Ayelet Fishbach || How to Motivate Yourself

From her extensive research, I yell It shares with us four crucial strategies for successful behavior change. First, identify the right goals. Second, avoid what she calls the middle, Third, resist temptations, and fourth seek social support. And equally important, A yell It gives tips on how to sustain motivation for longer periods of time. We also touch on the topics of reinforcement flow, deliberate practice, self control, and of

course Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So that further ado I bring you, I yell At Fischbach, nice to finally meet you. I I we have you know, we have colleagues and you know, Angel Dockworth and others that that I love you and it's nice to finally meet you. Thank you same. So you're a leader in the field of motivation science? Is what you how you refer to in the book.

Can you kind of tell our listeners a little bit about the you know, kind of trace the history of the field of motivation science and who were some of the original key players in the field, and uh, yeah, let's start there, sort of tell people what motivation science Isnation science is that the study of motivation, as we can infer from the name, we look at what gets people out of bed in the morning and into achieving their their goals, be eat the professional goals, their health goals,

their academic goals, How you motivate others, how you motivate yourself, which is specifically interesting for me, and so on. Okay, we are interested in this internal power that we call motivation that gets people going. You asked about people. There are so many, So we briefly chatted about our mutual friend, Angela Darkworth. Uh, you know, I work with hair a lot. There are just so many. I work with Katie Milkman, my advisors, yakovchorpen ur Iku Blansky did amazing work on motivation.

People like Walter Michelle and Toy Higgins and uh there was such a long list. I will I'll stop there because they you said, so many people, it's exploding. Yeah, it is an exploiting field. Would you consider Abraham masl as part of the origin story of the field, Oh yeah, yes, Well then you can go all the way to quote Lewin and you know people that inspired our thinking, William James. Yeah right, yeah, so if we are, you know, go

back to the origins. What I think was very important about Maslow's work was identifying that people have different motivations, so that it's not just about what he referred to as basic needs. I am less convinced by the hierarchy there. I revised the hierarchy actually recently, so I'll send you that work. I guess you think about my vision, please please do. Yeah, it's tell me more about your criticism

of the hierarchy. So the massless hierarchy assumes that the needs are always fulfilled in certain order, and so you would need the food before you would need the safety, for example, which I don't think is justifiable by any modern research. Feeling safe is as basic as feeling that you you meet your your basic I don't needs uh and no more. The more central criticism is that for many of us are sufficiently comfortable to have enough food and and and safety, and we have a roof over

our heads. So what's missing in a giving moment is not in a particular audio. Okay, it's not that we first make sure that our job gets us money before we want to see if it's also interesting to do that. It's really individual. It's very different for different people in different situations, and in my thinking, it's often more useful to think about what's missing, Okay, what's missing from your job, what's missing from your life, what's missing from your exercise regimen,

and not in a particular order. Yeah, I completely agree, and I think a lot of people misrepresented what he actually wrote because he tried to make it clear that it didn't all happen in a particular order that was necessary. And also he never even drew a pyramid, and that was missed represented by people are trying to come up with psych textbooks trying to illustrate it incorrect. So yeah, I know, I complete agree, and I'm glad that you made that point for sure. So now you're a professor

at the Business School right, the University of Chicago. So why did you choose a business school over like a psychology department just out of curiosity? So I did not choose a business school of psychology department. A business school chose me. I applied for ten jobs and nine were in the psychology departments and one was in the business school. And yeah, that's where I got my first job. Twenty years later. It pays better, pays better business schools, you know.

I didn't know that at the time. Yeah, yeah, well it's great. You know that there's such great synergy between the work being done in business schools, right, I mean in psychology departments all around the world. Right, there's a lot of people collaborating and trying to understand what motivates us at work, but also what motivates us to you know, out of work as well, you know, and the whole thing.

So you you outlined four essential ingredients in successful behavior change in your book, and I'd like to just if that's cool with you, can we go through each one today and talk about the latest motivation science for people. So first, the first ingredient is choosing a goal. You argue that's important to pick a goal, that's powerful and specific enough but not too specific to get you to the finish line. So this is my question, why is

setting goals harder than it seems at first? I would ask myself, I would ask you, is this goal something that brings to min actions? Can you relate it to something that you are going to do? Is this a positive state or is this an end state? Is this a goal as opposed to a means or a chalk? Okay, yeah, you know. I give the example of setting a goal to apply for a job. You actually know what that means.

When people say I want to apply for a job, they can easily translate it into action, but it's not very inspiring because it's not really what you want to do. You want to have a job, you want to maybe have a career, and setting the goal in terms of what you're trying to achieve, not in terms of how would you do this is better. Setting a goal that is intrinsic is very unintuitive to people in a way. Often we think about setting goals in terms of a going to force myself to do the thing that I

don't want to do. But you know what, if I cannot find any immediate rewards in doing this goal. If it doesn't feel right to me, if there's no internsic. Motivation, then this goal is going to fail, and I will just mention one more thing. Many times we set do not goals, avoidance goals, and those tend to be not so great. Yeah, what does it mean to set an avoidance goal? What does that mean? Exactly? The goal is

not to do something? Yes, yes, as we ask thousands of people about their news resolutions, it's something we started a few years ago, and many people set the goal of not to do something, not to eat something, not to spend on something, and not to be in a relationship with certain people. And the problem with avoidance goals, which, by the way, they seem urgent. So this is good, like when you say I should not do something, that

seems more urgent than I should do something. But the problem is that do not go or avoidance goals tend to bring to mind the thing that you're trying not to do. And you know, if we go all the way back to like Wagner's studies with asking people not to think about why bears. If I ask you not to think about white bears, you are thinking about white bears. If I ask you not to think about your eggs

or food that you should not eat. Well, you're now thinking about that person or the food, and so that these avoidance goales tend to bring to mind the thing that you are trying to avoid, and they are just less intrinsically motivating. I did like the idea I heard once of not only having a to do list, but having a not to do list. That can be helpful, right as long as it's you're just not obsessing over what's on the not to do list and constantly thinking

about that. Can't not to do list be helpful? Yes, avoidance goes out useful in the sense that they seem urgent, and that certain people just have the personality orientation of being more of avoids than approach, and so they are just more attractive towards that do not at least saying that if you are and sure, go with the approach, go with the goals they want. Everyage tend to walk better here everyan. I'm excited to announce that the eight

week online Transcend course is back. Become certified in learning the latest science of human potential and learn how to live a more fulfilling, meaningful, creative and self actualized life.

The course starts on March thirteenth and will include more than ten hours of recorded extras, four live group Q and A sessions with me, four small group sessions with our world class faculty, a puthora of resources and articles to support your learning, and an exclusive workbook of growth challenges that will help you overcome your deepest fears and grow as a whole person. There are even some personalized self actuisation coaching spots with me available as an add on.

Save your spot today and get fifty percent off the normal price by going to transcend course dot com. Sign up for the early bird today and get fifty percent off at transcendcourse dot com. We have so much fun in this course and I look forward to welcoming you to be a part of the transcender community. Okay, now back to the show. Yeah, so here's a massive quote I love what's not worth doing is not worth doing? Well? That sounds summarizes a lot of what you're saying there,

which is great. Yeah. One of the chapters you wrote is actually called Goals Aren't Chores? Right, And that's to highlight the fact that intrinsic motivation matters, and you know, our goals should light us up right at some point, they should inspire us, energize us. Yeah, yeah, you know. I give some examples of how much we hate paying for shipping or parking or a gift wrapping or anything that's not the thing itself. Like, we would not like to invest our money in it. We also would not

like to invest effort. When we ask people about how motivated they are to study for some classes is required in order to take another class, the prerequisite they are not very motivated. I discovered one of the studies that we went in which we auctioned the book and some people were bidding on the book. It was a signed book by my colleague here R Shaul Saylor. Other people were bidding on a tote bag that contained the book. Now they knew that the book was in the totepeck

that we met them. We presented this to them and nevertheless, the biddings on the book was about on average twenty three dollars, and on the totebeck that contained the book only around twelve dollars. So now even though people got more, they were willing to pay less. We don't like to invest in means. It's such a profound point that I feel like is often lost in the workplace a lot when managers try to motivate their employees. Yes, we often

too much in the details, we forget the big picture. Yeah, trying to motivate ourselves to complete the task. Not sure why we even do that. Yeah, yeah, so let's take let's let's continue down this train of thought about the importance of choosing the right goals and for the goal seting process. You also argue it's nice to kind of put a number on it, right, and so what's the role of quantification in this process? These numbers tend to

be highly motivating. People tend to think about achieving anything that is below with the number as a loss, as if they did not achieve the goals. So, you know, if I set my goals walking ten thousand steps a day, which is kind of a random goal, that's some market they are invented. It's really just the number. But if this is my goal and I only walk nine thousand and nine hundred steps, I might find myself stepping around my bedroom just to reach the daily goal. Okay, to

feel that I achieved. These numbers are highly motivating. Another nice example comes from a study that looked at the distribution of marath on running times turn out that there are many more people who finish marth on just below four hours or three hours and fifty nine minutes then just about four hours, like four hours and one minute. And this is kind of cool because really like what motivated them to put the energy in the last a few minutes was that they are going to meet their

goal of getting it after four hours. Four hours, yeah, four hours, yeah, yeah, Wow, that's so interesting. So kind of keeping that count and and and where you're you know, how close you are to getting there on a consistent basis, Like I assume that's something you can get obsessed with as well, though, right, and that can start to distract like anything you know, invertiduce shaped curve, it's like, oh, everything everything that you shupe inverteduce shape curve. Yeah. Well,

so sometimes the targets are meaningful, Okay. For some goals, it's really all or nothing. Okay, unless you graduate the very last class in your degree, you're not getting the Greek. Unless you have made all the purchases toward the reward, you are not getting the reward. Okay. So for for some goals, it really is the case that you need to get to the target otherwise you're not getting anything completed.

But for all these other goals such as exercising or no developing professionally, you should just have healthy relationships with these target numbers. They are meant to motivate you. They are not that importantly. It really doesn't matter if you almost got to this number or not. Yeah, well that's good to hear. And how do incentives play a role here? I guess that's intertwined with the extrinsic versus intrinsic reword distinction in psychology. But hell us does hel us doesn't?

Do incentives matter? Yes and no. We used to think that incentives undermine intrinsic motivation. We don't really think that anymore. There is really no good evidence that paying people for a job makes them less excited about their job, and often they are more excited. And some studies find that you might initially reduce your effort you were just getting paid, and so you think, Okay, I achieved my goal, I can relax my effort. I don't need to continue working

so hard. But then after a while you get the motivation back, and payment doesn't really decrease motivation in general, and not intuising motivation unless by getting paid you are not really sure why you do that anymore, and so incentives can mess up our understanding of why we do the thing that we do, like the classic studies by Leopard, like if you pay. If you give rewards to kids for drawing, they might ask themselves, do I even like drawing? Megey?

Were just doing it in order to get this nice certificate with the ribbon. We told kids that food can make them strong or smart, and they stop eating that food because they they were unsure that they like the food, giving that they thought about these incentives. But you know, put that aside. If we understand why we do something, if we are excited about what we do, then often getting the reward, getting the monitory reward or any other reward is something that helps us maintain the motivation is

often the immediate goal. Okay, in the long term, I might want to be a professional successful professional. In the short term, I'm going to give myself a reward for finish a project at work, and so I have some short term goals. When I worry about incentives, I say that it's really important that you reward the right thing so that you don't confuse yourselves about why you do the thing you do and what should be measured. Okay,

how should you evaluate your performance? Don't worry about uncertain incentives. They often work better than certain incentives. And don't have too many incentives. I don't have too many. Yeah yeah, yeah, So finding the right the right magic number is difficult. But what do you what do you think of smart call? You know, the s M A R T. Is that a scientifically grounded framework for reaching one's goals? Is it aligned with your research? Because I see it everywhere in

positive psychology, it's a it's a popular acronym. I I will connect it back to Maslow. Okay, like that, It's important to understand that there are many ingredients and there are many factors that influence motivation. The idea that we can make a list and only what's on the list counts and everything that's on the list counts is, you know, is a bit naive. We have many things that affect our motivation. So these are important factors that I just

don't think that there is a single recipe for motivation. Sure, and that that's an excellent point. It just seems like some of these I think the parts of the smart acronym map on the some things you've said already so as a specific M is measurable. So you did talk about the measurable part, A attainable, R, relevant and T time beast. But anyway, there there's a there's there's a move. Yeah, there is no intrinsic motivation there. That's true. That's actually

very true. Yeah, because Howard would had the eye to make it a nice acronym. You know. Well, so you know, the nice thing about this acronym, which is very old, is that it got people to understand that there is more than one thing. And these acronyms they emerge at the point in time where we were trying as a field to educate people that there is more than one thing,

There is more than one way to motivate people. And so people were saying there was more than one way here, there are five ways, but they are also more than five ways. In it, there was really a lot of ways to think about how to motivate yourself and others well are relevant. Seems somewhat linked intrinsic motivation. Your goal should align with your values and long term objectives. Can

you well, this is actually an interesting question. Can you have something that's very value aligned but you don't intrinsically enjoy doing it, but you kind of you know, even if you suffer doing it, Like a lot of people do a lot of things that are meaningful to them that they don't enjoy intrinsically, but they they want they know it'll make the wort a better place. You know. Well, many health goals are like that. Okay, they are either like that because we find that the way to do

it that is intrinsically motivating. You know, someone might hate exercising because the way that they try to exercise was always only motivated by some long term benefits. They could not find any pleasure at the moment, and at this point it's not intrinsically motivating. Then some behavior, say, some actions that we need to take in order to stay healthy are very much extrinsically motivating. There are certain treatments.

If you know, someone has to go through chemotherapy, this is very extrinsically motivating and no, nevertheless that has to be done. Yeah, yeah, So something can be intrinsically motivating in the long term, but not the short term as well, like, there are certain things that we're not enjoying doing them, but we can still be intrinsically motivated do them. My

over complicating things. Yeah, so let's define intrinsic motivation is doing something for the sake of doing it, Okay, so that the value is from doing okay, And in this sense, exercising or getting a job, they are rarely just intrinsically motivating. You're not just doing it for the sake of doing it.

You are thinking about long term benefits. But you might love your job or your exercise routine, and in this sense you're more intrinsically motivated than someone who is really only doing it in order to be healthy or pay the rent, and these individual differences really matter. Or those that are intrinsically motivated, that find the value in doing, not just in achieving what they will achieve by doing, are much more likely to persist on their goals. Thank you. Yeah,

I see that in the field. I see interest motivation defined differently by some researchers. So I appreciate I appreciate you clarifying that. Might head Richard Ryan on my podcast you know seft determination theory, you would consider him a major player and motivation science field as well. Yes, yes so, yes, so. There are a few definitions of intrinsic motivation, and I'm

really happy that you bought it up first. The economists usually or sometimes talk about intrinsic motivation is anything that's not money, okay, And so they really put the content that if you are being paid, you're extrinstically motivated. If you are not getting paid, your intrinsically motivated. And by that definition, you could think about the person or undergoes a chemotherapy as being intrinsically motivated because they they want

it they are not getting paid. Psychologists don't really use that definition. We use that the definition of doing something for the sake of doing it and getting the value from doing it. Now, what Ryan and this did in their work on intrinsic motivation is trying to understand what is the content that is most likely to be intrinsically motivating and what are the kind of goals that people pursue usually for the sake of pursuing and not for the sake of achieving. What are what they call internal

motives And this is really important work. What my work was doing is looking more at the structure okay, and putting aside the content, seeing that if people feel that doing is right for them, the doing feels good, they will be more intrinsically motivated, regardless of the content of the motivation. So the feeling is a real big part of this. You know, how it feels when you're engaging

in the activity? Is that right? You know something that Angela because my office used to be right next door to Angela's at Penn and we used to discuss flow and its relationship to to deliberate practice, because sometimes there are kind of opposites in some ways, at least the feeling experientially of putting in the effort of deliberate practice versus experientially the feeling of flow. And then some you know, some people in the field say that the flow feeling

is kind of a neutral feeling. You don't feel positive or negative because you're just not focused on you're you're so absorbed in the activity that it doesn't feel anything. You chick sent me I had said that, had said that, I believe at some point. So I think it's just interesting that you can have other states that are more like neutral when you're engaging them, but are really meaningful to you. You're really so enraptured with what you're doing.

Does that make sense? Yes? Absolutely, you know, sometimes the feeling might not be just like fun and pleasant, and still you feel very good about what you do. We recently published a paper that tells the story of a study that we went with people who are studying improvisation, and this is with the Second City Improvisation Club here in Chicago. These are not professional people. These are not people who are who know how to act and plan to have a career. This is like people like me.

You just want to boost the confidence through improvisation. And so when they start taking these classes, they tend to not like their experience very much. They feel embarrassed. It feels odd like you have to do something with your body and I get attention on you and you just

take not quite in your comfort zone. And what we did was asking people to feel uncomfort and so we told them your goal is to feel uncomfortable, and they were more engaged and they have more likely to tell us that they will come back, that they want to do it, and in a way that having this goal to feel uncomfortable really works for them. Now, what's going on there? Is that, Well, I know how to feel uncomfortable, and when I get myself there and I feel uncomfortable,

then I feel like I've achieved my goal. I feel like this is working. Okay, this is right. So like we capture like this feels right by having people embrace the discomfort that you will feel in the short run when you're just studying, learning import I love that I'm doing some work with Second City as well. Is a Kelly Lennard And yeah, what do you do with them?

Creating a code words top secret? We haven't we haven't unraveled to the general public yet, but yeah, I can say they're dear friends of mine and they have actually told me that they're doing some work with you, and they're very excited about working with you. Now I remember we really have the same friends. How come we've never met? Yeah, I know that's why. That's why the beginning I was like, well,

it's so nice to finally meet you. Yeah, yeah, but no, I'm that's that's so great to hear that you're doing you're doing work with them on that they're they're also yeah, that's and that's really yeah, and that's really important. That's really important. Work okay, So let's let's like move on in our ingredients. Even though you said they're not roles,

you know, they're just ingredients. The second is you need to sustain your motivation, right, Why is it important to solicit feedback on your performance and during this this kind of stage, Well, it's it's really hard to learn without progress. It's last so it's really hard to learn without feedback. So you don't know where you stand. You don't know whether we are doing it well or you are not

doing it well. It's really hard to sustain your motivation when you don't know that you're making progress okay, when you cannot look back or look ahead and say, yeah, like I'm getting somewhere okay. And often in order to perceive progress, you need to either look back or look forward, so you know, sometimes the target is moving okay, or it's really far away, but you can look back and say, well, I already did something, okay, I already I took my first class, or you know, I wrote the first page

in the book that I'm planning to write. That helps people maintain their motivation. And we found, for example, that when students were unsure whether they should study for an example, looking back the materials that they've already covered helped them

stay motivated. When people were not sure whether they should support a course charitable giving, looking at how much was already done, how much they contributed, to how much others contributed, motivate them to keep giving, to keep helping the course. Other times, when you're almost well, let's say, when you're beyond the fifty percent and you're getting closer to your target, and it's actually better to look ahead and to look

at the discrepancy. And this is where the discrepancy theories in psychology suggest that when you look where where you want to be and how far you are from there, that that will motivate you. You will monitor your pocus

towards that point. Yeah, that even goes back to one of my mentors and as an undergraduate, Herb Simon's work right on means and analysis and all that nerdy stuff from that time period of the fifty sixty Simon and new Yeah, yeah, there is, Yeah, there is like the you know, the total model, the test operate test accent, which is and all the suggest that you monitor you're pogus always looking forward, you're looking at the target. You see how am I getting there? Am I close enough?

If I'm close enough, and maybe I can relax my efforts. If I'm fou, I should increase my effort. That only works for people who are already committed. If you are uncommitted, if you're very far from your target and looking at the discrepancy tends to destroy commitment. Yeah, that's a good point. You're talking about avoiding the importance of avoiding the middle problem. What is the middle problem? Yes, so you're you start something, you are fully motivated, you're excited, you just decided to

do that thing. When you're about to reach your target or your goal, then again there is excitement that usually the increase in the effort. In particular, if it's there's all or nothing called in the middle. We don't have parties in the middle. We it's not something that we in particular pay attention to. And this is where we see a motivation not quite, not quite where we want

it to be. And we see that the declining motivation both on like how hard people work and on how much they adhere to their personal standards, how much they are willing to cut corners to just you know, cheat a little bit, maybe in a way people behave as if they are aware that they will not remember what they did in the middle, so they don't need to pay attention to be too careful about doing it right.

To give you a couple of examples, we looked at people in Israel lighting the manora over the eight days of Hanukahs. So they are supposed to light the manora on every day between day one and they eight, and most people light them Noah on the first day, and many people, the majority actually lights them Norah on the last day. But in the middle it's when people are slacking.

We did the study. We did studies in which people actually had to do something, do a task for several trials, and in the middle they were not doing such a great job. Yeah. I think a lot of people will resonate with that when they listen to this podcast. I mean, I know I certainly resonate with that. Okay, I know avoid the middle problem, but how can you overcome it? Do you have any strategies or tips for that keeping

middles short? You know, instead of an annual saving goal, make it a monthly saving goal instead of a monthly exercising goal, and make it a weekly exercising goal. So they were just less of a middle. The problem with the Nuious resolutions, for example, is that this goal is for years, so you know, it's it's really hard to maintain the motivation as moving from like March to April. And another solution is to I find new beginnings either.

You know, my my colleague Katie Milkman came up with a fresh start effect, which basically chooses some kind of random date to announce that it's it's the first day, it's it's it's the first day of pursuing this call because it's a Monday, okay, or because it's my birthday, or because it's the first day of the month, and any any reason that you can find in order to restart the count. It helps people recruit their motivation, motivation. Think about it as a beginning, good good, and uh yeah,

Katie is wonderful. She was on this podcast when her book came out, and I'm so glad you're you're working with her. Yeah, she's part of the Angela team, you know. Yeah, it's yeah, yeah, that's the whole team over there. Pet. Yeah, they're they're killing it. They're killing they're crushing, crushing it, they're getting it. Done. They're getting it done right. Yeah, they walk the talk. Okay. So the third ingredient is

learning how to juggle multiple goals. I think that for a lot of people this might be the hardest one for them because there's lots of things pulling us in different directions. How can we set priorities and find the right balance here? Yes? So, yeah, we always want several things, so we have to do lists for every day in our minds, and they are often conflicting goals. And sometimes we want to choose between these goals. Okay, Sometimes we

really want to set priorities. Okay, I might prioritize my health goal over my desire to each food. Other times it's really a matter of balancing, of making tradeoffs and so I you know, I might want to eat organic food, but I also don't want to spend too much money,

and they usually organic food is expensive. IM to balance between these goals, I need to decide how much I'm going to expand on the organic food or you know that they're ultimate balancing is career and family most well, I actually don't have the numbers, but many people choose

to balance between career and family. Of course, some people decide that they're going to postpone having a family so they can focus on a career, or that they will resign their career because they want to ployot as the family. But for many of us, it's a matter of balancing and to the extended people are making these tradeoffs, then we can look at what activities they choose, and in general, people prefer activities that maximize attainment. Yeah, these activities that

help them achieve more than one goal. So exercise in a way that maybe it's also my commute to work, it's also a way to spend time with a friend. Maybe it's also not an expensive way of exercising, so I can also meet that goal. The problem with these activities, we call them multi final means, is that because they sell different goals, they sometimes seem less efficient, less instrumental

for any of these goals. In a way, sometimes people feel that a commute to work is not as good exercise as an exercise that is just an exercisekin that doesn't also get you another thing. And they're actually funny examples with it that people prefer mouthwash that stings because you know, if it's pleasant, I assume that it's not

very good. Yes, right, And this is a mistake. But these kind of mistakes when people choose means that only self one goal teaches us about how people's goal systems work, how people in fail instrumentality based on the number of things that they can achieve by pursuing an activity. Does this make sense? Maybe I was a bit too academic. No, no, it absolutely, it absolutely doesn't make sense. I think that a big part of this is having patience and building

your self control muscle, right, and that's hard. I mean, do you have any tips for people and how they can build those muscles? Well, the first thing is to remember that this is a metaphor. We often use metaphors in order to help people understand what we are talking about, to help people understand that self control takes practice, basically, right, This is why we're referring to it as the muscle.

But then people take this metaphor too far and you know, coming up with all kinds of physiological explanations for self control, which I really and not not like. What this is the work on a good depletion, which suggests that after people excess self control, they get tired. Okay, they know they feel that they need to replenish their resources. And

a lot of this is true. But then again using the muscles metaphor preventive from understanding that a lot of it is the mental fatigue case that you're tired of doing it, that you cannot resist certain temptations for a really long time because you feel fed up with that. Okay, it's not that you actually got tired, it's just that I can resist cookies for a certain amount of time. At one point I would just say whatever, like you know, give me a break here, I say, of that cookie.

So but going back to the tips on how to have better exercise self control, I would say that a lot of the problem with self control is in identifying temptations, and we need to first see that there is a problem before we battle it. So we first need to

identify the temptation and then battle it. And the reason that it's not trivial is that many of the temptations, our every day temptations, will not help us if we do it is just once, if I yell at my partner just once, or leave a mess mess in the bathroom like no, nothing happens, skate like it's it's okay, like you know, in all me long enough, you will forgive me. It's really about being obnoxious to the people

around you too many times. That makes it inappropriate that you will need to control your your negative emotions or no, eating one cookie will not destroy your diet. Drinking one glass of alcohol might actually make you more pleasant at the party. It's drinking the seventh class that will make you very endpless. And and the trick is really understand when a temptation is a temptation. One way that I write about is using broad decision of frames, thinking about

doing that several times, so all the time. And there are some really nice studies that show that if you just get people to think about making these decisions several times, they are going to exercise more self control. So, now if you get people to think about the number of times that they will buy champagne this year, okay, and they realize that it's not just for today's party, it actually is something that I do several times a year, then they are paying more attention to how much money

they are spending on the champagne bottle. Well, any other research studies along designs as well, because I actually really enjoy hearing about the studies. You've conducted also gives our

listeners a kind of a window into scientific research. I will mention another study that we when with helping people identify temptations, we asked them about a bunch of ambiguously unethical things that you can do at the work place case such as taking office supply home or calling seek when you really just don't feel like going to work, using your traveling the budget for buying a meal for you and a friend, and so on, and for these

kind of behaviors. When people consider doing it just once, they say yeah, okay, yeah, I can see myself doing it. When you ask them whether they are going to do it multiple times, then they say no. So, in a way, by using the port decision from you get able to say no, I will not going to take office supply home if I think about all the times in which

I can do this. Then we did some other studies on what people do once they identify a temptation, and it turned out that if people anticipate temptations, if they know that they are coming, they are better able to resist. It's a bit like if I tell you that my desk is very heavy and can you help me lift it? You're going to oppose it with more force than if I tell you, this desk is very light, Can you help me get it to another corner of the room.

Knowing that the temptation is there makes people prepare to it and better able to resist it. So knowing in our studies, knowing that medical checkup is going to be unpleasant, the exercise is going to be hard, the studying is going to be difficult, led people to plan to invest more airport and more time in these activities. I'm really glad I asked you to mention another study because I love that study that you just mentioned, so thank you.

In Doctor Fishwalk, that's wonderful. It kind of speaks to the value of mindful awareness. I mean that links to Ellen Langer's work, would I would say right to a certain degree, Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Also, you know the study that we discussed with the second City, I think speaks to hell that too. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, the more I hang out with those guys, you know, like Kelly and and I realized that if you treat life like improv you know, you have a much more enjoyable life.

And also you make more friends because you can yes and everyone, Yeah, that's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well I really what I took like working with them is really the getting more comfortable with feeling uncomfortable. I think that improvisation is such a good experience a feeling uncomfortable and being okay with that, experimenting with it. Yeah. Complete, Yeah, the idea of staying positive, right, because like in positive psychology, there's a lot of focus on optimism as such a

strong breaker of lots of things. In your book, you talk about how to know if and when a glass half full or have empty perspective will motivate you. So I'm going to kind of link that to some of these ideas about optimism. And you know, yeah, it's interesting because I don't really think about the glass half empty as being a passions Yeah. And actually I think in the book, like you know, I know that this was

are usually meant optimism. Pessimists, the dis wepancy theories look at people getting motivated they what they have not done. Now it's not it's not that they are upset about the thing that they have not done. It's just that they look at what they have yet to achieve. We you know, we did a study with their employees in an advertising company and that was in Seoul in South Korea, and we asked some of them to look back at what they achieved last year and the others to think

about what they haven't yet achieved. And so no one is really upset or in particular happy about this exercise. But they either have in their mind the glass half fool everything that they achieved, or have empty like the thing that they have not yet achieved and they can still walk on it, but it hasn't happened yet. And what we found is that those who look back like the account war more. They were more enthusiastic about what

they did, They wanted to do that more. But those that were looking ahead had what we refer to is higher level of aspiration. They wanted to move to their next world. And so you you get those like high achieving people. They they always look forward, okay, they always look at the glass half empty, not in the negative sense, but in the sense of like, this could be my next step, that could be my next challenge, that is

the next mountain that I want to climb on. Their mind is on the on the things that they have not yet achieved. That makes sense, that makes sense, But you don't also don't want to get, you know, the

fear of missing out, you know. I yeah, you can get too focused on that rate and be like and and and not find the meaning and extract the joy in the moment of what you're currently accomplished accomplishing, right, yes, and so you you can choose to look at what you have achieved versus what you still want to achieve. And I think that you're pointing out something very important that if you're always future oriented, you never get to

celebrate your achievement. Right, You're never quite you want to be, You're always walking towards something that will happen in the future. And I also talk about learning from negative feed deck and I think that there is a lot of negative feedback around us that if we can extract useful lessons from,

then we can improve, we can do things better. It's not easy, well it's not easy, but in your book you actually go through and help people with some suggestions on how to stay on track when facebook negative feedback. That was one of my favor I'm gonna be serious, that's one of my favorite chapters in your whole work or sections sections in your book, you know, like, so talk can you talk all about that, you know, like what is a you know, what is a warning mindset?

For instance? And distancing and yeah, I talk about something that thank you, so you know, there is a lot of research in motivation science on how to learn from negative fitback, and the reason is that we are not very good at it. Okay, so people are not very good written as they say that. Also animals are not very good, Like, it's really hard to learn from negative feedback. It's easy to pay attention to the negative feedback, like it's it's easy to say, oops, I messed it up.

But the lessons So if not this, then what should you do? That's not trivial. It's not trivial because it requires thinking in terms of elimination, k Like eliminated one way? Then what are the ways that I could try it? Also just how emotionally because you might be too upset about the negative feedback, but we developed a way it's gay and one way is a called a growth mindset. Okay, thinking about negative feedback in terms of learning. So now

asking yourself or asking people around you, what have you learned? Okay, what is a better way to do that? Given the feedback that you just received and people that are learning from failure are improving? Okay. Another way is distance yourself. We find that it's much easier to learn from other people's failures, gay and so we we use really simple tasks.

You asked to guess the answer to some question I I don't know, Like giving your pictures of two couples and we ask you which one is a real couple, which one is just two people that we put their pictures next to each other, and you guess it, and we either tell you that you were successful or not. After five minutes we learn what have you learned? Do you still remember which couple is the right couple? Turn another? When people get negative feedback for themselves, they don't learn

very well. But when they watch another person making the wrong guess, they learn. Okay, they butter were able to learn from another person's mistakes. So distance yourself ethan courses work on a self talk comes to mind, all right. He said that one way to distance yourself is to refer to yourself with your name. Okay, So like for me it would be I yell at what happened? I

yell it? What should you do in this situation? And kind of like look at myself as if I'm looking at another person, if I'm looking at you, Scott messing Up, okay, and what I would learn from you? And I would mention one more thing that we develop, which is giving advice to another person. And this is actually a paper with the low and ask Chris Winkler and Angela Duckworth, Oh she's great, Okay, well you know we we should Lowen was my past talk. So she's close to my heart.

And as Alan came up with the idea that how but we ask people to give advice, So we will ask people who are struggling with school like kids to give advice to other kids who struggle in school. A lot of people that are overweight to give other people advice on how to lose weight. To people that are unemployed to give other people advice on how to get a job. And now that if you give advice to another person, that really requires you to think about what

you have learned and so you are learning. But it seems to me that's also related to like christ and have self compassion work as well, right, like how can we integrate the self like the self like having self compassion about about it as well as giving advice. I think there's a nice integration. There's a paper there if Kristen. That's interesting. Actually, you know, like in our work on advice that really the effect was on the person who gave the advice. So you gave the advice and now

you feel more motivated. And we didn't go to the next step of like what your advice is actually doing to the person who received it. Many times it was just a mental exercise of what your advice would be. We didn't actually give it to anybody. Yeah, I agree, but it's probably having an effect. Yeah, it's probably happen. Okay, Colauren, Colaaren, I'll make the intro to Kristin Kristen, you know, because she's doing great work. Okay, let's let's talk about the

value of social support. I really love this part of your book as well. Why is it What is important to think about when you're pursuing goals in the presence of others? What should you think through it? Yeah, well, so many of the goals that we pursue are with others. Actually, the most important goals in our lives, I often think that we do with other people. Okay, with the it's you know, at work or starting a family or like

in your community. Okay, you're doing things with other people, and so working with other people is critical because with your two hands and one mind, you cannot do enough. And other times it's in the context of personal goals and doing something without social support is it's extremely hard. Often if you don't have social support, that is, the people around you are not on board with your goal. That the first thing that you should do is find

those people who support you. Okay, find that that mentor okay, that person that agrees that what you're doing is worth doing and is going to support you and be your role model maybe, but mainly someone that contains your goal for you. So I talk about these two aspects, how to do things with others and how to make sure that we connect to the people that support our goals. Hmm. Yeah, and you argue that goals make a happy relationship. Yeah,

so what is that? What is that connection there? Yes, so we are drawn to our people who are who support our goals and we are you know, we just completed a series of studies where we ask people how much they know someone like a friend or a partner, and how much they feel that that person knows them, and then The third question is how satisfied are you with the relationship. And when we have these three questions,

we can see what better predicts relationship satisfaction. And this is really relationship with anyone okay, with a friend, with a colleague, with the spouse. It is mainly predicted by how much you feel that they know you, okay, And so we are drawned to be closer to the people who we feel know us, and you can therefore support our goals. The person that knows what I'm trying to achieve in my life is the person that I want to be in a relationship with. Now, of course, no

relationship has more than one person in it. So to the extent that I know their goals and can support theirs, and I want to be with them to the extent that they say I didn't say it quitely, to the extent that they know me, I want to be with them to the extent that I know them they want to be with me. Hopefully I did not confuse you with that sentence. The extent to which you know them, can that also increase the chances that you want to be with them, not not just that they want to

be with you. Well, so for each side. It is more critical to feel that you are not feel seen. Yes, feel seen, and that's selfish. Well you know what, yeah kind of No, No, I get it, I get it. Look, you know, I think this rates a little bit to Eli Finkle's work. Yes, Eli Finkle, Yeah cool. I'm so glad that you agree with that because I went out and know when connecting it to his work. But I'd like to you on these podcasts kind of trying to see make linkages when I can tell other researchers in

the field. And I really like how he has this kind of self actuisation model of relationships and he brings in my favorite psychologist Maslow in talking about you know, you want to feel it like both partners are helping each other grow, and that seems very much related to what you're saying. Yes, exactly. And Elay's work is mainly in the context of romantic relationships. That's right, that's right.

Really often look also other relationships and see a similar pattern where you want to be with a colleague or a boss or you know, and anyone in your life, a friend that understands your goals, that supports you. Yeah, yeah, you say quote. Ultimately, What matters is that a relationship helps rather than hurts your goals. In this way, helping each other pursue our goals is fundamental to social connection.

I just want to end this interview today on that note, because you know, during COVID and you do link at you have a paragraph there right about COVID there at the end of your book. You know a lot of people feeling really lonely right now right, and you know Caciopo's work, et cetera has shown the real health, you know, really be detrimental to our biology, in our health when

we're feeling lonely. So you know, just kind of ending on there's no kind of giving people a little bit of hope and how we can restore more relationships feel us only using some of this core research. I think it's very valuable, absolutely, And you know, John cosiopus work on social connection and how critical it is for physical health is the first to come to mind. We are very concerned with the loneliness service suggested people nowadays are

lonelier than before. And this is data before COVID. Okay, this is just like the modern lifestyle. We just people have more personal space and the negative aspect of that is that they just spend more time alone, or that older people can end up spending a lot of time by themselves. This is unhealthy. This is killing people, and in the context of COVID, that's a major concern when we are trying to to think about how to maintain

a healthy lifestyle. This is definitely part of what we think of clar for kids and for all their people, how to make sure that social connection is part of their daily lives. Huge, huge, Yes, your book is timely in a lot of ways and will always be timely for the rest of the homost sapiens that want to get things done what it will always want to be know how they can be better motivated. So your research is prey relevant to humanity, doctor Fish. But thank you

so much. Yes, thank you so much for coming on my podcast today and it was a true honor and pleasure for me and I wish you well with continuing your research and the book. Yes, thank you, congrats, congrats on the book. Thank you very much. It feels good and really love talking to you about it. You know, maybe we'll meet in person one day. Thank you. Yeah, that'd be very nice. That'd nay. Thanks for listening to

this episode of The Psychology Podcast. If you'd like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at thusycology podcast dot com or on our YouTube page The Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such a great supporter of the show, and tune in next time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.