Home 🏠 🔎 Search


Bad Transcripts
for the
Beat Your Genes Podcast & More

Episode 162: Explaining the Ego Trap 2 of 2
an auto-generated transcript


To get a shareable link to a certain place in the audio,
hover your mouse over the relevent text,
right click, and "copy link address"
(mobile: long press & copy link address)
 


dr. Lisle here we go all right you ready mm-hmm yep sure as you're born dear dr. Lila I've been struggling at university for years I just can't get myself to study I fall asleep at lectures immediately and then I get the urge to jump up when I sit down to read and literally every few seconds while studying my brain will throw up suggestions of what else I could be doing I feel a lot of anxiety when confronting this issue I've tried to explain to my parents what the ego trap is and I've even gone so far as suggesting that they should stop paying for my stuff and ask for rent or throw me out as you've suggested but they wanted to hear none of that could you suggest any solutions right what well like that of a young person is this is hilarious let's see now first of all I think they're Canadian or European because we don't say University here of the US we say vet University where we say what University is so we can we immediately suspect that they're from from a foreign land the now the following a sneak in lectures remember you can't make a human being fall asleep unless it's sleep deprived so so therefore it's possible that this person might be as staying up a little too late playing video and fetch arm room so that that could be an issue now obviously I don't I don't know that the exact nature of this person situation how poorly they're doing how long they've been in at school and how ludicrous this whole University investment is at this point and what they're studying however it's a general rule I would I would do exactly as this young person suggests I would tell the parents to give them a knapsack and a $20 bill yeah so that they officially they should quit school and get a job and start supporting themselves just like a normal animal anywhere in nature does the same thing if you're a baboon your mom gives you you know twenty dollars in a suitcase and says yeah I'm not supporting you anymore perfectly okay so this is uh remember that the meditation is simply a derivative of a computation of cost-benefit analysis across all of your opportunity costs you know relationships between you and the environment as best you understand them so if it turns out that if you're your your best CB is to sit around and do nothing and you know sort of go through the go through university six units a year like a caterpillar while you live and let live in mom and dad's beautiful twenty eight hundred square foot house and you've got to hold downstairs now your sister is gone and you know she has job and married so you're you're the you're the last one there you're you're there you're the apple of your mother's eye and so they're just keep hoping it's something going to happen obviously you would be better off almost under any other circumstances so this is what I call the animal in the zoo problem that animal is going to do sit around and don't do anything and they're not very happy and so if you if you let them out of the zoo it's scary of course and a lot of them could not make it in the wild so we wouldn't do that to them but it would be much better if we put them in a situation where they had a little bit of challenge and they had to do something so when they hide the Bears food the Bears are happier in zoos they don't do much of that because the Bears figure it out pretty quickly the now so this this isn't just with this young person situation it's many people's situations this is the problem of an heiress that that doesn't have to do anything and so now she sort of gets into nothing but trouble and a bunch of wastrel level activity this is husbands and wives and mediocre relationships but they're in cushy financial limited circumstances so it's pretty easy where they are but it would be difficult if they actually struck out independently and had to support themselves or enhance their their lifestyle it you know there were two it's a little too tough on their own so they just soon stay together and and not be very happy that's another animal in the zoo situation quite frankly this young person would be doing up it's a young man or a young woman hmm I'm assuming it's a young man but that that is just based on my own biases but let's suppose it is in that case he's better off being lost on a desert island and if it turns out if ginger Mary Ann is there with him he'll figure out what to do you'll be doing heroic things in no time and quite financial desert island will cause the same thing so suddenly an individual has to hustle they'll immediately be making more of their potential and there will be an edge to life that isn't there when you're in a zoo and once you do that for a while and find out how difficult it is to actually dig an honest dollar out of the world which is surprisingly difficult to do that then you little light goes on in your head as you start figuring out what if you were gifted an above-average mind you started figuring out that maybe it's a good idea to figure out how other people have used their above-average minds in order to make more of those dollars and so then suddenly we're back at university with some motivation to study so yeah what we've got is the animal in a zoo problem and the young man's or woman's answer the problem is accurate the parents should show them the door kindly and pleasantly and if they won't show you the door you can do it for yourself now there's nothing to stop you from taking a deep breath you know dropping out of school at the end of this semester reporter or whatever it is and getting yourself a job at Starbucks and seeing just what it takes to make $12 an hour all right fantastic so this actually isn't an ego trap question my mistake but it's reasonable to know and useful to know as I was reading a study that pub was published in November of last year in a journal called the frontiers in psychology it's a personality and social psychology journal and this was a study where they took a daily diary of several several dozen employees and what they determined first was whether or not people had high natural self-control or low natural self-control it turns out that when these people reported that they had low sleep quality the people with high self-control it's a genetic higher self-control it really didn't matter there about their performance but the people who have low self-control when they had low sleep quality it affected a performance significantly so it is useful to know for people that if you happen to have lower than average self-control or at least lower self-control then you got to get some good sleep ideally we'd want good sleep for everybody but in these touchup morson right and Nathan just to translate what self-control means just substitute the word conscientiousness hmm yeah that that'll that'll help clear up what that means so the authors didn't quite do their homework that's that that's what they were studying they were studying conscientiousness and and they found an interesting little effect there that if you're already a flake and then you're sure to sleep then you're completely worthless which course makes a lot of sense all right all right fantastic well let's take our collar D'Angela from Virginia Nicola welcome to the show thanks for calling hi um hi dr. Lyle I'm neither when you email about five seven and about 155 pounds and I believe that I'm holding on to my extra weight due to a highly conditioned cram circuit but I also think that I'm an ego trap with regards to date loss so my question is how does one entrap themselves and is it possible for the person in forcing that you go trap to be able to help support you and feel useful hmm I'm not sure you just lost me a little bit on the last part but let's uh let's just sort of walk through the problems that you're facing and for a few minutes and let's see if we can we can give you some help okay so it would look to me like at five seven one fifty-five that may be do you know enough about your history to know where where you would be really comfortable and happy with yourself weight wise three years ago I was dancing a lot and so I was like 120 pounds and then I kind of struggled with emotional eating and led to college which made losing a bunch of weight and I've already lost 15 pounds but I'm still you know waves away from where I wasn't I'm dancing and I'm not necessarily hoping to get all the way back down there but maybe in like the mid 120 okay now and now I sort of understand what your what you're thinking and what so when you were 18 so at 5 7 1 20 what were what were things like say when you were 13 14 15 16 17 is this all pretty consistent in other words you were slender and kind of tall and slender yeah it's like when I was 13 I was probably like 110 and then as I got older got it okay so what we're seeing here is that so it between in about three years between about 18 and 21 or so you gained 50 pounds is what happened yes yeah yeah that's that's that that is a gigantic amount of weight gain in a very small time period so just to kind of clear things up there's no emotional issue that's going to do that this is a you you underwent a radical dietary change here so the um so this did this pretty well coincide with you leaving home and going to college and eating from a different table um pretty well yes yeah at home I eat a very healthy whole food plant-based SOS all that stuff but in college it's very different got it okay so you go to college and now you're eating off the college smorgasbord and we wind up with really spectacular weight gain the and what we're seeing also is the genetics like in any medications or anything else that you were taking at the time anybody put you on antidepressants or anything like that no but I was finishing a lot yeah okay so so what we what we have here is I'll what we discovered with you Nicola as we discovered that you've got the genes to be significantly overweight okay so we didn't know that when you were 13 or 14 15 16 and 17 we didn't know it and so you were eating a very healthy diet at home that was you know had a lot of natural food in it so the overall calorie density of the diet was you know within target range for our species and so when you went away to school you went above that target range for the species and as a result we discovered that you're what's what we're going to call an easy keeper that's a name they have for horses that when you start feeding them rich or food they start to put on weight okay so a lot of raised horses they have to regulate their intake very carefully because if they don't they'll put on weight and now they're not as fast and so the so for yourself what the really the real fundamental issue here is the fundamental issue here is you know there can be there can be some complicated other things so we could throw in the notion of a conditioned cram and you go trap we could we could talk in those kind of details but the most fundamental issue here that we see is the pleasure trap so what's actually happening here is yeah that's really the fundamental research so now I'm actually back at home so I am back on that whole food plant-based um and yeah that's how I was able to lose 15 pounds but the reason that I'm taking time off is because last year my mom was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreas cancer so I'm going to take care of her and so she's the one who's also like pressuring me to wait which is why I believe on an ego trap because now it's a sense of urgency for that I should be as healthy as I can be because I do like cancer its genetic in our family like many people have cancer in my family so I that's why I think it's a cramtucket where I even help this is but that it could eat your bread and peanut butter that you talk about so and I most I'm also hoping to find a way to help her feel useful and helping me because I didn't she doesn't feel very useful right right yeah so you've got you got a lot going on here and so I would I would say that then obviously you're your mom's situation and her her emotional state and the state of her life that's that's got to be I assume that's very much primary for you as you sort of over everything so are you Lee are you the only kid to Tom or their other kids or what's happening I'm any child yeah you're an only child okay and is your dad around and my stepdad is yes stepdad okay so you've got a stepdad and then your your mother is so your mother's in and obviously a very scary health situation and so is she feeling so she's sort of feeling a sense of urgency to try to guide you in a way that will lower your risk of going down the same road is that part of what's happening yes okay all right so one thing that we have is we have we actually have a problem that your mom has a misunderstanding of reality so you eating peanut butter on Ezekiel bread is not increasing your likelihood of getting cancer and you being 40 or 50 pounds overweight which you're no longer but you were maybe you might you might naturally be 130 pounds at this point in other words you're you're not as young as you were at 18 and so it's very possible your natural genetics would lead you a little higher than 120 that's pretty thin for 5-7 oh maybe now that maybe you're 25 pounds overweight and so maybe you're you know 15% overweight or something the but your mother obviously did your mother introduced you to sort of the Whole Foods plant-based arena I actually introduced her but she got really into it so yes yeah educate card hmm right how long has she been into it um probably three or four years okay so it was this was this previous prior to her diagnosis yes she's diagnosed just this last year my goodness okay so this is uh obviously a tremendous shock and disappointment and a real you know a tremendous problem to be grappling with and no your your mom is she doing a good job on her own diet yes I did all of the food and she's very healthy fantastic okay so she's giving herself every chance to try to beat this thing into a stalemate which is I'm sure possible and so we hope for the best and and give her all the best wishes we can but one of the things that we want to do is sort of to reduce her worry and one of the things that it would might be useful for her to know is to know that that you know if a person is overweight that's not a substantial influence on their cancer risk at all so the your so your mom is it might be useful for her to know that that's a misconception and so on how to tell her this or how you might want to tell her this you you could say that you talked to me does she know who I am I tell her about your podcast all the cottony that the a dish he does she know sort of the Four Horsemen Campbell MacDougall Hornish Esselstyn does she does she know they're people okay no yeah yeah the what what has been discovered is that that there's a going to be a relationship between the animal food and somebody's diet and cancer that relationship is is modest but it's there but there but there's no relationship independent of that showing that excess weight on anybody's body is going to influence their likelihood of getting cancer okay so you can you can let her know that you spoke with me and that that so we'll we can you can to tell her that I'm actually quite tight with Colin Campbell and I've co-authored science with him and I'm well aware of his research and that there's no concern at all over the fact that your weight is higher than you would like it to be but that's not an influence on cancer okay so really what it is is that so really she can take that off of her plate so to speak and so the real issue is just you trying to battle a pleasure trap right and we we've now discovered that the pleasure trap for you is it like for everyone that's a very difficult problem to manage but but secondarily we found out that your genes are such that you're an easy keeper so if you don't do a good job then we're going to wind up paying the price in terms of excess weight okay so out of how long have you been back home now I've been home last summer last summer so since last summer you spend in last eight months or so eight or nine months that you lost this 15 pounds well by October I had lost um 30 pounds but then my mom was diagnosed and my eating habits went right out the window so Wow so well yes and then I started to do more like I I wasn't really struggling with the cram circuit at that point I was like be really well but then Jesus came I started really cramming okay so you you had gone very quickly from 170 down to about 140 yes wow you've got a very dynamic system so all we needed to do yeah all we needed to do is actually get get your diet down in normal ranges for calorie density and you are very very quickly restoring order so that's fabulous the so yeah I think right now then that as I was just describing it for in the previous issues previous issues we're talking when we were talking about the ego trap all that motivation is is it's a set of relationships about cost-benefit and so for yourself you know you're sort of looking at your life and it's context and your mom and it's pretty hard to get too motivated to worry about your own body and your own health habits when your mom is in this enormous fight ok so I don't really consider this to be a particularly high priority problem and I don't think your mind is considering at a very high priority problem so II to fight against the pleasure trap requires kind of a workspace in your mind that you've only got as as dr. Elson says you've only got so many units of potential units of effort for change and that's true and so if you're if we're spending a lot of your psychological units on other things worrying about someone else you've got less scheme battle something as aggressive as the pleasure trap so I'm not the slightest bit worried about you in terms of this long term and I would just tell you you know just just go go a decent direction do a decent job on your reading and this will sort itself out okay okay go ahead yeah did you have a question that I guess I know that is anything yeah yeah you just that this is not a problem that we need to worry about right now you're someone that when it when it is more important for you I believe that you'll handle it very well that the one thing that we can do for your mom is to let her know that you're actually safe and that in the long term you're going to be on a really great course my pleasure Nikola all right Nikola thank you so much for the call we really really appreciate it and for the wonderful question all right dr. Lyle we're going to go to another question from our listeners dr. Lyle jor some people like athletes students experience performance anxiety that affects their performance in the area of their endeavor seems that under practice conditions low pressure environment they perform without any problems but when under the gun they start showing a lower performance result is there a reason for this type of anxiety from the perspective of evolutionary psychology um that's a good question I've thought through this thing at one point and I actually read in a in a in a Malcom Gladwell book he goes through a he goes through an explanation some people analyzed this whole phenomenon of choking and unfortunately I can't remember the logic but it was quite interesting and it certainly had to do with it had to do with the process of shifting shifting a process from unconscious to conscious and the so this is this is kind of how I would see the concept of choking and that the to move from an unconscious to a conscious process would involve the the worrying about what other people are thinking because I'm being watched or somehow recorded so this is sort of the the activation of self presentational concerns so I see this as a bizarre manifestation of the ego trap so you can imagine someone who is expected to make a free throw in a big game and they are they are now thinking about that other people are expecting them to make this and they're not sure that they can make it and so as a result the the ego trap is activated and now they're actually procrastinating and fiddling and now what they do is they try to sort of consciously direct the process because they have to do it instead of allowing a unconscious process to just unfold the way they would if they were in practice and not considering being watched so you can you can activate the same process in practice if the coach is watching you it says okay I'm really going to need to look at your shot now what's the next five times down the floor let's have Jones shoot it and I really want to look at your form in your footwork okay now what do we do we can activate the same process so it doesn't have to be in the big game in front of the big crowd it could be under any sort of scrutiny from an outside party the so I think that this is a sort of a novel problem that is not one consistent or natural history and it's particularly I think particularly it's sort of a novel manifestation of you go trap and I think it's particularly obviously evident in motor skills so it's not going to happen typically with you know on a big test you know you've got a big math test in calculus and everybody you know expects you to do really well and you get in there and you quote choke I don't think so I don't think you choke good you you you might be nervous and a little hard to settle down per second but you look at the first problem and you start logically breaking it down etc this has to do with motor skills where motor skills are sort of wrapped little circuits you know inside of a well well honed myelinated you know circuits in in the motor area and as a result if we stop the action make the person be thinking about what it is that other people are thinking of them then they start to try to guide the process consciously and I believe what they do is if they start thinking through the fundamentals they start consciously directing the action and rather than essentially just letting a circuit fire in a coordinated fashion so they actually we're grasping their abilities back to the way that they learned it as opposed to just allowing allowing a smooth process to fire great skills have to do with with the coordination of a whole bunch of muscles and the timing pattern of the the firing and relaxation of a whole set of muscles throughout the body so when a basketball player shoots a basketball there's all kinds of things happening in muscles everywhere so remember is the feet are pushing against the ground in a certain way and that that energy is being transferred through the legs the hips etc the the the coordination of the upper body and then of course the hands and then the entire major motor movement this is super complicated and so if you and in order to do it well it's something that took years to wrap myelin sheath to get it to go if you break that thing down and miss coordinated all hell's going to break loose and that's what choking is and I don't think choking in that way would have been something that would have happened in human natural history I think this is a a I think from from just the it's a great question but as I'm thinking about this I believe this is a is a bizarre modern manifestation of this potentiality of human of human behavior and you're not going to choke if you're in on the African savanna and you've got a spear in your hand and there's a lion coming towards you okay you're you won't you you're you're going to be on autopilot and you're going to activate that myelin sheath however if there's a if there's a game and there's a bunch of pretty girls around and you're the guy that's trying to throw this thing through a throughout you know some kind of a hoop you may very well if they expect you to do really well because you've got this big rep you may very well choke so it's a little bit different issue as a result of of a novel type of situation so survival is more important than reproduction at the penita you yeah that's uh that's largely going to be the case that's why when the chips are down I handed to survive but I haven't managed to reproduce so that's how that works [Laughter] actually yeah you're reminding me about this this uh this myelin sheath is when I was when I was younger my parents put me through mmm through violin playing violin and so the teacher ha my very first teacher was really creative with how she would prepare her students before the the concert and so she once you learn the song then she would have a lesson where you play the song and then she like makes a whole bunch of noise taps on her stamp the music stand has some bells and whistles and clicking and dances around claps all over you so that you can prepare for a concert so it's interesting that we see that in play um right right yeah sort of a stress inoculation - good good a good strategy and they're doing that on professional athletics now they're they're finding ways to do exactly that mm-hmm all right our next question dr. Lyle had been listening to your podcasts and I'm wondering if the ego trap can still come into play when there are no longer societal expectations for example I've been retired for seven years the tight retirement was sudden my organization merged my job was eliminated and what I thought would be an opportunity with the new organization turned out to be far less attractive than it originally seemed to be so in the space of two weeks I decided to retire my husband was very supportive he agreed to subsidize some of my lost income so we can maintain our houses and pretty much have no change in lifestyle seems like the perfect solution except that it's not I'm bored frustrated and feel like my only purpose in life is to keep the house which admittedly I don't do very well because I hate housework and I procrastinate fine you might say then why don't I go out and do something get another job volunteer but I don't want to do that either I have no interest doing it my husband doesn't really want me to do it and nothing appeals to me enough to break the inertia my health is somewhat of an issue now my stamina is not what it once was that's not really what's holding me back I'm not sure what is holding back what say you move to Somalia refer to the first question we had the anthology that's what it is so yeah I kind of don't feel like working you know the new company came in job wasn't that attractive so just kind of decided to retire I mean it's beautiful and I'm glad I'm glad that this lady's circumstances were that good it's true good good glad cuz no you don't want to work on a job you don't want to do however we this is the animal in the zoo problem and the solution is to run an experiment with partly some kind of part-time job volunteer work or learn to crochet we're learning to do bonsai plants okay something the notion here what we clearly have is a productive activity deficiency and we're getting the malaise it's associated with the productive activity deficiency so just because you don't have to work doesn't mean you shouldn't yeah you're you're an animal and it's an animal which you have is you've got a mechanism for determining whether or not you're competent to survive and you don't what you want to do is you want to actually test that competence on a routine basis so that you can update your memory systems and your memory systems can basically say yes we can remember very recently you demonstrated your competence therefore you don't have to have any anxiety about the fact that you're not competent okay Theon and so if you if you have not traded in the environment you haven't actually you know carved some soap into an elephant and somebody bought it from me for five bucks if you haven't actually poured somebody a cup of coffee and got a tip for it if you actually haven't done any productive activity for which some non related non nepotistic situation would result in you gaining some goods from the world then we can expect that your self-efficacy with respect to your ability to survive has actually declined so as a result I would expect that there's a vague sense of not so sure I'm competent not so sure that I could survive without my husband and my pension and not so sure that everything is capiche between me and the world and so this person and there's a little haunting in the system saying could you really make it could you really make it out there in the world could you really survive you really you know have the chops and if you can't if you're if you're you can't answer that question the affirmative well of course it's a it's a probabilistic assessment that you make so I'm sure that the person believes that they could but they're not they don't have the certainty that they would have had they just earned a dollar today so it could be that you've got enough dollars in the bank and you've got enough support and you you actually feel very secure in that regard but I would still argue that the the overall process still results in a sense of productive activity and there without that without productive activity that that essentially you feel a malaise that that the person is experiencing so whatever it is that you do it you know whatever it is that it might be it should be something that that to you feels productive and if you look at the world and say gee there's just nothing that I can see in the world it would feel productive then then you're you're a person that needs to be threatened okay so you need to find out whether or not you would be accepted into a coalition for your ability to produce and see whether or not you could do it and if I'm going to assume that if this person does something that's productive and some other human being says hey that looks good so you go out in your yard and put plant a row of roses and somebody looks at it and says hey that looks nice your stone-age brain will say you know what that means is if I were to do that in somebody else's garden somebody might pay me 20 dollars to do it so you have effectively increased your own assessment of your ability to survive just by making your own garden more beautiful so there's there's an infinite amount of things to do in the world some of those things have to do with soaking in the natural beauty of the planet some of them have to do with looking at other people's achievements and enjoying those but another thing has to do with us producing achievements that other people find useful or attractive in some way we're both producers and then we are consumers and this person sounds like they are definitely young enough that they could still be a producer and therefore they should be one of the sadder things that you will see is in older people like my mother is now 86 and has significant help on Alzheimer's she's still with us enough that her personality still there and she can still think and contribute to a conversation but there is very significant memory deficits so I have to take care of all kinds of things that my mother 10 years ago was fully capable of doing and she feels it she feels the lack of ability to contribute and it's a significant source of depression and anxiety in her existence and so she wishes I would say at least a hundred times in the last three years I have heard her say what I need to do is to get a job and the very sad reality is she cannot get a job because nobody would hire her because there's nothing that she can do that she's confident to trade for okay so this little this little creature now is in fact dependent and she feels the lack of productive activity she'll get up and clean and clean her kitchen floor and do some things in your laundry and when she does that that activates that feeling of productive activity and she feels better okay but she would like very much to do something that another individual would say hey that's valuable that looks really good and so to to yield the floor to that experience behind the animal in the zoo trap I would say that that's a dangerous waste of life and that what this person needs to do is to look themselves in the mirror and realize hey you know there's exactly one person that's stopping you from engaging in productive activity and that's you your job is to go out and to figure out how to do something try it as if it's no fun and you don't get any kick out of it try something else and keep doing it until you trip upon some problem or some group of people that give you a response to your efforts that makes it worthwhile fascinating all right dr. Lila we got time for one more question or you want to do two more one more one more okay we're going to scroll scroll down all the way to the very last question mm-hmm it's about your bet that your method of getting someone out of a Neko trap okay dr. Lyle your method of getting someone out of an ego trap is incredibly effective as a previous caller on the show mentioned about his son now doing better in school now that his father lowers AI lowers his expectations however as I've seen it requires some tact not to damage the relationship for example I got my girlfriend now my ex-girlfriend out of a deep excuse me out of a deep ego trap but I damaged our relationship in the process partially responsible for getting her into the deep ego trap because I kept telling her that she could complete this extremely difficult project and that she was very capable of and to undo this ego trap I said I don't think this kind of thing is cut out for you and if I had to bet for or against you to complete the project I'd bet against you so she got out of it very quickly but she was bitter towards me afterwards she brought up what I had said during one of our arguments I know that our relationship now is unsalvageable but I don't want to make the same mistake with the new relationship can you go into detail about this method and how to avoid damaging the relationship Wow Nate did you write this ha ha no but I have had a similar similar situation where I was trying to trying to get a friend out of the ego trap and ended up insulting them so this question was very dear to me ah let me think about this yeah um yes sometimes when I present this I I don't I sometimes I'm a little bit in a hurry and I I don't I don't maybe go over these these issues in detail and I kind of expect people to have a possible social sensitivity and pack that they may not possess or that they made they made you know put on hold while they execute my sort of entertaining sounding program so let me so let me clarify this at least for our little corner of the world and that is yes it does require tact and that's why it's better off gun you know in a face-to-face way where you can watch the impact of your lowering expectations on the individual so it's possible that when you when you lower the expectations and then I'm not so sure that maybe you can maybe you can uh maybe you can't do it if you've watched them and they feel crestfallen if it actually takes the wind out of their sails then you realize who they were looking to me to estimate their statistical likelihood of success and now I've actually lowered their self-efficacy that is possible okay that's what everybody thinks is going to happen it almost never does but it might and so I'm looking for that okay what I'm looking for when I lower the expectations is the anger and the irritation which is what this guy found so he he lowered the expectations and it worked so the anger and the irritation I the person basically felt like hey you're under estimating me I'll show you which is the classic ego trap response now the truth is we can usually get uh the the anti you go trap response we can we can get a person out of the ego trap by just being playful with how it is that we do it so we can have a twinkle in our eye and kind of a smile yeah I'm not so sure you can do this okay and if you can maybe can okay if we do that it's irritating but it's not the same thing as the hard sell and the person the person is getting a message and the message is that that they that we don't in any way think less of them because we're not sure that they can do it and that we actually think that they might be able to do it but they might not not do it and we would consider it a little bit humorous if they couldn't do it okay and no status lost to them at all if they can't so this is a to this this is what I will do with my with my clients with Bill clients and with I I don't see kids anymore other kids I could do it that way too so you could tell a kid I don't think you could go out that diving board dance you hide for you I'm pretty sure you can yeah maybe maybe okay and you can be playful with them and they can watch your face and they can see they can be a little confused and but they can feel the irritation of all show you they can sniff that if they do it they're going to get to gloat and they can also sniff that you think that they might be able to do it so that they can infer that this is probably within their abilities and all they have to do is do it so that's that's the more sophisticated version now would there be a time in a place to actually to give the hard sell like like this guy did yeah there might be and where you just say huh I don't think so yeah that but mostly there's an important caveat whenever I fell hard on on the downside and that my attitude is hey but you know maybe you can maybe you can't I think there's a good chance that you can but that's fine we'll find out you know we'll learn by making an effort what do we have to lose and so the the additional part of the sales job is I'm still with you alway no I don't think any less of you if you make the effort and you fail and so you know might as well make the effort maybe we should maybe we shouldn't you'll have to decide for yourself but I don't see any reason not to give it a shot and see what happens and but I think there's a good chance it won't work but hey might so it's really what we're doing is we're speaking right to the source code because this is exactly what they're thinking if they really didn't think that they had a chance to succeed they would have no motivation to do it the they have some motivation to pursue it but they're tortured by the fact that the expectations are too high that they perceived that the world already gives them credit for having the abilities to accomplish whatever it is and so now they're in the trap as they run the CV there's just not enough upside so the the most elegant place to put the anti ego trap cell is right in the middle maybe you can maybe you can't okay and if you can that'd be great it'd be great outcome but I don't really expect it and so there's I think there's a good chance as you can't there's a lot of factors that are in the way that we're not in control of and it's difficult what it is that you're up to so maybe it doesn't work okay and that's fine no problem but we'll learn something in the effort so that's the that's the way to handle the ego trap in a way that we don't we don't like I said this part of this is my fault so you know I can I can tell this story in a short story where I fell hard on the downside and I fire up a tremendous motivation to prove me wrong and that's a that can be a beautiful thing so in this case obviously you know maybe it's a good thing that she's in X because you obviously the person did something elegant and and very clever and useful and and essentially unleashed a motivation that was very useful for the for the target person and then obviously we're talking it you know talking in the future about why we did what we did and would the person feel manipulated maybe but they would also see that they got tremendous benefit and they learned something super useful about themselves and about people in the process and if they didn't appreciate that and appreciate we were doing it for their own best interest and they're all done out of shape and definitely about it hey no I don't you know maybe it's a good distance X the great you know ego trap trick that is done and has been done in recruiting recording studios for decades is to tell the band that you know just you guys just rip around for a while and we'll roll tape in in a little while and then you roll tape the whole time and so by being out of the ego trap they are playing loose and they're playing they're just they're just doing you know they're just going with the groove and they sometimes manufacture fantastic stuff as a result of that they relax and and then you tell them later hey guess what we roll tape on that how are they upset that we lied to them no they're like thank God that was some of the best stuff we've ever done it's like yeah we got it okay so you know properly done properly delivered properly explained this shouldn't be a problem and I wouldn't worry too much about it fantastic chuckle I'll we'll make sure not to roll any tape when we're talking but Michael all right
Back to the top
🏃     👖




Artist