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Episode 171: Advice for an indecisive man, Advice for a teacher, Delusional friends
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hey Nate and dr. Lyle this I obviously a guy from the sound of my voice and I think that one of my biggest weaknesses is my passiveness and sometimes indecisiveness and I I hate that at times because I'm not able to take charge and I make I can't make confident copping decisions in a group setting and I feel this is an even bigger setback as a guy that it kind of makes me look weak and ineffective sometimes I was wondering if there was any techniques I can use to help offset this weakness especially since I'm sort of in a position where I'm expected to lead and manage and my role at work so I'd love to hear your answer and thanks for taking my call interesting hmm so what this sounds like is it sounds like a highly agreeable personality and so highly agreeable personality in certain circumstances is is good it's going to be an uncomfortable in a leadership position so the I'm trying to think off the top of my head how I've seen this done because I have seen it done I think that usually the best method for somebody like this to to to utilize is to essentially ask be asking a lot of questions of your team what do people and have it be a repetitive process that this is how it is that you go about making decisions in other words so we're going to we're going to go around the room okay what do we think we would structure these questions in a way that would make sense what do we think what are some strengths to this thing what are some weaknesses to it where are vulnerabilities what are people thinking and let's just kind of go around roundtable this thing mark what do you what do you would what's what are some of your thoughts on this and so this is a in essence you're kind of looking at two different leadership styles and a couple of examples of this would be the two different starship Star Trek captains so Captain Kirk was a more traditional alpha where he would he would certainly ask his his staff for information but then he would make decisions and he would be bold and decisive whereas Picard was much more of what I am referring to okay much more agreeable personality certainly not without strength but a very different way of going about doing things where he would be consulting and listening and asking questions and essentially let let that process and in other words if you can't if you don't want to find yourself contradicting your arguing with your subordinates then what you want to do is you want to facilitate a process or a social situation where everybody is safe to be contradicting each other like and that's why we set up this by saying things like what are the pluses of that what it might be some of the minuses and so we we make it so that there's not very much on the line that people aren't taking strong positions and what we're doing is we're essentially triangulating as a group on what we think the best decision is okay that's uh and we can we can leave with hey this is what I think we're going to do and I can you know like I can see that there's different avenues that we can take but I think this is the way this is the direction we're going to go and that way you didn't take a strong position and you didn't have to lead essentially you we've led from the closest thing we could get to to a consensus and that's probably how you can be actually quite effective in a cold leadership role rather than trying to be something you're not which is decisive and bold so that's how I would handle that now do you think that other five factor the other of their personalities of the big five are going to be more important as a leader if you are also agreeable for example like wouldn't would someone if they are agreeable they need to be more intelligent than someone who's naturally more disagreeable I'm trying to think about what as a leader I'm not even sure what our goal is here there there's the that's a it's a good question but we gotta ask it in context so if we're trying to talk about effective leadership it it matters a great deal about what that what is the decision-making process that the leaders are going through and for what reason so if you are if you're in a military situation where you're going to have to be making decisions and somebody's going to get a really really bad into the stick and there's really no way out then intelligence doesn't matter what matters is enough disagreeableness and enough you know sort of conscientiousness but not too much but just enough conscientiousness and a hell of a lot of disagreeableness to just say hey that's the way it is you're taking the hill you're not that's it that's hardly the best decision-making strategy for 50,001 other problems in life so kind of what I would tell you Nathan is that there's horses for courses and the and so this this person could be perfectly fine leader in a lot of situations but but the situation that he happens to be in there may not be an adaptation that is very effective this is the best move that he can make to essentially try to lead as close as possible by consensus and that's a you know that's a leadership in quotes it's actually is leadership it's just leadership of a particular style where sudden major risks are not necessary to be taken without consultation where you're just having to go with you know essentially the leaders gut on on a given you know decision so yeah every every situation every group process is different and therefore every leadership problem would have a different sort of ideal personality that would fit it and however if you are if you're highly agreeable in general that puts you in a bad position to quote be leading anything and so that the but obviously intelligence for example and conscientiousness are just generally good traits to have the to minimize risk because it's going to improve your ability to to make better decisions so all things being equal what you would want is a highly intelligent highly conscientious leader but you would want someone they would be at least in the middle of the bell curve for disagreeable because they're going to need group decisions are inherently going to piss off a significant amount of the group and for the individual to be able to carry that off without without sort of you know being turned into rubble by an internal mutinous disagreeable process you got to have some gonads so if you don't have a lot of gonads the best way to do it is to try to lead by consensus testing and mmm I guess that makes sense because even with few exceptions even the US presidents almost never get more than you know 50 60 percent of the vote mmm so they're always can grab about 50 percent of people not liking them and their ideas oh yeah there's always going to be constant conflict tension outrage etc you better be recent you know fairly disagreeable which you know all presidents are going to be if you're there's no super nice guy actually the closest thing we probably have ever had to a really nice guy I think was probably Jimmy Carter and you know I think the presidency was extremely hard for him I think his conscientiousness and his nice-guy nests made that a a particularly harrowing experience right yes no tequila I've wondered I'm sure we've talked before on the show about the natural-born leaders and how this some of this may be genetic sure do we know what charisma is in terms of a combination of the big five well the whole hell of a lot of this is is is just disagreeable is what it is so that that's what what most successful leadership is is disagreeable with a bunch of conscientiousness that's pretty much what it is the nothing real special they don't have to be particularly bright when we look at we look at political leadership I mean obviously depends on what domain we're talking about if we're talking about the high-tech world you better be really smart but if you're talking about general political process most political leaders around the world are probably moderately above-average and intelligence they're pretty darn conscientious and they're disagreeable as hell that's that's what drives that quote charisma is mostly I fully intend to get to the top of the dominance hierarchy and I'm going to keep talking and keep posturing and keep trying to get attention to get there that's what it is hmm I wish it was more complicated than that so we can go off on a longer answer it's just an animal instinct of this primate to try to get to the top of a local dominance hierarchy and so most of us even though we may have that in us a great many men have a desire to be dominant however you find out that you're running into each other all over the place yeah even on the playground and so the idea of who the hell is going to go to the trouble to try to get on the top of a major dominance hierarchy particularly one that isn't being sorted by it by it by some kind of an objective process with respect to ability so if you're trying to be the head surgeon at Stanford Medical School good luck to you you're going to have to impress the hell out of a hell of a lot of people over a long period of time with just sheer brilliance and greater ability than other people if you're trying to you know when you know some major piano competition there's going to be objective evidence that's going to be examined and you're going to be you're going to be a force to compete in that sort of way and so you don't have to be really an honoree cuss you might just be very talented with enough Drive but when it comes to politics you better be pretty disagreeable because there's no there's actually no what you call it there's no objective superiority about anything it is we don't elect the smartest person we don't elect the most moral person we don't elect anything we just this is all just you know people just throwing spaghetti at the wall and voting their wallet and their their instincts that's what happens and and so as a result what you're going to find is you're going to find a bunch of people that are inherently motivated to climb dominance hierarchies that are going to be trying to get to the top of one so our last election was a a fabulous case in point here which you have Hillary and Donald Trump to ferocious dominance hierarchy climbers like those both of them that have canine teeth four inches long but in both of them they're absolutely both absolutely ferocious and so no surprise who the hell gets all the way to getting the nomination of a major party in the United States you got to have some serious push to do that you don't have to have any particular talent for anything what you need is you push and they they have it both of them hmm yeah yeah I was thinking in the lines of you know highly extroverted you know that you we wouldn't expect to see a highly introverted president because they got to shake a lot of hands you know sure but right and obviously I guess emotional 'ti yeah what's that yeah yeah like Nixon wasn't particularly extroverted they you know you wouldn't have to be extroverted it would certainly help ya but the disagreeable generally quite pretty emotionally stable it would generally be the case Trump would be in an unusual unusually volatile you know that's that's the obviously that's what freaks everybody out is that he's a very very emotionally volatile seeming character comparatively to to most politicians but yeah but really I'd be in an incredible book called I think it's called the king of the mountain by I believe it's Arthur Ludwig it's an incredible tale and steady of the politics in the 20th century and this guy looks at every single you know country in the 20th century in its leadership and its leadership patterns and he goes through exactly the questions that you're sort of talking about which is what makes a leader what's charisma and all this kind of stuff and pretty much what he comes down to is is it's mostly dominance it's mostly just a desire to dominate other organisms and that's pretty much what it is Wow all right I'll check out that book that sounds fun well speaking of leadership our what's up yeah yeah go ahead so speaking of leadership our next question is about standing up and speaking in front of a class and so in previous previous question previous podcast you have answered about giving presentations so this listener writes in dr. Lyle you've answered a question about giving presentations and I wondered whether you the same advice to a high school teacher in one of my adolescence education classes this term we presented lecture demos one of the rules was no self-effacing humor is there a different cost benefit of self effacing humor in a high school classroom are there any other ways that teaching high school might have to be approached differently than public speaking in general or is it really the same um it's not necessarily the same and I think I think yet there's some overlap there obviously but it's not quite the same thing because when you're making presentations to the world you're not speaking to the same people every day for 200 days out of you know the year so it's a little different situation so when you're when you're making a public presentation you are you if you are clever what you're trying to do is you're trying to soften the blow that you're actually in charging that you've been put in charge of the village and that they're in a subordinate position and so there's a that that contrasts remember they have allowed themselves to be put in that contrast in most situations sometimes not sometimes they have to be there and listen to you because they have some credit that they have to get or that they're expected to be there for some reason and which point they're very uninterested crowd and and latent ly hostile the but we're going to assume for the sake of argument that people have come because they believe that that you have earned the right to have their attention however that doesn't mean that they that they don't have a well we'll just see attitude and so and there's a there's sort of a de facto I'm in charge undercurrent when you're the speaker like hey I'm talking and everybody else needs to shut up and listen so that's a you're assuming a dominant position now so that that to me is socially dangerous in other words there's a lot of reason why there would be some resistance to this so that's why I use self-effacing humor is that I am I am signaling to the audience that I am NOT looking down on them and I'm not you know seizing control or power etc so I'm breaking down that distinction between the two of us and I'm making this thing like I'm very willing to be a peer and look at them eyeball to eyeball as opposed to looking down so that's that's the reason for that process as I described now in a high school situation they already know the score they already know you there's already a you are actually literally in a position of power you are grading these people they they don't have a choice as to be there etc so the it's a different social situation now so now the question is would you use self effacing humor and the question would be why would you want to and the one of the reasons would be is that that you would want to be softening the issue that you are looking down on them or talking down to them but remember there's there's less latent resentment even though you may think that there is more but there's less because these people are not considering themselves your peer you know your ten or twenty or thirty years older than they are and you're the teacher and they're the student so that's a very different situation than a normal presentation adult-to-adult out but out there in the world now the so our real problem is with our disagreeable people in the high school class it's it's with the few individuals that actually have the same narcissistic push that we see in politicians that are resistant and frustrated that they are in it's Eunice born in position and that they seek to Trump the person that's at the top of the dominance hierarchy so there's our problem and so the question is you know would we use self effacing humor yeah with those individuals and the answer is not necessarily depends upon what they're like and depends upon what the nature of the relationship seems to be etc generally what I would do instead of that is that that I would be giving those people status when they earned it when they try to smart off and be shitty I would I would find ways to to not be giving them status but I like I'm trying to think through what this person is really asking in this question so I'm kind of talking around these issues as I'm trying to imagine the worst case scenario in a class and what this person would be worried about as a high school teacher so could you use self effacing humor it depends on the class and depends upon why you're using it so if you've got a very warm class and you are trying to you're trying to signal that you like them and that you don't you don't need to always be in this dominant position then self effacing humor is extremely charming and the kids will will love you for it okay and so anybody that says that you shouldn't use that it doesn't understand and doesn't have any talent so they haven't pulled this off of course you can do that beyond the so but but would you necessarily under under under certain cases in certain cup cases you would not necessarily do that because you wouldn't want to expose the weakness so one way to think about this is in the following way and that is is that self facing humor works very well when you will kind of Ford to lose the status and it's what we're going to call those status so it has to be false status it can't be real status so we're so I make a joke about my inability to draw but that's those status I mean it is it is it losing a little bit of status yeah really people can number one they can tell that I'm not really trying because nobody could be that bad so in second of all it's completely unimportant relative to what it is that we're talking about and what my accomplishments are so it's the loss of those status which is which is a charming process to use on an audience because that they can see that you're not fully yourself and that you're willing to look at my ball by ball you are willing to show the fact that you aren't just so high and mighty and fancy and album ends now the but it remember it's faux status so we're not going to want to use self facing humor over things that are that are more real so we're not going to actually try to lose real status I'm not going to go up there and talk about times in therapy cases where I've really messed up it's stupid things that I've done in order to then see that I'm human and that I you know that I've made mistakes too I know that isn't something that I would do so the where we you know what self effacing humor is it's got to be humorous it can't be in to be humorous it cannot be real status loss it has to be foe status loss so there's considerations here that are that that have to be thought through and but certainly there's going to be times in places and teacher in a high school or teaching anything when self effacing humor is wonderful and it's a it's a wonderful thing to use and it will it will you know increase your rapport with an audience there's other times when you know one should be careful and prudent when you feel like you're in a contentious situation and you you may not be able to afford that that risk about status loss then I wouldn't do it and there's going to be there's going to be times in places where the right way to play is to play straight and not take those kind of risks now would you have any inferences over the administration of this particular adolescent education class to say that there's the one of the rule should be no a self effacing humor we think that they're pretty disagreeable um not necessarily in other words there there can be situations where we're I mean this is where you're having to read who you're problematic people are and you're going to have to read the status that you have with the rest of the crowd and you have to read that you can you can throw trial balloons at losing post status and see if that improves your rapport with the most problematic people which it might okay so that's why there wouldn't be any hard fast rules it would be more a process of experimentation and the kind of thing that I'm talking about is the way to analyze the problem we're never reused loose in real status where were rigging it in a way that we're losing foe status and we we need to be in a position where we are good enough of what is that we're doing that we've earned legitimate status through our other performances but we are we are displaying a willingness to lose status when it's foe status so that's that's how we would go about doing that and that's actually very safe but but in situations where it's downright contentious if you've got a really problematic group of people then you probably wouldn't do that you just be sending them to the principal mm-hmm yeah ah yesterday guide dr. Lisle our next question dear dr. Lisle my friend is saying but delusional he so overestimates his abilities his insights and his possessions that he's consistently wrong but doesn't know it mm-hmm has the approaches of senior years he's on the way to leaving himself destitute all helpless if it doesn't drag me down with him put any ideas ya know so the the notion here is that that anybody like this is pretty inherently disagreeable so you're not you're not just if you've got delusions of grandeur you've got along with it some disagreeableness and that disagreeableness is leaking over into a bunch of narcissistic judgment that that is resulting in the person making very poor decision-making in there for not recognizing some obvious realities and so therefore this person is going to get increasingly expensive to deal with so this is where I would say you get to a disagreeable distance where you're not on the first line for helping this individual and there is no remember that that people need very little to survive so probably they will have that very little whatever that great little thing is if they've been working they've got some kind of Social Security that they can live in a trail they can share a trailer house with somebody in Tulare and and or Visalia maybe and they can and they could just be on food stamps everything you do not have to support them so you don't have to support them at some level that their self esteem feels better or you know that they feel better about them it okay not your responsibility it is unfortunate when someone is born with a narcissistic nervous system without the talent for for anything to come out of that narcissism sometimes if someone's got some talent there the narcissism will drive them to great efforts because they are getting enough feedback used it indicates that they're likely to be victorious that sometimes they'll work extremely hard and they will find their successes in life more than they would normally deserve as a result of an overestimation of their abilities they basically put out more energy there's someone of similar competence but no delusion so so narcissism isn't necessarily a checkmate for some individuals ability to be successful in the world at all that's practically necessary for politics now the but this individual if it turns out that that there they're headed towards trouble your your job is to absolutely not get sucked down with the vortex so if it turns out that they're if they're under some very humbling circumstances there's a difference between humbling and seriously compromise in the United States it's very difficult to be seriously compromised the truth of the matter is is that you could find a safe cheap enough place to live it may not be comfortable and it may be embarrassing that you can do it and if you have to share a house with with four other people in a mediocre part of town and you're in you know I don't know somewhere in you know you know Southwest Ohio somewhere in some abandoned manufacturing town where the that the house is rent for $850 a month and you got to pay a quarter of it then hey it's two hundred twenty ten dollars a month and a few bucks your Social Security could support you and so don't worry about this individual in their future that was their problem to worry about it and so that get yourself to a disagreeable distance and do not go down with the ship that's just a natural consequence of a nervous system that was genetically haywire and that's how it goes well and yeah I guess this is the same whether or not the person's family or not and but but with the addition that if this person's family then you're going to have more guilt chips being activated because you share some genes yeah yeah that's true and you know this is similar to what I will tell parents and other people when there's people that are addicted so you've got a person that's got a fifteen-year addiction history and they're in and out of rehab etc and this is a tough go it's essentially not their fault that they're they're in this mess they didn't ask to be born in a world that has some horrendous chemical in it that that they were to open and not smart enough to keep their snout out of so they wound up getting it addicted and it's a mess and and so in partly it's not their fault but it's also not your fault and so the fact that they that they may have a rough existence you know it doesn't mean we're not going to be trying to be punishing or rejecting these people but we're also not here to save them and so I'll tell parents hey if they can't be in the house they can't be in the house because when they come in they steal all of your stuff and hey now they don't get to come in but they should always know that you know there's going to be a bread box on the backdoor and that there's going to be bread there's a sleeping bag and they could sleep out in the yard and eat a loaf of dry bread it's like they're not going to starve it up and they're not going to be you know murdered in some alley you've got a safe place to go they can pitch a tent but they're not coming in the house so then that's before we get them into the homeless shelter ok so there's always a way to deal with things that we don't have to be angry and we don't have to be rejecting we just have to have boundaries and to be firm and that's going to be the case whether we have a situation with someone who's addicted or whether it's a case where the person just has a really kind of bizarre self-defeating personality structure but that's just how it's going to go and you know in both cases what we hope is that the the the persons at capacity to learn and the actual ability to make different choices you know may grow with every failure experience that checkmates them in a given time period which is fine and so very often we see people eventually work their way out of addictions and we see Narcis that eventually choke down the realities of the marketplace and you know our greeters at Walmart or somewhere like that so the point is is that it isn't that it isn't that they're you know they might eventually deal with their options but we don't have to be buffering them against the discomfort that their decisions are creating we do want to buffer them against tragedy but those are two different things and they are very different things fascinating and speaking of getting people out of these things or helping this leads to our next question which is dr. Lyle my observation recently has been that the best way to get myself and other people to do productive and healthy things is by starting small gradually increasing the difficulty of the tasks and then doing them constantly until they become a habit what's the evolutionary explanation for why we need habits in order to change ourselves well we don't need habits to change ourselves so we can we can dispense with the with the ultimate question that the person has so the what they're referring to is that they're referring to the fact that when you're when you're trying to make changes the a I'm going to back this whole question up and we're going to try to understand the motivation for change and then the challenges associated with change so the reason why you would change a pattern of behavior is because you come to believe that there's a superior pattern of behavior in terms of cost benefit payoff now there would be a number of reasons why you might change your mind in other words the reason why you're doing things the way you are doing them now is because your mind has analyzed that this is the best payoff but this is the best CV ratio and that all other alternative patterns of behavior are not as good so why do we buy our gas a bad Exxon station and take our shirts to that laundromat because our brain has analyzed and looked at the options and it says this is what I think the best option is okay so that's why you would continue to do that indefinitely now question is why would we ever change and the only reason you would change is if that you had new information that would suggest to you that this that the CB is better than another pattern that is the only reason why you would change now there would be several kinds of circumstances that could give rise to a shift in the CB and one of those circumstances would be the fact that something changes in the environment and the previous option is no longer available so now that that gas station went out of business for a while because they're redoing their pumps and now you start going over to this other gas station and it turns out that at that other gas station there's some cute guy or cute girl that works there and does the you know brings up the register and so and they've got a little shop in there and you go in there and get yourself a bunch of candy so it turns out that maybe there's reasons why now you never go back to the other place because now the CB has changed so this is what how it is that you this is why it is that you make changes how you make changes is simply the execution of the CB your brain runs the CB and then you use it sends patterns of nerve impulses down the motor neurons that attach the muscles that make the muscles contract in a pattern that executes some behavior that's all not very interesting to me what's interesting to me is the computation in the brain that says why did the CB change okay now what you're going to see is that very often to see some very significant change of a pattern of behavior is that very often the person will for one reason or not or another and it could be a multitude of reasons they shift slightly what it is that they do so they don't change something dramatically they change a little bit and when they change it a little bit it turns out that they that it seems like it's a better payoff so let me give you an example so someone one of my very first clients ever came to me and said that they were sent to me because they were told that that they got something wrong with their head because they've got this diffused joint pain all over their body and there's no reason for it so they need to go talk to a psychologist which was of course insane that this was the met of medical staff had given this guy this information and was ridiculous I told the guy to quit eating all dairy products now I didn't know how long to tell him - I told him a month but I didn't know anything I was just I had just read the mcdougal plan so I that's what I told him well he came back a week later and told me that all of his pain was gone in 48 hours and that he had thought I was out of line in the nut that he tried it anyway and then then he went and ate some cheese a couple three days later and the pain came back and then he stopped eating it and then then the pain was gone so this was about seven days later and he had already gone through a period where he did what I said got a good result then went back and did it the old way got the pain back and then switched back and then he's back out of pain that whole thing took place in like seven days it's a very interesting set of experiments so why did he do the experiment in the first place because somebody told him that there was a causal connection where he would have some control over an outcome that's why that there was a CB that he didn't know about that there was an offering so I had enough authority and enough confidence in my message that he bought it and bought it enough to run a little experiment so he runs a little experiment and then he runs another little experiment and he runs a third experiment is what he did okay and then subsequent to that that guy didn't go back on dairy products by the way so I actually had follow-up on him for several years so and why was that because the CB changed and he had made the causal connection as to what was causing you know he had he had now a better understanding of the cost-benefit analysis of the options that were in front of him so he chose an option that was you know wound up being conducive to his reduced pain now so that's when you make a little change what can happen is is that you can you can become more effective because when the brain makes a change it just grossly knows what behavior to do but it doesn't know exactly what behavior to do because it hasn't had the structural changes in the brain enough to make it really efficient so the first time you go over to grandmother's house you know in the snow that you're not quite sure where you're going and they tell you to take a left at the old barn and then a right you know what the at the big bar and then you go down about a mile and whatever so you're a little uncertain and you're not sure where you're going and you keep take a couple of wrong turns the next time you go you're better okay the third time you go you're better still and so as a result what's going to happen is once you make changes if they were worth making the first time then when you make them on subsequent occasions you're going to get increasingly efficient very likely that you will improve so the new CB you got lured into a change because bought by some factor of the environment so some nuclear information came in some gas station was closed you know some you you had to have your club your clothes washed you know on a given day and your old your place wasn't open on Saturday but these other people were and they had four hour service so you try something new so by hook or by crook your existing pattern of behavior winds up getting challenged by an alternative course of action causing your behavior to mutate a little bit now if it turns out that results in an improvement now you go down a new direction and as you go down that new direction you very likely may learn as you go so if the first move was worth it a little bit then the next move is worth it a little bit more the third minutes worth it a little bit more and now we have a new pattern of behavior okay now we would call that a habit so to say that we quote why do we need habits to make changes we don't need habits to make changes habits are the result of changes in our cost-benefit analysis ah that the lead to an experimental change in the behavior which lead then to very similar behavior changes taking place repetitively in the future which leads to a more sophisticated ability to execute what's important in that CD offering and to get it done easier faster cheaper with less hassle and as a result that becomes what you and I now call a habit change so that's what actually takes place
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