Hello and welcome to Being Well. I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the podcast, thanks for joining us today. And if you've listened before, welcome back. I'm here as usual with clinical psychologist, Dr. Rick Hansen. Rick is also my dad, if you're a new listener. So dad, how are you doing today? I'm really good. And as always, truly, I'm just basking in what a cool person you are.
Oh, my God. He's flattering me because I've set up such a cool in-person recording session for us today. I really feel like I finally dialed it in this time. Is it okay to kind of name the fact for us that you're barefoot right now?
I'm not against it. People are going to start. I'm not against it. All right, no feet pics. I'm trying to keep the feet out of frame so nobody knows. So today we're going to be talking about learning how to trust ourselves. By being natural. By being natural, yeah. Without shoes. Natural and liberated.
without shoes, right? Grounding down or whatever it is that some people are into. So this is about developing self-reliance. It's about seeing ourselves as somebody who can support ourselves through life, manage difficulty, be resilient in a world. We all want to feel like we can believe in ourselves and believe in our own ability to overcome different kinds of challenges.
And I wanted to start by kind of going back to the beginning here, Dad, and asking you, where does that feeling come from? Why do some people sort of trust themselves and other people tend not to? I've reflected a lot on this question. practical answer has to do with increasing what lifts us up in terms of trusting ourselves and having faith in ourselves and confidence in ourselves and reducing what pushes us down.
That's kind of a straightforward schematic. And then in terms of what lifts us up, I think about what develops trust in ourselves is basically that we know that we can be counted on. are two things. One, we will do the right thing even if it's hard, and we can talk more about what the right thing is. And second, we will cope with adversity. So more experiences of doing those two things and also more of, I think over time, an emphasis on bottom-up sources of doing the right thing and coping.
and over time becoming less and less reliant on top-down, conscious, deliberate, executive pressure on yourself to do the right thing or to cope in the right way.
That's a really interesting way to put it because if I think about myself, I'm fortunate enough to have an internal model of myself as being pretty reliable. And some of that comes because, hey, I had safe and supportive parents. I was raised in an environment where I received a lot of messages from the outside world that you can basically make things more the way that you want them to be, and you can handle situations even as they become kind of challenging.
But that model is operating invisibly in the background. I'm not doing a lot of top-down control, to your point, to get that to come out of me. It's just sort of there because those were the circumstances that I developed them. That's right. And also beyond those circumstances, you've spent nearly half your life. of your parents' home. And you as well have learned along the way. And in part by, and this is an element as well, where we challenge ourselves.
And then based on succeeding at the challenge. So we challenge ourselves in a way that's within range. It's a stretch, but we can pull it off. We might be kind of ragged about it, but we... usually succeed at it. And then when we do maximize the learning, let the learning land, take in the good. So you start to develop more and more of a sense of yourself.
as you know you know grew up with loving decent parents but for complicated reasons i definitely had a inferiority complex and i was very young going through school i felt very kind of ashamed of my own body and i didn't feel very capable so then when i landed in early adulthood and and started doing things in wilderness and including rock climbing i definitely Brought a big spoon to do everything I could to let those positive experiences that fostered a sense of self-confidence.
and trusting myself and knowing I could deal with hard things, that I could acquire them more and more over time. Yeah, I think it can help people too. Think about where this stuff comes from. Like you were just talking there about growing up in a home environment where, you know, good parents doing the best that they could, but also kind of fault finding. Maybe it was just the culture of the time, you know, whatever you pop out.
with this internalized model or this set of tendencies. I don't know if yours were this way, but for many people there's this kind of underlying feeling that security comes from the outside to them. and i was thinking about this a lot the other day yeah if you're developing if you're a kid growing up
you do not have a lot of control over your world, right? So security really does flow from the outside toward you. Your parents are the suppliers of that security. But then if a kid goes through a normal, healthy developmental process... over time with good informed parents or good enough parents to quote Winnicott, there's this natural process where they start showing the kid, not just telling the kid, but showing the kid that the kid can do things to-
overcome issues, figure stuff out, raise the spoon to their mouth, you know, whatever's going on. And you internalize that as part of your built-in model. But what if you didn't have those experiences? What if you had helicopter parents who didn't let you express yourself in that way? What if you had sort of dismissive or avoidant parents who just weren't really feeding you that kind of stuff? Maybe you had a lot of just experiences with other kids early on.
that didn't go so well, where you felt like you couldn't express your agency, maybe you're a little higher needs for whatever reason, and you just kind of need environments to be a little bit more controlled, a little bit more buttoned up. for you to get your needs met, which is totally normal, happens to a lot of people. For whatever reason, you get to this point in adulthood where you're looking around and you're going, huh, it feels like safety is still flowing outside in.
rather than from the inside out. And then a lot of what we're going to focus on today is how do we develop more of that inside out model. I'm really curious in a way if you yourself have had a strong sense of inner guidance. There's a whole territory of work these days around terms like self-leadership. In my case, for all kinds of reasons, I did not internalize.
external support very well as a kid, I kind of closed it off in part due to broad processes in me of just kind of shutting down altogether. When you're shut down altogether, you may not feel much pain, but it's hard to take in the good.
on the other hand you know a different background i think i just kind of wonder to what extent in the last 10 years or so have you had a sense of an inner guide or cheerleader or even inner coach in you that's been encouraging you to stretch, try scary stuff, or frankly, get off your butt, do the right thing, which might mean-
work harder, do more exercise, et cetera. Yeah. A big part of I think what you're highlighting here, Nat, is that to have a sense of self-trust, you need to have the feeling that you are kind of reliable fundamentally, that you are going to do…
the thing that you quote unquote should be doing, that you appraise for yourself that you should be doing. This isn't just about internalizing external messages or something. Like drink less, do the right thing. Yeah, just generally do the right thing. Man, it's a good question. I think that
I popped out of developmental phase until age 13, 14, something like that, with this basic sense of myself as having the ability to influence my external circumstances and solve problems. That was totally there for me. but I also had this kind of model of myself where I was fundamentally a little lazy. I was sort of lazy, I didn't really do what I quote unquote was supposed to do.
We described you as someone who ambled through life. Ambling through life is good. I think that one of the lines was that I did the minimum required effort to get an A-. They actually have an award in your name at your high school now. Highest GPA with the least effort. The intersection there.
You work the system the way you can, man. And over time, that really changed. But one of the things for me that has been a real project is changing that model. Because I still kind of think of myself from time to time as being... a little low effort, sort of lazy, whatever it is. And if you just look at an example like the podcast, we've gone six years without missing a Monday.
Clearly, we've done okay here from a sustained effort standpoint. From a diligence standpoint. Yeah, but I think this is actually a great example because that might be the case. Well, maybe true that I am a diligent, effortful, consistent person. I don't always feel that way on the inside. And so there's a gap there, right? Like, how do we close that gap? I've definitely gone out of my way to do some classic Rick Hansen in here.
some classic taken in the good. And this is I think how people develop more self-trust. It's you notice yourself doing the thing you're supposed to be doing. Because we've got a big negativity bias in the brain, we tend to notice the times where we didn't do the thing. or we notice the times when the environment was overwhelming for us, or whatever it is. But we tend to ignore them a million times just every day.
When you do all of the basic stuff, whether it's like taking a shower in the morning or choosing the clothes that you're going to wear, just like little, little things, all of those just flow right through us, right? So I've tried to notice those more and I've tried to internalize them when I do notice them.
I think that along the way, I've tried to listen to other people more who give me positive feedback. And I've tried to ignore people more who don't give me positive feedback. And I don't mean this just in terms of like...
not paying attention to the haters or something. I mean it more in a write for your fans, not your critics kind of way. Because particularly if you create public content like we do, it is just so easy to... I mean, everybody's got an opinion. Many of them are... totally reasonable and understandable, but end of the day, you kind of have to choose who you're making stuff for.
Yeah. And increasingly, I've oriented toward making stuff for myself, which has helped me feel better about this. And then it feels like I'm doing stuff that matters more. So I think a lot of this, there's a values piece to it too, where I've been able to identify more of the values that I care about.
So, as I'm expending effort toward them, it feels like more meaningful effort. Does that make sense? Oh, yeah. And that also goes, by the way, to the top-down, bottom-up distinction I made in that I think for a lot of people, their version of, oh, I can trust myself, I can trust myself to continually propitiate an internalized angry God. I'm going to satisfy the inner critic and the meanies and the internalized audience of people who are really skeptical and haters. Okay, I can trust myself.
to keep servicing those people, to keep making offerings to the angry God, as it were. And yeah, that does work, but it's not a long-term vehicle. for living well and living long, actually, it becomes very different when I'm hearing you say you've had more of a sense of really listening to what your deep values are. And I think in a way, self-trust in some sense boils down to, can you be counted on to be lived by the best within you? Yeah. That's a great way to put it. Totally.
And I do think that it's easy for people to not feel that way, even when they have been expending genuine effort over a long period of time in pursuit of a goal. I think that's something that I've really kind of struggled with personally. in spite of a lot of phenomenal support from the outside, in spite of a lot of advantages in life, one of which was being your guys' kid.
which I think just really speaks to the strength of these models that we have or these views of the self that we start to internalize early on how Even though at least half of the model that I had inside of myself was extremely supportive, very high self-efficacy, that kind of piece of it, there was this other stuff that I still needed to go out of my way to develop alongside it.
And I think that speaks a little bit to the different pieces of this for people. So there's a huge self-efficacy piece, which is the feeling that we're somebody who can affect the outer world, learn the things we need to learn to get where we want to go.
But that's not the only piece, I think. There are these kind of other things that exist alongside it. One of those for me is more of good appraisal, which I think gets to what we were talking about a second ago about write for your fans, not your critics. The ability to assess, am I the problem or is the environment the problem? Right. You know? Yeah. Can I be counted on to get blood from a stone? Yeah. No.
I can't. I guess I must be a big loser. Wait a second here. And so many people are that way. You weren't going to get blood. No, 100%. 100%. So we need to be able to tell, am I the problem or is the world the problem? Both sides of it are very, very important. Realism. Totally. And that allows us then to kind of be a little bit more flexible in some ways. If we appraise the world as the problem, we can
sort of weirdly lighten up about it sometimes because we're not so responsible for it. There's not such that deep sense of inner responsibility. But if we praise ourselves as the problem, wow, there's profound responsibility in that. And if we're the problem, good news, everybody, you can do something about it. Most of the time, 90% of the time, you can do something about it. And I think that feeling...
is really powerful for people. So we have this kind of flexibility where we're moving back and forth, we're going from me to you, from inner to outer, all of that good stuff. And then there's a missing piece, I think, to self-trust. There's a missing piece that people don't talk about. self-advocacy, the ability to stick up for yourself. You need to trust that you can stick up for yourself in these kinds of circumstances. Yeah, totally. And you're applying that to...
trusting yourself and feeling like you can rely on yourself. Yeah. In broad way. Yeah. If you think about it as kind of like the opposite of self-abandonment maybe, we did an episode on self-abandonment about a year ago, it became extremely popular. I think that's a real topic for people, this feeling like they're leaving themselves behind.
And self-trust in some ways, self-advocacy is the opposite of that, healthy assertiveness, that ability to stick up for ourselves even when circumstances are complicated. And that also means like an internalized sticking up for yourself. kind of like you were talking about, that voice inside that's really on your side. Does that make sense? That's right. I call it the caring committee, that there's this collection of voices, views, energies in me.
that are on my side. And they range from sweet, goofy, fairy godmother characters to tough as nails. clear-eyed, not fooling around, but not mean about it in terms of guiding me and then kind of everything in between. And listening to those forces and growing them. deliberately growing. The trauma triangle, she knows you have basically the victim who's hurt and attacked, the attacker and the protector, those three. For most people-
the internalized attackers are much more powerful than the internalized protectors and nurturers. So over time, what we can do is disengage from, disidentify from the inner attackers, defuel them. ridicule them a little better, understand them a little better, but they're trying to help you, but they're way over the top, but especially to grow the inner protectors. Yeah.
And that's a form of self-advocacy too. It's not just something that we're doing in the external world, we're also advocating for ourselves internally. And self-advocacy looks like a whole bunch of different things. It could look like
Hey, Forrest, you have a project that's coming up that you care about. It's time to start sorting out your schedule, even in ways that are slightly uncomfortable for you. You're going to have to say no to some people. You don't want to do that. But hey, you've got this bigger, shinier target out there that you deeply care about.
And when you do that, you're going to feel really good and you're going to feel like an effective person and you're going to feel like you can trust yourself. So, hey, you got to aim at that target. Sometimes that's self-advocacy. I think a lot of people who are doing well in life for whatever reason.
they don't have a particular sense of inner allies. No, I don't think they do, yeah, totally. Yeah, and this goes all the way back into psychoanalysis and developmental psychology, the introjects or the internalization of... nurturing others of various kinds. For me, it includes rock climbing guides who say, Hanson, stop whining, start climbing. But they do it with a smile. So those models get into us really easily when we're young.
which is part of why we talk about developmental experiences on the podcast all the time. Here as an adult, how do you get some of those more supportive models into you? And I'm kind of wondering about... Because for me, I needed those. I didn't have them. I sort of had those kicking around a little bit more, I think, because more positive developmental experiences. And so for different reasons. I do want to flag that this is an opportunity to, in other words,
what's your team, you know, inside you. And if your team has the full package of nurturing characters. encouraging characters cheerleading characters and firm guiding characters on it then you have more of a team and you can trust yourself more as you deal with the hard road of life the way you grow that team is just what you said
You have experiences of it in actuality or in imagination. Some of my main figures are fictional. These kind of older wise mentor characters and Robert Heinlein novels in science fiction or What would Obi-Wan Kenobi say? What would Galadriel do? And these become then ways to internalize that. So you build up more and more of that. And a key part of it is compassion for yourself too. These are parts of yourself that are.
tender and encouraging and sweet towards you rather than mean and sour and you can actually develop more of them over time and i for me these are factors that are really can be quite deep in intimate and soulful people, factors of self-reliance and self-trust. We'll be right back to the show in just a moment.
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even when I'm not eating perfectly. Let me get you started with my special discount. You'll get 20% off your first order. Just use code beingwell at fieldofgreens.com. That's code beingwell at fieldofgreens.com. Now, back to the show. I think this is really great. And I would love to now approach this kind of practically. Keep on going the direction that we're going. We often get a question that goes along the lines of this. What do you guys say is great?
I've gotten a lot of value out of it. Thankfully, they normally start with a little bit of positive reinforcement, which we love. Then you wait. Which we love. Oh, where's the butt coming? Where's the butt coming? Okay. And the butt is a very understandable butt. And it's some version of... This all sounds great, but man, I just feel like I'm kind of an anxious person and I feel kind of anxious in part because I just feel like I can't control my circumstances very much. I don't.
feel super agentic about controlling my external world. And the world is big and scary. And I feel kind of little and puny when stacked against this big, scary outside world. So it just feels like all of this stuff that you guys talk about is nice, but wow, you know, the hordes are at the gate. Okay. And even so, I could get overwhelmed at any moment. So what can I do to build up more of myself as big and strong and powerful in the face of all of these mighty external forces?
I know that's a question you've gotten more than once, and so I'm wondering how you think about it. Oh, that's beautiful. Well, I would put it a little bit in the frame I started with, with what are the positive influences that support the development of trusting yourself? And also how do we reduce the forces that push all that down? And one of them, or how do we address them? And one of them is, I'll start here with inner instability. On the inside out, many people experience.
that they're really quite unstable psychologically, often because they are quite unstable physiologically. They're a very sensitive person or they're regulatory systems. you know, that are intertwining and complex in our body, our hormonal systems and, you know, the underbelly of the nervous system and the GI system, your cardiovascular system, they're just very wobbly.
So here you are. How can you feel like I can trust myself when you're standing on shaky ground, when it feels on the inside, such as being really anxious a lot or very... sensitive to energies from other people, environmental sensitive. Yeah, that's a big example, the idea of feeling like
I have a hard time keeping other people's thoughts or feelings kind of on the outside in order for me to keep on doing what I really want. I get sort of overwhelmed by that, and then that leads to the anxiety, the self-abandonment, whatever the person is dealing with. That's right. It's really hard. And it's not your fault. And it really undermines confidence. I've known a number of people who are great clients. They were very diligent and they did the best they could.
We were trying to build a stable structure on quicksand and really shaky ground. So what do you do with that? And I think the what do you do with it is first to try to see it clearly. and to separate, okay, this is my physiology, this is my temperament, and this is- a kind of core of willfulness and deliberateness and motivation that's the core of my self-reliance, the durable core of my self-reliance, that's separate.
from these other things so if my efforts are not that successful or effective because of those other things that doesn't mean that i'm lazy or sloppier
It's because you were dealing with stuff. Man, I'm in a swamp. Totally, totally. You know, I'm in choppy seas. And that's the appraisal piece. So you've done a great job of describing the appraisal piece. Yeah, that's very good. For sure. Yeah, what's inside, that's great for us. That's really, really good. So, because I've seen this with a lot of...
People can get very self-critical. They can feel really defeated. And then if they're already tending a little bit toward learned helplessness or a sense of defeat. from the get-go, damaged goods yet again, I can't do it. If you're vulnerable like that, then it's really important to tease apart kind of like what's you and what's not you.
There's a place for just differentiating yourself. This is my temperament. This is my body. These are my sensitivities. This is the hand I've been dealt. This is the impact of past trauma on me. That's all separate from my own virtuous effort. Yeah. Which I can have faith in and self-respect in, for starters. Okay. And then do everything you can to stabilize the system, whatever it might be. 5-hydroxydryptophan, protein in every meal.
don't doom scroll so much whatever it might be as best you can to stabilize you know i think that's a major initiative for a lot of people and it can become a really good factor for trusting yourself more I think a big part of this process for people too is really evaluating the stories that we're carrying around about ourselves. Because like we were talking about, we internalize a lot of those external stories.
often growing up, all of that good stuff. But those stories often include a lot of assumptions or a lot of content that might just not be true so much these days. Or we go back through with the mind of an adult, Dan Siegel talks about this, he calls it.
forming a coherent narrative. We've talked about it a bunch on the show in the past. It's this term from developmental psychology and attachment theory in general. Yeah, that Dan's used a lot in his work. Yeah. So as a kid, things feel a certain kind of way. Yeah. It feels like, oh, this is happening to me because I'm not fill in the blank. I'm not smart enough. I'm not good enough. I'm not consistent enough.
Sometimes what happens when you reevaluate those experiences with the eyes of an adult is you kind of go back in and you go, wait a second, is that true? Was that true originally? Yeah. Or did that start to happen because of all of these other things that happened to me, all of these other experiences, all of these other factors? Well, wait a second, who am I really? And when you start to ask that question, that like, who am I really question?
all of this cool stuff can happen because it opens up this beginner's mind about the self. We just become much more open to possibility. So I think it's difficult for people to change the self-trust factor without being kind of open to change in general. That's so interesting. Because if you have a calcified view of who you are, if you're just sort of tight about like, this is me. Wow.
well, yeah, it's going to be really hard to change anything, right? So you need to sort of blow open that field of possibility of like, who am I really? Yeah. You need to seek your virtues clearly and- you need to take the actions that build up strengths inside and give you more and more evidence that you can do the right thing when it's hard and also you can cope with adversity. And when you've got that space...
When you're less of an expert about yourself, to put a certain kind of Suzuki Roshi in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind, there are a few. If you become, weirdly, less of an expert on yourself.
That's so interesting. You actually create more space for change. It's this weird kind of counterintuitive thing. I think it's actually one of the reasons that self-awareness sometimes kind of screws with people. You see this in therapy a lot. Therapists talk about it a lot, where a client will walk in and be able
to write you a dissertation on everything that's wrong with them. But then there's kind of in a weird way, no space for the therapist, because they've already figured it all out. And the therapist is kind of like, okay, well then what do you need me for? That's so interesting. So I'm thinking back on-
the comment, let's say, of someone who says, great stuff, great stuff, and- Big scary world, big small me. Yeah, that's right. A couple of things here. One, I'm reminded of my friend Vidyamala Birch's- story. She's someone who has suffered excruciating chronic pain. And one of the worst moments for her was as a young woman, early 20s, maybe late teens, in the hospital, unable to move.
recent operation on her back and just despairing about the life she was facing and you know how will i deal with it how will i deal with it how will i deal with it and then she basically just realized I just need to deal with the next moment. That's what I need to deal with, the next moment. Can I deal with this moment of pain? And that was a breakthrough for her. She realized she could.
and that life is moment after moment after moment. So in the moment, someone who's anxious, say, or someone who's dealing with tough circumstances, the question is not, you know, projecting yourself into the future. Oh, I'm going to be a future failure. I can be a present success in this moment. I think that's really good, dad. I think this is really, really good because you're bounding the problem to some extent. That's right. Yeah. The only thing you have to deal with
right now is the choice you're going to make right now. In this moment. Yeah. It's not the choice you're going to make tomorrow or the next week or the next year. It's just right now, what are you doing?
That's right. And that can really bring things down to earth for people. Yeah. And the way it is for me is that in this moment, I think of it as there's a range. And in the moment in which- a lot of people are really sweet and supportive and you just got a prize and okay the range is up here but on the other hand maybe you're swimming upstream uh it's really tough for you right now
You've just gotten some seriously bad news. The range is down here. The question is, in this moment, moment after moment after moment, are you nudging yourself to operate at the top of your range? That's all that you can be judged by. That's really, that's all you can realistically do. And that's what increasingly I think the question is, can you count on yourself most of the time to drift toward the top of the range of what's actually possible in the moment?
moment after moment after moment. So, Flores, how do you deal with encouraging yourself and inspiring and drawing yourself to being at the high end of the range? of what's possible for you moment to moment to moment. Sure. What helps somebody get that kind of- Yeah. And what helps you? I can reflect on myself and I can reflect on what I think of as good forces. that nudge me in that way, and costly problematic forces.
lots of shooting that nudges me toward the high end of that range. So either way, we're at the high end of the range, but one collection of factors that take us toward the high end of that range is better than others. So I kind of wonder how you deal with all that. Yeah.
I feel like a good way to think about this is in terms of those different key variables that I was mentioning before. We've got self-efficacy, flexibility, praising the world, and then being able to stick up for ourselves in different sorts of ways. I think that what helps the sticking up for yourself aspect and the self-efficacy to some extent is internalizing more and more a feeling of yourself as somebody who matters.
A lot of people really struggle with that basic sense of self-worth. Some people do this in a kind of more universal spiritual sort of way. Some people do it in a very pragmatic. Think of yourself as if you were a friend. Would you appraise your friend that way? Your friend matters to you. Why don't you matter to you as much as your friend matters to you? Those sorts of various exercises that people have. I think that that can be really helpful for people, just that
kind of like you were saying at the beginning, bottom-up sense of, hey, I'm somebody who matters too. That can be a real resource for people. Being around people who emphasize that aspect of you mattering. and who reflect that to you in meaningful ways, I think is a huge one for people. We can really feel it when we're in environments where that's not so much the case.
or where we're not so sure that we matter to other people. Those are two that maybe stand out to me off the bat. Are there any that jump for you? Well, just on mattering, you're really reminding me of one of the major pathways into that comes from... others and feeling and being empathically received by others. And some of the beautiful work Dan Siegel has done is around feeling felt.
feeling felt by other people and giving others that experience. And recently I was talking with someone, John Mills. It was a wonderful podcast himself. And he made the point that one of the drivers, just factually, of authoritarian movements and political movements that swerved to the right is very often younger men who feel like they don't matter.
They don't matter. And then that obviously has implications really broadly politically. So feeling like you matter, often grounded in being truly seen by others and also mattering to yourself. really crucially important. I'm really glad you brought that up. Yeah. I also wonder about regulatory skills, which are a little tricky to talk about sometimes because part of self-trust for people a lot of the time is a feeling that
as stuff outside gets bumpy, they're still going to keep on being cool. So what helps us keep on being cool when stuff outside of us is bumpy? Well, it's self-regulation skills. one of the big reasons that for children they feel like power flows from the outside and safety flows from the outside to them is because kids can't self-regulate. They are built with a nervous system that is fundamentally incapable of self-regulation. They require the parent to be there in order to regulate themselves.
to put this a certain kind of way, how do we learn how to parent ourselves? How do we learn how to be the secure attachment figure that's operating inside of us? That's probably just a conversation for another episode. We've talked about attachment security a lot on the podcast. Yeah, self-regulation, impulse control, executive function, tolerating distress.
Being able to sustain effort, self-monitoring, all the above. Yeah, all important. I want to put a little twist because I think the phrase distress tolerance is a great phrase. It makes total sense. I would sort of nudge people more. away from window of tolerance and towards something like window of comfort. Because that's really what we're talking about. We're talking about how can you retain your sense of comfort in normal situations, not
continue to tolerate situations that you actually shouldn't be tolerating. And that's the self-advocacy piece, right? Like a lot of people learn how to tolerate the intolerable. That's not what we're actually trying to teach people here. Well, the thing you're saying about self-regulation is really true. And in part, it relates to what I was saying earlier about if it feels wobbly and shaky inside, that's going to undermine self-regulation. Yeah, for sure. And understandably.
It's also true that the more that people strengthen executive functions, both top-down and bottom-up forms of regulating themselves so that they can- maintain a roughly even keel, as you were saying, in the waves of life while still aiming for that safe harbor. Yeah.
That's actually a really, really useful thing. And it's such a personal process because we're all unique individuals. We all got different nervous systems. We all got different experiences. We all got different windows that we start with, which can really affect how big the window- That's right. can be ultimately for people, all of that matters. So maybe it's about
developing a greater recognition when you're kind of at the end of your rope in a situation, and then being able to speak up for yourself, being able to advocate for yourself in that way. That becomes a kind of regulatory skill. So it's funny how these things can sort of flow from one to the other. Yeah. I'll name three aspects of self-regulation that to me are very relevant to, can you rely on yourself?
I mean, we can all rely on ourselves when we're sitting in the hammock with an umbrella drink, you know, and we're getting a mani-pedi. The whole point here is that this is for when stuff is tricky. Yeah, absolutely. When it's more challenging, one is, can you regulate your attention? Basic mindfulness training, especially if your temperament or your physiology or your life history have led you to have wobbly attention.
and distractibility and fairly poor attentional control attention is the front end of who we are becoming because as i say it's like a vacuum cleaner with a spotlight it illuminates what it rests upon and then sucks it in your brain so Training and developing regulation of attention will really foster self-reliance and self-trust. That's one thing. Second thing is being able to risk the dreaded experience.
We talked about a lot. Being able to know that, okay, it might be uncomfortable. It won't be intolerable, but it'll be uncomfortable. But I'm going to take that risk because the reward of that risk is greater than the cost to me. So I'm going to do that. And I'm going to get myself to do that. To me, that's something that you develop over time, too, through doing it. Again, again, start easy. But then with repetition, you realize, wow, this is great. You know, it's a wonderful way.
to grow but that's a key aspect of self-regulation and then i think a final aspect of self-regulation is very fundamental and it's you know following the principle that wisdom is choosing a greater happiness over a lesser happiness in other words that if you can trust yourself increasingly to lean into the high road in that moment by moment by moment in which you know you move toward the high end of the range the high road into the range compared given what's available to you in the moment
then that's another form of regulating yourself. It often includes delay and gratification and that kind of thing. Yeah, totally. Totally. Yeah, and then kind of like we just started with, this is all based on evidence. We have experiences. We try stuff out in the world. We try on this new way of being, this more assertive, more confident, more flexible, more self-efficacy way of being, and we got to go try stuff.
We got to go see what happens. We run a little experiment and maybe the result of that experiment is hell no. Maybe the result of the experiment is I'm not doing that again. You know, whatever it is, it's okay. You try the experiment, you get some evidence and you iterate on it.
And that's what we're doing again and again. But in order to do that, you need to be willing to risk it a little bit. You need to have that view of yourself as changeable. You need to be willing for things to go a little sideways out in the world sometimes. And that's based on
the feeling that you'll land on your feet, which is a kind of self-trust. So this becomes a very self-fulfilling prophecy for people. We kind of need to develop it a little bit, and then we try it out, and then we develop it a little more, and then we go in these kinds of rounds with that. Yeah. And then over time... you start to as you have said you see yourself in new ways because you are becoming new and one of the motivations for this i want to name as well has to do with i think
people can become complacent because they're reliable and they can count on themselves within frames of massive amounts of environmental support. Yeah. They're living with people who like them. They have a steady income. There's plenty of food in the refrigerator, outside, outside, outside. And that's a good motivation for developing more of the strengths inside that.
that you carry with you wherever you go. That's what you can count on. Absolutely. The more that you need this stuff. And flip side of the coin, that again can be kind of an appraisal thing, right? Like you can say, oh, if I'm just constantly surrounded.
by circumstances that are draining me, like socially or interpersonally or whatever's going on, then that means it's a circumstantial issue. I'm really okay on my own, but I'm just not getting the support that I need for whatever reason. That can be a piece of it too for people. We'll be back to the show in just a minute, but first a word from our sponsors. Now, back to the show. So I got one final question for you here, Dad, if you don't mind.
You've worked with a ton of people as a clinical psychologist. I have a lot of questions for you. Yeah, but that's what's for the next however many years of the podcast is for, buddy. We'll have time. I just got one more for this episode. You've worked with a lot of people as a clinical psychologist.
And in order to change, you need to have a basic view of yourself as changeable, which is something we've talked about. And you also need to kind of trust on some level, either your external advice as a clinician. or their internal guidance as an individual, right? Like you need some basic capacity for self-trust, right?
Well, the reason my face is getting... Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're turning into... Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're squinging. Well, like Mr. Potato Man or something. That's right. I don't know what's going on with everybody. Well, I just want to ask you. Are you disputing the privacy here? Yeah, I wonder about it. Yeah, all right. And I think there are different kinds of therapies and different kinds of clients.
and different processes. I think there's a certain amount of positive change that can happen for people that is beneath deliberate conscious awareness. Oh, for sure. Yeah, sure. Like social learning. where you just hang out. I'd think about Good Will Hunting and bless his memory, Robin Williams. Yeah. Certain kind of therapist. Yeah. Best screen therapist.
I've seen him in a lot of TV and movies. But anyway, and just hanging out with him, you start to acquire a different perspective. And it's so I just think even without a model of yourself as. open to change. There's a sometimes. No, this is totally, totally fair point. If Robin Williams, bless his memory, some of that stuff sinks in, can sink in. Okay. I just want to name that piece of it. No, totally fair point.
And I'm going to pursue this inquiry anyways, because I think that it's a good inquiry. And that's one reason why you're self-reliant. Because you are not going to be diverted. I'm not going to be swayed by you here, Dad. I'm going to stay. I'm going to stay. You're going to question authority as well. It's the Star Wars, the stay on target thing. Yeah. Anyways, totally, totally right on.
yeah and i think that what i'm actually asking here you're you're inspiring me to ask this question more effectively there are some people who come in the door kind of like that person described big scary world big small self yeah and That fundamental feeling of like, is there something in working with that person, that kind of person, that feeling that has stood out to you over time as a key part of the process? You're implying something.
that I'm going to make more explicit. And it relates to a little comment you made a moment ago when we went off camera. And you talked about in object relations. So why don't I set you up because it was your shtick and good shtick, and then I'll build on it for this. This is some old school psychology stuff. So yeah, object relations model, the basic idea is that we're-
We're moving through the world in different kinds of ways, and we see these other big circles floating around us. There's the external world, there are other individual people, and we define ourselves in large part by our relationships to these different things. And a lot of people are carrying around this model of myself as this little puny self.
next to this big, scary external world. I think that actually, if you go into the archives, people will... I forget which episode it was, but there was an episode where you held up one of your yellow pads next to your head and drew these various diagrams and people...
Did really enjoy it in the comments section. Send Rick to art school. He sucks. Rick might need a little art coaching, but people loved it. People loved it. They particularly loved the note that I gave you when you initially stuck it directly.
in front of your face. They were like, good coaching for us. Thanks, buddy. Anyways, it was very, very funny. So people are carrying around this model, right? A lot of people are. So what do you do? And in that process of building up the bigger, stronger...
burlier little me to compete with the other big circles of other people, often there'll be just kind of a moment in therapy. And I'm wondering if you've seen a consistent moment where that tends to move for somebody and what leads to that, if anything. So to kind of represent it a little bit, imagine the little circle is me and the big circle is world, then, blah, blah. And what we want to do actually is to rescale it.
not in a way that fosters selfishness, narcissism, arrogance, whatever, but more in which what is big is what is it like to be you? Now, in what is it like to be you? can be love, service, bodhisattva vow, commitment to others. But it's in a frame in which there's a broad, large focus on where you are at cause. and less of a focus on where you are at the effect of the world and others. Okay, all that said. So you're asking me how. Definitely, I've seen people have light bulb moments.
where they realize things along the lines of, wow, I've been just playing a role in their script. And it's not good for me. And it's on me that I've been playing a role in their script. i'm going to operate from a different script i'm going to operate from my movie are you in their movie or are they in your movie and so there can be a light bulb moment like that where people realize whoa i'm going to step out of their frame
And I'm going to step more into my frame. I'm going to focus on that. But here's what I was just really feeling into. One of the ways into this is to Refocus attention, which often is a natural feature of many therapies, is to refocus attention on your inner world, independent of the world around you, your sensations in the...
present again in this moment. Your inner sensing, your underlying emotions, the movement of the psyche that's very intimately your own, you're kind of alone in there with your own psyche. It's you.
Right. And so just that, the tuning into yourself, breathing sensations and all the rest of it, which is accessible to us all the time, gradually builds, enlarges your circle of- me right and it's a very natural process so more and more you're aware of what's going on around you but you feel more and more differentiated from it because you've turned up the volume on the internal signals of
the person that you are moment by moment by moment. Yeah, you become more laminated. Yeah. It's the process of that self-exploration that gradually resets. your object relations. Yeah. You become a priority too. Yeah. You matter. It's a form of mattering. You're just like Dan says, feeling felt, you feel felt to yourself.
increasingly totally and that brings you home just that and it's wonderful that it can be as simple as that it accumulates over time stick with it but it can be as simple as that and and i one final thing maybe that we'll get out of here because we've gone for a while, I suspect. But that is a doing. And I think that it's important to feel into the doing of that. You are making a choice to-
pay attention to what's going on inside of you. You are making a choice to step out of their movie and into a different movie. You are choosing. You are the creator. Because the more that you feel agentic, the more that you feel like you are the creator, you are the maker of your world, the more you're going to start to trust yourself. Because you're going to go, hey, as the world changes, whatever, man, I'm good.
I can keep on making things. I can keep on making myself the way more or less that I want them to be. Not perfect, not exactly right, but more or less the way that I want them to be comfortable enough for me. And that becomes our target. And then we see ourselves doing it over and over and over again. And over time, it becomes the model. And that's, I think, when all the bottom-up happens. It's just, oh, this feeling that we're not needing to access, we're not needing to...
be hyper top-down aware of the doing because it's just become sort of built into our experience over time. But you need to go through the conscious competence stage before you can get to the unconscious competence stage. Yeah. So a lot of what we're talking about here is investing in yourself. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. How do you trust that you'll be able to grow roses and corn there? Well, in part, because you've fertilized the ground. Yeah.
You've invested in the field. You watered them for a period of time. Whole thing. Yeah. Whole metaphor. Absolutely. Really investing in yourself. And I know we're wrapping up and there's an element here I wanted to ask you about, which is authenticity. All right, yeah. Genuineness. Totally. Yeah. Have you found that the more genuine a person is, the more they can count on themselves? Yes. And this gets entirely to what I was talking about kind of at the very beginning where...
as I got better at identifying what I cared about, my true values, and operating in pursuit of them, I felt more self-trusting over time because I started noticing my effort more as something that felt like it mattered because I was pursuing things that I valued, not just thrashing around in the external world, expending effort, but it wasn't really going anywhere. There was no sense of momentum associated with it. So yeah, I think the values-based action part of this is a total piece of it.
Because that's then a layer of self-trust. You trust yourself to be authentic, figure out what you care about, pursue the things you care about. It just becomes another domain within which all of this operates. Does that make sense? Yeah. You're reminding me of
the process of trusting that it's okay to expose our messy innards. Oh, for sure. In appropriate settings, not the boardroom, with our friends, with our partners. And I think for a lot of people... there's this model that the simplest model of the psyche ever encountered and in some ways i think one of the best imagine three circles so the outer circle the shell is the act it's who we like to think we are and who we want the world to be
Second circle is the scared self, who we are afraid we are and the things we don't want the world to see. And then there's the being in the third circle, the core, the core being. deep down inside ourselves. And I think for a lot of people their orientation to being reliable and trustworthy has to do with pleasing external sources by developing a really good act.
Now, there's a place for a really good act, but it's a fairly fragile boat. It's a fragile vehicle because what happens when your act is shattered or the world that promotes and supports your act falls apart? during a plague, let's say. And over time, I think the journey of growing self-reliance is that you gradually trust that you can...
still be okay if you're more exposed, you're more revealed, it's a little sloppy. If you're going through an issue with another person, you will still come to a soft landing repeatedly. And that process again and again. makes you much more integrated and whole. Being real. Being real about how it is, being real about the world around, being real about what really matters.
Not caught up as I think we often can be in the Western world and superficialities and images, everything. You know, I go back to that ad campaign. And no, being in the real. And I think the more that... we live in the real ourselves and are real with our intimates and value being real, then the more we can trust ourselves.
to deal with the real world. Totally. I think the authenticity piece of this is a huge piece of this. And again, conversation for another day, some of this is that in the act part of it. I've built more of an act that I like more. So I've still got some act. It's not like I've become totally revealed with other people, but I made choices about how I wanted that act to be and how I wanted that act to show up.
Yeah. Particularly in social settings. And I felt like I was able to really change that act from one that didn't really support my values or my goals. to one that really did. That's really true. And so in a weird way, the act became more authentic because we all still have act to some extent. You need to wear a little bit of armor to make it through the world because the world's a spooky place and bad shit happens and so on and so on.
I became more discerning about that act, more thoughtful about that act, and it just started feeling better to be over time. And that was definitely a piece of it for me too. Totally fair. knowing that you can count on yourself is knowing that increasingly you've got tool. Yeah. You've got skills. If you want the shields to go up.
Shields can go up. Yeah, where you can navigate a certain kind of situation. You've learned how to do that in terms of including how you present yourself, which then fosters positive feedback from the world, which then shores up your sense of self-reliance. Totally. yeah thanks for doing this with me today this was fantastic i love this conversation oh yeah same same today i talked with rick about how we can learn to trust ourselves
This is the core of self-reliance. It's what allows us to be resilient even when the world around us is chaotic and unpredictable and generally difficult to manage. To develop a sense of self-trust for most people is a process that starts in childhood. It starts with a good enough parent, a good enough social system, and one that eventually gives them more and more experiences of self-efficacy.
of doing the things that they need to do in life. They were able to lift the spoon to their mouth. They were able to make the friend. They were able to complete their math homework, whatever it is. But there are many, many, many people.
where they did not have those experiences growing up. Maybe they had parents who didn't allow them to express themselves. Maybe they struggled to make friends. Maybe they received a lot of input from the world around them that the way that they were... was problematic that they had to change in order to accommodate the world and that they should just expect moving forward as adults that safety would flow from the outside in that it would be given to them
at the whims of the external world. They could not create it for themselves. And so many people walk into adulthood with this as their underlying model of how the world works. I am this small beleaguered self. and i'm surrounded by this big scary world and i can't really trust myself and i can't really trust the world around me wow what a bad spot to be in to hopefully state the obvious here
This is not your fault if you are somebody who is carrying this model around. This model happened to you. It's not something that you did for yourself. But now, here we are, we're living in the world, and we don't want to feel that way anymore. So what do we need to do? We need to develop more of a sense of self-trust and self-reliance. We need to think of ourselves increasingly as the kind of person who can solve problems, overcome challenges.
and make our environments more the way that we want them to be. And I think that this comes from developing four key aspects of who we are. From developing self-efficacy, And this is all of the, I can learn what I need to learn and solve problems and affect the world around me stuff. Then we learn flexibility.
We develop a sense of ourselves as somebody who can be okay in different kinds of circumstances, so we don't need to regulate those circumstances so much. Then we develop the skill of appraisal. We start getting better at figuring out when it's the environment that's the problem or if it's us that's the problem. And then as we develop that discernment, we act on that discernment through advocacy, sticking up for ourselves.
If the environment's the problem, being able to look around and go, you know what? I don't need to be self-critical about this. This is an environmental problem. It's not a me problem. And as I mentioned during the episode, this self-advocacy... It occurs both out in the world with how we talk to other people, how we express our needs to them, how we speak up for ourselves.
but it also takes place inside of us. Because sometimes you got to advocate for yourself internally. You got to be able to speak up against the inner critic. And you also have to be able to speak up against the part that says, eh, you know, don't worry about it so much, or eh.
The world really is where all of the power comes from. So you should be this small beleaguered self. You know, whatever it is, we need to be able to align with the parts of ourselves that really have our back, that are really hoping for the best for us. So how do we do this? Well, I've got good news and I've got bad news. The good news is that this is changeable for most people. The bad news is that we need evidence in order to change it. We need to look at ourselves or look out at the world.
and see ourselves operating from the stance of self-trust to see ourselves doing things that we like, that we support, that we feel good about. The really good news is that most people are doing this all the time. and they're just really bad at noticing it. We have a built-in negativity bias in the brain. The brain is extremely good at noticing our negative experiences. It's very good at identifying all of the times that we messed up, that we fell down, that we didn't try hard enough.
It's not so good at noticing the times where we really did advocate for ourselves, where we did all of the things that we should do, and we just got a little bit unlucky, where we acted like the kind of person that we want to be. It's very, very bad at noticing that part. In order to act more in these ways, in order to show up more as this kind of person,
it's often really necessary for us to go through a process of deliberately evaluating and then changing the stories that we tell about ourselves. What's the kind of person that you think of yourself as being? As I talked about during the episode, I thought of myself, and I still think about myself this way, at least to some extent, as the kind of person who doesn't actually try very hard, as the kind of person who...
does not give a consistent effort, who is not reliable in that way, who just doesn't work very hard. Now... There's a lot of evidence that's counter to that, and I've gone out of my way to internalize that evidence over time. And you might think in your own life about what's this example for you? What's the story that was told about you by other people when you were growing up?
And how could you maybe change that story? How could you look around with the eyes of an adult and see, wait a second, that might have been true back then, but it's not true now at all.
i have all of this evidence that it's not true and actually if i really think about it I was only that way back then because of fill in the blank, whatever might be true for you, because your environment was a certain kind of way, because your parents did some dumb stuff, you know, whatever might be operating in the mix for you.
You can go through this deliberate process of taking a look around and asking yourself really seriously, is this really true? And that question, is this really true, helps us to start to break down. some of the overdeveloped sense of confidence that we have in the way we are or who we are. This is something I've been thinking about a lot recently, and I included some pieces of this.
in the piece that we published, I think it was last week, which was just me kind of talking to the microphone for about an hour and summarizing all of the things that I've learned up until now. If we're going to change, it is incredibly helpful to be a little less confident in how we view ourselves. I think that this is one of the reasons that self-awareness can sometimes be a problem for people. People who are hyper-self-aware are often very, very confident.
in that self-awareness they know everything there is to know about themselves they've figured it all out and in that view there is not a lot of space there's not a lot of room for possibility There's not a lot of room for, hey, maybe I was wrong about that. There's not a lot of room for writing a new story. It's all very calcified. It's very tight. So part of what we need to do is we need to blow open a little bit of space.
in that contracted sense of self, that certainty that we have about who we are and why we are that way. And we do this just by asking questions, by reevaluating those stories, by opening it up a little bit. This is the essence of don't know mind, beginner's mind, and it could be really challenging for people in part because it can often be tied to a lot of inner criticism as we start to do this. And I was wondering recently about this, like what's the function of an inner critic?
What role does it serve inside of our system? We talk all the time on the podcast about figuring out what the function of different behaviors are, because understanding that function can then help us to do something about it. So what's the function of this inner critic?
Sometimes it's to kind of keep us on track and make sure we try hard, all of that. That's the story that it tells, right? That's what it tells us about what its function is. But what's its function really? I wish I'd asked Rick about this. But I think that its function is to keep us the same. To keep us safe by keeping us the same. So it really doesn't like it when you start asking questions about why am I this way? And hey!
Could there be a different way for me to be? We close the episode by talking about how to develop a bigger sense of self. get our sense of who we are to be as big and as powerful as that sense of the outside world or, hey, maybe even a little bigger. And Rick gave a lot of great examples here drawn in part from his work with people around these topics. He talked about grounding down into the body and stabilizing the body. A lot of people feel this way because they have a nervous system.
that is a bit higher tone or it's a bit less reliable for whatever reason. So are there things that we can do to stabilize the nervous system and to feel more safe on a somatic level? He also wove in a lot of ideas that had to do with authenticity, which I mentioned also toward the beginning of the show.
As we are pursuing goals that we really care about, as we are acting in a way where we feel like the inside and the outside line up with each other a little bit better, it's much easier to trust ourselves because part of our trust is that we trust ourselves. to do things that we actually care about or to act in a way that's consistent with our values.
We talked about the importance of supportive environments, having friendships with people who make you feel bigger and not smaller. We talked about running little tests, little experiments out in the world, trying on this new way of being and then seeing what happens.
And I even like the part about making the act a little bit more authentic over time. That's something that's been very helpful for me. So I hope you enjoyed today's episode. I really loved this one. It felt very alive, very conversational. I had a really fun time talking with Rick about it.
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