Your first conception, most famous conception you had originally, publicly at least, was the chimp paradox. If people aren't familiar with the chimp model, how do you introduce them to that? I'll try and keep this up soon, but I'm going back 30 years now. So, yeah, I'm getting old, very old.
And as a young doctor, I suddenly started realizing I was talking to two individuals in therapies where, and again, I'm making this very black and white. One of the individuals I talked to was very rational and common sense and would engage me. The other was highly emotional and usually very irrational and distorted in a way of perceiving things themselves, the world of the people. But I could get the one that was irrational to become rational by talking and going through things.
So, that intrigued me that I took people in the room and some people, they were close, some people were miles apart. So, then turning to the neuroscience and looking at the brain, there were circuaries in the brain that are just automatic outside of our control. And as a psychiatrist, obviously, as a doctor, I'm learning also the therapeutic background we have as a bassist. We're going right back to Freud.
And you think, yeah, he was the genius of his time and he recognized the drives and the instincts. But what can we see now at the 1990s was the functional M.I. Scammers came in. And now we see, actually, these parts of the brain are not just drives and instincts.
There's an entire system that thinks and interprets and makes these interpretations without permission and makes decisions without permission, often based on the drives and instincts. So, there's this amazing machine that's trying to run our lives at the same time as we're trying to impose our values and the way we want to run it. So, I was intrigued with this. So, you mentioned wait at the beginning.
And I often use that as the best example. How many people get up in the morning saying today, I'm going to eat healthy, the right amounts, and at the end of the day, they say, again, it hasn't happened. And they were saying, why is it that this is happening? Because it's crazy.
And then they attribute it to willpower. Well, the newest science teaches something different. It shows that there's an entire system based on survival, which thinks and decides, and it's also impulsive and it looks for instant gratification. So, when you're offered something you like, say, don't know top peanuts and you think, I've eaten enough, this system says, no, no, we've got a little bit more, because it doesn't see what's coming.
So, I was intrigued. I spoke to a omitted specialist, The Greer Tapes, I'm very much an animal lover. So, as part of The Greer Tapes, the humans are one under five. What they said to me, simplifying it, was looking at the guerilla, the orangutan, and the bonobo, they think their brains operate differently towards.
But the chimpanzee doesn't, it's the same. It's the same thinking interpreting emotionally based system. So, I started looking and I started recognizing watching chimpanzee behaving human. There was such similarities.
However, when we turned to rationality and logic, we changed that behavior and we become very different. So, what I discovered, or sort of light bulb for me, I'm sure this has discovered it. What I really for me discovered was, you've got this inner chimp system that we've inherited alongside you as a human. And we've all got it.
And depending on how strong it is or how we learn to manage it, is how often it will present. And that became more and more prominent when I was working with individuals to say, you didn't think that, that is the chimp system. Now, that got published in 2018 to show the chimpanzee and the human had the same kind of thinking systems, which separates us from the rest of the years. But by then, I didn't want to wait that long, because I think it was blatantly obvious.
I know we have to give evidence. So, I started using it on my medical students, at Sheffield Medical School. At that point, as undergraduate dean, I was working a lot with youngsters between 18 and 23. So, I started explaining, you do have this chimp system.
They loved it. They really got this. They said, I can recognize when I'm in human mode. And they started in teachers there.
So, it became part of what I did with them. And we talk about what are the drives that are strong in your chimp, because the chimp brain is unique to the person again. So, it became an entertaining way of starting to understand what you're sharing your brain with. This incredible system, which thinks and acts for you, with a major backup system.
So, when I started doing the simplified neuroscience, the students were not king on the neuroscience, because it was too complex. They kept saying, make it so practical, which I wanted to do. So, they all started giving their chimps a name. And this went on for a good 10 years before, I effectively got catapulted into the line right with sport, which was a sidetrack.
And then it became public. And it just went a bit viral. And, you know, I started meeting people saying, they asked me, the chimp man, I'm proud to say I'm the chimp man. But I think the key for me was, I saw transformation of people who started recognizing the difference between themself and the machine.
So, that's why I called it the chimp paradox. And I wrote the chimp paradox, probably over about four years trying to refine it. I didn't want to get it wrong. So, I put out when I thought it's of course I can get it to explain, this is your brain and how it works.
There were, I kept being tested to go into more detail. And that's why it took me 10 years to actually think, okay, we'll do it again. So, I rewrote effectively and called it a path through the jungle. So, path through the jungle is more with, it's got the evidence base, the research behind it.
I know it in America, the chimp paradox didn't take off. And I know it was criticized because there was no evidence. So, I thought they're right to say that. So, I've now given 400 references.
And I'm pleased to say it was assessed by a Cambridge neuroscientist department. And they said it's sort of on. So, there is a writer from Cambridge University's website for those who are academically interested to say that they were saying that, yeah, this is an amazing model. And it's very detailed to link it to neuroscience.
Why would it have been useful in our past to have this very reactive setup inside of our minds? It's still useful now. When we look at, I'll talk in terms of the model, when you're using the human circuits, the transmitter systems and the speed at which they conduct are relatively slow. So, when we think rationally, we think steadily, whereas if something dramatic happened where our life is at risk, we need to think quickly and act impulsively almost instinctually.
So, the chimp system can do that for us. So, in a serious emergency, it will know what to do. So, it generally uses fight-flight freeze because that's what the amygdala hands to it as part of that system that's running. So, if you were, say, with someone who suddenly drew a knife, instinctively, you'd know what to do.
Whereas, if you had to think rationally, those split seconds could cost you a deal. So, but you can imagine this in many circumstances where there's an apparent danger we act very instinctively in our machine takes over. And it's pretty accurate. So, it's not that it's a bad system at all.
And people give this my inner chimp bit. And one of the elite athletes I worked with once said, how do I kill my chimp? And I'm thinking, you've really not got this because my chimp system is my best friend. Because as long as I understand what he's trying to tell me, what is the ways communicating, then I can use that and work as a team.
And there's evidence, strong research, evidence on this, that when we use a logical basis to our thinking and an emotional instinctive intuitive basis, it works best on their own. It don't work as well. So, I keep saying the chimp's the best friend you've got hence the paradox. You know, but you can make it your worst enemy.
If you're going to start saying, you know, I hate myself, I hate the fact that I eat too much, I hate the fact that I lose my temporary. That's not really very helpful at all. The approach is wrong. You need to do it for my opinion.
You need to be saying, if I'm getting annoyed, what is this part of my brain trying to tell me? You know, why is this evoking this emotion? And what can I do to stop this? And that's what I started doing with patients back in the 1990s.
I started applying it in my clinical practice. And I'm pleased to say I got some amazing results. I don't attribute that to me. I don't.
I think the person is the one who gets the results. They get insight and they worked with me. All I can do is help them and catalyze what they're understanding is, but the people who grasp and understood themselves and the way the machine was working and got the chimp and what I call the computer on board, they started saying it's life changing. It's really changed me because what they're doing is saying, I'm now in charge of the machine and then making it run and using it when it kicks a bit to say, what is it you're doing?
And they say, this is great. And that's what I tried to do. I said, it's a different approach. I know it's a bit out of the box, but I wanted it based on neuroscience because that's my academic background as a professor in psychiatry.
I'm neuroscience based. It seems to me that there's broadly two buckets of people that you've worked with. You've sort of worked with the human mind at its best and the human mind at its worst as well. What is different?
Are there many fundamentals that are the same for trying to get Chris Hoy to be in flow state during the Olympics as they are trying to deal with somebody who is highly dysfunctional and who doesn't really like the inside of the texture of their mind? Do you have different approaches when it comes to that or is it broadly the same physics? No, it's what I said at the beginning, which I know people kind of get frustrated with me because I do a lot of these like magazines or they tell you might say, give us five tips for our viewers or and I can't do that. So I often warn people don't ask me because I can't do that because it does boil down to uniqueness.
So I can only talk about people I've worked with who've gone public and said, please use me if you want to. I'll use Chris Hoy. I mean, I've known Chris 20 years now and it was an absolute pleasure and privilege to work with him. He's a real gentleman.
So when I met him, he was in a great place. He's never had any emotional disturbances in life of any catastrophic kind. So he's a very even balanced, very rational man. But what Chris said is, I believe he's insightful.
If I work with you, you can explain how my mind works and I'll be able to get focus on the track for the event I want to do. So why did his work with him and said, tell me what you're thinking is now. What is it you're trying to do with this event? What would help?
What wouldn't? And we worked to pattern out how we plan a mental program for his event. So clearly it's purely on what Chris did with me. But what I found is his chimp is a gentleman too.
So the chimping Chris is so close to Chris that you don't get these outbursts. You just don't get them. But Chris would always tell me, I know the difference. So even when he said, when I go emotionally there's a risk.
So we did a lot of good fun work, incredibly good, I go on students and I mentor. Great. So he's one extreme of a balanced individual who said, how do I optimize? I'll get that to what I do.
Whereas probably the most popular person I work with, Ronnie and Sullivan, who came to me very dysfunctional and has a really large chimp. And Ronnie says, tell the world everything. I'm not going to do that. All I can say is a fantastic guy that I really like and get on with.
We've worked together all the 10 years and his chimp's very active. Ronnie himself is subjected to this. So he's trying to learn how to manage it. So Ronnie, as a human being, is very, very different to his chimp.
So I can see even in interviews when Ronnie's answering, I want his chimp's answering. And so with him, it's more perfecting the skill. And I can say that I've worked in 10 years and it's a privilege and he's great fun. That over those 10 years as he approaches the world championships in Snooka, which is one multiple times, each year he's improved.
And that's a really key point for working with people that all of us can get the skill. Some of us are going to pick it up very quickly. So I've worked with people who transform themselves within weeks, months, every light bulb moments, but they put all the time in effort. And whereas other people, it's really tough to get the skill, you know, it's no different to say learning to sing.
We can all sing, but some are brilliant to start with and get even better. And some of us struggle, but we can still improve a bit. And emotional skills to me are exactly the same. You have a starting point.
I don't know what potential people have until I work with them. So I get someone who can start to square one in a really bad place and then do fantastic in a great place. I actually saw someone this morning, I've worked with on and off over 10 years. And she's in an amazing place now, but didn't start there, but really worked on it and increased the skill.
So it's great to see that. How should we best understand our emotions? Okay, because I know what you're asking is great. However, I just see you're getting frustrated with me.
However, it's like saying, teach me Italian, if I can't speak it, then teach me in the next 10 minutes. You think, where do we start? You're very basic stuff. So I think the answer for me, this is only me, to best understand is start going steadily.
It's not a promotion, but it's why I wrote a path for the jungle, because I think it takes you through 27 units. So start and build up so you learn things gradually and you practice them. So I give exercises. So again, one of the early starting points is understanding the difference between you and your brain working.
If you can see the difference and you recognize, I know who I am now, that in itself can lift self-esteem phenomenally, because you stop muddling yourself up with a machine that's overpowering you. So that concept is not as easy as it sounds to grasp. You can get it logically, but when you, the day you actually get it conceptually, you can't go back. You suddenly realize, I've been hijacked or I'm being swayed by a machine, not me.
And I'm very different to that machine. So that's the starting point. Then you go on, I would then go on two emotions and say, can we start seeing them differently? Can we see them as messages that are coming from the chimp or computer system to give you an alert or a question?
So anger, for example, not every time, but anger can be that you've not processed something from the past. You need to go back and process it. It's still underpinning the way you're approaching the world of people. However, it may be nothing to do with the past.
It could be current belief systems that I can't deal with life if it doesn't go the way I think it is, and that can create anger. The next one can be unrealistic expectations of other people or yourself, and that can create anger. It can even be a feeling of rejection. So you're going into relationships or meeting anybody every day with a defence position, and that will lead to a potential anger which is more of a defence mechanism.
So you can see anger is just an emotion. For me, the emotion is not too important. The fact you're getting a message is what's important. So anger, despondency, frustration, that's what your chimp brain is choosing to use.
And some of them use the same emotion to alert you, and it's non-appropriate emotion. So I would start saying, let's look at emotions differently, and let's understand the differences between them. And that's why I spent two units I've agreed in the path through the jungle to try and say, look, really, at the very early stage, let's understand what's happening here before we go on to start perfecting things like values and communication. Let's understand what our emotions are.
You mentioned about how self-esteem can become degraded if people are unable to work through this conflict that's going on inside of them. Why is that? How do you conceptualise just self-esteem as a topic? And do you see this tension as one of the most common or one of the common reasons why people's self-esteem can become a little bit eroded?
I think for me, the main reason people have loved self-esteem, I'll give the example of eating. We could use it, anger, we could use it, anything. If the person says, I'm going to set off today and I know my values, all right, I'm going to treat people with respect. I'm going to remain calm and collect because that's who I am.
Then they're defining themselves, and they send that to me setting off. If they now go out and oveate, what they're now saying is not, I'm a greedy person, or I'm a weak will person, that's now so derogatory and causing self-esteem to drop. And that's not scientifically accurate. That's not accurate.
What is accurate is to say, I've set up with intention of doing the following, and now this system has now impulsively started eating. Now, before we get people listening to us, but excuse, it's not an excuse, but you're still 100% responsible. You can't just go that much and pay it too much. I don't accept that, all right?
I say, oh, no, no, no, you have to manage the chimp. So you can't get angry with someone and blame the chimp. It's not a excuse, blame. That's what I say is your job is to say, apologize, and then say, okay, this is the difference in esteem.
I know who I am, what I can't do is manage the machine well, and all of us struggle with that. What I need to do is learn to manage the machine, upskill on it, and I could take me some time. That means you know who you are still, and you're not muddling yourself up with a machine and starting to come up with silly interpretations such as, I'm an angry person. There isn't an angry person unless you really believe that's who I want to be, which is nonsensical.
So I do review people, and I've asked when I'm working with them, if they come in and say, I got really angry this way, can I say, no, you didn't, unless you're telling me that's what you want to be. And then they say, no, no, I don't want to be angry. And I say, in other words, you've got hijats. So let's look at why you've got hijats, and let's give you the skill to manage the hijack and calm the chimp down.
So it is subtle, but it's, I don't know if you can grasp what I'm saying, I'm admittedly clear. Absolutely, yeah, yeah. What's interesting is this might be the wrong word, almost like a depersonalization of you, who you are at your core, and things that you do, the things that you do. Okay, yeah, the word is dissociation.
You're dissociating, you're saying to yourself, this is me, and now I've got this chimp machine, along with the computer, this machine in my head. So I'm not going to go forward, but if something happens and it provokes that, and it overtakes me, I now present to the world my chimp, or I present a mixture of me in the chimp. And the ideal for me is to always present yourself to the world, but get your chimp and computer as well, because they're not bad things. Our chimps can bring colour to our life.
So if we have a chimp that's got a sense of humour, which they do have, because our sense of humour is in the chimp system, not in the humour, all right? So the chimp will bring us a marathon humour. That's why the chimp believes something we say, it's why punch lines work, and then it realises that's ridiculous, and it calls us to laugh. So there are actually three different circuits that are all based in the chimp system.
So if we didn't have that, we probably would be pretty boring, because we wouldn't laugh. So you're saying, let's get on board, but you're the person who says, these are my values, these are my beliefs, these are how I want to behave in life. And you've set that, so I work a lot on that with people, and say, now we know who you are. Don't worry if you get hijacked and you present something different to the world, just recognise we've got work to do, and we're going to learn that skill.
And it will happen. You'll always get chimp hijacks. Tell me if I ramble too much, because I get asked a lot about, do you have a chimp? And my chimp wrote the books, you know, it decided to collude with me, because I think it was tired of telling me.
But as a young man, yeah, I experienced a lot of anxiety, a lot of frustration, a lot. And I couldn't work this out, but as a psych, I'm thinking, when you need to work it out, you're the person who's going to be helping people. You can't do that, it's a critical second to help myself. But then I realised that, yeah, I can be honest, I have a chimp.
Most of the time I know how to manage it, and it's on board and needs my best friend. So for me, one of the things I do is be sarcastic with it. I don't know why my chimp finds that funny. So if something upsets my chimp system and I experience frustration or whatever, I do say to the chimp, can we just answer the question?
Do you want me to be upset for an hour, a week, the rest of my lives? And for some reason, my chimp gives me a major laugh, something's okay, it's got get a life, get perspective. And we're okay. But I've worked out that that works for me 99% of the time.
There will be a time when my chimp hijacks me, and then I'll have to say, okay, I got hijacked, because I'm not different to anybody else. But I need to learn again, which everyone does. What are my trigger points? So trigger points for me where I know I'm vulnerable to losing this management of the chimp would be bullying, seeing someone intimidated, my chimp constrain it in.
So I have to be careful in situations where I say, okay, I've got it, let me do the deal. You don't speak. It seems like a real art form to be able to integrate this, the chimp with the human mediated, you know, in the middle. And that chimp human computer relationship seems like a very delicate dance, because as you say, if it was just raw rationality and pure cerebral horsepower and cognition all day, it would probably be moving off a lot of the color and a lot of the joy as well from the things that we do.
And it is, I think a lot about finding that balance. I've heard you talk about ghost emotions. What are those? Yeah.
Yeah, sometimes we learn, learn a behaviour, and it doesn't belong in real time. So a simple example is we can get a bad experience of public speaking. Now that would evoke most people's chips to start getting anxious. So the computer will always come to the rescue if you look at what the leaves and memories you've got.
So we can tamper with the computer. We can't do much with the chimp. It's the nature of the animal. We have to manage it.
The computer we can tamper with. But let's say I have a bad experience doing public speaking. It's very likely I've learned to become anxious. So when I stop myself, why are you doing this?
It's to learn behaviour. It's a ghost emotion. It doesn't belong there. It's not actually what I want to experience or indeed should be experiencing.
So ghost emotions are something that hang on inappropriately. They can be because we haven't processed but it can just be a behaviour way. You think let's change that behaviour. So I find a lot of people carry emotions and it's just something they've learned to do.
So you can desensitise them to situations and ignore the ghost. There's a difference. The reason I brought that in is, and again, this is the devil in the details, some emotions are scars. They're not ghosts and it's very important to get the difference between them.
So when I work with people, if you've got a scar, so you went through a really bad breakup and most people don't come out on scarred. So you've got some scarring from the relationship breaking up, whatever it is. And you can't process it. So I keep saying to people sometimes, I was trying to process it and you can do it maybe to a later stage, but if it was processed, it's a scar.
And there's a different way of dealing with that. So we have to, we deal with that, not by ignoring it, by actually managing it. So it can be to talk it through again, because that helps. Even though we know it won't resolve it, it will actually take pressure off.
So some scars, obviously the world I'm in, we mentioned sport, but I work a lot with your public and generally speaking, the people I made are not in a good place. So I do work with a small number of parents who have lost their children. And that must be excruciating. And it is for them.
And my approach and other people might have a different approach is to say to them, it is an emotional scar. It's not something you're going to get rid of. It's not something you'll even come to terms with. I think it's something you've got to manage, and accept that there will be some terrible days ahead, but there'll be some good days.
But that's a scar for me. So I don't try to remove it, because I don't think you can. Yeah, it's very, it's the more detail that you apply to looking at the inside of your own mind, the more you realize there are very subtle nuances between different things, whether that be the ghosts or the scars. What do you mean when you talk about stabilizers of the mind?
Yeah, sometimes the mind can become emotionally up and down. So I'll try and give a simple example to bring the point home. Let's say I do a lot of public speaking, and let's say that I go to an audience and I'm trying to get across everything I do. And it doesn't come over.
And I think I'm not getting there to do it. I'm fumbling with everything I do. I might leave that hole in my chimps unstable because it's saying, you know, you didn't do a great job there. And maybe I made a joke that was near the knuckle and it was meant in sarcasm to make them laugh, and it didn't come over.
And I think, I'll cheer you up, I'll be fenced someone. So my chair will beat me up for this or try. So I stabilized my mind by saying to the gym, hang on, you did your best. You live by your values.
It's not that you didn't try. You know, you did everything you could. You got it wrong. Or you did it, you weren't on form today, which no one can be every day.
So get a life. And then I would bring perspective. A week from now, nobody's even bothered. The only person that I remember is you, you know.
So perspective is a stabilizer of the mind. And sort of a lot of people, for me, it's a massive one. So again, you hear people commonly saying, will this matter in an hour, in a week, and a year. And for a lot of situations in really most situations, it doesn't matter.
So that's an example of one stabilizer of the mind. I love broadening time horizons like that. And it's something that I found myself really poor at doing in my past that the decision that I was making right now was going to be the decision that I would have to live with for the rest of my life, that this purchase of a car or this move to a new city or this change of a house or this makeup or breakup of a relationship or whatever it would be. It's like, when you realize that most things are time bound and most things are subject to changing future, it helps to release a little bit of the pressure.
And the same thing public speaking or a bad podcast. I do a bad podcast. I've got two more to do this week. And in the years time, there's going to be 150 more released.
You can't have a good podcast every single time, but you do it. And it helps to release and relinquish some of that obsession, I think, that we have and the pressure that we apply to ourselves. And I think you're demonstrating when I start working with you to say, let's look at what we mean by this chimp system. What does it work?
What can't it do? One of the things it can't do when our blood supply goes into the chimp system, which is the orbital frontal cortex, just above your eyes, when that lights up, it cannot get in perspective. It struggles with perspective. And it can't bring reality to a situation because it's very emotionally based the way we say things.
So if you have your bad podcast, it struggles with this. It starts catastrophizing. And it wants to go over and over. It doesn't actually want a solution.
It just wants to get rid of the problem. And there's a sort of difference. Whereas if we can train your brain to move to human mode, this is what I'm doing by my computer coming to the rescue saying, as a human being, I've got rationality and saying, you know, and I've got values. So you're bringing which the human system does, which is the top of your head, we see that lights up, you now bring perspective in.
So the complexity of the brain is that the human can't take the chimp on. If there's a fight between these two, the chimp will always win, because it has transmitters that can actually annihilate the human from functioning. So we get hijacked, literally emotional hijacks where people act out, and they can't do it. And people say, that means I'm doomed, because my chimp's always going to win.
But this is the subtle degree I've explained in the books that the way the chimp works, it knocks the human out. But it must necessity, they say, turn to the computer and scan, which we see it literally scanning the computer and getting advice, beliefs, experiences, intuition, it gets masses of information within a split second, which then advises the chimp, which it has to follow what to do. So if we program our computers well, that's the secret of managing the mind. So we program them so that when the chip knocks us out, our computer takes over and manages the chimp.
So there is a way around this, it's not doom and gloom. But if you don't program the computer and keep it running, then the chimp will definitely take control. A couple of words that you've been using a lot throughout this conversation, I want to dig into values, beliefs, drives, what, how do those fit together, how do we know what our true drives are, et cetera? Drives are in it compelling, um, emotions feelings we get, the biologically driven.
So there's a drive to eat, and everybody has that drive. So it's exceptional not to have an eating drive. All right, most people, it's extremely strong as it's a survival drive, it's common sense. There's a, there are lots of drives, there's a drive for security.
So and it's where you turn to fulfill that drive. So we talk to teenagers all turn to their peer group for security. We've explained that's got traumatic results at times. But if we turn for security to our environment, that will help the chimp, I'm not necessarily a human.
Our humans turn to security by looking within ourself and our resources, and what we think we can manage in life. So a human for security doesn't go on the environment, it may help, but it won't help in overall. The chimp will look on the environment, but getting the right environment, that doesn't help with the mind. So you often get a great environment, the chimp still, the human's still agitated saying, I don't feel.
So other drives, the sex drive is very powerful, and obviously that leads to a lot of difficulties with a lot of people, because they can't manage it, and the chimp can take over, so it's nothing in the computer, we're getting to difficulty. So drives are compelling things that get us out of our seats without having to do anything. They just make us move. First is the drive, the drive for first.
There's lots of them, the drive to be with the people. If you move on to beliefs, these are now what your experiences are, what you've been taught. So a belief, for example, again, I'm taking extremes. Let's say I believe that all people are good, and they're nice.
I'm leaving myself very vulnerable to those I know will take advantage of me. So I'll be taken in, I'm naive. If I have that extreme belief, if I have the extreme belief that all people are not to be trusted, that can have repercussions of me feeling very isolated, and not trusting someone, so I don't get any depths of friendships or interpersonal relationships. So you have to look and say, what are your beliefs?
So if you have a belief, which I push a lot, that one in five believe, and that's based more on reality and the research that's given that about one in five people love you regardless, all right? They're pretty deluded really, because even when you're not in the right, they'll still believe you, all right? One in five people criticise you regardless. Unfortunately, they're often the most vocal, so unfortunately, the social media, these are the main bulk of people coming in, and that's really sad that we have one in five people who are quite caustic.
And three out of five are reasonable decent people, where you're up on what you do. So they're like you if you're really decent and honest, but they're probably warned if you're not. So if you have that belief that one in five people you need to be wary of, because one in five people don't get flatted and misled, but three out of five, learn who the balance ones are if you want soundboarding. So if you're going with that belief, which I believe is a great one, but that's my bias, then it means I'm constantly assessing, is this someone I trust, or is this someone who's going to just flatter me, or is this someone who's balancing, which I'll usually move appropriately, and it'll make me stop and and think, hey, hang on the microphone.
So the leaps are something that guides you, but they're quite strong, because obviously these are what I call the gremlins and the autopilots, that if these but you try to do something and a belief stops you, then that can be a positive influence or a negative. So even sensible beliefs like don't skit on an icy pond, you know, especially if it's throwing, you know, that's common sense. So you have that belief because you either taught it or you've experienced it. So that's beliefs, beliefs, you have millions of beliefs, some of them are very strong, and some of them are not that incredible, but we formed them generically, and we formed them specifically for certain circumstances.
Value isn't really important to me. The reason I pushed values when I started doing this work 30 years ago and creating this model of the mind, as I was going to use of our patients, and again, it will be people who disagree with me. I want to give you what I believe and what's explained over the last 30 years. The only thing that gave peace of mind, which is different happiness.
So peace of mind is knowing what your values are and knowing at the end of the day you've lived by your values. So I worked on my values, and I found no matter what happens around me, whether I get criticized, misunderstood, misrepresented, these things will disturb most of us. At the end of the day, I can look at the mirror and think, how I live by my values, and if so, I'm at peace with myself. It doesn't matter.
It's uncomfortable, but I can live with it because I respect myself. So when I looked at this and did it with experience, with patients, everyone said, once you know your values, you're almost immune. You start realizing that's what's going to stabilize me and give peace of mind. So it's very important to know how to find values and what they are and not model them up with things like what's valuable to me.
That's not about it. So I was trying to say, once you've got your values, then you can measure, which I ask people to do, demonstrate your values in action every day, because that will bring you a peace of mind thinking I did the right thing. In your experience, where do most people go wrong when it comes to working out their values, sitting down with a piece of paper or doing some exercise online or whatever? What are the do's and the don'ts when it comes to defining values for most people?
Values. There's a confusion there, because if you go online and say, what's the value? You're going to get a lot of different definitions. So I had to say, well, what am I talking about?
So the people I work with, that's trying to agree, this is the definition of a value, and then at least we're on the same page. So I'm going to go with what I've created as a definition, but a lot of the people have got the same definition, I agree with them. So a value is immoral belief that you hold, something you think is what should happen, a decent person which is going to be made, I'm going to live by this decent value on this belief, which is going to be acted out with a behaviour. So for example, they can be subtle, let's say which many people do, I want to respect everyone, because if I know of me, disrespect someone, I feel bad, I'll lose my piece of mind.
If I unwittingly disrespect someone, and then realize it or get told, that will settle me. So I need to know, how do I measure respecting someone? So for me, I would put down number one is, I listen to someone, I don't have to agree with them, but I give them an audience, I don't attack them, I listen, and what their views are, I listen to their views, and I believe personally for me, that's showing respect. So if I wanted to say, let's just check on respecting people, I'm going to have a week where I actually say, how many times did you dive in without listening, or how many times did you stop, especially in an emotional discussion, how many times do you stop and say, I want to actively listen to what they're saying, understand it, I don't have to agree or understand it and respect that value or that belief.
So that's an example, what people do is they muddle things up, they say things like, my car, you know, that's not a value because there's no behavior, it's what you're saying is valuable to me, I really get a lot of pleasure and joy into my car, but that's not going to be bringing you peace of mind, all right, it may bring you happiness, so and I like to work on happiness separately to peace of mind. A lot of the exercises that I've seen online, looking at things like core values, do work, you come up with answers with things like curiosity, adventure, self-development, self-care, it seems like a key part of your definition is that it is, there is an action, there is something which is going to influence your behavior and how you show up in the world. Certain things like curiosity become very nebulous and difficult to define, you know, they're like intrinsic parts of your personality or the bits of you that you enjoy or respect, but when it comes to creating, like, enacting that, it feels like there's a little bit more of a difficulty going on there, is there anything to say about that, about some of them? Yeah, I mean, I get your point, I think for me curiosity comes under what I would loosely call is the drive for stimulation.
So some people, the stimulation will be just going to compute again, but the brain is satisfied with that, whereas for many people it wants difference, it wants new experiences, it wants to see what's happening. So we know that some people are more prone to saying, let's test things out, let's, and some people are wanting to achieve something. So I always put under this heading of stimulation, and again, most of us have got something we want as a stimulus, but it can be as straightforward as a social group, it doesn't have to be an I'm going to learn a new language or I'm going to get to a new level on the computer game, and so I'll try and explore that with people to say, what are you doing to give stimulation to both your human and your chin? What is it they both want and what's going to satisfy that?
And again, I think there's different drives for the human and chin, so I work out because some people are much more cerebral and say, I'd like to have a discussion group like, you know, reading a certain book and going in the club and discussing it, because that's a nightmare, the stimulation could be just being part of a group that supports a football team, but you're looking to see some people get stuck and they don't have any, and then they'll say things like, I feel dissatisfied, and it's hard when you don't know which way to turn. I do, I love animals, I've got a lot of animals around me, I've removed some from the room because I make noises when I do this, so I've rescued some animals, and I know some people discover that, so I've had people I've worked with, and they've said, once you get an animal, not everyone, suddenly you've got this responsibility, this interaction, this, you see the animals world differently, and they use that as displacing care onto the animal, and they get greater satisfaction, that's one example. So I would explore it with people what your call in curiosity adds a stimulation that drives to get stimulation and experience. Yeah, that's very interesting.
I think I probably need to revisit my, I've deemed core values, perhaps erroneously, it was maybe three or four years ago when I put mine together, and in there were a lot of things I actually can see a stimulation, two of them were curiosity and adventure, and they're things I like to do, but I'm trying to run them through a more fine filter, which is, okay, how does this inform the way that I behave in the world, and I don't know if they necessarily give me guidance with regards to that, so I think, okay, let's do some therapy with you. Hit me, hit me, there's only many people watching, so it's fine, cool. That's fine, it's not really therapy, it's just saying if you ask me to look at this, I would try and get us so we understand that the blocks we're working with, so we're looking at your values as being something if you buy into this as peace of mind and things that are moral behaviors that you think I should do the following, you know, respect people, help people, I don't know what your values would be, and now you've asked something different, you said, I've got this drive, where does curiosity come in, I've put that under one of your drives, and say clearly it's important to you, so let's look at how you're going to get mental stimulation through those drives, but you're moving on to different areas again when you're looking at things like happiness, because if you're saying that clearly drives over that, so happiness is something that most people search for, it's an odd one this, because I know when I started writing the books, I was told, oh, happiness is the one people want, and I had a little bit of difficulty because I don't search for that, I'm not saying that I want it, but it's not a big feature in me, I'm content to be peaceful, you know, but I'm not someone who searches for this great happiness and you know, I'm just happy to be just okay every day, that's satisfying to me, so I'm a bit a bit odd that way, but if you're saying not Steve, I need this, I want stimulation, but I also want like full settlement, because I'm expecting your curiosity is leading somewhere, you know, so I would be saying to you, let's look at what you're trying to get that fulfills your chimp brain, which is a really good thing to do, that gives you a great feeling and a wellness, and it may be excitement to adrenaline, it may be satisfaction, but I'd have to say, what are the words that are appropriate for what you're trying to achieve? It could be all of them, because then we can start understanding what is you're doing, but I have to say it, have to be careful, because as you get so analytical, you just get them with your life and I'm saying just to be spontaneous, but if you're finding that you're not feelful spilled, that's when I think that's analyzed, let's see what we can look at in the blocks, what's missing, so you're right, when you're saying, I'm not sure you defined them clearly, and therefore you won't be using them to advantage.
I think that's accurate, I think that functionally, it sounds nice, and there definitely things that I enjoy, but when it comes down to sort of what functional utility does it give me, can I look back on my day, look in the mirror and go, I was curious today, therefore I feel at peace with myself, there are many, many more things, including respect for others, which is a really great one from you, that I think would more highly influence the peace of mind I have. You've mentioned it a couple of times, I wanted to dig into this, this tension between peace of mind and happiness, and what's going on there? Yeah, they sometimes don't go together, you know, it's like, let's say I have, I've got stuff, let's say I've got a member of stuff, it was really not fitting in the group, and we've got, I haven't, just in case any of my staff are listening, and the clean problem, it's not definitely not angry, and I haven't got anyone, but if I say I did, and I thought, you know, the team are not yelling, and we've got this person who's not fitting in with our values, or they're just trying, but they just don't work well, then I know that the right thing to do morally is to grasp them up and go and save them and say, look, it's a mismatch, you know, there's no negative in that sense, it's going to be difficult, and then they may get, I'll have this in the past, they may attack me and say all the things in the world, you know, you're meant to be this caring person, but I'm thinking it's for the good, so I would leave that, I wouldn't be happy, you know, I'm not saying I don't want to be happy by the way, but I wouldn't be happy, but I'd have peace of mind, I've not done the right thing, and in the long run, they may not like me, and I've nothing good to say about me, but I know in the long run it's for the best for them and the team, so there's an example where peace of mind and happiness don't go together, and it could go the other way, I could be happy about something, but not a peace of mind, because I think actually, you didn't do the right thing, you know, so overall, I'm going to end up feeling not so good, I think, yeah, it's just superficial happiness. I was going to say, do you think it seems to me that happiness without peace of mind is more difficult to achieve, that peace of mind acts as a tarnish that can kind of colour and jade, any experiences and that the happiness will inevitably be more fleeting or more fragile?
Yeah, I haven't done this, which is a great place to go, but obviously it's part of my job, I've examined all the years doctors and medical students, because that's my goal, and I'm with the Royal College, and you know, I want people to pass, I don't like to feel anybody, and so if somebody's bald or anything, they don't really deserve to pass, I haven't done this, my happiness would be to pass them, but I wouldn't have peace of mind, because at the end of the day you were wrong, you shouldn't do this, but I might think I know there's something so much, and then I'll justify rationalised well that I'm sure they'll learn on the job, and I'm sure they'll be fine, and I've got, but that's rationalising, so you can see there's an example where somebody might lose peace of mind, but actually feel at the time, I'm happy, because I pass them, because if I don't, I'm going to have such an happiness. So sometimes we compromise our values, which lead to us having less of a peace of mind, and I'm not saying this right or wrong, I'm saying it's something people have to decide on. Yeah, that's very interesting, you brought up your work with medical staff, you've just done this new study, you've been completed and published a study on burnout and well-being, I think amongst NHS nurses and maybe doctors as well, to talk to me about sort of burnout as a concept, it's kind of a buzzword at the moment, I think a lot of people maybe do feel that they are overwhelmed with workload and stimulus, and I don't really have time for myself, and I feel like the past, maybe I was more peaceful or other things were slower, and then burnout was a concept, and then let's fold in this new study and what you learned from your time working with the NHS then. Yeah, I was with the NHS for over 20 years, so it was a great time.
Burnout, again, it's defined differently, but I think it's common sense what we mean, it means you certainly feel like you don't have the energy anymore, you get up in the morning and you dread it, so for a doctor, for example, let's go back to my experiences, I would do outpatients twice a week, and if I'm starting to burnout, I think I can't face it, I just want to get through this, that's a sign of burnout, whereas normally I'd be at Keenan and to use the acid to go and see them, or thinking, you know, if I get the slightest headache, I'm just going to fall into it, and you get signs of burnout, so there's a number of them, anxiety, people sleep, but it's generally this feeling of, I just can't do this, I can't do it, I'm overwhelmed as you pointed out, so with that in mind, when I did the chip model, which just took off, and it's very humbling, because obviously it was meant to be just for medical students to learn the new science, when the chip model did take off, I wanted to go back to my roots, and I worked, we did a series of workshops, I called it skills for life, and it's emotional management, and understanding yourself, so it's based on the jungle, and we said, we took 80 GPs from accounting nearby, and I said to them, we'll run eight workshops, and we'll see whether this affects your health, your communication with your staff, your burnout, your sickness rates, and that was just a pilot run I did, and it worked fantastically, again, credit to the GPs, and the staff who were working with the GPs, they worked on it, and they said it did make a message, so as a doctor obviously I'm bringing out this model, which is semi-fun, but serious, I want to know it actually works, it's fraudulent, so then I took a study with 200 teachers, I went into the schools, and we tried to say let's have a look at you, we had three cents a study, and again it's only a pilot run, with teachers in York, Birmingham and Cambridge, and that was just again just a pilot run, so we did it roughly and ready, and the feedback was really, really encouraging, so I didn't actually do the next study, because clearly I can't do my own assessment, so it was taken out of my hands by an independent research group, and I was not allowed to do the teaching bit, I was propped to one side, I accept, and I think that's right, and they underwent these series of big workshops, and then they did an analysis, which is published in the Journal for Mental Health, and it showed a massive reduction in burnout, a massive reduction in health issues, and a general health questionnaire was used to show that the increased health was marked, so we're excited by that obviously I'm over the moon, the nurses were brilliant and engaging it, brilliant, but they took it seriously, because obviously the front line and the stress on them is immense, and amazing, it was done under COVID, we had to do it online, because, and they all were brilliant to say we keep going, and the feedback was great, so we're now undergoing another group, I'm not involved, and independent researchers are doing 200 doctors, and again, I do a lot of talks to medical staff, because this is my world, and I'm more familiar with the medical, and then I'm sports, so it's very encouraging, so we've run this for the public as well, it's not just academics, and it's just to say if it resonates with you, then you can do this and see what you think, and the general feel is, now the research is published and analyzed that it does have an impact, I was worried that it wasn't like something back in the pan, because obviously a lot of therapies and they don't hold, so we did go back to the GPs months later without warning and say give us another feed and found it held, which wasn't surprising, because what I'm asking people to do is approach life differently, and once you do that, you more or less keep doing it, but you do have to maintain, I do say to people five or ten minutes a day as all I ask, to maintain these and learn to get your mind in order before you leave the house in the morning, that's what I'm asking. What do you think it is specifically about your approach that is assisting with the symptoms of burnout, or targeting even the root cause of burnout and overwhelm? I think genuinely, I think it isn't the model per se, I think it's the person being able to understand themselves, and start looking after themselves, and start understanding things like I mentioned trigger points, recognizing anxiety, rather than not seeing it, so we give teaching about subtle signs of anxiety, then recognizing how to detect things like beliefs that are not helping, so we're challenging a lot of things, but it's all about the unique person empowering them and giving them the tools to get the life and be the person that they are, that's what it's about, so when you do that, which will include practical things like communication skills, assertiveness, but learning how to communicate with the human side of the brain, rather than the chimp brain, which is emotionally driven and can often cause more problems, so it's a big overall in looking at you, I think that's why it's working because the person makes it work, they have to decide, I can't decide what works for them. Yeah, and as you've emphasized today, because we are so idiosyncratic, and because our drives, and our genetic predisposition, and our life experiences, and the ways we've dealt with past trauma, and all of that are so unique, it needs to be something which is sufficiently scalable, and each person presumably individually finds their own flavor of this, and that resonates with me, because I'm more of an angry chimp person, or my chimp and my human, Chris Hawley, rather than Ronnie O'Sullivan.
Right, and that's why I say, I say this to people, only you are going to discover, I like to just help you, and catalyze ways forward and suggest, but I'm going to have to ask you to do the work, it's not me that does the work, I do like it, but again, I'd say at this point, you know, it doesn't resonate with everyone, it's not for everyone, and there are fantastic therapies out there, and my job along with everyone in this field is to say, just try and get the best out of yourself and quality of life, so you know, if people go for mindfulness, CBT, these are excellent therapies, they're excellent models to work with, I mean, I'm an academic, so I like evidence based, however, if people go for things where there's no evidence, if it works for you, I'm not arguing, right, all I say is be very careful that you don't get fooled by something, particularly someone who, you know, is giving you stuff that's going to work in a short term, and then find your collapse down, so it's going to be something solid, there's plenty of stuff out there to resonate with. Have you found a particular cohort of people that the Chimp model works particularly well, particularly poorly with? That's a good question, and the answer is no, because it's whether that person gets it, I mean, some time ago, when I very first started doing this, I was asked to do a brief television series, which was with some women, I got four of them, and they asked me to teach them to ride a bike, because I was with cycling at the time, but they had to lose weird and learn how to manage their mind, so it was a bit of a fun series, I did, I loved it, the women were brilliant, they were brilliant, great fun to work with, but it was interesting that the Chimp model was almost in pause department, I mean, they knew who I was at the time, it was at the time, it was some years ago, but one of them didn't resonate with it at all, I was happy, I said, no, I can talk in different terms, but she had a moment where she'd be, she was doing some sport, and she'd gone after sport justifying why she was getting a takeaway, and she knew she was on telling, she said, I sat outside the takeaway, and I said, I deserve this, because I've worked hard, I've run off a lot of calories, and then I said to myself, you're on a television program, you're meant to be losing weight, and then she ran me and said, I've just found my chimp, she said it was bizarre, I was talking, and I'm thinking, who am I talking to? So sometimes, the penny has to drop where you think, I get what the neuroscience is, but it doesn't happen for everyone, and that's where I'm saying, find something that resonates with you, so who works with it, it's the person that resonates, so my younger student is three, or has one's three, who got it, and we'll talk about his naughty chimp, the eldest person that's come to me, that's actually said, this really works, there's about 80, and what he was, he was quite annoyed with me, he said, why didn't you write this six years ago?
I was a little boy at the time, I didn't have any knowledge, but I've had a lot of people who are, which is very humbling to me, or in the 60s, 70s, saying, ah, it's already, I had known this, so they're the beginning, you must bring this to schools, but I don't want to impose it, I think someone has to resonate, so there's a danger of imposing, and that's the last thing I want to do, it's got to be empowerment. Rounding out that conversation around sort of burnout and overwhelm, you spend a good bit of time in the new book talking about robustness, mental robustness, and resilience. Big buzzwords, you know, a lot of the guys that I've had on the show, people like David Goggins, who's this ultra-endurance athlete, Jocka Willink, who wrote a book about discipline, equaling freedom, a lot of discussion about mental resilience and robustness, what is interesting do you think about, or what have you learned about your conception of resilience and robustness, compared with maybe what most people don't understand or get wrong about it? Again, your definitions are so vague, if you start looking, there is so many different people say, this is what robustness says, so I had to do the same, I had to say to myself, define it, so if people are following you, they say, okay, if we use that definition, I see what you get going to, so I defined robustness as having a plan, so we can all become robust, it's like getting a toy for a child and saying, we've designed it for the child, resilience is handing it over and see if it works, so resilience is where you go out of the world and say, right, so I would have a mental strategy and plan to do with my trigger points, but when I get out there, that's being robust, I'm ready to leave the room, the second I get out, now it's resilience is the skill to stay robust, is to stay in that same strong position, so I think robustness we can all get to, but being resilient is a skill and I think that's where people come and start because they start beating themselves up instead of saying, it's a skill, that means you've got to acquire it and then turn it, but also, sometimes you get it wrong, like any sports person, for me managing my mind is a skill and every day I've got to work on this, so every day I do, every day I have usually around four points in the day where I do a quick check and say, right, can we just make sure I'm in human mode, make sure my beliefs are back in place, make sure I understand and get perspective, that's what I do, very briefly it can take a minute, five minutes, but that resets my mind, so I'm resetting, so I think resilience is something you've got to work on and know how to use your skill, but it's not easy, so that's why when I wrote the passage of the jungle I was saying, I'm going to show all the basics, so you know what, how things work in your mind, what resonates with you, what doesn't, so you can do the exercise to get yourself in a great place, by the end of it you've now got robustness and you've got some ideas on how to become resilient and that's why I did a bit of troubleshooting at the end to say these are the common things I find people say, it's not working for some reason, you know, Ronnie was sort of in did say as a health assistant, he asked permission to tell anything, I'd worked in him about two years and he rang me one morning and he was very much in chin more than distressed and he said, it's not working, it's not working, I'm quite harsh and I said to him, have you done the work and he said no, so I said okay I'm going to put the phone down, ring me when you've done the work, so I put the phone down and he rang me about three, four days later and I said how are you doing, he said brilliant, I said why I said I did the work, you know, so the answer is simple, there's no different anything else you've got to do with the work and the work is making sure your values are in place, making sure what we did the stone of life and not mention with all your beliefs in place and what the rules of the way the world works, you know, these are the truths of life and then also put in place a perspective plan, so when he did that he said yeah it's working again, so the answer is when people say to me it's not working is I always ask have you done the work and sometimes people need guidance because they'll do they really try hard but they're trying hard on the wrong things and then you've got to say hang on can I just adapt that or modify this and so a little sort of mess and then they go oh okay I'm off again and that's why I call my team the mentors because they're there not to instruct they're there to mentor you to saying oh let me help you, there's a glitch here and challenge things so you can work out yeah the tendency that we all have to complain about results we're not getting from effort that we're not making is very very pervasive and I see it I see it myself if I start a new training program or switch my diet up or try and do something different with my bedtime routine I it's like you've done it for three days what do you mean and you did that one of those days you didn't do it because such and such a thing happened or you were away from home so yeah it's one of the things I'm getting here and it's interesting it's almost like a philosophical underpinning here you know your own personal philosophy about the way that the world is and obviously we we experience the world through the texture of our mind it's the only way that we have to experience the world even experiences from other people still get filtered through our own mind and yeah it does there is a sort of almost like a whimsical philosophy undercurrent that I'm sensing through through some of the stuff that you're talking about making sense of the world around us yeah I didn't want to be restrictive when I did this to saying right I mean obviously I've been taught very well with philosophical models and medical models and but I did want to restrict people I think it's what people want to do with it and make of it I'm very much keen that they have empowerment but I still will challenge things I'll challenge beliefs people hold because I think that's holding them back beliefs about themselves particularly or other people of the world but I will yeah I think there is a philosophy underpinning it but it's your philosophy and I think sounding boards we use friends to do this all the time we say something they'll correct us I say well do you really see it that way so what I'm doing is doing that with hopefully the newer science behind it to give that push but I want to take you back something because on the thing it doesn't work one of the commonest things I get and this is an example of why it doesn't work sometimes if you do work for a few days and then you miss a day or two you can go backwards depending on what you're trying to achieve so I'm going to give sleep as an example I ran sleep clinics on time ago and people say to me I just have terrible sleep and one of the general rules of sleep is that it alerts behavior so although there's only circadian rhythms they're actually secondary to alert behavior so if we get you to learn a behavior of sleep then your brain will start to follow this and your body will the circadian rhythm is obviously powerful but it's not powerful as habit so I work with people who say right and I say go to bed whatever time it's 10 o'clock wake up seven o'clock and that's your sleep and they'll do this for say I'm making it up five days and then Saturday comes oh well we're late on we went on one o'clock and then got to bed and I slept in till 10 and the rules I'm being very lucky right the rules are simple for the next three or four days you're finished you can't do that with the brain so now your sleep's gone out until about Wednesday or Thursday so now you try again and you say well I'm doing what you said but that's the subtleties no you didn't you have to stick to it Saturday some days well now I know some people get away with it because we're variants we're not all the same but the general rule is once you do that you're finished it won't accept this disruption of sleep so again I'm trying to point out that sometimes there's subtleties in the way the mind works and it's the same with emotional stuff which is why I pre-programmed things about four times a day because my experience for me is if I don't then I get minor chimps my team might say major chimps outbursts and then I think gee and I have to come around say okay sorry about that let's start again right but if I trying it about three or four times get it back in tune I tend never to get one what I really yeah what I really appreciate about your approach and what you've gone through today is a real humbleness or sort of a lack of ego at least an apparent lack of ego around needing to be right and I think that it's a very strong signal of trustworthiness that it's just I want people to be better I want them to have a better relationship with themselves people that are around them I want them to have more peace of mind and live a more flourishing better life you have an approach that you believe in but if there are other things that people do I think it's a very refreshing way in a world in which everybody is trying to prove themselves to be right and prove their models and their worldviews and their books on their courses to be playing no but the reality is that none of us are always right and that no everyone will resonate so I'm not it's very nicely to say but I don't say it's humble I think it's been rational but you know there are plenty of other models that people have said this is much better or this I don't get this chip model so I don't think it's necessarily humble and I think on the ego thing to be fair like a lot of people who are in medical work and allied sciences and philosophies and all this and where we're practical and therapists we're there to help people we get kick hands up so in a sense you're feeding your ego because but it's only about for you to think oh that person really did well so I thrive and I think it's nice to on the people doing well so to me you know seeing someone suddenly saying I've really got my act together or achieved something like Chris Hoidy you feel thrilled that you think I had a little bit of a part in that so you're even humble in your humbleness which is unfulsifiable I'm going to keep on I'm going to keep on accusing you have it no I really I really do like it and I think the the idea of the mind having this hidden metric right the fact that our peace of mind our happiness the fact that we're living in alignment with our values we don't see it day to day in the same way it doesn't appear on a scale in the same way and I'm fascinated by how people sacrifice hidden metrics for observable metrics so let's say let's take a piece of mind and money a lot of the time people will sacrifice peace of mind in order to get money because it is so difficult to see and I really think that one of the things that appears to be happening here is trying to make that hidden metric a little bit more observable by checking in by seeing where I'm at by reflecting on what I've done.
I'm again I guess I'm adopting a scientist and I like to measure things and so I do like people to see that progress because we also know our chimp brains like to achieve as our humans do so I do push this to say let's get a scale to measure things even happiness you know we've not really talked about it but I asked people not to give me a scale five out of ten because I don't think that really helps because one minute they're one one minute they're nine what I do is I say things like tell me five things that will make you happy and they're like simple things so it could be having a cup of coffee go for a walk with a dog or it could be going out with friends for a meal so what I do is say right I want you to measure how many times you do that in a week because we know that if you do those things the chance of you being happy go up so I measure indirect so I often don't measure direct I think what's going to influence you to get what you want so I'm quite keen on what happiness lists I go on about them because again because most people do want to be happy I do want to be happy I've made myself into this kind of weird person but I'm saying peace of mind for me I have a peace of mind list but I think happiness lists I think are really important and I like to divide them into instantaneous because that can make a difference to our chimps maybe not our humans so for me a cup of coffee is right at the top of the list if I want to get happy I grab a coffee and think I'm happy now I even use that as a emotional blackmail on my gym so if I've got 50 emails and I've got to do them and my gym doesn't want to do emails right but I know it'll benefit people so I'll say you don't get coffee till we do 10 I have no idea why but it will do 10 so we both do 10 and then I get coffee so and it works for me so simply simple there's an equivalent you may have seen this in some of the training sessions that you've either done yourself or observed but in CrossFit especially you will have a time-bounded workout and the coach will be stood at the front of the room and you'll be your heart rate's at 180 and you've got the taste of metal in the back of your throat and you hate the coach and the workout and gravity and everything and the coach does this thing every single CrossFit gym on the planet does this the coach will shout from the front of the room Chris get back on the bar three two one jump on the bar and there's something about that countdown and it's like someone's literally put their hand inside of you and made you do the thing that they were going to do and the idea of like you're not getting a coffee or you're not going to go for a walk or you're not going to do the whatever um there are these little bugs or features perhaps in the code that we have that's running our operating system and sometimes you can just inject yourself at the right point together you can learn to do it it's the same man people say to me i worked with the very soon team um for a while and the biggest thing for them is getting out of bed in the morning because it said it's like four o'clock starts and it can be hard and so some of them struggled and again it's the same principle of saying don't think just block the gym because that's what's stopping you you want to get off it's only the chimp ring that says stay in bed or we could have five minutes more or and it's irrational really because you suddenly get up that's where the alarm's gone so again it's quite powerful to learn to block thinking and just say no i'm not going without acting um and that's basically what you did with your Chris get going three two you're not thinking anymore you're just acting so what he's done effectively you know scientifically he's told your computer on as a behavior it's not a chip not human that's got on the bike it's the computer that i was taken off and said it's irrelevant how i feel it's irrelevant what emotions there's an action needs doing and here we go so he's used to trick a point for the computer and that's why that will work but you can learn to do that for yourself which is what i have to get my computer to take over and match up okay okay we'll get coffee soon Steve Peters ladies and gentlemen Steve i absolutely love your work i love your demeanor i think it's very very good and no matter how humble you are i think that you should uh you should continue to do the things that you want to take all of the price because it seems very very well deserved what should people do beyond uh the books but those as well if they think that they want to get even more information if they want to start working with somebody on this what is it that you guys offer um i mean it can work things out from the books i said pass through the jungle is much more explicit with exercises to try that hopefully we would resonate with people and it goes through the science and there's lots of references 400 plus they can look up uh we run a small company and we do do workshops for teams or individuals i do a lot of fun stuff as well so we have a sports conference coming up in October i'm going on the Dracula hunt back to North Yorkshire and Whitby uh and we're going to do a fun i'm going to teach at the beginning of set them off i did it as a team build for my team they loved it so i thought let's open it to the public so i'm doing that in October as a weekend retreat so it's fun but it's team build fun um finding Dracula's coffee and then i do a Christmas conference so we do do public conferences we have an annual conference every minute where i don't do one speaking you would please you know my team get up and do it but we have the team available to do workshops and they can join what we call the truth which is online it's free just on the chip management website and i do i want someone to think which at the moment i'm following a pass through the jungle to try and give people something to work on practically and there's a community there we go on discussion boards so people want to join in and the resonate they can meet like 90 people which is what i'm trying to set up it's working i hope fantastic Steve i really appreciate you thank you thank you so much for inviting me