The Practical Application of Peak Performance - Todd Herman | Flow Research Collective Radio

I have been beating on the drum of curiosity for a long time with people, is being more curious, being more curious about yourself. Like, so many people feel like they're baked already at the age of 32 or 45 or on and on through the— and it's like, no, like, be— continue to be very curious about yourself. We end up saying, oh well, my morning routine is this, this, and this, and I always feel best when I'm this. And so the word that I like to add in there is currently.

Hey there, if you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one with our coaches, you'll go through our whole curriculum, you'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Sort of Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up. And I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird. Like when you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We would be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit fit. So that's getmoreflow.com.

What does it take to do the impossible? What does it take to level up your game like never before? What does it take for individuals, organizations, for even institutions to achieve paradigm shifting? Nothing is ever the same again. Breakthroughs.

Our mission is to decode the neurobiology of flow and cognitive peak performance, access the minds of maverick scientists, groundbreaking innovators, and world-leading experts to understand what it takes to achieve ultimate human performance so you can feel your best, perform your best, and accomplish your boldest goals. I'm your host, Rhian Dorris, and together with bestselling author Steven Kotler, I present to you Flow Research Collective Radio. Hey there, Ryan Dorris here with Flow Research Collective Radio. Excited for you to listen to today's episode, which is with Todd Herman. Now, Todd is a friend and really a veteran in the peak performance world over the last 20-plus years. He has been working with the highest achievers in sport and business. For over 2 decades. Todd is the creator of the multi-award-winning leadership and skills development program, The 90-Day Year. He's also the author of The Wall Street Journal bestselling book, The Alter Ego Effect: The Power of Secret Identities to Transform Your Life, and also a children's book, which is interesting, called My Super Me, which helps children find their inner hero. And build courage and confidence. Todd's professional programs are delivered annually to over 200,000 professionals across 73 countries. He was named by the Boston Herald as a training superstar, and he's been featured on the Today Show, PBS, NFL Films, the New York Times, CBS, Fox Sports Inc. Magazine, and many others. Todd lives at the moment in New York with his wife and 3 young children. And Todd is also a personal friend, as I mentioned. And I really think of Todd as a practitioner when it comes to peak performance, as someone who's in the trenches training some of the best athletes in the world, some of the best executives and entrepreneurs in the world. So, he's got just a really nice kind of hands-on and lived experience with coaching and training peak performance. And in this episode, we talk about a wide variety of things from how to develop an alter ego to elevate your personal or your professional performance, to some of the pitfalls that occur within self-development, and to why having a process for developing your own different identities is useful and important within peak performance. So, you're in for a treat. Enjoy this episode with Todd, and I will catch you in a second. Todd Herman, welcome to Flow Research Collective Radio. Absolutely great to have you here.

I'm excited for this conversation and been looking forward to it for a while.

As have I been. As have I been. So your book, The Alter Ego Effect, has lots of great quotes in it and lots of just great lessons. One of the quotes that I really liked was, your alter ego helps you to disassociate from your own narrative, your own story, your own beliefs, your own personality that might not be custom built to help you win. Can you tell us a little bit about what you meant in that quote? Yeah.

I mean, anytime you and I, anyone listening, are trying to make change happen, oftentimes we go into this default mode state of, but can I do it? And I'm always very interested in those statements that we make to ourselves. Can I do it? And I mean, I've just like anyone here, you know, been challenged by my own growth and trying to develop myself. And so because we build up a story and a narrative about what we think we can do, where we're going, what I can achieve, it's basically self-efficacy stuff depending on your own upbringing. The reality is most people have a fairly negative relationship with themselves and then their future because of that. "Because I'm from this neck of the woods, no one from where I'm from went and did this," or, "Because I didn't have these mentors or these people around me, or I don't have these coaches or people to get access to, how could I go and do whatever it is I'm trying to go and pursue? No one in my family has done this before." A lot of these invisible puppet strings end up ruling our behavior then, and we stop pursuing it. From my experience now of building out tens of thousands of alter egos for Olympians, pro athletes, leaders in business, leaders in politics, entertainers in Hollywood and on Broadway. The moment that someone would step into the role or the idea of an alter ego, now all of a sudden the strings that were holding me back have been cut. Because no longer is Todd, the guy who grew up in a farm in Schuler, Alberta, Canada, going and pursuing this. It's me attaching to a bigger idea, a better idea maybe, for going and accomplishing this thing. So that's what I mean is one of the great superpowers to have as a human being is the ability to shape-shift your identity. Because identity is the stuff that we all stack our habits, attitudes, and behaviors on top of. But going back to that statement I was saying earlier of like, can I do this? I'm very interested to know is what is Ryan's relationship with that term I? Because if it's a healthy one, great. But if there are some invisible traumas that are holding some people back, some difficult things that happen to them at young ages that they have a very hard time seeing themselves be successful, in the pursuit of whatever their discipline might be or the thing that they want. Well then, instead of me trying to do therapy with you, because I'm not a therapist, that's not my world, I'm a performance guy, I help you move forward, then let's build out a new identity for you between the 6 inches of your ears that you can attach to. And alter egos was just this great ready-made tool to help people achieve things much more quickly. And A big part of peak performance, and you and Steven know this well, is joy has to be a part of this process, fun, playfulness. I found that having a playful attitude was this great master key to unlock the zone, the flow state, and peak performance.

I love the emphasis on play. I'll come back to that in a moment. But the phrase building out an alter ego is a really interesting one. I like the way you use the word building. Can you describe to us what that process of building one of these alter egos looks like?

Yeah. So I mean, when you think about your own identity and how we build out this concept of ourself, it's shaped by the stories that we're given at a young age, the influences that we have around us, moms, dads, grandparents, whoever it is. And we start to see ourself through the lens of these other people. We adopt habits, we adopt behaviors and attitudes, a lot of times that we didn't choose, and then that ends up giving us our result. We see this world through these, these lenses. And so when we're building out an alter ego, we actually go through the same process a little bit. And what people need to understand is, is there is no one you. Like, there's no one Ryan. There are many versions of Ryan based on the roles that you play in life and the fields of play is what I call them, or the stages that you're on. So for example, this idea of Todd. Well, there's the Todd that's the dad to my 3 little kids, right? And what most of us do is we sort of amalgamate all these different roles together and we create this composite identity from them all, as opposed to really dissecting and bifurcating them. And then once we do that and we see ourselves through all the roles that we play, now I can go, and custom build the right person to succeed in that role. And this is where this concept of the way that I've worked with people on what is the method of the alter ego has been so successful. It's really helping people see that, no, you're not just one identity. And in fact, one of the really fundamental ideas in psychology and psychiatry that was underpinning many of the theories in that world was this theory of single self theory. Which is that they posited that the people who had the highest rates of quality mental health, so low rates of anxiety, low rates of stress, and low rates of depression, had a single identity that they lived through in their lives. Now, me as a practitioner, I'm on the field working with athletes, working with leaders every single day, coaching, mentoring, advising, all this stuff. That didn't make any sense to me because when my athlete got off the field, they were a very different person. I mean, most people don't want some of these extremely performance-focused competitive people coming off the court and acting the same way in normal life. So that just didn't make any sense. Since 2008, the entire world of psychology flipped on this concept of single self. Now the fastest growing field of psychological study, one of the fastest growing, is this field of multiple self. Theory, which isn't a theory. And a new study came out 2 years ago showing that the people who saw themselves as having many roles, many sides of who they are, and they deliberately mined and harvested those different roles, specifically trying to be great in this one role called mom and great role called CEO or great salesperson, whatever it is for someone, had the lowest rates of anxiety, stress, and depressive type disorders. So when you build it out, I'd say all this to give context to your question, which is the first thing you need to do is pick a role or an area of your life where you want to improve, where you might be the most frustrated, where you might be avoiding doing the things that you want to be doing. And that's where to start because you don't build out an alter ego for your entire life because that's just falling into the trap of single self. Pick an alter ego, pick an identity that you want to start creating in an important area for you.

Yeah. I love the mention of single self theory versus the current fields that are growing. Steven actually wrote an article, funnily enough, that people might want to check out back in 2013 called Who's in Charge Here? The Surprising Science of Self-Control. I think it was in Forbes. And he talked about how the boundaries of the self feel predetermined and clear that you are an I and other things are out there and external from you and separate from you, but that in reality, the sense of you as an individual separate self is really just that, it's a sense. And often in spirituality, it's talked about as the illusion of the self. And he talks about how even things like the gut flora that you have in your microbiome changes your sense of self and the boundaries are not predetermined or fixed. There's another great book called Being No One by Thomas Metzinger on this topic. And I don't know if you've come across Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright. That's an amazing breakdown of actually the way this idea shows up in spirituality and Buddhism. And he kind of describes the way Buddhism views the self and then how that actually maps to modern science in a really, really compelling way. So yeah, I love all the parallels between the alter ego effect concept and spirituality and cutting-edge science.

Yeah. And I mean, Metzinger is an absolute brilliant, brilliant man who produced some phenomenal stuff as well. So anyways, that's the start is seeing yourself as having many sides and then you go, okay, well, which side of me do I really want to develop here? The key with this concept And the reason I became really well known for being the alter ego guy 20 years ago now almost was because when you're dealing with people on the mental game side of things, for the longest time, because it's this elusive world to many people, change seemed like it was going to take a long time. Okay, I got to change my personality or I got to change my behaviors. I got to change my habits. And now the indoctrination of the self-help world has caused people to believe that it has to take a really long time to make these things happen. So for me, having an athlete who might be coming to me in a slump or it's a Wednesday and I'm getting a call from someone who's competing in the US Open at Flushing Meadows in New York City where I live, and they have a game on Saturday, but they've been underperforming or under-indexing on tour for 6 months, 8 months, a year, maybe even longer, I don't have the luxury to just come in and take a long time by working with you on your meditation skills, which again, meditation, it's one of the fundamental things that we help people on. As a practice, meditation, it is undeniable. It's extreme benefits to you mentally, emotionally, and physically. It's a phenomenal thing, but it typically doesn't work fast. Whereas an alter ego, if I shifted your identity, and because everything is stacked on top of identity, attitudes, beliefs, habits, behaviors, bets were off all of a sudden. Now, all of a sudden, I could shapeshift someone very quickly. And now, all of a sudden, for me, the challenge that was there was just finding the right source code, is what I call it, or inspiration for your alter ego. Who is it that you would love to, or what is it that you'd love to model when you're out there, whether it was on the tennis court or in the boardroom or at home with your children?

Hey there, just gonna interrupt. If you are a leader, a knowledge worker, or an entrepreneur and you want to take your professional success to the next level while reclaiming time, space, and freedom within your personal life, then Zero to Dangerous may be a fit for you. Zero to Dangerous is our flagship peak performance training. You'll work one-on-one coaches, you'll go through our whole curriculum, you'll join a community of peak performers from all over the world.

This was like a really weird thing that happened is my workday started ending at 2. So then somewhere in Zero to Dangerous, there was this idea that I needed now an entirely new category of things to do just because I enjoy them, which is, you know, entrepreneur for 23 years, it never occurred occurred to me to make a list of things to do for the sheer pleasure of doing them because I had gotten all my work done. Like, it never occurred to me to do that. It was really, really weird. I enforced the deadline, like it had to be real. I had to create the output to really have the experience be valid. And I was watching my productivity go up and up and up, and I was like, what do I do now? It's 2 o'clock. And it was just so weird, like When you have, you know, 20 or 30 people who have weird experiences like that and you can put them in a way that somebody can kind of scan through those, it allows somebody to self-identify and be like, oh God, that's really meaningful to me. Because some person's going to be like a 40-year-old dad who's going to go through Zero to Dangerous and make enough time to go see his kids play baseball or whatever. That's going to be somebody.

Go to getmoreflow.com, getmoreflow.com, pop an application through, takes 30 seconds. We will be excited to speak with you to see whether it's a good fit. So that's getmoreflow.com. Todd, what are some of the examples of helping people shapeshift and pull on an alter ego that have been most effective that you've seen or even directly helped people with?

So, I mean, I talk about it at the very— I think it's the first page of the book where I say, you know, all the names in the book here are changed for privacy purposes because one of the things that drives our, especially our more celebrity-driven, you know, sporting side of our business and then entertainment side is that I never disclose who we work with. And in today's world, that's a strange thing because everyone wants to Instagram hashtag the photo of them putting their arm around a celebrity so they can get likes and stuff. But privacy is paramount currency in my world. But I'll say as an example, so the areas that— it's funny because even the people that are listening to this show right now, typically going to be very ambitious people. They're top-performing individuals and everyone is looking for that one little extra edge that they can get. We're dealing with sometimes micro percentage points. With the super achievers that are listening. But one of the biggest takeaways that I've experienced in doing all the different keynote talks on this subject over the years is the moment I share with people my alter ego as a dad, everyone sort of leans into it and they're like, "Oh my God, I was thinking about building an alter ego for professional purposes." But many people who are parents feel like they're under-indexing. You give your business or you give your job, your role, your career, so much of your time, attention, and energy all day long. And one of the common things I hear from people is, "Todd, I have a really hard time turning it off when I get home." You've been flexing this muscle. Again, think about this. I love breaking this stuff down for people because when you think about this, you're like, "Oh my God, that's exactly what I do." Because when you understand how the self gets developed, Now, you're getting a source code. Now, you know how to go in and tinker with it. So, all day long, I'm flexing the muscle, Ryan, of being a Challenger personality type. Why? Because for the super achievers and big egos that I end up working with, I need to break through sometimes that hard exterior so that I can get to extreme levels of trust because when I get to extreme levels of trust, then I can get from you what's actually going on inside your head, what's really challenging you or troubling you or the classic pebble in the shoe for you. And so, I flex that muscle of being a challenger, challenger, challenger, breaking through, asking hard questions, challenging you. But is that really who Todd is? Is that all of the qualities and attributes that I have available to me that I could reveal to the world? No. So, when I leave this office and I go out into the world of my kids, my source inspiration for how I want to show up around my children is my own dad and Mr. Rogers. Mr. Rogers, very well known in North America, the classic childhood entertainer on PBS. That is such a great model for how I'd love to be around my kids, loving, caring, kind, patient, creative, fun. And so when I'm with my kids, I imagine me bringing the attributes of Mr. Rogers out and through me in my actions to my kids. It also informs me in how I should behave in those times of when I just want to blow my top off because my kids aren't listening to me or whatever. It's how would Mr. Rogers handle this situation? It's a gut check. It's a checkpoint. And because I built up my alter ego in the most hermetically sealed environment possible, when I'm sitting at my desk or I'm thinking or I'm meditating on the idea of how I want to become, I need to remember that in those times of crisis, in those times of challenge, that the best version of me chose Mr. Rogers as my source code to show up around my children. I say that because then people come up to me after and they're like, "I was going to build out, like I'd said before, this alter ego for business, but you know what? I am under-indexing huge with my kids." Or they'll say the other one, which is, "I'm under-indexing huge with my significant other." So I'm like, "Great. How would you like to be with them? Who have you seen out there in the world of movies, TV, entertainment, books that you've read, people that you know that you would love to bring to life more in that area. Because what you recognize then through this process is, wow, how many more attributes, traits, qualities of me as a human being am I leaving hidden away by me reflexively acting through this same identity that I've been living through for 20, 30, 40, 50 years? The great gift of being a human being is we are not oak trees. An acorn will always grow into an oak tree. We're not trees. We are not trees. We can change, we can shift, and we can do it quickly. And there have been so many little breadcrumbs left throughout history of people using this concept as a tool to help them develop themselves more quickly and get out of a model of themselves that isn't serving them anymore.

I love the "We are not trees." That's a great thing. I'm going to be repeating that in my mind in your voice.

Yeah.

The other thing I wanted to pull on there that you mentioned around the egos of the super performers or of the highest performers being, as a general rule, big egos, which I think is fairly true. At least I've noticed that anecdotally. Why do you think that is? Why do you think high performers often have that trait? And do you think it, it is part of what enables them to, to do what they're able to do, or do you think it's more of a limiting factor?

Uh, well, I mean, for most of us to get started on the path towards the pursuit of something, we have to have this innate sense that, well, people will want to hear this, people will want to hear me sing, people need to hear these thoughts, these opinions, these discoveries that I have, that does have a bit of an ego frame inside of it. Now, I'm not saying every human being that's ever pursued this has done it because of that lens, but it becomes a feedback loop of, so you do share your voice, you do share your thoughts, you do share whatever it is, your widget that you made, and then someone goes back and says, "Oh, this is genius. This is bright. This is amazing." And then you know, you reconfirm it in your own head and you're like, yeah, that's right, it is amazing, or whatever. So it's very easy for us to get caught in an ego loop, but then at the same time, it becomes a major trap because it becomes a huge self-fulfilling prophecy for us. And then we, we fall into this trap of not developing ourselves as wholly and fully as we could, because we think that the results that we're getting are because of this way of operating, this way of me showing up in the world. And it ends up stopping us from pursuing more of what we are. I'll give you a good example, actually. Through the work that I've done, and maybe you guys have discovered this as well too, but because I'm working with so many people in— Yeah, we've got a big training company and we do have a lot of programs that we that we have for large amounts of people, but I also stay very close to the one-on-one work because in that one-on-one work, you get to really unpack the nuances of human performance because you're right there with someone through those challenging and epically difficult times. And you really see what's getting that person through as opposed to what's postulated about inside of a self-help book. And one of the things that you find from people who are really top performers is they have been through some fairly traumatic experience at some age in their life. And yet it didn't stop them, but it might have given them an edge in some way. And then the mistake that they'll make that I've uncovered is that they think that it's that edge that they have, that this unwillingness maybe sometimes to overcome the trauma, because in some ways it still rules them in some way and they think that it's because of that dark energy that they're carrying with them, that that's the reason for their successes. And it's just not true. It got you here, but doesn't need to take you all the way to where it is you're trying to go. And so I have this whole network of different therapists, because again, I'm not a therapist. I don't do this work. I stay inside my lane. And that's one thing I'd encourage a lot of people to do more of, I think nowadays, is to stay in your lane. Just because you go and get certified in something doesn't mean that this thing that you have solves all the ills of human beings. And that's my problem with a lot of influencers that are out there is they learn about affirmations and they're like, "Oh, well affirmations, I can affirm myself out of anything." And it's just not even close to being true. And so anyways, I pass people off to these different therapists, but they resist it so much because they're so concerned that their performance on the basketball court or their performance as an entrepreneur is going to go down because now they're getting rid of this dark energy that they have computed in their head is is the reason for their success. And that's getting to the level of superstition, not to the level of facts and science.

That's interesting. Yes, Stephen's a big fan as well of the stay in my lane narrative. Todd, what are some of the things, because you've been working with high performers for well over 2 decades at this point, what are some of the common patterns you've noticed with the highest performers that you've coached and trained and worked with?

One of the first things that you notice is a real understanding of rituals. A lot of people nowadays are bombarded with the talk of routines and habits. Routines and habits are, of course, they have a powerful effect and they're an important part of creating the consistency part of the equation, but But the people at the elite level have rituals that they follow. And rituals are different than routines and habits because a ritual has a deeper narrative and story attached to it. And it's one of the things that's been lost, frankly, over the last 100, 150 years because of the globalization of really the world, where we're losing some of these traditions, these rituals of boy becoming man, girl becoming woman in the world. I'm closely affiliated with that world because of the work of Joseph Campbell, who I have as a mentor between the 6 inches of my ears. He's a part of one of my alter egos as well in business. And so, rituals is important because it's so deep inside of the recesses of your brain because it attaches to the emotional self now. Because if you just do a habit and it's logic and it's, "I'm doing this because I'm drinking water in the morning." because I wanted to hydrate myself. That's a habit. But if I'm drinking a glass of water and in my mind, what lives inside of this water was it was I'm drinking from the fountain of wisdom. And in my mind, this glass of water was the water that was poured into it came from my wisest mentors. And Joseph Campbell poured a little bit into it, and Benjamin Franklin poured a little bit into it, and Socrates poured a little bit into it. And now when I drink this water, what I'm drinking is the wisdom of my mentors. That's the difference between a ritual and a habit. And so, one thing that I notice, well, let's work with working with a team like Real Madrid and some of the elite performers that are on there is the ones that were getting different results, they lived in a different storytelling mode in their mind with the things that they did. There's a deep meaning behind it. It wasn't just rote, which I find in the biohacking world of today, people are doing a lot of the right things, but they're not doing it in a meaningful way. And so it's creating this emptiness. That's what I've started to see, this divide happening in the world of performance speak or self-help speak or leadership speak, that there is a detachment from deep meaning and people are doing a lot of the right stuff, but they don't have a lot of meaning going on in their hearts and in their minds. It's creating a bit of an empty void, I would say. The second thing that they have done way better than others is discipline. Man, it is a strict discipline that even high performers just don't have it. And nowadays, the biggest challenge I've had in the last 24 years, because I started this business in '97, long before coaching was an actual thing, and really mental game coaching was— it was around, but really only at elite levels, and I was really working at the amateur level. But the discipline of the athletes of today is, is, is weakened. Dramatically, and that's because of social media. So many other— while they're trying to build their careers in sport, they're also trying to build out businesses on the side, and then they're wondering why they're under-indexing on the court or the field or whatever it is. The ones who are succeeding, I think a great example nowadays is Mike Trout, arguably will probably go down as, if not the greatest baseball player in history, he'll be in the top 5 because his numbers just don't lie. Mike Trout is famous. Major League Baseball wants him to do commercials for them to build up the brand of Major League Baseball, and his response has been the same. "I'm here to play baseball. I'm here to hit, run, and catch, and that's it." He doesn't do a lot of interviews, but it's hard to argue with his results right now.

Ian Formigle I love that. I love, yeah, a couple of things there. Notion of rituals being routines that are infused with meaning, I think, is very powerful and makes total sense. It also makes me think that the reason discipline is a differentiating factor is actually because of the increased meaning that the highest performers are able to muster. How do you think people can increase the sense of meaning and ritualize their daily routines, their lives in a way that can help them gather some of that. I think, I mean, funnily enough, one of the things that in our work obviously that impacts this is time spent in flow. Time spent in flow is a precursor for meaningfulness. So I think that's definitely one route.

Well, I have been beating on the drum of curiosity for a long time with people. Is being more curious, being more curious about yourself. So many people feel like they're baked already at the age of 32 or 45 or on and on through that. And it's like, no, continue to be very curious about yourself. We end up saying, "Oh, well, my morning routine is this, this, and this, and I always feel best when I'm this." And so, the word that I like to add in there is currently. I currently feel like I'm operating at my best by doing it this way, but I'm open and curious to see if there's other ways that I can get there more optimally, get there more quickly, get there with more fun or joyfulness or whatever the thing is. So it's, I'm currently showing up in the world this way, but I'm very open to showing up in a different way, which is a very big leap for many people to make in their own heads is that. And I've seen that happen even for the people who've come through our alter ego workshops and taken the online program or people that have reached out that have read the book. And I get pinged hundreds of times a week from people. And some of those people when they reach out are like, "Man, I have a really hard time seeing myself being able to go and do this." And I'm like, "Well, then stop thinking of yourself doing it. You're missing out on the power of the alter ego is that's the job of this new identity that you bring into the equation. Give yourself a break." So, I think curiosity to your point around getting into these areas of more discipline or getting into rituals is a big part of it. Like, I'm just curious what that is. And then, the other side of this is Going back to our conversation around just being more playful, Steven Pressfield wrote a great book about resistance. And it's one of my 5 books that I give to all of my sporting clients. And in that book, one thing that I would add to it, because resistance is like whether you want to call it fear, you want to call it self-judgment, you want to call it doubt, whatever it is, resistance is sort of the container word. But resistance resistance does not have a bigger weapon than what creative imagination brings to the table. Your creative imagination is the ultimate tool to defeat resistance within. And that's why the alter ego stuff is so powerful is because it's leveraging. It's a tool to help you leverage your creative imagination. So, when someone is trying to get into more ritualistic thinking, allow yourself to be more creative. Even when I unpack for people like me drinking a glass of water. And my imagination going to the point of Joseph Campbell, Benjamin Franklin, and Socrates pouring water into that glass and me drinking from their wisdom, that adds more— for me, it does. It adds more fun to my life because I'm not sharing it. Again, I'm sharing it with you and everyone that's listening right now because I'm being interviewed on this topic and this is my world. A lot of the stuff around alter egos and even sharing some of these mental toughness ideas or mind game ideas is pretty much private. This is all stuff for me. I like the fact that there's so much that goes on in my head to help me achieve in the world that no one knows about. It's just me and my own psychology that I'm building out, my weapons that I'm using to help me win. I would just encourage people to really have more fun with this stuff.

Yeah, I agree. It's easy to underestimate the power of trivial, almost silly mind games, but they're effective. One of my favorite little mind games to do when I'm on flights is when reading, to pretend that if— it's a little bit sinister, but to pretend that if I stop reading, something's going to happen to the plane. It causes me to read for 5 or 6 hours straight, often from takeoff to landing. As a result, end up out of the way more effective, enjoyable flight. So just these little sort of mental hacks and tools and tricks, I think, that you can make up and be creative with are really, yeah, really can move the needle actually in a surprisingly large way.

[Speaker:TIM_FERRISS] So even that as a great example is a great example of what you're really doing there as well is you're flexing the power muscle of identifying yourself as a creator, right? Because "If I stop reading, then the ability for this plane to keep on flying through the air is going to be lost." At that moment, really what you're doing is you're playing God in that moment. It sounds like it's egotistical to do that, but I talk about it all the time. Listen, a lot of the stuff that people have written about in self-help books, telling people about ways to become successful, they're laughable to me because The people who really win, like really win, they have a phenomenal, what's called a superego. They have a phenomenal sense of their ability to create in the world better than anyone else that might be in their category. And if this helps you do that, and again, they'll never say that when they're at the press conference because it would make them sound completely egotistical to everyone else that would be listening, or it would sound just massively narcissistic. But it's what's helping giving them their edge to compete and win over other people. So you're flexing this muscle of creativity and being a creator.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely encourage people to just make up their own mental tools for various things to try to improve. Todd, what are some of the biggest pitfalls, sticking points, places people get lost in personal development that you've seen over the last 20-plus years you've been involved. I know one of the big, one of the huge ones I see, just to start us off, is people getting good at personal development and kind of viewing that as the end in itself and viewing having a broad knowledge of personal development concepts or tools or tactics as some sort of an end result when in reality it is often not more than a hobby. So I'm curious what some of the other pitfalls you've observed over the decades are.

Well, I would say the frame from the very beginning in the way that we've used the term personal development, self-help, just the etymology of those words isn't helpful. Because when I'm going in to go and help someone make change happen, And I believe you guys talk about this as well, is the first place for me to go is your environment. First place. Because if I can change up your environment, just the world that you're living inside of, could it be the influences around you? That stuff, people have no idea how much it really shapes what it is that they're getting as results in their lives. And so, when someone says personal development, self-help, immediately the lens gets placed on you. Whereas instead, they would have far greater results if they actually took a look at the world around them and, "Hey, what can I shift and change out here? What could I do inside of my office to help lift up my attitude, my habits, my beliefs? What is it with the people around me?" All of my greatest wins in life, almost all of them were a direct result of me having a phenomenal mentor, getting around the right people. Me even living in New York City, that was— I mean, as a farm kid growing up on a 10,000+ acre farm and ranch in the middle of nowhere truly, and I was an extrovert, I felt so out of place on the farm. Now, I don't lament growing up there because it was Amazing when you have two great parents that really give you the foundation of character and integrity and hard work ethic and things like that. But I heard about this place called New York City and that's where I had to get to. That was just where I needed to go. And then when I got to New York City eventually, and I already had a pretty successful career already, all of a sudden just having so much access, especially to the people that were in my world. There's 13 professional sports teams in New York City. You and I were just talking about, you asked me, why do I love New York City so much? I say to people, it's the center of ambition on the planet, and there's just no denying it. There is no city on the planet that has the same ambitious nature to it as New York, and that's because of all the industry that's there, all the different— There's media, there's entertainment, there's sports, there's finance. There's so many markets that are there, and New York City is not an easy place to live. You had better be there for a reason because you don't go there because of a specific level of quality of life and ease that New York City provides. You meet interesting people because of that. I would go and look at environment first when I'm looking at making change happen. That's a pitfall and a pratfall that people have when they're making change happen for themselves is environment. The second one, just to quickly, I'll say is that they don't really develop a discipline of truly looking at themselves and seeing that, yes, the version of me that is here right now was shaped and built by so many factors and people being unwilling to unshackle themselves from this current identity and being willing to evolve into a new one. And there's this great quote from Halsey, one of the current great pop singers of today, where her real name is Ashley. And she said in an interview back in 2019 that, "Me wanting to do this was so far-fetched. And the fact that I changed my name in the process, I think I had the foresight to know that being me wasn't enough." I had to become somebody completely different. At the time, I felt that Ashley didn't deserve to be famous and successful because she wasn't that special. But if I made Halsey, maybe she could be. When you actually look at her name, Ashley and Halsey, all she did was she just switched around a couple of letters. But it's a very prophetic statement and one that I would encourage other people who feel like they're really stuck by something to think about because what you are right now and, and who you've been shaped into being is not the end of the story, right?

I love that. Yeah, and the point as well on environment and New York in particular, I think is a huge one. One of the biggest pieces of advice that I give to people if they reach out and ask just casually or personally is get to the biggest market. Get yourself into the biggest market for whatever it is that you're doing. If you're trying to be in theater If you're trying to be in tech, if you're trying to be in finance, whatever the case may be, just the power of just being physically in the world's biggest market for the thing that you want to succeed in is just unbelievably immense. And I know so many people who had pivotal shifts in their life, their ability to create and achieve when they did whatever it took to just get themselves into the mix. It's one of those old self-help clichés that is really a great one and a true one, which is that proximity is power. And I think the value of that is immense. To close this out, Todd, let's ask you one of our, one of our final questions here, which we call the Research Genie question, which is: if you could have all the research immediately get done to answer any question, any burning question that you have or that you've pondered for years or maybe decades, what would that question be? That you would have instantly answered?

I would go immediately to mental health, and I would go to a question around what are the greatest causes of mental health issues, whether it's depression, stress, anxiety. And then on the flip of that, then what are the fastest ways to help pull people out of that dark energy that can sit on top of people. Just being in this world of helping really high achievers do hard things, it's not often talked about just how much of the time that they're living in their days is actually very hard on them. And as someone else who went through massive bouts of depression, I had suicidal attempts because of traumas that happened to me at a young age as well, I think that if we can help pull people out of mental health and depression issues, I mean, when you get to the other side of it like I have, it feels like you are operating— it's an unfair advantage. When you have a healthy brain, it is like the world has opened up to you in a way that wasn't accessible before, your level of focus, your ability to not question yourself as much anymore like you would with that cloud of despair that might be hovering over top of you. So mine would be around anything regarding mental health. I don't know if that answers it very well, but that's where I would go.

I love it. Yeah, that makes total sense. That makes total sense. I mean, what's bigger than that really? Todd, any final thoughts you'd love to share with people before we wrap up? And then also if you can mention where people can learn more about your work, where they can get The Alter Ego Effect as well. That'd be great.

Yeah. So I mean, my home base on the internet is toddherman.me, and that's where you can see all the different programs and businesses that we run or are a part of. And then more information around the book, you can find it at all your bookstores and Amazon and alteregoeffect.com. We've got more resources available for people that go there. And just a passing thought or just a final thought that I give people is When you really start to experience this extra gear that we have available to us, which is found in a world of being more creatively playful, this hard grip that I find many high performers have with optimizing this and optimizing that, that stuff gives you like 1%, 2% improvements, which again can be great and being very impactful. But when you find the gear of being creatively playful, it is just geometric leaps in your level of personal joy, satisfaction, and then just even output as well because you're not playing with the world of resistance and stress and tightness in the way that most people approach life. So find that creative gear and play with it more because it's a really powerful tool to help make change happen. And enjoy the process.

Yeah, and kick group flow off as well. One of Keith Sawyer, one of the big researchers on group flow, his triggers for group flow is yes and, which is one of the core principles in improv.

Yes, right.

So just activating that sort of playful, curious state, you end up tickling all the group flow triggers and then sparking group flow with the people you're interacting with, which is all the upside that comes with that. So I love that as a final note and Thanks, Todd, so much for your time. Appreciate it. And I'm excited to see what alter egos emerge out of this conversation.

I hope many do because they'd be powerful ones because I know that the people who listen to this are super achievers. And please ping me. Again, I'm available on social as well, and I love getting messages from people.

On Flow Research Collective Radio has been helpful, please consider doing us a solid and leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you are listening to this. Reviews help us connect to a wider audience so we can get these peak performance principles out to more people.