How To Build An Indestructible Mindset That Will Allow You To Achieve Anything

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Speaker 11 What do most people misunderstand about success in general?

Speaker 17 You're around the most successful people, you train them.

Speaker 14 What do people misunderstand about success?

Speaker 4 I think the thing that people misunderstand about success is

Speaker 4 they're looking for the easiest way to get there.

Speaker 4 You know, and it's funny. How many people

Speaker 4 books have you read or

Speaker 4 I won't say promoted but had on your show and everybody goes five easy steps ten steps to greatness yeah you know eight steps to this and

Speaker 4 those steps for success they're infinite they are infinite you cannot count them

Speaker 4 It doesn't matter how long you've been doing it. Those steps are constantly shifting.

Speaker 4 You don't know if they're there sometimes you have to trust that the next step is going to be there when you can't even see it and sometimes when you step on that step you go right into quicksand but you got to be able to pull yourself back out of it again so everybody's looking for these steps and there are no steps those steps never never end and you just can't climb steps Sometimes you got to crawl though, those steps, and you finally get to the top and everything shifts and you're at the bottom.

Speaker 4 It's crazy.

Speaker 2 What does that mean?

Speaker 11 Sometimes you're at the top and then you're at the bottom again.

Speaker 4 Well, you may get to the top and you're like, I'm here.

Speaker 4 And then you look back down and you look up again, you're actually on the first step. You're on the first step again.

Speaker 4 And where you thought was the top is not even the top. It's the beginning.
It's literally the beginning of where you're supposed to be.

Speaker 4 And that's when most people just quit.

Speaker 4 I just like, it just drives me crazy because everybody's like, here,

Speaker 4 look at,

Speaker 4 I always, people that I do the interview with, I always like to use them as an example because people can relate to that. All right.

Speaker 4 You've been climbing steps for how long to get to here?

Speaker 4 To get to it?

Speaker 11 I mean, since starting this, it's been over eight years, but the journey before then,

Speaker 11 it was, you know, decades to build myself, to prepare myself for this.

Speaker 14 And now I feel like I'm just getting started.

Speaker 4 Right, exactly. So you have just

Speaker 4 so all the steps that you climbed just to get started. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Just to get started. And people don't want to talk about those steps.

Speaker 4 They don't want to talk about those steps and how difficult those steps are and how many steps that you stumbled on and how many steps you didn't even see and how many steps that people placed in front of you and

Speaker 4 they

Speaker 4 pulled away. People that you were very close to, people that you knew.
Right.

Speaker 4 People that you thought were like, hey, these people actually have my back, except, yeah, they did have your back, but they were actually pushing you down the steps. Stabbing you back.

Speaker 18 Yes.

Speaker 4 No?

Speaker 4 And it's funny when you talk about those things or people talk about it, they seem surprised. But you should know that in that path, all those things are going to be there.

Speaker 4 They're going to be there.

Speaker 11 It's the obstacles, you know, Ryan Holliday says the obstacle is the way.

Speaker 2 Do you think that anyone can become a winner? Your book is about winning the unforgiving race to greatness.

Speaker 11 Do you think anyone can become a winner?

Speaker 4 Winning is in all of us. That's what I would say.
Listen, and we have wins every single moment. And those are the steps that get us a little closer to what we want.

Speaker 4 Every minute, you have an opportunity to win. You really do.
But with everything that's went on in the world in this past year, people forgot how to win.

Speaker 4 People don't even know what a win looks like anymore.

Speaker 18 What does it look like?

Speaker 4 Yeah, people don't even know like,

Speaker 4 and so many times a wind just comes by because there's a constant change, there's a constant shift, and now with the paradigm of way everything is being handled now,

Speaker 4 you have to look at things completely different. Everybody's waiting for normal.

Speaker 4 A wind doesn't look like what it used to look like anymore.

Speaker 4 All right.

Speaker 11 What does it look like now?

Speaker 4 What does it look like now? For each individual, it's different. For each individual, it's different.
For a lot of individuals, it's just like

Speaker 4 getting out of that routine that you were stuck in for so long.

Speaker 4 And did the pandemic allow you to take, you know what? Yeah, I was in a routine, but the routine wasn't getting me anywhere. I was in a routine of comfort.

Speaker 4 And the pandemic put a lot of people in a routine that was very uncomfortable, that they weren't used to.

Speaker 4 They weren't you, but it was a necessity. It was needed.
You know, people always wish for this time during this thing that happened.

Speaker 4 I want to spend more time with my family.

Speaker 20 And now they have it.

Speaker 4 Now you have it.

Speaker 4 Okay.

Speaker 4 Schools aren't doing a good job with educating my kids.

Speaker 4 Now you're homeschooling.

Speaker 4 I'd love to work from the house. Now you're doing it.

Speaker 4 Now you're doing it. Now you have all these things going on that you wished you had, as you thought were wins.
And for some people they were.

Speaker 4 And for others, you're just like, no,

Speaker 4 these are not wins.

Speaker 4 I do a lot of Zoom stuff at home, and I got a cat, and I got a very lively dog, and you'll see the cat run right across the screen.

Speaker 4 I don't have little kids in the house anymore, but trying to work and have them in the background asking for school help or, you know, they're on their bandwidth, trying to study in their school stuff.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 winning became a distraction.

Speaker 4 it became a distraction and people were trying to balance all these different things and forgot hey

Speaker 4 this is what my win is that you need to recognize what that win is now and during the pandemic it's not getting back to normal it's getting beyond normal

Speaker 4 figuring out what your next win is how to place it and how to continue to move forward on that win.

Speaker 4 Because it's easy to talk about the setbacks because so many people can relate to that. That gave us a nice little comfort thing.
Everybody can use

Speaker 4 the pandemic as an excuse.

Speaker 4 Yeah. All right.
And then you have other people that thrive during that time. They're like,

Speaker 4 I got to find out a new way to win.

Speaker 4 I got to find out like a real, real new way to win. And you had some people that really, really won big during that time.

Speaker 14 Absolutely. They stepped up.

Speaker 4 They stepped up. Yes.
They stepped up. They saw the steps, and it was like, okay,

Speaker 4 are these steps stable? Are they unstable? It doesn't matter. I got to climb them.
Right.

Speaker 18 I got to climb them. So how do we learn how to not let the doubt stay in us?

Speaker 16 How do we remove it? How do we get out?

Speaker 13 How do we turn doubt into fear and action towards greatness?

Speaker 4 Continue to work

Speaker 4 like a maniacal individual

Speaker 4 on what you want.

Speaker 11 Is that the only way to get rid of doubt, you think, is by working, obsessing over something and proving something so you don't doubt?

Speaker 4 Prove it to yourself.

Speaker 4 We have so many other individuals that are trying to

Speaker 4 prove it to everybody else. Don't worry about proving it to everybody else.
Prove it to yourself.

Speaker 11 And here's what I'll say around that.

Speaker 21 I think that's beautifully said because most of my life until I was about 30, I was living to prove others wrong.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 11 And it was the second most powerful fuel and energy that I think humans have is like, I'm angry, I'm hurt, I'm frustrated. I'm going to go prove these people wrong about me.

Speaker 24 And it drove me to be obsessed around winning, around achieving, around accomplishing my goals.

Speaker 14 And I did, I accomplished them.

Speaker 11 But it left me feeling very unfulfilled, lonely, insecure, doubting myself even more.

Speaker 14 Why am I not feeling what I want to feel?

Speaker 11 Why am I not still getting what I want inside? Because I was driven by the wrong things to prove other people doubting me wrong.

Speaker 11 And you hear that a lot by like people say prove them wrong, but I think it's prove yourself right.

Speaker 4 Prove yourself right.

Speaker 21 And like you said, I love that you're saying this because you'll prove others wrong by proving yourself right.

Speaker 11 So you don't need to go prove them wrong. Just do your best.

Speaker 4 You just gave an example. Yeah.

Speaker 4 You're one of your closest friends. Yeah.
Man, that's a terrible name. That's a terrible name.
All right.

Speaker 4 Prove yourself right.

Speaker 20 Yeah, don't prove him wrong right say okay.

Speaker 4 I'm gonna go do this for me whether you like it or not right and the best validation is when they come back to you I was wrong I was wrong. That's the best.
That's the best validation.

Speaker 9 You don't need to say I told you so.

Speaker 18 You just say I told myself so.

Speaker 4 That's it.

Speaker 9 It's a shift in it.

Speaker 4 Right. And that person, what did they try to do? They tried to create self-doubt in you.
And if you would have, this would have been called school of average. Yes.
You know?

Speaker 4 yes normalcy right right whatever whatever whatever whatever whatever whatever it would be yeah whatever it been so when doubt creeps in and we start to believe the doubt

Speaker 26 go back into proving yourself right go back into obsessing over the craft doing it for the right reasons not to prove others wrong not to look good in front of a crowd or whatever but doing it because you love the art of it the expression of it the creation of it the the vision of the thing you want to work on not to validate something that's lacking.

Speaker 27 Right?

Speaker 4 It's perfect. You look at when Kobe, his first playoff series.

Speaker 2 How old was he, Demo?

Speaker 25 In his first one?

Speaker 4 It was

Speaker 4 early in his career. I think he was like 18.
Yeah, no, no, I'm talking about before he won the finals. This was on the playoffs, in the playoffs, in the playoffs.

Speaker 10 I think he had this. No shack, pre-shack.

Speaker 4 Yeah, he had this horrible game against,

Speaker 4 I think it might have been the Utah Jazz.

Speaker 4 But he shot like four or five straight air balls. I remember that.
Yeah. Four or five straight balls.
All right.

Speaker 4 Now he could have came back next year and said, I got to prove everybody that said, man, you're too young. Why'd you take? No, it was just like, you know what?

Speaker 4 That's on me.

Speaker 4 I have to own, I have to own that. I have to own that moment.
All right. I owned that moment.
Now I got to prove to myself

Speaker 4 I can overcome this because now everybody else is doubting me

Speaker 4 but I can't doubt myself. I can't doubt my I can't doubt myself and everybody's had that moment everybody told MJ don't go to North Carolina you'll never play

Speaker 4 you'll never play and one of the stories I share with individuals is Dean Smith who was a coach at coach at the time

Speaker 4 he introduced

Speaker 4 Michael he said Michael I want you to meet I think I get the name right. I'm pretty sure he thinks I want you to meet Buzz Peterson.

Speaker 4 Buzz Peterson

Speaker 4 was the number one one

Speaker 4 recruited player in the nation.

Speaker 26 To go to North Carolina.

Speaker 4 To go, yeah, like the number one anywhere. He was

Speaker 4 number one player in the nation. And Michael goes to Dean and says, how could he be number one? He ain't never played me.

Speaker 4 He said,

Speaker 4 Dean saw something. He saw that competitive nature in MJ.

Speaker 4 And he wanted to see now if I tell him that,

Speaker 4 is that kid going to start doubting himself? Because everybody else has already told him, you shouldn't be here.

Speaker 4 You shouldn't be here.

Speaker 4 And Michael went out and he said,

Speaker 4 I don't need to prove to Coach. I don't need to prove to Buzz.
I need to prove to myself that I belong here.

Speaker 16 Did they end up competing?

Speaker 11 Didn't they do one-on-one?

Speaker 4 Yeah, they ended up, yeah, and it didn't turn out well.

Speaker 9 For the other guy.

Speaker 4 Yeah, for the other guy. Yeah.
And

Speaker 4 Coach Smith made them roommates. Oh, Oh, wow.
That's hilarious.

Speaker 11 Speaking of one-on-one,

Speaker 11 how many times did you get to play one-on-one against MJ or Kobe?

Speaker 4 Often, it never turned out well.

Speaker 12 Did you ever score a point against either of them?

Speaker 4 Yes, I did.

Speaker 20 Really? What was that?

Speaker 4 And it was the last point I ever scored. Really?

Speaker 9 Yes. What was that like?

Speaker 11 Where was the moment?

Speaker 4 It was during it, it was during, well, see, it was kind of like a setup.

Speaker 4 It was a setup. so it was um

Speaker 4 i was playing uh michael and i were kind of messing messing around and we had just he's just finished a

Speaker 4 a grueling leg workout he's like came up

Speaker 4 grueling leg workout so you can lay his head as low as muscle oh yeah and he's up there and he's you know we go up there to get loosened loosen up a little bit and he's just like he's shooting he goes man i can't even i can't even feel i can't even feel my i can't even feel my legs i said i got a great idea to kind of loosen you up a little bit i said let's play a little one-on-one he thinks i'm just yeah he goes

Speaker 4 I just go right around him at high score. And he's, oh,

Speaker 4 big mistake.

Speaker 4 Big mistake.

Speaker 4 You saw Lily,

Speaker 4 the lactic acid just bust out of his body in that second.

Speaker 4 And he goes, all right, motherfucker.

Speaker 18 That was the last point? That was.

Speaker 4 Last time I touched the ball. Really?

Speaker 10 He wouldn't even let you play with anybody anymore.

Speaker 4 You couldn't get the ball back. I couldn't get the ball back.
I couldn't get the ball back.

Speaker 4 I would get the ball back after he scored in the basket and I passed it back to him.

Speaker 9 Or when you had the ball and he was just swallowing him up.

Speaker 4 I couldn't get around him.

Speaker 4 When you're a professional at something, people don't realize how

Speaker 4 good

Speaker 4 those individuals are. I love the people that sit on the sidelines and all this other stuff, and they doubt, they doubt.
how talented those individuals are.

Speaker 4 And I always tell them in any sport, I said, listen, you give me who you think are the five worst in the league.

Speaker 20 Yeah. In the league.

Speaker 4 Pick up, I don't care who any of them.

Speaker 11 Dominate.

Speaker 4 Anyone. You get your top five.
They will literally die.

Speaker 4 Doubt can become an addiction

Speaker 4 just like anything, just like anything else.

Speaker 16 It's like winning.

Speaker 8 Yes.

Speaker 4 So what do people say the first thing when you become an addict?

Speaker 4 You got to talk about it.

Speaker 4 you got to admit it speak the poison out of your body yes like get it out talk about it it becomes less stereo it doesn't have as much power over you if it's inside get it get it get it out what do you because what I might think you're doubting may be completely different than something that you're doubting all right

Speaker 4 I may see something and you're like no that that that's that's that's not it well okay let's let's let's talk about let's talk about this a little more explain to me explain to me what what what's going on here what what created that doubt?

Speaker 4 What created that doubt? And we know after seven years,

Speaker 4 it had finally gotten to the point where it was just like, and no one talked to him, because, you know, Kobe wasn't going to talk to anybody about it. He's never going to talk to the media about it.

Speaker 4 He has to talk to some individual that's like, hey, okay, listen.

Speaker 4 I understand.

Speaker 4 I'm as obsessed and as crazy as you are, because that's why you hired me.

Speaker 4 All right. That's why you hired me.
I understand the winning mentality. I understand

Speaker 4 what's going on in under here. I understand the skeletons.
I understand the demons.

Speaker 4 I get those things. Mine aren't the same as yours, but I have them.
We all have them and very few can admit them. So when you start admitting doubt and you start to be able to talk about it, you take

Speaker 4 something that you've tried to bury in your closet

Speaker 4 that needs to be addressed, but you're trying to hide it. You're trying to bury it.
You're trying to put it away. And winning requires you to show up with all of you.

Speaker 4 It wants to show up the good, the bad, the fearful, the doubt, the anxiety, the ups, the downs. It needs to see all of you.

Speaker 4 Otherwise, it's never going to acknowledge you. It's not going to acknowledge you.
And you can't win with just one thing. You have to win with all of you.
All of it. All of it.
Wow.

Speaker 9 What was the

Speaker 9 greatest, three greatest lessons that Kobe taught you?

Speaker 14 We heard competing accountability and winning at all levels for Michael.

Speaker 8 What about Kobe?

Speaker 24 The three big lessons he taught you:

Speaker 4 obsession,

Speaker 4 extremely

Speaker 4 high threshold for physical and mental pain,

Speaker 4 discomfort,

Speaker 4 and also,

Speaker 4 winning.

Speaker 4 They all had that in common.

Speaker 11 The winning mindset, the winning mindset.

Speaker 4 Yes, he called it the mama mentality.

Speaker 14 What is the mindset of winning?

Speaker 16 They both had that.

Speaker 18 Obviously, they both had a lot of things.

Speaker 14 But what is the mindset of winning?

Speaker 11 When someone adopts that mentality, what does that do for them? As opposed to the mindset of,

Speaker 11 well, whatever result I get is fine, or it's okay if I have this, and I'm okay with that.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 I look at it three ways. So you have individuals that compete.

Speaker 4 You know, a lot of people that compete. Yeah.
You know, we all know how to compete. Everybody knows how to compete.
You don't forget how to compete. We just decide not to anymore.

Speaker 4 But a lot of people compete just to finish. Then there's individuals that win, but they only win one time.
Yeah.

Speaker 14 The hardest thing is doing it over and over.

Speaker 14 It's not easy to win. Right.

Speaker 9 But

Speaker 14 it's easy to win and then never win again.

Speaker 11 I mean, it's so hard to do it over and over consistently.

Speaker 4 And then there's people that win at winning.

Speaker 11 They win at winning.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 14 That is an art and a science probably combined.

Speaker 4 Yes, because here's how it goes. You can't come back the same.

Speaker 11 Once you win, you can't come back.

Speaker 4 You cannot come back the same. You have to come back different.
You have to come back better.

Speaker 4 This is where I always says, listen, winning requires you to be different, and different scares people.

Speaker 24 Absolutely.

Speaker 4 It scares people. So after each championship, every single athlete, high-performance athlete that I've worked with, even in business, would come up to me and say,

Speaker 4 what's next? Because I need to feel this again.

Speaker 4 I need to feel this

Speaker 9 again.

Speaker 4 Yes, I need to feel this again. So they know they have to come back.
Something about them has to be better.

Speaker 5 They have to continue to evolve and change.

Speaker 4 How many teams do you know in professional sports that they bring the exact same team back? I mean, exact same team that win again. They don't.

Speaker 4 There's always a little change, there's always a little tweak here. There's a change over here.
There's something, there's something that goes on over here.

Speaker 4 And every athlete who's won multiple titles over and over again, or even in the different business people, you look at, you just had Tony here. Look, he's won

Speaker 10 for decades.

Speaker 21 Four decades, He's been doing this.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 14 He's always reinventing, always finding new coaches, always mastering some skill, learning, evolving.

Speaker 4 It's just like, you just have to watch what these individuals do.

Speaker 4 He's not still using the same format he used 20 years. Like you said, new coaches, new content, new things, new technology,

Speaker 4 new everything. And it's available to us.
But people are like, oh, we did it once and we can do it the exact same way again. You can't.

Speaker 4 You can't.

Speaker 4 There's people that win at winning. And this is how this is extremely important on how on how they do this.

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Speaker 4 You said, well,

Speaker 4 how do you make sure you just don't go through this?

Speaker 4 We're all taught

Speaker 4 to manage time.

Speaker 4 Everyone tells you how to manage time.

Speaker 4 Make a list. This is what you do.
And here it is.

Speaker 4 Have a little timer when it goes on and all this other stuff.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 one of the things that I've teach

Speaker 4 all my clients from a business standpoint, from an athletic standpoint, I was like, listen, don't manage time. Manage focus.

Speaker 4 What does that look like? Manage focus.

Speaker 4 So what happens is

Speaker 4 when you try to manage time, the clock is always against you. You're trying to finish off something and time goes by so quickly.
When you're in that moment, when you're so focused,

Speaker 4 when you're so focused, you don't know if you've been at it for

Speaker 4 30 minutes or you've been at it for an hour. Yeah, or weeks.
Or weeks.

Speaker 4 You just go. Time creates distractions.
Lily, time, if you're like managing time, you get all these distractions that are going there.

Speaker 4 What does focus do? It blocks them out. Right.

Speaker 4 So don't worry about managing time. Manage your focus.
Be in that moment when you're in that moment. And then you'll get so much more done during that time.

Speaker 4 You know, time tells you to stop. All right.
Focus tells you, keep going.

Speaker 30 I often ask people, what is your biggest challenge? Like, what is the situation that you approach with dread and that you execute with anxiety and that you leave with a sense of regret? Oh, wow.

Speaker 30 And so if you look at all,

Speaker 30 so dread, that is you projecting yourself into a future that's not gone well. So you're borrowing trouble, basically.

Speaker 30 You know, the anxiety in the moment is you thinking more about what the other person thinks of you than what they're actually just thinking.

Speaker 30 You know, you're worried about what you said a minute ago or what's going to happen afterwards. You're not able to be in the present.
And then regret is...

Speaker 30 or what we call post-event processing. You're going over it, wanting a do-over, going, I didn't show, I wasn't seen, they didn't see who I am.
You know that feeling like, oh, they didn't see who I am.

Speaker 30 And you want to go back in and like in a rom-com, you get to have a do-over. Right, right.

Speaker 4 But in life, you're not going to be able to do that.

Speaker 30 So that sense of regret becomes like a piece of baggage that you carry into the next similar situation.

Speaker 4 And then you're worried because

Speaker 22 you don't want to do the same thing, so you put more pressure on yourself.

Speaker 30 What if we could, you know, approach with this sense of,

Speaker 30 you know, composure and execute it with a kind of calm and grounded confidence and leave feeling satisfied.

Speaker 30 Even if we don't get the outcome that we want, we know that we did everything we could to show up. They saw who I was and it wasn't the right fit or whatever.

Speaker 30 And I can accept that outcome. So you can both accept the outcome and not have that extra piece of baggage.

Speaker 25 Do you feel like people are going to be struggling with overcoming these fears more because of the internet and social media?

Speaker 17 Or how can they continue to navigate

Speaker 10 that fear of like the tribe in person, not just online?

Speaker 30 I don't even know where to begin.

Speaker 30 It's because there are also,

Speaker 30 first of all, like if I make any statement about where I stand on that,

Speaker 30 there will be a million people telling me I'm absolutely wrong. Got it.
But that's like, and the truth is complicated, right?

Speaker 30 Like, and in some ways, social media, like, so, you know, my son's on TikTok.

Speaker 30 And I can't believe

Speaker 30 the courage he has now to just put a video out there.

Speaker 30 And, you know, sometimes it goes and sometimes it doesn't. And he's not, he's fine

Speaker 30 if it doesn't go, if it doesn't move. So I think that that's actually been really good for him.

Speaker 30 He doesn't feel rejected. He just feels like, well, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but I'm never going to know if I don't put myself out there.
So I think in some ways,

Speaker 30 young people have become more courageous at trying things. I mean, you know, yes, I would like them to spend less less time on it.
And I like that he's doing music. You know, he's like putting out

Speaker 30 my kids doing quality content. Exactly, yeah.

Speaker 30 But I think that in some ways it's actually given young people an opportunity to be brilliant.

Speaker 20 To express themselves.

Speaker 30 Yeah, exactly. And to sort of to be rejected and see that they've survived, right?

Speaker 30 But rejection, the rejection that I'm talking about is a video, a TikTok video not going viral. It's not that it's na, which is not the same as nasty comments, like being rejected and trolled.

Speaker 30 That's a different kind of rejection, right? And that's, that's not.

Speaker 4 Absolutely. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 18 What about the, just the, the anxiety of

Speaker 26 putting yourself out there, whether it be going into a store and just interacting with people, whether it be going, giving a speech online, putting up, you know, something in human interaction in person and feeling embarrassed or rejected or made fun of.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 23 How do we learn to overcome that anxiety or stress about it?

Speaker 9 Is it as simple as just you got to practice it and just know that you're alive?

Speaker 30 I hate to say something so simple, but yes, like I am,

Speaker 30 I am just not afraid to embarrass myself.

Speaker 4 That's good. And

Speaker 30 I have to sometimes like

Speaker 30 hold on to that. Like, because I think it's, I think it was really important for my son to see that.
Like, to me, modeling that was really important.

Speaker 26 Not being embarrassed.

Speaker 30 Yeah, being like, you know, making mistakes, being goofy, like doing something goofy in the grocery store.

Speaker 4 And being okay with it.

Speaker 30 Yeah, another one is

Speaker 30 being okay with like

Speaker 30 chatting with a stranger and maybe they don't want to chat and that's fine, then you move on. But like, why not try?

Speaker 30 Those, I think doing those things,

Speaker 30 first of all, I think it's great to model that for kids, but I also think it's good to do it just to see that you've survived. You're fine.
Yeah. No one cares.
Exactly. No one even cares.

Speaker 9 And I'm not remembering this for the rest of their life.

Speaker 30 You might have made somebody smile.

Speaker 4 Right. Right.
So.

Speaker 13 I'm all about social, like creating social challenges for yourself.

Speaker 23 Like if you're terrified.

Speaker 30 I think that's a good one. I mean, like.
Chat with someone on the train or, and I know it's hard right now. Right, right.

Speaker 13 But do something consistently.

Speaker 30 Yeah. Or like ask someone,

Speaker 30 ask, you know, if you're, if you're at, I don't know why grocery stores seem like places where lots of silly things can happen.

Speaker 30 You know, if someone's like checking out, checking you, what do you,

Speaker 30 checking you out, but that sounds funny, checking you out, you know what I mean?

Speaker 4 Like checking out your groceries.

Speaker 30 And they are looking down and they seem, you know, grumpy,

Speaker 30 instead of deciding they're not friendly,

Speaker 30 Consider the possibility that they're having a bad day and literally like pause and say, how are you?

Speaker 30 Or like try to connect with them without being intrusive. Make eye contact with them.
Thank them.

Speaker 30 Make eye contact. Maybe they'll just be annoyed and not make eye contact back.
But I feel like that kind of thing is really important to try.

Speaker 30 And those are things that create sort of social benefits for others as well.

Speaker 4 Absolutely.

Speaker 26 This is something you've been studying.

Speaker 23 for, I guess, decades now, which is just mastering confidence, body language, overcoming these challenges.

Speaker 23 What's been the biggest challenge for you in the last 10 years that you've had to overcome knowing the research and practicing these things and talking about these things yourself?

Speaker 26 What's been the challenge for you?

Speaker 22 Whether career or personal or?

Speaker 30 I think the challenge for me has been adjusting to,

Speaker 30 you know,

Speaker 30 being more well-known than the average academic, right?

Speaker 4 Right, right, right.

Speaker 30 And actually, you know, leaving academia.

Speaker 30 You know, I still teach but i'm not you know i'm not uh full-time no you know i teach in executive education at harvard but i'm not i'm not a professor you know i'm i'm a lecturer when i lecture

Speaker 30 that leaving was hard really so i mean it was a big it was a big leap to say to leave that security

Speaker 30 um but it wasn't it just was not the right world for me but i i think the biggest challenge really has been dealing with becoming higher sort of having becoming higher profile and the kind of backlash that I endured as a result of that.

Speaker 30 Criticism. Which is not, yes.
And well, yeah, I mean, criticism's fine, but bullying is not.

Speaker 30 And

Speaker 30 I know that this is common. Like this happens to, in fact, it happens to a lot of junior professors who give TED Talks.
Really? Yeah.

Speaker 30 It's funny. Somebody just wrote to me yesterday.
She has a popular TED Talk and she

Speaker 30 said that at her university, people started calling her TED Girl and like sort of talking down to her.

Speaker 19 Even though it was a popular, well-respected TED Talk.

Speaker 30 Because it was popular, right? Like it's like if it had been, if it had not really hit the radar, it would have been okay.

Speaker 4 Really?

Speaker 19 But because she had some success.

Speaker 30 Yeah, so people had to sort of diminish her in a way.

Speaker 30 And I experienced a lot of the same stuff.

Speaker 30 what became hard for me was talking to colleagues, right? Like standing up for myself. And

Speaker 30 the truth is we need to stand up for each other, right? When people are in an acute bullying situation, they really can't stand up for themselves. But I'm still figuring out

Speaker 30 how to engage with other people in academia who weren't necessarily bullies, but might have been bystanders who didn't do anything.

Speaker 30 But to be able to say, I still deserve to be having this conversation.

Speaker 30 I deserve to have the beliefs that I have. I deserve to defend

Speaker 30 this massive area of research on body-mind feedback, of which

Speaker 30 I contribute a tiny bit to.

Speaker 30 Just because these people don't like it doesn't mean I can't

Speaker 30 say, well, here's why I do believe it.

Speaker 30 That's really hard for me. That is the thing that I would approach with the most dread, I think.

Speaker 18 Were you able to

Speaker 18 implement and integrate some of your own practices and teachings when those things happened to you?

Speaker 5 When you were getting, whether it be criticism or bullying or

Speaker 17 any of the stuff you were facing, were you able to actually integrate the

Speaker 10 body language for yourself?

Speaker 30 I mean for me the thing that works the best

Speaker 30 is

Speaker 30 I mean certainly I you know I do like I walk expansively like I you know I like like long strides before this kind of stressful thing. I do I won't sit sit down with my hands in my lap.

Speaker 30 Like even putting your hands behind your chair like this is a bit of opens you up a little bit. It forces you to open up just doing that.

Speaker 30 But the thing that works the best for me is breathing.

Speaker 30 And I know there is so much on breath work now, and I don't want to, you know, I'm not an expert, but the relaxation response that's triggered by certain breathing patterns is incredibly effective for me.

Speaker 30 And so basically, it sends your nervous system into this rest and digest state, which is the opposite of fight. flee or faint.
And so the one that I like best is called 478 breathing.

Speaker 30 And we can do it right now.

Speaker 4 Yes, do it.

Speaker 30 So basically for four counts, you inhale, for seven you hold your breath, and for eight, you exhale. So I'm going to count and you do it.

Speaker 4 Okay, four, inhale.

Speaker 30 Seven, hold it, eight, exhale.

Speaker 4 All right. One, two, three, four.

Speaker 30 One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

Speaker 23 And then you repeat that a few times. Three times.

Speaker 30 Like one time you feel it.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 30 It will put me to sleep at night. You know, if I'm relaxed, it makes me sleepy.
But if I'm anxious, it calms me down.

Speaker 30 So that just, I mean, there's just so much research on the relaxation response and breathing.

Speaker 30 But what I think is interesting about it is that

Speaker 30 that kind of breathing is expansive. Just like what I talk about, you know, like expansive posture, that's expansive.
You're breathing deeply and slowly. You're taking up more temporal space.

Speaker 30 You're expanding your, you know, like your physical body more. And when we expand, we tend to feel more confident, more powerful, more calm.

Speaker 1 Should we always, not always, should we be, frequently be in an expansive postural state

Speaker 4 when we're

Speaker 28 kind of nine to five-ish out in the world doing our activities?

Speaker 30 What we should be in is

Speaker 30 having good neutral posture. So it's interesting.
Before stressful events, you know, that's when I say find a private space.

Speaker 30 I I think I said in the TED Talk, find a bathroom stall, which I honestly think just like I thought of at the moment, but I can't tell you how many emails I get from people who are like, I was in a bathroom, you know, or like people who see somebody in a bathroom with their arms up in the air.

Speaker 4 They're like, are you power posing in it?

Speaker 9 Ted Lasso is saying she goes to the bathroom and does that, right?

Speaker 4 I know, I loved it. That's okay.
You can't imagine.

Speaker 30 Like, I love that show, and I had no idea.

Speaker 4 You had no idea it was coming.

Speaker 30 I was like sobbing.

Speaker 4 I was like, who am I?

Speaker 26 Well, it's so cool that you, you, Brene Brown, and Essa Perel, who I've had both of them on as well, were all featured in there.

Speaker 24 And I'm just like, that's amazing.

Speaker 30 I know.

Speaker 30 And I think all of us were absolutely

Speaker 4 thrilled.

Speaker 4 I mean, to have that.

Speaker 30 And I know I was telling Brene this, but the first time I saw that show,

Speaker 30 at the end of the first episode, I turned to my husband and I said, I love Ted Lasso. And he goes, that's because you are Ted Lasso.

Speaker 30 And I was like, well, I guess I had good self-esteem then. But I am Ted Lasso, and so are you.

Speaker 4 Yes, exactly.

Speaker 30 It's funny because Brady says that she's Roy Kent.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I can see her. She's weird.

Speaker 9 You can see a little bit.

Speaker 30 But anyway, yeah,

Speaker 30 so before these stressful situations, the ones that you approach with dread, that's when you find some space and really make yourself big.

Speaker 4 Expansive.

Speaker 30 Like whatever feels comfortable to you, expand.

Speaker 30 In front of other people, it comes across as really aggressive and domineering and off-putting.

Speaker 30 But if you're in the privacy of your own bathroom stall or office or whatever, you can do whatever you want. You don't have to worry about cultural norms or

Speaker 30 putting people off.

Speaker 30 In our everyday lives, we spend so much time like this,

Speaker 4 with our phones.

Speaker 30 And that is really bad. First, it's bad for us,

Speaker 30 just our posture, and it's creating this sort of fixed thoracic stoop that

Speaker 30 physiotherapists used to only see in elderly people. And now they're seeing it in like 15-year-old boys from, you know, gaming and things like that.

Speaker 30 And that's something, like you can't just be like, oh, I'm going to sit up straight. You have to work that out.

Speaker 4 For years working it out and align your body.

Speaker 30 Totally.

Speaker 30 It's not only hurting our posture, but

Speaker 30 I believe that it is affecting our mood. And so, you know,

Speaker 30 even just set up your workspace so that you can be more expansive.

Speaker 30 But

Speaker 30 we neglect our body language when we're alone because it's language. And if we're alone, we're not talking to anyone.

Speaker 18 We're talking to ourselves.

Speaker 30 We're talking to ourselves, right? So it's really important, I think, for us to be minding our posture. Also,

Speaker 30 there have been a couple of meta-analyses recently, which basically are just

Speaker 30 studies that look at all of the studies on a topic and come up with a sort of an average effect size. Like they say, yes,

Speaker 30 this is a real effect,

Speaker 30 and this is how big the effect is right so studies that have looked at power meta-analyses of power opposing studies

Speaker 30 show really clearly that it it affects the way we feel like so so it's you know expanding

Speaker 30 our body shrinking versus expanding affects way whether in a positive or more expansive more confident and powerful more powerful

Speaker 30 psychologically, you know, shrinking, less powerful, less confident. But what's interesting is that there are two meta-analyses.
One of them

Speaker 30 shows that more of the effect is driven by the difference between neutral and expansive. The other one shows that more of the effect is driven by the difference between

Speaker 30 contractive and neutral. So I'm not,

Speaker 30 we still,

Speaker 30 in short, there's evidence that both of those things matter. But certainly neutral is better than contractive.

Speaker 4 Shrinking, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 30 Exactly.

Speaker 28 And it's probably, you know, even if you were doing a meditative breathing technique, if you're closing your body off and breathing, you're still probably limiting yourself.

Speaker 10 So you can be breathing and trying to relax the nervous system, but you're closing your body off.

Speaker 4 It's hard to feel like more alive and confident and calm on a certain way. Absolutely.

Speaker 30 It's funny. I once, this woman wrote to me, she said,

Speaker 4 I...

Speaker 30 teach people public speaking and I had this student who was really stressed out, this man. And so I got into power pose for a minute, and he said it made him feel worse.
Really? And she said, but then

Speaker 30 I watched, we watched the video. She said, I videotaped him, and we watched the video, and I was like, were you breathing? He said, no, I didn't breathe.
I held my breath the whole time.

Speaker 4 Oh, my gosh.

Speaker 30 He's like, well, that's not going to work.

Speaker 4 So now

Speaker 4 I'm going to do it. Exactly.
So he had...

Speaker 30 been like completely still in this power pose and she I mean she was laughing about it but yeah

Speaker 30 how long should we be in an expansive postural states for you know it's funny i i really emphasized two minutes in the ted talk because that's what we had done in the in those first studies um i i think actually less is more like we've gone out to five minutes i think that i think that it just gets awkward it's that it's that it's that silly like you feel weird but also like your body you get sort of stiff so i you know i just think it's i don't even think you have to be still i think you can be moving in an expansive way yeah you know i think there's it's the whole,

Speaker 30 I sometimes wish that I hadn't called this power posing because it was so, it's such a sticky idea, right? It's got alliteration. It's like

Speaker 30 exactly, but at the same time, people got fixed on like standing like Wonder Woman or in the victory pose. And it's not, it's, being expansive is more expansive than this.
Yes.

Speaker 30 You know, it's, it's, in whatever way works for you.

Speaker 23 Yeah, the tighter you are, the probably less likely you're going to perform relaxed.

Speaker 4 Right.

Speaker 23 And football training before games and in practices, they would always tell us to be loose, you know, to move our body, to be flexible, to be expansive, but in a loose state of mind, in a loose body, not like rigid or you can't catch the ball if you're like too tight.

Speaker 23 So it's how can you be expansive, confident, and relaxed at the same time?

Speaker 19 Yeah.

Speaker 23 And practicing that in life with the power poses, I think, is great.

Speaker 9 Yeah. And Ted Lasso, she did it great.

Speaker 4 She She was like, oh, right.

Speaker 9 It's like a monster pose or something.

Speaker 4 I think she was like,

Speaker 18 it's amazing.

Speaker 30 She made this facial expression that I thought was great.

Speaker 4 She's a great actor as well.

Speaker 30 I wonder if that was like so, like, if they were like, just do a power pose.

Speaker 4 And she made it out for me. She probably did.

Speaker 30 I just feel like

Speaker 4 she was great.

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Speaker 4 Great.

Speaker 4 When, um, was there ever a time where you didn't implement this strategy and you realized, oh, I had, I could, I should have done, I could have done better had I done this, but I just thought I'd had it figured out.

Speaker 4 Um, only, you know,

Speaker 30 so I really love public speaking and it doesn't,

Speaker 30 it's like my favorite professional thing to do. It doesn't make me nervous.

Speaker 30 That's good. So

Speaker 30 for me, I think a lot of people assume that speaking is the thing that makes everyone nervous. So for me,

Speaker 30 it's not that.

Speaker 10 What makes you nervous?

Speaker 30 You know, interpersonal conflict, like one-on-one,

Speaker 4 or

Speaker 30 I get nervous in like smaller groups.

Speaker 30 I don't think so.

Speaker 4 It's been interesting.

Speaker 4 know.

Speaker 30 Talking to three people I find much more stressful

Speaker 30 than talking to you know 3,000 people.

Speaker 30 So I don't like to sit in a room for a long time before I'm going to get up and talk to people. I don't want to sit there in a cold room.
These rooms are often cold.

Speaker 30 And you're going like this and you're totally sort of stiff. And then you get up and you're like, ooh.
So I had that experience enough times to learn I need to be moving around.

Speaker 30 I need to to be warm not cold and and come in sort of you know right before I get up to present or to discuss so yes I've had the experience of being still and kind of you know hunched up for too long.

Speaker 18 Final question is what's your definition of greatness?

Speaker 30 I think people might think of it as sort of about being the most, sort of the best, the most competent.

Speaker 30 I think it's a combination of being, yes, your most sort of effective self, but also your most generous self. So greatness has to combine those two qualities.

Speaker 21 Why is it so hard for us to get started once we know, okay, now it's time to make the change, but it's still hard to actually get started in doing that.

Speaker 8 What holds us back from that starting step?

Speaker 31 Yeah, well, our motivation to make change is actually just like our motivation to do anything, by the way, tends to be sort of, you know, it ebbs and flows.

Speaker 31 There are times when we are in a more reflective, action-oriented, change-oriented mode, and times when we're more pessimistic or just sort of going with the flow because we're, you know, in the middle of things.

Speaker 31 And so actually, I've done some research on something I call the fresh start effect. This is with Heng Chen Dai, who's down the street at UCLA, my former student and Jason Rees,

Speaker 31 senior fellow at Wharton. And what we have shown in our work is that there are certain moments that feel like a new beginning in life.

Speaker 8 Like when?

Speaker 31 So one that you know about already, I don't know.

Speaker 4 New Year's or Yes, exactly, right?

Speaker 31 Like, you didn't need me to come here and tell you about any fancy science.

Speaker 4 You're like, yeah, I know about New Year's.

Speaker 13 Birthday, New Year's.

Speaker 13 Yeah.

Speaker 31 Yeah, there are moments that feel like, okay, I'm turning a page.

Speaker 26 An anniversary, a graduation.

Speaker 31 Move to a new community, right? A new job.

Speaker 4 City, yeah. You got it.

Speaker 31 Those are all fresh start moments. Actually, there's trivial ones too, but they can matter.
Like the start of a new week can feel like a fresh start. That's true.

Speaker 31 You sort of sit down, you go into work maybe for the first time in a couple days.

Speaker 31 you feel fresh at your desk, ready to sit and think about what are my priorities in a way that you wouldn't in the middle of a week.

Speaker 31 Start of a new month following the celebration of certain holidays, particularly the kind that we associate with fresh starts.

Speaker 31 So those are all moments when we feel like we've opened a new chapter and we have a couple things that go on at those moments. One is that we feel like, okay.

Speaker 31 This is a moment when I want to step back and think big picture about things because you recognize that there's that breakpoint you think actually about your life like you're a character in a book, that the way we organize our memories and structure them, it's not linear completely.

Speaker 31 Instead, it's like, you know, the college years, you know, the years playing sports,

Speaker 31 the years living in Boston, whatever they are, that's how you structure your memories. And that means there's actually implications for the way you live your life.

Speaker 31 Because when you get to one of those chapter breaks, that's when you do this big picture thinking. Interesting.
And you also tend to feel like your identity is shifting, right?

Speaker 31 So you like step into a new role as you, you know, I'm I'm turning 40 in the year ahead. And that feels like a big break to me.
Like I will be in a different age category.

Speaker 31 When I became a professor, I vividly remember like that was a huge shift in my identity.

Speaker 31 I felt like a different, okay, I have a different set of expectations and roles and ways I should sort of dress and talk.

Speaker 31 And that identity shift that can come, even if it's something as small as, you know, you're stepping into a new year and you feel like the new year knew you, you can look back and say, well, you know, last year, my old old job, when I was a graduate student, I didn't manage to eat right.

Speaker 31 But that was the old me and this is the new me. And so you feel this sense of optimism and disconnect from those past failures.
Right.

Speaker 22 It's easy to procrastinate or kind of feel lazy, which is part of your process as well.

Speaker 21 It's easy to feel that when things are okay.

Speaker 11 or when things are like good, but they're not like, it's not a big enough pain for you to be like, I need the motive.

Speaker 26 Now I have motivation to make a change.

Speaker 31 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 4 No way.

Speaker 21 Do we need a bigger pain or is it possible to create exponential change or transformation when things are okay or really good in your thought?

Speaker 31 It's so interesting. You know, I do think that even when things are good, we can have these kinds of fresh start

Speaker 31 experiences that shape us in positive ways. I'll give you an example.
I was on, I had a phone call. I was driving here from Santa Barbara this morning.

Speaker 31 I had a phone call with a friend who just got tenure, and he is thinking big. His life is great.

Speaker 4 What does that mean for those of of you who are doing that?

Speaker 31 Oh, yeah, fair enough. Not everyone is part of my weird world.

Speaker 4 Academic world, yes.

Speaker 31 Okay, so in academia, if you're a professor, this is like the be-all and end-all of your career. You're working really hard.

Speaker 31 You get your PhD, you get your assistant professor job, you work really hard, you write a bunch of papers, you teach a bunch of classes.

Speaker 31 And if your university says, you know, you're doing great, if you're good enough, they bestow upon you tenure, which means permanent job.

Speaker 31 Job security basically can't be fired unless you do something illegal. And they're saying, like, you have now total academic freedom.
We're no longer going to be evaluating you.

Speaker 4 We trust you.

Speaker 31 We trust you. And it's like this bizarre institution.
It's created to help people take risks. But it is a big moment in the life of an academic when they get to that milestone.

Speaker 31 It's like, there's nowhere else to go. You've climbed to the top of the mountain.
And so it's really exciting.

Speaker 31 It often happens to people around their 40s, sort of like midlife when you might already be having some introspection going on about like, why am I here? What's my purpose?

Speaker 31 So a lot of academics step back at that moment and think, what do I want to do now? What do I want to do next? I've been climbing and climbing to this point.

Speaker 31 And I was having this conversation with a friend

Speaker 31 on the drive here who had reached that point and was having that exact, okay, what's next? And wanted to talk about writing a book since I'd written a book. And like, what is that?

Speaker 31 Like, he thinks that might be the next big adventure for him. But nothing is wrong.
Everything is right. It's just that he reached a moment.
He reached an achievement.

Speaker 31 He got to the top of a mountain and looked around and realized, okay, I've climbed to my goal and it's time to figure out what the next one is.

Speaker 31 And I think that can be a fresh start too, that's positive.

Speaker 21 Identity is something that is interesting to me.

Speaker 11 How important is the way we shape our own identity or view our identity in terms of

Speaker 14 where we are to where we will be?

Speaker 21 Like if we stay stuck in old identities, how do we shed identities?

Speaker 11 You know, how do we create a new identity even though we've never actually lived it?

Speaker 21 Will that help us get there?

Speaker 13 Can you share more just about identity in general on how it hurts us or helps us?

Speaker 31 It's a fantastic question and I'm going to give you a somewhat, first I'm going to give you a somewhat frustrating answer. It frustrates me.

Speaker 31 I don't feel like academic research has wrapped its arms around identity the way I would like it to because I think it is unquestionably so important, right?

Speaker 31 The labels we put on ourselves obviously matter, but I feel like we don't know nearly as much as we should. It's one of the things I'm most interested to study

Speaker 31 to this book.

Speaker 4 Maybe, maybe.

Speaker 31 We know a little. One of the things I think is most relevant to the way

Speaker 31 I think about identity is mindset, which is it's different than identity, but a mindset can come with, or can be triggered by an identity.

Speaker 31 And one of the barriers we haven't talked about yet to change that I think is really important is whether you believe you can change. And identity and mindset are a big part of that.

Speaker 31 So we know a lot about mindset from work, for instance, by Carol Dweck at Stanford, who's done this incredible.

Speaker 8 Mindset versus fixed mindset.

Speaker 31 Exactly. And that's sort of an identity, right? You identify with being someone who can grow or you identify as someone who is X, right? Like, you know, I'm only this smart.
I'm only this capable.

Speaker 31 So in a sense, there's an identity that comes with believing you can grow or an identity that comes with believing you can't.

Speaker 31 There's also wonderful research on the placebo effect and how that extends beyond just medicine, right?

Speaker 31 We know about it in medicine, that like if you believe a sugar pill is going to make you healthier, you actually

Speaker 31 experience physiological benefits. But there's some really interesting research showing it's beyond, you know, we think of it in this medical context, and that's where it was first studied.

Speaker 31 Actually, I learned from a children's book. Like Ben Franklin studied this, and I don't know if you know, mesmerizing.
Interesting. That term comes from Dr.
Mesmer, who was the original

Speaker 31 sort of charlatan in France who was giving people fake medicine.

Speaker 31 Anyway, and Ben Franklin figured it all out.

Speaker 11 Sounds like a freaking Amazon.

Speaker 31 It does. It was like, and it's also a wonderful children's book.
So I wish I'd known that before I wrote my book. It would have been in there.

Speaker 31 Anyway, there's a lot more, though, than just the medical component to placebo effects, right? When we believe that we will achieve something that also can improve our achievement, right?

Speaker 31 When we believe we're going to get an outcome.

Speaker 31 One of my favorite studies that I describe in the book that I think is sort of related to mindset and identity is work by Allie Crum, who's a psychologist at Stanford.

Speaker 31 She did this really interesting work with Ellen Langer of Harvard, where they randomly assigned housekeepers to one of two groups.

Speaker 31 And those housekeepers were either told every day when you go and do your job in a hotel, you are getting exercise at the level that's recommended by the CDC.

Speaker 31 So you're getting a great workout when you do your job.

Speaker 14 You're burning a thousand calories or you're getting whatever like you're.

Speaker 4 Right. I don't know if a thousand calories is the definition.
You're getting a great workout.

Speaker 31 Oh, good workout.

Speaker 4 Yeah, maybe it's more like 300. Okay.

Speaker 31 Just not to get too overboard.

Speaker 31 And then another group just wasn't told that information. And the question actually was, are there differences in the outcomes those two groups experience a month later in terms of health?

Speaker 31 So does a group that believes they're, you know, doing a job that comes with health benefits actually end up losing more weight, having more controlled blood pressure? And the answer was yes.

Speaker 4 Really?

Speaker 31 Which is a, you know, on the one hand, you're like, is that magic? Like, what's going on?

Speaker 31 On the other hand, you can start to see how it actually would play out and how this would be applicable in other settings. So they believed their job could give them a workout.

Speaker 31 And all of a a sudden, maybe they're choosing to take the stairs from Florida to Florida to get those extra calories or like leaning a little bit more when they're, you know, using the vacuum.

Speaker 31 I live in a townhouse in Philadelphia. And someone pointed out to me, like, it's so great that you live in a townhouse, all that passive exercise when you run up and down the stairs.

Speaker 31 And now I am the one volunteering to like, you know, go grab the ketchup that we forgot if we're going to have dinner on a roof deck. That's exciting.
I can get extra exercise.

Speaker 31 So there's like different choices that you make once you start to have a different set of beliefs about your,

Speaker 31 you know, what you're achieving.

Speaker 31 So anyway, I think of this as related to identity, because if you're now you're starting to have the identity as I am someone doing a career that's physically active and now you lean into that and then you experience the benefits.

Speaker 31 So I think, I think the work on mindset is the best work I have seen that's really rigorous and that relates to identity.

Speaker 2 So if

Speaker 4 belief

Speaker 21 supports you getting those results you want or making the transformation or the change you want, how would you suggest that we learn to believe in ourselves more from a scientific point of view?

Speaker 21 Like, what's the data suggest on, okay, if you say these affirmations, if you look in the mirror and do this exercise, if you just smile at people and you create more reflection of joy, like what is the thing that you've seen in data that helps increase belief in oneself?

Speaker 31 Yeah, I think the most powerful thing is who you surround yourself with. Really?

Speaker 31 So I think the social context you create, the people around you have so much to do with whether or not you believe in yourself.

Speaker 31 And by the way, I also want to I want to add like a really quick footnote because the academic in me can't stand not to, which is to say you can have excessive confidence and that can be harmful.

Speaker 31 So this is a little bit of a dangerous like seesaw we're on here, right? You want to be confident enough and believe in yourself enough that you're going to lean into the opportunities and

Speaker 31 work towards the goals that

Speaker 31 because you believe you could achieve them. But if you're like, I've got this, I'm perfect, you're not going to practice, you're not going to work hard.

Speaker 31 So, there is, anyway, it's a little bit of a delicate balance. But back to how do you get to that right level of belief?

Speaker 31 Everything I know from research points to the structure of the people you surround yourselves with, whether it's the people you work with, the people you train with, if you're an athlete, the people you socialize with, they give you a lot of those beliefs in yourself.

Speaker 31 And you can choose them,

Speaker 31 but they will, with the messages they send you about what's acceptable behavior, what's normal, what they're achieving, and how you measure up, it shapes so much about our confidence.

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Speaker 4 Really?

Speaker 5 There seems to be, I think this is true.

Speaker 21 And I also love the examples of some of the great athletes who have accomplished so much that were doubted over and over growing up and kind of have this chip on their shoulder, like no one believed in them.

Speaker 5 And they said, I'm going to go prove them wrong type of mentality Which I think can get you extremely far in terms of success and results But never feel

Speaker 16 you'd never choose to do that right?

Speaker 31 So I think what you're pointing to is like it's not

Speaker 31 a necessary condition right it's not the best environment

Speaker 31 But if you get to choose and if you want to create an environment where you're gonna believe in yourself So you think surrounding yourself with the right people the right environment of people the right community

Speaker 10 What should those people be like?

Speaker 21 What should their attitude, their energy, their communication style be like with you?

Speaker 5 If people were reflecting on their five to ten people in their inner circle, what should they reflect on?

Speaker 21 They should have these qualities.

Speaker 10 They should say these things.

Speaker 5 Or here's some red flags.

Speaker 21 If your best friend tells you you shouldn't do this or your best friend says,

Speaker 14 I don't think you look good doing it, whatever it is, what are those flags and what are those, I guess, positive signs?

Speaker 31 Yeah. Well, okay, here let me pivot a little bit to another.
We're doing a lot of academic stuff.

Speaker 4 Obviously, I'm an academic.

Speaker 31 I'm actually going to tell you a story about a person in academia who is the most important person in my career. And that's my dissertation advisor.

Speaker 31 His name is Max Baserman. He's a Harvard Business School professor, great human being,

Speaker 31 and a great academic. What he's truly exceptional at is mentoring.
His PhD students have gone on to be tenured professors. Now everyone knows what tenure is at every elite institution in the world.

Speaker 10 So, he's good at instilling belief in other people.

Speaker 4 Unbelievable.

Speaker 22 Confidence, belief.

Speaker 31 Unbelievably good. And he does all the other things that you need to do to help someone succeed, right? Like, you know, good coaches, of course.

Speaker 31 You know, he, you know, the training, like the actual teaching of skills, all those things are part of it. But I think he creates an environment for people to thrive.

Speaker 31 And it actually took me a while after I had graduated as one of his advisees, and I was trying to advise my own students and figure out what was the secret sauce that made him so wildly more successful as a coach and mentor than anyone else in our field had really, I mean, stratospherically more successful.

Speaker 31 And what I realized is he had all the obvious stuff, all those obvious ingredients, like, you know, you know, responsive and new is stuff and gives you feedback.

Speaker 31 But there was an unshaking belief, like he treated you like family. He was there for you.
He believed that you could do it. He always was giving that positive reinforcement.

Speaker 31 Another thing that he did that I think is so interesting and related to research is he sort of created, I'll call it like mentoring circles within the students he was coaching so that we were not always just being coached or mentored and advised by him, right, but he would put us in the position to advise more junior students.

Speaker 31 So there's this wonderful research that I write about in the book by Lauren Eskris Winkler, who's a professor at the Kellogg School at Northwestern.

Speaker 31 And she had this amazing insight when she was doing research for her dissertation. She noticed that she was interviewing all these people who were struggling to achieve their goals.

Speaker 31 And as she asked them what they thought might help them achieve more, because that's what she was interested in. How do we increase achievement?

Speaker 31 They all have these really deep insights, you know, struggling salespeople and C students. When she got them to introspect, they actually knew a lot.

Speaker 31 They maybe just hadn't gotten there and no one had asked them. They also really liked being asked, like, what's your advice? How would you coach someone who was in your shoes?

Speaker 31 And she realized most of the time when someone is struggling or when we're coaching someone, our instinct, even if it's unsolicited, is to just whip out some advice.

Speaker 31 Like, here are the seven things that I think will help you get further.

Speaker 31 And it can be really demotivating because it conveys, like, I think you're kind of, you know, you haven't gotten your stuff together.

Speaker 28 You don't have the answers. I have the answers.

Speaker 31 I'm going to give you the answers. And that's our instinct.
And she thought, what if we flip the script?

Speaker 31 What if instead of putting our arm around someone and giving them advice, we said, you know, know, what would you do? What would you do?

Speaker 30 And do you, and actually

Speaker 11 how would you coach someone else?

Speaker 31 And not even just how would you, actually have them coach someone else. Like put you in the role of a mentor and coach to someone else who has similar goals so that you

Speaker 31 feel like you're on a pedestal. Wow, someone trusts me to give this kind of advice.
I must, I must, you know, be kind of cut out for this. Maybe I'm better at this than I thought.

Speaker 31 And then you're going to start introspecting in a way you might not if it was just your problem because you got to help someone else and you you don't want to let them down.

Speaker 31 And then when you do that, you actually figure out, well, I've got some good ideas. Like, maybe I do know something.

Speaker 31 And then once you've told someone else to do it, you're going to feel like a hypocrite if you don't do it yourself.

Speaker 16 Right.

Speaker 31 So this is another sort of social trick. Max would put us in these sort of advice-giving circles where the senior students are working with the junior.
And he rarely gave advice, actually.

Speaker 21 He more facilitated the experience for you to learn and create the answer within yourself, I guess.

Speaker 4 By helping others.

Speaker 31 By helping others. And he would, you know, he's nudging along the way and like, good job, or like maybe a little redirection.

Speaker 31 But, and, and if you go to him and you're like, I need to know how to do X, he tells you, but there wasn't a lot of

Speaker 31 steer, like backseat driving, sure, if that makes sense. And I think that also helped build confidence.
It like it, it made us believe in ourselves in those roles.

Speaker 31 And I now actually have an advice club of people who are former MAX students. Maybe no accident.
We sort of try to keep this going even beyond that point in our lives where he was coaching us.

Speaker 31 And each of us, we're at similar career stages, all professors, similar goals. And we reach out to each other.

Speaker 31 for solicited advice whenever we're facing a challenge, a career challenge, and aren't sure what to do. And it's just been totally amazing.

Speaker 31 So it's this peer group of people who support each other, care about each other. There's friendship.
That's all built in.

Speaker 31 We see others achieving and it helps us see, oh, if they can do it, I can do it. But then also we get to give advice and we grow from that as well.

Speaker 23 What would you say are the top three or five things

Speaker 21 that a coach can do to instill belief in someone else that you witnessed from him or that you've also seen with your peer group?

Speaker 31 I think a lot of positive feedback is super important.

Speaker 31 That that's like the predominant

Speaker 31 sense is that this person thinks I'm doing great even if they're also telling me ways I can improve because you don't want to only, obviously, it's really important to also get, well, like a little more like this.

Speaker 31 You need that nudging, but it needs to be with a positive. Sometimes people call it a feedback sandwich, right? You like start with the positive.

Speaker 31 Anyway, so I do think that positivity and like conveying they believe in you.

Speaker 31 I think creating a social structure for you, which is one of the things Max, there was sort of a whole ecosystem of other students and supporters and who were all striving towards similar goals. And

Speaker 31 instead of feeling like we were in competition with one another it was very clear that we were all part of a team almost every email starts with hi team right these are academics all vying for jobs and to sort of achieve and you could see it being very cutthroat and competitive we weren't on a team right we weren't playing for a team but we were a team and that was how we saw ourselves and then this structuring you know some people everybody structured to help others who are below you know below them it's sort of part of your role is working with them so those are a few of the key things i'm not sure i've hit your number.

Speaker 10 Positive feedback, social structure, supporting the team.

Speaker 31 Yeah, putting people in the role of advice givers or supporters and mentors.

Speaker 21 I think you, yeah, he said, you said he believed in you.

Speaker 11 He treated you like family

Speaker 8 mentoring circles.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 31 Yeah. So maybe we have hit your number

Speaker 4 you asked for. That's great.
I love that. I think those were the keys.

Speaker 16 I love that.

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