#28: How Learned Helplessness Affects You Daily

Hi, I'm Sy Wakeman, and you're listening to No Ego, a podcast where we teach you how to ditch the drama, end entitlement, and drive big results in your workplace and your world place. Welcome back, Drama Diffusers, for those of you that have joined me for many episodes of my podcast, and welcome. Hopefully some of you are brand new listeners, and I hope you not only enjoy this episode, in which I'm gonna cover learned helplessness, but I also hope that you go back and do a whole lot of binge listening because we have covered some amazing concepts of how to move beyond ego and work with a lot of peace and happiness and success at your organization. Today I'm gonna hit on a topic Learned helplessness. And I often talk about learned helplessness as a way to help people understand accountability, because learned helplessness is the opposite of accountability. So for those of you that are familiar with my work, you know I talk a lot about moving beyond ego. And personal accountability really is the death of the ego. We really can't be in a blaming mindset and an accountable mindset at the same time. And our ego is what will have us believe that everything is everyone else's fault. And more importantly, there's no way I can have impact. I'm the victim. The circumstances are the issue. And that actually, that state that the ego's in, many people in positive psychology have called learned helplessness. So I want to cover learned helplessness because I want you to start being able to recognize when you yourself are in it and also when you're fueling it in others. So learned helplessness, as I said, is really the opposite of personal accountability. It's when someone comes to believe that they can't have any impact on their circumstances. And this is really correlated to engagement, because if I am seeing my circumstances through the filter of my ego, I can't see any place that I can have impact. And when we're in a position where we don't really think we can have impact, what we do is is disengage. And so a lot of people think engagement is about having Pepsi and Coke in the break room or having perfect circumstances. But engagement really is about helping people see where they themselves could have impact and then go engage and make a difference. And that helping people see is really through self-reflection. And self-reflection is what we do to get beyond the ego. So learned helplessness is a state of the ego. We want to help ourselves and others move beyond that into self-reflection, into accountability. So often when I start teaching about accountability, I start with the concept of learned helplessness. It's important for us to realize in how many situations our ego has played us and is having us believe that we really don't have any impact. over the current situation. And my theory is you always have some impact. So let's talk about this learned helplessness. I first learned about it way back in my college days when I was hearing about a pretty classic experiment involving 3 mice. And I'll explain that to you in a minute. I just found this experiment very interesting and a fabulous analogy to where we screw up at times So in this experiment, they took 3 mice, and they chose carefully. They didn't just choose average performers. They test mice by their maze-running capability, and they chose 3 of the best. Now, if you're sensitive to animal stories, although this isn't horrid, you might not love the experiment that they did, but here goes. They named these mice so affectionately Mouse A, B, and C. Now, Mouse A and B were put into cages where they would be shocked randomly. And Mouse C was put into a cage where he wouldn't be shocked. So A and B are going to be part of the experiment, and C is going to be— Unaffected. The control group. Now, the shocking, it's important that it's random. If you really want to drive somebody crazy, be random. That really is the most stressful thing for people to take in. So if you're going to be mean, you might want to be mean on a regular basis, not random, because that is really damaging to folks. I'm just joking. No one should be mean. But they were randomly shocked. There wasn't a predictability in the shocking. So A and B randomly shocked, C never shocked. Then after each round— they went through 3 rounds of this— they would test their performance by putting them back into the maze and seeing how they did. And so it was so interesting how this played out. So round number 1, mouse A and B were randomly shocked, mouse C wasn't shocked. And remember, they had a baseline of how they ran the maze. After that shocking, they put all 3 of the mice back into the maze. Now, Mouse C ran the same he had ever— as always, he had always ran. This is important in a control group. There was no change. Mouse A and B both actually increased their performance, right? The adrenaline, the hype of the shocking actually caused their performance to increase. They ran the maze more effectively, more efficiently, faster. than they normally did. So I would call that kind of the adrenaline factor, round 1. Round 2, they continued the increased shocking and then put them back into the maze and found that the performance after round 1 wasn't sustainable, that after some shocking, performance increased after round 1, but round 2, after continued shocking, performance of both mouse A and B declined. Now, Mouse C, again, stayed the same, great in the control group. Round 3, they did something that really set off light bulbs for me. They continued the shocking, so they didn't stop the shocking, but they gave Mouse A a button that once the shock came in, he could step on that button and just end it immediately. He had a way to have impact. He had a way to act differently according to that shock. Now, Mouse B never got such a button. And again, Mouse C wasn't shocked, didn't have any buttons, just the control group. Here's what I love about round 3. Now, you would expect after all the shocking where their performance had gone up and then down that it would continue to go down. Well, here's what happened. Mouse C ran the maze. He's Always run it. Mouse B, the one who didn't have any button and continued shocking, even worsened his performance. In fact, he simply didn't even attempt to run the maze at all. This is the ultimate learned helplessness, where he wasn't even going to attempt it. He had generalized, I can't have any impact over the shocking. I'm not going to even try and have impact over Now, Mouse A, who had endured the same amount of shocking, actually did run the maze, and his performance came up to where it had been before any of the experiments. Now, the reason I find this fascinating when it comes to our role as leaders is that so often when people come to us, they want us to stop the shocking. They want us to stop what is hurting them from reality, or what is random or inconvenient. And a lot of our time is spent trying to run around and change circumstances, fix reality. And that really is pretty impossible. We're just not going to find more predictability and more money and better IT systems today. People need to learn to live more skillfully in their current reality and really come to realize that their circumstances aren't the reasons they can't And I love this experiment because instead of stopping the shocking, they simply gave Mouse A a button that he could have impact, and his performance was able to be maintained in spite of some pretty challenging external circumstances. So if you think about this, Mice A and B are maybe your employees, and that Mouse C who didn't get any of the shocking and just kind of stayed out of the fray, I'll just call him senior leadership, right? So I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. But when people come to you, they definitely want you to fix what is causing them pain. And what I want you to do is help them understand and self-reflect and edit their story and see what the true situation is and help them find a button, help them grow their own button so that they can react and move out of Learned helplessness. And this is really important because when people come to us, if we bypass the ego and use a question for self-reflection like, what would great look like right now? Get them thinking about what they could do to be great in that moment. And then all we say is, go be great. That will alone increase engagement. It will increase results because we increased accountability. Self-reflection gets us out of learned helplessness and into accountability, which is the main driver of engagement, even though many of you have been told that engagement is all about the external circumstances. And I just became fascinated with this whole concept of learned helplessness when I was going through my education. And in fact, I found myself in learned helplessness on quite a few occasions. And I was shocked about it because I know about this concept. But one of my own experiences with learned helplessness, I woke up one day, I swear I just woke up one day and I was like 100 pounds overweight and I was shocked. I'm like, how does this happen in a single weekend? I mean, talk about a bit of denial. I was just running hard and heavy and was shocked about— The day I got really in touch with the state of my health, my weight. So once I became aware of that, I thought, you know, I'm just going to put this on project status. I'm going to lose weight. Like, how hard can that be? I'm just going to make sure I'm doing the things I need to do and lose the weight, and life will be good. I'm a motivational speaker, after all. I can motivate myself because I can motivate others. And So I went out and I bought Dr. Oz's book. I never will forget. I bought that book and I put it on my nightstand and realized that that didn't work. You actually have to read the book, I think. But I realized pretty quickly I needed help. So I went out and I joined Nutrisystems. And I remember being so excited to lose the weight. And I remember being so disappointed because I actually turned out to be kind of a curve breaker. Unfortunately, the curve I broke was this. I lost weight more slowly than they predicted, and I gained it back faster than they thought possible. Like, I struggled and didn't lose the weight I wanted to lose. And so I came to the conclusion that Nutrisystems doesn't work. So I went to find a different diet. I went on Weight Watchers, and I heard that that is a great diet. It's really the undiet. You just count— Points. points, and, you know, if you eat the points that you are assigned to on a given day, you'll lose weight. So I tried Nutrisystems, and I really found that I didn't lose the weight I wanted and that I had a lot of ups and downs, and it was very frustrating. So I decided Weight Watchers didn't work, and I started to look for, you know, even easier ways to lose weight or better ways to lose weight. I remember one day I'm on QVC, and they had these jog jogging suits that basically were like plastic rubber, and you work out in them and sweat your little tail off and lose a ton of weight. Like, for those of you that were high schoolers in the '80s, you'll remember the wrestlers would run around in these rubber suits. And I tell you what, that worked. I lost weight. The problem was, like, the minute I drank a glass of water, I would gain it all back. I was looking at supplements. I was looking at all this stuff. And then I decided that it probably isn't me, that it probably is something outside of my control. It's not my actions. It's maybe my metabolism. And so I got on WebMD, and I'm like searching because it can't possibly be my behavior at this point. I've tried everything in my mind, and I need to figure out what's You know, sabotaging me. And it's got to be something outside of my control. This is how my brain was thinking. So I got on WebMD and I was going through the symptoms and it says, you know, are you fat? I'm like, yeah. And it was like, are you over 40? I'm like, yeah. And are you tired? I'm like, oh my gosh, I have all these symptoms. And there was a couple more, like, do you have dry skin? And once I got back what could be wrong with me, once I put that— push that button for, you know, my answers to my symptoms, amongst the, you know, 300, I tuned in on one that is I could have a potential thyroid problem. And I thought, oh my gosh. Now, I had mixed feelings because I know some folks that have thyroid issues and they're challenging. And I was like secretly praying for one. I'm not going to lie. I'm like, gosh dang, wouldn't that be awesome if it It was just my thyroid, and they could regulate my thyroid, and then I would be absolved from any responsibility here. I really wanted a thyroid issue. So I went to my doctor, and his name is Mike. And I'm like, Mike, and I'm explaining everything to him. I'm like, you know, I have gained all this weight, and I think it might be a thyroid issue. Will you please test that? And I've tried every diet, and they just don't work, and it's just really difficult to get the weight off. So Mike is being a great doctor, and he's actually kind of complimenting my diagnostic skills because he also put together— he's like, I've had 2 tracheas and 2 tracheotomies. And he's like, and you've delivered 4 babies in 12 years. And he's like, this very well probably could be thyroid. So he did the test, and he came back, and he just was so happy. I— My thyroid was like perfect. In fact, my thyroid was like a little overactive, meaning I would have to eat more calories than the average person to maintain the weight I was walking around with. I was horrified. I'm bummed. He's thrilled. He's telling me, Cy, you're the healthiest fat patient I have. Like, your cholesterol's great, your blood pressure's great, everything's great. You just need to lose weight. And I'm devastated because I just really wanted this issue to not have anything to do with me. I was in learned helplessness. I had come to believe that I had no impact over what I weighed. How did I get there? This is how I got there. This is how you get there. This is how your employees get there. I had made half-hearted attempts, and then when I got on the scale, I rewrote history in my favor. I did do Nutrisystems. I did Weight Watchers. But Mike, who is a great doctor and leader, started to help me reflect on what was really true. So he said, Cy, what have you tried? I said, you know, I've tried Nutrisystems. He said, well, when did you do them? I said, January through March. And he said, oh. And he thought a little bit, and then he asked me, he said, are vodka martinis on Nutrisystems? And I was shocked by the question. I said, well, I don't know. They never mentioned alcohol. And neither did I, conveniently. And then he smiled and he said, you know, we go to the same country club, and I buy you quite a few vodka martinis. I'm just wondering if you're counting those into your calorie count. And then he taught me the calories that go into vodka martinis and then multiplied those by 2, because that would be the calories that go into my vodka martinis. And I'm like, that is such interesting leadership. He's not colluding with me to try and find another reason for my weight gain. He's actually coaching me, asking me to have some accountability to the truth. And then he went to Weight Watchers. He said, so you said in here you tried Weight Watchers in your history. I said, yeah. He said, tell me about that. And I was getting honest by now, and I'm like, well, I did Weight Watchers Monday through Thursday, definitely always till noon. And as I was thinking about it, I realized that, you know, they only give you a certain number of points to eat. And so whenever I would get hungry, I would, like, go ask skinny people for their points. I'm like, are you going to use all your points today? And They would say, no, I can't possibly eat all this food, which is why they're skinny. And I would say, well, give me your points. And I would go have a McDonald's fish fillet or something fattening. And it was all starting to come to me, not because Mike preached at me or lectured me, because great leaders just ask twice as many questions as they give answers to. They aren't here to tell you what to do. They're here to facilitate. You're settling into accountability through your self-reflection. And then Mike did go on to teach me a few things. He taught me this mathematical formula about calories in and calories out. And I at first wanted to challenge that. I'm like, that's ridiculous. He's like, it's pretty well-researched. And I realized that my results on the scale are the accumulation, the representation of my choices, how much I move, how much I drink in water, how much I drink in alcohol, how many calories I eat, how much sleep I get, how much stretching I do, how much meditating I do, I realize that that scale isn't that big of a shock if I were in touch with my own reality. I shouldn't be surprised. In fact, I could get to the point, if I chose to, where I wouldn't even need to step on the scale because I could tell you what I weighed by just looking at my choices for the week. And while it wasn't very exciting and very thrilling to get Mike's leadership, it was freeing because I realized that what I weigh is completely about my choices. And while the accountability is heavy at times, it's freeing at times. Very freeing. One thing that is so freeing is I don't have to, like, lie to people anymore. I'm just honest. So if somebody says, Sire, you trying to lose weight? I used to say, oh my gosh, I try so hard, and with travel and my schedule, it's just really tough. And now, depending on the day, I just go inside to be accountable to the truth. I go, am I trying to lose weight? Let me think about what I had for breakfast this morning, which, by the way, was sausage. Oh, my gosh. And biscuits with gravy. No, it doesn't appear as though I'm trying to lose weight at all. Now, this is so wonderful to know that my results are co-created by me and that I can just take ownership for all of this. So now, what I weigh and how I feel and what my health is, I know what those driving indicators are. I know where I can have impact. And when I'm making those choices, I feel the effect of that, which is a lot of pride and a lot of engagement and a lot of happiness. So when we think about accountability, so many people are talking about accountability, but no one really is helping us understand it, nor helping others truly understand what accountability is. And besides being death to the ego, accountability is built on self-reflection. And self-reflection Reflection is what moves us out of learned helplessness. Learned helplessness is when we have fallen asleep and we've begun to believe the story of the ego that we can't have any impact. And then we look for truth and we look for people to collude with us. And we really begin to believe that I don't have power over what I weigh, that our employees need for us to fix their circumstances and make life easier on them. And we get to colluding and sympathizing, and it really robs from us our engagement, our happiness at work, our results. So this week, I want you to do your own self-reflection on where have you gotten into personal accountability? Where have you colluded with your teammates when they have come to say that there isn't anything they can do unless you or someone else fixes their circumstances? I want you to Identify those pieces and identify and self-reflect where you could have impact and where you are driving what the result is in co-creating that. My wish for you is that you all can stop hoping that your circumstances are different and instead work to grow your abilities so that you can live skillfully in these circumstances and any reality. And so, until next time, I want you to really think about when people come to you and they want you to stop the shocks, and what you can do instead, which is to help them grow and identify and learn those buttons that they can have impact in spite of the shocks. I want you to help people edit their stories when they're believing that they're a victim and at the mercy of circumstances. You can help them identify even just small ways in which they can have impact. Please let me know how you're doing. Share your success stories when you're using some of our techniques. If you haven't reviewed this podcast and you love it, we would hope that you would do that. If you are loving it, we hope that you help us spread the word. Share it with your friends. And in the meantime, keep ditching the ditch. Thank you. The drama. Thank you so much for joining the episode today. If you're loving this podcast, just make sure that you check me out on Facebook and Instagram, and especially YouTube.