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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Hello. Good morning. Three things before I start. Number one, if you haven't already, buy the book, how to stop worrying and start living by Dale Carnegie and read the first chapter. If that doesn't change things for you, nothing will.
Speaker 1:Some of those powerful chapters I've read in daily living, Amazing read, easy read. You can read it in half an hour in the morning, and wow, what an impact. So that's one of the things. It's like 99% on Kindle. 99%, 99p on Kindle, or like £4 paperback, book from the fifties, I think.
Speaker 1:Second, Robert Sapolsky, neuroscientist, stress expert, behavior expert, has written a new book coming out at the end of this month called Determined. And he has done a podcast with this podcast host, and it's the only one I can find recently of his. So talks about his new book. He talks about free will and determinism and all this stuff, and it's one of the most mind blowing, potentially existential listens I've had. Because if what he says is true, then and and the society accept us has changed everything about what we think as humans.
Speaker 1:So if you wanna link to it, let me know because we will be talking about it one day. No doubt. I'll I'm still trying to get him on to live Q and A with us. Third one is the topic of this podcast is the wisdom of talking to yourself, and a lot of this is coming from Donald Robertson's brilliant article on this. And Donald Robertson is a psychotherapist, stoicism expert, bestselling author.
Speaker 1:So he'd this is his daily living, looking into this stuff. So he first talks about Socrates and the Socratic method and how the love of wisdom is what philosophy is for Socrates. That he always looked at other people's viewpoints. He could learn more from that than himself was one of the things he probably thought about. Now there's something called a Solomon's paradox that Donald Robson covers here.
Speaker 1:This is a recent research by social psychologists. Some some find some fascinating support for Socrates' approach to wisdom. Professor Igor Grossman is the head of the centre of the University of Waterloo in Canada called the Wisdom and Culture Lab, which carries out psychological research studying wisdom. Wisdom has already been shown to be related to well-being. One of Grossman's initial insights was that we typically exhibit greater wisdom when considering other people's problems than we do when considering our own.
Speaker 1:We know this. This is our daily life. We've all admitted to this. You can give your best friend the best advice of all time. You can never take it yourself.
Speaker 1:Quote from the research. We chose the term Solomon's paradox to identify the contradiction between thinking about other people's problems wisely, but failing to do so for ourselves. The biblical king Solomon, known for his keen intellect and unmatched wisdom in guiding others, failed to apply wisdom in his own life, which ultimately led to the demise of his kingdom. Crossman, why we give great advice to others but can't take it ourselves, 04/07/2015, Forbes Magazine. So experiments carried out by Grossman and his colleagues appear to confirm that our judgment becomes better or wiser when we are examining other people's lives.
Speaker 1:For example, they give experimental subjects the same relationship problem to discuss, but whereas one group were asked to imagine it was a friend's problem, the other group viewed it as if it was their own problem. Okay? And wisdom was defined by the researchers in terms of measures of intellectual humility, such as being willing to search for additional information that could inform the judgment, such as open mindedness, such as being more likely to look at the situation from the perspectives of others, and compromise or being willing to combine alternative perspectives to find a solution. Here's the important stats. The group examining the problem as if it happened to a friend turned out to score 22% better on ratings of intellectual humility, 31% better on open mindedness, and 15% better on compromise.
Speaker 1:These are other experiments that confirm this, to to put it simply, that we're better at giving other people advice given ourselves. Like, think of that. 31% more open minded when you view a problem or situation from the third person or from your best friend's lens than yours. Now what does this mean? What does it mean for us in our daily life?
Speaker 1:Like, okay, Scott. Great stats, mate. Brilliant. Thanks for telling me. Now what do I do with that?
Speaker 1:So Socrates actually did this to himself. He would speak to himself as if there was another Socrates in his head, and he admits this. And one of the things Donald was unexplained that Socrates would often go back and spend time on by himself, but he wasn't just thinking. He was kind of having a conversation with himself and really had like a devil's advocate inside him that would go through everything and it would make, you know, really wrestle those quest those answers out. And the thing is as well, like, we all could do this.
Speaker 1:A lot of us contradict ourselves. If you find yourself in a contradiction, don't dig a deeper hole. Don't, you know, think, oh, well, I'm different. Try and see what contradictions you can find in your life. Look at things like, if we could take the advice that we give our best friend ourselves, we really would have a lot of far fewer problems than we do now.
Speaker 1:Would you agree with that? I would say it's probably one of the one of the most powerful skills that we can learn. But how do we actually do this? I'd say step one, we definitely need to slow down. I think, like, when we're giving someone else advice, we're very, very objective and we don't really teach shit.
Speaker 1:Right? So if you're talking to your best friend, whether it's a girl or a boy, and she's like, oh, my partner cheated on me, Your advice is leave him or her, you know? They've cheated on you. They haven't told you. They're only they're only sorry because they got caught.
Speaker 1:It's gonna happen again. You're gonna live your days worrying about this. It's not gonna be worth it. It's gonna be brutal for the next three months, six months, but in the long term, be much better for you. You don't wanna put yourself through this.
Speaker 1:Right? And you can easily say this, and it's clearly the advice to take. But when you're it's you in a situation, you think, oh, but it could be genuine mistake. Maybe maybe he didn't cheat that part. Maybe this you'd start you you start making things up.
Speaker 1:And why is the question. What is happening in the brain? Is it that we're scared to leave the known? Is it that we don't want change and change scares us so much? Willing to hold on to even something that is horrendously bad for us, even if it's living in daily horror, anxiety?
Speaker 1:Is that the reason? Is it that we think that might be wrong that because it's us that it's different because it's me? But, yeah, but that's what happens to you, but maybe something happens to me. It's different. Maybe my partner was slightly different.
Speaker 1:I thought so well of him that you wanna protect the image of yourself, that you didn't get cheated on or this and that. What is it? I don't know. But there's something going on there that is different to when you give advice. And when it comes to weight loss or weight management or whatever it is, you can ask me for advice.
Speaker 1:No problem. And you'll get a straight up. Bam. You could give yourself the exact same advice. And that's what I want you to task with today.
Speaker 1:Comes up to work. You're going to work. Boom. Whiff of cookies. Hello.
Speaker 1:Okay? You say, right. What advice do I give my best friend who wants to not eat cookies today, who has already had their meals planned, who just wants to eat eat near the steps, and what advice do I say? You say stuff like, look, that cookie is gonna make yourself feel better for literally thirty seconds, and then afterwards you're gonna probably regret the cookie, even though you could say how track is fun, you probably will regret it. You'll probably feel worse about yourself.
Speaker 1:It will knock your mood down, and when your mood is down, there's even more of a chance of then eating more crap to try and make yourself feel better, because eating equals pleasure, and pleasure gets us to escape the current situation. So you're gonna put yourself in a bad mood all day. It's not gonna last long, fifteen seconds, all for what? Look at the bigger picture. It's not worth it.
Speaker 1:And you go, yeah. Yeah. It's just fair. Fair enough. I cook yourself.
Speaker 1:You're not worth it. I'm just gonna eat the meals I've prepared and save money as well, blah blah blah. Right? That's the obvious advice. Why can't we do it to ourselves?
Speaker 1:Right? What what what is is blocking us? Donald goes on to speak about another researcher called research done on distance self reflection on 555 participants. They recorded their thoughts in a journal for four weeks. And in order to test whether wise reasoning could be cultivated in daily life, participants were to write about various pleasant or troubling social experience that happen each day.
Speaker 1:One group using first person and the other group using third person language. Those employing were found to have improved their wisdom as measured by the ratings, acknowledging other perspectives, and conflict resolution. The study also found some evidence that those employing illyism, I think I'm saying it right, experienced less negative emotions such as anger and frustration. So looking at things in the third person makes you you can look a situation better, and you actually get less stress from it. You probably feel a lot better about stuff because you can zoom out zoom out a bit.
Speaker 1:It's the same with cognitive behavioral therapy. So he mentions a 2016 study and which looked at 38 studies, which looked at the effect on emotion of deliberately adopting a third person perspective was measured, including with regard to anxiety, arse, have guilt, anger, sadness. Across the board, evidence was found that the intensity of emotion was reduced, and the meaning of events was viewed differently if you looked at things from a third person. Okay? So R and T Beck, the founder of cognitive psychotherapy, CBT, in the 1985 manual for the treatment of anxiety disorders, described referring to our fault in the third person as a technique of emotional self regulation.
Speaker 1:Someone might describe his own worries by saying Bill is feeling anxious. He's worried others are judging him negatively. In my case, Scott is feeling anxious. He's worried about others judging him negatively as he was observing the thoughts of another person. So give that a go today.
Speaker 1:See if it works. Can you become the third person? Can you speak or refer to what's happening to you in the third person? Can you take a slow, deliberate approach to giving yourself really great advice if he's your best friend? Can you then genuinely take that advice on?
Speaker 1:You're gonna be more open minded. You'd be less stressed about stuff. You'd have more emotional regulation, and overall, you'd have a calmer day. So give that a go today in your eating, in your training, everything in your relationships, and let me know how you get on.