This Tiny Habit Rewires Your Brain - Anne-Laure Le Cunff

I'm a neuroscientist and I help people make the most of their mind, think better, live better. Let's pretend for 24 hours that you are an anthropologist, but with your own life and work as the topic of study. And for 24 hours, you're just going to observe. Why do I spend my time in this way? Why do I care so much about this? I actually don't even believe in a fixed self. We keep on changing. The world keeps on changing. You change in response. You change in response to your relationships, the encounters that you have every time you read a book, listen to a podcast, have a conversation. Let's actually experiment. Let's actually run an experiment. Let's try something different. What's really interesting with experiments is that you're not starting from a goal and a binary definition of success. You're saying, I'm going to try this thing because I want to learn something new, and that's it. I know meditation can be dangerous for some people.

Really?

Yes, absolutely. There are ways where it can increase anxiety because—

before we get started with the episode, our books are now open.

If you need help getting in front of the right people, finding your dream customers, or winning new business, we might be able to help.

Why not outsource your sales to We Have a Meeting? Just go to wehaveameeting.com. Anne-Laure Le Cunff. How did I do?

You did great.

Okay. I'm trying. I'm trying my best. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

No problem. So we always start off the same way. Who are you and what problem do you solve?

I'm a neuroscientist and I help people make the most of their mind, think better, live better.

Nice. And people who pick up your book or interact with your work, what kind of symptoms are they normally experiencing that motivate them to look at what you do?

I tend to work with people who are quite ambitious, and because of that, the Type A kind of people who tend to maybe be perfectionists or overly focused on being successful on what I call linear goals. And I help them become a little bit more experimental, trying new things, exploring maybe a different path, something a little bit different, letting go of that idea of traditional success.

So if I'm, let's say I'm the the perfect person to work with you. So I walk into your office, I'm a perfectionist, I want to think about making better decisions in life. Where do I start?

It always starts with observation. So when a scientist wants to design an experiment, they don't just go and write the protocol, right? They have a look at what is the current situation, and it should be the same with your life and with your work. I encourage people to do a little exercise that I call self-anthropology. And the reason why I call it like that is because I tell them, let's pretend for 24 hours that you are an anthropologist, but with your own life and work as the topic of study. And for 24 hours, you're just going to observe, why do I spend my time in this way? Why do I care so much about this? Why do I spend so much energy on this? Why is that my routine and not something different? Without any judgment or self-blame, because an anthropologist wouldn't judge their topic of study, right? When you do that, you'll start noticing patterns, things that you've been doing in an automatic way, and that can become the seed to design what I call tiny experiments, trying things that are a little bit different.

So, so give us an example of what, what might the pattern be that the typical Performer A might be facing in life?

Okay, let's start with when you wake up. Typical pattern, I wake up, I open my laptop, I check my emails, or even I start checking my emails in bed. I've seen people do that, right? You open your phone and you just check, is there anything happening? Yeah, we've all done that. Or a bit better, you don't do it in bed, but yeah, cup of coffee, you get at work, first thing you do is check your emails. Booking meetings back to back, not giving yourself any break in the middle, canceling social plans or things, hobbies or things that you wanna spend time on because you have a work presentation or an important meeting with a client. And, uh, really in general, letting your to-do list dictate how you spend your time and your energy. Those are the kind of patterns that I see happening over and over again in ambitious people.

I wonder with part of this, so there's a lot of talk around the authentic self and the idea of authenticity. I wonder from your work if you've noticed if it's even possible to be authentically yourself, because obviously you're getting trapped in these habits and loops and maybe living a life you don't necessarily always want to live. But if you were authentically yourself, would that even be possible in the first place? So is there such a thing as the authentic self?

I'm going to get a little philosophical for a second. Yes. I actually don't even believe in a fixed self. We keep on changing. The world keeps on changing. You change in response. You change in response to your relationships, the encounters that you have. Every time you read a book, listen to a podcast, have a conversation, the three of us are not going to be the same people after we had this connection that we were before, right? So to me, the authentic self is not really trying to figure out what is that that person I'm trying to, to discover, right? It's more about staying in touch with yourself and constantly asking yourself, what do I need right now? What do I want right now? What am I curious about right now? With the knowing that this might change. It's just for right now, and that can guide your next decisions, that can guide your next projects, what you work on, the way you spend your energy. But it's also completely fine in 6 months to say, You know what? This was great. I learned everything I could learn from this and I'm ready to move on.

So let's say then I'm an ambitious person, right? And my want is to get the promotion, like the big promotion. But actually the why I want to get the big promotion is because I want validation from a parent who maybe didn't love me enough. Is that still a want that I need to go for and explore, or is it actually I need to be totally redirected?

So it really depends on why, as you said, the validation coming from, from a parent. We all need validation. So I think very often we tend to just dismiss the need in the first place because it comes from a place of lack in our childhood. And so we say, well, I don't need validation, right? The truth is our brains are wired to seek validation from our peers. That's not going to change. This is how we survive as a society. It is part of the mechanisms. That's why we call ourselves social animals, right? So that sense of validation is going to be very hard to get rid of except if you really, you know, you're enlightened or, and which I don't know if that's something everybody wants to aim for. So just separating, decoupling the, the, the fact that you want validation from where it comes from and then asking yourself, okay, I will probably want validation. Where do I want this validation, the sense of validation to come from? Do I want that to come from work? Do I want that to come from my spouse? You know, wanting to be a good parent, a good friend, that's also ambitious. We never think about it in this way. So thinking about your ambitions, where you wanna get validation from, again, observing where you're currently seeking it from and then asking yourself where you wanna get it from. If that's from work, I would argue that this is not a bad thing. What's bad is when it's unintentional, that we do it on autopilot without really questioning why we're doing things. So that's why I always tell observation first. And then if the answer is, you know what, I actually really want that promotion. I've been working really hard and I want that validation from my colleagues for the work that I've done, and I'm going to go for it, then do it. That's fine.

So how do you— so say I'm imagining this CEO, this high-performing salesperson in bed, and the first thing they're doing is they're checking their emails and they're doing it. And the belief around that will be, I have to do this because X means X, and I'm moving forward, I'm growing a business, we're running all of these different things. If you do the study, the experiment for 24 hours, and you're like, okay, that is probably like bad, how do you start to unpick belief of— because my mind would say, well, I need to do that, I have to do that in order to be X person. How do we start to unpick that belief?

So it's interesting because normally people would spend a lot of time reflecting on it. And the problem is that, at least with the people I work with, a lot of ambitious people are also overthinkers. And so I try to get them out of that and say, stop thinking about it, let's actually experiment, let's actually run an experiment, let's try something different. What's really interesting with experiments is that you're not starting from a goal and a binary definition of success. You're not saying, I'm going to do this thing because I want to succeed. You're saying, I'm going to try this thing because I wanna learn something new, and that's it. So I would say if you're in that situation, asking yourself, okay, what is a potential different approach to this? And let me try it. And I have the hypothesis that it might help. But my hypothesis might be wrong, and that's okay, right? As a scientist, when you don't get the result you expected, you don't blame yourself. You just say, huh, okay, interesting. Didn't see that one coming. What can we learn from this? So I would say pick something that you've been doing in a way that you think has been detrimental to your business, your mental health, your relationships, whatever that is. And then ask yourself, how could I do this differently? And the reason why my book is called Tiny Experiments is because I tell people to keep Keep it tiny. At first, you have no idea what's going to work, so just try to do the thing differently for maybe a week, maybe 2 weeks max, and pay attention to what changes. At the end of the week or the 2 weeks, you can look back and have this honest conversation with yourself. How did that feel?

We are entering a new era of outbound.

4 years in, We Have a Meeting has leveled up or our entire offer.

That's why multi-billion pound brands trust us, and we've booked meetings with Netflix, Spotify, Facebook, even Barcelona Football Club.

We've helped close deals up to £950,000.

We're doing it all— phone, LinkedIn, email, direct mail— and there's a few weird and wonderful possibilities that we're keeping in our back pocket. So if you're struggling to get in front of the right people at the right time, Inquire Today. So it feels like probably, and I love tiny experiments, but it feels like a lot of people will probably go wrong because January 1st rolls around and actually it's not a tiny experiment, it's the biggest experiment of their life. And that's probably so. So where, where do people go wrong when they set an experiment that's far too big for them?

Well, you already mentioned too big. That's a big problem. I call that the maximalist brain, and it's our tendency whenever we decide to do something new or to implement a change to just go for the biggest, most impressive version of it, cuz it, it feels good, right? You feel like I'm making a change. And so that's why I always tell people, if you're hesitating in between running your experiment for 6 weeks or 6 days, go for 6 days. Uh, and always try to go for the smallest version possible that is going to be enough for you to just have a feel for whether this is helping or not. That's one problem. Another problem is when we copy-paste our experiments from other people's experiments. So you might have a buddy who does something. That's something that happened to me with YouTube, for example, where everybody around me was starting a YouTube channel. And so I felt that kind of pressure that nobody was putting on me. I did that to myself and I said, oh wait, I also need a YouTube channel, right? We very often do that. And again, this is part of being ambitious. And, and you normally also have the kind of friends who do a lot of cool things and you feel like, wait a second, am I a failure because I'm not doing this thing? Am I missing out on something? So that's another mistake. And this is also why I tell people, again, don't overthink it, but keep it quite small because you can realize very quickly that even though your friends have been raving about this thing, maybe you don't like it. Maybe it's not for you. So those would be the two main things, making it too big and also copy-pasting your experiment from someone else. Nice.

What's the— I suppose people who maybe haven't read the book, what's a good example of a tiny experiment that was maybe surprise— the outcome might surprise people?

Well, I guess I'll use the YouTube one actually, because whenever I hear people say, you need to do this, instead of overthinking it, I'm like, okay, I'm curious, let's try it. So I did that with YouTube. I said, okay, I'm going to record and publish a YouTube video every week until the end of the year. And that was about 2, 3 months. I did it and, uh, I thought I would like it because I am fairly creative. I love writing, I love working with ideas, I love teaching. So I, I did the experiment and then I always recommend paying attention to both the external and internal signals when you're evaluating whether the experiment worked for you or not. External signals looked pretty good in terms of subscribers, likes, comments, whatever you would put in a dashboard that looked good. Internal signals, I hated it. Every time I had to sit down in front of this camera, I hated it. And because I had so much resistance around it, any day I was supposed to record a YouTube video, I was also procrastinating on everything else. So not only I didn't like the experiment itself, but it was having negative downstream effects on a bunch of other things in my life. And so what did I do at the end of the experiment? I stopped. You are allowed to do that. I stopped. And no, I did not get thousands of emails from people telling me, why did you stop your YouTube channel? Most people don't care, really. Everybody is busy. And so I, I think it's better to optimize for what actually brings you joy in your work. Rather than trying to please an imaginary crowd that actually doesn't care that much.

You mentioned something really interesting. So you talked about procrastinating. So there's like the task and then I'm procrastinating to not do the task. I think a lot of our listeners will come up against that a lot. Is procrastination typically a symptom if you're looking at it through that lens?

Absolutely. It's just a signal from your brain that something is not quite working. What's interesting though is that in our culture, we tend to completely repress that signal. If you go online and you look up, I'm procrastinating, help, or how to manage your procrastination, most of the articles you'll find, you'll find, or even on YouTube will be about how to beat your procrastination, how to get rid of it. It's, it's pretty violent actually. And, uh, it's a shame because you can learn a lot from your procrastination if you just treat it as a signal from your brain and you listen to it. You can get some very useful information that will help you not only get unstuck, but move forward. So I have a little tool in the book that I recommend using whenever that happens. So first, it requires a bit of a mental shift. Next time you procrastinate, you don't have to do it exactly like this, but just imagine saying, hello procrastination, welcome back. What are you trying to tell me? What are you trying to communicate? And then you can use this tool to have a bit of a structured conversation with your procrastination. Is the problem coming from the head, from the heart, or from the hand? If the problem is coming from the head, it means that at a rational level, you're not fully convinced that you should be working on this task in the first place. If the problem is coming from the heart, it means that although you think, yeah, I should be doing this thing, at an emotional level, you don't feel like this is going to be fun. It's not going to be enjoyable. And if the problem is coming from the hand, it means that at a practical level, you don't believe that you have the right skills or the right tools or, or even sometimes the, the right support network in order to complete the task. And what's great is that when you start having that conversation with your procrastination in a bit of a systematic way like that, you can also be systematic in the way you solve the problem. So if the problem is coming from the head, you can go back to the drawing board and ask yourself, okay, is that the right task? Is that actually aligned with my ambitions? Is there maybe a better way to do it? If the problem is coming from the heart, then make it fun. You can grab your, a friend and do a little coworking session or go to your favorite coffee shop. And if the problem is coming from the hand, then raise that hand, ask for help. And so that could be coaching, mentoring, or watching a video tutorial. But when you know that the problem is just practical, you can then go and solve that problem.

So when you were talking about that, it makes me think of like discipline and the— I guess it's listening to the body. But a lot of the time when you wake up at 5 in the morning and you're ready for the gym and maybe the baby's been crying, you think, oh, I don't want to do this. But then Sometimes people confuse procrastination with discipline. So what's your take on just— there are many books out there, I think some of them are called like Do the Hard Thing or Get Up, Kick Yourself in the Ass, whatever they are, things like that. So how do you torture yourself in a kind of manner when it comes to doing the things that you might not want to do, but you know you have to?

I think there's a misconception which a lot of people are feeding this idea online that ambition needs to be hard, it needs to feel effortful. Two things. First, there is a difference in between occasional resistance, doing something that you know you want to do because of a bunch of factors. The baby has been crying, you're tired. You're not going to question the fact that you like running because there are a few mornings where it's a little bit harder to do it.

Mm-hmm.

In those moments, using that kind of short-term willpower to do something that you know will make you feel good later and you just need to put push through that little moment of resistance, put your shoes on and go for the run. That's one thing. And that, I think, there's no question that this can be really helpful because sometimes there's just feeling better on the other side of a little bit of pushing through. Then there is the idea of just pushing through all the time, using willpower to work really, really, really hard, and this is how you're going to be successful. Uh, first, success doesn't work like that. There are a bunch of studies showing that there is a luck factor, there is a network factor of who you know and all of these kind of things, being at the, in the right place in the right time. So telling people just work really hard and you'll be successful is just a, a very toxic way to trying to help people. And I doubt, to be honest, that the, the people who say that are actually trying to help. And If you wanna be successful, I, I believe that you actually need to enjoy what you're doing, which doesn't mean that it's not hard sometimes, right? It, it's not incompatible. Sometimes you can do something that's quite hard but enjoyable. Writing my book was hard, but most of the time I actually enjoyed it and I had to push through sometimes a little time, but I, it wasn't a complete slog or feeling like, why am I doing this to myself? I hate every second of it, but I wanna be a book writer. And so something I would ask people who are really every single morning, it's hard to go for that run, is asking them, okay, what do you actually want here? Clearly you don't wanna run. What you want is maybe feel strong, have more energy, feel like good in your body, right? Well, running is not the only way to achieve this. Mm-hmm. Also running in the morning at 5:00 AM is not the only way to achieve this. And so that's where I would tell them, maybe try experimenting with something different. Is that a bit of yoga? Is that going to a dance class every Sunday? Is that, are there other ways to move your body that are not going to feel like it's a drag and you hate every second of it?

We've had a variety of guests on this podcast from like high-flying CEOs, billionaires, but I'd really love to get your opinion. I guess what would your definition What would the definition of success be?

Wanting to wake up in the morning and being excited about what's to come. I think that's the definition of success. And it's not a given. A lot of people are fairly depressed and actually struggle to get out of bed in the morning. To me, if that's what, if you have that, that's success.

Wow, that's a nice one. There's the hook. So I did a horrible thing the other day that I think we all do where you search things in ChatGPT and you get an answer that you think, I was like, oh my God, is that true? And it was around how much of our lives we spend in rational mode. And it said something terrifying like 30% of your life you'll be a rational person, 70% you'll be completely irrational. And then that led me down the path of is free will a real thing? And then before you know it, I'm wanting to throw my phone in the river and never look at it again. So I suppose from your perspective, what you've learned in the neuroscience, Are we just being dragged along by our irrational mind, or is there more to it than that?

Unfortunately, a lot of that is true. Yes, we're not rational beings. I don't think it's such a bad thing. I think what's really important is really to practice turning back on your rational mind in moments where it is actually important for you to make a decision that is as rational as possible. So it's a little bit like a muscle that you can train when you notice that you're not being rational right now. And again, it's all about intentionality. There are lots of moments in life I don't wanna be rational. When a friend tells me, hey, I just broke up with my girlfriend. I have this extra ticket to go to Peru together. Do you wanna come with me? I don't wanna be rational. I wanna be the person who says, you know what? Yes, fuck it, let's do it. I'll come with you, right? So you don't want to always be rational. There are moments where you would want to. Maybe you're considering a job, maybe you're considering a move to another city. And again, um, that's an assumption. Maybe not. Maybe you actually just wanna say fuck it and go and move to that place, right? So it's about asking yourself, is that the kind of situation where I need to use my rational mind? And if so, yes, I'll make the conscious effort to turn that back on, to reengage my prefrontal cortex and to say, let's be rational here, knowing also that it is probably impossible to be 100% rational. There are a lot of unconscious mechanisms that are going to make you make some decisions where you feel like you're in control and you have really thought about every single parameter. But we talked, uh, you know, we talked earlier about your childhood, like all of that has an effect, right? So I would say rather than thinking about it as a binary thing where you're being emotional or rational, more like a little dial where you kind of ramp up the, you know, turn on a bit more of the rational thinking when there's a decision that you feel like is quite important.

Is that a like set in stone piece? So I'm this percent rational, this percent irrational. Can you kind of cultivate the rational side of yourself?

It's important when you look at those papers to know that this is based on a hopefully large sample, not always. They can be quite but it's still based on a sample of different people and you will always have a bell curve where some people are a bit higher, some people are a bit lower. So that indicates that this is not necessarily fixed. And, uh, I don't know about the percentage, to be honest, but what I, I think can be cultivated is the self-awareness of knowing when you're being a bit more rational, when you're being very emotional, and then just cultivating that ability to, to switch from a mode to another. And again, I think it can also be helpful to switch it to the other way around, right? Maybe I'm being too rational about this. Let's just go for it.

We talk a lot about people. Me and Taka have been friends for over 18 years now. We've encountered a lot of people throughout our lives. And we go through life and we feel like we coincide with people called NPCs, non-playable characters. And we think, surely you can't be real. And then you see people and they go through their own transformation stories of this self-awareness. And you were kind of alluding to it earlier, but can you think of any other tiny experiments if people are listening and they're like, maybe I'm a bit NPC, maybe I'm being dragged around by my unconscious mind, any experiments that they can put into place to kind of find that consciousness and be more self-aware?

I think first it's really important to remove maybe the layer of self-judgment that might come from this realization, this NPC behavior, what I call in the book being cynical, where you'll say, I don't care, I'm not going to try, I'm just going to go with whatever, is just a protection mechanism. And usually when people behave in this way, it's because they don't want to take the risk to, to fail, or they don't want to know more about themselves. When you start experimenting, you will uncover a lot about who you are, what you want, about your friends, about your relationships, about some of the decisions that you've made in the past and the way you think and the way you feel. And that can be quite scary and it can be a lot more comfortable to just not experiment and go with whatever is in front of you. So first, removing the self-judgment and saying, okay, I've probably been hurt in the past. There's probably stuff that has happened that makes me behave in this way, number one. And then number two, again, that's the keyword, Start tiny. I would really pick something very, very small, very easy in your life where you almost want to use that as the factor to decide whether this is a good experiment or not. Something that feels so easy to do that there's no way you're not going to do it. And make it very short, 5 days maybe. Just try something a little bit different. For some people I've worked with, it could be as simple as just changing the route where they went to work. That morning a little bit different. Just that can help you start seeing the world in a slightly different way, get out of that autopilot mode, which then opens a door for you to start experimenting more.

I love that. And then I wanted to talk to you about quitting, because quitting is such a funny thing of, in the sales world and the entrepreneur world, like it's a case of like never quit, you might just be— we had somebody the other day that was talking about that, diamond meme where they're like, you might just be around the corner, which I, which I think is brilliant. Me and Zach have lived many different lives where we used to be in bands and then we've kind of given all of that up to double down on the business world. And we said that when we were trying to do music, it felt like we were constantly coming up against red lights, red lights, red lights, and knowing when to stop. So we've stepped away and now we're on a new path where it feels more like green lights. So how How should people approach quitting? Because it can feel like I'm a failure, I couldn't stick at things, I've given up, I'm not as good as these people on Instagram and YouTube and all of those things.

I call it pausing, not quitting, because you never know if you might come back to it. You guys get back together and do the band again, you know, in your 70s or whatever. I would come. You never know, in a few decades you might feel like, oh, actually I'm feeling that itch again, I want to try it again. And so I tell people, you're not quitting, you're pausing, you're putting it shelf. It's still there. You can come back to it whenever you want to. And the other shift I encourage people to implement is, again, think like a scientist. So what you've done is that you've collected your data, you tried, and that means that in the current circumstances, the data that you got is telling you that maybe this is not the right time for this. Mm-hmm. And you can pause it. So I tell people you have 3 options when you look at the internal external signals. In your case, for example, maybe the internal signals were saying, this is really fun, but the external signals all have those red lights, right? Okay, so this is not working. You have 3 options. First one is persist. You can persist and keep on going. Usually I recommend that if one of the signals is, is very, very, very strong, but if the other one is really not working, that's usually not going to be sustainable. So just persist for a little bit longer, see if any of those signals is changing, but if not, at some point you need to pause. The other one is to pivot. So maybe you change the format, maybe you do it in a slightly different way. I've seen people, for example, who instead of having a proper band where they go on the road, produce short clips for, for Instagram where they just get together, record something, post it, and they get a lot of that fun without investing as much of the work. Pivot. Ask yourself, is there a slightly different way for me to get the good without getting any of the friction. Or again, pause. That's okay. Again, mostly nobody cares. And, uh, and you can always come back to it later whenever it feels right.

Nice. Um, I think another question that people will definitely have is a bit of a through line on the different podcasts that we have. What's your stance on persuasion? Is it possible to persuade someone? Is it possible to persuade ourselves? What's the, what's the neuroscience behind it?

Yes, absolutely. You can persuade other people. You can, everybody knows, everybody who's fooled themselves into doing something they didn't wanna do know you can persuade yourself to do anything. Is that something that you actually want to cultivate? This is where I'm not 100% sure. I have a lot of friends who, uh, actually have either learned to use persuasion techniques or I even have a couple of people I know who are teaching other people people how to do that. That is more of a, a personal stance rather than something that is grounded in evidence. But personally, I have found that usually when something feels aligned and is working, I never really had to push really hard to try and persuade someone. And so to me, a skill that I find more important is communicating clearly. If you can communicate clearly what you're providing and how it might be able to help the other person and they understand what they would get, then they'll tell you, oh yes, actually let's work together, let's do that together. And this is perfect and this is aligned. If you had to really persuade them, to me there's always a risk that further down the line they realize that, oh, actually that's not really what I wanted and maybe I didn't need that thing. So I don't know if persuasion skills are, is, I don't know if that's a skill that is really that important to cultivate.

Mm-hmm. Good. Our book is out now. Sales Is Therapy is available everywhere for people who are looking to get better at communicating, asking better questions, closing more deals, and bringing in more clients. Beware, it is not for the faint of heart or for closed-minded people.

You can buy it in all good shops, links below.

Yeah, we've just brought a book out. If people want to get it, they can get it. Um, Sales Is Therapy is the name of the book, and the idea is that a sales conversation, if we can guide someone to kind of come to their own self-exploration and arrive at either a yes or a no, that's fine. You've kind of done your job. But it comes up against a very old-school style of selling, which sounds like what you're talking about, where it's very— use those manipulation tactics to just get the deal over the line. Who cares if it's fulfilling for them? So from what you're saying, we're doing the right thing.

Yes, I'm glad I gave the right answer.

Um, so when you look forward now, so obviously you've, you've brought the book out, there's probably people who've interviewed you like us and picked apart parts of the book and tried things out themselves. When you look forward now to the new world with AI and social media and things like that, what challenges do you think that brings with people even being able to recognize that they need to do these experiments on themselves and test things out?

The biggest risk, I think, with AI, and I use AI, I think it has amazing potential in terms of making the world a, a better place, but it's really the outsourcing our thinking. And I'm seeing a lot of people who are starting to rely on it a lot more. I've even noticed it in myself where I sometimes struggle to phrase an email and I'll go to ChatGPT to try and find a better way to say it. I never used to do that and I write for a living. I consider that I, I write, but there's this now, this self-doubt sometimes that there's maybe a better way to say this and I just need to check. And I feel like if I do that too often, I'll actually end up not writing as well as I used to because I'm again not using that creative muscle. There's also the risk with thinking about problems where I've also noticed that in myself, the temptation to just do a brain dump and putting it in ChatGPT to tell me about 2 or 3 different strategies to approach this. And it will always give me strategies that totally make sense on, on paper, but that have zero originality because they're based on what everybody has been doing in the past versus going for a coffee with a friend, taking our notebooks out and actually brainstorming together. And we end up coming up with ideas that there's no way I would come up with using ChatGPT. So I would say to anyone like me who uses AI, I also know people who refuse to use it and that's a different story. But if you're someone who find, you find it useful, and you use it, you try— again, it's about this almost the switch, the self-awareness and the switch to ask yourself for certain tasks that you truly deeply care about, where you wanna be able to still use your human brain to do them in the future, to maybe carve out a little bit more time to do these tasks on your own. It is going to be a bit slower, but first, you're probably going to be able to come up with ideas that are a lot more original, and second, you're going to make sure that in the future you're still able to perform the task.

I saw you posting about it the other day in terms of like people are losing this and the studies look quite scary. I guess it's very hard to predict. And I think we're all in this position at the moment where nobody can really say, oh, we're going, anybody that says we are going to end up here in 5 or 10 years, it's a prediction. It's an experiment. We don't know. But I guess if we continue to, outsource our thinking to artificial intelligence, where do you think as humanity we could end up?

It's one of those things where you could imagine a world where we have a lot of free time, but then what for?

Mm-hmm.

That's what I find quite fascinating at the moment is that a lot of the tasks that we automate away with AI are the kind of tasks that I would imagine we would want more space, more time to do creating, thinking, connecting, imagining. And so that's the scary part for me is that, you know, in an ideal world, we would automate away all of the boring stuff that we don't want to do, and then we would have a lot more time to create movies and write poetry. And I don't know if that's the direction we're going in right now.

Scary. We have a couple of different topics that come up in a lot of our podcasts. Some of them have kind of breached today. Persuasion is one of them and resilience is the other. So I always think of the listener and I think of like a 21-year-old who's never worked in sales before and they go to the interview and the guy interviewing them says, we're looking for somebody resilient. And they say, yeah, I'm resilient. I worked in a bar and I did late nights or whatever. What's your What's your thoughts around resilience and building resilience?

There are two kinds of resilience. There's the kind of grunt work type of resilience, which is maybe the one that you would say where, you know, I can stay up late, I can work really, really hard. And I think short term, that can be useful when you're pretty junior and you just need to show that you're motivated, you're going to be here, you're going to do the work. Long term, if you want to be successful in any career, I think you wanna switch to the other kind of resilience where it is really more about adaptability than it is about keeping on doing the same thing and working really, really hard without ever questioning your approach. This is where, again, being experimental is useful. It's about this flexibility of doing the work, but also always implementing some form of reflection after you're done with something to ask yourself in a very honest way, how did I do? How did that go? What can I do better? What can I iterate on? What can I change? And then implement that into your next cycle of experimentation, making sure that even though you don't have a perfect plan or blueprint of success, you don't really know where you're going because we don't know where we're going, right? You keep on growing because you keep on learning from each experience. To me, this is a way more useful form of resilience. Than the one where you're just able to push yourself really, really, really hard.

Are there alarm systems in the body and in the mind that would say you need to kind of get away from it for a while? You need to turn your phone off, you need to eat better, sleep. Are there things that we're kind of starting to ignore that are kind of built in there ready to go?

I love that you said that we ignore them because that's the issue. There are so many of them, so many signals, our poor body trying to tell us that something is wrong. We're so good at ignoring those signals. Again, we're so good at pushing through. And so again, that's where the reflection can be really helpful. Uh, I tell people it can be really good to implement a form of mindfulness practice, and I'm not talking necessarily about meditation. It can be journaling, it can be having a weekly coffee chat with your best friend. That is also a form of mindfulness practice. Anything that kind of stops, pauses the autopilot. For a moment and where you have space to reflect on how you feel right now. A lot of us don't have that. We just keep on going. We're always busy. We also sometimes have lots of social engagements with other people where there's actually no depth to it. We don't take the time to ask each other, how are you actually doing this week? Right? So having a way to stop the autopilot, whether that's for 5 minutes every morning before you start working, whether that's for 1 hour every week, if you hang out with a friend and you check in with each other, that's the way you are going to have that little window, that little space where you can pay attention to those signals and notice when something's wrong.

I probably know the answer to this. Is there, are there better researched areas? So is meditate, like meditation in the morning when you wake up or coffee with your friend, are there ones that are better researched that seem to work more broadly or is it more find what works for you?

Yeah, find what works for you. That's the, that's again, that's the challenge with those studies. They are going to give you a general, an average, right? You don't know if you're in that average or not. Actually, you know, meditation can be dangerous for some people.

Really?

Yes, absolutely. There are ways where it can increase anxiety in certain people, which is kind of paradoxical, you know, and you have people who don't understand, they meditate and they feel worse. There's a tiny portion of the population where that's the effect you're going to get. And if you only look at the average, you say, oh, meditation is good, right? So again, ask yourself, what am I trying to achieve here? You're not trying to meditate. Meditation is not the goal. Feeling better is the goal, right? Based on that, what is the research saying? What are my friends are saying? Okay, meditation seems to be good for a lot of people. I'm not going to assume it's good for me. Let me experiment with meditation for a couple of weeks. At the end of the 2 weeks, let's see what I feel. Is that helping? Is that not helping? Helping? Great. Let's keep going. Helping but not perfect? Let's pivot a little bit. Maybe I don't need to do this first thing in the morning. Maybe my lunch break is better. Or it's not working? Pause. I might enjoy it better at another time in my life, but right now this is not working. Let's experiment with something else. Coffee with friends, journaling, whatever that is.

So flowing on from the anxiety conversation, I love the kind of the framework you were talking about with procrastination. What frameworks would you think about when it comes to tackling anxiety?

It's first, don't ignore it. Don't ignore your anxiety. There is somehow, especially in Western culture, again, a little bit of shame around it where you're not cool if you're anxious. And so there's this idea that you should project confidence and not feeling any kind of anxiety. That's especially true if you're in a position of leadership. You obviously want to tell your team that you know what you're doing, you know where we're going together, just follow me, everything is going to be all right. So there can be a tendency to just ignore it. So first, don't ignore it. Second, don't assume again that there's any technique that you can just copy paste and that's going to work for you. So I know I keep on repeating this, but do experiment, try different things. For in some cases, just having a practice that tackles it at a physical level is enough. You have something psychologists call free-floating anxiety, and it's just this sense of discomfort that something is not quite right, but you're not sure what it is. And you could spend a lot of time journaling, talking to your friends, and maybe, maybe making yourself even more anxious because you can't figure out what it is. And it can just be just at a neurophysiological level, you just need a good stretch, or maybe you're really tired, maybe you're dehydrated. Your body is just trying to tell you, "We're not feeling great right now," and you interpret this as anxiety. And so sometimes just doing something very simple at a physical level is enough. Once you've done that, and if the anxiety is still here, then maybe go at a more cognitive level. And so again, journaling, self-reflection, sometimes, the anxiety is just part of whatever you're trying to do. I get a bit of anxiety before I get on stage. Honestly, like, I'm not even trying to solve that. I know that once that's done, that's done, and that's not really something I can get rid of. So not all anxiety is something you want to get rid of either. So again, self-awareness, observation, experimentation, and this is what's going to allow you to figure out something that works for you.

I feel like we're throwing it all at you today. Thank you. Bam, bam, bam, let's go. You said confidence there. Me and Duck were having this conversation the other week about confidence and what it actually means, because you've got one take, which is the affirmations of I am confident and kind of trying to instill that I'm a confident person. But then we were talking about like, confident in what? Like, like you say, confident. I'm confident when I'm a speaker, but then I go in a room full of strangers. Am I confident? Am I confident in the work I do? So confidence all of a sudden Is it the loudmouth in the room that can get up and dance on a table, or is it the person that has a deniable sack of evidence? So all of a sudden we were like, what is confidence? It's this big spectrum. And I don't know if we are confident or maybe we're not. What, what's your take on confidence?

Yeah, I mean, this is a problem in general. We sometimes use the same words for completely different things. And I completely agree with you that being confident as a personality trait, is completely different from being confident about something or confident in a specific situation. I personally prefer working with people who also are able to tell me, I'm not feeling really confident about this. Okay, cool. Let's have a look. Let's talk about it. Rather than always trying to project confidence when we actually don't really know, we don't have enough information, there's a bit of uncertainty. Confidence as a personality trait can also be great, but I think we all know that, that when someone is always, always acting in this way, there's also a sense probably of trying to hide something. Because again, if you're, if you're comfortable in your own shoes, in your own body, in your own mind, you're also comfortable admitting when you're feeling a little bit lost and you're not quite sure how to act, what to do, or what to think. So I would say instead of trying to cultivate confidence in general, maybe cultivate the ability to know when you're feeling confident and when you're not.

Nice. What then, leading on from that, what is imposter syndrome?

It's the feeling that you don't belong somewhere and someone's going to find out that you're a fraud, really. I did experience it when I was working at Google. I got this job and I genuinely was thinking that someone would figure out that I didn't belong there. Everybody was so smart. And then I found this group, internal group at Google that was called The Impostors with a bunch of Google employees in there. It was an anonymous group talking about how they were really scared that someone would find out that they didn't belong there. That immediately made me feel better, not because other people were suffering, but because I didn't feel alone anymore in that feeling. And, uh, what's interesting is that apparently, and this is not my core field of study, but apparently the more successful people are, the more likely they are to experience this imposter syndrome. And that's because the more successful you are, the more likely you are to be surrounded with people who are also very successful and also very smart. And so that constantly raises the bar of what success is supposed to look like. And so you keep on having this imposter syndrome. So a way I've been reframing it for myself is that Now whenever I have this imposter syndrome, it's probably likely that I'm stretching my abilities, I'm trying something new, and I'm meeting amazing people that maybe I wouldn't have had the opportunity to connect with in the past.

Do you think there's a function to it evolutionary?

Ooh, actually never thought about it. I think the, oh, I never thought about it for imposter syndrome, but in general, the fear of not belonging And of being rejected from the tribe does have, uh, an evolutionary, it, it, it makes sense because you want everyone as part of society to feel like they need to be productive members. You need everyone to feel like they need to contribute. This is how, again, we survive as a group.

Mm-hmm.

So there are a bunch of mechanisms that make you want to feel like you belong, you matter. You contribute and that if you were not here tomorrow, people would notice. It is a survival mechanism. I had never thought of imposter syndrome as maybe part of those mechanisms. So maybe.

I wonder if it's like we would be set role in a tribe and maybe imposter syndrome comes when you step out of the role. Maybe it's a bit of like autocorrection happening where it's like, stay, you're the hunter, remember? You're not supposed to be the leader. Yeah.

That's what's interesting about those survival mechanisms is that there's, there's really nothing wrong with them.

Mm-hmm.

If you just wanna survive, your brain actually does a really great job at making sure you don't put yourself in a situation of danger and that you stay in your role as part of society because your brain is designed for you to first survive and maybe you have some offspring and then you die and you've done your job. As a member of society, right? But most people nowadays want more than just surviving, right? If you wanna thrive, if you wanna grow, if you wanna evolve, if you wanna really make the most of this life that you have, those survival mechanisms can actually get in the way.

Thank you so much. This has been an incredible conversation. Yeah, it's been amazing. I feel like we've thrown so many topics at you in the space. Thank you so much for joining us today. If people want to, follow you, get in contact, buy your book? Where can they do all those lovely things?

Thank you. I loved your questions. And I write a weekly newsletter at nestlabs.com, which I send every Thursday and where I discuss a lot of the topics we talked about today. My book is called Tiny Experiments and it's available anywhere books are sold.

Beautiful. Thank you so, so much.

Thank you.