Moment 27 - How To Become The Person You Want To Be: Prof. Steve Peters

00:03The mind isn't one entity working. So when I ask people about self-image, I'm now going to split the mind a bit and say, what is the self-image that you feel you would like to have and that you are aiming to present to the world? And what's the genetic self-image that your mind is giving you and the mind interpreting? Hence, I started saying you have this circuitry, which is rational logical looking at the facts and you have a circuitry which is emotionally based it's not logic and emotion it's logically based with emotion and it's emotion based with logic and we don't control that so if i try and that's detail i should listen to that one again is what i'm saying is we have control over the circuitry which i call the human circuits and your self-image then might be that i'm a compassionate guy that i'm a trustworthy person that I always give 100%.

00:57This is what your self-image could be when I discuss with you and your circuits are responding. However, if you've moved the blood supply and oxygen uptake into what I'm calling the chimp circuits, circuits which are quite primitive, but think, you don't have any control over that. So they will generate thinking. And the chimp circuits may give a very different answer because they're much more likely to be emotionally and say how you feel about yourself rather than the reality so the feeling could be the reality but it's it's likely not to be so we get two images from two different circuits you know in the world we live in especially you know the social media world it feels like our drives and our values are somewhat um sometimes handed to us and we don't even know that something isn't our true sort of intrinsic driver or values but because of i don't know a desire to be to fit in or to be to gain approval from people we take it up as a value of our own or or we say if we're asked that that's something that drives us but it's not so we might say we want to be we want a Lamborghini or we want to be a public speaker or whatever but really probably underpinning that is our desire to be um to get recognition and to

02:09to be loved I don't know um but how do you go about understanding what your true drivers are in life and not the things that you say just uh yeah this is where when I looked at this as I say a long time back you start to see that if you ask people which is what I do to put away everything and just get a blank piece of paper that's why I start my starting point is always write down the perfect person you want to be because this now excludes any of the drives and a lot of what you're talking about is actually behaviors attached to drives they're not true drives drives are things like the need to eat the need to have security these are drives the need to be apparent and we have these compulsive driving forces within us that get us out of our seat and make us find something whereas gaining approval from people is actually based in the orbiter frontal cortex the chimp again where it's terrified of being excluded from the troop so a chimpanzee in the wild must be part of a troop otherwise the leopard's waiting so lots of eyes protect you so the chimpanzee has an inbuilt need to be with other chimps and in order to do that it must prove to the other chimps that it's worthy because if it isn't they could exclude it which would be

03:21death so we we carry that drive still that we need to be approved the problem is uh the chimpanzees got it right we've got it wrong the chimpanzee recognize it anyone only wants approval from its immediate troop whereas we actually try and get approval from the whole world you know so one person on social media tells the world that they're not like us and we can potentially fall apart instead of saying actually they're not in my troop so it's not important so take me through that process then so i get a blank piece of paper i write down who i want to be yeah um i'd say things like i want to be and correct me where i'm that's okay wrong here okay because i won't be wrong yeah but if i say i want to be um i want to achieve great things is that a drive no that's not a drive that's something you hope for yeah okay so we get the terminology right because if you hope for that but i accept it may not happen that you know you're working with the human circuit which is logical and rational so we hope to get like i work with elite athletes which is privileged and they hope to get say an olympic medal and they hope for that they accept that you may not get this even if you're on form on the day somebody may be better or you may make

04:25an error so as long as you have that then it shouldn't be stressing you okay it will be okay but if you move into saying i have to get an olympic medal we're now moving into the chimp circuits yeah because that's not true yeah you don't have you know you don't have to you know But if somebody absolutely says to me, you don't get it. If I don't get it, then life's not worth living. I'm not going to argue. What I'm saying is that's a choice you're making.

04:48And you must also accept the consequence. So I can't change that. So when you start your list, what I'm really asking you for is, what are your character traits? So discipline. Yeah. I mean, again, I would test the waters. I don't know what you're going to say here. You're on the spotlight. I'll just do a quick one for you. is to say, would you like to be a really nice, good person or would you like to be successful? You can only be one of them.

05:14Which would you prefer? A really nice, good person. Right, so I know where I stand with you now. So we have to now make sure that you understand that's the prime reason that we're going to do the work, is to get you to be the person that you want to be. This is the good news. If you write on a piece of paper the perfect person you want to be. So give me some more character traits. Traits. All the things that come to mind, of the impact I want to have on those that encounter me.

05:41So you want to be inspirational. Yeah. Yeah. I guess that is, but also just like empathetic and compassionate. Brilliant. You want to be an empathic guy, a compassionate guy, inspirational. You're probably going to add, if we go through this and add time, honesty, integrity, trustworthy, you know, respectful. When you've done all this, this is really crucial and it is a light bulb moment. if you think about this that if you had control of that part of your brain which you have and there was no interference from the rest of the brain then that's exactly how you would be in life true that is you so what i'm saying is the reality is fantastic that is you it's not who you hope to be it is you it's not a myth it's neuroscience it's you what we're now saying is that doesn't present to the world because now your chimp and the computer system, the backup to both human and chimp, now impose other things. And so the world might see something different. So you say to me, I want to be compassionate. And I walk in and say, I've had a really long journey today, all went wrong. And you're busy and you just get irritated and say, oh, for goodness sake, stop mourning. And then afterwards you think, well, that wasn't very compassionate.

06:53So I'm not compassionate, but that's, that's misunderstanding the neuroscience. clients you were always compassionate because your intention was always to say sorry steve that you've had a rough journey you know because it's important otherwise i wouldn't be telling you i mean you still might want to say stop mourning after a while but it's done nicely but what happened is your chimp is saying i don't need to deal with this it's doing my head in so i'll just have a go and that'll stop him and there you see this immediate reaction without thought to consequence so then our rapport fails a bit because i think not nice guy this but actually when I understand the science, I think he's probably a nice guy. His chimp wasn't very good there. That's very different to you going away at the end of the day thinking, what's wrong with me?

07:37Why was I lacking in compassion? The answer was get the neuroscience right. You've never moved position. You're always a compassionate guy who's trustworthy and honest and so on. Your chimp has interfered. Now it's very critical. I expand on two points here because the listeners are going to go up, hang on. This is not an excuse model. 100%, I'm tough on people. It's not an excuse model. You're 100% responsible for managing the chimp. So you need an apology. So when you know the chimp's been a bit brisk or rude, you got to stop and say, I apologize. You are responsible.

08:12So I'm not saying blame everything on your chimp. I'm not saying that. And the second point is, you gave me an answer there by saying, I want to be this compassionate guy. And people say, surely everyone writes the same list. Absolutely not. In the nineties, when I started to really pull this together and was looking at the neuroscience, clear as you probably know, I worked in the field of forensics. And if you take a typical person, so we'll take you as a typical person and we say, what would you give? You gave me the right list. Peaceful, calm, you'll go through integrity, honesty, compassion. That is really common on the list. However, However, when you get to the psychopath, they wouldn't put these.

08:52And when I asked them, they did not put honesty. They did not put compassion. They were not relevant. They had a very different list of who they would ideally like to be. And it wasn't pleasant. It was all about power. It was all about ego. These are what are in critical. This is what I'm going to be. So actually the human in that person is not the good guy. I used to say it's often the chimp in them that's the nice guy. The actual human's not so nice at all.

09:18So it isn't a good guy, bad guy. That is not at all what the model is. It's saying we all have these systems. Let's find out who we are, what kind of chimp we've got, because they're spread in characteristic, and then what have we got on our computer?