How to Get Unstuck: Self-Efficacy, Learned Helplessness, and Creating a Growth Mindset

hey everyone welcome to being well I'm Forrest Hansen if you're new to the podcast thanks for listening today and if you've listened before welcome back today we're going to be exploring maybe the single biggest reason that people end up not improving their circumstances and not growing and changing in the ways that they care about the most the belief that they are stuck that there's nothing that they can do that they can't exert much influence over their environments and that these circumstances will just keep on going and going and going now the contrary to this is something that's called self-efficacy and that's the belief that we have in ourselves that we can be an agent of change that we really can change those environments and maybe even most importantly we can't change ourselves we can exert some control over our motivation and our Behavior now improving self-efficacy is maybe the best thing a person can do to end up creating more of a life that they they want to live and today we're going to be exploring how we can do just that and to help us do that I'm joined today as usual by Dr Rick Hansen Rick is a clinical psychologist he's the best-selling author he's my dad and for the first time in a very long time he's actually in the same room with me as we're recording one of these so Dad how are you doing today I'm good and I'm really happy to be in your space and compared to your bedroom as a kid it's so orderly well that was that's novel that would have been novel when I was 13 years old or so yeah that's been a big transition over time maybe a way that I've grown and changed in a positive fashion that's true yeah that's good so I'm really happy to be here and it's a topic that's very close to my heart yeah and really Central to my own kind of Journey as a person yeah for sure well I want to start by actually going back a little bit why is it that we are so prone to feeling stuck this feeling of like there's nothing that we can do to change our lives um we've maybe internalized experiences where that have made it really easy for us to look around and say hey my influence here is pretty limited yeah and over enough time people just get to a point where they sort of give up yeah why are we so prone to that experience well like the important why questions there are there are layers of answers first to acknowledge sometimes people really are stuck yeah they've got a chronic health condition or they have a duty to someone they love an aging parent a child with special needs and that just keeps them in a certain set of circumstances or maybe they're structurally uh mistreated in the society in which they live those are real facts so we do what we can about those and still often we're stuck with a certain set of causes and conditions then there's how do we learn over our lifespan either to accumulate learned helplessness or technically what can be described as externalized locus of control that's another kind of related term or on the other hand how can we acquire a sense as Seligman and others have talked about learned optimism learned self-efficacy learned internalized locus of control in which we really really do well we have influence over and we find ways inside our own minds to come to peace with what we can so I'm sure we'll be talking about how to do that it is really interesting how rapidly mammals like dogs upon whom some of the earliest research was done in ways that today's ethical standards would not allow why is it that dogs and humans are so vulnerable to acquiring a sense of entrapment futility and defeat and one or two or three episodes like that versus the many many more times five times as many ten times as many episodes of efficacy are required to gradually unlearn that helplessness many people wonder and there's some speculation that's plausible that this actually is useful in evolution if you are struggling with something and you're unsuccessful at it maybe the most conservative and safest thing is to hunker down defeat it maybe depressed but you're not exposing yourself to risks including from predators out there in the wild so anyway that's kind of a way to understand it yeah it just means that we really need to compensate yeah for that biological vulnerability with lots and lots of counter experiences of efficacy and agency and lots and lots of taking in the good internalization when we have those experiences yeah to me two things just immediately stand out and the first is is something that I I did a short video on for my YouTube If people want to go and check it out it's called our homeostatic base or the principle of homeostasis we don't want to change yeah family systems theory family systems theory families don't want to change the one who tries to change yeah yeah our Baseline is very stable and it's very static by and large and so it takes a lot of effort to exert change in those kinds of stable situations right we don't like to move too far from what we know and there are you know plenty of evolutionary plausible explanations for this you kind of pointed to some of them and then the second thing that really stands out to me is just the self-fulfilling prophecy of this whole thing right where the only thing that guarantees failure in the future is not trying that's the only thing that guarantees it and so it's so in interesting to me that we will essentially concede that we will concede losing because trying and failing is more painful than just giving up and losing automatically oh yeah and isn't that like like that's there's something about that that just stands out to me is like if you actually think about it that way it's like whoa it just makes you shake your head a little bit right it's not rational but welcome to humanity yeah and there that's kind of interesting because I think about people who are always holding back for the last battle I think about that and if you don't fully commit yourself to something you are not putting all your self-esteem chips on the table subject to the turn of the wheel so you can always think to yourself well you know if I'd really tried or well if I'd ever sent that short story in or that poem or ask that other person out on a date or to marry me yeah it might have turned out okay yeah so you're kind of preserving a certain amount of self-worth or the possibility that will next year next year we'll do it next time I think that's one reason I think another reason uh has to do with um the negativity bias again and loss aversion I see one of the books on your shelf is from Daniel Kahneman thinking fast and slow my favorites Nobel Prize winner in economics as a psychologist for his work on loss aversion yeah yep and uh so very often people will overvalue uh the you know negative consequences and so they'll they'll stop trying they'll give up the positive that they possibly could gain to avoid the risk even though it's a small risk of a negative event related to the effort to gain the positive thing so to me that's another thing there in terms of that negativity bison the reason I started thinking about it it was picking up on what you said earlier about uh people in environments in which they have a lot of objective control over their situation they tend to be fairly open-minded and growth oriented and promotion oriented rather than prevention oriented these two major kind of dichotomies on the other hand people who have much less control over their situations and if things go badly they can be devastating tend to be much more conservative which is one of the explanations for why around the world typically people who live in rural areas or countries that are particularly rural tend to be much more conservative than people who live in cities who are also exposed to more points of view but in these rural areas there's so much out of your control you know my dad your grandfather grew up on a ranch in North Dakota and during the Great Depression it was drought for years locusts good is what the price of beef plummeted totally outside their control what could they do of course you would be very very cautious and conservative to try to you know minimize a bad outcome so something you mentioned earlier is learned helplessness if people listen to a podcast like ours they've probably heard that phrase before but I think it'd be helpful here because it's one of the big things we're gonna be talking about today to just dive into it a little bit more deeply explain what that phrase means and solve the context around it in a lot of ways the most useful way to talk about it it really brings it home is to describe the original research I'm going to be talking about some painful consequences for dogs so just kind of know that these were not lethal but they were unpleasant the research and I'm summarizing probably a whole series of studies occurred in two phases phase one was the training phase in which a Motley Crew of dogs were randomly assigned as it were to the a group in the B group and they were paired up so you had the uh A1 B1 dog the A2 B2 dog paired okay and so then the dogs were brought into identical uh pens small rooms that had a metal floor and a light a buzzer and a big button right around shoulder level for the dog and the training protocol was essentially for the light to go start flashing the buzzers to start going and then five or ten seconds later the floor would be mildly but painfully electrified in both pins the exact same amount of shock in the floor eventually one of them would hit the button and it would shut off the electricity in both pins so the dogs got exactly the same amount of painful stimuli the only difference was the button did not work in the B dogs pen so then after going through several cycles of this and being brought into the situation the a dog gradually typically quickly learned oh when the buzzer goes off the light starts flashing hit the button and that will prevent shock to your pen it'll also prevent shock to the B Dog pin but again the bee dog had no control over its face and we all can liken this to our own situations in life right kind of poignantly and painfully then in the testing phase phase two the dogs were brought into a pen a different kind of pan that was sort of like a long rectangle that had two sides with a low fence in the middle and the question was how much effort would the dogs make to escape their painful situation so they bring them in at different times but essentially the same matched pairs the A1 dog the B1 dog okay they'd bring him into this one side of the pen the lives are flashing the Bell will start ringing and then the floor would be electrified 10 seconds later something like that and then the first time it would happen is that the the a dogs would thrash around and go whoa get me out of here and then we jump over the bear to the other side where there was no electricity the B group dogs would just sit there they wouldn't make an effort so this puzzled the experimenters immensely they thought that the beaker of dogs meant to be a little inhibited but they'd learn so what did they do they lowered the barrier no barrier just a line there the dogs wouldn't walk across the line the experimenters would come in wearing rubber boots and gloves and drag to be group dogs across the line away from the electrified half to the other half that was safe and it would take dozens even hundreds of Trials to finally retrain the B group dogs that they could do something about their fate meanwhile to finish the experimenters observed that the B group dogs had kind of the canine equivalent of human depression they were mopey they lost their appetite they weren't interested in sex they just looked disparate it and kind of blew dogs like many mammals have a lot of the fundamental hardware neurologically for emotion basic emotions certainly that humans have and this became part of the basis for a broader theory of the ways in which learned helplessness can be a major factor of depression so that's the summary here and of loving dogs you know my heart is touched by what had to have but not had to happen what did happen um and yet the takeaways are really quite clear it was amazing how quickly you could train the B group dogs into helplessness even though they experienced the exact same amount of painful stimuli the only difference was that they were helpless and then how astonishingly long it took to help them unlearn that helplessness so to summarize them this and kind of say it back to you when somebody has repeated experience says that they can't do something about their circumstances they internalize that as learning and therefore really really importantly they stop trying to change their circumstances yes or God stops trying to push the button doesn't try to jump over the railing that's keeping them away from the thing they just they they throw their hands up metaphorically in this case and accept their fate is that more or less right yes defeat and to give a different analogy if a story so this goes back to my dissertation and uh I was watching uh in 20 mother toddler pairs diets well 15 month old kids toddlers and part of the protocol was that the toddler would sit in a high chair and with his or her mother would make a batch of Ginger Snap cookies so this was about did the mother offer alternatives to problematic child wants okay okay right yeah rather than just ignoring the child with when he or she wanted or punishing or suppressing their wants all right and I will never forget this particularly animated boy sitting in his high chair with a mom who you could tell she was really well intended really well intended and she was uh oblivious to her child's cues and what he wanted and there was a sequence with that I have on videotape in which he um watched her with a nice big wooden spoon a very desirable object if you're 15 month old uh stirring the batter for the ginger snaps and he started gesturing toward it ah you know his gaze goes right to the spoon he's gesturing ah she ignored him he got a little louder and louder ah ah she ignored him she was task oriented she really wanted to make a good batch of Ginger Snaps okay finally he gets louder and louder and she looks at him was holding the spoon and goes oh you want the spoon and he kind of smiles and then she turns away and keeps stirring batter with the spoon and he goes into a complete slump despair defeat it's the worst thing you'd rather see someone who's angry even enraged than just disorganized the self-structure kind of gets blown apart you see this is one of the central Hallmarks of trauma you just blown apart Despair and yeah that's what happens and can happen really easily when we're defeated entrapment and defeat yeah and what stands out to me in that story is that this is not a horrific experience for a toddler correct you know that the the if we think about in terms of like minus 10 to plus 10 experiences this is a minus two experience minus three experience you know you really desired a thing and you didn't get the good thing and yet it provoked that kind of a response from the child likely because it was the one of the takeaways especially for people listening and thinking about their own um upbringing and events in life uh repeated patterns of events that can occur on a time scale of a dozen seconds uh can really add up over time particularly based on the temperament of the person some people are more vulnerable to the acquisition of learned helplessness partly because they're more invaded in the core of their being by uh what's happening you know maybe they're particularly sensitive they're in the sort of highly sensitive person kind of range or in this child's case probably toward the spirit it into the normal Spectrum so really affected by things and also there's this dynamic in which if you think of mood the higher you grow the farther you can fall in other words sure this kid could get elevated in the combination of how positive and how intense so high positivity high intensity he was elevated and then boom she deflated his bubble she just popped his bubble again so these things add up and uh and uh we can really appreciate this was a well-intended parent no abuse whatsoever nothing to call CPS about and yet gradual accumulation of a lot of events like that can lead to a certain eh what can you do yeah and now of course you know we can start to apply this to ourselves and we can start looking through our own history and asking ourselves when did I have these kinds of experiences what were the circumstances in which I had these kinds of experiences and sometimes it's pretty straightforward even easy to identify where we've picked up a little bit of learned helplessness over time people are often very good at kind of telling their story in a sort of General way to a therapist in a clinical setting something like that and the the challenges for people normally come in when it's time to do something about them yeah but then there are also some circumstances where it can be really difficult to see the ways in which we've acquired helplessness sure because it seems so true yeah exactly because it just seems obvious that fill in the blank yeah um classified this if I asked for something you'll hurt me yeah of course yeah it's just it's the Assumption this is the way that people are with each other um a really simplistic example might be something like I'm just bad at math because you've had a million experiences growing up of an incompetent teacher or an angry parent or whatever else you know and like sure there's a there's a range of talent when it comes to different things and there's a range of talent when it comes to math or something like that but the only thing that guarantees that you're going to keep on being bad at math is that you didn't try to improve yeah so again it becomes this very self-perpetuating thing the assumption is that I can't do the thing and so I don't do the thing so what happens well I can't do the thing and it just keeps on going that way yeah another thing related to that is how are you treated for trying yeah yeah yeah this is a huge part of it yeah yeah totally how are you treated when you try and don't succeed and or how are you treated when you're feeling kind of big for your britches sure yeah you got on a sit up straight you got a little Moxie going and then you're suddenly people are saying you know girls don't act like that don't do that uh or uh something happens maybe you're a little annoying because you are a little louder sure rather you just kind of Go whoo I bet it really start buttoning it in yeah and just here if people are watching or listening it's so interesting to look at the physicality of this the embodiment of this here's where your partner would definitely add value yeah Elizabeth yeah from all kinds of places theater training and somatic therapy but think about shame yeah you know one of the things I've really learned recently from Paul Gilbert profound professor of compassion focused therapy and other things he points out the underlying biology of Shame yeah in primates is a submission behavior and you can see that uh in you know Alpha Beta dominance interactions the beta will curl under you know maybe it's the canine equivalent or the Simian equivalent of a dog you know rolling over and exposing its belly as a submission Behavior so there's this it's quite physical this is curling over sure yeah you know and then think about and that basically means I need to disappear I'm not really here I'm going to get off the radar which is the opposite of efficacy and think about what it's like to sit up a little straighter or if you're with people who are kind of be an old bossy you know it's like to set up a little straighter to get a little forward you know to uh activate the reticular activating system you know in the brain stem which is which is an alerting Behavior as you know as we came out of the forest into the Savannah Plains over like a 5-10 million year process back in evolution you know we moved from you know where where how many um vertebrates walk upright one yeah basically a bear can kind of sort of do it but not for very long right uh you know it's not very common and it may be a dog or a monkey but not very common anyways we did that you know we rose up we rose up and people can just feel what happens when you rise up uh you get more alert you feel more present you feel more potent you feel more like a hammer yes like a nail so you're you're already pointing to something that I wanted to talk about a little bit later but we can kind of just get into it now which is how do you develop more self-efficacy and we need to kind of understand the concept a little bit better to get there but one of the really important things about self-efficacy that I found when I was diving into the research is that all of these different things that we don't necessarily think of as being interrelated are profoundly connected to one another right our emotional system our fiscal system and our psychology yeah are all interconnected so what helps somebody experience more self-efficacy well generally good emotions tend to help them are you in a situation that's supportive emotionally or not like that's a big question if you're being supported emotionally by others it's a lot easier to feel like you can do something about your circumstances what helps improve self-efficacy having your body feel good you know like being basically physically healthy all of the little somatic indicators that you were applying there dad so it's really interesting how these different aspects can all work together to help us give ourselves a greater sense of like control and influence over our circumstances of you're pointing to Vitality to be sure and one of the things that can lead to less self-efficacy is chronic illness sure yeah and pain inescapable chronic pain for example that's where the work of people like video Mall of birch and John Cabot sand around mindfulness-based stress reduction it's been really important in terms of how we cope with chronic pain another thing that's interesting is to think about the ways in which as people get older it can actually be adaptive for them to give up about certain things and shrink the circle of their activities because that's a circle in which they can conserve their resources for the long marathon of being elderly and so one thing to think about is the ways in which it can be adaptive to recognize that you don't have efficacy there one of the things for me to be honest is well I'm always honest with you but to kind of really to be self-disclosing there you go I'll tell you um to a fault I'm definitely somebody who you probably know well I see the goal I see the path I walk the path there's like very little friction about it to a fault you know I can be determined to a fault and lately I've been looking at that and having this little voice in inside my mind you know like a dog will chase a ball it's the nature of the dog to chase the ball and yet the dog's gonna bump into people people expose itself to you know getting run over by a truck and inside my mind is a little thing like Ricky don't chase the dark don't chase the ball yeah and related to that has been the benefits of recognizing where I don't have efficacy and when I don't have efficacy I don't have responsibility and where I don't have responsibility I don't have blame so there's a balance here on the right hand we're encouraging people obviously I think it's a classic thing claim the power you do have and come to wisdom and peace about where you don't yeah yeah totally so the other uh big concept that I wanted to talk about today that I think could help people gain that sense of control and influence over themselves and their lives is growth mindset uh the book mindset by Carol dwack is sitting behind you over there I've just got it right on the counter um it's a great book would recommend it yes if you're watching on YouTube my dad's pointed to it right now um and so what's really cool about again this territory is how these different things can work together in really interesting ways like self-efficacy is our belief and our ability to influence environments make a difference create change yeah growth mindset is belief in our ability to change ourselves basically the ability to learn things in particular that are meaningful of to us so it's when the two start to work together that all the cool stuff can happen for people so could you take just a quick moment if somebody somehow is listening to this podcast episode without knowing this and explain to people what a growth mindset is ah quick summary leaving out many details developed a line of research beautiful profound Professor Carol dweck Stanford originally centered in schools with obviously lots of applications in non-academic environments just observing basically the distinction to sort of generalizing in cluster many individual differences and combinations of this uh kids who had an outcome orientation and so they they were very oriented around getting the high grade let's say on a test compared to kids who had more of a process orientation a growth mindset in what in which what was valuable for them was not so much the result but how much they grew how much they learned along the way and a lot of findings that over the Long Haul people with that growth mindset tend to feel better and perform better and then you can you can broaden that out elsewhere yeah I do think it's really interesting to apply the notion of a growth mindset to our social emotional learning not just academic learning and to apply that mindset to the acquisition of a growth toolkit which as you know has been right at the heart of my own professional work in terms of positive neuroplasticity taking in the good and helping States including the state of a growth mindset become traits like trait growth mindset and knowing how if you are interested in growing to help your experiences leave lasting traces behind in your nervous system so you really do um acquire more and more of the durable good you want to grow inside yeah so maybe a way to to think about this is do you think of things as being based in nature or do you think of things as being based in nurture right um do you emphasize Talent or do you emphasize effort is one of those major distinctions that you were just emphasizing if I could and Under The Heading of so-called nurture is really the combination which people tend to Glide right by of external influences yeah yeah totally totally great Point great point and there's been a lot of really interesting research on this and something that I've been playing around with a lot myself is just like increasingly believing that the ways in which we emphasize Talent socially are really problematic the culture in general just has a real fascination with Genius Like We love talking about Geniuses and prodigies and all of these things we just emphasize that over and over and over again what matters is that you're good at something and you're good at it quickly yeah and there's been all this kind of all kinds of research performed predominantly on children um looking at different kinds of reinforcement strategies and what are kids praised for are they praised for knowing quickly are they praised for having a lot of ability wow Tammy you're just so good at that thing or are they praised for their efforts in Pursuit at becoming better at it over time that's so interesting you know as I've mentioned to you off camera um lately I've just been reflecting on my life it's kind of typical of this developmental stage a certain amount of review and looking back while also really looking at mistakes regret and remorse and looking back I've really just taken a view that much of the fair standards to judge at least Myself by I think many people when you reflect on your life are uh did you try hard did you bring a good heart and did you learn along the way none of which have to do with Talent totally totally yeah yeah did you try right did you bring a work ethic to it I think uh you know your dad apartment your dad I'm your dad my dad my mom they both had a work ethic yeah they tried right it didn't always succeed but they tried and do you bring a good heart are you basically good-hearted and do you learn do you have a growth curve do you have a learning curve along the way totally yeah totally and so what do you see again in these studies is just that if um if kids are essentially praised for the efforts that they make yeah grades improve over time for their talents they stay flat yeah yeah so it's it's really it is a single variable that predicts so much in our lives why do you think we're so bad at learning this because it's under our nose they're all these sayings good process drives good product and yet people get very fixated uh around outcome and uh I've seen people my clients you know all kinds of classes I feel really bad about themselves I'm burrowing into why you know have you done something evils or something you really need to come to terms with no actually and you hear them tell their story they've lived virtuously they've tried hard they've brought a good heart they've learned along the way they've actually accomplished a number of things but they don't feel very good about themselves it's hard because they're the box score is is the is the metric of their self-worth and um anything less than a you know an A plus every time uh just feels like oh complete failure rather than acknowledging all the ways in which they try hard every day they're swimming Upstream with tough situations they're dragging some others along the road with them you know they're trying to bring their family home at 20 000 feet in a blizzard metaphorically every day oh yeah well why why do you think for us well I think we're starting to tread on the next episode that we're going to record together which has to do with intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation and finding a meaning and purpose in life broadly yeah and I wonder if part of what you're pointing to is essentially a kind of extrinsic motivation yeah it's like we're we're the box score approach is about what happened externally it's not about what was happening inside of you internally and so we we have a broad cultural framework that like your internal motivation matters so much as it allows you to accomplish things in the external world yeah and then from there it's kind of whatever you know that's for you to worry about yeah and I just think this is one of the huge knock-on effects of it we're getting better at it I do think we're getting better about it um as a as a side thing this is again maybe a whole other episode this whole like notion of a liberal education system is essentially a hundred year long experiment we've only been doing it for about 100 150 years we've never tried to educate the whole populace before okay history in that sense yeah yeah and I don't mean like liberal like liberal versus conservative or something like that I just mean like the whole notion that everybody should learn is completely modern so we're still figuring it out as much yeah yeah and we've applied an educational system that was designed for the children of aristocrats you know and certain kind of very controlled content heavy settings uh with a lot of punishment and we have essentially ported that entire approach and applied it to the to everybody everyone yeah without much um Innovation actually it's it is really interesting and so I just wonder about that in terms of things like developing a growth mindset over time like would be would we be much more likely to develop a growth mindset if we were put into more circumstances that worked for more different kinds of brains exactly and not just this kind of one rigid version of a thing that maybe works for somebody like me like I did okay in school you know but I'm pretty darn neurotypical dude you know I'm pretty oriented I can apply those kinds of like hardcore topics you can listen and write it at the same time yeah I can listen and write it just a bizarre skill that nobody had until 5 000 years ago because there was no writing so there you go so the the point is that all this is extremely new yeah yeah and it is not suited for most people and so most people because of this experience defeat or experience helplessness all the time in a school setting and so that just becomes internalized over the course of a long life you know so like why would you start to believe that you could learn things if all of your experiences with learning were essentially shitty for the first 20 years of your life oh yeah you know it's really funny we should do a whole a whole thing on the uh uh counter-intuitive applications of psychoanalysis oh I like this yeah yeah so there's this whole thing as you know psychoanalysis right so the the patient that's the word typically uh transfers to the analyst the patient's transference yeah patterns of relationships from their childhood transference and I think about the ways in which there's massive transference from experiences in schools yeah and then of course massive transference from experiences with groups of peers while growing up right and that's really something for people to be aware of and man it you know it leads me for us we should have like a soundtrack you know like for what you're doing something like big and spacious yeah he's like a deep voice he's on SiriusXM everybody knows him not me it's coming are you talking about Howard's yes yes oh my God yes I have to say we should have some like music yeah yeah yeah okay for what for when Dad when Rick busts out a list one acknowledge really what you don't have control over sure yep and doing that and it's going to be a long list yeah sets you up to acknowledge where you actually do have influence and it will bring a lot of inner peace because you realize man there's so much I don't have responsibility for but I don't have control over thus no responsibility thus no blame great second tell the truth about your history and the ways in which to whatever extent efficacy agency internal locus of control on the one hand were innate nurtured rewarded supported enabled and on the other hand there were forces that led you to experiences of entrapment defeat helplessness and externalized locus of control the forces are outside you tell the truth about that third mobilize a lot of love for the parts of you that were wounded and bruised and imprisoned oppressed inside your mind through all that and it really kind of sounds funny but it means bringing a lovingness to the parts of you that were squashed and often it's the most beautiful parts of us like that little boy who just wanted to wave the spoon so you know love those parts okay yeah there's a huge self-compassion aspect to the soul exactly it's like all that sweet part that just wants to get big and be loud and make stuff happen and it got squelched ill fourth look for opportunities today in simple undeniable ways to experience agency or efficacy I was thinking about it as I reached for the class I'm right-handed so I was like oh don't spill Rick on camera that'd be kind of gross don't ruin the shirt you know but so when you are exercising effective control you are influencing things um you know what it feels like yeah and enjoy it and really really take it out and then my fifth and last suggestion in my list there should be a sound effect for the last on my list maybe not okay all right so we'll do a little we'll do a little post post-production magic in here maybe um he said realize as you and I have talked about a million times and I've learned a lot from you about this is to recognize the invisible bars of your cage or the bars of your invisible cage and take risks you know of the dreaded experience in which you deliberately uh take a small risk you challenge yourself to be more agentic to more be more influential to be more visible to take more of a chance to put it out there whatever it might be and then when it goes well wow restabilize the bars of your cage not that it's good to have bars of your cage but now they're bigger the space is more expanded again and again and again and again and for many people where they will experience um the most consequential forms of agency are not in big behaviors like get grabbing a wooden spoon or leaping over a barrier to safety where they will most experience agency and efficacy is in their relationships yeah and and most people don't experience a lot of agency and efficacy as their relationship and moving into heartfeltness that's scary making vulnerable requests that are scary being firm telling people no drawing a boundary um making it clear for example that you kind of see another person really clearly and they're going to do whatever they do but you're going to not see them clearly anymore or you're gonna not fail to see them clearly anymore yeah there we go yeah anyway okay that's very less you will no longer be deceived yeah yeah no I mean I think that there's so much in that that we could yeah unpack and talk about more deeply what kind of stands out to me is one of the things you said at the very beginning which was really relates to like how I think about it that idea of like creating a coherent narrative about yourself yeah because it's really normal for people to have kind of a blend of like a fixed mindset about some things and a growth mindset about in other things right like uh taking myself as an example I really believe that I can learn new cool academic things in order to prep for a podcast conversation about this one really confident in that I've got a great growth mindset when it comes to that for a long time was not so confident in my ability to do some of the interpersonal stuff that you're talking about yeah because I had more negative experiences in that Arena where I had more positive experiences in the learn cool academic Thing Arena so it was natural that I developed a growth mindset in one place but a fixed mindset in another and so it can be really helpful to kind of take an inventory of yourself and ask yourself some basic questions like where are the places where I feel like I've got a good growth mindset already where are the places where I feel like I don't what were the experiences that led to the accumulation of that growth mindset or that fixed mindset where the environments where I do feel a sense of self-efficacy where I do feel like I can change them in positive ways where the environments where I can't do that what are the commonalities and the ones where I can't and the ones where I can what do they have in common with each other and how are they different and how do their differences communicate to me that I can't do anything about them yeah where do those beliefs come from to really just simplify all of this and that's been super useful for me um because when you start to unpack all of the pieces of the thing it's kind of like uh taking apart a complex machine and you see all the pieces lying out in front of you and when they're all in front of you you just get a better sense of how the whole thing works whereas if you just see a car as a car it can be kind of operated by Magic right it's ooh there are elves inside of it but you take the pieces apart and you're like oh this is a mechanical thing um and so that's something I would just really recommend to people if they're trying to unpack this or trying to understand where they're at with these ideas currently and what they can do in the future to improve them can you think of an example of something that for you felt uh Beyond Your Capacity to influence um sure and then you decided to try to influence it you claim to kind of agency related to it yeah well I'm gonna use a bad example but it's a meaningful one and hopefully we can find something useful in here uh what other people thought of me that's a huge yeah so I say it's a bad example because it's a very complicated one but essentially for the early part of my life I basically felt like it sort of didn't matter what I did people just had a view of me yeah and I didn't really understand why they had that view of me I thought that view of me was mostly incorrect yeah and I was kind of like well if I'm gonna get punished for this view that people have of me then what's the point in trying to behave better about it I should just kind of lean into what feels good to me in the moment because I'm going to get kind of punished either way so I might as well uh take the take the rewards that I get from those kinds of behaviors along with the punishment that I'm gonna get and then I think that in my mid-20s or so I a little bit before then but it really started my mid-20s was when I started stepping back and going like hey what if I could affect this more what would it be like if I cut what kind of uh impact would that have on my life would have a huge impact so I just started unpacking it and started going why do people think these things about you like what are the behaviors like if we assume that it's based on evidence just take that as an assumption and I assume that there's something I can do about it yeah what's the evidence and what will I do about it and just shifting into that stance of those two assumptions assume that it's based on evidence and assume that there's something that I can do about it um totally transformative for me it took years wow it took years and years because a lot of the time we're talking about people who had had a thousand previous interactions with me or 10 000 previous interactions or a hundred thousand previous interactions it takes a lot of new evidence to change the beliefs associated with those old interactions so it took time and I had to just be okay with it taking years um but over time I I got a lot better about a lot of the behaviors that other people didn't like that some of which were very understandable that they didn't like and I developed a much greater sense of control over my social relationships while also critically doing what you were talking about earlier which is just kind of giving it up for the things that I couldn't control or the things that I couldn't influence and over time I was able to find a little bit more peace about that too though I would say I'm still working on that one I don't know does that make sense yeah of course I'm happy for you as a person and your father that's very touching my an answer for me also just reflecting on it is that I felt as a kid that I was unable to affect people to love me and uh one of the uh quite intimately meaningful moments of my life occurred some years ago when I was actually driving to work and kind of reflecting on uh purpose in life and a sense of fulfillment of purpose in life and for me it just really landed that I was loved I was loved and uh that I had the capacity to affect people in such a way that I would be love I would be lovable and loved so that's kind of an answer for me yeah and you know we're in a deep place here but this is the kind of stuff that we can connect self-efficacy Theory that's a lovely reflection to add and it kind of broadens it out in a really beautiful way as we come to the end here yeah um I want to think about a very specific kind of granular example that somebody who's listening to this right now might be having in their life and I'm wondering what advice you would give this person all right um so let's say that this is a person music here you know yeah yeah okay great yeah we've got the music I see we had very different Visions for what this music was going to sound like Dad but hey maybe it might involve trumpets I don't know we'll we'll find out we'll see we'll do a little post-production um so somebody who is in I think a very normal situation where let's say that they are in their late 20s they are living with their parents they're in a they have a job the job is not tremendously fulfilling and they feel like they've kind of made various efforts to improve things but they just feel very stuck in that in that bedroom you know in that house and we can of course broaden this out to other kinds of circumstances that are kind of like this at various other stages of life but this is just one that I've been through myself and I've certainly seen plenty of my friends go through as well and if that person were coming to your office and they were like doctor I just feel stuck I don't know if your patients call you Doctor Rick or what they call you Rick all right Rick I just feel stuck where'd you start uh well a lot of layers of that uh probably empathy what's yeah what's going on what's your history what's really happening here um what are the payoffs in being stuck could you say more about that that's really interesting oh yeah well secondary gains or payoffs uh what are the benefits what's good about being stuck what does it do for you to be stuck how does it help you avoid certain risks certain you know the risks of certain unpleasant experiences maybe there are other people who see you in a certain way it preserves maybe like you said earlier certain equilibrium homeostasis in your family situation maybe you feel like you're fulfilling some functions for your parents maybe you're kind of helping them stay together or You Think You Are by being down in the basement playing music late at night whatever it might be always look at that part and then what are the calls what are the costs and honestly what are the cause and then okay could there be a better way could there be a better way to get the rewards that you're getting out of your current situation that you of course I understand don't like and uh a better way that also though would have less of those costs that's kind of a useful frame yeah and then at the point where the person becomes you know the joke about how many therapists it takes to life change a light bulb this light bulb wants to change okay pilot light is now starting to ignite and in that playing on experiences of self-efficacy in other areas where do you have efficacy where do you get your coffee why do you choose that place over another place uh how about your friends how's it going there you know how do you choose to actually not get into a stupid argument yet again with some friend who's trolling you you know how do you how do you make choices there okay what what does that feel like to be a cue ball not an eight ball a hammer not a name a nail what does that feel like great and then can you do one thing different I think there's even a book with that title do one thing different or differently I think but anyway it doesn't make as good a title so it doesn't sound as good I don't know okay and then you gradually start to realize okay what's your path from here um and oh I could give you a list for that Q soundtrack but one of the weird things is to encourage people to a longer view all right here you are you're 28. I see one of your books I think is 4 000 weeks uh is my good friend Tom said to me once as you know do you plan on being 40 do you plan on being 35 do you plan on being 30. as a 28 year old how do you want it to be and then you work backwards from that and you have people realize okay it's a slog but I need to start taking some steps now um you know I want to find ways to make more money I want to find ways to fulfill more of my talents I want to find ways to be frankly more credible bluntly as a life partner to another person who's looking at other candidates as we all do so what are the things I can do to improve my situation a little every day and then get on the ball you know one of the things that's happened for me as a long time therapist on the one hand I become a lot more compassionate including with people that originally I had a hard time with who just would not be the dog that would pick itself up but I've come to realize that many people they're just it's hard for them to change or they're afraid to change and or they just don't want to and rather than taking it personally or getting mad at them you know I've learned to be more compassionate about it on the one hand on the other hand this is a light bulb that wants to change uh I'm kind of like giddy up every day matters you know and there's a Zen saying there's something on the order of life is fleeting the next moment is uncertain this is a profound opportunity get going so there's that part too okay I'll just be quiet yeah I'm I'm wondering about specifically focusing on the efficacy part of that again just quickly toward the end yeah the person who is in the office you're saying the list they're nodding along with it but you always you almost can feel like kind of like it's like they're being almost beaten down by the list if that makes sense right so here's the question for you you know what I mean okay now you're the therapist all right well here we go all right here we go and what you see objectively sitting across from you is lack of effort wow and then how do you handle it how do you communicate that fact yeah and the way that's helpful without sounding like yet another nagging bossy punishing critical person but what you're really seeing is that there are things the person could do this is often what happens oh for sure you know I want a better life okay and then you have a discussion like well you could do X Y see you and they go yeah I really could do x y z you're like yeah and they're okay they come back next week how to go with X or Y or Z you know just one would be cool I'm like uh you know nothing then you'd run through that cycle three four five weeks and they're paying you too so you feel responsible for their money you want to deliver value this is a very interesting and under discussed clinical moment and how you handle it and how you handle it yeah you bet because you could be the most gymnastics brilliant pyrotechnic amalgam of Virginia satyr and Richard Schwarz and Carl jugg and Karen Horney and all the rest whoever that person just as I'm willing to make efforts light bulb doesn't work what do you do yeah yeah yeah I mean I'm not a therapist yeah I'm certainly none of those people so you know yeah this is all just the amusing I guess over here but I think that what it comes back to is like what can you do maybe as a clinician to reinforce in them the examples that you were talking about of the times where they really did do a thing yeah where they expressed agency in some relatively small way in their life and they go okay yeah if you can express agency in that way can you express agency in these other ways the whole like make your bad thing I think is like a little blown out of proportion to be frank uh and has been misused in a variety of different ways but just the principle of like moving one little Pebble in order to eventually shift to Boulder I think is a good principle yeah and so I I would wonder about that as a clinician if it would be possible to reinforce in this person a feeling of some kind of effort and I also think some people are slow movers just takes a while yeah where where you know you get one Pebble one Pebble one Pebble one Pebble and finally and through a somewhat mysterious process that I don't think we totally understand yet um maybe in part because we don't really totally understand why therapy works we know that it does work yeah but we don't really know why it works it's sort of mysterious in that way um they just have the moment they have the moment where they get on indeed or Craigslist and they actually apply to the 20 jobs and it just happens yeah one day and you the clinician are like why now and they're like well I just did exactly no it's the mystery yeah right or around wanting to change like people want to want to change yeah but they actually don't want to so what do you do and I had to really learn it wasn't my job to make them do anything it wasn't my job to make them make an effort and then I started to shift into a peacefulness myself about what was beyond my control which then opened up more space for some key clients to actually gee what a surprise you know actually start making efforts yeah or you know implementing that's interesting genuine wanting kind of you're lighting up on the rains the dynamic I shifted the script in which they were The Lovable uh lower the ten thousandth time in their experience yeah yeah and I you know as the person bearing witness kind of critically her so I stepped out of that that changed the script that was part of it and also really exploring uh the mystery of effort and the Mystery of wanting and I know we're going to do an episode of motivation and exploring things like physiological interventions totally addressing yes uh I think people now more and more psychedelic assisted therapies are getting breakthroughs uh they're re-stabilizing new ways that sort of I started reflecting more on like a reward process in the brain people who are dopamine depleters I was gonna say something that's dopamine yeah just disruptions of natural opioid production and experiences there and so they weren't getting reward for making effort so of course they would Peter out over time yeah know more and more about that and then it's so interesting you look at people who survive crazy situations you know hard situations for those who have a kind of central spark or core of determination they tend to make it some other people make it who may lack that core spark they make it for other reasons but that core Moxie feistiness fed upness yeah is a wonderful vitamin inside their innermost being and it's again that too is not something that's really talked about yeah about in therapy how to how to identify it and how to how to call upon it we tend to under recognize it um we know it when we feel it in a person you know you want them on your team yeah because they are not going to give up yeah I wonder how much of that has to do with different kinds of self-belief like limiting beliefs that we have about ourselves or even self-concept I'm just thinking about myself when I was in one of those circumstances similar to the one that I was kind of giving in the example you know I'm in my mid late 20s I'm living at home I'm kind of restless sort of figuring out what the heck I want to do with my life you were there for it um you know somewhere in there my self-concept changed and my self-concept changing really catalyzed I think a lot of change broadly for me how I stopped thinking of myself as the kind of person who just was listlessly moving through life in this particular kind of way and a lot of it changed um when my self-criticism calmed down and when I stopped using self-criticism as a defense yeah yeah and that was a big one for me I went to bed almost every night beating myself up and I kind of stopped doing that somewhere in there or maybe I became more committed to my own well-being maybe that was part of it I didn't want to beat myself up in that way yeah and and that was a big inflection point for me so I wonder about that and people's Adventures here as well yeah you know Kristen Neff is is on this with her book Fierce yeah Fierce compassion for self-compassion and I I don't want to overvalue it because again two I think there's probably something of a genderizing of this quality of a kind of intensity of persistence anyway I know we're coming to an end we've wandered a bit hopefully this was helpful to people yeah I I think that it's it's a tough thing to talk about in a really focused way because it's such a big concept and it touches on so many other things in ways large and small but today we mostly focused on how to improve self-efficacy and develop a growth mindset over time and along the way we referenced a lot of studies and examples Howard Stern the the soundtrack that's going to play beneath Rick's three by three matrices and lists and and related Concepts but yeah I just had a great time with this one and I think that there was something also that was that was nice about doing it in person I had a great time talking with Rick about what we can do to develop more self-efficacy and fight against feelings of learned helplessness and just a general sense of stuckness in our lives and that's where we started why are we prone to feeling stuck or like we don't have influence and there are a couple of different reasons for this the first is our negativity bias negativity simply has more salience than positivity that's the way our brain is built there is a ton of research that suggests that people tend to attend to pay attention to and generally remember negative emotions way more than they remember positive emotions or as Rick likes to say our brain is like a velcro for negative experiences but Teflon for positive ones another reason is our homeostasis the natural condition of systems is to resist change changing is hard and when situations fail to change it's easy for us to just stop trying to change them and this gets to all of the research on learned helplessness and experiments with dogs they quickly stopped trying to escape painful circumstances when they were unable to influence their circumstances even just a few times and it took many more experiences of positive agency to unlearn that helplessness we then talked about how we can develop self-efficacy and alongside it a growth mindset and a growth mindset is just really the belief that we can learn that we can grow and change over time in positive ways and one of the ways that we can reinforce a growth mindset is by focusing on effort over talent and moving toward a general effort orientation and this then got us into some conversations on the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and then even maybe broader than that how for many people school is a place where they mostly experience defeat and if school is your primary learning environment and you typically experience defeat there well you're not necessarily going to have a really positive orientation toward learning and Rick then offered a list of things that people can do to improve self-efficacy over time first he talked about accepting what we don't have control over I am connected to that tell the truth about the experiences that you've had of a lack of agency particularly in the past and this gets to a lot of the material that we talk about on the podcast frequently related to developing a coherent Narrative of childhood third we can mobilize self-compassion for the parts of ourselves that lacked agency we can bring a sense of love to the parts of us that were pushed down by the world around us then fourth we can look for opportunities today in simple ways to experience agency and efficacy even in tiny ways just know what it feels like inside of you to choose one food at a grocery store over another or to make the deliberate choice to get up and reheat your coffee as I've done several times today even just getting a sense of that feeling of mobilization can be very powerful for people people if they haven't had a lot of experiences of it in life then fifth critically take in these experiences when you have them life can be a thin enough soup for people as it is when we do have these experiences of self-efficacy it's really important to go out of our way to notice them and deliberately take them in and then at the end of the episode we went through a deliberate process of looking at an example of somebody who might feel stuck and walking through what Rick would recommend they do and to simplify this he talked about three things looking at the payoffs then looking at the costs then asking is there a better way that I could do this and this idea of payoffs which might seem really counterintuitive like what do you mean the payoffs I'm getting from feeling stuck a big idea in Psychology is the idea of secondary gains what risks does being stuck help you avoid does it preserve your equilibrium does it mean that you don't have to get into conflict with the people around you does it protect you from a certain kind of of dreaded experience you might have for example putting yourself out there in some kind of vulnerable way most of the time when we have a persistent pattern of behavior it's because we're getting something from it even if it's not an intuitive thing even if it's not at the Forefront of our mind even if it seems like a behavior where we're really getting nothing at all from most of the time there is some payoff associated with it or at least there was initially and now it's just become a habit then second we can look at the costs what are the consequences of this behavior for us and those costs might be very real in your life right now and then finally looking at is there a better way to get those payoffs without suffering so many of the costs and then after we explored that model Rick really returned over and over again to looking at where you do have a feeling of agency in your life what does it feel like to you when you're a cue ball and not an eight ball again even in very small ways can you do one thing differently to tomorrow than you did today and just taking that very very small step can itself be be a kind of tipping point in your life where it Cascades from one small step to another small step to another small step and then all of a sudden your life is radically different that is really possible for people it does happen what gets people to that first small step is often a bit mysterious it's really hard to pin down but we do know that once these steps start to Cascade it can create a ton of positive change so I hope that you enjoyed today's episode if you liked seeing us in the same room here in person maybe if you were watching the video or if you just enjoyed the vibe of the conversation when we were sitting in the same room together it would actually be great to know that because it takes some more effort to do that but if people like it then we'll do more of it in the future if you've been enjoying the podcast for a while and you somehow haven't subscribed to it yet please subscribe to the podcast hit the Subscribe button wherever you're listening to it right now on or hey subscribe to my channel if you're watching on YouTube if you'd like to support the show in other ways you can find us on patreon it's patreon.com beingwellpodcast and for just a few dollars a month you can support the show and you'll receive a bunch of bonuses in return until next time thanks for listening and I'll talk to you soon questions [Music]

Channel: Forrest Hanson

Views: 43,568

Keywords: Mental Health, Personal Growth, Self-Help, Psychology, Forrest, Forrest Hanson, Being Well, Being Well Podcast, Rick Hanson, Resilient, learned helplessness, self-efficacy, How to Change Your Life, Creating a Growth Mindset, Paul Gilbert, motivation, feeling stuck, personal agency, negativity bias, loss aversion, chronic pain, Carol Dweck, growth mindset, unstuck, get unstuck, how to get unstuck

Id: m1nKXKnaZUU

Length: 66min 40sec (4000 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 05 2023