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 hell, 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 hell. 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