Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DZK1nawEXQ
you say that children don't impact our happiness positively I mean that's a data what are you going to do and that kind of got me worried I have to say Dr tally Sherritt a leading expert on human decision making optimism and emotion her Ted Talk has received over 14 million views I'm going to talk to you about optimism kids and children their happiest and the most optimistic then it goes down and reaches Rock Bottom in your midlife laughs I'm 30 now so I'm heading right down to Rock Bottom as we speak um any advice yes absolutely so one of the startling things is you talk about how one tiny move up on the optimism scale is worth an extra 33 000 a year in salary it's quite something so Optimus this is what they usually do if something went well they usually interpret that as something about them that caused this positive outcome pessimists do the exact opposite I got the job but really because they didn't have any other candidates is that negative explanatory style the road to depression there's a really tight link between depression and pessimism the question becomes well how do I enhance optimism so there's a few ways to do it I was thinking that everything you do is for happiness the happiness is actually one of three factors that matter so one is happiness the second is meanings and then there's a third Factor that's also really interesting which is before this episode starts I have a small favor to ask from you two months ago 74 of people that watch this channel didn't subscribe we're now down to 69 my goal is 50 so if you've ever liked any of the videos we've posted if you like this channel can you do me a quick favor and hit the Subscribe button it helps this channel more than you know and the bigger the channel gets as you've seen the bigger the guests get thank you and enjoy this episode [Music] tally [Music] on the back of your book here the optimism biased it says you're one of the most Innovative neuroscientists at work today how would you sort of Define or categorize your own professional background
so I'm I guess I call myself a cognitive neuroscientist which is really a mix of Psychology and Neuroscience and I'm mixing behavioral economics as well um so it's it's really a mix of of all of that so I'm interested in how why human behave the way that they do um and why do they have the thoughts that they have and the feelings that they have and I think to understand that you do want to understand what's going on inside the brain um but then there's other fields that give you a lot of really interesting insights including psychology um and behavioral economics even things like law as well sociology philosophy so it's it's really a kind of interdisciplinary adventure and you studied both neuroscience and psychology at University and posts grad yeah so I did my undergrad in economics and psychology right and in fact I did that because at the time Neuroscience was not available for an undergrad degree in Israel in the whole of the country uh so that wasn't even an option yes this was a kind of a long time ago [Laughter] um and then for my PhD I did cognitive Neuroscience which is neuroscience and psychology mixed together what was compelling on a personal level to you about studying those topics why of all the things you could have pursued why those things then very early on I was just really interested in human behavior right it's about understanding yourself but also understanding other people around you um and you know I think it's one of the most intriguing topics and and the brain was kind of a mysterious kind of organ that is orchestrating all of that um so I think it was just in an interest in the world around you and people in it oh there's some like you know when you started studying neuroscience and psychology were there some like fundamentals about the nature of life and the nature of human beings that um I'm ensure there's so many of them but were there any like real fundamentals that were um debunked or reversed as it relates to your own personal perspective whether it's about personal responsibility or about um an agency or autonomy about how much
control we have about how much influence we have over our happiness were there anything foundational that had a real impact on your personal life you know there's one thing that recently is just it's just something that I recently changed my mind on and that was actually while writing the current book that I'm writing which I'm writing together with Cass Einstein um who is the co-author of nudge and it was actually in fact about happiness because and I remember this clearly I was in a workshop at the LSC and they did a survey they asked who thinks that happiness is the most important thing right that everything you do is for happiness and you know everyone had to stand on a scale if you think like it's all about happiness stand here and if you think it's not at all stand here and I was standing here I was thinking anything that we do we do for happiness and that all that and that matters and while writing this book actually we both came to the conclusion and for me it was a change of mind the happiness is actually one of three factors that matter um so one is happiness the second is meaning a lot of things you do because it gives you meaning and it doesn't necessarily give you happiness sometimes the two go hand in hand right but sometimes it doesn't um so you could do work that's meaningful and it doesn't necessarily give you happiness and sometimes it does and then there's a third Factor that's also really interesting which is called a psychological rich life which is basically variety a lot of people just do things for diversity for variety to try a lot of different things and again sometimes it goes hand in hand with meaning and happiness but sometimes it doesn't and that kind of explains why many times we make choices that we understand is not necessarily going to gain us more happiness but it will gain us some other thing one of these two other things that together I think is what brings a good life right and that that is something I think I changed my mind on that it's we're not actually motivated for happiness um probably defined as a good feeling kind of joy
why variety why do humans care about having Variety in their life I mean there's kind of the unconscious evolutionary reason give me that one um so I think it's exploration right to move forward both as an individual and as a society we have to explore a lot of different things some of these things are not necessarily going to give you happiness immediately or for you at all but a lot of times if you explore a lot of things you will find something that is going to be very important maybe for yourself maybe for our species I always give kind of you know the really simple example of um our ancestors leaving Africa to explore the rest of the world right they had I mean why would they do that I mean either they thought there was something better for them to find right and it was probably very hard to do but that's just kind of an example of exploration right you're trying different things um and I I can see it in my own life right I often do something and then I kind of okay I had enough with this let's try something else and so variety is kind of a factor that I'm trying to maximize it's kind of a balance right it's exploration and exploitation right so you need to do a little bit of exploitation because you found something that works and something that you're good at you don't want to just leave it be but on the other hand if you just stick with one thing you may be missing a whole other a lot of different things like farming and hunting it's like the analogy I think from that book who Moved My Cheese when I think about um variety my brain was going well I know some people that get so caught up in their comfort zones that they never go exploring and so the the thought that we'd be motivated or fulfilled by variety by new things by Adventure seems to sit in conflict with a lot of people that I know that are like stuck in a situation and um maybe not happy but they're they're more confident than known than they are leaving that place and and uh venturing out right because exploration is risky because there's uncertainty you don't know what's going to happen risk means that there's a high likelihood of both good and bad and you just don't know where it's going to go um and so that can cause fear um uncertainty is a state that usually
people don't like and don't enjoy um and that's definitely something that keeps you in place and in fact one of the kind of points that we make is that um it seems that people are not making enough change in their life um that a lot of times if people think about changing something in their life maybe it's a relationship maybe it's a profession it could be something stupid like you know the color of your hair or something like that um there's a great um fun little study that was uh conducted by the freakonomic uh Stephen Levy what he did he wanted to see if on average making a change when you think you might want to make a change this is not just like oh I think you should get divorced when you're not even thinking about it but when you're thinking about a specific change on average are you more likely to be happy if you go ahead with a change or not right and this is a tricky thing to study because normally you could say well let's test people let's ask them how happy they are before and after they decide to make a change after they made a change and then also let's do the same for people who didn't make a change and and see who's happier that's not going to work because people who just to who go on and make a change they probably had more reason to do it right so it's not kind of a good experimental design so he wanted to randomize whether people are going to make changes or not so what he did is he had people go online and he asked them are you thinking about a change and it could be small and it could be big and they said what the change was and then he had them flip a virtual coin so heads you go with a change you know you take the new job tails you don't um the likelihood that people would change if they got the heads the change was 25 more than the people who didn't so basically people were thinking about a change they did it they flipped the coin if they got they changed they're more likely to have a change and indeed people who went actually and and committed and and did the change were happier than people who didn't so that kind of suggests that we're probably not making enough changes than we should be um potentially because it's scary right trying something new is scary and
sometimes it's not going to work I think that's so much in friends of mine in like lots of DMS from young people who are in a situation where they're it's certain but it's miserable and they have a they have a potential option to like go through that dark Chasm to this potentially better place but they're choosing to stay in that certain miserable situation whether it's a relationship a job whatever it might be and I've always I've always felt that our relationship with uncertainty has a huge um sway on our overall outcomes and what I mean by that is people who are okay with jumping into that sort of dark hole where they where there isn't certainty about their outcomes and just persisting because they'd rather not be in certain misery end up having better lives but I don't know how to get people to have a better relationship with uncertainty I mean that's a compelling argument I can say to them but you know just stats and facts because I read your books Aren't Enough there needs to be some kind of emotional pitch to them to get them to diagnose first into uncertainty um any advice yeah that's a really good question first of all I mean you're absolutely right there's individual differences um on how comfortable we are with with uncertainty how comfortable we are with taking risks um so I think probably it would be something like to some extent helping them through the change so it might be difficult to change people's relationship with uncertainty in a global General way but perhaps every single time when there's a specific issue in front of them of what they want to change um kind of like helping them along the way with that change holding them their hand and you know so to speak um is probably the only thing that you could do right to be like I'm here for you whether it's a friend or a mentor um we're in their mind in that moment the thing that's causing the resistance you describe it as fear right yeah so what's the opposite of fear is it hope you know it's not an opposite okay but I think it is um something that will be um likely to drive you to take that step
and it's not so much just hope it's optimism which kind of takes us too yeah uh some of my research so okay what's the difference between hope and optimism so hopped hope is you want something to happen in the future right I want to get that job I want to find that relationship optimism is believing that I'm likely to get that job I'm likely to find that wonderful relationship and it's absolutely true that if you're optimistic you think this is going to go somewhere good then you're more likely to to go ahead and try that which makes sense right because my expectation is going to change my actions and my actions is going to change my outcomes right because if I think well I am gonna I'm gonna try for this competition because I think I'm I'm likely to to get something then I go ahead and I try if I think well there's no no chance I don't try and so of course I'm not going to get it so it's a bit of a self-fulfilling optimism um and so then the question becomes if I go back to your question then the question becomes well how do I enhance optimism right so there's actually and and that's it's a good idea because enhancing optimism will cause you to take more risk I want to learn how to enhance optimism and all of my team members one of my companies so there's a few ways to do it um one way is a sense of control we do have we are more optimistic about things that we believe we have control over because we do think that when we have control that means we can steer the wheel in the right direction right um and so if we can cause people to get a sense that they have control and if it's about your team is for example let's say they there's a project that you want someone to work on so you can just tell them to do that project or you can have them choose to do that project right and you can guide them to the choice that you think is correct but if they believe that they made the choice that enhances a sense of agency enhances the change of the sense of control and they become more committed to that option so you can give them oh well there's two options two projects you can work on which one do you prefer and again you
can frame it in a way that maybe perhaps will make them more likely to choose one or over the other but once they made the choice it's amazing we've done studies on this where we give people options for example going on holiday do you want to go to France or Rome right Thailand or Hawaii if they make a choice there are two things that are exactly they want it the same they really want to go Hawaii they really want to go to Florida but once they make a choice seconds after making a choice they now believe that Hawaii is much better than they did just a few seconds ago before making a choice and that Florida is not that great right because once you make a choice immediately your preferences change you rationalize why that choice was great and now you're more committed to it so that's true for holidays but it can be true for work as well right should I should I go work on on Project A or B if I make the choice I become more committed and it doesn't work if someone else makes a choice for you if someone else wants a choice for you don't get into this rationalization mode where you have to rationalize your choice because it wasn't your choice and once I feel I have control then kind of that also enhances my expectations of how good it's going to be but it also boosts your happiness right because I read about the study in Care Homes where they had an agency floor in the other floor where people didn't feel like they had a lot of agency and choice over their lives and there was a pretty significant impact on levels of happiness right yes so what they did is they gave them some plans is that is that the study yeah yes yes yes absolutely so um when we feel we have control we have agency that enhances well-being when we feel our agency has been restricted that causes anxiety right and this is one of the reasons that people are quite anxious on planes it's not just because we fear the worse but because we have no control at all right no control about when are we gonna get there what are we gonna eat right and that causes a lot of anxiety um so by enhancing agency and control you are lifting people's well-being happiness and reducing Stress and Anxiety yeah and those you know that study with the plants it works with kids
as well right you can give kids some plans to take care of or have kids make their own salads um they'll be more likely to eat it um so that's just you know a few examples what could um would you I mean we don't part of the Innovation team at any Airline or anything but I was just wondering in the playing example what could we do then to reduce anxiety for passengers I was thinking you know if we told them before takeoff listen if any you need to land for any reason well it's not that we necessarily will but as you say in that study with the the Care Homes it's about giving them the perception that they have control versus actually giving them control yeah okay so there's there's a couple of things that they do them work um for also some of the reasons but in a in a funny way it also enhances sense of control so one thing that the airlines do that I think is great is when you can see the um the the equipments um the pilot view you know yeah we can see yeah um that for some I mean obviously you don't have control but first of all it reduces uncertainty I mean I really like to look at that like what height am I in what year am I going so that and and although you know you don't have control that gives you a sense of reduce sensitivity in some weird way also enhances a sense of control I have to I have to say I was on a plane one day flying I don't want to see the airline but I was flying and I woke up in the middle of the night on the plane and I was it was turbulent and I was convinced that we were going down I was convinced I looked out the window and we were getting closer and closer to the clouds and I did my quick math we're flying from New York to London with three hours roughly three hours into the flight we're going down that means we're going down in the sea and I have about 10 minutes on that plane where I have complete certainly we're getting closer to the clouds why would we be getting closer to the clouds and I click on the little thing that you've described the little flight map thing and it says we're at 33 000 feet and we're not moving and I go okay I mean whoever thought that was a good idea obviously understand psychology um the other thing that that I that I
like that they do um is actually they did and I mentioned that in in one of the books and it's not really related to control but it relates to another really important part of psychology which is so normally at the beginning you know you're about to go um to get on the flight um and they have to go over all the safety instructions and normally no one would listen right because it was all about in the state of emergency then you have to do this and that and no one wants to think about the state of emergency right so you kind of like shut down they're like okay Twitter Facebook um and so what they did is they um and especially virgin did this um they switched it so it was very entertaining very light and it was all about the destination it was all about it wasn't about being in the sky and having an emergency state which is negative and I don't want my attention to go there I don't want to think about it it was about let's think about when you land and it's going to be the islands and you know the beach and so on and they kind of like put the information that you need to know within this very light entertaining positive humorous video and the number of people that that watched that attended has gone gone up really uh tremendously and in fact people started watching it at home before they even got on the plane right on YouTube so that's that's another really um interesting thing and that goes to another principle that we find a lot in our work which is that people um take in positive information about their own future much more than negative information about their own future so if I'm starting if I will tell you you know I think your podcast listening numbers is going to go down you'll be like well she doesn't know what she's talking about right but if I say oh I think this is great and it's only going to go up more and more with time you'd be like yeah she's probably right and become more confident so that's on average people tend to take positive information to update their beliefs more than negative it doesn't mean that we don't listen to negative information about the our own future
um but on average we see that you learn more from unexpected positive information about the future that's somewhat confirm some of the things that I read in your second book The influential mind where I remember I was watching a YouTube video where you were in it and they were x-raying is that what they call it when they look at someone's brain uh scanning someone's scanning yeah like in an MRI yeah like an MRI scan and they were scanning someone's brain um as you told them that you agreed with their beliefs versus when you told them that you kind of disagreed with their beliefs and when you agreed with their belief their brain lit up and seemed to be really receptive and then when you told them you disagreed with their beliefs their brain seemed to kind of just be Frozen and this is really useful for when you're thinking about having a conversation trying to influence or have a conversation with your partner or get through to someone that starting with agreeability or something where you you make them feel heard and seen and understood is a good way to open them up to information yeah so this relates to something that's known as a confirmation bias so the confirmation bias is our tendency to look for information that confirms what we believe and to use information that confirms what I what we believe to become even more confident and even more kind of in our belief and yeah so we we did a study where we had people come into our lab in in pairs and they had to make a financial decision together in this case they had to assess the value of a real estate so they made their decisions and we did scan their brains at the same time and they were just in two separate scanners but they could interact over the Wi-Fi and they had to they saw like a real estate and they had to say how much it's worth and they could see what the other person said and if they agreed with them or not and it's exactly what you said I'm agreeing with you when they agreed your brain is like when they agreed um and they gave them more information about how confident I am and so on so when someone agreed the other person's brain showed activity that suggested they were encoding the information
coming from the advanced partner they were using it to update their beliefs and they were becoming more confident but when someone disagreed they kind of as exactly what you said did they shut down they weren't listening they weren't using this information you know they were like well they don't know what they talk about and they were that's it um and as you said we feel that like in in real life all the time you know and it's it's a problem because really our kind of instinct when someone disagrees with us is usually to say well listen you're wrong let me explain I'll explain why why you're wrong here look at the data look at the figures and so on and what happens the person in front of us is shutting down a lot of times what they're doing is that the other person is trying to think about other reasons why actually they're right and the other person's wrong so while I'm talking you're trying to think about what are you going to say to you know but if I start with something where we have common ground then you're more likely to listen to me you're more likely to see me as an agreeing partner and be more open to what I'm going to say next and there's one example that I really like is actually about vaccines and this was before covid so it was about childhood vaccines so a lot of parents uh don't want to vaccinate their kids because of the alleged link to autism um and so usually they would go to the doctor's office and the doctor said well look there's no link between the two and here I'll show you the figures the data the science and it didn't really work the parents usually didn't change their mind so instead there's a group of scientists that said let's see if we can go a different route we won't actually mention anything about what we disagree which is the relationship to autism instead we will simply highlight what we already agree on which is that these vaccines protect kids from potentially deadly disease which is not something that the parents disagreed on but the whole that seemed to have been forgotten in the debate right while they were focusing on what they disagreed on so by focusing on that on what they agreed on which is the vaccines will will protect kids from deadly diseases they were three times more likely to change the
parents intention of vaccinating the kids wow so I think this means you know if we're kind of in a conversation about should we invest in this company or that company and we're kind of disagreeing about something is there a different route to get get to you know the decision that we want without focusing there are there other things that we agree on that that would take us to the same point and then there's another method which is just to highlight the commonalities between us that's also helpful you know perhaps there's something I mean we have a goal in common we have a motivation in common maybe there's something in our background which is similar and that also always makes people more likely to listen to you and to use what you're saying it's so true I was actually as you were saying I was thinking about a tweet I saw the other day where Mark Cuban was having an argument with someone else on Twitter and Mark Cuban was going back and forth with this person and he started his response to them with wrong full stop and then made his point and you see that a lot where you where someone will start a sentence with I disagree full stop and then make that point when that happened I'm just going to be completely honest because who can I'm a somebody that is imperfect and full of fault when someone does that with me when they literally start a sentence with wrong or I disagree it's instant combat right and like I'm well aware of it so maybe it doesn't come up as much in me but I remember I can go but I can remember three years ago where I was when someone said to me when we're having conversation and they went wrong full stop and then they made their point regardless of what comes next it's combat the minute you do that the minute you kind of close the door and like pull up the drawbridge which is exactly what that sentiment does it's combat from then on it's like it's this war of proving that you're right and that's not helpful for either party right it takes someone with a certain self self security I guess and um not not fragile ego to be able to to be able to be greeted with that um sort of conflict and turn to what we have in common and what we agree on first but it's a real it's a real
powerful skill for someone to master so if you're disagreeing with me for me to you know I like this as well with my relationship because me and my partner we might not agree on something we might we might we have like very fundamentally different beliefs about the world she's very spiritual and very sort of scientific and how I think but I know that I get through to her when I first understand how she's feeling I don't have to agree with it but even if I understand how she's feeling and kind of like validate her anything that I say next seems to get in behind if that makes sense yeah so I mean the difference is that what you're doing in the last kind of example is you're using what we call theory of Mind Right theory of mind is our ability to kind of think about what other people are thinking or feeling so basically take the point of view of the other person right if and and there's a huge variability in the ability of people to do that there's like tests relatively simple tests actually that can measure your ability to do that um and so if you do that the likelihood that you will answer by wrong is very very low right the reason we we start by wrong you're mistaken is because we do the opposite we come from our point of view which makes sense because our brain is here and our eyes are here right so it makes sense that we come from our point of a bit from our point of view it's like this is wrong this is not right right but of course the best way to get your message across is to try to see things from the other person's point of view and then think like okay what can I say from that point of view not from my point of view from that point of view um super difficult to do I'm gonna give an example say my um my partner was um upset about something and feeling stressed about something which is just to do with her environment and my first response was very like logical and scientific like and also psychological like kind of like it's just in your head which I know it's kind of gaslighting that's not exactly what I said before I get canceled but it was referring to the fact that I I think you can you can kind of think your way
through this like as if I was trying to help her feel empowered and not letting her environment get the best of her now that didn't work the response there was like not good my next approach was to completely understand how she's feeling and kind of go around her side and say to her do you know what you're only going to be here for five minutes anyway and then it'll be fine and that completely worked it was like she was glued on me as I said that and she looked at me and nodded and went yeah you're right the first approach of trying to play like logic and like no no you know didn't work but then when I said term I understood but then offered a solution from that place of understanding she was really open to it yeah and that was like an hour ago so it's in front of mind for me um yeah so so I think this is a problem a lot of times with like campaigns like political but also different campaigns where people try to um get a message across using data figures logic which are important I mean we need all the science and we need all the data to know what's true but once you know what's true the data is not enough to convince people of what is true and in fact the things that work are things that you're talking about which is emotion works really well stories anecdote example right for in science the worst thing we can do is use one anecdote right so we don't want to get a conclusion based on one answer but in order to get our message across in fact a single anecdote is really helpful right um and to my mind we actually have to embrace that that's the way the human brain works right so I mean I think in if we just go ahead and say well I don't like that I don't like how the human break works so I'm gonna give them data and figures anyway well the message won't get across right so we really need to embrace if we understand how the mind work and then we embrace it to get the the important information across and again another example that I kind of write about is This was um years ago with the 2016 campaign where um Trump was one of the candidates for the Republican Party
um and Dr Carson was another and they were debating and the debate turned again to the vaccines and autism question and so they were asked about you know Trump says that there's a relationship between childhood vaccines and autism Dr Carson is a pediatrician and and he was asked well you know what do you think about this and Dr Carson said look this is not true we have a lot of data we have a lot of Science and you know I'm sure that if Trump reads the science and data he will be convinced otherwise um so then they turn to Trump to see if he was convinced and of course he wasn't convinced but then what he did he used the absolutely opposite approach which is he told a story a story of someone who worked for him who had a little baby and he said the baby got the vaccine and he used like to induce emotion he is like you said it was a horse-sized syringe right and after a few weeks the baby got autism and now I'm not saying that we should do we should um communicate false information using anecdotes and emotion but me I remember I was actually watching that and my son was a few weeks old and he was next to me on the sofa and I'm a scientist and I know all the data and you know but still my and I know that he was wrong but my reaction was like ooh maybe I should think about this twice before I decide whether to vaccinate my little son here um and I felt like that for at least I would say like a few minutes a little bit more and kind of that feeling made me think look if I'm thinking that because all because Dr Carson just said there's data and figures and Science and Trump just told the story that got me feeling quite anxious and he was much more influential um what about everyone else that's watching you know people who are not neuroscientists who don't have training with science um and it really kind of hit home how powerful it is now you could use these techniques obviously to spread misinformation and to do harm of course but if Dr Carson had used some of these techniques as well he could say there's a science but together with that you know maybe using some kind of anecdote to maybe use some um
hope hope and optimism emotion right some something like that he would maybe have caused many many people who are watching it to vaccinate their kids and therefore to save lives um so I think there's like you know if you don't understand human behavior and you don't use it because maybe you don't like it you know you're like you don't like that that's how the brain works you'll be missing on something right this is why conspiracy theories flourish on social media right because all I need to do is get one anecdote one low context video one picture one screenshot of something and posted on Facebook and regardless of the science whether it's climate change or vaccines whatever that one little screenshot from a telegram group that says something happened to one person somewhere out of 8 billion becomes way more sort of um believable and plausible and um powerful than all of the science and I've seen that over the last couple of years it's why like the misin for me it feels like a bit of a losing War really because with bringing like facts and figures to an emotional fight and the facts and figures just will never win like even below the you know social media channels now we're putting the little tag on post to say well actually Politico says this isn't true it's like he gives a crap it hits somebody in the feelings um but it also speaks to the you know you talk a lot about this in your book The influential mind it speaks to how as as business people or in sales or whenever we're trying to be heard and understood or influence others coming with facts figures graphs and charts is not going to be as compelling as coming with um a really great emotional story I I've always impressed upon people as much as I can that like your facts and figures and charts and graphs really don't really matter when you're trying to convince people um and that's what your book really speaks to right and it's terrible for a scientist of course all day is you know gathers gather data and do analysis but um yeah so so it's an interesting question so why do these stories why are they so effective and so I think there's two major region reasons one is they are well free actually one is mostly they induce emotion and what
emotion does it gets you to focus because emotion tells your brain this is important right and it gets a whole brain noticing it's like a little red kind of light in your brain going emotion pay attention right so if you say something that's emotional people are going to pay attention and they're going to remember better so emotion enhances the likelihood that you will remember things um then the second reason is if you think about it how humans how did we learn right if before we had science before we had all these ways to get so much data we would we would live in like relatively small groups and we would learn from observing others right observing like a friend or someone who lives nearby it was learning from stories that's how we evolved to learn from a small n right only now do we have you know these these techniques and big data that we could really figure things out but our brain is still a brain of these humans that didn't have the internet that didn't have all the math that we have now and so we're still learning from stories that's kind of our our Instinct now we are sophisticated creatures we can't overcome this we can look at the data we can learn but really our instinct is to learn from a single story the third reason I think is that stories are often novel like you've never heard the exact same story in that kind of way again novelty causes you to pay attention and causes you to remember it's another signal if something is important right while data and figures you kind of heard it before if someone says well there's no relationship between Autism and vaccine or whatever I mean you've already had the science it's usually doesn't it doesn't sound so novel and really our brain cares about the headlines right what's new it's like a newspaper we don't care about what's been the same we care about this is new means that we should pay attention and then maybe it's important or maybe not but um that last Point really resonated about the the cnh that stories are in essence novel you've never heard about Debbie in Newcastle exactly before um but also what you know now it makes perfect sense as to why politicians in the house of parliament every week say I spoke to my constituent Dorothy in
Burnley and then they'll tell the story about Dorothy struggling to to hit her home versus just coming with facts and when you hear about Dorothy who can't heat her home you feel way more oh my God versus hearing 24 of elderly people can't hit their home for example when I think about motivation though does the same rules apply so if I want to motivate my team should I be telling them the Diary of a CEO has done 20 million downloads this month or should I be telling them a story of Dorothy who listened to the podcast and it changed her life I think in this case both things will will work I mean um seeing progress is something that really motivates us and seeing progress with numbers is an easy way for us to see progress right this is why um all these kind of like track your steps work right um so I think to motivate I mean it's oh it's always lovely also to hear a story I mean even for yourself if you know it doesn't matter how many people watched your podcast is that when you get like you meet someone they tell you about like how much you touch them and really change their life and they decide to make a decision because of you they heard you do something you really remember that right that like causes so much joy and motivation numbers are great too right when you look and you're like oh I have one million people listening to my podcast that's great too so I think both things work and when if you do use numbers it's really great to kind of show the progress right a really great way to change Behavior is to show people progress and numbers is just one way to show it right if they can kind of see it going up up up up um that's that's really helpful and I mean we know it in sports but it can it can be true for anything right if it's like you can do it it's money Investments right um seeing that go up relationships as well I wonder how you can do it for relationship it's a good question well I I actually I say that because I feel like I do that sometimes with my partner where um we might be facing some kind of issue and one of the most compelling things we've ever done when we're facing an issue is we look at all the issues we've overcame together and like how
we're here right so there were so many other times where we thought this you know we couldn't solve it she lived on the other side of the planet I lived here we both didn't want to move and then I've had exactly the same situation that was her problem for years and years oh really yeah I remember bits being sat in a bar and my partner was talking about an issue something that we were struggling with or whatever and I remember saying to her like look look how far we've come from where we were here to where we are now it's like well there's nothing that's gonna get in the way of us you know and that seemed to be compelling because I guess it was an emotional story of all these the previous issues we've overcame getting back to the optimism bias the optimism bias from what I understood is that is that bias to believing that um the future will be good is that is that accurate or is that inaccurate yeah kind of so um optimism on its own I mean even though I'm wrong no no that's right I'll just give you the scientific definition so um yeah so optimism is believing that that some you know that positive things will happen the optimism bias means that um you're either like that you believe these optimistic things these good things will happen but the evidence suggests otherwise so it's it's actually a mistake right the optimism bias so usually we Define it as overestimating the likelihood of positive events happening so you're overestimating um how much money am I gonna get with my first job when I leave graduate school right or overestimating like how long my marriage will last um and so on so overestimating the positive in light of the evidence that is in front of us and underestimating the likelihood of negative events happening so I'm underestimating my likelihood of getting covered of getting cancer of being in a car accident going bankrupt whatever it is based on whatever evidence is is there um so optimism bias does mean mistakes so the word bias means a systematic mistake so obviously when we think about the future we can't be right most of the time because the future is uncertain we don't know what's going to happen so
we're going to be wrong a lot of the times when we predict the future but the optimism bias means that the mistakes that we make tend to systematically be that we expect it to be better than it ends up being so that's basically the optimism bias right I expect it to be better than it ends up being um which sounds like a bad thing but it's not necessarily so I mean the word bias people usually because it is a mistake people usually think that that means it's not a good thing but it's not necessarily so it can actually have both positive and negative um outcomes to it so if you think about the positive um if I expect good things in my future specifically good things even though I'm overestimating the likelihood of these things happening even if they think oh I'm you know I'm gonna make one million in the next year and of course that's way more than I'm going to um but that then motivates you right so having these positive expectations motivates you to try harder it's a bit like I think I'm going to get the gold I'm more likely to get the silver so that's kind of the idea and it also enhances your happiness and well-being right because how you're feeling now is a lot to do not necessarily with what you're doing at the moment but what you think you'll be doing later right how you're feeling now is like okay you might maybe feeling nice talking here but um a lot of it is what do I think I'm gonna do later on this evening next week next month in a year our expectations of where we will be in the future affects our happiness today right and so if I have these positive positive expectations of the future even if they're not going to happen they make me happier today this is why there's a really cool study that was done at Harvard where they were asking people who are about to go on vacation how happy they were every day before vacation and have every day during vacation and every day after vacation for a week so a week before vacation every day a week doing vacation every day a week after vacation every day so what was the happiest day do you think the day before they were right exactly right the day before vacation they were still in the office right working on the
computers but on their mind they were already on vacation on the in their mind it was wonderful and when they went on vacation it was good but it wasn't as good as it was in their mind the day before so it's the anticipation of these Goods so it's an optimism bias because they thought the vacation is going to be better than what it ended up being but that brought them the happiness before yeah right and also probably enhance the likelihood they will go on vacation which is a good thing um as well so does that mean that we should uh in our relationships in our in our teams Etc we should try and give people things to look forward to absolutely absolutely and I think that there's two things you kind of want things in the diary right so having a vacation in the diary that's going to happen in a month makes you happy today so whatever it is whatever you're doing for that matters to your team have what I call anticipatory events right things that they could look forward to that will make them happy today um but also I think you know a lot of times I do motivate my uh Team by telling them that I think this project is going to work really well I mean even I think it's from going pretty well but I might like exaggerate a little bit because you know that enhances motivation and who knows you know maybe it will work even better than I expected so it's good to kind of enhance kind of the the expectations and also to have these things that people can look forward to and of course it works the other way so also if you're dreading something that's going to happen tomorrow next week right you have to go to the dentist or whatever bad thing is happening is gonna get there and that it's gonna affect your mood today um so dread of things in the future and anticipation of the good stuff is all affecting how we feel at the moment quick from one of our sponsors I've got a tip for all of you that will make your virtual meeting experiences I think 10 times better as some of you may know by now Blue Jeans by Verizon offers seamless high quality video conferencing but the reason why I use blue jeans versus other video conferencing tools is because of
immersion their tools make you feel more connected to the employees or customers you're trying to engage with and now they're launching one of their biggest feature enhancements to impact virtual events so far called Blue Jean Studio I actually used it the other day I did a virtual event using the studio which I think about 700 of you came to TV level production quality all done by one person with very little technical experience on a laptop so if you've got an event coming up and you're thinking about doing it virtually check out blue jean studio now let me know what you think because I genuinely believe I know this is an advert and I'm supposed to say this but I genuinely believe it's the best tool I've seen for doing really immersive simple but high quality production virtual events Intel one of our podcast sponsors and I want to talk to you for a second about their built for business vpro platform in today's Working World the office is pretty much anywhere and Intel V Pro means you can remotely manage repair and protect devices across your entire organization no matter how large or small giving me and my team peace of mind to work wherever we choose to for my it team whether on premise or via Cloud behind the corporate firewall or not Intel's vpro comprehensive manageability has us covered this is something that is so important to me I you know I'm a huge believer in employee flexibility and Trust so having features like this are super helpful so to find out more search intel.co.uk vpro and let me know how you get on how contagious is optimism and conversely pessimism in like in life generally if I'm around a group of pessimists or I'm around a group of optimists what kind of contagious impact is there on on me yeah any emotion is contagious um anything sadness anxiety Joy everything is contagious fear and it happens really really fast and in an unconscious way right it could be even like you're sitting in um in the tube and someone in front of you is looking fearful you straight away will will feel fearful yourself first of all you will mimic the expression of the person that's in front of you without noticing it so if you look fearful I'm going to start
mimicking the same facial expressions yeah and that facial expression will make me feel fearful right because our brain is learning from how our face right there's it's a signal and it goes both ways like a feedback loop um and there's a good reason for it because if someone is afraid there might be something dangerous around us so I should have you seen the main piece in the David Attenborough documentary that star they they know that they know that the other monkeys are taking a cue from them so they fake fear so they go and then when all the monkeys run off they go and get the food because they've like they've like got to level two where they realize that they're all taking cues from each other and I remember that documentary thinking wow like you know because all the monkeys would run the minute one monkey made a reaction and that's pretty much what you're describing there right yeah exactly and it works for good things as well if someone looks excited you're like you will feel excited as well you don't know why but if they're excited there might be something good around right together I'm just thinking about you it's just mimicking we do facial expressions we mimic any kind of facial expression and bodily Expressions as well yeah I'm trying not to no yeah but um but okay so why is this really important to think about because let's say you want to you're managing your team if you're stressful and you're gonna start like I don't know even like shouting or raising your voice or they're gonna get more stressed as well right so it's it's it's true it's a bit like the monkeys you can actually change at least X how you look in terms of the emotions you need to think about what is my what emotion am I conveying because the emotion that you are conveying is going to then affect how people around you feel um so there's a little bit of kind of emotional control um that is helpful too you mentioned now that you kind of you might exaggerate a little bit the belief in a positive outcome to your team members and I think that's and I hope they're not listening yeah well I think we all do sometimes I mean I usually believe it because I think I
have a bit of a bias optimism bias myself but um that's in part because of I guess chapter three in the optimism bias where you talk about how self-fulfilling um optimism is and there were some really really staggering statistical sort of studies and um experiments that have been done to prove that optimism really is a self-fulfilling thing and it kind of kind of makes me think about this concept of manifestation people always talk about manifestation and it seems that see it's in my mind always been this kind of pseudosciency you just think about something and then it happens what's your view on manifestation is it true yeah so it's not magic it's not that I'm thinking something in my mind and the waves are gonna change what happens in the world the reason if you believe something the likelihood will happen is higher is because you then change your actions right you think I think you know my startup is going to really succeed and that then changes your actions you're more likely to go out there and tell other people right so if you think it's going to succeed you're more likely to convey that information to investors and so on they can see your your kind of confidence they'll be more likely to invest in you right you put more time in you put more effort in um and that's why it can have an effect on the the outcomes so it's not kind of a magic kind of thing it's just that what we believe in our mind changes the way we behave and the way we behave in the world changes World um so that's that's why that is that's kind of like this idea of self-fulfilling prophecies is linked to this concept of stereotyping where one of the real startling things I read in your um in your work was that if a woman is reminded of her gender before a math exam then her performance on that math exam will drop right so our expectations where do they come from right to some extent I mean they're coming from around us as well not only we can have like confidence even if the people around us do not but other people's expectations whether it is your friends your family Society will impact your own
um and so and again that's becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy right if you're told females are not good in math they're not good in science they can't be CEOs and so on that will change the way that you think even if it's momentarily even you're trying to fight it it will change the way that you think and what you believe and that will then change um your outcomes and I think maybe in that I mean we don't know exactly why um reminding females about The Stereotype that the females don't do well with math changes the exam results but it could be things like maybe it enhances anxiety you start self-doubt right I mean if you go to an exam and there's self-doubt well that's not helpful um and there's you know there's all these classic studies where um there was in in a class they would tell the teachers at the beginning of the semester um who the talented kids were but it was random they randomly selected kids and they said these are The Talented ones by the end of the year they did better these kids right because the teachers believed that they were talented they would treat them in that kind of way they would maybe put more time they could fade their expectations to the kid the kids and started believing that they're talented and not give them confidence and they performed better and of course it worked the other way right if a teacher believe is told this is you know the naughty one this is you know the non-intelligent one that will then change um how the kids behave what they believe and this is where stereotypes are you know come into play as well because sometimes it's about not specific individuals it's about a whole group of individuals and one such example as well as the the study where African-Americans were found to do significantly worse on IQ tests compared to Caucasians people that are white when race was emphasized before the IQ test did as well as white people when no stereotype was mentioned before right just just by mentioning that I'm black before I do a IQ test will lower my performance on the test versus if you hadn't mentioned it because the association here you're reminded of ethnicity and you're doing this exam and
then you know that maybe in your Society there's a stereotype and again that can cause self-doubt and anxiety and so on and what I think I like is that I think after I I talk about that study I also talk about another study that after Obama was elected grades went up for African Americans um because it's again it's a self-confident thing it's amazing how these you know little things I mean it's not little the fact that Obama got got elected is not little but then the fact that that then impacts your self-confidence you know the little impact on self-confidence then changes um your grades um it's it's quite something but it also changes your um one of the other things I read that's really starting it also changes your salary you talk about how one tiny move up on the optimism scale is worth an extra 33 000 a year in salary over the long term right and I okay so that's um that that shows us a correlation I think I think that's um so we still don't know for sure if it is it that because I have specific traits I'm more likely to be optimistic and therefore more likely because of those traits also more likely to gain higher salary right so you know you can imagine I'm optimistic because I had a very privileged life um and I did well in school so I'm more optimistic and and for the same reasons and then more likely to get a higher grade um but um in in some cases so we don't know if it's going one way or the other way right if it's a causation or correlation one interesting thing that that has been found is that optimists are more likely to be entrepreneurs there's I mean that is quite clear you know um and again we don't know is it because I'm optimistic that I'm more likely to be an entrepreneur or is it something about being an entrepreneur that makes me more optimistic but what they found is after you become an entrepreneur you become even more optimistic right so that suggests that there is something it is true that optimistic people are more likely to take a chance more like to
take a risk and therefore more likely to be entrepreneurs and that experience of doing that enhances your optimism further which is really interesting kind of goes both ways does that then explain how we can teach someone to become more optimistic because if the pursuit of Entrepreneurship make is kind of self-reinforcing your optimism it's making you more and more optimistic one would assume that that's because you're gaining evidence about yourself and the world and what you're capable of as you're going which is further sort of fueling you and conversely someone who I know maybe Ling this too long in their comfort zone and is um like leaning out of opportunities constantly being negatively reinforced in terms of their self belief in their skills Etc so they're becoming more and more pessimistic is that like broadly true I think it might be yes I think you are gaining evidence that you can do things and I think even if you feel um you still gained evidence that you were able to try something new right right and not die and not die right and you learn something right um yes I think you're absolutely right um so if you're able to get people to have these kind of experiences that then causes them to become more confident that will then enhance their optimism so how do you know we talked about the all the positive upsides there of being an optimist how does if I've got a friend that's a pessimist or a partner or a husband or whatever it might be how do I get them we talked a little bit about it there but how do I get them to become more of a Optimist because I want to be surrounded by optimists I want my company to be full of them like pragmatic optimists but still people that believe that you know the future is going to be good um and we're going to do great things for all the self-fulfilling reasons you've described what do I do okay so first of all I just want to mention that about 30 of how optimistic we are is genetically determined this has been shown from twin studies but that still leaves two-thirds right um the um I think the best studies on this comes probably from Martin Seligman where he actually did experiments where
he got people who were somewhat pessimistic even slightly depressed and the approach that he took is to change the inter what he calls interpretation Style so optimists this is what they usually do if something happened and it it went well right you sold your startup for a lot of money you had a project and it was successful they usually interpret that as a meaning that they it's it's personally it's something about them that caused this positive outcome right and it is something in them that's quite permanent let's say my project went well because I'm a hard worker right and you know maybe I'm intelligent or whatever and then they say well if I have those skills that means that a lot of other things are going to work well in life right if I'm in a hard work or if I'm a good with good with people that also means that I'll be a good dad for example right when something negative happens they tend to do the opposite they tend to see it as circumstantial right this negative thing happened okay so I didn't put a lot of effort in this but not because I'm not hard worker I just didn't put enough effort because I was distracted by something else or you know this other person just happen to have a better better proposal so it's circumstantial that means that they don't take that as evidence of how am I going to perform in the future right so it's really different interpretation of negative outcomes and positive outcomes so what and then pessimists do the exact opposite when something bad happens they say this bad thing happened because of me because of a trait that I have and because I have this trait let's say I'm bad with people that's going to affect all the rest of my life and all these future projects when something could happen is circumstantial good thing happened I got the job but really because they didn't have any other people candidates so what Martin segment did is he taught people this interpretation style that he taught them whenever something good happens this is how you have to think about it you have to think about it what is it about you that caused this positive thing to happen right and how is that positive trait or whatever skill whatever everything you did how can it affect other parts of your life and other few
future outcomes and the opposite for negative something negative happened I don't mean it don't take responsibility but are there circumstantial right it could be something that you did but it doesn't have to be permanent right you happen to have be in a really bad State because I don't know something else your parent was was sick or something so he teaches them the people to kind of interpret this to find these reasons for the positive and negative and it seemed to work um to some extent now it's difficult I'm I mean you know it's not easy to turn a pessimist into an optimist um but it had some effect on their well-being and even on their physical health as a result is that negative explanatory style of saying okay this bad thing happened it's because of me it's because I'm not good enough whatever is that the road to depression yeah so there's a really tight link between depression and pessimism so pessimism is a symptom of depression it's an actual symptom um and so what we see is people with severe depression have a pessimistic bias they expect the future to be worse than it ends up being and worse than the evidence in front of them is um people with mild depression have no bias at all this doesn't mean they're accurate they can make mistakes but on both sides so sometimes they expect things to be better sometimes they expect things to be worse but overall um they don't have a bias happiness you know one of the things we talked about before we started recording was um Scott Galloway said on this podcast that happiness looks like a u-shape throughout our lives as in When We're Young we're a high level of happiness and then we kind of dip into our 40s I think I think from what I read when we hit our 40s that's kind of the lowest it sounds kind of moving sounds kind of a grim but we that's our lowest point of happiness and then it kind of Curves back up again as we go into the last sort of chapters of our life is that accurate because Scott didn't provide any research and I've mulled it over and I you know yeah no so this this is true it's based on many studies and and studies involving thousands of thousands
of individuals you know up to like 70 000 or more in a country and it's been shown in many many countries um so not just in in the Western World in many many countries almost all countries around the world um so exactly what you said kids and children their happiest and the most optimistic then it goes down and reaches Rock Bottom in your midlife as well as optimism does so actually in middle age you stop having an optimism bias so your optimism is greater greatest in children's and kids it causes goes down down and then really there's no optimism bias in midlife on average of course and then it starts going up you become happier and more optimistic until the last few years of life which is counter-intuitive to our image of the grumpy old man right and actually stays there until the couple last couple years of life um the difference between countries is that the dip the you know the point where it's lowest actually is a little bit different between country and Country I think in the US it's about 40 it's a relatively early I think in the UK as well but then some countries it's much uh I think like Italy might be 50 Greece as well like 50 to 60. and then there's a few countries where you don't see that Russia is one of them Romania and I forget there's another one where you actually don't see they actually just become you know less and less less happy um in those countries we don't know why that is that specific case I'm 30 now so I'm heading right down to Rock Bottom as we speak oh you've got time you've got time I'm about to turn so I'm way I'm looking forward I'm on the way well not quite yet but I'm about on my way up and this you know this links to I think chapter five in your book where we say where you talk about the chapters called that humans are bad at predicting what makes them happy and one of the startling things is it you say that children don't impact our happiness positively now I'm under the impression that children make us ecstatically happy well it's difficult but from what I've from what I've heard from people I thought children are something to really be looking forward to but you seem to assert otherwise in your book
um so this first of all I want to say this is just a research and the numbers and um my I'm not just saying this but my own experience is the absolute opposite um bear in mind her child is upstairs and he's watching this Leo no but but it's absolutely true because it's funny because because of that research and I wrote the first this is in my first book The optimism bias which I wrote before my kids and I I actually I mean I believed it it I mean I mean that's a data what are you going to do and and that kind of got me worried I have to say about having kids I was a little bit worried about the fact that children it says children's you know children don't mean you happy you become less happy you become less happy when you have children that's what the research I didn't I didn't see that oh sorry that's what you said right because children don't make you happy yeah right but I didn't know there was I thought they didn't make you more happy I didn't know they make you less oh no it's it apparently like um I mean the data shows I mean there's a little different points of data some so for example there's one piece of data that shows that this was done by actually Daniel conman who's a Nobel Prize winner um where they asked a large group of French women to say how happy they were throughout the day so I don't know every few hours or oh maybe at the end of the day they said what they were doing and how happy they were and they found that the least happy people are is commuting but then I think number two least happy was being with their children so I have to tell you from my own this is an anecdote an N of one my children really make me extremely happy I love being with them I'm really it's contrary to all the research so I I truly I mean I'm surprised you know before they were born I was thinking look if you know if I don't like them we'll put them in a boarding school and my mom was like I don't think you want to put them in boarding school you're probably and I was like well we'll see and then and then no absolutely love having them around so but that's just an end of one so I don't know and of course your own experience unfortunately even as a scientist shapes the way that you interpret the data but um I mean look
having I mean I'm sure having children can be difficult and and you know it depends on your life circumstances and all of that and temperament of the child and so on and so I'm sure it could be it could be difficult but is that is that because there's a distinction as you said at the start of this conversation between like happiness and meaning it might be difficult but it's meaningful I need like work is difficult there's like varieties of work if I'm working in a job with a little autonomy where the outcomes I'm like subjectively not interested in then it's just difficult work but if I'm like raising a child it's difficult but it's tremendously meaningful so although I might say to this the investigator that I'm unhappy when my kid is crying and running around and smashing everything and playing with the Rubik's Cube won't put it down I reflect on that in hindsight and go oh amazing absolutely I mean meaning is important and you should do things you should make choices um according to meaning as well um and and obviously there's individual differences in my case it they just actually make me happy I can like dance with them in my you know at home and like actual happiness um but but you know it can obviously it's different it's not like all the time of course um what about marriage that was the other one that was quite surprising that it didn't didn't make it but I think okay so that was a little bit so it's been a while since I look at this but I think it was nuanced which is what does make you happy is being in a relationship I believe that did make whether you were married or not married didn't really matter but I think being in a relationship was was inducing happiness the other kind of interesting finding about that is that um how fast people get over divorce right that it takes I mean I don't know if it's fast or not but within like so just before um a few years before you get divorced happiness starts going down because of course there's problems I guess and so on and it actually hits Rock Bottom just about the time that you get divorced and then then it starts going up you start
adapting right and in fact goes back to Baseline levels of happiness within about two years I don't know maybe maybe two years is a lot but then people uh bounce back um so when you kind of think about these changes which could be negative right divorce I think people don't consider as much our ability to adapt so fast right to change so fast I think covet was a really good example of the pandemic I mean before the pandemic if I was to tell you you're going to have to stay at home and not see anyone else and you'd be like this is disaster how's it going to happen um people adapt it quite fast yes stress we did studies we actually started doing studies a few weeks after the pandemic started we did see of course Stress and Anxiety was enhanced but a not as much as we thought and number two the um bouncing back was extremely surprising within just a couple of months a lot of people were back to their Baseline happiness so adaptation is really fast you kind of find ways to overcome these things that being said that was like a bird's-eye view because there were parts of the population that were not doing well right so if you kind of take a warm side view you see that for example people with mental health problems I mean pre-existing ones they had trouble adapting to this new situation um some like women actually did a little bit worse because they were probably had more of the the child care um younger individuals did worse in older individuals maybe because of that u-shape curve but in general people adapt faster than they believe they will and I think that goes back to our question of why don't people take risks and why don't write why don't they make changes I think because one of the reasons is they're afraid that they won't adapt to the change right and they underestimate how fast and how well humans adapt to changes in their environment and their situation I mean this is basically why our species did so well and why we're all here today I think because we can just adapt to to these different environment
changes and when we're trying to get people to take action in their lives or just take action in teams and such one of the things in the influential mind book that you wrote talks about how um fear and trying to scare people and I was thinking about it then when you're talking about the pandemic and much of what the governments were saying and how trying to get us to conform to the pandemics through um fear I guess um should we try and scare people into action as leaders yeah so so I really like this because it's kind of a fundamental neuroscientific uh finding that it's a little bit of a leap but tells you something really interesting and how to get people to do something or not to do something so basically what we find is that if you want to induce action it's more helpful to highlight the rewards you know if you do this you know if you put the time in you know you're going to get a promotion um unless so about the fear if you don't do this you won't get a promotion so if you want people to act highlighting rewards highlighting the good time the good outcomes is better if you want people not to act let's say you want them not to reveal some secret actually highlighting the punishment is better and why is that so this is where I find it really interesting which is we kind of evolved in a world that to get something good whether it is a promotion or love for we have to do something so I'm thirsty I need to move my hand and have a little sip of this T right so and imagine it doesn't necessarily this is a world we live in but it it's not necessarily the way it could have been it could have been that to get the tea I'd have to kind of like go like this and not do anything I imagine like different physics or something right but the world that we live in is to get the good stuff you have to do things and so our brain has evolved in this kind of world where anytime something good we anticipate something good a go reaction is activated deep in our brain in the midbrain it goes all the way to our frontal cortex and makes action more likely now the reverse is that if usually in the world to avoid something bad usually
not always but usually we just need to not do anything so whether it's deep Waters untrustworthy people uh poison I usually just need not to eat not to jump in the pool right I need to just stay put so our brain is evolved in this kind of environment that to avoid the bad things I need to not act and so when there is anticipation of something bad a no-go reaction is activated deep in our brain goes all the way to frontal cortex and it inhibits action now again we're sophisticated creatures we can overcome this but our immediate reaction is to freeze in this case not to flee or act right first we freeze and then we might be able to do something and so we see this in like very basic studies where we tell people press a button to get money or press a button to avoid losing money they press the button faster to get the dollar than to not avoid losing it because action is related to rewards right interesting so it's hard for them to do to I mean of course they do it but there's a little bit of inhibition if if the goal is to not have something happen not to lose right we kind of I mean a lot of I mean there's on one hand there are these theories about fear gets me motivated I don't want to lose that's why I don't really believe that that is the commonly true I think usually we do stuff to get things rather than to avoid losing things example in your book as well is you think about planes going down when people are most scared they just they're frozen and um fear doesn't necessarily seem to be a great driver of human action and motivation in the same way yeah that's that's really important for organizations that are trying to get their people to take greater risks um and to innovate and to take chances which is to try and remove as much of that fear as you possibly can right and also to kind of be able to vividly imagine this like goal this better future um again it's not because our whatever we think in our mind is changing the world but it changes your behavior chapter six in your book is what happens to people under threat and you talk a lot about stress and the role stress plays in organizations and companies now I've gone back and forward in my mind about the concept of stress because I
remember reading a lot that um some of the most subjectively fulfilling jobs were like quite stressful jobs it was things like being a military commander at the highest level because I guess they have a lot of meaning associated with them but what role does stress play on people's um behavior and actions as it relates to you know workforces and teams and relationships I'll actually start with the kind of example that you're you're talking about you're saying well a lot of them really most filling jobs are highly stressful but I think the people who take those jobs are somewhat resilient more to stress than others right so how much stress you're feeling is a subjective thing right it's not only about what's happening it's also about you so it you know so you could have a what other people will consider a very stressful job and you're maybe feeling a little bit stressed and we know I mean I'm sure a lot of people know this that the optimal there's an optimal kind of inverse u-shape for stress no stress at all is actually not that great for your performance and a lot of stress is also not good you want to be somewhere where you have a certain amount of stress that's driving you forward but again that certain amount of stress is the subjective feeling of it it's not the objective um happening right but what what kind of I talk about there is um that what happens when when you are stressed and when I say stress I mean you're feeling stressed like cortisol is going up and and you know that people tend to concentrate on negative information so if we give people so this is kind of interesting if we we I ask you like what is the likelihood that you will sell your company and you give me a number um and I give you a number and I say you know actually based on all my data you're more likely to sell the company you will listen to me you'll change your belief but when I tell you actually based on my num my my data you're less likely to sell your company that you believe you won't change it as much you listen you'll learn a little bit but you'll learn more when I give you the good news so we talked about that a
little bit before good news is more effective than bad news not under stress so if you're stressed out for whatever reason it doesn't have to be but a business reason you could be stressed because of the conversation you had with your partner that will then affect how you take the information that I give you you will now focus more on the negative information surprisingly negative information that I give you than you would otherwise will interesting um and if you look at you know if you look at events in in the world whether it's after a terrorist attack or a pandemic or natural disaster people get a lot of this kind of information even if it's not happening here there's a terrorist attack halfway around the world we get all the information on the media that stresses us out the stress causes us to focus more on the negative information which of which there's a lot of at the time and that can actually cause people to be overly pessimistic so a lot of times we're overly optimistic but actually when really stressful things happen we could be overly pessimistic and you can see that in the market in the financial Market where when the market starts going down even if it's a little bit it does cause stress and then start people get overly pessimistic they start panicking and selling their stocks well really they should be holding on so we get these like overly pessimistic reactions under stress because people start focusing on the negative so they don't see the evidence in the positive information they kind of focus on the negative information it's funny because the example you gave in the context of selling a company in a business I've got a very close friend of mine who pre-pandemic set valuation for his company I'm going to say 100 million and he was dead set on it he was you know he wouldn't accept a penny less post-pandemic and in the wake of the like sort of economic backdrop we're facing now recession he is desperate to sell it for 20 minutes exact same company it's weird how much his perspective has changed from being this person who is absolutely not willing to budge the company's not changing the company's as well as it was before but just with the pessimistic Outlook he's suddenly trying to offload the company
for fraction of the price and is suddenly seems to be incredibly desperate in doing that and I guess that further reinforces your point about us being much more suggestible um and pessimistic in times of threat and stress because now it's not likely that there's any a buyer out there and it's just interesting having observed that in him so quick so quickly it seems or it wasn't even print post pandemic because in the pandemic the markets were great it was about a year ago it's about 12 months difference um that he's willing to drop the value of his company by about 80 even though it's doing really really well um and then uh the one thing I think about a lot in building companies and Building Company cultures is the role stress plays on like Innovation and risk taking um it's interesting because most of the the teams that I run going back to social chain and even this team and other teams that I'm I'm in they are somewhat high pressure teams as in like we're really we're usually at the front of our Market we usually um pushing very hard the growth is usually very very intense but which causes like imagine stress but at the same time we're there and we need we'll stay there by taking a high degree of risks so how do I balance that environment which can be stressful while also needing people to continue to take risks and innovate and feel safe in doing so what advice would you give me um so because we said that stress is really stress is your own reaction within yourself um and that reaction can be different to the same outside environment then what you really want is to reduce people's stress and not necessarily not put the pressure on them right I mean that's the better right you could you could basically do two things you could say oh put less pressure on them I mean less give them less work to do um or on the other hand you could be like well actually let's stay with this amount of work but can we just reduce the way that they perceive it on the stress that they have so I actually think my answer is going to be extremely simple because the
research shows that simple things like and this is so simple that I'm exercise actually is great at reducing stress um I don't do things like meditation and so on but but people um there's studies showing that that also reduces stress so I actually think those are really important going outside walking in nature right social interaction so there's all of these things that that can reduce stress and I really believe that just having in this kind of sounds like really that's on but just working out like an hour in the morning or something like that is gonna hugely change it reduces stress it makes you more focused um then if you want to do like something more psychologically you can highlight how you can get through it right so okay so this is all the workload and these are all the problems that can there are hurdles these are the problems either the hurdles but okay let's think through how we go we actually overcome them rather than just put it out there right walk through about what okay what are we gonna do in order to get to where we want and then the other thing that we talked about the other a little bit ago is um progress monitoring that's always helpful like not just saying that things are progressed if you can actually like if there's a way to see it right if there's an actual way to like put it on a board or something like that um because again like just um enhancing people's confidence and optimism will reduce stress as well these are two fantastic books I mean they're right up my street they're people will know from listening to this podcast that all of this subject matter about influence about the brain about psychology optimism pessimism all these topics are things that I I absolutely adore so anyone that loves this podcast should immediately go and check out these books because they are real sort of foundational books on on this subject matter but what are you thinking about next what are you what are you you know you could write about anything I I think because of your your huge broad understanding of human beings there's so many things you could write a book about
sales whatever what are you thinking about next um so the book that I'm working on at the moment which um probably will be out in about one year in 2024. um is about how is it that in fact we're not noticing a lot of the things around us a lot of the good things around us and a lot of the bad things around us and in fact the reason for it is a basic physiological reason of how our mind works every single neuron in our brain actually and what it is is that when something is like constant doesn't change in front of us we stop noticing it we stop feeling it we stop responding to it so something simple like you jump into a pool it's really cold after a few seconds doesn't feel that cold or um there's like the refrigerator noise it really bothers you because you just walked into the room but after a few minutes or maybe half an hour maybe 10 minutes you stop noticing it you go to uh I don't know like if people still um remember going to a bar and was full of smoke before smoking with bands you'd go in and you'd be like oh and then you don't notice it anymore the reason is is that's how our neurons work that's how the brain worked the neurons will respond to things that are novel new just happened and after a while they adapt and they stop responding physically they just stop responding so okay fine that's that's fine when it comes to sound or smoke and so on but it happens to everything it also has what we call emotional adaptation so you meet your partner and it's so exciting and you're so grateful and you're really kind of feel the love and so and it goes down over time if they're constant if they're with you you just don't notice how wonderful um you know what is around you you've got a new job that you always dreamed of and you're so happy but very very soon you think oh you know what is the next thing now that's not a bad thing the reason that we do that is because we want to progress best but it also makes us a little bit less grateful and happy and the flip side is the side that people haven't noticed so much which I think most of our book is which is about the fact that we stop noticing the bad
things around us um things like for example if you go as we talked about a little before we started you go on Twitter when you just start at Twitter you know 2010 or whatever you'd go on in it and you'd be like oh this is terrible people are um calling names other to other people there's all this harassment online and you're kind of you notice it and you're and then you get used to it you don't notice it anymore so whether it is misinformation that that is around us whether it is you know dishonesty um even even things like the reason that we don't really notice climate change around us is because it's happening so so so slowly and our brain doesn't respond to things that are constant or very very slow so um or risk actually we have a whole chapter about risk uh risk adaptation right so how you get used to taking risks and you don't notice the risks anymore you underestimate the risks because you get used to that one of the things I was thinking so earlier when you talked about how when you were doing presentations on stage starting in a way that feels novel is a way to kind of bypass the mind's filter that that's useful that's used to people coming up on stage and saying hi I'm Tom from I don't know innovativesales.com and I'm going to tell you and then your brain just goes okay we know what to do with this filter and then generally in marketing as well we have this term we use a lot on our team where we'll say the word wallpaper you don't notice wallpapers there and so whenever a message sounds like wallpaper we know it becomes ineffective so when people do podcasts like this they'll say things like well I can subscribe now you've heard that 10 000 times so it works on no one I'm asking you to like And subscribe but you've heard the phrase so but if I say it another way if I say my mom's got a message for you and then my mum appears in her in her big wonderful African voice and says this is my son's YouTube Channel please do you know then as instantaneously it bypasses the wallpaper filter and you're like what that but it and and then the second thing I was thinking about when you talked about that is how we become kind of we lose gratitude for things in our lives very quickly because we were
coming sort of desensitized and use the example of our relationships so how does one stop themselves from becoming bored of their partner yeah actually I have answers but but um I I love your examples I might use a few of them and and I think I think what you're saying and I'll talk about the relationship in a minute but yes exactly what you want to do is surprise people right exactly what you're saying you need the brain to be surprised me I didn't expect that because what the brain is trying to do at all times it's actually trying not to be surprised the brain is trying to model the world to have an internal model of what's outside so I can anticipate what's happening so then I can react in time right I want to know like whether it's going to rain I don't want to be surprised in the rain because I want to bring the umbrella ahead of time so it's all about I have the best model of the world in my mind so I can predict what's happened so I can react in Time ahead of time so that's why we're not responding to things that are unexpected because the model in the brain already told us what is about to happen and when you surprise people that's when like the neurons go and then it's attention right so um so we actually talk um about relationships and um it seems that when you ask people and this is from um I'm gonna mispronounce her name but uh a well-known um uh relationship expert and she says that she's done studies and when you ask people when do you feel most attracted to your partner they say one of two things either when you see them in an unexpected way something that you're not used to maybe they're talking to some strangers maybe they're on a stage doing something and the second thing they say is when I'm away and when I come back I mean I I it's it's really resonating right it's like I mean I I feel that a lot like when I'm kind of you know I've been away for a while and I'm on the plane ready you know on the way home and I'm like oh I can't wait to see everyone again and you know so um what that tells us is that we need a little bit of distance I think that's
what it says right that in fact um you might want to be away for like a weekend for a day or so on um and that kind of causes what we call like it's a bit tacky but we call it sparkling like we're sparkling you're like we actually got the term from Julia Roberts my co-author happened to read and uh interview with Julia Roberts and she was saying how her life I mean it's Julia Roberts of course like rich and privileged and all of that but she was talking about her regular life and you know she has a couple of kids and her husband and she wakes up in the morning and there's breakfast and she brings him to school and then you know they go have a bike ride and lunch and then picks up the kids and she's like well if I did that every day all day for years and years and years I'd probably think it was quite boring you know and not that great but once in a few months she goes away and does Her filming or whatever and comes back and everything seems like re-sparkle again right because it kind of feels like new again so you want to to make feel things feel like they're new and one way to do it is just to take yourself to another place now you could say well maybe I don't have money to go away for the weekend well there's a few solutions for that so this was interesting because doing covid I got covered and so I had to go down to the basement and so I had to spend you know five days or a week in the basement um first of all it wasn't that bad it was like a little camping experience and second of all when like the few days were up I felt like my home life was so amazing so you know I came out of the basement um but it turns out so there's a little exercise that Laurie Santos recommends who's a professor at Yale and she says if you just imagine for a minute like close your eyes and imagine your life without your partner without like the great house that you have without like the great job that you have like if you really imagine it and think about it like that then so you know like the fear comes in and then when you kind of get out of that you're like oh I appreciate it right and I know you have to probably do it more than two minutes a year but
and I feel that's so true when you have kind of you know how you have a dream you kind of wake up from this really terrible dream where you lost your partner or something like that and you and you're like so appreciative and so yeah yeah I've got reoccurring Jim of being falsely imprisoned and I wake up oh my God my freedom no but you what you've described there is um me and my friends have been talking about we call it desire Management in our relationships which is like actively managing the desire because we have a really good example in our in our friendship circle of a friend who moved in with his partner on the second day and they didn't just move in together they moved into hotel room in the second day and they just this was coven or what um it was during covert but she she lived on the other side of the world so in order for them to be together she was going to have to fly across and stay with him and it was basically their second day they moved into a hotel room together and desire very quickly drops and you but there's also this Collision of Lifestyle so like oh my God you've left the toilet seat up and you make the bathroom wet and these kinds of smaller things which also are have a huge impact on desire but then you're held together in a hotel room for three months barely knowing this person desire in that early phase of relationship should be you know it's normally like a little bit exciting and it's funny how that can kill desire so quickly and then moving in and then um another friend of mine moved in straight away with somebody and they work together live on top of each other and I saw the same thing so me and my friends came up with this term called desire management where it's act actually our jobs as a sort of in a relationship to manage the desire actively manage it and this means obviously some people go for dates and they try and keep things new and fresh but one of the best ways that I do it my relationship is um my partner goes away all the time and so do I and like she's been in India for the last four weeks she got back yesterday or the day before it's like feels brand new again and she does it all the time she's always flying away somewhere I'm gonna go do this training
course in summer I'm like oh my God this is amazing because then I really don't but then also it's funny you said that because um last night we were at our Christmas party that's why everyone here is a bit pissed still a bit slow and some of them missing and um my girlfriend was really really pushing me to go up in DJ I've never really DJ'd before but I've been learning for nine months and she was like pushing she was like we'll go get a there was a DJ at the punch that will go get a USB stick now we'll go put it on there and you go up in DJ and I I noticed that when I went I went home I put some music on I came back to the party and I DJ'd I could see because it was seeing me in a new context yeah right and it's a really like high status probably quite attractive context um and conversely when she did her breath work sessions in London and she had this room full of 25 people and she basically has them hypnotized like they're crying and screaming and she's doing this thing it was so attractive for me to see that see her in this new club it's almost like discovering a new person because you also see that person from The Eyes Of The Strangers to see them right so they see them as someone that they don't know that they're not intimate with and you kind of maybe see that you get that point of view um well I can't wait to read that book as well we have a closing tradition on the podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to be leaving it for so let me see people don't believe me when I say this but I actually don't get to see the question beforehand um okay the question left for you is can you describe what winning means to you so it's a catch because I think what winning means to me is to get what I want however as we just said once you get what you want then you want something else so that's still the answer thank you so much Sally you write the best books you really do this conversation has been one of my favorite ever because you have a really
remarkable ability to deliver very important information that's very actual in people's lives do the tied in with the story that makes it seem um that connects an emotional level but then also support it with science and psychology so thank you so much it's honestly a huge and I I don't think it was super fun I really really mean it fantastic conversation and I I know already how much my audience are going to appreciate it because I can kind of predict because we're kind of the same people me and the audience so thank you so much for your time tell it means a lot thank you for having me [Music] quick one from our longest standing sponsor hero I I can't tell you over the last I'd say over the last really it's been about two and a half years it was really um post pandemic how much my health has become such a huge priority in my life and I have this laser laser focused on what I'm putting into my body it's funny because as you get older you can start to feel the things you're putting into your body more and more and more um and if I if I put something into my body especially things like gluten if I put those things in my body I feel them tremendously the next day my energy levels my sleep and everything in between huel has been probably the most important partner in my health Journey because I've been in the boardrooms I've been to their offices tens and tens and tens and tens of times I've seen how they make their decisions on nutrition and I trust it most of my team that are in this room with me consume it and get the benefits of it too so if you haven't already tried here do so if you see me wearing jewelry there's one thing you will know for sure this has been the case since before they're a sponsor of this podcast is that I'm wearing crafted jewelry their pieces are my favorite they are my favorite and as I said if you ever see me wearing jewelry I guarantee you it's crafter jewelry their new collection here is my favorite ever it's the most affordable brilliant versatile wonderful high quality jewelry I've ever seen and as I said the meaning of the pieces as you
can see if you look at some of these pieces for me of course it's interpretation but optimism um Freedom those are the kind of hints I get through and my favorite piece of crafts of all time is actually a similar piece to the one that Conor McGregor has Conor McGregor has a crafted piece um and it's of the lion if you're looking for male jewelry and you're looking for stuff that is high quality that is high in meaning and that is aesthetically beautiful and on Trend look no further than crafted [Music] thank you [Music]