EP 273: Tiny Experiments, BIG Breakthroughs with Guest Expert Anne-Laure Le Cunff

I call them tiny experiments and not big experiments because I think building this confidence in yourself and in your choices comes from proving to yourself that you can make those decisions and that good things will happen. It's really about starting small and just trying to do something different, maybe something that goes against what advice you would get from friends or from your employer, and seeing that the The world doesn't end. You've done something that goes against the scripts. You've done something different. You've done something that felt uncomfortable. And it's really about progressively building that self-confidence through cycles of experimentation instead of trying to make the big change straight away.

Hi, I'm Blake Schofield, founder and CEO of The Bridge to Fulfillment. Mom to 3, USA Today top 10 professional women to follow. Professional coach and former corporate executive who got tired of sacrificing my life for a comfortable paycheck. My mission is to expand perspectives to achieve greater impact at home and work without sacrifice. This is The Bridge to Fulfillment. On this week's episode, I am interviewing Anne-Laure Le Cunff. She's a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, and writer. A former Google executive, she went back to university to earn a PhD in psychology and neuroscience from King's College in London. As the founder of Nest Labs and author of its widely read newsletter, she writes about evidence-based ways for people to make the most of their minds, navigate uncertainty, and practice lifelong learning. Her work has been featured in peer-reviewed academic journals and mainstream publications such as Wired, Forbes, Rolling Stone, Fortune, Entrepreneur, and more. I really loved my time in this podcast talking with her about research-backed knowledge about how our brain works and how you can learn how to train your brain to create a more fulfilling life with really small, tiny experiments. I'm excited to share this conversation with you, and I hope that you leave this conversation with the ability to take a small, tiny experiment action in your life to continue to help you grow and build a more fulfilling career and life. Anne-Laure, I'm so excited to have you on the podcast today. Your energy is infectious, and so I'm excited to see what comes of our conversation today. So thank you for taking some time out of your busy week to spend with me and with my audience.

Thanks so much for having me, Blake. I'm so excited about this conversation.

You have a very fascinating background, and I'm really interested to have you share a little bit with the audience about your personal journey and how you ended up really finding your path and the work that you're really passionate about.

I, um, think about my life, my work, my career in general in two different phases, almost like two different parts of a book. And, uh, kind of similar to you actually, which is why I was so excited to connect with you and have this conversation. But I started my career in a very big corporation working at Google, and to get there I had a very focused linear approach. I tried to do very well in school. I went through a very intense interview process, and then once I was there, I did everything I could to be successful based on the traditional definition of success. So I tried to get promoted, I tried to work on the biggest projects, and I tried to get that internal recognition. And, um, still something felt wrong. I felt both burned out and a bit bored out as well, where I didn't really have excitement when I woke up in the morning. It felt a little bit mechanical. And, uh, I left my job at Google and I, I thought then that I would go go and do my own thing. But what I didn't realize at the time is that I kept on applying the same scripts that I had been taught. And for anyone listening to this who's familiar with the codes and the definitions of success in Silicon Valley, after you work at a big tech company, you're supposed to start a startup. So I did that. I started a startup. And again, it's just, that wasn't it. It still wasn't it. And it took for my startup to fail for me to finally find myself in a place where I had no idea what I was supposed to do next. To finally ask myself the question, what do I actually want to do? If I forget about the traditional definitions of success, if I forget about what people are expecting from me, if I forget about pleasing my parents and my friends, what is it I really want to do? And that really started that second phase, that second chapter in my life, which I'm still in right now, where I honestly have no idea where I'm going. I went back to school, I studied neuroscience, I just finished a PhD in neuroscience. For out of sheer curiosity to understand how the brain works. I started a newsletter, I'm writing online, I just finished writing a book, and I'm thinking about what is my next project I want to experiment with. And it's, uh, yeah, it's a life of playful experimentation. It's not linear at all. I'm a little bit lost, but I'm embracing it.

I love that. Uh, I find that so many of us that end up going maybe the quote-unquote non-traditional route started from backgrounds or families where we were given a very clear definition of what success looked like. And I wonder if your case is similar to mine. You know, I grew up with two parents that worked in corporate America. From a very young age, I was taught, don't do that, don't get a piercing, people won't hire you, don't dye your hair purple, people will judge you, don't do this and XYZ. And so a lot of my childhood was being taught the ways of which my parents had been taught or believed was necessary to be successful in a career or in life. And I actually started to realize in college that something felt off in the same way that you're talking about. I went to college to get my PhD in marriage and family psychology. That's what I was going to do, was be a therapist. And my junior year, I started to really realize, wait, some things about this don't feel right to me.. And I started to actually have a passion around motivational speaking, but back then it was really sort of the frontier. No one knew how it was gonna work. And because I had been taught a very linear way of success and that didn't have a linear path to success, I didn't even think like maybe those people have a team that I could go work on their team. I just thought my parents will kill me if I go to college and then I can't have a job and support myself. And so I, went the traditional route like you did. I spent 18 years in corporate America. I went through the roller coaster of like enjoying new jobs and then being bored. Exactly what you said, like bored and this like unsettled feeling and a lot of burnout to finally get to a place where I just couldn't do it anymore. And so I'm interested in your perspective, especially knowing that you and I share a passion for understanding how the brain works and how we end up on the journeys that we end up on. What did you learn about yourself and why you went the path initially that you did versus maybe being able to see or approach life differently?

I was nodding so much when you were sharing your story because it really resonates. And yes, absolutely, you're right. You guessed correctly. Very similar to you. I come from a background where— so in my case, I come from an immigrant background, but the result is the same, is that my parents really encouraged encouraged me to always make decisions that would be the safest, the safest choice. That's what I was supposed to do. I wanted to study literature and they told me, don't do that, nobody's going to hire you, there are no jobs, right? So I studied business and science instead with a career that was really designed to be successful professionally, designed to maximize job prospects. And all of my choices from high school until Google were based on this, on safety and on job prospects. So absolutely. And I think a lot of people for a variety of reasons go through this because I think for our parents, this came from a really good place. This came from a place of protection, of love, of wanting to make sure that your child would be safe, that you wouldn't have to worry about them, that they would have a roof on their head and food on the table. And so even though this came from a very positive place. I think a lot of us have grappled with this tension where we felt like we know what the safe thing to do is, but we feel like it's almost a little bit too safe that we lost in the process some of the curiosity, the excitement, the, the state of unknowing that can actually be very generative. And, um, you mentioned that you're also interested in how the brain works. For me, it was very interesting to discover that there are psychological phenomena that can explain why we follow these scripts. And that's the exact word that psychologists are using, actually. They call them cognitive scripts. And these can be very helpful because they tell you how to behave in certain situations. And if you think about it, it's a good thing that every time you find yourself in front of a door, you're not asking yourself again, how does that work? How am I supposed to open this door, right? So a lot of our responses are automated, and this is good. It allows us to go through life without having to overthink everything. But what we don't realize is that a lot of the decisions we make in life, some of the bigger decisions, decisions in our work, decisions in our relationships, decisions even in terms of the creative projects that we choose, are also at an unconscious level following those cognitive scripts. And just being aware of the existence of those scripts for me was a big aha moment because I started paying more attention to why I was making certain choices and asking myself, Is that the choice I actually wanna make, or am I following a script?

Mm. That's so powerful. You know, I, yeah, I've invested a lot of money and a lot of time learning in these last 7 years and sort of a non-traditional way, both learning through life and testing, you know, through myself and hundreds of clients, these principles, and then also learning them. And I think it's fascinating to me how many people still don't know that your belief systems are formed by the time that you're 7, that the majority of decisions decision-making that you're making is subconscious, to your point, these scripts, and that they can all be changed, that we have neuroplasticity, our brains can learn new things, we can change and do things differently. Recently I've been reading, uh, Mel Robbins', uh, Let Them book, which is really fun. And, you know, she talks about how difficult it is for people to change. And it's an interesting thing. I've spent 7 years actually learning how to move from somebody who saw the world in black and white, right or wrong, to somebody who actually has massively transformed my life. I think 90% of the belief systems that I had 10 years ago have changed. And so I've learned how to master change and how to understand the belief systems, challenge them, remove the things and replace them with things that are far more effective.. And I'm sure this is all stuff that you've learned. And so I'm excited to dive into this more because this research has been around for a very long time, but it doesn't get out to the public. And so, so many people are operating like we were from a place of burnout or unhappiness. And you know, when I was in corporate America, I started my career out actually in HR, and I knew something wasn't right with that one either. I kept looking and going, this isn't it. But the thing that always hit me was how many people were miserable and unhappy in their careers and were just going through the motions and believed that that was as good as it was going to be. And you just had to live that way. And what I now personally believe is that when we get to these moments where something feels wrong or off, where we keep having chronic sicknesses or burnout, it's really the opportunity to step into the growth of who we always were. And begin to see, to your point, what are the scripts we grew up with? What are the things that we believe? And begin to actually find our true self again. So I'm interested in your thoughts. If this is a new concept for people or they don't really understand, maybe they don't even know subconsciously what they believe or what's driving them. How did you begin to start to see that in yourself? And what advice would you give to somebody to start to do that? Because I think most people really are unaware of what those are. I certainly was 8 years ago.

I really like how you were talking about how people suffer, go through the motions, experience burnout. And I think the problem here for a lot of people is that they're not treating these as signals. They're treating these as a problem, immediate problem to fix. And usually it comes with a lot of self-judgment and shame where we feel like if we're struggling at work, if it's hard to get up in the morning, if we're exhausted by the time we get home and it's hard to take care of the kids because we feel like we have no mental or physical energy left. Something must be wrong with the way we're doing things, but we're just blaming ourselves. And usually we use willpower to push through because we feel like, surely everybody else around me is managing and I'm not, so something's wrong with me. Well, first, a lot of people are actually not managing. Everybody's struggling, but we don't talk about it. And second, for those people who are managing, very often it's because they actually have found a configuration in their life in terms of work and personal life and the kind of support systems that they have and the kind of self-care tools that they have and routines that they have that actually works for them. And that rarely happens by chance. It usually goes with a lot of questioning your assumptions, questioning the, the way you approach things, questioning even what you want, questioning your own desires. And so I would really encourage people you are struggling, to first stop blaming yourself and actually consider the struggle a signal from your brain that something is wrong, and your brain is just trying to communicate to you, hey, we're not too happy about the current situation, can we do something about it? By doing this, first you start opening a door where you're replacing this illusion of control that you have with curiosity and this kind of this gentle form of curiosity where you're really just observing and asking questions and just saying, okay, how are we feeling? What could be different? What could we experiment with? This is what's going to allow you to break free from those scripts and start writing your own story. Mm-hmm. Amen.

Uh, everything you said, I wish that whoever's listening to this will rewind and listen to that again. I've thought a lot about this concept. Right, that the things that we're experiencing are actually signs and symptoms that our life is in misalignment. They are warning signs, but because we're surrounded by other people experiencing the same thing, our brain will pattern match and say, nothing's wrong with me. Everyone else is experiencing this, right? There's a, a really interesting concept that I see play out over and over again, which is, you know, we seek people that are similar to ourselves. When we're struggling, to your point, often we blame ourselves instead of recognizing, you know, that this is a warning sign telling us to create change. And many times when we do seek advice, we're seeking it from maybe close friends or close family. And because of the belief systems that our close friends and family have and their emotional ties to us, they often don't have the tools to solve the problems we have. And so we go to them and we say, I'm suffering from this anxiety. I feel overwhelmed. I am lacking clarity. And they say, well, maybe you need a hobby. Maybe you just shouldn't care about work as much. Maybe X, Y, Z. And I think, you know, when I look back to my journey, that's a huge part of why I spent well over a decade of my 18 years trying to solve this problem is because I was going to the wrong people, people who actually hadn't solved the problem or had the same scripts or same belief systems or same traumas that I had. And so what it was doing was reinforcing this belief that the world I saw was the entirety of the world, that everyone struggled in this way, that this was normal, that I was the problem, that I needed to figure out a better way to deal with it. And I share that because often we aren't expanding our circle widely enough when we experience these things to actually be able to see, is the way I see the world complete? Are there other ways to look at the world or how I'm approaching this or what I can do that would be far healthier or far better fit for me? And, uh, it wasn't really until I got out of that bubble myself, moved into entrepreneurship, that I started really meeting people who had completely different life experiences than I did, had accomplished things in very different ways than I had, had completely different scripts or belief systems that I began to realize, oh, I'm just repeating all of these same things because I believe that the way I see the world is accurate and in its totality when that wasn't really true. And I was just repeating that cycle. And I think so many times we actually re-traumatize ourselves because we go to people that we think can help us in our most darkest or challenging times. And those people have the same belief systems or same limiting fears or same scripts, and they tell us that something is wrong with us or that we can't solve it or that we're the problem. And then we just continue to perpetuate the problem.

Yeah. And also an issue that is related to this is that we think that we can go to other people to give us a ready-made answer that we can then apply. And I think that is the fundamental mistake that a lot of us are making. And it does make sense from an evolutionary perspective. We hate uncertainty. We want an answer and we want it fast. If you think about when we used to live in the jungle, the more information you had about who was around, who was lurking in the bushes, who wanted to eat you, and, uh, any kind of information that you could have, and the faster you could get the answers, the higher your chances of survival. Because of that, whenever we're struggling, we tend to run to whoever is closest to us and who might have an answer to give us. And even though deep down we know, we know that nobody has a perfect answer that we can just copy paste, we know it's going to require a little bit of work. We know that something that worked for a friend might not work for us because we're all unique. We still try to bypass all of this and just to get that answer as quickly as possible, just to feel like this uncertainty, this fear of not knowing is gone. And so I think reimagining our relationship to uncertainty, embracing it as something we can learn from, not something to get rid of as quickly as possible, is also another part of the puzzle.

100%. I think that is one of the biggest challenges we have as a society. Uh, one of my favorite quotes is Virginia Satir. Most people prefer the, uh, certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.

That's amazing.

This belief system, right, that what we know to be true is safer than what we don't. And it was only through my journey of small experiments, which I love, because this is exactly how you help people get there, to begin to realize that if what I was doing was not working and there was no way that it would get me what I wanted, that was actually the greatest risk. Because the longer you continue to do things that your body and your mind and your heart and your soul are screaming are not right for you, it's like a 50 pound backpack, then it becomes 100 pounds, then it becomes 500 pounds. You— it is unsustainable. And so that was actually the risk. And being able to learn how to take small steps, small experiments, small motions forward to explore what was possible— when I began to realize that was the only way to get what it is that I wanted, and that often there were far better outcomes than I ever would have imagined were possible, it really helped me learn to embrace that uncertainty and to recognize that uncertainty was actually the gift. And it was beginning to realize that my brain is just naturally wired to repeat the things because it thinks that's safe, but that actually is not safe when you aren't doing the things that are aligned with who you are, your health, the life you wanna lead, et cetera.

And you just touched upon something so important, which is that if you're looking for a specific answer, you're only going to explore a very limited set of possible outcomes because you're limited by your imagination. You don't know what you don't know. And so by opening up the range of questions that you're asking, by having more discussions with different kinds of people, with exploring different experiments outside of your comfort zone, trying new things, giving yourself the opportunity to make mistakes and learn in the process, you're more likely to get to a place that you could not have imagined in the first place. And I think that's the best outcome you can hope for is being able to look back and feel like, wow, I had no idea I could get here. I had no idea this was a possibility at all. This is how you wanna feel when you look back. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's amazing. I think often high achievers, we're trying to figure out how to rig it so we can achieve our goals. And the way that we've been taught to do that, to your point, stops us from achieving those goals, reduces the amount of options that we actually have to win, and very often limits us because our view of what's possible for us is often much lower than what truly is. And so this idea of learning how to cultivate your curiosity and learning how to take small experiments is really beautiful. My experience is that young children know exactly who they are. They have curiosity. They go through the world and do the things that feel good to them. And somehow through their growing up experience and well-meaning adults who don't understand about human development and how things are done, those children take on belief systems, conditioning, etc., that actually stops us from trusting ourselves and being curious. I'm interested to hear your perspective on that. And this idea of we know who we are as a little kid, then we start trusting other people. How can we get back to trusting ourselves?

It's very interesting how, again, this all comes from a good place from adults very often just trying to help us be successful, be safe, life being efficient. Why waste so much time exploring different things when we know what works? So let's focus on that, right? And this is what we're encouraged to do in our studies and the way we manage our lives in general. So how do we get back to this place of curiosity where we don't necessarily know what we like, but we trust that we will be able to know it when we see it? And this is how kids learn, right? They try a lot of things, but they also quit a lot of things very quickly. So they'll try it and they'll say, ah, I don't like this. Actually, I'm going to do that. Oh, everything, and then if they find something they like, that becomes the most important thing in the world for them, and they can lose themselves in that, that project or whatever it is they're learning about and forget about everything else. As adults, it's really about recreating that kind of space for exploration. Unfortunately, we're quite busy. We have responsibilities. We can't necessarily spend the entire day looking at the ceiling and daydreaming and waiting for inspiration to hit. It may sound strange, but stay with me. This is something I've been recommending to the people I work with and they have found it really helpful. But you can actually schedule time for curiosity. And this is about blocking time in your calendar depending on how much time you have. That can be half an hour, 1 hour, 2 hours. We all have different schedules. You put that in your calendar as if it was a meeting, a work meeting. You tell everybody, don't disturb me. I'm doing research. You can call it whatever you want in your calendar so people leave you alone. And you use that time to just fall into a Wikipedia rabbit hole if that's what you want to do, to open a book you've been wanting to read, to listen to that podcast that you saved and you haven't had time to listen for a few weeks and that's been on your mind, to take some notes, to write a little something. If you're someone who has been thinking about writing a newsletter, for example, but you've been too busy to do it. You can sit down and write something very short in an hour and send it every week. Whatever you want to use for that time, what's really important is that you don't decide in advance what you're going to do with that time. It's not about scheduling work. It's not about creating homework. It's about having that time and being able to sit down and ask yourself, okay, curiosity hour, what am I feeling curious about right now? And it doesn't have to be productive. There's no need for any output if that's not what I feel like right now. I just need to follow and to honor my curiosity for that amount of time, and then I can go back to my adult responsibilities.

Mm, I love that so much. I have an old mentor, Randy Massingale. He would talk about creating what he calls righteous hang days, and it was a day where he'd have a set amount of money and no plan in advance. And it was what you're saying. It was just literally like, I'm gonna wake up and whatever I feel like doing that day, I'm going to go do, and I'm I'm gonna trust and I'm gonna follow my intuition and the thing that brings me joy. And he would stay out until he had spent all of his money and then he would go back home.

That's amazing.

Isn't that amazing? So I started doing that a couple years ago and, uh, I found it brought so much like joy and interest and color to my life because it just brings you back to being present in the moment and to recognizing that life is really meant to be enjoyed. And I think You know, as somebody who is a high achiever who spent so many years focused on achieving and climbing the ladder and accomplishing all these things, I see so many of us get caught in the wheel of believing that we need to be productive all of the time. And it is actually that belief system that's creating all of the burnout. It's that belief system that's stopping us from finding more creative ways to be efficient or really understanding what we're uniquely passionate and gifted and want to do. And so I, I really love, uh, your idea of helping people block 30 minutes, an hour, 2 hours, whatever that is, to get back to that childlike state. Because the more my experience has been, the more that you are in that state, the more you begin to open up the pathways to see the world differently.

Yes, exactly. It's almost like a muscle. You just need to use it, and, uh, the more you use it, the stronger it becomes, and the more you actually enjoy using it.

Mm-hmm. I love that. This idea of your brain being a muscle, I think is really powerful. I, uh, I have 3 kiddos. My oldest kiddo, several years ago, uh, had a lot— he is a very entrepreneurial mind. I ended up putting him in a program to help him learn entrepreneurial principles for success and how to figure out what he was good at and how to really learn to trust himself. And he talked about that program as, you know, the workout for the mind. And I thought that was really powerful and a place where in society I hope we can have more discussions around this because we've never been in more uncertain times probably than we are today. The level of technology and societal change and industrial change that's headed— that we are headed directly into as a society, we're going to learn— we're going to need to learn how to become more adaptable. How to trust ourselves, how to actually figure out what our skills are and how to adapt those in different ways, how to be curious and solve problems in new ways. And to me, so much of the journey starts with understanding that your brain is a muscle and you can train it, and you can also learn some of the lies that your brain tells you that aren't always the truth. And you can begin to have a relationship with yourself in a way that you can cultivate that trust, that curiosity, and those capabilities. And I think And again, most people, I feel like, don't know that yet. And it's so powerful.

Yeah, it's such a useful metaphor to really embrace your sense of self-agency and just knowing that, you know, you mentioned at the beginning of the conversation neuroplasticity, knowing that you actually have the ability to change your behaviors, to change your thoughts, to work with your emotions, to learn from them. To listen to those signals and decide to use that data, because it is data, to make better decisions. And, uh, I think this is a better relationship to developing a sense of fluid and very flexible control that takes into account the fact that everything is changing so fast. As you mentioned, technological change, industrial change, knowing that you have this agency to change and to grow as the world changes around you, but also knowing that there's no point really in trying to cling on to rigid systems and to ways of doing things, because any way of doing things that you might have right now might become outdated tomorrow. So the best skill we can develop really is learning how to learn.

100%. And I think depending on where you are generationally, I think this is a place that the younger generations have cultivated that more with technology, discussions around mental health, discussions about how your brain works. And the older generation really was taught, suck it up, this is how it's done, uh, et cetera. And so some of these concepts, depending on where you are in your life journey, might be something that you've already embraced or might be something that's literally the polar opposite of how you grew up. But I can say as somebody who, like I said, was was really raised in a very black and white linear way and went through all of the, this is how the systems work, this is the only way it works mentality, and now operate in polar opposite to that, that we all can learn this. And when I started this journey, really leaving corporate America, I said to myself, you know, I wanna do work that feels meaningful and impactful, and I wanna have a more sane life, right? Where I can pick my kids up and, and, uh, take them to school and be more present and not feel so overwhelmed or exhausted. And not go through the cycles of burnout. And at the time, I really had no idea that what I was really doing was teaching myself how to honor who I am, how to really learn to remove the barriers of my life and understand what my— what I was experiencing and feeling, what that meant. And ultimately, it gave me a much greater understanding of humanity and the shared struggles that we have. And I think the biggest challenge for high achievers is that we do believe that we We have been successful because we have been rigid, because we do all of these things, because we work so hard. And it's actually those belief systems that keep us trapped repeating these cycles because we fear if we don't keep doing the things that we've done, that everything will fall apart, that the financial security, the reputation, that everything we've done that we've put together won't exist. And it's only in starting to understand those fears and belief systems we are perpetuating and allowing ourselves to understand who we are and the ways of which our brain is actually limiting our potential. I think, can we gain the freedom? I had no idea the amount of freedom that was possible for my life in all ways, shapes, and forms when I started this journey. And I always tell people, there's so much more potential for your life, and it's all hidden inside of us. And so I love the fact that you are helping people take small steps forward to do that because it can feel overwhelming when you feel trapped in something, you feel trapped in the career, you feel trapped in the relationships, you feel trapped in the way of living and you don't know how to do it any differently. But to your point, in small ways you can begin to build that strength or that skill. So with that said, I'm interested to hear your perspective. You share a little bit about how tiny experiments can teach us how to value our insights above others' criticism. And I think one of the biggest things that stops people from doing the thing they innately know in their heart is right for them is a fear on how people will react or letting down the people that we feel responsible for. And so we often are prioritizing other people over ourselves. How can tiny experiments help people begin to value themselves and look inward first versus externally?

This is why I call them tiny experiments and not big experiments, because I think I think building this confidence in yourself and in your choices comes from proving to yourself that you can make those decisions and that good things will happen. And so it's really about starting small and just trying to do something different, maybe something that goes against what advice you would get from friends or from your employer. And it doesn't have to be risky. A lot of people on the internet will tell you that you should just quit your job and that you should just go for it, right? The reality for most people is that, again, we have responsibilities. This is not necessarily possible, and frankly, it would maybe not be the smartest thing to do. So instead, just choosing something that you do a little bit differently, and that could be starting a new creative project that is outside of your comfort zone. That could be acquiring a new skill that has nothing to do with your current job, something completely different that you're just curious about. Out. That could be— I have a friend, for example, who started doing stand-up comedy, just showing up at those shows and the open mic where you can show up and do a bit. Terrifying. I don't think I would be able to do it, but that worked for them. And by doing this and seeing that the world doesn't end, you've done something that goes against the scripts. You've done something different. You've done something that felt uncomfortable, and you did that that tiny experiment and it was fine, and maybe it was even fun, then you can start and do maybe something a little bit bigger, a little bit more ambitious, a little bit more uncomfortable. And it's really about progressively building that self-confidence through cycles of experimentation instead of trying to make the big change straight away. Mm-hmm.

Mm, that's powerful. You know, it's— I think about tiny experiments, to your point, many of the examples you gave are like following a passion or something from a creative lens. I often think if you aren't there yet and you are maybe like in the throes of burnout or in fight or flight, meaning you just have such a level of anxiety and stress, that the tiny experiments can be as small as I'm only going to check my email twice a day.

Absolutely. It can be as tiny as you need it to be. It's really about just experimenting with something a little bit different. And I've had people who experimented with just trying to go to bed at the same time for a week, just doing that and seeing if that works for them or not. Switching from regular coffee to decaf for a week and realizing for some of them that a lot of the symptoms of anxiety they had was because they were trying to compensate for their tiredness with too much coffee. So they just experimented with that and they learned something new. Or maybe trying to go for a walk from time to time. All of those kind of different things that you can do And the big difference between a tiny experiment and a habit is that with a habit, you commit to it for life. You say, I'm going to build this habit now. I'm going to be the kind of person who goes to the gym 3 times a week for the rest of my life. I'm going to be the kind of person who reads a book every evening before going to bed. And the problem is that 2 things. First, why commit for something that's for the rest of your life when you haven't even tried it first? And second, there is no such thing as an intrinsically good habit. It's really about, does it work for you? Is it aligned with your context, with your constraints, with your desires? Because of that, that's why I really recommend to people, before trying to build all of those new habits, which is very difficult, run a tiny experiment first for a week or for 2 weeks. And then if something works for you, then you can turn it into a habit. Mm.

So good. And, and what I think's beautiful about the idea of tiny experiments is it is a gaining of self-awareness. And often I think we lose that self-awareness as we grow and we worry and we overschedule and we overthink and we overplan our lives. We start to lose that connection of how does this make me feel? Does this make me feel good or bad? Does this give me energy or does this drain me? And the idea of these tiny experiments means that you go into it without expectations, and then you're actually saying, how does it make me feel? And what is the outcome of doing that? And through that, you begin to realize you have a lot more agency over your life, that maybe you aren't trapped in that relationship or that career or that job that you don't like. Maybe you really do have a little bit of time today to build the community relationships you want or take better care of your health health. Because often we think all the change has to come in big sweeping things, and we don't have enough knowledge to know even if it will work. So this idea of these tiny experiments is just a really simple way to do something small, see the impact of that, begin to, to your point, to trust yourself more. And, and then life gets better in small incremental ways, day after day after day.

Exactly. It's, uh, I like to call it becoming the scientist of your own life. You just have a hypothesis, uh, you know, kind of a, a research question almost. And you're asking yourself, what if? What if I changed that small thing? What if I approach this challenge in a slightly different way? What if I carved out some time in my day to do this little activity? What if I started learning about this new topic? What if? 'What if?' And you just keep on asking, 'What if?' You collect data, you look at it, you look at the outcome, and there's no success or failure in the traditional binary sense of the term, because as long as you learn something new, that's success.

Wonderful. So you have lots of ways that the audience could follow you and learn more about tiny experiments and how can they do this for themselves.

Can you share maybe the top 2 ways that they could follow you and learn more about Well, the top way to learn about tiny experiments is to just read my book, which is called Tiny Experiments, and you can look it up anywhere books are sold and get a copy there. And if you would like to read my newsletter, which I send every week discussing a lot of the topics that we just talked about, just go to neslabs.com, enter your email address, and you will be subscribed.

Wonderful. It's been such an honor to have you today. Thank you for sharing your passion and your knowledge with me, with the audience, and honestly, just with the world. I think there's no more important time than today that we learn these things so that we can be more resilient and adaptable. We can live more fulfilling lives and we can learn how to solve problems in new and novel ways that align with the things we're naturally gifted at and passionate about. So I will wrap it up with this. Is there any question I didn't ask you that I should have, or is there just anything that's on your heart that you would like to leave the audience with before we close up today?

Well, I'm just going to leave the audience with a question, I guess, which is, what will be your first tiny experiment? Mm.

So good. Thank you for that. I always believe that as a culture, we consume a lot of things, but the true learning is in the applying and the embodying of the lessons. So I like her challenge to you guys. What are you going to do with the knowledge you've learned today, and how do you use that to start to make small movements forward in your life? Thank you again for joining me. It's such a pleasure. And for those of you listening, as always, appreciate you being a loyal listener, and I hope you have a wonderful week.