When Beliefs Bend Reality: A Fireside Chat with Shawn Achor

Today we have a wonderful opportunity to meet with a bestselling author, Shawn Achor. He just published a wonderful book called The Power of Beliefs: How Strengthening 7 Core Beliefs Predicts Greater Success and a Better Life. Thank you, Shawn, for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me.

There's something that struck me in the book. It's what you call the Great Drift. What does that term mean? Can you define that for us?

So the Great Drift is a period of time where, that's very recent, where we've shifted the way that we look at the world. Through all of human history, our collective beliefs came from our job, our village, our political structure, and our religious structure. But only recently we've become untethered from all 4 of them. People don't stay in the same village anymore. We scatter across the world for work and for school. And, you know, Even when we stay in the same village, face-to-face contact has dropped by 60% over the past 2 decades. And we don't stay with the same jobs. Gallup found only 14% of people want to have the same job next year that they have this year, which is historical low, which means we're not finding the meaning for the most part that we used to feel within our occupation when we stayed with a job or we saw our work impacted the village. And we have the lowest trust in the political structure in the United States that we've had in the past 70 years. And in the United States, this is US-centric data, but in 2000, only 5% of people claimed to have no religious beliefs. Today, that's 24%. So there's been this massive shift that's occurred across the past 2 decades, and we're still hungry for belief. We're still hungry for meaning. But during this period of great drift where we've drifted away from those collective sources of shared beliefs, we cling onto individual beliefs that are being espoused by people around us. We grab onto influencers who are just as angry or disillusioned as the rest of us, or we grab onto OnlyFans subscriptions because we're lonely, or we scroll through social media hoping to get hits of dopamine instead of just feeling like we're missing out on what the rest of the world has. And it's left these scars upon us, these 7 negative core beliefs that are shaping why we see elevated rates of depression, anxiety. It's the belief that my behavior doesn't matter, that I'm alone, that I don't matter, that this work is not meaningful, or I have nothing to be grateful for, I'm missing out, or there's nothing greater than me. Those beliefs have become stronger during the Great Drift. And the goal of the book is how do we find a way of strengthening the opposite poles of those so we can move back to a place where we feel greater levels of meaning and purpose within our lives?

You argue that beliefs don't reflect reality, they bend reality. How do Beliefs bend reality.

Beliefs can be real, even if they're not true. So let's take the example of, for example, a child who is in college, who could be surrounded by friends that care about them, have 2 loving parents that would die for them, that have coaches and professors and mentors who all want them to grow. But if that student believes that he or she is unlovable or believes that they're alone. Those beliefs aren't true based upon the reality, but they are real in terms— it creates real quantifiable impacts. It bends the trajectory of that person's life. They feel like that because they're alone, it bends them towards depression or anxiety or away from getting connected within a community or believing that they're valuable. So in the book, what I'm arguing for is that if you look at the research on beliefs, what we find is that beliefs literally change the math About what's possible and probable in our lives. By changing the math, beliefs change our path, and it can bend us towards performance or it could bend us away from it. So some of the most famous examples of this, I know, you know, like stereotype threat research, where if you have a student, let's take a female student or a Black student, and which is what they used in the original studies of stereotype threat. And then for half of the students before taking a math test, they would prime them with an article that says, Women and Black students are bad at math, and then they go take a math test. The other half, um, before taking the math test, just read a neutral article that has nothing to do with either. And what they find is that if you prime the belief that people like me are bad at math, it turns out it bends what happens next. They actually perform worse on math tests after that prime. So what we're seeing is that, and if you don't have the prime, like we saw in the neutral category, What you see is they perform at the normal levels. We should have seen both groups performing equally, but the belief that I shouldn't be able to be successful limits the performance you see on the backside. We get, we even get worse at math, which is something quantitative. It's not even something emotional. And we see this on the opposite side with sports. We see people who believe that if they do the same routine before swinging a bat, or if they have the same routine before making a sales call, or we see You know, athletes wearing the same socks over and over again, like Serena Williams. As soon as she starts winning, she doesn't wash her socks. She just keeps wearing them. And she says it's gross, but it works. What she means is that she believes, despite all of her incredible genetic endowment and that her— she's got this incredible decades of training, she's one of the most successful tennis stars ever, that If she wears the same socks, that's gonna help her perform better. But when you do the research on it, we find that if you believe that this action will increase my performance, it is an increased likelihood of bending the reality, increasing the likelihood of a greater level of competition or performance or even getting a sale.

What you describe is really that the beliefs about you are not always true. And you can change them. So the question is, how can you tell yourself that you are the unicorn?

And it's the heart of the research that I've been trying to focus upon is, can we change our beliefs? Or are we just an amalgamation of all the beliefs that are given to us? Like people advertising and saying you're not good enough unless you have this product or that you won't live this long. There's a great study that came out after the book that came out at Yale. about aging. And we believe that as we get older, we decline mentally and physically. Yale researchers followed individuals for 12 years, which we never do for scientific studies. They followed 11,000 seniors for 12 years from 65 to 77. And what they found is if you track them on the same physical and mental scales, metrics, that at age 77, we were right. You decline mentally and physically. And for the average person, You decline mentally and physically. But if you look into the research, what you, what they found was that 32% of the seniors, 1 out of 3 of them, had enough escape velocity to actually, their cognitive abilities on the backside at age 77 were higher than they were at age 65. So I'm not arguing that cognitive decline doesn't occur. It does occur, but it doesn't necessarily occur from age 65 to 77. There was actually growth that occurred For 1 out of 3 of the seniors, 26% of the seniors actually were better physically at 77 than they were at 65, which completely breaks down our notions of what is a scientific fact. And they went one step deeper into the research. And I think this gets to your question. What they looked at is why is there a split? Why do some seniors decline and why do you see others grow? And The only thing that they could find differentiating them, if you held everything else constant, was the belief that as you get older, you decline, or the belief that as I get older, growth is still possible. That belief doesn't guarantee a positive outcome. People can pass away at 66. But what we're finding is positive beliefs don't guarantee positive outcomes, but they do propel us towards them. So much so that 1 out of 3 of the seniors did better. So what we're looking at is in our society is let's look at the research and be like, are these beliefs that we hold serving us? And which ones are not true and which ones are holding us back? What's fascinating about the stereotype threat research that I mentioned is that for most people, if you tell them people like you do worse at this action, whether it's basketball or math or sales or, uh, coin, uh, like reading ability, Um, whatever it is, they find that the majority of people after hearing that belief, they actually perform worse. But 10% of people, this is deep down into the research that we never get to because we normally look at the averages. Deep down in the research, 10% of the people that if you tell them a limiting belief, they go the exact opposite direction. If you tell them they're bad at math, they actually perform better at math than they would have otherwise because you've activated some sort of a signature belief that they hold. That they believe deep down, no, I can put anything I put my mind to, or that's not true. I'm actually good at math. I've got previous examples of this. I'm going to show you on this test. And what happens is for that 10%, they perform in a better way. So what we're looking for is how do we either become those people that have built up those signature beliefs, those beliefs that my behavior matters, that I am not alone, that I matter, that this work is meaningful, that there's something greater than me. Those beliefs, when we hold them, It turns out it acts as a shield against those negative limiting beliefs that other people hold. And not only do we feel better about ourselves, but all this research shows it changes how long we live. It changes how well we perform. The work I was doing at the companies we work with, we measure sales all the time. It's one of the easiest things to measure because we quantify it. It's not something as nebulous as engagement can be, right? And so what we did was we looked to see how sales improved over time when people held those beliefs. And what we found is that cross-industry, if you get someone to move from a neutral belief to the top quartile of optimism, the belief that my behavior matters and that this work is meaningful, if you get them to the top quartile of optimism, their sales rise 2 years later, cross-industry, by 37%. So what we're seeing is we can see massive shifts that occur as our beliefs bend that reality.

What you're saying is that PNA overrides DNA.

I like that. And you've talked to so many people who, you know, have been espousing this for, for so long. I think the research is catching up to the people who have been talking about the role that a positive mindset has in terms of our levels of performance. Athletes have known this without necessarily knowing the research behind it. But when we do the research, what we start to see is that we start with DNA, we start with an environment, some people's environment is better than other people's environment, but that's the starting point. From there, there's massive amounts of movement, and one of the greatest predictors of long-term performance is the beliefs that we hold about the world.

Yeah, it's all about the right mindset, the right skill set, and the right tool set.

Yes, that's right.

Let's shift to your 7 core beliefs. Let's start with the one that's the most difficult, in your opinion, to Create and maintain.

I think the one we struggle with the most in this society, unfortunately, is the belief that I'm alone. We have a loneliness epidemic according to the US Surgeon General, which it's one of those things we were talking about where a student can be surrounded by people that care about them, but we feel alone. Part of the reason for that is we erode the meaning structures that we have within our life and assume that people are only our people. If they agree with us and if they know everything that's going on in our life and it's the closest people, but then the closest people are also the ones we struggle with because you're in community with them. So then we start to jettison people off. And as a result of that, not only do we lose the weak ties, we lose the strong ties as well. And the problem with that is that researchers have found if you look at a hill you need to climb in front of you, your brain will show you a picture of that hill. What we didn't realize is if the person is alone looking at the hill and they believe that they'll be alone climbing the hill, The picture their brain shows them of that hill in their visual cortex is 10 to 15% steeper than the hill that they perceive if they're standing next to someone that they believe is going to climb the hill with them. Standing next to someone you believe is going to climb the hill with you shouldn't change your picture of the hill. But what your brain is doing is even before you decide whether or not I'm going to climb a hill, your brain is already warped and bent reality. Based upon some core beliefs. And one of them is whether or not I'm going to be alone climbing this hill or if I'm with other people. And those are the physical ones. Those are the ones we use with the Marines out at Camp Pendleton that I've been working with, 6 battalions of Marines out there. But then what we started to morph into realizing is it wasn't just the physical hills, it's the emotional hills as well. Trying to hit a sales target, trying to overcome debt, or trying to look at the news and see all these things are outside of our control and still believe that in the midst of an AI revolution, that there are ways in which My behavior still matters, or that I am connected to other people, or that I matter. And as we're doing this, those hills in front of us are collapsing or expanding based upon whether or not we think we're alone facing this challenge. Like, I'm alone, I'm going after this sales target, I alone have to figure out these debts, or I alone am going to find someone to marry. When in reality, there's so much interplay that's occurring within the ecosystem, therefore missing out Those hills in front of us loom larger and it decreases our likelihood of wanting to climb those hills. But when we start to connect to other people to realize, hey, we're not alone facing this AI challenge, or we're not alone as we're trying to achieve goals, whether it's a sales target or it's a production target, or whether it's getting good grades in school, or whether it's making sure your kids get to school with lunches. What we're finding is that as we look at those hills, the more we realize that we're not alone, And that we're with other people and that even if people disagree with one another, that we're still connected. Turns out those hills start to collapse. And not only does it increase the likelihood of us climbing them, but the success, we live longer, our symptoms become less acute. And Google found that one, the greatest predictor of a team's performance is the social cohesion on the team is whether or not people feel like that they're connected or not. So it's one of the ones we struggle with the most, but has one of the greatest impacts.

I think there are 2 more factors that we need to mention. One is the why. Why are you climbing that hill? Yeah, and the bigger the why, the bigger the try, the easier the how.

I think what we keep seeing when you look across these different authors and researchers, you keep finding these same patterns emerging. That's what I feel like I was doing in this book is I wasn't trying to create something new. I was looking for these umbrella categories that We have beliefs about everything. We have beliefs about whether or not Waymos are safe. We have beliefs about whether or not crypto has value. We have beliefs about what clothes to wear or whether or not we should be working 20 hours or 80 hours. We have beliefs about everything, but a lot of those beliefs don't change us very much. What I was looking for, what are the most predictive beliefs that if you think about people that are suffering in your life, that are really struggling at work or emotionally with their families, Usually there's an external factor. And also I'm willing to bet, I'm willing to bet money that they're struggling with one of those 7 core beliefs that they believe that in the midst of this challenge, my behavior doesn't matter, right? Or that I'm alone or I don't matter, or that this work is just not meaningful, or I have nothing to be grateful for. I'm missing out, or there's nothing greater than me. I'm willing to bet that they're struggling at least with one of those. So what we're looking at is if you can look to see where we're struggling, And we can strengthen the other pole of that. Instead of, I'm alone, I'm with other people. Here are some examples of how that's happening. Here are some actions I'm taking to create that. Suddenly you start to get movement from a negative status quo to something better.

Well, what do you think of positive affirmations as a way of creating a scaffolding for the beliefs?

I love it. And when I, you know, when I start talking about positive affirmations, sometimes I get pushback because people, feel like that they sound soft. I mean, I think that happened ever since that Saturday Night Live clip with Chris Smalley where he had like Michael Jordan look in a mirror and just repeat like, I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.

Right?

But when I talk to people that are very serious about performance, these are elite athletes and military people. They all use language to create that scaffolding you're describing. The people that I find that don't are the ones that feel like it's soft or are the ones that are struggling or that their performance is being buffeted by the external world much more. But when I look at these elite athletes or these elite soldiers, they know that where their words go, so goes their brain. So they're actually trying to create those patterns that are positive. What I attempt to do in the book is not try to push back up that hill towards positive affirmations, which are very valuable. I use them in my own life, But what I was trying to do was maybe one step lower, which was stop doing the negative affirmations, right? Like, or the negative mantras, which, you know, they're all throughout our life. I found that I was doing, one example that I had is when I first got into doing this research, I'm studying happiness initially, and people would call me on the phone and want me to come speak about happiness. And I would tell them about how busy I was. I would be like, I'm traveling all around. I've got so much going on. I was just here. I was just here. And I would get out of breath doing it because I've been traveling so much. I'm barely— my head's above water. I'm trying to, you know, all these, like, I'm drowning right now, I'm swamped, sorry I can't get back to you. All of this was trying to connect to people, but what it was doing was I was changing the— I was bending the conversation. Because after someone tells you how busy they are or overworked they are, they've only got 2 options. They're either gonna commiserate, be like, I'm so sorry things are so hard for you, or they're gonna be like, yeah, life is just so busy, I'm swamped right now too, I'm so busy. No one's gonna go the 3rd route, which is like, I just got back from Cabo and I had an Amazing time, right? They're not going to go that. So what you've done is you've only couched them into a position of feeling sorry for you, or they're going to talk about the negative as well. And as a result of that, those negative statements, which I was saying over and over again like a mantra—I'm busy, I'm swamped—those shape not only the conversation, but they shape me. I could even as I was saying it, I feel myself getting short of breath. Is my body trying to respond? Is actually releasing. neurochemicals preparing me for this fight that I just made up as I'm answering this question, right? And what's amazing about that is if you keep doing them, what happens is that they change us. So what I invited people to do is one of the strategies of the book is to not, is not to take on more, it's to take on less in the sense that let's identify what these negative mantras are instead of adding a positive affirmation. Let's just start by eliminating these.

I'd like to get a personal story from you when you did this wonderful TED Talk. I mean, you did several, but When you did your first one, before you walked out on stage, how did you talk to yourself?

So I did the opposite. What's interesting is that one, I was supposed to have 18 minutes to talk, but I was the last person of the day. So they're like, you have 12 minutes and then we have to shut off the lights. So I already went in being like, I was like, I'm going to do what I can do because I had practiced this talk, polished it. It was already hard to go from an hour to 18 minutes. And then I had to cut a third of it on the fly. And there's a moment, if you watch the TED Talk, where early on people in the audience start to laugh at something I said, and you see me panic a little bit. I'm like, there is not time for this. Don't laugh. I didn't, I didn't account for this. But when I walked on stage, I was like, let's do what I can do. And what it was, I think I remember, I remember thinking this clearly because there was only so much I could do with 12 minutes and I wanted to change people's lives. I wanted to get 2 semesters of research out to people and you can't in 12 minutes. So you can't in 18 minutes, you can't do it in an hour. And so what I was really trying to tell myself is what can I do in this moment? And let's do that. And then I didn't try to make it big. It wasn't like, I hope this goes viral because that would have made me nervous. I was like, well, this talk's ruined. I'll think about the next one. That negative statement would drive a negative outcome. Right. And as a result of that, it just allows you to work within the parameters that we're given based upon.

That environment. Somebody once said that the mind is an echo chamber of the past. How do you deal with those negative experiences that impacted you in the past and you have not let go?

I think there's 2 answers to that that I've seen both with the research in my own life and in talking with people. One of them is I think we have to have an awareness of the possibility for positive change, just like we saw with the Yale study. If you think getting older automatically means that you're going to deteriorate, you deteriorate faster. The same thing is true with going through difficult times in our life. Failures, things didn't go like you want to, a divorce, trauma early on in life. And what we hear from a lot of the research is we're trying to be compassionate, but what we tell people is if you had an early childhood trauma, your brain has a state of debilitation and your long-term outcomes will will be lower. If you hear that, you're like, okay, well then I'm trapped. I had a negative event that occurred in my life. I can't let go of it. And it's only going to create a negative outcome on the backside of it. If you have that belief, that negative event creates a higher likelihood of negative outcomes in the future because there's no other possibility for the brain to pursue. But if you look at the research and if you look at the world, you don't even need the studies for it. Is I worked with very low-income schools, and you meet kids or hear from parents or teachers where you have identical twins in the same house, same poverty, same parents or lack of parents, and one stays in a stagnant place and the other one rises and is successful. Or you find people that go through childhood trauma and then they become incredible social workers. Or if you look at most of the people that are in our space, that are successful, they're there not because of an absence of negative things that happen in their life. They're there because they went through negative things and it shaped who they were. But instead of being debilitating, it created compassion or grit or understanding for other people or altruism. And it caused them to change the path that they were going on. You know, when I work with social workers or creating positive change in other people's lives, the majority of them went through something difficult within their life, right? When I If you read any biography about a famous person, they all have usually in chapter 3, a massive negative that's about to occur within their life. So it's not because of an absence of negative that we can move in those directions. So if there's a negative event that's holding someone back in their life, the first step is to look, does it only create the negative or is there a possibility for the positive? And let's look around to other people who have experienced things like this and realize, I'm not alone. And there's a pathway forward that's possible. And then we research what, what actually those people are doing. One of the things that they do is that they reframe the experience. So 2 people could be in a car accident. I just heard this recently in a different permutation from some doctors here in Dallas. And they said they have patients that are negative and selfish and bad with their kids and bad at work, and they'll get into a car accident or have a heart attack at age 50. And some of them will be like, I hate this world. I don't want to be in a car again. I'm afraid now to drive. That they take from that, that the world is scary, that my behavior doesn't matter and the bad things happen. And other people walk away from the car and they're like, I could have just died. I have a whole new lease on life. I want to invest in my kids. I want to be a better person. I'm going to start joining this religious group, or I'm going to, you know, start caring about the right things at work or at home, whatever it is. And suddenly the same event, which is negative, can create massive splits in what happens next based upon the beliefs we hold about that. Do I believe that this is proof that the world is bad, or do I believe that this is proof that I can overcome even more things? Which is why the Marines put you through boot camp. They don't onboard you to their, to their organization with a beach vacation or a corporate retreat. They onboard you with boot camp on the most stressful situations possible because they know from decades, if you put people through stress with the right lens and with other people, that they come out stronger on the backside and they talk about those meaningful narratives the rest of their life. So part of what we're looking for is how do we do that in our life? So if there's a negative event, you can either go back and try to reframe it to look at, look at what I've overcome, or this is how it shaped me in a positive way now, or If that's too hard or painful, we have people do the opposite, which is we have them intentionally go back and look for positive memories and then entrench those. Go back and put those photos of the good times that happened in the same period, like the good things that happened during your childhood or the great things your parents did do, right? Or the friends you had in those moments or the meaningful events you've had since then, or your favorites in your phone are proof That meaning and positives can occur after whatever negative thing you've gone through in your life. The more your brain sees that, the more it changes the meaning structures that are undergirding the beliefs that we have about our performance.

In your book, you talk about the neural tribe concept. How does that work? How do you create that?

We know that feeling like you're not alone is so important, but what we were finding was that people are not alone. I mean, we have people speaking into our ears and into our lives all the time. It just might not be the people we want it to, right? So we find that, you know, we get alerts on our watches and phone for the negative that's going on. Even while listening to positive research, we can hear about the negative that's going on in the world, which is just a reminder, hey, your behavior didn't matter again on this one. And in the midst of that, what happens is that oftentimes our neural tribe, the people that are around us that are changing our brainwave patterns as we look at the world, are media or negative podcasts, the opposite of sharing this positive research, or that it's people that we disagree with, right? Or that don't live like we do, that have billions of dollars when we don't have any of that. And as a result of that, they're all talking and being part of that work. So what we're looking for, and you've met several of these people in your previous interviews, The famous, that you're the average of the 5 to 7 people that you spend the most time with is exactly what we're finding in this research is that the quantity opportunities to shape you also changes the valence, how positive or negative it is upon our lives. So what we attempt to do is we find people that hold onto those 7 positive beliefs, the people around you in your life, These are the people that believe that their behavior matters. They're not the ones that are like, there's nothing we can do in the midst of an AI revolution, or life is terrible, or these things always happen to me, or like, you're never there for me. Whatever it is, the negativity that's around us, what we're looking for are the people that hold the beliefs that we want to hold, that they believe their behavior matters, that they believe they matter, that they believe that they're not alone, that they believe they have something to give in that friendship and to the world. They believe that They have something to be grateful for, and they're not just talking about the negative. They're talking about what they're grateful for in the midst of the challenges that they see. They believe that there's something greater than just them, which changes how they interact in the relationship. And when people hold those beliefs, not only is it improving their life, but when we're near them, it improves our lives. Just as when we're around negative influences, it causes a negative downward cycle. Gallup found that in the midst of listening to all of this negative neural tribe, It turns out that 32% of Americans cross politics and cross religion. 32% of them believe that we are in the midst of the end times right now, which means that 1 out of 3 of us believe that we're in this rapid descent into entropy and chaos and the end of the world. And in the midst of that, why would I, why would I pick up the phone to make the next phone call? Or why would I, you know, keep studying English poetry? Or why would I bring children into this world if I believed that there's only negative on the backside? So what we're intentionally doing in the book is you try to identify those people that hold those positive core beliefs and you surround yourself with them. And it doesn't just, that neural tribe doesn't have to be just physical friends. This could be ones that we call, we have some great friends that we, that moved away from Dallas that Once a month we get on a Zoom call and we just catch up with one another, right? We could have been like, well, goodbye, that's it. But because of this, it's created this deep, meaningful narrative and relationship that sustained us. But also it's what we do on a daily basis, the podcast, the music, the movies we listen to. So it's finding the positive neural tribe and then surrounding ourselves with them virtually and in person.

Thank you, Sean.

Thank you for having me.