Something You Should Know - How Your Biases Are Used Against You & How Top Performers Think -SYSK Choice

Episode Date: March 28, 2026

When you walk up to a table with a group of people, you probably pick a seat without thinking much about it. But where you sit can subtly shape how others perceive you and how the interaction unfolds. There’s actually a simple strategy to choosing a seat that can give you an advantage — whether the table is round, square, large, or small. https://lifehacker.com/always-choose-the-best-seat-at-any-multi-person-table-5990596 No matter how rational you try to be, your thinking is shaped by biases you can’t fully escape. These biases influence what you believe, the decisions you make, and even what you consider to be “true.” Alex Edmans, professor of finance at London Business School and author of May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases―And What We Can Do About It (https://amzn.to/3vprIz3), explains how easily our biases can be manipulated by data, headlines, and persuasive stories — and how to become a more careful, independent thinker in a world full of misinformation. When you think of elite performers — Navy SEALs, top athletes, high-level leaders — what stands out is their ability to stay focused, calm, and effective under pressure. That kind of mental discipline may seem out of reach, but it isn’t. Eric Potterat, a clinical and performance psychologist and retired Navy commander who helped design the mental toughness training used by the SEALs, explains how these skills are built. He breaks down the habits and mindset shifts that allow people to perform at a high level — even in stressful, uncertain situations. Eric is author of Learned Excellence: Mental Disciplines for Leading and Winning from the World’s Top Performers (https://amzn.to/3TV4Qka). Toothpicks seem harmless — just small wooden tools to clean your teeth. But they can cause more problems than you might expect. In fact, once you hear what can happen, you may think twice before reaching for one again. https://acedentaloftexas.com/why-are-toothpicks-a-danger-for-your-oral-health PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS POCKET HOSE: Text SYSK to 64000 for your two free gifts with the purchase of any Pocket Hose Ballistic hose! DUTCH: If your pet is still scratching and you’ve tried everything at the pet store –it’s time to stop guessing and go prescription.Support us and use code SYSK for $40 off your membership at ⁠⁠https://Dutch.com⁠⁠ RULA: Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high-quality therapy that’s actually covered by insurance. Visit ⁠⁠https://Rula.com/sysk⁠⁠ to get started. QUINCE: Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.dom/sysk ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! SHOPIFY: See less carts go abandoned with Shopify and their Shop Pay button! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ EXPEDITION UNKOWN: We love the Expedition Unknown podcast from Discovery! Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When WestJet first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion, inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to WestJetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. Today on something you should know,

how to pick the best seat at a group table and why it matters. Then, humans have biases. But maybe you think you're smart, your objective, you don't have biases. You might think so, and many of your listeners might think, why do these biases apply to me? I'm a sensible, rational person. Unfortunately, scientific evidence finds it's the opposite, that more knowledgeable and more sophisticated people are more susceptible to these biases.

Also, why you just might want to skip the toothpicks at the next party, and how developing mental toughness improves performance at just about anything. I think when you look at the best performers who are sustaining excellence over time, their ability is more along the lines of how are they leveraging their software, those mental techniques that makes the hardware work.

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It's time we started hunting them. I can work with that. This should be tons of fun. Marvel television's Daredevil, Born Again, now streaming only on Disney Plus. Something You Should Know. Fascinating Intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use. in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

Hi there, welcome to something you should know, and today we're going to start with some very practical advice for a situation I know you've probably been in, and that is you walk into a room, maybe it's a restaurant or it's a meeting or something, and there's a table and chairs, and you wonder, where should I sit? Where's the best place to sit? Well, here is a strategy for choosing the best seat in a group situation. At a circular table that has four seats around it, it doesn't really matter where you sit. Any seat will do, you can't go wrong.

At a four-person square table, sit opposite your least favorite person, because conversations tend to work diagonally at that kind of table. In a six-seated situation, choose the middle of one side. It may be harder to get in and out, but you'll have more conversational options that way. For tables of eight or more, timing's everything. If you arrive first, you'll be expected to file to the end.

Maybe not so good. If you're last, you'll probably get the least desirable seat that nobody wants to sit in. Also not good. So the best strategy is to just stand back and wait for the right moment to make your move and grab a seat. And that is something you should know. While you might think that you are or can be objective about a topic, people have biases. They have beliefs that color their ability to be objective. A lot of the time, it's fine, it doesn't matter, small stakes.

But other times, for big things, it can matter. It does matter. And understanding these biases that are ingrained in all of us can be very illuminating. Here to explain them is Alex Edmund. He is a professor of finance at London Business School. He has a TED Talk called What to Trust in a Post-Truth world that's been viewed over two million times. And he is author of a book called May Contain Lies, How Stories, Statistics and Studies Explored Our Biases and What We Can Do About It. Hi, Alex, welcome to something you should know.

Thanks, Mike. It's great to be here. So in broad strokes here, let's start with your explanation of these biases. that tend to steer our thinking? Certainly. So there's two biases that cause us to make mistakes when we're interpreting information, data and evidence. So one of them is confirmation bias. So this is the idea that we have a pre-existing view. And if there's evidence that supports that view, we will latch onto it. We will accept it uncritically, even if the evidence is flimsy. And then in contrast, if there is some evidence that contradicts our view, we will click.

our ears to it, we might not even read it, or we might read it but with the view to try to tear it apart. So this means we will only latch onto things that we like and dismiss things that we don't like. Now confirmation bias, that does apply to questions where we have a pre-existing view. So that might be climate change or immigration or gun control. But what about the set of issues for which there is no pre-existing view? That's where the second bias comes in, which is called black and white thinking. So this is the idea that we view something as being always good or always bad. There is no nuance.

So let's give an example. So in the sphere of diet, we often think that protein is good. We learn in school. This builds muscles and repairs you. We also think that fat is bad. It's cool that way because it makes you fat. But what about carbohydrates? We might not have a preexisting view on that.

But Robert Atkins, he went viral because of his. Atkins diet, which gave the black and white conclusions that more carbs are always bad. He had a diet saying, let's avoid all carbs. Not just simple carbs and saying that complex carbs are fine. He said, avoid all carbs. That played into black and white thinking that latched on, it went viral because it was so simple. But notice that if he had had completely the opposite conclusion, if he had said have a diet to eat as many carbs as possible, he might have equally gone viral, because that also plays into black and white thinking. We think something is either always good or always bad. We're not predisposed to a particular direction. Okay, so I get what you say about having these biases,

but doesn't a little knowledge fix that? If I now know, if I know the truth about carbohydrates, and then I know the Atkins diet is probably not too healthy, case closed. You might think so, and many of your listeners might think, why do these biases, apply to me, I'm a sensible, rational person, can't I use my knowledge to overcome these biases? Right. Unfortunately, scientific evidence finds it's the opposite, that more knowledgeable and more sophisticated people are more susceptible to these biases. And so why might that be?

It's because of something known as motivated reasoning. So the smarter we are, we can come up with arguments to dismiss evidence that we don't like. And we can also come up with arguments to support evidence that we do like, even if that evidence happens to be flimsy. As an example, it may well be that there's a study which finds a correlation that we don't like. So if we are a supporter of gun control, we might not like a paper which finds that gun control is associated with higher crime. But we might say, well, correlation does not imply causation. Maybe there's other factors at play here. maybe crime would have been even higher had there not been gun control. But we turn off those same critical thinking faculties when we find something that we do like. So we do have knowledge,

but we apply only selectively when it suits us. Two things can be true at the same time. So in some cases, maybe gun control controls crime and maybe in other cases gun control doesn't. I don't think you can make the blanket statement that gun control does or doesn't affect crime? You absolutely cannot, and this is the problem of black and white thinking. So some of these issues may be nuanced. It might be that gun control works in certain situations, but it doesn't work in others. But if you were to give that message, you're much less likely to be tweeted in 280 characters and go viral. So something which has a simple message where we say X is true, period, that is what typically sells. So it could be something that carbs are always bad for your

health or waking up at 5 a.m. always improves your productivity. If you give that simple message, that's going to be far more powerful than waking up at 5 a.m. improves your productivity so long as you're also eating healthily and exercising daily and able to get in bed before 10 p.m. So that more nuanced message is probably going to be more accurate, but that's not the message that we want to hear, given our biases. Right. And it sounds like a miserable life too. I don't want to go to bed at 10 and get up at 5 and just eat vegetables all day. I mean, that would be difficult. So if you take people who have a bias and you explain it to them and you say, this is your bias, does it change them? Does knowing it change them? Or does it, do they say, yeah, I have a bias and too bad?

It actually can. So there are some nice studies which look at trying to overcome this situation. So not just studies highlighting the problem, but studies trying to solve this. And so there were two sets of techniques that they tried. So one set of techniques was just to say to people, be as unbiased as possible when evaluating the information. And that just didn't work. That would be like trying to tell a baseball player who's batting 200 tries to hit the ball more accurately. So they just don't have the ability to do that. That's just a limit to their physical ability.

But there was a second set of techniques which was to give people specific bias and counteracting thought processes. So one of them was if you see a study whose findings that you like, let's say it's gun control reduces crime, they told you to imagine the opposite. So imagine that the study instead found that gun control increases crime. How would you try to attack that study? Well, you'd say, is it correlation or is it causation? Now that you have found some ways to attack that study, then apply the same skepticism, even if the study finds the results that you do want.

So this idea of considering the opposite, how would you react? That is something which helps people to address their biases, and these studies were shown that that technique was in fact able to reduce biases, even though the first one, just generally telling people to be understanding. biased was ineffective. I can imagine people listening to you going, yeah, but I don't read studies.

It's not what I do for fun is sit around and read studies. You read studies, but the information I get doesn't come from a study. At least when I read it, I'm reading articles, I'm reading, you know, blogs or watching television or listening to a podcast. I'm not analyzing studies. I think this is a great question. That's a really important one. So somebody might look at me and say, well, I'm an academic researcher.

I spend my life evaluating academic papers. What relevance does this have to the person on the street who does not do this for your day job? And hopefully you don't do this for fun either. But what I'm trying to stress is that you receive the information from research in any form. Whenever you pick up a magazine, let's say this is men's health, women's health or runners' world, you're reading about research. you're reading, is it true that drinking more water improves your athletic performance? Should you be drinking caffeine before a workout?

What is the best recovery shake? That is research. If you read a blog saying waking up at 5 a.m. Change my life. Is it that the act of waking up at 5 a.m. caused you to change your life? Or is it that somebody who chooses to wake up at 5 a.m. is probably doing lots of other things to get their act together.

and it's those other things that are leading to the improvements and performance. Before I had my first child, I went to some parenting courses and they said, you need to breastfeed. Breastfeeding is correlated with superior performance in terms of child IQ, child health, mother postpartum depression. But was it that breast milk causes these outcomes? Or is it that mothers with a more supportive home environment were able to, to breastfeed because of how challenging it is, and that support of home environment is what

caused those outcomes. Because if so, the onus is then on me as a father to provide a more supportive home environment rather than telling my wife she needs to breastfeed all the time. So we get information in so many different contexts and we need to think about is this information correlation or causation? Is this information a unique hand-picked case or is it generally true? Maybe there was one person who woke up at 5 a.m. and it did change the life, and they will blog about it and tell people. If you were somebody who woke up at 5 a.m. and it had no effect, you would keep that to yourself. So what we might be seeing is a selected sample of isolated anecdotes. And again, this is a case in which we need to be discerning about the information that

we see. But it seems to me, I mean, you're a research guy, an academic guy. You look at these things in a much different way than most people. And the fact is that you can go on Google and pretty much find evidence to support whatever you want, either side of the breastfeeding issue or any other. I mean, it just, so then what do you do? Yeah, and this is a huge challenge in the information age. So you might think, oh, it's great now.

That information is so easy to get. When I was a kid, I had to trek down to the library and to look it up into the encyclopedia, nowadays we have easy access to information and even academic research, which used to be behind paywalls, this is now increasingly open access. But this leads to challenges as well as opportunities is that you can always corral information to support whatever you want to support. And this is particularly a problem if you are biased, right? So if I wanted an excuse to drink a lot of red wine after dinner this evening, I would just Google why red wine improves your health.

And I'm sure I could come up with a lot of highly cited studies and highly circulated studies to support this. So what this means is that what matters is not just whether there's a study. We often hear the phrase, research shows that X. Studies show that Y. But studies show nearly everything you want them to show. What matters is the quality of research and these issues we've discussed, such as correlation versus causation, that is critical to finding out whether research is of sufficient quality for you to change your decisions based on it, or is this just conventional wisdom,

or, to be unfair, is this just an old wide tale? We're talking about human biases and how they affect our thinking. My guest is Alex Edmonds. He's author of a book called May Contain Lies, How stories, Statistics, and Studies exploit our biases and what we can do about it. At Desjardin, our business is helping yours. We are here to support your business through every stage of growth, from your first pitch to your first acquisition.

Whether it's improving cash flow or exploring investment banking solutions, with Desjardin business, it's all under one roof. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us. And contact Desjardin today. We'd love to talk. Business. Uh, where are my gloves? Come on, heat.

Winter is hard, but your groceries don't have to be. This winter, stay warm. Tap the banner to order your groceries online at voila.ca. Enjoy in-store prices without leaving your home. You'll find the same regular prices online as in-store. Many promotions are available both in-store and online, though some may vary. So, Alex, it seems to me that it's kind of human nature. to want to believe whatever you believe and have some evidence to believe.

And most things aren't life or death anyway. And there's comfort in thinking that what I believe has got some sort of back up to it. And that's kind of how people operate. That is indeed kind of how most people operate. And then what I'm trying to highlight is, well, how can you be different from most people? So sometimes it might not be life or death situations, but it just affects our understanding of the world. So you might think, oh, why is inflation higher in one country rather than another? What causes unemployment?

What causes economic success? And I might not be a central banker with the ability to directly cause inflation or control inflation, but I just want to understand the world better. And I think to have a more discerning look at the data just helps me having a richer understanding. Even if there's no practical effect on decision making is not my knowledge of the world, just richer. a bit more informed. But also the number of decisions that we might take based on information is just much wider than one might think if you thought of research as just scientific paper.

So nearly every decision that you take. So after this recording, I'm going to work out. And so what is the work I am I going to do? Is it high intensive interval training? Is it low intensity study state? How is this matching with the other workouts I've done this week? Am I going to have some pre-workout supplement? all of these decisions are based on evidence. And you might think, this sounds like a bit like a professor who's trying to scientifically analyze every decision. Is this not analysis paralysis?

No, because this information might make my life easier rather than more complex. Because if I can achieve the same outcome with three workouts a week, which are based in the science as I can with six workouts a week, then I actually then have more time for myself. And what I'm trying to highlight in the book is the questions that we ask ourselves, they don't think take a lot of analysis to do. Simple questions like if this was the opposite, how would I react? That will only take a moment's reflection, but in terms of our productivity and our effectiveness, there can be large effects in terms of the outcome. So here's an example of something that we just discussed on this podcast a few episodes ago.

it was is going barefoot a good idea and there is good evidence for both and it's good evidence for both and a lot of things have good evidence for both sides and you could and and you just kind of have to pick one if you want to go barefoot there's the evidence and it doesn't necessarily contradict the evidence on the other side it's just different evidence i think that's fair and there could be good evidence for is, is rugby better for you or is football better for you or should you study English or math? So what I would like to then look at is how tailored is the evidence for my particular situation? So if going barefoot is generally good, but there studies finding that going barefoot is bad if you've got a history of ankle weakness because that's when ankle

strength is particularly important because you're not wearing shoes that could be supportive, I might pay more attention to that. And it might be that going barefoot is good if in conjunction with a lot of other things, if you're doing certain things with your diet, if you're doing particular types of plyometric training. And so I want to look at beyond the headline study, we like to believe the headlines going by effort is good or it's bad, but it's often good or bad in conjunction with other types of behaviour and for certain types of people. And therefore, that would allow me to focus on particular studies that matter for my particular situation with the other behaviors that I'm doing alongside going barefoot.

People seem to like, whether they should or shouldn't, people like recommendations, which are basically anecdotes. I had a good experience with this doctor. I had a good experience with this company. And so you should to. And people find comfort in that. And it's based on just one experience, but there seems to be something in human nature that that feels right.

Yes, this is known as a bias called familiarity bias, where if something is familiar to you, if it's a recommendation given by one person who you're friends with, that might outweigh all of the other negative recommendations by lots of other people. For example, after an earthquake, people are much more likely to buy earthquake insurance, even though scientifically, after an earthquake,

the plate tectonics are now resolved that's less likely, that there'll be an earthquake in the near future. So when something is particularly salient or familiar, this has an outsized effect on our decisions. So it may well be that a friend says, hey, I breastfed my child and my child is doing well. Well, it could be that your child would have done well otherwise. It could be that you were doing lots of other things to help your child,

such as always being present, like reading to your child and so on. But if it is a particular example that we want to be true, we will believe it and we will isolate this. particular case and generalize and extrapolate from it. Well, it's interesting because it's what you, everything you say makes perfect sense and yet it seems that we kind of fight it, that we, or not fight it, but we just, we, we do what we do because of the biases we have and it makes people feel good. So there's not a lot of reason to not. And yet there is a lot of reason to not. Yeah. So these biases, they're often really

ingrained with us. They're quite difficult to fight. So they're, back to confirmation bias, which we led this chat with, this is the idea that we don't like evidence that contradicts our viewpoint. This is so deeply ingrained in us and this has been evidence in the following way. So if you take people, you give them a statement that they know, that you know they agree with, and then you give them something that contradicts that statement, and you see what happens to their brain by hooking them up to an MMI scanner. If you give a political, a non-political statement, like Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, you give them contradictory evidence, nothing really happens. But if it is a political statement, like immigration is good for society,

you give them some contradictory evidence, then the part of the brain that lights up is the amygdala. That is the same part of the brain that lights up when the tiger attacks you. You go on the defensive, you respond to something that you don't like, like a tiger attack. So this is the same part of the brain that this is why it is difficult to overcome biases, and therefore those who are able to do this, be this in investment decisions as a shareholder, be this in company decisions as an executive, you are the people who are able to get out of sublime loans before the crisis, make different decisions, and get ahead. So really, no matter how objective you think you are, how able you are to critically evaluate something,

we all have these biases. It's really, I think, important for people to understand that and that you can't really escape it, but you can try to fight it. I've been speaking to Alex Edmonds. He's an economist, a professor of finance at London Business School, and he's author of a book called May Contain Lies, how stories, statistics, and studies exploit our biases and what we can do about it.

He also has a TED Talk that's been viewed. over two million times called What to Trust in a Post-Trust world. And there's a link to the TED Talk and a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Appreciate you coming on today. Thanks, Alex. Thanks, Mike. Really enjoyed the conversation. You don't need AI agents, which may sound weird coming from service now, the leader in AI agents. The truth is, AI agents need you. Sure, they'll process, predict, even get work done autonomously. But they don't dream, read a room, rally a team, and they certainly don't have

shower thoughts, pivotal hallway chats, or big ideas. People do. And people, when given the best AI platform, they're freed up to do the fulfilling work they want to do. To see how ServiceNow puts AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. In communities across Canada, hourly Amazon employees earn an average of over $24.50 an hour. Employees also have the opportunity to grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs for in-demand fields, like software development and information technology. Learn more at aboutamazon.ca. When I say the phrase mental toughness, you probably think of certain people in the military,

like the Navy Seals or maybe elite top athletes, people who have this ability to use their mind to ignore distractions and to They focused, even under the most stressful conditions, almost like a superpower. But it can't be a superpower, because superpowers aren't real. So what is mental tough? And how can we all be more mentally tough? Here to reveal those secrets is Eric Potterat, who knows a thing or two about this. Eric is a clinical and performance psychologist,

a retired commander from the U.S. Navy after 20 years of service, during which time he helped create the mental toughness curriculum for the Navy Seals. Eric spent several years as the director of specialized performance for the Los Angeles Dodgers. He's worked with the U.S. Women's National Soccer Team, the Miami Heat, and several other Olympic athletes, first responders, business leaders, and NASA astronauts. He's the author of a book called Learned Excellence, Mental Disciplines for Leading and Winning from the World's Top Performers. Hi, Eric, welcome to something you should know. Hey, Michael. Good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Sure. Well, when most people hear the term mental toughness, they have a sense of what it means. But what does it mean to you? What do you mean by mental toughness? Boy, great question. Look, there are a lot of definitions out there, and I tend to be a relatively simple guy. I think the easiest definition to wrap my head around is the ability to control the human stress response in multiple situations. So regardless of the discipline that you practice, whether it's military, first responder, sport, business, I think it's really the ability to use certain tools and techniques to control that human stress response and be able to thrive and perform optimally in that discipline. Well, it sounds almost impossible. It's not. It sounds very difficult.

It sounds. And when I think of people who are mentally tough, I think of them as that their mental tough. Defines them, that that's who they are, not just what they do. I think we're a lot of people make a mistake is they assume that these are end states. Like, you know, when you look at pick your favorite performer, whether there's an athlete, military, businessman, or woman, whatever it may be. And if you think of that person, you probably think of a few things they do well. their ability to focus, perform well under pressure, limit distractions, be resilient. And I think the difficulty with a lot of those terms is they're accurate, but they're end states.

What very few people are telling us are what are these individuals doing in order to execute that end state? I know they're focused. I know they're extremely disciplined. I know they're resilient. But this is why I think the better definition is really looking at the tools and techniques that they do to get to that end state. Well, and are they focused, disciplined, and resilient all the time, or this is something they work themselves into when they need to?

Ooh. That's, look, you're talking to a guy who's extremely biased. You know, I've spent a career in this field. And I think, so my two answers to this is, I think they can turn it off and on. But I think more importantly, this ability is learned. I don't think anyone's come out of the womb with this ability to be mentally tough. I haven't seen any data to support that, whether it's on the neuropsychological side, psychological side, et cetera. So I think that these men and women have navigated through years of micro failures and years of coaching, good teachers, parenting, difficult things to kind of hone this ability to,

to leverage these techniques and perform optimally. When I think of somebody mentally tough, for some reason, I think of somebody who's physically tough, like military guys. And is that, is there a connection? Yes and no. I really like the metaphor of a computer metaphor, as it were. I mean, this is this software versus hardware. I think as you just stated, when you think of military.

You think athlete, you think of these are physical outliers. I'm telling you, I haven't been someone who's worked 20 years in the military with incredible physical performers. And then I spent obviously the second half of my career in professional sport. Again, outlier physical specimens, whether they're Olympians or professional, you know, pick your favorite sport. But at the world class level, everyone has the same hardware, yet everyone isn't performing under pressure very well all the time. So, you know, the best example I have is the Olympics, right? At the Olympics, every year, every country sends their best men and women to perform, pick your favorite event. And everyone generally has the same physical abilities, right? And the difference between

no metal and a metal is sometimes hundreds or thousands of a second. So they're showing up with the same hardware. But this is why back to that metaphor of the computer, I think when you look at the best performers who are sustaining excellence over time, their ability is more along the lines of how are they leveraging their software, those mental techniques that makes the hardware work. That's why I really like that metaphor a lot. I mean, you and I can have the best computers money can buy, but we're not going to leverage the power of that computer without the updated operating system and applications if it's a, you know, a smartphone. So I think with these men and, I'm I think with these men and women, they're physically performing well, but it's the software that's making everything work.

So how do I leverage my software? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think that, you know, that's what I've spent 30 years looking at. I mean, literally 25,000 encounters with the best performers in the world. And after time, after about 10 to 12 years of working with these people, it became clear as day to me that generally the best performers are doing roughly the same things. plus or minus. So we've been able to kind of consolidate what those are and they kind of fall under bins of, you know, adversity tolerance tactics and everything from goal setting, visualization, self-talk, breathing, compartmentalization. So there's a number of, I think, lessons and

tools and tactics that we can reverse engineer to the general public, if you will. All right. Well, let's start reverse engineering and put some of these things into practice. You know, I think first and foremost, I think one of the easiest things to do is, is to really talk about mindset. I think that's when you look at the best performers on earth. They are leveraging, catalyzing, and optimizing a certain mindset for the role that they're playing. And I think my takeaway message to you would be, you know, just keep in mind that we all have different roles that we play in life. myself, I'm a father, I'm a husband, I'm a performance psychologist, I'm a avid pickleball player, tennis player on the weekends. And if I executed the same mindset for every role that I play,

research is pretty clear. I'm not going to do many of those roles very well. So I think one of the ways to catalyze a certain mindset for a certain role that we see these top performers do is they have what we call pre-performance routines. So I think that's one of the easiest way. ways to think about transitioning into a certain mindset to a high performance role. So how would that look? Yeah, the metaphor I really like is a dimmer switch. So the most popular pre-performance routines for humans to perform is probably music. Think about if you want to go perform something athletically or a very important business

presentation to a client or to a boss or to a teammate. about maybe a song that might catalyze and get that juices and the focus, get those juices and the focus going. So pre-performers routines can be workouts, they can be mantras, they can be an article of clothing that just starts to tell you, hey, I'm ready to perform. I think another technique that, you know, there's about eight to ten that we unpack that we've learned from the best performers. Another one that's extremely important and low-hanging fruit, as it were, would be breathing. We know that when human beings get into high pressure, high performance situation, let's call that leverage. We know that when human beings are in leverage or high performance, high pressure situations, the breathing rates change.

They become very rapid and shallow. In fact, they range from about 16 to 22 breaths a minute. One of the ways to reverse engineer that we see the top performers practicing is they get their breathing rates to about six breaths a minute. So an easy way to think about that is a four second inhale, just a natural pause at the top of that inhalation, and then roughly a six second exhale. So it's a little bit longer of an exhale. And that obviously is 10 seconds and that's about six breaths a minute. So that is a very quick way to physically and mentally be able to perform very, very well. Because it does what to you?

Yeah, it actually reverses the human stress response. Back to your initial question of my definition of mental toughness is the ability to control the human stress response. When we're stressed, or put another way, when we're not practicing mental toughness, there's something called, you know, vasoconstriction. We get muscles get tense, the veins and arteries kind of constrict, blood pressure goes up, heart rate goes up. And those are the physical symptoms, if you will. The mental effects are what we call executive functions, our ability to problem solve, the ability to think clear. clearly on our feet. So those really go by the wayside under pressure. The fastest way to reverse that is this theory of fours, four seconds in, four to six seconds out for roughly four minutes.

It reverses that. And to put very candidly, what it's going to do is it's going to vascularize a certain area of the brain. It's going to get a lot more blood to the frontal lobes of the brain where you can execute better decision-making processes as well as all the physical aspects that we've talked about as well. And that makes sense. I think people have a sense that breathing, well, we hear it from, you know, in other areas of life that breathing is really important. It calms you down.

It's part of meditation and all that. And what else? Because these are great. I mean, I hadn't heard these talked about in this topic. So maybe a few more, please. You bet. So obviously, pre-performance routine. So how do you get ready, how you catalyze or, you know, construct that mindset and then breathing?

I think next on that list would be. And it sounds a little bit touchy-feely, but just hear me out here is really self-talk and thought management. We know that when the non-elite performers get into high-pressure situations, again, pick your discipline. I'm agnostic to what that discipline is. That sometimes their self-talk starts to take over. I can't do this or I've made a mistake and therefore I start thinking about that mistake and it just literally derails everything. So when you look at the best performers in the world, they are really much better at looking for evidence. They may make a mistake.

They do make mistakes. But their ability to put that into a box, compartmentalize that and not let that lead to this domino effect of thinking that I'm more likely to make another or what are these people thinking of me. Are they thinking I can't give this presentation, for example? So I think, you know, my long story short here is really look for evidence and think, you know, make sure that self-talk is evidence-based and more focused on the positive rather than the negative. I think, you know, these performers are definitely controlling those negative thoughts and they're putting them by the wayside more times than not. But when you say, when we do a self-talk, a lot of it is not reality-based. We're like trying to imagine. We're trying to make ourselves better by saying how wonderful we are and how well we're going to do.

And it isn't reality-based. It's much more future-based and wishful thinking. Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned that. I mean, there's great studies that really kind of talk about how future-oriented we all are. You know, I came across one that, you know, 60% of our thoughts are future-oriented. And that's why people are successful. They're thinking about the things and the deadlines they have.

have and and their future based. I get that. But I think a lot of the elite performers, they're really working much more in the present state. Meaning, you know, if I use a sporting example, let's say a wide receiver, you know, drops a very easy touchdown pass or a business person makes a hiccup in a presentation and they misstate something that they'd gone over repeatedly. It's really important to be present and to really make sure you're looking for evidence. This doesn't mean I'm a failure. This doesn't mean the client is going to, you know, say, hey, this person isn't qualified for whatever advice or whatever presentation they're given. So I think, interestingly, when you look at the statistics at the world-class level, the only way that individuals are more likely to make an additional mistake after they've made

a mistake is if they focus on that mistake. So if you think about it, it makes intuitive sense, right? if I'm taking my mental energy and I just dropped that proverbial touchdown pass or I dropped that proverbial presentation to a client, I'm much more likely to fumble again if I'm focusing on that rather than kind of what my mission was and what I've pre-prepared for prior to that event. So soft talk is really important. But how do you do that when I think it's the natural inclination when you drop the ball to think about the ball you dropped.

How do you not think about what you're thinking about? Yeah, so think about this as, again, I'm bringing up a lot of metaphors or a lot of examples today. Think about dominoes. The whole idea of, you know, if I lined up 100 dominoes in front of you and me today and the first one falls,

we know what's going to happen to the other 99. The ability of controlling that self-talk is watching the first three or four dominoes fall and then grabbing that fifth dominoes. before it can affect this, you know, sixth or seventh. So that's metaphorically speaking. What I'm trying to state is that it's really important to put that mistake. And here's another technique, by the way.

We call it black boxing or the fancy psychological term is compartmentalization. When you make that proverbial mistake, put it into a box and stay mission-minded. Meaning tell yourself, I need to put that away for a moment or an hour or two. I need to complete whatever the mission is, whether it's a game. whether it's, you know, combat, whether it's a business presentation. And then at a future time, when the mission is done, we can unpack that, unpack the proverbial box and take a look at what went wrong and try to learn from that. So interesting statistics also, we know that most negative consequences to self-talk.

So when I say negative consequence, most of the time when I'm anxious, when I'm irritated, when I'm bummed out. 94% of the time, that's due to what we call irrational thoughts. So this ties directly to self-talk. The elite performers don't have the 94% irrational talk, right? Those irrational thoughts because they're looking for evidence. They know, hey, this is just one pass that I've dropped. That means I'm statistically going to catch, you know, the next 30 in a row or something.

And is there a point where you find in working with people that there is a plateau? I mean, you can't continually get better because your head will explode or something. Yeah. Respectfully, I just don't buy that narrative. I do think, you know, one of my favorite quotes of all time is a Roger Federer quote. And he said, staying the same as going backwards. And I do think when you look, and obviously how many weeks number one or how many years number one was this guy. We can name countless, you know, the Roger Federer's of the world in their disciplines.

I do think that that's also something we see with the world's best performers is they're constantly trying to incrementally improve. The mistake that I think a lot of people make, Mike, is that they try to do too much too soon and that proverbial head will then explode, right? Rather than, okay, how can I continue to work incrementally out of my comfort zone and keep pushing what I believe the limits are? Because I actually think those limits are self-imposed. But isn't it true that, well, I think everybody knows it's true that you only get better if you go beyond your comfort level. To play tennis, to get better at tennis, you've got to play people who are better than you, not worse than you. Yeah, 100% agree.

And this is where I can certainly create some hate mail and some naysayers out there as well. And I have to say this very carefully. Do I want people to fail? Of course not. None of us want to watch someone fail. But these micro failures or iterations are really important. The other quote I really like is, you know, if you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough. You're not moving outside of that comfort zone.

But there's a very fine area there, right? If you think of the comfort zone is this, you know, circle in the middle. And then there's this buffer zone where that growth happens. If you go too far out, then it's catastrophic failure, right? An embarrassment. And that's when people kind of pull back into their shell. And they're like, see, I told you. So I'll never try that as opposed to being very incremental and progressive about how you're trying to hone that craft, whatever it may be.

I think when I, well, for me, when I think of somebody who's mentally tough, somehow in that mix of, that definition is somebody who's not very emotional, that they, that they can keep emotions out of it, that, you know, they don't cry, you know, when they lose. They're tough. They're mentally tough. But can you turn it off and go have a good cry? Yeah, I think, so the Navy, as you know, I was 20 years in the military, 10 of those years, I was the head performance psychologist for the Navy SEALs. I retired as a commander. And one of the terms that the seals used, I'm not a seal, I was their psychologist, was calm is contagious. And it's a very interesting term.

I went one step further related to your question. I think emotion is contagious. So I do think there's a time and place to emote and to have that, you know, as you say, cry or really get upset. But keep in mind that if you're doing that around people, around teammates, around coworkers, it is literally a contagion. I know when I'm around people who are irritated, I find myself getting more irritated. When I'm around angry people, I find myself getting defensive and upset as well. So it's a really interesting concept to think about emotions as a contagion. Do the best performers in the world have emotion?

Of course they do. But when it comes time to perform, they are really, I think, exercise that we call more of a neutral, detached mindset. For I'm not going to go too high or too low, I'm just going to actually. execute my plan and my blueprint, and I'm going to do it without emotion. Well, I think there's a fascination. Well, I've always had a fascination with how people who are mentally tough have that ability to focus and zero in and block the rest of the world out. And it's really interesting to hear how it's done and maybe try to do it yourself. My guest has been Eric Potterat. He is a clinical and performance psychologist. He is a

retired commander from the U.S. Navy, where he helped develop the mental toughness curriculum used by the Navy Seals. He is author of a book called Learned Excellence, Mental Disciplines for Leading and Winning from the World's Top Performers. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming on today, Eric. Thank you so much for having me, Mike. It's been fantastic. Toothpicks. They sound like a pretty benign, small, little piece of wood. How much harm can they do? Well, they can do a lot of harm.

Serving food with toothpicks might seem like a handy and harmless way to serve food, but if people bite into a hidden toothpick, it can do some serious damage to the mouth. And if a portion of the toothpick is swallowed, it can perforate the intestine with life-threatening or even deadly results. Sometimes people don't even realize they've swallowed a piece of toothpick, which can make the diagnosis extremely difficult. In addition, a lot of toothpick users tend to chew on it well past its prime,

and that can cause premature wear and tear on tooth enamel. Toothpicks can also damage existing dental restorations, like crowns, veneers, and fillings and cause them to dislodge or fall off. off. In general, serving food with a toothpick might not be worth the trouble. And that is something you should know. Oh, I would really like it. If you would just take a moment and leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whatever platform you listen on, it would really help us a lot. A lot. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know. Oh, the Regency era. You might know it as the time when Bridgeton takes place, or the time when

Jane Austen wrote her books. But the Regency Era was also an explosive time of social change, sex scandals, and maybe the worst king in British history. And on the Vulgar History podcast, we're going to be looking at the balls, the gowns, and all the scandal of the Regency era. Vulgar History is a women's history podcast, and our Regency Era series will be focusing on the most rebellious women of this time. That includes Jane Austen herself, who is maybe more radical than you might have thought. We'll also be talking about queer icons like Anne Lister, scientists like Mary Anning and Ada Lovelace, as well as other scandalous actresses, royal mistresses, rebellious princesses, and other lesser-known figures who made history happen in England in the Regency era. Listen to vulgar history wherever you get podcasts.

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