Ian Robertson (5:03)

Ian Robertson, welcome to the show.

Ian Robertson (5:05)

Hello, Don.

Ian Robertson (5:07)

So I'm curious, how did you get interested in the subject of confidence?

Ian Robertson (5:11)

Well, two things. One, I wasn't very confident young person. And second thing, my wife is a brilliant clinical psychologist, Fiona O'Doherty. The moment I met her, she said, there's one thing you can give a child if you can give them confidence, almost nothing else matters. Of course, other things matter, but that's just so important. And it took me decades before. I then wrote a book called the Winner Effect which showed that the best source of success was success. And there's biological foundation for that in the brain. And I then realize that what success gives you is confidence. And confidence has its own dynamic. But the great news is it's something that can be learned, which is the good news for people who are less confident.

Ian Robertson (6:00)

Yes, and we'll get into how to learn it. But staying at a high level just in these early innings here, how do you define confidence?

Ian Robertson (6:09)

Let me define it by saying what it's not, first of all, by saying it's not optimism. Optimism is the belief that things will turn out. Secondly, it's not self esteem. Self esteem is your evaluation of yourself and that can sometimes cause more problems than it helps. The secret sauce of confidence is its link to action. It's linked to the action systems in the brain. It's a belief that has two components. One is that you can do something in a particular domain. And the second thing is that if you do that thing, the outcome you want is more likely to happen. So that's the can do and can happen. Confidence is essentially a stance towards the future that makes it more likely that the future you desire will happen.

Ian Robertson (6:55)

A stance toward the future that makes it more likely that the future you desire will happen. That's really interesting. So it's not irrational self belief, it's not irrational hope. It's really something a little bit more nuanced and sophisticated.

Ian Robertson (7:14)

You're absolutely right. I could be as confident as I like. I like singing. I'm confident I could sing in La Scala, in an opera. But unless that's based on some real past successes and some past achievements, I'll never be able to do that. Realistically, however, I can set goals for myself and I can project into the future to targets that I want to achieve that stretch me, that are not guaranteed to happen. But that could happen. Marissa Mayer, the first woman CEO of a major tech company, Yahoo, she said this about success. Success is about doing things before you feel quite ready. And that's True of confidence, confidence bridges the uncertainty that's inherent in the future. So if we are going to be 100% certain that we can do the thing that we want to do and 100% certain that that will generate the outcome, then you don't need confidence because there's 100% certainty of that happening. However, all events in the future have a degree of uncertainty. What confidence does is help you to bridge that uncertainty, to price in the uncertainty that's inherent in the future, and to deal with the anxiety that's inherent in facing an uncertain future outcome.

Ian Robertson (8:41)

You mentioned earlier that there are two strands to confidence can do and can happen.

Ian Robertson (8:47)

Yeah.

Ian Robertson (8:47)

Can you go a little bit deeper into each of these?

Ian Robertson (8:50)

Yeah. So the great Stanford psychologist Bandura, Albert Bandura, can do is what he called self efficacy. And the can happen is outcome expectations. These are two sets of beliefs or expectations about the future. And that gives four states of the mind or brain. So can't do, won't happen produces a state of apathy, and it's measurable in the brain. Using positron emission tomography scanning, you can visualize dopamine receptors in the brain's reward network. And you can see the people who are apathetic actually have lower levels of dopamine receptors. And that results in low mood, high anxiety, low drive, and low initiative. So that's the top left, if you like, of this four square grid. Move along to the right and you have can do, won't happen. Now, that produces frustration. You know, I can change my diet, but you know what, it doesn't matter what I eat. I put on weight or I can get that college degree, but you know what? From where I come from, that won't get me a better job. And that produces a sense of frustration. And that switches on or activates or augments another neurotransmitter system in the brain, the norepinephrine system, which is part of the fight or flight system. And when you get too much norepinephrine in the brain, that interferes with clear thinking and that worsens your anger. Now, in the bottom left of this grid, foursquare grid, you get can't do, could happen. You know, I just can't stop smoking. I know if I could, I'm going to live longer and be healthier and get rid of this cough. I just can't do it. That tends to produce anxiety and depression and of course, anxiety as part of the fight or flight system. And that activates norepinephrine as well. And so that's where these diagonal in the four squares, the top right, the can do won't happen and the bottom left can't do could happen. That's a terribly dangerous axis where when you're angry you feel anxious and when you're anxious you may feel angry because the same physiological systems are activated by these two belief states of the brain. Then you go to bottom right and you have can do can happen. And that is a pretty remarkable state of the brain where your brain considers that it succeeded in the thing that it believes can happen. So your brain treats it as if it's a success already achieved and you get a little increase in dopamine activity in the brain's reward network. And that has five effects on you and your brain. First thing is it lowers anxiety because it raises your mood. Thirdly, it makes you more likely to take action, to do stuff, to take that first step, to make that first move to setting up your company. Fourthly, it makes you a little bit smarter because of the increased dopamine in the frontal lobes that happens when this dopamine reward network switches on. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, it makes you more persuasive, makes you more of an influencer. It makes people more likely to listen and do what you're saying because confidence gives you status. And when you have status, people will tend to be more persuaded by you. So that's why confidence is such a remarkable, critical, if you like, fuel for creating futures. And without confidence, we would have no civilization like we have here today. That collective confidence of humanity to come together to envisage technological, political, social, health states of the world that didn't exist, but which they had because they believed they could happen, they worked towards and created them. No other species does this. Imagining a non existent future and working towards creating it.

Ian Robertson (13:02)

You may not know this, but I have a lot of confidence that I have this magical power to inhabit the minds of my listeners and to know what they want me to ask. And I suspect that many of my listeners, I'm being facetious here, we don't know each other, so you probably don't know that I'm an incurable wise ass. But many of my listeners, I suspect at this point are wondering about overconfidence. And I just want to signal that we are going to get to that, but not yet because I want to stay with some of the physiological effects of confidence that you have enumerated so well. There are, and you write about this in your book, a lot of health benefits that accrue to confident people. Can you talk a little bit about those?

Ian Robertson (13:42)

Yes. So I mentioned that one of the critical things about confidence is it makes you do stuff, it makes you more likely to take action. The greatest corrosive of confidence is anxiety. And the greatest antidote to anxiety is confidence. So anxiety is a worry about the future with a focus on threats. And that anxiety, if it's sustained over time, and this is the ability of the human brain to time travel into the future means that you can create threats that are indefinite into the future and no other species does that. So that means we can keep our body and our brain in a constant state of arousal and sense of threat, which actually causes us to secrete the hormone cortisol in doses and over periods, which are not good for us and which are toxic to the tissues of our body and brain. And if you can find a way of controlling what you attend to in the future, that you've managed to direct your attention, we'll be talking about this later, about how to learn confidence. But if you can manage to control your attention so that you're thinking about or noticing potential positive outcomes rather than doom scrolling or talking or constantly thinking about negative outcomes either for yourself or the world, then you can control that anxiety. But the thing about anxious people, and there's been a study done across the world in 40 different countries, and anxious people do less of everything, they take less action. Why? Because anxiety is a response to a perceived threat. And so when you see threat around you, what do you do? You tend to pull back, avoid not risk taking action. So the anxious person calls off that, oh, that date, doesn't say, I've got a headache, I can't meet you for dinner tonight. Oh, I'm not going to go for that job interview. They pull back from things, they do less stuff and that has really negative effects on their health when combined with the chronically elevated cortisol. And so confidence comes from taking action that results in positive outcomes and that has these biological effects in your brain, the increased mood and the lowered anxiety, which have enormously positive health benefits. We know that chronic states of anxiety are really not good for us when they're long lasting. Short spells are fine, but long lasting anxiety and feeling, we're always risk of failing or we're being negatively evaluated by other people. All these feelings eat away at the cells of our body and brain. And that's one reason why, for instance, Oscar winners live on average four years longer than Oscar nominees. And that's got nothing to do with wealth and everything to do with being Taken out of the rat race of being of competitive evaluation and being secure in that sense of a golden ticket for you have made it, you are successful. That's a kind of hypercharged confidence available to very few people. But we can all get a mini version of this if we take action in the world towards goals that are meaningful to us in a careful, progressive way. Goals that stretch us a little bit, but not too much, because that means we're 90% chance of achieving them. And then we can build up the hormones in our brain, the hormones that are associated with the winner effect and success experiences. We can build up a state of our brain that makes future success more likely and that has enormous health benefits on our brains. We cannot underestimate the sense of not achieving progression towards our goals, the negative health effects of that and the positive effects that comes from having a strong sense of purpose. Of course, a strong sense of purpose generates goals which triggers actions, which gives success experiences which build enormously positive, both mental and physical benefits for our brain and our bodies.

Ian Robertson (17:50)

On my little team, we have an expression. The term we use is a squirrel. And the derivation of that term is that there's a great Pixar movie Up. And in the movie up, the bad guy chases around the good guys with a pack of dogs. But the vulnerability of the dogs is that every once in a while they get distracted by a squirrel and they scream squirrel. And go chase it. And so I'm going to chase a squirrel that you tantalizingly dropped a few paragraphs ago. You said something about Oscar winners living four years longer. Can you just say a little bit more about that? And is that effect, that kind of validation that Oscar winners receive that leads to a kind of relaxation, is that effect available to normal people outside of Hollywood?

Ian Robertson (18:37)

Probably nothing as big an effect, but I believe so. It also applies to Nobel Prize winners. Nobel Prize winners live, on average, one and a half years longer than Nobel nominees. So both groups are enormously successful, have huge successes, but one of them has been given this accolade. Now, to go back to the Oscar winners, four years increased lifespan is what you would get for the world's population if you cured all cancer. It's an enormously robust effect. Strongly strong, strongly effect. And the greatest source of stress for the human brain and mind is the fear of the negative evaluation of other people. That's because we're a tribal group species. And in evolutionary terms, being expelled from the group meant death. And so signals of rejection or criticism by the group are the greatest source of anxiety as Measured by how much cortisol we secrete. So what happens if you win an Oscar? You almost buy yourself unlimited status. You're no longer just as good as your last movie. And similarly the Nobel Prize winner is no longer just as good as her last academic paper. Because almost the more successful you become as you rise in status, so the threats to that status can magnify and become greater and become more vulnerable. So you're being lifted out of the rat race if you like. There's a few signal awards. I've only seen the evidence for this for Oscar winners and Nobel Prize winners. I'm guessing an Olympic gold medal might do something like that as well. Maybe a smaller effect. But in terms of your question about we ordinary mortals, can we get a bit of that action? I think we can. I think that's what authentic success, success that is built on our intrinsic goals rather than extrinsic goals. So we know that well being is much, much higher in people whose motivation is intrinsic. That is their main kind of values and motivations have to do with relationships, personal growth, health. Whereas people who are motivated by values that are primarily extrinsic, for instance status, money, wealth, status, money and power, they end up having lower levels of well being worldwide. Because if you tie yourself to external competitive goals, like being the best at X, Y or Z, or being more successful than that person, or more good looking than that person, you're on a hiding to nothing. There's always going to be someone more successful, richer, better looking than you. It's a big world. You're always going to have that constant cortisol secretion of feeling like you're failing in some way competitively. Whereas when you tie yourself to intrinsic goals, these goals are your own and they're not competitive. And so there's a security in that, particularly when they're anchored in values that are non materialistic. So that buys you a happiness and that buys you a security. That's a small version, I believe, of the Oscar effect. And I think the Oscar effect works so amazingly because it's in the context of largely extrinsic goals of status, fame, money. And that is a recipe for cortisol secretion, for stress, for fearing you're losing out for fear of failure. And suddenly this accolade lifts you out of that. And so that's why the health benefits are so enormous. But I do believe that particularly if you tie yourself to intrinsic goals, your own goals that you set for yourself that are not competitive, you're really potentially building yourself a mini Oscar effect.

Ian Robertson (22:29)

That's really interesting. Of course, easier said than done. Maybe I'll say a little bit about how I've tried to do this and hear your thoughts about my strategy and possibly other strategies that people could use. I am absolutely not immune to these extrinsic pressures and goals. And, you know, and I absolutely still feel them. And I'm aware of how much suffering they have produced for me internally, having chased awards in the TV news business back when I was in it and trying to sell as many books as possible and build as big a business as possible and get as many good reviews for my work and all of that stuff. Seeing how chasing those squirrels to be a little cute just leads to exhaustion. And occasionally. I mean, the diabolical part of it is occasionally it works. The dog catches the car, but the satisfaction doesn't last. So for me, and many people who listen to this show know this, I got a little tattoo on my wrist about a year and a half ago, and it's just a reminder that my work really is for the benefit of all beings, which is a Buddhist term of art. It's a little earnest, which is off brand a little bit for me, but it doesn't really matter because just having that reminder right next to my watch helps me. It gives me a little bit of the Oscar effect. Not in that it makes me feel fully validated, but it just elevates me out of the rat race a little bit and into my intrinsic purpose, which is to be useful. So I just offer that up for your thoughts and whether that lands for you and whether you have other ideas for people who don't want to get a tattoo.

Ian Robertson (24:06)

Well, look, first of all, none of us are immune to the extrinsic goals, including myself. You'd have to be a Zen master to be. And many of them succumb to if they become well known or start chasing fame or chasing money. And of course, we can do without them. It's a question of what we prioritize. We have a number of values and a number of goals, and we don't just focus on one thing. But in terms of what you said with your tattoo, which I think is a lovely story, Dan, the thing that really most of us spend our lives doing is unconsciously is warding off that glimmering awareness of our own mortality, the kind of fear of extinction. And a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to build some illusory tower and protect them from that, and no one yet has. And the illusion that great wealth or great Fame will somehow buy you immortality and great power. And many people succumb to that delusion and just start their whole life going for these things in order to ward off the fact that they will die. However, that little tattoo on your wrist is essentially about an affirmation of a core value for you, which is that sense that your work is for everyone. Of course, we're all doing it for our egos to some extent, but there's a sense you're doing this because you believe this will benefit to a much wider group of people. Very important value. Now, the great thing about values are values are eternal in the way that the human self is not. Values don't die. Human beings die, but values don't. So if you can disengage yourself from your own self, from your own ego, from that slightly illusory phenomenon that we call the self, if you can kind of have a bit of a detachment from that, not completely, obviously, and bring to mind your values, as you do whenever you look at your watch, the scientific evidence that that has enormously beneficial effects. It reduces activation of the amygdala, the emotional rousing center in the brain. It increases activation in the prefrontal cortex and the bits that have to do with self reflection. So affirming your values and escaping from values that are like the hamster wheel of building status and ego, escaping from them into more eternal ones, essentially you're moving towards a kind of immortality because yourself, it's your values, and values go on forever. And that definitely is, as you suggested, that kind of mini Oscar effect that's.

Ian Robertson (26:49)

So interesting, values as a path to a kind of immortality. And values will play a role in our discussion about how to learn to be confident. And we've been teasing the audience with. With the notion of actually diving into that. So let's do it. How do we boost our confidence, especially in a world that seems to militate against confidence, by throwing us into a constant state of comparison, et cetera.

Ian Robertson (27:18)

Yeah. So let's start with one critical thing, which is what we pay attention to, what we feel and what we do depends largely on what we pay attention to. And so if you can control your attention, you can control your feelings and your thoughts to some extent. And that's why mindfulness is such a powerful method, because mindfulness is, to a large part, attention control training. That's what it was first called by Jon Kabat Zinn when he first, if you like, secularized some of his practices. It was called attentional control training. So let me give you a little Example of the role of attention in anxiety and therefore in confidence, because anxiety is the greatest corrosive of confidence. As a mature student, I finished my PhD and I was giving the first presentation of the data from my PhD to quite a small audience, but a prestigious audience. And it was my first outing and I was very nervous. And as I started to present my data, there was a very distinguished Oxford professor in the front row and she started to shake her head and frown and I couldn't keep my eyes off her and my anxiety increased and increased. I started having these thoughts about, oh, this is a disaster, my academic career is finished before it started, this is all rubbish. By the end of this, it was only a 20 minute talk, I was a wreck. And then one of her students came up to me and said, are you a medical. An md And I took that as a criticism because implied that I wasn't a good scientist that explained my poor. So I really was in a very upset state. Turned out that professor was going through a bad time and she was having actually a very severe illness. And her shaking her head really hadn't anything to do with my presentation because I gave the presentation later to other people. It wasn't Nobel Prize stuff, but it was not bad. And what I learned there was this primitive tendency we have when we feel under threat to become hyper vigilant for other signs of threat. So our attention systems become like Patriot missiles just looking to shoot down or to detect potential threat. Whole attention system becomes a spotter system for bad things happening. And the same thing happens to our memory system. In that state we dredge up past negative memories. So that distortion of attention and distortion of memory results in a cascade of negative emotions that get worse and worse, generate too much norepinephrine, interfere with our ability to get things in proportion, to see the wood for the trees, to solve problems. And that of course even makes us more anxious. So what I learned subsequently and what I do now, if I ever feel similarly under threat, if you like presenting new data or in a presentation where people are critical, is I control my attention by choosing to look at the people who are looking interested or at least awake, and not to look at the person who's on his phone or the person who has his eyes closed or the person who's frowning, I deliberately feed my brain. Like if you like, choosing my algorithm to feed me from social media. I'm not allowing myself to be fed constant gloom. I want nice things as well. So I'm choosing to feed my brain with positive input by choosing to look at the people who are listening to me. At least that's what we do we say with social anxiety. You know, some people very anxious in social situations and they believe that everyone's looking at them. The one person that does look at them because they're doing something, they're standing awkwardly at the door, they focus on that person as confirmation of their threat perception and they don't look at the three people who are eating their lunch and haven't even noticed you're there. So if you can learn to control your attention, that's a major step towards controlling your anxiety and therefore giving yourself a better chance of then taking action. And that's the second recipe for confidence doing stuff.

Dan Harris (31:32)

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Ian Robertson (32:31)

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Ian Robertson (34:44)

Before we get into taking action, because I have a lot of I want to discuss with you in that regard. Let me just stay with this Controlling your attention I'm imagining. Well, imagining two things at the same time. You can fight on either one of these hooks as I dangle them here. One is that some people listening might be like, well, how do you actually do that? How do you actually control your attention? And if you do focus only on the positive, are you in a state of denial? And then the second thing that's coming up in my head as I listen to you talk about managing your attention in this way, is that a gratitude practice? Whether through journaling or just as I do, listing a few things that went well that day in my mind as I'm preparing to fall asleep, that might be a way to manage your attention. So any response to the foregoing?

Ian Robertson (35:31)

I think these are great examples, Stan. Running over what you're grateful for that day is actually choosing to pay attention to positive things. And similarly, that's why one of the incredibly positive effects of keeping a diary because you're actually recording things that happen during the day, many of which will be quite enjoyable. And the trouble is we tend to forget them unless we pay attention to them. And we maybe focus on the one big negative thing that happened. The bad conversation we had with a colleague or with partner or something that clouds our memory for the day and the week and means we don't notice or remember actually most of the week. Most of the day was a great cup of coffee I had. I'm not in hospital. I have that friend, you know, I really enjoyed that beer after work. So that gratitude practice is a great example of controlling your anxiety, as is journaling, keeping track of the small things, particularly in your life. And it's the small things that generally give us happiness much more than the big things. And yes, the thing is about if you're in a state of anxiety, it's very hard to have the mental resources left over from the anxiety to actually think about what you're thinking about or think about what you're paying attention to. And that's why you have to practice it offline when you're not anxious. These are habits you have to practice hundreds of times before they become automatic. And once they become automatic, then when you're in an anxious state, they're more likely that you will do them, and that will be more likely to bring down your anxious state. And I'll just give you one more example of something you can do to control your attention, and that's using your breathing. So if you breathe into the count of four and out to the count of six and do that a couple of times, you feel different after you do that because you've changed the chemistry of your brain. In a critical attention center, there's a part of the brain called the locus coeruleus deep in the middle of the brain, which is the only source of norepinephrine, which is part of the fight or flight system. And the locus coeruleus is chemosensitive. It responds precisely to how much carbon dioxide is in your blood. So as you breathe in and out, the chemical composition of your blood changes and so does the firing of the locus coeruleus. And when you breathe in this slow way, particularly breathing out for longer than you breathe in, you reduce the norepinephrine release in your brain, which lowers your anxiety and makes your thinking clearer and allows you to pay attention more accurately and be less hooked on to the negative threat signals otherwise will escalate your anxiety.

Ian Robertson (38:30)

That's really helpful. I did it while you were speaking. Always works. Okay, I interrupted you earlier when you wanted to move on to another way in which we can learn or boost our confidence. And it is taking Action. Yeah, Take it away, Ian.

Ian Robertson (38:45)

So the great Persian Afghanistani poet Rumi, 13th century, he said, the path only appears with the first step, which is such a profound, profound statement, because in much of our life, there's a big uncertainty in the future. We don't quite know. Yeah. Sometimes we can set goals that we've got a 90% chance of achieving, but sometimes there are periods in our life where actually it's not quite clear what goals we should set and what we should or should not do. And the risk there is that that makes us anxious and makes us hold back and not do stuff. What Rumi says is sometimes you just have to take that first step. And only taking that first step will change your perspective. It will lead you somewhere different where you might have a different perception, a different thought. You will see something, you will hear something, you will meet someone, which you would not have done had you not taken that first step. And that's again, part of the secret sauce of confidence is doing something in spite of uncertainty, in spite of anxiety. And just the mere act of taking action can give you a sense of success. Because I did this in spite of the fact that my body was telling me I didn't want to do it because I was so anxious, I did it by setting a goal that I call an internal goal. Sometimes the external world is. You don't have enough control over it, so you have to turn inside yourself and say, I'm setting goals for myself that are internal. I'm going to see if I can do that thing, go into that social situation even though I don't feel like it. I'm going to set myself a goal of doing that even for 5 minutes, for 10 minutes, and setting the goal sufficiently well so that if you do it, you get a sense of success. You get a little surge of dopamine, which is a natural antidepressant. When that happens, mini antidepressant, and lowers your anxiety and gives you that sense of moving forward. So that's why the confidence depends on action. It's linked to the action systems of the brain. And anxiety does the very opposite. So doing stuff in spite of feeling anxious actually is a huge source of confidence, because you're mastering adversity, you're mastering yourself. There are ancient Buddhist and other practices to do with mastering yourself. Well, anxiety is one of the greatest challenges to mastering yourself. And you can do it. You have to take action. Small goals stretch you a little bit, and sometimes that's about taking action for its own sake. If things are tough in your Life. If you're a bit. Don't quite know where you're going, take a step, do what Rumi said, and you will see, meet, smell, hear something that you would not have done had you not taken that step.

Ian Robertson (41:53)

Okay, some follow ups on this. First, as somebody with panic disorder, I'm quite familiar with exposure therapy, which is where you do the shit you don't want to do, face your fears. In my case, claustrophobia. So riding elevators, going on airplanes, even though every cell in my body is telling me I don't want to do it. And there's enormous satisfaction when you do it, you do gain confidence that you can do these things. That being said, and I suspect you'll agree with this, but I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. It's important to, and this goes back to your goal setting notion. It's important to proceed slowly and systematically so as to not overwhelm the system. So not like going from treating your claustrophobia to, you know, hopping in the trunk of somebody's car or into a coffin or something like that. Would you agree that you want to proceed cautiously?

Ian Robertson (42:45)

Absolutely. I mentioned norepinephrine and dopamine, two of the brain's neurotransmitters, and both of them have sweet spots. Too little or too much, and your brain really underperforms. There's a sweet spot in the middle that's optimal performance. And the same is true for goal setting. Goal setting is just so important, focuses your attention and increases the chances of success, experiences that build a winner effect. And if you're a perfectionist, for instance, who sets the goals so high that it's very difficult, you're never satisfied with it, then that can lead to demoralization and a failure to get any success experience. And similarly, if you're over ambitious and impatient and you set goals that stretch you too much, too far beyond what you can do at the moment, you're greatly increasing the chances of failure and you're not doing what confidence really is built on, which is the optimal stretching of yourself a bit into uncertainty, but giving yourself a greater reasonable probability of success. And that's why I totally agree with you. I mean, there is a treatment for phobic disorders called flooding, where you just sit in that place for, or do the thing for hours upon end. And it can be effective, but it's very risky as well, because if you leave before the anxiety has gone down, you can end up feeling worse than you were before. Whereas the incremental approach that you just stretching yourself bit by bit, never going in, not feeling any anxiety. You have to feel a bit of anxiety because there has to be a bit of uncertainty whether you can do this. But if you do it under these circumstances, boy has that powerful effects on your brain and on your mind.

Ian Robertson (44:37)

Okay, here's my other follow up on this question of taking action. I think a lot about just trying things, just making experiments, especially in a moment of uncertainty. I've talked about this publicly, but I was involved for many years with a meditation app, and my relationship with my co founders kind of went sideways. And I ended up having to leave and starting over. And in the process of starting over, I've tried a bunch of things. I tried to go on social media, make some experiments there. I started a subscription service, and that is morphing and changing as I grow it. And I've tried to do live events and to make merchandise and just trying lots of little and sometimes big things. And for me, an important aspect of all of this is a willingness to fail, because I know if I'm unwilling to fail, I won't do anything. So what's the role of failure in taking action?

Ian Robertson (45:34)

A number of. As for the confidence habit, one of them is attention, One of them is action, Another one is attitude to failure. That's absolutely critical. Confidence is about bridging uncertainty in the future. So you say, I think I can do that thing. Okay, you're deliberately setting a goal that stretches you and therefore is not 100% certain I can do that thing. I think I can do it. But if it's really stretching you a certain percentage of times, you won't do it. You'll fail, which is statistically necessary for confidence to work. It can't work 100% of the time, but you then have to turn your mind to what your response to failure is. And the thing about failure is we know psychologically and neurologically that it's a much better teacher than success. Failure gives you many more pointers to what went wrong than success gives you to what went right. Why? Because success is often a significant proportion. Luck or circumstance. Yes, Your effort and what you did plays a part. Whereas in failure, if you can bear to turn your mind over the emotional hurdle of paying attention to your failure, you will learn much more about the reasons for what the outcome was. However, it's very hard to do that, and it's particularly hard for one category of person, and that is people who hold a theory about themselves that the great Carol Dweck in Stanford called a fixed mindset. So if you Have a theory of yourself that says either could be I'm very clever, it could be I'm very anxious. It could be I'm a person who can't learn. Or it could be I'm not musical. Or it could be I'm not social. If you have a big I theory about yourself that categorizes you with the implication is that it's kind of fixed by your genetics or your upbringing, that mindset makes it very hard to deal with failure. Either the failure confirms a negative mindset. Yeah, I knew I was stupid. I never thought, how could I do that? I know I'm stupid or I know I'm anxious. What's the surprise that I failed? But also for the person with the positive mindset, I always thought I'm clever, maybe I'm not clever. And so the brain goes into repair mode, ego repair mode, self protection mode. And there's good research with children and sitting tests and you record brain activity. And children who have a fixed mindset about themselves who fail an item don't learn from that failure because they're so busy paying attention to trying to protect the concept of themselves, their fixed theory. So your failure attitude to failure is very much tied to a fourth A in the attention habit, which is your attitude to yourself, your theory of yourself. And what we know about the human brain is it's enormously plastic. Neuroplasticity is the absolute signature of the human brain. We only have 20,000 genes. These cannot possibly specify for all our behaviors. Our brain changes all the time with what we do and what we think and what we feel. And if we have a theory that says, no, it's who I am and what I do is programmed in there, hardwired, then it really hugely undercuts any chance we have of changing our behavior. Because learning a new way of thinking or a new way of feeling or a new emotional stance takes thousands of trials. And learning is always up and down and a gradual up, but there's always down periods. And if you hit a down period and you have a fixed theory of your abilities or yourself, then you will give up. So that's why embracing failure, monitoring what you say to yourself after a failure, and if you find yourself saying big I phrases that I call them, like I am or I am not, these are big fixed mindset phrases. And they imprison you and cut you off from the slow up and down of learning, of the learning the habits of confidence, the habits of anxiety control, the habits of emotional control.

Ian Robertson (50:27)

This is all incredibly helpful. So the Four A's thus far. Attention, action, attitude to failure, attitude to yourself. I'm going to ask a question that's a bit of a non sequitur came up in my mind when you were talking about attitude to failure. So it doesn't follow quite neatly out of attitude yourself, but maybe it does. I employ a lot of defensive pessimism and I know you're not a big fan of pessimism. You write in your book that it handicaps because it makes you suffer twice. You suffer in your pessimism and then you suffer if you fail. And I buy all of that, and I do find that so. For example, back to this new company that I've started in this new subscription service that I launched, et cetera, et cetera, all these new things I've tried over the last year or so. The managing director of my little company, Tony Magyar, essentially the coo, she shares my penchant for pessimism. And we often, when we're making our budgets, we make very modest projections. We set the bar low for success. We don't assume that things are going to go extraordinarily well. We leave room for upside, surprise. And I find this soothing given my baseline or factory setting for anxiety. So what say you?

Ian Robertson (51:41)

All human lives are defined by the balance between two primitive forces. And all animal lives are as well. And that is between appetite or approach going forward for the reward and avoidance, pulling back to reduce the risk of punishment. And that's a primitive wiring in all mammals brains and all reptiles brains as well, going forward for reward or pulling back from punishment. And the world is complicated. The threats are real and if you didn't have a reasonable balance between these two opposing forces, you wouldn't last very long. However, these actually are instantiated to some extent in the two halves of the brain, with approach, goal setting and approach and future orientation being more associated with left prefrontal cortex and the perception of threat and avoidance being more right prefrontal cortex and the two halves of the brain constantly tussling against each other, trying to inhibit each other. And in the normal healthy human brain, the non depressed person's brain, there's always a slight advantage for the approach system over the threat system. We're slightly more overconfident than crude statistics of the world would allow us to be. And no one would start up a company, Dan, like you have. No one would start up a company if you weren't slightly more optimistic than statistics allow. That's healthy overconfidence. And it's absolutely vital for Humanity that we have that capacity to project ourselves into a future where maybe the statistics aren't fully in line with that. Now, because confidence works so well and because healthy overconfidence has these effects, antidepressant, anti anxiety makes you a little bit smarter, makes you more likely to take action and gives you status and influence, because that works so well, you're actually more likely to multiply and get success. And of course success, like confidence, is exponential. Small achievements build bigger and bigger and bigger, like compound interest. So it's very likely that if you really are confident this way, you will become successful. And the risk then is that you become overconfident. And this happens to whole economies. It happened in 200607 on Wall street where all the traders then could think of was bonuses and huge bonuses and huge profits. There was inability even to remember past crashes because the memory systems and the attention systems were so inflated, so biased towards approach, appetite, reward. And what happened then is of course in millions of brains of people in the financial system and individuals taking mortgages, was the threat perception circuits of the brain were inhibited because of the dominance. And so you got this diminution of the ability to even remember risk, past negative downsides, to remember what the risky situations were. And with that you get other changes in the brain linked to the right frontal cortex to do with self awareness, to do with empathy. All of these things get diminished when you overinflate the left dominant confidence oriented parts of the brain. And that's where you get into overconfidence. So it's this delicate dance we have to do. And you know what, if I was starting a business, Dan, I do exactly as you said. I mean that's appropriate husbandry of our brains is to motivate ourselves to go, yeah, we want to wash our faces, we want to survive. So we're forecasting a cautious small profit. And let's be delighted if our actual financial outcome ends up better than that. Because the brain loves being surprised. The reward system loves unexpected, unpredicted rewards. They love them. That switches on the dopamine system much more than rewards that we're certain.

Ian Robertson (56:02)

Okay, so what I'm calling defensive pessimism is probably not the right terminology from your standpoint. What I'm calling defensive pessimism you're really saying is just avoiding overconfidence. Exactly. I have the confidence to start the business, but I'm not so overconfident as to assume it's going to be a million dollar business tomorrow.

Ian Robertson (56:21)

No, you're doing very, very finely tuned goal setting that takes into account not just potential upsides, but potential downsides. You're setting goals that stretch you because you're saying my business can survive. That's a pretty important goal. So it's not that you don't have confidence, it's not that you're not optimistic, but you are appropriately constraining that and just having just the right amount of mild overconfidence, if you like. And that's a bit like overcoming your claustrophobia. It's a thing to do it incrementally and carefully.

Dan Harris (56:55)

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Ian Robertson (58:52)

Let'S stay with overconfidence for a second. Examples come to mind readily of people who are just unbelievably overconfident. I'm thinking about that movie from the 90s where Alec Baldwin plays a doctor and somebody says he's a surgeon. And then somebody says, do you have a God complex? And he says I am God. That's an extreme example. But we all know overconfident, cocky people. How do we avoid that without squelching the healthy confidence that we want?

Ian Robertson (59:25)

Well, how do we do it in ourselves? How do we do it for people who have power over us is a very different matter. Because confidence buys you status, status buys you wealth, wealth buys you power. And it's very difficult to speak truth to a powerful boss. And if there is no mechanism of speaking truth to a powerful person who's got control over you in some way, then you're going to rely on governance. Some kind of governance, some kind of. In a corporation. Good, well run corporations have 360 degree assessment where the person with power is assessed by the people over whom she has power as well as by people above them and colleagues. And that's hugely constraining on the otherwise potential cascade of narcissism and overconfidence that happens with the accretion of power and wealth and influence and fame depending on the domain. All of these things can so readily distort almost to delusional form a person's thinking. And throughout history we see this happening. Julius Caesar had himself made a demigod while he was still alive and had statues as a demigod all throughout Rome. He was a populist dictator who overthrew the republic in Rome. And John Paul Getty, the billionaire oil. He bought a villa outside Rome on the coast that belonged to Nero and he believed himself to be a reincarnation of Nero. So he believed himself and many major dictators, and some major business people as well, some major celebrities and entertainment get such success and such overconfidence, they start to feel special. And some of them in a godlike way. I remember Tony Blair, the British Prime Minister, who was a very good prime minister until he got carried away with this Iraq war adventure. And I remember him being interviewed on British television and the interviewer, Michael Parkinson eventually wheedling out to him. But what drove him? And then he got admitted, yes, that maybe God had spoken to him. You know, maybe he had a special. He was following what God was telling him. So this relationship, you have such success or power or wealth or fame that you feel I must be so special. I'm not just like ordinary human beings, I'm godlike. And that is culmination of a kind of deluded narcissism. Unfortunately, if you have unconstrained power. It's almost guaranteed to happen. It's almost like a disease you can foresee in someone if you give them unconstrained power or relatively unconstrained power, they will start to feel godlike. And that has also. Adolf Hitler was so impatient with these generals that he took over control of the army, embarked on a disastrous invasion of Russia because he felt godlike, distorted his judgment, abolished his perception of risk. Whatever empathy he had was gone. And these are biological effects of great power in the brain. It's happened to Vladimir Putin as well, after the isolation of COVID and this ghastly behavior in Ukraine. This is individual human psychology and neurology as a result of unconstrained power leading to supreme overconfidence, distorted judgment and narcissism.

Ian Robertson (63:06)

So very hard to change overconfidence. When somebody has accrued an enormous amount of power and influence and wealth. How can we guard against it in ourselves?

Ian Robertson (63:17)

Well, in ourselves. Well, mindfulness. I don't want to become too much of an advocate for mindfulness, but I mean, it's a very powerful method. And what mindfulness does is to make you detach yourself, disengage a little bit from your own ego and realize that you are not your thoughts. For example, that there's this beautiful capacity of the human brain to watch itself watching and think about itself thinking. And if you can just decenter a bit from the striving and the hungers of the ego, if you can really do that, that's a potential significant, not guaranteed, but can moderate the risk of overconfidence. And the other is to really build self awareness. And that's where journaling is so important. And that's where things like gratitude practices that you talked about before about. There's a very interesting study of obituaries done in New York Times obituaries. And when they got people to evaluate the human beings whose obituaries they read, now, most of the people they'd never heard of, so they weren't people they knew about, but they were asked to do a kind of evaluation of the people whose obituaries they read. And what they found was none of the earthly accomplishments of the dead people figured in the evaluations of the readers. Only the predominant features that led them to think of the people as being good or bad people were their moral qualities rather than their business or scientific or medical. Whatever they were, it was their moral qualities that led the readers to say, yeah, I rank this person high as being an admirable person to the extent that we can Define our values, our morals, and make them conscious to ourselves. That too is a potential antidote to getting too narcissistically involved in one's whatever it is, looks, intellect, wealth, or whatever it is.

Ian Robertson (65:34)

So we've come back to values. In your book, you talk about values as being useful in learning or boosting confidence. So we just talked about values as a way to mitigate overconfidence. But how can values be a source of healthy confidence?

Ian Robertson (65:51)

Mainly by anchoring the ego in something bigger than itself and so by making it feel less under threat. So Desi and Ryan, brilliant psychologists, University of Rochester, they developed this method called self affirmation, which is where you get someone to define, to identify what their core values are, and then to spend a couple of minutes writing what these values are, why they hold them, and what they mean to them. So it's just an exercise to bring to mind this kind of what do I stand for? And then they would present people who had either done this exercise or not with various types of ego threatening messages. And they looked at brain imaging using FMRI and they found that the people who had taken a few minutes to affirm their values were less ego threatened by these messages, as measured by the amygdala activation in that amygdala, fear and anger emotion center in the brain. And also had different pattern of activation in the middle of the prefrontal cortex where we do self reflection. That really is a pretty powerful antidote to anxiety, a particular kind of anxiety, which is the fear of negative evaluation by other people. I mean, we really are a group species and we're just constantly looking over our shoulder to see what other people are thinking about us. And we're spending enormous amounts of effort and money and everything to try and maintain a good image of ourselves in the eyes of other people. And that's a huge source of stress, huge driver to our behavior. Whereas if we can just relax a bit out of that, say, I don't really care what other people think of me. My values are my relationships with my family, or my values are my integrity, or my values are my professionalism or whatever it is that it gives you this security, it generates these intrinsic internal goals that give you satisfaction and success irrespective of what the competitive environment is. Yeah.

Ian Robertson (68:02)

So I found this useful just to relate a little story I was actually reading. My staff prepares me for every interview, what we call a prep doc. It helps me prepare for every interview. And I was reading my Ian Robertson prep doc as I was getting ready to go on cnn. The other night to do a segment about mental health. And as I've referenced before, I have panic disorder. I've quite famously had a panic attack on live television, and I haven't been on television in a while. So I was really nervous as I was preparing to go on cnn. You know, I know how to do this. I've done television for 30 years, and so I have some reason for confidence. And, you know, the brain can go into mutiny mode and it can make it very hard to function in certain contexts. So remembering that my goal is to benefit all beings was very helpful in that moment. But there was another technique that you write about that also really helped. So I thought I might prod you to talk about it. You recommend that we reframe our anxiety as excitement.

Ian Robertson (69:06)

Yeah.

Ian Robertson (69:06)

And that really landed for me as I was freaking out about going on cnn.

Ian Robertson (69:11)

Yeah. Thank you for asking me about that. Very briefly, a story about my own experience. I was. Many years ago, I had a really difficult situation with someone that was working for me, and it wasn't going well. And this person knew how to press my buttons. And I responded angrily in meetings in a way I felt bad about afterwards. This problem was festering, and I was waking up early in the morning thinking, how am I going to solve this problem? And then one morning I woke up and thought, hold on a minute. I don't think this problem's solvable. There was a meeting for coming up the next week, and I've been thinking, how am I going to solve this problem? I realized this relationship was from my point of view, I couldn't sustain it, have to go to HR and everything like that, which was very unfortunate. So I turned, having decided I couldn't solve this problem in the external world, I changed my goal to be an internal goal. And I said, I'm going to set myself the goal at this meeting next week. Behaving myself, utter cool Zen like professionalism in the face of provocation. I am going to be absolutely calm and unperturbed, at least on the surface, in the face of buttons being pushed. And first, when I thought of this meeting, I was filled with dread and anxiety. And then gradually, as I rehearsed in my mind's eye, the meeting imagined what would be said. Imagine my reaction, practiced a different kind of response to it than I'd shown in the past. So that by the end of that five days before the meeting, I was in a state of excitement, of kind of edgy excitement. Could I do this? Could I achieve this internal goal? So I went into the meeting. And yeah, my buttons were pushed, but I was so unusually able to not respond in the way that was expected to respond and was very cool and professional. Some people can do this. It just wasn't hard for me. This was a personal goal. And I came out of that meeting with the problem totally unchanged in the external world. But me feeling like a million dollars because I'd achieved this against anxiety, I'd achieved this significant goal, an internal goal of my own. Tiger woods, the golfer, he says that the day he doesn't feel nervous before he goes on the golf course is the day he gives up. Because nerves is actually just another word for arousal of our brains and body's preparation systems for action. And the symptoms are the same in anxiety, anger and excitement. And they only become a particular emotion when you put words on them. And so there's research from Pittsburgh, the Wharton Business School there, showing that just saying I feel excited before a stressful event leads to better performance. Even though your heart is racing, your mouth is dry, if you label that as excitement, it changes from a threat mindset into a challenge or a goal approaching mindset. So it's a very powerful technique. Children love it. They love being told that maybe they're anxious about a test or a sports event. They just say, oh yeah, that funny feeling in my tummy, that's, ooh, that's famous for them. I'm excited. Yeah, I'm excited. It's a very, very powerful method.

Ian Robertson (72:36)

You dedicate a significant chunk of this book to some factors that mitigate our confidence, including race and gender and class. So I feel bad that I'm bringing this up toward the end of the interview because it really is something that you focus on quite a bit in the book. But given that we only have a few minutes left, can you say a little bit about how gender, race and class can diminish confidence and what the possible mitigating factors might be in other ways? How can we work with this situation?

Ian Robertson (73:07)

Certain categories of people have certain negative stereotypes associated with age involves a set of preconceptions about what older people should do. Gender sex has the same supposedly women are poor visiospatial abilities than men, for instance. And that negative stereotype, say, in women, has led to a much smaller proportion of women doing engineering or subjects in university that would require visiospatial thinking. But actually research shows that it's not a genetically determined difference in visuospatial processing. It is largely because if you tell a woman who's aware of this stereotype that are being tested for their visual spatial ability. Then immediately part of their brain, part of their attention circuits are going to be thinking about, oh my goodness, am I going to fail? I'm going to do badly on this because I'm a woman. Which actually takes away from the computational powers of the brain necessary to do the task. The study showing if you give women 20 hours playing medal of Honor, a fighting game that men play much more often, but requires complex visiospatial skills, women will catch up with men and their visual spatial ability. So sex, race, age, disability, height, there's all these categories of people who, if they absorb the negative stereotype, which is very difficult not to. The moment that stereotype is activated in your brain, it's the opposite effect of self affirmation. It becomes something that requires you to pay attention to it, something that raises your anxiety, that increases norepinephrine and interferes with the very cognitive capacities required to do the task. And so you get incredible negative self fulfilling prophecies, the opposite of confidence, by the corrosive effect of negative stereotypes being sometimes quite unconsciously internalized in the brains of the stigmatized or stereotyped group.

Ian Robertson (75:19)

And I know from reading interviews with you that you were surprised by the extent to which this would become a salient issue in researching and writing the book. Just to come back to it in our remaining moments here, if a listener to this is a female, or from a marginalized racial or ethnic group, or is elderly, what are the ways to work around these depressors of confidence?

Ian Robertson (75:45)

Try and avoid saboteurs. If you've got colleagues or friends or people in your family who are sabotaging you in some way, distance yourself or at least find ways of orienting your relationships to people who support rather than sabotage. The other thing is to behave, to fake the trappings that counteract the stereotype. And so if it's age, for instance, just avoid dressing old, avoid stooping, try and mimic the external features as if you were younger. And women, don't allow yourself to be browbeaten in a meeting. It's much less likely to happen in the USA than it is in Europe. But don't allow yourself to slip into the dominance relationships that many men try to impose on women, sometimes without either of them being fully conscious of it. But American women have learned to do this much better than European women have on average. And that is revealed in many of the fact that American women suffer much less of a confidence gap than say, Irish or Scottish or Italian women do.

Ian Robertson (77:00)

This has been such a fascinating conversation and Just to say on this issue of confidence as it relates to race and gender and class. While we did not get to do a fulsome investigation in this conversation, I have done interviews on imposter syndrome and related subjects that I will post links to in show notes. Ian, before I let you go, would you please remind everybody the name of your book, the new one, and maybe some of the previous ones that you've rinsed. And you know, is there a website we can learn more about you? Please plug everything.

Ian Robertson (77:33)

Thanks very much, Dan. It's been a pleasure talking to you. The website is ianrobertson.org Just Ian I A N R O-B-R-T-S-O-N.org the last book I wrote is called How Confidence the New Science of Self Belief. It's published by Penguin. It's available on Amazon and other bookshops. The previous book I wrote was called the Stress Test and that very much addressed the positive aspects of stress and the fact that it's an energy that can be harnessed. The one before that was called the winner effect, which I alluded to, which shows you that the greatest source of success is success. But it's been a delight talking to you, Dan. Thank you very much indeed.

Ian Robertson (78:14)

That's exactly the word I would use, delight. Ian, thank you very much.

Dan Harris (78:22)

Thanks again to Ian.

Ian Robertson (78:23)

Really great to have him on the show.

Dan Harris (78:24)

It was great to talk to him. If you sign up@danharris.com, you will get a cheat sheet of this episode right in your inbox which includes key takeaways, timestamped highlights and a full transcript. Much more going on over@danharris.com so come join us. Before I go, I just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, DJ Kashmir is our executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, and I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey@wondery.com survey.

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