Melody Wilding

How do you become fully confident and in control of your emotions and experience at work? It's by mastering your own psychology and that of others. On this show, we decode the science of success, exploring how to get out of your own way and advance your career to new levels without becoming someone you're not. I'm Melody Wilding, a best-selling author, human behavior professor, and award-winning executive coach. Get ready and let's put psychology to work for you. Something I find myself coming back to again and again with the clients I work with is the fact that the gap between knowing what you need to do and doing it is almost never an intellect problem. You could be an incredibly capable person. Maybe you have run billion-dollar projects, you've managed hundreds of people. You're known as a subject matter expert in your field. And you may still go blank in conversations or ramble, talk in circles, even when you know your stuff cold. And if I were to ask you what happened, I bet you wouldn't say I had no idea what the answer was. But you would say something more like, I was worried about how I would come across or I wasn't sure they were buying it. Or maybe deep down you have had your sight set on an exciting opportunity. But every time the chance to advocate for yourself comes up, you convince yourself, Well, I'm not ready yet. So-and-so is a better fit. Maybe I'm just being full of myself. In both of these examples, it's as if there is this invisible anchor dragging you down, slowing or completely stalling you from taking action. That anger is your beliefs. And today's guest has spent years researching exactly why beliefs are so hard to see, harder to change, and most importantly, a concrete process for finally being able to do both. His name is Nir Ayal. He's a globally recognized authority on behavior change and human potential, and author of two books I consider to be essential reading, Hooked and Indistractable. His new book is called Beyond Belief. By the end of this conversation, you will understand why the same situation that derails you has almost no effect on the colleague who sits next to you. And it has nothing to do with their smarts or their talent. You'll understand why the self-doubt that shows up right before you ask for what you want is predictable and one you have much more control of than you ever thought. And you will walk away with a totally new way of looking at the stories you have been telling yourself about who you are, what you're capable of, and what's available to you. Here's Nier. All right. Nier, it is such a treat to have you here because you have written two of my all-time favorite behavioral psychology books that I come back to again and again and again, which are indistractable and hooked. Love them. I feel like they were so cutting edge when they came. You were so ahead of the curve with thinking about people's behavior and how we interact with technology. And I am curious, how did you get from those two topics, indistractable and hooked, to now writing about beyond belief? What was the what was the journey with that?

Nir Eyal

Yeah. So the uh the string that connects everything together is my fascination with human behavior. That's really what I do is I've I've always been obsessed with why we do what we do. So hooked was about how to build habit-forming products for good, how to use technology to uh change people's behavior, to help them eat healthier, exercise more, save money, or any any kind of habit that we can facilitate through the technology we use. And that's that's definitely what's happened. You know, the book has sold over uh half a million copies, and I I get emails all the time from every conceivable industry about how they're using uh the psychology that used to be kept in Silicon Valley. And I played a small part in democratizing those tools so that the rest of us could build habits for good. Then the second book, Indistractable, was kind of about the flip side. If hooked was about how do you build good habits, indistractable was about how do you break those bad habits. And that was a problem that came from my own struggle with overusing technology and how I finally became indistractable, going back to the first principles of the psychology of distraction. Then I started getting some funny phone calls. Uh, you see, I do these office hours every week that anybody can call me up and ask me any questions. And if they read any one of my books, I'm I I love talking to readers. And so every once in a while, maybe like one out of 20 calls or so would sound something like this, Melody. Somebody would call me up and say, Hey, Nier, I read Indistractable. I really liked it, but I just wanted you to know that uh it didn't work. I'd say, Oh wow, tell tell me more. I would love to learn. Let's go step by step. We'll figure out where where things didn't work out for you. So let's start with step one. How did step one go? And they'd say, Nier, I read step one. I definitely read it. I just didn't um do it. Like, okay, no worries. You know, that's it, I guess that happens sometimes. Tell me about step two. How did step two go? And they'd say, Yeah, you know, I I I read step two. I definitely read step two. I just I didn't do that one either. And so here I was kind of racking my brain, trying to figure out how is it that people would wait for months to tell the author of a book that they had read that the things that they didn't do didn't work. And at first I thought, well, did I mess up? Like, is is it I spent five years writing this book and I put 30 pages of citations to peer-reviewed journals, and I really want to make sure my work is thorough, and why didn't it work for people? And then I started thinking, actually, you know what? I kind of do this for the books I read too. I I have stacks of books on my bookshelf of books that I haven't put into practice. I've listened to podcasts and YouTube videos and paid consultants and gurus to tell me what to do, and I haven't put a lot of that stuff into practice either. So isn't that weird? It's just oh, interesting? What a why is that? It turns out that Plato asked the very same question. He he called it in the Greek uh akrasia, the tendency to do things against our better interests. And so I want to dive in deeper. And what I realized after looking at this topic backwards and forwards was that our fundamental understanding of motivation is incomplete. That we tend to think that all we need to do is know what to do, know the behavior. If somebody just gives me the secret of what it is I need to do, tell me the steps. And if I want the benefit, well, then the behavior will lead to the benefit. That's all we need, right? But we know that's not true. Common sense tells us that that's not true. Even if the economist tells us that's all you need is an incentive, there's something missing. Clearly, there's something missing. Because if all we needed was the information, we're drowning in information, right? If you don't know how to do something, just ask ChatGPT, Google it, buy a book. We're drowning in the information. What's missing, what I concluded, is that motivation is not a straight line between behavior and benefit, but that motivation is a triangle. That in order to sustain motivation, you not only need to know what to do, the behavior, you also need to know the benefit. But you most importantly, what holds it all together is the belief. That, for example, if you're working for a boss who you don't believe has your best interest at heart. Maybe you don't believe they're gonna give you that promotion. Maybe you don't believe in their leadership, maybe you don't believe the company's going in the right direction. Are you gonna sus sustain your motivation to work for them? No, you're gonna slack off or probably find another job. Conversely, if you don't believe in your own ability to do the behavior, it doesn't matter if you know exactly what to do. If you don't believe you can do it, if you have imposter syndrome, so-called, or if you think I'm not good enough, I'm not ready, this won't work, I need more information, you're also not going to do it. You're gonna lose your motivation because you don't have that belief. So I realize that there was this kind of hole in our our everyday understanding for leaders, for managers, even for just the rest of us, everybody. If we don't understand our beliefs, we don't understand what drives our behavior, and we don't understand why we don't achieve our long-term goals.

Melody Wilding

Oh my gosh, it's it is so insightful to hear that because I, as you were saying, you know, you could have the most, you could have the fanciest technology in the world. You could have your AI, you could have uh, you know, uh push notifications on your phone to do something, but you still don't do it. And it's and it and then it can turn into self-recrimination about is it me? Am I just not disciplined? Do I not want this bad enough? And all right, but I I have some questions about that where we go wrong with some of the mantras we tend to believe about beliefs, very meta there. But how do you define a belief? Because you have a very particular definition, and I want to make sure we're all on the same page as we go through the rest of the conversation.

Nir Eyal

Fellow word nerd here, yes. Uh we have to get our definition straight.

Melody Wilding

So correct, yeah.

Nir Eyal

Here's what a belief is not. A belief is not a fact. A fact is a conviction that is based on actual evidence, it is based on objective truth. The world is more like a sphere than it is flat. Sorry, flat earthers, the world doesn't care what you think. That is a fact. You cannot change a fact, okay? That is an objective truth. On the other hand, we have faith. Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence. So God rewards the righteous. There's no amount of evidence that someone could present to somebody who has that matter of faith, nor should they. That is faith. No more power to them. But in between fact and faith is what we call a belief. And what makes belief so special, their definition, is a belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence. So we're not pulling it out of thin air. It's based on evidence. But it is open to change. It is open to revision based on new evidence. And so the reason this is such a magical tool is that unlike faith, which almost never changes, unlike facts, which you cannot change, a belief is open to revision. And so the most important thing that I took away from the six years of research that went into Beyond Belief was that beliefs are tools, not truths. There's a different burden of evidence for a belief versus a fact, because beliefs tend to be about predictions for the future. They haven't happened yet. AI is going to take all our jobs, AI is going to lead to utopia. I can do this, I can't do this. I should marry this person, I shouldn't marry this person, I should take this job, I shouldn't take this job. All of these things are beliefs based on current evidence about the future. They're not based on facts, they're based on bits of evidence. And so if we pick the right beliefs, we have what we call liberating beliefs, these beliefs that increase our motivation and decrease our suffering. If we hold on to the wrong beliefs, the wrong tools for the job, we increase our suffering and decrease our motivation. And so it's it's absolutely critical when it comes to sustaining our motivation for ourselves, for our other, for our colleagues, that we understand how to recognize those limiting beliefs, call them for what they are, understand why we have them in the first place, and then turn them around. And there's a process for us to do this so that we can adopt these more motivating, liberating beliefs. And this isn't about positive thinking. It's not about manifesting and all that hocus pocus stuff. You know, I'm my books are very science-backed. And it turns out that a lot of the stuff people tend to think about beliefs not only is wrong, but actually backfires. For example, you know, positive thinking, that that's also that's just just having blind faith that things are always going to work out. No, that's also not based on real world world evidence. However, we can decide when it comes to these beliefs about the future, these convictions based on evidence that are open to revision. We can actually change not only what we see, literally what we are able to see, also what we feel, not just our feelings, but also our actual physiological state. We're talking pain and suffering, are moderated by our beliefs. And most importantly, we change what we do, our sense of agency and all those combined into who we ultimately become.

Melody Wilding

Yeah, that's exactly what I was just thinking in my head is the way that beliefs then will calcify into an identity. And I was thinking of the of an example. A lot of people who listen to this show are very focused on developing their executive presence and communication skills and influence skills. Yet they will tell themselves, I am an introvert, therefore I cannot do X. Or the people at my workplace will judge me if I change the way that I'm speaking up in meetings. So let's get into um some of those stories we tell ourselves that, well, this isn't my style, right? That's another one I hear that that's just not me, that's not authentic to who I am, or a common one I'm sure you you also see a lot is I'm not cut out for this, right? I just I don't have that in me. So, what is that process to start shifting? I love the idea, it's very pragmatic view to make our beliefs more useful to us so they are serving us. They don't have to be this ultra-positive Pollyanna thing, but they need to be useful and utilitarian, the right tool for the right job. So, what is that process that we go from something that is a brick wall to something that is actually serving us?

Nir Eyal

Absolutely. So, so I'll tell you personally how this affected my own life. When I started uh my career, I had terrible stage fright. I would go on stage and right beforehand, I'd get the sweaty armpits and the cotton mouth and the heartbeat in my chest, the palpitations. And I and I think to myself, the look how anxious I am. And I'm not ready for this, and I need more practice and I need more information. I should probably take some course and I'm not gonna do well. And if I don't do well, I'm gonna embarrass myself. And I would go down this anxiety spiral based on what? Based on a belief that I wasn't good enough, that I wasn't ready for this. And so I didn't change the signal. I didn't change the sensations. I still get I'm getting it right now, Melody. I'll be totally honest with you. I right now I'm getting the sweaty armpits and the cotton mouth and the heart palpitations. But my interpretation of that information is completely different. There's a difference between pain and suffering. Pain is just signal, pain is just information. Suffering is our subjective interpretation of that signal. It's completely judgment. And judgment is what causes our suffering. When we believe that something should be different than it is, that's the source of all our suffering. And so when we think of beliefs, not as facts, but as tools, I like to say beliefs are tools, not truths. And so now, even with the same information, the same physical sensations that I always have had, I have a totally different belief. My belief today is you see, my heart is beating quickly so that my brain can receive more oxygen, so I can deliver my best possible presentation and help millions of people. So, same exact data, same information, totally different belief. Now, what that took, what that that simple statement took, was a process. It's almost like, you know, limiting beliefs are like your face. If I told you look at your face, how how do you look at your face? You can't look at your face. We all have a face, but you can't look at your face. You can look at your hands, you can look at your feet, you can't look at your face. Same goes with our limiting beliefs. We can't see them. In order to see our own limiting beliefs, we have to reflect. We have to take out something outside of ourselves. We have to look in a mirror outside of ourselves. And it's the same way with our limiting beliefs. We can see everybody else's limiting beliefs, just like we can see our own face, right? We can see our boss's limitations, we can see our spouse's limitations, our kids, everybody else. We can tell them, you know, for days about their limitations. But our own limiting beliefs, we can't see because to us, they feel like facts. And that's why they're so hard to see, because they're always hidden, because your brain has spent your entire life getting you to do and believe what it has done in the past. Because in the past, these beliefs served it in some way. And so it was a good tool back then, but we don't keep using a tool just because it worked once. It's like a like a carpenter saying, Oh, one time I used a hammer and it was really effective. So I'm only going to use a hammer. It's the one and only true tool. No, you can set down that tool, pick up a better tool that is better for that job. And so that's what this process of figuring out these limiting beliefs that hold us back by asking ourselves, is this belief serving me or is it hurting me? And the effects are so profound. I mean, I talk about in the book how how they increase your lifespan. Literally, it's the the you know, there's a study done out of Yale that found that just having a positive view of aging increases lifespan on average seven and a half years. Seven and a half years. And to put that in perspective, Melody, that is greater than the effect of changing your diet. It's greater than the effect of exercise, it's greater than the effect of quitting smoking. Seven and a half years. Now, it's not some kind of cosmic magic that when you believe happy thoughts that, you know, that changes your mitochondria or something, that's not what's happening at all. It's that people who have positive views of aging, people who believe something like growth is possible at any age, versus people who have a negative view of aging, such as aging involves inevitable decline, the people who have that positive view are more likely to change their behavior, which then changes their biology. And so when we adopt these, these liberating beliefs, we do change our day-to-day lives, we change our everyday behavior, and therefore we also change our biology. And so if it does this to lifespan, what does this do for our business? You know, as we're going through this rapid change of AI and geopolitical unrest and everything that's happening in the world, depending on how you see that reality, depending on what your beliefs are, nobody knows what's going to happen. When nobody knows what's going to happen tomorrow, we have no idea what's going to happen to AI. It could be wonderful, it could be terrible. We have no idea. But based on your beliefs about what you think is going to happen and or what you choose to believe, you will literally see opportunities that other people just won't have access to. And so it's so important that we decide our beliefs, or our beliefs will dictate our future.

Melody Wilding

Yeah. Oh, it's I am always saying to my clients, you will act consistently with the beliefs you have about yourself and other people. I was just talking to a group of clients yesterday about how at the at more mid and senior levels, disruption is the condition you are operating in. So just your belief needs to be, and your expectation for situations needs to be, it is not going to go fully to plan. Someone is going to change a priority, someone is going to interrupt me in the meeting, someone will have a question that comes out of the blue. And when you expect that or your belief is that going in and, you know, dot, dot, dot, I can handle it. I have the resourcefulness and the skills to be able to handle that. Then all of a sudden, just as you were saying, the way you perform and are present in that moment totally changes because you're not blindsided by it. You're like, okay, here it is. Now this is the moment where I stay calm and I show myself and I respond in a diplomatic way, which, as you were saying, has this cascading effect of how you perform, then how people perceive you, then the opportunities you get in the future.

Nir Eyal

Yeah.

Melody Wilding

So yeah.

Nir Eyal

It actually reminds me, just uh before I forget it, there's such a great example of how when we when we think that it's just about having positive thoughts, right? Just be a pop just be positive, just be an optimist, or or you know, just manifest. And we see this on social media a lot, that the solution is just manifesting. Or vision exercises. We hear that a lot too, the visioning exercises. And it turns out that the data shows, the studies show that those types of visioning exercises, when we when we focus only on the goal, when we only focus on the outcome, studies have found that people become less likely to meet their goals. That when you know Gabriel Ottagen did a study where she put people in a room and she connected them to blood pressure monitors and they focused on their outcomes, right? They manifested the beach body or business success or love in their life or getting a good grade on their test. And what they what she found was that they relaxed, their blood pressure dropped, their heart rate dropped, and they became less likely to actually go out there and do the things that were necessary to get what they wanted. So just raw, rah, let's go get it, you know, let's go get our goals is not enough. What you have to do is visualize the right way. You know, people say, well, athletes visualize. So doesn't that work for athletes? Well, this is a great way, example of the self-help industry taking something that's true and making it false. Because if you actually look at what athletes do when they visualize, they don't visualize the trophy and the gold medal. That's not what they visualize. They visualize how they will react physically and psychologically to that difficulty. They prepare for the pain. So exactly as you said, it's not a surprise because they know I can handle it. I've rehearsed it already. That's the right way to visualize. That's what we have to do to prepare for our goals, is to prepare for the pain psychologically. I mean, this is really what separates winners from losers, is that people who consistently succeed are able to separate pain from suffering. I mean, this is the unlock that people who are very successful in all fields, whether it's the arts or business or what the people who are at the top of their game, the same exact signal that the rest of us get that we would interpret as pain and suffering, to them is not pain and suffering. It's still pain, right? They still feel the same things that. The rest of us do, but they make completely different judgments. And that prepares them for the inevitable difficulty that comes along the path to getting what they desire. So just sitting back and saying, well, I want this thing. It's just going to happen. I'm going to vibrate the cosmic uh whatever vibration of the universe. That doesn't work. But visualizing the pain in your way and how you will prepare for that psychologically, making sure that you can rise to the occasion, that's what changes the game.

Melody Wilding

That is so important. One one question I find really helpful when I know I get stuck in in these ruts between I'm taking pain and I am turning it into suffering or at least an extended struggle for myself. I ask myself, what am I making this mean about me?

unknown

Right.

Nir Eyal

Like how am I what am I making this mean? I love that.

Melody Wilding

Yeah. How am I personalizing a situation? I told this story on uh to my email list a while ago, but um, a while ago I was on a plane, and you know how this happens where you're trying to get onto Wi-Fi and you're trying every possible restart your computer, connect on your phone, nothing's working. And so I am sitting there thinking, Am I an idiot? I feel like everybody else is on Wi-Fi already. And why can't I figure this out? What am I doing wrong? I shouldn't even be in this class of the plane. I should be somewhere else. And then the the flight attendant is walking past. The gentleman in front of me grabs her and says, Excuse me, the Wi-Fi isn't working. And it was one of those moments where I was like, I was going to grab her and say, Excuse me, I'm having trouble getting the Wi-Fi. I can't get the Wi-Fi working for me. Which subtext is, there's something wrong with me. I was personalizing my belief was I was personalizing this situation that I was the only one. I couldn't figure it out. And it was just one of those very small moments that makes you just think, what am I, what am I doing? Oh my gosh, I see it so clearly there.

Nir Eyal

Yeah. So that's a beautiful example. What am I making this mean? I really, really like that. And that that bit of reflection, that's that's one of those cognitive mirrors that we just go through our day-to-day life without pausing for that exact reflection. You know, silly things that used to make me mad, you know, like a business deal didn't work out, or I I a couple of days ago I dropped a cup of coffee. Okay, it spilled out of my hands. That would have made me mad. Oh, I dropped this cup of coffee, or somebody cut me off in traffic, or somebody said something I didn't like, and that rubbed me the wrong way, and it would, it would irritate me, it would cause me suffering. Why? It's not a fact that it has to cause me suffering. These are just subjective interpretation, they're just beliefs. And when you realize that and you can unlock that power, it's it's life-changing. I'll give you a great example. There was a study done back in the 1950s. It's a little bit of a morbid study, but this is what happened. You can't do this anymore. But there was a study where a biologist by the name of Kurt Richter had a very simple question. He's a biologist. He wanted to know how long a wild rat could swim. Pretty simple question. Takes a wild rat, puts it in a cylinder of water, stands there with a timer, and measures how long it takes for a rat to give up and to stop swimming. Turns out 15 minutes. That's his answer. 15 minutes. Now he wants to see can he make the rat more persistent? Can he increase the amount of time they swim for? So he takes a new rat, puts it in the same cylinder of water. This time, at the 15-minute mark, when he sees the rat is starting to struggle and give up, he reaches in, pulls out the rat, dries it off, lets it catch its breath, and then plunk, back in the water it goes. Now he does this a few times. He conditions the rat to now believe that if he keeps swimming, salvation might be possible. So how much longer does the rat swim for? Right? You've read the book, so you know already. But for the people listening, when I ask folks, what do you think? How much more persistent did the rat become after it was conditioned to expect that if it stayed motivated, if it kept swimming, that salvation might come? People say twice as long. Okay, 100% improvement in persistence, 30 minutes of swimming. Then some people say, no, no, no, no, no, probably four times as long. I bet the rat could swim for 16 minutes. And if you take a step back, that's that's crazy. Like, imagine if I could make you four times more persistent. You could uh run four times further, you could make four times the phone calls before you, you know, the sales calls before you gave up. You could be four times more patient. If I could increase your persistence four times longer, yeah, I mean, you that would be game-changing, right? But the rats didn't swim four times longer. The rats swam not for 60 minutes, they swam for 60 hours. 60 hours of non-stop swimming. Now, what changed? Their bodies hadn't changed, they hadn't suddenly become Michael Phelps rats, right? They there nothing physically had changed in the rats, same rats, same environment, right? The same cylinders, nothing had changed in their outside environment. The only variable left, we can't ask the rats, obviously, but the only variable left is that something switched in their minds. That the 60 hours was always within them. They always had the power to swim for 60 hours, but they gave up at 15 minutes. And this is what we do every single day. We believe I'm at my limit. That's it. I've had enough, can't anymore. And we're not even close. Not even close. We've all got that 60 hours within us. We just keep quitting at those 15 minutes because our beliefs don't let us see what we're capable of doing.

Melody Wilding

There is a, I think, related concept to this that you talk about in the book that I have turned over in my head so many times because it's it's counterintuitive. It's so fascinating, which is you say, as our problems decrease, we expand what we consider a problem.

Nir Eyal

Yeah. Prevalence inflation.

Melody Wilding

Yeah. Can you talk about how that may play out for the person who's listening? How might they see that in their work or career? Because to me, that was a huge light bulb that I know I am guilty of. So I would love to hear you on the melody.

Nir Eyal

Yeah, you're part of a very illustrious club. We all do this. I'll tell you a study that that uh illuminates this. So they did a study at Dartmouth where they took a group of women and they said, Hey, you're gonna be part of this study. We're trying to figure out how people treat those with a facial disfigurement. So they had a Hollywood artist, uh makeup artist, come and put like a large scar on their cheek of these women, okay, large visible scar. And they said, Okay, we're gonna send you into this room with a stranger, and we want you to have a conversation and simply note for us how you're treated. Okay, how do people treat you when you have this large scar on your face? Now, they made it look super real so that the other person wouldn't know it's fake. And they showed the women who had the scar what it looked like. Now, right before they go into this room to have a conversation with a stranger and report back on how they were treated, the makeup artist says, Wait, wait, wait, one quick second, can you sit down for a minute? Let me just do a quick touch-up. And unbeknownst to the person, the woman who had the scar, they actually removed the scar entirely. They completely removed it, but they didn't let the women know, they didn't see in the mirror that the scar was gone. They thought the scar was still there. So they go into this room, they had this conversation, thinking that they had a scar that wasn't even there. Now, what's so amazing about this study is that these women who participated in the study who thought they had the scar came back and said how they were stared at, how they were treated poorly, how some people looked disgusted even having a conversation with them just because they had a scar. A scar that wasn't there. So, how many times have we walked into a business meeting, a sales conversation, uh talk about executive presence wearing a scar that's invisible, that only we see. We become super judgmental of ourselves, making a problem that doesn't even exist. I'm not good enough, I'm not ready, imposter syndrome, blah, blah, blah, all these limiting beliefs that we think we are stricken with that in fact nobody else can see. It's just in our heads. And so we limit ourselves, we limit what we're capable of doing and becoming for problems that don't even exist.

Melody Wilding

So uh so guilty of that, right? And research is me, search.

Nir Eyal

I wrote this book for me more than anybody else. Let me tell you.

Melody Wilding

Oh, yeah. I I feel that we've we we teach what we most need to learn in many ways.

Nir Eyal

That's right. And and look, I'll tell you what, you know, I with all my books, I write my books not because I know the answer, I write books because I want to know the answer. That's why it takes me so long to write these books. I go to first principles, I start with the basic research, and I build myself up back from that, trying to solve my own issues. And I oftentimes have to reread this stuff because it's very easy to discount how are how desperately your brain wants to pull you back into passivity. Because remember, your brain's primary job is not to make sure you're happy, it's not to help you flourish, it's not to help you meet your full potential. Your brain doesn't care about any of that stuff. Your brain's primary job is to keep you alive. And so the safest bet to keep you alive is to do and believe exactly what kept you alive before. Probabilistically, if it worked before, it's gonna work again. You know, thinking different and doing different, that's risky. Something bad might happen. And so your brain hates changing its mind. I'll say it again, it's so true. Your brain hates changing its mind, which means we need to consciously fight against that pullback to passivity. You know, a few years ago, there was this landmark research that everybody in the psychology, organizational behavior community believed, which was called learned helplessness. You probably heard it talked about a hundred times. Learned helplessness, that that you are taught over time if something doesn't work, that you're helpless and you just give up, right? And everybody believed this. Martin Seligman, one of the authors of this study, became the president of the American Psychological Association. This was gospel. To their credit, Seligman and Meyer, this original researchers of this learned helplessness study, they're amazing scientists, and they actually revisited the data and they did something that very few scientists do. They actually refuted their own results. And it turns out that not only was learned helplessness wrong, their conclusion after re-looking at the data was that it's exactly the opposite of what we all believed. We do not learn helplessness, we are born helpless. That a baby, when a baby comes into the world, they are helpless. They require help from their caregivers. And the same with all of us. We are constantly being pulled back to passivity, to helplessness. What we have to learn is hope. Hope is what must be taught. That's what we're actually fighting against is that helplessness that is our default state. And so we it's not good enough to just know, okay, I've I know everything I'm done, right? I'll read this book once. I constantly have to remind myself of this research so that I myself will be able to overcome my limiting beliefs.

Melody Wilding

One area connected to this last topic I want to touch on with you as a counter to everything we have been talking about, and that goes right along with learned hope, fullness, is engineering your own luck. That's something you talk about. How do you engineer your own luck? Especially again for the people who are listening to this, who are thinking about how they show up in their communication, in their meetings, with their leadership. What can someone do to start engineering more luck into how they're showing up at work day to day? What does that mean and look like?

Nir Eyal

Sure. So the studies find that actually the most successful salespeople out there, they enjoy what's called provoked luck, meaning they just think to them it just looks like they got lucky. But in fact, when they went back and analyzed, well, how did that lead come about? It wasn't chance. Luck is not chance. Luck can be engineered. And there's some very simple practices we all can do. One of them is showing gratitude. So Tina Sealy talks about this. She is, she's at Stanford uh researcher there, and she is known throughout Silicon Valley as being the goddess of gratefulness. Yeah, she just she sends gratitude notes to anybody and everybody. Whenever she never, and it's I think it's a wonderful rule that we can all adopt. When someone does something nice, even if it's saying good morning, a simple gesture or just something that's worthy of praise, never hold back on praise. For some reason it feels uncomfortable. We don't want to praise people. It might be, it feels weird. Don't hold back, showing gratitude. And so she has this habit of sending people thank you notes, handwritten thank you notes. And so, what a great example of provoked luck. If somebody's sitting at their desk and there's some kind of opportunity that comes to their mind or is a passing thought, and there's your handwritten thank you note on their desk, you're gonna be first to mind, right? So that practice of showing gratitude is definitely one way you can engineer luck. Another big one is thinking of yourself as lucky. And here's the study that that proved this. I shouldn't say proved, that showed this. We we collect evidence. We never have definitive proof. I hate when people say science proves that science never proves anything. We just have more evidence. So here's one bit of evidence. So there was a study that found that when two groups of people, one group were people who believed they were lucky, one group of people believed they were unlucky. Now it wasn't a fact. Okay, the scientists didn't go around and say, oh, let's let's see who is actually lucky or unlucky. They just asked people, do you think you're a lucky person or an unlucky person? Okay, two groups. They gave them the same exact task. The task was look through this newspaper that they have given them and simply count how many images you see. Okay, how many photographs, how many images in this newspaper? Just count them. One, two, three, four, five. The group that believed they were unlucky took on average two and a half minutes. The group that believed they were lucky took 11 seconds. Why the difference? Because on page two of this newspaper, one of those images in big bold letters said, There are 43 images in this newspaper. Collect your reward. The lucky people flipped to page two, saw the image, read it, got f got up from their chairs, collected their reward, and they were out the door in 11 seconds. The unlucky people, even though they had correctly counted the number of images, they correctly put down 43 images. So they saw the message that said how many images there are in the newspaper, it didn't pass through conscious attention. It was all signal and no interpretation. They never made sense of it, even though they had counted it. So that's a great example of how believing you are a lucky person generates more luck in your life. You see things, you literally see things with your eyeballs that other people don't see. By the way, this is what makes great entrepreneurs. If you read Walter Isaacson's uh biography of Steve Jobs, he talks about how Jobs had a reality distortion field. And this is what we see among great entrepreneurs. They see hundred dollar bills all over the place that the rest of us are blind to. They have what's called entrepreneurial alertness. They can see opportunities based on their beliefs that the rest of us can't ever see.

Melody Wilding

That's uh now I'm like, I have entrepreneurial alertness. I feel like you've just you've shifted a belief for me, which is fantastic. And to that end, before I ask where people can find you, if you could impart or install one belief in every person who is listening right now that could dramatically change their career or their work life, what would it be?

Nir Eyal

Just one. Can I have two?

Melody Wilding

You can have two. Yeah, yeah.

Nir Eyal

Okay. Number one, you don't see reality clearly. We need that intellectual humility to understand that none of us sees reality clearly. We see reality through a tiny pinhole of attention that we call reality, but it's just a simulation happening in your brain because your brain just can't absorb all that information. It has to see reality filtered from its belief. So, number one, you do not see reality clearly. And number two, you are capable of far more than you can imagine.

Melody Wilding

Amazing. Near, thank you so much. Where is the best place to send people?

Nir Eyal

Sure. So my website is nearandfar.com, and we actually have a free five-minute belief change guide, totally free. It's yours for the taking. We just couldn't fit it in the final edition of the book, so it's all yours. And that's at my website, Near and Far Near. Spelt like my first name, n-irandfar.com. And the book is called Beyond Belief.

Melody Wilding

Amazing. Thank you again.

Nir Eyal

My pleasure. Thank you, Melody.

Melody Wilding

Thanks for tuning in to today's episode of Psychology at Work. If you enjoyed the show, I'd be so grateful if you could take just a minute to rate and review wherever you are listening. It's how we reach more professionals just like you. And if you'd like to see even more content on how to feel more self assured, grounded, and in control of your emotions and reactions at work, follow me on LinkedIn or head to the links in the show notes.