Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Dr. Albert Bandura on The Theory on Creating Human Results

Episode Date: August 30, 2017

This conversation is with Dr. Albert Bandura.This conversation was an honor. He's literally a living legend in the field of Psychology -- He's an extraordinarily innovative scholar whose work in social cognitive theory has become an incredible resource in academics and for practitioners dedicated to human excellenceHis theories are part the core pillars with my work with elite teams, athletes, and performers. It was a complete joy to learn from him in this conversation, after I've spent so many years from him via research articles.His research changed our understanding of human learning -- how modeling and interactions impact learning - and how we can become more powerful as humans, in a variety of circumstances. He laid the theoretical foundation for understanding the self-regulatory mechanism for his theory on human agency.Human Agency is defined as the human capability to exert influence over one’s functioning and the course of events by one’s actions. Albert’s “Theory of Agency” has 3 elements. 1st, you have to project yourself into the future to have something to work toward. 2nd, is self-regulation, the extent that you can regulate your thoughts, emotions and behavior. The 3rd is self-reflection, to what extent you can judge your capabilities (also known as self efficacy). Self-Efficacy theory is at the center of much of my work with professional athletes and performers.While this might not sound novel now, this was a radical idea when he first introduced the concept that: Human beings are not just reacting to influences, they have a capacity to shape the course of their lives.Dr. Bandura pushed against conventional wisdom by introducing the notion that our thinking influences our behavior, our behavior influences our environment and our environment can influences how we view the world and ourselves. Dr. Bandura is game-changer -- a significant contributor to the betterment of human life_________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And this one is significant. This conversation we're going to have today is a gem. And we want to work to better understand what they're searching for. We want to understand their psychological framework, which is how they see the world and how they understand how people work, how they work, how their craft works. and then we also want to work to understand the mental skills that they've used to build and refine their craft finding mastery is brought to you by linkedin sales solutions in any high-performing environment that i've been part of from elite teams to executive boardrooms one thing holds true meaningful relationships are at the center of sustained success. And building those relationships, it takes more than effort. It takes a real caring

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right now is the chocolate chip cookie dough. And a few of our teammates here at Finding Mastery have been loving the fudge brownie and peanut butter. I know, Stuart, you're still listening here. So getting enough protein matters. And that can't be understated, not just for strength, but for energy and focus, recovery, for longevity. And I love that David is making that easier. So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. This conversation is with Dr. Albert Bendora.

It was a complete honor to sit down with him. He's literally a living legend in the field of psychology. He's an extraordinarily innovative scholar whose work on social cognitive theory, which is the thrust of his work, it's become an incredible resource in academics, but also for practitioners dedicated to helping others push the boundaries of human experience and to really understand human excellence. And his theories are at the core of my pillars that I work from to help elite teams and athletes and performers from a wide variety of ranges to help them become their very best. And this, it was just a joy to sit down and learn from him. I've been studying his work for so long from a research frame that just to sit across from him and to really have the opportunity to look him in the eyes and see how he was able

to articulate his life's work, it was just an incredible gift. My hope is that his genius just spills through this conversation. And his research, it changed our understanding of human learning, how modeling and interactions impact learning, which are so important for an accelerated organizations that want to do amazing things, and how we can become more powerful as humans in a variety of circumstances. And he laid the theoretical foundation for understanding self-regulatory mechanisms, so how to regulate yourself across varied conditions, and his theory on human agency.

Human agency is defined by the human capability, that's your capability, to exert influence over your functioning and the course of events that are based on your actions. So this was brand new to the field when he introduced it. It was really disruptive that your thoughts and your actions would change the course of your life. And so, because before that, the main theory operating psychology is that we were simply responding to external stimuli. And that's what the field of behaviorism was so he was completely disruptive to the field by saying that you are a human agent in of yourself and that your capability to exert influence over your life is your responsibility and so his theory of of agency has three elements

first you have to project yourself into the future to have something to work toward okay that's not new now, but it certainly was at the time. Second is the self-regulation mechanisms, the ability to regulate yourself. And it's the extent that you can regulate your thoughts, your emotions, and behavior that really impacts your future. And the third part is the self-reflection component. And that's the extent to how well you can evaluate your capabilities. And that spawned the theory of self-efficacy. Now, I know we're getting kind of technical here, but follow me for just a minute. Self-efficacy, efficacy is also a word for power, is the theory that is at the center of so much of my work with professional athletes and performers, because there are a handful of ways that we can influence our ability

to feel efficacious, to feel powerful. And when we understand those mechanisms, which we'll talk about in this conversation, when we can understand those mechanisms, then we can play with them. It's almost like levers to increase our ability to feel powerful as a human being. And so it's just like you can tell I'm excited. So I'm going to get right into this. And again, Dr. Bendor pushed against conventional wisdom by introducing this notion that our thinking influences our behavior and our behavior influences our environment and our environment influences how we view the world, how we view ourselves. And so there's a complete transactional model between environment, thoughts, and behavior that, you know, it seems like that, of course, that's the

case, but he's the person that introduced it to us as a field, as a human race. So I love this. Dr. Bendora is a game changer and a significant contributor to the betterment of human life. So it is my complete honor to want to sit down with him, but also to introduce to you, if you are unfamiliar with his work, Dr. Albert Bendora. Well, I've had a very unusual developmental period, namely, my parents migrated from Eastern Europe, my father from Poland, my mother from Ukraine. This was in 1898. They had no formal education. My father worked on the tracks laying the Trans-Canada Railway. When he got enough money, he purchased a homestead, which consisted of wooded lands, boulders. And this was the

homesteading arrangement that the government gave people. They could purchase homesteads for a small amount, but then each year they actually documented how much of the wooded land they had turned into farmland. So here you are in this wilderness. So they had to build, well, first of all, they had to convert the land into farmland. They had to build their well, first of all, they had to convert the land into farmland. They had to build their own homes.

They had to build their own schools, their own churches concurrently with very little assistance from the government. They weren't responding to a pre-existing environment. They had to create the damn thing, both the physical and social environment concurrently. Now, the only way they could do that is through a very sense of common humanity. The first year, well, you have this wooded land. So they lived together in sort of a communal setting. And they helped each other, you know, begin to build these, build the towns and the villages and so on.

Now, they built schools, but they were woefully short of educational services and resources. There was one schoolhouse that housed first grade through high school. We had three teachers trying to teach the entire high school curriculum. I had to take a lot of courses by correspondence. A couple of us got together and decided we can see if we can educate ourselves, where I developed a tremendous capacity for self-directed learning. Okay, so how old were you at that time? I was born in 1925. So I started in this rural area. That's where I was born. And then when you decided to take it upon yourself to educate yourself, was that, were you in junior high school, high school?

That was primarily high school because you see, I had to take some courses by correspondence and so on. So one time we pilfered the answer book for the trigonometry class and brought that class to a halt. At one point, my mother, you know, seats me down and says, Albert, you got to decide what you want to do with your life. I said, well, I have a hockey game in an hour. She says, not today. She says, you can stay here. You can till the land. You can play pool. You can drink yourself to oblivion, or you might try to see whether you can get an education. I thought the way she framed it so neutrally, education seemed to be the better deal. You wouldn't know this, but I had the same, I was like age 17, 18. My mom pulled me aside. It was in our kitchen. And she said, we've tried. We've tried to help you the best we can.

Now you have to make a decision. You can either get a job and move out, or you can go to school and you can still stay here for a bit. Now, we live just a couple blocks from the ocean. And the thing that I did was surf. So I was like, wait a minute, I'm not ready to go get a job and move out and kind of pave my own path. So if I go to school, you mean I can keep surfing.

And so I think we had a very similar 17, 18-year-old experience. And were you drinking a lot? Or was that just what the town was doing? No, that was normative. You know, the farmers would come into town. And there wasn't a hell of a lot to do there. And so, you know, they would play pool. They spent most of the time in the beer parlor.

My father, when I was very young, he would take me to the beer parlor and stand me up on the table because I was a good singer and they were all amused. No kidding. So you have an appreciation for performance? Oh, yes. At that early age, my father. him along because that was good for a couple of glasses of beer. It was probably beginning high school.

During the high school breaks, my parents said, Albert, you know, it would be a good idea for you to get out of here. Why don't you go to Edmonton? At that time, Edmonton was the capital of Alberta, population 8,700, no, 8,000, 87,000. So I worked in the Session Door. I picked up a lot of carpentry skills. And then one day, this was a break just before my senior year and I came home and I said there's this fantastic job in the Yukon where you can get your room on board and a pretty good stipend will probably carry me through the first year of college they said well it sounds very good it's a good thing they didn't know where the Yukon was, what I was getting into. Well, it turns out that the Alaska Highway was built on a lot of muskeg. And so the highway keeps sinking.

And so they try to find the best route for a stable road. And so they had these base camps every 80 miles just to continually maintain the surface of the highway. Now, I pull into the base camp and there's an ambulance there and they're loading somebody on. And I introduced myself and asked whether someone got injured and said, hell no, that's our cook. He drank all the lemon extract. We have to go and have his stomach pumped up again. So I knew that this was not going to be Mr. Rogers' neighborhood. And did you feel like you were going to fit into that?

Like, okay. Yeah, well, this was a strange collection of characters. They were running around from the draft board, loners, and ex-wives, and so on. So they were really a deviant group. Did you go in and work there? Oh, yeah. So do you feel like you fit into that group? Well, it sure expanded my view of the psychopathology of everyday life.

The psychopathology of everyday life. The psychopathology of everyday. Yeah. This is phenomenal, Dr. Bendor, because you're one of the most esteemed, if not the, you've influenced my work more than any other professor. And so here I am learning from you about like you fit in with the degenerates and you understand and fit in with the best in the world at Stanford and your colleagues at Oxford and Cambridge and whatever. Dr. Bendor, did you always know you were going to go to university? Yes, but I had very humble aspirations. The other person in my

family who had some education was my sister who got a certificate as a teacher. Did you ever set out at a young age to want to be the most revered or one of the top psychologists or world-renowned for something? Did you ever have those aspirations? And the reason I'm asking that is because I think pop psychology would say you're supposed to. And my experience with Best in the World is that many of them, they didn't care about that. My experience about having visions of fame, I said, hell no. I had no vision. I was really struggling for survival. The idea of fame, hell no. What I think carried me. What a cool word you just used, what carried me, instead of what I was hungry for.

This is a really impoverished environment. I look at my parents and I said, what remarkable, agentic pioneers of the Canadian nation. They built everything. They didn't have any big aspirations. None of them went to school. They got on a boat in Hamburg and took seven days to get across country. And then they end up in this place,

which is just barren. And I said, what remarkable people these were and the ingenuity. Now, they also knew how to party. It was not all work. I love the word pioneer, by the way, just what that represents as somebody who's not only on an expedition, but willing to create something along the way. In this case, it was not willing. They had to. They had to build a house. They had to build a school. There was none there. They had to build a church. Okay, so go back to that word carry. What carried you through? And then I want to ask you what you're most hungry for and have you maybe comment

on that word hunger or crave or what you're driven. And I know I'm touching on motivation, but what carried you? What does that mean? What carried me is, first of all, you have to have some kind of goal in your life. You don't jump in a cab and say, take me somewhere. My goals were very short term. If I'm going to go to college, I'm going to have to find some money somewhere. So if I go and work in the Alcan Highway, I can cover one year of it. And then when I get to UBC, I can pick up jobs in the afternoon. That could carry me through UBC.

My advisor at UBC, I'm getting straight A's in everything. So I was really doing well. Why is that, that you would get straight A's at a university with not a very good education coming up? Like you figured out how to educate yourself from a very small homestead. Why did you get great grades? I had tremendous self-directed learning. So you wanted to learn? I knew. I was a good learner because I learned that in high school. Okay. So when you were at the university, would you focus well in class or would you do the reading afterwards? How would you do that process of great learning? Well, I came from a very impoverished environment. Jeez, when I got into these classes, class or would you do the reading afterwards? How would you do that process of great learning?

Well, I came from a very impoverished environment. Jeez, when I got into these classes, I was amazed. Look at this stuff. Hold on. You're giving me goosebumps right now. And this is how I measure success throughout my day is how many moments I can be of awe because I didn't know this about you. Look, I got goosebumps again. Okay. I didn't know this about you, but one of the gems, the crown jewels of you is that you loved learning and you figured out how to learn efficiently. Then you found yourself in a formal structured environment that they had a sense of how to create an environment to learn well. And so therein lies the essence as I'm listening, that the person, the environment, those two models of your triangle model, the person, the environment, and what's the third one? Behavior, right? And so therein lies your attachment, like you lived it. Well, people say, did you always want to be a psychologist?

I'm commuting with a couple of pre-meds and a couple of engineers. They have courses very early. I didn't know there was life that early. So I'm at the university early, and I'm not going to have any course for, could be an hour or two hours. So I'm sitting in the library, and some person left a course catalog on the table because ordinarily they put them away. So I'm flipping through them. That was probably sort of oriented maybe toward a major in biology. And I'm flipping through and I see

psychology and it's beautiful filler. Filler, that's perfect. So I enrolled in psychology and I said, this is a fantastic field because this is the only science in which for ethical and social reasons, you're prohibited from producing conditions that verify your theory. Oh, my God. There's none like it. It's unbelievable. this is a core theory, namely, in order to explain behavior, you not only need to learn the psychic life, but you have biology, the psychic life, you have social structures. It really is a core theory that integrates all other theories in its causal explanations. And so, you know, we're driving home and we'd always be talking about psychology rather than medicine or engineering.

What that taught me is there's a lot of fortuity in our life paths. This is why you wrote the paper, The Psychology of Chance. Yeah. And so when I was the president of the Western Psychological Association, I have to give a talk. And I figured the best way to be boring is to be totally predictable. So what would happen if I started becoming curious about fortuitous events in people's lives? I thought, I'll look this up a bit, see what I can find. And I got all these fantastic examples. So that's when I gave the talk on chance encounters and life paths. And then, you know, I described the way in which I met my wife as a graduate student,

that my buddy was late getting there, so we lost our starting time. This is your golfing with your friend? Yeah. So we were bumped to a later time, and there were two women ahead of us. And they were slowing down, and we were speeding up. And before long, we were a joyful foursome, and I met my met my wife to be in the sand trap oh my god had my buddy been at the same time my family life would be a darn and it was interesting i gave the talk and then i got published in the american psychologist so i

was getting all these letters of people in psychology. These are, you know, faculty members and so on, writing on how the Ferdowits events in their lives, as to how they happened to get into psychology. And then, so when I gave the talk, about a couple of months later, I get a call from one of the psychology book editors saying that he entered the room as rapidly filling up and he grabbed this chair that was empty. And next week, he's going to marry the woman he happens to be seated next to. I love it.

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on the path of mastery and masters of craft is what people and events shape us. And what, first, I'd love to hear what you think of this question, but people and events have a tremendous influence and they shape us in our trajectory in life. And then I go on to ask, like, can you talk to me about a person or an event that was fundamental in shaping who you are today? I'd love to know what you think of that question, but also if you could elaborate on that story as well. See, I have this transactional model that our thinking influences our behavior. Our behavior influences environment. And then our environment can influence us without saying or doing anything. Namely, if you walk into the room and if you're black, you're going to be treated differently than if you're white. You're going to be treated differently if you're young or if you're old or if you're pretty or you're not so good looking so and then that shapes how you view yourself and they all this is all transactional

and so you're thinking and your behavior is influenced by the environment in which you live but you also are creating that environment by how you think and how you behave, these are transactional. So in the case of fortuity, there's quite a bit of indeterminism. And this is true even in physics. These atoms are floating around there, but they can't predict exactly what they're going to produce. Then when I take an agentic view, I say that there is something that people can do about fortuity. There are two things. One,

you can make chance happen, be active, go places, expose yourself to ideas so you have more intersects. And secondly, you can not only make it happen, but you can also exploit it. Namely, if you have a lot of interests and competencies and values, you can exploit chance events when they occur. Is that like capturing the opportunity that you co-created? Well, yeah, because you see, in the case of philosophers, one philosopher said that luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Pasteur cribbed from him when he said chance favors only the prepared mind. But I often prefer citing probably one of the most distinguished lay philosophers, Rachel Mark, who said,

you can play the hand that fate deals you, but when it occurs, you have to be in the right place at the right time, but you got to have something on the ball. So, this is an extending agentic theory to the fortuitous character of life. Okay. So, I want to know who shaped you or an event that was fundamental in your shaping. It might've been your wife in the sand trap, or it might've been your influence by other professors or people in your life or parents. Maybe it was the homestead. I'm not sure yet, but I wonder if you could follow this idea just a little bit further, which is let's go environment. So right now you and I are having a conversation and you're having a conversation with yourself about this conversation. And so am I. And when we can quiet

that voice, then we get back into this conversation completely and absorb, which is one of the great tasks for elite performers, for people who want to express mastery, is to quiet that conversation and come back to this conversation or this task. So which is more important? The conversation you're having with yourself, so this is the agency, or the nature of this conversation, or the interpretation of this conversation. I see those as three, and I'm wondering if you would condense two of them. What I'm saying is all those are interacting. I agree. I a thousand percent agree. And then if there is one that's more important, is it the conversation you're having with yourself about you and me in this conversation? Or is it the nature of the conversation?

Well, when it's structured, it's the nature of the conversation becomes important. But as you get into it, it's also the other aspect you mentioned. Which is your conversation with yourself about this conversation. Yeah, because, well, let me give you an example. Before we started, I said, what do you think would be a good path for us? So here I am concerned and interested because I could go in 40 different directions. So first of all, I have to get your view as to how we can structure it to begin with. And then as we're going along, I have to keep monitoring. Am I going off track?

And did I clarify enough? Because I've been talking this stuff a long time, and I've got to make sure that it's the same thing you're hearing and so on. So these are the processes. So they're both happening, parallel track. And then if there was one for you, and maybe you say they're both equally the same, I'm tending to lean toward that the inner conversation I'm having with myself about the thing that I'm doing is actually more important than the thing that I'm doing because it is the

filter for which I am trying. Well, that's the proximal determinant. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So we're agreeing on that. Yeah.

But then begins to develop the theory as to how you're going to link that to behavior. So in agentic theory, there are four features. The first one is forethought. You're projecting yourself into the future where you want to be. Now, the problem, in most cases, that doesn't work because it's too distal. You have the immediate environment that you have to deal with, namely, you know, having a hot fudge sundae. And now it's going to override any future plan you have for weight loss healthy dinner so projecting your future self is that what you're calling forethought yes what i'm saying is

you project yourself into your future namely where do you want to go because that's going to shape your activity but but then i point out that just so goals are not sufficient because they're too remote so what you got to do is break that down into proximal goals which tells you what you got to do in the here and now which is going to get you there and the main problem with goal setting it's too distal and current influences easily override it. So this is where you're investing your own self-evaluation in the kind of aspirations you're setting up for yourself. Namely, are you doing what you need to do to get there? And if you have a set of distal goals, namely, what do you want to be? And at the same time, you're setting

proximal goals as to how you're going to get there. For example, say, well, I want to be a doctor. Well, that is going to do a hell of a lot until you begin to decide, I have to go to college, and I have to go to college, I have to take pre-med courses. And after I get pre-med courses, I have to figure out how to get into medical school. And after I get into medical school, I have to take internship and have an internship and so on. So you could see having a distal goal shapes the course, but your proximal goal is going to determine whether you're going to be studying organic chemistry or not. Okay. So in the distal and proximal, long-term, short-term goal setting, I'm not convinced. I've appreciated the research on it, Locke and Latham, yourself, and there's

been great research around goal setting. I'm not convinced that the act of writing down a goal matters. Oh, no, it's not writing them down. It's committing your self-evaluation to them so that if you're matching them, you feel good. And if you're failing them, you feel self-discouragement and so on. So it's not the goals. It's to what extent do you commit yourself to those goals? The writing down for me has always been an exercise for clarity, but the work is to work to their head of what they could be and what they can be doing in their life when it's either extremely too big or it's too small? How do we help know how to match that for a person? And my work is like, I don't get in the way when it's wildly big because who am I to know if that's possible or not? And then when it's too small, it's like that now it's

questioning my evaluation of what I think is possible for another person, which is like, that's dangerous territory. So how have you helped? How do you help people in just this one small way to pursue what they think is possible and to potentially expand that view? Well, you see, people put a lot of emphasis on the justal goal to say, you know, I want to be a doctor. But that isn't going to do much of anything. That's sort of a hope. There's a difference between a hope and some kind of structure in your life as to where you want to go. You know, I use the example.

You don't get in a cab and say, take me somewhere. You need some kind of guide. But that guide is not where the work is. The work is, what are the things I have to do to get there? And then how committed I am to the minutes. The commitment, that's the motivator. You're committed. And if you're committed, then you're going to be self-satisfied. If you make the proximal changes, you're going to be self-satisfied. If you make

the proximal changes, you're going to be self-satisfied if you fail to fulfill them. So it's the affective aspect of goal setting, not the goal setting itself. Goals have no physical reality, so they can't be causes, but symbolic representations of those goals now get you there. I love that symbolic representation, which is like how it feels to have the image of what it could be. And also your strength of your commitment to doing the things that are going to enable you to realize that goal. That's where the power is. Okay, so I'm confused here because I've been around, fortunate enough to be around people that are the most motivated in the world.

And so I don't really understand motivation and the way that, because I've been around folks that they'll do whatever it takes. And what I've come to learn is that when you make a decision and it matters to you, so you've got this clarity of, of who you want to be and where you want to go. And you've made the decision. You'll do whatever it takes. Well, yeah, but that's commitment. You made a decision and now you have to commit yourself to it. They try to create this image, but then can't commit to it.

What's happening? Why would that be the case? Well, most of the goals don't work because they are structured in such a way that they obviously are going to fail. What are the features of the goals don't work because they are structured in such a way that they obviously are going to fail. What are the features of good goals? One, they're explicit. They're not some kind of general. They're very clear.

They're clear. Secondly, the distal goal are sort of a hope and an ambition. It's the proximal goals that are going to get you there. And third, you have to have a commitment to them, which is going to drive you. There's a model, and I'm blanking on her name, and it's a funny and famous quote where she says, nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. Something along those lines, right? So in my theory of goal setting, it has to be explicit.

You have to break this down in smaller steps as to how you're going to get there. You have a swimmer, say an Olympic swimmer, who has the distal goal of knowing what level he's going to have to break in order to get a gold. And then in that four years, he breaks it down into milliseconds. And what he's doing is cutting off a little bit, a little bit, a little bit for four years. Well, that's known as having a goal, namely, what is my speed having to be if I'm going to win a gold? And then how much will I have to make over time? So the focus is on the distal goal now, and you have a series

of distal goals, and that's going to get you there. But think of the fantastic commitment of your life in order to knock off, you know, 30 seconds or something. So in this eugenic theory, the projection into the future is important, but you've got to make it in such a way that there is self-commitment and that there are consequences to your proximal goals, namely satisfaction in mastering the distal goal, self-satisfaction with missing it, and so on. That's the motivator. The other part of projecting to the future is outcome expectations. What do you think will be the result if you fail or you make it? And this is where this becomes the issue of, are you self-centered or are you centered on task-oriented? Oh, look at that. Okay, so therein lies why people might play it safe and shut down.

Because they're self-centered in the way that it might feel in the future if they don't make it. And even it could work on the proximal level. Franco, who's on the pitching mound, can't be thinking of what in the hell is going to happen if I pitch the wrong pitch? What are the consequences if we lose this game? That's being self-centered. Rather than focusing on what they got to do in the here and now, they are worrying about what the consequences are going to be if they screw up and so on. Okay. So when somebody is self-centered and they're absorbed in what could go wrong, or they're observed in what others might be thinking of them. It's going to screw up their performance.

A thousand percent. That little nanosecond, when you can move from that to task, how do you encourage or support or challenge people to do that? And I know you're going to go to self-efficacy in just a moment, and I can't wait to get there with you. But that little nanosecond, when all of a sudden they're doing that self-evaluation or they're consumed with what could go wrong, their body temperature heats up, their physiological system is on, the fight and flight responses have taken over. There's that whole cascade of neurochemicals and stuff that's taking place. How do you help them get over to task? Well, this is where, you see, there are several things. You see, when Franco is on the mound,

he's had thousands of trials. This is not a new thing for him. He's learned how not to do it. He's experiencing. And then when he's there, he's probably had 10,000 trials. And so with all those trials, so you would suggest that a conversation with yourself, like, whoa, Franco, come on now, you know this, hold on. And then would you have him breathe? Would you have them talk himself into focusing on a narrow external point for pitchers, like find a dirt spot? I know what kind of pitch will be weak for him and what will be strong. Okay. So awareness first, then guide. And then when they have awareness, when I have awareness, I can speak to myself that, and I'm doing that, I feel like the fight or flight system's on and I have awareness.

Sometimes I can't find a way to get out of it. And I find myself in a loop. And I talk about this experience I had. I had the opportunity to go back to my college and give a commencement speech. And I was going to talk about mastery and high performance and mindset. So I'm supposed to understand and have a command of these things. And it was like, I don't know, eight years out of college that I did this or something like that. And I'm on stage and all the other professors that I had deeply respected, and my heart is pounding. Okay. And I'm supposed to know something about high performance. And I look down at my wife and she sees me working. And I give her this grin, like I'm kind of in trouble

right now. And so I'm in the fancy robe and all that stuff. And I'll tell you what I'm doing. I have awareness. My heart is pounding. I'm sweating in all the wrong places. And I have to go deliver this speech. And I want to think clearly and communicate with emotion about what I've come to learn. But my mind was shutting me off from access to all that good stuff. Okay. And so this is what I was doing. I'm like, thank God I know this stuff because I'm squeezing every one of my muscles and then holding my breath at the top, taking a deep breath, squeezing all of my muscles about 70%. And on the exhale, I'm letting everything go. Now, no one else knows what I'm doing, but my wife is looking at me getting about a half an inch taller because my butt cheeks were, you know, okay. So I'm working

and I'm working and I'm working. And so I know that when I'm on the edge of my perceived capacity, that I could become completely alive. And in that aliveness, sometimes it's like, I call it the razor's edge. And I'm looking for moments to get to that razor's edge. And when I'm on that razor's edge, sometimes it's beautiful and wonderful. And like, it's amazing. It feels really alive. And other times I'm struggling, like you wouldn't believe. So, so I'm fascinated by the razor's edge of love, of risk, the razor's edge of the hostile environments where things could go terribly wrong, because I think there's an aliveness that we're deeply attracted to in that

place. So can you help me understand how to get better at that razor's edge? And then I'd love for you to talk about, why do you think that I or others are fascinated and terrified at the same time by the razor's edge? I know I just asked you a bunch of questions. Well, the first thing is you got to realize when you're up there on the stage, that was your first trial. It was. So it was brand new to me. Okay. Okay. God bless it. This is so good because, you know, go back to Franco for a minute with the picture. I hear you say he's done it 10,000 times or 20,000, whatever it is. But, and I'm choosing that word purposely, but that moment is completely new to him because he's never been in it before. Like you and I have never been in this moment before, but we've had lots of conversations before. Okay. That's what

I want to grapple with. Should he, do you, do you suggest that based on your models, that's what I want to grapple with. Do you suggest that, based on your models, that the person benefits by saying, I've done it a thousand times, but they never have done this moment? Yeah, if it's novel. But it's always novel. No, for Franco, he's been around. He knows exactly what kind of pitch. But the question that he would probably have is, can he really control the pitch that much? Can he control it that much? Yeah. Brilliant. Okay. So you don't think that this moment is novel? Well, no, because as I say, in Franco's case, he's probably done it

30, 40,000 times. And what I'm trying to articulate in my head is that those, let's say 40,000 times, the 399,000 times before, each one of those was brand new, but they're clumped together in some kind of way that seem like there's context. But each one is uniquely new. And so help me understand how you think about that, the newness of each moment. At first, you break them down into smaller tasks. You bunch them then so that now the performance goes smoothly. Okay, I see it totally. So all of the 399,000 times before that they are preparing him for this moment. Yeah. And so he can go back and say, well, I've done 20,000 kind of just like this.

Yeah. There's 20,000, you know, whatever. And then that, so that begs the question for me, what about, let's call it world series. Let's call it the biggest game of his life, whatever that's supposed to mean. And, and so he's never been in a World Series before bases loaded. How do you help a person who's never been in a particular situation and they perceive it to be big, which I think is a trap, by the way? How do you help the person there? First of all, you have to make sure that the coach has confidence that he can handle that situation and then convey that.

So that the doer is going to look to his environment to see if others believe. Yeah. Right? And then if, okay, so he looks over to the coach and the coach is giving him the nod, like, you got this. That means that the coach can't be consumed with what could go wrong. Oh, yeah, because he may also be anxious that this guy could blow the game. Right, okay. So what if your environment is neutral? You pan the audience, you pan your supporters, and they're neutral because they're scared. Now what do we do? Well, this is where

you're looking for cognitive correspondence, not physical. Somehow, cognitively, you see something in this that is not too different from what you've done before. In the other case, you see this as entirely novel under conditions where you perceive at least some similarity. Your efficacy goes up, your performance increases under conditions where you view this as entirely novel. This is where you shift to self-focus rather than task focus.

Got it. Okay. Because if it's completely novel and you don't have a model that you can be successful. Yeah. This is your being on the stage there. That's right. Yep. You've never done that before.

But if you see something similar that you've done, there's no reason why this should be frightening to you. Got it. And to your model of learning, social learning, is that if you see somebody that you think is similar to you being successful, that that can either enhance or debilitate your performance. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it, because I, and I love that little moment where we have to filter in your model that if you see someone close to you that, and they're doing well, there's a little moment in that filter that we have to decide if, if we can be successful or not. And it's that filter that I think really screws people up or, and, or promotes them to why, for example, in many of these studies, they perform and then you give them false normative, namely, how well did they do compared to what others have done?

And where they feel they've done better or that others that builds their efficacy and performance. If they feel that they really are in the 20th percentile of what other college students have been able to do, that really pretty much destroys their efficacy and their performance. So this is where you're giving them information that's totally irrelevant to their performance, but it's a profound effect on their behavior. And then that is based on the filter that we were just talking about, how they perceive themselves relevant to how others have done.

So in my theory of agency, there are three elements to it. The first is you have to project yourself into the future to have something to work toward okay secondly is your capacity for self-regulation to what extent can you regulate your thought processes your emotions your behavior and so on and so this is where you have to have some kind of standard and you're comparing your performance against that standard and then you have the self-evaluative reactions as to whether or not you fulfill the standard or fall short. If you fall short, you say, I'm going to have to redouble my efforts and so on.

And then the third one is self-reflection. This is primarily to what extent do you judge your capabilities, and that's the efficacy part. So these are the three elements of agency and the theory. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Over the years, I've learned that recovery doesn't just happen when we sleep. It starts with how we transition and wind down. And that's why I've built intentional routines into the way that I close my day. And Cozy Earth has become a new part of that. Their bedding, it's incredibly soft,

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them out head to caldera lab.com finding mastery and use the code finding mastery at checkout for 20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com finding mastery. Is this, I don't know, you've talked about this so much. Does this get boring for you? No, no. I mean, this is your life's work that I'm fascinated by. Well, you know, people ask me, you know, are you anxious? You know, no, I've been through this. And it starts. Okay. So if self-efficacy is the belief in one's capabilities.

Yeah. Is it right for me to assume that the four components of self-efficacy are the way to enhance one's belief of their capability? There are two things. One, it's a belief in your capability, or at the collective level, it's the belief in your team. So we have not only the individual, but the collective efficacy. And there are four ways you build it.

Build it through guided mastery. Namely, you break it down into smaller steps, you begin to perfect it. And then as you develop it, you then have to learn that success does not come easy, which means that in this graduated mastery program, you're given progressively tougher challenges as you're developing. And then you have to learn how to deal with failure, which means that you then are subject to, you have to have experiences in which you're failure. And here you have to know how to manage failure. And that is you treat it as informative. Namely,

you learn from failure rather than get demoralized by it. Have you seen a cost to early success in self-efficacy? When people have early success and they become recognized, they're fed a lot of money. I've seen a real cost. Oh, yeah. This is a serious one. A good example is the guy who wrote Death of a Salesman. As his first hit, he said for the rest of his life, he was miserable because he said, anything I write now cannot live up to my first one. So he was tortured. This is big hits for musicians.

Yeah. You know, that they get stoned basically, you know, with the artistic expression because the outcome, and I've seen it with young athletes and even NFL or NBA athletes that have wild success early on is that it becomes really frustrating because it's not going that way again. Yeah. Well, you know, that, that hits everyone, you know, and I'll tell you when I write a a book, it's just as good as what I did before. So this is not just, but, you know, when I wrote the self-efficacy book, I always had an abiding interest in using the knowledge we develop into programs of individual and social change. When the efficacy book was published, each chapter was saying,

how do you apply this in education, in health, in clinical conditions, in athletics, and in organizational behavior, and in social and political change. This was a theory that was really crossing disciplines. So I decided when I'm, my theory about staying young is you stay young through self-renewal. What does that mean? Take on new challenges. So here I'm age 90 and I decided I need to add another dimension to my theory, namely I need to add morality into my theory. So I'm going to write a book on morality, but I felt the problem, the theories of morality were really uninformative to me because they were primarily oriented on the acquisition of moral standards and moral reasoning,

but they were divorced from conduct on the assumption that once you adopt moral standards, it dictates your behavior. It doesn't. And so what I was saying is that in a social cognitive theory, that's only half the story and the less interesting half, because what you have to do, explain the self-regulatory mechanisms during that explanatory gap that gets you from thought to action. And that is you have standards, you commit yourself to them, and then you have self-sanctions depending on whether you fulfill your standards or you violate them. And then what's striking is that we have a pervasive moral paradox in which otherwise considerate people are behaving harmfully and feeling good about themselves and living in peace with themselves. So how can that happen? And then I developed eight mechanisms by which they strip morality from their behavior and disavow responsibility for it. So then you can have a tobacco industry that kills half a million people annually. And then you have all good people there. You have advertisers learning how to write ads that are going to hook children in smoking.

You have movie actors who get paid for smoking in their movies. You have lawmakers who exempt nicotine from any bill involving drugs, although it's the most addictive one. We see it in sport where athletes are promoting fast food. You know, like, same thing. Yeah, okay. and the tobacco industry, in the finance industry, terrorism and military counterterrorism, and the death penalty, and then the most important one, in moral disengagement, in environmental degradation, and so on. And so I changed my writing style completely. It's not graphs and so on. I go and read the internal documents of these companies

and how they're talking to themselves. And I'm demonstrating causal processes as they're happening within the context and longitudinally and so on. So if you look out there, I have the book on moral disengagement, how good people do harm and live with themselves. And so at age 90, people tell me, this is the best book you've written so far. I'm saying to myself, what am I going to do next? I'm not going to sit around. So I decided I can open up a whole area in morality now with this. And what I need to do is write a formal manual on how to measure this thing. And furthermore, when I was working on the book, I'd get up every morning and I'd rush out and get the New York Times to find out who is the new evildoer today.

So it was fantastically exciting. And when it got published, I got kind of sad that I didn't have this thing to work on anymore. So I said, well, maybe I should begin writing a theory on moral engagement. Namely, that's part of the message I have the book. First of all, you got to make sure that we make it hard for people to remove morality from their behavior. Secondly, if the public knew these eight mechanisms, they could see through them and they would be less effective. But third, there was really a call to action as to how to enlist moral engagement in the development of inclusive, socially just, and humane societies, and said, well, maybe I could write a book on moral engagement. Oh, wow, I've been really doing what I preach. So here I am, you know, going to 92 years.

I don't see myself any different than when I was a graduate student. The same excitement about an area. For example, Ed Locke was writing a book on do distinguished people have fame as their goal? He asked me about me and I said, hell no. My view of progress is you got to commit yourself to something that you feel is worth it. And then you get your satisfaction by making progress toward that commitment.

I always had deep commitment to picking something that I felt was worth doing. And also, in my theory, since I had a commitment to individual social applications, that somehow you can make life better for others. Okay. And then on the self-efficacy model, if we've talked about mastery and performance outcomes. Oh, yeah. Let me finish that. Okay. So in gaining mastery, it's not only acquiring skills, but then it experiences in taking on progressively tougher challenges, which means they have to really work even harder at it. And furthermore, they have to know how to deal with failure, that failure should be informative rather than demoralizing. Someone

asked Thomas Edison, he apparently had tested 4,000 filaments before he found one that worked. And so they asked him, well, then't you get discouraged anywhere along the way? He said, hell no. What I did, I learned 4,000 things that don't work. He's using failure as informative rather than demoralizing or losing efficacy in oneself. That's one way. The second way is through the power of social modeling, namely you shortcut that process by benefiting from the experiences of others

so that you can shortcut the acquisition process through social modeling. And then, you know, I have a lot of ideas as to under what conditions whether you'd be influenced by models if there's a lot of assumed dissimilarity you'll say well maybe it's for them but I don't it doesn't apply to me and so you have a theory where you have to specify under what conditions will modeling be influential and what conditions it won't. And then the third one is people have views about your efficacy, and those who can boost your efficacy lead you to believe that you can do it. But they go beyond that.

They set up experiences where it's going to work. Namely, it's not just telling them, but it's also structuring experiences for them in which you know that if they act on this new belief, that it's going to get reinforced and so on. So it's not just verbal persuasion. It's creating an environment where the verbal persuasion actually has some context. Coupled with setting up conditions where they'll be able to realize them.

That's what's lacking. People say, oh, you can do it. Yeah, but you've got to set it up in such a way that you can also help them do that. And then the third is how you read your emotional experiences. So here, if your heart is pounding, you have really doubts whether you have what it takes. So this is reading your own emotional arousal in ways that could be debilitating and so on. So these are the four ways you build it through guided mastery, through social modeling, social persuasion, and through inferences from your somatic and emotional states and so on. And then there are

four ways in which it works. First of all, it influences your cognitive processes. It determines whether you think pessimistically or optimistically. That's the cognitive aspect. Secondly, it's the motivational aspect. This has to do with kind of aspirations and goals you set for yourself and your commitment in the face of adversity and difficulty. And the third, how it affects your emotional life in terms of your vulnerability to stress and depression.

And then final one, which is probably the most important one, it shapes the kind of decisions you make at critical decision points. That's important because that determines the direction in which your life is going to take. So that's why your investment in the four components of efficacy influence the future. And then optimism and pessimism are learned. And self-efficacy, you're suggesting suggesting influences optimism and pessimism. Yeah, we have the paper I wrote with Benite where he was studying post-traumatic stress disorders. He had a whole set of studies on hurricanes, on fires, volcanoes, tornadoes, and so on. And so he studied people's efficacy that they can recover from these.

So those that felt that they could recover from them are the ones essentially behaved in ways that enabled them to do so. And that was when you're controlling for the severity of the destruction. You know, the severity of the destruction, you know, the mountain blue in Oregon, some people lost not only their homes, but family were killed and so on. So he said when you control for the magnitude, the best predictor was their belief that they can restore their life. And he measured optimism and efficacy predicted optimism, but after you control for efficacy,

optimism did not have the effect. Optimism is often more sort of vague. It's not linked to how do you translate optimism into mastery performance. Okay. But they are linked. I can do that. Yeah. Yeah. I believe that in the future, something amazing is going to take place. So then I should keep working. Optimism without efficacy gets you nowhere. I love that. I love that. Okay. Brilliant. Okay. So as we're rounding out this conversation,

I'd love to get your take on just a couple more points here, which is, if there's a word or a phrase that cuts to the center of what you understand most, in just a word or a phrase, what is that? I would think, again, it gets back to my sense of agency, that human beings are not just reacting to influences. They have a capacity to shape the course of their lives. That would be central to my work. And then it focuses on, okay, so how do you build this thing? Yeah, yeah.

How would you finish this phrase, my philosophy is? My philosophy is, My philosophy is... It's a humanitarian one, namely. How can I contribute to the quality of people's lives? And you've done that beyond your imagination. I would imagine that's phenomenal. I mean, to think that I'm there in Mundare thinking at this level, this is fantasy. This is fantasy.

But I got there in small steps in each case. And I managed to commit myself to things that really affect people's lives. And that's where my self-evaluation is hooked up. I didn't care what other people thought of my work. In fact, my work was always going counter to what was in vogue. I was talking about modeling at the time of behavioralism in which they couldn't understand how you could learn without performing responses and getting reinforced. So I got clobbered by the behaviorists. And then the cognivists at that time said, well, he's a behaviorist. I got it from

both ends. And then I was doing work on self-regulation at the time where Skinner and others were saying that all our behavior is shaped and regulated by the environment. And this business of agency is illusory. Where does pressure come from? There would be two kinds. It can come from the environment and then it comes from self-generated pressure. For example, if you study depression, if you have a high sense of efficacy,

you aren't stressed. You aren't doubting your capabilities. All you're focusing on is what the hell do I have to do then to realize this? If you have strong environmental demands and you have doubts that you can fulfill them, that's when you have tremendous pressure. And then for you, which one is larger, environmental pressure or internal pressure? It's both of them, but I would judge that your belief that you can do it, this is why you have these people in fantastically life and death situations. There was a book there by a general who, this was in Vietnam.

He and his battalion are in a valley, and they then realized that the Viet Cong had got them greatly outnumbered. They're going to get wiped out if they don't figure some way of organizing themselves and so on. And it was interesting, the interviewer said to the general, and you know, they suffered heavily, but they also killed about 500 Viet Cong. So the interviewer says to him, did you ever talk to God in that situation? He says, no, I don't talk to God in those situations. He said, in those situations, I don't think about my own death. I don't think about God. I don't think about my family and what could happen. I only think about what do I need to do right now to protect my soldiers. So here you couldn't think of a greater environmental pressure. And here he was so damn focused on what he needs to do to make sure that fewer of his soldiers are killed. Which is the internal question.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, you're setting up a model for me about between the two, whichever one is larger probably dictates. You see, if you feel that you can match a challenge, it's not an... There's no threat. It's an opportunity. And if you have the mindset that if you have difficulty, you learn what you need to do differently to succeed rather than get stressed about it. Yeah, there you go. Okay. If you could interview masters, what would be the one question

that would be most important to you? I suppose the questions people would ask is how did you do it? Because to do it you have to invest a fantastic amount of energy and time over long periods of time. Thinking of the swimmer who had to cut off a few seconds for four years. He gained mastery, but boy, the self-demands are absolutely unbelievable. You have to be able to override rejection.

In the efficacy book, I described that virtually every one of our innovations have been rejected at the outset because they went counter to, and these are absolutely unbelievable. Well, let me just, I'll go to my office and just bring up an example where I have a speech I gave about those who have gained fame. Here's Warren, Warner at warner brothers rejecting talking movies he said who the hell wants to hear actors talk here's the impressionists had to arrange their own art exhibitions because their works were routinely rejected by the par Salon. Beethoven's teacher called him hopeless as a composer. Here's Vince Lombardo was rejected for a coaching job

because he possesses minimal football knowledge and lacks motivation. Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor for lack of creativity. Robert Goddard, the rocket pioneer, found his ideas bitterly rejected by the scientific community. So can you imagine the kind of rejection they had to take? See, this should have killed Beethoven, should have killed Walt Disney.

They had to believe that they could do it, or they had to be so committed to the activities. You had the same experience in your life. Sure, sure. I got stuff rejected, oh yeah. And E.E. Cummings had one of his books rejected by 15 publishers. And when he finally got it published by his mother, the dedication read, with no thanks to and he listed all the 15.

Sense of humor helped. One guy was getting so many rejections in small cards, he said he preferred the 8x11 because he was papering his office and he would have rejected parties. Sense of humor. Here's Western Union's rejection of Bell telephone offer to purchase the right for the telephone. And then here's this telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously

considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value. And here's a response of David Sarnoff to his associates. He's urging them to invest in the radio. And the answer was, the wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who the hell would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular? I love it. Jobs and Wozniak describes their rejection officer at Atari and at Hewlett and Packard. They said, we went to Atari and said, we got this amazing thing. You didn't build it with some of your parts. What do you think about funding us?

We'll give it to you. We just want to do it and pay our salary. We'll come here and work for you. And they said, no. So then we went to Hewlett Packard, and they said, we don't need you. You haven't even gone through college yet. So this is a computer, and this is, here's a Yale professor explaining to Fred Smith, who went on to found Federal Express, why he gave him a C in grade for his thesis proposing an overnight delivery system. He said, the concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn a better grade than C, the idea has to be feasible.

We're talking about these are people who look at the rejections they had to deal with and how they overrode them. And Decca Records rejected the Beatles with the non-prophetic evaluation, we don't like their sound and groups of guitars are on the way out. Then when Decca rejected them, then Columbia Records followed suit and rejected them. So I end up by saying rejection often comes with hostile embellishments. John Garcia, seminal research in psychology, was rejected for 10 years. Because according to the theory in vogue, you learn through contiguity. The events have to be paired continuously. The stimulus comes on and then you have to experience it.

He was giving his animals some drug that they wouldn't get nauseous until about six hours later. And they were getting to then develop aversion. Even at a delayed stage? After a delay. And so he was continuously rejected with hostile embellishment. John Garcia's seminal discovery were rejected for years. He was told by a reviewer, one is no more likely to find the phenomena he claims than bird droppings in a cuckoo clock.

The question is, you have to say, how in the hell did these people survive? And it's normative rather than unusual so okay as humans there is an incredible fear to not belong to not matter and so many of us play the game just to fit in and there's something different that these men and women have done what we behave in ways that are supportive but what's what's in vogue at the time. And all of these guys were presenting something new. And they all got rejected. And they got profoundly rejected.

If you look at Stoddard, he never got, during his lifetime even, didn't get credit for. Stoddard, yeah. during his lifetime even, didn't get credit for it. And he was being rejected by our National Academy of Science, saying, first of all, there's no reason to believe that this thing could go up into the outer space. Secondly, if it did, it has no value. This is the National Academy of Science. Can you imagine getting something like that in the mail? So how do people get through in your mind? How do... They had to have a commitment that they were able to sustain

themselves despite the hostile rejections of their stuff. Sometimes it doesn't work. See, I point out that we often think of scientists, you know, as just being, you know, just they found this big thing. But what I point out is that modeling is also the mother of innovation. Namely, Jobs and Wozniak could not have produced their computer without all the research that went into the science behind it. So they were able to pick elements that were relevant. They combined them in novel ways and came up with something new. So they were thinking that they could come up with something better than existed. And as I say, many of them got killed off in this early phase where they were conducting behavior in relationship to their own standards rather than accommodating to what was in vogue at the time.

So when you look at this, virtually every innovation that has touched our lives was repeatedly rejected. Rejections often happen with hostile acknowledgements and so on. And the people who are successful, innovative, non-anxious, non-dispondent in treatment, and tenacious social reformers take an optimistic view of their efficacy to influence events that affect their lives. George Bernard Shaw put it well when he said, reasonable people adapt to the world, unreasonable ones try to change it. Human progress depends on the unreasonable ones. Don't despair if you suffer rejection and setbacks. Those who have gained fame and fortune suffered mightily in the hands of rejecters lacking foresight. Thank you. Thank you very much for your time and your commitment. I mean,

it's made a tremendous impact on my life and millions. So thank you. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing these conversations with you. We really appreciate you being part of this community. And if you're enjoying the show, the easiest no-cost way to support is to hit the subscribe or follow button wherever you're listening. Also, if you haven't already, please consider dropping us a review on Apple or Spotify. We are incredibly grateful for the support and feedback.

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