 Sir Ian, or Professor Ian, welcome to a podcast that's such an honor to have you on this show. For those of you who don't know Ian, he is one of the most accomplished clinical psychologists in the world and has an insanely remarkable history and one of the most amazing authors as well, so all the good things we're going to learn a lot about confidence and the brain and the boa. Yeah, Ian, welcome. I hear you're in a beautiful Dublin. Yeah, I am indeed. We could start off, I think you've written, is it ten scientific books and five books for normal people? Yeah, so I think there's, yeah, something like that and a bunch of scientific papers and I'm sure they're recommended reading at all hospitals or wherever they need to read them. But how did you get into this? Did you wake up when you were younger and go, I definitely want to know more about the brain? Well, I tell you what, when I was only very, only people as old as I am will remember this. There was an ITV series in, I guess it must have been the 1950s and 60s called the Human Jungle and it was a fiction series where the protagonist was a psychiatrist in Harley Street and he had these usually very rich, beautiful people coming to him with complicated problems that involved a kind of Sherlock Holmes type unraveling of what was going on and I loved this and decided I wanted to be a psychiatrist and then when I was about to applying for university or in my mid-teens I discovered you had to do medicine and I didn't like blood so I switched to computer science, bizarrely and then was able to transfer to psychology at Glasgow University and there I never looked back, I just loved the subject and continued to be passionate about it and then I trained as a clinical psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry in London at the Wadsley and under Hans Isink and Jack Rachman and there I got kind of frustrated after a few years about the lack of connection the lack of the fact that clinical practice didn't seem to have a strong enough base in science and so I started to ask myself how the brain and the mind interact and in these days you thought it was mainly a kind of one way or a path one tended to assume that it was genetically determined that the people you saw was largely biological genetic factors and that turned out to be completely wrong as with all things it goes as much the other way and that was the great revelation of brain plasticity the paperist and Mike Merson from San Francisco in the 1980s and the brain has physically changed by experience so that was a revelation for me and so I ended up doing my PhD on trying to improve brain function in people who had had strokes and head injury and then I got a very fortunate job in Cambridge with the wonderful cognition and brain sciences you were there and I spent fantastic years as a senior scientist in Cambridge before moving over to Dublin to establish the Institute of Neuroscience and the Professor of Psychology here and subsequently some other endeavors all based on the premise that how we organize ourselves, how we interact what we do, how we think shapes the physical structure of our brain and hence of our health and well-being and performance so the move from Cambridge to Dublin had nothing to do with your love of Guinness I like that as well Dublin was a fantastic play, it was a real fantastic opportunity and brilliant scientists here and I was able to do things here but spread my wings here in a way that would have been more difficult in Cambridge I think actually you mentioned this in your book the difference between being a big fish in a small pond or being a small fish in a big pond Yeah, that being said, I wouldn't have missed Cambridge for anything I would just brilliant people, they're brilliant, a lot of people and fantastically stimulating so it was absolutely what a privilege to be there for 80 years and you learn so much and your brain's physically changed by contact with all these brilliant people it is what I remember, I had a wonderful chat to Dr Ian McGillcrest and it was always really lovely to know that your brain can continually grow Absolutely and of course my current research is about how to because we have an epidemic of dementia across the world even more in poor countries than in rich countries and so the idea is now to apply these principles to trying to maintain the brain function to reduce the scale of dementia worldwide because there ain't no proper treatments or no readily scalable treatments so we have to luckily, we know now some of the principles of how to keep brains fit and somewhat protected against the ravages of diseases like Alzheimer's disease not completely, it'll never completely stop it but it builds your resilience to them Well, good luck, I think the world needs more of that I've seen what dementia can do, it's a painful thing I loved reading every now and then about different experiences they do experiments they do, sorry to try and kill that I remember reading something, I mean this is probably old hat for you now but I remember reading about something like they were giving them a mario cart to play or something to help them with spatial awareness I think some studies saying it helped them Oh yeah Daddy Let's say, even in someone with dementia there is still a degree of neuroplasticity some learning is possible and you know people's wellbeing and their state of mind and what they can and cannot do very much depends on what's happening to them and the stimulation and the engagement and so things like music and interacting with young children all of these things produce profound changes and produce profound changes I guess then, I promise we'll change the topic in a minute but it made me think I wonder whether this has had a sort of a more negative effect in certain countries around the world where we don't tend to live with our grandparents anymore or our parents anymore we're all in totally different places and cities and there's much more isolation Yeah, that's certainly true And although I remember 40 years ago in the 1970s living in Fiji in the South Pacific and there was a family living in a shanty town that I became very friendly with and I'd go and stay there you know it was kind of huts made of cardboard and corrugated iron the old grandmother I didn't know had put a name on it now but I realised then and realised now Alzheimer's but she just sat in the corner you know and nobody really addressed much to her so she was in her own way in some ways you could have seen that she'd been in a good nursing home there would have been people interacting or doing stuff with her but that didn't happen so it's not even though it's preferable that people live in communities it doesn't guarantee the quality of interactions that will keep people engaged So anyone out there, no need to feel totally guilty So I'd love to move on to your amazing book it's all about confidence I'll look behind me here how confidence works that's the marvellous one I'd love to mount it absolutely loved about it is it takes something that could be I think quite complex and you've shared so many amazing stories I mean when I was going through it there were stories I think you start off with stories from Venus Williams and you've got stories about different CEOs Brexit, golf players, tennis players there's a story to see is everyone in there and it just makes it so much more accessible I always sort of grew up suffering from dyslexia I really struggle when people don't tell stories and this book is full of stories so thank you for writing it well thank you it's a joy to read really thank you very much that's very kind of you the thing about confidence is you listen to in any domain of life politics, economics, but particularly sport you will never hear a poster pre-match discussion that doesn't bring up the word confidence or half a dozen times it's just absolutely central to our lives I hope Ireland and Scotland continue that confidence in the world yeah and somehow one of them's going to have to go I think South Africa is going to go through I hear they are doing very well so yeah I guess to start off with I guess what would be your short description of what confidence is and why do we need it Confidence is above all a belief that is a self-fulfilling prophecy it creates what it predicts so it's a state of mind where you believe that you can do something and that if you do it a good outcome will follow and that belief creates a state of the brain that makes it more likely that outcome will happen because the chemical changes in the brain particularly in the ward network the dopamine system creates a brain that's more bold less depressed less anxious more motivated and ready for action and slightly smarter and so it is really the fuel that gets us across this bridge to the future human beings are the only species that can imagine things of the world that don't exist yet and work towards creating them and confidence is what gets them to cross that bridge and it's not optimism optimism is a sunny belief that things will turn out it's not self-esteem that's your self-evaluation what it is the secret source of confidence is the fact it's so closely linked to action to taking action it's your belief that you can do a particular thing both in the inside world the internal world and in the external so it's it sort of sounds like it can be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy that's right I mean the greatest corrosive of confidence is anxiety and the greatest antidote to anxiety is confidence anxiety activates the threat perception systems of the brain the avoidance systems so it makes you pull back because you're anticipating punishment or negative outcomes and so across the world we know that people who are chronically anxious do less of everything they do less stuff they exhibit fewer behaviors because they're frightened they're motivated by fear that means the great Afghanistan poet philosopher Rumi said the road only appears with the first step so if you're not taking first steps you're not seeing roads that are going to lead to perceptions and opportunities and encounters and sheer good fortune that comes from moving forward even though you're moving forward without knowing precisely where you're going and that's what confidence does how do you then become less anxious and more confident say that again how do you become less anxious and more confident well I'll give you one example he's to anxiety well you were talking about rugby earlier so a couple of years ago I was sitting at home in a Saturday afternoon and I my stomach was twisting and my pulse was racing and my hands were sweaty so if I ask you what emotion do you think I was having most people will say anxiety fear but no I was excited because it was a rare occasion there Scotland was beating England at rugby so I wasn't bringing you that but here's the question how do you distinguish how do you know what emotion you're having if the symptoms of excitement are exactly same as those of anxiety you only know what emotion you're having by the label you put on it and we know that someone who's in a high anxiety performance situation who says to themselves I feel anxious rightly before they do the past versus someone who says I feel excited and they both have the same symptoms just saying that word makes you perform better why? because you're changing the emotion by cognitive jiu-jitsu the emotion only exists as a diffuse propensity for action that's all arousal is is a propensity to act either fight or flight or celebrate and when you apply that mental framework to it to say this is me this is excitement so suddenly the thing that's causing you fear and causing you to think of all the negative things that can happen suddenly you're seeing an opportunity to perform a challenge to face a challenge that's the challenge of mindset that activates different brain circuits to those that are activated in fear and threat reception and they these I am excited if you like the challenge circuits actually inhibit the fear ones that's why the best way to overcome anxiety is to do the thing you're anxious about in spite of the anxiety and not to be frightened of the fear so it is a kind of courage and that's what courage is it's doing stuff not because you're not frightened but in spite of the fear and taking action in spite of fear is one of the greatest sources of confidence and the more you do that the more you will feel more in control of your fear rather than under under control of it I guess it's kind of both sides that I need to get very comfortable with failure well that's critical um failure is an amazing teacher is a much better teacher than success um but the trouble is we just as we tend to run away from fear we also tend to run away from failure because we tend to think big thoughts about failure I am no use I am humiliated I am this or I am that and these are big entrapping thoughts that paralyze you um and whereas if you can dissect failure and say okay that's interesting failure is an amazing teaching signal let me understand why I failed you know what was it was going on to make me fail and if you do that you will and that involves a different set of thoughts you get rid of all these big tried to draw big conclusions about you and yourself and your ego and rather say well what were the circumstances what did I not do what did I do what did someone else do what did they not do what were the circumstances and if you do that doing a kind of post mortem of the failure as an incredible teacher and doing that will give you a sense of control that help you embrace failure if you do that and then allow yourself to transcend the anxiety that came from the failure by doing the thing again you will be more likely to do it as long as you set yourself don't set yourself huge goals set yourself goals that are in the sweet spot of neither too easy nor too hard that stretch you a little bit and these will be different for different people sometimes for someone just walking 10 yards out the front door is an amazing goal for them that challenges them for other people be much higher goal doesn't matter it's all individually focus so that's where this goals and action and responding to failure are all critical ingredients in building confidence it's more on this advice and another sort of question is I wondered whether is there a relationship between maybe and apologies if this is a silly question introversion and extraversion yes not a silly question it's not a silly question at all extraverts do more stuff extra means outside extraverts are more likely to speak out in the room where no one is talking so extraverts are more in approach mode and less in avoidant mode it's not saying that everything is rosy there are huge advantages also being an introvert because you can be more reflective and sometimes avoid the traps of impulsiveness or maybe not as dependent on other people's approval but yes this confidence is linked to this kind of this kind of dominance in a primitive way and that's why men have an advantage over women in confidence but the thing is that confidence is not just these brach outward the tokens of confidence there can be a steely internal confidence your belief that you can do stuff that may be very very quietly expressed and sometimes that can be much more powerful because it's because people are surprised by it so an introvert can be very very confident and particularly if they're strongly grounded in their values if you know what you stand for and you have your values and you articulate them then the quietly people cannot do very much can sometimes have a much bigger impact on a group of people than the more loud outward charismatic brach person so confidence shouldn't be confused with extroversion but extroverts have a bit of an advantage in the superficialities of confidence just as men can have vis-a-vis women and is that you mentioned the difference between men and women is there a reason for that is that just some evolutionary thing or is there a different chemical made there's no doubt about it that testosterone plays a part testosterone is correlated with certain type of narcissism a certain type of narcissism can be important nobody would stand for elected office if they weren't a little bit narcissistic so narcissism was not always all bad and it goes with this kind of extrovert dominant kind of personality which again needn't be bad it can be good as well and yes that has been shown to be correlated with testosterone levels and of course women have significantly lower baseline levels of testosterone than men so boys and girls start off with this kind of difference but as with all these genetic or biological differences they have quite small effects on your behaviour all other things being equal the problem is in the world all other things are not equal and these small advantages get amplified success breeds success a person becomes more dominant and as a result that squishes down and creates withdrawal or submissive behaviour and the person who's having to encounter this dominant person so these things the environment the social and cultural environment simplifies or minimizes these genetic differences there are huge cross national differences in the confidence gap between men and women it is for instance much less in North America than it is in Scotland or Ireland England's a bit somewhere in between still quite significant in England so culture just how culture responds to sex differences there's a huge effect on whether this confidence deficit will be allowed to mushroom or not that's amazing I never thought about that it makes the sense that you mentioned there as well that different countries have different general confidence levels well, general confidence levels also confidence gaps you know the rich and privileged of any country will always be supremely confident the Americans are always very confident I kind of I wish sometimes we had more confidence in the UK you know sometimes critically or critic criticise Americans could be loud and all that but they do learn that in their education system not to be self deprecating you know we kind of like the self deprecating humor it's always kind of defending us but that kind of self deprecation can have its cost you know on our self confidence sometimes it's better not to be self deprecating to bite back the kind of oh this is probably a rubbish but these little verbal takes that serve to ward off the fear of criticism actually make us less confident and more importantly people less confident in us so if you're a new company and you're pitching to venture capital as we start up, the last thing you want to do is oh this is probably rubbish but they don't want to hear that they won't say I firmly this is an incredibly important concept I believe it's going to work you have to and that's the thing about confidence expressed even though there may be internal doubt if you express it externally as a social message it buys you status and if it buys you status that will then reflect itself in increasing your confidence because other people will accord you status so that's another way in which confidence is a self fulfilling prophecy because it makes you more persuasive and give you higher status you're muted sorry I was reading in the book you mentioned the easterland paradox which I think was you know that is it sort of the more happy you are, the more wealthy you are is this the same with confidence the more confident you are the more successful you are or the more successful you are the more confident you are both are true both are true and it's very interesting it's big American social mobility studies when they look at who moves when people move from smaller towns and rural areas to the big cities they tend to become richer the Dick Whittington story and when you ask when you look at who moves it's not the brightest not the smartest IQ wise the more confident and that confidence that confidence takes them, allows them to take that step into the unknown the leaving your hometown involves and maybe not knowing what you're going to do but you know your path appears with the first step and confidence allows you to take that first where do you think you fit on a level of like sort of confidence, super confident yeah, yeah so I grew up as a working class the council housing Glasgow I was very fortunate to grow up in the post war welfare policies that meant you got grants to go to university the social mobility was high in these days I'm an exemplar of social mobility I was very unconfident, very aware of my class status vis-a-vis friends when I was in the sea scouts friends in the sea scouts who came from private houses and I was very aware of that and slightly ashamed of my very modest council house and very lacking social confidence a lot, quite reasonable academic confidence I was fortunate to go to a really good school again, not me paying and but the thing is, so now having all the privileges of that education and the success, breathing success I'm pretty confident I'm pretty confident in most situations but I mean singing a choir asked me to sing solo in front of an audience I'd be as confident I couldn't do it so these things are domain specific and I wouldn't be that confident you know, I don't go out and blow everyone away a party I'm quite kind of stuck in the kitchen you know, kind of person used less depending on how much you have to drink but that's so confidence is learnable, it's hugely influenced by your career your social status and that's how you perceive your social status directly affect the density of the dopamine receptors in your brain's reward network so your social class or your perceived social class it changes the biology of your brain in ways so the lower your perceived social class the lower your mood the lower your motivation the higher your anxiety the lower your quality of life these social status profound effects on the biology of the brain and creates the behaviors assume or feel like biologically determined they're not largely biologically determined they're largely determined but the social gradient that you perceive yourself to be on there's one wonderful antidote to that and that is people who are objectively at a very low social status and see themselves as having a low social status otherwise they'll have low mood higher illnesses die sooner except if they have a sense of control if they perceive that they have a degree of control over their lives perhaps via family relationships via their community but that is a huge antidote to the negative effects of perceived social status on the brain's biology and confidence and control of course is the twin sister of confidence confidence makes you feel more in control both of the external world but also of the internal world if you go any more things that's amazing does that sort of help explain I'm not too sure whether this tracks elsewhere in the world but certainly in the UK there's a general feeling that people who go to private school tend to be much more confident than people who go to state schools absolutely 100% you're like really yes you're getting good education there'll be good education in public and private and state schools as well you're essentially buying two things you send your kid to public school one is contacts and the other is confidence CC that confidence is just I cannot exaggerate what a beneficial resource it is it just isn't like a magic elixir and I remember when I started in one of the courses I did and there was someone from I reasonable degree from Glasgow University it wasn't double first or anything I remember there was a colleague turned out to be a nice lad but he was from Oxford very confident outward spoke up all the time and came with a first from Oxford and all that and I remember just feeling diminished and kind of inferior and after about two months I realised that I was smarter than him you know and and not that he was maligned in any way it was the superficialities that he had turned and he was actually a really nice guy that became friendly with but these superficialities intimidated and if I had been a girl from Glasgow I would have been trebly intimidated by this and inhibited and wouldn't have experienced the huge kind of increase in confidence that comes from going to a brilliant educational institution where you're meeting brilliant people and you're able to test yourself that wonderful environment and so these you know I'm not saying I mean to look Oxford and Cambridge I'm working in Cambridge wonderful places, brilliant people but your average student from Cambridge it's fine but so is your average student from Glasgow or Leeds or Liverpool and what you get in Oxford and Cambridge particularly in public schools is the confidence and that's what three times of IQ I would say yeah I mean it's so interesting you say that I wonder whether could you speak to the Education Secretary and get them to do classes on confidence I mean it sounds like there are lots of things we don't learn in school that I think are very valuable to people in their lives I'll look for that if you give a child confidence if you give a child confidence you're setting them up for life and the trouble is the the two biggest two of the biggest determinants of confidence of your social class and your gender your sex you know also physical stature and physical appearance are very important as well but all of these things none of them are inevitable they're all there to play for because the real test of confidence is can you do it and particularly can you do it in spite of adversity because doing stuff in spite of adversity and doing it in spite of the anxiety that adversity causes gives a much tougher and more robust confidence we know the children for instance and young adolescents and your children and adolescents who have blessed knowing nothing but success in their lives best at sport, popular good academically we know that they end up on average more emotionally vulnerable as young adults than children and adolescents who have had some adversity not huge amounts there's a sweet spot of adversity that gives you a kind of emotional resilience because it's like being vaccinated it's like an emotional vaccine for example children who have a Saturday job end up more emotionally robust as young adults and children who don't because having a Saturday job you're rubbing up everyone's going to be treating you as well and as nicely as you've been used to and you're protected so that's why team sports involvement in groups things like I was in the sea scouts things like that really important rubbing up against people and learning not everything is sweet not everyone thinks you're wonderful sometimes horrible things happen to you and you get your mood goes down and you feel anxious but you don't treat that as a big disaster you say well yeah I'm anxious and fed up you know confidence if you treat these things properly confidence builds and makes you a tougher person I guess in the schooling context that probably would maybe work the same with boarding versus day as though when you're boarding you're taken out of your little comfort zone with your parents you're sort of forced in with a whole load of other people yeah yeah yeah I'm sure that's the case as long as it doesn't get you know how sometimes you can get to unhealthy environments can develop if you don't have the protection of an alternative right there's not much adversity there either too much adversity or systematic bullying or stuff like that that's the challenge but yeah some people really just find themselves thriving you know in that kind of context where they're not able just to run back to the protection of mommy and daddy I mean confidence before I read the book whenever I was thinking about it I'd often think about politics would probably be the space I'd go to immediately and you see the sort of dangers maybe have been overcome yeah that's the thing about confidence is this strange two-edged sword you know that it makes you more successful and success is the greatest source of success so it's like compound interest so a confident person can end up with huge status and all the resources wealth and rank and other things that go with status and that when that becomes too much that can go to people's head and in politics it without the constraints of good governance pre-press independent judiciary elections regulations and rules if you don't have these there's almost a totally predictable path five percent of people put in that position of having unfettered power engaging which is the kind of ghastly hubris and pathological narcissism of people like Putin and Trump and Kim Jong-un and the other tictators who are rising up unfortunately in the world at this moment this is an highly predictable effects of unfettered power in the brain the greatest brain-changer and that power leads to a kind of pathological overconfidence so you get you know Hitler I mean that's a Hamilton-Voke Hitler but Hitler and Napoleon both had such successes and the power went there had so much that they both committed the folly of invading Russia and they both brought them both down and Putin's done exactly the same in Ukraine so overconfidence is a trap and you get it in a less dramatic form in very successful CEOs for example very successful celebrities so much success helps the balance between approach and avoidance in the brain between challenge and threat that their self-awareness diminishes their perception of risk diminishes and their judgment gets scrambled and they do silly, bizarre things that's good to know and say I hope just like you can learn to be confident maybe they can learn to be slightly less confident well that's that lovely more adversity or something they need well that's why we need elections and free presses and free journalism you know and that's why these people try and systematically the first thing is they try and dismantle look at Netanyahu in Israel just now try and dismantle the independent judiciary try and dismantle other people try and dismantle the free press because A, it's a threat to your ego B, it's a threat to your freedom so these people are no volunteers it's like addiction it's very very similar to addiction to alcohol or drugs generally once you get addicted it's very people sell them kind of just voluntarily give it up usually they have to really hit the buffers in some way to suddenly bring an awareness to themselves of the damage they're causing to themselves and other but if you're a powerful leader you can change the world so that you're immune to that damage so Netanyahu has thousands of people who has Putin killed but he's immune to these effects and no one who's going to speak truth power Russia will end up coming out of a window so this is the real risk and if you're a CEO of a successful company if you're managing to woe the markets with your confidence I'm thinking if we work here in Adam kind of my second name but anyway we were the famous collapse of we work it was based on his charisma and his overconfidence which was actually not based on reality so these kind of commercial realities can pull people down but politics you can have a secret service you can be Maduro in Venezuela you can just keep things going because you have technology to control millions of people and your control of the army so it's a very very one of the biggest challenges to the world is how individual leaders become intoxicated with power and the the loss of faith and democracy and democratic processes is hugely worrying because these are the things that constrain power and of course we would just have to think of fear in China and just shake our heads that even the Chinese used to change their government every 10 years because they knew the power after 10 years does terrible things to people and now he's changed the rules he's staying on probably for life it's incredible I mean I know we're running out of time but would there be any sort of final tips you'd leave on confidence to find that right balance yeah I guess just I'd say as someone who knows what it's like not to be confident is to to really get into your mind that you can say to yourself I can do this and that this what about this is important so realise that just talking to yourself is not going to make you more confident but taking action in the world and just taking that the first step the roommate talks about and take a step for the sake of it without even knowing necessarily where that's taking you get into the habit of taking steps in spite of these doubts in spite of that anxiety and gradually get into the habit of setting goals for yourself to stretch your bit cause your bit of anxiety and do it in spite of that in spite of yourself and if you do that regularly you will steadily build your confidence absolutely incredible advice anyone listening we wish you all the best with that and the best tip would be to go and get your book how to as a person available at all good bookstores online and in the real world how confidence works by Ian Robertson and if you want to look up more about Ian and get in contact he's got a marvellous website as well it's inrobertson.org if I got that right and it's a wealth of information on there as well there's lots of incredible stories about Ian and yeah it's just been such an honour to chat with you today and thank you so much for sharing so many incredible tips and yeah what an honour, thank you thank you very much Chris really enjoyed talking to you thanks