How to Get Out of Your Own Way with Todd Herman

Welcome back, Kwik Brains. So here's your question of the day: how do you get out of your own way? I know this, this is actually a question we had in our private Facebook group.

Mm-hmm.

People ask me all the time, Jim, I set goals, I set resolutions, you know, my relationship with my health, that I take one step forward and I take 3 leaps backwards, or I procrastinate, or I just don't have the confidence to do the things that I have a vision for inside of myself. So how do I use my brain? How do I hack my brain? Or what tools are available for that? And I'm really excited about this conversation we're gonna have today. And Todd, first of all, thank you. Todd Herman, thank you for being on our show.

Absolutely, it's a pleasure, man.

And we were geeking out over high performance because Todd is a high performance coach. He, I mean, he's a game-changing expert. You're a strategist, you work with some of the most elite individuals in corporate America, both in boardrooms and also in the field. Athletics also as well, as a former athlete yourself also as well, but also as a parent. So in all these different contexts, you must see certain patterns.

Yeah.

Where people, they can't get out, they say they can't get out of their own way, but what does that mean and what can we do about this? Because your book, right, which I recommend everybody go pick up, The Alter Ego Effect, talks about this a lot.

Yeah, I mean, And a lot of the root of the question, especially in your community, would be because they're learners, they're people who are striving, they are coachable, they're consuming, trying to find new ways of activating that other self that actually gets out there. The frustration builds even more so sometimes because they're trying ideas that they sound good, they sound right, but on the field of play of performance, they actually don't. It's actually one of my great frustrations, kind of like with the self-help and personal development world is like they've been trotting out ideas for a very long time, and the people who've been trotting them out aren't practitioners. They haven't been working with people one-on-one. And I've worked with people for over 16,000 hours, you know, in pro sports, Olympic sports, in business, public figures. And the one missing thing that people keep on passing by, which is something you're a massive advocate for— this is why I'm excited for this conversation— is tapping into our Real superpower that human beings have, which is our creative imagination, our ability to build worlds in our own mind. Some people create a heaven from hell or a hell from heaven, right? We narrate and we add meaning to things, and sometimes people are sort of weighing themselves down with those bricks that get tossed their way instead of using them as building blocks to step up. And so those people, when they're talking about getting out of their own way, it's because they know that there's a gap.

Right.

Between what they can do, what their capabilities are, what the skills are that they have, and what they're getting out on the field of play of life, whatever it might be, if they're a parent or if they're a, you know, business professional or if they're an athlete. And so my job has always been, how can I make it so that what your capabilities truly are inside of you are now reflected on that field? And the bridge that I've used for the longest time with people is tapping into the creative imagination, and specifically one of the major tools I use is using an alter ego to help tap into maybe a different emotion or a different set of qualities that are actually already still inside of you that draws out of you and finally gets yourself out there.

And the power of imagination, that really is a superpower. I'm dressed as my alter ego, my superhero, with the royal blue and the— Everybody, you know, Batman has their bat, Wonder Woman has her W, Everyone has their spider, if you will. I always have my brain shirt. And I just wanted to also talk about, you were mentioning that people, they have a vision for their life, and yet they maybe step back or they sabotage, and they try other things.

Yeah.

Like they've looked at other things in the self-improvement industry, and because it didn't work for them, because we're talking about the difference between working with practitioners, people getting results, they feel shame and they feel guilt, or they feel like it actually perpetuates this idea like, I'm not enough.

Yeah.

Everybody else seems to be getting this right, 'cause I hear it from all the same people. What's wrong with me?

Totally. And that's why I get so frustrated with it. 'Cause again, I wrote this book after doing this, I'm in my 22nd year of working, and it's not that I had this idea last week and I'm like, this is gonna be a great idea for a book. It really is one of my secret sauces to working with people. And it is frustrating that when you, with your own intention of doing the right things, and you pick up a new idea that sounds nice, But you know, the the mind is a the mind is a funny thing. Like what you think is practically correct doesn't actually work that way in the practical application of how we perform. And the people who have gone out and done phenomenal things have leveraged the power of an alter ego consistently over and over again. And the great thing about this idea is when people hear it. there is an immediate connection to it in that you've either played with the idea before or you've heard of it. And then there might be a little bit of resistance, 'cause then some people go to, but is this about being inauthentic or fake or something like that? Which is not even anywhere near what it is. But here's what I can tell, every single person that's listening to this or watching this right now has 100% used this idea. Why?

Wow.

'Cause it's built into the human psyche. When we were young kids, we played with this idea, pretending to be Superman or Wonder Woman when we were jumping off of the couch, or our favorite athlete, you know, basketball player or hockey player when we're going, I'm gonna go be Wayne Gretzky or LeBron James, whatever the case is.

Or firefighter or nurse.

Or firefighter or cowboy or whatever, like we do this. And so that's us playing with new ideas in our mind and seeing what it feels like and helping us to expand our skill set and do things that we maybe don't think that we can do, but that other, person or thing can, and it's extraordinarily healthy. And then we end up growing up and we're told to, like, you know, act your age or grow up or, you know, be more serious or whatever. And we start to move away from this creative imagination, you know, like what you've got on your shirt right there. And we start kind of, you know, shunning that, and we become more pragmatic and practical and all that. Now, I'm a massively pragmatic person, but I'm pragmatic in the way that What's the stuff that actually works? And I'm gonna do that. And using and leveraging an alter ego is 100% what allows people to more gracefully move through life with some grit, some perseverance, and really healthy self-talk. And there's this great study that was done on this at the University of Minnesota where a lady had heard about this kind of concept of alter egos, and so she decided to kind of run a test with young children, 4 to 6-year-olds. She brought them into a room and gave them a puzzle that was unsolvable. So right off the bat, there was gonna be failure for everybody. And she tracked to see how long they would stick with the puzzle before they would quit. Okay, so they do that. One thing that came out of it though was it was fascinating to hear what their self-talk was. And it was, it started to descend into, you know, beating themselves up. Okay, then they brought in this rack of superhero costumes. Specifically, it was Batman and it was Dora the Explorer. And they said, "Hey, choose whichever one that you want and put one on." So they put on the costumes, and then they gave them another unsolvable puzzle. And this time, their level of grit and perseverance went way up. But the self-talk also changed as well, and they would start. So they ended up sticking with their puzzle for way longer. That's how you're measuring the grit and perseverance. That's how we know that. you know, they were sticking it out longer. But they would say things like, Batman wouldn't quit, so I won't quit, right? And I mean, that's a really healthy thing for— I mean, I've got 3 children under the age of 6. I want my children to have that kind of self-talk. And the more and more that we can reinforce it then by whether it's, you know, putting on a costume that helps activate that or play with this idea, we can all use this to suspend that disbelief about what we think we can and cannot do because of you know, personal narrative or traumas. We've all had something happen to us.

Right.

Some people extraordinarily deep and harmful things. Other, other times it was an experience that was kind of shocking and jarring to you, but everyone's had trauma because it all gets stored in our brain that way. And so, you know, why meet that resistance of force head-on with willpower, which is what typically had been brought out for the longest time in the self-help world? I'm going to use my willpower to beat resistance. Well, resistance can have many things behind as to why it's showing up that way. Trauma, like I said, personal family narrative. Well, you know, like the Quick family has never been an entrepreneur, so why would I be an entrepreneur, right? Or, you know, no one from my country has made it XYZ, or, you know, whatever it might be, so why would I be able to do that? All those things happen at such an unconscious level, and they end up impacting people's belief in what they can see for themselves or their performance, despite the fact that on an internal level they want it, right? And so for me, I'm like, why, you know, stare— why move at this force of resistance, which is like a herd of rumbling elephants, with this willpower, which is like a mouse in comparison? Instead, the back door to resistance is our creative imagination. We can step around it by tapping into the powers of someone and something else in our own mind, which then now infuses us with the confidence that we can go out there and do that, because it's not you doing it now. You're suspending that disbelief. It's actually Oprah going out and doing it, or it's, you know, Stan Lee, or it's, you know, Wolverine or something like that. Now here's the reality: it's still you.

And that's the truth, because it's the truth. Some people who are watching this or listening to this right now could say that's That's not authentic, you know, that's not really— you're faking it until you're making it.

Yeah, which is nothing— I mean, that's a terrible term, and I've couldn't— I can't stand it because, A, just in the context of messaging, as we all know, you know, saying faking it till you make it, it's a terrible way of actually explaining it away. But what you're doing is you're acting very intentionally from the inside of who and what you want to be showing up as out there. Faking it is when you're trying to do something to deceive other people or trick them. If that's what your context is, then yeah, you're 100% faking it and you are 100% being inauthentic. Plus what you're doing in that moment is you're creating what I call a trapped self. Anytime your motivations are for other people, other things, to impress, to create an outcome, like it's all about that outcome, then it creates this trapped self 'cause now your motivation is about that as opposed to being very, intentionalist from the inside, and I'm doing this because I want to show up this way because I'm sick and tired of not showing up that way. Nothing feels more inauthentic to a human being than when you end your day with your head on a pillow beating yourself up because you wished you would have said this, done this, raised your hand, spoke up, taken action like closing the deal when that person was obviously giving you the buying signal, but you're so scared of someone saying and rejecting you. that you didn't do it. Well, that wasn't your heroic self, what I call in the book showing up. That was a trapped self that shunned away and kept yourself safe. The brain does this, right? I mean, it, it dislikes comfort zone and getting to the fringe, but a heroic self and tapping into an alter ego can bring you around that and allow you to actually show up like you know that you can.

Yeah, when we're talking to our, our community about accelerated learning and they want to learn faster, We feel that one of the things that keep people stuck from growing is the expectations and the opinions that they give their power, especially to the people that sometimes matter the most to them, you know, their family and their friends. It's, they're the ones that are saying, oh, you're going to another conference, or why are you listening to another podcast? And, you know, a lot of, one of the strongest forces is our belief in ourself, our identity, who we think that we are.

Yeah.

And sometimes the people that care about us the most are the ones that maybe we give the power You know, to be able to have that kind of effect. And what you're saying is with the alter ego effect, you could use the power of your creative imagination to put on, to show another side of yourself, this superhero self, the superhero you that everybody has inside of them.

Yeah, well, to understand that your identity is always constantly evolving anyway. This is about bringing the power back inside of yourself and saying no, like, because at your core Everyone understands that at your core, you are not those things because that wasn't how you were born. You learned these things over time. You know, in the book, I talk about the different layers that end up creating this self and how each one, you know, has a dark side to it, and then there's this light side that comes with it as well. You know, the ordinary world and the extraordinary world. But when we're drawing on and using the qualities of someone or something else, we remove all the narrative associated with that person, 'cause we haven't lived that person or that thing's life.

Right.

So we're actually just donning the positive qualities of that. You know, I talk about in the book, you know, Kobe Bryant, when he built out the Black Mamba, after he went through a very, very challenging time, and he learned everything that he could about the Black Mamba. Like, he would, I would probably put Kobe up against any biologist on the planet about, you know, the knowledge of the Black Mamba, 'cause he did, he consumed it. One of my clients, this early on, he's a young 14-year-old, well, 13-year-old at the time, and he had been dominating in baseball all of his kind of life, just loved it. He's from the New York City area here. And all of a sudden, his peers started hitting puberty before him, and they started getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Now, he had all the baseball skills inside of him, but he started paying attention to how much bigger that other kid was. Todd, that guy has a mustache. He was pitching and he had a mustache. And so he was getting— now he was outside of his own head, right? He wasn't controlling what he could control. And one day when we were chatting, I said, do you know about Paul Bunyan? And he's like, no, who's that? And I said, okay, call me tomorrow at 4 o'clock when you're done school and let me know about everything you can about Paul Bunyan. So the next day he called me, he's like, our call is over? And I'm like, yep, I gave you some homework, go do it. So he goes and he researches about Paul Bunyan. comes on the call, and I mean, he was an encyclopedia. He's like, this guy was 100 feet tall, he protected the settlers as they were going out across the land, he did great deeds for other people, he could knock down a huge redwood tree with one swing of his axe. And I said, now, imagine that you went out as Paul, would Paul Bunyan, as he's walking to the plate, be ever thinking about how big that other kid is?

Mm-hmm.

'Cause he's 100 feet tall. In fact, he's gonna be thinking about, wow, this is a little bit surprising that that little kid's gonna pitch me a ball when I can knock down a tree with my axe. And, and so I got him to start playing with it. But the, the reason behind it was I wanted him to get so emotionally engaged with the idea of Paul Bunyan so that he knew his backstory. Because as you know, and I mean, you're around the world of Marvel, Marvel Comics, and they're phenomenal at building these worlds. That really the bridge that connects thought and action is emotion. It's been proven in science that when you disconnect in Alzheimer's patients the emotional context of something, they won't be able to make a decision. So decision is actually an emotional lever that's being pulled. Well, when I'm helping people with developing alter egos, I want them to have as much emotional resonance as possible. Possible with that story so that they can act through it with more grace. And so with him, he was like, oh no, he wouldn't. And I'm like, well, what else? What else? What would Paul be thinking? Because I want him to actually step into the thoughts of Paul, not himself, because his thoughts right now are hurting him despite the fact he has the capabilities. And he's like, well, he wouldn't think this and he would think this. And I'm like, what else? What else? Well, he went 23 for 23 at the plate. His next 23 appearances, knocking out consistently home runs all the time. His dad called me up and he was like, this isn't possible. Kids don't hit 23 for 23 at the plate, especially when they're the smallest kid on the team. I'm like, don't put limits on them.

Right.

Don't put limits. Your job as that parent is to not say this can't be done. It's like, what else can you be doing? What else can be done, right? And I've seen this happen over and over and over again. That's the power of this, is a change can happen now for people when you start to really reengage with this idea that you've used in the past. And I say in the book, yes, I've written the book on this. I didn't invent it. I didn't invent alter egos. They've been around for a very long time. Cicero coined the phrase for the first time in 44 BC. And I love the way that its root form truly comes from, which is the other I or trusted friend. And when you think about superheroes and that world, we all are looking for allies that can help us along the way. But there's one ally that people have ignored for the longest time, and it's the internal ally. This is— an alter ego becomes your internal ally. I mean, I love having you as an ally, as a friend, and we can help each other out, but I live with myself 24/7.

Right.

And that alter ego that we can use in context of a specific field of play— we're not building an alter ego for every like all of our life, right? 'Cause that becomes a challenge. But it's in context, it's for that field of play, for business or for sales or for at home when I'm a parent, I'm stepping, like really being intentional about that self that I'm bringing out there. And maybe right now because of old patterns of behavior, I have a tough time believing I can do it, but you know what, when I'm at home and I'm stepping into Mr. Rogers, Yeah. which is actually my inspiration for my alter ego at home, That's who I'm acting through. And in my— in that moment when I could react in, um, react in a negative way when my one daughter is having a massive meltdown and just respond emotionally because the noise is driving me crazy, Mr. Rogers wouldn't.

Right.

He would get down on one knee, he would embrace Sophie and give her a hug. And I can say this because I did that, you know, all day long. You and I are working with high-level people, um, or creating content for people. And it's very easy for me as someone who's a challenger personality. I mean, I work with tough people. I've got to challenge people constantly. But my kids don't want challenger dad coming home. They don't want confident, articulate, decisive. They want playful, fun, you know, get down on the floor. And so it's me being intentional. I want to bring that gentle self to that situation. And no one embodies that better than Mr. Rogers.

Right? I love the documentary, Won't You Be My Neighbor? He even uses alter egos. He actually, with all the puppets—

A third of the video—

It's amazing.

Of that documentary, I mean, I did too, 'cause I'm like, thank you for only validating this even more. But his wife said, you know, when he had on Daniel Tiger on his hand, she said that that was the more true representation of who he was as a person. And there's this one segment when he says, you know, it doesn't look like from here to here is a very big distance. But I can tell you it was, and it was very self-efficacious for me to do that. And it's the same way with us. The difference— distance between here and here, or here and here, to take action, to say something, doesn't look like it's very far, but it can be a huge leap for some people.

Yeah.

Well, stepping into that alter ego can help make that resistance go away and allow you to say the things that you want to say, do the things that you want to do, and And help live the life that you most want to lead, and that you know that you can, but for whatever reason that resistance is getting in the way. And then over time, there's this great quote that the kind of the Hollywood Golden Era actor Cary Grant said, and he said, "I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be, or I became that person, but at some point in time we met." And to know his history, he battled with depression all of his life. He was very concerned about how other people perceived him. Came from not a great neighborhood in England, but was making it in Hollywood. And he really did want to bring out this more kind of dashing and debonair and charismatic person that he felt like was on the inside, but somehow he had this gap in his own mind. And that quote that he had said was at the near the end of his career. The only thing I would change about it was I activated the person. It's not about pretending, but it's I activated. This is about your choice. I activated the person I wanted to be, or I became that person, but at some point in time we met. And if you think about where you are, going back to what you had said at the very beginning, but where you are and where you want to get to, it's like a 2-circle Venn diagram. It's not quite overlapping yet, but that bridge to help make it happen can be an alter ego. And then all of a sudden, some point You are. Like it happened with me when I first started out in business. I was 21. I looked like I was 12. Totally concerned about what other people were thinking of me and insecure about, well, you know, I don't have enough degrees to go and talk about this subject matter. And, you know, all of this insecurity was like stopping me from going out and doing the things that I wanted to go do, which was I was really good already. I was good already at helping people navigate the mental game of And I wasn't working with pro athletes yet. I was starting out working where I needed to be, which was with youngsters, beginners. But I still wasn't making the calls to go and book speeches or workshops or anything like that. And I remember back to when me using my alter ego in football, which then helped me get college football scholarships. And I thought, well, what if I brought Geronimo, which was my alter ego, out into business? Doesn't kind of match up because Geronimo was fairly aggressive out there. Doesn't really help me in business. So again, this is where context matters. And I thought, well, but right now I'm so insecure, I want to be confident and I want to be decisive because I wasn't making decisions. And I want to be articulate when I'm on stage and describing what I do and how it can impact other people. And then I thought, wait a second, I used the helmet to trigger Geronimo. I need something to trigger this other self. And so I've always thought that people who wear glasses are smart, and you know that they're— and that's who I wanted to start showing up as. So I went to LensCrafters in West Edmonton Mall where I was living at the time, and I bought a pair of non-prescription glasses. And I started— that's when I was starting— I'd start stepping into Richard. You know, when those would go on, that insecure Todd would go to the sidelines and Richard would take over.

Non-prescriptive glasses.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so to this day, and this was long before wearing glasses was cool, you know, this is like, this is the, this is the late '90s. Even the optometrist was like, you've got 20/15 vision, like you don't need glasses. And I'm like, can you just please just let me buy the glasses? Personal reasons. And but now obviously, you know, people wear them for style and that's all I wear them for now is dress. My point about that whole 2 circles coming together, one day I was working away and I didn't have my glasses on, 'cause I would, I would step in, it was me purposely stepping into that and activating that self.

And this is like a reverse Clark Kent kind of—

Exactly, it's what I called it. It was my reverse Superman. Superman put on the glasses to become the mild-mannered Clark Kent, I put on the glasses to become my Superman version of myself, and that's what I actually called myself, was Super Richard, 'cause my first name's Richard. And so, but as I was working away, and I didn't have my glasses on, and then I went to that quote from Cary Grant, and I was like, I became the person I wanted to be. I didn't need it anymore. So it was a mechanism and a tool that I used to get my best self out there.

It's interesting how actors, when I spend time with them training them to memorize their lines or speed read their scripts, I was always a little bit envious that this is all I've done for over 25 years, And this is my passion, my mission. I'll be doing it for another 25 years. If I was gonna do something else though, and no one's ever asked me this, I'd be interested in acting, not because I don't want the fame.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm jealous of the amount of learning that they could do. They could try on different hats.

I know.

The amount of research that they do, the training. They're gonna play a new character, and what they get to adopt in this new mind. They get to try on, borrow someone else's genius. if you will, and that imprints on you.

Yeah.

And, you know, I don't know, I haven't thought about this, but when you're thinking about Batman and some of the characters are playing, you know, the Joker, or some of these, you know, where they might be going through different mental states, that really could leave an impression on somebody.

Yeah.

You know, and so it's very important that I wanna talk about how to actually create and control an alter ego, but I think a lot of us are doing this all the time. Like, everyone who's watching this thinking about what exactly is an alter ego and how do I create control it, but I feel like people are doing this already, and they're really great at it because they're feeding their identity and they're going to it. Sometimes we use our creative imagination for not so good results, meaning we go into that smaller version of ourself where we're scared of giving that toast at that wedding or be able to talk to that person we're attracted to, and we rehearse it.

Yeah. We're typically using the creative imagination, again, to create a hell from heaven. More than we are creating it for our heads.

So we're really good at that skill. We're super good at it. Right, so it's not like people have to learn something brand new.

No, that's what I'm saying. In the book I'm like, you know, I didn't invent this. More than anything else, I'm on a mission of a great remembering for people. Like just to remind you that you've already done this, you've used this.

We're doing it daily.

It's powerful, you're doing it daily. Other people have used it. Martin Luther King, Oprah Winfrey, Winston Churchill, all of the different athletes.

Beyoncé.

Beyoncé with Sasha Fierce allowed her to, get past that sort of gospel self. I mean, she grew up in an environment where it was gospel, it was, you know, obviously hymns and growing up in that environment of church, and all of a sudden she's being thrust into this world where she's standing on stage with— at one point there was 8 of them in her troupe, and they're singing pop songs that might be provocative in some way, dancing around provocatively, and that was a real resistance point for her. that was gonna be a challenge for her to express herself creatively if she didn't come to grips with it. And so she created Sasha Fierce, and Sasha Fierce went out there. And then of course she retired Sasha Fierce later on, and that's because she became the entertainer she wanted to be.

Right.

And it's not— wasn't negative. It wasn't her faking it. It's just, it's natural. We do this. So Creative imagination and people employing it for negative purposes, you know, I'm trying to get people to tap into it for positive. And then over a while, just like any habit, just like the stuff that you teach, it becomes just more ingrained and it becomes a natural way that you operate. Unconscious competence.