#1222 - Taking Control of Self-Control

Can self-control be taught? In this episode, Justin and Kylie explore the science of self-regulation and how parents can help their kids—and themselves—build better habits. Drawing on an insightful interview with Professor Ethan Kross, author of Chatter, the conversation highlights strategies for boosting motivation, building emotional resilience, and taking control in those tricky moments where willpower fails.

KEY POINTS:

• Self-control is not an innate trait—it's a skill that can be learned and strengthened.

• Motivation plays a crucial role in our capacity for self-control.

• External factors like being hungry, angry, lonely, tired, or stressed (HALTS) reduce our ability to regulate ourselves.

• Self-distancing, including the “Batman Effect,” can help children and adults manage strong emotions and make better decisions.

• People who appear to have strong self-control often just design their environments to avoid temptation.

QUOTE OF THE EPISODE:
“People who seem to have the most self-control often set up their environments in such a way that they don’t need to exercise it at all.”

KEY INSIGHTS FOR PARENTS:

• Teaching kids self-control starts with helping them understand triggers and setting up supportive environments.

• Self-control can be undermined by stress and unmet needs—parents should be compassionate, not critical.

• The “Batman Effect” (asking “What would Batman do?”) helps kids take a step back from their impulses and act with intention.

• Modelling healthy responses and acknowledging your own challenges shows kids that emotional regulation is a lifelong practice.

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

• Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It by Ethan Kross

• HALTS acronym (Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired, Stressed)

• Ethan Kross’s full interview (to be aired Saturday)

• happyfamilies.com.au

ACTION STEPS FOR PARENTS:

1. Teach kids about HAL

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
What if self control could be taught? What if we
could be way more effective with self control and help
our children to control themselves, to regulate their emotions, to
hold it together a whole lot better. Today we give
you the answers about how this can be done. Welcome
to the Happy Families podcast, Real Parenting Solutions every Day.

(00:28):
It's Australia's most downloaded parenting podcast. We are Justin and
Kylie Coulson. Kylie, a little while ago I had to
chat with a guy called Ethan Cross, and we're going
to play some snippets from that interview and replay the
full interview on Saturday. Self control is one of those
things that we find ourselves constantly talking to our kids

(00:48):
about the whole idea of being able to regulate your
emotions hold it together. Sometimes the kids do better and
sometimes they do worse.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
When I think about self control, I think about the acronym.

Speaker 3 (01:01):
Halts, hungry, angry, lonely, tired, stress.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
And how our self control capacity is minimized.

Speaker 3 (01:10):
Does decrease so much, just decreases.

Speaker 2 (01:13):
So much in those time things. But I also feel
like my personal experience is my self control is really
highly determined by my level of motivation. So if I
am highly motivated to exercise every day, then my ability

(01:34):
around self control to get out of bed and to
actually put my shoes on and go for a run
or go for a bike ride even when it's raining
is high.

Speaker 4 (01:47):
Yeah. Yeah, isn't that curious because.

Speaker 2 (01:49):
My motivation to do something is high. But if I
if I'm not motivated, then you can almost guarantee that
my self control is going to be about as low
as it can get.

Speaker 1 (01:58):
So I want to share something with you from this interview.
Let me quickly I introduce who Ethan Cross is. He's
a professor at the University of Michigan's Psychology Department and
the world class, world leading Ross School of Business. He's
also the director of the Emotion and Self Control Lab.
He actually studied under Walter Michelle. The name might not

(02:19):
mean anything to you, but you know what.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
Will He's a marshmallow.

Speaker 4 (02:23):
Really you knew that. I'm so impressed.

Speaker 3 (02:25):
Yeah, the marshmallow experiment. Guy, I didn't that was not
set up.

Speaker 4 (02:28):
I didn't think. But you had known that obviously you
could tell from my response.

Speaker 1 (02:32):
Ethan's the author of the international best seller Chatter The
Voice in Our Head, White matters and how to harness it.

Speaker 4 (02:38):
It was chosen as.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
One of the best New books of the Year by
The Washington Post, CNN, and USA Today, and the winning
Winter twenty twenty one selection for Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grantz's
and Cain and Dan Pink's Next Big Idea Book Club.
It's been translated into over forty languages. It's a big deal.
It was a big deal to have him on the pod.
When I asked him this question, Kylie, I love these answer.

Speaker 4 (03:00):
I said, a.

Speaker 1 (03:01):
Question of self control? Do some people have it and
some people just not have it? And here's how he responded.

Speaker 5 (03:08):
One other thing we know is that you can change
your self control. You know, one of my pet peeves
is when I hear people saying you have no self control.
That's absolutely not true. Everyone possesses self control to some extent.
Some of us are better at exerting it in some
context as opposed to others. I may be really good
at exerting self control regulating myself when I'm working on

(03:28):
a problem at work, but maybe I have a little
bit more difficulties when I'm coaching soccer. That's not true.
I'm pretty good there too, But I have my I
have my weaknesses. They're associated with the with the pantry
post ten pm at night, when I crave some foods.
We all have our Achilles heel when it comes to
self control. But what we know is that there are

(03:48):
different tools we can use to improve our self control.
And these these these different things we can do. They're teachable,
their strategies are often easy to implement, and so I
talked to my kids about the different ways that they
can manage the temptation when it exists.

Speaker 2 (04:06):
So I'm curious. You're only obviously sharing a snippet, Yes,
but what were the tools that he shad?

Speaker 3 (04:11):
Well, you'll have to listen on Saturday to hit the
whole feet.

Speaker 2 (04:13):
It's not fair.

Speaker 1 (04:14):
But as he talked about the pantry after ten pm,
I said ice cream. Ice cream doesn't belong in the pantry.
Ice cream belongs in the freezer.

Speaker 4 (04:22):
You know.

Speaker 3 (04:22):
I said it because that's my weakness. Yes, I struggle
with self control so much around ice cream.

Speaker 2 (04:28):
But again, your motivation is minimal.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
Yeah, And what's curious is just recently we've been on
a pretty big health kick.

Speaker 4 (04:36):
My interest in ice cream.

Speaker 1 (04:37):
Chop actually perused the lolly aisle in the supermarket the
other day, and as I walked through the aisle, I
was just like, not interested, don't want any of it,
completely disinterested. Again, motivation plays a really big, really big role.

Speaker 2 (04:54):
So I really struggle with the concept of changing self control.
From the point of view I probably never heard the word,
but when we look at the fact that our motivation
levels shift with time, with education, with life experience, with
different seasons, it would make sense that our ability to

(05:19):
change and modify our self control in different areas would occur.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
And a lot of this is about habits. A lot
of this is about what you prioritize, what your value.
Sometimes we know that we need self control and we
just think, don't want to be controlled right now. Habits
like anger is a habit. For example, yelling is a habit.
We can be controlled when we need to, when we're
motivated to because maybe somebody's observing us and so we're

(05:45):
going to be on our best behavior.

Speaker 2 (05:47):
So when I think about self control, and I think
about the many stresses that we have on us, and
I think of holts and how many times we find
ourselves hungry, angry, lonely, tied, or stressed, we could pretty
much put our hands up every day with any number
of those things. If we're relying entirely on self control
to get us through tricky situations, we're going to fail

(06:11):
a lot.

Speaker 4 (06:12):
We talked about that a lot in the interview.

Speaker 1 (06:13):
I don't want to sort of spoil the whole interview,
but that's one of the big things we talk about,
and how the people who seem to have the most
self control often set up their environments in such a
way that they don't need to exercise.

Speaker 4 (06:24):
It at all.

Speaker 2 (06:25):
That's right.

Speaker 4 (06:25):
It just looks like they're doing so.

Speaker 2 (06:26):
If ice cream is a big issue for.

Speaker 4 (06:28):
You, don't buy ice cream, you don't.

Speaker 2 (06:29):
Walk down the ice cream as to start with, but
you don't have it in the house.

Speaker 4 (06:34):
That's right, exactly all right.

Speaker 1 (06:35):
After the break, we're going to talk about one of
my favorite parts of the interview. It's just brilliant. I
think you're going to love it. And it's a strategy
you asked about the strategies. It's one of the strategies
that you can talk to your kids about. Kylie Ethan
Cross is the international best selling author of Chatter, and

(06:59):
as we had this conversation, I asked him to share
some strategies about how we can teach kids self control.
He shared a bunch of them that we're all revolving
around this idea called self distancing. Self distancing will explain
it in a lot more detail in the full interview
that will replay on Saturday, but in short, it basically

(07:19):
means that you kind of move yourself away from the
thing that's causing the hot emotions where you don't have
any self control. And he talked about one it's my
absolute favorite. I'm going to play it for you.

Speaker 5 (07:29):
Now you can try something what we've called the Batman effect.
Find their favorite superhero. So superheroes are usually generally really
good at exercising restraint right and being able to do
good things in the world, and so in some studies,
what a Colleague of Mind Sephanie Carlson has found is
that having children imagine their superhero, use their name, imagine

(07:53):
your Batman and say what would Batman do right now?
Would Batman be able to not eat the marshmallow? Or
Dora the Explorer? What would Dora do? That can be
really powerful. It transports them into this other role which
gives them some distance from the temptation and also the
superpower to restrain it. So that's been a fun strategy

(08:13):
that the kids have been able to benefit from in
some experiments.

Speaker 1 (08:17):
So I guess the main thing I'd say is make
sure your kid doesn't want to be deadpool. That won't
work so well.

Speaker 2 (08:24):
Coming from a religious home, We've had plenty of conversations
with our kids, and growing up, I had conversations where
there was an acknowledgement what would Jesus.

Speaker 3 (08:34):
Do if he was there?

Speaker 1 (08:34):
It's the WWJD think that's the grown up version of
the Christian version of the Batman effect.

Speaker 2 (08:40):
Yeah, but another take on it is what would I
do if my favorite person, whether it's a school teacher
or mum or Auntie jan Like, what would I do
if they were here and they were watching me?

Speaker 5 (08:56):
Like?

Speaker 2 (08:57):
How would I respond? I want to do everything I
can to be seen in a good light by them,
How would I respond in this situation?

Speaker 1 (09:05):
In the interview, I talked to him about how regularly,
and I feel a little bit embarrassed to say this,
but regularly people will come up to me and say,
when I'm struggling with my parenting, I just imagine that
doctor Justin Colson is sitting in the living room watching me,
and it helps.

Speaker 4 (09:18):
Me to be a better parent. That's kind of the idea.

Speaker 1 (09:21):
That's the self distancing idea, and it helps us to
be better with our self control. It helps us to
quiet the chatter in our head and simply behave better.
It's a fascinating interview. It's one of the favorite, one
of my favorite interviews that I've ever done, and I
can't wait for everyone to hear it. So that's happening
on Saturday morning. It's for your weekend listening. A little

(09:43):
bit longer than the usual interview, but it was just
so much fun that I kept talking and so did he,
and I think that you're going to get so much
out of it. Make sure you check it out then.
The Happy Families podcast is produced by Justin.

Speaker 4 (09:55):
Ruland from Bridge Media.

Speaker 1 (09:57):
If you'd like more information about how to make your
family happier, please visit us at Happyfamilies dot com dot au.