Our self-image is the blueprint of our entire lives.
If you do not believe you are worthy capable, have some degree of power, you either will not try or you will sabotage yourself, because when you hit a roadblock you'll say see, told you so.
So we need to imagine that our self-image, our limiting beliefs are the pot that we have planted ourselves into.
The issue is that when we're in that pot, that's all we see.
But all you need to do sometime is recognize you're in a pot, move yourself to a bigger pot or, better yet, plant yourself in open soil.
Hey guys, how you doing?
Hope you're having a good week so far.
My name is dr rongan chatterjee and this is my podcast.
Feel better, live more.
Many of us want to feel calmer, have better health and ultimately, live a more meaningful life, yet so often we hesitate, overthink or delay making the changes we know that would really help.
Well, this week's guest believes that what holds us back is not a lack of motivation or confidence, but a lack of self-trust, which is the foundation that shapes everything from our habits to our relationships.
Dr Sade Zerai is a behavioral researcher, award-winning educator and leading authority on confidence and self-doubt.
In her brand new book Big Trust Rewire Self-Doubt, Find Your Confidence and Fuel Success.
Her message is really simple.
We need to stop getting in our own way, loosen the grip of self-doubt and learn how to back ourselves when it really counts.
During our conversation, we discuss why self-trust sits at the heart of confidence, action and meaningful change.
The four key attributes that make up self-trust acceptance agency, autonomy and adaptability.
How repeatedly breaking promises to ourselves erodes our identity.
Why small daily actions become meaningful proof points of who we want to become.
How comparison and people pleasing are signs of low self-acceptance.
And why confidence is not the starting point but the result of action and evidence.
Sade believes that we are not defined by our doubts, but by the choices we make when doubt appears.
And this conversation offers a compassionate and practical guide to strengthening the trust we place in ourselves, which in turn opens the door to everything worthwhile.
Closer relationships, better health. and a happy and contented life.
In one of your social media posts recently, you wrote this.
Over the last 10 years, I've learned that self-trust is the ultimate life enhancer, performance amplifier and success multiplier.
It separates those who do from those who wish.
What is self-trust and why is it so important?
So in order to explain self-trust, I have to take it a few steps back.
So Rangan, let me ask you a question.
Without thinking about it too hard, what would you say is the opposite of self-doubt, which we know is the greatest blocker that we face.
What is the opposite of self-doubt?
Self-trust.
Self-trust.
I gave it away.
Most people will say confidence.
Most people will say self-belief.
Some people say clarity.
Some people say purpose.
It's actually self-trust.
But too many people are waiting to feel confident.
We think that confidence is the antidote to self-doubt.
And that's why so many people are continually putting things off until they feel that sense of readiness.
Confidence actually doesn't come first.
It comes after you take action, after you do something.
Because when you take action, you're getting a proof point, an evidence piece, a view of hey, I can do this.
It's not as hard as I thought.
It boosts your skill.
It boosts your capability.
It builds what's called self-efficacy.
And that's what creates that sense of confidence, which creates momentum.
So if this thing so many people are waiting for happens after the action, there's something that comes first.
And it is trusting yourself.
Because what we know my research over the last five years and looking at decades worth of literature that exists, meta-analyses it's found that if you do not fundamentally trust yourself and there are four dimensions which I'm sure we'll dive into if you don't trust yourself across these four dimensions, you will invariably hold back hesitate overthink, wait until you feel ready and you're getting in your own way.
And even if you achieve success, you're always going to be feeling like something is missing.
So self-trust is really that ultimate amplifier of everything good in our lives.
Yeah, I love that.
A lot of people listen to this podcast because they want to improve their lives in some way.
It could be they want better health.
They want to be happier.
They want closer relationships.
And it's been pretty clear to me over the last few years that actually what lies at the heart of all of those things is the way that we view ourselves.
And over the last couple of years I've been saying in live shows or on this podcast to people that one of the most toxic things I believe you can do is say you're going to do something and not do it.
Because when you say you're going to do something which often happens at the start of the new year and you don't then follow through, I think one of the problems with that is that you show yourself that actually I can't trust myself because I said I was going to do it and I didn't.
James Clear has this beautiful quote and I'm going to butcher it because I don't really remember it, but it's exactly aligned with this.
It's the idea that every time you say you'll do something and you do it, you're putting a vote in the ballot box of who you want to become.
And when you're not showing up consistently and saying I'm gonna do this and then you do it, you're eroding that sense of trust.
You're giving yourself evidence that, okay, I can't show up for myself.
I don't back myself.
In fact, there's this really fascinating study that was published in 2014, looking at children and child behavior.
I love looking at children's behavior because really our brains are very similar.
We've just learned how to manage our emotions a little bit better and maybe think a little bit more logically.
So what they did is they had this group of children.
With half the group, they said, can you please help?
With the other half, they said, can you be a helper?
The group that was asked to help helped far less than the group that was asked to be a helper.
Why is that?
Because on the one side, we're asking them to do something.
Can you help?
On the other side, we're making it about their identity, about who they are.
I want to be a helper.
I want to live up to that.
And so, when we think about the role of identity and how we see ourselves, our self-image is the blueprint of our entire lives.
And so, if we're not able to show up for ourselves, take the action, which is a demonstration of self-trust.
We are then creating this blueprint that I'm someone who makes promises that I can't keep to myself.
Yeah.
It kind of plays into self-limiting beliefs as well, doesn't it?
Because if we don't show ourselves that we can keep our word to ourselves, then we break that trust.
And then our self-talk almost reinforces this negative belief pattern that you know I can never stick to my health goals.
You know, damn, you know, I bought that book.
I was going to do that four-week plan.
And yet again, I didn't do it.
The more times that happens, the more we show ourselves with proof that we can't stick to our plans right.
So sometimes I believe that actually...
New Year's resolutions.
Whilst for sure, for some people they can be helpful, I think for many people they're not, because they try and bring something in on January the 1st.
By the end of January, it has gone.
And sometimes I feel that if you've done it for five consecutive years, you've got five successive failures, five successive times where you showed yourself that you can't trust yourself.
Exactly right.
In fact, there was a large scale study where they had something like 8000 entries and they found that most people who set a goal on January 1st end up breaking it by day 21.
Yeah.
And so then, we need to be asking ourselves why is it that so many people have these goals, these resolutions, these things they want to do, even if they're small?
And yet they're just not able to follow through.
Why is that happening?
So we know it's a result of a lack of self-trust.
I mean, it could also just be poor discipline.
It could be bad habits.
It could be other things distracting you.
But fundamentally it comes down to how we see ourselves, which then begs the question how do we determine how we see ourselves?
What actually goes into that?
And that's what fascinates me.
And that's what absolutely piqued my interest, which is what sparked a lot of my own research, is How do we measure, how we see ourselves, this idea of self-trust?
Because it influences so many aspects of our lives.
As you mentioned, our ability to pursue health goals, our ability to pursue meaningful relationships, our ability to be successful at work and to perform, and our ability to be happy all rests upon this thing, this elusive idea of self-trust.
What actually is it?
Yeah.
I love it.
I really do.
I'm obsessed by thinking about what is it that gets in the way of people making the changes that they desperately want to make.
And I started off the conversation with that sort of quote that I read from you.
But it's self-trust that separates those who do from those who wish.
That is the heart of it, right?
Because a lot of people wish their lives were different.
They wish they could stick to their habits.
They wish they could have closer relationships.
And I think there are all kinds of things like habit formation and all that kind of stuff.
But I kind of feel that those things are downstream.
I think, if you really go upstream, Everything good in life comes from your ability to trust yourself.
So you've written this new book called Big Trust.
Let's talk about what exactly it is.
And of course, in the book, you break it down into these four different components.
So do you think it's a good place to start by going through those four components?
Then we can go into a bit more depth?
Yeah, I think that's great.
And I think I'm going to take it again a little bit further back to describe why the four components of survival and how the self-trust really plays out as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So one thing I will also preface all of this with I have been passionate about people for as long as I can remember.
And I have had my own hypotheses about why some people succeed and why others don't.
And I've noticed patterns in a lot of leaders and the teams that we've worked with around the world.
What I have now discovered is that when we look at the data, when we look at the research, we're given the frameworks that explains why people achieve certain things in their lives the outcomes.
And I love making sure that the data is aligning with what I'm experiencing and what I'm seeing.
So I'm going to share a study with you from 1970.
So a little while ago now, but it is a fascinating insight in terms of how we show up in the world and how beliefs influence that and then influence our outcomes.
So, taking you back to the 1970s, a psychology professor from Dartmouth by the name of Robert Kleck conducted this fascinating study, brought together a group of people and they were essentially sent out to have conversations with strangers.
But before they had the conversations he split the group into two.
One group had a scar drawn on their face, from their right ear to the side of their right mouth.
Big, ugly, visible scar.
He allowed them to have a look at themselves in a hand mirror before they went into these conversations so they can confirm yes, I have a scar on my face.
Both groups went out and had these conversations with these strangers.
At the end, they came back in and they reported on how they felt the conversation went.
The group that had the scar overwhelmingly reported that they felt the conversation was tense.
They felt judged.
They felt like their conversation partner was cold.
They felt that they were treated differently because of that scar.
Now, that's not particularly surprising, because humans are very judgmental and often people can discriminate based on physical appearance.
But what's interesting about this study is if we rewind a little bit.
Before he sent these groups into conversations, That group with the scar was given some moisturizing cream, or rather, they applied moisturizing cream to the scar and they said this is to set it, so it doesn't crack.
Great.
But what they did unknowingly to the participants was completely wipe off the scar.
They now had no scar on their face.
They went into these conversations believing they had a scar, expecting that they would be treated differently.
And guess what?
That is what their experience showed.
Now what's even more interesting is they had neutral third parties watching on video watching these conversations and they didn't notice any difference in any of the conversations in how people were treated or how people acted.
It was entirely in their heads.
And this is what psychologists call expectation bias.
We have an expectation about us.
In this case, it was a physical appearance thing, but it goes much deeper than that.
It's also an expectation about how we feel we deserve to be treated.
Do you believe you are lovable?
You are worthy?
You are capable?
You have some kind of personal power?
Because if you go into relationships or conversations or the world believing that you do, you will notice things that confirm that.
Because of confirmation bias, because of selective attention, where the brain selectively attends to things that it thinks are important.
And what does it think are important?
Whatever your beliefs are, whatever you tell it.
So I think this is such a fascinating, mind-blowing insight because just think about how many people are walking around in their lives with these internal scars.
Yeah.
I just love that study so much.
It explains so much.
The scar was removed.
It wasn't even there.
It wasn't even there, but they believed it was there, and that shaped their reality.
Yes.
And I often think about limiting beliefs like... container.
Like your belief is the container of your life.
And whilst that belief holds weight in your mind, you will only ever live your life within that container.
You can't go beyond it because your belief won't allow you to.
So that limiting belief limits your experience of life.
But I guess, how would you say people can start to, I guess, change those limiting beliefs?
So the first step is to acknowledge that you can change it, because most people will say well, this is just who I am.
Because they're building the proof points that they can't do it, or that people always treat them poorly, or that all their relationships will be a certain way.
Because again, their self-image, which is how they see themselves, is showing up and reinforcing those initial beliefs.
So I love that you mentioned this idea of a container, because when we so my husband and I, Faisal and I we moved to Koh Samui Island at the end of 2021.
We live on a tropical resort island.
We're very grateful for that.
One of the things that we did was we wanted a tropical flair inside our living room in our villa when we moved there.
We love tropical nature.
So we brought in a manila palm.
Now, a manila palm, when you plant it outside, it can grow quite tall.
It's beautiful.
We love the shade that a palm tree gives and the look and feel.
But when you bring it inside, inside its pot.
We had a reasonably big pot, but it was way smaller than if it was planted out in the open.
And we asked the gardener essentially, how tall would the plant grow?
And he said, maybe two meters if you're lucky.
Now, this is about one-tenth, one-fifth maybe of what it could grow to outside.
And I thought that was fascinating because if this plant, if this palm tree had a consciousness which it doesn't, but if it did, it might think okay, two meters, that's my potential.
That's my reality.
That's all I can be.
But if it's planted outside, its reality, its potential is very, very different.
So we need to imagine that our self-image, our limiting beliefs are the pot that we have planted ourselves into.
Yeah.
And we can at any moment.
So the issue is that when we're in that pot, that's all we see.
That's genuinely what we believe that we are, because it's a blueprint that then influences how we live our lives.
And it's continually reinforced.
So it's very easy to feel like this is me.
I am fixed.
This is concrete.
But all you need to do sometime is recognize you're in a pot.
Move yourself to a bigger pot or better yet, plant yourself in open soil.
Now, this is easier said than done.
So then the question is, how do we do this?
So first step, acknowledge you're in a pot.
No matter who you are, there is a pot.
I think there are very few people who are planted in open soil.
Most people we've spoken to have a pot.
So acknowledge there is a pot and you can break the pot.
So what do we need to do in order to build self-trust?
We need to fundamentally change our self-image.
So then this again begs the question, what is a self-image?
How do we update that belief that we have about ourselves?
Because we're going to keep living a life that reinforces that.
There's this phrase I love you will never rise above your opinion of yourself.
You will never rise above your opinion of yourself.
If you do not believe you are worthy capable, have some degree of power, able to handle the situation, you either will not try or you will sabotage yourself, because when you hit a roadblock you'll say see, told you so.
Yeah.
So what do we do?
So this is what triggered me to go back and look at decades worth of research and literature.
I wanted to understand what the best esteemed minds in the field of organizational behavior, cognitive psychology, had to say about what is a self-image.
How do we judge ourselves?
And that's when I found something buried in the literature around the 80s, 90s.
It actually was the late 80s.
And what some researchers had found in the field of organizational behavior is there is a concept called our core self evaluations, which is the core most beliefs that we have about ourselves.
And depending on what your beliefs are across these four, they're actually personality traits across these four personality traits when they combine.
It reminds me a bit of Power Rangers.
You know how when they combine, there's this amazing power?
It's similar to that.
When these four combine, it fundamentally shapes how you see yourself.
Now what's even more interesting about these four personality traits is, depending on your levels of each of them, it has been found to predict
So meta-analyses of looking at almost 100 studies have found that it is predictive.
Of your job success, your job performance, your career satisfaction, your relationship success, even how much money you will make, regardless of where you start out in your life.
It's all to do with how you view yourself.
It's all to do with how you view yourself, specifically these four things.
So then what are these four things?
I think everyone wants to know what are they.
So I'll tell you what the personality traits are.
And then I'm going to share with you what the trainable attribute is, which is where our research comes in to actually change that personality trait.
Because for a very long time, Rangan, there has been a belief that personality is stable, right?
Who we are is who we are and we fundamentally can't change it.
Do you believe that?
Not anymore.
Great.
Fantastic.
And I think something we need to acknowledge is in the realm of any kind of science behavioral science, cognitive science neuroscience, psychological science.
It is an evolving area of study.
And so there are things that we thought that we were discovering are not actually accurate.
And so we always need to be open and malleable with our views of what's going on as we learn more.
Yeah, that's a really interesting point there for me.
You ask about what I think about personality, and then you talk about the fact that research is constantly evolving, and it is.
I think there's something really interesting about research.
Research, I think, is really, really important.
And it's not everything.
Yes.
Because research and science is always changing.
So that means at some point in the past, that research or science was maybe not completely right.
Yet we act as though the latest research tells us oh, All that stuff in the past wasn't quite right, but now we've nailed it.
But it's like, well, hold on a minute.
When someone will usually have a book that's coming out about that as well.
It's constantly changing.
So personality, for example, I think is a great example.
One of the reasons I don't believe personality is fixed or many aspects are fixed.
Maybe there are certain attributes of our personality that are, or we have, tendencies is because I used to be someone who everyone would call mega competitive.
Interesting.
If you talk to any of my best friends, they will say, Rangan was one of the most competitive people.
He would not lose and I wouldn't, right?
But I'm not anymore, because and this is when we get into your four attributes this is where the first attribute acceptance, comes in.
For me,
I never thought I was enough, okay?
I got my sense of self-worth as a child, or I took on the belief as a child that I was only loved when I got top grades, when I achieved right.
So if you think about that, if that's the way you're wired as a young child, it makes complete sense that you would develop the trait of competitiveness.
Because what will that do?
It will ensure that you constantly achieve and that you get that validation that you think that you need in order to be loved.
But over the last 10 years, probably since my dad died and I've been on this kind of journey, as it were.
I realized and identified, with some help, where that came from and have processed it and have done the work whether that be therapy journaling meditation, whatever it might be to the point now where I'm not competitive anymore.
So I know and this comes back to the research, I know on an individual level that a lot of people just say oh, I'm competitive.
That's just the way it is.
Maybe, maybe not.
And to be clear, the research does matter.
But on a personal level I'm like in some ways the research doesn't matter to me, because I know I used to be competitive and now I'm not.
Therefore, I know, at least from personal experience, that that trait is certainly malleable and open to change.
So a couple of notes on research which I have only discovered since spending five years doing PhD research.
You're absolutely right.
Research evolves.
And that's why looking at meta-analyses is actually far more effective, because you're not just looking at one study.
You're looking at many many, many studies and whether the statistical significance is following through.
The other thing with a study is it may have been done with 10 people in a remote island.
That's completely removed from where you are.
You never know.
The other thing I have discovered is not all research is equal.
You can pay to publish.
Someone can conduct a study. pay a journal, a dodgy journal to publish, and then guess what?
It's published research.
The average person doesn't know that.
They're suddenly citing this.
I'm going to acknowledge that before I understood this, I used to do that.
I didn't check the validity of the source.
I didn't check the quality of the journal.
Now, I only reference top tier journal articles because and they have to be peer reviewed.
They have been reviewed by other peers, other experts in the space that can validate.
Yes, the analysis follows best practice.
The way that the analysis has been interpreted is et cetera, et cetera.
But even then, research changes.
The other thing when we're looking at studies.
This is just kind of an educational piece that I think is interesting, but I think it's great for people to be aware of it.
Sometimes.
So a lot of what we share.
We do a lot of work with organizations, Fortune 500 leaders, and we are sharing research.
And some people will say, well, that's not my experience.
Disagree.
And it's because we're looking in research for statistical significance.
That doesn't mean that 100% of the time it is effective.
It just means that, for example, if you're looking at job performance before and after some kind of training, All you're looking at is that the people who were participating in that, their job performance, has increased by something that is statistically significant.
On average.
On average.
Yeah.
So not everybody and not everyone going to 100%.
Yeah.
So just things to be aware of when you're listening to research.
We need to still be discerning and also determine, is this my reality or not?
So now back to personality, where we were.
So for a very long time, there was a belief that personality was stable across the lifespan.
And there were countless studies that have been conducted that confirmed this.
We do know that personality is largely shaped in our earliest years.
Yeah, for sure.
Nature nurture.
So part of it is hardwired into us.
This is why you get two kids in the same environment, maybe twins.
One of them at the age of two is happy to go off and explore.
And the other one is attached to mum or dad's leg.
That's to do with the psychological trait of openness to experience.
One of the kids is high on that, one of them is low.
But we also know that the environment that parents and early caregivers provide in those earliest years can either reinforce or activate certain traits within us.
And then again, when we're in school, in that environment, and then as we age.
So there are all of these elements you mentioned and I'm sure we'll come to it that Based on whether you felt like you were only a value or you felt like you needed some reason to get that love and sense of validity from your parents.
If it was grades, if it was look at me performing on stage, you start to internalize this view that I am only worthy when I am performing or perfecting something, or you need to have a reason.
And I'm very similar to that.
And this is not to say that our parents are responsible for all of our challenges as adults.
They did the best they could with what they knew.
This is just how life evolves.
I just want to, before you continue, just highlight that point.
I think a lot of people get stuck in a trap of blaming their parents.
They go through this sort of journey of maybe listening to podcasts or reading books and going oh wow, my early childhood years.
That's mom's fault.
Are really influential in how I'm an adult.
Okay, that's step one.
The natural next step for many people is I can't believe mom and dad did that, or mom did that or whoever, whatever.
They're responsible.
I think that's a dangerous place to get to.
That will keep you stuck.
That will keep you stuck in victim mindset.
You know, so I just want to make it super clear that My parents were amazing, literally amazing.
I think the person who I am today is largely because of how mum and dad raised me.
And at the same time, I also took on certain beliefs that they probably didn't even want me to take on, right.
So I think that's super important.
And I probably went through a blame phase as I started to uncover things, but I quickly moved beyond that.
I thought this is not helping me.
They were doing the best that they can and...
I can totally understand you, like me, from an immigrant family.
I totally get why an immigrant family to the UK in the 1960s or an immigrant couple would literally think that the way my children are going to avoid the struggle that we've had is by getting straight A's and becoming a doctor, lawyer or engineer.
It makes total sense when you understand their lives.
Do you know what I mean?
Absolutely.
Which is why empathy is also really important.
For sure.
Completely.
So beautiful.
I love that we've touched on the role of early experience and how it does shape who we are.
You know, I always say that we are absolutely a product of our past, but we do not have to be a prisoner to it.
That is a choice that we make.
And one of the greatest mistakes that many people make is they become a prisoner to it.
They think that their past determines who they are, who i am, because of that, and then they don't take steps to expand the pot or repot themselves or plant themselves outside.
So, going now to this idea of personality, what we have found, which is very aligned with your experience, personality is stable.
Unless you choose to intervene, you can act.
Otherwise, therapy wouldn't exist.
If people could not change, we would be in a very, very worrying world and a worrying place for all of us.
We can fundamentally change.
We can fundamentally rewire our brain.
Neuroscience studies have demonstrated this.
But you have to be active in your desire to change some part of yourself and then create what's called an intervention for yourself, where you are going to therapy, where you are actively applying tools that you're learning in books, that you are working on yourself, because it's very easy to default back to how we have been for many, many years.
But you can change who you are, which I love.
I think it's so empowering.
One of the questions I ask myself every morning as part of my own journaling practice is which quality do I want to showcase to the world today?
Beautiful.
And I think at the heart of that question is everything you've just said we can change and we don't have to be a victim of our past.
I love that idea of the intentionality that you have, because you're right.
Well, whenever we prime ourselves within the morning, tends to be what we notice, tends to be what we confirm and tends to be what we live behind.
In fact, I'm going to just share a very quick little exercise that we share with a lot of our students.
And it's this idea of, you know, we all have, do you have a to-do list?
Do you like to-do lists?
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I'm going to just share a very quick little exercise that we share with a lot of our students.
And it's this idea of, you know, we all have, do you have a to-do list?
Do you like to-do lists?
Yes, sometimes.
Yeah?
Yeah, I will.
You know, if I've got a lot going on, I will try and write it down.
Map it down.
Today I need to just plow on and crack on through these things.
So many of us will use something like a to-do list to keep track of tasks.
We encourage people to have a to-be list.
Yeah.
Who do you want to be?
And a lot of people struggle.
And one of the reasons why a lot of people struggle with who they want to be is because their pot is so narrow that they feel like who they can be is just who they are right now.
They need to acknowledge there's a pot.
So we like to work through an exercise where we imagine OK imagine, you're at the end of your life and it's been a beautiful fulfilling, lovely life.
And there are people sitting in the front row.
What are the one, two or three qualities that you want them to say about you?
It's not, oh, he was amazing at business.
He was an incredible podcast host.
He had the best guests.
It's going to be things like compassion, patience, generosity, impact.
So you ask yourself, what do you want them to be saying about you?
What kind of legacy do you want to leave?
Because we don't take anything else with us.
And then bring yourself back to today.
They go on your to-be list.
And then, at the beginning of every morning, you ask yourself okay, who am I going to be today from this list?
It also helps you fundamentally change that self-image where you're not just saying well, who I am today is who I'm always going to be.
You're going, no, no, there is progression here and I can be that.
How do I then become that today?
Yeah.
It kind of plays into values, doesn't it?
Completely.
You know, it's like, what are my core values?
Who am, know what are the qualities that represent the essence of who i am, and then you know if you hold those things close to you, if you think about them a lot and you make sure that you are embodying those values and everything that you do.
So you know, my three core values, as things stand today, are integrity, curiosity and compassion.
And i know when i am embodying those three values in every interaction in my life.
So with the barista at the local coffee shop, with you when you walk into my house this morning, with the train driver who takes me to London, with my wife, with my children, with whoever I meet at the school gate, the other parents if I'm embodying those three qualities everywhere I go.
I'm bulletproof.
I feel good.
My behaviors are good.
I feel good about myself.
I'm more successful because it all starts to align and fit together.
And you give yourself the proof that I can be this person.
Yeah.
You know what's so interesting about values?
I was actually thinking about this on the way here.
So many people have these professed values, who they want to be, who they align behind.
But then they're not aligned in their expressed values.
So there is this distinction about between professed versus expressed.
What does that mean?
Some people have values of family, service, impact.
And then you actually look at their lives and you think, where?
I don't see it.
And do you know why?
Because they don't trust themselves.
Right.
They do not trust themselves enough to live in alignment with those values.
When you don't trust yourself.
That means you are allowing external influences to guide your decisions, your behaviors, your actions, whether it's the need for validation, the fear of taking that step or sharing your mind or speaking to that person.
And so I think there's this beautiful link, which brings us back to this idea of self-trust.
If you truly want to live aligned to your values, you have to fundamentally trust that you are worthy of the values, that you can live to those values.
And again, that brings us to these four elements.
So the very, very first trait, which is almost there's no order to these according to when we look at the literature,
But I would say that this is one of the deepest, most core drivers of self-doubt.
And then when it's strong, it's a driver of self-trust.
And it's the psychological trait of self-esteem.
How do you fundamentally see yourself?
Do you see yourself as worthy?
Do you see yourself as someone who deserves good things?
Lovable?
If you do not, that's what we call a lack of acceptance.
So acceptance is the behavioral element, the trainable element.
If you want to improve your self-esteem, you need to develop the habit of acceptance.
And it is shown in the literature to be a habit that we can develop within ourselves.
When you struggle with self-esteem, when you struggle with this lack of acceptance.
Rangan, you said that you struggle with this area.
Can you share a little bit of how it maybe shows up in your or maybe not anymore, but how it showed up in your life earlier?
I would say that when I used to struggle with acceptance and it really was, you know, that belief that I guess I wasn't enough in who I was, I had to achieve in order to be enough.
So I had to, I guess back then I would be driven a lot by external validation.
If other people say I'm doing good stuff, then I'm good.
But that's a very fragile place to be because yeah, you can crush something and people can say good things.
But then if you're that dependent on external validation, I remember that Criticism absolutely destroys you because you live in a very fragile state.
Whereas today, having worked on this trait and we can maybe talk about that later over the past decade or so and having mostly, I would say, resolved those issues,
And again, we can come back to that when I say mostly.
I just feel there's a real deep sense of contentment and who I am today.
I don't need to achieve in order to feel good.
I know that I'm a good human being.
I know that I treat people well, that I care about my work.
In some ways, it doesn't matter what people think.
It does.
But if someone disagrees or doesn't like something I put out online, okay, great.
You don't take it personally.
You don't internalize it.
It's like, yeah, you know what?
There's 8 billion people on the planet.
You have a different opinion to me.
No problem.
So it's kind of interesting for me.
And look, we're going to go through these four traits, right?
And we're still on the first traits.
But one of the things I was going to ask you is, Because you say there's no particular order.
And I guess my own personal bias is probably playing in here.
But I kind of feel that acceptance is the most important one because I feel if you get this right, the others kind of follow suit is my hunch.
But what's your take on that?
So my experience, personal experience would absolutely be the same.
We find that those who struggle the most will struggle with acceptance.
And when you can develop that attribute within yourself, everything becomes easier.
Because no matter what happens, you don't take it personally, you don't internalize it.
Suddenly life, you're floating, right?
You've taken off this massive weight.
What we do see is a lot of highly, highly successful driven people struggle with acceptance.
And they claim that, well, that is what keeps me pushing.
That has been the secret to my success because I never feel like I'm enough.
So I'm constantly going next goal, next goal.
I hit the goal, don't really feel satisfied, and then shift to the next goal.
It's called the arrival fallacy.
They're searching for a sense of enough on the other side of that goal.
And they're perpetually searching.
And on the one side you could say OK, it is a driver of success, but it's also a driver of burnout, emotional exhaustion, neglecting the people that you love, neglecting your values, in search of that enoughness.
And also there's this beautiful quote or insight that comes from Bronnie Ware.
So Bronnie Ware was a palliative nurse.
You're aware of her story?
She's a friend of mine.
She's been on the show.
Oh my goodness.
Can you send her my best?
I've spoken about her book.
Maybe every four podcasts or so it comes out.
But please, continue.
It's beautiful.
I mean, we should get her on to share this.
But she was reflecting on her experiences in the final days or final week's days of life of people.
This is when the masks have come off.
The need for acceptance has dropped because fundamentally it's the end.
And her reflection was that the top regret people have is not I wish I set up that business, or we scaled there or I did this.
It was, I wish I lived a life.
I wish I had the courage to live a life that was aligned with what I wanted, not other people's expectations.
And so fundamentally, that brings us back to this first driver of self-doubt.
It undermines our trust in ourselves because we're outsourcing our worth.
But as you said, we then live in a very fragile place.
Yeah, but it's achievement, right?
A lot of people will come to your work, Sade, because they want more confidence.
They want to do better at work.
They want to perform.
They want to achieve more.
But achievement's an interesting word, right?
It's an interesting concept, because you can achieve and still not feel enough, or you can achieve and know that your self-worth was not dependent on that achievement, and then you're likely to be contented and happy.
And this is, of course, why we see so many high-performing people, whether it be athletes or billionaires or whatever.
It's a cliche now, but it's true.
So many people who achieve feel empty.
So many top sportsmen are not happy.
So many CEOs of companies are not happy because and it goes back to what you said before there's a belief that that sense of lack inside drives you to work more and push more and achieve more.
And it does.
But then the question is, what do you want out of your life?
Do you want achievement and the feeling of emptiness?
Or do you want achievement and a feeling of wholeness?
Exactly.
And I think everyone agrees achievement and wholeness is the ultimate.
Yeah.
What a lack of acceptance does, it creates a void and we fill that void with I am my work.
And therefore we go through a process that cognitive scientist Maya Shankar calls role identity fusion, where we feel like all we are is our title.
And it doesn't just apply to work.
For some people, if their primary role right now is a caregiver to their children, it's I am a father.
I am a mother.
That is my role.
And then beyond that, they don't know who they are.
Maya Shankar.
Dr Maya Shankar has this wonderful story that she shares that really prompted her to go into her space.
She was an incredible violinist.
And at the age of 15 she was chosen to work under Itzhak Perlman, one of the preeminent violinists in the world.
So she was on the up and up.
So I believe she went to a Juilliard summer camp.
And one morning she gets up early and she's practicing on her violin.
And then suddenly she hears a pop.
And she hadn't stretched her fingers and she had snapped a tendon.
And she had injured herself to such an extent that she was told by doctors that she would never be able to play the violin again.
This is her entire life at the age of 15.
I mean, we think 15 for most of us when we were figuring out who the heck we were.
But for her, this was her life and she had so much promise.
And she shares.
Later in her TED Talk, she shared that she went through a grieving process not just for the loss of violin, but actually for the loss of her identity.
She had no idea who she was if she wasn't the violin girl.
And so she went through this whole process and now she studies a lot of this and she has these beautiful insights.
But the The premise here is that we become so attached to our jobs that it is our label.
I am this, which means that when that thing is no longer there, we have no idea who we are.
We don't know what our values are.
We don't know what we stand for.
We don't know how worthy we are because we've always defined it by that thing.
I'm going to share a little tip, which is an unusual one, but I love it because it's unusual.
What the literature says is a really fantastic thing to do.
Essentially, if you experience this, if you struggle with acceptance and you attach yourself to your job or your title, your role is to go and get a hobby.
Go and get a hobby.
Why a hobby?
There was a study of Nobel Prize winning scientists, 500 of them.
And researchers found that Nobel Prize winning scientists were three times more likely than regular scientists to have a creative hobby.
Not only that, they were 22 times more likely to have a hobby in the performing arts, like acting drama, music.
What's the insight?
They actually many of them reported that it was their hobby that allowed them to think differently about things, to give themselves a break and to give themselves an identity outside of their intense work.
It also allowed them to bounce back quicker because they had something else that gave them a sense of enjoyment.
And it's not that they were amazing at these things, but it was an outlet for them.
When we then look at other research, looking at hobbies, there was a study with, I think, over 90000 people across 16 different countries.
And they found that having a hobby any hobby increases your sense of self-esteem, which is linked to acceptance.
So if you're someone who struggles with acceptance and you define yourself by your work, go out and get a fun hobby.
What it also does is it encourages you to embrace the messy beginning and to not feel like you need to be performing at a high level to be valuable, because we all suck when we're starting something new and that can be really uncomfortable for people.
If you lack acceptance, you'll feel like, well, if I'm not good, that's a reflection of me.
I internalize that.
So go out and enjoy the messy.
Yeah.
Embrace it.
Yeah.
What is it do you think that hobbies do for us?
A few things.
So it gives us an identity outside of our work or rather it reminds us that we are not our work.
There's other things we can do and we don't have to be excelling at every point in life.
It also, in my view, especially when it's a creative hobby.
It activates different parts of the brain, the creative parts of the brain, the parts of the brain responsible for play and exploration.
And I think also with certain hobbies, especially when.
So there's this when we look at flow, the state of flow, To enter the state of flow, I think people throw the term out too liberally.
But when we look at actually what creates a state of flow where time disappears and you're just absolutely immersed, there has to be a degree of skill.
So you have to be able to do something to some extent.
So usually if you're a beginner, you don't really experience flow until you know how to do it.
And there has to be a degree of challenge.
So it can't be super, super interesting, like scribbling on a piece of paper.
Maybe if it was coloring in the lines there might be some degree of challenge or picking the right colors.
But when we have those two things and some level of enjoyment, that's when we enter a state of flow.
And flow is this incredible rejuvenative state where we not only perform better, but we're getting this.
It's almost like we're recharging internally.
Some people think you can only recharge by taking a nap or having a sleep, but you can actually recharge through things like flow or going for a walk, which is a.
I think it's beautiful to know that there are things that we can do that can help us build these different attributes and qualities in ourselves that also have a flow on effect.
I think it just makes you a more interesting person when you have hobbies too.
You're more likely to meet people.
You're more likely to connect on other topics.
This whole idea of identity and you know, in the book you write about the risk of a single identity, right?
Which is, of course, why people, or one of the reasons people, struggle in retirements, because the entirety of who they were was their job.
They suddenly stop at 65 or whatever age they stop at.
Suddenly it's like, who am I?
Who the hell am I?
You know, because that's who I was.
You know, I've heard of stories of people who, even after they retire, they still wake up at the same time put on their work outfit, get on the train, go to the office, walk around and then come back.
Because it was so deeply entrenched in their identity, feeling like they have a purpose.
And that's the other thing.
When your work is entirely your everything and your identity.
As soon as that's taken away, what is your purpose?
A lot of bodybuilders, a lot of sports athletes will experience this too, where they're so focused on the goal.
They achieve it and then they experience a complete drop, almost like a depressive drop afterwards, because they don't know who they are or what they're supposed to be doing with their lives.
Yeah, because it's focused on the achievement.
Exactly.
Not the process, not who you are in the pursuit of that goal.
That's irrelevant.
It's just about the goal itself, which is very, very problematic.
And we see this in sportsmen all the time, right?
But going back to identity for a minute, right?
There's retirement, of course, right?
There's losing your job because you got sick, right?
Which is certainly, you know, it does affect people from time to time.
Or needing to be a carer.
Or needing to be a carer.
But I know a lot of the people who listen to this show are parents.
And I know a lot of people, this hasn't happened to me yet because of the age of my kids.
But a lot of people struggle when their kids hit 18 and leave home, right?
So for the last 18 years, the entirety of their identity was about being a parent, about looking after them, getting them from school, feeding them, taking them to their classes.
And then suddenly, let's say, their child has gone to the workplace or has gone to university or has moved out.
If someone was to come to you, as a parent say, I'm really struggling with that.
What would you say to them?
Get a hobby.
No, I'd say, look, it's completely natural to feel that way.
It's interesting.
Actually, that's also the time where a lot of relationships break down, because the priority has been the kids for so long that once the kids are gone, they suddenly realise they've grown apart from each other.
And the one thing they had in common, which was caring for the kids and being great parents, is suddenly not there.
I can see that.
I can totally see how and why that happens if you're not careful.
And I mean they were prioritising their children and prioritising being good parents, but I think it's also important to prioritise yourself in terms of self-trust and your relationship along the way.
And that might be getting a hobby together.
We hear all these things.
I'm not a relationship expert, but the importance of date nights, the importance of having time to talk about things other than the kids, which is really tricky when you have kids and they're demanding on your time and who's doing what drop off.
But again, it comes back to what are you prioritizing?
And of course you want to prioritize the kids.
But also in order to be there for the kids.
If you have a really strong foundation, they're going to see that.
That's going to create in them this sense of, oh, I want to emulate what my parents had.
And then again, it just all has this beautiful follow on benefit.
One of the ways I think about it and I'd love your take on this is the thing that stays with you for the entirety of your life, even as your identity changes, changes or the roles in life change, you know from whether it's your job or being a parent, or whatever it might be, the thing that stays the same, I believe, are your values right.
So if you can really tune into what are those values that represent the person you know yourself to be let's say, using mine as an example integrity curiosity, compassion I believe that as long as you're living those values as much as you can each and every single day, it kind of insulates you away from these identity changes.
Because let's say your children leave home and I'm not looking forward to that, right?
Just to be clear.
How old are the kids now?
15 and 12.
Oh, it's coming maybe soon-ish.
Yeah, I'm happy to say it's not coming.
But, you know, I just love them and I love hanging out with them.
I love doing stuff with them.
I honestly can't imagine my life at all whether or not in the house with us.
I just can't.
But of course, it's likely to happen at some point.
I believe that if you really tune into those values and you are living with those values even, let's say, the kids leave and they're doing something else, but you're still able to show up as the person you know yourself to be.
I think that really insulates you from these ups and downs when your role in life changes.
What's your take on that?
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There's a question that often comes up, which has actually come up twice in the last two days.
And it's if we're living in this world, where we are so influenced by the world around us and the self-doubt and the who are we really?
And actually there's an analogy that I need to bring and physically demonstrate, because I end up referencing it so frequently.
But OK, so Rangan, imagine I have two glasses of water here.
They're clear glasses.
They're full of water to the very top.
Now, I also have a ping pong table tennis ball, and then I have a golf ball over here.
In one of the glasses, if I put that table tennis ball on the top, what happens to the water?
The ping pong ball?
The ping pong ball.
Table tennis ping pong.
It floats?
It floats.
And the water is unchanged, mostly.
Golf ball, much heavier.
If I drop that into the water on the other side, what's going to happen?
It's going to sink, and water's going to start falling out.
Yeah, it's going to be very messy.
So if I ever do that demonstration, I should bring a towel.
Note to self.
So this is how we think about a lack of self-trust or self-doubt rather.
Self-doubt, which is when we doubt our capacity, our worthiness, who are we beyond our identity.
These doubts are not necessarily unhealthy.
They don't mean that we're broken.
It's about how we choose to respond to them.
If we see them as that ping pong ball, that tennis ball, we know that they're there, but it's floating, it doesn't affect our identity.
We can choose to process them if we need to, or just push them aside if they're not relevant to us.
And this is what we find those who are the happiest and the most successful in terms of trusting themselves.
They do this really well.
They actually don't focus on eliminating the thoughts and the doubts.
They lean into who they are, acknowledge that, okay, I have a thought, but that is not my reality.
I don't have to accept it.
You are not your thoughts.
You don't have to accept your feelings.
You can process them, right?
So that's the ideal state.
We call it light self-doubt.
Doesn't become internalized.
On the other hand, that golf ball is heavy internalized self-doubt.
And the worst part is that we lose, we lost some of the water when we dropped that in.
We lose a part of ourselves when we're living with that doubt and we think it's who we are because again, that pot has shrunk.
Now what happens if I grab a spoon and I ever so gently or chopsticks, if you're really good with them, and I take out that golf ball.
So now the doubt has been removed.
Has the water magically been replaced?
No.
No, we've lost a part of ourselves.
And so some people will go through this process of rebuilding who they are, eliminating the doubt, or rather knowing it's there but not internalizing it.
But then they still don't know who they are.
And this is almost like what we're talking about with.
When the kids leave, the parents have to go through this process of rediscovery.
Do you know what my answer to that is?
What?
Do you want to fill that up?
Go back.
That is fundamentally who you are.
And then you need to make sure that it's not just a professed value.
It's not just something that you say you want to be.
It's how you're actually living your life.
Yeah.
Being a parent is what you do.
It's not who you are.
Beautifully said.
And if you think about this logically, if you stand back, it's kind of obvious, because there was a time in your life where you weren't a parent.
So if being a parent is the totality of who you are, then who the hell were you before you were a parent?
There was an essence to who you are as a human before these roles, right?
And you wanna take it all the way back.
I think I said this to Henry Shookman when he was on.
He's a Zen master who's got the most wonderful voice and this beautiful meditation app called The Way, which I pretty much do every morning when I wake up.
And I think I said to Henry that you know the essence of who you are.
You can go super deep on that.
Because, you know, I can call you Sade, you can call me Rangan.
But I don't know what age or what day after you were born, you were called Sade.
I don't know what day I was called Rangan.
It may have been the fifth day or the sixth day.
I don't know.
If the totality of who I am is Rangan, who was I for those five days before I got the name?
There was an essence to me.
Now that's super deep, right?
And super spiritual.
But I love thinking like that because I think it really speaks to this idea.
There is an essence to who we are, And I think that is one of the ways you get away from these identity shifts.
I mean, you write about it in the book the risk of a single identity.
But you can actually just go really upstream and go.
Well, who is it that you actually are when you take away all these labels?
It's who we were before we got here.
And in my view, who will be after we leave here.
And as you said, it's this very spiritual realm, but it's essence.
It's beautiful.
The essence.
And I think the beautiful thing about that as well is, especially with the parenting example, when you have kids move out, when you're going through that process, that re-identification of like who am I?
Who was I before?
You need to acknowledge also you're fundamentally changed because you had kids.
For sure.
You have developed incredible qualities and attributes as a result of that.
And so you don't have to feel like you're locked into whoever you were before.
It's almost like this process.
How can you?
Because again, when you're a parent, there is some degree of a pot, because you're a parent, you have other lives that you are responsible for.
So there's some element, you can't just be like, you know what, bye kids, I'm gonna move to Africa tomorrow, you can stay.
It doesn't work like that.
There are some limitations in terms of responsibility.
You can go and repot yourself, replant yourself outside.
That's such a beautiful idea.
It's this constant reinvention through life, right?
So the essence of you perhaps is going to stay the same.
But as you go through life, you can reinvent all these different transition points.
So what perhaps could you not do whilst you were a parent?
There's an opportunity now to perhaps follow that passion, do that thing.
You know what I mean?
It's not going to be the same.
But I think that's where we fall into traps in life in general.
And I think that plays into self that when we think things are gonna stay the same, life is a constant state of evolution and change right.
It's always.
I think one of the reasons we get stuck and struggle is when we want everything to stay the same.
I mean, the only constant in life is change.
That's the only thing we know.
So the better you get at dealing with change, the better you're gonna get at life.
Exactly.
Okay, you're making the case in this podcast and in your new book that self-trust lies at the heart of, frankly everything good in our lives.
And you're saying that there are four attributes that make up self-trust.
We've just gone through the first one, which is acceptance, which is all about self-esteem and your worth and your value.
Let's now go to two, three and four.
Let's do it.
Let's move to number two.
So the second element of self-trust, and when this is low, this is where self-doubt creeps in.
This is related to a competence type of self-doubt, which answers the question, can I do this?
Can I actually do this thing?
What does that mean?
Do I have the skills, the ability, the resources?
Can I learn what I need to learn?
So it relates to the psychological trait of self-efficacy, which is actually what we were talking about earlier, where when you take the action, you develop the proof point, you build that sense of hey, I can do this.
That's your self-efficacy increasing, which increases the confidence that makes you more likely to do the thing again.
So that's how that's connected.
And self-efficacy is that fundamental belief of I can do it.
I can set a goal and achieve that goal.
I can... start a business and do what I need to do for that business to succeed.
Even if something doesn't go well, I can figure out how to get back on track.
So that's what the second attribute relates to.
Now, if someone is struggling with agency, we call it agency because the trait is self-efficacy.
But in order to improve or strengthen that trait, we need to tap into the psychological attribute, the trainable attribute of agency.
Now, when agency is last people feeling like a fraud, especially incompetent people.
So I think we can touch on imposter syndrome in a moment.
But I'll go through each of them quickly and then we can kind of dive into them.
So imposter syndrome comes up a lot.
The belief of, okay, I don't deserve to be where I am.
People think I'm smarter or more capable than I really truly am.
We also see a lot of comparison in the form of comparing yourself to other people's skills and abilities.
That person is much better at that than I am.
That person has them further ahead than I am.
I'm falling behind.
And that leads us to never feel like we have done enough or that our skills are enough.
That's all under agency.
Well, so agency and acceptance.
Actually, they call them caravans, in the sense that a lot of them will rise and fall together.
We find that agency and acceptance when we've done our own studies of over 2000 people.
They tend to rise and fall together.
Yeah, you can see what, even just if you think about comparison for a minute.
And again just to make sure everyone's following the first attribute of self-trust is acceptance.
The second one is agency.
When I think about comparison, I think about acceptance first.
And the reason I do and this is why I believe that acceptance might be the highest one of all, and again that's a personal bias is because I found in my own life that I would compare and make myself feel bad when I didn't feel enough in who I was.
Yes.
Because that's when it bothers you, right?
That's when the comparison can turn into envy.
That's when the comparison can turn into jealousy.
But when you feel enough, when you've worked on this acceptance attribute and there's kind of loads of tools in the book to help people do that, if you feel enough in who you are, other people's success doesn't affect you.
It's not a reflection that you're no good.
And I love in that chapter or the multiple chapters.
At the start of the book on acceptance You say a lack of acceptance shows up in four ways.
A pressure to prove, the likability trap, the shrinking syndrome, and schadenfreude cycle.
When you don't feel enough in who you are, it does show up in those ways.
And I think people will hear that and be able to go, oh yeah, that's me or that's me.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah.
Let's explore them.
You're right.
This is really juicy stuff.
So we found in our work with especially high performers.
So most of our work is with people who are already competent.
They're competent and they're achieving something in their lives, whether they're really good parents or really good creatives or really good entrepreneurs.
But it does apply across the board.
The very first pattern that we see with people who are struggling with acceptance is the pressure to prove.
They constantly feel like they need to prove themselves to be worthy.
And so they keep pushing, and they keep pushing and they never feel like they've done enough, because they don't feel like they're enough.
So that's the first.
The second is the likability trap.
Because we have outsourced our sense of self-worth.
We need other people to approve of us in order to feel like we're acceptable.
We need to be liked by others, which can lead us to sacrifice our desires, what we truly want.
We might say yes when we really mean no.
We might prioritize everyone and everything else.
To the detriment of what we truly want or need.
And then the third is the shrinking syndrome.
This is where if you struggle with acceptance, you also fear failure.
Not because of the failure itself, but because of what you make it mean about you.
You internalize it.
I failed, therefore I am a failure.
We might fear failure, not because of the failure itself, but what other people will think about us or say about us?
They will reject us.
And fascinatingly, social rejection is considered, or rather processed, in the same way that physical pain is in the brain.
They have the same underlying processing system, which means the brain is wired to protect us.
And so if we're accessing the same parts of the brain responsible for physical pain, we see it as emotionally painful.
So the brain wants to protect us from that.
How does it do it?
By magnifying everything that could go wrong, making you feel like you're not enough, so you don't try.
And we call this the shrinking syndrome, where you shrink back your potential because you are afraid of taking the step and just in case it goes badly.
You make the pot smaller.
You shrink your pot.
And then the fourth, which is a very interesting one.
This is how I know when I'm struggling with acceptance.
I do want to mention as well.
So there's something a little bit more complex that I don't share often, but I know that you Rangan, and I know your audience will probably appreciate the nuance here.
All of these psychological traits and the behavioral capacities, we have what's called a baseline.
So if I were to, and they study this by, it's called experience sampling.
Where they would get someone, for example, multiple times a day to do a little assessment to determine where they are on each of these, because it fluctuates.
If you haven't eaten in the morning, you might find that you're a little bit, you know, things.
So they will do it multiple times a day over a number of weeks.
And then they average your responses, which means that they're eliminating the seasonality, but the the conditional effects of
I'm tired.
I had a bad day, et cetera.
So we have a baseline, but these can still fluctuate.
So I have worked really hard at my acceptance to improve it.
And now I think my baseline is pretty good.
If I get criticism, I'm okay at brushing it off and rationalizing it.
I don't let it internalize too much.
But if I am around certain people, I still feel the same things that I used to before.
Certain people will trigger, you know, like we all have someone in our lives.
It's a little bit intimidating.
We feel like we can't do anything right by them.
Maybe it's a parent.
Maybe it is a friend.
Maybe it's someone you meet professionally.
So you can still dip.
And so for me I know that my acceptance is at risk when I get a kind of satisfaction from seeing someone else.
For me, that is my moment of oh, this is bad.
It's called schadenfreude.
It's a German word.
And it essentially means when you relish in other people's misfortune.
And so if you find that you get a lot of enjoyment, or if you know someone who gets a lot of enjoyment out of pointing out someone else's flaws, it's probably because they really lack their own acceptance.
Yeah, that's such a good point, because when you accept yourself for who you are, you don't.
You're happy when people succeed.
Exactly.
You celebrate their success.
Exactly.
Well, here's a question for you.
Okay.
Because you're a real expert in this space.
You built up this knowledge base.
You help all kinds of top companies with their leadership and how can they perform better?
How can they increase their ability to trust themselves, etc., etc.?
?
But of course, as we record this, you have a massive book launch coming up.
Yeah.
Okay.
So how do you feel about the book?
How do you feel about the fact that when a book like this comes out in the world and you appear on several podcasts, some people are going to like it?
Some people are going to make comments about you and about the content, and I'm sure you want this book to be successful.
As does anybody.
As does any author.
If it's not successful or the launch doesn't live up to your expectations of what you hope and think it's going to be, how do you feel about yourself?
Okay, a few things I want to touch on.
My brain was going on overdrive because this has been a journey for me.
Anyone who struggles with self-acceptance, whenever they're putting anything out into the world...
It also when you struggle with agency.
Same thing, because you don't feel like what you're putting out is of the standard that it could be.
We struggle with what if, what if, what if.
So in fact, in the book, at the end of the part on acceptance.
So how I structure it is there's the four parts and then the ways they show up and then what we can do to strengthen that attribute.
And then at the end of every attribute part I share a more higher level paradigm shift that can help us with that attribute.
The reason why acceptance gets to us is because it's I, me, my.
What do they think about me?
How am I coming across?
We become so egocentric in a negative sense that it derails us.
So a beautiful reframe is, okay, how do I self-forget?
How do I make this not about me?
How do I focus on being of value, being of service, being of impact is not I mean.
What does success mean right?
If this book is not successful by other people's measures, is it having an impact?
Are the people who are reading it thinking, wow, I needed this.
This is helping me.
I tried this one thing and I feel so much better.
For me, that is my measure of success.
It is impact.
And it's because I'm self-forgetting.
I am choosing to self-forget, choosing to detach actively detach from the me and making about other people.
And I think this is such a valuable paradigm shift that we can use if ever we are struggling with how am I coming across?
What if I'm going to fail?
What does this mean about me?
Put you aside, leave yourself at the door.
Who are you helping? someone else feel interesting?
How can you elevate other people and help?
And so just a side note, this idea of helping others is so powerful that when you, for example, hold the door open for someone, or when you pick up a napkin for someone that they dropped, you get a shot of oxytocin and it feels fantastic.
It's called a pro-social high.
And it has this beautiful undoing effect where, even if you felt terrible, you can suddenly feel happy.
Not only that, you get the shot of oxytocin.
They get a shot of oxytocin, which is a connection hormone neurotransmitter.
Not only that, anyone who sees that gets the same.
Yeah.
So you're going into this book launch with a sense of, Being of service to others.
Completely.
Everything we do in our business, in our lives, service.
So you know how you mentioned your values?
Yeah.
Mine are very similar.
My number one is care.
My number two is compassion.
My number three is service.
Yeah, I love it.
So that's all I hope for.
So I love that.
And I totally resonate with that.
Okay, I'm taking us off track, right?
There's four attributes of self-trust.
First is acceptance, which is to do with your worth, your value, your self-esteem.
Second, which you touched on, what you've gone through is agency.
You know, can I handle this?
This is about self-efficacy, the belief that you can do things.
Yes.
And we see imposter syndrome.
We see comparison, but comparison not in terms of, oh, you are more worthy than I am more.
You have more skill than I have.
I can't start because look at so using podcasting as an example.
A lot of people want to start a podcast.
They look at other people who are well ahead of them and think I could never do that.
Because they're so far ahead.
And so you hold yourself back because you don't think that you're going to be as good.
But we all know that everyone starts somewhere.
And you need to embrace the messy imperfection of the doing before you get there.
So that's what we see when it comes to a lack of agency.
We also see the whole hesitation, the occupying yourself with preparing and researching and planning everything and feeling like you're doing something and being productive but you're not.
You're just, you're like that swan, right?
Graceful on the surface, running like this and not actually moving anywhere.
As someone who's been podcasting for eight years now, do you know how you get good at podcasting?
By doing the podcasting.
By podcasting.
Not by thinking about podcasting or thinking about your logo or thinking about things.
Just start.
The things we distract ourselves with to feel like we're being productive.
Now, if you were to go back and watch or listen to the very you did.
How would you feel?
Would you cringe?
I would probably cringe.
I probably would.
Not probably.
I'm 99.9% certain I would cringe.
Well, you know what they say.
If you're not cringing when you go back and watch the first thing you did, you waited too long.
You waited too long.
Because let's say you're waiting till you're not at that cringe stage.
In that year, you could have actually started.
Made it cringeworthy.
And then imagine how good you would be at the end of the 12 months, as opposed to waiting the 12 months and then starting when you think you're ready and then having to go through the cringe.
We all cringe.
When I think about our social media journey.
So quick little backstory.
COVID happened.
I had just left a 10 year corporate career.
I started my career in the legal industry and was so plagued with self-doubt that I was physically sick.
I made myself physically anxious.
I was vomiting during the day from the stress.
That's not healthy.
Then I thought, I can't do this to myself.
Moved into banking and finance.
Why banking and finance?
I just needed something other than the law.
I didn't know what I was doing in that industry either.
Really struggled.
But then I found my footing.
But in any case, so that was 10 years ago.
I then left and a week later we were planning on relocating overseas and expanding the business that I was working on with my husband Faisal, in the last couple of years while I was in corporate, which is similar to what we're doing now working with organizations, speaking at events training, et cetera.
And then COVID happens in that week.
So suddenly like we'd already sold our couch.
Why I say that we'd sold our couch is you don't sell your couch until you're certain you're going.
So like visas are sorted, flights are there, COVID happens.
Suddenly we have no business.
All of our clients are now postponing or it's indefinitely on ice.
No one knows what's going on.
One week, two weeks, a month, two months.
Who knows how long it'll last?
Our business was helping people.
How do we help people when we can't go to the companies where they are?
Well, we reach their people.
Where are their people?
Well, the whole world's kind of in lockdown.
Let's go to where they're going to be, which is on their devices.
Let's create video content.
So I had to create 40 pieces of video.
Well, I didn't have to, but I chose to create 40 pieces of video content in one day.
I just changed my outfit and my hair.
But I had these little short videos, which meant I had 40 days of content and I couldn't back down.
And it was the best thing I could have done.
Because if I had waited...
Or rather, if I had posted something and looked at how it was performing and compared it to other people's, I would have thought, oh my goodness, they are so much better than me.
They're more articulate.
Their video editing is better.
I would have been feeling like I can't do what they do, which is agency, and I would have given up.
I also, anyone knows that it takes a while to get any kind of traction when you do anything.
You don't see gains the first week at the gym.
You do not see gains the first week when you're on social media.
But day 21, one of the videos hit the algorithm. exploded.
By six weeks, we had 225,000 followers on TikTok.
I did it on TikTok because I didn't know anyone there.
And I wasn't afraid of what people would say, what my family would say, what my work colleagues would say.
Exploded.
When I got to that point, I was no longer focusing on the outcome.
I was focusing on the process, the process of posting every day.
If I was focusing on the end goal, I never would have done it.
And so it goes back to this idea of who are you becoming through the process?
And how are you building that self-trust, getting the wins, getting the evidence that shows you, I can do this?
So when we bring it back to agency, people who struggle with agency wait to feel ready.
They wait till they have the skill, the capability, the knowledge.
But you don't get those things until you try.
And this is why you mentioned something like this earlier, this idea of people know what they want.
Sometimes they know how to get what they want, but they don't do it.
There is a knowing-doing gap.
This is a term coined by Pfeffer and Sutton.
Knowing is not doing.
And when you can bridge that gap, amazing things happen.
And do you know what bridges that gap?
Self-trust.
We call it big trust because there are these four elements.
Yeah.
And there's a beautiful story that comes from Elizabeth Gilbert.
So the author, Elizabeth Gilbert.
She wrote Eat Pray Love, one of her well-known books, which was turned into a movie with Julia Roberts.
And she was reporting or writing about how when she was writing that, that's her memoir.
So you'd think writing a memoir, it's your life.
It should be. writing it, I just got stuck.
I didn't know how to progress because she said she had this mantra of this sucks running through her head constantly.
Paragraph after paragraph, page after page, it was just not good enough.
She'd throw it away.
And then she had this moment of clarity and she thought, hold on a second.
I didn't promise the universe that I would write brilliantly.
I just promised the universe that I would write.
So how can I just show up and write?
And that is exactly what she started doing.
And then that book went on to become an incredible bestseller, turned into the movie.
She was on Oprah.
We sometimes, when we lack agency, we feel like we have to have it all figured out before we start.
We feel like we have to write the bestseller and we haven't even put pen to paper.
So how are you going to take the step to not create the book, but be the writer who shows up every day and writes a line or a paragraph?
How are you going to show up every day and be the person who embodies the qualities that you want to have, the to-be qualities and just figures it out as you go?
You don't have to be perfect.
You just have to start.
Tell us about the third attribute, which is autonomy.
Okay.
Autonomy is the third attribute.
I'm going to show you, or tell you, what it sounds like, or rather it looks like when someone doesn't have autonomy, and then it will make a lot more sense.
Okay.
So we see people with low autonomy have four common characteristics. traits, behavioral patterns.
The first one is they complain a lot.
They are constantly complaining about everything.
The weather, their family, their job, the economy, everything feels like it's out of their control.
The second one is that they tend to be very resentful of other people, of other things.
Everyone has life easier than I do.
Why does this always happen to me?
That person doesn't deserve that.
I do.
So there's complaining, there's resent.
The third one is they tend to blame.
Nothing is ever their fault.
It's everyone else's fault.
It's my parents' fault for not putting me in music classes sooner, so I could have been a famous musician.
It's my school's fault for not providing me with an environment to do X, Y Z.
It's the government's fault for never taking ownership.
And then the fourth.
One behavioral pattern that we see here is they tend to dwell on past hurts and the way they have been mistreated in the past, which they very well may have been.
Maybe they were handed a really unfair hand of cards, but they will keep ruminating on this and sharing this story with anyone who will listen.
And the first time you hear someone sharing something like this, you think, gosh, that's horrible.
That's terrible.
That person has had such a difficult life.
By the 30th time, you realize, okay, they're keeping themselves stuck.
I get it.
Their life was incredibly objectively, maybe very difficult, or maybe not.
Maybe just the story they're telling.
But they are unknowingly keeping themselves stuck in this.
So what does this all mean?
What does it relate to?
It's the trait of what's called an internal locus of control versus an external locus of control.
Locus comes from the Latin loci, meaning location.
So it's where you place control in your life.
When you have an external locus of control, you feel like life is happening to you.
You have no control over everything.
You feel like other people have some kind of unfair advantage.
You feel like the victim, the endless victim.
And the worst part is that you enjoy that feeling because it means you don't have to take ownership.
Not only that, you often get a lot of validation from the people around you.
Oh no, that's terrible.
Poor you.
Can I help you?
So this kind of sympathy that we get not only feels good, but also keeps us stuck.
Yeah.
Because we feel like, who am I if I'm not the one complaining and people are helping me?
But you also repel the people that could actually help you, because when they try, you're not open to it.
You say, you don't understand me.
And then you've created this echo chamber and attracted other people who are also the same.
Yeah.
You did a video recently actually on co-rumination.
Yes.
When you, I mean, first of all, I totally agree about complaining.
I think if you're someone who complains regularly, you do not realize how toxic that is for your life.
The way I look at it, the way I articulate it, is that I say it's almost like an internal form of stress.
You are literally making yourself a victim to everything.
I get that things happen in your life that you didn't want, that you wouldn't choose.
That may be unfair.
That may be unfair, but if you're constantly complaining, it's pretty safe bet that your mindset in life is holding you back.
When we look at a lot of the studies on complaining.
So the brain cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is imagined, which is why visualization is so incredibly powerful.
When you're complaining, what studies have found is that you are reactivating the same parts of your brain that were active during that situation.
There you go.
And so you're reliving it in vivid detail, which only makes you feel worse.
It may feel good temporarily, but you're not then empowered to do anything about it.
And not only this, the mind is wired or the brain is wired to magnify what you focus on because the way the brain and the mind kind of interact.
And if you're complaining, what are you focusing on?
The negativity.
You become a negativity magnet without realizing it.
The key is constantly.
Everyone complains to a degree.
Exactly.
But if you have a constant repeated pattern of this, it is one of the worst things you can do.
It's funny.
You know I've posted a few times about complaining and it seems to really connect with people.
And you can often get some really vocal comments of people really pushing back.
Well, they're just revealing a lack of autonomy themselves.
Exactly.
Again, and it's not saying that life isn't difficult for some people.
No.
But regularly complaining will not help you.
It will keep you stuck.
It will make you feel as though you're a victim to the world, that you have no autonomy, that your choices don't make a difference.
And my favourite exercise about complaining, I'd love to hear yours.
My favourite one is for seven days see if you can catch yourself every time you make a complaint and then See if you can reframe that complaint either to action.
So you do something about it or to gratitude.
Oh, I love it.
I love it.
OK, so the gratitude one is so powerful.
And I think what I've had to help people with because they say when when they feel like complaining.
So I actually used to wear a rubber band on my wrist.
And every time I had a complaining thought, I often used to complain in my head.
It wasn't usually to other people, but I would snap it.
I would use that as my reminder.
Oh, I'm complaining in my head or I've got a negative thought.
I'd snap it and I'd shift to gratitude.
But what I found and what other people find is when they're in that state it's really hard to be grateful.
And so I now say, OK, well, what are you grateful that you don't have in your life?
Because you can be grateful for what you have, but sometimes it's important to be grateful for what you don't have.
I am not sleeping on the streets.
I don't have a lot of drama in my life.
I don't have, and some people say, oh well, don't focus on the things that you don't want, because they'll come true.
I think in this case, when you're already in a negative emotional state, sometimes trying to flip into a positive one, the brain is smart.
It knows the difference.
It's called emotional incongruence.
You can't necessarily go from a highly intense negative state into a really positive one, because it'll resist.
But you can shift slowly and go, okay, what am I grateful that I don't have?
And then when you're feeling that expansiveness, that gratitude brings, then okay, what am I grateful that I do have.
Yeah.
There's a section in the book where you write about autonomy, where you say every obstacle you face is one of two things a reason to grow or a reason to give up.
The choice is yours.
That kind of speaks to complaining, doesn't it?
Completely.
You can either go with something I can do.
I'm just going to give up.
You know, my husband did that.
Or, you know, it's kind of it ain't going to help you.
The choice is yours, though.
Yeah.
Nothing changes if you choose to do nothing about it.
There's this analogy that I love to share in the book, and I wasn't aware of it before.
So cows and bison are quite similar in terms of you know, they're cousins in terms of the animal kingdom.
Fairly similar, but they have a very, very different response to storms.
Now, of course, cows are domesticated, bison are wild, so probably part of it.
But when there's a big storm coming in, cows have been observed to huddle together and And often they'll huddle under a tree or they'll walk away from the storm.
Now, what happens when you're walking away from a storm?
You often end up getting the brunt of the storm when it finally catches up to you.
Whereas bison do something remarkably different.
They have been observed to walk towards a storm, which counterintuitively means that they get through it quicker and they often miss the intensity of the storm.
And I love this because I mean I kind of wish it was a different animal, because we don't like saying you have a cow mindset, because people have a resistance against it.
Don't call me a cow.
But the idea is that it really does embody this idea of autonomy.
Bad things happen in life.
There are a lot of unfair things that happen.
There are challenges, there are failures, there's untimely death, there's grief, there's sickness illness, whatever it is.
Do you choose what next?
Or do you say, why me?
And do you run in the other direction and then have to deal with the brunt of it later?
And I feel like complaining is that embodiment of that cow mindset where it's too hard.
I don't want to deal with it.
I prefer easy.
And it is easier to complain about something than to do something about it.
Especially when, okay, let's say you cannot do anything about it.
But if you choose to complain, you're only making it worse for yourself.
So we always say, if you think, why me?
Shift to, okay, what now?
Why me to what now can be one of the most powerful reframes.
You remind yourself there's always a step you can take.
And it comes down to do you focus on what you can control or do you focus on what you cannot?
When you focus on what you can't, you are literally powerless to do anything about it.
So how do you feel?
Powerless.
When you focus on what you can control, which ultimately is your thoughts, your reactions, your actions, you suddenly feel powerful because you realize hey, there's actually a lot I could do in this realm.
And then that changes how you are approaching the external realm.
I think that's one of the reasons why regularly embracing discomfort is so beneficial.
I love that you bring this up.
Because you're exercising your autonomy, aren't you?
It's not everyone's cup of tea, but some people love cold showers or cold plunges, right?
Yeah.
Is it your cup of tea?
Yeah, I don't mind it at all.
My wife, for example, no way in hell is she interested in a cold shower or a cold plunge.
I am, right?
But I'm also interested.
For example, one of my sort of discomfort rules for life is barring exceptional circumstances, I will always take the stairs.
Brilliant.
You know, in a world where we're all conditioned to comfort, I think one of the reasons we feel a lack of autonomy is because many of our lives have become so comfortable.
Where we can literally, you know, if your job allows you to do this, you can literally get up in your just on your phone order.
You want a coffee, go on your phone, order.
You can literally have a sort of life that, for 99 of your evolution, would have been deemed ridiculous.
And so I think people are almost training a lack of autonomy by how comfortable our lives have become.
I think also it's exacerbated by the fact that there is a lot going on in the world.
And it's easy, when we focus on how little we have control over, to start to feel like I have no personal influence in this.
So there's two elements that really conflate each other, or rather sorry, they compound when they're combined.
The ease with which we can live our lives, and then the fact that there's a lot in the world happening that we cannot do anything about.
Can we touch on this idea of discomfort?
Please.
Because I think it is so incredibly powerful.
A lot of people who do not trust themselves see discomfort as a verdict that they shouldn't be doing the thing.
I'm not out for this.
This is my sign that this is not for me.
They're too quick to judge because they haven't conditioned themselves with that tolerance for the uncomfortable.
But what we know when they're looking at brain scans?
The only way we grow is actually when we're facing something a little bit uncomfortable.
Discomfort is a sign that we are expanding our possibilities in terms of what's happening in our brain.
We can rewire new pathways when we face discomfort enough times and then we find that discomfort is not as uncomfortable.
It's just like when you go to the gym if you only ever weightlift five kilograms, you're never going to grow your muscles.
You have to progressively increase that and experience that additional discomfort to then grow that muscle right.
You're literally like tearing your muscle and then rebuilding it.
It's uncomfortable.
It can be painful.
Same thing applies.
Now, when it comes to discomfort, what is actually fascinating is we often hear a lot of people who have low autonomy will feel really unlucky.
They feel like everyone else is, oh, that person is so lucky.
That person doesn't deserve their success.
They're just lucky.
And we hear this a lot.
My life is so hard.
Everyone else has so much luck.
When we actually look at it, OK, we need to acknowledge luck is a factor.
There are entire research areas dedicated to studying luck.
And in fact, in one study they found 60 percent of managers attributed their success to being in the right place at the right time, or the wrong place at the wrong time.
Right.
Luck is a factor.
But again, if we are waiting for the luck to happen and feel like it happens to everyone else, we're keeping ourselves stuck.
So there is this concept called, I can't remember the person who coined the term.
It's called the luck surface area, right?
Luck surface area is the amount of luck you make yourself available to receive.
It's almost like, are you becoming discoverable to luck?
And how do we do that?
By expanding our tolerance for discomfort.
I love that.
Expanding your tolerance for discomfort, doing more of the hard things, because the more you do the hard things, the easier the hard things become.
And then the more opportunities you have to capitalize on opportunities.
So there's a story from Christopher Nolan, director.
I love a good story.
I hope you're enjoying the story.
Yeah, I love your stories.
Christopher Nolan is iconic film director and he has been responsible for films like Inception and Dunkirk and Oppenheimer.
And he also has this reputation of being really lucky with the weather.
People will often say, oh, Nolan's just so lucky with the weather.
And then when Christopher Nolan is interviewed, he responds and says I'm actually incredibly unlucky with the weather.
He resists that.
He says I'm not lucky with the weather, but we have just made a commitment that we go out there and we shoot, no matter what the weather is.
And when you do that, remarkable things can happen.
Now, this paid off when they were filming one of the scenes in Oppenheimer.
I haven't seen it, but I know the story.
So they were filming the first test of a nuclear detonation.
And they were out there.
The film crew was there.
And there was this huge, dark, ominous storm that was rolling in.
And they were ready and they were prepped and they recorded it.
And they created this piece of cinematic magic because they were there.
Now, I think this story is valuable for a few reasons.
They didn't wait for perfect conditions.
They were always there ready, which meant they were building their tolerance for the discomfort of not knowing what they're going to shoot with.
That also meant that when the opportunity presented itself, look at this storm, they were ready.
They had the skill.
They knew how to handle that discomfort because it probably wasn't uncomfortable anymore.
And they were able to capitalize on that.
Their luck surface area had expanded.
And so when we encourage people to expand their sense of autonomy, focus on what they can control.
Part of that is make yourself uncomfortable.
Try the things.
Go and meet the person.
Ask them for something where you know they're going to say no.
Get rejected.
Do all the things that feel uncomfortable.
And so we talk about something called a micro bravery.
How do you actually build your luck surface area?
Practice micro bravery.
Keep it really small.
Keep it really low risk.
And just put yourself out there and try something new.
Do something that makes you uncomfortable.
Maybe it's going and a lot of people have social anxiety.
So maybe it's going and just saying hi to someone at the cafe and asking how their day is.
If that makes you uncomfortable, try it.
Even if that person says, I don't want to talk to you.
Fantastic, you got a tick on the board of discomfort.
Try it again the next day.
Until that thing is no longer uncomfortable and then up the ante a little bit.
Those who succeed are those who are happy being uncomfortable.
Yeah, I love that story.
There's also this phrase, isn't there, in English, you know, you make your own luck.
Yeah.
Right.
So I don't know, you just mentioned that story of maybe someone who's nervous to talk to others.
Right.
And they're constantly looking around again.
Man, that guy is always meeting the coolest people.
He's so lucky.
He's so lucky.
But maybe that's because that guy's constantly talking and he talks to the barista and he says hi to people in coffee shops, or whatever it might be.
So his surface area for finding that luck is being abused.
He's not lucky, he's putting himself out there more, so it appears that he's lucky.
Which again goes back to the plant pot, and how narrow is that container with which we live?
Can we broaden that container?
You mentioned stories and I know we're trying our best to get to the fourth attribute, which you've not got to yet.
But I want to make sure we tell this story because it's a beautiful story from your book.
And it's a beautiful story, I think, from your TED Talk, which is due with Andre Agassi.
Oh, yeah.
So can you tell the Andre Agassi story and tell us how it fits into Big Trust?
Absolutely.
I just want to quickly share, just for anyone interested, that idea of the micro braveries.
Why that's so powerful is it's called systematic desensitization.
It's how anyone gets over any fear. you start small.
If you fear spiders and you go through this process, they'll show you a spider on the wall, a picture of it.
Next step will be a spider in a cage on the other side.
Next stage will be the spider on a cage on the table.
Next stage will be the spider on your arm.
You're systematically desensitizing yourself to something that you fear, which is what this idea of discomfort is.
We don't like it.
We fear it.
We avoid it.
Okay.
Andre Agassi, I love this story.
His memoir, Open, is fantastic.
It's from that.
So this is back in the And he was so deeply ashamed of it because he was known for having the hair.
So now he's suddenly a late teen who's very visible.
He's playing these games.
He's really talented.
He's got a lot of promise.
And he's so insecure about what people will say.
His entire focus was his image.
So he arrives at the also.
OK, so actually, let me take it back a bit.
So he's so embarrassed that he starts wearing a hairpin.
So a lot of the time when you look at these images of him from kind of the 80s 90s, he has this big mane of hair.
I remember super well.
Yeah.
And it was a hairpiece because of his insecurity.
So the breaking point comes in 1990 at the Grand Slam finals.
I think it was a Grand Slam.
It's the finals.
He's made it.
I think it was the French Open final.
Oh, French Open.
Sorry, it was the French Open 1995.
That's coming up.
That was the Grand Slam.
French Open 1990.
The night before the finals, catastrophe strikes.
He washes his hairpiece with the wrong conditioner or shampoo and it actually starts to fall apart and disintegrate in his hands.
Now, this is a crisis for him because he needs the hairpiece for the next day.
So him and his brother try to salvage it together with 20 bobby pins.
But it's not in super secure shape.
He says that night he prayed, not for a win, but for his hairpiece to stay on.
Wow.
So now he comes to the next day.
And how do you think he's performing?
He's completely preoccupied.
He's insecure.
He's worried about this hairpiece and how he's going to be perceived.
And he loses three sets to one.
I'm surprised he actually won a set.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If he's trying to play...
The world's watching.
It's probably been televised to tens of millions around the world.
And if he's thinking about this can't fall off, right?
I can't have anyone seeing my heads.
I mean it's amazing, because what's amazing about that story is that, going back to the start of this conversation, we can think that this kind of stuff only applies to us regular mortals who are, you know, we're trying to achieve better at work, or we're trying to get that promotion, or we're trying to start a podcast, whatever it might be.
But Andre Agassi was one of the best tennis players on the planet at that time.
And that I guess lack of self-trust in his image and who he was without his hair was potentially cause him to lose one of the biggest matches of his life.
And it was.
He was the favorite to win.
He had such a good run.
And then suddenly, the day of, he just could not be in the zone because he was completely consumed by this insecurity of what will people think of me?
And the interesting thing is that we kind of do something like this, too.
Of course not with a physical hairpiece, but we hide certain parts of ourselves because we do not believe that we are acceptable as we are.
So we contort, we change, we manipulate how we show up in the world.
We might hold back our ideas.
We might hesitate and overthink.
We might not give people feedback that we know could help them, because we don't want to hurt their feelings because of how then it'll reflect on us.
And then we create this reality where we're so focused on what's called impression management.
How do people see me?
How am I coming across?
That we sabotage our performance in various areas of our lives.
Quick side note how I define peak performance is very different to how it's defined by other people.
A lot of people define it as being at the elite level in whatever field you are.
I define peak performance differently because I think that is so alienating for most of us who are never going to be at the peak top 1.
I define peak performance as operating from your peak state, no matter where you are or who you're with
That means being the best parent you can be.
That means being the kindest that you can to the barista who got your coffee order wrong.
That means showing up with the kind of energy that you want to receive from other people.
That to me is peak performance.
And we sabotage our ability to be that when we are doubting who we are at our core, because we don't have self-trust.
So back to Agassi's story.
So he was devastated, of course, as you would be.
And his girlfriend at the time, Brooke Shields, suggested, why don't you just shave your head?
Just shave your head.
And he said, I couldn't do that.
I'd feel naked.
And she said, no, you wouldn't.
You'd feel liberated.
So he resisted for a while and then eventually he shaved his head.
And then in 1995, he shows up at the Australian Grand Slam final.
He was competing against Pete Sampras.
He was bold and unburdened, and he absolutely dominated, and he won three sets to one.
And in his memoir he writes something along the lines of people say that it was my best performance yet, but I'll always say it was my best bold victory, because for him it was such a moment of just owning who he is.
And when you own who you are, you lose the need to perform for other people.
Yeah.
It's such a powerful story.
And there are so many examples I can think of where we can apply that or use it as an analogy for our lives.
I don't know.
I mean, let's say longevity, for example.
And this kind of plays into identity as well that we were discussing earlier.
But this idea that a lot of people struggle, particularly in the West, with ageing.
Oh, yes.
Right.
Because as you get older, things start to change.
Your looks change.
For some people, their body starts to change.
Their hair changes.
And because we're so attached, because we think or many of us think that who we are is how we look.
That's a huge problem.
Because, as things change, if you're attached to that and you can't grow old gracefully, you're going to have a problem.
You're going to be going out into the world with that sort of mask on, a bit like Agassi.
You're like, I hope people don't notice this.
What can I do to hide it?
And I get it.
I'm not criticising.
It's human to do that.
But I think that Agassi's story is so, so powerful, particularly because he was one of the best tennis players in the world when this happened.
And even he was played with this self-doubt.
It's interesting when you talk about aging, because this is something I've been thinking about a lot.
What I love about this model not only is it science-based, but it applies to so many different realms.
It applies to health and health goals.
It applies to aging.
So I was reflecting on this.
I think one of the reasons or I'm confident that one of the reasons a lot of people struggle with aging is because it challenges their identity, because they're so attached to how they look.
And when we look at these four attributes, it reflects that they don't accept who they are, in spite of how they look right.
So there's this piece of, no, I have to look this way in order to be acceptable.
They could also be thinking or projecting forward and thinking well, can I still do the things that I do now?
Which relates to agency?
They also feel like it's out of their control.
Aging is out of our control.
We cannot control the aging process, which undermines a sense of autonomy.
And then all of that gives them a lot of anxiety, aging anxiety, which then undermines their adaptability.
And so it can bring this whole other element of self-doubt or undermining self-trust at this new life stage.
And we live in a society where Physical appearance unfortunately, is the driver of a lot of things, because people make very quick judgments.
I mean, there are studies that show that when a judge is handing out judgments or if there's a jury, someone who is more attractive will get a lighter sentence.
And they've looked at attractiveness scales objectively.
And so, you know, unfortunately, we live in this kind of world.
I feel like the world would be a lot of a better place if we were all blind, if we couldn't actually see anything.
Hmm, purely from the perspective of no discrimination.
But then someone said yeah, but then people would discriminate based on your voice or something, or the type of words you use.
So, you know, we need to get there.
But it's fascinating, again, how no one is immune to this.
It can happen at any stage.
I always say that self-doubt doesn't disappear with achievement.
It just scales with responsibility.
It just morphs and looks different earlier on in our careers or in our journeys.
It's very much about belonging.
And for Agassi, it was, I need to fit this image that people have of me.
I'm this young athletic guy with hair.
I need to be that.
Yeah, because he was also the big Nike-sponsored athlete.
I remember being at secondary school and pestering my mum to buy the pink Nike Air shoes.
I was like, everyone at school, I wanted them.
Do you know what I mean?
His image was a big part of who he was, or personality.
I guess, his perception of who he was.
It wasn't a big part of who he was, but it's his perception of who he was.
And unfortunately that was probably reinforced by how he showed up in the world, because he was embracing that perception.
And then other people were validating that perception, which made him feel like he had to maintain that for their sakes.
Yeah, but he loses it.
He shaves it off.
He's liberated.
It doesn't matter anymore.
It reminds me of monks, right?
What happens to monks?
Obviously I'm not familiar with every discipline of monks, but it's quite common for many monks to shave their head when they go to the monastery.
And I think I asked, was it Geelong Tubson?
I've had a few monks on the show over the years, and I've asked one of them about the hair.
And I think...
It's this whole idea of, you know, we're trying to go inward.
We're trying to sort of figure out the essence of who we are.
We don't need... Attachment to anything material.
We just try to remove those attachments.
Let's go to the fourth attribute, just so we've covered them all off in this conversation.
I actually want to come back to the Nike, because you mentioned the Nike Air Max 1.
Okay, let's do it.
Okay, really, there's another story.
Again, sorry, I love the stories, but I think they're so memorable.
Yeah, yeah, I love them too.
So 1985... is going through a lot of challenge as a company.
Their stock price is declining.
They've just laid off a huge amount of people.
They are struggling to enter the basketball market.
They needed fresh talent.
So what they decided to do is hold a 24 hour footwear design competition for their internal staff.
And Tinker Hatfield was a corporate architect working for Nike.
He had absolutely zero experience with footwear design, but he entered and he won.
The next day, he's basically told, OK, Tinker, you're now in the shoe design team.
Okay, so he goes in.
Now for his first official shoe design.
He decides to get inspiration from a building that he learned about in architecture school, which is called the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
And this is an inside out building.
So all of the structures, the mechanical structures, the elevators, everything is on the outside by design.
It's a really funky, cool building.
So he gets inspiration from that and he decides to sketch out the Nike footwear.
You know the shoe that he wanted to design.
And he puts a visible air pocket in the heel.
This idea of let's show them what's inside the shoe.
That ended up becoming his first ever design with zero experience as a designer.
It became the Nike Air Max 1, which was absolutely iconic.
Phil Knight claims that it saved Nike.
Tinker had zero experience.
He says that what you come to create is a culmination of everything you've done before.
And why I love that is it's because he never doubted that because he didn't have experience, he wasn't worthy to be there, which would be acceptance.
He didn't doubt that, well, I can't do this.
I don't know how to design, which would be agency.
He didn't focus on things outside of his control.
He just trusted himself.
He showed up with big trust.
And now he created this iconic sneaker.
So this is the power of when we back ourselves in the moments that matter, when we remind ourselves of these four attributes.
And we will get to the fourth one.
And we show up, we call it big trust energy.
It's not a state that you need to aspire to and spend your whole life achieving.
You can actually choose to show up with big trust energy at any point in your life, based on how you choose to just be there in the moment and what you're focusing on.
Love it.
Super powerful.
The fourth trait, adaptability.
We got there.
Thank you everyone listening and watching.
What is it and why is it important?
Okay, so let me ask you a question.
Can you think back to a moment where you had a lot of self-doubt?
A lot of self-doubt and there would have been a particular moment, maybe anxiety, overthinking.
You don't have to tell us what it was, but can you think of that moment?
You can go back as long as you need to.
Yeah, I think so, yeah.
What did it feel like in and on your body?
Just very briefly.
I guess I would say it felt overwhelming.
It felt hollow.
I guess it almost felt like I didn't have any power, like I was powerless.
Undermining autonomy, interesting.
I guess those are things that come to mind.
Now and this is very common when we're in a highly stressful situation where we perceive that there's a potential threat or we've got a lot of that anxiety.
It feels completely overwhelming and it can actually undermine the other attributes.
Now, pause that moment for a moment.
Pause the moment for a moment.
Strip out any emotion from that moment.
So suddenly the emotion is gone.
That heavy weight is gone.
What are you usually left with?
You're not feeling anything in and on your body, but did you have...
Any kind of thoughts that were running through your head?
This is quite hard for me only because I feel that I really do trust myself these days.
So you're a bad case study.
But the reason I'm struggling to answer this is because I feel strongly that this is an area whilst I didn't call it big trust.
Literally, I would say since my dad, I'd have been on this journey.
So it's a good 12 years where I've been excavating my inner world, figuring out why I think the way I do, why certain things make me nervous or used to.
And through taking action and showing myself that I'm capable, time and time again, by embracing discomfort, by doing all these things, I feel like I really do have a sense of trust in myself.
And I think the thing I've found and I don't know if you would agree with this or not, but when you do learn to trust yourself, I feel that life is played on easy mode.
Your experience of life is completely different.
You don't realize how much of your experience of life whether it's your marriage or your job, or comparison track whatever is downstream from the fact that you didn't trust yourself.
You know, you have raised something really important that I'll quickly touch on before I keep going with this one.
So if you're listening and watching along, just pause on that thought for a moment.
We will come back.
The reason why that trust changes the way that we experience life is because it changes the stories that we tell ourselves.
And we are the stories that we tell ourselves.
Professor Dan McAdams has studied this idea of narrative identity for over 40 years.
And he's found that we all have a narrative that we tell about who we are, what we're capable of and any experience that we have will fit into that narrative and follow the genre of the narrative we've written.
So if we believe that we have control of our lives, if we trust ourselves, the story will be what's called a redemptive story.
So even if something bad happens, we tell it as if we've redeemed ourselves.
We have learned something.
We're never going to do it again.
We see it as part of our journey of growth.
And it leads us to feel like we are more personalised contamination story, which is where everything always happens to me.
Life is unfair.
See, I'm not worthy.
I'm not lovable.
They treated me poorly again.
Nothing changes.
And this just creates the life that we're living.
The great part is that he tells us, and his research confirms, that we can edit that narrative at any point in time.
And even making small edits to the story that we tell changes how we feel, which is so empowering when it comes to big trust, because this is giving you the pen to rewrite the stories that you have, you know.
It also plays into what we said before, Sade, this idea that you can change anytime you want, right?
And I think...
The fact that I feel I've got a lot of trust today in myself, I don't want that to put people off.
I want it to actually inspire people and go oh wow, it can actually change quite quickly with regular, intentional practice, to the point where I am now struggling to remember what it feels like to not trust myself.
Right.
It's proof that it is absolutely possible.
I love how you just said that.
So someone once asked me, what's your greatest regret in life?
And I couldn't answer it because I don't I have taught myself not to see anything as a regret.
Everything is a learning.
And so I cannot go like, what's your greatest failure?
I don't know, because I have changed the story that I'm telling myself.
And as you said, it should be incredibly empowering.
I love hearing stories about people who have experienced self-doubt and, from a young age, you know, doubted their ability, their worthiness whatever, and gone on that journey, that intervention that we talked about, to fundamentally change some of these otherwise stable qualities.
Because if you didn't choose to do it, you'd probably still be the same way.
Exactly, exactly.
Okay, fourth attributes.
We're on adaptability, aren't we?
Yes.
And you're talking about, you're trying to paint the picture of what adaptability is for us.
Yes, and I chose the wrong kind of person, which is okay.
So let's go back to that example, right?
All of us have an experience where we had a lot of strong emotion.
And then, if we pause that moment and remove the emotion out of it, we're often just left with a bunch of thoughts that were fueled by the emotion and reinforce the emotion.
But once the emotion is no longer there, we can process those thoughts.
I can't do this.
Okay.
I'm not worthy.
Okay.
And then it allows you not to identify with them or internalize them.
You can rationally process them and ask, what is this thought's purpose?
What is the function of this thought?
And what is the function of the emotion that's associated with this thought?
And that is the essence of adaptability.
It's not being driven by our emotions.
It's not being in the passenger seat.
It's not even being in the driver's seat.
It actually is about being the observer on the street, seeing the car drive by.
Your emotions are visitors.
They're like clouds in the sky.
They come, they go.
One of the most beautiful pieces of emotion that I have found out from the literature is that emotions are not permanent.
They are temporary.
They are transient.
But we can choose to make them more permanent when we keep ruminating on them, when we keep thinking about them.
We turn it from an emotion, which usually comes in response to a stimulus.
Something will happen or we will be thinking about something in the past or anxiety about the future.
That's kind of like a stimulus in our minds.
And then we experience an emotion.
It's usually fleeting and then it dissipates.
But when we keep thinking about that thing, we convert it from an emotion into a mood.
Yeah.
And then it becomes the glasses that we wear.
It shades everything.
It shapes how we then show up, that show how parts of the brain fire in response to what someone else is experiencing.
So if you were to come in here today rongan, and you were really sad and quiet, there are parts of my brain that are attuned for empathy and would be determining what is this person feeling?
Because, from a biological perspective, i need to make sure you're not a threat and you're not trying to kill me, and part of my brain's function is to determine what are you feeling?
Are you safe?
And then i actually, which can be great for empathy, but not so great when it comes to how we're showing up and then influencing the people around us, whether it's our families, whether it's our teams, our clients.
So fundamentally, what adaptability is is in the context of big trust.
It's entirely related to how you respond to your emotions, not necessarily.
I mean.
Manage is one piece.
Some people talk about it as managing it.
I like to think of it as how are you responding to the emotion that's coming in?
You put it beautifully in the book, where you say can you stay emotionally grounded when doubt arises?
Yes, and I love that such a beautiful sentiment.
You know, life is gonna throw challenges to us from time to time, and I guess it's stress resilience, isn't it?
It's the ability to handle the stress and not let it change who you are.
So you can respond with composure instead of reactivity.
And again, I think this is a completely a trainable skill.
You've got loads of tips in the book on how we can do that.
One of the things I do regularly is I do breath holds.
Fantastic.
And there's many benefits for me.
I don't do it like with hyperventilation beforehand, nothing like that.
Just stay calm and then you hold your breath.
And that practice has really, really helped my resilience to stress.
Because if you're able to control your mind and your whole stress response, your nervous system when your brain is screaming to breathe, one of the most primal threats, right.
And I couldn't a few years ago, but I can now.
You know, you learn, oh, wow, I've got so much autonomy over the state of my nervous system.
If you can do it there, most things in life don't even come anywhere close.
So it's a trainable skill.
Shana, listen, I could talk to you for hours on this stuff.
It is right there. up my street, this kind of stuff.
You know, it's totally at the core of why we behave in the way in which we do.
Why can't we live the lives that we so badly want to live?
It's all about that trust that we have in ourselves.
It's all about the way that we view ourselves.
There was so much in the book we haven't even scratched the surface on, but hopefully this conversation gave people a really nice overview of your framework.
And if you like the stories, there's plenty of more stories in the book, right?
So I love the way you illustrate the concepts through stories.
At the end of this conversation which I hope won't be our final conversation I want to know for that person who constantly struggles, who never feels like they can achieve their goals, whether it's with their health, whether it's at work, and they've identified through this conversation that they have a lack of trust in themselves, but they don't know where to start.
What do you say to them?
I'm going to share two things.
One is more inspirational.
One is more practical.
The first thing is know that you are not broken.
It is just a natural part of being human.
And you can always choose to change.
Yes, it might be hard.
Yes, there'll be discomfort.
But the beauty of understanding the human brain is knowing that we can rewire it at any time.
That's the kind of more empowering motivational part.
The second part is the really pragmatic piece.
If you don't know where to start, the first thing I encourage you to do is be clear on where you want to go, not in terms of the achievement, but in terms of who you want to be.
What is it going to look like, that end state? visualize that, feel that.
Now, a lot of people get stuck there.
They just visualize where they want to be.
And then what we found from research is that when you only do that, it saps your energy.
When you have this, they call it a positive fantasy about a future.
It saps your energy.
Why?
Because the moment you hit a roadblock, you feel like I can't do it.
Or there's such a big gap between where you are now, because your pot is small, and where you want to be, where you're planted in open soil, that you think well, I can't.
This is who I am.
Not that.
You can't identify it.
So what we encourage you to do very pragmatically is what are all the things that are going to help you get there?
But what are all the things that are going to get in your way of getting there?
Write that down.
What are all of the blockers that are going to prevent me achieving that?
It might be my family doesn't believe in me.
It might be I get bored really easily.
Whatever it is, write it down.
And then if you end there, that's going to be a problem, because you're going to think, oh gosh, so many things in my way.
So the next step is to demonstrate big trust, which is use inversion thinking.
What will I do when this happens?
Not even if, it's probably a when.
When my family starts criticizing me because of X, Y, Z, I'm going to respond like this.
When I get really bored when I'm on the treadmill, I'm going to do this.
It's called an implementation intention.
And research finds that when you do this, you are more likely to keep at it and to actually achieve the place you want to be.
But you have to be really pragmatic that yes, things are going to get in your way.
Demonstrate your autonomy.
Remind yourself you're worthy.
Remind yourself you can do it.
It shrinks the fear to size and allows you to genuinely believe in yourself, to have the trust because you've anticipated what can get in your way.
You know what you're going to do.
And so then you just follow your plan.
Yeah, I love that.
We talk about being prepared.
It's a scout's motto, isn't it?
Be prepared.
That this is really taking that up a notch.
It's preparing for the things that are going to get in your way.
Don't just get motivated by an Instagram quote or a podcast and think, oh my God, that's it.
I'm going to crack it now.
No, there's going to be obstacles.
But when you think about the obstacles, write those obstacles down and have a strategy for when that obstacle comes, which means when it does come, you know what you're going to do about it.
Exactly.
Charlie, I absolutely love that.
The book is called Big Trust.
Rewire Self-Doubt, Find Your Confidence and Fuel Success.
I think it's going to help so many people as well as the book.
If people want to stay in touch with you, where can they find you?
So we share content regularly on YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram.
LinkedIn is more for the professional audience.
We will always have something for leaders or if you're a part of a team or collaboration.
Instagram.
We share a lot of content around mindset confidence, peak performance And yeah, if you resonated with this, I really encourage you to get your copy of Big Trust.
Also, because I want to take you back to the beginning.
These four attributes, they're not my ideas.
They're straight from the literature and the psychological traits that they rest upon.
They are predictive of success, performance, happiness, the amount of money that you make.
And the idea is the book is giving people the roadmap to feel more in control, to show up with that big trust, energy and fundamentally change their lives, by starting with changing how they see themselves, which means expanding and eliminating the pot that they're in.
Yeah, love it.
Sade, great work.
It's going to help so many people.
Thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
It's been such a treat.
Really hope you enjoyed that conversation.
Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life.
And also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else.
Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information.
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If you want to listen to every episode without having to hear any of the adverts, you can do so with an Apple subscription.
We're extending the free trial from seven days to 30 days.
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And always remember, you are the architect of your own health.
Making lifestyle changes always worth it.
Because when you feel better, you live more.
