[0:30:20.6] AC: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's because you're also ceding control of your own outcome and your own thoughts. You end up leaving those situations with a sense of regret, as opposed to a sense of satisfaction. One of the interesting things about these stressful situations where people feel present or not present, or powerful or not powerful is that when people feel powerless, they don't feel they've been seen. They leave something like a job interview feeling like, “Ah, I wish I had shown them who I am.”

They leave with a sense of regret and they can't get themselves out of the cycle of wanting to do over, but you don't get a do-over. You just have to move on and not pick up another piece of baggage that you carry in with you to the next situation that looks the same way. People often, that sense of regret is all about what happened in that moment. It's not actually about the outcome. When people feel present and powerful in something like a job interview, when they leave they feel satisfied and they feel much more accepting of the outcome, even if it's not the one they desired. They feel that what happened was fair, that they were seen, they were heard and if they weren't chosen, that's okay. Maybe there was somebody who is a better fit. It doesn't reflect so strongly on them in a negative way.

I think that for me, I very much do focus on these feelings of expansiveness versus contractiveness and what you can do to prepare yourself before you go in, because one thing that people are not great at doing when they feel bad about themselves is telling themselves that they're powerful. When you feel anxious and powerless and then you tell yourself, “Oh, no. I'm actually powerful,” now you just feel you're lying to yourself. It can make it even more salient, so you can get a rebound effect, a heightened sense of powerlessness.

We're not very good at talking ourselves down off the ledge, but we are good at walking ourselves down off the ledge at changing the way we carry ourselves, the way we breathe, the way we move, our speech, our posture, all of those things. Again, not just about standing like a superhero. There's so much more research out there from many different fields that show the same pattern. When we expand, we feel powerful and we can control our expansiveness.

If you start from the head down to the feet, it's a ways to expand. I've already mentioned this, but speak more slowly. Studies done at Stanford GSB, researchers like Deb Grunfeld have found that when you get people to slow down their speech, they feel more powerful and others perceive them as more powerful. Slow your speech. Breathing, right? Do you breathe shallowly, or do you breathe deeply? When you breathe deeply and expansively and really fill your lungs, you are triggering what's called the relaxation response. That is a complex circuitry in your mind that's telling your body that you are not in a threatening situation. You are in a safe situation. You don't go into fight, flee or faint mode. You feel comfortable.

There you've got just two things that you can do starting at the head. Certainly, even simple posture like sitting up straight is a way of expanding. Your shoulders should be back and down and your chest should be open. You should basically do what you would do when your grandmother might have told you to sit up straight. Studies show that people who are clinically depressed, if you get them to sit up straight for just two to three minutes which goes against the typical posture of someone who's depressed, they feel significantly happier. The same then applies to people who are not depressed as social psychologists have shown.

Then you have complex posture, which is what I've been studying is the various ways in which we expand in more complex ways, not just sitting up straight, so having your limbs away from your torso, having your feet apart. When you do that before you go into a stressful situation, you feel more powerful. You don't do it while you're in the stressful situation, because it comes across as really rude, right? You're not going to man spread when you're sitting in a job interview, you're not going to stand like a superhero or in the victory pose when you're in a job interview, but you can do it in advance.

Even movement. Studies by a guy named Nico Troya whose Queens University outside of Toronto, shows that even walking changes the way we feel. When we feel happy for example, we walk in a more expansive bouncy way. When we feel sad, we get really contractive. When he has people walk in this way that mirrors happiness and they don't know that that's what they're doing. They just know they're walking in a way that matches what they're looking at on a screen, they end up feeling happier and more powerful than people who walked in this contractive way.

All of those things override the doubts that happen when you're trying to change your mind with your mind. Instead, use your body to change your mind. Carry yourself in an expansive way with a sense of pride, with a sense of purpose, right? When you carry yourself that way, that's the world that manifests in front of you.

[0:35:33.7] MB: That's exactly what I wanted to get into next. Tell me more about the notion of the mind; mind connection versus the mind body connection.

[0:35:42.4] AC: The body and mind connection encompasses so much different work. So much of that is important, right? Cognitive behavioral therapy for, example. I mean, certainly in many cases for many people, that's a hugely important part of reducing stress, or improving your mental health. I don't mean to be dismissive of it. Again, if we're talking about performance in stressful situations, we're just not very good at talking ourselves out of feeling bad, especially when we're anxious.

The body overrides that. The body skips that step. If the body is acting as if it's not threatened, the mind begins to fall in line what the body is doing. We're animals. This is a very basic primitive reaction. I mean, the same is true – there's a woman who is a horse trainer who I talk to quite often, who's developed this technique, she works with very submissive shy horses. Her job is to bring them out of their shells. What she finds is that firstly, horses can't talk themselves out of it, right? They're just not able to. The horse trainer can't talk them out of it.

She changes their body language through these different kinds of games and interactions, so that eventually she gets them to behave in a way that emulates the airs and graces of powerful horses. When they do that for a period of time, it’s like it snaps them out of it and they come out of their shell and they become much more willing to interact with other horses. Their health improves, they're more likely to be able to go to competition and do well in competition. It just goes on and on. The same is true for humans. I think in these moments of anxiety, remember that you're an animal. Use some of these very primitive approaches to snap yourself out of it.

[0:37:32.9] MB: What a great example. It crystallizes things, because as you said, you can't convince a horse to come out of that behavior pattern. Yet, just with an intervention at the mind/body level, you can create behavior change.

[0:37:46.8] AC: Right. When you think about – Just another example, because people often ask me this when it comes to – athletes often ask me this. Well, what about visualization? Think about an alpine skier visualizing the course before the gates open. Does that mean that that doesn't work? I would say no, it doesn't mean that. An alpine skiers, let's talk about Lindsey Vonn and you often do you see her before – I do. I love watching ski racing. You see her before she races with her eyes closed and she's – you see her gently going through the motions of going down that course.

There is a physical piece. She's also visualizing the course and she's visualizing how she wants to do as she skis down through that course. Does that work for her? Hell yeah. It's definitely working for her. Lindsey Vonn is not necessarily feeling incredibly stressed and self-doubting before every race. The point is that we're really not good at that when we are feeling self-doubting and anxious already off of that.

[0:38:50.8] MB: Another piece of this that I want to dig into is imposter syndrome. How does that play into all of us?

[0:38:56.5] AC: Imposter syndrome is not just about feeling powerless. It's about feeling powerless, it's about feeling that you somehow accidentally got the job, or the award, or whatever it is and that you're going to be found out at any moment. It also involves what we call pluralistic ignorance, which is we think that everyone else who has that job or goes to that fancy school is feeling great and confident and deserving. They're not. Impostor syndrome is so pervasive when you take places, like at Harvard Business School for example, 75% to 85% of students report feeling imposter syndrome, right?

Other people are not walking around feeling like, “Oh, I totally deserve to be here.” They're feeling the same kinds of doubt. I think the first thing is to realize that you're not alone. Everyone is feeling imposter syndrome at some point in their lives. If you are in a situation with people who've really excelled and in a competitive situation, chances are a lot of people are feeling that way. They're feeling that if they really put themselves out there, someone's going to realize that they were an admissions mistake and come and tap them on the shoulder and say, “Sorry, but we made a mistake and you have to leave,” right?

Impostor syndrome definitely is coming from a seer, a feeling of powerlessness, but it becomes even more complex in how we think about it. Now when – and it's very context specific. People could feel like an impostor say at Harvard Business School when they're being a student and go home and feel totally fine and not feel like an impostor with their spouse, right? It's not that you're walking around feeling powerless all the time. You're feeling powerless and as if you're an impostor in this one particular context.

When impostor syndrome was first studied in this 1970s by a woman named Pauline Clance, she originally thought that it was much, much more common among women than men. Then she learned pretty quickly that it wasn't. It was just that women were more comfortable telling her that they were feeling that way. Women are more comfortable talking about it. This is one of the ways in which gender stereotypes I think really hurts men. Men feel that they're not allowed to talk about those things, to share those kinds of fears and weaknesses and vulnerabilities. As a result, the research and the therapy around impostor syndrome was first focused just on women.

She realized that as soon as she was doing rather than interviews anonymous surveys, men were reporting impostor syndrome at exactly the same level as women. Men are feeling like impostors. I think the burden on men – so this whole idea that it's a woman's problem is not only bad for women. I think it's bad for women, because it's like another thing to heap on top of the pile of all of these things that women are afraid of. It's also a burden on men, because men believe that men generally don't feel like impostors and you do feel like an impostor, that's really going to make it even harder on you. Let me just rest assured to all the men in the audience, most of the men that you know, 85% of them probably have felt like imposters.

[0:42:05.0] MB: It's funny, I out of college for number years I worked at Goldman Sachs and in my analyst training for the first six weeks on the job is crushing impostor syndrome the entire time. I know exactly what it feels like.

[0:42:17.3] AC: Yeah, yeah. Probably almost everyone in your group felt the same way.

[0:42:21.5] MB: What can we do to overcome, or deal with impostor syndrome, other than the awareness that it's so prevalent?

[0:42:28.8] AC: Well again, notice when you feel it. What are the things that make you feel it often? It's funny and counterintuitive, but things that make people feel like imposters are the things that make you look the exact opposite of an impostor to outsiders. Winning an award for example, being recognized publicly for something that you did well, that makes impostor syndrome momentarily or for a brief period of time worse for a lot of people.

Realize that the reason you're feeling that way when those things happen is just because you're feeling very – because it's public, you feel exposed and you feel more afraid that you're going to be found out. Knowing what are the things that stoke that feeling for you is important and knowing that as you learn the ropes, you're going to get over that. One of the people that I talk to in the book is the wildly successful sci-fi writer Neil Gaiman, who's written two dozen international bestselling books. I'm sure, many people in the audience will know who he is. He's also just a delightful genuine, open person who admits to feeling an imposter syndrome.

He was talking to me about a time when he was writing this book called American Gods, which was going to be his big, big novel and he was talking to a friend of his, a writer, mentor of his. He said something like, “I think I've gotten over the imposter syndrome. I think I finally figured out how to write a novel.” His friend says, “You never figure out how to write a novel. You just figure out how to write the novel that you're on, right? The one that you're doing now.”

The idea is that it's this game of whack-a-mole. It's going to keep on popping up again, but don't panic about it. Go, “Okay, I noticed that feeling. I'm going to let go of it now and not perseverate or ruminate about it.” Eventually it just goes away. You might feel it again when you go into a new context. Maybe that's a good thing. It means you're challenging yourself or you're doing things that they're making you push yourself.

[0:44:34.8] MB: For listeners who want to concretely implement some of the tactics, themes, ideas that we've talked about today, what would be one piece of homework that you would give them to really concretely use these ideas in their lives?

[0:44:49.5] AC: Let's just talk about the expansive – the body-mind piece. I would say first of all, before you go into a stressful situation, prepare by using expansive postures; the warrior pose in yoga, stretch out, make yourself as big as you feel comfortable doing, but in private, right? Not in front of other people. You want to do it in private, because you don't want to feel – you don't offend people, but you also don't want to feel that you’re being judged. Do that before you walk in.

When you walk in, use posture that have a good posture. Carry yourself with a sense of pride, but not in a way that's domineering. You're not challenging somebody to a duel, you're trying to have an interaction where you connect with them, where they see you as confident, but they also see you as likable and trustworthy and engaged and as somebody who wants to be there, who doesn't feel that he or she is the most important person in the room, but is someone who's there to connect.

Huge, big poses before, reasonable good posture during and use also open gestures. Gestures, palms up for example, that show that you are comfortable being there. Mind your posture throughout the day. If you're sitting over your computer a lot, or over your phone which we find is hugely problematic and causes what we call text neck, or eye posture, people really begin to hunch and that does affect the way they behave and it activates the inhibition system.

If you're staying a lot of time on your phone, try to change how you're holding your phone. I'm not going to tell you to put your phone down, because I know how hard that is to do. What we see is that people who sit back and have their – hold their phones up over them as opposed to hunching over them, they don't seem to activate the inhibition system in the way that the people who are slouching do.

Mind your posture. Realize what your – notice the times when you start to slouch and make yourself small and see what you can do to correct that. The other is pay attention to other people's posture, right? When you're in an interaction, remember that presence begets presence. When you're present, you are inviting others to be present. When you're present, you're saying I am authentic. I am here. You can trust me. They respond in kind.

What you want to do is pay attention to times when they're using body language that looks powerless. If their body language changes and suddenly they close off, try to figure out what happened. How can you get things on track again?

[0:47:23.0] MB: For listeners who want to find you, the book, all of your work online, what is the best place for them to do that?

[0:47:29.4] AC: I would say I'm very active on Twitter and I'm AmyJCCuddy, so two Cs, because I have two middle initials. Do you look for me there. You can look for me at amycuddy.com, or amycuddyblog.com, but I think the book is really a useful and practical and very strongly evidence-based guide to understanding what's happening to your body and mind in these stressful situations, how you can overcome it. Please do look for the book Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges.

Obviously, you can buy it online. I always encourage people to buy from their local, their indie bookstore, because I certainly love those places and would like to see them succeed, but it's widely available and it's now in 34 different languages. It's available all over the world. For many of you, even if you're not native English speakers, I hope that it will be available in your native language.

[0:48:21.1] MB: Well Amy, thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing all this wisdom, all these practical strategies. It was a great conversation.

[0:48:28.2] AC: Thanks so much.

[0:48:29.6] 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 e-mail. My e-mail 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.

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How You Can Be More Confident In Tough Situations, Conflicts, and Negotiations with Kwame Christian

Do you feel uncomfortable in conflict with others? Do you experience fear and anxiety when dealing with tough situations? Most negotiation tactics and strategies assume you’re already a master negotiator with nerves of steel - that’s the wrong starting place. In this episode we discuss how you can get comfortable with having tough conversations and build the foundation to become a real master of negotiation - using a simple and easy to apply framework. We discuss how you can deal with tough situations and conflict from a place of poise, curiosity, and confidence with our guest Kwame Christian. 

Kwame Christian is a business lawyer and the Director of the American Negotiation Institute where he puts on workshops designed to make difficult conversations easier. As an attorney and mediator with a bachelors of arts in Psychology, a Master of Public Policy, as well as a law degree, Kwame brings a unique multidisciplinary approach to the topic of conflict management and negotiation. He also hosts the top negotiation podcast in the country, Negotiate Anything.

• Should we hide from conflict or should we seek it out and embrace it?

• Avoiding conflict is human, but it’s not healthy

• Do you lack confidence in tough situations and conflict?

• Do you experience fear and anxiety when you’re in a situation of conflict?

• “Giving recipes to people who are afraid to get into the kitchen"

• Powerful tactics and strategies don’t matter if you’re unable or unwilling to enter conflicting situations in the first place 

• When people are afraid - their limbic system lights up and their prefrontal cortex is less active - your rational decision-making shuts down and you react more emotionally 

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy - an action oriented approach to pushing past phobias, fears, anxieties and more

• Rejection Therapy & exposure therapy - how to build the skillset of mental toughness 

• Be intentional about exposing yourself to difficult conversations

• “Give me the difficult conversations and I will do it"

• By forcing yourself into difficult and tough situations - your brain actually changes (via neuroplasticity) and it gets easier over time 

• How do you negotiate with someone and move them out of a negative place / negative emotional state so that you can help get what you want out of a tough situation?

• 3 Step Framework

• Step one is to Acknowledge Emotions

  1. Get Curious with Compassionate Curiosity

  2. Engage in Joint Problem Solving / Collaborative Negotiation 

• It’s not that someone is crazy, it’s that you’re talking to their inner child, even though they are an adult - speak to the that inner two year old, acknowledge their emotions, then help move beyond them

• How do you use the tool of “Acknowledging Emotions"

• Put it on YOURSELF, not on you “If I was in this situation, I would feel X (frustrated, etc)"

  1. Tell me more about what you’re experiencing?

  2. The goal is to help them get it out of their system?

• Then transition to "compassionate curiosity"

• How can we help you feel more secure?

  1. How can we help you solve this problem / situation?

• Often times people’s emotions will be hidden under a veil of professionalism - exploring the emotional side first helps to defuse them

• When exploring emotional issues - use the past tense

• When you shift to compassionate curiosity - it starts to begin looking to the future

• With compassionate curiosity - start really broad - then begin narrowing your focus

• So, what are you looking for?

  1. They will signal what’s important to them, then you get more and more specific 

• A complex problem doesn’t necessarily require a complex solution 

• Why is preparation so important?

• The power of joint problem solving and joint brainstorming to develop a collaborative approach to solving problems 

• The rule of thumb of when to make the first offer - when you know MORE than the other person - or at least as much as the other person - then you should make the first offer 

• Above all else an offer is information

• There is a common misconception that you should never make an offer first 

• The first offer that goes on the table will have a disproportionate amount of influential power 

• Your first offer / anchor needs to pass the “because” test - as long as you can justify it in some way, it will impact and frame the negotiations 

• The “copy machine” experiment

• False Belief Negotiations is a zero sum game.

• There is a difference between conflict and combat. Conflict is an opportunity to solve problems and learn more, there is a big difference. 

• Negotiation isn’t the art of deal making, it’s the art of deal discovery 

• 3 Pillars of Negotiation

• Get more of what we want

  1. Get less of what we don’t want

  2. Strengthen relationships 

• Even if you don’t get a deal, there is still value to be achieved from a negotiation

• Homework: Take action - don’t avoid conflict, look at it as something to approach and use it as a Tool to strengthen your skills - find and seek out small conflicts 

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 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 5 million students, professionals, and enthusiasts around the world.

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [Podcast] Negotiation - How to Improve Decision Making with Matt Bodnar

• [SoS Episode] Proven Tactics For Getting What You Want & Persuading Anyone With Master Negotiator Kwame Christian

• [TEDTalk] Finding Confidence in Conflict | Kwame Christian | TEDxDayton

• [SoS Episode] Your Secret Weapon to Becoming Fearless with Jia Jiang

• [SoS Episode] Embracing Discomfort with Matt Bodnar

• [Article] In-Depth: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy By Ben Martin, Psy.D.

• [Book] How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish

• [Article] When to Make the First Offer in Negotiations by Adam D. Galinsky

• [Book] Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade by Robert Cialdini Ph.D.

• [SoS Episode] How a Judge Literally Rolling Dice Could Get You Double The Jail Time - The Anchoring Effect with Matt Bodnar

• [SoS Episode] Simple Strategies You Can Use To Persuade Anyone with The Godfather of Influence Dr. Robert Cialdini

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[00:00:11] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than 2 million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries and part of the Self-Help for Smart People Podcast Network. 

Do you feel uncomfortable in conflict with others? Do you experience fear and anxiety when dealing with tough situations? Most negotiation tactics and strategies assume you're already a master negotiator with nerves of steel. But that’s the wrong starting place. In this episode we discuss how you can get comfortable with having tough conversations and build the foundation to become a real master of negotiation using a simple and easy to apply framework. We get into how you can deal with tough situations and conflict from a place of poise, curiosity and confidence with our returning guest, Kwame Christian. 

Do you need more time? Time for work time, for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our email list. It's called How You Can Create Time for the Things That Really Matter in Life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the email list at successpodcast.com.

You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our email subscribers. We recently pre-released an episode and an interview to our email subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience. That had tremendous implications, because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first. With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live exclusive interview, just for e-mail subscribers.

There's some amazing stuff that's available only to email subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Or, if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you're on the go, you don't have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222.

In our previous episode, we discussed how to deal with never feeling like you're enough. Showed you how to overcome the insidious trap of people pleasing, looked at the most effective treatments for OCD, panic attacks, anxiety and stress, discovered the dangers of toxic perfectionism and how it might be holding you back, told you why should is a dangerous work and much more with our previous guest, Taylor Newendorp. If you want to banish procrastination, people pleasing and anxiety from your life, listen to that episode. 

Now, for interview with Kwame. 

[00:03:03] MB: Today we have another exciting guest back on the show, Kwame Christian. Kwame is a business lawyer and the director of the American Negotiation Institute, where he puts on workshops designed to make difficult conversations easier. As an attorney and mediator with a bachelor’s of arts in psychology and a master’s in public policy as well as a law degree, Kwame he brings a unique multidisciplinary approach to the topic of conflict management and negotiation. He also hosts the top negotiation podcast in the country; Negotiate Anything. 

Kwame, welcome back to The Science of Success. 

[00:03:34] KC: Thanks for having me, Matt. It’s a pleasure to be back. 

[00:03:36] MB: We’re excited to have you back on the show. Longtime listeners will deftly know that negotiation is a topic that I'm a huge fan of, kind of digging deep on and one of the most popular kind of topics that we talk on the show. So there's definitely a lot of meat and a lot of things to kind of dig into, and you’ve been on to a lot of stuff since you were last on the show. 

[00:03:54] KC: Absolutely. I would say the highlight since being on the show is having the celebrity name, the Matt Bodnar on my show, the Negotiate Anything podcast, to share his knowledge on negotiations. That was pretty cool. But since then, I've done a TED Talk called Finding Confidence in Conflict, where I introduced the new concept called compassionate curiosity and did pretty well, and since then it's taken me on this journey where more and more people were asking me to elaborate on that idea. So it’s leading to a book. So by the time this episode airs, the book will be out, and it's called Nobody Will Play With Me: How to Find Confidence In Conflict. 

[00:04:33] MB: So let's dig into that, that kind of idea, confidence in conflict. A lot of people, and I think a huge majority of people probably actually sort of seek out to actively avoid and steer away from conflict usually in their lives. Is that a healthy sort of habit or practice or should we be kind of embracing conflict or even seeking it out in some cases?

[00:04:53] KC: It is something I see all the time. Is it healthy? No. But is it human? Yes. It's a defense mechanism, and what's interesting is before I did the TED Talk, as somebody who believes in evidence-based approaches to solving problems, I surveyed the audience. I asked my audience of the podcast, “What is your biggest concern? What do you need help with? What would you like to hear?” 

For me as a lawyer, I’m strategists. I’m a tactician. I really like getting into the nitty-gritty, and I was really shocked to hear what people said. They said their biggest issues are, first, they don't have confidence in these conversations. Secondly, they’re experiencing a lot of fear and anxiety before and during the conversations. Lastly, when they're in the midst of the conversation, they feel as though they don't know what to say. 

That really forced me to change my approach and help people to feel more confident and address that foundational issue first. I realized that in the past I was essentially giving recipes to people who are afraid to get in the kitchen. So it really forced me to change my approach and it’s been helping people. So now people are more confident and actually moving towards these conflicts, because they’re seeing it as an opportunity to get more of what they want, avoid things that they don't want and strengthen the key relationships in their lives. 

[00:06:09] MB: I love that analogy of giving recipes to people who are afraid to go into the kitchen, because I mean it's such an important skillset, and yet I think that sort of framework that the fact that the fear and anxiety of these tough situations holds people back from ever even kind of coming to the table in the first place is a tremendously common problem I think, obviously, with negotiation, but really if you look at it in a ton of different kind of endeavors. 

[00:06:32] KC: Absolutely, and that’s the thing. It really hit me hard, because I would have these very nuanced episodes that introduced tactics and strategies that are powerful and evidence-based, but then I realized it doesn't matter if people are unwilling or unable to use them in the heat of battle. 

So when you think about it psychologically, when somebody's engaged in a difficult conversation and they are feeling emotional about the situation, they’re afraid, there's a lot of activity going on in the limbic system. What we found is that when there is a significant amount of activity on one brain structure, it takes away energy from the other structures. 

For example, the prefrontal cortex, where we have logical reasoning, is not as engaged. So what we’re finding in addition to that is that when you're stressed out in these conversations, your body is going to be filled with cortisol, the stress hormone, which clouds your judgment and ability to think clearly. At the time when we need to be at our best cognitively, we are inhibited significantly. So that's why it forced me to realize we need to address these foundational issues of fear and anxiety, and when it comes to the strategies we use during the conversations, we need to simplify it and give people a tool that they would actually be able to use easily in the midst of a conflict. 

[00:07:49] MB: Let's dig into that. How do you think about dealing with that fear and anxiety that often kind of comes up around conflict and negotiation and having difficult conversations?

[00:08:00] KC: As a young Kwame, I wanted to be a clinical psychologist. One of the things that I really enjoyed learning more about was the cognitive behavioral therapy. So it's a really action oriented hands-on approach to moving forward when it comes to pushing through phobias, anxiety, fears, those types of things. When it came to negotiation and working with people and teaching them how to be better at conflict, it forced me to realize that I can use this same kind of approach when it comes to making people more confident and feel less fear and stress during the conversations. 

On my podcast and in these sessions that I do when I go and travel the country and do these conflict management and negotiation seminars, I encourage people to do what I call rejection therapy, where they actually seek rejection. So it's mundane everyday situations where you take the opportunity to ask for what you want to kind of fabricate that fear of rejection, because that’s one of the biggest fears that people have. What you do is slowly you become desensitized to it. So it's taken from the idea of exposure therapy. 

For instance, if you're afraid of spiders and you have a therapist that’s working with you, what they would do is they would first have you look at a picture of a spider from a distance and then slowly bring the image of the spider closer. Then maybe have you see a real spider from a distance and then have you bring the real spider closer, and these are separate sessions. Then eventually you get to the point where you might be able to sit in the same room with your heart rate not being too excessively elevated and then maybe even to the point where you could touch it. 

I want people to be intentional about exposing themselves to these difficult conversations, because it's going to make you stronger for the next one, and there are opportunities to practice these techniques that we teach on the podcast and the framework that I introduce in the book. 

[00:09:56] MB: It’s such a great toolkit, and we've actually had Jia Jiang who had a TED Talk that sort of really popularized rejection therapy on the show. So we’ll throw that episode in the show notes. But I couldn't agree more, that intentionally kind of facing your fears, getting uncomfortable is such a powerful framework and powerful method for building those skillsets of kind of mental toughness and emotional resilience, right? We kind of talked about what we sort of call the sphere of discomfort, which is basically this idea that the options and opportunities available to you are only as big or as good as your ability to sort of get uncomfortable. The more you do something, like the first time you do anything, it’s kind of scary and new and frightening, and if the 50th time you do it, you’re kind of getting the hang of it. The thousand time you do, you're practically bored, right? It such a relevant and useful tool of building up that emotional skillset. So I think it's a really good strategy. 

[00:10:50] KC: Absolutely, and I'm glad you mentioned him, because I was just finishing up a chapter in a book called Confidence, and there is almost an entire page dedicated to explaining that TED Talk, because it really forced me to realize like this is something that I could overcome. I remember when I was younger and I discovered that TED Talk, I was working at a nonprofit Institute, and one of the things that they did was they offered professional development training and job opportunities for youth that were disadvantaged. 

For example, you needed to be below a certain level of income in order to participate in the program. For a family of four, it was about $56,000, and if you had one penny more, then you were poor, but not poor enough to take it vantage of the program. What we had to do is intern coordinators was to have those difficult conversations with people and let them know that even though they were so excited to take advantage of this opportunity, they didn't meet the income requirements, and it would break our hearts, it would break their hearts. It was incredibly difficult. 

After watching that Ted Talk, what I did is I told my colleagues, “Listen, everybody that you have to reject for this particular reason, give them to me. I'll have the difficult conversation and I will do it,” and this was one of the hardest things to this day still. One of the hardest things I ever did, but I forced myself to do it just so I could become a little bit more comfortable. Did I ever become fully comfortable? No, but I was at least comfortable enough to take committed action and I carry that strength with me now even today. 

[00:12:25] MB: Wow! What a great example of how to really kind of concretely implement that in your life and sort of step up to the plate. I'm sure it wasn't hard to convince those people to give you the difficult conversations, right?

[00:12:36] KC: No. They were very happy. 

[00:12:38] MB: I mean, it kind of reminds me of firing people too, right? The first time you fire somebody, it's really scary and kind of awkward and then by the time you – I don’t know how many people are listening who’ve hired a lot of people, but I fired a fair amount of people over the course of my career, and like the more you do it the more you realize that it's actually almost like cathartic and can be really sort of healthy to fire somebody once you realize that there is a misalignment. But to get to that place, you have to kind of soldier through all these really uncomfortable conversations to get to sort of the position where you have a really healthy perspective. 

I mean, I've been in situations where we had to fire a long time employee and they literally like thanked us and we’re like so grateful and happy and like felt like they were sort of being freed to pursue this new opportunity, but without the developing, building that kind of muscle and getting in those difficult conversations, you're never able to really truly do that. 

[00:13:28] KC: Absolutely, and I love the term that you used where you said soldiering through. Right now I'm reading a book on neural plasticity, and it's about how you can actually change your brain structures and the wiring of your neurons through action and consistent action. I'm realizing now when it comes to these difficult conversations and soldiering through, like you said, and consistently putting yourself in the position to have these conversations, you're actually changing your brain, their different connections. Because as they say, neurons that fire together, wire together. So these connections become stronger. So that's why it gets easier overtime, because your brain is actually changing. So it's a mental workout. It's like another body part. The mechanics of it and the structure can change based on the experiences that you put in front of your brain. 

[00:14:18] MB: I think that’s a great way to phrase it too, is the mental workout, right? These kind of rejection challenges or difficult conversation challenges are a great way to work out your brain, work out that skillset so that when you step up to the table at a really kind of tense, high-stakes negotiation, you're much more comfortable and much more confident. 

[00:14:37] KC: Absolutely. The thing is too, the way I look at this, is like a sports psychologist. When you look at sports psychology when it comes to athletes, they realized that, of course, the athletes need to have a firm physical foundation and then they also have a firm technical foundation. But what they're realizing more and more is that we need to have a firm psychological foundation too. I think it kind of takes people off guard when I go into the companies and I’m working with their negotiation teams or their HR teams and I start off by talking about these things that most people would consider soft, like talking about emotions and psychology. But then as we go through the process, they realize, “Wow! This is important.” It’s important, because it not only helps me to understand myself on a deeper level, but it also helps me to understand others on a deeper level. A lot of times during these conversations, because the other person isn't as emotionally aware, we find ourselves having to ask questions in unique ways, in strategic ways to lead them from a specific mental state that is unproductive to a place where they can actually process the high level information and arguments that were given to them. 

[00:15:44] MB: This might be a little bit of a sidetrack, but I want to dig into that sort of skillset as well, because I think that's something that has been really impactful for me. How do you think about kind of using questions and using the right sort of framing to get somebody out of sort of a hole that they've trapped themselves in from a positional standpoint or kind of an emotional state that’s really unproductive for what you're sort of trying to negotiate towards?

[00:16:09] KC: Yeah, I have a story for this that could help. I am the father of an almost three-year-old. So every morning I'm in hostile negotiations. As I was trying to think through the steps of compassionate curiosity and how I could apply it to negotiation, this situation came up with Kai. So every morning before we would go to school he would fight me on the same topic. My wife is a doctor, so she has to go in early, so I take him to daycare. 

What I would do is I would say, “Kai, it's time to go to school,” and he would say, “I want mommy,” and then I’d say, “Kai, we need to go to school. Mom is not here.” “No, I want mommy,” then he would cry.” 
So what he would do is he would start off the morning just telling me everybody he loved more than me. First, it would be, “I want mommy.” Then he would say, “I want grandma,” and then he would say, “I want uncle Kobe,” and that was a bit hurtful, because that's my brother who lives in a different city. This was the last draw for me. He said, “I want Buxton,” and Buxton is my brother's dog, and I realized I had a problem on my hands. 

So I read this book called How to Talk So Children Would Listen and Listen So Children Would Talk, and what they said was you need to acknowledge emotions. So I said, “Okay. I’ll give it a try. Let’s try it out.” So the next morning I went up to Kai and I said, “Kai, it’s time to go to school,” and he said, “I want mommy. I don’t want to go to school.” I said, “Do you love mommy?” “Yeah, I love mommy.” “Do you wish mommy were here?” “Yeah, I wish she was here.” “How about you say, “I love you mommy?” and he would say, “I love you mommy.” “Okay, Kai. Are you ready to brush your teeth?” “Yeah, I'm ready to brush my teeth.” 

So that's an example of where what he was requesting was substantive. He wanted his mother. That's a tangible request. But what he was really saying beneath the surface, it was an emotional request. He wanted me to acknowledge and respect the fact that at this moment he was missing his mom, that he was willing to accept the fact that she wasn't there, but he wasn't willing to accept the fact that I didn't respect it and acknowledge it. 

So when it comes to our difficult conversations, a lot of times at the beginning we need to take some time. Like I said with compassionate curiosity, the first step is to acknowledge emotions. So we need to ask questions, dig deeply into that psychology to figure out what the emotional need is. Then we can move on to the second step, which is getting curious with compassion, and that's what digging more into the substance of the negotiation. Then the third step is just joint problem-solving, which is the fundamental of collaborative negotiation. 

[00:18:40] MB: What a great example, and it's funny – Yeah, I just added that book to my to read list. One, because I recently had a kid, but also because I think that the reality is that skillset is probably incredibly applicable to dealing with the vast majority of adults as well. 

[00:18:53] KC: Absolutely. The thing is Kai has really helped me to understand the psychology of it, because, yeah, he’s two years old, but that part of our brain doesn't go away. The prefrontal cortex evolves and grows on top of it. So a lot of times what we see in these negotiations is that we’re frustrated because we’re talking to somebody and we’re making all of these logical points, but it’s not getting through. Then we say, “This person is crazy. They don't get it.” It’s not that the person is crazy. It’s that you are talking to their inner two-year-old like they are a full-grown adult. 

So when you’re willing to understand that emotion still play a role in it, then you can speak to that two-year-old, help them grow through the conversation by acknowledging their emotions, and then once you're satisfied and recognize that, “Okay. I can see you now. It seems like they're getting it. It seems like they reached a state of somewhat of equilibrium insanity, now I can put forward my arguments.” But it doesn't it make sense to make any points to a person who is not in emotional and psychological state that is prepared to receive it. 

[00:20:01] MB: So in the context of dealing with an adult who is maybe reacting emotionally, how would you think about kind of using that sort of skillset of acknowledging emotion? What does that look like?

[00:20:12] KC: What you would do first is, well, state what the obvious is what I would say. For instance, if a person seems frustrated, what I would do is I would guess. I would say – But I wouldn't put it on them, but I would put it on me, because a lot of times people don't feel comfortable if you say what they are feeling and put it in their terms, because they don't really want to own it. If you put it on you, then they could say, “Yeah, you're right.” It feels a little bit less threatening to them. Because in the business world, a lot of times people live in this fiction where they believe that emotion shouldn't exist. So they don't feel comfortable sharing it. 

What I would say is, “Listen, this is probably pretty frustrating for you. I know if I were in this situation, I would feel frustrated,” and then I wait to see what they would say. Then if they can kind of confirm that, I would say, “Can you tell me more about what you've been experiencing or some of the challenges you've been experiencing?” So I’m digging deeper into the issue that they’re feeling and the emotions around that. Then once I feel satisfied based on their responses that they have gotten that out of their system, then the questions that I ask would shift more towards substance, more towards problem-solving. 

What kind of things do you think we could do to make sure this doesn't happen in the future? How can we help to make you feel more secure in this situation? Those type of questions. So we’re transitioning from the acknowledging emotions to the compassionate curiosity stage where I'm asking questions. The reason I call it compassionate curiosity is not because I want to really get into a nuanced conversation about what compassion is or isn't. It’s meant to help you moderate your tone, because a lot of times in these difficult conversations, even the best intentioned statements can be read as hostile simply because we are at a heightened emotional state. 

So what I do is ask people to think about somebody who is compassionate. About 90% of the people would say Mother Teresa is compassionate. Then I would say, “Okay. In this conversation, if Mother Teresa was here asking an open-ended question, how would she say it?” So it forces you to moderate your tone, approach it a little bit more than a softer manner and approaching it in the nonthreatening way allows the person to feel more comfortable sharing more information. 

[00:22:29] MB: I want to dig into the compassionate curiosity piece, but before we kind of go down that rabbit hole, coming back, the idea of acknowledging emotions. Is the goal of that sort of step in the framework to help them process that emotion and get it out of their system? 

[00:22:44] KC: Absolutely. Absolutely, because if you don't, it will still fester underneath the surface. The thing is a lot of times with these emotions, they're hidden under a veil of professionalism where they recognize there are certain things they can and cannot say, they can and cannot do. So they simply won't do those not because they don't want to, but because they know that they can’t. So they will hide those emotions from you. 

I really go out of my way to make sure that I explore that emotional side before I get into this. Remember, this is me as a business attorney who negotiates with opposing counsel, as a mediator who is in the middle of these difficult hour-long, hours-long mediations between attorneys on opposing sides and I use this successfully in those situations too. That's what I wanted to create a framework that could be utilized in every type of situation or we can see how it could be utilized in these social interactions we have with our friends and all the way up to the highest level of negotiations we have within our businesses. 

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[00:25:57] MB: So let's dig in to kind of the compassionate curiosity piece and explore that a little bit more. Once you've identified the kind of emotion that they’re struggling with, did you sort of frame the questions you're asking around how do you help them solve that emotion or how do you kind of transition that into from sort of the emotional to kind of more substantive and issue based things?

[00:26:18] KC: Yeah. So what we do is, like I said, once we’re satisfied there, we transition into the substance and issues. Typically, before this conversations, especially in the business world, I'd like to set an agenda. I would have it so that maybe not on the agenda it doesn't say emotional issues, number one. It will talk about concerns and problems. So, really, one of the easiest ways to do this is to change the tense. 

So when we were dealing with those emotional issues, most likely those issues originate from things that happened in the past. So I'm doing a fact-finding endeavor based on things that happened in the past and their perception of those things. Then what I’d shift more to or the substance, the compassionate curiosity stage, this is where I am looking into the future, because most of the time, almost all time when we’re having these conversations, they're going to be with people with whom are going to have an ongoing relationship in some capacity. So I want to kind of outline what the future of the relationship could look like. 

At this stage what I'm doing is I'm changing the tense to focus on the future to outline the parameters of what our relationship could look like going forward and things that we would like to avoid going forward. Then once I feel as though I’ve gotten enough information, then I'm going to start moving into the problem-solving, but not until I feel as though I have a solid lay of the land when it comes to these conversations. 

[00:27:43] MB: So it’s essence it’s kind of figuring out, “Hey, if I was in your situation, I feel really frustrated kind of,” etc., get that out and then you say, “So, what could we do in the future to help you feel – To help you not be frustrated?” or would you couch it specifically in terms of their emotions or would you kind of frame it more broadly than that? 

[00:28:03] KC: What I'd suggest doing at this stage is using something that I call the funnel technique, where the beginning of my questions they start off incredibly broad. Then as I start to get a better idea of where we’re going, where they want to go and where I want to go, the questions will become more and more narrow. 

For instance, a lot of times in in these mediations even though I've read the whole case file, I’ve talked to the opposing counsel and all these things, I would talk to one of the parties, and after I feel as though I’ve explored that emotional side I'd say, “So what are you looking for?” Think about how incredibly broad the question is, especially in the case of litigation where in their complaint they need to say to a specific dollar amount exactly what they're looking for. So I know what they’re looking for, but I want to see where they take that question, because within their answer, within their response to that incredibly broad question, they're going to signal to me what's important to them. Then based on that signal, that's where I'm going to start to get more and more specific. So I need to be able to follow their lead and kind of think on my toes. That's why I'm so intentional about preparing beforehand. So time I was on the show I probably mentioned this free resource, but if you go to americannegotiationinstitute.com/guide, you can get a negotiation preparation guide, a conflict management guide and a salary negotiation guide. 

Before all of these difficult conversations, I’m systematically preparing and thinking through what questions I could potentially ask on what specific topics, because it helps me to be a little bit more nimble, because it's really difficult to come up with high-level questions on the fly. So I want to think through it as much as possible beforehand. 

[00:29:47] MB: I think that's so important, and I want to dig in to preparation actually in a second. But I think it kind of bears repeating too, and you’ve touched on this as we started out this exploration with the example of the three-year-old, but the reality is you're using the same skillset and legal negotiations with other lawyers in board meetings and all kinds of really high level business encounters. This is part of the reason I'm digging so specifically into it, because I do the same thing. I use a lot of these tools and a lot of these skillsets and try to bring kind of emotional intelligence into the communications I have with people, especially difficult communications. I think it's really important for the audience to understand that point that these are not just skillsets for dealing with people who are being kind of emotional or rational children. This is really a powerful framework they can apply across a huge array of interactions. 

[00:30:38] KC: Absolutely, and that's the thing. These interactions, these business and social interactions, they're definitely going to be complex. But our approach to them does not need to be complicated, and that's why I really want to harp on the use of this framework, because the beauty of a framework is that it gives us a roadmap of where we can and should go, but it also tells us where we shouldn't go and helps us to avoid those red herrings, because those things could be more damaging than doing the right thing could be positive to the conversation. I want to help people to understand what things they should ignore as well as tell them what to do. 

Like I said, one of the things that people struggle with is not knowing what to say, and I think they don't know what to say because they see all of the moving parts. They see the complexity and they believe that a complex problem requires a complex solution, but that's not the case. If we stay focused on a simple framework, our outcomes in these negotiations will be significantly better. 

[00:31:37] MB: I like that phrase, the complex problem doesn't necessarily require a complex solution. Let's come back and get into the preparation piece now, because I think that's so critical. I mean, if you look at a lot of the research around negotiation, you see the power preparation. But tell me little bit more about why you think it's such a vital step of being a successful negotiator. 

[00:31:59] KC: When it comes to the preparation, one of the benefits beyond the substantive is the psychological and emotional. Ones we feel as though we are familiar with the situation, it gives us more a greater sense of control. When it comes to feelings of anxiety and frustration and fear, a lot of that for us as humans comes from the fact that we don't feel like we’re in control and it's often irrational. As you know, humans tend to be irrational. 

For example, more people are afraid of flying than they are driving, but we know statistically driving is one of the safest modes of transportation, especially relative when compared to driving. But why is it that we feel so much safer and so much more at ease behind the wheel of a car? It's because we have control. 

So we’re taking the principle of control and applying it to our negotiations by giving ourselves a framework and strategic systematic approach to the negotiation, and the more you know about the situation, the more control you will feel. Because you have a greater feeling of control, it will diminish your level of anxiety, which will increase your level of performance when it actually comes to the conversation. 

[00:33:07] MB: So what are you – I mean, obviously, the listeners can kind of go check out that guide and get some really kind of compelling and specific resources. How much – Let's say, how much preparation are you doing for an average negotiation? I know it varies a lot. But just as kind of a rule of thumb, how do you think about sort of how much prep work to do before you feel like you're ready to rock?

[00:33:27] KC: Yeah. Well, it depends on the gravity of the situation. For instance, I remember a few weeks ago I had a presentation, and all day negotiation training at a tech company in San Diego, and we had a preparation call, like a prep call just getting things in order, knocking out the final details of the engagement, and I was feeling really nervous. I was like, “Wow! That’s kind of strange. I’m nervous.” 

Like I said, I still get nervous for conversations to this day. Then I ask myself, “What would you tell a listener if a listener asked you what to do?” I use the same guide that I had there and I walke through it. After going through it for about five minutes I felt good, I felt at ease and I felt good during the conversation when it did happen. Now, compare that to a business negotiation, I remember one time I had a negotiation on behalf of a client and I prepared for that negotiation for 45 minutes using the guide, and then the negotiation on the phone ended up being three minutes long. But it went really, really well, but it only went well because they put in those 45 minutes of preparation. It's important to strike the balance. 

If you're one of those people who is a perfectionist, a lot of times we think ourselves into inaction. So if that's your issue, what I would do is I would set a time limit on the amount of time you prepare, because sometimes we can get a little bit too deep into it and it really turns into a style of productive procrastination, and I don't want people to fall victim to that. So it is really a matter of degree. So I guess if I were to summarize that whole thing, I'll give a very lawyer response and say it depends, but I would always say that it requires preparation in some capacity. 

[00:35:11] MB: I think the answer to many incredibly important questions is it depends, but I'm also a former debater. So that probably shapes that in a way. So let's come back to kind of the third step, which we touched on a little bit, but this kind of idea of joint problem-solving or collaborative negotiation. Tell me little bit more about that. How do we sort of transition once we started to kind of develop that compassionate curiosity? How do we move into that next phase and what does it really look like?

[00:35:37] KC: So when it comes to this phase, what we’re doing is – Really, it's a joint problem-solving situation, joint brainstorming I should say. So the reason I use that term is that it’s intentional, because people typically aren’t afraid of a brainstorming session. As a lawyer, when I am going into these conversations, framing it is going to be important, because lawyer versus lawyer, whether it’s a lawyer versus a lawyer, me versus an unrepresented party, I typically don't use the word negotiation. I don't say, “Hey, now to the next stage of this negotiation,” or “I'm looking forward to our negotiation.” I would say, “Chat, or let's try to figure it out,” because that's really what it is. I want them to be in that mindset to where once we get to this stage, we’re working together to figure it out. 

As far as the way that I actually transition, I would probably say something like this, I would say, “Well, I think I have a pretty good understanding of where you stand, and I hope I’ve given you an opportunity to understand where I stand. Here's what I think we could possibly do to work this out.” Then I would get my proposal. It's important to understand this important rule of thumb when it comes to when to make the first offer. The rule of thumb I use is when I know more than the other person or an equal amount to the other person, I will make the first offer, because when you think about the impact of anchoring and the first offer advantage, I don't want to miss out on that opportunity. But if I'm in a situation where the other person knows substantially more than me, then I'll sit back and I'll wait for them to give me an offer, because above all else, an offer is information. Once somebody makes an offer, they need to substantiate that offer with credible facts and objective criteria. 

Once that offer goes on the table, I’m going to ask more questions to learn more about it before I counter. So that's how I would transition it. I would just try and put a bow on it and say, “Okay, this fact-finding part of it, I feel we wrapped that up and I feel like we have a good understanding.” So the person then, psychologically, they know that we’re transitioning to the next phase. It kinds of puts a nice stamp on the part of the conversation and allows them to transition a little bit smoother to the next part of the conversation. 

[00:37:47] MB: So that brings up a really interesting point, because I think there's kind of a common misconception that you should never name a price or you should never kind of make your offer first. You should always wait for the other person. But if you really actually look at it, I think there's actually studies that have been done, and we’ll try to find them and throw them in the show notes. But anchoring is such a powerful phenomenon, that there's actually a huge advantage to being the first person to make an offer in many contexts. 

[00:38:08] KC: A massive advantage. Matt, I’ll quote a few studies here. I don't know the author of these studies, but here's one of my favorites, because it just shows how weird humans can be psychologically. Here's the study. So they had people in two different groups, group A and group B, and they ask them similar but different questions. So the first group they said, “Do you think Gandhi was a greater than or a less than 140 years old when he died?” Now, the obvious answer is less than 140 years old. Duh? Right?

So then they asked the other group, “Do you think Gandhi was greater than or less than 13 years of age when he died?” So, of course, the answer is greater than 13 years. Now, this is where it gets good. So they asked both parties, “How old do you think Gandhi was when he died?” So group A, who was anchored with 140, guessed that he was 20 years older, on average, than the people in group B. So this question was a nonsensical question, but it was the number that served as the reference point for the subsequent question. So the first offer that goes on the table will have a disproportionate amount of persuasive power. So that's why, if possible, you want to learn as much as possible for you to be able to put down a solid anchor. 

So I say the anchor needs to pass the because test. If you can't come up with illegitimate way bolstered by objective criteria to explain why you're asking for this, then the anchor is illegitimate, because if you are too aggressive with the anchor unreasonably so, it loses persuasive power and you lose credibility which can hurt you throughout the rest of the negotiation. Use it carefully. Just make sure you'd be able to finish the statement I'm asking for this because. 

[00:40:00] MB: That reminds me of two things. One, there's another really funny study about anchoring that talks about like the power of sort of totally arbitrary information. I think they had people write their Social Security number on the top of like a survey and then they priced out how much they thought a bunch of everyday items cost, like a pencil, an apple, a coffee cup, that kind of stuff, and the people who had – Or the last two digits of your Social Security number. The people whose last two digits ended in like 96 had much higher prices across the board for all these everyday objects than the people whose last two numbers of their Social Security number were like 1, 3 or whatever. We actually have a whole episode that will throw in the show notes too on anchoring, that listeners who wanted to get a lot deeper on that stuff. 

But I also think there's a ton of psychology research that just even just saying because, even if the reason is completely nonsensical in some cases, that actually can increase people's likelihood to sort of agree with whatever you're offering them as well. 

[00:40:55] KC: Absolutely. That’s the classic copying machine example, where the first group they said, “Can I get in front of you? Can I cut in line because I need –” They just asked if I could cut in front of you, and so the success rate was something like 60%, “Sure. Go in front of me. I don’t care.” But then when they said, “Hey, can I cut in front of you because I need to make some copies?” The success rate went up to above 90%, which is crazy, because everybody's in line at that time to make some copies. 

People, they’re primed to focus on the word because, because they just assume that something legitimate is going to come after the because, and thus it receives more persuasive value. 

[00:41:33] MB: The human mind is fascinating. I guess that's why we have a podcast, right?

[00:41:38] KC: Exactly. 

[00:41:39] MB: So let's come back to kind of negotiating tactics and strategies. One of the other things that I know you’ve talked a lot about is the importance of timing and how you sort of time things within a negotiation. I’d love to dig into that a little bit more. 

[00:41:50] KC: Absolutely. Let me give a book reference on that. So after you read my book, of course, shameless plug, check out Pre-Suasion by Robert Cialdini. So Cialdini, of course, is the person who created the book about a quarter century ago now called Influence: The 6 Principles of Influence, and now he came out with this most recent book about two years ago called Pre-Suasion. So it talks about the timing of your requests. 

So he gave an example of reciprocity. Reciprocity is one of the six principles of influence whereby if you give somebody something, it creates the level of psychological debt where they feel indebted to you and it makes it more likely for them to give you something in return. So in the case of a negotiation, that means if you give a concession it makes it more likely for them to reciprocate that concession. 

Now, the most recent studies when it comes to timing demonstrates that it's almost like a bell curve with regard to the timing of the persuasion. For instance, if I give you something, Matt, and then you say, “Thank you.” Now we’re at the top of the bell curve of persuasion. So at this time, if I were to ask for something in return, you are significantly more likely to give it to me than if I were to wait two days. Then, of course, if I were to wait another week, it will be less likely and then if I wait a month, it will be even less likely. 

So there is a timing aspect to when we make these requests. So what I would suggest doing is reading that book and see what are those triggers that people respond to and then timing your requests accordingly. But I think that reciprocity example is a perfect one, because that's something that we see in the business world and in the our everyday lives all the time. 

[00:43:31] MB: Yeah, Pre-Suasion is a great book. We actually had Cialdini on the show right around the time the book came out. So we’ll make sure to toss that one. There’s going to be some pretty detailed show notes on this episode, lots and lots of book references and things to check out. 

[00:43:43] KC: Nice. 

[00:43:44] MB: Another thing that we actually touched on in our previous interview with you that I thought was really important that I think a lot of people miss about negotiation and I think bears kind of digging back into is this idea that many people sort of think that negotiations are kind of zero-sum game, right? And hat my win is your loss, and that's not necessarily always the case.

[00:44:05] KC: Exactly. Going back to what we said about collaborative negotiation, in order to be an effective collaborative negotiator, you have to reject that mentality. I think that is one of the reasons why people are so afraid of negotiation. So they think it's a zero-sum game where my winning necessitates you are losing and then they assume the other person thinks the same way. So they’re really conflating conflict and combat, where with combat, your goal is to do destruction and mutual damage. But conflict is the problem-solving endeavor, a fact-finding endeavor. It's an opportunity to learn more. 

So when you think about it in terms of, “I want to satisfy my interests. I want to try to meet my needs,” and then recognizing that you can help yourself to meet those needs by helping somebody else meet their needs. It makes this exercise a lot less threatening, because, like I said, the way I think about it is we are two people coming to the table. You have needs, I have needs. Let’s chat about them and figure out what we can do to make this relationship work.

I think it will acquire also a comfort level with recognizing that the deal might not work, and that's okay. So one thing to keep in mind is that negotiation isn't the art of deal-making. It's the art of the deal discovery, and if we think it's deal-making, we might try to push through or bully through a deal that really shouldn't happen, because our interests simply don't align. if they don't it, it's completely okay. 

[00:45:34] MB: I found that to be incredibly true, and I think one of the fundamental things that that I, in any negotiation, it's all about trying to discover what is the other party want. Is there sort of an overlap of the two sort of Venn diagrams of your interests and theirs? If there's enough sort of space in there, there's an opportunity to make a deal. But trying to sort of force a negotiation or a transaction or whatever with somebody where there's not enough kind of shared interest and mutual sort of win-win overlap is never going to work out in the long run. 

[00:46:04] KC: Absolutely. I think that's why I focus so much on letting people know that there are three pillars to negotiation or conflict. The first goal is to get more what we want. The next pillar is to avoid things that we don't want them. Then the last one is strengthening relationships. Now we might not be able to maximize pillar number one. We might not be able to maximize pillar number two. But in every negotiation, if we approach the other person with respect and engage in collaborative problem-solving, we can still maximize pillar number three. Even if we don't get a deal, there’s still value that can be achieved from both parties simply by strengthening the relationship through the process. 

[00:46:44] MB: So kind of coming back to this core framework and sort of summarizing it for the listeners, as you call it, the simple framework for approaching any conflict, whether it's in the boardroom or the dining room, is this idea of starting with the acknowledgment of emotions, moving to compassionate curiosity and then ultimately engaging in a framework of joint problem-solving. 

[00:47:05] KC: Exactly. 

[00:47:06] MB: Very cool. I think it's a great framework, and I was really curious of kind of digging into some of the meat of the quite specific how to phrase this question, how do you phrase that question? Because this is such a relevant skillset and something that I'm going to absolutely kind of integrate into my own negotiation skillsets and I'm constantly negotiating with people. As you said, really, the realities were many, many conversations that we have throughout our lives are negotiations whether we realize it or not, right?

[00:47:33] KC: Exactly. So it’s not a question about question of whether or not we are going to negotiate. It’s a question of whether or not we’re going to do it well. So we might as well learn these skills and get better at it, because negotiation is not going anywhere. 

[00:47:47] MB: So what would one kind of piece of homework be as sort of an actionable step that listeners could take to concretely kind of implement some of the ideas and tactics we’ve talked about today?

[00:47:58] KC: The first step, I guess I need to promote this book and say check out the book if you're interested, if you find any of this interesting. The next step would be to take action, because I know I'm one of those people who can be very heady and stay up in my head when it comes to these types of difficult situations in general, not just typical conversations. So what I would do is I would sit there, I’d learn more about it I’d create a strategy, then I’d adjust that strategy. Then three months later, nothing has happened. So this really is an action oriented approach. If you want to develop your confidence in these conflicts, you really need to take action. 

If you’ve listened to this point of the podcast, you are probably more equipped than most, because most people don't take the time to learn these skills. So to take action. You have enough knowledge and skillset just from this to take action in an improved fashion. So whenever you see the opportunity to engage in conflict, don't look at it as a threat or something to avoid. Look at it is something to approach. It's a signal that something is wrong with the relationship or there’s something to investigate, and use it as a tool to get more of what you want, to avoid things you don't want, and strengthen the relationships around you. 

[00:49:09] MB: One more time for listeners who want to find you and the book and all of your work online, what is the best place for them to do that?

[00:49:15] KC: Yeah. Since you all are podcast aficionados, check out the Negotiate Anything Podcast, and the book is called Nobody Will Play With Me: How to Find Confidence In Conflict. 

[00:49:26] MB: All right, cool. That is a wrap. Lots and lots of actionable takeaways, lots and lots of things in the show notes, and great conversation. 

[00:49:34] 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 e-mail 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.

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

How You Can Overcome Procrastination and People Pleasing with Dr. Taylor Newendorp

In this episode we discuss how to deal with never feeling like you’re “enough,” show you how to overcome the insidious trap of "people pleasing,” look at the most effective treatments for OCD, panic attacks, anxiety and stress, discover the dangers of “toxic perfectionism” and how it might be holding you back, tell you why “should” is a dangerous word, and much more with our guest Taylor Newendorp. 

Taylor Newendorp is the founder and president of Chicago Counseling Center and specializes in the treatment of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Perfectionism, and Anxiety Disorders. He was worked as a practicing therapist for many years and completed the International OCD Foundation's Behavioral Therapy Training Institute Taylor is the author of The Perfectionism Workbook: Proven Strategies to Break Free from Perfectionism and Achieve Your Goals.

• What is the myth of perfection and how does it impact your life?

• Hiding weaknesses and mistakes is very dangerous and contra to personal growth

• You are more likely to grow, thrive, and succeed once you acknowledge and accept your weaknesses

• The Five Tendencies of Toxic Perfectionism

• “People Pleasing” perfectionism

• Expectations placed on you by by your family or the environment you grew up in

  1. Every action you take is designed to please other people and you constantly need external approval to feel good about yourself

  2. Everyone liking you is an impossible and unachievable goal. No matter what you do there is no way to please everyone. 

• What is the root cause behind the “people pleasing” tendency? 

• Perfectionism can often be genetically pre-disposed if your family has a history of OCD or anxiety

• People pleasing is rooted in the idea that for you to be loved you have to achieve and be successful

• How do you overcome the fear that if you give up your perfectionist expectations and the desire to please others that you will flip to the opposite and be unproductive and unliked?

• How much of what you’re doing is is because you WANT to or because you feel like you HAVE TO in order to have other people like you?

• What activities are you doing that you do solely for the approval of others? Would you do them for their own sake?

• One of the biggest roots of perfectionism is your own expectations of yourself and others 

• Growth Mindset vs Fixed Mindset and how that impacts perfectionist tendencies 

• The danger of being a “procrastinating perfectionist"

• Put off doing something because you’re worried it’s not perfect

• Do you feel a feeling of discontent? No matter what you do, no matter what you achieve, do you feel like it’s never enough? Do you keep pushing yourself harder and harder causing stress and anxiety for yourself?

• How do you deal with self criticism and negative self talk?

• What is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and how does it work?

• How do your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors all impact each other?

  1. The way we think about things has a direct impact on our emotions and feelings

  2. Looking at your thought process

  3. Looking at your expectations of others

  4. Looking at what you’ve been telling yourself

• Examining your own thought processes is a HUGE key to solving this

• Exposure and response prevention is a highly effective solution to OCD, panic attacks, anxiety disorders, etc 

• Purposely exposing yourself to something that produces an amount of anxiety, stress, and discomfort, and then preventing your usual response 

• The more you face what causes you distress and tolerate it, your stress and discomfort around it starts to fade 

• The danger of using the word “Should”

• Learn and familiarize yourself with the cognitive distortions that are out there and see how they are playing out in your head 

• Understand the connection between thoughts and feelings and how that might be influencing how you’re behaving

• One question you can use to challenge your negative thoughts - if you had to stand up in a court of law and prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this thought is 100% true would it hold up? 

• Often you have NO evidence to back this thought up 

• Expectations are often at the root of our “shoulds” and your perfectionist tendencies 

• When you feel something uncomfortable - avoidance and distraction are the two most common strategies for avoiding discomfort

• The more you avoid something the more you increase your anxiety around that fear. The fear grows larger and larger in your brain. The more you face and spend time with your fears, your anxiety dissipates. 

• Dig into and understand the triggers that make you uncomfortable and continually face them to build tolerance and resistance to them 

• Exposure and response therapy creates new neural pathways that reduce anxiety over time

• What is the relationship between perfectionism and OCD?

• A lot of people with OCD engage in compulsive behaviors to get a sense that things feel “just right"

• Being enough and achieving your goals without fear

• You should make your goals specific, measurable, and meaningful 

• Mindfulness at its core is about observing yourself, observing others, without attaching judgement to it 

Thank you so much for listening!

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [SoS Episode] Research Reveals How You Can Create The Mindset of a Champion with Dr. Carol Dweck

• [SoS Episode] Your Secret Weapon to Becoming Fearless with Jia Jiang

• [Website] Chicago Counseling Center

• [Book] The Perfectionism Workbook: Proven Strategies to End Procrastination, Accept Yourself, and Achieve Your Goals by Taylor Newendorp MA LCPC

• [Website] Rejection Therapy with Jia Jiang

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] 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 three million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries.

In this episode, we discuss how to deal with never feeling like you’re enough. We show you how to overcome the insidious trap of people pleasing, look at the most effective treatments for OCD, panic attacks, anxiety and stress. We discover the dangers of toxic perfectionism and how it might be holding you back. We tell you why the word should is so dangerous and much more with our guest, Taylor Newendorp.

Do you need more time? Time for work, time for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our e-mail list. It's called How You Can Create Time for the Things That Really Matter in Life.

You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the e-mail list at successpodcast.com. You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our e-mail subscribers. We recently pre-released an episode in an interview to our e-mail subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience, and that had tremendous implications because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first.

With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live exclusive interview just for e-mail subscribers. There's some amazing stuff that's available only to e-mail subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the e-mail list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Or if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you're on the go, you don't have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44-222. That’s S-MA-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we discussed the surprising science of creativity. We started with a fascinating look into how your brain creates reality around you and a science meaning to things that often have no meaning at all. Then, we examined the unlikely relationship between doubt, ambiguity and creativity. We asked how you can chip away at your assumptions, so that you can open up spaces of possibility to be more creative.

We explored the foundations of asking truly great questions and examine the way that doubt can be a powerful force for unleashing creative insights and much more with our previous guest, Dr. Beau Lotto. If you want to create epic breakthroughs in your life, check out our previous episode.

Now for our interview with Taylor.

[0:03:05.4] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Taylor Newendorp. Taylor is the Founder and President of the Chicago Counseling Center and specializes in the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder, perfectionism and anxiety disorders. He's worked as a practicing therapist for many years and completed the international OCD foundation’s behavioral therapy training institute. He's also the author of The Perfectionism Workbook: Proven Strategies to Break Free From Perfectionism and Achieve Your Goals.

Taylor, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:36.4] TN: Thank you, Matt. I appreciate you having me on.

[0:03:38.6] MB: Well, we're excited to have you on the show today. I'd love to start out with obviously you've done a lot of work around perfectionism and you talked about this idea of the myth of perfection. Tell me a little bit about that.

[0:03:50.4] TN: Yeah, sure. I think a lot of people could probably relate to the fact that especially in our culture, there is a lot of importance placed on doing your best, being successful. There's really nothing wrong with that. Where things go skew, if you will, is when people start to form the belief that they have to be perfect in every respect of their life to achieve success. They have to be perfect in their personal and professional relationships. They have to come across perfectly when they're interacting with anyone on any level and they can't let anybody perceive that they might possess any weaknesses, and that they especially tend to live in fear of people knowing that they might have possibly made a mistake at some point in their life.

This myth of perfection, it is a positive thing that it's something that people could and should strive for in order to have a certain amount of success in their life. The problem is that I think most people probably acknowledge that perfection is simply impossible to achieve. That's because perfection is a – it's a subjective thing. Two different people are not going to define perfection in the same way. Again, it's something that no one could ever really truly achieve.

The problem that is happening more and more for a lot of people is that the more they're striving to attain perfection in their lives and they're simply not achieving it, because again, it's unachievable, they're experiencing a lot of dissatisfaction, a lot of discontent, and that leads to really unpleasant things to experience; certainly stress, anxiety, depression that can even drive some people to really destructive behaviors, whether it's eating disorder behaviors and an attempt to achieve the “perfect body.”

Some people turn to substance abuse of some sort or another, because they can't cope with feeling like a failure all the time. There is a big crossover with perfectionism and a wide range of psychological disorders, especially things like eating disorders, like I mentioned, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

[0:06:12.5] MB: I think you bring up a really good point. It's something we talk a lot about on the show, which is basically the idea that you should try to hide your weaknesses, or ignore your mistakes, or bury your mistakes is really problematic and really dangerous.

[0:06:25.0] TN: Yeah. One thing that I just believe as a person and I see the more I'm on this plan and interacting with all different kinds of humans is that no part of being human is having certain strengths and also having certain weaknesses. A lot of people are very scared to show any vulnerability. In my work with people and what I try and touch on in the book is people actually tend to grow more once they acknowledge their weaknesses and work on ways to improve them and mistakes I do not see as a bad thing. There are some mistakes that can have negative consequences. For the most part as people, we tend to learn the most and grow and develop the most from the mistakes we've made in our lives.

[0:07:18.9] MB: For somebody who's listening that maybe has a tendency to hide their mistakes, or not want to acknowledge their weaknesses, how can they start to chip away at that, or move towards an acceptance of being imperfect?

[0:07:33.9] TN: Sure. One thing to think about is what I just touched on, which is this shared human condition, which is that we're all imperfect and that's just the way it's supposed to be. It's the way we all are. One thing I found really helpful in my work with people is using cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, and e specially the technique within cognitive behavioral therapy, which is understanding any unproductive, or unhealthy thinking you might be engaging in, which ties into the beliefs you hold on to.

Really taking a look at how realistic, or unrealistic those beliefs are and starting to chip away at your beliefs in a way that feels better to you, for lack of a better phrase, and also can lead to more acceptance and productivity.

[0:08:27.8] MB: I definitely want to dig into cognitive behavioral therapy and the implications of that. Before we get too deep down that rabbit hole, I want to come back and understand and dig into this idea of perfectionism a little bit more.

[0:08:41.3] TN: Sure.

[0:08:42.1] MB: Tell me about some of the tendencies, I think you call them the five tendencies of toxic perfectionism. Tell me a little bit more about how those manifested and what each of those are.

[0:08:52.9] TN: Yeah, definitely. Well, the first thing to understand is that there's overlap among all the different tendencies that people who struggle with, what I call dysfunctional perfectionism tend to have. Really quick, I just want to say perfectionism itself, it's a personality trait and people may have some traits that fall under these different perfectionist categories. When I go over them, it's not that anybody fits into just one box. People often share a few of these different, what I call toxic tendencies.

The first one that people really tend to get stuck in and struggle with is what is known as people-pleasing perfectionism. This occurs when people for whatever reason, sometimes it's because of their family environment that they grew up in and certain expectations are placed on them. Sometimes it's because of beliefs they come to form because of expectations placed on them by teachers, coaches, mentors over the years.

People start to form this idea that everything they do in their life must be done in the service of helping someone else feel good about them, if that makes any sense. In essence, they're not really doing anything for themselves. Every action they're taking is designed to please somebody else, and they really feel that they have to get this external stamp of approval to feel good about themselves at all.

This drives people to work excessively. They put self-care way, way, way on the backburner. These are people who get burnt out very frequently, both academically and in their professional careers. These are people who may not be fully honest, or be their true selves when it comes to any personal, or intimate relationship. Again, it all falls under this umbrella of they feel like they have to do everything just to make other people like them.

Again, this is something that is pretty much an impossible and unachievable goal, because I'm of the mindset that no matter what you do in your life, there's no way to please everybody all the time. That's one of the most toxic tendencies of perfectionism.

[0:11:15.0] MB: Before we dig into the next one, I'd love to talk a little bit more about people-pleasing, because I think that's something that resonates for me for sure and I'm sure many listeners also struggle with it. Tell me more about the root cause behind the tendency to want to be a people pleaser.

[0:11:29.7] TN: Yeah, that's a great question. It's hard to know the root cause for everyone, simply because everyone's an individual. One of the reasons I mentioned that perfectionism does seem to be a personality trait is because there's some evidence that's starting to show that this is actually a tendency that people are born with. When you look at people who struggle with perfectionistic tendencies, not all the time, but more often than not, there is a history of other things within the family.

It could be history of things like anxiety, depression, OCD, even a history things like substance abuse and that sort of thing. There's more and more research showing that it's very possible there's actually a genetic component that's influencing people's perfectionistic tendencies. Having said that, people can be born with this genetic predisposition, if you will, and then grow up in an environment that influences these 10 entities even more and really solidifies that what really becomes a need, a perceived need to please to everyone.

Again, everybody's different. A lot of times it does arise out of the environment we grow up. I use an example in The Perfectionism Workbook about a young woman I worked with. She was the youngest of four kids in her house, both parents were a highly successful, very well-liked individuals, her older her siblings all excelled in school, all did very well with their extracurricular activities, had an older brother who was an amateur athlete for a number of years.

She grew up with this expectation that she had to be the best. What she saw was that the more success everyone in her family had, the better lights they were, the more friends they had, the more people were coming around her house day in and day out. She started to internalize and come to form this idea that for me to make other people happy, for me to feel good about myself, I have to please others. The best way I know to do that is to always be at the top of the class. I have to be the best on my volleyball team. I have to not just volunteer for, but be the head of every extracurricular activity I can think of. These are ideas that if people start to believe them at younger ages, childhood, adolescence, they become solidified in early adulthood and it's really at hard to shake those beliefs.

[0:14:03.7] MB: I have a couple questions around this, but want to – I'm curious, how do you ultimately overcome the tendency of people-pleasing? I'm also really curious for somebody who is in that world of wanting to please people and having your identity be routed around feeling like you need to achieve and be successful to be loved, if they resolve that issue, do they then stop being productive? Do they then stop on the journey of success? Or how do you think about that piece of the puzzle?

[0:14:32.7] TN: Yeah, that's an excellent question as well. That's actually something I hear my clients express a fair amount is this fear that if they stop operating the way they have been, if they give up some of their beliefs and their perfectionist expectations of themselves, that somehow they will then flip to this total opposite, which is being a completely unproductive, unliked person.

All I can tell you is I've never once seen that happen to anybody as they've worked on trying to overcome their own perfectionistic tendencies. I think the reason for that is because they have set the bar so high for themselves that they can take the “risk” of lowering the bar a fairly decent amount and they're still going to be performing at a higher level than the average person. They're still going to be liked, just as well as they ever were.

I think one of the most important things for people-pleasing tendencies to explore is when you're undertaking any action and you behavior engaging, or engaging ion, how much of it is because you truly want to because it's something that feels meaningful and fulfilling to you? How much of it is because it feels like it's something you have to do, something you should be doing to make other people like you?

I think a lot of times when people can start to make the distinction that well, I actually about 85%, 90%, 99% of the time, I'm doing things because I feel like I have to. This is something I need to do, I must be doing to have other people like me, then that's where it's crossing the line. It's not really a meaningful fulfilling activity for the individual. They're simply doing it to have other people approve of them.

[0:16:24.4] MB: How do we start to chip away at the foundations of that, or move towards overcoming that tendency?

[0:16:32.3] TN: Yeah. It does take a decent amount of work. This is something I really don't sugarcoat at all, if people want to work on trying to make some changes in their lives and overcome these tendencies that are causing them more harm than good, causing them more stress than fulfillment. It does take a lot of work. It takes a lot of practice. I think the good news is that for people who have perfectionistic tendencies, anyway you're talking about people that tend to be highly intelligent, are usually very creative, people who are persistent, they've learned how to persevere, they're diligent, hard-working.

It's a matter of working with the individual and trying to help them harness those positive attributes they already possess, those skills that they already can implement and just using them in a different way. Really, the main thing to work on time and time again when you're struggling with perfectionism is really taking a look at your own expectations. What are your expectations of yourself? What are your expectations of others and how realistic are they?

It comes back to some of the cognitive behavioral stuff. It's really doing a lot of challenging your own belief system and really being willing to look at things from a different perspective. One of the things I touch on the workbook as well is having what is known as a growth mindset, versus a fixed mindset. People with a fixed mindset tend to operate on the belief that things in life are just the way they are and there's nothing that they can do about them. That can translate to anything. It can be they don't believe they can change the way they think about things, they don't believe there's a different way to manage their emotions, they don't believe that there is any way to function other than what they already know. That's a fixed mindset and ultimately that is very limiting and it keeps people stuck.

With my clients, I talked a lot about trying to adopt a growth mindset, which for lack of a better phrase is just being more open-minded. Even if you're skeptical, at least being open to the possibility that maybe there's a different way for you to look at things, maybe if you're willing to challenge some of your own unproductive thinking patterns and belief systems and start to see things from a slightly different point of view, that is actually a way to feel better about yourself and really reduce stress.

[0:19:07.4] MB: Dr. Carol Dweck, who's the pioneer behind a lot of this mindset research is a previous guest on the show. We'll make sure to include that episode and some other resources we have around fixing growth mindset in the show notes for listeners who want to check that out.

I want to come back to these other tendencies of perfectionism. Tell me about the second of the five tendencies.

[0:19:28.6] TN: The second one often surprises people. It's a person who is a procrastinating perfectionist. I don't like to make sweeping generalizations, but a stereotype that does still exist in our culture of a perfectionist is someone who might also be known as what they call a type of a personality as someone who is working nonstop. Oftentimes in the American workplace, these people are called go-getters and that sort of thing. There are certainly a lot of perfectionists who operate that way.

There's also a huge chunk of people who struggle with perfectionistic tendencies that spend a lot of their time feeling paralyzed and actually their expectations have gotten so unrealistic and so out of control for them that they just live petrified and fear and they procrastinate. They will put off doing something, because they are afraid that they will not get it exactly right. They will put off things like applying for a job, because they're worried that they don't have the perfect application.

They will put off a social interaction, because they're worried that they will not come across perfectly. What if they don't have the right things to say in a conversation? What if someone notices that they seem a little bit nervous, or tired, or off their game? People who really become gradually more and more isolated because their expectations are keeping them stuck in fear. That can also tie into this this fear of making mistakes and like I alluded to, fears of just not coming across as the type of perfect individual they think they should be.

[0:21:19.0] MB: I think it's interesting, because when you talk about perfectionism many people may think, “Hey, I'm not a perfectionist,” but the reality is all these different tendencies can manifest in a number of different ways, whether you're a people pleaser, whether you're a procrastinator. There's a lot of subtle ways that perfectionism can seep into your life. I think it's really insightful to look at these different angles and ways that it may be impacting you.

[0:21:43.4] TN: Oh, I completely agree. I'll say a couple of things to that. First of all, I'm pretty honest with people. I don't consider myself a perfectionist, but I can fully acknowledge I have perfectionistic tendencies. By that, I mean, I have this underlying sense that is with me most of the time throughout the day and night, that no matter what I've done, I probably could have done it better. Or no matter what I've accomplished in the course of the day, a week, a year, there's this sense that I still could have done more. That's both on a professional level and a personal level.

As a parent, I feel there's always more I could be and should be doing as a dad for my kids to take care of my family. On a professional level, I have this ongoing sense that I could always be reading more, I could always be researching more, I could be finding ways to help more people. It's not something that keeps me awake at night. It's not something that causes an undue amount of stress in my life, but it's certainly there. When I talk about things in those terms, I do find that most people can relate to that to some degree.

The other thing I'll say is that more often than not, when I'm treating someone for perfectionism, they have walked into my office and said, “Hey, I'm a perfectionist. Can you help me with that?” It's more that they have noticed, again this feeling of discontent, that no matter what they've achieved, no matter what's happened for them in their lives, they're not satisfied, they don't feel good about what they've done, they don't feel good about themselves as individuals, so they keep pushing themselves harder and harder that causes a lot of stress and anxiety.

Or on the flipside like we were just touching on, I get people who come in because maybe they've been out of college, or grad school for a year, or two years, three years and they haven't found a job yet, because again, they're frozen in fear. They're so worried that they're not going to get everything perfect, get the perfect position, whatever it may be, that they've been sitting around being inactive for years. That also does not feel good to them.

There is dysfunctional perfectionism, which is when these expectations and these tendencies are impacting you 24/7. There's certainly a fair amount of people out there struggling with that, but I completely agree with you that a lot of people have these tendencies, with a few of them to some degree, it just may not be impacting them to the point where they think they need professional help, or they need to do something like take up a self-help book.

[0:24:22.2] MB: I think it bears repeating that you may not describe yourself as somebody who is a perfectionist and yet, you might be suffering from – you might be a people pleaser, or you might be a chronic procrastinator, or you might be highly critical of yourself and you might have negative self-talk, all of these are different manifestations of what you're essentially calling perfectionism.

[0:24:45.0] TN: Yes. I completely agree. I'm glad you mentioned the self-criticism and the negative self-talk. These are things I see across the board for people that I'm treating for anything. It doesn't have to be for perfectionism, but that is a huge factor with something like depression. People experience low mood, because they're being very, very hard on themselves. Again, it's this idea that no matter what they've done, it's not good enough, they could always be better. If you constantly feel like you're not good enough, of course you're going to feel down, of course you're going to feel depressed.

On the other side, maybe that's causing a high amount of anxiety because you feel no matter what, you should be pushing yourself harder and harder and harder. Those are the types of things that lead to burnout.

[0:25:31.8] MB: How can we re-conceptualize or deal more effectively with negative self-talk and being very self-critical?

[0:25:39.8] TN: This is an area where I know I've mentioned cognitive behavioral therapy a couple times, this is an area where I really find that mode of therapy, that mode of treatment to be really highly effective. Cognitive behavioral therapy in a nutshell is really getting a solid understanding of how your thoughts, your feelings and your behaviors all impact one another. Whether or not we're fully aware of it, those things are almost always influencing one another.

I truly believe that the way we think about things has a direct impact on our emotions, on our feelings and those can be emotional feelings, it can be physical sensations that go along with stress, it can be muscle tension, that sort of thing. It can be even how we feel about ourselves as people, and the way we're thinking about things, the way we're feeling certainly influences our behavior and influences how we act or when it comes to procrastination, it can translate to a lack of action.

Within cognitive behavioral therapy, a lot of it again is looking at your thought process. What are your expectations of yourself, of others? What are your beliefs about yourself as an individual? Are those just ideas you've been telling yourself, or you've heard maybe from other people in your life, or are you able to use some objective evidence from your own life to challenge these beliefs you form? I really think examining your own thought process is a huge, huge key to overcoming some of this stuff.

Also within cognitive behavioral therapy is a mode of treatment that is much more action-oriented and that's called exposure and response prevention. This is something I use very frequently with people with OCD, anxiety disorders, any specific phobias, or panic attacks. It works very well for people who live in fear of making mistakes. Exposure and response prevention is basically just what it sounds like. It's actually purposely exposing yourself to something that tends to produce some amount of anxiety, or distress, or discomfort for you and then preventing your usual response.

One example would be okay, say someone has an important proposal they're working on for work. The perfectionistic tendency would be that they have to get every single detail exactly right. That might be things like working on it many, many, many, many more hours than anybody else in their position would do. It can lead to things like almost compulsively rereading, rechecking what they've created, what they've written, going over it again and again and again and again, just to make sure they haven't missed a single detail, again out of fear of making a mistake.

The exposure piece would be taking something like that and having the person actually try and work on resisting, or preventing their usual response. It would be okay, write up this proposal and do your best to turn it in without checking them more than twice. I've come up with little ways to try different exposures with people. I will have them send me a quick e-mail without checking it. I will have them tell me something that is inaccurate, or is wrong. I will have them write me an e-mail with spelling errors, or again, where they've just got an effect completely wrong, so they're actually actively practicing making mistakes.

The way the process works is that the more people are actually – they'd seen this thing that causes a lot of distress to them and learning that they can tolerate it, any stress or discomfort around it starts to fade. That actually allows people to see, “Okay, once I get past the anxiety of getting something wrong, I'm actually better able to see what I have learned from it. Maybe I've learned that hey I can tolerate some discomfort, or maybe I've learned that it's okay to not be the world's best speller. It's okay to misspell things now and then. Nobody is judging me negatively and life goes on.”

[0:29:58.0] MB: I love exposure and response. I think that's such a powerful framework. Before we go deeper into that, I want to come back to cognitive behavioral therapy. I want to really concretely look at this for a second. Tell me about how does – someone listening to this episode, how would they implement that into their life? How would they implement CBT at a really specific and granular level?

[0:30:21.6] TN: I think the first step, which is really the basis of any CBT work is learning about it and understanding what are known as cognitive distortions. Cognitive distortions are any unhealthy irrational, or simply inaccurate thinking patterns that people might be engaging in. These are actually things that are pretty easy to find. Even with a quick internet search of cognitive distortions, people can start to learn about all the different categories of distorted thinking patterns that tend to be a product of and further exacerbate things like anxiety, depression and stress.

Some examples, one that I really think is probably the most applicable to people who struggle with perfectionism and people with tendencies is what are known as ‘should statements’. There's a whole category of distorted thinking patterns that simply revolve around the word ‘should’. As people telling themselves things like, “Well, I should be at the top of my class. I should be the top salesman in my company. I should never get anything wrong. I should be happy all the time.”

All these things are telling themselves over and over again that they should, or again, feel they have to be doing. That can be a pretty destructive distorted thinking pattern. Other thinking patterns that people get stuck in that's into being productive is all or nothing, or what is known as black-and-white distorted thinking. It's really, that's a very limiting one, because in any given situation you're really only giving yourself two options. An example would be, I have to be perfect or else, I'm a complete failure.

When you really have people look at beliefs like that and break them down, that's when change starts to occur. People can step back, look at things like that a little bit more objectively and say out loud, that's unrealistic and are those really my only two options in life? If I'm not perfect, does that necessarily automatically translate to me being a complete failure? No. Most people would say it's not.

To get back to your question, I really think learning and familiarizing yourself with all the different types of cognitive distortions that are out there is the first step when it comes to cognitive behavioral therapy. Then breaking down how you tend to feel, how you tend to react when you're thinking those things.

Again, for the person that's highly self-critical and is always beating themselves up over and over again, they can recognize that the more they do that, the worse they feel. Again, it can be feeling down, it can be feeling dissatisfied, it can be flat-out anxiety and panic. It's understanding the connection between thoughts and feelings and then like I touched on how those things might be influencing the way you're behaving in any given circumstance, whether it's a social interaction, or whether it's a task you're working on for work, whatever it may be.

Really, it's getting a clear, clear picture for yourself of how those things are all influencing one another. Then with CBT, really coming back to the thought process again, again and again and really challenging it. One question I frequently ask people and this is not something I came up with, this is an old-school standard CBT question is okay, this thought you're telling yourself over and over again about yourself, or about other people, whatever it may be, if you had to stand up in front of a judge and jury in a court of law and prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that this thought you were thinking is 100% true, what a holdup.

If it's a distorted thought, almost every time the answer is no. People can identify, I have no evidence to back this thought up. I have no evidence to show me that I'm a failure. I have no evidence, no hard evidence from my own life to show me that people don't like me. Time and time again, it really comes back to challenging the unproductive thinking. I'm trying to gain a new perspective and people do see that has a direct impact on another feeling in general, how they're feeling about themselves and has a direct impact on how they're acting.

[0:34:41.9] MB: It seems like expectations are at the root of many of these tendencies and limiting beliefs.

[0:34:48.2] TN: Yeah. Again, I think this is where I have the advantage of being a therapist, being a counselor where I have the time to really help people explore those expectations, again where they came from, were these direct messages they were receiving from other people in their lives, or these things that have been influenced by our society in general, I can tell you for a lot of people I work with, male and female who are struggling with any eating disorder or body image issues. A lot of people get into these societal expectations of how they “should look,” how their bodies “should be.” When it crosses a line and to again, these perfectionistic expectations of how they think they should look, that's where it can get really destructive and unhealthy.

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[0:37:54.0] MB: I want to come back to exposure and response, because I think that's such a great framework, even things as simple as social interactions. We've had previous guest on the show Jia Jiang, who talked about the idea of rejection therapy, which is a great way to get comfortable with uncomfortable social interactions. Tell me a little bit more about the science behind why exposure and response is such a useful tool for dealing with any discomfort, or negative experiences that we have.

[0:38:24.7] TN: Yeah. What tends to happen for people if there is something that causes them anxiety, if there's something that causes them discomfort, more often than not, the response is to try and avoid it somehow. Or if they're feeling really uncomfortable, try and instantly distract themselves by any means they can think of. Avoidance and distraction are the most common ways people tend to react to something that causes discomfort.

What happens over time is the more people are avoiding something, it's actually increasing their anxiety around it. An easy example would be something, like someone who has a fear of dogs. It can be for whatever reason, maybe they had a bad experience when they were younger, or dog tried to bite them, maybe not. Or for whatever reason, they formed this fear of dogs. Because dogs make them uncomfortable and they tend to get stressed and anxious around them, their solution is to avoid it.

Again, what's happening over time is the more they're making all these efforts to stay away from dogs at all costs, it's helping that fear just grow larger and larger in their brain, and t no point are they giving themselves the opportunity to learn that if they actually faced a dog and hung out with a dog, that anxiety around the dog itself would probably start to fade some.

The science behind exposure and response prevention is helping people identify really specific triggers that do tend to produce that discomfort, or distress for them. Then gradually, systematically having them start to face those triggers in any way that they can think of, in any way that their counselor can think of.

What tends to happen, more often than not, it's not a 100%, nothing is, but more often than not, when people gradually and systematically expose themselves these feared stimuli over and over and over again, the brain starts to engage in new learning. The brain starts to adjust, new neural pathways are formed and that directly translates to feeling us anxious. In a nutshell, people start to learn, “Hey, I can handle this. I've spent most of my life avoiding this and reinforcing this idea I was telling myself that I can't deal with this, I can't tolerate this, I can't handle this,” but once they actually face it and endure that initial discomfort around it, like I said the brain starts to figure out, “Oh, actually this does not need to be perceived as a threat and I can tolerate this.” Even if there is ongoing discomfort around it, that discomfort tends to be far less and it tends to come and go much more quickly.

[0:41:05.7] MB: It's really interesting that the more you avoid something, the greater your fear and anxiety around that becomes. I'm curious, and this was the next thing I wanted to dig into, how does that relate to the connection between perfectionism and OCD?

[0:41:22.1] TN: Okay, great question. The first thing I’ll say is a lot of times people are curious, or don't seem to really get it when I say I treat perfectionism. Actually, the way I became exposed to perfectionism as an issue and as a clinical issue, I was primarily through my work with people with obsessive compulsive disorder.

Just to make a quick distinction, OCD is very much, it is a brain disorder. Most of the research points to the fact that people are most likely born with OCD and they experience events later on in life that tend to have a pop out, or come to the service. Perfectionism itself is not OCD. Like I said earlier, it it's more of a personality trait. People can possess perfectionistic characteristics without having obsessive compulsive disorder.

The overlap is that for people with OCD and again, this is a blanket statement. There are a bunch of different subtypes of OCDs. This is not really doing it justice. For a lot of people with OCD, they are engaging in compulsive behaviors to get a sense that things feel just right. You could use any number of examples. Again, it's totally subjective based on the individual.

One example could be okay, I walk into my office and I close the door behind me. Then I get the obsession. The obsession is an intrusive thought, or doubt that did I close the door behind me? Because that doubt is so strong for the person with OCD, then they then feel the need to engage in a compulsion. The compulsion would be like, “Okay, then I need to check the door handle again and to make sure it's closed.” They would do that.

Again, the nature of the disorder is that no matter how many times a person engages in a compulsion, there’s still the lingering doubt. People will often describe that they will go back to a compulsive act over and over and over again, until something changes a little bit in their brain and again, they just get this feeling where they get this sense that then it feels right, then it feels it's okay and they can move on.

The crossover with that and perfectionism is that again, someone may not have OCD, but they may be engaging in a perfectionist behavior, like I alluded to, okay. I'm going to read and reread this e-mail over and over and over and over again, until I can make sure it's just right. I can make sure it feels okay and it seems like it's mistake-free and I feel like it's perfect, or as close to perfect as it's going to get.

That's one example of how there can be a crossover. Again, there are many different types of OCD, but one of the subtypes is people who struggle with things like organization and symmetry and they can again, translate to anything. It can be feeling everything on their desk has to be lined up just right, clothes have to be put away in their drawers a very specific certain way. That gets jumbled up along a lot of times with feeling like things have to be perfect, for lack of a better word.

[0:44:33.1] MB: I want to come back to now and talk about the solution to some of these challenges, which you talk about and describe self-acceptance and self-compassion. I love the way you phrased it in the last chapter of your book, which is being enough and achieving your goals without fear. Tell me more about that.

[0:44:51.4] TN: Yeah. One of the reasons I wanted to talk about working towards goals and trying to achieve goals is because I think it's very important to have goals. That's what keeps us moving forward in life. Again, whether it's a personal goal, a professional goal we set for ourselves. It's something that drives us. It's something that keeps us moving forward and it can translate to people achieving a high amount of success in their lives and achieving contentment in their personal lives, achieving a sense of self-satisfaction.

The problem with perfectionism is that more often than not, when people are striving towards these goals, first of all, the goals they've set for themselves are unrealistic, many times unattainable, impossible. The work they're doing towards those goals is motivated by fear, it's motivated by stress. Again, it's this sense that is something they absolutely must have to be doing, or else they're worthless as a person.

Then a lot of times when people don't achieve those unrealistic goals they set for themselves, that just sets off a whole other cycle of self-criticism and negative self-talk, which is perpetuates anxiety and depression.

One of the areas of CBT that I touch on towards the end of the workbook is acceptance and commitment therapy, which is again, not doing a full justice, but in a nutshell, understanding what you value in your life, what is most important and meaningful to you. Then taking a look at whether or not the goals you've set for yourself actually fall in-line with those values, and if there’s things that are going to actually help you have more of a sense of fulfillment in your life.

When people are setting goals for themselves that are more based on what they value in their life, what is meaningful and important to them and they're making those goals specific and measurable and again, meaningful, that actually tends to provide a lot of natural motivation for them. It starts to translate to this sense of they're doing something that they a want to do, versus this perceive me that it's something they have to do to again, please others, or something they absolutely must do if they're ever going to feel slightly decent about themselves as a human being.

Along with the acceptance piece of things is a mindfulness component. This is an area that I really found to be highly beneficial when I'm working with people who've come in seeking help for really any issue. I think you guys know, really at its core, mindfulness is more about just observing things, observing how you're feeling, observing what it is you're thinking about, observing how you and others are acting in your daily life and trying to just make observations without touching any judgement to them.

The problem with dysfunctional perfectionism, again a lot of it comes back to these expectations people place on themselves, is that if they're not achieving what they think they should be, then that leads to a lot of negative self-judgment. The more they're judging themselves negatively, again that's just going to perpetuate things like stress, insecurity, anxiety and depression.

[0:48:22.4] MB: What would one piece of homework be that you would give listeners to concretely implement some of the ideas and themes that you've talked about today?

[0:48:30.4] TN: I think the first thing for anybody that thinks that this might be causing some amount of unrest in their life is to sit down and do what I call a self-inventory of your own expectations. I know we've talked about that a lot, but it's the keystone towards working on all this other stuff we've been addressing.

The first piece of homework I give people when I meet with them in my office is the same thing I would recommend to anybody out there, is take some time to sit down and just be completely and totally honest with yourself, what are your expectations for yourself? Really try and be as thorough, as comprehensive as possible. What are your expectations for yourself when it comes to finances? What are your expectations for yourself when it comes to personal relationships? That can be friendships, it can be intimate relationships, it can be family relationships.

What are your expectations of yourself of how you “should be” when you're interacting with people socially? What are your expectations of yourself when it comes to your lifestyle? That can include your health habits, exercise, diet, whatever it may be. What are your expectations for yourself as far as how you want to feel? Again, what are your expectations as far as what you want to achieve for yourself?

More often than not, when people sit down and they're really honest and they take time and they do this homework assignment really well, they can sit back, read over and recognize, “That's unrealistic, that's unrealistic, that's causing me a lot of distress.” When people are able to step back from their own thoughts and expectations and get a little bit more of an objective perspective, that's the groundwork you need to start to really challenge and change any unproductive thinking and work on just accepting yourself as you are, and working towards more realistic and again, more meaningful, more fulfilling expectations.

[0:50:34.1] MB: Where can listeners find you and your work online?

[0:50:37.8] TN: I've tried to make my website from my practice a pretty good resource for people, and that's just chicagocounselingcenter.com. I've got a few blog posts on there that address perfectionism, address different subtypes of obsessive compulsive disorder, some of the treatment methods we've talked about, like exposure and response prevention, CBT, mindfulness. I also have links to other great sites that are out there for resources. I have a link to my book on there.

When I created The Perfectionism Workbook, I really tried to make it as comprehensive as possible. I try to think about all the different facets of perfectionism I've seen and really countless clients I’ve had over the years, and I've tried to throw in pretty much every different treatment technique I've tried with people that's had any positive result. It's a very skills-based book, it is a workbook, it requires a lot of work on the individual. So far, the feedback I'm getting on it is that it's practical, it's helpful and it seems to be a pretty decent resource for people struggling with some of these tendencies.

[0:51:48.2] MB: Well Taylor, thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing all this knowledge and wisdom with our listeners. It's been a pleasure to have you here.

[0:51:54.8] TN: Thank you very much, Matt. I appreciate you taking the time. It was a pleasure speaking with you as well.

[0:52:01.7] MB: If you're a fan of the podcast’s focus on evidence-based growth and you're an entrepreneur, or business executive, my question to you is this; with the hours you invest in personal growth each month, how many of the tactics and strategies that you learn are you actually implementing to push your career and business forward? If there's a gap between what you're learning and what you're actually doing and it's costing you opportunity, or real concrete financial and career growth, you should check out my Science of Action Project.

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Create Epic Breakthroughs By Blasting Away Your Biases & Assumptions with Dr. Beau Lotto

In this episode we discuss the surprising science of creativity. We begin with a fascinating look into how your brain create reality around you and assigns meaning to things that often have no meaning at all, then we examine the unlikely relationship between doubt, ambiguity, and creativity. We ask how you can chip away at your assumptions so that you can open spaces of possibility to be more creative, we explore the foundations of asking truly good questions, and examine the way that doubt can be a powerful force for unleashing creative insights and more with our guest Dr. Beau Lotto. 

Dr. Beau Lotto is neuroscientist, author, and the founder of the Lab of Misfits. His studies in the science of human perception have led him to work in several fields including education, the arts, business, and more. Beau has given multiple TED talks, has spoken to companies such as Google, and his work has been featured on the BBC, PBS, Natural Geographic, Big Think, and much more!

• Do we see reality as it really is? Do we see the world as it really is?

• We have no direct access to the world except through our senses 

• Raw data from the senses is all the information the brain gets 

• Data by itself is pointless - any piece of data could mean literally anything

• You can conflate so many different things from your senses 

• Information is ambiguous - it conflates multiple aspects of real world objects 

• The brain relies on history - on context - to interpret all the information it collects - the history of your life, your culture, your evolution, your family, and much more

• Most of your life happened without you even being there - you inherited most of the context and history for how you interpret the world

• Your brain has effectively encoded biases and assumptions that filter and shape your perception of reality 

• You can never step outside your biases and assumptions 

• There is a real world - made of energy (and chemicals) that it out there - you’re detecting parts of that 

• Even visible light - what you see only a tiny fraction of the energy and electro magnetic waves out in the world

• “The four color map problem"

• Pain is not a function of the world - there is nothing in the world that is painful - pain doesn’t exist without humans there to sense it - pain is the perceived value of information 

• What do illusions means? When you see an illusion is your perception of reality being fooled?

• We didn’t evolve to see the world accurately, we evolved to see it usefully - evolution didn’t optimize for accuracy, it evolved for utility 

• Because of this conclusion we can constantly update and adapt our perceptions

• We can increase or decrease illusions by making things consistent (more or less) with what we expect 

• Language is an illusion - light house is different than lighthouse 

• Context is often irrelevant - the key is how your perceptions relate to the past - to HISTORY 

• What do you know about KiKi and BuBu?

• Can simple shapes demonstrate the power of biases to shape our thinking?

• We have no direct access to another person and their behavior and their motivation

• Every personality that you perceive is inside you, projected outward

• Poetry creates a level of ambiguity that enables people to construct meaning for themselves and reflect onto that 

• We’re always doing these interpretations of the world - but the upshot is that we can change and adapt our perceptions. 

• This isn’t postmodernism - it’s science. Some things are better than others. You have to come and figure it out yourself. 

• Your brain does not create meaning by passively receiving content - it makes meaning by physically engaging with the world 

• The brain evolved in our body and the body evolved in our world 

• Feedback is essential for synapse and brain connections to be made and re-made. The world changes, the world is dynamic.

• We're constantly updating and redefining reality 

• Your brain never makes a big jump - you can’t get from one side of the room to the other without crossing the space in between 

• Change your assumptions and you change your perceptions - and start to see differently 

• We think of creativity as putting two things that are far apart together - of a eureka moment or moment of insight - for YOU these ideas are far apart - the creative person is making the next logical step of assumption 

• Creativity is only creative from the outside not the inside 

• Creative people are making small steps to the next most likely possible. The key to creativity is to CHANGE what’s possible and change your perceptions and assumptions of what’s possible

• What makes creativity hard is the updating and changing of biases and assumptions

• When you take a step - what’s the reference to that step? It has to be your previous step 

• Creativity is a search algorithm of searching your space of possibility by taking the next possible step 

• The KEY is to expand your space of possibility 

• Nothing interesting begins with knowing - it begins with not knowing, it begins with doubt, it begins with a question

• The first step from going from A to B is going from A to not A - to step into UNCERTAINTY 

• The problem is that we hate uncertainty

• The KEY is to expand your space of possibility / HOW do we change our assumptions? 

• The best person to reveal your biases to you is usually not you it’s someone else 

• It’s very scary to question your biases and assumptions 

• The need for closure, the need for certainty is so strong that we constantly need closure 

• In essence, uncertainty is the key to creativity 

• The surprising evolutionary solution to creating uncertainty in your life (to be more creative) 

• Play is evolutions solution to uncertainty - it’s a way of being, a way of interacting, that celebrates uncertainty

• The reward is the activity itself - intrinsically motivating 

  1. What’s the reward of Skiing? It’s Skiing. 

• Creativity = Play + Intention

• Awe and wonder are also key skills to embracing uncertainty. When you experience awe and wonder you feel connected to the world, you feel curious

• What is it that you care about that is bigger than yourself? We will go further, we will tolerate more pain, we will walk further across the desert for someone else than for ourselves 

• How do we bring creativity to specific challenges in our lives?

• Ask questions 

  1. You only ever learn if you move or change

  2. You shouldn’t enter conflict with certainty - you should enter conflict with doubt and with questions 

  3. Asking certainty-based questions like “What, where, and when” - what we really want to get to is the WHY - what you want to get are the principles that transcend context 

  4. You get to principles by understanding WHY something does what it does 

• Find out what you care about, have the desire to shift/move/change, and ask the right question - then engage other people

• The most interesting questions are between Naive and Expert

• Naive are great at asking questions, but don’t know it

  1. Experts can recognize great questions, but can’t ask them 

• How do we celebrate doubt? How do we chip away at our assumptions so that we can open spaces of possibility to be more creative?

• Thinking is hard - which is why we so often don’t do it - we try to avoid it (either consciously or subconsciously)

• Creativity begins with humility - it begins with not knowing 

• Science doesn’t begin with a problem - it begins with a QUESTION

• The real challenge is to find good questions and ask better questions

• A KEY to asking good questions is to Doubt what you assume to be true already

• Iteration is not about finding better solutions, its about iterating to better questions 

• Questions can create uncertainty 

• Design thinking is starting with questions - questions that you care about deeply - or questions that are relevant to the challenge at hand 

• The best questions EXPAND the space of possibility and help you go from thinking in 2D to thinking in 3D

• Wisdom is knowing when to be on one side of the edge of chaos or the other

• Innovation is the cycle between efficiency / utility and creativity

• Moving from high spaces of possibility to low spaces of possibility 

• Increase the dimensionality of your search space

• Add another person

  1. Increase idea diversity

  2. The best solutions come in a COMPLEX search space not a simple search space

  3. Question assumptions

  4. Celebrate doubt

• Homework: Take ownership of your own biases and assumptions. Engage in a person you care about with a question of your assumptions next time you have a conflict

• Homework: Go from A to “Not-A” - Let go of reflexive meanings. Take a cold shower and feel the cold water, don’t attach the significant of uncomfortableness - just feel the coldness as neutral.

• Homework: Change the meaning of what’s happened in the past (which will change your assumptions and perceptions). The brain is a time machine - we can never change what happened, but we can change the MEANING of what happened. You can change history of your past meanings. That’s what therapy does. 

Thank you so much for listening!

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [Video] Beau Lotto: "Deviate" | Talks at Google

• [Book] Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson

• [Website] Lab of Misfits

• [Book] Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently by Beau Lotto

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[00:00:11] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than 2 million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode, we discuss the surprising science of creativity. We begin with a fascinating look into how your brain creates reality around you and assigns meaning to things that often have no meaning at all. Then we examine the unlikely relationship between doubt, ambiguity and creativity. We ask how you can chip away your assumptions so that you can open up spaces of possibility to be more creative. We explore the foundation of asking truly great questions and examine the way that doubt can be a powerful force for unleashing creative insights and more with our guest Dr. Beau Lotto. 

Do you need more time; time for work time, for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our email list. It's called How You Can Create Time for the Things That Really Matter in Life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the email list at successpodcast.com.

You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our email subscribers. We recently pre-released an episode in an interview to our email subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience. That had tremendous implications, because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first. With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live exclusive interview, just for e-mail subscribers.

There's some amazing stuff that's available only to email subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Or, if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you're on the go, you don't have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222.

In our previous episode, we discussed the science of talent. We looked at how great talent is built into the very physical structure of the brain itself. Explored the incredible importance of striving at the edge of your ability and staying there as long as possible. The vital importance of making mistakes in the learning process, how a group of kindergarteners beat a bunch of CEOs at a simple team building exercise. A powerful tool Navy SEALs use to make better decisions that you can apply in your life right now and much more with our previous guest, Daniel Coyle. 

If you want to unlock your true potential, listen to our previous episode. Now, for our interview with Beau. 

[00:03:10] MB: Today, we have another unique guest on the show, Dr. Beau Lotto. Beau is a neuroscientist, author and the founder of the Lab of Misfits. His studies in the science of human perception have led him to work in several fields, including education, the arts, business and more. Beau has given multiple TED Talks, spoken to companies such as Google and his work has been featured on the BBC, PBS, National Geographic, Bit Think and much more. 

Beau, welcome to The Science of Success.

[00:03:37] BL: Thanks for having me on. 

[00:03:39] MB: Beau, we’ll very excited to have you on the show today. I know your work is really, really fascinating, and I think the listeners are really going to enjoy it. I’d love to start out with kind of a simple premise, but I think in many ways kind of unpins a lot of what you talk and write about, do we see reality as it really is? Do we see the world as it is truly is?  

[00:03:58] BL: No, we don’t, but this isn’t postmodern relativism. The world exist, it’s just that we didn’t evolve to see it. We see something else. In fact, in some sense, be useful to see it. The reason why we don’t is because we’re ever separated from that world. We have no direct access to the physical world other than to our senses. The problem with that is that the senses receive information from that world that is totally ambiguous. So your listeners can do a little experiment on themselves. They can hold up their finger, one of their fingers in front of their face and they can line up that finger to something that’s in a distance that’s much larger and they move it further and towards them till the finger and the object are the same size, and of course they’re not the same size. But the point is that at that moment in time, the information arising from that object in the world and your finger as far as your eyes were concerned were in face the same size and the problem is that’s the only information your brain gets when it comes to seeing the world. 

Everything that your brain is receiving from the world is inherently meaningless, because it can literally mean anything. What’s more, that information doesn’t come with instructions. It doesn’t tell you what to do. So one of the things that people need to remember is that in a very fundamental and deep sense, data by itself is pointless. There is no inherent value in any piece of data, because it could literally mean anything, and that’s true at the most fundamental level of what your brain is dealing with. 

[00:05:26] MB: So tell me more about that idea and why is it that the kind of raw input that our senses collect about the world is not – As you sort of put it, is why is that pointless? 

[00:05:38] BL: It’s meaningless, because it conflates more to aspects of the world. So it’s a multiplier as supposed to attitude. So you take size and distance. You put those two things together, they multiply. It’s like being given the equation X times Y equals Z, and you’re given Z and you have to solve for X without ever knowing Y. It’s mathematically impossible, because there’s an infinite number of combination in X and Y that can give you Z. 

So you conflate reflect and illumination, or amplitude and sound and distance. So something that is loud and far away can give rise to the exact same stimulus that is something quite and up close. So that’s the reason why information is ambiguous, because it literally conflates multiple aspects of the real world objects. Even more than that, those objects don’t – Even if we could see them directly, which we can’t, they’re forever separate from us in terms of their behavioral value. Like I said, they don’t come with instructions. They don’t tell us what to do. So your brain has to rely on another piece of information that doesn’t exist in the moment, and that piece of information is history. 

So the functional structure of your brain is literally a physical manifestation of your past interactions with the world. That’s effectively what your brain is representing, the structure your brain representing, and not just your history, the history of your culture, the history of your family, the history of your organization, your business, or in fact even your evolutionary history. 

So you can really make a real argument that most of your life happened without you even there. You inherited most of that experience and it’s through that experience that your brain is making sense of meaningless data and making it meaningful. 

[00:07:21] MB: In essence, the brain collects kind of this raw input and we kind of impose context of meaning on to that information to ascribe to it some sort of relevance to what we’re doing or the way that we perceive reality. 

[00:07:35] BL: Yeah, we call it – So the behavioral significance of data, or the empirical significance of the data. Your brain is inherently empirical. So evolution, learning, development are all different ways, different time frames and using different mechanism to do the same thing, which is the shape, the structure of your brain according to trial and error. 

As a consequence, what happens is during evolution, say, when you approaching something that had, say, a low intensity, that could have been a hole, it could have been a dark repainted surface. Originally your brain had no idea knowing which was which. So for those who actually stepped into it and it happened to be a hole, they got selected out. So your brain them has effectively encoded biases and assumptions, because that’s really what history gives you are your biases and assumptions. Those biases and assumptions keep you alive. Every time you take a step, your Brain has hundreds of assumptions that the floor is not going to give way, your legs aren’t going to give way. They are essential for your survival. 

But what was once useful may no longer be useful, which is why your brain also evolved to adapt. So we’re constantly having to update our biases and assumptions. A common misperception or misconception is that while we think we might have sometimes biases and assumptions, but other times not. In fact, you always do. You can never step outside your bias assumptions. The whole idea is stepping outside the box is a silly idea, because all you do is you step inside a new box and you can never leave them. 

So it creates a fundamental question about how we could actually ever see differently. But that’s what history has given you. It’s giving you biases and assumptions and it’s through that that you construct what you see. 

[00:09:15] MB: So what would you say to somebody who comes back and says, “Well, there is kind of an objective real world beyond my own perception. 

[00:09:24] BL: Well, of course, there’s a real world. So there is a physical world. There is a physical world literally of energy, right? What your senses are detecting is energy in terms of, say, electromagnetic radiation, or vibrations that your eardrums are detecting. So there’s little energy and chemicals in the case of your taste buds or your olfactory systems. That’s what you’re detecting, of course. So that exists, and it’s generated by stuff in the world. It’s just that, again, we don’t see it. 

So take for instance color. Color makes a very good point. So color comes from light. Light by definition is the part of the electromagnetic spectrum between 4 and 700 nanometers that we’re sensitive to. Well, actually the amount of electromagnetic radiation out there is massive compared to that tiny window that we see. So we see only a very small part of the whole possible spectrum. That’s one point. 

The other point is that it’s a linear space from 4 to 700, so small to large. But our perception of color is not a line. So at one end we might see red, at the other end we see blue. Now, perceptually, red and blue are actually quite similar to each other. In fact, the more similar to each other than they are to green, which means that our perception of color is in fact a circle, right? Red, green, blue to yellow. 

But the light that’s generated is not circular. It’s a line. What’s more is we break that circle into categories of color, again, red, green, blue and yellow, but there’s nothing categorical about light spectrum, but it was actually useful to see four colors, and one of the possible reasons for doing so is that if you think of cartography, when you’re making a map, you need at least four colors to make sure no two countries share the same color. It’s called four-color map problem. 

In other words, we’re solving these problems in a way that’s useful but not necessarily realistic. Another perfect example is pain. Pain is not – The perception of pain is not a function in the world. There’s nothing in the world that is painful, right? Pain doesn’t exist without us there to sense it. Pain is the perceived value or importance of a stimulus it tells you to avoid. But there’s nothing inherently painful about an object.  

[00:11:44] MB: So how do things like sort of optical and auditory illusions sort of interact with this thesis? 

[00:11:50] BL: So what they demonstrated is that a number of points. What they don’t demonstrate is far too often people will use illusions I think in a fairly superficial trite way, which is to say that our perceptions are being fooled. Your perception is not being fooled. So this might seem a contradiction to what I said. They’re only illusions if you assume that the brain evolved to see the world accurately. By definition, an illusion is to see it differently in the way it really is. 

If you evolved to see the world accurately, then you’re seeing illusions. But the argument here is that we didn’t evolved to see the world accurately. We evolved to see it usefully. What evolution gives you is not accuracy. Evolution gives you utility. In that sense you kind of have two options. Either everything you see is an illusion, or nothing is. Your perceptions are not fragile. They’re robust. It’s just that they’re not seeing the world in any sort of literal sense. They’re seeing it in a utilitarian sense. That’s incredibly useful, right? 


If there were a one-to-one relationship, it would be between our perceptions in the world. It would mean that we had no way of actually adopting or changing our behavior. Instead we can constantly update and see the world differently. We can constantly adopt. So there’s actually tremendous freedom and understanding that your perceptions are not of accuracy, and illusions make that point very strongly. 

What’s more, they demonstrate of where the perception is constructed, which is that it’s constructed empirically, it’s constructed in your history. So in our work, we’ve shown that we can take illusions and we can make one more or less consistent with different types of what we call empirical significance and we can either increase or decrease the illusion accordingly. So we can make it more or less consistent with different kinds of experiences, or we can even create new experiences to create new illusions. In that sense, language is an illusion, right? You take a word, you take the word light and you put it in a new context and you change the meaning. So if you put it with a light house with a space in between, that means one thing, but if you put it as lighthouse with no space in between, you have yet another word, another meaning. That is effectively illusion. The same stimulus giving a rise to the different meanings depending on what surrounds it, all of which is grounded in your history of what it meant before.  

[00:14:08] MB: So this kind of context that we bring to bear when we’re constructing our perceptions of reality, you touched on this a little bit, but where does that come from and how do we think about all of the things that are kind of shaping our perceptions of reality? 

[00:14:21] BL: The context comes from history. So there’s no inherent value in context. I’ll give you an example. So if I give you a hieroglyph. I presume you’re not an Egyptologist, but tell me if you are. So if I give you a hieroglyph, that probably doesn’t mean anything to you. It doesn’t mean anything to me, right? But if I put it in a new context of hieroglyphs, it changes its meaning, but you still don’t know what it means. Because that context is also just as ambiguous too. 

So in that sense, the concept of a context is arbitrary, right? The decision of what’s a stimulus and what’s around is meaningless. So the context is as meaningless as is the stimulus. What’s relevant is how they relate that to the past, to what this meant for your behavior in the past. What the past gave you is not the history of what the thing turned out to be, because you never have access to this. We’re not like artificial neural networks being trained by Google, because in that context you have the computer scientist that when the neural network says train and it’s giving you an answer and the computer scientist says, “No. That’s not right. This is the real answer,” and then what we call back propagates the error, right? It’s because it’s giving you an absolute error. 

But in our experience, we don’t have that. We don’t have a god that tells us, “Actually, you got it wrong by this amount.” What we have is behavior. What we have is whether or not it enabled us to survive. So that’s what context is doing. It’s relating the present to the significance of the past. Again, not just your past. It could be your evolutionary history’s past. It could be the past that you inherited from your culture. 

[00:15:58] MB: I think there’s a really good example that you shared this I think in your Google talk, which we’ll throw in the show notes as well. But it’s hard to demonstrate in some ways the podcast, because so many of the examples and things you use are visual, but there is like this image of a circle, a little dot that was like inside of a box and there was a triangle that was like coming in to the box and like moving towards it, right? 

So in and of itself, it’s basically irrelevant, but you can impose the context that this is like a horror movie where the dot is being slowly hunted down by the triangle. 

[00:16:30] BL: Yeah, that’s right. It was a video that was made in the mid-1940s. It’s a video made in 1940s, and what happens is that you have two triangles and a circle. One larger triangle and a small triangle and a circle. Of course, they don’t mean anything until you put them into motion. As soon as you put them into motion, people watching can’t but help project a meaning on to these shapes. They start hating the big triangle and they start feeling bad for the little triangle. 

Then suddenly after the big triangle beats up on the little one, it moves over very sort of slowly, opens this sort of line drawing door and goes into this larger square and it looks like it’s going to go after the little circle and everyone starts worrying for the circle. Then during my talks, I actually stopped it just before the triangle does anything. Everyone’s like, “What happens to the circle?” 

But, of course, none of that actually exists. All we’ve done is we’ve put it into motion, and through that motion you then recognize meaning in the motion and that meaning isn’t an inherent value of the motion itself. It’s only a consequence of what was useful to see, which is why you could argue we have a fear of slithering. We come into the world with a fear of slithering. Why? Because that is the stimulus that evoked fear for a good reason in the past. 

I mean, I can give you a visual example for your audience where they can imagine in their minds two different shapes. I’ll read the minds of all the members of your audience with this, okay? So I’m going to predict the words that they’re going to give to arbitrary shapes that they’re going to construct. So one of the shapes is imagine a line drawing that’s drawn by, say, a black pen in your mind and this has a multiple points on it, quite jaggedy multiple points, 7, 8 points, okay? The other shapes has the same number of protrusions but they’re rounded, more like a cloud, right? Now you have these two shapes in your mind.

Now, they don’t have names. They’re arbitrary shapes. So I want to give you two words. The first one is kiki and the second one is booboo. Now, which of those shapes which has no name is kiki and which one of those shapes is booboo? Everyone will say that the sharp shape is kiki and the rounded shape is booboo. The deep question is why? It has everything to do with pain, right? Your perception of pain, because if I give you the words of love and hate, everyone will say the sharp shape is hate and the rounded shape is love. If I say hate and I prick your finger, it activates same part of your brain, which is about pain, because hate is a painful perception. So what you’re doing is you’re actually comparing the meaning of the information, not the information itself. That’s the basis of metaphor.  

[00:19:23] MB: I love this sort of kiki and booboo example, because when I saw these two images, especially immediately it seems so obvious that sort of the sharp jagged shape is kiki, and the sort of rounded blob like shape is boobook, and yet it’s completely arbitrary. 

[00:19:40] BL: It’s completely arbitrary. Of course. There’s nothing meaningful about – I mean, there’s no even meaning in the word hate. In fact some people could say, “Well, these sounds are sharp.” Well, then I can give you the word odio. For all your native Spanish speakers, if they ask the same question in their mind, “Which of these shapes is odio,” they’ll see it’s the sharp shape. Why? Because odio means hate even though it’s a rounded sound. Again, we’re comparing and we’re matching and making relationships to the meaning of that and not the data. Again, that meaning is a historical meaning. 

[00:20:15] MB: I love the kind of shape examples, because they’re so arbitrary. They’re literally sort of just geometric shapes moving around, or in the case of kiki and booboo, it’s sort of static. Yet we naturally kind of impose and bring to bear all of our kind of past experiences and create, in some cases, kind of a narrative and all of these sort of information about what’s going on. Yet there’s actually nothing really there. 

[00:20:38] BL: Absolutely. You can make the same argument for everything that you and I are saying right now. Everything that we’re saying right now is inherently meaningless. There is no meaning in anything we’re saying. Your listeners are actually constructing the meaning in their heads. In fact, we’re doing it ourselves. When we think about shapes and the meaning of shapes, you can think of the shape of a face and the shape of expressions of a face. Because in the same way, we have no direct access to the reflections of an object. We have no direct access to another person. We can measure their what and the where and the when, but we can never measure their why. We can never measure why they do what they do. We can never be inside their head, which means that everything that someone else is doing, you are constructing the meaning of what they do based on your history of experience, your biases, your assumptions. You can never measure their why. So you project their why. The same way you color a surface, you color another person. 

So every personality that you perceive is literally inside you projected outward. You’re coloring another person based on the arbitrary information that you’re receiving.  

[00:21:47] MB: It’s funny. I’ve kind of had a – This is sort of tangential related, but I also think it really underscores that point that in many cases, the way you interact and experience other people is sort of a mirror of your own perceptions. There’s this email that I’ve sent out to tens of thousands of people and it’s this really simple email, sort of a “Hey,” I introduced myself, all these stuff, and the responses – I’m actually going to write an article about this, because it’s so ridiculous, but the responses I get to this one email are complete polar opposites. Some people will be incredibly thankful, grateful, “Hey! Thank you so much. Wow! I can really sense you’re such a good person. This is awesome,” and it will literally on the other end, people will be like cursing me out, telling me I’m a scumbag, like, “Get out of my inbox.” It’s still the same text to thousands of people and yet their responses couldn’t be more different. 

[00:22:32] BL: Yeah. I mean, that’s of course why we have things like emojis, because we’re trying to layer in, because you can’t have intonation in text. I mean, that’s what brilliant writers are able to do, but also that’s the beauty of poetry. The beauty in poetry is to create a certain level of ambiguity that enables people to construct the meaning themselves and to reflect on to that. 

But the point is that it’s not that we sometimes do this. We always are doing it. We’re always doing this interpretation and there’s tremendous power in that awareness, because it’s only and having that awareness that you actually have the possibility of freedom. Actually, you have the possibility of doing things differently.

[00:23:12] MB: Actually, that’s what I wanted to come back to, is this idea that – This sort of conclusion that because our perceptions are sort of arbitrarily imposed on reality, we can update and adopt those perceptions. Tell me a little bit more about that. 

[00:23:26] BL: Yeah. First of all, it’s not arbitrary. I mean, this is postmodern relativism. It’s not that everything is equivalent. Some things are better than others. It’s just that you don’t know if they are a pry and the information doesn’t come and tell you. You have to figure that out yourself. This is what happens when kids come into the world. They’re figuring it out themselves. 

So to comment to your question or sort of slightly a roundabout way, there is a wonderful experiment where you had two kittens, recently born, eyes just opened. You have one kitten that’s running on the ground [inaudible 00:24:00] and it is physically connected to another kitten that’s actually suspended in a basket. The point of the experiment is that wherever the one on the ground goes, the one in the basket also goes, because it pulls it along. After a period of time, you take the two kittens and you test their vision. The one on the ground, well, it seems perfectly fine just as you expect. But what about the one in the basket? It’s had effectively the same visual experience, same visual history of the one on the ground. The answer is that it’s blind. It can’t see. Why can’t it see? Because it’s never been able to physically interact with the sources of meaningless information and make meaning from it. Your brain does not make meaning by passively receiving content. It makes meaning by physically engaging with the world. That’s where your brain lives. It lives in the physical world. 

We so often forget that our brain evolved in a body and our body in our world. Silicon Valley keeps forgetting this. We have millions and millions of years of evolution of making meaning by physical engagement. The reason is, because that’s how your brain can actually get feedback, and feedback is essential for its synapses, for its brain connections to be made and remade. The reason why it has to do that is because the world changes. The world is dynamic, constantly updating the – Constantly updating. I call it redefining normality, is because what was once useful may no longer be useful.

The biases that we used to have were useful at one point may no longer be useful, and yet it’s still constraining our behavior. Your brain never makes a big jump. I can’t get from one side of the room to the other once without passing through the space in between. The same is true for your thoughts and your ideas. All you do is you take a small step to the next most likely possible. What is next most likely possible is determined by your biases and assumptions. There might be a great idea that far away in your space that you can’t even see it. You’re just going to take a small step. 

So the only way to see differently if everything you’re doing is a reflex grounded in your history of biases. How could you ever see differently? The answer is change your assumptions and you’ll change your perceptions, because you actually change the space of possibility and therefore the thing that sits right next to you. The way you do that is by physically engaging with the world. 

[00:26:24] MB: So I think that before we get into kind of the how we actually change our assumptions, I think you highlighted a really important point from your work, which is this idea that sort of from an external perception, creativity can seem almost magical, because the gap between these two connections seems really broad to a sort of a spectator, but it’s actually not to somebody who’s sort of been expanding their sort of space of adjacent possible. 

[00:26:50] BL: That’s right. We typically think of creativity as putting two things that are far apart together. Again, this concept that your brain makes big jumps and this moment of insight, “Ha!” right? That’s not really what’s happening. I’d argue that there’s nothing creative about creativity. Creativity is only creative from the outside, not from the inside. So when we you see someone putting two things that are far apart together, it’s for you that they’re far apart together, right? But they are making a small step to the next most likely possible. 

The difference is your space is a possibility. They have different assumptions, different biases, because they had a different history than you. So that’s why we see, “Wow! How did they do that?” Well, they’re not. They’re making a small step to the next most likely possible, but that means what creativity is, is, again, to make small steps. But to change what’s possible, by changing your biases and assumptions. If that’s true, then what makes creativity hard is the process of changing biases and assumptions, not the process of linking things that are far apart together. It shifts the focus of the task, which actually makes creatively far more accessible. 

Too often, creativity research is they’ll do research on people who are creative and they say, “This is what it’s like to be creative,” suggesting that the answer is, “Well, if you want to be creative, be like them,” or that creativity is only accessible to the artist, etc. No. Creativity is accessible to everybody. What’s hard, again, is – For some reason, what’s hard is changing your biases and assumptions. 

[00:28:22] MB: That reminds me of – I don’t know if you’ve ever read the book, Steven Johnson’s book; Where Big Ideas Come From. It’s a really interesting read. He talks about this notion, he studies Darwin and all these other stuff, but he talks about this notion of what he calls the adjacent possible, which is the same idea that it’s not that there’s these sort of giant creative leaps, but it’s basically that it’s kind of this slow constant kind of iteration that eventually looks like a giant creative leap. 

[00:28:48] BL: That’s right. So from the outside, you don’t see that progression. But then the question that’s not answered there is the progression of what. What is progressing? In one sense, there are a number of ways of answering that. One is when you take a step, what’s the reference of that step? Is it you previous step? In other words, the step of everybody else? When you’re deviating, all you’re doing is you’re making reference to your previous step, not the step of everybody else. What you find is accidentally, or otherwise, you go in a different direction. 

To do it for the sake of it is not so interesting, but to do it because you’re following a passion, you’re following something you care about, you’re making reference to your previous step, you just have to find yourself going in different directions. Not always. Sometimes you might find yourself going in the same direction, and that might be a good idea, because that might be a great solution. 

The beauty of doing it this way though is you know why you’re there as supposed to just coping, right? Because this is basically a search algorithm. You’re searching your space of possibility by making reference to your previous step. Then suddenly you look up and, “Whoa!” No one’s around you, right? Because you’re following your own trajectory. You’ve now deviated. But you’ve not done anything particularly special. What you’ve done is you made reference to your previous step and you’ve challenged your assumptions and biases to the process of asking questions. 

[00:30:10] MB: Hey everyone. I wanted to take a quick second and tell you about this episode’s incredible sponsor, Brilliant. Brilliant is a math and science enrichment learning platform. Brilliant is unique and that it teaches you these concepts through solving fascinating and challenging problems. We’ll be featuring a new sample problem to our email subscribers every week as part of Brilliant’s support for the show. So be sure to check those out. Listeners have loved solving these sample problems in the past, and Brilliant’s problems feature all kinds of cool scenarios, from poker games, to World War II airplanes. 

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[00:32:22] MB: So let’s get into the kind of specifics around doing that. How do we think about expanding our space of possibility and how do we think about kind of updating those assumptions and biases are changing them? 

[00:32:32] BL: Well I mean, it’s interesting because it’s this conundrum where everything I’m doing in the moment I have no free will. It’s just a reflex. When I gave the kiki/booboo and the two shapes example, people couldn’t help but make connections. They would have felt like they were making a free will choice, but it was already the sense predetermined. 

So it feels like how is it possible to ever do that? Again, the answer is that nothing interesting begins with knowing. It begins with not knowing. It begins with doubt. It begins with a question. So if you want to shift from A to B, the first step is not B. The first step from going from A to B is to go from A to not A. You get a stimulus and your brain automatically generates their reflective meaning. The first step is to not generate that meaning. To step into uncertainly, step into not A. 

The problem is we hate uncertainty. We initially hate uncertainty in almost everything we do. Because if you aren’t sure that was a predator, it was too late. You brain evolved to take what is uncertain and make it certain. To take what is meaningless and make it meaningful, because dying was easy. If you weren’t able to predict usefully, you got selected out. So to be in a situation of uncertainty is literally to increase the probability of death during evolution, which is we then get these behavior of physiologically emotional responses towards certainty, which means escape, get out of here. Create certainty. 

In fact, in some sense, one of the useful responses, the fear in some sense is anger, because what happens with anger is you become morally judgmental, become completely certain in your view. You feel better. But though a natural response, it is completely devoid of creativity. It’s how you then step into [inaudible 00:34:21]. But that’s not the deepest problem, is that we hate uncertainty. The other problem is that so many of us aren’t ware that we have all these biases and assumptions that everything we do is grounded. 

Again, not always to disadvantage, usually to advantage. But we lack the awareness that everything we do is grounded in biases and assumptions, most of which we inherited. Even if we accept that premise, which illusions demonstrate fundamentally, we don’t even know what they are. We’re almost always blind to why we do what we do, which is why often marketing surveys don’t work, because people get answers that they would like to be true, or what they hope to be true in the future. But we often don’t know why what we do what we do, which is why the best person to reveal to your biases to you is usually not you. It’s usually someone else. 

In fact, that’s what sometimes the best technologies do, that we get into that in a moment. But either way, once you accept that you have biases and assumptions, much of what you inherited. Even if you can identify what they are, the biggest challenge then is to question them, and that’s incredibly scary for people. I include myself in all that of course. I mean, in fact, it is going to be for any living system. That is the fundamental challenge that living brains evolved to solve, which is the challenge of uncertainty. You can argue, that’s in a sense this need for closure, the need for certainty is so strong. This is why Game of Thrones is successful, right? Because Game of Thrones finishes on a minor chord every week. If it finished on a major chord, the show would be over, right? We need that closure. 

In fact, before, when Mozart would go to sleep, he would go to the piano and he would go “Da-da-da-da,” and then his father couldn’t deal with the fact that the chord didn’t finish. He’d have to go and hit that last note to finish the chord before he go to sleep. He’d even make an argument that Uber is successful, has been successful, not simply because they enable us to get a taxi easier. It’s because they tell you when the taxi is going for arrive. [inaudible 00:36:26] you’re late and you’ve got [inaudible 00:36:27] and you don’t know when it’s going to arrive. But if I say, “Don’t worry. It’s going to be there in five minutes. In fact, I’m even going to show you where it is. Your cortisol level stay low and you don’t get stressed.” We just hate uncertainty and irony if that’s the only place when we go if we’re going to see differently. 

[00:36:45] MB: So how do we kind of step into uncertainty or cultivate more uncertainty in our lives? 

[00:36:52] BL: It’s a great question. Well, fortunately, because it’s such an important place to go, evolution gave us a solution. So your listeners can think of, “What’s the one behavior, class of behaviors, defined by a single world that has four letters where they actually love uncertainty?” It’s not that they tolerate it, but they love it. The answer is play. Play is a solution to uncertainty. That’s why they evolved, because play is a way of being. It’s a way of interacting with the world. It celebrates uncertainty. It celebrates about possibility, diversity. It’s inherently cooperative and it’s what we call intrinsically motivating. 

What I mean by that is almost everything you do – So intrinsically motivating means that the reward is the thing itself. So you think of work. You work to get money for most people, right? You do one thing to get another. The reward of play is play. What’s the reward of ski? It’s skiing. This is also true for sex, right? We have these emotional responses to perpetuate the thing happening and because play is so essential. 

Now, if you add intention to play, because play has no intention, what you get is science. Science is nothing other than play with intention. I’d argue that anything that is creative is effectively the state of being, that is play with intention. The beginning of play, the beginning of stepping into uncertainty, there’s another perception that evolution gave us, which is the perception of awe and wonder. 

We know we’ve been doing recent researching on wonder as have a number of labs around the world, including one of the main labs in Berkley. What we and they have demonstrated is that when you experience awe and wonder, a number of things happen inside your head, but you feel small and connected to the world. You’re surprised, and beyond surprise you think, “This is amazing. I want to understand it.” So you want to step forward. But with awe, you have to change your reference frame if you’re going to have that understanding. So it’s as if evolution gave us the perception to step forward to reduce our ego and to have the desire to know.  

[00:39:12] MB: So let’s dig into the concept of play a little bit more and how do we think about sort of adding an intention to something and sort of making it playful, if that makes sense? 

[00:39:24] BL: Well the adding intention is usually important, because – Again, what’s required to step into uncertainty is such a potentially scary space to be that you have to have a strong desire to be there. What’s more, a lot of our biases and assumptions that exist in ourselves or in our culture, if you think about a meme, a meme is nothing other than a cultural assumptions, and these things have a momentum. They have tremendous weight behind them. If you think about your brain, when your brain gets a stimulus, that stimulus then generates a pattern of activity in your brain, which is effectively what we call attractor state. 

Think of a whirlpool. A whirlpool has attractor state. Arises from interaction of interacting water molecules. Well get to an equivalent thing happy inside your head. You get a steady state of activity that arises from interaction between your brain cells. Now, every time you get that same stimulus, generate that same meaning, you’re deepening that attractor state in the same way you’re deepening the, say, depth and the strength of a whirlpool. When you do that, it requires more and more energy to every disrupt that stable state. 

Well, that energy requires desire. It requires care. So one of the most important thing is to find out and discover what it is that you care about that is bigger than yourself. We know from research, ours and others, that we will go further. We will tolerate more pain. We’ll walk further across the desert for someone else than for ourselves. 

There are many stories where someone was, say, plane crash in a desert and they’re trying to get across, and it was the fear of not dying, but the fear of their loved ones finding them dead that drove them on more than the fear of their own death. Again, it’s another perception that we evolved to help us maintain that momentum to change that attractor state. When thinking about this, it’s about care. It’s about carrying for something that’s larger than yourself. 

[00:41:36] MB: So I want to kind of zoom it into something really specific. Let’s say I had a challenge in my life or in my work or something like that that I wanted to address more creatively. How do I kind of concretely bring these to ideas of play and intention together into sort of solving that challenge? 

[00:41:55] BL: Well, the first one I suppose is to ask a question, but ask a meaningful question. Too often, we ask the question – Well, first of all, you have to adopt that mindset and you have to adopt the mindset of entering conflict in many way. So conflict, as I define it, has to do with engaging the situation as differently from what you expect. You’re not in conflict. 

So if you want to change something, you’re now in conflict, conflict with yourself for instance. Now, normally, if and I are in conflict, too often we’ve been trained and experience that my aim is to prove that you’re wrong and to shift you towards me. The problem is you’re trying to do exactly the opposite. Prove that I’m wrong and to shift me towards you. So notice that conflict is usually set up to win, but not learn. Because you only ever learn if you move. It’s a crazy strategy. Evolution does not solve conflict in this way. Evolution is about movement. 

First of all, you have to adopt a state where you have the desire to move in conflict, which means you have to enter conflict in a different way. Actually, once people understand how perception works, you’re almost foolish. In fact, you are foolish if you enter conflict with answers, enter conflict with certainty, when instead you should be entering conflict with questions, entering a conflict with doubt, with uncertainty, because now you actually have the possibility of moving. So that’s the first thing. 

The second thing is what is it that you’re going to move? Too often we ask questions that are information-based questions, like what, where and when. These are things that we can measure. They have a certain level of certainty about them. But they’re not actually terribly meaningful questions, because they create data. As we know, data by itself is pointless. 

What you want to better understand is why, because what you really are after is not a rule. Rules are very efficient. They’re useful in cases of efficiency, but they’re specific to a context. What you want is a principle, because principles transcend context. You get to principles by understanding why something does what it does, not what it does. When you do a Google search, what Google really wants to know is not what you’re searching for, but why you’re doing the search and they use keywords as proxies for the why. So that’s the other thing. Find out what you care about. Have the desire to move, to shift and ask the right question. Ask the question of why. Then usually engage other people. Because the most interesting collaborations are between naïve and expert, and you can shift between naïve and expert in your own mind. Experts are super efficient, but they ask you a good question, because they know what they’re not supposed to ask. 

Whereas people are naïve are great at asking questions, but they don’t know they’re good questions. What’s remarkable is that an expert can recognize a good question when asked. They just often can’t ask. So it’s a wonderful combination. That’s the collaboration. 

When people experience growth through conflict, there is a relation that they feel. We love that feeling, because far more interesting from shifting is to expand, is to expand your space of possibility, because now you have more degrees of freedom in which to move at any point in time.  

[00:45:14] MB: So looking kind of at a really granular level, how do you think about or how do you sort of in your own life start to kind of celebrate doubt and start to chip away at some of your own assumptions and be more adaptable? 

[00:45:31] BL: It’s hard for me as well, but I actually think it is literally an exercise. Just like you get stronger muscles by using them, you get a stronger brain by using it. 20% of the energy that you consume goes to 2% of your body mass. Your brain is incredibly expensive. When you see differently, you literally are growing in some cases new brain cells. You’re definitely growing more complexity of the brain cells that already exist. You’re reforming connections. 

When two grand master chess players sit next to each other and play a game of chess, they literally burn thousands of calories by sitting and thinking. Thinking is expensive, it’s hard, which is why so often we don’t do it. We try to avoid it. So engaged in that process of thinking is a very difficult thing, but we can actually find such value when we expand our space of possibilities. I just continue to remind myself of the pleasure that I personally get when I move from where I am, and I get tremendous pleasure even in conflict with my wife when I realize what an idiot I’ve been, right? Because, wow, that’s something I didn’t know before, and I get tremendous pleasure from that realization. 

In my view, to be liberal conservative has nothing to do with your political space. It’s whether or now you’re willing to move from wherever you are. I don’t understand why we wouldn’t have that desire to move, because we get such elation when we do.  

[00:47:07] MB: I think – And tell me if this is incorrect, but it seems like kind of a key piece of what you’re describing is this idea that when we encounter any sort of issue, challenge, conflict, etc., where we want to kind of bring creativity into the fold, a really key piece of it is not entering with kind of the certainty of trying to prove a certain point or prove that you’re correct or validate your existing assumptions. It’s much more about bringing kind of doubt and awareness and a humbleness that you want to find out what’s really true. 

[00:47:40] BL: That’s right. Creativity begins with humility. It begins with not knowing. It doesn’t begin with arrogance. That’s for sure. If you think about design, even the design process, mostly a design begins with a problem, and then they iterate to try to find a better solution. Now, that iteration is nothing other than an empirical process, which is effectively science. But science doesn’t begin with iteration, and science doesn’t begin with a problem. The best of science begins with a question, because if you come up with a great solution to a problem that’s completely meaningless, who really cares? 

What’s really hard and a real challenge is finding a good question. We don’t even teach children. We too often don’t teach children how to ask a question, much less what a good question is. Most questions are not good. It’s great to ask questions, but not all questions are good. What defines a good question will usually to dealt what I assume to be true already, but that’s very hard, because often I don’t even know what my biases and assumptions are. So how can I even question them? 

So really what we’re after is asking really good questions, and what iteration is about is not about iterating to be better solutions, it’s about iterating in better questions. Because if I ask a brilliant question and come up with an answer, I usually have actually increased uncertainty, because I usually create more questions in that solution. Design thinking should be starting with questions and finding out what those questions are that you either care about deeply, what another person cares about deeply, or what is relevant to the situation, or what even the organization is about. 

[00:49:20] MB: I think that makes a ton of sense and kind of ties back in this whole conversation we’ve been having about uncertainty. In many ways, questions, it seems like are an incredibly powerful tool for sort of cracking open the door of uncertainty or possibility and bringing a healthy amount of sort of humility to the questioning process can really help open up spaces of possibility that ultimately underpin creative thinking and creative insight. 

[00:49:46] BL: That’s right. Again, what the best question do is they actually expand your space, because again it’s not necessarily about shifting. If you’re in a line, all you can do is go forward in a way. But if you’re on a surface, now you can move in two dimensions. If you’re in a cube, you can move in three dimensions. That’s what it is to be adaptable. That’s what it is to be open. That’s what evolution does. 

I mean, another strategy is to – Because really what you’re – What you really want to do when it comes to innovation, because innovation has two sides. It has creativity and efficiency. It’s not being in one side or the other that matters. If a bus is coming at you, I don’t want people to stop listening to this and go out into the street and say, “Oh! I wonder if I could see this differently.” You want to get out of the way as fast as possible. It’s just that we live life too often as if everything is a bus. 

Wisdom is knowing when to be on one side of the edge of chaos or the other, right? It’s being at the edge of chaos on average. Innovation is actually the cycle between efficiency and creativity. So quite sort of literally in some sense, what happens is often companies or individuals start with creativity and then they move quite quickly from creativity to efficiency. What they’re doing is they’re going from a high space of possibility to a lower space of possibility. They’re decreasing dimensionality. That’s the increased efficiency. The problem is they’ll then often stay there. Then the world will change and they keep trying to maximize efficiency. 

What they need to do is expand the space again. They need to increase the dimensionality of the search space again. That might mean add a new person, increase a diversity of the group that you’re working. The best solutions in a complex systems exists in a complex search based on a simple search space. 

So now you increase the dimensionality. You add new individuals. You increase the diversity of the group. You find new creative solution and then you would go efficiency again. You now retract, go to a more efficient of group of people, etc., and it’s a cycle.  

[00:51:42] MB: So for listeners who want to sort of concretely implement the principles and ideas we’ve talked about today, what would be kind of one action item or sort of piece of homework that you would give them to test or apply some of these assumptions? 

[00:51:56] BL: It would be a – Often, I’d given quite a few talks and I remember this one person coming to me afterwards and saying, “Oh! I’m so glad you told me this, because my wife has so many assumptions and biases. She’s always saying this, that and the other. I can’t wait and go home and tell her about all her biases and assumptions.” 

I’m thinking, “You really miss the point,” because you’re absolutely right, but he’s missing the point that he too has all those biases and assumptions that are being projected on to her. First, take ownership of the fact that you have these biases and assumptions. Your first exercise is to engage in the person that you care about with a question, with an assumption the next time you’re in a conflict. That’s one exercise.

Another exercise is simply to practice going from A to not A, to let go, to practice letting go of reflexive meanings. What would be an example of that? Take a cold shower and you’re in the cold shower. Normally we feel, “Oh! This is uncomfortable.” Well, that’s being an A. That’s having a reflexive response to the meaning of the coldness. 

Try doing this; feel the water, feel it is cold, but try not to attach a meaning to it. Just feel the water and feel it cold. Don’t attach the significance of uncomfortable, but also don’t try to pretend that it’s not. Just feel it as neutral. This is effectively what meditation is trying to do, is trying to let you sit within not A. to let go of reflexive meaning. A final other exercise, is when we think about how we can actually change what we’re going to do in the future, the way we do that is we change the meaning of what’s happened in the past. 

So your brain is like a time machine. It’s moving, constantly moving past, present, future. While we can never change what happened, we can change the meaning of what happened. Because what I want to do in the future is the history of not what happened, but the history of those past meanings and literally change my statistical history, which means [inaudible 00:54:05]. That’s effectively what every story is doing, every therapy is doing, is getting you to rename the significance of what’s happened in order to change what you’re going to do in the future.   

[00:54:18] MB: For listeners who want to be able to find you and your work online, what’s the best place for them to go to find you? 

[00:54:24] BL: We have a lab, we have a couple of companies as well. So the lab and company are called the Lab of Misfits, and they can go online at www.labofmisfits.com. Of course, there are a number of talks, etc., and the book Deviate, or send me an email. 

[00:54:42] MB: What’s a good email for them to reach you? 

[00:54:43] BL: Beau@labofmisfits.com. My lab also is increasingly putting on events. We effectively turned my lab into a night club, and we measured everything in the experience. We call it the experiment, what we call experiential experiment. My idea is that people have an experience and they walk away with a better understanding of themselves. So they can keep track of where and when we do this. 

[00:55:05] MB: Perfect. Well, we’ll make sure to include all of that in the show notes. Beau, thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing all these wisdom and all these insights with the audience. Fascinating conversation and we really enjoyed having you on here.  

[00:55:17] BL: Thanks a lot. It was very fun. 

[00:55:18] 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 e-mail 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.

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The Hidden Brain Science That Will Unlock Your True Potential with Daniel Coyle

In this episode, we discuss the science of Talent. We look at how great talent is built into the very physical structure of the brain itself, explore the incredible importance of striving at the edge of your ability and staying there as long as possible, the vital importance of mistakes in the learning process, how a group of kindergartners beat a bunch of CEOs at a simple team-building exercise, a powerful tool Navy Seals use to make better decisions that you can apply to your life right now, and much more with our guest Daniel Coyle. 

Daniel Coyle is the New York Times Bestselling Author of The Talent Code, The Culture Code, several other books. He is a contributing editor for Outside Magazine and works as a special advisor to the Cleveland Indians. His most recent work focuses on how we can build cultures that last and high highly productive and his work has been featured on the TED stage and more.

• What is a talent hotbed? What are these little places that produce hugely disproportionate high achievers?

• How does the brain learn and what that has to do with Talent?

• What does great practice look like, what does great motivation look like,  what great coaching looks like?

• How do you learn a months worth of practice in 5 minutes?

• Repeatedly going to the edge of your ability, noticing your failure, and learning from it - that’s how great performance is built

• Modern science was deeply wrong about how the brain grows and responds - and the myelin (the wiring in your brain) grows 

• Muscle memory is a deep misnomer - all the memory comes from the wiring of the brain. 

• The faster and more accurately you build the wiring in your brain through deep 

• Great practice, great learning is really ugly - it's very effortful to hang out there and be in that place

• At most, you can really do this deep practice for 1-3 hours per day

• The 10,000-hour rule misses a key point - it's not just hours, but also quality reps

• Great talent is literally built in the physical structure of the brain

• The key idea is to REACH - get to the edge of your ability and play there - stay there as long as possible

• It’s not nature vs nature - it's not either or - its nature multiplied by nature 

• How do we learn at the edge of our growth zone?

• You should be aiming for a failure rate of 20-30% of the time

• If you’re failing more than that, move the target closer

  1. If you’re failing less, move the targets further away 

• This concept of learning at the edge of your comfort zone flips the entire idea of mistakes on its head - mistakes are WHERE the learning takes place 

• Mistakes are information that you can use for your next try - they’re a keep component of the learning process 

• Mistakes are the gift - they ARE the moment - when the learning is embedded in your brain

• If you flinch, turn away, and lose you the ability to learn from your mistakes

• Learning from your mistakes is not just a moral argument -it’s a physical reason - its a physical argument about your BRAIN STRUCTURE 

• Culture isn’t magic - it can be built - there are specific actions you can take to create a high-performance culture 

• The way to create feedback loops in business and areas with murky or long feedback loops is to define your scoreboard - define yourself against a very clear standard or dashboard for yourself - hold yourself accountable to metrics

• Define what you want - make the bar really clear

• Improvement comes down to 3 things

• Where are you?

  1. Where do you want to go?

  2. How will you get there?

• The first two pieces of that require a lot of reflection

• Learning = Experience + Reflection. Without the reflection, you won’t learn. 

• Get really specific on what skills you want to improve - and then build a process towards improving those skills and make it as measurable as possible

• Culture is not a mystical force - its something that’s really practical and specific

• When you look closer at cultures of high performance - you realize that there are specific activities 

• HBS study - different is net revenue for two identical companies with different cultures was 720% more net revenue over time 

• Culture is the MOST IMPORTANT THING you do in a group - it's your most important asset, it's your Achilles heel 

• “Signalling behaviors” - baked into us by evolution - can often short circuit 

• Being vulnerable and open builds trust - not the opposite 

• High-performance groups operationalize truth, vulnerability, and safety 

• Navy Seals “AAR” - After Action Review - hard conversation about what went wrong, what went right, what they’re doing to do differently next time 

• The most important words a leader can say is “I screwed that up"

• Groups that hide vulnerability are weak

• Leaders who are constantly radiating humility have more strength - humility takes strength 

• To be vulnerable at work - frame your vulnerability around learning

• How do you create a foundation of vulnerability in good cultures?

• Make sure the leader is vulnerable first and often

  1. Deliver negative things in person 

  2. 2 Line Email to your email

  3. One thing you want me to keep doing

     1. One thing you want me to stop doing

  4. Aim for warm candor and avoid brutal honesty. When you’re brutally honest you enforce a culture of brutality.

  5. Danny Meyer story - "If you don’t ask for help 10 times today, it will be a bad day"

     1. Give the truth, but give in a warm way

     2. When you make mistakes, I’m here to help - we are interconnected 

• How a group of kindergartners beat a group of CEOs at building a tower of spaghetti 

• Our mental model of group performance is wrong because it doesn’t include safety

  1. We are built to care about status - deeply wired into us is this worry about how we fit in and we’re constantly expending mental energy worrying about status 

• Group performance is not about how smart you are, not about how verbal you are - it’s about how safe you are

• How do we create psychological / status safety with those who we work with in order to foster a culture of high performance?

• Over-communicate safety

  1. Deliver a really clear signal of connection early on 

  2. Send a really clear signal that “I see you” “we are connected” 

• Smart groups use the first day, the first hour - to continually signal the basic human connective signals 

• Strong cultures over communicate their purpose by “a factor of 50x” - they talk all the time about their core principles and their core purpose

• Strong cultures have distilled what matters into a cohesive set of emotional GPS signals 

• Intensive questions about “what comes first” - really getting specific about what your values are 

• Build a map that show’s your organization what true north is - and be as vivid and explicit as possible about what that is

• Parables

  1. Stories

  2. Catch Phrases

  3. Images

  4. People

  5. Over-communicate what matters most to your organization 

• Do great cultures and organizations transcend conflict?

• We have a powerful instinct to hide away from negative moments and things we don’t like - and yet leaning into mistakes and problems is the best way to grow as an individual - and the best way to form strong organizations 

• Homework: “WSD” - Write shit down. Have a place and a time every day where you can get away from things and reflect on what happened. A cool calm place where you can reflect, trace threads, connect dots, reflect on your performance. This is the most powerful thing you can do. 

• “I've never met a high performer who doesn’t have a reflective habit"

Thank you so much for listening!

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [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

• [Wiki Article] Danny Meyer

• [Article] What a Marshmallow Reveals About Collaboration by The Build Network staff

• [Article] Does corporate culture drive financial performance? By Kotter

• [Personal Site] Daniel Coyle

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] 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 two million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries and part of the self-help for smart people podcast network.

In this episode, we discuss the science of talent. We look at how great talent is built into the very physical structure of the brain itself; explore the incredible importance of striving at the edge of your ability and staying there as long as possible, the vital importance of mistakes in the learning process, how a group of kindergarteners beat a bunch of CEOs at a simple team-building exercise, a powerful tool Navy SEALs use to make better decisions that you can apply to your life right now and much more with our guest, Daniel Coyle.

Do you need more time? Time for work, time for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our e-mail list. It's called How You Can Create Time for the Things that Really Matter in Life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the e-mail list at successpodcast.com.

You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our e-mail subscribers. We recently pre-released an episode in an interview to our e-mail subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience, and that had tremendous implications because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first.

With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live exclusive interview just for e-mail subscribers. There's some amazing stuff that's available only to e-mail subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the e-mail list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Or if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you're on the go, you don't have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44-222. That’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we discussed the foundations of evidence-based thinking, the important balance between habits and decisions and how each of them shapes who you ultimately become and dug into the idea that your decisions set their trajectory of your life, but your habits determine how far you walk on that journey.

From there, we explored how to build high-impact habits, what you need to do to determine the best habits to focus on first, how you can harness the power of the aggregation of marginal gains and much more with our guest, James Clear. If you want to crush procrastination and overwhelm, be sure to check out our previous episode with James.

Now, for our interview with Daniel.

[0:03:08.3] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Daniel Coyle. Daniel is the New York Times bestselling author of The Talent Code, The Culture Code and several other books. He's a contributing editor for Outside Magazine and works as a special adviser to the Cleveland Indians. His most recent work focuses on how we can build cultures that last and be highly productive. His works been featured on the TED stage and much more. Daniel, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:33.9] DC: Hey Matt. It's good to be here with you.

[0:03:35.4] MB: Well, we're very excited to have you on the show. I'd love to get started with, I mean, I think both of your – two of your biggest books, The Talent Code, The Culture Code have so much wisdom. I'd love to start with maybe this idea of individual talent and then when you move to looking at how we can collaborate and work in groups and build culture.

[0:03:54.8] DC: Yeah. Well, that's funny. That's how I started on this little journey. Got interested in his talent hotbeds and it sent me on this long trip I've been on for the last 10 years. I'd love to start there.

[0:04:05.1] MB: I think, even that statement is a great place to dig in. When you say talent hotbed, what is that and how did that spark this this journey?
[0:04:14.1] DC: We've all heard of these places and they're real. There are little places that produce statistically impossible numbers of talented performers. There's a place in Russia with chess players, there's a music camp in the Adirondacks that produces unbelievable players, there's a tennis club outside of Moscow called Spartak that produces more top 20 women than all of America did for a period of about 10 years.

We're all familiar with this idea, the little town in the Dominican that all the shortstops come from, we're all familiar with that and how unlikely it is. That mystery is what sent me on this journey with The Talent Code, where I went to find out what the hell's going on there? What's that all about? Is it something in the water? Is it something more?

The journey took me on this this deep dive into basically how the brain learns, and what great practice looks like, feels like, smells like, what great motivation looks like, feels like, smells like and what great coaching looks like. I found there was a pattern, that they all shared a pattern that is really clear when you look at the human brain. There's a certain practice that's happening there that improves your learning velocity. The subtitle of the book is that greatness isn't born, it's built. That's what I found out to be pretty much true.

[0:05:23.2] MB: There's so many ways I want to go from that and unpack what you said. Let's start with this simple idea of how the brain learns, in that journey to uncover these talent hotbeds, how did you start to peel back the layers and really understand how our brain really functions?

[0:05:40.4] DC: It started with going there, going to these places and seeing them involved in this certain practice that puts you on the edge of your ability. There's a story that I tell early in the book and it's of a clarinet player. Her name is Clarissa and she's part of this larger study that attract improvement for over years.

They were able identified these extraordinary moments where her learning velocity increased, where she learned. In this case, it was a month's worth of practice in five minutes. I was able to look at the videotape. What does that five minutes look like? We typically think of talent as something that just blooms and happens with effortlessness. What I found was exactly the opposite.
I mean, she's making mistakes, she's playing and then it's almost like she wants to drop her clarinet. She feels that mistake so intensely. She's so aware of what right is and what wrong is and she repeatedly goes to that edge of her ability, fails, notices the failure, learns from it and then moves again. That moment, which is really called deep practice is where her brain is being built, where she is building that brain.

Then you go a little deeper. I went to this fantastic doctor, Dr. Douglas fields who studies the brain and learning and a bunch of other stuff at the National Institute of Health in Maryland. He showed me this picture of something and it looked like electrical tape wrapping a wire. It was this spiral around a wire, and he started telling me about myelin.

Myelin is a brain substance that was thought to be inert for many years. It's basically the insulation around your wires of your brain. Like your brain is a bunch of wires and myelin is the insulation that lets the signal go from one spot to another. If you didn't have it, the signal would leak out and it's the same reason we got myelin on the cords that we're using to talk right now that insulates the wires.

He started telling me that modern science actually got it deeply wrong when it came to myelin. It wasn't inert. It grows and it grows in response to practice. They've actually done these brain studies where they can look at brains of say a piano player after 50 hours of practice, after a 100 hours of practice, after 200 hours of practice, and the myelin on those circuits in the brain grows in proportion to the hours that you spend.

In other words, every effortful rep earns you some new connections, every effort rep earns you another wrap of this insulation. When you get more insulation, I don't know if your audience is into electrical engineering, but the thicker insulation is, the faster the signal speed becomes. The thicker that myelin gets, the more you earn another wrap and earn another wrap and earn another wrap, you get better signal speed, which means you get better skill; this this idea of – we always talk about muscle memory. “Oh, he’s got great muscle memory.”

That's actually a deep misnomer. Muscles don't have any memory. They don't. All the memory comes in your wires of your brain. The faster and more accurately you build that machine between your years through deep practice, through going to the edge of your ability and repeating and learning, the better brain you build.
[0:08:34.2] MB: I love that idea of essentially cramming a month's worth of learning into five minutes by really being at the edge of your ability. That's really interesting.

[0:08:43.3] DC: It's beautiful to watch actually, because it's really ugly. It is not a pretty place to hang out, and it's very effortful to hang out there, which is why you can't do it in for five hours a day. You can't do it for 10 hours a day. Most the places I visited had really intensive practice for between one and three hours a day, and that's where they could really get the most done.

This idea that we have, and I think it's been fueled a little bit by the 10,000-hour number and this idea of great world-class experts, and so will only have to take 10,000 hours. That gives you a sense like, “Well, I just need to put more hours in, right? Now you were measuring hours.” It's actually a bad nudge, because don't measure hours, measure quality reps, measure – we often measure our practices by, “Oh, I spend an hour doing X.”

Don't measure it that way actually. Measure it by how many intensive reps you can get. For example, if you want to memorize part of a book, don't highlight it and go over it. That's been shown it doesn't work very well. The best way to do it is to read the book once, close it and then try to regenerate what's in the book. Actively put yourself in that [inaudible 0:09:48.6] spot of like, “Oh, I don't quite have it. I'm failing, but I've almost got it,” and try to generate that. As much as you can, make your rep active and reaching. The keyword is really reach, like to get to the edge ability and reach just past it. The more you can do that, the more effective your practice will be.

[0:10:05.7] MB: I think it's another really critical idea, this notion that talent is I mean, not something necessarily that you're born with, but it’s literally something that’s built into the physical structure of your brain through this, so this reach through this deep or deliberate practice.

[0:10:23.0] DC: It is. It’s liberating idea, and it comes with a few caveats. If we're talking about talent as pure speed, or pure ability to leap, no. Genes matter, you know what I mean? Genes are not important, right? We've always thought of this as nature versus nurture, right? Is this a nature or is a nurture? What the science is increasingly telling us is it’s nature times nurture. It's a multiplier. If you've got some natural proclivities and what you can do with quality practice is really deeply accelerate those through the active reaching.
[0:10:55.7] MB: Tell me a little bit more about this idea of reaching, or being at the edge of our growth zone.

[0:11:01.9] DC: Well, it's interesting. All reaching is not created equal, Matt. If I remember the first time I went downhill skiing, I was definitely reaching. I was 15-years-old, never really been on downhill skis before. I just flopped my way down the mountain. It was not pretty. I was definitely reaching, but I was way, way away from my target, and I didn't learn anything except how to fall really well.

What you should be aiming for is anything between – and it varies according to task, but aiming between making it between 70% and 80% of the time. You should be failing 20% to 30% of the time. That's a reach. If it's too easy and you're making it 90% percent of the time, you're probably not learning enough. If it's too hard and you're making it 10% at the time, you need to move the target closer, so that you can more accurately get it.

When you think about that reach, it really makes you reinterpret another word, which is the word mistake. When we fail, it feels really bad, and it feels we should stop and it feels it's a problem and it makes you turn away from it. What happens in these talent op eds and in other high learner environments is people really lean into that, because they realize that mistake is not a verdict. That mistake that you made is information. It's information that you can use for your next try.

It's like you're building a map, right? I'm trying to find Wichita on the map and if I reach toward Wichita and I have no idea where I am, it's hard to find where the right path is. If I know that I went to Kansas City, then I can go toward Wichita. I can use that to triangulate. Those mistakes are gifts, because they give you the edges in the field that you need and the information literally that you need to make us a more accurate reach next time.

[0:12:48.2] MB: The many ways that it almost seems like mistakes are where the learning is really taking place essentially.

[0:12:53.4] DC: Oh, my God. Mistakes are the gift. That is the moment. There's a really key moment. They've actually shown this on brain scans. I'm sure your listeners are familiar with Carol Dweck's work with Growth Mindset. They can actually identify the moment. It happens like 0.2 seconds after you make a mistake. In some people's brains they look intently at the mistake. What the hell happened there? I want to know, right? In other people's brains, they shut down and look elsewhere.

It's really a provocative question for all of us, like which one are we, right? When we make a mistake, there's that tendency to flinch and close your eyes. If you do that, you're losing a huge opportunity. If you make a mistake and you really get more interested, that's where the growth is going to happen.

[0:13:34.1] MB: Yeah. I mean, we're huge, huge fans of Carol Dweck. She's a previous guest on the show and her book Mindset, probably was one of the most transformational books that I ever read personally. I couldn't agree more about the theme that if you delude yourself into thinking that you haven't made a mistake, or you don't learn from your mistakes, there is so much self-sabotage happens, and it really all realms of learning and personal development.

[0:13:57.3] DC: Totally. We always think of that as being a moral point like, “Oh, you should learn from your mistakes, because it's the right thing to do.” It's actually also a neural point, right? You're actually having that opportunity to build – an unbelievable opportunity to build your brain that you're walking past. It's the right thing to do from being a better person point of view, but also from being a better learner.

[0:14:18.6] MB: I really like the way you phrase that. I mean, from the perspective of the myelin structures inside of your brain, if you're not learning from your mistakes, you're not allowing your brain to get wired in a way that's going to make you more talented and ultimately help you become more successful.

[0:14:31.7] DC: You're building habits, myelinating and building better wires for you to look away. All these things grow on each other. That's the other thing that got me interested as I went through the individual stuff, if we can in some ways make the turn toward culture here, because the power of a culture to create an environment where everybody is learning is incredibly cool.

The idea that certain leaders can send signals to say, “All right, we're going to make that safe. We're going to make it safe to really make mistakes and learn,” can have a huge effects on the overall learning of a group. I saw that. That's what got me interested in groups in the first place, because you'd walk into these hot beds and some of them just – they felt different, right? They felt really cool. They felt really connected.

We talk about that term chemistry, like that group has really great chemistry. We feel that when you walk into a great school, you walk around it, be around a great family, be around a great sports team, be around a great business. You walk in you feel that chemistry. We've always thought of that as magic, right? But it ain't. It's not magic. It's human signaling. They're aligned their behaviors with really powerful wires in our brain that help us generate closeness and connection and cohesion.

[0:15:39.5] MB: Absolutely want to dig in to all of that. There's one other thing I want to come back to before we go too deep down the culture rabbit hole, which is something that I constantly think about and struggle with. As somebody who's really done a lot of homework on this, I'm curious what your perspective would be. I can easily see how this deep practice and knowing when you're at the edge of your growth zone and all these things apply to things, like chess, or tennis, or discrete skills where it's easy to get feedback and measure the results. How do you think about applying this to things like business, or larger fields of interaction where there's really unclear long-term, murky feedback, or no feedback, or there's a huge amount of noise between action and feedback?

[0:16:23.4] DC: Right. Now that's a really cool question, and it's one that actually we faced a little bit in terms of some of the work I've done with the Cleveland Indians. Not with the baseball players so much, but with the on the baseball operations side, because we're trying to do what you're talking about, which is the big challenge there that I think you're speaking to is the fact that the world, especially the business world it's this really mushy place, right?

Like, did that meeting go well? Did that meeting not go well? How am I doing? If I'm shooting free-throws, I can add that up. I know my free-throw percentage, but what's my percentage on having good conversations with people, right?

I think the way to think about that space is exactly in-line with sports. You have to define your scoreboard, right? You have to create moments of reflection where you assess yourself on how you're doing against a clear standard. A lot of successful people I've seen build that standard for themselves. I've seen it like three or four times recently where people will build their own dashboard, right? It's a piece of paper that sits on their desk and it's got the key things they want to get done for the day and might have to do with learning this, it might be relational, might be connecting with a spouse, it might be something completely different, but the idea of constantly holding yourself accountable to some really specific metrics on what you want to do and really specific standards.

Making a bar really clear, this is where language ends up being massively important in defining what you want. Any improvement comes down to three things; you got to figure out where you're at, you got to figure out where you want to go, and you got to figure out how you're going to get there. Those first two pieces are really a lot of reflection.

In modern life, all learning is made of a loop. On the top you have experience, on the bottom is reflection. In our world, the world is filled with experiences. Carving out time to reflect, to really figure out, “Okay, where am I with my skills? Let's say my sales skills, or my skills at giving a pitch? Where am I with those skills? How can I assess that? Where do I want to be? Give me a really clear windshield of specifically the skills that I need to build.” Then I need to build a process for getting there.

I think a lot of times, we give a lot of credence to experience and a lot of lines of work. How do I become a better lawyer? Well, you just have to have a lot of experiences. How do I become a better baseball scout? Well, you just have to have a lot of experiences. That's what we're told. That's not actually true. You can build your own system, but it really hinges on figure out where you're at with reflection, figure out where you want to go by staring at greatness, who is great in your environment? How can you quantify that greatness and describe it? Then, build yourself a plan of daily habits for getting there.

[0:19:08.4] MB: I think that's a great answer, and especially the piece of both thinking about reflection and using those contemplative routines, or contemplative time, whether it's journaling, or thinking, or whatever to really step back and figure out how do I tie my experiences to what I want to take away from them and how I'm going to improve on them. Then I think marrying that with this notion of really measurable process-driven goals is a really comprehensive way to think about that. Thank you for such an insightful answer.

[0:19:36.7] DC: You bet.

[0:19:37.9] MB: Let's get back to this idea of culture now. I want to come back to something you touched on a moment ago, which is this notion that building great cultures isn't magic. It's not this voodoo thing. It's something that there's very practical, specific actions that you can take, and you've actually been out in the field and studied people like pro basketball teams and Navy SEALs and all these different realms of endeavor and found that it's not this impenetrable mystical force. It's something that's really practical and specific.

[0:20:11.0] DC: Mystical force. I love that, because that's exactly how we perceive it, right? Like, “Oh, man. Apples just got that thing, or Amazon, or whoever.” That idea is very sexy and pervasive, that they've got it and it's something they're born with. It's the group version of genes, right? They've just got that magical thing that lets them be awesome and we don't.

When you look closer at that – well, it's quite ironic actually that we view it with such – through such a mystical lens, because by far, when you look at the studies, there was a cool Harvard study that took 200 paired organizations, they were identical in every respect, except for one. One had a strong culture, one had a weak culture. Then they tracked them for 11 years. The difference in net revenue between strong culture and weak culture was 756%. Culture was worth that much 756% in that revenue, in performance basically.

Culture, it's this ironic thing because culture is by far the most important thing you do in a group. Ut's the most important asset that you have, it's your Achilles heel potentially. Yet, we regard it like it's some mystical smoke, which is crazy, because when you look underneath the smoke, what you see is this very old, very simple set of signals. Signal, they're called signaling behaviors.

There's certain behaviors that caused these ancient wires in our brains to light up and they have to do with some very fundamental evolutionary things, like safety. Am I safe? Am I not? Then the other one has to do with sharing risk. Are we sharing risk here, or are we not sharing risk together? The third has to do with where are we going?

A good visual for your listeners, if you're trying to think about what a great group looks like, picture a flock of birds moving through a forest, or maybe better, like a school of fish moving to a coral reef, thousands of fish altogether moving through this really complicated environment in real-time. That's what great culture is. When you look – watch Pixar make a movie, when you watch the Navy SEALs operate, it's connection, it's sharing of information. They're not hiding information. They're showing where each other is and it's clear direction of where the goal is, where are we going.

That image of those – of that school of silvery fish moving through the coral reef is exactly what they're achieving by sending these signaling behaviors of safety, like it's safe to be connected here, of sharing vulnerability, sharing risk and of purpose. This fundamental language is what the book is about.

[0:22:42.5] MB: I think it's great that you bring it back to how evolution has shaped our psychology. It's funny, the very first episode we ever did of the Science of Success many years ago was called The Biological Limits of the Human Mind and it was all about how evolution has baked in certain biases and behaviors into our brains. In most cases, they work really well, but occasionally especially in modern society which is not necessarily what our brains were designed for, they can often short-circuit.

[0:23:10.5] DC: Super exactly, exactly. One of the big ways it does that is around this notion of vulnerability. Typically, we're taught. If you and I are going to trust each other that we've got to build-up trust in order to be vulnerable, right? We're going to work together. We've got to build trust and then we can be vulnerable together.

In fact when you look at the science and you look at the experiments, we've got it exactly backwards. Being vulnerable together builds trust, being open together. There's some really cool experiments I talk about in the book where they pair people and ask them questions, one set of questions, one group gets one set of questions designed to create vulnerability. It asks something like, “When was the last time you sang in the shower?” People have to ask each other. Or, “Tell me one thing that you've always wanted to do and why haven't you done it?”

Another one it's just the other group just gets factual questions like, “Who's your favorite movie star?” At the end, they have them all do a cooperative act. The team that got vulnerable together performs better. They're better at cooperating and which really shows how backwards we've got it. Vulnerability, sharing weakness together is what builds trust. Great groups operationalize this.

They purposely create with the intent of an athlete training. They purposely create moments where people can get real and where people can be vulnerable and tell each other the truth about what's really happening. I mean, when the SEALs do a mission, whether it's a training mission, or whether it's Bin Laden. For the book, actually I end up talking to the guy who trained the people who got Bin Laden. They do something called an AAR, which is called an after-action review.

They get off the helicopter and they circle up and they start having a hard conversation about what went wrong, and about what went right, and about what they're going to do different next time. It can be a five or 10-minute thing. It's incredibly powerful. It's a hard conversation. It's really hard to admit, “Yep, I totally screwed that up.” It's the thing that lets them build a shared mental model of what they're doing. It’s the thing that lets than cooperate, just like the people in the experiment, cooperate better.

Actually, one of the commander that I spent time with, his name is Dave Cooper, he put it this way, he said, “The most important four words a leader can say are I screwed that up,” which was it was shocking to me in some ways. I thought Navy SEALs were supposed to be confident, and they are. The real confidence they have is that they can share weakness together. Groups that share their weaknesses are strong, and groups that hide their weaknesses are weak.

[0:25:34.8] MB: It's funny, that example about the Navy SEALs I thought was one of my favorite anecdotes from culture code, and especially that phrase, “I screwed up,” right? It's so often in our culture that we try to hide, or minimize and it comes back to what we're talking about earlier, right? Minimizing our mistakes, when in reality the best thing you can usually do is to take responsibility and own up to it.

[0:25:56.6] DC: Totally. For your sake, for the sake of your brain, but also for the sake of the culture because it makes it safe for others to do the same thing, and there's such – we're wired for status. We've got all of this impulses to preserve our status. It's really, what I saw in the places that I visited where that leader – world leaders who constantly radiated what you might call a backbone of humility.
We think of humility as being just a quality on its own. Like, “Oh, it's so humble.” Actually, it takes great strength. That's why it's really a backbone of humility, that it takes strength to be able to say, “Hey, I need you. I really need your help on this. Or, I do not know how to do that.” There's really cool ways to do that. I mean, especially for women, it ends up being sometimes hard to be vulnerable at work because it can be perceived as weakness and it would perceived with bias. The leaders I saw always framed their vulnerability around the learning.

There was a cool moment, an engineer at Google told me about he had used to work at Pixar. One day, they were hanging out as a bunch of young engineers and the head of Pixar came by, this guy named Ed Catmull who is a co-founder with Steve Jobs at Pixar. He came by and he just watched them. They got nervous. These are 20-something engineers working on a problem, and then Ed Catmull speaks up and he says, “Hey, when you guys are done, could you come up to my office and teach me how to do that?”

It was a really cool moment. The guy got goosebumps telling me about it happened 15 years before, but that way of expressing vulnerability around learning. We're not just going to say that were, “Oh, I'm not good at that. I'm done with that.” It's, “I want to learn that.” For a leader to send that signal is incredibly powerful.

[0:27:42.4] MB: Hey everyone. I wanted to take a quick second and tell you about this episode's incredible sponsor, Brilliant. Brilliant is a math and science enrichment learning platform. Brilliant is unique and that it teaches you these concepts through solving fascinating and challenging problems.

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[0:29:54.0] MB: I want to dig into – dig into the vulnerability a little bit more. Tell me about some of the – I think that that's a great way of framing around learning, but I'm curious what are some of the other – as you call them, ideas for action around cultivating vulnerability in a group setting and building a culture around, making a vulnerability acceptable?

[0:30:13.7] DC: Yeah. Really making sure that the leader is vulnerable first and often ends up being really important. Another related thing is delivering negative stuff in person. There's a lot of times when you got to give someone a no that you’re tempted to hide behind a text, or an e-mail, or a memo, or something like that. What I saw in good culture is a willingness to have that moment, where you're saying, “Look, this is a hard conversation to have, but we're going to have it.”
Actually at Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg asks her people, “Have you had a difficult conversation today?” Which is really pretty cool question. That ends up being a nice way to have vulnerability. Another way they could get sent is through something called the two line e-mail, and this is an idea that comes from Laszlo Bock who was former head of People Analytics at Google, now works for a startup called Humu. Laszlo says, “Send an e-mail to all your people. Make a habit of it saying, ‘Hey, tell me one thing you want me to keep doing and one thing you want me to stop doing.’” It's a really short e-mail, but it sends an extraordinary signal of connection and vulnerability and learning, willingness to learn. Tell me. I want to get better.

Another way to think about it is when you're talking about vulnerability and having real conversations is to aim for warm candor and avoid brutal honesty. When you talk about okay, we're going to have real conversations and tell each other the truth. There's a certain person in some organizations who gets real excited about that and like, “All right, we're going to be brutally honest together.” When you are brutally honest, you enforce a culture of brutality. What you should aim for instead is warm candor, which is when you send a signal of connection and I'm giving you this because I care about you, I'm interested in your development and also candor, I'm telling you the truth. Aim for warm candor and avoid brutal honesty.

[0:32:06.5] MB: I want to dig into that a little bit more, because I mean, being somebody who has read up on things like Principles by Ray Dalio and gone super deep into a lot of these rabbit holes, I think I may personally have a tendency to lean more towards the brutal honesty side of things. How do you think about really switching that, or cultivating warm candor instead of brutal honesty?

[0:32:28.1] DC: Use the camera. Deliver one signal, deliver a candor signal, but also pull the camera back to show the connections. One great example of that I saw – I studied Danny Meyer's restaurants. Danny Meyer runs some of the top restaurants in the world, known as a Gramercy Tavern.

I watched a woman named Whitney. It was her first day. She trained for six months to be a front-of-the-house waiter. She done all this training, this is her first day at the front of the house. Right before she was about to go out, her manager leaned over and said something to her. What did he say? Like, “Go get them. You can do it.” What he said was, “If you don't ask for help 10 times today, it's going to be a bad day,” which is really like a high candor.
I winced little bit when I heard it. That's high candor. You're going to make 10 mistakes today is basically what he’s saying. He’s also saying, “Look for me. Ask me for help 10 times today.” That’s a warm message. He delivered both. He gave her the truth. We expect he made mistakes safe. He put her on her learning edge. It wasn't like, “You better not make a mistake today.” It wasn't just mindless, good luck today, go get him. It was this in-between ground, which is uncomfortable to stand on, but it's like, you're going to make mistakes, and when you do, I'm here to help. We're a team.

It's really pulling that camera back and not just delivering the truth, but showing the interconnection between the people in the room, showing the interconnection between people who are there to support each other when they do fail. Makes that failure safe and makes the learning happen.

[0:33:56.2] MB: That's a great example. Correct me if I'm wrong, but am I thinking about this, it's almost like bring some emotional intelligence into that, into that honesty and think about how it's going to impact the other person and frame it more from perspective of caring about them and also being a resource for them to help them with whatever that particular issue is.

[0:34:17.9] DC: Exactly.

[0:34:18.8] MB: I want to come back to the concept of safety. We touched on it and then really went deep down the vulnerability rabbit hole, but I think that's a really important element as well. I know you tell story of these kindergarteners and how they defeated CEOs. Can you share that anecdote?

[0:34:38.0] DC: Yeah. This is my favorite one. I mean, this guy came up – Peter Skillman, he's this engineer and designer came for this contest. It was a super simple contest, right? Who can build the tallest tower with 20 pieces of raw spaghetti, a yard a tape and they had 18 minutes and a single standard-size marshmallow that had to go on top of the tower, right? Ready, set, go.

The interesting thing that he got was some CEO, some lawyers, some MBAs and groups of kindergartens, four-person teams, and they all start. Question is which one's going to win? They all start. All the adult groups start the same way. They talk, right? They're all talking. Then they suggest some ideas and then they hone those ideas and then they divide up roles and it's super smooth. It looks gorgeous. It looks so cooperative. It looks so polite. It looks so lovely.

Then over here you have the kindergartens and they're basically just eating marshmallows and it's complete chaos, right? They're taking stuff together and it's – if you had to bet your life savings on which one is going to win, most of us would bet on one of the adult groups, right? Because that's our mental model of group performance. When we see – it focuses on what we can see, which are individuals. When we see smooth, verbal, cooperative teams, we think it's going to be – it's going to work. When we see total chaos, we think it's not going to work well.

What ends up happening is the kindergartners win like every time. They beat the MBAs, they beat the lawyers, they beat the CEOs, and that's because our mental model of group performance is wrong, because it doesn't include safety. We’re built to care about status. Deeply wired in us is this worry of where we fit in, and that starts churning the second you put any human being in a group.

They're talking smoothly, but underneath their talking is this whisper, “Where do I fit in? Who's in charge here? Is it okay to say that?” It slows ideation, it slows creativity, it slows performance. Over with the kindergartners, they do not care. They do not care about status. They just are shoulder to shoulder, cramming stuff together, making it happen, building something, it falls down. What better feedback can you get to go back to where we started this conversation, than from making a great mistake together?

They learn from that mistake. They're able to churn out more tries and they get a better result. The adults usually do one try and it usually falls over, because they haven't anticipated how complicated this actually is.

It really gives you a new way to think about group performance, because it's ain’t about how smart you are. It really is not. It's not about how verbal you are, how well you talk. It is about how safe you are. Can you go shoulder-to-shoulder? Can you just start cramming stuff together and see what happens? That's what a good group does.

When you look deeply at the early days of Google, when you look deeply at the success of the San Antonio Spurs and the Navy SEALs, what you see are people who do not care about status, who are working shoulder-to-shoulder because they've created this atmosphere of safety, where their brains can relax and work together.

[0:37:38.6] MB: How do we start to think about creating that culture environment of safety with people that we work with?

[0:37:45.8] DC: Yeah, the first is to understand how the amygdala works, right? The amygdala is at the center your brain and it's the part that's a fight-or-flight alarm system. To understand how that works, you got to understand that it is super vigilant, it is constantly looking for micro-signals that you're not safe. When it does, it checks you out. It will start looking for the exit doors.

Understanding how important it is to over-communicate safety. That starts the first day, ends up being way more important I think than people think, the first hour. Delivering a really clear signal of connection early on that the previews further future connection that cares about the whole person – there was a cool experiment at a place called Wipro, which was a call center. They capture some of these lessons. They were struggling at Wipro. As a call center, they lost a huge percentage of their people every year. They figured, what can we do?

They tried this crazy experiment, where they changed training by one hour. The one hour – two groups. One group got the standard training. The other group got this training where instead of telling them about Wipro, they flipped it and they used the hour to ask questions. Like tell me new hire, what happens on your best day? What happens on your worst day? They asked them, if we were on a desert island and marooned, what skills would you bring to our survival?

Then they hired them all and then they went back seven months later and retention went up 270% in that second group. 270%, because they received a really clear signal that said, “I see you. We’re connected.” They over-communicated safety and they demonstrated that safety with behavior. Smart groups use that first day, that first hour to continually signal these very, very basic human connective signals.

When you get hired at Pixar, whether you're the barista, or a new director, you get brought into a room and the head of Pixar comes out and says the following sentence; he says, “Whatever you did before, you're a movie maker now. We need you to make our films better.” Then they have a meeting called The Daily, where they show the footage from the previous day, and anybody in the company can speak up and make an improvement or a suggestion. Anybody. A barista can raise their hand and say, “I think that color is off. I think those clouds look fake,” whatever. It ain't just the messaging, it's the messaging plus the behavior and the set of organizational habits that reinforce this very, very basic signal like, “Look, we're connected.”

[0:40:18.7] MB: I'm just clarifying this for the listeners, but it's essentially not a physical safety. It's more like, you're part of this community. We see you as a human and you're welcome here to express yourself and be yourself and you don't have to worry about your status.

[0:40:35.4] DC: Yes. Exactly right.

[0:40:37.1] MB: Let's move on to the concept of establishing purpose, which I know is the third building block of creating strong cultures. How do you think about what that means and how organizations can strive to do it?

[0:40:50.1] DC: Yeah. Somebody, when I start out on this journey I thought, “What purpose is something that seems to come from the organization's hearts and from their guts?” I didn't expect that they would talk much about it, especially the Navy SEALs. I thought they'd be quiet about their purpose. It turns out when you spend time in those communities, they over-communicate that stuff by a factor of 50.

The SEALs talk all the time about how they're the quiet professionals, which is funny because they talk all the time about how quiet they are. They talk all the time about shoot, move and communicate, and they talk all the time about how the only easy day was yesterday. They almost fill their windshield with these mantras. It ends up functioning like a mantra map, where they’ve distilled what matters into a cohesive set of emotional GPS signals, that really show what matters, that really, really show what matters.

The best the best story about purpose that I bumped into had to do with an event that happened in 80s, the Tylenol poisonings in 1983. Johnson & Johnson the maker of Tylenol got a call one day that, “Hey, your product just killed people in Chicago,” and some madman had replaced the capsules with poison and it killed innocent people. What happened next is Tylenol, just like that school of fish we were talking about before swung into action. They voluntarily pulled millions of dollars’ worth of product from the shelves. They dealt with total openness with the press against the advice of their lawyers. They went against the advice of the FBI to pull even more product from their shelves. They've developed safety packaging in a matter of weeks. I mean, it was absolutely incredible.

As a result, Tylenol still around. When you roll the clock back on that story like, why were they able to do that? That's amazing. Tylenol shouldn't exist today and yet, it does, because there was a leader at Johnson & Johnson, a guy named James Burke who a few years before had started to worry that his people lacked the purpose, that there wasn't a clear sense of direction of true north. He had created a series of what he called credo challenges, where people got together and had these intensive discussions around the question of what comes first.

Any business that anybody – you could have 10 things come first, right? Shareholder price comes first, quarterly report comes first. In Tylenol’s case, it could have been their relationships with hospitals, or their research and development. What they decided in those meetings was the patient comes first, the health of the patient comes first. They created this tremendous vivid consensus around what true north was.

As a result of those intensive conversations, when the crisis came, they all knew what true north was. Okay, should we pull the product? Yes. Should we develop safety packaging? Yes. They didn't have to debate it, they didn’t have to hesitate. They could act just like one giant brain. That to me illuminates how to use purpose in an organization.

You got to build a map. You got to build a map that shows what true north is and also what true south is, like what you definitely don't want to do, and be as vivid, explicit and flood the zone with really clear signals. Those signals can take the form of stories, parables, they can take the form of catchphrases, they can take the form of images, they can take the form of people, but to really over-communicate those – whatever 10 words matter most, whatever ten images matter most. Flood the zone, flood the windshield with that clear sense of purpose.

[0:44:21.6] MB: You also talked about in our pre-show conversation, you mentioned this idea that many people think that organizations that have a really healthy culture are conflict-free and yet, that wasn't necessarily what you uncovered in your research.
[0:44:35.9] DC: Totally. That's funny. When I got into this, I thought, “I'm going to get to Pixar and the SEALs and San Antonio Spurs and I'm going to find these magical places that transcend,” right? They're just awesome. I actually didn't find that at all. They have conflicts. These are incredibly successful places. They probably have more conflicts because of the way, because of the honesty with which they confront their core tensions.

Every organization – there's no such thing as over the rainbow where you'll ever get to a place where tensions will go away. What you can do though is face toward them. Face toward the real problems that you have, and that's what makes those groups I think unique, and it ultimately gives them a strong culture. The idea that continually being aware of those tensions that they face and those problems that they face and never hiding from them, but instead creating honest conversation around them.

[0:45:29.6] MB: I think that comes back to the same theme in many ways we've been talking about throughout this conversation, this idea that owning up to your challenges, facing reality, facing your mistakes is one of the core components of not only individual performance, but the performance of high-functioning groups as well.

[0:45:46.4] DC: It's so true. It really is. We have this powerful instinct to hide away from those moments, and to flinch away from them as organizations and as individuals. It doesn't mean they don't hurt. They still hurt, but leaning into that pain and using it. It's funny, because it's only in recent years, like I'll do a metaphor with physical fitness, right?

For many years, it was thought it was unhealthy to run long distances, or unhealthy to lift heavy weights, right? Until about the 70s when we discovered how the aerobic and anaerobic engines work. It turns out, pain is a good thing in a way, because it tells you where the edge is and by experiencing it and pushing your body to the edge, you actually get stronger.

I think what a lot of the science that we have now shows us that cultures and groups are built exactly the same way, by experiencing that vulnerability and risk and pain together, that is what makes groups stronger too. Leaning into that moment as painful as it is, ends up being the place where growth happens.

[0:46:49.8] MB: For listeners who want to concretely start implementing some of these ideas into their lives, what would be one piece of homework that you would give them as an action item to begin implementing some of these ideas?

[0:47:03.0] DC: Yeah. I think the main action item, I've heard it described would be WSD, which stands for write shit down. I think in our lives, we often have a lot of experiences and we presume that learning is going to take place, but actually having a place at a time every day where you can get away from things and reflect on what happened today, whether that's what your individual skills are with your group, to actually have a cool calm place where you can really reflect and see and start tracing the threads and start connecting dots and start setting goals and start reflecting on your performance and figuring out what where you want to go and how you're going to get there. To me, that that's the most powerful thing.

I haven't met any really high-performers that didn't have some way of capturing experience. Some way of really WSD and giving you an opportunity to layer on and reflect and see and learn, and that's what it's all about.

[0:47:54.8] MB: For listeners who want to find you, your work, etc., online, what's the best place to do that?

[0:47:59.7] DC: danielcoyle.com would be a good place to start.

[0:48:03.7] MB: Awesome. Well Daniel, thank you so much for coming on the show sharing all this wisdom. Really, really fascinating work and researches you've done and some great conclusions from all of that research.

[0:48:14.9] DC: It’s fun spending time with you, Matt. Let's do it again sometime.

[0:48:17.8] 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 e-mail 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.

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These Habits Will Help You Crush Procrastination & Overwhelm with James Clear

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Listen to the Episode

Why You Need to Hear This

Watch the Episode

Become Anyone You Want With The Science of Successful Habits

Show Notes, Links, and Additional Research

Building Better Habits

Reviews of Atomic Habits

Get Help

Episode Transcript

If you keep trying to change your life but always end up in the same place; if you struggle to develop good habits and break bad ones; if you exercise for a week then find yourself making excuses not to be active; if you want practical, easy-to-digest advice on how to build the life you want, then this interview with author and entrepreneur James Clear is for you.

If you’re like me, you have set goals before. Some of them you’ve reached. Others you haven’t. When you reach your goals, you feel like a success. Like you’ve worked hard and really cared about what you were doing.

But when you fail to reach your goals, you struggle. You think that you weren’t good enough, that you weren’t trying hard enough, that you didn’t care enough.

Clear tells us that’s wrong. That it’s neither your goal nor your willpower that allows you to succeed.

Instead, if you can’t change your habits, the problem isn’t you. It’s your system.

Most of us try to change our habits by sheer force of will. What we need to do instead is set up systems to help make success easy, attractive, satisfying, and obvious.

This interview with Clear allowed me to review the times I’ve failed to reach my goals. Before now, I couldn’t figure out any pattern. There were some goals I didn’t care about that I easily reached. Other goals were deeply meaningful to me but success escaped me again and again.

With the useful ideas Clear presents, I was able to break through the mental block. The practical advice gives me a way to create a step-by-step plan to develop any good habits and break any bad ones.

In this episode, we discuss the foundations of evidence based thinking, the important balance between Habits and Decisions and how each of them shapes who you ultimately become and dig into the idea that your decisions set the trajectory of your life, but your habits determine how far you walk on that journey, from there we explore how to build high impact habits, what you need to do to determine the best habits to focus on first, how you can harness the the power of the “aggregation of marginal gains,” and much more with our guest James Clear. 

James Clear is an american author, entrepreneur, and photographer. His personal blog, jamesclear.com has over 400,000 email subscribers and his first book Atomic Habits is set to release in October this year. His work focuses primarily on habits and human potential looking to answer the question “How can we live better?” by focusing on science-backed methods. James’s work has been featured in The New York Times, CBS, Forbes, and more.

Thank you so much for listening!

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Become Anyone You Want With The Science of Successful Habits

Science or personal experience? Which is the best informant of our decisions, especially when it comes to maximizing our potential and living better—whatever that means to us as individuals?

Author, entrepreneur, and photographer James Clear offers an off-the-beaten-path answer to that question that involves holding on to two distinct ideas simultaneously.

“The first,” he says, “is that science and scientific research is the best tool that we have for figuring out what works across a broad range of cases. So in other words, what is true or what is accurate in many different circumstances for a given a topic, rather than just based on like an individual’s opinion or one particular case, or one particular circumstance.”

Then, he says, if you’re going to be a practitioner of ideas, “you have to be willing to accept the fact that you are not the average.”

He says we need to adopt philosophies of self-experimentation.

Why? As he points out, “it's quite possible that a research study will come up with a finding that says the average is X and you, in fact, are Y or Z or something totally different.”

He gives an example:

“The average American family has something like 2.3 kids or something like that, but, of course, there is no single family that actually has to 2.3 kids. It’s impossible to have .3 of a child. So my point here is that you both need to trust the science and trust the evidence that is the best method we have to kind of guide your actions, yet still be willing to go through the trials and the trial and error yourself to try to figure out what works in your individual circumstance.

Clear, whose personal blog jamesclear.com has over 400,000 email subscribers, is also the author of Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones, an instant New York Times bestseller that was released in October 2018.

In his role as author, especially, he says he’s very wary of being a new-age version of someone in the Ivory Tower, just writing about ideas, and his commitment to staying grounded has inspired him to pursue many endeavors including…

- Traveling and photographing his journey around the globe. 

- Diving into weigh-lifting and competing.

- Publicly sharing all of his work. 

“I feel like all those little ways are kind of methods for me to have my own skin in the game and figure out what actually works for me and not just share some thoughts,” he says, noting that he wants his ideas to be “tested by readers and the audience at large.”

He acknowledges that “the vast majority of our opinions are simply those that have been reinforced through whatever this version of life is that we’ve lived,” saying that of course we have personal evidence for our beliefs—it’s the experiences we’ve had in our lives.

“If things have happened two or three times, that seems like a fairly relevant bit of evidence for why you should believe a particular thing. Of course, two or three instances in the grand scheme of the world was basically nothing.”

He says science “gives us a way to kind of look at a thousand or 10,000 instances of a particular topic or issue and maybe hone in on something that’s a little more robust and accurate,” and that while “you don't want to overweight any single instance”— “at the same time, like I just mentioned, you need to be willing to realize that ultimately you're trying to figure out what works for you.”

Notice and, not or.

“Basically, any one of us could be a billion different things. You could live an infinite number of different lives, but only one of those is actually lived out,” he says.

That seems obvious, but here’s where his take on science and self-experimentation comes in:

“Science gives you a way of whittling that number down and being able to focus on taking guesses that are more sound, more likely to succeed, and hopefully more useful for you.”

Clear says that our initial decisions can set us out on completely different paths.

From there, our habits determine how far we’ll go.

Clear’s bottom line: Decision making and habit creation are two of the pillars of living a great life.

“If you can make good decisions and master the habits related to those, then it’s very hard to not have better outcomes.”

Leveraging Atomic Energy

Clear’s interest in science shines through even in the metaphors he leverages.

He says that in thinking and writing about making good decisions and building better habits, he chose the word atomic because change and improvement need to be small.

“Obviously an atom is like the smallest fundamental unit of a compound, the smallest fundamental unit of a thing.”

Likewise, he says small habits are easy to start and easy to stick with.

He says 1 percent change—atomic change—is most valuable when it’s part of a system of change because it’s like compounding interest.

“Productivity—for example, being slightly more productive and getting 1 percent more done each day or getting an additional task done each afternoon—it doesn't really count for much on any given day, but over the course of a 30-year career, that can be a really big difference.”

Unfortunately, negative thoughts also compound.

“Once you get in the habit of seeing people as a mean, or vindictive, or vengeful, you can see that behavior anywhere,” Clear notes. “You start the spot evidence of it all over the place. That’s where you’re primed to look for.”

So how can we change these habits and avoid getting stuck in a rut, behaviorally or in our heads?

“Habits are a double-edged sword.”

Clear says that’s what makes it “incredibly important to understand how they work, so that you can avoid the dangerous half of the blade.”

“If you know how they work, then you can get them compounding for you rather than against you.”

He gives the example of Team Sky—a British cycling team that was floundering in the early aughts, but went on to take 60 percent of the gold medals available in the 2012 Olympics after implementing a slew of wildly creative changes that were supported by science (from adopting surgeon-approved hand-washing techniques to prevent colds to traveling with the pillows that data said gave them the best night’s sleep).

Clear says, “Small improvements are not just like a cherry on top of your performance, but actually can be the thing that separates you from being mediocre to being truly great.”

“It’s very easy for us to dismiss a small bad choice [like] eating a cheeseburger rather than a salad or something like that, or choosing to not study for 20 minutes rather than sitting down and studying tonight. But it's only a year or two, or five years later that the full impact of those small 1 percent choices and little changes ends up revealing itself.”

He says that true behavior change is identity change and that this change can happen with 1 percent choices that make decisive moments as easy as possible.

“Your actions become evidence for the type of person that you believe that you are.”

So how can you leverage atomic success to become a believer in yourself? Clear has a lot of suggestions and insights that are ripe for practical application.

He points out that it’s hard to get excited about repetitive processes.

He acknowledges that we’re the victims of the 24-hour news cycle we’ve created, saying, “The only things that get covered on the news are events—and events that are newsworthy. So it's only the earthquake or the splitting of the stone that is worthy of talking about.”

“Nobody is going to make a news story about somebody hitting a stone for the 37th time and [it] not happening.”

He says it’s because we’re so focused on events (and disaster) that we get wrapped up in thinking everything is about results and success.

We become blind to the process. “Really,” he says, “it’s always the process that leads to the outcomes.”

Some of his tips for supporting yourself in the process:

Respect the feedback loop. “The hallmark of pretty much any habit,” he says, “is that they don't happen just in a sequence. They happen in a loop. They end up strengthening or weakening themselves depending on the feedback that you’re getting.”

He points out that, “Once you see yourself as religious, it becomes a reason to go back to church every Sunday. Or once you see yourself as studious, it becomes a reason to study again and try to get a good grade in the next test because you got one on the last one and so on.”He challenges people to ask the question, “Does this habit cast a vote for the type of person that I want to become?” and invest their energy accordingly.

Titrate down. Become aware of the power of little habits, and get smaller and smaller until you start experiencing success.

Clear says you should “downscale your habits until they can fit within two minutes.” Why?

“If someone [is] talking about building a habit of going for a run each day, well they might say, ‘Well, I should start small. So let me only run for 10 minutes.’ Actually, even that is still way too big.”

“What we’re talking about here,” he says, “is the habit should be getting your shoes on. So tying your shoes is the only thing you're focused on. Once you get your running shoes on, then you just get out the door and let it go from there. Whether you run or not, whether you actually even take a step, is not the goal.”

Clear knows this works from his own experience.

He shares that in the evening, his wife gets home from work and they might either change into their workout clothes and go to the gym or sit on the couch and watch Office reruns.

“It’s really that brief moment where either we change into our workout clothes or not. That little habit, that decisive moment determines what is going to happen in the next two hours.”

Find your tribe. In addition to recognizing the importance of atomic change and leveraging 2-minute habits, Clear also highlights that from an evolutionary standpoint, it is really important for humans to belong.

“We’re deeply wired to signal to provide indications to the rest of the people around us that, ‘Hey, I'm part of this group too.’”

Of course this can have all sorts of negative implications, but rather than falling in line with whatever’s around you (sometimes the source of the habits you’re trying to change), Clear says, “The powerful punch line is that you need to find a group where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.”

More specifically, Clear says you should seek out a group where your desired behavior is the norm and who you could already be friends with, maybe for some other reason. He gives the example of Nerd Fitness—a site that helps former comic book kids hook up with workout buddies, encouraging people to get creative about networking.

Beyond that, be open and honest about who you are and what you’re after. Keep your new habits small and get ready for big change.

Show Notes, Links, & Research

• There’s no real playbook, everyone is operating on their best guess and trying to do their best with limited information

• Science and scientific research are the best tools we have for determining what the “Best guess” would be for improvement

• Science is still a guess, but its the best method we have to guide our actions and is much better than anecdote or opinion

• You are not the average - you have to adopt this philosophy of self experimentation to determine what works for you

• It’s very hard to step outside of your own experience - but that experiment may not always be the best predictor or provider of information

• You could live a billion lives - its up to you to decide and determine which single version of YOU actually gets lived

• Your decisions set your trajectory and your habits determine how far you walk

• Decision making creates leverage, habits capture it

• It’s always the process that leads to the outcomes. Focus on the process. And build a system so that process happens every day

• True behavior change is identity change. Once you change your identity it doesn’t feel like work anymore.

• It’s NEVER the first mistake that ruins you - its the spiral of mistakes that follows it. Get back on track.

• A “craving” is a desire to change your state” to some small degree

• Motivation is something that rises and falls arbitrarily - don’t rely on motivation to force yourself to adopt new habits

• It can be dangerous to “start too big” with new habits

• The true impact of habits is far greater than we realize - little habits are like an entrance ramp to a highway - the determine what we end up doing for minutes or even hours afterwards

• Focus on mastering a few decisive moments that end up shaping how you spend your time - and make those moments as easy as possible.

• Find people who’ve achieved what you want to achieve - but also have SOME commonality with you now

• Homework: downscale your habits until they can fit within 2 minutes (make sure your habits are small enough)

  • Read one page in a book

  • Make the decisive moment as easy as possible

• Homework: reduce friction so that doing that behavior is as easy as possible. Start with environment design

  • Increase friction for bad behaviors

  • Reduce friction for good behaviors

1% Better Everyday - James Clear (24min)

What are your most important goals in life? What habits fuel those goals? What if you were able to get 1% better at each of those cornerstone habits everyday? How would that change your life? That's the topic of James Clear's talk at ConvertKit's Craft + Commerce 2017.

The Surprising Power of Small Habits (53min)

Books:

Atomic Habits - October 2018

The Habits Guide

Mastering Creativity

"A supremely practical and useful book. James Clear distills the most fundamental information about habit formation, so you can accomplish more by focusing on less."
-Mark Manson, #1 New York Times best-selling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

“James Clear has spent years honing the art and studying the science of habits. This engaging, hands-on book is the guide you need to break bad routines and make good ones.”
-Adam Grant, New York Times best-selling author of Originals, Give and Take, and Option B with Sheryl Sandberg

"A special book that will change how you approach your day and live your life."
-Ryan Holiday, bestselling author of The Obstacle is the Way and Ego is the Enemy

“As a physician attempting to help my patients build healthy habits to decrease and reverse chronic disease, Atomic Habits is the playbook I have been searching for. Not only does the book offer actionable items I can teach my patients, I can refer them to read and implement the ideas themselves. The format is powerful and simple. This should be taught in all medical schools.”
-Laurie Marbas, MD, United States Air Force veteran

“Atomic Habits was a great read. I learned a lot and think it’ll be helpful to a lot of people.”
—Gayle King, co-anchor of CBS This Morning and editor-at-large for O, The Oprah Magazine

“Useful new book”
–Wall Street Journal

“In Atomic Habits, Clear will show you how to overcome a lack of motivation, change your environment to encourage success, and make time for new (and better) habits.
–Glamour.com

“Atomic Habits is a great book for anyone who is frustrated with the way they can’t seem to kick that one (or two dozen) bad habit(s) and wants to finally achieve health, fitness, financial freedom, great relationships, and a good life.”
–Medium.com

“Excellent. Well worth the read.”
–Benjamin Hardy, Inc.com

Episode Transcript

 [00:03:02] MB: Today, we have another great guest on the show, James Clear. James is an American author, entrepreneur and photographer. His personal blog, jamesclear.com, has over 400,000 email subscribers and his first book; Atomic Habits, is set to release in October of this year. His work focuses primarily on habits and human potential looking to answer the question; How can we live better by focusing on science-backed methods? His work has been featured in the New York Times, CBS, Forbes, and much more.

James, welcome to The Science of Success.

[00:03:33] JC: Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

[00:03:35] MB: We’re super excited to have you on the show today, and I’d love to start out with – It's something obviously we’re big fans of, but it's great to have kind of another member of the sort of evidence-based growth tribe on the show. How did you kind of begin down that journey of really looking at focusing on kind of the science behind what makes people perform and what makes people kind of live better lives?

[00:03:58] JC: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think it’s something you realize as you grow into adulthood is that there's no real playbook. Everybody is just kind of like operating on their best guess and trying to do the best they can at the time. So my question as I started to except that truth was, “Well, how can I have better guesses? How can I try to hone in on and optimize the strategies that I'm using?” and science, at least thus far, is the best tool or strategy that we have for making better guesses and for kind of honing in on what works.

I think there are kind of like two ideas that you have to hold simultaneously. The first is that science and scientific research is the best tool that we have for figuring out what works across a broad range of cases. So in other words, what is true or what is accurate in many different circumstances for a given a topic, rather than just based on like an individual’s opinion or one particular case, or one particular circumstance.

But then at the same time you have to hold this idea that you really need to, if you’re going to be someone who is not just a – Like a reader or a researcher of science, but also a practitioner of those ideas, then you have to be willing to accept the fact that you are not the average. You are just you, an individual and of one, and in order to implement any of those ideas, you have to adopt this philosophy of self-experimentation. So it's quite possible that a research study will come up with a finding that says the average is X and you in fact are Y or Z or something totally different.

One of my favorite examples of this is like the average American family has something like 2.3 kids or something like that. But, of course, there is no single family that actually has to 2.3 kids. It’s impossible to have .3 of a child. So my point here is that you both need to trust the science and trust the evidence that is the best method we have to kind of guide your actions, yet still be willing to go through the trials and the trial and error yourself to try to figure out what works in your individual circumstance.  

To me, it's kind of those two ideas that combine what it means to be an evidence-based practitioner, which is something that I strive to do in my work. I mean, it’s very easy to have an opinion and just write about ideas. It’s hard enough work to have a good opinion, to have something that’s research-backed. But I'm very weary of like being a new age version of someone in the Ivory Tower and just writing about ideas. That’s why I do travel photography around the world. That’s why I’m a weightlifter and compete, and it’s why that I publish my work and share it publicly so that I can kind of be tested by readers and the audience at large. I feel like all those little ways are kind of methods for me to have my own skin in the game and figure out what actually works for me and not just share some thoughts.

[00:06:43] MB: I think you bring up a really good point too, which is science is still a guess, but it's typically sort of the best guess and it's a much more effective guess than sort of anecdote, or opinion, or something that isn’t as kind of rigorously researched. I think people can kind of sometimes pooh-pooh that and say, “Oh! There's studies that say everything, or studies are always being reversed,” and that kind of stuff. But I think you really have to look at the other side of the equation and think about, “Okay. Well, what's the basis for your beliefs and your evidence?” 

[00:07:14] JC: Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, I think is very hard to step outside of your own experience, and most of the time we don't realize that the vast majority of our opinions are simply those that have been reinforced through whatever this version of life is that we’ve lived. You have like personal evidence for your beliefs, which is the history of experiences that you’ve had in your life. So if things have happened two or three times, that seems like a fairly relevant bit of evidence for why you should believe a particular thing. Of course, two or three instances in the grand scheme of the world was basically nothing. So science gives us a way to kind of look at a thousand or 10,000 instances of a particular topic or issue and maybe hone in on something that’s a little more robust and accurate.

[00:07:57] MB: Yeah, that's something I feel I encounter again and again is kind of people who sort of overweight their personal experience and underweight the science or kind of the broader research.

[00:08:09] JC: It’s hard, because you kind of have to do both. You don't want overweight any single instance and yet at the same time, like I just mentioned, you need to be willing to realize that ultimately you're trying to figure out what works for you. So you have to trust your experience or that something might be slightly different than the average of a particular study or whatever. [inaudible 00:08:29]. That’s a hard balance to strike, but I do think that being informed by science and evidence is a much better way to go about the process of self-improvement than merely guessing.

Basically, anyone of us could be a billion different things. You could live an infinite number of different lives, but only one of those is actually lived out. You only follow one of those paths. So how do you decide which one it is? So it's not possible for any person, any individual to take all billion guesses throughout their life, and science gives you a way of like whittling that number down and being able to focus on taking gases that are more sounds, more likely to succeed, and hopefully more useful for you.

[00:09:09] MB: I think that kind of fundamentally underscores why decision-making is such a critical skillset. I mean, we talk about it all the time on our show and I know you've written and spoken about it as well. But it's such a valuable tool, because life at the end of the day is just sort of a series of decision after decision after decision.  

[00:09:29] JC: Yeah. I like to say that your decisions set your trajectory and your habits determine how far you walk along that trajectory, how far you move along that path. The benefit of making a good initial decision could be like solid, but the benefit of making an excellent initial decision could be orders of magnitude better.

Just classic example is like choosing an idea to start a business around. One idea might get you a 10X return, but another idea might get you a 10,000X return. You're going to be working hard each day on either business, but the initial choice sets you on a completely different path. So this is true for your habits and daily routines as well, but the differences is once you make that initialization decision, it’s your habits and the fundamentals that you stick to day after day determine how far you move along that path.

Someone could have a business idea that could generated a 10,000X return, but if they don't develop the habit of making sales calls every day, for example, then they don't actually realize that potential. So decision-making creates leverage habits, capture it. I think especially in our world, our modern world, and this has only been true the last 100, or 200, maybe 500 years, we have created systems of leverage that are greater than any that have existed thus far in human history. So coding and programming the internet creates almost infinite leverage and scale for you to reach the rest of the world. Capitalism and investing and compound interest, I mean, all of these things are forms of leverage, and so your initial decision dramatically increases or decreases the return that you could have, but your habits determine whether or not you capture that return.

[00:11:06] MB: I love how simply you’ve kind of married the sort of dual schools of decision-making and habit creation, because that's a great and really kind of thoughtful way of connecting those two things together meaningfully.

[00:11:19] JC: I think they’re two of the pillars of living a great life. If you can make good decisions and master the habits related to those, then it’s very hard to not have better outcomes. So in that way, it’s not that it’s easy, but I like that it simplifies what the task of self-improvement is. It’s also about making good decisions and then building better habits.

[00:11:37] MB: I think that’s a great framework, and I want to get into the decision-making piece of that. But I want to kind of save that for later on in the conversation and come back to or dig into more of this, this kind of idea of habit formation, because I know you've obviously written a tremendous amount about that and your new book is focused primarily in kind of the habits side of the equation. To start with, one of the things I know you've spoken about in the past is this idea of getting sort of 1% better every day. Can you share that philosophy or that sort of idea and where that comes from?

[00:12:06] JC: Sure. So the book is called Atomic Habits, and the reason I chose the word atomic is because there are two things that I think make a habit powerful. So the first is it needs to be small, and obviously an atom is like the smallest fundamental unit of a compound, the smallest fundamental unit of a thing. They need to be small, because small habits are easy to start, easy to stick with, and we can get into that more about why it's so important to start small. But it's not just any small habits that really makes a big difference. It’s not just any kind of 1% change. It’s only when 1% changes compound and build on each other that they become something more powerful.

An atom is like the smallest fundamental unit of a larger system. That's the piece of a molecule. In the same way, a small habit or 1% improvement needs to be a piece of a larger system within your life for achieving self-improvement or achieving results in sports, or music, or school or whatever it happens to be. So in that way I think atomic is a great phrase for it, because it's not only small, but it's also powerful, and that's really what we’re looking for here when we’re trying to build better habits and achieve improvement.

You asked about why 1% change, why is that crucial? I think it's because habits are like the compound interest of self-improvement, and you can see this in many different areas of life. Productivity for example, being slightly more productive and getting 1% more done each day or getting an additional task done each afternoon, it doesn't really count for much on any given day, but over the course of a 30-year, that can be a really big difference. Same way with pretty much any of these strategies for habits compounding, they not only can work for you, they also can work against you.

Negative thoughts compound, for example. Once you get in the habit of seeing people as a mean, or vindictive, or vengeful, you can see that behavior anywhere. You start the spot evidence of it all over the place. That’s where you’re primed to look for. Then once you see more evidence of it, you start to believe it more and it just becomes this downward spiral rather than an upward spiral.

So in that way I think because habits are so powerful and have this tendency to be the compound interest of self-improvement to escalate or crash based on which side of the equation you’re on, it becomes particularly important to learn how to master those. The phrase I like to use is habits are a double-edged sword, and so it makes it incredibly important to understand how they work so that you can avoid the dangers half the blade, because if you know how they work, then you can get them compounding for you rather than against you, and that I think is why 1% improvement is kind of a good way to encapsulate the power of habits have over our lives.

[00:14:44] MB: There’s couple different things I want to dig into around this idea. I definitely want to talk about how we sort of determine which habits have the potential to compound effectively, but before we get into that, tell me about the idea of the aggregation of marginal gains and why compounding is so important and how sort of tiny shifts can actually create massive outcomes down the road.

[00:15:07] JC: Sure. The aggregation of marginal gains, the phrase that comes from Dave Brailsford, who’s the performance director for Team Sky, which is a professional cycling team in Great Britain, and in the early 2000s, he was hired and they had a very mediocre team at the time. They won a single gold medal, I think, back in 1908, and they had never won a Tour de France. It’s like the race thing around for like almost 100 years.

So he was hired to change that, and his strategy, his kind of core philosophy as a coach was this concept that he called the aggregation of marginal gains. The way that he referred to it was like the 1% improvement in nearly everything that we do. So he started by looking at a bunch of things you would expect the cycling team to look at, like they put slightly lighter tires on the bike. They figured out how to use a more ergonomic seat. They have their riders wear these electrically heated over shorts to kind of keep their muscles warm while they were riding. They asked each rider to wear a biofeedback sensor so they could see how they responded to training and adjust their workouts appropriately. But a lot of these things are things that other professional cycling teams are looking to do as well. So then they did a bunch of stuff, a bunch of 1% improvements that you wouldn't expect the cycling team to do, like they hired a surgeon to teach the riders how to wash their hands to reduce the risk of getting a cold. They went to a wind tunnel and tested different fabrics in it to see which type of fabric led to the most aerodynamic ride and they have their outdoor riders switched indoor racing suits, because they ended up being lighter and more aerodynamic. They split tested a bunch of massage gels for muscle recovery to see which one led to the best form of recovery.

Then one of my favorite ones is they figured out the type of mattress and pillow that led to the best night sleep for each rider and then they brought that on the road with them to hotels for big competitions. So Brailsford’s philosophy here was that if we can actually do this, if we can execute on all these little 1% changes, then I think we could win a Tour de France within five years. That was kind of the challenge the he laid down to the team. He ended up being wrong. They won the Tour de France in three years and then they repeated again the next year with a different rider, and then they had one year where they didn’t went in and then they’d won two more in a row after that. So won four out of the next five years after they implemented this.

Then with an even larger set of riders, when they went to the Olympics in London in 2012, they won 60% of the gold medals available. So this idea that small improvements are not just like a cherry on top of your performance, but actually can be the thing that separates you from being mediocre to being truly great. That I think is something that's kind of hard for us to conceptualize. We don’t often think about how small habits make a difference in either direction. It’s very easy for us to dismiss a small bad choice eating a cheeseburger rather than a salad or something like that, or choosing to not study for 20 minutes rather than sitting down and studying tonight. But it's only a year or two, or five years later that the full impact of those small 1% choices and little changes ends up revealing itself. You don't realize how much your previous choices made a difference until they have time to compound, and that's really a principle that is central to any type compounding. You always use compound interest graphs for finance that they stay relatively low and small in the beginning and then it's only in the last like 10 years that they multiply it to some crazy degree and you’d become a millionaire.

Warren Buffett, a classic example, one of the richest people in the world now, but he wasn't a billionaire until he was well into his 50s, which seems almost impossible given that he’s worth like almost a $100 billion now, but it's all been late in his life that that curve has escalated. This is something I call the plateau of latent potential. It's this idea that very early in that curve, it’s still really low. It kind of feels like you're stuck on a plateau and it's kind of – I like to use the metaphor; it’s analogous to heating up an ice cube.

Say you’re in a room and it's cold. You can see your breath. Ice cube sitting on the table and it's like 25°, and it goes up 1° to 26, the ice cube is still there, nothing. 27, same thing. 28, 29, 30, 31. Still ice cube on the table. Nothing has changed. Then you get to 32 and suddenly the ice cube melts. You hit this phase transition.

But it's not just because of this 1° shift from 31 to 32, it's the same as all the other shifts before it. So what happened? It's actually because you were accumulating this latent potential in the shift from 25 to 31° and all of that work was not wasted. It was just being stored. I think so often in life we feel like our work is being wasted early on, whether we’re trying to lose weight and we don't see any results, or trying to build a business and sales aren’t coming in yet, or trying to learn a language and it doesn't quite click. It feels like we’re not getting anywhere, but actually that work is compounding. You’re just kind of stuck on this plateau for the time being, and then it's only later, if you stick with, that actually see how much all that previous effort counted for. So this philosophy of marginal gains of making 1% improvements, it often won’t impress you in the moment on any given day, but it ends up leading to very powerful results in the long run.  

[00:20:23] MB: It’s such a great story, and I think really clearly kind of demonstrates that as you put it, these seem like sort of extraneous little extra things, but they really are at the differentiator between winning and losing, the differentiator between getting the results you ultimately want to achieve and kind of feeling stuck and feeling like you can't make progress.

[00:20:42] JC: If you think about it, that’s really just what our days are. I mean, it’s a collection of individual moments like that, a collection of 1% choices. So if you can win those little battles, you end up winning the bigger ones in the long run.

[00:20:55] MB: I think the other pieces too, and you touched on this a little bit, is this idea that people kind of get caught up in this illusion that there's going to be like a rapid change or transformation or that there is this one sort of secret strategy or thing that's just out of reach, and if they could just figure out that one trick, that one sort of hack or shortcut that that's the thing that's holding them back. In many cases, that's almost sort of the opposite of what's true.  

[00:21:21] JC: Yeah. I mean, there’s nothing surprising about the fact that we want faster results. I mean, who doesn’t want that? This is kind of, to be honest, a little bit of the purpose of science, is we’re trying to figure out what actually works that we stop wasting our time on things that don't. So it's a good quest to want to do things more effectively or to get results faster, but there's a negative side to it, which is we leap for any strategy that promises immediate, or rapid, or quick rewards, any kind of get rich quick scheme that’s applied to really any industry.

I think, in reality, it changes usually even when it looks bit, even when it looks like an overnight success. It's like two tectonic plates grinding against each other on your surface. So for years, for probably hundreds and millions of years, they’re grinding and pushing and there’s work being put in and it doesn't really show up as anything. Then one day suddenly an earthquake happens, and it seems like this one event came out of nowhere, but really it was the millions of years of grinding that happened before it that led to the release of this major energy.

I think this is true for almost any field of life that you have to be willing to put in a long amount of work for there to be a release of some kind of performance. The San Antonio Spurs, great NBA team, won five championships. They have a quote in the locker room and it goes something like, “Whenever I don't feel motivated to continue working, I think about a stone cutter pounding on a stone a hundred times and then it splits at the 101st, and first and I know that it was not the 101st swing that did it, but all those that came before.” It’s kind of that same idea.

This a little bit of a victim of – Like we are a little bit of a victim of this like 24-hour news cycle that we have created. The only things that get covered on the news are events and events that are newsworthy. So it's only the earthquake or the splitting of the stone that is worthy of talking about. Nobody is going to make a news story about somebody hitting a stone for the 37th time and not happening. So because we only hear about results and hear about successful all the time, I think we get wrapped up into thinking that it's all about results, or it’s all about success, and we become invisible and blind to the process that hides behind it. Really, of course, it's always the process that leads to the outcomes. So my book tries to pull us back to center a little bit, help us realize that the process is the thing that we need to focus our attention on and then talk about how do we build a system so that process happens each day, rather than just hoping that we’ll feel motivated to do it.

[00:23:57] MB: I definitely want to get to the kind of the motivation side of the question and the idea of sort of hoping that we feel motivated. Before we dig into that, I want to circle back to this notion of determining kind of which habits have kind of that potential to compound over time. How do you think about evaluating habits or determining which ones have that sort of power or that latent ability to be habits that can get 1% better every day? 

[00:24:22] JC: Yeah, that’s a good question. Well, I guess there are two ways to think about it. The first is you can think about the results of the habit itself delivers. So, for example, doing a push-up each day is going to lead to some form of muscle growth, and if I can continue to increase the number that I do from 1, to 2, to 10, to 20 and so on, then there should be some kind of games that are coming from that habit itself.

But then there's also a second way to look at it, which is your identity compounds as you develop evidence for being that type of person. So each time that I do 10 push-ups, I'm not just getting my body in shape. I'm also casting a vote for being a fit person, or I'm providing a signal to myself that I'm the type person who works out, or I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts, that kind of thing.

In the long run, I often find that accumulating evidence for a particular identity is actually the more powerful approach, and I'll get into that in a second. So I think that the answer to your question is what I asked myself is; does this action cast a vote for the type of person that I want to be, or the type principles, the type of values that I want to stand for? If it does, then I think it's worthy of trying to do each day and like let those effects compound, because it’s not only about the results that individual habit provides, but also about what it represents or who it represents myself becoming.

For example, if you go to church every Sunday for 20 years, then you believe that you’re religious. If you study Chinese every Tuesday night for 20 minutes, you believe that you are studious. Your actions become evidence for the type of person that you believe that you are. Eventually, it becomes this kind of like two-way street. It's a feedback loop, which is the hallmark of pretty much any habit, is that they don't happen just in like a sequence. They happen in like a loop. They end up strengthening or weakening themselves depending on the feedback that you’re getting.

So as you start to develop or adopt this aspect of your identity, then it becomes a reason for you to repeat it in the future. Once you see yourself as religious, it becomes a reason to go back to church every Sunday. Or once you see yourself as studious, it becomes a reason to study again and try to get a good grade in the next test because you got one on the last one and so on.

In that way, I think one way to answer your question is; does this habit cast a vote for the type of person that I want to become? Eventually, the goal is not to be perfect. Nobody can be perfect, but you don't need to be perfect. You don’t need to have like a unanimous number of votes in any election. You just need to accumulate the majority of the evidence if you believe that about yourself. This is actually a really powerful way to change. Ultimately, I think, true behavior change is identity change. It’s a change in how you see yourself or what you think is normal for you, because once you consider it normal for you to do, it's no longer really behavior change. You’re just being the type of person that you already think that you are. You’ll hear this from people who have gone through some kind of transformation will say, “I really struggled to work out for a long time, but now lifting weights is just part of who I am, or “Meditating each day is just part of my daily routine. I can’t imagine my day without it.”

I mean, it's a signal of an identity shift of believing something new about herself and once you believe that, it doesn't really feel like work to do that anymore, it's just like, “No. It’s not work. It’s just who I am to meditate,” or “It’s just who I am to not smoke,” for example.

Anyway, I think that that's a powerful way to think about that challenge of; is this a habit that is helping me or not? Is this a habit that I should focus on? Does it cast a vote for the type of person I want to become?  

[00:28:00] MB: I think that's a really, really insightful way to kind of think about it and looking at habit selection through this sort of lens of identity creation. I mean, it kind of harkens back in some ways to sort of the commitment and consistency tendency that Cialdini writes about in Influence and obviously there’s a lot of psychology research behind it. This whole idea that you start to kind of – Once you make a decision, your sort of self-image starts to reinforce, “Okay. Well, I’m the type of person who does that,” and then eventually that becomes part of your identity.

[00:28:31] JC: Yeah, I think that’s true. There are quite a few different studies that showcase the power of it. There are a bunch of voter studies, for example, that show that people are more likely to show up at the polls if you can get them to say – Identify and say, “I am a voter,” rather than say, “I want to vote tomorrow, or I am planning on voting.”

So to adopt the identity of being a voter, rather than to talk about the action of voting, it’s actually more powerful to adopt the identity. I think it does probably have some connection to the commitment and consistency idea that once we state a claim for being a type of person, we end up looking for ways to reinforce that claim. We don't want to conflict ourselves. We don't want to have some type of internal struggle. Often, a lot of the most painful problems, not only for individuals, but also organizations and teams, is some form of identity conflict. The team, or the business, the brand wants to stand for one thing, but the individual feels like they don't stand for that. Or you say you're one type of person, but then you’re faced with a situation where you have to act in a different way. This type of identity conflict can lead to some real challenges. So whenever possible, we want to avoid those challenges. We want to find ways to be in alignment with the identity that we have adopted, and you can imagine how that shapes our behavior in the long run.

Once you adopt an identity and say, “I am a Yankees fan,” or “I am a cross-fitter,” or “I'm a vegan,” or “I'm a democrat,” or “I am a republican.” All of these things become evidence of reasons for you to act in a particular way once you've adopted that set of beliefs.

[00:32:12] MB: Another thing that I think I know you’ve kind of written and talked about in the past and aligns with this whole idea of sort of casting votes every day for the identity that you want to move towards is the notion of never missing twice. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:32:26] JC: Yeah. With any habit, the key is consistency, and you need to repeat a habit enough times not only for the neurological pathways in the brain to be strengthened and for that action or that skill would become fairly fluent, but also enough times for you to believe it, for you to think this is like the kind of person that I am. What I realize, the more that I study people who are lead performers, or top athletes, or top musicians, or top artists, is that they make mistakes just like everybody else. It’s not that they’re really that they’re flawless in some say, but the key is they get back on track more quickly.

So the phrase that I like to use is never miss twice, which is that if you find yourself falling off course, is you’re supposed to workout Monday, Wednesday, Friday and you miss your Wednesday workout, well then all of your effort and intention should go into getting back in the gym on Friday, because what you don't want is it’s never really the first mistake that ruins you. It's always the spiral of mistakes that follow it. Making one mistake is not really a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Missing the Wednesday workout doesn't mean a whole lot if you’re back in there on Friday. But many people find that they kind of adopt this all or nothing mentality with their habits. This is especially true with dieting. People feel like, “Oh, I need to stick to this diet,” and then as soon as they slip and don't follow it to some degree, they feel like the whole idea has brown for some reason, or it’s almost like we think either I should just do what I normally do, or I should follow this diet seven days a week. If I follow this diet only three days a week, well then that couldn’t be useful. Which soon as you state it that way, it sounds ridiculous. Like eating healthier three days we probably would serve you, but for some reason we convince ourselves of these things and it becomes easy to let one mistake spiral into many more, and never miss twice is a nice little strategy that kind of helps keep you on track.  

If you screw up your dinner that night and go off track and binge eat, then make sure that you get back on track and have a healthy breakfast in the morning. If it’s more about holding yourself back on track quickly, it doesn't really matter if you fall off the wagon if you get back on fast. If takes you a while to get back on, then suddenly you build a new habit of not doing the right thing rather than getting back on track with the habit you're actually trying to build.

[00:34:38] MB: Yeah. When you sort of rephrase it and kind of reframe it that way with the dieting example, it makes it so clear that there's no reason to kind of throw everything out just because of one mistake.

[00:34:48] JC: You’re not even really looking to be perfect. I mean, this is one of the things that I think is valuable about the 1% philosophy, which is if you could just eat one meal healthier each week than you are now, then that is an improvement. If you can do – It comes back to my point about evidence, which is a lot of people need evidence or a reason to believe that they’re even capable of change. So many people have tried to change or tried to make improvements and it hasn't worked out, that now they believe that it’s like not for them or something, that they somehow aren’t capable of doing it. But if you can stick to just one better meal each week, well, then you have a reason to believe that you could stick to two and you can kind of escalate and improve from there rather than trying to go straight from 0 to 100 and hope that somehow you could like radically transform your life or transform your results.

[00:35:37] MB: Another thing that I think is a really critical point that you talk about in sort of habit formation is this idea that it's kind of dangerous or incorrect to wait until you feel motivated to do something.

[00:35:49] JC: Yeah. Motivation is interesting. So researchers can track motivation or desire. We want to call that – In the book I call it craving, and I define a craving as a desire to change your state. So pretty much every movement, every choice that you make is driven by the desire to change your state, at least to some small degree. It might not even be conscious that you’re doing that, but you want – You’re in a particular state right now and you want to be in a different state. So you walk into the kitchen and you see a plate of cookies and you envision what it would be like to eat that cookie or that you would feel better or that it would be tasty. So you recognize, “Oh! I’m in a current state that does not involve cookies. I would like to be in the future state but does involve cookies,” and that's the gap between current state and your future state is your level of motivation or desire. When that gap is wide enough, you take an action.  

So that is true, but it also fluctuates. So you can – Scientists can track the level of motivation or desire based largely on dopamine levels in the brain. I want to throw a caveat in here and say that dopamine gets talked about a lot. It's not the only aspect or only molecule that plays a central role in habit formation or in behavior, even though sometimes it gets talked about in this kind of all-encompassing way. But does play a central role, and so I think it’s worth talking about or worth using as an example.

Anyway, dopamine is constantly circulating throughout the brain. But the levels change based on circumstances and situation based on the cues that you're picking up. So when you see a cookie, for example, then dopamine might spike and that spike leads to a rise in desire, or rise in motivation and gets you to act and you go and pick the cookie up. This is true for all kinds of habits. There is one study that showed cocaine addicts a picture of cocaine but only for 33 milliseconds, which is actually too short to consciously know that you have seen any yet still there was a rise in dopamine and desire.

Anyway, the body is continually picking up on different stimuli in the environment and recognizing what's going on. Depending on how attractive a particular stimulus is, the level of motivation and desire in your brain rises or falls. Well, you can already see that there's some kind of issues here, especially related to habits, which is that a habit, by definition, is something that you do repeatedly and do consistently, and motivation, which we just described, is something that rises and falls. So why would you want something that you need to do consistently to rely on something that is inconsistent?

So this is the challenge with picking a habit that requires a lot of motivation, which is that high dopamine levels and a lot of motivation are only going to be there every now and then. So you're faced with this situation where either to do something really difficult, you need to make sure that it happens at a time of day when your motivation is always high, or you can rely on it to be high, or you need to scale the habit down so that it's so easy that you can do it even if your motivation is low. The second approach I think is the more effective one, which is that a habit should be so easy that you should be able to ask yourself the question, “Can I do this habit 98% of the time no matter the conditions without fail?” If you can't answer that question, then you're probably starting too big.

This is a surprising thing for a lot of people. Even when you know that you should start small, it’s still really easy to start too big. So if someone talking about building a habit of going for a run each day, well they might say, “Well, I should start small. So let me only run for 10.” Actually, even that is still way too big. What we’re talking about here is like the habit should be getting your shoes on. So tying your shoes is the only thing you're focused on. Once you get your running shoes on, then you just get out the door and let it go from there. Whether you run or not, whether you actually even take a step, is not the goal. This sounds kind of ridiculous, but it makes more sense when you understand the impact that habits can have on your daily routines and kind of how behavior works in general.  

So there's a story that I tell in the book about Twyla Tharp, who’s a famous choreographer and dance instructor, and every morning she works out for two hours, which sounds like this Herculean feat, this really impressive habit. But she says that the habit is actually not going to the gym. The habit is she wakes up, she puts on her workout clothes and leg warmers, walks outside and hails a cab at the corner of, I think, it’s 91st Street in 2nd Avenue or something like that. Then the habit is she hails the cab, as soon as she hails the cab and gets in the cab, the habit is done, and then she knows that the workout just kind of follows naturally, but she doesn't really worry about the workout itself. She worries about hailing a cab.

That I think is a great example of the impact that habits play in our daily lives. So depending on what research study you look at, habits are defined to encompass about 40% to 50% of our daily behaviors, which is a lot. Things that you don't think about, like brushing your teeth, or tying your shoes, or whether you scratch the side of your face while you’re talking to somebody, or cover your mouth when you laugh or stuff like that. Nobody thinks about all these little habits that are filling up their day.

But I would argue that the true impact of habits is far greater than that for the simple reason of the example I just gave with Twyla Tharp, which is that little habits are like an entrance ramp to a highway. They’re like a fork in the road. They determine what we end up doing consciously for minutes, or even hours afterward.  

If you take the habit of pulling your phone out of your pocket, you pull your phone out, you’re standing in line at the supermarket or something like that and you can be staying in line for five seconds and we’re like, “I need to be doing something. I’m bored already.” So we pull our phone out, and that action only takes two seconds, but the action of doing that ends up determining what you spend the next 10 minutes on. Are you playing a video game? Are you answering email? Or checking social media, and all those things are more conscious choices. You might think carefully about how to respond to a particular email, or think carefully about how to beat this particular level of a video game.  

But the habit of pulling your phone out shaped the set of options that you’re facing and what you’re paying attention to. So I like to call that a decisive moment, and a decisive moment, there's usually – I would say for my day, there’s quite 5, maybe 8 decisive moments throughout the day. They kind of determine how I spend the next hour or two that follow.

So, for example, in the evening, around like 5:00, 5:15, my wife gets home from work and either we change into our workout clothes and then go to the gym, or we sit on the couch and watch The Office reruns or eat Indian food or whatever, and it's really that like brief moment where either we change into our workout clothes or not. That little habit, that decisive moment that determines what is going to happen in the next two hours. If we can master that moment, then all the other stuff, like we’re going to get in the car, we’re going to drive in the gym, we’re going to step under the bar and do the workout. All of that doesn’t even really require that much motivation because you’ve already kind of set the path in motion.

So bringing it back to your original question about motivation and how it fluctuates and how it works and whether we need it to stick to habits, I think it's far better or more effective to focus on mastering a few of these decisive moments throughout the day that end up shaping how you spend the next hour and making those decisive moments as easy as possible, requiring as little motivation as possible, because once you do that, then you find that good behaviors often falls naturally.

[00:43:24] MB: That's a great, great answer and really detailed. I think the phone is a perfect analogy, because it's almost a subconscious reflect to sort of pull out and look at your phone and then you can sort of like wake up 10 minutes later and be like, “What's been happening?”

So I think one of the other major factors that often gets ignored in the habit conversation is the importance of social norms. Can you tell me a little bit about how those kind of impact and shape our behaviors and habits?

[00:43:49] JC: Sure. A social norm is like a collective agreed upon belief by a group or a collection of people. For example, in many cases, these are just implicit. We don't even really talk about them, but like you step on to an elevator and everybody turns to face the front rather than facing the back. If you have an interview, you wear a suit, not workout clothes.

Now, there's no reason that you have to do these things. You could show up at an interview in workout clothes, but you would be judged, it would be weird, because it violates the social norm. It violates the kind of collective agreement about how we’re supposed to act in a particular situation. Much more than we realize, these social norms, these kind of implicit agreed-upon beliefs shape our daily habits and behaviors. The key for making them work for you rather than against you is that you have to realize each tribe, each little subculture or subgroup, has a set of norms that are associated with that group.

Take crossfit, for example. Crossfit has a set of norms. You don't call the gym a gym. You call it a box. You don't call the workout a workout or an exercise, you call it a WOD, workout of the day. They have this kind of like shared language about how they approach it. Then there's all these other kind of implicit things that it means to be part of the culture. If you decide to join a crossfit gym, then you might start eating paleo, for example, or you find yourself buying knee sleeves, or wrist straps, or different types of weight lifting shoes.

Partially, because you need those things to do the workout, but also partially because having that stuff and talking in that is what it means to fit in with that group. This is a very deeply wired trait for all of us. We want to fit in with the group because we want to belong. From an evolutionary standpoint, it was really valuable to belong. We lived in tribes of hunter-gatherers. If you were abandoned, if you didn't belong to the tribe, then that was basically a death sentence on the savanna.

So we’re deeply wired to signal to provide indications to the rest of the people around us that, “Hey, I'm part of this group too.” So we look for ways to do that, and the key is that we look for ways to signal that we belong when we want to belong to that tribe, when we want to be part of that friend group. So this is I think is – This is kind of the powerful punch line, is that you need to find a group where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. That's the first part.

For example, getting in shape. Working out seems like a hassle to a lot of people. It seems like a lot of work, but there are many people who that is just normal for. Going to the gym is just a normal thing. It’s not something that requires a ton of efforts. It’s part of their identity as we talked about earlier. You're looking for a group where your desired behavior, the thing that you want to achieve is part of the normal behavior. But then the second part of that is that you're looking for a group that you also share some type of context with, that you could already be friends with.

One of my favorite examples, my friend, Steve Camp, runs a website called Nerd Fitness. So it's all about fitness and getting in shape, but for people who love Star Wars, or superheroes, or Batman, or Legos or stuff like that have like some kind of nerdy interest as well. So if you're the type of person who loves Star Wars and you feel kind of out of place in the gym, well, making friends with people who are in Nerd Fitness is perfect, because now you have a reason to be friends. You have a reason that you want to belong to the group, that you want to prove to them, “Hey, I'm into this too,” and all of these new people that you’re hanging out with now are also into the thing that you want to achieve, the desired behavior for you is part of their normal behavior already. That's a really powerful way to change, because you have a reason to connect, a reason to belong and you naturally start to soak up some of the social norms, or some of the typical behaviors of that group and culture. 

[00:47:38] MB: That makes a ton of sense. I mean, that kind of simple idea that you’re sort of the average of the five people you spend the most time with. It's thrown around a lot, but it's actually something that's kind of backed by the science and the evidence around what shapes human behavior and what shapes our sort of expectations and intentions and ultimately our habits.

[00:47:57] JC: I mean, social norms are incredibly powerful, so much so that they're almost invisible to us. You can think about the type of school system that you grew up in, or the type of neighborhood that you grew up in. I mean, if you move to a new neighborhood, and then on Tuesday evening everybody sets the recycling out, then you look around and you’re like, “Oh, I guess I need to sign up for recycling. That’s what people like us do here,” because you want to fit in with the rest of your neighbors.

Same reason why people like trimming their hedges and mow their grass. There's no reason you have to mow your lawn, but you do it because you would be frowned upon by the rest of the neighborhood if you were the sloppy one. So there are so many things that we do like that, from the religions that we practice, to the schools that we go to, to the way that we act in conversation, whether or not we buckle up our seatbelt, or whether we smoke inside, or adhere to the laws and don't smoke. Laws and regulations are just a way of formalizing a social norm, formalizing something that we largely, not always, but largely have agreed-upon that this is the way we [inaudible 00:48:52] particular situation. Yeah, in many cases, those social norms end up shaping our behavior in very meaningful ways.

[00:49:00] MB: So what's kind of – For somebody who wants to apply that, how do they sort of seek out or find people who have those social norms that will get them the habits that they want?

[00:49:09] JC: Yeah. It’s a good question. I don't think it's that hard to find people who are achieving the thing that you want to desire. Pretty quick Google search could probably find you people who are – If you want to run a million-dollar business, you can just search for groups of entrepreneurs who do million+ in revenue or whatever. It probably isn't that hard to find that. What is harder is finding people who have achieved that, but you also have something in common with you now.

For this, I think this is one reason why it's crucial to have hobbies or to have a variety of interests to be curious about multiple areas, multiple things, because it gives you more hooks, more surface area to connect with people on. So the more things that you're curious about, the more opportunity you have for making those connections between the people that are already achieving what you want to achieve and the people that you have some kind of interest with, and once those Venn diagrams overlap, you’re like looking for that nerd section.

[00:50:04] MB: I think that's a great point, and having that commonality, that sort of common thread is what enables you to connect with those people and ultimately bridges the gap between – Kind of forms the basis for that relationship that then lets you start to kind of transform your habits. 

[00:50:18] JC: Agreed.

[00:50:18] MB: For somebody who's listening to this episode that kind of wants to concretely start to implement some of the ideas that we've talked about today, what would be kind of a piece of homework or an action item or sort of a first step that you would give them to start implementing these ideas?

[00:50:34] JC: I’ll give you two. So the first step is to downscale your habits until they can fit within two minutes. There's nothing magical about two minutes, but I call it the two minute rule and it’s just a good like sort of starting ground for figuring out if your habit is small enough.

For example, like fold the laundry becomes fold one pair of socks, or do 30 minutes of yoga becomes takeout my yoga mat, or read a book every week becomes read one page tonight. So you're just trying to take whatever the thing is you're trying to achieve and you scale it down so that it’s small enough that you could do it within two minutes.

Then the second piece is to reduce friction so that doing that behavior is as easy as possible. The most effective way to do this, to start, is almost always environment design. So let's take the reading example. If you want to build a habit of reading one page every night, then you could say, “All right. After I make my bed in the morning, I’m going to take a book and put it on my pillow so that when I get in bed at night, the environment is already primed. It’s there. It's ready. I can just pick the book up and read a page.

So you can do this also for habits that you want to avoid. For example, if you – A common example I give is if you walk into pretty much any living room in America, all the couches and chairs face the television. So it’s like what does that room designed to get you to do? It’s designed to get you to watch TV. So if you can adjust that just slightly. You could take the remote and put it inside a drawer and put like a book in its place, you could put your TV inside like a wall unit or a cabinet so that there are doors that close it off and you don't see it as much. You could, after each use, unplug the television and then only plug it back in if you can say the name of the show that you want to watch out loud. So all of these are just little ways of increasing friction between you and the bad behavior.

So I would say if you can do those two things, if you can scale your habits down to just two minutes or less so that they’re really simple and easy to start, then we’re talking about kind of that decisive moment, make the decisive moments as easy as possible. Then if you can redesign your environment to reduce the number of steps between you and the good behaviors so you’re reducing friction or increase the number of steps between you and the unwanted behaviors, so you’re increasing friction for the bad habits, then I find that those two things I think you'll find will make a bigger impact than you would think especially if you scale them.

I mean, the collective impact of living in a room, or an office, or home where you've got 50 little environment design hacks that are all kind of nudging you toward the right thing and away from the unproductive thing, it’s much bigger than you would think. All those little 1% improvement add up. So I think both of those are very actionable and very good ways to start.

[00:53:08] MB: Where can listeners find you and your work and your upcoming book online?

[00:53:12] JC: Yeah. So the book is called Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results. You can find it at atomichabits.com, and we’ve actually put together a variety of bonus materials, extra interviews and downloads. How to apply the ideas to parenting? How to apply the ideas to business? You can get all of that additional material at atomichabits.com. So that’s probably the best place to go and check things out.

[00:53:33] MB: James, thank you so much for coming on the show for sharing all these wisdom and knowledge. So many great kind of insights and ideas. It's been a pleasure to have you here.  

[00:53:42] JC: Awesome. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Double Your Productivity and Focus on What Matters with Marc Effron

In this episode we discuss how to become a high performer at work. We look at one simple question you can use to double your productivity, we talk about how to decipher scientific evidence and determine what’s really important to focus on for maximum performance, we examine how to get quality feedback on your work, share strategies for creating high performance habits and behaviors, and uncover what it takes to quickly improve your performance with our guest Marc Effron. 

Marc Effron is the founder and president of the Talent Strategy Group and publisher of the Talent Quarterly Magazine. He is a Harvard Business Press best-selling author and just released his latest book 8 Steps To High Performance. He has been recognized as one of the Top 100 Influencers in H.R. and he has worked and consulted with some of the largest companies in the country.

• We have so much science that tell us many of the right things to do - and yet its often so hard to discern signal from noise 

• People like writing about individual topics - but often don’t combine them all into one cohesive view of reality as a whole

• “The Three Tiers of Proof” 

• Bottom tier “Research" - a consulting firm does a study and comes out with a report - not peer reviewed, not validated, not controlled - but still may have some value

  1. Next step up - "Science" - someone has published an article in a peer reviewed journal 

  2. The best - "Conclusive Science" - 100 people do the experiment and all come to the exact same conclusion 

• How do we think about parsing out the signal from the noise in reviewing scientific research?

• Does this person have a financial incentive / commercial interest to present this finding?

  1. How does this fit with all the other information out there? Does it align with most of the existing information?

• What are the Levels of proof that we should look for when we evaluate scientific research?

• Meta studies are one of the most helpful tools - its the highest level of proof for scientific research 

• Start with the simplest ideas and move from there - begin with the most simple and powerful concepts and then go from there.

• The challenge is that we are attracted to novelty - and yet it’s often the simplest things that create the best results 

• Success is about the basic execution of the fundamentals at a high level - its not about secrets, its not about short cuts - there is no secret to success - it’s about doing things that are simple work and well in a consistent and disinclined way

• High performers and high performing companies execute consistently on the basics

• High performer is someone who out performers there peers on a consistent basis - performers and behaves at the 75th percentile of their peer group - over a sustained period of time 

• Peer group is a key component of this - it raises the standard substantially 

• “Whats the one thing I can get better at right now?” 

• How do we find the biggest lever that can we move / change / improve to take ourselves to the next level - what’s the simplest ONE THING that you can focus on improving first?

• If you want to get better you’re much better off asking others for feedback than just looking at yourself

• What’s your disciplined approach for gathering feedback from others about what makes you so successful?

• How do we gather quality feedback?

• Source of opinions and quality of opinion are not equal. 

  1. Find your high performing peers

  2. Find your high performing people at your bosses level that you would like feedback from

• If you’re a solo entrepreneur your customers or investors are probably the best people to ask

• If you’re at the top of your game it’s a lot more challenging to get that quality feedback because people spend their time sucking up to you

• 360 degree feedback tools are helpful for this (more anonymous the channel the better you are likely to get real feedback) 

• Goal setting is very scientifically validated tool to improve performance

• How can you maximize your performance by increasing the stretch of what you’re trying to achieve

  1. Have 2, at most 3, BIG things that will make the largest contribution to your organization

  2. Is your daily life organized around the 3 big rocks you need to move this year to create the biggest possible impact for your organization?

  3. "What would it take for me to deliver 2x next year than what I delivered this year?"

  4. Ask your boss: I want to deliver 2x next year - what’s the ONE thing I could do differently to deliver more on that goal? (Overcome the fear)

  5. It’s not like they haven’t thought of this before - they already have an answer for this - they already THINK IT, they just haven’t told you yet 

     1. If you work with them, they already have these thoughts 

• Can we set goals that are too big and too ambitious? How do we strike that balance?

• Ask yourself - is your big goal too disengaging? Could it be harmful to the organization?

• What Exercises are there for determining those 2-3 big things we should be focusing on?

• When you get feedback from people - you’re the LAST PERSON to know the information - everyone else already knows it 

• Everyone is fallible and can improve at something

• What does it mean to “behave to perform?"

• There many different ways to succeed, but a limited number of ways to fail 

• What are the similar ways in which we all tend to fail?

  1. What are the things that consistently de-rail you?

• Given where my company is - what needs to happen for me to be the most high performance I can be? What are the few behaviors that matter the most for performance right now?

• Three “buckets” of behaviors that cause us to derail:

• “Moving away” behaviors - behaviors that cause you to put distance between you and other people. Passive aggression, shyness, etc. 

  1. “Moving against” behaviors - putting you into other people’s space and make them want to spend less time with you

  2. “Moving towards” behaviors - suck up behavior, managing up and the people below you don’t like it

• The three buckets are predictable and can be determined, so that you can fix them. 

• Focus on what you can change and ignore the rest. 

• There are thousands of stories per year of people who were born with no meaningful advantage and can become high performers 

• There are many fixed traits of your life, background, abilities etc that you can’t change - focus on what you can change 

• How do we accelerate the growth of our most important factors of high performance?

• It’s the experience we have that grow us fastest - the most big, challenging, scary, risky experiences you have the faster you’re going to learn. 

• Every day you should ask yourself - am I in an experience right now that is advancing me as fast as possible?

• It’s easy to get comfortable, but comfort is the enemy of growth

• We often exaggerate the downside and underestimate the upside

• Evolutionary programming gets in the way of the most optimal strategies for high performance

• How the “Cake story” can transform your perspective on simplicity and execution 

• Homework: Action begins with an assessment of where we are today - how do you compare against the 8 step framework - then determine what your ONE key priority going forward should be 

• Homework: Ask your boss: I want to deliver 2x next year - what’s the ONE thing I could do differently to deliver more on that goal?

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [SoS Episode] Self Help For Smart People - How You Can Spot Bad Science & Decode Scientific Studies with Dr. Brian Nosek

• [SoS Episode] The Biological Limits of the Human Mind

• [Website] The 8 Steps

• [Book] The Leadership Machine: Architecture to Develop Leaders for Any Future by Michael M. Lombardo and Robert W. Eichinger

• [Book] What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

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 two million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries and part of the self-help for smart people podcast network.

In this episode, we discuss how to become a high-performer at work. We look at one simple question you can use to double your productivity. We talk about how to decipher scientific evidence and determine what’s really important to focus on for maximum performance. 

We examine how to get quality feedback on your work, share strategies for creating high-performance habits and behaviors and uncover what it takes to quickly improve your performance with our guest, Marc Effron.

Do you need more time? Time for work, time for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our e-mail list. It's called How You Can Create Time for the Things that Really Matter in Life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the e-mail list at successpodcast.com.

You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our e-mail subscribers. We recently pre-released an episode in an interview to our e-mail subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience, and that had tremendous implications because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first. With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live, exclusive interview just for e-mail subscribers.

There's some amazing stuff that's available only to e-mail subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the e-mail list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Or if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you're on the go, you don't have time, just text the word “smarter" to the number 44-222. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we discussed the shocking truth about the danger of positive thinking. Is it always good to visualize your goals? Could there be potential downsides to daydreams and fantasies about the future? How can we identify what stands in the way of our goals and take concrete action to get there?

We looked at these questions and much more along with a proven evidence-based methodology for creating effective behavior change to actually achieve what you want with our previous guest, Dr. Gabriele Oettingen. If you want to learn what it really takes to achieve your goals and dreams, listen to that episode.

Now for our interview with Marc.

[0:03:00.3] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Marc Effron. Marc is the founder and president of The Talent Strategy Group and publisher of The Talent Quarterly Magazine. He's a Harvard Business Press best-selling author and just released his book, 8 Steps to High Performance. He's been recognized as one of the top 100 influencers in HR and has worked and consulted with some of the largest companies in America. Marc, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:26.2] ME: Matt, super happy to be here.

[0:03:28.2] MB: Well, we're super excited to have you on the show. To start out, I'd love to dig into one of the core themes that you write and talked a lot about in your most recent book, this idea that many people have made the topic of high performance really convoluted and confusing and as you put it, more challenging than it needs to be. I'd love to talk about how has that happened and how have you tried to approach it from a different perspective?

[0:03:54.0] ME: Sure. Well, it always just seemed strange to me that we have so much science that tells us so many of the right things to do that was never really synthesized and packaged into one easy to understand place. In the beginning of my book, I even say wouldn't it have been nice if somebody had simply sat us down as a 18-year-old and said, “Look, there's a bunch of things that we know work and there's a bunch of things we know don't work. Let me tell you what those are.”

That's really what I try to do in the book and it hadn't happened up at this point, I think not because anybody had a intent not to do it, but folks love writing about individual topics. There's a lot of writing about emotional intelligence, or about strengths, or about little things that people claim work, but no one really has a commercial interest in saying, let's just sort through all of this and figure out what's most powerful.

[0:04:46.1] MB: It's funny, I'm a huge fan of Charlie Munger and we talk a lot about him on the show and his approach to the world as the lens that he caused worldly wisdom. A huge component of that is integrating all kinds of different disciplines of knowledge into a coherent, practical vision of reality that pulls from really any disciplines that are necessary to form a cohesive view of the whole.

[0:05:10.6] ME: The good news in this field, we talk about high performances, we actually do know a lot about what is conclusively proven to be helpful. The facts are out there. This is really about us assembling those in a way that's easy for folks to understand and apply.

[0:05:29.0] MB: When you talk about the concept of something being conclusively proven, and I know you dig into this a little bit in the book, tell me about what's that threshold that you use and I have a follow-up after that, but I want to just dig into that first.

[0:05:42.4] ME: Sure. Let me frame up a really fast way that I screen information that comes at me. I look at three tiers of proof. Those tiers are bottom tier research. Research means a consulting group did a study, could be a huge study, it could be a small study, but consulting firm does a study, comes out with a report, that's research. No one's looked at that, that the core data, nobody's validated it, it might not have been done in a very controlled way, but it might be absolutely fine but it's independent.

Next step up, what I would call science. Science means that somebody has published an article in a peer-reviewed journal and the rest of us have a chance to read through that and say have they do the experiment. What were the conclusions? What's the level of proof? There's some independent thinking that we can all review. Then to me, the highest level of proof is what I would call conclusive science, which is that a hundred people will do the exact same experiment and almost all of them come to the exact same conclusions.

When I'm sorting through information I'm looking for science, for interesting findings, but conclusive science to recommend something, but there's a ton of science that never gets replicated, never gets proven to be true over time. I like the belt and suspenders level of confidence that you get, whether that’s conclusive science.

[0:07:04.3] MB: It's funny, Brian Nosek who's the founder of the replication project, or the reproducibility project is a previous guest in the show and we went – we explored this topic in depth in that interview. For listeners who wanted again, that's another great episode to talk about. I'd love to get into, there's so much information out there that's often hard to sort out the signal from the noise. How do you think about parsing that and especially for somebody who's a layman, or doesn't have a PhD, how do they think about combing through scientific research and really determining is this article valid? Is it is it relevant? Is it peer-reviewed, etc., versus is it pseudoscience or not really as believable?

[0:07:49.3] ME: Yeah, and it's a big challenge Matt, is most folks aren't industrial, organizational psychologists and they shouldn't have to be to figure out what it takes to be a higher performer, but we all have a lot of the information flying at us every day and having the ability to really sort through that at least separate the wheat from the chaff, if not the great wheat from the pretty good wheat is a critical skill.

I’m a skeptic by nature, so my starting screen is just a an average guy looking at material is is the person who's presenting this material to me, do they have a commercial interest in me believing the outcome? If it is, “Hey Matt, if you stand in your head for an hour and a half, you're going to have a IQ that's 30% higher than it is today and I happen to sell some mats that make standing on your head even more comfortable.” Then you might want to doubt that finding. If it's presented by a group who probably doesn't have an obvious commercial interest in the outcome, I'm at least willing to look further and then I go back to that screen I just set up, which is well, is it research?

Meaning, I just gathered some data. Is it science? Somebody else is seeing this, or is it conclusive science? A lot of folks have actually proven this to be true over time. I would just say that the average Jill or Joe looking at a claim just needs to take that very skeptical eye and say one, why is this person bringing forth this information? Is it because they want to sell a product? Nothing wrong with that, but look carefully at that. Then what's the level of proof that you as an individual need to believe something and how does this fit with all the other information, to your point around Charlie Munger, all the other information you have about what makes somebody successful? Does it seem to line with that, or if it contradicts everything you've ever thought of? Maybe it's not true.

[0:09:39.3] MB: I think the first thing that I find really interesting with that and there's some other piece of that I want to break down and dig into, but you outlined the power of incentives. As Munger talks about as well, incentives can have such an ability to shape people's behavior. I find it really fascinating.

[0:09:53.2] ME: Absolutely. I think, what we need to understand is how do we best align incentives with either what you want your employees, or what you want yourself to do to be a higher performer? Because we like to think sometimes that it's dollars that do it, or it's big opportunities that cause folks to be more focused or to apply more effort, but a lot of what we know from psychology is that motivation one, a decent chunk of it comes from different personality types. Some folks are going to show it to be naturally more motivated and not need an incentive.

Also that things big goals, well that might not seem like an incentive, actually do probably more to drive people in a productive direction than saying, “Well, here's a big check if you get something done.” There are very few folks who are actually going to deliver more because you write him a big check. If you get them unbelievably interested and involved in their work, that's probably the best shot to ensure they're delivering over what you expected.

[0:10:52.5] MB: Before we jump in to the eight steps of high performance, I want to come back and look a little bit at this concept you touched on a second ago, which is the idea of level of proof and the a tool that you use to evaluate the quality of scientific information. Other than the three-tiered level, are you looking at certain things like the quality of meta studies, sample size, etc., or what are some of the tools that you use that listeners might be able to apply for themselves when they think about calibrating levels of proof on scientific information that they're consuming?

[0:11:24.0] ME: Sure. Well, I think you bring up a very helpful one. Well, you can't always find a meta analyses to prove your point. It's great if you can. For those folks who weren't up on the lingo, meta analyses is simply an analysis of a lot of studies. There are about a hundred studies that test whether drinking coffee is good for your mental health, then a meta-analysis would look at all those hundred studies together and figure out well, do they tell us anything when we look at them collectively instead of looking them individually?

Think of that as highest level of proof. If you look at those hundred studies, that's more helpful than looking at one. Yes, I love meta analyses and that's most of what I use in eight steps to high-performance to prove these points. While there might be some interesting fringe findings out there in the world of science around high performance, my view back to our original discussion is well, if we know what works, why don't we simply focus first on explaining to people in a very simple way, “Hey, we know these eight things are helpful. Just do these. If there's some other things around the edges, you can think about those later.”

That meta analyses, or the meta analysis that folks are going to review, that's going to probably give you the soundest direction and ideally is the highest level of proof, but also recognize now meta analyses depend on someone doing those. You have to hope that your favorite scientist has fallen in love with the same topic that you have and has actually done the work that's going to allow you to draw the conclusion.

[0:12:52.0] MB: I think that's a great starting point perspective, this idea that we should start with the simplest and most proven ideas, implement those and that's not necessarily to discount that maybe some of this other research that's less validated may still have some value, but it's just saying if we only have a limited amount of time and a limited amount of resources and energy to focus on, let's start with the things that are the simplest to execute and the most scientifically validated.

[0:13:15.0] ME: In the challenges that were attracted to novelty. I find this all the time in my field, I spend most of my time helping big global companies make their HR processes work better and I hear every week, we've been doing the same thing for years. We'd love to do something different. Okay, well what if a CFO said, “Hey, we've been beating earnings every quarter for years. We'd love to do something different.” Just as stupid. If you're setting goals and people are performing at a very high level, then great, keep setting goals.

If people have been behaving badly, then great, do something different. The starting point should be if you know certain things work, let's focus on flawlessly executing those certain things, as opposed to saying, “Well, here is something new and different. We should try that.” I think part of that is just human nature. We get bored.

Every morning when we start our car, the engine turns over. We should be happy with the boredom that produces. We don't want the drama of our car starting up sometimes and not starting up sometimes. Part of this is getting comfortable with the boredom of disciplined execution around high performance.

[0:14:19.5] MB: I think it's funny and this is probably one of the most common findings if you look across self-help literature, or business books, or biographies of great achievers is this fundamental idea that and I think paraphrasing a quote from Jim Rohn from many years ago that success is not magical and mysterious. There's no shortcuts. It's really just the execution of the basic fundamentals at a really high level.

[0:14:44.1] ME: Yeah. I couldn't agree more with that. What I find both in working with corporations and individuals is most of the corporations who succeed and most of the individuals who succeed don't do anything that any of us haven't heard of. They don't have a secret to success. They simply do everything that the rest of us know works well in a very consistent and disciplined manner. It is that focused execution that matters 95% of the time.

Half of that is just a challenge of to my earlier point, avoiding the novelty of, “Oh, I'm bored. I'd like to do something different.” High performers and high performing companies say, “Yeah, it's boring. It's boring and successful, so I'm just going to keep doing it.”

[0:15:28.0] MB: I think that's a good segue to get into more around some of the findings around high performance. Start out, I'm curious how do you define, or think about what is a high performer?

[0:15:39.4] ME: I think that's a great starting point. We all would love to think that we’re high performers and I'm sure most of us try pretty hard to be high performers. It's fair to say that a high performer is likely somebody who both delivers and behaves at the 75th percentile, versus their peers on a consistent basis. There are a few key phrases in there. One is performs and behaves, so this is not you're the high-performing jerk, or you're the really nice guy who doesn't get much done. You've got to perform at the 75th percentile on both, which means better than three out of four people that you work with, and over a sustained period of time.

This is not that you have a good project, or a good month, or even a good year. This is man, Matt just shows up every single day doing great stuff. I mean, it really is that level of disciplined high performance that separates out those who were truly high performers from those who aren't.

[0:16:39.1] MB: It's funny, I think another key element of that idea that almost seems throwaway phrase, but really highlights a core component of I think the way that you present and think about high performance is that you just tossed in there that it's your peer group, right? It's not necessarily comparing your performance to the spectrum of everyone, but it's saying the people who are your peers, how are you performing against them as a particular group.

[0:17:04.3] ME: Yeah. It's a high standard. As human beings, we hate being compared to others. Social comparison is one of the things that makes our brains more nervous than almost any other thing that we do. It's very easy since most of us overestimate our abilities when we're doing social comparison at work and saying, “Hey, I'm at least as good as that guy, or at least as good as that gal,” to overestimate where we genuinely are.

It can make it very challenging to understand am I truly a high performer against an objective standard? Part of that goes to being open about the fact that all of us can probably get better at at least one thing and we should probably regularly be asking those around us what's the one thing I can get better at right now, and just being continually gathering information to understand how close am I to really being a high performer and what's the biggest lever I could pull right now to get closer to that level?

[0:18:01.0] MB: I love that approach. How do we, and we might be jumping around a little bit but how do we think about finding that one thing we can improve and determining whether that's really the lever that's going to move the dial the most?

[0:18:14.1] ME: Sure. I'm going to be channeling Marshall Goldsmith for a lot of this, production move with Marshall. He wrote What Got You Here, Won't Get You There, a great executive coach. What Marshall would say is well, the best way to find out is to ask other people. Again, that's probably one of these scariest things we can do is say, “Hey Matt, I'm really trying to be a better entrepreneur. Do you have one suggestion for me about how I can do that?”

The reason most of us don't ask people that question is because most of us don't want to hear the answers. A lot of this is getting in our mind in the right place to say, “I'm sure that I can get better at something and I'm sure the person I'm speaking to can probably get better at something.” We're on neutral ground. We can each get better at something. If I really want to get better, I'm probably better off asking others than asking myself since I'm probably a little bit delusional about how good I am. A lot of this comes down to saying what's my disciplined approach, so back to discipline, for gathering information about how others see me and their view about what's going to make me more successful.

Because well, we might want to say well, I'm sure there's an objective standard we can measure Marc against and see how he does and if he's high or low in certain elements, we’ll change those. More effective is if Matt and the people who work with Matt are my peers, they're likely the ones who are going to determine my future. If they tell me a different way to behave, or a different way to perform, that's probably pretty good advice for the primary thing that I should be focusing on.

[0:19:44.1] MB: Let's get a little bit more specific. How do we think about the actual practical application of starting to cultivate or create that disciplined approach for gathering feedback?

[0:19:54.5] ME: Well, part of it is to understand whose opinions are most valued in the environment you work in? It may be that your best friend is a high performer and you should listen to him or her, and maybe they're the office slacker and their opinions probably aren't quite as valued. Step one, it's understanding who are my high-performing peers? That would be one group that we'd want to look at.

The other question be who are other high-performing leaders at my boss's level who I would like to get some feedback from? For your peers, again, it might feel a little bit threatening. I guarantee you they have something they would like to tell you about how you could be a better performer, so put that in the back of your mind and just have the guts to ask them that one question. “Hey, I'm trying to get better at X. Do you have any suggestions for me for how I can do that?” Ask the high-performing peers, you likely know who they are if you don't ask your boss. “Hey, I'm trying to get even better at my job. I’d love some more input. Can you tell me the few people who are at my level who I should speak with and who might have some great suggestions?”

Then for the folks at your boss’s level as well, for people you might work with on projects, or have presented to in the past, same thing, grab a cup of coffee with them and say, “Look, I'm really trying to get better at what I do. I'm trying to be really open about the fact that there are things I can improve at. Would you have a suggestion for me about something that I could do going forward that would make me more effective?”

Don't categorize it. Don't rate their answers. Simply say thank you, because I guarantee you the people that you work with have an idea in mind for how you can be a better performer. They are happy to tell you, but they're likely not going to offer that advice up unless you ask.

[0:21:39.8] MB: For people who are entrepreneurs, or are at the top of their organizations, how do they think about gathering that same feedback and parsing it for right down, would call it believability?

[0:21:49.8] ME: Sure. Well I think a couple of thoughts. One is if you're a solo entrepreneur, then your customers are probably the people you should ask. These are the ones we're going to have the most interaction with you, or investors if they're a component of your ecosystem. If you're at the top of the house, it's a lot more challenging. If you were a CEO, or a C-suite member, then there are a lot of people who spend their time sucking up to you, and they're not going to give you accurate insights and information about what you could do differently. They're going to tell you how great you are.

Even when you beg with them to be honest, they likely won't be. Simple 360 feedback tools are very helpful in doing that. For those of you who aren't familiar with the 360, it's simply asking people around you in a structured survey hey, on the dimension of communication, how does Marc do? On the dimension of explaining strategy, how does Marc do?

Getting some structured feedback that way sometimes can get more honest and practical information back to an individual. For entrepreneurs, I'd go to customers first. For somebody who's at the top of the house, if you don't think Walter is going to be super honest with you, then let’s start with some a structured tool that makes it feel a bit more anonymous and maybe a bit more safe because of that.

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[0:24:49.2] MB: Let's shift back. I know we went down that rabbit hole, which I think was really fruitful. I want to come back to the larger structure of the steps to high performance and begin with as you touch on a little bit the first step which you talked about is having big goals and how do we think about that and tell me a little bit more about the science behind that.

[0:25:09.1] ME: Sure. There is such incredibly strong science around goal-setting, how to set goals, what do we get from goals. It's amazing how many companies and how many leaders aren't as good at this as they could be. When we talk about setting big goals in the book, there are really two components; one is just what it sounds like. How could you maximize your performance by increasing the stretch of what you're trying to achieve?

Now, that doesn't mean necessarily working harder. It might, but it doesn't necessarily mean that. What it says is you're probably already incredibly busy. You're doing lots of things, but are you focusing on the two, or at most three big things that are truly going to make the largest contribution to your organization?

Is your daily life organized around here, the three big rocks I need to roll this year and while I have 30 other things to do, I know I need to get these three things done because that's what's going to contribute most to my organization.

Asking yourself something as simple as what would it take for me to deliver twice in 2019 when I livered in 2018, I find is an amazingly helpful starting place. Now for most folks are going to roll their eyes and say there's no way I could do that. Cool, think through the question. If I had to deliver twice and figure out what delivery means, deliver twice what I delivered in 2018 and 2019, what would I need to do differently. I guarantee you it will bring clarity to your thinking.

Man, I probably need to stop wasting my time on X. We got this pet project, but it doesn't really contribute to one of those three big things. Wow, you know what? I probably need to improve my staff quality. I've let that one guy hang on. It will clarify your thinking amazingly well, and maybe you won't get to twice, but maybe you'll get to one and a half times your performance. Or heck, if you could increase your performance by 25%, I guarantee that your boss, or your customers, or others you work with would be thrilled. Part of it is simply saying, “Hey, what does a bigger goal look like?” I start by saying, “Well, how could you get to 2x what you do today?”

[0:27:24.0] MB: Is it possible to set goals that are too big, or overwhelming?

[0:27:28.5] ME: Yeah, there's always the chance that you're simply fooling yourself about the possibility of achieving a goal. There's probably a few different ways of looking at that. If there's no harm done, so if you're saying, “Hey, I sold a hundred widgets this year. I'm going to try and sell 200 widgets next year,” and you only end up selling a 150 widgets. Well wow, you did a great job.

If it's something where you say, “Hey, we're going to set a safety standard at a certain level,” but it turns out that's an unrealistic safety standard and people get injured because of it, then that's different. I think part of it is saying, “Is my big goal going to either be disengaging?” I just don't think I'm going to get there, so I'm not going to try hard. Or might it actually be harmful to myself, or to the company. I'm going to work myself to death, or it might increase the risk of the organization. Yet certainly possible to get to those levels, I would suggest most of us have a ton of stretch left on us that wouldn't get us anywhere near those points.

[0:28:31.1] MB: I love the question what would it take to deliver 2x next year? Are there other questions, or tools that you use maybe thinking around how do we determine, or select what those two to three big priorities are?

[0:28:44.8] ME: Sure. Well, I think a few things. One, if we're trying to figure out how do we leapfrog performance again, that one question to trusted folks that you work with, something like, “Hey, I would love to deliver twice where I delivered this year boss. What's the one thing you would want me to do differently that would get me closest to that goal?”

Again, getting to a focused outcome is incredibly helpful in these areas. It's really easy to get overwhelmed if you say what are three things, or five things, or eight things I can do differently? Here's where I want to go boss. I want to go from New York to Los Angeles faster than anybody else has ever gotten there. Tell me the one thing I could do that will help me to get there faster. Ask your boss, ask your high-performing peers. I guarantee you that they will give you very practical advice around that.

[0:29:36.2] MB: I think it’s a great question and really focuses things. It's funny, even thinking about actually asking that question there's a little bit of fear that comes up with that. How do you think about overcoming that piece of it?

[0:29:48.2] ME: Sure. Well, the starting point is the people you're talking to already have an answer waiting for you. It's not like they haven't thought of this before. They see mad at the watercooler and they think to themselves, “Hey, good guy, but I wish you would also do X, or I wish you would stop doing Y.” They already have the answer. They just haven't told you. You can either pretend that they don't have it, or you could say, “Hey, do you have any thoughts for me about how I can either do X, or stop doing Y to be an even higher performer?”

I think that's where a lot of us get wrap around the axle is that we think, “Oh, these people have never thought about me, or how I could do better. Therefore, I don't want to either surprise them, or cause them to be anxious by ask them a question about me.” I guarantee you, if you work with them, they have an idea about what they would like you to do differently going forward.

[0:30:37.0] MB: Such a great reframe and I think really clarifies. They're already thinking it about you. It's just a question of whether you can get that information and use it to improve yourself, or not.

[0:30:45.6] ME: Yeah. This is the classic and we see this a lot in the work that we do. If you give somebody a 360 feedback report and it might contain some things that are unpleasant, or uncomfortable and they hide it away in their desk drawer. I always tell them you're the last person to know this information. Everybody around you knows this, because they're the ones who filled in the 360. You putting it in your desk drawer actually doesn't hide that information from anybody.

Just starting with a view that hey, we're all fallible people, we can all improve at something, probably be a higher performer the sooner I know those things. Does it take some guts? Absolutely. Is there a potential for embarrassment? Absolutely. Ask yourself, how long would I like to wait before I have that information?

[0:31:29.4] MB: Great question. I want to I want to continue down and make sure we get to cover some of these other themes and ideas. The next concept you talk about is this notion of behaving to perform. Tell me a little bit more about that.

[0:31:39.7] ME: Sure. Well, I think that a lot of us think that we behave well at work, we're well intentioned, we show up doing what we think is right, but to what we were just talking about, it's likely that our behaviors aren't necessarily perfectly aligned to what it takes to be a high performer. It's helpful to look at the science and understand will the science tell us anything about what allows people to show up successfully at work in terms behaviors.

There is a lot of good science. Part of the challenge is there are many different ways to succeed, there are a limited number of ways to fail. That probably means there's two things we should think about; one, is there a particular set of behaviors given where my company is right now that are going to make me more successful than not? If we're in an entrepreneurial mode, are there certain things I need to do now? If we're a turnaround mode, are there certain things I need to do now that I might not naturally do?

Step one is understanding given where my company is, what are the specific behaviors that are going to help me be a higher performer? Perhaps more importantly is because we all tend to fail in very similar ways, understanding what we call derailleurs and there's actually a quick and easy little quiz in the book to figure out what your derailleurs are, it's actually your derailleurs that are going to hold you back in your career and hold you back from being a high performer.

The good news is that while there are many ways to fail, we can identify the limited number of ways you're likely to screw something up. If we can figure that out, this is all personality-based, once we can figure that out, it's very easy to say, “Hey, in this particular situation I'm probably more likely to do things that are going to screw things up and so I'm going to be aware of that and correct for that in advance.

A lot of the key point around behavior is simply understanding in your organization what are the few behaviors that matter most for performance right now, but then just as an individual understanding what is my personality give me in terms of derailleurs that I need to be aware of and correct for?

[0:33:42.9] MB: What are some of those common ways that people fail, or what are some of those derailleurs?

[0:33:48.2] ME: Well, an easy way to frame that is there are three buckets of behaviors that cause us derail. One bucket we would call moving away behaviors. Moving away. These are behaviors that are going to cause you to put distance between you and other people. It might be that you're passive-aggressive. You're going to say one thing in public and do something else in private. It might be that you're very shy, or reserved and so you don't really like to interact with people that much. These are all behaviors that are going to cause people to not want to connect with you. Obviously, that's going to probably lower your ability to be a high performer and certainly slow down your career growth.

They're moving away behaviors. They are moving against behaviors. Those moving against behaviors are going to be things that put you into other people spaces. Matt, if you and I are in a meeting, I'm going to make sure you hear all of my good ideas. Boy, I've got a lot of them. Why don't you just be patient while I tell you how smart I am? Or I might be the person who's waving at my hand around in team meetings, because I just need to make my point.

Things that really put you into other people's spaces and cause them to say, “I don't really want to spend a lot of time with this guy, or I don't see this person being able to perform at a higher level because of the way they're behaving right now.” There are those moving away behaviors, there are moving against behaviors. Then there are moving towards behaviors.

Moving towards behaviors, think of those as suck-up behaviors. Those are behaviors where you're really good at managing up, but you're not really good at managing down. The challenge for people who do that is you're seen as somebody who probably doesn't support your team well, you're seen as somebody who is probably more interested in their own career success and preserving the status quo, than challenging things, or representing your team member as well.

Those are the three buckets, but you can put almost all of the ways that people mess up at work into those three buckets. The good news is they're predictable. As I mentioned, we have a quickly quiz by one of the world's leading personality psychologists in our book, and there are obviously longer tests that you could take as well, but these are very predictable behaviors based on our personalities. Once we know what those behaviors are, once we know how we're likely to mess up at work, we can be aware of that and catch it before it happens.

[0:36:12.5] MB: I know this is a topic that you touch on a lot in the book, how do we think about the fixed components of our personality, or attributes versus the ones that are malleable or changeable?

[0:36:24.5] ME: Sure. Even the subtitle of the book Matt, is focused on what you can change and ignore the rest. Because I'm sure, we've all heard of our careers, people blaming things in their past for where they are professionally today. Well, I was brought up this way, or I didn't have this advantage.

Well, it's certainly understandable that some people are probably born on third base and think they hit a triple and some people are born with in great environments with great parents. We can't do a darn thing about that. There are certain fixed components of how we walk into work every day. Our personality is fixed, our intelligence is fixed. How we were brought up is fixed. The way we look, our height, our appearance is fixed. All of those things; intelligence, personalities, socio-economic background, our looks can influence performance and it's completely unfair. Let's state for the record, completely unfair, given that you cannot do a darn thing about any of that.

When you step into the working world, one of the few things that you can control which is what the eight steps are and what's the most effective path around that. I say in the book yeah, there are certainly people who are going to start the race a number of meters ahead of you. If they aren't as engaged, don't have as high of ambition, aren't as well prepared, you can pass them in that race. There's thousands of stories every year of people who are born with no meaningful advantage being higher performers.

This is basically saying don't necessarily stop fighting against the injustices that you might have suffered, but recognize here's where you are today. Given what you can control, what's the plan?

[0:38:04.8] MB: I think that's a great framework and especially this idea of focusing on things that are within your control and not really spending too much time or energy getting stuck on the factors that are beyond that.

[0:38:15.5] ME: Yeah. I mean, let's admit it, life sucks sometimes. Great. We'll admit that, then we'll move on. We all have things in our background that are advantageous and disadvantageous to us being higher performers. Cool. Given where you are right now listening to this podcast, what can you control and what's the next step you're going to take?

[0:38:34.6] MB: How do we think about as we move into that place of taking action and trying to grow and improve our abilities, thinking about the third step that you've outlined, which is growing yourself faster. How do we think about accelerating the growth of the really key factors to high performance?

[0:38:52.0] ME: Sure. Well, the great news is the science here is very clear that it's the experiences that we have that grow as fastest. Not that your education isn't valuable, it is a fantastic foundation. As I tell folks, I'm really glad that my position went to medical school, so he got his education. I'm even happier that he's had 30 years of practice, because if all he had was many years of schooling, I wouldn't let him near me.

That goes to experiences are what matters. The more big, challenging, scary, risky experiences you have, the faster you're going to learn. Every day you should think about am I in an experience right now? That might be your job, it might be a project you're on, but am I in an experience right now that I think is advancing me faster in my career than any other experience I can have? Because the more big challenging scary experiences you have faster, the faster you're going to grow, the faster you're going to be a high performer.

[0:39:54.6] MB: I love that question. I think it's so powerful and really another great clarifying question to think about the activities and things that you're focused on and whether they're truly pushing you to grow.

[0:40:07.5] ME: It's easy to get comfortable, Matt. We all like getting comfortable, I like getting comfortable. Sometimes you just say, “Man, haven't I tried hard enough long enough already?” Maybe, for high performers the answer is always, “Yeah, and I'm just going to do it again today.”

[0:40:24.2] MB: I mean, that's another common theme that we see again and again across many, many different fields of people that we interview on the show, that the more you embrace discomfort, or get comfortable being uncomfortable, the faster your growth is.

[0:40:38.7] ME: Yeah. Again, this all goes back to personal risks. I think most of what the science would say, most of us really overestimate downside risk and underestimate upside opportunity. Even to something as Bezos what we were talking about before, asking people around you how you can improve. The only real risk there is you might be personally slightly embarrassed by what you hear.

The upside benefit is massive. You might be able to remove a barrier that was causing you not to be able to move forward. A lot of this is simply we need to get out of our own ways and understand we can all get better, and the only way that's going to happen is by asking other people how we can do that.

[0:41:18.2] MB: It's funny, the very first episode that we ever did of the Science of Success many years ago is called The Biological Limits of the Human Mind. In that episode, we talked about how our evolutionary programming for millions of years has primed us to have certain mental shortcuts that can often usually work well and especially for the evolutionary environment, the hunter-gatherer world in which we evolved are really finely tuned. In often in today's world, those innate reactions, or mental shortcuts can cause serious problems.

I think that's a great example of one of them when we – especially with social risks, we often massively exaggerate the downside and really don't understand the real opportunities that are on the other side of it.

[0:42:00.7] ME: Even, let's take something as simple as networking and connecting, which outlines step four. For introverts like me, the thought of walking into a social event, walking up to somebody and introducing myself is about the least desirable way I could possibly spend my time. I know that the downside risk is one, that I might be a little bit embarrassed, or maybe I'll say something slightly stupid. The upside benefit is huge, but more importantly the science would say almost everybody in that room is thinking the exact same thing.

I'm not in a room full of a wonderfully successful extroverts who just can't wait to talk to me. I'm probably in a room full of people just like me. That should give most folks comfort that yeah, I might feel a little bit awkward, but the person I'm speaking will probably feel the same way and we'll both feel less awkward together once that conversation actually starts.

[0:42:54.5] MB: I'd be curious, coming back to this idea that you should be putting yourself in experiences that are advancing you as best possible, or creating the best possible growth experiences for you, I'd be curious if you're willing to talk about to dig in a little bit around some of the science and the research behind that, because I found that to be a really fascinating conclusion.

[0:43:13.8] ME: Sure. The whole experiences pieces, relatively new I guess in the field of science. This is something that Bob Eichinger and Mike Lombardo went back at the Center for Creative Leadership, I think of the late 70s, early 80s came up with really by researching successful executives, and really understanding what had allowed successful executives to move faster than those who had either plateaued, or who have been unsuccessful.

What they really identified was it was the quality and the diversity and the challenge of the experiences that those executives had had, and as importantly, their ability to learn from those experiences. It's one thing to throw Marc into four challenging experiences, but if my brain can't process the learnings from them, I'm no better after those four than I was before. Step one is you put people in those big challenging experiences, but step two is either if you're somebody's boss or if you have the discipline to do it yourself, coming out of that experience to say what are the few big things I really learned from this and what am I going to be doing differently in the future because of that?

Ideally even, asking those questions before the experience. If I say, “Hey, I'm going to take this big new job.” It's scary and it's a little risky, what are the three things that I'm taking this job to prove to myself, or taking this job to learn? Type that somewhere, tuck it away and revisit it once a quarter. Okay, I hope to learn these three big things. Am I learning them? Am I learning them at the pace that I want to? Are they still the right three things to learn?

Structuring those experiences, not simply throwing yourself into a series of different things is going to be the best way to extract the learning from it. It is I would say good solid science isn't as conclusive as some of the other things that I talk about in the book. Nope. I think most of us in this field have found is it seems it proves itself true even if we don't have the belt-and-suspenders level of meta analytical confidence we’d like to torn out of.

[0:45:24.0] MB: One other thing from some of your previous work that I found to be really fascinating that I thought in many ways ties some of these ideas together was the cake story. I just wondered if you could share that anecdote as just a simple lesson for thinking about execution and high performance.

[0:45:39.8] ME: I would be happy to share the cake story, Matt. The cake story begins with a leading business magazine, publishing what it says is conclusive research, that if a CEO makes and serves cake to his or her staff, that their performance will increase. Humor me on this one.

Two CEOs read this article. They're convinced that if they make and serve cake to their staff, that their performance will increase. They're both very excited about doing this, but neither of them has ever made a cake before. They each turned to their HR leader and asked for some help and coming up with a great cake-making and serving plan.

At the first company, this HR leader is very excited about this task and he decides to go on a big benchmarking expedition and flies around the world to interview companies who makes great cakes and to interview renowned bakers, and he hires McKinsey to do a multi-million dollar benchmarking study on making great cakes. When he's gathered all those data, he's come up with what's truly a brilliant cake-making plan.

On the day that it is his turn to present this plan, he gets a big push cart, like the ones you get at Costco and he loads up on that push cart, 212 ingredients, a 500-page instruction manual, 38 pans and an industrial-strength oven. He pushes into his boss's office and he says, “Boss, this will allow you to make a world-class cake.”

The CEO is very committed to the core concept, make cake to increase performance and engagement, but what's in front of him looks rather involved and he asks the HR leader if there is another way of doing this. The HR leader sighs and rolls his eyes and explains to the CEO that he has benchmarked all of the best companies around the world. In fact, this is the same cake-making plan that Google uses.

His boss thanks him for the effort, shows him from the office, but he looks at what's laid out in front of him and realizes that as committed as he is to this core concept, bake cake, serve cake to increase engagement, this is just too involved. He's not going to get it done. CEO doesn't make the cake, performance decreases, the company suffers.

Now over the second company, the HR leader is just as excited about this task, but she decides instead of a big benchmarking expedition, she is going to go back to the core science of making cakes, just to make sure she understands the fundamentals really well. In doing that, she recognizes there were only seven ingredients required to make a cake. She gathers those seven ingredients together and she's about to walk into her boss's office to present her plan and she thinks to herself, “Now my CEO has never made a cake before, even with these seven simple ingredients he's going to screw something up somehow. How can I add some value to this? How can I make life a little bit easier?”

She looks at the dry ingredients that are in front of her, the flour, the sugar, the baking soda and she decides she'll mix those ingredients together into essentially a cake mix. She takes that cake mix and a cup of milk, one egg, one pan and a one-page instruction manual into her boss's office and says, “This boss will allow you to meet the core business goal of making and serving cake to your staff to increase engagement.” The CEO is pleased. He makes the cake, performance increases, the company prospers.

If that story sounds a little silly to you, just substitute whatever the most recent leadership fad is that you're familiar with and ask yourself is that really the simplest most straightforward way to get the job done? The challenge and the whole point of the story, Matt, is that we grossly overcomplicate what it takes to be a high performer. The fundamentals are in front of us. The fundamentals are incredibly well-proven by the science. We just simply need to understand and then flawlessly execute those fundamentals.

[0:49:49.5] MB: It's a great anecdote and I think underscores the core principle in many ways that you've shared throughout this interview. I'm curious, for listeners who want to concretely implement some of the themes and ideas that you've talked about on the show today, what would be a piece of homework that you would give to them as a concrete action step to start taking action on this?

[0:50:10.3] ME: Sure. Well, I think all great action starts with some assessment of where we are today. You're not going to get to a destination, unless you know where you're starting from. To me, the starting point is simply how do I think I currently compare against these eight steps? Ideally, you'd buy the book understand that. If you don't want to buy the book, just go to the website, theeightsteps.com, read through the eight steps and simply rate yourself on a one to three scale, three I'm fantastic, two I've got some work to do, one I'm pretty horrible.

Even with a fast assessment like that, understand what your one, underscore one priority should be going forward. Then back to what we've talked about earlier, ask a few folks around you, “Hey, I'd love to be better at connecting with others. Do you have one suggestion for what I could do to be better at doing that?” I guarantee you those two simple steps are going to put you in a really good path to high performance.

[0:51:08.3] MB: For listeners who want to find out more, do some homework and find you and your work online, what's the best place to do that?

[0:51:14.5] ME: The best place is that same website, theeightsteps.com. Or if you just want to read a lot of what I've written before, you can go to our corporate website, which is talentstrategygroup.com.

[0:51:26.1] MB: Marc, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing all this wisdom and sharing a really beautifully simple framework for thinking about the fundamentals of high performance.

[0:51:35.1] ME: My pleasure, Matt. Best of luck to all of your listeners for being even higher performers.

[0:51:40.6] 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 e-mail. My e-mail 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.

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The Shocking Counter-Intuitive Science Behind The Truth of Positive Thinking with Dr. Gabriele Oettingen

In this episode we discuss the shocking truth about the dangers of positive thinking. Is it always good to visualize your goals? Could there be potential downsides to daydreams and fantasies about the future? How can we identify what stands in the way of our goals and take concrete action to get there? We look at these questions and much more, along with a proven evidence-based methodology for creating effective behavior change - to actually achieve what you want - with our guest Dr. Gabriele Oettingen

Dr. Gabriele Oettingen is a Professor of Psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg. She is the creator of the WOOP process and author of the book Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside The New Science of Motivation. Her work has been featured in The Harvard Business Review, NPR’s Hidden Brain, and much more!

• Positive thinking must be positive, right?

• The shocking and counter-intuitive science behind the truth about positive thinking

• The myth of “positive thinking” and “being optimistic” is very seductive - but it can be dangerous and misleading

• Positive fantasies and daydreams about the future can be very helpful when we think about improving our mood - but when it comes to actually executing and creating results, positive fantasies can have a serious negative impact on our behavior and our results

• Should (or can) we dismiss positive fantasies and daydreams?

• Positive fantasies and daydreams are important because they give our action a direction to move in, and yet they impede actually taking action in that direction?

• Why is it that positive fantasies and dreams stop us from achieving our goals? 

• Positive fantasies make you feel like you’ve already attained the desired future and the impression that you’re already there

• Studies show that inducing positive fantasies about the future causes a drop in energy and motivation

• Positive fantasies and daydreams sap our energy for moving towards our goals

• Mental Contrasting of the Positive Future and the Inner Obstacles of Reality standing in the way of that positive future

• What is it in me that stands in the way of realizing my goals?

• Emotions

  1. Anxiety

  2. Irrational Beliefs / Limiting Beliefs

  3. Bad Habits

• By identifying your inner obstacles you will understand if you want to, or if you can, overcome it 

• You need energy and motivation to overcome your obstacles

• The difference between a fantasy, a daydream, and a goal 

• Mental contrasting helps you prioritize your goals and figure out the right ones to pursue 

• The myth of “positive thinking” and “being optimistic” is very seductive - but it can be dangerous and misleading

• Most of our wishes are more challenging, difficult, and complicated than we think they are

• Sheer positive visualization won’t help you get to your goals, and may be harming you and making it less likely for you to achieve your goals 

• Positive visualization creates a measurable physical change in your body that makes you less likely to the action and create results 

• The idea that you have an obstacle in the way will stir up the energy necessary to overcome your obstacles

• Thinking about your obstacles will produce strategies that will help you overcome your obstacles

• The Conscious Exercise of Mental Contrasting triggers nonconscius processes and the conscious processes do the work

• The work of Mental Contrasting builds associative links to the subconscious that produces the behavior change necessary to achieve your goals

• 3 Key Processes that predict effective behavior change 

• Cognitive associate link between obstacle and behavior - Reinterpretation of reality based on this framework

  1. Energization towards your goals

  2. You can effectively process feedback towards your goals without your self esteem or ego being hurt

• Conscious work of Mental Contrasting leads to automatic subconscious behavior changes

• You can complement Mental Contrasting with If/Then Plans called implementation intentions

• If I encounter ___OBSTACLE___ then I will ___SOLUTION

• The combination of Mental Contrasting + Implementation Intentions it the “WOOP” Strategy

• Wish

  1. Outcome (imagine)

  2. Obstacle (imagine)

  3. Plan (if/then)

• It only takes 5-10 mins to apply the WOOP methodology - 5-10 mins of concentrated focus

• Slow

  1. Uninterrupted

  2. Focused

  3. By yourself

• WOOP builds the subconscious framework that creates the behaviors that result in action

• WOOP is a skill you can learn and its different because it draws on automatic subconscious processes to create behavioral change

• How to Your wish needs to be both challenging and feasible

• WOOP is a discovery tool - dig a little deeper into your wishes - what is it really that stands in the way?

• Implementation Intentions - if situation X arises, I will do Y

• Implementation are a research validated strategy for linking your obstacles with key behaviors to make sure you implement/execute your plan

• Homework: WOOP for yourself (details on woopmylife.org)

Thank you so much for listening!

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [Website] WOOP My Life

• [Website] About WOOP

• [Website] Science of WOOP

• [Article] Implementation Intentions by Peter M. Gollwitzer and Gabriele Oettingen

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[00:00:11] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than 2 million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries and part of the Self-Help for Smart People Podcast Network. 

In this episode, we discuss the shocking truth about the dangers of positive thinking. Is it always good to visualize your goals? Could there be potential downsides to daydreams and fantasies about the future? How can we identify what stands in the way of our goals and take concrete action to get there? We look at these questions and much more along with the proven evidence-based methodology for creating effective behavior change to actually achieve what you want with our guest, Dr. Gabriele Oettingen. 

Do you need more time; time for work time, for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our email list. It's called How You Can Create Time for the Things That Really Matter in Life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the email list at successpodcast.com.

You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our email subscribers. We recently pre-released an episode in an interview to our email subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience. That had tremendous implications, because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first. With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live exclusive interview, just for e-mail subscribers.

There's some amazing stuff that's available only to email subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Or, if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you're on the go, you don't have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222.

In our previous episode, we went deep on the science of performing under pressure. We looked at why some people perform under pressure and others don’t. We discussed the skill of flexibility and fluid intelligence, explored the differences between stress and pressure. Looked at the concrete strategies for managing both of those in your life and much more with our previous guest; Dr. Hank Weisinger. 

If you want to learn how to perform when it matters most, listen to that episode. Now, for our interview with Gabrielle. 

[00:02:55] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Dr. Gabriele Oettingen. Gabriele is a professor of psychology at New York University and the University of Hamburg. She’s the creator of the WOOP process and the author of the book; Rethinking Positive Thinking: Inside the New Science of Motivation. Her work has been featured in the Harvard Business Review, NRP’s Hidden Brain and much more. 

Gabriele, welcome to the Science of Success.  

[00:03:19] GO: Thank you for having me. 

[00:03:21] MB: Well, we’re very excited to have you on the show today, and I’m really pumped to dig in to the kind of research and the conclusions that you’ve uncovered, which I think kind of go against a lot of these sort of traditional kind of conventional wisdom of much of kind of the self-help world. 

[00:03:37] GO: Yeah. At the beginning, it was interesting, because our findings were counterintuitive, and actually it went against our own expectations. We thought positive thinking must be positive, but then when we did our first studies, we found that positive thinking actually can be detrimental when it comes to realizing these positive daydreams and fantasies which we have for the future. 

So positive thinking in terms of daydreams and fantasies and visions about the future can be very helpful when it comes to increasing our mood or exploring all the different possibilities we might have for the future. But when it comes to fulfilling our wishes and to reaching our fantasies, then they are detrimental. 

For example, we found the more positively women who were involved in a weight reduction program fantasized and daydreamt about their success in the program the less well they did later on. Three months later, they lost fewer pounds. One year later, they lost fewer pounds, and even two years later. 

But also in other areas, in the academic area, in the professional area, in the interpersonal area, and the house area. For example, the more positively university graduates fantasized about a good transition in work-life, the fewer dollars they earned two years later, the fewer job offers they had gotten. What is interesting, the fewer applications they had sent out, or the more positively students fantasized about a good grade in the exam, the less well they did. Or in the interpersonal domain, the more positively students fantasized about getting together with a person they had a crush on, the less likely they were to actually get together with that person. Or with the elderly in the house domain, the more positively hip replacements surgery, patients fantasized about an easy recovery. The less well could they move their joint two weeks later, the less well was their general recovery and the fewer steps they could actually walk. 

It seems as pleasurable as these fantasies and these daydreams are, they are a risk for not actually reaching our fantasies and daydreams. Then we thought, “Oh my! What shall we do? Shall we just dismiss these positive fantasies and daydreams, or we can’t really?” Because these positive fantasies and daydreams, they come from our needs. 

When you have a need, meaning you have a deficiency. For example, you don’t have enough water. Then you suddenly start fantasizing about getting to the water fountain, about drinking a nice fresh glass of water. So we did experimental studies where we compared with the people with the need, let’s say for water, would fantasize more positively about drinking water than people who would have a need in a different area, and that’s exactly what we found. 

You can also do it with psychological needs. For example, if you deprive people of meaning, they will fantasize about a meaningful job. Or if you deprive people of interpersonal relationships, they suddenly fantasize about meeting a friend. So we cannot dismiss these positive fantasies and daydreams because they give action the direction. But why do they then impede the realization of these fantasies? 

We did some studies for that question too. We asked, “Why is it that these positive fantasies actually kind of stand against attaining them in the future?” We found that these positive fantasies make people feel already having attained the future. They positively fantasized and visualize the positive future in their mind, and that gives them the impression that they’re already there. They’re already in the goal box, if you want. If you are already there, what do you do? You relax. So energy goes down. 

With these studies, for example, where we induced positive fantasies about the future as compared to negative fantasies, or questioning fantasies, or factual thoughts, or no thoughts at all, and we found that when you induce these positive fantasies, that people actually relaxed. They feel less energized. You can also measure that by blood pressure. So systolic blood pressure goes down, meaning these positive fantasies give action the direction, but they sap our energy. 

Then the next question was, “What can we do so that people who positively fantasize about the future get the energy of actually going the cumbersome way to reach these positive fantasies and daydreams?” Now, what will be the answer to that question? The answer to that questions might be they say compliment these positive fantasies and daydreams with a healthy sense of reality. That’s actually then how we proceed at this research. We said, “Okay, what you need to do is you can make people fantasize about the future and positively visualize all these desired events.” But then you need to make them aware that they’re not already there.  How can you do that? You just sort of ask them to find and imagine the obstacle in the way, the obstacle in themselves that stand in the way that they actually go the cumbersome way or realizing these positive daydreams and fantasies. 

What you need to do is what we call mental contrasting, mental contrasting of the positive future and the inner obstacle of reality standing in the way of attaining the positive future. If you do that, so you think about, “What do I really want of the future? What is my dearest wish? What is it that I want? Not what other people want me to do necessarily. What I want? What do I want for the future?” Then you identify this wish and you summarize it in a couple of words. 

Then you say in order to really stir up these positive energies, you say, “What would be the best outcome if I realized that wish? What would be the best thing? How would I feel?” Then you identify the best outcome, and then you imagine that best outcome, and that’s exactly this positive fantasies and daydreams, which we’re just talking about.

Instead of stopping there and indulging in these positive fantasies, you now change gears and you say, “What is it in me that stands in the way that I realize this dear wish and that I experience the positive outcome? What stops me? What is it in me that impedes me? What is my main inner obstacle?” 

That’s neat, because now you want to stand, what is it in your way, and it might be an emotion, anxiety. It might be an irrational belief. Somebody said at some point something about you which you took to heart. It might be a bad habit. Just these kind of automatic things you do. But by identifying what it is in you that stands in the way, you will find that inner obstacle. What you do then, imagine, you imagine that inner obstacle occurring. You will understand what you can do to overcome that obstacle and you will also understand that you need energy to overcome that obstacle, and you will understand whether it’s worthwhile to overcome that obstacle. 

So by identifying that inner obstacle, you will understand whether you actually want to overcome it and whether you actually can overcome it. If it’s not too costly and you can overcome it, you will now fully commit to realizing your wish and experiencing that outcome. So now you have a goal. You don’t have a kind of uncommittal wish anymore. Now you have a goal. You say, “Okay. Yes! That’s what I want to go for. That’s what I really want.” 

But if the obstacle is too costly or simply not surmountable, then you will say, “Hmm, maybe I should adjust the wish a little bit. Not 7 times in the week exercise, for example, but maybe just 4 times. You say, “Well, at the moment, it’s not a good time, because I’m in the end of my exams. But as soon as the exams are over, then it would be a better point in time.” 

Or you will say, “This is just too costly, or it’s simply not surmountable,” and then you can let go and say, “Okay, I invest my energy in more promising endeavors and not in trying to reach a wish that is not attainable after all.” 

So what mental contrasting does, it helps you prioritize your wishes, and commit to those and pursue those that are dear to your hear and are feasible and de-commit or not pursue those goals or those wishes that are either too costly, not opportune in your life right now, or are simply not reachable. 

Mental contrasting helps you to clean up your life to say, “Yes! This is what I really want. Yes! Let’s go for it. And this is what I better let go.” That’s the reason why it is a need, because you get clarity about what you want and what you can do and where you want to put your energy and your resources in.

[00:16:03] MB: There’s a couple of places I want to dig in, and there are so many different things that you’ve brought up that I want to explore further. Kind of coming back to the original premise, which I find really fascinating, you basically set out to discover the benefits of positive thinking and yet sort of counter to your own expectations or predications about what your research would show, your work kind of started to peel back the layers and reveal that in many instances the science shows that our daydreams and our fantasies can actually negatively impact our progress towards our goals. 

[00:16:33] GO: Yes, exactly. That’s so counterintuitive not only because prior research has not focused on that, but it’s also counter our culture that we can think, “Oh! Positive visions, positive kind of fantasies, daydreams, they’re always good.” Not necessarily. It depends on for what? Yes, for mood, for exploratory reasons, they’re good. You feel good. They’re pleasurable. But at the same time, they bare the danger that you will never get it.  

[00:17:11] MB: So how did we kind of come up with this or kind of land with this cultural myth that we should think positive, that we should be optimistic, that all of the kind of traditional or typical kind of jargon that you’ll see in many self-help books and a lot of personal development literature, how did we end up with that and how do we kind of move beyond it? 

[00:17:34] GO: Well I wish I could have an imperative answer to that. I certainly don’t, because I don’t know how these myths developed overtime in history in our culture. But it’s very seductive to think that just by positively fantasizing about the future, you would already reach the positive future. It’s so seductive to think you could reach the positive future without actually going the cumbersome way to reaching it. Most of our wishes are more complex and they are more difficult to reach than just stretching out the hand and doing it. 

Now, you could say, “Well, you don’t need mental contrasting if the wish is super easy, or if you can just do it automatically.” Then you don’t need it. But as soon as a wish a little bit more difficult, needs a little bit more effort, needs a little bit more complex thinking to be reached, then sheer positive visualizing will just not bring this future to you. 

[00:18:51] MB: So tell me a little bit more about kind of the mechanism by which this sort of positive visualization or daydreaming and positive thinking starts to kind of sap our energy or prevent us or slow us down from sort of achieving our goals and dreams.

[00:19:08] GO: Well, what we find is that people who are positively fantasizing, versus those who are induced to negatively fantasize or produce questioning fantasies or produce factual thoughts and just experimentally induced, that these positive fantasies, which are induced, that they lead people to relax. This is actually measurable by feelings and by systolic blood pressure. We find that people feel already there. They mentally feel themselves already in place. That’s what we then kind of disturb by doing mental contrasting. We interrupt that, “Oh! I’m already there,” by putting in the obstacle of reality and say, “Hmm, what is standing in the way that you are already in the goal box, if you want? What is that in your way?” 

By making people aware what it is that stands in the way, we can actually interrupt that complacency that people have when they just kind of go on the little visualization journey into the future. The idea that you have an obstacle in the way, then will stir up the energy to overcome that obstacle. The resistance which we put in by making people aware that there is an obstacle in them will produce this energy to overcome that obstacle, and it will produce, when you think about the obstacle, it will produce strategies that are opportune to overcome that obstacle. It doesn’t matter whether this obstacle is kind of emotional, or whether it is an irrational belief, or whether it is a bad habit or so, it produces anyway these strategies to overcome that obstacle. 

In mental contrasting, the non-contrast processes that actually produced the behavior change, produced the prioritization, and then the active unsuccessful pursuit of the goal and the let go of the wish. These mechanism, they are non-contrast. That is really neat, because mental contrasting is a counterstrategy. Okay, you define the wish, you define the best outcome, you imagine the best outcome, you define the inner obstacle, you imagine the inner obstacle. What then happens is if you have an surmountable wish, then non-contrastly, meaning outside of your awareness, the future will be connected to the obstacle of reality. The obstacle of reality will be connected to the behavior to overcome the obstacle. 

So these associative links are triggered by the contrast technique of mental contrasting, and these associative links are completely uttered of people’s awareness and they then predict the behavior change. They are the mediators of behavior change. 

What happens then also is that people automatically, without that they know, will understand that the reality is an obstacle. So the party on Sunday night or Saturday night is now an obstacle to doing well on the exam on Tuesday. It’s not a fun anymore. We interpret it in non-contrast terms as an obstacle, rather than a fun party. 

The idea really is that these conscious exercise triggers these non-contrast processes, and these non-contrast processes then do the job for you. What then happens too is that the energy goes up, and we measure that again by systolic blood pressure. When you do mental contrasting of a feasible wish, then the systolic blood pressure goes up and it predicts then the increased effort and the increased success. 

What happens then as a third component is that when you get setbacks or when somebody criticizes you or have negative feedback, that you process that negative feedback really well, so you get all the information out of these negative feedback. So you don’t take it personally. Meaning, you are not defensive. You’re not defensive. You take the negative feedback. You take the setbacks and helpful, useful information to reach your wish. 

These three processes; one, cognitive, associatively between future and the obstacle in between the obstacle, and the behavior to overcome the obstacle. The reinterpretation of the reality as, “Oh! This is an obstacle. The second component of mechanisms is the energization. So that’s motivational. First cognitive, second motivation, more energy. Now I have the energy ready to help me reach my wish. Then the third component or the third mechanism is that I can effectively process the feedback, the kind of setbacks, and I will process them without that myself concept or my self-esteem is hurt. 

All these three processes will the predict the behavior change. So it is as if you automatize your behavior. So you do the conscious exercise that leads you to automatically behave in a way that you do what needs to be done to reach your wishes, or also to let go from your wishes. So you can actually rely on these processes, which you aren’t even aware of. That’s neat, because if you apply it, you do the strategy of mental contrasting, then you realize that you’re behaved in a way that you programmed yourself beforehand. So you kind of automatize yourself.  

What you can then do as well is you can complement this mental contrasting with if/then plans. This is a strategy which has been discovered by Peter Gollwitzer, implementation intentions in the scientific literature, or if/then plans. So what you do then is you take your obstacle after you have imagined that and then you ask yourself, “What can I do to overcome that obstacle?” and you think about an effective action or an effective thought and you formulate that and you put it in front of your eyes. Then you make an if/then plan. You say, “If,” and then you imagine the obstacle, “then I will,” and then you imagine the behavior to overcome obstacle. 

The combination of mental contrasting and the implementation intentions is what we call WOOP, which is a four-step strategy, which contains find a wish that is dear to your heart. Your wish, what is really important to you? Find the best outcome. How would you feel? What’s the best outcome? Imagine the best outcome. Find the inner obstacle that is standing in the way and imagine that inner obstacle. Then find the behavior to overcome the obstacle and make an if/then plan. If obstacle, then I will behavior to overcome obstacle, and that’s WOOP. You can apply WOOP wherever you are. You just need about 5 to 10 minutes of quiet. Actually, you can also do WOOP in a New York subway, where it’s really loud. That doesn’t matter. But it needs to be kind of background noise. You can’t do anything else. Because if you know from our research, it takes mental effort. 

So from our neuropsychology research, we know it draws on the processes that are typical for mental effort. So you can’t do emails or you can’t talk to anybody apart from doing WOOP. WOOP means you take 5 or 10 minutes and they’re just for you and everything else can wait. You need to be slow. Because WOOP is an imagery technique, you need to be slow, otherwise you can’t produce the imagery, and you need to be interrupted. 

Again, you can do it in the New Your subway, but you need to be interrupted. You need to be slow and just for yourself. Everything else can wait. Then you go through these four steps. By going through with outcome, imagine. Obstacle, imagine. The plan, if obstacle, then I will behavior to overcome obstacle, you trigger these automatic processes. They do the behavior change without that you are even aware. 

So I will every day, for example, in the morning, I WOOP my wishes for the day. You can WOOP life-changing wishes. But you can also WOOP every day more [inaudible 00:29:36] wishes. Then I go through the day, I WOOP maybe one, or two or three of these wishes in different areas of my life. Then I go through the day, and then in the evening I think, “What did I do today?” Very often, I think, “Oh! I’m surprised how well this meeting went,” or “I really had a good interaction with my colleague,” or “I really finished this paper,” or something. Then I remember, “Oh! This is what I WOOP’ed this morning.” 

So you actually act automatically without that you’ve realized that you do what is in the service of your wish fulfillment. 

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[00:32:06] MB: I want to come back to the kind of core components of the WOOP framework before we get into kind of some examples of maybe how to use it, the two kind of component pieces I think are really important and I’d like to dig in to each of them. Kind of coming back to this idea of mental contrasting, I think it’s a really powerful point that you’re making that this idea of using sort of the tool of mental contrasting, which is a conscious exercise that we sort of spend time and focus on, we can actually start to, kind of as you said, build the associative links to the subconscious that are ultimately going to kind of lay the foundation and the groundwork for sort of automatic behaviors changes down the road. Is that correct?

[00:32:46] GO: Yes, that’s correct. That’s exactly it. That’s why it is so different from other behavior change strategies which focus more on increasing the attractiveness of behavior change or increasing the self-efficacy that I can do it, or which focus on framing, learning goals versus the performance goals, in Carol Dweck’s work, for example, or which focus on social comparison processes. In the alcohol literature sometimes, people use social comparison that they say, “Yeah, other people drink less than you.” Then people kind of for a certain time get a little scared and they drink also less until they get together with their buddies again. 

But these other behavior change strategies, they might be effective too. But WOOP is really different, because WOOP draws on the automatic processes. Because it draws on the automatic processes, it has a chance against the automatic processes which are already in place. Meaning, you build new goal habits by replacing the bad old habits. Habits, yeah, they’re automatic. But you can only change these automatic processes, these bad habits, by having processes that are kind of strong and non-conscious as well, because these habits are non-conscious processes and you need to have other kind of non-conscious processes which goes against them. That’s the reason why this is so neat, especially when it comes to more complicated behavior change problems such as you have some substance obvious, or kind of bad habits, like whatever the bad habits, interpersonal habits, or kind of personal habits, or also work habits, like procrastination or interpersonal habits, that you get really angry or strong impulses that you want to, “Ugh!” eat the chocolate cake. It is neat, because you instill automatic processes that have a chance against the automatic processes, which are already in place in your life.  

In don’t want to say anything against the other behavior change strategies. They have been proven effective too. But WOOP is different because it draws from automatic processes, because it’s a skill you can learn, like riding the bicycle, or swimming, or riding, or whatever. It’s a skill, which you can learn, and the more you practice WOOP, the better you get, the more expert you get. You can WOOP any wish you have, in the academic domain, in the professional domain, in the interpersonal domain, in the house and fitness domain, any wish qualifies, long-term, short-term, trivial, non-trivial, whatever. 

The only thing you need to do is you need to have these 5 or 10 minutes and then you need to say, “What is the wish that I really would like to fulfill for myself that is a little challenging, but feasible?” If you do that, if you identify this wish – Actually, WOOP is a very good way of understanding what you really want, because it asks you for a wish, and it asks you not for any kind of wish, “What do you want?” No. It asks you, “What do you want?” because when you actually answer this question, then you understand what your needs are. These wishes come from our needs. So you actually have a chance to really sort of give in to your needs. Then by understanding the outcome, the best outcome, you can really imagine the wish fulfillment, and that’s important, because you need this passion. You need this passion for the future. 

WOOP only works for wishes that are dear to your heart. So you need to identify a wish that is dear to your heart, the outcome, imagine the outcome. That’s the first step. That’s really sort of you anchor your wish in the sky. You anchor it in the future. Then you ask yourself, “In me, what is in the way?” 

Why do we kind of instruct people to ask in me? Because if you have the external obstacles, you can’t change them. You can’t change your boss, you can’t change your company, you can’t change your context, you can’t change all of these things. You can’t change the weather when it comes to fitness. But you can change how you react to your boss, your company, the weather, whatever. By understanding what is it in me that stands in the way, then I can also overcome the obstacle. So the wish needs to be challenging, but feasible, best outcome, imagine, and then the inner obstacle. Very often, it’s an emotion, an anxiety, anger, resentment, whatever, but it’s your emotion, and you need to identify. Nobody else can. It’s a discovery tool. WOOP is a discovery tool, because you will discover, “What do I really want? What’s the best thing? What is it that I kind of desire?” Then, “Why don’t I do it? What is it in me? Why don’t I do it? Why don’t I go for it?” 

By identifying that obstacle, you might have only identified an obstacle to that wish. You might also identify the obstacle to other wishes. You can dig a little deeper. Dig a little deeper into your wish. What is it really that stands in the way? That will be very interesting. I mean, with a little humor, you will discover. You don’t need to tell anybody, but find out what is it in you that stands in the way? Then you can react to it by saying, “Okay, how can I overcome that?” and do an if/then plan.  

[00:39:06] MB: Tell me about – I want to come back and sort of understand how the phenomenon of mental contrasting, and then after that, I want to dig in to implementation intentions. But how does mental contrasting specifically sort of harnessed by the WOOP framework and the WOOP process? 

[00:39:22] GO: Well, mental contrasting is WOOP. We just renamed it. In the scientific literature, it’s called mental contrasting with implementation intentions. The mental contrasting part is the wish part, and the outcome part, and the imagery. Mental contrasting is an imagery technique. Then the obstacle, the obstacle in the way and the imagery of the obstacle, that’s mental contrasting. 

[00:39:49] MB: So just to clarify, it’s basically kind of the combination of visualizing your sort of goals and dreams and desires and then sort of doing a little bit of visualization, thinking around, “Okay, what are the actual obstacles to that.” Contrasting those two things and then trying to sort of reconcile them back to the actions and stuff you’re going to take as a result of sort of thinking about your goals, thinking about the obstacles with sort of equal weight and importance, and then ultimately determining how you’re going to kind of bring those two things together. Is that correct? 

[00:40:19] GO: It’s correct, but it’s not quite correct. First of all, you never say, “I’m just thinking about my goals,” because there are so many exercises. Yeah, list your goals, or what is your goal? “Sure, I want to go to college,” or “I want to have a promotion. Yeah, sure I want that.” But mental contrasting is so different. It’s asks you for a wish. It’s asks you what do you really want for your life, for the next four weeks, for today? What do you really want?

By understanding what you really want, you will understand much better where your needs are. You don’t need even to think about the needs, because the wish is an expression of the needs. But think about what is dear to your heart. What actually do I want in life? What do I want today? What I want to get out of this meeting? What do I want tonight when I – Mental contrasting with implementation, it is  WOOP, is for times when I’m stuck. What do I want? I want to get out of here. For times, when I’m really doing fine, but I could do better. What do I want for tonight? I want to have a good evening tonight with my friend. What do I want for the next phone call with my mother? 

Whatever it is, it needs to be dear to your heart. We are not used anymore to think about what do I really want? Take yourself into slow motion before you do WOOP. Its’ not that you need to have slow motion for long meditation sessions, or 8 weeks mindfulness or something. No. No. No. No. It’s just that you need to slow yourself down for the next 5 or 10 minutes and then say, “What do I want for today?” 

Let’s say in the academic domain, or I the professional domain, or, yeah, in the fitness domain, what do I want for today? Then you go slowly to one best outcome. Not for the best millions of outcomes. No. For one best outcome. Again, for one best obstacle. Not many obstacles, just one. The central obstacle, the most important. That’s important, because otherwise these are automatic processes can’t be triggered. Again, then one best behavior to overcome obstacle. 

So it is a little counterintuitive for what we are used to do where we say, “We have goal setting strategies,” or we have other strategies where we want to list all the goals and see where we are. In that perspective it’s really different. It’s an imagery technique, and therefore you need to be slow, and therefore you need to be quiet, and therefore you need to have these 5 or 10 minutes for yourself. 

[00:43:28] MB: Tell me the kind of concept of these implementation intentions. What is an implementation intention and how do we, using kind of the WOOP methodology, how do we sort of integrate that into our sort of planning, or goal setting, or visualization techniques? 

[00:43:44] GO: Now, implementation intention has been a concept discovered by Peter Gollwitzer, which had been around for a while, and there is a huge literature on the effectiveness of implementation intentions, and it come in the form of if situation X arises, then I will do the goal directed behavior Y. 

Now, by doing that, you connect the situation with the goal directed behavior. Now, we talked about mental contrasting where we said, “One effect of mental contrasting is that outside of people’s awareness, the obstacle is linked to the behavior to overcome obstacle.” What we thought is what if the obstacle is really hard to overcome? Then we thought, “Okay, let’s add the plan. Let’s add an implementation intentions to make this link between the obstacle and the behavior to overcome obstacle even stronger.” That’s what we did. 

In the context of mental contrasting, the implementation intention takes the form of if the duration, this time it’s an obstacle, then I will behavior to overcome obstacle, which is the goal directed behavior. So we integrate the implementation intention into the framework of the mental contrasting. Now, what is neat that’s so far the research on implementation intention has focused on contents, which were given by the researchers, or by the educators, but it was pre-fabricated. 

Now, the problem really with this research then is, that you need to put in the content from outside. If you want, it’s kind of put in quotation marks, is “paternalized.” But how can people make these implementation intentions just by themselves? How can they produce them by themselves? By doing mental contrasting, because mental contrasting can refer to any content or any wish, outcome, and obstacle, by finding the obstacle, we guaranteed that the situation part, the [inaudible 00:46:02] part, the implementation intention is relevant and it’s recognizable. 

So now you can have an implementation intentions, which is cut to the kind of personal needs. Then the same for the behavior to overcome the obstacle. That has been pre-fabricated in past research, but now the person herself or himself has come up with that behavior to overcome the obstacle, or to react to the situation. Meaning, now we emancipate people. They can have their own implementation intention. They don’t need a researcher, or the educator, or anybody to tell them what to put in the if part and what to put in the then part. 

So we made by inventing WOOP, or by combining mental contrasting with implementation intentions, we made it possible that implementation intentions are kind of individualized for each person, so that each person can now come up with their own wish, outcome, obstacle and their own if/then plan. So we emancipate people. 

Because people are the best experts of their lives, it is a tool that you can apply now to any wish you have. You can make as many WOOPs as you have wishes. That’s really nice, because now you don’t need a coach anymore, or you don’t need a trainer, or a therapist anymore, I mean, for daily life. It’s different in clinical cases. But you can emancipate yourself by using WOOP, and WOOP therefore can be considered a companion to your daily life and a companion that helps you to get inside into your wishes, to prioritize your wishes, and then also to attain your wishes.  

[00:47:57] MB: Tell me about the kind of striking the balance between having our wishes be sort of challenging enough, but also feasible enough. 

[00:48:06] GO: Yeah. I mean, our research has shown that when the wishes are feasible, high expectations, then people really go for it, commit to them and attain them. If they’re not feasible, not at all, then people will say, “Oh, this is too much energy for wish fulfillment,” and they will de-commit and will let go. So that’s prioritization. That’s what we say in the WOOP exercise, take a wish that is feasible. Take a wish that you can actually attain, because then you can use WOOP in order to actually fulfill your wishes. But you can use WOOP also to actually find out whether you want to even go and realize your wishes by not saying, “I will come up with a wish that is feasible.” Let’s say, you have a wish, which is very important to you. You don’t even have to think about kind of carefully to identify if it is a wish you really want. But you want to know whether it is worthwhile pursuing it or not. Then you do WOOP in order to help you prioritize, to help you understand whether the obstacle is surmountable or not. 

So you can use WOOP really for very different purposes. One is to find a wish that is feasible and then really to attain it, or to find a wish that is very dear to your heart, and you want to find out whether you want to actually go for it, or whether you want to actually let go and put your energy into something, which is more feasible. The challenging part where you say, “Find a wish that is already challenging.” If a wish is super easy to reach, you don’t need WOOP. You just go and do it. So you don’t need the exercise. Therefore, you better do WOOP for wishes that are a little bit difficult, but in principle, feasible, that will help you most in fulfilling your wishes. 

[00:50:22] MB: For listeners who want to kind of concretely implement some of the things we’ve talked about today, maybe do sort of a WOOP for themselves, what would be kind of one piece of homework that you would give them to start kind of implementing this methodology? 

[00:50:38] GO: Right. That’s a good question. Actually, in the past years, we have been designing materials which will help people to actually use WOOP for themselves and to apply it in their daily life as a kind of routine practice. We put these materials on the woopmylife.org website, which is actually translated into many languages, and which contains detailed instructions in written form, in audio form, in video form. It also contains references to the WOOP app, which has the bare bone instructions and which you can download on your Android or iPhone, and which guides you through the WOOP exercise without that you actually need to think about, “Now, what is the first step? What is the second step? What is the third step?” So if it’s a help to use WOOP on a daily basis. 

Then you’ll also find some references to Rethinking Positive Thinking, where we describe the research backgrounds and some of the studies in great detail, and also some example. So that will be a very good start to look at the WOOP materials, the videos, the audios, the app, and the book. On the website, there are also references to the research if you’re interested. Then certainly, on the WOOP My Life website, you can always write to us. If you have questions, please feel free to write to us. We get a lot of correspondence, and also kind of people inform us where they applied WOOP and you find them applying it in so many different life areas. It’s really kind of moving to see. If you have experiences, you can always write them to us, and then if you don’t mind, we put them on the website. So that would be great. If you want to have more personal training, just let us know. 

[00:52:58] MB: Again, you told listeners where to go, but for listeners who want to find you, learn more, etc., one more time, what is the website for them to be able to find you online? 

[00:53:06] GO: Okay. It’s WOOP, W-O-O-Pmylife.org. 

[00:53:15] MB: Awesome. Gabriele, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing all these wisdom and knowledge and the surprising science from all of the research that you’ve done. It’s been a really fascinating conversation. We’ve enjoyed having you on here. 

[00:53:27] GO: Thank you for having me. 

[00:53:29] 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 e-mail 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.

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

Creating Nerves of Steel – The Science of Performing Under Pressure with Dr. Hank Weisinger

In this episode, we go deep on the science of performing under pressure. We look at why some people perform under pressure and others don’t. We discuss the skill of flexibility and “fluid intelligence,” explore the differences between stress and pressure, look at concrete strategies for managing both in your life, and much more with our guest Dr. Hank Weisinger. 

Dr. Hank Weisinger is a psychologist trained in clinical, counseling, school, and organizational psychology. He is the originator of Criticism Training and the emerging field of pressure management. He is the author of several books including his most recent New York Times Best Seller How To Perform Under Pressure and his work has been featured on the Today Show, Good Morning America, ESPN, NPR, and much more!

• Feedback is a “bogus phrase” in the corporate world

• The work on criticism and anger that Dr. Weisinger comes from deep clinical experience and informs his perspective on emotional intelligence

• Emotional intelligence is not a new field - it’s been around for a long time - and yet most people don’t grasp the basic premises of emotional intelligence

• Why do some people perform well under pressure and others don’t?

• Why you shouldn’t focus on "Anger management “ - instead it's about emotional intelligence

• Almost no one has a deep knowledge of emotional intelligence - even many so-called experts

• Why advice doesn’t work and what you should do instead of giving people advice

• You can’t criticize someone for something they can’t change - the goal of criticism is to create change - and sometimes people can’t change - sometimes the best way to create change is to change your own behavior

• Telling people to change their behavior isn’t always the best way to create change - it’s often about being more flexible and looking for new avenues to impact their behavior

• Criticism is not flaw-finding - it's about finding a way to help people 

• Finding problems and flaws is easy to do - its hard to find a way to improve. You must always be improvement oriented. 

• The power of “use this, or come up with your own” - help people don’t just point out only negatives

• How can I communicate this information in a way that a person will be receptive to it?

• Pay attention and you will see opportunities in everyday life to change people’s behavior 

• A good key to developing the skill of criticism is how quickly you can recognize the defensiveness of another person and use it as a clue that you’re being ineffective and need to try something else

• The faster your recognize that you’re being ineffective the faster change your behavior and create results

• Why mental flexibility is one of the top skills of world-class performers 

• What is “fluid intelligence” and how do you train and develop it?

• There’s a big difference between a sports psychologist and a clinical psychologist 

• "Nobody does better under pressure” - The edge is not in rising to the occasion 

• It’s not about rising to the occasion - it's about limiting your downside and making sure you don’t choke 

• In your pressure moments you don’t have to “rise” - just don’t do worse - and usually, your best is good enough

• If you played your best and lost - don’t feel bad. You only feel bad when you play below your capability. 

• Pressure is a villain in your life. There’s nothing good about it. The function of pressure is to weed people out. 

• What is pressure? You're experiencing pressure in a situation where the (a) the outcome is uncertain and (b) its dependent on your performance. 

• Stress and pressure are two different psychological concepts - you must treat them separately and handle them separately. 

• Stress is about having lots of demands on your time and feeling overwhelmed. There are lots of ways to reduce stress. 

• If you have to perform effectively under pressure 24x7 that's a terrible way to live

• Evidence-based strategies for reducing the feelings of pressure during the moment

• “Pressure anxiety” vs “performance anxiety” - what’s the difference and why is it important?

• Pressure is a constant demand. 

• You don’t rise to the occasion, you fail to the level of your training.

• All you need to do is do what you’ve been trained for and TRUST YOURSELF.

• Trust yourself and get out of your own way. 

• The power of “procedural memory” 

• Anxious thoughts can crowd out space in your working memory

• How people perform under pressure is often about how they perceive the situation - do they perceive it as threatening or do they perceive it as an opportunity?

• “Sure there’s pressure, just think of it as fun"

• Cognitive appraisal - an important process that impacts how you evaluate the things around you

• “Always think multiple opportunities” 

• The more important you make something, the more you pressure you will experience, the worse you will do 

• The power of minimizing and "under-exaggerating"

• “Befriend the moment” - make it fun and challenging 

• Don’t get over-attached to an outcome and define yourself and your self-esteem by your job performance

• Homework: Literally write down your anxiety and you will do better in your pressure moments. Write them down and they will be less likely to surface during the moment of truth.

• Homework: Affirm your self-worth before a pressure moment with 3 things that have nothing to do with your performance. 

• Homework: Share your feelings of pressure with others. 

• Homework: Anticipate what might go wrong during a pressure moment. 

• 12 Hours of meditation creates material changes in your brain and makes it easier for you to relax on cue

• Managing pressure doesn’t require to do anything new - it just requires you to do something different. 

• Thoughts / Arousal / Behavior - All 3 Factors Interact with each other - pressure attacks each of those and harms your performance 

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 week’s episode is brought to you by Bespoke Post and their monthly Box Of Awesome! The team at Bespoke Post are always out scouting for quality and unique products to send people just like you each month! Whether you’re in search of the perfect drink, a well-kept pad, or jet-setting in style, Bespoke Post improves your life one box at a time.

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [Amazon Author Page] Hendrie Weisinger

• [Book] Anger at Work: Learning The Art Of Anger Management On The Job by Hendrie Weisinger

• [Book] Performing Under Pressure: The Science of Doing Your Best When It Matters Most by Hendrie Weisinger and J. P. Pawliw-Fry

• [Article] Mayer and Salovey Model of Emotional Intelligence by Rachel Green

• [Wiki Article] The Natural (film)

• [Personal Site] Hendrie Weisinger PhD

• [Website] Hendrie Weisinger PhD - Business Courses

  • [Coupon Code] "pressurescience"

[00:00:19.4] 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 two million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries and part of the self-help for smart people podcast network.

In this episode, we go deep on the science of performing under pressure. We look at why some people perform under pressure and others don’t. We discuss the skill of flexibility and fluid intelligence, explore the differences between stress and pressure, look at concrete strategies for managing both in your life and much more with our guest, Dr. Hank Weisinger.

Do you need more time? Time for work, time for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined, and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our e-mail list. It's called how you can create time for the things that really matter in life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the e-mail list at successpodcast.com.

You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our e-mail subscribers. We recently pre-released an episode in an interview to our e-mail subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience, and that had tremendous implications because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first.

With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live exclusive interview just for e-mail subscribers. There's some amazing stuff that's available only to e-mail subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the e-mail list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage.

Or if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you're on the go, you don't have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44-222. That’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we discussed several seemingly good ideas that are actually quite dangerous. We started with a look at how the immune system can teach us about the vital importance of being anti-fragile. We then looked at the lessons from ancient cultural traditions all the way up to modern psychology research to peel back the layers of our current social dialogue and look at many notions that have permeated our current thinking.

What are the best ways to promote growth and development? How can we help people heal who've suffered from trauma? How can we create a framework that allows our society to seek truth and solve our toughest challenges?

We take a hard look at the answers to these questions and much more with our previous guest, Dr. Jonathan Haidt. If you want to learn how to think clearly and understand some of the big issues going on in our world today, listen to that episode.

Now, for our interview with Hank.

[0:03:06.9] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Dr. Hank Weisinger. Hank is a psychologist trained in clinical, counseling, school and organizational psychology. He's the originator of criticism training and the emerging field of pressure management. He's the author of several books, including his most recent New York Times bestseller, How to Perform Under Pressure. His work has been featured in the Today Show, Good Morning America, NPR and much more. Hank, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:36.3] HW: Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

[0:03:38.0] MB: Well, it's great to have you on the show. I'm a big fan of your work and I think there's some really, really important concepts that you talk about and share and come out of your work. One of the things that I'd love to start with as a foray into this is I know you previously have done some work and written about anger and how to deal with anger and then you talk about how you pivoted that message to being about something else. I'd love to hear the story of why you shifted the message from how to deal with anger towards what you're focused on today.

[0:04:09.2] HW: Well, through my career, the first subject you mentioned, criticism training, that was the first subject I got into which was giving and taking criticism. This is at a time when everybody in the corporate world was using what I considered the bogus phrase of feedback. As I'm coming to my office, I have some feedback to give you. From criticism, I went into the subject of anger management. Both criticism and anger came out of clinical experiences that I have had with the patients. One of the things with criticism I realized is nobody ever comes home and says, “I had a great day today. I got criticized.” Nobody ever comes home and says to their partner, “I wish we could have some more anger in our household.”

Ironically, both criticism and anger I did not call it emotional intelligence at the time, but both of those became microcosms of emotional intelligence. Then I went into the subject of emotional intelligence. I wrote a book called Emotional Intelligence at Work in 1995. What is very interesting to me is that many people – I just did an interview with a UK magazine on the subject of emotional intelligence. Quite honestly, I get nauseous when I have to talk about it, because it is so old to me. Yet, people are still talking about it like it's the newest thing on the planet.

Then I went into the subject being a big sports fan and a big Yankee fan, when I moved from LA to New York, I was lucky because one of my daughter's friends in LA, her uncle was the manager of Yankee Stadium. I was going to 20 games, 30 games. I drive him from Connecticut, I'd be home by 11:00 and I got very frustrated, because at this time in 1994, the Yankees were terrible. I asked myself the question, “Why do some people perform well under pressure and others don't?”

What I realized is that it wasn't that the Yankee players at that time were choke artists, they were just terrible players. They weren't very good. I started to explore the concept of pressure. It was an extension of previous interest. I mean, if you can't manage anger, it's going to be very hard to perform your best when the money is on the line. When you ask me about shifting, I wrote a book called Anger at Work, and it was the subject of what was going on in corporate America in the 90s. Yet, if I would call a company, “I'd to talk to your managers about anger management,” the typical reaction will be, “No, forget it. Nobody's angry here and don't you ever call us again.”

Amusingly to me and my friends is I would call back the same company, speak to the same person six months later and say, “Oh, I'd to talk to your managers about emotional intelligence.” The reaction would be, “Oh yeah, that's great. That's good.” Emotional intelligence is good, anger bad. What do you think is the first emotion that people would always want to talk about? It was always anger and sometimes anxiety. What that clearly made me realize is that the corporate America has a restriction on subjects that you can speak about.

It's okay to be enthusiastic and it's okay to be passionate, but God forbid, you express anger then you become Big Bill in the company. I very gradually instead of promoting the subject of anger management, which is very big in the clinical and the therapeutic world, but not in the corporate world, so I shifted into the concept of emotional intelligence, because that was sexier, it had more of a positive connotation and it was through emotional intelligence that I could still help people deal with managing anger. That's beyond me now, because now the only thing quite frankly is a topic that I'm really interested in is performing under pressure.

[0:08:26.9] MB: I think it's really funny and almost speaks to the power of framing and anchoring and priming, that just essentially the same topics presented in a different light drastically transforms the way that people engage with the material.

[0:08:42.1] HW: There is no question about it. This was the issue with criticism. If you call it criticism, it's a negative, but if you use the word feedback, it's perceived as being more neutral. I used to say to people, then why do people get defensive if you call it feedback? The reason was because no matter what you call it, the person internally will hear it as criticism. Therefore, I would recommend to companies, and I spoke to every company you can think of on this subject. You have to give an overt message in your organization that criticism is permissible. What is so ironic now is you look at the President of the United States and you see, I used to say that criticism is the most important skill for an executive. I think Trump is bearing me out to prove that is accurate.

[0:09:32.1] MB: I think it's funny, another thing that you touched on that's really, really important is this idea that and we won't go super deep into because I do want to focus most the interview on dealing with pressure. Emotional intelligence is not a new finding and yet, so many people don't even grasp the basic premises of the fundamental ideas around it and have no idea how to cultivate it for themselves.

[0:09:55.9] HW: What I have found quite honestly is that even people who go around the country giving presentations on emotional intelligence, their knowledge is very superficial. They still don't understand it. For example, listening is not emotional intelligence. It's how to use emotional intelligence to enhance your listening. That's what people do not get. They think that they equate soft skills with emotional intelligence. No. It's about how to use emotional intelligence managing your emotions, being sensitive to the emotions of others, to use those to make those soft skills more effective.

Anybody can give criticism, but there's a difference between a person who applies emotional intelligence in giving criticism, than a person who doesn't. That is very upsetting to me as a psychologist, because my biggest problem with emotional intelligence is that it's turned into a business. People promoting emotional intelligence subjects; how many articles do you see? Well, here are these 10 characteristics of the emotionally intelligent person. Then somebody else writes here, the seven characteristics, here are the 15 characteristics.

I mean, everybody has become an expert on emotional intelligence. Very few people have actually read the original research by John Mayer and Peter Salovey. Most people mistakenly think that Dan Goleman was the creator of emotional intelligence, of which he was far from it.

[0:11:27.0] MB: If you would indulge me in one question that was really, really impactful for me around your work from studying criticism, I thought that the idea that you talked about that advice doesn't really work, and that's raising the question of if we shouldn't, or really can't help people by giving them advice, how should we go about helping them? I'd love to dig into that a little bit.

[0:11:48.8] HW: Well, the thing that criticism for me is a metaphor for creating change. That is why one of the rules became do not criticize a person for something they cannot change. Why our parents criticizing Johnny for getting a C in school when Johnny is a C student? Now he can be the best C student possible, but he's never going to get a A.

This is what I tell Net fans. I said, “Why are you criticizing your team? They're terrible. This is the best they can do. Don't get upset at them.” I did a study at UCLA on sexual criticism. The number one sexual criticism that females reported getting from their partners was that their legs were too short. Now what is a woman supposed to do when she hears that? You can't criticize a person for something they can't change. When you say advice, well sometimes you can give a person advice and they take it. If you're my employee, I can criticize you in a very positive way.

When you're sitting there and you're saying, “Yep, you're right. I agree.” From my framework, if you don't change your behavior, my criticism has not been effective. The goal of criticism is really to create change when you are giving it. Sometimes the way that you create change in another person is not by verbally telling them what to do. Sometimes the best way to create change is to change your own behavior, because remember, criticisms and interaction. That means what I do affects you and what you do affects me. There's a giving and there is a taking of criticism. How you give it if that's how the person takes it.

Now sometimes, I can influence you by not even talking to you. I remember my mother growing up, would hate it when my father would smoke cigars in the bedroom. She could tell him that and complain about it, “Stop nagging me and whatever. Go out of the room and so on.” What she finally did is she changed the environment. She took all the ashtrays out of the bedroom. She didn't have to say anything. She just made it more difficult for him to maintain that behavior.

I had a client once, the way he got his wife to stop smoking in the car, he said, “Every time we go somewhere, if you want to smoke in the car, that's fine,” but he would stop the car and he would get out. Finally, she gave up the smoking. There's all different ways of how you can communicate information. You have to be clever, you have to be creative and most importantly, you have to see criticism as a chance to put up the person, not to put down the person.

Most managers, most people in relationships, they are not giving criticism, they are being critical. Critical means floor finding, telling a person what they are doing wrong. That doesn't help. That's why it's hard to do criticism. I can tell you, I could say, “Now, here's what's wrong with your show. I can tell you 30 things wrong, or why this was a bad interview.” That's easy to do, but it's much harder for me to say, “Matt, here's how you could do it better.” It's hard to tell a person how to improve. It's easy to tell them what they are doing wrong.

That's why another cardinal rule of giving criticism is always be improvement-oriented. One of the ways that you can be improvement-oriented on a concrete level is moving it into the future. Next time you give a presentation, remember to have time to leave time for questions. As soon as I say next time, your anxiety is reduced, because you're not going to get fired. You're going to get another opportunity.

[0:15:33.9] MB: What a great series of examples, and I think that really highlights such a fundamentally important part of giving criticism that so many people miss, which is it's not just pointing out all the things that are wrong, it's proactively helping and guiding the conversation, or the actions, etc., towards finding some solution.

[0:15:54.4] HW: The irony is when I wrote a business book on – my first business book on this subject, which is called The Critical Edge. My editor was wonderful. When I got a manuscript back, first she wrote me a five-page letter, single-spaced saying, “This is going to be as wonderful and as useful as all your other books.” Every time I looked at it and I manuscript and she had those yellow post tags, three of them on every page, but her comments would be along these lines. You need a zippier line here, use this, and she would give me one, or come up with your own.

It was a wonderful process. Ironically, when I was talking about how to give criticism through writing, I used the letter that she sent to me as an example in the book, as a way of giving her kudos. The point is when people think of criticism, we always think of it as verbally telling the person. I'm saying that the whole process of giving criticism, you have to be strategic criticizer, just like companies have strategies and strategic planning, you have to have a strategy when you criticize somebody.

It starts out by simply saying, “How can I communicate this information so the person is going to be receptive to it?” If a person is not receptive to it, you can talk all day. You have to make the person receptive. Sometimes that means that the best time to criticize the person is when you're watching a TV show and you just slip it in, because you're using an example from the TV show to illustrate what you're talking about. That's why you always have to be ready. You always have to be ready to make a difference where you can see that you can influence people.

When I was working in doing my internship in LA at the Brentwood VA Hospital, I worked on a schedule. I get there in the morning, staff meeting, go to the canteen, get some coffee, make some phone calls to my friends all over the country. I had a government watch line. Then at 10:00 I see a patient and then I become the therapist. That's for an hour. In other words, I let the time of the day dictate the role I was in.

My supervisor said, “Always think of yourself as a therapist, because if you always think of yourself as a therapist, you will see opportunities pop up that you can make a difference in the normal course of the day.” I started thinking like that. Now when I'm going to the water fountain, I see a patient there, I'm thinking, “I'm going to be next to that guy in 10 seconds. What can I say or do that will actually have a therapeutic impact?” I started becoming more effective. I was giving therapy to everybody, including my friends.

[0:18:36.6] MB: I think this notion that communicating information in a way that people will be receptive to it and the premise behind that that you should fundamentally take responsibility yourself for what's going on in your life and what's going on in the world and those around you, I think is really important. I mean, you talked about that in another context, which is the idea of blame, right? Instead of blaming other people and giving that attribution to the external world, you should view your own problems as your own ineffectiveness in some form or fashion.

[0:19:09.9] HW: Absolutely. I would teach people, because look Matt, if you start to criticize somebody and then they start to get upset, what do you usually say to them?

[0:19:20.3] MB: Calm down, or stop being upset. Getting defensive.

[0:19:22.7] HW: Yeah. Right. That’s right. I like to teach people that when the person gets defensive, instead of saying you're getting defensive, to step back and realize that you're being ineffective. You're being ineffective when a person gets defensive. If you were effective, they wouldn’t get defensive. Very importantly, a good point to develop criticism skills is how quickly can you recognize the defensiveness of another person and to use it as a cue that you're being ineffective.

If I'm criticizing my son or daughter when they were in school about their homework and I see that they start to get defensive, the faster I realize that, the faster I can try something else. The faster a teacher recognizes their teaching style isn't working, the faster they can change. The faster a doctor recognizes that this protocol for chemotherapy isn't working, the faster he or she can change. The faster a coach can realize that his defense isn’t working, I mean, how stupid would it be at halftime to say, “All right, we're down 30 points. Same game plan.”

You have to be able to recognize when you are ineffective. The faster you recognize you're ineffective, that's how you empower yourself to try something different. Rather than blaming the other person.

[0:20:47.5] MB: I think this segues into performance psychology and performing under pressure. I mean, when you look at and study people who are peak performers in literally any field, whether it's sports, martial arts, chess, music, anything, you see these commonalities again and again and again, and I think one of the biggest is taking responsibility and realizing that feedback is from the environment, not necessarily feedback as criticism, but feedback from the environment if things aren't working, you needed to take that burden on yourself, instead of getting tied up in your ego and trying to protect whatever mental image you've crafted of how things should be, as opposed to how things really are.

[0:21:28.6] HW: Yes. That is why mental flexibility is one of the great cognitive attributes of effective people, because it allows them to change and adapt in the moment. Well, there's many types of intelligence for two terms. One term is it's called crystallized intelligence and fluid intelligence. If I said to you, tell me everything about American history. That would be your crystallized intelligence.

Fluid intelligence is the idea that you can adopt to a new situation. In other words, golfers who practice golf and they're hitting shots off in the middle of the fairway, that's basically a waste of time. It's much better for the golfer to practice shots that they're never going to have to deal with. That's what you develop your fluid intelligence is how you perform in novel types of situations. Some athletes can do that, others lose their composure and then it's downhill from all that.

You raised an interesting point that I want to clarify when you said well, if you study elite performance and so on. Because I listened to some of the sports psychologists that you have interviewed and I've been on many sports psychology pods. There was a big difference between a sports psychologist in a clinical, or a counseling psychologists. Sports psychologists basically study elite performance, and that's the flow on the research. That's like somebody who says, “Okay, we have 300 college seniors who want to go to the NFL. We're going to put them through our program.”

Then the person says, “One of the things we found is that these people are highly competitive. They're very focused.” In other words, here are the eight attributes. Now my question is, what about all the attributes that they forgot about? Why are there only eight? See, that's a bogus type of research. It’s just like survey research. It would be like, I don't know it was before your time, but it's still a popular book. Steve Covey wrote The 7 Habits of Effective People. When I spent time with him I said, “How come there's not eight habits?”

I happen to know that giving and taking criticism is a key habit of effective people. It's not on your list. I can name 10 others that are not on your list. In other words, it's not experimental research. When I wrote a book on performing under pressure, I did not study people who performed well under pressure. I studied the concept of, or the construct of pressure and that took me in a very different pathway than what most sports psychologists would say.

When I was a graduate student, there wasn't even a program in sports psychology. Most of the top sports psychologists happen to be in the anyway. How a sports psychologist, how they study elite performance is very different than when I did. By studying the construct of pressure, it gave me a lot of revelations. I will tell you that one of them is nobody does better under pressure.

Tom Brady does not do better under pressure. The quarterback for the Seattle Super Hawks does not do better under pressure. The C student is never rising to the occasion in getting 1600 on their SATs, but many times the A student will choke. What I found as a sports fan is that the edge is not rising to the occasion. Did you ever see the movie The Natural?

[0:25:20.3] MB: I haven't.

[0:25:21.3] HW: It's with Robert Redford. It's about a baseball player named Roy Hobbs and of course, the dramatic point is at the end of the movie when he's up, game deciding situation, three and two, everybody's going nuts, every baseball fan has seen this scenario thousands of times. Of course, what does the Robert Redford character do? He hits the game-winning homerun and everybody's saying, “Boy, did he come through.”

Now in the book by the same title written by Bernard Malamud, he struck out. That is reality. What you hear sports psychologists all the time saying, giving the message that elite athletes, they're great when the money is on the line. They’re great all the time. Tom Brady is the best quarterback all the time. The fact that he is the best, that means that he is more likely to throw important touchdown passes, than a quarterback who's not the best. He doesn't play better in the Super Bowl. He plays great in every game. That's what sports psychologists don't get.

They think the key is rising to the occasion. No, it's not doing worse. It's not doing worse. If the A student aces their SATs, that's not a big deal. That's what they've been doing for four years. When a field goal kicker kicks a 40-yard field goal, that's not a headline, that's what you're supposed to do. They miss a 40-yard field goal, that's a headline, that becomes a choke.

I think that's a big difference. For the listener, what I want them to realize how that applies to them is that your pressure moment, you don't have to do better than you've ever done before. You don't have to rise. You just don't have to do worse. Usually, your best is good enough. Now you can still do your best and not win. An athlete can have a stellar performance, but they don't win, but that is very different than choking.

Anytime an athlete plays their best and loses, they never feel bad. They always say, “Look, I played great and he played better and I want to congratulate him and so on.” They only feel bad when they played below their capability. That's what really bothers them, because then their talent didn't get the job done. They let pressure take them out of the game. It's not only in terms of affecting your skills, pressure is a villain in your life. There's nothing good about it. It downgrades your cognitive skills, your judgment, your decision-making.

I know you have the sports psychologist who works with Pete Carroll, so I'll say this for him. Pete Carroll's call against the Patriots is one of the greatest chokes in decision-making in sports of all time. No matter how they try to spin it, it was a major, major, major choke. You never would have seen Belichick passing on that. That's a big difference.

I studied the concept of pressure and when I realized pressure is a villain, it downgrades your cognitive skills, your judgment, decision-making, attention, your memory, it also downgrades your psychomotor skills. Think of it, what happens to kids in a college if they can't handle the pressure? What happens to them?

[0:28:47.5] MB: They fail out.

[0:28:48.4] HW: That's right. What happens to a team that can't handle the pressure NBA playoffs?

[0:28:52.9] MB: They lose.

[0:28:55.3] HW: Exactly. That is the function of pressure, to weed you out. It is nature's selection mechanism. I mean, who do you think invented the phrase, do or die? Do you think that was in ESPN sports in that analyst who said, “Oh, money's on the line. It's the do or die situation.” Because for your ancestors, every pressure moment was a do-or-die situation. If they didn't perform, they are extinct. Those people who can perform under pressure get to advance. If you can't perform under pressure, it's going to make it very hard for you to advance down your chosen life path.

What I learned, because you mentioned the word evidence-based, so I started thinking – first of all, let me define what pressure is. You experience pressure when you're in a situation where the outcome is uncertain and it's dependent on your performance. That's when you experience pressure. One of the things I found in doing research, even among researchers is they confuse the word stress and pressure. Stress and pressure are two different psychological constructs. Most people treat them the same. As a result, it creates havoc in your life, because you treat every stressful moment as though it's a do or die. As a result, you're on high alert 24/7. That is a terrible way to live.

You experience stress when you're overwhelmed, when you don't have the resources to cope with the demands of your environment. Let's say it's 2:00 your time now. Let's say you have to finish this interview, then you have to go to the cleaners, then you have to go shopping, you have to pick up a friend at the airport, now you're getting a lot of demands. You're going to feel stressed, but you can delegate, you can prioritize. You could say, “You know what? I'll go out for dinner, I don't need to go shopping. I have clothes in my closet, I don't need to go to the cleaners.”

You have multiple ways of how you can reduce stress, and that's another difference that when you experience stress, your goal is to reduce it. When you experience pressure, there was only one solution that you can do, and that is you have to perform effectively. That's a big difference. If you think you have to perform effectively 24/7, that becomes a terrible way to live. What I found is that there are strategies, evidence-based, or out of experimental psychology studies that show us how we can reduce the feelings of pressure in the moment.

You're giving a presentation tomorrow, you're starting to feel nervous a minute before. What can you do? You're taking a test, you're having an audition, a crucial conversation, those are all in the moments where we use what I like to call pressure solutions. The other difficulty that many people have, a nice experience is when I lived in LA is reducing the daily feelings of pressure. One of the clinical terms that I coined is what I call pressure anxiety; different than performance anxiety.

Performance anxiety is when you get anxious when you have to perform a particular task. Pressure anxiety is the perpetual feeling that you have to be producing, and see, that's the pressure part, the demand, you have to produce, you have to be successful. The anxiety part is how much longer can I do this?

I was doing gigs when I was in my 40s for every company you can think of. I was on a plane three times, four times a week and so on. Every night I used to think how much longer can I do this? How much longer? How many more times is Merrill Lynch going to call me? How many more times is IBM going to call me and whatever? It continually made me anxious. I found people listening were 25, 30, they're what I call pressure performers. That means every time they have an opportunity, be it a presentation, a sales call, they want to perform, because it will advance them. They’re the pressure performers. My kids are would be pressure performers.

I have friends my age, many of them are very successful lawyers, they have no anxiety when they go and give an opening argument, or a closing deliberation. That's not the pressure they feel. They have mastered that. Their pressure is how much longer do I have to pay for my daughter's apartment? How many more years of medical school do I have to pay for my son? These are what I call pressure reducers. What I have learned over the years is that there are strategies for reducing the daily feelings of pressure, as well as strategies that can help you perform your best in the moment.

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[0:36:04.9] MB: You race so many good points and I want to get into a number of different points that you talked about. One of the most important things I think is that, I think you're right that there's so many ways that you can put the world in a neat little box of six or seven strategies that work, or solve a specific problem. Oftentimes, reality is extremely complex and messy and it's not as easy as just wrapping a bow on it and solving it. What you've been talking about really makes me think of, I think it's a military saying or phrase, which is you don't rise to the occasion, you fail to the level of your training.

[0:36:36.8] HW: I would agree with that. This is like, look at Navy SEALs, or look at a sniper who can make a shot in a storm that's 2,000 yards away. There's nothing special about that. That's what he's been trained to do. What that phrase really means is that you just have to do what you've been trained to do. This is the same thing with athletes. Go in and kick a 50-yard field goal. It’s like a golfer that starts thinking about a swing. Why is he doing that? That's what actually makes you do worse, because you become overly self-conscious. He just has to do what he's been trained for.

If he doesn't – if there's a gap in their performance, sometimes I just do, just like a student, “Oh, my teacher never taught me how to do this type of equation,” that becomes more reflection on the training. I used to get the message will be given to me, all you need to do is to do what you've been trained for. You're nervous about seeing this patient, you've been trained how to do it. Just trust yourself. That's the one phrase. I take that on a different meaning than a sports psychologist. Trust your skills and so on. I would phrase that get out of your way. You don't need to think. Everything is automatic. There's different types of memory that we have; working memory, I don't want to go too far off on a tangent and procedural memory. Now you drive, I assume correct?

[0:38:10.9] MB: Yes.

[0:38:11.6] HW: Okay. When you get in your car near more in the morning, are you consciously thinking, remember when the first time when you were learning how to drive? You get in your car, put your seatbelt on, look in the mirror, look over your right shoulder, look over your left shoulder. You've had a methodology and you would do each step. When you get in your car this morning, you didn't think about any of those. That's because you have done it so many times, it becomes automatic.

When I put a little scratch on my car when I pay attention to how I'm pulling out of the driveway, because it interrupts the fluidy of the of the process that you have already learned. Many times you learn, it's like when you play a piano, first you have to learn how to play it. After you've played it so many times, you're not even thinking about it, that's because it's in your procedural memory. If you're taking a math test and you need information, that's where you use a different type of memory called working memory, which is like an iPad.

Think of yourself as having a mental iPad. Now there are some iPads that have more storage space, just like some students have more storage space than other students. If you're in taking a math test, the only thing you want on that mental iPad is information about math. If you're in the middle of the test and you start thinking, “What are your parents going to do if you don't get an A, or you won't get into college?” Those thoughts now are taking up space in your working memory. All of a sudden when you need to know that formula, it's no longer there. Instead what is there are those worried thoughts.

This is what pressure does to us; it distracts us, it disrupts our body, it creates distressful feelings such as anxiety and fear. The biggest difference between people who do well in a pressure moment, and when I say well, I mean, close to their capabilities, versus people who fold is how they perceive the situation. Do you perceive it as threatening, or do you perceive it as an opportunity?

The first book I wrote, I was lucky. It was a New York Times bestseller right out of the chute. I was 30 years old, and I was going on all the radio and TV shows. Now I will tell you, they sent me to TV school, because I was so anxious. They actually taught me. By the time I was ready to go on The Today Show, I was thinking, “This is great fun. All my friends are going to see me. This is a great opportunity to sell hundreds of thousands of books.” I didn't feel any pressure. I don't feel any pressure when I'm doing a interview with you, because in my mind, this is an opportunity. It's going to help me promote myself, it's going to get the word out, I get to help thousands and thousands of people. Why would I feel any pressure? That is very, very important. Anytime my kids were taking a test I'd say, “It's your opportunity show the teacher what you know, or see it as a challenge.”

[0:41:23.0] MB: I'd love to dig into the how-to and the concrete strategies that you talked about. Tell me a little bit about some of these evidence-based strategies for reducing the feeling of pressure during the moment and preventing it from derailing our performance.

[0:41:38.2] HW: Sure. It's important, where the strategies come from? Well, they come from experimental studies. Experimental study, I know you know what that means, to some listeners, rather than a correlational study. A correlational study is if I set 500 athletes and then I interviewed them all and now I make a list of here are the 10 attributes and so on. Of course, that's my opinion. There was no legitimacy to that as a real, as a valid type of scientific investigation, because I have my own biases when I go into those situations to begin with.

Experimental studies is when they take a variable like pressure and they manipulate it. They might create a situation that you feel high pressure in, or low pressure in and they manipulate different things. Because remember what pressure is, performing in a situation that is important to you and the outcome is dependent on your performance. The incentive is important.

Studies have been done for example, where they increase the value of the incentive as a way of increasing the pressure that you experience, or they focus on the consequences, the negative consequences. Sometimes we experience pressure because we don't like the negative consequences. It's not the incentive that's so important, but we don't want to get kicked out, to put it like that.

Reading all these studies, I found that there were certain principles that will help a person reduce it. One of them and one of my favorite that I've inadvertently used is what I call, always think multiple opportunities. See, one of the things that pressure does is distorts your thinking, and creates what I call pressure distortions, magnification. It’s the most important test I'm never going to take. The more important you make something, the more pressure you experience and ironically, the worse you will do.

Parents could tell their kids, this is really an important test, inadvertently they're making the kid do worse, because they're increasing the amount of pressure. Derek Jeter says that he treats a world series game the exact same way as he treats a game in April. Joe Flacco said the same thing. How do you prepare for the Super Bowl? “Just like any other game.” Why would these people do anything different? One of the pressure solutions, I'm giving two very quickly is to shrink the importance of the situation.

When you have an interview for a new job and a friend says, it's not a big deal. That's actually good advice. See, it's counterintuitive. It's hard for a parent to say, “Don't worry about your SATs. It's just another test. It's no big deal.” That's exactly what they should be saying. One is minimize the importance, or shrink the importance. Now the reason for that is because we tend to over exaggerate the importance. Some people will say, “Well then you're lying to yourself, because it is important.” I agree, it is important, but it's not the most important thing in your life.

How many parents have heard their kids come home and they say, “Oh, I didn't get into Harvard. My life is ruined.” The parent says, “Oh, you're being ridiculous and so on.” Yet, that same parent will come home from work that night, “Oh, I blew the presentation. My life is over and so on.” We get this catastrophic thinking, we over exaggerated. To counteract a tendency to over exaggerate the importance, I say that we have to minimize, we have to under exaggerate by telling us things like, “It's not a big deal.”

I've actually have discovered the mindset of people who do well in pressure moments and those are two of the thinking patterns that they have. One is it's an opportunity, they're befriending the moment, it's going to be fun, it's going to be a challenge. Two is they realize they're going to get another chance. Anytime, when I first started teaching at UCLA, I always said to myself, even if I'm terrible, I'm going to get home and there's going to be 20 phone calls asking me to speak. There's always another opportunity. There's always another bus. There's always another person to go out with.

I was giving a talk in Canada one time to a financial company on leadership through 500 financial advisors in the room. One young guy, he must have been about 25, 26, gets up and he says, “How do you handle the pressure of calling a girl for the first time?” He said, “For me, that's a lot of pressure. How do you handle it?” Before I could respond, another guy two years older jumped up and said, “Just remember, there's a 100 other girls waiting for the same phone call.” Everybody laughed, but everybody knew it was true.

[0:46:22.6] MB: For listeners who want to concretely implement some of these ideas and solutions into their lives, what would be one piece of homework, or an action item that you would give them to start implementing some of the stuff right away?

[0:46:36.1] HW: Well, one of the things that I would say, let's say that a person who's listening has a big presentation tomorrow. Now I don't care how hokey this sounds. There's tons of research to make it “evidence-based.” Studies have shown that if you write down your anxieties and feelings, not think about them, but literally write them down, you will do better in your pressure moment. The reason is because those anxiety thoughts you've gotten them out of your system. They are less likely to surface in the moment of ruth.

It’s like talking to your friends all day about a personal problem, and then he speak to another friend at 10:0 at night and they say, “Well, what's going on with such-and-such?” You say, “You know what? I'm sick of talking about it.” You've literally gotten it out of your system. That's a concrete activity that people could do. Write down their anxieties and their fears the night before.

If I am a coach of a team, I have every player doing that and plus, just to make sure that they do do it, I will collect them.Aa second thing that a person can do, see one of the reasons that happens in pressure situations is we get over-attached to the outcome and we start to define our self-esteem based on the job. If you have a bad interview and it's not because you had a bad guest, but because of something you did whatever, then you get down on yourself and you start to worry and you say, “I'm no good. I'm never going to make it this and so on.”

What studies have shown is that if you affirm your self-worth again before a pressure moment, I would tell everybody, before you go into a pressure situation, think of three good things about yourself that have nothing to do with your work, you end up doing better. Because you start to realize that even if you screw up, you're still a worthy person.

I used to tell my kids no matter what you get on the test, you're still great kids. I still love you. My son once asked me, I said, “Will you get me something good if I do well on the test?” I said, “Of course not.” I said, “I get you something that you like, because I love you. It has nothing to do with what you do on the test.” That to him was at that age, was a revelation. People had to affirm their self-worth.

I remember years ago, a California Angel pitcher, I think his name might have been Donny Moore, gave up a home run and as a result, the Angels didn't get in the playoffs. The press got down on him for five days in a row and the guy committed suicide. Now I will not say, like Malcolm Gladwell will jump to the conclusion was that one incident that we could generalize that he committed suicide. I can tell you that he felt he had no worth, and that he has been affirming his self-worth. What if I gave up a home run? I'm still a good person. I'm still a good father. I'm still a good husband. That makes a big difference.

Sharing your pressure feelings, very important for young men to do. Most of them like to keep feelings and – they don't like to admit it, because they think it makes them less manly. That's because they've been watching too many movies and listening to too many sports announcers about stepping up. Sharing pressure feelings is a very smart strategy, whether it's with your partner, or whether it's having a team meeting for five minutes. “Hey, who's feeling a lot of pressure or whatever? Let's get it out in the open.” That becomes a very important strategy.

Anticipating. Anticipating what could go wrong in the pressure moment. When I first started teaching at UCLA I said, “Well, what do I do if somebody gets up and says this guy stinks and walks out of the room?” Or worse yet, if everybody says he stinks and walks out of the room and one person stays. I would visualize myself dealing with the worst possible thing and still doing it with some type of style and dignity.

It's always good, Tom Brady will anticipate every defense that could be thrown at him on that. Then when it comes, he’s ready for it. That's the difference between people who lose their composure and people who don't. Anticipating is another one of those mental strategies that a person can use. Meditation, studies have shown that if you meditate, magic number is 12 hours. It doesn't have to be in a row, you start to create changes in your brain. As a result, it becomes easier to relax on cue.

If you're into practicing meditation, that's another “pressure managing strategy” that you can use. These are all accessible. Well, what I want people to realize is that managing pressure doesn't require you to do anything new. It just requires you to do something different. You're using your natural tools. Your natural tools are your thoughts. Everybody has thoughts, but how a person who performs well under pressure thinks is different than a person who chokes.

We all have physiological arousal, that for people who do poorly under pressure, that arousal gets out of control. That's when they feel butterflies, or they feel that their body tensing up. That's why learning how to relax is very, very important. It impacts our behavior. How many movies have you seen where the person gets so nervous, they can't – the bad guys chasing them. They can't even put the keys in and start their car, or open their door. That's your human performance system.

Visualize a triangle; thoughts, arousal and behavior, like a triangle. All those three factors interact with each other. What pressure does is it sabotages. It attacks each one of those components. Those strategies that I mentioned are ways to fight back, so that you're in control of your thoughts. You're in charge of your behavior and you are in control of your physiology. 

[0:52:55.5] MB: For listeners who want to dig in, learn more and find you and your work online, what's the best place for them to find you?

[0:53:01.6] HW: I would invite everybody to go to my website, which is hankweisingerphd.com and they'll see a whole bunch of articles and videos for free, that I think that they will find very useful. There's a lot of good articles on the blog, there are also radio interviews to listen to. I intend to put the link of this podcast up there as well. Also Matt, I want them to look under courses and they will see my online performing under pressure class. It's not ready yet, but I will give you a coupon code that you can pass on to your listeners that will give them a 30% discount on the class, which they have access to for life, and I am always updating it. Quite frankly, I think they'll find it – everybody will find it very, very, very useful.

[0:54:02.6] MB: Well, we'll make sure to include that code in the show notes for listeners who want to find it, again successpodcast.com, you can find all the show notes on there. Hank, thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing all this knowledge and wisdom, obviously a tremendous amount of research and clinical experience and it really shines through in all of the examples and stories that you provided.

[0:54:21.4] HW: Well, thanks for having me and I hope to come back again in the future.

[0:54:25.5] 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 e-mail 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.

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Three Dangerous Ideas That Are Putting Our Society At Risk with Dr. Jonathan Haidt

In this episode we discuss several seemingly good ideas that are actually quite dangerous. We start with a look at how the immune system can teach us about the vital importance of being “anti-fragile.” We look at lessons from ancient cultural traditions all the way up to modern psychology research to peel back the layers of our current social dialogue and look at many notions that have permeated our current thinking. What are the best ways to promote growth and development? How can we help heal people who have suffered from trauma? How can we create a framework that allows for our society to seek the truth and solve our toughest challenges? We take a hard look at the answers to these questions and much more with our guest Dr. Jonathan Haidt. 

Dr. Jonathan Haidt is a social psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He is the author of multiple books including most recently The Coddling of The American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. He is also the author of over 90 academic articles and his work has been featured across the globe.

• In teaching psychology 101 Jonathan found that there was much wisdom in the ancient traditions around how we could be happier 

• There are a lot of really bad ideas being spread these days - despite the fact that they arise from good intentions 

• What can the immune system teach us about vital importance of anti-fragility?

• The reason peanut allergies are rising is because America started protecting kids from peanuts in the early 90s

• Kids need to get sick and be exposed to dirt and germs so that they can be healthier - that’s the cornerstone of the immune system

• The importance of being anti-fragile

• If you try to protect children you end up making them weaker, not stronger

• The importance of play - free play without adult supervision - and letting children take risks

• We can’t reach natural without a lot of play (in the form of risk taking)

• Comfort zones are most often expanded through discomfort - we must be uncomfortable to grow

• Our extreme culture of overprotection has really harmed children

• Every ancient culture that leaves us with deep writing shares the idea that we don’t experience reality as it really is - we experience reality as we interpret it - our life is the creation of our minds

• “There’s nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so"

• You don’t grow in a threatening world - you hunker down and get defensive

• Children need to be in the zone of exploration and excitement

• You shouldn’t trust you first reaction - you need to question your first reaction

• What happens when students themselves ask for protection from ideas and think that ideas will traumatize them?

• A desire to protect those who are emotionally fragile is wrong - exposure is how you solve fear and emotional fragility

• The way you overcome a phobia is not by hiding and walling yourself off from what you’re afraid of 

• If the goal is actually to help people - the entire culture of safetyism - that people are fragile and need to be protected - is directly opposed to the scientific research around what actually helps people

• Are the phenomena of Safe space, trigger warnings, micro aggressions and the morality of “safetyism” that arose in the last few years healthy for individuals and society?

• If you goal is healing trauma and helping people improve - embracing discomfort is the best solution

• If your goal is to seek truth - then you must expose yourself to ideas you disagree with and have others challenge your ideas as well 

• If you goal is ideological victory then you try to silence your opponents ideas 

• If people don’t share ideas because they’re afraid of being attacked - then the entire goal of truth seeking cannot be achieved. Today people are afraid of speaking up and afraid of challenging many ideas

• Humans are tribal creatures - we evolved with a tribal mentality in order to survive - and yet this instinct can be very destructive when we apply it to ideological divides 

• We’re playing the truth seeking game, we’re trying to make a diverse community, and we must give everyone the benefit of the doubt

• Just as we don’t tolerate racism or sexism, we shouldn’t tolerate anyone silencing ideas  

• Silencing discussion and thought policing can actually foster support for damaging and negative ideas

• This isn’t just a debate about how to interpret reality and communication - the culture of “safetyism” is a major contributor to the rise of suicide and anxiety

• Since 2011 rates of suicide have risen 25% for men and 70% for women 

• This is a pragmatic argument - its not moral or political - and yet the dialogue today prevents the discussion of truth from even happening

• What does the psychology tell us about child development and personal improvement?

• What kind of norms are conducive to growth and self improvement?

• The world is incredibly safe now - physically its very very safe

• We live in a bubble where algorithms confirm what we already want to believe 

• Anything you say has infinite downside potential - you could be shamed and criticized - the internet and social media have enabled many intellectual “mob” dynamics where ideas that go against the norm are often silenced or never brought up

• Our evolutionarily ingrained mode of thinking is more tribal/religious and this is directly opposed to the more scientific method of thinking and inquiry 

• What does it mean to be spiritual, but not religious? We have all the same religious psychology that we’ve always had, but without organized religion. And often these religious tendencies can manifest in social movements. 

• At times people fighting for a cause can drift into a tribal mindset 

• How can we “wise-up” ourselves and our children to think more clearly and embrace the lessons of psychology to be healthier, happier, and think more clearly?

• The “Chicago Principles” for freedom of thinking - an open platform to speak, discuss, and debate ideas - so that you can make your case with evidence and good arguments. 

• If you don’t have diversity of ideas when you’re searching for truth you often come to erroneous conclusions. When we lose viewpoint diversity the science itself is at risk. If you don’t have diversity you’re likely to have bad thinking. 

• We have to think about the social process of how imperfect flawed individuals (like all humans) can work together to discover what’s true

• Homework: Spread these ideas to others.

• Homework: Think about the context and system you can to improve and think about how these principles can be appleid to keep healthy debate and productive disagreement 

Thank you so much for listening!

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

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [Book] The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt

• [Book] The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt

• [Amazon Author Page] Jonathan Haidt

• [Book] Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• [Book] The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• [Book] The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

• [Book] iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us by Jean M. Twenge PhD

• [Book] Free-Range Kids, How to Raise Safe, Self-Reliant Children (Without Going Nuts with Worry) by Lenore Skenazy

• [Website] Let Grow

• [Website] OpenMind

• [Website] Heterodox Academy

• [Download] ALL MINUS ONE: John Stuart Mill’s Ideas on Free Speech Illustrated

• [Website] The Coddling

• [SoS Episode] The Biggest Threat Humans Face in 2018

• [Wiki Article] Chicago principles

[00:00:19.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[00:00:11] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than 2 million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries and part of the Self-Help for Smart People Podcast Network. 

In this episode, we discussed several seemingly good ideas that are actually quite dangerous. We start with a look at how the immune system can teach us about the vital importance of being anti-fragile. We look at lessons from ancient cultural traditions all the way up to modern psychology research to peel back the layers of our current social dialogue and look at many notions that have permeated our current thinking. 

What are the best ways to promote growth and development? How can we help heal people who’ve suffered from trauma? How can we create a framework that allows for our society to seek the truth and solve our toughest challenges? We take a hard look at the answers to these questions and much more with our guest, Dr. Jonathan Haidt. 

Do you need more time; time for work time, for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our email list. It's called How You Can Create Time for the Things That Really Matter in Life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the email list at successpodcast.com.

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There's some amazing stuff that's available only to email subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Or, if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you're on the go, you don't have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222.

In our previous episode, we discussed several simple strategies for thinking better by looking at lessons ranging from sources as disparate as the methods of Sherlock Holmes to the principles of professional poker. How do you create focus and engagement when you're trying to solve a problem? What are the potential ways that you can improve your memory to supercharge your thinking ability? How can you train your mind to think more effectively about emotion, risk and uncertainty? We discussed this and much more with our previous guest; Maria Konnikova. If you want to learn how to think clearly and make better decisions, check out our previous episode. 

Now for interview with Jonathan. 

[00:03:11] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show; Dr. Jonathan Haidt. Jonathan is a social psychologist and professor of ethical leadership at New York University Stern School of business. He's the author of multiple books including most recently The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure. He's also the author of over 90 academic articles and his work has been featured across the globe. 

Jonathan, welcome to The Science of Success. 

[00:03:35] JH: Hi, Matt. Thanks so much for having me on. 

[00:03:38] MB: We’re very excited to have you on the show, and there's so much work that you've done that I think is super relevant for our audience, but I'd love to start with kind of the sort of opening parable of Coddling the American Mind and kind of the story of the guru and how that sort of explores some of the kind of, as you call them, untruths that are causing people to think sort of poorly about the world today. 

[00:03:59] JH: Sure. So my first book is called The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, and it grew out of a course I taught at the University of Virginia. I was a professor there for 16 years, and in teaching psych 101 I decided to – I found that I was often quoting the ancient, so I wrote a book basically taking ancient ideas and evaluating them as a psychologist. Are they true?

So what we do in The Coddling of the American Mind is we noticed that there're a lot of really bad ideas being taught to kids these days for good intentions. It’s always done for some purpose to help them in some way, but they can be debilitating. 

So, for example, the first one is what doesn't kill you makes you weaker, and that's obviously the opposite of the classic dictum; what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. So the way we decided to open the book, it was Greg's idea that we would go on a – Greg Kukianoff is my co-author. What if we tell a pretend story that we’re going off on a wisdom quest ourselves? So we start of the story kind of straight-faced saying that we went on a trip to Mount Olympus in Greece and we talked to an oracle there in pursuit of wisdom, and he gives us these words of wisdom, like what doesn't kill you makes you weaker. So that just flies in the face of not just ancient wisdom, but of modern psychology about anti-fragility, which I hope we’ll talk in length about. But that was sort of the literary device that we used to open the book to get across the idea that kids can be harmed by bad ideas even if they are well-intentioned. 

[00:05:27] MB: So let's take into anti-fragility, because I think that's one of the kind of cornerstones of what you talk about in Coddling the American Mind, and it's funny to me because we interview people from such a wide array of fields; the military, the FBI, astronauts, poker players, neuroscientist, research psychologist, and again and again and again you kind of come across this theme that you have to face discomfort. You have to kind of – To build that mental toughness, you have to engage with things that you disagree with and things you don't like, and that's ultimately sort of one of the fundamental things in performance psychology, is that you shouldn't sort of hide from things that you just like. You should sort of toughen yourself against them. 

[00:06:05] JH: That's right. So I could repeat that. I could just be the 17th person to say that on your show, but maybe what I can bring in, which your listeners might not have heard about, is the immune system and the way that the immune system works. So we open chapter one with the story of my son's first day of preschool when he was three years old, and the teachers just went on and on and on in the parents’ orientation meeting about peanuts. It was like this is the most important thing they care about. No peanuts. Nothing that ever touched a peanut, or looks like a peanut, or has the other word letter P in it. It was crazy. Because it turns peanut allergies are rising. 

Well, when I looked into this, I discovered that the reason peanut allergies are rising is because Americans started banning peanuts. They started protecting kids from peanuts in the 1990s, and that just flies in the face of the logic of the immune system. So the immune system is this credible evolutionary accomplishment. Evolution had no idea what germs and worms and parasites we were going to face. So it created this open-ended system that learns, it learns really quickly, it learns even while in utero. It learns from what foods your mother has eaten, as to what foods you’re safe and which ones it should react against. 

And if you protect kids from dirt and germs, if your mother is always washing your hands and not letting you play in the dirt, yeah, in the short run, you're going to get sick less often, but kids need to get sick. They need to be exposed to dirt and germs so that their immune system can wire up and then they’ll be healthy for the rest of their lives, or healthier. 

So what this shows is that the immune system is anti-fragile. It’s a wonderful word made up by Nassim Taleb, the guy who wrote The Black Swan, and it describe systems that are the opposite of fragile. So if a wineglass is fragile, you have to protect it, and if you drop it on the ground, nothing good will happen. It will break. But there are other systems that you have to drop on the ground in order for them to work. 

So while Taleb was originally writing about the banking system, the economic system that was so fragile before the 2008 crash, he called it. He predicted that the system is fragile, not anti-fragile. So it was vulnerable to catastrophe, and he was right. In the same way he says, “There are many other systems, like the immune system,” and even says, “like children.” He says “If we over protect children, we think we’re doing them a favor, but we’re not. We’re weakening them.” 

[00:08:26] MB: I love that example of the immune system, and I think it shows that kind of the importance of being anti-fragile is hardwired not only into our psychology, but our very biology. 

[00:08:35] JH: That's right. That's right, because when you have an open-ended system that has to learn, evolution built in that learning into the process. So we make a big deal in the book about the importance of play and free play without adult supervision, and it has to include letting kids take risks. 

I learned so much interesting work on play, but one thing that I'm sure your listeners will have noticed when they were kids or if they've seen other teenagers, when kids learn to skateboard, they don't just go for a ride, they ramp up the challenge. So once they skateboard, they then skateboard on staircases and they try to skateboard down railings. Kids do this. Once they master a skill, they want to test themselves, push themselves. That's the developmental program. We are designed for play. We can't reach maturity without a lot of play, which includes risk-taking. 

So this is wonderful. My wife gave me a fortune the other day. She had a fortune cookie and she handed me the fortune. It said, “Comfort zones are most often expanded through discomfort.” That's exactly the process. Kids seek out discomfort in some ways. We’re designed to push ourselves, test results, and that's how we grow strong. 

[00:09:47] MB: Yet our culture has continually in the last 5, 10, 15 years been sort of moving more and more towards being fragile and being more brittle. 

[00:09:56] JH: That's right. Our book; The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation For Failure. It's not about millennials, it's about the kids born after 1995. They're the ones who really bore the brunt of our extreme overprotectiveness, our extreme emphasis on academic achievement, our willingness to sacrifice recess and also some other things for more and more and more time on math and other skills that will be tested. We just started over protecting and under liberating our kids, especially in the 1990s. It goes back to the 1980s, but it really picked up its pace in the 1990s. We think we’re doing kids a favor, but we’re hurting them. We are preventing them from developing in the way that human beings were designed to develop. 

[00:10:41] MB: So you talked about a number of kind of untruths that you uncovered or sort of discussed in The Coddling of the American Mind. Let’s dig into the next one, which is sort of always trusting your feelings, or the belief that you should do that. 

[00:10:54] JH: Yeah. So chapter two of the happiness hypothesis, the second great untruth is always trust your feelings. So what we really need to be teaching kids is to question their first reactions. This is part of maturity. The book actually grows out of Greg Lukianoff’s experiences. My co-author and friend, he is prone to depression, and he had a suicidal depression in 2007, and as a result of that he learned to do cognitive behavioral therapy in which you learn the names of distortions. Like people who are depressed and anxious, they are constantly catastrophizing is one distortions, like, “Oh, this little thing happened, but my God, it's going to cause everything else to fail,” or black-and-white thinking. Everything is either all good or all bad. 

There are these patterns of disordered thought, and Greg had learned to stop doing them. That's what you do in CBT. You learn the names of these distortions. You catch yourself doing them, and gradually over a few months, you do them less and then you're happier. You're tougher. You are more resilient.

What Greg began to see in 2013, he runs the organization; The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, fighting for free speech for college students. He began to see in 2013, 2014, the first signs of students themselves asking for protection from ideas, because if somebody reads this novel, it could traumatize them. It could reactivate their PTSD, and there's not really any evidence of this. PTSD is not reactivated by some obvious reminder of like the word. It's often activated by something particular to you and your experience, something that happened on the day of your trauma. 

So the whole thing is not based on very good psychology, but it's based on – Let's give him the benefit of the doubt, a desire to protect people who are emotionally fragile. But it's misguided, because the way you get over fears is to be exposed to little reminders, not to the giant fear itself, but to little reminders, like the mention of something in a novel. 

So the overprotectiveness, the desire to protect people from the very experiences that will actually help them get over their fears is misguided, and we think maybe contributing to poor mental health on campus. 

[00:13:06] MB: I think that such an important point, and this whole idea that the way you overcome a phobia, right? I mean, if you look at the psychology research, it's not by constantly walling yourself off and building your life and building your own sort of personal world where you never encounter the thing that you're afraid of. It’s through exposure therapy. It's through building that muscle of being comfortable with discomfort. 

[00:13:28] JH: That's right. I think it's Pavlovian conditioning, for any listeners who have taken psychology. So if you have an elevator phobia, maybe you were once trapped in an elevator for six hours and you thought you were going to die. What should you do? Should your friends help you avoid television shows that have elevators in them? Should people walk you up the stairs and not even bring you near an elevator? Should they accommodate to your phobia? That might seem like a nice thing to do, but in fact the more your friends do that, the deeper your phobia gets. 

When you get reinforced, when you avoid elevators and your anxiety subsides, you learn to avoid elevators. But if you go near an elevator and nothing bad happens to you, that's actually how your sphere subsides. That’s when you get over the phobia. That’s how you counter condition. That’s how you extinguish it. 

So here, the always trust your feelings and the anti-fragility come together. We are anti-fragile creatures. We have very strong feelings, but those feelings are not always a reliable guide to the world as it is. Sometimes we need to change our feelings. This is called growth, education and development. 

[00:14:35] MB: And I think it's really important to kind of underscore again that talking about phobias, and elevators, etc., that this perspective is based in science. This idea that the way to overcome a phobia is by exposure, and the opposite of that, this sort of pursuit of avoidance in creating these kind of safe spaces is, well, kind of very well-intentioned is not based in science. In many ways, kind of opposed directly to what the science actually says around dealing with these kinds of issues. 

[00:15:05] JH: That's right. So if the goal is therapeutic, if the goal is actually to help people, then the whole culture of safety, as we call it, the idea that people are fragile and need to be protected from things that could trigger them or make them feel uncomfortable, is misguided. Again, that fortune, comfort zones are most often expanded through discomfort. 

So when students want to create a safe space, it comes out of feminist chat rooms in the 1990s. So if a group of women on the internet want to create a space where they can talk about experiences of sexual assault and rape and they want to say, “This is a safe space in which everyone will be supported.” That's totally fine. There's a right of free association. People want community. I mean, that strikes me as totally fine. 

The issue is, should this way of thinking be brought on to a college campus and should it ever be used when thinking about speakers on campus or classroom discussions? That's the question. That's where I believe we make a big mistake. By we, I just mean some students. Most students don't really go in for the safe space ideology. Most students are perfectly normal and healthy and tough. 

But there's been a new idea since around 2014, plus or minus a year, a new idea crept on to campuses fairly rapidly and spread very quickly about safe spaces, trigger warnings, micro-aggressions, cultural appropriation. I never heard any of these terms before 2014, and by 2016 they’re all over the academic world. 

[00:16:31] MB: So what do you think obviously that whole kind of ecosystem is starting to seep into the behavior and the thoughts of not just children, but many people around our society? How do we kind of bridge the gap between what the science and the research shows are kind of healthy reactions to negative stimulus and what the kind of emotional response of people often is?

[00:16:52] JH: Well, that's what we’re hoping, that a science trade book like ours will do some useful work. So this new morality of safetyism that emerged on college campuses around 2014-2015 is very quickly spreading from American college campuses, to British-Canadian, and more recently Australian universities. It’s not spreading on the continent of Europe. They don't have these ideas of safetyism. So it is spreading throughout the English-speaking world in higher ed. 

Then what became really clear last year, in 2017, is that it’s spreading very rapidly through certain industries; through media, technology, and journalism. Those of the three where I hear a lot of reports about it. So if you go to work, if you graduate from a liberal arts college that is all about safe spaces and things like that, then you go to work in a mining company or a manufacturing company, people are going laugh at you and you'll get over it quickly. 

But if you go to work at the New York Times or The Atlantic, they’re wonderful publications. I love those newspapers and magazines, but I've heard from people who work there that among the youngest, the interns, the youngest people, they’re bringing this idea in that certain viewpoint, certain people are so hateful, so unacceptable that we cannot give them a platform. We cannot listen to them. They are dangerous, their mere presence, their ideas are dangerous. 

Now, if there's any field that should understand the necessity of bringing diverse viewpoints together and of listening to both sides, it's journalism, also law and also the social sciences. In all of these places, this new philosophy of safetyism, it's a politicized notion. It's related to the culture war. It's undercutting the ability of these areas to do their work.

[00:18:30] MB: I think that's where these ideas in some way sort of concern me, aside from the whole conversation about sort of the therapeutic damage that they can cause potentially, is that when they kind of get in the way of the scientific pursuit of truth, I think that's where it gets kind of really concerning. 

[00:18:47] JH: That's right. That's a good way to put it. So a way that I began to think about this, is that human beings are very flexible. We can play a lot of different games, and each game has a different goal or endpoint, or telos as the ancient Greeks said. What's the purpose or function of something? 

So we can play the healing game if we are doctors or therapists where we try to make someone better, or we can play the discovery game when we try to figure out what's true. So for that, we often do try to consult diverse viewpoints. We have people debate and argue. We do this in juries. We do this in the science literature. 

So the truth seeking game is a very special game where you have to have people who will challenge your confirmation bias and, in turn, you challenge their confirmation bias. None of us are very good at finding the truth on our own. We’re all very, very good at finding evidence to support what we already believe. That's the confirmation bias, and that was at the heart of my second book; The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. 

So we can do the healing game. We can do the truth seeking game, or we can do the victory game. That's where I know who's on my team. Other people are on the other team. You're either with us or against us. We’re good, you’re evil. Depending on the stakes, the ends will justify the means, and we must win. We must defeat you. 

Now, I think our politics is horrific. I don't want to get too political on this broadcast, but I certainly understand people who are playing the game of defeat the other side very passionately. Right now, there certainly is a place for the victory game of the war game, but the classroom is not it. The classroom is a very delicate ecosystem in which if people are afraid that they will be attacked personally for sharing an idea, they won't share their idea. If people don't share ideas that go against the consensus, then the whole system breaks down. The truth seeking game cannot be played. 

So this is what's happening not at most universities. Most universities are not overtaken by this, but if you look at the elite schools, especially in the Northeast and the West Coast and especially the liberal arts colleges, there's data showing that most students report self-censoring, especially around political or politicized topics, and anecdotal reports, whenever I go to these schools and I ask if they have a callout culture, all hands go up. People are afraid of speaking, afraid of challenging received wisdom, and this is terrible. This is a terrible environment to put young people in, but this is the way things have evolved especially in the last few years. 

[00:21:13] MB: I think that kind of gets to the third untruth that you talk about, which is this sort of battle between good and evil and how that can cause kind of cognitive distortion. 

[00:21:24] JH: That's right. So one of the big themes of the righteous mind was that we are tribal creatures. We evolve for tribalism. There's no other way to explain it. If you look at fraternity initiations at universities in America and you compare them, the initiation rites of pre-state societies, the pain, and fear, and disgust that is used, the rituals that take place exactly at midnight. There’s something on the human mind that really prepares us for tribalism. Men more so than women, young men especially go in for these tribal rituals, but it's very deep in our psyche, and this I think is the only explanation for sports. Why do we spend so much time and money on sports? Because we love tribalism, we love the battle of us versus them, and we can do it in a way that’s not harmful. Sports doesn't really make people hate the other side, except maybe in Britain. They have soccer hooligans and things like that. But for the most part, sports is friendly rivalry. 

Well, in academic life, it can be really destructive to interpret everything in a sociology class through the lens of us versus them, where us, let's say, is the left and them is the right, or to make it racial or gender, does a terrible disservice to the people engaged in the conversation. It prevents them from playing the truth seeking game. It dragoons them. It forces them into the victory game, and a lot of students don't want to play it, but they're afraid to stand up against it. 

[00:22:47] MB: So how can we start to kind of clear the way for the pursuit of truth and kind of the freedom to express any idea and evaluate whether it's true or not?

[00:23:00] JH: Yeah, it's hard, but I think it begins with an appreciation of the fact that we need boundaries around activities, and leadership must set those boundaries. So what I mean is the president of the university on the first day or when he or she welcomes the incoming class, of course, they talk about – They talk about diversity and inclusion, of course, but along with that they need to talk about what we're here to do. Why are we here? What is special about this place that you could not get if you just stayed home and went to the library every day, or found books on the Internet. What's special about this place?

So if they set norms about our mission, that we’re playing the truth seeking game, that we require disagreement, that we are trying to make a diverse community, and that means there will be frequent, almost constant misunderstandings. We have to all try not to give offense. I think it's useful to train students in those ways. But at the same time, we have to train everyone to give everyone else the benefit of the doubt. 

Diversity is hard, and I think some of the ways that we teach about diversity may amplify problems. Given that we’re tribal creatures, the more we play up identity and we teach students to judge each other based on their identity, the worst things will be. 

So I think leadership has a crucial role to play, especially at orientation on universities. They have to set rules, and just as we will not tolerate acts of racial hostility, or sexism. We’ll not tolerate those things. Similarly, we should not tolerate anyone shouting someone else down, preventing someone from speaking. So these are some of the most florid examples of what's been happening on college campuses, is speakers who get no platform, or shouted down because their views are deemed to be too hateful. 

The usual way to respond to that is to either just don't go to the talk, or debate the person. Show them where they’re wrong. Show the audience where the person is wrong, and that's the way things were on college campuses until around 2013-2014. That’s when this recent wave of shout downs have been.
A couple of them have involved violence, although for the most part they’ve been nonviolent.

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[00:27:03] MB: It’s interesting, and in many ways when you can kind of silence the debates around these ideas, you prevent some of these more kind of racist and sexist perspectives from really being explored and dismantled, in many ways kind of create a space for them to kind of foster, because they can't be challenged because they can't be discussed. 

[00:27:19] JH: That's right. When you tell people, “You can't say that. You will be punished if you say that.” The response is never, “Oh gosh! Then I must be wrong. I'll stop thinking that.” The response is usually a kind of anger. It is an emotion in the psychological literature called reactants. Reactants is the angry feeling you get when you're told you can't do something or say something, or if you're pinned down. You have an extra strength to fight off restraint. People don't like that. 

And so in many ways, speech restrictions, the sort of thought policing, it makes a lot of people angry, and I think it makes especially young men much more interested in speakers and for that attack, that kind of political correctness. So there’s certainly has been a rise of – Again, I don't want to get into the debate about what is the alt-right and all those things, but I think the political polarization that we're seeing, I think many people on the left are shortsighted if they try to shut down kinds of speech. I think when they do that, they tend to simply make enemies and push people over to their opponents. 

In fact, I got a great quote here. Let me see if I can find. There’s a quote from Steve Bannon. Let’s see what did he say. He said, “The democrats, the longer they talk about identity politics, I got them. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the democrats.” 

Now, that's a strategy decision. I'm not sure that he's right about it, but as a social psychologist, I think that there is at least some truth to that, that people on the left or some recent movements on the left, when they talk about these identity issues in ways that seem to attack people or treat people as evil, they make enemies, and it's often counterproductive. 

[00:29:07] MB: So kind of pulling back from the sort of moral or political element of this, I think you talk in the book as well about kind of how this culture of safetyism contributes to things like rising suicide rates and anxiety. Tell a little bit more about that. 

[00:29:22] MB: Yes. This is why I think that we will begin to see some change, because this isn’t just a debate about how to interpret things. What we're seeing is a very, very large and rapid with a sudden onset, a large rise in rates of anxiety and depression in adolescents. It's not a rise of bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia. It's not across the board and it’s not just people making up words or a new generation acting like it's, “Oh! We’re so depressed, because we’re happy. We’re comfortable talking about depression.” It’s not that. Because the suicide rate has shown the exact same thing and the hospital admission rate for self-harm has shown the exact same thing. 

Let’s see. I think I have some numbers here. Let me see if I have those numbers handy. So if you look at the suicide rate for adolescents, boys always have a high - Girls make more attempts, but boys have – Boys commit suicide more often, because they tend to jump off buildings, or use guns. They tend to use irreversible means. 

So boys have a higher rate, but what has happened since roughly 2011 is the rates of suicide and anxiety and depression began rising for boys. So the boys’ suicide rate is up 25%. If you take the average of the suicide rate for the United States for teenagers from 2001 to 2010, that was 11.9 per hundred thousand. That's risen to 14.8 per hundred thousand. So that's a 25% rise in boys killing themselves, teenage boys killing themselves. That's gigantic. That's a lot of kids. But compare that to the rate for girls, it was only 2.9 per hundred thousand if you average across the first decade of this century, and it goes from under three to now about five per hundred thousand. That is an increase of 70%. The girls’ suicide rate is up 70% if the last two years of data are pretty much identical at five per hundred thousand. 

So my point is that something rather sudden has happened. It hit us all by surprise. Over the last few years, we've been hearing reports from college campuses that the student counseling centers are overwhelmed that the line of students seeking help for depression and anxiety is way out the door. We can't meet the demand. Will, now, finally in last couple of years, we have really clear national data on this. So this is a catastrophe. This is a lot of dead kids, suffering kids, destroyed families. This is horrible what's happening. We’ve got to get a handle on it. 

Social media is clearly a big piece of the puzzle, and there’s a wonderful book called iGen, I-G-E-N, by Jean Twenge that goes into that, but we think that the other big, big piece of the puzzle is rather than just social media. The other big piece of the puzzle is that we cracked down on playtime and independence so severely in the 1990s that we've denied kids the thousands of hours of unsupervised play that they need to become self-governing adults. 

Kids need to have plenty of time to work out conflicts to be alone, to not have a parent there by them all the time, and because we've deprived kids of play and freedom so severely since the 1990s, we think that this is one of the reasons why as they get older they have failed to develop their psychological defenses. They're not as comfortable being on their own. When they come to college, they need a lot more help. 

[00:32:36] MB: I think that kind of underscores and comes back to what we were discussing earlier, which is the idea that this – And you make this point in the book as well, is this is kind of a pragmatic argument. It's not necessarily sort of a moral or political position, and yet in many ways the dialogue today kind of often prevents this sort of the rational discussion of this from taking place. 

[00:32:57] JH: Exactly. So I'm a social psychologist. I study how to help people get along, how to bridge political divides, and the debate about what’s going on on campus unfortunately is so politicized. So we have one side, people on the right and the right wing media saying, “Oh! Snowflakes and SJW, social justice warriors. They’re crazy.” 

We have the people in the left saying, “Oh! You know, the alt-right and the racists, and the homophobes,” and all sorts of bigotry, and each side has real things that they can point to. Each side is not crazy, but they're just making the problem worse, and what Greg and I are trying to do in our book is put aside all moralism. We’re not blaming anyone. The subtitle of the book is really what the book is about. It’s how good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure. 

We’re trying to cut through the partisan nonsense and just say, “What does the psychology tell us about child development? What does the psychology tell us about intellectual development in college? What kinds of ideas, or climates, or norms are conducive to growth and which kinds impede it?” So that's what we’re trying to do in the book, is just take a very pragmatic approach to diagnosing a serious problem and then recommending solutions. 

[00:34:13] MB: I think it’s worth noting as well that I know we’ve talked a lot on the show about sort of child development and sort of focusing on children and universities. But the reality is that these principles of growth and the psychology research around how to improve and grow and move out of your comfort zone, this applies to anybody and everybody and there's many people whose growth is limited by kind of the perspective that they should avoid or kind of wall off things that they disagree with as opposed to sort of facing them head on. 

[00:34:40] JH: That's right. I think that habit is clearly taught by social media. So it's not really clear what to do about this. So the generation we’re talking about, igen, or genz, kids born after 1995. They’re the first in history to grow up with social media, millennials got it when they were in college or later. They didn't have it as teenagers, but igen got it when they were 13, a lot of them 13 or 14. 

So the world is incredibly safe now. The crime rate is over. Rates of child deaths and accidents plummeted. The world is physically very, very safe for today's young people, but live much of their life on social media where there's all kinds of nastiness, and racism, and sexism, and social media offers people the chance to block other people. 

So if you grow up being exposed to bad words, which of course are upsetting, and then you can block those people, then you come to college and somebody, the college republicans have invited some speaker that you think is hateful. Why can't we block them? Why do we have to have them on our campus? 

So I think their habits of thought that are developed by a grown up in a social media ecosystem that are not good for living in a democracy. Democracy is messy. You're always going to dislike the other side, and somehow we have to learn to work with each other. My fear is that the youngest generation has grown up with such vivid examples of Democratic dysfunction and with tools to block out other people. 

So I think when they grow up and take over the reins of governance, they may not be as prepared as some previous generations were. That's my fear. I don't know what will happen, but that is a concern. 

[00:36:13] MB: I wrote a piece a couple of months ago around the same idea that essentially we live in a world today, and social media is a big piece of it, that algorithms essentially sort of reinforce constantly our own kind of confirmation bias. We live in a bubble basically where we’re almost never exposed to any ideas that we disagree with. It's such a major contributor to the polarization in our society today. 

[00:36:34] JH: That's right. So the Internet and social media have done two things that are very, very powerful. So we've known since the 1990s, as soon as we got search engines, like Google, and before that, AltaVista, that the internet makes it very easy to confirm whatever you want to believe. So you can start only consulting sources that you like, and of course the media ecosystem has been very conducive to that. 

So there's the filter bubble problem. We’re all sure that we’re right. We become more self-righteous, more angry at the other side. But the other effect, which is very different and I think is perhaps more pernicious, is that the costs of punishing others have gone way, way down and the benefits to doing so have gone way, way up. 

What I mean by that is that we all live in an economy of prestige, that is just as you get paid for some things and you get billed for others, when you do something socially, you either gain credibility or prestige points or you lose them. So if everybody is incentivized to – You gain prestige by doing well in the test or by making money, you'll try to do well on test and you’ll try to make money, and that may have some negative social repercussions. But for the most part, those are not so bad. 

But if you are incentivized to condemn others, if you get points for calling out others – So if someone says some perfectly innocent thing or they wear a piece of clothing that you can criticize and call it culturally insensitive, if you get points for doing that, well that’s how you get a call out culture. So young adults today, or teenagers, are for the most part it seems immersed in ecosystems that many of the elements of a call out culture. What that means is that they grow up such that everything they say has almost infinite downside potential. Anything you say could be taken out of context. Maybe you slip. You use a word you're not supposed to use, and you can be pilloried for and you can be publicly shamed for it and others will join in, because they get credibility points. They get prestige points for jumping on the pylon. 

So the internet has enabled not just the informational distortions of a bubble, but the social distortions of mob or vigilante justice. It’s not exactly justice, but mob dynamics. I think we have to really be sympathetic to the young generation growing up like this. So when they come to college, yeah, they're more reluctant to speak up in seminar classes, they’re more reluctant to challenge prevailing, the norms or whatever is the dominant view in the classroom. So their education suffers because of it. 

[00:39:03] MB: And that kind of gets to something else that I've heard you speak about, this idea that the sort of – The sort method of scientific thinking is an unnatural sort of way of thinking and the kind of religious mode of thinking. I’ll let you kind of explain what that means, because it’s not necessarily religious. It’s sort of our more natural kind of method of thinking. 

[00:39:23] JH: Yeah. So I love to think evolutionarily. I think human beings are the most fascinating species that’s ever lived. I'm really glad that I'm one of them, and we have an amazing origin story. A part of the origin story is we have to get from where upright walking apes about 3 or 4 million years ago. We’re not human in any real sense. We’re just like chimpanzees or guerrillas who happen to have stood up, chimpanzees or bonobos who happened to have stood up vertically. Somehow we get from there to civilization, and it seems – At least the story that I tell in the righteous mind is that a really big part of the transition was because we developed religion. I don't mean large-scale religion. I mean, tribal dynamics in which we circle around something. Make it sacred. We worship a tree, or a rock, or an ancestor's skull. There are forms of traditional or tribal religion that are very, very similar around the world. 

In doing that, we create a moral order, we create a set of rules and norms that bind us together, and this is especially effective as we’re fighting the next tribe over. So we have a long period of evolution for tribalism. So if we evolved for that, and then we develop these large-scale religions only very recently; Christianity, and Hinduism, and Judaism. These religions are very recent, and in some ways now they're not fading out, I wouldn't say, but more and more Americans say that they’re spiritual, but not religious.

What that means is that they have all the same religious psychology that we've always had. We think about sin, and sacredness, and blasphemy, and sacrilege, and things like that. They have all the same psychology, but without an organized religion. Sometimes those religious psychological tendencies show up in new social movements, and this is what some people are saying about some elements of social justice. 

So social justice of course is crucial if people are being denied access or dignity because of their category membership, then that is a social injustice. So in the book, we’re very clear that social justice is a good thing. There are certain meanings of social justice that are so consistent with deep intuitive notions of justice. But at times, people fighting for a cause drift into a tribal mindset in which they can become like religious inquisitors, and a lot of people are writing about this now. There's a lot of interesting pushback from people who are not white males who are now writing about the ways that identity politics and the social justice movement have in some ways gone too far, gone off the rails, or imported some kind of ugly tendencies. So that’s something that we’re very concerned about. 

[00:42:01] MB: So how do we, kind of as you put it in the book, wise up to thinking more clearly around all of these various problems?

[00:42:10] JH: Yeah. So it's a really multifaceted problem, and therefore there's no simple answer. In the book, we conclude that there are six causal threads, six different causes of the problem, and the briefest list is rising political polarization with political purification of the faculty. Rising mental illness, especially depression, overprotective, paranoid parenting, the loss of play, the bureaucratization and incorporatization of universities and some new ideas about social justice and identity politics that, as I said, I think are often counterproductive. So those are the six trends. 

Some of those can't really be reversed. So what we recommend in the book is break the problem into what are we doing to kids before they reach college? Let's stop doing that, or at least really keep our eye on what is healthy developments and kids can live independently. In the second piece is what kinds of environments they find once they arrived in college? Though I should say, a lot of the dynamics are now happening in high schools, especially private schools, prep schools, are changing very rapidly as far as I can tell. 

So on the child-rearing front, I think we need a lot more free range parenting. So there's a wonderful woman, Lenore Skenazy, wrote a book called Free Range Kids after she let her nine-year-old son ride the subway in 2009 and he survived. He wanted to do it. He rode a few steps by himself. A lot of people were upset by this, like, “Oh my God! How dare you let your kid ride the subway? He could be abducted.” So she started based on those experiences. She started a movement called Free Range Parenting. 

Lenore and I and a few other people have recently grown this movement into a group called Let Grow. So if listeners go to letgrow.org, especially those who are parents. If you want advice on how to raise kids, go to letgrow.org, and we have a lot of advice based on scientific research. A lot of it for how do you give kids a healthier childhood that will make them stronger, more resilient adults? That's the first piece. 

Second piece is what do we do on campus? There, it just requires leadership, and leadership at many universities has been reactive, not proactive. So if you wait for things to blow up, if you wait for there to be a protestant and demands over somebody who said some word that somebody didn't like, to wait for that to happen, it’s very hard to get a handle on things. 

But if you lay out the norms very clearly upfront on the first day of class, the first day of orientation about what we’re trying to do here, the special role of universities. How we need to give each other the benefit of the doubt. If you have good clear leadership and you emphasize that this is different from the public square, this is not about fighting the political war. We’re doing something different here. I think you can create environments in which students can grow intellectually. They can have some space away from the culture war that's likely to rage for the rest of their lives once they leave college.

[00:45:03] MB: I know you also talk about kind of a framework called the Chicago Principles. Could you share those and kind of why that's so important?

[00:45:09] JH: Yes. So these issues, the issues we’re talking about now about students protesting, speakers, things like that, they didn't just start in 2013. There was a wave of that in the 1960s. In Britain, they call it no platforming. So there've been students making demands on universities for a long time. When I was in college, I went to Yale in the early 1980s, and then it was all about compelling the University to divest from South Africa. 

So students have applied pressure to universities for a long time, and that's understandable. That's normal politics. But if you're running the university, many leaders have observed that their job is just impossible. Because if they agree to do what the students want on .1, well, a third of the university community believes the opposite and a lot of the alumni deal with. 

What happens if you take sides? It's the same problem that corporate leaders are now having with their push to take sides on Donald Trump or anything else. It's antithetical to the spirit of the enterprise if leadership and the institution has to take sides on every issue. 

So the University of Chicago put together under the leadership of Professor Jeffrey Stone, they wrote a great document; The Chicago Principles on Freedom of Speech, I think is what it was called. The key point is that the university provides a platform on which all members are free to speak, free to contend, free to make their case, but the university does not take sides. As long as you say that, then you instantly redirect student efforts from protests to demand that the university do X, Y or Z to students arguing with each other, which is what they should be doing. 

So the Chicago Principles can really help insulate universities from the kind of pressure campaigns that many are getting and let them focus on providing an open platform not for everyone in the world. We don't want every holocaust denier and neo-Nazi to come to campus, but at least students should be free to speak and argue with each other and they should learn to make their case with evidence and good arguments.

The Chicago Principle is a very simple fix, but it's a step that every school should take to endorse them, to have a clear policy that people get to speak, nobody gets shouted down, and the university is not going to take sides in your debates. 

[00:47:18] MB: I know we touched on a number of sort of semi-political themes in this interview, and I want to underscore again this point that we discussed earlier. My personal perspective on this is sort of purely pragmatic. I'm concerned with how do we sort of discover the best possible strategies for improvement? How do we determine what the scientific research says? Ultimately, how do we pursue truth? When I think about my kind of intellectual heroes, people like Carl Sagan and Charlie Monger, the pursuit of truth and trying to really discover what's true is of such sort of fundamental importance to me. The issue can often get politicized. But I want to kind of bring that back and just reemphasize what you’ve discussed and said many times in this conversation that this is a discussion of what does the scientific research say and how do we create a society where we can have healthy, happy, psychology well-formed individuals and we can pursue truth. 

[00:48:14] JH: That's right. That's beautifully put. The one thing I would just add to that is that it's hard to just say, “Oh, we're just pursuing truth here. No politics.” Well, we’re often guided unconsciously by what we want to be true. So if a research community has no political diversity, then that research community is going to surprise – Not surprisingly find, but the scientific research supports what it believed all along. 

So just as when psychology was all male, it came to some erroneous conclusions about gender and about women's psychology, and it was very important to get women into psychology. So in the same way, the social science isn’t particularly left. There are many reasons for that, and would never have universities where half the faculty are conservative. There are a lot of psychological reasons why progressives are more drawn to the activities of faculty members. 

But when the imbalance gets severe, as it has gotten in the last 10 or 15 years, when we lose viewpoint diversity, then the science itself is at risk. The conclusions of science about politicized topics are no longer reliable. 

So what a lot of my work is on is not trying to help any group. I'm sometimes accused of trying to help conservatives, because I think we need more conservatives in the academy. But what I'm really trying to help are university and trying to help the process, that if you don't have diversity you’re liable to have some bad thinking. So we have to think very carefully about the process, the social process, the institutional process by which imperfect flawed, post hoc reasoning creatures like us who evolve to dance around campfires and worship rocks and trees. What kind of process and culture puts us together? Is that we end up producing reliable science. That's kind of an amazing story. It's a process that's easily corrupted, and that's what I'm really trying to work on in a lot of my projects and it’s what Greg and I are trying to work on in part in our book; The Coddling of the American Mind. 

[00:50:07] MB: So for listeners who want to kind of try to concretely implement some of the things we’ve discussed, what would be sort of a piece of homework or an action step that you would give them?

[00:50:17] JH: Well, first go buy the book. Buy a copy for all your friends and have them read it. I’m only being a little bit facetious, and that some of these problems are not ones you can address on your own. So the social media problem for raising kids is really hard to just crackdown on your own kid. I’m trying that now with my 12-year-old son and my 8-year-old daughter put on a program that limits them to two hours a day of internet use. It's very hard for me to do it on my home, because they say none of their other friends have this. They feel like they're being separated, because can't do – My son can't do Fortnight, and he can't do these battle games with three or four hours a day like his friends. 

But if you have a group or community; a school, a religious congregation that has a discussion about these problems, if you do things as a group, you can be much more effective. More generally, I would break it down into are you trying to improve a school? Are you trying to improve an office or a company? Because these problems are flooding into the corporate world. So listeners are going to find these issues coming to them at work increasingly over the next few years. 

So try to define what's the system that you’re hoping to reform or improve, and then think about what changes would keep healthy dynamics of debate, and discourse, and respectful disagreement. 

[00:51:32] MB: For listeners who want to learn more and find you and your work online, where's the best place to do that?

[00:51:37] JH: We have a website for the book at thecoddling.org. I cofounded an organization called heterodoxacademy.org. I also cofounded this project that's just grown wonderfully at openmindplatform.org, and that's a program we developed that will help any community learn to talk more openly, learn skills of productive disagreement. 

So our most powerful tool is the open mind program at openmindplatform.org. We produce a wonderful book of John Stuart Mills, On Liberty, just The Second Chapter. Arguments about freedom of speech and why it's so important in a liberal democracy. So if you go to heterodoxacademy.org/mill, you can find our Mill book. It's free, a free PDF download or an inexpensive Kindle. So we have a variety of resources that will help individuals and groups to maintain or improve the climate for healthy productive discourse and disagreement. 

[00:52:38] MB: Well, Jonathan, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all these wisdom, a very important and very timely topic. 

[00:52:45] JH: Well, thanks so much, Matt. I really enjoyed our conversation. 

[00:52:47] 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 e-mail 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.

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Simple Hacks For Thinking Better From Sherlock Holmes To Professional Poker with Maria Konnikova

In this episode we discuss several simple strategies for thinking better by looking at lessons ranging from sources as disparate as the methods of Sherlock Holmes to the principles of professional poker. How do you create focus and engagement when you’re trying to solve a problem? What are the potential ways that you can improve your memory to supercharge your thinking ability? How can you train your mind to think more effectively about emotion, risk, and uncertainty? We discuss this and much more with our guest Maria Konnikova. 

Maria Konnikova is the author of two New York Times best-sellers Mastermind: How To Think Like Sherlock Holmes and The Confidence Game. Maria graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and received her Ph.D in psychology from Columbia University. Her work has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, WIRED, and much more and she is an avid poker player as well.

• Is is possible that a fictional character could teach us how to think and make better decisions?

• How stories and examples can bring important scientific concepts to life

• How many steps lead up to 221 B Baker Street?

• It’s not about eyesight - its not what you see it’s also what you observe

• Mindfulness - the thing that distinguishes Sherlock Holmes from any other detective is that he is fully present and sees and observes small details

• The hidden power of how remarkably quiet Sherlock Holmes is - he’s a great demonstration of the power of contemplative routines

• There’s no such thing as multi-tasking - there is only the concept of Task Switching

• Focused engagement and concentration are the key to building deep memories 

• “The game is afoot” - how flow can help us think more effectively 

• How do we create focus and engagement when we’re working on something?

• You carry this real estate with you all the time - your “Brain attic” - and how you can use it to think more effectively

• Any information you remember is only useful to you if you can retrieve it when you need - and that’s why you must store things properly 

• A few strategies for making your memory more effective:

• Encoding - the moment where we first remember it. If you aren’t paying attention you won’t remember in the first place and the memory will never get encoded. 

  1. Memories are most powerful when they’re tied to other existing memories

  2. Every single point of encoding is an anchor or retrieval point that can retrieve everything

  3. Use multiple senses to encode a memory - not just one - build a rich texture of memories to encode them 

• Encoding is different than rote memorization - it’s much more powerful

• How Maria went from a psychology PhD to becoming a professional poker player

• How poker can teach you how to make decisions under conditions of risk, uncertainty, and emotion 

• You can teach people about biases and yet they still make the same mistakes 

• Poker is a way to teach your mind to think in the right ways about risk, emotion, and uncertainty

• Poker is an interesting confluence of ideas and a laboratory of ideas that that are important to thriving and succeeding in life

• Probability

  1. Variance

  2. Risk/Uncertainty

  3. Ego/Emotion

  4. Self awareness and your own shortcomings

• There is no better metaphor for the game of life than poker

• What enabled Maria Konnikova to go from a total outsider to a professional poker player in such a short period of time?

• Having one of the top players in the world mentor her was a huge piece of it

  1. Having a beginners mind and being willing to not know and ask simple questions 

  2. Being willing to study and put in massive hours to learn

  3. Fully immersing yourself, studying 9-10 hours a day, reading, analyzing hands, watching streams, taking notes, talking to people about strategy

  4. There are no shortcuts, ever. There’s no magic bullet. 

• You must put aside your ego to learn and improve

• Homework: Single most important thing that you can do is meditate 10 minutes per day every day. It doesn’t matter what’s going on around you. Admit the distractions and then let go of them. It doesn’t need to be a quiet place. That one habit can be life changing. 

Thank you so much for listening!

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http://www.successpodcast.com/show-notes/2016/12/28/why-you-shouldnt-follow-your-passion-the-rare-value-of-deep-work-with-cal-newport

Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [SoS Episode] Why You Shouldn’t Follow Your Passion & The Rare Value of Deep Work with Cal Newport

• [App] Freedom

• [Article] Could boredom be curable? - The Boston Globe

• [Book] Mastery by Robert Greene

• [SoS Episode] When the Impossible Becomes Possible - The Secrets of Flow Revealed with Steven Kotler

• [Book] Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

• [SoS Episode] Effortlessly Remember Anything – Lessons From A Grandmaster of Memory with Kevin Horsley

• [SoS Episode] How To Learn More In Record Time - Speed Reading, Concentration, & Memory with Jim Kwik

• [SoS Episode] Brain Scans Reveal The Powerful Memory Techniques of Memory Champions, Greek Philosophers, and SuperLearners with Jonathan Levi

• [SoS Episode] Making Smart Decisions When You Don’t Have All The Facts with Annie Duke

• [Wiki Article] Daniel Kahneman

• [Wiki Article] Stanford marshmallow experiment

• [Book] Sherlock Holmes: The Centurion Papers: The First Collection by The Davies Brothers

• [Book] The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It . . . Every Time by Maria Konnikova

• [Book] Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova

• [Instagram] Maria Konnikova

• [Twitter] Maria Konnikova

[00:00:19.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:11] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than 2 million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries and part of the Self-Help for Smart People Podcast Network. 

In this episode, we discuss several simple strategies for thinking better by looking at lessons ranging from sources as disparate as the methods of Sherlock Holmes, to the principles of professional poker. How do you create focus and engagement when you’re trying to solve a problem? What are the potential ways that you can improve your memory to supercharge your thinking ability? How can you train your mind to think more effectively about emotion, risk and uncertainty? We discuss these and much more with our guest, Maria Konnikova. 

Do you need more time; time for work time, for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our email list. It's called How You Can Create Time for the Things That Really Matter in Life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the email list at successpodcast.com.


You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our email subscribers. We recently pre-released an episode in an interview to our email subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience. That had tremendous implications, because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first. With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live exclusive interview, just for e-mail subscribers.

There's some amazing stuff that's available only to email subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Or, if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you're on the go, you don't have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222.

In our previous episode, we broke down the complex and confusing world of body language and nonverbal communication. We discovered the easiest starting point for learning the basics you need to know to get started with reading and understanding body language, and we dug into the specific tools and strategies you can start using right away to not only decode the body language of others, but also change your own body language to communicate what you want. We explored all of these and much more with our previous guest, Joe Navarro. 

If you’ve always wanted to learn about body language but feel overwhelmed by such a complex and confusing field, be sure to listen to that episode. Now for our interview with Maria. 

[INTERVIEW]

[00:03:04] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show; Maria Konnikova. Maria is the author of two New York Times bestsellers; Mastermind: How To Think Like Sherlock Holmes, and The Confidence Game. Maria graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and received from PhD in psychology from Columbia. Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Wired and much more. She’s also an avid poker player. Maria, welcome to The Science of Success. 

[00:03:34] MK: Thanks for having me, Matt. 

[00:03:35] MB: Well, we’ll super excited to have you on the show today as long time listeners will definitely know. I’m a big poker player as well and so I definitely want to dig into some of that stuff. But before we do, I’d love to kind of start out with some of the other work that you’ve done, especially the book Mastermind I thought was really fascinating. 

What kind of led you to decide to write a book about Sherlock Holmes and are there some applications from kind of a fictional character that can actually lead us to better thinking and decision making? 

[00:04:07] MK: Yeah, those are both really great questions. The first one especially because I’m not someone who was a lifelong Sherlockian. When I started writing the book I realized there was this huge community of Sherlock Holmes fans, Sherlockians from all over the world who’ve just lived and breathed Sherlock Holmes for their whole life, and that wasn’t me. I had been introduced to the stories as a child when my dad read them to me – Well, to our whole family. We had reading hour every Sunday before bed. It was really wonderful, and they really were beautiful. I remember loving them as a child, but I had never reread them as an adult. So it was kind of a childhood experience, childhood memory and nothing more. 

In this particular instance, I was working on a piece about mindfulness, and this was actually years before everyone knew what mindfulness was. So we’re going back to like 2010 when this was not a buzzword and people, when you say mindfulness, were like, “Oh, doesn’t that have something to do with Buddhism,” and that was basically the end of it. 

I was trying to figure out, “Okay. I want to write about mindfulness and cognitive psychology. How do I do that in a way that people will relate to, that they’ll understand what it is?” because whenever I’m writing I always like to have stories, examples, things that bring scientific concepts to life. As I was trying to figure out how to do this, I actually had a flashback to childhood to my dad reading to us. I remembered one particular scene, which was I couldn’t remember the story. I knew it was from Sherlock Holmes, and it was about Holmes asking Watson how many steps lead up to 221B Baker Street and Watson not knowing. 

Luckily, now we’re living in a time of Google, so I was able to go online and just quickly Google steps 221B Baker Street, and right away I had the story. I reread it and I thought, “Oh my God! This scene is actually –” My memory was really good in terms of just going to the right place, because if you read the scene fully, it’s not actually really about the number of steps. It’s about this exchange that Holmes and Watson have at the end when Watson says, “Well, I don’t really understand. My eyes are just as good as yours,” and Holmes says, “It’s not about eyesight. This is the difference between us. You only see. I both see and observe.” I was like, “That’s mindfulness, both seeing and observing.” 

So I wrote up the piece and then ended up doing really well, and in the process I also became really kind of fascinated with the Sherlock Holmes stories. I thought, “Oh! This really interesting. I really enjoyed reading this. Let me start rereading them. Maybe I’m missing something.” 

So I started rereading them from the beginning, and just within a few stories I said, “Oh my God! This is a goldmine. There are so many psychological concepts here. It’s so well-described. Conan Doyle really knew what he was talking about when it came to the human mind, and that was the seat of the book and that ended up becoming Mastermind.

To get to the second part of your question, of course, Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character, but what people often don’t realize is that first of all Arthur Conan Doyle was medically trained. He was a doctor. He actually started the Holmes stories, because his practice wasn’t going very well and he was sitting by himself and waiting for patients that never came. So he started writing the Holmes stories, and he was someone who was always very much into all of the scientific developments of the day. He followed everything that was happening in Germany. He knew what was going on with the signs. He was a follower of Sigmund Freud, and Holmes was actually based on a doctor. He was based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s mentor at the University of Edinburgh, and Joseph Bell was the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes. 

So we have here a fictional character who’s created by someone with a deep scientific training based on a doctor. Yes, absolutely, we can apply him to real-life because he came out of real-life.

[00:08:11] MB: What a great instance of kind of the power of subconscious incubation, right? You’re sort of working on an article and your subconscious just bubbles up this idea from 10, 20 years ago and suddenly that is exactly what you were looking for for that article. 

[00:08:26] MK: Yeah. I think that’s probably the longest incubation period I’ve ever had, but it was a really crazy moment, because I distinctly remember this. I was like, “Oh!” I remember as a little, like that’s what struck me. That particular story, it wasn’t like murder or some big moment when I was scared. It was this not knowing. Because I remember identifying with Watson and saying, “Oh my God! I don’t know how many steps lead up to 221B Baker Street either.” I don’t see and observe. I only see. 

As a kid you don’t really get the depth of that message, but it definitely stuck and I have never, I think, seen subconscious incubation in action to the extent that I saw it then.  

[00:09:11] MB: So let’s dig into some of the kind of lessons from studying Sherlock Holmes. What were some of the big findings or takeaways that you uncovered? 

[00:09:19] MK: Well, I think that the first one was actually the first one, literally. It was this theme of mindfulness which ended up becoming the theme of the book, that the thing that distinguishes Holmes above any other detective, is the fact that he is able to observe. He’s present. He’s in the moment. He really just focuses and takes in all of these information. 

One of the things that you find when you actually read all of the stories and look at what Holmes does, is how remarkably quiet he often is. He often makes a joke that he’s the most inactive/active detective I’ve ever seen, because if you look at photographs – Well, photographs. If you look at drawings that were done for the book, and basically every story you see him sitting in the chair with his fingers stippled together. Just sitting quietly or with a pipe or with his violin, and it really taught me the importance of taking those quiet moments of taking a step back, really making sure that you reflect before you act, before you jump in to anything, and that you try to see the whole picture. Because I think we’re living in a moment where we’re really just primed for a constant action. Whenever you take a step back and are like, “You know, I just want to reflect on this for a moment,” people are like, “Oh, you’re wasting time. You’re not doing anything.” 

What Sherlock Holmes helped me rediscover was that actually doing nothing can be the most powerful thing that you can do. It can really unlock your mind. It can really force you to focus and to take in so much more than you would if you were just constantly busy, busy, busy. That’s a lesson that I think I have to keep relearning, because everything in society pushes against that. 

Especially when it comes to, I think, the buzzword, multitasking, which is kind of my eternal enemy, because one other thing that you learn from Holmes and something that I tried to kind of convey in the book was that, first of all, there’s no such thing as multitasking. Our brains can’t do two things at once. So it’s task-switching, and it’s really exhausting and you don’t actually end up doing anything as well. 

But Holmes also, this fictional character, shows the importance of being able to resist distractions and just kind of to uni-task, to really uni-task well, and that that’s one of your most powerful things when you can unleash your mind in that way. 

Once again, that’s so hard to remember. Even right now, you and I are doing this interview and I’ve actually blacked out my computer screen, because otherwise I have – I don’t know, how many tabs opened. It’s just so temping to be like, “Ooh! Let’s look at Twitter and see what’s happening. Let’s look at this. Let’s look at that.” 

I actually remember when I was writing the book, I downloaded this software, because I was writing about it, freedom, which turns off your internet. Because I was writing and not multitasking, I was like, “Oh, this is actually really interesting. Let me try it out. I don’t actually need it.” Get a free trial period and I think after 10 days or something you have to pay for it. I was like, “Oh! Let me do the trial period. I’m not actually going to need it.” 

The first day I turned it on, you can actually put in any amount of time. I don’t remember, it was like from 10 minutes to 10 hours, something like that, where you can’t access the internet. Within two minutes when I was writing, I noticed my fingers going to the alt+tab to actually check my email and I realized just how often I got distracted, and I ended up buying the software, and it was the best purchase I ever made.  

[00:12:57] MB: That’s awesome. It’s funny, I think mobile devices obviously, which we don’t need to go down that rabbit hole, but is another massively addicting and distracting thing that we’ve talked a bunch about on the show. But coming back to this idea of kind of how sort of quiet and contemplative Sherlock Holmes is, one of the kind of recurrent themes that we’ve seen again and again on Science of Success is this idea of contemplative routines and how important it is to kind of step back from the constantly reactive nature of boom-boom-boom, email this, that. So many people making demands on your time, and even spending 10, 15 minutes once a week or once a day to step back and say, “What should I be doing? What should I be looking at? What should I be focusing on?” and how powerful that can be. 

[00:13:45] MK: Absolutely. Absolutely. Something that I started doing actually after writing this book was meditating every morning, not for long, for like 10 minutes. It’s absolutely huge. It’s a game-changer in terms of your clarity of thought, of your ability to concentrate, to make decisions. It really helps you harness your brain power for the rest of the day. I think that people who’ve never done it can’t quite appreciate. They think that it’s total bullshit. Until they try it. Because it sounds so crazy that 10 minutes a day can actually make such a big difference. 

But recapturing that quiet space in your mind can be so powerful, and I think that it’s something that at every single level people are forgetting to do. I wrote a piece a number of years ago about boredom. There was really some interesting research being done on what boredom actually is and the fact that people are more bored now than they have been in the past, even though it seems like you should never be bored, because there’s always something going on. 

Well, it ends up that boredom isn’t that there’s nothing to do. It’s that you’re attention isn’t engaging with any one thing. So the more distractions are around, the more you have your phone, the more you’re not forced to actually make choices, concentrate, do one thing. The less able you become to pay attention and the more easily bored you become, because your attention doesn’t engage with things in a meaningful way. I found that both fascinating and frightening.  

[00:15:18] MB: I was just reading, or just finished reading actually the book Mastery by Robert Greene, and one of the most interesting kind of takeaways – I don’t know if you’ve read it or not, but that he talks about in that book is this idea that to achieve master, it’s about kind of a deep encoding of whatever your mastering into the mind and into the subconscious. The only way that that kind of deep encoding work really happens is through focused attention over long period of time and long stretches of time, like years and years of focused attention. When we’re constantly distracted, that encoding like never happens. So we never end up building the sort of muscle memory and the subconscious processing power to really get towards mastery. 

[00:16:01] MK: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. I haven’t read the book, but I think that point is a very good one. I think it’s true not just of mastery, but let’s even go take it down a notch even if we’re not trying to master, but just trying to do anything, learn anything, absorb anything in the short term. I think it’s very easy to forget just how important engaging with it can be, because if you – Just think back. This is I think an experience that everyone has had. Think back to school, to like elementary school, or middle school, or high school. What do you actually remember from that? You remember the classes in which you were engaged and which you like the teacher, in which some book or some concept really spoke to you and you don’t remember anything else. 

Now, you might have been a straight A student and you did well in the moment, but your brain didn’t retain it because you weren’t really engaging with it. It was a much more surface process. But you’d be surprised at how much you actually remember from 10, 20 years ago just because you were engaged at the moment that you were learning it and that you actually played with the material. You were interested in the material. 

Actually bringing this back to Sherlock Holmes, one of the things that I think distinguishes him from a lot of other fictional characters, and I think is a key reason why he’s able to be so successful, is that he loves what he does. He has fun. So the common refrain, one of the most famous quotes from the book, “the game is afoot,” and that’s something that Sherlock Holmes says repeatedly about his cases, “the game is afoot.” It’s a game. It’s engaging. It’s interesting, and that’s one of the reasons that he’s able to do well and to keep learning and to succeed, because he actually sees it in that light. 

I think that’s a very powerful mental thing that we can do, is turn things around so that they do become more, again, like more interesting, more challenging so that we’re actually excited and engaged as supposed to, “Oh God! I can’t believe I have to do this, or I have to read this, or I have to look at that.” You’re going to have to do it anyway. You’re going to have to invest the time anyway. So why not make it something more meaningful? 

[00:18:14] MB: So how do we think about kind of creating that engagement or creating that sense of playfulness when we’re working on something? 

[00:18:23] MK: I think that it’s very specific to you and to what you’re working on and some things are obviously – They lend themselves to it much more easily. So if it’s actually for your job and you enjoy your job, well, then that should be pretty simple. If it’s something that’s mundane, but for a greater you know why you’re doing it, I think that’s key. Then you actually figure out ways to make it interesting and to actually psych yourself up about it, because it might be a very boring mundane thing, but you’re doing it in the cause of something much bigger, much more interesting, much more exciting. So you keep that thing in mind. You keep that ultimate goal in mind. Why are you doing it? You’re like, “Okay. How can I reframe this so that it’s no longer this boring thing, but now a piece of a much more interesting puzzle? Let me look at it as like one puzzle piece that’s essential. Without this puzzle piece, I can’t do this very interesting thing.” 

I think that there are lots of ways that you can reframe your approach, reframe your thought, reframe the task, reframe whatever it is to make it much more palatable. I think a very important litmus test is if you can’t do that if it’s actually like just absolutely impossible. You have no idea why you’re doing it. You have no idea what you’re doing. You don’t like it. You don’t see any purpose for it or whatsoever. Then you might want to rethink your job choices.  

[00:19:45] MB: I think that ties in many ways kind of back to the concept or the idea of flow. 

[00:19:50] MK: Mm-hmm. For sure. For sure. I actually in Mastermind wrote about flow, because I think it’s a concept that really applies to mindfulness and to the ability to concentrate, to the ability to do something well. It’s a state that we can achieve in a lot of different ways. I’m sure all of your listeners know what flow is, but just as a quick kind of refresher, it’s that feeling of being kind of at one and with your task and [inaudible 00:20:21] who created that concept, and I actually recommend his books on it. If you haven’t read them, he’s a very interesting writer and thinker. But it’s just being kind of really focused on what you’re doing to the point where it stops being separate from you. It becomes kind of this flow, this state of enjoyable activity. We can achieve it in so many different ways doing almost anything. 

I mean, there are some studies of people achieving flow doing just the most mundane, really crazy stuff. It’s not like you suddenly achieve it when you’re always, when you’re doing something creative, like playing the violin or doing something like that. So it’s actually more of a place in your mind than it is integral to the activity as such, if that makes sense. 

[00:21:12] MB: Absolutely. For listeners who want to dig in, we had a great interview that came out a couple of weeks ago with Steven Kotler from the Flow Genome Project that goes much deeper into that. But I want to come back to when we’re talking about, I think, this idea of sort of task switching and multitasking, when we look at how focused attention really helps kind of build the right muscles for thinking more effectively and how engagement is a key piece of that. I think this ties back in some ways, and you could probably elaborate on it much more intelligently than I can about this idea that you kind of call the brain attic, and how we sort of think about storing information and organizing knowledge in our heads. I’d love to dig into that concept and learn a little bit more about it. 

[00:21:58] MK: Yeah, absolutely. So I steal that concept directly from Arthur Conan Doyle. What Sherlock Holmes says in the books is that, basically, you carry this real estate with you always in your mind, your brain attic, and it’s his metaphor for memory. He has this exchange with Watson, because Watson always gets the short end of the deal in all of these exchanges. He says, “Watson, there are multiple types of attics. Yours is basically a lazy lumberjack’s attic. You just put God knows what up there. Obviously, I’m Sherlock Holmes, I have this wonderful pristine attic.” 

What does that actually mean? Well, it goes back to what we’ve been talking about, this idea of mindfulness and of focus. So if you think about your memory as a place, just think of it – Imagine an empty room, an empty attic in a new house and you can make a choice of how you’re going to use that space. You can be someone who’s really excited that you suddenly have an attic and you’ve never had an attic before. So now you never have to throw anything out. You can just throw it up all there and you’re never going to run out of room. 

What ends up happening – Well, first of all, you can’t find anything. Secondly, you do run out of room. Thirdly, you run out of room faster than your next door neighbor who has the same attic, but was using it more effectively, because you haven’t been optimizing how you store things, and it’s just one big mess. The files you do have up there get all jumbled up and messed up, and even when you find something, it might be wrong. 

So that’s actually kind of the default of how our memories are. If we don’t think about it, that’s the kind of attic we have, because we just kind of remember things as they stick. We don’t think about it and we don’t necessarily put a lot of thought into how we’re encoding them. 

What Sherlock Holmes is trying to tell Watson, and this actually very close to our current understanding of memory. Now, the brain attic is flawed in the sense that memory is much more malleable. It’s not actually kind of this hard, enclosed space. But taking that to the side from a moment, let’s imagine this is an expandable attic. 

What Sherlock Holmes says is, “Well, you need to be very careful. You need to be mindful of every piece of information that goes up there, because it’s not infinite, and you not only have to be aware of what you’re putting up there, but you have to be aware of where you’re putting it,” because any information you remember is only going to be useful to you in so far as you can retrieve it. Imagine yourself sitting in school taking a test and there’s a question and you say, “Oh! I knew that. I know that. Oh God! I definitely studied that.” 

Well, if you don’t actually remember it at that moment, it’s useless to you. You’re going to get a zero for that question. That’s the essence of why you need to store things properly. You need to be able to retrieve them when you need them. Otherwise they may as well not exist.  

So a few things about kind of what you can do to make your brain attic most effective. Number one is encoding. So the moment that we have the most control over our memories and over how well they’ll be stored is the moment of encoding, the moment where we first remember it. 

So some things will never get encoded, because even though we experienced it, we didn’t pay attention and it’s actually not in our memories and we’re not going to be able to retrieve it later on. Actually, often times people get into a lot of trouble. There have been court cases with this where while you were there, how can you not remember? You must be lying. Actually no, they’re not. They just weren’t paying attention. They never encoded that memory. They were there, but they don’t remember. 

So you have to make sure you have to make the conscious choice to say, “Okay. I want to remember this. Let’s encode it into my mind. Now, how am I going to encode it?” Well, you want to do it in a way that’s most effective and space efficient. So our memories are strongest the more we can associate them with things that are already in our memories. 

So thematically, if it’s related to some of the concepts we know, if we’re with people with whom we share other memories, if we’re in a space where we’ve shared other memories. If there are sounds, if there are smells. Basically anything you can do to help encode that piece of information, use it, and tag that memory as much as you can. Cross tag it, cross reference it, because every single one of those tags, every single point of encoding will later be a point of retrieval. 

So even if you forget three of the tags, as long you’re number one, you’ll be totally fine and you’ll be able to retrieve that memory. So that’s kind of that’s your efficient attic. That’s the one where you actually care about everything that goes in and you care about how it goes in so that when the moment comes, you can take it out intact and use it. 

[SPONSOR BREAK]

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[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]

[00:28:48] MB: I want to dig into a couple of different piece of this, because I think this whole approach of kind of conceiving of your brain in that way and the idea that only things that we actually can remember and retrieve at the right time are sort of relevant or useful. I think that really kind of harkens back to the Charlie Monger kind of mental models approach to the world, which I’m a huge fan of, and we talk all about on the show constantly is this idea that you have to kind of array knowledge in your brain around sort of useful semantic trees so that you can connect different pieces of information and understand the world more cohesively. 

But it also comes back to, and we’ve had a number of interviews where we talk about the power of visual memory and pneumonic techniques and all of these kind of strategies for encoding that are incredibly powerful. Specifically, I’d love to dig in to one of the things that Sherlock Holmes talks about, and I know you kind of write about, which is how we can bring multiple kind of senses into the encoding process and how useful that can be.  

[00:29:50] MK: Absolutely. So I kind of started mentioning that when I was talking about encoding things into your brain attic. But we tend to really ignore most of our senses at any given moment. So when we’re encoding a memory, we’ll encode the primary memory. So if we, for instance, want to remember what happened, we’ll just use our eyes. If we want to remember going to a concert, we’re just going to use our ears, and that’s incredibly wrong because we have a lot of different ways that memories are becoming a part of us. The more we can engage our senses and the more we can actually actively engage with our sense while we’re forming the memories, the more powerful that memory is going to be. The easier it’s going to be to remember. The more vivid it’s going to be and the easier it’s going to be to recall. 

So, for instance, we’ve known for a very long time, and writers have written about it. Everyone, even people who have no idea who Marcel Proust is, know about Proust’s madeleine is, that’s smell is an incredibly powerful ways to evoke memory. One of the reasons is that it’s actually connected to the emotional part of the brain. There’s a direct connection there and a way that there isn’t for other senses. 

So knowing that, if you’re actually trying to remember something, it doesn’t have to be bout food. It doesn’t have to have anything to do with smell as such, but try to remember what the smells were at the moment. Going back to your studying for a test, or you’re trying to remember something, you’re going to give a really important presentation at work, but you need to memorize it. So you’re really trying to kind of remember what’s going on. Well, maybe you’re doing it at a café. Breath in. Try to figure out what are the smells around here. Try to associate with a different sense. Hey, if you’re going to associate it with the small of coffee, awesome, because there’s probably going to be coffee at your meeting. Try to get the exact same blend to get the stuff going in your mind. 

Listen. What’s the music playing in the background? Do you have any other associations with this music? I’m sure you’ve experienced this feeling where suddenly a song comes on the radio that is from the summer you were 13-years-old and all of a sudden you have all of these memories coming back that you didn’t consciously try to remember. That’s huge. Why don’t we use that actually to our advantage knowing that? 

So listen and actually try to associate the sounds with it. Obviously, we look all the time. So that’s something that we’ll do probably anyway, but if you do it more consciously and if you actually try to notice the colors and actually really try to look in an almost meditative way, that will help you. I will often remember things because I could remember exactly where it was on the page on the table what I was doing and when I can actually picture it in my mind. It helps me retrieve that information. 

Use the sense of touch. Use your posture. Where are you sitting? What are you feeling? What are kind of the textures around you? Actually just fully engage with the moment and then try to use those senses as ways to make the memory more tangible, bigger, more three-dimensional even if it’s something really stupid, like memorizing what I’m going to say on this slide of a really boring Power Point. It can make it much easier for you to then know exactly what you’re saying, and it will be more interesting, because you will have spent the time actually  truly encoding it into your brain as supposed to just trying to rote memorize it. 

I think we really underuse that sensory approach. That said, it’s actually – This takes time. So I’m not recommending doing this at every moment of everyday for every memory. That’s going to be overwhelming. So you have to pick and choose. You have to be kind of mindful. You have to be picky and you have to figure out what’s actually worth remembering. What do I want to spend the energy on encoding and go from there.  

[00:33:58] MB: We’re going to throw some resources in the show notes for listeners who want to dig more into those strategies as well, because these techniques are so powerful if you get into the visual memory techniques that you can use to encode things. I mean, I still remember numbers that I’ve encoded using visual methods like six months ago that I’ve never thought about, and if I think about the kind of mental, like the mental image, or the memory palace that I created for it, it’s amazing. 

[00:34:23] MK: For sure. 

[00:34:24] MB: There’s so much more I want to talk about, and so I want to kind of change gears completely. The thing that we haven’t even gotten into  yet, which is truly fascinating to me, is that you started out as a psychology PhD, a writer, all these stuff, and yet now you sort of find yourself – And correct me if I’m sort of mischaracterizing this, but you’re not a professional poker player. Is that correct?

[00:34:47] MK: That is correct. It is in service of writing. So my next book is going to be more memoristic about my journey into the world of professional poker. I took a poker for this book, and I ended up – I didn’t know that if I was going to be good, if I was going to enjoy it. I didn’t know anything about poker, and it not only drew me in, but it ended up that I was able to do well in it. So right now, the book ended up getting pushed back a little bit. Yes, I’m playing fulltime. 

[00:35:25] MB: I think that’s amazing, and I want to dig into a number of kind of pieces of that story. How did you – Or sort of what kind of drew you in to the game of poker as somebody who studied thinking and psychology and human behavior and decision making. Once you kind of got in and started playing, what really drew you into it and make you more fascinated with it?

[00:35:46] MK: When I was in grad school, my main focus was on decision making under conditions of risk and uncertainty and under hot or emotional conditions. So my advisor was Walter Mischel, who created in the 1960s the famous marshmallow test of self-control. So I was interested in self-control and in kind of how all of these things interact in environments where we don’t have a lot of information, where there’s a lot of uncertainty and where we’re really stressed, where we’re feeling under a lot of emotional pressure. 

Anyone who studies those sorts of things will find very quickly that while human beings are incredibly smart and normally are very good at making decisions in some environments, that breaks down a lot when it comes to uncertainty, when it comes to kind of probabilistic thinking, when it comes to emotional decisions. Right away you start seeing biases. You start seeing people kind of go wrong and start making mistakes. 

Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize for this work was kind of the first one to really publicize it, which is basically how our minds go wrong, all of the different biases and heuristics that we use in making decisions. That’s what you see over and over and over. 

What you don’t see nearly as much is, “Okay. Well, how in the world do I correct this?” Normally I’m right, and a lot of times these biases are there for a reason and they serve us well. But in these uncertain situations, when I’m emotional, when these biases really kick into high gear, how do I get over that? The answer is it’s really, really difficult. You can teach people all about these biases and they still have them and they still make these mistakes. 

So what I realized when I got into poker was that poker is actually a way to teach your mind to think in the right ways and you do it over and over in a controlled environment through experience, which actually is incredibly helpful for actually teaching your mind to think in that way. So I think poker players understand probability in a way that most people don’t. They understand variance in a way that most people don’t. They understand uncertainty and risk in a way that most people don’t. 

So it’s a very interesting confluence of ideas, where on the one side I’ve side I’ve studied all of these biases, and so I have a deep understanding of what’s going wrong. Then now I have this laboratory, if you will, to explore all of them and to kind of go deeper into my own brain and see what I can learn from a game that actually tackles them if you want to be good at it head on. 

[00:38:46] MB: I couldn’t agree more, and that’s why I love the game of poker so much. It’s just such a fascinating. I think the term laboratory is great. It’s such a fascinating laboratory for teaching yourself not only this kind of really important mathematical concepts, decision making concepts and really a huge array of kind of emotional concepts as well that are really important to thriving and succeeding at anything that you do in life. 

[00:39:12] MK: For sure. For sure. It’s one of these things that – So you’ve been a poker player for a while, but I’m someone who totally came from the outside. So, for me, it just kind of hit me over the head all of a sudden, and I think that that is part of the fascination, because I had no idea what I was getting into. I’m like, “Oh my God! Wow! This is so much better than I ever thought it could be.” It teaches me so much about myself and about my shortcomings, things that I didn’t know existed. 

It’s one of these games that is infinitely complex. So it’s not like suddenly you’re like, “Okay. I understand poker. I understand statistics. I understand this. I’m done.” If keeps evolving and changing, because you are playing people. You are playing situations. So you’re playing human dynamics, and those keep evolving. As people strategy evolves, your strategy has to evolve. So as a metaphor for life, it basically doesn’t get any better than that.  

[00:40:10] MB: So you touched on this a second ago, but as somebody who’s a longtime poker player, obviously – And I’m sure you get this question all the time, but it’s amazing to see someone who – I think, what? Two, three years ago, you never played poker and now you’ve become a professional. What enabled you? We talked earlier about kind of dabbled into this idea of mastery. What enabled you to excel so rapidly in the game of poker? 

[00:40:37] MK: Well, I think it’s a lot of things. First, I was incredibly lucky that I was able to gain access to some of the best players in the world. So my coach and mentor is Eric Seidel, who I think is one of the best players of all time, if not the best player of all time if you look at historically the fact that he’s been winning and kind of at the top of the game since the 1980s. No one else has been able to replicate that. 

So having a mentor who is such a force in the game is crucial, because you can learn from that. You can really absorb it, and I’m someone who definitely loves to learn. So I’m very happy. I’ve been a writer my whole life – Well, my whole professional life. I’m very comfortable saying I have no idea what’s going on. Teach me. Help me. So I love learning from people who are very, very good. So I was very lucky that he was involved and that he introduced me to some other incredible poker players who’ve been incredibly helpful along the way. That’s one of the things. 

But the other part is that I do love learning and I’m willing to study and to put in massive hours. So sometimes when people ask me kind of what I do, they don’t really believe it, and they say, “Oh, well.” Or even if they believe it they’re like, “Oh, but that’s crazy.” Really tell me how to be good without having to do this. 

So basically I’m studying and working like 9, 10 hours a day every single day. I fully immerse myself in the world of poker. So when I’m not playing, I’m either reading, or analyzing hands, or watching streams, pausing them, taking notes, trying to figure out people’s strategy, trying to talk to people about strategies. So I’m always doing something to work on my game. I think that a lot of people don’t really want to do that. They want to play poker because they see it as “easy”, and I think it’s the polar opposite of that. It’s a very, very hard way to make a living, and good poker players understand that. There’s no easy money. 

So, for me, it’s just been a fully immersive fulltime job of learning and constantly trying to improve. I think being willing – I think you always have to be willing to put in the hours and to realize that there are no shortcuts ever. 

So it’s the same with writing. When people ask me, “Oh, I want to get published in the New Yorker too. How do I do that?” I say, “Well, I’ve been writing fulltime for over 10 years before I got my first piece published in the New York.” They’re like, “Oh, but I don’t want to do that.” I’m like, “Well, I’m sorry. There’s no magic bullet. That’s what you have to do, and that’s not the answer a lot of people want to hear. 

[00:43:36] MB: It such an important point and a theme that comes up again and again on the show as well. Even coming back to this, kind of the book Mastery by Robert Greene, like he has a quote in that book that’s if you’re – I’m sort of paraphrasing it, but it’s basically, “If you’re looking for a shortcut, then you are unsuited for the pursuit of mastery.”

[00:43:56] MK: Yes, I think that’s a very good way of putting it. I have nothing to add. 

[00:44:02] MB: I think also this idea of kind of, as what I would call sort of beginner’s mind, which is this notion of setting your ego aside. Being willing to learn, being willing to ask what might be sort of dumb or embarrassing questions. Kind of putting yourself out there and just saying, “Hey, I don’t know, and I just want to learn.” I think so many people get kind of tripped up on the ego side of it and never really fully embrace that, which is such a core component of learning.

[00:44:28] MK: For sure. For sure. I think actually in poker, that’s more true than it is in a lot of other places, because poker is such an ego-driven boys club. I mean, there are hardly any women in it in any given tournament. If it’s kind of a big well-known tournament, it will be about 3% of the field if you’re lucky. So it’s not a lot at all. That’s actually up. So before, it used to be – Sometimes we would be 0% of the field. When you have so much kind of male ego, when you have so much testosterone, when it’s always been kind of a boys club, in those environments it can be very difficult to put aside kind of that ego to realize, “Okay, there are a lots of people who are much better than I am.” 

To be fair, I think the best – These days, the best male poker players are absolutely willing to do that and are among the smartest, most studious people I’ve ever met. They work their asses of and they work hard and they’re working with lots of software. They’re really, really trying to understand the game in an incredibly deep level, and I think that’s amazing. 

[00:45:41] MB: So what would be kind of one piece of homework or sort of actionable advice that you would give to listeners who want to kind of concretely implement some of the ideas and concepts that we’ve talked about today? 

[00:45:53] MK: The one concrete piece of advice that I would say, and this is the one habit that we’ve already talked about that I’ve changed, but I actually think that it’s the single most important thing that you can do is have a 10-minute  a day meditation. Everyone has 10 minutes. I don’t care how busy you are. I don’t care how much you have going on. You have 10 minutes, because it doesn’t actually matter what is going on around you. That’s the beauty of this. It can be incredibly allowed [inaudible 00:46:22]. You could be a mother or a father with like five kids running around. As long as there’s someone else keeping an eye on them for the 10 minutes that you have your eyes closed that they’re not going to kill themselves, you don’t care that all of these things are happening. 

Because the point is to kind of admit all of the distractions that are happening and then to let go of them. So it’s not like you need to sit in a quiet place. It’s not like you need to lie down. You can be standing. You can be sitting. You can be anywhere. It’s just this ability to do a 10-minute exercise where you just focus on your breath or whatever kind of meditation you want to do. 

I just happen to do mindfulness meditation and to really train your brain to acknowledge distractions. Let them go and go back to the moment and to force yourself to do it for the full amount of time. So you can set a timer on your phone. There are a lot of apps that you can use. I think that it’s something that can be really difficult at first. But if you can actually implement that one habit, it can really be life-changing in your ability to concentrate to make good decisions, to pay attention.  

[00:47:35] MB: For listeners who want to dig in, learn more, find you and your work online, what’s the best place for them to do that? 

[00:47:41] MK: I am on Twitter @mkonnikova, where I tweet a lot of stuff. I’m on Instagram @grlnamedmaria, except girl doesn’t have an I in it, because I was late to Instagram and there’s already a girlnamedmaria with an I in it. So I’m a misspelled girlnamedmaria. I have a website, mariakonnikova.com, that I unfortunately don’t update nearly as often as I should, and I have Facebook @mariakonnikova, but I also don’t love Facebook. So I’m not on there as much as I am on the other platforms.

[00:48:14] MB: Well, Maria, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing your incredible journey and all of the wisdom that’s come along with. It’s been great to have you here. 

[00:48:23] MK: Thank you so much for having me, Matt. It’s been a pleasure. 

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[00:48:26] 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 e-mail 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.

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A Beginner's Guide To Body Language & Nonverbal Communication with Joe Navarro

In this episode we break down the complex and confusing world of body language and nonverbal communication. We discover the easiest starting point for learning the basics you need to know to get started with reading and understanding body language and we dig into the specific tools and strategies you can start using right away to not only decode the body language of others, but also change your own body language to communicate what you want. We explore all this and much more with our guest Joe Navarro. 

Joe Navarro was approached to join the FBI while working as a police officer at the age of 23. He spent the next 25 years at the FBI working as both an agent and a supervisor in the areas of counterintelligence and counterterrorism. Since retiring in 2003 Joe has written several best selling books on human behavior most recently The Dictionary of Body Language: A field Guide To What Every Body is Saying. His work is frequently featured on programs such as The Today Show, Fox News, Good Morning America, and more!

• How do we breakdown the maze of nonverbal communication and cues and use them to understand and influence others?

• Nonverbals are everything other than spoken communication - body language, clothes, cars, pens, accessories, etc 

• You can use nonverbal cues to deeply understand other people, their behaviors and desires 

• Does the logo on your sweater impact whether people are willing to help you or not?

• Human beings are incredible sensitive to small changes in nonverbal cues

• How do you crack the nut of nonverbal communication and break into such a complex and confusing field?

• The most simple way to understand human body language is to break it down in to the basic categories of “comfort” and “discomfort”

• Nonverbal communication takes place at the speed of light

• We are always transmitting, we’re always being examined, people are assessing us the minute we come into view

• What image are you presenting to the world? Someone who is confident or someone who is shy and insecure?

• It’s not about “faking” your body language -its about what “role” or “image” you want to portray to other people

• The more senior you are in an organization - the broader your gestures should be - and the smoother they should be

• A “hack” you can use to overcome fear and self defeating body language

• What are some specific tactics and strategies you can go out and use on your own to learn how to read other people’s body language right now?

• Easy signs of discomfort to spot and teach yourself to view:

• Eye touching / eye covering - a powerful phenomena that can even be seen in blind children 

  1. Lip compression is a very good indicator that something is wrong - someone is struggling with something or worried about something

  2. Jaw shifting - sign of struggle / difficulty

  3. Neck touching - welcome tend to touch the base of their neck with their finger, men tend to grab their necks or massage their necks

  4. Ventilation behaviors - pulling on your shirt, lifting up your hair - shows difficulty or struggle

• It’s much harder to spot positive behavior than negative behavior 

• Negative nonverbal impressions can last for a very long time - its very important to give a positive nonverbal impression on someone - they will remember a negative one for a long time 

• Handshake

  1. Personal Space

• If you stand at an angle, people will listen to you for a longer period of time

• Everyone is in the people business - what are the things that you look for that are appealing?

• People who are friendly

  1. People who smile

  2. People who take the time to talk to you - even just 15 seconds to chat with someone for a second

  3. Make a kind comment 

  4. Flashing your eyebrows is a GREAT way to say hi to someone 

• Tilting your head slightly to the side is one of the best ways to build rapport with people

• When things are very stressful - the best leaders slow everything down, they command space and time and their own behavior to pacify everyone

• Be sensitive to others - what are their needs, wants, desires, and fears?

• The feet are the most honest part of the body - how you can read people’s feet to understand what they’re telling you 

• When they’re something we don’t like our feet will immediately turn away from it

• The limbic system in the brain - the “lizard brain” - is responsible for our survival and triggers many of these subconscious nonverbal reactions

• Try this out at a meeting or cocktail party - pick out a behavior, observe it, and see if you can learn to watch for it

• Once you train yourself in these skills - it runs like software in the background of your life and applies to every interaction you have with someone 

• What’ s your curbside appeal today? How can you update it to present a better image to other people?

• It’s very difficult to detect deception in someone’s body language - the story of the parking ticket 

• Far too often we can see behaviors but not know their true cause 

• How can we use nonverbal communication to influence other people? 

• Easy strategies for influencing others with nonverbals

• Grooming

  1. Good manners

  2. Movement

• Exercise to try out: "Sell me this pencil, without saying a word” - you’re not selling the object, you’re selling how you feel about the object. 

• Point with your full hand, palm open, to be less intimidating

• All actors rehearse - it’s no different with the nonverbal personas you want to use to interact with people

• When you begin to break down these little nonverbal cues - you start to realize that they all affect you and others around you

• Homework: watch as people are reporting on the stock market on a good and bad day and watch their nonverbals

• Homework: watch a TV show with the sound off and see if you can pick out what’s going on from just the nonverbal cues

• Homework: 3 starting behaviors to look for 

• Look for eye blocking/eye closure

  1. Look for lip compression & jaw shifting

  2. Look for neck touching 

  3. Notice when it happens, how it happens, what questions were asked, and how people answer - build that into your repitoirs and the expand your skills

Thank you so much for listening!

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [Book] The Dictionary of Body Language: A Field Guide to Human Behavior by Joe Navarro

• [Author Page] Joe Navarro

• [Psychology Today Profile] Joe Navarro

• [SoS Episode] The Secret Science of Lies & Body Language with Vanessa Van Edwards

• [SoS Episode] How To Master Emotional Intelligence & Why Your IQ Won’t Make You Successful with Dr. Daniel Goleman

• [Personal Site] Joe Navarro

• Bonus Article - Four Ways to Empower Yourself with Non-Verbal Communication

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] 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 two million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries and part of the self-help for smart people podcast network.

In this episode, we break down the complex and confusing world of body language and non-verbal communication. We discover the easiest starting point for learning the basics you need to know to get started with reading and understanding body language. We did into specific tools and strategies you can start using right away, to not only decode the body language of others, but also change your own body language to communicate what you want. We explore all of this and much more with our guest, Joe Navarro.

Do you need more time? Time for work, time for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined, and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our e-mail list. It's called How You Can Create Time For The Things That Really Matter In Life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the e-mail list at successpodcast.com.

You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our e-mail subscribers. We recently pre-released an episode and an interview to our e-mail subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience and that had tremendous implications, because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first.

With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live exclusive interview just for e-mail subscribers. There's some amazing stuff that's available only to e-mail subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the e-mail list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Or if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you're on the go, you don't have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44-222. That’s S-MA-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we discussed how a few crazy ideas from quantum physics might just change your life. We looked at how some of the core principles from the hard sciences have huge implications for the way we live, love and deal with the world of danger and uncertainty. Is it possible that the laws of physics hold lessons that could help us redefine our relationship with anxiety and suffering and open the door to possibility? We discussed this and much more with our guest Mel Schwartz. If you want to learn how a few key principles from the hard sciences could radically transform your worldview, listen to that episode.

Now for our interview with Joe.

[0:03:06.5] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show; Joe Navarro. Joe was approached to join the FBI while working as a police officer at the age of 23. He spent the next 25 years at the FBI working as both an agent and a supervisor in the areas of counterintelligence and counterterrorism.

Since retiring in 2003, Joe has written several bestselling books on human behavior. Most recently, The Dictionary of Body Language; a field guide to what every body is saying. His work is frequently featured on programs such as The Today Show, Fox News, Good Morning America and much more. Joe, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:42.7] JN: Matt, it's a pleasure finally to be here.

[0:03:45.5] MB: Well, we're super excited to have you on the show. As I was telling you in the pre-show, I've been a fan of your work for a long time and have a copy of Read ‘Em and Reap, which is one of your poker books sitting on my bookshelf, and so it's great to finally get you on here.

[0:03:58.0] JN: Well, it's my pleasure. I've been looking forward to this.

[0:04:01.0] MB: I'd love to obviously the field of non-verbal communication, which you're one of the world's top experts. It’s so vast and immense. For somebody who wants to approach that from a layman's perspective and maybe pick up a few strategies, or tools to make themselves more effective at understanding people and ultimately influencing them, where would you recommend starting and breaking down this confusing maze of information?

[0:04:30.1] JN: Well, that's a great question. What I usually try to tell folks is this non-verbals is everything that communicates, it's not a word. I mean, everything from the shoes you wear, to the color of your clothing, to how well you're groomed, to the other stuff, the body language is all communicating. I think the first takeaway is we are always transmitting information about ourselves. We transmit information about ourselves by the cars we drive, or how we keep our house, but also by our body language. That's really what I'd to talk about today is how we use that body language, both to interpret what people are thinking, desiring, fearing and how we also use it to be more empathetic and establish better communications.

[0:05:25.5] MB: I think that's a great definition, and it's really interesting that it expands beyond, I think when you think about non-verbal communication, you just think of body language, right? Maybe a few related components. It's really interesting that you include all of these other things, whether it's car, your clothes, what pen that you use, all these different elements and they all really are communicating a tremendous amount of information if you're willing to attune yourself to be able to absorb it.

[0:05:52.5] JN: Oh, I mean, and the research now is so ample. From my books when I started this in 1970s, there was so little research. I'll give you an example of some recent research in the non-verbal arena of influence where they took an individual and they asked him to go out and ask people for favors, but he was just supposed to wear a sweater, a green sweater.

They tallied how many people would help him and then they took that same sweater and I won't say which logo, but they just put a little half inch logo of a famous clothier and the difference was without the logo, only about 13% of the people would help him. With the logo, about 52% of the people would help him. It's just fascinating the research that's being done now as to how sensitive we are to the smallest of things that says this person can be trusted, or as of higher status and so forth.

[0:06:53.4] MB: How do we start to peel back the layers of that onion? Because I mean, and as somebody who's been doing this show for years and I've read several of your works and many other books about body language and facial expressions and all this stuff, I still feel like a total novice when I get into this stuff. I feel like I have a little bit of an ability to read behavior, especially coming from the poker world, but it's such a confusing and immense topic. How do we start to really approach it in a way that we can really internalize some of those lessons?

[0:07:23.8] JN: Really good question. The easiest way is the same way that as babies learn to do this and parents learn to do this, and that we are basically communicating at all times. We're either comfortable, or uncomfortable. This dynamic can change in a second; as a baby, all of a sudden the baby starts squirming, starts crying. Obviously, there's an issue there. Maybe the baby is wet, or needs to be patted, or fed.

We're no different. We can be sitting – you're a young executive, you're sitting in a meeting and all of a sudden somebody says something and didn't go over too well and you start seeing these displays of discomfort, things shifting in the chair, lip-biting, looking away, putting the chin down, things that communicate, “Hey, you know what? You should have said that didn't go over too well.”

We're very good as a species at communicating both comfort and discomfort readily, and in real time. That's the beauty of non-verbal. May I say this Matt, that non-verbals is the only means of communication that takes place at the speed of light; the minute somebody displays it, you are picking up those photons and you are immediately interpreting in how they feel about you, or how they're reacting to something.

[0:08:54.1] MB: I feel like we hear the statistic thrown out all the time, but when you look at what – and I know it's a confusing topic. When you look at what percentage of “communication is non-verbal,” how do you think about that question?

[0:09:07.4] JN: Yeah. Throw the numbers out the window, because nobody really knows, because non-verbal communications take place in the moment. That moment is in context is affected by many things. I mean, you can have a terrible day and you walk through the front door and you may be reflecting a day's worth of things that have adversely affected you.

We know that in courtship behavior and dating, it can be as high as a 100%. We know it can – in a meeting, it could be less. What I try to teach is don't worry about what percentage it is. It's usually very high. Even if you're sitting in a chair doing nothing, you're still transmitting information. You can still transmit whether you're interested, or you're just laying the totally disinterested.

What I try to teach is forget the numbers. Just be aware that it's a high percentage. That we're always transmitting, that we're always being examined. The people are assessing us the minute that we come into view. The question is what are they assessing? Are they assessing someone that is confident, somebody that's friendly, someone that appears to let's just say have their act together, or someone who is shy and maybe is insecure?

What's interesting is when I do seminars Matt, and I say to people, “I want you to stand up and I want you to look tough.” Everybody acts this out like they've seen on television. Okay and then you say, “All right. I want you to look you're studious, like you're a professor,” and they act these things out. After we do about seven or eight of these, we say, “Now what do you think people think of you when they see you day in and day out? Who do they see?”

What's interesting is a lot of them haven't decided how do they want to be portrayed; as a leader, as a follower, as someone that's confident, or just someone that's happy following along?

[0:11:19.5] MB: Can we fake our body language and our external cues to other people, or will people be able to see through that?

[0:11:27.7] JN: Well, I wouldn't say fake. I hear that term a lot and I hate it, because I remember when I first came into law enforcement, I'll tell you I was scared. There were a lot of nights when I had to roll up on a scene and I was there by myself, no backup for 15, 20 minutes and I was scared. You have to present yourself as cool, calm and collected.

I go back to what Shakespeare said that life is theater. What I tell people is it's not about faking, it's about what role do you want to portray. That we can portray those role. Talk to anybody that's gone into the Marine Corps, become an officer and they'll tell you they send them out into the classroom, outside the classroom and they say, “Go find your voice. Go find your posture. Go find your presence, so that you look like an officer, so that people are willing to follow you.”

What else do we call that? We call that acting. We have roles to portray. The question of course is how well do we do that? Exceptional people rise to the occasion and they do the kinds of things that are endearing of a leader. I'll give you an example of something that we were talking earlier, you and I before the show about validation.

Notice how the more senior you are in an organization, the broader your gestures are, but they should be smoother. The minute we run into somebody who has very jittery gestures and they're not very smooth and they're very narrow, we tend not to respect that person as much as someone who has those broad smooth gestures, which by the way, from talking to military officers, this is what keeps the troops calm, because they get a sense of everything is okay from the non-verbals, not the verbals.

[0:13:43.3] MB: I like that perspective and I think it's a much less intimidating way to think about it is it's more like acting or imagining the role that you want to fulfill, or portray, and then living that out. It's almost a mental shortcut, or hack to be able to change the way that you're thinking about your body language, the way you're presenting yourself to other people.

[0:14:04.3] JN: Exactly. I'm what you call a high-end introvert. I'm a very private, I don't like big get-togethers, but I have to tell myself, “All right, I'm going to do an event. There's going to be 300 people there.” I need to break out of that and it's in a way, for some people this comes very naturally. For me, it's a performance that is part of me. This is part of me. It's not like it's fake, because it comes from me, but I have to tell myself this is a role I must fulfill now because these folks have come to see me and I can't just go to the green room again. I need to be out there.

It is in a way a hack of how do we overcome ourselves and yet reveal a part of ourselves, because I do want to be a part of the group. I wish I was, like some of the people that I know that just love to be in large groups, but that's just not going to happen, so I have to perform it.

[0:15:10.2] MB: I want to come back to this distinction that you made earlier, which I think is really, really important, these two different buckets of lumping, or grouping behaviors into the broad categories of comfort, versus discomfort. I really like that as a heuristic for thinking about it, because there's so many ways you could interpret body language. I feel that's a great starting point to say, “Okay, are the behaviors that I'm seeing falling more to the categories of comfort, or are they falling into the category of discomfort?”
[0:15:39.4] JN: Matt, that's a great way to put it. Not just one behavior, but these three or four behaviors, where are they falling? I'll give you an example. One of the things that we put under the comfort displays are when you see someone and they look very comfortable with themselves; they look confident. When we see them standing with shoulders broad, when we see them stepping away from the podium, when we see them with the open gestures, palms up, when we see them making direct eye contact, not just with one person, but with many people in the audience, we say, “Okay, these are consistent with all the behaviors that one would expect to see with confidence and this fits under comfort displays.”

Versus you're in sales, let's say and you're talking to someone, they're asking you questions, but every time they ask you a question, what if they see you tucking your chin down, biting your lip, or compressing your lip, doing something that we often hear and see where you all of a sudden have to inhale really quickly, and then you shift your lips to the side, you go – and then the lips shift, or there's touching of the neck, or ventilating where you're pulling on your jacket, or your shirt.

Well, they asked you a question. It was a simple question, why are we seeing these displays of discomfort? Is it because you don't know the answer? Is it because this is a difficult area for you to answer? Or is it because there's some hidden issues there?

Well, these may look like small little things, but to the average person they may not be able to put a name on it, but they're sensing there's something odd here. That's not the way we want to come across if we are in sales, or in leadership.

[0:17:41.8] MB: You've given a couple anecdotal examples of these, but I'd love to get into maybe some of the most obvious, or the most predictive behaviors for somebody who's listening who wants to practice these in real-time. What are some of the biggest, for lack of a better term, tells to look for around both comfort and discomfort?

[0:18:02.0] JN: Yeah. You and I were talking earlier Matt about validation. Go out and validate this notice that when the stock market drops, how often the photographs they take are of individuals pressing their fingers into their eyes, covering their eyes and so forth? Eye-blocking behaviors are extremely accurate. You're familiar with my work and in the poker world, this is one of those areas where the flop comes out, and as the community cards are unveiled, you see more and more of eye touching, eye covering.

The person is weak, because here's something that I found fascinating in 1974 when I was studying these kids that were born blind. When they hear things they don't like, they cover their eyes, they don't cover their ears and they've never seen. Eye-blocking is something that is part of our paleo circuits. It's very ancient with us as a species and we see it universally.

The other one that I would tell you is lip compression is a very good indicator that something is wrong, that the person is either struggling with something, or they're worried about something. As is jaw shifting, one that you often see in the board room, but you also see it in poker, where the person is confronted with something and all of a sudden they begin to shift their jaw left and right. Jaw shifting basically says, “I'm struggling here. I'm having difficulties,” and it's also very accurate.

As is the former I talked about, which is the neck touching. Now men and women do it slightly different. Women tend to touch the base of the neck. It's called the super sternal notch; there's a little dent there and they tend to touch that and cover it with their fingertips. Men tend to do it more robustly by grabbing their necks, massaging their necks. Invariably, it means the same thing. I don't feel confident. I feel something is wrong. I'm concerned. I'm worried  and so forth.

Ventilating behaviors; you ask somebody, “Hey, is that going to be done by Wednesday?” They start to pull on their shirt, or they lift up their hair. Ventilating behaviors are saying, “I'm having difficulty. There's something wrong here,” and they're very authentic. Then when we come down to the hands, notice how expressive we are. When we're confident about something, our fingers tend to be spread very wide and our thumbs tend to pop up. The minute we lack confidence, boy those thumbs just come crashing down, our fingers tend to stand together and there's less hand dramatic movement.

These things which I point out in my latest book are very small by themselves, but when you add them up and you begin to see four, five, six, seven behaviors all at once, now you're building that confidence that something is seriously wrong here.

[0:21:20.8] MB: Great examples. I think there's a number of those that are really, really relevant. It's funny, in poker obviously, you can see a lot of those. It's a great learning laboratory. What about the other side of the coin, looking at confident behaviors? What are some of those, or what are some of the most lowest hanging fruit in terms of learning, or developing the ability to spot them?

[0:21:43.6] JN: Yeah. I'll tell you, there is no such thing as low-hanging fruit when it comes to positive, because our brain unfortunately retains all negative things far longer than positive things. There's a biological imperative for that. If we didn't retain negative things longer, we would probably have to learn not to touch the hot stove every day. Positive things don't stay with us for very long, so it's imperative that we do things right; everything from doing the right handshake, where our fingers are pointed down, they're not touching the inside of the wrist of another person, they're not crushing the hand.

To when we stand in front of other people; if you ask how many of you have had somebody stand too close to you when they're talking to you? Everybody raises their hand, in the same way they tell you that they've had bad handshakes. You figure out, “Well, how do you screw that up?” One of the things that you immediately need to need to assess for is how much space does each person need. What I say is you lean in, you lean forward to shake hands, but then you take a small step back. That creates about two and a half to three and a half feet of space, and that's a good way to create that space that most people are actually more comfortable in.

Then the other thing is don't stand directly in front of another person. If you want to increase the amount of time that people will listen to you, stand at an angle. It's actually easier to – it minimizes the amount of face time if you're directly in front of somebody, versus if you're at a slight angle. For everybody that's listening, that we're all in the people business. What are the things that we look for that are appealing?

People that are just – they appear friendly, they smile, they take the time to talk to you. Here's what's interesting; it doesn't matter what they say. It's a fact. It's the non-verbal of taking 15 seconds to stop and just chat with someone. That is transmitting that I'm interested in you as a human being.

One of the more powerful things that we can do when we talk to people is be attentive to them, but how do we do that without coming across as we have an agenda? One of the ways we can do that is just by tilting our head slightly to the side, by canting our head to the side, we are exposing our neck, the most vulnerable part of our body and what we're doing by doing that is saying, “I'm here listening to you. I may have an agenda, but right now I'm listening to you. You've got the floor. I'm attentive.” These are the things that are very powerful.

Obviously, when things are very stressful, the best leaders slow everything down. They command the space. They command time. They command their own behaviors, so that that has a pacifying effect on everybody else. Great leaders do that. The military is known to do that.

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[0:27:17.2] MB: I think it's fascinating that a negative impression that you might make with somebody will last much, much longer than a positive one. It's really important to manage and make sure that you're not creating a negative impression with simple things like a handshake, or personal space, or your appearance, etc., when you're meeting people and trying to build relationships with them.

[0:27:37.2] JN: Yeah, exactly. If you  know that imperative that we have to strive to put more points up on that board of positive things, but remember, well what are those positive things? That kind comment, that smile, something that you can do, even if you were on the phone and you don't have time to say hello to somebody, you flash your eyebrows when they come in, as though you were saying, “Hey, how are you?” You use your eyebrows to flash, even though you're tied up talking to somebody, that communicates to the other person, “Oh, that's – he or she is recognizing me.”

Remember, at about three weeks of age, babies respond to eyebrow flash. You can test this. Ask somebody if you can just look at their baby for a second as you smile at the baby, flash your eyes and notice how they light up. Well, as it turns out, I'm 65 and I still light up when somebody greets me that way. I think it's in our DNA to respond to that and it's something that we can do every day that says to others, “You're important to me.”

I don't know. Nobody knows. Is it because we're willing to burn blood sugars and do something that defies gravity by arching our eyebrows? Nobody's sure of this, but we know it works and we know that it's very positive.

[0:29:06.2] MB: It's funny. I like the phrase you said that it's in our DNA, because even in psychology research shows that people will respond to flattery, even when they know that it's insincere and obvious. The same idea, right? Even if you're aware of a lot of these non-verbal communication strategies, or tools, they still work even despite the fact that people might be consciously aware that, “Oh, they're doing these various things.”

[0:29:32.2] JN: Yeah. That's one way to look at it, Matt. The way I look at it is it's part of that [inaudible 0:29:38.8] where we do things repeatedly, we do very short things repeatedly and we build that into our DNA. Our neuro circuits actually become robust. I don't know if it was because my grandmother did it and my mother did it and they made me do it, but it's something that if we don't do these things, we can teach ourselves to do it, so that we become that person that greets others, that shows interest and so forth. I think the more that we do it, the more genuine it becomes.

I will caution you that most of us pick up when there's a fake smile. I mean, we run into the social smile all the time. On the street somebody gives us that social smile, but we pick up. We're very sensitive to when people give us a false smile and there's false pretenses. I think it's important to differentiate that it's not about harboring bad feelings and then trying to fake it. It's really about can we bring ourselves to like each other and then – just be, have that pleasantness for each other and just make it part of your life and be genuine about it.

Otherwise, we all know somebody that they're just odd. I remember working with a guy that never said good morning to anybody. I have never seen anybody so miserable in my life, and I think if he ever turned around and say good morning to me, I would have had to call the weather channel to see if hell had frozen over, because this guy was just – I mean, his whole life, he just look like he was constipated. I have to think he was just miserable. What's interesting about people like that that think it's okay to be that way is that they create a field of toxicity around them and it affects a lot of people in their midst.

[0:31:50.6] MB: Even taking some of these non-verbal cues too far, I know in the past you've used the example of the politician’s handshake and how that can be taking it too far.

[0:32:01.8] JN: Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of research that's been done and what handshakes do we like, we don't like. The politician’s handshake where two hands cup you at the same time; the weak handshake, the jujitsu one where they try to be on top and all sorts of things. I think when we have social intelligence, when we have that emotional intelligence that Daniel Goleman was talking about is we're very sensitive to others. What are their needs, wants and desires and fears?

Obviously, if you're shaking hands with a locker room full of athletes, you're going to have a stronger handshake. The fact is that most people are not that way, and you're going to have to respect what that handshake is. Handshakes is the first time humans usually touch. All these chemicals are released, which can be either very positive, or they can be very negative.

[0:32:59.3] MB: Changing directions slightly, but coming back to some of these cues that we can observe in other people, I know you've famously said that the feet are the most honest part of the body. I'd love to hear a little bit about that.

[0:33:09.9] JN: Well, I'll tell you what, I came out with that in 2004. People were just really resistant with that. They had never heard of this before. Of course, at that point, I had sat through probably 13,000 interviews in my law enforcement career, somewhere around that. I had made these observations. If you think about it and it's something that you can immediately go out and test. Nobody runs to the edge of a tall building. We inch over if it's very high. We don't run towards anybody that is a potential threat to us. If we see a dog that's snarling at us, we may look at it and keep our eye on it, but our feet immediately turn away.

You can go to a party, a reunion and you see somebody that bullied you 30 years ago and you might not in recognition, but you'll find your feet turning away. Because your feet in conjunction obviously with your brain are responsible for your survival, they tend to be very, very accurate. When there's something we don't like, we immediately turn away.

Ride an elevator by yourself and you may find yourself leaning against the back of the elevator with your legs crossed. Boy I tell you what, you get a bunch of guys that have been drinking and they get on the elevator and that you will stop doing that, your both feet will be planted on the ground. Because in our brains, we have this exquisite system called the limbic system and it is responsible for our survival. It doesn't care about social niceties. It just says, “I will not allow you to be off-balance when there are people around you that may be a threat to you,” and so you immediately put both feet down.

In the same way that the pupils of the eyes when we see something that could potentially hurt us, the pupils tend to constrict, so that we can see it with greater precision. These are things we don't have really a lot of control over. Yeah, the feet I mean, tell any child they're going to Disney tomorrow and watch their feet and they get happy feet. Yeah, that was one that really shook things up, but I think even poker players now have validated this many, many times over, where someone had the winning hand the nuts and they saw their legs jumping up and down and you often see the shirt vibrating. Yeah, definitely.

[0:35:57.9] MB: The thing that, and you pointed this out and you've given a number examples of this actually, but I think the thing that really makes this come alive is when you start to try and just use some of these ideas at a cocktail party, or at a meeting, or whatever and just spend a little bit of your conscious energy and effort to watch people and just see, “Okay, can I read something about their behavior and take something away from it?”

At least for me, approaching it like that, approaching it almost like a game, you start to build these muscles subconsciously. Then eventually, and I know you're probably well beyond this point, you can just see someone immediately know, “Okay. Oh, wow.” Their feet, their lips, you aggregate all these factors together and start to get a real read on their comfort level, or their discomfort level, etc.

[0:36:42.1] MB: Well, you have a very good point. When I started out, I didn't know everything that I do now. I've slowly validated over time and that's what I encourage people to do. Go through the book, The Dictionary of Body Language, pick a behavior and see how often you see it and validate what it really means. The more you validate it, the less you have to think of it. I get this question all the time, do you really think about this? I say no. I mean, it runs like software. It just runs in the background. I don't have to break it down. If I'm asked to, obviously I can. 

When you have about 400 behaviors that I highlight, you're not going to look at all of them, but let's start with the eyes. How often does someone who's stressed about something cover their eyes? How often is it that when we've already made up our mind, or we don't like something, we purse our lips? You begin to validate these things and pretty soon, you say, “Wow, these are 12, 15 behaviors that I feel really confident about. Now let's see if I can go further and further and further.”

We all have beginning points, but I think this is something that we can always grow. Obviously, you as an interviewer, a podcaster, you're listening to the voice, you're listening for stress, you're listening for comfort, you're listening to see if somebody is stuttering, or their mouth is getting dry. You develop this ear for it. You don't think about it, but you know what's going on. In the same way with body language, we can begin to validate a lot of these things and depending on our occupation.

At the same time, we need to stand in front of a mirror and be honest with ourselves and say, “Do I look my best? Do I present my best? Do I look genuine? Do I look confident? What can I improve? What's my curbside appeal today and can I change my curbside appeal to increase my likability?” I've done that. I think we can all do that.

[0:39:04.4] MB: I want to look at another piece of this and maybe a little bit of a caveat for listeners, you tell a great story around a parking ticket and how negative cues can sometimes be misleading. It pokers another great example, but I think the parking ticket story is a perfect illustration of how it's not always a perfect tell, just because you see somebody being uncomfortable.

[0:39:26.0] JN: Yeah. I think we have to be very careful with what we observe. People ask all the time about deception. Forget deception and body language, because it's very difficult to detect. The best example I can give was here I was, the FBI's expert on body language. I was asked to help out with an interview. This poor woman, she gets called into our office and it has to do with financial fraud. Usually, the first 20 minutes or so, we don't ask any hard questions. It's just a get-to-know-you thing.

About 20 minutes into this conversation, I noticed that she's becoming more and more stressed. She's pulling on her hair a little bit, ventilating the back of her. Hair her lips have gone from being full to now they're just very thin and she's compressing her lips a lot. When she swallows, it's these really hard swallows. Her chin is down and she's rubbing her hands together a lot. I'm thinking, “Oh, my goodness. Here all the traditional tells that so many people have told over the years are indicative of deception.”

I said, “She's ready to confess.” I said to her, “Ma'am, you look like you need to get something off your chest.” I'll never forget this because it's so humbling. She said, “Mr. Navarro, thank God, because when I parked downstairs, I only had two quarters and the meters running out.” It was one of these things where it was a humble check. I realize, “Wow, I saw the right behaviors,” but what I didn't know was what was the cause. This was a big eye-opener to me that far too often, we see behaviors, but we don't know what the cause is. It's our job, your job, my job to when we see discomfort displays is to when it is appropriate to ask is everything all right? Is something wrong, and so forth?

Had I done that early on, everything would have been fine. As it turns out as you know from the story, she wasn't even involved in this crime. Somebody had stolen her identity and used it to bill some insurance company.

We have a responsibility when we have this greater knowledge is what are we doing with it? Yeah, I see the behaviors. Now what am I going to do with that? My job is not to accuse, but to ask. I have to tell you when my daughter was growing up, I had to restrain myself, because often time she would come home from school and I could just tell that there was something wrong, that something had happened.

I think this is good for all of us. You have to restrain yourself and say, “Now is not the time. Give her time and eventually, she will bring it up.” Usually she did. She would say, “Oh, you're not going to believe what happened and so forth.” Otherwise, we become that person that people may even want to avoid us, because they see us as too intrusive in our observations.

[0:42:53.7] MB: We've talked at length about the observation, understanding side of the equation, talked a little bit about influencing other people. I'd love to dig a little bit more into the influencing side and how we can use non-verbals to influence others.

[0:43:09.6] JN: Good question. I hinted at it earlier when I talked about our curbside appeal. Certainly, with our interest where we actually take the time to spend even a few seconds with someone, I'm always amazed that I'll go to this place, or that place and they say, “Yeah, the boss he stopped by the other day and he asked me how my family was.” They remember that six months later, these little things that we do.

I think in a world that's become very much more relaxed, I think we still have to remember that we're very sensitive to hierarchy. I always tell the story when the conquistadores arrived in the new world, they saw the same behaviors here that they had seen in Queen Isabella's Court. I think good manners, which manners in general are non-verbals, but particularly good manners are important. I think grooming is important. I think how we present, also how we move for instance. We can all recount a time, or a place where someone just – they just walked so slowly, or they walk like they just didn't care, that we weren't important, that our movements are communicating something about how much we care.

That when we are approached, that we create an environment that says, “Even though I'm busy, I'm willing to pay attention to you,” in a friendly way. Or at least I'm willing to say, “Look, I'm tied up right now, but I'll give you my full attention in about five minutes.” Don't become that person that when you need an answer, you fear going to see that person, just because of their non-verbals. People can tell, he or she's in a bad mood.

Listen, every day we have periods of time when maybe we're not in the best moods, but we have a responsibility when we see somebody that's coming towards us to say, “Okay, I need to put on that costume and I need to become that actor that receives people well.” That is all about non-verbals.

One of the things that we can do, and I often have people in my class do this and say, “All right, you're going to meet me at the door, you're going to ask me to sit down and you're going to sell me this pencil. I want you to do all of that without saying a word.” It's interesting to see how people sometimes fumble, even the initial greeting and how to walk over, right? Maybe they point to the chair with their index finger, which I don't recommend. You should always point with a full hand, with a palm open. They tend to be very erratic and not smooth it out.

This whole process, this theater is about making people comfortable, about showing that you're interested in them, and then about how you feel about this object. You're not selling the object. You're selling how you feel about the object. It's always amazing to me how people get that wrong. They said, “Well, how do I do that?” I say, “How do you feel about this object?” That's when they have to think how do I act about that? What if it was a puppy? Would you transact that differently? That's when they begin to get it. That's when they say, “Oh, look. Take a look at my puppy. Isn't he cute, right? The smile,” but without the words. That's something that we can practice. If I may, I've known a lot of actors over the years through my work. They all rehearse. They all rehearse this.

[0:47:27.0] MB: Yeah. I think that's a great exercise and it's funny, just even visualizing myself doing it, I'm already picking up on the different ways that I would use a number of non-verbal strategies to try and influence somebody. It gives you a little bit of insight into your own behaviors and the different inflection points within that interaction, where you can potentially change your behavior, or modify it to try and be more engaging and friendly, etc.

[0:47:53.9] JN: Well, I mean, something so simple Matt, as let's say, you're selling me an eraser. Would you grab it from above, so that your fingers are blocking it as you hand it to me, or would you grab it from the side so that you can see it, so you're cupping it with both hands? Would you move it towards me softly, so that as you're moving it my eyes are naturally drawn to it, because your orientation reflex kicks in, there's movement, and so now I'm tracking this thing? Would you hold it on your hands like it's something treasured, or would you just dump it there in front of me?

When we begin to break these little things down, you realize all these things affect us. We can do very simple experiments, where the people were experimenting on really don't know what's going on. Where we take one group and we say, “Here, take a look at this and let me know what you think.” Then we take another group and we hand it to them in a very special way. Then we ask them, rate it. Invariably, how we handled that object, when we handle it properly, it's always rated higher.

[0:49:04.9] MB: Bringing this back to concrete strategies that listeners can implement in their lives, what would be one piece of homework, or an action item that you would give to somebody listening who wanted to start testing out these ideas, or start building that as you call it that software in your mind, that muscle of recognizing and understanding non-verbal cues?

[0:49:25.9] JN: Yeah, absolutely. An easy one. Watch as people are reporting on the stock market, on a good and a bad day and watch their non-verbals. Turn the sound off on your television, watch a show and see if you can pick out what's going on just from the non-verbals. These are things that we do routinely, but focus on two or three behaviors.

If you had to start today with three behaviors, I would say look for the eyes, look for eye-blocking, eye-closure, look for lip compression, look for jaw shifting, neck touching and notice when it happens, how it happens, what questions were asked, how they answer. Once you build that into your repertoire, use the dictionary of non-verbals to go through it and say, “Well, what other behaviors are there?” Things like a hard swallow, things such as somebody's asked a question and you find that they're all of a sudden their tongue is in their cheek. Why are they doing that? All these things are explained at length, but you have to start somewhere. It's always a good place to start in the face. It's probably the most interesting.

[0:50:48.8] MB: For listeners who want to dig in, learn more and find you and your work online, what's the best place for them to go?

[0:50:56.0] JN: They can go to www.jnforensics.com and that’s my website. They can look at all the 30 books that I’ve published, my articles in Psychology Today and elsewhere. They can e-mail me at jnforensics.com and I’m happy to send them a free bibliography with over 300 articles, or books on the subject.

[0:51:25.6] MB: Well Joe, this has been a fascinating conversation, a great exploration and a really awesome starting point into the vast field of body language and non-verbal communication. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all this wisdom.

[0:51:40.1] JN: Matt, thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

[0:51:44.0] 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 e-mail. My e-mail 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.

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

This Simple Idea From Quantum Physics Could Change Your Life with Mel Schwartz

In this episode we discuss how a few crazy ideas from quantum physics might just change your life. We look at how some of the core principles from the hard sciences have huge implications for the way we live, love, and deal with a world of danger and uncertainty. It is possible that the laws of physics hold lessons that could help us redefine our relationship with anxiety and suffering and open the door to possibility? We discuss this and much more with our guest Mel Schwartz

Mel Schwartz is a psychotherapist, marriage counselor, author, and speaker. He is one of the first contemporary practicing psychotherapists to distill the basic premises of quantum theory into therapeutic approaches. Mel is the author of the book The Possibility Principle: How Quantum Physics Can Improve the Way You Think, Live and Love and has been featured in Psychology Today, TED, and much more.

• How a panic attack led to a chance encounter with a worldview that transformed Mel’s perceptive

• The Core Principles of Quantum Physics and how they can redefine our lives

• Reality is not certain, predictable, and deterministic 

• Uncertainty = possibility, determinism shuts the door to possibility

• The epidemic of anxiety in our society has to do with our relationship with uncertainty - warding off uncertainty creates stress and anxiety

• Quantum theory holds the premise that reality is literally one inseparable whole

• Science confirms the “mystic” belief that everything in life is inseparable 

• “The myth of separation” - We are no longer separate disconnected cogs 

• Because all life is interconnected, compassion and empathy makes sense and there is fertile ground for purpose and meaning 

• You don’t need to be a math wizard to understand how the principles of quantum physics can transform your world view 

• Arguably the most important scientific discovery that has ever occurred

• Our thinking has been trained to compartmentalize and separate the world

• This is not woo woo new age or a spiritual conclusion - this is a fundamental conclusion of hard science

• Our language shapes how we perceive the world - when we use the language of dualism and determinism we create a lived experience that is reinforces the illusion that we are somehow separate from the world

• Depression comes from a sense of alienation and alone-ness from Newton's deterministic worldview

• The Newtonian worldview - the deterministic / mechanistic worldview 

• Reality is not fixed - its stirring and unfolding 

• Quantum reality is in a state of potential - always waiting to occur 

• Let’s take a look at the role certainty and uncertainty play in our lives

• The need for certainty feeds into a fear of making the wrong decision and traps people in anxiety and fear

• The fear of the consequences of a decision - the fear of the uncertain - often constrains people

• Life is like a river - get into the flow of life - you can still navigate

• Mistakes should not be feared - labeling your experience as mistakes causes you to live in a prison of fear and anxiety

• Your thoughts are often addicted to seeking certainty

• Don’t avoid it - embrace discomfort - we must embrace discomfort psychologically and cognitively to grow 

• Embrace confusion - it’s exciting, its a sign post for growth, it gets you to places you’ve never been before 

• Embrace vulnerability - its OK to be transparent, its OK to be yourself, its OK to be who you want to be - that’s authentic self esteem

• As a culture we don’t pursue “authentic self esteem” we pursue “other esteem” - we alter and shape ourselves to elicit approval and recognition from other people. 

• We’ve been playing from the wrong game plan

• The way to embrace uncertainty is by shifting your relationship with your thoughts

• We are imprisoned by our thoughts - they create accompanying feeling and emotions. 

• You have to develop the method, create the muscle memory - to see a negative thought, see it, accept it, but you don’t have to believe it 

• Uncertainty = possibility

• Addiction to certainty = anxiety, fear, stress

• Ask yourself - what is my thought telling me? How do I know it’s true? How often do I have these thoughts?

• Old thoughts and limiting beliefs defend their territory

• Don’t be reactive - be contemplative 

• If you can’t see the thought or emotion - you become that thought or emotion 

• Acting strong is acting, and that’s weak

• What does it mean to really be strong? To be vulnerable. Sharing your insecurities, self doubts, and fears. When you share them you’re not worried about anyone else judging you. 

• When your relationship with yourself is in tact - thats authentic self esteem - you can’t be judged by anyone else

• You give other people the power to judge you - and judge yourself based on what you think, they think of you

• Your thoughts and feelings are the paintbrush on the canvas of your life

• The way we picture reality is the way we experience reality 

• Homework: In the course of your day - try to capture the themes of your thoughts and ask yourself, what are they telling you? 

• Homework: As yourself some larger question - how do you view life? How did you come to your core beliefs about the world? What informs your core beliefs about the world?

Thank you so much for listening!

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [Book] The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture by Fritjof Capra

• [Book] The Possibility Principle: How Quantum Physics Can Improve the Way You Think, Live, and Love by Mel Schwartz

• [Article] Feldenkrais Learning and David Bohm's Dialogue Model, by Ilana Nevill

• [SoS Episode] The Skeptics Guide To Meditation With Dan Harris

• [SoS Episode] Proven Strategies of Mindfulness and Self-Compassion with Dr. Ronald Siegel

• [Personal Site] Mel Schwartz

• [TEDTalk] Overcome Anxiety in 7 Minutes | Mel Schwartz | TEDxBeaconStreet

• [SoS Episode] How You Can CRUSH Self Sabotage with Dr. Gay Hendricks

• [SoS Episode] Are You Being Held Back By Childhood Limiting Beliefs? With Guest Catherine Plano

• [SoS Episode] Four Questions That Will Change Your World - An Exploration of “The Work” with Byron Katie

• [SoS Episode] Evidence Reveals The Most Important Skill of the 21st Century with Dr. Tasha Eurich

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] 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 2 million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries and part of the Self-Help for Smart People Podcast Network.

In this episode, we look at how some of the core principles from the Heart Sciences have implications for the way we live, love and deal with the world of danger and uncertainty. Is it possible that the laws of physics hold lessons that could help us redefine our relationship with anxiety and suffering and open the door to possibility? We discuss this and much more with our guest, Mel Schwartz. 

Do you need more time; time for work time, for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our email list. It's called How You Can Create Time for the Things That Really Matter in Life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the email list at successpodcast.com.

You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our email subscribers. We recently pre-released an episode in an interview to our email subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience. That had tremendous implications, because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first. With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live exclusive interview, just for e-mail subscribers.

There's some amazing stuff that's available only to email subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Or, if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you're on the go, you don't have time, just text the word “smarter" to the number 44222. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222.

In our previous episode, we told the truth about time. We threw out all the old and outdated conceptions of time management and looked at how time really works. We explored the fundamental way that you must blip your approach to time so that you can focus on what really matters in your life. 

We looked at how you can become an artist, manipulating time at your will, stretching your best moments so that they last longer and ruthlessly removing things that clutter your life. If you press for time, like there’s never enough and want to figure out how to create time for what really matters in your life, listen to our previous episode with our guest, Laura Vanderkam. 

Now, for our interview with Mel. 

[00:02:56] MB: Today, we have another great guest on the show, Mel Schwartz. Mel is a psychotherapist, marriage counselor, author and speaker. He’s one of the first contemporary practicing psychotherapist to distill the basic premises of quantum theory into therapeutic approaches. He’s the author of the book The Possibility Principle: How Quantum Physics Can Improve the Way You Think, Live and Love and has been features in Psychology Today, TED and much more. 

Mel, welcome to the Science of Success.

[00:03:24] MS: Thank you, Matt. It’s exciting to be with you. 

[00:03:26] MB: We’re very excited to have you on the show today, and it’s funny, obviously science is kind of a big theme of our show, even in the title of the show, The Science of Success. But in many ways I think that you’ve created a really unique perspective on kind of integrating some science that we typically don’t really dig into or talk about on the show, specifically this kind of notion of the quantum worldview and applying it to life, stress, anxiety, all kinds of different things. 

I’d love to kind of dig into that and really hear about how you kind of came to this approach that perhaps quantum physics could hold some answers for living better lives. 

[00:04:01] MS: Well, [inaudible 00:04:02] field of inquiry, Matt. I’ll go back about 25 years ago. I had recently divorced and I woke up one beautiful spring morning thinking it’s a great day to take a bike riding. My young children was with their mom for that day. So I went out and enjoyed myself. 

In the middle of that bike ride I experienced, well, I guess we call it panic attack. My mind started to raise, was fear about my future, what it would be like. Bike around and headed back home. Upon arriving home, I absentmindedly pulled a book off the shelf, which was called The Turning Point, by a physicist named Fritjof Capra, and I started to read about this fascinating shift of paradigm, this worldview shift taking us away from Newtonian reality [inaudible 00:04:46] quantum worldview. 

After reading about 10 or 15 minutes, I noticed that I wasn’t feeling anxious any longer. I continued to reading and I found that I became fascinated in this new worldview. It excited me, frankly, than it thrilled me. It’s 25 years later and I’ve never stopped. 

I began to look at the core principles of quantum physics, which are reality is not certain or deterministic as we had been trained to think by Newton. It’s not predictable. It’s uncertain, and I began to realize that uncertainty equals possibility, whereas determinism shuts off the door of the possibility. 

As a therapist, I’ve come to see that the disorder and epidemic of anxiety we experience has to do with our relationship with uncertainty. When we ward off uncertainty, when we need to know the future in advance, it creates this stress and anxiety. Paradoxically, if we learn to embrace uncertainty, we can write the waves of change. 

Furthermore, I saw that quantum theory held that reality isn’t literally won inseparable full. Just as eastern mystical traditions had always taught us, but now science was confirming that mysticism, at least on the quantum level. Well, over the last couple of decades, science has indicated this inseparability that appears on the quantum level, it appears on our everyday macro level as well. What does that do? 

It means that we are no longer separate disconnected cogs in Newton’s machine-like universe where there’s no meaning and purpose and change is hard and we are inert. But if we are all thoroughly interconnected, meaning in purpose or our birth right [inaudible 00:06:36] participates in the creation of reality. It’s more like a reality making process. In this interconnection, compassion and empathy make perfect sense, because if I tend to the other and care for the other, it improves my lot in life. We’re not alienated, separated individuals. I think so much of what ails our modern culture comes from excessive competition in greed born of Newton’s worldview of individualism, of separation. I refer to it as the myth of separation. 

So I began to employ inseparability, uncertainty, and potentiality into my work as a therapist and I found that the results were often startling. They came with the same issues, month after month and year after year. We were able, and by me, my therapy clients and myself, to foster and approach which would help people have turning points just as I had that turning point in reading that book. It was not a slow gradual process of getting it. 

I don’t believe that self-improvement, enlightenment needs to conform to gradualism. [inaudible 00:07:46] life when we have an aha, we look at something differently and we start to write a new script for our lives. So that’s what brought me to this work. My approach is that I read quantum physics. By the way, for the listeners, I am not a scientist. I was a C-student in science. I’m not reading math and formulas. I’m simply reading principles and asking, “If this is so, then how can I reorganize how I live my life to benefit from this powerful new worldview?” 

I find it effective in overcoming fear and anxiety and becoming the master of your thinking, and I use some of these techniques to enhance our communication and our relationships, Matt, as a broad overview of what has brought me to this work.  

[00:08:34] MB: The interesting thing that I find with this kind of quantum worldview that you’ve applied to psychology and self-improvement is that this is a conclusion that is based on kind of the fundamental principles of the hard sciences. It’s not something that is from social science, or psychology studies where it’s often easier to kind of turnover, disrupt the results or maybe the sample sizes can be so small that you can get kind of erroneous conclusion. These are some of the major fundamental ideas from physics, biology, etc., and they have some really monumental takeaways for the way that we live and exist in the world.     

[00:09:14] MS: Moreover to that very point, there’s a chapter in my book, the possibility principle, in which I suggest that arguably, the most important scientific discovery that has ever occurred goes unknown to most of us, because we have to radically reconsider reality. 

When I speak of inseparability, this had to do with a thought experiment between Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. The experiment was if you take two photons, they exist in what’s called an entangled state, Matt, which means they have an affinity for each other. As entangled particles, they have a spin, but they have opposite spins. One spins negative, one spins positive. 

The thought experiment was if we take these photons and separate them by a great distance, let’s take half the universe. How long will the signal take from one to the other in regard to alternating their spin? So we change the spin of one. The other particle must change its spin. How long will it take? Einstein argues that the signal will be sent and it cannot travel as fast as the speed of light. Niels Bohr said no signal will be sent. It won’t be necessary. They are as one no matter the distance between them. 

This caused Einstein to make his famous statements of, “God doesn’t play dice with the universe, and if this is true I’d rather be a cobbler than a physicist,” and the debate rages on for decades. After Einstein’s death, the technology is finally available to test this theorem, and the results conclusively show that Niels Bohr was correct. No signal is sent. Now this has been retested with increasingly more sophisticated technology over the decades, and the result is always the same. 

Now, in our everyday lives, we experience inseparability. We can call it ESP, or intuition. I talk in my book about the fact that if we have a pair of twins and she lives in San Francisco and he lives in Paris and she falls down and breaks her ankle in exactly at that moment she feels a pain in her ankle. The skeptics says, “Well, they have shared DNA, but this occurs increasingly without the shared DNA.” 

There are ways of knowing that are not applicable to the rational analytical modality of science and what we do, and it’s bad science, is we discard it as an anomaly. Placebo effect is an example. Medicines accepts placebo effect, but we should look at the placebo effect and say, “Well, wait a minute. If my mind can be as efficacious and healing what I need to treat as the medicine, I need to look at that. Therefore, I propose there is no mind-body connection, because there is no mind-body separation. They are as one.” 

You see, our thinking has been trained to separate things up to create compartments and divisions where none exist, and then our thought does not think and operate in wholeness, which contributes to so much of the disaster we encounter in our world. We need to learn to think in wholeness. 

As you said, this is hard science. I do not come at this from new age or from spiritual traditions, but in this case, quantum physics as a hard science is affirming and corresponding with many fields of deep spiritualism. They appear to be as one. 

[00:12:56] MB: You know, it’s funny. We’ve had that theme and that idea recur in a couple of conversations on the show. One of the most recently, our interview with Steven Kotler. We kind of look at – He studies flow and the science and psychology behind that. What they found is that even the kind of perception in your brain that you are separate from everything else in the world. There is  a specific part of the brain that kind of generates that essentially controlled illusion that you are separate. 

When they study people who meditate really deeply, whether they’re Buddhist monks, or nuns or even people who are in extreme flow states, that part of the brain shuts down and that creates that sort of sense or that feeling that everything is one and that you are not disconnected in any way from everything else. 

[00:13:37] MS: The way I look at that phenomenon with regards to the brain is I do not believe that the brain produces thought. My belief is that thought leaves its mark on the brain. So imagine that you’re walking at the beach. If you look behind you and you see your footprint in the sand, we wouldn’t think the sand produced the footprint. Your foot left this mark on the brain. 

I believe that our thoughts and feelings leave their mark on the brain, which is actually good news. Because it means we are not hardwired and we are not at the mercy of brain chemistry. Again, terms like hardwired. I think I have a screw loose. These are terminologies that come from Newton’s machine-like universe. 

We have to look at our language. Our language is so important here in depicting how we picture reality. I’ll be giving a TEDx talk in a couple of weeks in Fenway Park around language. When we use the two be verbs; is, am, were, was, be, these are all inert verbs that preclude movement or change and speak of objective realities. They are remnants from Newton’s worldview. They turn us into passive victims in how we picture ourselves and our relationships. 

Language plays a large part in this shift of paradigm. I wonder why it has taken us nearly a hundred years to enjoy the benefits of this worldview shift. Then it occurred to me that our thoughts are comprised of words, and if our words, like to be verbs are rooted in the inert objective reality of Newton’s worldview, then the shift gets perturbed and we don’t break through. 

So speaking without using and writing, without using two be verbs completely changes our notion of how we communicate. It allows us to speak and think in perceptive where we are the perceiver, we are participating in the creating of our thought and our perceptions. It is an inter-subjective based reality rather than the reality of Newton’s objective perspective, where we are separate and discreet and observe in what is. 

So based upon the insights of quantum physics, objectivity cannot and does not exist, and I regard that as good news, because if objectivity exists, we become the objects. It leads to a malaise, decrease enormous amounts of depression. Depression comes from the sense of alienation and aloneness of Newton’s worldview. 

So when we begin to consider that our thoughts and our thinking participate in the constructing of our personal reality and our perception of others, everything opens up. Now, I’m not going to the extreme of the nonsense of fake news. I’m not arguing that there aren’t things we can’t all agree on as having happened as real. I’m not moving to that extreme. I’m talking about in our perceptions and experiences as human beings, we can begin to shift from a human being to what I call a human becoming. 

You see, the question; who am i? Is an often asked question, and I wrote an article called Who Am I? In this article I proposed it’s the wrong question. Who I am is looking for a fixed, finite, specific inert response. What we should be doing is asking ourselves how would I like to experience my life? I like to see myself as a human in the process of becoming, not being, to move out of that stalled, fixed, inert state of mind that creates the construct and the belief that change is hard. Change needn’t be hard. But if we’re operating from this old worldview, then change is the exception and is hard. 

[00:17:39] MB: I want to come back and dig into this and just sort of extrapolate this concept a little bit for listeners so that they can have a better understanding of it. When you this about this idea of kind of the Newtonian worldview, I think you’ve done a really good job kind of explaining this notion of how quantum physics can reshape our perceptions of the world. But when we think about the kind of Newtonian worldview, tell me what is that so listeners can kind of spot that thinking in their own lives and be aware when they’re kind of using that frame of reference, or using that language to sort of perceive reality. 

[00:18:12] MS: Certainly. Newton described reality as a giant machine, became known as a mechanistic worldview or a machine-like worldview. The giant machine, this comprised of separate discreet parts. We, of course, became separate parts in Newton’s machine. 

One of the fundamental tenants of Newton’s worldview is determinism. If you have enough information, today we’ll call it data, you can reasonably predict the future. Well, that mindset, this need to predict the future completely frustrates and thwarts our ability to be present and to engage in a flowing participatory reality. 

Instead of actually engaging in life, so many people sit back and live life, and so you’re playing a chess match. You’re looking and calculating and contemplating, “Should I make this move or that? What will be the consequences?” We’re playing it all out in a deterministic way. In so doing, we succumb to anxiety and fear, the fear of making the wrong move, the fear of making the wrong choice. 

The other tenant of Newton’s worldview is of course the separation. So if we are all separate from one another, it leaves us without meaning and purpose. Compassion and empathy are the exception. We compete, and individualism takes hold to the point of greed running rampant, which we see so much of in our world. 

On a smaller personal level, this is what I see occurring in relationships. Relationships fall apart when we can’t be empathic and compassionate. It’s easy to say I love you, but it becomes challenging to act lovingly. 

So when I look at epidemics of anxiety and depression and they are at epidemic levels, I consider that they are the natural outcome of Newton’s machine-like universe, because as human beings, if we are living under the template of a machine, that is dehumanizing. It doesn’t inspire. There is no wonder and awe and connectivity and imagination. 

Let’s look at an expression like that’s immaterial. A legal term, but we use it in our everyday lives; that’s immaterial. What does that suggest? It suggests that something that is not material is less than. It isn’t important. We need to measure everything. 

I recently was in a session when one of my clients would propose that everything is measurable. I asked him if he could measure his love for his wife. How would he quantify it? So we became the objects of our own measurement. As I proposed, it leads to so much of the illness that we experience in so many levels, and I find the solutions lie in the quantum worldview, which suggest that reality isn’t fixed. It’s a reality-making process. It’s completely stirring and unfolding every nanosecond. 

I took that belief that quantum reality is in a state of potential, always waiting to occur, and I considered that we too are in a state of pure potential. In the nanosecond before we have our next thought, we’re in state of pure potential. But if we keep having the same old thoughts, we don’t experience our potential. 

So I’ve devised methods to be able to see your thought and experience that nanosecond as actually a second or two. When you can see your thought, you’re thinking, and that’s when you can access new possibility and new change in your life. 

[00:22:02] MB: This week’s episode is brought to you by our partners at Brilliant. Brilliant is a math and science enrichment learning tool. You can learn concepts by solving fascinating challenging problems. Brilliant explores probability, computer science, machine learning, the physics of everyday life, complex Algebra and much more. They do this with addictive interactive experiences that are enjoyed by over 5 million students, professionals and enthusiasts around the world.

One of the coolest things that I really also like about Brilliant is that they have these learning principles and two of them in particular really stick out to me as powerful and important principles. One of them is that learning is curiosity-driven. If you look at some of the most prolific thinkers and learners in history, people like Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, they were incredibly curious individuals, just really, really curious. It’s so great to see that one of their learning principles is this principle of curiosity.

Another one of Brilliant’s learning principles that’s absolutely critical is that learning needs to allow for failure. If you look at Carol Dweck, if you look at the research behind Mindset, this is one of the cornerstones of psychology research. You have to be able to fail to learn and improve. You have to be able to acknowledge your weaknesses. You have to be able to push yourself into a place where it’s okay to make mistakes. These learning principles form the cornerstone in the foundation of Brilliant. It’s such a great platform. I highly recommend checking it out.

You can do that by going to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. I’m a huge fan of STEM learning and that’s why I’m so excited that Brilliant is sponsoring this episode. They’ve been a sponsor of the show for a long time and there’s a reason; they make learning math and science fun and engaging and exciting.

You can get started today with Brilliant by going to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. That’s brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. If you’ve been enjoying our weekly riddles in Mindset Monday, we’re also collaborating with Brilliant to bring some awesome and exciting riddles to our Mindset Monday e-mail list.

[00:24:09] MB: I love this idea that reality is not fixed. Obviously, from sort of a physical and a quantum perspective, that’s a fundamentally true law of physics. But I want to dig in to the kind of broader concept of uncertainty and what happens when we try to avoid uncertainty and why do so many people live their lives in kind of a mode of uncertainty minimization. 

[00:24:34] MS: We’re trained to seek certainty. Let’s take a look at the role certainty and uncertainty have in our lives. Uncertainty fuels the growth domestic product. Sports are based on uncertainty, movies, thrillers, books. We seek uncertainty in our lives, but on a more personal level, we become choked by certainty. Why? It’s the operating worldview that we need to avoid of making a mistake. We need to make the right decisions and we can best be assured of doing that by collecting enough information so that we can predict a future event. 

So people become afraid of making the wrong decision. They become afraid of the consequences of their decisions, but so many people then become stalled out in anxiety and fear and don’t make a decision. 

Matt, we need to concern ourselves with the consequences of our inactions as much as our actions. I work with so many people in which I see the fear of the consequence of a decision stalls them out. I see this in the corporate, I read it too, where I do consulting with corporations. The fear of the uncertain constraints us in our relationship with the known. 

What happens [inaudible 00:25:54] relationship with the unknown? If we learn to embrace the unknown? Again, unknown equals possibility. So think of it this way. I did this exercise with a client and it’s part of a recent TEDx talk I gave on overcoming anxiety. Picture you’re on the bank of a river and the river is flowing, and I explained to you that, metaphorically, that river is the flow of your life. I entice you to go into that river, but you’re stopped with this fear or uncertainty. But you get into the river and in the middle of the river the current picks up and you grab a hold of a boulder. I say to you, “Why are you holding on to the boulder?” You say, “Well, the river bends to the right up ahead. I need to know where it’s going. I don’t know where it’s going.” 

My response is, “We’re not supposed to know where it’s going. You need to get into the flow of life, but once you’re in the flow, you’re free to navigate. You can shift direction, but we have to get into the flow.” 

The fear of making a mistake has become such a powerful tenant and meme in our lives. We need to unravel this notion of mistake. A mistake is an event that occurs we wish hadn’t occurred, but mistakes need to be experienced, because by experiencing them, we grow, we evolve. We need to take the concept of mistake and start to limit it and not exalt this fear of a mistake because it creates a tremendous amount of anxiety and stress. Life is all full of experiences. If we label them mistakes, we live in fear. 

This is my second career. When I was 40-years-old, I had a defining moment and decided to close my business and pursue an area I thought I could be passionate about. If I succumb to the fear of would be that a mistake? I wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation with you today. 

Now, it might not have worked out the way I planned, but that’s okay. I’d be in the flow of life, and I’d navigate in some other direction. We need to get into the flow, and to do that, we must welcome uncertainty, not avoid it. 

[00:28:00] MB: So how does the fear of mistakes and kind of the fear of uncertainty fuel anxiety? 

[00:28:06] MS: Direct correlation that I see between anxiety and avoidance of uncertainty. What is it that avoids the uncertainty? It’s our thought. See, thought becomes addictive to seeking certainty. When thought becomes addicted to seeking certainty, and there is no certainty, what’s the result? We’re anxious. We’re afraid. 

I have found that in my work as a therapist, when I can help people see how their thought is addicted to seeking certainty and rethink it so that they can embrace uncertainty, anxiety and fear retreats. If reality appears uncertain – Now, we seek certainty. The conclusion is dysfunction. We can’t exist that way, can we? Reality is uncertain, but we need certainty. How well is that going to play out? 

The way to break it down is search for your thought, is demanding certainty and seeking certainty and change your relationship with that kind of thinking. When you change your relationship with uncertainty and see it as your ally, so that if you have a thought that says, “This is making me feel uncomfortable,” then that should be a signal that you’re on the right path. Don’t avoid it. Embrace the discomfort. 

When we go to the gym and workout, we embrace discomfort. We know we’re creating new muscle. We must embrace discomfort psychology and cognitively to grow. So if you’re feeling uncomfortable, take it as a good signal, as a guide post and take the next step in that discomfort in regard to bringing on some more uncertainty. 

[00:29:43] MB: It’s funny, if you look at the science and the research and the studies of people who are some of the top performers in nearly any field, that theme, that idea of discomfort and embracing discomfort both psychology, cognitively, physically, etc., is one of the core kind of themes of human performance. So I think it’s such a really good point. I want to give you credit as well. 

Even before kind of the interview got started and the preshow discussion, listeners obviously don’t know and aren’t going to hear this, but you even said, “Matt, you can ask me anything you want. Any question you want about anything.” 

It’s funny, because some people, before they come to the show, we’ll get a list from them or their assistant or whatever that these are the only things they’ll talk about, or don’t ask me about these things. It’s funny, because you have such a health relationship to discomfort and uncertainty that it really shines through. That it was just kind of small anecdote that you’re living these principles, but they’re also really important principles to be living. 

[00:30:41] MS: Well, when I’m asked a question I’ve never been asked before and I don’t have an immediate answer, that’s exciting for me. That’s authentic. When I read books, if I understand everything I’ve read, that book was a waste of my time. I embrace confusion, because if I can be confused, somewhere down the road I will be breaking through. 

So it’s kind of like embracing vulnerability. Matt, by vulnerability, I don’t mean weakness. By vulnerability, I mean my transparent authentic self where I’m not concerned about what you think of. I hope you like me and I hope you’re impressed. But if you’re not, that’s okay. That’s authentic self-esteem. 

So asking any question allows me to go places I have never been before when I get asked new questions. Otherwise, it’s all rote. As a culture, we don’t inculcate or develop authentic self-esteem. What we do is pursue what I call other esteem. Other esteem means, if I think that you’re impressed or you like me, then I temporarily feel good about myself. 

But what people do is they alter and shape themselves to elicit approval and recognition. But when we’re doing that, we’re betraying any developing sense of authentic self. If we taught this to children in school, it would be an altogether different world that we live in. 

So I welcome that that asked a question I’ve never heard before, and I have found if I go on stage and I’m preparing for a talk. When I give TED talks, TEDx talks, I do some preparation, because it’s a short talk. I want to nail to it. But when I get on stage and I just freewheel and I just let it flow and come out, it feels so much more authentic. It’s so much better. It’s trusting that whatever comes up and whatever you share, is what needs to come up, and not to judge yourself, you see. It’s critical for your full thought that that’s the judging of us. That’s the kind of thought we need to see and we can learn to release. You can learn to become the master of your thinking when you learn to see your thought and not becoming a thought. 

[00:33:02] MB: I want to dig into that and I also want to dig in to self-esteem. But before we get into kind of either of those topics, I want to come back and touch a little bit more on discomfort and uncertainty. How do we, sort of from a practical sense, go about actually changing our relationship with uncertainty? How do we go about kind of redefining the way that we experience and/or think about it? 

[00:33:24] MS: Once you grasp the concept that we’ve been playing from the wrong game plan. So the concept is seeking certainty, bad thing, limiting, fear-inducing. So you get the concept. Now the question is, “Okay. I buy the concept. How do I do it?” We do it by shifting our relationship with our thoughts.

So this doves down into my work around thought. Thought tricks us, and that thought tells us the truth. That’s called literal thought. Thought tells us, “I don’t want to make a mistake.” Thought tells us, “I’m concerned about what they’ll think of me.” We don’t even see the thought operating. We buy it and we become the thought. 

I introduced the notion of what I call participatory thinking. Actually, I won’t have credit. The great late quantum physicist, David Bohm called it participatory thinking. That would sound like this; instead of saying I need to know the future, literal thought. Participatory thinking sounds like this, “I’m having a thought. Same old thought. My thought is telling me I need to know the future.” Now you see what happens when I think that way? I can say the thought and dissemble it, “Ah, that’s the thought that tricks me. That’s the thought that leads me down the wrong path.” 

There’s a me who has embraced this new worldview, and I’m now seeing the thought part that limits and constrains me. So thought becomes like a knock at the door. You hear the knock, but you can decide whether to get up and answer that door or not. So we can develop a muscle memory whereby we can see the thought. Now when I can see my thought, not only am I thinking. There’s a sense of me to this larger and more sovereign and powerful than just my thought. 

This allows me an intellectual wisdom, a deep intuitive wisdom. Otherwise, we have millions of thoughts throughout lives. They us the “truth” in your mind, and these millions of thoughts direct and embellish how we experience our lives we are imprisoned by our thoughts. Those thoughts summon up accompanying feelings and emotions. We’re trapped in this cycle of old thought and old feeling, and that’s why it’s hard to change the way to break through, and I delineate this in great detail in my new book, is we can develop a method to create a muscle memory whereby we see the thought. We don’t have to become the thought. We are the thinker of the thought, and then we can carve new territory. 

So with uncertainty, we stop with the meta view. Uncertainly equals possibility that’s good. Addiction to certainty equals fears, stress, anxiety, that’s bad. What do I have to do to break free? I have to start to master my thinking. I have to be able to see old thought that is addicted to certainty and learn to release it. This is achievable. It requires some effort. 

For many of the listeners who may be saying to themselves now, “That’s hard to do.” Look at your thought. You just had a thought that said that’s hard to do. You don’t know. Arguably, you’ve never tried to do this. So capture that picture. I’m proposing it isn’t hard to do. No one’s ever taught you how to do it. 

[00:36:49] MB: So our kind of tools and strategies like meditation, some of the methods that you would recommend, or what are kind of some specific ways to start to see and understand our own thinking? 

[00:36:59] MS: Well, meditation, as we all come to understand. Meditation is universal benefits. In my own authenticity in this particular moment, I don’t want to sound commercial and like I am self-promoting my book. So I have a dilemma in this moment, because I developed a methodology through my work over many, many years as a therapist to teach people how to do this and it’s all laid out in the book. Other than reading this, I’m a bit at a launch, just to tell your listeners, how to go after it. Because I haven’t quite seen it out there. 

But you can try some simple exercises. Ask yourself, “What is my thought telling me? How do I know it’s true? How often do I have these kinds of thoughts?” Practice this technique of seeing the difference between literal thought and participatory thinking. Old thought defends its territory. It doesn’t go easy and it tricks us and it is telling us the truth. 

Participatory thought sees the role with thought is telling you. See that role and then you rise above the thought and you can tap into profound sense of wisdom and insight when you can rise above and not submit to simply being your thought. 

You see, thought is reactive. Feelings are reactive. When you can see your feel or see your thought and express it, that is contemplative. So saying to someone, “You know, when you said that to me, I felt myself becoming really angry. Let me explain why.” That’s a health communication. You can see the anger and communicate it. If I can’t see the anger, if I can’t see the thought, I am the thought, I am the emotion and then I’m lost. There’s no way to go with it.  

[00:38:46] MB: I think that’s a really insightful distinction that if you can’t see the thought or see the emotion, you become the emotion. I really like that. I haven’t conceived of it that way, but I think it’s a great kind of tool for thinking really clearly about why strategies … And personally, for me, I’ve meditated every day for years and I’ve found meditations are really effective strategy. If for nothing else, just giving you the awareness of what thoughts are sort of flittering through your head so that you can kind of catch them and say, “Hold on. Is this thought really true? Is this thought really – Is it actually real or is it just something that’s kind of floating by and is it kind of a limiting belief that could be holding me back or could be stopping me from achieving the things that I want to achieve?” 

[00:39:28] MS: Then to take that and use it in our communication with others, that is so essential and it’s so rare to see it. It’s so rare to hear someone say to someone else, “I was having a thought or I was having a feeling. Let me share with you what it was.” That’s representative. That’s participatory. Instead, we just dive in to the thought or feeling and we exchange it as our truth. That’s why we see so little breakthrough in communication, because communication is not generative that way. Are you [inaudible 00:40:01] objective truce against one another? I mean, certainly in the political realm today, we see an altogether absence of participatory dialogue. 

[00:40:12] MB: I want to circle back to the kind of notion of self-esteem and authentic self-esteem. Tell me a little bit more about that and how that ties into the whole sort of quantum framework that we’ve been exploring today.

[00:40:26] MS: Self-esteem I believe is the way we use it, it’s a misnomer. I mean, if you ask educators or parents, “What gives children self-esteem?” They might likely say, “Good grades, excelling in sports, having a lot of friends.” In my perspective, none of that is self-esteem, because it means that the moment that my child didn’t have good grades or wasn’t good at a sport, or didn’t have a lot of friends, what would happen to the self-esteem? What if it was self, they’d still retain it. 

So self-esteem is if you remove of all that. What is my co-relationship with myself? Are my thoughts my best ally or are they my antagonist? Am I at peace and in harmony with myself? That’s authentic self-esteem. But as a culture, we are not taught to pursue authentic self-esteem. We’re taught to go after other esteem. 

So in my work, so often I will see people who we might call people pleasers. They want people to be happy with them. They’re people who camouflage and hide and disguise aspects of themselves, because they want to be well-thought of. That’s a pursuit of other esteem, and it’s not genuine. 

So in conversations between people, it is the exception when people are being genuine. Now, vulnerability has a lot to do with this. We’re taught, taught as a culture, and this is more so for men. Men are taught to act strong. Acting strong is acting, and that’s weak. What is it to really be strong? Again, even more so for men, to really be strong is to be vulnerable. 

By vulnerable, I don’t mean crying and feeling week. By vulnerable, I mean sharing your insecurities, your self-doubts, your fears. When you share them, that means you’re not setting up anyone else to be the judge of you. You’re not worried. Your relationship with yourself is intact. That is authentic self-esteem. Someone else may disappoint you. So be it, but your co-relationship there is with self. You’re not worried about judgment. 

Let’s look at the concept of the word judgment. If you have an authentic self-esteem, there’s only one person who can be your judge, and they reside in the courtroom and they wear long, black robes. If you appear in front of them, they are the judge. In human relations, people have opinions. If we elevate someone’s opinion and confer upon them the status of being a judge, we’ve done that. It’s because we’re judging our self based upon what we think you think of me. 

So authentic self-esteem requires a complete shift in how we view ourselves. Now, when you come across a person who operates in deep authenticity, they standout, they’re illuminated. They have a confidence, a way of beating is singular and it’s because they have authentic self-esteem. We’re coming back to the concept of mistake. It means if I make a mistake, okay, I made a mistake. I make mistakes. So be it. 

I can have an embarrassing moment, a foolish moment. I am okay with that. I’m a human being. Other question here, Matt, is how does this correlate to the quantum worldview I’m talking about? Well, here’s a moment. I’ve never been asked a question about how this relates to self-esteem. So I’m embracing uncertainty, because I don’t at first know my answer. 

But here is a thought that comes up for me. The quantum worldview is a matter of perception. It is a subjectively created reality, that is my thoughts and feelings that are the paintbrush on the canvas of my life. So if I’m to develop authentic self-esteem, I need to focus on my perceptions, on my thoughts and my feelings and understand how they script my life. Instead of simply focusing on what I think you think of me, which is other esteem. 

So now that I’m immersed in responding to your question, I say it is the quantum subjective reality of perception, and the perception here needs to focus on my perception of me rather than my concerns about what I think you think of me that would delivery authentic self-esteem. Just like embracing uncertainty, we need to embrace transparent vulnerability. 

[00:45:07] MB: Coming back to kind of the core theme that we’ve been talking about today, this whole idea that the fundamental principles of the hard sciences of quantum physics, these ideas of possibility, uncertainty and interconnectedness and how everything kind of is one have profound applications for the way that we live our lives, deal with stress and anxiety and connect with other people. I think it’s really important conclusion that this is not something that it sounds very kind of woo-woo and spiritual, but it really is an implication of a deep, hard physical science. 

[00:45:43] MS: This hard science is the underpinning for all of the day-to-day practical aspects of our lives. Anywhere from your co-relationship which require compassion and empathy, which means that they require connectivity. Losing some of our individuality and opening to the needs and feelings of the other and learning to language it in that way. As I said before, speaking without the two b verbs is a quantum language, so participatory language and it invites generative discussion in our emotional well-being. 

In psychological well-being, it is absolutely required that we not think of ourselves again as being hardwired or having screws loose. We are not machines that the basis what it means to be human. Think about it this way. Which worldview would benefit us as human beings? Newton’s machine like universe comprise of things, separate and disconnected and inert without any meaning and purpose, hold and [inaudible 00:46:50] a machine. 

The quantum worldview or the thoroughly interconnected, unfolding tapestry of reality making process, which everything participates with everything else, and you are an integral part of that participation. Which worldview invites you to thrive in your life? There is it. 

You see, the way we pictures reality is the way we experience reality. This is not a theoretical supposition about science or philosophy. It’s the filter through which we see life. Nothing could be more important. 

[00:47:27] MB: Mel, for listeners to concretely apply some of the themes and ideas that we’ve talked about today, what would be kind of one action item or a piece of homework that you would give them as kind of a concrete step towards implementing some of these ideas? 

[00:47:41] MS: In the course of your day, try to capture the themes of your thoughts and ask yourself what are they telling you. As I expressed before, are they your ally? Are they your worst critique? Also, ask yourself some large questions, which is, “How do I view life? Do I think it’s a dog –” God help the dogs, “competitive reality?” Also, perhaps the most important question you can ask yourself about anything is when you look at your core beliefs. Ask yourself, “How did I come to this belief? What informs my belief?” 

I think, arguably, at this moment in my life, my belief is that’s the most important question we can ask ourselves, because when we ask, “How did I come to this belief?” very often, we see the belief really extends on very tenuous ground and it should require some reexamination.  

[00:48:30] MB: For listeners who want to dig in and learn more, where can people find you, your book and your work online? 

[00:48:36] MS: My website is my name, melschwartz.com. That’s M-E-L S-C-H-W-A-R-T-Z, melschwartz.com. I have hundreds of articles I’ve written, videos, TEDx talks. Everything you’d like to know about my work you can find at my website. 

[00:48:55] MB: Well, Mel, thank you so much for coming on the show. We’ll throw all of those in the show notes as well so listeners could go right there and find everything. But a fascinating conversation. I love the integration of quantum physics into our worldview and then profound applications from that. So thank you so much for coming on here and sharing all of these knowledge.

[00:49:13] MS: Thanks, Matt. Your show and the questions you asked are of a higher level, and I certainly appreciate that. 

[00:49:19] 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 e-mail 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.

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The Death of Time Management & How You Can Manipulate Time with Laura Vanderkam

In this episode we tell the truth about time. We throw out the old and dated conceptions of “time management” and look at how time really works. We explore the fundamental way you must flip your approach to time so that you can focus on what really matters in life. We look at how you can become an artist manipulating time at your will - stretching your best moments so that they last longer and ruthlessly removing the things that clutter your life. If you feel pressed for time - like there is never enough - and want to figure out how to create time for what really matters - listen to this episode with our guest Laura Vanderkam. 

Laura Vanderkam is the author of several time management and productivity books. Her TED talk titled “How To Gain Control of Your Free Time” has been viewed over 5 million times and she is the co-host of the podcast Best of Both Worlds. Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Fortune.

• Does time management work? Is time management a concept with too much baggage associated with it to even be meaningful?

• It’s not about cramming so much stuff into your life - it’s about focusing on the most important things. 

• Fundamentally flip your approach - removing as much as possible is much more important than cramming as much as possible into your day

• A day in the life of 900 busy people - and the conclusions of how the most successful people spend their time

• People who were highly relaxed around their time had a tendency to plan “mini adventures” in their lives 

• Putting more valuable stuff into our lives makes time more memorable. If you want to feel like you have more time you need to create more memories. 

• Before you can improve your time and focus it on the right things - you have to begin measuring it. 

• We have lots of stories about where our time goes - but they often aren’t true. 

• Can we become “artists manipulating time” to stretch the best moments so that they last longer?

• Anticipation is powerful - starting savoring before it starts

  1. Be as present as possible, notice details, think about how you might describe it to someone

  2. Tell the story of what happened - every time you tell it you get pleasure from it

  3. Commemorate it with artifacts (ticket stubs, t-shirts, etc)

  4. Play the same song over and over again to encode that song to a specific memory or experience

  5. Create as many memories as possible - more memories makes time expand 

• Time is highly elastic - it stretches to accommodate what we need or want to fit into it 

• Time management is not about shaving extra hours out of every day - it’s about selecting the right priorities

• The key to time management is treating what’s important to you like a "broken water heater"

• If you’ve ever binged something on Netflix - you found extra time because you had something that was a big priority

• Lack of Time = Lack of Priorities 

• Instead of saying “ I don’t do XYZ because I don’t have time” instead say “ I don’t do XYZ because its not a priority"

• Many people never pause for 10 seconds to consider what their priorities are

• The people who manage to take time out and think about what’s important and how they want to spend their time 

• “Reflective Activities” like journaling, meditating, praying - stepping back from life and thinking about life - people with the highest time perception and time management scores did these every other day, the lowest scores people never did it

• If you want to feel like you have more time - instead of picking up your phone - try thinking about your life and spending time on reflective activities and contemplative routines 

• What’s your time perception score? 

• It’s not that people with bad time perception and time management are working harder - the data shows that they are not - it’s that they are wasting their time on irrelevant or low value activities like social media, browsing their phone, etc 

• Being busy is not an example of how important you are - it’s an example that you have a lack of control of your time

• How do you create a time log and measure how you’re spending your time?

• It’s easy to track your time - the tool is not that important - don’t let perfect be the enemy of good - start capturing at a high level where your time is going and have a holistic perspective?

• Part of feeling relaxed about your time is knowing when and how you’re spending your leisure time

• Letting go of expectations is a great time management strategy 

• Planning your weeks before you’re in them is a great strategy to make time for your priorities FIRST

• Make a 3 category priority list:

• Career

  1. Relationships

  2. Self

• Each one of those categories is key!!

• A great tactic for setting your short to medium term goals - writing a “Performance Review” (for next year)

• Look at this list all the time

  1. It can start informing your schedule choices

• How do we create more effective morning and evening routines?

• Homework: Track your time for a week (if you can’t track it for a day or two)

• Homework: Plan a “mini adventure” during the work day or after work this week - do something different, put a little adventure into your life

• Time is how we perceive it

Thank you so much for listening!

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [Book] Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience by Fred B. Bryant and Joseph Veroff

• [App] Moment

• [Personal Site] Laura Vanderkam

• [Book] Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done by Laura Vanderkam

• [Book] 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think by Laura Vanderkam

• [Book] What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast: And Two Other Short Guides to Achieving More at Work and at Home by Laura Vanderkam

• [SoS Episode] Everything You Know About Sleep Is Wrong with Dr. Matthew Walker

• [SoS Episode] The Secret That Silicon Valley Giants Don’t Want You To Know with Dr. Adam Alter

• [SoS Episode] Essentialism - Get the Mental Clarity to Pursue What Actually Matters with Greg McKeown

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] 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 two million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries and part of the self-help for smart people podcast network.

In this episode, we tell the truth about time. We throw out the old and dated conceptions of time management and look at how time really works. We explore the fundamental way you must flip your approach to time, so that you can focus on what really matters in life. We look at how you can become an artist manipulating time at your will, stretching your best moments so that they last longer, and ruthlessly removing the things that clutter your life. If you feel pressed for time like there's never enough and want to figure out how to create time for what really matters, you're going to enjoy this episode with our guest, Laura Vanderkam.

Do you need more time; time for work time, for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our e-mail list. It's called how you can create time for the things that really matter in life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the e-mail list at successpodcast.com.

You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our e-mail subscribers. We recently pre-released an episode in an interview to our e-mail subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience. That had tremendous implications, because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first. With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live exclusive interview, just for e-mail subscribers.

There's some amazing stuff that's available only to e-mail subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the e-mail list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Or, if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you're on the go, you don't have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44-222. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we showed you the science of communication. Have you ever been afraid to speak or present? Have you been worried that you don't have the skills, or tools to communicate your ideas to the world? We dug into the science and the strategies of mastering skills, like speaking and presenting, crushing the anxiety that often accompanies these high-stakes moments and sharing evidence-based strategies for becoming a master communicator with our guest, Matt Abrahams. If you want to learn how to speak and present with total confidence, check out our previous episode.

Now, for our interview with Laura.

[0:03:05.3] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show; Laura Vanderkam. Laura is the author of several time management and productivity books. Her TED talk titled How to Gain Control of Your Free Time has been viewed over five million times and she's the co-host of the podcast, Best Of Both Worlds. Her work has appeared in publications including New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Fortune and much more. Laura, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:30.4] LV: Thank you so much for having me.

[0:03:31.9] MB: Well, we're super excited to have you on the show today. It's funny, we constantly try to pull the listeners and see what topics or themes are really important to them and top of mind for them and time management and how to get more time was actually the number one thing that our listeners wanted to hear about and want to learn more about. That's part of the reason we sought you out and we really wanted to have some more guests on the show where we got into the concept of time. Thank you for coming on the show.

[0:03:57.6] LV: Yeah. Well, I'm not surprised that people are concerned about time and trying to do the most with their time, because I mean, obviously how we spend our hours has a big effect on how we live our lives, and anything we're going to accomplish is going to require putting time against it. It's really this ongoing journey of all trying to use our time in better ways, so hopefully we can talk about some strategies today that will be helpful for people.

[0:04:23.0] MB: Definitely. I'd love to start out with this idea of, I think so many people when they think about time management and I don't even really the word time management, because I think there's so much baggage associated with it, but when people think about time in their lives, you've talked about a lot of misconceptions and ways that people don't really think about it correctly, or think about it from the wrong perspective. I'd love to hear your thoughts around that.

[0:04:46.7] LV: Well certainly, a lot of people when you say time management, what comes to mind is trying to cram 30 more things into your day, which is really not the point. It's not about scheduling every single minute of your life, or getting 10 billion more chores done and all your e-mails answered by 2 PM, or whatever it is. It's not really about that. It's honestly about spending your time and your energy on the things that are most important to you, and on the things that will help you achieve your goals in life.

When you approach it from that perspective, you have a very different mindset about time. You stop trying to cram more, and in many cases, you start getting rid of things, because you realize it would be more beneficial to have open space, so you can think about things, or deal with situations as they come up, or linger in good conversations as they're happening, because they start leading to new opportunities. It's a very different mindset.

[0:05:40.2] MB: I love that idea of fundamentally flipping your approach, instead of trying to cram as much as possible into your day. You're saying it's really more about removing as much as possible, so that there's the space for what's truly important.

[0:05:53.7] LV: I mean, there's really no point in being busy just to be busy. I know, people often like to talk about how busy they are and how much they have going on, which is a nice way to talk about how important we are. If the demand for our time is high, then we must be very important, that's why we're so busy.

I've interviewed and studied the schedules of many very successful people over the years. I've always been surprised at how much open space there is in some people's schedules. These are people who clearly could fill every minute, if they chose to. Certainly the demand for their time is there, but they choose not to. They choose to recognize that open space does invite opportunity into their lives, because they have time to think, they have time to linger in good things and explore them and create new opportunities.

Yeah, I think it's about asking for all our commitments, all our obligations; is this something that really is adding joy and meaning to my life and the life of people that I care about? If so, great, like double down on that. If not, maybe time to figure out how to scale it down, or get rid of it over the next few months.

[0:06:57.3] MB: Well, I think you touched on something that I'd love to dig into a little bit more, which is this idea that, and I know you've done a lot of work around studying really successful people, learning from them and then seeing at a really granular level how they spend and allocate their time. I'd love to unpack that a little bit more and hear more about what some of the surprising conclusions, or results were from that work.

[0:07:20.6] LV: Yes. I've done a couple different time diary projects for a book that came out a few years ago, I looked specifically at professional women who are also raising families, look at how they spent their time. I recently wrote a book called Off The Clock, that involved looking at the – a day in the life of 900 busy people with full-time jobs, other things going on in their personal lives. Had them track their time for a day, ask them questions about how they felt about their time, so I could look what the differences were in people's schedules between people who felt relaxed about time people, who felt time was abundant, with equivalently busy people, who felt time was getting away from them, most scarce, they were starved for time.

I found a couple of interesting things. First, that the people who felt most relaxed about their time were highly likely to plan, what I call, like many adventures into their lives, that I had people track just a normal March Monday, and the people with the most abundant perspective on time we're doing things like going to salsa dancing lessons at night, or going to a big band concert, or going to a movie on a Monday night.

On some of that that might seem a bit of a paradox, because committing to do stuff like that might make us feel we have less time. I have something in my evening, therefore I have less time, but it turns out not to be the case. It turns out that by putting interesting things into our time, we make time memorable. But when we make time memorable, then we remember it. We don't have this sense that time is just slipping from one side of the hourglass to the other.
I found that quite fascinating, that if you want to actually feel like you have more time, you need to create more memories and have this mindset toward having adventures in your life, even on normal days.

[0:09:06.9] MB: I think that's great. It comes back to the paradox that you talked a little bit about, is this idea that the people who are often the most successful, don't necessarily subscribe to this cult of busyness and constantly telling everyone how busy you are and constantly feeling overwhelmed and busy. It's really, they have a much more slow and intentional approach to their time in many cases.

[0:09:30.0] LV: Yeah, they don't fill their time with stuff they don't want to do, because they want to leave it open for the things that they do want to do. It's pretty simple when it comes down to it, but it has profound implications. I mean, I remember one of the gentlemen I interviewed for off the clock, he’s managing teams in three different continents in corporate America. Of course, they would say, “Oh, he must be in meetings all the time, like I'm trying to get on his calendar, like I'm going to e-mail him and ask for some time and I'll probably be offered 15 minutes on a Wednesday three weeks from now.”

He sent me back a note and it was just like, “Yeah, I'm pretty free on Thursday and Friday this week, so why don't you just pick a time that works for you.” I’m like, “What? What is this?” He was intentionally leaving his schedule very blank and he wanted to talk with me and he had open time on these days, and it's not that he didn't have anything to do. I mean, he has teams on multiple continents, but he made sure that he wasn't packing his calendar with meetings. He had a very good rapport with his teams, where they could come to him with anything and they could come to him at any time, but they knew they didn't need to set up a formal hour-long meeting to get an answer on something. That allowed him to be very nimble and make decisions very quickly and also allowed them to make decisions very quickly. I thought that was pretty profound.

[0:10:40.6] MB: For somebody who's caught up in this this reactionary state of constantly feeling busy and feeling overwhelmed, how can they start to open up to this new approach, or this new perspective around thinking about time differently?

[0:10:57.2] LV: Whenever anyone wants to spend their time better, I always suggest that they first try to figure out where their time is really going now. This is another one of those paradoxes. I'm not saying, “Oh, people should feel relaxed and off the clock,” but I want you to know exactly where your time goes. We have to pay attention to the clock first, before we can start feeling off the clock. Because one of the reasons people feel so overwhelmed and busy, if they actually don't know where all their time is going.

They don't know, am I spending enough time on the things that are important to me, or maybe I'm skimping in this area, or I'm spending too much time in this area? If you don't know for sure, it can become the source of anxiety and stress. I have people track their time for a week. It's not as difficult as it sounds. I know probably people are like, “Oh, no. Not that.”

I use a spreadsheet. I've actually been tracking my time for a little over three years continuously now, which nobody else needs to do that. I want to be very clear, I'm not expecting anyone else to track their time for three years, but just a week gives a very good perspective on your life and where your time really goes. I just use a pretty simple spreadsheet that's got half-hour blocks along the left, days of the week along the top. There's a 168 hours in a week, so there's 336 cells on this particular spreadsheet, and I just write down what I'm doing, check in three times a day, fill in roughly what I've done since the last time I checked in.

It takes about three minutes a day, which is the same amount of time I spend brushing my teeth, so not a huge commitment. Yeah, just look at it at the end and add it up, see well, how much time are you working for instance, or how much are you spending in the car, how much time are you sleeping, how much your TV time, or exercise time, or volunteering time, or friend time, or family time, whatever it is that you happen to do with yourself.

Then when you look at the categories, you can decide, “Well, does this seem right? How do I feel about this?” The fascinating things, people have all kinds of stories they tell themselves about where the time goes, which may not be true. We have a tendency to view our weeks where we're working in the longest hours as typical. In our minds maybe we’re like, “Oh, I was at the office until 9:00 p.m. on Wednesday. Therefore, I'm working always 12-hour days. If I think of five days a week, that's 60 hours and I'm working on weekends too sometimes, so that doing things, and so it must be 70 hours a week.” It turns out every other day, you weren't there until 9:00 p.m. and there were breaks during the day, Friday you came in late and left quite early, and those weekend e-mail checks only added up to an hour, even though it felt more than that.

The number will come out to like 48 hours, and people are like, “Wait. Wait. 48 hours, that's a very different number than 70,” but that's what happens, or people tend to remember their shortest night as typical, because again, it really stinks to not sleep we tend to remember the night where we didn't sleep and that stands out in our minds.

I found looking at people's time logs, the vast majority of people sleep more than seven hours per day when you average it over the whole week, even very high earning people, successful people, people with a lot of responsibility, people with young kids, we have people listening to a podcast in that situation. Even so, it does tend to add up over the week. Not for everybody, but for the vast majority of people.

Often looking at our time logs, we can get a better sense that's not in this story of overwhelm, this narrative of catastrophe. When we sent back from that, just look at the numbers, then we can decide, “Well, actually I am spending a little bit more time in the car than I'd like. Are there ways I could scale that down? Or I'm doing more errands than I'd like. Are there ways we could start ordering stuff online? Or I seem to be at work longer than I wish to be, because I get really distracted in the middle of the afternoon, go down some internet rabbit hole. If I maybe figured out how to manage my energy and take real breaks, then I could actually focus for the afternoon, maybe I could get out a reasonable hour.” Lots of things you can discover.

[0:14:34.7] MB: It's so true, the mind and we talk about this all the time in the show and actually, our very first episode ever of the Science of Success was called the biological limits of the human mind. The mind is such an inaccurate tool sometimes. There's so many biases and shortcuts etc. Often are our own perceptions of the way things are, even about our own lives are really inaccurate and it's not until we measure them that we can really get a true picture of what's really happening.

[0:15:00.3] LV: Yeah. I mean, I talk about this all the time, and yet, I do it myself. That was certainly one of the things I discovered when I started tracking my time continuously. I had this idea that I worked 50 hours a week, because I had tracked my time for a few weeks here and there over the years and I had always worked about 50 hours a week during those weeks. Then I started tracking my time continuously and I realized that in the past, I had chosen very specific weeks to track, namely the weeks when I was working 50 hours a week, because I had in my mind that was who I am, I'm this professional working long hours and I want to show these weeks to the world that showed that.

When I tracked my time continuously, I couldn't do that and I found that the average was a lot closer to 40, which is a different number than 50. 10 hours that now I need to account for. Where are they going? I don't know. Well I found out. You need to track your time to start getting that data.

[0:15:50.0] MB: I found, this is getting deeper down the rabbit hole, but in talking back, there's an importance of measurement. One of the things that I've taken some time to do for myself is map out what an ideal day would look like for a 24-hour cycle and basically say every hour, how do I want to allocate and be spending that time? Then started measuring that against not only what my actual days look like and how I was spending those hours, but even spot checking or looking at certain items like for example, flagging. How many hours a week do I spend in meetings?

Going back through my calendar for a month or two and tracking okay, every week I had 15 hours this week, 22 hours this week, all that stuff and starting to see whether it's meetings, or time wasted browsing on my phone, or different core almost red flag items, finding those opportunities that’s okay, maybe if I tweak this thing and set more of a budget for how much time I'm going to spend on these activities, suddenly you can really start to free up hours a week that you didn't realize we're getting wasted down a certain rabbit hole, or sucked into a certain activity.

[0:16:54.6] LV: I think that's a really smart idea. I like the idea of creating, I like to call it a realistic ideal day. I mean, so it's not a perfect day, because then we'd have flying cars, but a realistic ideal day that, what would your schedule look like?

You don't need to separate – I mean, how about a realistic ideal week? Because again, a week is the cycle of life as you live it. When you're thinking of that ideal day, you're often picturing, say a work day, but we have weekends as well and we should think about them, because being intentional about our weekends is a great way to maximize our fun, leisurely enjoyable time and make sure we're spending that in ways that are rejuvenating to ourselves as opposed to just spending the whole weekend on chores and errands, or else attempting to do nothing and yet, the nothing turns into stuff that we didn't really want to do, and so you hit Monday not feeling so great about it.

[0:17:42.8] MB: I know you wrote about some of these strategies for as you call it, making life memorable and the idea of not filling time and lingering. I'd love to dig into that a little bit more and maybe talk about how we can savor some of the finer moments of life.

[0:17:59.9] LV: Yeah. I mean, one of the things about time is it does keep passing. We can learn how to make some of the good moments pass as slowly as what we have with the bad moment. Say you think you're something stuck in a boring meeting, you’re looking at the clock counting seconds, hoping it's going to be 11:00 soon, you can get out of there. That time seems to pass really slowly and yet, good moments seem to often go by very quickly.

The question is can we become better stewards of time, or artists manipulating time by really lingering in these good moments and trying to stretch them? There turns out to be a couple techniques that really work. I found some research on this. There's a book called Savoring that came out in I think 2006, by a couple researchers who had really delved into this topic, of how people learn to stretch good experiences.

In psychology, it's fascinating to see how people can take tough moments and be resilient in them, but it's also an equally interesting thing to see how people can take good moments and make them feel deeper and last longer. A big chunk of that is knowing that they are coming up, because when we know something good is going to happen, then we can anticipate it. The anticipation can stretch the pleasure for quite a bit of time.

That concert with your favorite artist is only going to last two, three hours, but if you get the tickets two months ahead of time, you can think about it for two months and you can have some of the pleasure of knowing you're going to go hear it for two months, so that's one way to stretch out the pleasure.

Certainly, while the good event is happening, you want to do your best to be fully present, to take in as many of the details as possible, that's one way to keep your mind from wandering to your utility bills or something like that. Just notice details and think about how you might describe this to someone afterwards, and the stories of it. If you have somebody there with you, talk about how much you're enjoying yourselves. Actually calling that out to each other is a good way to remind yourself that you are enjoying yourselves, and to focus on that.

Then after the fact, you think about how you can – you do recount it to someone, like you tell the story, you tell the story again, if you can, because the more times you tell it, you get a little bit of pleasure from it each time. Think about ways that you can commemorate it, if there's any artifacts you can take from the time. That's why people buy concert t-shirts. It's a way to get at that, to get some of that pleasure from it.

Sometimes you can even consciously do this with things that you know you're going to want to remember later. I had a great conversation with a lady the other day who told me that she had gone to Europe one summer when she was a young person. One of her companions on this trip kept playing the same song over and over again like, “Why are you doing this? Why do you keep playing this song?” Her companion said at one point, “Listen, every time for the rest of your life that you hear this song, you are going to think about the summer.” It is true. They do. Every time they hear that song, that is the summer that comes to mind. They have those memories of their summer in Europe and what they did, long after the relationships themselves have gone away, they still have this song which allows them to stretch back that memory, to still have that memory, even when so much of life tends to fade.

[0:20:59.4] MB: That's a great example, and I can think of a personal instance of a trip that I took with my wife and some friends a couple years ago, and we were all obsessed with this one song and we played it over and over and over again. Now every time we're together and we hear it, we all think back to that trip, and it's encoded to that memory.

[0:21:15.3] LV: You can do that. I mean, you could even do it with your hotel soap, or something if you're trying to remember a vacation. Sniff the soap, and then for the rest of your life, that olfactory memory is going to be associated with this time. Having those artifacts is what tends to unlock this and allows us to relive, and the more memories you have of a unit of time, the more time seems to expand. That's how our brain and judges how much time we have is how many memory units we have formed.

If you think about the first day of a vacation, it tends to seem very long if you're traveling somewhere exotic, because your brain has no idea what it needs to know, so it's remembering everything that you encounter. That can make that day seem very, very long. The question is well, can you do that in normal life too, right? Can you have new experiences, novel experiences, can you plan in things that will be memorable? Because then, you will remember those days.

[0:22:06.3] MB: I want to come back to getting back to that concept more broadly of how we conceive of time. I know you've shared, or talked to a phrase about the idea that time is highly elastic. I'd love to incorporate that into the conversation we've already been having and explain that topic a little bit more.

[0:22:23.3] LV: Yeah. I mean, time is what it is, but I always say that time stretches to accommodate what we need, or want to put into it. In my TED Talk you mentioned, in the intro I tell a story of a lady who could track her time for me. Very, very busy, many things going on in her life, but she goes out for a Wednesday night for something. She comes home and finds that her water heater has broken, and so there's water all over her basement, so she obviously has to deal with this. Sit down the minute aftermath that night, the plumbers and the cleaning crew, because her carpet is all destroyed and everything.

All this is being recorded on the time log for the week and it winds up taking about seven hours of her week. If you think about a lot of time management literature that is out there, it’s all structured along those ideas of, “Oh, we're going to help our readers, or viewers, or listeners find an extra hour in the day. We're going to shave bits of time off everyday activities added up, we'll have time for the good stuff. We're going to find an extra hour on the day.”

Well, if you think about it, finding seven hours in a week to deal with this water heater explosion is like finding an extra hour in a day. Obviously, if she'd been thinking at the start of the week like, “Oh, let me find seven hours to whatever, train for a triathlon.” I think, most of us – she would have not been able to find the seven hours to do that, but then when she had to find seven hours because there's water everywhere, she finds seven hours.

Really what this gets at, is that time is elastic. It's not that she had a magical seven hours somewhere, so that when something was important enough to her, when it was I'm getting water all over her basement, she had to deal with it, and so she found the seven hours. Really the key to time management in general, it's treating whatever is important to us as the equivalent of this broken water heater. We decide that we are going to get to it. We are going to make the time in our lives, in our busy lives for it.

A less extreme example, but you might see this all the time, if you've ever picked up a real page-turner of a book, or started a real binge worthy series, it is somewhat magical how you find extra time to read the next few pages, or to watch the next episode. Where did that time come from? Well what it is is that you had something you really want to do with it, and so you made the time. That time is very elastic. It will accommodate what you decide to put into it. Make sure that you are putting the important stuff in first and everything else will fit around that.

[0:24:36.3] MB: I think this hints at, or not even hints, but really gets at the core of one of my favorite quotes, which is there's no such thing as lack of time, there's only lack of priorities.

[0:24:46.0] LV: Yeah, that's a similar version of this a very busy woman I once interviewed put it to me like, I don't – I never say I don't do – I don't have time to do X, Y, or Z. I don't do X, Y, or Z, because it's not a priority. That basically I don't have time, means it's not a priority, which is true, if you think about it. I mean, whatever it is you're saying is not a – it's not that you don't have time for, if somebody offered to pay you a $100,000 to do it, it would probably become a priority.

If you think about it that way, whatever it is, you'd probably do it, you'd find the time. Obviously that's not going to happen for most things, but putting it that way can help us see the reality. In most cases and if it's not a priority, we're not choosing and we're choosing not to do it. It doesn't mean that it wouldn't be a priority for someone else. It doesn't mean that it's not a good thing. It just means that for whatever reason in your life right now, it is not a priority. I think we're better off just owning that and being honest with ourselves, rather than hiding behind this excuse of lacking time.

[0:25:43.6] MB: This week’s episode is brought to you by our partners at Brilliant. Brilliant is a math and science enrichment learning tool. You can learn concepts by solving fascinating challenging problems. Brilliant explores probability, computer science, machine learning, the physics of everyday life, complex Algebra and much more. They do this with addictive interactive experiences that are enjoyed by over 5 million students, professionals and enthusiasts around the world.

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[0:27:51.0] MB: I think many people's lives, they never even pause to take 10 seconds and consider what their priorities actually are, and end up almost like a pinball, just bouncing between commitment, commitment, reaction, reaction, reaction. How do we start to break out of that?

[0:28:09.3] LV: Yeah, it's very easy to be reactive when it comes to time, because time keeps passing, whether we think about how we're spending it or not. It's like you're in a boat in the middle of the stream, it's hard to direct things from there. You have to pause and get yourself over to the side and see where the current is going.

The people who manage to do that are the people who feel they have a better control of their time and their schedule and where their lives are going. In this time diary study I did for off the clock, I found that people who had the highest time perception scores were also the most likely to engage in what I call reflective activities. Those things like journaling, or meditating, or praying, just these things that have you step back from your life and think about your life.

The people at the highest time perception scores did these on average pretty much every other day. The people with the lowest time perception scores, at least have never done it, never did those things. Again, these are all equivalently busy people, these are all people who are working full time, are all working within a range of hours, they're pretty normal. All have commitments in their personal lives.

It doesn't take much time to write the journal or meditate. You can do it in five minutes. In fact, the people with low time perception scores, spent more time watching TV, or on social media. Again, they had leisure time. They were just not spending it in ways that allowed them to think and reflect on their lives. If you do want to feel like you have more time, you might try and there's little bits of time we all have when you're waiting for a phone call to start, you’re waiting for the bus, something like that. Instead of picking up your phone and deleting e-mail, or looking at headlines, or looking at social media, you might try just thinking about your life, or writing in a journal, meditating, any of those things. Because if you do those things, you will start to feel you have more time.

[0:29:50.1] MB: We've often on the show heard those reflective activities and also called contemplative routines. There's a lot of science around how powerful those are in shaping your priorities and your ability to step back and really determine what the most important things to focus on in life are.

[0:30:06.1] LV: Yeah. I'm sure there's, whatever you want to call them, but the science is pretty good on it. It makes sense, right? I think the key thing for people is that it doesn't have to be the hour-long session. You don't have to go off on the silent retreats for three days. It's really about just taking little bits of time and choosing to do something, other than being on e-mail, not really doing anything productive, but thinking we are. Because what happens is people have leisure time, but then we tend to chop it up with these phone checks. I found that the people who had the highest time perception scores checked their phones about half as frequently as the people who had the lowest time perception scores.

[0:30:42.7] MB: Just briefly, I'd love to dig in a little bit, tell me what exactly is a time perception score and how does that factor into – I mean, I think we could assume it, but I just want to make sure we have a really clear understanding of what it is and how that's shaped by people's behavior.

[0:30:56.8] LV: Yeah. I realized I was just throwing that out there and didn’t mention what it was. When I had people track their time for a day, these 900 people, and then I asked them, it was like 13 questions that was getting at various aspects of time perception. Yesterday, I felt present rather than distracted, or generally in life, I have time for the things that are important to me, or yesterday I spent time on things that made me happy, generally make time for people who are important to me, just all these different things that we're getting at, feeling like you had enough time, right?

People could answer from strongly disagree, one, to strongly agree, seven. Then I would assign them a score, so the people who had most 7s on all these questions were at the top of the time perception score. The people with the most ones in the lowest scores were on the bottom. I could break out, there's 900 people, so yeah, I can cut it a little bit and say the top 20% and the top 3%, the bottom 20% and bottom 3% compared to the average and see what was the different –

What was interesting to me is some of the things that weren't different. You might think that the people at the lowest time perception cores were working really extreme hours, for instance and that turned out not to be the case. Almost everyone I studied worked between seven and nine hours on this March Monday, and the people who had the lowest time perception scores were really not that – I mean, was minutes off the average. It was not very different from the average at all. It's not that they were working around the clock or anything like that, it's just how we choose to spend that discretionary time we have, has a big effect on how we perceive time.

[0:32:24.1] MB: I think that's a really critical point, which is that it's not – that people who feel distracted, or they don't have time for what's really important, it's not that they're necessarily working harder, it's that their time is getting sucked into things like browsing their phone, or getting sucked into Facebook, or social media, instead of being consciously invested in things that are really important, or really high-value to them.

[0:32:47.4] LV: Definitely. I've seen this in various schedules of high profile people I've studied. I talked about how I've tracked my time and I can look at the days they're tracking. I see, like I might be working more hours than these people, but it's not because the demand for my time is higher, these people these are people who could pack every minute of the day if they want to do, is that they're choosing not to. They're embracing their power by saying, “My schedule is mine. If I only wish to have seven hours of work commitments for the day, that's great. I'm going to leave open space in the middle of the day, so I can relax, or think, take a real break, or if things run over, then I have space for it without making the rest of the day be a disaster.”

It’s really their power move is not to pack every minute. I think that's fascinating. Being busy is not always an example of how important you are. It's really sometimes more an example that you have not yet claimed your control over your calendar.

[0:33:41.7] MB: It's funny, we've talked about this in a couple previous interviews. One of them with Greg McKeown, the author of Essentialism, where we really dug into the a cult of busyness and how, if you ask someone how they're doing in the United States today, almost always their response is, “Oh, busy. Busy good and busy.”

[0:33:58.9] LV: I’m fine. Busy. Just fascinating, right?

[0:34:02.4] MB: It’s so funny, because we get caught up in that self-importance of busyness, but ever since really going, starting to go down this rabbit hole of time management and using contemplatively routines to determine the most important things to focus on, not only have I tried to not tell people that I'm busy, but I also when someone says that they're busy, I almost view that as a marker that they don't really have – they haven't really invested the time in these reflective activities to cultivate actual control over their time.

[0:34:31.5] LV: Yeah. If they did, I think they'd get a very different perspective. Hopefully people listening to this will take that to heart.

[0:34:37.8] MB: I want to get into some of the specific tactics and strategies for implementing some of these ideas and themes. Specifically, I know we touched on and you talked a little bit about this idea of a time log, or a time diary. I'd love to learn a little bit more about how the listeners could concretely implement that.

[0:34:57.0] LV: Yeah, tracking your time doesn't have to be very complicated. I use a very simple spreadsheet, and if people want to come to my website, it's just my name, lauravanderkam.com; you can get e-mailed one there. You can make your own. It's really just Excel. Or you can use – there's dozens of time tracking apps on the market. Often, it's like billing software for instance, so people buy it for their companies because they need to build their time to different things, but you can repurpose that to build all the projects in your personal life too, if you felt like it.

Or you can even just walk around with a little notebook and write not what you're doing. The tool itself is really not all that important. What's important is that you just try to stick with it and don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, like you don't have to record every bathroom break, you don't have to record every time you got up and filled your water bottle at the water cooler. It's really more about just having this holistic perspective, and where the time goes, so that you know roughly like, “Okay, I was working during this time and I took a break here and this is what I did with my break. Yeah, this is when I got in the car and this is when I got home and this is what I did after I got home, this is when I ate dinner, this is what I did afterwards, this is when to bed.”

Then on weekends too, make sure you track a weekend. I find people – I ask people to do this sometimes and then they just stop on Friday afternoon. Did life stop then? It did not continue? What happened? I mean, it's fine if you don't want to share what you did on your weekend with me, that's perfectly fine. I understand that. It's usually not about that. It's just that they didn't even think it was important to track the weekend. I think part of feeling off the clock and relaxed about our time is knowing where our potential leisure time is and knowing that we're spending it on things that we truly enjoy. One of the best ways to figure that out is to actually track a weekend to say, what are you doing with the 60 hours between 6 p.m. Friday and 6 a.m. Monday, and how are you happy with that? Did it go the way you like? What did you not do? What did you do? How do you feel about that?

Yeah, just try for a week and then look at the major categories and ask yourself what you like about it. There's probably something that's going great and you should celebrate whatever that is. You can ask what you want to do more of with your time and you can also ask what you want to spend less time doing. I think if you focus on all those questions and ramp up the things you do want to do and ramp down the things you don't, then over time you'll start to spend your time better.

[0:37:12.6] MB: It's such an important point that you shouldn't get caught up and letting perfect be the enemy of good. I think people so often get trapped in this fear that they have to be capturing everything, they have to be measuring it perfectly, and there's a really a good mental model that we talk a lot about on the show as well, which is the idea of being roughly right, is often better than being precisely wrong. The idea is generally, if you're approximately correct, you can actually get a ton of value out of that. If you try to refine it too much, oftentimes you end up derailing yourself for not doing it, or whatever. Sometimes the freedom of just getting it approximately correct is a really effective strategy.

[0:37:52.2] LV: Yeah, it also saves time too.

[0:37:54.0] MB: That’s right.

[0:37:54.9] LV: Letting go of expert to expectations of perfection is one of the best time management strategies I've ever encountered, because it's probably good enough. The vast majority of things, like going from the 95th percentile to the 99th is not really getting you much and probably is wasting a lot of time.

[0:38:10.3] MB: One of the other themes, or ideas that I know you've talked about and it dovetails obviously with everything we've been discussing today, but I think it's really worth digging into and sharing is this idea of putting your priorities into your schedule first, and then filling everything else. I'd love to hear you explain that and tell a little bit more about that.

[0:38:28.5] LV: Yeah. I mean, you read a lot of time management literature, which everyone talks about this, because it's what really matters that you put what is important to you in your schedule first. Some people go as far as why would we even bother making a to-do list, if it doesn't have a time attached to it, like what is that? It's these things that we want to do take time. Our time is represented by a calendar, like we only have so much time. If it doesn't have an assigned time, it can't happen. Better to think about the assigned time for these tasks that you're deciding to do, as opposed to just listing them and hoping that they will happen at some point.

I try to put important stuff in my schedule first, by planning my weeks before I'm in them. I try to do this on Friday afternoon, which is something I actually picked up from David Allen, productivity expert; I'm sure many of your listeners are familiar with. He said a lot of his clients were planning their weeks and doing the weekly review on Friday afternoon. What I do is I make a three category list for the week ahead; career, relationships and self.

The reason to have a three-category priority list is it will nudge you to put something in all three categories. It's pretty hard to make a three-category list and then leave one of the categories blank. That's just not how people tend to make lists, so it's a little trick right there to nudge you to have a more balanced life. Just a short list. You can put two to three items in each, probably not more than eight, 10. If it's more than 10, they're not really priorities, then it's just your laundry list of everything you need to do.

The good thing about this is you've got your work stuff there. Most people know roughly what the good things they should be doing on the work front beyond what they absolutely have to do. Nudging yourself to create things, like personal priorities, or relationship priorities even more so, it makes those things happen, because when you start saying, “Oh, what is my relationship priority for the next week? Well, my spouse and I haven't been out to eat in a while. Let me ask this person what would be a good night for that, and then we can maybe make a restaurant reservation somewhere,” and if there needs to be a babysitter involved, you’re in that stage, then you make it happen.

You get the logistics and then you both have it on your calendar, you're both looking forward to, you got a reservation somewhere, it's probably going to happen. Whereas, if you just generally have in your mind like, “Yeah, we should spend time together,” yeah, that's not going to happen. Or getting together with friends. Many of the people who are happiest about their time, the high-time perception scores in my studies are the people who spent the most time with friends, because they are the people who make us feel time is good, like we have time for the things we want to do.

You look at your priority list for the next week and say, “Oh, actually I really want to get together with this friend I haven't seen in ages. Let's see if we can go out for a drink together sometime during the week.” You e-mail that person, you look at your calendar, see when it can happen, all of a sudden, wow, you're meeting for a drink on Thursday night. How exciting is that? How awesome is that? You're going to look forward to that all week. That's how you schedule these priorities. That's how you think about what you'd like to be doing, get it on the calendar and then these things happen.

[0:41:18.3] MB: I love the two of the themes from that. One, the planning your week before you get in them, phenomenal tactic, and I borrowed a very similar strategy from – you see the author of GTD?

[0:41:29.8] LV: Yeah, getting things done, yes.

[0:41:31.1] MB: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, same thing. I use the same exact methodology. I do it on Sundays. I spend an hour or two of planning out my whole week and setting my most important tasks for every single day, and that really helps me feel like I'm starting the week with a foot ahead basically. The other thing that I found really interesting is that you – everybody's to-do list, or priority list often is almost exclusively career focus. I love that you included relationships, but also really self on there. It's such an important bucket and I feel like many cases gets almost completely left off and neglected.

[0:42:03.8] LV: Yeah, but it's really what makes life feel doable. I mean, if you have on there like, it doesn't even have to be the things you do regularly. If you run five times a week already, that doesn't have to be one of your personal priorities. That's probably already going to happen. You're good about that. Maybe it's that you want to instead of just doing your three miles on the treadmill in the morning, someday you're going to go find beautiful park and run there.

Like you look at the upcoming weather for the week and see that one day, it's going to be a really great weather and you want to go to this park and you can carve out time for that to happen, wow, you’re going to have a great run, you're going to look forward to it, you're going to enjoy it, you're going to think about it afterwards. Something like that could go in there, or time for a hobby perhaps, or even reading 100 pages in the novel that has been sitting on your bedside stand for the last six months. That could be a personal priority that you want to get through to the next week.

Yeah, elevating these things to the same status as your work priority list, your work to-do list, just massively increases the chances that they happen, and it treats them with the importance that these things deserve, because they are important. This is an important part of life. Life isn't just work. Work is a wonderful part of life, hopefully. Work is a very enjoyable, meaningful, fulfilling part of life, but it tends not to be the only thing. Treating ourselves and our relationships with prior – as important as well, can really make us feel like whole people.

[0:43:19.6] MB: I want to jump into another tactic that I've heard you share that I think is really impactful and I wanted to share with the audience, which is this idea of writing your next year's review, or writing your next year family letter.

[0:43:33.6] LV: Yeah. This is a way to start thinking about your goals, but putting your goals into a near-term thing, like the next six to 12 months. One way you can think about this is writing your own year in performance review, either for the end of this year, or if you're listening to this at the end of the year, maybe think about the next calendar year.

Let's say it's been an amazing year for you professionally and you're giving yourself this performance review that's making you pop the champagne corks, because it's been so awesome. What three things would you have done professionally in the course of the year that would make it so amazing? You think about what these goals would be, these things you would write in a prospective performance review, because those are the things that made an amazing year professionally, so those are really your top career goals.

You can do this in your personal life too, if you think about what you might write in a holiday letter if you have listeners who are young enough who've never gotten one of these really ridiculous misses that people have mail out around the holidays. You just think about it yourself being like a holiday party in December, and you're telling your friends and family what you did in your personal life that mattered to you in the course of the year. You can look forward to December think about, “Well, what would these things be?” If this were to be a really amazing year, the year that I'm just on fire at this party telling people about. What would those three things be?

Maybe it's the year that you took the extended family trip to Ireland, or the year you ran that 10k, or the year you joined a choir, or did a community theater production, or whatever it is. What would be so cool in your personal life that you would really just want to tell people about it at this party? List three things. Now between the prospective performance review and this holiday party chitchat, you have six top goals. These are six top priorities for the next six to 12 months, whatever time of the year it happens to be.

You should put this list somewhere really prominently. Put it on your desk, put it on a post-it note on your computer. You want to look at this list all the time, because this list can start informing your schedule choices. If you plan your weeks on Friday like I do, or Sunday like you do, look at that post, look at the six things and say, “Well, what am I actually doing in the next week that would get me toward those goals? Am I making any steps toward those? Because if I can, well those should definitely be on the priority list.” If this is the year you're going to run that 10k, you should for the next year, next week you can definitely make it a priority to research which 10k you think you could do, and maybe find a training book somewhere and find your training shoes, your running shoes that you have to dig out of the closet and find somebody who'll go run with you. These are all steps you can take that will get you toward those goals.

[0:46:01.3] MB: It's funny, the same Sunday review that I do, sort of your Friday review, I keep a list of all of my medium-term goals, and then I'll look at those and then say, “All right, how am I going to – this next week, how am I going to take action towards as many of those as possible?” Monday, I'm going to take action on this one, Tuesday I'm going to take action on this one, etc. It's a great way to chunk those down and keep meaningful progress going every single day, or every single week.

[0:46:27.5] LV: That's great. I love that you're thinking about putting it in Monday and Tuesday, because I think that's the real pro tip here for your listeners is when you make that priority list, put as much of it as possible toward the front of the week. The reason is it's A, it's treating it as a priority, so you want to do it first. Also stuff is going to come up. I mean, the reality of life is that things will happen. Like I don't know, be a big snowstorm, or power outage at the office, or work emergency, major client calls, you need X, Y, or Z. The closer these priorities are toward the front of the week, the emergency either have yet to happen, or if you do have stuff come up, then you have the rest of the week to reschedule this stuff.

Whereas, if you put it off till the end of the week and say, “Oh, I'm going to do all that Friday afternoon.” Well, you might not, because you'll be tired on Friday afternoon. You won't have energy to start these new projects. If you're racing to get to the weekend with stuff that's come up during the week, then that's these high-priority, but maybe not urgent stuff is going to get jettisoned. As much as possible, if you can do Monday or Tuesday, the better off you'll be.

[0:47:25.7] MB: I want to zoom in, we've been talking about time in a broader sense. I want to zoom in a really specific day part and see what from your work and research have you seen around the most effective morning and evening routines.

[0:47:39.7] LV: Yeah. Well morning routines are always a big draw in the productivity world. We all want to find the perfect morning routine that's going to help us get so much done and start the day on the right foot. I think mornings can really be great. I mean, I love when I see people with morning routines. I want to stress for people, it doesn't have to be this great thing, it doesn't have to be long, it doesn't have to be elaborate. If you're doing the stuff in life that you find important to you, like if you are finding time for exercise and any creative pursuits you want to do and spending time with friends and family, you probably don't actually even need some elaborate morning routine.

It's more that for many people who have full-time jobs that are in offices and have family commitments, or personal life commitments, morning tends to be the time that you can get to these things that are important to you, before everybody else wants a piece of you the rest of the day, before you wind up with all the work emergencies, the personal demands. If there is something that is important to you, that life has a way of crowding out, then morning is often the best time to do those things.

Probably, you don't have to wake up at the crack of dawn, you probably don't even have to sleep less. Many people when they track their time, they discover that they are not spending the hours before they go to sleep in particularly wonderful ways. This tends to be the time when people are just watching TV that they didn't mean to watch, puttering around the house, surfing the web, two-hour Instagram, I don't know what it is. People are doing stuff before bed that they're just tired, and so it just keeps going.

If you can put a stop to it a little bit earlier, go to bed a little bit earlier, wake up a little bit earlier, and you can then have time in the morning for these things that do require focus and discipline, like exercise, or writing that novel, or any other creative pursuit that you wish to do, or even family breakfast, or something like that, if you have a family and family dinner is difficult to make happen because people are all these different places, family breakfast could be a great substitute.

Yeah, it's whatever is important to you that life has a way of crowding out. I think for most people, the evening routine is about enabling the morning routine, so the evening routine is about making sure that you are going to bed at a time that will allow you to wake up rested and ready to go. Sadly enough, I do think that going to bed early is how grown-ups sleep in.

[0:49:50.9] MB: Yeah, I totally agree with that. I think the idea of flipping the unproductive evening time into really productive morning time is a great hack, because it's so easy to get sucked into just sitting on your phone and looking at Instagram for an hour before you go to sleep, and yet, that time is completely wasted. Whereas, if you would have just gone to bed and then gotten up an hour early, you could do some really fruitful and productive work first thing in the morning.

[0:50:18.0] LV: Exactly. Easier said than done of course, but yes, that is the goal.

[0:50:21.6] MB: I mean, I think it comes back to one of the themes we've talked about earlier in the conversation, which is the idea of measurement, right? If you're if you're not measuring and tracking that time, you might not even really be aware that you're – how much time you're really spending browsing your phone, or watching TV, or doing things that maybe you don't want to spend five hours a day on your phone, maybe three hours a day would be plenty of time texting and chatting and that stuff.

[0:50:46.6] LV: Then you get two hours back. Yeah. Or else, you're walking around with this story that you're not a morning person, and I hear this from people all the time, “Oh, I'm not a morning person.” Well sure, I mean, there are people who are night owls and I'm sure many of your listeners truly are. The way to know is if you are doing your best work at night, like if you are running that side hustle at night, you're writing the Great American Novel at night, you're doing your paintings, or composing your music, or whatever it is. If you are doing that at night, great, you're a night owl.

For most people, what they mean when they say they're not a morning person is that they're tired in the morning, but they haven't really thought through, “Well, why am I tired in the morning? Well, maybe it's because I am on Instagram for an hour before bed every night, and my life would be improved in all sorts of ways if I stop doing that and you get an extra hour of sleep, or maybe just get an extra half hour sleep and wake up half an hour earlier and have time to write in a journal, or meditate, or go for a run, or actually spend some relaxed time with your spouse, or kids.” These are all things that you can do if you had a bit more control over getting to bed at a reasonable time, so you could wake up refreshed.

[0:51:42.3] MB: For listeners who want to concretely implement some of the ideas, or themes that we've talked about today, what would be a starting point, or a first piece of homework you would give them as an action item to begin implementing some of these things?

[0:51:57.2] LV: Well, I hope people would try tracking their time for a week. If you can't get through a week, just try for day, right? Try one weekday and one weekend day and see what you learn from that. Often, that can wet your appetite for keeping it going for a week. One fun exercise that might help you have a different perspective on time is to try planning in one of these little adventures during your week.

Think about tomorrow, probably if you're listening to this during the week, tomorrow's a normal workday, nothing crazy going on, but look at your schedule, think about how you plan to spend your time and think about, well what one out of the ordinary, memorable fun thing could I do with my time tomorrow? It doesn't have to be elaborate. I mean, it could be that you take a colleague you've been meaning to chat with and the two of you go to a new restaurant that opened up down the street, or maybe you're working closely with a team, you all know each other pretty well, you decide to go to a park for that meeting instead of sitting in your conference room.
Or maybe it's that you park your car in a different garage and walk a slightly different route into work, and then on the way to your car in the evening, you stop in some cool little store that you saw on the way in and you explore that for a few minutes before you go brave the traffic on the way home. Or maybe at night, it's that you go for a walk after dinner, or you go someplace interesting to have a drink with a friend. Just anything that would be different, that would be a little adventure you can put into your life.

Think about what that might be and make that happen for tomorrow. I promise you that you will remember the day a little bit better, and it will also make you feel you have more time, mostly because you start to see yourself as the person who has the time to do these adventures. That's really all about the mental game. It's all about time is how we perceive it. We do all have the same amount of time and time doesn't stop for anyone, but we do so many things with our amazing brains to change our interaction with it, and that change our perception of it.

[0:53:47.8] MB: For listeners who want to learn more, who want to find you and your work online, what is the best place for them to do that?

[0:53:53.5] LV: Well, you can come visit my website, which is lauravanderkam.com. I'm one of those old school people who's still blogging four times a week, I guess I never left 2007. I enjoy it still. If you listen to all your episodes, or the Science of Success you're looking for other podcasts, I run one called The Best of Both Worlds, with my co-host Sarah Hart-Unger.

I also hope some of your listeners will check out the book that just came out, Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done. A lot of these strategies that we talked about in this episode on how to make more memories, how to feel more in control of our time, how to feel more time is fun, as opposed to this drum beat marching toward doom.

[0:54:31.8] MB: Well Laura, thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing your time with us today and for sharing all these insightful lessons and strategies.

[0:54:39.4] LV: Well, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

[0:54:41.7] 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 e-mail. My e-mail 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.

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Speak & Present With Total Confidence Using These Tactics with Matt Abrahams

In this episode we show you the science of communication. Have you ever been afraid to speak or present? Are you worried about not having the skills or tools to communicate your ideas to the world? We dig into the science and the strategies of mastering skills like speaking and presenting, crushing the anxiety that often accompanies thee high stakes moments, and share evidence based strategies for becoming  a master communicator. 

Matt Abrahams is a Professor of Strategic Communication for Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He is the co-founder of Bold Echo Communication Solutions and author of the book Speaking Up Without Freaking Out. Matt’s videos and training techniques have been viewed tens of millions of times in TEDx, Inc. and much more!

• What happens when you rip your pants in the middle of a big speech?

• Anxiety can have a tremendously negative impact on our ability to to communicate

• Confidence in speaking and what it means to be authentic and how to be an engaging communicator 

• Anxiety negatively impacts communication in two major ways

• Audiences have trouble listening to a nervous speaker

  1. You get caught up in your own head 

• A foundational tenant of all communication is to be audience centric - your job is to serve the needs of your audience 

• Research sees anxiety about speaking and communicating as ubiquitous across ages, cultures etc

• Fear of communication is hard-wired intro your brain by evolution and it’s social pressures

• Risking our status causes is to feel very anxious

• There are two fundamental approaches to dealing with anxiety

• Dealing with the symptoms

  1. Dealing with the actual sources of anxiety

• Speaking in high stakes situations is internalized by your body as a threat

• Hold something cold in the palm of your hand it can reduce your body temperature and counter-act sweating and blushing that results from anxiety. 

• There are many sources that can exacerbate anxiety

• Distracting your audience is a great strategy to take their focus off of you. Give the audience something to distract them and get them more engaged

• Start with symptom management, then get into dealing with the sources

• If you get shaky - do something to engage big muscle groups - broad muscle movements 

• If you gesture more slowly you will actually slow down your speaking rate

• People who perform get very nervous - performance anxiety is very real

• Cognitive reframing of the speaking situation - not as a performance but as something else - see speaking as conversation 

• Practice conversationally, use conversational language, and use questions - and you can speak much more effectively. 

• Time Orientation - not being future focused, but instead being present focused

• How can you get more present oriented? Do something physical, listen to music, count backwards from 100 by 17

• Greet your anxiety - give yourself permission to be anxious. This is how you short circuit the loop of getting nervous about getting nervous. This works with any emotion, not just anxiety. 

• 85% of people report being nervous in high stakes situations - but we don’t share it, we don’t talk about it.

• The self-defeating beliefs and behaviors that perpetuate and exacerbate anxiety.

• The powerful learnings from improv comedy that can make you be a more confidence speaker 

• Dare to be dull - don’t strive for perfection. Do what needs to be done, and by reducing the pressure you put on yourself you increase the likelihood that you will actually achieve a great outcome.

• Make your presentation about your audience instead of yourself - this reframes the entire situation.

• The “Shout the wrong name” exercise that can help you reduce your anxiety in real time

• We are constantly judging and evaluating ourselves - this stifles presence and stifles creativity in the moment

• We have to get out of our own way. 

• See communication as an opportunity.

• The most foundational principle in improv comedy is “yes, and” - seeing interaction as opportunity and not threat 

• Constraints and structure invite more opportunities for creativity (in life) and in communication

• Should you take improv classes?

• The components of confidence

• Managing anxiety

  1. Creating presence & meta awareness - adapt your communication to what’s happening the moment 

  2. Convey emotion - confidence speakers convey emotion 

• Confident speakers adjust and adapt - approach your communication as a series of questions that you want to answer

• Being present

  1. Using inclusive language

  2. Connecting with your audience

• Confidence is a balancing act between warmth and strength (you need both!)

• How do we add warmth when we are speaking?

• Inclusive language

  1. Pausing

  2. Paraphrasing

  3. Asking questions

• You have to tie the data and facts back into the emotions - the implications of the science and the data

• The “What?,” “So What?,” “Now What?” Structure 

• The answer

  1. Why its important

  2. What you do with the answer that’s just given

• These same principles can be applied to any communication medium - email, text, speaking etc - communication is the transmission of meaning from one person o another 

• Homework - Take the opportunity too build your skills. Like any skill you’re trying to build -  it’s all about

• Repetition - find avenues to speak and give presentations

  1. Reflection - ask yourself what worked and what didn’t work

  2. Feedback - find a trusted other - a mentor, a colleague, a loved one who can give you honest feedback. We are bad at judging our own communication

Thank you so much for listening!

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

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [SoS Episode] What Makes People Turn Evil, Time Paradoxes, and The Power of Heroism with Dr. Philip Zimbardo

• [Book] Speaking Up without Freaking Out: 50 Techniques for Confident and Compelling Presenting by Matthew Abrahams

• [Website] Bold Echo

• [Website] No Freaking Speaking

• [TEDTalk] Speaking Up Without Freaking Out | Matt Abrahams | TEDxPaloAlto

• [Video] Think Fast, Talk Smart: Communication Techniques by Matt Abrahams

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] 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 two million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries and part of the self-help for smart people podcast network.

In this episode, we show you the science of communication. Have you ever been afraid to speak, or present? Are you afraid about not having the skills, or tools to communicate your ideas to the world? We dig into the science and strategies of mastering skills, like speaking and presenting, crushing the anxiety that often accompanies these high-stakes moments and share evidence-based strategies for becoming a master communicator with our guest, Matt Abrahams.

Do you need more time? Time for work, time for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined, and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our e-mail list. It's called how you can create time for the things that really matter in life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the e-mail list at successpodcast.com.

You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our e-mail subscribers. We recently pre-released an episode in an interview to our e-mail subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience, and that had tremendous implications because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first.

With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live exclusive interview just for e-mail subscribers. There's some amazing stuff that's available only to e-mail subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign-up to the e-mail list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage.

Or if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you're on the go and you don't have time, just text the word SMARTER to the number 44-222. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we discussed happiness. Can the pursuit of happiness backfire? Why are people more depressed and anxious than ever in a time when the world is physically safer and healthier than it's ever been in history? We looked at the crisis of meaning in our society and examined how we can cultivate real meaning in our lives beyond ourselves and move towards an existence of purpose with our guest, Emily Esfahani Smith.

Now for our interview with Matt.

[0:02:45.6] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Matt Abrahams. Matt is a professor of strategic communication for Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. He's the co-founder of BoldEcho Communication Solutions and the author of the book Speaking Up Without Freaking Out. His videos and training techniques have been viewed tens of millions of times on TEDx and much more.

Matt, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:08.8] MA: Really happy to be here with you, Matt.

[0:03:10.7] MB: Well, we're super excited to have you on the show. Obviously, your name is great and I think that you've got some really cool stuff to share with the audience that we can dig into.

[0:03:17.7] MA: Excellent. Looking forward to it.

[0:03:19.3] MB: To start out with – I'm curious and I think you share this. It was in I think one of your TED Talks that you got into this whole world of how we can communicate with each other more effectively through speech debate when you were much younger in your life. I'd love to hear that story and hear your involvement, because I was a debater for a number of years in high school, and so I always like to connect and hear people's stories from being in speech and debate and that kind of thing.

[0:03:41.9] MA: Well happy to share this story, although it's quite embarrassing. I was a reluctant participant in speech and debate. As a high school freshman, my English teacher had us all stand up and introduce ourselves at the first day of class. Because my last name is Abrahams, I went first. After I introduced myself, he came up and said, “This talking thing seems to work for you. I need you to go to this speech tournament.” I had no idea what he was talking about.

I had a week to put together a speech. He said, “Do it on something you're passionate about.” I was at the time and still I am very passionate about martial arts. I did a speech on karate. I show up one cold Saturday morning and in a suit that was too short and too tight. I was so nervous to give this speech that I forgot to put on my special karate pants. Any of you who have done martial arts know that they're pants that have a little extra room, so you can move around.

I started my presentation with a karate kick, because I was told do something to get your audience's attention. Matt, I'm sure you can tell where this is going, I ripped my pants doing this karate kick in the first 10 seconds of my 10-minute talk. At that moment, I just learned the impact of anxiety on communication. Few people have angular moments in their life that set them on a trajectory, but upon reflection that moment really set my passion for figuring out the role of confidence in speaking and what it means to come off as authentic and be a really engaging communicator. Speech and debate is something I continue doing after that moment, mostly to prove to myself that I could do it. It definitely affected my entire life and career.

[0:05:20.0] MB: I want to dig into this. I know you've got some incredible strategies and tactics that you've researched yourselves and uncovered in the science and the data. Before we get too deep down the rabbit hole, I'd love to start with the question that you accidentally uncovered with your karate kick. How does the –

[0:05:36.8] MA: Physically uncovered too. Yes.

[0:05:38.3] MB: That's right. Yeah, there you go. How does anxiety prevent us from being the best communicators that we could be?

[0:05:45.8] MA: There are two ways in which it affects us. First and foremost, if you have ever watched a nervous communicator communicate, you as an audience member feel nervous and uncomfortable yourself. Because of that, it prevents you from actually connecting and remembering and engaging with the speaker. One form of impact is on the audience. The other form is that because of our increased self-awareness, because of the distraction of the physiological symptoms that result, it doesn't allow us to be our true selves to be able to communicate fully and be completely involved and engaged. Both sides of that equation, its effects on us, as well as effects on our audience really, really hamper us from sharing our ideas, telling our stories and really being present with others.

[0:06:35.5] MB: I think it's really interesting that you bring the component of the audience into this equation, because a lot of people, especially those who fear speaking, or don't have a lot of confidence in when they're giving, even in small situations like presentations, or meetings, etc., focus solely on their own experience. When in reality, it's a two-way street. I know that's another thing you talk about deeper into this as well.

[0:06:58.8] MA: Yeah. To me, a foundational tenant of all effective communication is being audience-centric. Your job is to be in service of the needs of your audience; be it the presentation audience, those in a meeting, or even in an interpersonal conversation. My mind is always thinking about the impact of this stuff on the audience. If and when you and I get into discussing techniques for managing anxiety, we'll talk about some things you can do to change your relationship with the audience so that it can help you feel more comfortable and confident when you present.

[0:07:31.4] MB: Well, let's come back to – before we dig into some of the techniques and strategies, I want to talk about where this anxiety is coming from and why so many people have fear, or get anxious around speaking and communicating across a myriad of circumstances throughout our lives.

[0:07:48.5] MA: Yeah. I and other researchers fully believe that this is built in. It's hardwired. We see anxiety and communication across culture, and typically across age range. This is something that is ubiquitous and a part of the human condition. That leads us to think there's something biological in our evolutionary history, and I happen to affiliate with the camp that says really what's at stake whenever you communicate in a high-stakes situation is your status. I'm not talking about who drives the fanciest car, who gets the most likes on a post. What I'm talking about is from an evolutionary perspective, thousands of years ago, your relative status to others in the group associated with, meant everything.

It meant your access to resources, to food, to shelter, to reproduction. In anything you did that put your status at risk was literally life threatening. Communicating in front of others can be very risky in terms of your status. That is why I and other academics believe that we feel this anxiety that comes up in interpersonal situations, performance situations, testing situations, it's all from that risking of status.

[0:09:04.8] MB: It's funny, the very first episode that we ever did of Science of Success is called the biological limits of the human mind, and we talked about how evolution has in many cases baked in these behaviors and shortcuts, which often work out really well and have a survival benefit, but in modern society can typically or frequently short-circuit in ways that we couldn't really predict or imagine.

[0:09:27.8] MA: I think that's happening to us when it comes to this anxiety around speaking. Now certainly being aware of your situation, being aware of the significance of what your communication and interactions might mean in the short-term and long-term, that does have advantages to us still to this day. Because it is so significant, this risking of status, it puts us in a situation that doesn't necessarily fit with many of the situations we find ourselves in on a day-to-day basis.

[0:09:56.0] MB: Yeah. I think this is a great contextualized example of one particular avenue of how the brain can short-circuit and how these biological limits can hinder us, but there's actually a ton of science and research and strategies as well around how to combat that and ultimately become a more effective communicator.

[0:10:12.5] MA: Yes, there are.

[0:10:14.0] MB: Well, let's dig into a little bit more around some of these solutions for being a better communicator and specifically around dealing with the anxiety that comes from communicating.

[0:10:25.1] MA: Sure. From my perspective, there are two fundamental approaches you have to take managing anxiety. One is dealing with the symptoms that we experience; the physiological and cognitive symptoms. Then there's the actual sources of anxiety that make it worse. For example, many of us when we get nervous, we blush and perspire. That's because our core body temperature is increasing. When you feel under threat and that's what speaking in high-stakes situations is experienced as internally by your body; it's a threat, so the fight-or-flight response gets activated. When that happens, a whole bunch of neuro-hormones are released; cortisol, adrenaline, etc. What that does is it causes your body to get tense, if you're about to runaway or fight, getting tense is actually a good thing. That causes your blood pressure to increase. When that happens, your physical temperature goes up and that's what leads to blushing and to sweating.

A wonderful thing you could do, and this happens to me, my big symptom of anxiety is blushing. If you hold something cold in the palms of your hands before you speak in a high-stakes situation, you actually reduce your core body temperature. That reduces the sweating and the blushing. I ensure you and everybody listening, at some point in their life been cold and held warm coffee, or warm tea and felt how it warms them up, we're just using this in reverse to counteract a very normal symptomatic response to our anxiety around communication.

That's a symptomatic approach you can take to reducing one symptom. Now in terms of the sources of anxiety, there are many sources that exacerbate anxiety. For example, many of us when we are communicating, feel as if we are being evaluated by our audience. In fact, we are. A great way to manage this source of anxiety is in essence to distract your audience. Get them focused on something else, so they're not focused on you, and this gives you a little bit of a breather, gives you an opportunity to collect yourselves.

I'll give you an example of what I mean. In my coaching practice, I was fortunate to coach an executive who's doing very well in his career, but he keeps getting really nervous every time he presents. What we do is every time he gives a big presentation, he starts with either a video clip, or a poll, and the audience pays attention to that clip or that poll, giving him a little bit of a break to collect themselves. While they're distracted, which by the way is actually getting them more engaged with his content which is a good thing, he has that opportunity to collect his thoughts. When it comes to managing anxiety, you have to attack both the symptoms and the sources to help you feel better.

[0:13:06.4] MB: I think that's such a great distinction, and something that – I mean, I've interviewed and discussed and read tremendous amount about dealing with anxiety and dealing with fear. I don't think I've ever seen it so cleanly broken out into solving symptoms versus solving sources. I think that's a great framework.

[0:13:22.8] MA: Yeah. It helps a lot of people. The sources pieces tend to be a little more overwhelming for people. If you scaffold your anxiety management by starting with some of these symptoms, you begin to feel traction and feel as if you're getting a hang of managing your anxiety, and then you can begin to approach some of the sources, which are a little more complex to address.

Not only does it give you a wider variety of techniques you can use, it actually gives you a progression that can help you feel like you have more sense of an agency in this actual combating your anxiety.

[0:13:58.7] MB: Well, let's dig into, I think the holding something cold is a great example. I'd love to hear a few other strategies, maybe starting with the symptom bucket; how we can in real-time, we're about to give a speech, or we're doing something and we feel that anxiety creeping in, what are some of those things we can do to address those symptoms as they're coming on, or as they're happening?

[0:14:17.7] MA: Sure thing. Happy to share several with you. Several people when they get nervous, get a little shaky, and that's the adrenaline coursing through your body. If you do something that engages big muscles, you allow that adrenaline to dissipate. Most nervous speakers make themselves tight and small, and they hold that in so they actually shake more. If you were to start a presentation, or a meeting, by doing a big broad gesture of welcoming people, just say, “Welcome to the meeting, or I'm so excited you're here in my presentation,” and extend your arms wide and take a step towards your audience, you're engaging big muscles. By engaging those big muscles, the adrenalin dissipates and you stop shaking, and that can be really helpful.

Another thing people struggle with in terms of symptoms is they feel that their breath is short and that they end up speaking very quickly, because they're breathing quickly. Nothing works better than taking a deep calming breath, something you might do if you're taking yoga, or doing Tai Chi, or Qi Gong. That'll slow you down and slow down your heart rate, which many people when they get nervous can feel pounding in their chest.

Another thing that helps, a lot of nervous speakers speak so fast. There's this idea that if we speak faster, we'll get done sooner. If you gesture more slowly, you will actually slow down your speaking rate. It's very difficult for the brain, because of cognitive load to speak fast and gesture slow. We tend to sync those up. You'll notice people who speak quickly tend to gesture quickly. We can use that to our advantage and slow down our gesturing to slow down our speech rate. Those are just a few techniques that you can use to combat some of the symptoms that we experience.

[0:16:00.7] MB: That's great. That's really funny. I naturally speak very quickly, especially I think it's that exact nervous energy that wants to be done as quickly as possible. The act of slowing down my gestures I think is a great personal thing that I'm definitely going to implement.

[0:16:15.9] MB: Yeah, I think you'll see some change right away with that.

[0:16:19.0] MB: Let's flip to dealing with the sources, which I know can be a little bit more thorny and then get a little bit more complicated. What are some of the strategies, or things – you touched on one of them obviously, but some of the other techniques that you've seen and the science shows are some of the most effective ways to do that.

[0:16:36.8] MA: Sure. Let me share two with you. First, we've known for a long time that people who perform, get very nervous. Performance anxiety is something well-known in the literature. Any of your listeners, yourself included, Matt, if you've ever done any acting, singing, dancing, or played a sport, you know what this performance anxiety feels like, because in each one of those activities, there's a right way to do it.

If you're an actor, you have to speak your line in the right way, in the right place. If you're an athlete, you have to do what your sport requires at exactly the right time and the right way. Some sports even keep track of the errors and mistakes people make. We feel tremendous pressure in these performance situations. Now the problem is many of us take our communication as a performance, so we feel there's a right way to do it and we want to do it right.

The reality is in all my years of teaching and coaching, there is no right way to communicate. There’s certainly better and worse ways, but there is no one right way. We have to do what in the academic literature we call cognitive reframing. We have to reframe the speaking situation, not as a performance, but see it as something else. Research that I was involved with a long, long time ago in graduate school and some of my colleagues did research on is this notion of converting, speaking as performance to see it as a conversation.

Most people are not as anxious, or anxious at all when they're having a conversation. If you can see your communication is conversational, it will help you feel better. How do you do that? Well one, is if you're practicing a presentation, or for a meeting, practice it conversationally. Sit down at a coffee shop or with some friends and just talk it through. If you practice it as if it's a performance, you're just reinforcing that performance approach.

Another thing to do is to use conversational language. Nervous people distance themselves linguistically. They’re use words like, “One must consider,” instead of, “You should consider.” Use words like us, you, we, that's all conversational. Then finally, and this will resonate well with you Matt, I know based on what you do, asking questions. Questions are incredibly conversational. If you can use those techniques of practicing conversationally, using conversational language, using questions, you help yourself see you’re speaking as conversational, rather than performance. There's a long history of research saying not only does that make you as a communicator feel less nervous, but it also engages your audience more because we respond more to conversational approach. That's one source and one way to deal with it.

Another source has to do with our time orientation. When I was an undergraduate, I did some research in this notion of time orientation. What we know is what contributes to people's anxiety is their worry about potential negative future outcomes. In other words, we're worried about what could go wrong. The students I teach are worried they're not going to get an A, the entrepreneurs I coach are worried they're not going to get funding. If we can somehow get people not to be future-focused, and that is anxious, but help them be present-focused, they can then short-circuit that anxiety.

There are lots of ways to become present-oriented. Matt, you've probably seen athletes who before they do their sport listen to a song or a playlist. You’re doing something physical, walking around the building, shaking hands with people. I do a silly thing that helps me get present-oriented. I count backwards from 100 by a challenging number. Most recently I started it with 17s. Try counting backwards from a 100 by 17s and you have to be present-oriented to do that.

There are many sources of anxiety and there are things you can do. You can frame things from being a performance to conversation, you can change your time orientation from being future-oriented to being present-oriented, and those will help.

[0:20:41.2] MB: This week’s episode is brought to you by our partners at Brilliant. Brilliant is a math and science enrichment learning tool. You can learn concepts by solving fascinating challenging problems. Brilliant explores probability, computer science, machine learning, the physics of everyday life, complex Algebra and much more. They do this with addictive interactive experiences that are enjoyed by over 5 million students, professionals and enthusiasts around the world.

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[0:22:48.2] MB: One of the other strategies that I know you've talked about and written about is the idea of greeting your anxiety. I'd love to dig into that a little bit.

[0:22:56.6] MA: Thank you for asking that question. Many of your listeners are familiar with the notion of mindfulness. Mindfulness is so important for so many reasons. An anxiety management technique that comes from the study of mindfulness is this notion of greeting your anxiety ,rather than getting caught up in it.

Interestingly, many of us get nervous because we're nervous, and that sounds silly, but it's true. You've probably experienced this. If you're starting to get nervous about a communication, maybe you want to ask someone on a date, or maybe you have something important to say in a meeting and you start to feel your heart beat faster and the sweat on your brow and then you say, “Oh, my goodness. How did I get here? Why am i trying this? Why isn't it somebody else? I I'm not prepared.”

All of a sudden, you're spiraling out of control because your anxiety is carrying you away. We can stop that by simply invoking a mindfulness practice, which is greeting the emotion that we're feeling at the time, and give ourselves permission to experience it. We simply say, this is me feeling nervous. It makes sense that I'm nervous. I'm going to do something that's important to me, that's a consequence and significance. In so doing, you give yourself space, you give yourself a sense of agency and control over something that many get carried away from.

Mindfulness teaches us that this doesn't just work with anxiety. It works with any emotion. Applying this approach and giving yourself permission to experience the anxiety is really, really empowering.

[0:24:26.3] MB: I wanted to dig in it out and ask about that one specifically, because that's something that has worked really well for me. I think we've talked about that technique, or variations of that and in past interviews on the show, and that's something that personally I always have found cultivating that self-compassion and that permission to be anxious, or angry, or whatever in the given situation is a great way to break the loop of getting anxious, about being anxious, or angry about being angry, etc.

[0:24:52.8] MA: I like how you said that. It is breaking the loop. Part of the challenge I think is in what I find in my work is a lot of people don't talk about their anxiety around speaking. We end up feeling like we're the only ones who have it, which is absolutely not the case. In fact, 85% of people report being nervous in high stakes situations, so it's the rare person who doesn't feel nervous. Because we don't talk about it, because it's not something that we share, it's hard for us to give ourselves that permission and be compassionate with ourselves, because we feel we're broken, or it's wrong for us to feel it, because we don't think others have it. Just understanding that we're not alone allows us more permission to be kind to ourselves when it comes to dealing with our anxiety and communicating.

[0:25:37.6] MB: I want to go a little bit deeper down the rabbit hole and talk about some of the self-defeating beliefs that can often perpetuate, or exacerbate our anxiety.

[0:25:48.7] MA: There are many. One of them has to do with perfectionism and that's close to that notion of getting things right. People want their communication to be perfect, and they want the situation and the experience that the communication occurs in to be perfect. You get into that analysis paralysis phase, where you're thinking and so concerned about everything that it prevents you from actually doing anything.

I do a lot of work that is incorporating more and more from the world of improvisation. There are some really powerful learnings from improvisation that can help people who are nervous speakers, or working to become more confident speakers. One of the key tenants in improvisation is this notion of dare be dull. Everybody is striving for greatness. We all want to give that right answer, or say the right thing at the right time, and that perfectionism gets in the way.

If you just dare to be dull, do what needs to be done, say the piece that needs to be done, you actually by reducing the pressure you put on yourself increase the likelihood that you will actually say the perfect thing, or the better thing. One thing we have to work on is reducing that sense of perfectionism.

Another thing I would say, another self-defeating approach is a lot of us start in our communication by saying, “This is what I need to say.” We make it very specific to us. As I alluded to earlier, it's all about your audience. It's not what you want to say, it's what they need to hear. That sounds like verbal jujitsu, and I'm just moving words around, but in fact it's a foundationally, fundamentally different approach. If you make it about your audience and not about yourself, you get out of that self-defeating spiral of analyzing everything you're doing and evaluating everything you're doing, and you realize that you have something valuable to say to your audience and this act of communicating is helping them, and that really can change how you feel and the experience from the audience's perspective.

[0:27:49.1] MB: I loved the example from improv that you – I think you have a speech where you went through an exercise, and you point at things and say the wrong thing. Would you explain that to the audience, and for whatever reason –

[0:28:02.8] MA: It's a really fun exercise. It's called shout the wrong name. You can play this game anywhere. If your listeners are not familiar, improv is an approach to – it came out of the acting world, but it's really an approach to life. It typically is comprised of playing games, and these games have a deeper philosophical and life intended meaning. One game is called shout the wrong name, where you literally point at things, or look at things and you say anything, but what they're really called.

If you're sitting in a room and there's a window, you would point at the window and you would call it a cat, or you would call it ugly, or you would call it a fireplace. It's anything but what it is. I use this game to prove or show to people just how much we evaluate ourselves. After we play the game for a little bit, I ask people, I say, “What was that experience?” People say it's hard. I say, “Why is it hard?” Often, what comes up is people are judging the wrongness of the words they use.

They look at the window and they say it's a fireplace. Well, fireplaces are like windows, so that's not really good. I should have called it maybe an animal. They're doing all this judging and evaluating, which serves to stifle the actual being present in just doing what needs to be done. When people have that epiphany through that game, they really get this idea that we have to get out of our own way. We have to just allow to have come up what comes up.

Then we uncover other things in that game. People stockpile. When I describe the game, my immediate question afterwards is who knows the first five things they're going to say? [inaudible 0:29:39.3] almost everybody in the room raises their hand, because your brain is wired to help you. When there's a challenge, you want it to help you. Sometimes that help gets in the way of actually experiencing the moment. That shout the wrong game, name game is really fun, and I would encourage all of your listeners just to try it on their own and see what it brings up for them, but it's a lot of fun to play.

[0:30:01.4] MB: For whatever reason when I do that exercise, I just start laughing. My brain for some reason is like really funny to point at my speaker and call it a banana, or something. I don't know why, but it just makes me laugh. I think it's a great exercise, and I think as you said, it builds that muscle of breaking the pattern and forcing yourself to be present and be okay with imperfection.

[0:30:23.2] MA: It absolutely does. If any of your listeners are not in a place where they can do that, or feel that's a little challenging, you can do the same thing. I challenge all of you right now listening to fold your arms in front of your chest like you normally would. Now I ask you to do the same thing the opposite way. That experience that you just felt like, “Oh, my goodness, this feels weird and awkward and I can't believe it.” That's the same thing that comes from the activity of shout the wrong name, and it's the same thing that Matt and I are talking about that, that permission to give yourself freedom in your communication and in your actions.

[0:30:55.6] MB: Just to clarify, you're saying cross your arms one way and then cross them the other way?

[0:30:59.0] MA: Yeah, so fold your arms in front of your chest like you normally would. Let's say you're cold, or somebody said something that really challenges you. Now cross them the opposite way, so have the other hand on top.

[0:31:09.6] MB: I can't even – my brain is breaking when I'm trying to do this.

[0:31:12.7] MA: Exactly. That's how patterned we are, and that's what that activity, as well as the shout the wrong name activity is showing us is uncovering our patterns that we use in a day-to-day basis, the habits we have. Sometimes we have to change those habits into choices, so we can have a broader toolset to confront our communication or other opportunities in our lives.

[0:31:34.2] MB: What are some of the other lessons or strategies that you've discovered, or uncovered from improv comedy?

[0:31:41.2] MA: I'll share two with you. The first has to do with seeing communication as an opportunity. Often, we feel so threatened. Take a question-and-answer session, say you're interviewing for a job, or you've just given a presentation and your audience is now going to ask you questions; many of us feel very defensive in that situation. We have to protect our position. We have to defend the threat of the questions.

That puts us in a very different space, a very negative space, it affects our nonverbal presence, we tend to be tight and enclosed, it affects our responses, they tend to be short and curt and not detailed. What if you were to see those situations as opportunities? To see them actually as a place where you can expand, where you can help somebody else. That would change your entire approach. You would be more open, your answers would be more clear and in-depth and detailed. Improv teaches us that.

In fact, the most foundational principle in improvisation is yes and. This notion of somebody asks you something and you say yes to it and you move forward. That openness, that seeing the interaction as one of opportunity, not threat can profoundly change how we communicate and interact.

The second piece that comes from improv and this is going to sound strange to people, improv is actually a lot about structure. You think that's counterintuitive, because you think people are just making things up on the spot, and they are, but they're doing so within a defined set of rules, or practices. If you play an improv game like shout the wrong name, there's some rules to that game. Most improv activities have rules and boundaries, and those provide the structure.

A colleague of mine who I work with when I do some improv work, he likes to say that if you give children a blank field and just say go play, they'll play and they'll be creative. If you give them a jungle gym to play on, their creativity goes through the roof. The physical structure of the jungle gym invites more opportunities for them to be creative. The same thing is true with communication. Using structure helps you.

You've all heard people just ramble, hopefully I'm not doing that right now, but when you ramble, it's hard to pay attention as an audience. It gets confusing. If you provide information in a structured way, it helps your audience. Structure can help, as well as just adopting an opportunity mindset, rather than one of threat.

[0:34:09.3] MB: Great learning, and it's funny. I've toyed at the idea of actually taking improv classes. I have no desire to be a comedian or anything like that, but really just to force myself through the training of learning that communication skill set and being uncomfortable with it.

[0:34:25.2] MA: I cannot encourage you more Matt, to do that. Improvisation when taught right, is not about acting and performing and being on a stage. It's about exactly what you were talking about. In fact, in the classes I teach at the business school, as well as the consulting I do, the next step I often encourage people to consider is taking improvisation for exactly the reasons you highlighted. Do yourself a favor and try it. It's a lot of fun and will really help your confidence, as well as your ability to respond in the moment in your communication.

[0:34:55.7] MB: Confidence is a topic that I think is worth digging into. Is there a difference between the strategies that you've shared and talked about around decreasing anxiety, versus some of the strategies that you've seen, or the research shows for building confidence around speaking and communicating?

[0:35:12.7] MA: That's a really insightful question, and thank you for asking that. A lot of us, myself included most of the time conflate those two terms. In fact, they are a bit different. To me, confidence has several components. One of which is managed anxiety for sure, but additionally confidence has two other pieces. It has this notion of presence. A confident communicator is one who is immediately present with his or her audience. They're not the people who are going to start their slide presentation and get through it no matter what happens.

There's a level of meta awareness in confident speakers who adjust and adapt their communication to what's happening in the moment. That's what I mean by presence. Confident speakers are present when they're involved in their communication. Additionally, confident speakers convey emotion. I don't mean they're necessarily pounding their chests screaming, but there is an emotion in what they're saying. Confidence is about that allowing yourself to show emotion when you speak.

In doing so, by being – having that presence and by allowing emotion, you truly can be authentic, so there's a lot of connection between confidence and authenticity. Again, this is all predicated on managing your anxiety, but there are things that you can do to bolster your confidence once you've got anxiety under control.

[0:36:33.8] MB: What are some of those confidence building strategies?

[0:36:36.8] MA: Well, we've talked about a couple. One is having that audience-centric approach really being there for your audience. Another is to imagine yourself in conversation with your audience. I'll give you a very concrete example. Confident people adjust and adapt. One way to prepare yourself to adjust and adapt is rather than having a whole list of bullet points that you want to cover, or information on a slide, simply approach your communication as a series of questions that you want to answer.

If you were to look at my lecture notes when I lecture to my students, you'll see it's just a series of questions. When I am lecturing, I am answering the unasked questions of my students. In so doing, it puts me in a very different place. I'm very present, I'm using inclusive language, I am connective with my audience and all of that displays or comes across as being confident. Really thinking about how you relate to your audience demonstrates that confidence.

One last thing I'll mention about confidence; confidence is a balancing act between warmth and strength. Confident people have found a way to balance warmth, being open, being emotionally available, with demonstrating their competence, their knowledge area, what expertise they have, and that's something that we have to think about. A lot of us err, especially if we're younger, or newer in a position, err on the side of this strength where we like to pound our chest and share what we know, why we are justified in being in the interaction, or even in the room that we're in. That can be a mistake, so we need to make sure that we're constantly balancing our warmth and our strength in our interactions. Confident speakers have learned ways to do that.

[0:38:28.6] MB: How do we add more warmth to our speaking?

[0:38:31.6] MA: Yes. Some of it is linguistic; again, asking questions, inclusive language. Some of it is nonverbal, so nodding and staying open in our body posture, pausing. Paraphrasing is a wonderful warmth-enabling tools, so when somebody says something, you take what they say to validate it. It doesn't mean you repeat exactly the same words, but you comment on either the emotion, or the gist of the idea. Those are ways to show warmth to people.

It could also be pre-interaction work. If you have a big meeting tomorrow, you could write somebody in advance and say, “Hey, looking forward to it.” In fact Matt, you did that for me for this very podcast. A very nice e-mail came to me saying, “Looking forward to chatting with you.” That is signaling warmth before we ever connected. There are things you can do in the moment, as well as in advance, and certainly everybody knows if you do an interview, or have a nice interaction with somebody, sending a thank-you or a follow-up, all of those demonstrate your warmth to help others see that you really are a caring person.

[0:39:30.2] MB: That's a great toolkit. I think that's something that I've heard. The reason I was curious, I personally struggle with the warmth component. I think I've sometimes fall too far in the strength side, especially the show since we focus on science and evidence. Whenever I'm speaking, I'm always like, “These are the facts,” you know what I mean? I think, I want to add in a little bit more warmth to it.

[0:39:48.5] MA: What I have found, I work with many technologists, many scientists and it is about the facts and the stats and the data, but if any of the data, the facts, the stats the technology are having – think about the impacts and ramification they have. If you're saving trees, if you're saving time, if you're saving money, if you're saving lives, there's emotion there that you can tap into and that warmth can come from that piece of it. It doesn't have to be the science itself, but it could be the implications of the science where you can really demonstrate warmth and concern.

[0:40:17.9] MB: That makes a ton of sense. Thanks for the feedback. I want to come back to this strategy you talked about of using questions as the structure of the outline for your speaking. I think that's a really compelling strategy. As somebody who grew up in the world of speech and debate and that stuff, I have a similar approach, which is I can almost never give a speech word-for-word, or memorize the specific things. I can almost only talk off of talking points and which is the flip side of a question in some ways.

[0:40:46.6] MA: Yeah, I totally get where you're coming from. I'm very similar. In fact, I actively discourage people from memorizing. Memorizing feeds into that whole performance mindset we talked about a while back. I like using questions. Let me share with you a way that might help you and others. There is a structure that I am so passionate about. It is called the what, so what, now what structure.

I believe most of our communications can be fit into this structure and you'll notice all three of those are questions; what, so what, and now what? If you are answering a question, this is your life Matt, I know you ask questions, you answer questions. You can answer a question with that structure, though what is the answer, the so what is why it's important, and the now what is what you do with the answer that you were just given.

If you are giving feedback and somebody says, “What do you think about the podcast I just did?” The what is the feedback, the so what is why it is important to the person, and the now what is what you'd like them to do differently, or continue doing if it's positive feedback. Using a structure that's question-based, what, so what, now what, can be really helpful, because not only does it help you organize your thoughts, it makes it directly relevant to your audience, because the second point, the so what is all about the value to the audience, and it helps you be concise, because there's a beginning, a middle and an end. Using that question-based approach leverage through a structure can really transform the way people communicate. I in fact write my e-mails in that structure, and people tell me that my e-mails are much clearer than others they receive, simply because there's a structure to them.

[0:42:23.6] MB: I think that's a great mini-learning from this whole conversation is that we've been talking primarily about speaking, but communicating is especially in today's world, there's so many other avenues and venues, and a lot of these lessons could be applied to something like e-mail as well.

[0:42:37.7] MA: Yeah, I totally agree. Every quarter I teach, I'll have a student come up and say, “I just used this when I was writing a presentation, or writing an e-mail and it just blew my mind that I could apply these same practices to that type of communication.” Communication at the foundation is really all the same thing. It's transmission of meaning from one person to another. These techniques apply more or less to any form of communication. I encourage everybody to think about how you can use structure and see things as opportunities in written and spoken communication.

[0:43:11.9] MB: What, so what, now what structure in a funny way uncovers essentially the hidden narrative that we use for most of our podcast episodes, right? The first third of the episode is around what are these ideas and what is the science, and the second half is why does that matter, and then the third, or the latter half of the episode is typically how do you apply that to your own life? It's funny that without even consciously doing that, we've fallen into that narrative pattern.

[0:43:36.0] MA: The secret is out. Yes. It works well, right? You've gotten great response to your podcast. That approach, that structure is really intuitive and resonates with people, and it helps you as the people who create the podcast, so that's cool.

[0:43:49.1] MB: For listeners who want to concretely implement some of the ideas, tactic strategies that we've talked about today, and I think we've given them some piece of homework already, but what would be an action step, or a piece of homework that you would give them to put some of these ideas into practice?

[0:44:04.7] MA: There are a couple things that come to mind. First and foremost, like any skill you're trying to build like an athletic skill, or something, a language skill. It's all about repetition, reflection and feedback. You need to give yourself an opportunity to get the reps in. As many opportunities as you can, to communicate in the way you want to work on. If you want to work on presentations, find avenues to give presentations. For example, I'm a big fan of Toastmasters. If you haven't heard of Toastmasters, you should check them out. It's an organization dedicated just to giving people opportunities to practice.

Check out universities and community colleges who have courses on communication. Find venues to practice. If you're passionate about a particular hobby, or in some organization you belong to, a religious organization, a public service organization, get up and speak. It's all about the reps. Then take the time to reflect. At the end of any communication, a presentation, a meeting, even an interpersonal interaction, take just a moment or two and think about what worked and what didn't work.

There's that silly definition of insanity, where you do the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. People do that with their communication. If you don't reflect on what worked and what didn't, you're likely to do the same thing again. I encourage my consulting clients, at the end of their meetings to dedicate two minutes to just say how did the communication in this meeting go, and what can we do better and differently next time. That reflection piece is critical.

Then finally, find a trusted other, a mentor, a colleague, a loved one, who can give you honest feedback. We are not the best judges of our own communication, because our communication isn't intended for us. It's intended for others. We need to have others let us know if we're hitting the mark or not. The homework is really around repetition, reflection and feedback, and take the opportunity to build your skills. Like any other skill, you can get much better at your communication.

[0:46:03.7] MB: For listeners who want to dig in, learn more be able to find you and your work online, what is the best place for them to go?

[0:46:10.6] MA: Yeah, thank you. I have several avenues people can explore. One, the book I've written, Speaking Up Without Freaking Out covers many of the concepts that we've talked about today. My consulting practice that I co-founded is boldecho.com. We want people to communicate boldly and have their messages echo long after they're gone. Then I curate a website that has a bunch of free resources that I've created in others, and it's called nofreakingspeaking.com. Those are three good avenues to continue the conversation about building confidence and compelling communication.

[0:46:45.9] MB: Well Matt, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing all of these practical strategies and tactics and it has been a great conversation and really enjoyed having you on here.

[0:46:55.1] MA: Thank you, Matt. It's been a fantastic talking to you and I've enjoyed listening to the podcast myself. Please keep up the good work.

[0:47:00.8] 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 e-mail 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.

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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.

Stop Chasing Happiness and Do This Instead with Emily Esfahani Smith

In this episode we discuss happiness. Can the pursuit of happiness backfire? Why are people more depressed an anxious than ever in a time when the world is physically safer and healthier than ever before in history? We look at the crisis of meaning in our society and examine how we can cultivate real meaning in our lives, beyond ourselves, and move towards an existence of purpose with our guest Emily Esfahani Smith. 

Emily Esfahani Smith is a journalist, positive psychology instructor, and author. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College and earned a master of applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Her articles have been read over 30 million times, her TED talk has over 1.3 million views and her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, TIME, the TED stage, and more.

• Should we be pursuing happiness?

• There’s more to life than being happy

• When we pursue happiness - it’s very self-oriented

• 2 reasons why the “pursuit of happiness can backfire"

• It’s not possible to be happy all the time - and it’s a fool's errand to try and pursue happiness all the time - it’s not a realistic expectation for your life

  1. Happiness is very “self-focused” - how is this affecting ME - its a very selfish perception 

• People are healthier, safer, more comfortable than any time in history - and yet anxiety and depression are increasing, suicide rates are increasing - why is this happening?

• Our society is in a crisis of meaning. 

• What’s the difference between meaning and happiness?

• What will get you out of a rut is not by focusing on trying to be happy - but by trying to engage in something meaningful 

• One of the best cures for depression is volunteering in your community - getting outside of your self

• We often use the terms "meaning and happiness" interchangeably and yet they are very different 

• Happiness is a transient and fleeting emotional state

• Meaning is about connecting and contributing to something beyond yourself - being connecting to your family, to god, to nature, to the universe, etc 

• Some of the essential characteristics of people with meaning in their lives

• Your life has worth and significance

  1. Your life has a sense of purpose

  2. Your life is coherent

• The self is a very poor site for meaning

• You have to connect to something beyond yourself

• When you tune in to someone else - there is such a powerful and meaningful bond that is formed - when you’re actually present, listening, and there for them. 

• You don’t have to wait until you find your “Capital M” “Meaning” - meaning can happen and be a part of every day small instances in your life and be present

• How can we find meaning beyond ourselves in a world where most of our major social institutions have eroded away to a large degree (patriotism, religion, family, etc)?

• In the modern era - the challenge of being alive is the challenge of trying to find meaning on your own

• The Four Pillars of Meaning

• Belonging - being in communities and relationships where you feel valued for who you are intrinsically

  1. Purpose - using your strengths to serve other people. Having something worthwhile to do with your time. Making a contribution to the world. 

  2. Children who do chores around the house have a higher sense of meaning

  3. Transcendence - when your sense of self-starts to turn down or turn off completely. Stepping beyond yourself.

  4. Storytelling - the story that you tell yourself about yourself

• How do we create belonging in your life?

• Forming intimate relationships with others

  1. Belonging is a choice that we make - and we can choose to cultivate in any given moment

  2. You can also take the initiative to create these new types of communities within your own life and community

• How do we change the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves?

• The first thing is to recognize that we are constantly telling ourselves stories about ourselves

• A “contamination” story and how that can change your self-perception and create negative results in your life?

• Something happened in my life, then there was a negative result, not I’m “contaminated"

• A “redemptive” story - a story that moves from bad things happening to good things happening

• Something bad happened in my life, and that has made me grow, made me stronger 

• If you’re telling a negative story, how do you start telling a better story?

• Narrative writing, journaling 

• Is leading a meaningful life just about accomplishment and achieving results?

Thank you so much for listening!

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [Book] The Power of Meaning: Finding Fulfillment in a World Obsessed with Happiness by Emily Esfahani Smith

• [Article] There's More to Life Than Being Happy by Emily Esfahani Smith

• [Book] Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Martin E. P. Seligman

• [Twitter] Emily Esfahani Smith

• [Personal Site] Emily Esfahani Smith

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] 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 two million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries and part of the self-help for smart people podcast network.

In this episode, we discuss happiness. Can the pursuit of happiness backfire? Why are people more depressed and more anxious than ever in a time where the world is physically safer and healthier than it’s ever been in history.

We look at the crisis of meaning in our society and examine how we can cultivate real meaning in our lives beyond ourselves, and move towards an existence of purpose with our guest Emily Esfahani Smith.

Do you need more time? Time for work, time for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined, and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign-up and join our e-mail list. It’s called How You can Create Time of the Things That Really Matter in Life.

You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the e-mail list at successpodcast.com. You’re also going to get exclusive content that’s only available to our e-mail subscribers. We recently pre-released an episode and an interview to our e-mail subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience, and that had tremendous implications because there was a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first.

With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guest in a live exclusive interview just for e-mail subscribers. There’s some amazing stuff that’s available only to e-mail subscribers that’s only going on if you subscribe and sign-up to the e-mail list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Or if you’re driving around right now, if you’re out and about and you’re on the go, you don’t have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44-222. That’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.
In our previous episode, we discussed how the impossible becomes possible We looked at how to create paradigm shifting breakthroughs, dug into the science and research at the frontier of peak human performance to understand what’s at the core of nearly every gold medal or world championship, the powerful concept of flow.

We examined how to create flow in our lives, how you can use it as a tool to become 400% more creative, to learn skills 200% faster and much more. We dug into all of that with our previous guest, Steven Kotler.

Now for our interview with Emily.

[0:02:56.6] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Emily Esfahani Smith. Emily is a journalist, positive psychology instructor and author. She’s a graduate of Dartmouth College and earned her masters of applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Her articles have been read over 30 million times. Her TED Talk has been viewed over 1.3 million times and her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Time and much more.

Emily, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:21.6] ES: Thanks for having me.

[0:03:22.9] MB: Well, we’re really excited to have you on the show today and really pumped to dig into some of the things you talk about. Let’s start off with something that I think a lot of people almost assume as a given and don’t even really question or drill back down and think about is should we be pursuing happiness?

[0:03:40.7] ES: This is the question that motivated me to write my book The Power of Meaning. Actually, my book grew out of an article that I wrote for the Atlantic that was called There is More to Life than Being Happy. I was in graduate school in positive psychology at the time, which is this field that integrate, studies the good life, meaning, happiness, things like that.

As I was learning that research working as a journalist and began to get really concerned and bothered by this message that we received constantly in our culture that a good life is a happy life and that we should pursue happiness and that the whole – they struck as me as odd, was because I knew so many people in my life and as many people growing up who weren’t focused on that pursuit. They were engaged in really stressful activities, like their work, raising children, dealing with illnesses, helping in their communities, and they were stressed out, they would get frustrated. They weren’t focused on their own happiness and they weren’t even happy much of the time. Yet to me, there seem to be a real value and significance in what they were doing.

Then coming upon the research, it confirmed my intuition, which was that there is this whole new body of work that shows that when we pursue happiness and prioritize it the way our culture encourages us to do. It’s this very self-oriented pursuit and that it can make us actually unhappy and feel lonely.

In contrast, when we look to another way of living our lives, one that’s focused on the pursuit of meaningfulness, or on doing things and contributing in ways that lie outside of yourself that this is a much more a fulfilling path and leads to a deeper sense of satisfaction.

[0:05:37.9] MB: I want to explore that idea a little bit more, this notion that the pursuit of happiness can somehow make us happy – or sorry, the pursuit of happiness can make us unhappy, or potentially anxious?

[0:05:48.9] ES: Okay. I think it’s an interesting finding, because there’s so much out there about 10 steps to happiness, all these books that you can buy to make yourself happier. I think that there are two reasons at least why the pursuit of happiness can backfire. I think the first one is that we have really high expectations of what a happy life should be. This really interestingly have my historical perspective are concept of happiness has changed over the course of western civilization, but especially over the last 200 years, where happiness used to mean a state of leading a meaningful life. Happiness was in a positive emotion, the way that we think of it today.

Then about 2, 300 years ago, the definition started changing to mean, feeling maximizing positive feelings and minimizing negative feelings. If that’s the definition of happiness and you’re expecting to be in that state all the time, you’re going to be disappointed, because feelings and emotions come and go. It’s not possible to be happy all the time. The very definition of an emotion is that it’s a fleeting state. I think we have this unfair expectation for what a happy life look like that’s just not realistic.

I think the other thing is that when you set your sights on the pursuit of happiness, it can put you in this mindset that very much focuses you on yourself, because you’re constantly evaluating am I happy? Is this making me happy? How is this affecting me? That mindset takes you away from pursuing things that are actually deep and meaningful, because those deep and meaningful things won’t necessarily make you happy. We know from the research that it’s when you pursue the meaningful objectives and projects and relationships that you end up with a deeper sense of happiness down the road.

It’s the very – this mindset that focuses on happiness takes you away from what’s really important. When you’re taken away from what’s really important, you’re depriving yourself of this deeper sense of happiness that you may want.

[0:07:52.8] MB: I think it’s really interesting that the data supports this idea that in many sense,  people are physically the safest they’ve ever been, objectively living – at the highest end living that they’ve ever been living at. Yet, suicide rates are rising in many cases. People are less happy, despite being physically more comfortable and healthier, etc.

[0:08:13.2] ES: Exactly. When I came across that bit of research, it really surprised me. Basically, human beings Steven Pinker is this social psychologist who writes a lot about this, that nearly every conceivable measure if you look across the span of history, life has been getting better for human beings. You’re much less likely to die from a violent death than you were at any point in human history.

Every year, millions of people are being lifted out of poverty, quality of life has never been better for people. Less people die of sickness and illness than they ever have before. It’s a really good time to be alive.

Yet at the same time, there is this crisis of meaning that a lot of people are dealing with, and that’s reflective in these rising suicide rates, rising rates of depression, anxiety and loneliness. What’s really interesting is that when social scientists try to figure out what’s driving these rising tide of despair, this increase in suicide and depression and what have you, they find that it’s not a lack of happiness in life, but a lack of meaning.

I want to just say something more about this point, because I think it’s a little bit counter-intuitive. I think when we look at somebody who’s feeling depressed, or suicidal, or anxious or whatever. Or when we feel those ways ourselves, we think, okay, I feel that the solution is to feel better. That means, making myself go happier.

In fact, that’s not going to get you out of the rut. What’s going to get you out of the rut is engaging in some meaningful project, because that’s the way you get outside of your own head, outside of these voices that are telling you how bad you are, how terrible life is and reengaging with the world, coming outside of yourself and realizing, “Well, actually I do have a role to play. I am needed. The things I do matter.”

I had a professor of psychology in grad school who was also a clinical psychologist. In other words, he saw patients in addition to performing research. He said something that really stuck with me, which is that one of the best cures for depression is going out and volunteering in your community, because it gets you outside of your head and makes you feel like you’re making a difference.

[0:10:26.3] MB: This distinction between meaning and happiness, I think a lot of people might conflate those things, or even think that they’re the same thing. Tell me about what distinguishes meaning from happiness and how are they different?

[0:10:37.6] ES: It’s such a good question. When I first came upon this body of work distinguishing, meaning in happiness, I think it was a lightbulb moment for me, because like many, I thought – I use those terms interchangeable. Yet, I felt this dissatisfaction with the way our culture was talking about what a good life is about. It occurred to me that once I was able to pull these terms apart and understand them as separate ways to live a good life that that dissatisfaction went away. It was clarifying.

Happiness as I alluded to earlier, it’s a positive mental and emotional state. If you feel good, you’re happy. If you feel bad, you’re unhappy. It’s transient. It comes and goes. It lives in the moment. Meaning though is bigger. Psychologists say that the defining feature of leading a meaningful life is connecting and contributing to something beyond yourself. For some people that might mean, raising their children, or being involved in a family unit.

For others, it might mean contributing to their communities, whether it’s a church community, a religious community of any kind, their work community, or it could be more cosmic than that, like feeling connected to God, or nature, or the universe. That’s a defining feature of meaningful life. When people say their lives are meaningful in surveys and things like that, they list them as meaningful, because three conditions have been satisfied.

One is they believe their lives have a sense of worth and significance. You think your life matters. The second is their lives are driven by a sense of purpose. There’s some goal, or principle that is motivating them and driving them into the future. Finally they think of their lives as coherent. That means that when they look across their life, their own lives and also when they look at the world in general, they don’t see their experiences and the world around them as random occurrences, as disconnected, as nonsensical, but they see what’s happening around them as part of a larger whole that makes sense and that helps them understand why they are the way they are, and why the world is the way it is.

[0:12:56.0] MB: Obviously, your work ed has been – Martin Seligman’s research has been foundational to much of the work that you’ve done. When I read the book Learn Happiness, or Learn Optimism for the first time, one of the most standout lines for me was this phrase that’s almost like a throwaway phrase. It’s towards at the end of the book, but he says that the self is a very poor sight for meaning.

I think that really underscores what you’ve unearthed as well, this idea that in today’s society, everybody’s so caught up in their own pursuit of me, me, me and happiness and self-focus, when in reality happiness, or not happiness but me they see, I may even be contemplating them now, meaning really derives from something much richer and something beyond you. It’s something contributing or serving something beyond yourself.

[0:13:42.2] ES: Exactly. No, I love that sentence from Marty’s book that the self is a pursuit for meaning. It’s exactly right. You have to connect to something beyond yourself. That could be just an encounter with another person. I think for me, it’s a constant lesson that I have to relearn and it seems every single day that when I tune in to somebody else, whether it’s a stranger I’m getting to know for the first time, or I’m having a conversation with my husband or my friend, that there is such a powerful bond and meaningful bond that is formed when both people are present and listening to each other and truly there for one another. It fills you up and gives you that sense of fulfillment.

I think one of the things about meaning is that we think it’s this huge thing that you have to find or tackle and at meaning. When you think of it in terms about Marty is saying, it lies outside yourself, you find that there are lots of ways that you can search for meaning and find it in your day-to-day life.

[0:14:43.5] MB: That’s a really, really key point and something that I think personally I’ve definitely gotten tripped up on, and I think it’s easy for people to get tripped up on is this idea that you have to find – as you call that capital and meaning, you have to spend days, weeks, years trying to figure out what’s the purpose of my life when in reality, in many cases it’s the small moments that really help build towards that.

[0:15:05.1] ES: Exactly. I was talking to someone the other day who grew up a foodist. He’s a serial entrepreneur now, but he had this foodist way of looking at things. We were talking about meaning and he said something that I thought was really powerful, which is that living a meaningful life is about doing whatever you’re doing in the present moment well.

Being a parent, doing that well, washing the dishes, doing it well, this podcast, doing it well. There’s something about just this active mastery that takes us outside of ourselves and that gives us a sense of pride and fulfillment.

[0:15:41.5] MB: In today’s society, a lot of our major social institutions and things that people use to ascribe to and derive meaning from beyond themselves, things like even the nation, the country, patriotism used to be such a bigger thing. Religion is obviously is eroded tremendously, so that the family unit has eroded. How do we think about cultivating, creating meaning in a society, in a world where all of those previous pillars of meaning have eroded and people are in many ways adrift now?

[0:16:11.9] ES: That is the problem of being a person in the modern world. It’s essential existential problem. There were all these sources. Meaning, that we’re defaults sources of meaning. You didn’t have to – it’s not like you were choosing to be for most people anyways, choosing to be – to ascribe to certain religious dogmas, or choosing to identify with your nation that was just part of the water, the air that you were breathing and it conferred meaning in life.

You see that when you go to countries that are not yet developed. Third-world countries, where they haven’t experienced modernity yet, they still are very much living in that world. They get so much meaning from religion and their communities and their tribes, or their sense of nation. In those countries too, you find that there is lower suicide rates and all these other markers of a crisis of meaning don’t exist there as they do in the modern world, excuse me, in developed countries.

The question is what do we do about that? I think that one answer is clear. We don’t want to go back to a time where the material circumstances of our lives are worse, but we have more meaning in our lives. We want countries like Sierra Leone where there is this high sense of meaning, but it’s so poor we want them to enter into the modern world, so they can have a higher quality of life. Then if you don’t want to move backwards, how do you move forward?

I think that the existential philosophers, like Niche, like Sartre, they talk about this that in the modern world, the challenge of being alive is the challenge of choosing to find meaning on your own. There’s a million paths ahead of you. It can be overwhelming, there’s no default path to meaning anymore, so you have to choose. That can feel overwhelming, but it’s a responsibility that we each have to take.

One of the things that motivated me to write my book was trying to understand, okay, if you are at that fork in the road, when you’re trying to figure out which path do you take to lead a meaningful life, are there certain things, certain pillars let’s say that you can lean on that will help you find meaning in your life? There were. In my research, I interviewed a bunch of people, read thousands really of pages of research, psychology, philosophy, literature, you name it, and I started noticing that there were these four themes that came up again and again in the stories people told me and in the research that I was reading.

They are what I think of as the wellsprings of meaning. Whatever path you choose, these four things, a combination of them, or maybe all four of them are what bring meaning to our lives. The first one is belonging. Having a sense of belonging, being in communities and relationships where you feel valued for who you are intrinsically and where you value other people in turn. 

The second one is something I mentioned briefly earlier, and it’s purpose. Purpose is about making – having something worthwhile to do with your time. What that often means is having some pursuit or project that involves making a contribution to the world. Maybe your purpose is to find a cure for cancer. A lot of people have more local purposes, more humble purposes that are equally powerful for them, like raising their children, being a good person.

There is a study that shows that kids who do chores around the house have a stronger sense of purpose. It’s a wonderful example of what that guy I said what was telling about, that meaning comes from doing something in the moment and doing it well. Well, for the chores, I think what was going on is that the kids felt like they were a part of a larger project, which was helping with it, maintaining of a household, helping their parents out. It was this thing that made them useful and valued.

The third pillar is transcendence. These are those moments when your sense of self starts to turn down or turn off completely, and you feel connected to something much bigger than yourself, whether it’s nature, the universe, humanity as a whole, God, people had these experiences during meditation, listening to music, going to an art museum and having an encounter with beauty. There are a lot of different ways to experience transcendence.

Then the final one is storytelling. Storytelling goes back to what I was saying about coherence earlier. When I’m talking about storytelling, what I’m really talking about is the story that you tell yourself about yourself, about how you became the person that you are today. I think that’s a framework that I present in my book, that if you want to live a meaningful life, try to cultivate these pillars of belonging, purpose, transcendence and storytelling. That will set you on your way.

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[0:23:26.6] MB: Let’s dig in a little bit more, maybe starting with belonging. How can we better cultivate or find that belonging, coming back to this idea we talked about before in a world where oftentimes it feels like there’s traditional ways that people used to find it have eroded or evaporated.
[0:23:45.3] ES: For me, there are few ways I go about this in my own life. The one is what I was talking about earlier, which is just forming these micro-connections with other people. I think it’s so easy to go through life, basically objectifying others. I don’t mean that even in a sexual sense. They usually use that term objectifying in a sexual sense. What I mean is just the other person is just an object in your periphery and you don’t really see them for who they are and the fact that they have a whole story, a whole history that if you just knew a little bit about it, would bring you two closer together.

I was at a conference this weekend where there were a bunch of people I didn’t know. I’m someone who’s introverted that’s always a little bit intimidating of the situation. This goes back to what I said earlier about this lesson that I had to learn over and over again; as soon as you start talking to people on a deep level expressing interest in them, forming this micro-connection, they open up and then you open up, and then they’re just fond of belonging that form between you that can be really powerful. Maybe you don’t see them again, but for the rest of your life, maybe stay in touch, who knows? Maybe they become the person that you end up marrying.

In that moment, that bond of belonging forms and it’s powerful. Recognizing that belonging is a choice that we make and it lives in the moment and that we can choose to cultivate it with another person just by the presence that we bring to a conversation.

The second thing is yes, a lot of the old communities are dying. There are ways to form new ones. I would encourage people to take the leadership, to take the initiative, to do this in your own life, whether it’s work or just in your own community. I’ll give an example, so I’m involved with this project called the Ben Franklin Circles. These are basically small groups of people that meet all around the country to talk about values and character and what it means to lead a good life.

Franklin, our founding father of course had these 13 virtues that he thought were critical ingredients to leading a meaningful life. The virtues include things like humility and industriousness and frugality. Some of them are super old-fashion, like chastity. The idea is that each meeting we get together and we talk about one of these ideas, one of these virtues and whether it’s still relevant in modern life and how it’s still relevant in modern life.

I run one of these circles here in Washington DC and we meet about once a month, once every two months. What was really powerful to me as I started doing this is how quickly a community forms and how quickly people were willing to make themselves intimate and vulnerable to each other. I mean, these were strangers beforehand and almost immediately we were able to form a community, and the reason I think is because we were gathering together to talk about this common interest that we have in what it means to live a good life. Two, to talk about things that really matter to us, like values and virtues and character.

To do at Washington DC is specially powerful, because right now there is so much in our country and in this city in particular that’s tearing people apart. Doing this group was a reminder that whatever our political differences are, whatever our religious differences are, no matter where we’re from in the country, there is a common set of values that we share, and if we come together around those values, we can really cultivate belonging.

[0:27:23.4] MB: I love that example and it’s such a great way to take responsibility for proactively creating that belonging within your own life. I love to dig into this concept of storytelling as well. That seems really, really interesting to me. How can we go about changing the stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves?

[0:27:44.2] ES: I think the thing to – the first thing we have to remember with storytelling that helps us in that process of changing the story is recognizing that we’re telling a story. I think that we don’t always realize that we are creating this constant narrative in our heads about who we are, about why this or that and that happened to us, why this person said that to us, how our childhood affected us, it’s all these little stories that we tell about just daily occurrences, and then also the broader story of our narrative art that we’re telling.

We don’t always realize that we’re telling a story. We think that, “Oh, this happened and this happened, then this happened and all of a sudden, here I am.” Really, what making narrative and interpretative choices about what details we include in the story and which ones we don’t include, because it would be impossible to include every single detail in that narrative.

It may be that as we’re making these narrative choices, we end up telling a story that hold us back, rather than moves us forward. Let me give you an example. There is a few different types of stories that psychologists find that people tell about themselves. One of them is called a contamination story, so a story that moves from good things happening to bad things happening.

In the research, there was I remember one example coming up of a woman who met this man. They were going to have the baby together. It’s really, really wonderful. Then he died unexpectedly and that was the story that she told. It was really good, then it went to really bad. People tell stories like that, in turns out are more anxious and depressed and believe their lives are less meaningful.

That’s a story that would perhaps hold you back, because you’re in this negative mindset, you dwell on it, you illuminate, you’re not able to move into the future in a healthy way. That have been the story, the opposite from a contamination story is a redemptive story. It’s a story that moves from bad things happening to good things happening. Let’s take that same example. Let’s say that you have the same woman and she says, “I met this man. It was wonderful. We had a child together and he died and it was terrible. It was traumatizing. He was the love of my life. I didn’t have many more and then my child no longer had a father. I felt like I didn’t know what I was going to do.”

“Then as time went on, I realized that this experience as difficult as it was, made me grow in so many ways. It deepened my spiritual life, it made me realize what my true purpose was, because he died of cancer and I started doing activism work in cancer centers and groups. It was horrible, but given that it happened, it made me grow in all these ways.”

That would be redemptive story. They’re just terrible thing that happened, but she finds a silver lining in it that makes the suffering seem worthwhile in some way, even though all things be equal she still wouldn’t have wanted her husband to have died. People who tell stories like that redemptive stories, they rate their lives as more meaningful. There are these types of stories that we can tell that are more conducive to leading whole meaningful lives. A redemptive story is one of them, there are other kinds of stories as well; stories that are defined by love as the theme, stories of agency. In other words, stories where you’re in control in making things happen and where you feel like your life matters, and stories of growth, which is like the one I just said. The themes overlap as well.

The question then is okay, for telling a bad story, how do you start telling one that’s better? There are a lot of different ways that you can do this. I mean, some people go to a therapist, they seek out professional health and that’s really helpful to them. I think that you don’t necessarily have to do that. You can reflect on your story and do the work on your own too. If you’re willing to be introspective, put the time and effort into it.

There’s a really rich body of research around narrative writing, so sitting down and writing about your most difficult experiences for 15 minutes a day, for three to four days in a row. It turns out that people who do that end up finding more meaning and what happened to them, as those three or four days go on and they end up finding some positive meaning specifically, some silver lining.

If they start by telling a contamination story, they end by telling a redemptive story. This isn’t for everyone of course, but it’s for statistically amount of people. What does that tell? I think it tells us that writing, journaling, reflecting on your experiences in a deep and sustained way is one way to change your story.

I just too as a final point for this, that it’s not going to happen overnight. These Sundays, it was 15 minutes three to four days in a row. I think for a lot of people, it’s going to be a process, especially when it comes to more difficult experiences, a process that can take years to work through.

[0:32:35.7] MB: I think it’s fascinating that you can look at two completely opposite perspective on the same event and you can tell yourself these almost polar opposite stories and the story that you tell yourself about it has a substantial impact on your emotional state, your reaction and your behavior, even in many cases can be years down the road.

[0:32:56.2] ES: Exactly, exactly. I mean, it affects your health. Those studies that I talked about where they’re writing for three to four days, one of the major findings is that the people who did that were healthier later on. They were less likely to be sick. They measured their blood. Their immune system was in a better shape. The fact is pretty profound.

[0:33:15.8] MB: Changing gears a little bit, I want to look at the current culture that we have around ambition and success and reconcile the pursuit of those kinds of things with the pursuit of meaning. In your mind though, are those things conflicting, or could they have healthy relationship with one another?

[0:33:36.0] ES: Yeah, it’s a really interesting question. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. I think there is this sense in our culture that among a certain group of people who are maybe what we would call part of the elite, that you have to accomplish, you have to be successful that living a meaningful life is about achieving credentials, like going to a good school, getting a certain type of job, buying a house, etc., etc., etc., getting that promotion, making it to the C-suite, on and on it goes.

You constantly looking up the ladder, not realizing that there’s – there are people ahead of you having this competitive mindset and trying to get ahead. I think that that can be a really damaging way to think about how to lead your life. I mean, it’s the reason why I think people are experiencing so much burnout. I think it’s a big part of why there is so much spiritual emptiness among people as well. It’s part of why we have the meaning prices is because we define our worth and our sense of significance in terms of our career success.

The problem with that is that when we’re not successful and not all of us will be, we’re not going to all accomplish our dreams and become the people we hope we will become in terms of our careers, there is this real reckoning that happens. We were forced to conclude that, “Oh, maybe my life isn’t worthwhile, because I didn’t do all these things. Now my friends are doing them and I’m not doing them.”

I think there’s a real problem there, and I think that the solution to it is redefining success more in terms of leading a meaningful life. A psychologist on the 20th century who I think is helpful here, his name is Ericson. Ericson thought of life as a series of developmental stages. As you go through life, your job is to master certain developmental tasks. When you’re young for example, you’re learning how to trust other people and trust the world around you. As you become a teenager, you’re trying to figure out who you are and what your purpose is. As you become a middle-age adult, the task is to become generative. This word he coins called generativity.

What it means is that you’re making a contribution to your society. If in the first half of life you’re thinking about how you can – what you are, who you are and what your purpose is, and the second half of life you’re thinking about how to help other people rise up, how to mentor them, how to raise children, how to be a community leader. For him, that is the definition of success and living a meaningful life.

I think that if you’re caught in this mindset of I need to succeed, I need to accomplish, I need to climb that ladder and it’s unfulfilling to you, maybe or if you’re caught in that mindset and you didn’t succeed and if you feel like a failure in some regard, maybe reframing what success is about would be helpful and reframing it in terms of not winning all the time, but of being a person who contributes to others and who helps other people move along in their path.

[0:36:53.3] MB: I think that’s a great definition. It’s funny. I mean, I think in many ways our show title, the Science of Success can be misleading at times, because it’s not just about the traditional trapping of success. It’s really much more about when we talk about success, it’s that definition that you’re talking about. It’s living a meaningful life, it’s doing what you want to do in your life. It’s not necessarily just the acquisition of fame or money or reputation or whatever.

For listeners who want to concretely implement some of the ideas and things that we’ve talked about today, what would be one piece of homework or one action item that you would give them as an action step to implement some of the ideas that we’ve discussed?

[0:37:30.6] ES: I talked about writing earlier and journaling. I think it gets a bad rep, especially today when there is like gratitude journal, your best self-journal that can seem a little hokie. I think there’s something to be said about having a Google Doc on your computer, or having a pad of paper, where you can sit down and write about the things that you’re trying to process, whether that’s your definition of success, some experience of failure that you had that was really painful, a moment of adversity that you’re trying to overcome.

Just sitting and writing about it and reflecting on it in a deep and sustained way for maybe 20 minutes a week, I think that that’s really powerful way to build meaning and to develop wisdom as well, which is a really critical component of living a meaningful life.

[0:38:19.8] MB: For listeners who want to find you and your work online, what’s the best place for them to find you?

[0:38:25.2] ES: I’m on Twitter. My handle is @MEsfahaniSmith. I also have a website emilyesfahanismith.com. You can  also find my author page on Facebook.

[0:38:37.2] MB: Well Emily, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing all these wisdom. I think a really important conversation around how we can misconceived of happiness and how we can really focus more around creating meaning in our lives.

[0:38:49.4] ES: Thank you for having me.

[0:38:50.7] 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 e-mail. My e-mail 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.

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When the Impossible Becomes Possible - The Secrets of Flow Revealed with Steven Kotler

In this episode we discuss how the impossible becomes possible. We look at how to create paradigm shifting breakthroughs, dig into the science and research at the frontier of peak human performance to understand what’s at the core of nearly every gold medal or world championship - the powerful concept of flow. How do we create flow in our lives, how can we use it as a tool to become 400% more creative and learn skills 200% faster? We dig into this and much more with our guest Steven Kotler. 

Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist and the cofounder and director of research of the Flow Research Collective. His most recent work, Stealing Fire, was a national bestseller and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Steven’s work have been translated into over 40 languages and appeared in over 100 publications, including The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Wired and TIME.

• Wherever people are taking huge risks to change the world, you find flow 

• How do you create Paradigm Shifting Breakthroughs?

• Whenever you see the impossible become possible you see two things:

• People leverage and take advantage of disruptive technology

  1. People finding ways to extend human capacity

• Peak performance is about being fanatical - repeating, week after week, year after year, for your entire career. You have to have that level of hunger, motivation, and drive

• Steven’s work is focused on studying the peak performance state known as Flow

• How can we use Flow to massively level up performance?

• Major Characteristics of Flow

• Flow is definable - it has  core characteristics

  1. Complete Concentration

     1. Time Dilation

  2. Flow is measurable

  3. Flow is universal

  4. Flow is a spectrum experience - you can be in micro flow or macro flow

  5. Flow often mistaken for a mystical experience before it was measured and studied

• Similarities and differences between flow and addiction?

• What’s the relationship between the Brain’s default mode network and flow?

• People who have the highest life satisfaction have the most flow in their lives

• Every gold medal or world championship that’s been won - had flow at it’s core

• McKinsey did a 10 year study on flow - it made top executives 500% more effective

• Flow creates a 400% - 700% increase in creativity

• Can that really be true?

  1. What is creativity?

• Soldiers learn skills 230% faster in flow states

• What is creativity and how do you measure it?

• The act of creating

  1. Problem formation, idea generation, pattern recognition

• Triangle of High Performance - the foundational principle of ultimate performance in today’s world

• Motivation

  1. Creativity

  2. Learning

• When you’re in a flow state you’re actually using LESS of your brain not more of it

• Your brain is burning a lot of energy and so it shut’s this part of the brain down

  1. As your need for concentration goes up, the brain starts shutting down non-critical areas to maximize attention

• Why does time pass so strangely in flow states?

• Your sense of self falls apart when you move into a flow state - increasing your performance

• Flow shifts your brain wave function profoundly

• Flow also creates a huge dump of positive neurochemicals and stress hormones are flushed out of your system and replaced with “big five” neurochemicals

• All five of these chemicals are pleasure drugs / reward drugs 

• Flow is one of, if not the most, addictive experiences on earth

• Creativity is recombinatory - it’s what happens when your brain combines new ideas with old information and creates something new

• It’s early days in flow research - but neuroscience is still trying to figure out huge pieces of the data and research

• Flow is a tool, it can be used for good, it can used for ill

• Playing a video game puts you in a flow state

• Anybody can access flow because flow stats have triggers - flow is universal provided certain initial conditions are met

• One of the most important triggers is the challenge/skills balance - when the challenge slightly exceeds our skillset

• Complete Concentration is the #1 Necessary Pre-Requisite for Creating Flow States

• “F*ck Off I’m Flowing"

  1. You need 90-120 min periods with total concentration

  2. No email, no pop-ins, no distractions, etc

• How do you tune the challenge/skills balance to trigger flow states?

• If your challenge can be 4% greater than your skills you’re in the right zone

  1. Its totally arbitrary - it changes every day for every individual - and even within individuals 

• Discomfort is a great trigger to know you’re about to get into a flow state

• Peak performers have the problem of biting off too much of a challenge - puts too much fear into the equation and ends up blocking flow and locking yourself out of peak performance

• Chunk those challenges into smaller and smaller sub challenge until they’re “slightly challenging”

  1. You have to go slow to go fast

• “Let my people go surfing” - Patagonia

• Training up flow while you’re surfing trains the brain to enter flow states in general

  1. Heightened creativity lasts for several days

  2. Conscious altered and being focused is usually 1-1.5 hrs

• How long do flow triggers carry over from fun activities?

• You can’t live in flow all the time 

• Struggle

  1. Flow

  2. Recovery

• You have to move through the whole cycle before you can restart a flow state

• A place where most people screw up Flow - they take the amplified creativity from flow and ride it til the very bitter end until they are very exhausted. That makes it more difficult to jump into flow the next time. 

• Take yourself near the end and then call it quits. 

• Rest & Recovery is a core component of repeatedly re-entering flow states

• Naps

  1. Breaks

  2. Reset your consciousness/ focus on another problem 

  3. Active recovery protocols are really important

  4. Watching TV and drinking a beer is not a good recovery protocol

     1. Meditation

     2. Long Sauna

     3. Yoga

     4. Hot bath, massages

• The intersection of flow states and the Science of Spirituality

• The same neurobiological states from flow show up in the same place as mystical experiences, psychedelic states, states of awe, near death experiences. All of these experiences neurobiologically are very very similar.

• There is biology behind our mythology - mystical experiences are very similar to flow states. 

• Psychedelics are super powerful for healing capacity, but there are some positive applications to boosting creativity and more. 

• Psychedelic experiences are biologically indistinguishable from spiritual experiences

• Oneness with everything - the perennial philosophy - in every major tradition on earth

• From Tibetan buddhist to Franciscan nuns - the brain experience of being “one with everything” is the same

• In Science, at every level of scale you see one-ness. The separation from the universe is a controlled illusion maintained by the brain. From quantum cells to stardust - we are one with the universe. 

• We don’t live in reality - we live an estimated construction built by our brain. We create reality as we go along. 

Thank you so much for listening!

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [Book] Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

• [Book] The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler

• [Book] Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal

• [Book] Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

• [Wiki Article] Marsh Chapel Experiment

• [Website] Andrew Newberg

• [Website] Flow Research Collective

• [Personal Site] Steven Kotler

• [SoS Episode] Seven Catalysts To Creating Progress and Becoming A More Effective Leader with Dr. Teresa Amabile

• [SoS Episode] Everything You Know About Sleep Is Wrong with Dr. Matthew Walker

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] 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 2 million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries and part of the Self-Help for Smart People Podcast Network.

In this episode, we discuss how the possible becomes possible. We look at how to create paradigm-shifting breakthroughs, dig into the science and research at the frontier of peak human performance to understand what's at the core of nearly every gold medal and world championship; the powerful concept of flow. How do we create flow in our lives? How can we use it as a tool to become 400% more creative or learn skills 200% faster? We dig into this and much more with our guest, Steven Kotler. 

Do you need more time? Time for work time for thinking and reading? Time for the people in your life? Time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our email list. It's called How You Can Create Time for the Things That Really Matter in Life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the email list at successpodcast.com. You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our email subscribers. 

We recently pre-released an episode and an interview to our email subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience, and that had tremendous implications because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the email list first. 

With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our email list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live, exclusive interview just for email subscribers. 

There are some amazing stuff that's available only to email subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage, or if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you’re on the go you and you don't have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. 

In our previous episode, we discussed how to make better decisions under conditions of uncertainty. We look at the worst call in the history of football, discussed examples from life, business, and even high-stakes poker to understand how to make the best possible decision in a world filled with unknowns. 

What exactly is a good decision? Is that different from a good outcome? We look at this key question and uncover the wisdom hidden in the reality that these two things might be completely different. All of these and much more with our previous guest, Annie Duke. 

Now, for our interview with Steven. 

[0:03:01.3] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Steven Kotler. Steven is a New York Times best-selling author, award-winning journalist and the cofounder and director of research of the Flow Genome Project. His most recent work, Stealing Fire, was a national bestseller and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His work has been translated in over 40 languages and appeared in over 100 publications including the New York Times, The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and much more. 

Steven, welcome to The Science of Success. 

[0:03:28.9] SK: Matt, thanks for having me. 

[0:03:29.8] MB: Well, we’ve very excited to have you on the show today. As I was kind of telling you in the preshow conversation, I’m a big fan of your work and I’ve been reading your books for a number of years. So it's great to have you on the show and kind of dig into some of the stuff you've been working on recently. 

[0:03:42.8] SK: Thank you. It’s really nice you say. 

[0:03:44.3] MB: So I want to start out with one of the ideas that you've written and talked about and I find really interesting, which is this kind of notion of creating paradigm-shifting breakthroughs. What exactly does that mean and how did you kind of come to the place of sort of thinking about those? 

[0:04:00.6] SK: At sort of at the center of the work I do has always been a kind of a singular question, which is; what does it take to do the impossible? What I mean by that is what does it take to achieve paradigm-shifting breakthroughs, or huge kind of levels up and in-game, and this is cross domains, right? I was interested in sports, in science, in technology, in business, wherever people are taking on huge and significant challenges. That’s sort of where you find me, and usually what you see is whenever you see the impossible becoming possible, in my experience you see one of two things interacting, right? You see people leveraging and taking advantage of disruptive technology and you see people finding ways to extend human capability. So I tend to play at the intersection of those two things. 

[0:04:50.2] MB: So I want to dig into that a little bit more. When you talk about this kind of idea of making the impossible become possible, and I know you’ve studied in many cases kind of worked alongside these people, like extreme athletes and really peak performers. Are these lessons that can actually be applied to sort of individual normal people or do they only really work for kind of extreme athletes and astronauts and these kind of top people?

[0:05:16.0] SK: Two-part answer, all right? I’m going to give you the user-friendly part one is, yes, of course. I mean, that's one of the amazing lessons of this kind of work. Bold, essentially – Abundance is a book about people solving impossible challenges in the world with technology. Bold is a book for how anybody can solve those challenges in the world of technology and build business around the ideas and such. Bold is the application of that stuff. 

Rise of Superman looks at action, adventure sports athletes who are extending the bounds of physical possibility, redefining kind of the physical limits of those species, and it kind of breaks down a little of how. I think Steel and Fire gives you much more of the application of that in ordinary lives. It takes an out of action sports, takes my research on flow, and talks about how it’s showing up everywhere from business, to technology, entrepreneurship, and so forth. So I think that the part one of this answer is, yes, of course. 

I think part two is peak performers have their ferocious about peak performance, and I always say if you're interested in this stuff and you want to know what are the three things you can do Monday morning, you're applying the wrong game. You’re not actually interested in peak performance. Because the truth of the matter is it's three things on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, repeat, week after week, year after year for a career. That's what you see with peak performers. You have to have that level of hunger. You have to have that level of motivation and drive. 

So the answer is, yeah, anybody can do this stuff. The tools and the techniques, the technologies are available to everyone at this point. They’ve absolutely been democratized across the boards. The question is; does the individual actually want this? You actually want to tackle those kind of challenges? You're going to suffer enormously along the way, but you probably can get it done. 

[0:07:20.3] MB: I want to dig in to this a little bit more. When you talk about kind of – You talked about the two components that make the impossible possible, which is technologies, or disruptive technology and extending human capacity. I want to look at specifically on the side of extending human capacity and some of the work and the research that you've done at that, at kind of the Flow Genome Project. What does that mean and how do you sort of think about extending human capacity?

[0:07:44.0] SK: The Flow Genome Project, we study the peak performance stake, known as flow, and we’re a research and training organization. What we’re interested in is how can we use flow to massively level up performance? That’s essentially the heart of the work we do. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, flow has a lot of synonyms, runner's high, being in the zone, being unconscious. It’s technically defined as an optimal state of performance when we feel our best and we perform our best. 

More specifically, it refers to any of those moments of rapid attention and total absorption. It’s so focused on the task at hand that everything else just seems to disappear. Action awareness will kind of merge together, your sense of self will vanish, time passes strangely. It will slow down. Sometimes you get a freeze-frame effect, memories from a car crash. More frequently, it speeds up and you get so engrossed in what you're doing five hours passes by in like five minutes. Throughout all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof. So whenever you see the impossible become possible, you’re seeing people leveraging flow to make that happen.

[0:08:55.9] MB: And I want to get into and spend some time talking about kind of what creates flow and how we can cultivate it in our lives. But before we dig into that, I want to understand a little bit more about sort of what happens when somebody's in a flow state and maybe some of the results that you've seen around how being in flow can create kind of a massive impact on performance, productivity, etc. 

[0:09:17.1] SK: Great question. So flow – Let me put it in sort of a historical context for you. Flow science is pretty old. It stretches back about 150 years, to the late 1870s. That’s when the first studies on flow were actually done. 

So the idea that an altered state of consciousness, which is what flow technically is, could impact performance substantially is very real. It gets sort of this great leap forward in the 1960s and 70s because of a man named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He’s so often described as the godfather of flow psychology. 

He taught us five things about flow that are really critical that I reach now, and the first one sort of answers your question, which is he discovered that flow is definable. The state has eight core characteristics, and I mentioned some of them before. It starts off with complete concentration in the present moment, the vanishing of self, time passing strange, which is technically called time dilation, and so forth. 

So because it’s definable, it is also measurable. We have really good psychometric instruments. We don't have physiological flow detectors at this point, though my organization, the Flow Genome Project, is working on that, but we are getting to the point that we really trust the cycle of go metrics. So we can measure it off of these core characteristics. 

Csikszentmihalyi also discovered that the state is universal. So it shows up in anyone, anywhere, provided certain initial conditions are met. He also figured out that it's a spectrum experience. So you can be in a state of micro flow, and this happens to most people all the time. You ask for more of a description of the state. 

So micro flow is when only couple of flow’s characteristics show up at once, or maybe more of them show up that they’ve dialed down on low. So for example, you sit down to write that quickie email, and you look up an hour later and you've written an essay, right? Creative brilliance is just flown out of you for the past hour. Your focus was really intense. You were focused there. Maybe you sort of forgot bodily functions. You had to go to the bathroom and you didn't notice until you sort of pop back up. You felt it had a tremendous amount of control over your writing. One idea flowed into the next, into the next, into the next, which is by the way where flow's name comes from. That experience of every decision and every action flowing seamlessly and effortlessly from last is where we get the name of the state, and it was Csikszentmihalyi nemed it for that reason. 

Then you can have macro flow, which is when all the characteristics show up at once, and for a really long time, I mean the first seven years of flow research, people thought they were having mystical experiences, because then you were having – Time was slowing down and people are often having all kinds of like intuition was so loud and like the ideas that were flowing forth were so creative that it really felt like a force greater than yourself was sort of in control, and that's a macro flow state. 

It wasn't until Abraham Maslow did research on it in the 50s, and he found flow was common among all successful people, and everybody in his study group was an atheist. So suddenly, Oh, wait a minute. This isn’t a mystical experience reserved for spiritual and religious people. This is open to anybody interested in success,” and that sort of where that that went away, but kind of spectrum experience of it has made it really sort of hard to diagnose over the years. 

Did that answer your question?

[0:12:47.1] MB: Yeah, I think that's great. I have sort of a follow up to that, but before we dig into that, I have almost sort of a medic question for you. As somebody who studied flow really deeply for years and years and years and obviously dedicated a tremendous amount of time and energy to it, we actually have an upcoming interview with Mihai Csikszentmihalyi. I'd be curious, what would you want to ask him?

[0:13:07.5] SK: We’ve been in contact over the years, and in fact we are – The Flow Genome Project is now teamed up with a researcher in his lab and we’re building a flow and addiction study. We want to look at the similarities and differences between flow and addiction. 

Sort of ask him some of the stuff that I’ve wanted to ask him. If I had a chance, I've heard lately that he's been talking more about the relationship between the default mode network and flow. This gets more into the neurobiology of flow. So I would have questions around that and some of his new thinking there. 

We have a couple of spots that his ideas don't agree with our ideas, and some of the is work that we’ve been testing and studying and trying to get more clarification on, and I might bring those things up. But they’re not going to make sense until I tell you more about flow. 

[0:13:58.3] MB: Fair enough. Well, then let's get back into it. I'm curious the kind of impact, the importance of flow in terms of some of the results you've seen in the data, the research, etc. 

[0:14:07.3] SK: Oh, yeah. That was the second half of your question, which I failed to answer. My bad. All right. Csikszentmihalyi does his big work in the 60s and 70s, and suddenly we know that flow is universal, it’s definable, it’s measurable, it’s all of these, and it’s well established at this point, that flow is performance, and this is one that sort of Csikszentmihalyi’s last finding and starts to get at your question. 

His last finding and maybe his most important finding is that flow appeared to be the source code of not just kind of a peak performance, but the source code for overall well-being and life satisfaction and meaning, and this is one of the things that showed up. He conducted what was then one of the largest studies ever done in optimal side. This is what he discovered, is that the people who score off the charts for overall life satisfaction and meaning and such are the people who have the most flow I their lives. 

So that was kind of the first look at, “Oh, wow! This stuff is really important.” Then people started to ask the question, “Well, if this is optimal performance, how optimal? What are we actually talking about? What does that look like? Can you measure it?” 

What we now know is in sports, pretty much every gold-medal or world championship that’s been won, flow stayed in his heart. Flow is responsible for major progress in the arts, major breakthroughs in science, technology, business. We have really compelling work done by McKinsey. They did it 10 year study looking at looking at flow and business and top executives reported being five times more productive in flow than out of flow. So that’s 500% more productive. That means you could go to work on Monday, spend Monday in a flow state. Take Tuesday through Friday off and get as much done as everybody else. Huge increase in productivity. 

We are now starting to get much clearer as we get better at kind of understanding where flow comes from. We’re starting to be able to kind of break apart productivity and we’re now seeing flow, for example, and I can explain why. All these will make more sense if I explain the neurobiology with flow has a huge boost on motivation, huge impact on creativity. Studies are showing a 400 to 700% boost in creativity when you're in flow. We found that that heightened creativity, [inaudible 0:16:17.5] worked at Harvard outlast the flow state by a day, sometimes two. 

We’ve found – This is research done by advanced brain monitoring junction with The Department of Defense, that soldiers and radar operators in flow, for example, learn target acquisition skills 230% faster than normal. 

So huge step functions worth of change in flow, and we’re seeing this across the board. I mentioned in our preshow conversation that we just did some interesting work on creativity and flow, and I can't talk too much about it before it’s published. One of the things we looked at is, as I mentioned, there were these 400 to 700% increases in creativity and we went, “Oh, that's amazing! Can that actually be true? What do we really mean by creativity?” 

So we borrowed some ideas from – We did sort of a meta-analysis of creativity and psychology and how do you measure it and settled on five subcategories for the process component of creativity, which is the act of creating, not the product, not the outcome, nothing like that, but just the act of creating itself. We looked at everything from like problem formation, through idea generation, pattern recognition and so forth. We were using a Likert scale. So 50% boost is the most we could measure on our scale, but it was all 40%, 50% boost in all these subcategories in creativity. 

So when you start peeling back the hood, underneath creativity, you will also see these kinds of boosts. You just got to think about it in terms of your audience for a second. Motivation, creativity and learning are the three sides that are so-called high-performance triangle. They’re the foundational skills we need for thriving in the 21st-century. So huge impact on performance both at an elite level and at a normal level.

[0:18:11.0] MB: So we like to dig into the science on this show. Let's get into a little bit of the neurobiology and how that sort of flow states impact things like learning and motivation and creativity.

[0:18:20.9] SK: So when you ask questions like that, you usually want to know four things. I'm not going to fill you in on all four, but I just want to tell you that we’re leaving some stuff out. But you want to start with neurooanatomy. Where in the brain something is taking place? Flow is interesting, because  the old idea of ultimate performance was that – You probably know this. You’ve heard this. It’s 10% brain method. It’s, “Hey, you're only using a small portion of your brain under normal conditions. So performance, a.k.a. flow, must be the full brain on overdrive.” 

It turns out we had it totally, completely backward. In flow, we’re actually not using more of the brain. We’re using less of it. What happens is what's known as – I’s technically known as transient hypofrontality, transient means temporary. Hypo, H-Y-P-O is the opposite of hyper. It means to slowdown, deactivate. Frontality is the prefrontal cortex. Part of your brain that’s right behind your forehead. 

Prefrontal cortex is really a powerful part of your brain. It does a lot of good things for you. Complex logical decision-making, long-term planning, sense of morality, sense of will. All these things are important. But in flow, this whole portion of the brain gets shut down and it's technically an efficiency exchange. The brain burns a lot of energy. It’s always looking for ways to conserve, and as your need for intense concentration in the present moment goes up, more attention, right? The brain starts shutting down noncritical areas to maximize attention. As a result, you get a lot of flow’s core characteristics. 

So for example, why does time pass so strangely in flow? Time is actually calculated all over the prefrontal cortex. It’s sort of a network effect. Like any networks, node start to shut down. The network starts to collapse. In flow, what happens is we lose the ability to separate past, from present, from future. Instead we’re plugged into what researchers call the deep now, sort of an internal present. Same thing happens to your sense of self. Self is actually a bunch of different structures in the prefrontal cortex. Couple of other parts of the brain as well. 

Again, as the prefrontal cortex starts to shut down, your sense of self disappears. A huge impact on performance. When part of your brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, one part of the prefrontal cortex shuts down, that’s where your inner critic lives, so that nagging, always on, defeat this voice in your head. When you move into flow, that voice disappear. It goes silent. As a result, we experience this emotionally, first of all, is liberationist, is freedom, right? We are literally getting out of our way, but what we see on the backside is creativity goes way up, because you’re no longer doubting all of your need ideas. 

Risk-taking goes way up. So bringing those need ideas out into the world, for example, which is a risk that you have to take goes up. So that's what we’re seeing in terms of neural anatomy. A slightly larger version of that, we see networks. You've probably heard of the default mode network by now. This is one of the network systems that also governs your inner critic, and a lot of meditative practice is knock it out, turn it off. Same thing happens in flow. Your default mode network gets very, very, very quiet in flow. 

We have shifts in brainwave function that I'm not going to talk about, and then we have profound changes in neurochemistry, which is the last thing I’m going to talk about, and this is really where you see a lot of the performance boosts that you asked about earlier. So in flow, most of – We get a big dump of five of the most potent neurochemicals the brain can produce. This is dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, anandamide and endorphins. Flow appears the only time we get all five of these at once. What really happens is as you move into flow, stress hormones are flushed out of your system and they’re replaced with these big five neurochemicals. 

All five of them do a bunch of different things. They’re all performance-enhancing chemicals. On a physical, they’ll increase muscle reaction time, they’ll deaden our sensitivity pain, strength will go up, those sorts of things. Cognitively, they’re much more interesting, and I want to not break them down sort of in terms of motivation, learning and creativity, the three things I hit upon earlier. 

So all five of these chemicals are pleasure chemicals. They’re pleasure drugs. They’re the World War of drugs. Rarely do you get all five at once. Just to put this in context, romantic love, which many people identify as one of the greatest feelings on earth is mostly dopamine and norepinephrine. Two out of the five chemicals that you’re getting in flow. So flow is this huge burst of feel good neurochemistry. It makes it one of if not the most addictive experience on earth. Psychologist hate that term. So they call it the source code of intrinsic motivation. But when McKinsey found that 500% boost in motivation was the shift in neurochemistry that made it possible. 

Same thing happens with learning. Which shorthand for how learning works in the brain. The more neurochemicals that show up during an experience, the better chance that experience will be tagged as important and saved for later, transferred into long-term holding. So the more neurochemicals that show up, the better learning outcomes you get. Flow is an enormous dump of neurochemistry, which explains this 270% boost in learning that DARPA discovered. What it suggests is that that’s fabled 10,000 hours to master. The research shows that flow can significantly reduce them. 

Creativity, same thing. So what a lot of these neurochemicals do is they surround the creative process, and what I mean by that is creativity is recommendatory. What happens when your brain takes in a bunch of new information, combines it with older ideas and uses the results to produce something startlingly new. 

Flow boosts all – And these neurochemicals boost all the brain's information processing systems. So we take in more data per second, information acquisition goes up. We pay more attention to the data. Salience goes up. We find faster connections between that incoming data and our older ideas, so pattern recognition goes up. We find faster connections between that incoming information and far flung disparate outside the box ideas. So what’s called lateral thinking goes up. 

Then on the backend, when you’re able to take that idea and make it public, risk-taking goes up. So the neurochemistry that shows up in flow surrounds the creative process, which is why you're getting this big boost in creativity. 

So that’s the quick and dirty, very quick and dirty rundown of kind of the neurobiology of flow. Let’s also point out that this is its early days. I mean, neuroscience is accelerating exponentially. We’re seeing all kinds of breakthroughs, but there are still holes in this research we can drive a bus through. We know a ton more than we did more than we did 20 years ago, but we’ve got massive amounts of questions. So everything I just said is true until it's no longer true. We’re moving very quickly. So no longer cure could be around the corner. 

[0:25:33.1] MB: That's fasting, and that was a great kind of dive into the science, and I like the way you sort of broke everything out. That was really, really instructive. I'm curious, and this is kind of something maybe more from your sort of personal experience or maybe you’ve seen something in the research on this, but how did you sort of think about, I guess, sort of flow states that arise from what I would call kind of fun or extracurricular activities versus flow states within sort of work and productivity. 

Can we get kind of - and this kind of comes back to addiction - can we get kind of addicted to a flow state arising from something like video games or something like that? Versus flow from being in the zone when you're kind of executing in project or something. 

[0:26:11.6] SK: It’s a great question. Yes. To answers to your question, and I’ll start the first one, is that flow is a tool. It can be used for good. It can be used for ill. Soldiers fighting battles are in flow states. Terrorists and terrorist training camps are often in flow states. Kids playing video games are in flow states. You at work, really focused on an engineering project, an architectural project, a writing assignment, take your pick, are in a flow state. It’s across-the-board, and you are absolutely correct. Anything that produces flow is really sticky. When they want to know how popular is a videogame going to be, how much is it going to sell. One of the main metrics they try to measure is how much flow it produces. The most successful videogames in the world are the ones the produce the most flow, because huge, addictive neurochemistry.

Csikszentmihalyi I speaks about this really in an interesting fashion, and this sort of gets us to the second part of this, which is anybody that can access this stuff because  flow states have triggers. This is what we’ve learned over the past sort of 10 years, and Csikszentmihalyi discovered that flow is universal provided certain initial conditions are met. So those flow triggers are those initial conditions. 

One of the most important is what's known as the challenge skills balance. All these triggers do is drive attention into the present moment. They amp up attention, and some of the neurochemicals that we’re talking about are primarily focusing drugs, norepinephrine and dopamine. That’s primarily what they do cognitively. They help us pay attention, and that's their function. 

Besides being pleasure drugs, they’re focusing drugs. So that's what all of these triggers do. They drive our attention. Now, most important is the challenge skills balance as I mentioned, which says that we pay the most attention in the present moment when the challenge of the task at hand slightly exceeds our skillset. So you're always pushing hard on your skills when you’re flow. This is a constant. 

As a result, Csikszentmihalyi pointed out that flow is addictive. But unlike other addictions, gambling, video games, take your pick, that can lead backwards in life and slow down your progress. Flow, because you’re constantly leveling up your skillset, is an addiction that leads forward into the future. But make no mistake, it still an addiction. When we deal with action, adventure sports athletes who are transitioning out of risking their life for a living into, “I want to have a family and do something else.” They’re coming down from an addiction and you have to sort of deal with it that way. Same problem with special operators returning from war, same issues. 

[0:29:03.4] MB: This week's episode is brought to you by our partners at Brilliant. Brilliant is a math and science enrichment learning tool. You can learn concepts by solving fascinating, challenging problems. Brilliant explores probability, computer science, machine learning, the physics of everyday life, complex algebra and much more. They do this with addictive interactive experiences that are enjoyed by over 5 million students, professionals and enthusiasts around the world. 

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These learning principles form the cornerstone of the foundation of Brilliant. It's such a great platform. I highly recommend checking it out. You can do that by going to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. 

I'm a huge fan of STEM learning, and that's why I'm so excited that Brilliant is sponsoring this episode.  They’ve been a sponsor of the show for a long time and there's a reason. They make learning math and science fun and engaging and exciting. You can get started today with Brilliant by going to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. That's brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. 

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[0:31:09.9] MB: I want to dig now into some of these triggers and how we can kind of create flow states in our own lives. Let's start with kind of the challenge skills balance as you talked about. For example, what if we have some work that we want to get into a flow state on, but perhaps either the challenge is too great, or the challenges is sort of too small. How do we adjust that dial to kind of trigger flow? 

[0:31:30.1] SK: I’m actually going to back you up one step. Everything else is moot, unless we talk about complete concentration, which is the fundamental kind of – Challenge skills is the most important flow trigger, but you can't build a house without complete concentration. The reason I mentioned that is when I go into companies, the first thing I tell them is, “If you can hang a sign on your door that's says, Fuck off. I'm flowing,” you can't do this work. 

What the research shows is to really maximize flow and the productivity you get from flow. You need like 90 to 120 minute periods of uninterrupted concentration. That means that no open office plans. That means if you’re functioning under a regime that demands messages be returned in 15 minutes and emails in half an hour, you’ve got a problem and you need to kind of talk to your boss and shift that stuff around a little bit, or you need to carve out time before work or after work to focus on this stuff. That’s the place you have to start, otherwise you just can't build it. 

From there, I want to get to your question, which is how you tune the challenge skills balance. Here I want to talk about kind of the most useful piece of non-research research there has been on flow, and here's what I mean. A bunch of years ago, Csikszentmihalyi was talking to a Google mathematician and they were trying to figure out, “Can we measure the ratio between challenge and skills? Can we put a number on it?”

They almost arbitrarily just sort of decided on 4%, that the sweet spot was if your challenge could be 4% greater than your skills, you are in the right zone. We took this idea into the flow genome project and working primarily initially with athletes and then a little bit with artist. We’ve been studying it. It’s totally arbitrary. What 4% for you is is different for me and it's different on every day. Your 4% on a day that you got up great night sleep and ate great food the day before, versus I stayed up all night and I feasted on Twinkies, different. It varies on a day-to-day basis. 

What I like about using that number, and this is I think where it becomes practical, is 4% for people who are little shyer, meeker, maybe a little bit of an underachiever sometimes, is tricky because it's outside your comfort zone. How do you know when you're getting close to the right spot? You're uncomfortable. It doesn't feel good anymore. It's a really good way just to know where you are with this. 

For peak performers, that we have the other – The flip side of this problems is peak performers are going to bite off challenges that are 30%, 4, % 50% greater than their skillset without even noticing. Do it all the time. As a result, it is going to put too much fear into the equation. You’ll get too much norepinephrine and cortisol in system and it ends up blocking flow. So you’re going to lock yourself out of the state of peak performance. You’d really need to tackle those kinds of challenges. 

If you are the kind of person who bites off huge challenges, one, make sure you chunk them into smaller and smaller sub-challenges, smaller goals and smaller roles until they’re in that, “Oh, well. I'm slightly uncomfortable here, but I'm not overwhelmed,” spot, then you're on the right spot to maximize focus
and maximize flow. 

[0:35:03.1] MB: That’s extremely helpful, and I think I'm definitely somebody who kind of falls into that bucket of frequently biting off problems that are too large for myself. So I’ll be applying that technique for certain –

[0:35:13.2] SK: Yeah, we all have been saying at the Flow Genome Project, which is when it comes to this stuff, you got to go slow to go fast. Let me give you a different example of this in a different workplace environments. So, Patagonia, the outdoor retailer, always tops the list of best place to work in America. One of the reasons is their very high flow environment. They were sort of built around so much of Csikszentmihalyi earlier ideas back in the 90s, and they have one main corporate rule established by Yvon Chouinard, who’s the CEO. He calls it, “Let my people go surfing.” 

So Patagonia, obviously a lot of outdoor athletes who work there, and that's one of the reasons you’d want to work there. Their headquarters, it’s in Ventura County. It’s right on the Pacific Ocean. So they have a rule, which is, “Whenever the waves are breaking, it doesn't matter what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter if you're on deadline. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the middle of a project that was due yesterday. You can go surfing.” 

The reason is, surfing is packed with flow triggers, really high flow environment. We’ll talk more about what those triggers are in a second. But packed with flow triggers. So if you go out, you go surfing for an hour and you come back and you’re 500% more productive, who cares that you just wasted an hour? 
You’re now really, really, really hyper productive. 

It doesn't look like peak performance. In an organization, or anybody could be like, “I’m on deadline, but I’m going surfing. See you.” That doesn’t look like an organization dedicated to peak performance, to productivity, to the bottom line or any of those things. But it’s actually an organization that's totally dialed in for that stuff, because you’d got to go slow to go fast with this stuff and you got to prioritize flow. 

[0:36:49.0] MB: So how do those flow states kind of carry over, or I guess how long? So if you go surfing for an hour or you do some sort of – I guess what we’re talking about earlier, sort of a fun activity to trigger flow, how long will you be kind of reaping the harvest of that flow trigger?

[0:37:05.4] SK: So there’s three different answers to this. One is that flow is essentially a focusing skill. So first of all, by training up while you're surfing, you’re training up flow in the office, because you’re training the brain to think in a particular way basically, to shift consciousness in a particular way. So that in itself spills over. 

In terms of actual time in the flow state, that is an open and unanswered question. What we've seen for the research I mentioned earlier, we know, right? Because [inaudible 0:37:37.2] did the work, that the heightened creativity will outlast flow state by a couple of days. That sticks around for a little while. 

The really, “I'm in flow. My consciousness feels altered,” experience, it varies, but an hour and a half  is usually – That’s sort of the maximum kind of zone that most people stay in. This has to do with the fact that these neurochemicals, they’re easy for the brain to produce, but they've got raw materials and it takes a certain amount of time to produce them from scratch. Sometimes you need sunlight, and sometimes you need vitamins and minerals. So once you're through those things, there’s a down period. There’s a cycle. Flow isn’t an always on thing. You can't live in flow. There’s a four-stage process. The frontend of the process is a struggle phase. It doesn't feel like flow, and then you move into flow and then there’s a recovery phase on the backend. You have to move through the whole cycle before you can really start a flow state. 

That said, you can get access to the heightened learning, the heightened creativity, those things. They linger for a little while. The creativity seems to linger for longer than, I would guess, the heightened bits of learning and the motivation. But the honest answers, we don't really know on that one. 

In some flow states, there is altruism based flow state known as helper’s high. It was discovered by [inaudible 0:38:55.2] who founded Big Brother Big Sister. He discovered that that seems to lasted two days on average, which is really interesting and really strange. That maybe from a promote research perspective, we think that's because it's got – It may have a oxytocin involved and maybe more endorphins than other flows states. We don't really know, but those are the things we’re looking at. By we, I mean the entire research community. So there's no real immediate answer to your question, but usually 90 minutes is kind of what you work with as a core flow state, and then the afterglow usually a couple, two, three hours at a high level.

[0:39:31.5] MB: Yeah, that makes sense. I was just curious, because I’m trying to think about how to sort of concretely apply these principles to my own productivity. 

[0:39:38.1] SK: Yeah. Let me give you a tip here. A place where most people screw up, and this is the difference between people who had a lot of experience with flow, especially with deeper flow states, versus people who are new to these ideas. One of the things that people who are new to these ideas do is they will take that accelerated –  That amplified creativity and they will ride to the very bitter end. If their brain’s pattern recognition system is all fired up and they're coming up with new ideas, and new ideas, and new ideas, they're going to keep working until is totally exhausted. That actually makes it more difficult to really jump into flow the next time. You want to take yourself almost to the end and then you want to sort of call it mandatory quits before you’re totally exhausted. Because otherwise the recovery period is going to have to be more extensive than you want. 

[0:40:32.6] MB: Let’s say you do sort of a 90-minute burst of flow. How long should your recovery period be before you try to reenter?

[0:40:38.1] SK: Again, it depends. If you're in a really deep flow state, a lot of physical activity, you're really exhausted in the body. That may be it for your day, right? You may get one big flows state, and it may be a day, two, three before you sort of get back in. If it's a low-grade focused attention flow state, you can pop out, and usually if you have some kind of recovery protocol. For example, I wake up at 4 AM. Start my day. I usually start by working on whatever book I'm writing. I usually work from about 4 AM to 7:30 or so. Then I hike my dogs for an hour and eat some breakfast. Then I can come back to work. I can't really get in an another flow state just then. I'm still sort of like dithering around, but I break for lunch, take a short nap and then I' can usually get back into flow in the afternoon. 

[0:41:28.9] MB: Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. 

[0:41:30.5] SK: And everybody's different by the way. You’re going to – naps are good. Food is good. Resetting your consciousness is really important. Meaning, like take your mind off the problem, right? If I’ve been writing all morning, I don’t want to immediately jump to another writing task. I want to garden for an hour, go for a walk or do something to shift my consciousness a bit, meditation, whatever. 

[0:41:53.3] MB: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I mean, I think one of the themes that we’ve seen kind of repeatedly on the show is the importance of rest and recovery to peak performance in general, and then obviously kind of specifically around the creation and maintenance of flow states. 

[0:42:07.6] SK: Yeah. I always talk about it as one of the need for recovery. I talk about in terms of like a grit skill. I think for peak performers, it is so hard to shut it down, that grit is required for recovery. So I think active recovery protocols are really important. One of flow states, for example, if you end your day and your recovery protocol is, “I’m going to watch television and drink a beer,” you're not actually doing your body any good. Television doesn't shift the brain waves out of sort of a high beta for long enough for you to recover, and alcohol is really not your friend in that process. One or two drinks doesn't really matter, but if you go over that, you're going to mess with your REM sleep, and you have to sleep seven to eight hours a night is what the research shows most of us need. 

There are outliers, but that's really – That’s sort of baseline, and you have to have an active – An active recovery, by the way, if you’re not familiar with the term, is a term that talks about – It means like a restorative yoga practice. A long sauna, meditation, hot baths, massages, those sorts of things. You need a daily active recovery protocol if you’re going to do. You’re really going to have a high flow lifestyle. 

[0:43:28.3] MB: I’d like to take kind of a change in direction and talk a little bit about one of the other topics that I know you’ve spoken and written about that I find really fascinating and kind of aligns with some of the recent research you’ve been doing around, as I think you called it in a recent Google talk, the intersection of sort of flow states and the science of spirituality. 

[0:43:45.9] SK: I started out looking as much the science of spirituality, because it wasn't entirely clear that flow wasn't a spiritual experience, right? Those two ideas started out together. When early research, for example, William James, who did a lot of the foundational work on flow back at the turn-of-the-century, the first American psychologist, philosopher wrote the first psychology textbook. Back then, he was looking at flow as a mystical experience. He was studying the same thing. 

They split apart in the 20th century. Freud sort of really, really was a hard-core atheist. Didn't think psychology had any place kind of working in that world, and the rest of science will agree. So there was sort of a hundred year detour. Then these ideas come back together around the turn of the 21st-century neurobiological. 

What we started to discover is that when you look under the hood of flow, so the same neurochemical, neurobiological, neuroanatomical shifts, changes that we talked about earlier in flow, they show up across a bevy of experiences. Deep profound meditation, trance state, out of body experiences, near death experiences, mystical states, speaking in tongues, things like that, psychedelic states, states of awe. All of these things neurobiological are very, very, very similar. They’re similar on the inside and they produce similar effects on the outside. All of these experiences is self disappears. Time vanishes. We feel a huge boost in motivation and the feeling of being moved by forces greater than our control, put it in slightly more mystical terms, spiritual terms. 

Then we see a massive amplification in the information we have access to. This shows up across the boards in all of these experiences. So we sort of took a hundred year detour around these ideas and they’re coming back together now. Where they get really exciting is you have more tools to solve problems with. 

For example, I mentioned in our preshow conversation that another study we’re running at the Flow Genome Project is in conjunction with researchers at Imperial College in London, and what they've done at Imperial College in London is they’ve done – In David Nutt and Robin Carhart-Harris’s lab, they’ve done all the foundational research, FMRI research, on psychedelics. So they’ve looked at MDMA, psilocybin, iowaska, DMT, acid. 

So when I say flow shares characteristics with psychedelic states, this is the reason we know that, and we've teamed up to do a sort of comparison contrast study, and one of the reasons – And this is very downstream from where we’re going and we’re not there yet, is right now we’ve been looking at psychedelics for their healing capacity. They’re phenomenal for PTSD. There’s new work on anxiety, on depression, on addiction, those sorts of things. 

But there’s a lot of people who have noticed that the same thing that helps get you from subpar back to zero can help you go from zero up to Superman with psychedelic’s creativity is very old research. This research going back in the 60s that shows huge boost in creativity and psychedelics. We see the same thing in flow. So one of the simple questions you sort of from a performance standpoint you'd want to ask is, “Hey, I’ve got a creative problem. I need to solve. What’s the best thing? Should I aim for a flow state here? Is micro-dosing with psychedelics, will that get it done? What about a heroic dose of psychedelic? Is that better? What kind of creative project works best with which treatment?” Those sorts of questions are things we are starting to be able to ask and answer now. That’s the results – Psychedelics may not sound like the intersection of spirituality to you, but there’s research going back to the 60s, The Good Friday experiment most famously, that show that psychedelic experiences are indistinguishable from spiritual experiences. 

[0:48:06.5] MB: I think you also kind of previously talked about in line with that same theme this idea of sort of the unity experience and the experience of sort of being one with everything and how there's a sort of a biological component behind that. 

[0:48:19.6] SK: Okay. So this was my toe-hold into flow research. I said earlier, when I started this, it was really unclear, and the reason was surfers and flow, which was the first population I ever studied often report becoming one with the ocean. I was one with the two, and it’s really common. It happens all the time. Surfers didn't really like to talk about it because everybody would think they were nuts. You go into a shrink's office in 1995, 6, 7 and say, “Doc. Hey, man, I had this experience. I feel one with everything,” you are getting sent to a psych ward. That's what's happening. 

But then Andy Newberg, who’s a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, decides he wants to study this phenomenon. The reason he wants to study it is it’s so common. Oneness with everything has been called the perennial philosophy. It's in every mystical tradition on earth and it was there long before there was mass communication. 

So he figured it's got a point to something real, something biological. So he did brain scans of Buddhists and Franciscan nuns when they were experiencing moments of so-called unity, oneness with everything. He found that a portion of the brain known as the right parietal lobe gets very, very quiet. 

So earlier I said that in flow, the prefrontal cortex shuts down. In deeper and deeper flow states, when attention gives really focused, that will start moving deeper into the brain. One of the places that gets impacted is the right parietal lobe. This portion of the brain does a bunch of stuff, but it basically is a navigation system and it helps us draw a boundary that says, “This is where you end and the rest of the world begins." And this is sort of important if you want to walk through a crowded room. You sort of need a sense of like, “My shoulder is here,” and people who have brain damage to this portion of the brain, they can't sit down on a couch, because they’re not quite sure where does my leg end and the couch begin?

This portion of the brain when it shuts down completely in deep flow states, or in meditative experiences, or trance states or whatever, you can no longer separate itself from others. The brain conclude – It has to conclude that in this particular moment in time you’re one with everything. 

By the way, we’ve had this experience, right? If you played a racket sport, for example, and gotten really good at it, you get to a point where you can't feel your racket in your hand. It feels like an extension of your hand or your car. The pedals feel like an extension of your feet and you can feel the tires through your feet. This is common with racecar drivers. It’s because this boundary of self is flexible. We can move it around. Blind people feel the sidewalk to the tip of the cane. It’s because this boundary is extendable. 

[0:51:01.5] MB:  I think one of the most interesting kind of takeaways from some of that research is this idea that in some sense, the brain is sort of creating the experience of being separate from everything else. When you take that away, it's almost like the oneness has been there the entire time. 

[0:51:18.6] SK: Well, I’ve have written about this. This is where things get complicated, because at every level of the spectrum, scientifically, at every level of scale, you see oneness. If you reduce human beings to the quantum level, obviously, we got the same basic ingredients. That's true. But even if you look at just what you consider you, which is the stuff inside your skin, we know there's enough foreign bacteria in your body that essentially you're on from your elbow to your fingers is foreign bacteria. Most of it is in your micro biome, and we know that the micro biome control can impact our emotional state, for example, and our cognition, our ability to think about problems and such, and our consciousness. 

So our experience to the world, we experience it as I am Steven Kotler, a single unit. I'm just me. But the truth of the matter is it’s a cooperative experience. My version of the world is me, my micro biome, the viruses in my body. It’s all creating this experience. So sort of at every level of the scale, going all the way up to the cosmic, we are star dusts. We all got our star in the birth of stars. We’re made up of molecules that we’re spewed out of stars. At every level of scale, we are one, right? We have a discreet experience of consciousness while we’re inside our body, but on certain levels at least, something of an illusion. But that shouldn’t be a surprise. Current thinking on reality, right? We don't live in reality. The brain takes in a shit ton of information. It filters down something, hunting for like the most familiar pattern it can find. The minute it finds that pattern, it guesses about what is in reality based on our prior experience, which is why babies experience the world very differently from teenagers and adults. 

There's book after book after book in neuroscience for 25 years has talked about how we create kind of reality as we go along. The question gets a lot more nuanced and subtle when you start peeling it back, and it just gets really weird. I have no idea what the right or wrong answer is, and I don’t, by the way, think this is proof or not proof of any kind of metaphysical anything. I just think it's the facts of the case and they’re peculiar. 

[0:53:45.8] MB: It’s a fascinating mystery, and I just wanted to kind of touch on that, because I think it's one of the most interesting things that you work on and have talked about. So I wanted to share some of those really kind of unique ideas with the listeners. I know we’re running out of time here. To kind of wrap up our conversation, for listeners who want to concretely kind of implement what we've talked about in one way or another today, what would be sort of a first kind of action step or piece of homework that you would give them?

[0:54:10.7] SK: Yeah, the first place. I would tell you to go is the website for the Flow Genome Project. If you go to the landing page, you’ll see something that says, “Take the quiz.” That quiz – And I hate that language, and we’re changing the website. But it’s an older version of it that I don't love. But that quiz is actually our flow profile, which has become the largest study ever conducted in optimal psych. All it is is a diagnostic, and it's taken flow’s 20 triggers and broken them into four categories, sort of clumped them in their most familiar clumps. All it says is if you’re this kind of person, you are likely going to find more flow in this direction. That is a great next step. 

You can also, if you want to take things a step further, if you go to my website, stevenkotler.com, sign up for my email newsletter. A, you'll get lots of information. B, you’ll get a 90-page peak performance primer that has a complete breakdown of flow and all of flow’s triggers in it. So those would be my two next steps. 

[0:55:09.4] MB: Perfect, and I think you kind of touched on this already, but for listeners who want to find you, who want to learn more, I'm assuming those are kind of the place that you would have them go. 

[0:55:17.5] SK: Yes, stevenkotler.com, flowgenomeproject.com, or you can find me on social media. Twitter is Steven_Kotler. 

[0:55:26.6] MB: Well, Steven. Thank you so much for coming on the show, fascinating conversation. As I said, I've been a fan of your work for a long time and it was great to kind of dig into all of these really exciting ideas. 

[0:55:36.7] SK: Thanks for having me. It’s been a lot of fun. 

[0:55:38.8] 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 M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

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Making Smart Decisions When You Don’t Have All The Facts with Annie Duke

In this episode we discuss how to make better decisions under conditions of uncertainty. We look at “the worst call in the history of football,” discuss examples from life, business and even high stakes poker to understand how to make the best possible decisions in a a world filled with unknowns. What exactly is a good decision? Is that different than a good outcome? We look at this key question - and uncover the wisdom hidden in the reality that these two things might be completely different. All this and more with our guest Annie Duke. 

Annie is a professional decision strategists and former professional poker player. She has leveraged her expertise in the science of smart decision making throughout her life and for two decades was one of the top poker players in the world. She is the author of the book Thinking In Bets: Making Smart Decisions When You Don’t Have All The Facts and after being granted the National Science Foundation Fellowship, studied Cognitive Psychology at The University of Pennsylvania.

• How do we get create lessons from our experiences?

• How do we sort out the noise in the gap between decision quality and outcome quality?

• In poker (like life) you can make really good decision and have a really bad outcome - but that doesn’t mean that you made a bad decision

• This fuzzy relationship between decision making and outcomes can be very problematic for people 

• “Resulting”- tying the quality of the outcome too tightly to the quality of decisions

• “The worst call in the history of all of football” - But what it really?

• An unlucky / bad outcome is not the same as a bad decision

• You get emotionally pulled around in evaluating the quality of your decisions based, usually, on the quality of the outcome

• Red lights and green lights - and how they can shine a light on hidden risks to decision-making

• The only thing that matters is not the result - but the process  of making decisions - because that is all we can control

• In our own lives we constantly lurch into over-reactions when we focus only on results and not on our decision-making quality

• Improving your decision-making accrues across your life through everything you do and harnesses the principle of compounding - a small improvement in decision-making & thinking cascades through everything you do

• Strategy #1: Approach the world through the frame of decisions as bets

• Why you should ask “Wanna Bet?” to get more clarity about a situation

• There are 2 major sources of uncertainty between Decisions and Outcomes

• Luck/Randomness

  1. Information Asymmetry

• The framework of “wanna bet” creates a hunger for information and a desire to narrow down / reduce uncertainty

• Strategy #2: Get other people involved in the process with you

• You are really good at recognizing other people’s bias, even when you can’t see your own

• When you’re trying to make a decision (or a bet) the person who will win is the person who has the most accurate “mental model” or model of reality

• Its about trying to get the most accurate mental models and get to the truth - not just trying to prove that you’re right

• What we care about is being ACCURATE not being proven RIGHT

• It feels good to be right and it feels bad to be wrong - the key to this shift is to CHANGE what you feel good about - don’t feel good about being right - feel good about moving towards the Truth

• When you ask “how sure am I about this?” You’re rarely 100% or 0% sure about this

• Strategy #3: Try to quarantine yourself from experience

• Escape the quality of the outcome and how it impacts your assessment - unless you have enough data to actually verify it 

• Key Steps to Focusing on the Decision-Making Process Not the Outcome

• Evaluate decisions prior to getting the outcome

  1. Create a Decision Pod of other people who can challenge your thinking

• How do we make better decisions under conditions of uncertainty?

• What does it mean to think in “Expected Value?"

• Most times the future is not 100% to turn out a certain way - there are a variety of outcomes - and each of those outcomes has a probability of occurring and each outcome has an impact 

• The key to making effective decisions is to multiply the probability of the outcome by the impact/magnitude 

• Being “roughly right” is better than being “precisely wrong"

• Its OK to guess and use rough probabilities when thinking probabilistically - you will still make MUCH better decisions

• Doing the work of improving decision-making creates large positive results and is a self fulfilling cycle

• The opinions that are most valuable to you are the ones that disagree with you - they can actually teach you something

• Homework #1: find a group of people who are open minded, who want to be better decision-makers, and agree together that you want to question each others thinking, not be defensive, hold each other accountable to bias

• Homework #2: Start listening to yourself for signals that you might be engaging in biased behavior, using the words wrong/right, should of

• Homework #3: Discuss a decision with 2 different people and give them opposite “outcomes” (Tell one it went really well, tell the other it went really poorly) to get clear sense of different sides of the coin

Thank you so much for listening!

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [Video] Butler picks off Wilson to seal Patriots Super Bowl XLIX victory

• [Video] Philadelphia Eagles: Philly Special

• [Article] A Head Coach Botched The End Of The Super Bowl, And It Wasn’t Pete Carroll By Benjamin Morris

• [Article] Fooled by performance randomness: over-rewarding luck by Romain Gauriot and Lionel Page

• [Book] Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts by Annie Duke

• [SoS Episode] The Biggest Threat Humans Face in 2018

• [Personal Site] Annie Duke

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] 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 2 million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries and part of the Self-Help for Smart People Podcast Network.

In this episode we discussed how to make better decisions under conditions of uncertainty. We look at the worst call in the history of football. Discuss examples from life, business, and even high stakes poker to understand how to make the best possible decision in a world filled with unknowns. 

What exactly is a good decision? Is that different than a good outcome? We look at this key question and uncover the wisdom hidden in the reality that these two things might just be completely different. All this and more with our guest, Annie Duke. 

Do you need more time, time for work time for thinking and reading? Time for the people in your life? Time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our email list. It's called How You Can Create Time for the Things That Really Matter in Life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the email list at successpodcast.com. You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our email subscribers. 

We recently pre-released an episode and the interview to our email subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience, and that had tremendous implications because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the email list first. 
With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our email list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live exclusive interview just for email subscribers. 

There are some amazing stuff that's available only to email subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage, or if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you’re on the go you and you don't have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. 

In our previous episode, we went deep on the science of personality. We looked at how we've moved way beyond the debate of nature versus nurture. Examine the myth of authenticity and the danger of just being yourself and why human well-being, a.k.a. success, depends on the sustainable pursuit of core projects in our lives. 

We explore the complex dance of self-improvement between the limitation of biological social factors and the identity of individuals and looked at how much agency and control we really have in shaping our personalities and lives among all these different factors with our guest, Dr. Brian Little. If you want to really understand yourself and how to live a better life, listen to that episode. 

Now, for our interview with Annie. 

[0:03:10.6] MB: Today, we have another unique guest on the show, Annie Duke. Annie is a professional decision strategist and former professional poker player. She's leveraged her expertise in the science of smart decision-making throughout her life and for two decades she’s one of the top poker players in the world. She’s the author of the book Thinking in Bets: Making Smart Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts, and after being granted the National Science Foundation Fellowship, she studied cognitive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Annie, welcome to The Science of Success. 

[0:03:40.3] AD: Thanks for having me. 

[0:03:41.8] MB: Well, we’re ere very excited to have you on the show today. As we kind of talked about in the preshow a little bit, I am a poker player so I’m familiar with you and some of your work, and I think the decision-making, sort of thinking methodology that poker teaches is so valuable and so sort of applicable to a broader kind of sphere of life. 

So I’d love to start out with kind of this idea that you talk about, which is sort of the difference between bad decisions and bad outcomes. 

[0:04:06.4] AD: Yeah. Sure. So I think that one of the big problems that we have in life is trying to figure out the lessons that we’re supposed to take from the way that things turn out. So we have this idea that you should be learning from experience, but that’s actually really difficult because there are a lot of playing in the way that your outcomes relate to the actual quality of the decisions to lead up to them. 

So this very loose relationship between outcome quality and decision quality which you can see really well in poker, right? I can play the best hand and I can actually play it very well. On the turn of a card, because I don't have any control over the cards that come, I can lose. So I can make really good decision and have a very poor outcome, or I can play a really bad hand. Actually play it pretty poorly, and because I get lucky in the cards that are still to come, I could actually win. So I can make really poor decision and have a really good outcome. 

And this lose relationship actually creates a lot of problems for us, and what you see people do is that when they’re evaluating outcomes out in the world, they tend to do this thing called resulting when they're looking at other people's results. What resulting is, is tying too tightly the quality and the outcome to the quality of the decision. In other words, thinking that it's a reasonable thing for you to be able to work backwards from whether the outcome was good or bad to whether the decision was good or bad. In other words, thinking like if I win a hand of poker, I must have played it well, or you lose a hand of poker, you must have played it poorly. 

So if you want me to, there’s a really, really good example of that that I actually opened the book about Pete Carroll and the Super Bowl, if you want to go into that as an example. 

[0:06:00.9] MB: Yeah, I’d love to hear that example and dig into it. 

[0:06:03.2] AD: Okay. Then, actually, I just posted today on Twitter about a very good example of that that we could get into that’s like brand-new research. So I think that might be fun to look just really quickly. So let me give you that sort of popular sports example of resulting. 

So it’s the 2015 Super Bowl, Super Bowl XLIX, and the Seahawks are on the 1 yard line of the New England Patriots. It’s second down on the 1 yard line, 26 seconds left in the whole game, and the Seahawks are down by four and they have one time out. 

So, obviously, if the Seahawks can score here with a touchdown, they’re going to win the game, because there’s not going to be time for the Patriots to be able to march back out on the field. So everybody is expecting, because it’s second down and they’ve got the one timeout. So everybody is thinking, “Okay. They're going to hand it out to Marshawn Lynch, who’s one of the best short-yardage running backs in the history of the game and he’ll obviously just try to barrel through the Patriots line. Then if he can't do that, Pete Carroll will call a timeout. They’ll hand it off to Marshawn Lynch again and give him two tries at the end zone. 

So that’s what everybody kind of thinks is going to happen, and instead, what Pete Carroll does is something pretty surprising, which is he calls for a pass play. So he has Russell Wilson pass the ball. The ball is very famously intercepted in the end zone by Malcolm Butler. Obviously, that ends the game. 

It’s really interesting, people can go on to YouTube and they can see the clip from the actual game, and I really recommend that you listen to Cris Collinsworth actually call this play. So after the ball is intercepted – I mean, Cris Collinsworth is just flabbergasted and saying this is the worst call that he’s ever seen in the Super Bowl, and the headlines the next day didn't disagree. Most of them declared USA Today, The New York Times, The Washington Post, they were all saying this was the worst call in Super Bowl history. The Seattle Times actually, which I think has more skin in the game said it was the worst call in the history of all of football. 

So the question is; was this really a bad call? We know the really bad result for sure. It was a very, very bad outcome. But it wasn’t a bad call. Well, Pete Carroll was asked about it actually on The Today’s Show, and I think they were trying to get him to say that it was a really bad call, and what he said instead was, “Well, I agree that it was the worst result of a call ever.” 

I think that that’s an incredibly insightful comment by Pete Carroll, because when you actually look at the map, and you can do this by – you could look at Benjamin Morris over on 538 have pretty good analysis of this. Also, Brian Butler, I think over on Slate analyzed it as well, that the map actually looks pretty good for doing a pass play.

I think the key piece of information to note is that if you look at the 2015 season, the number of intersections in that situation were zero. It’s probably too small of an end. But if you look over the past 15 season, which I think is generously aggregating the data, because covered has changed, but let's just go over the last 15 seasons just to get a lot of data, then the intersection rate in that spot was only 2%. 

The interception rate in that situation is going to be somewhere between 0 and 2%, depending on what data you pull. I think once you know that, it's a little bit easier to recognize that it was probably just a really unlucky outcome and not necessarily a really bad decision, that it was just an unlucky bad outcome. I think that it's pretty easy to get there once you kind of imagine that Pete Carroll called that pass play and the ball was caught for a touchdown. What do you think the headlines could have looked like? 

[0:09:57.6] MB: Probably most genius play in Super Bowl history. 

[0:10:00.0] AD: Yeah. I mean, I think that they would've been loud and this is the kind of thinking that got him to the Super Bowl in the first place. You could imagine that, right? He out-Belichicked Belichick, who’s known as a pretty creative coach. 

We actually have an interesting example of this now, which is the Philly special. So for people who are familiar with this year's Super Bowl, the Philadelphia Eagles on fourth down on the 1 yard line of, again, the Patriots who are in the Super Bowl every year as we know. They’re up by three, the Eagles, and everybody is expecting Doug Peterson to call for a field goal and just take the easy three and go up by by six going into the second half 

Instead, he goes for it — not only goes for it on fourth, but runs a very unusual play called the Philly special, and Nick Foles, the quarterback ends up in the end zone catching the ball. Everybody talks about how it’s an incredibly brilliant play. But if it had gotten dropped and the Eagle had actually lost that game, you know that that’s exactly where people would've been looking and talking about what a stupid decision it was by Doug Peterson not just to take the three points. 

Hopefully what you can feel from those example is how much we emotionally get pulled around in the way that we evaluate the quality of our decisions based just on the quality of the outcome. Because, obviously, whether that ball is caught or dropped on that one time in the end zone by the Seahawks does not have anything to do with whether the decision was good. 

In the same sense, if I go through a green light and I happen to get in an accident, that doesn’t mean that going through green lights is a bad decision. If I run a red light and I happen to get through it safely, it doesn't mean that running red lights is a good decision either. It’s the same thing for Pete Carroll there, and this is a really, really, really big problem for decision-making, is that when we’re trying to learn from our experience, we get so hung up on whether things turned out well or things turned out poorly in terms of whether we repeat the decision or change the way that we’re doing things. We end up with these weird reactions to the way that things turn out, and if we can't get past that and if we can't get past resulting, it becomes very hard to become effective at learning. 

[0:12:22.3] MB: It’s such a great example, and I love the idea of kind of the stoplights, because that really crystallizes it I think really clearly. As somebody who you know plays poker, obviously, like a suck out is a great example of something like that. But for so many people, even a lot of people you see at the poker table, they get so focused on the result of the hand as supposed to kind of what the decision-making process was and how the kind of went into it. 

So I think pulling it out and providing some context in sports and with other examples is a great way to shine light on the fact that it's so easy to get caught up in the result, and yet what really matters, because the only thing we can actually control is how do we make better decisions. 

[0:13:00.7] AD: Yes. So there’re been a couple of articles that have come out recently that are looking at this by really good economists and behavioral scientists. So one was looking at – And this is where you can see how these overreactions and under reactions can be really, really devastating based on a single result. 

So they were looking at the NBA. One group of researchers was looking at the NBA and they were looking at cases where the team one by one point or lost by one point. So I imagine you would agree with me that winning by one point or losing by one point is really mainly a matter of luck, that there's probably no difference in the level of player, the decision-making that goes into a one point win or a one point lost. That’s just variance. I mean, I assume we can just agree on that. 

What they looked at with lineup changes, and what they found was that you were much, much more likely to get a lineup change after a one point loss than you were after a one point win. Of course, in reality, there should be no difference between those two. So what you're getting is this big overreaction to a one point loss, which is just based on the quality of the outcome feeling like you need to change something now. But you're not getting that same reaction to a one point win even though statistically those would be the same. 

Then, actually, there was a paper that I was just looking at today from probably going to butcher his name, but Spyros Makridakis, and what he was looking at, he created a situation. This was where he was giving people data to evaluate. So it’s quasi-experimental. So he was looking at how good agents were in soccer and evaluating talent, and it was a close misses for kicks. So where they either hit the post or it just went in. 

Again, these are going to be a matter of luck, b you're very close to the post. What they found was that agents were much more likely to view the player is talented when it just went in versus when it hit the post, and that's very similar to the NBA situation. 

So these are cases where we know that the determining factor is mainly luck, and yet people are acting as if the outcome of the big signal for scale. In our own lives, we see this all the time. When in our business lives or our personal lives we have a bad outcome, we go and look for things that we can change. We think, “Oh! I need to change something because I bad outcome. So I need to change strategy,” and you get these very big overreactions to them. Then went things are going well we think we’re supposed to rinse and repeat, and we don't recognize that just that we should probably be patting ourselves on the back less, because good outcomes can always going to have some luck element to them, and sometimes very big luck element to them. We should also probably be changing strategy and recriminating ourselves less when we have poor outcomes as well. 

[0:15:55.6] MB: So how do we start to combat that kind of emotional reaction or that kind of natural kind of gut reaction to think about the result, as supposed to pulling back and evaluating the process?

[0:16:09.3] AD: I'm really glad that you asked that question, because that’s a really big – Okay. So here's the situation. There's a lot of noise. We know that our brains work this way. We know that we naturally try to make these connections. So my answer to you is not, well, now that you’ve learned about it, you’re fine. That's not actually very helpful. 

So that’s the first thing, is that with any of these cognitive biases, having knowledge about the bias is not necessarily that helpful and it's really just because this is the way our brains work, like we’re just sort of built with them and we can't take our brains offline and install new software. Like here we are. 

So first let me give you the good news, which is that very small changes can have very big impact. So you don't need to get that much better at this in order to have a big impact on what the quality of the outcome over your lifetime are going to be, because it acts like a compounding interest. So if you can get a few percentage points better at being more rational and evaluating your outcomes, for example, or overcoming confirmation bias, or not succumbing to hindsight bias, whatever it might be, you’re going to do a lot better in life. So that’s the good news. 

Let me give you some hints about how to kind of deal with this. So hint number one is to think about – To sort of approach the world to in the frame of want to bet. So, really, to think about would I be willing to bet that this is why this happened. So, for example, with the Pete Carroll thing, if you said, “Oh! I can't believe that that was the worst decision in Super Bowl history,” and I said, “Well, do you want to bet on that?” What would happen to you when I challenged you to that question?

[0:17:50.0] MB: Yeah, that’s really interesting. I mean, I think you start to – At least the way I would think about it is start evaluating other decisions. Start looking at the probabilities of different outcomes happening and that kind of stuff. Then it gets – You start to think much more objectively and kind of quantitatively about it. 

[0:18:05.0] AD: Right. Because what that does, what that want to bet does is it causes the uncertainty to bubble up to the surface. So if we think about why is it that outcomes and decision, like that relationship is hard to evaluate, there’s two sources of uncertainty that cause that to be hard to evaluate. The first is lot, which we’ve discussed about, that there's just a lot of luck in the way that things turn out. The second is information asymmetry or hidden information. That we don't know what Pete Carroll knows, for example, when we’re trying to evaluate that. We don't know what coverages he saw, what kind of things he had practiced. 

In fact, when we’re actually watching that, it's not like we’re living in the matrix and we can see those percentages or the decision tree right in front of us. We don't know the map either. So we’re sort of guessing at it. 

So when I challenge you to want to bet, what it does is it reminds you that while you might have been so certain about what the connection about the quality of that outcome and the quality of the decision work, that there is, of course, uncertainty there from hidden information and luck. When I say want to bet, what it does is it spurs you to start trying to examine the uncertainty. So it causes the uncertainty to bubble up to the surface in a really good way and you start asking yourself questions like, “Well, why do I think this? What research have I done? What's the math? What are the real probabilities? What does Annie that I don’t know? Why is she challenging me to this bet?” So it causes you to think about what my perspectives might be, which is really important. Because one of the best ways to be a decision-maker is not just to imagine things from your perspective, but try to imagine things from other people's perspective. That’s naturally because other people's perspective offers valuable insights that you might not yourself have. So you start to question what my knowledge might be. 

All of these causes you to be very, very information hungry, because once I say want to bet and you acknowledge the uncertainty, because I’ve caused the uncertainty to come to the forefront, now what you want to do is start to narrow down the uncertainty, to reduce uncertainty. In order to do that, you have to start seeking out information and thinking about things from different perspectives. So that the first step, is to really recognize this probabilistic relationship and to try to ask yourself as much as possible, like, “Would I be willing to bet on this?” Because that allows that to come through. 

But, remember, I said to you. It’s hard for us to get around our brains working this way. So the second thing that is really, really helpful is to get other people involved in the process with you. That’s because I think that in your own life you’ve probably noticed that you’re probably pretty good at recognizing when other people are bias, like what other people's biases are. Even if we’re not so good at recognizing it ourselves, we seem to kind of have a clearer view of when other people are maybe engaging in biased thinking. 

So we can use that to our advantage and we can get some people together and say, “Listen. I’m going to watch your back and you're going to watch my back.” But the key is that you want to do it through this idea of we’re going to approach the world through thinking and bets. What that means is that we’re going to approach the world through the frame of trying to be accurate, versus trying to be right. 

So let me explain what the difference between those two things are. So if we’re engaging in betting, the person who’s going win is the person who has the most accurate representation of the objective truth. I assume you agree with that. 

[0:21:37.9] MB: Absolutely. 

[0:21:39.0] AD: Right. So that's what I mean by accurate, that you're trying to figure out what sort of objectively what the world is and sort of have the most accurate mental models, right? So we are accurately modeling the world. We’re not just trying to prove that we’re right. So we’ve heard a lot in the news about echo chambers.

So when most people get together in a group, they sort of form a tribe whose goal is to prove that they are better than everybody else, right? So we kind of see this in politics, right? So the problem with that is that what ends up happening is that instead of de-biasing the individuals in the group, but actually causes more biased, because I am looking at – We’re all looking at the world to try and just to agree that we’re all smart and right. So it's whatever our prior beliefs are get affirmed. 

So you'll say something about politics and I'll be like, “You're totally right,” and the other side are a bunch of idiots. Then you're like, “Yeah,” and then I'm like, “Yeah,” you're like, “Yeah,” and I’m like, “Yeah.” Obviously, that's not very helpful. 

So when most of us are approaching the world, we’re just trying to prove that we’re right, that the things that we already believe are true, and people who think that way are going to lose in betting. You probably know this from poker too, right? People who persist in their same beliefs about like – I mean, a good example would be there are some people who think you're always close to slow places, right? Meaning, try to track people with aces. Like how do their lives go? 

[0:23:08.1] MB: Yeah, I think you’re totally right. I mean, poker is such an unforgiving sort of crucible of learning, which is why I think it's such a great thinking tool, because in poker, the game doesn't care if you persist in your own kind of ignorance or persist to try to be right instead of be the correct, right? Or sort of try to be right instead of try to get to what's true. So you keep getting punished over and over and over again mercilessly until you change your thinking and start evaluating your own biases. 

[0:23:34.9] AD: Right, or go broke. Which is actually what happens to the majority of people, which is what’s so telling, right? The people who are successful are the ones who do the thing that you, said, right? But those people are very few and far between. So we’re trying to get ourselves into that group of people. 

[0:23:51.3] MB: And it's funny. I mean, we talk at length about this on the show and I wrote an article kind of at the beginning of this year called The Biggest Threat Humans face in 2018, and we’ll throw that into the show notes if any listeners want to check it out. But it was basically all about this idea that people today live in a world where they don't care about sort of pursuing the truth. They only care about being validated and feeling like they’re right. So that's causing all kinds of kind of social, and political, and problematic issues. The articles sort of addresses, “Well, how do we move forward and how do we kind of advance as a civilization if we’re kind of slipping into this place of ignorance and we’re losing kind of the pursuit and the grasp of what's actually true. 

I think our podcast in some ways is kind of a project to try and teach people how to think and teach people what's important so that they can – We kind of take their own journeys towards finding the truth and kind of leveling up and being smarter, kind of better versions of themselves. 

[0:24:45.8] AD: Yeah, I completely agree. We’re certainly seeing this in politics, right? The argument isn’t about what's the best policy. It’s about are you on my side? So, exactly. What that piece that you wrote, obviously, it totally germane to what we’re were talking about right now. So if you get a group of people together, like what you're trying to do with this podcast, where you’re saying, “Look. What we care about is not being right. What we care about is being accurate.” So I’m agreeing that because my goal is accuracy, that I’m going to have to take some short-term pain sometimes. It means that sometimes I’m going to find out that something I believed is not actually accurate. Now, that's okay, because my goal is accuracy. 

So what you're doing within the group is you’re reinforcing this new mindset. The reason why we think, “Oh! I just want to be right,” is because it feels good to be right and feels bad to be wrong, and we’re all just trying to feel good about ourselves. Where I’m just trying to feel like we’re smart and we’re valuable and our opinions are meaningful and we’re good thinkers and all of those things. If we have to say this opinion that I hold actually turns out I need to calibrate it, because it's not exactly right. In the moment, that feels really bad to us. 

But if we’re in with a really good group of people and we’ve decided that the goal is accuracy. What ends up happening is that the kinds of things that we start to feel good about shifts. So, for example, if I come up to and I say, “You know what? I think I was really wrong about this thing. Let me talk to you about it.” You'll say, “Oh my God! That's so amazing that you changed your mind and thank you so much for sharing that with me.” 

Now, what’s happened is that because we have this commitment, I’m now being reinforced for the act of mind changing, or the act of calibration, or the act of mistake admitting, or the act of giving credit to someone that maybe I don't want to give credit to, because, for example, they’re on the opposite side of the political aisle, or whatever it might be, and you’re reinforcing those behaviors for me. 

So now what happens is that the kinds of things that cause me to feel good about myself are things that actually move me toward the goal of accuracy. So I don't have to give up feeling good in the moment, because I change what it is that makes me feel good. The best thing that I could do, for example, in poker, if I walked up to say Eric Seidel, who’s an amazing player and one of my mentors. If I walked up to him I said, “Man! I think I really butchered this hand.” That would get so much more reinforcement than if I walked up to him and just said, “Oh! I got so unlucky,” which is what most – That’s the kind of talk that most people are reinforcing. 

Eric Seidel would've walked away from me if I said, “Oh, I just got so unlucky,” because he didn't care about are you right or are you wrong. He cared about are you getting better. Are you getting more accurate? Are you moving toward the North Star? Your North Star? 

So now, when I walk up to him and said, “I think I really butchered this hand,” which might feel really bad, sort of, at the outset. Once he’s become my mentor, that's what makes me feel. So get a really good group of people together when you're committing to accuracy. You’re going to hold each other accountable. You’re going to listen to diverse viewpoints. You’re going to be willing to – And here is a really important thing. You’re going to be willing to sit in the middle of not saying something is 100% or 0%, that Pete Carroll's call was bad or good, but holding those beliefs somewhere in the middle. Because once I say, like, “Do you want to bet?” What that does is it causes you to see like how sure am I about this? What you realize is that you're very, very rarely 100% or 0% on anything and it moves you to the middle where you’re like, “Well, I’m like 60% sure that was a terrible call.” 

So now when I start to walk through the map with you, instead of having to have a full on reversal from right to wrong, you get to go from like 60% to like 45%, which isn't as big a deal, because you're sitting in comfort with uncertainty anyway. So that’s the second step that’s really important. 

So the first is really start thinking about want to bet and really start embracing uncertainty and understanding the uncertainty in this relationship. The second is get other people to help you. The third is –I think this is the really kind of interesting one, is the best way to ensure that you’re learning well from experience is to actually trying to quarantine yourself from experience. 

So I know that that’s sounds a little bit weird, but let me try to explain what I mean. When you have an outcome, good or bad, the quality of the outcome casts such a strong shadow over your ability to evaluate the decision quality that it’s mostly better not to have the outcome at all. I mean, unless you actually have like 10,000 outcomes, unless you can flip a coin 10,000 times and you can run a Monte Carlo, which for many, many decisions we can’t. 

Most decisions, the probabilities are relatively unknown. You're guessing at them, and we mostly don't get enough tries at the decision in order to have enough data to be able to say something across the aggregate, right? So we're usually dealing with just a handful of outcomes as were trying to evaluate decisions. We know that the outcome quality, it’s just casts this very big cognitive shadow. So what we have to do is try to figure out how to get out from under that cognitive shadow. 

The way to do that is to kind of ignore the outcome and focus on the process of the decision in the first place. So there're really three things that you can – There's four things you can do in order to really do this. Number one, as much as possible, evaluate decision prior to getting the outcome. For example, if you’re thinking about a particular sales strategy, really do really good evaluation of that sale strategy in advance. Try to imagine what the outcomes of that strategy might be, or particular tactics that you might be employing and what the outcomes of those particular tactics might be. 

Try to – When you're thinking about what those outcomes might be in advance, think about what the probabilities of those outcomes might be and actually write them down, and don't be afraid to try to do that. People will say to me, “Well, I can't say what the probability is, because I don’t know what the exact answer is.” But it's not school where it's like you have to say if I flip a coin, how often it will land head? We know the answer is 50%. 

For most things, you're going to be guessing. It’s going to be a range. You’re going to be like, “I don’t know. It’s somewhere between 30 and 55% of the time,” and that doesn't feel good to most people because it feels like a wrong answer, but it's not, because it's better than not trying at all. Once you get that range on it, just like with the want to bet question, it causes you to try to really seek out the information that might allow you to narrow that range. 

So it makes you very information hungry, which is good, because you're actually thinking probabilistically. So think about the outcomes. Try to assign some probabilities to those outcomes, and now that helps you, because it helps you to actually make a better decision in the moment prior to the outcome coming. Then once the outcome hits, because you’ve memorialized that process, you're less likely to overreact to a single outcome, because you recognize that outcome is part of a set. So that the first strategy, is much as possible, try to do this in advance. 

Now, there are some outcomes that you can't do in advance. So for example, you know from poker, I can't go through that process and memorialize all that stuff and work in a group to try to get to those scenarios. When I’m making a decision at the poker table, I have 30 seconds. So pretty much all of my evaluation is occurring after the fact, exposed. 

So what do you then once you already have the outcome if we know that the outcome casts such a strong shadow? There're three strategies for doing that. The first is, is if I’m working with you as a member of my decision pod, to try to talk about an outcome. We’ll talk about the quality of my decision. It's really good if I walk you through the decision only to the point that I have the question and not beyond. 

So I imagine you know from describing poker hands that this is actually really difficult to do, right? So when people are describing poker hands to you, how often is it when they're asking you a question that they don't describe the whole hand before they ask for your advice? 

[0:33:07.5] MB: Yeah. I think there’s always missing information. What position were you in? What was the stack size? What was the stack size of your opponent? What were the table dynamics? There’re so many kind of pieces of the puzzle that often times people just leave out huge factors that could meaningfully impact it. 

[0:33:22.2] AD: So I think that that’s true. How often is it that someone describes a hand to you where they have a question about the hand and how often is it they don't tell you how the hand turned out? Don’t they tell you how the hand turned out like every single time? 

[0:33:35.7] MB: Yeah, that’s right. The best way do it would be to just –

[0:33:37.1] AD: And then they ask you. 

[0:33:38.4] MB: Yeah. Just don't say the outcome, and then analyze whether they made the right decision or not. 

[0:33:42.3] AD: Right. Because, think about it. So here is the problem, is that once I’ve told you the outcome, I’ve now infected you with the outcome. We know that there’s this bad thing called resulting. I’m now going to make you result. 

So, naturally, whether you're trying to or not, if I tell you that I won the hand, you're probably going to process my decision is better. If I tell you that I lost the hand, you’re going to process it as worse. So when I described, for example, a poker hand to you, I might say like, “Okay. I was in first position. I’m going to give you all the right info, obviously.” I was in first edition and this is was my stack size and this way my opponent’s stack size. Here's what my hand was and here's sort of whether I’ve been loose or tight or perceived as aggressive or whatever it is. Here’s the perception of me. Here’s how that person has been playing. I had this particular hand and I was trying to decide whether I should open the pot for a raise or fold. What do you think? I stop. 

Most people don’t do that. Most people will move on and say, “So, I was trying to decide whether I should raise or fold.” So I raised, and then they did this and blah-blah-blah, and they describe the whole hand and they'll say to you, “So what do you think of whether I should’ve played the hand or not?” You might as well not ask the question at that point. 

That's true for infecting people with any kinds of beliefs. It’s like, for example, if you have a hiring decision and you have four people interview the potential candidate. If you allow those people to talk to each other before they come and tell you their opinion, you might as well have had one person interview the candidate. You have to figure out how to quarantine people from these things that really a part of what causes bias so that we know that my beliefs can cause bias for myself, because I'm a natural tendency to try to argue toward my own beliefs. 

Guess what? If I tell you my beliefs, I’ve now infected you with those and we’re going to now probably come to consensus in our view toward those beliefs. If you know the outcome of a decision, I’ve infected you with it. So when I'm talking to you and I’m trying to work with you, it's really good for me to not tell you what I believe and not tell you the outcome. That's a really good thing to do, and only describe up to the point that I have the decision and try to quarantine you from the rest of these stuff. 

Another really interesting exercise that you can do that I think is super, super valuable, I kind of hinted at a second ago, which is take one group of people and describe the decision that you have. Go past the decision point to the end, to the outcome and tell them that the outcome was good. Then take another group of people, describe the exact same decision process and tell them that the outcome was bad and just look at what happens in terms of their evaluation of the decision process so that you can see how much the outcome drives the analysis of the decision. How much it biases the analysis, the decision, and then you can interpolate between the two, because the people that you tell that the outcome was poor are going to point up the weaknesses in the decision process and those obviously you would like to be able to see. The people that you tell the outcome was good to, they’ll point out the strengths in the decision process and then you can kind of combine those two pieces of advice to try to get to a better answer about what the quality of the decision was. 

[0:37:03.8] MB: This week's episode is brought to you by our partners at Brilliant. Brilliant is a math and science enrichment learning tool. You can learn concepts by solving fascinating, challenging problems. Brilliant explores probability, computer science, machine learning, the physics of everyday life, complex algebra and much more. They do this with addictive interactive experiences that are enjoyed by over 5 million students, professionals and enthusiasts around the world. 

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I'm a huge fan of STEM learning, and that's why I'm so excited that Brilliant is sponsoring this episode.  They’ve been a sponsor of the show for a long time and there's a reason. They make learning math and science fun and engaging and exciting. You can get started today with Brilliant by going to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. That's brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. 

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[0:39:10.7] MB: So I want to change gears a little bit, but kind of come back to a concept that I think underpins a lot of this thinking, which I love kind of the concept that you’ve talked and written about and this whole idea of sort of how poker and sort of broadly decision-making is really about kind of trying to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty. 

As you sort of put in the subtitle of the book; making decisions when you don't have all the facts. I think one of the key components of that is this concept of expected value and how that kind of weighs our decision-making process.

We spent a lot of time on the show digging into the bias side and kind of the human side of it, but I'd love to get into as somebody who's been in the trenches and made a lot of this kind of quantitative probabilistic sort of thinking. I'd love to hear kind of you talk and share the idea of expected value and how that kind of weighs into what we've been talking about. 

[0:40:02.2] AD: Yeah, absolutely. So, again, in terms of making decisions under conditions of certainty, really, we’re talking about these two sources of uncertainty, which is hidden information and luck. So we’ve got those two pieces of the puzzle. What that means is that any given outcome, there’s – Basically, what it means is that there are more futures that are possible than the one that will actually happen, right? 

So for Pete Carroll, there was a future where the ball was fumbled. There was a future where the ball was intersected. There was a future where the ball is just incomplete. There was a future where the ball was caught. So we can sort of think about all those different futures and then think about that only one of those could occur, in this particular case, it was the ball was intercepted occurred. But each of those futures have a certain probability attached to them. 

So this is true of anything. It's not true of things that we sort of naturally think of as quantitative, right? That’s not the only place that’s true. So we think of like, for example, if we’re talking about investing, right? That, “Oh! Well, that’s obviously very quantitative. So we’re supposed to think about these probabilities and think about how we’re supposed to calculate those out.” But it’s really true of anything that we do in life. 

So thinking an expected value is a way to hold in your head that the future is uncertain so that we don't have these really big overreactions and so that we can evaluate our outcomes in a more rational way in order to learn from experience. 

So let me just say first of all what thinking an expected value means, and then I'll give you an example from my own consulting of how I sort of wrap this into a group where probabilistic thinking would have been necessarily natural to them that it really ended up improving the way that they work. 

So expected value is exactly this idea. Any future isn’t – Most times, the future is not 100% going to turnout in a certain. So there is a variety of different outcomes and each of those outcomes has a probability of occurring some percentage of the time that it happens, and each of those outcomes has some sort of return that you might get from it. So we always want to think about that the return is an all or nothing. The return is whatever the return is multiplied by the number of times that it will occur. 

So I'll give you a very simple example. If you tell me that when I flip heads, I’ll win $100. That doesn't mean that I'm going to win $100. It means I’m going to $100 when I flip heads. I’ll flip heads 50% of the time. So that means that what I actually am – My expected value on the next flip is 50% times the hundred that you're going to give me. So it's actually $50, not $100. So how can we apply this to something that’s less direct, like coin flipping? 

So I work with a nonprofit called Afterschool All-Stars. Afterschool All-Stars is a very big nonprofit. It’s national. Provide three hours of structured afterschool programming for over 70,000 inner-city kids per day. Really great. So they’re offering programs. 

Now, obviously, one of the things that's true of all nonprofit is that they have a big reliance on grants for funding. So I was working with them trying to help them to deal with their budgeting, because their budgets were kind of all over the place. Also along with that, to try to understand to help them understand when they should be hiring outside grant writers, which obviously cost money and also how to sort of work their stack in terms of prioritizing grants. 

So what I asked them to do was to give me a list of all the grants that they were applying to that year and what each grant was worth. So what they gave me was a list of all the grants that we’re applying to and what the grant award amounts were. So that's what the potential word was. So I said, “Okay. That's great. But what I need to know is how much are each of these worth to you. So you have to think about how often you’re going to get them and then multiply that by award amount to get it.” 

That was a surprisingly hard thing. It took a few back-and-forth to get them to understand what I was asking for, because it’s not a way that people normally think. In that, what I got was, “Well, we can't know what percentage of the time we’re going to get it.” I said, “Well, that’s true. But do you agree that you're not going to get it 100% of the time?” “Yes.” “Do you agree you're not going to get it 0% of the time?” “Yes.” “Do you agree you’re not 50-50?” “Yes” “Okay.” 

So we've kind of gotten a yes, no and maybe out of there. So you're going to be better than anybody else, because you have the most experience within your organization and with these foundations of kind of guessing at what the percentage of the time is. So you just have to take your best guess. 

So they started doing that and they took their best guess and then I showed them, “Okay. So now you multiply it by the grant award amount.” That actually tells you how much the grant is worth. So they started doing that and it did a bunch of really good things for them. Number one, because they had to actually estimate the percentage in order to get to the expected value, it made them actually think more about what the actual probability of getting the grant was, which helps them make decisions under conditions of uncertainty because they start thinking about, “Well, really. What is the luck element and what is the skill element? What can I do to make this grant better? What information can I find? What can I understand about the grantor and will it start to reduce the information asymmetry in order to get those guesses to be better?” So that's the first thing it did. 

The second thing it die, it revealed to them that some grant that they thought were very high value were actually not so high value and some grant that they thought were kind of low value were not that low value. So I can just give you an example. If you have $100,000 grant that you're going to get 10% of the time, that is not worth as much as a $50,000 grant that you’re going to get half the time. $100,000 grant that you’re going to get 10% of the time is 10% times 100, which means it's worth 10,000 to the organization. 

A $50,000 grant that you’re going to get half the time is 50,000×50%, which means it’s worth 25,000. So it helped them to understand what the actual worth to the organization of the grants were. Now when they were doing their budgeting, they weren't guessing so much, because they were taking all of those expected values, all of those expectancy and putting that into their budgeting for the next fiscal year. So they’re budgeting was more on. So that was really good. 

Then after the fact when they got or didn't get a grant, they were much less likely to overreact to it. So they were much less likely to start pointing fingers and blaming and say, “I can't believe that you didn't get that.” It helped them understand when they should hire an outside grant writer, because they could understand if the hourly that they were going to have to pay the grant writer was enough to increase the percentage of getting the grant enough to make it worth their while, to make it worth the return on the investment. So they understood that.

Then the other thing that it did that was really wonderful was because their focus started getting really digging down into these better probability estimate, they started calling up the foundation, and instead of just calling the ones that they didn't get, which is what they used to do. They would call them ones they didn’t get to ask what they could've done better, which his sort of our natural response. They started also talking to the grants, the people who gave them grants that they did get. 

The reason why they were talking to those foundations, which they didn’t used to do, was because they really wanted to understand how much of it was the grant that I wrote. Was I close? Was it a close call? Was it like one of these one point win versus one point losses or did a really clear the goalpost? Was I right in the center of the net? Because those are really important for understanding why you got the grant, because if it was a close call, obviously, you would want to treat that like you didn't get it so that you can improve going forward and you want to include that in your future probability estimate. 

Most people don't do that because it's painful. We really like to feel that we’re right and we did a good job and that our decision process was good. When we go to somebody where we got the grant and start probing around and they tell us, “Well, actually, you kind of got lucky.” That doesn't feel good unless you have a focus on accuracy and not a focus on being right. What thinking an expected value does is it naturally put your focus on accuracy so that that’s what you feel good about. You feel good about the call. 

So once we got all of that and there are sort of development attained, they ended up actually taking that way of thinking an expected value to program as well and thinking about what the success rate of a particular program might be. In this case, it would be how many kids would you serve. Also, with programming, there're some issues of if you get certain programs, you might be more likely to get a grant. 

So they would think about what’s the probability of success of program A versus program B if they have a choice between the two, and they're trying to think about how many kids would each program serve, and now they can come up with an expected value for how many kids are going to be well served from Program A versus program B. So it doesn't just have to be about money when you're thinking about it. It can be a return on your happiness, for example. How much happiness will I get out of something? How much satisfaction? In terms of health, like how much will it affect my health if I make choice A or choice B and what percent of the time do I think that that will actually work out? 

I think it’s a really valuable way to start approaching the world that really improves your decision-making and also goes a long way to helping with this resulting problem and helping with this kind of confirmation bias problem and this problem that we all like to affirm the things that we already believe and sort of think really well of ourselves. We don't like to probe around into the things that could actually help us improve our decision-making. 

[0:50:00.6] MB: Yeah. I think that's a great example and it's good to see kind of an application outside of the sort of really sort of clearly delineated world of poker. That's always something that I've tried to sort of zoom out and apply more broadly to business and personal context, is the beauty of poker as kind of a learning laboratory for teaching some of these decision-making concepts, is that in many cases you can kind of go and do the math after the fact and say, “Okay. Well, in fact, this was a correct decision, or this was an incorrect decision.” 

Now, you may not have perfect information of that case, but in many cases, you can kind of run the probabilities and say, “Okay. If they’re going to fold 30% of the time, this was a good all in,” or whatever. Whereas in business and life, it's so much harder to sort of cut through that fuzziness between decision and result and really figure out, “Okay. What actually was the correct decision?” 

[0:50:53.3] AD: So part of that problem I think comes from the fact that, in poker, it is actually possible to run a Monte Carlo, right? So you can take a particular hand and you can kind of run it enough sometimes to see how that might work out in the long run, that particular decision. So you can think of hypotheticals that you can actually run and see how they’ll go. 

I mean, poker ends in a cloud of no information a lot of the time. You don't end up seeing the card, but you’ve definitely played hands that are like that, or you can have some idea of, for example, if you said you can do these counterfactual, or you can imagine if the person is going to fold 30% of the time, or 40% of the time, or 50% of the time, or 20% of the time and you can figure out what their folding rate would have to be in order to make it a waiting decision. 

So there are ways to sort of explore in there that are more precise. But with a lot of decisions that we make, we can't do that, because the decision is somewhat unique and the probabilities are sort of more open and unknown. I think that that's where becoming really information hungry and having a really good group of people around you offer you their perspectives as well becomes really important, because even if your decision is unique to you, pieces of the decision are the kinds of decisions that other people have made. 

So we can think about bringing other people into the process as a way to kind of run a Monte Carlo, because then they’re going to bring their own experiences and their own evaluation of the process and their own sort of pieces of the puzzle and give their perspectives on your decision in a way that’s going to help you to cobble together something that looks like the decision that you made so that you can narrow down. So you’re not just guessing as much. So that you can actually get some clarity on know what’s worked for other people or hasn’t worked for other people. What their view. What their perspective is. What weaknesses they might see. What stress points they might see that you wouldn't otherwise see, because for any decision you make, lots and lots of people are making a decision that’s sort of like it. 

So if you can bring their experience to bear, it’s a little bit like being able to run that, “Well, if I done this, or if I had done this, or if I had done this, how do I think it would've turned out?” You might not be able to run it on a computer, but you can run it with other people.

[0:53:11.0] MB: I think you made another really good point about that and sort of how to apply this to more broad context in the sense that it doesn't have to be a perfect exact probability. Charlie Monger from Berkshire Hathaway has kind of the famous saying, or I think Warren Buffett says the same thing, is that they would rather be roughly right than precisely wrong. 

So the whole idea is to can you get a sense of, “Okay. We don't know the –” I think you’re nonprofit example really highlights this, is like we don't know if it's exactly a 35% chance of this sort of grant closing, but we know that it's between maybe 30 and 40%. This is a rough estimate and that can – Even if it's not a perfect number and the probability is not perfect, so many people kind of get caught up on that need to have the exact probability. When in reality, you can still make really effective decisions using this sort of lens of expected value even without exactly precise probabilities. 

[0:54:03.6] AD: I would actually argue to that point that not trying to all, taking the choice of not trying because you think that you can't come up with an exact answer is really, really disastrous. Like if I had a choice between stabbing an exact answer and not trying at all, I would take stabbing at an answer, because at least I’m thinking about, right? At least there are – Even though I should be thinking about a range, right? I should try to be roughly wrong as you said. I should recognize that it should be a rough estimate. 

But if I’m at least trying to come up with an exact answer, I'm trying. I'm recognizing that it is probabilistic in nature, and because I'm trying to come up with an exact answer, I’m at least looking for the information that would allow me to get there. Now, it’s a much better step to your point, the Charlie Monger and Warren Buffett statement to recognize that you’re actually going to have a rough estimate and that you have to be comfortable with that. That it's okay that you have a rough estimate. 

The fact that you can't get to an exact number, like 56%, doesn't mean that you're just supposed to say, “Well, screw it. I shouldn't even try, because I can't. I don't know that 2+2 is 4. All I know is that 2+2 is somewhere between three and five.” Well, okay. Because that’s way better than not trying at all, because if you don't try at all, the whole range is available. Then 2+2 might infinity, which we know is so silly. 

By the way, we do this in – If you think about it, we do this in math a lot, right? Like if I were to say to you what’s 156×243 and you said, “Whoa! I don’t know. It’s not off the top of my head.” I could actually get you to think this way, because I could say, “Well, do you think the answer is three?” Of course you’d say, “Well, no. That’s ridiculous.” I say, “Do you think is the answer is 225 million?” You’d be like, “No. Of course not.” 

So I can start to get you in the right range, like, “Do you think it’s a hundred thousand?” “No.” “Do you think it's 342?” “No.” We can start to get down into that range where we’re going to get somewhere in the 20,000-ish area, right? We can kind of get ourselves to a place where we kind of recognize, “Well, it has to have this many zeros, because I know what 100×200 is,” right? That’s sort of like – You start to sort of think about the other things that you know that are easier problems that can apply to it. I can now start to get you to range it down even if I can't get you to exact. 

In that case, the kinds of the decisions that you'll make out of – I can’t remember what the example I gave was, but the kinds of – Things that you’ll make out of – Decisions that you’ll make around whatever that number are, are going to be a lot better, because you're not going to be making decisions as if the number is three, and you're not going to be making decisions as if the number is 200 million. You’re going to be in the right range and that’s going to get you a lot farther along. 

[0:57:01.6] MB: I think that comes back to one of the things you talked about much earlier in the conversation, which is another really important point that we actually harp on a ton on the show, which is the idea that even these incremental kind of small improvements in your decision-making cascade through everything that you do and it impact your life across a vast array of kind of arenas. Because, really, fundamentally, life is just a series of decision after decision after decision. 

[0:57:26.7] AD: So there’s two things to think. I actually got asked this in an interview once. I said, “Well, how does improving your decisions really help if a lot of the decisions you make are one timers? So you can think about, well, hopefully one timer would be like getting married. I think for the majority of people now, it's a two timer. But let's call that a one-time decision and it’s like getting married. 

So how can it help because you're only doing it once and you just answered that question, which is, “Well, yeah. But if you're improving the quality of your decisions, you make thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of decision throughout your life.”

So if you improve the quality of each of those decisions even if the decisions might be different over the course of your life, that your outcomes are just going to better, because your decision quality is going to be better, even if it's a decision that you only do once. That’s going to realize – You can think about it as improving decision quality across a particular decision that you can run the decision 10,000 times. Over those 10,000 times, you'll be able to realize the game, but you could also think about it as more horizontal as opposed to vertical across all of your decision. Even though the decisions are somewhat different, if you're improving your decision quality, you'll see those gains start to realize. I think that’s the first important thing to understand. 

The second important thing is that I think that this kind of goes back to what we’re just saying about this idea of people are afraid to think about how often an outcome might occur, because they think they can't be exact. That people think that anything less than perfection is somehow failure, and they don't understand or they can't feel or they don't really – It's hard for them to embrace the idea that, “No. If I just get a little bit better, it’s okay. That I don't need to measure myself against perfection.” 

So I don't need to think about, “Oh! Am I getting it exactly at 56%?” It’s, “Am I not trying at all,” or “I’d rather be at between 20 and 80% than not trying at all, because even that’s better and it’s going to get me a little bit of the way.” 

So I like to give this example actually from poker, which is this, like, if I am not working with a group and I'm not really trying to improve these kinds of things, I'm not really trying to de-bias. I'm not really trying to think about how to learn from my outcomes. I’m processing the world and the way that I sort of born into it with not really trying to move my decision-making at all. 

Let's say that out of 100 opportunities that come my way, when I'm playing poker, maybe I catch five really good learning opportunities. I’m missing 95% of the learning opportunities as my natural self and I’m catching five of them. 

Now let’s say that I start to do this really great work and I start to find some people that I can really deconstruct decisions with and I start to think about how to be a better decision-maker, and now let’s say I improve that output so that now I’m catching 10 opportunities to learn out of 100 that cross my path. I think that a lot of people look at that as a failure. They say, “Well, you're missing 90% of the opportunities to learn.” I say, “No. That’s a tremendous success, because new Annie is going to crush old Annie. Old Annie is only catching five, and new Annie is catching 10.” 

So I suppose you can look at it as new Annie is missing 90%, but that's not the way I look at it. I look at it as Annie just doubled her opportunities to learn and, obviously, that version of Annie is going to crush in terms of her ability to win the old version of Annie who wasn't trying at all. 

So I think we really need to understand that the goal is to make these small changes. Now, look, if you can make big changes, that's great, but I think that it's unrealistic and I think that we think, “Oh! I’m going to get to this perfect state.” It actually inhibits us from being able to move forward, because we will view ourselves through that lens of failure. 

Whereas if we say, any time that we do catch ourselves, anytime that we catch ourselves being bias, we catch ourselves equating the quality of the outcome with the quality of decision or engaging in hindsight bias, or I told you so, or black-and-white thinking, or not thinking probabilistically and we catch it and we were reverse. That’s a success. Even if we missed a whole bunch of stuff before that, if we catch something that we wouldn’t have already seen, it really makes a difference. 

So I try to think about our – That we have this distribution. Let's call it just a normal distribution of the quality of our decisions. Our goal is to get more of our decisions our at the right tail, out at the good end of the tail. I think that doing this work, two things happens. One is you are more likely to end up with more decisions out at the right side of the tail. Not all of them, right? But you will. 

Then through this kind of training where you start to change, what it is that you get your reward from? Where you start to change getting your reward from Pete saying, “Wow! I really think I butchered this decision,” or “I think I might've made a mistake,” or “I think this other person, like I don't really like them, but I think I have to give them credit for this.” Where that start to be what you sort of get your high from, that will just slightly start to shift that distribution to the right, just a little bit, but that little bit is going to have you returns for your whole life. 

[1:02:42.3] MB: I think that’s such a critical point, this idea that changing. Then you mentioned this very early on in our conversation, but like re-orienting yourself to what makes you feel good is kind of this pursuit of truth and getting to what's true, as opposed to proving yourself right. It’s just a massive kind of fundamental impact across all of the results that you see in your life. 

[1:03:03.5] AD: That sort of mindset shift, is that in normal social conversation, like if I’m just talking to somebody who’s like isn’t in my decision part or whatever and we’re just like at dinner and you’re just like – Or you’re at a cocktail party or something like that. The normal interaction is that if I express some sort of belief that is not true that the other person generally won’t correct. They want offer the other piece of information. 

There're really kind of two reasons why that is. One is either if they really believe that you're wrong, they usually don't want you to feel bad, right? Because like you're at a cocktail party. They're not looking to get in an argument with your or whatever. So they don't really want to embarrass you. They don’t want to make you feel bad. They don’t want to get in an argument with you. So they usually hold the opinion to themselves, or they might thing that they’re wrong, and so they don't offer up their information because they don't want to be embarrassed. 

So you've expressed something with great confidence and so now they question their own belief, and so they won't actually offer up the information that you have. When you start to engage with people in the way that we’re talking about where it's around accuracy and we have an agreement to accuracy. It reverses that, because what you know is that if you don't tell me information that you have, that’s what’s actually doing harm to me. That it's not about like, “Oh! I might hurt her feeling because I’m telling her information that would have to cause her to calibrate her opinion.” It’s that you know that if I found out that you had information that would have helped me develop a more accurate view of the world and you didn't tell me it, that would be the harm that you would cause me. So that’s as beautiful thing that really happens when you create a really productive decision pod. 

[1:04:36.7] MB: So kind of tying this up, for somebody who’s listening to this conversation that wants to start to improve their decision-making, start to implement some of the ideas we’ve talked about today, what would you sort of give them as a piece of homework or kind of a starting step towards implementing some of these processes and ideas? 

[1:04:54.3] AD: Well, obviously read my book. So, yeah. I mean, I think that the biggest, the most important piece of homework is to go find some people who are looking to be more open-minded to be more constructive about the way that they hear the sense, that really do seem to want to be better decision-makers. You can find them as coworkers or as friends. Maybe members of your own family, and sit down and really write down an agreement with them. 

Say, “We’re going to be in this together and here’s what we’re agreeing to. We’re going to hold each other accountable to bias. We’re going to try to not be defensive when people challenge our opinion. We’re going to pat each on the back for things that signal that we’re trying to be accurate as opposed to trying to be right. We’re going to be open-minded to diverse opinions and we’re going to open ourselves up to people who disagree with that,” right?

Go look at your Twitter stream right now and see if you're only following people who have the same opinions with you or if you’re really, really paying attention and following with an open mind people who disagree with you, and go fix that. Go fix your social media if your social media is all on one side. Because you should be following people who disagree with you. 

Because the opinion that disagree with you are actually the most valuable opinions for you. They're the ones that have the most to teach you, because you already know why you think you're right. What's the most valuable is people who might point out to you why you might be wrong, and you can't get that if you're only listening to voices that agree with you. So go fix that and go find some people to do that work with you. So I would say that that would be piece of homework number one. 

Piece of homework number two would be to start listening in yourself and you can also do this as a group exercise as well. For the things that might come out of your mouth that signal that you're engaging in this kind of bias behavior. So any time that you declare things with certainty, using the words wrong or right, saying I should have known, or you should have known, or I told you so, or why didn’t I see that coming? In chapter 6 of the book, I've got a list of some of those kinds of things to get you started. 

But try to listen for those things that come out of your mouth that might get you to start thinking, “Well, I’m not really thinking in [inaudible 1:07:09.3]. I’m thinking with certainty. I’m thinking that I should have been able to see what was happening, when obviously I couldn't,” and really write those down and like pin those somewhere. Put those up on your wall or something so that you're aware of those kinds of things that might come out of your mouth or those kinds of thoughts that might go through your head so that when you have those thoughts, it will actually regular you to go in and actually step back and really examine was that true and signals that maybe you should say, “Well, would I bet on that?” 

So when you say like, “Oh, I should have known it was going to turn out that way,” and you know that that's on your list, that you step back and say, “Well, wait. Would I really bet on that? Would I bet that I should have known?” so that you can go back and start to think about really what the decision quality was. I think that that’s a really useful exercise and you can do with a group and you can share the list with the group so that they can point out when you're saying things like that. 

Then the third piece of homework that I would say is really try this thing of discussing a decision with one person and telling them that it turned out poorly and discussing a decision with another person and telling them it turned out well and just listen for the differences, because I think that that's one of the most eye-opening pieces of information that you can ever get. When you see how different the analysis is. Make sure that when you're doing it, you're not talking about something that's really obvious, like running a red light or running a green light. Make sure it's really like a more Pete Carol kind of decision. Something about a strategy or a tactic that you applied or a tough decision that you had in your life, and go talk to one person and say, “Hey,” and here it is. It turned out great. This make up a great outcome for it. Then with another person make up a bad outcome and really just hear them. I think that there's nothing more that will show you how much you need to really keep outcomes away from people when you're trying to get advice. 

[1:08:58.4] MB: And for listeners who want to dig in, learn more about you, read the book, etc., where can people find you and the book online? 

[1:09:04.6] AD: Sure. So if you’d look at annieduke.com, everything is there. So my book is definitely there. You can order there from whatever your preferred bookseller is. I really recommend – I also put out a newsletter every single Friday, and the newsletter goes through things that are sort of the moment that apply to this kind of thinking. 

As an example, in this particular – In the newsletter that’s going to be coming out tomorrow, I have a piece on Bloomberg article where they declared – These people had done a simulation of the World Cup, where they had Germany as the most likely to win the World Cup. Obviously, there're a lot of teams. So Germany was 24%. So when Germany got knocked out, Bloomberg wrote an article about how the simulation was wrong. 

So I have usually about five pieces in the newsletter. For example, this week, that's one of the piece of just talking about how problematic that is that they declared the simulation wrong when the simulation literally said that three times out of four, Germany was going to lose. It just happened that Germany was the most likely, and this is part of how you can see out in the world the way that this sort of need for uncertainty and the way that we are black-and-white thinkers instantiates in terms of our ability to really understand outcome quality and decision quality. 

So I’ll take from that, for example, which was obviously news in the sports to research in behavioral economics, economic psychology, to politics. Looking at how you apply to business. Looking at how you apply these kinds of concepts. So if you want to subscribe to my newsletter, you can also go to annieduke.com and there is links to archives of old newsletter so that you can read what I write before you decide to subscribe. 

Then if you do decide to subscribe, you’ll get that every Friday. You can also go look at my foundation, which is howidecide.org, and what we do is try to bring these kinds of decision skills to youth with a special focus on inner-city youth. So I help people explore that. Then you can also follow me on Twitter @AnnieDuke. 

[1:11:18.0] MB: Well, Annie. Thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing all these wisdom about decision-making and thinking more effectively. That was a really fascinating conversation, and we’re glad to have you on here. 

[1:11:27.3] AD: Well, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it. 

[1:11:29.9] 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 hi, shoot me an email. 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 email. 

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Why The Science of Trait Psychology May Just Predict Everything In Your Life with Dr. Brian R. Little

In this episode we go deep on the science of personality. We look at how we’ve moved way beyond the debate of nature vs nurture, we look at the “Myth of Authenticity" and the danger of “just being yourself,” we examine why human wellbeing (aka success) depends on the sustainable pursuit of core projects in our lives, explore the complex dance of self improvement between the limitation of biological, social factors and the identity of individuals, and look at how much agency and control we really have in shaping our personalities and lives among all of these different factors with our guest Dr. Brian Little. 

• What is Trait Psychology?

• Traits do have predictive validity

• “The Big Five” personality model is the most dominant perspective in personality trait psychology

• OCEAN

• Openness to experience

  1. Conscientiousness

  2. Extraversion

  3. Agreeableness

  4. Neuroticism 

• Honesty / humility is a sixth factor that may not be included in the “Big Five” model

• These personality traits have consequential predictive ability for your life outcomes, happiness, marriage, success, divorce, etc

• Big FIVE is a starting point but not the entire picture of your personality

• The trait of conscientiousness is a very good predictor of work place success but also predicts health outcomes, why is that?

• Conscientiousness is the tendency to get things done, to be responsible, self regulate, etc 

• Disagreeable people also have a health risk factor - low agreeableness shows an increased risk for heart disease

• Openness-to-experience and conscietouness have different paths to success - but both can be successful predictors of positive life outcomes

• The myth of the creative hero. The creative project is much more important than the illusion of the solo creative.

• How changeable or immutable are our personality traits? Are we stuck with the personality we are born with?

• What are “Free traits” and how do they interact with our personality?

• Your trait expressions can be shaped not just by your biology but also by the things that really matter to you - by your own “personal projects”

• If you constantly act out of character - you may eventually run the risk of burning out

• The study of our traits gets us INTO the study of personality but not ALL THE WAY in

• We’ve moved WAY beyond the nature vs nurture debate 

• Genetic expression is a matter of external influence than shapes the expression of genes

• Certain personality expressions are linked to either dopamine or serotonin expression in the brain

• There is a biological “base” to our personality - but it’s a base that we can either act against or act in accordance with it

• You are like all other people in some ways, like some other people, and like no other person

• Self improvement is a dance between biological, social, and individual factors 

• Traits are a necessary way of understanding personality but they are not sufficient 

• We explore "The Bodnarian Aspects of Matt"

• Rather than a black and white concept that an individual just a collection/combination of traits - its a complicated mix of biology, social impacts, and individual desires/goals etc 

• How much agency and control do we have in shaping our own personalities amid the stew of factors that impact who we are

• We are not just pawns - we can shape things and change the trajectory of our lives (within reasonable boundaries)

• You must begin with a reasonable appraisal of the ecosystem in which you live and work

• Many people squander their 20s pursuing the wrong roads or paths

• “Go for it” feels good - but its often a cheap way out - take a harder look and really look at the best path forward for yourself 

• Accepting and facing reality as it is - including your own limitations and weaknesses - is an essential component of success

• Human wellbeing (“success”) depends on the sustainable pursuit of core projects in our lives. 

• The sustainable pursuit can be maintained if you have a mix of internal motivation and a realistic assessment of your own ecosystem

• Envisioning your barriers may increase your effectiveness and ability to solve them

• Natural dispositions that we don’t borrow from our cultural scripts are the first line of influence that help shape what becomes the core projects in our lives

• Out of the stew emerge biological shaped, but also socially influenced possible futures for yourself that are anchored in core projects 

• The sustainable pursuit of core projects is vital - the way in which we get them is

• The “Myth of Authenticity" and the danger of “just being yourself"

• The origin of your self improvement projects is very important 

• Homework: If you want to play outside your personality comfort zone, start with small uncomfortable changes and gradually build into more and more difficult situations 

• Homework: Conduct short term experiments, self change experiments, “fixed role explorations” and then monitor the impact that has on your personality and behavior

Thank you so much for listening!

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [Book] Me, Myself, and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being by Brian R Little

• [Book] Who Are You, Really?: The Surprising Puzzle of Personality (TED Books) by Brian R. Little

• [Book] Introduction to Personality by Walter Mischel

• [Wiki Article] Albert Bandura

• [Encyclopedia Article] Bernard Williams

• [Wiki Article] Personal construct theory

• [NYU Profile] Gabriele Oettingen

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] 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 two million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries and part of the self-help for smart people podcast network.

In this episode, we go deep on the science of personality. We look at how we move way beyond the debate of nature versus nurture. We look at the myth of authenticity and the danger of just being yourself. We examine why human well-being AKA success, depends on the sustainable pursuit of core projects in our lives. 

We explore the complex dance of self-improvement between the limitations of biological, social factors and the identity of us as individuals. We look at how much agency and control we really have in shaping our personalities and lives among all these different factors, with our guest Dr. Brian Little.

Do you need more time? Time for work, time for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you signup and join our e-mail list. It’s called How You Can Create Time for the Things that Really Matter in Life.

You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the e-mail list at successpodcast.com. You’re also going to get exclusive content that’s only available to our e-mail subscribers.

We recently pre-released and episode and an interview to our e-mail subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience, and that tremendous implication, because there was a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first.

With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guest in a live exclusive interview just for e-mail subscribers. There’s some amazing stuff that’s available only to e-mail subscribers that’s only going on if you subscribe and signup to the e-mail list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Or, if you’re driving around right now, if you’re out and about and you’re on the go and you don’t have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44-222. That’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we showed how you can decode scientific studies and spot bad science by digging deep into the tools and skills you need to be an educated consumer of scientific information.

Are you tired of seeing seemingly outrageous studies published in the news only to see the exact opposite published a week later? What makes scientific research useful and valid? How can you as a non-scientist read and understand scientific information in a simple and straightforward way that can help you get closer to the truth and then apply those lessons to your life? We discussed that and much more with our previous guest, Dr. Brian Nosek. If you want to be an educated consumer of scientific information, check out that episode.

Now for our interview with Brian Little.

[0:03:23.1] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show, Dr. Brian Little. Brian is an internationally acclaimed scholar and speaker in the field of personality and motivational psychology. He's currently a research professor at Cambridge University, where he's a fellow of the Well Being Institute and director of the social ecology research group in the Department of Psychology. He was previously voted the favorite professor of Harvard's graduating class three years in a row, and his work has been featured in Time Magazine, the Ted Stage and much more.

Brian, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:55.0] BL: Thank you, Matt. Delighted to be here.

[0:03:57.4] MB: Well, we're very excited to have you on the show today. To start out, I'd love to dig into, obviously you're an expert in in personality and what makes us ourselves. I'd to start out with one of the things that you've talked about and written about a lot, which is the field of trait psychology and the fundamentals of the big five personality trait model and how that works.

[0:04:20.7] BL: Yeah, happy to do that. Before a while, trait psychology was very much the dominant perspective in studying human personality. Then in 1968, a book was written by Walter Mischel that really challenged the whole notion of whether there are stable traits of personality. Then subsequent to that, there was a Renaissance work on personality and on how traits do have predictive validity, and that it isn't nonsensical to talk about our personality traits.

It is in that context of a revitalized trait psychology that the work of my own work and that of my colleagues and students is placed. In this renewed personality trait psychology, the big five is the most dominant perspective. It postulates that each of us can be placed on five spectrum that represent the big five traits, and these traits are – they spell out an acronym. It spells out OCEAN; O, openness to experience. C, conscientiousness. E, extraversion. A, agreeableness and N, neuroticism.

There are many challenges to the big five, but it is still the dominant perspective. One of the challenges suggests that there's a sixth factor, which might be called honesty and humility, and that is differentiated from the others. Now what's exciting about big five is that they are predictive. Your score on these scales predict consequential outcomes that are really important, such as but you're likely to be divorced or whether you do well in your organization, or in terms of the overall theme of this program whether you're likely to experience success and what success you're likely to experience.

For example, the difference between openness and conscientiousness is each can predict success, but those who are open to experience more likely to find success and creative, innovative spheres. Whereas, those who are conscientious are much more likely to find them in fields that are more conventional in answering questions to which there is an answer. Whereas, the more open individuals explore questions that are new and are themselves innovative.

Each of the other dimensions; extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism, or its obverse stability are highly consequential. I'd be happy to go through each of them in more detail, but that's the bare bones of what the big five traits is about they're relatively stable, they have consequential outcomes that matter for people’s lives, and they get us up to the starting point, but not all the way through to understanding who you are as a person.

[0:07:31.4] MB: I do want to dig in a little bit and there's a couple different pieces I'd like to explore. One, I'd love to hear a little bit more about some of those research examples, or implications of how the big five can predict life outcomes 10, 20 years down the road. Then the second piece I'd to dig into maybe after that is learn a little bit more about the different paths of success of somebody who is more operating out of openness, versus somebody who's operating out of conscientiousness.

[0:08:01.4] BL: Yeah. First of all, the long-term predictions, one of the most interesting of these is the trait of conscientiousness. It is a very good predictor, as you might expect of promotion in your workplace, of relative success in university. Yet, perhaps more surprisingly, conscientiousness is more likely than other traits to predict health and success in the future. Even, and I find this most interesting, it even is a good predictor of premature death.

Conscientiousness, just to flesh it out a little bit is a Tennessee to get things done, to get them done on time, to be responsible, and we can understand why that plays out well in our organizations, but why would it affect our health? I think this is probably due to the fact that highly conscientious people who are able to self-regulate are more likely to follow through on health advice in their positions, for example. They stick with the health regimen. They count those calories, and consequently they live longer and they're healthier throughout most of their lives. That's a consequential outcome that I think plays out into our futures and actually may impact the length of those futures.

The other example is on agreeableness. Now agreeableness is at the positive end, is the person who is well, agreeable, pleasant. They don't like conflict they, and so they do things in groups, or in relationships, which will subvert conflict and get around it, sometimes in very subtle ways. The lower end of that disagreeable people also have a risk factor for their health. The evidence is pretty clear that low agreeableness poses risks for coronary heart disease. The reason for this, as you may remember the old work on type-A personality, the person who is trying to get ahead and push, push, push, push, and it was often thought that it was at hurry sickness that was the predictor of cardiac risk, but it seems not to be that.

The behavioral pathogen appears to be hostility, and hostility is the core component underlying both type A behavior, and it is related to scoring low on agreeableness on the big five. Again, you have a personality trait with long-term implications for the way our lives go. That I think it's helpful to know about. I think in terms of the subtleties, you may take somebody else, because quite active an extrovert. They need stimulation, they love to have stimulants and they react well to stimulants, because neocortically they have a tendency not to be as arousable, so they need to have stimulation in their field, in their environment, or by the ingestion of stimulants of some sort.

They can be seen as irrepressible and so on. It may well be that you have a partner who is very extroverted, and you may worry that they're overdoing it. They're working crazy hours. They're working 70 hours a week. They’re push, push, push. You may think that they need to slow down and you force them to go to the Caribbean for a week. There they are checking their e-mail and you're tempted to say and you might say, “Good. You need to stop. Stop right now. Look at me. You're going to kill yourself.”

Now the paradox there, the subtlety there is that person may simply be extroverted and not disagreeable. They may not have that hostility that the real coronary-prone person has. The subtlety here is by loving them and trying to get them to slow down to improve their health, you may actually increase their hostility. I think that we need to be very careful when we interact with our loved ones and our colleagues that we understand the full spectrum of their personality dispositions when we're trying to do well by them and do good for them.

[0:12:48.7] MB: Let's come back to this, the different paths of success. I'd love to hear a little bit more about how people with high openness find success in life versus how people with high conscientiousness find success.

[0:13:00.4] BL: Yeah. The high open to experience person loves exploration. They have what I call alacrity. They're keen. When you mention something to them that sounds interesting, they throw themselves into it. They are as I mentioned earlier, they tend to do well in fields that require creative problem-solving. There have been some wonderful studies mainly out of the University of California Berkeley on creative individuals.

One of the most clearly emerging patterns of what these giants of creativity, I mean, in architecture were talking people like Frank Lloyd Wright. I mean, these are – he actually did not appear he was unable to, but people of his rank were studied and were compared with individuals who were not rated as creative as them in their fields; architecture, arts, science, technology and novelists and so on. They were in the same firms if they were architects, so you had a nice control group there. You had that highly creative ones, you had partners in the same firms that were not creative and you looked at their personality.

One of the best predictors of the creative individuals was their openness to experience. What's interesting about openness to experience is that when it comes to emotions, it means that you're very open to negative emotions, but also positive emotions. You have individuals a high in openness to experience, who are willing to accept and register in their daily lives that they're anxious, that they're depressed, that they're feeling a bit vulnerable, but they’re self-conscious about how things are going right now. These are aspects of negative emotion.

You also see in the highly creative people that they're over the moon joyful when things progress. That they could be cheery, they have aesthetic chills. One of the best unique features of open to experienced individuals is they experience what we call piloerections. These are your hair standing up when you – at the back of your neck when you’re listening to your favorite piece of music.

The interesting feature of those who are open to experience is that they may be seen as being very emotional, very up and down in their moods, passionate perhaps is another word for it. This can lead them both to extraordinary success in their emotion-driven creative work, but they can also be a real pain in the neck to work with. They require individuals who were perhaps more conscientious to check the bank balance in that major architectural project. To check the provision of elements for the creative acts and theater, or whatever it might be. To check that your search grants are coming through in the field of science.

One of the features of one of my books on Me, Myself and Us is that there's a bit of a myth of the creative hero that we think of highly creative individuals as being beyond the norm and emergent at a level where they cannot be compared to the normal person. I'm more interested in not the creative hero, but the creative project, the creative outcropping of those creative individuals. They cannot occur, will not occur without the concurrence of individuals who will tell you that the bank account is low, that they'll double-check the things you need to do, that will tell you if your fly is open when you're going to the bank manager for a loan.

It's the interplay of these different personalities that I find particularly intriguing and that we need to be mindful of, before we say there are good people, bad people, personality and the expression of personality is a social ecology. We draw from and contribute to the pursuits of others.

[0:17:24.2] MB: In some sense, that's almost like the classic artistic stereotype and that makes a lot of sense. I'm curious, we've talked a lot about these big five personality traits and how they can impact and predict life outcomes. How immutable are these traits, or how changeable are they?

[0:17:42.5] BL: It's a service of considerable research interest rate right now. In one sense, they're fairly stable. If you look at the kids in kindergarten who were the outgoing, extroverted ones, relative to their peer group when you come back for your school reunion, there's still relative to their peer group the outgoing extroverted ones, and the shy ones still tend to be a little bit shy and so on. There is this what we call rank order stability across the decades. That doesn't mean that individuals may not change. In fact, much of my own research has been looking at in how we may change from let's say, being an introverted person into being more extroverted, and why do we do this.

I coined a term, free traits, to discuss the characteristics or depict the characteristics of individuals who are biologically introverted, let us say, but whose actions appeared to be very extroverted. I use myself as an example, that I've been as you said in your introduction very, very graciously that I received some recognition for my teaching. In the first couple of lectures, my students certainly don't think I'm introverted. Biogenically, which is the term I use to subsume genetic and evolutionary and biochemical and other features of personality, biogenically, I'm very introverted.

One of the features that you can tell about introverts is that they don't handle stimulation in the same way as more extroverted people do, so that if I had a caffeine late in the afternoon, I can't sleep at night, whereas more extroverted person is relatively unaffected by that. What I find is that my trait expression and the trait expressions of the people listening to this program can often be shaped not just by your biogenic dispositions, but by the things that really matter to you, what I call your personal projects in your life, and my personal or personal projects is being a professor. It seems to me that as a professor, I'm called upon to profess which, means to convey with passion what I believe to be true, no holds barred.

When I talk to my students early in the morning and they'd be and up all night drinking milk, I need to engage them and have them not fall asleep or fall further asleep. I’ll do it, and I do it because I love my field and I love my students and I love to expose them to what I find is exciting in our research.

I can do that fairly easily now, because I've had decades and decades of experience doing it. People who act out of character in this way may run the risk of burning out. A naturally extroverted person can put on an entertaining lecture and not necessarily feel any cost for that, but those who act out of character can experience a cost. It works with the other big five traits. You may be naturally a very agreeable person, but you have a parent who needs to go into a care facility and you're getting stymied at every turn. For all of March, you need to act as a disagreeable person. You do so and it's hard for you, because you're naturally very, very sweet, but you do it.

It raises the question, why do we engage in this behavior? As I say, I think it's because of the core projects in our lives. We act out of character for professional reasons and we also act out of character for love. A guy who is trying to put on a great birthday party for his kid is likely to act out of character, even if he is introverted, as a goodtime dad who is really enjoying the party. After the party, he's ready to go into his room and just so to collapse.

This is part of what makes us human, I think. This is where I think, as I mentioned before that the study of our traits gets us into the study of human personality, but it doesn't take us all the way in. To look all the way in, we need to look at these core projects in our lives. To look at how we sometimes act out of the character and look at how we sometimes bend to accommodate to the social expectations, the professional expectations, the expectations that come from being a good friend. This makes life more complex, but to me it makes it much more intriguing.

[0:22:51.8] MB: I think that makes a lot of sense. I want to dig into the concept of free traits a little bit more. Before we do, you touched briefly on this concept of the biogenic nature and I want to zoom out and examine. You've talked previously about the three different natures; biogenic, sociogenic, etc. Would you explain that framework and why that's important in understanding personality?

[0:23:16.2] BL: Yeah, thanks for that, because it's a really important distinction, I believe. We’ve moved way beyond the nature-nurture debate of what I would have been exposed to as an undergraduate on. We now know that one has one's nature or nurtured, that their genetic expression is contingent upon context and certainly an intrauterine life, their influences from external influences that will shape the expression of genes. We can't simply talk about something just purely nature or purely nurtured.

That said, I think it's useful when we talk about traits to talk about the biogenic influences on them. We know for example, that some of the personality characteristics, particularly openness to experience and extraversion are linked to dopaminergic pathways in the brain and the reactivity, other aspects, the more stabilizing aspects of conscientiousness and so on. I seem to be more related to the serotonergic pathways. They're also some influence and some research. Not all of which is concurs with other research, so there's still a bit of complexity and about the molecular genetics of personality and various snips and sorts that will shape our lives that has not been as cumulatively impressive as it was originally thought.

I think that there is no doubt that there is a biogenic base to personality. That's the base that we may act against when we're deliberately trying to shape our own lives, or we can act in accordance with it. Let's take extraversion as example. We can clearly examine and lay out the biogenic influences on extraversion as I mentioned. There are also sociogenic influences on the expression of behavior that is regarded as extroverted. Some cultures placed a premium on extroverted conduct, others place a premium on more introverted conduct.

For example, when people in some Asian countries are talking about problems with their content in school, they're worried that their kids are too extroverted and they want to become more introverted, because the norm there is a more introverted norm. Whereas in North America is typically the opposite, that that is the concern of the parents.

We have biogenic, we have sociogenic influences upon our behavior and they meet as if  we’re in the idiogenic, and that's the same root as the word idiosyncrasies; is the particular singular aspect of your own behavior. I think it's important, and so let me just preface some further comments on that by saying that in personality psychology, we study the way in which each of us, each of the listeners here is like all other people, like some other people and like no other person.

The idiogenic source of our personality are the singular pursuits projects, the commitments that you make in your life. I believe that all three of these influences play out as important factors in shaping our lives. As you move through your profession, as you try to improve yourself as many of your listeners are motivated to do, we can look at the dance as a word between your biogenic propensities, the sociogenic constraints within which you work and the idiogenic projects, commitment, concerns that really motivate you, that make you distinctive among all the other people in your life.

I think that if we ignore any of those roots, we'll miss something really important. It's funny, I would often, before my classes I would meet with them and they'd be milling around before class and I got into the habit of saying, “So, how's it going?” The answer was always, “Fine.” The next day, how's it going? Fine. Every day it was the same routine. One day I came in and I said, “How's it going?” The response was, “Fine.” I just said, I looked at the student, I said, “No, really? How's it going?” That no really, was really an opening to discourse and exchange of ideas and what really concerned them, that was very, very rewarding, both for them and for me, because I genuinely was interested in how they're doing.

The response would be, “Really? Terrible. My girlfriend's gone to Stanford and left me again.” I think the multivariate statistics was designed to suck the very soul out of me. They get into things that are singular about your girlfriend, Leslie. Distinctive about how you find stats difficult. That allows me to understand them way more than if I were to simply look at their scores on big five personality traits.

I guess, one of the things I'm crafting here is the argument that traits are a necessary way of understanding one personality, but they're insufficient. There are these other ways in which are like no other person. The distinctive Bodnarian aspects of Matt that I think are really important to take into account. Else, or else, we just stick you in a category, put you in a pigeonhole and I'm not even sure pigeons belong in those pigeon holes.

[0:29:22.4] MB: In some sense, by the way I love that phrase, the Bodnarian aspects of Matt, that's a good one. Rather than this black and white conception of an individual as a collection of a bag of traits, it's really a much more complicated mix of biological factors, social impacts and also individual desires, goals and experiences.

[0:29:44.1] BL: That's right.

[0:29:44.7] MB: How do you see agency, or individual agency and control playing into how we can shape our own personalities and then how it interacts with this stew of factors?

[0:29:58.3] BL: That's a really great question. That could take us three hours, but let me compress it into two minutes and eight seconds. Agency is really a crucial concept to invoke when you're trying to explain the shape of human lives. This is where the idiogenic sources is highlighted, that earlier perspectives on human personality would argue that we're simply the victim of our biogenics, or upon shaped by the sociogenic influences in our lives.

I've argued for many years and there are certainly other theorists as well; Al Bandura, perhaps most, well certainly most famously in the field of psychology, who have argued that we are not pawns, but agents, that we craft our lives in ways that transcend the forces that arise out of our biologies and our cultural shaping. That there are is that we’re fates beyond traits. I believe that agency, the act of shaping of our lives, which is what I mean by an agency, is a necessary way of understanding why individuals do what they do. I think it is an important stance to take in our lives to feel that we can shape things, that we’re not victims, but that we can shape our lives.

I also believe that we can overdo in our expectation that we can invariably shape whatever it is we want. One of the things that I emphasize when I'm talking about people's personal projects is that they be based on reasonable appraisal of the ecosystem in which they're working. By that, I mean that if you are not aware that there are legitimate constraints upon your behavior, legitimate in the sense that these are reality constraints, that no amount of wishing and no amount of agential optimism can subvert, that you need to take these into account when you're shaping as best you can your life.

This is the kind of reality test. Sometimes it's really difficult to tell students for example, the course that they’re trying to pull at might work, but a much better one in which they can be truly excellent is this one instead. Many people I think find themselves hooked onto a particular desired identity in the future, without sufficiently checking into alternatives that could bring them to joy in the sense of efficacy and the sense of joy that they wish. Therefore, they can actually squander their twenties by pursuing something which would be better off downplayed and explore other alternatives.

I think a good teacher will provide those alternative paths to people who are stumbling on the paths that they're currently exploring. A good parent would do that with their kids, and a good friend will do that. “When you say so, I'm going to do X.” You wonder if in fact this is such a good idea. Go for it is very rewarding as a thing to say to a friend, but only – but all too often, it's a cheap way out of I'm not really being a friend, because you realize that there may be alternatives to that action that would be better off, given the person's natural talents and we all have talents that can create successful lives for us if only we would explore them instead of getting bogged down in less fruitful ones.

[0:33:57.2] MB: It's funny. I think in many ways you're echoing a theme that we hear repeatedly on the show, which is this idea that’s accepting and facing reality as it is, rather than as you want it to be, including the self-awareness of looking at your own limitations and weaknesses is really an essential component of success.

[0:34:16.9] BL: Absolutely. It's very interesting that as a professor, I find that the hardest lecture I give is on this topic, because students want to be told that they want to have reinforced what they've learned, that there's nothing you can't do if you want it enough and work hard enough at it. I wish this were so. I would love to play in the World Cup, but I'm a little too old and I have no football skill, but I can certainly become the most astute observer of the World Cup in Canada where I’m from. If we can find alternatives to the projects that we want to pursue that are more viable, this is highly desirable.

In fact, I've reached the conclusion that human wellbeing, success in terms of the show's themes, depends on the sustainable pursuit of core projects in our lives. A core project is a project which if you woke up without it tomorrow morning, if it were no longer there for whatever reason, you may wonder whether you should carry on at all. These are the things that crowned us, the philosopher Bernard Williams called these ground projects. These are things that are the greatest source of meaning to us in our lives.
For many of us, it's family and the love of spouse. For others, it is their profession. A core project has to be sustainable. In one way, it can be sustainable. The sustainable pursuit can be maintained if you have sufficient internal motivation, and if you realistically examine your ecosystem, which goes to your point Matt, that if you really don't think that there is a barrier there and there is, and you get as the British say god smacked by reality, it can really unhinged you.

I think we need to be more cautious and discerning in the things we undertake by looking at the possible difficulties. Indeed there's some exciting research out of Columbia University on precisely how envisaging these barriers to project or goal pursuit may enhance your ability to cope with them and to bring them through to completion.

[0:36:49.1] MB: This is a two-part question, but what shapes our selection of our core projects, and then also how can we select the right kinds of core projects for ourselves with the perspective in mind of what we've talked about in terms of sustainability and internal motivation and an assessment of our own place within that stew, or that ecosystem of various factors?

[0:37:13.3] BL: Yeah. This is a hard question and it's one that I don't have an answer to – that satisfies me yet, but I can give you a few directions that I've been going over the years in trying to grapple with it. I think the question of how do we choose the core projects goes to the whole question of our biogenic natures. I think that we are naturally predisposed to being attracted to things that become our specialty, and that if we look at little kids who suddenly become excited by animals and they fantasize about animals and they develop a really discerning orientation to them, or sports, or friendships.

These natural dispositions that we don't borrow from our cultural scripts, but are just naturally oriented to I think are the first line of influence that help shape what will become a core project. Getting social validation for them in terms particularly of having them modelled by people you admire, this could be ranging from your parents to individuals who are become your mentors, this can make you suddenly go up and say yes. Yes, what Rajit has been doing is exactly what I want to do, and I'm going to internalize that as a core project in my life.

I think that again, I love your invoking of the word stew. I think that out of the stew, emerge biogenically influenced, but also socially and culturally shaped aspirations the ideal me, the possible self that I could be in the future that is anchored in a core project. When I talk to clinicians who have worked within the framework I've been looking at with core projects, but they say that individuals who lack any core project in their life, who are equally interested moderately in a whole bunch of things don't fare as well.

When they do become committed to a project that trumps everything else, meaning in their life is enhanced and the clinical picture becomes more optimistic. I think that the sustainable pursuit of core projects is vital. The way in which we get those core projects, how they are shaped or more challengingly, how they arise in the first place is on the agenda for my colleagues and students over the next few decades more.

[0:40:01.9] MB: This is a change in direction, but I'm curious and I think it ties back into this in some ways. When you talk about and you've previously written about the myth of authenticity, can you tell a little bit more about what that means and how that interacts with what we've been talking about?

[0:40:17.3] BL: Yes. The myth authenticity. One of the influences that really shaped my early development in the study of personality was by a psychologist who should be read much more than he is, but he's quite famous among personality researchers, by the name of George Kelly, who's an American, who wrote about The Psychology of Personal Constructs. In one of his books, he talked about how insipid was the admonishment to be yourself. He said that I can't think of anything much more boring than being yourself. It's a very boring way of living your life.

Let's try to see what you might become that's different. Let's look at alternative construals of oneself. I remember that interesting me at the time, and then it coming up again when we see this whole business about authenticity, which is very hot in the management literature right now and the organizational behavior literature, and the notion that it is really crucial for a young manager for example, to be authentic in her or his management style.

I remember a wonderful depiction of this as something that sounds great, but can actually really, really backfire. The example in the Harvard business review was of a person who said, “Yeah, I'll be authentic. I have to be a woman. I want to let my staff know that I'm scared, I'm vulnerable. I feel really nervous when I am speaking to the board.” She did and it ended up that this rather than this authenticity bolstering her management credibility, lowered it.
It would have been better according to the analysis, had she not given in to the authenticity of her biogenic nature, but idioenically in terms of the goal that she had to act in a way that was more assertive and confident and self-efficacious. Your listeners may be saying, “Maybe I should just be natural and be authentic by being not very agreeable. I'm a disagreeable person. Really being – spending most of my time playing games on my computer. Yeah, I'm not conscious, but man I'm really, really authentic in missing deadlines, because that's me. This is the authentic me.” With Bud, you get Bud. You don't get somebody else. I'm an authentic slob.

That is not likely to wax well for Bud, because succeeding in life I think requires that we adopt core projects that shape us in ways that are not just socially desirable, that would be rather superficial, but lead on to greater fortune, lead on to productivity, lead on to exciting new ventures.

You may be, you may regard authenticity as something which reflects only your true biogenic you. I think this is misleading. I don't think you should just naturally be yourself, except perhaps with your dearest friend, where we say, “Yeah. Now I can really be you. I can be me and you can be you and we can hang out together and let everything just be natural.” There is another authenticity and it is showing adherence to and respect for your core aspirations in your life. It may mean that some people may see you as being a little bit disingenuous. On the other hand, acting out of character in the way we've been discussing can also lead to real change. It can also mean that you become that which you're opposing, and that can be liberating for creating new paths in our lives.

[0:44:31.8] MB: For listeners that want to concretely implement some of the ideas that we've talked about today, what would be an action item or a piece of homework that you would give them to start implementing some of the things we've discussed?

[0:44:46.2] BL: I'm a big believer in the effectiveness of self-change projects. One thing that’s worth mentioning is that when individuals take on a desire to change, in the way that the philosophy of your whole podcast is about constructive, personal change that will lead to greater success, the origin of that project is really important. For example, if you're very introverted as I am biogenically, and you want to become more extroverted, then it really helps to practice this. Practice it in small settings first. Try speaking up at a meeting where it's not too threatening to do that, or and expand it and gradually build up from small starts, small wins as we call it, to more challenging approaches.

Now if you initiated it, it's much more likely to go well, than if it were forced upon you by somebody else. If somebody says to you, “Doug, you've really got to be more outgoing starting next Thursday man,” that is less likely to be successful. Than if Doug himself chooses that project after a degree of reflection. Those who are listening who want to work on enhancing their social repertoire by becoming more agreeable, but retaining the capacity to be disagreeable when it's warranted, to be both extroverted and more introverted depending on the context that you're in, to be stable emotionally, but to see the value of being sensitive and hypersensitive, which more neurotic people feel.

You can mount these experiments. They can be itself change experiments that you may start off slowly and maybe take, the first one will be a week. For this week, you're going to move in a direction on the big five, or any other desirable change that you want. That is a step in the right direction. Then reflect on it at the end of the week and see, “Whoa, boy. That was tough, but the feedback I got was really terrific. Or that really sucked, and the feedback I got was what on earth is up with you.” Well then, you may have to shape that back a bit.

Now here is where getting some professional help and counselling help is always a good idea.  I find that the people are able to do these little short-term experiments of what George Kelly, who I mentioned before called fixed role explorations, where you try out a new way of behaving, and then you monitor the effect that it has. This can be quite liberating, and particularly if you have a community of people who know that's what you're doing. I don't think this has to be done by self.

You say, okay, I'm not that agreeable a person. In fact, people have called me the seventh most disagreeable person in New York. I think that it's getting me into difficulty. I know it's not good for my health to constantly piss people off. For the next week, I'm going to try doing things, and if you catch me being agreeable and pleasant and it doesn't seem phony, let me know because I'm going to do this for a week. If you think we were able to do those shortcoming experiments, self-change experiments, I think that would be a good concrete way in which you could change the trajectory you're on right now.

[0:48:19.6] MB: For listeners who want to learn more about you and your work, where can they find you and your various books, etc., online?

[0:48:27.0] BL: You can at all major book dispensers. You can get a book called Me, Myself and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being. The other book for those with shorter attention spans is called Who Are You, Really? The Surprising Puzzle of Personality and it's based on my TED talk 2016 by the same title.

[0:48:52.5] MB: Well Brian, thank you so much for coming on the Science of Success, sharing all of your incredible wisdom and stories. It is a fascinating conversation, really, really interesting and very much appreciate you joining us on the show.

[0:49:04.0] BL: Thank you. Delighted and your podcast is vitally important. I'm just delighted to participate in it. Thank you.

[0:49:11.4] 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 e-mail 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.

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

Self Help For Smart People - How You Can Spot Bad Science & Decode Scientific Studies with Dr. Brian Nosek

In this episode, we show how you can decode scientific studies and spot bad science by digging deep into the tools and skills you need to be an educated consumer of scientific information. Are you tired of seeing seemingly outrageous studies published in the news, only to see the exact opposite published a week later? What makes scientific research useful and valid? How can you, as a non-scientist, read and understand scientific information in a simple and straightforward way that can help you get closer to the truth - and apply those lessons to your life. We discuss this and much more with Dr. Brian Nosek. 

Dr. Brian Nosek is the co-founder and Executive Director of the Center for Open Science and a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. Brian led the reproducibility project which involved leading some 270 of his peers to reproduce 100 published psychology studies to see if they could reproduce the results. This work shed light on some of the publication bias in the science of psychology and much more.

• Does the science show that extrasensory perception is real?

• Is there something wrong with the rules of the science or the way that we conduct science?

• What makes academic research publishable is not the same thing as what makes academic research accurate

• Publication is the currency of advancement in science

  1. Novel, positive, clean

• What does “Nulls Hypothesis significance testing” / P-Value less than .05 even mean?

• Less than 5% of the time would you observe this evidence if there was no relationship

• The incentives for scientific publishing often skew, even without conscious intent by scientists, towards only publishing studies that support their hypothesis and conclusions

• The conclusions of many scientific studies may not be reproducible and may, in fact, be wrong 

• How the reasoning challenges and biases of human thinking skew scientific results and create false conclusions

• Confirmation bias

  1. Outcome bias

• “The Reproducibility Project” in psychology

• Took a sample of 100 studies 

  1. Across those 100 studies - the evidence was able to be reproduced only 40% of the time

  2. The effect size was 50% of what it was 

• “Effect Sizes” - how strong was the effect of the studied phenomenon

• The real challenge is that it's extremely hard to find definitive evidence of whether the replication of studies 

• Science about science is a process of uncertainty reduction

• What The Reproducibility Project spawned was not a conclusion, but a QUESTION

• The scientific method is about testing our assumptions of reality with models, and recognizing that our models of the world will be wrong in some way

• The way science makes progress if by finding the imperfections in our models of reality

• How do we as lay consumers determine if something is scientifically valid or not?

• How do we as individuals learn to consume and understand scientific information? 

• How can we be smarter consumers of scientific literature?

• We discuss the basic keys to understanding, reading, and consuming scientific studies as a non-scientist and ask how do we determine the quality of evidence?

• Watch out for any DEFINITIVE conclusions

  1. The sample size is very important, the larger the better

  2. Aggregation of evidence is better - “hundreds of studies show"

  3. Meta-studies / meta-analysis are important and typically more credible

  4. Look up the original paper

  5. Is there doubt expressed in the story/report about the data? (how could the evidence be wrong, what needs to be proven next, etc)

• What is a meta-study and why should you be on the lookout for those when determining if scientific data is more valid? But there are still risks to meta-analysis as well

• Valid scientific research often isn’t newsworthy - it takes lots of time to reach valid scientific conclusions 

• It’s not just about the OUTCOME of a scientific study - the confidence in those outcomes is dependent on the PROCESS 

• By confronting our own ideas/models of reality, our understanding of the world gets stronger and moves towards the Truth

• Where do we go from here as both individuals and scientists? How can we do better?

• Transparency is key

  1. Preregistration - commit to a design

• The powerful tool of “pre-registration” and how you can use it to improve your own thinking and decision-making

• As individuals trying to make evidence-based / science-driven decisions in light of these findings, how can we apply these lessons to ourselves?

• Homework - deliberately seek out people who disagree with you, build a “team of rivals"

Thank you so much for listening!

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [Wiki Article] Reproducibility Project

• [Study] Reproducibility Project: Psychology

• [Research Article] Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science

• [Study] Investigating Variation in Replicability: A “Many Labs” Replication Project

• [Wiki Pages] Investigating Variation in Replicability: A “Many Labs” Replication Project

• [Article] How Reliable Are Psychology Studies? By Ed Yong

• [Podcast] Planet Money - Episode 677: The Experiment Experiment

Real Life Inception – From Bank Robbery to Neuroscience with Dr. Moran Cerf

In this episode we discuss real life inception with a former bank robber turned neuroscientist. Is it possible to plant ideas in your head? Are your memories an accurate reflection of past reality? Can you change and mold your memories to be different? We open the door on human irrationality and explore why and how we make bad decisions, and what you can do to make small changes that will create a big impact in your life and much more with our guest Moran Cerf.

Dr. Moran Cerf is a professor of neuroscience and business at the Kellogg School of Management and the neuroscience program at Northwestern University. He is also a member of the institute of complex systems and was recently named one of the “40 Leading Professionals Under 40.” His research uses methods of neuroscience to understand the underlying mechanisms of our psychology, behavior changes, emotion, decision making and dreams. His work has been featured on the TED Stage, In WIRED, The Scientific American, and much more. 

• What’s it like to Rob a Bank?

• How Moran went from an accomplished bank robber to a prominent neuroscientist

• Most times in life we tell our story backward to make sense of the past

• Are people rational actors who make decisions in their own best interest?

• Humans are not rational actors - they often make irrational choices

• Behavioral economics opened the door to explaining human irrationality - but neuroscientists were necessary to truly explain WHY these mistakes were happening

• Irrational behavior - why it works - and how we can change it 

• Is losing a $10 movie ticket the same as losing $10? In case of most people’s behavior - almost certainly not. 

•  Your memories are not a reliable reflection of reality or your past - despite the fact that you think they are 

• “Don’t believe everything you think"

• Real Life Inception - Planting Ideas In Your Brain, re-shaping your memories

• How neuroscientists use magicians and slight of hand to demonstrate our ability to rationalize and explain our decisions

• If you make a small positive step, the brain will start to build pillars of support to underpin that new behavior

• How does neuroplasticity impact our brain's ability to change adapt and transform our beliefs and memories

• Your memories are never fixed - they aren’t sitting in a vault, perfect, unchanged. Your memories are changed and modified every time you remember them and pull them back. 

• Ever time you use a memory, you change it a little bit - over time we change memories greatly - we can remember things that never existed and forget what truly happened

• This is how the brain deals with trauma and negative experience

• Even when you’re sleeping your brain rehearses, loads, and engages with your memories.

• Bringing up and talking through negative memories physically reshapes those memories in your brain

• You can use a daily decision-journal to see when you make the best decisions - and try to emulate those decisions - find the commonalities in situations where you made good choices

• Humans are a lot simpler than we think we are. 

• You think you are very unique - in terms of your brain - but we are very similar and fall into predictable behavioral patterns and biases 

• When it comes to human behavior and decision-making - we are a lot more similar than different 

• We often think our decisions are our own - but in reality, they are often influenced by biases, the environment, and many things beyond our control. 

• We are discovering that more and more of our brain is not really under our control. 

• We use 100% of our brain, but it's not all accessible to us. 

• Subtle shifts in your environment change how you respond to things. 

• “Embodied cognition” shows that many things are happening to us, that we don’t have full control over 

• If you have a name for something you can think about it, if you can think about it you can control it

• Coding things are huge as well (what was the temperature, your mood, hunger level etc when you made decisions)

• Just by listening to this episode you’re improving your ability to think more effectively and make better decisions! 

• How can we take these lessons of neuroscience and apply them to make ourselves smarter and better decision makers?

• Making decisions is a tax on your brain. Outsource low-level unimportant decisionmaking. 

• Evolution is an incredibly slow process - it takes millions of years

• Planting computer chips into your brain - and teaching your brain how to read and interact with them. 

• Homework - surround yourself with people who are doing what you want to do 

• Think about what you want

  1. Find people who have it 

  2. Spend time with them and in their proximity

Thank you so much for listening!

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

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [Personal Site] Moran Cerf

• [Wiki Article] Behavioral economics

• [Wiki Article] Daniel Kahneman

• [Wiki Article] Embodied cognition

• [Wiki Article] Francis Crick

• [SoS Episode] The Power and Danger of a Seemingly Innocuous Commitment

• [SoS Episode] The Mysteries of Consciousness Explained & Explored with Neuroscientist Dr. Anil Seth

• [SoS Episode] The Scientific Search for The Self - Discovering Who You Truly Are with Dr. Robert Levine

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] 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 2 million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries and part of the Self-Help for Smart People Podcast Network.

In this episode, we discuss real-life inception with a former bank robber turned neuroscientist. Is it possible to plant ideas in your head? Are your memories an accurate reflection of past reality? Can you change and mold your memories to be different? 

We open the door on human irrationality and explore why and how we make bad decisions and what you can do to make small changes that will create a big impact in your life and much more with our guest, Moran Cerf.

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 only available to our email subscribers, so be sure to sign up and join the email list today. First, you're going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand. This is our most popular guide and it’s called How to Organize and Remember Everything, which you can get completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide. You got 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. Our listeners have been absolutely loving this email. It’s short. It's simple. It’s filled with articles, videos, stories, things we found interesting or fascinating in the last week. 

Lastly, you're going to get exclusive content and a chance to shape the show. You can help us vote on guests. You can help us change our intro music and much more. You can even submit your own questions to upcoming guests. You’ll also have access to exclusive giveaways that only people who are on the email list get access to, and much, much more. Be sure to sign up and join the email list. There’s some incredible stuff, but only subscribers who are on the email list are getting access to this awesome information. 

I wanted to also highlight before we start this interview, we had an amazing conversation with our guest Peter Shallard a couple weeks go where we looked at the gap that exist between learning and doing and why it is that so many smart, ambitious people invest hours in their growth and development but fail to see breakaway external results for the time they’ve invested. If you sometimes feel overwhelmed by all the things you know you could or should be implementing to level up your life or career, then that episode will blow your mind. 

We explore what science is telling us about the actual execution of concrete individual growth and measurable upward mobility across various dimensions of life. We share the most effective tactic for moving yourself from learning to doing and much more with our very special guest, Peter Shallard. That interview is one of the most impactful interviews we’ve done on the Science of Success. It’s completely different from any other episode and it will help you finally take action on what you’ve been procrastinating on. Check that episode out. 

Now for our interview with Moran. 

[0:03:31.0] MB: Today we have another fascinating guest on the show, Dr. Moran Cerf. Moran is a professor of neuroscience and business at Kellogg School of Management and the neuroscience program at Northwestern University. He’s also a member of the Institute of Complex Systems and was recently named one of the 40 leading professionals under 40. He’s work has been featured on the TED Stage, in Wired, Scientific American and much more. 

Moran, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:58.9] MC: Thank you. 

[0:04:00.1] MB: Well, we’re thrilled to have you on the show. You’re obviously a fascinating individual, and for people in the audience who may not be familiar with you, I’d love to start out with – I’m sure you get asked this all the time because it’s such an incredible kind of moniker or experience to have kind of attach your name, but as somebody who loves heist movies and bank robberies and all that kind of stuff, tell us about your experience robbing banks.

[0:04:25.1] MC: Well, I spent over a decade of my life in my teens and early 20s working as a computer hacker for the good guys. So my job was to help banks and government institutes find what hackers could do badly to their systems before the hackers actually do that. I help them secure the systems better. So in doing so, one of my jobs was actually to try to break into the organizations, to the banks, to the financial institutes of sorts of find flaws in the security so we can secure them better. So I did have a lot of bank robberies on my sleeves. 

[0:04:59.6] MB: And in some of these cases, I mean, obviously a lot of it was sort of digital penetration testing, but in some cases you actually physically robbed these banks. 

[0:05:07.8] MC: Yeah. What’s less known about bank robberies, since there aren’t a lot of books with directions how to do that, is that the majority of them are actually of course done online using hacking tools, but hackers are also responsible for finding flaws in security more kind of physical. Someone leaving a note on the computer with their password or a camera that works on batteries and the batteries die every now and then and no one cares about that. 

So our job as hackers was also to sometimes actually go to the bank physically and try to find those security flaws and it involved actually coming to the bank and physically asking for the key to the vault and pretending to be bank robbers to see how it works. So we did that a few times, and for all purposes for the point of the bank tellers, this is a regular bank robbery, a clumsy one though.

[0:05:59.5] MB: I mean, that’s truly amazing. I can’t imagine what that experience must have been like, and I’m sure it was a lot of fun as well. 

[0:06:08.2] MC: Makes for a lot of stories. 

[0:06:09.7] MB: That’s true. So you’re an accomplished bank robber turned neuroscientist. Tell us a little bit about how that sort of transition took place and what drew you into the world of neuroscience?

[0:06:22.2] MC: So like most things in life, we tell our story backwards based on how we got to where we got rather than forward by planning it, and I guess I could think of various ways to figure out how I ended up who I was. But I think that I would boil it down to at least one encounter with a famous neuroscientist and biologist, Francis Crick, who was one of the guys who was remarkable in many ways, but essentially is the father of modern biology because he discovered the double helix and how it creates basically the building blocks of life and won the Nobel Prize in the 50s for that. 

After that, he became a neuroscientist who focused on looking at consciousness, and I was just a kid fascinated by consciousness research when I met him once and told him about my career trajectory in the hacking world and only learned at the time that he also had a short-lived career as a hacker during World War II. He was breaking codes for satellites, we were breaking into banks, but in his mind there was some similarity. The way he phrased it was that if you know how to look into black boxes and understand how they work without actually having access to what’s going on inside, you are what makes for a good scientist. 

Then he said the sentence that always changes someone’s life, “If you’re willing to give up your career right now and move to neuroscience, I’m going to write a letter of recommendation for you.” With a letter of recommendation from the Nobel laureate who discovered DNA, you pretty much can go to any school you want. So this was the moment that shaped everything and made me live my career as a hacker and start on as a neuroscientist trying to look at black boxes in the brain. 
 
[0:07:59.7] MB: That’s fascinating and really, really interesting. So I’m curious, I mean, I know a lot of the work you’ve done has kind of been around decision making and how our brains work. Starting out with kind of this core premise you look at, and I think this is something that’s being rapidly adjusted. But if you look at something like economics or many of the kind of social sciences, there’s this presumption that people are rational actors who make decisions in their best interest. Is that a roughly accurate way to think about human behavior?

[0:08:30.6] MC: So what you’re alluding to is exactly right. For the last 180 years, economics and much of the business world relied on their mistake, and this is a mistake to some extent even though there are some tools to this mistake, which is that humans are rational. It’s not. Humans are irrational. They’re not fully irrational, but they’re not rational in the way the equation predicts. So for the days of Adam Smith who created the idea of a homo economicus and national being, we could expect a lot of the theories of economics by assuming that people make rational choices, that if you have two items and one of them is cheaper, you’re going to buy the cheapest one. If you have two things that otherwise identical, you would never buy the thing that is more emotionally connected to you for no reason, because emotions shouldn’t have any part in economics. It should be just a pure rational choice. But we know that people don’t work like this. We know that forever there’s always some anomalies in the equations that couldn’t be explained by the theory, and this was the psychology of human beings, that sometimes we do buy the most expensive thing just because it signals to others that we’re willing to pay a lot of money for something expensive, and it makes no sense economically, but it makes total sense for us, because pride is something that the equations of Adam Smith couldn’t really put as an argument. 

We know that sometimes people do things because they’re sad that they wouldn’t do if they were not sad. So just somehow your feelings change what you buy. We know that the temperature in the room, who you talked to before, how many things you looked at before you made this choice. All of those things end up making us choose things different than what the equation predicted. 

For the last 20 years, there’s been a field called behavioral economics that basically took all the mistakes so to speak of the predictions and explained them, and they explained them using psychology. They said people aren’t rational. People have all kinds of works of their mind that lead to what they do that cannot be explained by just looking at an equation, but can be explained perfectly if you look at psychology. 

However, this also got to a dead end at some point. So a lot of the behavioral economists, which were mainly psychologists who did economics couldn’t really explain why this is the case. They could describe it, but not explain why. They said people would sometimes buy the product in the middle if you have three options, but we don’t know why. We think that because they don’t want to buy the cheapest one. They don’t want to buy the expensive one. They want the middle one, and this kind of works well, but we can’t really explain to you why or how we think, and more than that we can’t change that. If we want to make people be rational, we don’t know how. We only know that they aren’t, and that’s where neuroscientists like myself penetrated this field of behavioral economics and said, “We can explain to you. We can explain to you how the mind work and actually help you understand why people do the things that you quantify as irrational, and also we can actually help you change them.” So we can look at the brain and see what drives behaviors from the brain’s perspective and then offer ways to change that, and this is I think where people like me came. 

So there’re three kinds of states. First; economics theory predicts thing that make mistakes. Then behavioral economics or psychologists come and explain those mistakes by saying they’re consistent and they’re predictable and they always happen, but we don’t know how to change them or how to fix them. Now neuroscientists come and say we can fix them, change them and even offer a kind of complete explanation of how people behave, and that’s where I come into the world of economics, business and bring neuroscience to the game.

[0:11:54.1] MB: So let’s explore that a little bit more. Tell me about what are some of the kind of conclusions or explanations that you’ve uncovered and working on discovering around how people behave irrationally and perhaps how they can change or modify that behavior?

[0:12:10.9] MC: So I’ll give you examples of irrational behavior, what we understand about how people work and then how we can change it. So for instance there’s a classical experiment that actually won its author the Nobel Prize, Daniel Kahneman, the early turn of the century, where he show that people behave irrationally in the following ways. Imagine that you, for instance, bought a ticket to the movies for $10 and when you arrived at the theater and you’re about to enter you realized that somewhere between your home and the theater you lost the ticket. It fell off your pocket and you now lost our ticket and they asked a question, “Would you now stand in line and buy another one for $10?” Some people said yes and many people said no, “I’m fed up with this theater. I’m upset. I’m going home.” 

Then they asked people a different question. They say, “Imagine you didn’t buy a ticket. You just went to the theater to buy one and on the way to the theater you lost $10. Would you now not buy a ticket to the theater?” Everyone said, “Of course, I will buy a ticket to the theater. What does it actually do with losing $10?” 

For economists, $10 in the form of our precedent or $10 in the form of a ticket are the same. It doesn’t matter what image is on the paper, but for us it matters, because in one way we feel like we invested some of our emotions into the purchase and when we lost it we feel like we lost part of the theater and we might actually go home. 

Now, when we come to think about it, we know that people indeed behave this way because they think of money differently in context. They think of money differently when they’re angry, when they already put something to it, but we can’t really change that. My colleagues and I come and try to change things is by looking at how our memories work, how our emotions work and basically offering access to those from various levels of complexities. 

So I’ll give you the most complex one we can do right now, which is to actually change your memories and make you behave differently. That’s extreme and I should kind of put a disclaimer. Don’t try it at home yet until we understand how it works entirely. But one of the things we learned right now is that your memories, your experience in the world are not reliable to the extent that you don’t really know what’s going on inside your mind perfectly. You think you do, but you don’t. 

So for instance, you and I right now are speaking and you definitely believe that it’s happening, right? You will not question the fact that we’re talking right now, but what if tomorrow you had a friend talk to you and this friend said, “Hey, remember that we had this soccer match we were playing last night?” You say, “No, I was actually on an interview with this professor last night.” She says, “No. No. No. You were with me playing soccer.” You would argue and you would totally believe that you were with me. You would never doubt your own mind even if she starts showing you pictures of the two of you playing soccer or bring 10 other people who would tell you, “No. We were also there and you played soccer.” You would still not believe it, because there is this idea that we totally believe what’s happening inside our brain and we never doubt that. There’s a barrier of entry to our brain. We really doubt everything that comes in. We’re skeptical. But once it’s in our brain, we never doubt it. We trust our memories entirely. 

There’s a joke among neuroscientists where they say, “Don’t believe everything you think,” but that’s not the reality of how people operate. We always believe our thoughts. Now, we know that this is not a true thing. Now we also know that we can actually offer you ways to know that by changing them. 

One of the things we do in my lab right now is we try to take people who go to sleep, and while they’re sleeping we poke inside their head figuratively. We don’t really drill inside, but we just do things to their brain using tools that allow us to look inside their head and we have them wake up with different thoughts and different memories than the ones they went to sleep with, and in doing so they actually operate differently. Tomorrow they might actually believe that something didn’t happen happened, or they might have different views on some things that they always have one view about. In doing so we can actually start slowly changing how they think about things, so when they come to the experience that I mentioned earlier of going to the theater to buy a ticket, they actually would have a different mindset, a mindset that actually knows that there’s no difference between money in paper or money in ticket and they would respond differently. 

We actually take your brain and train your brain to understand these complexities so that you won’t make the same mistakes that others make. Sounds pretty creepy. It’s pretty remarkable and we’re just at the early stages of understanding how it works, but it allows us to actually take a person who is irrational and nudge them towards rationality. 

[0:16:18.3] MB: I want to dig in to a number of different pieces of that, but I want to start with how are you inserting these memories or beliefs or ideas into people’s brains?

[0:16:28.2] MC: There are multiple ways. To that I’ll give you a simple one and a complex one. So the simple one is it turns out that if you take a choice that people have no strong feelings towards and you change it and you make them believe that it was coming from them, they will totally trust it. 

I’ll give an example that’s concrete. There’s a study that was done by two colleagues of mine. They’re in Sweden right now. Where they would bring you to the lab and they will tell you to play a little game where they’ll show you two cards with two pictures of individuals and they say, “Hey, we’re going to show you two pieces of two men. You don’t know any of them. We just ask you to make a choice. Who do you find more attractive? The guy on the left or the guy on the right?”

You’ll say, “Okay. I don’t really know any of them. I’m looking at the pictures. I think that the guy on the left is more attractive.” They say, “Fantastic. Here’s the card with this picture of the guy that you just chose. Hold the card in your hand and explain to us in one sentence why you picked this guy.” So you hold it in your hand and you say, “Yeah, I like this guy because he’s smiling.” They say, “Fantastic. Let’s try another trial.” Pulling two new cards with two different people, showing you the cards, asking you again to make a choice, “Who do you find more attractive?” You make a choice, they give you the card. They ask you to explain to one sentence and then they move on to a different one. They did it for about one hour. 

During the one hour you see dozens of couple of pictures. Each of them means nothing to you because you don’t know who they are, but each of them is a choice that you make and explain. But here is the interesting part in this experiment. Every now and then, once every, say, 20 trial, they actually give you the card you didn’t choose. So you chose the guy on the left. They use slight of hands to give you the card on the right that you didn’t pick without telling you. So you get the card you didn’t choose. 

What they find are two interesting things. One is that people never noticed that they got the card they didn’t choose. So they just take the card that they received without noticing that this wasn’t their choice. More importantly, they hold the cards in their hand and then they go on and explain why this is really their choice. So in a matter of a second, you chose A, I give you B and you take B and you explain to me why you always wanted B, which means that somewhere in this moment you had a shift of memory. You make a choice, I change something in what the outcome is and you will go on to explain it. If I ask you to explain it more, you will create a more complex web associations about this choice that you didn’t make that will make you believe that it’s really a tool.

So here’s an example for that. You imagine you go to a supermarket and you’re about to buy 10 different items. One of them is a toothpaste. You go the shelf and there’s Colgate on the left and Crest on the right and you sit there for a while and you debate which one you want more and you try to be rational about it. You say, “I’m going to look at the color of the package and the price and how much CC of toothpaste is there and what’s more friendly environmentally?” whatever, and you ultimately choose Colgate, let’s say. 

You put it in your basket and then you go on and you shop for other things and some point you get to the checkout, but in the moment you chose Colgate on the shelf, and the moment you got to the checkout, I sneak in your basket and I replaced the Colgate with a Crest. If the choice means nothing to you, which is what’s true for most choices that are kind of arbitrary, you would not notice that I actually replaced the Colgate with a Crest. You will buy the Crest, and if I stop you on the way outside the supermarket and I say, “Hey, we’re interested in market research to ask you why you chose Crest.” You’re going to never say, “You know what? I have no idea,” or “I actually chose Colgate.” You will just go on and explain in detail why Crest is better and why you like the minty taste or the whitening compound or whatever. If I probe even more and asked you for more explanations, you’re going to dive deeper into your brain and come up with even more complex answers and the more complex answers you’re going to give me, the more convinced you will be in the truth of those answers. 

The point, that then you will actually be convinced that you really like Crest. Tomorrow you’re going to buy Crest yourself. So this is a small experiment where we just ask you questions with something you didn’t want and in answering them you create the associations in your brain that make you believe that you wanted it and go on and really desire this thing. That’s like one example of creating memories. 

There’s a complex one that i just mentioned briefly because this one really is not something that’s tangible in any way for your audience, but it’s something that scientists do a lot, which is we actually look at patients who undergo brain surgery and do things inside their heads. One of the things I’m known for as a researcher is this work that we do for the last, now, almost two decades where we work with patients who undergo brain surgery for clinical purposes, and during the surgery, the surgeons placed electrodes inside their head in order to understand how they think and work and to identify the source of their problems. 

What we do is we say, “Since you already agreed to a surgery and you already let us in your brain, we also want to study you. We want to also ask you if you want to buy Colgate or Crest while you’re on the operating room and understand how you make these decisions,” and essentially we use those wires inside people’s brain to understand how memories work, how thoughts and feelings are created, but also to understand how choices are being made and we change them. So that’s the extreme version of what I just said earlier instead of having you change things outside of your brain and explain to them, “We actually go inside and help you change them yourself and explain them differently.” So that’s something that you really shouldn’t try at home, but the first one is a version of a simple one of me moving your choice into one direction and having you explain why, and in doing so creates new answers. 

[0:21:39.9] MB: That’s interesting and a little bit scary, but really fascinating. 

[0:21:44.1] MC: I agree. 

[0:21:44.4] MB: I want to get into kind of some of the implications of that around human augmentation and some other things. Before we kind of get down that rabbit hole, I want to stay on this decision making track for a few minutes. That experiment reminds me a little bit of kind of the commitment consistency bias that Cialdini writes about in the book Influence, and I don’t know if you’re familiar with the yard sign experiment where they would go and ask people to put like a little sticker that said, “Drive safely on their window,” and then they would come back two weeks later and those people would be willing to put these gigantic billboards on their yards that said “Drive safely.” 

[0:22:17.9] MC: I think what you’re alluding to, and that Cialdini is known for that, and I think that others are kind of following his suit right now, is that if you do a small step to change behavior in the right direction, the brain will be helpful in helping you do it yourself in a much bigger way. So with people asking me, “How do you kind of change behavior of someone,” and changing behavior is really, really hard, but making small nudges is really easy. What we learn is that many times the small movement starts things on its own if you see a reward. 

Think about going to the gym. If you take a person who is overweight and tries to lose weight, the idea of losing 50 pounds seem impossible and seems really, really hard. So people kind of lose hope right away even before they started, because it kind of feels impossible. But making a person go to the gym once, working really hard and feeling something the day after is easy. If you do it once you will feel something, and this feeling that something works is enough to actually make us want to do it just one more time. 

I think that if you try to change someone’s behavior, going for 180 degrees is really, really hard, but going for 10 degrees is possible and the hope is that once the other person sees that change is happening, they will carry the 170 degrees remaining themselves. So I think that’s kind of where we’re going. We don’t really say, “Let’s take a person, poke in his brain and make him wake up differently.” We don’t say, “Let’s take a democrat and wake him up a republican.” But let’s say, “Let’s take a democrat and just offer him a new lens on the views that he had before and maybe this is enough for him to actually be open to new ideas to talk a republican, talk to a person who is a bit more conservative,” and that’s enough to move things in directions that are more kind of converging. So you can take people from opposing opinions and just have them find a language that can be used for the two of them to talk. You can take people who are having difficulty changing behavior and give them the steps towards changing behavior. 

I think that’s something that was known to a lot of psychologists for a while, but now we’re starting to look at the neuroscience evidence. We actually see, we quantity the change. You would go to a therapist before and talk about your girlfriend who dumped you and hope that things are going to get better after a few meetings. Now we can actually quantify the therapy and tell you, “Yes, things are moving. You actually are showing changes. You see things differently or better overtime, and this means that you’re making progress.” I think that many people, once they see that something works, they do the work themself to make it work fully, and that’s like a good tip I guess for people altogether. Don’t aim for the entire 180 degrees right away, but just 10 steps that actually show to the other person that doing something will make a big kind of difference. 

[0:24:54.6] MB: So how does the concept of neuroplasticity kind of play into these changing patterns of thought and memory and belief?

[0:25:03.8] MC: That’s a great question. We know two things about the brain, and now we know a third one that’s [inaudible 0:25:07.8] you. But the main thing that you should kind of know and [inaudible 0:25:10.4] audience and maybe the take home message, is that their brain is the organ in our body that mother nature gave us to adapt the world after we’re born. Most of the other things in your body are kind of fixed, like the DNA or the eye color, the hair color, how much hair you’re going to have in your chest. Everything is all set in a way when you’re born. The only thing in our body that’s made for the patient is the brain, and this is the organ that constantly responds to things in the environment. 

Now we know that these organ changes overtime and some changes happen faster and slower and over ages, there are some ages where things even change faster. When you’re a kid, 0 to 5, you can really, really change fast. When you’re an adult, it becomes a little bit harder to change. This is why it’s easier to learn languages when you’re 0 to 5. It’s harder to learn languages when you’re older. 

Also, there was one thing that always changes. These are your memories. Your memories are never fixed. They’re never kind of sitting in a vault like we imagine them to be. Just experience happens, you store it in your memory and you load it every time someone asks you a question about that memory. It actually works differently. You go to an experience, you store it in the vault, but then when you asked about this experience, you open the memory, you offer it to the other person as token and then you resave it. This means that if you resave it every time you use it, you can always change it. 

Imagine that your girlfriend dumped you and you’re feeling really, really sad. You go to a therapist. The therapist asks you about this thing. You tell the therapist about this breakup. In doing so you actually open the memory for changes. The therapist maybe will say something. She would say something like, “You told me for a while about this relationship and you never really were satisfied.” In saying that, she actually introduced a little change to the memory. Now you resave everything with this change. 

When you come to the therapist a week after and she asks you again about this breakup, you won’t load the original. You would load the modified version, that one that you saved last. Every time you use a memory, you change a little bit. Which means that overtime, when we use memories a lot, we actually change them and we change them sometimes greatly. We change them so that we remember facts that are totally differently overtime. We actually have new lens on experiences that we happen to kind of find important. The more we use it, it actually changed a little bit more because we use it a lot more. 

Now, this is by design. This is how our brain is working so that we can heal. So if something bad happens, we actually deal with that and poke in the memory for a while until it becomes better. This is how our brain deals with trauma. This is how our brain deals also with things that we want to kind of remember more. We add more and more angles and more and more nuances of them until they become a perfect memory in our mind. So we actually use memories and change them all the time. 

Now, knowing that means that we can actually use that to help you change. The neuroplasticity that you asked me about suggests that I can have you talk about things. I can help you go through experiences, and in doing so really change how you view them. Primarily, we now know we can do it also when you’re sleeping. Even when you’re sleeping your brain still rehearses memories and loads them in kind of things about them in the form of dreams, in the form of thoughts that happens when you’re sleeping. It can even now reactivate some of the memories even when you’re kind of resting and help your brain do this process of rehearsing them and changing them. 

All of it is to say that we have more and more evidence in the last couple of years to how the brain changes memories, experiences and thinking about things and we’re now trying to quantify that and help people really understand when things happen, when changes are happening and how changes are happening so they can actually get better in all walks of life; get healthier, have less traumatic experiences, and altogether align their outcomes with their interest by ways of actually rehearsing the things that they want more and really living the life that aligns with what their intensions are.

[0:28:57.1] MB: So as a neuroscientist, is your work looking at kind of the – In some sense, the sort of the physical aspects of how the brain changes, how memories are stored and recalled and how are the beliefs can be kind of shifted by these kind of interventions?

[0:29:13.3] MC: Yes. So we look at it not just like in theoretical neuroscience aspect, also practically. We’re trying to kind of see what things people can actually do that will help them change. One thing I said is that we actually learned that just taking experiences that are bad and actually dealing with them by talking about them more and more. So talking about them particularly with people who can give us positive inputs actually makes us get better. You’d go to a person, you tell them the story, they give you positive input, you save it, you go the day after, you tell them the story, you give you positive input. It actually changes. It means that overtime you will get better. You will have different perspective of this same bad experience. That’s a tangible, practical thing. 

We also know that, generally, giving people access to their behavior in the past with some kind of reflections of that helps them to change. For example, if you’re the CEO of a company, we have studies where we tell you, “For the next week, work about your life regularly.” Just every time you have a choice, write down the state you are at when you made this choice. How hungry you were? How hard you were? How mad at people you were or how important their inputs were. Put as many things as you can into the moment and then tell us what the options were and what the choice was and just code your choice, log them for the next 10 days, let’s say, and then when they come after a week of doing that, we actually go with them over all the choices and we ask them to tell us which ones they’re happy with and which ones they’re not happy with. Which ones they like the outcome. Which ones they feel they made a mistake. 

We look at their brains when they make the ones that are good and the ones that are bad and try to profile their brain and tell them, “You know, it seems that your brain makes choices that you feel happier with when you’re hungry. You feel happier with choices when you’re in the evening rather than in the morning. You like choices better when you’re with these people, but not with that people.” 

So we kind of help them see which states their brain is when they make choices that they like more and then help them actually kind of profile their brain. What’s important is that every person has different brains. You might feel better making choices in the morning and I might feel better making choices in the evening, or your wife might like better choices that happen when she’s surrounded by 10 people and you might be alone. 

So every one person  has their own brain, but we try to actually help people figure out what’s their brain profile and what choices align with that and what choices are not and maximize the time that they spend making choices that are important in the right environment. You can say that, “For this particular choice, I’m going to wait in the morning because I know that my brain works best in the morning when I’m full after I spoke with 10 people, but when I’m alone, closer the deadline.” 

In doing that, we actually look at your brain and tell you what your brain’s perfect states are, how to get there and make decisions that are better. Now you don’t have to work with neuroscientist for that. Neuroscience gives you more access to the brain, but even every person from the room that is listening to you right now can do it for themselves. They can take 48 hours by which they just sit with a notebook and every time they make a choice, they just write down the conditions and then look back at the choices, code which ones they like and which ones they are not happy with and try to see what is common to their situations and they were at when they made choices that they like. Maybe you were the simple person or maybe you were alone. Maybe you were hungry or full. Maybe you’re in a loud place or a quiet place. Some of the choices are going to tell you something about who you are. That’s enough to, even without looking at the brain, understand something about what’s your best case scenario. 

[0:32:32.7] MB: That’s a great strategy and reminds me of a very similar tool used on sort of a broader spectrum, is the idea of a decision journal. I mean, this is almost like a daily decision journal, but the other concept would be kind of expanding that out to looking at the major decisions in your life and trying to understand what are the kind of contexts and inputs around those and then aggregating those overtime so you can see your own sort of biases or repeated errors in your thinking.

[0:32:56.3] MC: Absolutely. I think what’s important in understanding with people who don’t believe that, but I can’t stress it enough, is that we’re a lot simpler than we think we are. People think, “Oh! But until you understand the complexity of my mind, you need hundreds of choices and to follow me constantly and really understand.” 

People think that they’re very unique, and it turns out that for the sake of brain and choices, we’re a lot more simple. We’re a lot simpler than we think we are. We are all falling into one of very few clusters. We’re very predictable. This is what marketing mangers knew for a while, that if you priced a thing as 6.99 rather than 7, everyone knows that it’s actually 7. It’s one cent different, but it works. All of us somehow fall for this in our mind because we read numbers from left to right rather than right to left. 

Even though one of us is an engineer, another one is a housewife, a kid, an adult, speaking English or not, we all fall for that. Somehow marketing managers realized that when it comes to choices, we’re a lot more similar than different. In that sense, if you just find your brain and figure out which kind of category you fall into out of very few, you will find not only how you work and what’s helping you do best. You’d also find who’s like you and who’s not and you can start thinking about putting yourself next to people who think like you or think different than you so you can make choices similarly. 

So maybe someone who shares your views and values and then you can outsource some of the choices to her instead of having to make all the choices yourself and say, “I trust my wife because I know that she chooses like me. So I’m going to give her the reigns when it comes to what we eat and when we go on vacation and she would give you the choice of who you’re spending time with and when you should talk to this or that person,” because you know that brains would actually work the same way. But maybe in your company, you want someone who thinks the opposite of you because you’ll say, “I’m going to be really good in the morning. I need someone else to be really good in the evening, and this is the person that will make the best thing for me.” In many ways, once you start profiling your decision making style and asking others around you to do the same, you will start finding what’s the perfect match. Well, not just you, but for a group around you. 

[0:35:05.1] MB: I think that’s a really interesting point, and I think it kind of comes back to this idea that you touched on earlier, which is with the experiment where people were kind of handed the pictures they didn’t select, we think our decision making is so – And the problems that we faced are so unique and so kind of one off, but the reality is not only do they often times fall into kind of simple, predictable patterns of bias and behavior, but also in many cases our decisions aren’t even really our own decisions and they’re impacted by small external factors, like the environment and other things.

[0:35:38.0] MC: Absolutely. So we know more and more now that more and more of our brain is not really under our control. This myth that says that we only use 20% of our brain. This is not true. We use 100% of our brain, but not all of our brain is accessible to us. Not everything in our brain is something that we have control. A lot of things that happen in our brain happen without you actually governing them. Simply, you can think about three things, right? Your brain sends a signal every second to your lungs and to your mouth and to your nose to inhale and exhale and contrast and expand. All of these happens under the hood. You have no access to that. It just happens and you’re there witnessing it without the need to actually govern that in a new way. 

This is true for even more complex things, like your emotions. You don’t really say, “Some friend of mine is sick. I should activate sadness right now. Turn on sadness please. Sadness for 10 minutes. Turn off sadness right now. Let’s move to happiness.” You don’t really control your emotions. They kind of dawn on you and you’re a witness to their exposure. 

So we know now that the brain has a lot of things that are happening that we have no control over. They just happen to us. We’re beginning to actually understand how they work and how to get control over them, but for the sake of the immediate moment, we should know that a lot of things happen in our brain that we don’t have access to, but they do have influence on our life. The temperate in the room changes how you respond to things. 

There are experiments where people are asked to hold a cup of tea in their hand while they write an essay about their mothers, and whether it’s a cup of hot tea or a cup of iced tea, changes how nice or warm or cold they are in their writing about their moms, just because the temperate in your body reflects thoughts that are in your mind differently. So you probably have all the repertoire of options of things that you think about mother, but if you’re cold in your body, you will reflect some of the negative ones maybe more than the positive ones even though you don’t put them in your head. 

This is all part of like this field. It’s called embodied cognition that chose time and again that a lot of things are happening to us that are driven by our mind and our body that we have no full control over. The moment we understand them, we can actually predict how they’re going to work, but at the same time they’re governing how we think, decide and operate without us knowing exactly how they are going to influence us before they are actually manifested themselves.   

[0:38:00.7] MB: So what can we do or maybe somebody who’s listening, how could we kind of constructively think about the idea of embodied cognition and these other things we’ve been talking about, decision making and behavior, how can we incorporate that into our own decision making and process and try to live with that effectively or be better decision makers as a result?

[0:38:20.9] MC: So I’ll give you a few quick ones. First of all, just by knowing about it. If you just know the term, if you go to Wikipedia and read about it, if you listen to our conversations about it, immediately things get different. You immediately become aware of this just by knowing that these things exist. If you have a name for something, you can think about it, and if you can think about it, you can actually control it. So just whoever is listening to right now, already by listening made a first step. 

Let’s take it differently. Another step we can make is also to code things. So we said that the CEOs of companies come to us and we tell them, “Please, write down what was the noise level in the room when you make a choice in the board room. Tell us who you were with.” Just by coding thing in your life you will become aware of the patterns and you will start to know them. That’s option number two we mentioned. 

Option number three, of course, is to work with a neuroscientist who can actually look at your brain and analyze your brain as you make choices and really kind of create a pathway, diagrams that explains to you how you choose and to change it if you want. Option number four, which I think is my preferred one, is to surround yourself by people who overtime prove themselves to be decision makers that you like and outsource some choices to them. 

So I always go to restaurants with people I really, really like to have dinner and when the menu comes, I tell the other person, “Choose for the two of us.” Sometimes I will choose for the two of us. Sometimes they would choose with separate choices. I say, “I trust you. I know that your taste is great. I like new experiences. I know that you’re going to want what’s in my best interest. You choose for the two of us. I’ll do the same next time so we cannot overload each other with the choices.” If none of us know each other that well, I ask the waiter to say, “Hey, give me two, three options that you think are good and I randomly choose number three,” just to kind of make it so that I would commit to something but not fully choose always the first one because it might be given by some other ideas.

Those things actually ease our lives because they tell us first of all that, A, we don’t have to make choices, but B, the choices that we make when it comes to small things are usually pretty similar. You won’t be that disappointed from the salad compared to the stake, and you think before that you really will be, but you won’t. 

Also, as you start to get the outcomes of choices and you see which ones you’re happy with, which ones you’re not, who chose them, you start to know something about your colleagues and your friends and you say, “Okay. Every time I go to a stake place, I should take Leslie and have her make a choice, because the past history shows that she’s really, really good.” “Every time I go to a movie, I should go with Anthony and let him choose, because I know that he’s making a good choice.” In doing that we, A, become friends, but also B, remove a little bit of the load, the choices we have on our brain. We know that making decisions actually is tax on our brain. Having many of them tires our brain. So if they’re not that important, why don’t divide them by people and take people that you know are making good choices in domains and have them do those for you. That’s tip number four in out of four ways to actually do better in choosing.  

[0:41:17.4] MB: So I want to come back to what we talked about earlier, kind of the idea of inserting memories and transforming the brain. You recently gave a TED Talk called Humans 2.0 where you kind of talked about human augmentation and a really interesting kind of future of how we can apply technology to the brain and enhancing our cognition. I’d love to hear your thoughts about that.  

[0:41:39.0] MC: If you look at evolution, it’s a really, really slow process. It takes millions of years. If you think about how long it will take you humans to say develop wings so we can fly, it’s a process that won’t be your and my lifetime. It will take years of evolution if it’s even advantageous for human to have wings. But for the first time in history, we actually are able to take over evolution and enhance human bodies much faster. Rather than millions of years, it could be a few months or years. We do that by actually harnessing the power of technology and the power of the brain. 

So what we know with the brain, is the brain is a machine that gets input and learns what’s the signal in this input. This is, if you want how we learn things as babies. When you’re born, you have a brain, the brain is pretty, void of stimuli, but you start bombarding the eyes of a baby with photons from the world and its brain quickly learns how to do the complex [inaudible 0:42:32.6] transformation of the signal and essentially learn to see. It takes a baby a few hours, days, weeks before it learns to separate colors and identify moving shapes and gradually learn how to identify object and stuff like that. Within a few weeks you already see. You see the same way. You see after many, many years of training, and you see by having your brain do complex processing happening under the hood. 

In the same way, your brain learns how to hear, how to smell, but we can also think of new organs that don’t exist right now and see if the brain of a human would learn how to control them. Imagine that I take a third arm and plug it somehow into your brain and connect it to your body. The question is; will the brain learn quickly just by getting feedback from this new arm, how to control it? The answer is yes. The answer is some experiments that were done on animals and a few that were done on humans, we plug new devices into their brain and we see that their brain within a few weeks or months usually learns to control them. 

The classical example would be the cochlear implant. That’s a device that people that are deaf use to hear. You basically a device that translates the molecular vibrations in the air into the language to their brain and the brain just gets bombarded with a new signal that it doesn’t know, because these people were deaf and they didn’t hear anything before, but suddenly their brain gets new signal coming from vibration in the air and within a few months they learn to hear. That’s how we kind of can conquer deafness. 

There are now studies with humans that are trying to conquer blindness and make people who were blind learn to see. We gradually learned that the brain learns a lot of things if you just blast it with information that has meaning and let it do its magic. Now in the same way we can imagine a world where we indeed connect a third arm and teach you how to control it or plug two wings into your brain that would start flapping and changing how they feel. Overtime your brain will learn how to actually control those wings, but also how to fly. 

This kind of idea that we can enhance the human body by plugging devices into the brain and having the brain learn quickly how to control them is the notion of Human 2.0. We take the body that you are born with, we plug new devices into it; wings, our complex nose, a third eye in the back, anything you can imagine as long as it knows how to speak the language of the brain, we presume that the brain will learn overtime to control it and you will gain this new senses and you kind of control over the organ. That’s Human 2.0. 

[0:45:08.7] MB: It’s so fascinating to me this idea that the brain is so effective at adapting and understanding new information that essentially we’re not quite there yet obviously, but potentially in the near future there could be the technology basically implant a chip into your brain that could learn to intuitively think and interact with just like your own limbs or your own sort of thinking patterns that could actually be – Whether it’s sort of an external piece of electronics or computational power or whatever. It’s really, really interesting. 

[0:45:39.5] MC: Absolutely. I think that the nice analogy that someone equated it with is two people. One guy navigating the world with a map, trying to get from point A to point B. Another guy just memorizing things in his brain and then navigating with his mind. The only difference is whether the thoughts come from your own mind or from the map, and gradually we know how to basically put this map inside your head. 

This map is an example. It could be your phone. It could be any gadget on the outside world that will give you an advantage. Right now if I ask you to calculate how much is 58 x 56, you would spend some time with a piece of paper or with your iPhone trying to do the numbers. But if I ask you how much is 2 + 2, you will just outsource, so to speak, the thought from your linguistic area to the calculating area. You’re going to get the number and you’re going to turn it back and you’re going to say the number is 4. It’s just because one of them is easy, one of them is hard. But if we take the 

iPhone chip and put it inside your brain, when I ask how much is 58 x 56, you will just do the same thing, but inside your head you will just think the thoughts that will turn to the iPhone, like the guy turned to the map and asked the iPhone in your head how much is the answer. It will do the numbers for you and give it back to you and you will just spit the answer not even knowing that it happened on a different device, because once we plug it into your brain, it would even feel to you like it’s a different thing. The same way you don’t really feel the separation between the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. They just feel like part of the same thing. If we put a thing inside your head, it will do things for you. It will just filter you automatically and immediately, like it’s you making the same things, and this is kind of the next level of what we can do. We can actually start harnessing the power of technology inside our head and feel like it’s doing it for us, really, kind of integration of human and machines. 

[0:47:17.8] MB: So fascinating and it’s such an exciting future to kind of contemplate. So wrapping up, for listeners who want to concretely implement some of the ideas that we’ve talked about today to improve themselves, what would be kind of one piece of homework that you would give them as an action step or starting point?

[0:47:36.5] MC: I think that, in my mind, the first step is to just know. So the more you know the language of what is – We spoke about recognition, about irrational thinking. Once you know those things, you can’t ignore them anymore. They become part of your life and you start being aware of things. So that’s step number one. I think every person who’s listening to this podcast did step number one. 

Step number two, surround yourself with people who embody the things you want to have yourself. I tell a lot my students always that if they want to become something, one way is to learn about it and actually trying to train themselves. But another one is to just surround themselves with people who have that. If you want to be funny, you can actually buy a book of 1,000 Jewish jokes and read them or you can actually try to learn how to be funny by looking at the comedians. But another one is to just find friends that are funny and be with them for a while. It will figuratively rub on to you by osmosis. You will actually become funnier because you will just internalize how they do things by how fast they are, what’s their timing when they tell jokes. You will somehow learn that. 

Same is true for any other thing you want to manifest. You’re always late and you want to be on time. Be next to people who are always on time. You will just become a person that’s on time automatically. I think this is tip number two that I always try to kind of do in myself. You think what you want, you find people who have that and you put them next to you, and this works magically in changing you without you needing to work for that. It just happens automatically. 

[0:49:07.9] MB: Where can listeners find you and your work online?

[0:49:11.5] MC: So I have a website. It’s my first and last name .com, morancerf.com. Generally, I’m the easiest to find. If you just look my name, there are so many now talks and videos that my students and I have given that it’s the easiest to find. Really, the most accessible scientist you can imagine.

[0:49:29.7] MB: Well, Moran, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing all these wisdom. Such a fascinating career and life you’ve had and it’s really cool to see how you’re applying these now to help people become smarter and to change neuroscience.

[0:49:43.3] MC: Thank you so much, Matt. It really was a pleasure. 

[0:49:45.1] 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 M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

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