How Your Biases Are Used Against You & How Top Performers Think -SYSK Choice

why it matters, then humans have biases, but maybe you think you're smart, you're objective,

you don't have biases. "You might think so, and many of younessless might think, why do these biases apply to me? I'm a sensible, rational person. Unfortunately, scientific evidence finds it's the opposite, that more knowledgeable and more sophisticated people are more susceptible to these biases."

Also, why you just might want to skip the toothpicks at the next party, and how developing mental toughness improves performance at just about anything. "I think when you look at the best performers who are sustaining excellence over time, their ability is more along the lines of how they leverage in their software.

Those mental techniques that makes the hardware work."

“"All this today, on something you should know."”

Start to learn how to tune in on an "EuroPromonat" of Shopify.de/recorder. "Hi there, welcome to something you should know, and today we're going to start with some very practical advice for a situation I know you've probably been in, and that is, you walk into a room, maybe it's a restaurant, or it's a meeting, or something, and there's a table and chairs, and you wonder, "Where should I sit, where's the best place to sit?"

Well, here is a strategy for choosing the best seat in a group situation. At a circular table that has four seats around it, it doesn't really matter where you sit, any seat will do you can't go wrong. At a four person square table, sit opposite your least favorite person, because conversations tend to work diagonally at that kind of table.

In a six-seated situation, choose the middle of one side. It may be harder to get in and out, but you will have more conversational options that way.

“For tables of eight or more, timings everything.”

If you arrive first, you'll be expected to file to the end, maybe not so good.

If you're last, you'll probably get the least desirable seat that nobody wants to sit in, also not good. So the best strategy is to just stand back and wait for the right moment to make your move and grab a seat. And that is something you should know.

While you might think that you are or can be objective about a topic, people have biases. They have beliefs that color their ability to be objective. A lot of the time, it's fine, it doesn't matter, small stakes. But other times, for big things, it can matter, it does matter. And understanding these biases that are ingrained in all of us can be very illuminating.

Here to explain them is Alex Edmunds.

“He is a professor of finance at London Business School.”

He has a TED Talk called What to Trust in a Post-Truth World that's been viewed over two million times. And he is author of a book called May Contain lies, how stories, statistics, and studies export our biases and what we can do about it. Hi, Alex.

Welcome to something you should know. Thanks, Mike. It's great to be here. So in broad strokes here, let's start with your explanation of these biases that tend to steer our thinking.

Certainly. So there's two biases that cause us to make mistakes when we're interpreting information data and evidence. So one of them is confirmation bias. So this is the idea that we have a pre-existing view.

And if there's evidence that supports that view, we will latch onto it. We will accept it, uncritically, even if the evidence is flimsy. And then in contrast, if there is some evidence that contradicts our view, we will close our ears to it. We might not even read it, or we might read it, but with the view to try to tear it apart.

So this means we will only latch onto things that we like, and this is things that we don't like. Now a confirmation bias that does apply to questions where we have a pre-existing view. So that might be climate change or immigration or gun control. But what about the set of issues for which there is no pre-existing view?

So this is the idea that we view something as being always good or always bad.

There is no nuance. So let's give an example.

“So in the sphere of diet, we often think that protein is good.”

We learn in school, this builds muscles and repairs you. We also think that fat is bad. It's called that way because it makes you fat. But what about carbohydrate? We might not have a pre-existing view on that.

But Robert Atkins, he went viral because of his Atkins diet, which gave the black and white conclusions that more carbs are always bad. He had a diet saying, "Let's avoid all carbs." Not just simple carbs, and saying that complex carbs are fine. He said avoid all carbs, and that played into black and white thinking that latched on it

went viral because it was so simple. But notice that if he had had completely the opposite conclusion, if he had said have a diet to eat as many carbs as possible, he might have equally gone viral.

Because that also plays into black and white thinking, we think something is either always

“good or always bad, we're not predisposed to a particular direction.”

Okay, so I get what you say about having these biases, but doesn't a little knowledge fix that? If I now know, if I know the truth about carbohydrates, and then I know the Atkins diet is probably not too healthy, case clothes. You might think so, and many of you on this list might think, "Why do these biases apply

to me? I'm a sensible, rational person, can't I use my knowledge to overcome these biases?" Right? Unfortunately, scientific evidence finds it's the opposite, that more knowledgeable and more sophisticated people are more susceptible to these biases.

And so why might that be? It's because of something known as motivated reasoning. So the smarter we are, we can come up with arguments to dismiss evidence that we don't like.

“And we can also come up with arguments to support evidence that we do like, even if that”

evidence happens to be flimsy. As an example, it may well be that there's a study which finds a correlation that we don't like. If we are a supporter of gun control, we might not like a paper, which finds that gun control is associated with higher crime.

But we might say, "Well, correlation does not imply causation, maybe there's other factors that play here, maybe crime would have been even higher, had there not been gun control."

But we turn off those same critical thinking faculties when we find something that we do

like, so we do have knowledge, but we apply it only selectively when it suits us. Two things can be true at the same time, so in some cases maybe gun control controls crime, and maybe in other cases gun control doesn't, I don't think you can make the blanket statement that gun control does or doesn't affect crime. You absolutely cannot, and this is the problem of black and white thinking.

So some of these issues may be nuanced. It might be that gun control works in certain situations, but it doesn't work in others. But if you were to give that message, you're much less likely to be tweeted in 280 characters and go viral. So something which has a simple message where we say X is true period, that is what typically

sells, so it could be something that carbs are always bad for your health, or waking up at 5 AM, or ways improves your productivity. If you give that simple message, that's going to be far more powerful than waking up at 5 AM, improves your productivity, so long as you're also eating healthily and exercising daily and able to get in bed before 10 PM.

So that more nuanced message is probably going to be more accurate, but that's not the message that we want to hear given our biases. Right. And it sounds like a miserable life, too. I don't want to go to bed, TED and get up in five, and just eat vegetables all day.

I mean, that would be difficult. So if you take people who have a bias and you explain it to them, and you say this is your bias, does it change them? Does no wing it change them or does it, do they say, yeah, I have a bias and too bad. It actually can.

So there are some nice studies which look at trying to overcome this situation. So not just studies highlighting the problem, but studies trying to solve this. And so there were two sets of techniques that they tried. So one set of techniques was just to say to people, be as unbiased as possible when evaluating the information.

And that just didn't work. But that would be like trying to tell a baseball player who's batting 200 tries to hit the ball more accurately. So they just don't have the ability to do that. That's just a limit to their physical ability.

But there was a second set of techniques which was to give people specific bias and counteracting

So one of them was, if you see a study who's finding things that you like, let's say it's going to control reduces crime, they told you to imagine the opposite. So imagine that the study instead found that gold, gun control increases crime. How would you try to attack that study? Well, you'd say, is it correlation or is it causation?

Now that you have found some ways to attack that study, then apply the same skepticism even if the study finds the results that you do want. But this idea of considering the opposite, how would you react? That is something which helps people to address their biases and these studies were

shown that that technique was in fact able to reduce biases even though the first one

just generally telling people to be unbiased was ineffective. I can imagine people listening to you going, yeah, but I don't read studies. It's not what I do for fun is sit around and read studies. You read studies, but the information I get doesn't come from a study, at least when I read it, I'm reading articles, I'm reading blogs or watching television or listening

to a podcast, I'm not analyzing studies.

“I think this is a great question that's a really important one.”

So somebody might look at me and say, well, I am an academic researcher. I spend my life evaluating academic papers. What relevance does this have to the person on the street who does not do this for your day job and hopefully you don't do this for fun, either? But what I'm trying to stress is that you receive the information from research in any

form. Whenever you pick up a magazine, let's say this is men's health, women's health or run as well, you're reading about research. You're reading is it true that drinking more water improves your athletic performance, should you be drinking caffeine before the workout, what is the best recovery shake?

And as research, if you read a blog saying waking up at 5am changed my life, is it that the act of waking up at 5am caused you to change your life or is it that somebody who chooses to wake up at 5am is probably doing lots of other things to get their act together. And it's those other things that are leading to the improvements and performance.

Before I had my first child, I went to some parenting courses and they said, "You need

to breastfeed. Breastfeeding is correlated with superior performance in terms of child IQ, child health, mother, postpartum depression."

“But was it that breast milk caused as these outcomes?”

Or is it that mothers with a more supportive home environment were able to breastfeed because of how challenging it is and that supportive home environment is what caused those outcomes? Because if so, the illness is done on me as a father to provide a more supportive home environment rather than telling my wife she needs to breastfeed all the time. So we get information in so many different contexts and we need to think about is this information

correlation or causation? Is this information a unique hand-picked case or is it generally true? Maybe there was one person who woke up at 5am and it did change the life and they will blog about it and tell people. If you were someone who woke up at 5am and it had no effect, you would keep that to yourself.

So what we might be seeing is a selected sample of isolated anecdotes and again this is a case in which we need to be discerning about the information that we see. But it seems to me, you're a research guy and academic guy, you look at these things in a much different way than most people. And the fact is that you can go on Google and pretty much find evidence to support whatever

you want either side of the breastfeeding issue or any other, I mean it just, so then what do you do? Yeah and this is a huge challenge in the information age. So you might think it's great now that information is so easy to get. When I was a kid, I had to trek down to the library and to look it up into the exact

paper. Nowadays, we have easy access to information and even academic research which used to be behind paywalls, this is now increasingly open access.

But this leads to challenges as well as opportunities is that you can always corral information

to support whatever you want to support. And this is a particularly a problem if you are biased, right? So if I wanted an excuse to drink a lot of red wine after dinner this evening, I would just Google why red wine improves your health and I'm sure I could come up with a lot of highly cited studies and highly educated studies to support this.

“So what this means is that what matters is not just whether there's a study.”

We often hear the phrase, "Research shows that ex."

But study shows nearly everything you want them to show.

“What matters is the quality of research and these issues we've discussed such as correlation”

versus causation, that is critical to finding out whether research is of sufficient quality

for you to change your decisions based on it or is this just conventional wisdom or to be unfair is this just an old white tale. We're talking about human biases and how the effect our thinking, my guest, is Alex Edmund. These author of a book called "May Contain lies," how stories, statistics and studies exploit our biases and what we can do about it.

Safe! Vizosteria! Holy dang it's a ruck! Yet's cost no doubt for being! So Alex, it seems to me that it's kind of human nature to want to believe whatever

you believe and have some evidence to believe and most things aren't life or death anyway

“and there's comfort in thinking that what I believe has got some sort of backup to it.”

And that's kind of how people operate. That is the kind of how most people operate and then what I'm trying to highlight is, well, how can you be different from most people? So sometimes it might not be life or death situations, but it's just affects our understanding of the world.

So you might think, oh, why years inflation higher in one country rather than another? What causes an unemployment, what causes economic success?

And I might not be essential banker with the ability to directly cause inflation or control

inflation, but I just want to understand the world better. And I think to have a more just certainly look at the data just helped me having a richer understanding. Even if there's no practical effect on decision-making is not my knowledge of the world just richer if it's a bit more informed. But also the number of decisions that we might take based on information is just much wider

than one might think if you thought of research as just scientific paper. So nearly every decision that you take, so after this recording, I'm going to work out. So what is the work that am I going to do? Is that high-intensive interval training? Is it low-intensity study state?

How is this matching with the other workouts I've done this week?

Am I going to have some pre-workout supplement? All of these decisions are based on evidence. And you might think, oh, this sounds like a bit like a professor who's trying to scientifically analyze every decision. Is this not analysis paralysis?

No, because this information might make my life easier rather than more complex. Because if I can achieve the same outcome with three workouts a week, which are based in the science as I can with six workouts a week, then I actually then have more time for myself. And what I'm trying to highlight in the book is the questions that we ask ourselves, they don't think take a lot of analysis to do.

Simple questions like if this was the opposite, how would I react? That will only take a moment's reflection, but in terms of our productivity and our effectiveness, they can be large effects in terms of the outcome. So here's an example of something that we just discussed on this podcast a few episodes ago.

It was, is going barefoot a good idea. And there is good evidence for both. And it's good evidence for both. And a lot of things have good evidence for both sides. And you could, and you just kind of have to pick one.

“If you want to go barefoot, there's the evidence.”

And it doesn't necessarily contradict the evidence on the other side, it's just different evidence. I think that's fair. And there could be good evidence for is, as long be better for you, was football better for you, or should you study English or math.

So what I would like to then look at is how tailored is the evidence for my particular situation. So if going barefoot is generally good, but the study's finding that going barefoot is bad, if you've got a history of ankle weakness, because that's when ankle strength is particularly important, because you're not wearing shoes that could be supportive, I might pay more attention to that.

And it might be that going barefoot is good if in conjunction with a lot of other things,

plyometric training, and so I want to look up beyond the headlines study. We like to believe the headlines going barefoot is good or it's bad, but it's often good or bad in conjunction with other types of behavior, and for certain types of people. And therefore that would allow me to focus on particular studies that matter for my particular situation with the other behaviors that I'm doing alongside gangbathic.

People seem to like whether they should or shouldn't.

People like recommendations, which are basically anecdotes.

I had a good experience with this doctor.

“I had a good experience with this company, and so you should too.”

And people find comfort in that, if you, and it's based on just one experience, but there seems to be something in human nature that that feels right. Yes, this is known as a bias called familiarity bias, where if something is familiar to you, if it's a recommendation given by one person who you're friends with, that might outweigh all of the other negative recommendations by lots of other people.

For example, after an earthquake, people are much more likely to buy earthquake insurance, even though scientifically, after an earthquake, the plate tectonics are now resolved, it's left likely that there will be an earthquake in the near future. So when something is particularly salient or familiar, this has an outside effect on our decisions. It may well be that a friend says, "Hey, I blessed that my child and my child is doing well."

“Well, it could be that your child would have done well otherwise.”

It could be that you were doing lots of other things to help your child, such as always being

present, like reading to your child and so on. But if it is a particular example that we want to be true, we will believe it, and we will isolate this particular case and generalize and extrapolate from it. Well, it's interesting because it's, everything you say makes perfect sense and yet it seems that we kind of fight it, that we are not fight it, but we do what we do because of the

biases we have and it makes people feel good, so there's not a lot of reason to not, and yet there is a lot of reason to not. Yes, so these biases that often really ingrained with us, they're quite difficult to find, so they're going back to confirmation bias, which we led this chat with. This is the idea that we don't like evidence that contradicts our viewpoint.

This is so deeply ingrained in us and this has been evidence in the following way. So if you take people, you give them a statement that you know they agree with and then you give them something that contradicts that statement and you see what happens to their brain by hooking them up to an MRI scanner. If you give a political statement, like Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, you give them contradictory evidence nothing when he happens, but if it is a political

statement, like immigration is good for society, you give them some contradictory evidence, then the part of the brain that lights up is the amygdala. That is the same part of the brain that lights up when the tiger attacks you, you go on the defensive, you respond to something that you don't like, like a tiger attack. So this is why it is difficult to overcome biases and therefore those who are able to do this, be this in investment decisions as they shareholder, be this in

company decisions as an executive, you are the people who are able to get out of sublimalones before the crisis, make different decisions and get ahead. So really no matter how objective you think you are, how able you are to critically evaluate something, we all have these

“biases. It's really, I think important for people to understand that and that you can't really”

escape it, but you can try to fight it. I've been speaking to Alex Edmunds, he's an economist, a professor of finance at London Business School, and he's author of a book called "May Contain Lies," how stories, statistics, and studies exploit our biases and what we can do about it.

He also has a TED Talk that's been viewed over 2 million times, called "What to Trust in a Post-Trust

World?" And there's a link to the TED Talk and a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Appreciate you coming on today. Thanks, Alex. Thanks Mike. Really enjoy the conversation. If Bravo drama pop culture chaos and honest takes our year-level language, y'all want all about Terry H podcast in your feed. Hosted by Roxanne and Chantel, this show breaks down real housewives reality TV, and the moments everyone's group chat is arguing about.

Roxanne's been spilling Bravo T since 2010, and yes, we've interviewed housewives royalty like Countess Luan and Teresa Judays. Smart recaps, insider energy, and zero fluff.

you episodes weekly. Hey, it's Hillary Frank from the Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast

about parenthood and reproductive health. We talk about things like sex ed, birth control, pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and of course, kids of all ages, but you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships, and, you know, periods, the longest shortest time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at Longest ShortestTime.com When I say the phrase "mental toughness," you probably think of

certain people in the military, like the Navy Seals, or maybe elite top athletes. People who have this ability to use their mind to ignore distractions and to stay focused even under the most stressful conditions, almost like a superpower. But it can't be a superpower, because superpowers aren't real, so what is mental toughness, and how can we all be more mentally tough? Here to reveal those secrets is Eric Potterat, who knows a thing or two about this.

Eric is a clinical and performance psychologist, a retired commander from the U.S. Navy after 20 years of service. During which time he helped create the mental toughness curriculum for the Navy Seals. Eric spent several years as the director of specialized performance for the Los Angeles Dodgers. He's worked with the U.S. Women's National Soccer

Team, the Miami Heat, and several other Olympic athletes, first responders, business leaders,

and NASA astronauts. He's the author of a book called "Learned Excellence," mental disciplines

“for leading and winning from the world's top performers. Hi, Eric, welcome to something you should”

know. Hey, Michael, good to be here. Thanks for having me. Sure. Well, when most people here at the term, mental toughness, they have a sense of what it means. But what does it mean to you? What what do you mean by mental toughness? Boy, great question. I look, there are a lot of definitions out there, and I tend to be a relatively simple guy. I think the easiest definition to wrap my head around is the ability to control the human stress response in multiple situations. So,

regardless of the discipline that you practice, whether it's military, first responder,

sport, business, I think it's really the ability to use certain tools and techniques to control that human stress response and be able to thrive and perform optimally in that discipline.

“Well, it sounds almost impossible. It's not. It's very difficult. It sounds, and when I think of”

people who are mentally tough, I think of them as that, that their mental toughness defines them, that that's who they are, not just what they do. I think we're a lot of people make a mistake, is they assume that these are end states like, you know, when you look at, pick your favorite performer, whether it's an athlete, military, and business man or woman, whatever it may be. And if you think of that person, you probably think of a few things they do well.

Their ability to focus, perform well under pressure, limit distractions, be resilient. And I think the difficulty with a lot of those terms is their accurate, but their end states. What very few people are telling us, or what are these individuals doing in order to execute that end state? I know they're focused. I know they're extremely disciplined. I know they're resilient,

“but this is why I think the better definition is really looking at the tools and techniques”

that they do to get to that end state. And are they focused, disciplined, and resilient all the time, or this is something they work themselves into when they need to? Ooh, look, you're talking to a guy who's extremely biased. I've spent a career in this field, and I think, so my two answers to this is, I think they can turn it off and on, but I think more importantly, this ability is learned. I don't think anyone's come out of the womb

with this ability to, you know, be mentally tough. I haven't seen any data to support that, whether it's on the neurosecological sides, psychological side, et cetera. So I think that these men and women have navigated through years of micro failures and years of coaching, good teachers, parenting, difficult things to kind of hone this ability to leverage these techniques and perform automatically. When I think of somebody mentally tough, for some reason, I think of somebody who's

physically tough, like military guys, and is that, is there a connection?

this is software versus hardware. I think, as you just stated, when you think of military, you think athlete, you think of, these are physical outliers. I'm telling you, I haven't been

someone who's worked 20 years in the military with incredible physical performers, and then I

spent, obviously, the second half of my career in professional sport. Again, outlier physical specimens, whether they're Olympians or professional, you know, pick your favorite sport. But at the world class level, everyone has the same hardware, yet everyone isn't performing

“under pressure very well all the time. So, you know, the best example I have is the Olympics, right?”

At the Olympics every year, every country sends their best men and women to perform, pick your favorite event. And everyone generally has the same physical abilities, right? And the difference between no metal and a metal is sometimes hundreds or thousands of a second. So, they're showing up with the same hardware, but this is why back to that metaphor of the computer. I think when you look at the best performers who are sustaining excellence over time, their ability is more along the lines

of how are they leveraging their software, those mental techniques that makes the hardware work. That's why I really like that metaphor a lot. I mean, you and I can have the best computers money can buy, but we're not going to leverage the power of that computer without the updated operating system and applications if it's a, you know, a smartphone. So, I think with these men, I'm sorry, I think with these men and women, they're physically performing well,

but it's the software that's making everything work. So, how do I leverage my software?

“Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think that, you know, that's what I've spent”

30 years looking at. I mean, literally 25,000 encounters with the best performers in the world. And after time, after about 10 to 12 years of working with these people, it became clear as day to me that generally the best performers are doing roughly the same things, plus or minus. So, we've been able to kind of consolidate what those are and they kind of fall under bins of, you know, adversity tolerance tactics and everything from goal setting, visualization,

self-talk, breathing, compartmentalization. So, there's a number of, I think, lessons and tools and tactics that we can reverse engineer to the general public, if you will. All right. Well, let's start reverse engineering and put some of these things into practice.

You know, I think first and foremost, I think one of the easiest things to do is to really talk about

mindset. I think that's when you look at the best performers on Earth, they are leveraging, catalyzing and optimizing a certain mindset for the role that they're playing. And I think my takeaway message to you would be, you know, just keep in mind that we all have different roles that we play in life. Myself, I'm a father, I'm a husband, I'm a performance psychologist, I'm a, you know, avid pickleball player, tennis player on the weekends and if I

executed the same mindset for every role that I play, research is pretty clear. I'm not going to do many of those roles very well. So, I think one of the ways to catalyze a certain mindset for a certain role that we see these top performers do is they have what we call pre-performance routines. So, I think that's one of the easiest ways to think about transitioning into a certain mindset to to a high performance role. So, how would that look? Yeah, the metaphor I really like is a

dimmer switch. So, the most popular pre-performance routines for humans to perform is probably

“music. Think about, you know, if you want to go perform something athletically or a very important”

business presentation to a client or to a boss or to a teammate, you know, think about maybe a song that might catalyze and get that juices and the focus, get those juices and the focus going. So, pre-performance routines can be workouts. They can be mantra as they can be an article of clothing that just starts to tell you, hey, I'm ready to perform. I think another technique that, you know, there's about eight to ten that we unpack that we've learned from the best performers, another one

that's extremely important and low hanging fruit as it or would be breathing. We know that when human beings get into high-pressure, high-performance situation, let's call that leverage. We know that when human beings are in the leverage or high-performance, high-pressure situations, the breathing rates change. They become very rapid and shallow. In fact, they range from about 16 to 22 breaths a minute. One of the ways to reverse engineer that we see the top

performers practicing is they get their breathing rates to about six breaths a minute.

So, an easy way to think about that is a four-second inhale, just a natural pause at the top of that

And that obviously is ten seconds. That's about six breaths a minute. So, that is a very quick

“way to physically and mentally be able to perform very, very well. Because it does what to you.”

Yeah, it actually reverses the human stress response. Back to your initial question of my definition of mental toughness is the ability to control the human stress response. When we're stressed or put another way, when we're not practicing mental toughness, there's something called vasoconstriction. We get muscles get tense. The veins and arteries kind of constrict. Blood pressure goes up, heart rate goes up. And those are the physical

symptoms, if you will. The mental effects are what we call executive functions. Our ability

to problem-solve the ability to think clearly on our feet. So, those really go by the

wayside under pressure. The fastest way to reverse that is this theory of force, force seconds in, four to six seconds out for, you know, roughly four minutes. It reverses that. And to put very candidly, what it's going to do is it's going to vascularize a certain area of the brain. It's going to get a lot more blood to the frontal lobes of the brain where you can execute better decision-making processes, as well as all the physical

“aspects that we've talked about as well. And that makes sense. I think people have a sense”

that breathing. What we hear it from, you know, in other areas of life, that breathing is really

important. It comes you down. It's part of meditation and all that. And what else? Because these

are great. I mean, I hadn't heard these talked about in this topic. So, maybe a few more please. You bet. So, obviously, pre-performance routines. How do you get ready, how you catalyze or, you know, construct that mindset and then breathing? I think next on that list would be, it sounds a little bit touchy-feely, but just hear me out here is really self-talk and thought management. We know that when the non-elead performers get into high-pressure situations,

again, pick your discipline. I'm agnostic to what that discipline is. That sometimes their self-talk starts to take over. I can't do this or I've made a mistake and therefore I start thinking about that mistake and it just literally derails everything. So, when you look at the best performers in the world, they are really much better at looking for evidence. They may make a mistake. They do make mistakes, but their ability to put that into a box compartmentalized that and not let that lead

to this, you know, domino effect of thinking that I'm more likely to make another or what these people thinking of me or they thinking I can't give this presentation for example. So, I think, you know, my long story short here is really look for evidence and think, you know, how to make sure that self-talk is evidence-based and more focused on the positive rather than the negative. I think, you know, these performers are definitely controlling those negative thoughts

and they're putting them by the way side more times than not. Well, when you say, we do a self-talk, a lot of it is not reality-based. We're like trying to imagine where we're trying to make ourselves better by saying how wonderful we are and how well we're going to do and it isn't reality-based. It's much more future-based and wishful thinking. Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that. I mean, there's great studies that really kind of talk about how future-oriented we all are.

“You know, I came across one that, you know, 60% of our thoughts are future-oriented and that's why”

people are successful. They're thinking about the things and the deadlines they have and their future-based. I get that. But I think a lot of the elite performers, they're really working much more in the present state. Meaning, you know, if I use a sporting example, let's say a wide receiver, you know, drops a very easy touchdown pass or a businessperson makes a hiccup in a presentation that, and they, they misstate something that they'd gone over repeatedly. It's really

important to be present and to really make sure you're looking for evidence. This doesn't mean, I'm a failure. This doesn't mean the client is going to, you know, say, hey, this person isn't qualified for whatever advice or whatever presentation they're given. So I think interestingly, when you look at the statistics at the world class level, the only way that individuals are more likely to make an additional mistake after they've made a mistake is if they focus on that mistake. So if you

think about it, it makes intuitive sense. Right? If I'm taking my mental energy and I just dropped that proverbial touchdown pass or I dropped that proverbial presentation to a client, I'm much more likely to fumble again if I'm focusing on that rather than kind of what my mission was and what I've prepared for prior to that event. So soft talk is really important.

about the ball you dropped? How do you not think about what you're thinking about? Yeah. So think about this as, again, I'm bringing up a lot of metaphors or a lot of examples today.

“I think about dominoes. The whole idea of, you know, if I lined up a hundred dominoes in front of”

you and me today and the first one falls, we know what's going to happen to the other 99.

The ability of controlling that self-talk is watching the first three or four dominoes fall and then grabbing that's fifth domino before it can affect this, you know, sixth or seventh. So that's metaphorically speaking, what I'm trying to state is that it's really important to put that mistake and here's another technique, by the way, we call it black boxing or the fancy psychological term is compartmentalization. When you make that proverbial mistake, put it into a box

and stay mission-minded. Meaning tell yourself, I need to put that away for a moment or an hour or two. I need to complete whatever the mission is, whether it's a game, whether it's, you know, combat,

whether it's a business presentation. And then at a future time, when the mission is done,

we can unpack that, unpack the proverbial box and take a look at what went wrong and try to learn from that. So what interesting statistics also, we know that most negative consequences to self-talk. So when I say negative consequence, most of the time when I'm anxious, when I'm irritated, when I'm bummed out, 94% of the time, that's due to what we call irrational thoughts. So this ties directly to self-talk. The elite performers don't have the 94% irrational talk, right? Those irrational

thoughts because they're looking for evidence. They know, hey, this is just one pass that I've dropped. That means I'm statistically going to catch, you know, the next 30 in a row or something. And is there a point where you find and working with people that there is a plateau? I mean, you can't continually get better because your head will explode something. Yeah, respectfully, I just don't buy that narrative. I do think, you know, my one of my favorite

quotes of all time is a Roger Federer quote. And he said, "Stay in the same is going backwards." And I do think when you look and obviously, how many weeks, number one or how many years, number one was this guy? We can name countless, you know, the Roger Federer's of the world in their disciplines. I do think that that's also something we see with the world's best performers,

“is they're constantly trying to incrementally improve. The mistake that I think a lot of people”

make, Mike, is that they try to do too much too soon. And that proverbial head will then explode, right? Rather than, okay, how can I continue to work incrementally out of my comfort zone and keep pushing what I believe the limits are? Because I actually think those limits are self-imposed. So, this isn't it true that life, I think everybody knows it's true that you only get better if you go beyond your comfort level. To play tennis, to get better at tennis, you got to play

people who are better than you, not worse than you. Yeah, 100% agree. And this is where I can certainly create some hate mail and some naysayers out there as well. And I have to say this very carefully, do I want people to fail? Of course not. None of us want to watch someone fail. But these micro failures or iterations are really important. The other quote I really like is, if you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough. You're not moving outside of that comfort zone.

But there's a very fine area there, right? If you think of the comfort zone as this circle in the middle and then there's this buffer zone where that growth happens. If you go too far out, then it's catastrophic failure, right? And embarrassment. And that's when people kind of pull back

into their shell. And like, see, I told you, so I'll never try that as opposed to being very

incremental and progressive about how you're trying to hone that craft, whatever it may be.

“I think when I, well, for me, when I think of somebody who's mentally tough,”

somehow in that mix of that definition is somebody who's not very emotional that they can keep emotions out of it, that, you know, they don't cry, you know, when they lose, they're tough, they're mentally tough. But can you turn it off and go have a good cry? Yeah, I think so the Navy says, as you know, I was 20 years in the military, 10 of those years, I was the head performance psychologist for the Navy SEALs. I retired as a commander. And one of the

terms that the SEALs used, I'm not a SEAL, I was their psychologist, was calm is contagious.

emotion is contagious. So I do think there's a time and place to emot and to have that, you know,

as you say, cry or really get upset, but keep in mind that if you're doing that around people, around teammates, around co-workers, it is literally a contagion. I know when I'm around people who are irritated, I find myself getting more irritated. When I'm around angry people, I find myself getting defensive and upset as well. So it's a really interesting concept to think about emotions as a contagion. Do the best performers in the world have emotion? Of course they do. But when

“it comes time to perform, they're really, I think exercise that we call more of a neutral detached”

mindset for I'm not going to go too high or too low. I'm just going to execute my plan and my blueprint

and I'm going to do it without emotion. Well, I think there's a fascination. Well, I've always

had a fascination with how people who are mentally tough have that ability to focus and zero in and block the rest of the world out and it's really interesting to hear how it's done and maybe try to do it yourself. My guest has been Eric Potterat. He is a clinical and performance psychologist. He is a retired commander from the US Navy where he helped develop the mental toughness curriculum used by the Navy SEALS. He is author of a book called "Learned Excellence."

Mental disciplines for leading and winning from the world's top performers. And there's a link to

that book in the show notes. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming on today, Eric. Thank you so much for having me, Mike. It's been fantastic.

“toothpicks. They sound like a pretty benign small little piece of wood. How much harm can they do?”

Well, they can do a lot of harm. Serving food with toothpicks might seem like a handy and harmless way to serve food, but if people bite into a hidden toothpick, it can do some serious damage to the mouth. And if a portion of the toothpick is swallowed, it can perforate the intestine with life threatening or even deadly results. Sometimes people don't even realize they've swallowed a piece of toothpick, which can make the diagnosis extremely difficult. In addition, a lot of toothpick users

tend to chew on it well past its prime, and that can cause premature wear and tear on toothpick. toothpicks can also damage existing dental restorations like crowns, veneers and fillings and cause them to dislodge or fall off. In general, serving food with a toothpick might not be worth

“the trouble. And that is something you should know. Oh, I would really like it. If you would just”

take a moment and leave a rating and review on apple podcasts, Spotify, whatever platform you listen on, it would really help us a lot. A lot. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know. Hey, it's Hillary Frank from the Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. There is so much going on right now in the world of reproductive health and we're covering it all. Birth control, pregnancy, gender, bodily autonomy,

menopause, consent, sperm, so many stories about sperm. And of course, the joys and absurdities of raising kids of all ages. If you're new to the show, check out an episode called The Staircase. It's a personal story of mine about trying to get my kids school to teach sex ed. Spoiler, I get it to happen, but not at all in the way that I wanted. We also talk to plenty of non-parents so you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about

human relationships and, you know, periods, the longest shortest time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at Longest ShortestTime.com.