Latest / Why We Do What We Do / Nostalgia: Grit With Steven Hayes

Transcript

Nostalgia: Grit With Steven Hayes · Why We Do What We Do

0:03
You're listening to Why we do what we do? Welcome to Why we do
0:16
what we do. We are a psychology podcast. I am your host,
0:20
Abraham, although it doesn't sound like me if you've listened to us before.
0:24
Due to some unexpected events, one of them being my voice right now,
0:29
we were unable to record the normal episodes that we had record in the time
0:34
that we had planned to. So what we're going to do since it's summer
0:37
and people have got stuff going on and there's been holidays, my voice is
0:41
kind of shot, is we're actually going to release a bonus nostalgia episode.
0:46
Now, this isn't a normal nostalgia episode because typically when we release one of
0:51
these, do listeners know we will add something to the end of it.
0:55
Well, we'll expand upon that conversation with updated information. Noticed I didn't introduce
1:00
my normal co host, Jane, who couldn't be here today. So yeah,
1:04
this is just going to be just a re release of that full episode.
1:08
And this was our most popular episode for a long time. It's now
1:12
our second most popular episode. So I'm hoping that people who have weren't around
1:18
to hear it the first time, who maybe didn't know that it was in
1:21
our catalog, will get a chance to catch it this time around. So
1:25
this is a conversation that we had with doctor Stephen Hayes. This episode originally
1:30
published December twenty seventh, twenty seventeen. So yeah, it was several years
1:36
ago about the concept of grit in psychology, the sort of persistence and determination
1:42
and what that means and how to think about it. And also it talks
1:47
a little bit about acceptance and commitment, training, acceptance and commitment, therapy,
1:52
mindfulness and some other ideas, and so just wanted to, you know,
1:56
bring this back into our feed, have it show up for people so
1:59
that if they didn't catch it the first time, they could listen to it
2:01
this time. And even if you did catch it last time, it's been
2:04
a while, so maybe it will be a good conversation to revisit. I
2:07
think about this one kind of a lot myself. I reflect on it.
2:12
I think about things that he said. Just a really great speaker and presenter
2:15
and a lot of people I think have benefited greatly from the work that he's
2:20
done. So anyway, that's enough of this horrid voice that you've had to
2:23
hear. Let's let past why we do what we do. Crew, pick
2:28
this one up and tell the story or share the story that in the interview
2:31
that we had with doctor Stephen Hayes. All right, so this is Abraham
2:42
and I'll be your host, and it's your co host, Ryan O.
2:45
And so this is why we do what we do. We have a special
2:46
episode today. We are privileged to have a guest in the studio with us.
2:52
His name is doctor Steve Hayes. Thank you so much for being here.
2:54
Awesome to be here. So, Ryan, why don't you give us
2:57
a little introduction here? Yeah, so I wanted you to dive into a
3:00
little bit about like how you got into psychology. Sure, so let's maybe
3:04
let's start there. How did you find yourself running into this psychology world.
3:07
Well, I'm interested in why people do what they do. I suppose,
3:10
you know, most people get into psychology because I've seen something, even their
3:15
own behavior of their family, that this interests them. Sometimes not happy things.
3:19
But I decided even in high school, and part of it is I
3:21
loved science, but I also loved kind of literature, and I ran the
3:25
literary magazine and all that kind of stuff, and I said, well,
3:29
what can you do that is science? And you can get into these deep
3:32
human issues psychology, And it was this thing called psychology because I hadn't done
3:38
anything other than read popular literature. Maslow as my hero at the time.
3:42
I still kind of think well of them, peak experiences and all that kind
3:46
of what you know, this podcast focus on to just very practical things of
3:50
how we live in ways that are more successful. And I've never wavered.
3:54
I'm glad I made the choice because it turns out it's right. You can
3:58
put the hardest known science filtered around it if you want, and it's very
4:01
practical. When you go home and you kiss your wife and hug your kids,
4:05
it's in the room. Yeah. Awesome. So there's there's a lot
4:09
of different areas that we can jump into, especially when we're talking about something
4:13
such as acceptance and commitment therapy or you know the underlying like language processes there
4:17
that you study the time. So today's topic that we want to jump into
4:21
was largely known as like grit, right, yeah, perseverance in a way,
4:27
yeah, that type of thing. Yeah. Yeah, So I just
4:29
want to kind of free flow this and see where it goes. One thingle
4:31
I like to take on here is just kind of look at popular resources that
4:34
are out there, so psychology today, YouTube and those sort of things.
4:39
Ted talk. The one that was like up top and everywhere was Android Duckworth's
4:43
book that came out in twenty sixteen titled Grit, and she kind of talks
4:46
about it is just passion and perseverance for very long term goals. So maybe
4:50
we can start there, like, is that something that we are okay with?
4:54
Yeah, that sounds great. Is that an acceptable general definition? I
4:57
guess yeah, it'll work. I mean this kind of perseverance for long term
5:01
goals, things that really care about but that have an arc take a while.
5:04
That isn't something you can just do a one and done. And that
5:08
passion part is that there's a deep connection to those purposes. And the angle
5:13
that I would bring to it is that we've been able to pull out its
5:15
joints some of the things that interfere with that, and what do you do
5:17
with those things and what gets in the way of these longer term things you
5:23
really care about that you want to produce in your life and whatever that might
5:26
be, whether it's a successful podcast or being able to be a competitive athlete,
5:30
build a business, maintain a relationship, raised kids, you know,
5:33
go to school, got a good gree I mean that these things require this
5:36
kind of gritty persistence and a lot of the things that are out in the
5:41
culture that tell you here's how you do it, it turns out that's not
5:43
right. Yeah, and so some of it's counterintuitive. Some of the things
5:46
we've discovered in our research and be able to put into our practices and things
5:50
that your grandmother would tell you or things that you're just reading the newspaper,
5:55
requires some deeper dive into what fosters and gets in the way of creating kind
6:00
of the ability to get what you really want when that takes a long time,
6:05
takes a lot of work, is hard and requires persistence required. Okay,
6:12
so maybe what we can dive into is like, what's the model you
6:15
kind of look at it at from and then what are some of those things
6:17
that I guess the research hasn't quite lined up with right or you're learning different
6:21
things, like let's just explore that wherever. Well, I think most people
6:27
if they were just to talk about it and think, so what in their
6:30
family and their background or this common sense and we would do it would probably
6:33
get kind of a wheel power lecture or some kind of some sort of wagging
6:39
finger about how you have to really try hard, you really have to keep
6:42
pushing, keep trying, never give up. Things like that, which really
6:46
about to advice about persistence. But you know, if you dig a little
6:51
deeper, and some of it's in Duckworths work and what's in there. But
6:54
there's some features I think we can bring to it. It's the depth of
6:58
the connection to meaning and purpose that will carry you through on one hand,
7:01
and I think also on the other hand, not doing things that get in
7:05
the way. There's a lot of things that you know your grandmother might tell
7:09
you to do, or that you're just your mind tells you to do that
7:11
if you follow it, it's going to create problems for you. I'll give
7:14
you an example. Let's say you're working with grit with an athlete. A
7:18
very common thing is to focus on the form that they have to show and
7:23
persist in it, but also to you know, keep their mind off things
7:29
that distract and a fear, et cetera. That's a bad idea. That's
7:33
a really bad idea, and there's not very good evidence of it, especially
7:39
if you look long term. And why because when you try to keep your
7:42
mind off something deliberately. It means you have to mind remind yourself as to
7:46
whether or not you're no longer minding it, which means you just minded it
7:48
again. So you get these loops within loops, this crazy way that our
7:54
minds work, where if I'm focusing on distraction, let's say I have a
8:00
split, now I have the dispart. Don't focus on this. That's the
8:03
dispart. Traction. It's just like traction on tires, right, It's what
8:05
pulls you towards things disc meaning, don't do it, So don't have traction
8:09
towards that. Yeah, but if you're really thinking about that a lot,
8:13
then you're thinking about that, And so how do we instead put something that's
8:16
more like a traction? I mean, what do you focus on that?
8:20
What might actually be able to capture and pull you across these barriers that you're
8:24
going to run into if you have any kind of passion and purpose in your
8:28
life. That's counterintuitive and grandma probably doesn't know about that, and a lot
8:33
of the coaches don't know about that, and so et cetera. You know,
8:37
you look at places where people need grit. It's easy to do it
8:41
in sets a way that you actually have. You're working against your own interests
8:46
in the name of fostering your interests, which really that just sucks. That's
8:50
not where you want to be. And we have some ways of helping people
8:54
out of that kindundrum ota that these kind of feedback loops that they get in
8:58
your way. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of what you
9:01
said already is that there's not really going to be a fine distinction between what
9:07
is easy and what takes grit. That's going to be different for each person,
9:11
and that grit might it might mean persevering in the face of something that's
9:16
it's difficult. You know, it's lifting something that's really heavy, it's pushing
9:18
yourself physically to a point that it's difficult to overcome. And in that moment,
9:24
and we actually did an episode on on willpower. What we talked about
9:26
in the instance, what you're trying to overcome is the desire, the motivation
9:31
to get out of this sure and make an end. But at the same
9:33
time, there are things that get in the way that aren't necessarily pushing yourself
9:39
physically, but that when you get in your own way about things. And
9:43
I like to always share personal examples on here because it's fun and embarrassing and
9:46
confronting. And so, for example, you know, I'm one of those
9:52
people where it's like the grass is always greener. Even when I'm doing the
9:54
thing that I want to be doing, I'm thinking about I wish I was
9:58
I can't wait till this as done so I can be onto the next thing
10:01
that I want to be doing. And it's just there's always that, and
10:03
simply being able to recognize how I make the choices and also just the way
10:09
that I think about those things in the moment, it shifts how I interact
10:13
with those experiences that I have. And so I think, just to piggyback
10:16
off of what you've been saying, that there's a parallel there in that.
10:20
In this perseverance refers to identifying where barriers like that exist, that are where
10:26
we kind of our own thoughts and our own language that they just get in
10:30
the way of us being able to commit to the things that we really want
10:33
to do and persevere in the face of the motivation to do other things.
10:37
Yeah, the big ones that get in the way, or thoughts, feelings,
10:41
memories and bodiless sensations, or the stories that you tell about yourself and
10:46
others, I mean those the big ones. So your self concept doesn't fit,
10:50
for example, or you kind of view yourself as a victim, or
10:52
you view yourself as you know, deep down, I'm really not ready to
10:54
do this, et cetera. You sort of buy into a story. That's
10:58
one, but another is that as you move ahead, it's emotionally hard.
11:03
You know, you have thoughts of failure. You can be physically hard in
11:07
terms of you know, just your bodily sensations involved in doing hard things.
11:11
And so what do you do when part of you is saying no, there's
11:16
something aversive in their difficult, challenging emotionally, cognitively or in terms of self
11:22
story and self concept. And there a lot of the advice is wrong,
11:30
I mean a lot of the things that we're told to do. If you
11:31
have a negative self concept, just believe in yourself an adopt a positive one.
11:35
The problem is is if you're trying to trick yourself, then you're kind
11:39
of aware of the fact that you have two stories going on here, and
11:41
then your mind's torturing you with all kinds of evidence that you're basically lying to
11:45
yourself. You're a fraud. You're fooling people. It's just one of many
11:48
examples where you end up instead of keeping your eye on the prize, you're
11:52
keeping your eye on the war within. And when it's one, then you
11:56
can sort of get back to what you actually have to do here. You
12:00
know, that's exhausting, encounter productive. So the message that I would want
12:03
to focus on is how do we connect with our passion and purpose in a
12:09
way that'll carry us forward. But then how do we also deal with these
12:13
barriers that come up and deal with it in a way that's more open and
12:16
flexible and allows us to move quickly, not through them, not instead of
12:22
them, not over them, not around them, but with them. It's
12:26
very much like picking something up and carrying it with you. I mean,
12:28
after all, your thoughts, your feelings, your memories are in you.
12:31
They're not bigger than you. That's just an illusion of mind that there's something
12:35
out there that can stop you. They're not a physical barrier. And figure
12:37
out a way to put them in the pocket, put them in the wallet,
12:41
and carry them with you. I mean, you don't have to make
12:43
them go away, you don't have to change them. Do you have to
12:45
relate to them? In a way that they're no longer functioning as barriers.
12:48
If I had a physical object in front of me, okay, I might
12:50
need to figure out how to get over, under, around, and through.
12:54
But my memories aren't like that. They're going to go with me.
12:58
My emotions aren't like that, they're going to go with me. So our
13:01
own language and the advice that's in the culture actually is is wrong and sometimes
13:05
deeply wrong. And we would all know that, everyone would know that,
13:11
except for the immediate effect of following that advice is often positive. For example,
13:18
if you are worried about something and you try to distract yourself, it's
13:22
only over the long term that you'll get into these self amplifying loops of you
13:26
know, a Hoverzon commercial that won't end. You know yet there yet,
13:31
and my there yet. You're never there yet. You don't have the confidence,
13:33
you don't have the self esteem, you know, whatever you think you
13:35
have to have. But immediate effect is positive. If I'm saying, you
13:41
know, I'm good enough, you know for a few minutes, maybe a
13:46
few hours. Or if I instead of doing the scary thing, I'll do
13:48
this other thing well for a little while. So everything we know about how
13:54
the human mind works is now is more impactful than then, sure short short
14:00
term contingencies, right, So we get drawn in, like a fish getting
14:03
drawn into a fish trap, into doing things that don't work, and then
14:07
when they don't work long run, but they do work short term, to
14:11
do more of them, right, So we're doing more and more and more
14:15
and more of it doesn't work, and meanwhile we're surprised at why we can't
14:20
lose weight, we can't stick to that exercise program, we can't persist of
14:24
that business challenge. And it's because we're fighting ourselves instead of connecting with that
14:31
sense of meaning and purpose that you know can move mountains if we're able to
14:35
bring together you know, your whole self and community people who share your vision
14:41
together to make it happen. So we kind of hid this from the listeners
14:45
upfront, at least if they didn't know already. You have an immense amount
14:50
of literature behind you, yeah, and a really cool movement. And we
14:54
were talking before the podcast about how it's it's not just one person, right,
14:58
it's this whole community. And I think you you've actually done a really
15:01
cool job. And at the end we'll talk about what that community is maybe
15:03
and where people can go. But I think this is relevant. So I
15:07
mean over six hundred scientific articles, forty four books, Like, there's an
15:11
immense amount of literature here, Like what are you guys finding for those people
15:15
that are like struggling in the moment and trying to find like that are looking
15:18
for these strategies, Like, what are you guys finding that actually works?
15:22
Now? Well, part of what's exciting and really cool about what we're doing
15:26
is, you know, the work that we're doing on acceptance and commitment therapy
15:30
or ACT and the underlying basic work. You know, initially a lot of
15:33
it was applied to things like you know, mental health, problem substance use,
15:37
et cetera. But the principles really came down to how to have a
15:41
mind and not get in your own way. I mean, it's how to
15:45
sort of be human, be able to remember and think and evaluate and compare
15:48
all those things that we can do so wonderfully you know, the link to
15:52
things like problem solving, creativity and all the rest, but also can easily
15:56
create our life as a problem to be solved and put on whole until our
16:00
problems are solved and then we can start living. You know, and then
16:03
the clock becomes a mockery, you know, because you realize you're not living,
16:07
and so forth. It turns out a lot of these things that feel
16:11
like iron bars that you know cage us in are like printed on rice paper.
16:17
They're really not very heavy and thick. Once you see the I want
16:22
to want to say the trick, but once you see the illusion of mind,
16:26
I mean, it's kind of like the Wizard of Oz with the big
16:30
scary head, you know, talking to you and telling you to go get
16:33
the the broomstick from the wicked witch of the West, and then there was
16:38
the East anyway, one of the before you're able to move forward, and
16:41
then the curtain gets pulled aside and some frumpy little guy talking into a microphone,
16:48
and that not quite as serious. Don't pay attention to that guy behind
16:52
the curtain just doesn't have the same impact as a big scary head. And
16:56
so when you pop the illusion of how the mind gets in your way,
17:02
how the rules that you're adopting inside your health, the talk that you're doing,
17:07
you're not very far away from doing something that's really fundamentally different. Not
17:11
that it's not a pantasy, it's not you know choirs aren't going to sing
17:15
immediately, but you immediately head in a different direction. So if I can
17:19
give you just one example, take an example of a really really difficult thought.
17:25
If somebody listening to us has one where you know, there's kind of
17:29
a thought that you buy into that gets in the way of you doing something.
17:33
You know, like you really want to make something happen in business,
17:37
but it's hard or in a relationship, but you'd have to step into a
17:40
space that's difficult. And if you can put it into words and like put
17:44
it into a sentence, sing that thought and see what happens. Say it
17:49
in the voice of your least favorite politician, see what happens, or in
17:55
Donald Duck. Might work to steal it down to a single word, say
17:57
it over and over again. But ted X talk that's up and people want
18:02
to see it. I walked through about ten methods for everything from giving your
18:06
mind to name. But it's not self ridicule. It's a matter of kind
18:10
of distancing, of being able to see your thoughts the way you might look
18:12
at your hand, as opposed to seeing your thoughts the way it might look
18:17
if your hand was covering your eyes, your hand's covering your eyes. You're
18:21
not seeing your hand, You're just seeing nothing. And that's kind of what
18:22
we do with our thoughts. We let them get up so close to us
18:26
that, you know, to go back to that other metaphor. I know
18:29
I'm mixing them now, but the dictator within is like the Wizard of Oz
18:33
scary floating head. You know. I've got people emailing me from around the
18:41
world who've let the words within dictate to them. And some of these simple
18:48
methods just opening up a little crack, you know, like opening a window,
18:51
and then fresh air can get in just a little crack, just a
18:53
little enough that there's a human being in there has a choice and has not
18:57
just run on automatic pilot, but whatever programs are kind of natural verbal conditioning
19:02
inside her head, and it can become transformational in the sense that you now
19:07
are in a different direction. You can realize that I can take that thought
19:11
with me and do this scary thing with this girl I want to ask out,
19:18
or do this scary thing with this business I'm trying to get started,
19:22
or whatever the case might be. And we've shown this in terms of task
19:26
persistence. That particular method is called diffusion it's made up word. It means
19:32
to not be soffused with a Latin root word that means poured together with the
19:37
content of your mind. Instead of start looking at your mind the way you
19:41
look at your hand. If it was a few feet away from you.
19:44
You can see the thoughts, but they're not dictating what else you can see.
19:48
They're not running you. It's up to you. Know. It could
19:51
be something useful in that thought. You know you haven't done your taxes.
19:53
Okay, thanks, I need to work on that. I mean, sometimes
19:56
thoughts are really helpful. Sometimes you know, deep down there's something wrong with
20:00
you. Yeah, I heard that done. That doesn't help. I understand
20:03
where it came from. Sometimes you can even remember the moments, or even
20:10
you'll hear things in your mother's voice, your father's voice, you know,
20:12
like programming, sometimes you can feel like where it came from. And it's
20:18
fine to notice that, but not to be run by it, because then
20:21
you're just you're kind of running on an automatic pilot. And you'd how to
20:25
pray for good programming. Well, if we had that, we wouldn't need
20:26
help, right, they wouldn't be listening to this freaking podcast because you'd already
20:30
be doing everything you wanted to do. That's not normal. That's not what
20:34
happens. People need, you know. So these diffusion methods of sort of
20:41
turning what looks like lemonade back to lemons and water and sugar, you know,
20:44
kind of taking it apart. So there's a little bit of choice when
20:48
you're having thoughts like I'm not good enough, or this is too hard,
20:52
or I should just go have a six pack or whatever the thing is,
20:56
you know, not that hard to learn, and it gives you something to
20:59
do that's powerful and useful. Other than just waiting for the thoughts to change
21:03
or waiting for them to go away, and waiting for them to stop or
21:07
change their form. You'll wait the rest of your life for that. A
21:11
quick ad break forced upon us by capitalism. Let's get back to this conversation.
21:22
So, one thing that I sometimes think about when having these discussions talking
21:26
about willpower and persevering through things that are difficult, is making sure just that
21:30
we make the point very clear, we're not necessarily advocating that if there's something
21:37
that's going wrong in your life that you have to be able to work through
21:41
that and just deal with it. Like if you're being abused, or if
21:45
you are having a terrible time at your job, or if you are there's
21:48
something that is not in line with how you'd like your life to be going.
21:52
That grit doesn't mean that we're you know, well, I think we're
21:56
generally talking about grit as being able to persevere through something that is working toward
22:00
a value. It's recognizing that or working in line with a value, not
22:03
working but not to a goal, recognizing that. It's not that when there's
22:07
something that you really should not be experiencing and should as a term we can
22:12
discuss later, but sure it's one that it is absolutely not in line with
22:15
the values, and that in general, we could say people, this type
22:19
of experience is not necessarily part of the human experience. It's not the part
22:22
of the experience that we have to deal with things that are like traumatic and
22:26
dangerous and that might be part of someone's job might be really dangerous and might
22:30
lead to things that are traumatic. But just saying that grit doesn't mean that
22:33
you just need to buck up in whatever terrible thing you're dealing with just deal
22:37
with it. But in the instances where you're dealing with something that is in
22:41
line with what you'd like your life to be and what your values are and
22:44
what your goals are. There is something to be gained from being able to
22:48
look at how your language plays a role in that and just if you could
22:49
comment on what you're thinking, Well, there's in a persistence and just the
22:52
word grit can pull for this thing or persisting in the form that you have
22:56
currently, and it really doubles down if you know that My work is called
23:00
acceptance and Commitment therapy because that acceptance works and sounds like and furthermore issues just
23:06
accept your lot and that persisted the form really which is you know, almost
23:11
toxic, that combination. When the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Act was first kind
23:17
of hit the world in a way that was sort of on this radar screen
23:22
of some people in the culture. That was when it was written up in
23:25
Time two thousand and six and a five page story my little fifteen minutes of
23:29
fame with a nice little two page picture that I sent to my mother my
23:32
face in Time magazine. That was really cool. Yeah, but you know,
23:37
immediately I got pushed back from people who are saying, here it is
23:40
telling the downtroud and to accept there a lot. And you know that this
23:45
idea of persistence and acceptance kind of, as I say, it almost adds
23:48
to it. Is not that what you're persisting with is sort of keeping the
23:52
faith with yourself that what you care about matters, and that going in that
23:56
direction matters. What you're accepting is to receive the original sense of the word
24:02
acceptances that comes from a Latin word that means to receive, as if to
24:06
receive a gift, which is still in your English but barely like here,
24:11
when you give a gift to somebody, would you accept this? We say
24:12
that to the people, we don't mean here? Would you tolerate this?
24:17
Here? Would you be resigned to this? When you give a gift you
24:18
don't mean that, you mean, you know? Would you willingly take this
24:22
in as a gift that I'm giving you? You know? And inside a
24:26
lot of this chatter is a gift of our history. There's wisdom inside it,
24:30
even the painful experience we've learned about that you asked this question, why
24:33
are you psychologists? A lot of people have had painful family histories and so
24:37
forth, and they know something about trauma. They've seen mental illness, they
24:41
know something about suffering. That's why they want to step up to it.
24:42
Well, that's a gift. It's a gift. It's where your passion comes
24:47
from. I bet you most people you think deeply about your passion. If
24:51
you flip it over. It's also a place that you know how to hurt.
24:55
You know. If you're passionate about relationships, you probably know something about
24:57
being wounded in relationship. If love is important to you, probably know something
25:02
about loss, you know. So there's this kind of rich soup, you
25:06
know, in there of you know, I think persistence is more like keeping
25:11
the faith with yourself. And a closer word would be almost something like faith
25:18
and not meaning religious faith, but faith and this kind of leap of wholeness.
25:23
And it's right in there. And there's some of the words that people
25:26
would say when they're talking about, you know, grit, I'd say words
25:30
like confidence. Well, the fidense part is a Latin word that means faith.
25:34
Oh, that's what it means. Fete is faith. It's the same
25:37
root as a word faith. Okay. So, and most people think that
25:41
you're going to get confidence by attacking your feelings of insecurity, which is the
25:47
least with faith thing you could do. If you want to have faith with
25:51
yourself, how about having faith with the fact that sometimes you have self doubt,
25:55
sometimes you're not sure, sometimes you have different thoughts. Open up to
25:59
that, put it in a wall that carry with you. That's a pretty
26:00
faith self faithful thing to do. Right. So confidence, the behavior con
26:04
means with right with faith in yourself is to persist in passion what you really
26:11
care about, not by form, but by this place that I care matters,
26:18
and I can bring it into the world, bring it into my life
26:21
even when it's difficult. So it takes something like an abusive relationship. You
26:25
now, what people want are committed, loving, loyal relationships. If you're
26:30
an abusive relationship, at some point you're going to find that in a different
26:33
form. If you're going to find it at all, that means escaping from
26:38
the abusive relationship, and so that takes grit. That's hard. Your mind
26:45
screams at you. You feel like you're going to be completely alone. No
26:48
mean's ever going to love you again. The person might be dangerous, there's
26:52
all kinds of things in there. Right, Plus you probably love the person.
26:55
You're going to have to walk away anyway. Why, because what you
26:57
care about matters, because your life matters, what your passion is matters.
27:03
That's a kind of persistence that's with faith in yourself. That's a kind of
27:07
confidence, right that I can, you know, put myself into a healthy
27:11
relationship and that people will care to be with me and so forth, even
27:15
if my mind's telling me that maybe even what abusive spouse is saying, which
27:18
is nobody will ever love you, you know, you're not worth anything without
27:22
me, or whatever the abusive pattern might be. And I was mentioning the
27:27
early you know, sued me for going on so long, but the early
27:32
kind of flowering of interest in ACT when we were getting I was really buoyed
27:37
up by the fact that one of the very first randomized trials of ACT was
27:42
putting ACT into a work environment that was really tough. It was a call
27:45
center at a bank, and the comparison condition was a behavioral training program that
27:51
taught people to reduce stressors in their work environment by changing the structure of the
27:55
environment itself, right, and it did pretty well people's willingness to change the
28:02
environment. Unfortunately, it didn't lower stress very much. What ACT did is
28:07
that lowered stress was helpful with mental health, and people start stepping up and
28:14
changing their work environment. Nice. So you'd say, okay, so this
28:18
is not accept your lot. This is accept your feelings and change your lot
28:22
and you know, go to the form and change the environment, et cetera.
28:27
Well, why do we play it small? Why do we play our
28:30
lives small? And I think it's very often because we have these things within
28:33
that are telling us that we have to play it small. It's hard emotionally
28:37
to step forward and to play our life big. And so it's the same
28:42
gritty message of you matter, your passion matters, but also bring all of
28:49
the stuff inside you along with for that journey. Don't be waiting for that
28:53
mess to be cleaned up and for you to have one hundred percent clear emotions,
28:56
thoughts, memories, and sensations before you can do it anything, because
29:00
you're going to wait for the rest of your life. Meanwhile, there's things
29:03
to change in your life, and that might mean leaving a relationship, that
29:06
might mean confronting a boss, that might mean leaving a job. That's a
29:11
kind of persistence too, that's a kind of gritty move too. That doesn't
29:15
mean just keep doing the behavior. It means keep caring about the values that
29:21
you bring to that behavior. Super Well said, yeah, yeah, I
29:25
had some thoughts and some questions. Doesn't ask but you kind of just kind
29:27
of answer them along the way. So another one I had is maybe a
29:32
little bit small of a question, but just where does this come from with
29:33
there are people who seem to already sort of come prepackaged in a way with
29:37
their ability to make those sorts of calls and stuff. And you know,
29:41
we know that that is not necessary that your genes don't code for grit.
29:45
We know that's not a thing that happens, not likely. No, then
29:49
looking at where does this come from with those people who seem to be really
29:52
good at it? And is this something that people seem to be really bad
29:55
at it? Is that something that they can change about themselves? It is
29:57
something that can change, can measure it, you can show you change the
30:00
process, change the outcome. It's one of the things that I'm most excited
30:03
about and proud about about the act work is that inside these about two thousand
30:07
studies on the basic and applied model and the technology, there a couple hundred
30:12
on these core processes and showing that you can target them and change them,
30:18
you know, in terms of the evolutionarily established thing. A couple of things
30:22
to remember. That One is that genes are turned on and off by environment
30:26
and behavior. So not just be thinking because you've got your gene plateful,
30:30
but you do, you get your twenty eight, twenty five thousand whatever genes,
30:33
you're not going to change them that you're kind of predetermined, no,
30:37
because you're actively turning those things on and off. If you meditate for eight
30:42
weeks, about fifteen hundred of year genes get reliably turned on and off,
30:45
and randomized controlled trials mostly involved in regulating stress reactions. Well, that means
30:52
every freaking cell in your body is now genetically different, even though it has
30:56
the same genes, because they're expressed or not expressed environment and behavior. Does
31:02
that? I mean sells or systems for turning environment and behavior into biology.
31:06
That's what they are, and there's there's regulatory systems to do that. So
31:07
that's one thing to say. But the other thing is people naturally get dealt
31:12
not just by genes, but also by culture and family history and so forth,
31:15
a different deck of cards to play. Let's take, for example,
31:19
some folks will associate aversive events that happen with other events more easily over longer
31:26
timeframes. You can show it at birth jumping out of the womb. Different
31:32
as to whether or not a versive events. You actually get stuck with a
31:34
diaper pen. Not that we still do pins with diapers, but that's how
31:37
old I am. You know, some infants will and we'll associate that whereas
31:45
other's not so much. Well, that then predicts something. What does it
31:49
predicta Well, one of the things it predicts is higher levels of experiential avoidance.
31:53
People who work hard to avoid painful emotions often are people who are dealt
31:59
more paid emotions. Now, that could be by early childhood trauma, could
32:02
be things that happen by experience. Some of this by underlying biology. Some
32:07
of us respond more to things like that and so. But that doesn't mean
32:10
it can't be changed. That you don't have ways of acquiring a greater openness
32:16
to emotional difficulty and a little bit of distance that allows you to persist,
32:22
because it isn't that you have to subtract and eliminate the aversives. You have
32:27
to persist through the aversives in a way that's not suppressive and doesn't blow up
32:30
on you. Where you're using kind of ways of coping or ways of being
32:35
that are actually counter productive in the long term. So if you can teach
32:37
people, for example, these kind of emotional willingness and opening methods, people
32:43
who have a biologically established high strung easily associated with aversives kind of biology,
32:52
and sometimes this is in families. Whole families are all like this, and
32:54
they're more prone to what to anxiety disorders and substance abuse. You can show
32:59
it why because both of those things regulate these built in negative arousal under negative
33:06
emotional motivation patterns. But if I can teach you how to open up to
33:10
that emotion and persist for a little bit, you can get to some of
33:15
the positive outcomes that are down along a different pathway of larger rewards, but
33:22
a little delayed, and you have to walk through aversives to get there.
33:27
So you take this kind of fence that's keeping people caged in based on their
33:31
biological but also family learning and other history, and instead, now this thing's
33:37
been pushed out and you have like a bigger domain kind of a platform in
33:40
which you can learn and experience consequences that are farther away or more probabilistic,
33:47
or involve immediate emotional things or raise difficult thoughts or feelings or bodily sensations have
33:52
less power to restrain restrict control. That's a kind of freedom inside your biology.
34:00
And oh, by the way, actually it turns out some of those
34:02
things will actually start up and down regulating the very genes that are producing the
34:07
reaction. So and that's been shown that the mindfulness studies I mentioned, but
34:14
not just that, and animal models and in human models both that as you
34:17
learn some of those skills, your basic biology starts lining up to make it
34:23
actually easier, not harder, over time. So the cool message about that
34:28
is some of these skills that you can learn, these psychological flexibility, we
34:30
call them skills. I mentioned the diffusion one, the acceptance one, but
34:36
there's a handful of other ones. You start getting your history, your behavioral
34:39
patterns, and even your underlying biology working for you instead of against you,
34:45
and it gets easier, not harder. So that's kind of cool. It
34:49
isn't something you have to slog on for the rest of your life, you
34:52
know, it's something that actually get easier as you build skills and being able
34:57
to produce the kind of passionate, gritty capacity for persistence in the service of
35:05
your values. You've mentioned a lot about the research, and I would like
35:07
to talk about how to talk about this with respect to understanding it scientifically.
35:13
But I'd like to actually start that conversation by asking you about how well you've
35:16
seen this, the work that you've done, and also the conceptual system that's
35:21
built around that and with that and how that's developed as well. Have you
35:24
seen that that maintains relatively well over cultures and different parts of the world,
35:29
the different languages and that sort of thing. It's an awesome question and a
35:31
really important one, because the last thing we frequently need is yet another white,
35:37
male dominated take on mental health. You take the or behavioral health,
35:42
you take some of the models that have been out there, like this Western
35:45
conception, like you know, they're creating all the psychiatric nosology cubbyholes inside the
35:52
DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual American Psychiatric Association. Well, if you
35:57
take that and you put into other parts of the world, everything gets worse.
36:00
Everything mental health gets worse. Cultural fabric gets torn. And I'm not
36:06
just saying that. You know, look at the Vicarum Patel's of the World
36:08
guide in India is on the time one hundred list is a physician and psychiatrist.
36:14
But this is the last thing we need is Western medicine coming in and
36:16
telling people how to run their behavior, because it just tears at these cultural
36:22
wisdom that's sometimes far wiser now what we've found. Conversely, and there's a
36:27
reason for it. The psychological flexibility model that's underneath the actwork is built on
36:34
very basic ideas about how learning works. These half a billion year old processes
36:38
of contingency learning operate and classical conditioning. You know, if people have taken
36:45
their psychology one on one course half a billion years old, how do we
36:49
know that all the organism that evolved during the Cambrian period do it? None
36:52
of them before I do. So, if you're a sponge or a jellyfish,
36:58
you don't do it. If you're a spider's worm, of course you
37:01
do do it. Well, okay. These learning systems are then kind of
37:07
impacted by these more recent kind of language learning systems that are evolutionarily far more
37:15
recent and can get in the way of doing things that for example, if
37:22
you're taking something that associative learning or contingency learning makes hard learning on the basis
37:29
of delayed consequences, especially if they're probabilistic, is hard. So it's an
37:35
easy fit. Where do you have a hard time in your life? Where
37:37
do you actually have a hard time doing? Way to Almost always there's things
37:40
where the immediate benefits, like you one way, and the long term benefits
37:45
it would be better to study now, But on the other hand, I
37:49
could watch another game of Thrones and you know, so it would be better
37:53
to you know, clean up that mess with my staff person than the other
38:00
hand, I can do that next week, and you know, so these
38:02
short term, long term kind of things, well, turns out that language
38:08
sometimes can actually double down on that make it worse. And that's something that's
38:13
newer. What you and I are doing right now is not something that dogs
38:16
and cats are doing. We have creaty good evidence on that. It's probably
38:21
only two hundred thousand years old, maybe two million years old. We know
38:23
the chimpanzees don't do it, you know, you know the twelve month old
38:27
babies do. So we and if you want to talk about it, we
38:30
can talk about what I mean by what they're doing. Well, back to
38:32
the cultural issue. If what we're managing is how this evolutionarily recent thing of
38:40
being able to talk, reason, think about things, symbolically, problem solve,
38:46
and these ancient processes interact that ain't human culture. It's human, but
38:52
it's not something that should fundamentally be different in Japan versus China versus Africa.
38:57
It turns out it isn't. We now have randomized trials on the methods,
39:02
but also studies on the processes in twenty seven different languages, in literally almost
39:08
every well, in every continent other than that, I don't know anything in
39:13
Antarctica and in areas around the world that are defined all these different ways.
39:19
We have act studies out of Africa, we have act studies out of China
39:22
and Japan and all the rest, and we have these flexibility process studies going
39:27
on too long as usual. Book bottom line is the relationship between psychological flexibility,
39:31
the things I'm talking about now, between connecting with your passion to foster
39:36
that gritty movement towards and knowing how to do something different with the barriers that
39:42
show up that are based on the world within thoughts, feelings, memories,
39:45
bodily sensations, the relationship between that and success and behavior, between mental health
39:51
problems, substance use, problems, behavioral health problems, being able to be
39:55
a good athlete or to lose weights is exactly the same in every culture we've
40:01
looked at. The levels may differ from one culture or the other. Some
40:06
cultures are more experientially avoidant than others, for example, but the relationship between
40:10
these processes and outcomes is the same every place that we've looked, and it
40:15
should be because, after all, just being able to talk is not a
40:21
cultural issue. How you talk and that produces some things like in Japan we
40:25
talk about weve not iu that produces some differences in the underlying psychology, and
40:31
we can model that and put it into our methods. Too long an answer,
40:36
I'm sorry for going sold, but the bottom line is know that because
40:39
it's so basic what we're chasing. Yes, culture matters, it matters on
40:45
top of this, and we're talking about things that are down at the level
40:50
of something like reward learning or reinforcement. That's not a cultural thing. Culture
40:54
builds on that. That's the same. That's true with these things like diffusion,
40:59
acceptance, attention to the now, values, what the values are,
41:04
what the issues are that'll change from culture and culture, but not that they
41:07
matter. Another interruption from the ads and we're back, and so not to
41:20
put words in your mouth, but just to sort of say what I was
41:22
hearing and what you were saying, and you can correct me if this is
41:24
wrong or tell me if I'm right. Is that the basic psychological processes that
41:30
you're sort of that the model that you use in understanding how to influence things
41:36
like written perseverance and other things that are done in act, all of those
41:39
are part of the underlying psychological experience of being human. Yes, And that
41:45
the race and culture, those things don't affect what it means necessarily to be
41:51
human, and that the process is involved in how we do our language at
41:55
the fundamental level of how it works. Just that's part of the human experience
42:00
around the world. Yeah, and we build on that. And these are
42:04
the things matter, they matter deeply, and diversity issues and so far the
42:07
are really critical and we've done a lot of work in this here, But
42:10
no, the deep messages were human beings and all human beings share these basic
42:17
psychological processes. And then culture and history and all of that, religion and
42:23
sexual orientation and gender and all those things build on that. And so you
42:29
need to be mindful of those things, study those things, look at those
42:31
things. But fortunately we've gone down to a level that's so basic. Some
42:37
of these core prosities how their expressed will be different, but the core processes
42:43
will be inside the different cultures and communities. And you know there's something sweet
42:50
about that we're human beings. Yeah, that's not something that we should feel
42:53
as so minimizes the importance of gender and diversity and all that. It puts
43:00
sit in a context that actually allows us to do some healthy and healing work,
43:04
which we really need. I think the whole world is looking around and
43:07
saying, holy beans, and if we can't figure out how to deal with
43:10
these differences between cultures and communities and politics and all the rest, we could
43:15
be in real trouble and actually act the work. The organization came out of
43:22
nine to eleven, so we've kind of there's a lot of backstory to that,
43:27
but we've been consciously trying to create a community that can step up to
43:32
these challenges of conflicts between peoples and so forth, and building a psychology that
43:39
might be more adequate to do that. And so launching off of some of
43:45
that discussion, especially around the basic processes, again, I want to say
43:49
sort of my understanding of this, and then here's some of the words of
43:52
wisdom that you'd definitely be able to share about the fact that we use a
43:57
lot of words, and we say things like mind, and we say things
44:00
like think and emotions and stuff, and that at what you're up to.
44:06
It seems like to me, is that all of that because those are things
44:09
that we know that we can experience and we have words for them, and
44:13
there are things that we can We look at human language and we can see
44:15
how human language affects behavior, both and how we talk to ourselves and how
44:20
we talk to others, and how our culture shapes the language that we use,
44:23
and that sort of thing that what you're up to and getting at things
44:28
like perseverance and gratit. This, as you mentioned, goes a lot far
44:30
beyond any niche example like that is that we can account for all of that
44:37
stuff. We know it's there, so there can be a science of it,
44:39
and you're packaging it in such a way that we now have terms to
44:45
apply to those processes and say we see that this is how this works.
44:49
And so if we can describe the way that it works, and we can
44:52
describe what the experience is. We can use that description as a tool now
44:55
to do the good objective science that needs to happen, so that we can
45:00
understand how to describe it and communicate it and then to make meaningful change for
45:04
people. Yeah, I think, what if I can read it back to
45:07
you and see if it resonates what you're saying. You know, so much
45:10
our cultural knowledge and wisdom is cast in terms of these private experiences that we
45:16
have of thinking and reasoning and feeling and remembering and sensing and so forth,
45:23
and it's been hard for objective Western science to get in there and kind of
45:28
figure out how to treat that in ways that actually ends up being really useful
45:31
and connects deeply with people in their actual experience. Doesn't minimize or dismiss or
45:37
handwave about it. Oh that's just this. No, it takes advantage,
45:40
you know, it takes the complexity seriously, and at times has happened in
45:45
psychologies, we've adopted terms that your grandmother could understand. There just kind of
45:50
lay terms, et cetera, and that could take you to the to a
45:52
certain distance. But there's a deeper understanding that we need to get to.
45:58
Part of what we're trying to do is to really understand, for example,
46:00
how does this process we're engaging in right now work, where did it come
46:06
from, and how does that impact us? And as you do that,
46:09
then you can kind of have your cake and eat it too, because you
46:12
can talk normally. It takes on that word mind. I don't mind the
46:15
word mind. It's a great way of talking about the kind of a repository
46:17
of all these kind of skills of symbolic learning, relational learning, language,
46:22
and cognition, higher cognition that's in the human experience where you're able to,
46:28
you know, talk about and interact with things in this very dynamic relational way
46:35
and you know, collection of all these different rules, ideas, thoughts,
46:39
evaluations, comparisons, predictions and so forth. Mind is a pretty good name
46:44
for that. But if I just say, oh, you have to change
46:46
your mind, thank you very much, dude. How do I do that?
46:52
So I just think something differently? Well, you know that's been looked
46:55
at quite a lot, and in fact, we went through a wave in
47:00
psychotherapy. I mean, I'm part of the cognitive behavior therapy wing to a
47:02
degree where there was way too much of detect challenge dispute and change being applied
47:08
to difficult thoughts. You know, twenty five years into the tradition, Whoops,
47:13
turns out that's not why the methods work. You know, that's a
47:16
little harsh to say, and I'm part of that tradition, but you know,
47:22
it turns out it was much more in line with the kind of thing
47:24
I'm talking about is that, Yeah, thoughts are important, but you have
47:29
to be really careful about detect, challenge, dispute, and change because a
47:32
lot of that gets your attention focused on the wrong things. So we need
47:37
a deep understanding about how the mind works that connects with things. You can
47:44
actually do things that are outside not just oh the brain made me do it,
47:47
or my genes maybe do it, but something I can do differently.
47:51
It changes how those things function in my life. And that's what we're doing
47:55
with that. But it turns out underneath it, there's this thing called relational
47:59
frame. We've spent you know, thirty five years trying to develop a relatively
48:04
adequate analysis of higher cognition and language, and we have an answer that's new
48:09
on the planet, you know, associative learning, which is most people know
48:14
and what's the major cognitive science. That's what you're going to read about in
48:16
the magazines are going to read about. The mind is what we've been doing
48:21
for three hundred years. I think it's mostly wrong, and we have a
48:23
different take on it. And because of that worry but we're I'm not here.
48:28
It's a little difficult to tell that story fully. But the more important
48:31
thing is is a different take that tells you, very concretely, here are
48:36
some things you can change in persons life by talking, by giving the methods.
48:42
I gave you some examples that are counterintuitive and very helpful. They're known
48:45
to be helpful by Western science tests of them and many of them. So
48:51
we're going to figure it out. And I say the we is I just
48:53
mean science, I mean psychological science. But I'm also saying that the behavioral
48:59
wing that I'm part of, the contextual functional wing, has a new life
49:06
there in the form of relational learning. I don't know if what fit the
49:10
podcast, but I'm going to say the words just to say I'm that.
49:13
You know, here's the thing we really learned that's different is the human mind
49:17
does not build on association. It's built on relations, and relations are something
49:22
you learn to do so. Another way to think about it, your mind
49:27
is more like a fractal that has to do with a family than it is
49:31
a Tinker toy set or a Lincoln log set or a Lego block set.
49:36
I'm dating myself to talk about tinker toys. But it's or here's another way
49:40
to say it. A person walks into a party, shakes a few people's
49:45
hands, leave, turns out they head a disease. They come in and
49:47
say, hey, this is a contagious disease. Who's hand to be shake.
49:52
That's the current model of the mind. That's the way we're trying to
49:55
make it work. What's connected? What looks similar here, something that's a
50:00
little different. You're throwing a party. You want to make sure that the
50:04
seating arrangements lead to really good social interactions. And you find out that somebody's
50:08
coming who's gay and a Trump supporter. Where are you going to set him?
50:15
You know, I know, by the way, really really really doesn't
50:19
like fundamentalist Christian ideas. Pick your thing, It'll change your whole seating map.
50:27
You're gonna that person can't go Just see what I'm saying. So the
50:31
mind is like that, it's this very active, dynamic thing. We're in
50:37
a large event like that, you would know how everybody's likely to relate to
50:42
everybody else. A big family event, you all even know how they related.
50:45
It's very dynamic, and when you put something in it changes everything.
50:50
So we know how to think relationally, not just associatively. It isn't just
50:53
like chalk on one hand gets on the other like germs and a person who's
50:57
using that first metaphor is using or It isn't just that, oh, you
51:01
know, I had a bad experience with you know this bottle. So something
51:06
that looks similar is going to frighten me. So formal similarity what goes together
51:10
by time, is not how the mind works. It works by something more
51:15
like a family picture, and that will include formal similarity, but it's not
51:22
a substitute. If you're looking at a big picture of a family, you
51:24
couldn't tell by looking at that picture who's related. You might say, oh,
51:29
okay, well this this person's black and that person's white. Yeah,
51:32
but they might be married. But this person's male, and they might be
51:37
married too. Jack might be married to George. Now, but this person's
51:39
younger, this said, Yeah, but the young person could be the aunt
51:43
of the person who's older. I mean it's like that. It isn't easily
51:47
well, the people who live together, they could be distant cousins, that
51:50
people live on the other end of the country, could be in a long
51:52
distance marriage. So you know, it's like that relationships aren't defined just by
51:59
what they look like or where they are, or time or appearance. They're
52:05
defined by this dynamic process of applying a frame of relationships. This is related
52:12
to that, like when you've learned that somebody is married to somebody, or
52:16
if they're a Trump supporter, or oh, by the way, they're gay,
52:20
or by the way they don't get along with the fundamentalist Christians. That
52:23
the whole mind is like that. And when you know that, you can
52:29
do a lot of cool things. You can mess around with things that change
52:32
how the mind works when it's working against you. Like the example is using
52:37
of singing your difficult thoughts. But you can also think about how to sort
52:43
of put things in there that change how the mind when you want to work
52:46
it towards you, like your definition that you use of passion and persistence,
52:52
How do we connect with our passion? I can bring passion into the room
52:58
and when I've done that, it's like inviting a guest to that family dinner
53:01
that's changed everything, like a really charismatic person who suddenly the whole party is
53:07
focused on that person. You can do that, You can put things in
53:10
your mind that I like that because they're that important to you, They're that
53:15
central, and so you know. The commitment part accept this, and commitment
53:20
therapy is how to do that. So you open up to the difficulties and
53:23
find a way to move with them. But then you connect with that person
53:28
purpose and passion and find a way to make that real. It's a lot
53:31
easier when you know how the mind works to do that. You start to
53:36
tie it back to a lot more of the discussion about the great and perseverance.
53:38
And one thing I've known some people in my life who have the sort
53:43
of approach to dealing with things where it's like to get through this and need
53:47
to be angry, and like you have to have a winning personality. Mentality
53:51
is like, it's about that I got to win. I'm gonna win,
53:52
I'm gonna beat down the opposition, and I'm going to be angry about it.
53:57
Could you speak to that as being necessary and or sufficient part of the
54:01
process of the perseverance and the grid. Yeah, people do do that.
54:06
But you know, if you actually look at the health outcomes of that,
54:07
good luck, because there's some pretty good evidence that that's going to have a
54:12
harmful effect on your physical health. If you know, remember that will type
54:15
A type B personality stuff. Yeah, that turned out to be mostly not
54:19
quite right. But there's a piece of it that's turned out to be pretty
54:22
good, which is this kind of suppressed anger, you know, that core
54:27
that often people use and frankly, let's be honest, more males than females.
54:30
Yeah, and not just males, but it's more males and female.
54:34
Yeah, but they're dying a heart disease earlier, and some of it has
54:37
to do with that. So you know, you can push down the accelerator
54:40
and the break at the same time, but the car is not going to
54:43
like it. You can pump all that anger into the room to try to
54:45
get something going motivation wise, but if you're just an exploding on people a
54:51
your social fabric is going to fall apart. Your workers are going to quit,
54:53
your you know, partners don't want to work with you anymore, and
54:57
so that's not going to work. So what are you going to do it?
54:59
You're going to pushed down the accelerator, push down the brake. I'll
55:00
get angered in the room to move me, but I'll try to break it.
55:05
So I don't know, bust up the china shop with my bullish behavior.
55:10
Where is that going to go? It's going to go into your poor
55:14
physical health soon enough, and poort mental health as well. So you have
55:21
to be careful that. The Other part of it is it's so much unnecessary.
55:24
Everything that we know about motivation says that positive motivation, if you can
55:30
do it, has longer persistence, has broader application, and has kind of
55:36
a softer effect on us. We're more creative in working how to get our
55:40
positives, and it's too many sheet sheets ways and unhealthy ways of working our
55:46
negatives. When you're using a lot of reversive motivation, you're producing side effects
55:52
you don't want. Plus you may find shortcuts to fulfill that motive, you
56:00
know. I'll give you an example. I would imagine that a person who's
56:05
really trying to build a business environment through anger is going to be very demanding
56:12
of their co workers in ways that are reversive. Would you get behavior that
56:15
way? Yeah, you'll get behavior, but you'll get avoidance behavior. You'll
56:21
get people lying to you. You're going to get a lot of things that
56:24
will blow up. You want an example, and run and run. The
56:29
bottom fifth of the workers were shamed systematically. Wow, they had a name
56:36
for him. Yeah, and it was a public shaming. If you were
56:38
in the bottom fifth, there would actually be a ceremony. It's like something
56:43
out of some sort of nightmare sci fi thing, Yeah, where you would
56:47
be shamed. And it was built on this kind of cheesy, not really
56:52
true evolutionary account. You know, he was a big fan of Dawkins.
56:54
A block on his name. What's his name's skilled skull. Anyway, the
57:00
guy, the n run guy went to jail, should have you know,
57:05
and this survile the fittest kind of dog eat dog thing. You know,
57:08
Well, why did they fail? They failed because when you did that to
57:13
workers, they started lying. Yeah. I don't know where I heard this.
57:16
I heard this in the last like twenty four hours have been when I
57:20
was reading, you know, reading up on great and such. You know.
57:22
And he paid the cost for that kind of verse of that fotivation by
57:27
losing his company. Yeah, and they actually actually fired people that way too.
57:30
They took out the Lewest there was the lowest percentage was fired at the
57:34
end of the year. Yeah, what what happened is the shaming. You
57:36
would lose your job, that would be announced publicly. You had to be
57:38
there for it. You would actually be there in the room while they're saying
57:42
you're stripped of that, and if somebody else would take you, you could
57:45
keep your job. Otherwise you're gone. Yeah, so you had to go
57:49
around like beg you know some unpleasant work environments. Yeah, no, I
57:53
mean god, you know, can you be any more stupid? But you
57:57
know, if people buy into a vision, I give you an example,
58:00
be Corpse. You know, you can organize your companies sometimes around values that
58:06
are more than profit. People don't realize that. Most of our laws don't
58:08
allow that. You know, if you're on the board, you have to
58:12
only care about profit unless you're structured properly where you can also care about the
58:15
environment, worker health, things like that. BE Corps can do that.
58:19
We have provisions and a law that allows to do that. Well. We've
58:22
done studies on what predicts success in that environment, and it's things that have
58:30
to do with positive motivation. Perspective, taking on others, hearing the voices
58:34
of others. You can see it in things like more diverse companies do better.
58:38
They do especially better in downturns. You know, companies that have women
58:43
not just men, ones that have different ethnicities. And part of the story
58:47
here that's inside some of the things that you see around issues of diversity and
58:51
so forth. Isn't just violence playing and sweet flowers and so forth. It's
58:54
dollars and cents. I mean figuring out a way to have more diverse ideas
59:00
in the room and being able to listen to those. You know, we
59:02
have a kind of a false idea in there that this group think idea.
59:07
You know that once you start functioning as a group, you're going to be
59:09
really stupid because we're all going to agree it's mostly not true based on some
59:14
methodological issues I could walk through, but mostly if we're in community with others
59:19
in a positive way, we're going to be able to persist. We're going
59:22
to be able to change things better. And are you going to want to
59:25
go to a work environment that's like Enron or you want to come to one
59:29
where you're treated with respect, your views are treated with respect, you're in
59:32
a partnership, and there's a positive motivation that isn't just about you know,
59:39
escaping being fired. It's about accomplishing something that matters in the world. And
59:45
so these issues have values come right back in. Values based organizations, values
59:50
based businesses do better. So over and over again, I think it's the
59:53
same message. I'd be careful about the person who tells you that they're going
59:58
to motivate themselves with things. Yeah, look more broadly, see what happens
1:00:01
to the relationships to their physical health, and see if they really can pull
1:00:05
that off. My guess is no one more rude interruption. Sorry, here's
1:00:08
some ads. Okay, back to that thought something else that you were speaking
1:00:20
to and that sort of quick fix. A metaphor I was thinking of was
1:00:23
going back to the idea of athleticism of like, oh, I'm gonna if
1:00:27
I take this injection of this thing that's going to give me like let's say
1:00:30
just I don't even know what drug this would be. Let's say speed.
1:00:31
I don't know if that would do it, but let's pretend to speed.
1:00:34
I'm gonna get this injection really quick. That's going to get me over the
1:00:36
hurdle. This one time, like that's going to push me to be able
1:00:37
to accomplish something kind of amazing right in this moment, and now I have
1:00:43
a major health concern on you know, it's almost the opposite of perseverance in
1:00:46
the sense that in the long run this will it can't work, yeah,
1:00:51
but in the immediate effect is that it will work. As you were saying,
1:00:53
it's like the short term solution. It doesn't make sense that some people
1:00:58
would cling to that because right off the bat it's effective pretty quickly, but
1:01:02
it doesn't last. No, it's exactly right. And you use the example
1:01:06
of athletes, which is a really good one because Grid is especially applical there.
1:01:09
I was there in Rio, and you know, watch these spectacular world
1:01:14
class athletes and multiple events down there, awise from Brazil. We took advantage
1:01:17
of going and I you know, I saw people win gold medals who I
1:01:22
know, their coaches and their sports psychologists or act people, and I know
1:01:28
what they're doing, even know some of their names, but I don't permission
1:01:30
to say who they are who won those gold medals. But you know,
1:01:35
I also see because I've done a little bit of work in sports, I've
1:01:37
done some randomized trials of how to do different things with sports related things.
1:01:44
Maybe I can talk about that in a second. You know that a lot
1:01:45
of what the coaching that's out there is this you know, you know,
1:01:50
no fear or go kind of this very tough you know, get going or
1:01:55
get gone thing that drives behave you're out if you're a versive enough coach,
1:02:02
and so forth. But it also produces a lot of harm. People crash
1:02:08
and burn inside that. My wife works at the Counsing Center at UNR and
1:02:13
looks sees what happened is theification. We've had a sports coaches there who run
1:02:19
their teams that way. Yeah, and then they go to the Counsing Center
1:02:22
and they quit, you know, because it's just a really harsh environment in
1:02:27
which to learn these skills. So just mentioned this randomiz style we ran recently.
1:02:32
Early Leaming, who's now works in the resilience program for the US Army
1:02:37
because of this dissertation, in part, was doing work with CrossFit athletes.
1:02:43
These guys are crazy. And I say I say these guys because there's men
1:02:45
and women that you know, they are one tough group of folks. I
1:02:50
fear have been around CrossFit athletes because you get to be competitive CrossFit man.
1:02:54
I mean you were doing things that are so out there physically. Yeah,
1:02:59
yeah, it's insane. It's insane. Well, and so we did a
1:03:04
little trial where we brought people in on a static cold task where they had
1:03:07
to hold out a two pound weight at a ninety degree angle with a little
1:03:12
ring that to text, when you let your arm down, people think that's
1:03:16
easy. Now you try it. About ninety seconds in, the burn is
1:03:20
starting to get you. You know, eventually you know, your whole body
1:03:23
starts shaking and stuff, and because the amount of lactic acid is just pouring
1:03:28
through your whole body by the static hold. And they were very good at
1:03:30
persisting. But here's what we did. We did in one case, we
1:03:32
really pushed them to focus on the form, just keep going, kind of
1:03:37
persist form focused very much, I think like most coaches would do you know,
1:03:42
to do it right, focus on how to do it, keep going,
1:03:45
versus one where we kept coming back and asking about how willing are you
1:03:50
to feel that feeling and persist, So we kind of focused on could you
1:03:54
stay open to the feeling. I had one also where you had a distraction
1:03:59
consider condition where you had to think of anything else, but that don't think
1:04:02
of the pain. It's going to be painful, but don't let yourself think
1:04:05
of the pain. Well, the willingness condition, which is much less in
1:04:11
sports psychology, is barely in there was head and shoulders better and being able
1:04:15
to hold these static holds with very competitive athletes. So it tells me that
1:04:24
even down at that level, that very basic ability to persist on athletic tasks
1:04:30
and things like that, this idea is staying open but also linking to this
1:04:33
passion piece. You know, openness not as an end and of itself,
1:04:38
but as a way to help you persist in what your passion is. That's
1:04:42
a combo that really can bring something new into things like their athletic work.
1:04:48
But also nowadays we have dozens of randomized trials on things like exercise but also
1:04:56
losing weight, but also being able to study dealing with procrastination, you know,
1:05:01
stepping out to the challenges a physical disease and on on a go.
1:05:04
So it's a generally useful skill of accept and move, open up, direct
1:05:12
your attention towards what brings meaning and purpose in your life. And you can
1:05:15
learn that I was just going to ask you about things like pay management and
1:05:19
weight loss and when you're the things that aren't as we had sort of brought
1:05:23
up earlier, they're not necessarily require physical endurance, but they require overcoming the
1:05:29
motivation to not do it. And things like weight losses is an important one
1:05:32
when you're doing eating. Changing eating habits can be very challenging for many people.
1:05:36
Sure, and that was the question, So you actually addressed that.
1:05:40
I was actually going to share a story really quick where because I'm familiar with
1:05:43
some of the work that you've done on this, I have a almost debilitating
1:05:46
fear of water and being in water where there's creatures that live in there that
1:05:50
want to eat me. I was in Hawaii seven weeks ago at the time
1:05:53
of this recording, and a lot of the activities in Hawaii revolved going out
1:05:57
and snorkeling and being you know, one of them. In particular, what
1:06:00
was a night snorkeling with manta rays, which sounded really cool if I could
1:06:03
be in a glass case where I didn't have to be in the water and
1:06:05
nowhere near these animals, and I really had to the whole time I was
1:06:10
there, basically walk out into the ocean and have the experience of like I
1:06:15
am experiencing the terror that I'm going to be eaten by a shark at any
1:06:18
second, and I'm also going to be here with the what I'm doing,
1:06:24
and that I wasn't trying to distract myself. I was trying to just be
1:06:28
with it, as you were saying. And the fact that I was able
1:06:30
to go out at you know, night time of all places in the ocean
1:06:34
and do this night snorkeling with the mant rays was one of the greatest experiences
1:06:39
of my life. And I was fortunate that I could be there. And
1:06:41
you know, although I was screaming as the manta ray is coming toward me
1:06:45
and is an inch away from my face, you know, I also knew
1:06:47
that I wasn't going to get hurt, and I wasn't putting myself in real
1:06:49
physical danger. But I was. I was able to have that experience,
1:06:54
and that was because I could allow myself to be willing to experience that emotion,
1:06:59
that arousal in that condition and still participate. There's just scores of studies
1:07:05
showing that the combination is helpful even with these very very practical things like the
1:07:11
one to do talked about effacing our fears and moving ahead. And it turns
1:07:15
out that you know, that's some of how exposure works actually, even traditional
1:07:19
exposure methods that we thought really for the longest time, we thought, well,
1:07:25
the work is that the emotion goes away and then you're able to do
1:07:27
it, And that's not true. Actually it works more by changing your relationship
1:07:30
to those emotions and so forth. You mentioned pain management, and there's an
1:07:35
area where, you know, where they keep lists like the American Psychological Association
1:07:40
or the stamps of the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration of federal government where
1:07:45
they keep lists of evidence based procedures act as listed as you know, evidence
1:07:50
based for pain then probably with better data on that than almost any other area
1:07:58
of the work, because it's just so consistently helpful. Wow, And what's
1:08:01
in the culture is so consistently unhelpful. If you go to your average physician
1:08:05
or something that you're going to come away with a script or maybe with you
1:08:11
know, mechanical device, or if it con dos enough with a pain pump,
1:08:14
you know, maybe we'll actually do a surgical implant. Yeah, but
1:08:16
you look at what's happening around the world. It's not by accident. If
1:08:20
you turn on your television screen and it's got commercials, they're not just doing
1:08:25
commercials for the opiates. They're doing commercials for the thing they oh you have,
1:08:31
oh see I you know, you know, opiate constipation producer or whatever
1:08:36
the thing is. And there's actually selling the prescriptions for the constipation, for
1:08:42
the opiates for the chronic pain on mainstream. To do the math about this,
1:08:45
how much money it takes to put a commercial on pain stream network TV.
1:08:50
And there's an insane amount of opiates floating around. We all know that.
1:08:55
Where'd that come from? It came from pain management, from the Centers
1:09:00
for Disease Control saying that Thailand all is too dangerous, better to use opiates.
1:09:04
Literally, that's what happened because tilan all can hurt her deliver, et
1:09:10
cetera. And somebody sold them on the idea that opiates were not that addictive,
1:09:15
you know, And now we got you know, people you know,
1:09:16
own major companies walking out on Fourth Street, you know, trying to score
1:09:21
opiates because the docs don't want to give it to them anymore. If you're
1:09:25
in Reno, you know, there's a person who owns a big automotive dealership.
1:09:29
Who's not going to spend a lot of time in jail, you know,
1:09:31
because that why back operation. Yeah, and it became addicted because it
1:09:35
was so. And I don't just wag a finger at the medical establishment,
1:09:41
but I want to say, look, the cultural conversation about pain is off.
1:09:46
That's how we got here. And you know, chronic pain is at
1:09:51
epidemic level in every country that treats pain itself as something that has to go
1:09:59
away before you findunction. If you go to and this is new, this
1:10:02
is not this is something we invented the happy, happy, joy joy smiley
1:10:06
face button. So how humans are supposed to be is something that's a lot
1:10:11
newer. So Scandinavia, for example, fifteen percent of the gross domestic product
1:10:15
is spent on chronic disability, and most of it's chronic pain. They have
1:10:18
the best worker laws in the world, but they also have in their culture
1:10:25
now you're never supposed to be in pain. They even call burnout pain.
1:10:30
So if you're upset with your job, you can be put on permanent disability.
1:10:35
This is a crazy idea. If that happened to your grandparents and stuff,
1:10:39
I would have quit farming. I mean, who wants to be behind
1:10:43
there. You know, if you're you know, arthritis, you know,
1:10:45
pushing the plow and we've got this catty wumpus deal that. You know,
1:10:50
pain is something that's not part of the human experience. I don't want to
1:10:54
minimize how hard it is for people in chronic pain, but I'll give you
1:10:59
kind of give you an example. Are you going to give you an example?
1:11:01
That's very close. It's my closest I can get the chronic pain experience,
1:11:05
which is I have ten. It's just really loud medically diagnosed, it's
1:11:10
huge, too much punk rock that's a big you know, sex pistoles on
1:11:15
on. I mean I lived in Greensboro. They would they would come from
1:11:17
the smaller bands, some good ones, Circle Jerks, x et cetera.
1:11:21
Had We had to go from Atlanta and knowing of these bands, but I
1:11:25
had to go from Atlanta to d C for their for their their weekend gigs.
1:11:30
So on Wednesdays in Greensboro, the vans pulled up and these gigantic speakers
1:11:35
and amps came out, and you too, could be in front of one
1:11:40
hundred and seventy decibels of some screaming, tatted up lunatic like I loved it.
1:11:46
Yeah, I loved it. Yeah. Well I'm almost seventy and guess
1:11:49
what I have inside my head? Well, so I've been working for thirty
1:11:57
years on these methods, you know, and I that my ears start ringing.
1:12:00
They're ringing more, ringing more, and ringing more. What I'm going
1:12:02
to do? Go to the audiology. Just give me this cheesy habituation based
1:12:06
thing. Put on noise makers in your house. You know, you habituate
1:12:10
to the noise. It's getting worse, getting worse. And then I catch
1:12:14
myself thinking I should just shoot myself. If I just shoot myself, the
1:12:17
noise will go away. And then the second voice comes, Dude, that's
1:12:24
a suicidal thought. Maybe you should apply your life's work to it. It
1:12:30
took me three years before it even occurred to me. Within one day,
1:12:36
it was fifty percent handled. Within two days, and ninety percent handled.
1:12:41
In one week, it was one hundred percent handled. And this is eight
1:12:43
years ago. Seven years ago. We've now done randomized trials on it.
1:12:46
Do my ears still ring? Yes, hugely, accept Maybe not in this
1:12:53
sense. In this second, in this moment, they're ringing. I think
1:12:58
it's been two weeks since they've been ringing, except if I ever thought about
1:13:02
it, or look, they'd be ringing. Of course they're ringing. They're
1:13:04
ring twenty four to seven. What else are they gonna do. It's just
1:13:08
I don't care, and you can't make me care. I don't care.
1:13:14
So you know, there's probably an air system in this room right now?
1:13:16
Can we hear it? My ears are bad enough I can't. But probably
1:13:20
you sitting here haven't thought about the freaking air conditioner or a heater in the
1:13:24
background, whether the fans, it's moving air. If you really detect it,
1:13:27
you look, you cold, probably catch it. You don't because it's
1:13:30
irrelevant. Chronic pain could be like that, so can anxiety, so can
1:13:36
I'm afraid of the man of rays. It's a stimulus in your environment,
1:13:41
right, It's a stimulus in your environments, in your internal environment. Do
1:13:45
you have to give it importance? Oh? Only if it's important? Is
1:13:50
it important? No, well then don't give it importance. Well then I
1:13:57
won't think about it. No, no, no, no, that's given
1:13:59
it importance. You see, there's a subtlety here. It's a trick because
1:14:02
your mind doesn't know how to give it importance. But you do you know
1:14:08
how not to be interested. Do you know how to be bored? You
1:14:10
know how to look at other things that are more important, but your mind
1:14:13
knows how to do is apply a problem solving rule. Well, when you
1:14:15
do that in a subtractive way, I need to get this to go away,
1:14:19
it makes it important bad idea. So it's there's a little zen of
1:14:27
just being a whole human being who can care about what you care about and
1:14:30
not care about what you don't care about. I don't care about my ears
1:14:32
ringing, and you can't make me what happens, it doesn't matter. And
1:14:41
we now have taught people how to do it, we can measure it.
1:14:45
By far the bigger predictor of intendatives predict suicide. I mean, at about
1:14:49
the same level as depression. This is not a little baby bouncy's issue.
1:14:53
If it ever happens to you, you'll find that out. People with your
1:14:57
iPhones, be careful about the wall, because you're headed towards my life and
1:15:02
you better know the skill or it's going to blow up on you someday when
1:15:06
the ears give up. But it's not just that, when the joints give
1:15:11
up. It's going to be painful, but It's not just that when you
1:15:13
get portrayed, relationships are going to be scared of it. It's not just
1:15:15
that, you know, when you've had physical illness, you'll wonder whether or
1:15:20
not you can keep going with some of the loss of function that will happen
1:15:25
to you over time if you live long enough. So we need to put
1:15:29
things in our culture, in our psychology that help us have the kind of
1:15:33
gritty persistence that's kind and self compassionate, not the finger wagging anger you must
1:15:41
do it or else that's looks like grit, but it's something more like aversive
1:15:46
forcing and nobody wants to It's more like coersion. I love it. That's
1:15:50
exactly what it is. It's coersion. And you are not a dog to
1:15:55
be whipped even by you, So treat yourself a kindness. But persistence matters,
1:16:00
the passion matters, Living a life worth living matters. All right,
1:16:05
Yeah? I love that? So okay, I wanted to get into just
1:16:09
a kind of a quick wrap up and like, where do people go next?
1:16:13
I guess so like you have this community, right, yeah? That
1:16:15
or community ACBS. Tell us brief a little bit about that real quick.
1:16:19
Well, if you're a member of the public and they're not a professional.
1:16:24
You know place I suggest people go there's some really great self help kind of
1:16:28
things, or your interest in the ACT space I get out of your mind
1:16:30
into your life. This is there, the happiness trap. There's other ones.
1:16:33
Just go on Amazon wherever you get your books, Google my name,
1:16:38
acceptance in commitment, therapy, whatever, ultra cheap twelve bucks. I will
1:16:43
usually advice is skim it, set it aside. Skim it like one day,
1:16:46
don't do any of the exercises. If it speaks to you, go
1:16:48
back and do it again. So now you kind of know where the overall
1:16:51
story arc is where we're going because you've skimmed it. Do it slowly.
1:16:56
If you hit an exercise, it just you can't relate to skip it.
1:16:59
You can come back later. You can do that whole thing. I'll take
1:17:01
you a month to get help. On Yahoo groups, there's a thing called
1:17:05
ACT for the Public. Just search for the words ACT for the Public.
1:17:09
Free to join if you want, completed an anonymity, create a log in
1:17:13
name or whatever that gives you that. It's about two hundred two thousand,
1:17:16
five hundred people reading actbooks and stuff, not just mine, to other people
1:17:20
wonderful communities. Some people hang out for years, they've really become wise.
1:17:26
I've interviewed some of these people, I've met them directly. They're just inside
1:17:30
their suffering and then getting on top of it and kind of figuring out.
1:17:33
They just are so awesome and there's so much wisdom. Plus a whole bunch
1:17:36
of ACT treatment developers and people like that hang out on the list and contribute.
1:17:43
There are web based resources for free and stuff. The TEDx talks i
1:17:47
mentioned, you can look at Jonathan Brooker's mine, There's some others. There's
1:17:53
an ACT YouTube channel you can look at. If you go to Stevenchayes dot
1:17:57
com you can kind of log in for my newsletter. I've got a freeb
1:18:01
up right now of how to Turn Pain into Purpose, just a little eight
1:18:05
minute kind of rant and kind of some guidance about how to do that.
1:18:12
If you're a professional, but professional doesn't have to mean a PhD in psychology,
1:18:16
if you do anything where this would fit in your role, if you're
1:18:18
a teacher or a coach, or a nurse or a no T or a
1:18:20
PT. You know, anything where you have sanctioned in your society to do
1:18:27
that, and this is relevant to it, even just owning a business whatever.
1:18:31
Search for the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science and consider joining it takes like
1:18:36
we have. Our dues are values based, and that means you pay what
1:18:42
you think the work is worth to you, given your ability to afford it.
1:18:45
I think our minimum is thirteen bucks. A free journal comes with it
1:18:48
all kinds of really cool stuff. And then you can log into the website,
1:18:51
which is a wiki site, and there's like a thousand pages. Anybody
1:18:56
can put up anything. Don't put up porn, and so far nobody has
1:19:01
anybody can put up anything basically, and so it's kind of like old Jerusalem.
1:19:05
I mean, the web developers for ACBS are constantly trying to rationalize it
1:19:10
a little more, move pages around. But it's this vast resource of videos
1:19:15
and tapes and protocols and books and for free, free, free, free,
1:19:19
free, free, free, free. You'd spend the rest of your
1:19:23
life getting on top of all of it. And you can find something that
1:19:26
applies to almost anything. Plus there's a list serve you can set it in
1:19:30
your membership set settings. Again, about two thousand people a little more out
1:19:34
of the eight thousand or so members around the world who belong to a CBS
1:19:40
look at the list culture. You can set the ability to join in your
1:19:43
membership settings. Look, spend a week look at the culture and get it.
1:19:45
We don't live flame wars. We just you know, a certain respectful
1:19:48
place that's there. And then post any question you've got about anything having to
1:19:53
do with the work, and you'll get multiple answers, and really good ones
1:19:58
from people around the world who just comporting each other. So we kind of
1:20:00
created a culture where we give things away and support each other. And turns
1:20:05
out, while boats rise, people still make money, they still sell books.
1:20:11
It's all fine, but not by this grabby thing of anointings and certifications
1:20:15
and multiple levels and trainings that you know. One of the things trainers have
1:20:20
to agree to to become a recognized act trainer, which has done sort of
1:20:24
more like a grant review. No money changes hands other than just processing the
1:20:28
paperwork eighty bucks, is you have to agree to not certify therapists and give
1:20:33
away what you learn for low cost or no cost. Yes, you can
1:20:38
charge for your workshops and all that, but we've got about what almost seventy
1:20:42
recognized trainers around the world, so we're trying to create a community where it's
1:20:45
about making a difference for the people that we serve and not about you know,
1:20:49
how to grab and become immortal and make a lot of money. Nobody's
1:20:55
mortal. The money goes away. But meanwhile, can we put things in
1:20:59
the culture at help that's what you're trying to do. I mean, we're
1:21:01
going to put things out there in people's lives that help make a difference.
1:21:05
And if that is of interest to you as a professional, and something that
1:21:12
I've said somehow resonates, come hang out with us. Awesome. If I
1:21:15
was going to plug two other things, practice is the other option, awesome.
1:21:19
Awesome. It's a really good training company in the US. I've kind
1:21:24
of thrown in with them just because they're a wholly owned subsidiary of New Harbinger
1:21:28
Publications, which is a worker owned, values based organization, and I've been
1:21:33
beat about the head and ears by lots of publishers. I owned a publishing
1:21:36
company, sold it to New Harbinger actually because I wanted to have a good
1:21:41
home. It still exists, called context Press. A lot of the early
1:21:45
work on contextual behavioral ideas were done there and it still goes on and they
1:21:50
created a training company called Practice, So if you are a XISCEET, which
1:21:57
is continuing education and training, they offer workshops around the country on ACT,
1:22:02
including things like boot Camp ACT for beavor analysts were actually reaching out that way,
1:22:09
so some specialty kinds of things. So that's a great mention. I'm
1:22:12
glad they did, especially if you're a professional and you want to you know,
1:22:15
actually acquire ACT skills with places to learn it. What was the other
1:22:19
one, It was actually Context Press brought it out. That is like myself
1:22:25
in Abraham and some other folks ran into that I don't know, seven eight
1:22:30
years ago, and it was one of those things like who has what money
1:22:32
to buy which books? And we don't have yet. That's well, you
1:22:36
know, I used to be actually in my house and when students from you
1:22:40
and R especially in the behavior analysis or clinical room, would come over,
1:22:43
I had to watch them because sixing and tho, they're back in the book
1:22:45
room. Oh I think I'll have this one. Dude, wait a minute,
1:22:49
a lot, let's make a deal. And also that's you really cheap
1:22:54
or something good. Yeah. Context was something that my acts Linda and myself
1:22:59
created years in years ago and built out into We've published seventy titles and now
1:23:04
because it's continued on, it's probably one hundred titles that are context time.
1:23:08
Yeah. Yeah, no, they were always reasonably priced. We just grad
1:23:11
student dollars and trying to get whatever we could as fast as we could.
1:23:15
Have about a third of them myself. Yeah. Well, you know,
1:23:17
one of the things I mean this is probably not in what the listeners care
1:23:20
about, but just to say you in terms of podcasts and things like that,
1:23:24
you know, you find these pivot points, these places where you can
1:23:27
change the world books and videos and podcasts and ted talks or pivot points like
1:23:33
that. And I just knew that early on and created along with Linda Publishing
1:23:40
Company because it allowed us to get things out there that we're a little on
1:23:45
the edge. And at the time, the late Ogden Lindsley was a student
1:23:49
of BF Skinner, had this phrase where you said, you cut your publications,
1:23:54
but books count. And it's true. You can change people's minds with
1:23:58
the book. So we've we've been building the base for what I'm talking about
1:24:02
by putting the things in place to help people kind of learn and participate and
1:24:08
contribute. And I'm really proud of the fact that there's way more books on
1:24:12
acting RFT than anything I would ever do, and that's just awesome. But
1:24:17
it started with context press. Yeah. Yeah, that was actually the first
1:24:21
time I contacted you, was like an email about, hey, what was
1:24:25
the role of context press? Something that I probably said, I'm so glad
1:24:28
you asked you did, Yeah, because nobody asked that. Nobody understands,
1:24:32
you know, they don't see the game. They see the end result of
1:24:35
the game. But there was all these little things put in place, and
1:24:39
you know, in the early days of context I'm sending the books. Yeah,
1:24:43
I'm putting the book orders in the spreadsheet. I'm a freaking PhD.
1:24:46
Right, I'm driving down to the post office, putting them in there,
1:24:50
getting the things out of the post box. You know, I'm doing the
1:24:54
layout. You know, it just was insane at conferences like the old KLOB.
1:25:00
This is the Association of Behavior Analysis in California. You know who's behind
1:25:03
in the booth. Steve Hayes is in the booth trying to sell you books,
1:25:06
not books I've written sometimes, but well, you know, but that's
1:25:11
how that change happened because then people could read about this, all these weird
1:25:15
philosophical ideas, theoretical ideas, new wave. So it's kind of missed how
1:25:21
it happened. People focus on what happened, and I liked the question.
1:25:28
Yeah, because people can use it. What you're doing right now. The
1:25:31
podcast is an example. This is like a trim tab on a boat.
1:25:35
You know, it's just this little freaking tab, but it makes the differences
1:25:39
whether not the boat sails this way or that way, whether planes or not.
1:25:42
It's a tiny little thing, little trim tabs. You're doing trim tabs
1:25:45
on the culture. Yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah, thank you.
1:25:47
Yeah. I remember distinctly getting back like a page and a half email that
1:25:51
was probably excited, and I'm pretty sure if I remember. I think it
1:25:56
was like three twenty three in the morning. I think I remember like the
1:25:59
time stampoint that came in and I was like, what's this guy doing up
1:26:02
replying in such lengths with how busy he is? Yeah, I appreciate it.
1:26:06
Kind of emails another trim tap. I have a rule I respond to
1:26:10
every email. It's an insane rule. It's harder every year, but it
1:26:15
matters because you know who knows who you're talking to. Yeah, you might
1:26:19
be talking to somebody who ten you know, if I could tell quick story
1:26:23
and everything. But yeah, you know, Dermott Barnes Holmes is why there's
1:26:26
a really vigorous theory of language andcognition other slational frame theory in the basic labs.
1:26:31
I'm just a clinician. Yeah, I came up with a theory,
1:26:34
but I can't do enough studies. Dermott, as a student, sent out
1:26:39
letters to a whole munch of his heroes, Bees Skinner, Me and a
1:26:44
bunch of people. He got replies from two people Bees Skinner and me,
1:26:48
and he says it's part of why he picked up a mimeographed copy I think
1:26:55
of the first RFT thing, read it on the train. But he got
1:27:01
off like three hours later, said that's it. That's what I'm stetting.
1:27:05
So you don't know what you're doing and respond to an email three in the
1:27:09
morning, Yeah, you may be changing the world. Yeah, your mind
1:27:12
tells you you're wasting time because you've got all these important things to do.
1:27:15
But if you put it out there, you have a chance to So I've
1:27:20
I answered my emails. Yeah, I just you know, I've adopted a
1:27:24
lot of that logic myself and what I do, and he keeps me going
1:27:27
sixteen hour days always. I love them like I can. I wouldn't trade
1:27:30
them for anything. So cool. Okay, I think that's kind of where
1:27:33
we where we're at. Yeah, again, thank you so much for being
1:27:35
here. It was awesome. Shared a lot of really fascinating ideas and stories
1:27:41
as well as some I think really important wisdom and just sharing your expertise I
1:27:45
think is enormously helpful. And glad that we could we could pull you in
1:27:48
here out of I know you've had a very busy weekend and in a very
1:27:53
busy life, but we're very very grateful to have the opportunity to share what
1:27:57
your your knowledge and everything with our listeners. Yea, thanks so much for
1:28:00
your time. No, it is an opportunity for me as well. And
1:28:02
then part because you're asking really cool questions, you're having a good time.
1:28:05
That's great, So thank you for the opportunity. Great. All right,
1:28:09
well I think then that wraps us up. This is Abraham and Ryano courseign
1:28:13
enough, we're out. Thank you everyone for joining us on this little trip
1:28:21
down memory lane. We'll have all new content out next week, so join
1:28:28
us then. But if you would like to get in touch with us with
1:28:30
thoughts about this or any other episode, email us directly at info at WWDWWD
1:28:34
podcast dot com. You can reach us out on the social media platforms.
1:28:38
Join us on Patreon, where I will read your name along with the list
1:28:41
of supporters, which includes the lovely people of Mike, m Megan, Mike
1:28:45
T, Justin, Kim, Joshua, Brad, Stephanie, Olivia, Brian,
1:28:49
Ashley, Kiara, and Michelle. Thank you all so much for your
1:28:53
continued support and generosity. We couldn't do this without you. As always,
1:28:56
thank you for listening. Thank you to doctor Stephen Hayes for his contribution of
1:29:00
that episode. Thank you to Ryan, my co host at the time,
1:29:01
and of course thank you to Shane, my constant support here. If you
1:29:05
reach us on social media, you will talk to our social media coordinator that
1:29:09
is Emma Wilson and audio Engineering and magic Making Happening is justin and writing in
1:29:14
fact checking from Shane and myself. I don't even know how to close this
1:29:16
thing without Shane. I'm just gonna say thanks, This is Abraham and we're
1:29:20
out. You've been listening to why we do what we do? You can
1:29:25
learn more about this and other episodes by going to wwd wwdpodcast dot com.
1:29:30
Thanks for listening, and we hope you have an awesome day.