232. Leveraging the Power of Prefactual Thinking (Refreshed Episode)

Welcome to episode 232 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy Today's episode is all about pre factual thinking.

Ready?

Let's get started.

You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now here's your host, Melina Palmer.

Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. Today's episode is all about pre factual thinking.

And if that has you thinking, huh, don't worry.

The episode will of course get in and talk all about what pre factual thinking is. It is closely related to Counterfactual thinking, which was episode 68 of the podcast and this episode originally aired as number 71. In its simplest form, Counterfactual thinking is our what ifs and if onlys where we look back and wonder what might have been if only something had been different.

This can be from outside factors or.

Things within ourselves that might have changed an outcome, and our brains are really good at coming up with idealized scenarios where things would have been amazing and.

Perfect if only this one thing had been different.

Pre factual thinking is when we do something very similar but are looking into the future again.

I won't get into it too much.

Here because that's what the meat of the episode is about, but I do.

Want to let you know why I hand picked this episode from the back.

Catalog for you to listen to and reflect upon today.

On Friday in just a couple days.

My guest in episode 233 is Lee Caldwell and he's going to be talking about his proposal that there's actually a System three. You've heard me talk about System one and two, or rather the subconscious and conscious processing of the brain. Our elephant and writer. And Lee says there's something else in there that should be its own category altogether. It has to do with imagining and thinking into the future. So it felt like a good idea for you to have a nice refresher on pre factual thinking today. So you're all set and ready to be thinking about this possible third system question on Friday.

So as you listen today, think about.

The possibilities and what might come and be ready to reflect on this when you tune in for episode 233. And of course, don't forget your free worksheet and links to past episodes like the one on counterfactual thinking I already mentioned, and books and articles all waiting for you in the show. Notes for this episode, which are found within the app you're listening to and@the.

Brainybusiness.Com 232 and with that being said, let's talk pre Factuals if you have not yet listened to episode 68 on counterfactual thinking, you're okay to listen to this one first, but you might want to pop back into it after you finish this today, especially if you have follow up questions in that episode. I get into the different types of counterfactuals, upward or downward, omission or commission, usual or extreme, and those do apply to prefactuals as well. But I'm not going to get into them and explain them again today because we already have the content for that and your time's very valuable. Instead, I want to build upon that episode and talk about the difference between prefactuals and counterfactuals and explain how they can work differently to help you achieve your goals. Building on our theme here from last week, goals are so important at this time of year. First off, as the year is ending, you're looking back at what you have done, what you could have done, and also looking forward at what you can.

Do in the future.

This is all counter and prefactual thinking in action. And as I've said already, they can be a huge aid in reaching goals or a massive hindrance. Understanding how they work is a big step toward being able to use them to your advantage. So that is the point of this episode. I'm going to do that by first telling you a little bit about the difference between the two. I'm going to give a real life a couple of examples from my own experience of dealing with these, one as recent as yesterday and one from a few years back, and then also some studies and information about how these have been shown in the lab. So first, counterfactuals are looking back at something that has already happened and essentially undoing it in some way in your mind. Remember in episode 68 we talked about how simply ruminating isn't the same as a counterfactual memory. Reflection itself isn't enough. You need to change what happened or could have happened in your brain for it to be a counterfactual thought. These are the what might have been thoughts, the if onlys. Prefactuals are when you look to the future and think about what could be. Like counterfactuals, this can either be negative or positive. If you look to the future in a negative way, it has been called defensive pessimism and may involve anticipation of regret and building strategies to avoid or prepare for what could be, sometimes building out excuses and sort of dwelling on what could happen. And because the brain gets what it expects, this isn't always that beneficial and can create a self fulfilling prophecy. There are also positive prefactuals that's getting into the next time I'll Language I provided you on episode 68 and in that ink article, when you think about what could happen or how you might succeed in the future, studies show you can actually have great benefits in all sorts of tasks. Again, I'll share a couple of really specific studies for you later on in the show, but applying this type of thinking has been helpful for ultra runners and triathletes and Olympians and executives and children. Really, everybody can benefit from using these tools in the right way. For now, I want to talk a little about the reciprocal nature of counterfactual thinking and prefactual thinking and how they can feed off each other in either a positive or negative way. To do this, I'm going to give that personal example of something that happened to me yesterday. First is the negative example of how I could have reacted and how our brains really are wired to dwell on things. You see, the brain does get benefit from dwelling and dread. I'm not going to get into the specific brain chemicals for you here, but I've linked to an interesting article that outlines the different chemicals pretty well. If you're interested, just know that your brain is driven by its desire to get these chemicals and there are different rewards with each. If you've been listening to the show for a while, you've heard me talk about anticipation and dopamine. Your brain loves dopamine and it drives it to do all sorts of things. Anticipation is at the core of a lot of pre factual thinking, the what might happen space. If you let yourself play through all the scenarios over and over. What if this happened? What if that happened? Ooh, what would that be like? One of the things you're giving your brain is dopamine from the anticipation. If you remember, I've talked about this study before about a rat in a lab that's pressing a lever to get a treat, and that it actually increased and got more dopamine release. It doubled when there was only a 50 50% chance of getting that treat, and that the dopamine release only took place for the time leading up to getting the treat. So once it got the treat, it completely stopped getting dopamine. I've linked to episode two in the show notes where I talk about that study a little bit more. But the treat for the brain is in the buildup, the pre factual. So it wants to think through scenarios over and over and over. And it isn't always wired to do this in a positive way unless you put in some interventions. And at first these are a little bit more conscious. You have to train yourself to switch, especially if you're really prone to this negative spiral that can happen encounter and prefactuals, but know that it does become a lot more natural over time. Speaking of which, let's get back to that story about what happened yesterday. One of the things I did was an unexpected presale, which I called a gratitude discount to everyone who was on the brainy business email list. If you want to be on that list and included in any future surprise sales, download the freebie@thebrainybusiness.com 71 so I decided to call this a gratitude discount because I'm so thankful to everyone who takes the time to connect and listen, subscribe, interact on social media media. All of it really, truly means so much to me and I wanted to reward that. The email I sent started out by saying hi Susie Melina here, do you know how important you are to me? And then went on to talk about the discount. It of course was sent via my email software, but I like to use names when I can, especially in a thank you. Well, I'm sure you can guess that something went wrong. We tested in advance and it looked fine, but of course it got all wonky and some people didn't have that merge line lined up properly. We still don't really know exactly what happened, but those people got an email that said hi percent sign first name percent sign Melina here, do you know how important you are to me? So this is unfortunate whenever it happens. If you have an email list, you've likely dealt with it at least once or have received an email like this. But really, could it have come with a worse first line? Your brain's automatic response to the do you know how important you are to me? Question, which was truly. I mean, it's very genuine. Even with that percent sign, first name, whatnot. These people are everyone is very important to me. But now it comes off with this response. Your brain automatically thinks not very. You didn't even merge my name right. Thankfully this didn't happen to the whole list. I'm guessing it was less than a dozen people, but we're not really 100% sure yet. Now to the counterfactual pre factual brain bonanza In a negative world, I could sit and dwell on this for hours, days or weeks probably. If I really wanted to get into it, my brain might say, oh my gosh, I can't believe that happened. We tested everything. I wish I would have tested again. I should have gone into activecampaign to make sure it was right instead of just trusting. It worked when I got the sample email. If only insert name here had checked in this one spot. What must everyone be thinking? They must hate me and think I'm irresponsible. What if they all unsubscribe? What will I do then? Have I lost them? Will they stop listening to the podcast? I shouldn't send any future emails until this is 100% fixed and I know for sure we will never have issues again. And then I'll take a break to buy a pint of ice cream before continuing to factualize, counter and prepare. You've been there, right? You've done this. I know you have. We're wired for it. Even if it was when you were 5 years old and lost your Barbie or GI Joe, or maybe when you hit send on an email too quickly, or said something stupid in front of your boss, or stopped for a quick Starbucks and walked in late for the meeting, or realized at the end of the day you had broccoli in your teeth and wondered when did I eat broccoli? There are countless examples, because our brains dwell on this stuff all the time. Like I said, they're wired for it. And as you saw in the example, it's easy to jump from counterfactual to prefactual and back again. The brain is swimming and spinning in the thoughts, and if you don't watch out, you could spin out of control. One important difference I want to note between counter and prefactuals is that studies have found counterfactuals tend to focus more on outside situations and influence that you really had no control over. So they're more likely to be fruitless, like if only it hadn't rained that day. Or in the case of my email, why don't they set up the system to detect this sort of thing? Or if only someone would have warned me not to do that. Whereas prefactuals are more likely to focus on what you can actually do and things within your realm of control, which can be better for overall behavioral change. You, of course, can have things within your control and counterfactuals, but they're more likely to include these other things that you didn't have any control over to begin with. To use prefactuals for positive behavior change, you want to look at the if then and future outcome action ties. Let me tell you what I mean. Instead of just predicting a possible scenario of the future, you want to identify a specific circumstance. For example when I get home this afternoon or when I wake up in which a particular action like I will go for a run is carried out to help you achieve a goal to become fitter. So when I get home this afternoon I will go for a run to become fitter. Consider how this differs from the more general if I go for a run, then I will become fitter. Both can be useful, but the specifics give your brain something to process and remember in the future. It has that timestamp and this tactic has been shown to work on everyone, like I said, from marathoners to executives and children. With that in mind, let's look at the other approach to my email fiasco, the positive and what I actually did when this happened yesterday. First I woke up to an email from a subscriber who happens to be a family member, thankfully to let me know the email was off. I did get one other email from someone yesterday who let me know about this mess up that they received and she was nice enough to share it with me, knowing I would see the humor in the irony and pointing that out that it made her laugh when she saw it versus being irritated herself. And while I did see the humor in it, don't misunderstand. When I first got the email in the morning letting me know there was an issue, I was crushed. Truly, I hated seeing that. Why would this happen? Of all the emails, why this one? I was so excited about the special offer and the new course and really. But instead of getting sucked into the pity party, I used my positive prefactual thinking to determine what to do next, what the future could be. Fortunately, this was set up on an A B test. You know I love my testing and I've linked to the episode about that to help you setting up your own. This one was a 10 1080. If you aren't familiar, the main types of tests you can do for something like this would be a simple 50 50. So half get one version and half get the other. In that case, everyone on the list would have gotten the email and it would have been too late to physically change or stop anything. With a 1080 it's sent to a random 10% getting one version and another 10% getting the second version and then it's set to send the one that performed the best to the remaining 80% in this case two hours after the first email went out. Because I received the first notification before the full 80% email was supposed to go out, it gave me a chance to think a little about what could happen prefactual and because I didn't dwell too much on what might have been counterfactual, I could take steps to actually make it better. We stopped the second email for the 80% and set up the coding so those without a name field would get something that said hi friend and then move forward. I also used the power of prefactual thought to say to myself how might we prevent something like this from happening next time? Like I said, we tested. I get the sample email sent to me and mine said hi Melina, Melina here. Which is always comical to read in my inbox. But the problem is and what I learned from this flub, there's learning and everything. I learned that the test wasn't set up to account for what could go wrong, but only show me if things went right. What I now know I really need is to have a sample email that doesn't have the name field filled in that we can run a test on if we were to set up this type of logic in the future. That way I can see that it gets a hi friend message or whatever else we should be sending instead of the high percentage sign first name percentage sign and we can actually see it on a test instead of just assuming that piece is working. One key to using counterfactuals and prefactuals for your benefit is to look for the learning opportunity, ask questions that are not helping you dwell and instead say how might we do better next time? Or what can we learn from this or what actually happened and try to laugh about it. Like I said, we have to move forward at some point. Often in the moment we see the scenario as the worst possible thing that could ever be and feel like we need to stumble all over ourselves to fix or apologize. Fight this urge.

Take a breath.

It isn't as bad as you think. Use the moment to get a few facts before you do anything. I have a lot of training in this area both on the intellectual brain science level and on the job practical experience. In my previous role as Director of Marketing and Brand at the credit union, I oversaw the website, social media and all communication to the membership of the credit union. Stuff goes wrong all the time. Sometimes it's little, but the untrained brain would still like to make A mountain out of those molehills. And sometimes it is a much bigger deal. Say we ran an upgrade that didn't properly integrate with the visa processing System and all 30,000 members can't use their credit and debit cards, the call center's flooded with angry members and there's no ETA on when it will be fixed.

Fixed?

That's not a hypothetical situation that happened along with about a million and five other very similar scenarios where mobile banking was down for a week or the website wouldn't work, or someone posted an angry comment on social media. My job in those situations was to be the calm voice of reason. Myself and the head of IT were the decision makers of what message to send to whom, at what time. When something goes wrong, even something little, the inclination is to ask for a giant alert on the website or an upfront phone message for when people dial in. But you can't do that for everything because it will either overwhelm the brain and make it so nothing is noticed, sort of a boy who cried wolf scenario, or it will actually draw attention to something that most people didn't notice anyway. If something went wrong and it impacted 2% of the membership, there's no need for a massive alert to everyone or a big public apology, unless it's something really bad like a data breach. But I'm talking about more run of the mill stuff here and believe it or not, credit card processors going down or ATMs not working is fairly run of the mill. It happens more often than you realize because there's someone in that institution like me who's only alerting you when you need to know something. In the case of my emails, like I said, I think probably it was a dozen or less people that had that problem that went through for them, but we didn't know until we dug in. So we stopped and ended up sending. Maybe there are now some people that got two emails in the way that this all worked out, but it was better than if I would have sent a big apology email about how terrible it was. And please don't be upset and don't judge me. You've seen that email, maybe you've written that email before. That just draws attention for everybody for something that wasn't even on their radar. So knowing the true impact is really important. Before you send out that apology, your brain is going to blow this thing, whatever it is, way out of proportion with the tools it has in its arsenal pre factual and counterfactual thoughts. It wants you to think that everyone else is thinking the worst and spreading the word about how terrible you are. So you better get in front of this thing. No, let me be the calm voice of reason in your head. It will be okay. You can move through this if you use those prefactuals to your benefit. Whether you're applying this to life or business, the steps are the same and fairly simple. First, take a deep breath, pause for a moment to assess the situation, then ask some questions. How many people were impacted? What really happened? Is it fixed already? If not, when will it be fixed? What can we do now to make it better? Then take the actions you identified need to be taken. Sometimes it does justify pulling out the big guns and putting the giant banner on the website and recording the upfront message on the phones. Whatever needs to happen in your situation, do it now. And sometimes that's nothing and that's okay. Then you start writing out what you can do now to make this situation and others like it better. Next time. There will always be a next time. These are your prefactuals working for you to help you do better. So the summary of that is Breathe. Assess. Questions, Actions, Reflection. It seems like there should be an acronym in there. Maybe I'll think of one later, but right now that cue is really making it rough. This is of course summarized for you on the freebie for this episode@thebrainybusiness.com 71 and now that I've shared some stories about how this can look and feel. As I've said, I'm sure you have a million and five of your own. Please do come share your counterfactual and prefactual stories with me on social media. You can find me as the brainy biz on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. I'll have a post to share the best and worst stories in this area. Or those smack my head moments you can't wait to leave behind in the rear view mirror. Of course to do that you have to stop counterfactualizing. I want to leave you with the study findings I mentioned earlier on in the episode some stuff that shows how this has worked in the lab to prove how beneficial it can be when applied to other types of thought. One study I really liked was looking at how counterfactuals and prefactuals would work on performance in a balancing task compared to a control group group. So in all the groups they were on a balance board. One of those things where you put a wooden plank on top of a round object and have to keep it as flat as possible and not let one end touch the ground. They got to test it out once or twice before beginning the actual timed study. And then they had time trials. The test involved time trials to see how long they could balance on the board. One group used counterfactual thinking methods. My performance time in that balance task would have been better if and the other was given a pre factual prompt. My performance time in that balance task will be better next time. If so, there's a very subtle shift there. It would have been better if or will be better next time if the control group was doing a creativity exercise that had nothing to do with the balancing task. So what do you think happened? Both the counterfactual and prefactual group did remarkably better as the trials progressed than the control group. Basically, the control group stayed the same over their three tests. The average was about two seconds of balancing. The ones doing the positively structured counterfactual and prefactual thinking averaged 10 to 12 seconds. That's. That's five or six times better. Studies have found that people perform better on a task after doing prefactual thinking even if they have no prior experience as well. So if they would have looked at the balance board and been asked to think through what they would do to perform best when they get on the board, they did better than those who just step on willy nilly. This is why role playing and visualization techniques are so important and why they play a big piece in mindset work. Planning for the future is how you shape it into what you want it to be. Sometimes that's based on the past and sometimes you have to make it up as you go along. Moving out of negative counter and pre factuals into the positive space is such a useful and versatile skill for everyone. This is something that should be taught to every single person. We can teach ourselves to be resilient and our children as well. Anyone can do this. And the simplest way to start incorporating it in is with the next time aisle language. Your brain will always default to the woe is me pity party and wanting to pre formulate an excuse for the problem that hasn't even happened yet. You'll likely always start there in this negative space. Thankfully less and less as you practice these tactics. But. But it's okay. Be prepared for that too. All our brains are programmed for it. But it's what you do next that matters. It's okay to give yourself a minute or ten to be annoyed and shake your fist in the air in irritation. Believe me, I complained a bit about yesterday's email. But then you move forward and think about what it's teaching you. There's always something to learn and always a way through to the other side. You'll get there faster and easier if you structure your counterfactuals and prefactuals to the positive. I promise. So what got your brain buzzing as.

You thought about pre factual thinking? When you look to the future moving forward, what might you change?

What could you do differently?

If you're someone who has gotten stuck in vicious cycles of negative, counterfactual and pre factual thinking in the past, how will you change that that and how can you use prefactuals for good? Keep that in mind as you get ready to listen to Friday's episode 233 with Lee Caldwell, which, as I said, is about his proposal that there's actually a System 3 and it has a lot to do with imagination and thinking into the future. If you aren't already subscribed to the podcast, now's a great time to do so to be sure you get that and every episode as they come out. And of course, remember those show notes for the episode which have related past episodes, books, articles and your free worksheet on prefactual thinking. It's all waiting for you@the brainybusiness.com 232 and just like that, episode 232 on pre factual Thinking is done. Join me Friday for a brand new episode with Lee Caldwell discussing the possibility of a third system of the brain. It's going to to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it.

Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me. And remember to be thoughtful.

Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit visit thebrainybusiness.com.