The Wellness Scoop - Changing Habits & Reaching Goals

Episode Date: March 16, 2021

We talk to behavioural scientist Dr Grace Lordan about what makes some people succeed while others are unable to reach their goals; from the importance of removing the ego to taking ourselves out of our comfort zones, changing our narrative and looking at long-term success over instant gratification. With a specific lens on creating purpose in our careers and reframing failure. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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is a weekly show focused on everything that matters to us at Delicious Cielo. We believe that feeling good is a holistic 360-degree approach to our lifestyles and that wellness is about so much more than just what we eat or how we exercise. It's also about our relationships, our mindset, our sleep patterns, our stress levels,

and how we look after ourselves on a day-to-day basis. On this podcast, we'll be breaking down all of these topics, looking at absolutely everything that impacts our mental and our physical health, and sharing the small, simple changes that'll hopefully inspire you to feel better. So the first question we've had from our listeners this week is, what are your top tips for starting a healthy plant-based diet? Yeah, it's a great question that, and one actually we see all the time across our inbox actually at Delicious Cielo and I think we're actually going to touch a little bit on our episode today on how to get started and actually follow through with something you'd like to change or move towards in your life so I hope that the question will be also further answered in this episode but for me the main thing is to be realistic and I think

it's always tempting to change everything overnight but I think it can be incredibly challenging and so I think there's two parts of it I think it's all about thinking about what feels genuinely sustainable for you in your life and for me the number one thing there is about making it enjoyable healthy food or plant-based food should be absolutely delicious. It should have loads of colour and texture and abundance and flavour and you should never, ever, ever feel a sense of deprivation or a sense of dieting. If you do, it's not going to last in the long term. And our second question is, how did you personally find the transition? Yeah, so I changed my diet when I'm totally plant-based, focused on a natural diet back in

2012. I actually changed everything overnight which is exactly what I told you just now not to do but I was very very ill my autonomic nervous system was impaired and I was so ill and I'd spent about a month in that hospital and I was in a very dark place with my mental health and I realized I needed to make a big change and I had nothing to lose at that point. And so I kind of went all in overnight, but it was really, really hard. I guess I'd caveat that with I had such huge motivation because I couldn't do anything. I'd lost really a huge sense of my quality of life. And so the motivation to try something new was probably higher than it is in most instances,

which is why I think I was probably able to make such drastic changes so quickly. But it was certainly really difficult for me. What made it so much easier was when I truly learned to cook. And that's obviously where Delicious Yellow came in and again, started to really enjoy it and started to really look forward to what I was making and being able to share that with friends and family. That's what really transformed it for me. And then our third question today we actually were talking a little bit about on our social media last week and in our newsletter if you're not signed up for our newsletter you get great free recipes and ideas and inspiration every week

and you can just sign up for free on deliciousiella.com but we've actually recently changed all of our packaging and done this big rebrand project. It was really what consumed a huge amount of our time last year. And I guess it's really reflective of how the brand has changed over the last five years, but we've had quite a few questions about why we've done it and about the new packaging, recyclability. Ultimately, we just felt like the brand had grown a lot and the various different activities that we have in Delicious Yellow had become much, much clearer between our cafe, between our food products business and between all of the content that we publish in our app. And it just felt that we could have a clearer way of bringing all of those

together. And so it was a really exciting project. I mean, it really takes you kind of ripped you apart. And the other thing that we were super focused on was trying to come up with the most sustainable packaging solutions we could. So we're so excited to be a first brand in the UK to be using a fully recyclable film on all of our snacking products, which is rolling out to stores now. Yeah, that's a big thing for us. And we really appreciate everyone's support on that as well. So hopefully you'll see them in store now. So today we're going to be speaking to Dr. Grace Lorden, who's a behavioural science expert at LSE and an economist by background. Grace has been researching why some people succeed and why some people don't and how we can look to make what our goals and our dreams are in our lives a reality.

So welcome, Grace. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. I wondered if we could just start actually with what behavioural science actually is. Yes, so the role of behavioural scientists is really to try to understand better why people behave the way they do. And also to think about interventions that might actually get people to behaviours that we want. So from a government perspective, there might be things that people are doing that the government aren't very happy about. So you can think about interventions that might allow people to be told in a way that will get them to a place where the government wants. And then from an individual perspective, which is really my interest, very often people will say that they want to do something and really, really mean it, and then end up doing something completely different. So really giving people the tools that they need in order to get them to the place where they actually want to end

up. And in behavioral science, we call that the intent action gap. And it's really fascinating. So there's some behavioral scientists will come from the perspective that people just say that they will do things and never have an intent to do them. My work is really about getting to the core of people who say that they want to go in a particular direction. I believe that they want to go in that particular direction, but they still don't end up actually getting there. And what are the most common reasons that people don't? I think it's really down to time discount rate.

If I was to give one reason that is the heavy lifter, a lot of times when we're thinking about our future, the things that we actually need to do to build a future that we want have payoffs that are in the future. So they're in one year time, two years time, three years time. They're not today. So if I'm on a very steep learning curve, it can feel very, very unpleasant in the moment. Whereas there's lots of other things that I can do today that will make me feel instantly happy and give me this happiness hit. So, for example, I can spend time with my friends, I can go for drinks, I can eat nice meals. And I think the

whole idea behind chapter two and chapter three and Think Big is really getting people to think about, for example, the fact that they might be making promises to themselves that they can't keep because they're over investing in these things that give us immediate gratification. That's very interesting. And just to dissect that a little bit, it's so one of the things that give us a media gratification. That's very interesting. And just to dissect that a little bit, so one of the things that you're saying is the most important is to stop looking at happiness in today and look at what the goal is for the next even 10, 20 years and the reality that that actually takes sacrifice? Yes, I think that very often the choices that we make overemphasize our happiness in the particular moment.

So, you know, people enter university now and they really want to enjoy every single moment of the experience. And for some subjects, that's just not possible. The learning curve is really, really steep. So they end up trading off some kind of moments of pain when you're on that learning curve. The moments of pain are both because it actually is hard and it can sometimes feel boring to study something that you're finding difficult. And secondly, the pain is, you know, behavioral science talks a lot about ego and the role of ego in our decision making. And we tend to really gravitate towards things that make us feel good about ourselves, that we're smart, that we're attractive, that we have all these kind of,

you know, great traits. And then if you put yourself in the shoes of somebody who's learning something that's really, really difficult, it's damaging to your ego not to be top of the class. It's damaging to your ego to be below average. But then on the flip side of that, the best evidence that we have for advancing ourselves in our career, if that's what we want, is to surround ourselves with people who know much more about things. So you actually should be the person who knows the least in the room in a particular moment. And again, it's getting people to feel comfortable with the idea. It's OK to say that you don't know. It's OK not to have knowledge in a particular moment. You're moving towards a place where you're going to have that knowledge eventually.

And that's the journey. And the starting point is always going to be that you don't feel particularly good about yourself. And what are the internal disciplines that enable you to get past the immediate gratification of something and actually have that much longer term focus? So I try to actually focus on external things and rebalancing the costs and benefits towards the present moment. So I talk a lot about the idea that you should just recognize in yourself if you have a problem with time discounting and if you're over investing in happiness today at the sacrifice of the future. And if that's your personality, accept that about yourself, you know, and there are strengths and there are difficulties. And one of the ways to overcome that is to think about how can you make it easier for yourself to do the thing that you find difficult? Or if it's just something that's very, very hard, and you're not getting pleasure about it in the moment,

is there something that you really do enjoy that you can bundle alongside what you find unpleasurable in order to kind of reward yourself when you do show up for yourself in that day. So I think it's about accepting essentially that anytime we're doing something that's difficult, I think it pretty much applies universally to the population that you're going to have this struggle and making sure that the costs and benefits align that it will show you up, get you to show up for yourself today, then becomes really important. And how long does that initial struggle typically last? I mean, I can think of something very relevant for me, I completely got out of the habit of exercising when we were struck with

the pandemic in last March, and work was incredibly busy, and it was stressful. And we had the girls, or we had Sky at home at the time, and May on the way. And I just completely got out of exercising. I started exercising again, probably last October or so. And the first few times I did it, I was just like, oh, my God, this is miserable. No wonder I stopped. It's just awful. But fortunately, I did persevere. Now I absolutely love it. And it's regimented into my morning routine.

I exercise and I feel infinitely better for it. And I felt like I probably had about a week or so that I needed to get through before I really started to feel like I was over that initial hump. How does it typically take people to get through that very difficult first stage and then into the kind of the calmer waters of progress? I mean, I think the example you give is quite unique in that you have been an exerciser before. So I'm not surprised that you say that it took a week for you to kind of get back on that saddle. And there's kind of two things to think about what was probably happening during that process that might be helpful for listeners. So the first is as behavioural scientists, we believe that we have two thinking styles. One is very, very slow, very, very deliberate. It's what you invoke if

you're doing kind of a difficult maths problem, if you're choosing a partner, if you're deciding what mortgage to take on. And the second is these kind of fast, impulsive responses that you're almost on autopilot. And really what you ended up with exercise is that you're now probably doing your fast brain. So it's now automatic for you to wake up in the morning. It's part of your routine and to get on with it. But that struggle in the week was really trying to convince yourself in your slow brain to get moving. And I spend a lot of time kind of talking about narratives, which is really, really

important in the book. It's kind of the story that you tell yourself has become who you are. So now you're an exerciser. So it basically means that it's a core part of your personality. You mightn't realize that it's in your brain going around that you're an exerciser. But the reason that you're finding it easier to go is that it's become this habit. If you're starting something new, what we're really trying to do is to get people to deliberately use their slow brain to show up for themselves, to engage in small steps. So they end up it being a habit at some point in the future. And what that takes,

I mean, you know, how often you have to repeat that until it's embedded in the fast brain kind of varies from study to study. So what you see are estimates that essentially suggest if you do something 20 times relatively close together, that it becomes a habit. And I would say that's an average. So to use your exercise example, that would mean for the average person, they might have to do your routine 20 times for it to become a habit. For some of us, it will take longer. For me, it takes much longer for me to embed habits into myself. I think I have I have a personality that lends myself to going towards the very pleasurable activities and not necessarily the ones that are good for myself sometimes. But I think if you remind yourself to engage in that habit, it becomes part of your narratives and it becomes part of who you are.

So, you know, for some people, if they're starting on a journey of something that's really, really difficult, I would advise them not to put a particular number on it, but just to notice that it's getting slightly easier each time to actually engage in that activity and bear that in mind that eventually they won't even be thinking about it they won't even have to do that self-reflection great so something I wanted to pick up on that you mentioned just earlier which is obviously the word happy it's a real buzzword and I think it's a very interesting topic something we've looked at before on here with various different experts and and dissecting kind of what it really means. And certainly for myself, I very much concluded that there's a lot of sense in that actually, it's something you really have to work hard on. And it's not something that just happens. It's

not something that you can just have. It's not a constant state. It's something that requires to some extent, quite a lot of discipline quite often for a lot of us to continuously implement those habits that actually build a kind of a happier sense of well-being across the day. But I wondered, when you're talking about the fact that actually, say, reaching a different career goal or going back to study something or trying to change big lifestyle habits will be very hard to begin with. And you, as you said, you may well succeed much better if you are the least qualified person in the room. But obviously, from an ego perspective,

that's very challenging. And it's very difficult to put yourself in a place of vulnerability and, I guess, kind of mental duress to some extent. And how much do you feel there's this sense of expectation that things should be easy and that we should just be happy today and that we shouldn't have to work really hard on things? Because that's certainly something I find is that we're constantly looking to some extent for a kind of easy solution for a quick fix for a magic bullet. And actually what you're saying is really to get to where you want. It's a very long term process of literally changing the wiring in your brain so that the way you think about doing these activities changes.

I mean, this is a great question. I'm surrounded by happiness economists, so I kind of really know what's going on in the literature at the moment. And I get frustrated when happiness research is covered in the newspapers that really talks about people who do a particular thing or people who have a particular characteristic are happy because that takes a snapshot of somebody's life at a particular moment in time. And it doesn't really talk to the idea of smoothing happiness over the life cycle. So if I said to you today, Ella, that I can give you a recipe and that for one year's time, you're going to feel mildly uncomfortable. And I should stress for listeners, actually, Think Big is really all about doing very small things to advance you towards your life goals.

So you might actually feel your ego is fragile, but it's only for 90 minutes a week. It's not for it's not for an incredibly long period of time. But if I said that to you and if I said if you follow this, you will definitely end up with the type of job that you will love and that it will fill you a purpose and you will be fulfilled because you will have gained the skill to allow you to do that job. You would probably take that bet. But very often how we present people with choices is that they need to follow their passion. And that gets mixed up with the fact that you're going to feel happiness immediately in the moment. And also I think it allows, it kind of sets people all up for kind of negative things to happen later on. So, you know, I'm working on the Government Skills Commission at the moment. And

one thing that I find like really puzzling is, you know, hairdressers, if we look at the happiness literature, are one of the happiest people that you can meet. And so are philosophers. But people who train as hairdressers and people who train as philosophers are much less likely to end up doing a job in that particular trade. So there's a whole bunch of hairdressers who have gone through the training who are employed in something else who are probably very miserable. So I shouldn't be giving advice to people to become hairdressers and become philosophers to become happy unless I warn them that you're taking the risk that you might actually end up with a job. And that's the piece of the puzzle that's actually missing. In Think Big, what I really want people to take is to take a step back and not focus on becoming a hairdresser or not

focus on becoming a philosopher, but focus on identifying tasks and activities that they enjoy doing. And by doing that, if you do end up going through the hairdressing training, because that is what you think your passion is, if you've taken this kind of task identification approach, should you not end up with a job at the other end, you will know very easily what your skills can actually transfer into. And the same with philosophy. But to kind of come back to your point about this idea of median happiness, the happiness literature that I think really has weight is the idea that when we're thinking about happiness, and my colleague Paul Dolan, who's written a book called Happiness by Design,

talks a lot about this, that we should be trading off and have a good combination of what we call pleasure and purpose. So the pleasure is these kind of instant gratification things that are wholesome for us. You know, spending a dinner with friends is something that we absolutely should do, but we shouldn't be spending all our time eating with friends. What I'm saying is that you should find a purpose. And when you're on your journey of kind of figuring out the skills that will allow you to work in a job that has that purpose, there's going to be this tension between pleasure, purpose, trade-off. But eventually, if you do end up in a job like I am today that you really enjoy, it will be worth it. And you have lots of years ahead of you engaging in those activities that you identified and using the skills that you've honed.

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Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn Ads. Email bob at libsyn.com to learn more. That's b-o-b at l-i-b-s-y-n.com. And when it comes to purpose, what is the best way for people to actually discover the things they actually really care about? I think about myself and I spent from the age of three to the age of 26. I had enormous purpose in my life because I played golf to a very high level. I was able to play professionally. I was chasing a dream. Every morning I woke up,

I was focused on one thing and that was trying to be the best golfer I possibly could. And I absolutely loved it. And I stopped playing when I was 26. And I went and worked in finance where I felt zero sense of purpose. And I really, really didn't enjoy it at all. And I was doing it with basically just kind of constantly looking for something else that I could do that I could have an enormous amount of purpose about. And for me, that was when we started our company together. And we started that just over five years ago. And every morning since I've been running our business at Delicious Seattle with our food products and our app and our cafe, I have just this enormous sense of purpose. But in a way with that, there was a dose of luck within that because, you know, we were lucky to have met each other and we were lucky that Ella's absolute enormous

passion for the brand matched my enormous passion for, you know, I love business and I'm hugely ambitious in that. And so we were lucky in that what's gone from there has been lots of hard work. But that initial stage was quite lucky that we met each other and that we that we had these two things that align so how can someone who is sitting there feeling hopeless because I remember being that age and thinking what on earth am I going to do with myself and I was just desperate for purpose in my life how can people go about finding that? I mean what you describe about finance is really common. And I think I even say in the book that I meet so many people who are studying economics at the LSE to go into finance, actually, and they

don't want to, it's not for them. And I think in the UK, and I think this is true pretty much of every country that I've ever been to, we're overly obsessed with talking about people working in sectors, talking about occupations, and actually people who go through their teens and their early 20s have a really bad idea about what they'll actually be doing in these occupations. So I don't know what your experience was, but for a lot of people who enter finance, they don't know what they'll actually be doing day to day. And I think the solution for people who don't have that kind of bang moment where everything comes together is to really move away from thinking about one occupation, move away from thinking about one sector and identify the tasks that they enjoy doing. Now, I think if I did this exercise with you, you would have started talking about tasks that would really kind of align with the role that you're actually doing today that fulfill you. And I think once you've managed to identify these are the activities that I enjoy spending my time doing, that allows you then to

think about what are the jobs that you can get to engage in those activities and what type of skills you should actually be honing. And if you take that perspective, you're consciously then choosing to hone skills to allow you to engage in things that you actually enjoy, rather than choosing an industry and a kind of an image of an industry or an image of an occupation that you like, and then choosing the qualification to map to that. And if you're somebody who's very income orientated, once you do the activities exercise, you can take a step back and say, are there jobs available in the economy today that would allow me to earn a certain money for a lifestyle that I'm accustomed to? But I think the

starting point has to be really thinking about what do you want to be doing on a day-to-day basis? Because if we just focus on job titles, very often what people think about the job, and I've done this experiment with both children and with adults, what people think somebody would be doing in a job versus what they actually do are very, very disconnected. I think that really kind of taps into one of the bits that I thought was interesting that you wrote about, which I felt we should touch on the myth of the overnight success as well, in terms of an image of what something is and the reality of what sits behind that. And you say luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. And the reality is there is no such thing as an overnight success. Someone has been quietly honing their craft for normally a substantial period of time,

but suddenly something erupts. And I wondered again, if you could talk a bit about that, because I think sometimes it's quite daunting because you look at perhaps what someone else is doing or where someone else has managed to get to with their goals and you feel like you can't get there. I love Steve Jobs' quote of it takes 25 years to become an overnight success. It's true. It really does. And I think a lot of times as well, how things are announced makes it look like it's much shorter. But most people who have had any level of success as an expert have spent years kind of honing their craft. I think that's the first thing. I think the second thing, given the way that you framed the question, I think one of the best things that people can do

is to move away from comparing themselves to other people. So I think look to role models and think about what skills do they have that I have to get? What are they doing every day? Would I be happy doing that? That's wonderful. But comparing your progress to people whose journey you know nothing about is really going to affect your well-being. So, you know, we've mentioned happiness already. The best thing that you can do for your happiness is focus on absolute progress. You know, so what have I, how am I today compared to last week, compared to last month, compared to last year? But kind of the expression, you know, success is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, I think is really important, because opportunities often feel like luck. So it very often happens that I get an opportunity,

and I will think, oh, I really got lucky. You know, Ella asked me to be on her podcast. This is really wonderful for me. But of course, between me and you, I have had to write a book, get commissioned by Penguin. And had I not taken that effort, you and I would never have been connected. And it's the fact that we have Penguin in common in our network. So they either reached out to you or vice versa at some point. And I certainly made the effort to reach out to Penguin. These are the steps that people never really talk about when they get opportunities. So most of my opportunities in life that feel lucky, if I'm truly self-reflective, they didn't fall out of thin air. They came because of networks

that I've developed over time, because I've made efforts to talk to people and I've made efforts to give back to my networks, to connect people with each other that actually had no benefit for me. And I think kind of the two things about success is they need to run together. You need to be kind of working on how can I create more opportunities for myself and for other people because I think once you do it for others they do pay it forward and pay it back and secondly honing your craft and even the example that you gave about you and Ella coming up with the business I think if we had lots of time when we really drilled down there were probably lots of moments where the two of you

were actually preparing for that yeah no it's, it's completely true. And I think that, you know, I probably explained it in a slightly too simplistic way on that, because I think, you know, there was more planning, and there was much more thinking about it. And then there's obviously been enormous amounts of hard work and blood, sweat and tears that have gone into to get it where it is today. But yeah, I think it was the BT CEO that I heard say a comment where you've got to increase your chances of luck. And so there are certain things that you can do and certain activities that you can take where you increase your opportunities and that that break might come to you. One of the things, Grace, we just talked about was that idea of comparing yourself to others. And I know something else you talked about,

and I think you said, if I'm right, we often talk about so much is out of our yourself to others. And I know something else you talked about, and I think you said, if I'm right, we often talk about so much is out of our control in life. And of course that is true. There are going to be big life events that are way beyond our control. Obviously the last year, COVID being one of them, certainly. But there is a new set, I think, that there's about actually 80% of things

that we can control. And so much of that is our mind. And I certainly hadn't thought that much before reading your book, actually, about how much, you know, we think about biases that other people have and that exist in the environment around us, but we don't necessarily sit and reflect on our own biases that we have about ourselves. And I know you talked about, you know, several things, obviously, the kind of imposter syndrome, which is something that people talk about quite a lot, but also the kind of self-serving bias. I thought it was very interesting, the ostrich effect, choice, supportive bias.

And I wondered if we could talk a little bit more about that and about the way that we hinder ourselves. Yeah, I mean, so the 80% really comes from me reflecting on myself. What I ask readers to do is to reflect on what might be holding them back and to really think about how much of it is within their own control and how much of it isn't and I think today I could say 80 percent of my success is in my own control and probably 20 percent I'm still reliant on other people when I was 10 years younger the ratios were probably different they were probably 60 50-50, because you are much more reliant on other people. But even then, that's 50% of things that you can action yourself

without the help of anybody else. And as you move forward in your career, those ratios will change. And if I think about kind of the biases that I've written about in the book, the one that I think holds most people back is anticipatory loss aversion from so many things. So when people are thinking about putting themselves forward for something, they tend to think about what they will actually lose if they don't succeed. And that anticipation is a life experience in itself. So it feels really negative. It has kind of downward effects on your happiness. And you can almost convince yourself not to put yourself forward just by living through that experience. And I think the interesting thing about the behavioral science literature is it actually tells us that anticipatory loss aversion,

this experience that we have about thinking we might fail, is actually worse than the failing itself. Because when we're going through that process, we actually underestimate our ability to bounce back. Because as human beings, we really do bounce back. And you know, there's lots of slogans in tech companies that talk about needing to fail, needing to fail fast, there's learning and failure. And I think all of that is really, really true. And getting people to reframe putting themselves forward to kind of move around that anticipatory loss aversion can really get people out of whatever status quo and whatever plateau that they found themselves in for a very long period of time. And I think also when I was thinking about anticipatory loss aversion, you know, people really underestimate the likelihood

that they will succeed as well, if we think in terms of probabilities. So really getting people to think about that, and also recognize that the more often you put your hand in the ring for something, the more likely it is that you will actually succeed. So success is a numbers game in a lot of particular situations. And I think some of the other biases that I wanted people to think about when reading the book

is also how we choose the people who are around us and how we choose our networks. So again, coming back to ego, which we discussed in the beginning, we like feeling good about ourselves. So we tend to like having conversations with people where we feel safe in the conversation, where we understand everything that's actually been said, and when everyone's perspectives are aligned. And I spend a lot of time working in groups where even the most dynamic people, once they come into a group, tend to over-focus on

shared information that's common to them, which that they actually agree. And think about what that actually means for innovative ideas, or think about what that means for you if you're trying to accelerate your career and you have people who are around you who are all saying the same thing and possibly agreeing with these kind of biases and these stories that you're telling about yourself all the time. So kind of really trying to move away from this kind of group think in how you kind of approach your career, moving away from confirmation bias, and really embracing the idea again, that actually you might surround yourself with people who will make you feel uncomfortable from time to time. But it's getting outside your comfort zone is going to make you be much more

successful. And it's getting outside your comfort zone, going to make you be much more successful and it's getting outside your comfort zone that's going to make you be somebody who actually stands out. We've spoken about this on our podcast before and that fear of failure can cripple people and what is it that enables you to take that step to be prepared to fail but also give yourself the opportunity for a much larger success? Very often when we think about changing our careers and changing our future, we think about it as all or nothing. So I'm going to take a step out. And when I do, there's no way back. And I think if you are that type of person, or indeed, if you just have responsibilities where it's very hard for you to take a big step out, taking the think big,

take small steps approach, it really is for you, because it's almost like you have a revolving door. So if you step out and things don't work out, you can just go around again. There's lots of different opportunities. And some of the kind of anecdotes that I talk about in the book of people that I've met didn't make decisions to change careers. They started engaging in activities that were the ones that they wanted their kind of new future self to be in an ideal world. They kept their old safety blanket. So they kept showing up for the same job that they did. But they were engaging in these activities that they enjoyed. They were learning a skill that they could see a purpose in.

And over time, they took the step when they knew that there was actually no risk. So I think kind of sometimes when we think about changing our career, we too often focus on this binary all or nothing. And this is a problem actually throughout a lot of human behavior. The light switches either on or it's off. And in this case, it really is about having a dimmer switch. You know, go in slowly, spend 90 minutes, think about the activities that you want to be doing in the future hone a skill and do that slowly commit to that over a medium term and then you don't have the what you just described this kind of I can't move away from my own life because you never really fully move away from your own

life until you're ready. I loved you said that the easiest way to ensure you don't reach your goal is to jump in too quickly yeah and it's something that I totally resonate with. And I think it'd be nice to just touch on it quickly is the fact that, as you said, I think there is this all or nothing mindset. And if you want something in your life to be different, you've got to start today. But I think I know I am naturally quite a passionate person. So I can be quite an all-or-nothing person and I wondered because we're very different in that sense is there a different type of personality that therefore things need to be a bit adjusted for because I know once I start something yeah I'm 100% in sometimes or 100% out which probably isn't the best skill. I mean I think in some ways there's

lots of books written for you, Ella, to be honest. So people who want to throw everything in, want to go all in, you know, I think there's so many books. And I think that really is a small proportion of the population. I think the majority of people really want to make changes in their lives, but they're not going to take a big jump. They need to stand on their tippy toes. And the reason is sometimes when you take a big jump, it can be too intense and you just recoil from it. Or if you take a big jump in some professions, that actually sets you up for failure.

And with all habits, it's been shown in behavioral science that you're much more likely to keep it if what you're aiming for is standing on your tippy toes and it's within reach anyway, rather than something that's kind of majorly away. And what I've tried to do in Think Big is try to connect the fact that as humans, we want to have lofty aspirations. Sometimes we do want to shoot for the moon with the reality of our actual day-to-day behavior, where we just want to take tippy toes and we're feeling a bit lazy

some of the time and that's okay so if there's people who are listening who are kind of saying look I really just want to throw myself all in I do think that there's probably better books on the market for you I think this is for listeners who are saying I really want to change things up but I have you know I'm nervous I really want to change things up and I'm afraid of failure I think the think big take small steps approach is perfect then. I mean, we see that in the starkest terms in the industry that we work in, in health and wellness, where you've got people who, you know, they just want that instant diet and they want to lose weight incredibly quickly. And whenever we get people who write to our hello inbox and saying, you know, I want to do some kind of plan. And

we just, you know, you have to say, look, we're not the company for you. We take an incredibly long term view. You know, one thing that I would love to kind of say to listeners is that careers are becoming much more like health and well-being now. So I think before where you got one qualification, you got one job and you just did the job for the rest of your life. That's really changed. And for people, particularly in professional careers the need for continuous learning the need for kind of continuously on learning kind of to use a word that's becoming quite popular at the moment it's getting more so we're being shaped by the fourth industrial revolution I think globalization trends I think some of the shifts because of COVID

does mean that we need to constantly be investing in ourselves with respect to continuous learning in the same way that we we do more automatically for health perhaps. Yeah. Yeah. So making big goals and plans for what you actually want in your life, whether that's your relationship, your career, your wellbeing, your family, you know, every aspect of it, it is really about being totally honest with yourself that today might be uncomfortable, tomorrow might be uncomfortable. But if you keep plodding and you keep making those little changes over the next few weeks and months and years, you will start to get to where you're aiming for if you keep going. But I guess what's probably worth highlighting, and I presume is very much the case, certainly would say we've both found it in our lives is that it's a

very squiggly line. It's not like you say, okay, this is what I want for my career, or this is what I want for my relationship or for my own well being. And you start making the steps. And yes, it's difficult today. But each day gets a bit better. And you kind of climb this like smooth and steady curve. I certainly think in every aspect of my life it's been up and down and you go up quickly and then you go down further and it's I'd certainly feel like it's something to be very aware of that there's no kind of clear trajectory and that it won't be smooth sailing yes I think that's exactly right and when you said squiggly I smiled because um I don't know if you know about the book called the squiggly career yeah I did an event recently with um Helen Tupper and yes I think it's really about the idea that

once you're kind of moving forward I think the second part that I would add is I think think big gives room for if you fall off so if you're four days and you've skipped a lesson not to count that as a failure just to put yourself in the best position to get back on the horse again. And I think, again, as human beings, we tend to beat ourselves up a lot once we absolutely fail to the fact that we never get back on the wagon again. So really kind of thinking about this, even if you pause your career for a small while, that's absolutely okay. If something else happens and it's conscious, that's better. Even if you unconsciously find that you've fallen out of those habits making sure that you put those structures back in place as

quickly as possible so resilience as well as ego management feels like a kind of key combination absolutely as a pairing yes I you know really realizing that your ego is fragile and giving yourself a break you know if you're feeling bad it, but don't let that hold you back. Great stuff. Well, Grace, we cannot thank you enough for sharing all of these incredibly wise words with us. And the book's out on the 25th of March. Is that right?

And we've so enjoyed reading it and we can't thank you enough for coming on and sharing all this with us today. Thank you. Thank you so, so much, Grace. And I will put the details of the book in the show notes below for everyone and i really genuinely think it's an absolutely brilliant way of planning what you want and i think as as grace says it it does take planning

and so i think having that logical thought through written down plan will probably be very helpful i know it always is for me. And we will be back again next week. Next week, we are talking about something completely different. We're actually talking about female hormones, periods, menopause, perimenopause, all of the very confusing information that's shared on that topic and the impact of stress as well. So totally different, but we will be back again next Tuesday. And thank you guys so much for listening. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads.

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