Being your Own Life Coach | John Muldoon | TEDxShanghaiAmericanSchoolPuxi

Well, hello everyone, oh my, you're like a bunch of high school kids in the morning. My name is John Muldoon, by the way, that was a great introduction. Thank you. I am the high school principal here at the Shanghai American School pusci campus. and I'll tell you, I'm also a little nervous about

being

here today. I'm still very much in this stage this year and I've talked to a lot of different people, but there's something about it like a red dot back there on the ground that's intimidating and part of what I'm going to talk about tonight is about

being

honest with

your

self and with other people, so I think what better way to start than to say I'm a little nervous to be and be honest with you.

I see you laughed a lot during that last one, which I think sets the bar pretty high for me, so this is what I'm going to tell you a little about. There is a disclaimer here in a very unscientific art of why I am nervous when I saw our school psychologist here and I am sure you are, so I am sure that the psychologist in the crowd will be very analytical with the One piece of advice that I give them all, so I hope none of this is negligence. Here's the fact that our brains are extremely powerful organs and we don't often think about how we are using them correctly.

In fact, I can point to the first time I thought about it. how we use our brain I was in sixth grade and I also did it in sixth grade and they're going to ask me to do what my family is going through a really hard time, a really horrible time, actually, and we spend a lot of time in the car, like this. that my dad drives it and I'm sitting next to him in the front, my sister, my brother and I have back cramps, it's always a good recipe for doing something well and my dad compulsively listens to motivational tapes, yes, cassette tapes , yeah, so him listening to cassette tapes with all these people telling me and my family through the car speakers how wonderful

life

is and how wonderful we are and how everything is going to be amazing was like worst, great, hey, it was objectively the worst thing ever and not at all what I wanted to hear when I was going through horrible things that I couldn't control and will never forget.

I remember this one and particularly this guy that I cook my dad for if they are still a team then this guy says that. the key to happiness is to talk to

your

self, but not just talk to yourself, say really cool, think of yourself, it's like, you should wake up every day, this and it sounded so ridiculous to hear it, right, he, it's like, you you lift Every day and you go to the mirror and you look at yourself and you think you look good, today is going to be amazing, right? Hey he said if you do this all the time, you'll actually have little voices that will develop in your head that will say nice things to you all day and here I am, I'm like 11 or 12 years old and I'm training your brain to get little voices that They talk to you all day, yeah, like I'm pretty sure that's the brand. about something that's not right, I mean, I can't tell you how many fights we had about this as a family, mostly started by me, why can't we just listen to the radio like a normal family, but I'll never forget it.

This is because we were going through what was probably the darkest chapter of my father's

life

and he showed that him choosing to listen to someone say good things to him was a choice he made. I didn't understand that back then, so fast forward. a bit, he had just made me deputy director in my life, so I guess we are working fast and hard. I'm feeling pretty good and I found out that my favorite teacher, my sixth grade social studies teacher, is retiring, so I'd like to stop by to see him that day like that day I found I drove to school I didn't tell him I was going I just went I don't know why I did it he was my favorite teacher he helped me I went through so much in that same period of my life I went through so much so I just walked no one stopped me it was amazing.

I walk down the hallway straight to his old classroom, he's still there like he was always right. I open the door and walk in, he looks at me and walks away, well actually that's not what he said. I can't tell you what he said on stage, but he said something like that and he came up and said this to me. A big hug and says John Muldoon, I can't believe he's still alive, right? And I'm like, are you confusing me with another John Logan? But he wasn't and actually the truth is that he was right, we talked. a lot about it, he only knew me at that time in my life, well, me and I, I'll tell you he was very angry, right? and he, our separation thought he left me, so he's not around anymore, it's a little sad. to think about but the thought he left me with was how proud he was to see me and how happy I seem because he said that in over 35 years of teaching he has never met an angry kid like me and it's kind of funny but it's also a little tragic that I remember him so fondly and I think that's his memory of me, like all the anger anyway, the change didn't happen overnight for me if you go a little forward or back since I became assistant. principal I was in 9th grade I was in high school things still weren't going well for me I was actually angrier than I was in 6th grade I was just saying something I didn't have any friends I mean I was so isolated my grades were It was horrible what they did I'm not ashamed Tell you that I was about to fail high school in the middle of my freshman year and I had the help of my history teacher, another history teacher who took an interest in me, right?

It's probably like that. My second favorite teacher, maybe that's why I became a history teacher and he was like a Jedi. Actually, I owe my life to this man. He waged what I can only call psychological warfare against me. He made me so angry that he cheated on me. in wanting to do well in school I don't know how he did it like that I think about it now I have no idea how it happened but it happened on the trip I mean please don't underestimate the magnitude of this transformation that I was talking to my counselor about that I wasn't going to go back to school next year if I didn't change things right and suddenly I was getting all A's and B's and I was being nicer to people and actually maybe I was working on making friends, actually, yeah Whatever it was, the transformation was so severe that my father sat me down and asked me if I was on drugs, and that's pretty complicated when you think that, as a son, you know your grades.

I've gotten really good and you know, it seems like maybe you have some friends now and you're not miserable enough to be around. Are you taking drugs heavily? That's how it was in reality, but this rosy period in my life was not destined to last because, as I think everyone here knows, you can't really trick a moderately intelligent teenager into doing something he doesn't want to do for a long time. time, so by the end of the year, the job was over and I had this big confrontation. With this teacher, who if you ask us was not smart, I wanted to start a verbal fight with a Jedi psychological warfare mental teacher, but I left the year feeling so angry, deflated and confused, and thinking that although it is the key word that I left the year thinking about how this happened and I was thinking about it because I was so angry that they did it myself, I had actually let it trick me and so I didn't know it at the time, but I was searching for an epiphany and I wish I could tell you that it happened and it was amazing and it was like this moment that changed everything immediately and I was on top of a mountain and true, but that's not really how it happened, I was at work This horrible summer job at Lake and it wasn't something that happened and changed my life right away, but I'm standing there, I'm at work and this mom comes over with this little boy and she gave me I was like little matchbox model cars, right?

You know what I'm talking about, she has this little matchbox car and I hope you're ready for this. It was a model of my dad's old car, like the same crazy shiny gold paint with the weird white roof like it was a model of my dad's old car I could practically hear the tape of the guy with the voices in your head talking to me just like My brain hurt when I saw that car and I'm like this, everything is a week away from leaving school and I stay there, there is no coincidence in my mind, it can't be a coincidence that this guy tricked me, tricked my brain and I thought he was pretty clever, he tricked me into doing something I didn't want to do and then a couple of days.

Later I remember that other time in my life when someone told me that you can trick your brain into doing anything, so I started thinking about it, there has to be a connection and now I know and we all know there is a connection. connection, right? your brain is so powerful there are so many studies on your brain there are so many studies on the thought patterns in your brain and the words that emerge and the patterns of that thought literally how you talk to yourself and the power of it, you know Some of these examples that I'm going to share with you are fresh in my mind because I was reading an NPR article but there are so many you should see them 19:11 the Scoober psychologist and most people think that's when we really started. thinking about thought patterns by accident, one day they realized, and I guess in 1911, it was very fashionable for a woman to wear very big hats, so they realized that women, when they walked through doors with these hats positions, they had to dock and lean. on their heads they did it even when they didn't wear hats and they said: why?

So they studied it and found that if you have a pattern that sets up in your brain without a conscious decision not to do it, I'll do it, it's not rocket science, right, it's pretty deductive for us. Now there are many studies on this. There is another one about doors. Interestingly, in 2013, there is a group of scientists who are working with young women who have anorexia and they noticed that. They didn't walk through the door like they expected even though everyone was on the smaller side and the doors were double doors like the ones we have behind the auditorium here, they walked sideways as if they were sneaking past. someone was right or they were trying hard even though there was a lot of space, so they looked at it, they added it to their study expanding the scope of their study and they wanted to solve it and they discovered that they had such disordered thinking patterns in the brain that it influenced many of their behaviors and the crazy thing about how they walked through doors and the crazy thing about it is that they had no idea that they had these thought patterns running like that in their brain and they were not aware of the influence on their behavior all the time you know there is So many, there is another one and then I will stop sharing studies with you, there is one from the University of Pennsylvania that they found when they studied American football players that by imagining throwing a football correctly you have a performance gain similar to when you physically practice it, that It's crazy, right?

You can practice doing something in your mind and it doesn't have the same magnitude of effect, but a similar effect from doing it physically is really amazing now that I've done it. You didn't know any of this then, did you? I didn't know that patterns in your brain start to set when you're young. All the messages you hear when you're younger. All the messages you hear. now even those that you are not aware of come in somehow and the more you listen to something the more it takes root the more your brain accepts it even if you don't agree with it and these roots grow and if we use the type of vernacular of the type of audio tapes that's when the voices start well, that's when you start to have patterns of behavior that influence other ways of thinking, the way you feel and the things you do.

This is why some people and we see this well, we all know people like this. They have been told since they were very young that if they work very hard and don't give up, they can do anything well, these people act differently and then receive the opposite message: they will never be able to do anything well. Even though they probably don't agree with the message that they can never do anything right, take it to another level and this is when I think about it. I wonder if I've really lost my mind. Sometimes the voices in your head if that's what we call it. they're talking to each other they're having a conversation in your head I'm a visual thinker so I like to think of it like a speed dating event, we're in a big auditorium and all these little positive and negative patterns. of behavior that move from table to table talking to each other and what happens is that when they interact with each other the positive patterns decrease the effect of the negative patterns the negative patterns decrease the effect of the positive patterns right in Crimea, it makes sense but it is incredible and if you look at it on a macro level, that's why someone who is extremely positive recovers from bad news much faster than someone who is not, they feel less fazed by a setback in their life because they have so many other positive things.

Thought processes that counteract the negative impact of it do not make them less likely to understand what is happening, but they do.They feel differently about it and may act differently, the opposite is true, the sweet, sweet joy of an amazing moment in life could be fleeting for someone who has predominantly negative thought patterns anyway. I didn't know any of this when I was 15, but I had listened to a lot of motivational tapes in the past, so here I am, I'm going to conduct an experiment. decide for myself, we have a scientist out there. I just like to shake my head.

No, you can't perform an experiment on yourself, but I was 15 years old. I'm using the experiment and research very loosely, so I decide I'm going to calm down. but not just cool but ridiculously cool and here's the thing: it's really hard to believe I wasn't cool in high school, right? My students are telling me this right now, but the truth of the matter is that I wasn't great and I knew it and okay, I got it, so I'm going to do exactly what that guy on the tape said I should do, so I I woke up and none of this is a surprise to anyone who knows me. a very intense person right, I woke up every day and looked in that mirror and told myself how incredibly cool I was, right, I was like the most handsome and cool kid that went to my school and this is actually very embarrassing , but I I mean, my wife said I shouldn't share this part, but I'm going to share this part.

In fact, I bought blue paint, blue, my favorite color, and I painted on the wall in front of my bed four big letters, cool, and I'm like. I go all out and then I don't know if it's because I was 15, if it's because I was desperate for something positive in my life or what, but after a while I convinced myself that I was actually pretty cool, right, Jeremy? our school psychologist, now you'll have to unravel that later, but then something surprising happens because we all know I didn't really change much about myself, I was changing the way I thought about myself, but my sister, my little sister. sister who by the way was super cool and always very popular, one day she walks in the door while I'm singing in my bed, literally talking to myself about how cool I am and she just can't take it anymore, she's just like you. so it's not okay, if you have to tell yourself that you're cool, you're not cool, even worse, if you have to tell other people that you're cool, you're hurting yourself even more and then like I know she's amazing now, but in the end time oh my god right she looks at me and says maybe and this is brilliant she didn't mean for it to be brilliant but it was brilliant maybe you shouldn't try to be cool maybe you should try to be happy for a while so that not everyone let's be miserable being around you, very hard for her to leave and it's not the norm for me at that time.

I didn't react. I just sat there on my bed like I had crushed my failed experiment by thinking about how uncool I am. but also to think that it's not that I don't feel happy, I don't feel unhappy either and it was very strange for me to think about that and I realized and I have never liked to think about it as if my predominant emotion was just real The emotion that I constantly felt It was anger. I was angry and did the smartest thing I have ever done in my life to this day. I wondered why he was so angry and backed away.

It's sixth grade. and I started thinking about all the things that had happened and how they were out of my control. I was pulling all the strings. It was horrible, it was painful to think about, and I didn't learn another experiment right away. For a while while I was thinking about all this, I was thinking about how I was thinking and I was thinking about how I was feeling, but finally I decided that I couldn't follow my sister's advice, I couldn't try to be happy, I was too big, right? I was going to do a second experiment.

I was just going to try to be grateful for some things in my life. There was good stuff every day, but I attacked it with the same intensity that I attacked trying to be cool, so, I mean, I was an animal. I was thanking everyone for everything, right, you lent me a pencil, it was the best thing that ever happened to me, and I mean, I'd show up on your doorstep five years after you did something, if I was grasping at straws for something I do. thank someone and I would thank you for something you did five years ago and people didn't really know how to take me, it was like when I had that quick transformation during the school year, no one knew who it was that was going on.

With me no one could explain it some people really thought that when I thanked them for things I was making fun of them and in fact my dad asked me if I was on drugs again but something like that was like the defining moment in my life that I really started to realize. I realized that there were so many good things in my life that I was missing out on because I was too busy getting angry at everything and I also realized that thinking about how there are always angry things helped me realize when I was getting angry and stop it, and in I was actually I feel happier, so while I'm going through all this I start making all these rules like these rules for life.

I call them trade secrets so I don't be an idiot. Actually, that's quite negative. I call them trade secrets. We can call them trade. secrets to like being a good person and some I can share with you we are going to share two of them the first is what I do every day since I was 15 years old my first period I give sincere thanks three times a day three times a day that's all now I do a lot more than that but I say thank you sincerely three times a day the second rule is to be cool and it's not to be objectively cool oh he's cool that's not the right thing to do this is something I subject everyone here to everything time if you ask me how I'm doing well, for example, ask me how I'm doing.

I'm great. I'm the best I've ever been. I'm living the dream. These are all. things that people say every day when they ask me how I'm doing, but that's not really where it ends, like sometimes people tell you to do that, like everyone hears it, like fake it until you make it right, that is a lie. lie to yourself I'm not saying I'm cool because I'm trying to convince myself I'm cool. I respond in an exaggerated way, so positively because that is a sign for me, it is actually a moment that I take advantage of every time someone asked me how I am to check how I really feel and most of the time I feel very good.

I am an intense person. We've already established that, so I feel great and that's awesome 99.9 percent of the time. I'm not lying to you one percent of the time I don't know I say I'm great I might not actually feel good I might take a second and look at you and say I'm not really feeling Great and it depends on how good we feel let's get to know I could say more. Maybe not. I don't know, but think about how many times a day you've been asked how you are or what's going on, how many times a day I actively think about how.

What I feel and why I feel it and then what am I going to do about it? Because if we don't actively manage these patterns in our brain, they control us and if you don't think about how you're going to do that if you don't have a system or something that works for you you're just letting it go, you're just letting things happen. I couldn't write clearly. We saw where that took me in my life. I could not do it. So there are a couple of things that go with this, right? I told you that there is a very unscientific Chua lis who has a way of writing behavioral science, he has a way of talking about this and I never say them in the right order, so I have a flashcard what they really say is that the first thing What you need to do is identify the emotion in the right pattern, you need to recognize that you are having it, you need to give it a name.

I am angry, I am sad and whatever the latter is, you have to look for it, it is not enough to say I am angry why are you angry? where does that anger come from you have to pull those threads it's not easy it takes time it's quite painful sometimes the next thing you have to do is identify what you really want to be if you're sad you want to be happy that's also not so easy sometimes and then the next one and this makes us sound terribly like if you are a computer you have to consciously manage the way you think about that thing and the pattern that controls those things in your brain, so you like to overwrite the bad pattern with the bad pattern. well, the new old pattern with the new pattern and that's how you change the way your brain works in the first place. very unscientific I used to call this mind over matter right, that was like my mantra when I was a kid mind over matter today is going to be great I will do great but I don't call it that anymore I call it being yours

coach

I think it's much more accurate we all deserve a great

coach

in our life we ​​should start with ourselves it is a hard job being a coach is a very hard job I have coached many things in my life to do it well it is really difficult for anyone You can be a coach, but to be a great coach, the kind of coach you want, it requires a lot of work.

I'm going to be your own coach. Forget that it's a full-time job, but it's worth it. I mean, my sixth grade teacher thought she was going to die early. She was 30 years old, that's horrible. She used to teach sixth grade. I never thought that about any of my kids, not even the ones I really cared about, so this isn't the system for everyone. This is what worked for me. The power of your brain is Hands down, you can't just let it do its thing, you have to intentionally think about what's going on there, you also have to be aware that there are a lot of criticisms of what I'm talking about right now, there are a lot of criticisms.

For all the resources out there there are people who say you are fooling yourself when you do this, it's not really honest and I have two answers for that, the first answer is that this is all about honesty, it doesn't work if you're not honest, right? If you wake up every day and just try to be cool, right? Or you tell yourself you're cool when you're not and you don't think about why you're not really cool, how? I really feel like it doesn't work, so the cheating criticism doesn't hold up in my case, but if you ask me today, I asked: I don't care, this works for me, like I just said my 6th grade teacher thought I was going to achieve it.

He was so unhappy and angry that's no way to live life. I don't want to say that thinking like this and finding this way in the system that works for me saved me from death, but it definitely saved my life in more ways. I didn't and I am deeply grateful for all the happy little accidents along the path of my life that helped me stumble upon it, so think about your mindset, listen to the voices in your head and be your own best coach, thank you for have me tonight