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wow we've now recorded more than 100 episodes of the diary of a ceo and i've had some of the most amazing inspiring and life-changing conversations with some of the world's most accomplished experts business people psychologists athletes you name it so this week we're going to do something a little different something many of you have requested for a long time and something i've always wanted to do this week we're going to look backwards this week i'm going to share with you the key moments the actionable life-changing epiphany-inducing moments from the last 100 episodes that had a lasting impact on me that changed my life so without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the diary of a ceo i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself we hear this phrase a lot which is find your passion yeah and i almost feel that it's it's in many respects quite harmful because it that question is kind of loaded it it assumes a singular passion for a star it assumes that you can discover it like an easter egg and then and also um the the context in which that question usually sits in it implies that once you find it then it's you know then it's the the the it's a can of unlimited like happiness and orientation forever and then that's yours and it i just feel like sometimes language can be harmful because it it simplifies very complex things and sometimes multifaceted plural things you know so i wondered if that you know that phrase uh find your per find your passion was something you um you felt similar about or yeah yeah i do i mean yeah it's true that passion can be a significant multiplier of human potential so you know people are passionate and engaged in a business they can direct their energy in a in a worthwhile meaningful manner so so so it's it's worthwhile but you're right but um there's a big difference between passion big difference between happiness and joy some are in the moment at home i think joy is in the moment and i think happiness is something um that we
continually continually adjust towards um your passion can be a significant multiplier of human potential particularly in the workplace so it does have a place it is something which is useful to understand and it ultimately it always comes down to personal introspection and self-awareness for me and i think that um we need to work harder at understanding ourselves and when we are constructing a mindset which is conducive to performance so we optimize our potential when we're in a particular state of mind and that state of mind might be passion it might be relaxation it might be enthusiasm might be enjoyment but we need to almost get to know ourselves and know that um there are certain things which enable us to do others and once we work backwards and understand what that looks like maybe we can gain some more consistency i say to a lot of sports people and to a lot of business people that consistency of mind gives you consistency of play and i'm convinced of it and the more consistent we can be in our thinking we understand um the building blocks the component parts to success yeah the more success we can have and how does one establish consistency of thought um because i completely agree with that i completely agree i've seen that in my own life when i've been consistent with my thinking i've managed to you know perform the same habits every day um but then sometimes i'll lose consistency in my thoughts because i lose um [Music] i lose i guess i lose attachment or sort of my anchor with my my why yeah and i talk a lot i've talked a lot in this podcast over the last couple of weeks about this realization i've had this year with the gym which was every year february march i was incredibly motivated to go i was fired up trying to look good for summer yeah and then obviously once you look good and summer has ended it's almost like you've lost your anchor right so like you get into september and the why which made you go and to think consistently every day has been has evaporated and i'm tr i can't get myself to go to the gym in october right do you know i mean i always think that consistency of mind comes from understanding the intrinsic
quality of our decision-making processes and i say that a lot to people in sport and in business so yeah you can make a good decision and have a really bad outcome or you can make a bad decision have a good outcome and this is why i've worked with leadership teams who have confused luck for genius made really bad decisions with a great outcome you know markets have changed competition's done something something's just worked in their favor um so um this is really important for us to not judge our decision making by our outcomes and we often do so we'll say this is a good decision because it resulted in this or this is a bad decision it resulted in that and we can only understand the outcome retrospectively so it's wrong to measure our decisions by the outcomes and we need to go back to how we made a decision in the first place and once we start to understand the intrinsic quality of our decision making process we can become more consistent in how we make decisions and therefore have more control over those outcomes so i think that you know two things i think that and then we'll use you as the example here steve that consistency of mind will come from knowing how we make decisions i don't understand that we put our weight into evidence how much we use prejudice and bias and opinion whatever it might be but let's understand how we make decisions and in that way we can be consistent in um how we apply our logic and thinking and feeling to try and determine some best outcomes and then the other thing and um as you've just positioned is reframing let's stand back and create some time and space to understand and um you know why we do things and why we don't do things now i always say that um the people are most successful and i've had a pleasure working with six sports people who got to number one in the world i can guarantee you one thing i had in common was that um they um they never made big changes and um it was small changes so i'm a big big believer in the one degree of change if you take two parallel lines and you move one by one degree it may not seem much at first but it's a really big difference between where you start and where you end up
so um everyone's trying to you know make a dramatic change and see change from tomorrow i'm going to be different i think it's about doing something a little bit more than what we've been doing it ratan a bit more consistently and then the other thing with these people who obtained you know what i call um super achievements at home so they did really really well um is that they actually worked on their strengths they started to understand what was good about them and do that some more so we think to be better as human beings i'm gonna be better as a business or a team of people we need to fix our weaknesses um i'm not sure that's true i actually think it's more about understanding our strengths and playing to them so i've actually worked with teams before in business and in sport who have actually weakened the strength by trying to strengthen a weakness if you think about it it's ridiculous and actually weaken the strength by trying to strengthen the weakness we need to be careful so i think understanding what's good about us understanding you know where our behaviors come from in regard to the thinking before it and then reframing some of those words and pictures and i guess that's what you've done with your gym example because i guess change some of the words and pictures in your head to therefore feel differently which has resulted you in acting differently yeah and i really you know i was i was valuing intensity over consistency and intensity wasn't sustainable right so i was going through the summer like to the gym two times a day i was starving myself like eating things that i i didn't want to necessarily eat yeah and the the consistency came from being a bit more um realistic with myself being like you know if you miss the day of gym it doesn't matter you don't have to perspective yeah perspective isn't it yeah and i think do you know it's funny because again so many sports people have worked with and business people who will lose perspective they'll lose the tournament and it's dreadful you know win a tournament i've i've made it you know it's just turning point for me now they win a big contract you know in business and you know this is us now we're set up you know or they lose a contract and um life has never been so
dreadful um but i think that we need a better perspective on things so their ability to think more long term term to be more forgiving you know to understand with more um reality at uh what's good and what's not so good um it's probably the way forwards i want to talk about failure yes now which seems like a good thing to talk about and in your book philosophy you you list seven failure principles number one failure just is failure is a fact it's inevitable it's going to happen to all of us no matter how much we try to avoid it i guarantee that it will happen and that can feel scary but it can also feel liberating because once you've accepted it as a fact there's no point in trying to avoid it so you might as well take the risk so acceptance of failure starts with the observation of it failure is a fact but how you respond to it is within your control whether you decide to feel like a failure for many years after the thing that's happened or whether you think to yourself okay well that's taught me something and i'll do it differently next time i guess the risk there is one bad failure people stop trying exactly and then i i was thinking this is very similar to confidence in the way that like if you have one bad failure your performance next time you get an opportunity if you actually don't manage to just avoid it completely will probably be worse because of nerves and that you know the memory if i'm terrible and yeah and then that's going to increase your chances of failing again and then the kind of like self negative reinforcing cycle kind of continues and you your confidence and your sort of yeah your guts kind of cascade downwards and can for some people work in the other direction where you have a success your confidence builds you walk on stage to do that you know public speech next time around with a bit more confidence you do a better job which increases your chance of success and it cascades upwards about how failure works from your experience it can work like that i mean to take the example you've just given
one of the ways of looking at that if you're then stuck in a downward cycle and you're failing and you're trying the thing is that you're therefore in the wrong situation so you're in the wrong workplace for instance that that isn't generous enough to like make you feel okay after your failures or doesn't make you feel like you can be your true self in which case i would argue you need to remove yourself from that situation and find the place that does suit you or it can be a question of mindset and a question of applying that mindset that we've just talked about which is okay i failed i'm feeling in a downward spiral how much of that is fact that's a very difficult thing to do on your own when you're a very low ebb and that's why i'm a huge advocate of therapy and again i know that i come from a privileged place where i can afford therapy but even if it starts with reaching out to your friend and talking about it or reaching out to your work helpline and talking about it or texting shout the mental health charity or calling the samaritans that's a really valuable step and the other thing that i would say there is that i'm very aware that my definition of failure which is what happens when life doesn't go according to plan has a fatal flaw which is that sometimes there are failures that are totally cataclysmic that we couldn't possibly have predicted that go against any plan whatsoever like a global pandemic like a terrible illness that you contract like the death of a loved one it would be monstrous for me to sit here and say those failures are as easily assimilated or learned from or dealt with as fading or driving tests and so i'm not saying that at all those kind of failures will require a process of mourning and coming to terms with the thing that you've lost and that's absolutely right and as it should be my only thing is the way that i choose to live my life is i mourn but i don't have to constantly relive the pain i can still feel sadness
about something but i don't need to live in that place of reliving it constantly becoming a victim yeah and becoming defined by that i can choose to be defined by something else i can choose to be defined by my response to it i can choose to find some kind of meaning in something that was meaningless at the time and that's how i choose to live my life because that makes it less sad and i and i think that that choice is available for most of us so point number two in your book is you are not your anxious brain i think you've talked about that i met this man called moe gowda he used to be the chief business officer of google x but he wasn't happy and he has a lot to say about expectation versus reality so if we can manage our expectations of life so if they're equal to or less than our perception of events and how they turn out then we can be happy or contented and he was the one who really brought it home to me that we are not our worst thoughts that our thoughts are produced by our brain as organic matter in the same way that blood is pumped around our body by our heart like we wouldn't think we were defined by our blood so why would we think that we are our thoughts actually as you know the premise of all meditation is that you can observe your thoughts who's doing the observing that's you that's you why would you need thoughts like you don't need to communicate yourself so your thoughts are just being produced by your brain constantly and i found that really helpful the idea that once you realize that you can train your brain to think differently and to replace negative thoughts with positive ones as much as you're able so he gave this incredibly moving example his son ali died at the age of 21 during a routine operation and in the aftermath of ali's death moe would wake up every morning with tears streaming down his cheeks and his first thought would be how he died
and it was an unbelievably oppressive grief-stricken thought and after a few more weeks of it he was like i just can't live like this i can't live like this and so he challenged his brain to come up with a different thought and each morning he would wake up and he would still think ali died and he died and he'd still be crying but he added something to that sentence and he added yes but he also lived and in that differently expressed sentiment was 21 years of memories of a father and son who were best friends and that was what enabled him to carry on living and if he can do that in that situation i sure as hell can do it when someone criticizes me on instagram it was a really helpful lesson almost everyone feels they have failed in their 20s so i think that a lot of people struggle in their 20s particularly in this day and age because of the curse of comparison and because we live in a culture of curated perfection where you're constantly comparing yourself to your peers filtered appearance on instagram and the life that they seem to be living so we're comparing our insides with everyone else's projection of their outside exactly yeah and for many people although i know not you but for many people it's the first time that they've come out of full-time education and come out of a system of exam and reward exam and reward and there is no exam that you can sit to show that you're being a good grown-up so you feel quite lost plus piling on top of that the pressure to find your passion to like make a career for yourself but also to earn enough to pay or rent living in house shares like just trying to make your way and trying to forge your identity in this day and age it's just so hard to do all that at once and then you're like oh and i should be having like a thriving personal life and i should either be in a long-term relationship or having one night sounds and making footloose and fancy-free and drinking roads and then at the weekend making vegan brownies because i got to watch what i eat and all of that sort of stuff and it's exhausting and so really what i wanted
to say in that failure principle was that so many people come on podcast and say that they feel they failed at their twenties and i think a lot of us fall into the trap and i did too of believing that we had to have our life sorted out by then and actually your twenties are a decade of transition of discovering who you are of grinding up the spices of life in your pestle and water and the older you get my experience has been the more you know yourself and the more you know what you want to do and that's where success lies i've had so many more opportunities after leaving my 20s behind in the rearview mirror wow when we choose to share our vulnerabilities is when we feel most satisfaction most connection i think is what i said well i don't why is it so satisfaction on my own i like that too because you probably do feel personal satisfaction it's like but when we choose to be open about our vulnerabilities that's paradoxically when we find the most strength and the source of the most real connections with other people amen yeah and that's something that i have genuinely learned through the podcast the first season of the podcast i did i was very much i came from a very traditional newspaper journalist background so for me it was like i'm interviewing my guest i will ask the questions and i will listen and then i would ask another question and it was only as time went on that i felt more comfortable sharing my own experiences and whenever i did that i had such an incredible like feedback loop of like just amazing people sharing their stories and their vulnerabilities and also saying that they felt less alone because i shared mine and really that's what my entire life is about ultimately is connection and so i really want to encourage people not to be scared of opening up about the things that they perceive as their weaknesses because so often what you think of as your most personal shame turns out to have most universal resonance and that was certainly my experience talking about fertility and miscarriage
and divorce like actually that's where i've had the greatest impact i think and i'm so grateful for that why do you think that is why do you think vulnerable in terms of like why it has such wide resonance why do you think that is because i think that when we're vulnerable we're being real and we're letting our masks slip and you'll see a glimpse of who the authentic person is and there's something just absolutely quintessentially human about that so it's a human recognizing another human it's a human recognizing another human beneath the pretense and i think it also reassures people because as we've been talking about in this culture that we live in which is so defined by social media and how you appear and the currency of perfection again it's such a relief it makes you feel like you can breathe and someone's like oh god i'll tell you about today i sat in bed in my pyjamas eating hummus direct from the top because i felt really down that's an act of singular generosity to someone else who can then have the space to talk about how they're feeling and that brings us to the topic of mindset really nicely you know i've heard you talk about having a growth mindset and a fixed mindset what is the difference between the two so i think for thank you for what it's worth i think this contrast is is so important i mean i can talk about it through my own life but you know in a fixed mindset people think that success however defined is all about talent having the gift having the genetic inheritance and or you know having the personality trait in order to excel a growth mindset is saying okay talent obviously matters it's a factor but it's not enough it's what we do with our talents so people in a fixed mindset have two massive risks one they think they're so talented they don't even need to try so think of a young person who's just been um invited to join the manchester united academy and they're suddenly getting
money into their bank account they're able to buy the fast car and they think i'm god's gift and they and the amount of academy coaches who have come to me and said we don't understand it we had this hard-working youngster we invited them into the academy and then they just went off the rails it's a fixed mindset they think their success is assured so they stop putting in the hardy arts and don't transition into the first team so that's one danger the other danger is people who don't think that god's gift but like me at goldman sachs you make one failure and you interpret that as meaning i obviously don't have talent therefore i'm just going to give up you see what i mean yeah so that's the negative version yeah so you've got the i'm super talent is everything and i've got it so therefore i don't need to try talent is everything i don't have it therefore i should give up they're both terribly uh damaging i think a growth mindset it doesn't mean that we think we're all going to be the best speaker in the world i wasn't the best table tennis player in the world i never got into the top 20 of the world rankings but with that attitude i maximize my own potential i'm very intrigued as to um you know some certain people in our society are more self-believing than others um you see differences in um genders and races and and backgrounds and i think a lot of people in my dms and this is where the question comes from i have so many young kids in my my dms that are struggling with confidence or lacking self-belief and i wondered if you had any words of wisdom for those in my dms that can't find confidence and self-belief i think for what it's worth um that self-belief self-esteem other things are that kind of overrated um and the reason goes back to something we said earlier i mean there was a movement in the 70s and 80s in western education to build self-esteem in young people and the way to do it was to let them succeed all the time right so you won't remember this but it
would you give them easy tests get them to pass and give them lots of and then praise them for how super talented they were they get all this self-esteem and they can change the world people were so worried about undermining self-esteem that there were no losers in sports days at some schools i don't know have you heard of this everyone's a winner yeah ever gets a sticker you know and that was all about building it was called the self-esteem movement right but it failed and the reason it failed is because people would keep succeeding and you know they'd get all this self-esteem and then then they'd be given a difficult test right or they would leave school and they'd actually hit the real world where they would fail and what happened all the walls of their world would come crumbling down oh my goodness i've never felt before right self-esteem that is frag and people would protect their self-esteem by not trying new things right and and that's a disaster self-esteem can be very fragile i i like to talk much more about resilience we want people we i want my children to be resilient to try new things to mess up but not to be devastated by it and that i think is a much better quote now it may be that when people are talking about confidence what they really mean is resilience i want to be able to walk into to a room give it my best shot things don't go slightly wrong i'm going to carry on regardless every person who's a success has had some really tough difficult moments and i just think that's an inevitable part of learning how do we build resilience in ourselves growth mindset is very strongly related to it so instead of um you know for parents out there i don't you probably have a very young audience i'm so major but but uh the parents out there it's very easy to praise young people for their talent you're super talented they've just drawn a picture you're super talented you're the next picasso you think they're going to develop all this self-esteem
the problem as i've said is that you know the moment they draw something that isn't picasso as soon as they get negative criticism oh my goodness i'm no picasso after all um much better thing to do is to praise them for the effort or the process well i love the way that picture that the colors fit together they think oh right if i want to develop as a painter i have to make the colors fit together in a more sophisticated way you're aligning their mind and motivation with the journey they need to take to fulfill their potential so it's good experiments praising for effort praising for process is a much more um positive thing than praising for talent and fixed attributes it's interesting because in my company i came to learn that um the most effective way to get my teams to innovate was to praise them for the effort and the process as opposed to the outcome because if it became about the outcome the successful failure of the experiment then um which is largely actually outside of their control right when you're doing so if i say to my team right we're going to build this website and we think it's going to do this whether it does that or not whether there's product market fit whether it's a success or a failure isn't actually in their control the bit they can control is starting doing it and the process of getting to the point where we press go live and so we what i learned in the last year of my business was we would celebrate the um conducting the experiment not the outcome of the experiment exactly right actually that is exactly the same thing and it's interesting that if you look at r d you know um have you had a six sigma yes yeah so one of the things i mean one of the big master i mean six sigma is a great process you know like lean manufacturing or um your toyota pro things of that kind it's basically squeezing out variation isn't it so if you imagine making a car or you know manufacturing car all it takes is one component in the engine to be of the wrong size or specification and the whole thing won't work so six sigma is about delivering and executing
with no variation but when you're innovating you need variation you need to try new things if you're trying to create a new computer program a new website or a new drug and you don't know which combination of ingredients they're going to create you need to try lots of combinations if you penalize people for failure oh my god and you're only judging them on the outcome and it fails and then they're like stigmatized they will never try you need you know that's where failed fast cars yeah you've nailed it that's exactly the insight that i think is is important for some people that's terrifying yeah the thought of like throwing themselves into that place of uncertainty that they have to travel through before they get to their new self how do you get someone to come willingly into uncertainty to leave that job or to you know take on that promotion or to pivot in their career when they're scared of the unknown or you know it's like well then i would think about what i would think about rather than what i'm afraid of i'm thinking about what i'm excited about and so rather than i'm afraid of what i'm going to leave behind or i'm afraid of what might happen i'm expecting more about what could happen and when we focus on what we want and what we could have and you know it's it's optimism isn't it it's about what's possible and what could i achieve you know and you asked me earlier about you know some of the things about sports psychology and visualization was one was a massive technique really that i learned from my sports psychologist and employed and still use all the time and i think when you can start to visualize what that new role person identity could be and when you bring it to life with all of your senses and see it really vividly then that's exciting and what what could i achieve and what could this look like and and the power of visualization is that your mind
does when it's when you see it really vividly your mind doesn't know the difference between a vividly imagined experience and a real life experience what's your process for visualization and now is it something that you do actively you set time aside and do it or is it just something that you naturally now do when you're pursuing a goal so a little bit of both as an athlete it was definitely something that i would sit down usually i'd be lying on my bed i would have done some relaxation because the more we clear our mind and relax the easier it is to visualize and to see really clearly and so i would it would be a conscious right i'm going to spend the next 15 minutes or even two minutes or five minutes or whatever time i had visualizing my next race and seeing myself execute that race plan as perfectly as i can and in exactly the right way and i would visualize everything from um if it was the olympic discipline and we've got nine boats on a start line i'm seeing my i don't know which lane i'm gonna be in when it comes to race day so i'm seeing myself racing every lane i'm seeing myself with with the headwind with a tailwind with it raining i'm seeing myself [ __ ] up the start because that might happen but then i just going to recover from it and i'm going to see myself recover and i'm going to see myself win from behind i'm going to see myself win from the front i'm going to see imagine you know they'll start being delayed or it's a full start you know all these eventualities so that when it comes to the event i'm prepared and it can just all unfold and i'm not phased by anything that happens but but most importantly i've seen it happen the way i want it to happen and then i believe that it can happen and what visualization also does is when we when we're visualizing a goal for example it starts to activate the subconscious to generate creative ideas about how we can achieve our goal it's it's it's my i don't know how it works and why it works but it's mind-blowing and it does work and it
starts to um get your brain to perceive and recognize the different um resources that you need to achieve your goal it's like the law of attraction and it starts to activate that in your life and bring in the people the resources the environment the circumstances that you need to achieve your goal and so now what do i do i probably i do spend some time consciously going right i'm just going to spend two or three minutes visualizing my goal i'm seeing it happen i'm seeing it realize um but then other times i'm probably just you know driving in my car and subconsciously you know like daydreaming almost but i think the the conscious right i'm gonna visualize now is really powerful because then you start to really it starts to ingrain in the subconscious quick one i talk to you guys about huel a lot so i'm going to do a quick intermission to tell you about a bit of a change that's happened in the last two months in my life as you guys know my favorite heel product historically has been the ready to drink which is these bottles here they are nutritionally complete however recently since huel introduced the heel protein this now plays a huge role in my diet the salted caramel flavor protein from huel which is only 105 calories and has 26 vitamins and minerals and 20 grams of protein um serves two rolls in my life now first thing i do when i wake up in the morning is i have a glass and then at night time after i've been to the gym straight after the gym i have a glass it tastes amazing if you're going to try it follow my instructions here get a couple of cubes of ice put it in a blender put on the salted caramel protein and it tastes like a delicious smoothie i've already gone through one tub of this i'm actually on my second tub and i've got two more tubs to go before i'm gonna reorder more but genuinely the salted caramel flavor maybe because i have a liking for salted caramel for me has been a game changer professor steve peters steve's invented this groundbreaking concept called the
chimp model and it focuses on how there's these kind of three parts to our brain the first part is called the chimp which is our sort of desire to be impulsive and irrational and emotional and short term the second part is what he calls the human and you'll hear him talk about this which is logical and rational and thinks in terms of facts and thinks things through in the long term and the third part is what he calls the computer which is our set of core values and beliefs i wanted to talk about exactly that topic which is like managing your emotional reactions um across different facets of life and i think um i'll go let me just give you an example of a situation that i went through that i've read about in my book so i'm just going to be completely honest because that's what i tend to do on this podcast um i broke up with a girl and um like two days later i found out that she'd slept with somebody else and when i even though i'd broken up with her when i when i read the message that she'd slept with somebody else my brain yeah revenge message her to destroy her life that's what my brain said to me but i um and and i'm at a place in my life where i feel quite secure in my self-image let's say i don't feel particularly insecure i'm i'm i'm a confident person but even i couldn't seem to get a grip of my own desire to react emotionally in that situation um and really interestingly as well it was actually my friend calling me i went to the gym i thought maybe i'll go to the gym and that'll like clear my head it was my friend calling me and this i don't know where this fits in psychiatry but my friend said to me steve just remember you broke up with her she's probably doing this to um make herself feel better and to you know rebound or whatever but um that was one of those key moments where i was like god like the damage you can do if you don't know how to control that like primitive urge to just bruh okay you've covered a lot of ground yeah that could be an hour's work here so i'm going to take it back and try and go
very steadily to try and drive home there's a lot of areas one is first of all what would you expect somebody's mind to do confronted with the same situation what would you expect them to do probably the same exactly so nothing abnormal happened there wasn't a problem yeah you're saying this is absolutely healthy and normal but maybe not helpful yeah and what you really said because you've told me this if it wasn't a problem to you you wouldn't have mentioned it so clearly your human brain is saying i don't want to get revenge that's not what i want what i want is to just be calm and collected accept the reality of it and move on unfortunately we have to learn now how the mind works so it's like saying you went to the gym so therefore you're a fitness man if i said to you right i've never been to a gym for 30 years i'm going to go tonight and at the end of the day i'm going to be super fit and you laugh because you know that's ridiculous it's not the way the body works so we have to now look at another aspect so now we know it's normal how does the mind work when we get a really nasty shock and something which is devastating so the the reason that chimp is there and the reason we're here is for us to be safe and present the next generation to the world that's what the chimps agenda is so what happened there is the generation that you thought you were going to get was taken away from you so this is devastating so we expect you to be devastated we also expect you to accept the mind is going to now grieve and it will take approximately three months give or take you're talking about heartbreak here yeah you've got to grieve yeah so the mind has a rule on the way it deals and processes grief i can't speed that up so if some like if i meet you that night and i say right i'm going to get you out of it i'm going to fail because you have to go through these ripples and and work it through so your human brain can do it in seconds because that's logic she's gone she was dishonest it's a good thing she's gone now no more wasted time yep that's easy but our the emotional chimp brain has got to process it it cannot do
it overnight so you've got to now allow around a 12-week process and you're going to go through various stages of grief in the loss of what is a very significant relationship and on top of that there was another insult it wasn't just she said it's not for me she slept with someone else so that is really going to get your chimp you know we expect it now to be devastated and your chimps reaction some people wouldn't but it's common that it wants revenge it wants to say right if you did this to me you're going to suffer now in reality what you've just said by your nodding is that's not what i want i just want to move on and accept it wasn't for me she did what she did that's her problem not yours and what your friend did is start to try and turn it round with some facts to calm your chimp down and say because it always looks to the computer let's look at reality and the reality is if i said to you um this girl is going to come back into your life and they'll bring all that pleasure you used to have but she's going to have affairs every few weeks is that what you want no no see you did break it up you know so you just try and look at it in a different way and say let's look at the reality and the facts of the situation but you cannot stop the grieving you can't stop the yearning or the bargaining because guys in the opposition often go back and plead and then she'll say i made a mistake and and then you have to make a decision you know and then they'll bargain again and then if you go through that you're going to disorganize stage but this can all be circumvented if you suddenly met somebody new your chimp might recover very quickly is that what tends to happen well unless we know this is the rebound right so this is never a good thing okay i'm sure some of you listen to going i have married the person i met on a rebound so of course it's all probabilities but generally speaking you need time to get over this gather yourself so you're in a good place when you do meet somebody else to have a good relationship that's interesting so it's quite complex the whole thing so yes rationally we can pull you along but we've got to give you a lot of tlc and that should go through
grieving don't be harsh on yourself and what your experiences are totally natural unhelpful but natural so many people are going through a grieving process in it could be a significant life event it could be the loss of a partner at the death order is there anything in psychiatry from your experience that can okay that process is unavoidable but is there anything that i can do to help that process be easier yes there is i mean one is understanding it as you say if you start to go through this and say to people like this is how your mind has to do this and like you tell me in the gym you laugh i can't do it in the night well how long and you still it's a bit of a piece of string but roughly speaking if you keep going regularly two three times a week maybe three months six months you're going to see a difference for sure and it's the same with me explaining the mind i would explain to people that we go through a grieving process you are likely to experience the following emotions or stages in the grief process but you are unique and everybody grieves individually so it's very important as i said earlier i don't have a process uh you know like a recipe and say this is what we're going to do i work with you as you grieve but i want you to get insights that's the key so the work i do is giving understanding and insight and then applying this so you learn the skill of managing your emotions and the skill of understanding the skill of mind management that's what i'm about teaching a skill base so you can be independent of me but use me as a fallback on that on the point of rejection which we talked about a second ago is it the stories that i then tell myself about myself which impact my self-image that really hold that hurt me the most because it feels like when you go through emotional sorry romantic rejection or heartbreak it feels like um even if you it it's not the sort of like front of your mind the fact that someone didn't want you or they were they wanted someone else makes yourself tell yourself that you are not good enough not pretty enough not smart enough you weren't enough and it feels like so much of the hurt and the pain
lives inside that story you're telling yourself about yourself and again if you stop and we'd look at what you've said there are these factual statements or are there impressions and feelings impressions and feelings so we know that the chimp brain is in full flow now yeah so what we're saying is don't quench that it's not wrong it's expressing and it's like as i said you've got this best friend so if this happens to me i now said what is it you're telling me and you'll go through all this you know it's the end of the world and you know clearly no one's ever going to love you and and then we sort of counter it by saying well let's look at that so we start to rationalize and that can help the grieving process because we start saying well let's not just sit there with these falsehoods let's challenge them and let's replace them with truths not brainwash it's no good saying for example say i'm your best mate and you've just fallen apart and you say it's because i'm ugly it's no good me said no you're really handsome that's not that's an impression again from me what i'd be saying is let's look at facts if we look at people in relationships do people find a partner eventually and the answer is most people yes so the chances are very high and if you can get through this will you eventually get back on your feet is there a future yeah yeah there always is a future there always is a future even for people in a much more serious situation where they become suicidal and obviously as part of my work you can tell them with honesty there is always a future and things do change and feelings do move so when you start giving these facts and rationalizing the facts of the situation that is going to be powerful for starting to settle your emotions but giving falsehoods you know i know you can do it or you're that's not going to set your trip there's street wise yeah yeah so you'll just keep agitating whereas if we talk facts then it'll settle but again there's a key point here we have to find the facts that resonate
with you as facts because if i said like i just did will you find another partner what's what's the general rule if you said to me yeah but i don't believe that everybody does there's no point me forcing this truth on to you i'd have to look for others that might resonate with you yeah such as if i go out and actually start socializing when i'm ready then the chances are i'll increase my probability so that gives me a bit of hope you might work with that yeah so you've got to find what resonates with the person and again that's why i don't have this recipe i'm saying discover them but think around but you can offer common things yeah super interesting and it again it perfectly explains why in that moment for some bizarre reason my friend telling me being very sort of rational with me things that i genuinely did accept to be true just completely diffused my brain because he's acting effective as you're human yeah that's what he's doing he's coming in rationally and stepping back and saying let's look at the facts here yeah and he's hit some nails on the head where you think oh that's settled me down a bit yeah so but what tends to happen is you tend to isolate yourself most people do this after this has happened and they go within themselves and they engage these emotions which generates more and more falsehoods and distorted ways of perceiving themselves and the world instead of being able to which is not easy talk to themselves rationally and preempting things like you know let's work with reality it's not easy to do that so when you can't do it it's not a failure you turn to your best friends and they'll do it for you so what is the cause of unhappiness as you see it especially if you're building sort of machine learning applications that are gonna you know um solve you know make people arrive at contentment or happiness in a personalized way we must be able to know what's causing this lack of allow me a bit of time to explain it because it it's simple when we get it but it's not simple to get to it so so happiness is very predictable okay if
you look back at any point in your life where you ever felt happy there is one commonality across all of those moments that can actually be documented in a mathematical equation okay you've never felt happy because of a specific event in your life okay take for example rain rain doesn't make you happy or unhappy there is no inherent value of happiness in rain okay rain makes you happy when you want to alter your plants and it makes you unhappy when you want to sunbathe right and so it's not just the event rain it's the comparison between the event and an expectation in your mind of how life should be okay if you're worried about your plans then life should be generous to me and get me rain so i can water the plants and if life does that then life meets your expectations and you're happy okay and so happiness in that sense becomes equal to or greater than so it's really mathematics that your perception of the events of your life minus your expectations of how life should be okay and apply that to anything apply that to anything so you know my favorite example is nature we're all happy in nature why are we all happy in nature i mean you go out there and there are ants and there are flies and you know trees are crooked and there are you know shrubs everywhere and bushes and it's just really not that hedged and organized but that's what we expect so you know nature's chaos is what we expect nature to be and so we feel happy you know nobody ever sits in front of the ocean and says i like the view but please mute the sound okay you just take it you know it's it's the monotonous sound and the view and the wind and and the sun and the whole experience right and because of that uh happiness becomes very different than what was defined to us okay what was defined to us is that happiness is found in a gathering at the pub or a party or a you know an activity or some kind of pleasure or fun or elation or whatever that is that's not at all true these are i call these the state of escape okay
happiness as per the definition of the happiness equation is events equal to or beating expectations life going my way okay and so basically happiness is that calm and peacefulness you feel when you're okay with life as it is it doesn't really matter what life is okay what matters is that you can be okay with it right so so you take you know any example if your boss is annoying and your expectation is yeah bosses are annoying this is what life is about they become bosses because they're annoying right and and so if if that's your expectation you're going to look at it and go like yeah i need to learn the skill of managing annoying bosses okay and if that's the case then you're not going to be upset about it similarly anything else if you look at it then it's not just the event it's your perception of the event so you have a uh something to influence it's not just the event your partner might say something hurtful on friday at 4 p.m that's the event my partner said something hurtful at sunday morning you tell yourself he or she doesn't love me anymore okay that's your perception of the event that's not actually the event the event is something hurtful was said but your perception of the event is your work is your it's your brain adding color to it and then you compare that to your expectations right you compared my boss is annoying too my boss shouldn't be annoying where did you get that from right so we blur the happiness equation we break the happiness equation because of what i call the six and seven okay six grand illusions and seven blind spots which are the six grand illusions are basically uh call them pathways that the modern world teaches us to navigate the modern world that our illusions are not true okay take for example control everyone knows that to succeed in the modern world you have to learn to control certain events right so you start to believe that the way to succeed in life is to control everything but the truth is even if you go down to the basics of physics that we never are in control that the absolute design of nature itself of the universe itself
is entropy and chaos right that's the actual design and so if you try to control it you're bound to be disappointed a lot of events are gonna miss your expectations okay and yes i'm not saying don't control anything at all but start to understand that you're you're going to be selective because you have a finite amount of effort and by the way even if you're selective and you you try to control everything sometimes things will fall out of control if you live your life through the illusion of control good luck finding happiness so six grand illusions the illusion of uh of thought the erosion or the illusion of self the illusion of uh knowledge the illusion of time control and fear okay now that's one side and that disrupts your your entire view of what to expect from life because you're expecting life to behave through a length of a lens of an illusion the other side of it is what i call seven blind spots okay and the seven blind spots are not really defects in your brain as a matter of fact they are the very design of your brain okay your brain is designed to tell you what's wrong okay it's not designed to you know if a tiger shows up right here now my brain has no use whatsoever in telling me oh my god look how majestic that animal is right yeah it's a beautiful animal but my brain will say we're gonna die okay and we're gonna die is the idea that basically makes our uh our brain constantly look for what's wrong blur the events of life you ask a mother and and she will say oh my daughter's been sick all winter you know she just had two episodes of flu three days each but to the to the caring heart of a mother that needs to be exaggerated to the exaggeration is one of the blind spots your brain is trying to get you to take action so it pushes you it pushes you by exaggerating the event a little bit so that you jump in and take action and accordingly the event you're comparing to you're comparing the wrong event to the wrong expectation and the happiness equation falls apart under all of this you're inferring something which i think will annoy a lot of people and that is that happiness is
a choice and that you you can choose to be happy and that if you're unhappy and really for many circumstances in our life day to day and work and love in relationships personal responsibility is the is the answer and entirely on you and a lack thereof is the cause absolutely you know what you just did you've just lost us 88 of the audience to tell someone uh it's your responsibility to get yourself out of this horrible place that you're in is quite disturbing because we like the idea of saying no no hold on no no it's not me life is treating me really badly that's why i'm not happy okay i can't do anything about it life took my son you know life took my son i have the right to be unhappy yes life took your son that's true and you have the right to be unhappy but you're never going to get out of unhappiness if you wait for life to bring him back or you wait for life to correct its action okay the only way you can come out of unhappiness is if you choose and say okay it's going to be a long journey it's gonna take a lot of time okay and i'm gonna try and try and try but i'll get there and neuroplasticity proves that neuroplasticity basically tells you that if you just run a happiness kind of activity once a day every day your brain will be better at it and i mean please don't get me wrong but what do most of us do every day we watch negative news we swipe on toxic positivity and we're just drowning ourselves in negativity and then what happens what happens is we become really good at being negative we become really good at finding what's wrong with life become very good at you know getting pissed off with the prime minister right because it's an activity we do on daily basis so your brain goes like this must be important for her or him okay i'm just going to make sure i have the neurons aligned around that and so you're basically we're basically configuring our brains to be unhappy and and that is the kind of neuroplasticity that we need to shift you know if you if you go to the gym
and lift weights every day you're going to look like a triangle if you squat every day you're going to look like a pair okay the same is happening inside your brain you just don't see it if you're constantly watching you know news media right you're literally building your muscles that are concerned and are you know critical and are worried about the world when in reality most of the time you can't do anything about it there's something in there which is clearly a theme in i think three topics we've touched on which is this theme of like radical acceptance oh absolutely i mean this is what i call the jedi master level of happiness so there are three levels of happiness right i call it the happiness flow chart events are going to piss you off it's just the truth if you can manage to acknowledge your emotion and say oh my god i feel so am i angry is this anger i mean this is this what i'm feeling and then and then you take that feeling and you say to yourself okay interesting i am angry i need to do something about it i will give you three steps okay the beginner's level is ask yourself if what you're thinking is true your partner said something hurtful on friday your thought is he or she doesn't love me anymore okay ask yourself if that thought is true if it isn't drop it there is no point to be unhappy if it is then let's go to the black belt level of unhappiness which is can i do think something about it that's the second question is it true is question one can i do something about it this question two right and oh honestly by the way it doesn't take more than two seconds to feel the emotion ask yourself if it's true and then go to say to to uh to can i do something about it and if yes then do it what are you waiting for text him or text her and say baby can we please talk over dinner what you said on friday hurt me okay instead of just banging your head against the table hoping that they will find out and come and say oh i'm so sorry you know i i i was teaching this this story really hurts me i i was
teaching you know when before lockdown i i taught a lot of people in workshops and seminars more than 20 000 people one one day one of them comes to me in the first break and says what are you talking about what do you mean happiness is a choice you have no idea what happened to me okay and i said okay and she said when i was 17. she was 74 at the time can you believe that 57 years of holding on to one thought hitting her head against the wall right and i hugged her i hugged her i cried and i said did it work did all of that work or was the better thought okay it was horrible but can i do something about it okay and that's question number two that's black belt sometimes however there's nothing you can do about it whatever she experienced could be irreversible what i have experienced the loss of ali is irreversible there is nothing you can do about it okay and i'm not asking everyone to get there quickly but the jedi master level of happiness is to say okay it happened and i have no choice to change it there is nothing i can do to fix it so can i accept it but not surrender and lie down and you know and die accept it and then start to do something to make my my life better despite its presence or maybe because of its presence okay can i accept that ali died and start to spread his message so that my life and the life of others become better can i do that i call that committed acceptance okay and it's very simple if you commit and accept to if you accept things you you can't change and commit to make your life better despite of or because of their presence nothing can beat you nothing can beat you and yeah does it is it horrible that i actually managed to move on and and you know not hit my head against the wall for 27 years does that say i don't love ali what are you talking about i do rally i cry about missing him still today right it's not that it's there is nothing to prove in that what what i can prove is i love him so much that i actually dedicate my life to
spreading his message that's so much better than sitting there and saying ah life hit me i don't like life right that's a six-year-old attitude honestly okay adults will say okay and especially business people i mean your audiences huh the market changes all the time do you sit down and go like i lost another deal or do you just get up and say why did we lose this deal what can we do about it right and if if there is something wrong with the product can we change the product right well you talked to there about business in particular rings very very true because in business and you've been you know very successful entrepreneur yourself and worked with teams you'll get people who are high in defaulting to logic in moments of chaos and also default to personal responsibility and those that don't yeah and the outcomes of both groups are quite predictable very different and actually this this approach of is it true uh can i do something about it can i accept it and and commit i learned that in business and it's a very simple business approach now most of us do that in business but when it comes to our personal life we don't do that and interestingly most of us by the way who do that in business are very successful in business and most of us who do that in life are very successful in life it's not just happy it makes us makes us successful because it doesn't waste our cycles on things that are not necessary so if you can do it at work do it at home do it in your life do it in your relationships it's really a very straightforward flow chart i hope you enjoyed that look back at my uh life-changing moments from my first 100 episodes i've got to say november december january we're publishing the best podcast we've ever published when i saw the guest lineup i genuinely was like i looked at the list and thought how how is it possible that my idols
world exclusives people i've wanted on this podcast since it began many years ago have all decided to come in the same month and honestly november and i guess we're recording with within that month which will be published over the next three months is the reason i started this podcast and it's a real sign of where it's going and the platform it's become so thank you for sticking with me it's going to be one hell of a last quarter i know that's going to change my life for good that's for sure and i can't wait to bring you more people's diaries have a wonderful week quick one as many of you know i've been trying to make my life a little bit more sustainable as it relates to energy ever since i sold my range over sport and bought an electric bicycle and my energy as a sponsor of this podcast one of the brands that make that transition much much easier they are at the forefront of british renewable ecosmart technology and their products are really really changing the game if you're on youtube you can see what i'm holding in my hand this is called the eddie right it's the uk's number one solar powered diverter so what is a solar diverter it's a device for people like you and me that means you can divert your excess energy back into your home rather than back into the grid which will save you power and money it's super user-friendly and easy to install and you can control it using the my energy app on your phone to find out more about this product and more products like it that will help you make that sustainable transition head over to myenergy.com and um i highly recommend you check out the eddie it's um it's a real game-changer product and one that i'm going to be installing in my home soon [Music]