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Episode 248: Earning esteem, feeling pride, and self improvement
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do you have any tips for getting yourself to do the hard things you know you should do i am a voracious consumer of self-improvement content i truly believe in the science and superiority of the whole food plant-based diet and the importance of regular exercise for physical and mental health and in the benefit of productivity and life improvement i have things that i know would absolutely improve my life in the long term but i cannot seem to make myself do these things even though i'm high in conscientiousness it's as if i keep convincing myself i can just slip on by by being lazy it's a pattern that has followed me all my life i'm quite smart always got good grades but i've only put in the effort to do well rather than extraordinary well like i could have even though i know this would be of great benefit to my life in the long run i just don't know what to do with myself anymore i'm in my mid-20s and obese lonely depressed addicted to technology and performing far below what i could be in life how do i get myself to do the things that i know will make myself more happy and increase my competitiveness in society well um what's happening is uh what we're going to do is we're going to understand this is just a one of a billion permutations on the question of why does anybody do anything or why does any animal do anything that it does so the reason why any creature does anything that it does is that it's running a cost benefit analysis so if it's a worm it's running a very simple cost benefit analysis about the temperature of the soil or something that it smells in other words it's a pretty simple machine a human is the most complex computational machine that is ever arrived at by evolution on this planet that means that the cost benefit analysis that the human is going through in its decision making is extraordinarily complex and it has all kinds of variables that you can't see so you have access to some of those variables consciously but the vast majority of the variables and and most of the explanatory power is probably percolating below the surface of your awareness as certain instincts get activated as you become aware of the environmental contingencies that are around you so so the reason why you do things the way you do them and the reason why you see repetitive patterns in in people's behavior is because their behavior is is uh in an equilibria there's an equilibrium in in the cost benefit analysis it's essentially like if you're trying to analyze a business and look at the rate of return on the business and you're not really that interested in anything as long as the rate of return is between seven and eight percent and it's a complicated business and there's receipts coming in from all over the place and all kinds of different offices and salaries and etc etc but you know for 19 years out of the last 19 years it's been somewhere between seven and eight percent rate of return that's just what it is sometimes it's a little higher sometimes it's a little lower okay in the in the great recession you know it it actually went negative for two quarters big deal nobody cares everybody understood it so the that that just because one little thing is transgenders in the spreadsheet a little bit doesn't mean it's going to change the overall cb so just because one office went up three percent of its receipts last quarter management is not all excited about it and they're not saying well what on earth did they do in that office this this quarter that made that happen they just look at it and they say well it's no big deal they don't even notice okay you guys said a decent quarter who cares nobody cares nobody's interested in why they just consider it random unknowable fluctuations now so you this person's behavior is in a long-term uh a set of of equilibria and so and the reason why that's true is it's due to a bunch of complex cost-benefit analyses the only thing that changes the the person's behavior the person is tearing their hair out frustrated about why can't i change my behavior why can't i change my behavior i see all these positive reasons for it well it doesn't matter the the positive reasons aren't sufficient to change the behavior because it's not influencing the underlying cost benefit analysis the underlying cost benefit analysis says it's not worth it oh you're if you eat really healthy for the next 60 years and you're in your 20s then you might not have a heart attack when you're 83. who cares i'm 25. like it's gonna make any difference okay so the the the human being is running the cost-benefit analysis and they're not seeing the upside and so uh they say they're obese and they want to be more competitive yeah a lot of people want to be more competitive i always wanted to be richer and better looking and there's things that i could have done from the time i was 12 years old that would have had both of those things happen so there i always could have done something to make myself a little bit better looking and i could always done something to make myself richer sometimes making yourself better looking makes you poorer then you got to trade off okay but the but the thing is is that the only thing that's going to change the situation is going to be new information new information is what changes the cb so suddenly you know we find out this is just ridiculous jen's going to roll her eyes if she ever listens to this all right so we find out that there's some extraterrestrials that are running around planet earth now that have landed and they're they're utter they're not actually poisonous and they're not trying to take over our government or anything but they they need to eat some people okay well now does that change your cb well i think it does dr lyle are you talking about aliens again yes okay so the uh so the truth of the matter is is that its information will change the cb now enough information that is relevant to the problem uh will change the cb enough to to actually change the behavior pattern it's not going to change it if the sales go up in that quarter for that office to three percent maybe three and a half percent the next quarter nobody cares but if they went up 30 percent in the next quarter now you've got everybody's attention now the whole company changes policy because some hotshot manager went in there and made a change and it made a big difference in sales okay now you've got our attention so you know the motivational speaker guru uh of my childhood was mr e james rhone of adventures in achievement and roane used to say well you know how do you set your goals how big do your goals have to be et cetera and he said they have to be big enough to turn you on and that's right in other words the goal needs to be big enough it has to you have to imagine an outcome that is sufficiently exciting that your nervous system says hey that's worth having now what roane didn't know was he didn't know that you can't just put it through your imagination you your cost-benefit analysis actually runs a perceived probability of success on whether or not you think that that is likely for you you know they sort of skip over that and all that self-help literature that this person's reading because they don't understand that so the the idea is just dream big visualize big fancy thoughts visualize your success and that's how you're going to manifest positive things which is a complete and total [ __ ] but what we want to do though is we want to look at a situation and we want to see okay well what would it take what do you believe that it would take that would make a substantial difference in your life uh if you change your circumstances x degree now that's important to try to get that clear so if the person's obese maybe they're 50 pounds overweight and therefore not in a very competitive situation with respect to to mating for example and they realize well i'm really not particularly motivated to lose five pounds okay and i'm not particularly motivated to lose 10 pounds and if i think about it i'm really not that motivated to lose 15 pounds now if i could lose 50 i'd be motivated but here's what gets interesting i don't have the perceived probability of success that i could do it okay so they they sort of know that in theory it would be possible but their own perceived probability of success that they could do this is not high okay so and a lot of times what happens is is that even though it's logical that you could see in theory how it is that you could do something until you experience uh that you have done the things that are required to do it you are not sure you know your perceived probability success is low so a low perceived probable probability of success with respect to a component of a goal is a very very important issue so when a person scans over their life and looks for things that they would logically hope to change significantly and they can imagine a different set of circumstances where their life is a lot better they are also running through their head their understanding of a matrix of sub-goals that would have to take place in order to have this happen and they're overwhelmed by it and aren't sure that they can do it and they don't know enough about the details and so the whole thing actually looks implausible this is where expert help expert analysis the right perspective on what it takes to achieve things uh etc is required and that's what we're part of what we try to do here is try to give some of this information out in a way that people can use it without having to talk to us one-on-one or anybody else one-on-one i can still be super useful to talk to people one-on-one to break down a goal into sub goals sub goals are the things that are required to do any goal you don't write a book you write a sentence and then you write another sentence and then you write another sentence after that okay you don't you don't learn to play tennis you learn one tiny little fundamental after the next that's how you do it you don't quote learn to play the piano you learn what middle c is and then we start from there and you don't lose 50 pounds you lose two or three ounces a day by doing a really good job on a plant that's what you do and folks that's all you ever do there is never a day when you lose a pound there is never a week where you lose 17 pounds that is not how it works it's two or three ounces a day and the way you lose that two or three ounces a day comfortably and reasonably and well is not to starve yourself it's to make the correct dietary choices and then it automatically takes place okay so there is no secret sauce it's simply the the repetition of excellence and fundamentals that's what will get us there and nothing else will nothing else that's not crazy in that regard you you know you can get addicted to some kind of legalized speed that that could help maybe keep doing that all right so here's the deal so the deal is is that what we need to do is we need to look at some things that we're going to change because we're going to try to get new information and so what we're going to do is we're going to run experiments the experiments allow for a short period of time to change how you're doing things rather than have some kind of a vision in your head that you're going to have to make some permanent wholesale changes in order to get to your goal and when your mind scans through and runs the cost benefit analysis on that it just shrugs the soldiers and says forget it i don't think i'm going to do it i don't think i can do it i don't think i will do it so why even bother to do step one okay and if we don't do step one then we never get new information so that's the value the tremendous value of running experiments now another thing to do is to do structural changes so if you live in a house with a bunch of roommates that eat a bunch of crap and there's never room in the refrigerator for your stuff to get it organized it's then buy a refrigerator and stick it right in the kitchen okay or put it somewhere else in other words you change your environment structurally structural changes in the environment are major because what they do is they change the cost benefit analysis of all kinds of behavior they shift behavior patterns by virtue of the fact that we've changed the cost benefit analytics so this is the reason no government program of education ever did anything with respect to reducing smoking you can forget about that what changed it was making it illegal to smoke inside of buildings that's what did it okay then people had to go outside in the cold in minnesota in february to light up every hour finally they just said forget it we're not doing it so structural changes changing the cost-benefit analysis of the whole spreadsheet that underlies the the behavior pattern that's how we do it now in this case uh there's some things that i would tell this person to do i'd say okay guess what shut down your technology for 14 days that's how you're gonna you can check your email from the library or you can check your email you know you could just say okay i'm going to check it every other day people can just wait and i'm going to do it at 6 00 p.m and i'm going to check all my email from 6 p.m to 6 20 p.m i'm going to answer what i can answer then i'm done okay figure out how it is that you are going to pull yourself away from facebook instagram insta face my face whatever the heck it is and get out of it okay don't be watching a bunch of stuff on youtube etc this is the last thing you needed to hear all right then then you know white knuckles some self-discipline that put in half an hour a day of exercise do it every day no excuses at all now what are we trying to do here what we're trying to do is we're trying to discover something important and it's the most important thing when it comes to sustaining any long-term behavior change in the face of the pleasure trap or the ego trap and that is that what we need to do is we need to discover and cherish the fact that we our behavior is the engineering device and it is the only one that will cause a shift in our self-esteem so right now you know there there are going to be three or really four different processes um three of them are esteem processes that are the the uh essentially the foundation of happiness in the way the human nervous system works the first is self-esteem and self-esteem is a moral judgment that your internal audience passes on you about when it observes your effort with respect to any worthwhile goal so if you do a half-assed effort it gives you half-assed feedback and says you did a half-assed job if you were downright self-destructive and self-indulgent it looks at you and it says shrugs your soldiers and says well that was shitty you you're really mediocre okay people believe that that's the internal critic and that that's what beats us up and that's what causes our self-destructive behavior none of that's true those feelings are the result of the fact that we got sucked into the pleasure trap now getting sucked into the pleasure trap you know shouldn't be any embarrassment it is massively underestimated so everybody's chasing around the block looking for the reasons why people are self-destructive with respect to pleasure trap processes and they're looking to their childhood and they're looking to to bad experiences and they're looking to the warm feelings that they had with you know chocolate chip cookies that their grandmothers when they grew up and their house at home was all disrupted and bad and contentious and so that's the only place he ever got any comfort and that's what they're seeking now that is all bs none of it's true the reason why people are sucked into the pleasure trap is because it's the pleasure trap it's the hyper activation of pleasure pathways uh artificially by modern stimuli whether it's gambling pornography recreational drugs alcohol sugar fat salt etc that's what it is now so don't expect that it's going to be easy and don't expect anybody to hold your hand like you just gotta tough it out you gotta you gotta be willing to run the experiment to pull yourself out of the pleasure trap so do it and what you're gonna find if you're certainly capable of doing it it's just motor control at the end of your finger so you you understand that if you do this and you pay the price for a short period of time you understand that you're not that motivated to pay the price because you understand that you'd have to pay it sort of indefinitely and religiously to lose that 50 pounds that would be the thing that would actually change your competitive standing and change your life but what i want to argue is that a big price that you're paying that you are generally unconscious of is the internal audience's daily frown the internal audience is is not going to give you any positive esteem because you don't deserve it and yet if you start to earn it it will give it to you very quickly it may give it to you in a modest degree at the end of one day it might even do it at the end of two hours i've watched my own internal audience when i've been feeling sort of i don't know self-pitying about something for a while some some deal one way or the other some girl dumped me you know i don't know what it would be but the point is i could feel a little bit self-pitying like gee the village owes me a little bit better i've been in that state before we all have i don't know maybe allen hasn't been but most it normal people have been there and then i notice that if i'll get up and get moving and start taking action and start straightening things up getting things organized i.e you know picking up after the hurricane that pretty soon what happens is it's your internal audience you know we're no longer in a wine mode looking to the village for you know looking at the referees for help instead we our internal audience starts to give us a thumbs up that it appreciates that the efforts that we're making and when you notice that shift and you can notice that shift dramatically in seven days with respect to dietary pleasure trap type behavior that you can start it isn't that your self-esteem will soar but it feels very different and now you realize ha that's interesting that is not an accident that is not ephemeral that is something that is reliable and consistent esteem is by nature perishable you only earn it and then you can lose it and earn it and lose it etc you don't you don't you know you aren't seen by the world this great person for doing one good deed and then do a bunch of mediocre stuff and but your self-esteem is something that you can earn it every day and so for this individual and any other individual this is a great question that we start off with today because uh we may not get to question two the thing is is that this is a this is a prototypical problem for people so therefore this speaks to a huge percentage of people that are struggling with anything the answer to the question is how am i going to get myself to start making most of myself answer challenge yourself to a short-term experiment and when you do that experiment pay attention to the most important outcome variable that you are not designed to pay attention to which is the self-esteem mechanism pay attention very closely you will find the feelings of self-loathing and self-disgust and you know mediocrity will be gone okay that's interesting it is not a roaring change of your happiness but it is a very very significant one now the next thing that happens is the next feeling process that's important is the process of self-confidence when you work diligently at something you will eventually see progress and when you see that progress your nervous system is going to run an analytic on whether or not the amount of progress was worth the effort that we put in very often the answer is no okay but that's in context of us not paying attention to the vital importance of self-esteem so that's why we want to look at this and we are we're going to work diligently at something until we start to see some improvement when we see improvement we can start to actually run an appropriate analysis on what this thing is going to look like now this is why i'm so determined so often to try to run math and try to explain things in a way in weight loss that people can understand because people have highly distorted views of how it is that this is supposed to go they think that they make a snap decision suddenly they become i don't know a mcdougal maximum weight loss mogul and that this is the the magic thing is supposed to hit their you know like like tinkerbell used to you know touch your skull and now everything changes and now you're going now then you're going to sort of roar out of the gates here and we're going to lose 10 or 12 pounds a month and you're going to have this dramatic change you know in the next few months that this is the magic that waits for you this is rocky balboa turning your life around in six weeks forget it okay exceedingly unlikely not true almost has never happened i mean it has happened in a few cases but typically that's not a typical response of human biology to those these kinds of changes yeah more like a pound a week okay so it's going to be more like you do a really good job and it's going to take a year and so we're not going to race there we're not going to get spectacularly positive feedback of the scale every week we're not going to drop three or four pounds and another three or four pounds and we're down 15 pounds in a month it happens don't count on it and if you did it's mostly water so month two it's not going to look anything like month one you have to understand that these changes are inexorable and they will happen in the right way and they will work but you have to do it you have to make the right choices and you have to make them consistently so i want you to know that when you start looking for feedback we have to run the experiment long enough if you're 50 pounds overweight you're obese and you do this well for two weeks at the end of two weeks we should definitely see you down somewhere between two and four pounds when you you can do that by taking averages take the average three days in a row right now take the average three days in a row two weeks from now those averages we should see you down couple two or three pounds when we do um i want the response to be i'll be damned this thing is working not oh my god i did all this work and we only got we're only down two or three pounds no we didn't do all this work what we did is we're gonna do what is required to get this job actually done properly over and over and over and over again for the rest of your life okay and notice what happened to your internal audience in the last two weeks notice the end of the self-loathing notice a feeling that you can only get through this type of process it's called pride okay that pride that comes from that work that will not leave you it you will not habituate to it okay if you do it again the next day you'll get it again you do it the next day you get again then you screw up the next day fine you just learned a lesson you didn't get pride that day you didn't deserve it okay now the thing is is if you continue long enough this person says they've got high conscientiousness really are we willing to enjoy the process of earning and feeling self-esteem for a month because if you are willing to do what it takes to enjoy that outcome then at the end of the month you will have a very significant and notable change in your body you will see it you can see it on the scale it's not going to be two three pounds it's going to be six or eight pounds it's like oh there's no question that this works okay and now what happens is your ability to run a proper cost benefit analysis on this entire uh process now just got better you are now not operating under a distortion that that people will tell you it's supposed to be quick and easy but at the same time you realize a little bit of effort you're not sure you're willing to do it the whole thing feels impossible because it feels like you're going under water and try to hold your breath for six months or nine months and then finally get to the other side and be beautiful uh-uh that's not what we're doing we're not going under water and holding our breath we are making a change and we are experimenting with whether or not our life and our openness and our self-indulgence and our conscientiousness can intercept in a way that we could actually pull this off and settle in to a new way of doing life okay and if we can we're going to experiment with it because it's not a natural thing a golf swing is not natural a baseball swing is closer to natural tricky to do things that are a little bit unnatural okay so by doing things that are a little bit unnatural the um but you can eventually they feel better you get in a groove that's how it is that we're going to do things if you do that you're 30 days away from knowledge about how your self-esteem works that's it you know you're not going to forget it you're going to be watching for it and you're going to see it and you're going to see the times when you screw up and you're going to observe uh that that uh it is literally a reflection of the excellence and diligence of your behavior and it's not a reflection of anything else there's no internal critic to talk back to for the from your cognitive therapist no that internal critic the internal audience is giving you honest-to-god feedback about what it is that you did and it's very clear what the printout is and guess what if you don't like the printout today change it tomorrow because it's an honest critic and it's an honest audience and it will it will change if you do now so what are we going to do get out of the technology get yourself half an hour day of exercise cook up yourself a big pot of vegetable soup that you're going to eat a whole bunch of helpings out of it this week are you going to be perfect probably not but you could the uh aim at is at a serious goal we can look out over the horizon and we realize okay big enough to turn us on it's what january guess what by september you could be in screaming shape a whole new life completely different competitive standing not even close do we want to try to get there just to see what it's like well of course if it was easy but what if instead what we had to suffer through was nine months of very high self-esteem that's not so bad is it okay and along the way a growing sense of confidence that would start to to speak very loudly within a month when we have enough reliable feedback that we would have enough accuracy in our ability to estimate the parameters that we would say oh my god i can do this if i can do the first seven pounds i can do the next 43 there's nothing in principle different about the next 43 that's different than the first seven so why wouldn't i try another month and see what it feels like to go down 14. okay so what will cause a behavior change new information how are we going to get new information we're going to change our environment to a new set of circumstances i.e a new set of information which is the configuration of cost benefit analysis with respect to particularly energy output by doing any structural changes in the environments that we can buying an instapot learning how to work it getting a refrigerator in there that works that isn't isn't filled with other people's crap i'm not sure what structural changes do you need a decent pair of knives how about some decent uh tupperware containers uh would you we need to throw all the crap out of the pantry that's in there and grit our teeth as we send 287 dollars worth of food into the garbage maybe so okay but what we want to do is we want to make whatever structural changes are obvious and we think might be useful and then on top of that the last change we make is to realize you know what a new set of information would be why not run an experiment why not okay jim rohn used to ask uh a set of questions at the end of his seminar i forgot about it i hadn't remembered this this is now 30 years out of the sky is probably the last time i thought about this it was a beautiful inspiring sequence at the end of his lecture he said people might say why why do it what's the point blah blah why why do all these big things and he said my answer to that is why not why not what else are we going to do are we just going to replay the way we've already been doing it settle for the internal sense of media mediocrity and that we have not actually actualized our potential is that what is that we're going to do why not why wouldn't we try why wouldn't we do something different why wouldn't we take a chance on something that looks like it's logical reasonable and yet it's aiming at something really outstanding why not the next question he said why not you other people can do it why do they have any special dispensation why not you there's no reason why not you you can you can do this nobody is stopping you the world's powerless to stop you from doing this this is a faith that is in your own hands why not and finally the last question he says why not now [Music] why wait okay now is an excellent time to take this on so why not why not you why not now run the experiments watch your self-esteem change do the first fundamentals that are associated with the long-term goal and watch your self-confidence grow at some point down the road when you have done an excellent job and you have got results you will get the beginnings of the gold that comes with these changes which is esteem esteem is what it is that we're seeking esteem it is what it is that we are consciously directing the goal towards we want other people to love us to be attracted to us to want to be in relationships with us of various kinds that's where the rubber hits the road in evolution is an esteem but folks we can't skip over the steps that are required to get to the esteem uh that's what the world wants to sell you the world wants to sell you that you get to short cut your way to esteem imagine your greatness come to my seminar awake awaken the giant within okay oh find your own greatness find that i remember uh embarrassingly on the back of nathaniel brandon's book i think called breaking free was the notion the whole notion of repressed pain and childhood trauma that was stopping you from being great his nonsense he had bought into the freudian nonsense as fine a thinker as he was in many ways he made classic mistakes of that genre the buy this book find out the buried greatness that's within you i.e it's just some little trick and some little insight that's going to change it for you no that isn't how it works the way it works is with hard work diligence fundamentals feedback that comes from within from the self-esteem mechanism and then finally as you work diligently what happens is your self-confidence starts to rise when your self-confidence rises that that is as a result of observing the effects of your efforts and seeing that your performance has changed even when nobody else can see it that changes your cost-benefit analysis on whether or not it's worth continuing that is super important you will not continue to persist in efforts unless you get feedback from those from some feedback process you're not designed as an animal to continue to put out effort unless you've got evidence don't look for that evidence and esteem cues from other people look at an immeasurable process where you can see objectively that you're improving because if you're not then there's something about your fundamentals that is failing you and you need expert guidance to find out what it is that's what chef aj needed chef aj was a very diligent eater she was very knowledgeable about food she was extremely competent in the kitchen she did not understand some very important fundamentals about calorie density and weight that was the easiest fix folks that i ever had to give somebody that turned their life around literally on a dime that was one conversation that was shorter than the one that we're having tonight okay i remember walking around my cul-de-sac that day i was out i remember wondering if the neighbors were interested in hearing what i had to say okay you may have changed more than one life right the point is is that i have lousy reception in my house which happens and so i needed to go outside and it was a perfectly warm day we could figure out about when it was and walking around and around my cul-de-sac in a circle chef aj and i had that thing and i remember her startled voice as she was realizing that she didn't understand the math okay that was all it took that girl took a hold of that and started eating healthfully and 27 months later that lady was as thin as the hollywood superstars of her era okay that's what happened a lifetime of struggling that was over but along the way what was happening was the self-confidence self-esteem everything was rolling the right direction the this is how people make big changes and this is how people do big things all achievements all big achievements are just a bunch of a little achievements there is no leap okay it's a process it's a daily process of accretion that's how it takes place there are days you know more spectacular days there's days when you have some big insight when you're working on a problem but watson and quick did not figure out the d a molecule quote one day that was a process that went all along and all kinds of things went into that okay there was a day when the insight came but it could not have been possible without all of the other days before okay now so maybe you know just occurs to me some you know sometimes you need outside help and you do like aj needed that aj was doing everything she could figure out how to do there's critical information she didn't have she happens to call me up i happen to know the answer she executes it done beautiful okay sometimes people need a a time out where they change their environment completely so they can get to see what it feels like when they make these changes so that they can run a better cost benefit analysis on it's worth it that's what fasting escape is for okay maybe a person a lot of people can make make use of that kind of experience for exactly that reason but the notion is why not you why not now why not running an experiment this is how we will change possibly the cb that is sitting in an equilibrium and defending itself through energy conservation and possibly a distortion about what the real cb is on on these outcomes if you are a person in your 20s and you are 50 pounds overweight and you are feeling a little lost and lonely and uncompetitive and don't know what to do then thank you for asking this question because this question rings around the globe okay it's all over the place it's in you know a hundred million souls and so the answer is the one that i've given you we make some changes we run some experiments we challenge you to say do you are are you willing to do the work to earn some self-esteem don't think about the esteem now keep right focused on on the on the feedback within with the self-esteem will eventually come self-confidence with the self-confidence of your improvements will eventually be noticed by the village and you will get esteem that's what we're after and that's the integration of of how the happiness process can be can be invested in and then how you can get the victories that you need you
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