The One You Feed - Kerry Patterson

Episode Date: July 28, 2015

This week we talk to Kerry PattersonKerry Patterson is the four-time New York Times best-selling co-author of Crucial Conversations, Crucial Accountability, Influencer, and Change Anything.He received his doctorate from Stanford. He has been featured in more than 150 print and radio programs, including MSN Career Builder, and CNN. He is also the co-founder of VitalSmarts, an innovator in corporate training and leadership development. He is a recipient of the Mentor of the Year Award and the 2004 William G. Dyer Distinguished Alumni Award from Brigham Young University. His latest book is called The Grey Fedora.In This Interview Kerry and I Discuss...The One You Feed parable.What a crucial conversation is: stakes are high and emotions are strong.What is happening in the brain during conversations that are emotional.The role of the amygdala.How moving from anger to curiosity helps defuse tense conversations.The one question we should ask ourselves before entering any disagreement.See additional show notes and links on our websiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you think to yourself, here's my plan, you have to say, in case I run into problems, what am I going to do? Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast

is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknoworeally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Kerry Patterson, the four-time New York Times bestselling co-author of Crucial Conversations, Crucial Accountability, Influencer, and Change Anything. He received his doctorate from Stanford and has been featured in more than 150 print and radio programs, including MSN Career Builder and CNN. He is also the co-founder of Vital Smarts, an innovator in corporate training and leadership development. His latest book is called The Gray Fedora. And here's the interview. Hi, Kerry. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Eric. I'm excited to get you on.

Your book, Crucial Conversations, is one of those books that made a big difference on me. I think I knew some of the concepts in it, but when seeing it all packaged up the way you had it, of the concepts in it, but when seeing it all packaged up the way you had it, it really is a very powerful way to approach interacting with the people around us. So we'll get deeper into that in a minute, but we'll start off with the parable. So there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson, and he says, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops, and he thinks about it for a second,

and he looks up at his grandfather, and he says, Well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, The one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, it's a nice beginning to our work-crucial conversation because one of the first things you have to deal with when stakes are high, opinions vary, emotions start running strong, is people start turning sort of ugly and sort of have to ask yourself, what's going on there? And are they sort of going to be relegated to that sort of style for the rest of their life, or can people change?

And the parable sort of highlights a battle that's been going on in psychology for years is, do we have these sort of fixed traits that we're born with, these qualities and characteristics that can't change, or is it a function of how we learn and grow and what we feed? And the answer turns out to be, it's how we learn and grow and what we feed? And the answer turns out to be it's how we learn and grow and feed. And our book talks about how to avoid feeding bad assumptions and how to bring life to good assumptions so that interactions go more smoothly. Yeah, exactly. So why don't we start off and talk about what is a crucial conversation? What makes a conversation crucial versus

just another you know couple minutes of chatting well mistakes are high and opinions vary and emotions went strong or excuse me are running strong those are the three characteristics of the crucial conversation more than a casual hey how you doing stakes are high we're not both agreeing easy going and our emotions aren't one are running strong. Under those particular cases, we are in worse behavior. That's what makes it crucial. And unfortunately, that seems to be, at least in my experience, is when those things are happening is the time that I'm most likely to be coming out of a very reactive place.

It's a lot harder to be strategic and think about how I want to communicate when I am emotionally charged like that. Yeah, well, we're hardwired to do that. We didn't know this with any certainty until recently with the high-resonance magnetic imagery where we can watch brain function, and we can see what happens as someone sort of throws us under the bus or attacks us or criticizes our ideas. Rather than saying, that's interesting, let me find out why they believe that, we prepare for a counterattack. And we actually move from using the prefrontal cortex, where the high cognitive processing goes on for more irrational conversations,

into the amygdala, which is preparing us to go into fight or flight. And so the wiring in our body, adrenaline hits, and all of a sudden we feel attacked and we attack back. And we feed that wrong wolf. That amygdala, he comes up a lot on this show. It gets into all kinds of trouble. Serves a valuable purpose, but it's a little hypersensitive for today's world. Yeah. My partners and I are currently writing on the topic because people ask so much about it. We have colleagues who are doing research

on the high-resonance magnetic energy. And we're learning a lot more about it. And it turns out that it was beautifully designed for a time where we weren't complicated and we didn't live in clans, but now that we live in clans and we're interdependent, it doesn't serve us well. It's nice when the hair stands up in the back of our neck in a dark alley, which happens once in every 30 years, and it doesn't serve us well when you go into a meeting and someone attacks

us. We talk about, okay, we have these brains that were designed for when we, you know, lived on the savannah, for example, but when do our brains start to catch up? I mean, is there any sense of, you know, how long? You know, I'm just kind of curious, because they've got to be progressing in that direction, I would think, and I know that the time I think of the world and evolutionary time are very different. Yeah, you're talking hundreds of thousands of years. You're talking about genetic engineering that occurs through mutations. Mutations occur when certain rays shoot through our head or when cells split. And then it either makes the organism better suited to its environment, which in this case is rewarding, it makes and it continues or it doesn't.

Most things don't. So that process, that whole process of mutation is indeed hundreds of thousands of years. We can't wait. We have to learn how to be aware of what's happening, catch what's happening in ourselves and within others, and come up with alternate behaviors because that's hardwiring. And we don't fix hardwiring through ruling it. We don't fix it through training it. We don't fix it through anything other than waiting for it to be hardwiring, and we don't fix hardwiring through rolling it. We don't fix it through training it. We don't fix it through anything other than waiting for it to be hardwired,

and I'm not interested in seeing it when I'm waiting anymore. And then just overriding it when we see it. So let's talk about what the key concepts are. You've got a framework for how to conduct crucial conversations in a more effective way. So can we just start sort of walking through that? Well, first of all, as we find ourselves in a position where we see people starting to argue, ourselves included, we have to stop, take a breath, and sort of ask ourselves, wait a minute, what's going on here? And rather than allowing ourselves to get angry,

we have to stop and sort of say, why would a reasonable and rational person be doing what they're currently doing? And that goes to feeding the wolf. That goes to what stories do we tell ourselves? And so we try to enter a crucial conversation if things start turning ugly, and we try to sort of think the best of others to be a good motive. So rather than sort of saying, wait a minute, you know, I'm sick and tired of you screaming or yelling and whatnot, you would say something more like, gee, I can see you're pretty upset about this.

I'm not quite sure why. Could you tell me more? And we move from angry to curious, and curious, of course, leads to people opening up and sharing the whole story. Thinking the better of others. So I think I've heard it, you know, assume positive intent. You know, I think it goes against the, I've talked before on a mini episode about the fundamental attribution error, where we sort of give ourselves the benefit of the doubt, but not others. And, you know, that is such a powerful way to approach things if you approach it with, you know, why? Yeah, I love the way you guys phrase that. Why would a reasonable good person behave this way? Yeah, rather than what's the worst and most personal way I could take this, you know, which is the more likely way to respond.

And I think the other thing that can be so hard is if we've spent a lot of time with, in particular, relationships, handling our crucial conversations in a devastating way, we've sort of brought out that worst in that other person often enough that it's really hard, you know, it takes a lot of effort to get back to pre all the damage that's been done from both sides at that point. lot of effort to get back to pre all the damage that's been done from both sides at that point. With one client I was working with who was constantly going into sort of an angry mode, he worked on his skills. Some of the other skills, of course, include establishing mutual purpose,

how can we both succeed in this, you know, if they misunderstand you stopping and saying what you do mean versus don't mean. So as we began to teach him and others these skills, this particular guy became very good. But the people who worked with him for a 10-year period didn't trust it. They thought, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is something he's going through, and it'll take a while, but he'll be back to his old way. Well, he didn't go back, because the skills that he learned were ones that helped him in tough conversations, and those are the kinds of things you carry with you. He had to be transferred before people would accept him for who he became.

They're tough on each other. Right. So after we recognize we're in a crucial conversation and we start with that, you know, assuming positive intent with the other person, where do we go from there? Well, the issue depends on what you're seeing happening. And so you're having to stop and diagnose. And if they think you're out to get you, you're out to get them.

So they say something like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've seen this. All you really want is what's best for your department. You don't care about our department at all. You need to deal with that directly by establishing mutual purpose and say, actually, what I'd like to do is end this conversation by solving the problem in a way that we're both satisfied. I'm not interested in winning at your cost. And once people realize that your intention is not to sort of you win and they lose, they're much more likely to settle down to a healthy conversation.

Right. And so a lot of the work that you guys do is in the workplace, but this stuff applies every bit as much and possibly more in our own, in our personal lives and our relationships. Yeah, we were some of the first in the country 30 years ago that actually offered workshops after work where the people who had been through training would have their spouses come in and they would apply and learn the skills, the spouse would learn the skills, and then they would practice them in ways that would benefit their home. And it was often considered a perk to work at a company where you're getting enhanced parenting skills.

Now, one of the things that you guys talk about, you've got some general framework, and one of them that you talk about is master my stories. So this is maybe before we go into that conversation. What does that mean? Well, you know, people will often say something like, you know, I was doing fine, and then they made me mad. That's an interesting way of describing it, because no one can make you mad. You make yourself mad.

And the process of doing it is very well known. The other person does something. Let's say, for example, you're working on a project, and you're struggling on one element. You can't get it figured out. And as you're getting ready to leave, excuse me, as you come in to work the next morning, you run into a colleague who says, you know what? I knew you were working on that problem. And I stayed after a little bit because

I was waiting for the mail to be delivered over here in interdepartmental mail. And anyway, I started working on that problem. I solved it. What do you think of that? And we asked people, how would you feel if someone came and said they solved the problem you're working on? About half say, I would be happy. Another half say, I wouldn't be happy. And so the issue was, well, what makes you either happy or unhappy? And it goes to what you think, what was the motive behind what they did? So we tell ourselves the story. They enacted behavior, which is neutral. They did something to solve a problem. Half the people say, gosh, they did that because they wanted to make my life easier, and they're a good team player, and I'm happy that they did that,

and I'm happy in their relationship. And others tell themselves a different story. They say, oh, yeah, yeah, I know them. They did that to make me look bad. They're going to announce in the meeting that they solved the problem that I couldn't solve. And so you see a behavior. You draw a conclusion about the other person's motives, and then that's what makes you angry. If your motive is bad, you become angry. If your motive is good, you're not angry.

And that's the story we tell, rest of the interview with Carrie Patterson. So one of the things I'm curious about, and we explore it a lot on this show, is exactly what you described. We're always telling ourselves stories. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor.

We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by.

Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, really sir bless you all hello newman and you never know when howie mendel might just stop by to talk about judging really that's the opening really no really yeah no really go to really no really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason bobblehead it's called really no really and you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

We are making up an interpretation of what happens out in the world and we have some degree of control over what that interpretation is the thing I'm always curious about is and the question is, when are we when are we, you know, when are we assuming positive intent? When are we doing some positive thinking that's helpful? And when do we slide into denial, where we're sort of putting a happy spin on everything, regardless? Yeah, yeah. The idea is, we're doing this to help us as we go into the conversation, so we're not angry, because when we're angry, it's just not going to work. We haven't come to our conclusion by asking why would a reasonable person do that. What we've done is we've set our emotions up to a point where we can handle it in an effective way.

So we then walk in and we describe the problem, and we say, gosh, and the problem is a definition of what was expected versus what was observed. And so we're now going to go do with the problem, but we're going to be fairly open about it. It's going to sound more curious. It's going to be, rather than, I can't believe you didn't get me the project in time, you would say, gosh, Larry, can we talk? Sure. And you might set it aside in a safe environment with just the two of you. I was expecting to have this project done at 3, as you suggested. 3 came and left, and I didn't get it at 3.30 and 4.

I couldn't find you. And eventually at 4.30 it came. I was sort of wondering what happened. And so you're describing expect it was observed, and then you would pause and ask for their viewpoint on it. Because you don't know what happened. Their boss may have come to them and say, screw that project. We've got the president coming in, go fix this, and we'll do that. You have no idea what happened. You really don't. And so you're going

to describe the problem, what was expected, what was observed, and then diagnose. And you're going to do it in the context of not being angry and smarmy and all of yourself because you haven't told yourself enough story. That sets the theme. You still deal with the problem. Yep. It's a great way to look at it. And you talk about when we go into, you know, we sort of, so mastering my stories, I think, is getting control over that and not going in with a negative story, being open, and then you talk about the next stage is really the confronting with safety. So you talked about describing the gap. Right. You know, and so what are ways that we can help people to feel safe

in conversations? Because either we've got a history of maybe being in unsafe conversations with that particular person, or just in general, where, you know, people can be really gun-shy. So what are ways that we can help people with that? There's several things that we do to make people feel unsafe. One of them would be, I described earlier, is we enter a conversation with ourselves and our goals and minds and don't care about others. And so they have a reason to feel unsafe, which is, oh yeah, here we go again. You're going to argue with me. You're going to beat me down. You're going to get your way. And I'm going to end up having to go do something I don't want to do. That makes me feel unsafe. Or it could happen in an instant where

you're using inflammatory language. You're pushing really hard, you're cutting them off in good sense, you're inflating the data to support you and deflating their supportive data. That makes them unsafe. There's a lot of things. And so what you're going to be watching for is, what am I doing that would make people sort of pull away from the table? doing, it would make people sort of pull away from the table, but equally important, watching them to see if no matter what you're doing, are they feeling unsafe based upon what's in their head, what had happened to them before. We're watching for evidence that they're feeling unsafe, then rather than attacking, we make it safe by establishing mutual purpose or clarifying the difference. Yeah, I like where you, one of the things you say is to talk tentatively, and not, like, tentatively, like, I'm shy or I'm afraid to talk, but without expressing, being open to the ideas that other people have, or coming with it, like, well, here's what I see, you know, what are you seeing, instead of, you always do this, or it's, you know, we tend to go to such extremes sometimes to make a point.

go to such extremes sometimes to make a point. Yeah, that's the harsh language they're cutting off in flooding them, you know, stating as if it were God's truth. Well, any rational person knows. If they want to see what untenative language looks like, if you want to see what not to do, if you want to sort of say, I've been to the pinnacle of bad, go watch Congress in action. Because they're preening for cameras. They aren't saying, you know, I've been thinking about this, maybe I could be wrong, but let me just pass this out, let me play devil's advocate, all language of tentativity, all of which help make it much safer to discuss things openly. It's sort of like, I can't believe the people across the aisle are so incredibly stupid!

I mean, that's how they're, whether they're saying it or not. But, I mean, the fact of the matter is, is like, we're all right and you're all wrong, you know? And it's like, wow. I mean, no wonder we can't come to any kind of compromise, understanding, you know, third way. We're entrenched. We're not listening. We're not making it safe for people to listen to us. So, if you take a deep breath and

sort of say, this isn't about preening in front of the cameras, it's not about winning, not about looking good, it's about adding meaning to the pool. There's this pool of meaning in front of us, you have some of it, I have some of it, if we can get it all out there, we'll then act with much better information, we'll make much better choices. Yeah, exactly. And one of the things I think is interesting is, you know, this idea of making it safe in the conversation. Sometimes that's not a one-time thing. So you guys described, well, you can do that at the beginning of the conversation,

but you need to be watching throughout the conversation to see if people are indeed feeling safe. There are some, you know, there's some red flags, some things you can see. And then you just say, you know, step out of the content, you know, rebuild the safety, and then come back in, and that if you don't take the time to do that, you're not going to make any progress on the content. No, no, no, because both of you are entrenched, they're entrenched, and so they're treating any information that you're bringing as an invading virus, they're going to fight it off, and sort of say, wait a minute, let me stop. Let me break this.

And you break it. And we've talked about several ways. The one in which it sounds like you're thinking what I'm trying to achieve here is a solution that works for me, but it's going to cause you additional work. They go, yeah, heck yeah, it's been going on for years.

Well, let me be clear. I'm not going to be happy if you leave with the solution that works for me but doesn't work for you because I know over the long run that won't work. Can we spend some time? And you just can watch the tension come off their face, the relaxation. So back now it's going to be a conversation.

They're not having to sort of hype their arguments. We're not going to be hyping ours. We're not going to end up in our usual sort of fighting and then leaving unhappy. We're going to maybe stick with this until we're both happy. We're going to find a third way. Right. So one of the things is your books are about, you've got this method and it's really about how to conduct these conversations. You've got more specifics in other books about how do you handle confrontations or how do you handle situations of holding people accountable. What I'm curious about is, so we know, now we know how to do it, but boy, is it hard to step into those conversations. It takes a lot of courage.

What are some ways that people can build up the courage or enter into those conversations when they're really hesitant to do so? You know, we learn the skills not by sort of dreaming them up or sitting in an office and brainstorming. We watch real people at work, and so that was that tentative language, reduced defensiveness, that establishing mutual purpose made it so that they were moving together. We would see people doing it. And when we saw people, you know, who really handled what I would consider maybe touchy conversation, and they had dealt with something that's difficult to someone's competency, et cetera, and afterwards, we would interview them and say, gosh, how did you get the courage to do that?

They never saw themselves as being courageous. And the reason was that they were skilled. Their history had been such that if they entered a high-stakes conversation, they had so many skills that it almost always ended well. If it almost always ended well, it'd be like sort of going to a planet that had air and breathing and saying, you know, I don't have to worry about that anymore. And they didn't worry about high-stakes conversations because for them it was normal because they had the skill. So the best solution is to crack open a book, sit down with a friend and work on enhancing their skills, and the confidence will then fall.

Yeah, I think there's some truth to that. I've had a bunch of successful, crucial conversations, and I've also had a ton of really terrible conversations. And so I still find, like, even though I've been successful, the overwhelming majority, if you go back all the years I've been alive, it's hard to overcome that, even though mentally I go, yeah, I know I can do this. I've done it before. Every time I do it, it's good. There's still that underlying dread. Well, we're preparing, you know, that's the sort of, that's the coming off the Savannah preparation that we have is prepare for the worst, make it the worst, it could be the worst, and it's hard to overcome that. But once again, I'll say work on your skills as the skills lead to more positive results.

With time, you'll begin to be more confident. Yeah, and I think the other thing the books do a really good job of, the accountability in the confrontation book, is really talking about why it's so important to have those conversations and how valuable it can be. And really seeing, I think the other side is when you start to recognize, like, you can come out the other side of those conversations, everybody's way better off instead of just, it's not like you head off a bad situation. You can actually make things a lot better. You know, we have a lot of people who first cannot get over their notion that, so what you're going to teach me is, I get my way, right?

That's the only way they can see a success. They can't see a success as being one where I bring some things in, you bring some things in, and we come up with something we never should have thought of. Or maybe I'll say, now that I understand, your 22 years is a better idea. And that's a victory. We are so competitive with a special kind of competition, meaning I win, you lose, that it's hard for many people. In radio interviews, the host often will say, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get this crucial conversation thing, but how do I get my boss? And it's sort of like, well, what do you mean?

Well, I don't like it, but I want to get him. So how do I get my boss? We're not trying to teach you how to get in boss. And it's sort of like, well, what do you mean? Well, I don't like it, but I want to get him. So how do I get my boss? And he said, we're not trying to teach you how to get any of this kid. Because no matter what we say, okay, okay, I get that. But how do I get my boss? Right, right. Like this mindset that's been, you know, sort of cracked, you know, poured into their ear and left there for years to foment. And so for a lot of people, it's going to be a long time until they learn the skills, apply the skills, and then start bringing a different attitude, which is, you know what, maybe we both have something to say here. So I'd like to change directions to another book of yours called Change Anything that's about how we changing behaviors or habits, we have a tendency to say, I'm terrible at this, or I never can do this, or I don't have enough willpower, or I'm the kind of person who...

And you guys have done a lot of research that shows that that's not really what's happening. Can you tell us what is happening? Well, most of us are in a situation where the world around us, in fact, it's true for everybody, is perfectly organized to create the current behaviors that you're exhibiting. And so let's say you're spending too much or you're not exercising enough, pick something that we all work on coming at the beginning of the year. And we think, gosh, I'm a bad person because I haven't been able to achieve that. I'm going to really try harder. And we call that the willpower trap. We assume that if we just tried harder, we'd end up better off.

And the fact of the matter is we really ought to consider that we're blind and outnumbered. There's about maybe 10 or 15 or 20 different forces currently acting on us from peer pressure to personal drive to our lack of skills to organizational structure, all lining up to get the current inappropriate behavior. We don't even see them. And until you can see them and then deal with them in a broader way, you're going to constantly be falling back on willpower, which is insignificant. Have you ever gone into a casino where they're gambling? I have.

Have you thought about the design of that casino and what that design is trying to achieve? Well, I have. Since I've read your books, I know where this is going. But I think you... Sorry. No, no, it's actually good. I mean, the point you're making is like the carpet is designed to be so ugly

that you want to look up and you want to look around. Yeah, you want to look down. There's no clocks on the wall. There's no windows. You don't pay with cash because you're losing money. They make you change it, so you're using chips, and chips are just little pretend things. And when you win, there's big bells, and you lose, there's not big bells, and you can make a list of maybe 200 things, maybe a book, six things.

I can't remember how big it was. We met with a guy in Australia who was the king of this. It was a book like four inches thick, you know, sort of saying, this is what's affecting the behavior of gambling. The goal is to have you lose money and not be angry. Right, and keep doing it. Yep, and the world is stacked that way, right? Oh, yeah.

My wife roomed at Grand Canyon with a woman who played the organ in the great, the beautiful dining room that looks out over the canyon. And normally during the day there would be this lovely music being played, but during peak hours the music would pick up faster and faster, like roll out the barrel, da-da-da-da-da, because people eat faster when there's music playing. Here to ask them why they got back from running so quickly, I don't think anyone would say because...

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer.

We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really.

Oh, yeah, really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Music was playing fast. Right. I don't think people who get up off of restaurant chairs to get back to their car, thinking they're going to stay in the fast food restaurant and have their food, realize that the reason they got out is because that chair was designed to be so uncomfortable. So it would drive them out of the room so more customers could come in.

The world is designed to get the inappropriate behaviors around us. change anything, six different sources that you've got to be looking to to see how they're playing to either motivate you to do the right thing, motivate you to do the wrong thing, enable you to do the right thing, or enable you to do the wrong thing. You've got six ways of looking at that. Yeah, that's what I wanted to do is, you know, spend time on those six factors of influence. So the ways that we can align our lives, the people in our lives, all that to ensure the greatest chance of success. And you, you say that the, the, the difference between people who don't really use any of those factors of influence or only use one or two versus people who use six or more is, I think you said something like 10 times the success rate, which is what I tell people I work with. This isn't about you

being a person who has the willpower or a person who can do this or can't do it. It's about the strategies. How are you going about it? So tell me what, you know, let's maybe work our way through what those six are. Okay. Well, we first break them into two categories, motivation and ability. Motivation means you want to do something, not do it as you might guess. Ability means even if you're motivated, can or can you not do it? And so the fundamental attribution you referred to earlier is to assume that all problems are motivation problems. And a lot of the things are due to ability. When you look at people who are having trouble with their finances, they often are incapable of calculating what's happening with their savings, et cetera.

They're not good at math. They don't know how to create savings books, et cetera, et cetera. And that's the aspect that needs to be worked on in order for them to improve. They're clueless as to what's happening to them. Or as we thought, if we just told them, quit spending money, which is the motivational piece, it would all go away. So we look at the motivation, ability, distinction, and then we look at personal, you know, am I motivated intrinsically? You know,

that's where we often will focus because it's a big part of our problem. I like the taste of fatty foods, for example. I'm motivated personally. Then we look at personal ability. You know, do I have the skill set required to enact the behaviors that are required to get me to change? From there, we move to social. And we sort of said, you know, we are indeed social animals. What are others doing? Do we have other people, you know, helping me with the problem? Or are they hindering me? You know, we interviewed people who had been alcoholics for 30 years, and many, many, many

of them found out that they were unable to change until they aligned themselves with people who were going to help them with their personal change project as an hindrance. Right. And so others can be accomplices or they can be friends. And we have to know what you wish. And we often have to have a conversation, negotiating with them to move them from being an accomplice, a drinking buddy, an eating buddy, a spending buddy, whatever they are,

to someone who says, hey, I thought you were kind of working on that. You know, maybe I can help you here. So are others motivating us and are others enabling us? And then the final one, and this is the one that I was referring to earlier, when you walk into a casino, how's the physical world around you structured? If you're having trouble spending money, you realize there are people right now pouring over endless videotapes of individuals in various shopping scenarios, deciding whether a cent mark or a dollar mark will entice you

to buy more, which one's more enticeful, how many inches away can it be, et cetera, et cetera. There's a book on why we spend that looks at the 200 characteristics of the physical world that's being changed so that we purchase more. And so we then look at this physical world. Does it enable us? Does it motivate us? And we now have all six sources, motivation, ability for individual, social, and organizational or physical world. So the last two, the structural motivation is, do we have, like, give me an example of a structural motivation when it comes to, say, losing weight.

We've been using that analogy. What is an example of that? People kind of do that one. In other words, putting up signs and reminders would be a way to motivate yourself physically. So you don't have to have your friends calling you and telling you. a way to motivate yourself physically. So you don't have to have your friends calling you and telling you. We actually are working, we have developed a product over the years that cues people and sort of says, how are you doing today?

It uses their smart device. It has a little conversation with them about what they've eaten and why and how they're doing it. So you're going to see lots of applications coming out in the future. They're going to build pictures of your grandchildren you want to play with, and that's why you're trying to take weight off, are going to come onto your screen 15 minutes before you go to lunch. That would be a structural motivation. So say we throw off the willpower trap, we look at these six sources of motivation, and we really work to line all these different things up. We've got, we, you know, we learn how to do the things, we've got our friends involved.

You know, we set up our environment. What are other things that are important to staying on course? Because one of the things that I think is challenging for a lot of people is we start off good, we structure our lives around all these things, we make some progress. But particularly if it's something we're doing because we're trying to solve a problem or we're trying to change something that causes this pain, is that pain tends to recede. So do the reasons for doing it sometimes. So do you have some tips for how to stay on the track when you're doing well? Yeah, what you have to do, yeah, you have to prepare for setbacks. If you think to yourself, here's my plan, and here's how I'm going to execute it perfectly,

that's the way you need to start. I mean, you don't want to start off with failure in mind, but you have to say, in case I run into problems, what am I going to do? And what you're going to do is you're going to stop and say, what led to this particular deviation to my plan, and then how do I restructure the world to make sure that doesn't happen again, which is very different than saying, what am I going to do to, you know, to re-motivate myself? Or what typically happens, we say to ourselves, I'm just bad at this and we quit. But instead we sort of say, okay, something just happened. Oh, geez, I sat down at the table and I had three friends with me and they started ordering dessert.

I'm not good at restaurants, and I'm going to figure out this. In fact, I told them I didn't want desserts, and they kept pushing me for desserts. And rather than just giving in, I'm going to have a conversation with them and turn them from accomplices into friends. And I'm going to say, gee, you know, next time we go out and we're going to be working hard, I'd rather you not try to talk me into eating and sharing desserts with you. Would that be okay?

And say, okay, so I have a plan for overcoming the deviation rather than just feeling bad about yourself or quitting. We're near the end of our time, but one last question I'll ask you is you describe vital behavior so that it's not being on alert all the time wears us out. Willpower is a resource that can go away. So you talk about focusing on vital behaviors. What does that mean? Yeah, what you're going to find is there's going to be certain things that if you do them,

they're going to affect your life in more powerful ways. And so rather than just affecting one or two things in your life, they're going to affect many aspects in your life. That's why I think for lots of people, turning their accomplishments into friends is an important one because it then plays itself out as a help in so many different ways. So the vital behavior you're working on is, I'm going to talk with people who are currently encouraging me to do the wrong behavior and ask them to stop doing that. Not only will they stop doing that, but they may start encouraging you.

There are people you run into all the time, and so it happens quite frequently. And so this particular one gets three or four or five benefits out of it. And when you do that, you start making bigger changes. And they're very personal. Yep. And I love that when you said earlier the we are blind and outnumbered when we go after trying to change these things. And I'm always amazed by how just a little bit of help and encouragement and support and creating a plan makes these things so much easier and so much more powerful to get done. So thank you for creating all the work that you've done around that.

You're welcome, Eric, and thanks for having me on your show. Yeah, it's been really enjoyable, and we'll talk again soon. Thank you. Okay, bye. Bye. you can learn more about carrie patterson and this podcast at one you feed.net slash carrie