Confidence Expert Dr. Shadé Zahrai: Feel Like You’re Not Enough? THIS Proven 4 Part Framework Will Transform Your Self-Image & Build REAL Confidence

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ninety percent of people are waiting for that feeling of
confidence before they take that step. That feeling of confidence
it does not come before we take the action. It
comes after we take the action.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
Hey, everyone, welcome back to On Purpose Sam your host
Jay Shetty, and today I'm joined by Shade Zarai, Award
winning leadership expert and author of her first book, Big Trust.
If you haven't got your copy yet, make sure you
go and grab it. We're going to put the link
in the caption. If you've ever felt held back by
self doubt or fear of failure, this conversation will show

(00:32):
you how to trust yourself again and start moving forward
with real confidence. I've followed Shade on Instagram and TikTok
for years now. I'm a huge fan, and today I
finally have her on the seat on On Purpose. Please
welcome to the show, Shadai Shaday. It's so great to
have you here.

Speaker 1 (00:50):
It's so wonderful to be here.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
Jays, congratulations on that. Thank you. I love the topic.
I'm so glad that you zeroed in on it. I
actually believe that that self doubt is, without a doubt,
one of the biggest issues in the world today. At
an individual personal level. And the reason why so many
people don't go after their dreams, don't go after the

(01:13):
career they want, don't go after the person they want
to be with, don't go after a promotion, don't go
after a connection a friendship, because we are scared of
how we'll be perceived. And the reason why I'm so
happy we're talking about this subject and that you've dedicated
your book to it is because I often think about
what my life would look like if I had listened

(01:34):
to myself doubt. And I think people think that people
who've had some success in their career don't feel self doubt.
And I would say I felt self doubt before I started,
I felt selfed out during it, and because I still
think about the beginning, I still feel self out today,
but I know what to do with it, and your

(01:54):
book gives us a brilliant method. So I want to
start off by asking you, if someone was to listen
to our podcast today, what would they overcome and what
skills would they build?

Speaker 1 (02:04):
So this is essentially going to be a master class
on self doubt, but not only what it is actually
determining for yourself. What are the drivers of your self
doubt because we think self doubt is just one big
blob of worry and anxiety and insecurity. But when we
look at decades worth of literature my own research over
the past five years, we've distilled it down to four

(02:25):
main drivers. And so if you're able to determine, okay,
where am I on these drivers, which one is really
propelling myself doubt, that allows you to then determine what
you need to do to move through it. As you said,
self doubt doesn't necessarily disappear with achievement. It doesn't disappear
as you advanced in your career. It just scales with responsibility.
But the real measure of someone's success and happiness is

(02:47):
if they can hear the voice of self doubt and
still move forward anyway. And so what I want to
help everyone listening with today is to determine which of
the drivers of their self doubt is taking the driver's seat,
and then exactly what they need to do to move
through it so they can get the connection they want,
the success they want, the performance that they want, and
create the life that they want.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
I love it. Let's talk about the four drivers, because
I'm fascinated now as well too. Let's do it to
discover I've been dealing with it.

Speaker 1 (03:14):
We can actually diagnose your doubt profile it. So the
first thing we need to do is rewind a little bit.
How did we come across these four drivers. So we've
been working with leaders and teams across organizations for the
last five to ten years, that's tens of thousands of people,
and we found that again, no matter where someone was
at on their journey, they were hearing this voice of
doubt and it would sound different and it would look different.

(03:36):
But then we wanted to know, okay, specifically what is
driving this and we need to bring it back to
something called yourself image. Let me tell you about a
study that was conducted in the seventies and it opens
your mind as to the power of the self image
that we have about ourselves and how that keeps repeating
throughout our lives. So in the nineteen seventies, a psychology
professor by the name of Robert Kleck from Dartmouth can

(04:00):
Hedu did this fascinating experiment where he brought people together,
he split them into groups, and with one group he
drew a scar on their face from their right ear
to the side of their mouth. Big, ugly scar, and
he let them see themselves in a hand mirror. Then
he sends the groups out to have conversation with strangers. Right,
so you have one group that has this scar, another
group has no scar. After the conversations, they come back

(04:23):
and they report on how they felt the conversation went.
The group with the scar overwhelmingly reported that they felt judged,
it was tense. The other person was distant because of
the scar. But here is where it gets really interesting.
If we rewind just a little bit, Right before the
researchers sent them out into these conversations, he applied moisturizing

(04:44):
cream to the scar, so they just see themselves in
the mirror. He then applies his cream, but he doesn't
tell them that he's removing the scar.

Speaker 2 (04:52):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (04:53):
So now they have no scar on their face, but
they believe that they do. They go into these conversations
believing expecting they will be treated badly, poorly judged, and
that's what they experience.

Speaker 3 (05:06):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
It's wild when you think about the implications for us
in our lives. Okay, it may not be a physical scar,
but we all have beliefs or expectations about ourselves based
on how we see ourselves our self image, and then
we're going to notice things that reinforce it. Because of
how the brain is wired confirmation bias, selective attention. Your

(05:27):
brain is wired to magnify what you focus on. So
if you're going into your life, into your conversations, into
your meetings, into your work, believing that you're not worthy,
that you're not capable, that you don't deserve it, you're
going to notice things that reinforce that, and it's only
going to make you feel worse. So we know that
about self image. So the first question to ask ourselves
is what are these invisible scars that we are carrying

(05:50):
throughout our lives? How can we become more aware of them?
So then my next question is great, So that's the
power of self image, and self image drives our self doubt.
But how do you measure self image? If I were
to ask you, Jay, what do you think your self images?
You might share something and then I'd ask someone else
what do you think your self images? And they might
share something else. We need to determine if something is measurable,

(06:13):
so we can determine what it is. And when we
look at over fifty years worth of research, this is
when we find that, yes, there's a lot of information
out there, but it really comes down to just four
dimensions of how we see ourselves. And when these four
things come together, that shapes our self image, it shapes
how we interact with the world. Not only that these

(06:35):
four things that actually have their base in our personality,
they have been shown through meta analyses of over one
hundred studies to predict our success, our job performance, our
career satisfaction, how happy we are in our life, and
our relationships. And it all comes down to these four things.
And I could not believe it when I came across it.

(06:55):
So let me tell you what these four things are.
Because essentially these four things drive our self image, which
then drives our self doubt when they're weak. So the
very very first one, the first driver of your self doubt,
which shapes your self image, is what we call acceptance
self acceptance. It relates to this personality trait of self esteem.

(07:16):
So how you see yourself in terms of your value
and your worth. Now, if you don't accept yourself it
shows up in four painfully familiar habits. The first one
is what we call the pressure to prove you feel
like you constantly have to prove yourself through your work,
through your performance. You have to prove that you are
of value to other people, so you seek their validation

(07:38):
and their praise, and when you don't get it, it
becomes this automatic switch and you need to win it back.
That's the first The second one is what we call
the shrinking syndrome. So this is where someone might be
afraid of success because they don't accept who they are,
and therefore they're afraid of what will happen if something

(07:59):
amazing happens to them, because deep down they don't feel
like they deserve it, so then they try and sabotage
before they get there. The third is what we call
the Schaudenfreuder cycle and the shaden Freuda cycle. You may
have heard of it. It's a German term. It's that
moment when you see someone else fail and you suddenly
feel really good about yourself. You feel a little bit
better about yourself, you enjoy other people's failures. This is

(08:23):
a sign that you do not accept yourself. Wow, your
self seem is suffering. And then the fourth pattern that
we see here is of course that endless need for approval.
We need other people to like us to validate us,
we might become codependent in our relationships. We say yes
when we really want to say no. We wear masks
and contort ourselves to better suit the people around us,

(08:45):
but in doing so, we lose ourselves. So that is
the first and in my view, the most foundational acceptance.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
And as I'm learning about it from you, it feels
like that starts so early and you're just carrying it
for all these years, and then you become aware of
it when you're starting to apply for a job, or
you're wanting to put yourself forward for a promotion, or
you're trying to find the relationship with your dreams, and
all of a sudden, now you're like, well, why do

(09:13):
I feel this way? And I can imagine a lot
of our listeners right now are sitting here going, shauday,
I do all of those four things. That's me. Yeah,
that's me. And so if someone's listening right now and
just saying shadah jay, that's me. I do all four
of those things. I have no idea do I have
to stop doing those things? Do I have to? So
I self acceptance, That is the issue that I'm having.

(09:35):
I don't accept myself according to your four measures, where
do I even begin to go? What questions should I
be asking? From that point?

Speaker 1 (09:43):
So I love how you mentioned that we developed this
early in life. Let's start there and then we'll go
to how we can start to break the attachment that
we have to this. So generally, this sense of acceptance
that we have develops in the first three to four years.
Initially it's based on the response we get from our
parents a primary caregivers, and then it also develops based
on whether we feel that we get the emotional support

(10:05):
and the nurturing that we need. If you feel like
you constantly have to earn your parents' attention or do
something exciting to get them to pay attention to you,
then we develop this belief that I must perform to
be worthy. It can also happen later in life when
a parent says to you or compares your report card
your grades to a sibling, or makes you feel like

(10:28):
you're only of value when you're winning an award or
coming first in the swimming competition that you're in the race.
So we develop these really early on, and you know,
we do need to acknowledge so much of who we
are as a result of those early experiences. That doesn't
mean we are a prisoner to that, and it doesn't
mean that we should be blaming that environment and our

(10:49):
parents and our you know, the caregivers that we had.
We need to acknowledge that they were doing the best
that they could with what they knew at the time.
We have this beautiful ability of taking ownership of our lives,
which actually comes down to the third pillar, which we'll
get to, which allows us to, as you said, become
aware of these patterns so often, Jay, and if you're listening,
you may find that you have not been aware of

(11:10):
these things. And it's only when you listen to sessions
like this, conversations like this, when you read a book
where you suddenly start to almost self diagnose and realize, oh,
this is me. See that as a really positive thing,
because you're identifying that you are part of this experience
as opposed to just this is who I am. So
that's a really positive thing. So what do we do

(11:32):
if we identify Okay, I'm really struggling with acceptance. The
very first thing is to acknowledge that you are not
your thoughts and you are not your beliefs. Beliefs are
simply just a repeated pattern of thought that has happened
so many times in our brain that it becomes a default.
It's just a really really fast process neural pathway. And
in the same way that a belief is formed early

(11:52):
in our lives, we can overwrite that belief. Yes it
takes time, Yes it takes a repetition, Yes it takes practice,
but we have the ability to do that through conscious choice.
And so the moment you start noticing that you're feeling insecure,
those thoughts come into your mind. I can't do this,
I don't deserve this. I'm not enough. That's the key

(12:13):
phrase for someone who lacks acceptance. I'm not enough. So
I must prove that I'm enough. I must earn that
feeling from other people. I must chase it through achievement.
The moment you notice that, consciously re engage the prefrontal
part of your brain. This is how you re engage
attention and say to yourself, hold on, I don't need
to believe that thought. I don't need to believe that belief.

(12:36):
Remind yourself that I have value, I am of value.
And one of the simplest hacks that you can use
in those moments is to stop thinking about yourself. I
know that sounds really odd to say, but when we
are suffering with a lack of self acceptance, it's always
I me, my, How do they see me? How am
I coming across? What am I doing right now? If

(12:59):
you can to go, okay, how can I be here
for them? How can I be of value? How can
I be of service? How can I make this person
feel seen? That's called self forgetting, And research shows that
this process of self forgetting by becoming more service oriented,
helps to quiet in that incessant voice of the ego.
And it's remarkable how when you tap into that suddenly

(13:20):
you realize, Okay, I don't have to be so in
my head. I want to share just a couple of
really simple techniques for anyone who really does struggle with acceptance.
The first one is, if you struggle with acceptance, you
are going to attach your sense of identity to your
job and to your achievements and to your performance. So
if things are going well professionally, if you're achieving things,

(13:42):
if you're doing amazing things, you feel fantastic. And then
something happens and it all crumbles and you fail. You
take it personally, you internalize that failure. So the first
and foremost thing you need to do is acknowledge you
are not your job. There is so much to you
that exists outside of that in environment, which I know
is really hard to do if you work, especially in

(14:03):
a corporate organization where your entire status is determined by
your job title and how well you're delivering and your
promotion track record. Right, So we tend to internalize these things,
but you need to consciously remind yourself through that prefrontal activation,
I am not my job. I am so much more
than this. And there's a really interesting little technique we
like to share. Not even a technique, it's actually a suggestion. So, Jay,

(14:26):
there was a study that was conducted with Nobel Prize
winning scientists and they looked at five hundred of them,
and they found that they were three times more likely
than regular scientists to have a creative hobby. Not only that,
they were twenty two times more likely than regular scientists
to have a hobby in the performing arts, singing, music, drama.

(14:49):
They many of them attribute that hobby to helping them
bounce back whens didn't go to plan, and also to
allowing them to make connections that other people would have
been able to. And so what can we take from that?
It's great, right, cool study. What can we take from that? Well,
having something outside of work that we can pour ourselves into,

(15:11):
especially something creative, because we know about the impact that
has in the brain that allows us to remind ourselves. Hey,
even if I didn't do well today at work, even
if I didn't achieve this thing that I wanted to,
I get to go and take on that character in
that play. I get to go and pick up my guitar.
I get to go and paint that beautiful painting. And fascinatingly, hobbies,
especially creative hobbies, have been found to increase your self esteem,

(15:33):
which increases your sense of self acceptance. So it's a
very odd one, but I would encourage you if you
struggle here, go and pick up a hobby and embrace
the messiness of being a beginner.

Speaker 2 (15:43):
I love how practical, tactical and simple this is. And
simple in a good way in that I think anyone
who's listening right now, they've got their plan of action
for acceptance. You've got the questions to ask yourself or
to make sure you know. I don't need to believe
that I don't need to agree with those beliefs. I
don't need to agree with those thoughts. You've got the

(16:04):
idea of what's your hobby, and so I love that
you said that. I started thinking about my own and
I've got a vefew. I've got pickleball, a play it
on a football or soccer when I'm back in London,
I enjoy. I mean, they're not creative in artistic sense,
but they're they're physical because my work's so creative. So
in one sense, just these physical competitive things that allow

(16:25):
me to be with friends connection. I love game nights, brilliant,
A big fan of game nights, and so it seems
like anything that's collaborative and competitive makes me feel good
because my work's so creative already. So I think I
don't crave creativity, but I do crave that desire to
play and be free. Something you said that resonated with

(16:46):
me was this idea of if you performed for your parents,
if you had to perform to get your parents' attention,
you ended up thinking that performance equals success equals winning
equals love equals worth. A lot of people are really
successful today have just lived that pattern now. So in

(17:09):
one sense. It's also a pattern that makes people quite
successful in the public eye. So the biggest performers in
the world, some of them would say themselves that they
were the performer in their home or their family, and
they didn't realize it until they became the number one
person in the world at something that that wasn't who
they wanted to be. It's who they became because of it.

(17:30):
So it can make you successful, but maybe not happy.
What do you think about that?

Speaker 1 (17:35):
Oh, yes, I love that you've mentioned this. So there's
two elements we need to touch on here. So this
lack of acceptance that develops early on, where we feel
like we must perform to be of value or to
earn the attention of others. That leads us to perfectionistic
tendencies as adults, where we set these very very very
high standards for ourselves, beat ourselves up when we inevitably

(17:56):
don't reach them, and then just set the next high standard.
And so for a lot of people, well, this does
propel them forward, this does propel them to amazing heights.
But as you said, they might reach that number one
pinnacle and then they stop and think, this is not
what I wanted. This is not the life that I
wanted to lead. And so what we need to think
about with success is two elements. Okay, there is the
material success, the status, the external success, but then there

(18:18):
is that internal feeling that really should be coming with it,
the sense of satisfaction, the sense of fulfillment. And so
anyone who is driven by a lack of acceptance, what
we see in a lot of really high performers is
that if they're driven by this, yes they have amazing
work ethic, Yes they're incredibly diligent, but they never feel satisfied.

(18:40):
And that level of emptiness that they feel also drives
them to try and seek that satisfaction from the next hit,
the next achievements called the arrival fallacy. When I get there,
I will feel like I've made it. And then they
get there and they think, why doesn't this feel any different?
And then they set the next goal and they're perpetually
seeking this state of enoughness, and then they sacrifice things

(19:01):
on the way to get there because they're so fixated
on believing when I get there everything will fall into place.
That they've sacrificed relationships, they've sacrificed time with their children,
they've sacrificed family, they've sacrificed well being generally, and so yes,
it may be a driver the fundamental question that we
get asked about perfectionism because we have a lot of

(19:21):
people who say, well, I set high standards and I
think it's a good thing. Isn't that a good thing?
The fundamental difference is what happens when you don't achieve
the standards. That determines whether it's perfectionism or it's just
striving for excellence. If you beat yourself up and tell yourself,
I'm a failure, I'm not enough, I'm terrible. You judge yourself.

(19:42):
That is a sign of perfectionism. That is called maladaptive.
That is a reflection of you not feeling like you're enough,
so you punish yourself. Whereas if you fall short, yeah,
you can feel disappointed for a while. That's fine, that's natural,
that's human. But then if you ask yourself, Okay, how
do I get better? How do I learn and how
do I apply what I've learned to implement it the

(20:03):
next time I do it to get further ahead. That's
called striving for excellence, And it all comes down to
your approach. I also spoke to someone very recently, a
highly highly successful business woman, very prolific on social media
as well, and she said to me, she's driven by
that sense of She described it as it's a sense
of not enoughness, but not to do with me. It's

(20:25):
that I have so much impact I want to create
that I don't feel like what I'm doing is enough.
And so for her, she's driven by purpose and service.
And so I said, okay, so what happens if you
get to the end of the day and you don't
feel like it was enough? From that perspective, and she said,
I just get more fired up for the next day.
And I said, does it make you reflect on you?
Do you become judgmental on you? And she said no.

(20:45):
I said, there you go. So you can be driven
by this incredible desire to serve others and to be
of value. And that's a fantastic way to still get
that desire to perform and to succeed. But for the
right reasons.

Speaker 2 (21:00):
I love that nuance because I think for so many
people it's very much like ambition bad, satisfaction good. And
that's such a simplistic way of looking at it. Because
you're so right, and I love that question of how
does it feel when you don't hit that goal. Do
you actually get more energy and more excited and more
focused and more diligent, or do you become more harsh

(21:20):
and more critical and more comparative. And as you were
saying that, you repeated this sentence a couple of times
when you were talking, you said, you are not your job.
And I was thinking, your work is not your worth,
and then I was thinking about just how hard wired
it is. So I was looking into this, and it
was about the time of the Industrial Revolution that work

(21:42):
became so much more attached to worth. Everyone knew what
role they played on the conveyor belt, there was the
division of labor. You now had everyone having titles and roles,
and the question became what do you do? And everything
became about title. Now, if you take it back a
bit further, you've actually got everyone's last names being represented

(22:03):
of their job. So you have Baker, Blacksmith, whatever else
it may be, and that became your name, and that
was just your shop front. And so this hard wiring
that we all have of our work being our worth
has been hardwired for a few decades now and probably longer,
but it's so hard to lose it because that's what

(22:25):
you're measured on since you were a kid, the grades
against your friends, then the college you went to and
its reputation, the degree you received, and then the first
job you got. And it's almost like, as you get
out of school, your job becomes the only measurable thing,
like the amount you earn in your job title, because

(22:46):
people aren't comparing like, oh, I've got seven kids, you've
got three, Like that isn't really a point of contention,
thank goodness, Yeah, yeah, thank goodness for sure, but that
isn't really the metric, or you're not like, oh I've
got you might compare like, oh I've been in religion
for ten years, You've only been in one for two,
But the job feels like oh this so much money
I make in this in my status. How do you

(23:08):
operate in a world which is created for that competition
and that comparison and not feel that short and for
it of like, oh I feel happy when someone else
is not making How do you manage both of those emotions?

Speaker 1 (23:23):
So we do live in a world that is absolutely
amplifying our self doubts and is almost designed to get
us to compare ourselves to others. As you said, in university,
you're often ranked against your classmates, and we don't really
have objective markers other than salary and how many cars
you have, and where you live and job title. And

(23:43):
the fact is, in the world that we live in
as well, your job does attract a certain perceived status,
you know, lawyers, doctors. Suddenly people go, oh, they pay attention.
But this is just fueling this comparison that we have
and this sense of not enoughness. So how do we
prevent ourselves. We need to knowledge we live in this world.
We're consumed by this world. It's very easy to internalize

(24:04):
these things. And that is why these four pillars are
so fundamentally important. Because we're just talking about the first one,
but as I go through the rest, you'll see how
you can also use the other three to counterbalance. So
a lot of people struggle with acceptance and they think, Okay,
I need to get my acceptance really strong before I'll
be able to move forward and succeed and be happy.

(24:25):
Not necessarily it's a lifelong journey. You can actually lean
on other attributes, so we call them the four a's,
the four attributes of self trust, which reflect our self image.
You can lean on your other attributes to help you
take action anyway, focus on what you need to focus
on and prevent yourself getting stuck in that comparison cycle.
Something that we do share though with people is if

(24:46):
you feel like you're constantly comparing to other people and
you're feeling like you're worse off, You're feeling like you're
not as good as they are. Something that's really valuable
is to move from comparison to what we call emulation.
Comparison is pitting two things against each other and looking
for differences. Emulation is cool. Look at what that person

(25:08):
is doing, how did they do it? And how can
I emulate that? So I can do it too. So
you take learnings from their journey, apply it to your own,
and suddenly, rather than feeling, oh gosh, I'm so far behind,
you suddenly realize, hey, if they can do it, I
can do it. What's that first step I'm going to take? Yes,
So that's one step you can take. It's to really
focus on, Okay, how do I stay in my lane?

Speaker 2 (25:29):
Yes? Yes, I love that.

Speaker 3 (25:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:30):
I've often said you can turn your envy into study
and it's beautiful.

Speaker 1 (25:34):
That beautiful like.

Speaker 2 (25:35):
How can you take this feeling of like, oh, why
did they have it? And why am I so behind?
And they're show ahead and go okay, well what did
they get right? And I think often when you start
doing that, you realize, oh, wait a minute, they actually
got a lot wrong too, And when you actually start
looking and paying attention to someone, you go, oh, they
actually had three businesses that failed before that. Oh, I

(25:57):
just know about the one that took off. Oh, they
went through a divorce through that. They haven't had a
perfect life. They've had a lot of difficulty. Oh I
didn't realize that. You know, they lost a child. Like
when you actually study someone, you actually get this textured, colored,
multifaceted view of someone versus the oh they're on the
front cover of Forbes, or they're on the front cover

(26:19):
of Time magazine or whatever else it may be, and
then you don't get that texture. So I love that
idea of turning it into emulation. And I assume with
what you're saying, that's also just a habit that every
time you see something and you feel envious and you
feel that feeling of being left behind, you just go okay, well, no,
let me learn from it. Let me study that right.

Speaker 1 (26:38):
Absolutely, all of these things that we're talking about are
actually just habits. And in fact, I would argue that
a belief is simply an habitual way of thinking. Yes,
so when we understand that their habits, it also empowers
us to realize, hey, we can create better habits over
the old ones. And what happens in those moments when
you start to notice that self doubt, that inner criticism
that I don't feel good enough to happening, is you're

(27:00):
often tending to and this links to the third pillar,
which we'll get to, you tend to start focusing on
things outside of your control. This is why all of
these four they really do. They rise and fall with
each other. You start focusing on things outside of your control.
When you do that, what we notice when we look
at brain scans is that there's less activity in your
ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for rationality and solution

(27:22):
finding and logical thinking, which means that your thinking is
largely driven by the emotion centers, which is why it
feels so self consuming. When we're in that state, all
the emotions come with it and all the negative thoughts
come with it. I'm so far behind. I'm never going
to be as good as them. I'm a screw up.
Whatever it is. So consciously catching yourself out is an

(27:43):
incredibly powerful first step. And then the next step is
to direct your attention. Direct your attention to what you
can focus on, moving to that idea of study or
emulation that in itself is re engaging those frontal regions
of the brain, which is going to help quiet in
the emotion centers and allow you to take the best
next step for you.

Speaker 2 (28:04):
What's that? I love it. Before we go into the
other three, which I really want to do, I want
to ask you. I'm taking this tangent because i can
feel people thinking about it, and I'm like, okay, I
want to ask it, like, fake it till you make it?
Is it actually good advice?

Speaker 1 (28:20):
Fake it till you make it is something that we
hear constantly. I don't necessarily like the idea of faking
anything because I think that links to in authenticity and
it might give people permission to do things that are
completely insincere. I like to use what Amy Cuddy describes
as be it until you become it, which is, you know,
it's a matter of semantics, but I think it resonates

(28:41):
so much more with people who are all about sincerity
and authenticity and integrity. You do not have to fake
being someone else. You need to be that person, have
the energy that you want to be exuding, see yourself
achieving what you want to see, who you want to
be right, and then show up every day as if
you've already achieved. It is this remarkable thing that happens

(29:01):
which has not been able to be measured just yet.
When someone puts out to the universe, I want to
achieve this, I believe I'm this, and then they start
acting in a way that is aligned with that. Things
are attracted to them, opportunities come their way importantly too,
though they also take the steps to put them on
that path. Just on this point, I want to mention

(29:22):
something really fascinating that comes out of the research, Something
that we see a lot of people talk about online especially,
is manifestation. Manifest who you want to be, be it
till you become it, have the vision bought on your wall,
and I definitely think there is some power in that. Again,
it has not been able to be measured as far
as I'm aware, but there is another element where if
you're visualizing yourself becoming something and believing you can achieve

(29:46):
that what you're doing is changing yourself image. You're updating
that blueprint. You know, we spoke about it earlier. The
idea of these scars. You're allowing yourself in your mind
to create this new concept of who you are. Because
if you cannot see yourself as being there, as deserving that,
you will inevitably sabotage yourself as you get there. Yes,
you will notice everything getting in your way, and that'll

(30:07):
be proof that, see, I can't do this. So that's
the idea of upgrading yourself image. So that's really really powerful.
But then a lot of people get stuck where they
just have this view of where they want to go,
they're so clear on it, they're excited about it, and
then suddenly they just they flounder. And it's because of
two things happening. There was a study that was published
that found that when we have these beautiful positive they

(30:29):
call them positive fantasies, these visualizations where we want to
be and we feel them and we embody them, it
can actually sap your energy. Why because when we then
face a roadblock or a setback, that we are completely
unprepared for it, challenges that view that hey, I can
get there, and suddenly we start to think, oh no,

(30:49):
we start to anchor back on our current self image
and think too hard, I'm never going to get there,
I don't deserve it, I'm not capable enough, and then
we retreat. So there's an important step and second step. Right,
So you need to visualize yourself getting there. But then
you also and this is contrary to what a lot
of people suggest, what the research suggests, what we encourage

(31:10):
all of our students to do is be very clear
on what are all the things that are going to
get in the way of you getting there? Be really
clear on that. A lot of people say, no, don't
anticipate that, because you'll will it into existence. No, we say,
be very pragmatic. What are the things that could get
in the way. One of them is, well, my own
belief about myself. The other one is the people I'm around.

(31:33):
Maybe they will prevent me from getting there. It could
be boredom, it could be this obstacle, that obstacle, that
set back, that failure. Write them down. But then there
is an important second step. If you only write them down,
you're going to enter an entire world of catastrophizing and worrying.
So the next step then is to ask yourself, what
will I do if and when this happens. You create

(31:54):
your contingency plan, your recovery plan, so that if it happens,
you have your steps, You've prepared, You've essentially been there before,
so you don't need to worry about spiraling into overthinking
and worry and catastrophizing. You say, nope, I've been here,
I've got my plan. It's called an implementation intension. And
if you come up with these if then you are

(32:16):
going to be more likely to achieve that goal, more
likely to persist when the roadblock, when the failure comes,
and more likely to move towards where you want to go.

Speaker 2 (32:33):
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(32:58):
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org forward slash on purpose. It's so fascinating, isn't it

(33:24):
that the human mind either imagines everything going wrong, yeah,
or imagines everything going right. But then you're presenting this
like medical ground of be pragmatic, be aware. If this,
then that and that's the reality of life, Like that's
where you're going to live. Like if you just sit
there in dreamland and think of everything being perfect, we

(33:45):
know that's never going to happen. And also we have
this tendency to just think in nightmares where well, everything's
going wrong, nothing's ever going to work out, I'm not
worth anything. And these we almost gravitate to these extremes
because they feel safer in a way weird way. Why
do we do that? Why do we gravitate to these extremes.

Speaker 1 (34:03):
The brain craves certainty. The brain fundamentally crave certainty. And
the reason why when we look at fundamentally why the
brain does what it does, it's primary function. A lot
of people say its primary function is to protect us.
There's a little bit more to it. The primary function
of the brain really is to make sure that the
rest of the body is doing what it needs to
do while using the least amount of metabolic energy. Right,

(34:27):
so it needs us to function while using as little
energy as possible. And so part of that is obviously
protecting you because then if you're in a situation where
you're having to deal with something terrible happening, the brain
has to put in a lot more effort. So it
will often magnify everything that could go wrong, because if
it does that, it gives you a sense of certainty, no,
this is going to happen. You're going to fail, you're

(34:48):
going to fall short, they're going to laugh at you,
they're going to reject you, and at least you know.
At least you know so that you don't do the thing,
because if you do the thing and that happens, your
brain's going to have to put in a lot more
work to get through that. So if it can prevent
you from taking that step. And we actually refer to
this as what's called the misguided protector in our mind,
it's that voice, it's an inner deceiver, and it's trying

(35:10):
to protect us, but it's misguided. But fundamentally, it will
highlight everything that could go wrong, so that we don't
take action because then it succeeds, then we're safe, but
we're stuck. And then the other extreme, of course, is
only visualizing where we want to be because again it's certainty. No,
I'm guaranteed for that to happen. And then we know
what happens when you hit a roadblock. Suddenly everything crumbles

(35:32):
and then you go into the other side. Oh no,
all these things are going to go wrong. So when
we recognize that this is just our brain doing what
it needs to do, there's something else which is really
interesting here. There is a connection between intelligence and anxiety.
People who tend to be higher on intelligent IQ ratings
of IQ, they tend to be more aware of complexity,

(35:53):
more aware of all the risks that could go wrong,
which then leads them to overthink about those risks and
then overthink about what could happen if those risks actually occurred,
which increases anxiety, which reduces confidence and then reinforces that
initial state of awareness of the complexity. And so if
you're listening to this and you feel like you're constantly

(36:14):
overthinking and you're constantly aware of risks, it could be
that you have a slightly higher than average IQ. But
it's also important to know that we can break that cycle.
We call it the spiral interrupt technique. When this is happening,
the part of the brain that's activated is the emotion center,
the threat detection center. It's trying to identify everything that
could go wrong to keep you safe. So what you

(36:34):
can do is control your attention. Bring your attention back
to what can I control right now by literally saying
to yourself, this is my brain doing what it does.
I am safe to act anyway. So again, simply by
doing that, by consciously controlling your thoughts, you are re
engaging those prefrontal regions, which reduces activity in the amygdala,

(36:57):
in the fear centers, and allows you to have that
of rationality. So then decide what's next.

Speaker 2 (37:02):
Yeah, I can think of a really good personal example
of that. I remember. So, I was very fortunate to
go to public speaking school from age eleven to eighteen
and had training and found it comfortable being on stage
and everything else. But then as soon as my scales
started to change and I started to work in different
audiences and different arenas, in different spaces, I could notice

(37:23):
that my heart rate would go up. I could notice
that my hands would start to shake. I could notice
that I felt sweaty palms. I could notice that I
felt nervous and anxious. And I used to start to think, well,
I have the skills, and I'd like, what am I
doing wrong here? Like you know, and I'd overthink that,
and then I'd overthinking, go, oh my god, everyone's going
to see my handshaking, and then am I going to

(37:44):
hold the card? Or like should I put it down?
Or like what if my slides? And then you're overthinking it,
and it was it's what you just said. And I
had a different set of words for it that I
would say internally, and it was just, no, this is
what happens when I care. Yeah, And what I started
to realize was, oh, when I care, my body's going
to do this. And I can go and give an
amazing talk anyway, but I care. That's all it's showing me.

(38:08):
And I don't need to stop this or I don't
need to get over this, or I don't need this
to disappear in order for me to go out there
and do what I do. And you're so right that
simple moment of and it goes back to acceptance that
this is just biologically what happens when I care. Yeah,
get a bit nervous and yea, my heart beats faster
and all the things that and it's like, Okay, if

(38:29):
I can reframe that, so much can happen.

Speaker 1 (38:32):
I love that you mentioned that one as well, this
idea of caring, because when we acknowledge that our brain
is just doing what it's wired to do, and then
we can essentially interpret what we're feeling in a way
that's going to serve us. And so we can either
interpret that heart rate, as you said, as you get
into the overthinking of the overthinking and then you're stressed
about the stress. It's called a meta emotion where it's

(38:52):
like an emotion about an emotion and it just spirals
out of control. Or you can say, no, no, this
is my brain is just doing its job. I'm prepared,
I'm ready, I'm going to be of service here. I care.
I care about delivering a good outcome. And it's powerful
when you recognize that.

Speaker 2 (39:08):
Yeah, what's the second A Okay, so.

Speaker 1 (39:10):
That's the first day, that's acceptance, the second eight.

Speaker 2 (39:12):
There's so much more in the book. I just read
so much more there's so much more in the book.
I am just moving us through as rediscussed about, how
do you want to.

Speaker 1 (39:20):
Hear one other thing for people who struggle with acceptance,
just because it comes up so frequently, especially for people
early in their careers. And this was me fifteen years ago,
working in corporate in a male dominated environment. I started
my career as a lawyer, commercial law. I was in
that industry for four years. Then I moved into banking
and finance for six years. Oh gosh. The whole time,
I felt like an impostor. I felt like I didn't belong.

(39:41):
I felt like a hiring mistake. But I get I
got very good at faking it. So okay, now I'm
going to share a little bit of my story. So
when I was very young, the age of three or four,
I had a beautiful, supportive Persian family and we'd always
get together at my grandparents' house and have kebbab that
my grandpa would make, and then after dinner, so I
was I liked performing as a kid after dinner there

(40:02):
would be this chance shah thereby I had bed asset,
which means shah de has to dance for us, and
it was great when I was a kid. I'd get
up and I'd do my little thing, and they'd watch
and they'd cheer, and it was fantastic. But then as
I got older, I started to enjoy it less and less.
But I didn't know how to say no, and so
at the age of nine or ten or twelve, I

(40:23):
still felt like I had to perform to make people happy.
This was entirely in my head. If I had communicated
to them or said a boundary, I said, look, I
don't feel like it, they would have been fine. My
family loved me. I didn't know, and I internalized from
a young age that I am only as good as
the performance I'm giving, which means making other people happy.
And I have carried that with me through my entire career.

(40:44):
In fact, one of the drivers of me doing a PhD,
which was one of the hardest things I've ever done,
was because of this feeling of not being enough and
needing to still prove myself, which is the wrong reason
to do anything. And I will tell you this much
it's done, and I still don't feel I still haven't
developed that acceptance. So it's an ongoing process for me,

(41:04):
and I'm very aware of it and I'm working on
the habits to develop it. But when I entered the workforce,
so I did law because I did really great in
high school and I had a lot of pressure to
use those grades. So it was like law, medicine engineering.
I wasn't going to do meta engineering, so I did law.
I did it with psychology because I was passionate about people.
But law was so difficult for me that I had

(41:26):
to focus so much on it and I had to
overcompensate because I didn't feel like I belonged. I tried
to drop it after the first class, but any case,
I kept with it never felt like I belonged. I
was able to do really well. I got fantastic grades
at the end, got a job in a top tier
commercial law firm, but that feeling of this is not me,

(41:46):
this is not for me, stuck with me, and I
was trying to fake it till I made it. So
I was becoming someone different. I was speaking differently, I
was showing up differently, trying to sound smart and credible,
using big, fancy words to fit in. What I now
know is that that can backfire. Studies have been found
that when you use unnecessarily complex language where you're trying

(42:07):
to be perceived as more credible and competent. It does
the opposite, and it undermines your credibility and your competence. Simplicity,
it's all about simplicity. But I didn't know that, so
I carried that through banking. I was so full of anxiety.
I literally hide behind my cubicle so people couldn't give
me work because if they didn't know I was there,
I wouldn't basically be given it. Then I moved into
banking and finance, convinced that if I moved into a

(42:29):
different industry, I could start fresh, reinvent myself, leave the
doubt behind. Do you think that happened. No, absolutely not.
Doubt doesn't work like that. I took it with me
because of my self image, because I was carrying that
self image around the scars I had. And again I
came from a wonderfully supportive family, and still I had scars.

(42:50):
And one of the things as I was doing research
for this book is there's a lot of talk about
attachment theory and those early experiences. What some people experience
is a secure attachment style when they're young. They have
a supportive environment, full of love and validation and yet
still as adults, they feel like they're not enough, and
could be one of two reasons. It could be that

(43:12):
you feel so indebted to your family that you feel
like you need to keep performing for them to make
them proud. The second reason is that you might also
have had a sibling who was challenging just by nature
of their personality, and you saw that and you didn't
want to be that, and so you became the opposite.
You became the good kid to be that for your parents,
and you just take that with you. So that was me,

(43:33):
and then I started feeling guilty about why am I
feeling this self doubt? I have no reason to, and
so it became this whole big thing. Anyway, seven years
in banking and finance, I eventually found my way. I
tapped into roles that I loved, learned to lean on
my strengths, and I stopped trying to be like everybody
else and realized, hey, I'm here because I have some
value to offer. How do I tap into that value?

(43:55):
And then so that was kind of my journey, and
that I completely forgot the question that you asked me.
But that's a little bit about my how I got there, Oh,
what I wanted to share is something that I used
to do, which people listening might do if they struggle
with acceptance. Because we want other people to be happy
with us, we say yes compulsively, reflexively before we even

(44:16):
know what we're saying yes to, So we end up
taking on more work, we end up doing more than
most people, We end up exhausted because we don't know
how to say no. Say no is a superpower, but
it all comes down to how you say it. So
something that we encourage is what's called intentional delay. All
it means studies have found that if you just delay

(44:36):
by a number of milliseconds, you make a better decision
under pressure. So what that means is if someone asks
you to do something, instead of immediately yes sure and
then having to spend your entire weekend at work, you
would say, I would love to help let me get
back to you by the end of the day to
make sure I am able to or let me check
my calendar and I'll get back to you within an hour.

(44:58):
So you're doing two things. You're creating a delay and
then committing to get back to them. That process allows
you some space to then ask yourself Okay, is this
something that I genuinely want to do or I feel
compelled to do because I don't feel like I'm enough.
You run it through that little criteria, and then if
it's compulsion because you don't feel like you're enough, you
give them a polite decline, and if it is something

(45:21):
you want to do, you go ahead and you do it.
That is a powerful way to remind yourself that what
you need matters to and you can politely decline without
affecting a relationship.

Speaker 2 (45:31):
Yeah, that's the hardest part. I think we all have,
because I know you write about in the book that
we respond to social rejection like physical pain. Yes, we
think that if someone and social rejection works two ways, right,
Like one social rejection is you're not invited to a party.
But the other type of social rejection is you saying

(45:51):
no and then thinking the other person thinks you're mean
or bad or rejects you in the sense of, oh,
you're not good at your job. And I think we
often don't talk about that second version of social rejection,
which you get from standing up, setting boundaries whatever it
may be, where you go. I don't think I can
do that, and then someone goes, oh, I knew you
didn't care, right, like a friend or whatever it may be.

(46:11):
And that's a feeling of social rejection, which feels like
a punch in the gut. It does feels like someone
just stabbed you because you're like, no, I don't care.
I love you, I'm there for you, and you're like no, no, no.
So so many of these things are so hardwired, Like
you just said, your example is, I was listening to
you speak, and I was thinking about your beautiful family
who loves you, and and I get that. It's so

(46:32):
in our head where it's like, oh, I have to dance.
I've always danced, I've always made everyone laugh, I've always
told jokes. I've always got good grades. I'm the good kid.
I'm the hyper Labels the labels, right, and those labels,
most of us put them on ourselves. Sometimes they did
come through teachers and parents. Of course, there's plenty of
versions of that. Ripping off a label is not easy.

Speaker 1 (46:56):
It's painful.

Speaker 2 (46:56):
It's painful, right, so that ripping off a name tag
is wherever, but ripping off a label is so much
more painful. How do you encourage people to go through
that process of ripping off a label. I'm the dancer,
I'm the entertainer, I'm the performer. When it shows up
in all areas of their life. They're now doing it
for their partner, they're now doing it at their job,
they're now doing it to their siblings. And it's like, well,

(47:19):
if I start tearing this off, people are also going
to be like, Oh, you don't want to entertain me anymore. Oh,
you don't want to make.

Speaker 1 (47:24):
Me laugh anymore, you don't care about me any.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
Don't care about me anymore. And that's what they're really saying.
So the cost of ripping off a label is so
high for people, How do you begin that journey?

Speaker 3 (47:38):
Like?

Speaker 2 (47:38):
What do you do?

Speaker 1 (47:39):
So to peel off a label? You need to have
a deeper yes? What does that mean? We often say
yes to other people because we're trying to maintain who
we are and that perception, and again, that risk of
social rejection is so painful that we want to avoid it.
What's really helpful is to okay, you know that there's
a yes that you can be given them. What is

(48:00):
your deeper yes? What is you declining this thing going
to allow you to say yes too? Which is actually
more important for you in the long run. So it
might be saying no to working late tonight is me
saying yes to spending more time with my kids before
dinner time, me saying yes to investing in my physical health.

(48:21):
So there's this idea of know what your deeper yes is,
so that you're not just saying no to someone, you're
actually honoring something within you. But the second element these
labels that we wear. The brain loves labels because the
brain lacks efficiency because it wants to operate with the
least amount of metabolic energy. So it'll label things hot, cold, good, bad, true, false.
And we also slap these labels in ourselves. I like

(48:43):
to encourage people once you're aware of your labels. Now,
how do you know what a label is? It's anything
you put off after the words I am, I am intense,
I am boring, I am unworthy, I am such a procrastinator.
These are labels. The more moment we have I am
before something, we are internalizing that we're making it mean

(49:04):
something about us and we are identifying with it. And
this is really dangerous refusing with that label. So we
had a client that we worked with right around the
time of the pandemic. She just started a new job.
She was a senior leader and she when I initially
met her, I said, tell me about yourself. So she shared,
she loves pickleball like you Jay. She was a mother.

(49:25):
She had just started this new job, and she said,
and I can be intense. But when she said I
can be intense, her entire face wrinkled in disgust. So
I knew there was something there, and I said, what
makes you use that label? So quick side note, this
is just a little other tip. I avoid using the
word why in any conversations, in any client meetings, the

(49:48):
word why can be like an interrogation. People get defensive.
Why j why that you suddenly get on edge. But
if you say what, what was the reason? It's so valuable.
And this is effective for teamwork, This is effective for feedback,
even speaking to your partner. So this little side note,
But in any case, I asked her, I said, what
does that label mean to you? Where does it come from?

(50:08):
And she said, well, when I was leaving my previous role.
As I was leaving, my boss said, oh, you're intense,
but we'll miss you. And that label stuck. And this
was a label that she'd stuck on as an adult,
but when we dug deeper, we found out. So she
was one of I think seven kids in an Egyptian family.
When she was a kid, she was the youngest and
she had to fight for attention, so she was loud,

(50:30):
she would scream, she was what they would call too
much all the time, and so as a kid, she
internalized this belief of I am too much. And so
when this label got attached to her intense, it brought
back all those memories. And so if someone has a
label like this, what's really important to do is to
acknowledge that you don't have to necessarily rip it off.

(50:51):
You can replace it. So with her, I said, okay,
so describe your intensity to me. And she described what
it meant. And I said, okay, well, I that as passion.
What if you said I'm passionate? And she had this
moment of recognition in her face. She said, Oh, my goodness,
you are so right. I'm passionate about what I do.
I'm passionate about life. That is why I care so much.

(51:13):
It's pure passionate, it's not intensity. And that moment of
recognition fundamentally changed the meaning she'd applied to the quality
that she had, and then she started showing up with
that passion and owning that passion, and that was her
reclaiming a label. But if you have a label like
I'm boring or I'm such a procrastinator, you need to

(51:34):
shift it into something that is growth oriented or actually positive.
So we hear I'm boring a lot from the people
that we work with, and we supplore it. Yeah, when
we get down to it, a lot of them will
claim that they get funny enough. I have a scar.
I feel like my story is boring. I don't like
talking about myself too much because I genuinely don't think
I have an interesting life or interesting story. So I

(51:55):
have this I'm boring narrative. I don't know where it
came from. Actually I probably do. I'm not going to
share that, but God, so I when I was in
high school, my parents went through a divorce. It was amicable.
I'm blessed with a truly remarkable family. It was an
amicable divorce. But naturally, anyone who experiences that, you start
to question could I have done anything differently? Should I

(52:17):
have been more supportive? Should I have done this or
been a better kid? And so I internalized that, and
one way that that came out is not wanting to
talk about it with anybody, because it's almost like if
I spoke about it, it would make it worse. So
I just bottled it all up. And so from around fifteen,
I stopped sharing about myself. In fact, even when I

(52:39):
entered the workforce, I had a group of work friends
and one of them broke up with me. A female friend.
She broke up with our friendship because she said, I
feel like I don't know anything about you, and you
know so much about me. What she was referring to
in that situation was I don't like to share a
lot of the negative things going on in my life.
A lot of especially women, and like to connect by

(53:01):
sharing negative things. All you think that's bad, look at
what I'm going through, and that's how they bond, which
in itself is not necessarily healthy. But because I wasn't
sharing much about myself at all or any of that,
I wasn't able to connect with people. And so that
is something that I have taken with me through my
entire life, and I'm still kind of trying to shake it.
But this idea of replacing a label would be Okay,

(53:21):
so a boring label could be you'd replace it with
I am thoughtful and I like to give other people
time to share what they're going through. Right, So it's
not I'm boring, it's just no, I'm more thoughtful. I
prefer careful deliberation, and I like things to be stable
and grounded, and I like making other people feel seen.
That's one way that you take a behavioral characteristic that

(53:42):
you have and flip it into something that is not
a negative, which then allows you to feel like you
can build on it. What about I'm such a procrastinator.
We get a lot of these, so we share a
lot of content on social media, we get a lot
of people commenting and sharing, and this idea of I'm
really you know, I procrastinate all the time, I can't
get started. You shift from I'm a procrastinator to I'm

(54:05):
learning to be better with my time and take action
over overthinking. So you take a label and you shift
it into what you want, and that's one way that
you're changing that self image. You're changing it to be
what you're aspiring to work towards. And once you can
see that, you're more likely to actually move towards it.

Speaker 2 (54:23):
Yes, yeah, I mean thank you for sharing that back.
Of course, thank you for being so open, because yeah,
it's always harder to share those types of things and
the things you're struggling with. And I can relate to
what you're saying as well, Like I find myself being
someone who loves deep, thoughtful conversation, so I gravitate towards

(54:44):
one to one even in a big group of people.
And initially many years ago, and especially when I moved
to LA and you know, got invite to all sorts
of events and everything, in the beginning, I would just
feel like, oh, I didn't There was a part that
felt I didn't belong at these events because I was
surrounded by people that I grew up watching on TV
and film. And then there was another side of me,

(55:07):
more interestingly, which was, oh, I don't know how to
do small talk and small talk's not my thing and
I don't know how to navigate that. And that even
happened when I went into the corporate world, because after
I left the monastery where we didn't do a lot
of small talk, it was very difficult for me to
go into corporate networking scenarios because to me, the conversation

(55:28):
just didn't go anywhere, and at that time, I would
start to think, maybe I'm boring, Maybe I have nothing
to say. Oh I'm not that funny because I can't
just quip and whatever. And I'm good at building rapport
one on one, but just in a group, I just
didn't feel confident about it. And I started to reframe
it as I'm just going to look for the one

(55:49):
person that I can have the deepest, most beautiful conversation with.
And what's amazing is wherever I go, I have to
go to so many events for work or whatever is
and I just found the one person that I had
the most meaningful connection with. And what I found is
that just turned into loads of great friendships. And so
now I never feel alone anywhere because I know someone deeply.
They're knowing a lot of people in a shallow way
where I can still feel alone and disconnecting. What was

(56:12):
helpful for me was there are certain settings where I
will be boring, but there are certain settings where I'm
the least boring person in the world, and I'm just
looking for those And that acceptance allowed me to play
to my strengths and who I want to be and
what kind of conversations I want to have, And it's like,
I want to get to know someone deeply. I want
to share intimate things. I want to hear things back.
I want to hear about worldviews, like I'm fascinated by that.

(56:34):
What I don't want to hear about is where's the
best restaurant for dinner? I'm just not interested, Like that's
not And so in that conversation, I am boring, And
that's okay because I don't want to be interesting there.
And so I love what you're saying because there's so
much freedom when you address the truth of it and
you find the part of it that is, like you said,

(56:56):
growth oriented, not just positive. We're not positively spinning it
because that just feels fake. But it's where's the growth
side of this? That's what it was for me. The
growth side was go and find someone who wants the
same thing as you, because then you'll have a great time.

Speaker 1 (57:10):
How did you so when you were starting, let's let's
live to you if you don't mind, so let's do it.

Speaker 2 (57:15):
Yeah, this is your version of I'm boring side. I
listened to other people.

Speaker 1 (57:18):
Oh yes, so when you were starting in this space
and you found yourself in those situations. What kind of
self talk helped you stay grounded and not become self critical?

Speaker 2 (57:29):
The first thing I realized, And a lot of my
approach has been inspired through my monk teachers. So a
lot of what I would hear in my self talk
was what I'd learned. And so whenever I would go
to events in the beginning, people say did you talk
to this person? And did you network with this person?
Did you talk to this person? I was like no,
because I don't think that is the right thing to do.

(57:52):
Like I don't I don't think me going up to
someone that I don't know and doesn't know me and
starting up a conversation is authentic to me and who
I want to be. If it happens authentically, that's amazing,
but that's not authentic to me. My my authentic version
is to help people feel safe and comfortable, smile, be

(58:13):
courteous and kind, but to not be invasive, especially in
places where everyone's kind of stressed and anxious. And and
so my approach has always been to talk to someone
if they talk to me, to smile at someone, and
if there's a you feel a sense of like I
we're both looking for someone to connect to find it
and recognize that ultimately everyone's feeling anxious here. So there's

(58:33):
no one who's feeling confident and you're feeling anxious. Everyone's
feeling anxious because no one knows anyone and no one
knows who to talk to. So I think for me,
my self talk was trust hence beautiful title big, trust
your book. Trust that you don't have to meet everyone.
This isn't your only opportunity to do sell yours. This

(58:56):
idea of like like you know, sell yourself, hand out
your business card, every like I'm like, having a meaningful
connection with someone is probably more valuable than handing your
business card and shaking hands with everyone in the room
just so you can say you shook hands with so
and so and X, Y and Z. It's like to me,
it was it was reminding myself that value was deep,
it was meaningful, it was purposeful, it was intentional, it

(59:19):
was it was mutual. The imposter syndrome part, there was
definitely a lot of negative self talk at the stuff
like you don't belong here, it shouldn't be in this room,
like oh my god, you know, and I'd freeze a
lot and just I'm not even going to say a
low to that. I'm not even gonna smile because you're
so stressed out. Yeah, and I think the self talk
that got away that helped me get through that, I

(59:41):
realized it wasn't self talk. It was just showing up
and sitting in that discomfort. It wasn't so there was
no self talk, and I know that's going to lead
to it that it was just continuing to show up
feeling that discomfort, feeling that uncertainty, and recognizing that it
didn't stop me from connecting, smiling, meeting being myself. And

(01:00:04):
the biggest question I'd always asked myself. Actually, Trevannoah said
this to me when he came on the show. He
was like, Jay, you always fel comfortable at all the
things you're at, and I wouldn't sense that you don't.
And I said, well, that's because I only go to
things I feel I have a purpose at. And that
solved everything to me, where I was like, if I
know why I'm going somewhere, I can show up as
my best self. If I don't know why I'm going there,

(01:00:25):
and I kind of think someone thinks I should go there,
or someone on my team said it would be a
good idea. Now I hate being there because I'm lost,
Whereas if I know what my purpose is and why
I'm standing there, great like I could be alone there,
I could be everyone's best friend there, I could be
anything anyway. Sorry, long answer, no brilliant answer, the nuance
and complexity and not give you a you know, a throwaway.

Speaker 1 (01:00:47):
It was wonderful. Thank you so much, and I'm sure
everyone listening appreciates so much hearing your own journey and
your perspective as we go through this. There's a few
things that came to mind as you were speaking. One
of the things you said is that mistake that we
make when we think we're the only one feeling a
certain way. Everyone else must be confident I'm the only one.
It's called pluralistic ignorance.

Speaker 2 (01:01:04):
Interesting, I didn't know that way.

Speaker 1 (01:01:06):
Everyone actually feels that way. I mean, look, we say everyone,
probably ninety five percent of people will feel that. But
as you said, your ability to just show up in
the discomfort and acknowledge that, hey it's uncomfortable, but I'm here,
I'm safe, it's fine. That makes it easier. The next
time you do it, you develop what's called a tolerance
for discomfort, and that leads to amazing things. And then

(01:01:27):
the other thing you highlighted is that what helped you
is this idea of having a purpose and this idea
of not making it about you. It was this concept
of self forgetting that I'd mentioned as one of the
we call it the gift of self acceptance is the
ability to forget yourself and make it about other people.
So you said, if I have something meaningful to share

(01:01:47):
which is not about you, that's about adding something to
them that allows those voices to quiet in because it's
not just you doing it because you want to or
you think you need to, or you think you should.
It's for their sake. So that's beautiful. And then I
love how you brought in imposter syndrome, which brings us
beautifully to the second pillar, which is agency. So just

(01:02:08):
my way of recap, we've just covered acceptance for everyone listening,
and acceptance is essentially, when your self esteem is shaky,
you seek validation. You feel like you need to prove
your worth. Your sense of identity is attached to what
you're producing or performing or achieving. The next way that
self doubt can show up is not to do with

(01:02:29):
the I'm not enough or I'm not worthy, and entirely
to do with the can I actually do this thing?
Do I have the skills and the ability to do it?
And what we see here is a lot of people
will fall into imposter syndrome.

Speaker 2 (01:02:44):
Shay, can you actually define what imposter syndrome is?

Speaker 1 (01:02:47):
Imposter syndrome actually doesn't exist in the literature and the
research as the term imposter syndrome. It's called imposter phenomenon. Now,
just notice the difference between a syndrome and a phenomenon.
One of them is a behavioral phenomen phenomenon that was
observed among a group of people. The other one pathologizes
it and makes it seem like there's something wrong with us.
So imposter syndrome was initially discovered in the nineteen seventies

(01:03:10):
where they were specifically looking at women. So this was
high achieving women, women who had just entered the workforce,
women who had PhDs and a strong track record behind them,
and they felt like they didn't belong, They felt like
they were frauds, They felt that they were undeserving of
their success, They felt that everyone else thought that they
were smarter or more capable than they really were. So

(01:03:32):
there's two elements for the impost phenomenon we'll move away
from syndrome imposter phenomenon. The first element is that you
feel like a fraud that other people believe you to
be something you're not. And the second element is that
you have to have some kind of track record behind
you that allows you to feel like I don't deserve this.
If you feel like an impostor and you've just started
a new job, it's probably not impostor right, It's just

(01:03:55):
I'm in a new environment. I need to give myself
grace to learn. When we sell I diagnosed and say,
oh my gosh, I'm such an imposter, this is imposter
syndrome that can lead us to withdraw even further. We
use it as an excuse. So remind yourself, no, the
imposter syndrome or imposter phenomenon is only when I have
achieved something. I've just won this award, I've got this
amazing job, and I can demonstrate that I've got all

(01:04:17):
these achievements behind me, but I still don't feel I
deserve it. Yes, that is the definition of imposter phenomenon,
and it is so common, not just among women, but
also among men. Some studies have found that up to
eighty two percent of people at some point have felt
like a fraud. So if you've ever felt this way, firstly,
rest assured you're in very good company. The next thing

(01:04:39):
to be aware of with imposter syndrome or phenomenon is
if you feel like a fraud, Rather than hearing that
voice saying you don't belong, don't speak to that person,
don't speak up, flip it immediately to Wow, what an
amazing opportunity I have to learn and grow? Who can
I learn from? What do I need to develop here?

(01:05:00):
And it's this idea of shifting from almost comparison into
emulation or envy into study. Make it something action oriented
that's really powerful, and speak to someone about it. So,
you know, Jason Siegal from How I Met Your Mother,
he was describing on a podcast how he was when
he transitioned from actor into director on Dispatches for Elsewhere.
From Elsewhere, he was so full of imposter syndrome and anxiety,

(01:05:25):
and he said he didn't know what to do. He
was overthinking and it was becoming this big thing. So
finally he calls all the crew together and in front
of everyone. He says, Hey, everyone, this is my first
time doing this. Don't really know what I'm doing. If
I do anything that bugs you, let me know. I'm
sure we're going to have an amazing time. He called
it out. He acknowledged he didn't try to be perfect,

(01:05:46):
as we try to do when we feel like the impost.
We try to overcompensate so people don't find us out.
But he just acknowledged it. And he said it was
incredibly freeing. When you call out the fear, it shrinks it.
And so if you're ever feeling this way, speak to
someone about it. You'll probably find they've been there too.

Speaker 2 (01:06:03):
Yeah. And I love what you said about this idea
of because a lot of people ask me, they're like, Jay,
do you ever still feel self doubt or like an impost?
And I said, I always feel it when I'm doing
something new. Yeah, and that has made me realize that
it's got nothing to do with me. No, it's because
I'm trying to get out of my comfort zone. Yes,
So I love it now. So I love the idea
of feeling that way because it's proof to me that

(01:06:25):
I'm pushing myself outside of my comfort zone. I'm trying
something new or expanding something where building a new business,
for starting a new venture, we're creating a new service,
purpose program, whatever it may be. It's like I've just
never done it before. And yeah, if I keep doing
everything I've always done, I don't get nervous anymore. But
that's boring to me. Yes, and that's not exciting. And

(01:06:47):
so now that feeling of being uncomfortable and being nervous
and being wondering whether I fit in and everything is
great because it's a sign to me that I'm moving forward.

Speaker 1 (01:06:58):
Yes, it's growth with it integrity, as we say, because
if you had blind delusion, you wouldn't feel the doubt.

Speaker 2 (01:07:04):
Yes, right exactly.

Speaker 1 (01:07:05):
So you've got the integrity, the intellectual humility to know, Okay,
I haven't done this before. Here are the gaps. But
you're embracing the discomfort that comes with growth. You only
experience that kind of imposter feeling when you're stretched. You
would never feel that if you know how to do everything,
and if you're fully comfortable.

Speaker 2 (01:07:22):
And if you're a narcissist like you're actually, yes, well.

Speaker 1 (01:07:24):
Do you need to acknowledge It's like five to eight
percent of the population that we're not talking about.

Speaker 2 (01:07:27):
Yeah, no, but no, but that delusion point is true
that if anyone ever says, oh, I never feel any
self doubt, there's a sense of delusional confidence or a
lack of self aware, a lack of self awareness, which
isn't healthy because you're convinced, and it almost is an
insecurity projection because you're convincing yourself. No, no, of course
I don't feel anything. It's like, well, no, everyone's human

(01:07:48):
would feel. You'd feel something, no matter even if it
was really small, like if I feel this is a
terrible example, but because I don't cook, I can't cook
to same my life. It's like if if my wife
asked me to cook dinner, I would be freaking out
because I want to have a clue of what to do.
And it's the small it's a very small thing, like
people know how to do it. It's simple. It seems

(01:08:09):
like an easy risk. Yeah, now risk, yeah to some degree, yeah, exactly.
But that's the point that it's it's not even about
the grandiosity of the task. It's about what's new to
you and what you find difficult. And so no one
can even say, oh, but that's small or that's big, big,
and smaller, not the indicators of whether you feel uncomfortable.

(01:08:30):
And so for someone something uncomfortable might be doing something
really small, and for someone else, you might be doing
something really big.

Speaker 1 (01:08:36):
And exactly exactly. And a big part of that comes
down to your level of agency. Where do you fall
on that scale. So agency relates to what's called self efficacy.
That's a personality trade, which is the belief that you
can do what you need to do to achieve what
you want to achieve. I want to take you somewhere,
which relates to this, and it actually relates to the
overarching theme of the book Jay. If I were to

(01:08:57):
ask you, I mean, we've kind of primed it now,
but if I were to ask you off the top
of your head, what do you think the opposite of
self doubt is?

Speaker 2 (01:09:03):
Is it not self trust?

Speaker 1 (01:09:05):
Yeah? So AT primed you, so it's absolutely self trust.
So we find though that ninety percent of people, if
we haven't had this conversation, I should have asked you
that at the very beginning, when we ask this question,
ninety percent of people will say that it is or
ninety five percent will say it is confidence. Confidence, And
so many people so much of the population are waiting

(01:09:25):
for that feeling of confidence before they take that step.
They say, I'll know when I'm ready. You know, that
feeling of confidence that we wait for. Actually, when we
look at the literature, it does not come before we
take the action. It comes after we take the action.
Because the brain needs to see yourself doing the thing.
It gets a proof point, it gets an evidence point,
Hey I can do this. That then builds a degree

(01:09:48):
of skill and competence. Hey I did it and I
was okay, and I got better, which then boosts your
self efficacy, and then that creates momentum and motivation. And
that is the feeling that we've a asociated with confidence.

Speaker 2 (01:10:02):
So what do we need before the.

Speaker 1 (01:10:03):
What do we need before Well, when we actually look
at the word confidence, So I think this is where
the mix up happened. When we look at the origins
of the word confidence. It comes from the words in
Latin con and fidere, meaning with trust. And so really,
what we need before we take action is not that
feeling that we're waiting for. It's self trust, trusting that

(01:10:24):
you can handle whatever comes your way, whether you succeed,
whether you fail, whether you bounce back, whether you bounce
whatever it is, you will be okay. And in order
to do that, we call that the state of big trust,
which is recognizing these four attributes, reminding yourself that you
can strengthen them, working on strengthening them, and also knowing

(01:10:45):
which one can you lean on when you might be
weaker in the others. So that's and why this ties
into agency is agency is such a big part of
this because if you do not believe that you can
do the thing, if you don't believe that you have
the skills or the ability to learn or capacity to adapt,
you will not take that step. And so you will
perpetually wait to feel ready, and then you're waiting and

(01:11:06):
you will often occupy yourself or distract yourself with preparation
and planning and all the things that we do that
we think we're being productive by doing, but they're just
distracting us. It's procrastinating essentially. Yeah, we just need to
take the action. So agency is recognizing, hey, I can
do this. I have been here before, as in I've
been in unfamiliar situations and I was fine. How can

(01:11:28):
I draw on that I have handled challenges before? How
can I bring those attributes there's this fantastic story that
comes from Polisher, legendary graphic designer. So in the nineteen
it was nineteen ninety eight when Citybank was merging with
Travelers Insurance, creating City Bank. They or City Group, they

(01:11:49):
brought Polisher in to create the logo design. And so
she's sitting at this meeting and they're all talking about
what they want for this logo. She grabs a napkin
and she starts scribbling on this nap for a few seconds.
Finally she slides the napkin over and she says, here's
your logo. The table was stunned. They said, how is
it possible that you created a logo in a matter

(01:12:10):
of seconds. And she sat back and she said, it's
done in a second. And thirty four years, it's done
in a second, and every experience and everything that's in
my head, this is what happens when we lack agency.
I mean, Paul is showing us what it looks like
to have a strong degree of agency. When we lack agency,
often what happens is we start to undervalue the skills

(01:12:33):
and the strength that we've developed, because now they become
easy for us. They're no longer an effort for us,
and so we forget the value that they can add.
We've come to e quate and I think this is
a byproduct of the society that we live in. We've
come to equate effort with value. I must put in
effort in order to be delivering something of value, and
if it comes too easily, then it's not a value.

(01:12:55):
But that's because your expertise becomes second nature to you,
and then it becomes invisible to you. Not only that,
it can become invisible to other people if you do
something reasonably easily like this situation. How can you design
this logo that they ended up paying one point five
million dollars for? How can you do that in a
few seconds. You have to spend months creating this design

(01:13:16):
in order for us to pay you that money. No,
we need to remind ourselves that we have an incredible
track record of not only hard skills and tangible achievements,
but what we call essence qualities, the growth, mindset, the curiosity,
the persistence, the diligence, and these are things that you
develop not only at work, but importantly in life. We

(01:13:39):
forget when we're at work, and this used to happen
to me all the time, and it happens to so
many of the people in our programs. They start a
new job and they yes, they may not be able
to do the things that they need to do in
the job, and then they get so down on themselves
forgetting that they have all these other skills and attributes
that they can be applying to help them learn what
they need to learn. They can bring their growth mindset,

(01:14:00):
the curiosity, their desire to learn new things, their ability
to grasp things really quickly. They can bring all of
that with them, and as soon as you remind them
of that, they suddenly feel so much more at ease,
and it opens up their mind to learning quicker. So
if anyone listening is in a position where you don't
feel like you have everything that you need, everything on

(01:14:20):
the job description, and you're magnifying your gaps, which is
what the brain does, pause and write down. Firstly, write
down everything that you are needing to do. Write everything
on the job description for the role, whatever it might be.
In the middle column, what are all of the qualities
that you have developed over the course of your life.
And then in your third column, you're mapping your middle

(01:14:41):
column to your first column. Right, So I'm going to
bring my growth mindset for this one, this one and
this one. I'm going to bring my diligence for here
and here. I'm going to bring my ability to be
really tenacious to this, that and that. And then suddenly
you've mapped out what you need to apply and how,
and it's incredibly empowering and it boosts your self efficacy
and your sen of agency.

Speaker 2 (01:15:17):
You've reminded me because you just gave us the Latin
of confidence. I remember looking at the English Dictionary definition
of confidence, and one of them was the acknowledgment and
appreciation of one's own abilities and skills.

Speaker 1 (01:15:31):
Beautiful like, that's actually the Beau definition.

Speaker 2 (01:15:33):
So confidence isn't a feeling.

Speaker 1 (01:15:34):
It's not a feeling.

Speaker 2 (01:15:35):
It's not a feeling. It's not an attitude, it's not
a mindset. It's the acknowledgment and appreciation of what you've
just said, of one's own skills and abilities and qualities.
As you're saying, it's a bit more than that. When
I looked, I think it might even say qualities. Actually
I could be wrong. I actually think it might actually
say that. And now when I think about it, I'm
like of course, it's almost like when you're halfway up
a mountain, you have to look back down and say,

(01:15:59):
I've walked up halfway.

Speaker 1 (01:16:02):
As opposed to just looking at how much is left
to go Oly.

Speaker 2 (01:16:04):
If you just look at the top and you go,
oh god, that flag is so high, Oh my gosh,
there's so many you know, there's such a steep climb.
But if you look back and go, how did I
get halfway up it? That didn't take that long, Okay,
I've done half Okay, god noo. And it's just so
fascinating to me that we haven't been trained to do that,
to actually acknowledge. And I'd say that to everyone when
I'm speaking on stage sometimes and I'm working with someone

(01:16:27):
in the audience who's having a really tough time with this.
Something I like to remind everyone is each and every
one of you have been through something really difficult. Each
and every person has been through a extreme pain, whether
it was the loss of a loved one, the divorce
of family members, a break up, the loss of a dream.

(01:16:51):
Everyone there is no human on the planet who hasn't
been through something that for them was exceptionally difficult. And
you're still here and you survived, and maybe you've even
fallen in love again and have an amazing job and
have found kindness and grace within yourself. And if you
don't look at that as a monument and as a

(01:17:12):
marker of how far you've come, nothing will ever fill
that you have to There's nothing that will ever, ever,
ever ever fill that void, because if you can't notice
all the hard things you've done, you will continue to
ignore all the hard things you're about to do and
not even feel you're capable of them. And I love

(01:17:33):
that you're giving people a practical methodology in the book
and today in how to actually do that, And I
agree with you, before you apply for that job, do this. Yeah,
Like this is more important than putting your resume together
and all of that, because before that job interview, do this.

Speaker 1 (01:17:49):
I love how you've just touched on this idea of
the challenges we've been through, which leads us into the
third pillar. But before we get there, I want to
come back to agency for a moment. So when people
are applying for jobs, what's really valuable to know is
that you don't have to have one hundred percent of
what's on the job description, but you have to be
able to demonstrate if you make it to an interview
that even though you don't have everything that's there, you

(01:18:10):
have other transferable skills and attributes and qualities that you
will apply to learn what you need to learn. So
let me share an example with you. When I worked
in banking, I applied for a very, very senior role
that was probably three levels above where I was, and
I was completely underqualified for it. I already had another
job that had been offered to me, so I wasn't

(01:18:31):
this was kind of a side piece. I wasn't side piece, No,
it was it was an opportunity that you know, I
would have taken if I had it, But it meant
I didn't have as much pressure, so I got to
try something. So I went in there for the first
round interview and it went really well, and I went
back for the second round interview, which was the final one,
and when I came to sit down with the head

(01:18:51):
of this entire area, I sat down and he said
to me, look, Shade, I need to tell you that
we we're not entirely sure. And as he was finishing,
I jumped in and I said, it's very clear that
I don't have all the roles or all the track
record of having done this before. Yes, I don't have

(01:19:13):
experience in all of these things, but let me tell
you what I do bring. I have been in roles
in the past where I haven't known how to do anything,
and I very quickly got up to speed. I asked
what I needed to ask, I learned, I excelled, and
I was able to deliver In this example. I did this.
In that example, I did this. I see this as
being no different. Yes, I haven't been here, but I
will bring that. And in fact, I consider the fact

(01:19:35):
that I don't have experience a bonus because I'm not
going to do things the way everyone else does. I'm
going to ask the curious questions where everyone else just
takes it as a given. And do you know what
he said to me? He said, I had planned for
you to come in here today and me to tell
you that it's not going to work out, but you've
completely changed my mind. I now have confidence in you.
We'd like to offer you the role. So then I

(01:19:56):
asked for some time to think about it, and I
realized that actually the other one was better suited to me.
But it was a lesson in how you shouldn't take
yourself out of the game before the game begins.

Speaker 2 (01:20:07):
Yes, yes, go.

Speaker 1 (01:20:08):
In there with confidence acknowledge if you don't know how
to do The worst thing is to say no, I've
done it before and then get caught out. Don't lie,
but have the confidence, the conviction in the fact that hey,
you have a lot of things you've done before. You
can bring all of that right now, and in fact,
maybe it gives you an edge. And then you want
to tell them how you would spend your first ninety days.

(01:20:28):
So give them your ninety day roadmap, so you would
go in there and say, okay, So my first thirty
days is going to be spent getting a lay of
the land, to understand how people do things, to understand
the culture, and to really have more of an observational role.
The second thirty days is going to be me determining
what are the gaps that I need to fill the quickest.
I will be taking learning programs, I'll be doing training internally,

(01:20:51):
maybe shadowing some people. Now, when we get to our
final thirty days in that ninety day period, that's when
I'm implementing. That's when I'm developing a strategy for what
my next twelve months is going to look like that's
how I'm going to ensure when I start this role,
I'll be able to hit the ground running. And you
just say it with so much clarity and conviction that
they will be blown away.

Speaker 2 (01:21:12):
Yeah, Yeah, it's yeah, And especially if you follow through,
it's brilliant because women, when they see a resume, underestimate
what they can do. Men overestimate what they can do.
And I feel that a lot of those women won't
apply for a job because they can do seven out
of the ten times, whereas the research shows a man
will apply even if he can do only four or
five out of the ten things. As a woman in

(01:21:34):
the example that you've just given as well for your
own life, like, what can women do to not bow
out before the race?

Speaker 1 (01:21:43):
Is to not bow out before the race, essentially, don't
take yourself out back yourself. And something that's really valuable
here is what we also know when we've looked at
neuroscience studies is that women tend to evaluate rejection harder
than men, in the sense that we deem it to
be much worse than for example, a man may, so

(01:22:05):
we have a tendency to really blow it out of proportion,
and that's why we often don't want to try something
if we don't think we're going to succeed. We're keeping
ourselves safe again at the function of the brain. So
if you can say to yourself, I'm not taking myself
out of this race, I'll let them take me out
if they don't think I'm suited, but I'm going to
put my best foot forward. I'm also going to remind
myself that even if it doesn't work out, that is

(01:22:26):
not a verdict on me. I'm not going to make
that mean something about me. I'm just going to learn
and do better next time. When you can frame it
that way and also start to get more comfortable with rejection.
So there's this idea of rejection therapy. Now, the principle
behind it is that if you fear something, you're going
to avoid something. If you fear a spider, j you're

(01:22:46):
not going to go near spiders. But if you want
to get over that phobia, what we do is the
process of systematic desensitization, where first I'd show you a
picture on my phone of a spider, then next I'd
show you a video, Then next I'd have a spy
in a cage on the other side of the room.
Then it would come closer, then it would be right
in front of you. Then it wouldn't be in the cage.
Then it would be on your hand, and you're systematically

(01:23:08):
I mean, this wouldn't all happen in a day, This
would be over a number of sessions. But you're essentially
telling your brain, hey, I can feel that fear, but
I'm safe. And what happens is you desensitize yourself to
that fear, and so by the time you've got the
spider on your hand, you're not having that massive emotional
reaction anymore. Same principle applies when it comes to things

(01:23:30):
like rejection. If you can put yourself in low stakes
rejections where you might apply for a bunch of roles,
knowing that you'll get rejected, great, do it. And then
when you get rejected, you ask yourself, Okay, am I
making this mean something about myself? No, fantastic, it doesn't
mean anything about me. I'm going to try again next time.
The more you do this, the more you learn that
it's okay. You are still you, You still have value,

(01:23:51):
you can still accept yourself, you still have agency, and
you can apply what you need to apply to achieve
what you need to achieve. So that's one process to
think about. So any women who were listening, or even
men who hold back, stop holding back, take the step.
What's the worst that could happen?

Speaker 2 (01:24:09):
Did you see any other differences between men and women
in your research?

Speaker 1 (01:24:12):
So I saw really clear differences when I used to
coach men and women. And this is actually even before
I was officially coaching. We don't even coach anymore. We
don't do one to one, we do group sessions. Now
will work with companies. But when I coached, and I
was actually coaching, when I was still working in banking,
so I would have people reach out to me colleagues,
co workers, peers, leaders and asked me to coach them.

(01:24:33):
I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't
know what it meant to be a coach. I had
no credentials, nothing, But I loved to help, so I
started helping as much as I could. And what I
discovered is that the women who would reach out to
me would do so because they had self doubt. They
were holding themselves back. They wanted to ask for a raise,
and they didn't have the courage to do so the

(01:24:53):
men who reached out to me for coaching wanted to excel,
they wanted to perform better, they wanted to be more productive,
they wanted to start a side business. And it was
really really clear that what they were seeking helpful was very,
very different. It's not that these men didn't have self doubt,
but they see in that environment. It was a small
sample and anecdotal entirely, but it seemed like they just

(01:25:15):
wanted to get ahead and know how they could move faster,
whereas these women felt like they were stuck and they
needed to get unstuck. So I found that really fascinating.
I think part of it is that men typically don't
like to share the doubt that they're experiencing. They see
it as a weakness, whereas women we are just much
more in tune with that, we acknowledge it, we share

(01:25:36):
it with communicative and then also potentially there's this element
around sharing at work. So this is moving slightly in
a different space, but still really valuable for anyone listening.
A lot of women are branded as being emotional when
they're insecure, when they have, you know, they feel a
strong emotion in a meeting or something like this, Interestingly,

(01:25:58):
a lot of men have very strong emotional reactions to things,
but it's more anger or frustrated or stress. They don't
get labeled as emotional. So what some research has found is,
if you feel like you're being labeled as emotional because
maybe you've got a lot of self doubt and the
insecurities coming out in that moment, say out loud and
to yourself, I'm just really passionate about this. I'm acting

(01:26:21):
this way because I'm so committed to seeing this through,
or I'm so committed to doing a good job. By
shifting from emotional to passion or commitment, it fundamentally changes
how people see you and how you see yourself. And
so that's just a little tweak, a little hack that
comes from the science around helping to Again, it's almost
like this labeling, you're not emotional, you are just passionate,

(01:26:42):
you really care deeply about this thing. And then again
it allows you because you're shifting your attention to then
focus on, Okay, what am I doing next? So, Jay,
now I think we should go into the third pillar.
Are you ready to dive through?

Speaker 2 (01:26:53):
Yes?

Speaker 1 (01:26:54):
So the third pillar is what we call actually, before
I tell you the third pillar, I'm gonna share Bruno's
story with you. So Bruno was an entrepreneur who reached
out for help. He was running a business, it was
doing really well, and yet he was one of these
people who would always find a problem in every solution.

(01:27:14):
He would always focus on what was wrong and it
was always everyone else's fault. So the very first time
that we met, he walked in, he was rushing, he
was complaining about the weather and the traffic and the
fact that it was so hot in the room. And
he spoke for about five minutes, ranting. We hadn't even
shook hands or sat down. He was stuck in this

(01:27:34):
litany of grievances. Finally we sat down, we started speaking,
and what I discovered is that Bruno has a number
of common patterns. He was an endless complainer, chronic complaining
about everything. Not only that, he was very resentful to
other people. He felt like everyone else had an easier
life than he did. Other people's business success was easier,
that he felt like he was constantly having to work harder.

(01:27:56):
The third pattern was blame. Is constantly blaming other people
for issues that he was responsible for. He was never
willing to take ownership. And the fourth pattern is he
would keep reliving past hurts, so past times that he
had been hurt by somebody, someone had double crossed him,
someone had treated him poorly. He kept sharing that story. Now, initially,

(01:28:20):
when you're having a conversation with someone you listen to
these stories. Of course you have empathy. By the tenth
time they're telling you this story, within a few months,
you realize they're stuck in a cycle that is keeping
them stuck when it comes to complaining. And I'll share
what the attribute is in a moment. But when it
comes to complaining, we don't realize. This is a sign
of a lack of self trust because we lack the

(01:28:41):
trust that we have the ability to do something about
the situation. So what do we do? Focus on what
we cannot control and magnify it and complain about it,
because it's easier to complain than to take ownership and
do something. When we keep reliving past hurts, things that
have happened to us in the past, we're telling what's
called a contamination story. Jay, you mentioned earlier how every

(01:29:05):
single person has lived through hardship, every single person, and
depending on the story that they tell themselves about that hardship.
It determines how they feel about that hardship, whether they
internalize that hardship and make it mean something about them,
and then whether they feel empowered in their lives or
the victims. And I'll come back to that story in

(01:29:26):
a moment, or the example of the hardships, because I
do have a really great case study for that. But
coming back to Bruno, what we discovered is that he
had a very low level of what we call autonomy.
He felt like he didn't have the freedom to make choices.
He felt like he didn't have the ability to influence
his outcomes, and that's why he fixated on everything outside

(01:29:48):
of his control. This relates to what's called a locus
of control. So Jay, you have a locus. I have
a locus. Everyone listening will have a locus of control,
which comes from the Latin word location, which means where
do you place the control in your life? Do you
believe that you can control things? And I'm not talking
about control everything, because we know a lot of life

(01:30:09):
is uncontrollable, but do you believe that you have some
degree of influence or that life is happening to you
because of external forces or other people, or society or
the government. If you have an external focus, external locus,
you will focus on things outside of your control. What
other people think, what other people do, what other people say,
what the government is doing, what the media is doing,

(01:30:32):
what your neighbor is doing, what your brother is doing,
the future of the past, things that you cannot control.
And then how do you feel when you're focusing on
those things? You feel powerless? Why? Because you are powerless.
When you have an internal locus, you acknowledge that you
can influence the outcome, you can shape your path. Again,
not everything is controllable, but you focus on what you

(01:30:53):
do have control over your thoughts, your feelings, your interpretations,
your actions. That is it. And when you focus on
those things, guess what, you remarkably feel more powerful because
you're focusing on things you can do. We also know
when people get stuck. So where Bruno was when he
was in that external locus, we see a lot of

(01:31:15):
activity in the emotion centers of the brain, very little
activity in the prefrontal regions, which is what we need
for rationality and solutions and logical thinking. So, if you
ever find yourself feeling like you're complaining, feeling like a victim,
and I'm not talking about real victims. I'm talking about
those who victimize themselves. If anyone listening ever feels that,

(01:31:37):
and the reality is it can happen, especially when unfair
things happen in your life. You need to tell yourself, okay,
instead of why me, what now?

Speaker 2 (01:31:48):
What?

Speaker 1 (01:31:49):
Now? It's happened. I can't do anything about it. I'm
not going to dwell on it. What am I going
to do about it? And we have this great little
exercise we love to share with people. It's called the
I could and that I will list So when people
get to this state, if we encourage them to think
about what you will do next, often what happens is
that they start to think about all the things that
they should have done or that they should do. And

(01:32:12):
the language of should is very disempowering. It does one
or two things that either makes us feel like we're
falling short or that we're being compelled against our will.
And we don't like being told what to do. It's
called reactants. And when we hear a should, often it's
like a part of us is telling us what to do,
and we don't like it. We resist it, so we
avoid the words should. So when we move to coulds,

(01:32:32):
research has found that when you use the word could
instead of should, it opens up divergent thinking.

Speaker 2 (01:32:38):
It's remarkable, it's a remark, it's a word.

Speaker 1 (01:32:41):
Sometimes when I look at some of this research, I think,
how is something this simple so incredibly powerful? And it's
because words create worlds inside us and outside of us.
So you shift to could. Grab a piece of paper
and you split it into two two columns. On the left,
you right your I could list. What are all the
things that you you could do in the current circumstances,

(01:33:02):
whether you've just been laid off from your job, whether
your business failed, whether your relationship has broken down. What
are all the things you could do right now that
allows you to feel a sense of okay, there are opportunities,
there are possibilities. Here. You're also directing your attention, which
reduces that emotion activation re engages your prefrontal regions. Next step,

(01:33:23):
what will you do? Circle three things from your could
do list and write them in your will do list,
and you write I will bang bang bang, and then
you take action. You're hijacking that ruminatative part of your
brain and gearing yourself towards action, reminding yourself that no
matter how bad things are, you always have a choice,
and you're choosing to take a step forward. So we

(01:33:45):
shared all of this with Bruno and we had to
go through this long process. But for Bruno, there was
something else that was really affecting him, and it was
this contamination story he was telling. He kept telling people
and himself, my life is so difficult. It's always been
so difficult. It's always going to be so difficult, and
it took a lot of time to shake that. We
worked him through a process which I'll share in just

(01:34:06):
a moment, but I want to share a story that
we shared with Bruno and he loved it, and so
I think all the listeners will appreciate this. So this
is in the When was It Okay? So there's a
nineteen year old boy. He's a drummer and he loves drumming.
This is a true story, by the way, I'm not
making this up. He absolutely loves drumming and he's playing
with his band for two years. They are working together,

(01:34:27):
they're refining, they're so excited and they feel like they're
just on the brink of something really phenomenal happening. It's
at that moment that his manager calls him into the
office and he sits down. He's not really sure why
he's there, and they say to him, look, Peter, we're
letting you go. We're replacing you with a different drummer.

(01:34:48):
And he wasn't even really given an explanation. Just like that,
his dreams of working with this band and taking them
to stardom had just crumbled, and he didn't even understand why.
And they said, we're replacing with a drummer by the
name of Ringo. This band was the Beatles, right before
their global megastardom. They replace their drummer. Now, Peter Best

(01:35:12):
goes through a depression. He starts spiraling, he becomes resentful,
he becomes suicidal. He's loading bread in the back of
a delivery van while he's seeing the band that he
worked with for two years on a global tour becoming icons.
But today he tells a different story. He says, everything

(01:35:33):
I've been through, happy and sad, good and bad, have
made me who I am today. I wouldn't change any
of it. He acknowledges that life would have been very different,
but he chooses to tell a story that is centered
around ownership. And he chooses to focus on what he has,
his beautiful wife, his wonderful kids, his grandchildren, and he
even says, he goes, if you dwell on all the

(01:35:54):
bad things in your life, and if you have a
regret or resentment, you will become a twisted and bitter
old get which is a very English thing to say,
but it's so true. And he embodies this idea of
the stories that we tell. So what he was referring
to here is what we call, or what psychologists and
researchers call, a redemptive story. Dan McAdams has researched this

(01:36:18):
for forty years and he's found there are essentially two
stories that we tell. A redemptive story is one where
bad things happened and we redeemed ourselves, We learned something,
we grew stronger, we accepted it. A contamination story is
where that story has become contaminated in your self identity,
your self image. You carry those scars with you everywhere,

(01:36:38):
and then you keep seeing it replayed because remember how
you're showing up. The scars that you're carrying shape your expectation,
which then influences what you see through expectation.

Speaker 2 (01:36:47):
Bias huge that's huge.

Speaker 1 (01:36:49):
So that's another and a lot of people say, well,
how is this self doubt? And I love that this
is considered part of your self image because if you
do not believe or trust that you have the ability
to shape your outcomes or redefine your story, you're going
to struggle. And that's why this third pillar is autonomy.

Speaker 2 (01:37:07):
There's something you said today that really struck me. I
was saying that everyone's been through hard things, and the
way you flip that really powerfully, and it was subtle,
was that but it's how you feel about how you
got through those hard things that define how they impact you.

(01:37:29):
And that is so true and powerful. Like that really
really hit me and resonated with me. I don't think
I've heard it being said like that before, because, like
you said, you talked about your parents' divorce, and even
if it was even though it was amicable and you
had a loving family, your take was what else could
I have done? So even though you've been through a

(01:37:52):
hard thing, you see it as your fault in some way,
or you see it as something you could have done better,
and therefore thinking about that hard thing and getting through
it doesn't make you feel stronger it makes you feel
weak and insignificant and whatever else you would use to
describe yourself, because your memory of it and your story

(01:38:12):
of it is I failed. Yes, your story of it isn't.
I'm still alive and it's still survived, and I'm still good.
And that is magnificent as a as a case study,
because that's why people's difficult times don't inspire them, because
their difficult times remind them that they're a failure. Yes,
because that's the story that they built around. Yes.

Speaker 1 (01:38:33):
And we also know that when you're remembering a memory,
you're not actually remembering the first thing, the first time
that it happened. Yeah, you're remembering the last memory you
had of it. Yes, And this is why actually memory
is so fallible. They've done some studies where they've looked
at suggestion and they've had people witness a crime and
then they get asked to report on the crime. And

(01:38:54):
let's say there was a yellow car that was speeding
by the person asking questions would say how fast do
you think the red car was going? And because they're
not thinking about the color of the car, they'll report
a speed and then the next time they ask them,
that person will say yeah, it was a red car.

Speaker 3 (01:39:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:39:12):
And so we need to be so mindful every time
we relive something. And this is why overthinking, resentment, complaining
is so dangerous. We're re wiring this into our system
and also just remembering the last time we remembered it.
But you know what's beautiful about that. It means that
you can actually change the meaning you're applying to these events,

(01:39:33):
and then when you start remembering the new meaning, you
start to fundamentally change the memory. You mentioned something that
I love sharing about, which is the bad experiences happened
to us, the unfairness, the colossal pressure that we face,
the whatever it is, the heartbreak, the early death, the
challenges at work, business failure. A lot of these things

(01:39:57):
may lead to PTSD. If something is traumatic enough, it
will lead to PTSD. And a lot of people in
their minds think traumatic experience PTSD. But did you know
that there's quite a large number of people who never
experience PTSD. They experience post traumatic growth. I do not
talk about this enough.

Speaker 2 (01:40:15):
I've never heard of it.

Speaker 1 (01:40:16):
I've never heard of it either until I came across
the research. There was a really large number of people
who don't go through the traumatic negative experience, They experience
growth from that traumatic experience, and then when they've had
a look at what is causing the growth, there's one
quality that they have curiosity. They don't just accept the

(01:40:36):
situation for what it was and then internalize it for
what it was. They ask questions about the situation. Could
I have changed this? What could I have done differently?
How did I feel when that was happening? What if
I were to approach it this way? They go through
almost a process of self inquiry, almost like coaching themselves
to try and determine, Okay, what actually happened and what

(01:40:56):
was my function? And can I change my interpretation? And
they use it to get better rather than become bitter.
And that is a powerful reminder to us that we
can reclaim that autonomy. So how do we do it?
How do we change these stories? It's a process called
narrative reidentification. It comes from narrative therapy. It's been around
for decades and it's been proven to be highly highly effective.

(01:41:19):
It just takes time. Essentially, what you want to do
is determine what is the story you're telling yourself. So
in Bruno's case, his story was that my life is
more difficult than everyone else's. And when we got deeper,
it's because when he was growing up, he had an
older sister who was the golden child, did everything right,
achieved amazing things. He was constantly compared to her, and

(01:41:41):
he wasn't given freedom to make decisions because his parents
had assumed that he's going to mess up. They told
him this is what you do. This is because you're
never going to be like her, so we will create
your path for you. So he never had a sense
of autonomy, which led him to constantly focus on things
outside of his control because he had nothing that he
felt he could control. So we had to work through

(01:42:02):
that process and this was really confronting for him because
he naturally would resist, but we worked through it and
he was open to it. Then the next step is, okay, Bruno,
is that story serving you? Genuinely? Is it serving you?
And it took him a while to acknowledge that no,
it wasn't. He doesn't want to feel that way. So
then the next step is, okay, how would you rewrite
this story in a way that served you? What would

(01:42:25):
you tell someone else? Let's go through that process, so
you essentially rewrite your story focusing on what you learned,
how you grew, and how you became stronger using that curiosity.
And this took a little while for him to get
comfortable with that and work through it. But then every
time I would ask him, tell me your story again,
tell me again, focus on what you learned. And it
was remarkable seeing how he changed every part of him,

(01:42:49):
changed the way he would turn up, the way he
initially would spend five minutes complaining at the beginning of
a session to suddenly be smiling, sitting down, ready to
get going. And this is because when you re edit
your narrative. Now we're not saying you change the facts.
You cannot change the facts. What has happened has happened.
But studies have found that the real power comes not
in changing the history, but in changing the meaning that

(01:43:10):
you have applied to that, what it means for you,
how you've interpreted it. And you can edit your story
at any point in time, which is the most beautiful thing.
And this is a process that I actually take through
people through in the book and Bruno stories in there
to work through it because a big part of it
is okay, great, we know this, but how do you
do it? And that's essentially why I wanted to write
this book, to help people have this guide to step

(01:43:33):
by step work through these processes to strengthen these attributes.
And when you can do that for autonomy, you suddenly
feel more personally powerful.

Speaker 2 (01:43:41):
Yeah, because we just make it out like everything's our.

Speaker 1 (01:43:44):
Fault completely or everything's out to get us.

Speaker 2 (01:43:46):
Yeah. Yeah, and there's enough evidence to prove that. Yes,
if you're looking for it. Yes, we know that there's

(01:44:09):
things we can control and there's things we can't control.
But when you were saying you're calling it the external locus,
when your mind space is locked in the external locus,
you feel powerless because you are. Yeah, and that I
love that connection because if we believe we're powerless, it's

(01:44:31):
because we're finding all the evidence that we're powerless. So
if I considered the weather today and your mood and
my success online today as a dictation of how good
I am, then I'm going to feel powerless because I
actually am powerless by the three metrics that I've chosen

(01:44:52):
to do it by. So it's not even that your
story's inaccurate. Your story is just wrongly focused completely.

Speaker 1 (01:44:57):
Your attention is on the wrong thing.

Speaker 2 (01:44:58):
Yeah, and so just that simple shift back to say, okay,
let me actually only measure myself by things I can control.
And I don't know why we all believe that we
can control someone else's mood, our boss is mood, the weather,
the timeline, the schedule. Like, I just don't know why
we feel so strongly that we can control the things

(01:45:19):
we can't and that we can't control the things we can.

Speaker 1 (01:45:21):
Because it's easier to do that. It's much harder to
focus on what we can control, because then we feel
empowered and we have to do something about it. Remember
the brain, the brain likes certainty, and it wants to
use the least amount of effort possible. And if it
gets you to focus on everything outside of your control,
you're not using your prefrontal regions, which require a lot
of metabolic energy, and so great it's easier for the brain.

(01:45:44):
We go down these habit paths of overthinking and catastrophizing,
and then we don't have to do anything about it.
We don't have to take the step into discomfort, we
don't have to risk the rejection or the criticism by
trying the thing. There's this beautiful analogy of a cow
and a bison, which I came across and I loved
and I had to put it in the book, and
I want to share it because it's very short, but

(01:46:04):
it's so poignant to what we're talking about. So cows
and bison are very similar in terms of their animal history,
very very similar to their cousins in the animal world,
but they have a very very different approach to how
they weather storms and challenges that they might experience, like
a physical storm. So cows have been observed to huddle together,

(01:46:26):
usually under a tree, but also they generally walk away
from the storm, so they'll walk with the wind and
then what happens is they end up receiving the brunt
of the storm when the storm eventually catches up to them. Bison,
on the other hand, have been observed to walk towards
the storm. They walk into the wind, which counterintuitorly means

(01:46:48):
they generally pass the brunt of the storm they get
through it much quicker. So what is the insight that
we learned from this, Well, there are two mindsets. There
is the bison mindset, where you see the bad thing,
you acknowledge the bad thing, approach the bad thing knowing
that there's light on the other side, or the cow mindset.
You avoid the bad thing. You run away from the
bad thing. You don't want to own up to the

(01:47:08):
bad thing or take ownership over it. You run away,
and then it'll just get worse and worse and worse.
Some people don't like the you know, thinking of themselves
as a cow, so you can think of something else,
some other animal, a labord or whatever it is. But
we need to be asking how do we embody more
of that bison mindset? How do we just acknowledge you know,
life is hard, life is really hard, and you get

(01:47:29):
to choose how you're going to show up to that
hard Are you going to try and avoid it? Because
what we also know part of this pillar is recognizing
that the more you expose yourself to hard things. So
this goes back to your story Jay about how you
just embrace the discomfort and now you love it. The
more you can expose yourself to discomfort. So when we're
experiencing discomfort, it's the brain's way of telling us, Hey,

(01:47:50):
this is uncertain. I don't like it. Go back and
play it safe because then I don't have to use
as much energy. Right, But if you can acknowledge that
that discomfort is often what triggers neurotrophins in the brain,
which are these proteins that help us learn things and
develop new pathways in the brain. And it's through discomfort
that we get that way. And that's why learning something
new is uncomfortable, because it's triggering parts in the brain.

(01:48:13):
But the more you do that, the easier it gets,
and then that initial discomfort is so much less the
next time, and then less the next time. You almost
reinterpret what you feel. Hey, I feel this way because
I care. I feel this way because it's excitement, not fear,
and that idea of being the bison, stepping into the discomfort,
putting yourself out there. A lot of people talk about luck. Oh,

(01:48:34):
I'm going to share one more story with you. It
from Christopher Nolan. It's such a good one.

Speaker 2 (01:48:37):
I love you know. Nolan's my favorite, brilliant Okay, so.

Speaker 1 (01:48:40):
You're gonna you're gonna resonate with this. You're gonna resonate.
So Christopher Nolan for anyone not so familiar, he's the
incredible director of Oppenheimer and Inception and what.

Speaker 3 (01:48:49):
Else is it doing Dark Knight trilogy exactly. Yeah, phenomena.

Speaker 1 (01:48:52):
Yeah, Memento is brilliant, and a lot of people, oh Interstellar,
that's right. A lot of people will say he is
phenomenally lucky with the weather when he shoots.

Speaker 2 (01:49:03):
Interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:49:04):
Okay, noomenally lucky because incredible, incredible scenes with just the
weather being exactly what it needed to be. Like, there
was this one scene in Inception not inception in Oppenheimer
where they were doing the detonation of the first nuclear
bomb and they had this incredible, dark, ominous storm that
was rolling in and they were able to film and

(01:49:26):
get this incredible scene that created cinematic magic. There was
so much drama. Now, Nolan in interviews he rejects the
idea that he's lucky. He says, I am not lucky.
I am incredibly unlucky. But we have made a pact
and a commitment that when we go out there, we
shoot no matter what the weather conditions are in and
that allows us to capitalize when the right weather is there.

(01:49:49):
So what is the lesson that we take from this?
Nolan's team has created an environment where they embrace the
discomfort of not knowing what weather they're going to have.
Some days it rains, some days it's sunny, some days
it's great, some days it's not. They film regardless, So
they're exposing themselves to that discomfort so that when the
opportunity arises like that amazing storm, they know how to

(01:50:11):
handle it. They've been in similar situations. They are prepped,
they are primed. And we call this earned luck. So
it's not just oh my goodness, we got lucky, No,
we earned that luck. We created what's his name is.
There's a tech entrepreneur who calls it a luck surface area.
You can increase your luck surface area and the chances
that you will receive good luck by exposure to discomfort, visibility,

(01:50:36):
putting yourself out there, putting your hand up in the meeting,
applying for the job that you think you're not going
to get. You don't know unless you try, and that's
the sign of your autonomy. And so strengthening that attribute
is so important for that state of big trust, so
you can start to achieve the things you want to achieve,
get the opportunities that you really seek.

Speaker 2 (01:50:54):
It's amazing talked about accept and we've talked about agency autonomy. Yes,
I love that you taught You taught me something about
Nolan that I didn't know because I'm a big Nolan geek.
So I love that. What's the fourth one?

Speaker 1 (01:51:07):
The fourth one is what we call adaptability, and it
specifically relates in the context of doubt and big trust.
It relates to your ability to adapt to your emotions.
We cannot necessarily control emotions. We can guide them, we
can harness them, but they will often come in response
to a stimulus. Yeah, so how do you adapt to it?

Speaker 2 (01:51:26):
So for that, what I want to do is I
want to give you a series of scenarios okay, where
I think you are having emotions, Okay, to help you
answer it. Sound good? Yeah, okay, great, all right, because
I think this is what I was saving these for
because I feel they'll their moments in time that all
of us experience where there is an emotional reaction and

(01:51:46):
we need to know how to adapt.

Speaker 1 (01:51:47):
Yes, brilliant.

Speaker 2 (01:51:48):
So you're about to speak up in a meeting and
your brain floods with what if I mess up?

Speaker 1 (01:51:55):
So we call this the three second spiral stop. So
when this happens, you want to acknowledge. So first we
take a breath, take a moment, take a breath three seconds,
breathe in second step, is to acknowledge that your brain
is just doing what it's meant to do. It's just
wired to magnify everything that could go wrong. But it's okay.
There's no physical danger here, so you need to remind

(01:52:16):
yourself nothing terrible is going to happen. The fourth are
way up to the third step. I think we're up
to the third step. The third step is to keep
your whatever you're going to say, keep it as short
as possible. And the reason why I say this is
because your brain is magnifying what could go wrong, because
you probably haven't done this many times. It doesn't really
have the proof points that you can do this and
do it well. And if you try and go out

(01:52:38):
there and the first thing you want to say is
a five minute monologue about you're going to fluster and
lose it, and then you're going to have a negative
evidence point. So keep it really short. You might validate
what someone else has said. That's a great idea, Jay,
or I'd like to build on what Simon said, Or Maria,
can you repeat that one more time. I want to
make sure my notes have it correctly. Really low stakes, easy,
you're just allowing that energy to come out once you've

(01:53:01):
done that and you've got the proof point. The next
step is, Okay, now I'm going to really share what
I wanted to share. Ask that longer question, share my perspective.
I know I can do it because I just did
it before. I'm also going to breathe again. I'm going
to remind myself there's no physical threat, and then I'm
going to speak. You want to make sure that you're
not speaking fast, because when our emotions are in overdrive,
we get nervous. We speed up our pace, which then

(01:53:23):
can make people zone out or it undermines our credibility.
So speak slowly, have a pause, importantly, make eye contact.
That's what allows people to stay engaged. And that's how
you can harness your emotion in that moment.

Speaker 2 (01:53:36):
Got it. Great adaptability? I love that, all right? This one.
If you're in a meeting and a coworker takes credit
for your work, what do you do?

Speaker 1 (01:53:45):
So you're in a meeting and that coworker takes credit.
There are two scenarios. Either it's happened before or this
is the first time. Let's start with If it's the
first time, you might feel that negative emotion bubble, that unfairness,
that inequality, that this is not right. What I encourage
you to do firstly, determine whether you speaking up now
is what you want to do. Sometimes it's not even

(01:54:07):
worth it. Let it go. But if this is something
that you really need to get recognition for, you put
in a lot of work, you really feel like this
is important, call it out immediately. So Jay, let's say
you're taking credit for my work. I would jump in.
Even if I have to cut Jay off a little bit,
that's fine. I'd say. What Jay's trying to explain is
that he worked on the initial proposal. I then jumped

(01:54:29):
in and I worked with clients and we got the
whole project going and it was a fantastic team effort
and we're really proud of what we've created. You immediately
jump in there, add you in. You don't say that's
not right, Jay, I was involved. You guide the conversation,
bring it back to the team, and then make it
about the impact or the effort at the end. And
that way, it's a polite way to just remind the person, Hey,

(01:54:49):
you're on notice, I was involved in this too. Now,
if it keeps happening, you want to have a conversation
with that person, which is hard because again, if you
lack acceptance, you're also going to feel very insecure. What
are they going to say? What if they're going to
hate me? What if it's going to damage their relationship?
Have a conversation with them in a private environment, and
you would say, hey, j I've noticed. So you make

(01:55:11):
it about an observation, I've noticed that in the last
three meetings when you have so it's when you when
you have taken credit for the work that we've been
involved in. When you I feel, I feel like my
contributions are not valued or appreciated, and I would like
and I would like us to be a part of

(01:55:31):
a team that recognizes each other. Okay, So when you
I feel and I would like, And then what you
want to do at the end is how do you
feel about that or what's going on for you when
you take credit for this work? Are you aware of it?
Allow them to speak, and then again you're politely highlighting
to them, Hey, I'm aware that you're taking my credit.

(01:55:52):
It's kind of not okay, it's happened before. How are
we going to address this if it keeps happening. You
would have a private conversation and say, look, if this
does keep happening, I will mention it. Every meeting that
comes up where you do take the credit, I will
jump in and say, hey, this was me too. How
do we make this work for the sake of our relationship,
for the sake of our collaboration. So you want to

(01:56:12):
focus on assertiveness. Tone is going to be important. You
don't want them to become combative, but also giving them
an opportunity to defend themselves if they weren't aware of it. Yeah,
you know, giving them the benefit of the doubt, which
helps you feel like you're not going in there combative,
You're going in there with a collaborative view.

Speaker 2 (01:56:28):
Yeah. That's good. And hopefully if you're dealing with a
slightly mature individual, they'll be able to receive it well,
because I think that's half the battle. That you're working
with someone who just you know, to that if someone
just got fired or lost their job, what would you
encourage them to do?

Speaker 1 (01:56:46):
I could, I will list So if you just lose
your job or you just got fired, and you're generally
what will happen is you will feel very low autonomy
because these things are completely out of your control. You
might also feel a lack of agency. Oh no, I
got fired. Does that mean my skills are not valuable?
You might then experience a lack of acceptance. Oh no,
I'm a failure. I'm never going to be good enough.

(01:57:06):
And then the adaptability is going to be going crazy
because your emotions are firing. So what will help you
as the first step is the autonomy piece?

Speaker 3 (01:57:14):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:57:14):
Okay?

Speaker 1 (01:57:15):
What are all the things that I could do right now?

Speaker 3 (01:57:17):
Well?

Speaker 1 (01:57:17):
I could reach out to someone, I could ask the
interviewer for feedback. I could update my LinkedIn I could
you know what? I could take a day off and
just process this and then I will What will you do?
You might be like, you know what, I'm going to
take a day off to process this because this was
a lot, or I'm going to take a week off,
I'm going to take a month off.

Speaker 2 (01:57:35):
Whatever.

Speaker 1 (01:57:36):
But remind yourself you can take an action and then
take the action and then make your plan. But fundamentally,
if we bring it back to big Trust, you have
to remind yourself you are not your work. It was
a business decision. It is not a reflection of your value.
Maybe let's say that you were an underperformer and it
was a reflection of your performance, you still say to yourself,

(01:57:56):
this is data that I'm going to process and get
better next time. Next one agency, I can improve my skills.
I can go work for an organization that values the
skills that I already have. I can learn what I
need to autonomy what am I going to focus on
right now to keep moving forward? And then that adaptability,
what else do I need to do to make sure
that my emotions are in check? And a lot of

(01:58:18):
it is reframing. So instead of saying I am anxious,
because remember this idea of labeling anything that comes after
I am, we internalize it feels like it's fixed. Instead
of I am anxious, I'm noticing a thought that I'm
feeling anxious because this thing happened. Identify the stimulus. Instead
of I am a failure, I'm noticing a thought that's

(01:58:39):
telling me I'm a failure because I just lost my job.
You're creating what's called cognitive diffusion, separating yourself from the thought,
reminding you you don't have to believe everything you think,
which also reminds you you don't have to believe everything
that your mind tells you to, and that can be
really powerful I.

Speaker 2 (01:58:56):
Love how your four a's just fully encapsulate the entire
process and give us something to turn to. It all
times is to quickly diagnose which one we're struggling with
before the domino effect happens and it all start toppling
each other own shut it today has been I have
learned so much from me. I feel like you've blown

(01:59:16):
my mind with research, fascinated me with stories, so many
great practical tips, and it's all inside this new book,
Big Trust, Rewire self doubt, Find your confidence and fuel
success by shutters A right pre order your copy. You
will have it for the new year so that you
can start your new year with less self doubt, find

(01:59:38):
your confidence, start trusting yourself. Please pre order this book
right now. As an author who knows how hard it
is to write books, authors put in so much time,
so much effort to put together. As you can tell,
Shat is one of the most researched, most well read,
and you know, comprehensive thinkers that we have like that.
It's such a brilliant tapestry of a step by step

(02:00:02):
process of what people can actually apply in their lives.
And so it'd mean the world to me if you
go and support her book, Go and pre order it.
Pre Orders help authors a lot too, So I just
want to put it out there that if you've been
if you found value in today's conversation, which you'd be
crazy to think you haven't, then please go and pre
order the book Shadow. We end every episode with a
final five. These questions have to be answered in one

(02:00:23):
word or one sentence maximum, So Shadows, all right, these
are your final five. Question Number one, what is the
best advice you've ever heard or received?

Speaker 1 (02:00:33):
My mum always encouraged me, if you want it, ask
for it.

Speaker 2 (02:00:37):
Great advice.

Speaker 1 (02:00:38):
So why I asked my husband to marry me?

Speaker 2 (02:00:39):
Did you I did?

Speaker 1 (02:00:41):
That's more than a sentence. So my incredible husband, Faisal
is also co author. So a lot of the ideas
I wrote it, but a lot of the ideas are
our ideas. When I met him, I had a deep knowing.
It wasn't even an emotional thing. It was a deep
knowing that, Okay, this is the person I want to
spend my life with. And then we got to a

(02:01:01):
point where I said to him, it was very quick,
it was It all happened in a year. We met,
we were married within about nine months. I said to him,
I can see us having an amazing life together. It
was basically like, look, this might be forward, but I
can see us having an amazing life together. That was
essentially me proposing, and then he said how do we
make that happen? And that was him accepting.

Speaker 2 (02:01:24):
That was it.

Speaker 1 (02:01:24):
So there was no will you marry me? Getting on
my knee. It was just a conversation making sure we're
both on the same page. And then it happened so quickly,
and then from that moment to when we were married
was like three months.

Speaker 3 (02:01:33):
That.

Speaker 1 (02:01:34):
Yeah, so if you want to ask, because in fact,
Steve Jobs shares this story of how when he was young,
he was about twelve years old and his neighbor was
the head of Hewlett Packard and one day he just asked,
He said, can I come in and learn some things?
Can I just come into the office? And he said
it was that ability that he had to just ask,
because ninety nine points seven percent of people will not ask.

(02:01:57):
They will wait for someone to tap themselves on the
shoulder to give them the opportunity. They will wait to
get the promotion or get given the raise. It doesn't
work like that. We don't live in that world, especially
in the context of work, where studies have found that,
especially in big organizations, managers don't remember at least sixty
percent of what their teams do. They either don't know
or don't remember, which means if your manager is not

(02:02:19):
aware of what you're delivering, you need to ask for
what you want and demonstrate it by way of tangible value. Right,
here's what I'm delivering, here's what I'm asking, So we
have to ask. So that was wonderful advice from my mom.

Speaker 2 (02:02:30):
I love that question. Number two, what's the worst advice
you ever heard? Who received?

Speaker 1 (02:02:35):
The worst advice that I got was when I worked
in banking. I had someone say to me. It was
a manager at the time. He said, I think you
should just go into roles where you help people. Now,
the reason why I found that bad advice at the
time is he was saying it because he was trying
to undermine me. I was in a highly strategic role.

(02:02:55):
He was basically encouraging me not to pursue that, to
just go and help people. Now, if someone says that
to you in a bank, it's not a good thing.
The reason why that was bad advice is that sometimes
we get advice. This is such a long response, sorry,
but sometimes we get advice from people that they come
out as if they're caring about you and they have

(02:03:16):
your best interests at heart, But really it's discouragement framed
as advice, as was this one. Now, little does he know,
my entire career now is helping people. So I took
that advice and I ran with it, and I'm so
grateful for it. In that environment, that was terrible advice
to give somebody. So I think it's so important when
it comes to advice, acknowledge that people are only going

(02:03:37):
to tell you things based on their frame of reference,
so what they would do if they were you, or
they might be trying to discourage you. So you can
take it if you want to, You can leave it
if you want to. I want to share just one
other thing. It's not a question. I think we've finished
the five questions right because I've gone over. I have
one other thing that I want to share here, which
is not related to these two, but I have to
say it because it's so powerful and simple. What we

(02:03:59):
found is when people go on the journey of growth,
any journey of growth, like people who have gone through
the Big trust framework and seen those transformative impacts in
their lives. They get comments from those around them, like,
what is the most common comment someone would say if
someone's been on this journey of growth? There's two words,
any ideas.

Speaker 2 (02:04:17):
If they've been on your journey of.

Speaker 1 (02:04:19):
Any journey of growth, not only are it can be
on any journey of personal development growth.

Speaker 2 (02:04:23):
And what would they say to describe that journey?

Speaker 1 (02:04:25):
Well, what other people say to them is usually you've changed.
And when they say you've changed, it's generally not coming
from a positive, supportive plas. Yes, it's coming from a
place of I don't like how you're outshining me right now,
you're no longer in this mold that I have for you,
and it's making me uncomfortable. Never allow someone else's discomfort
to prevent you from going on your journey. Those who

(02:04:47):
are meant to be with you on the journey will
join you on the journey. And this is really hard
when it's family or loved ones or close friends. The
best response in that moment, rather than allowing it to
undermine your sense of self trust and doubt your choices,
is two words aunt. Really three words, thanks for noticing,
Thanks for noticing growth has been a priority for me.

(02:05:10):
That's awesome that it's working. You flip something that would
otherwise be a negative into an absolute positive, which does
two things. It makes you feel really good about it,
but also from their perspective, it suddenly flips them to think, oh,
maybe I can do that too. Growth has been a
priority for her, Maybe I can make growth my priority.
And it opens them up. It almost gives them permission

(02:05:31):
to do the same. So when someone says you've changed,
respond with thanks for noticing.

Speaker 2 (02:05:35):
I love. That's powerful, isn't it. It's such a great
response because it's also showing that you see as a
positive rather than most of us. I think also, when
when you're in your growth journey, your initial reaction is also,
what do you mean, why is there a bad thing? No,
I'm the same person because you're still trying to you're
still trying to grapple with it, and you're still trying
to fit and grow at the same time. Whereas when

(02:05:56):
you are, when you're fully grown, you won't care and
you'll be like, oh, okay, cool, like thank you, you know,
thanks for noticing, and so yeah, no, I love that response.
It's brilliant and and you're spot on that. I think.
Also half the time, there's a there's a brilliant piece
of wisdom called Handlan's Razor m and it says Handlon says,

(02:06:16):
don't attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by
ignorance or stupidity. Beautiful And it's one of my favorite
freeing I'm writing about in my book right now. It's
one of my most freeing things I've come across, because
our mind has this thing to turn everything everyone says
to us into malice. And that person literally said it
as a passing comment. They kind of thought of it

(02:06:38):
for two minutes. They said something, but it wasn't that deep.
They're not obsessing over it. But we take care as like,
oh my god, they think I've changed, and they don't.
They hate who have become.

Speaker 1 (02:06:48):
Especially if we struggle with big trust on any of
these elements totally.

Speaker 2 (02:06:51):
And the truth is, it's not malice. It's just someone's ignorance.
But it is someone's lack of time, it's someone's lack
of capacity, it's someone's basiness, and it's you know. And
it's funny because it's almost like when we say you've
changed to someone, we think we have good intentions and
when someone says it to us, you know, so it
comes with that. So I love that, thanks for noticing,
because it doesn't come from a place of revenge. It

(02:07:13):
doesn't come a place from improving yourself. It doesn't come
because otherwise we're like I've changed. Oh no, no, I'm
still it's same. I'll prove it to you, like let's
let's go back out to the party or whatever. And
it's like, no, I don't want to do that anymore.
And so I love thanks for noticing because it isn't revenge.
It isn't proving yourself, It isn't validation, it isn't tell
me how, it's not looking for praise and approval. It's brilliant.

Speaker 1 (02:07:35):
Yeah, you know. I love how you mentioned Handland's razor.
Have you heard of Wisiati. Dan Karniment so.

Speaker 2 (02:07:44):
Great.

Speaker 1 (02:07:45):
So he's brilliant. His work is so phenomenal and something
that fundamentally changed my life, and I think if you
can also grasp this idea, it will fundamentally change your life.
It's very similar to hands Handlands Razor, but just a
little bit broader. Wisiati is an abbreviation for or an
acronym for what you see is all there is. And
what he was describing in his book Thinking Fast and

(02:08:07):
Slow is that when we have an interaction with someone,
we will draw conclusions about that person and that situation
from that two second interaction because what we see is
all there is in that environment. But actually there is
so much more that led to that situation. Maybe that
person was having a really bad day. Maybe that person's
relationship just broke down and you're meeting them right at

(02:08:28):
that point. Maybe they're in pain, and yet we have
this one second, two second, one minute interaction. Our brain
goes into what you see as all there is, and
you forget that there's so much else, and this leads
to what's called fundamental attribution error. Okay, so Jay, when
you're driving on the street and someone cuts you off,
do you usually have certain feelings towards that person who
cut you off? Of course, right, and you make certain

(02:08:50):
assumptions about their personality Oh my gosh, careless, ignorant, blah blah.
That's called fundamental attribution error because if you accidentally cut
someone off.

Speaker 2 (02:08:59):
Totally, Oh, I wasn't even paying friends, struggling like I'm
trying to help.

Speaker 1 (02:09:04):
So that idea of someone cutting you off. What you
see is all there is, that must be your reflection
of their attributes and character and personality. But what Kardoman
encourages us to do, which is similar to Hanlin's razor,
is get a broader picture what else could have been
going on for this person? And I love it when
you're driving because I tend to get I don't get
road rage, not at all, but I do find sometimes

(02:09:25):
if there's a lot of traffic and I'm in a rush,
I tend to get into the what you see is
all there is, So if someone's rushing or speeding, I
will go through and think, Okay, what are the three
things that could be happening for this person. Maybe they're
busting to use the toilet, or their wife has just
gone into labor, or they've just heard that their kid's
been You don't know right. And it's beautiful because it
just reminds you that you're not the center of the universe.

(02:09:46):
It feels like you are, but you're not. And when
you realize that you're not, it gives you this sense
of I find it very empowering to know that we're
actually part of something much bigger than just us and
I me.

Speaker 2 (02:09:58):
My absolutely, I love it. Okay, have it. Question number three,
what is a line of self talk that you used
most often for yourself?

Speaker 1 (02:10:08):
Care less, care more?

Speaker 3 (02:10:10):
Oh?

Speaker 2 (02:10:10):
Okay, explain? Okay.

Speaker 1 (02:10:11):
So we post content and we have since twenty twenty,
basically during the pandemic we started and I still find
so we do it ourselves. We don't have a team
that does our posting. It's something we're happy to do
because we like the process of being connected. Every time
I'm about to post something, I have a voice in
my head. What are people going to think? Are they
going to like this? They're going to think you're silly,
You're not articulate enough, You're not credible enough. I literally

(02:10:34):
have to say to myself, careless, care less about what
people think. And so I used to just do the
careless and that was helpful. But then Faisil, my husband
and business partner, he said, Okay, it's great that you've
got the careless, but what are you caring more about?

Speaker 2 (02:10:47):
Ah? So good.

Speaker 1 (02:10:48):
Don't just focus on what you you know, the kind
of negative. Oh I'm going to care less? What are
you focusing more on? So now I say, okay, careless
about what people think. Care more about being of service,
being of value, being of impact, leaving a positive legacy.
That's brilliant and it's beautiful, and it's something you can
use in the moment when you're about to step onto stage,
when you're about to approach a stranger in a bar,
when you're about to have that conversation about your pay raise,

(02:11:13):
care less about the outcome, care more about making this
person feel seen or demonstrating my value. It's beautiful and
so simple.

Speaker 2 (02:11:20):
Yeah, I love that. I also love it because it's
the careless part makes sense. And also one thing I
realized over time was also caring more about the people
who left qualitative positive feedback. Oh yeah, and learning to
actually care more because it's so easy to skip past
beautiful comments where everyone's like, you are so articulate, Shahday,
you are so credible, Shade, you are so non re

(02:11:42):
ignore it and you kind of just go, yeah, whatever, whatever, whatever,
And that care more careless works well there too. I'm
not saying only to care about things when people say
nice things about you. I think it's important to be
able to listen to criticism and negativity and feedback, and
of course but I think the idea of we don't.
We don't receive praise with nearly as much depth as

(02:12:05):
we receive criticism now, and that is a huge issue
for us as humans, where we don't know how to
receive a compliment, We don't know how to receive a
pattern the back. But if someone says I'm a negative
to us, we know how to receive that. We will
hold on to that for the rest of our lives
and carry around wherever you know. Why, yeah, God, because.

Speaker 1 (02:12:23):
Of the scars that we carry. So when someone is
giving you praise, it's because your self image doesn't feel
it deserves it, and so it doesn't internalize it. But
when someone criticizes you, criticism only hurts if you deeply,
deep down, believe that about yourself. And it all comes
down to where you are on these poor pillars. So
if you receive criticism and you take it personally, it's

(02:12:45):
often because you have a low level of acceptance and
deep down you don't feel that you're worthy. You're trying
to appear a certain way or prove something, and so
what that person says hurts so much because it is
cutting it that deep wound that you have and so
again it's this idea of yes, as you say, how
do we acknowledge more of the positive things that come
through and use that to reshape our identity, reshape our

(02:13:08):
self image.

Speaker 2 (02:13:09):
Yeah? Absolutely, I love that that scar research you shared
at the beginning.

Speaker 1 (02:13:14):
Isn't it fascinating?

Speaker 2 (02:13:15):
It's so good question of before? How do you define
your current purpose?

Speaker 1 (02:13:20):
Someone once asked me what is the one word I
want people to say about me at my funeral? And
without thinking I said that she cared. And then I
thought about it a bit more, and I probably would
have had all these other things, But I think the
fact that that came through so clearly for me when
I didn't think about it. My purpose is to live
a life where I'm caring about other people, and that

(02:13:42):
looks like me being present for them, me serving them
through the work that we do, helping them through our programs,
through this book. It's fundamentally because I care about people
overcoming what is holding them back, and I care about
them living fulfilling and successful and meaningful lives, and so
everything I do is aligned by that. What about you, Jay,
what's that? How would you define your purpose in just

(02:14:04):
a few words?

Speaker 2 (02:14:05):
The way I've chosen to describe it right now is
that to make the world happier, healthier, and more healed beautiful.
And the word that I've really lean to in all
of those is healing. I value healing more than happiness
and health I do value equally as healing. But I
think even in our health, we're always healing, and so
I think the challenge is, my take is everyone's hurt

(02:14:26):
in some way physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and everyone's healing.
And so if we can help create a more healed world,
a healing world actually even more than healed, because healed
means it's done, and so a healing world is a
good world. And so if we can, if I can help,
if I can be useful in and of service to

(02:14:48):
helping people heal in whichever area they're struggling in through
people like yourselves and the wonderful experts and people come
and share their stories on the show, then that, to
me is the world that I want to live in,
is a world is healing always because we're always going
to feel pain and always going to get hurt, so
then there has to be an equal focus on healing.

Speaker 1 (02:15:07):
It's beautiful and I love it that it almost going
back to the idea of the scar. It's like also
healing the scars that we have.

Speaker 2 (02:15:13):
Yeah, it's healing, and it's that's what you're gonna have
to do, because yeah, you're healing yourself image according to
you know what you were saying earlier.

Speaker 1 (02:15:21):
Yeah, beautiful.

Speaker 2 (02:15:22):
Fifth and final question were.

Speaker 1 (02:15:23):
I kind of don't want you to ask it because
I don't want this to end.

Speaker 2 (02:15:27):
For another three hours. This is the fifth and final question.
If you could create one law, and we asked this
every guest who's ever been on the show, if you
could create one law that everyone in the world had
to follow, what would it be?

Speaker 1 (02:15:42):
It would be to leave each person better than you
found them.

Speaker 2 (02:15:48):
Yeah, it's a good law.

Speaker 3 (02:15:50):
Yeah, each place, each person, each each animal, each meeting,
each em each Yeah, it would be so much better.

Speaker 2 (02:15:57):
Yeah, I love that. That's beautiful. We've never had down
the show. Shutz, thank you so much. Today. The book
is called Big Trust, rewire self doubt, Find your confidence
and Fuel success. Pre audio copy right now. Follow Shade
on Instagram, TikTok, across all of social media. If you
don't already, you're gonna absolutely love her content. She's as
articulate online and offline. I can't wait for you to

(02:16:19):
read this book. I can't wait for you to practice
these principles. It truly is a masterclass. And shut in.
I'm so grateful to you, so thankful that we've got
to spend this time together.

Speaker 3 (02:16:28):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (02:16:29):
I hope this is the first of many times you'll
come on the show.

Speaker 1 (02:16:31):
I hope so, I hope, so thank you. It's been
such a treat.

Speaker 2 (02:16:33):
Thank you. If you love this episode, you love my
conversation with doctor Joe Dispenser on why stressing overthinking negatively
impacts your brain and heart and how to change your
habits that are on autopilot. Listen to it right now.

Speaker 4 (02:16:48):
How many times do we have to forget until we
stop forgetting and start remembering. That's the moment of change.
Who cares how many times you fell off the bicycle?
If you ride the bicycle, Now you ride the bike.

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Host

Jay Shetty

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