Latest / The Data Shaman Podcast - Quant Mind, Shaman Soul / Season 3, Ep 2 - What we tell ourselves about identity (Re-mastered)

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Season 3, Ep 2 - What we tell ourselves about identity (Re-mastered) · The Data Shaman Podcast - Quant Mind, Shaman Soul

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_01: Hello.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um today I'm a bit more confident about this podcast now, because I'm getting used to Jordan, which hopefully you will met uh in the last episode, and uh I'm super excited about this episode, and it is all about identity.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: Who are we?
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: What are the stories that we tell about ourselves that stick, and how can we change it?
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, as neurodivergent person, we often uh put up a mask because we don't want to really show who we are, and also like we want to bend blend in, we want to belong.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: And this episode will help understand what identity is, what are the latest research?
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: What is the latest research about identity, and a couple of easy exercises that you can do to move to move the idea of yourself to the one that you actually want.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Hope you enjoy it.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: Have a wonderful day.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Daniele.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_01: I want to start with a confession from a client.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_01: A senior guy just made MD.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: The job he had been chasing for 15 years, and about three weeks in he calls me and says, Daniele, I think they're going to find out.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: Find out what?
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: That is exactly what I've asked him.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: Find out what He goes quiet, and then he says that I'm not actually this person.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: That I have just been doing a very good impression of him.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: Oh oof.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, who hasn't had that thought at 2 AM?
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: The thoughts of me not belonging somewhere is definitely up there.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: But here is what got to me.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: He wasn't talking about his skills.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: He could do his job very well.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: He was talking about who he was.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: He had gotten everything he ever wanted.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_01: And the thing that was keeping him up wasn't the work itself.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: It was the gap between the title on the door and the portion he believed he actually was underneath.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: So this episode's about imposter syndrome.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_01: Not really, but we are close.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's about the thing under imposter syndrome.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's about identity.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: Who do you think you are?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: And how much of that is real?
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_01: How much you inherited without asking, and how much you could actually change if you really wanted to.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: Because I've come to believe the most of the hardest problems my clients, and by the way, myself, bring me aren't strategy problems.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: They are identity problems wearing a strategy mask.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's a big claim.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Let's get into it.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: This is the Misfit Executive.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Jordan.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I am Daniele.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: Today, the person you think you are.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so before we talk about changing who you are, I want to push on something.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: How much of who you are is even up for grabs?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because the whole self-help industry is built on you can become anyone.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Is that true?
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: The short answer is no.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: And the best evidence I know comes from a researcher named Jerome Keegan at Harvard University.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: He ran this very interesting study.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: He took 500 four-month-old babies into his lab and exposed them to new things.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_01: New sounds, new smells, a balloon popping, a stranger's voice.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: Four month old, so no personality yet you'd think.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: You would think.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: And about twenty percent of them reacted really strongly.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: They thrashed, they cried, they were overwhelmed.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_01: Kagan called them high reactive.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: Now here is the part that confuses people.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: The common sense guess is that those anxious overwhelmed babies grow up to be the nervous ones, the shy ones.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so you would assume the calm babies become the confident extroverts.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's exactly what I'd assume.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: It is actually backwards.
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: The high reactive babies, the ones who freaked out the balloon, were the ones most likely to become quiet, careful, inward teenagers.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_01: And the calm babies became the bold ones.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: Years later, Kegan's team put some of those grown-up babies in brain scanners, and you could still see it.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: A more excitable amygdala, the brain's novelty alarm, still firing decades later.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: So the temperament's just in there from the start.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: The rubber band theory of personality.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: You can stretch a rubber band.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: And similarly, you can stretch yourself a long way past your natural setting.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_01: But only so far and not forever.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: And it always wants to snap back to your baseline.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_01: Her idea is that Bill Gates is never going to be Bill Clinton, no matter how much he practices, no matter how much he wants it.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: And Clinton's never going to be Gates.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: I want to resist this a little because it sounds like an excuse.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I'm just built this way, don't ask me to change.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: Very good.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_01: But resist it.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: Because that's the trap on this side.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: The floor is real.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: But if you want an analogy, people pour concrete way too early.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: They just take one data point.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_01: I got novels presenting once.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: And they build an identity out of it.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: How many times have you heard somebody say, I'm not a presenter?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not an umbusperson.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not a people person.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: I'm an introvert.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: I'm an extrovert.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_01: That's not temperament.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: That's a story that you tell yourself.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: And here is the distinction I would offer a leader.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_01: Temperament is your floor, where you start from.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: The story you tell about your temperament is the ceiling.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: And the ceiling is almost always lower than it needs to be.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: Say more about the ceiling.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: So there's So there is this image in a book called Life in Half a Second that I can't get out of my head because it reminds me of a Metallica song, but this is for another day.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_01: Fleas in a jar.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_01: You put fleas in a jar and they jump out.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: Fleas can jump way higher than the jar.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: So what you do, you put a lid on and they jump, and they hit the lid.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: They jump and they hit the lead.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: And after a while, you will see that they adjust.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: They only jump to just below the lid.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_01: You take off the lid and they keep jumping to exactly the same height for the rest of their lives.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_01: There is no lid anymore.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_01: The lead.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: You take the lid off.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you take the lid off, and they keep jumping to exactly the same height for the rest of their lives.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: There is no lead anymore.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: The lead is now inside them.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: That's bleak and a little too on the nose.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: It is a bit on the nose.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: And to be honest with you, we're not fleas after all.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: But let's take a real life example.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_01: The four-minute mile.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: For decades, the belief was that a human being physically could not run a mile in under four minutes.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: That your heart would basically give out.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_01: Your body was not capable of doing that.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_01: It was treated a bit like a law of physics.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_01: Roger Bannister breaks it in 1954.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: And here's the thing that should mess with you a little bit.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_01: Within about six weeks, somebody else broke it too.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_01: And then it just kept falling.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: And the amateur runner know that they can do it.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing changed physically in six weeks?
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_01: Well, of course, it cannot change physically in just six weeks.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_01: What happened is that the lead came off.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_01: The thing that had been holding everyone back wasn't their legs or their body.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: It was the shared belief about what was possible, which they would each absorb as a fact about themselves.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, but I run an operations team, I'm not running miles.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: What's the executive version of the four-minute mile?
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's the number everyone in your industry treats as physics.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_01: You can't close these deals in under six months.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_01: You cannot get more than X clients in this category.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody that size can do that.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_01: And some of those, to be honest with you, are real constraints.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_01: But a lot of them are actually leads.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: Someone bolted on years ago.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_01: And the whole field keeps jumping just underneath.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: The identity version is personal.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not the kind of leader who delegates.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not someone who can sit in conflict.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, says who?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_01: When did you run that test?
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: Usually never.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: You just inherited it.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_01: Which, to be honest with you, is the perfect bridge.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_01: Because a huge amount of your identity you literally did inherit from the people that aren't in the room.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: So there is a case in a book called Head Thrush 2, and not the best title for a book, but it's written by two executive coaches.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: So it is right into my world.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: There's a man, let's call him Lee.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: He's brilliant, he's a corporate contrarian, but exhausting to work with.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_01: That there was a hidden agenda behind everything.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_01: I've worked with that person.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone has.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: This is such a common label.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: The label that is difficult is paranoid.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: But when they actually did the work with him, it traced back to his family.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: His family had survived an internment camp, and his father had raised him with the one absolute rule.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: No one outside this family can ever be trusted.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: That was survival wisdom.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_01: In the camp it was true.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: And Lee carried it decades later, a generation later, into the rooms where he was wrecking his career.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: So he's running his dad's software in a situation it was never written for.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, it's nice that you use the word software because effectively our software is made up by our DNA.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: But the breakthrough in coaching, the line they use in the book, is that he finally saw that he was not his parents.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_01: The trade felt like him.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: It felt like identity, like just this is who I am.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a cautious person.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was actually an inheritance, it was passed down.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: And once you can see it as inherited, you can decide whether to keep it or not.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_01: This connects to something you say a lot: that arrogance isn't what it looks like.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: Every time somebody pointed out my mistake, I had to go on the defensive.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: And this looks like pure arrogance.
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_01: This looks like big ego.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: But they argue it's the opposite, and I agree.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_01: It is an insecurity wearing a mask.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_01: The accurate employee makes the person feel threatened, exposed.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: So he has to crush them to feel safe.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: The line in the book is arrogance is a mask that keeps outsiders from seeing the insecurity inside.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Why does that matter practically though?
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Arrogant, insecure, the behavior is the same, the person's still a pain.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: But it matters enormously because the treatment is the complete opposite.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: If someone's generally arrogant, you push back, he's at the boundary, you let reality land.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: If someone is secure and acting arrogant, pushing back makes it absolute worse.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: You have confirmed this threat.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_01: You have to make it safe first.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: Misdiagnose the identity underneath the behavior, and you'll apply exactly the wrong intervention.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: That's true for your team, that's true for your boss, and that's true for you.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: When you cut yourself, when you cut yourself, putting when you cut yourself puffing up.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: So the move is always what's underneath this?
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_01: What's the source?
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: What's the source?
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: Because the behavior you can see is almost never the real thing.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: I want to go to the darker version of this.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: What happens when the identity story turns on you?
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_00: When you fail at something and you make it mean something about who you are.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: This is the most important five minutes of this episode, so let's slow it down a little bit.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: There's a distinction in the research between guilt and shame.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: Guilt is I did a bad thing.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone has felt guilt.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone thought that we're doing that it had done something bad.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: Shame instead is I am the bad thing.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: If you read any book about parenting, you know exactly what I'm talking about.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: Guilt is about behavior.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: Shame is about identity.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: And they feel almost the same from the inside.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: They feel almost identical in the moment, but they do opposite things to you.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: Guilt actually tends to motivate repair.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: You did something bad, so you want to fix it.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: Apologize.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: Make it right.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: Shame is darker.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: It makes you want to hide, disappear, or even lash out.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: Because the problem isn't something you did, it is something you are.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: And you can fix what you are.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: So you just want to escape it.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: You just Is there data on that or is it a nice framing?
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: So there is data.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_01: A study of prisoners found the ones who felt shame, I am a pet person, were significantly more likely to re-offend than the ones who felt guilt about a specific act.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: Or felt guilt about a specific act.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: Shame-prone people also show more trouble with things like substance abuse.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: I would describe that directionally rather than quote the exact number on air.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: But the pattern is very robust.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_01: Shame doesn't make people better, it makes them worse, actually.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: That's so counterintuitive because we think shame keeps people in line.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: But we weaponize shame because we think it works.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_01: If you're a parent, maybe you've used it with the children unconsciously.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe bosses do it.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: And the most interesting thing is that we do it to ourselves all the time.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: And it fires because you can punish someone into a better identity.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I know that is a bit bleak, but there is a hopeful turn.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_01: Sandberg draws on Christine Neff's work on self-compassion.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: And in a study of people going through divorce, genuinely one of the hardest identity ruptures there is.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: What predicted to recover well wasn't self-esteem.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't optimism.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: It was self-compassion.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: The ability to fail and not abound on yourself.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: Define self-compassion, because to a lot of executives that word sounds soft.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Sounds like letting yourself off the hook.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it is exactly the opposite of letting yourself off the hook.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: Letting yourself off the hook is it wasn't my fault.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: Self-compassion is it was my doing.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm still worth something.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: So let's fix it.
• 17:22
  SPEAKER_01: There's a study where people wrote themselves a short, compassionate letter about failure.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_01: The way you will write to a friend who screwed up and compared to a control group, they came out meaningfully happier and less angry about it.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: The specific figures I keep a bit loose because as I read the notes of this podcast, I completely forgot to add the numbers.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: But the fact is real and it is being replicated in different forms.
• 17:47
  SPEAKER_01: The practical version for a leader, when you blow a quarter, the sentence is I missed that.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: Not I am a failure.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: One is a behavior you can change.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: I miss that.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: You can do something to hit that the next time.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_01: The other one is a prison.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_01: I did, not I am.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: I did.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: Not I am.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_01: If people take one thing from this episode, it's definitely Let's talk about the opposite problem.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: Not someone ashamed of who they are, someone clinging to who they were.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_00: Because I see this all the time with founders and long-tenured leaders.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_00: The thing that made them successful becomes a cage.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, it is often a golden cage.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: And there is a piece of and there is a piece of brain science that explains this almost perfectly.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: Have you heard of the endowment effect?
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: This is a classic economics experiment.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: They give students a coffee mug and then ask what they would sell it for.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: And people demand roughly double what the buyer would pay for an identical mug.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: The second the mug become mine, it is worth just from owning it for five minutes.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_01: Far too high, and most importantly, your brain refuses to sell.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_01: So the founder who won't kill their own pet product?
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_01: This isn't being stupid.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: It is just their brain that is charging mug prices for it.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's charging much more than what other people see.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: And the deepest version is when the thing that you can't let go of is who you have been.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: I'm the hustler.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'm the one who does it all myself.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_01: I am the technical founder.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_01: That identity has made who you are.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: And now it's the exact thing capping your company, you know, putting a lead on it.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_01: Because the next level needs you to be someone else.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: And selling your old self feels like a loss.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: Again, at mug prices.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: This is the succession problem.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_01: And the promotion problem.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it is with every transition.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: Take Tina Fey, the writer at SNL 30 Rock, and so on.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_01: The work ethic that made her.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: It is the work ethic that made her.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: At SNL, she started writing on Mondays when everyone else started Tuesday night, set her on brutal standards, became the first female head writer.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: That identity, I outwork everyone, got her everything.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: And then she's running 30 rock.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: And years later she reflects and she says something like the people who worked on it scattered the moment it ended.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: I think we broke them.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because you were still being the person who got her there.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 21:28
  SPEAKER_01: But you need to be careful because the trade that gets you promoted very rarely is useful once you've been promoted.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_01: It actually damages your team.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: There is a line when you're a manager, every whisper is a shout.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: Your identity as the brilliant individual contributor doesn't need an upgrade.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's who you are.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: Leave it there.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_01: Park it somewhere.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: And instead focus on your new identity.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: You are a manager, you are a leader.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: You definitely need different skills than the one that got okay.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: You've convinced me there's a floor I didn't choose, a ceiling I built, inheritances I'm running, and a brain that overcharges to keep me who I was.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's a lot of locks on the door.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: How does anyone actually change?
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: So three keys.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so because you used the analogy of the door, let me use three keys.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: And they're all in the show notes.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_01: The first one is a concept from a psychologist named Brian Little that Susan King writes about.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: Free trait theory.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: The idea is you have your fixed traits and you have the temperament floor.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: But you can act out of character, way out of character, in the service of things you deeply value.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: Little calls them core personal projects, so a deep introvert can be electric and outgoing and bold for the thing that matters to them.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: A professor, terrified of the spotlight, becomes riveting on stage because he loves his students and his subject.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: But doesn't that burn you out pretending all day?
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: Well, absolutely does.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's the key caveat.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: Little says you need restorative niches, places you go back to your real setting and recover.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_01: So the move isn't become an extrovert.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's I will stretch, hard, out of character for the things I actually care about.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: And then I'll retreat and refill.
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's not fakery.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: That's identity in service of values.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: It is the most freeing ideas in the whole stack, honestly.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's one key two is evidence.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: You do not change identity by deciding to be different.
• 23:53
  SPEAKER_01: You change it by collecting evidence.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: And this is straight out of the motivation hack.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_01: The idea of success spirals that we talked about in the last podcast.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: You set goals so small.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: You set goals so small that you cannot fail.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: Not meditate 20 minutes, instead, meditate for one minute.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: Not write the book, just write one sentence.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: And every single day you keep that tiny promise.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: You're not building a habit.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: You're not building a habit.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: You're filing a piece of evidence in the case for a new identity.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_01: And someone who keeps promises to myself.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: Each kept promise is a brick.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: Means too many, and the spara breaks.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_01: He says it's like breaking a bone.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: The next one is harder, but stacked up, tiny wins rewrite the story faster than any affirmation.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: Because the brain believes behavior over declarations.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: In the last podcast, you can't talk yourself into a new identity.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: You can act yourself into one, one small promise at a time.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_01: And key three, the one people most underestimate, is the environment.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: There is a line, McLowitz, Quots in Life in Half Second.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: And it's originally, I believe, from Jim Rohn.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
• 25:18
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I would frame that as a powerful heuristic, not a measure law, because it gets quoted as if there is a study behind the exact five.
• 25:26
  SPEAKER_01: And really there is not.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: But the underlying truth is well supported.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: Identity is contagious.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: Who you're surrounded by sets the ceiling of what feels normal and the forward feels possible for someone like you.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_01: So if you want to become a different kind of leader, I put yourself in rooms where the kind of leader is the average, not the exception.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_01: You will absorb it almost against your will.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: We think identity is this private internal thing.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: It is actually shockingly environmental.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: Bring us back to your client, the new C-suite guy who thought they'd find out.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: Indeed.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: So here is what I told him.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: And it draws on something from Robert Holden's Success Intelligence.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_01: Holden has this idea he calls fraud guilt, the imposter feeling.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_01: And the counterintuitive thing he points out is that it gets worse with success, not better.
• 26:25
  SPEAKER_01: And that's because the gap between how fast other people's estimation of you rises and how slow your own self-image updates.
• 26:33
  SPEAKER_01: The promotion happens instantly.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: But the internal identity lags years behind.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_01: So the more you achieve, the bigger the gap can get.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: Which means the solution isn't another win.
• 26:51
  SPEAKER_01: I will feel legitimate after the next thing.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'm afraid you won't.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_01: Another trophy doesn't close the gap, it widens it.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: The only thing that closes it is updating the self-image directly.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: And Holden's weird comforting move is to show you.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_01: And Holden's weird comforting move is to show you the company you're in.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: Michelle Pfeiffer says she figured people will find out she wasn't really talented.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: That he was all a sham.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_01: Kate Winslet before shoots thinks she's a fraud about to be fired.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: Mike Myers convinced the no talent police were coming from him.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: We're coming for him.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: These are the most accomplished people in the field.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: So the feeling isn't a signal that you're actually a fraud.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: The feeling in this case is just a lag.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_01: It is the receipt, you know, for growing faster than your self-image can keep up.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I told my client, the discomfort you're feeling isn't evidence that you don't belong.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's evidence that you grew.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: No, your job isn't to own the title again.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: You already have it.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_01: Your job is to let yourself become the person who has it.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: That's law, identity level work.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: It is another deal.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: Did it land?
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, a month later, he sent me one line.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_01: He said, I stopped waiting to feel like him.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_01: I just started being him badly until it got less bad.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: Again, this is a paraphrasing.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: Which honestly might be this whole episode.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: Let's leave people with something to actually do, not just think about.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: Three things.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: Quick.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: The person you think you are isn't a fact.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's a case you're still building.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, it is a case you're still building.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: We are all a work in progress all the time.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_01: And the control that you have on it is that you get to choose the evidence.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the whole game here.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: That's the episode.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_00: If this one hit, send it to the person you know who just got the big title and is quietly terrified.
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_00: They need it today.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_02: Wonderful.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_01: I will see you next week.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Jordan.
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_02: There we go.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: This is Rob.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um probably what I take out of this is that identity is something that is connected to act.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_01: And this somehow and all of these somehow reminds me that everything is connected to action.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_01: We should stop.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to change and this reminds me that it is all connected to action.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: If you do want to change, the easiest way to do it is to act.
• 29:57
  SPEAKER_01: You want to change your job?
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: Apply to a job.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: You want to change your life, do something even little that is different from your from what you had done yesterday.
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: Even little from what you've done yesterday.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: And then you will become a different person.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_01: That just takes time.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_01: Just takes time.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I hope you enjoyed.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I'll see you next week with a completely different episode War and Peace by Dostoyaski.