Tarek Kareem Harris – Toolkits for an exceptional Life Performance Psychiatry #2

			Welcome back, everybody. And thank you for coming to our second seminar on toolkit for an
exceptional mind. Today we're talking about the toolkits themselves. And really, we're going to show
you why
		

			we earn our money as newer psychiatrists why we do it better, or why we ended up doing it better
than more routine coaches or therapists and that kind of thing.
		

			Because we know how to adjust the things that need adjusting. So we'll talk about improving
predictions and accuracy. We'll talk about why we make the mistakes that we do make and how to guide
the attention seeking instrument of the mind to towards making better decisions. And how that
applies in real life and how to make money when others lose it. I'm sure many of you are interested
in fascinated by that even as academics or students. And so let's press on. How many of you know
there's actually a few more of you than they were yesterday. So clearly, we've done something right.
Well done. Thank you. And, well, let's try and prove our worth here today.
		

			Supposing we were to focus on one thing, investors, and we're trying to take that investors mindset
and improve their ability to grow their own wealth.
		

			It doesn't really matter what they want to improve, but we can adapt what we do as a process to
focus on that particular aim. And six elements are applied to the mindset. These are the six basic
areas where we address the fundamental question of how exceptional people not only make excellent
decisions, which is only half of the story so far, because, yes, what I haven't told you is about
the other half. The other half is this, the problem with exceptional people is that there is no such
thing. Sorry for the apparent deception, but you will understand what I mean when I explain.
		

			People do exceptional things. So exceptionality is not an identity. It's an event, many of my
clients who are very high achievers in sports finance, or wherever, they become confused and
bewildered as to how they're not consistent or more frequently able to be exceptional.
		

			So basically, our formula is to try and help people get from infrequent exceptional performance,
with many lows in between, to more frequent highs and performance. Without as dramatic drops in
performance in between two elements, we need to improve consistency, and frequency. And that's how
you reduce error rates.
		

			And the functions that we use the F with the exclamation mark, that's a kind of mathematical
representation. It's about a geometric amplification. If you get these things, right, using the
right tools isn't just additive. It's not like saying, oh, we'll give you more petrol. And with 10
gallons more petrol, you'll go 100 miles further know exactly saying it, we're gonna give you a
supercharger, and it will be orders of magnitude better.
		

			That's how exceptional people make it look easy. And it's indeed true. And we know that
		

			clue as to how we make that happen, is to look at things like engagement and focus. And we connect
that to spare capacity. How does one incorporate these sorts of things into everyday life and our
decisions? How does one take a huge bite out of this cognitive load of life, so that you're far more
frequently running with this spare capacity? It's about being the opposite of what you're taught,
never fall for the trap of saying you ought to give 110%.
		

			Firstly, that's mathematically ridiculous. Secondly, 100% is not sustainable.
		

			And thirdly, you have no spare capacity for interruptions and eventualities happen if you're already
running 110%. And finally, you'll never be able to appraise the information differently, to be able
to step outside and hold on. Am I making any errors? Am I missing something here? So going at
something at 100% is neurologically what we call at risk of causing a stereotypy. You become fixated
on the target and you lose flexibility. You lose context, you lose refinement, and that's when
people become ruthless, difficult, inflexible, and in sightless.
		

			Let's apply this to a real world situation. Suppose you are given a choice of stocks to pick and
with each of the stocks, you have a reasonable amount of knowledge about each stock. Do you believe
that your choice of stock is something you truly make freely? The one that you pick?
		

			Do you think you're picking that consciously? Or do you believe something rather scary or unusual is
that your brain is appraising the stock without your permission. And as a result, someone else can
predict what you're going to pick? Well, before you know what you're going to pick?
		

			Well, I can tell you that we've done these tests on racing drivers, we've done them on pilots and
surgeons. And what we, what it turns out is actually we can predict what someone's going to choose,
before they themselves are conscious of what they're going to choose.
		

			Why does it happen? Because of a truth, over 99% of your actual decision making power, and your
execution is pre conscious, or unconscious. Not subconscious is where kind of personal development
falls down. They all worried about past traumas and motives. And Freud invented this idea of
subconscious. It doesn't exist. We're talking about science, performance, neuroscience, not therapy.
And so we look at things like pre conscious processing or unconscious processing.
		

			And it's a bit alarming, isn't it? If so, many of your decisions are already predetermined? Are you
really acting out of free will at all, if all your pre conscious areas, which namely good things
like your frontal cortex, the brain is making decisions for you with relative accuracy, it's not
trying to sabotage you. So you are rarely surprised by what you decide.
		

			It's like when you pick the stock, you're not going to then say, well, I don't know why I picked it.
But you might say something like, Well, looking back, it's clear that I would have been better off
picking stock B or stock C rather than stock a. And it turns out that the information that led to
picking stock B, your stock C was actually available to you at the time, but you chose somehow to
overlook it, or to not prioritize it. Why? It turns out that the people who stand out who are more
consistently correct, or exceptional in their ability to make these decisions are the ones who can
spot what information really matters. They're the ones who said, Actually, I'm going to look at
		

			these factors in stock B, and stocksy. Because somehow, I know that those things are more important
to my decision. They have the ability to sort of mouse out to tease out what information to pay
attention to. Now we can say that the benefit of hindsight is 2020. Of course, you can look back and
say, well, I should have picked this and I should have picked that. What I'm saying to you is that
you have the potential to have 2020 vision right now, in fact, that is the truth. You do have good
vision, but you don't know where to look, you don't know what to look for. That's why you're
choosing one set of information over the other and you don't know which is the most useful, which is
		

			the most prescient bit of information.
		

			So you get this idea that the mind is paying attention to things mostly without your permission. And
you might wonder, well, can you improve your ability to pick the right things to pay attention to?
You're habituated to spot patterns that you believe are important, or that your brain finds
compelling for reasons outside your own free will? And what does the brain tend to find compelling
to look at or to pay attention to? Fear of loss, emergencies, attractiveness of status, power,
wealth, anxiety, novelty, these sorts of things. This very conversation is an example. If you're
anything like a competent person, at this very moment, you will have competing thoughts such as
		

			well, what's being taught? What am I going to learn? Is it worth my time? Why am I listening to this
isn't too complex? Is it too airy? Fairy? Am I missing out on something? Should I keep hanging on?
Is it worthwhile skipping this? Should I speed it up? What else is bothering me? So all of these
things are swishing around in your head. What ought you to be looking for? How would better
decisions benefit you? What areas of your life? Would that impact the most? Would it be your net
worth your friendships, your relationships, how you dealt with difficult people, your business
decisions, your health, or knowing what makes you happy?
		

			Let's look at how looking at the wrong things can really impact negatively your ability to make the
right decisions. Here's a simple video. Something in this video changes. I want you to spot what's
changed.
		

			It's not going to last very long, but just watch it
		

			Did you spot it? Most people don't spot it. And yet, when we look back, it's clear that there's a
massive change going on right before your eyes. Just think about that.
		

			A good decision, if you know where to look is going to have effects far down the line accurate, with
lower effort, less lost time, greater confidence, greater creativity, and a better sense of self
belief. You're going to then set off and learn and teach yourself where you might be going wrong,
that you just want to know what it takes. What efforts can you make to become better at the
decisions that you want to improve?
		

			Doing the same thing repeatedly? and expecting different results? is the definition of insanity.
That's what Einstein said, right? And I would expand this or at least extrapolate it, and I'd say,
doing the same thing as everyone else is unlikely to help you stand out.
		

			Stand to Reason, right. And I started off seeing patients in a neuro psych clinic. These people had
very troubling conditions. You know, dyslexia, severe brain injury, waking epilepsy, synesthesia,
add. It's all about stuff which you know, people find fascinating, but somehow bizarre.
		

			I mean, look, the most famous neuro psychiatrist was Oliver Sacks. He wrote the book, The Man Who
Mistook His Wife for a Hat. What did I learn through doing this work, I learned that people who
become defined by the things that they don't do well, they forget themselves, and they devalue.
Where they do well, I saw a guy who couldn't relate to the who couldn't read or write. And yet he
was the guy in his very poor estate, who could change your gearbox. In exchange for a beer. I saw a
girl who invented her own written and spoken language fully resolved. And she also happened to be a
judo master self taught, who turns out that she could beat any man in her weight class, she went on
		

			to actually win an Olympic medal.
		

			Why? I remember seeing a Czech guy who'd worked as a delivery driver before he came to see me. And
by the time we'd done with him, he had gone on to get a master's in mathematics from Cambridge. So I
did two things. I went to Oxford business school, and I started to look deeply into outlier
psychology, genetics, evidence, and so on. And I scoured the books and personal development and
separated the nonsense from the evidence. And by evidence, I mean, the evidence ladder.
		

			Let me tell you this, there's stuff that works and has good evidence to prove it. And that's not
very common. And there's a stuff that works, but has growing evidence is kind of where I am and
where the science is trying to evolve. And there is nonsense that works. But it's false. It's kind
of benign and positive nonsense. It's inspirational. At the far end, there's nonsense that works.
But it's misleading, and addictive, because you will lead down a path of some improvement, but then
you end up paying more and more, and you become almost brainwashed into a cult like belief in the
system, rather than the results. And if you don't succeed, you end up blaming yourself. It was never
		

			the system's fault. It is because you didn't apply the system well enough. And that tends to be the
domain of big name gurus. So how do you know it works? You can find out by asking the right kind of
questions, how rigorous the finding is, how reproducible it is, how repeatable it is, but I did it
on my own for years and years, because our own biases are so dominant, our wish to make more money,
or wish to ignore our potential hazards in the face of what we would really like to achieve.
		

			Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking Fast and Slow, described it in one nice abbreviation. With
CRT, what you see is all there is it's a bit like what you see in front of you in a circus when you
see a juggler juggling, or when you see a magician.
		

			If the circus is doing its job properly, you will believe that what is within that spotlight is all
there is to see and you'll become completely oblivious, ignorant agnostic of anything that's outside
that circle. And so you make your decisions on what you're being shown
		

			own, rather than what is actually happening.
		

			The truth is we do like being liked, and we like being deceived. We pay for it, it amuses us every
time you switch on the TV and watch a show.
		

			Every time you go to see a magician,
		

			we train ourselves to be deceived. We reinforce it. It's harder than ever, nowadays to separate
facts from reality, because the facts, as we see them, as presented in the news or in propaganda,
are more mixed up with fictions and with how people want us to perceive things than ever.
		

			And so what I'm saying is the 1%, those who we sometimes idolize as, seek being somehow more
connected to the truth, then are smarter than you. They're just the ones who happen to be the one in
the spotlight, until you decide not to until you decide to shine your light elsewhere outside this
bright spotlight. And I believe that you can also do it, and I can show you
		

			what should you be doing? Well, you should be discovering your own facts, researching your own
opportunities, why perceptions are controlled by education, by expectations by archetypes. If you go
to Oxford business school on an investor night, when they doing the kind of exhibition of innovative
breakthroughs, which are looking for investment, go and see how convincing the venture capitalists
are the big corporates or the hedge funders, they're so good at making you believe that they're the
only game in town.
		

			We want to be above and ahead of the curve, we want to be closer to the truth. We want your own
decisions, your relationships, your strengths, your performance, your presence, your purpose, to be
more in tune with what you really can do and what you'd really like them to be.
		

			And it is as wide ranging as all that because like I've always said, we're getting in very upstream
from everything else in your life. We're getting in at the level of helping your mind, like Seligman
said, the way you think, can be changed and improved.
		

			We need to break a lot of myths to do that. Right. Some of the myths that we need to break are
these, firstly, let you have to have therapy to be free from your own traumas to become your best,
that's a myth, you don't need it. Secondly, oh, you can't be in a relationship. If you have your own
issues, that you've got to somehow make yourself proper and pure or compatible with someone you're
going to love yourself, etc. I know that sounds like a romantic idea, but it's simply not true. Most
good relationships. In fact, some of the most solid relationships are based on the fact that people
need each other people are deficient, and people complete each other.
		

			This is how nature bonds us.
		

			Another myth is that you have to be good all round. Well, you don't most people who achieve
extremely high things actually only good at one or two things. They just seem to be lucky enough to
make the big deficiencies, not sabotage their lives.
		

			Here's some moments you have to be good in physical health, to be in good mental health or to have
good wellbeing. Not true. You can have mental illness and still have good well being. Other things
which are common, which you kind of know about but which may be interested learn these limits, you
have to drink three liters of water a day. Vitamin C is good for immunity character good for eyes
and vision. Eating too much causes weight gain. Those all of them are absolute myths. And you might
think, Well, what the *, believe me they are, and you can email me or talk to me. And I'll
explain why. And it's not me trying to fudge it. They are myths.
		

			And I've walked this journey in order to come to this realization. This is the world where he who
knows how to see the world without an agenda without being led on by both his own and others biases.
		

			Where he without biases without agenda becomes a master of his life, and the master of the world
that he lives in.
		

			Most people don't achieve it. There's a chapter of philosophy called Kohlberg who said that only 1/6
of people realize the essence of reality, as we see it. That's a five, six that people just are not
going to get it because they're just not equipped with that inherent ability to step outside of
themselves and reflect. So that's either a bit of very good or very bad news for you. If you've been
listening to this or watching this, and thank you for turning up, and if you get what I'm saying
here. You are in an insightful minority, and this is for you. What if you can't see it at all? If
none of this stuff makes sense, then this isn't for you. Because your ability to have what's called
		

			meta cook
		

			decision to step outside yourself is just not something that you'll be able to create from scratch.
		

			It's almost genetically neurologically unavailable to you. Why? Well, its nature doing its thing.
Nature's does what's in the interest of the species. That's why evolutionary psychologists will tell
you that the human race is designed in the main to be conformist and unquestioning the need for
stability and unified belief and for people not to question the status quo that requires greater
numbers of people than the few who have the impulse to change and transform. That's what led to the
species thriving as we have done.
		

			agents of change. If it's you, you will always find it difficult to find allies or cooperation. And
this is part of the evolved design that we as a species have arrived at this is the formula that
works, a minority of change agents and majority of people who are willing to accept the status quo.
If you can make peace with that, and find ways to influence people,
		

			then you're going to succeed. Otherwise, you live your life bewildered at why you feel unheard.
		

			You will have your own strengths that are greater than his greater than mine greater than people
around you. But you need to find those strengths. And this brings me to another part of the puzzle.
How do you know what your strengths really are?
		

			You need to find the right analytical tools, the right psychological tools, the right instruments,
you need to know where to focus on key events, right from the pregnancy of your mother, to your
behavior in childhood to your proclivities and your genetics and your major faults and deficiencies
today. That's right, Your deficiencies also hide some of your strengths.
		

			Just like Richard Manson's dyslexia became a strength because he was able to recruit people who were
better than him. He had a social strength arising from his disability. So you need a formula, a
system by which you can make the most of who you are individually.
		

			Doctors can't help you with that, because they focus just on deficiency and normalization. coaches
don't know enough about genetics and phenotypes to do it. And psychologists don't concentrate on
strengths, certainly not on the value of things like trauma. That's why kind of I've ended up doing
what I'm doing. As a performance I graduates. We focus on taking all of you and making more of that.
		

			Other people in my ilk include people like Steve Peters, who wrote the Chimp Paradox, and if you
haven't read that, then I highly recommend it.
		

			This is a guy who's taken Liverpool Football Club, and clop to their heights of resilience defying
the odds against their meager budget versus big time clubs like Manchester City. This guy has taken
people who are alcoholic, depressed wrecks like Ronnie O'Sullivan, you may have heard of, and turned
him into a world champion snooker player, he's taken burnt out cyclists like Chris Hoy, struggling
with crippling depression, and made him a world beating sprint cyclist. So one of the bonuses that
I've put together in this is how I will spend time with you at the beginning of your journey, and
help, I will help pin down your areas of strength and give you a toolkit that you can take to people
		

			who know you. And when they look at your strengths. Using these instruments, you'll start to get an
idea of where your true talent lies. And you will undoubtedly be surprised why because of this
picture here.
		

			This is a picture of self knowledge and self awareness.
		

			I remember the first time I sat with one of my clients, recent clients, chap who's an international
cricketer, he plays for international team as a high order batsman, he was struggling to find form.
And what he thought was an impediment that of his father's with rear view of him always trying to
please his dad actually turned out to be a strength. Contemplate this for a second. How could it be
that having a difficult emotionally detached parent can be helpful to your future performance
without creating resentment and anger?
		

			These are the things that happen. You might compensate and perform well just to try and disprove
them.
		

			You might because you're driven by such emotional depth. Things like anger and spite. These things
are resistant to decay because they ignite a mission that you may never really achieve.
		

			You need to understand that the emotions are a reserve an asset. But there's a subtlety here. I'm
not saying that you have to channel your anger or turning it to work for you. Because that will just
make you bitter. And it's not compatible with what I think is another key aim in performance
science, which is to also bring you contentment. There are plenty of very hyper
		

			foreigners who do very well making money or doing sport, but they're not content.
		

			Ethically, I find that difficult and I would like to help bring you contentment. So it is about
making a negotiated peace with things that have caused you pain, it means you are more masterful.
And you understand that you do have the reserve this reserve anger, which then puts you in a quest
for justice or greater effort and helps to focus you, but he's not going to end up dominating you
and making you this sort of angry, embittered, over reactive kind of person.
		

			These are the areas where even in this simple example, we can re address your perceptions.
		

			You have to become almost two contrasting things a diversified and be focused. And these are
contradictions why? Well, here's the answer. You are a bit like a diamond, you're not yourself. You
are many selves. So depending on how you hold the diamond light plays on it differently and appears
differently. There are many different parts of you that you have to reevaluate where they get their
information from your emotional, your intellectual, your philosophical, and you have to review and
revise that. You have to look at things far more widely and outside where you have been trained or
where you are naturally inclined to look for them.
		

			If you're a tennis player, are you a great server, a great volleyer a great backhand? What are you,
only a specialist coach will help you nail down your calling card to such an extent that nobody
could possibly try to compete, even if they're trying. Why? Because your particular niche is where
you thrive more than 99% of everyone else.
		

			Let me ask a question. Put your answers in the comment box here. Do you believe that your true
strength is yet to emerge? Rated from one to 10? One being not at all? 10? Being? Yes, you truly
believe your true strength easier to match. Okay, good. Good. A nice spread of answers there. Okay,
next question. How much do you believe your best performance can be enhanced?
		

			As a personal best so far in an area that you've chosen? Can they be enhanced? No more? Or can it be
improved by 20% 4060 100%? Plus?
		

			Okay, now, I've asked you this, because they're based on your own appraisal of yourself. But I've
also got the evidence of how much in practice happens. For the first question. It's actually true,
that most true strengths are yet to emerge. Because most people don't have a huge amount of self
knowledge. It's by definition, if you use your own brain to look at who you are, your own brain is
going to have blind spots. It's simple, you're not going to be able to appraise yourself.
		

			And secondly, when you think about your best performance, again, you've only done your best knowing
what you've known, using what you've used. You have by definition not been available to areas that
you are unaware of
		

			people underestimate how much they can improve because of these two biases. Firstly, history you
have tried as hard as you have to believe that you could do better is almost like a threat to your
ego. How could you have got to the age where you are the achievements that you have? Having missed
something obvious, Mr. Trick, and the second is our friend Commons abbreviation again, what you see
is all there is simply put, you're not aware of what you're not aware of. Okay. It's like being a
driver, who never realized that his car had a fifth gear all these years. We've all been there
working things out. And I'm sure you recognize that Trump, right. I used to hate setting schedules
		

			on my phone, picking picking up times and days and whatnot, scrolling through various menus. And
then I saw some kid do it. I think it was a some postgrad at the university somewhere. And he just
said, Siri, make an appointment with Tim in three weeks on Tuesday evening at 6pm. To discuss
performance. And bang city said Yes, Dan, what the *. So before you decide where to invest your
money, before you throw in the towel on your relationship with your spouse, before you deal with
your enemies, your shareholders, your son, your estranged father, before you believe that you can't
get motivated to do what you need. Before you believe you can't be healthy. You must entertain this
		

			possibility. You can and it's not your fault that you've not known how so far that it's not
complete. Society, as it stands is not geared towards this kind of individualized exceptionality.
It's just not what we do as a conformist Mass.
		

			ironically, we used to be like that back when it really mattered. And that's what we'll talk about
tomorrow, we'll look at defining performance targets and how we kind of gear them to what different
people want. And we present the mind really as a sort of almost like a consumer good. Without being
as cheap as that we're trying to give the client a number of options for where they want to enhance
this or where they want to avoid X, Y, and Zed. And we will help to define a way going forward. And
we'll sort of round off by describing what we've done to take the performance coaching principle and
apply it to a an online platform and how the trials have hopefully shown results that are similar.
		

			So do tell other people if you must, if you wish. I think we've got enough capacity to have.
		

			Yeah, so about 400 and something at the moment, but we've got capacity for up to 500 I think. So. By
all means a few more.
		

			The more the better within the limits that we've got. And check you out tomorrow, by all means. Send
your questions to me by commenting underneath this video and I'll endeavor to answer those.
		

			When we talk tomorrow, or I my team will get back to you by email. Thanks