Why You Don’t Change (But How You Still Can) [ENCORE]
Episode Stats
Summary
Dr. Ross Ellenhorn has spent his career facilitating the recovery of individuals diagnosed with psychiatric and substance abuse issues. In his latest book, How We Change and 10 Reasons Why We Don t, he s taken what he s learned in his work and applied it to anyone trying to change their lives.
Transcript
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Hey, this is Brett. We're taking a break from new episodes for the holidays. We're rebroadcasting
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episode number 657, Why You Don't Change, But How You Still Can, with Dr. Ross Ellenhorn.
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It's a great episode to listen to as you're thinking about the changes you want to make
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in your life in 2023. We'll see you next Monday in 2023 with a brand new episode. Happy New Year.
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Anyone who's ever
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tried to lose weight, curb their temper, quit smoking, or alter any of their habit in their
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lives knows that personal change is hard, really hard. Most self-help books out there treat people
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like machines, blitzing past this difficulty and offering mechanical five-step formulas for changing
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your life. My guest day says such simplified solutions hugely miss the mark. He argues that
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if you ever want to change, it's more fruitful to understand why you don't than figure out why
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you do. To understand that, you've got to go deeper, existential even. His name is Dr. Ross
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Ellenhorn, and he spent his career facilitating the recovery of individuals diagnosed with psychiatric
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and substance abuse issues. In his latest book, How We Change and 10 Reasons Why We Don't, he's taken
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what he's learned in his work and applied it to anyone trying to change their lives. Ross and I
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begin our conversation with some of the reasons we don't change, including the existential pressure of
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feeling like you're solely in charge of making change happen, a dizzying amount of freedom and number of
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options for what to do with your life, and day-to-day factors which influence our level of motivation.
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From there, we turn to the role of hope and faith in psychology and how these forces can both boost
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and restrain your ability to change. We discuss the way a fear of hope can constrain your life,
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why you sometimes need to embrace staying the same in order to ever change, and the difference
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between good faith and bad faith. We discuss the idea that you don't develop hope, but you can
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develop faith, and how to build your faith in yourself through embracing humility and taking small
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steps. Ross then explains why he doesn't really give advice on how to change beyond finding the good
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in a bad habit, but how patience and your social environment can also help. This show's got some
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counterintuitive advice that will help you see your struggles differently after it's over.
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Check out our show notes at aom.is slash change.
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All right, Ross Ellenhorn, welcome to the show.
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You work with people who've been in and out of the psychiatric system and trying to get help,
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and they haven't been able to make changes, but this book is also geared just to regular people
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who have found change to be hard, and I think we've all experienced that to one extent or the
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other. Trying to quit smoking is hard, trying to lose weight is hard, controlling your anger,
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your temper is hard, and you always have this desire like, this is the time. This is the thing
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it's going to be. I'm going to get it this time, but then a week later, you're off the treadmill.
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So what's going on there? Why is it so hard to make personal changes like losing weight,
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quitting smoking, being more patient with your kids?
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Yeah, and so I learned why it's hard from these individuals who are having such profound
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problems with motivation and with accepting help, but it really is applicable to all of us,
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including you and me. No one's free from this, and it's basically that every time you're trying
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to change something in your life, you're exposing something that's really terrifying,
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which is that you're kind of driving the bus that's your life, and that's what existentialists
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would call existential accountability, and that causes anxiety. There's nobody really making
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things happen for me. I'm in charge, and if this life's going to have any depth or meaning to it,
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I'm in charge of that. And so every act of changing yourself is really this profound act of kind of
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shepherding your own life, right? It's very interesting because think about what people did,
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at least at the beginning of COVID, in response to that. The massive agility that people showed
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in changing their lives, right? But they did it in a group, and they did it because they had to,
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that's actually easier, even though it's more massive, than dieting. Because dieting is like,
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I'm on my own, I'm in charge of my life, and I'm making this happen. And so there's always that
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pressure of having to look at yourself and your own accountability every time you try to change
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something. No, yeah, I think that's, yeah, it's definitely existential. Like, freedom is so scary.
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You'd rather just like, I'd rather have someone tell me exactly what to do, so I don't have to think
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about this. Right, right. I mean, there's this fascinating work on why is it that Scandinavian
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countries, that people are so much happier? And there's all kinds of reasons. But one reason is
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less choice. In the United States, and you walk in, there's like 20 different cereals. You walk into
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PGA Fridays, and there's enormous menu. And that level of choice actually can become depressing.
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Well, yeah, and we also have just choices on how we want to live our lives. You know, 100 years ago,
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your choice was like, my dad was a farmer, his dad was a farmer, I'll be a farmer. Now it's like,
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well, I can be a blogger, I can be a lawyer, I can be an accountant, I can be whatever. And that can be
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really terrifying to have to make that choice. Yeah, yeah, that combined with a culture that says
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that because you're free, something's wrong with you if you don't achieve those things. So there's
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also a mythology in that, right? That everybody's sort of seen as this free agent that should be
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able to make their life become whatever it should be. You know, so there's like this, there's two
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things going on at the same time in our culture. One is this idea that wherever you are is sort of
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your, an expression of who you are. And the other is, you know, you're in charge of your life,
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because there is some truth to that. The second part, you know, that you're in charge of your
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way you respond to the world. You're not always in charge of how, where you end up.
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All right. So there's this deep existential reason why it's hard to make personal change,
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because it's scary to accept the fact that you're the one who's driving the bus of your life,
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and you have all these options to choose from as to where to go. But there's also more day-to-day
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things that can either make us more or less motivated to change.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so there's this field around us. And let me give you an example from the book,
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and then I'll explain why that example is important. So I have a goal in my life to give
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more honest, critical feedback to my employees, because it's not something I'm very good at.
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And one day I needed to give one of my managers some feedback, and I really felt like this was
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the opportunity to change that behavior. But I didn't sleep all the night before. It was kind
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of a muggy day. I felt lousy. All the excuses for not doing it started entering my head. You know,
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maybe I'll just do it next week, or I'll kick the can down the road some other way.
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And I was in New York City, and I got on this elevator with a group of people.
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And while we're going up, this woman spills her coffee. And somebody in the elevator says,
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you know, I'm going to sprinkle a little sugar on that to make it congeal so it doesn't spread
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through the elevator. Another person grabbed some napkins from their pocket and put it on it.
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And we got to like the fifth floor, and this guy got out and said,
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that was the best elevator ride ever. And everybody started cracking up. And then we
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got to the 10th floor, and this businessman gets out, and he yells back to us, same time,
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same date next year. Let's all meet here on the elevator. And we just lost it. And I got off of
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that elevator, and I was totally prepared to give this manager feedback. Now, what happened in that
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elevator ride? Well, we all live in these fields, and the fields are very complex. And you cannot
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predict when those fields will shift. And the fields are basically, there's a bunch of forces
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moving you forward. There's self-esteem. There's all kinds of traits, your own self-confidence,
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your own mental agility. But there's also things like how good your day is going. What happened to
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you yesterday? What's on your mind at that time? What's your socioeconomic class? What else is going on
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at that point? And then there's all these restraining forces, all these things holding
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you back, your self-doubt, socioeconomic reasons, all of those things. And so what happened to me that
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day was there was enough of an extra little bit of good stuff going on, sort of a sense of faith in
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humanity that pushed me over to the ability to actually change my behavior. And that's why one day
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you might be planning to diet and you can't diet. And then the next day you wake up and you're
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completely able to diet. That's because something has shifted in this field around you. All the
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forces holding you back, all the forces pushing you forward. And the way to think about it is each of
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us is sitting between those two forces at all times. Sometimes we're closer to our goal because
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either the positive forces are stronger and the negative forces are the same, or the negative forces
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are less for some reason and we're pushing towards it. And then we're always in this field
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between these two things, moving back and forth.
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And then as we just discussed earlier about this existential anxiety, that's a restraining force.
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But what's interesting about that, just the fact of wanting to do something, to achieve a goal,
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make a personal change, actually can cause a restraint because we start freaking ourselves out.
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That's right. That's so great you point that out. That's exactly right. That the thing,
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that changing comes with its own built-in restraining force, right? There's other kinds of
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motivations where it's just basically these two fields, but change always has that existential
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accountability. And it also always has hope. So hope is always there. Like if you're going to plan
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on losing weight, you're hoping to lose weight. And so there's always hope as a positive force forward.
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But the problem is that hope too has its restraining element because hope can lead you to profound
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experiences of disappointment and helplessness. And so if you've had enough experiences of
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disappointment, hope is actually scary. And that's part of why hope is both a positive force and a
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Well, let's dig into this idea of hope more because this is the first book of psychology
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that I actually, where it deals with hope very seriously because you often read about hope in terms
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of like, you know, like a religious book or something like that. In this realm of psychology,
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humanistic psychology, what is like, what does it mean to hope for something? It's just like want
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something that you don't have or can't see? What is it?
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Well, first of all, I want to point out what an insane world we live in that hope is not a central
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element of what we're talking about in psychology. And that we have all these weird terms that psychology
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and psychiatry is made up that have very little meaning like depression, anxiety, that they don't
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really have a meaning attached to them when hope does, right? I'm hoping for this thing. I'm experiencing
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despair because I didn't get it. Like these words have been removed from therapeutic practices. It's
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very sad in a lot of ways because it treats people as if they're kind of like these broken things instead
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of recognizing they're dealing always with the same things everybody's dealing with, which is how do I hope
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for things and how do I deal with the despair of not getting them? So hope is not quite an emotion.
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It's sort of an emotion and a position that makes sense. So hope is in a way, it's similar to other
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things that are emotions and positions like paranoia. Paranoia is not just a feeling. It's a position
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towards life. And hope is this attitude in which you place importance on something you want and you
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start moving towards it. So every time you hope, you're actually attributing to something an
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importance. So the example is, you know, your parents ask you what you want for Christmas or
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Hanukkah and you say a bike. The minute you say bike, that thing becomes this important thing to you.
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You also notice at that point that you lack a bike. So two things are going on at the same time when you
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hope for something. It becomes important and you recognize you lack it. That means that hope
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always implies risk because if you don't get it, you recognize something you've now appointed as
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important you don't have and you recognize you lack it. So every time you're trying to change
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something about yourself, you're going to be recognizing if you don't get it, you lack that
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thing that you want to change and it was important. And hope is this thing that moves you through
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uncertainty. You don't hope for something and know you'll get it. That's what makes it so
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evolutionarily important because hope is getting you through uncertainty to a goal. It moves you to
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the goal to uncertainty. It's kind of very different than a cheaper emotion, which is optimism. Optimism is
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everything's going to be great. Hope is, I don't know if everything's going to be great, but it's going
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to drive me, move me towards that thing. And there's two very important qualities to hope. And if you take
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a survey on hope, you'll be taking Charles Snyder's survey typically. And there's two things he's
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looking for that hopeful people do. One is they have a belief in themselves. There's a sense of,
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I can do this. And the other is they find alternative pathways. So hopeful people, when you see a barrier,
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you try to figure out your way around it. And when you think about hopeful politicians, they're often
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talking about how we're going to work our way around something. They're not promising we'll get there.
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You know, Churchill's famous speech about we'll fight here, we'll fight there, we'll fight there.
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He never says, we'll beat the Germans. He's just talking about, we're going to try every way
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possible to fight them. And that's hope. That's where hope rests. It's this emotion we experience
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Okay. So you mentioned one element of hope is this belief in yourself that you're capable
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of doing something. That belief, like faith comes up. And like you also, like hope and faith are
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also connected. And again, faith is one of those words we typically associate with faith and with
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religion and spirituality. But in this model of how people change, like what is faith?
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Yeah. So again, this is a real problem that we would think of these things
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as important in church and in synagogue and in mosque, but not important in therapy, right?
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So faith is very similar to what Bandura, a social psychologist calls self-efficacy.
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So self-efficacy is the belief that you can make things happen, that you're competent enough to
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control your life and to fix things and make things and be able to kind of take on something
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and make it work. That's different than self-esteem. And that's really what faith is in yourself,
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which is that I can get through this. I can figure out how to get through this. And so hope has that
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kernel of faith in it because that element, what Snyder's pointing out is this sort of belief in
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yourself. That's kind of faith. That's faith, right? And when you've been met with lots of
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disappointments, you lose that faith in yourself. And if you lose that faith in yourself, you become
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afraid of hope because you're saying, hope's going to bring me to that point again where things
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are going to fall apart because I'm going to get disappointed. I'm going to fail.
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And I don't know if I have enough faith in myself to handle that.
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No. So yeah, that's, I mean, that's a good point. So like these things, the faith and hope,
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they drive us, they help us move forward in uncertainty. But as you said, it's a double-edged
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sword because once you experience that defeat, you don't get what you wanted or you had faith in
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yourself and your ability and like it didn't work out, like you just, you go, you can fall into
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Right, right. And also despair, the other term I would use for that is,
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helplessness, the experience I can't get my needs met. I can't make my life work. That's a profound
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experience, right? I'm driving this bus and I'm no good at making things work. That really beats you
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up, right? And so that's why the next time you're ready to hope, you're like, I don't want to have
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that experience again, that I'm not able to make my life work. That's a very profound terror.
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No. So yeah, I mean, that's a good point. So you mentioned like when you were talking about hope
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and giving an example of hope and the kid hoping for a bike that the holidays, if you don't get the
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bike, like you're, it's, it's a bummer, but you move on. But like when you say you hope to lose weight
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for the 20th time, like that can be even more devastating because just like, it's about you.
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It's not a thing. It's about you as a person. Absolutely. That's right. Right. I mean,
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think about, think about COVID again, right? Like what were we hoping for when we massively adjusted
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our lives? We were hoping for the status quo. We weren't, we weren't hoping for some great thing
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to happen. Right. So the challenge of hoping wasn't that great. It was just like, let's get through this
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thing. Right. But to say to yourself, I'm going to lose weight. That's like all the responsibilities
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on my shoulders. And I'm hoping for a thing that I'm going to, that, that, that makes me better
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than I am right now. And that makes that really kind of serious, right? Because the pitfall is I'm
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not able to diet. If I'm not able to diet, simply do that. Am I capable of doing other things?
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Who is this person driving the bus that's, that is my life, right? Can I have faith in that person?
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Yeah. There's existential stakes whenever you make a goal like that.
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And I thought it was interesting, your research on hope and this fear of hope. So like hope can
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cause a fear of hope because there's always a chance you're not going to, it's not going to
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happen for you what you wanted. What you found is that people who are the most hopeful are actually
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the most afraid of hope. Or did I get that right? Did I read it wrong?
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People who are very hopeful and have fear of hope are very agitated. Okay.
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They, they get engaged in these things called counterfactuals where they're constantly thinking,
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I should have done this. I should have done that. Right. Or this should have happened differently.
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They, they don't, they're less likely to see a positive event coming up than a person who doesn't
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have hope. And that kind of makes sense. Like a person who doesn't have hope, they're like,
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oh yeah, my graduation's coming up. Big deal. Person who has hope, they're going, oh my God,
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I'm going to get excited about this. And then I'm going to be let down and they get scared of it.
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They don't want to look at it. So what we're finding is that the relationship between hope
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and fear of hope is this sort of difficult, difficult situation. And what that means on some
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level is we might be, we might be actually diagnosing people as depressed or even in despair
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when actually they're people with a lot of hope, but they're afraid of it. It scares them.
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They're like a, they're like a high diver who's afraid of heights.
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And you make this case is really, I mean, it's counterintuitive that, okay, when you decide
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to hope for somebody, you also have this fear of hope and you decide to let the fear drive your
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decision. We often think, well, that's not good, but you kind of make this counterintuitive
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case that sometimes that's what needs to be done. Sometimes you have to just kind of stay the same
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because you still got some work you have to do before you can make that big change you're,
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you're hoping for. Yeah. So this, this gets, this gets a little con, not convoluted, but complex.
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Maybe let's think about this for a second. So I'm afraid of trying something that will change my life
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because I'm afraid of that feeling of helplessness is going to happen and despair if it doesn't happen
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again. And I'm afraid my hope's going to coax me into doing it. And then I'm going to be let down.
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What am I protecting when I do that? I don't change. I'm protecting my hope in a strange way.
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I'm protecting my capacity to keep hoping. I don't want it injured anymore. So I'm actually doing
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something that's, that's nurturing of myself. I'm trying to kind of make sure that what hope I have
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is safe. So I'm playing possum. I'm not moving forward because I don't want that injured again.
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I'm staying still so that I don't get whatever motivates me more hurt. And so in the book,
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that's really what I'm talking about is can you find a way to have some affection for staying the
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same? That's sure a better attitude towards staying the same than hating it, right? And being
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shameful about it. That's such a disrespectful way to look at the fact that you didn't diet or you
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didn't work out or anything like that. It's not respecting that there's parts of you that are
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trying to take care of yourself that aren't working. And they come from self-love and all love
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is messy and inaccurate and screwed up and sometimes goes overboard. Love is not some pure state. And so
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sometimes you go overboard and you protect yourself too much, but it's coming from the right place.
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Well, yeah, something you say about people who have a fear of hope, the thing they do to protect the
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hope that they have is they severely constrain their lives, right? And like time kind of gets
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compressed. Like the only things you're worried about are things that happened a few months ago.
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And the only things you're kind of maybe excited about are the things that will happen in a few
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months, but you're not really hoping what's my life going to be like in a year, two years, three years.
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What are my kids going to be like grandkids? Because you don't want to hope that far in the future
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because there's a, there's a good chance it might not work out the way you hoped for.
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Right, right, exactly right. You know, and so then what are you doing there? You're trying to protect
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what hope you have from another injury. And that kind of makes sense. You know, it's not great.
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You know, you end up staying the same, but on the other hand, you're doing something that
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has some sense to it. And the more you can respect that, maybe even find it kind of beautiful that
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you're doing it, the more likely you are to change. It just doesn't work to like hate yourself for not
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that just doesn't work. Shame. If you want to, if you want to really be stuck, be shameful. That'll,
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No, this idea of like hope and being afraid of hope reminds me of like that, that saying,
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I don't know if it's connected, but it sounds kind of the same. Like cynics are just idealists
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who have been disappointed over and over again.
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Right. It's like, I think people like hopeful people, they're just like,
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people who are afraid of hope. They're just, they're hopeful people, but they just been,
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they feel like they've been burned so many times that they, they get kind of like, I'm not going
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to put my, I'm not going to hope this time because it'll feel bad.
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Yeah. I would just adjust that just a little bit from people who are, you and I are afraid of hope.
00:22:11.480
I mean, some people are just more afraid of it than us. I mean, you know, there's not a single
00:22:15.880
theologian out there that says, go hope. It's easy. Right. They're always talking about it.
00:22:21.120
Hope and courage go together. That it takes some strength to face hope. And if it takes some
00:22:26.980
strength to face hope, there must be something scary about it. And there's what's scary about
00:22:30.420
is hope is always about risk. And I'm, that's not my, that's not something I made up. Every
00:22:35.800
theologians talked about hope is a risky attitude. You're climbing a mountain and every step you take
00:22:44.560
towards hope means a bigger fall if the thing doesn't work out. And that's why religion has
00:22:51.420
always been about hope and faith. It's trying to kind of get people to act on hope. It's a really
00:22:58.440
evolutionary thing. We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
00:23:03.800
And now back to the show. So, okay. Staying the same. So like, say someone makes a goal to lose
00:23:09.240
weight or maybe they want to change their job, but like they haven't made the move because
00:23:13.000
there's a whole bunch of reasons. You give like a whole bunch of reasons that in the years you've
00:23:17.340
been working with people, you found different reasons, like different things that people are
00:23:20.960
protecting when they just, when you say, when they decide, they might not know they're making a
00:23:25.500
decision, but you know, when they decide, I'm not going to, I'm not going to move forward on that
00:23:30.060
change that I hope for. And one of them is just pain. Like, yeah, we, we've been kind of talking
00:23:34.920
about this, but this pain of one pain is just the fear of existential freedom. And we'd rather just,
00:23:42.720
like we talked about earlier, just escape from that. I mean, any examples of people you worked with
00:23:46.500
where the reason why they stayed the same, because they were afraid of that existential freedom.
00:23:51.880
Yeah. I would say that most of the people I deal with, you know, and now this is me applying my
00:23:58.800
ideas on them and I'm, I'm pretty much against people deciding what other people's experiences
00:24:02.800
are, but sure. But my way of looking at things is that most of the people I'm dealing with,
00:24:07.520
this is what they're struggling over. They're having a major existential crisis, partly caused by the
00:24:15.080
fact that they've had a massive disappointment because of having been diagnosed with a psychiatric issue.
00:24:21.140
And so they're dealing with, you know, if I'm free, I'm accountable. And if I'm accountable,
00:24:28.020
can I actually get my hopes up again? You know, can I have another experience of kind of loss
00:24:33.280
regarding this? And so for most of them, I think this is going on for them.
00:24:38.220
Well, and you, you also talk, you bring this other existential idea of, of bad faith and good faith.
00:24:43.480
You know, good faith, I think this is from Sartre.
00:24:46.540
You said that like, you know, good faith is when you recognize that you are accountable,
00:24:50.340
right? You're not, you might not be responsible for the hands you're dealt in life, but you are
00:24:54.500
responsible for how you respond. And that's the scary thing. Bad faith is whenever you pretend
00:25:00.060
you don't have that like ability or accountability or responsibility. And, you know, I remember you
00:25:06.360
talked about one person you worked with who did something that looked like good faith was actually
00:25:10.560
bad faith. I guess what it was is he, he set up this like system of accountability where people
00:25:16.540
checked in with him. So he had people check in with him. Right. So like it's, it looked like good
00:25:21.940
faith in that he was setting up this system, but it was actually kind of a bad faith move because
00:25:26.300
he wanted other people just to take care of it. He wanted to set up the system. Then he didn't have
00:25:31.700
Right. Right. That was a, that was a fascinating thing. That's right. That's right. So he,
00:25:35.180
he wanted these, these, you know, we kept telling him, you know, because I run this program that,
00:25:41.240
you know, it's 24 hours. So he just kept telling me, you could call any time if there's a crisis.
00:25:45.780
Right. But he wanted check-ins to make sure he wasn't in crisis. And, and that's bad faith
00:25:53.640
because what he wanted was this sense that people were kind of there automatically responding to him
00:26:00.080
and that he was the sort of passive person that they were taking care of because passivity is kind
00:26:05.000
of the art of bad faith. Right. And to call us would mean that he was an agent. He was making
00:26:11.820
this happen. So that, that's a really significantly injured person, right? That they, they knew that
00:26:17.600
they had this service where they could call any time, but they didn't want to use the service
00:26:21.720
because they were so terrified of actually being an agent, making things happen. Right. And that's
00:26:27.720
kind of classic for a lot of the people I work with, you know, but, but right now, you know,
00:26:32.040
you and I are talking, this is a good faith interaction. I'm feeling completely like I'm
00:26:37.380
my own agent of my life right now. You know, I feel like I'm spewing out words and ideas that are
00:26:43.060
my own and I'm accountable for those things. And when I leave and I walk home, I'm going to be
00:26:49.380
thinking about how I have to be home at a certain time. And that have to is bad faith because I'm
00:26:56.500
acting as if that time I have to be home is something I have to do instead of I want to do
00:27:02.060
because I don't want to piss people off that I'm late and I'm making that decision. So our days are
00:27:06.880
filled with these back and forth between good and bad faith. Right. And some of that's, some of that's
00:27:12.500
just functional. You can't just go through life, seeing everything as a choice, but some of it's
00:27:16.960
because we just are sort of terrified of this idea that there's a lot of choices in front of us.
00:27:21.940
Well, I mean, so going back to this idea where that, that can actually be useful because I think
00:27:28.420
people are hearing that like, well, that's not good. Bad faith sounds not good where you pretend
00:27:32.680
like you don't have accountability for your life, but like say to talk about this guy who set up this
00:27:38.060
system, like it sounded like it was useful for him. Can it like, can that be a way where he sort
00:27:42.760
of works his way up to building good faith? Yeah. Yeah. I tell this other story about, I mean,
00:27:49.400
you know, and these are extreme stories because these are people that have been under extreme
00:27:53.200
experiences of disappointment. Right. But I'm, but this is another example. I had a guy in a group
00:27:58.300
and I hated this, but I was a junior therapist at the time. So we were asked, we had to ask them
00:28:03.320
to give a number to their mood, which is sort of dumb, but, and he would always say every week he was
00:28:09.180
a two, which is really low in depression. Like he was a two with 10 being, you know, doing really well.
00:28:16.440
And he'd say a two every week, but there were these women in the group who went to church with
00:28:21.500
him and they'd come into my office and they'd tell me things like he was starting to date.
00:28:26.300
Like he spoke at the church the other day, like he got his own apartment, like he got a job.
00:28:31.700
And then one day he didn't show up. He never showed up again. And so he needed us to kind of stay in
00:28:37.140
this place of seeing him as a two, not scare him with our expectations going up about his own agency,
00:28:42.740
right? That he can make his life work in order for him to escape bad faith. He couldn't have us be
00:28:48.500
part of it and get excited for him. And so that was sort of his method to get out of it.
00:28:53.680
No, that's another one of the 10 reasons why we don't change the fear of just expectations from
00:28:58.040
ourselves and others, right? Once you tell people your wife, like, oh, I'm going to, this is, I'm
00:29:02.820
going to lose in weight. This is the time I'm going to do it. And she's like, yes. And then,
00:29:06.540
you know, a week later, you're, you know, got the burrito taco enchilada meal and, you know,
00:29:15.080
she's disappointed and you feel it. And you're like, I just don't want to experience. I'm not
00:29:17.920
even going to say, I'm trying to make a change.
00:29:20.900
Right. Right. Exactly. That raising other people's expectations means raising them seeing your,
00:29:27.480
your, that you're the master of your life and having other people witness that is scary,
00:29:33.680
right? Because then you can let them down. You witness yourself letting them down and you feel
00:29:39.500
bad about yourself. So you try to avoid that. And one way to avoid that is to not change,
00:29:43.980
right? You stay miserable so that you don't have to face the misery of a disappointment in front of
00:29:49.440
them. And the same goes with our own selves. We don't want to raise our own expectations. And we
00:29:53.520
sort of stay in this state, this possum like state, because we don't want to have that experience of
00:29:58.360
being, you know, raising our hopes and then having them dashed.
00:30:01.400
And I mean, so this one guy you talked about who was, you went to your, your group therapy
00:30:05.900
session said he's a two, like that was kind of his way out of it. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Smart.
00:30:11.280
Yeah. It was smart. But I mean, how else have you seen people overcome this fear of just
00:30:16.340
expectations? Is it just, does it come naturally? Does it come when you're ready? What happens there?
00:30:22.700
I think that it's a couple of things. One is that I really don't think that you can
00:30:26.420
develop hope. You have to develop faith. So the more people kind of get better at things,
00:30:32.660
get better at life, the more willing they are to kind of risk hoping again. Right. And so the more
00:30:38.220
willing they are to kind of face the fact that things might not work out, but they'll survive.
00:30:42.420
So I've seen that in my own life, you know, the more I've gotten good at things, anything,
00:30:46.540
the more I kind of feel like I can kind of survive other disappointments. And I've seen that in my,
00:30:51.940
in my clients, you know, the more that they can kind of take care of themselves and be in charge of
00:30:55.120
their lives, the more willing they are to take greater risks. I guess, you know, the one story
00:31:00.240
I tell in the book is this guy used to kind of know back in the punk scene in LA who wanted to
00:31:05.760
quit smoking. And he did actually the opposite of the guy that gave the two. He took pictures of
00:31:12.420
himself looking like an idiot smoking and he called these idiot cards and he plastered them and he was
00:31:18.820
really well known in LA and people loved them. So he plastered these all over the clubs and the
00:31:24.020
bathrooms and the clubs all over the place. And it was his way of kind of reminding himself
00:31:28.760
in a way that, you know, continuing on with this behavior wasn't actually working for him.
00:31:34.580
It was this kind of reflection of this thing, but he also made it into kind of a performance
00:31:38.840
because he got all these other people involved in a way where they were reflecting to him.
00:31:43.140
And it held him accountable in this other kind of way that helped him finally quit. It was kind of
00:31:48.160
a beautiful little piece of performance art in some ways.
00:31:50.700
Well, you mentioned one thing that people kind of get out of, overcome these fears of
00:31:54.680
expectations or freedom is, you know, they start taking small steps in different areas of life.
00:32:00.700
It might not even be related to the big issue in their life, right? Whether they think they're
00:32:05.280
depressed or they've got something else, but they decide, you know what, in this one area of my life
00:32:11.260
where the stakes aren't that big, I'm going to make these small steps. But then another reason
00:32:16.200
like people don't change is because like small steps, like that's kind of undignified, right?
00:32:20.600
It's like, that's, that's for babies. Like I'm, I'm a grown man. I'm going to make big changes
00:32:25.360
now. And so a lot of people think, well, it's not even worth it. If I had to do like these little
00:32:29.220
minuscule steps and I'll make much progress, then I'll just stay the same.
00:32:32.920
Yeah. Yeah. So here's, here's another word that you don't hear in therapy enough,
00:32:36.900
which is humility. That when you head out towards a goal, if you find every small step to be
00:32:43.260
insulting, because every small step reminds you where you are, right? It reminds you how far you
00:32:48.780
are from the goal. Matter of fact, if you don't take those small steps, you can dream all you want
00:32:53.140
that you're really close to the goal and never, never change, right? It's really easy to kind of
00:32:57.320
think, oh yeah, I could do that tomorrow. But to take the small steps is this kind of painful event
00:33:03.060
of having to look at where you are in relationship to your goal. If you're afraid of hope, you'll never
00:33:08.260
take those small steps. Or if you have this kind of overblown version of yourself where you think
00:33:14.100
you can achieve it right away, you'll never take the small steps. And the danger in that is that
00:33:18.220
every small step, once it's completed, actually adds to your faith in yourself. If you can do it,
00:33:24.620
it adds to your faith. And the next day you're going to take the next step, but you've got to get
00:33:28.360
on those steps along the way in order to keep going. You have to, these fuel each other if you can get on
00:33:35.800
the track. But the problem is you're terrified and you're, and it's painful because they're each one
00:33:40.080
is an insult. Right. I mean, so like, I'm trying to think of a problem. Like, you know, if you have
00:33:44.360
to, if you need, if you're trying to get a promotion at your job, a career that means a lot to you,
00:33:48.360
it might mean you have to take some sort of remedial course or go to some like continuing
00:33:52.600
education class that you think is really easy and you're going to look like an idiot and you're just
00:33:57.020
like, I'm not even going to do that. But like, if you had hope and you wanted to act on that hope,
00:34:01.820
like you would do it, you would, and you had the humility, you would do it.
00:34:05.600
Right. Right. Yeah, that's right. It's exactly right. And then, so the humility is kind of needed
00:34:10.900
at that point of the small steps, right? You know, the story of Icarus is really fascinating
00:34:16.880
because Icarus's dad, who was the God of craft, which is amazing, right? Because craft is all about
00:34:24.340
small steps. You have to really get skilled at craft. And he built Icarus these wings and the wings
00:34:31.160
had two problems with it. One was, you know, we know about the sun, right? They'd melt if he got
00:34:35.640
to, if he got, if he had hubris, if he got too close to the sun, but if he got too close to the
00:34:39.900
ocean, they'd get wet and get destroyed. And that's humility and that that's humiliation, right? And so
00:34:46.440
you have to kind of float between those two things. You can't be kind of like worried all the time that
00:34:50.420
I'll feel bad about myself and humiliated if I, if I, if I take this small step. And you also can't
00:34:55.500
be living in this world where, oh, I'm, I'm, I'm above those small steps.
00:34:59.720
So we say we hope for a change, but sometimes we just stay the same because like, we're afraid
00:35:03.460
we're trying to protect ourselves from all these things we've been talking about. The fear of
00:35:06.340
freedom, the expectations, the indignity of small steps. So like, I mean, I think we kind of hit on
00:35:13.240
it, but it's like how I, the first step is looking at these things as maybe not as a negative,
00:35:17.500
because that will just, I don't know, kind of taint things and make you feel worse about yourself,
00:35:22.560
which just sort of creates this vicious cycle. It's not good. So like, what is the solution?
00:35:27.280
So to this, these tensions of that, that's created of, of hoping, and then you hope causes
00:35:31.880
fear of hope and all, I mean, it's like, yeah, what, what do you do? You just, like, what do you,
00:35:36.960
when you work with a, when you work with a, with a client, like, what does that process look
00:35:42.060
like of, of change when they finally happens for them?
00:35:44.900
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I'm, I'm in this awkward position of writing a kind of self-help
00:35:50.040
book that gives no advice, right? Because I really don't believe that like advice on what
00:35:57.060
you need to do to change works. What I think works in what science shows is contemplation
00:36:05.340
from a nonjudgmental space, right? In other words, I'm doing this for this reason. That's
00:36:11.820
why I have 10 reasons not to change, right? I'm doing it for this reason. I could do it
00:36:16.880
for this reason. And I'm looking at both and I'm weighing them, right? You're not going
00:36:23.620
to do that. If you look at sameness as bad, you're never going to look at the reasons for
00:36:27.200
it, right? And so real change happens, real sustainable change happens when you're able
00:36:33.000
to say there's some good in this behavior I want to change. And I have to say goodbye
00:36:37.240
to that good in order to move forward. If all you say is that, is that lie to yourself
00:36:43.960
that everything about this thing is bad, it's very hard to move forward. That's really what
00:36:49.280
is happening now in some ways with people with problematic habits or what's people call
00:36:54.060
addiction is that we're discovering that if a person can discuss and think about why
00:36:58.280
they like using, why it's important in their lives, what it does for them, they're actually
00:37:03.220
more likely to give it up than somebody where it's just about, you know, you're screwed
00:37:07.760
up because you're an addict. And that's what I'm trying to do in the book. I'm trying to
00:37:11.340
say, you know, spend some time looking at this thing and appreciating it. Because if you do
00:37:17.100
that, you can probably leave it behind. You can retire it. You're never going to retire it
00:37:20.640
if all you think is it's bad and that you're bad because you're doing it.
00:37:24.200
Well, it sounds like it's a good analogy, be like a protective, overprotective parent,
00:37:27.320
right? Overprotective parent isn't, they're not doing it out of like, they had this urge
00:37:31.260
to be a totalitarian. They're usually doing it out of like a sense of love and they want to
00:37:34.460
protect you. But at a certain point, they have to realize that's actually not going to help my
00:37:38.600
kid. I need to back off if I really do love him. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I have a 22-year-old
00:37:47.100
son who's planning a big road trip right now. My wife and I are discussing whether it's a good
00:37:52.640
idea for him to do it. And it's like, what are we doing? This kid's 22. But we love him and
00:37:59.120
we're worried about him. And if we were to intervene on that in some way, we would be
00:38:03.100
doing something not good. But it would be coming out of our love. It wouldn't be coming out of
00:38:08.320
anything bad. It would sure piss him off and it wouldn't feel good. But it's not bad. It's just
00:38:19.180
So let's kind of recap big picture overview of what we've talked about so far. So there's this,
00:38:23.120
whenever you want something, you hope for something, automatically there's attention that's
00:38:28.580
created, right? Between where you are, you don't have the thing and where you're at,
00:38:32.820
the thing you'd like. And by thing, we're talking about personal change here. So I'm not talking
00:38:37.660
about a bike or an iPad or whatever. And then whenever you start hoping, that's a driving force
00:38:43.840
towards the thing you want. But then also there's a countervailing restraining force, which is the
00:38:48.940
fear of hope. And then there's also faith is driving us towards that. We have this capacity. We have
00:38:53.580
faith in ourselves and the ability to do what we want or what we need to do to achieve that thing
00:38:59.020
we'd like. But there's also a countervailing restraint to there. That's like, you mess up and
00:39:05.140
your actions don't give you the results you wanted. And embedded in that, there's all these other
00:39:09.780
driving and restraining forces. Like you were talking about earlier, you're in a good mood.
00:39:14.740
Your family's supportive. The weather's nice, but also restraining things like
00:39:19.840
people are annoying. Customer service experience that went bad. That can all affect things as well.
00:39:33.200
Yeah. And then the other thing, sometimes we decide in all the mix of these tensions and
00:39:37.880
driving forces just to stay the same because that's easier sometimes. And it protects where we are
00:39:44.120
now. That's right. And I think the only thing I want to add to that is that sometimes those
00:39:51.500
restraining forces are out of our control. And so I give this example or story in the book about
00:40:00.300
a woman who works in the cafeteria who wants to go back to college and has to drive to her college
00:40:07.180
through rush hour to get to class and then has to drive all the way home, has to find parking on
00:40:14.560
campus, is dealing with having to take care of her kids too. And she may be filled with hope and have
00:40:20.520
low fear of hope and still not do as well as a person with high fear of hope and lots of hope who's
00:40:27.200
the executive in her company where the cafeteria is and someone drives them to the class and someone
00:40:33.300
helps them with his homework and all those sorts of things. So there's all kinds of other restraints
00:40:37.360
than simply our existential choice. There's all kinds of other socioeconomic restraints,
00:40:43.240
gender restraints, all kinds of restraints on us as we move through life. I definitely don't want
00:40:48.900
this book to be something like Tony Robbins. I just don't believe that we can think things and
00:40:53.780
beautiful things will happen. I don't believe it. There's plenty of political and economic
00:40:59.320
forces against us as we move forward in life. But the other, I mean, that's true, but you also
00:41:04.220
make this point, like Sartre would say, it's like, yes, there are restraints, but we have the ability,
00:41:09.080
like we can navigate that. It's going to be hard, but we can take a posture towards these restraints
00:41:14.460
that's hopeful, faithful, and I'm not going to say positive because I don't want to get with,
00:41:19.960
but like, yeah, you have efficacy. Yes. In the world. Yeah. Yeah. And your response to the world.
00:41:25.560
That's right. That's right. Yeah. And also, I mean, it just sounds like too, you know,
00:41:29.660
I think it's interesting. We've been talking about faith, hope, humility. I mean, I think
00:41:33.840
another thing that's required for change is like patience. And that's something that's not really
00:41:38.040
talked about. Oftentimes when you go to a therapist, it's like, well, here's our plan. We'll meet for
00:41:42.660
three weeks and then, you know, a month, once a month after that, and then you're done. It's like,
00:41:48.240
it sounds like your idea is like, no, it could take a year or two to, I don't even know if you
00:41:53.800
solve things completely. It doesn't sound like you solve things completely, but get for things
00:41:57.560
to get better. Yeah. Yeah. There's this, you know, this book Zorba the Greek, it was also a movie.
00:42:04.640
Oh yeah. Yeah. And there's this scene in Zorba the Greek that's just so beautiful where he finds a
00:42:11.020
chrysalis with a caterpillar that's slowly becoming, it's just about to the point where it's becoming a
00:42:17.380
butterfly and he decides to help it. So he starts opening up the chrysalis. And of course the thing dies in
00:42:23.560
his hands and he's like, that's just about the most sinful thing you can do. He says this in the
00:42:29.300
book, you know, like not letting something just sort of emerge in its own time. Right. It's just an
00:42:36.920
awful thing to do to it. And we're doing that too much to ourselves. We're not respecting the fact
00:42:43.120
that, you know, it might take getting on an elevator and with some coffee spillers for us to feel like
00:42:50.020
I can move forward today. You know, you have to wait for your field to be in the right place
00:42:55.700
sometimes. And you have to be patient with that. Well, another thing you talk about, you were talking
00:42:59.340
about all these different restraining forces that we don't have control over, but another like driving
00:43:02.920
force that can help us is our social environment that can play. And so surrounding yourself with
00:43:08.440
people who are supportive and understanding, et cetera, that can help a lot. I mean, that's maybe like,
00:43:14.600
you know, a lot of, that's why we people go to group therapy or join AA because it's just being
00:43:19.660
around people who got their back or they feel like they got their back. Yeah. I mean, I have to tell
00:43:25.780
you, you know, it's amazing how little sort of the psychotherapeutic professions understand motivation
00:43:32.580
and how well social psychology understands motivation. Social psychology has it down and they've done
00:43:39.700
research after research on that. And this is about things like a sense of your value and your
00:43:44.540
community, your purpose, your social support. These are all the things in a person's field
00:43:50.420
that actually move them forward. I mean, you know, social psychology is basically kind of the study of
00:43:54.840
motivation on some level, on some level. And it's all about this thing about what are the things going
00:44:00.160
on around you that get you to move forward. And one of the main ones is social support. Social support
00:44:05.080
is just this medicine, right? That kind of moves you forward. I got this cousin of mine that does
00:44:11.280
this research where he has people sit in a chair and he's a social psychologist and he has them sit
00:44:18.040
in a chair and he has this tarantula in this plexiglass box move closer to them down this ramp. And
00:44:23.560
they actually can control how close it gets. And people that only think about negative support,
00:44:29.800
only think about it. They don't have less social support than the other people.
00:44:33.220
Think that that tarantula is closer to their face than the people that think about positive
00:44:38.720
social support. Not that they have more social support. Two people walking towards a hill will
00:44:45.260
see, will be more accurately measure the height of that hill and how hard it will be to travel that
00:44:52.220
hill than one person. So social support has all kinds of things to do with how we look at threats
00:44:57.880
and how we look at challenges. And so surrounding yourself with people feeling connected to people is
00:45:03.140
just vital to us moving forward. We know that isolation ties with cholesterol and smoking for
00:45:11.000
heart disease. And that's because of all the cortisol that's in your system when you're isolated,
00:45:14.740
right? It affects all, it makes you paranoid. It causes all kinds of problems for people.
00:45:20.700
So these are all social things. They're not necessarily psychological.
00:45:24.300
Yeah. Social support can help you be more of an individual, like with good faith, right?
00:45:29.520
That sees that they are accountable and responsible for their life. That's kind of,
00:45:34.940
it's kind of counterintuitive. Like you need the group to become an individual.
00:45:38.220
Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's really great though. It's a really great kind of paradox that you can't
00:45:44.080
be too lonely to be alone, you know, with yourself. That these things really feed our ability to be
00:45:51.380
original and creative with our lives is this sense that we're connected to others.
00:45:55.200
Well, Ross, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book
00:46:01.440
My, my work is at ellenhorn.com. That's our, that's my company. And then the book is, you know,
00:46:06.960
it's an Amazon, it's everywhere. It's, it's HarperCollins and they can just look it up how we
00:46:13.300
Well, fantastic. Well, Ross Ellenhorn, thanks for your time. It's been a pleasure.
00:46:18.880
My guest today was Ross Ellenhorn. He's the author of the book,
00:46:21.280
How We Change and 10 Reasons Why We Don't. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores
00:46:25.160
everywhere. You can find out more information about his work at his website, ellenhorn.com.
00:46:29.260
Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash change, where you find links to resources,
00:46:41.660
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our website at
00:46:45.060
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00:46:48.380
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00:47:15.740
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