683: Nir Eyal - How to Break Limiting Beliefs, Create Your Own Luck, Transform Your Relationships, and Start Seeing Opportunities Everyone Else Is Missing

- Welcome to The Learning Leaders Show. I am your host, Ryan Hawke. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleiter.com for show notes of this and all podcasts episodes go to learningleiter.com.

Now on to the nights featured leader, near aisle is a Stanford lecture. Behavioral designer and one of the most rigorous thinkers in the world on why people do what they do and more importantly, how to change it.

He's the author of three books, his latest is called Beyond Belief. The science backed way to stop limiting yourself and achieve breakthrough results during our conversation we discussed. Why near says, most people don't have relationship problems.

They have perception problems. And he shares the four questions that can transform any relationship.

Then their critical difference between facts, faith,

and beliefs in why understanding that distinction

“is the key to changing anything about yourself.”

And then near shares, how we can manufacture more luck in our lives. So good, ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy. My conversation with near aisle. This episode is brought to you by Insight Global.

Insight Global is a staffing and professional services company dedicated to being the light to the world around them. If you want to learn more about the CEO, Bert Bean and Chief Revenue Officer Sam Kaufman check out episode 424.

We had a fantastic conversation talking about my partnership with the great people at Insight Global. If you need a higher one person, hire a team of people or transform your business through talent or technical services

Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. Hiring can be tough, but hiring the right person can be magic. Visit Insight Global.com/learningleader today to learn more.

That's InsightGlobal.com/learningleader. [MUSIC PLAYING] I flip to the back of your book because I love reading about the people that you love, the acknowledgment section. And I'm very curious about your partner, both in business

and in life, Julie. She's the first thing you mentioned in the acknowledgment section.

“How has Julie impacted you when it comes to belief?”

Wow, interesting.

So yeah, I always love interviews that start different.

And this is the first time anybody's ever asked me about Julie. So I love this a great question. So Julie and I met the first week of college. I was helping her dad. I had already moved into college and I helped her dad

move a big little box and it turns out that that box was being delivered to Julie's dorm room. And that's how we met. And that was in 1997. And we've been married since 2001.

So we're going to celebrate 25 years this year. She has done so much for my belief. I mean, you meet somebody. You kind of come in with certain beliefs and a certain personality and then you kind of adapt.

And if it's not going well, you become more apart, right? Like you become more as individuals.

“Whereas if it goes well, I think you become more of a whole.”

And if it goes really well, then you become a better version of yourself. And that I think is definitely what Julie's done for me. And in fact, a big part of the genesis of the book came from her introducing me to this technique

called the turnaround, which comes out of the work from Byron Katie that she used with her mother to repair the relationship that she had with her mom. And then I started, and then she kind of invited me to learn this technique as well.

And I was just so impressed with it. And it started with interpersonal beliefs, you know, our relationship beliefs. But then it kind of turned into, wow, you can use the same technique in all kinds of different beliefs.

And so it's something I use daily from anything from daily annoyances to workplace interactions to dreaming up the future to, you know, getting myself in a good mental place. This turnaround method is kind of at the core

of how we can change our minds to service rather than hurt us. What's the turnaround method? So the turnaround method is where you push yourself to collect a portfolio of perspective.

So the problem is, is that our minds hate changing beliefs.

We use these beliefs to justify passivity. And we call these limiting beliefs. A limiting belief, according to my definition. I don't know if anybody else is to find them. My definition of a limiting belief is a belief

that saps motivation and increases suffering. And it does that by creating short term relief from discomfort.

I'm no good at public speaking. And so I'm going to avoid public speaking, right? I reduce my motivation to go on stage. So I'm providing myself temporary relief but long term suffering.

Because long term, I know I could have done a great job at that presentation. I could have put myself out there. So even though a short term comforting, it was long term harmful.

That difficult relationship with my mom, you know. I don't want to have that conversation

because, you know, she's always that way.

She'll never change. You know, that there's just goes to reinforce what I've always seen in her. So the limiting belief is she is one way. And I can't change that.

Liberating belief might be completely different in both those scenarios. It's maybe I can change myself, right? So what a turnaround does is it helps you identify many different kinds of beliefs.

And then you can choose the ones that serve you, versus the ones that hurt you, the one that you've been holding on to,

“just because that's what you've always known.”

And it provides some semblance of safety and passivity and reduces immediate discomfort versus saying, hey, what could be just as true? And just collecting that portfolio perspective allows you to pick and choose.

So to me, I feel like we all, especially from a leadership perspective, but just in general, life, we'd all be better served if we spent more time leaping outside of ourselves and trying to put ourselves in the perspective of other people,

trying to think about, even if you have like a really bad boss, Liz White's been told me this 10 years ago, I feel like on this podcast. 'Cause I was complaining about a, you know, they're terrible.

And she said, well, have you ever thought about what life is like from their perspective? And it sounds basic. Well, no, I hadn't Liz, I just complained about them, right? We all talked about people.

It feels like the turnaround has elements of that, of perspective of, hey, let's pause for a moment. 'Cause we all see the world through our eyes. And we're all pretty good at doing that. But why not for a second, let's pause

“and see it from someone else's perspective.”

Maybe that will help us understand why they made that choice, why they did that thing that we think is stupid. 'Cause we're only viewing it from our eyes or our beliefs are perspective and not theirs.

Is that an element of it? - Well, I think we all know the answer. We all know the punchline. Yeah, see if somebody else's perspective. Yeah, think positive.

Yeah, you know, your beliefs are your destiny. We kind of know that stuff, right? Like the old Henry Ford quote or a tribute to Henry Ford, nobody knows if he actually says it is. Whether you believe you can or you can't, you're right.

So everybody kind of agrees with the end answer. It's about how do we get there? All right, think about it from someone else's perspective. How, you can't even understand your own perspective. You only try and understand somebody else's.

It's just one of those confusing enough. And so what do we do? We retreat into our limiting beliefs. I'm wrong there, right. I'm sorry, the opposite.

I'm right there, wrong. What we wanna do with this process is exactly the opposite. What we wanna try and do is a step by step approach

to help us break past what limiting beliefs always do,

which is that they hide themselves. A limiting belief by definition is hidden because we think that what we see is accurate.

“We all think that what we experience is a fact, right?”

Like I saw it for myself, I'm stating my truth. This is the way things are, but that's not true at all. The way the brain processes information is woefully inadequate to put that burden of truth on it. So why does this happen?

So your conscious attention can only process about 50 bits of information. That's your conscious mind. You can only process 50 bits. It's about a sentence per second.

However, your mind is processing 11 million bits of information, right? So the Santa Mai voice in your ears, the light hitting your retinas, the ambient temperature of the room,

your brain is aware of all this stuff. Your conscious mind is not. So your brain has to filter out and leaves you with 0.000. You're 0.45% of the information that's coming in. So that's the difference between reading a simple sentence

or war and peace twice every second. It's just way too much information. So in order to make sense of all this data coming in, the brain has to see reality through a tiny pinhole of attention, just a tiny fraction of reality

do you actually consciously are aware of? And so how does the brain make sense of all this? It has to make predictions. And those predictions are based on our beliefs. We call this predict processing.

And so everything you experience, everything you see, everything you feel, and everything you're inspired to do is determined by the three powers of belief. And it is only when you force yourself

through an active process, not just, well, try and see it from their perspective, not just try and think positive. That stuff doesn't work. It's kind of platitudes.

You need to have a structured process to teach you how to do that. And once you do that, you unlock your real potential. That's the game changers that you can do things

you never thought possible.

You can repair relationships

You can go into situations that you thought

you were terrified of and come out the other end much better for it. Okay, how do we do that? Okay, how do we do that? It sounds great.

I'm in. Let's go for it.

“Yeah, so maybe the best way to illustrate this”

is with a personal story about how my life changed with it. So it started with my relationship with my mom. But you can substitute a workplace relationship, a marriage relationship, any interpersonal relationship,

any belief that you hold. So here's, let me set it up for you. Here's what happened. A few years ago, my mom had her 74th birthday. And I want to do something nice for her Ryan.

So I decided I was going to send her some flowers. Problem was, I was in Singapore, and she was in Central Florida where I grew up. And so to get flowers to Central Florida, I had to call a bunch of florists

and I had to stay up late and look at reviews and try and figure that to make sure that the flowers arrived on time. I went to bed at 1 a.m. Pad of myself on the shoulder.

And I thought, okay, you did a nice job near you. You did something good for your mom. She's going to love it. I woke up the nice morning. I called her up and said, "Hey, mom, happy birthday."

Did you get the flowers I sent? To which she says, yes, I did it. Thank you very much. But just so you know, the flowers were half dead. Don't order from that florist again.

I instantly became my 13 year old self. And I blurted out something I should not have, which was, well, that's the last time I ordered you flowers again. And I didn't immediately regret it. Now I do, but you can imagine it went over

about as well as you'd expect. And after the call, I turned to Julie. And I wanted her to sympathize with me. I wanted her to tell me why my mother was clearly being too judgmental, right?

Like, here I done something nice for her and after she's being all judgey about these flowers. Or you're like, how rude is that? I wanted to vent. And she said, how about we do a turnaround?

And I said, no thanks. I do not want to do your stupid mumbo jumbo and touch you feeling nonsense. Like, we're supposed to vent here, right? Like, that isn't what we're supposed to do.

Like, you can't let people not know how you feel. You have to get it off your chest.

“You have to vent, you have to tell people what you really think.”

You can't hold it inside. Like, I even tell you why you know how terrible what she just did to me was. And she said, okay, well, let me just give you some space for that in her very patient way.

And so I reluctantly decided to not vent because at that point, I had read what the psychology literature says about venting, venting is actually terrible. It doesn't nothing but reinforce your beliefs about people because not only do we not see reality clearly,

we certainly don't see other people clearly. We see our beliefs about people. We don't see reality as it is. We see reality as we are. And so I knew that venting was not going to help me.

So I did the work here. I did what I'm about to share with you,

which is I first wrote down the belief.

And again, credit to Byron Katie, she came up with these four questions. And she basically channeled Aristotle. His technique is over 2,500 years old. So basically what you do is you write down the belief.

My belief was, my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. That was the belief. And then she prompts us with four questions. The first question is, is it true? Is that belief true?

Ryan, come on, back me up here. Clearly, my mother is being too judgmental and hard to please when I bought her these flowers. She should have just said, thank you. Obviously, next question.

Second question is, is it 100% absolutely true? Is it absolutely true? It sounds like the first question. It's actually not. Is it absolutely, because when you add the word absolutely,

that means in all circumstances, no exceptions. Was my mother, in this case, 100%, there is no other explanation. She was being too judgmental and hard to please. Well, maybe, I mean, depends how you look at it, I guess.

Maybe there's a 1% chance unlikely, but yeah, maybe there's a 1% chance that someone could see it differently. Okay, fine.

“Third question, who am I when I hold onto this belief?”

How do I feel? Who do I become? How do I react? Well, I mean, well, I believe my mother is too judgmental, hard to please, I'm not very nice.

You know, I'm short-tempered. I'm not my best self. Okay, here's the fourth question. Who would you be without that belief? If you had an magic wand, it sounds crazy,

but let's say you have a magic wand, tap your brain, and boom, you don't have that belief anymore. What would your life be like? Who would you be? If I had this magical power or it'd be pretty awesome,

I'd be more patient, I'd be kinder, I'd be more myself as opposed to a 13 year old version of myself, so kind of would be nice if I didn't have to have that belief. So what did I just do in about 30 seconds?

I determine number one, that belief may not be true. Same very true of in a day ago, maybe it's not true. There's a shred of evidence, perhaps it's not true. Two, it doesn't really serve me. I don't feel good with that belief.

And three, there might be a better way to be, right? I could be actually be happier without that belief, okay? So now something opens up.

For the first time, you can see a situation,

you force yourself just to these four questions. And let me tell you, this is a very simple minor example. I think a lot of people can relate to. If you have a mom in the like mind,

the most extreme views politically and how their political opponents are causing them suffering. I've seen it with people who have trauma and baggage and a lot of suffering in their life. And I mean, you can see how through these four questions

they open up new possibilities that they don't have to continue suffering. And so now comes the turnaround. The turnaround involves doing something absolutely ridiculous that you're gonna hate, which is it's asking you

to look at that belief as the geometric opposite.

“What would the exact opposite of that belief look like?”

Now why you're gonna hate it? Because the brain hates changing its mind. We hate changing our minds. We have what's called a psychological immune system. Just like if you get a splinter in your finger,

you have a biological immune system, your body will mount into immune defense. Well, the same happens in our minds that we do not like changing our minds. We hate it.

And the more you feel that, oh, that's crazy. I don't want to think that way. That can't be true. The more you need to explore it.

Because it's something that you are afraid to address because it might reveal a deeper truth. And that's exactly what happened to me.

So here's what happened to me.

First, I wrote down that first belief. My mother's two judgments on heart to please. Now what's the opposite of that belief? The exact opposite is my mother is not two judgments on heart to please.

Now the job that I have to do here is figure out just any way is there any possibility that that could be true. I don't have to believe it, but is there any possibility that could also be true in any alternative universe

“that my mother's not two judgments on heart to please?”

Well, the more I thought about it, maybe she was just conveying information. The flowers arrived, half dead. That's information. That's not judgment.

That's just stating a fact. Maybe she was trying to help me not order from this floor anymore so I wouldn't get scammed. So she was trying to be helpful, not hurtful. OK, is it true?

I don't know, but it sounds like it could be plausible. So now I have two beliefs. Let's see if we can go for a third one. Another turnaround could be not my mother's two judgments on heart to please.

What's the opposite? I am too judgment on heart to please. Ooh, yeah, OK, how could that be true? Well, when I sat with that for a minute, I realized that I had rehearsed in my mind a script of what I wanted my mom to say.

I had already pre-planned the effusive praise I wanted for being a good son in getting my mom flowers. And when that praise didn't come, I lost it. So who was being judgment on heart to please? I was.

OK, now there's a fourth belief in this one really hit hard. I am too judgment on heart to please towards myself. OK, how could that be true? Well, when I had spent a bunch of time landing for this thing that didn't work out the way I wanted it to work out,

I felt like I was incompetent. Like, here's this simple thing that I didn't work out the way I wanted that I paid a bunch of money for, and I had messed up. And now the money was wasted, and my mom doesn't like it. And so that's a judgment on me.

And so I felt incompetent. I felt like I was an apt, and that didn't feel good, because I was judging myself. And this is what's called a misattribution of emotion,

that when we feel bad inside, if you've never been bullied or been

a bully yourself, this is always what happens. When you feel crappy on the inside, the first person you can find, you're going to punch him in the face, either physically or verbally, because you feel crappy. And that's kind of what I did to my mom, because I felt bad.

So now she should feel bad. Her people hurt people. That's right. And we do this all the time. And it started out something, you know?

She was being chewed, and I had a case to be made. Like, anybody listening to this story is like, yeah, your mom probably shouldn't have said that.

“And so I believe this firmly that that's why I blurred out and said,”

I'm not ordering you flowers, because clearly, that was true. She was too judgmental. But now I have four beliefs. OK, I have the original one, plus three more. Ryan, which one is true?

All of them, none of them, who cares?

Here's the thing that's so important to realize about beliefs.

Beliefs are tools, not truths. Beliefs are tools, not truths. This is the most important thing I can convey. A fact is an objective truth. It is fact about reality.

It is so whether you believe it or not. The world is more like a sphere than it is round. And then it is flat. Sorry, flat earthers. It doesn't care what you think.

That is an objective fact. Faith is something else. Faith, on the other end of the spectrum, is a conviction that does not require evidence. God rewards the righteous. No evidence is required.

In between, faith and fact is a belief. A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence. A conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence. What makes beliefs so special, the reason they are so underutilized, is that they can change.

They can change. And so most of our problems in the world, interpersonal problems, personal problems, geopolitical problems come from this unfortunate situation,

and the thing that they think are fact are nothing more than beliefs,

which are changeable.

“And so now, when I had these four beliefs,”

I could look at them and say, "Uh, I've held onto this one, which says my mom is two-dimensional and hard to please." And that only has one way out. The only way that I could be happy is if my mom changed with that belief. The only one way, she has to change, so I could be happy.

Good luck. That doesn't often happen. The other three beliefs, well, now I could do something about that. They were in my control. And so that enabled me, it freed me.

It was liberating. It's a liberating belief. I could do something I couldn't previously do. I could have a relationship with her, because I could take care of my own garbage,

as opposed to insisting that she admit that she was wrong, which was not going to happen. And so this is just one quick example. You can do this with your interpersonal relationships with yourself, about how you think about the world,

with business challenges. I mean, the aspects of this go on and on and on,

I think it's incredibly powerful technique.

Okay, can I push on it a little bit? Please. Okay, so your mom is--

“By the way, changing my mind is the best thing ever, right?”

Because I'm all about changing beliefs. So I love it. This is my love language. I don't know if I'm going to change your mind. I just want to say what I'm honestly thinking.

Okay, so, and I don't even know how to phrase yet. We'll figure it out. Your mom is one of the four people that you dedicate the book to. So, I don't know if she's like the best example to use for this tool, because in life, you love your mom.

Unconditionally, she loves you unconditionally. I'm guessing. So, there are other people in life at times. I mentioned a boss or whatever the list wise story or others. But there are sometimes, we have to deal with people who are legitimately

narcissist. Not that I can factually say that. But, you know, you know these people. And we have to work with them or deal with them from time to time. And yes, we could try to turn around and we could try to put it more on us and be more reflective

and thoughtful like you are. I want to be around people like you by the way, like that are that reflective and thoughtful and curious. That's my tribe. That's what I'm talking about.

But, you are in the minority of the world by being that thoughtful of a person. We can all have those stop bubbles of the people that come up, that are not like your mom, that are not going to love you unconditionally, that are actually trying to do harm to other people that are very self-centered. You know what I'm saying?

Turn what about for those types of people that we've all encountered. Do we just say, "Ah, I'm just going to go the other way." I mean, what do you do? What do you do in that situation? Let's go back to what is a limiting belief.

A limiting belief is a belief that decreases motivation and increases suffering. So, where does suffering come from? What is suffering? Suffering is what happens in the gap between what is and what you want to be. So my suffering with my relationship with my mom was coming from the fact that I wanted

her to be different. That's where my suffering was coming from. Who said I have the power to change that? Why should I expect her to be different? So, this limiting belief, that person's a narcissist.

What's implicit in that belief is, and that's bad. Does it have to be bad? Give me one way that that person in your life who's a narcissist is not bad. The easiest is that person's a narcissist. Awesome.

Awesome. You know why? Because I don't want to be around the narcissist. I don't want to suffer anymore. I'm not expecting them to change.

Right? We have to understand. Everyone, even the narcissist, they are operating from the best tools they have. And so how do we measure love when we say, oh, I love you so much. What does that even mean?

I love you a lot. I love it. What does that mean? To me, love is measured by the benefit of the doubt. How much benefit of the doubt we give to somebody.

If you think about your, so for me, like your kids, you give them the whole world. Yeah. Yeah. Like someone you love more than them. It's my daughter.

“I remember the day when she was born, they let me wash her for the first time.”

I take her downstairs after my wife gave birth. And I was the first person to give her a bath and wipe off all the gunk. And I remember when I held her, I loved, I just felt this overwhelmingly feeling of adoration. Like I'm just crazy about this girl five minutes ago. She didn't exist.

And now like I love her more than anything. And I gave her complete total benefit of the doubt. Now, why do I love her so much? Isn't it because she does things for me?

She never sent me flowers, right?

So, yeah. I didn't do anything. You didn't make me feel good. I love her so much because I give her complete benefit of the doubt. Even though babies, you know, they poop, they need food all the time, they cry.

But I never said, oh, she's crying to annoy me. She's doing that to hurt me. That's stupid. That's that's really delusional. No, we give babies ultimate benefit of the doubt because it's the only tool they have

They're not doing it to a noise. And yet why is it that when those babies grow up and become adults, we don't give them benefit of the doubt. The narcissist in your life, the person who offends you, the person that hurts you, they just, that's the best tools they have.

That's the best tools they have.

“And given, you know, it doesn't mean you have to be with them.”

It doesn't mean you have to include them in your life. That's not the requirement. The requirement is, how do you figure out to stop suffering, to be at peace? That's what I want in my life. I want to be at peace.

As opposed to, constantly expecting things to be different than they actually are. And so that's what this technique does. It helps you find the belief in your life that reduces suffering. That's the whole idea. It doesn't mean you have to be with them.

It doesn't mean you have to forgive them per se. Although forgiving means you had to judge them in the first place. And so part of it is releasing that idea of needing to forgive in the first place because you can't forgive unless you have previously judged. And so this big revelation for me is that I was possibly judging everything.

Everything, right? Somebody cuts me off in traffic. I let jerk. There's a line at the burrito place. Oh my gosh.

The business thing didn't work out. The stock market goes down. The judging, judging, judging all day long. It's all we do is judge. Good, bad, good, bad, good, bad.

Expecting things to be different than they are. Why? These are all limiting beliefs. And all they do is make us suffer. They make us miserable.

Thank you for going along with that with me.

“Because I think what it is is, at least personally, it's an expectation problem.”

Exactly. I try to have high expectations for myself for the people that I love in my life, both how I treat them and how I respect them and love them and care for them and end them for me. But maybe there are others who I have the same expectations for them.

But that's not who they are. And that's me. It's causing you to suffer. Correct. We don't have relationship problems.

We have belief problems. It's your belief that something should be different than it is, that people, that's like asking my daughter to speak Russian. She can't speak Russian. Like what am I expecting?

She can't. She doesn't have that ability. So why should I have expectations that people should meet my expectations? Now, it doesn't mean that if an employee is not performing, then I have to keep them around. I can fire them.

That's okay. But I'm not going to suffer from that. Here was the requirement.

Here's what they did or didn't meet.

We may part way is that's totally fine, but it's not going to cause me suffering. It's not going to cause me this emotional angst. I'm not going to be ruminating about it. I'm going to let it go because it's a limiting belief to believe that things should be different than they are.

Okay. Can we take a slight off-ramp for a second? Sure. It applies to chapter three. Okay.

It's about better relationships. So I want to get to the secret to better relationships in a second. But we were introduced by mutual friend of ours, the guy named Shane Snow. I love Shane Snow. I've been lucky to have dinner with him a few times.

In New York City, he's been super helpful to me over the past 11 years. The first person I had on my list that I wanted to interview when I launched this podcast 11 years ago. He said you got to talk to near. He's the best.

He's the man we've done a lot together. We wrote together. Right. Before we start recording, you talked about these sessions. You would have with him and a few other people.

These writing sessions. Can you take me inside that room for a second? I know this is not part of what I'm doing off-ramp. I can't help it. I can't help it.

Can you take me inside that room of you and Tim, urban, and Shane. These other people I've had on my podcast, what it was like, why you did it and how it helped you? Yeah, so this has to do with my second book, Indestractable, how to control your attention and choose your life.

One of the techniques in the book that I discovered is this amazing power of focus through

a mutual goal. Even if that mutual goal is just a stay focus. It's incredible. I would work on my own. I would get distracted.

I would check email. I would do this. I would get that. But when I had other authors around me and what we would do, we would sit down. I'd prepare some coffee.

You know, I have a big old drink of coffee and sit down. We would write for 45 minutes and take a 15 minute break. Then write for 45 minutes, take a 15 minute break. We do that for three hours. Just sit down in your computers, type it away.

Yep. Just type it away. But we were with each other. So when you see the person next to you, Mark Manson, typing fiercely, getting his book done and shame was there and Tim Urban was there and we were all writing.

Not only is it inspiring and keeps you on track. And so this is actually a technique I recommend is to find what I call a focus friend. So somebody that you go to a coffee shop with or go to the company canteen and say, hey, you know what? I really need to focus.

Let's keep each other accountable. Let's just work next to each other. And just like working side by side and seeing that other person also working on the stuff they should be working on.

“So we would oftentimes say, okay, what are you working on?”

What are you working on? All right, go. And that would keep each other accountable.

And it turned out to be incredible.

Mark finished his second book.

Wow. Who could have thought at that time, you guys would all go on to be these big time famous authors? Were you like that at the time or no, you guys were just all trying to figure it out together?

Well, so I published my first book hooked and Mark had published Settle Art, Shane had published.

I think one or two books at that point and Tim was a head and published his book yet, but he was a pretty famous blogger at that point as well. So yeah, we weren't like super young in our careers, we're like getting going. Yeah, I just think there's a big power in putting yourself physically in rooms with high standard, get after it, hype, people.

And regardless of what you're striving to do, having a practice of that and you mentioned you want to get back to that when you get back to New York City of putting yourself in rooms with others who are getting after it. Do you respect and they respect you, that's just like a universal truth life. Yeah, no, there is definitely something to that.

There's also a dark side, which you can't help like compare and back to what we were saying earlier about expectations and suffering is that comparison is the thief of joy. And so sometimes it can be tricky to be like, wow, I'm in a room with people who are super duper successful.

“I was like the least successful author there at the time, so sometimes you have to put”

it in perspective.

And to know, you know, I'm falling a process about the outcome.

It's about the journey and turns out the best thing you can do is do the work. That's what I'm saying. I mean, now that's even more prevalent than ever, Instagram, social media in general, that you look out and you see the highlight reels of your friends of people you don't know of just the world in general.

And it is so easy, even for the most self-aware person in the world to start comparing themselves to other people's highlight reels. How do you manage that? I try and stick with the process. I think that's the best line of defense.

So I'm a big fan of time boxing as opposed to to do lists. And so I think what most people do, we're told that, you know, if a task is under two minutes, just do it, which I think it's terrible advice because every email takes less than two minutes. And so now you're spending your entire freaking day doing email. And then, too, to do lists are one of the worst things you can do for personal productivity

because there's no constraint, right?

You can always add more things to it to do lists.

And so you come home from work every day and you say, oh my gosh, I still have all these things I haven't done. I like to do lists. And you start saying stupid things like, oh, I'm no good at time management. Well, no, it's not that you're not good at time management.

This stupid technique you're using to do lists are dumb. They don't have constraints whereas a time box calendar, and this is a very old technique. I didn't make this up. It's actually the most well researched time management technique way, way better than to do lists to do lists have not been shown to be very effective at all.

It's much more effective than to do list is planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. This is called an implementation intention very well studied. The reason this is so much better is because the goal now becomes not to finish anything. Okay, this is super, super important.

The goal is not to finish anything. What does this crazy guy talking about? What do you mean? To do lists all the finishing stuff?

“Yeah, that's the problem because what do we do with the to do list?”

We measure our self worth by how many cute little boxes we check off. I used to do a task and say, oh, I forgot to put that on my to do list. I'd write on my to do list after I did it just so I could check it off. How stupid is that? We do it.

We do it. We do it. We do the urgent stuff. We do the fun stuff. We don't do the important stuff that we need to do to move our lives and career is for it.

Whereas when you have a time box calendar and this answers your question of how do you stop looking to your left and right and comparing and contrasting with everybody you know, you put the time to do the work. So by having it on your calendar, the reason the goal changes, it's doing the work, not finishing the work.

So why is it so much better than to do list? Because when you start on to do list, you work on it for five minutes. You say, well, let me, I have this question. Let me just go check this thing on Instagram. Let me answer an email.

Let me check my Slack channel and then what am I working on again? Oh, I totally forgot. Whereas the time box calendar, the only goal is to work on that task or do that thing for as long as you said you would without distraction. That's it.

Not finishing working on that task without distraction. Why? Because now you have a feedback loop. The biggest problem with stupid to do list is that there's no feedback loop.

“How long did that take you to you have to do a presentation?”

You have to do a write a blog post. You have to how long did it take? I don't know because you weren't tracking. Whereas when you say, OK, I have a presentation to give a need to be 30 slides long. And when I worked on it for one hour, I got three slides done.

OK, well, that means I need this many time boxes to finish the entire presentation. So now I have a feedback loop. I can start assessing how long things take for me to finish. So that's how you do it. You make time to do the work to turn your values into time.

That's the secret. What is the secret to better relationships? You write that you don't have relationship problems.

What do you mean by that?

So this is the exact what I was saying before about this relationship with my mom. The problem was not in the relationship. It's not that anybody had to do anything different. It's that I had the belief that she had to change so I could be happy. So I was stuck on one and only singular belief.

Well, guess what? I could be happy other ways. I could be happy if I realized any of the other three beliefs that we discussed earlier that she was not being too judgmental in heart to please. That I was being too judgmental in heart to please.

That I was being too judgmental in heart to please towards myself. Those three made me much happier than sitting there waiting.

“She has to apologize and admit she was wrong, right?”

Those didn't make me happy because it wasn't going to happen. So that's the belief problem. You don't have relationship problems. You have belief problems. Well, just to get a view in Julie, both living the turnaround.

This is a weird question. But how is it when you guys have a disagreement perhaps a fight? Are you away? Wait a second. I didn't do the turnaround.

Is that good? When you're both so knowledgeable of these tools? I guess what? You don't fight. Really?

You don't fight. You wouldn't Julie, don't fight. Why would you fight with your spouse? We're on the same team. You fight with your enemy.

Why would you fight with your spouse? No, let's say you have a disagreement about a parenting thing. Any decision, I mean, you know, you're living together. You do life together. So you're not the same person.

“So you have disagreements so I assume so how do you not fight?”

How do you make sure that you stay aligned on the same team? Put it in the same direction. Honestly, since we have started this technique, we used to fight or not fight. We used to have disagreements. Now we don't even have disagreements.

We collaborate. We collaborate because now this has become our habit. This has become what we just default to. If there's a very smart person, as much smarter than me, who has an opinion, who I respect deeply.

I love and admire. I would like fight with that person. Why would I even disagree with that person? I would collaborate with that person. It's like going to a mentor and saying, what do you think we should do with our daughter

as having this in this challenge? We've had challenges. That doesn't go away, okay? Life never gets easier. You get stronger.

That's a very important point. Life never gets easier. You just get stronger. Stuff keeps coming, right? But we don't suffer from it.

Now we collaborate through it. And that's a completely different mindset. We're not adversarial. There's no need to be, because I know she's operating with the best tool she has. She knows I'm operating with the best tools I have.

And because we have this understanding that if we see things different, that's an asset. Awesome.

“Now we celebrate the fact, okay, I think things should be this way.”

You don't think so. Amazing. A new perspective. Right? Because thinking about it like collecting that portfolio perspective as we talked about

earlier. I came in with one. It took work to get to the other three.

Now if I have a person who comes in with another perspective, amazing.

Now it's like collecting Pokemon cards. Right? You've got to get them all. Then now with more perspectives, I can pick the best one. So it's a game changer.

Wow. You guys should go on the road, teach that stuff. Seriously? You know what though? Here's the thing.

People don't want to hear this. What do they do? Why would you say that? My limiting belief at this very moment, and this is why I'm doing the best with, is that by sharing this stuff, I'm sharing what's worked for me.

I don't want to change people, right? It's hard enough to have changed myself, right? To be where I am today. And that's why I share in my work. When I try and change people, when I try and take this stuff on the road and say,

hey, here's the right way to be instantly people come up with excuses. They instantly want to share all their limiting beliefs. Well, you are a stand. My husband is my wife is that and she did this. And he did that little, and they'll come with the million reasons why they are the source

of the problem never me, hoping me, oh, definitely not me.

And so it doesn't go anywhere. So what I've tried to do, and this is why Julie is very private about this as well, is we try and figure out for ourselves. And if we learn some lessons along the way, we'll try and share them this way. And you ask, actually, excellent question.

Most people don't ask these kind of questions. Well, thank you. I appreciate that your work, though, is absolutely transformational. Correct. Thank you.

I appreciate it. Thank you. You would agree, though, that's correct. I don't think that's a belief. I think that's a fact that's transformational.

By definition, transformation means change. Hopefully, for the better, I hope my work's transformational. So you say you don't want to change people, but you do, right? I mean, that's what your work does. By definition, changes people if they read it, they listen to you, they listen to

this podcast. They actually think about it, they have a conversation with their husband or wife about it. They do some work. And then they try to use the tools to improve, to get better, to actually put it into

Why it's helped me long before we ever even talked, right? Which is the first time, is that it by definition is transformational, which then means it's changed me for the better, and lots of other people too. So in a way, you say you don't want to change people, but you do. You do change people in a great way.

Well, I appreciate that. That's very, very kind of you. I guess that's not my goal. When you say, if you're changing people, if people want to change, wonderful. That's fantastic.

It's benefited my life and it can help others. There's nothing better. When I wake up in the morning and again, email from someone, as I did this morning, saying,

here's how my life changed, it's amazing, it's a beautiful, beautiful feeling.

But that's not what I want, that's not what I'm expecting. If it happens, beautiful, that's a wonderful thing. What do you want then? I want to explain the world's for they can be made better, that's my mission, that's what I do.

“I do the explaining part, and this by the way, this happens with a lot of folks, right?”

Like, you know who the most successful people are, they're not the people selling you online programs about how to make online programs. That's not, that's not where the insights are. The insights are locked up in secret, right? Because there's no incentive to share it.

And frankly, like, knock on the wood, life has been good. We've started three companies to get other Julia and I have started three businesses. This is our latest business, this writing stuff, which I do for me. Frankly, I just, I like to write out, I like to process, I write books on stuff. I'm stuck on.

So when I was getting distracted all the time, I wrote indestructible to try to figure out how to manage distraction. When I learned about the power of beliefs and how to utilize them in my life, I wrote beyond belief. And if others benefit from that as well, that's fantastic.

But I'm not out there selling courses and that's not my, because I don't have to. Yeah, well, no, it's awesome.

Is it writing though such an amazing tool for both clarity and learning?

“That's why all leaders, whether it's public or not, should have some formal writing practice”

because it creates such clarity, it helps you understand what you really believe, the process of getting those messy thoughts out of your head onto the page. Like you guys were doing in that room together and like you and Julie do now, that is valuable as a tool, as a practice, as exist if you want to be a clearer, more informed thinker. It is the most underutilized secret weapon.

I could not agree more because you can't write clearly if you can't think clearly. And so writing forces you to sit down and put in text, right, in black and white, what you believe? Now, the next level, okay, so you can write, write, write, write, write, you can have a bunch of gobbledygook, which is the first level because there's even more gobbledygook in your

brain. So when you actually get it out on paper and write it down, then you can actually see what you believe. Then the next level, if you really want clarity, is to try and teach that when you try and give a talk, like turn a 350 page book into a 45 minute talk, and it's going to force you

to get real in terms of what really matters, not to just what's fluff. Yeah, I love it. Okay, you write a little bit about luck, luck isn't chance.

“This is a great chapter title, how do you see opportunities that others miss?”

So we're out here, we're all looking for the opportunities, we're all missing them. Then somebody else does something, you know, ah, I just got lucky. He just got lucky with that thing, right? So you write luck isn't chance though. So how do we see opportunities that others miss?

So this is the first power belief. There's these three powers of belief, the power of attention, which changes what you see, the power of anticipation, which changes how you feel, and the power of agency, which changes what you do. And so in the power of attention, the power to change what you see, what the resource literature

shows us is that having certain beliefs literally changes what you're able to see.

The back, we talked about the 11 million bits versus 50 bits of information that you're

able to process that tiny pinhole of attention that you can see reality through are beliefs shape what that pinhole is focusing on and how it's being filtered in our brain. So let me give you a good example. They did a study where they asked people who were self-described lucky or unlucky to do a very simple task.

The task was, take a newspaper, which the researchers had given them same newspaper, both groups. They said, would you please count the number of photographs in this newspaper, right? The number of images in this newspaper. The people who were self-identified as unlucky, people who thought that they believed that

they were unlucky, they took on average two and a half minutes to finish this task. The people who were self-described as lucky, who believed they were lucky, whether they were lucky or not didn't matter, it's people who believed they were lucky, they didn't take two and a half minutes, they took 11 seconds. Why the difference?

The difference was that in this experiment, every paper they gave had on page two, one

43 images in this paper, collector prize, it literally told the answer, the people who were

self-described unlucky, who believed they were unlucky, they never saw it.

They literally, their eyes glanced over it, their brains took in the formation, but never became part of their conscious awareness, it never made it into that pinhole of 50 bits of information per second. So to them, it didn't exist, whereas lucky people saw it, so they literally saw reality differently, because they believed that opportunities come, that things like this happen.

And so that's just a great example, in entrepreneurship, we see this all the time, Walter Isaacson in his biography of Steve Jobs talked about his reality distortion field, and that's exactly what this is, that entrepreneurs, they won, they tend to be way more optimistic, they believe that lucky things happen to them, and so they see opportunities, you know, to be an entrepreneur, you've got to see things differently, I mean, you see $100 bills

“on the ground when everybody's walking over them, right, you have to see this opportunity.”

And so that is driven by beliefs that you believe you can will things to change. >> Pro Noia, right, what's that? Have you talked about Pro Noia before, did I hear this? Learn this from you? >> Oh, not for me, but I know the phenomenon. >> You know, Pro Noia is going to have.

>> Pro Noia is this belief that the world is out to spiring, right, to treat you well, that good things are going to happen. I know I cut you off, so I apologize to that, I'm going to get back to this in a second, but near, it actually maybe think of a very personal story about a few days before my wedding day with my wife Miranda.

She's one of the things I love most about her is her, she shares this trait with my dad. If that is being insanely optimistic all the time, love it. And so part of our wedding was planned to be outside, some of the reception stuff, so we look at the weather forecast, and it showed it was going to rain. Which, you know, put the damper on a wedding, if you're going to do some of that outside,

you got to move and you all the stuff, and she, I'll never forget it, because we say it all

the time now, Miranda looks me and she said, with our luck, it's going to be a bright, beautiful, sunny day for all of our guests and our family with our luck. So many people in the world say with my luck, and then they follow it by something that is bad or negative.

“And I remember that it was just a few days before we got married that I was like, man, that's”

the right woman. What a way to go through life. And now we say it all the time. We both say to each other, our children say it with our luck, now I love it. That doesn't mean it's going to come true, but it doesn't mean we're right, but it

means we believe in Pronoia. We believe in that. We've had our share of adversity like every other family, like every other couple, we've all have it, right? It's coming.

We know it, but this belief in this mindset of saying with our luck, fill in the blank of something that's extremely positive, it is so much more enjoyable to go through life with a person who looks at the world like that. It's so nice, man. It's contagious too.

It's contagious to the people around you. So this idea of with our luck, something great is going to happen. Oh, I'm just telling you, man, it's contagious, and it's fun, and it's so much more enjoyable to walk through the world with people like that. It's so true.

And here's the ironic thing. Is that it becomes true. So my family does something similar. We say whenever something good happens, we say, ah, everything good happens to us, right? We just, we just celebrate, right?

Like, there's no line at the T.A.A. saying, hey, everything good happens to us. The food was good. Oh, you see, we found this school restaurant, everything good happens to us. Like, I had little things, big things, everything good happens to us. Now, do more good things happen to us than bad things?

I don't know. Maybe, maybe not, who cares? Beliefs are tools, not truths. Beliefs are tools, not truths.

So you can choose to believe in, and here's what's crazy, when you believe those things, you

notice them more. So to you, your life actually does seem like it's magical. It does seem blessed.

“It does seem like you're always lucky, because that's what you are letting through those”

50 bits of information. You're seeing life through that lens. And so what this study demonstrated with people counting the photos was that they did become more lucky because they thought they were more lucky. So they saw opportunities that others missed.

It's similar with, maybe you have the science behind this with gratitude. So my thinking is, if you're always looking for opportunities to say, thank you to somebody, whether you write them notes, you text them, you call them, you say it to them to their face. Having this mindset, my friends, Brooke Codgaren, Stokes, they have thankful Thursdays.

But when I notice, it's not only on Thursdays when they write like three hand-written notes to people, they're grateful for every Thursday. It's not only Thursdays, that they're more grateful. It's every day. It's all the time of regularly saying, I'm the type of person who lives with gratitude.

I say thank you to people all the time. We have a contest with my girls is, how many times can you say thank you when we stand in

Because there's like four or five to people that work on your bowl or your breeder, whatever you're going to get. And you say, you want white rice or brown rice, brown rice, they do it. Thank you. Okay, the next person puts the chicken.

Thank you. And so just this idea of saying thank you regularly, it becomes your default setting. It opens your eyes out into the world to like, you just see more good things happening because you're constantly looking for opportunities to say thank you. It's again, it's another cool way to go through life instead of saying, oh, that person

messed up or they did that thing bad. You're looking for opportunities for people doing well so that you can thank them. That's absolutely right. And in fact, we know in a business setting that having gratitude, and I learned this from Tina Selle, it's Stanford.

This is called provoked luck that they did a study on salespeople. And they found that the salespeople who show gratitude more often, they found that 60% of their opportunities were provoked luck, meaning that 60% of the opportunities that came

“their way, they provoked the lucky thing that happened, so how does that happen?”

How do they create luck? How do you provoke luck? So something is simple as sending a note of gratitude. And this is something that I try and do all circumstances, right, if somebody makes me feel

just a little bit of happiness, never hold back kind of compliment, never, ever hold back

kind of compliment. They're free. You get so much back from them. That's not why you should do it. But it just turns out that that's the fact of life that you just get so much back.

How does that happen? You know, you write a note, Tina Selle does a, she writes, thank you notes compulsively. I just, hey, thank you for this, a little reminder, a post-to-note, thank you for that. And she gives us a great example of, she wrote a thank you note one time to somebody. And the thank you note landed on someone's desk, and think about it, right, you're sitting

at your desk, and you've got all these things to do, and here's a thank you note. And then to the right of that, thank you note, is your laptop where you've got an email about a new opportunity that's come up? Well, who is going to get the call about that opportunity? Well, you're thinking, it's right there, oh yeah, Ryan's top of mind, Ryan's such nice

guy. So maybe that, no, wow, what a sweetheart. Yeah, like you know, I'm going to call Ryan about that opportunity.

“You're just top of mind more often, and that's how you provoke luck to come back at you.”

Near, there's a million more things we can get to.

We touched on just a little bit of your book, I love it. I'm grateful for you that you sent it to me. I want to close with one more question. Since we started personal, we've touched on personal moments throughout. I want to end with a personal question.

So fast forward to one year from today, okay, this is called the champagne question. You and Julie, I don't know if you drink champagne or not, it doesn't matter. You and Julie, though, let's say for the instance of the question are pop and bottles. You guys are celebrating like crazy. What are you celebrating?

Wow. What are we celebrating? A year from now. One year. I think that comes to mind is that my daughter's going to college.

And so we'll be celebrating setting her off to school. Yeah, that little baby grew up. How do you feel about that? I'm going through the exact same thing right now. Yeah, how old are your kids?

We have four, the all being college next year. Wow. How four are going to college next year? Yeah, yeah. Holy smokes.

So one of the byproducts of changing my relationship with my mom is that I started changing my relationship with my daughter, these two incredibly important women in my life. Because love was measured from the benefit of the doubt. And so when I started regiving my daughter, Beth, the doubt, that a few years ago, you know, we were kind of having difficulty, we were arguing, this was before I started writing

beyond belief. And I learned about these techniques. And then expecting the grace from my daughter that she would give me benefit of the doubt, push me to figure it out with my mom. Because I needed to give her the benefit of the doubt as I would want my daughter to

give me benefit of the doubt that I know that in my shoes, I'm doing my best. I'm not perfect. I make mistakes. It's the tools I got. And you know what?

My mom is well. And you know what? My daughter too.

“And everybody, even the narcissist, asshole, person who's all just trying our best, right?”

The tools we have available based on our beliefs based on our history. And so, that completely changed our relationship. We just, for my birthday, my birthday was a few weeks ago. We went and skiing together. And let me tell you Ryan, the entire three hour card ride up, the entire three hour card

ride back. We were having a conversation. We were just chatting. We'd be wrote an article together in the car, we had an idea for like a blog post. We wanted to do together.

She's in the writing as well.

And it was just amazing because like, you always love your kid as soon as your kids

born. You love them. But if you do your job right and things fall into place and you're very lucky, you like them. And that's a game changer, right?

You go from loving them to, I like you. Like I was sitting across the table when we had dinner after we went skiing together.

And that's just, gosh, is there anything better? Then frankly, I don't know if I would've gotten there, had I not learned these techniques of seeing my beliefs differently. Oh, man, that's as good as it gets. Thank you for sharing the books called Beyond Belief, the Science Backway, stop limiting

yourself and achieve breakthrough results.

“Like your other books, man, I think you're getting better and your past ones were”

awesome. And so I've been a follower of your work. I'm so glad and grateful for sharing, for connecting us. I know this will not be the last time we talk. And I'm pumped, man, to continue our dialogue as we both progressed near things so much.

And anytime, you call me anytime and we'll, we'll come as a rate as we've been sucked

on others and kids together anytime. I love it, man. Thank you so much. It is the end of the podcast club.

“Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club.”

If you are, send me a note, Ryan at learningleader.com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with near aisle. A few takeaways from my notes, beliefs are tools, not truths.

The most powerful ones aren't the ones you can prove.

They're the ones that help you live better. And then you do not have relationship problems. You have perception problems, change what you believe about someone and you can change what you're capable of seeing in them. And then lucky people aren't necessarily lucky.

They see opportunities others miss because their beliefs have trained their attention to look for them. With our luck, it's going to be a beautiful bright sunny day. It's so nice to be around people like that. And then the belief that once served you may now be your biggest obstacle, the goal isn't

to find the right belief and hold it forever. It's to stay curious enough and to keep revising. Near really made me think throughout this entire conversation, I hope you found it useful. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing the spread the message and

“telling a friend or two, "Hey, you should listen to this episode of the learning leader”

show with near aisle. I think it'll help me become a more effective leader because you continue to do that." And you also go to Spotify, Apple, podcast, subscribe to the show, rate it five stars hopefully, write a thought for you by doing all of that you are giving me the opportunity to do what I love in a daily basis and for that.

I will forever be grateful. Thank you so so much. Talk to you soon. [MUSIC]