So, my mission is to look at the people who got high self -control, the high -trade self -control, and try to understand, what are they doing?
What actions are they engaging in to bring about the good outcome?
Because I don't think it's magic, I don't think it's just like they're born with high self -control and therefore they don't do anything and all of a sudden they get all the good stuff later in life like longevity, health, etc.
They see the world differently and they engage in actions in accordance with how they view the world.
You can start reflecting on your goals and start asking yourself, how do these goals align with my personal values to get at autonomy?
How does it connect with other people for relatedness?
And how do I feel a sense of like competence and mastery and self -efficacy from these?
So kind of rethink it.
So, have you ever found yourself staring down a piece of chocolate cake or a cookie or some yummy treat knowing you really shouldn't indulge, but feeling almost powerless to resist its siren call?
Or how about hitting the snooze button one too many times instead of dragging yourself out of bed for that planned early morning workout?
I know I have been there more times than I can count.
We set these ambitious goals for ourselves, but then our will power or self -control seemed to crumble in that moment of truth.
Why is summoning up self -control so fiendishly difficult sometimes?
What if I told you that much of what we think about will power and self -discipline self -control is turned on its head by cutting edge research?
My guest today has been at the forefront of upending our assumptions about self -control through groundbreaking studies.
And his surprising findings reveal that maybe, just maybe, we've been thinking about this whole will power thing all wrong.
So my guest is Michael Inslett, a professor at the University of Toronto who has been upending our assumptions about will power and self -control through his research in his work and play lab.
In his work spanning social psychology and cognitive science and neuroscience, he has challenged the once prevalent theory of what's become known as ego depletion.
The idea that self -control is a limited resource that gets used up over the course of the day.
Michael's findings point to a surprising truth.
People with exceptional self -control don't actually resist temptation more than others.
Instead, their secret may lie in how they perceive and relate to those temptations in the first place.
And his exploration of the psychology behind will power reveals some powerful insights that could transform how we pursue our goals and live with more ease, including why using words like will power and self -control might actually be a part of the problem.
In this conversation, he shares the wisdom from over 175 peer -reviewed publications.
We dive into practical strategies for boosting self -regulation, reframing our motivations, and striking the ideal balance of work and play.
Because as Michael reminds us, the path to our best life demands both effort and rest.
So stay tuned as we unpick the mysteries of self -control and uncover a blueprint for living with more freedom and authenticity and purpose.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.
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I'm excited to really explore your work.
I've been fascinated by what's been coming out of your lab recently, especially the paper I guess it was earlier this year on on self -control.
It's something that I've been just thinking about on so many different levels, reading research on and trying to figure out what's real and what's not real.
So I was fascinated by sort of like your approach to it.
Before we dive into the actual work, I'm curious also just on a personal level, what's your draw to really deepen into and explore just the world of self -control?
Oh, that's a good question.
I mean, my origin story is probably a bit convoluted.
I got into the research because I started my career out being a social psychologist who's interested in prejudice and discrimination.
And there was a very influential theory floating around in the world.
And I wondered if being a target of prejudice might be such a pressure that would deplete someone's self -control and leave people who are again targeted by stereotypes or stigma or oppression, being a little bit more impulsive, a little bit less able to kind of regulate themselves.
So that's how I started.
But then I quickly left the world of the psychology of prejudice because it became fascinated by the psychology of self -control and self -regulation and executive function and effort.
And I think what drives me now is, well, I think number one, I'm just a curious person.
I'm a scientist. I just want to understand how this thing works.
And I feel that we have lots of lay intuitions.
So we have like, you know, we're all lay psychologists to some extent, and we all have ideas about self -control.
And I feel some of them, many of them perhaps are wrong.
And I think scholars themselves, people who I respect and admire, say things that I don't think are actually true about self -control.
So that's number one.
And then number two is I want to help people.
I mean, I actually want people to be able to reach their goals.
So wherever your goal might be, can self -control help?
I'm not so sure anymore, to be honest, but I do want to help people reach their goals.
And I want to give people the best advice that we have as a science, multiple sciences, we've got psychology, economics, neuroscience, and I just want to make sure we're pointing people in the right direction.
Let's dive into some of the myth busting then, because as you described in this really late 90s, early 2000s, I think we came into this time with a certain idea and it felt a little bit hardened, I think, to a lot of people like this is just the way it works in the context of self -control, like willpower
and this notion that it's a depletable resource.
I think it was commonly known as the ego depletion theory.
Take me into this, because I think it was such a prominent sort of like mode of thought around self -control that you're really challenging.
So first layout, what was that concept?
What was that all about?
This was a theory proposed by Roy Baumeister, who is I consider a friend, even though we spar intellectually.
He wrote a book in 1994 when it was published, and it was on the topic of self -control.
And at that point, this was not a big topic in social psychology and psychology more generally.
And he wrote this book, and then he published in the late 90s, a series of papers that made some really interesting points.
Really good to think of the theory as making two broad points.
Okay. This theory might be called the theory of ego depletion or the resource model of self -control, but the theory makes two broad points.
One, not so controversial, one now controversial.
The first point that it made was that self -control underlies many, many different things that we care about in our lives.
So dieting, exercising, being kind, and not expressing prejudice and discrimination, being, you know, kind of cool in the face of adversity or pressure.
These are just, you know, drug abuse, of course, gambling.
There's so many issues in our society, behaviors that we engage in, that we need to regulate.
There's a little bit too much of it, and it's not so good for us, or maybe we want more of something and we can't reach our goals.
So he said all these things are related to self -control.
They all draw upon self -control.
So self -control, you can think of it as a central resource.
It's, and this gets into point number two, but you could think of it as some sort of central, all acts of self -control draw on the central resource.
Point number two, the controversial one, but the one that got everyone excited, is that this central resource that powers all these different things, this resource we call self -control, is a limited resource.
It runs out after use.
So a metaphor we could use is the metaphor of fuel in your car.
It doesn't matter where you go.
You want to go to place A, B, C, D, E, E, F, G.
It doesn't matter. You still need fuel.
It's a central resource that powers your car.
And with any depletable resource, when you use it, you lose it.
So it runs out after use.
And we all know that because if anyone owns a car, knows you've got to go to a gas station eventually and develop a bit more fuel in there.
So the idea here though is that self -control is essential resource, powers all kinds of things, and we run out of it.
What this means is like in the course of a day, you're going to be less able to control yourself or regulate yourself.
At the end of the day, versus the beginning of the day.
And I think we all kind of, we might know that a bit intuitively.
We also get tired. We have circadian rhythms that kind of determine how we do things.
But this theory stated is if you control yourself at time one, it's really a theory about time.
You control yourself at time one, you'll have less of this resource at time two, and maybe this resource will even be depleted at time two.
So I'll just give you one example because maybe it's a bit abstract at this point.
And there's like, I think last time anyone counted, there's about 600 studies of the kind that I'm about to tell you about.
So a typical study, you bring someone to a lab, and you have you bring people to the lab, and you have half the people regulate themselves.
You have them engage in self -control.
So maybe, for example, they're told to not eat to fast before they can come into the lab.
And then they smell the waft of delicious cookies being baked in the lab.
These are real studies, by the way.
A little bit evil. Yeah, I mean, that smell of freshly baked cookies is irresistible.
We all love it. And then the cookie is not always the smell in the room, but the cookies are on the table.
Okay. And half the people are told, you can't eat those cookies, please do not eat the cookies.
Yeah, a lot of the people are told, you want to eat cookies, eat cookies.
Okay. So half the people are resisting, they're engaging in self -control, half the people are enjoying what's in front of them.
Then afterwards, everyone in both conditions of this experiment would do something else that might require self -control.
So maybe they, for example, there are some famous tests in psychology called the Shrook test.
This is a test where you read a bunch of literally color words, the word red, green, yellow, and blue.
But the trick is that these words are printed or presented on a screen in colors themselves.
So sometimes the word red is printed in green, sometimes it's printed red.
When the word red is printed in green, it's harder to say what the color of the word is.
And that is thought to involve attentional control.
You've got to kind of stop yourself from the word reading response and replacing it with a color naming response.
And what a typical pattern would be, a finding would be that those who resisted eating cookies did less well, did more poorly on the Shrook task right afterwards.
Okay. But that's just one study.
It's one dependent variable, meaning one way we measured self -control, but there's countless number of ways.
So sometimes people might be put in a situation where they might blurt out something inappropriate.
Like they're giving something some food that is not culturally what they might see in a menu in North America.
Anything is gross, but it's kind of rude to say that because you don't call those cultures food gross.
And after they have regulated themselves at time one, they're more likely to blurt out.
Ooh, disgusting. Like getting a soup with a chicken leg in it, for example, which actually I would see my grandmother make growing up.
And not something I like, but I definitely saw it, but we know it's inappropriate to people lost control.
And again, 600 studies of this variety.
So that's the kind of general idea.
It left psychology quickly went into business schools, influencing economics and neuroscience.
Probably the peak of its fame was when Barack Obama, when he was still president, quoted it in a famous interview, I think it was in Vanity Fair by the famous author, Michael Lewis, Obama suggested that he only wore the same suit other than one pantsuit that everyone criticized him for.
He'd always wear the same exact color suit because that way he would avoid having to think about what to wear that day, thinking through things, involve a decision making, which might draw upon the same self -control resource.
And that way he was fresh for later in the day.
So it really became popular and widely touted.
Yeah. I mean, so the notion is if I had this right, that the assumption was that we start the day with a full tank of willpower.
As the day goes by, as we have to use that to resist this or to exert effort here, or it sounds like you're also saying make decisions.
It sort of draws on that same full tank.
Decision making, resistance, willpower, effort, it all starts to draw a little bit of fuel from that tank.
And each time we dip into it, it depletes it.
So our willpower goes down, or down, down, down, our ability to control, to self -regulate goes down.
So by the end of the day, or maybe at lunchtime, you kind of have nothing left in the tank.
So of course you're going to have the shake along with and the fries along with your salad and stuff like that, because you have nothing left to actually stop you from doing that.
That's sort of like the general theory.
That's exactly right.
This kind of explains why at the end of the day, even though you had all these grand ideas of doing something that's good for you, but requires effort and control, you end up plopping yourself on the couch and watching endless YouTube videos, for example.
And a lot of people, as you described, they've experienced their version of this.
It's like it's later in the day.
It's like, well, I'm supposed to be doing, I told myself I wasn't going to read after dinner, but now I'm just binging whatever the latest show is.
And I really don't want to be doing that, but I feel like I literally have no ability to stop doing it, whatever their version of it may be.
So how does this, because your work definitely challenges it, but this theory started to be challenged also before your recent work, at least as far as I know.
I remember reading one study, and tell me if I'm getting this entirely wrong, I can't remember who came out with it, that said whether you see willpower as a depletable resource or not is actually more a factor of whether you believe it to be a depletable resource or not.
So it's much more. Talk to me a little bit about the challenges, the downfall to this theory.
Yeah. I'm going to say off the bat, what I'm going to ask you and your listeners to hold in mind is actually two things at once that are opposite.
This is why it's hard for people to grapple with this because the theory itself might be right in some ways.
It might be right in some ways, in a very simple sense, that we didn't need, we know this for over a hundred years now, that we get tired.
And at the end of the day, when we are tired, just like our bodies need rest, our minds need rest, and thinking and controlling ourselves and exerting effort is a product of the mind, and we're less willing to do that, or less able even to do that when we're tired.
And that's probably true.
So it is probably true that in the day, especially if you're a morning person, you might be less able or willing to do the kinds of things you want to be doing.
Okay, I'm pretty sure that's true.
There's lots of evidence for that from the field.
And just common sense.
While that's true, it doesn't mean that the lab experiments that had been reported to support the theory are good, or accurate, or reveal things to us that they say they reveal.
So okay, so the challenges to ego depletion are the theory of ego depletion are multiple.
Okay, you've already mentioned one.
But essentially what what ended up happening was a series of studies started getting published that made it appear that whether we were able to control ourselves or not, is less a matter of fuel being in the tank, whether we are able to control ourselves because we've been depleted.
And it seemed to be more a matter of like our interpretation, our perception, or as I like to say, our willingness to exert effort.
And there's a series of studies.
So for example, this is conducted by some of the proponents of the study.
But a classic study, I got to describe that what we call the sequential task paradigm, this paradigm of doing something at time one that does or did not involve control.
And then everyone does something at time two that does involve control, and the people who control themselves at time one are less able to control themselves at time two, that's the general pattern.
Okay. But a series of studies started getting published.
So for example, again, by the proponents of the theory itself, they had a study where the same pattern is there, but now they pay people to control themselves at time two.
So now we want you to do whatever task is a troop task or the you know, be kind task wherever it might be.
And now we're paying you to do this task.
Well, all of a sudden, you're able to do it, you're able to perform as well as a non depleted person.
A even softer version of that is when the experiment is really, really nice, the person in that room acts extra generous, extra kind.
And now you feel obligation to that person.
And now you perform as well as a non depleted person.
So now it seems to be less about an inability.
And maybe more about a lack of willingness.
So when you control yourself at time one, maybe you're like, Hey, man, I'm like, I've done this work for you.
And I'm no longer willing, I want to get out of the experiment right now.
That can be what's what's going on.
But just to draw the point home of how deeply inconsistent those findings are with the resource model.
Again, let's go back to our metaphor of the car.
A car does, in fact, run not a metaphorical resource, but a real resource fuel, when I get to work, and my work is rather far away from my home, I've got to drive about 40 kilometers away.
Now, if I didn't have that much gas to begin with, and I get there and my gas tank is not empty, guess what?
No amount of motivation is going to move the car, I could put a million dollars on the hood of my of my car, and my car will still not move, right?
The only thing that will help it move is to refuel it.
It's the same thing, whatever resource it is, that's underlying self control has run out, then how can money overturn it?
So it can't be a resource that's run out.
The other studies, like you mentioned one, so for example, people have different conceptions of self control, they might think self control is limited, or they might think it's a renewable resource.
And apparently, there are important cultural differences here.
So in the West, we tend to think of control as something that runs out.
But in India, for example, they have different views of self control that it's a kind of a software planishing resource.
And depending on how you view things, working, you know, exerting self control time one does not deplete you, if you believe it's renewable, you think it's fine.
There's another study, which I particularly liked on it, I think was at University of Indiana, by Ed Hurt and Josh Clarkson, they gave people false feedback after the time one task.
And they gave them feedback that told them, Hey, you look really tired right now.
Maybe you want to take a little rest.
Or they said, Wow, you have from this exercise, it looks like you have lots of energy, you must have had a good night's sleep last night, right?
And then afterwards, they everyone again does this second self control task.
And guess what they find, they find that how people perform at time two is shaped by the feedback they got.
So in other words, you have people who are quote unquote depleted, but yet believe they've got lots of energy, they perform that task just as well as someone who is not depleted, someone who was not depleted and was told they were tired, they all of a sudden acted as if they were depleted.
So it seemed to be like something else was going on.
It didn't seem to be a resource that could explain things.
So yeah, trouble brewing, but then another chapter, which was even more problematic.
But if you're staking on the line of theory, this is these are the inconsistent findings.
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We all experience that sense of depletion, but there's other things going on.
There are other potential contributors and explanations.
This is a darker chapter because it affects not just ego depletion and resource model of self -control, but it impunes all of social psychology and all of maybe psychology more generally, but especially social psychology, my home discipline.
That's what I think.
I think 2011 is an important date because a series of things happened.
I'm not going to get into it.
I give a literally two -hour lecture on the replication crisis.
I'm not going to do that now, but I'll simply state that in the 2010s, many people started discovering that we cannot replicate basic findings in our field.
And of course, replication, as any high school science team would know, is kind of a hallmark of science.
You find something, it's not a true finding unless you can repeat it.
And ideally, not just you, independent people who maybe aren't for different motivations, they also replicate it.
We need that. And for all kinds of reasons, replications weren't happening in psychology.
It appears like they don't happen in a lot of sciences, which is bad news for science.
And the other things, we also abused our analytic tools, so we misuse our statistics, I think mostly inadvertently.
I just don't think psychologists had enough of an understanding of what was needed for correct scientific inference.
And then the third problem is that journals are incentivized to publish positive findings, findings that support the hypotheses of their authors.
And journals tend not to publish negative findings.
But that's a difference.
And I'm just making up numbers here.
What if I told you there were 3000 studies that were conducted in total, but only 600 worked, you might not be as impressed by those set of findings anymore.
So we don't have that.
You can think of it as the denominator.
We have a numerator, which is like how many worked, but how many were tried in total.
We just don't know.
It's a very difficult thing to estimate as well.
So all these three things in combination led to a lot of replications of work.
And perhaps the area that was most targeted on much of the right word, but received the most focus, maybe because it was so prominent, was Ego depletion.
And Ego depletion was tested by critics.
It was tested by a partisan.
So people who believed in theory, such as myself.
And there have been a series of these replications, a big multi lab around the world replications.
And the effect could not be replicated.
I mean, it's so interesting.
I had the pleasure of having Dan Kahneman on the show a couple of years back.
And we were talking about this to a certain extent, because he was this iconic behavioral economist, ecologist, and who wrote this book, Thinking Fast and Slow that has became this groundbreaking book.
What I didn't know or realize until that conversation he was sharing with me, he's like, there's a chapter in the original version of that book that no longer exists in the book.
It was a chapter on Primes.
He read the research.
He believed it. He thought that this was legitimate.
It came from solid people who were well -intended in publishing this research, enough to include an entire chapter in this book.
And then when all of that started to get challenged and they were having all sorts of replication issues, he revisited it.
He's like, oh, I actually can't stand behind this enough so that he literally had to remove it from future versions of the book.
So it is fascinating how, and again, like you said, I think most of this is not malicious intended or it's not driven by ego.
It's just the state of how things were done or analyzed or looked at the tools that were used in a particular way.
And it's just different now.
There's a lot more, I think, rigor that is going into the exploration of replication, but ego depletion, this whole theory of willpower and self -regulation ends up on the chopping block because of this.
Were there other major, major theories of self -control floating around then also that similarly fell or was that really the dominant driver of thought around this whole thing at that point?
That's an excellent question.
So I would say that because it excited so many people, like ego depletion, I think was the only game in town for a while.
And then other people, as it became more popular as a concept, people started saying, oh, we're using different words, but we're talking about similar things.
So in cognitive psychology, there's a concept of executive function or cognitive control, what sometimes called or attentional control.
If you look at the definition of cognitive control by some of the best people in the world, the definition is very similar to self -control.
So they were like, oh, maybe there's some overlap here.
There's also a very famous work done by Walter Michel, who is well known for his work on what is now referred to as the marshmallow study.
Which initially it was about one thing, initially was about, oh, here are some strategies that people could use, children could use to regulate their impulses, but then they had the bright idea of following these children for 20, 30, 40 years and found, wow, this thing that we measured was being measured
for your listeners who don't know about the marshmallow studies, how long children could wait to eat a marshmallow sitting in a room just facing down the marshmallow.
And it turns out the longer you could wait, the longer these kids could wait, predicted all these things 20, 30, 40 years later.
So they became adults who had more self -control and then who reaped the benefits of having more self -control.
Despite that being really quite a popular finding now, it wasn't as popular when I was in grad school, because the 30, 40 years hadn't passed yet.
So we hadn't seen this, the power of traits here, but since it's become very well known, but to be honest, it too has suffered from the replication crisis, but not needily in the same way as even depletion.
So it's kind of like, okay, some effects don't replicate.
Some don't replicate, some do.
The ones that do might not be as strong, but I think more problematic is, and this is just normal science, is our interpretation of those results is a little bit different now based on replications.
So it turns out the kids who can wait have parents who have more money and are more educated.
So they're smarter.
So are we saying anything about self -control or are we talking about wealth and intelligence?
Okay, now that's bad news for self -control.
The good news for self -control is that there's other research that's even better.
This is research done by Terry Moffat, but someone named I think his name is Avishalam Kaspe is a major author, my friend, the collaborator, Brent Roberts is an author.
And this paper is so cool.
It's a paper that has a very unique sample.
It's a sample. It's called the Dunedene samples, referring to Dunedene, New Zealand, a small town in New Zealand.
And I believe, although I could be wrong in some of the details, they recorded every birth in the year 1972, which is the year of my birth, and they've been tracking these kids, now adults, now 52 -year -olds, for 52 years.
And in a study published in 2011, they recorded children and then preteens, they record their level of self -control as children.
And then they've been tracking, they tracked them for 40 years and found incredible things.
So those who had higher self -control were healthier.
They were more likely to be alive.
They were less likely to abuse drugs.
They had more money at the bank.
They were less likely to be in debt.
They were less likely to be convicted of a crime.
Like the list goes on and on and on.
Whatever positive things you can measure is associated with self -control.
And here's why I even mentioned this, it controlled for intelligence.
It controlled for family socioeconomic status.
So it's clear why there is this association.
So from this, at the very least, we should leave this conversation saying there's something about people who have this trait, people who have what we might call self -control or willpower that is like a superpower.
I say that to my students when I teach this stuff.
If you are expecting a child, given the research we know, you don't want your child, like, you know, there's a debate about what traits you might want them to have as pros and cons for practically every trait.
But you would want your child to be smart and you'd want them to be conscientious or have lots of self -control.
Because it just predicts the good life and all these kinds of dimensions.
So a very, very powerful trait.
And that's why I haven't given up on talking about self -control.
I just want to make sure we talk about it in a correct way.
Yeah. I mean, it's so fascinating and you've used the word trait a number of times now.
And the notion of self -control as a trait, I think is probably something that rubs people the wrong way.
And maybe this is just my overlay, right?
So when I think about a trait, I think about something that is a part of us, you know, probably from birth, and is largely immutable.
You know, like, maybe you can kind of tweak it or maybe we can kind of move it.
But it's like if my eyes are green when I'm born and that is a trait of mine, all the thinking in the world isn't going to make them blue or green, you know, like, or brown, you know, like 20 years later, I can't sort of, there's no intervention that I can do to change that.
And I think when we think about physical traits, most of us are like, yeah, okay, I'm good with that.
That's the way it is.
But then when we think about sort of like psychological dispositions as traits that are as immutable as eye color or height or something like that, we don't want to believe that because we want to believe that that like anything that is involved in our mindset and our psychology, especially if it's
something that we perceive not as an advantage, we want to believe we can do something that will change that.
So when you about self control, let all the benefits that derive from it, I think we've all experienced it when we've had even flashes of self control, we're like, oh, this allowed me to do this thing or resist this thing, we're like, yeah, that's that's great.
I love that experiences.
But when you then sort of like position it as, but this is a trade, it's like there's a friction that evolves, like you almost don't want to believe it.
Yeah, yeah. What you're describing might be an especially American character trait or a the notion of traits.
And why do I say that?
Because, you know, America's founding ethos is, you know, the American dream, which is this notion of, you can come here, pour disheveled masses, and you can remake yourself to anything you like.
And to some extent, like if that's true, I mean, there's more freedom and the mobility in the United States compared to many, many other places, some evolutionary psychologists call a blank slate view of the world.
It fits really well with a notion of merit of of a meritocracy, we believe that the United States, Canada, you know, we talked about Canadian dream to as a meritocracy.
And what does that mean?
That means the outcome you receive in your life is based on what you've done, how you behaved, how hard you've worked.
And if now we tell you, well, how hard you work is not really up to you, that really, really rubs us the wrong way, because it really undercuts our philosophy of our life and our countries.
So it's difficult. But I want to correct one thing that you said.
So it's true, then we think about a height and eye color, these are hard built into us, we can't really do much about it.
But it's not true that we can't do anything.
So for example, not with eye color, but height, we know that nutrition matters.
Like height is determined largely by genetics, I think it's one of the most like the highest heritable traits, sorry, eye color and hair color the most, height is up there.
But there's also the environment that matters.
Okay. And personality traits are even more so this way.
So yes, we are born in the world with a blueprint for how we're going to be as people, most traits, so personality psychologists, they talk about five big traits, they call the big five.
So if you're if you're if your listeners don't know, you can you think of the acronym canoe in Canada, so I got canoe in mind.
So canoe so seize conscientiousness, which we'll talk about, I think a little more in a little bit, a is agreeableness.
So whether you're kind, polite, empathic, canoe and is neuroticism.
So how emotionally unstable you are, how much you like to dominate by negative emotion, O is openness to experience, the extent to which you care about, like, you know, learning new things and challenges, intellectual challenges, especially.
And then finally, ease extroversion.
It's like how going you are how moved you are by rewards in your environment, the opposite of that, or the lower end of that would be, of course, introversion, some words, maybe a little bit shyer, or someone who doesn't, it's estimated to the same extent as as extroverts.
And all these traits, you know, rule of thumb is all of them are heritable about 50%, meaning that like, 50 % of the variance you experience will be just based on your parents.
That's it, you can't do anything about it.
But the other 50 % are in fact based on your environment.
I think some people quickly say, oh, it's, you know, how your parents raise you.
Yes, that plays some role.
Some developmental psychologists argue not as much as you might think, parent might not matter as much as you might think for personality development, peers maybe matter more, the kind of immediate home environment, or like the city environment, or wherever you live environment might be especially important.
So those two things, the environment and genetics will determine your degree of how much self control you have.
And again, yes, a story that a lot of people don't like.
But I don't think it helps us by putting our head in the sand and saying I don't like this.
So therefore, it's not true.
So my mission is to look at the people, for example, who got high self control, the high trait self control, and try to understand what are they doing?
What actions are they engaging in?
To bring about the good outcome?
I don't think it's magic.
I don't think it's just like they're born with high self control.
And therefore, they don't do anything.
And all of a sudden, they get all the all this good stuff later in life, like longevity, health, etc.
They see the world differently.
And they engage in actions in accordance with how they view the world.
So are there tips and tricks that we can help people with?
So that's how I do it.
Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating.
So then what you're saying then, if I understand this right, is that you would view self control and maybe self control is it and maybe we'll tease this out a little bit also, is either another word for conscientiousness or a subset of conscientiousness under the big five.
But you would view this as a trait, but as you're describing, that doesn't mean that it's fatalistic.
That just like the other personality based traits, yes, let's own the fact that a certain amount of this is inherited.
And it kind of is what it is.
But that's not 100%.
Maybe it's closer to half to 50 % somewhere in there.
So then what are the factors for the other 50 % that may in some way, shape, or form affect our ability to have this trait of self control?
What actually contributes to that?
What enhances that and is that right?
Yeah, I think the other half is the environment.
Early environment is really important.
So childhood environment is really important.
But later, parents will play some role there.
But it's also like I said, it looks like peer environment is quite important.
Peer influence is perhaps more important than parental influence.
Some developmental psychologists argue, it's controversial.
It's not my area, but this is, you know, just know the environment matters.
So the fact that we're speaking now, we're both in North America, we have a culture, we have a certain way of viewing things that shapes our personalities.
If I grew up in Israel or Yemen, where my grandparents are from, I might have a different set of idea, a different environment that would shape my personality in a different way.
So despite me having the exact same DNA, if we work from the assumption that this thing is partly, it is what it is in the environment and culture and people, peers in particular have, have a really healthy influence on how it shows up in us.
The question is, how do we then construct a life that creates the optimal number and quality and frequency of these different inputs that would give us this thing, that as you described, the research shows leads to all these incredible outcomes.
And we don't need research to show that, I think to a certain extent also, just like our own individual lived experiences, like when I experienced this thing, good things happen on the other end.
But that also makes me want to tease out something else that you write about, which is this difference between the trait of self -control and the state of self -control.
Yeah, I think you're, you're, you're heading right in the right direction here.
So I think for us to understand how to, let's say, get someone who isn't lucky enough to have the trait or we all have the trait, but we just have it in different quantities.
If they don't have the trait, that's a good thing.
But I think we're going to be able to be able to get people who can't get their homework done on time.
And we know that self -control is important there.
And I don't think, I don't think screaming at them saying, you know, just do it, just have more self -control, put down the video game, put down TikTok, that's not going to help them.
So we want to know like, what are the things that we can do.
So that's, you know, I think it's been implicit and implicit mission in the field for a while, but I don't think we've quite spelt it out that way.
So that the first thought that many of us had was, well, people were high in trait self -control that is, you know, by trait, I mean, they're a person whose situation the situation, they seem to be behind self -control.
They walk in various situations, being the same kind of person.
The first thought was that these people engaged in a lot of state self -control by state self -control, I mean, in the moment, they're controlling themselves, they're saying no to alcohol, if they're trying to abstain, they're saying no to French fries, if they're trying to diet, they're essentially,
they're saying no to themselves when they, you know, they want to go back into bed instead of going jogging in the morning, right?
So they're doing a lot of this resistance.
So state self -control is defined as essentially any action mental or physical that you could take to take action in in line with long -term goals.
Okay, when there's conflict, me speaking to you right now doesn't require any self -control, because I'm enjoying this conversation, I don't have any cognitive conflict about being here, right?
But sometimes in the afternoon, I face conflict.
And again, I mean, cognitive conflict, because I'm hungry.
And I do like fruit and I eat regularly.
But sometimes my wife might bring in some like baked goods, like a croissant or a scone, which I adore.
And now I'm like, Oh, God, the apple or the scone, right?
So I need self -control to stick to the apple.
Okay, I need to say no to the scone, no to the croissant, and yes to the apple that requires self -control, right?
So that's what I state self -control, applying self -control in the moment.
And our original thought was that the people who have this trait called self -control, and in a minute, maybe we should start thinking about calling it something else, we thought that they do a lot of controlling in their day to day life.
That would make sense.
Because that's that's what happens for every other trait.
So for example, I talked about extraversion as a trait, and I'm widely described as an extroverted person.
What does that mean?
That means I engage in lots of extroverted actions.
So I say yes to parties, I'm stimulated by other people.
I'm gregarious, I'm talkative.
I do these actions that are consistent with what it means to be an extrovert.
So doesn't the same thing happen for those who are high in self -control?
Doesn't that mean they're controlling themselves a lot?
It was so obvious that that would be the case that we need to wait like 20 years before somebody even bothered answering asking the question.
And it was an incidental question.
It was just like, Oh, we just kind of threw this in there as almost like a check of sanity.
And this is first discovered by Will Hoffman is a friend of mine, who's a German social psychologist, published with Roy Baumeister again, who I mentioned earlier, in a paper in 2012.
And what he discovered is really changed the field.
And we're still grappling with it.
We're still having to figure out what is going on here.
But we found it what will found was that those who are high and again, this trait self control actually engaged in state self control, not more, but less, they regulated themselves less.
So like, what are they then?
What are they doing?
They're not doing that thing.
They're doing less of that thing.
So what is it? And then people have come up with ideas, an idea that Angela Duckworth was another friend of mine who studies self control.
And someone I admire a great deal.
Her idea and others as well is that Oh, what people are high in traits of controller doing is they are engaging in what she calls situation selection.
They are crafting their environments, such that they don't face temptations.
Therefore, they don't need to regulate themselves as much.
So an example would be that someone's diving, they just don't bring in the croissants to their house.
And therefore, they're not tempted by croissants.
And therefore, if I asked them, Hey, did you do you control yourself right now?
They would say no, because they aren't tempted.
Okay, I think that's probably explained some of it.
But I also think that that fails for two reasons as an explanation.
The first reason is we live in a world that is full of temptations.
And we don't live in a bubble.
We don't live only in our houses, even during COVID.
We leave the house I live in downtown Toronto, and I leave out okay, sure.
My wife didn't buy croissants.
But guess what? I walk five minutes away, I've got five bakeries.
I've got all manner of restaurants.
I've got fast food places.
If I want to eat junk food, it will be very easy for me.
I will be tempted if I'm if I want junk food.
It's there and I'm tempted.
I have to regulate myself.
Okay. People who are high in trade, self control also live in the real world.
So that I just don't think that is is a likely scenario.
And then I actually have data with with my student Marina Milley of Skaia and Blair Saunders, where we examine the extent to which people use different kinds of strategies to regulate their their impulses that might lead them astray.
And we find that people are all strategies are kind of more or less the same in terms of like, they're successful about half the time, in any one moment.
But whether people are successful at any one time doesn't actually predict whether they're successful long term.
So that a disconnect between what they're doing in the moment is state self control and then some eventual outcomes.
So it just it strikes me as not correct.
I think a different explanation could be and one that is very difficult to solve is maybe these people that we call high in self control, they're not tempted by things to the same extent.
They don't like chocolate croissants, like I do.
They want to eat carrots and broccoli or they want to study, or they want to exercise.
Now, how do they become this way?
Were they born out of the womb, liking carrots and broccoli?
I doubt it. So there's something else and find out what that something else is.
I think we have to think far more broadly about what we've been calling self control up until now trade self control.
And then we do think about it in a different way.
And then maybe we'll get different clues.
I mean, that's so interesting, right?
In the notion that maybe there's something actually in the brains of these folks where the stimulus of all these things that would be like so much more desirable and tempting for other people, it just doesn't trigger the same yearning, the same craving, the same desire in them.
So they don't actually even have to resist all that much because they don't have something to resist because that's really interesting.
But it's also like it presents a puzzle, right?
Because I can't think of self control is deals with many kinds of stimuli that will tempt us.
So I have a really tough time believing that someone is born or we said it's not just only genetic, it's also learned.
Someone has come back to it.
And let's say by 20, we think personality is more or less stable, that somehow they don't like any tempting things.
Yeah, it's like there's got to be something.
Right. Exactly. But the broadband, they seem to have like be pretty good at pretty much everything.
And also, one thing I should say is I don't want to overstate things like the effect sizes we're talking about are not massive.
We're not talking about like massive, massive differences.
But there are differences on the left that are important.
I think what is more helpful than is to kind of go back to the drawing board and ask ourselves, Okay, what do we mean by trait self control?
So the people to then talk to are not social psychologists or cognitive psychologists.
It's personality psychologists who study people, they study individual differences.
And I've already mentioned the five the big five, right?
The first one of my canoe is conscientiousness, a word that I have trouble spelling, and people who are not native English speakers have trouble pronouncing.
And not a great word.
Great choice of words, I should say.
So Angela Duckworth, she is essentially, I don't want to be uncharitable, but she's kind of reinvented the construct and called it grit.
Okay, but it's essentially the same thing.
But I think it's better to call it conscientiousness, it's to respect its, its history, and the amount that we know about it.
If it's easier for your listeners to think about as a grit, but conscientiousness itself is a trait about how to meet all these various kinds of goals and in has aspects that has facets to it.
Self control is one of them, okay, the ability to resist temptation.
But there are other facets that might be as important.
So another one is industriousness, having an appetite for work.
So I'm an industrious person, like I can't sit still I like, on the weekends, I'm like always putting around the house doing things, my wife, it drives my wife crazy, because much more comfortable just sitting back and relaxing.
Conscientious people are also responsible, when they say they're going to do something, they're more likely to do it.
Because they feel some sort of obligation some sort of like packed with themselves or someone else.
So maybe that's it.
Maybe it's just like, I stick to my word.
And some people are more okay with not sticking to their word.
Another one is called traditionalism.
I don't love that word, because it connotes contrivatism and, and can old fashioned values.
But I think what it means in the context of conscientiousness is adhering to social norms, and seeing value in the norms of society, and respecting authority to some extent.
And I wonder if I have no evidence for this at this point, is that the secret sauce of conscientiousness?
Is it that because that would then explain why they have these broadband, you know, kind of advantages.
So if we assume that the rules and norms, whether it be explicit laws, or just informal norms of a society, if we assume they're wise, if we assume that they will lead us to have a good life, which I think there's probably some, we can argue that this was wisdom in our culture, and if you're sensitive
to what your society rewards, then you're going to be more likely to internalize those values.
And then you're more likely not to be tempted by the things that lead you away from those values.
So I'll give you an example.
It's been a long time now.
And I think it's not no longer, it's not only in Toronto, I think it's widespread.
But a number of years ago, maybe 15 years ago, the big school board in Toronto, the Toronto district school board decided to essentially get rid of due dates.
I think the reason behind it is wise.
And that is that there's many different circumstances in people's lives and kids lives.
And sometimes they can't hand things in and they get penalized for not handing things in on time that are for circumstances that are out of their control, like they've got home insecurity, they haven't eaten that day, they have an abusive home, home life.
So I think it's a very kind gesture.
But what it also does is it sends a signal that being on time is not important.
Punctuality is not important.
And this then changes our values of the school kids.
And now we're seeing it the ramifications of it at university and maybe at workplaces where people don't respect due dates anymore when things are due, but in the real world, you're in a business and your client needs something.
If you don't send it to them on time, guess what, you no longer have that person's business.
So there are real consequences.
Now thankfully, our broader society sees the value of being on time and being punctual.
Now, again, the people against this is an hypothesis.
Maybe the conscientious people sense they can see what's being rewarded, not just explicitly by the DDSP, but more broadly in society, and they internalize those rules, they adhere to those rules, and they're just less likely to be tempted.
So that was one possible idea.
But now you see, we're not talking about self -control anymore.
We're not talking about saying no to things, pushing things away.
We're talking about being sensitive to your society and what it rewards.
Yeah. So we're sort of expanding the concept and saying like this doesn't exist in a vacuum.
This is part of a broader set of qualities, experiences.
The trait is it's more complicated and expansive.
So maybe conscientiousness is sort of like the better overarching description of this.
And we'll be right back.
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What do I do with this?
I'm in the middle of years of my life.
Maybe I feel like I've got a reasonable amount of this trait in me and I've been able to accomplish a certain amount, a certain amount of industriousness.
I can resist the thing or strive towards something that's meaningful to me even when I know it's hard and I'd rather be doing other things.
But there's a whole bunch of other things out there that are not working for me, where I don't have the control to resist, or I get halfway and then I keep bailing on it or I'm procrastinating on this.
So maybe I'm feeling I've got some of this in me and I don't have some of it in me.
What can I do? Are there things that I can do to help me?
Because there are behaviors that I want to manifest to live the way I want to live, achieve the things I want to achieve, and be in the world in a particular way.
How can I think about being proactive and just saying I accept whatever it is that I have or don't have on a trait level?
But then what can I do on a daily basis to help me get where I want to get and be what be how I want to be?
Yeah, that's an excellent question and I certainly won't want to leave your listeners nihilistic.
Sometimes I get there myself, but I do in fact think there are things we can do.
But it's by clarifying our concepts that we get there.
It's not by sticking to just just keep at it, you know, keep doing yourself control.
So I teach a class, a seminar, it's only pretty small, about 20 or 25 students.
It's called the science of behavior change.
I'll just start with the bad news.
There's not many things I think we know, but there are things we do in fact know that are backed by research and that I stand behind and that are helpful, that can help people reach their goals.
So what might those be?
So we really talked about that really interesting and perplexing, vexing finding of those who are high in trait self -control, control those who have less.
And that then led people like Ansel Duckworth to say what about situation selection, kind of like avoiding the temptations to begin with.
And despite me kind of poo -pooing it, saying it's a bit like narrow, there is wisdom still in that general idea if we expand it out a bit.
And I think the way you can expand it out is by two things that are released strongly related.
The first is goal setting.
So setting goals, and there's a good way to do that, and there's a bad way of doing that.
And then planning, which is part of, you know, good ways of goal setting.
So maybe the conscientious people are setting explicit goals for themselves, and they do in a, again, an intelligent way, and they plan it out.
So they know all Monday morning, I wake up, I got to do this.
Like I write, I have a sub stack, I, Monday morning, I write, I write for the sub stack, I know what I do the first thing in the morning on Monday, actually on Tuesday, Wednesday, too.
So you plan it out.
So those are my two favorites.
So now how can you set goals in a better way?
Actually, to plug my own sub stack, my next weeks, or I'm not sure where this will air, but at some point you'll, you'll see a sub stack exactly on goal setting.
There's something called goal setting theory.
I mean, it's, it sounds like all like big and important because it has theory at the end of it.
But it's a really, really simple idea.
And the idea here is that people accomplish more, they're more productive when they set goals for the productivity.
Okay, so and this was done in the field.
So for example, I think this is hilarious.
Some of the first studies was done, very Canadian was done on loggers and loggers, some of your listeners might not know they get paid on a piecemeal basis, the more trees they cut down, the more they get paid.
Sad for the trees. I love trees, but blogging exists as an industry.
So you would think that every logger would want to cut down as many trees as possible because they get paid more than other day.
These industrial and organizational psychologists went in and said, Hey, what if we gave people a tool to help them to be even more productive?
And the tool was simple.
It was like, how many trees do you want to cut down today?
A number, a specific number, a concrete number.
And I don't know what that number would be.
I've noticed how many trees are cut out of today.
Let's say 60. Those people who said 60 or put a concrete number in, they didn't always reach the goal.
They often didn't, but they cut down more trees than the other group who are just told, go ahead, cut down as many trees as you can today.
And again, they're both incentivized to cut down trees, they both want to have money in their pockets.
But those who had concrete goals did better.
And then there's been 20, 30, 40 years of research on this with thousands of studies fleshing out the theory.
But at the heart of it, it's very simple.
When you set a goal, make sure it's concrete, it's specific, it's challenging, and it's time bound.
And time bound might be the most critical one in my point of view, but concrete and specific, I mean, say what you're going to do.
And don't think about outcome only, think about the process to get to your outcome.
What acts so you're a student and you want to get an A in your class, a goal of I want to get an A is vague.
How do you get an A?
Well, you get an A by studying, by reading your textbook, by going over your notes, maybe multiple times having a study group.
So you're going to see part of the goal setting is now making it concrete and now I'm also planning.
I'm thinking about other stuff that are involved in reaching the school.
So now you've cut it down, you knock it down, but you've made it very, very specific about what you want to do.
So that's specific and concrete, challenging, easy goals, they might feel good when you accomplish them, but you want what we call reach goals, things that are kind of just outside your reach, and maybe you don't accomplish them every day, or maybe you don't accomplish them ever, but it shouldn't be
too far do you get discouraged.
And also you should be forgiving of yourself when you don't reach them, because you know you've set a reach goal.
Okay. And the third, and most important, this has to do with planning and scheduling or calendaring is make it time bound, put a deadline to it, even if it's something that has no deadline.
Freelance work, for example, doesn't have deadlines typically before you've at least got a contract, put it in your calendar.
And the reason why time bound is so important is because this is why goals are so important in general, is that it gives you feedback on how you're doing.
If you don't have a time bound, if you don't have a concrete, you can't really tell yourself in a really accurate way, if you're making progress towards your goal or not.
So I know that I write my sub stack on Monday morning, if it's Monday afternoon, and I haven't read anything, I feel bad about myself.
And then I redouble my effort the next day.
So I've gotten feedback, and I take action.
And when I do make some progress, I get the feels, I feel good.
And then I'm motivated to be doing it the next day.
So you build competence, self efficacy, and you keep on going.
So that's the kind of theory of why goal setting works.
And then I think that the compliment to that is planning and using your calendar.
I've got actually remarkably little research on calendaring.
But I think it's a really good tool to not just use it for your appointments, which of course, we all use it for that or many of us use it for that, but literally break down some of your goals and put it in your calendar, those concrete steps that will help you.
So that's kind of one broad thing you could do.
And I think that's accessible to most people also, which I like, like these are ideas that we can actually put into action.
I started, I guess they call it often, it's called timeboxing my calendar a couple of years back, which is doing exactly what you're saying.
Instead of just putting meetings in, I look at the things I don't want to accomplish.
I break them down to the task that will get me there.
And then I put those tasks into the calendar.
And I just found I'm much more likely to do them.
As much as I do or don't want the end state, if it's in like that, it's almost definitely going to happen.
Even if I look at it and I say, my day got blown up, now I'm going to actually move that thing to an appropriate place.
And I'm going to rethink my commitment to that in the first place and whether it was realistic or not and like had like whether I need to make some adjustments, but it's been a huge differentiator for me.
So there are practical things that we can do.
Yeah. I have one other thing that is a bit more difficult.
I've got some studies.
We're just getting going on it.
But as I mentioned, all right, I don't think you did mention this actually, but I kind of hinted at it.
We ran some studies again with my student Marina Miliav -Skaya, who's actually a professor now in Ottawa.
And what we did was we looked at what people do on a moment -to -moment basis in their daily life and then to see if any of those things that they did in the moment -to -moment basis predicted how well or how much they accomplished their goals sometime later.
So we've done it with like three, six, I think even 12 months later.
Okay. And we found there was more bad news for self -control.
Self -control help people in the moment.
So if you say no to Wendy's hamburger, guess what?
You don't eat the hamburger.
But your goal isn't to not eat a hamburger, at least not your bigger goal.
Your goal is to lose weight or to be healthier.
Okay. And we found there's a zero association between resisting temptation in the moment and goal progress up to a year later, which was like, what?
But what we found that did predict goal progress three, six, 12 months later was whether you were tempted to begin with, whether you had the desire that led you astray or that could lead you astray to begin with.
So again, this idea of like, if you're tempted, you're already undone.
Okay. So then the solution is don't be tempted.
How do you do that?
You know, a million dollar question.
I don't think we have great answers, but we have some hints.
So from motivation science, we know that motivation comes not just in quantities, but in qualities and kinds.
And there's a very prominent theory that actually springs mostly from Rochester, New York.
It's called self -determination theory from the University of Rochester.
And this theory essentially makes the point that when you're motivated for the right reasons, engaging in actions that are motivated for the right reasons feels effortless.
It feels light. It feels pleasurable.
It feels good. Okay.
And one of the ingredients of a good kind of motivation, self -determined motivation, there are three pillars.
The first is autonomy.
You chose it. You want it.
It's not something that your parent told you, a doctor told you society tells you, you want it.
I like birding, not because my kids think it's not cool.
My wife thinks it's not cool.
My friend's laughing at me.
I don't care. I think birds are beautiful.
And I want to look at it.
And I guess it's pleasure seeing them.
Okay. I've chosen that.
And you could think that, for example, dieting, you might ask yourself why you're dieting.
Often on the answer is not because you want to diet or you want to eat well.
It's just because you want to look a certain way, maybe your spouse wants you to look a certain way.
That's now an extrinsic reason for doing something.
Not as healthy as an intrinsic reason.
Second, the action brings you closer to people.
It's relational. It involves groups of people and we're social animals.
So things that involve other people tend to be good.
So whatever goal you can do, if you can bring other people along, like running is much easier when you've got friends running with you.
And then the third is the thing needs to make you feel like you're competent or you have got mastery of that thing.
So and this is hard, especially learning something new.
But as long as you kind of feel like you're making progress, it can feel good.
So these three things build self -determination.
And we wondered if it's possible to turn something like that's not self -determined to set it is self -determined.
So we, as for shorthand, we use a have to goal, like I have to do it.
I you know, my society doesn't have to do it.
So I want to go I want to do this.
I have to eat broccoli.
I want to eat broccoli.
They're very different.
And the closest we've seen is this was a therapy essentially, but I don't think I tell your viewers go to therapy to reach your goals.
It's not a scalable intervention.
But you can start reflecting on your goals and start asking yourself, how do these goals align with my personal values to get at autonomy?
How does it connect with other people for relatedness?
And how do I feel a sense of competence and mastery and self -efficacy from these who kind of rethink it.
And what we've developed now, we're still kind of a working project is we're using AI, we've heard that chatbot that is called a motivate chatbot that people come there asking saying, okay, what are your goals?
And then through a series of steps, the chatbot frames these goals help people see how their goals might be self -determined.
And we wonder if that will then translate to them being more persistent, finding more joy and sticking with it for a little bit longer, so that they're not tempted anymore, right?
Because they love this thing.
Yeah. It's a hard ask.
But this is what we're thinking.
But I mean, it's so cool if you can actually change that wiring from like taking something that you perceived as a have to, and then get your brain to actually then translate it and say, like, this is actually a want to that it would, you know, it's like, I've never been a moment in my life where I've
said I have to eat chocolate today.
Right? Like, if we can kind of like flip that switch, that's pretty me.
I'm so excited to see where this is all gonna lead with the work that you're doing on it.
It's very cool. Yeah, thank you.
Feels a good place for us to come full circle in this conversation as well.
So in this container of good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?
To live a good life?
Oh, boy. So I'm the director of the work and play lab.
That's the name of my lab that I changed the name a few years ago.
And I'm a firm believer in both those things.
I'm a firm believer in working hard, in exerting effort towards the things that you care about.
But I'm also firm believer that we need rest.
We need leisure. You can exert effort and leisure too.
And it turns out that the best kind of leisure would be effortful leisure.
So not just physically effortful, but also cognitively effortful.
So I would say find that balance with work and play and don't be afraid of effort because I think it'll be, it can lead to a meaningful life.
Thank you. Thank you.
Hey, before you leave, if you'll love this episode, say that you'll also love the conversation we have with James Clear about atomic habits.
Find a link to James's episode in the show notes.
This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers, Lindsey Foxx and me, Jonathan Fields, editing help by Alejandro Ramirez, Christopher Carter, crafted our theme music, and special thanks to Shelley Dell for her research on this episode.
And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app.
And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable and chances are you did, since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor and share it maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person, just copy the link from the app you're
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Tell them to listen, then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that's how we all come alive together.
Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.
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