No.1 Neuroscientist: Age 30 to 50 Will Be Your Unhappiest, Here's How To FIX IT! - Dr. Tali Sharot

You say that children do not have a positive impact on our happiness. I mean, that's an indication of what you're going to do and that worried me. I have to say Dr. Tally Sherritt, a leading expert on human decision making, optimism and emotion, the Ted Talk of hers. received more than 14 million views. I'm going to talk to you about optimism, children and children, the happiest and the most optimistic, then it descends and hits rock bottom in

your

middle-aged laughter. I'm 30 now, so I'm heading straight to Rock. Down as we speak, any advice, yes, absolutely, one of the amazing things is that you talk about how a small step up the optimism scale is worth an extra 33,000 a year in salary, that's quite a bit, so Optimus, this is what What they do if something went well, they usually interpret it as something in them that caused this positive outcome.

Pessimists do exactly the opposite. I got the job, but actually, because they didn't have other candidates, that negative explanatory style is the path to depression. T

here

is a very close bond. Between depression and pessimism, the question is: how can I improve optimism? So t

here

are a few ways to do it. I was thinking that everything you do is for happiness. Happiness is actually one of the three factors that matter, so one is happiness, the second is meaning, and the other. then there is a third factor that is also very interesting, which is before this episode begins.

I have a small favor to ask you two months ago. 74 of the people who watch this channel did not subscribe. Now we're at 69. My goal is 50. 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 that subscribe button? It helps this channel more than you imagine and the bigger the channel becomes as you have seen it. the older the guests, thank you and enjoy this episode, he tells in the back of his book here, biased optimism, he says he is one of the most innovative

neuroscientist

s working today, how would you define or categorize his own professional experience?

I guess I call myself a cognitive

neuroscientist

, which is really a mix of Psychology and Neuroscience and I'm also mixing in behavioral economics, so it's really a mix of all of that, so I'm interested in how humans behave. the way they do it and why they have the thoughts they have and the feelings they have and I think to understand that you want to understand what happens inside the brain, but then there are other fields that give you a lot. of really interesting ideas including psychology, um, and behavioral economics, even things like law and sociology, philosophy, so it's really kind of an interdisciplinary adventure and you studied neuroscience and psychology in college and graduate school, yeah, so I did my degree in economics and psychology, right? and in fact I did it because at that time neuroscience was not available for a degree in Israel in the whole country, so it was not even an option, yes, this was a long time ago, and then for my PhD I did cognitive neuroscience, which It's neuroscience and psychology mixed together, which was compelling on a personal level for you about studying those topics, why, of all the things you could have pursued, why those things from very early on were you really interested in human behavior, right? ? it's about understanding

your

self but also understanding other people around you um and you know, I think it's one of the most intriguing topics and the brain was kind of this mysterious organ that's orchestrating all of that um so I think It was simply out of an interest in the world around you and the people around you, oh there are some like the ones you know when you started studying neuroscience and psychology, if there were some fundamentals about the nature of life and the nature of beings humans that, um, I'm sure there are so many of them, but were there any real rationales that were debunked or reversed as far as your own personal perspective, whether it was about personal responsibility or about agency or autonomy over how much control How much influence do we have on our happiness?

There is something fundamental that had a real impact on your personal life. You know, there's one thing that recently is something that I recently changed my mind about and that was actually while I was writing the current book that I'm writing. along with Cass Einstein, who is the co-author of nudge, and it was actually about happiness because, and I remember this clearly, I was at a workshop at the LSC and they did a poll and they asked who thinks happiness is the most important thing. . The truth is that everything you do is for happiness and you know that everyone had to stand on a scale, if you think 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 of anything we could do.

What do we do for happiness and all that and does that matter? As we were writing this book, we both came to the conclusion and for me it was a change of heart. Happiness is actually one of the three factors that matter. So one is happiness and the second. it means a lot of things that you do because it gives you meaning and it doesn't necessarily give you happiness, sometimes the two go hand in hand but sometimes they don't, so you could do work that is meaningful and it doesn't necessarily give you happiness and sometimes it does and then there is a third factor that is also very interesting which is called a rich psychological life which is basically variety, a lot of people just do things for diversity to try a lot of different things and again sometimes it goes hand in hand with meaning and happiness, but sometimes it is not like that and that explains why many times we make decisions that we understand

will

not necessarily give us more happiness, but

will

give us something else, one of these other two. things that together I think is what brings a good life and that's something that I think I changed my mind about we're not really motivated by happiness um probably defined as a good feeling kind of joy why variety why humans They care about having variety in their lives, I mean, there's a kind of unconscious evolutionary reason, give me that one, so I think it's right to explore to move forward both as an individual and as a society, we have to explore a lot of different things, some of these things .

They won't necessarily give you happiness right away or at all, but many times, if you explore a lot of things, you will find something that will be very important, maybe for you, maybe for our species. I always treat you kindly. Learn the really simple example of our ancestors who left Africa to explore the rest of the world. What they had. I mean, why would they do that? I mean, they thought there was something better to find and it was probably very difficult to do. but that's just kind of an example of exploration, right, you're trying different things, um, and I can see it in my own life, right, I often do something and then I'm okay, I've had enough of this, let's try something else, like this that variety is It's a kind of factor that I'm trying to maximize, it's a kind of balance, it's the right exploration and exploitation, so you need to do a little bit of exploitation because you found something that works and something that you're good at, No.

I want to leave it that way, but on the other hand, if you're missing out on one thing, you might be missing out on something else, a lot of different things like farming and hunting. It's like the analogy I create from that book Who Moved My Cheese? When I think about variety, my brain was fine. I know some people who get so stuck in their comfort zones that they never explore, so the idea that variety would motivate us or satisfy us with new Adventure things seems to be present. I have conflicts with a lot of people I know who are stuck in a situation and, um, maybe they're not happy, but they're more confident than they know and they leave that place and they venture out well because exploration is risky because there's Uncertainty: you don't know. what's going to happen.

Risk means there is a high probability of both good and bad happening and you just don't know where it's going to go. And that can cause fear. Uncertainty is a state that normally people don't like and don't enjoy and that's definitely something that keeps you in place and in fact one of the points we make is that it seems like people aren't making enough changes in their life, which many Sometimes, if people think about changing something in their life, maybe it's a relationship, maybe it's a career, it could be something stupid like knowing the color of your hair or something like that.

There's a really fun little study that was done by Freakonomic. uh, Stephen Levy, what he did, I wanted to see if, on average, making a change when you think you might want to make a change, this is not just 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, you're more likely to be happy if you follow through with the change or if you don't do it correctly, and this is a tricky thing to study because normally you could say, "Well, let's try people, let's ask them how happy they are." before and after decide to make a change after they made a change and then let's also do the same with the people who didn't make a change and see who is happier, that's not going to work because the people who just go ahead and make a change, they probably had more reasons to do it right, so it's not a good experimental design, so he wanted to randomize whether people were going to make changes or not, so what he did was he had people log in and he asked them: 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 that it came up heads with a change, you know, you take the new job, tails, no, um. the probability that people would switch if they got heads was 25 more than people who didn't so basically people were thinking about a change they did flip the coin if they got it they changed they were more likely to have made a change and in fact, the people who actually did it, committed, and made the change were happier than the people who didn't, that suggests that we're probably not making enough changes than we should, potentially because it's scary to try something.

New things are scary and sometimes it's not going to work. I think that happens with a lot of my friends, like a lot of young DMS who find themselves in a situation where it's safe but it's miserable and they have a potential choice. They like to cross that dark abyss to this potentially better place, but they choose to stay in that miserable situation, whether it's a relationship, a job, whatever it is, and I've always felt that our relationship with uncertainty has a huge influence on our outcomes. general and what I mean by this is that people who are okay with jumping into that kind of dark hole where there is no certainty about their outcomes and they just persist because they would rather not be in certain misery end up having a better life, but they don't.

I know how to get people to have a better relationship with uncertainty. I mean, that's a compelling argument I can tell you, but you only know statistics and facts because I read your books. They are not enough. There needs to be some kind of emotional tone in them so that they diagnose uncertainty first. um, any advice, yeah, that's a really good question, first of all. I mean, you're absolutely right, there are individual differences in how comfortable we are with uncertainty. how comfortable we are with taking risks, so I think it would probably be something like helping them to some extent through change, so it might be difficult to change people's relationship with uncertainty in a global, general way, but maybe every time there is a specific event. problem in front of them about what they want to change, kind of help them along the way with that change, hold their hand and you know, so to speak, probably the only thing you could do well to be like me. here for you, whether it's a friend or a mentor, we're in your mind at that moment, what's causing the resistance, you describe it as fear, yeah, so what's the opposite of fear?

I hope you know it's not the opposite, okay? I think it's something that probably drives you to take that step and it's not just hope, it's optimism that drives us as well, yeah, some of my research is okay, what's the difference between hope and optimism? I hope you want something to happen in the future. I want to get that job. I want to find that relationship. Optimism is believing that you are likely to get that job. I'm likely to find that relationship wonderful and it's absolutely true that if you're an optimist and you think this is going to go somewhere good then you're more likely to go ahead and try what makes sense because my expectations are going to change my actions and my actions are going to change. to change my results correctly because if I think right I'm going to try to participate in this competition because I think I'm likely to achieve something so I go ahead and try it if I think right there's no chance that I won't try it and So of course I don't.

I'm going to understand, so it's a self-fulfilling optimism, um, and then the question is: if I go back to yourquestion, then the question is: how can I improve optimism so that there actually is and that's a good idea because improving optimism will make you take more risks. I want to learn how to improve optimism and all my team members at one of my companies, so there are a few ways to do it. One way is a sense of control that we have. We're more optimistic about the things we think we have control over because we think that when we have control that means we can turn the steering wheel in the right direction, right?

So if we can make people feel like they have control and if it's your team, for example, let's say there's a project that you want someone to work on, so you can just tell them to do that project or you can ask them to choose to do it right and you can guide them to the choice that you think is correct, but if they think that they made a decision that improves the sense of agency, improves the change in the sense of control and they become more committed to that option, so you can give them . Well, there are two options, two projects you can work on, which one? they prefer and again you can frame it in a way that maybe makes them more likely to choose one or the other, but once they made the decision, it's surprising that we've done studies on this where we give people options, for example, leaving vacation.

Do you want to go to France or Rome? Thailand or Hawaii. If they choose, there are exactly two things they are. They love it the same. They really want to go to Hawaii. They really want to go to Florida, but once they make a decision, second. after making a decision, they now believe that Hawaii is much better than a few seconds ago before making a decision and that Florida is not so good, because once you make a decision, your preferences change immediately, you rationalize why that choice was great and Now you're more committed to it, so that's true for vacation, but it can also be true for work.

Should I go to work on Project A or B? If I make the decision, I commit more and it doesn't work. If someone else makes a decision for you, if someone else wants a choice for you, don't go into this rationalization mode where you have to rationalize your choice because it wasn't your choice and once I feel like I'm in control, then too. I do the same. it increases my expectations about how good it will be, but it also increases your happiness because I read about the study in nursing homes where they had an agency floor on the other floor where people didn't feel like they had much agency and choice over their lives and there was a quite significant impact on happiness levels, right, yes, what they did was give them some plans, i.e. the study, yes, yes, yes, absolutely, so when we feel like we have control, we have agency. improves well-being when we feel like our agency has been restricted, which causes anxiety, and this is one of the reasons why people are quite anxious on airplanes, it's not just because we fear the worst, but because we have no control , there is no control over When will we get there?

What are we going to eat well and that causes a lot of anxiety? So by improving agency and control, you are increasing people's well-being, happiness, and reducing stress and anxiety. Yes, and those you know, study with plants. It also works with kids right, you can give the kids some plans to take care of or have the kids make their own salads, they'll be more likely to eat them, so that's just so you know some examples of what you could, I mean I'm not part of any airline's innovation team or anything, but I was wondering in the game example what we could do then to reduce passenger anxiety.

I was thinking, you know, if we told them before takeoff, listen to see if we need to land. For some reason, well, not that we necessarily do it, but as you say in that study with the nursing homes, it's about giving them the perception that they have control rather than giving them control, yeah, okay, so There are a couple of things they do. It works for some of the reasons too, but in a fun way it also enhances the feeling of control, so one thing that airlines do that I think is cool is when you can see the equipment, the pilot's view, you know, yeah .

We can see, yeah, um, that for some, I mean, obviously, you have no control, but first of all, it reduces uncertainty. I mean, I really like to look at that, how tall am I in what year am I going? I know you have no control, that gives you a feeling of reducing sensitivity in some strange way and also enhances the feeling of control. I have to do it. I must say that one day I was on a plane flying. I don't want to look at the airline, but I was flying and I woke up in the middle of the night on the plane and it was turbulent and I was convinced we were going to go down.

I was convinced. I looked out the window and we were getting closer and closer to the clouds and I did my quick calculations, we are flying from New York to London with three hours, about three hours into the flight, we are going to sink, that means we are going to sink into the sea ​​and I have about 10 minutes on that plane where I have full, we are certainly approaching the clouds, why would we be approaching the clouds? And I click on the little thing that you described, the little flight map, and it says we're at 33,000 feet and we're I'm not moving and I'm going fine, I mean, whoever thought that was a good idea obviously understands the psychology.

The other thing I like that they do is that they actually did it and I mentioned it in one of the books and it's actually not like that. related to control, but it relates to another really important part of psychology, which is that normally at the beginning you know that you are about to get on the flight and they have to go over all the safety instructions and normally no one would do it. Listen well, because it was all about the state of emergency, so you have to do this and that and no one wants to think about the state of emergency, so you like to close, they say, "Okay, Twitter, Facebook, um, so what ?" They did it, um, and especially Virgin did this, um, they changed it, so it was very entertaining, very light and it was all about the destination, it wasn't about being in the sky and having a state of emergency which is negative and No.

I want my attention to go there. I do not want to think about that. It was about thinking about when you're going to land and it's going to be the islands and you know the beach and stuff, and they like to put the information you need to know into this very light, entertaining, positive humor video, and the number of people who watched and attended has increased tremendously and, in fact, people started watching it at home even before getting on the plane directly on YouTube. So that's another really interesting thing and it goes to another principle that we find a lot in our work, which is that people take in positive information about their own future much more than they take in negative information about their own future, so if I'm starting out If I tell you , you know I think your podcast listening numbers are going to go down, you'll be like, "Well, she doesn't know what she's talking about, does she?", but if I say "oh, I think this is great and it's just going to go" .

Increasing more and more over time you would say yes he is probably right and you will become more confident so on average people tend to take positive information to update their beliefs more than negative it doesn't mean we don't hear negative information . about our own future um, but on average we see that you learn more from unexpected positive information about the future that kind of confirms some of the things that I read in your second book The Influential Mind where I remember I was watching a YouTube video where they were in it and they were taking um, when you told them you agreed with their beliefs versus when you told them you disagreed with their beliefs and when you agreed with their beliefs, their brain lit up and they seemed to be really receptive and then when you told them no. you agreed with their beliefs, your brain seemed to just be frozen and this is really helpful when you're thinking about having a conversation trying to influence or having a conversation with your partner or communicating with someone who starts with kindness or something where they You make people feel heard, seen and understood. a good way to open them up to information, yes this relates to something called confirmation bias, so confirmation bias is our tendency to look for information that confirms what we believe and to use information that confirms what we believe that will be even more confident and kinder in our beliefs and yes, we did a study where people came to our lab in pairs and had to make a financial decision together, in this case they had to evaluate the value of a piece of real estate, so they made their decisions and we scanned their brains at the same time and they were just on two separate scanners but they could interact over Wi-Fi and they had to see it like 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 they didn't and it's exactly what you said I agree with you when they agreed your brain is like when they agreed um and they gave you more information about how sure I am etc. when someone agreed, The other person's brain showed activity that suggested they were encoding the information coming from the advanced partner, using it to update their beliefs, and becoming more confident, but when someone disagreed, in a way exactly what you said, 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're talking about and they were, that's it, um and like you said, we feel that. in real life you know it all the time and 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 you're wrong here, look.

When looking at the data, looking at the figures, etc., what happens is that the person in front of us closes down a lot of times. What you're doing is the other person is trying to think of other reasons why they're actually right and The other person is wrong, so while I'm talking you're trying to think of what you're going to say to them, you know? But if I start with something where we have common ground then you're more likely to listen to me. they're more likely to see me as an okay partner and be more open to what I'm going to say next and there's an example that I really like is about vaccines and this was before covid so it was about childhood vaccines so that a lot of parents uh don't want to vaccinate their children because of the supposed link to autism um and they usually went 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 numbers and the data. science and it didn't really work, parents generally didn't change their minds, so instead there was a group of scientists who said, let's see if we can take a different route, we won't actually mention anything we disagree about , which is the relationship with autism, we will simply highlight what we already agree on, which is that these vaccines protect children from life-threatening diseases, which is not something that parents disagree on, but everything which seemed to have been forgotten in the debate just as they were concentrating.

What they didn't agree on, by focusing on what they agreed on, which is that vaccines will protect children from deadly diseases, they were three times more likely to change parents' intention to vaccinate children, so I think This means that you know if We are in some kind of conversation about whether we should invest in this or that company and we disagree on something. Is there a different route to get to know the decision we want without focusing? There are other things. that we agree on that that would get us to the same point and then there is another method which is simply highlighting the commonalities between us that is also useful, you know, maybe there is something, I mean, we have a common goal, we have a common motivation, maybe there is something in our environment that is similar and that always makes it more likely that people will listen to you and use what you say.

It is very true. 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 with the wrong point and then expressed your point and you see that many times someone will start. one sentence with I disagree and that's it and then make it clear when that happened. I'm going to be completely honest because who can be someone who is imperfect and full of guilt when someone does that to me when they literally start a sentence with wrong or I disagree it's an instant combat, okay and like I'm very aware of it, maybe It doesn't come up as much in me, but I remember that I can go, but I can remember three years ago where I was when someone said to me when we're talking and they were completely wrong and thenThey made their point clear, regardless of what comes next, it's combat the moment you do that, the moment you close the door and lift the drawbridge, which is exactly what that feeling is combat from then on.

It's like it's a war to prove you're right and that's not helpful to either side, right? It takes someone with a certain amount of personal security, I guess, and um no, not a fragile ego to be able to be greeted with that kind of conflict and draw first on what we have in common and what we agree on, but it's real, it's really powerful. . skill that someone must master so if you don't agree with me just so you know I like this with my relationship too because my partner and I may not agree on something we might have fundamentally different beliefs about the world she is very spiritual and very scientific and how I think, but I know that I communicate with her when I first understand how she feels, I don't have to agree with that, but even if I understand how she feels and I like to validate her, any Whatever I say next seems to be behind me 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, correct theory of mind. mind. it's our ability to think about what other people think or feel, so basically we take the other person's point of view correctly if and there's enormous variability in people's ability to do that, there are tests like relatively simple tests, actually that you can measure your ability to do that um and then if you do that, the probability that you answer wrong is very, very low, right, the reason we start wrong, you're wrong is because we do the opposite, we come from Our point of view. point of view that makes sense because our brain is here and our eyes are here, so it makes sense that we come from our point of view a little 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: okay, what can I say from that point of view? not from my point of view, from that point of view, um, it's very difficult to do.

I'll give an example, let's say my partner was upset about something and was feeling stressed about something that has to do with his environment and my first response was very logical and scientific and also psychological like it was just in your head. which I know is kind of gaslighting, that's not exactly what I said before I got canceled, but it was referring to the fact that I think you can think of this as me trying to help her feel empowered and not let that her environment took over her now that didn't work the response there was like it wasn't good.

My next approach was to fully understand how she feels and go around her and say, do you know what you're doing? Anyway I'll only be here for five minutes and then everything will be fine and that totally worked, it was like she was glued to me when I said that and she looked at me and nodded and said, yeah, you're right, the first approach of trying to playing with logic and saying no, no, you know, it didn't work, but then when I said the term, I understood it, but then I offered a solution from that place of understanding, she was very open to it, yes, and that was about an hour ago, so it's on First thing on my mind, um, yeah, so I think this is a problem a lot of times with similar campaigns, like politics, but also with different campaigns where people are trying to get a message across. using the logic of data figures that are important.

I mean, we need all the science and we need all the data to know what is true, but once you know what is true, the data is not enough to convince people of what is true and, in fact, the things that They work are things that you are talking about, which are emotions, they work very well. stories anecdote correct example in science the worst thing we can do is use an anecdote correctly, so we don't want to get a conclusion based on one answer, but to get our message across, in fact, a single anecdote is really useful, right? and in my opinion, we actually have to accept that that's the way the human brain works properly, so I think if we go ahead and say, well, I don't like that, I don't like how the human brain works, like that that I will give you facts and figures anyway, well the message will not be conveyed correctly so we really need to accept it if we understand how the mind works and then accept it to convey the important information and again, another example that I write.

What I'm writing is This was years ago with the 2016 campaign, where Trump was one of the Republican Party candidates and Dr. Carson was another and they were debating and the debate turned again to the issue of vaccines and autism, and That's how they were. When asked about yourself, Trump says there is a link between childhood vaccines and autism. Dr. Carson is a pediatrician and they asked him, well, do you know what you think about this? and Dr. Carson said, look, this is not true, we have a lot of data. I have a lot of science and you know, I'm sure that if Trump reads the science and the data, he will be convinced, if not, then they turn to Trump to see if he was convinced and of course he was not convinced, but then what? ?

Did he use the absolutely opposite approach, that is, did he tell a story of someone who worked for him who had a small baby and said that the baby received the vaccine and it used to induce excitement? It's like you said it was a horse. - correct size syringe and after a few weeks the baby had autism and now I'm not saying we should do it, we should communicate false information using anecdotes and emotions, but I remember I was actually watching that and my son was a few weeks. old and he was next to me on the couch and I'm a scientist and I know all the facts and you know it, but I still know he was wrong, but my reaction was like ooh, maybe I should think about this twice before of deciding whether to vaccinate my little son here um and I felt like that for at least I would say a few minutes a little bit longer and that feeling made me think look if I'm thinking that because everything because Dr.

Carson just said there are facts and figures and Science and Trump just told the story that made me feel quite anxious and he was much more influential. What's up with everyone else watching? You know, people who are not neuroscientists who have no training in science. It's like I realize how powerful he is now. These techniques could be used, obviously, to spread misinformation and do harm, of course, but if Dr. Carson had used some of these techniques as well, I could say there is a science to it, but along with that, maybe it will be used. some kind of anecdote to maybe use some hope, hope and optimism, emotion, something like that, maybe it would have caused a lot of people who are watching to vaccinate their children and therefore save lives, so I think there is something 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 that's who you are you don't like it that's how the brain works you're going to be missing something true that's why conspiracy theories flourish in the social media because all I need to do is get an anecdote, a low-context video, an image, a screenshot of something and post it on Facebook and regardless of the science, whether it's climate change or vaccines, whatever, that small screenshot of a Telegram group. that saying something happened to one person in 8 billion becomes much more believable and plausible and powerful than all of science and I've seen that in recent years that's why to me it feels like the mistake.

It really is like a lost war, because by bringing facts and figures similar to an emotional fight, the facts and figures will never win, not even under the social media channels, you know, now we are putting the little tag on the post to say "good." actually Politico says this is not true, it's like it cares, it hits someone in the feels, um, but it also talks about, you know, you talk about this a lot in your book The Influential Mind, it talks about how, as people of In business or in sales or when we are trying to be heard and understood or influence others, presenting facts, figures, graphs and charts will not be as compelling as presenting a big emotional story.

I've always impressed people as much as I can say that your facts, figures, charts and graphs don't really matter when you're trying to convince people, and that's what your book is really about, and it's terrible for a scientist, of course. , all day, you know? collecting data and doing analysis, but yeah, it's an interesting question: why are these stories so effective? I think there are two main regional reasons: one is that they are free, actually the other is that they induce emotions and what emotion does it do. It makes you focus because the emotion tells your brain that this is important and it makes the whole brain realize that it's kind of like a little red light in your brain that makes the emotion pay attention, so if you say something It's emotional, people are going to pay attention. and they are going to remember better, so emotion increases the likelihood that you will remember things.

So the second reason is, if you think about it, how humans, how we learned well, if before we had science, before we had all these ways of becoming science. With a lot of information we would live in relatively small groups and learn by observing others, observing like a friend or someone who lives nearby, learning from stories, that's how we evolved to learn from a small n, only now we have You know, these techniques and big data we could really solve things, but our brain is still the brain of these humans who didn't have the Internet, who didn't have all the mathematics that we have now, so we're still. learning from stories is kind of like our instinct, we are sophisticated creatures now, we can't get over this, we can look at the data, we can learn, but actually our instinct is to learn from a single story, the third reason I think is that stories Stories are often novel as if you had never heard exactly the same story that way.

Novelty makes you pay attention and makes you remember that it is another sign if something is important, while facts and figures that you have heard before if someone says well. there is no relationship between autism and the vaccine or whatever, you've had the science, usually not, it doesn't sound that new and our brain really cares about the headlines, 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 we should pay attention and then maybe it's important or maybe it's not, but that last point really resonated with the fact that the stories are essentially novel, you've never heard of from Debbie in Newcastle exactly before um, but also what you know now makes a lot of sense why politicians in the House of Parliament say every week that I spoke to my constituent Dorothy in Burnley and then they will tell the story of Dorothy struggling to get to her home. instead of just presenting facts and when you hear about Dorothy not being able to heat her house, you feel a lot more, oh my gosh, compared to hearing about 24 elderly people not being able to go home, for example, when I think about motivation, although the same rules apply.

So if I want to motivate my team, should I tell them that Diary of a CEO has had 20 million downloads this month or should I tell them the story of Dorothy who listened to the podcast and I think she changed her life in this case? both things will work, I mean, seeing the progress is something that really motivates us and seeing the progress with numbers is an easy way for us to see the progress properly, that's why all this kind of tracking your steps works well, like this which I think motivating, I mean, oh, it's always lovely too to hear a story, I mean, even for yourself, if you know, it doesn't matter how many people watched your podcast, it's that when you meet someone, they tell you how much you touch. them and they really change their life and decide to make a decision because of you, they heard you do something that you really remember, that's true, that causes so much joy and motivation, numbers are also great when you look and say, oh, I have a million people listening to my podcast that's cool too so I think both things work and if you use numbers it's really cool to show progress properly a really great way to change behavior is to show progress to people and numbers are only one.

It's a way to show it well if you can see it going up, that's really helpful and I mean we know that in sports, but it can be true for anything if you can do it, it's money. Investments. right, seeing as that also increases in relationships, I wonder how it can be done for relationships, that's a good question, well actually I say that because I feel like I do that sometimes with my partner, where we might be facing some kind of problem and One of the most compelling things we have done when faced with a problem is to look at all the problems we haveWe got through it together and we like how we are here, so there were many other times where we thought this I know we couldn't figure it out.

She lived on the other side of the planet. I lived here. We both didn't want to move and then I had the exact same situation that was her problem for years and years. Oh, actually yes, I remember. bits were sitting in a bar and my partner was talking about a problem, something we were struggling with or whatever, and I remember saying to him: look, look how far we've come from where we were here to where we are now, it's like Well. there's nothing standing in our way, you know, and that seemed compelling because I guess it was an emotional story of all these previous problems that we've overcome, going back to the optimism bias.

From what I understood, it's that bias of believing that the future will be good, is it that accurate or inaccurate, yes, something like that, so, optimism alone, I mean, although I'm wrong, no, no, that's right. I'll just give you the scientific definition, so yes, optimism is believing that some know positive things will happen. Optimism bias means that, or you are like this, you believe that these optimistic things will happen, these good things will happen, but the evidence suggests. otherwise it's actually a mistake, optimism bias, so we generally define it as overestimating the probability of positive events happening, so you're overestimating how much money I'm going to make from my first job when I finish grad school, or overestimating things like how long my marriage will last, etc., overestimating the positive in light of the evidence in front of us and underestimating the probability of negative events occurring, so I am underestimating my probability of being covered from getting cancer or from being in a car accident going bankrupt whatever it is based on whatever evidence there is, um, so optimism bias means errors, so the word bias means a systematic error, so obviously when we think about the future we don't We may be right most of the time because the future is uncertain, we don't know what is going to happen, so we will be wrong many times when we predict the future, but optimism bias means that the mistakes we make tend to be systematically the ones we make.

We hope they are. better than what it ends up being, so that's basically the optimism bias, right, I hope it's better than what it ends up being, which sounds like a bad thing, but it's not necessarily, so I refer to the word bias , people generally because it's a mistake, people generally I think that means it's not a good thing, but it's not necessarily a good thing, so it can actually have both positive and negative results, so if you think about the positive, yeah 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 going to make a million next year and, of course, that's a lot more. than I'm going to win, but that motivates you, so having these positive expectations motivates you to try harder, it's a bit like I think I'm going to get gold.

You're more likely to get the money, so that's the idea and it also improves your happiness and well-being, because how do you do it. How you feel now has a lot to do, not necessarily with what you are doing right now, but with what you think you will do later. How you feel now is like okay, maybe you feel good talking here, but um. A lot of this is what I think I'm going to do later tonight next week next month a year from now. Our expectations of where we will be in the future affect our happiness today, so if I have these positive expectations of the future even if they're not going to happen, they make me happier today that's why there's a really interesting study that was done at Harvard where they asked to people who were about to go on vacation how happy they were every day before the vacation and every day during the vacation and every day after the vacation for a week, so one week before the vacation everyone the days a week of vacation every day a week after the vacation every day So what was the happiest day?

Do you think they were right the day before on exactly the right day? before the vacation they were still in the office working on the computers, but in their mind they were already on vacation, in their mind it was wonderful and when they went on vacation it was good, but not as good as what they thought about the day before, so it's the anticipation of these Goods, so it's an optimism bias because they thought the vacation was going to be better than it ended up being, but that brought them happiness sooner, yeah right, and it also probably improves the probability that they do it. go on vacation, which is also a good thing, does that also mean that we should uh in our relationships in our teams, etc., we should absolutely try to give people things to look forward to and I think there's two things you can do? of wanting things in the diary properly, so having a holiday in the diary that will happen in a month makes you happy today, so whatever you are doing that is important to your team, have what I call anticipated events, right things that I might hope that makes them happy today, but I also think that a lot of times I motivate my team by telling them that I think this project is going to work very well.

I mean, I even think it's to look pretty. well, but maybe I would like to exaggerate a little bit because you know that improves motivation and who knows, maybe it works even better than I expected, so it's good to improve expectations and also have these things that people can look forward to. cravings and of course it works the other way around, so also if you fear something that will happen tomorrow next week, you have to go to the dentist or whatever bad thing is happening will get there and affect your mood today, the fear of Future things and anticipation of good things are affecting how we feel right now.

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You know I'm a big believer in employee flexibility and trust, so having features like this is very helpful, so for more information search intel.co.uk for vpro and let me know how you understand how contagious it is. It is optimism and, conversely, pessimism in life in general, if I am around a group of pessimists or I am around a group of optimists. What kind of contagious impact is there on me? Yes, any emotion is contagious. Anything, sadness, anxiety, joy, it's all contagious fear and it happens very, very quickly and unconsciously. The right way, it could even be like you're sitting on a tube and someone in front of you seems fearful.

You will immediately feel fearful. First of all, you will imitate the expression of the person in front of you without noticing it, so if you look scared, I will start imitating the same facial expressions, yes, and that facial expression will make me feel afraid, because our brain is learning from what our face is like, 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 that there might be something dangerous around us, then they should have seen the main piece from the David Attenborough documentary in which he stars, they know that they know that the other monkeys are taking a signal from them to feign fear and then, when all the monkeys run away, they go to look for the food because they have reached level two where they realize that everyone is following each other's signals. another and I remember that documentary thinking wow, like you know, because all the monkeys would run away the moment one monkey reacted and that's pretty much what you're describing there, yes, exactly, and it also works for good things if someone He seems excited.

It's like you feel excited too, you don't know why, but if they are excited, there might be something good together. I'm just thinking about you, it's just an imitation, we make facial expressions, we imitate any type of facial expression. and body expressions too yeah, I'm trying not to, no, yeah, but that's okay, so why is it really important to think about this? Because let's say you want to, you're managing your team, if you're stressed and you're going to start. Like I don't even know how to shout or raise my voice or they'll get more stressed too, so it's true, it's a bit like monkeys, you can actually change at least X how you look in terms of emotions.

You need to think about what my emotion is, what I am conveying because the emotion you are conveying will affect how the people around you feel, so there is a bit of emotional control, that is also useful, you mentioned now that you may exaggerate a little the belief in a positive outcome for your team members and I think that's what it is and I hope they're not listening. Yeah, well, I think we all do it sometimes. I mean, I generally believe that because I think I have a little bit of optimism bias, but that's partly because I guess chapter three of optimism bias where you talk about how self-fulfilling optimism is and there were some statistical studies and experiments really amazing things that have been done to show that optimism really is a self-fulfilling thing and it kind of makes me think about this concept of manifestation.

People always talk about manifestation and it seems like there has always been this kind of pseudoscience in my mind. about something and then it happens What is your point of view on manifestation? It's true? Yeah, so it's not magic. It's not like I'm thinking something in my mind and the waves are going to change what's happening in the world. The reason why if you believe in something, probability will do it. what happens is greater is because then you change your actions, do you think? I think you know that my startup is really going to be successful and that then changes your actions.

You're more likely to go out and tell other people, so if you think it's going to work. to be successful, you're more likely to pass that information on to investors, and so on, they can see your type of trust, they'll be more likely to invest in you, right, you spend more time, you put more effort into, um and that's why it can have an effect on the results, so it's not something magical, it's just that what we believe in our mind changes the way we behave and the way we behave in the world changes the world, um, that's why that's why.

Kind of like this idea of ​​self-fulfilling prophecies is tied to this concept of stereotypes where one of the really surprising things that I read in your um in your work was that if a woman is reminded of her gender before a math test, then Your performance on that math test will drop, so where do our expectations come from? To some extent, I mean, they also come from around us, not only can we have the same confidence, even if the people around us don't, but also other people's expectations, whether. They are your friends, your family, society will affect yours, and so, over and over again, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, right, if they tell you that women are not good at math, they are not good at science, no.

They can be executive directors, etc. That will change the way you think, even if it's momentarily even if you're trying to fight it, it will change the way you think and what you believe and that will then change your results and I think maybe by that I mean thatI don't know exactly why reminding women about The stereotype that women don't do well in math changes test results, but it could be things like maybe anxiety increases, you start to doubt yourself, right? ? I mean, if you go to a test and there's doubt, well, that's not helpful, and there are all these classic studies where, in a class, they told the teachers at the beginning of the semester who the gifted kids were, but It was random, they selected them at random. children and said that these are the talented ones.

By the end of the year, these kids did better because teachers believed they were talented, would treat them that way, maybe give them more time, and could lower their expectations. the child the children and they began to believe that they have talent and it did not give them confidence and they performed better and of course it worked the other way around, if a teacher believes that they tell him this is, you know, the naughty one, this is, you know, the no- a smart one who will then change the way children behave in what they believe and this is where stereotypes also come into play because sometimes it's not about specific individuals but rather a whole group of individuals and one of those examples, as well as the study that found that African Americans performed significantly worse on IQ tests compared to Caucasians, people who are white when race was emphasized before the IQ test, as well as white people when no stereotype was mentioned before, simply mentioning that I am black before taking an IQ test will lower my performance on the test compared to if you hadn't mentioned it because here the association reminds you of ethnicity and you are doing this exam and then you know that maybe in your society there is a stereotype and again that can cause doubt and anxiety etc. so what.

I think what I like is I think after talking about that study, I also talk about another study that after Obama was elected, the ratings went up for African Americans, um, because it's again, it's a trust thing. in yourself, it's amazing how you know these little things. I mean, it's no small thing, the fact that Obama was elected is no small thing, but the fact that that impacts your self-confidence, you know, the small impact on your self-confidence then changes your grades, is quite a bit. , 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 a small step up the optimism scale is worth an extra 33,000 a year in long-term salary, right, and I'm fine so that's um that shows us a correlation I think it is so we don't know for sure yet if it's that because I have specific traits I'm more likely to be optimistic and therefore it's more probably because of those traits, I'm also more likely to earn a higher salary, so you know, you can imagine that I'm optimistic because I had a very privileged life and I did well in school, so I'm more optimistic and therefore the same reasons and then you are more likely to get a higher rating. but in some cases we don't know if it goes in one direction or the other, if it is a causality or a correlation.

One interesting thing that has been discovered is that optimists are more likely to be entrepreneurs. pretty clear, you already know, and again we don't know, is it because I'm an optimist and 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? As an entrepreneur you become even more optimistic, right? That suggests that one thing is true: optimistic people are more likely to take risks and therefore more likely to be entrepreneurial, and that experience of doing so improves your optimism.

Also, what's really interesting goes both ways, so it explains how we can teach someone to be more optimistic, because if the pursuit of entrepreneurship makes your optimism self-reinforcing, makes 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 go, which fuels you even more, and conversely, someone I know maybe stays too long in their comfort zone and it's like leaning in Opportunities are constantly negatively reinforced in terms of their self-confidence in their abilities, etc., so they become increasingly pessimistic. Generally speaking, it is true.

I think it could be so. I think you're getting evidence that you can do things. think even if you feel like you still got evidence that you were able to try something new correctly and not die and not die correctly and you learn something well um yeah, I think you're absolutely right um so if you're able to get it that people have this kind of experiences that then makes them more confident and that will increase their optimism, so how do you know that we are talking about all the positive advantages of being an optimist? How does it work if I have a friend who is a pessimist or a partner or a husband or whatever, how do I get them?

We talked a little about it there, but how can I get them to become more optimistic? Because I want to be surrounded by optimists. I want my company. I'll be full of them as pragmatic optimists, but there are still people who believe that you know the future is going to be good and we're going to do great things for all the self-fulfilling reasons you've described, what do I do right, so first? Of all, I just want to mention that about 30 percent of our optimism is genetically determined. This has been shown in twin studies, but that still leaves two-thirds correct.

I think the best studies on this probably come from Martin Seligman, where he actually did experiments where he got people who were kind of pessimistic, even a little bit depressed, and the approach he took was to change the middle style, what he calls interpretation. . So optimists, this is what you usually do if something happened and went well. You sold your startup for a lot of money, you had a project and it was successful, they usually interpret that to mean that it's something personal that caused this positive outcome and it's something in them that's pretty permanent, let's say my project got done.

Well, because I'm a hard worker, right, and you know, maybe I'm smart or whatever, and then they say, well, if I have those skills, that means a lot of other things are going to work well in life, right? TRUE? a hard job or if I'm good with people that also means I'll be a good father, for example, just when something negative happens, they tend to do the opposite, they tend to see it as something circumstantial. Okay, so I didn't put much effort into this, but not because I'm not a hard worker, I just didn't put in enough effort because I was distracted by something else or you know this other person just has a better situation. proposal, so it's circumstantial, that means they don't take it as evidence of how I'm going to perform in the future, so it's a really different interpretation of the negative results and the positive results, so what?, and then the Pessimists do exactly the opposite when something bad happens.

They say that this bad thing happened because of me because of a trait that I have and because I have this trait let's say that I am bad with people that is going to affect the rest of my life and all these future projects when something could happen is Something circumstantial good happened, I got the job, but really because they didn't have other people candidates, what Martin's segment did was teach people this style of acting that he taught them whenever something good happens, that's how you should think about it. I have to think about it, what is it that made this positive thing happen well and how is that positive trait or any skill, whatever it is that you did, how can it affect other parts of your life and a few other future results and the opposite for the negatives? something negative happened, I don't want to say that I don't take responsibility, but there are circumstantial circumstances, it could be something that you did, but it doesn't have to be permanent, right, it turns out that you are in a really bad state because I don't.

I didn't know that something else was going on with your father, he was sick or something, so you teach people to interpret this to find these reasons for the positive and the negative and it seemed to work, to a certain extent, now it's hard, I mean, you already know. It's not easy to turn a pessimist into an optimist, but it had some effect on their well-being and even their physical health, as a result, that negative explanatory style of saying "okay, something bad happened, it's my fault, it's because me." I'm not good enough, whatever it is, that's the path to depression, yeah, so there's a very close link between depression and pessimism, so pessimism is a symptom of depression, it's a real symptom. um, and what we see is that people with severe depression have a pessimistic bias that they expect. the future will be worse than what it ends up being and worse than the evidence in front of them is. um, people with mild depression don't have any bias, this doesn't mean they are accurate, they can make mistakes, but on both sides, sometimes they hope things will get better, sometimes they hope things will be worse, but overall, no They have a prejudice about happiness.

You know, one of the things we talked about before we started recording was that Scott Galloway said on this podcast that happiness looks like you. -form throughout our lives, as in When we are young, we have a high level of happiness and then we dip into our 40s. I think from what I read, when we reach 40, that's the lowest, it sounds gentle. moving sounds a little bleak but that's our lowest point of happiness and then it goes back up as we move into the last kind of chapters of our life, it's that accurate because Scott didn't provide any research and I've thought about it and you know yeah, no, so this is true, it's based on many studies and studies involving thousands of thousands of people that you know, up to 70,000 or more in a country and it's been shown in many countries, um.

So, not just in the Western world, in many countries, in almost every country in the world, um, exactly what you said, children and children are the happiest and the most optimistic, then it goes down and bottoms out in the median age, as well as optimism. Actually, in midlife you stop having an optimism bias, so your optimism is higher in children and in children, this causes it to go down and then there's really no optimism bias in midlife on average, so Of course, and then it starts to increase, you become happier and more optimistic. until the last years of life, which is contrary to our image of the grumpy old man, and in reality it remains there until the last two years of the couple's life.

The difference between countries is that in the fall, you know the point where it is lowest. It's actually a little different from one country to another. I think in the US it's around 40, it's relatively early, I think in the UK too, but in some countries it's a lot, I think Italy might be 50 and Greece also between 50 and 60. And then there are some countries in which you don't see that Russia is one of them, Romania and I forget that there is another one in which you don't actually see that they actually become less and less happy in those countries in which they don't.

I don't know why that's that specific case. I'm 30 now, so I'm heading straight to Rock Bottom as we speak. Oh, you have time, you have time. I'm about to change, so I'm on my way. I'm looking forward to it, I'm on the way, not quite yet, but I'm on my way up and this, you know, links to, I think, chapter five of 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 surprising things is that you say that children do not impact our happiness positively now I am under the impression that children make us very happy, well it is difficult but from what I have heard from people who thought that children are something to really look forward to, but you seem to claim the opposite in your book.

So first of all, I want to say that this is just research and the numbers, and um, I'm. Not only am I saying this, but my own experience is absolutely the opposite. Note that your son is upstairs and is looking at Leo. No, but it's absolutely true because it's fun because of that research and I wrote the first one. This is in my first book. The optimism bias that I wrote before my kids and I actually, I mean, I believed it, I mean, it's a given of what you're going to do and that worried me. I have to say that about having children I was a little bit worried about the fact that children says children, you know, children doesn't mean you're happy, you become less happy, you become less happy when you have children, that's what the research I didn't do, I didn't see that, oh sorry, that's what I said right because kids don't make you happy, yeah right, but I didn't know there were any, I thought they didn't make you happier, I didn't know that they made you less, oh no, apparently it's like um, I mean the data. shows, I mean, there are a little bit different data points, some, for example, there is a data that shows that this was done by Daniel Conman, who is a Nobel Prize winner, where they asked a large group ofFrench women to say how happy they were. throughout the day, so I don't know every few hours or maybe at the end of the day they said what they were doing and how happy they were and they discovered that the least happy people are traveling, but I think number two is the least happy. happy was being with her children so I have to tell you on my own this is an anecdote one N out of one my children really make me extremely happy I love being with them it really is contrary to all the research so I really want to say I'm surprised you know , before they were born, I was thinking look, you know, if I don't like them, we'll put them in boarding school and my mom said, I don't think you want to put them in boarding school.

You're probably in school and I was like, well, we'll see and from time to time I don't love having them around, but that's just the end of it so I don't know and of course your own experience unfortunately, even as a scientist, gives shape. the way you interpret the data, but I mean, look, I mean, I'm sure having kids can be difficult and you know it depends on your life circumstances and all that, the temperament of the child, etc., etc. I'm sure it could be difficult, but it's because there's a distinction, as you said at the beginning of this conversation, between happiness and meaning, it can be difficult, but it's meaningful.

I need the work to be difficult, there are varieties of work. If I'm working in a job with a bit of autonomy where I subjectively like the results. I'm not interested, then it's just a difficult job, but if I'm like raising a child, it's difficult but it's tremendously meaningful, so although I might tell the researcher I don't feel happy when my son cries, runs, destroys everything and plays. I won't leave it with the Rubik's cube. I reflect on that in retrospect and say, oh amazing, absolutely. I mean, meaning is important and you have to do things, you have to make decisions, um according to the meaning too, um and obviously there are individual differences in my In this case, they just make me happy.

I like to dance with them in my you know, at home and I like real happiness. But you know it can, obviously, it's different. It's not like all the time, of course. What about marriage? That was the other one. one that was pretty surprising that it didn't make it, but I think that's okay, that was a bit, it's been a while since I looked at this, but I think it was nuanced, which is what makes you happy is being in a relationship, I think That made it so that whether you were married or not didn't really matter, but I think being in a relationship induced happiness.

The other kind of interesting finding on this is, how quickly do people get over divorce? It takes, I mean, I don't know if it's fast or not, but just before a few years before you get divorced, happiness starts to decline because of course there are problems, I guess, and so on, and it actually hits rock bottom. almost. The moment you get divorced and then it starts to escalate, you start to adjust properly and actually get back to baseline levels of happiness in about two years. I don't know, maybe two years is too long, but then people recover. so when you think about these changes that could be negative, I think people don't consider as much our ability to adapt so quickly, change so quickly, I think greed was a very good example from the pandemic, I mean, before the pandemic , if I told you that you will have to stay home and not see anyone else and you would say that this is a disaster, how is it going to happen?

People adapt pretty quickly, yeah, stress, we did studies that we actually started. By doing studies a few weeks after the pandemic started, we saw, of course, that stress and anxiety increased, but not as much as we thought and number two, the recovery was extremely surprising in just a couple of months, many people came back to your basic happiness, so adaptation is very quick, you somehow find ways to overcome these things, that being said it was like a bird's eye view because there were parts of the population that were not doing well, so if you take a warm side You will see that, for example, people with mental health problems, I mean pre-existing ones, had problems adapting to this new situation.

Some, like women, fared a little worse because they probably had more child care. The younger people did it. worse in older people maybe because of that U shaped curve, but in general people adapt faster than they think and I think that goes back to our question of why people don't take risks and why they don't write , why don't they make changes, I think because one of the reasons is that they are afraid of not adapting correctly to change and they underestimate how quickly 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 I think why we're all here today because we can just adapt to these different environmental changes and when we try to get people to act in their lives or just act in teams and things like that.

The things in the influential mental book that you wrote talk about fearing and trying to scare people and I was thinking about that when you were talking about the pandemic and a lot of what governments were saying and how they were trying to make conform to pandemics through of fear I guess we should try to scare people into acting like leaders, yeah, I really like this because it's kind of a fundamental neuroscientific discovery that's a small leap, but it tells you something really interesting. and how to get people to do something or not do something, basically what we found is that if you want to induce action it's more useful to highlight the rewards, you know, if you do this, you know, if you put in the time, you know. "You will get a promotion, um, unless it's because of fear, if you don't do this, you won't get a promotion, so if you want people to act, highlight the rewards, highlight the good time, good results are better if "You want people not to." To act, let's say you want them not to reveal some secret, actually highlight that the punishment is better and why it is that way.

This is where I find it really interesting. Is it that we evolved in a world in which to get something good, be it a promotion? or love because we have to do something, so I'm thirsty, I need to move my hand and take a little sip of this T, so imagine it's not necessarily like that. This is the world we live in, but it's not necessarily the way. It could have been, it could have been that to get the tea I would have to do something like that and not do anything that I imagine, like different physics or something, but the world we live in is to get good things.

We have to do things and that is why our brain has evolved in this type of world where every time we anticipate something good, a deep reaction is activated in our brain, in the midbrain, which reaches our frontal cortex and makes the action. be more likely now. the opposite is that if generally in the world to avoid something bad usually not always, but usually we just don't need to do anything, whether it's deep water, untrustworthy people, uh, poison, usually I just need not to eat, not to jump into the pool, TRUE? simply staying still so that our brain evolves in this type of environment in which to avoid bad things I need not to act and so, when there is anticipation of something bad, a reaction of not going is activated deep in our brain that reaches up to the end. frontal cortex and inhibits action now again we are sophisticated creatures we can overcome this but our immediate reaction is to freeze in this case not to run away or act correctly first we freeze and then we might be able to do something and then we see this in very basic studies where we tell people who 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 avoid losing it because the action is related to rewards, very interesting, so it is difficult for What to do, I mean, of course they do it, but there is a bit of inhibition if the goal is to not have something happen, not to lose, right?

I mean a lot, I mean, on the one hand, there are these theories. About fear motivates me I don't want to lose that's why I really don't think that's true. I think we usually do things to get things rather than to avoid losing them. You believe the example in your book too. about planes falling when people are most scared, they're just frozen and fear doesn't necessarily seem to be a big driver of human action and motivation in the same way, yeah, that's really important for organizations that are trying to getting people to take bigger risks, um, and innovate and take risks, which is trying to eliminate as much fear as possible, and also being able to vividly imagine this goal, this better future, um, again, it's not because Everything we think in our minds is changing the world, but it changes your behavior.

Chapter six of your book is what happens to people who are threatened and you talk a lot about stress and the role that stress plays in organizations and businesses. Now that I'm back and I'm still thinking about the concept of stress because I remember reading a lot that some of the most subjectively satisfying jobs were pretty stressful jobs, 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 in people's behavior and actions when it comes to the workforce, teams, and relationships?

In fact, I'll start with the kind of example you're talking about, you're saying Well, a lot of them, actually, most of the jobs they fill are very stressful, but I think the people who take those jobs are more resilient to stress. than others, so how much stress you feel is subjective, it's not just about what's happening. also about yourself, so you know, you might have what other people would consider a very stressful job and maybe you're feeling a little bit stressed and we know, I mean, I'm sure a lot of people know that optimal is an optimal kind of way.

Inverse U for stress, no stress at all is not so good for your performance and too much stress is not good either. You want to be in a place where you have a certain amount of stress that drives you forward, but again. that certain amount of stress is the subjective feeling of it, it is not the objective, it is happening well, but what kind am I talking about, it is what happens when you are stressed and when I say stress I mean you feel stressed like Cortisol is increasing and you know people tend to focus on negative information, so if we give it to people, this is something interesting.

I ask you what the probability is that you will sell your company and you give me a number. um and I give you a number and I tell you that you know, actually, based on all my data, you're more likely to sell the company, you'll listen to me, you'll change your belief, but when I tell you, actually, based on my number, my, my data, you are less likely to sell your company, you think you won't change it, you listen, you will learn a little, but you will learn more when I give you the good news, so we talked a little about that.

A little before good news is more effective than bad news, without stress, so if you are stressed for any reason, it doesn't have to be more than a business reason, you could be stressed because of the conversation you had with your partner which then affects how you take the information that I give you, now you're going to focus more on the negative information, the surprisingly negative information that I give you than you would otherwise be interested in, um and if you look, you know if you look at the events in the world, if it is after a terrorist attack or a pandemic or a natural disaster, people receive a lot of this type of information even if it is not happening here there is a terrorist attack on the other side of the world we receive all the information in the media that we are stressed by the stress caused by focusing more on negative information, which there is a lot of at the moment and it can actually make people too pessimistic, so many times we are too optimistic, but in reality, when things happen really stressful, we can be too pessimistic and You can see that in the financial market, when the market starts to go down, even a little, it causes stress and then people become too pessimistic, they start to panic and sell their stocks well. , they really should hold on.

We get overly pessimistic reactions under stress because people start focusing on the negative, so they don't see the evidence in the positive information, they focus on the negative information. It's funny because the example you gave in the context of selling a company. In a business, I have a very close friend who before the pandemic established a valuation for his company. I'm going to say 100 million and he was determined to do it. You know, he wouldn't take a penny less. -pandemic and in the wake of an economic context similar to the one we are facing now, recession, he is desperate to sell it for 20 minutes the exact same company, it is strange how much his perspective has changed from being this person who is not at all willing to give in. the company is not changing the companyas good as before, but just with the pessimistic outlook, he's suddenly trying to get rid of the company for a fraction of the price and suddenly he seems incredibly desperate to do it and I guess that reinforces his point even more. we are much more suggestible and pessimistic in times of threat and stress because now there is not likely to be a buyer out there and it is interesting to have observed that in him so quickly, so quickly, it seems like it was not even printed after the pandemic. because in the pandemic the markets were great, it was about a year ago, there's about 12 months apart, you're willing to write down the value of your company by about 80 even though it's doing very, very well, and then in the only thing I think about.

Much in construction companies and construction company cultures is the role that stress plays, such as innovation and risk taking. It's interesting because most of the teams I lead go back up the social chain and even this team and other teams that I am. They are actually high pressure equipment as we are generally at the front of our market. In general, we press very hard, the growth is usually very, very intense, but that causes like imagine stress, but at the same time. We are there and we need to stay there taking on a high degree of risk.

So how do I balance that environment that can be stressful and at the same time need people to continue to take risks and innovate and feel safe doing so? What advice would you give? Give me that because we said stress is really stress is your own reaction within yourself um and that reaction can be different to the same outside environment, so what you really want is to reduce people's stress and not necessarily not put pressure on them.right, I mean it's the best, right, 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 say, well, in Actually, let's stay with this amount. of work, but can we simply reduce the way they perceive it based on the stress they have?

So I think my answer is going to be extremely simple because research shows that simple things like and this is so simple that I'm actually exercising. It is excellent for reducing stress. I don't do things like meditation and stuff, but there are studies that show that that also reduces stress, so I think going for walks in nature, the right social interaction, so there's all of these are really important. things that can reduce stress and I really think that just having these types of sounds sounds like it's really good, but just exercising for like an hour in the morning or something like that is going to change enormously, it reduces stress, it makes you more focused , so If you want to do something more psychological, you can highlight how you can overcome it well, so okay, this is the whole workload and these are all the problems that there may be, there are obstacles, these are the problems or the obstacles, but Okay, let's think carefully. like not just saying things have progressed, if you really can, if there's a way to really look at it, if there's a real way to put it on a dashboard or something, because again, just improving people's performance.

Confidence and optimism will also reduce stress. These are two fantastic books. I mean, they're in my way. People will know from listening to this podcast that this whole topic about the influence of the brain, psychology, optimism, pessimism, all of these. The topics are things that I absolutely love, so anyone who loves this podcast should immediately go and check out these books because they are kind of the foundational books on this topic, but what are you thinking about next? You could write about anything. I think because of your enormous, broad knowledge of human beings, there are so many things that you could write a book about sales, whatever it is, what are you thinking about next?

So the book that I'm working on right now is probably going to come out in about a year in 2024. It's about how it is that, in fact, we're not noticing a lot of the things around us, a lot of the good things around us. In fact, the reason is a basic physiological reason for how our mind works, every neuron in our brain actually and what it is that when something is constant it doesn't change in front of us, we stop noticing it, we stop feeling it. you stop responding to that, so something simple like jumping into a pool is really cold after a few seconds it doesn't feel that cold or um there's like the noise of the refrigerator, it really bothers you because you just walked into the room, but then about a few minutes or maybe half an hour maybe 10 minutes you stop noticing and you go uh, I don't know if people still remember going to a bar and it was smoky before smoking with bands, you would walk in and say Oh, and then you don't notice it anymore, the reason is that this is how our neurons work, this is how the brain worked, the neurons will respond to new things that have just happened and after a while they adapt and stop responding physically, they just stop. respond very well, it's fine when it comes to sound or smoke etc., but it happens to everything, it also has what we call emotional adaptation, so you meet your partner and it's very exciting and you're very grateful and you're really like you feel the love and that diminishes over time if they are constant if they are with you you just don't realize how wonderful um you know what is around you you have a new job that you always dreamed of and you are very happy, but very soon you think, oh, You know, what's next?

That's not a bad thing, the reason we do it is because we want to progress better, but it also makes us a little less grateful. and happy and the other side is the one that people haven't noticed as much, which I think is the biggest part of our book, which is about the fact that we stop noticing the bad things around us, things like, for example, if you go while we were talking. a little bit before we started, you get on Twitter when you just start on Twitter, you know, 2010 or whatever, you'd still be on it and you'd be like, oh, this is terrible, people are insulting other people, there's all this. online harassment and you notice it and then you get used to it, you don't notice it anymore, so if it's misinformation that's around us, if it's dishonesty, um, even things like The reason we don't really notice climate change around us it's because it's happening very slowly and our brain doesn't respond to things that are constant or very, very slow, so, or risk, we actually have a whole chapter on risk. risk adaptation, so how you get used to taking risks and you no longer notice the risks, you underestimate them because you get used to that.

One of the things I was thinking about earlier when you talked about how when you were doing presentations about starting the stage in a way that feels novel is a way to bypass the mind filter, that's helpful, you're used to people coming up. to the stage and say hello. I'm Tom from I don't know, novativesales.com and I'm going to tell you and then your brain works fine. We know what to do with this filter and, in general, also in marketing. We have this term that we use a lot on our team, where we will say the word wallpaper.

You don't notice wallpapers. there, every time a message plays wallpaper, we know it becomes ineffective, so when people make podcasts like this, they say things like well, I can subscribe now, you've heard it 10,000 times, so it doesn't work with nobody. like and subscribe but you've heard the phrase but if I say it another way if I say my mom has a message for you and then my mom comes on it with her big wonderful African voice and says this is the My son's YouTube. Canal please do you know that instantly bypasses the wallpaper filter and you say what but that and then the second thing I was thinking about when you talked about that is how we become like we lose gratitude for the things in Ours lives very fast because we were becoming a little desensitized and used the example of our relationships, so how can one avoid getting bored with their partner?

Yes, I actually have answers, but I love your examples. I could use some of them and I think I believe what you're saying and I'll talk about the relationship in a minute, but yeah, exactly what you want to do is surprise people. Exactly what you are saying, you need the brain to surprise me. I did not do it. I hope that because what the brain is trying to do at all times is actually try not to be surprised, the brain is trying to model the world to have an internal model of what is outside so it can anticipate what is happening and then be able to react in time.

I want to know if it's going to rain. I don't want to be surprised by the rain because I want to bring the umbrella in advance, so it's about having the best model in the world in my mind to be able to predict. what happened to be able to react in time in advance, that's why we don't respond to unexpected things because the model in the brain already told us what is about to happen and when you surprise people that's when the neurons go and then it's attention, so we actually talked about relationships and it seems like when you ask people and this is from um I'm going to mispronounce her name but uh a well-known relationship expert and she says it's over. studies and when you ask people when you feel most attracted to your partner they tell you one of two things when you see them in an unexpected way something you're not used to maybe they're talking to some strangers maybe they're on stage doing something and the second thing they say is when I'm away and when I come back, I mean, it's really resonating, I mean, I feel a lot like when I'm, you know, I've been away for a while and I'm on the plane ready, you know. , on the way home and I say, oh, I can't wait to see you all again and you know, so what that tells us is that we need some. a little bit away, I think that's what it says, right, that in fact, you might want to be away for a weekend for a day or so, and that causes what we call is a little tacky, but We call it brilliant.

We're brilliant, it's like we actually got the term from Julia Roberts. My co-author read an interview with Julia Roberts and she was saying how her life, I mean, it's Julia Roberts, of course, rich and privileged and everything. that, but she was talking about her normal 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 takes him to school and then you know they're going for a bike ride and lunch and then she picks up the kids and she says, well, if she did that every day for years and years and years I'd probably think it was pretty boring, you know, and not that cool, but once every month she goes off and does it. filming or whatever and you come back and everything seems to shine again because it feels new again, so you want to make things feel like they're new and one way to do that is to just take yourself somewhere else now.

I could say well maybe I don't have money to go away for the weekend, well there are some solutions for that so this was interesting because doing covid I covered up and I had to go down to the basement and I had to spend, you know, five days or a week in the basement. Firstly, it wasn't that bad, it was like a little camping experience and secondly, as the few days passed, I felt like my home life was amazing. you know, I came out of the basement, um, but it turns out there's a little exercise that Laurie Santos recommends, who's a professor at Yale, and she says if you imagine for a minute, you close your eyes and imagine your life without your partner, without anything. the great house that you have without the great job that you have, if you really imagine it and think about it like that, then you know that fear comes in and then when you come out of it, you say, oh I appreciate it, and I know that you probably have to do it more than two minutes a year, but I feel like that's very true, when you know you have a dream, you wake up from this really terrible dream where you lost your partner or something and you and you're very grateful and yeah, yeah, I have to Jim recurrent of being falsely imprisoned and I wake up, oh my God, my freedom, no, but you, what you've described there is um.

My friends and I have been talking about what we call Desire Management in our relationships, which is like actively managing desire because we have a very good example in our friendship circle of a friend who moved in with his partner on the second day and No. They just moved in together, they moved into a hotel room on the second day and just this was a coven or whatever it was during the undercover period, but she lived on the other side of the world, so for them to be together, she was going to having to fly out and stay with him and it was basically the second day that you moved into a hotel room together and the desire drops very quickly and you, but there's also this collision of lifestyles, so oh my gosh, you left bathroom. you sit down and wet the bathroom and this kind of smaller things that toohave a big impact on desire, but then they keep you together in a hotel room for three months without knowing that this person's desire in that early phase of the relationship should be you know, it's usually a little exciting and it's funny how that can kill desire so quickly and then move and then another friend of mine immediately moved in with someone and they work together, live on top of each other and I saw the same thing, so my friends and I came up with this term called desire management , where it's actually our job to actively manage desire and this means that obviously some people date and try to keep things going. new and fresh, but one of the best ways I do it, my relationship is that my partner is gone all the time and so am I, and like she's been in India for the last four weeks, she came back yesterday or the day before yesterday, It's like it feels. she new again and she does it all the time she's always flying somewhere.

I'm going to go do this training course in the summer. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is amazing because then I don't really do it, but it's also funny, you said. that's because last night we were at our Christmas party that's why everyone here is a little angry still a little slow and some of them are missing and my girlfriend was really pushing me to go up to DJ. I've never really been a DJ. before, but I've been learning for nine months and she was like pushing, she said, 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 there and you up on DJ and I realized that when I went, I went home, put on some music, came back to the party and DJed.

I could see because he was seeing me in a new context, yeah, right, and it's a really high status, probably a pretty attractive context, um and on the contrary, when he did his breath work sessions in London and he had this room full of 25 people and she basically had them hypnotized like they were crying and screaming and she was doing this, it was very attractive to me to see her in this. new club is almost like discovering a new person because you also see that person from The Eyes Of The Strangers to see them well, so that they see them as someone that they do not know, with whom they are not intimate and maybe you will see it. that you understand that point of view um well, I can't wait to read that book too.

We have a closing tradition on the podcast where the last guest asks a question for the next guest without knowing who will leave. Well let me see, people don't believe me when I say this, but I can't really see the question beforehand, um, okay, the question you're left with is: can you describe what winning means to you? So it's a problem because I think what winning means to me is getting 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 make this conversation. one of my favorites because you have a truly remarkable ability to provide very important information that is very current in people's lives.

Tie it into the story so it feels like it's connecting on an emotional level, but also back it up with science and psychology, so thank you. Honestly, it's huge and I don't think it was super fun, I really mean it, fantastic conversation and I already know how much my audience is going to appreciate it because I can predict it because we're kind of the same people, me and the audience, so Thank you very much for your time. Say it means a lot, thank you for inviting me. A quick one from our oldest sponsor hero. I can't tell you the last thing.

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