 Well, welcome Dave, you know, funny in reading this book because expectations and mindset is 80% of everything, right? And Henry Ford said it best, if you think you can or can't, you're correct, right? And so that means that we need to be putting a lot of our energy to getting our mind right. And expectations are a large part of that. So can you tell us what got you interested in this topic and why you put the book together? I guess, you know, I'm a science writer, that's my background. And you can't really be a science journalist without covering the placebo effect, you know, it's just constantly there in every study you cover. And you know, I'd always been fascinated by that how actually, you know, recent research shows that the placebo effect can often bring about real objective change. So it's not just about people's moods improving or them kind of trying to please the experimenter. You actually do see some physiological change. So someone believes they're taking a painkiller, you know, they actually, their brains start producing his own opioids. So that had really fascinated me. But the thing that really made me want to write this book actually was a personal experience. And that was when I was going through quite a difficult time in my life. And I was given this course of antidepressant pills. And my doctor, you know, as they're obliged to do told me about some of the side effects, which include having really bad headaches. And straight away, I started getting these headaches and, you know, it's quite debilitating while I was struggling to kind of do my work. But actually, pure coincidence, I was writing an article about a phenomenon that's related to the placebo effect called the nocebo effect. And that's the negative placebo effect, if you will. It's the evil twin. It means that if you expect to become ill, if you expect to have some kind of symptom, you do develop that often. And again, it's linked to physiological changes. Now looking into that article, I found that lots of the headaches that people experience when they're taking all kinds of pills, including antidepressants, are often caused by the nocebo effect. So you can tell that because people who are taking a dummy pill, but believing it to be the real drug, also experienced those headaches. And finding that out was amazing because it meant that, you know, open my mind to the possibility the pain wasn't inevitable, and then the pain vanished. And that just got me so fascinated in how else are our expectations shaping our lives in ways we don't even realize, because that pain to me felt totally real. It wasn't imagined. It's not like I was making it up. And so, yeah, that kind of got me down this huge rabbit hole. And then eventually, eight years later, became the expectation effect of the book. What would you say the expectation effect is if you could just give a quick summary for the audience? Right. Yeah. So I mean, the placebo effect is one type of expectation effect, but my definition is that it's the phenomenon where our beliefs create self-fulfilling prophecies through free, main, but potentially intersecting mechanisms. And they are changes to our perception, changes to our behavior, and changes to our physiology. And that can happen in all areas of life, not just in medicine with the placebo and nocibo effects, but with our reactions to exercise, to a new diet, in education, even how we age can be shaped by expectation effects through these three different mechanisms. And there's a lot of influence on those beliefs, both internal from our own thoughts and feelings, but then external from group and from marketing. So you think about a lot of these pharmaceutical commercials and they'll list these severe side effects and they're forced to do it by law. But then oftentimes you think, well, why would I want to take a drug that makes me feel that way? And I'm being externally influenced by marketing and media. So what does the science show us about the internal expectations that are created and then the external from media and other people that we're related to? Yeah. So I mean, the kind of theory behind the expectation effect is that the brain is acting as this kind of prediction machine. So it's constantly building these simulations of the world around it. It evolved this way because that's actually a very effective way of processing the messy sensory data that we have. So if you could actually see the patterns of light that are falling on your retina, it would be very different from what you're actually experiencing in your visual consciousness because the brain is doing a lot of slicing and dicing of that data and sometimes filling in blind spots or ambiguities. And it's doing that through these simulations. Similarly, the brain is using these simulations to prepare the body for the challenges it's going to face. So that is where the physiological expectation effects come in. Now, when the brain is building these simulations, it's going to draw on all of your life's experiences. Whenever you've been in a similar context, it's going to draw on all of those to try to predict what's going to happen next. And that happens with other animals. We know that other animals can experience expectation effects through processes like conditioning. But humans have this broader capacity for culture. We have things like language. We have symbols and symbols are meaningful. Words are meaningful. Words can bring into mind all of these different associations. And so that's where things like advertising come into because actually we're immersed in culture and our culture is then shaping our prediction machine and the calculations that it's performing. And I think for a lot of us, it isn't conscious, right? So we aren't aware of this. If we haven't studied this, we haven't looked at the science and we're being pushed and pulled in all these different ways. And oftentimes these expectations can keep us from behaviors or actions that could help us, could improve our life, could allow us to lose the weight, could allow us to have a great workout, could allow us to perform on an athletic front or on a stage or even socially in connecting with other people. So for you, what was that initial breakthrough like when you realized this expectation effect was happening for you internally? And then how did it change the way you approach some of these situations where expectations have been limiting you? Yeah, I mean, it was totally liberating actually because I think what comes across really strongly in this research is that we care about all of these beliefs about ourselves that we just assume are true without really interrogating them. So one for me was assumed I wasn't really good at exercise. Like I didn't have sporty jeans. And, you know, so I was kind of conscientious about going to the gym. Like I really tried to get fit, but it was always quite an ordeal for me. Like my workouts, you know, were really like not pleasant. I didn't enjoy it at all. And I didn't make like great progress. Like I'm sure it was good for my body, but like I didn't feel like I was really getting a lot out of it in terms of like building strength or stamina. But then what the research kind of made me question was, well, was that objectively true or is it just because I had bad experiences in gym class at school? And actually I was like the youngest kid in my year and I was quite short for my age, but most of the time I was doing physical education lessons. So I was always going to be kind of near the bottom of the kind of running order in races. So I started thinking about that. I looked into the research on fitness and, you know, we really do see quite strongly that people's beliefs about the natural fitness can shape the whole experience of a workout. So when people are given sham feedback about the jeans they carry, whether they have like a good sporty version of the Kreb one jean or whether they have the bad couch potato version that shapes not just their stamina on the treadmill, but also physiological processes like how efficient the lungs are at releasing carbon dioxide and bringing in oxygen and, you know, also things like how comfortable you feel subjectively what your perceived exertion is. And yeah, so then I just kind of started to question those beliefs. I kind of looked into the science and you know, the science is quite obvious that like I don't have a disability. I don't have anything like wrong with my body. So I it's just I am going to benefit from exercise and I am going to kind of get fit or stronger and I did, you know, like it really helped. I managed to reframe some of the sensations I was experiencing too. So whereas in the past when I kind of became breathless on the treadmill, I'll have this kind of negative self talk, like telling myself that, you know, like, oh, you're a failure. Like you're just not cut out. But there's like, you know, you're always going to be a slob or whatever. I just kind of tried to reframe that and saw the breathlessness, the aching, the pains as being like, you know, that is just the experience of exercise of pushing your body to its current limit and building strength and building stamina is actually a sign of growth. And what the research shows is that when you reframe your feelings in that way, you see the pains that you're going for as a sign of growth. That actually encourages the brain and to produce these endorphins that give you that's run as high. So it actually makes the exercise more pleasant before and afterwards. And that is exactly what I found. So now working out is really one of my favorite things. It couldn't be a bigger transformation for me. I was just talking to our X factor members yesterday on our group call. And I was discussing this, this very thing and how that belief reshaped the way I engaged with the gym. So up through my through my middle of my 30s, I was working out regularly, but I hated it. I did it begrudgingly. I did it because I knew I had to and that there was benefits for it. But I dragged my ass there every morning. And of course, being there in that attitude, wow, I'd fool around with some stuff. I'm due to the workouts that I knew and I would leave. And of course, I had plateaued because that was my approach and I had used that approach for so long. And it was also around that time that I had got into guys like David Goggins and some more belief structuring stuff. And I had gotten into my head and I think it was through a few different people. But the idea and belief that came out of that for me was that that if I was to sacrifice one hour a day to completely hating life, right, to be at my best physically and mentally, wouldn't that be worth it? And I was like, that's a fair deal to sacrifice an hour of my day to be at my physical and mental best. And the minute I adopted that idea, how I approached the gym completely changed. Now it wasn't begrudgingly. Now it was an accepted sacrifice for a certain result. And that I was excited about going into the gym because I liked the return on that investment. And it was just an idea that formulated that just retrained and reframed how I viewed that. And of course, at that point, AJ and I had signed up for a half marathon. And I was saying yes to more physical workouts than ever before. And I was excited about all the workouts. And but it was that switch. And of course, it just it changed the whole way I engaged and thought about it. Yeah, I mean, that's very similar to my experience. And I think there's like you say, there's different ways that you can reframe this. But I think, you know, what you don't want to do is to go to the gym carrying kind of a sense of shame, maybe of your current performance or resentment like you were saying, you know, it's much better to frame it as growth as a kind of positive challenge rather than a responsibility. You know, all of these things are very important. Well, the concept that you brought up in the book, you stress, I think is really relevant here because a lot of times the way we frame the physical pain or reframe the discomfort, it could either be the worst thing in the world, it could be a sacrifice, it could be war. I've heard some trainers call it or it could be growth. It could be progress. It could be fuel to reach that next speed. And oftentimes we believe as a culture that it's really your muscles that are dictating the plateau. It's your performance. We're all performing at our best. When in actuality, your brain is governing all of these behaviors and keeping you in the state of a safety zone, a comfort zone based on past experiences and not actually allowing your muscles to go to true failure, to sheer exhaustion. You're being protected by your mind. And if you can shift the way you view that stress, that pain that you're feeling around working out, you can actually use it to fuel higher levels of performance. Yeah, I mean, that's the leading very here for why that particular expectation effect works the way it does. And it's because, you know, the brain is a prediction machine. It's really, you know, it's taking care of you and it's trying to prevent you from injuring yourself during your workouts. So it's kind of trying to balance, you know, what it thinks your physical resources are, what it thinks your muscles can take, how much glucose it thinks is going around in your body. And then it's kind of weighing that up against the physical demands that it thinks you're going to face. And it's always going to come in kind of conservative because it doesn't want to reach total exhaustion where you might have a serious kind of breakdown or injury. Now, what we're doing with these reframing exercises is we're not, you know, like completely moving the dial because that would be dangerous if you were like totally overoptimistic and your brain's not really going to allow you to do that. But we are just shifting it in the right direction. We're stopping it being so overly conservative and just allowing ourselves to make the most of the resources we do have. And that's why, you know, reframing works, but also sports placebos work like a lot of sports supplements when they're compared to placebos don't work any better. It's the belief of that they're going to work rather than the active ingredient that tends to be best. So, yeah, you know, it's kind of it is mind over muscle here. It really is the fact that your brain is kind of, yeah, it's calling the shots when it comes to exercise. And a lot of those feelings that we have around exercise could also happen on the stage before a job interview, before a networking event. We label it social anxiety or, you know, fear of public speaking. And there's a really interesting observation around athletes who view that as a good thing like the butterflies mean I'm going to perform at my best and the blood is pumping and I'm ready to release more glucose into my muscles versus those who view the butterflies as like a sign that things are going to go poorly or they're going to fail again or they're really going to struggle. Just that understanding that whatever physiological feeling is coming up for you around the stress response, you can label it in a way that actually allows you to perform better or worse. That's really under your control. Yeah, exactly. But I think we were talking about, you know, advertising of like drug side effects, but actually I think a lot of the media is selling us this idea that stress is just inherently bad for you, that it's dangerous, you know, it's going to give you a heart attack that's going to damage your performance. Like if you feel anxious before a talk, you're going to fail basically. So you have to be super chilled. That's the message that we're receiving. But that doesn't make sense from an evolutionary point of view, like the stress response evolved because it's meant to enhance your performance. And right. And it's not like I don't believe that we just have this kind of fight or flight or nothing stress response. It's like, it's, you know, it's got these graduations, like it's a subtle nuanced thing. And what the research shows is that when you do reframe stress, if you looked at it as this kind of meaningful emotion that's telling you that something is really personally important for you. And then you recognize that those physiological sensations you're having, that the butterflies in your stomach, you know, the racing heart, that they're actually serving a purpose. The racing heart is pumping oxygen to your brain and to your muscles to make sure you've got enough fuel to do the task ahead. If you do that reframing and see the stress essentially being a sign of growth and improvement and being enhancing and energizing, then what you see is you have a healthier stress response. So you don't go full vital flight for what you do have is just an enhanced performance. You know, if you're giving a talk, you're kind of focused, but also able to think more freely, more creatively. You're you're on the ball rather than being kind of so terrified you feel paralyzed. And we see that in all kinds of areas, not just public speaking, not just sports, but even, you know, graduate students taking really tough exams when they reframe their stress in this way and realize that their anxiety can work for them. They perform much better, especially on the types of questions that we're going to cause the highest levels of anxiety. So, yeah, reframing stress, seeing this potential for use stress is incredibly powerful, in my opinion. Great point, David. And that's exactly why we encourage all of our audience to get their influence index score with us. So they have an understanding of themselves and how far they can go on this journey. And for those of you who are listening to the show right now and want to get that, you can get it at thearticharm.com. And one of the big breakthroughs for our clients and our programs is this understanding that those physiological responses that we're talking about, maybe it's sweaty palms, maybe it's an increased heart rate, maybe it's feeling cold all of a sudden because you're sweating. It's not as noticeable to the audience or the person you're talking to it is to you. But if all you do is focus on the physiological response, it's very hard for you then to focus on the communication, the talk, being on stage, the interviewer, or the first date. And if you actually realize the other person isn't observing those physiological responses that you're feeling and you can move beyond being hung up on those physiological responses, you can actually perform better for exactly the reason you said. You're having more blood flowing. You're actually getting more oxygen to your brain. You're harnessing all of your body's resources to perform at your best. But we have to focus on the right thing. We can't focus on the sweatiness or the breathing that we're feeling or the intense heat that might be coming on us in those moments where we're feeling this response physiologically. And through our video work exercise, we actually show them on video that it's not noticeable. Although they're feeling this intense response internally, it's not noticeable to the audience. We're not observing it at all. In fact, we're observing what they're saying, the way they're communicating, their body language, far more than any of those internal signals. And it takes a bit of exposure to those internal signals, I should say, to realize, okay, I can do this. Now I just have to put focus on the areas that are more impactful to the task at hand, the test, the interview, the first date. Yeah, I mean, I've experienced that myself. So I gave a TED talk, a TEDx talk last year. And like normally, so through reframing stress, I've learned to be quite comfortable with public speaking, like I normally quite enjoy it. But there was something about standing on that red dot that I found it was almost because it felt a bit imprisoning that you can't move very much. And it's, anyway, I did have a bit of a stress response and I felt like my leg was shaking. And I was like, for the first like 30 seconds, I thought, oh God, this is gonna be so visible. It's gonna be terrible. And then like you said, I was like, well, I just have to accept that like whatever's happening down there, I'm just gonna ignore that and try to focus on what I'm saying and communicating my message and getting that, you know, introducing the science of the expectation effect in the best way I could. And, you know, this shaking kind of stopped eventually and you know, all went fine. Then I looked back at the video and like what felt like this huge kind of tremor wasn't visible on the clip at all. So yeah, it was much worse in my head than it was ever gonna be in real life. But on the same subject, you know, I've seen some really good research showing that even if people do detect some of these signs of nerves, so even if they can hear a little tremble in your voice or see the hands of itching a bit more than you might want them to. People, it's not just that they're forgiving of that. They actually do see you as being more appealing and likable because it's such a relatable, understandable response to giving a public talk or to going to a job interview. Like people in general just aren't judging you on those things in the way that we feel. Like the reality is really as bad as we think it will be. Well, the other thing to go about that is if I'm coming to a TED Talk to hear you speak, I wanna hear what you have to say. I'm not narrowing my focus to look for these signals. It's about the totality of that experience and focus on learning something and the growth that comes to that. And if you seem like a normal person that I could connect with, well, even better, that allows me to focus on what you have to say much more so. If there's any body language that's outside of that, that would draw my attention away from what you have to say. Yeah, exactly. That's what, and I've come away from some talks and people have said, especially when I first starting out with my first book, they were like, I can tell that you feel a bit nervous, but they were like, you shouldn't be. Like we liked you because of that. We actually were rooting for you. And like you said, they just wanted to hear what I had to say. And as long as I appeared like I knew my stuff and that I was not bullshitting them, then they were like, that's what they wanted to come to the talk for. I weren't there for this kind of super slick like performance as if I was some kind of Hollywood actor giving a talk. They were there to hear what I'd learned about these psychological topics. So along with this, obviously there's the physiological stress response, but then there's also for a lot of us the way we visualize events happening. So you talked a little bit about, based on past experiences, this predictive modeling that your brain does, but we can actually use positive visualization to start to shift those expectations. And we've heard about Michael Phelps and his ability to visualize races to the tiniest detail. And of course, all of the feats of glory that he's achieved in his Olympic career, but how does an average person harness this power of visualization? And what does science really tell us around visualization? Cause when we talk about it in our coaching programs, some clients raise an eyebrow or two or feel like it might be woo woo to feel that, oh, I just have to daydream about success or manifest success and then it happens. But the visualization, there is sound science on helping your performance. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so I have to say before I was kind of researching and writing my book, I was a bit like your clients, like a little bit skeptical of visualization, I think because we have heard a lot of pseudo science around that kind of stuff. And I'd say like with all of the expectation effects, it's not like you can just visualize what you want and you don't have to actually put in any real work for it. Sadly, I wish it were a voice. It's called the metaverse. Right, but that being said, like visualization can help you to capitalize on the other stuff you're doing. And my favorite example of this again is with exercise. What we see is that when people regularly visualize doing an exercise, like lifting a heavy table, for example, so people might do that every day for a month, just visualizing it, not actually going to the gym. Now, that's not going to actually build the muscle fibers themselves, but what it does do is change the way the brain plans and executes its movements when it's lifting heavy weights. So it's kind of encouraging it maybe to recruit more muscle fibers and to make those movements more efficient to give you the confidence, to give the prediction machine the confidence that it can lift heavier weights than you have been doing previously. And that's exactly then what happened at the end when these participants were tested after having done this visualization exercise every day for a month. At the end of that, they were able to lift about 10% heavier weights than they had done previously before they'd done the visualization exercise. So it's a very marked effect. Now I'll say the best thing obviously is to do both to kind of go to the gym and combine that with visualization. It's also really useful if you're injured. So there've been studies looking at people who've got their arms in plaster casts and they get them to do this visualization exercise. And what that helps is to maintain the strength in those muscles even when they're not being used because it helps the brain to kind of recognize that there's still strength in those limbs and that you can still, once the cast is off, you can still get back to your regular routine without having lost all of the progress you've made previously. Now, is there a specific type of visualization that is the most impactful? Yeah, so you could do it in a kind of first person or third person perspective. And what I mean by that is you could kind of really immerse yourself in this visualization as if you were actually doing the exercise right now in your body. Or you could look at it from the outside as if you were like an observer watching you do that. That's not very useful at all. There's no statistically significant benefit to doing that third person fly on the wall visualization for building strength at least. But there is really that immersed first person visualization that's the most effective. That's interesting that you should mention that because anytime that I've ever visualized myself going through any behaviors or emotions, I've never thought about it in viewing it in third person. It was always in first person, but I guess if you told somebody to visualize it, they could very well do it in third person and not reap any benefits. Exactly. So actually, weirdly, there are some other benefits to visualizing stuff in the third person but just not the strength. But say if you are getting super stressed about an event and you keep on thinking about it. So say you are thinking about this talk that's really stressing you out. Trying to imagine yourself from the third person in that situation leaves you feeling more detached and can actually reduce this stress response. So there's benefits to both, but I think when you're building strength, you really want the brain to be planning those movements very accurately and that's best if you're immersed in what you're visualizing. The level of detail that you utilize in the visualization helps tremendously as well. So it's not just, okay, I'm gonna think about it for 30 seconds, but it's every syllable of the talk with you on stage. It's you walking in the room for the interview answering the questions then exiting the room and the more that you can harness your ability to visualize as fully as possible that experience, the more benefit you're giving your brain for that future experience and its predictive modeling. Yeah, exactly. You're kind of giving yourself the possibility, I guess, to try out all the different alternative scenarios you might face. And then it is like a form of rehearsal, I guess. It's just you're doing it in your mind if you can't actually get to the venue to do it in front of an audience before the talk itself. So yeah, as much detail as you can in that circumstance, I think it's incredibly helpful. Now, we always talk about the impact that our relationships have on our expectations. So for many of us, we might be in situations with friends who aren't supportive of us stretching our comfort zone or doing things outside of the norm. And one of our exercises inside our X Factor Accelerator involves going out and stretching your comfort zone, by laying on a sidewalk with people passing by. Now, to share that exercise with people who aren't familiar with self-development or maybe aren't concerned about growing their confidence in that way, they might be very skeptical and say, well, why would you do that? That sounds awful. People are going to point and laugh at you. But inside the group, with members are all doing it together and coming back the next week and talking about how amazing and invigorating they felt having accomplished that and no one reacted negatively to them laying on the ground, it actually creates more impetus for group members to participate and to join in the next week and to get value out of it. So this group expectation is often set by our friends, our family, relationships around us. And we don't often think about the impact that their expectations are having on our ability to perform and take action in meaningful ways in our life. I wanna add to that as well in that exercise, what usually happens, the majority of our clients then after doing that one exercise, I'm like, well, that wasn't so bad. When will that exercise bother me? So then they look for more and more heavier traffic areas to do the same exercise to figure out at what point does that anxiety hit and then being able now to attack that and use those opportunities to get more and more comfortable being in those social settings and then at that point, all of the concepts that we've talked about on this show become very easy to use because now you've navigated your inner critic and the anxiety that was keeping you from being proficient. I love that example. Yeah, I'm gonna try that myself. But yeah, I do think like you say, our friends, our family members, it's like people have kind of written a script for us in the way that they think we're going to interact with the world and it's really difficult for us to escape their script and to kind of take charge of that, kind of chart our own kind of narrative if you like. There's a whole ton of research on this, a lot of it from education, looking at teachers' expectations of students and teachers should be quite good judges and often they are of like who are the more able students but they're still biased like everyone else, they come with these assumptions and then they transmit those beliefs about someone's ability to that person where it becomes internalized and it can be, it doesn't have to be someone being actively verbally nasty to a kid or a student or an employee, it can just be like nonverbal cues like whether they kind of look distracted and bored when you're speaking or whether they're kind of nodding along if they give you enough time to finish a thought or whether they're just like dismissing you instantly and moving on to another point before you've really had a chance to develop what you were talking about. Now all of those kind of cues are really important and what happens is that when you're treated in that way, you begin to feel that you are not an effective agent yourself so it increases your anxiety, makes you feel, less capable, more demotivated and then that translates into your performance and that's incredibly sad actually that when you look at the data sometimes these teacher effects, it can begin like quite early on and then it kind of escalates throughout the school because each, once a kid starts underperforming then they're kind of, it's gonna create the expectation that they're gonna always be kind of lower in the class. So it's a real problem but there are ways to deal with that and one of my favorite exercises that people have shown can help you to overcome this is called self affirmation and that is, again, it sounds a bit kind of new agey, kind of flaky pseudoscience but it's not like just repeating a mantra like I'm gonna become rich, I'm gonna become rich. It's much more about trying to look at the things about yourself that you really know you value and it doesn't have to be related to the task at hand at all so if it's someone worried about their academic performance or public speaking or work performance just forget about that and try to focus on the other things you like about yourself say your sense of humor, how good a son or daughter you are, how caring you are, how creative you are, giving music to all of these things and then you kind of list maybe 10, pick one, write a short essay about that in particular like why that value or that ability is so important for you and then that's it, you can forget about it but what that's done is there is created this sense that you have, well a realization in fact that you have all of these other resources it helps to increase that self efficacy that might have been taken away by the other people around you and so what we see is that in education for example that can help these disadvantaged groups who are facing that stereotype threat and that anxiety, all of that that comes from this from others beliefs, it can help them to kind of let go of that anxiety and so they actually start to perform consistently better when they perform this exercise regularly. And I think for a lot of our clients who are into self development they might not have friends or family members who are so into this or feel like this is an area that they wanna strengthen and oftentimes they'll feel that the expectations of others will hinder them from sharing or wanting to take action or wanting to stretch their comfort zone and then the flip will happen, they'll join a group like our X Factor Accelerator be surrounded by people who have removed the expectations of what it would be like to land a sidewalk or remove the expectations about what it would be like to use the conversation formula with a stranger and come back the next week feeling like anything's possible in that environment when you're surrounded by people who are only talking about positive expectations removing the negative pessimism, self-talk and expectation setting that are often found in social groups or in our community or in our family who could be holding us back. Yeah, that's it. We really want to surround ourselves with those people who are not kind of prejudging what you're capable of. You know, I hope and in my experience some people do kind of update their expectations of you. Other people don't and some people, this is even shown in that research some people actually react very negatively when you kind of break away from the script. And I don't know, I don't have a good answer for how we kind of deal with those people but I think if they're coming from a bad place and then they're trying to subconsciously maybe but holding you back, like we need to be really conscious of that effect that they're having on us and make a kind of sensible decision about how to manage that relationship. I think an important part is determining what side of you you feel comfortable sharing with them, right? And maybe this self-development side is not what you share with them. You share your musical interests or you share your sports that you enjoy with them but you remove that pessimism or that negative effect that they have on this area of your life where you're really stretching yourself and look for other people, coaches, mentors or even other participants in coaching programs who are going through those same challenges with positive expectations of growth and you'll be able to see it's like fertilizer for your growth and your ability to perform in these moments. I think there's another aspect to it as well and there's a safety mechanism but the traps that come with setting up expectations and focused on the wrong things. For a lot of people, I think their peer group is an opportunity to measure themselves about what their expectations should be and or if they're chasing, say, happiness that we certainly, there's a book by Russ Harris called The Happiness Trap and all about that which is if you're looking, if I'm looking at AJ and I'm like, well, AJ's happy so I need to be more like AJ and then all of a sudden I hear that AJ is on the self-development kick and he's growing and he's putting himself in these situations to grow now I have to follow that and maybe I'm too scared to do that so I don't want AJ to be doing those things because I want AJs to be next to me and happy so I could be happy. Right, yeah. Social comparison is like one of the number one things that kills joy and life satisfaction. Yes. And so I think it's also important for us to recognize that we have this tendency ourselves like you say and so I think with our own self-development it can be useful to focus on your own trajectory more than focusing on how you compare to these other people because you're always gonna be able to find someone else who's a bit more successful than you seems to be happier than you as Richard than you know, all of those things and that's not good for your own satisfaction and I think it can be demotivating with your growth and we actually see that even with studies of exercise you know, the kind of fit-spiration posts on Instagram like I'm sure they are useful for some people but for lots of people actually they're really demotivating at the gym and because by comparing yourself to someone who maybe has a slightly more toned than you know, better abs like bigger muscles on their legs or whatever that negative comparison you're making between yourself and them that then reduces your perceptions of your own physical ability and actually makes the work out then that you do significantly harder and it reduces like it kind of damages your mood afterwards you don't have that run as high so yeah, we have to be careful of our own self comparison to others and I think like you say we should also be conscious of how other people might be perceiving our personal growth and whether we might be having the same effect on them Now, we've talked a lot about discrete performance or specific performance and its ability to harness those expectations but a lot of times expectations can also deplete our willpower so things that take a lot of time training for a long period of time losing weight over a long period of time requires a level of willpower to stay with it even when there are plateaus naturally that are happening or gains aren't happening as fast as we like what does science say around expectations and their role in our willpower and what can we do to harness science to increase our willpower? Yeah, I mean, I was kind of shocked by this research because you know, I'd always really believed the research on ego depletion which was just the idea that you your brain has like limited resources to practice self control after a certain point when those resources are diminished it's much harder for you to either stay focused on the task you're doing or to stay committed to your goal so you become more impulsive, more distracted you give in to temptation whatever your goals might be so it could be, you know you don't end up going to the gym and you sit watching a box say it could be that you're, you know you reach for the cookie jar but then I'm kind of sticking to your diet you know all of these things it could be like for me that I'm like always on social media rather than like writing my next book so you know, I really believe that it's like when you get fatigued when you've practiced self control after a certain point it's kind of diminished but the research shows that actually a mindset is, that is the result of a mindset and actually you have some people who see their willpower as being easily depleted in this way and that becomes their self fulfilling prophecy you have other people who see willpower as being kind of self enhancing so it also makes intuitive sense actually if you think about it that you kind of get into the zone with doing the task that you're doing like you know, if I was writing for example sometimes I can be really in the zone and then it actually once I've got that it's very easy for me to keep going it's like it becomes self perpetuating the same with self control you might think that first day of giving up candy is going to be really tough but then it gets easier after that point because you kind of built up your strength on that first day so two very different mindsets both of which can become self fulfilling prophecies and actually most of us probably might have a mixture of the two we might have one mindset for one type of task light sticking to a diet, another mindset for another type of task light exercise or kind of avoiding distraction at the workplace but the good news is that whatever mix of mindsets we have in the situations where we have that depleting limited mindset we can, you know, once we're aware of that we can remind ourselves that that's not necessarily the case we can remind ourselves of the times when we have actually had this self perpetuating willpower and by doing that we find that actually, you know we've changed the script again and we're on this new trajectory where our willpower in that particular area now is enhanced simply by changing our mindset and what I love about that we talk a lot of this on the show you can't think your way into acting but you can act your way into thinking and in a lot of these examples okay, we need to find other situations where we had that mindset and things came together and created that willpower well, if you're not experiencing life if you're not allowing yourself and stretching yourself in various areas picking up a musical instrument as well as learning public speaking as well as reading and listening to all of this content then you're not gonna have those experiences the action points to draw from to make those mental models for other future activities that you're working on so we talked a lot about exercise we've touched a little bit on diet and one thing that came out in the book was the power of words and language and how it can cue us and frame things in a way that impact our expectations is the meal gonna be satiating or is it gonna feel like it's basically prison food, flavorless something that I would dread eating versus a diet that I would actually look forward to so what role do words and language play and our expectations and how can we harness the science to use that to our advantage whether it is in dieting or reaching some of our other goals Yeah, I mean words are incredibly important in the way we frame all kinds of experiences but using the example that you kind of started like with food it can change the way that your body responds to what you're eating and I found that incredible if you have a milkshake and you have been told it is this kind of sensible but totally insipid health shake with few calories and no real ice cream no kind of chocolate flavoring if you've just been told that it is prison food then hormonally your body responds to consuming that as if you've eaten nothing as if it contain no calories at all like the response in your ghrelin which is the hunger hormone just barely changes at all it's like the worst thing of your dieting for you to consume stuff but it's actually not helping to satiate you at all and you're still gonna have all of those hormonal signals to seek food now if you have that say milkshake and you're told it's luxurious and decadent you know full of like delicious double cream you know then your body starts treating that as if it's a really satisfying meal and you see that drop in the hunger hormone ghrelin so your appetite decreases after you've eaten it in just the way it should do now again you mentioned earlier that are we conscious of this happening and we're not really conscious of that happening like I think we consume a lot of food without really considering the associations that we've got with that food how it's been presented to us but all of that is incredibly important and I think in dieting in particular you know we can easily think that like just forget about flavor, forget about enjoyment it's all about reducing the calories but this research shows that's the absolute opposite of what we should be doing like the flavor, the enjoyment the pleasure that we're getting has to be a crucial ingredient and whatever we're eating even if we're trying to reduce the overall number of calories and going along with that it's important to not distract yourself while eating so you talked about your social media habit many of us will be on our phone and mentally checked out while we're eating and very quickly not feel satiated even after having a high caloric meal and we're also pretty bad judges of whether or not food actually has the right calories because again we're cluing into these words so we'll hear healthy or low fat and all of a sudden we're making expectations about what that's gonna taste like if it's gonna fill us if actually we're gonna feel satiated at the end of that meal all based on the words and the labels of the packaging of the foods we're consuming Yeah I mean it's really unfortunate that say people have this it's called the unhealthy is satisfying intuition so basically if a food is simply labeled as being healthy we assume it has fewer calories that it's not gonna be so satisfying and that becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy we assume that if something is if we're eating a hamburger and chips that that is gonna give us more satisfaction even if the calorie content is identical so if you're on a diet and you're eating like plate of broccoli, little bit of salmon you know we've got this kind of intuitive response that means that we expect to experience hunger pangs later on and we do as a result so overcoming that intuition educating ourselves about food, about the calorie content about the nutritional value of what we're eating and then making sure that you know if you're eating those healthy foods that you're still getting all the pleasure that you would have done from that junk food you know that is as essential to the process of dieting as just kind of you know trying to cut the calories without really considering like all of those associations I'm very curious as a writer you know outside looking in it feels like a very daunting task especially thinking about writing your next book and then all these thoughts of writer's block and where am I gonna get my creativity come to mind so taking all this great science and lessons you've learned in this last book how are you harnessing this in your creative process when it comes to writing what do you do mentally to get yourself prepared for the output that's necessary to create your next book? I think like there's a couple of things that I've learned and I think one that has been really helpful is learning how to reframe frustration now a bit like the stress response I think when we're doing an intellectual task or a creative task and it's not working how we wanted it to and you know we don't understand like a naughty concept or you know the words just aren't flowing we can see the frustration as like a sign of failure and we kind of work that up with this kind of catastrophic thinking process into this kind of worst case scenario where it's like I always used to be worried it's like I've written like one book it's like my creativity's probably dried up now and that's it I'll never write again I mean that is such a ridiculous thing to think at like in my mid 30s that like I've already passed this like very shallow peak and that's it it's downhill ever after it was ridiculous but I did used to have that mindset and so I just you know learning about the science of the expectation effect I've learnt to actually reframe frustration as this positive process because we know from the neuroscience and psychology that frustration is often what we feel just before the breakthrough is actually just a sign like the aches in our muscles when we're working out it's a sign that we're pushing our brain beyond its comfort zone to grapple with something that is not you know never experienced before and that is a good thing and that's the only way that we're going to grow you know as writers all in any profession so that was my main lesson there's another trap in the creativity bucket which is after depleting all of your creativity and pouring it into a project and feeling like that is it that's the masterpiece I don't know if I have another one in me and you put that there if that is really in your soul you will find yourself with that pen in your hand again or the guitar in your lap again and you start chipping away and there's another part there as well which is if you don't continue to strengthen and that creative muscle and push yourself to your creative limits and try to maintain somewhat of a status quo in a certain genre box that doesn't allow you to push that creativity that has a crippling effect on you as well it can almost make you feel depressed of like why am I trying to create within these confines when where I want to grow is outside of those confines? Yeah exactly I mean that's really how I'm trying to kind of frame creativity now and to realize that it's not like you have a fixed number of creative faults in your head that kind of it's not a limited resource that's just going to run down to empty I actually think with creativity the more you express yourself the more you push yourself out of the comfort zone the more abundant your creativity becomes and it's recognizing that that actually each idea you have can lead to two more ideas so we can afford to be brave of the way we express ourselves rather than always being living in this state of fear about having a creative block A lot of those confines come due to the external expectations that we put from other people who might be viewing that but there's another powerful mechanism that is combined with that which is monetizing that creativity for those people where your ideas and where you want to go with that creativity may be nothing that this group of people that you know so well want to pay for but what you haven't thought about is the new group of people who are going to be appreciating the strides that you had made to push those boundaries and there's a whole new group of people who are expecting that to be moved in that manner and that's a new bucket and a new audience and expectations you'll be dealing with but it'll allow you to be happier and find people who are going to appreciate all of the striving for new realms of creativity Yeah, exactly I think like we often underestimate just how hungry people are for kind of new ideas 100% So obviously with expectations I feel the frustration piece I'm really glad that you highlighted that because it's a mental pain that we will often be the limiter that stops us from moving forward so for those in our audience who right now might be feeling some frustration in an area of their life what advice do you have for them who may not be writing to use that frustration to channel that frustration in a reframe that's more impactful for their growth? I mean, I think this is a very general rule about how you can reframe frustration but I think the number one thing is to first recognize like why are you feeling frustrated? Like it's like you're probably frustrated because things aren't working out the way you want but what's the kind of real source of that? Like if you can't do what you're doing like what happens if you can't do that? Like what are the consequences? And recognizing that will lead you to recognize like what's really important at the fundamental level of this task that you're doing. I mean, I see that a bit like with public speaking for instance, like if I asked myself like why was I nervous about public speaking? It was because like I'd written my books and I really wanted to communicate that message to people and a little bit of me really relished the possibility of doing a great talk, connecting with people, getting that feedback from them, having those conversations. I was almost too scared to admit that that what I really wanted was to actually be good at it because it can be incredibly rewarding. And so I think that can be something that we often forget. It's like we're not gonna feel frustrated or anxious about something that isn't personally meaningful in some ways because we really want something and recognizing that drive is so fundamental. I love that. Thank you for sharing an excellent book. I'm really excited for our audience to dig in especially when it comes to this idea that there are all of these influences in an internal, external, societal that we actually have control over mentally to reframe and move towards our goals in a faster manner. We love asking every guest what their X-Factor is. What do you think makes you unique and extraordinary, David? I don't know. I think my curiosity I guess is what I think. Like that's the thing I'm most proud of actually because I really think especially with these subjects that interest me that I write about like I can just take one like lead and it just takes me like in places I've never expected before and I just love that process. And I think that is kind of maybe what makes my, it certainly is like what has fueled my writing and so yeah, that's what I'm most proud of. I love that. Thank you for sharing. Where can our audience find out more about the book and all of your work? Cool. So people can get the book from any good bookshop I would hope but you can find out more about me and about the expectation effect of my previous book, The Intelligence Strap and also read my portfolio on my website which is www.davidrobson.me and I'm on Instagram and also I've just started using threads as well. Okay. So if people can wanna start a conversation it's David A. Robson is my handle. Beautiful. Thank you so much, David. It was a pleasure having you. Thank you. Thanks so much. It was a great conversation.