Speaker 1When people say authenticity, we should note that what we call, most people call authenticity is a costume of childhood beliefs. Like my authentic self and how I act is typically what I was in childhood. How I deal with conflict, how I make friends, how I stay safe, all these little patterns that I learned when I was eight or nine. I'm still repeating a lot of that stuff. So when we say authenticity, it's always important to think that it's authenticity plus removal of ego and a willingness to receive social injury. And that's the best way that I've ever been able to describe that to somebody. Like if I'm being authentic in a conversation, then I'm willing to receive a social injury for it.
Speaker 2Cody Sanchez said something to me, which has stayed with me. She said, again, I'm I won't be friends with anyone in private that won't say something in public that will cost them something. And going to your point about social injury, I think what Cody's actually saying is like, that's how I know that they're authentic, is they're willing to risk something for something they believe. I also think this is how you know a brand's authentic. Like, are they willing to cause social injury in the near term for something they believe in the long term?
Speaker 1You know? Yeah. And a lot of what a lot of the recent brand debacles that we've had is they thought they were doing something to avoid social injury that caused a massive social injury.
Speaker 2Because people said you're not being authentic to your audience. Yeah. Yeah. When they tried to do like get into identity politics and stuff like that. Yeah. Okay. Like, like extreme virtue signaling and stuff like that. Yeah. Which backfires.
Speaker 1Can we go into this childhood development thing really quick? I think it's super important for people to know. And I'm a behavior profiler. And if anybody listening didn't know that. And one of the things that I teach everybody is this thing called the childhood development triangle. So it's just three sides of this triangle. So when you're growing up, what did that child have to do most of the time to earn and keep friends? So friends is one. And then to feel safe. What did the kid have to do to feel safe? For some kids, safety was like, I don't know, somebody gives me a hug at the end of the day. For some kids, it was like, am I going to eat today? For some kids, it's like cracking jokes. Yeah. And I'm going to crack jokes and keep friends. I'm going to feel safe by becoming really loud and dominating the room. I'm going to become safe by getting really small and shrinking so nobody notices me. Or I'm going to become safe by being hyper vigilant because I don't know if dad drank before he got home or if he's going to start drinking when he got home. So I'm going to feel safe by becoming really loud and dominating the room. So it's like, what did that child, what are the scripts that that child needed to run on autopilot to feel safe, to make friends, and then to get rewards? And that would be the third side. And the rewards for some kids might just be like appreciation. And it's typically just appreciation, affection, love. And that tends to get written in childhood. And the kid who writes all these permanent scripts, they put them in a backpack and carry them all the way into adulthood. Yeah. And 90% of us are walking around with this exact triangle governing our life. And if you look around at people at work, you see this woman who every time there's a meeting, she wants to speak up a lot, but then she shuts her mouth and her body shuts down and all that kind of stuff. You're seeing an eight-year-old who got yelled at at a family dinner table. That's all. But you're just seeing it in a grown-up body.
Speaker 2I have two examples that are super front of mind that completely align with what I'm saying. I have two examples that are super front of mind that completely align with what you've just said. I have two colleagues that I work with and I got six months into working with one of them. And I could always tell that there was something not quite right because whenever I was in the room, they would stare at me a lot and they would be a little bit more on the pessimistic side than I'm used to. And one day at dinner, I was talking to them about their childhood and they offered up that their dad was, his mood could change rapidly and he was always pointing out why something would never work. And I was like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't and why and he was an extreme pessimist and suddenly this person who is in my life suddenly made sense i completely understand it because you grew up in that environment where to be safe um you agree with it had to pay attention to to the authority figure and then yeah you had to also you learned maybe that you know pessimism was a way to safety yeah safety and then there's another colleague who's actually in the room over there and i'll ask her before we publish this if i can say this publicly but similar thing she expressed to me that she had a dad that was his mood would change rapidly and i said to her one day i said um i call her sarah i said sarah you're always staring at me whenever i look at you you're already looking at me and it's like you're like over analyzing and overthinking and she explained to me the same thing she said when i grew up my dad's mood would just change like this so every time i'm preempting i'm like a radical preemptor i'm thinking 20 steps ahead of like what might go wrong or you know which makes her exceptional at her job but i would you know one might assume that that comes at some kind of cost yeah so safety
Speaker 1yeah very true very true and the the way that i explain this if somebody wants to like it's not where you can kind of go back and like sit there for five minutes put it on a post-it note and then figure your whole life out i wish i had a cool a trick to do that but the way that like i want people to think about this is going back to your childhood a lot of those things these are just contracts that were written in a child's voice and when you start hearing these patterns repeating in your head force yourself to hear the voice of a kid that's all it is it's just a kid who made these choices it's not an adult so we're typically three different people all of us we have a work self like a professional kind of self we have a home self and we have a self with friends and what is that as a kid that's classroom playground home so i'll typically take people through this process of where were you around authority figures which is like classroom or home what were you around when you're all your friends were around you got made fun of or you had to become really small and that that goes on the friends side of the triangle and that that talks about how the social patterns that are going to show up for me and somebody says well i keep attracting these negative people into my life why do i do that and that that goes to these patterns because if i do this i know this is going to happen i know that's going to happen it's just completing a story archetype so that's the childhood development triangle and it is really powerful to start understanding our own patterns and i'm not saying that you can go out there and there's like here's six steps that are going to change your whole freaking life if you if you do these six things the awareness is what you want you want massive like self-knowledge and self-awareness with the side agreement of i am not special and i'm completely okay if i'm never understood because most of what happens uh when we get into arguments with our spouse we get into these bitchy arguments with people at work it's our argument to be understood more than it is for us to come to a solution i need you to understand me so getting okay with the idea that you might not never ever be understood is like step number one number two i am not special and that that helps us to open the door to start coming into a lot of these things but if you if you're a leader at work you can start seeing these patterns in your employees and you can be like i see an eight-year-old there and if you get to a point where you're seeing some of these a behavior that might have pissed you off and somebody that works for you and you're like wait a second now i can see exactly what's going on because this this and this probably happened you don't need to make some prediction or fortune telling thing about their childhood but you're starting to see these patterns and you know now how your team's going to respond in conflict and if the if it's a conflict and it's social you're seeing all their friends patterns if it's a conflict and somebody might be losing their job you're going to see their safety patterns come out and you'll see your own
Speaker 2so do you think i should go to the key people in my life maybe my team and ask them these questions about around how did you make friends is that the question what did you do to make and keep friends what did you do to make and keep friends and what was the safety
Speaker 1question again like what what did you need to do or avoid to feel safe and the rewards one what did you feel and this one's always you want to put the word feel in there what did you feel like you had to do to earn rewards and what were rewards to you okay it was appreciation or somebody that's like hyper significance driven like i've got to have the rolex i've got to have the ferraris and all this kind of stuff they never got rewards because their parents ignored them unless they brought home a certificate they're teaching them how to do it they're teaching them how to do it so it's not like they're like oh i can't do it i can't do it so it's not like i can't do it so it's not like i can't do it so it's not like i can't do it they only got acknowledged when they were socially significant and am i
Speaker 2right in thinking here that these are fundamentally interlinked in many ways because when you're talking about safety i was running through my head the things that made me feel safe and they were rewards that i could tell my friends about yeah so i like i touched all three of them and part in part because we you know i was thinking i was very different to my society i was very different to my society i was social group when i was younger we were the black family there wasn't another black family that i knew of um Um, other than maybe one other kid, I think in the area in Plymouth in 1994 or five. Um, so some of the material things I wanted, like the shoes that everyone had made me feel safe because they made me fit in and that, you know, and that got me friends race. I thought it did. So like, for me, it really was like an interconnected triangle. Yeah. That's just one of many examples that I could think of.
Speaker 1It does tend to do that. And I will typically wait for somebody to figure that out. And as they're filling it out, they're, they're kind of like, Oh, I did this because of this to get to this. And it, you'll see a little cycle start happening. Uh, but it's great for self-knowledge, but if you're a behavior profile, that's what's going to run people. You're going to know how they're going to respond to conflict. You're going to know what they're going to avoid. You're going to like, if you're putting teams together, I know what people I want to have working with each other. And it doesn't have to be some complex nine hour thing. Like you can see this stuff in everyday life.
Speaker 2And you're not saying that I need to. I don't want to radically change. No. But what if one part of this triangle or one behavior I've learned for safety or for rewards or for friends is making my life worse? Yeah. You know what? It could be ruining my life. Like it could be the thing standing in the way of me having a romantic relationship or getting promotion or building a business. It's like getting in the way now. Yeah. What do I do chase?
Speaker 1So you, you've identified the pattern. Let's assume that you've, you've got it. You're like, Oh, I've got this shit. That's, that's happening on repeat. The part two of this is I need to focus on that being a kid that belongs to a child. And I need to write down like this. Here's how that child wrote the contract, made the promise to themselves, developed the contract. And then even if you make it up, like when I'm going to write down a little thing, when did this kid bring it into adulthood? I need to stay small in order to stay safe. Let's say it's one of those things. And then you just start. You're telling yourself that is a child's voice. That's a child's voice to you. The voice is not going to go away. That's the sad part. That's like me. You trying to not complete the sentence. Mary had a little in your head. You can't get rid of it. No matter how hard you try to delete that it's repeated over years and years, just like one of these things that, that what truly changes for you is hearing a child, hearing a misguided child who developed a coping mechanism. For the world, not knowing that they were like, they just assumed I'm going to have this forever. I'm going to need this as an adult. I'm going to bring this into my adult life. Part two of this is you make a, like a wallpaper or something for your desktop. And we talked about being negatively motivated or away from negative things. You make a, like a motivational wallpaper that has your big limiting belief on it. And then take it to an extreme at a client that had this. If I say small, I'm going to be safe. And he was in a business, like he owned a business, but he wouldn't go get these big clients and he wouldn't, he wouldn't go do this. And the guy's got three kids. And I said, I want you to make a desktop wallpaper. This is my kids don't deserve for me to be successful. And I want you to look at it every single day when you turn your computer on, because that's exactly what your belief is saying. Because if your kids truly deserved it, it would override the belief. So you just need to write the belief in plain English and what it's truly, truly costing you in your life is my kids don't deserve me to be successful. My kids don't deserve money. And that's what it comes down to. And every day you look at it, you're, you have a feeling of disgust and there's a hyper awareness of that thing running in your head. You're going to be more prone to hear it when it does come up. And you're also training yourself to hear it as a child's voice, which means you're going to start hearing fiction. You're still hearing the same sentence, but you're hearing a fictional story.
Speaker 2There's two parts. I love this. And there's two parts to it that I think I wanted to talk about. The first is in doing so in waking up in the morning and seeing my wallpaper that says like, my kids don't deserve a great life or whatever. Of course, it's going to motivate me to take action, which is then going to start to build new evidence. Once I take action, once I win that big client and I realized that everything's fine, which is going to change my life. And then the second point I wanted to point out is like, people listen to podcasts like this and they write this stuff down and then they have relapsed. And things don't change fast enough. And I think that can sometimes make them feel hopeless or inadequate because they heard it on the diary of a seer or whatever. And then they did it for a bit and they struggled and it didn't quite work out. And then they went back to the old behavior. And I think in part this happens because we live under the presumption that this stuff is easy and it's fast. And that at some point in the future, I can fix my trauma. Like, I think one of the best realizations I ever had was realizing that the bullshit that I've carried with me in that backpack since I was a kid. That the stuff about what will make me safe or what will reward me or how I'll make friends or who I am or whatever, my survival mechanisms, they will be with me forever. And actually, instead of trying to delete them, like throw them out the backpack, what I was able to do is like turn down their ability to make the decision.
Speaker 1That's it. That's it. You've totally got it. And I would say this for anybody out there that you're trying to go through this and you're having a hard time. I get it. It's totally tough. The number one way that we influence another human being. Let me just kind of metaphor this for one second. When you watch a hypnotist and hypnosis is fun. Anybody can learn to do it. It's a pretty easy thing. So it looks very dramatic. But one of the things you'll see me do at the beginning of that is like, go ahead and give me your hand and I'll hold their hand for a second, like put both hands out like this and then flip them over. That's great. Now, just to test your eyes really quick, look all the way up and look all the way down. Look all the way left, look all the way right. All right. Then spread your feet a little further apart, a little closer together. Actually, no face this way. And I want to make him do like 50 things. None of the things that I just did with them are meaningful. None of them. Everything was micro compliance. So this is how social media starts roping you in. This is how politics starts roping you in. This is how cult leaders will recruit you into a cult. Micro compliance. And you don't realize that you're going through this massive amount of compliance. So like you go through a doctor's physical and they go through like this 90 point checklist. They've made you do 50 things and then they recommend a weird drug or they recommend you get on some other drug. Take some time to think about it because our brain is hardwired for these micro compliances. So I say this to say that if you're going through any of these things, you're trying to change your beliefs or you're trying to change something in your body. Use what works for brainwashing and figure out a way that you can get micro compliance with your own goals on a very regular basis, small little wins. So your brain has that just like hypnosis, just like cult recruiting, just like brainwashing, small little things at the very beginning. So everything in influence should be looked at as a wedge, everything.
Speaker 2It reminds me of that famous study they did where they got people to give electric shocks to other people, the Milgram obedience experiment. And they managed to get a member of the public to give another member of the public lethal electric shocks just through sort of micro compliance, but also through authority because the experimenters were like wearing white jackets, white overalls, et cetera.
Speaker 1And here's the second thing in that experiment that's going to perfectly tie back to this. So this experiment that you're talking about happened at Yale University. It was 1962. I mean, there's tons of data on it, but essentially strangers would shock another person seemingly or what they thought was to death just because some dude in a lab coat told them to. But what they didn't account for, and even Dr. Milgram's book was called Obedience to Authority. They thought it was all about the authority, the lab coat, the guy's tall. It's a professional setting. But really think about if you go back to our ancestors, like the most important resource to your ancestors was focus. There's nothing more important than focus. And the number one way to generate focus, because if I don't have your focus, I can't command authority, right? So focus is always first. My focus, authority, tribe, and emotion. Those are the four things that govern a mammal, all mammals, dolphins, doesn't matter. So I have to have focus before authority, and they didn't talk about that. And the way to get focus is through novelty. Novelty meaning? Something unexpected. Something unexpected is occurring. So like if you walk past the same bush every day 10,000 years ago, and your job is to carry fish from the river. And suddenly you walk past that bush, and you hear a big ass stick snap. All of your focus, all of it is on that stick. It's not on your kids. It's not on your health. It's not on anything that's going on. It's to this new unexpected piece of information. That hijacks our brain. Anything novel. Hijacks our brain. So if you see like, and it follows that pathway. Focus, then authority, and then tribe. What's everybody else doing? And then emotion. Then how do I feel about it? So it's, and what happens is, we are hardwired to respond to these things. You cannot decide not to respond to novelty. Your head turns to loud sounds. All this stuff happens. So the way that, if you're trying to do this, like brainwash yourself. If you're trying to do this, you're trying to do this. You're trying to do this, you're trying to do this. And if you're trying to do this, you're trying to do this. walls in your office move your furniture around buy a new car if you if you can i want you to like just imagine is how would i influence my dog in this situation i would need imagery i would need something to shift if i move the kitchen table to the side and move all the furniture when my dog comes out of the bedroom he's gonna know something's different
Speaker 2yeah i think this is one of the great secrets of good marketing is that it beats your brain's wallpaper filter and um i read a little bit about this in my last book about this idea of beating the wallpaper filter i think we talked a little bit about it last time but i talked about a study where they got a rat and put it in a maze with chocolate at the other end of the maze and they looked at the rat's brain as it went through the maze the first time and they saw that the rat's brain was like exploded with activity it's smelling the walls it's trying to figure it out like and then they put the rat in the maze the second time and there's like almost no brain activity because it's on autopilot it knows the maze so it doesn't need to use any of its cognitive resources its cognitive resources can be allocated to new surprising things the maze is no longer surprising whizzes through the maze to the chocolate and even like as you think about how you got out of your bed this morning and got down to the kitchen you didn't have to think so you paid no attention yeah um but you would have paid attention if you walked down there and you're like sofa wasn't there um and how does that then apply to marketing so like how do you surprise people is like a central question of anyone who's trying to build a personal brand start a podcast or do marketing um but i guess also to to persuade people it's one of the things i think about a lot when i talk on stage yeah is i know i'm competing with your mobile phone your twitter feed or your tiktok so i have to do something almost like every 10 seconds to like catch you off guard and mr beast i guess is the great master of this and it's probably why he's got half a billion youtube followers because the minute that video starts
Speaker 1we're hooked in
Speaker 2you're hooked but
Speaker 1this i mean that's the power of novelty i would challenge anybody to take this challenge if you're scrolling through short form content watch for something that like jerks your attention like some kind of weird novelty thing that happens and that video is probably short 20 maybe 40 second video that that captures your focus through novelty the next video watch for an authority figure a famous youtuber a celebrity a politician a pop singer who thinks that they know politics all that kind of stuff watch for an authority figure next watch for a tribe signal so a tribe signal is going to be here's how many people agree with this here's lots of people doing one thing these tickets are selling out here's the taylor swift concert here's everyone cheering at the concert here's how you're supposed to behave is basically what that means in the tribe section you're supposed to do what these people are doing and then watch for the emotion so watch for this pattern it'll be a focus generating novelty then it'll be authority then you'll see tribe then you'll see an emotional video and guess what happens after the emotional video well add what you just
Speaker 2listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode if you want to listen to that full episode i've linked it down below check the description thank you
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