Top Psychologist: Toolkit to Accomplish Your Hardest Goals
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We can IT, especially the outside of gold settle, be wildly ambitious about what IT is that we want to accomplish. No, rather than setting a year alone ball, which we might feel an instinct to do instead.

By the same token, if we see ourselves through these more negative labels than we might also act in where he is in a line with that and in needlessly hold ourselves that it's a mechanism by which you can get people to open their minds up without them fear like they are the entire moral confess that they live by so that we don't have to employ will power. We should really focus on the way that we design our lives. And the choice architecture of our lives we're talking about here are aspirational identities, right? And we don't want to get in our own way.

I want to switch gears just a little bit to something you've said when you are in the White house that is fascinated with me, which is how does how we frame our goals affect our ability to accomplish circles?

So one example of this is that.

Welcome to the knowledge project, the podcast about mastering best to what other people have already figured out, so you can apply in their insights to your life. I'm your host shampoo, a quick favorite. Ask before we start. Most people listening to the show right now haven't hit the follow button. If you can hit that big follow button right now on apple or spotify.

We appreciate IT if you'd like access to the podcast before everyone else, my thoughts and reflections at the end of each episode, including all the takeaway I had member only episodes, hand edited transcripts or you just want to support the show you love, join at fs dop log G S slash membership. Check out the show notes for a link. Today my guest is mia shanker p hd.

She's a brilliant cotton n of scientists who worked in the White house behavioral science group. She's the host of the podcast called us like change plants. I really wanted to talk to me a about the idea of identity, what is IT, the limitations and advantages of choosing them, how they affect our ability to complied our goals, how our identity affects our ability to learn from others, and how IT impacts our politics.

Should we keep our identity small or should be expanded? These are questions that we talk about. You'll walk away from this episode with a clear understanding of when your identity helps you, where IT may be limiting you, and with practical tips on using IT to set and accomplish your goals.

You'll also learn that slight differences in how we frame those goals can make a huge difference in whether we accomplish them. It's time to listen and learn. I want to start with the almost unbelievable story of how you got into Julia.

When I was six years old, I started playing the violin. And within a few years, I think my parents realized that my dreams and envisions were surpassing whatever connections they had in the classical music world. I daas a physicist.

My mom helps students get Green cars. This was really not in there domain. And so one day I remember my mom and I were in new york for a different violin audition.

And SHE knew that the Julie art school of music in new york was what I had my site set on. Even though moderation, I absolutely no chance of getting in at all at that time. That was my dream. And so we're in new york, and my mom just looked at me and said, hey, why not? We just stopped by Julia and you can see what IT looks like and it'll just feel a fun experience.

And so we walk over the Julia and then, as were passing by the front door, my mom looked at me kind of seriously and said, what can we just go in? And I remember thinking that he was totally nuts. I mean, what does that even mean? We did not have an invite, right? I was not a student there.

But so let just go in there. What's the worst thing that can happen? And so we we walked in there, and my mom, you know, with the security guard, know that her daughter dreamed of coming here.

And could we just check IT out? And we ended running into a fellow student, and her mom and my mom was chatting with them and expressing that I was really interested in playing the violin. And within just a few minutes, my mom had asked them if they were willing to introduce me to their violent teacher.

Then fast were, they were really gracious and said yes. And then twenty minutes after that, I was auditioning on the spot for this Julia teacher. Just looking back, I mean, yeah, IT was a pretty wild story of just wanting in there. But IT was such a format of lesson for me about the importance of trying to be entrepreneurs and trying to just be a bit of a goget when opportunities are not just presented to you.

And in this particular case, I Carry a lot of importance, because what I did play for the teacher that day, he was pretty forthcoming about the fact that I did not have any chance of getting in at my current ability level. But he believed in me. He thought I had potential, and that with the proper training, I might have a shot.

And so he invited me to study at his summer music program that year for, you know, fiber. So weeks. And so my mom and I packed up our bags and we went to to color to, and then we said you with him, and he was really only because of that training that I was able to pass the Julia audition in the fall. And so i'm really, i'm grateful for my momma courage. I'm also grateful for the happens stance of at all, but since then I have been the type person that sends many a cold email and walks through physical doors and metaphorical doors, because whatever fear I had around IT was kind of van out of when I was a kid.

What a crazy story. What are you interested in studying and learning about identity?

Long story short, with the violin, I was very optimistic about potentially becoming a concert violence. But then when I was fifteen, a sudden hand injury kind of added my dreams overnight. And I was forced to reckon with the fact that I was no longer going to be able to do this thing, that, since the time I was sick, had essentially defined my life.

And in that moment, what was so shocking to me, and in being told, you know, you can no longer play the violin, is that I I knew that there was gonna a grief associated with not being able to play the violin. But I did not expect to mourn the loss of myself at this more fundamental level, because I hadn't realized, I mean, I was fifteen at the time SHE. And right, so I had not put all the pieces together.

I had not realized conciousness just how tethered my identity was to the violin. And so in losing IT going to have this ocracoke ent like, oh my god, this is a much bigger deal than I even thought. And so that was the kind of lived part of my experience that LED me to first think about identity.

And then I ended up becoming a cognitive scientist. So in losing the violin, I had to figure out, okay, what comes next? X, and I read a bunch of books, and I became fascinated by the human mind, and all that was capable love, and all there was to marvel that.

And in my role as a cognitive scientist, where I study the human mind, identity just comes up over and over and over again, right? And I can become a central feature of our lives, how we see our cells and how we process change in, especially as I moved my interest towards this topic of change, right in my podcasting is like change plans. I, I interview people who have gone through this heroic tales of change at times.

And what you realize along the way is that they're not just telling you this external story of change. They're talking to you about something internal that shifted. And often times it's the last of an identity unexpectedly, ly, and they're trying to figure out who they can be in the face of this change.

And so early, quickly, after starting my show, I realized, well, you know, I don't even know, this is a show that change. This is really a show fundamentally about identity. There is a concept in cognitive psychology called identity for closure.

And IT refers to the idea that we can premature recommit to an identity before having fully explored all other ways that we can be, or the things that we want to be in this life. And this often happens in adolescence. So we see things models for us through our environment, through parents, through coaches, through teachers, through our community, right? We're often just spoonfed certain identity labels or roles that we feel we should play.

And hard of the process of growing up is examining those labels for ourselves and trying them on for fit and figuring out which ones feel good in which, once done, in which one's we want to reject, in which ones we want to embrace. But what can happen is that even later in life, we can have this kind of identity for closure. We have, what I would call change, and do ce identity for closure, where you go through an experience.

And I just naturally cuts off opportunities for you, and then you have to figure out what comes next. When I was fifteen, and I certainly felt pray to this kind of for closure, because I had built my entire self around the violin without expLoring who else I could be. And so then when I lost IT, I felt extremely disoriented.

There is a potentially more robust and sustainable way to define yourself. So I don't think we're going to get rid of the human desire to identify with things in general, to have strong identities. There are a huge source of inspiration and focus, and they can give us feelings of belonging and community, uh, they can give us drive and motivation, right?

If I to find myself as a violation ist every morning when I wake up, I know what I want to do, and I willing to commit to hours and hours of practice, the chAllenge becomes, though, when you inquiry yourself to something that is precarious in some way. And that's what I found of the violent, what I strive to do, because it's very much works in progress, but I hope this resonates for your listeners, is to attach my sense of identity and worth, not to what I do, but to why I do IT. So this has been an exercise in trying to understand, okay, ma, you fell in love at the violin, and you enjoy IT for so many reasons.

What was IT about the violin that was so intoxicating ing for you? What were the features that made you light up? And when I stripped away the superficial features of the violin and kind of looked down to the surface, I realize that there were many traits and features of playing music that really resonated with me, but in ways that transcended the violence.

So I loved emotionally connecting with people through music. I love the idea of honing a craft at slowly chipping away, getting Better at something. In witnessing that kind of progress, I loved having this kind of single minded determination in these goals that I was chasing.

IT was possible for me to find those same features in other pursuits, right? If I just looked hard enough so I could still find my love of human connection in other places, and in fact, I have right being a cognate of scientists now. And having my podcasts like change of plans is all about forging deep emotional connections of people, right? And I can witness progress in my role as an inner viewer or in my role as a scientist.

And so I would urge people to ask themselves, what is IT that sits you at the root of my passions in life? And can I find my meaning and worth and place my identity in that, such that when life throws, ws me a big change of plans, write a massive curve ball? I can more in that law, sure. But I don't feel completely disoriented because there are still so much of me that persists and that I can find expressions of in other medium.

I as you're saying that it's like we can identify our identity with a skill we can do IT with, a habit we can do IT with something larger, like democrat or republican. We can do IT with something still larger, like american or canadian or european, and we can do IT from what to why, which sort of makes me wonder what is identity .

is a this complicated philosophical question that people have been pondering for basically as long as we've been around. The way that I approached actually is about expanding people's SE of self. Because I think what happens, especially to get older, is that we lock into an understanding of who we are, who we think we are and is often not totally accurate and it's certainly not comprehensive.

I mean, our sense of identity is formulated based on the quite random events that have occurred in our lives in the various ways in which we've been pressure tested or pushed or chAllenged. And we didn't choose that path, right, to reveal to us the maximum number of data points about ourselves. We are just living life that hand going through IT and seeing what happened.

And so I think because we have a first person perspective on our minds, we sometimes believe that we have a very good understanding of who we are. And then what happens in the face of a change is IT reveals to us. All that remained hidden from you, right? All that existed that maybe didn't have a reason to be expressed before then, are the various ways in which were more resilient or the the greater number of skills that we have or the coping mechanisms that we have at our disposal. And when I think about identity, I think we benefit from having more expensive identities and and identities that feel more valuable, that don't feel fixed in in ways that are problematic as we navigate the many years of life that, that we have, we're willing to revisit and we're willing to reexamine and we're willing to see in a more flexible way.

It's like IT. IT can be limiting and empowering. It's almost like a thermos. IT reinforces whatever you put into IT. IT does not have a judgement about good or d but if we identify is like unknown technical person or something, it's almost as if we absolve ourselves of the responsibility to learning grow. So in in a sense, you know, as you are saying, that is it's almost like our identity is the story we tell ourselves.

absolutely. It's so well sad and it's very much a narrative we tell ourselves and you you know to your point, IT can be extremely limiting because when we in some ways like tight cast ourselves, what says being non technical or is being not as social as other people or not as strong mentally or physically, whatever IT is that can really hinder our progress.

Because there is research on identity priming, which says that we do act in ways that are consistent with our perceived identity or the identity we aspire to have, right? So when we see ourselves as a voter, we're more likely to vote. When we see ourselves as being ecofriendly, we're more likely to recycle.

By the same token, if we see ourselves through these more negative labels than we might also act in where he's at a line with that and and needlessly hold ourselves back when IT comes to making progress. And I really, really love your point and IT resonates with me so much about kind of accountability. Like when you self identify, I say non technical, you're off the hook of IT, right? You don't have to try as much because you've just already decided that you fall into that bucket. And so you don't actually reach whatever growth potential you have in that area because you kind of just written yourself off that part really resonate with me. And I think that's an excEllent point.

You serve head on a little bit that the risks of rapping yourself with, uh, an instrumental, I think, that transferred to something like a profession and no longer able to do IT that then that can cause sort of an identity crisis. Can that also be a plus? So I guess the sort of meda question is how can we use our identity to help us a lish our goal?

There are absolutely s and pluses to anchoring ourselves to what we do IT also gives us A A clear sense of a future that we can imagine write, the future might look kind of lurana office. And when you identify, as you know, having a certain profession, you can at least project what you think the next five years can look like. And so there is definitely benefits to a curing yourself, an identity.

And that's why I don't want us to do away with that concept altogether. What i'm proposing is having multifaceted identities. So you can multiple layers of abstraction when IT comes to where you derive meaning and how you define yourself. And so at one level, you can absolutely say, okay, I am a lawyer, I am a doctor, a safe home mom, I A tech worker, and then you can have deeper layer is of identity that can be your safe landing.

You know, almost like a shoot when when life throws, you would change that you can fall back on, so that when that thing may be a threatened for a whatever reason, I mean, maybe you get into an accident and you don't have the same abilities that you had before you get a chronic illness that prevents you from doing those things. You don't feel that your entire self worth has been stripped away in the process that is destabilizing the way that I think is counter productive. And i'm always trying to be a pragmatic about things and figure out, okay, what are the ways that we can try to show as much resilience as possible in these moments.

And so I do think that if you can try to build identity layers, if you will, and depending on the moment in your life that you're engaging in and and the chAllenges that you're being thrown, you can almost opportunistically choose that level of abstraction, right? You can choose the layer at which you want to self identify is possible that in the moment at your job, I saw that helpful to think of yourself as, oh, I am the type person who loves connecting with people because you have a really annoying work assignment let's do in five hours. And that's not going to be sufficient motivating, right? And so that's where you might call upon the the stricter label, which is just what you do.

I like that because it's sort of like you can turn identity into whatever you want to help you accomplish your goals as .

long as it's not illusional. So I really don't i'm not okay with people telling themselves stories that are simply adventitious or promote psychological well being, right? They have to be rooted in reality.

They have to beat some degree veit by the people in your life, if you identify, is like an extremely compassionate person. But then the people around you don't feel that way about you. It's worth potentially revisiting and updating. So I really do feel like we need to allow and feedback in those spaces and just make sure that whatever our self assessment is, is at least in part rooted in in evidence that we're collecting about ourselves along the way.

One of my favorite ways to solve problems as asked myself what I don't want and wondering if we can sort of do that with identity. And I was thinking about this, I sort of take as identity is the things that we don't do more than the things that we do, what are the benefits and sort of coins of thinking about IT that way.

say a little bit more about that arise.

You can just be like, you know, i'm non smoker, instead of identifying as a smoker. And so you can t to take the negative. What are the identities that I don't want yeah and then how do I avoid I mean.

research show that can be as effective and there is some research showing that when people are in the process of quitting and let's say they're often a cigarette, there is a difference in terms of express behaviour. If you frame your current state as being someone who is in the process of quitting smoking versus being someone who doesn't smoke. I think when you add the the not label, you can feel as fiercely about the things that you don't do, right? Even on character front, like I don't lie, we can feel as much conviction in those non behaviors as we do in the more proactive behaviors.

I want to get in part of a larger discussion about identity and how that affects. So we talked earlier about sort like skills and habits. Democrat, republican, you can think religious or non religious as sort of groups of people when we identify with something that seems to put us in like a grad place.

So if I identify as Christian, I don't mean to be an expert to express an opinion on that. And I sort of got this idea from program. And the same is true for politics, right? If I identify as a group, say democrats, I don't need to be an expert to have an opinion on the economy.

I just need strong convictions. These are unique areas where there is no objective, wrong or right, only subjective questions. And since we can't be proven wrong, we tend to feel like every opinion is equally valid. The question then becomes, how do we have discussions about something that we made part of our identity? And what does this mean for us individually and as a country?

Facts and science and evidence don't surface as much as they should in some of our debates. And it's because when we look at how IT is that people form their attitudes and belief about the world, they're not simply basing IT on what the data says. They're basing IT on their tribal membership, on their identity membership.

So if you identify with a particular political party or particular community group, there is this feeling of allegiance that can supercede our rational minds, right? So we hear leaders saying certain things, and we implicity buy into what they're saying because they leave this group that we feel convictions about. One downside of the group identity label is that IT can make us less scrupulous and IT can make us less critically minded in ways that we otherwise would be right.

If we are reasoning through every situation for ourselves, we would probably take a closer eye to certain conclusions that are drawn. One thing that's so important for us as humans is to have the humility to change our minds and to have the humility to update our point of view in our opinions about things. And if you feel too strong, tribal membership IT can impede you from updating your point of view.

Because in that moment, you're not just asking yourself, do I believe in that x virus is real? What you're really asking is do I belong to x gw or not? Because if I don't only that now, I might get ejected from the group, right? That feels like there's so much on the line every time you are open to the idea of changing your mind about something in the face of new information.

And I think that's the part of the culture we have to work to change as much as possible, which is there has to be, quote, like wiggle room within these identity spaces, right? You should still be allowed to belong in a group even if you differ from people in some of their opinions. We can have these purity complexes around group membership. Otherwise I really does hold us back from arriving at Better conclusions and from being wiser and dismissing our pride in the moment in favor of of actually trying to arrive at the right conclusion or the right solution. So I feel very, very strongly that element of our human psychology and also the way that we reinforce IT through some of these factors is a really big chAllenge that I I would love to see this work through.

Well, one thing I ve thought about is that we're sort of animals, right? So one of the tendencies we share with animals as that were territorial, and when animals are territorial, they react without reasoning. And humans, we're lucky.

We're capable of reasoning in between arctic, the certain situations will return not to reason. And one of those situations is when somebody tread on our identity that that's our version of territorial. We're not walking around being on. No street lamps or something to our territory. Our territory is almost how we see ourselves. And it's really fascinating to me because one of the quirks with this is that we instantly tend to reject other people's ideas, even if they're correct, because IT belongs to somebody that we don't like or some other group in more in what can we do for ourselves to open our mind and actually thinking those moments instead of responding without reasoning?

Yeah, I mean, I D go articulating this, this massive chAllenge. And there's another concept in a psychology that I think is a really useful aid here, and it's more on how we communicate messages. So there's this concept called moral reframing.

What we find is that grounding our arguments in moral terms that a firm rather than threaten the moral views of those we disagree with, is far more effective at helping them change their their viewpoints. So for example, there was this one study showing, what, if you want to convince conservatives to care more about the environment, you might appeal to values that, you know, conservatives tend to hold. So, for example, patriotism, right? Like you might say, being pro environmental allows us to protect and preserve the american way of life, right? This is, this is the language that they use in the study.

IT is patrioti C2Conserve thi s bea utiful cou ntry's nat ural res ources. So it's still aligned with facts, but you're grounding IT in whatever values that group has. And what that allows for is that allows for people to boat stay consistent and true to their underlying beliefs about the world and the things they hold close to them while also being willing to entertain a new way of thinking.

And I think that's such a powerful instrument because it's a mechanism by which you can get people to open their minds up without them feeling like they're threatening the entire moral confess that they live by. I mean, I use the example of the environment, conservatives and supplies across the board, all people in groups and communities. I think also the power of the messenger, IT plays a big role.

So I have some personal experience of this. When I was working in the obama White house, we were eager to help residents of flint in the face of the laden water crisis rights of this. This was an awful, awful situation where laden water was poisoning generations of people.

And one of the things we did as we design these facets ts about water safety. And there is a question of who should be the messenger of these factors. And I think we thought, oh, IT should be the environmental protection agency because the the acronym is E P A, because the E P A is kind of the leading authority when IT comes to all these matters ism.

So we should have become from a government body. But then when you think about IT a bit more from the perspective of the psychology of the people who are are struggling, right? You realize way to second, their local government has just lie to them, you know, for years, and we've experienced decades of and frantisek and systemic racism.

They don't have a lot of reason to believe in these authority figures and to trust the words that are coming from these authority figures. And so I remember what the local E. P. I did in fln is they organized a canvassing effort where residents of the community, heads of churches, heads of lions, C S.

People that you're seeing at the grocery store or church on sundays, they're knocking on doors and they're saying, look, I can vote for the content of these factors, like I as your friend, as your neighbor, as your community member. And that's a situation where IT was much more effective for the message to from someone who is trusted rather than quote, the highest authority figure. And I think it's it's a humbling lesson as we think through public policy and who should convey messages that we utterly think this idea that people at the top of government are always going to be the best communicators on the message. I mean, it's certainly not the case.

Fascinating because like as you are saying that i'm like one of the problems today, the erosion of trust in government institutions. This was sort of like a micro example of that, but a micro o example. How do we do that as a nation on a bigger scale that there's uh you know another pandemic or an emergency after we've a wrote of this trust and and how do we establish trust in our institutions? I do think .

that we have to think at all levels, right, so we can think at the the highest level, like you're saying, and you how can policymakers and in social architects figure this out so that we see this at more scale level. But then there are also the individual lines we're changing in our everyday life, and I don't want people to give up on that because that matter is too. And we kind of want to we want to initiate activity at both the bottom in the top.

as you were saying that IT sort of related to identity, right? Because now my identity is, I don't trust government institutions. And once you have that is like cattle, we change that. So IT comes back to really the fundamental question of like how do we change our identity when we want to?

Or the positive. Yeah and I that example in flinch shows is that even something as simple as the messenger I mean, when your door is knocked down and it's someone that you see a church on sundays and they're telling you that they believe in a document that was created by the government that is a step forward, right? You are getting that person, at least in the context of this factory, believe in something that the federal government has shared with you.

I don't want to discount that is also being meaningful progress. So one thing I wanted to share in the context of everyday conversations we have with people, right? So that proverbial like think's giving dinner where you're sitting down and there's an uncle there and you disagree with them in the past, you just kind of given up.

And then like this is not worth at there is a research in psychology which shows how we can make more progress in those situations. And this is known in the research as motivational interviewing or deep canvassing. And they use this in the context of know political campaigns and trying to see if people can make progress on convincing people to change their minds on important political or social issues.

So there's a couple key features of motivational interviewing that are good to consider here. So one is the same way that I talked in the context of moral refrain, as you don't want to undermine the other person's fundamental sense of humanity because that's just gonna. That's gonna close the door immediately, right?

If you starting a conversation with machines and you're like, I think you're a terrible person, chances are are not going na get very far, right. So you want to try as hard as you possibly can to show as much genuine curiosity for the person's views. You might find them a Warrent, but you want to understand how IT is that they arrived at those views.

How do they get from point a to point b and try to at least express curiosity for the journey? Oh me, they were born a to a family where their grandparents, all of this thing, or maybe they were bullied in school. And so they felt that the only way they could really belong with joining X R Y community group, whatever IT is right?

You wanted to show curiosity, and that will, at least in vite, more of a conversation, rather than just simply a confrontation. The other thing in this relate to this curiosity point is you want to increase your question to statement ratio. So one thing that we can often do in these contacts is simply just tell people what we think they should think, right? We just come at the gate being like, well, this is how IT actually isn't.

This is what the data shows. And um IT feels authority in a way that often just not can do so to actual mindset change. And so instead, you want to increase the number of questions that you're asking and try to keep statements more to a minimum.

And then when the person shares their point of view back with you again, you might find IT to be totally at odds with euro life philosophy. The way you think about the world, you can be really validating, helpful to restate in your own words what they just said to you, so that you can at least validate that they've been heard again. You disagree with them, but you're saying, i'm listening to you. I'm understanding what you're saying.

I'm going to rephrase what I just heard you say and that can open people's minds, right? The technique at that point that's really helpful is you can ask them a pretty powerful question, which is, hey, so you believe this thing, what evidence do you think you would need in order to change your mind about that thing? And what I love about that question is that I just presupposes that they ought to be willing to change their mind in the face of new evidence.

You're kind of like putting them on the hook for at least acknowledging that there could be something in theory that could change their minds. Now you might be talking to someone who is particularly resolution stubbing their views and make IT say, literally no evidence could change my mind. That's the point at which you stop the conversation, and you may be focused the corn bread, and you get back to your thanksgiving ving dinner.

But for most people, they might say, if I learned that these three things were true, I might be willing to change my mind. And that is progress like that, even just the idea to location of what those things are is very, very meaningful. And I think you can engage with them on those things. You can also ask them how they believe their ride of their hues, right, so that they can actually see that there is maybe some redness, and how they arrived at their views.

Like, how did you get from point a to point b? Oh, actually, IT turns out that I was just really over inquiring on what my friend told me at school that one day, or you know what my colleague said about this article that they read and like they can find holes in their own arguments when they have to trace that path, and realized I wasn't the result of, like, you know, really clear, disciplined, rational, scientific thinking. But like everyone, myself included, we arrived at reviews for a variety of reason in our minds are shape for all sorts of reasons that aren't always totally sound.

And we should also, of course, use the same tactics on ourselves, right? So we tend to believe going into these conversations that are only jobs to change their minds, when in actuality, we might be a little blind to the holes in our logic and we might benefit from having a slightly more open mind going in because. It's actually okay to leave the conversation in which both people have changed their point of view just a little bit right. That would be potentially an excelling outcome for the conversation.

Sounds like a step forward, let's say, have a goal to run a marathon next year, and i'm not currently a runner. How can I use identity as a means to accomplish that goal?

There is some research showing that you do want to frame your goals in terms of due behaviors or is do behaviors. So you are kind of acknowledge this before. It's much more easy to measure progress when we're engaging in proactive decisions or proactive behaviors rather than the absence of things.

You say, okay, I want to be a runner. I'm to start by running half a mile everyday. That's gonna easier to track. Then i'm i'm gonna sell on my couch for as long, right?

It's like that's a really hard thing measure and and and also just doesn't fuels inspiring or motivating when IT comes to identity. I actually think that we talked a lot about a wheele room in identity and thinking of our identity is slightly more malleable and trying not to have a purity complex about IT. And I think that applies to goal setting as well.

So we can, at especially the outset of goal setting, be wildly ambitious about what IT is that we want to accomplish. And we can have that purity complex where if we don't aby by the rules, let's say, of our first week or a second week, we just fall off the wagon. We think, okay, well, we really can threw this up.

So what's the point? And that can be really counterproductive. And so there is a research showing that when we introduced what are known as emergency reserves into our goal setting, basically get out of jail free cars into the process of goal setting, we're much more likely to stay the course and to reach those goals.

So for example, let's say, I want to run three k or whatever a five k in however many weeks you actually build in, six days along the way where you don't actually run for whatever reason you got sick, you have to drop your kids off at school. You don't feel like IT, that's okay. You but you're basically bridging and empathy gap that exists between you in your future self.

When you're building in that emergency reserve, you're acknowledging that real life is gona happen and that when I don't run that one day, IT is not a threat to this future or present identity of runner IT is a expected and suda welcome part of the process because it's a more sustainable way to achieve your goals. So one mistake we can make is on a sunday at four P M. When we're a lying on a couch washing T, V, we think to ourselves, okay, i'm going to get at that for every morning and i'm going to work out at four I am.

And when push comes to shove, of course, were at a very different state in that moment. And we often have a really hard time sticking to those goals. And that's another example of an empty y gap between our present cells and our future cells, which can be very problematic.

And so if you are up at four A M and you are at the gym working out, that's a reasonable moment to say i'm going to try to keep doing this for however many days I can manage, right? But I think that's another way that you can set goals in ways that really not feel like you're threatened. Your your aspirational because what we're talking about here are aspirational identities, right? And we don't want to get in our own way at the time. We're actually setting the goals such that we make less progress than we could. And so we can take these factors into account at the outset.

I love that. Thank you. I want to switch gears just a little bit to something you said when you are in the White house that is fascinated to me, which is, you said the bumping a myth often does little more than reinforce IT.

So that's true. What can we do instead? What role does a story play and what role of facts play when IT comes to changing .

people's money is a very particular claim, which is that when you are myth busting, you tend to say what is not true, right? So you say IT is not the case that blaw, right? You try to correct the record, right? Disappoint SE people of of this existing belief.

But what they find in research is that very quickly after you say read the the public service announcement or you listen the commercial, people forget whether there is a not or or not in that sentence. And so what happens as you've actually just stand then the neural connection between or let's say in this case, were trying to convince people not to boil their water because that won't get rid of LED. They all actually ming the problem worse.

So we say, like you know, is not true that boiling your water is going to lead to Better water safety. Okay, they might forget the not. And so now i've just in my brain strengthened the relationship between boiling water and the term water safety.

And so that's where we have to be careful. And so what research has found is that we should actually just make more affirmative statements that are correct. So in order to have safe water, you should use a water filter and you should install IT in this particular way. And you should you know you you try to go on the road with the the things people should do, and that way you're only strengthening the neural connection between the two relevant things that do actually fit together and will actually lead to Better outcomes.

I never thought of without. I like that you highlighted this, but I want to come back to IT, which is you said here's how we can use identity to help us accomplish all. How does how we frame our goals affect our ability to accomplish articles?

You want to recognize when you're defining goals as what we call approach goals versus avoiding goals because they can have a different impact on our motivation. So for example, I want to eat healthier foods versus the avoidant version of that would be, I want to avoid unhealthy foods, right? And we do know that do goals are more motivating.

They promote endurance, their met with pride. Do not goals are more effective in certain cases where we're trying to inspire urgency. Maybe there is like a health thing that you really should not do and that IT makes a lot of sense to do.

They do not go another way that we can change the way that we frame the goals that we're more likely to act on IT is to think about who is setting the goal. So it's really interesting like humans just love being in the driver seat, like hands on a steering. Will you like owning our goals in our outcomes and often in this context, right?

We are working with a boss who's giving us a directive or working with a coach in the gym who's getting us a directive. But the degree to which we can introduce some degree of personal agency in that process so that we feel like where the one setting the goals can be super helpful. Now we're in the real world, right?

IT doesn't mean like your boss is going to be like, hey, you decide what you do today, but maybe there's choices, right? Maybe there is like three priorities. And you feel like you're in the driver seat when IT comes to choosing the exact priority that you focus on or maybe at the gym, it's like, okay, it's a lower body day, but you have options.

We do find that people are definitely Better at achieving them when we are the ones who feel like we set our own targets. And that's because we're really tapping into intrinsic motivation verses just extrinsic motivation, right? Fear of judgment or punishment from from some higher up.

I want to understand that do behaviors a little bit Better when you use the example, like I want to eat healthier food, a couple things came to mind. One was when creating that goal, we have a lot of willows. And in the moment where we choose to opt out of eating healthy food, we probably don't have a lot of willows.

So that relates to sort of what you are saying, like don't set at all to go to the gym IT for A M when it's like, yes, I don't know, three pm in the afternoon and IT strikes me that eventually everybody loses the bottle with Willy wer. So where i'm going with this is, is IT almost Better to set rules. My rule is I only eat healthy food. And then all the sudden you've changed IT from a willing wer question into, I just need to follow this rule that I ve set for myself.

I think both are going. Attacks will power. I think even that subtle framing of like I don't eat unhealthy foods, like if you're near the chocolate cake, you're so gona feel the pole, the chocolate cake. No semantic shift is going to be that powerful to eliminate the willpower issues.

I know until the duckworth focuses a lot on this so that we don't have to employ willpower, we should really focus on the way that we design our lives and the choice architecture of our lives. What this means in practice is to the extent that you can control your environment, you just make things unavailable to you, and you make other things really readily accessible and available to you. So the the canonical example of this is cafes where they try to encourage healthy eating.

They put all the junk food at the bottom, and there are no pake containers. And then they put the healthy food, like the fruits and vegetable les and and healthy snacks on full display. At I level, sorts of things are more likely to grab, and those little nudges are actually quite effective and they don't require as much wl power because you just text your environment accordingly.

And so that's what I would recommend in situations like that. And then the other thing we know shame about motivation is that we don't have stable amounts of motivation over the course of goal pursuit. Mister m, researched by my friend I oat fishback SHE, calls IT the middle problem.

So basically what happens is we have a huge verse of motivation of the outside of the goal. We all can resonate with this, right? January first, the lines to the gym are long, and then, like january twenty of something, they start to waive, right? So we all enter goal pursuit with a lot of enthusiasm of excitement.

And then we also find actually that towards the end of goal pursuit, as we are reaching the end, we experience monotonic increases in motivation was called the goal gradient effect, where as we get closer the goal, we get even more motivated and excited about IT. But there's a law in the middle. So so that's the problem, right? It's like you see, oh, there's like a diff in the motivation and I think we all have the lived experience of this, right?

It's like, oh, my gosh, I was so excited in the first. Three weeks of this thing and now i'm kind of losing steam. So what I ett recommends is to actually just make the middle periods of time as short as physically possible.

So rather than setting a year long goal, which we might feel an instinct to do because we want to set a really ambitious goal. And so we're like, let's let me get a year long goal because that I can really achieve the the best version of this thing that I had my site set on. Instead, you set week long goals.

So that way, the middle period is not a multi month period, is actually just a few days in the end of the week, right? And you can get away with a day or two not working very hard, right? And the climate way back out and say that final day of low motivation. And so I really like this idea of trying to, from a temporal perspective, kind of like bound your motivational cycles so that you can experience this dip in a more constraint face.

It's almost like you're marathon ghor and you hit a wall and your sort of like mile ten. And instead of focusing on the finish line, you focus on how do I get around the next corner and then you accomplish that all. Then you focus on the next corner. See shorten the distance between where you are and what you want to compliance.

Actually, I want to share the one motivational technique that I use like every single day of my life is the most um so this is from my friend katy milkman at the university of pensylvania SHE SHE calls a temptation bungling. The idea is very simple actually. But what you do is you pair a desirable task with an undesirable task, so something that you have to do, right?

So let's say you have to undo the dish washer, you have to follow laundry, you have to get some sort of work assignment done. You have to work out whatever the thing is that you have a little bit of dread towards is the undesirable test that, that needs to actually happen. And then you pay IT with a desirable activity that offers you more of an immediate reward.

okay. So this might be okay. While i'm folding laundry, I listen to my favorite you know pop album that just came out or while in on the train I watching netflix, or while I am doing this really tough work assignment, i'm treating myself to like my favorite Candy. Um and the key part like the the the only way in which this temptation bundling works is if you actively deny yourselves that rewarding activity in all other domains of life so that IT really feels special IT feels coupled with the undesirable activity. So I can't be watching netflix all the time and then feel motivated to go on the read milk to just watch more netflix, right?

I have to choose, say, a show where it's like you can only watch the show when you're on the tread mill, you can only listen to this pop album when you're folding laundry, you can only eat this Candy when you're working on writing your book, whatever the thing is, right? And I ask us to be such a game changer because you get really slept up. And what happens with, for me, should be reality T, V.

shows. And I really wanted know what happens. And so I do feel a pole to go back to doing the undesirable thing just because i'm so easy to see what happens the line. And so that one has been really effective for me. But again, you have to you do have to be very rule days here, which is that you can't indulge that thing in in other places.

That's really important new ones. Thank you very much. My for this conversation, this best stern. I want to end on a personal question, which is, how would you define success?

I think success for me is making people feel like they've been understood by me in some way. I think as a cognitive scientist, I am obviously very tuned to people's inner life. And I think this is positionally.

I'm A A fairly open person who's often willing to share a lot about my interior life with people. And I find IT to be probably one of the most beautiful experiences in life where I have been vulnerable at someone or open with them. And they in turn share something with me that they were holding in or feeling uncomfortable about.

And we have this moment, this kind of singular moment of connection when we're both willing to share those experiences with one another. And I just think that if we allowed more people to feel understood in the chAllenges that they were facing and just less in their own heads, kind of just like suffering in silence and torturing themselves, we would just all be so much happier. And I do think that kind of understanding and compassion is is available to us. I mean, I think being economic scientists is the greatest lesson in empathy. Because when you understand why people are the way they are, it's really hard to like, really hate people and I think that that feeling of being understood again, that doesn't mean that you agree with people, but you at least off in year like, okay, let me try understand what where you're coming from that that to me is being a successful person .

that is beautiful. Thank you.

Thank you so much.

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