Transcript
00:00:00Here's a four-step approach to being truthful with yourself and getting better and making
00:00:03life better and being happier at the same time, or doing the same thing for people that
00:00:07you love in your life, maybe even your kids.
00:00:09Number one, here's the truth.
00:00:12You're not perfect, but you're normal because nobody's perfect.
00:00:17This is incredibly important to understand because once again, our Pleistocene brains
00:00:21that are still back in the, you know, our tribe or band of 30 to 50 hierarchically arranged
00:00:28individuals, you know, we feel if we're, if we're, if we're not as good as somebody else,
00:00:33that that's abnormal and we want to be normal by, by being better than other people.
00:00:38But the truth is that that's wrong too.
00:00:41You're imperfect, but it's really, really normal to be imperfect.
00:00:44To have pain is normal.
00:00:46To feel uncomfortable, to be sad is, is normal, to feel inadequate, to feel insecure.
00:00:52It's normal.
00:00:53And it is so important to tell yourself and to tell your kids, yeah, you know, I feel crummy
00:00:58today at some really, really normal thing.
00:01:00You know, that's a, that's a metacognitive practice.
00:01:02This is something that, you know, people do in, you know, Vipassana meditation or many
00:01:06forms of prayer to say, I feel insecure about myself.
00:01:09I feel sad about myself.
00:01:11I'm feeling bad about these particular circumstances.
00:01:13Why is that?
00:01:14To be introspective about that, to acknowledge the fact that these are normal human emotions
00:01:19being produced by a human brain that contains a functioning, healthy limbic system as a source
00:01:25of signals about the outside world.
00:01:26There's nothing bad about that.
00:01:28There's nothing normal about that.
00:01:29And then to say, this information is actually useful to me, very useful to me, stay tuned
00:01:35because we don't want to leave it at that.
00:01:37That's just step one.
00:01:40I'm imperfect and I'm normal.
00:01:43And so are you.
00:01:43Step two, I accept this.
00:01:46I accept myself.
00:01:47I mean, again, that's sort of the, I'm okay and you're okay.
00:01:50And, you know, I sort of trashed that a minute ago and I still would, you know, if this were
00:01:56the only piece of advice, accepting yourself is one step in this, but it is an important
00:02:02step is to accept this.
00:02:04And again, this is not to say I'm okay, but to accept the fact that this is reality is the
00:02:08way that this actually works.
00:02:09I accept my imperfections and I treat myself with a kind of compassion.
00:02:15You know, we often are so much harder on ourselves than we are to other people.
00:02:18You know, I, you know, I recognize that because I'm such a striver and I'm such a perfectionist
00:02:23in everything that I do.
00:02:24And I realized like if anybody talked to me the way that I talked to myself, I'd be so insulted.
00:02:29I mean, I would be scandalized if somebody talked to me that way.
00:02:33It would be hard for me to forgive anybody who talked to me the way that I talked to myself,
00:02:36you moron or something dumb, like taking a right when I was supposed to go left.
00:02:40Like anybody did that and it was a passenger in the car and say, I think you needed to go
00:02:44right there.
00:02:45Oh, okay.
00:02:46But me, you get the point.
00:02:48And so it's having a compassion about yourself is really important.
00:02:52There's a great article on this, by the way, in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,
00:02:56which is a great journal.
00:02:57From me to you, self-compassion predicts acceptance of one's and other's imperfections.
00:03:03Acceptance, not celebrating it, but accepting it as normal is step two.
00:03:09Step three, work to improve.
00:03:12Now here, this gets really important because if you stopped with, I'm okay, you're okay,
00:03:16then you can do something that a lot of people have done in the last decade,
00:03:19which is to make your flaws into a sort of identity, right?
00:03:24My, you know, things about my personality, things that ordinarily you'd want to improve.
00:03:28It's like, nah, that's who I am.
00:03:30And use it kind of as a cudgel against other people.
00:03:32Don't do that.
00:03:33Your flaws shouldn't be your identity.
00:03:35You shouldn't relate to yourself through your, you know, the things that you should want to improve.
00:03:42Doing that is to say, is to resolve the cognitive dissonance that life is crummy,
00:03:46the world is against you.
00:03:48And so therefore you're going to try to, you know, not just make the best of it.
00:03:51You're going to use it as a source of self-understanding.
00:03:55Very unhelpful to you.
00:03:57Very bad for your mental health to do that.
00:04:00To say, you should acknowledge I'm flawed in this way right now.
00:04:05That is not to say I will always have this flaw.
00:04:08On the contrary, self-acceptance can and should facilitate improvement.
00:04:12Now, here's a good example of this.
00:04:14I learned Spanish as an adult.
00:04:16I moved to Spain when I was 25 years old.
00:04:18I did that because I was chasing a girl that I had fallen in love with, to Barcelona.
00:04:23And I moved there.
00:04:25I didn't know it worked.
00:04:26I knew no Spanish.
00:04:28It was so dumb.
00:04:29I studied German in high school.
00:04:31That's useful.
00:04:32You go to Germany, they all speak better English than we do.
00:04:34You go to Spain, nobody speaks a word of English, including the girl I was in love with.
00:04:38Nothing.
00:04:39So, I had to learn Spanish.
00:04:41And I talked like a toddler at 25.
00:04:44It was unbelievably humiliating.
00:04:46I didn't say, I'm just crummy in Spanish and then never try to talk to anybody and shut
00:04:51in on myself and say, well, Spanish is stupid.
00:04:53No.
00:04:55I said, you know, I made myself into a kid again.
00:04:59You know, I have my grandsons.
00:05:01I have four grandsons growing every day, it seems.
00:05:04Well, they're growing, but the number appears to be growing every day, too.
00:05:07And when they're learning to talk, you know, nobody's like, you idiot, you just mispronounced
00:05:11hospital.
00:05:12You said it hopital.
00:05:14I mean, idiot.
00:05:15No.
00:05:16On the contrary, you say that's a funny little flaw, and then you tell them the word, and
00:05:20over time, they actually learn it, and you treat yourself with the same self-compassion,
00:05:24and you work to improve.
00:05:26And over time, sure enough, after about a year, which was slower than some people and
00:05:30faster than others, I could go out of the house without rehearsing what I was going
00:05:34to say.
00:05:35And now, you know, years and years and decades and decades later, I can lecture in Spanish,
00:05:39and I can live in Spain.
00:05:42And the other day, I did live TV in Spanish.
00:05:44It's my second language.
00:05:45I'm almost as comfortable as I am in English.
00:05:48I still have an accent, by the way.
00:05:50But you get the idea.
00:05:52Self-enhancement says that that whole idea, you won't make progress if you pretend you can
00:05:57already speak fluently.
00:05:58And you also won't make progress if you make your lack of fluency your identity.
00:06:03You get my point.
00:06:05Work to improve, step three.
00:06:07Step four, don't blame other people for your flaw.
00:06:10Now, again, sometimes other people are to blame for stuff, but it still doesn't help.
00:06:15It still doesn't help.
00:06:16There's a very interesting body of literature that shows that people who take responsibility
00:06:21for things that aren't even their responsibility, they tend to do better in life.
00:06:26And you can kind of figure out why that's the case.
00:06:28They're sort of life entrepreneurs, right?
00:06:31They find solutions to things.
00:06:32But if you're wallowing in the idea that everything is somebody else's fault, you're very unlikely
00:06:38to be finding productive solutions to the problems in your life, and you're going to get less happy.
00:06:45Marty Seligman, Martin Seligman, here's in Pennsylvania, my great mentor.
00:06:48Marty Seligman, he created a whole body of research on something called learned helplessness.
00:06:55Now, learned helplessness occurs when you feel like nothing that you can do can make anything
00:07:00better because everything is out of your control, ordinarily because of the actions of other people
00:07:05that kind of are conspiring against you.
00:07:07And he said that this is a huge predictor of depression, a huge predictor of anxiety.
00:07:12And by the way, it makes it so people can't ever solve problems.
00:07:16Even if they're not the cause of the problems, they have no possibility of solving these problems,
00:07:20which is really, really unproductive.
00:07:22He's shown this with laboratory animals.
00:07:24He showed it with people.
00:07:25And, you know, people get just sort of depressed mood and in a sort of permanent state.
00:07:32Learned helplessness is horrible.
00:07:33And it comes because you figure there's nothing you can do because things are out of your control,
00:07:38or nearly because it's somebody else's fault.
00:07:42Scholars have shown that people with a weak capacity for emotional self-regulation tend
00:07:46to blame others for their poor choices.
00:07:48Now, I'm not going to say that everything is your fault and something's wrong in your life.
00:07:52Sometimes, I mean, there is injustice.
00:07:54There is discrimination.
00:07:55I completely have got it.
00:07:58But the idea of looking for culpability in other people and outside your control is usually
00:08:05the worst way to look at things, at least as the first course of action.
00:08:08Fifth, here's the best part.
00:08:10That's why you're here in the show is reframing your imperfections and others,
00:08:15not as failings, but as puzzles.
00:08:18So here's the fun about self-improvement.
00:08:20When I first started getting really interested in self-improvement, I remember when I was kind
00:08:24of older, as a matter of fact.
00:08:25I read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie in 1936.
00:08:29I read Stephen Covey's book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.
00:08:33And they just energized me, man.
00:08:35Not because I was like, check, I got all this stuff.
00:08:38All these 36 habits to Win Friends, I got all of them.
00:08:42No, I didn't.
00:08:43The interesting thing was that I didn't have most of these habits.
00:08:46And the fact that I recognized the fact that there was something that I could do was great
00:08:50because it gave me this challenge.
00:08:52It gave me a castle in the sky I could walk toward.
00:08:56It was so wonderful.
00:08:58It was a puzzle for me about myself to solve.
00:09:01That's one of the things that people really like when they're starting a program of physical
00:09:04fitness is that it's not because they're already fit.
00:09:07It's because they have a purpose.
00:09:09They have a direction.
00:09:10They have a goal.
00:09:10And that gives them all this gusto for being alive.
00:09:13It's a puzzle that you can solve that's utterly solvable.
00:09:16And when you do, you're going to be better off.
00:09:19And that's going to make you happier.
00:09:20I'm going to get better grades.
00:09:22I'm going to have a better relationship.
00:09:24All the imperfections of yours are interesting puzzles to solve.
00:09:28Now, I tried to raise my kids this way.
00:09:30When something wasn't right, I wouldn't say, that's bad.
00:09:34I would say, that could be better.
00:09:37Here's how.
00:09:39And they want to be better.
00:09:40They would do that.
00:09:41And we had, you know, when there was a grades problem, we would deal with it.
00:09:43And, you know, whatever it happened to be, or a behavior problem.
00:09:46And the idea of puzzles to solve, without just getting a cookie at the end, by the way,
00:09:50with the satisfaction that comes from being better, this is the most exciting thing.
00:09:55Now, again, I'm preaching to the choir here because you're watching this show because you're
00:09:59into it.
00:10:00You're watching Office Hours because you know that you can be happier and you want the secrets.
00:10:05That's already acknowledging that you're not as happy as you could be, but that you believe
00:10:10that the secrets are there.
00:10:10And you're watching this show to get those secrets because you want to apply these ideas.
00:10:14You already understand how to turn imperfections into puzzles.
00:10:18Do that more and do that with your kids and do that with everybody around you.
00:10:23And you will become a force for absolute positivity in your life and the lives of other people.
00:10:29Now, that also suggests one last point, which is how boring not to have areas of improvement
00:10:35in life.
00:10:36How boring?
00:10:37What a horrible way to live.
00:10:38You know, that leads to this idea that I've arrived.
00:10:41And I've talked in the show before about a rival fallacy.
00:10:44You get a particular goal in anything in your life, in your relationship, in your money,
00:10:47in your fitness, in your health, in anything.
00:10:49It doesn't live up to expectations.
00:10:51The goal in life is progress, making more progress and more progress.
00:10:55And when you find something that's an area of imperfection in your life, don't lie about
00:11:00it.
00:11:01Say, yeah, man, that's why I'm alive.
00:11:04That's what it means to be an entrepreneur.
00:11:06That's the kind of progress that I want to make.
00:11:09And that is a big part of the meaning of life because meaning has purpose at its core, goals
00:11:15and direction at its core.
00:11:16Your imperfection is the source of your excitement in life.
00:11:22And that's a great thing.
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