Tarek Kareem Harris – Toolkits for Exceptional People #1

			Well, good morning or good afternoon or good evening, depending on which part of the world you're
in. I can see we've got many participants from a number of time zones today. And I'm really grateful
for your time and attention. And all who regardless to see Chicago, little cluster from the East
Coast, just using the Geo Map locator thing. That must be you folks over at Harvard.
		

			Oxford, of course, where we're based London, few Londoners Germany, Iceland, one in Iceland,
Estonia. Oh, that's you young. Thank you.
		

			And a few guys over in Bangalore Hello, now. Oh, and one in Canberra. Okay, so, look, I'm excited to
be here. And I'm really grateful that you guys have shown up by invitation. And I am glad that you
brought people who you thought would be interested. And this is really an information session,
		

			showing you if you'd like the state of the art of where we are with performance and neuro
psychiatry, what I've been doing both voluntarily and commercially for the last few years, and to
celebrate the launch of our latest thing that we're going to be offering to private clients now,
outside of tech and outside of firms, which is the exceptional program. And that's really a question
of, well, can we improve someone's decisions? And by that, I mean, can we get in at the cognitive
and emotional level and improve the way someone thinks and acts, which is upstream of everything
upstream of investments, finances, behavior, habits, friendships, relationships, all of it?
		

			And it's quite a big ask, but let's try and answer that question. I grant you it's quite a bold one.
But let's, let's see how far we've got. And I hope you'll be suitably impressed by what we've
learned and equally excited to support us in what we've got to learn yet. So let me introduce myself
first, to those of you who don't know me that well, my name is Dr. TK Harris. I'm originally from
the UK.
		

			But I grew up in Africa for a time and I studied medicine, and then business in Oxford, and practice
medicine, as a consultant neuro psychiatrist for many years in the UK, and then branched off through
the business connection into performance coaching and commercial coaching, helping lots of spin out
companies and some some of the bigger tech firms around Oxford in the orbital, including some work
with Formula One with you guys have written McKinsey finance firms and what have you. And the last
few years, I've kind of tied that with my voluntary work, which sees me back in Africa most of the
time, helping people who can't access good mental health to access it, and I write books, and create
		

			free media to that effect. But I've come back, if you like to where I started. And my latest book is
about my performance coaching, performance consulting,
		

			discoveries and techniques, which I hope to share with you today. So
		

			yeah, where should we start? Okay. All
		

			right. Let's start by asking the question. And the reason why I'm think we should ask questions,
because we do this interactively. Right. Today, I'm presenting to you and I need you to guide
yourself
		

			as to what this presentation might do for you. And one thing we learned from people who fought
perform exceptionally is that they know how to manage or concentrate their attention. And what's
interesting is some of them know they're doing it, some of them don't. But the effect is the same
consciously or unconsciously, they managed to hijack their attention, rather than let it hijack
them. And they do so best when they seem to have a quest and urgent quest to answer some kind of
vital question. And what's interesting is, if there isn't a question for them, they seem to make one
and they feel that need to answer it, and that seems to pursue or enhance their efforts in their
		

			performance. So there's two questions which I think you can use to hack this presentation. Right?
First of all, can your decision making processes be made to be far more apt? Accurate, consistent,
efficient and robust? And that's to do with thinking your behavior, your emotions, your appraisals,
your communication with others? And secondly, how would you use such a thing and where would you use
it? What grabbed you as
		

			A place where you could really benefit from such things. Could it improve life in a real sense,
rather than just in a laboratory somewhere? Could it make you wealthier? Could it improve your
relationships? Could it improve your specific performance measures in things like sport and finance?
Could it improve friendships? And can it even address the sort of lofty things like can it improve
character, kind of give a person purpose in life? So in order to answer this, let's, let's break it
down a little bit. And the first thing we need to look at is self awareness.
		

			To be able to work on your own mind, you're better off knowing what's already in it, how it works,
in particular, your own cognitive styles, your own biases, your own strengths, and so on. This is
why self awareness is so important. It's quoted by leaders as the most important personal quality
that they need. What am I capable of? What do people see in me? What effect do I have on my
environment, the people around me, my health, my business, my friends, and so on? And how do those
things affect me?
		

			What's interesting is that most people's perceived Self knowledge is very poor, CEOs and high net
worth individuals have among the highest disparity between their self perceived self awareness, and
their actual self awareness measured when you check the difference between how they perceive
themselves versus how others perceive them, when they're asked privately. Most people have no idea
where they might really thrive, which never mattered very much in conformist societies in the 20th
century. But it's actually the main key to success in the 21st century. It's all about your niche.
It's about how you differentiate, and it's about how you can stand out. So this leaves us with a
		

			great learning need with which institutional education has not really caught up. Many investors fail
to realize it, you're doomed to make the same mistakes as everyone else. And you're doomed to follow
the herd, if you use what you're taught.
		

			That's not to say everything you're told is wrong. But it all it does mean that you need to focus on
the things that make you stand out. There's a book by another chap, who was at Oxford is a fellow
there, his name is Nassim Taleb and he wrote a book called anti fragile. And that's all about how
true strength is in how a system like your decision system or natural system can individuate its
decisions. It's something which actually nature gave us and it's closer to the natural state of
affairs anyway, because nature doesn't just remain resistant to assault or trauma, nature actually
gets stronger by being assaulted, traumatized and attacked. And these are strong words, but I really
		

			do mean them. Because as we will see a bit later, we have to understand the nature of difficulty if
we're going to become our strongest or most refined selves. So would you like to start thinking and
acting in a way that gives you the presence and confidence in your abilities that's only seen in
those who are perceived as thought leaders, to follow a thought leader means you're immediately a
thought follower, which is kind of literally the opposite of what you should do as a successful
differentiated investor or sports person or competitor.
		

			So would you like to think and act and behave in a way that reduces your error rate. And that's kind
of what we're, that's what we're talking about you to make decisions that are more thoroughly
resolved, more likely to be correct. And to have a better longevity. Can we make less mistakes, and
I'm talking about making four times fewer mistakes. When you put the research down on the
improvement of decisions using these methods, you make 75% less mistakes, which is four times three
of mistakes, make one quarter of the mistakes you're used to.
		

			And those are upstream from everything else in what you choose to do, what you choose to pay
attention to what information you use to make decisions. Can you see why that sort of stuff is
really important because it leads to your appraisal and decisions and actions and everything else?
So let's ask that second question. What would this improved decision consistency and correctness do
for you in terms of your life? Where would you use it
		

			depends where you prioritize and where you want to grow and where your strengths are. But some
people might want to use it in wealth to increase their passive or active income. Others want to use
it in their relationships to be better at them. Others want to find a purpose to decide what they
want to do with themselves. Other people might be trying to improve their mental health, physical
health, and just those ordinary daily decisions. They want to be improving their habits or getting
rid of bad habits or
		

			Also people need to appraise the risks they take, especially for people who are
		

			given to taking risks in business. The error rate is often way too high for them to tolerate, but
they can't be. But they can't help but be drawn to those risky situations. Can we help them to
reduce their error rate? And all sorts of other things about their choice of allies, your treatment
of uncertainty? Where do you want to make the greatest gains.
		

			And this leads me to a story. I had a patient once who came to see me he was troubled and mournful
about what he called his obsessive fixing problem. He's very bright X Cambridge, and he landed
himself a job in a fast track associate scheme at a big investment bank. But after a year, he got
fired, ostensibly not for not attending to his duties and not being a team player, or somesuch. And
in the confidential envelope of our appointments, he told me that he was fired because he kept doing
things that weren't his problem to fix. And as far as he was concerned, he thought he showed them
up, and he was angry at them. In truth, it turns out, he was not himself troubled by his fixing
		

			tendencies. Although he thought they were a problem.
		

			He couldn't see what he'd done wrong. And therefore he couldn't even apologize. He came across
defiant and unmanageable, because this was just a defensive front. In truth, he was quite confused
and bewildered. Yes, maybe he wasn't told exactly what to do. But in his view, he fixed problems
which are actually more persistent, more real, rather than just being given these toy problems that
a graduate trainee might be given. So his first few sessions with me were filled with this kind of
brutal mask of self importance, venting about how people were so hypocritical and that sort of
thing. And I could have given him a quick diagnosis of being narcissistic or having a poor sense of
		

			self, or even being obsessive compulsive. But that would have been wrong. I just remained steadfast.
Because I saw that there was a skill or strength that he had, it was just misplaced. He wasn't quite
willing to tune in to how people really behaved, despite what their appearances were. And He sniffed
out glitches and delays and heavy handed software processes. And he ironed them out without being
asked without actually asking for permission. And they invariably benefited, but he wasn't supposed
to do it. And it made him look strange, and it made them look slow. Anyway, fast forward a year, and
he wasn't interested in becoming normalized. And frankly, neither was I in truth. So we took another
		

			track, we said, Let's enhance your niche.
		

			What you do is you refine and rationalize software systems. So we're going to build you up in that
respect. And we're going to build you up in terms of your interpersonal skills, and your business
skills to support that niche. And by aligning and refining his personal skills around his niche, we
accelerated the ascent to his own individual niche that would have potentially taken years to
realize had you just remained in the bank graduate recruitment scheme. And the end of the story
actually would be a punch line, if it wasn't the truth. The bank that had fired him was now his
client. And he was charging them 12,000 pounds a day, to do the very things that they'd fired him
		

			for only a year earlier.
		

			So he was there with two of his sort of colleagues or people that he employed, and he was addressing
the problems that he had corrected before. And even at this price, he was a bargain. Because the
money and downtime he saved them equated to many multiples of his fee. He was saved from a lifetime
of overwork or making mindless PowerPoint slides and having to say yes, and not to his managers, and
his social skills also bloomed and his personal life bloomed, he became a better fit with himself.
Now, why have I told you this story, because it demonstrates that this stuff actually can work. But
it depends on how you use it, and where you focus it. And these stories catch your imagination,
		

			because they're both surprising, but also very obviously true. They tell you something about another
way of being something that you felt has been there, but you've never quite been confident to find
the shape of all we did with this person was adjust the way that he saw the world. And that made him
more successful than he could evident. had he taken every course or obtained every degree and had
every mentor and done everything he was supposed to do. Why? Because we were able to guide his
attention to where his individual skills could benefit him. Not in an ideal world, but in the
chaotic, unfair, unpredictable dynamic world of today.
		

			It's like
		

			Mind is a factory. And the product of that factory is your decisions. If you have amazing education,
incredible tools and great technology, but you're looking at the wrong thing, then your information
is bad. Your raw material is bad, bad raw material means bad products, it doesn't matter how good
your factories? Where are you getting your information from? If it's what's just in front of you,
how do you know what is in front of you? Is it something that your mind has just decided to focus
on? And can you separate yourself from your unconscious biases? Can you separate yourself from the
fact that your mind tends to jump to look at things which it decides to pay attention to, but they
		

			may be the wrong things? Can you? Can you be sure that you can disconnect from those biases and
biological factors or psychological priming that skews you? And it's a very powerful effect. Like
I've said in other talks, look, when people looked at parole committees, granting parole to
prisoners, and meeting for a full day, they were turned out, you know, they've got lawyers and
judges and all kinds of very qualified people on board. But it turns out that the most powerful
influence on their decision to let a prisoner go out on parole was actually how recently they'd had
tea and biscuits. Isn't that interesting? Right? Expertise means nothing. When we understand that
		

			our purely biological nature, our own biases can I can override our intellect without our even
knowing.
		

			So what I do, or like tend to do how I work with people is I kind of select to invite those who want
to introduce quality control to their factory. Now in the minds of factory, how can we improve the
quality of the decisions, we look at the information, the processing and the output, it's for people
who want the factory to craft its products for very different sets of circumstances. So you're not
always using the same processes depending on where you are at home at work, or whatever. And it is
quite a extensive refurbishment, it's about completely letting go of your expectations. But
interestingly, what brought me to this line of work was because when I looked at the world of self
		

			help or personal development, I found that a lot of it was rather misleading, sometimes benign ly in
sometimes it was just made up by people who wanted to make a career out of it.
		

			And it's astonishing that people fell for it. Why? Because well, there was nobody else presenting
other options.
		

			But we repeatedly fall for these sort of things. If you've heard of things like Barnum statements,
or the for effect, or if you know that NLP was invented by people who weren't clinical scientific at
all, then you'll understand what I'm all about. Yet, we're still sure that people do want some kind
of help, and people will make up systems will go to meet up systems, because they believe there's
some sort of mystical power that they can't quite access otherwise. In India, they say millionaires
use financial advisors, but billionaires use astrologist, but surely that can't be right. What's it
about? Here is why the sort of pseudo sciences or these sort of self development systems have their
		

			power, these other factors, there's unpredictability, you don't know what this person is going to
say. Because if they don't have a system, then you're gonna have to believe exactly what they say
about how that system works. There is a connection, what these people can do, or what these systems
do is they forge a deep connection between you and the system, or you and the sort of great person
who's running this system. They're charismatic, they're convincing, they're compelling.
		

			And they seem to have a might and a presence about them or charisma. And they've got a following
and, and, you know, they've sold so many books, and they seem to have a sort of authority over these
things. They, I began to understand this in more detail when I looked at actually very functional
technical teams. 10 years ago, I was at a trackside in Formula One and I saw the a highly funded
team descended to the kind of crisis that stretched high performing people in ways that separated
the best from the rest. They were mired in real world issues that were both softly defined and
destructive. Here's the problem. exceptional people face unusual problems, chiefly among them, the
		

			fact that they're not conformist. And the fact that their performance can be inconsistent, and
conventional methods of development and coaching don't seem to work as well for them, if at all. And
they're very high achievements are often interspersed with periods of dramatic failure, which they
can't understand. And you can see this in some of the highest performing people who seem to resort
to superstition and the sort of gurus because you
		

			If you can't access or don't know how to access your best performance, you're going to reach for
things which seem to have some kind of role or effect. But those things are merely spurious, they're
superstitious. How do we help that team?
		

			It turns out that their car, their f1, car had 32, onboard computers. And they've probably got even
more now. Yet, none of those computers made any difference to the performance of the most important
computer of all that have the driver, the human mind. That's where it begins and ends, I had to
emphasize this issue to the engineers and the team members, because that helped them to crystallize
the idea that it is all to do with performance, and consistency. But you're looking in the wrong
places. Focus on how to make your mind make better decisions. Putting aside your biases, and your
expectations. And looking at the truth. Human Performance is the first principle of every decision
		

			of every achievement. It's the original and the most important source of successful decisions in all
the situations that we've ever faced as a species. And that's kind of why I like doing what we do.
Nothing is out of our scope, when we find ways to access our finest cells.
		

			So this led me to various adventures. Beyond that. People like the Indian Institute of Technology,
which is very well respected one of the top institutes in the world, and the tech companies that
surrounded a sufferer of brain drain to the USA, it's almost like a norm in Indian middle class
societies to have your son or daughter get a job in Silicon Valley. And this is slightly I'd argue
slightly selfish of the USA,
		

			but also slightly misplaced, because you get a lot of guys who go there and they feel demoralized,
or they feel the performance doesn't show up the way they'd like it to. So what are the issues that
help a person to function? And what are the things that we could do to help stop this brain drain?
Or at least make people think a bit more rationally before disappearing to the USA being promised?
Lots of money? Is it more than money? Is it more than morale? What makes a person really want to
work, to stay at work to apply themselves beyond what a paid job would ask them to do? Can you
manufacture or manipulate what's going on in their mind, in the minds of people who's whose actions
		

			kind of dictate the success of your future. And we're not talking about brainwashing, we're talking
about how to help them to feel at their best in your place of work or in in a in an effort where you
are conjoined with them.
		

			So it's kind of work has no boundary, because it is so upstream from everything else. I remember
working with an American company, in fact, an entrepreneur who was heading for an IPO. And he was
interested in trying to raise the value of his company perceived value, so that, you know, he would
obviously get more families IPO. And we use things that were beyond the sort of normal toolkit of
economists or financial analysts, we looked at the acquisition more as a hunt. And we use rather
more primitive, instinctive, powerful things that actually people who want to buy shares or acquire
companies seem to use more reliably. You know, the idea is, you don't sell you get bought. But and
		

			so the people who buy you need to feel that they're under control, they need to feel that they're
hunting you. So you just make yourself more hunt worthy, right, that's a kind of clue about the
various things we did to help raise their value. So all of this, your decisions need not be as much
of a roll of the dice. But we can help to predict that actually, your dice, when you roll them are
more likely to be between one and three, rather than a four and a six, right? So it's reducing
probability of error. It reduces risk it and that has effects all throughout your life because you
feel more confident more in command. So it improves your well being it frees up your time, because
		

			then you're not so preoccupied with trying to correct your course. It also improves your risk
appetite, because then you become more masterful about the kinds of things that you're going to look
at as far as your own portfolio of decisions is concerned. And so it proves your flexibility and in
your dynamic range of where you might choose to focus your efforts. And these two kinds of tools are
more empowering at a fundamental neuro psychological level. It's about as upstream as I could
possibly get you. What is more upstream than influencing directly how the cells in your brain choose
to partner and cooperate and handle information. Can it be done well,
		

			the great
		

			Discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes. And
that was written by William James, back in the 19th century. Fast forward to Martin Seligman, who's
a big name in in psychiatry, and now in performance psychiatry, and he's a psychologist based in
Chicago. And there's, I encourage you to look up his work at the school that they're doing them. And
he's one of his quotes that I like is habits of thinking need not be forever. One of the most
significant findings of psychology in the last 20 years is that individuals can choose the way they
think.
		

			Choose the way they think, the very business of how one perception, one thought, some emotion or
another, some words, some memories, or how someone else appears to you. All of that can be stopped,
questioned, redirected? Well, you could do what I did and spend 25 years learning everything you can
about it and applying it for the benefit of patients and clients. You can make your own toolkit from
bare iron, right? Or you can go to the shop and buy the toolkit for yourself, get an expert help
you, for example, that's why people come to me, I guess, either way would be good. And it depends on
what you can spare, and how enthusiastic what kind of appetite you have for this effort. If you've
		

			got a lot of spare time, then use the first option. Dig in, and it will be a really rewarding
journey, get a toolkit, have someone assist you in how to do this thing?
		

			Why do exceptional people think differently? Well, there's trauma and difficulty, we need to we need
to understand the power of that exceptional people also notice what other people don't notice.
They're almost trained, if not naturally inclined, to not pay attention to what other people are
trained to or where they normally focus. And one other important thing that exceptional people do is
they make more of what they have, whether it's good or bad, they seem not to be interested in
whether a quality of theirs has some kind of moral or societally normed judgment, good, bad,
destructive or whatever. ruthlessness can be good or bad or useful or useless, depending on how it's
		

			used.
		

			Let's look at the story perhaps, you know, of Michael Phelps, he had
		

			ADHD, which is a very troublesome condition. It makes him very restless and unable to focus and
physically
		

			find it very difficult to sit and stay SAT.
		

			Let's look at this picture. This picture is actually a demonstration of how people with natural
differences. This is back when I was dealing with people who are newer psychiatric problems, but how
they found a way to thrive both in spite of and because of their particular differences. There are
differences things like dyslexia, autism, ADHD, dyspraxia, anxiety, OCD. And what this shows us is
that these sorts of abilities are these sorts of habits are indeed made on the basis of someone's
choice. Some people will be ground down by the traumas by the perceived lack of resources, but other
people seem to sort of thrive on them. And it's quite an accident as to what attitude they chose.
		

			Why would it matter? Well, look at the world today, the world is turbulent, it's unpredictable and
rare events are becoming far more frequent. There's economic crises wherever we are, there's
economic unpredictability. And these rare events, black swan events are becoming the rule
		

			is the rise of wars in Eastern Europe, the rise of right wing politics as inequality, inflation, and
even the basic financial order of the world is being threatened in terms of crypto and digital
global currencies and that sort of thing. So what is the formula? How do we help a person to improve
their ability to make good decisions? And just as importantly, how can we scale this up so that more
people can access it? It's expensive to do this one to one. And as part of our sort of general
mission to bring truth and evidence to a greater numbers of people, we spent a lot of time nearly a
year developing a way to do this. For 10 years, we've worked exclusively with elite level clients,
		

			but and now we want to bring it to greater numbers of people with the same effect so we can reduce
the cost while keeping the advantages and it's time to show you how so tomorrow.
		

			Tomorrow is about the toolkits we use. How can we improve decision predictions and accuracy by up to
a factor
		

			For how can we improve communication style? Even people like sales or lawyers? How can we I think in
some cases, the impact was increased by up to nine times. And we also examined some things of why
people don't learn from therapy or coaching, why the brain doesn't learn how to fix that. And we'll
be looking at applying this in a real time situation, how can we take somebody to give them real
effects on their lives? How can they make more money? I mean, people are interested in that. How
does it make money when other people lose it, and so on. So I look forward to seeing you. If you
have questions, then I'll take them now. If you're in the live session, if you're not in the live
		

			sessions, what we'll do is we will be listing this video as a kind of pre recorded live session on
another platform. So I hope you've got access to that. And if you've got questions, and you're on
that platform, then just put them in the space underneath the module and we'll address them either
in the next session. If you're on time, or otherwise, we will address them in a more general way, if
not in the course itself. Thanks again and see you next session.