 Good mental health, a regular podcast series that explores the tweets of behavior expert Dr. Neil Maranello. He's a Solutions-focused life coach in Woodstock, Vermont, with near six decades exploring the human condition. He joins us now on the show where our topic today is trust people to be themselves. And I have to tell you, Neil, I've had a lot to think about this one. But before we get into my thoughts, I want you to join us and share what is the theory behind this tweet? Trust people to be themselves. Well, I remember walking in on my mother who owned a, she lived in Miami Beach, but she owned what she called a taxpayer, which was an office building in Manhattan. And it had 10 offices in it. And she pointed to one of the offices and she said, this office is rented, but the office manager isn't telling me that it is. And I said to her, well, why don't you confront her about that? And she said, why would I do that? This way I know how she's cheating me. It took me a while to figure out that my mother really expected that everybody was going in one way or another, try to rip her off, and that she trusted that that was the case and that she trusted that she couldn't really trust anybody. My father had a slightly different attitude. He basically saw kids as stupid people who haven't learned yet how the world works and like to get away with stuff. The truth is that everyone has secrets and everyone's afraid of getting discovered. Everyone's afraid of being shamed. But everyone also has to live with themselves. My father actually knew that that was an important thing for each individual. And that was sort of the beginning of my understanding that people have ways of thinking, people have to explain to themselves what they do and what they say. And what they say to themselves, if I can understand that, makes them available to be changed. Otherwise, you're dealing with the traditional definition of insanity. You know, the idea that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting something different to happen as a result. The reality is that that that definition works. The best predictor of future behavior is always past behavior, unless you can change the way a person is thinking about their behavior. And that's the key from my perspective to learning how to trust people trusting people to be themselves is understanding their inner dialogue, understanding how they're talking to themselves and saying and doing whatever it might be possible that they can do that would change that dialogue so that their behavior in the future will be different because they'll have to talk to themselves differently. You know, for me, again, I have a completely different read on it as well. Being that I'm out here in in, you know, the real world, not that you're not but for me what was coming up was. To me that because I live in my own reality and what I see here and whatnot, I interpret that I may not see someone as they really are. And that may create a problem for me when I interact with this person, because I'm not seeing them as they really are. And yet, if I trust them to be themselves that opportunity for frustration from another person or whatnot, would be less. That's correct. And the difference between you and me and that is that my job is to explain what a person is saying to themselves while they're doing something that I don't understand. And so, if I don't understand it, I feel like I'm the one who's screwing up. I'm not inside that person's head. I don't understand how they perceive themselves. When someone lets you down when you feel betrayed when in one way or another, you feel astounded by something someone does. You have the reaction that most people have the reaction I have is how did I screw up. How did I not understand what that person is saying to themselves and how can I explain to myself, what that person is saying to themselves. And again, just, you know, kind of even extrapolating on on it a little bit. You know, I think there are fewer people who actually do know themselves, and more people who have probably a skewed vision of who they are. And as an example, I'll just bring that back to me. I always like to think that I'm very punctual. And, you know, 2pm is 2pm. It's not 205. It's not 210. And yet, I, a number of years ago, I had someone, you know, kind of put it back to my face to say, Well, no, Matt, you're not always punctual. I've been late a number of times. And so that was a wake up call for me about my own behavior that I was not aware of and had a skewed vision of who I was as someone who was punctual. So again, that to me seems to be able to feed into this, this theory, you know, to trust people to be themselves, even when they themselves aren't fully aware of who they are and what their behavior is. But it's less punctual if you hadn't had that rule. In my business. I live by the clock. If I'm even five minutes late for anything. There's something wrong. I'm either dead or my clock isn't working. The. But what you say to yourself. In order to explain your behavior is the key. If you want to go directly to how you think or how, how others think we each grow up with with parents who we tend to put on a pedestal. And I know I grew up with seeing my father as a God. And it took me a long time to understand what his particular problems were. My guess is from my knowledge of you that you grew up getting inside your father's head, watching him, seeing how he thought, and not realizing that some of the ways he thought we're pretty screwed up. And it's interesting in that regard only because you know I was born in the early 1960s and I would be a child of a Korean war veteran. And if you look at people probably from my generation and perhaps even a little bit before, we are the children of servicemen from World War two and the Korean war. And more than likely they came back somewhat maladjusted, let's just say, based on what they saw and what they were forced to do in, in times of war. Like PTSD or whatever stars that they carried from that experience that it translated down into how that they raised their children. So again, you know, trust people to be themselves and, you know, I think we grow up thinking that the people who are supposed to love us the most are supposed to protect us the most. You know, speaking on my behalf and I'm sure more on my generation we grew up with violence in the household, probably as a result of these men not being able to process what they've been through. Yes, yes, remember PTSD did not exist in the early 60s. And it was a sign of being more feminine than masculine to not deal with your own problems. And the ways of dealing with your problems had to do with alcohol had to do with denying the violence that you would witness that experienced had to do with the approach avoidance relationship with guns. When you're growing up, and you're witnessing your father's approach to the world. It comes from that subculture that he grew up in. And there happened to be in the second world war, and that was very much of a different upbringing and war than the Korean War. And of course the, the war that I grew up during was the Vietnam War. Each the, but the, the concept of being a man and being masculine and what it means to be a man which always even up until recently did not involve ever seeing a shrink. In fact, that was a sign of being more female than now, being, you know, limp wrist or whatever that was. I grew up as I did in a culture in which having any kind of same sex leanings was considered to be totally terrible. And my guess is that you saw that in your father's thinking by studying him, and you didn't see what was wrong with it. Wow. But, you know, as I look at this, you know, trust people to be themselves are subject matter today. I just see how again, oftentimes we're all looking with rose colored glasses that we want to see the best of somebody. Because I think that's the human condition, isn't it, to, to, you know, ascribe certain characteristics to the other that we're interacting with, given that for most of us, we have that trait to want to see the best in others. When in fact, maybe it's not there, or, or, or whatnot. Well, not if you're my mother. I think the expectation creates reality. One of the first experiences that I had when I first went to college was this is 1961 was experiments done by a guy named Rosenthal. And Rosenthal had a bunch of randomly chosen mice that he was running through mazes. And he then chose a bunch of graduate students. And he gave half of the randomly chosen mice to the graduate students and said to some of them said to that, that half the graduate students. These are specially bred maize bright grass. These, these have been bred for generations to run through mazes very fast. And then he gave another half of the randomly chosen rats. Excuse me mice to the graduate students, other graduate students said, these are specially bred maize dull rats. And he had them then time them running through mazes. And sure enough, it was recorded that the rats, the mice that were supposed to be able to run through the mazes were timed as running through much faster than the rats that were supposed to be maize dull. All of which made sense because his hypothesis was that expectation creates reality. And the graduate students were pushing the stopwatch a little later on some of them a little earlier on others. Then, however, he got another group of graduate students and he had them actually time the, the mice running through the, the mazes and he found that the mice that were supposed to be maize bright actually were running through the mazes faster than they might still were supposed to be maize dull. And in other words, somehow the graduate students were communicating in the way they were handling the mice, whether they were supposed to be smarter That started me on understanding how you can create expectations, even with an animal, just by what you expect to happen. And it began fascinating me with this concept that that if you expect someone to be a certain way they tend to be that way. And that, that moves it further into the idea of understanding what's going on inside the mind of the person that you're talking to. You know, and this just to me brings up, you know, quantum physics which are actually proving exactly what you just stated here that expectations can affect outcomes. That's exactly right. What you expect to happen is more likely to happen because you expect it to happen. It's the same basic concept of what you attend to changes the thing you're attending to. And I would say that you know if we're putting this into today's context, you know, this is a real good example of racism in that if you have a certain expectation of a minority group or any group for that matter that more than likely you're going to be proven right because your expectation of that behavior is dictating an outcome, and whether that that is, you know, accurate on a larger scale or not, but it's your perception that forms that reality. And what changes that is the capacity for empathy. And you actually get inside the mind of someone else, and you realize that they're just like you, in most ways, it changes your perception of yourself and your racism or your particular attitudes towards things. An excellent example was a, I believe it was an Israeli woman who was, I'm not sure whether it was an Israeli woman or it doesn't matter but it was an Israeli woman or whether it was a Palestinian woman. And basically what happened was a bomb killed her brother. And she then found out who had set off the bomb, and without telling them, joined the family of the people who had set off the bomb, and got they got to know her she got to know them, of course she didn't tell them that she was actually on the other side. And then finally she did, and it blew their minds, because they began to realize hey, she's just like us. Right. And, you know, I have a similar story that I recall where again, Palestinians and Israelis thought the other were, you know, monsters, I mean, literally not human. And it was only when they started interacting with each other that they realized, oh, you don't have a tail, or you're not a monster. So, again, yet in their mind and in their perception that was what the other was. And that is the key to what you were talking about before, having an optimistic perspective of things, because it is important to people to live with themselves. And it's important to them to have something they say to themselves while they're doing, they were saying other things to other people. And once you actually get inside the head of another person, once you actually understand how they're thinking, and you see how similar is to how you're thinking when you see that they have secrets, and they want to they don't want to be exposed and shamed any more than you do. It becomes much more of a possibility for you to actually change your racism, your, your good guy, bad guy attitudes, your way of looking at the worlds that bifurcates it that turns everything into a dichotomous way of perceiving things. It's much more complicated than that. And it's much simpler than that. It's much different from anybody else. We're all special people in the sense that we're all have our own way of thinking and looking at things and understanding how somebody thinks and looks at things can be easily determined by just watching what they say and do. Everybody tells you who they are by their behavior. The topic again is trust people to be themselves for me though I, this, this is, I think for children, this is innately difficult and, and by children I mean, you know those up to 15 years old, only because they're, they're not able to differentiate and there is that trust. And, you know, when I was looting to, you know, children of my generation who grew up with violence in the house, that that, in essence, set a behavior pattern, but also a, I don't know how to explain it other than to say that a lack of trust if you will. Again, that those that they thought loved them the most would act out in violence towards them. It's very clear that happened to you. Well, and, and if I can share that a little bit, you know, through the work that you and I have done. And through conversations that I had with my father after, you know, a lot of work that we've done, I came to find out. You killed yourself. Well, yes, actually after that. The truth is that you killed yourself you just happened to survive. I killed a part of myself. And who was it the trigger. Was it you or was it the part of you that was your father. Boy, that's a that's another topic for another discussion but my point being here that, you know, my father shared with me that all his life. He wanted to be a soldier, of course, because he grew up when World War two was going on and, you know, children of that era idolized army men. And so did society, if you will. And so he grew up. What, I think that was true with my father also. Yeah, volunteer to join the army, even though he didn't have to. Wow. And so my father, you know, that's what he wanted to be and then he went to the Korean War, and had an eye opening experience about what the terror of serving during wartime is. And he recounted a story where he was on a ridge and he and a fellow gunner were seeing just these hordes of Chinese coming at them and all they had was a, you know, a mounted gun. And they ran away, they ran down the mountain because they were so terrified at the horde that was coming at them. When they were running away, they realized, oh, we left the gun there. And so they had to go back run back up the mountain, get the gun, and, again, run away. And from a very far distant distance, a general or a colonel or something like that saw the second half, where they ran up, grab the gun, and then took it away. And he was awarded a bronze star and a purple heart for that, you know, valiant effort. And yet, in his mind, he was a coward. And I think that shame really was in him for the rest of his life, and that probably dictated then his behavior to his children that he was so ashamed of. He was ashamed of himself in the time of when he was most called upon for courage, and he failed that and that sense of shame dictated the way he behaved to his children and his wife for the rest of his life. And that's very, very sad. You know, had he seen me at that time, I would have said to him, Why did you run back up with cowardice. Yeah. Yeah. And so I just I think it's interesting that yet here as a as a child I certainly didn't know one. I mean I only realized that and probably the last two years of his life that he was able to share that. And so, I mean after you killed yourself. Right, right. But as a as a child I certainly didn't know that and couldn't understand why the violence was in the household. I certainly can understand it and certainly through the work with you. But I certainly at that young age, you know, I'm trusting someone to be themselves but I have a very skewed awareness of who and what he was. You're trusting him to be a role model you're trusting him to be who you want to grow up to be. And so you're getting inside his head trying to think the way he thinks, trying to be like him, modeling your behavior after him. I'm saying this because I did the same thing with my father. I happened to luck out because my father had a different experiences during the war than yours. At the same time. The simple reality is that nobody's perfect. And when you put somebody on a pedestal, you have to deal with the part of you that knows there's something wrong with them. And again, you know our topic trust people to be themselves. And I'm always reminded, when we do these sessions, how it all comes back around to some of the things we've talked about before because it's all about expectations again, managing expectations. Yes, and the key to that is understanding what our thinking is, and whether it's accurate or not. I am concerned about truth. I am concerned about reality. Both of those are variables. Both of those change from moment to moment. And until you understand that you don't have the ability to let go of your delusions of those false beliefs that you think need to control your life. Many of those false beliefs are passed on to us by our parents. And we just accept it. You know, why wouldn't we, these giants that seem to be in control of our world are saying this is the way it is. That may or may not be the way it is it may be the way it is for them. And once you understand that that's the way it is for them, you can begin trusting people to be themselves and looking at what the differences between who they are, and who you are. It's interesting because again, I'm going to bring it back to me here on an issue and that one of the things that I'm struggling with right now is, you know, I'm very successful right now in a new business that I've started this past year. And I'm a little bit overwhelmed right now so I'm stressing out a little bit over it because it is so successful. And it's taking so much time. And I'm aware of my patterns and my past behavior. And so what's coming up is that I see the excitement that I had when I initially started my, my business diminishing, and that can usually trigger a behavior where it's like screw it and you throw it all away. And want to go on to the next new exciting thing. And so I have to be very careful to again try to manage my own expectations and be aware of my own behavior here from the past that again this is very much in my pattern here. I'm quite cognizant that I really don't want to throw it away and screwed up because you know I am quite pleased with what I've created but again, I'm a little concerned at my past behavior and how that may come to dominate my future actions. One of the ways of doing that is to recognize that you're in the process of becoming your own man. I see adolescence as a three stage process, rebellion, age 1314 confusion age 1516 and identity formation age 1718. Of course I've had people 75 years old in my office, who were still not past the confusion stage. The, the most important thing to me is that when you hit the identity formation stage, you basically are trying to decide how you're going to be like and how you're going to be different from the same sex parent. And in your case, because of the fact that you survived killing yourself, and you had an opportunity to actually get to know your father, and watch him change, because of the effect of your killing yourself had on him. Yeah, you then got to become more your own man, and get in touch with how you're different from your father, and how you want to be different from them. And that means that you're now at a stage of becoming your own person. And that means you're dealing with your patterns, the patterns that are characteristic of you as a man, not as a boy, not as your father, but as a separate individual. And that gives you the opportunity to change your expectations to change the way you're thinking about yourself, and to become even more of a man, because you've already superseded your father. Well, I know that, you know, I've had the opportunity to go down a literally list, all the jobs I've had and I've had over 60 different jobs. And you know I talked to some other people and they're like, gee, I've had more. And you know I'm not even yet 60. So, you know when we look at that, you know and I see that pattern. I'm, I'm loathe to repeat it. And so I'm just so pleased that you and I are again consulting on a regular basis so that I can come to this awareness of this pattern, and be able to talk with you about it. And to help me achieve what I truly seek, which is fulfillment professionally and, and to be able to support myself financially. And, and to actually be in service. Well, the person that you are is someone who succeeds at something, and then gets bored. Yeah. I know I have a low threshold of boredom, you know, right. When you get bored, you tend to self sabotage. True. And what I think is necessary is for you to recognize that there's an awful lot more to life than earning a living. And if the way that you're choosing to earn a living happens to be working. That's good. Especially because in the new business that you have you're actually helping people. Right, and totally good. Yeah, and, and this sort of kind of goes back to expectation and event and then also, again, what we perceive. And, and I can see in that, you know, I had been asking for a number of years to how can I be of service. And then this opportunity presented itself which is a 180 degree difference from anything I've done previously. Being of service is a wonderful thing. At the same time, it has nothing to do with money. Exactly. And, and, and so what I was getting from it initially is diminishing in its excitement or reward for me. Is this experience rewarding for you. It is for me. Well, yeah, I love what you and I do. Okay, so we're not getting paid for it either of us. And we're being of service. I don't know how many people are going to see these, you know, now or sometime in the future. Yeah, it's very exciting to me to think that very possibly after I'm dead someone will watch one or all of these podcasts and get something from it that changes their lives. That's being of service. Do you think that that isn't a human characteristic, the desire to be of service. Everybody wants to feel good about themselves. Everybody wants to explain their behavior in a way which makes them feel like they are being of service in some way. Unfortunately, some of the ways people explain their behavior as being of service involves hurting other people. And from my perspective, any hurting of other people unnecessarily is something that is suspect. And, you know, kind of going back to shame is, is, is that part of it too in terms of, you know, you and I talked about my shame, certainly a lot in the work that we've done. And is this desire to be of service, you know, the desire to basically overcome shame. And there are good ways of doing that. And not so good ways. The good ways of doing it are basically saying, I'm going to make up for the mistakes I've made in the past, and for the shame that I experienced from mistake from those mistakes by doing things in the future. And so that changes that definition of insanity. And it says, I am going to be different in the future than I was in the past and here's how. And if you make the change in a way which helps people more than hurts them, then you're moving in the right direction. And we're speaking here with Dr. Neil Miranello is a solutions focused light coach and behavior expert with near six decades, exploring the human condition you can follow Dr. Neil on Twitter at coach Dr. Neil or topic for today's podcast is trust people to be themselves Neil, share more about that that theory of this. It's been very, very rewarding to me because when I see someone behave in a way or say or rationalize their behavior in a way which doesn't make sense to me, which allows them to hurt other people unnecessarily. And I need to understand what they're saying to themselves that allows them to do that. So for example, in one case, I had a guy who made a deal with his mother to take over a business that she created at the expense of his siblings. And the result of that was that he wound up making the money and running the business into the ground and the siblings wound up losing 10s of thousands of dollars as a result. And I remember being very angry at him at the same time trying to understand how did he perceive that, how did he allow himself give himself permission to do that to basically screw his brothers and sisters. And, and when I talked to him he said well I guess Neil that you and I have different worldviews. I see myself as a businessman. And as a businessman that's an appropriate thing for me to do. And I realized that his definition of a businessman involved it's being okay to screw your buddy. Good. Once I understood that it became possible for me to talk to him without being furious. And for me again I, I think it. One of the things that was coming up as you were sharing that is that we have to be really careful about what we perceive, because it will, it can be conceived that in that it sort of goes back, as if we perceive a certain group or a certain individual to have certain traits and characteristics, you're going to see that that person does have it, because that is what you have put out there in the universe. And it's a, it's a very cause and effect type of relationship. And, and in a sense, it's where I'm sort of now in this place where I see abundance and pride where others see disparity and inequality. And if that's what they're putting out there to the universe the universe is going to respond in kind and show that to them. Yeah, I think that the, the basic principle and we've talked about this, almost every single podcast we've had is everything is projection. And if it's only about anything, you're probably screwed up about that. And if you feel like somebody is a bad person. That prevents you from seeing what the reality is, because that person, however bad the things are they're doing is saying something to themselves, which makes sense to them. You have to understand what they're saying to themselves, it becomes possible to change it, but you have to get past your own bowl. In order to see that you have to say okay I feel strongly about that, because I feel strongly about that. I'm probably not being fair to that person I'm probably not truly understanding what their experience of the world is. If I understand it from their perspective, then I can change them. And then by the way, that changes me to right right and and so as you're saying this, the thing that was coming up for me was like the placebo and the no sebo effect you have spoken about before to me, and, and, you know, science is actually proving again which you know share a little bit about that as as as it relates to this. Well, during the I don't know whether I used this example before but during the Second World War, there are a lot of things that the German scientists were doing, which was anathema horrible stuff. One of the things that they did was to tell somebody that they were going to drain his blood, and when and when the, and it was in a transparent thing that the person could see, and they said when, when your blood level reaches this point. You will be very tired when it reaches this point you will pass out and when it reaches this point you will be dead. And they didn't drain one drop of his blood but he believed it. And sure enough, when it reached the first point, he got tired when it reached the second point. He passed out and when it reached the third point he was dead. That's how powerful a no sebo can be. And, and so we're, you know, talking here and sharing about how to, you know, put that into your everyday life. I think it's important to visualize good mental health, as we say or good overall health. And that even, you know, cancer, for an example, may in fact, not even be in your body, it's more in your mind and then it manifests in your body. Yes, yes, I have dealt with many people who were supposedly dying of cancer. Sometimes I've been successful sometimes I haven't, but the key to it is helping them to visualize and helping them to identify with the cancer cells helping them to find a way to deal with those cancer cells that brings them rather than to themselves. And one of my earliest cases was a case of a woman who had been given six months to live. And I work with her, I had her talking to the parts of her that had cancer I had her becoming those parts, switching chairs and dealing with it. And in fact, that woman is still alive now. And that was over 30 years ago. However, when someone who particularly wanted to cause trouble for me said, you can't continue to see her anymore. In order for her children to get the care that they need. I went through a huge reaction. And I was curious. I cured her of cancer. Of course I didn't cure cancer she cured herself I just set up the environment in which you could do that. And it taught me a lot about my own narcissism. Wow. Well, and, you know, Abraham Hicks, if you've ever followed her or the listening audience out there, have ever followed her on, you know, she talks about how to visualize the experience of what you want. If you want to win a lottery, you know, actually visualize what it feels like, and to experience the feeling of having that extreme wealth and being in that experience will actually draw the event to you. Yeah, I don't believe that. And what I do believe, though, is that you give yourself a good experience, and you feel good about yourself, but the actual ability to control the future, I think is based on your ability to see the now, in terms of the way the past fits it. Nobody can predict the future, but you can experience now in a way that allows you to see what might happen. If you look at the way the past fits into the present. You can actually experience the now as it is occurring. You can have a pretty good idea of what's likely to happen. If I see myself, as I do most of the time as a catalyst, as somebody that connects with people at a particular point in their life, joins with them, and then make certain moves and changes things, and then gets out of the picture. And that just seemed to get better after that. And that's what a catalyst does, but you have to be aware of all the variables, or enough of the variables that are operating at the moment. It's very easy to get distracted by a variable that you're very emotional about. And that, to me, is the key to my effectiveness. To the extent that I can see myself as others see me, I can understand what power others are given to me, are giving to me, and then I can use that power to help them change themselves, and then get out of the picture. Wonderful. Final thoughts on our topic here today. Trust people to be themselves. It seems like, again, it all comes back to expectation and perceptions, which again, as you said, is almost a constant theme in this podcast series. Yes, it is. And the more, if I've been putting in six decades on this business, it's exactly that it's understanding myself. The more I understand myself, the more I understand other people. As we started off, and I think the first podcast, there's no part of anybody that's not a part of me. If I don't get in touch with the part of me that can be like the person I'm talking to, I'm screwing up. And it becomes very important to me to be able to become the person I'm talking to and predict their behavior, based on their own past history, and what I'm telling myself. Wonderful. Dr. Neil Maranello, he's a behavior expert with near six decades exploring the human condition. He's a solutions focused life coach in Woodstock, Vermont. And he's been tweeting for a number of years on Twitter. We're examining a number of those tweets in his podcast series. You can follow the good doctor on Twitter at coach Dr. He's been talking about him personally as well. If you feel you'd like to enjoy the benefit of his personal consult I can speak highly to his expertise, having been a client of his off and on for the past two and a half decades. On behalf of Dr. Neil Maranello on that Kelly we're both wishing you good mental health.