The Essentiality of Self-Belief and How to Develop It With David Hulman
In this episode of the Negotiate Anything podcast, host Kwame Christian interviews David Hulman, founder of Self‑Belief Chief, to explore why confidence matters and how it can be systematically built. Hulman shares his personal backstory—a football coach’s vague advice to “believe in yourself”—and explains his obsession with uncovering why many people lack self‑belief despite wanting it. He introduces a practical, six‑component framework for self‑belief (clarity, focus, pain, energy, momentum, growth) and a simple scoring system (0‑10 per component) to diagnose confidence gaps. The conversation then moves to the “reliable peak pattern,” a method for identifying the common denominator in past high‑performance moments and leveraging those cues to reproduce success. Finally, Hulman unveils a new technique called “scratching,” which re‑authors painful or disappointing memories by creating a dissociative, playful mental image that changes the emotional charge, drawing on concepts like cognitive reappraisal, positive association, and neuroplasticity. Throughout, the dialogue ties these tools back to negotiation and conflict resolution, emphasizing action, pattern‑breaking, and empathy as keys to translating insight into consistent, high‑quality performance. The episode closes with promotional plugs, resources on selfbeliefchief.com, and a call to listeners to apply the frameworks in their personal and professional lives.
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Hello, my friend, and welcome to another episode of Negotiate Anything. Thanks for spending time with us today. It's listeners like you in 181 different countries that have made Negotiate Anything the most popular negotiation and conflict resolution podcast in the world. I'm your host, Kwame Christian. I'm a business lawyer, mediator, professor, and the director of the American Negotiation Institute. Before we get started, I have 2 quick questions for you. Is negotiation a critical part of what you do? Do you need to resolve conflict and persuade at work? If you answered yes to both of those questions, visit our website to learn more about our negotiation workshops. We've traveled the country working with professionals just like you, and we'd love to have the opportunity to work with you too. Check out the link in the description to learn more. David, thanks for joining us today.
Well, thank you, Kwame. Thank you so much for having me. And after you being on my podcast, it's a pleasure to return the favor as well.
Yes, likewise. So how about you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?
Sure. So, um, yeah, so I had Kwame on my podcast, which is called the Self-Belief Chief Podcast. So I, I founded the business Self-Belief Chief, which looks at basically coaching high performers, but it's in many different areas. So for me, my personal struggle is it started from a very early age. I remember a coach of mine— I was a footballer— coach of mine And he sat down and went through a report with me, and he said, David, you really need to start believing in yourself. Anyway, that was the end of the conversation. He starts walking off. I said, how? And he said, what do you mean? I said, well, you told me I need to believe in myself more. I said, but how? And if you've ever had someone say to you, just believe in yourself, and it's that eye-rolling thing, say to them, how? And have a listen to what they say, and you'll find out it's all of a sudden more difficult than solving a Rubik's Cube. It's just no one actually has an answer to what is something that everyone wants to do. And I built this obsession, which is, if everybody wants to believe in themselves, why don't they? But more importantly than that, it's rather than just saying we want more confidence, it's, well, why do people want more confidence? How does it affect our relationships? How does it affect our sales, our business, our friendships? Every single thing. And creating different programs under the kind of Self-Belief Chief brand which specialize in different things, because confidence in different areas is a different language. So there's no point trying to say confidence generally or whatever. That's too vague. It's the confidence to do something. And that makes all the difference. And so through that obsession of wanting to understand what changes the quality of people's lives, but again, if everybody wants to believe in themselves, why don't they? I was obsessed with that question. And once I could, you know, understand it in terms of relationships, then I thought, okay, now let's do it in sales. Okay, let's do it with athletes. Let's do it with this. Let's do it with this and create as many different programs so that people go, you know what, that's the area I need confidence in. Because you're probably the same, Kwame, you know, you're no doubt, you've got unbelievable confidence when it comes to conflict negotiation, but no doubt you've got other areas where, like all of us, you go, actually, I'm not quite as confident in that one, or I'm not quite as confident in that one. We all have those. And so yes, we might be a confident person, or yes, we might have confidence at this, or a good sense of self-belief, but actually it's an environment where we know, if I had confidence in that area, that completely changes my life. That changes the quality of my life. That gives my family the finances they need. It gives me the type of relationship I want. It just changes everything. It means I'm not lonely and isolated. It changes so much. And so yes, confidence is part of the equation. But really, the Self-Belief Chief Brand and what I do is how do we take action? And that's what I loved about you on my podcast, Kwame, which was just that. So much in terms of the practical steps. But really, our life only changes when we take action. And so we need to have the right mindset. We need to break someone's pattern. And I love that you talk about breaking people's pattern with empathy. I love the examples that you gave, or you've given when we've had conversations, of actually you can disarm people with empathy and it breaks someone's pattern. Then we can start taking action and move it that way. So that's been my life's obsession, and, uh, and finding as many platforms, as many ways to share that is, uh, it's something I, I absolutely love to do.
This is fantastic, David. I'm so excited for this because when, like you said, when I was on your show, Self-Belief Chief, also everybody make sure you check out that podcast, fantastic show. When I was on the show, after we were done, I said, no, I need to have you on my show as soon as possible because I don't think people recognize just how important confidence is. And that's why my book is titled Finding Confidence in Conflict, because it doesn't make sense to give recipes to people who are afraid to get in the kitchen. You actually have to have that self-belief to actually take action. So I'm really excited to get into that with you. And so the 3 things we're going to talk about today, number 1, the 6 sources of self-belief, number 2, reliable peak pattern, and number 3, the technique called scratching, how to overcome a previous disappointment. This is exciting. So let's go ahead and start with the first one, the 6 sources of self-belief. Tell us more about that.
Yeah. So in my, in my desire to understand confidence and understand how to simplify this. Because, you know, the enemy to anything is complexity, isn't it? And confidence, that it seems like a simple term, but when anyone describes it, it just gets too complex and convoluted. And so I did a huge kind of piece of research to understand what is confidence at the simplest, simplest level. And for people listening, this is something which you might want to grab a pen and paper to actually just test this out for yourself so you can understand actually how this works. So I looked at neurolinguistic programming, game theory, sports psychology, just any, any different field of human behavior and understood, tried to understand how they define, how they describe confidence. But also the people I worked with, wider research, wider conversations, to find all the terminology, all the words, all the phrases people use to describe confidence, to then narrow them down. And then I narrowed them down to just 6 things. It's with these 6 things that when you score each of these out of 10, you can work out why lack confidence in a particular area. So for example, Kwame, to use your, your no doubt huge confidence in conflict negotiation, if I run through the 6 things and we can have a sense of why it is we're confident in that area, and then it can be compared to other areas where we lack confidence. So let's go through those 6 things. So the first thing, and these are the bits worth writing down, of the 6 things that you need to be confident in an area, the first thing you need is clarity. Clarity brings things closer. When you have clarity, it comes closer to you. And having clarity in terms of why, what, when, how, all of those things. Can you ever find clarity 10 out of 10? Probably not. It's an incredibly difficult thing to do. But that is, for a lot of people, why they never take a first step, because they have such poor clarity as to what is required. I'll give an example. I had someone who came to me and they said, David, I want to be richer. And I got a pound out of my back pocket and went, here you go. Well, you're richer now, aren't you? Now, of course, that's probably not what they meant, but if you get— if you're so vague in terms of what you're asking for, then of course you get vague results. Having more clarity in terms of who your ideal, you know, your ideal audience is, having clarity in terms of who is it you're having a conversation with and actually what's required. So that's clarity. So the first thing is clarity, but the second thing is you can have that whole picture But you need focus. If you cannot focus on the specific target, you need to see the whole picture. That's why we have clarity. But then you need to know what the specific target is. Tony Robbins said, whatever you focus on, you feel. I think it's a fantastic, fantastic saying. You obviously focus on the problems, what's not going well, guess how you're going to feel? Focus on what's going right and the target and the solution, guess how you're going to feel? So the first one, we need clarity. Then we need focus. The third thing is pain. Now, people always look at me a bit strangely. I'm sure people listening will be like, what? What's that got? What's that got anything to do with my confidence? The pain is ruining everything for me. I want to avoid pain. Absolutely. But if you know how to turn pain into power in the future, if you understand that maybe through experience, maybe through a strategy, whatever, that if this problem comes along, I'm going to know how to deal with it. It gives you confidence in the present because we don't worry, we don't fear, we don't get anxious about what might happen because we know what we will do. So we need clarity, we need focus, and we need pain. We need to go through those hard points and those experiences. No doubt, Kwame, again, through your confidence in negotiation, part of all of that is the amount of experience you've learned the hard way. You found out what didn't work. You had those conversations where it's like, oh man, it just didn't work. I'll ask you the question. I presume that's the case.
Yeah, absolutely. And I tell people all the time, if you have somebody who's teaching you anything, but of course, in negotiation and conflict resolution, and they can't answer the question, your biggest failure in a negotiation, then they're probably not very good. Because if you can't, if you're not failing, then you're not really trying that hard.
Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So it makes perfect logical sense that that would be a part of the equation. So we said clarity, number 1, focus, number 2, Pain, number 3. Number 4, energy. Okay? Energy. Emotion is created by motion. The hardest way to change your mind, when you try and get in the right headspace, when you try and— when you have a conversation with someone, if you're doing it from a place of really low energy and felt shy and quiet and, I don't know if I can actually have a conversation or get whatever, you're not going to deliver. But when it comes with the right energy, when it has a sense of commitment and passion and drive to it. But not just about as much energy as possible. Part of it's the right energy, right? If you want to have a conflict, you know, resolve something, you're not going to go, yeah, we can do this! Like, that's just not how it works. So it's not about as much energy. But I say to people, you are what you consume, what you watch, what you listen to, who you spend your time with, um, you know, your exercise, your fitness, your diet, your sleep. All of these different things that we spoke about last time as well that affect our energy levels. And so we have to get an understanding of what gets us to the right point in terms of energy. Energy is a really hard thing. And when we're trying to get in the right headspace, the right mindset, the hardest way to change your mind is to change your mind. The easiest way to do it is through your body and through your energy. So that's the easiest way. You could have the right energy as well. So clarity, focus, pain, energy. And what are the last 2? The 5th one is momentum. if you feel like you're starting from scratch, that's a difficult place. But my belief is that we have momentum developing our entire lives. We just often don't recognize it because of the way the brain is designed. We're supposed to spot the dangers, the negatives, the problems, what's going wrong, because it's great, and thank God it does that because it's kept us alive. But at the same time, that when we feel like we, you know, when we just feel like it's endless negative momentum it just feels like, you know, I have to start from scratch again, I have to start from scratch again, and you just don't feel qualified or comfortable. But we also recognize, no doubt you felt this, but you just feel like on fire. We've got this momentum, it's like, I've done this, I've done this, I've done this, I've done this, and it just is, it's just never-ending. It's just keep going, keep going, and keep moving forward. You can write down, you know, a list of things, whether it's something you're grateful for or things that you've achieved or things that you've done or whatever. You could build a huge, huge list of things that build a sense of momentum for you without you even having to move. All of a sudden you go, wow, actually, shit, I've done a load of stuff here, and actually I've achieved this, and I've actually done this 4 or 5 times before. I'm not starting from scratch. I've actually got a lot of momentum here. So we all need that. So clarity, focus, pain, energy, momentum, and the last one? Growth. We all need to have another level to go to. We also all need to feel like we can go to another level. If you say to anyone, pretty much anyone, if you were exactly the same and nothing changed and nothing improved, in 10 years' time, would you be happy? No one would say yes to that question. However good you've got it, everyone wants just a little bit more. And that's fine because progress equals happiness. We all need to feel a sense of progress. We need to feel grateful, but we need progress as well. And this is when you work with high performers. Maybe this has been— you've recognized this as well, Carmo. When you work with high performers, You know, and whenever I've worked with, say, athletes and, or you speak to, you know, a celebrity or something like that, and they're stuck and they seemingly have everyone, everything by societal standards, and yet sometimes they're miserable. Why? It's because they can't see what the next level to go to is, or that they thought they would achieve that level and then that would be fine. That would be it. That would be enough. And unfortunately, because the way the brain's designed, it's not our fault. The way the brain's designed, it's not enough. We have to keep moving and improving and growing. So just to kind of sum all of that up, so you look at clarity, focus, pain, energy, momentum, growth. Those 6 things, what I get people to do that I work with is I look at those things and score them out of 10 in an area that they do feel confident in, and an area they don't, just so they can understand it. And people listening might want to do the same.
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Out of 60, really we want 8 out of 10 in each, in each of those 6 categories. So we want a minimum score of 48 out of 60. So I get people that have a score of 20 out of 60. They go, you know what, I, I Having a problem with my family, a sort of conflict with my family. I'm not good at having these conversations or discussing it. I don't really know what I'm going to say. So we go through it. Okay, how much clarity do you have in terms of what it is you're going to say or why you need to say this? They say, well, I've got a 3. Okay, what will get us to a 5? Okay, do this, this, and that. Okay, what will get us to 6? What gets to 7? Part of that equation might be therefore working with someone like yourself. depending on what the situation is, is to have clarity. Okay, now actually, rather than us going 5, 6, 7, maybe we need to find the right person, an expert in this. If this is such a high-level conversation that we're having, maybe you need a Kwame. Maybe you need someone that can actually take your clarity to a 10. Maybe you do need to invest in something in that area. So that's a point. But also, can you focus on the solution? Can you stay focused on the solution, or is your mind drifting to what if this happens, and what if that happens, and what if this happens? You know, do you know how to deal with the pain? Do you know how to turn it into a— turn it into power if it— if the conversation starts getting difficult? What's your energy like beforehand? Are you in the right place? Are you feeling like quite meek and shy, or do you have your energy where your head's up, your chest is back, your chest is up, your shoulders are back? All of that, and so on and so forth. I won't go rattle through all of them, but anyone listening, I'll just finish by— finish that point by saying Do that with an area you feel great in, your confidence will be 48 and above. Do it in an area that you're not confident in, it'll be lower. But then you can start looking at, ah, why? Which areas do I need to improve in? Why is my confidence low? Not just my confidence is low, why? And the most important thing to say of all of it is everyone is different. We all need those 6 things, but everyone prioritizes 2. Some people need more clarity and focus as their top 2. For other people, it's, you know what, energy is the most important thing, probably followed by growth. Look at those 6 things and think, which 2 of those are key to me and my performance? That is the thing that gives you an indication, because you might not be able to remember all 6 all the time. But if you know your top one, if you go, you know what, actually, if I take nothing away from this podcast, I've realized that energy is the number one thing for me. Right? So anytime I lack confidence, my energy must be off. It must be because that's my top thing. There's no way that's scoring highly. And so that's one thing I'd really encourage people to take away, just so at least you now have an understanding why it is you might be lacking confidence.
David, I feel like this is a therapy session right now. This is fantastic. I'm excited to go through this for myself. And for the people that you've worked with, what would you think is the single biggest barrier to confidence based on this scale?
So the way to answer that question, of course, firstly depends on which things do they prioritize, right? Everyone is different. So I've got to work with the athlete where their energy isn't right. I've got to work with the couple where they just, they can't stay focused on actually where are they trying to get to rather than focusing on the problems. Got to deal with the problems. Having said all of that, I think the clarity— not that it is the most important thing, but whenever I work with someone, their clarity typically is so poor in that area. If we have a good sense of what the picture is, if we know the why and we know the when and the how, if we get those down, then a lot of people start to go, oh, actually, right, I can see the picture forming. Because all emotion is contained in a picture in our mind. Now, if we don't have the picture, our brain starts drifting to what we don't want again, because that's the way it's designed. So if they get a good sense of designing a compelling future and getting a picture, and it looks bright, it looks exciting, it looks colorful, and having clarity in terms of where they're trying to— what, you know, what good looks like. So if you're going to have that difficult conversation, or if you're going to have that situation which is going to go one way or the other, the clarity in terms of what's going to be required, but the clarity of actually where you're trying to get to. Because a lot of people don't really know what the end result they're trying to get to. Just to give a quick example on that is I had a— I went skydiving. Probably a huge mistake, but I went skydiving. I'm obviously fine. I'm obviously still here. I went skydiving and I was sat next to a girl shaking in the, in the sort of the training room. Shh. shaking like a leaf. I turned to her, I said, are you okay? Probably the stupidest question I could possibly ask, but are you okay? And she goes, well, actually, I got driven here by my family blindfolded for my birthday surprise. I didn't know I was actually gonna be skydiving today. Now that's the worst surprise I've ever heard, ever. And her dad, who was also with her— and her kids are there— but her dad who was with her was supposed to do it and he bottled it. He clearly hadn't gone through the 6 sources of self-belief. So anyway, so I had to say to her, you know, try to calm her down. We had to change the, change the energy thing first. But just to kind of touch back onto what I was just saying, which is she was worrying about what's, you know, if this happens, if this happens, this happens. I said, forget that. I said, how will you feel once you've done it? Because that's the picture we really need to build. It's not just the picture of how it's going to go. Because that's only so kind of interesting. Oh, it'd be really good if it went, you know, this person said this, and then this happened, this happened, this happened. But it's 1,000 times more compelling if we have this fantastic vision of what it's like when it's done. When you have that conversation with someone, you might be avoiding a conversation, a difficult conversation with someone, because you're worrying too much about the conversation itself. You need to know and understand how that's going to work. But how do you feel once it's done? That's the most important thing for me, is building that vision where you go, oh well, actually— so for this, for this girl, how will you feel once you've done it? All of a sudden, from this shaking, you just stopped. She does notice she stops shaking. Oh wow, I, I can imagine it's an amazing feeling. And actually, it's something I can go to work and tell everyone that I did. And my kids must be so proud of me when I do this. And there'll be a video and they'll get to watch it back, and they'll— we'll get to enjoy that as a family together. And, uh, my partner will just, you know, will think, wow, she's unbelievably brave and courageous, and maybe he'll have even more respect for me. I said to her, so you do, but you're not gonna do it though, so that's fine. She's, oh, okay, no, hang on, no, no, I might, I might do it, I might do it. And she agreed to do it because you need the other elements as well. She agreed to do it only if she was in the same plane that I was. But, and then she went first in the plane. I saw how quickly she fell out the plane. I thought, oh, I made a mistake. I've made a mistake here. This is not a good idea. But that was it. She just needed to see the end result. So I'm curious, Kwame, for the work we did, and we had a good conversation last time, when you talk, have conversations with people, how important is it for you to sort of build that picture for someone? So it's, here's the process, but actually, how do you feel once it's done? Is that something you consider important?
Absolutely. I think about it in terms of regret. And I say, well, who is the person that you think you'd respect the most when you look back? on what you did or did not do in this part of your life, what is the decision that you would respect the most? And that usually gets people to think with a different perspective. And that's one thing that I never want to happen because I hate that feeling of regret. Like I could have done something and I didn't do it. And for me, I'd rather, I'd rather take a shot and miss than not take the shot at all. And usually when you give somebody that type of death perspective, it kind of pulls them out of where they are in the moment and helps them to see the picture a little bit more holistically.
Absolutely. And you use the deathbed thing, which is— you might well be familiar with Les Brown, but he quoted one of Martin Luther King's writers. I forgot the name of the writer. But he said, his writer, this writer said, imagine on your deathbed seeing the ghosts of all the people around your deathbed, but those ghosts being your The decisions you didn't take, the dreams you didn't act upon, the conversations you didn't have, the people you didn't say I love you to, all of those sorts of things. So it's interesting that you said that, because that's something I absolutely bear in mind, that type of philosophy. Absolutely.
Absolutely. And I think, again, I really like this because it gives you a little bit of clarity too, right? Because sometimes just because of your emotional state, you develop a little bit of tunnel vision, not a little bit, a lot of tunnel vision. And like you said, you focus on the thing that you don't want to happen. And I remember, so I play tennis, I love playing tennis. And a lot of times your head placement in sports in general, but tennis especially, will have an impact on the trajectory of the ball. And so if you're hitting a serve and you're missing the serve into the net a lot, usually it's because your head is coming down too soon. You're not watching the ball long enough. And a lot of times in life, Your direction will follow your focus. And if you keep on focusing on the negative, the negative, the negative, it's almost like that focus just manifests that negative outcome that you were afraid of the whole time, instead of like what you were suggesting, focusing on what, what's the good thing that could possibly happen. It's almost like raising your perspective. So you're not going to miss low. You're going to focus on something that's a lot more productive.
Absolutely. I love it. And the thing you said about the tennis thing is, it's interesting you bring that. When I work with athletes, that's a common thing I talk to them about is when there are, when there are car crashes. And but when I say car crash, you know, someone hits a tree or a lamppost. It's the only tree, it's the only lamppost on that street, and they hit it. Why? It's because we immediately start to focus on what we don't want to hit. And we look at that. And we start going, oh, how do I avoid that? So we look straight at it. Whereas actually, you know, when you talk to a Formula 1 driver or a NASCAR driver, whatever. When you're trying to come out of a skid, you've got to focus on where you want to go. That's the only option you have. You can't focus on the wall. You can't focus on that car. You have to focus on exactly where you want to go. And that's a really difficult thing, by the way. So I'm not here to trivialize it. But like you said, on the tennis serve, absolutely. When we start to, you know, understand the process and actually what we're focusing on. But you're right, taking the time to actually consider what that is, but actually write it down, draw it out, sometimes intellectually. The things I just said about the 6 sources of self-belief, I'm sure people listening will be kind of nodding along going, yeah, yeah, I get that, I get that, I kind of do that. But a lot of people get that intellectually. Do they actually implement? Do they actually practice? Do they implement? Do they take the time to work this stuff out? And I think that's, again, taking action. It's the difference. A lot of people will nod along intellectually, but until we actually take the time to work this stuff out, So it's that small 1% or whatever to go, oh, you know what, when I was throwing that ball up in that serve, my eyes come off the ball just half a second before it should do, every single time. And then I go through a process with someone in terms of that tennis serve, of just understanding that your eyes, they just stay there, but they almost got to stay there what feels like a little bit too long. Because I love my tennis as well. They've almost got to stay there just a bit longer than it feels normal. And, and that makes us, you know, it's just a little kind of habit or routine so that we, you know, success leaves clues, right? So we— it's not that we don't have the answers, but it's really defining and understanding why. Why do we have the answers? Why do we know what to do already? And that often is the 1%. Most people think the 1% is this new thing, and it's not. It's consistency, it's predictability, routine. We would much rather be able to perform consistently than perform at a 10 out of 10 a handful of times. the rest of the time is very average. If we could just be consistent. Yeah. And it's the same, you know, in business. If you knew how much money you're going to make each month, we'd rather have a very good amount of money each month consistently than have this skyrocketing month knowing that the other 11 months are going to be quite low or up or down or whatever, and it's going to cause stress. In terms of our ability in anything, we want predictability. Again, similar in negotiation, conflict, anything is to have a sense of predictability. The hard thing about that is, and the reason why the 6 Sources of Self-Belief I find so useful, is in interpersonal relationships you don't have control. You have influence at best. You never have control because there's more than one person. So therefore, in some cases, with the 6 Sources of Self-Belief, you want to build clarity. A lot of people want to build clarity for control. So you might have to accept, you know what, I can't get 10 out of 10 because I don't 100% know how the other person will react. I might get to an 8 or 9. What does that mean? Maybe I've got to build up the other 5 areas a hell of a lot more to kind of counterbalance it. Because in other cases, energy, we might for whatever reason have an injury or a physical problem or there's foods we can't, or for a period of time or a phase of our life, we can't do something. So maybe for whatever reason, our energy, we can only get to an 8. So therefore, the other 5 areas got to become stronger. We might intellectually, for example, someone who likes energy, know that energy really helps us. But would you know the answer when energy was taken out of our life? What would we do then? We have to know those other 5 areas exist because we have to believe that confidence can come from more than one place. It's like an investment. You wouldn't invest all your money in one place hoping that does well. You'd invest it in 3, 4, 5 different places to make sure your money— hopefully it's the best thing, but also to safeguard it. And that's the approach I take with confidence as well.
There are so many quotables here. I'm struggling with, with my notes. This is really, really great. And for the sake of time, let's move on to the next one, which is the reliable peak pattern. So what is this as it relates to confidence?
Sure. So the thing that I call, I call it that because people want peak performance. But one, I always talk about confidence as a pattern. And the other bit is how do we find it reliably? And again, it's not a new thing. It's, it's understanding what already works and utilizing that. So what I do with people, for example, let's say 2 of those 6 sources, let's take for example clarity and focus because they're just the first 2 on that list. If I know someone's got clarity and focus, I go, okay, and they want to build their confidence. Let's say an athlete that I work with, if I want to build their confidence and their performance Right, when have you performed? Let's look at 5, 10 examples of that. They go through those examples. Okay, yeah, and this one in this occasion, I played so well in this occasion, I performed unbelievably here. Okay, we look at those 10 examples, right? What were you focusing on in each of those examples, in each of those situations? So then we define it. Actually, let's take focus and energy because that might be— No, focus, energy, let's take those 2. So And go back to a tennis example, because there was someone I worked with a while back, and his forehand, he just, he lost this confidence forehand. So we looked at 10 examples of when that forehand was perfect, and he mentioned all these different things. And I said, what's the common denominator? So the reliable peak pattern is really about what is the common denominator. It's not about complicating, it's about simplifying. So with the forehand, he says, you know what, every time with a forehand, my left hand moves in this particular shape. I've forgotten that my left hand before, you know, being a right-handed tennis player, my left hand would move like this to almost guide myself first, to almost, almost be pointing at the ball, and then it would bounce. And I just completely forgot. And actually, the other common denominator is that when I focus on that forehand, as it bounces up, I hit through the ball and my eyes just stay there, just stay locked in that space. I don't look at, you know, anything else. I just look at that ball because I want to make sure I hit that specific spot on the ball. And the other thing he says, you know what, I used to— I can't believe I forgot to do this— I used to practice that forehand in my mind 100 times a day. Why did you stop? I don't know. The beauty of doing this is that when you try and teach someone something new, they might go, it might work, maybe it'll work. Do I totally trust it? Would I try it in a high-perform— in a high-pressure situation? Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn't. That little bit of lack of trust or that hesitancy means that people won't follow through. They won't perform. But remind someone of what already works for them, their belief goes through the roof because they go, oh my God, yeah, I performed so well on these occasions. I have done it. I know this works. I'm not telling them something that works. They're telling themselves what works. That is a lot more believable to them. People want to find out their own answers. And so we look at— then we do the same thing with energy. So it's cross-referencing those examples. Look at the energy. How did we get ourselves ready beforehand in those occasions? Oh, you know what? I always— I can see I always did this. I haven't done that for years. And I actually, you know, maybe these occasions have been like 2 or 3 years apart, and he'll just find out that randomly he didn't do these things. That was just a random thing that that he did on those occasions. But actually, it did help. It did create a sort of a peak performance. And that's their peak pattern. And that's how we find the reliability, is not by creating something new, but by finding what already works. And then with that conviction, believing that, oh, I know this works because I've seen it happen already, rather than trying to teach them something new they're gonna have to try for the first time. Do something and do what already works. That is a great way to get them to perform through their best filter, rather than me trying to pretend that I am the expert, because I'm not. I'm not the expert. They are the expert at what they do.
This is incredible, because as it relates to difficult conversations and negotiation, I can't think of anybody I've worked with who says, I've never been able to have a good conversation. I've never worked with anybody at that point. There can always be an instance where it did work out well, where you did have the conversation, and it was successful. And it makes a lot of sense trying to figure out those common, those common tactics, those common tools, the common approach between those victories that they've had in the past, so they can actually be more intentional about revisiting those tools and using them in a way that's authentic for them.
Absolutely. And so, you know, with sales, for example, when I work with people in sales, I mean, there's just infinite information on sales, isn't there? But But one of the best things I find is that especially people who do have the experience, you know, at the beginning you've got to learn these things. But when you're having these conversations with people and when we get into that rut or pattern where we just, we don't know, we're not building rapport in the same way, we don't feel empathy or, or what, just whatever's going on that just creates this stumbling block and we go, why have I not sold or created, you know, made sales for 10, 15, 20? Now we'll look back at what works. But in doing it, we can save ourselves years of trying to go, you know, just do more, do more, do more, see what works. And experience, of course, is incredibly important. But you can spend half an hour looking back at the best, not just average occasions, the times you performed at your best. And I promise you, there is a common denominator, and that is your reliable peak pattern.
Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And again, you're not reinventing the wheel. You're already going to what they already do well. I think that's a great approach. And now what about scratching? Tell us about that one.
So scratching, okay. So if we think of, you can either think of a record player or a DJ or something like that, right? So you have a, you have a, for people who are too young, your vinyl discs or whatever, might be too young, but you've got your vinyl discs. When you scratch it, whilst it's playing, the sound changes. Okay, why does any of that matter? We have conversations, arguments, frustrations, but we don't perform, or just a bad situation, or just something, and it just builds this picture in our mind. And we go into future situations or occasions, and that's there, and it's there, and we know it's there. It's the back of our mind, and that creates a bit of the what if this happens again feeling. That picture holds all the emotion. So to bring back in the record player, someone has a picture of a disappointment. And let's take a, you know, a difficult conversation at work, and you thought you knew how to handle it, and it just, it, you know, it went past you, went beyond you, it just escalated, the temperature went up, and you've now created this unbelievable friction with someone. And maybe now as a manager, or a CEO or whatever, you're now in a place where you go, ah, do I know how to handle it the next time? Or is this going to come back in my mind? Am I simply just not good at this? Is this picture just going to keep coming back up at the wrong points in my mind? It's just going to be there as soon as I go for that conversation or that discussion, or even with that same person where the temperature rose. That picture is in my mind and it's— I can't focus, I can't concentrate. Okay, so that picture that you have in your mind— and people listening, again, you might have a picture in your mind right now of something that is a dis— has been a disappointment, a setback, a trauma, a bad situation. You have a picture. That picture has lots of emotion inside of it— sadness, frustration, anger, jealousy, whatever it might be. To change the emotional feel that that picture has, we need to scratch it. Again, the record player, we scratch it, it changes the sound. So if we scratch the picture, scratch the picture, change the emotion. So what I do to explain it, it's like a 20-minute exercise I do with people when they've gone through unbelievable setbacks or disappointments. And I'll just explain it in short, which is we have to create a disassociation. I get people to put that picture up on a cinema screen, and they do this from a subconscious place. So as I said, just in the interest of time, I won't go through the exercise, but just explain it in a little bit of detail. That subconscious plays rather than our conscious mind getting in the way. Is to have their eyes closed, they get in a state of REM, they put this picture up on the cinema screen, and I ask them, what's the predominant emotion? They might go, anxiety, I feel anxiety. How much anxiety do you feel out of 10? This is a 10. I can, I can feel it. It's like I'm there right now. Okay. Change the characters in the picture to cartoons, or change it to animals. Give them kind of weird voices or silly voices or whatever, and make it playful. Or even put like a theme tune in the background, or just make people laughing or something. Just change the picture, and we get in that place, in that headspace. And then they'll play it forwards and backwards. They'll play the situation forwards and backwards. Okay, great. Scratch the picture. Now move 3 seats back. The screen has now got smaller, so you're now moving away, which creates a bit of dissociation. They do the same thing, play the picture forwards and backwards. forwards and backwards. We might even bring in a new picture which bursts through the cinema screen that completely overwhelms the old picture, a new picture which creates a sense of exactly what we want, if we, if we achieved, if we performed, if life was beautiful, all of that stuff, and play that forwards and backwards. The essence of it is we keep moving them further and further back, the screen gets smaller, they become more disassociated with this painful image. It's the same thing you'd use for a phobia as well. but it connects a new picture that bursts through the screen, that anytime they think of this old picture in the future, immediately this new picture comes into their mind. There is no way that those 2 aren't joined forever now. And the beauty of that is if every time the old picture exists, you then dwell on it, you think of it for 10, 15, 20 minutes, an hour, whatever, 2 hours, 10 hours, you think about 2 days after a bad conversation, just in your relationship, you avoid each other for 3 or 4 days because that picture's just overwhelming you. So the problem isn't the emotion. The problem is how long it lasts. Sadness, frustration, anger— they're all fine. Sometimes they're good things. But does it last for 10 minutes or for 10 hours? The scratching exercise— when you change that picture and it forms a new picture, and it's— and, you know, it becomes this thing where It's not something you have to try. It's this old picture comes in and this new picture comes in, and it just immediately short-circuits the emotion. Okay, you're gonna feel sadness, anger, frustration. I had to do this with a woman who'd lost her husband. And yeah, does she still feel pain? Absolutely. But it takes her to a different place, and it takes her to a place where she could let go and move on, and she's actually dating again. And so again, when I do it with people who have these, you know, they're panicking about this, they'd had a conversation with their sister and it just went terribly, it went awful, and they know they've got to have to broach it at some point, but they're so worried because the picture in their head is presenting itself, it's stopping them working out what they need to do. We scratch that picture so that that emotion doesn't last. If the emotion doesn't last, that then gives us a bit of freedom and space and work and time to work out what we need to do. It's the pictures in our mind that prevent us from taking action moving forward. So if you scratch those pictures, you can change the emotion forever.
This is a phenomenal approach. And for me, as a psychology nerd, I'm really in love with this. And one of the things I I'm obsessed with is memory. Because I'm trying to teach people, I want to help people retain the knowledge. And one of the things that's interesting about memory is that everybody focuses about how to make it stronger, how to learn more, how to retain more. But could you imagine the psychological benefits of being able to spot erase memories too? Sometimes, if you went through something traumatic, Absolutely. There's, there's nothing out there that can help you to completely forget. But what you've provided us with though, is a way to take that same memory that we might want to get rid of, but we can't get rid of, and turning it into something empowering. I think this is an incredibly powerful approach. And, and so if you go through this, when do you think it's, it's the best time to go through it? Once you first experience it, or when? What's your opinion on that?
Great question. It's one I've thought about a few times because you work with people, no doubt the same with you, you come into people at different stages of the conflict, right? You've got the people at the beginning, and so there might be slight adjustments that you need to make. I think it depends what it is. If you talk about trauma, it's probably too much too soon, and it's something that people need time. You know, if I could wipe away grief in 5 minutes or a conversation, I'd be earning millions every month, so I obviously can't do that. Right? But at the same time, after a while, after a period of time— now, conflict and that stuff, that's not trauma, right? So I think there's no reason why the sooner the better, because the longer that picture's in your mind, the more it develops. And you like memory. And so, for example, when you think about— I forget, there was some study that was done which proved that— they did one of those studies where it's eyewitness testimony type of things. And then, you know, and you no doubt love those things. I can see the smiley face that you do enjoy those. And just the fact that memory is so poor in that. But what they found was with people, like a year later, their account is 75% of it is not even what happened. And so if memory is that poor and that difficult, what it's meaning is we, we build a picture in our mind initially, and then it keeps developing, it keeps forming, it keeps building, and it goes bigger and bigger and bigger. That leads me to think that the sooner we can deal with that, the easier it becomes. You can do it at any point, right? If you've been suffering with something for 10, 20 years, even if it's a phobia or whatever you've had your whole life, you can still deal with it. But I love that you've made a great point. I think it's absolutely worth making, is people have the expectation to get rid of the memory forever. If that's the expectation, that's often a game we can't win. But there are plenty of things where we actually go you know, it might have been like a, a conversation at the end of a relationship or something, uh, and it might be that you never want to think of it. You think you never want to think of the relationship again, but actually at some point, wouldn't it be nice to remember that you didn't feel like you wasted years? That actually that was a good experience, that actually that relationship was good, and that you learned a lot from it, and that it really did help you in the future? And actually, rather than trying to go, let's pretend that part of my life didn't happen, and trying to act as if we've wasted part of our life. It's— we can't control the events, but we can control what they mean. And scratching allows us to change that meaning. And I found for me personally, because someone much more intelligent than I am put some of those ideas in my head so I could start forming that idea of what you could do with someone, is actually I don't want to forget these things. I want to learn. I want to grow from these experiences. And the last thing I'll say on that, because I think it's such a good point that you've made, is when you look back at an event, you never look back at the event itself. You look back at how you saw the event, right? So how we define it in that first moment is how we're gonna remember it in the future. That's another thing I do in terms of I use 60 seconds as much as possible. If a setback, disappointment happens, 60 seconds to not, not rubbish it or pretend it wasn't bad. To define it in such a way, in a positive way. What am I learning? What am I growing? What am I accepting? What I'm taking? Because that is what I'm going to remember in the future. So with that 60 seconds, yeah, you might still have pain in the future, it might still be disappointment, setback, but you know, you might have a difficult conversation. You come out of that conversation, give yourself 60 seconds not to pretend, oh, it was fine, it was easy, that's— it didn't really happen, and pretend all of that stuff. Off the back of a difficult conversation, that was a difficult conversation, but you know what, I could maybe, maybe I, let me think about it from their point of view. They're probably thinking this. Okay, I can build some empathy because I can, maybe in the conversation I wasn't thinking this. Maybe I can understand it from their point of view, and maybe this needed to happen so that we can get that tension out the way, so it allows us to have a better conversation next time. What else could I take from it? You know what, actually, it's an experience which I can learn and grow from. It's things were easy all the time, then I wouldn't ever be improving, and I'll get caught out in a much bigger scenario, much bigger situation. So maybe I need this little bit of conflict here that allows me to do things that are 10 times harder in the future. Now when we go back to thinking about it, all of those definitions are part of the memory. And I think that's really important. So I think that's a really good point, Kwame, that you made. So as a psych— as a fellow psychology nerd, I mean, how do you use memory In terms of when you look at conflict resolution, what's your process or thoughts in terms of how memory plays a role in it?
Well, it depends on how we're looking at memory. If we're thinking about memory in terms of difficult conversations in the past that didn't go well, and how that impacts the way that we navigate future types of conversations, I think we have to go through a process like this one. We have to think about ways to think differently about it and find a way to learn from it and change and evolve. Now, if we're talking about memory with regard to the specifics within a difficult conversation, my recognition is that memory is incredibly fallible. And it's no matter how bad you think memory is, it's probably worse. And so oftentimes in these difficult conversations, what ends up happening Is that you have 2 people essentially battling vehemently over their imaginations. This is my imagination and this is yours, and the conversation becomes predictably unproductive. And so I encourage people to use what I call future-focused problem solving, where we just acknowledge how the person is feeling about the situation, validate it, and say, yeah, it makes sense that you feel that way. And then we look to the future. Yeah. So we ask questions to orient the focus of the people in question to the future. I don't want you to focus on the negative things. We can focus on the problem that you're perceiving, and then what we can do together to avoid that problem in the future or rectify the situation. But as far as the details of what happened in the past, I'm not going to spend much time going back and forth on that. I'll just listen, summarize so they feel heard, and then reorient the conversation. to the future.
I love that. You're right. It's— yeah, you're just, just in the conversations, it just, just negotiable conflict. There's just so many intricacies which is just impossible to recall. But as again, we're just interpreting it in different ways. We look at the same— every human being on earth, I find it so interesting that we could, we could all look at the same thing and yet we're seeing something completely different. And that for me is just you know, aside from the memory aspect of it, we just, it's the definition of everything that we're doing is different. And yeah, absolutely. You just can't trust your mind.
Not at all. Not at all. And when we're talking about scratching, the 3 things that came to mind for me were number 1, cognitive reappraisal, number 2, positive associations, and number 3, neuroplasticity. And so when we think about cognitive reappraisal, we're acknowledging how we're feeling emotionally, but then we're reinterpreting the definition that we give for the feeling. So for instance, our heart rate might be elevating, we— our palms might get sweaty. You could either say I'm afraid, or you could say I'm excited. And that's something that I had to do a lot when it came to public speaking because I was terrified of public speaking. The funny thing is I still feel the exact same way every time. Hmm. But now instead of saying, I'm afraid, I say, I'm excited. And so there's a little bit of that involved in scratching that I can see. And then also associations. You think back to Pavlov's dogs, how we're all constantly associating things, we're pairing things together. So we're pairing this event in the past with a negative interpretation. And so then what we're doing here is we are pairing this same instance in the past with a completely different interpretation. Right. So instead of seeing it as something that was detrimental, we're seeing it as a necessary part of our development. There's some value to it. And so by going over it in your head in this new, more positive and empowering way, we're pairing it with something that's more positive. And then with neuroplasticity, we think about, I think it's Hebb's Law, where neurons that fire together wire together. And every time we think about these things, we create these patterns of thought and these connections become stronger and stronger and stronger and stronger. And I've had to think back about times in my life where I started to feel negative. And so we have to think about, okay, I'm angry now, but anger prolonged into the future becomes resentment. And anger right now is how I feel, but then resentment is closer to who you are because of that constant firing together over and over and over again. And so again, when I think about how we are interpreting these negative instances in our life, I think about who I want, who I want to be. If I project my feelings into the future and I don't resolve this feeling, if I don't change the way I'm thinking about it, who are these thought patterns creating in me? And so when you think about it that way, we recognize there are consequences to the continuations of these negative thought patterns. And again, I think this is where scratching is so powerful because That when you think about how our thought patterns shape our brain and who we are, we're taking control of how this particular instance impacts who we want to become in the future.
You described it better than I did. Yeah, the anger resentment thing you said is, it's a perfect example of a pattern. And you have patterns of behavior, but like in terms of neurons and those sorts of associations, we have it at a biological level as well, those types of patterns. So absolutely, in terms of the way our, you know, our synapses fire off to all the different signals. So absolutely on both sides, I think that's quite a good description of what's going on. And what I really like about scratching is a lot of things when I work with people, a lot of things people don't like to have to try. What I mean by that is you give people a strategy or something to, to kind of deal with the pain or emotion. People want to— they don't want to have to go, right, I've got to remember to do this and remember to do this, remember. So, oh, you know, I thought of this, right? I've got to do this thing. I've got to do this thing. And to have to feel like doing that. Now, if they had the discipline to do it, yeah, great. They would turn it into a habit where it doesn't feel like effort anymore. And those things are fantastic. There's some really great strategies and tools that do that. What I like about strategy— scratching is whilst I don't believe in quick fixes at all, especially in the types of areas that I coach in, what scratching does do is it creates something where the person never has to try. Because when the memory comes into the head, a signal goes off exactly how you described it. A different signal goes off so they don't have to put in the effort. So it immediately does something where it's actually— when I work with people, they go, hey, how But how does that work? How have you done that? Because I can't, I can't think of anything different. I did this with someone who, they wanted to lose weight. I said, what's your favorite food? They told me their favorite food. We did exactly the same thing. I ruined pizza for them. Now that was difficult. I love pizza, so that was heartbreaking for me. But I had to ruin pizza, that every time they think of pizza, this new— and I won't even tell you what the image was because it's so horrible that it just created this different feeling. But with that new picture, they had new, you know, it was different taste, different smell, different feel, all of that stuff, all those sensations. Because food is an emotional thing, a pizza or whatever, all the emotions were different. They didn't associate any of the same emotions. The pizza is now ruined for them. Now it's exactly the same thing as when we're going, when we're in a difficult situation or had a difficult situation. Is that we don't want— and we have to go into another high-pressure environment— that actually different signals are being sent to us. Not because we're trying to send different signals to us, but because we went through this exercise, it now sends different signals. And now I go into it— and just to use your example of public speaking, I had someone deathly afraid of public speaking, and we went through a similar exercise, and they started changing the things in the picture to— what was one of the things they did? They imagined— I have no idea why— imagined a snake making the sound of a pigeon, right? I cannot tell you for the life of me why, but they said, oh, in this picture I have, I turned this person into a snake and they made the sound of a pigeon. Now, I have no input into the picture, so before you think I'm crazy, it's not my fault. This is what this person came up with. But it made them laugh. They thought, how stupid is that? But when they go into their going to an arena or whatever to speak, when they think of the fear, as soon as the fear goes, the snake making the sound of a pigeon, which for whatever reason makes them laugh— well, if you're laughing like you are, you just— everything goes. The tension, everything goes in them. And it's just that fear doesn't stick around. And like you said, redefining fear, you know, I think anxiety and excitement, biologically the exact same thing is happening in the body. No doubt why you do it, because You just redefine it. It's the same thing. Now similarly, just that sense of fear— fear being a good thing— and now it's defined in a better way. It now connects to something that makes them feel relaxed and laugh and everything else, which is exactly what you want when you're going to speak in front of however many thousand people. So I thank you for your description. I've written some of your description down of it because it was pretty spot on. And yeah, and I certainly hope for people listening, if you've had a setback Um, you know, it's a 20-minute exercise to do. You can't do it at a conscious level. You can't, because the conscious mind just— you know, if you said to someone, believe in yourself, but you just said it to someone's face, you'd go, screw you, what are you talking about? But you do it at a subconscious level, at a deeper level, and did this sort of stuff, it tends to go in. So you have to do it at a different level. But, um, but yeah, but for people listening, I mean, it's, it's, it's a simple exercise. which I've just, you know, again, someone much more, much more intelligent than I am gave me the ideas around it. And I just think it's a really, really helpful thing. It's made a huge difference in my life. I hope for people listening at some point, maybe, maybe it'll make a big difference in theirs as well.
Absolutely. David, this has been fantastic. But before you go, let them know about the podcast. Let them know how they can get in touch with you. And give one one key takeaway for the audience too?
So, well, firstly, so thank you very much. I really, really enjoyed having you on my podcast and listening to the episode. Listening to your podcast has been fantastic. So it's a real privilege for me to be on yours. So thank you for that. For the people who want to listen a bit more about kind of these crazy stories with snakes making the sound of pigeons or whatever else, if you heard something today that you think, actually, you know what, I'd like to understand a little bit more about that. You can find all my stuff at selfbeliefchief.com. You'll find the podcast there as well where I interview different guests who've got different expertise in different areas. So I'd love for you to tune in to that. On the selfbeliefchief.com site, there's a lot of loads and loads, hours worth of free content on there for different areas of life. So if it's, you know, you're coming out of a relationship, you're suffering from heartbreak, more specifically for this audience, if you know you're struggling with sales and you want to have an understanding of what already works for you and understanding that process, having, you know, even stronger conversations through your own filter in an authentic way, then please by all means get in touch. You'll be able to find that detail on the website as well. But, uh, but by all means just visit the website. I'm sure there'll be something for you. But otherwise, if there's something different, then please feel free to get in contact with me and I'd love to hear from you as well.
Fantastic. David, a pleasure, my friend. Thank you.
You're welcome. Thank you.
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