How We Think and Behave: The Power of Scripts and Schema
Sprout Sweater Episode 12 : The Big Sweat Interview with Dr Simon Raybould
Join Dave Algeo aboard "Sprout 1" and take another journey into your inner world where mind, meaning and metaphor collide.
This episode is a 'Big Sweat' interview and Dave is joined by Dr Simon Raybould, former research scientist who now specialises in helping people have more impact in life and work. In the episode we explore how the mind works and why it relies on 'schema' and 'scripts' to automate much of our thinking and behaving. More importantly, how can we use this knowledge to tap into our brain and shift our thinking and behaviour to support our goal striving.
Simon started his life as a research scientist, looking at the causes of childhood leukaemia. Eventually he became centre manager at the UK's largest social science research unit but he's also been a lighting designer for dance companies, an author, playwright and actor... and a fire eater.
Simon is currently daring people to take the 69stories challenge. Find out more at - presentationgenius.info/69
You can learn more about Simon and his work or connect with him at the following:
Newsletter at https://presentationgenius.info/hi
Blog at https://presentationgenius.info/blog
Twitter: @presentations
Dave Algeo is a writer, coach, trainer and speaker empowering others to live big, by identifying the small but significant things that can transform the life we are living. Join Dave on the good ship 'Sprout1' as we explore the inner galaxy of the human mind, and find the sprouts that make the biggest difference. These are the sprouts you are looking for.
Search for 'Sprout Sweater' in your favourite podcast feed. To find out more about the podcast, and episode show notes at Podcast — Stress(ed) Guru and more about his in person and online events at www.stressedguru.com. Drop Dave a line at dave@sproutsweater.com to ask questions, offer feedback or suggestions for future podcast content.
Episode 12 Show Notes
The following is a rough draft of the content (not a full transcript - more notes forming the basis of the podcast recording.
Welcome to another Big Sweat at the sword at one of my monthly interviews with an expert in a particular field where we deep dive into some of the topics that I cover in the earlier episodes and shorter episodes. With me today is Dr Simon Raybould.
Dave : Hi Simon, how are you doing?
Simon : I’m alright Jeff. Shall we start that again cos you’re not Jeff are you?
Dave : No, I’m not Jeff, I’m going to leave that in because you laughed at me at the start of this one.
Simon : I’m talking to Jeff later on today.
Dave : Shall we start again.
Simon : Let’s start again
Welcome to another Big Sweat episode of the sprout sweater. In these episodes as hopefully you will know by now we spend a lot longer in the episode and we explore a particular topic that I may have talked about the last few shorter episodes and we explore it in more depth with an expert on a particular topic. This week I’ve got Dr Simon Raybould with me. Hi Simon, how are you doing?
Simon : Hello Dave I’m fine I’m looking forward to this
Dave : Yeah, great. I’m looking forward to the opportunity to pick your brains. Anyway, if you could give a bit of background Simon about yourself and your work and your current focus. We’ve known each other for a lot of years and you're my kind of go to for a number of different areas which will no doubt tease as we go through. Tell everybody a bit about yourself.
Simon : I started life as a research scientist. Many, many years ago I did a PhD looking at the causes of childhood leukemias and then I spent 24 years in research applying those techniques that I developed there to other things such as life chances and a whole bunch of other stuff. Eventually I became the centre manager for the UK’s biggest social science research unit and then I dug my escape tunnel into the rest of the world which is no feat because my office was on the 4th floor; so, I had a lot of other people's offices to dig through before I got there. Now I run my company specialising in training people in some soft skills all related to presentations, communications, confidence, assertiveness, impact. Having more personal impact is the generic phrase.
Dave : Very sub-synced as always Simon. Obviously we’ve known each other for a few years and one of the things I’ve really got to appreciate about you is the rigor and that research-based approach to your work and that’s obviously what I often try to pick your brains about as well. So, I guess in relation to the theme of the sprout sweater what we often talk about is the stories we tell ourselves, the narratives we tell ourselves and the scripts that we run automatically almost. Those unconscious habits and routines and rituals that we have day to day and how they can both be helpful and also get in the way. I wanted to pick up on that initially and maybe then dig into some of your work around confidence and having more impact and presence I guess as well. But I’ve had conversations with you in the past about the schema and scripts aspect of our thinking processes and I know that comes from the cognitive side. Do you want to elaborate a bit more so that you can probably explain it a lot better than I can?
Simon : Depends what you’re referring to because there are a couple of things it could be. Schema is when you know something so darn well it becomes a little black box and you never have to think about it again. The analogy I always use because it’s the most fun is to cast your mind back to when you were learning to drive. Particularly when you were learning to change gear and you’ve got this full on shift, mirror, signal, maneuver, put your foot down shift your… and your brain is absolutely crack on full and then God help you if somebody in the passenger seat speaks to you at the point when trying to change gear because it just melts your brain. It's one more thing you can’t cope with and if you're anything like me you turn at them and go ‘SHUT UP I’m DRIVING!’ because you just can’t; even though that person in the passenger seat was saying literally to me at the time ‘be careful not to hit the parked police car’. It just tipped me over the edge even though they were giving me good advice, it was more advice than I could cope with at the time. It was just one too many things and I was stressed out about it. We do tend to get a bit stressed out about that, about a whole bunch of things, not just the specifically cute issues but about a bunch of issues that go with our lives. One of the big things that always takes people by surprise is that even being helped can tip people over the edge because you know that you can give your brain is full, your thinking too hard, you don’t have things wrapped into schema so your making lots of conscious decisions and then somebody says ‘where would you like to go for a meal out on Saturday night’. And it's supposed to be a treat and they’re supposed to be saying great things – it’s a meal out with your spouse on Saturday night. What's not to love? But it's just one thing too many and you end up going ‘How the hell should I know?!’ and what’s supposed to be a treat suddenly becomes a cause of stress in its own right because it just tips you over the edge past your cognitive capacity.
Dave : Yeah, it makes total sense does that. We probably all got numerous examples of when that’s happened to us or when we have been on the receiving end of them. So, just a little bit more so the schema are those things that over time that practice, habit, routine, ritual is so practiced and habitual and embedded that we don’t need to invest any conscious thought, is that it?
Simon : Yeah that’s it. It's kind of like you know when you learn some rules at school about something. One up here, well you could always if you wanted to and you say what ‘s the shortest distance between two points and a straight line. We all use the Pythagorean theorem of the square of some other root on the other two sides, we never test it, we just use it. Because we’ve tested it at school once, we now know it to be true and we just use it. Schemas are just like that, things that we have tested in the past that we no longer bother to validate because why would we. We know that little magic black box does what it says it’s supposed to do.
Dave : So, what about scripts then?
Simon : We run a whole but you know as well as I do, we run a whole bunch of scripts where we tell ourselves this is the story about me. I am such and such a person, I behave like such and such a way and because we have got such a high cognitive load on us all the time and we are not running enough schemas we tend to run absolutely at maximum capacity. We can’t think everything through that we need to think, so we tend to follow scripts because our brains just can’t cope with any more information. If there is a heuristic record, if there is a shorthand script that we can follow, we tend to follow it because it's less cognitive load, it's just easier. A silly example, I’m being completely silly. If you see somebody walking down the street who is 7ft tall who kicks babies the next time you see someone who is 7ft tall and your brain is running on maximum capacity and you don’t have the thinking space to go ‘do I know this person?, ‘no’ so what do I know about them ‘nothing’. Are they likely to kick babies, ‘I don’t know’ instead of doing that your brain just goes ‘last time I saw somebody 7ft tall they kicked a baby therefore the chances are this person who is 7ft tall is going to kick this baby’. And we respond to these semi auto pilot, semi scripted semi auto pilots heuristics the vast majority of what we do. I am tongue in cheek and if you're 7ft tall please don’t take offence at the example I’ve just given you but you get the idea.
Dave : Yeah. So, in terms of defining the difference between schema and script I just want to kind of define the terms and get clear about those before we kind of start to build on it.
Simon : The way I build on it if that’s where we are going, when we build on it sometimes is to have a script which we tell ourselves or a script that is semi written which can be as positive as the negative ones. For example, I did a couple of years ago I did a lot of work in Ireland. It was pretty stressful because I was flying to and from Ireland and I didn’t see my wife for a long time. It’s worth pointing out that when I was working in Ireland for 3 months it wasn’t worth coming home for some weekends because I would just get home in time to turn around a bit. My wife’s solution to that was to fly up to Ireland and have a weekend away with me which I thought was a remarkably nice thing to do. But I’d kind of get to the airport and because you don’t know the airport, you don’t know what you're doing, and you don’t know where the car hire place is there’s this bit where you uh I’m out of my depth and you get a bit freaked out about it. The story I was able to tell myself at that point is to use a story of an alter ego. I don’t know what to do but who do I know who would know what to do? Batman would know what to do, what would Batman do? And then you run the script of what would Batman do? I’m not saying that Batman has a solution to every single… actually do you know what maybe I am but I’m just using Batman as a facetious example because you can run most scripts positively and ask yourself, my scripts have run out who has a better script that I can follow. Batman has a better script that I can follow or James Bond has a better script that I can follow, or wonder woman has a better script than I can follow or you ask yourself very simply what they would do and you follow that script through. It’s a little more complicated and messy than I’m making it sound but it’s a really powerful starting place for when you're out of your depth.
Dave : That feeling of being out of your depth and there have been a number of times in my life when I’ve experienced those moments and the panic that can arise when those existing scripts don’t do the job or are completely just not the right ones. That feeling can be, is overwhelming. It can insight panic and all sorts of things in yourself which is obviously very destructive. So that tactic of then saying well what would they do if you don’t have the script for what that thing is, how do you get it when you’re imaging something because that’s a question that is interesting isn’t it. I find, I suggest to other people, what would such and such do if you admire them under high pressure emotion situations, what would they do? Now when it's somebody that you know that you’ve seen work under pressure you kind of can switch out of your nonexistent script for this situation into ‘well I’ve seen them do this’, so you’ve got a bit of a script there, does that make sense.
Simon : What would James Bond do? James Bond would just walk up to the desk and do this.
Dave : Right, ok. You’ve got a script based on their general behavior and approach, attitude or something like that, is that kind of what …
Simon : Yeah, yeah and before you go too far down that route of that question what you would do if there is no script, if you haven’t made make one up, hand on heart I have never been in a situation where I haven’t been able to run somebody else’s script because we have all read a story at some point in our lives with a hero who knew what the hell they were doing. So what you have to do is, cast your mind back to that story that you read and don’t tell me that you’ve never read a story in your entire life because there are some people that go ‘oh I never read fiction’. Well firstly poor you and secondly is that’s what your parents were for when you were a bairn. But you can go even further than that, and go I don’t know what to do, what would I do if I did know what to do. Which is kind of a meta script if you like. It’s a script about a script. I don’t know what to do oh shit what should I do, I don’t know. If I did know what to do what would I do – oh I’d do that, OK do it. And it sounds right, it sounds really weird, it sounds like it's not going to work but the number of times I’ve used it and the number of times I’ve seen it used when you’ve just literally said to yourself and it’s a coaching question isn’t it. And I know you don’t know the answer to this question but if you did know the answer what would it be? The reason it works is because it gets the person to step out of their current script which is telling them I don’t know what to do. Because I want to pick up on a point you said earlier on when you said ‘your scripts aren’t serving you and you’ve run out of scripts you don’t know what to do’ actually that’s running a script. The script you're running is I don’t know what to do. There is an I’m out of my depth script and it stops you running the I am out of my depth script which is just a fiction you’ve got in your head and it replaces that story about yourself with another story about yourself which is I’m not out of my depth because I know what to do and away you go. It's kind of like this idea.. Well, here’s a silly question: how easy is it to solve your own problems? Answer or most impossible because if you could solve your own problems you would have solved it and it wouldn’t be a frigging problem any longer. But how often have you or I or anybody else floated a problem to somebody else that we can’t solve and they have gone ‘well why don’t you just do so and so’? because they are seeing from the outside of the problem. It’s the old Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, somebody else’s problem concept. You can solve problems that aren’t yours much more easily than you can solve your own problems. So, if you’re telling your script, if you’re telling yourself a script about I don’t know what to do but if it was somebody else who was doing this what would they do? You're solving somebody else’s problem. You’re not solving your own problem, you’re not solving the Simon is in the airport and doesn’t know where to go problem. You’re solving the somebody else is in Dublin airport and doesn’t know where to go problem. Which is much, much easier to solve.
Dave : Um Ok. This is where my heads going on this. What I’m not sure I might have lost the thread just there, I had it and it's gone but I want to try. We are talking about the scripts like I don’t know what to do script or we’re helping somebody else. I think I might have lost my thread here but I’m going to try to grab it back. This is mine, I think I’ve lost my way script. I’m running the script ‘I can’t solve this problem’ because as you said there, oversimplify if I could, I would have already done it. But by shifting it into a different script which is I’m actually helping somebody else out or what would I do if somebody else had this very same problem I’m shifting it into a different script.
Simon : Yes. You can either pretend to be somebody else or run somebody else’s script or ask yourself if I was standing at the airport and if Dave came to me and said I don’t know what to do what advice would I give him. It’s much easier to solve that problem because you’re not freaking out at that point. So seriously if I’m stood in Dublin airport and I’ve no idea where the hell I’m going if somebody came to me and said I don’t know where I’m supposed to be what should I do, it would be really obvious for me to say to them well why don’t you look for the such and such desk or the information desk or the signs or the whatever it was. Actually, I wasn’t doing that because I was just overwhelmed by the... actually, I’ve just realized I’ve been saying Dublin all the way through this. Dublin airport doesn’t freak you out. Dubai airport on the other hand that does freak you out because that's the size of the city that I live in. It’s just that the airport is the size of the city I live in. It’s much easier, in fact you’ve seen me do this, you’ve seen me do it on stage a long time ago in Leeds I think. Simon does not know what to do on stage. Simon freaks out before he goes on stage. On the other hand there is a pretend version of Simon who knows exactly what he’s doing on stage and you become this other person running this other script who goes Simon on stage script start to run it. You change the way you stand because you are being some and away you go. And the idea is that you run these scripts pretending that they are somebody else until you assimilate them and they become your own schema. I’m now at the point where somebody says to you are comfortable on stage, hell yes absolutely because I’ve been on stage often enough being somebody else to mean that I can switch between me and this other person and the performance version of me and I can do all those now a that a drop of a hat, just at the blink of an eye. Metaphorically at the blink of an eye. Doesn’t mean I don’t get nervous. It does mean there is a version of me that knows what to do with those nerves.
Dave : Right, yes. Yes again it's that idea shifting into the script I’m feeling nervous I can’t handle this, I’m rubbish, I’m into, hang on a minute there is a Simon that knows how to deal with these nerves and interpret these nerves differently, handle these differently and voice the different techniques. When you talk about it becomes a schema it’s the thing going back to the idea of the car. Rarely if ever, I’m saying if ever, I’ve never sat in my car and thought I have really no idea how to drive it now. Do you know what I mean? But I could, if I thought about it, think I could put myself into that script where I just panic about it if you know if you make that leap because but I’m so ingrained in it like get in the car I know what I’m doing that schema just runs automatically.
Simon : Until you sit in someone else’s car where are the indicators are on the opposite side; where the dashboard is laid out differently and you look at the gear lever and go where the bloody hell is reverse.
Dave : Yes a new car which is often why they will sit with you for 10 minutes in the car before you take it out of wherever to say this is where that is. Yeah you're right because it throws. So that is an interesting one, so it throws the existing schema which I guess is pretty set. It's not only set as in automatic, it’s set in its detail, is that fair to say.
Simon : It can be, yeah very very set in its detail.
Dave : We then need to sort of become very conscious of that to know how we adapt it. I guess the best kind of schema is something that has that flexibility built. You’re always changing cars and this, that and the other. I know when I was in the police I would drive my car to work then I’d drive a different panda then they might get the keys to the transit van to go and pick something up or somebody up. You know that kind of thing and you would always be having to switch between different vehicles.
Simon : I used to do it a lot when I was touring as a lighting designer. I would look at a lighting control desk in a theatre and go ‘right then of these 536 buttons which one turns it on’ I’ve no freaking idea because every lighting board is different. I mostly would like your problem of getting in different cars than sitting in front of different lighting boards because I have no idea what the hell I’m doing here.
Dave : I’ve seen some of the sound boards in some of these studios and lighting boards when you’re having a look behind you just think what on earth? I guess like you say if you’ve developed, if you’re working with them all the time you’ll develop very complex schema to deal with those kinds of things.
Simon : Yeah you're right. You’re hinting at something what I’m going to call a meta schema which is a schema that says how do I decide which schema to use. So you sit in the ford transit and the first thing you do is go you run a script that goes I’m a competent driver I can figure this out. Almost like loading a computer module that says right what am I doing, I’m operating a ford transit - load operating ford transit module bleep. Done, I can now drive a ford transit. I’m simplifying of course. The meta schema is going, what am I sitting in? I’m sitting in a ford transit. Do I know how to drive a ford transit? Yes. If yes, load that module, if no, ask somebody how the hell to drive a ford transit or I’m dressing in a ford fiesta do I know how to drive one of those. The meta module is the do I know how to do this, if not, how do I find out.
Dave : That’s actually a really important element of this isn’t it because if, from the examples you gave before, a lot of this is how do I get out of my own way. If my script is suddenly running I don’t know what to do I can’t handle this or I’m just feeling like ‘aw man I canna do this man its rubbish I’m taking nothing in you know’ whatever those feelings are, we are operating a script that might be comforting in one sense because it's familiar. But it's just not productive and it's certainly not good for us in any sense. So acknowledging that we have those scripts and schema around it I guess because I’ll come back to a question about schema shortly. We need to then look at what are those meta scripts that allow us to shift out . Did you call them meta schema or meta scripts?
Simon : I called them meta scripts but honestly the difference between a schema and script is blurry it depends on who you are reading.
Dave : Ok so that meta script is something that we need, that’s the getting out of our own way. Getting out of the current script that we are running to then operate something at a bigger level to then pick a different script. It could be what would they do, or what advice would I give or what would Batman do.
Simon : What Batman did is almost always the right answer to the question. What would Batman do?
Dave : It didn’t take you long to get Batman into the interview. I have to say Simon that’s probably a record.
Simon : It was a tossup, what would Batman do or what would Dr Who do. One of those two things is almost always the right thing to do. Or if I’m feeling really grown up, really really grown up I ask myself the question what would my wife do; as I’ve discovered that’s 99% of the time that’s the right thing to do.
Dave : And knowing Carin being the sensible of the two.
Simon : Fully aware that my wife is the grown up in the relationship, no problem with that.
Dave : You know that script, you know it.
Simon : There’s a couple of things to point out. That panic script that you run I don’t know what to do. One of the problems with that is the very first thing that goes when you don’t know what to do is your ability to be rational. Once you’re in your own way almost by definition you’re staying in your own way because you can’t have the logical thinking to get yourself out of something. You can prepare so that you have a hypothetical if this then that is already set up in advance or you could run models rehearsals for it. You could run smaller, less scary versions of it and all of that kind of thing before you are in these positions. Cos let's face it the chances of us genuinely being in a position where we have no idea what the hell to do completely by surprise with no warning whatsoever is practically nil. Short of alien abduction we are always warned. I’m facetious about the alien abduction but we always know that there is something coming up. We may not know the details of it but we do know that there is something happening and we can preload if you like or prepare in some shape or form. Silly, silly, silly, silly example if the phone rings. You don’t know who it is on the far side but you do know the protocol for answering the phone. There is never a situation, which reminds me I should turn my phone off, which reminds me there is never a situation where you’re not going to go. I've got a rough idea of the sorts of things that might happen so you’re at least partially prepared. If you are going to an exam at school you didn’t know what the questions were but you did know that there were going to be questions. And you did know that the first thing you should do is read the instructions about how many questions you should answer. And you knew the second thing you should do is read all the questions so you could find the ones you could have a best crack at and you knew that when you had done that then you should start answering the questions. Rather than a blind panic ‘oh my god’ and start writing answers.
Dave : Yeah which you know we have probably all experienced in our times. What you are kind of saying there if I’m picking this up is having something that at least gets you going in a situation. Because one of the things I have found personally, professionally with a lot of people that I’m coaching or talking to is that once they’re going, once we are going, once we are into it you kind of settle in albeit may still be nerve racking, it may still be uncomfortable, unpleasant or however but it’s the fear of that, it’s the fear before that kind of puts you into freeze mode or whatever. If you can have a script that kind of just helps you get going you then move into potentially a mode of being able to run with what’s there.
Simon : Let me give you an example of that from my specialty field which is presentations and standing on stage or standing in front of the boardroom and all of that kind of jazz. There is a really simple tool you can use which is just have a ritual before you go on stage, before you start to make the presentation, before the thing happens because that kick starts your script. If I do this my script starts to work because your right once you’re up and running on stage it's much easier to run the presentation. A number of people I say to them what’s the scariest bit about a presentation and I always get the same two answers. One is the questions because I don’t know what questions are going to come. Wrong, yes you do just haven’t done the research lets figure that out. But the other thing they say is it's getting started, once it's running it’s much easier because I know what I’m doing. So, what we do now is set up something that starts the process of delivering the presentation from the beginning. It could be rehearsing your first six lines or whatever but it's in ritual. In fact, there is a member of my team Claire, but I don’t know whether you have met Claire, but she’s a member of my team called Claire who said she swears she can see when I’m doing, because my rituals are inside my head now I don’t need the physical although happy to use the physical it’s a good starting place. She says she can see the inside the head things happening because I stand differently and my eyes take on a different focus. It's not as ‘your eyes change colour and you suddenly grow 6 inches’ it's not that but she swears she can actually see the moment when she stops talking to her friend and starts talking to the performer. She actually says she can see it happen because I’ve got the ritual that kick starts the script of Simon knows what he’s doing on stage. Whether I do or not is another matter, a completely separate issue. Competence is different from this sometimes.
Dave : Right, that’s something to pick up on as well just to explore. When you were mentioning it I was thinking about we all kind of know that sports performers, athletes, many of them will have little superstitious movements or rituals within that and they become, that’s part of that.
Simon : Right let me stop you because it looks like superstition to people from the outside. You say to an actor, you say an athlete or you say to a footballer whatever ‘do you have any rituals you do before?’ ‘Yes I stand on one foot and I do yoga tree pose for 30 seconds with my eyes crossed’ and that sounds like superstition from somebody. But you know and I know that once you’ve rehearsed it that becomes part of your kick start. The idea of me being able to do tree pose for that long is a fantasy but you get the gist. So, it’s not a superstition, it's a ritual and those two things are not the same.
Dave : Things like wearing the same shirt, same underwear type of thing, how does that fit into it because I’ve got my lucky shirt on or something like that. How’s that work?
Simon : I tell people to try and avoid having a physical thing because sods law being what it is they won’t have their lucky shirt for the presentation. So, I try and teach people the rituals which is something that you do or something that you think rather than something that you have. Sods law will screw you up every single time. So for me, I think you know this already but for me part of my preparation ritual is to rub my thumb across the inside of my wedding ring. That requires me to have my wedding ring on. I get that, so it requires a physical thing rather like your lucky shirt or stuff but after 37 years I physically can’t take my wedding ring off. It just does not come off. I'm never going to be without it. I physically cannot remove it without Vaseline and ten minutes, hang on, nope can’t do it, it hurts my knuckle. So I’m ok with cheating for my rules a little bit but by and large these rituals should be physical or mental rather than external objects. By all means start with an external object but that’s a crux that you want to get away from as soon as you can.
Dave : So it’s a way into the practice into creating it but then focusing on something that you always have with you which is the physical feeling or thinking process or something. That’s what you really want to build and embed.
Simon : Yeah something that is in there so that it's automatic and internal. That’s the idea at least.
Dave : You mentioned there’s so many things I want to pick up and ask you about but you mentioned that’s competence not this. So, what do you mean?
Simon : I might be confident about going on stage and thinking that I was God's gift to presentations and actually suck. The two things are not, there’s not a correlation of 1.0. There is a bit of a correlation but there is not a perfect correlation and for some people who think they are brilliant on stage it's actually a negative correlation because they are God awful and they should never be allowed to talk to anybody let alone me because I have a habit of telling them that they are awful occasionally. In fact, I get told off for being quote “unnecessarily honest in my feedback”. Don’t ask who said that but they were quite blatant about the fact that I had overstepped the boundaries of acceptability. But yes there is a relationship because if you are confident you are more likely to be competent. If you are terrified you are more likely to screw up so if you are less terrified you are less likely to screw so you are more likely to become competent but I wouldn’t want people to assume that just becoming confident makes you automatically competent. So the things that grind my gears are when I say to people you know presentations training I say ‘if I waved a magic wand what would you like to be able to do at the end of this training course?’ and they go ‘well I would like to be completely confident talking about x y and z’. I go ok you know about x y and z. ‘oh nothing I haven’t done the.....’ well get out of my class then until you know what the hell it is that you’re talking about because confidence is not a magic bullet here. The other thing that people seem to get very confused about is this idea that they want to become confident before they do anything. How did you learn to ride a bike I’m assuming you can; never seen you, assuming you can. How did you learn to ride a bike? Was the first time you ever got on a bike, somebody put you on a mountain bike at the top of a hill and threw you down a 1 in 3, it’s only got one brake, it's got 32 gears and it's got suspension and you’re doing about 45kph down a rough track. Was that your first experience of riding a bike?
Dave : Absolutely not, no.
Simon : Because the first time you rode a bike you were probably a bairn with suspenders, but I don’t mean suspenders.
Dave : Stabilizers
Simon : Stabilizers, that's it, fraudulent slip there. You’ve got the stabilizers on the flats, all of that kind of stuff and you get gradually confident about becoming more and more of a risk taker on your bike by taking more and more risks which are at the edge of what people call your comfort zone. Jumping out of your comfort zone leaping onto a bike onto a 45kph hill you’re going to crash and burn. On the other hand, if you never move out of your comfort zone you’re never going to get the stabilizers off. So the idea is you want to be working at the edge of your comfort zone to grow your comfort zone rather than randomly leap out of it into those memes where you go ‘the magic happens outside of your comfort zone’. So does the crash and burn mate. The growth happens at the edge of your comfort zone. What I’m suggesting here is that the schemas and scripts and things could be used at the edges of your comfort zone to expand it gradually so that you become more comfortable at more things rather than just doing the random jumping into stupid stuff.
Dave : Right totally bought into that mate totally makes sense as well. So, a couple of things I’ve got a great example with Rosie and teaching her because she has just learnt to ride a bike.
Simon : Rosie is? For those who don’t know you.
Dave : She’s lovely, she’s been mentioned a few times. I took her to the park no stabilizers on the bike and there was tears, tantrums. There’s was frustration, there was not wanting to give up there was all of that and eventually we got to the point where she was riding the bike etc. It kind of struck me that the scripts in action in the sense that the script in action was ‘I can’t do this, I’m never going to do this’ but there was also the emotional charge to that. I remember thinking about it afterwards and thinking that not only did I have to help with the tactics, the actual how-to's - just look ahead, don't look at your wheel, you know, hold onto the handlebars and just keep pedaling that kind of thing. There the physical elements. There’s all of the emotions there and it's about how do you, I mean I talk about here’s my cabbage the crackerjack analogy of chunk your cabbages down, slice them down and chunk them into sprout sized actions. But it's not just actions, it's how you slice down and deal with the emotional side because that’s very powerful, that’s like the charge behind the script. Before we could actually get on with the skills which is the competence bit we had to deal with that bit before. By hook or by crook, I’m not saying that I did it particularly well but it was a case of let's just keep going, let's break it down into small bits. Just pedal a couple of times, just do that, you can do this, remember this and kind of just giving her the reassurance. So I guess that difference between that idea of confidence and competence. We have the skills and what have you and yes obviously confidence comes into that but its dealing with the emotional charge of some of these scripts that get in the way. As adults we all have that.
Simon : Yes and you can’t expect a 5 year old to be able to do this kind of thing. Parenting is about teaching your children that blah blah blah blah. But there is something here for, I’m going to pretend that I was a perfect father and I’ve raised perfect daughters and I’m going to give you advice on how to raise your five year old. Are ready to ignore me.
Dave : Come on
Simon : Because you know what my daughters are like so there’s not a hell in chance. I forgot what I was going to say now, completely forgotten what I was going to say. Sometimes it's about not wanting to push too many things too far. For example, if you’ve gone to the park and taken her stabilizers off at the same time that might be a bit of a freaky thing. What you do is you go to the park with stabilizers. And here’s the bit people forget, and you go in your back street where she is completely comfortable all the time without stabilizers and then you go to the park without stabilizers. It's not a linear thing like people think. It’s not a go to the park, then take off your stabilizers. It is take off your stabilizers, put them back on, go to the park, come back. Then you start building those skills together because you’ve proven to yourself that you can do it without stabilizers and you’ve proven to yourself that you can ride in the park now it's just a question of putting those two things together. Whereas if you’re going in a linear thing of go to the park, take your stabilizers off you are much more exposed.
Dave : Just to kind of develop this. The reason for that is because the fledgling scripts if you like there’s a couple there, if you chuck them all into one unfamiliar environment the overriding script is ‘I don’t know where I’m at or what I’m doing’ and what have yer. Whereas if we have those fledging scripts and we kind of build on them, in familiar, in the comfort zone at the edges of and then start to push out from that we have got a better chance of that fledging script becoming more embedded.
Simon : Yeah. Embedded, and embedded fledging script eventually becomes a schema where you don’t have to think about it. In a couple of years’ time Rosie will be able to ride a bike and you’ll be sitting there and thinking I wish I had never taught her to ride a bike because she is taking far, far, far, far too many risks; as her father I really don’t want to see that. This is the voice of bitter personal experience by the way.
Dave : Or my older son Thomas moves onto a motorbike at one point, I was so glad that he got rid of that but anyway.
Simon : I kind of taught my kids to ride bikes and now they are riding them down mountains in Argentina and I’m thinking err….really ok. And when I say down mountains I basically mean down 1 in 1s. Who the hell thought that was a good idea to give anybody a bike? It should calm down now because there’s that protective father script that kicks in quite spectacularly if you’re not careful.
Dave : Building on that then or kind of taking into us as adults or anybody who is finding that they.. the theme of the sprout sweater is one small but significant action or changes in habit, routines can lead to bigger things if we are consistently applying them. But it's ultimately about trying to sort address that question that many of us have at particular times in life is this it? You know I’m feeling like my life’s not my own or I’m just feeling a bit lost and directionless or what do I want to do with the rest of my life type of thing, this isn’t meaning full or fulfilling. The thought of making changes can be in itself just another potentially overwhelmed thing. We might switch into that script of ‘I cannot handle it’ or ‘it's too much’. I talk about, you mention the comfort zone, I talk about you can retreat into your numb zone. That alternative place where you just want to block out the uncomfortable feelings, avoid the issues, you might just work harder, drink you know whatever. You use those kinds of things that block out time or block out the emotion. But the alternative to that is rather than thinking about as you say making the big leap there is a bit of a I guess in some of the aspects of self-development this idea in praise of big, huge action, big dreams and all of that. I’m not against having big dreams but you’ve got to start somewhere haven’t you by the smaller steps. So how do we take what we have just talked about and encourage somebody who is thinking well ‘where do I start?’ Where do I start with..
Simon : There’s a tool, an observation I was given by a careers advisor when I went to them at university and said I’ve just had enough of being a research scientist. I want to do something else. They pointed out that a change in career such as I was thinking about is not an event, it is a process. And as soon as you start to think about these things not as binary switches but as long-term process/projects it’s much easier to wrap your head around them. So, in the same way as you might have a project about researching X or building Y you have a project which is about changing from being a carpenter to a plumber or changing in my case from being a research scientist to a trainer. Now there are still things that I use in my training from my research science days the stuff where I go back to research papers and all that kind of jazz but you have this process where one of the steps might be for example what are the things about being a research scientist that I like that I want to take with me? That’s a tiny, tiny step, it's just how long does it take to do that. It takes about as long as it takes to have half a bottle of wine. Approximately, approximately so I’m told, a friend a told me. But the point is that’s a step, that’s a tiny incremental step towards knowing what it is that I want. The other thing that you have to bear in mind is that if you want, if you're robust enough at this, you end up with a script which doesn’t say I’m a research scientist or I am a dancer or whatever you go I’m a human being and currently I’m working as a …. So what you are doing is changing the script that you’re running about what you do, not the script about who you are. The best thing to do with that is to get right down to your absolute fundamentals, your core philosophies about who you are, what you believe in, why you are doing what you are doing because once you know your why you’ll find that you apply your why in different circumstances. I have taken huge things from my research scientist days, the why that’s come with me for example would be I used to do research science so more people knew more stuff to make the world a better place. Well actually that’s exactly what I’m doing as a trainer. More people know more stuff so they can make the world a better place. The only difference is that once upon a time I used to discover that stuff and now I tell people about that stuff. That’s a much smaller step than people think it is. In fact, it’s a tiny, tiny little step, lots and lots and lots of things have remained the same. Such as why do you get out of bed in the morning and why should anybody care. If the story you are telling yourself is not the research scientist vs the story of being a trainer but the story you are telling yourself your script is more people because of me more people will know more things and will therefore can have more impact and make the world a better place, I’ve barely changed the script I’ve just changed the skin that goes around it that’s all. I kept the main things the same.
Dave : I love that, the idea of how that can help somebody who is feeling they’ve lost direction or questioning ‘I hate this job’ or ‘I hate what I’m doing at the moment’ whatever it is, how it appears in life. We often can see that if we are not as aware of that binary choice ‘just put up with it and wind your neck in and get on with it’ or just totally burn all bridges, you know have your mid so called midlife crisis mis manage it all of that and just chuck everything out and you find yourself as I did, because I did that years ago, in a place where I had to. I had nothing, I had no real story, I had no sense of identity. I was like I often describe it as a ‘Lego’ house. I smashed it up. I had Lego blocks all over and had to start from scratch. Actually, what you are saying there is, if we can just reframe it and rather than avoiding it or just becomes some massive event in our life we change that idea to there is something here let’s change from an event to a process.
Simon : That's really key for me.
Dave : It's very, very powerful, I love the idea that as someone who is very process driven I like to kind of have steps. I love that idea. It's a journey. Its steps. It’s a process and actually you don’t have to have all of the steps or the answers you don’t know. Seeing it as that gives you permission to then start taking the first steps. Those first steps may be to go back to ‘what do you already do that you like?’, that’s always the phrases you used.
Simon : Yeah it is. I’m just going to pedantically pick up on one word there, not go back to but go down to.
Dave : Down to what’s your thinking?
Simon : I don’t want to go backward because backward implies retreating. It's just me playing with words a little bit. Get right down into the core of you rather than going back to what you used to be. I just want to avoid the word back because it implies things I don’t want to go for.
Dave : So we are getting deeper aren’t we, we are getting deeper into those core drivers and actually what we can see I would suggest for the majority of the time, for the majority of us is that those things at the core will always stay the same. As you say your why is I might change the dressing around but that still stays the same which then gives you permission to say actually this may not be as radical or as disastrous or catastrophic as I imagine it to be. Actually, I’m keeping a lot here. What's the next step? What can I change? What could I explore? What things could I experiment or play with? in that shaping and testing things. What things definitely are not going to factor in? What are the things that are definitely complimentary to that that I’m already doing? Let’s see what I could do ethically and what have you done less of.
Simon : Discover observations the first is, it's never as easy as we are making it sound. No model is as clean as it ever appears when you draw it on a white board. The second is that you need to give yourself permission to screw it up. Because sometimes you are going to have to muck things up and it's ok to get help and it's ok to go ‘do you know what that one bombed that’s not where I’m going’ but one thing I’ve found incredibly useful was to think of the 4 T’s. You mentioned there something like how do ethically less of this and in order to do that I kind of like a 4 T approach. Now different people have different, this is just mine. Target, Tactics, Tools and Time. Target is what am I trying to do. Tactics - how am I going to do this? Tools - what equipment support or people do I need around me and Time is pretty damn obvious when am I going to set aside time in the diary to do this. Because far too many people just jump in with those things missing and the project fails because that step fails and the step fails because they haven’t got the right tools or they didn’t get the right support or they weren’t.. you get the idea. I’m not saying that’s rocket science and I’m not saying that there are not better ways of doing it but for me Target, Tactics, Tools and Time is just a nice little what do I need to consider.
Dave : I love that and tie that in with your previous statement about you will make mistakes and it's ok. You don’t know what you don’t know so when you step into those 4Ts there are things you’re going to realise you didn’t know or that you didn’t have but then adopting another script that says ok so what can I learn and what can we pick on and what can we get on with. Rather than the script that says ‘I didn’t, what’s the point it’s never going to work’, ‘it's not for me’ ‘who am I to think I can’. So, it’s about changing those, challenging and being aware of those scripts whilst we are doing and exploring this. Adopting that kind of, I kind of treat it as a bit of adventure. You're exploring, you're testing and seeing what happens and how do we re-frame. In our own language being like a fellow nerdy person I often think about exploring the galaxy and adventures of Captain Kirk on the Starship Enterprise. That’s my language of trying to gee myself into that mindset as opposed to what can happen is that self-defeating of ’oh God it just never works, it just hasn’t worked again’ ‘what’s the point just go back to whatever, just crack a bottle of beer open and just…’
Simon : I was reading some research so long ago I can’t remember where it came from now. Where these guys were looking at the difference between two groups of people. One who identified themselves as lucky and those people who identified themselves as no I’m not a lucky person. And the only difference that the researchers could identify was that some people identified themselves as lucky and some people identified themselves as not lucky and all the differences were consequences of that identification not causes of that identification. So if you think of yourself as lucky and you’re applying for four jobs and you haven’t got them your approach would be ‘well I will apply for the 5th job you never know I might get it’ and you have a 1 in 5 chance of getting it. Whereas if you regard yourself as unlucky and you applied for four jobs and haven’t got them you go ‘well you see I’m never going to get’ so don’t apply for the 5th job or by definition you have zero chance of getting it at that point. Now that’s not to say that positive thinking always works, it's not to say that going for the job always works, it is however to point out that negative thinking sadly does.
Dave : Never work
Simon : Negative thinking works. If I think I can’t do it then yeah if I think I can’t do it then whatever. My personal trainer at the gym just looks at me when she says ‘lift that’ and I look at it and I go I can’t and her first response is ‘yeah you're right you can’t’. But if I tell her I can’t and I’m not going to try by definition I can’t pick it up. Whereas if she gives me something and I have a go at it I may or may not be able to do it. Hello Ann if you’re listening to this I’ll do 20 burpees after this just to make you feel better because let’s face it 20 burpees sure as hell doesn’t make me feel better. But if she gives me something to pick up I may or may not be able to pick it up but I may or may not be able to pick it up.
Dave : It increases your chances of a positive outcome by simply having a go or adopting that approach, that pattern. One of the things in some of my reading around is that optimism or optimistic thinking style can be adopted. It's not a trait in the sense that it's not fixed. We can all adopt an optimistic thinking style with practice because its further to go. But is that tapping into the idea of scripts. My typical script might be ‘never works, give up just don’t bother’ ‘never get that job it will never happen’ ‘they don’t want me here my face doesn’t fit’ you know all those kinds of scripts that come in.
Simon : I’m looking at your face right now Dave and I can, I’m with them there frankly.
Dave : Thanks
Simon : To answer that question before you go too far it sounds like it but honestly I don’t know because I haven’t read the research that you have, or I don’t recognize the research you’re referring to. But it certainly does sound like that, yes.
Dave : I can’t recall, because again it’s a little while ago but it’s not the optimism vs pessimism there isn’t sort of a natural tendency towards those. It's just that we can adopt an optimistic thinking style and which separates that which to me kind of speaks the language of I can adopt a more optimistic script here. That goes back to the meta script idea that you have to be able to be aware enough to say actually is this script serving me the outcome that I want or want to go. Where can I find the right script or how do I find the right script to tap into.
Simon : Up to a point, yes. Now I’m desperately trying to think of the name of a guy, Admiral something begins with a ‘sh’ – can’t remember it. American, basically pointing out that optimists and prisoner of war camps don’t make it. Because they say it's going to be done by Christmas, we are going to be free by Christmas. Then Christmas comes and you’re crushed because you’re not free. His observation which seems perfectly sensible to me is that you can be optimistic about the outcome whilst still being miserably realistic or even pessimistic about the process of getting there.
Dave : I can’t remember his name but you're right he was a prisoner of war for some years and that’s what he noticed. He noticed the more who were genuinely pessimistic, prone to just giving up would kind of give up more easily and give up hope and that would lead to a greater chance of them not surviving. Then you have the optimists, optimists on the other end who I guess I would use the phrase almost delusional optimism, like it will happen tomorrow, we’ll get out next Christmas and fixing on a date or a point.
Simon : Stockdale is the name. I’ve googled him while you were talking.
Dave : Admiral Stockdale. Now because it was in Good to Great wasn’t it, Jim Collins’ book the Stockdale paradox. I guess I have two phrases that like the optimistic thinking style in my head. I think pragmatic, practical optimism not delusional optimism because that delusional optimism for me does not serve a purpose. Well maybe it does in a sense it can boost you up in a moment. It can be a short-term kind of feel-good factor I don’t know and we have probably all done it. I’ve had a beer and yeah I can do this…
Simon : Yeah but what happens when it doesn’t work
Dave : That’s a good point.
Simon : You are then back to worse than square one.
Dave : For me the pragmatic, practical optimism is more about exactly how you describe it. Look I’ve got a greater chance, there is a greater chance of things working out if I adopt this approach and work towards it but don’t be so fixed on the how or when it's going to happen because there are lots of unknowns, there are things I don’t know. I might not actually want it when I realise it. I might change my mind along the way; there might be setbacks that I wasn’t anticipating. That practical, pragmatic optimism is a bit to me it kind of gives you that opportunity to be flexible and not pin your hopes on it. Put everything, all your eggs in that basket type of thing.
Simon : Sounds remarkably, sounds dangerously like we’re agreeing with each other.
Dave : God what’s going on here.
Simon : Stop talking quick.
Dave : I know, is that a good place to end the podcast. Simon and Dave agree what’s going on here?!
Simon : We need to go lie down in our separate places, just in a dark room
Dave : On a serious note though Simon thank you for your time this has been brilliant and it's been great to talk through these in some detail and kind of articulate some of the questions and thoughts that I had and understand them largely in heading in the right direction. It's still a journey and exploration all of this for me.
Simon : Everything is for all of us and that’s one of the scripts I’m running. I consciously have to run this script is ‘you don’t know all the answers Simon and that’s ok’.
Dave : And that’s a great parting thought for listeners as well. We don’t know all the answers but part of the adventure I guess is finding those out as we go along and some of the tactics we talk about - a process not event is a cracking term.
Simon : Great. I want to float something even further past you. You don’t have all the answers thank God. How awful would life be if you did - just a really scary thought. If I actually knew what I was doing, not only one I be dangerous to the rest of the world but how sad and boring would my life be because part of the reason of being alive for me is to figure out what the hell you’re talking about.
Dave : I think that’s as good a place as any, the adventure of just figuring it out. Thank you very much Simon. Just a parting thought, there will be details in the show notes about where to find more about you. Is there anything you want to say in terms of where people can find you, find out more about you, any asks of the audience?
Simon : Twitter is @presentations or find me on LinkedIn its simon-raybould-presentations. There are 3 I think now Simon Rayboulds on LinkedIn one of whom is a Canadian bread maker. Don’t go to him, he’s awesome and his bread fantastic I’m sure but you do have weird conversations about baking bread with him. Just say hi on LinkedIn or on twitter.
Dave : Brilliant. Thank you very much for your time Simon.
Simon : My pleasure and I’ve really enjoyed talking to you Dave, thanks very much.
Dave : Take care, bye
I hope you’ve enjoyed your flight aboard Sprout1. For show notes and information on how to get the podcast feed direct to your Apple podcast, Spotify or other favourite podcast feed visit sproutsweater.com and touchdown!
Episode 13 Teaser:
In episode 13, Dave explores sleep - and outlines three key areas you can improve in small ways to sleep better.