Destroy Your Old Self: A Full Self Improvement Guide - Jordan Peterson

[Music] I believe and I believe this as a scientist and is that you perceive the world through a structure of value that is essentially a map of the territory so when you look out at the world you think well there's the world that's the objective world but obviously you don't just see the objective world because we wouldn't have to have we wouldn't have had to develop science to give us a picture of the objective world if you just saw the objective World mhm it's actually pretty damn difficult to formalize an objective picture of the world

so if you don't see the objective World well what is it that you see well a lot of what you see a tremendous amount of what you see is memory like you don't know that but your brain uses memory to represent things whenever it can because look seeing the world is unbelievably challenging neurologically and so we we exercise the use of our central vision very selectively we only look at what's important mhm well what's important is what's valuable well you don't know that you're making a unbelievably complex value ladent decision whenever you look at something

it's happen like it's actually the frame through which you see the world and it's a map and the reason for that is well you have to do things you have to get from point A to point B you now I derive part of this theory in maps of meaning from a book called the neuros psychology of anxiety by Jeffrey gray gray developed a theory of emotion that's predicated on the idea that essentially on the idea that most of your emotions are experienced in relationship to a goal okay and so you establish a goal then movement

towards that goal or evidence that you could move towards that goal makes you happy produces positive emotion whereas evidence that the goal is invalid or that you're blocked in some way produces negative emotion so you lay this map on the world it has a d it always has a destination point in mind in there's always a destination Point implicit in it or explicit in it so it's and it works as subtly as this for example so if you walk into your room and you're and you're uh you want to walk towards something to pick it

up and your room is cluttered because you've been careless all that clutter manifests itself as an obstacle to your goal and produces negative emotion and and you experience that instantaneously essentially and automatically and so part of the reason you know that I encourage people to clean up their rooms let's say is well it's it's a it's a microcosm of all this your room is part of the part of your experience that you have control over and it's easy to underestimate its significance but you have that's a place you can alter you can set it up

for whatever it is that you're doing well what are you doing well that's the first question you have to ask yourself if you're going to set up your room it's not trivial it's hard genuine ethical virtue is a source of it's the only source of resilience and strength that you have and it's also the place as far as I can tell that the meaning that allows you to set yourself against suffering resides you know people talk about life and its meaning and they say well life is meaningless but people never mean that because if you're

in pain or you're terrified you're overwhelmed with meaning it's just not the kind of meaning you want and so and it's not a reality you can talk yourself out of easy easily and that's particularly true of pain but it can also be true of anxiety and so the question is is there a reliable source of meaning that you can set against that and and what's its nature if so and so here's a way of conceptualizing it to some degree so I'm currently in a rather remote location in Northern Ontario and uh one of the advantages

to being here is that I can go out on my dock at night and I can look up and see the night sky and when you see the night sky when it's pitch black you you are face to face with something as near to the infinite as we can face in a prosaic day-to-day setting and so there's an experience that goes along with that and the experience is one of awe and wonder and awe is a very interesting emotion let's say it's a un believably ancient from a biological perspective so if you feel awe your

hair might stand up on end sometimes you get that feeling chills running down your back say when you're listening to music that you particularly enjoy and that's a variant of the reflex that that prey animals have when they see a predator their hair stands on end so that they look bigger now of course they don't know that so part of that feeling of awe is tied to our ancient mamalian Heritage it's it's a it's a variation of the response we had to a predator we're in the face of some we're facing something much greater than

ourselves MH and so but there's more to it if you think it through because when you face the night sky for example or you face something you confront something that fills you with Wonder and awe there's also a call to action that's sort of implicit in it and maybe you think well well the wolf is calling to the rabbit to be better at defending itself in some sense to be a better rabbit because otherwise man you're going to be eaten by the wolf and when you look up in the night sky to the night sky

and you feel a there's a call there it's part of that experience to imitate that great thing that you perceive now you might say well how can you imitate the infinite Cosmos as well obviously that that's a very complicated question but you know you're a very complicated thing and God only knows what it means for you to imitate the infinite when you apprehend it I mean that's in some sense that's the fundamental question of life is how do we adapt ourselves to the infinite complexity that surrounds us what must we become well you don't think

you don't merely think that through and I I mean you don't I don't human beings in general don't we puzzle it out and we use all sorts of information to do that and and some of these more primordial experiences that are outside the domain of strict rationality nonetheless point us in an in an ethical Direction and and the ethic would be you should be you could should and could be more than you are well then the question is how do you bring that to Earth how how does that look when you try to embody it

dayto day mhm well I would say these and this these are obviously not my ideas they're very old ideas well maybe you Ally yourself with truth to the degree that you can maybe you pursue Beauty maybe you pursue the love that attaches you appropriately to other people etc etc and so and you do that because well I think you do it because life is very very difficult [Music] I was talking to my wife the other day and she's become very interested in Christianity and she was talking about uh a set of mysteries that are part

of the Catholic ritual and one of the Mysteries is uh Christ's bearing of his cross and someone helps him and this isn't the Rel I'm not I'm not speaking about this Rel iously I'm speaking about it practically and psychologically there's a it's a remarkable story because it implies that human existence like our subjugation to vulnerability which is exemplified in that story to be rejected by the crowd to be betrayed to be killed that subjugation is so difficult that even God himself needed help and so the question is that and like I said I'm not speaking

religiously I'm I'm looking at the story in some sense as a psychologist it's like what does that imply well it implies you have to call on on you have to note when you're being called to be more than you are and you have to attend to that very carefully because life is extraordinarily difficult and to manage it in a manner that makes it acceptable or perhaps more than acceptable you have to be everything you could be so that's not exactly strength right it's it's way more than that strength is a is a way into it

it's a ver it's a specific virtue it's a way into this into the discussion of what constitutes the ideal [Music] often you talk about one way to find meaning is in the journey between who you are and who you could be but how do you make sure that when deciding like who you could be that you're not aiming too high then potentially you could be disappointed how you make sure that it's challenging enough to keep you engaged on yeah that's a really good question yeah yeah well that's a that's something you encounter practically in a

clinical setting all the time well you know let's say I I was dealing with a client and maybe that was somebody who say a man 35 years old he still lived at home um so's two dependent room is a complete bloody catastrophe and you know he's living like a Brady 13-year-old and that gets pretty ugly by the time you're 35 you know and he knew it and I'm sure his mother knew it although obviously she put up with it which was probably her mistake at least in part but maybe we decide well you know let's

start by cleaning your room and so as a cognitive behavioral psychologist you engage in a process called collaborative empiricism and that's partly to solve the problem that you described is well how do we know we set the right goal well I say well go try it and just watch yourself like you don't know who you are and come back next week and we'll see how you did and maybe I remember this one F he came back and he said you know I went and got the vacuum cleaner from the closet which is something I really

never done and I I put that vacuum cleaner in the doorway of my bedroom Crossways so it blocked the doorway and then I just walked over it for a whole week like he was completely nonplused at his own intransigence and look what he did he he was so resentful and so angry that he instead of vacuuming in his damn bedroom like he planned he just stuck the vacuum in his own way and then martyred himself over over it every day for a week it's like okay then we're starting to get somewhere with the whole you

living at home thing here and so well that was too high a goal for him and you say well how do you know that it's like well he didn't do it did he so then what you do practically is you say well how about you bring that vacuum cleaner into your room this week and that's your whole assignment and just watch what happens when you bring it in watch the fantasies that flicker in the back of your mind as you live out your resentment at your therapist for daring to make you bring that vacuum Across

the Threshold of your bedroom and so if people catch those fantasies wof that's quite the bloody Nightmare and quite the Revelation to themselves I can tell you because you have to be one angry person to put a vacuum cleaner in your doorway and walk over it every day for a week and so then we'd get somewhere it's like okay now we're getting to the bottom of things you know and but maybe the next week he'd come back well with the fantasies at hand and rather shocked as a consequence but the vacuum cleaner was then in

his room and so he broke the threshold there you know and then maybe we'd have to maybe all he could do was sort out a drawer or half a drawer something like that so what you do is you know you pick a Target that you think is probably reasonable and you can negotiate that with yourself what I would do often practically with my clients is I would say well we're going to your life is not going very well and that's why you're here I mean that wasn't a pronouncement on my part and I would ask

them you know what what problems they were suffering from what they were suffering from but I would usually do a I would say a pragmatic analysis of the generic quality of their life and it's not that hard to do you can do this for yourself it's part of this self-authoring program that I have online um well I'm miserable and I'm anxious and I'm bitter and I'm angry and I'm stuck in my career and I don't seem to be able to get anywhere and godamn it life isn't worth living anyways and so half the time I'm

suicidal it's like okay okay you know we right now we've established the problem domain right at least somewhat and then I would say well hypothetically you'd rather that some of that wasn't the case right so because we want to establish a goal what is it you want more misery or less misery and usually by the time people had come to therapy unless they were mandated to do so which never works by the way they wanted things to be better that's why they were there you know now and then you get someone who was there just

to you know maybe please someone else or but I could usually get beyond that because if they were willing to come there there was at least a part of them that was hoping that there was such a thing is up and then we just walk through their life it's like okay well let's do a an assessment do you have any friends and how often do you see them well I have six friends but I only see them once every six months you know one of them every six months well you know that's pretty low on

the Friendship hierarchy so I just file that away as as a piece of evidence do you have an intimate relationship are you as educated as your intelligence would indicate might be useful um do you have a job do you have a career or failing that a job right because generally people need at least a job and perhaps hopefully a career um how do you regulate your drug and alcohol use because that's a major Pitfall for people how do you use your leisure time how do you take care of yourself mentally and physically now that's not

everything about life right but but if you don't have any of that well we have a place to start then you know like maybe maybe you should try to make one friend you know and and there there are there are ways of doing that so for example one of the things that my wife and I used to do when we moved to a new place which we did fairly often was we' pick some local hangout Place restaurant bar something like that and we just go there every week and until we started to know at least

the Proprietors we'd introduce oursel and we'd make that a routine and then you know you can get to know people and sometimes with my clients I would have to some of them were incredibly not socially skilled like in ways you can just you just just have no idea well maybe some of you do how well because I don't mean you specifically although maybe I do but um but you may you certainly may know people like this um you I had one client who was literally so socially anxious he could not use a telephone and so

he was just Terri he was absolutely terrified of people he'd been horribly bullied he was three4 death he had obsessive compulsive disorder he had an intellectual impairment I mean this guy had a rough time man and he was so terrified of he could hardly talk to men and women man they were so terrifying to him he just didn't even know literally where to start well sometimes when people are extremely impaired they don't know anything basic they have no friends why well they they introduce themselves like this what's your name and then maybe you say it

but they're so preoccupied that they don't hear it and then they shake hands so let's shake hands that's not good that's not good you don't remember the name you're not making eye contact so you can't see the person's emotional response and then you're afraid and that's why you're looking away and then because you're afraid and you're looking away you don't pick up the social cues about how to initiate conversation even if you know how to do that so then you're awkward and because you're looking away you don't listen and then you can't enter into the

flow of conversation and so we'd practice shaking hands you know maybe 20 times till the person could do it and was comfortable with it and you know that's how you start at the bottom of [Music] things I mean the guy had a lot of obstacles standing in his way and so we had to find you know a a place to start but we would set those seven goals like well you know maybe you could have a friend or to and maybe you could do something that would educate yourself to some degree and maybe we can

take some step towards moving you towards a job with him I started trying to get him a volunteer job which you think would be easy but which is actually practically just so you know it when you're thinking about people struggling at the bottom who are unemployed why don't they get a volunteer job say to start them in the process it's bloody well harder to get a volunteer job than a real job you need a police check for most volunteer positions if they deal with personal care because people are so afraid of litigation and for someone

who's basically illiterate and also has extreme social anxiety the whole police check thing just that wasn't just wasn't working and I sent him to an employment office and they said well type up your resume and distribute it it's like that's real helpful he can't type you know he's barely literate he's never used a computer he doesn't know what a resume is even it's like type up your resume and distribute it Jesus how pathetic so so one of the things you do if you negotiate with yourself is going set a goal and and see if you

move towards it and if you don't well maybe it's the wrong goal maybe it's too large maybe it's too small for you right so now it's not engaging you um maybe you didn't really want to pursue that goal and you're just deluding yourself and you know it's helpful to have someone to talk those things over with but I would say start from the P if you're not doing what you want to do or what you think you should be doing Drop the presumption that you know who you are and start to negotiate with yourself like

you're a stranger who needs to be enticed forward people need the opportunity to be good at something it so then you might ask yourself well what's the best antidote to the discomfort of life and you might say well it's comfort and I suppose that's what you act out when you swaddle a baby but a better antidote is something like Adventure to Excellence and that's far better antidote to suffering than the mere absence of suffering so not to say that the mere absence of suffering that's not nothing you know stepping out of that sedation from Comforts

difficult though especially if you've become routinized to it yeah well that's the difficult difficulty of maturity you know the freudians said very wisely that the good mother necessarily fails what's that mean I mean she stops providing the comfort that insulates people against the need for adventure I heard you say recently that um a mother's ability to let her child go out into the world knowing that they're still vulnerable and that it's now down to them and the worlds to look after them that's one of the bravest things that they can it's the female Cru fiction

so and and that's exemplified best in well the best portrayal of that I've seen is Michelangelo Pi you know it's it's a statue of Mary uh and she has Christ's body on her as an adult on her lap and he's broken and destroyed and you know she's displaying that and that's that's The Bravery of a mother to allow that to happen but not only that to to facilitate it facilitate it so what about where you go kid where you go where you go well why it's dangerous out there it's like yeah no kidding it's more

dangerous here if you stay with me by a lot so you might lose your body out there in the world but if you stay here you lose your soul there's a classic representation of the feminine in the west and the classic representation is Mary and here here's one of the representations it's lovely and it's derived at least in part from the story of Mary and the snake in the Garden of Eden and so Mary has her foot on a serpent and she's holding Christ off to the side like this well that's exactly what mothers have

always done it's a biological portrait of human women is they hold their infants out of the reach of the terrible Serpentine Predator obviously that's what we do well that's fine but adults aren't infants and neither are children and if you treat them like they are you undermine them you you you you pathologize them you turn them into Old infants that's an ugly thing and that's the Freudian nightmare you know and this happens in therapy very frequently I mean you can be Tangled into a terrible relationship with your father that's often either because he was absent

abusive or tyrannical something like that but the the the standard pathology with mom is she did everything for you well what's left for you to do nothing including never leaving right and that's the motivation you know for the woman who's nothing but protective mother there's no role outside of nurturing of nurturing nurturing of nurturing of infants of nurturer of infants well you just keep them infants they'll never leave they might kill you a night in your sleep but they'll never leave it's so comical watching the feminist postmodernist in particular rattle on about the absence of

gender reality and act out the archetypal devouring mother at exactly the same time for for them the world is divided into predators and infants and the Predators are evil and need to be stopped and the infants need to be cared for well that's what the mother does but adults are not infants and all you do is destroy them when you treat them that way especially when they're adolescents and just starting to develop you know there's there's a rule that I attempted to abide by when I had small children and the rule was don't do anything

for your children that they can do themselves and that's annoying that rule because it takes you like 15 seconds to to dress a 2-year-old but you let the 2-year-old dress himself it's like it's 15 minutes or 20 minutes or half an hour you chase them around the house but if you let them learn to dress themselves then you don't have to dress themselves any dress them anymore and they can do it and you do that with setting the table and you do that with everything it's like no it's okay you do that now well I

care for you so much let me do that for you it's like I don't care for you at all when I say that I don't care for you at all I'm going to stop doing everything I possibly can for you as rapidly as I possibly can say well that's great that's how you work in an old age home do not do anything for the inhabitants that they can do themselves cuz you rob them of the last vestages of their independence right it's what you do when you're a manager if you're a good manager you make

yourself Superfluous by extending autonomy and Independence to the people that you manage so that they can take over the whole job you don't do that by doing everything for people and you certainly don't do that by dividing the world archetypally and uncritically into Predators those who have more and victims infants those who have nothing and acting like all you can ever do is protect them you don't protect first of all you can't protect people you can only make them strong that's it you cannot protect them you can make them strong and then they can protect

themselves a woman is extremely bonded with her infant say between 0 and 9 months and the infant is utterly helpless and so complete compassion and the provision of comfort is the only job that matters and that's really the case and then the woman has to switch gears to some degree the mother has to switch gears as the child starts to become more uh more mobile fundamentally and more independent she has to let go of the infant which is a real grieving process and she has to start to facilitate this movement towards independence but that's a

hard shift and so partly the role of the father in that is to be an advocate for the child's Independence and to comfort the mother to let her know that that degree of security provision is no longer necessary but also to act as an advocate for the child's outgoing uh outgoing desire and so so it's the Ed situation is not only the mother it's also say the weak father but then it's also the child so you can imagine cuz you you Bel that these negotiated agreements were were relational so you know you're six you're in

grade one maybe you're feeling a little ill maybe you're not maybe you're playing with being a little ill and maybe you're playing with exaggerating how ill you are and your mom comes downstairs and says you know you've got a test today at school maybe you haven't quite prepared for it maybe you know you should have and she says but you know you you seem to have a tummy ache um maybe you're too sick to go to school and the kid thinks maybe I could just stay home and you know Mom could tuck me in and

I wouldn't have to take that test and I wouldn't have to confront the world and he says yeah yeah my stomach really hurts and and way we go and the child has made a choice and you think well that's and that's a catastrophic choice and you think well children shouldn't be held accountable for choices they make at that age it's like that child's soon going to be an adult that's going to make very similar decisions the the choice has consequences and to be held accountable for that is to recognize purely that the choice has consequences

and that it is a choice now you know you could say well 95 5% of the blame is to be put on the mother and maybe that's an overestimate I think it probably is but the child could say mom you don't have to worry about me I'm going to get up and go do this and that's choice and that's the right choice so these are always chicken and egg problems obviously but that that fleshes out the complexity of the situation you know if you're if you're being enticed down a pathological Road you can accept or

reject the invitation now some people are better at enticing and some people enforce it more harshly and you know there's all sorts of individual variability in situations like this but just because you're offered the baate doesn't necessarily mean that you have to take it so and I'm not a determinist I do believe that people have free will whatever that means that's a murky subject and it gets complicated the more you look at it but whatever it's still good shorthand way of describing the fact that we seem to be cursed with responsibility for our own destiny

at least to some degree if you want to know something about yourself sit on your bed one night and say to yourself you got to mean this like you got to be desperate this is no game this it's like my life is not everything I want it to be and perhaps it's not everything that I need it to be and by need I mean my life is so unbearable that the suffering that's attended upon that has made me nihilistic cynical bitter resentful homicidal genocidal in unable to have a good relationship Pro prone to punish people

for their virtues because of my jealousy uh driving the proclivity to see evil everywhere except within my own Heart Like These are problems man and you ask yourself you sit on the bed and say okay man I'm ready to learn something like what what's one thing I'm doing wrong that I know I'm doing wrong that I could fix that I would fix it's like you meditate on that you'll get an answer and it won't be one you want want but it'll be the necessary one you know and it it's often something that will point you

to small things so Carl Yung said people in the modern world don't see God because they don't look low enough and so imagine you're in your messy bedroom you know and you're sitting on the edge of the bed trying to have a honest dialogue with yourself and the little voice says you know it's pretty disgusting in here and you think well I'm way above Such trivial niceties as organizing my roof it's like now that's Pride that's arrogance if you're above organizing what's actually yours how in the world are you ever going to organize anything else

and so you get on your knees and you think well it's time to you know take a brush to the toilet and maybe that's where you start and so and that works like that works you start making those micro improvements like real micro improvements real on the ground actual micro improvements to things you know that are wrong you'll improve unbelievably rapidly so when I was doing my clinical work which I I did a lot of career work with my clients both at a beginner level I would say like really a beginner level with people who

had no employment whatsoever no history of employment who are undereducated and who lacked every skill you could possibly imagine these were people who were really and Dire Straits up to people who were operating at the top of their profession but who could still strategize forward and so for example let's say you're at a dead end in your job Cas so I don't find my work meaningful all right so that's a problem statement it's like well why not I find the work I do repetitive and boring and without spirit I have a bad relationship or a

neutral relationship with my boss who doesn't know who I am um I have problems with co-workers all of that needs to be differentiated right and analyzed in detail so we might say for example let's say you believe that you're undervalued at work and maybe you are what you need to do is you have something to say and we would have to figure out what it is that you have to say but it would be some variant of I'm bringing more value to the table than I'm being compensated for and that's demoralizing me and it's also

not good for you you being my boss because if I'm actually more valuable than is being recognized then the fact that you're not valuing me properly means that I will become demoralized I won't work properly and you won't get the best out of me so it's bad for both of us and if your boss is in principle not amenable to such a discussion then what you should seriously consider doing is finding another job okay so let's say we're going to set you up for this okay this isn't like next week's Enterprise man this is your

life so the first thing I would ask is well do you have your resume or CV in order well I haven't typed it up for 3 years well what do you think about bringing it up well I'm pretty nervous about that because there's some holes in it and you know I didn't do so well in college and I'm kind of embarrassed about my resume it's like okay bring it in let's go through it let's let's let's at least update it let's look where the holes are let's look at where the inadequacies are as far as

you're concerned right this isn't my judgment it's your judgment let's walk through those judgments and see if they're warranted because maybe you're just too guilty and ashamed and self-conscious and anxious and you're not you're looking at your resume more critically than someone else would and maybe there's some holes that you need to rectify you know you're you're at you you were two courses away from your ba and you dropped out or something like that well maybe we need 6 months to address that at least even if you can't be fully educated you could be taking

some courses online and so when you went to a new job interview and they said what about this hole you'd say well I I came to terms with that six months ago and in an effort to rectify it I'm taking the following courses and here's my plan for completion that's a really good answer and anyone with any sense who's interviewing will accept that as an indication that although you're not perfect and who is that you have a good plan and that you've thought it through like that's the kind of answer that in all likelihood will

cement your candidacy for the position okay so now you're going to go to your boss well you have to have your CV and your resume in order and you have to be able to stand on it solidly and which at least means that you're prepared to address the inadequacies in a credible realistic believable and truthful manner all right now what you do is apply for like 10 jobs you don't have to take them but maybe you have to go to an interview or two or three or four and maybe there's a bunch of opportunities out

there for you that you didn't even know about and maybe someone offers you a job and so now now you can go to your boss and say here's the situation I'm in here at work um here's my evaluation of the problems in relationship to me here's what I could do for you if you gave me a 40% raise and the opportunity to progress but I'd like to see a plan for that and um I've been looking for other opportunities before conducting this discussion and I have some well then if your boss treats you with contempt

at that point and doesn't listen then perhaps he or she is a little more narcissistic then might be optimal and it's time to find a new job but this isn't something you do trivially and so when you're doubtful say you're trapped you ask yourself well why am I trapped that's a hard question right because some of it's your own inadequacy a lot of it and all of the part of it that you can deal with is your own inadequacy so even if it's unfair you know even if you're hemmed in for any number of reasons

inappropriate like ethnically predicated oppression let's say or maybe you live at you're in a a workplace that really is sexist in some fundamental sense well that's not good it's not just it's not fair it's it's not meritorious all of those things and maybe you shouldn't be there but what you can do to begin with is every bloody thing you possibly can do to put yourself in the most virtuous and Powerful negotiating position possible and you have to think like a snake in some sense to do that you got to get the details right you have

to be prepared to bite and and you have to have your eyes on the prize so to speak [Music] I'm trying to get a hold of the Disney people at the moment because I want to do a lecture series on Pinocchio because I think Pinocchio is brilliant work of art um and if you're a puppet and an actor and Pinocchio is both at times in that movie both a puppet and an actor so why an actor like why is there why is there something wrong with being an actor well the first question is well who's

who sets your role and then the second question is who's pulling your strings so you've put on this front that is there to make you popular and sexy and desirable and to mask from yourself your own inadequacies but that's a role well who wrote it and for what purpose and so Yung said for example that we all acted out a myth and whether we knew it or not and you know maybe you're acting out a tragedy may maybe you're acting out narcissist you don't know because you've put that you've put that on yourself in an

attempt in some ways to deliver to people what they want or more accurately to look as though you're delivering to people what they want and it's not nothing to do that right because at least you're attempting in some sense to adapt to the social World someone who's really infantile and dependent someone who's never left home part of their problem is that they haven't crafted a Persona so you don't want to denigrate it entirely but it's no substitute for the real thing and it turns out that not only is what we want from each other the

real thing but that's also the adventure of your life and so if you aren't truthful and that means unfortunately especially at the beginning when you start to be truthful it means deeply coming to terms with your inadequacies in humility so it's very painful without that you don't have the adventure of your life you have the role that has been that you've acques to and that'll take all the meaning out of your [Music] life it's very difficult to calibrate how many units of physiological preparedness you should manifest per unit of threat mhm right CU how big

is the threat the answer is you don't know you wake up in the morning and you have an ache in your side is that nothing or is that the cancer that's going to kill you in 6 months and it's pretty low probability that it's the latter but the probability is not zero so why shouldn't you be panicked out of your mind and the answer is some people are and sometimes they're right so the calibration of threat especially when it's associated with novelty is virt an an impossibly difficult computational problem we have like 10 different mechanism

M to try to solve that and one of the mechanisms is well there's tremendous variability in response and if you're higher in trait neuroticism you're going to have the problem you're described all the time you're going to be doubtful about your competence and the validity of your position and the only treatment we really know for that is to expose yourself to things that you're afraid of voluntarily and to become braver as a consequence of doing that but some people have to live with that more than other people the thing I realized was that after a

while if you continue to disprove your imposter syndrome in the real world you have a challenge you're adamant that you probably won't or might not or don't deserve to get past it and then you do after a while you have to admit to yourself that your impostor Syndrome has nothing to do with your capacity and everything to do with your addiction about feeling an like an imposter yeah and well and and that that does change as people age generally speaking they become more agreeable more conscientious and lower in negative emotion and some of that is

that adaptation you see that you survive through various challenges and then you can review that evidence to yourself but also the people around you bolster you because they have confidence in you and so their anxiety doesn't trigger your anxiety and they'll remind you too you know you got this you've done things in the past such a wealth of data you know you've done it so many times yeah and yeah I think and that and that does help I mean it does help people get more confident as they get older and they acre experience because of

that but it's subject to that underlying trait variability and sensitivity to negative emotion I mean there there's been good psychometric analysis of self-esteem scales and neuroticism scales and they're the pretty much the same thing reversed and so are you confident in yourself self-esteem you lack confidence trait neuroticism and so it is harder for some people because it takes more evidence for them to dampen down their their response to threat so and and it's partly because we're all adapted to some degree to the failure of induction right just because something happened multiple times in the past

does not mean necessarily that it will happen the next time and that's a big it's the farmer and chicken problem right farmer is always feeding the chicken chicken thinks the farmer is his best friend but one day the chicken is dinner and that's induction there was a stable pattern in the past you come to rely on it but at any time that Axiom can be disproved and so the fact that we have variability in trait neuroticism is a consequence of the the the probability of the failure of induction it's it's a very difficult problem to

solve how to regulate negative emotion you know and uh but I would say that the best way we know is to keep facing challenges voluntarily pay attention at a rate that works for you develop your competence that actually stabilizes the environment around you so it's it actually is less predictable and less threatening plus you acrew that evidence and you get the social support for doing so that's your best pathway forward so there's this idea that Carl Yung developed um he extracted it I don't know from where from some ancient writings that he was familiar with

I believe they were Jewish writings he said that classically speaking traditionally speaking God was viewed to rule being with two hands the right hand and left hand and the right hand was Justice and that was you're going to get what's coming to you but the left hand was mercy and the idea essentially was that the cosmos could not exist without the proper combination of justice and mercy you should get what's coming to you but people are failable and they make mistakes and so it's reasonable to apply that to yourself you know there's an idea that's

been developed by psychologists over the last few decades that people are basically narcissistic and that they generally feel that they're better at most things than other people um I don't buy that I don't think the experimental evidence for that is very strong and I certainly haven't seen that for example in my clinical practice where I've seen that people are generally far harder on themselves than they are on other people um one example of that I've written about this in my new book too is that you know if you have a pet that's sick and you

take it to the vet and you get medication you're very likely to give the pet the entire course of medication to go to the pharmacy to get the prescription filled to give the pet the medication to follow it through but if you are the person who has the problem yeah you all laugh cuz you know the story it's like a 30 you won't even go fill the prescription and of the remaining two-thirds of you half won't won't take it to completion and you think well why why are people like that and I think it's because

they know themselves they have contempt for themselves because of their flaws and then they come to despise themselves and I think that's a big mistake that's lack that's too much Justice and not enough mercy and you know Yung wrote about the biblical injunction that you should treat your neighbor as if he were yourself essentially but he talked about that as an equation which was quite interesting so because it's often read as something like you should be nice to people which is not what it means at all because first nice is a very low-end virtue but

it isn't what it means what it means is that you should you should treat your neighbor as if he or she is someone that you wish to encourage and develop but that you should also have exactly the same attitude towards yourself which is sort of in some sense regardless of what your opinion is of yourself critical let's say hypercritical even which is often the case with people who are anxious or perhaps who are hyper conscientious you have to put forward to yourself the same sympathy we could say that you would extend to someone else that

you cared for that's the thing is that you have to come to treat yourself as if you're someone that you care for and I mean that technically you know you detach yourself from yourself and you think okay well if I was going to construct a motive being that was optimal for this person that I happen to be what would that look like and that's sort of independent of whether or not you think you deserve it it's like maybe you deserve it maybe you don't innocent until proven guilty that's a pretty good policy but you should

come to lay out a mode of being for yourself that gives you some credit you know and that will also help you in your dealings with other people but it's often very difficult for people to do that to themselves every time you make a status shift as you move upwards of course you have impostor syndrome because when you first make a transition into a new role you are an impostor because you're a beginner you don't know what you're doing and that doesn't mean you're a liar or a fake and it doesn't mean you should presume

more knowledge than you have it's what did n to say every great man is an actor of his own ideal and that's that's that's that feeds into the impostor syndrome in some sense if you want to move to the next stage at some point you have to act like you're already there when you're just barely started and that's not a lie you know it's it's the willingness it can be and it can degenerate into a lie especially if you presume more than you know but if you move you know let's say you move from being

an undergraduate to a graduate student well every all the other graduate students and the professors know that you're just a beginning graduate student they're they're not going to expect as much from you as they would from a more seasoned graduate student so you have some leeway that's genuine but you are you know the low rung occupier of that role and of course you're going to feel like you're an impostor if you have any sense because you're just barely there you you just made the transition that's okay you know that's not a problem first of all

you have to understand that everyone with any sense who isn't narcissistic feels that and it's actually an indication of your mental health and your competence as long as that doesn't become crippling it shouldn't knock you out I'm such a phony well don't be a phony that's the first thing if if you're dealing with competent people and you admit your ignorance the competent people never judge you harshly for that as long as you've been paying attention so in my classes for example people were often afraid to ask questions and so sometimes I would point to people

and ask them if they had a question especially the quieter types and they'd be afraid to ask the question because well they're revealing their ignorance and they would assume they're the only person in the room that's that ignorant but they're not because if they were paying attention and they had a question the probability that half the class had that question was really high it's different if you're not paying attention and so you can be ignorant you can be an ignorant newbie and you can even ask the questions that are necessary to ask in that position

and sort of Reveal Your inadequacy and as long as you're dealing with competent people and you've been paying attention they're they're just going to answer your questions then you only have to be ignorant once that's the thing about asking a stupid question you only have to ask it once then you're no longer stupid when I went out on tour in 2018 before I went out I thought I wanted to do this like 100% right or at least as close to that as I could manage so I went out and bought some expensive suits and I

spent way more money than I ever thought I'd spend on clothes and I really felt quite bad about it you know I thought maybe it was an extravagance but I thought no way man I'm going to see if I can nail this dead on and I'm going to be speaking to you know 100,000 people I'm going to look as sharp as I possibly can and uh one of the consequences of that has been that young men in particular come to the lecture tour dressed up in suits three-piece suits they're when the couples come and they're

dressed up like they're coming to a wedding or so that's really something and uh why do you think that is why do you is it because you set that standard sick acting like kids okay you know our whole culture pushes the idea that Teenage life or even childhood for that matter but Teenage life is some sort of Pinnacle and then everybody dresses down so they look especially men they look like overgrown 10-year-olds and there's something extremely demeaning about that and so to provide people with the opportunity to dress up in a in a classic Manner

and to look like adult to present themselves in that manner there's something very attractive about that because we haven't done that in our culture that's been I would say downplayed in importance or or or or for for certainly since the 1960s who's to blame for that because you recall anytime you would fly in an airplane if you see old school pictures people would dress in three Pat suits to go on an airplane this is in the 60s I assume and then now you see someone like Mark Zuckerberg wear a t-shirt to give a speech in

front of a TED talk or something like that for some of it's just fashion you know I mean fashion moves around and then and it's it usually drifts from the top down and so when formality becomes the norm but that drifts down to say to the working class then the upper class thinks well we can't do that because that would you know associate us with the unfashionable people and then they dress down and so then that drifts down the hierarchy and so there's some of some of it's just fashion but a lot of it too

is this idea that this sort of reflexive rebellious attitude that anything that violates traditional Norms or even anything that's associated with patriarchal oppression and adulthood is to be eliminated in favor of what's hypothetically a more free individuality but it's not because everybody looks the same I was in Washington four or five years ago maybe longer than that it's probably longer than that when I first went in the summer and one of the things that really struck me all these people wandering around these great monuments is all the men looked like overgrown 10-year-olds they they looked

exactly like their kids except they were bigger they looked like they' been inflated with a bicycle pump and I thought this is weird that that adults are dressing like children and not good and so some of it's fashion but some of it's also that is it exclusive in America how about in Canada what have you seen all over the world with this no I don't think it's exclusive to America I think it it was more noticeable to me in Washington and I think that's when it really hit me because Washington is in some sense a

place of pilgrimage and people from every class go there and that's that's a good thing and and they should from every economic class and so it was like a cross it was a real cross-section of the total population and that was one of the things that struck me quite quite bluntly I talked to my father about this years ago um because he always wore a suit when he he was a teacher he's still alive he he's a teacher and he always wore a suit and I asked him why one day and he said because it

was his way of showing respect for the students and I mean I'm not saying that everyone who doesn't dress in the suit is being disrespectful but there's something about outfitting yourself for the task at hand and there's also something about attempting to put some effort into presenting your putting your best foot forward and I don't really buy the it takes more time in the morning argument it takes a bit more time but once you like be before I went on this tour I went through all my clothing and and I tossed out everything that didn't

fit and which included a number of suits that were old and I had to organize them and that took about a day to get my closet in order I started buying nice clothes let's say this year really I had some decent suits before that um I did some research online to find out who good suit manufacturers were you can look that up but in before this tour I went and talked to a good tailor uh expensive place I I felt terrible spending so much money on clothing um but I felt that if I was going

to go talk to it's been 200,000 people that I was going to do it right and and I was going to invest in some decent clothes and even though it it hurt my um cheap Northern Alberta soul to do it um it was definitely worth it so go talk to someone who knows what they're doing go talk to an actual tailor and and and you can do some research online there's lots of resources online that are devoted towards devoted to helping men figure out how to dress three-piece suits look really good um I I've got

them tailored and fitted so they're not bepoke suits they're off the rack but they've been tailored and that makes a big difference uh all the subtle things that tailers do they tuck it in around the waist they cut it to your body all of those things help it's really good to have a good pair of shoes couple of nice ties I learned how to tie a full Windsor knot recently and that actually helps uh you don't want your tie to look too skinny um lots of people have been dressing up to come to my talk

so it's nice to see a lot of young men come welld dressed often in three-piece suits but not always and it's really good to see them dressed like grown-ups I think that's a real plus um I had a rule that I didn't write in 12 rules which was dressed like the person you want to be that's I kind of took that from Carl from from because n said um every great man is an actor of his own ideal it's a very nice aphorism and basically what it meant was that sometimes you have to act out

what you want to be before you become it you have to pretend it's not a lie it's it's really a pretense like children pretend to be a father before they grow up and become a father it's a form of practice and so tip one might be figure out who you want to be tip two might be well then dress like that person that's a good start and because I think if you want to become who you want to be then no detail is too small to overlook and certainly it isn't exactly that people judge you

by their clothes by your clothes although they do to some degree it's that if whatever you can have going for you you might as well have going for you that's how it looks to me and certainly my experience has been that the response to my improved wardrobe has indicated that that the investment was clearly worth it um indisputably and clearly worth it and it's nice to be dressed sharply to go in front of an audience it's a sign of respect to the audience there's other ways of showing respect to an audience but that's certainly one

and so it's been extraordinarily worthwhile I would say if you're going for a job interview if you're at any critical point in your life then you should dress the part because you want to do everything you can to tip the scales in not in your favor exactly but in favor of having the right thing happen physical attractiveness is extensively studied in Departments of psychology how big of a determinant of success is it apart from IQ or any of the other big five traits um that's tough one because physical attractiveness is a very complex trait um

it's also for example it's a marker of health and of course health is a mar is a prerequisite for Success so we know that physical that people who are physically attracted though are given the benefit of Doubt by other people they they benefit from the positive halo effect and the positive halo effect is the propensity of people to assume good things about someone if there is one outstanding thing about them that's easily evident that's good and so if you're if you're if you stand up straight with your shoulders back so that's rule one and 12

rules for life then people are going to see you as more attractive if you're symmetrical you're more attractive if you're thin but not too thin you're more attractive um well and then there's like good skin and good teeth and good hair and and all of those things in proper proportions and youth and there's a whole slew of things that that that feed into that if you are characterized by a plethora of those features then people are also going to assume that you're more competent and more um and more more worth having around let's say but

the problem is is that you are so separating out the attractiveness from the things the attractiveness are is correlated with is very hard that's why you have to do multivariate analysis that's multivariable analysis in any complex social science because a lot of these traits overlap so but you know you can you can there's there's some some things you can do about that postural adjustment is helpful to work out with weights that's extraordinarily helpful that that increases improves your posture and makes you more confident and and and and and and you can dress reasonably well and

intelligently and um all of those things to to help yourself capitalize on whatever attractiveness you can muster so Zazu the eyes of the king comes to check out the king and that's uh Mufasa yeah and he he's a very Regal looking person uh lion and he stands up straight and tall and that means that he's high in seratonin because serotonin governs posterior flexion and if so if you're dominant and near the top of hierarchies you take tend to expand so that you look bigger than than you could if you shrunk down and so if you're

low dominant person you wander around like this so that you look small and weak and you don't pose a threat to anybody but if you're at the top you expand yourself so that you can command the space and that's why he has that particular kind of Regal posture and if you look at his facial expression you see that it's quite severe like he's he's capable of kindness but he's also harsh and judgmental and that's what Society is like that's what the super ego is like and what that means is that he's integrated his agression and

I've seen this happen in my clinical clients when they come in and they're too agreeable they look like Simba looks later in the movie when he's an adolescent and he's sort of like a deer in the headlights everything is coming in and nothing is coming out but when the person integrates their Shadow and gets the aggressive part of themselves integrated into their personality their faces Harden and if you look at people you can tell because the people who are too agreeable look childlike and innocent and the people who well a hyper aggressive person will look

you know mean and cruel but I've seen people's face changes change face change in the course of therapy uh men and women so and what happens is they start to look more mature and it's it's more like they're they're judging the world as well as interacting with it properly once they integrate that more disagreeable part of them it's very very necessary and that's part of the incorporation of the yion and Shadow [Music]