 an added benefit that we haven't talked about. One way you can help yourself change is not just by giving advice to others, but by surrounding yourself with supporters, people who have similar goals, who can sort of show you what's possible. Maybe they're even a little ahead of you on the path to achieving similar goals so that you can copy and paste strategies that have been effective for them. And I think my advice club harnesses that as well as the power of giving advice. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. And when we talk about confidence, because I think many in our audience are tuning in due to some confidence issues when it comes to socializing and making relationships happen in their lives. There are some really interesting studies around this that I found in the book fascinating around actually giving advice. And we've heard in the past that those who teach can't do and giving advice can actually hinder you from making change in your life. And that's really not what you found in the science. So I'd love to unpack what we can do to foster the confidence necessary to overcome that barrier of low confidence and create change. Yeah, this is one of my favorite insights in the book too. And it really grows out of the research of Lauren Eskris Winkler, a really brilliant psychologist who's at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. And when she was a doctoral student, she was trying to understand what compelled people to be grittier, more persistent towards their goals. And she interviewed all sorts of people who were struggling to achieve goals. So she was interviewing students who weren't doing well in school, salespeople who weren't hitting their sales goals, et cetera. And she noticed something really interesting, which was that a lot of them lacked confidence. But a lot of them when she probed had great insights about what might actually help them turn things around. And that surprised her. And she also realized that a lot of the time what was happening to these people in her conversations is that they were surprised to be asked what they thought would work for them. They said they're so used to every stranger they meet, sort of putting their arm around them and offering up a bunch of unsolicited advice about how to be more successful without a real understanding of their situation, that it was a welcome change to be asked their own opinion. And she had this insight Lauren thought to herself, you know, it seems like what's happening when we give people advice, which is what's happening to these folks all the time is we're just destroying their confidence, making them feel like we think they're such losers. Why else would they be in this situation and need my wisdom, my words of wisdom that I've introspected about for 15 seconds, even though they've been living with this challenge for far longer. And she thought, what if we flip the script and stopped giving all this unsolicited advice and actually put these people who have deep insights about what might help them improve in the position of advice giver. If we asked them to coach someone else who's facing a similar challenge, it would signal to them, hey, I really think you've got what it takes and boost their confidence that other people believed they had real wisdom. Second, it's going to force you, if you're the one giving advice now, to actually think deeply in ways that some of these folks hadn't been prompted to before about what would work for someone like them, right? What would work for me? Gosh, I don't want to give bad advice. And then finally, once you've advised someone else on how to solve a challenge or achieve a goal that you too are hoping to achieve, you're going to feel like a hypocrite if you don't take your own advice. And so she has done these amazing studies and I've gotten to be a part of some of them showing that if you randomly assign people to give advice to their peers, it actually improves the advice giver's own achievement for all the reasons I just described. And I think it's particularly important in settings where confidence is a barrier and motivation can be a barrier to change because it does have that uplifting benefit of giving people the sense that, you know, maybe they actually can figure this out. Students do better in school when they're prompted to spend 10 minutes giving advice to their peers about study strategies that might be effective. So anyway, I love that research and I love that you asked about it. Well, I know that I felt that way in my college experience of group study, where we would constantly be helping support one another and it had led to me with a deeper understanding of the subject. And it's really even what we've noticed in our own coaching program. So in our X Factor accelerator, we have a mastermind environment. Many join thinking that Johnny and I are just going to coach them, but we encourage everyone to share their own experiences in the change that they've impacted in their life. And with that, it does boost our client's confidence that they're thinking through the problem and then exactly that that saying is believing effect where now I don't want to be the hypocrite. I don't want to just give advice that I'm not following myself. You look at yourself a little self-critically and say, you know what, I'm going to put in some extra effort. I know how to do this. I'm going to solve the problem in my own life, which I thought was really fascinating from the book. And you actually created an advice club. So can you share a little bit about that? Because I think it's such a great exercise for our listeners. We drop great content each and every week, and we want to make sure that you guys get notified. And in order to do that, you're going to have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. Yes, this is probably the best thing in my professional life. Honestly, I have a group of women who were all at a similar career stage with similar goals around, you know, making an impact both in research and communicating about science. And so we have these similar ambitions were friends. And we formed this club. It's an advice club. We used to call it actually a no club, because one of the things we most needed advice about was time management and how to sort through all of the invitations we received to do things outside of our sort of day job. And so our rule is we have to reach out to each other when we get these challenging invitations and ask for advice and ask each other, you know, how should I handle this? And I anticipated some wonderful benefits from this when I formed this club with two other amazing women, I thought, you know, solidarity and learning from their wisdom and those things I've gotten in spades for sure. But an unexpected benefit has actually been when I'm giving them advice, because they come to me for challenges. I have noticed that improves my outcomes to improve my confidence when I face a similar challenge that I can actually tackle this and maybe don't even need to tap them for their wisdom. And it helps me think more critically through the challenges I face in my own life. So it's, it's a win, win, win in so many ways. And I should note that an added benefit that we haven't talked about one way you can help yourself changes, not just by giving advice to others, but by surrounding yourself with supporters, people who have similar goals, who can sort of show you what's possible, maybe they're even a little ahead of you on the path to achieving similar goals so that you can copy and paste strategies that have been effective for them. And I think my advice club harnesses that as well as the power of giving advice. It's so powerful. And it's what we try to do in our programs as well. And when you have that supportive environment, you really start to feel like things are possible, that the problem is not just yours. I know it's very easy to personalize and feel like some of these challenges to change are unique to you and not easy to overcome. And as you put the book together, you talk about these six internal hurdles or barriers, which one have you found has caused you the most struggles in your personal change? I love hearing those stories. Oh, that's easy. My biggest barrier when it comes to change is unquestionably impulsivity or the fact that I give into temptation instead of doing what's good for me in the long run. So often, whether it's, you know, procrastinating on getting work done or binge watching TV when I should be going to the gym, I have all sorts of issues with impulsivity. So that is actually really where what I first started studying, I sort of started out doing, I'll call it me search instead of just research. And I think this is one where recent research points to the most counterintuitive way to overcome the challenge. There's this great research by I.L. at Fishbok at the University of Chicago and Caitlin Woolley at Cornell University, showing that in general, when we face temptation, our instinct is to just, just, you know, follow Nike's advice, just do it, just push through, right? Like, okay, maybe the gym isn't that fun in the moment, and I'd rather be playing video games, but like, just, just, you know, go get on the maximally punishing stair master, do your workout, get through, get fit if that's your goal, and, and that's the strategy you should take. And what I.L. at and Caitlin have shown is even though that is what most of us think we should do, it's a mistake and a small minority of people make the right choice. What that right choice is, is to actually try to make it fun in the moment to pursue your goals. Because if you enjoy it, if you pursue that goal in a way that is fun, like going to Zumba class with friends to get fit instead of getting on that machine that hurts. Okay, maybe you make a little less progress in each visit, but you keep going, you persist because it's actually something you look forward to instead of something you dread. So interestingly, this, the sort of best solution when it comes to dealing with impulsivity is just to lean into it, just make it more fun to do the thing that isn't normally fun. And so you can do that by changing the way you approach your goals, like choosing different activities that will help you achieve your goals, but that you enjoy more. Or I've studied one tactic, which I call temptation bundling, and that is literally linking something that is a hook for you that's like, you crave it with the thing that otherwise would be a chore. So for me, like binge watching lowbrow TV shows while you're exercising, only letting yourself do that. You crave the trips to the gym to find out what's going to happen next in your favorite TV show. You feel no guilt watching the show. You don't waste time at home because you're not allowed to watch it there. Or listen to your favorite podcast while you're doing household chores, or cooking fresh meals for your family or only opening that favorite bottle of wine when doing the same. So there's all these different ways, right? We can link something we crave, whether it's food or fiction or podcast or TV shows, whatever it is, with something that otherwise would be not instantly gratifying to change the nature of that experience. That's really helpful. That chapter in the book got me humming Mary Poppins, a spoonful of sugar. Yes, Mary Poppins knew it all along. We just didn't have the science to back it up until more recently, but exactly. A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, not just for kids, but for adults too.