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Episode 51: How to feel good, how to succceed at life improvement
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hey dr. Lyle how are you doing today good about yourself I'm not too bad today's topic we're going to be talking about is how to feel good and how to succeed at life improvement now you know the new years come and passed it's been about a month and I don't know what data is on this but most people have resolutions and then what is it twelve days after most people are just about done with it so yeah a few hours actually yeah yeah rad yeah I thought I was the only one okay yeah well maybe about a week week and a half ago me and my buddies we were always just trying to you know succeed up this life improvement stuff and failing miserably at least I am right and they're what we decided to do is we picked a couple of things that we're trying to do and and we thought you know what let's make a bet and kind of use the competitive processes between males to see if we can see if we can achieve this and set some pretty clear goals try to keep ourselves out of the ego trap you know low order expectantly losing the bet is we tried to figure out what we both hate like really despise and it turns out for him if he messes up on some of his goals he's got to sing a karaoke song of my choice so you know if any listener who wants to send me an email as to what you know fun karaoke songs I can recommend for him could be a girl or a guy yeah that should be fun my punishment is is for every time I mess up I have to do something I despise which is I have to march in a feminist rally so then I have to actually pretend that I like it got it that's beautiful yeah so that's already better yeah so so far you know we've been going at it pretty strong it's only been a week and a half so you know hopefully I don't end up having a march in like seventeen feminist rallies God knows there's gonna be a lot of them in the next four years but there but but this got me thinking when people try to succeed at life improvement for us it's only been a week in half so it seems to be this negative reinforcement you know the punishment seems to be working for us but who the hell knows right yeah well what's also working there is if there's there's status processes there though between the two of you so that's probably the most important process that's going on so but anyway all this is all this is fine your your weaseling around trying to figure out how to do something and the something that you're trying to do is you're trying to influence the cost-benefit analysis that underlies all behavior so that's that's actually what's taking place so whenever you're trying to figure out whatever you're trying to figure out like how does motivation work and should I go to a Tony Robbins seminar and discover my giant within by walking across you know phony hot coals now whatever is that that people are magically trying to do they're they're going to buy a book on I don't know the magic of thinking big or whatever it is bottom line is is that what they're trying to do all all motivation comes from the same place and that motivation comes from a cost-benefit analysis and so you're you're running cost-benefit analysis on on all possible behavioral options everything that you can actually everything that you can imagine you can't run cost-benefit analysis on things you can't imagine so that's the value of getting new information is because new information will alter the matrix of how does that your head works and new information will cause you to alter your cost-benefit analysis whether it causes you to well alter your behavior is unknown because it may it may not actually cause the the ultimate decisions that arise out of the cost-benefit analysis to change so for example if if we have someone contemplating a dietary change and and we tell them tell some lady that's 50 pounds overweight that if she quits eating Snickers bars she's going to lose five pounds in the next year she just may decide well what's the difference you know it's not really that doesn't that isn't sufficiently attractive to be willing to get put up with that sacrifice if we if we told her that if she would stop the Snickers bars she would lose 50 pounds in the next year she probably wouldn't believe us and so therefore she would do it either so cost-benefit analysis is changed when you believe the the new information and it alters your analysis of the whole value propositions that are that you are observing and that you're contemplating and imagining and and therefore it's it's new information winds up altering the landscape for you and then that that's how behavior changes so that's the that's the source of life improvement and does that make sense yeah that makes sense so so let's say like you tell somebody hey you're going to lose 50 pounds of you this that and the other and they still don't believe you even though it's factually correct I mean do you have to understand or you know you have to under self something no there's all kinds of all kinds of problems there so there's there's all kinds of details and this is it's very interesting when you're working with people one on one and you are you are actually giving them your the source of the new information it's very interesting to observe that as you give them the new information they it may or may not tilt their cost-benefit analysis and there may be reasons why it doesn't so the primary being the reason is that so for example if I tell somebody that came in there 50 pounds overweight and they eat they eat and do everything wrong so I started explaining to them that if they do things differently that this is the way this is animal nature this is how this works if you feed animals rich food they wind up getting overweight if you feed animals food consistent with their natural history they lose the weight no animal needs to override its hunger Drive in order to be very fit it's the natural state of organisms to be in ideal fitness which maximize is their aesthetic impact on the opposite sex so therefore you will not have to eat less than you want or exercise more than you want etc etc so I explained this and you as you as I then describe what whole natural foods is relative to what it is they're eating their imagination actively starts running the cost-benefit analysis and they start realizing that they're not so motivated to do what it is that I'm saying so now you watch the you watch the ambivalence in the system as you get to different scenarios running in in parallel in the mind in the imagination as they flip back and forth between what it would be like to be 50 pounds lighter and what the impact of that would be versus what it is that they're going to have to get up to get there and and you watch you can sort of observe this dissonance in people with respect to all kinds of things a great deal of human and happiness in fact most of it in this country has to do with things that can be fixed so most things are are solvable most of the there's a reason why people experience happiness the unhappiness that they do and that is that unhappiness is a natural byproduct of of a of a feedback that comes primarily from the the social world where we've had expectations violated in the negative so you thought Susie was going to go out go with you to the prom and it turns out that even though she's been your girlfriend for two months she accepted a prom date from Bill who's the quarterback of the football team okay you're all bent out of shape about it obviously and with good reason so your expectations have been violated in the negative okay when you can be irritated that you expected to wait for five minutes in line at the bank when you got there and it turns out there's 18 people in line and you're going to be there for 40 minutes near your expectations are by later than negative and you're irritated okay so whenever your expectations are violated in the negative you feel bad in some fashion you might feel jealous envious depressed anxious or angry okay a lot of different things you might feel depending upon the context of the situation if your expectations are violated in the positive you're excited happy loving lustful etc in other words those are positive feelings you're flattered etc so you have positive feelings that are told you things were better than we thought negative feelings or it's worse than we thought and a relatively pleasant neutrality not just neutral but a pleasant neutrality of life when things sort of never violin either violated nor your your expectation to either direction so what I'm interested in is recurrent moods that are negative and people so someone that's depressed someone that's anxious someone that's bitter or someone that's angry someone that's jealous someone that's envious etc etc so if there's someone who is persistently having a motional tone to their life that is negative that is very interesting to me and it's interesting to me because it it would not be consistent with the natural history of the organism for that to be a chronic state okay so that the the state that they're in they're in that state because something about their relationship between themselves and theirs particularly their social environment is violating their expectations in the negative Veon okay so that's what's happening so people that are like angry all the time generally it's because they they're disagreeable people and they are they have an unusual genetic variant there and as a result they're very entitled about a number of things and they're going to spend a great deal of their life irritable irritated and with conflicted interpersonal relationships etc someone who is not that way but it's irritated and angry right now and bitter about something and has been even for a few years that could be a situational dynamic between them and somebody else where they have they believe they've been treated very unfairly okay so that's a that's a different situation so anyway my point is that and what I'd like to to share with anybody that's listening is that if you're unhappy about anything that unhappiness is not an inevitable byproduct of being a human now Freud thought so Freud actually believed that life was just kind of miserable and that was just sort of the nature of human life and that's just how it was that's not true as it's very clearly not the case so that says more about his thinking and his own personal existence than it does about anything intelligent about psychological theory beyond you are designed by nature to strive for circumstances that yield improvements and when those improvements happen you're designed to get a noticeable shift in your mood towards positive and when when you fall short or you're negative or you get negative feedback then you're going to have a negative feedback etc but the system is absolutely built well in order to encourage the following and this is the fundamental basis of what's actually happening and this is very deep biology and then we're going to we'll peer down deep into the biology and then we'll quickly come back up and talk about humans and how it is that we address problems of any type fundamentally what's going on is that an animal is just a little device for reproducing DNA and that animal what makes it an animal instead of a plant is that this thing moves around and has muscles and as a nervous system and so now and so really what this thing has is it has a couple sources of energy that it's going to utilize in order to orchestrate behavioral patterns that are going to optimize its genetic success so those two sources of energy are going to be calories that are going to eat and the other source of energy is going to be neural energy or it's going to be the the capability of its brain to run computations it's going to it's going to have that energy replenished by sleeping so obviously as they build neurotransmitters from food so this is this is how what this thing is so if you don't think of it as a human think of it as a generic organism that what it's going to be is it simply an animal that has the capacity for movement so it can shift its location in space and it does so by contracting muscles and relaxing other muscles in a pattern that alters its location so when you are talking to some pretty girl Nate you are actually altering your location you are as your mouth moves your mouth is moving because muscles are contracting and muscles are relaxing in a specific pattern for you to actually have words come out of your mouth that are that are discernible by the person that you're talking to okay that's that's what's actually trends that that's what's happening you know what is that when they like they run away really quickly after start talking to them yeah that's that's bad feedback just so you know in case you need help with a scorecard okay so you're also contracting certain muscles in order for you to remain standing okay and if you're like most men when an attractive woman is around you suck in your your chest you suck in your stomach that isn't because you might be fat because if our listeners would know this but Nate's not fat at all is in superb shape but what you also do when you suck in your stomach is you actually make the distinction between your chest your chest shoulders and chest and your stomach a greater distinction and that distinction that V or that that that V pattern or a triangular upside down triangle pattern is a is attractive females so you enhance that by sucking in your stomach so that's case you wanted to know why you're sickening your stomach or actually you already knew why you're suck in your stomach but now I know why you're sucking in your stomach and now you know that I know oh yeah I've read somewhere about this golden ratio where like if your shoulders are perfect ratio to your to your hips for men and that's not that women find that exceedingly attractive right is there something about others - oh yeah no there's no question about this so so it's going to turn out that just as males have ratios that signal to them that a female is very attractive that they there's reasons why this could be we're not actually all together sure what all the reasons are there's probably is probably more than one reason the but it but it is so so it's very clear that males have preferences for certain shapes of the female form and and females have preferences for the shape of the male form and they're there they're actually they're actually very stereotyped and you can see see what they are so the the hourglass shape of the female and the the sort of equilateral kind of triangle upside down for the male with broad shoulders and narrow waistline this is this is absolutely consistent with if you were to take data which people have on the statistical likelihood of a male having sex with partners outside of his primary relationship that likelihood is is much higher the the better that ratio is in other words what it's what's doing is it's it's a they are they are approached and they are signaled by females that they find attractive for what we call extra pair copulations in other words ie no and no investment just give me some DNA and that's that's what happens in the real world with respect to gene reproduction so okay so so for guys who are trying to do this they don't necessarily need to look like on abortion agar if they're pretty skinny they just they probably want to work their shoulders pretty well and then if they're if they're overweight all they need to do is lose it lose the weight in the waistline and now they can alter that that now Here I am trying to like explain very deep theory and where we go where we're instantly sidetracked into details which you know it's very interesting when people try to stick their heads in the sand about human nature human nature is actually not hard to determine all you have to do is be willing to open your eyes without sticking your head in the Senate so for example so the people people make many comments about the culture and issues of man woman differences and so on and so forth it's very clear the the males are in the gym pushing the weights in order to get bigger okay very obvious they are also trying to get their hands on money okay so they want two things they want muscles and money which will make them more attractive they are not stupid they are reading the cues of females they also intuitively know how the female brain works to some degree and so there's a reason why we sell BMWs and gym memberships that's a that's a very clear thing females are at Macy's in front of the one of the greatest frauds in the world which is makeup and so they're there with a bunch of attractive females as models for how good they could look if they they put this stuff on them and they're caught in in an evolutionary arms race because the other females are are doing the same thing and so females have no doubt been painting their faces and trying to change the contours of their faces and trying to enhance their fertility cues for god knows how long we know it goes back certainly through ridden human culture and if it goes back that 6,000 years we know it goes back on other 60,000 so females are extremely concerned about their sexiness and their appearance so our males males are additionally concerned with their resources which are clearly a derivative and of their ability to hunt and protect and defend and so this is just evolution playing out itself in the 21st century very clearly not all make sense mmm yeah so back to the deep important stuff thanks guys okay so what's going to happen here is that when we're trying to change oh so what an organism is is it's simply trying to move around landscape contracting muscles in a pattern though optimized DNA reproduction now when we get all the way to a human well we don't have to get there first first of all we can have to do is we could say that clearly what's going to happen is that it contracts these muscles in these patterns this is not random it what what these things have is they've got pre-programmed knowledge of how valuable certain targets are made food habitats etc and so there they moved may move in ways that enhance their relationship to the environment with respect to the opportunities and the threats and their habitats so a rabbit doesn't have to learn that Fox is dangerous it already inherently knows it doesn't need to know it doesn't need to learn that a hole is a good place to hide it already knows it doesn't need to learn that carrots are a good thing to eat it already knows the organisms come with a library that sits inside there their DNA and gets reproduced effect we created in in flesh and blood inside their brain in order to do these computations and help the organism on its way when they are successful and they get successful feedback it feels good to them and when they get distressing or they get negative feedback or they reduce their likelihood of survival reproduction they feel bad so organisms have good feelings and bad feelings for a reason and good feelings and bad feelings are tracking their there are reflection of genetic benefits and costs in the natural history of that species so when a pretty girl smiles that you Nate that feels good you don't have to learn that that's a good thing you didn't even ever have to get laid you knew that that was a good thing before you ever got laid okay you knew that that Smile is a statistical this is signal of increased statistical likelihood of getting laid right and so you and so therefore you're already designed by nature to figure out what did I do that made that Crowell smile okay so if you if you talk positively about some political candidate and she's smiling then you're going to continue to talk positively about that political candidate you're not stupid okay you're you're simply tracking what it is that you seem to be doing that seems to be associated with the positive feedback and you're trying to morph your behavior in order to have that good feedback continue that that basic strategy is the same strategy when you're trying to sell shoes it's the same strategy when you're trying to keep your job or get a promotion it's the same strategy when you're trying to have the fosters over to your house to say that you can be friends because you think that they're cool people and it's the same thing when you're trying to find a mate what you're trying to do is you're trying to do things contract muscles in a way that will effectively result in positive feedback and if you're a human the social world is critical if you're a leopard the social world is not as important your contracting muscles in a way that reduced the likelihood of your of your kittens getting killed and reduces increased likelihood of you making a kill on some food so this is uh depend upon what kind of organism it is its contracting muscles in ways that are efficient and effective for its biological success now let's look at human life and human life improvement people do things as best they can they try to they try to figure things out they look for patterns they have the genes helping them they don't they know who the good-looking people are they know how good-looking they are they know where it is that they should be targeting their efforts and they know when they're wasting their time so and the average guy doesn't try to hit on the prom queen the prom queen doesn't even give a glance or a smile at an average guy unless she's trying to get something out of him by by dangling her sexuality in front of him so that it'll sign some paper or look the other way or give her a better grade on a test in other words she has no she has no intention of having a relationship with this guy so the human beings are are maneuvering as best they can our question is why would anybody be persistently depressed or persistently thwarted or stymied in a given domain the answer is that there's a limited number of reasons why this can be true the the first reason can be they can be miscalibrated which means that they can actually think that they're better than they are that's one possibility that is certainly what it looks like in other words when when someone is their business isn't going as well or socially they're not doing as well or romantically they're not as doing as well as they think they ought to be doing it would appear that their misery is the result of the fact that their feedback seems to be pretty consistently worse than they expect okay so that that would cause there to be negative feelings now it's also possible that usually usually people don't keep getting negative feedback worse than they expect because pretty soon they learn to expect it so if they make a bunch of efforts and nothing changes what happens is is that their calibration lowers and then they are not as miserable nervous system has no interest in making you miserable it's making you miserable for a reason if you feel insecure you've got insecurities it is about things you're supposed to have insecurities about things you are supposed to feel competitive vulnerabilities and you're supposed to be looking over your shoulder and being concerned about how to address those in order to be more competitively successful if however you have made efforts behind those insecurities and those anxieties to come up you've hustled around you've done what it is that you can you've copied your competitors and your feedback is still substantially lower than you would have expected then what happens is is that first you're depressed and then you make peace with it and so I give the example people people will hear this and they'll first say oh no that's terrible oh does that mean you give up does that mean you just settle on life absolutely not it absolutely does not mean that it means that the system is designed by nature to actually try to get you to utilize your muscular contractions and your neurons firing in such a way that is optimal to optimize your particular situation it's not here to just have you settle at a mediocre life that's not what it's here to do at all it's going to use excitement and joy and love and lust and misery and disappointment and heartbreak it's going to use it all it's going to use every single tool in the toolbox to try to get you to live your life optimally and if it turns out that you've set your sights too high if you hustle around every way that you can think and then you fail what's going to happen is you're not going to give up on life and then feel like you're mediocre and you have to live mediocre simply what's going to happen is you're going to set your sights lower changes everything you don't do this consciously it's done unconsciously so this is a the example that I give is 85% of eighth-grade boys believe they're going to be professional athletes only one in 10,000 people will to be a professional athlete most those professional athletes do not become wealthy okay so it's going to turn out that very few people find fame or fortune in athletics almost nobody and yet almost none of us are miserable about this so I'll just ask you need did you ever ever have any any legitimate quasi fantasies that you might be a professional athlete when I was playing hockey in high school in college I used to joke around my teammates and say yeah one day I'll be a 40 year old you know rookie for the Pittsburgh Penguins AHA so in other words so so you have to played hockey did you play hockey at the collegiate level no no not not that not that good that's why I was Joel and I thought it would take me three hours to get to the level of a rookie right but you where did you grow up in the north somewhere where they had ice no I grew up in Southern California so I started rolling in yeah Natick when I was airborne and I wasn't born in January February like Malcolm Gladwell claims so right that's what is that that that must you know you can felt the right astrologer you would have known okay so all right the point is is that so it turns out you're just kind of a loser in this whole way so you didn't have any dreams that had to die I am I do remember singing I did all seriousness I do remember thinking that man if I were pretty hard I will try I can I can get to that level and then it was just shattered pretty quickly because I wasn't I wasn't even the top 10% of rice players so yes yeah usually this this realization sinks in to almost of people by the 11th grade after they haven't made the JV team and then it's completely it's actually off everybody's mind 99% of them by the first year of college of the ones that are actually collegiate athletes this persists for a little while till they find out that they're not a starter in their third year if they are is if there are even a scholarship athlete and if it turns out that there is star a star on their team it it becomes clear in the course of the season that that they're not they're rarely the best player on the floor at which point they'll start you know slowly watching their their their calibration in no miserable fashion but they they become calibrated and they realize that it might be a good idea to get that degree in communications so that maybe they can get a job alright now the so the point is miss calibration is is a very it's a ubiquitous characteristic of humans they're going to tend to very often shoot too high and they're going to expend some energy there it would be a disaster if you had a chip that wasn't willing to shoot too high because you might you might underestimate yourself which would be an evolutionary crime so you would absolutely would be worth putting out some effort to find out if you can have quick and easy relative success in a given area ie that you have quote Talent and we would want to make sure that you have big dreams about the possibility of demonstrating your superiority over your competitors by by making you think that the world is going to bow to you so people put out some effort kids shoot baskets in the driveway they put on rollerskates and try to become Wayne Gretzky until in California and they they all try to become Joe Montana or these days Tom Brady or whatever it all says it that they're trying to do the trying to become Michael Jordan now and those Mis calibrations are are quietly reorganized into accurate calibrations and the person then spends their life pursuing opportunities that make the most sense at the time ok so and so new information calibrates the system now what about misery that's persistent ok misery that's persistent is actually a very interesting signal and that interesting signal indicates that the evidence is unclear about what what the person situation really is so this person might be in a relationship where they're pretty unhappy but the problem is you know they have moments where they're pretty happy and then it turns out they're not happy and then in turn turns out that they're kind of happy and then maybe it's going to be fine and then it turns out it's not happy at cetera so what they're getting is they're getting conflicting evidence and the conflicting evidence is very frustrating for the system the nervous system is trying to figure out what is the right course of action and it it looks for the patterns and tries to figure out how to be successful and it changes and modifies things in order to try to see whether or not they can find a sweet spot where the feedback is finally consistent with the expectations so a great example would this for this would be hitters in the major leagues or golfers okay you won't see football players and basketball players doing too much tweaking of their of their skills because their skills are more gross motor coordination but but hitting and pitching as well as golf these are very fine motor coordination skills and the difference between success and being an also-ran is very very narrow very few neurons here and a few neurons there and so as a result people tweak and tweak and tweak and tweak and tweak and and and they patiently are impatiently modify their strategies a little bit and and they're either they either move towards more success or they don't and if they you know if they their expectations are consistently violated the negative they wind up increasingly frustrated and unhappy they will eventually so one of the big problems in life is when you get sort of confusing feedback a great example would be a relationship where one partner is not that much not into the other partner but the other partner really likes the the first partner and so they're hopeful and they continue to be hopeful that maybe this relationship could work out you know they've been together seven years they've got a lot invested they're best friends etc etc and this thing is is frustrating as hell that the partner that isn't as much into this other partner you know you know hopes to maybe make it work and sort of signals that the other partner needs to make some changes but they try to be nice about it because they're not sure whether or not it will really make any difference anyway and if you if you signal that that those changes need to be made then you're essentially got an implied contract that that if if the person makes those changes then they will be acceptable so this is this is a this is a nasty little situation that many people are in and it's a tough one because essentially if you're the person if you're the rejected party on a side of this kind of a mess the problem is it's hard to get calibrated it's hard to get calibrated because sometimes things seem to be good and then other times they seem to be bad and when you can't seem to get control of it and and that's pretty frustrating so the second the second situation is not miss calibration it's actually that we're getting real live failure feedback and we and but it's confusing and we can't figure out the pattern of success now the this could be with a lot of things could be the career could be with the relationship with your parents could be relationship where the romance could be romantic partners in general all could be many things so what we're going to try to do in the next few minutes is sort of talk about a some general principles at how to succeed at life improvement there's there's a fundamental process that we want to get to there's a fundamental process that we're going to use and it's a process called a position of power and a position of power takes place that with whatever it is that you want this mate this job this career this success this Friendship Circle this house this car etc this body whatever it is that is that you're seeking those things have competitive constraints on them and you may or may not have of what it takes to obtain those things okay those things are not under your direct control they are you have indirect influence over whether or not you can obtain that mate obtain that feedback obtain that job obtain that doctorate obtain that level of success obtain that house etcetera you do not have direct control in fact it is not under your control it is only under your indirect influence relative to your efforts so therefore you are not in a position of power with respect to whether or not you have those things so what we want to do is we want to get to a position of power in a position of power is a psychological place that is basically inner peace that comes with realizing that if we don't get there that we're going to survive this is a it's very useful to consider with respect to mates job financial success or anything else under the Sun that the following is true number one there is essentially an if infinite possibility of an infinite number of mates you've got a lot of time you could find a new one there is no one mate that settles the issue right there's no one job that settles the issue there's no one house that settles the issue etc okay human beings have been happy and very happy without any fancy houses and without any fancy cars without any fancy titles and without any fancy glorious anything without any number one New York Times bestsellers etc the human beings have been happy when they have earned esteem and the right way from the people that matter to them that will create human happiness so our job is to take aim at that process and the most important person that we're going to earn a steam from is going to be from the individual themselves so the most important component when it comes to any clinical problem that walks through my door no matter what the person is frustrated about no matter what what competitive situation them stymied frustrated depressed miserable anxious jealous doesn't matter what it is okay we go through a series of steps where we walk our way through psychologically some very important truths and the important truths are that that no one person no one goal no one situation is is the deciding factor of our happiness if that were true that would indeed be cruel okay it turns out that that's not true because your happiness is dependent upon whether or not you earn a steam in the right way from the people to matter and you can do that that is always possible that is always within your possibility if you do very good things and you do them in a very good way and you don't get a steam from some people then they're not the right people okay so the and the most important person that we're going to earn a steam from is the person themselves so this this now ties in to how it is that we set goals so when we set goals for self improvement in any dimension the reason why we're setting those goals for self improvement is because we're attempting to become more competitive in some very important competitive arena of life it's it usually has to do with our our competitiveness in the marketplace with respect to either finances with respect to mates or with respect to friends that's generally it's generally some process like that so it's going to turn out but whatever those things are whatever the competitive niche it is that we are trying to deal with that there are obvious sub goals that are involved in becoming more competitive if you're an actress there's things that you can do to become a better actress if you're trying to be a soccer player there's things that you can do to become a better soccer player if you're trying to be a sales person there's things that you could be do to become a better sales person if you're trying to be a surgeon there's things that you could do to increase you're likely to become an insurgence in other words there's always something that you can do and those things are usually not very complicated but they might be just complicated enough that you're not very good at them and they're what I call the fundamentals or the rudiments and so we can break down any competitive problem to rudiments we always can and we look at those rudiments and our job usually we can look out at the marketplace and see what other people are doing better than the individuals doing maybe they're thinner maybe they're more muscular maybe they're wealthier maybe they have better hair if they have better clothes better car better country-club who knows what it is that they have better and maybe it's making an influence on the marketplace and maybe it isn't but the point is is that our job is to break down whatever the competitive problem is and address our competitive deficits right now we might look at the competitive deaths of deficits and say you know what I don't want to do it I'm good enough at which point it's very useful to draw a line between the competitive deficit and the negative feedback that we're getting from the marketplace and we could say we we believe there's a reason why the marketplace has given you feedback that is not as good as you want and it's because we have a competitive deficit over here ok the and the person is yes but I don't want to address the competitive deficit no problem to cost-benefit analysis right sometimes the person doesn't want to address the competitive deficit because they don't think that they can actually do it that they can't improve that much our job is to fearlessly address competitive deficits by attempting to address the fundamental components of the competitive deficit and put the time and energy and effort in in order to improve this and if it turns out that it does not address the competitive deficit sufficiently to improve our market enough that we're all excited about it then so be it but what does happen when we do this is the following is that the self-esteem mechanism notices or diligent effort the self-esteem and ISM cannot help itself it is a ruthless and pitiless judge it cares about it watches us and it watches our degree of effort and it give us our feedback about our our competitive effort the Nathaniel Branden who is a Los Angeles psychologist he was a member of the so called Objectivist movement in the 1960s he was a protege of the philosopher novel assign Rand and he went on broke away from that and and became a sort of major theorist and thinker in the concepts of self-esteem he never did tie self-esteem into evolutionary process he didn't understand that he died before that became sort of mainstream thinking and lead academic psychology but he had many fine insights about self-esteem as with some mistakes but some many many fine insights and what he said or one of his quotes is that self-esteem is the reputation that you have with yourself and this is exactly accurate this is precisely right that a lot of human unpleasantness or or negative feelings and depression of course what we see on the surface is the person's frustration and feelings of defeat or anger with the market feedback they're upset at being rejected they feel like it's unfair or they feel defeated and it feels hopeless whatever it is that the situation is they're the only reason they're experiencing a negative reaction is because their expectations are violated in the negative and they are at a loss because they don't understand really the dynamics or if they think they understand the dynamics they feel powerless to change them our job as individuals or certainly as a therapist but even as an individual addressing your own life your job is to look at this as fearlessly as possible and maybe you need help and maybe don't maybe all you need is the clarity to say listen what is my competitive deficit what would it take how much effort would it take to improve the competitive feedback the truth is there's almost always something that you can do to improve your competitive position and almost any domain and so what we're talking about here is neurons violent firing and muscles contracting we're talking about hustle and it's going to turn out that if we start to put out hustle and we start to also use our brains and learn and ask questions and get expert feedback an opinion and learn and grow and make more efforts and fail and then try to study the failure what will happen is that our our ability to succeed in this domain will evolve and it is certainly not going to evolve down it can only evolve up as we get more more competence and so what will happen along the way as we as we fight for every bit of increased competence at these rudiments or fundamentals is our self esteem mechanism will be observing us and it will be nodding its head and knowing that we are trying and giving good effort now the biggest secret in in psychology not known to psychologists there are many secrets that they don't know but the biggest one that people don't know is they don't know just how fast the self-esteem mechanism can change this is what people don't know so let me let me just fire a few examples this could be a person that's out of shape this is a guy that it's kind of overweight and he's not very strong and he's is he doesn't feel very good about himself and he doesn't feel very competitive he doesn't get feedback from the women that he would really want to get feedback from he's a he's a five but he's genetically a seven and he doesn't he's not so arrogant that he that he thinks he could get a ten but he's kind of hoping and he's holding out for an eight and he's 35 years old and he's 40 pounds overweight and he does a little drinking and he smokes a little pot and he isn't doing that well financially and he's frustrated and lonely okay this guy has all kinds of options all kinds of options there is nothing there is no human being standing between him and becoming fabulously in condition there is no human standing in the way okay there's no human standing in the way from him getting extra jobs on the weekends and finding out how to get his life financially better so that he's he's in better shape financially there's nothing standing in the way from him eating much much healthier food and getting his skin cleared up there's nothing stopping him from getting a better haircut than the haircut that he's got there's nothing to stop him from earning some of that extra money and getting better clothes than the one that he's got and a better car than the one that he's got so literally this guy if you would actually contract some muscles get to sleep on time shut the shut the internet off at 10 o'clock get up in the morning and exercise etc literally this guy could turn his life completely around and there's nobody stopping him okay now the reason why I feel passionately about this is that people I'm not I'm not berating people like a Methodist minister I want people are asleep at the switch very often they're suffering quietly they're suffering indefinitely that and they do not understand and grasp just how much control they have what this guy looks at is he thinks wow that would be a lot of effort I'm not even sure it would pay off you know I'm not even sure that if I ever found somebody that you know I'm I'm not if I found somebody if I turn my life around in eight months from now everything look great I might find somebody but I would feel like a fraud it's like all this is going through his head then she finds out for my friends that I used to be 40 pounds heavier then she she dumps me etc etcetera who knows what goes through this head but here's what goes through my head what he doesn't know is that in three weeks his self-esteem mechanism will be excited he know that he's three weeks away if he does an excellent job his self-esteem mechanism will be nodding at him like a like a very tough dairy on a straight alpha football coach that's basically saying good job good job I can see you're working hard you may be the weakest guy on our team but I'm watching you hop those bleachers in the Sun and I'm seeing you work really hard and that's alright that's alright the Oglethorpe you're doing alright okay that's exactly what that internal coach is going to be saying if you work hard and that feeling self-esteem feeling is is drowned out or can be seemingly drowned out by how acute the feedback feedback is when the esteem mechanism gets feedback from other people the direct feedback from other people is very acute and very impactful the self-esteem mechanism is very slow and very methodical okay the esteem mechanism reaction to other people is like the stock market going up and down every day and everybody's either excited or devastators that moves the self-esteem mechanism is like the quarterly average of how this thing moves if you put three weeks in on this thing you put the first dot on the graph and the self-esteem mechanism looks behind at the last three weeks and says you're doing a pretty good job okay so this is how it is we attach those rudiments and improve their abilities in those areas and their feelings about themselves will generally improve much more rapidly than the feedback will from the outside world okay we get addicted to the process of defending and enhancing the reputation that we have with ourselves that's the the lesson that echoes through Nathaniel Brandon's work and it's the it forms the core of what it is that that I try to do with what I call us Team Dynamics fantastic and for anybody listening if you do feel like you have a problem that is outside the scope of just what you've heard feel free to call into the show and have a session with dr. Lyle on air with a you know talking about a problem we can walk you through it or your website right it's a steam dynamics org and they can talk to you one-on-one very good well thank you very much my pleasure and we'll talk to you next week
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