The Mindset Advice That's Ruining Your Life

00:00:00This is an interesting one, Drew, because I feel like maybe I'm overconfident about this episode. I'm not worried about this episode one bit. I know. In the entire month we've been prepping for it. I got that sense. Zero concerns. Yet, I've been surprised that you have seemed quite underconfident. Yeah, I think that's what makes it work, though, too. Is my overconfidence merged with your underconfidence? We somehow form a balance. Okay. I think so. There's a balance in the force. I think so. I'm not confident about a lot of things, to be honest with you. Like what? You know, just anything. I don't know. I've never put a whole lot of stock in confidence anyway, so I don't know. Well, you might be ahead of the curve on that one. I just feel like this is such a bread and butter topic, and I have been writing about this and talking about it for my entire career. It's a bread and butter topic since we've been working together. I mean, the last 14 years, we've discussed confidence so many times. We've researched it so many times. Yeah. I just feel like, why worry, man? What do you like? Hang loose. What like, like, do you see, see what I'm doing? My, my hands here. This is what we do in, in LA here. We hang loose. Hakuna Matata. Hakuna. Yeah. This is a great intro. Oh God. People are gonna love this. Well, why don't we get into it? You've done the thing. You know which thing I'm talking about. You stood in the bathroom before the meeting, the interview, the date, and you did the pose, the hands on hips, the chest out. Maybe you whispered to yourself, I am confident. I am capable. I deserve this. Maybe you read a book. Maybe you wrote an affirmation on a sticky note and put it on the mirror. Maybe you visualized the promotion so vividly you could feel the handshake. And then, of course, you walk into the room and you felt exactly the same.

00:01:45or worse because now there was an expectation that you told yourself you should feel confident and then what you actually felt made that gap even harder. So you tried it again, you did another book, you did a different mantra, you watched another TED talk, you've been doing this shit for years. Maybe decades. And here's the thing you've never said out loud to anybody. It has never worked. Or at least not in the way that they promised. So here's what nobody tells you about confidence. The entire concept, the way that you understand it, the way it's been sold to you since childhood, was invented by a preacher with an inferiority complex. Before that, for centuries, confidence was an insult. It was vanity. It was a lack of trustworthiness. It was sin. And the research, it's even worse. The most popular confidence technique in history was based on a study of 42 people that the lead author themselves had to eventually abandon. Positive affirmations make insecure people feel less secure. Visualizing success decreases motivation. The entire confidence industry is built on the same error repeated for decades. And that error is exactly what we're going to explain to you in this episode. Today we're going to tell you the story of a minister so crippled by his own insecurity that he built an empire around overcoming it. We'll tell you about a singer that sold out Carnegie Hall without being able to sing a single note. We'll talk about the Stanford psychologist who discovered how to cure lifelong phobias in a matter of just a few hours. So here are just a few of the things that you're going to learn in this episode.

00:03:16You're going to learn why everything you've been told about confidence, from the affirmations to the power poses to the positive thinking, is built on a single fundamental error that's been repackaged and resold for 70 years. You're going to learn the accidental discovery in a room full of snakes that revealed how confidence actually works in people and why the sequence runs exactly backwards from everything you've been taught. You're going to learn why affirmations reliably make people who need them the most feel worse. You're going to learn why you can't think or visualize your way into confidence and what the science actually says about the only thing that builds it. We're going to talk about the cult-like psychological movement that convinced an entire generation of parents, teachers, and school systems to do something that research quietly showed was not working from the beginning. We're going to talk about why the most psychologically healthy people are slightly delusional about themselves, and the precise reason that same trick fails for the rest of us. We're going to talk about why some people seem unshakable in every situation that they walk into, and why it has nothing to do with what they believe they can accomplish. We'll also cover the 2,000-year-old framework that turns out to be empirically correct, confirmed by studies on spider-phobic women, Air Force cadets, and a basketball player who vomited before every game. This and much, much more. So before we take a deep dive into this subject, I just want you, the listener, to sit with a question. What if confidence isn't something that you actually build? What if it's not a feeling that you generate or a mindset that you adopt or muscle that you strengthen? What if confidence isn't something that you actually build? What if the entire framework, the books, the seminars, the affirmations, the poses, is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what confidence is, where it comes from, and what it's actually good for? My name is Mark Manson. I'm a three times New York Times bestselling author, and this is Drew Burney, my co-host, producer, lead researcher, and the man whose entire life has been one never-ending power pose.

00:05:10Look at you. So confident over there. So confident. And this is The Solve Podcast. We aim to be the most comprehensive podcast in the entire world, where every episode we try to solve one practical life problem for you once and for all. And today, we are solving confidence. I'm pumped, Drew, not only because this is just a classic topic that we've been addressing our entire careers. I love these episodes where we get to do the little switcheroo where it's like, oh, you think you want to be confident? Actually, the research shows that you probably shouldn't want to be that. I think out of all the topics we've done so far on the Solve podcast, this is probably the topic where the self-help advice in the actual psychological research are the most diametrically opposed to one another. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We're going to see that. This is one area that the industry just flat out gets wrong repeatedly. Yeah. Astonishingly, repeatedly over a long, long period of time. Over many decades. Yeah. Many decades, many culprits. We will name names and we will correct the factual errors. We'll be right back after this message from our sponsors. I want to thank Hinson Shaving for supporting the podcast. On camera, you notice every flaw on your face that nobody else would, razor burn included. Most razors flex the blade to hug your face, which shifts the cutting angle and makes you press harder, which is where the irritation ends up coming from. Now, Hinson shaving does the opposite. It's designed in Canada by aerospace machinists. So they lock the blade in place and control the cutting angle precisely. There's no springs, no pivots, no lubrication strips, fixed geometry, same results every single time with no extra pressure. Now look at my face in this video. Yes, just look at it. How beautiful it is. That smoothness is from the razor, not the lighting, not the camera, my beautiful razor.

00:07:10The irritation that I used to fight every morning is gone. And there's real satisfaction in being able to solve a problem that you just assumed was inevitable, especially when you're on camera for a living. So if you want to try Hinson's razors for yourself, they're offering 100 blades free with the purchase of a razor. That's over two years worth of supply. Head over to HinsonShaving.com slash solved and use the code solved at checkout. That's HinsonShaving.com slash solved for 100 free blades with the purchase of a razor. Use the code SOLVED at checkout. Okay, jumping back in. All of the confidence advice that you and I have ever heard started in the same place. Came from a preacher in the 1940s who was terrified of everything. So his name was Norman Vincent Peale. And when he was young, he was just absolutely... freaked out and anxious about everything. He couldn't sleep at night. He couldn't stop comparing himself to the other preachers and seminary school. He was constantly afraid that he was failing to live up to his father's enormous expectations of him. He genuinely believed that he had what Alfred Adler called an inferiority complex. He just felt bad about himself all the time. And every time he had to go up to the pulpit to speak, he was just so overrun by So eventually, Peele developed kind of a system for himself. He called these thought conditioners. And really what they were was just a series of affirmations, positive visualizations, and some prayer techniques that he kind of cobbled together for himself. And he essentially just used them to kind of pump himself up enough to get up and deliver a sermon. And he found that the more he was able to do this, the more likely he was to get up in front of people and have a good sermon and, you know, perform really well. Now, the critical point here is that this was a personal coping mechanism that he developed for a very specific context and situation that was unique to him. Most people don't have a profession where they're forced to speak publicly on a regular basis, but Peel did. And so because he was a highly neurotic, anxious person, he had to find some sort of system for himself. He found that thing. All of that is great. That's all like everything up until now, I think, is like pretty normal and OK. Here's where things changed.

00:09:29Because he decided that his little personal coping mechanism was the solution to everybody's problem in the entire world. In 1948, he wrote a book called A Guide to Confident Living that became a bestseller. And then in 1952, he followed that up with a book called The Power of Positive Thinking, which a lot of our listeners have probably heard of. Maybe they've even read it. It's been 186 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Not bad. It's not, you know, 325 weeks. Okay, okay. You know, it's a good, a respectable showing. It spent 48 weeks at number one, sold over 5 million copies, has been translated into over 40 languages, on and on and on. It's been a massive hit. It's a self-help classic. It gets recommended all sorts of places. And inside The Power of Positive Thinking, he recommended 10 simple rules for developing confidence in your everyday life. The promise of the book was essentially that confidence is a feeling or a belief that you can generate through consistent mental habits. And the implication of the message of the book was that you feel confident first and then you act or perform second. That is kind of the chain of events that happens around confidence. For the purposes of our episode here, I would like to call this... The Peel fallacy, because this is 100% wrong. And we're going to spend most of this episode digging into why this is wrong and why this leads people astray. So the Peel fallacy is essentially the belief that to be successful at anything, you must feel confident. And then because you feel confident, you will perform better. And I think this fallacy has persisted across the decades. Yeah. Because I think it, A, it feels intuitively true. Let's say I'm really nervous about coming in here and shooting this podcast. In that moment that I feel nervous, I am looking for something to solve that anxiety. And there is an erroneous belief that if that anxiety gets solved, then the podcast will go well. Right. We want it to be true, right? Right. Whereas like that is actually not necessarily true.

00:11:45The research is borne out over and over again that that is not always the case. I think the other reason this has persisted for so long is that it's extremely marketable to people, right? Like people look at high performers and they perceive that high performers don't seem to be very worried or anxious about their performance. And they assume that that high performer was confident and that's what made them a high performer. Whereas the causation is completely backwards. The high performer is a high performer. And because they're a high performer, they don't really worry about their performance a whole lot. The other aspect of the Peel fallacy that we're going to come back to in the next chapter quite a bit is... Is that there is a tendency both with us as individuals, but also in the self-help industry, just as a market to take something that works in a specific context and then generalize that across the population. Right. So it's like I have found things in my life that ease my anxiety, that make me feel a little bit better about myself, that help me get through the day. And it's human nature to assume that because it worked for me, it must also work for you and it must work for everybody else in the studio and it must work for everybody listening to this. And that is just not true. A vast majority of personal advice that works is personal. It is very specific to our personality, our history, our environment, our goals, our dreams, ambitions, all those things. So again, we're going to see this aspect of the fallacy crop up time and time again. And again, I think this persists because as consumers, we want to believe that there's a trick. We want to believe that there's a one size fits all solution to all of our confidence issues to make us to ease our anxieties, to make us feel good in high pressure situations, to improve our beliefs about ourselves. And it's a very seductive thing to buy into, but it's just not the case.

00:13:37You've come right out and said, okay, this is wrong. Yes. And you've been harping against this- My whole career. 15, 20 years at this point, right? Yeah. What I found shocking a little bit was that it hasn't just been that, oh, we kind of figured out along the way that, oh, this isn't right. People were like, no, this isn't right. Right away. I didn't know this either. There were like harsh critics right out of the gate. We- kind of take it for granted now is like, oh yeah, of course you want to be confident and then you can act and you can perform better and all of this. We kind of like just assumed that, or I assumed that when I was a kid anyway, for sure. When I was younger, this is the water we, you and I grew up. Absolutely. It's like my teachers and parents told me when I was a kid, just think positive, just believe in yourself. But this was actually kind of a crazy idea at the time. For instance, there's this guy, R.C. Murphy, who came right out the same year or maybe a couple of years after the book was published, that the power of positive thinking was published. And And he pointed out right away, he's like, Peele was exaggerating the fears of the readers, right? Like when you're taught that negative thoughts are going to ruin your life, you're not going to tolerate those at all in yourself, right? And then not only that, though, his big point that he wanted to make was that you're not going to tolerate the other people who point that out to you either, right? There's like a whole social aspect to it. And we saw this as like the self-help movements grew and grew, you know, through the 70s, 80s, 90s. If you came into some self-help movement and you try to point out, hey, this probably is a little bit toxic, you guys, you would get this huge backlash from it, right? That was happening right away. So Peel had all these fans, like these fanatic fans. Murphy came and pointed out, he's like, these people, if you come and point out something realistic and some fault with this, they just double down back at you, which we see this all the time now too, right? Yeah. Well, and you see this also just, I guess, kind of in the therapy culture of Instagram and TikTok, right? It's, it's like, just block out the haters, cut people out of your life. Don't tolerate any sort of like. You call someone a narcissist and somebody's like, well, I don't know if they are. And then you get like, oh, you're enabling the narcissist. Yes.

00:15:32It's a total incapacity to tolerate criticism. That was already present right after this book came out, which kind of shocked me. I just thought it was kind of like this big cultural thing and everybody hopped on board and it was a big bandwagon and there wasn't a lot. There was some real pushback against this. Another guy, Donald Meyer, he wrote this piece in A New Republic and he called it The Competence Man. And it was a critique against Peel. That is not a compliment. Okay. That is not a compliment. This is actually where the term con man comes. I didn't know this until we researched this episode, but yes, con man comes from confidence. Con man comes from confidence man. Meyer pointed it out. It was a specific American archetype. And this is a little bit of foreshadowing we're going to get to later. But this was a very American thing at the time. The con artist or the con man was somebody who sold you a belief in something that wasn't real. And so it was very much an insult to Peel. He said that he was more of a grifter, that you're trying to manufacture something in yourself that isn't real, that isn't there, that isn't actually based in anything. His real indictment, though, was that... These Peele fans, these fanboys and fangirls that signed up for this, they don't actually trust ability. They don't trust competence. They don't trust work. They don't trust talent, right? They trust the chant. They trust kind of the mantra that Peele was peddling, right? In older traditions or in traditions up to this point or even maybe a few decades before this, This had a name that he pointed to, okay? And it wasn't faith. It wasn't an undying belief in yourself or anything like that. It was actually an appeal to a lower power at this point. Like in Christian theology, let's just take that for example, up to this point.

00:17:08claiming some sort of mastery through like ritual or incantation. Cause that's what people was saying is like, if you just repeat this enough and if you just have the right set of words and mindset and you, you can overcome anything up to that point, like bypassing genuine effort and faith, especially like in the Protestant tradition, you know, the Protestant work ethic, that was kind of seen as sinful. Yeah. Right. That wasn't an innovation. This was heresy. This was like black magic almost. And there was a real backlash against this, a small but vocal group of people led by this like like people like Donald Meyer, who pointed this out and said, it's almost like a cult that you're selling here. So this was very I just found this really interesting that this was actually very present right away. It's interesting to me that this backlash existed in the 50s because you don't really see this backlash show up. in the preceding decades. By the time the 60s and 70s come around, you're into all the free love, hippy-dippy, Esalen Institute, you know, human potential movement. It seemed to be just the whole culture was moving towards that, right? Right, it's just, if it feels good, it is good, right? And these people, there was a small group of people like, hey, hold on, we haven't thought this for a long time for a very good reason, and they just weren't listened to. Not to jump ahead too much, I mean, and not to toot my own horn too much. I promise I will not, like, fucking... self-congratulate myself this entire episode. I will hold you to that. I will hold you to that. So like I said earlier, like you and I grew up in this water and like all of our teachers told us this stuff. Our parents told us this stuff. You turned on TV and like Oprah and Geraldo were like telling you this stuff. It was mainstream that you should always just think positive and believe in yourself. And you know, it's if you can dream it, you can do it, all this stuff. I think our generation, because we grew up in this, we became very cynical about it. If I was to do kind of like an objective assessment of my own career, I like, I think the first five or 10 years of my career, I really made my name on being kind of the millennial who calls out a lot of this bullshit. If you just like blindly tell yourself positive stuff, you're going to become untethered to reality and you're not going to be able to deal with consequences and you're not going to be able to accept feedback or criticism. So you're not going to grow, right? All this stuff that sounds pretty obvious,

00:19:22on the surface and especially now in 2026 it sounds very obvious but like back in 2012 2013 like this was pretty transgressive, right? Especially in the self-help space. But it's been interesting because I do feel like the self-help industry has gotten much healthier and more realistic over the last 10 or 15 years. It is interesting to see like these sorts of critiques have become quite commonplace now. Like, you know, not just us, but like there's plenty of podcasters and authors and people on and seminars and stuff that like openly talk about this now. So it's interesting that we've kind of come back to this after a few generations. Okay. So how much credit can we give ourselves here though? Because was it just kind of like that youth rebellion that we had to, because I remember this too, growing up like in the nineties and like watching Geraldo or Oprah or something like that. And I'd just be like, what the hell are these old people? I think some of it is just like youthful rebellion too, right? Yeah. A little bit of it. I mean, I mean, it didn't sit right with me either. I was just like, this doesn't make any sense to me. And like, you know, I read Think and Grow Rich when I was like in my late teens, early twenties. And I'm just like, what the fuck is this guy talking about? I remember my mom and all of her friends became obsessed with The Secret when it came out. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good one. Yeah. And I remember reading that in high school and just being like, what? the actual fuck is going on here. The youthful rebellion piece like opens you up to kind of, right? Like you always want to look for the counter argument to whatever your parents believe when you're young. Now it would be called cringe. Like that's what I felt back then. It's like, oh, this is cringy. Well, what's interesting too is that you're seeing a return to these sorts of beliefs and mindsets with Gen Z, right? So if you go on self-help TikTok and you like watch all these Gen Zers who are posting stuff, it's all this shit. It's like manifestation and like

00:21:07Yeah. You know, don't let anybody kill your vibe. And because I asked myself, I'm like, do I do any of this stuff in my life? Like any of it? There is one thing I do. Oh, what is it? Okay. There is one thing I do. It's actually ironically quite similar to what Vincent Peale used to do. So when I go on speaking tours, obviously, like when you're going to get up in a theater in front of 2000 people, like it's fucking nerve wracking. There's something, too, about being a solo speaker. You're backstage in the green room, like, by yourself in the dressing room alone. And it's just you. The whole show is you. So it is a lot of pressure. And it is, like, pretty fucking nerve-wracking. And so I remember on my first big speaking tour back in 2018, 2019, I developed a ritual, which is music has always been kind of my state pump. You know, it's like always the thing that makes me feel better. So I found a song. It's so cheesy, dude. I feel I'm like so embarrassed. No, no, you got to say it. So Oasis has this song on their first album called Rock and Roll Star. Okay. Okay. And it's and I just started playing that backstage on repeat before my shows. And it became like my pump up. It's like, yeah, dude, you're fucking rock and roll star. You know, like it would just get me over the hump to get me on stage. And then and then I was fine. Well, I'm not saying like none of this stuff like doesn't change the way you feel necessarily in the moment, right? No, but that's the whole thing, right? It's like, what if imagine if I came on this podcast and I like looked into the camera and I told a million people watching this, you need to download Rock and Roll Star by Oasis because that's what's going to make you confident. Like that is essentially what Norman Vincent Peale did. I see. Okay, you're saying you're taking that specific thing and generalizing it. Yes, and we will cover this once we get into all the confidence research about how domain-specific confidence is and how domain-specific interventions are. But that is essentially what is happening, is that Norman Vincent Peale found a handful of

00:23:02His version of Oasis is rock and roll star and then wrote a bestselling book and sold it to millions of people. And it's still around today. I was racking my brain. I'm like, do I do any of these things? I think the one thing I might do is if I don't feel confident about something, I just avoid it. I'll say that. But I don't like, I don't think there's a lot of things I don't try to do. I really don't try to give myself a pep talk before anything. I'm just like, I'll just throw yourself into it. I've noticed if I hesitate that, you know, yeah, it's, That sucks. Like, I guess my, my method is just jump into it and go, which we'll kind of get to that too. But I wonder if some of it was like, I grew up in a small town in the middle of nowhere. Right. And in the, in the nineties, and it always seemed like we were a decade or two behind everybody else. I don't know the people around me were never like, they were just like, just do it. Just go. Just, just, just work. That's what, that's all it was. Maybe that's just in my head. What, what was going on there? Have you heard about this new thing called retard maxing? Nope. What is that? Maybe we should do a retard maxing solved episode. What is this? So apparently it's just some random guy on YouTube. His life advice is literally what you just said. It's like, don't think about it. Just do it. Like it's, you know, the midwit meme, right? Or it's like the Jedi on one side and the mid and the idiot on the other side. And then the midwits like freaking out and obsessing about all this complicated stuff in the middle. His argument is basically like, just be the idiot as much as possible because he's

00:24:32in a lot of cases, you're going to end up doing the same thing the Jedi does, right? So it's like, if you want to be confident, it's just like, don't worry about confidence. Just go do the thing and not spoil this four-hour episode. There we go. There's the episode. We're done. But maybe we should just go home. I do want to talk on just kind of the lineage of this strain of thought through the industry over the years. I don't want to spend too much time on this because it's like I could do a whole podcast just on the history of the self-help industry. But you do see this lineage show up again and again and again. Tony Robbins in the 90s and 2000s. Tony has a more nuanced approach. to the positive thinking angle. I think what I appreciate about Tony's work is that he does implement a lot of legitimate psychological principles and recognizing your emotions and working with your emotions and the powers of your belief and challenging beliefs and dealing with trauma. There is a lot of soundness to the advice that he gives, even though it's often packaged in kind of the same rah-rah, just believe in yourself type packaging. The worst culprits of this are very much kind of the manifestation of... whatever thoughts you put into the universe, that's what the universe sends back to you crowd. We already mentioned The Secret by Rhonda Burns. The most recent iteration of this is Joe Dispenza. Like, it is just an ever-present... segment of this market yeah well it goes back to the think and grow rich yes that's basically just the secret right yeah i mean and this strain of thought goes it goes well back into the 19th century like there was a movement in the early 1800s called new thought that actually emerged out of the transcendentalists if we wanted to go back in time and murder somebody in the cradle to get rid of this it would ironically it would actually probably be ralph waldo emerson oh no really which sucks because yeah it's awesome yeah

00:26:21Emerson is awesome. He planted the seeds, though. I see what he's saying. But, you know, Emerson really spearheaded transcendentalism, which transcendentalism was kind of this idea of, like, you can, like, we have a capacity to kind of evolve beyond, like, who we are when we're born. And we can control the direction that our lives grow in. And then that got, like, kind of perverted in the mid-19th century into this... concept called new thought, which was that whatever you believe is going to be true about yourself will become true about yourself. And then that's kind of where that that strain began. The whole point is that this is still alive and well, it is alive and well because of what I mentioned earlier, a it is in the moment that we are feeling in crisis when we are feeling most unconfident. this intuitively feels like the problem that needs to be solved, even though it's not. And then B, you have that fallacy of people look at high performers and they see that they appear confident. And so they erroneously assume that the confidence preceded the high performance when it's actually the other way around. It's the high performance generates the confidence. There's other modern renditions of this too, that like certain techniques or whatever that get peddled in those circles, I think. And there's some interesting research around some of these as well. So we have things like affirmations, visualizations, power posing even too. So if we want to real quick just run through some of this research because it's kind of interesting actually. Let's start with affirmations. Okay. So there's a study in 2009 that was the first to really seriously kind of test if affirmations work or not. And so they gathered these participants and had them repeat, I am a lovable person every 15 seconds. And they had them do this 16 times, I guess. Okay.

00:28:02What happens is that the exact kind of people who need this, actually, it doesn't work for them, right? Basically. So if you have already have kind of a low self-esteem and you repeat to yourself, I'm a lovable person. I can do this. I'm, I'm, I'm going to be okay. I'm, I'm awesome. While you have low self-esteem, it actually makes it worse. Right, because you sit there and you're like, wow, I'm such a loser. I have to repeat to myself that I'm lovable over and over and over again, which just makes you feel worse. And then if you do feel good about yourself, you're like, wow, I don't really need to do this because I feel good about myself. That's exactly what they found. It's just cognitive dissonance is all it is, right? If you have beliefs about yourself that you are... you're not a worthy person or whatever, and you're telling yourself, I am a worthy person or I am lovable or whatever. All it's doing is highlighting that gap and it creates that cognitive dissonance and you have to resolve that cognitive dissonance in some way. And usually what it is, is making yourself feel worse. Your self has to be aligned in some way. You know, it has to be consistent. There's been some other studies around this. There's like a 2020 study that didn't quite replicate that, but they also just found no effect on it. So it's either no effect or a bad effect on this. If you are somebody who has a high level of like self-confidence and self-efficacy and all of that, like your example, when you go and speak, right? Like you've done it before, you know, you can do it. You throw the tunes on, you say you're a rock star and it helps a little bit just to get you over the hump. That's fine because there's not a huge gap between that and what you've already done. they're techniques to pump up your emotional state in the short term, right? So you list, I listened to that song or Norman Vincent Peale, like does his affirmations or whatever. Like the ending result of that is that it improves your mood very temporarily. And once your mood is improved, that can make you feel a little bit better about what you're about to do. Where things go amiss is this assumption that anything permanent is happening. I've met a lot of people who swear by affirmations and, and I've, it's funny, I've been on a number of podcasts where people have

00:29:57I do affirmations every morning. Like, why, why do you tell people they don't work? And I'm like, well, hate to break it to you. It gives them that little mood boost, makes them feel better. Maybe, you know, at the beginning of the day for a minute, five minutes. And then they just kind of, falsely think that that is carrying on through in a more permanent way throughout their lives when it's it's actually not the podcasters or whatever come at you they probably have a good track record of you know doing well and so telling themselves they're going to do well they're like oh yeah i'm gonna do well it's fine it works out and then they move on yeah like that's fine but if you're telling yourself i'm gonna do well and you're just a wreck no that's not gonna help you just telling yourself it's gonna work out is not going to help you Okay. Clip that. Put it on repeat. Okay. Okay. Anyway. Anyway. Okay. Let's go on to the next one. A very related one, though, too, is the visualizations, right? This is a big one, you know, vision boarding or whatever. There's this psychologist from NYU, Gabrielle Odigen, I think is how you say her name, has been testing this for like decades. And it's like really got into the weeds on this. Basically, what she's found is that positive visualization on its own, it's really interesting. It actually reduces the energy you want to put towards whatever goal. So if you're visualizing a goal you have and you put a lot of positive visualization of you attaining that goal, it reduces the motivation you have for that goal. It's like you've already consumed part of that goal. You get a small hit of satisfaction from that goal. So your motivation is decreased from it. Yeah. Like your brain kind of almost treats it as like, oh, you've already got the goal, so I don't need to be as motivated towards it. Why bother? So why bother at that point, right? One of the studies she found, like women who fantasize more positively about losing weight actually lose fewer pounds. Like they don't lose as much weight. Another one she did on hip replacement patients. And those who had these rosy recovery goals, they're like, oh no, I'm going to be fine by next week or whatever. They did worse. Students...

00:31:54who fantasize about job offers, like, oh, I'm going to get this job offer. You know, I can see myself getting it and all that. They end up doing worse in their interviews and everything like that. Exam grades, all this. She did this in all these different situations and found the same thing over and over again. So this is where we run into the manifestation crowd because you get a lot of people who are like, I manifested this, right? It's like, I dreamed about this and then I made it happen. When you do visualize something you want in your life, There's a usefulness in that it orients you towards, I guess, thinking more critically about how to attain that thing. You leverage your perceptual biases to help you get it. So maybe there's a fine line between simply like, explicitly defining a goal for yourself and then like actively fantasizing visualizing about it on a regular basis she actually found kind of where that boundary okay visualization isn't all bad but the thing is is that just like only visualizing the end goal only visualizing having done the thing that's what's bad interesting so visualizing the process of getting there she calls it whoop Okay. This is something you want to attain. So that's the, like the, the thing you want, right? Then the outcome. So you do have to visualize the outcome, getting the outcome and all that. But then importantly, the next two, I think are the most important obstacle. Visualize the obstacles that you're going to encounter along the way. Okay. And, and really see like, okay, this is probably going to come up. I'm, it's kind of like that stoic negative visualization. Something wrong is going to happen. Right. And I need to be ready for it. And then the last one is to have a, actually create a plan around it. So there's a whole visualization arc that you can use, but it's not really a visualization necessarily. It's more engaging in a process.

00:33:43So most people just, they stop at whoa, which is the wish and the outcome. And that's essentially just fantasizing. Whoa. Yeah. Whoa. I wish it was woo because that would be so perfect. But yeah, the obstacle and the plan that like, that's actually where the rubber meets the road. That that's what generates. Yeah. I guess the momentum or the velocity towards the outcome. That's a very active engagement with, I don't even know if I would call that a visualization necessarily, but I mean, there's visualization elements to it, but it's more just like an approach to something because you're creating a plan, you're envisioning the obstacles, you're getting ready for them, and it's just a lot more realistic then. Do you visualize outcomes you want in your life? Because I do, and it's funny, I don't do it intentionally. I just kind of, I'll just daydream about stuff I want. No, I don't. I guess I don't really do a whole lot of that. Interesting. Take me through your process. I've always done this naturally. I've never did it. I remember when I read visualization stuff, I was like, well, yeah, sure. Whatever. You know, like it just seemed like very obvious and kind of dumb to me. Like if I have a certain goal or something, I will just think about not only the outcome, but like the process of attaining that goal. Right. So it's like, I just kind of will mentally rehearse what it will take to get there. And also like some of the benefits of having it, like how cool it'll be if I, you know, I don't know, whatever. I actually have started doing this more recently. One of them, um, I was just talking with you about this earlier. I've been getting into running, uh, like longer distances and more endurance stuff. And I have a good friend who does like crazy endurance stuff and he's kind of taking me under his wing a little bit. I started, I guess I did start kind of doing this a little bit with that. oh, that'd be so cool to do these like crazy trail runs. These guys are up in the mountains, you know, middle of nowhere. And like you're running overnight and stuff like that. I'm like, oh, that'd be crazy. So there's kind of the wish and the outcome to crossing that finish line or whatever. But what I really started doing lately was more of the, okay, the obstacles. The training is...

00:35:34rigorous. And so I have to like really plan for that. So he got me signed up for like a coaching app and stuff like that. From that, you get a plan out of it too. But the obstacles, I've really been thinking more around like almost like visualizing the process around it, running by myself and the heat in the mountains or the cold in the mountains even too. I guess kind of when I visualize or fantasize about stuff. Yeah, it is both the positive and the negative are present, which I guess it's worth noting that Ottingen's entire findings are essentially that visualization is only useful if you include the negative thoughts as well. Yeah, you have to be realistic about it. Right. If you block the negative thoughts and you're just focused on the- As soon as they come in, those are going to wreck the fantasy. Yes. it's a rehearsal for action is what it is. It's not a rehearsal for like, I get to sit back and just enjoy all this. Cause that's what the motivating part. It's not a rehearsal for being awesome. It's a rehearsal for accomplishing work in. Yeah. Putting work in for sure. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Last one that I'm going to cover this time. Power posing. Oh yeah. Okay. I remember this. Have you ever tried this? No. We'll get into this. We'll get into this. Okay. So in 2010, again, not that long ago, A study comes up. I remember this TED Talk. It was massive. It was everywhere. One of the most viewed TED Talks. But what it was based on- Tens of millions of views. Yeah. What it was based on was this 2010 study they did. Okay. 42 people. So already small sample size. Not many, you know. As you see, right. They had the high power pose and a low power pose. So basically, you know, the high power, like- Should we demonstrate? You should demonstrate this. I- Is this the high power pose? I don't know where you're sitting down if it's very- Is this- Chest out, hands on the hip. Like that's the power pose, right? Right. wait, I got to suck my stomach in. Okay, now I'm confident. You look powerful, Mark. You look so powerful. I'm so confident right now. Their claim in this study, though, was that just doing that, that you would have measurable increases in certain hormones, like raise testosterone, lower cortisol, which is a stress hormone, right? Not only that, but then they took more risks after this too. So they had them perform tasks that involve some risk and the people who power pose would take more risks.

00:37:42That culminated in 2012 in this huge TED Talk. And it was, again, one of the most viewed TED Talks out there. It was kind of just one of those fake it till you make it data points. Problem was it didn't replicate. In 2015, there was another set of researchers who did a pre-registered study of 200 people. They found no effect on testosterone, no effect on cortisol, no effect on risk-taking. The only thing that survived was that people did report feeling a little bit more powerful, a little bit better, a little bit more confident in themselves. State pump. Just like before you go on stage, right? Same type of thing. This is not confidence, people. This is a momentary state pump. The lead researcher, I think the senior researcher on this in 2016 finally gave up. Retracted. And she said, no, this was Dana Carney. She said that she doesn't believe that the power pose effects are real. She even walked through all the flaws in this study. Good credit on her. I'm sure she had a lot of pressure. Good for her. Good for her, though. Honestly, more researchers should do this. She noted the tiny sample. There was participants who dropped. They didn't include in this. They had a whole bunch of measures that they took that they didn't report even to. So they were cherry picking big time out of this. And it was just this one small study and outlier effects that they saw. So you know what this reminds me of? I remember back when I was like 20 years old, I read this, but there was a book, I think it was called The Book of Body Language. And it had all this research in it. Like, I remember there was one study supposedly where people in an audience, if they cross their arms, they're less likely to agree with the lecturer or something. Whereas people who put their arms by their side and opened up their body were more receptive to the information. Open versus closed poses, yeah. Yeah. All of it turned out to be bullshit. And I actually think the lead researcher, I think it was a Dutch guy, it turned out he was just like making up a lot of data. All this is to say is that this sort of like nothing burger has been around for a long time. This is kind of pointed at as one of the poster childs of the replication crisis that happened in psychology that I think we're kind of starting to come out of a little bit. Like people were aware of it. The late 2000s, mid 2010s, there was just this whole like, oh shit, we can't. Like nothing's replicated. And this was one of them.

00:39:49And it had a TED talk behind it, right? That blew up. Everybody, I mean, people still probably watch it today and believe it. This was the poster child for the replication crisis. Affirmations. Bullshit. Oh, yeah. Visualizations, mixed bag. You need to visualize the obstacles. Right, right. And the problem solving. Which I would argue isn't really using visualization, but anyway, yeah. News alert, everybody. Planning works. Power posing. Body language. Embodiment stuff. Right. Bullshit. Have you ever tried the power posing? I tried all this shit. Yeah. I tried all this shit. Yeah. I mean, I got really into all this stuff in my teens and in early 20s. I remember doing the whole thing, like looking at myself in the mirror and telling myself things. I felt ridiculous. I was like, this is... So stupid, right? Like if I actually felt these things, I wouldn't have to look in the mirror and say them. You know, the visualization stuff, like I have a very active imagination and I visualize a lot of things very easily. So like, I never understood that. And then the power posing thing, it's funny because I remember back when I was a day in relationships coach, a huge emphasis was put on body language. Body language, yeah, sure. And it was interesting because it was, body language was, first of all, a huge component of just physical attractiveness is body language and posture and, you know, standing up tall. It was interesting because it's like when you do correct people's posture and body language, like you do, there is a noticeable kind of, Oh, there's a state change for sure. There's a little emotional pump that happens. Right. And they do feel a little bit like, yeah, yeah, I'm, I got this right. A useful question is like, is there anything from this that is salvageable from, okay. Yeah. Let's call it the mainstream corpus of self-help advice. You've tried it all. So you tell me, The only person that I will like give a little bit of credit here is Tony. What most classic self-help people do is they just state pump you endlessly, right? Like you just go to one of these seminars or you read the secret and it's just like, you are just getting bathed. You're getting showered in positive affirmation and just being like told that you are fucking amazing in the center of the universe for, for hours. And yeah.

00:41:54That feels really good for a short period of time. I think Tony's a little bit more sophisticated in what he does. He still does the state pumping. Like a lot of his methodology is really like if you look at what he does in his seminars, it's like very driven by like state pumping people. He's a little bit smarter in that he recognizes that people are a little bit more open and suggestible when people. they're in a good mood. So like when you're feeling like shit, when you haven't slept, when you're cranky and you're angry, you had a big fight with your mom or your sister or whatever, like you don't want to listen to anybody's advice. Your focus is very narrow. Yeah. You're like, dude, don't tell me what my morning routine should be like. Fuck you. Right. But like, if you're in a great mood and you're just like vibing and you're having a great time and, you're meeting all these cool people, right? And then you get hit with a piece of life advice of like, Hey, you should try this. Like you're going to be much more receptive to that advice. And so I think he uses it as a tool. He still, he still sells it as like, we're going to make you confident. We're going to make you feel good about yourself. We're going to unleash the giant within, right? That's his whole, that's his whole thing. It is a means to an end in his program, at least. So like, yeah, So I'll give, I'll give a like, like, I guess half credit there. Yeah. I just think a lot of, most of this stuff is feel good bullshit. What do you think about anything though? Like, uh, like limiting beliefs or anything like that? I don't know if this is the same category or not, but you know, we just did the episode on change and I get, I think you could, you could kind of think of limiting beliefs as adaptations that we talked about in that episode where it's like a layer of your identity almost that you buy into. I don't know if that's a different category though, maybe. Yeah, we're going to talk about beliefs quite a bit in the next chapter. I do think there is a lot more credit around the belief stuff because you do beliefs really do create kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Like that's further downstream and you're it takes some work to get to them and.

00:43:49Yeah, well, it is tricky, right? So, I mean, we will talk about this. But, like, if you go back to the example of, like, me backstage about to go on, you know, talk in front of a bunch of people. My belief about myself in that moment and my ability to deliver a good talk matters a lot. If I believe I'm not capable of delivering a good talk, I'm going to struggle and suffer a lot more than if I do believe I'm able to give a good talk. This is where... maybe a little bit of moderate delusional thinking can sometimes be beneficial. You're not going to change a belief with an affirmation necessarily. That's what you're saying or a visualization or anything like that or a power pose. Yeah. To sum up everything we've been told about confidence from affirmations, the body language, the positive thinking, the rah-rah stuff. It's essentially been built on a mistake, which we call the peel fallacy, which is this idea that you need to feel a certain way in order to perform a certain way. And that is Not the case. Not only is that not the case, but it's also not useful because you can't really just gin up confidence out of thin air. Ultimately, confidence is built by evidence. It's built by experience. It's built by being in situations and understanding. coming out the other end okay and therefore knowing that you can handle other situations like that one in the future. In a way, confidence is actually not very complicated at all. This is one of those topics where the research in some ways is kind of just obvious, but it's all the narratives and stories and beliefs and things that we tell ourselves that make it complicated around it. So we're going to spend most of next chapter dispelling a lot of those narratives and false beliefs around confidence. We're going to get into the actual nitty gritty of what confidence is, how do you actually build it, what the research actually says about it. The interesting thing is that the most successful confidence researcher ever, A, you've probably never heard of him, and B, he figured it out on accident, and C, it involved a room full of snakes.

00:45:55We'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Quo. Confidence is technically invisible. Nobody can see how sure of yourself you feel. They can only see how you show up, which is brutal in business. You can be the best in the world at what you do, but the second a call goes unanswered, the customer doesn't think you're busy, They think next. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O. It's the business phone system built so that you never miss an opportunity. Quo keeps every call, text, and voicemail in one place, so your team can jump in and pick up right where it left off. Its AI agent even answers after hours while you're gone. It's rated number one on G2 and trusted by over 90,000 businesses. Confidence is not always what you feel walking in. Sometimes it's the call you didn't miss. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash solved. That's Q-U-O dot com slash solved. All right, let's get back into it.