Hello and welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. My name is Angela Sharina. I'm your host, your partner in change, personal and collective transformation, your executive coach 360, someone too ready to push your edge to the next level and help you unlock more, unlock and grow and use more of your potential. On today's podcast, we with my dear AI host Coco co-host are gonna discuss how to see our cognitive blockages, our thinking patterns that are broken, that are keeping us hostages in the looping, repeating patterns of our life, whether that's business or relationships or your personal health and fitness. I had I was having a coffee with a friend a couple of days ago, and we were talking about coaching, and I told her how I like to help clients see their mental models that are broken, broken in a sense that they are they don't allow my clients to get to the next level towards goals and aspirations that they have. And she asked me, how do you see that in clients? And then how do you actually help them to see that and realize that? So then you can work together on adjusting those. And I told her, well, good listening really helps you to see where clients' thinking doesn't allow them to get to the goal that they have in mind where they are in their own way. Just listen carefully. But in terms of how to help them to see that, it's kind of also like helping yourself to see your own blind spots. And how do you do that? You help your client and yourself to get out of your own mind. And there are great techniques that have been proven by some thought leaders in business and in decision making and in emotional regulation. So there are some tools, specifically, we're gonna talk about one tool today that helps you to break through in your relationships, in your health and fitness, in your business, when you're seemingly just keep going through the same loops and the same patterns, thinking like, why do you track the same things or why keep you why do you keep repeating seemingly again the same cycle? So without further ado, keep listening to the conversation between my AI co-host, which are trained on my blogs, that uh will help you to discover what that tool is and how you can use it. Start using it today, and how I used it to get some breakthrough in my business and in my relationship. So stay tuned. But before I let you go, don't forget to check out the link in the show notes. The invitation to apply to high performance performing entrepreneur reboot five-day free challenge that is coming up at the end of December to give you a boost to break through any limits that you have in 2026. So check it out and stay tuned.
SPEAKER_02But really, it's about this how do we get a clear look inside our own minds? Because let's be honest, it is so easy to spot flawed thinking in other people.
SPEAKER_03Oh, laughably easy.
SPEAKER_02Right. You can see your coworkers blind spot from across the office. You know exactly what your friend is doing wrong. But spotting the little cognitive glitches that keep us stuck, looping the same patterns.
SPEAKER_03Well, that internal lens is perpetually foggy. It's, you know, it's the classic paradox. You're the subject and the observer at the same time. So the bias is just it's baked into the system.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell, so that's our mission for this deep dive.
Exactly. We've gone through a stack of sources here on decision-making, psychology, leadership, and they all, strangely enough, converge on one deceptively simple tool. It's called self-distancing.
SPEAKER_02Self-distancing.
SPEAKER_03We're going to explore how forcing this little separation between your emotional self and a more objective viewpoint unlocks just incredible strategic insight. And it works across the board, regulating emotions, planning a huge business move, or just figuring out why you can't stick to your goals.
SPEAKER_02And this is the good stuff because it's not just theory. The sources give us actual concrete things to do. We have examples from emotional regulation, from high-stakes CEO strategy. It's all here. And it delivers some uncomfortable wisdom, but necessary wisdom.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Powell It's a shortcut to seeing what's really holding you back.
SPEAKER_02Okay, let's unpack this. So let's start with the basic problem the research brings up. It's this question of how do you help people see their broken thinking?
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_02And the whole difficulty is that thinking is invisible. We don't see the process, you know. We just see the result.
SPEAKER_03We just live the result. And when we make a choice, it feels totally justified because our own internal narrative, our inside view, I've already built the perfect story for why it's the right choice.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell That's the core obstacle, right? That internal story we tell ourselves.
SPEAKER_03Absolutely. We are just not objective when we're emotionally invested. That inside view is full of our personal history, our fears, our ego. It's like a gravitational field.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell A gravitational field. I like that. So you might know you should do something.
SPEAKER_03You might rationally know you should start that new health routine or you know, fire that client who's a total pain. But the gravity of that inside view, that inertia, it just keeps you stuck.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell And the sources are all clear on this. This isn't a personal failure, it's just how the human brain is walking.
SPEAKER_03It's a feature, not a bug.
SPEAKER_02So how do we get around the wiring?
SPEAKER_03That's where the structured practice of self-distancing comes in. It's a technique designed specifically to force that separation. It shifts your brain from what they call a hot state, you know, emotional reactive to a cold state. Strategic, factual, more abstract. We're never going to be perfectly objective. I mean, that's impossible. Right. But by doing this, we get measurably better at making choices that help us in the long run.
SPEAKER_02Okay. That hot versus cold distinction feels really key. And it sets up the next part perfectly. Because this is where it gets interesting. We see the same pattern, the same tool showing up in three totally different areas of life.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it's incredibly versatile.
So let's start with the first one, the one we can all relate to. Navigating really charged emotions. You're furious, you're overwhelmed, you can't decide what to do, you're in that hot state. The research from Mark Brackett gives us a really simple way out.
SPEAKER_03It does. His work shows that the self-distancing move here is something we can call the friend test.
SPEAKER_02The friend test.
SPEAKER_03The question is simply this What would I advise a friend if they were in my exact spot?
SPEAKER_02It sounds almost too simple. Like that's it. Why does just asking that question change anything?
SPEAKER_03Because it's creating neurological distance. The moment you frame the problem as belonging to someone else, you decouple it from your own limbic system.
SPEAKER_02The fight or flight part of the brain.
SPEAKER_03Exactly. You literally shift cognitive gears. Just changing the pronoun from I to you or they stops you from feeling the emotional swirl and lets you start analyzing it with your prefrontal cortex.
SPEAKER_02That's fascinating. So all the drama, all the history, he said this and she did that, it all just kind of shrinks.
SPEAKER_03Trevor Burrus, Jr. It becomes background context instead of the main event. You suddenly get access to the calm, wise part of yourself that was there all along, just locked away by the stress.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell You know, that's exactly what I do when I send a frantic text to a friend.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_02Half the time I'm not even looking for their advice. I'm just creating a third party so I can give myself the advice I already know I need.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Powell That's a perfect way to put it. You're outsourcing the objectivity that your own situation just won't allow.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so let's scale this up. Let's move out of personal feelings and into, say, high-stakes corporate strategy. The sources show the exact same mechanism at work here. But instead of emotional fog, we're fighting against organizational inertia.
SPEAKER_03And this brings us to Jim Collins' work in Great by Choice. He studied these incredibly resilient companies, the ones that navigated huge turbulence and came out stronger.
SPEAKER_02And he found a pattern.
SPEAKER_03He found a pattern of structured self-distancing among their most effective leaders.
SPEAKER_02So how do they do it? What was their version of the friend test?
Oh, it's a tool we can call the new CEO test. They would literally stop and ask themselves this question. If someone new, someone really competent stepped into my role today, what's the one thing they would immediately do?
SPEAKER_02Oof. I can't imagine how brutal that question could feel.
SPEAKER_03It's tough.
SPEAKER_02Because when you've been running something for years, certain problems just become wallpaper. They're just the way things are.
SPEAKER_03Exactly. And that's what this question shatters. The sources say fresh eyes reveal what familiarity hides. Inertia is the real killer of growth. The new CEO doesn't care about past failures or who's friends with who.
SPEAKER_02They just care about what works.
SPEAKER_03They just care about the most strategic move. It forces you to see the obvious thing that your own comfort zone has been hiding from you.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell But hold on, isn't that a little dangerous? I mean, if I'm the current CEO, I have to manage the reality on the ground, the people, the budgets. If the hypothetical new CEO says fire half the company and pivot, you can't just do that.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Powell That's a great point. And it's a critical nuance. The question isn't meant to be the final plan, it's meant to break the deadlock. The new CEO gives you the strategic truth. That's the first step. The ideal move. Then your job as the current leader is to translate that truth into a pragmatic plan. So maybe the new CEO says, divest this division. You then create a two-year plan to sell it off gracefully and retrain the staff. The strategy comes from the outside view.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell And the execution comes from the inside view. Okay, that makes sense. You break the inertia, then you guide the landing.
SPEAKER_03Precisely.
SPEAKER_02So that leads us right into the third domain, which basically formalizes this whole idea. We're talking about complex decisions with a lot of uncertainty.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Powell Right. This is where Annie Duke's work in how to decide comes in. She brings the inside and outside views into direct conflict.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell The inside view. That's our personal story again.
SPEAKER_03Aaron Powell It is. Duke says that whenever we make a big decision, launching a product, hiring someone, we are always optimistic about our own specific situation. We think we're the exception.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell So if I'm opening a new restaurant, my inside view is my recipes are the best, my location is perfect, I'm gonna crush it.
Exactly. That's your inside view, full of all that rich personal detail. Duke's framework says that before you're even allowed to write that story down, you have to first build a rigorous outside view.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell Okay, so what does the outside view look like?
SPEAKER_03It's a distant, factual, probabilistic list. You have to look at what are called base rates.
SPEAKER_02Base rates.
SPEAKER_03You have to ask, what's the actual success rate for new restaurants in the zip code? What percentage of first-time entrepreneurs make it past year three? You're basically forcing yourself to look at your project as just one data point among thousands.
SPEAKER_02That feels incredibly humbling. It's grounding your personal optimism in cold, hard reality.
SPEAKER_03That's the entire point. The outside view gives you the statistical truth, and the inside view gives you the nuance of your situation.
SPEAKER_02And you have to document the outside view first.
SPEAKER_03You have to. It prevents your own ego and your biases from coloring the whole process. You escape the gravity by making that distance mandatory.
SPEAKER_02Okay, let's bring this all home. The source material gives us a really specific, practical example of someone using this. A business owner was feeling stuck, growth was stagnant, so they asked themselves the big question.
SPEAKER_03The ultimate test question.
SPEAKER_02If a highly competent friend took over my business for a week, what would they do that I'm not doing?
SPEAKER_03And the insight that came back was it was immediate. And it was a total blind spot. The problem wasn't a lack of skill or ideas, the weakness was the network.
SPEAKER_02The network.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. The source laid out this chain of connection. Trust comes from referrals, referrals come from relationships, and relationships are built on proven value. He just wasn't building those relationships.
SPEAKER_02So the outsider, the friend taking over, would see that immediately. They'd say, stop tweaking the product and start meeting people.
SPEAKER_03And that diagnosis led to a strategy that felt well, it felt really hard to do.
SPEAKER_02Because of the ego.
SPEAKER_03The ego and just the short-term financial pressure.
SPEAKER_02Aaron Powell And that strategy was give away some of your best work to the right people for free. Let's just sit with that for a second. Because when you're the one running the numbers and you feel like you're struggling, giving away your time and revenue.
It's completely counterintuitive.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. The inside view is screaming, I need to bill every possible hour just to stay afloat.
SPEAKER_03Exactly. It's immediate, tangible sacrifice. But the outside view, that strategic, self-distanced lens, showed that the sacrifice was actually an investment.
SPEAKER_02An investment in the one thing that was holding the business back.
SPEAKER_03Trust and referrals. And it wasn't just random. It was about targeting the right people who could see the value and were connected to the right kind of future clients.
SPEAKER_02I love how the source material summed it up. The strategy felt painful to the ego, but was wise for the business.
SPEAKER_03That's the tension right there.
SPEAKER_02It's about ignoring that short-term fear to serve the long-term strategic goal.
SPEAKER_03And this connects to what you hear from so many successful entrepreneurs like Alex Ramosi. The idea of demonstrating massive value up front. Self-distancing just helps you get past the personal financial panic and see that it's the right strategic move.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so what's the big lesson here? What does this all mean for you, the listener?
SPEAKER_03The main takeaway we've distilled is that our thinking is just. It's universally biased. We're wired that way.
SPEAKER_02And while perfect objectivity isn't the goal because it's impossible, these practices are proven tools.
SPEAKER_03The friend test, the new CEO test, the outside view.
SPEAKER_02They make us measurably better decision makers in every part of life.
SPEAKER_03Right. It feels like the big discovery is that stepping outside your head reveals things that were obvious the whole time.
SPEAKER_02They were just hidden by that fog of familiarity and emotion. The wisdom is already in you. You just need to create the space to access it. Self-distancing is how you create that space.
SPEAKER_01It's not about learning a new fact, it's about changing the frame. So we want to leave you with the final provocative question that the source material poses for you to think about this week. Where in your life in a project that's stuck, a relationship that's challenging, or a big decision you're facing, where would stepping outside your own head, just for a moment, help you see the strategic move that's been right there all along? That's it for this deep dive. We'll talk to you next time.
I hope, guys, that you really enjoyed this co-hosted episode, and now you have one powerful tool confirmed by best in business practice, decision making, emotional regulation. This one powerful tool of self-distancing to help you make better, more unbiased decisions, more balanced decisions to help you break through those loops in your personal, professional life, your relationships to keep moving forward, keep growing, keep improving, keep unlocking and using more of your potential. Thank you guys for tuning in. Share, review, rate our podcast. And guys, till next time, keep learning, keep improving, keep growing, and keep unlocking more and more of your potential.