Overconfidence and the Art of Knowing Yourself

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Hi, everyone, I'm Renee Brown. And I'm Adam, Renee episode four. Okay, so in this episode, we are going to talk about one of our favorite Olympic moments from Alon from this year.

We'll spend the first half of the episode talking about island goo.

We'll talk about her incredible display of metacognition

during a press conference. And we'll also talk about in the first half how that level of thinking about your thinking really helps you defend against one of our least in most favorite biases, which is Dunning Krigger.

And second half, we're going to take some questions. My social media has gone off the rails with questions for us. So I know yours has too, so we'll take a couple of those. Before we get started, I want to share something really funny with you. Are you ready?

Uh-oh, I'm ready. So you know how, what episode were we talking about the fact that you're a minimalist and I'm an maximalist? Two. Episode two.

“So I think when we're talking, I said something like,”

"Yeah, you know that meme on Instagram or the like, I hate minimalism. I get a note from Hank Green who's like, "What am I favorite people?" I do too.

And he said, "Hey, by the way, that meme is me talking." I do not know that. Did you know that? Had no idea. Okay, let me just play it. It's so funny, especially when you think about it being Hank.

Okay. Hey, hey, minimalism. That's not my vibe. I want to feel like a wizard who is surrounded by the collections of his many adventures.

Hey, hey, but when you say it like that, I don't want to be a minimalist either. I want to be surrounded, like a wizard surrounded by the collections from my many adventures. I just, and I do see your go-blue Michigan thing right behind you.

So you have, you are a wizard and you have collected something from your adventures. It's true, but it'll make a few things.

“Okay, before we start, do you want to ask me about my sweatshirt?”

I do now. Okay. I need you to, I need you to find your sweatshirt. I need you to find your sweatshirt. Today, I'm supposed to ask your question about sweatshirt.

Okay, this is my University of Texas long-horn sweatshirt. Let's go. Texas walks off Oklahoma in the 10th. Women's and men's basketball killing it in March madness. Men's swimming per usual.

We win the whole thing. Natty Tower goes bright orange. I just want to start there. And if you can see behind the camera, we've got hook 'em signs going up all over the place

because I've got two long horns in the room with me. Yeah, I cannot compete with that, but we are in the final four. Although, by the time this plays, I think we're going to have a winner on the men's side. We will.

And the women's side, right? I'm not sure about the dates. But, okay, Adam, did you catch the clip of Eileen Guz, Olympic press conference where the reporter from the athletic

She said, this isn't, this isn't meant to be rude,

“but do you think before you speak because your answers are so quick”

and so comprehensive? Yeah, I loved this moment. And my favorite part of it actually was it didn't happen on a slope. It was just, it was seemingly innocuous interview. Yes, and just to let you know that Eileen Guz,

if you don't know, specializes in freestyle skiing, competing across all three of those disciplines, half pipe, big air, and slope style. She's the only freestyle skier ever to metal in all three at the Olympics.

And she holds the Olympic record. Oh, yeah, I mean, she's a superstar. She's also extremely smart and this question from a reporter,

well, I didn't know who the reporter was when I first saw this clip.

It sounded a little nexus, but it's not. No, and I just want to get props to Charlotte Harper, the reporter from the athletic, because it is, at first when I heard it, I was like, kind of pissed off, and then you listen to the warmth

and loveliness through which she asked the question, "I want to break it down." So we both immediately go. And I've seen a lot of kind of analyses of this moment where people are missing the mark about what it is.

I think it's meta-cognition. Do you think it's meta-cognition? I do, but I need to spend more time thinking about that thought. Yeah, if that's an accurate analysis or not.

So let's go back, let's to define it for everybody.

“It's the meta-cognition, I think, again,”

I'm going back to this chapter in strong ground, where I tried to grab all the kind of the skill sets and mindsets to ready ourselves for the future that's already upon us. meta-cognition is in the top five. It is the ability to notice what your mind is doing

and evaluate it and deliberately change it. Two pieces to meta-cognition. Awareness and regulation. Awareness is what am I thinking, assuming, regulation given that, "How do I want to respond or adjust?"

I mean, this has to be meta-cognition that we're seeing from her. I think so.

I mean, I've always thought about meta-cognition

as the ability to think about your own thinking and then evolve it accordingly. And she's not only doing that, she's describing how she does it, which might be meta-cognition. So one of the things I think is interesting when we think

about meta-cognition, let me tell you a story that was also interesting. Month ago, I was with the CEO of a hospital here in Houston. I'm actually not in Houston, but in Houston. And she said, "I was listening to strong ground on my phone while I was walking."

And when you got to meta-cognition, I was like, "I don't, I don't think I get it." I'm going to have to read that, not listen to it. So then I got home and I read it and I'm like, "Okay, I need to reread it." And I made some notes and I highlighted the parts that made sense to me.

And then I finally got it. "Can you explain to us what it is?" I was like, "You just did." And she said, "What do you mean?" And I said, "You came across something

that you didn't quite understand. And you knew what it would take to get there."

“Would you agree that that's how it works?”

Yeah, I think the, I mean, the first part is she had the intellectual humility to know that she didn't understand it. Yes, huge. As opposed to just assuming, "Okay, I get it." And then to your point, she went and actually,

I was like, "Okay, I don't know if she'd read the

whole body of research on how we're better at critical thinking

when we read than listen." But clearly understood that intuitively. And said, "Okay, I've got to, I've got to really scrutinize this material to process it." How clear and persuasive in your opinion is the evidence

reading versus listening? It's pretty consistent for critical thinking and depth of processing. Okay. And I think that's important because when we're listening, we don't pause and replay nearly as much as we pause and reread. We don't highlight as much, we don't summarize as much,

we don't synthesize as much, we're more absorbed in the experience as opposed to stepping out of it to analyze. God, that is really interesting because one of the things, I want some of the feedback that I get when I read my audio books because I listen to I read, I only read non-fiction

and I listen to fiction. And which is interesting. And I'm very clear about how I learn because if you survive a PhD program,

I mean, I think we started with 14 in my cohort and we ended with three.

You either don't make it through or you don't make it through.

“So you have to understand how you learn because it's”

they assigned to you more than what you can is humanly possible. So you have to learn how to do that. I think that when I'm reading my audio books, I will actually say, you know what, that was a big definition. I'm going to reread it for you in case you're doing the laundry or walking or driving

because I would have to go back and reread that if I was reading the actual book. So I'm going to reread this too right now.

And I get a lot of good feedback about that but I never,

I just thought it was, I thought it was just me. It's not, and I love that you actually paused to do that, which never occurred to me. You know, I'm a pauser. Yes. So I've heard. Yes, I'm a pauser. Okay. The other part of Metacognition that I think is interesting is, because Metacognition has four or five different parts to it.

One of them is calibration and I'm really interested in your take on this because I see you doing it in real time sometimes. It's weird. You have a, and you have a certain face that you make when you're doing it, I think. So calibration and Metacognition is how closely your confidence matches reality. Good calibration is on things. I know well, I'm confident on things I don't. I'm curious and

cautious. Poor calibration is chronic overconfidence or done in Kruger. What do you make of

calibration as a part of Metacognition? In, in some ways, it's, it's the most important scale

because if you get that wrong, everything else fails afterward, right? If you, if you are

“confident where you should doubt yourself and also you doubt yourself where you should be confident,”

then no matter how much time you spent thinking about your own reasoning, you're going to end up adjusting in the wrong places. Support for the show comes from Canva. An idea is just an idea, but actually transforming that idea into a thing. That's where the real work lives. It can be a journey full of pitfalls and banging your head against the wall or it could be a lot easier than that with Canva. Canva

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It's time to turn those "what-ifs" into, with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com/curiosity. Go to shopify.com/curiosity. That shopify.com/curiosity. Okay, I've learned a lot about, because I want to get into this because, so metacognition, thinking about our thinking, before we go into the kind of a dive on Dunning Kruger, I want to walk through a breakdown of what Eileen Guzad and tie it to specific

"I apply a very analytical lens to my own thinking, and I kind of modify it."

“So I apply an analytical lens to my own thinking, and then I modify my thinking. So I think this”

is an example of metacognitive, monitoring, and regulation, which would be kind of the core. Is it Flavel, the main researcher that put this construct on the map? I think it's Flavel. He kind of his core definition actively observing and adjusting one's own thought processes.

So you hear that she does this. The second thing that I think is so interesting, I've got

542 questions for you about this. I journal a lot. I break down all of my thought processes. So I think this might be metacognitive knowledge development, which is like building an awareness of how your own mind works. What do you think about journaling as a way to getting explicit about how your mind works? Well, I think there's so many things that are interesting about this. I know, right? The first thing that I mean, I hardly know where to take this. I think the first thing

that I'm really struck by is we actually, we all intuitively know that metacognition is an important

skill. Anybody who's ever gone to therapy is trying to use metacognition?

Wait, say stop, no. I can't let that go. What does that mean? What do you mean everyone that got me as someone is like therapy, consumer, par excellence? Is that what we're doing in there? Well, I mean some of it is also emotion understanding and regulation, right? But what's your better, you know, I guess there's a cognitive and emotional and behavioral component, but I think about cognitive behavioral therapy, for example. And that entire approach to trying to improve your

“life starts with the idea that you have some dysfunctional thought patterns and you need to monitor”

them, notice them, and then adjust them. And if that's not metacognition, what is? That's true. This is the first time ever I've thought about addressing vaulty thinking under a metacognition

lens. Okay. And that's for me. Well, so that's for me why journaling is such a powerful tool

from metacognition is, you know, journaling according to some psychologists is essentially self-guided therapy. It's a way of reflecting on your thoughts and forming a story and then self-distancing. So that your thoughts are staring at you from a page as opposed to inside your head. And then you can see them more neutrally. I don't quite want to say more objectively, but because you're separated from your thoughts, it's easier for you to evaluate them and figure out where they accurate,

where are they leading you astray. What do you think? This is where I need help. Because then I write down in my journal, what I'm thinking, and then I bring my journal to therapy and I'm like,

“what do you make at this shit? That's why that's why I approach. And then I get some great feedback”

about, uh, great that you captured it. And then of course, the dreaded, what do you think about this shit? You know, and then I'm like, oh my god. Okay. Um, yeah, it's for me priceless. Okay, let's go to the next one. Do you have a journal about your journaling? No, I just watched reruns of Bridgerdin. No, I don't do that. No, or listen to like, uh, hockey-tawn country music on vinyl. That's what I do, instead of thinking of journaling about my journaling. No, but you know, oh my god,

maybe I do because I do journal and then I do go back and do art over my journaling that reflects what I'm learning from it. So I'll include a little picture of one of my pages. If we can blur out the actual words because my journaling, my journaling is my space where I'm like, and then I punched him in the throat and then so yeah. So I think, but I guess I do because I do do an art full recap. And I choose, I, I watercolor over my journal and I also use a lot of

art and collage. Wow. Of course, this is coming together in 3D and multicolored. For me, yes. Yeah. Yeah. And my, you know, my journal just has words. I had to tell you one page that I thought was, I wrote down, I was trying to excavate the team was trying to excavate the mental models that were driving some, some, some not impactful behavior at work. And I just wrote two or three things down in the journal that I thought were mental models getting in the way. One

of them was grind equals playing to win versus groundedness equals playing to win. And I have a huge

Because that was like a third eye open moment. Okay. Let's go, let's go. Let's finish this. Okay.

Back to island. She says, you can control how you think and therefore you can control who you are. And to me, this is an example of kind of metacognitive regulation, the ability to not just calibrate and develop knowledge, but to regulate yourself and your thinking. And then the last one is

“huge. And I want to talk about it because I think it's something missing that you're seeing”

in some of the new research that's looking at Dunning Kruger through a different lens. I think it's really big. Elingus says, how can I approach my own brain, the way I approach my craft of free skiing? Which I think is recognizing that thinking is a skill that can be deliberately practiced and improved. Wow. What do you make of that? I mean, this is supposed to be what happens in school, right? We're supposed to get better at thinking. But I think, I think most education systems can

find us to, okay, here's how you get better at thinking about algebra. So you can get more problems right. Here's how you get better at thinking about an essay. And there's very little, let's think

about how to think more effectively regardless of what the problem is. How do you think effectively

“about your own biases? How do you think effectively about your interactions with other people?”

The fact that Elingus recognizes all of that as a skill to develop and work on. I mean, to me, it challenges just something really fundamental that many people do that prevents that, which is they take their own thoughts as gospel. They have a thought and therefore it must be true. And she has this great distance between her identity and her thought processes, right? You hear her saying, I want to, I want to think about and figure out how my own brain work.

So I can make it better. And become someone different as opposed to saying, I need to believe everything I think. I need to internalize every view that I hold, every assumption, every opinion, every belief. And I would love to better understand how we get more people to that point for an idea of thoughts on how we can do that. I mean, I just think it explains what's happening in this country that if I were a despot, if I were a dangerous leader,

the first two things that I would go, the first thing, the first two things that I would vilify, are skills that increase metacognition and empathy. And that is exactly what's happening

“from the far right today. I mean, really, I think the first two things I would do is I need to”

make sure that people don't get too good at thinking are too good at compassionate empathy,

especially for vulnerable populations. If I can vilify any type of critical thinking,

if I can vilify the process of deeper thought and then make sure people don't care for other people, I could rob you blind. That's, I mean, really, that's the first place I go. I got to be honest. That's the playbook. And I think you're right. I think the far right may have started it, but I think the far left is doing the same thing. I think cancel culture. Cancel culture is a refusal to empathize with somebody who did something you find objectionable. No, I think. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I agree.

I also, I think what the two have in common is the inexplicable connection of thought to moral indignation. Say that again. I think what would extremism on either side having common is fueled by self-righteousness and thought is inextricably tied to moral indignation. I think both of those things don't get us out of the peril we face right now, but I only see one side of them. I only see one side of the far. I mean, I'm, I'm not, I don't identify with either side of

those ideologically or politically, but yeah, I don't even think it is helpful to rank which

getting hurt and it who's hands. And so I do have a bias there for sure. And maybe it's a bias.

“And maybe I'm just right. I need to, I only go a little bit. Okay, let's get into how metacognition”

and this is really speaking of an interesting kind of political connection and also social connection. Let's talk about what Denning Krigger is. I've learned a lot about Denning Krigger actually for me, from your podcast and from your books. So why don't you walk us through what it is and what it isn't? Okay, so the original finding is that the people who are least knowledgeable or least skilled at a task are the most likely to overestimate their knowledge and skill. So the people with

the worst sense of humor are the most likely to overestimate how funny they are, the people who struggle the most emotional intelligence are the most likely to exaggerate how great they are at reading and managing emotions. The people who do poorly on a trivia test are the most overconfident about their expertise and the list goes on and on and on and this has been documented in so many different domains.

“But I think it's really important to to caveat that this actually doesn't happen to complete novices.”

If you're a total beginner, you know you don't know anything. It's when you gain a little knowledge or a little skill that you start to get dangerous because your confidence rises faster than your confidence and then you can start to get trapped on sometimes called Mount Stupid where you're at this point of very high confidence that is not matched by your own capability level and then

you're basically ignorant but arrogant and I think what scares me about that a lot is at that point

you've lost meta cognition. You believe you know things you don't and you cannot see the errors in your thinking. I think flat earthers are sort of classic Dunning Kruger victims. How to do what I miss? I think it's really interesting. One of the things that I remember when I first came across the research and kind of did a deep dive on it is this idea of dual burden in Dunning Kruger. Like you don't know and you don't even know that you don't know.

“I got to tell you from like so I get so this is one of the hardest things I think to lead”

and if you're leading or managing someone who's got some Dunning Kruger bias around their own ability it's a very hard thing because they don't know that they don't know literally and so I find it to be very frustrating for people but I am gonna tell a quick story about how I had

Dunning Kruger like how so when I first started pickleball I played tennis for 40 years and so

the first time I went to go play you know it's everything's ranked by beginning intermediate advanced and so I you know slept over to the beginner thing and was kicked out of the beginner group almost immediately because not because I could play pickleball but because this was not my first rocket sport you know I understand how ball hits the face of the paddle I understand and you know I can hit hit I can hit balls you know I've done that for many

decades so then I was like oh god I'm really good at this I'm actually gonna be excellent at this so I went over to advanced and signed up for open plane advance and lost every game and then someone actually told me I thought I was just having a bad day but someone actually said and listen if you're playing pickleball I'm not saying that 95% of white men over 50 are gonna coach you without being asked but I'm gonna say if someone's coaching you when you haven't been asked 95% of the time it's

gonna be a white dude over 50 and one of these came up to me and said listen it's not fun for us when you're playing up like this you don't you shouldn't be in an advanced group and I

well first of all was really embarrassed a little with a little with a little bit of shame rising

because I hated that I overestimated my ability but what was interesting is I went to the intermediate group and I kind of that's where I should have been but I immediately paid for an hour for a coach to watch me play and there was it this was kind of when duper scores like your score ranking like UTSA if you're from tennis or whatever like your score ranking but you know what games you can be in in your tournament stuff and so I said I really want to be and I think of

if I compiled all of your best moves into one game are we on a one to five scale we're on a well

we're it goes up but like for someone like me you know I'm gonna probably max out at 4.5 you know and so I thought oh my god why and he said it was interesting because he gave me some information and

“he said you're gonna do this to the ball if you want to be a 4.0 they're gonna do this to the ball”

you're hitting baseline drives and staying back at the baseline because you're a baseline tennis player the game pickle balls one and loss at the kitchen you're not coming up you are slamming the ball into your opponents from mid court and they're slamming it back on your tennis shoe string because you don't know how to reset and drop a ball and at that moment the Dunning Krigger was gone because I had the skill to predict accurately what my level was does that mean this is make this

make the story make sense oh this is so good David Dunning says that when you lack the skills to produce excellence you usually also lack the skills to judge excellence and so what you were doing

was you were building that second set of skills so that you could figure out where you stood on the

“first okay you got you have to slow down this is gonna be really important for people so”

say it again and get explicit about the story okay so David Dunning says when you lack the skills to produce excellence you often also lack the skills to judge excellence so your pickle ball skill level was not excellent no but also your knowledge was really low yes and you couldn't even gauge what excellent look like you didn't know enough about the game to figure out where on that spectrum you were and what you were asking the coach for is a bunch of information you were gathering data

points about what excellence looks like so you could then put yourself on the map and I'm assuming after you put yourself on the map you then had a navigation plan for how you were going to move forward oh my god I did there were like eight skills I had to improve so I took two every six months and it's interesting because and I'm just gonna make this aside I mean I love pickle ball

“it is not going to ever have the viewership of tennis for this reason you have to be a very good”

player to understand and appreciate what you're seeing on a pickle ball court if you're watching professionals you can just walk out of the womb and go to Wimbleton and watch center court and understand Jesus these are athletes like both beyond belief you don't understand what it takes to do what people the professionals are doing on a court and pickle ball unless you play pickle ball so everyone who watches it thanks I can do that's like ping pong it's like giant ping pong you know

so this is really interesting well I think part of what's interesting about this is it makes me think about the fact that it's harder to gauge your own knowledge or skill level in tasks that are more complex or more subjective say that one more time say that since one more time if you're doing something complex or if there's not an objective way to score it it's easier to fall victim to done in Kruger it's easier to be overconfident when you don't really know anything

or you're not very good so let me let me give an example that that stands out as we talk about this I think nobody thinks that they could win nobody thinks they could outrun you say in bold or else in Felix as a sprinter yeah nobody thinks they could do a sub two-hour marathon without being a world-class runner because the times are really objective and I can sit there just going all out on my treadmill and realize I can't even sustain for a mile but the winners do

for 26.2 in a marathon super clear calibrated you're Calibrated you're Calibration Calibration okay easy when there's an objective standard that you can benchmark yourself against I made the same mistake that you did in pickleball in ping pong I have I have good reflexes

I've always had good hand eye coordination I grew up being one of the better ping pong players

of anybody I played and I always thought gee my athletic limitations that it played me in every other domain ping pong is probably something I could get really good at if I ever focused on it and last year I went to a charity tournament no I thought okay I did it was it was it was it was in Philly and they said bring the family so I went with a couple of our kids and it was

who trains with pros and then there was a world champion there and I said okay I've got to try my hand like let me let me see how far off I am it took me three trips just to get my paddle on their surf and not only did I suddenly realized how far I was from being any good at ping pong just the the amount of work that it would take to get there like I don't think I could physically pull it off like I don't think I could transform my mind and body into that skill level okay this is

“this is way harder than I thought and I think that ping pong is simpler than pickleball in a lot of ways”

but it's still complex and subjective enough that I couldn't tell where I stood and I didn't know all the things I would need to know and get good at in order to actually be decent at it this is so interesting because we have such a competitive ping pong family so we have ping pong tables we have a ping pong table and I guess what's theoretically a formal dining room in our house

because like first of all no I don't want to have anybody over into if I have someone over

we're not doing anything formal so we just said bucket and put in a ping pong table there and so we're very we're very competitive but it's interesting when I play people we have to first of all we have to play it's on like we got to play some ping pong that we can do yeah that we can do but I play a

“very flat game and so when you get to really good people it's all speed spin and angle and it's like”

I can't answer a serve either I can whip up on some people in my family not my 20 year old son at this point but because he's a spinny guy you know but it's this is so interesting so let's okay so let's take this out of paddle sports and I'm going to tell you another another dining cruiser place for no it's not a dining cruiser anymore what what what are you call it if you thought you were good at it you learned you sucked and it's true that you suck

and you're never going to be good at it this is one of these areas for me time estimation

which really matters at work this is not a ping pong pickleball you know recreational fun thing like I am terrible at time estimation oh you're talking about the planning fallacy yes

“where in the original studies it took people on average three to four times longer to finish”

a task than they estimated but I have a dining cruiser with a planning fallacy rising like no it's it's I've been I've been trying to apply the same kind of calibration techniques where you write down how accurate you think you're going to be you do it and you see how off you are on your prediction like that's one of the skills that you know helps you develop not a cognition and get over dining cruiser right prediction performance debrief prediction

performance debrief my prediction is always wrong on time estimation my performance sucks

and the debrief I'm not interested in even journaling which are you are you wrong in the standard planning fallacy direction though that you you think you can do things faster than you really can yes like yes and I get frustrated with I mostly think other people should be doing things faster like for example all right so that's a different conversation no but for example like we were going to have some wins charlie was in high school some of the water polo team parents

over for something informal because again my ping pong tables in the formal dining room but we were going to have them over and about an hour before they got there I told Steve I don't think there's enough color in the yard I need you to run to home depot and get some flowers and plant them before people come over and listen to this let's wait no thank this through with me for second flowers why aren't you growing faster no listen any I'm in the clock he said listen I'm not

doing that they're going to be here an hour and I said it'll take you 10 minutes to get to home depot 15 minutes to pick out the flowers 10 minutes to go back that's like 35 minutes and you can plant them in 20 minutes I don't get the problem go ahead yeah I can I can't help you there yeah and we didn't get the flowers I'm just going to say and he obviously and he said I'm so happy to add color to the yard I'll need one or two days in advance are you going to grow them what do you think this is

but what's what's interesting to me is that this is a repeated challenge in the same direction

“right so you you know that you underestimate how long something's going to take it happens you've”

held yourself accountable by scoring yourself and then what does it doesn't it bother you to repeat the same error over and over no I'm just trying to find faster people okay you know you sound like half the managers I've ever worked with okay let me tell you what I do do I mean and then we'll

we'll have to come back because we would do I do the questions here's what we have done

this is a scrum this is a tool from scrum our agile processes that I love I'm obsessed with a lot of scrum tools we call it at beberg bernay brown education research group that's our organization we call it the turn and learn so in a meeting we will say okay here's the project everyone understands the parameters and what we're doing everybody write down on a post it how many months we think

“this is going to take or weeks or whatever and we'll do it in weeks because I already get anxious”

if we use months is the time increment I like to use hours but they've got me down to weeks so weeks and then a count of three we'll turn them over and we do that to avoid like you know

halo effect because people will see mine first and be like oh my gosh she's the boss and she thinks

we can do it so when we turn it over really quick everybody's got the number of weeks including like the engineers and the operations people and mine will say two weeks and there's will say eight months so but but I lose so so well I don't I do oh yeah I do of course yeah I do I respect the process and I respect the fact that that I'm not good at it but I'm not able to change it because if I wrote eight months down on my post it I would just be bullshitting to show how much I've grown

“so what so the underlying belief hasn't changed the way that you form your expectations”

is flawed in the same way that it was before. No maybe the anxiety disorder still in place I don't know like maybe it's just I can't stand it like let's go let's go but I have learned to I have learned to defer to the judgment of people I respect and trust who both hold the sense of urgency and a practical excellent operational mind. So I like what you're doing for calibration which is you're not just anchoring on your own judgment you're

bringing in the wisdom of crowds but you've also recognized that crowds vary in their wisdom yeah you've found people who are good at this specific skill with the kinds of tasks you're doing. Yes yes we'll in the segment here. Yeah because I look great look at me look at me bring I go using my own mind to help. Please wait now imagine what your dreams can become when you put imagination to work at

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Okay I want to go to some questions for the second half we only have about 20 minutes left maybe

let's go some questions. I do too. Okay I had one one other thing I wanted to just bring up here before we leave this. Yeah that's great. Before we leave our friends Dunning Kruger and the idea of met a cognition and thinking about our own thinking any final thoughts on that before we go to questions from our first episodes. Okay two quick things on this the the first one is when we were talking about Dunning Kruger earlier I kept thinking about Elon Musk

and how the people who love him and the people who hate him are both missing part of this story. Like when I see Elon I see Dunning Kruger. I see somebody who is brilliant at hardware which makes him really effective at electric cars and rockets but does not know

X or whatever it's called now has run into so many problems and I see his detractor saying Elon's a moron. No this is domain specific. I hear his supporters saying Elon's a genius and I say no that too is domain specific and if I were in his orbit the thing I would try to help him do his calibrate. How would you how would you tackle that per day? I would love to just hear how do you

“think about getting someone in a position like that who's not calibrated to look in the mirror?”

I I'm torn between like unleashing right now or being more thoughtful and saying I don't

know him I've never met him I couldn't assess but if we took someone like that I actually think

the problem that we're talking about now is maybe a first cousin of Meta cognition especially when it comes to Elon which is self-awareness and emotional regulation and emotional awareness. So I don't think this is a I don't know I don't know him so I don't know if this is a cognitive battle where boy how do we get someone to understand that their expertise is domain specific and if we could get them to understand that they might be able to apply some of the same things that are maybe

more intuitive about their domain expertise to things where they want to learn and be better but I think

I would have to say that your lack of self-awareness and your lack of emotional awareness

is so great that not only are you not able to engage in smart Meta cognition you're making decisions that hurt other people and unless that's intentional we got bigger fish to fry

“what's your second one? Okay second one is I think there's a there's a just a bit of a cautionary”

note as people work on Meta cognition which is on the one hand there are real upsides of analyzing your knowledge and explaining what you know we we know from a long history of research on the the teacher of factor the tutor effect that when you explain things you notice someone else you actually understand them that yes and you also get better remembering them which is great we also know from research on the illusion of explanatory depth that when you try to explain

something that you think you know you will find out really quickly when you don't and the studies on this are hilarious you ask people you can do it right after you write a bike or flush a toilet how do you think here's on the bike work how does that toilet flush and you will hear people start to stumble and stammer and realize they don't have a clue how the basic machinery they've been operating their whole lives actually works

unless they've really carefully studied it and that that task right of saying well let me actually try to explain what I know is to me the ultimate way to calibrate

wow so maybe wait we should just pause there for a second and say if you don't have that wisdom

of crowds if you don't have that wise crowd available to you like you do Renee or like you put together or you're not sure who to ask right just the the the practice of explaining will help you

“figure out what you understand and what you don't and I think that's probably something we can all”

do regularly I love this okay I'm gonna add a third cautionary tale before we move on sorry I've one other cautionary note on this part perfect you go first okay mine would be to say that you cannot meta cognition your way out of a Dunning Kruger bias alone there's no there's no amount of studying your own mind around a topic that will increase your competence in that topic it has to go hand in hand meta cognition plus actual skills building so in pickleball I couldn't just

understand oh this is why I'm overestimating myself and then all of a sudden oh I'm better at pickleball no I have to do the meta cognition work of oh this is why I'm overestimating myself now I need to learn how to reset from mid court I need to learn how to get up to the kitchen faster from the baseline I need to learn how to do a better drop so it's so overcoming overestimation is not just about understanding your thinking but but building skill in that domain and I think that's

very important I think that's really important because there's been some interesting research

around a topic they really thought they were much better at it than they were they skilled them

up in meta cognition but did not give them any skills in what they thought they were really good at and the meta cognition alone didn't pull them up and out you got to do the skills building

“too in that area agree or disagree hard agree okay I think that is that is spot on and it”

actually sets up the one other thing that I think needs to be just put on the table is caveat which is in the short run getting better at meta cognition can make you worse at the skill you're trying to build yeah oh god wait which I mean just so frustrating you cannot open the store we

cannot change topics yet no no no no no why is that I hate this it drives it crazy so the my favorite

demonstrations were with golfers where if you ask a golfer to explain their stroke they actually performed worse afterward and I think this is easier to unpack with our rackets for an example so if you ask a tennis player like walk me through the mechanics of your serve then their serve will get less accurate and what seems to be happening there is you've taken a skill that was mostly automated and you've all of a sudden made it conscious and trying to think through the steps actually

“interferes with your ability to effortlessly execute those steps on autopilot and I think this is”

this is a version of what happened to Simone Biles in Tokyo in the 2021 Olympics when she got the twisties there's a lot of research showing that when you when you have performance anxiety it makes you more self conscious and it starts to take what might be a routine that you normally do on autopilot and and make it more salient so you're actually thinking through what am I supposed to do now and that makes it more likely if you're a gymnast or a diver for example you get lost in

midair if you are a baseball player or a golfer you might get instead of the twisties they would call it the yips but it's the same basic thing which is all of a sudden I'm feeling anxious and I start to pay attention to well what is my arms supposed to be doing here what is my legs supposed to be doing and that interferes with my ability to smoothly just go through the motions and I don't

“think this is just true for sports I don't think it's just true for physical challenges I think”

that anytime you do something well automatically as you start to analyze it and describe it you may take a step backward before you can take two steps forward what do you think oh my god so we are in we are inside now look this is a really important conversation and it's a conversation that I think I'm learning from and hopefully our listeners and people who are watching on YouTube will learn from I say we pause the questions for the next episode and just finish up on this because

you've opened the door into what I think should probably be a full episode but I have to say that you use the word twice you use the word interfering twice that when you start taking when you stop playing from habit and you start working on something to improve you get interference and now you're inside of my favorite a book that came out 50 years ago I read every year every sports team that I work with I use every leadership team yes yes is it the inner

game of tennis with Timothy Galway yes so the formula there and we just we actually just did this with the group of 200 senior leaders the formula that I think about all the time from that book which is just if you haven't read it's a classic I mean it's just so good but I read it every year

the thing that I always think about with that is performance equals potential minus interference

and one of the big we'll save that whole book for another conversation but one of the things I think about all the time is you know performance equals potential minus interference when you are working on skill development in a new area that is absolutely interference when I'm working on you know not staying on the baseline but getting to the net very quickly in pickleball I will get to the net and then I'll get slammed with a ball that I can't

even answer because all I'm not inflow I'm not inflow and when we see athletes who are winning and at the highest level of performance they are inflow they are not thinking about the mechanics of a shot they are they are relying on their training and what they've done and they're trying

through footing before the serve they are not thinking about how they're taking a corner in F1 they

are not thinking about who's down the pitch and where are they in relationship to the goalie they are not doing that and so helping people who are listening right now understand you are going to go backward before you go forward in metacognition and skills building is is we would be remiss without saying it because even if what you're working on is having more connecting conversations with your partner staying curious with your children it is not going to feel good when you're

trying it and learning it not at all and I ran into this when I was as a as a shy introvert

trying to get better public speaking I was working with a speaking coach who said you don't have

to shout every sentence you're you're you're over compensating for your fear that you're you're you're going to be too withdrawn and you're going to be boring and you know it's actually

“modulation and variety that will keep your audience engaged and you need to work on that and”

I found that as I worked on that I would stumble over my my content yes I tripped more on the stage I was you know I was so focused on trying to get my my pitch right and have awareness of and control over my tone of voice and the way that I was articulating things and how much emphasis I was putting in different places and even pacing right that everything else fell apart and I felt like I was getting worse as a speaker but I had to get to the point where some of those

adjustments would happen naturally and I didn't have to think about them anymore in order then to sort of put the pieces back together and I would say there was there was probably a three-month period where I felt like I couldn't give a talk without being completely in my head and ruminating about everything that was going wrong and it was it was it was really frustrating but it was it was a necessary backward step in order to unlearn a set of habits that were

we're holding me back from being able to deliver my message effectively and I didn't think about this as a metacognition problem at the time of oh I'm taking something off of autopilot that was automated incorrectly and I need to now rewire it in order to put it back on autopilot yikes that would have been helpful where where were you 10 years ago where were you when I was like slamming every ball from the baseline like um yeah like I could knock the paddle out of your hand

but it's a different sport and so yeah this is this is such a good conversation let's save the questions for next time because they're they're really good and they're complex and I think we can learn a lot from them but I we've covered a lot today so

any key takeaway for you today from our conversation starting with i-line metacognition

“dining crewer I think I think we've covered most of my key takeaways but one thing we didn't”

maybe make explicit that we should is as I listen to you talk about i-line go I'm struck by how rare it is for people to even admit out loud that they think about their own thinking and they work on improving their thinking and I think the idea of normalizing hey my brain didn't come with an operating manual it didn't come with an owner's guide I need to spend a lot of time observing how it works figuring out what it does well what it doesn't do well so that I can

achieve mastery over it or at least you know not constantly interfere with it and have it interfering with me and my goals I think that's that's something we should we should all aspire to do more of I mean I really I love that for your takeaway and I'm gonna I plus that one and I would say for me

“as we normalize the discomfort and the building of this I think my takeaway is better skills”

plus better metacognition equals better calibration metacognition without skill or skill without metacognition is there's a fragility to it that we need to be cautious about yeah yeah I think that's that's a wonderful way to wrap yeah I love it see you next time the curiosity shop is produced by Bernabey on education and research group and granted productions you can subscribe to the curiosity shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app

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