Afford Anything - Personality Isn’t Permanent, with Dr. Benjamin Hardy

Episode Date: July 14, 2020

#265: Are you the same person you were five years ago? Ten years ago? Fifteen years ago? Of course not. Things in your life have changed: your interests, hobbies, decision-making process, and habits are different than they were a decade ago. Likewise, our personality changes -- and this means we can decide who we want to become. Today’s guest, organizational psychologist Dr. Benjamin Hardy, literally wrote the book on personality impermanence. During this episode, he shares research on why our personalities aren’t as fixed as we think they are and the strategies we can use to change. Dr. Hardy is the bestselling author of Willpower Doesn’t Work and Personality Isn’t Permanent. He’s a contributor to Inc. and Psychology Today. From 2015-2018, he was the number one writer on Medium.com. If you want to rise to the level of your goals, rather than fall to the patterns of your past, this episode is for you. For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode265 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything. Every choice that you make is a trade-off against something else, and that doesn't just apply to your money. That applies to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention, anything in your life. That is a scarce or limited resource, and that opens up two questions. First, what matters most to you? Not what does society say should matter most, but what is truly a priority in your life? And number two, how do you align your daily decision-making to reflect that?

Answering these two questions is a lifetime practice, and that is what this podcast is here to explore. My name is Paula Pant. I am the host of the Afford Anything podcast, and today, Dr. Benjamin Hardy joins us to talk about how personality is not as permanent as we might think. Dr. Benjamin Hardy is an organizational psychologist who has written extensively about topics such as personality, willpower, and motivation. He is a contributor to Psychology Today, Inc.com, and he was the number one writer on Medium.com from 2015 to 2018. He's the best-selling author of Willpower Doesn't Work and has now published a new book called Personality Isn't Permanent. On today's episode, we discussed how our personalities are not as fixed as we think they are, and what we can do if we want to change our sense of identity in order to rise to the level of our goals rather than fall to the patterns of our past.

If this is a concept that intrigues you, listen on. Here is Dr. Benjamin Hardy. Hi, Ben. How are you? I'm excellent. How are you doing? I'm doing really good. Just happy to be with you.

Thank you for spending this time with us. You've written about how personality changes throughout your life. Can you first introduce that concept, the central thesis of personality not being permanent? Absolutely. There's lots of strands of research I use to build the foundation of this book. one of them just being what's called longitudinal research. So they've done studies now on people who are like in their 70s. They measured these people's various aspects of these people's personalities 50, 60 years ago.

And the researchers were surprised that these people were not the same people at all. And that's becoming more and more, you know, not surprising. Like, although there's common conversation that like you are who you are, you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Like the truth is, is you change a lot. And so that kind of takes me to Daniel Gilbert. He's a Harvard psychologist, and he's been studying this for quite a while. And basically what he's found is that even if you look back over the last five to ten years,

if most people are actually introspective and thoughtful about it, they actually are quite different from who they were five to ten years ago. Most people can quickly see that they actually make very different decisions than they did in the past. They have different priorities or preferences. The things that they used to think were interesting or no longer interesting. So it's easy to see even on like a five to ten year frame. that you are quite a different person. You see things a little differently, but the real rub or the real challenge for people, it's not that their personality doesn't change, it's that their perspective

of their personality can get stuck. From Daniel Gilbert's perspective, we overemphasize the present. We're very strongly obsessed in many ways with who we are right now. And as a result, it leads us to under-projecting what's possible for our future. We don't spend much time imagining a different version of ourselves in the future. We're very definitive in who we are today. We're very much trying to understand and proclaim who we are today, which leads us to not being imaginative or thoughtful about seeing ourselves as a different person. So what the research shows is that people change way more than they predict they will as a rule.

I mean, that's just as the masses. Right. Part of Daniel Gilbert's research, he found that even when people are aware of how much they have changed in the last, five to ten years, they underestimate how much they predict that they will change within the next five to ten years. Yep, that's the key. And there's a lot of reasons why. One of them is obviously, as he says, we don't spend very much time imagining our future self. We also think our future self is who we're going to be today. We think that who we are right now is who we're going to always be. As he says, human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished. We're also kind of just in similar roles. I just think that people tend to over-emphasize their current self and really get

definitive in the labels they either give themselves or in the story that they tell about themselves. It can be very present-focused. There's another kind of realm of research that connects this for myself. That's from Carol DeWack. She's the Stanford researcher who kind of coined the terms fixed mindset, growth mindset. And what she found is that people with the fixed mindset are very definitive in who they are today. You know, if you fail a test with a fixed mindset, meaning you don't believe you can change, then what that means is that that's where you're at. You can't surpass this mountain because it's obvious you're not up to it because you already failed the test. Whereas like people with the growth mindset, they fail the test. They're like, okay, I'll figure this out. What Kildewak says is they get to luxuriate

in the power of yet. They're not there yet, but they get to get there. And so people, with the growth mindset, they don't really care that much about who they are today because they're more interested in what's possible for their future. Whereas people with a fixed mindset and people that are overly definitive in who they are today, it matters a lot more to them who they are today. Whereas for myself, I don't really care who I am today. I'm way more interested in where things are going. Now, when you say who you are today, there's the situational component of the circumstances of your life today. But then there's also the personality identification component of today I identify as an introvert. I identify as somebody with a lot of anxiety. I identify, you know, in in X, Y, Z ways.

Part of your book talks about how even that sense of self is more dynamic than many people assume. Oh, yeah, hugely. Right now I'm having this conversation with you. I'm at my office. I'm going to go home after this conversation and go and be the dad of five kids. And so I'm definitely going to show up differently. And I'm going to have different patterns of behavior, even just stepping into my house. There's going to be all these triggers that are going to go off in my head and rhythms and routines that shift me into dad and husband mode. And I probably have habit, I know I've got habits associated with my home environment that are totally not apparent in this environment or when I'm on the road. And so yeah, yeah, personality is not just a score that you get. And then that's who you always are.

Ellen Langer, she's the Harvard psychologist who studied mindfulness for an enormous amount of time, she's found that when people have overly adopted a single perspective of themselves, you know, whether it's introvert or it could be anything, they tend to believe that that's who they always are, which is inaccurate. In different situations, you're going to show up differently in different contexts. And context is really the thing that matters more than, you know, most people give credit to. You talk about the five myths of personality. Can you describe what these five myths are?

Let's first do a high-level overview and then we'll go into depth about each one. Sure, yeah. So the first one, which can be a good, nice hot button for a lot of people, is that there's no such thing as a personality type. So, like, if you take a type-based personality test, a Myers-Briggs, a disc, an eagram, generally the more popular ones, those would give you a type. And interestingly, and I literally just wrote an article about this, because I noticed that there was a person who was high up at Myers-Briggs and she had written an article on Forbes. and I wrote a response to it on psychology today, but in that article, the article on Forbes, she agreed that personality changes and can change and actually should change, but that your personality type doesn't change. And that's her perspective. That's the Myers-Briggs perspective.

No science to back that up. There's no science for even the notion of a personality type. A lot of psychologists would kind of throw that into the realm of horoscopes. That's just not really how personality works. And so that's obviously the first. First myth, second myth being, and I really don't know the order of how I threw these in the book, but that it doesn't change, that it's innate, that it's non-flexible, that you are who you are, personality is stable over a lifetime. That's totally false. Other myths are that personality is completely from your past, that the past is the thing

causing you to be the person you are today. That's inaccurate. You know, that your personality is just the authentic you. that it's just you once you've kind of figured out and discovered who you really are, then you can just play to your strengths. Like that's also false. And then finally just, and I don't even remember, but just, you know, those are, I mean, those are generally that, like that it's your authentic self, that it doesn't change,

that once you've finally discovered who you are, you can then live the life you want. Those are generally the myths. And there's no good backing. And those would lead to, I would say, ineffective. They would stunt a lot of potential growth and change. So let's take into each of those one by one. And let's start with going a little deeper into this notion that personality cannot be categorized into types. Because certainly, as you mentioned, personality typing tests such as the Myers-Briggs, the Enneagram, these are pretty popular.

Immensely. It's a multi-billion dollar industry. They're enormously popular. This is, I guess, where we could talk about the big five. The Big Five is kind of the most scientific view of personality. It's still a very imperfect theory. There is no perfect theory. And it is a Western theory of personality, meaning that they've studied the Big Five in other cultures and it hasn't worked out so well.

Basically how the Big Five Views Personality is it breaks personality into five categories or five factors, which we're all somewhere on these five factors. So there's extroversion, which is basically just how social you are to many degrees. There's conscientiousness, which is how organized and goal-oriented you are. There's emotional stability, which is just how emotionally stable you are in various situations. It just breaks it up into these categories, agreeableness, you know, how good you are at developing relationships and being agreeable with people. And then finally, openness to new experiences.

It breaks into that. But what would happen is, is if you actually took a test, and anyone can do this, you can go and take a Big Five personality test online. First off, the test construction. really matters. Usually with a type-based personality test, it's very poorly constructed for actually getting good data. Usually those tests, they'll ask you a bunch of questions, and then they force you to answer, you know, like one of four scenarios. They're forced choice. Whereas, like, a big five, if you took it, you would be asked a question, such as, like, you know, how much do you like trying new things? Could be anything like that. But the structure of the answer would be, it would give you what's called a Lykerd scale. And that scale would be like one to five or one to six. And that scale would be like one to

seven, one being like totally disagree, seven being like totally agree, somewhere in the middle. You know, it's like neutral. And you could give some nuance to your answer, you know, like maybe four out of seven, five out of seven, or like, you know, but you answer the question, then you'd get an output. And the output would give you a percentile rank against the general population. And by the way, with percentile ranks, usually most people are somewhere in the middle. Like, they call the bell curve. Most people are somewhere in the middle, and then there's some outliers on both sides. Me as an example, I think you would never actually call yourself an introvert or an extrovert because that would be actually inaccurate. And like even Carl Jung, who the Myers-Briggs claims to base

themselves off of, he said there's no such thing as a pure introvert or extrovert. Such a person would be in a lunatic asylum. So like no one is actually one or the other. We're just somewhere, we would score a percentile rank. You may be slightly an outlier. Like for myself, I'm like in the 60th percentile for extroversion, maybe even 55th. And usually most people are going to be somewhere right there. Like, I'm pretty dead in the middle. But what the research shows is that all of these things are going to change over your life. And all of them are situational in many ways. Like, the role that you're in many ways determines how social you are. Your goals in many ways determine where you're going to show up on these. I mean, so these are going to all change over time,

but you can also actively improve on these. If you want to become more emotionally stable as a person or what we would call emotionally flexible so that you can handle stressful situations, you can do that. So it's just not smart to throw yourself into a category because first off, the category wouldn't always be true. But the bigger challenge is that the category then becomes a part of your identity. And your identity is different from your personality. Your identity is how you self-describe.

It's your self-concept. It's your story about yourself. And usually with these labels that then becomes your identity and then your identity drives your behavior, and it also drives your goals, and it drives you to seeking to prove the identity being true. Like James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits, and I love this quote of his, he says that the more sacred in ideas to us, or the more it is a part of our identity, the more we're going to defend it against criticism. So it also just stunts your imagination towards seeing yourself as a different version of yourself. If you take the type-based way, seriously, it makes you think your personality is more extreme than it really is. So, you know, it just doesn't work in types. That's just not how it should be viewed.

And you make the argument that overly categorizing or typifying yourself is a way in which people limit themselves as opposed to instead setting a goal or a vision and then becoming that person they need to be in order to achieve that. They may instead set a fixed identity and then limit themselves based on the boundaries of what they believe their fixed identity to be. Very much. Yeah, your personality and your comfort zone are very similar concepts. And usually with overly labeling yourself or overly defining your current self. You know, and it's really healthy, actually, kind of going back to Gilbert, it's good to view your current and your former self as two different people. You're not the same person you were in the past. You actually would make different decisions and you can actually look at the decision making of your former self. And you can say, I wouldn't do things the same way. You know, I even look back.

at the book I wrote before this one, which is willpower doesn't work. I recently listened to the Audible just for fun. And I saw a lot of things that I no longer agree with, not necessarily fundamentally disagree with, but I definitely see things differently. And I know that my future self is going to see things differently as well. And so I think that the obsession with the current self can really limit your perspective that you're not the same as you're going to be, you're not the same as you were. And also, you're not going to be the same in the future. So don't hold so tight to your current self, indeed, and instead, who is the person you want to be? You know, like, the research is growing in this realm of the psychology of your future self,

that you have to actually have a clear future self in order to make quality decisions in the present. Frankel found that to be the case as well. He wrote the book Man Search for Meaning about his experience in the Holocaust, but without a hope and sense of purpose towards your future, the present loses meaning. And so you need a clear future self to make high quality decisions in the present or intentional decisions, but you also need a clear future self to engage in a deep learning process or what we would call deliberate practice, which is how you just develop skills.

And so the lack of imagination and decision making towards a future self can really stunt people. And instead, we're really good at just saying this is who I am. This is my boundary. This is what you can expect of me. rather than actually thinking about what you would choose and what you would want. We like to define our limits, for sure. All right. So let's say that a person, they may have a particular goal that relates to the external world or to their, again, to their situational context.

Let's say hypothetically a person says, well, my goal is that within the next five years from now, I want to be making $100,000 a year and debt-free and saving $25,000. percent of my income. I love all of that. So that might be there the situational context goal that they have for five years into the future, but they also have certain identity around who they believe they are. So, for example, they might think, well, I'm just not good at math, or I'm not very organized, or I can be highly anxious, or I'm really shy. To what extent could those identifiers limit their ability to pursue that situational goal. Hugely. They could hugely limit that goal.

A lot of people, they want to make more money, but they have really bad identity around money and really bad stories or habits or beliefs about money. And so obviously you would want to do two things. First, you would want to clarify the person you would like to be. If you're someone who's making six figures, you're saving a lot of money. so you're someone who saves, who's comfortable with money, who's comfortable having money, who likes good things or who invests money, I would clarify your future self and the type of person you are in addition to your circumstances and situations.

And why this is important is that very much the goal does determine the process. So if the goal is to be making six figures and have the freedom to live wherever you want versus the goal to be a millionaire and be running a company, those two things would require a different identity and a different daily process. I'm not going to tell you which one to pursue, but you decide which future version of yourself and situation you want, and that's the thing that's going to have to dictate the things you learn and develop between you and there. But it is important to kind of reverse, you know, look back on some of the things that have stunted your growth or that have led you to being who you are currently today and ultimately reframing those. So kind of thinking,

maybe like why do I have negative beliefs about money? You don't have to go too too far. I don't think you have to spend so much time digging through the past. I think a lot of it's just determining what you want and then figuring it out. But it is nice to be able to point to various events and to say, or even just scenarios. Like I just grew up in this situation. And then using that to explain what's led you to this point, but ultimately choosing a different meaning for it rather than being defined by it or blaming it for where you're at, just choosing to tell a different story that, you know, that is how you saw things or that's what shaped you initially, but you've chosen to view things differently for these reasons. And you are not going, you know, and I would argue it's definitely not

healthy to have a negative view of the past. Ultimately, you can kind of say the past to some degree factually that I grew up in, let's just say, a broke situation, you know, like I can even speak for myself. Like, my parents are not enormously great with money. I do make a lot more money than both of my parents combined at this point. And I can see how when I was 17, 18, 19, even 20, my views around money were very much shaped around that environment. I also did have other influences, but at some point or another, I chose to be inspired by different influences.

But I have no negative perspectives towards my parents at all. I can just ultimately choose to define why I've chosen to look at money differently. You have to kind of have reasons as well. It's not just, this is my future self. You also want reasons behind why that future self is compelling and why you're no longer interested in doing things the way you were before. So I think a lot of it has to do with not only choosing the future self, but choosing the meaning of why it's so important to you.

That relates to the idea that you talk about that the past is something that's happened for you rather than to you. Oh, yeah. I think that that's how it should always be viewed. usually if anything's a negative traumatic experience, you know, anything. I mean, even growing up without money, you can choose to blame that as your reason for not having opportunity or success, or you can choose to use that as the reason for why you're going to choose to do things differently.

You know, you get to choose the lens through which you view the past. And this is how history works. I mean, we're in the middle of a pandemic. We're going through like this extreme racial revolution, which is awesome. But it's forcing us to look differently on how things we're going. in the past. That's just what happens. Our view of the past always adapts based on where we're at in the present. The past isn't the thing that caused us to get there. It's our current situation that causes us to choose how we look at the past. And for your own self, it's much better to just

choose to look at the past that it happened for you, that it was beneficial. You know, I went through a lot of hard experiences, and I still go through hard experiences. And it's best to say that this is something that you can use because then you can actually learn from it and you can actually use it to propel you forward if you if it's something that happened to you where you're the victim towards it then obviously you've placed control outside of yourself and also you're assuming that events led you to where you're at versus the meaning that you gave to events and more than likely it's the meaning that you're giving to events that's causing you to be the person you are versus the events themselves and so if there are

aspects of who you currently are that are limiting, it would then be incumbent on you not just to take the actions that are required to fulfill those situational goals, but to fundamentally alter your sense of self so that you can become the type of person who does the things that leads to the ideal situation that you want to create for yourself. Yeah. There's this like the old school adage B-Doo have. You'd be the person. first do what that person would do and you can have what that person would have. So I think like starting with future identity is big because then you can to many degrees use that as the new narrative for your new identity. You don't necessarily need to fake it until you make it because we're all agreeing that your future self is a different person than who you are today. But you are at least pointing your story and your behavior and your attention in the direction of your goal. The goal is that you not only have a new vision for your future, but it's also the new story. You're not.

afraid to tell people about what you're trying to accomplish. You're not ashamed or hiding your goal out of fear of failure or fear of judgment. You're just being honest. This is what I want to accomplish. And by telling people about it, you're going to be able to believe it more. You're going to get more support and accountability in your environment. You can also then proactively put yourself in the right environments around the right people who will ultimately get you in that direction so you can become that person. Changing your behavior actually can over time change your identity. it's better to think about the identity you want first and then have the behavior follow through. And then ultimately, over time, your behavior repeatedly is a reflection of your personality.

So it's not enough just to say that that's what you want. But you imagine it, you say it, and then you use that as the basis for your daily actions. I mean, that's why I'm personally a big fan of evening and morning routines, mostly because when you wake up, I think that there's a lot to say about how you start something, in many ways shapes how it ends. That doesn't always have to be the case, but starting a day in a reactive state where you go subconscious

and then you just live on autopilot to what's urgent and kind of just the roles in the situation and maybe the addictions of the technology and whatnot can really create a fast forwarding of time where a lot of time can pass and not a lot can change. But if you put yourself in the right frame of mind in the beginning, whether it be through journaling,

meditation, prayer, whatnot, and you project out your future self and then think about what you could do before things start getting busy, right? You can actually take action towards your future self, and that's called living intentionally or living courageously. And the more you do that, the more confidence you'll build as a person.

And so you can do this. I mean, I speak for myself, and I'm sure you can speak for yourself. The goal is actually that your future is the thing driving your behavior rather than the past. The goal is that the things you're doing on a daily basis, even if it's just going to the gym and working out, it's based on a goal. It's based on what you're trying to accomplish as a person rather than you just doing what you do because that's what you've always done.

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but many things for our customers. Big bank muscle, fintech hustle. That's your commercial payments a fifth-third better. In your book, you talk about some of the different reasons that people stay stuck in patterns that developed from the past. And you identify four key reasons, people being defined by past traumas, people being defined by identity narratives that they've already formed, subconscious ideas and beliefs and the environment that they have. How do you address each of these issues such that you can rise to the level of your goals rather than fall to the patterns of your past. It's just important to realize.

I think that the stories that we have about ourselves are often past-based or heavily present-based. And that story, your identity is a big driver of your actions and behaviors and what you're willing to do. It takes a lot of willpower, and also it's not sustainable to act outside of your identity. To do something where you just don't see that that's who you are. And so addressing identity and narrative is huge. And the reason I brought up trauma is because often our narratives about ourselves are the

byproduct of former negative trauma, you know, traumatic experiences. And it's important to realize that trauma isn't always some huge event like, you know, returning from war or being in an abusive marriage, although those are heavily traumatic and they can have an enormous impact on our identity and on how we see ourselves and how we, you know, even what we aspire towards. But trauma can also just be being told you're not smart or you're not good looking or that, you know, like it could be just little things and we all have little things occur all the time which can negatively impact how we see ourselves.

And it's important to actually choose a different perspective on what maybe once was a trauma. You know, I mean, in the book I talk about someone who I, you know, know, know, know very well who she was in a private art lesson, and the instructor corrected her in such a way in front of the class that it led her to being embarrassed and in her embarrassment. And when it comes to emotions, we all have reactions. We all have reactions to events. The reaction isn't really what matters. It's really what you choose to do afterward, which is what we call emotional regulation, which is a skill so needed to be developed. As a parent, I can promise you, like, sometimes I react in a negative way and can get upset with my kids,

and I'm ultimately teaching them how to be reactive rather than to sit, take a breath, be mindful of the situation, and ultimately choose what to do with it. But often we have negative experiences, and in this case with my, you know, this relative of mine, this was 40 years ago. This is an amazing woman who's in her 80s now,

but 40 years ago she was in a private art lesson, she had this experience where she was embarrassed because of how the teacher corrected her in front of the other people in the class, and the narrative she formed about herself because of her reaction and her emotions was, I'm not good at drawing, I can't do this. And so that then became her view.

And that's still how she views herself 40 years later is that she can't draw. But that was a narrative and an identity that she formed because of an emotional reaction to an event. Now, the reaction is just how you emotionally felt about it. But that doesn't mean that that's the meaning you had to give to it. She could have chosen to give the meaning

a million different meanings. The meaning she gave to it was that I'm not good at doing this. She could have had conversations with people, could have journaled about it, could have ultimately done a lot of different things to choose a different meaning. She could have ultimately gotten to the point where she chose to say, holy cow, that teacher's investing a lot. He's giving me extra attention. Yeah, it's kind of a little bit embarrassing or it was embarrassing. I initially felt embarrassed because I was wondering what people would think about me, but now I just, I realize that this is exactly what I need. want to become the artist I want to be to do the kids books I want to do.

Like we as people get to ultimately choose the meanings of our experiences. Often we don't. Instead, we build meanings based on how we initially felt. And so it's just really important to realize that often how we see ourselves is incredibly limited because of the experiences we've had. And obviously there's the other big levers, you know, this conscious in the environment, which if we want to we can go into, environment, you know, and social group being big aspects of that.

But, yeah, I mean, there's reasons why we go into repetitive cycles. It's not because our personality is innate and unfexible. The anecdote in your book about the woman who 40 years ago was corrected by an art teacher in a very public, a very embarrassing way, and as a result decided, I can't draw and has let that be her reality for the last 40 years reminded me very much. Of all things, a fiction book, it was The Babysitters Club. Nice. That I read when I was a kid. And Claudia, from the Babysitters Club, is an aspiring artist.

And she takes an art class. And in this art class, every student, the teacher just sort of looks at their painting and says, mm-hmm, and walks on by. And with Claudia, the teacher constantly harps on, you change this, change that, that could be improved, this could be improved. And so throughout the course of this book, Claudia thinks, like, oh, my God, I must be the worst student. I'm the only person who's getting corrected. And at the end of the book, it turns out she has a conversation with the teacher about it. And the teacher says, frankly, it's when something is already good, that's when I can see the tweaks that can take it from good to great. It's interesting.

But she might not have ever gotten that perspective if she wouldn't have asked, right? Exactly. And she could have gotten that perspective so much sooner, right? Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And that's precisely what that anecdote in your book reminded me on. Well, it's interesting because meaning has everything to do with context.

And she didn't have that context initially when she was getting corrected. She just thought that she formed a meaning based on her very limited perspective, that, I must be horrible about this because she keeps correcting me. Then, you know, over time and at some point another, she gets more context. She asks the question or the teacher says, no, I do this because when I see great work, I can see how it can be tweaked. If she had that information or that perspective sooner, she wouldn't have created the meaning in her mind that she can't do it.

When I was growing up, my parents got divorced, my father became an extreme drug addicts, literally from when I was 11 to 20. He overcame it all, and he's an amazing place now, and we have a great relationship. But when I was 11-year-old, 13, 14, and it was just all happening, of course I was forming meanings. Of course I was experiencing emotions. and I will say I had a very limiting identity and byproduct, very passive personality for a long time. But while writing this book, and I've forgiven my dad, you know, and we're great friends now,

and he's also completely changed his life. But one of the things that I intentionally wanted to do while writing this book was expand my own perspective of that aspect of our life. And so I just asked him a ton of questions. You know, we're both very comfortable with each other. He's gone through all sorts of therapy. He's even done a lot of, he's even support a lot of addicts through like group counseling and whatnot in the past.

So like he's very comfortable talking about it, which is obviously a very clear sign of healing. But I just asked him, will you just tell me all about what led to the divorce, what led to you becoming a drug addict? Just tell me everything. I just want to know your perspective. because I'd never actually gotten his perspective. I only had my perspective.

And my perspective was limited. I don't even really remember my perspective anymore because of how long it was. But he just broke it down and he just said, you know, he told me about his childhood. He had been adopted, but he told me about being bullied as a kid. And he told me so many interesting things, you know, about his brother that I just didn't even know about. And then he told me just about the challenges between him and my mom and the things that ultimately led to the divorce. And just the depression of having his three-sumers. sons and his wife gone, you know, unexpectedly and just coming home from work alone and ultimately

being in a very deep and vulnerable place and just he was suicidal to some degree for a while because he just felt like he had failed in so many ways. And then he got invited by a friend to go get a drink at a bar and he'd never really been a drinker. But when I was learning more and more about his side of things, obviously I became way more empathetic and compassionate and understanding towards him. and therefore not as negatively impacted and feeling like such a victim. I was like, holy cow, like I can understand. Obviously, I wouldn't want myself to make those decisions, but ultimately I can understand when you actually explain things.

You know, so in psychology, there's a concept called the fundamental attribution error. We judge ourselves based on situational factors, but we often judge other people based on their character. So, like, if I'm running late for a meeting, I'm going to explain all the reasons why I'm late. it's because X, Y, and Z, all these situational factors, you know, I couldn't get my car running. Like, I give myself the benefit of the doubt. But when you do something wrong, you know, if you cut me off on the road, I'm going to think you're just a bad driver.

Like, I'm going to attribute it to your character, and that's what we call the fundamental attribution error. There's always a reason for the behaviors. And if you can get more context, you can better understand why that person is acting the way they are or why you're acting the way you are. It's really powerful when you can broaden the context of whether it be your past or even a situation, whatever it is, you can then attribute new and better meanings. So for my relative, who ultimately made a snap judgment about herself and formed a fixed narrative or a fixed mindset, which ultimately stunted her ability to get good at art and ultimately

probably to some degree some regrets, or at least at this point just the belief that she can't do it. And in my opinion, the loss of a lot of development and maybe a lot of satisfaction and achievement and transformation, if she would have been willing to get more context, even if that starts, and in my opinion, it can start by yourself in the form of just writing down how you feel and what happened. And then ultimately thinking about it in different ways, you know, like asking what could this have meant or why did I choose to feel that way or then maybe having conversations. You know, there's a quote from Victor Frankel, but this quote also is similarly stated in many other places that emotions cease to be suffering when you give it a clear picture. And giving it a clear picture often means just turning it into a story, you know, telling people that this is what happened and then getting alternative perspectives. And ultimately, choosing a better meaning. At some point, you have to choose the meaning you give to it. And that's a choice that we make.

You know, like she could, she did choose the meaning that she's not good at art. She, it was kind of a reactive meaning. I recently bombed a talk. So I gave a talk to a very high profile group hoping that it would lead them to supporting my book launch, to be honest with you. And I just didn't do very well. I flopped the talk, was incredibly embarrassed. And the thoughts that initially came to me was that I shouldn't be a part of this network

anymore. I was frustrated by how it went. The thoughts that were racing through my mind at the time were this group's not good for me. They're not going to contribute to me and I'm not really going to contribute to them. Those are the thoughts racing through my head because of my embarrassment. But I didn't want that. I didn't like what that was creating for my future because I was realizing this is going to limit my future if I go this way. And I don't want that. I had multiple conversations kind of sharing the situation, getting different people's perspectives, and ultimately having a conversation with the guy who led that group, and telling him like, this is how I feel.

You know, I hated how the talk went, and also was a little frustrated that I didn't get the support I was hoping to get from this group for my book launch. And he was really kind and thoughtful in how he responded. We went back and forth, and ultimately, I chose instead of, being negatively impacted by it to just say, I didn't say in the simplest words this happened for me, although it really did. But I chose to give it the meaning, this could be the best meaning that's ever happened to me. If I choose to learn from it, this is the best meeting that's ever

happened. Because if I choose to learn from this, I will get so much more out of this than any other meeting I've been to. And I was inspired by my mom because literally the week before it was Mother's Day, I guess this was last month. But she said, this Mother's Day was the best Mother's Day. she's ever had. And I was like, well, why? What made this one so special? You know, and she's like, well, I just loved it. You know, I just loved how I was talking to my boys. My younger brother's in a treatment facility right now. But she was just like, I just loved it. It was so good. And we both talked about meaning making the fact that that was a choice that she had to, she chose to just call it the best Mother's Day ever, but now that's how she genuinely feels about it. And that's the

story she's telling about it. So I just did the same thing. I'm just like, that was the best meeting I've ever had. And by choosing that meaning, now all of a sudden I'm not ashamed. I can have normal conversations with the people who are in that group, and I can still be strategic about accomplishing my goals versus just cutting off my goals because of my feelings. And so I just think it's important how we frame the past, the present, and ultimately our future. Can you believe the narrative that that's the best meeting you ever had when the emotions around it were so raw and negative? Yeah, well, it takes time to get past that initial reaction. But the sooner you face the emotions versus bury them, the faster that they go away. I'm no longer

embarrassed by the talk because I still, I don't actually feel like it was as bad of a talk as I initially thought. I initially thought it was horrible because it didn't turn out the way I was hoping it would. But now my view of even the talk itself and the way that people experienced it isn't the same way. Most people actually really liked it. I mean, it could have been better for sure. And I didn't get the result that I was wanting it at that point in time. But now, literally a month later, first off, I'm no longer embarrassed by it. Actually, I'm proud of it, as weird as that sounds, because I was stretching myself,

if I'm really thinking about it. I call it power moves in the book where you're, like where you're aggressively chasing a future self, if you don't fail regularly, then you're not actually stretching yourself. Like, it kind of was a failure to some degree, but if I'm looking back on my former self a month ago who attempted that,

I'm freaking proud of that person because that person was trying something huge and he failed to some degree at his goal, and it led to a lot of learning and ultimately a lot more vulnerability where I can talk to these people about what I'm trying to accomplish and I can ultimately learn a lot.

I failed because I didn't know what I was doing. And in neuroscience, they call that, you know, a prediction error where we often avoid situations that are beyond us or deal with uncertainty because we don't know what's going to happen. And so instead we stay in the stable situations that we can predict. but prediction errors are where all the learning is.

So like if a child who's a little toddler touches a hot stove, that's called a prediction error. Like they predicted incorrectly that their hand was, they didn't think that their hand was going to get burned, obviously, when they put their hand on the stove. But that's how incredible memories are formed. And that's where deep learning is formed, which allows you to better navigate the world. And if you're not going to put yourself through those types of experiences, then you're never going to actually be able to produce better results. I'm not just lying. I'm not convincing myself of a false narrative. It is exactly what I needed if my goal is to continue to get better at what I'm trying to do.

I mean, even a radically failed marriage or just anything, if you choose to view it that that's exactly what I needed. Obviously, it was horrible. And in many cases, with trauma, you aren't at fault. But ultimately, it happened. And so it's up to you if it's going to debilitate you or if you can say, wow, I'm going to be better because of that. Wow, I just learned a lot. It's like either you choose learning or you choose to completely turn your brain off to learning.

And instead, you're defined by the past. That's the difference between trauma and not trauma. We'll return to the show in just a moment. How do you construct an environment that is conducive to that type of reframing of trauma and that type of learning and growth? I think the willingness to have conversations is one big one, you know, like talking, you know, having people in your world where you can talk about what's going on, being open, not embarrassed about how you're feeling. So having supportive people around you who want you to succeed

that you can actually have good conversations with. And you can actually, I call them empathetic witnesses in the book, but where you can actually actively reframe on purpose. You know, like if you're struggling or stuck, where you can reach out to people who will help you get out of that, you know, who will encourage you and remind you of your future self or help you through a challenging problem. I mean, it's very important that we have good people around us who can encourage and support us and also that we can be open with and who can be open with us. I think that's big. Obviously, being aware of how the environment is impacting you. And so that's important. You you. There's a quote from Marshall Goldsmith, who wrote the book Triggers, and he said,

if we do not create and control our environment, then our environment's creating and controlling us. And so I think just being aware of the inputs you let in, if you're listening to negative media, as one example, you'll probably have a negative mindset. You know, there's a separate quote that says your input shapes your outlook. Being mindful of how the influences around you are shaping your views of things, the media you listen to, the music, and to the people who surround you, these things are shaping how you see the world. They're shaping your identity and your personality. And so being thoughtful about what you should be ignorant of. You know, in the book I talk about strategic ignorance. What influences do you already know

you should be unaware of? So like as an example, Peter Diamandas, the futurist, says he just refuses to watch mainstream news because first off he knows it's biased. Second off, He knows what it does to how he feels. It doesn't support his growth. He's not ignorant. It's not like he's choosing to not be aware because he gets his information from different sources. He's just choosing to be strategically ignorant of various things.

Seth Godin, the writer, he talked a lot about how he used to read the Amazon reviews about his books all the time. And they just made him feel like crap because some of the negative people would just troll him and just give no constructive criticism, just literally tear him down. And so at some point or another,

he just realized there's no point for him to be aware of that. Like, he's just not going to go there anymore. So choosing to remove, you know, from a willpower perspective, it's equivalent to removing the negative food from your house or like the unhealthy food from your house if you're trying to be healthy. So you don't have to think about it anymore.

You know, Michael Jordan says, once I made a decision, I never thought about it again. So rather than going back and forth in your mind and burning out your decision fatigue of if I should do this, You just make one choice. You remove the thing from your environment and you just don't have to think about it more. I think the other one is just having reminders, having an environment that supports your future

self and weeding out the things that are pulling you back. Just being aware of how your environment is shaping you and then constructing an environment that can support you. And you can do that in simple ways because environments and situations, although they're different, they're similar. Like you can set up situations. Just as one example, I had to recently write a book. in a very short timeline, a different book than this one.

I'd write the book in three months. And that situation, the timeline of it, like the deadline, forced me to write so much faster than I would have if I didn't have the deadline. So you can proactively set up situations as well. I call these forcing functions. But you can set up a situation that forces you to show up. A short timeline is obviously a smart one. It's setting up the context so that you're forced to do what you want to do anyways.

but you've created a scenario where your chances of failure are a lot less because the situation requires that you show up a certain way. What do you do if you set up a situation in which the situation requires that you show up a certain way, like a timeline that is realistic yet aggressive? You set up that situation and then you observe yourself still not rising to it. Yes. Well, that's actually exactly what happened to me. I was starting to fall apart emotionally and I was getting stressed out. I actually got really sick because I was stuck. I experienced Extreme Riders Block.

This book is the one we're talking about right now. It's called Who Not How. It's a book I co-authored with a guy named Dan Sullivan. It comes out in October of 2020. So it was a co-authorship. It was a different book than I've written before. It was purely about entrepreneurship. I got stuck very much and I had a really good friend.

Well, I mean, his name's Tucker Max, but he was editing the book. And he's really the person who helped. me through it, but my problem initially was that I was stuck with what this book should be. And again, that had a lot to do with my framing. And so I struggled by myself, you know, and I love the quote that you're only as sick as your secrets. But I was struggling and I was confused and I didn't want to bring it up. I just figured I could get myself through it. And the deadline started getting closer and closer. And I was supposed to have like a draft sooner, like five weeks ago kind of thing. Not that far, but like a few weeks ago.

And ultimately, you know, I finally admitted to Tucker, who was editing it, I said, dude, I'm stuck. Like, I can't get past this. And I'm actually really sick now because of the stress. And so we're going to have to push the timeline back a little bit. He's like, dude, why didn't you tell me this like weeks ago? You know, we could have solved this. And ultimately, we had to get on the phone a few times.

What's interesting is with the alternative perspective, you know, and obviously surrounding yourself with mentors or people with better perspectives. In this case, Tucker is just a brilliant book guy. He just knows books way better. So a single conversation with him can solve 10 hours of problems. You know, 10 minutes of his time can solve 10 hours of my time if I'm sitting by myself trying to hash through this. But also, he helped me emotionally realize why I was stuck.

And I think that that's part of having good people around you is helping you understand why you're stuck. Usually why you're stuck has to do with your view of the thing. in my case I was stuck because I was trying to write a book that Dan would like Dan is the co-author and I'm the writer he's the main author and it's mainly his ideas we both realized when he was asking me good questions and helping me realize why are you so stuck why are you not liking this book like this is something you've been excited but I just like dude I'm just trying to write a book that Dan would like and then he was like

dude that's the stupidest thing you could do like it's also good to have people who can just tell you flat and for you to also not take it as criticism but just be open And we both realized the best thing that I could do was just write the book that I wanted to write because I'm the writer. And ultimately, that would be the way for it to be the most successful anyways. There's a reason I'm the writer in that case. And in that case, actually, the book's called who, not how. And so you should actually just let the who do the how as an entrepreneur. And I was the who. So I just let me write the dang book. But once I got to the conclusion and got that out of me and felt heard and also just felt like I had permission to do what I wanted to do, then I was able to write well again. And, you know, because I first half had the support. And also I started being faster at telling when I was stuck. Rather than waiting for a week or a month to try to figure out on my own, as soon as I got stuck and, like, knew that I needed help,

I just reached out and said, I'm stuck without having any ego, you know, just like, I need help. Can we have a conversation? Like, I'm stuck right now or I'm having a hard time. Like, I think the faster you can communicate along the way. Because if you're pursuing a big future self and you're stretching, yourself, you're going to get stuck. You're going to be trying things you've never done before. You're going to fall in your face. And so the more emotionally open you are, the more emotionally

flexible you can become. And so it's about not trying to do it by yourself, not doing it through grit and willpower, but instead doing it through relationships and through support and breaking through. So yeah, I got stuck many a time and I learned the lesson that I should be a lot faster at communicating when I'm stuck. And ultimately we hit the deadline. We knocked it out. It was the fastest thing I had to write, but I almost shot myself in the flip by trying to do it by myself. Well, thank you for spending this time with us. Are there any final takeaways that you want to leave this community with? I think the major insight of this book, and there's a heavy amount of research. Yes, these are also my opinions, but there's also heavy amounts of research to

support them. Clarifying your future self is such an essential thing. Obviously having the courage to face your past and choose different views of it so that you're not so stuck there also takes huge courage. But deciding who your future self is, which is a decision you make, one of the things that Victor Frankel said is that what man needs, speaking of men and women, what man needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. Your personality is not something you discover, passion or purpose are not things you discover. There are things you choose. It's a freely chosen task. And so I would invite listeners to freely choose who you want to be in the future and use your future self as the basis for what you do

today. That would be living intentionally. And that would lead to a lot of transformational learning experiences. It would lead you to going outside your comfort zone, which is your current personality. and actually expanding like you did as a child, continuing to grow and not solidifying yourself with who you currently are. A lot of people say that kids can learn fast than adults, and that's totally junk. Adults have such developed brains.

If we were actually applying ourselves, we could learn so fast. Kids just are way more flexible, and that's something that's a skill to be developed again. So I guess the biggest invitation of my book is to let your future self be the thing driving your behavior, not your former self. And this book can show you how to do that. Well, thank you for spending this time with us.

Where can people find you if they would like to learn more about you? You can find just Benjaminhari.com. Benjaminhari.com is my website. The blogs are there. You can get personalities and permanent anywhere like Amazon, Barnes, just wherever you would prefer to buy the book. Thank you. What are some of the key takeaways that we got from this conversation?

Here are six. Number one, choose who you want to be. Dr. Hardy says that this is perhaps the single most important thing that you can do to help yourself when you're attempting to expand your personality and your sense of possibilities. Adopt a growth mindset and be curious about the possibilities of who you can become. And develop a sense of self on a daily basis. Tell yourself that I am someone who is X, Y, Z, or I have the identity of someone who is X, Y, Z. Your personality is not something you discover, passion or purpose are not things you discover.

They're things you choose. It's a freely chosen task. And so I would invite listeners to freely choose who you want to be in the future and use your future self as the basis for what you do today. As Dr. Hardy says, the person you are now is not the person who you will be in 10 years. So why not proactively choose who you want to be? Reflect on the time. type of person that you want to be? What characteristics do you want to have? How do you want to identify? What habits and traits do you want to embody? Break this down into small, incremental actions and improvements that you can make towards becoming this person. Keep a journal in order to keep track of your goals and your progress. You can also practice journaling about your future

self. So, for example, you can write down what one behavior or pattern do you want to change? what statements can help you achieve this. How will you practice this in your day-to-day life? And then each day you can journal and document how you focus on shifting your pattern of X or Y or Z. For example, if you naturally tend to spend money pretty casually, but you want to start identifying as a frugal person, then the behavior or the pattern that you want to change

is perhaps impulsive spending. And on a day-to-day level, you can journal about what you did that day to refrain from an impulse purchase. Maybe you were at Target and something caught your eye and you picked it up, but instead of then carrying it to the cash register and checking it out, you put it back down and you made a note that if you're still thinking about it in a week, you can go back and get it. That would be an example of a daily behavior resisting an impulse purchase

that fuels a larger pattern of conscious spending or spending in a more frugal or deliberate way. So that is key takeaway number one. Choose who you want to be. Key takeaway number two. Stop focusing on absolutes. As Dr. Hardy says, most of us aren't absolute introverts or extroverts. We're somewhere in the middle along a spectrum,

and identifying as either or can cement the belief that that's all you are. And this doesn't just apply to introversion and extroversion. It applies to any label or characteristic that you have. If you over-identify with a given label, it doesn't foster the belief that your personality is flexible and that context matters. You may behave differently around a group of new people at a networking event than you do when you're around your family or your loved ones. It's just not smart to throw yourself into a category because, first off, the category wouldn't always be true. But the bigger challenge is that the category then becomes a part of your identity. And then your identity drives your behavior.

and it also drives your goals, and it drives you to seeking to prove the identity being true. Beware of overly identifying with labels or stories that don't fit the future narrative that you're trying to build. Now, you can use this to your advantage. Since identity drives behavior, and that behavior reinforces your identity, choose your future identity carefully.

Choose what adjectives you want to use in order to describe yourself and your future self, because soon enough, your behaviors and your decisions will follow suit. So that is key takeaway number two. Key takeaway number three, reframe your past. The stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves are powerful. If we tell ourselves the story of, I'm a bad public speaker, I'm a bad artist, I'm bad at math, I'm disorganized. If we tell ourselves those stories, then we begin to believe it.

Our view of the past always adapts based on where we're at in the press. The past isn't the thing that caused us to get there. It's our current situation that causes us to choose how we look at the past. We can choose how to interpret our past, and we can choose the meaning that we give to an event. For example, we can look at a time in which we may have stumbled over our words while giving a speech on stage, and either tell ourselves the story, I'm not a good public speaker, or tell ourselves the story, hey, I survived, I did well. I entertained the crowd, and it was a stepping stone on my path to becoming a top-notch public speaker.

Think about things that have happened as something that you can learn from, something that can help you propel yourself forward. And reframe your past such that it happened for you, not to you. It has shaped you into the awesome person that you have become. So that is key takeaway number three. Key takeaway number four. Be, do, and have. First, identify the person that you want to be, then do the things that that person would do, and the consequences will follow. Be the person first, do what that person would do, and you can have what that person would have.

This reminds me of something that a previous guest named Todd Herman talked about in episode 184. He described the power of developing an alter ego. The alter ego was the bee. It was the identity of a certain person. And embracing that identity, embracing that alter ego, made it easier to do what that alter ego would do. So the example that Todd Herman gave was that when Beyonce was early in her career, she would sometimes have some stage fright.

And so she developed this alter ego, Sasha Fierce, and she went on stage as Sasha Fierce. And by virtue of identifying with this alter ego, Sasha Fierce, she then would do the things that Sasha Fierce would do, that contributed so much to the person that she became, the person that she is today, that eventually, after some time, she didn't need that alter ego anymore. That was the example that Todd Herman gave in episode 184. You can listen to that at afford anything.com slash episode 184. And this advice from Dr. Benjamin Hardy, in which he talks about be, do, have, first, be

the identity of the person, be the person. that you want to be. As a result, you will then do the things that that person will do, and as a result of that, you will then have the success, have the outcomes that that person will have. This be-do have really reminded me of that conversation with Todd Herman. So start by adopting the identity that you aspire to have. Think about somebody who embodies it, and what would they do? Point your story, point that narrative towards your goal. That is key takeaway number four. Key takeaway number five. Establish both a morning and an evening routine. We've all heard about the benefits of having a routine, but Dr. Hardy drives the point home. When you wake up,

I think that there's a lot to say about how you start something in many ways shapes how it ends. Starting the day in a reactive state such that you go on autopilot doesn't help you proactively change. So instead, start the day in a way that is mindful and intentional about how you spend your time. For example, you might start your day with a few minutes of journaling or prayer or meditation. You might start your day with exercise. Be intentional about the first things that you do when you wake up and the last things that you do right before you go to bed. Because both of those bookend and largely set the tone for what happens in that messy middle. So that is key takeaway number five. And finally, key takeaway number six, construct an environment that's conducive to

change. In order to rise to the level of your goals, rather than fall to the patterns of your past or fall to the patterns of your present, you want to set up an environment which supports the types of changes that you want to make. Be aware of your inputs. Be aware of environmental cues and triggers. And reshape your environment in the way that's most conducive for you. Maybe that means taking Facebook off your phone so that you can't mindlessly scroll through that app for 20 minutes a day. Maybe it means that the only time that you visit Facebook is on a laptop or on a desktop. Maybe it means that you move your savings to a bank account that is not the same bank account that you use for checking. So that way when you log into your account, your normal

checking account, you don't see your savings and therefore you're not tempted to dig into it or spend it. Out of sight, out of mind. Those are two examples of how you can reshape your environment and reshape your environmental cues and environmental triggers in order to foster the type of behavior that you want and ultimately to be conducive to building the type of person that you want to be. It's about not trying to do it by yourself, not doing it through grit and wellpower, but instead doing it through relationships and through support and breaking through. Those are six key takeaways from this conversation with Dr. Benjamin Hardy on how you can reshape your future self. We've mentioned a ton of resources in this interview. He talked about mindset by Carol Dweck, Atomic Habits by James Clear, Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankel, Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert.

We've compiled a list of all of the resources that he mentioned during this interview, and you can find that list of resources on our show notes page. at afford anything.com slash episode 265. You can also sign up for our free podcast newsletter, where we will send you a synopsis of every episode, including key points that the guest made and the resources like the ones that I just named. That way, if you ever want notes on an episode,

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anything.com slash community. That's our show for today. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoy today's episode, please do three things. Number one, most importantly, share this with a friend or a family member. If you know someone who would benefit from listening to what we talked about in today's show, send them a link to this episode, which you can find at afford anything.com slash episode 265. Number two, make sure that you hit subscribe or follow in whatever app you're using to listen to this episode so that you don't miss any of our awesome upcoming shows. And number three, leave us a review. You can go directly into whatever app you're using to listen to this episode to leave us a review there. Or if you're at your desktop or laptop, head to Afford Anything.com slash iTunes.

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