Your Secret Superpower…you Learn by Failing

In this podcast, Dr. Jon Finn discusses Chapter Two of The Habit Mechanic book. He highlights how a major sporting failure when he was younger became a springboard for great success in the future.

He also talks more about using failure as a catalyst for growth and development and the challenge of knowing what we need to do, to be our best everyday, and actually doing it.

Podcast Transcript

Hello Habit Mechanics Dr Jon Finn here, I hope you’ve had a fantastic week so far. I’m really excited today because we’re going to continue to go in depth inside the Habit Mechanic and take the behind The scenes tour of the stories behind the stories look at some of the details in the book in even more detail and just try to make it as easy as possible for you to become Habit Mechanics and build small new helpful Habits that make your life easier I’m joined again today by my colleague and friend Andrew whitelam Andrew how are you? Hi there Jon yeah I’m very much looking forward to this this episode of the podcast we’re looking at chapter two of the book and I think for me what this does and I think it’s clear for everyone that when it comes to resilience well-being developing leadership skills developing motivation confidence being your best every day I think this helps us to recognize this chapter chapter two that there’s a really important distinction to drawbetween knowing information about these things and actually doing to achieve these things in other words going through the processes and implementing these things and implementing changes in your daily life so you achieve these things and you develop these new mental and uh mental attributes and psychological attributes so knowing versus doing is very much the essence of this chapter too and I think it’s fascinating to be able to talk to you in depth about this and there’s a there’s a great story in the book which we’ll come on to in a minute to start this chapter but um the um the opportunity to look at that in depth is great as well and I think it’s worth mentioning Jon that um we previously asked for some questions on last week’s podcast and later in this podcast we’ll be announcing the the winner of our mini competition the first person who submitted questions and um will be uh answering their question later in the podcast and um asking people for more and of course people can win a free a three year subscription to uh Habit Mechanic University app so um very well worth taking part um so as I said then Jon um in in chapter two to kick it off is a great story that you share with people about your own sporting exploits and um it’s certainly an amazing lessonum about how failure and a setback can spur you on to grow and develop and Achieve great things would you mind sharing more yeah so you often get asked why or I get off well you often when I say you I mean generally things were passionate and interested in people ask us how did you get into that what was the starting point for you and for me my interest in a form and psychology was super charged by an experience I had whilst playing rugby um playing sport was pretty much the only thing I was good at as a kid growing up and you know surprisingly enough that’s pretty much the only thing I practised as well and it was I suppose normal for me to be one of the first picks in the team and to to just find playing sport quite easy because it’s just something that I enjoyed doing spent a lot of time doing and when I got to University I got the opportunity to um go for some trials for the international student team and I got selected into the training Squad um and that accumulated in playing a warm-up game before uh an international test match uh of student International Rugby game against Australia this was a warm-up game it was a selection game for that game um it was a work probably probably worth saying Jon at this point if you don’t know your rugby um whatever code of rugby is Australia are always always formidable opponents and always very very testing opposition yeah so we know um well my friend played in the game that I didn’t get to and he said it’s the most it’s the hardest game on Rugby’s ever played in his life um so yeah that’s and he’s he’s not bad um so it was a wet cold windy day in the north of England I I think I was 19 at the time we were playing against the men’s uh professional team and I was just out of my depth early I hadn’t seen I hadn’t been involved at this level before I remember distinctly in you know in the changing rooms beforehand players throwing up making themselves physically sick because they’re wanting to get to what I Now understand the right activation level I’d never seen that before um and I was playing fullback and that meant that part of my job is to catch High balls and very early in the game the the ball went up I was stood um pretty much underneath my goal posts sort of so almost on the try line where the opposition need to get over to score points the ball went up he was swirling up around in the air I was getting closed down quickly by to what seemed to be ginormous um men I didn’t really think of myself as a man at 19 but um I just may be part of the problem but um the the thought that was in my head was don’t drop the ball don’t drop the ball don’t drop the ball now this is a catch I’d made hundreds if not thousands of times before and I didn’t even drop the ball I just completely missed the ball and this got a try um and I was substituting not long afterwards you know and connected to that story actually to think the year before or maybe 18 months earlier I ruptured a quad muscle in my right leg and I was a kicker and that meant I was really struggling to train the the level of intensity needed to train to be physically fit enough to play at those levels I saw on my leg just kept breaking down so I sort of knew at that time I’m not going to be able to play it at a high level because physically my body’s not up to it so I thought let’s just try to keep playing the the recreational sort of University level you know do a good job for my for my University team and sort of knock the the higher Ambitions on the head so then I kind of withdrew from even though I got selected I think for the seven Squad after that um I didn’t go because I I just I got sick of getting injured really well at the time I was studying sports psychology as part of my degree so I studied Sports Science um sort of physiology sports psychology motor control which is the science of how you learn um and fundamentally getting better at anything is about learning so I started that that Journey very very early in my understanding of how we actually learn and we studied nutrition as well but the psych really got me interested it just grabbed a hold of me I’d been maybe subconsciously it I kind of remembered this later but it did always interest me the psychology because I was a goalkeeper um I played a lot of golf I I really understood the negative impact that thinking too much could have on sports performance um especially in those what we call sort of closed skills where you’ve got a lot of time to think whether it’s sitting a golf ball catching a high ball making a kick and I do distinctly remember being with being in my my father’s van going to the Golf Club and um it was the British Open and it was the year Jon Daley won it I think it was at carnoustie or Saint Andrews or somewhere and it was maybe Friday and Daly was leading the competition and it was the wash up after play had finished but the discussion was all about is Jon Daly cheating because he was picturing the shot he wanted to make before he hit the ball so in other words he was using imagery to see the shot he wanted to hit and he he must have explained this in his first round interview so the discussion was is that legal should that be cheating plus this cheating I just thought that was fascinating maybe I was you know 14 15 years old then so I so I’d had this I suppose deeper interest in sports psychology that rugby experience um got me thinking about it more and the fact that I was studying sports psychology and back to your earlier point I knew and you probably don’t you don’t need to study sport psychology I don’t imagine to know that you shouldn’t be telling yourself do I drop the ball don’t drop the ball well I I had a more sophisticated understanding of things like imagery and self-talk um affirmations those real basic sports like stuff than most people would have but yet you know when the pressure came on um I wasn’t using them so I was I was kind of kicking myself a little bit but I thought that if I can compete at high high levels athletically because my body wouldn’t let me anymore even though I was only 19. I thought it might be quite interesting to help others from a psychological performance psychologist sport psychology angle so so this this this adversity this well I think terror is probably the right word Jon but with this this rugby uh confrontation that uh you were involved in I think many people would would feel genuine Terror um with a physical confrontation of rugby unless they really um were used to it that this was a I suppose a bit of an epiphany then for you a bit of a a rebirth and and your thinking and led you on ultimately to to where you are today with tougher Minds then yeah it was certainly important ingredient um I do think those moments are probably overplayed well because I know so much about learning but it was definitely an important moment in my life and you can only learn by failing you know that’s the key and I fail every day and I will continue to do so but it’s what you gal of the failure that’s key so you can dwell on it you can beat yourself up you can regret well I’d I was on LinkedIn yesterday and someone uh someone had a post that said my grandma said there’s two days that you shouldn’t worry about yesterday and tomorrow you know focus on today in other words and I just thought it was really interesting the wisdom of grandparents but we can certainly learn from yesterday and we can use those insights to help us to be our best tomorrow uh so be our best today and be and be our best tomorrow but yeah that you know I spend a lot of my teenage years playing sport so luckily I was able to get some lessons out of those and one of them was certainly really important in pushing me into the into what I do today um helping people to become Habit Mechanics through boot of a mind and and it certainly was the start of a a very long and and substantial Journey for you obviously um academic study and then practical application in the world of business education and Elite Sport of the things you develop with with tougher minds and you arrive today with a The Habit Mechanic book an Amazon bestseller and the Habit Mechanic University app and the tougher Minds consultancy um how did that how have did the um Journey pan out if you like from from your realisation and then as you started to develop tougher Minds as a as an organisation and offer what you do now to people how did that Journey take shape yeah so I did my dissertation in sports psychology and I actually looked up the rule of imagery in golf and I was really interested in how the difference in image reuse imagery effectiveness in very good golfers in simple terms to kind of beginner golfers so I did a qualitative dissertation on that literally interviewing golfers how they used imagery um and then I went off to work in America via something called Camp America that people might be familiar with so the the year after I well the summer after I finished my undergraduate degree I went off to America not knowing what grades I’d got or or anything um which obviously you needed to understand your grid before you could position yourself to get to the next thing you’re going to do whether that was more study or jobs Etc and I got a really nice surprising email said I got a first class in my dissertation which meant I got a two one in my degree and which meant I could do a masters um in sports psychology at a top you know Institute so engaging and getting interested in the sport psychology piece you know led to that dissertation been pretty good because I was genuinely interested in it and then I went to study a masters in sports psychology at a different Institute with some really really groundbreaking researchers really interesting people doing research for organisations like NASA and supporting athletes that were winning gold medals at the Olympics and breaking World Records and they were they were really interested though some of the Sykes were really interested in the emerging neuroscience so the the technology is allowing us to look inside the brain in real time functional MRI scanners will be coming accessible affordable enough for research institutes to buy them at that time I think the French government invested in a lot a lot of these machines so all the papers we were reading were from French researchers so I just got them more and more interested and also some of those uh psyched people that were working at the highest level um in an applied way as well not just research and then I got a job after my masters in professional sport essentially I work for a technology company called prozone they were the first company in the UK to offer a solution that allowed sports teams to measure player activity on the field so how far players would run how many passes they met how many tackles they made Etc and essentially their fitted cameras into stadiums and they’re would use that information to to create data packages if you like that coaches could use to inform their practice arsene Wenger was a big early adopter so Clive Woodward was for the England rugby union team so I was working with the coaches to show them how to use the software and interpret the results and obviously that that was about measuring and monitoring Behaviour ultimately so it fit really well with my sport psych stuff um the South African rugby team at the time was using it as well and I remember I got the opportunity to analyse a guy called Percy Montgomery who was the full very famous South African fullback analysing his routines his pre-shot routines if you like pre-kick routines and noticing the difference when he made successful kicks versus when he didn’t so really taking all this academic theory that I’ve been learning and put it into practice that got me on some of the backroom staffs of um some of these teams it led to me wanting to learn even more so I ended up doing a PhD um to dig deeper into I was interested in the transition between you know why um the very best 18 year olds for example in football might not always be even deemed worthy of having a professional football contract when they’re when they’re 22 23 24 years old why why is that transition from being an excellent uh young professional athlete to an excellent seasoned professional athlete so challenging so I did my PhD work on that looking at the role of emotional regulation um I also worked at Carnegie um the sports faculty of what was then lead to Matt so Carnegie is a very prestigious Sports and education centre which was one of the original P training training colleges along with Loughborough so I got to teach and create applied psychology modules teach on I taught physiology as well I taught motor control alongside that I was working for the professional golfers association um where I created something called the pre-shot system to make it easier for coaches to bring their golfers to think and perform under pressure and then I got the opportunity to take the all that stuff that I’d been working on and go to work for a set of schools called the mom the schools which are a group of private schools in Wales probably the top private school in Wales people call it the Welsh Hogwarts it’s that kind of place um and the remit was basically we want you to infuse performance psychology sports psychology into the day-to-day lives of our of our young people um I two years to do a blank piece of paper and it was a phenomenal experience and learned Lots managed to do some really good work there we wrote a paper about some of that work actually which was interesting but that work got a lot of press attention because he was in the build up to London 2012 and we’re probably dig into some of these stories when imagine letter in the of Car Series as well but other schools wanted that wanted the same approach um a school called cult in London who we still work with now actually we’ve been working with them for this is our 10th year of working with them um they wanted to kind of plug our program into what they were doing as well this other value of developing their young people to be resilient and you know it was which was pioneering at the time and essentially so we had the sport we have the education and you know also we were working at University level education as well working on things like PhD residential programs so all the way through that that educational Journey but essentially we recognize the importance of training parents in what what their children were learning so we’d always have parent training programs as part of our school programs and the parents essentially said this training is much better than anything we get at work so can you come into our businesses and do this for us as well and that’s what took us into the city of London at the request of the parents show introducing us to their employee their employers and in all their in their swimwear is where tougher Minds emerged I think tougher Minds really emerged after my first consultancy was called performing Beyond potential um and tougher minds I think emerged after Monmouth that very specific name and you know the Rebrand if you like um so yeah that’s a potted history of part of my life yeah absolutely fascinating Jon I think the thing that um is so interesting about that is um this exposure you had to critical thinking to Cutting Edge thinking and and research and science um combined with a practical application of um these ideas to test them with real people in the real world which is of course so important and I think if you read the read the book in chapter two specifically um you say that um it was clear the way the world is now means that process was so important because your realisation was a new approach was needed to be successful to be our best in the world we live in yeah the focus of most of my education or my foot I’d say all my formal education in terms of learning how to help others be at their best was very much on helping people to have more knowledge and more skills and you know that that story that that I shared earlier it’s also in the book about essentially choking under pressure I knew what I should be doing and I actually had the skills to be able to do it but I I didn’t use the skills I did something else and I thought there must be a better way to help people you know we haven’t we haven’t nailed this down yet you know psychology I find it really interesting that when I started to work in professional sport when I worked in a elite football rugby Cricket at the top top levels I I worked for the England rugby league team I work with a guy called Johnny best though is now one of the best cricketers in the world have worked with Premier League uh managers Etc the that time when I first started working in professional sport was the first big wave of sport Science been adopted across the piece it’s probably driven by people like arsene Wenger and Clive wood with the same early adopters of the of the pros on technology because they were just looking for any Cutting Edge they could get but at that time the back room staff had very minimal Sport Science support they might have had one fitness trainer part-time nutritionist maybe then they started to get a bit more specialist on the strength and conditioning piece and then they might have had a an analyst maybe a site was in the background somewhere fast forward to today if you go to the top teams they might have I’m not exaggerating they might have 10 to 20 analysts they might have um five to ten strength and conditioning coaches they might have you know a team of nutritionists most teams don’t have a psychologist so that that did not um that did not spread like the other support system spread why why wasn’t it valued it kind of been doing a fantastic job that’s the only thing I can think of is that the people in the positions to psychologically support the athletes weren’t equipped with the right knowledge and the right skills to really have the same impact that the nutritionists were seem to be having that the fitness guys would seem to be having that the analysts were seen to be having um and I do generally think that psychology as a science it’s it’s probably the hardest science to crack because it’s a it’s focused on something that we’ve we can’t see um it’s interesting side of school we’ve only had the Technologies to looking to look at it in any kind of meaningful way this is the brain I’m talking about in the last or 20 25 years so and Jon just to interrupt this is you mentioned it earlier uh when you’ve spoken you were telling us about your Masters this is the functional MRI scan magnetic resonance imaging I think is the is the what the abbreviation stands for so you can actually see what’s happening in the brain when people are thinking and taking actions is that right you can yeah and it’s not Magic in the sense of you can see what someone’s thinking in terms of what they’re saying to themselves but you can see activity you can see brain function much more clearly and much more reliably than we’ve been able to see before um so my sense was there was a there was a better way to take this very intangible invisible thinking process that influences and drives everything all our Behaviour and make it easier for people to understand and access because for example you know I got parachuted into a group of schools where I wanted to help everyone across the the school community you know including those from the nursery level upwards I had to make this really really simple really really accessible you know I would formally teach of 10 11 year olds this stuff um so yeah so I knew they had to be I knew that to be a better way to do it and and I could see that pain Point increasing for people as well where for my grandparents generation for example they were working in the factory from being 14 years old teenager being a teenager is something we’ve made up in the west it’s not a real thing being a teenager it’s a label we’ve put on something they were in they were working when they were 14. and probably by their late teens early 20s they’d learned their core jobs and the core skills they needed to perform those jobs and those skills didn’t really change for the rest of their lives they didn’t take work home with them there were no emails they worked you know a set period of time if you fast forward to today the world is very very different I I presented at a conference just before the pandemic for the British American Trade body at the Chicago Booth University campus in the city of London and the conference was called the 100 Year life and it’s essentially saying kids that are at primary school now you know they’re probably going to live till an average of at least 100 and they’re going to have four or five different careers they’re not just going to go to university get a degree be an accountant for the rest of their life whatever that looks like at some point they’re going to retrain probably probably go back to University and then they’ll do it again and again so we know that the only constant in the world we live in that what’s described as the vuca world is change and change means that is harder than ever to be psychologically well it means that it’s harder than ever to be at our best um and actually when you start to understand what humans are designed to do a lot of the things that are most instinctive for us make Modern Life even more difficult because instinctively we’re wide for survival so we’re wired to prioritise Staying Alive being concerned about what important people in our lives think about us and then once there are no issues with the first two things we want to save and conserve energy when you put a brain it’s designed to do those things in a world like the world we live in it’s problematic and that’s why we have more people than ever before reporting that they’re not doing very well and they don’t feel very well but again when I looked at the solutions to help people to do better I just wasn’t convinced that I wasn’t just looking I was trying these things out so for me psychometrics are more damaging than helpful psychometrics promote a deterministic mindset about yourself you know there’s a fantastic HBO documentary that came out a couple of years ago now just taking you on a historical tour of where Myers-Briggs for example comes from you know about it was created about 100 years ago that’s that’s for people who don’t know is it perhaps worth pointing out John that’s a a psychometric test that’s quite well established and well respected still yeah probably the most the most established um you know it wasn’t created by scientists it was created by a mother and a daughter really well-intentioned no doubt about it you know I’m not I’m not criticising the intentions of it But ultimately it was designed before we understood how brains really worked and we know that it’s we know we know about the negative impact that being deterministic about ourselves can have on our lives that’s Carol dweck’s work mindset where she’s observed the damaging impact that fixed mindsets can have on happiness and performance compared to what she calls growth mindsets but that’s people thinking that’s people thinking they can’t change they can’t get better they can’t Implement a new approach in their lives that’s what we mean by deterministic Young yes that’s it so you’ve got a belief that you’re either good at something or you’re not good at something and that’s drilled into us but science has shown that we’re not fixed and actually we get good at what we practice and actually we ultimate and Habitualize what we practise and we now know thanks to the work of people like the late professor and zarickson that you know practice is just as if not more impactful than our genes because genes are malleable we know we Now understand epigenetics so yeah I wasn’t very convinced by what I was seeing someone who’d push themselves who’d wanted to be at their best he was actively using these ideas I thought there must be a better way to do this I I think I’d been um for someone who was studying a sports psychology Masters or I think you can you can swap out the word Sport with performance Masters in 2000 the early 2000s I think my cohort were uniquely exposed to insights from Neuroscience because I don’t think anyone else is looking at it quite that way certainly none of none of the contemporaries I I’ve met um in my academic life was studying those things at that age so I think I had a a different way of thinking about things um thinking about the drivers of what made us healthy and happy and at our best and I wasn’t that compelled by what I was seeing in the market and I thought there was a better way to do it um that’s why I created tougher Minds and part of your your overhaul of your view of how how we should work towards being our best every day leadership developing resilience developing well-being all these critical things that we need was the role of Habit and I think obviously people can see from your background how that’s now become a very amazing reality and a powerful force it in what you do and what you deliver but but tell us how that realisation was achieved Jon and and tell us more about how you then started to help people understand and work with this idea of our Habits governing virtually everything we do yeah so I think the first step was making it really easy for people to understand [Music] themselves better to start to understand how their brain worked and start to understand [Music] how they could improve their focus if they’re wanting to do that so they could be more productive or how they could improve um their sleep or their diet or their exercise or how they manage stress or their confidence or improve themselves as a leader so getting all those fundamental or tougher Minds Habit Mechanic Knowledge and Skills in place you know and anyone who’s got to have a Mechanic book and the app is it’s just a toolkit um I think in the book and the app there are there are over 30 tools that allow you to work on yourself to improve these areas that are fundamental for being our best whether that’s better sleep down exercise better Stress Management better confidence better productivity better performing under pressure uh tools to help me to learn more efficiently and effectively and then all the leadership areas raw model cultural architect um action Communicator swap coach but it was one thing getting people to know those things and understand them the next barrier was how do you help people to implement those things and actually absorb them into their day-to-day and that’s where I started getting really interested in in Habits you know I was very fortunate to work with um another friend and colleague Professor Jim McKenna gyms and applied behavioural scientists is interested in helping people to build to change their exercise Behaviour essentially or what we would now say as to build better exercise Habits so I was learning from an alongside Jim about you know the importance of getting people moving past what they know this what their just knowing what to do but actually how can we help them to change Behaviour also at that time you know books like thinking fast and slow were coming out which was a book by Daniel Kahnemann um who won a Nobel Prize for his work in that area he was talking about thinking heuristics but really he’s talking about thinking Habits so just this how we’re driven by our subconscious and automaticity so all these insights were emerging and I just yeah I just got deeper and deeper into the Habit literature you know there are a few red herrings in that in the Habit literally literature as well because the pop psychology hasn’t done a very good job on Habits it’s very light it doesn’t really understand them um because ultimately if you look at the scientific literature not everything that is a Habit is labelled as a Habit so of course the people that are researching those books just miss those things yeah I wouldn’t think if care lemon’s work as Habits when it is Habits if we take the definition of a Habit as a automatic or semi-automatic Behaviour so so yeah just through a range of experiences you know on all the time again we’re out there in the field we’re training people by getting feedback from people where learning what works what doesn’t work um and that’s what compelled me and I think when I first started to see the the headlines about just how Habitual we are and that would come from these numbers would come from Professor George lakehoff’s work it would have been something like 95 of what we you know think and do is subconscious it’s a Habit that’s now up to 98 percent and we think it’s probably more than that so it’s quite modern understanding just how Habitual we are certainly when I was started to study this area over 20 years ago we you know the data wasn’t around to really compel us that most of what we were doing was or subconscious what’s Habitual so I I just went on the journey um and what’s emerged is the thing that’s blocking any of us being at our best is our Habits and those Habits are valuable and we can learn how to get rid of the destructive ones and build ones that are more helpful for us being at our best and you call this this potential for Change Jon this this once once you’ve helped people with a realisation about the all-pervading role of Habits you call that a secret superpower which is part of your approach to set people on um a new Direction on a New Journey yeah I think it’s our superpower is learning we are learning all the time I’ve heard learning experts literally say some people just can’t learn to which I fall off my chair you were learning all the time whatever you know think of what you know now that you didn’t know an hour ago but it was a news headline an email that came in from someone we’re learning all the time is what we’re designed to do it’s one of the big insights that Neuroscience has shown is that our brain is changing all the time in accordance with what we pay attention to [Music] um so it’s our superpower and it’s invisible to us you know we’re tall and conditioned from a very young age that we’re either good at something are we not good at it because the nature versus nurture argument is so in is so embedded in our society and how we think whereas the new way of thinking about ourselves is it’s nature plus nurture you know we’re a result not only of our genetic makeup but of what we practise and we’re practising every millisecond of the day you know if David Beckham didn’t practise playing football he wouldn’t be a professional footballer I can guarantee you that so there’s no there’s no innate right to be good at anything um we get good at what we practise and we can all learn to improve you know sometimes that’s misunderstood you say well I’ll I’ll never be able to run as fast as you saying but that isn’t what the science says and says however quickly you can run now with the right training you can learn how to run a little bit faster however good you are at concentrating now with the right training you can learn to concentrate a little bit better however good you are at managing stress now or not with with the right training you can learn to be manage stress a little bit better however good you are as a leader right now with a little bit of training you can learn how to become a better leader so we can wherever we are we can move ourselves forward but the the thing we’re trying to do to help us to move ourselves forwards and stay there is to turn the learning into Habit so we don’t just know that it’s a good idea to eat five portions of fruit and Vegeta we get in the Habit of doing it we don’t just know it’s a good idea to um what 10 000 steps a day we get in the Habit of doing it and you know it’s a Habit when it’s the easiest thing to do and that Jon is the essence I suppose of this this knowing versus doing which you cite at the the start of chapter two that’s the that’s it boil down and and made real for people um just quickly then tell us about this step-by-step process of building new helpful Habits that you outline in all your training in the Habit Mechanic University app and then of course the book The Habit Mechanic how does that work in reality for people how do you implement it with groups and individuals yeah so we’re always moving people from knowledge to skill to Habit but that’s the key sequencing so if I want to improve myself it was interesting actually just in the app um the Mechanic University up either yesterday or at the weekend someone posted that last week the goal on average an extra I think they said something like 51.2 minutes of sleep a night and they had the previous week by using uh diet exercise swap too so this is a this is a two you use to monitor your sleep your diet your exercise and making it a behavioural science-backed Improvement plan so that’s a great example of that lady and so if and if you read chapter 19 and you’ll have a Mechanic that information’s in there it starts by giving you more knowledge about your sleep your diet your exercise then it introduces a skill which is the the desk swap too and then you can create a Habit building plan which is in chapter 20. which shows you how to activate the nine action factors to make it as easy as possible to keep using the death swap tool every single day and all the book is structured in that way as is all of our training so if we think about other approaches you do a psychometric you gotta deterministic opinion you know invalid opinion about what you’re good at or what you’re not good at and actually that opinion is a Mac as miraculous as it might seem is what you’ve told the tool so the tool isn’t telling you anything that you haven’t told it so you’ve told the two or what what you think about yourself and it just spits it back at you in a fancy way but then all of a sudden you’ve got a deterministic understanding about yourself that I’m either good at this stuff or I’m not good at it and then you might have a few areas to work on but that’s it there’s very little structure put around that that’s going to help me to secure the things that you think is a good idea for you to practise there’s very little Behavioural Science structure put around that to help you to actually turn that into a Habit so we’ve got to help people to do the intelligent self-watching and part of that is getting more self-knowledge we’ve got to help them to Target a particular tool like the death swap in this case or it could be the five-stage team power model or it could be the cultural Architects um the self-assessment tool and then we’ve got to help people to prayer a Behavioral Science backed uh have a building plan using um which is based on our proprietary nine action Factor model which we’ll get into into later chapters but that’s the structure and I think this is quite a good part quite a good juncture actually to step back and think about the structure of the book because the the book is very deliberately structured in a way that gives um the reader the best chance of learning about themselves first and foremost before we introduce the toolkit and that’s why so the book is broken into four steps Step One is discover your secret superpower which is what you just referred to Andrew step two is learn how your brain works step three once you understand yourself in much more detail step three is then when we introduce the skills it’s called Habit Mechanic skills and step four is Chief Habit Mechanics skills which is an optional section but if you want to help others to be at their best but whether you’re a title leader someone who wants to be a senior leader in the future whether whether you’re just a team member that wants to positively contribute whether you’re a parent a coach a teacher the step four chief of Mechanic skills will be powerful for you but we always start our programs we know that you know one of the one of the night action factors in the first one we always introduce is a Habit Mechanic mindset which is really about helping people to understand how their brain actually works that it’s malleable it’s changing all the time we are learning all the time straight away that’s at huge odds with what psychometrics do psychometrics tell you that your your fixed essentially even if they don’t they don’t explicitly say that that’s what they’re implicitly referring to this is your type you are this type of person um and that isn’t true you get good at what you practise this is why this is what I learned you know it’s the big problem with Talent identification systems is that they’re trying to predict and this is why title identification systems are traditionally pretty poor is they’re trying to predict what someone’s going to be good at in five years time in ten years time based on what they can do now what you can do in five years isn’t determined by what you can do today what you can do in five years is determined by what you practise tomorrow what you practise the day after that what you practise the day after that and so on because practice is so influential in what we get good at and that’s why I say very genuinely the only way to be your best in the world we live is to become a Habit Mechanic you have to adopt that mindset that you are working on yourself and you’re going to get good at what you practise um for better and for worse it works both ways of course which is or sometimes counter-intuitive we don’t think about the idea that if I continue to practise beating myself up that’s why I’m getting really good out there the Habits that I’m building but in order to stop ourselves doing that we first of all have to be aware of it um so we so we don’t use psychometrics use Habit metrics and that Mechanic is full of Habit metric tools that help you to learn about yourself in a really empowering way and give you the platform to start building new helpful Habits not to be deterministic about yourself and give yourself an excuse for for poor Behaviour because also if we go back to the factory model idea the reality is is that whatever you’re good at today as competent as that might make you right now that there are going to be new skills you’re going to need to be at your best in six months and in 12 months because the world is churning around us all the time so we’ve got to keep working on ourselves and if we want to be happy working on ourselves I would argue is the best thing that we can do just by working on ourselves we can we can help ourselves to make the personal progress that is so key to feeling good about ourselves you know just going back to the tea plan that we talked about in the last episode just by rating ourselves every day on the scale out of 10 how well did I do my best to be at my best you start to see you are scoring higher on average you know day after day after day and it’s like the lady reported in the app about getting nearly an extra hour sleep per night which is seismic by the way um but I know I see that time and time again because these tools work and there’s so much noise out there in this space so many things have promised so much but never deliver because they’re not based on good science they’re not they’re not developed by people that have spent their entire life doing this those tools do that time and time again they allow you to make personal progress so if you want to work on yourself you know the toolkit is there it’s all in the Habit Mechanic book and they are well Jon that’s a great point I think to uh to start to draw this podcast to a close absolutely fascinating insights and stories there thank you for sharing those and I think um people will be um if they haven’t already read The Habit Mechanic book I think they’ll be very very intrigued and motivated and prompted to do so and all that Revelation all that insight and more it is in there so I I certainly as someone who’s read it would encourage anybody to pick up a copy and um really read a lot more about um those amazing insights you’ve shared with us today on this podcast um now you mentioned the Habit Mechanic University app and of course um you very kindly created an opportunity for people to win a free subscription to the premium level of that when that goes live um by asking people to submit their questions to us and we’ll answer them on this podcast uh we’ve already done that um and we’ve had uh some fascinating questions in and as I say we’ll just conclude if we can just buy um looking at one of those questions this has come in from Pauline so Pauline thanks very much for your question uh by the way as I say please do keep submitting your questions via the website to us um but back to Pauline’s question uh we’ve talked about professional sport a lot um on on this podcast this specific episode so it’s uh seems to me to be appropriate to uh to answer this question too um and um I think it’s uh something that will chime with a lot of people and people will will relate to uh we often hear professional sports people talking about psychological Concepts and ideas in their in their interviews when we watch sport on on TV but Pauline’s question is specifically is it easier for professional sports people to use goal setting tools than regular people as she describes them because professional sports people already have a defined direction or a Target or or even a passion yeah it’s a great question my experience would be no it’s not there are plenty here of professional sports people who don’t want to do what they’re doing who are fed up who would rather be doing something else who turn up for work every day and go through the motions they’re not passionate they’re not interested um they’re human beings at the end of the day and whether you’re getting paid 100 000 pounds a week or you know nothing life life can be challenging so yeah but I understand why it’s easy to look at those people and think that there can easily be super motivated Etc and it’s really interesting if you in chapter 32 of the book the cultural architect I really dig into self-determination Theory um which I think is the the best motivation Theory out there self-determination Theory or to be self-determined means that you’ve chosen to do this thing and we understand that as the most robust type of motivation so if you’re self-determined You’re Gonna Keep persisting for longer you’re going to keep going because you’ve too you’ve chosen what you want to do um very the theory emerged by um by the work of a very search called Harry Hala um who got fascinated by his lab animals so he he had primates in his labs that he was doing some I don’t think it was you know bad research he was doing some fairly mild research observing their behaviour but before one of the the night before one of a research experiment started I think he just wanted to calm them down uh so he put something like a Rubik’s Cube in each of the cages and when he came back in the morning he was fascinated by the fact that we’re all playing with them um and this kicked off this this whole area of self-determination Theory research and you can think of self-determination it’s on the Continuum one end is I chose to do this I want to do this the other end is I’m being coerced to do this I’m doing it because I have to do it and when you’re on that end of the Continuum your motivation is much more fragile and you’re much more likely to give an easy and there’s some research that I find really interesting where they’re um actually started to pair children to play so there you know I had children in a laboratory setting and then let them there’s a lot of toys and let them play it and they’re you know timed and observed how long they played for what they did then they introduced another condition where they started to pair some of the children to play and as soon as this tied to pay the children to play their motivation dropped off they didn’t want to do it and you would argue that that moved them from something that was a very self-determining activity to something that was far more coercive and there’s lots of steps in between and I I share in the cultural architect chapter how you can make um what you ask other people to do more self-determining you know you will notice that the Habit Mechanic is set up in the book and our approach is about is set up in a very self-determining way um I never tell you to do anything nothing in our approach is prescriptive it’s about you doing what what helps you um you’ll only know what helps you by trying things out so that everything is framed as if it’s helpful try this if it’s helpful do this um so yeah I I think that you know professional very successful professional athletes do talk a lot about goal setting um and that’s probably why we think we can it’s easy to think that it’s quite easy for professional athletes to do that [Music] um but if you’re struggling for motivation go to chapter 16. and start creating the fam story uh that that’s the tool that we’ve created via our work in professional sport but also in education and in the workplace um and we know that if you’re motivation is low then using an intelligent goal setting tool is going to help you to improve your motivation I don’t know but better tell them that the fan story people tell me every day how it’s helping them and why it’s so powerful so that that’s a great question Pauline thank you for submitting that let me just Andrew mention go if you go to our website just if you go to the contact us page um you can submit a question there just no question for the podcast and then you’ll get entered into the draw and then if you don’t want to contact us via the website just um email us at contact at tougherminds.co.uk and email is your question there and we’ll we’ll read another question uh yeah in the next episode okay Jon thanks so much for that um I think they’ve reached the conclusion of what’s been another fascinating episode of the podcast uh thanks again for your Insight thanks again uh for sharing your stories with us um I guess it’s important for people to to take to them that that you can like And subscribe to this podcast on so many platforms wherever you get your podcast we’re also on YouTube now as well so by all means like And subscribe to us there and John anything else you’d like to say just to conclude this episode yeah thanks for listening and remember it’s not about knowing new things it’s about doing things differently and the easiest thing to practise doing differently is to start to practice doing some diff something differently is try the tea plan which is chapter one of the book we did an entire episode on it last week in the last last week’s podcast there’s people in the having Mechanic University up busting their teas every day um so if you’re not sure what a tea plant should look like or you want some more examples Beyond what’s in the book just go into the app remember if you post it in the app you get the benefit the the extra benefits of the community support ordinary self-accountable and just activate some more of the Behavioral Science and gets it on your side so take positive action the t-plane only takes two minutes and you will start to see some positive results I guarantee it So yeah thank you Andrew thanks for the great questions thank you to everyone for listening and remember you’re only one Habit away