Transcript
Episode: Self-Coach Your Way to Success
Joel Miller:
All right. So you know this experience, a friend or a colleague contacts you. They’ve got a problem, they’re coming to you for insight, they’re coming to you for answers and you’ve got it. You listen to their problem and within a few minutes you’ve got a pretty good sense of what’s going on and you’re able to give them advice that really will make a difference in the way that they deal with the situation. You know that’s true because they thank you, number one. But number two, they come back to you a day later, a week later, a month later and they tell you, “Hey, you know that advice you gave me? Was exactly what I needed. You can’t even believe what happened, it was perfect.” The problem is, it’s kind of hard to do that with ourselves if we’re honest. It’s way easier to give advice to a friend than give it to ourselves and yet we don’t always have that friend to go talk to. We don’t always have somebody to go ask hey, how do I get myself out of this situation? Hey, how do I get myself unstuck?
Well today on the show, we’re actually going to talk about how to flip that dynamic so that you actually can coach yourself to success. Hi I’m Joel Miller, chief product officer here at Full Focus and this is the Business Accelerator podcast. Today we’re talking about self-coaching, particularly how to get yourself out of negative mindsets that are blocking your progress. First we have a conversation with our founder, Michael Hyatt and our CEO, Megan Hyatt Miller about mindset. This is pretty special because they’re talking about their brand-new book, Mind Your Mindset and specifically the self-coaching methodology that they reveal in the book. Then we’re going to shift to a conversation with Ethan Kross. He’s a professor of psychology and management at the University of Michigan and he’s the author of a book called Chatter, which is all about the voices in our head and how to deal with them. Ethan is going to share findings from his own research to help us apply this self-coaching methodology and share an interesting paradox. So Michael and Megan’s new book is Mind Your Mindset: The Science That Shows Success Starts with Your Thinking.
It actually comes out at the very end of January, January 31st and we’re going to preview some of the content from that book on this very episode. First they’re going to look at one problem that honestly every business owner has, a bias to action. That’s normally a plus unless it prevents us from stopping and thinking about the actions we’re taking. So what Michael and Megan do in this conversation is explore three steps to coach your thinking to get better results.
Michael Hyatt:
If there’s one thing we know about business leaders and particularly business owners, is that they have a bias toward action. For many of us our motto is ready, fire, aim. We just want to get into the experience, we want to create that product, we want to start marketing it. We launch that program but we don’t give it the thinking it deserves and because we don’t, it impedes our results or at least keeps them from being what they could be. So if there’s one thing we can learn from sort of neuroscience and the world of brain science is that thinking drives our actions and actions drive our results. Now if you see that chain or understand that chain, the best way to impact the results is to change your thinking. That’s where it all starts and so we want to talk about the three steps to coaching yourself to success and this whole idea of self-coaching. Which by the way, the first time I ever heard that phrase was from Brooke Castillo.
So I want to give credit where credit’s due, but self coaching is probably the most important coaching that any of us will ever do. But it’s coaching about our thinking, coaching about our mindset. So in our new book, Mind Your Mindset. The book that Megan and I are releasing here in a few short days, we talk about the three steps to basically coaching yourself to success and improving your results. So Megan, let’s dive right into this. What’s the first step?
Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, the first step is to identify the story that you’re telling yourself. It’s funny because thinking is kind of a clinical or sanitized term, but the way our thinking shows up in our own brains is in the form of stories. We’re making meaning of things, we’re trying to understand why did that not go the way we wanted to? Why did we miss this goal? Why did we not hit our budget? Why did that hire not work out? Why did that product not launch successfully? Or I mean you could have the converse which would be positive, but in this case it tends to be negative. Our brain is so oriented toward protecting us and making sense of the world that it’s always going to be constructing these stories. If you feel like that narrative in your head is a little on the negative side, congratulations on being human. Your brain is doing exactly what it knows how to do. The good news is, is that it doesn’t have to stay there and gosh, I saw this in absolute 3D this weekend.
I was taking our son Jonah who’s a brand-new golfer to a golf clinic at a local club that teaches this stuff to kids. It was the very first time that he had gone from learning discrete skills and I won’t even try to name what those are because I’m not a golfer and I don’t understand it, you would Dan.
Michael Hyatt:
We have to remedy this.
Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah, I know. It might be on my list of goals for this year but he was playing in a scramble with some veterans. It was a really cool thing that they were doing and for the first time ever he was playing the course. Not the whole course, I think they did maybe four or five holes or something like that. He got in the car, I dropped him off and came back to get him and he got in the car and I was all excited to hear about it. I said, “How did it go?” He said, “Terrible.” I was like, “Oh no, what happened?” He said, “Mom. I mean every time I hit the ball, I’d either miss it or it wouldn’t go straight. I mean, it was so humiliating. There were kids way younger than me that were way better, I’m just terrible at golf.” That’s a story, right?
Michael Hyatt:
That’s a story.
Megan Hyatt Miller:
The facts were that he swung and wasn’t able to make contact with the ball or whatever the way you’re supposed to say that is, and that he wasn’t able to hit the ball where he wanted it to go. Those were the just boring old facts, but the story that he told himself about that was that he was no good. Now, nevermind the fact that this kid’s never played a golf course before. He’s just been to these clinics where they focus on one discreet skill, but that was his story and it’s so easy to identify in a kid because they’re not very sophisticated. You can just see it, but we do this all the time as adults and especially as business owners who are trying big things that don’t always work out.
Michael Hyatt:
Yeah. Totally and those stories control kind of the reality we experience and here’s the thing about stories. I was reading a study the other day that said, “Up to 50% of our memories…” I think this is a low estimate, “Are false.”
Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right, isn’t that crazy?
Michael Hyatt:
Yeah. We took some facts and we basically knitted a sweater and that sweater is called our memory and it’s called a story and it may or may not be true. I’ll tell you, the older I’ve gotten the more I realized how important it is to identify those stories because those controlling narratives impact everything.
Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, they drive the actions that we take.
Michael Hyatt:
That’s right.
Megan Hyatt Miller:
So in my example about Jonah. He said to me, “I don’t think I want to play golf anymore.” Because the story in his head was that he wasn’t good. So he was ready to quit playing golf because his very first time playing on a real course didn’t go well and that happens all the time for us as business owners. Again, we’re just a little more sophisticated about it. So it’s a little harder to identify these stories but they’re at least that powerful if not more.
Michael Hyatt:
So for example as a business owner you may think to yourself, I’m really terrible at hiring the right people. Maybe if you really were to look at that, it’s just one or two experiences that created that story. But that story is now becoming a narrative that’s inhibiting your results or maybe you think, I’m not good on camera because one time you were on camera and you fumbled a little bit kind of like Jonah at the golf course. So you think well, I’m just not any good at being in front of a camera. So again, it’s important to identify those stories because there is thinking behind every action and all the results. Until we can identify those stories and do something about them, they’re going to control us at an unconscious level. I think this is where we have to take a deep breath and wake up to our lives and see these stories for what they are, but to identify them is the first step.
Megan Hyatt Miller:
The truth is they’re totally subjective and they create a bias in our brain against what we actually want to discover. Meaning that when you think something like, I’m not any good at managing the financial part of my business because maybe you struggled with cash flow at one point. Then the solutions to solve that problem of, I’m not very good at business finance are going to be very limited or not helpful. But if you had a different kind of story, which we’re going to talk about in a few minutes. Your brain would go looking for different kinds of answers and all of a sudden the quality of the answers that you would find. The resources you would discover would be vastly different which is then going to dramatically alter the kind of results that you get. So that’s part of the connection here of why these stories matter because your brain tries to validate the stories that it’s telling itself. So when you’re telling a disempowering story, it’s going to look for evidence of that everywhere.
It’s going to look to further instantiate that and it’s going to be very difficult to get a different outcome than the one you’re getting unless it’s just worse. So we’ve got to be on top of identifying these stories.
Michael Hyatt:
Before we move to the next step, let me say this. This is how powerful stories are, stories will shape your results. They’re more important than anything else you do and if you’ve got the wrong story, you’re going to get the wrong results and you’re going to get the wrong results consistently. Which leads us to step number two, which is to interrogate. So step number one is to identify, step number two is to interrogate those stories. So quick story here, so one night Gail and I were kind of reviewing our days. So typically we lay in bed and talk about our days and try to identify our wins and pray together, then we go to sleep. So she said to me, she said, “How was your day?” I said, “It was terrible.” She said, “Well, tell me about it?” So I kind of went through it with focus on this one thing that happened and I don’t even remember what it was, but she said to me.
She said, “I want to be empathetic but let me tell you what this sounds like to me. It doesn’t actually sound like you had a terrible day, it sounds like you had a terrible 20 minutes. It sounds like you had some pretty good things happen and if you were to take the 20 minutes out, it would’ve been a great day.” I mean that was a revelation, I was thunderstruck by that. I said, “You’re exactly right, I’ve created a whole narrative about today based on my selective picking and choosing of the facts and my assembly of those facts into a story.” So to interrogate the story means we begin. Anytime we see a result that we don’t like or experience a result that we don’t like, the first place to begin is to interrogate our thinking. What was the story that was behind this result?
Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, back to my example about Jonah. We started talking in the car. It was just the two of us on our way back home and we started talking about okay, why do you think that happened? After he said, “I’m just not any good. I don’t think I want to do this.” He said, “Well, I think my clubs are too short.” Now, I don’t know…. Again, I don’t know anything about this but he’s had a growth spurt recently. I said, “Jonah, that could absolutely be true. I mean, I don’t know but I’m assuming if you have clubs that are too short that would make it pretty hard to hit the ball in the direction that you’d want to hit and get all the pieces to line up.” He was like, “Yeah, maybe I need some new clubs.” I said, “Yeah, maybe you do.” Then I said, “The other thing is you’ve never played on a course before. You’ve learned all these little pieces but now you had to pull it together, that’s more complicated. Maybe you just haven’t learned how to do that yet.”
I was reminded of Shauna Niequist book, I think it’s called I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet. She moved to New York City. She was trying to adapt to city life and there were all these moments where they were sort of awkward, where they were learning to do new things in the city. She just developed this little mantra with her family when they would be discouraged because they got on the wrong train or whatever and would say oh, I guess we haven’t learned that yet. In other words you’re not wrong, you just haven’t learned that yet and-
Michael Hyatt:
That’s so good.
Megan Hyatt Miller:
He was like, yeah. I mean he’s a kid, so he’s a little slow to come around on this. But I can kind of see the wheels start spinning like oh, maybe I’m not bad. Maybe this is not a question of innate talent, it’s just a question of skill that I haven’t learned. I said, “Jonah, part of the reason people like golf is because it’s hard and it’s complicated and it’s something you can work on for your entire life and you’re just at the very beginning. You just started playing this year, your instructors have actually told us that you have some natural talent. But also it’s going to be difficult, this is your very first time. I remember when I was riding horses and I got thrown off of horses all the time when I was your age and that was my sport and that was just part of learning how to stay on. It didn’t mean I wasn’t any good at it, it just meant that I was doing something difficult.” So I think we have to do that for ourselves, what else could it be besides this?
What else could the explanation be that doesn’t shut you down and disempower you for this thing that happened? As it turns out, there probably are all kinds of explanations that would be far more empowering and set you up to find a solution to that thing than to just cause you to quit or check out or give up.
Michael Hyatt:
I think part of this is so insidious because we buy into the cultural myth of the natural maid or the natural talent that people have. So we think oh, she’s a natural singer or she’s natural when it comes to finance and what we don’t see is the 10,000 hours that were behind that.
Megan Hyatt Miller:
That’s so true.
Michael Hyatt:
The practice that got to that. I’ve had people say to me before, Megan you probably have too in your coaching. It’s like man, you’re just naturally good at business. No, I made 40 years of mistakes.
Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right.
Michael Hyatt:
I’ve just made more mistakes than you have but that story, again like Jonah kind of controls the narrative. People try things once or maybe twice and then they give up, they say well I guess I don’t have the talent. I don’t have the ability, I don’t have the X factor. I don’t have that thing that would enable me to succeed and this will really screw up your business. So anything you’re going to try, you got to be willing to do poorly at first if you’re going to improve and get really great at it. I mean, I think of some of the early product launches that we did Megan, in this business.
Megan Hyatt Miller:
I was just thinking about that.
Michael Hyatt:
I mean we had failures, things that fell apart in the first 10 minutes of the launch.
Megan Hyatt Miller:
Over and over.
Michael Hyatt:
Over and over, but we were just doggedly persistent and stayed with it and over time we got better. Now we still have a lot of lessons to learn but here’s the cool thing that’s happened is the more you experience better results, that too shapes your story. So this is the crazy thing, the story is going to impact the results. If I think I’m a bad golfer, my behavior will live up to my expectation. One of my best friends who sadly is gone now, Megan you knew him. But oftentimes when he would make a bad putt or a bad drive he would say to himself, “You idiot, you can never hit it right.” He was talking to himself out loud and I got to hear it and I wanted to say, well if you say so. Because guess what? Every time he said that out loud, he reinforced that inner story and he better guaranteed a bad result because it reinforced it.
Megan Hyatt Miller:
When you were talking about products a minute ago, I was remembering this is… Gosh. I don’t even remember how many years ago, it was probably almost 10 years ago. We launched your best year ever goal setting course for leaders. We were like hey, we know about leadership, this is going to be awesome. This-
Michael Hyatt:
Brilliant idea.
Megan Hyatt Miller:
This is brilliant, we know we’re speaking to leaders. That’s our audience, this is going to be fantastic. So we recorded it, I can remember where we recorded it. Even now I can walk around that set in my mind and we launched it expecting it to be as successful as the one we had done for individuals. We literally got one order and I think that might have been our own team checking the checkout process. We were just so mystified, is there an error? What’s wrong? It’s so interesting because at that moment… So that’s a fact, I mean the fact was we got one order and it might not even have been a legitimate order. But the story that we could have told ourselves is nobody wants to learn anything about achievement in business, which would’ve been silly. I mean the data would’ve been against that, but we could have thought that or nobody respects our authority in this space.
But we’ve since gone on to build an incredibly successful coaching program with 100s and 100s of clients that we have helped set and achieve big goals for their business so they can scale their business without compromising their most important values. Had we have chosen a different story, now in fairness I’m not sure we were super conscious about this. Somehow we were just… Despite ourselves we were able to tell a story that was empowering, but that could have directed the entire future of our business. When we came up with the idea of starting a coaching program, we could have shut it down because we could have said well I don’t think anybody would want that. Remember that? Of course, we launched and only sold one thing. So you see how this story thing can affect your results?
Michael Hyatt:
This is something you just said Megan is something we say in the book, Mind Your Mindset. But there’s a difference between what happened and what it means. There are the facts and then there’s the interpretation that we layer upon the facts and so it could be about anything. I increasingly find that there are things that I grew up with that shape my narrative about myself, about my parents, about my siblings, about my life. That as I interrogate them and try to separate the facts for my interpretation, there are thousands of interpretations that I could have layered upon that same set of facts. Our friend Bob Goff says, “Always look for the least creepy explanation.” I think that’s good because oftentimes we go to the most dramatic explanation. That person doesn’t look at us in quite the way that we expect. Maybe they’re sidetracked or they’re working through a problem or something just happened that’s stolen their attention and we created a narrative like it’s about us.
Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right.
Michael Hyatt:
They don’t like us or they’re displeased with us or whatever and honestly it has nothing to do with us. So there’s a fact and then there’s a meaning and the essence of the interrogation process is to get in there and separate that so that you have the ability… This is the third step, to imagine a completely different story or a different interpretation.
Megan Hyatt Miller:
Right. But in order to shake loose that story that’s disempowering. We’ve got to do the interrogation step because otherwise there’s going to be an internal conflict between that story that feels so true, that’s disempowering. Like Jonah saying I’m just not good at this. That feels very true in that moment and unless we shake that loose with the interrogation process, we’re not really positioning ourselves to imagine something better. So while the interrogation process may be the most unfamiliar part of this process or uncomfortable, it’s really critical to complete that before you move on to the imagine step. So that it can take root, so to speak in our psyche. But when we get to this point now we want to imagine okay, what story do I want to tell? What story is going to help get me closer to where I want to be? What story is going to close the gap between where I am and where I want to be? So as Jonah and I were talking about this experience he had in a scramble, we were talking about the idea that maybe you just haven’t had enough practice yet.
Maybe you will be a great golfer once you’ve had enough practice and maybe what we need to do is ask granddaddy, that’s what he calls you. Maybe we need to ask granddaddy to take you out where it’s not a competition, you’re not so worried about other people. You just have the opportunity to practice on a real course with somebody who you feel safe with and not worried about what they’re thinking and you feel free to just learn without the pressure. He was like, “Yeah, that would be fun.” It was just so interesting to see what happened when he started to imagine a different outcome. His set of experiences might not mean what his original story told him, that there might be an alternative narrative that would be hopeful.
Michael Hyatt:
I think it’s important to know too, that once we reimagine the story sometimes it takes a while for the results to catch up.
Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yes.
Michael Hyatt:
Right? Because it takes practice. I’m not a big fan of coming up with affirmations or stories that are a stretch to the imagination. Here’s what I wouldn’t advise Jonah to do. I wouldn’t say hey one of the things that you can do is that every day say to yourself 10 times, I’m the world’s greatest golfer.
Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah.
Michael Hyatt:
Yeah, because your subconscious won’t believe it. But if you were to say something a little bit more authentic like, I’m learning to be a really good golfer. Or even I’m learning to be a great golfer.
Megan Hyatt Miller:
Or I’m really proud of myself for how I’m learning how to golf.
Michael Hyatt:
Yes. Part of the golfing journey is learning to be resilient. The guys that succeed on the pro circuit are not the guys that hit every shot perfectly because that is a league of no one. It’s the guys that are the most resilient that can shake it off and not take that experience or that result and make it part of their narrative. You know what I’m saying? So they hit it into the woods and it’d be easy to say, well there’s more proof that I suck. What we’re saying is no, just shake that off. What is your real identity? Oh. Well, I’m going to learn from that. I can see that I left my club face a little bit too open and I can correct that.
Megan Hyatt Miller:
I think what you’re really saying is that the people that succeed at golf and life are the people who become conscious of their stories and can tell a better story when things don’t go the way they want. So that they’re able to successfully move on and try again and this is a powerful strategy for resilience. Because anybody who you ever talked to who has been successful over the long haul will have a mile long list of failures and disappointments and things that did not work out as part of their battle scars. They’ll be proud of those things because what they figured out was how to talk to themselves. That’s what really makes the biggest difference in success, is how do you talk to yourself? Not what thoughts pop into your brain because we probably should have said this at the beginning, these negative stories they just pop into our brain. It’s just our brain doing what it’s supposed to do. You’re never going to stop the negative thoughts or the thoughts that are self-incriminating, that’s just part of being a human.
It’s okay, but the difference maker is can you then respond back in a way that ultimately is empowering or not?
Michael Hyatt:
All of us have living inside our head, at least one narrator who’s telling us what everything means in real time as it happens. The secret to being successful is to realize that and then to consciously edit the script that the narrator’s using and change it. That’s what we teach in, Mind Your Mindset. Is that how you can take control of your results by taking control of your thinking and it makes all the difference.
Joel Miller:
If your narrator right now is telling you that you are interested in this book, that’s because you are. If you want to find out more about Mind Your Mindset, go to mindyourmindsetbook.com. The pre-order window is still open, so if you are interested in learning more and getting some great bonuses. Go ahead and pre-order the book at mindyourmindsetbook.com. After the break, we’ll be back with Ethan Kross to discuss a paradox that if you can get your head around, it’ll make a big difference. All right, let’s now jump into our conversation with Ethan Kross. Just a reminder, he is the author of the book Chatter and also a professor of psychology and management at the University of Michigan. I asked Ethan about the conversation that pretty much all of us have running in our head all the time, what’s the neurological basis for that?
Ethan Kross:
Well we all have an inner voice, our inner voice is refers to our ability to silently use language to reflect on our lives. I like to think about it as a kind of Swiss Army Knife of the human mind that lets us do many really important things. So your inner voice helps you at the most basic end of the spectrum, keep information active for short periods of time. So Joel, you look like you are of a similar vintage as me. Hopefully I’m not insulting you there but I’m going to guess prior to cell phones, you would memorize a phone number. Right? You’d repeat it in your head.
Joel Miller:
Oh, yeah.
Ethan Kross:
All right. So that’s using your inner voice, your inner voice is part of what we call our verbal working memory system. This is a basic system of the human mind and what it involves doing is keeping nuggets of verbal information active for really short periods of time. So if you go to the grocery store and you go down the second aisle, it’s always a second aisle for me. I think to myself oh, what did my wife tell me to get? Then I rehearse the list in my head, I go down. Cheese, milk, yogurt, right? That’s your inner voice, we’re using it to keep information active. That’s one thing it helps you do, the inner voice helps you simulate and plan. Before I give presentations I will go for a walk around the hotel lobby or neighborhood and I’ll go through what I’m going to say during my talk from beginning to end. I’ll rehearse it, I won’t just rehearse it often verbatim. I’ll then simulate a few different possibilities for how the talk is going to end.
Usually I simulate the worst case scenarios, which often involve an incredibly obnoxious looking individual from my childhood asking me a question in front of everyone else. Then me responding with this totally out of sync with reality, courageous response that I get a huge applause from the audience. Right? What am I doing there? I’m using my inner voice as a tool to prepare myself for different eventualities. People report doing this before dates, interviews, presentations, that’s another thing it does. Let’s talk about exercise and performance, many people use their inner voice to motivate themselves a lot. When I’m exercising and not wanting to be doing the things that the aversive, obnoxious, high intensity interval training instructors telling me to do each morning. I’m talking to myself, right? Come on man, you’ve got this, three more sets, three, two, one, three more reps. I’m saying things to the instructor that I wouldn’t say to their face but in my head I’m shouting all sorts of expletives. Why don’t you try doing blah, blah, blah, right? So that’s me using my inner voice too and finally, we use our inner voice to tell stories.
Things happen in our lives that don’t go the way they want. We reflexively engage this tool to make meaning out of the situation, why did this happen? What can I learn from the situation? We use our inner voice to tell those stories and those stories that we tell ourselves, they shape our understanding of who we are. They impact our identity, so this inner voice really gets at the core of who we are and how we think about ourselves. Those are just a few examples of the wonderful functions that your inner voice serves. You would not want to live life without this inner voice.
Joel Miller:
I want to take two thoughts you just gave in that explanation and put them together for an additional question. Which is, when we think about performance and then you think about stories, those two concepts. We’re often telling ourselves a story about how we performed in the past and then we’re using that as a way to think about how we might perform in the future. Tell us a little bit more about that dynamic and maybe where it can go wrong?
Ethan Kross:
Well, the stories we tell ourselves impact what happens next and I think that’s a crucial point for us to recognize. So if you start telling yourselves the wrong kind of stories, it can put you down one kind of trajectory that can spell doom and gloom for many things that we care a lot about in our lives. I’ve often described our inner voice run amuck, which is what I call chatter and I’ll tell you a little bit about why I use that phrase in a second. But if the stories we tell ourselves take this dark turn, that can undermine our ability to think and perform at work. Because we are overthinking things, we are experiencing paralysis by analysis, we can’t focus. It can cause friction in our social relationships because we start telling ourselves stories that make us feel bad and we ruminate about those stories over and over again and then we share them with other people over and over again. We talk their heads off about this stuff and there’s only so much they can listen to before we push them away.
So those bad stories can affect our relationships and then they can also affect our mental and physical health. The mental side of things is something that many people reflexively often understand, right? If you have an internal narrative that is negative and repetitive, if you are looping over and over negative information in your head and it’s bringing you down. People understand how that can often sink their moods, lead them to experience anxiety, sadness and so forth. But what we’ve also learned is that it can impact your physical health and I think this is really fascinating and important for listeners to understand. Many people think that experiencing stress is toxic. I’ll give presentations and I’ll say, has anyone ever heard that stress kills? Every single hand in the audience goes up What I’d like to clarify is that, that is not exactly true. Your ability to experience stress is a gift of evolution. The fact that you have this system that instantly prepares you to deal with a threat in your environment is really, really helpful. There’s nothing wrong physiologically, biologically from experiencing a stress reaction in response to a threat that then subsides.
What makes stress toxic is when your stress response is triggered and then remains conically elevated over time, it just remains active. That exerts a wear and tear in your body that predicts things like problems of cardiovascular disease, inflammation and even certain forms of cancer. This is precisely what these negative conversations that we have with ourselves are chatter. That’s what chatter does because we experience an event that doesn’t go the way we want it to go. We don’t just experience that moment, learn from it and move on. We experience it and then we keep replaying it in our heads over and over and over and over again and that keeps that stress response elevated over time. So to answer your question very succinctly, when those conversations go the wrong way they can be quite dysfunctional for I think many of the things that most of us care a great deal about in this life.
Joel Miller:
Why are those internal conversations, that chatter, why is it so negative so often?
Ethan Kross:
Well first of all, I don’t know that it often is as negative as often as we think it is and the reason for that… The reason why I want to give that qualification is there’s this wonderful finding in psychology that I just love and it can be summed up as bad is stronger than good. So the bad stuff, it just screams out at us and it captures our attention a whole lot more than the good stuff. I can give… This is a true story. I can teach one of my big lecture courses here at the university to 300 plus students and at the end of the semester I can get 298 glowing reviews and then two negative ones, two moderately negative ones. I’m effectively on the couch with a cold compress over my head bemoaning the fact that I have these two negative reviews. Oh my God, right? So that’s really the embodiment of this principle. Danny Kahneman won a Nobel Prize for this kind of work, for this idea of loss aversion. We’re more sensitive to the negative stuff in our lives than the positive stuff.
None of that should diminish the experience that we often have when these negative conversations we have with ourselves perk up. The reason they can feel so terrible is because they are all consuming. As an example of that I’ll ask you Joel, have you ever tried to read a book when you’re worried or ruminated about something? You read five or six pages and under oath you would swear that you’ve read the words. But if someone asks you what you just read, you don’t remember a damn thing you’ve read?
Joel Miller:
100%.
Ethan Kross:
Right? Pretty common experience.
Joel Miller:
Yeah.
Ethan Kross:
What’s happening there is we only have so much attention and if all of the attention is devoted to the chatter. Which is what often happens and for understandable reasons, you’ve got a problem in your life. So you’re using all of the resources we possess to solve it but you’re not making progress. Well, that’s all you could think about. You’re zoomed in on that issue and it really just crowds out everything else and when I say everything else I’m talking about the people we love and care about, the work we need to do. That’s not a really great feeling and so I think that’s one way of answering your question.
Joel Miller:
Focusing on business owners and other leaders for a moment, how does this commonly show up? The negativity side of it, or even if that’s just part of it for us, how does this show up most often?
Ethan Kross:
Well, it can affect us in a variety of ways. It’s kind of like… Chatter is like, I’ve used the metaphor or analogy of an octopus that wraps its tentacles around us in a variety of different ways that can harm us and that are directly relevant to the organizational context. So it consumes our attention, makes it really hard for us to focus and I think the consequences of not being able to focus in the workplace are pretty obvious and clear. It can create another performance deficit in the form of paralysis by analysis. We start overthinking decisions and behaviors that we normally are capable of executing without thinking. So much of what we do in the workplace, we just do it. We don’t think twice about it, when I get up there on stage I’ve given thousands of presentations. Yeah thousands, I think it’s fair to say. I don’t think about whether I’m using my hands too much or too little or whether I’m smiling enough or pacing the room. I just do it because I’ve learned how to automatize that behavior to have a particular kind of positive consequence.
If I’m experiencing chatter about that performance, now I’m zooming in and all the details. Am I moving enough? Am I smiling enough? Once we do that, that’s how you have professional athletes choking under the spotlight. That’s how you have surgeons botching procedures. That’s how you have presentations to the board run the wrong way, so those are two ways that I can present. It can create friction in our relationships with other people, our colleagues who don’t want to listen to us talking about these things over and over. It can also make us poor supporters of the people who we care about because they come to us with their problems at work that they want to work through but we’re busy dealing with our own crap and so we don’t think about it. Then finally, it can undermine your health and wellbeing. Which there was a recent statistic that chatter in the form of depression and anxiety, which can easily spill into. I think the statistic was like a trillion dollars in terms of the impact that has on the global economy.
There is definitely a trillion in there, whether it’s one or more I can’t tell you. But absolutely-
Joel Miller:
That’s incredible.
Ethan Kross:
Trillion, in terms of lost productivity because people are not showing up for work and so this was a report by the Lancet and the World Health Organization. So pick your poison, thinking, performance, relationships, health, productivity. These issues are directly relevant to not just living a good life but also performing well and being good employees and employers.
Joel Miller:
One concept in the book I was pleased to finally have a name to go with was Solomon’s paradox. Can you tell us what is Solomon’s paradox?
Ethan Kross:
I love this finding, it’s one of my favorites. So Solomon’s paradox is named after the Bible’s King Solomon, who is world renowned and historically renowned for being one of the wisest people in history. People would travel all over to receive his advice on how to deal with thorny issues. If you dig into King Solomon’s personal history though, what you find is that he was really good at advising others but when it came to his own life he made a rash of terrible decisions. He got involved in what I like to call love octagons and by that what I mean is not mixed martial arts but not three women but eight women and they all wanted different things from him and it ultimately contributed to his kingdoms demise. What his story and many other people’s stories like Abraham Lincoln and others attest to is the fact that we are much better at giving advice to other people than we are giving and taking advice from ourselves. This is a really powerful phenomenon in my view, right?
I’m going to guess, Joel that there have been moments in your life where you have said things to yourself. You have thought things that were kind of out of touch with reality and maybe dark and catastrophic and I’m going to say this because most human beings have these kinds of intrusive thoughts at times. Would you dare give the same… The things you were saying to yourself, would you ever say those things to your best buddy or even your worst enemy if they came to you for advice?
Joel Miller:
No.
Ethan Kross:
You wouldn’t do it, right? You wouldn’t do it. So this is I think a really important insight to have as we live our lives because it really sets up how you can manage your chatter. It identifies a lot of different pathways for how you can get help for rerouting the conversations we have with ourselves when we find them taking the wrong turn. One tool that we’ve studied and I will admit, I use this myself. This is my first line of defense when it comes to chatter, is something we call distance self-talk. I’ll start trying to give myself advice like I would give advice to a best friend and I’ll use language, the structure of language to help me do it. I’ll actually use my own name and the second-person pronoun, you to coach myself through a problem. All right Ethan, how are you going to manage the situation? It may sound silly and I want to give a caveat. I don’t advocate doing this out loud in public.
You don’t want to talk to yourself using your name while walking down a public street or in the lobby of your building but silently in your own head. This can be a really useful tool because what happens here is this, most of the time we use names and words like you. We use those parts of speech when we think about and refer to other people. So in your mind, the link between those parts of speech and thinking about others is really tight. So when you use your name in the pronoun you, to try to work through a problem it’s essentially shifting your perspective. It’s putting you into the advice giving mode. It’s like you’re talking to another person and that makes it much easier to give ourselves sound, objective, chatter, fighting, advice.
Joel Miller:
So you can be the wise Solomon instead of the foolish Solomon.
Ethan Kross:
That’s right, you’re out of the octagon and you’re in the throne and you are doling out good advice.
Joel Miller:
How can business leaders hedge against this paradox, the Solomon paradox?
Ethan Kross:
Well, I think simply being aware of it is step one. I think there is great value that comes from simply understanding how the human mind works when it comes to emotions and making difficult decisions that often arouse them. So awareness of this paradox is crucial, but then having actual tools you can use to diffuse it and so I just gave you one. We’ve actually done experiments where we give people a really difficult problem. In one case it’s happening to you and the other case we frame the problem is happening to another person, and then we have people generate advice about how you should navigate or this other person. We then code the advice for how wise it is and you can actually define wisdom. It has multiple features, recognizing the limits of your own knowledge, having some humility, recognizing that the world is constantly in flux. Things are likely to change, perspective taking those are a few of the features that go into it. People generate wiser feedback, wiser advice when they think about the problems happening to someone else and the self.
In other experiments, we add a third condition where we have you think about your own problems using your name. All right Ethan, how should you manage a situation? What we find there is that completely eliminates the gap between reasoning about someone else’s problems and reasoning about your own.
Joel Miller:
Wow.
Ethan Kross:
When you use your name, you’re in that more sound advice giving mode that basically diffuses what drives Solomon’s paradox.
Joel Miller:
So what you just described, distance self-talk, some of these other tools. These are ways of self-coaching, can you give us one or two examples of some other tools for self-coaching?
Ethan Kross:
Yeah. Well, first let me just say they’re close to 30 tools out there and I won’t attempt to give you all of them right now very quickly because I’ve tried it before. I sound like Mighty Mouse, it’s not a good look and really I think the take home here is… I think the key here is to familiarize yourself with all the tools that are out there and then start experimenting with them. Most of them are really simple things you could do. They’re all science backed and we know that different tools work for different people in different situations. So the real key is to find the unique combinations. I’ll give you a couple of things that I do personally, I’ll do distance self talk. I’ll do something called mental time travel or temporal distancing. When the chatter strikes, all we think about is that issue and we often lose sight of the fact that our chatter comes often with intensity but it eventually goes. Most things in our life eventually fade with time. Time is what some scientists call, it’s a piece of our psychological immune system, it helps us repair emotional wounds.
We lose sight of that when we’re experiencing chatter and simply reminding yourself of that. The fact that your reactions are unstable, they’ll eventually pass with time. That can be really useful for giving people hope that things will get better. So there’s a really easy way to do that. Just think about how are you going to feel about this problem tomorrow, next week, next year, 10 years from now. That broadens your perspective in a way that really helps us recognize that as bad as this thing is, we will eventually get through it’ll get better. That can be very useful for helping people rise to the occasion. Another thing people can do very simple, I must admit I was blind to this before I reviewed the science. Create order around you. So I’m the kind of guy where when things are going well in my life, it’s like the clothes are all over the place. There’s a trail from the bathroom to my office downstairs. When chatter strikes everything is pristine, is put away where it needs to be. Why do I do that?
I do that because when you’re experiencing chatter, we feel like our thoughts and feelings are taking control. We don’t have agency and that’s not a good feeling to have because human beings are for lack of a better term. We are all at some level control freaks and what I mean by that is we like to know that the world is predictable, that we have control over what’s going to happen and knowing that we can exert some agency. So when you create order around you, that gives you this sense of control that compensates for the lack of control we feel when we’re experiencing chatter. So that’s why you see so many people like myself spontaneously cleaning and organizing when they’re struggling. Don’t wait to do it if the chatter is there, now’s the time, take a couple minutes to put things in order. Final thing I’ll say on the things you could do on your own real quick, consult your chatter board and what I mean by that is this. Many people have the intuition that when they’re struggling with chatter, talking it out with someone can be useful.
It’s not exactly that simple, in fact it’s a lot more complicated. There’s been a lot of research on this and what we’ve learned is that simply venting your feelings to someone else just getting it out. That can be really good for strengthening the friendship and relational bonds between people. It feels good to know that there’s someone else who’s willing to listen to us but if all you do in a conversation is vent about what happened. You leave that conversation, you feel good about the person you just spoke with but you’re just as upset as when you started because you haven’t done anything to work through and problem solve. The best kind of conversations when it comes to chatter are conversations that do two things. First the person you’re talking to, they do take the time to listen, learn about what happened to you, they empathize, they validate. But at a certain point in the conversation, they start helping broaden your perspective. They start working with you to problem-solve, to help you find that solution. That is the art of being a good chatter advisor to someone else, right?
Listening but then also shifting to advise at the appropriate time. So that’s one take home from the science. The second take home is, if you’re the one experiencing the chatter think really carefully about who in your life serves this chatter advisory role. It’s not everyone, I’ll often do an exercise with people when I do workshops. I’ll have them list before I tell them about any of this. List all the people in your life that you talk to about your personal and professional problems. Create two columns, right? Then I’ll talk about the science and I’ll say okay, now circle the people in those two lists who don’t just let you vent but do both of these things for you. It’s always a minority of those individuals. Those are the people you want to talk to when it comes to your chatter, not just anyone because they can actually make it worse. So there you go, that’s the Ethan Kross personal set of tools for managing chatter.
Joel Miller:
One thing I’ve experienced over the years in dealing with where negative self-talk or just this chatter kind of comes up. Is in peer groups where sometimes an unhelpful narrative can get cemented because it’s just simply validated as opposed to challenged. If we’re exposed to somebody venting, how can we be helpful to them beyond merely validating? Especially if we know maybe there’s more than one side of the story or there must be more than one side of the story.
Ethan Kross:
Well, that’s where part two of these conversations come into play. So basically this two part about listening, validating, empathizing but then working through that actually scaffolds onto something that is very fundamental about human beings. That we have social and emotional needs on the one hand and cognitive needs on the other and what that means is, first and foremost we need to feel like we’re being heard and we’re connecting with someone else. But then we also need to work through our problems, we can’t just have them float out there in the world. So if someone comes to you with a narrative let’s say, that’s driving a harmful reaction or a harmful story that you disagree with. You can still demonstrate that you connect with them as a human being, right? I’ve had many difficult conversations with colleagues, students, superiors, who I disagree with. First and foremost I basically establish though that, look I recognize that this is how you feel and it makes sense that you feel this way given the way you’re thinking about it. But now let’s think about some alternatives, all right? So you’re connecting with…
You’re showing that you’re on the same page as them human to human but then you’re saying all right, well now that we’re in this space where we can speak openly with each other. Now let’s lay it all out and try to work through. Is the way you’re thinking about it actually, does that map onto reality? Is that actually the most productive and healthiest way of managing the situation? I mean, I do this with my kids. I’m going to whisper a little bit because they’re actually in the background. You may have seen a few of them and my mother behind me in that door but I’ll do this with my kids all the time. I mean my kids they come home, they feel terrible about things that happened at school. Sometimes they’re partly to blame for why they’re feeling that way, right? So first it’s establishing I’m their dad, I love them, I connect with them and then it’s about working through the problem and finding the best solution. I do this with my graduate students, I do it with my collaborators.
It’s really a basic process that can be imposed on any kind of conversation regardless of the domain.
Joel Miller:
Okay finally, last question. If you were to leave the listener with just one word of advice, what would it be?
Ethan Kross:
If you experience chatter, welcome to the human condition my friend. Most of us do at times, don’t beat yourself up about it. Educate yourself about the tools and start experimenting. Start figuring out which ones work for you and which ones don’t and implement, implement, implement.
Joel Miller:
All right. Ethan Kross, thank you for being here.
Ethan Kross:
Thanks for having me.
Joel Miller:
That’s it for another episode of the Business Accelerator Podcast. If you’re a business owner and your internal dialogue is telling you to find out more about Business Accelerator. You probably should, I’d listen. After all we help busy, but growth minded small business owners just like you scale yourself and your business so you can win at work and succeed at life. It’s what we call the double win and if you’d like to experience that for yourself, go to businessaccelerator.com. One more thing, next week January 31st is the launch of Megan and Michael’s new book, Mind Your Mindset: The Science That Shows Success Starts with Your Thinking. So you’re going to want to come back, next week we’ve got a really special show all about the book, all for the launch. Now I get it, if you can’t wait, no worries. Just go to mindyourmindsetbook.com. You can find out how to pre-order it, you can get all the pre-order goodies there, mindyourmindsetbook.com. That’s a wrap, we’ll be back next week with more conversations to accelerate your business.