10 secrets to improve your intelligence & mental performance

In this episode of the podcast, Dr Jon Finn discusses Chapter 5 of The Habit Mechanic.

He explains the central importance of learning and why this attribute is key to all of us, if we want to improve and develop – in any given endeavour.

Most crucially, Dr Jon outlines the 10 factors that either SUPERCHARGE or BLOCK learning and highlights that the vast majority of us don’t know these are involved in the learning process.

He also explains:

How we can all learn to be happier and do better.

And he discusses how we can learn to successfully live and work with new technologies which are rapidly becoming part of our daily lives (like ChatGPT!).

Podcast Transcript

Hello Habit Mechanics, I hope you’ve had a fantastic week! My name’s Dr Jon Finn welcome back to the Habit Mechanic podcast. We’ve got a really exciting episode this week we’re going to talk about chapter five of The Habit Mechanic, take a deep dive into it and join today by my friend and colleague Andrew Whitelam. Andrew, how are you?

Hi Jon great to be with you again and um I’m certainly looking forward to this one um as you say chapter five when I read it in the Habit Mechanic book it had um a very profound effect on me because there’s one word that the chapter centres around if you like for me and that’s a word that people might view as a little bit mundane and perhaps think they know everything about it and everything that it means and how it affects their life and that word is learning.

But really there’s far more to it than that and and the chapter we talk we are talking about uh gives people an amazing as I say profound view of that word and all the implications and the science behind it um and I think the crux of it is that we can all improve we’ll come on to talk about that in just a few moments Jon or I’d like to ask you more about that but later in the podcast we’ll also be talking about an exciting development in the tech World and taking people’s questions um but um I understand Jon you’ve been uh busy uh with uh in recent days with uh the the coaching certification that you’re offering people?

Yes we’ve just released some new spots on the certified Habit Mechanic coach program where people learn to become a certified Habit Mechanic coach. It’s really exciting that the first cohort uh a good way through their Journey now and you know their results are already getting for themselves and the people they’re working with are remarkable and we’ve just got such a great diverse range of people that have signed up everything from what I would call Elite business uh you know big global companies we’ve got professional sport we’ve got military we’ve got high Edge High Level education we’ve got um people with their own businesses we’ve got people with their own coaching businesses we’ve got people that are looking to make transitions into becoming a coach um so yeah it’s just a really interesting group to work with um when it’s certainly there the main thing that I’m doing with my time at the moment I think what’s different about this program is that we’re showing people how to help others build new Habits not just have nice well-intended coaching conversations where people feel a bit better about themselves afterwards we’re showing them actually how to help other people to make sustainable long-lasting changes in their lives by using our Habit metric tools which allow people to analyze their Habits and start identifying their destructive Habits and understanding what their super Habits are and we show them how to use our range of over 30 award-winning Habit Mechanic tools which then show people how to destroy those destructive Habits and start building the new super Habits.

And what’s also great is that the the people that are training to become certified having Mechanic coaches they get that other get book copies of our book they get access to the to the app for their for their people so they can start to use these Habit Mechanic tools with them in real time which supercharges the results that they’re getting so if that is of interest to people you can check out more details on our website get in touch that we do have a few places left but I know there won’t be here for long but if you’re interested in doing it uh further into the air we have a waiting list as well that we can put your name on to so yeah that’s really exciting and I think the the thing that we’ve both been working on together as well Andrew is the the new Habit Mechanic Keynote diagnose been getting some great traction and you’ve been on The Cutting Edge of um working with with third party clients on that so what’s the response being to the private Mechanic cleaner yes that’s right Jon yes I’ve been um talking to people about the Habit Mechanic keynote and um um one thing that immediately fascinates them is um the the the the the promise that we make to them that um we can improve people’s happiness and performance by at least 16 in the 90-minute keynote and that that’s something that really is attracting attention and people clearly like to know more about that um and it’s something that is getting people talking for sure you’ve had obviously um a lot of positive feedback already um about the the keynote from people in the the finance industry and the the marketing industry the the organizations who’ve delivered them to um and I think I think a refrain that we hear from from the feedback is that people really love the the practicality of of the insights you share and how they’re accessible and how they can be implemented but they’re of course based on and built with this Cutting Edge science and that’s something that that gives people um a great deal of confidence but also um when they see the the profound effectiveness of them um and of course they’re able as well to take away a copy of the Habit Mechanic book and get access to the Habit Mechanic University app as well so i’m not only uh does the keynote set out your toolkit um for improved performance and happiness but also they have these these uh tangible tools to take with them as well and I think um again as well as as well as the the overarching headline of of the 16 Improvement in 90 minutes people are also um uh talking about how they they really like the idea of having more control over their lives and the the pathway being shown the pathway to make permanent positive change uh to improve um all aspects on many aspects of their life and work including including leadership skills as well so um it’s um it certainly had some good feedback and we look forward to working with people and talking more about the Habit Mechanic keynote and again as you say Jon um full information about that is available on the website tougherminds.co.uk um you’ll see on the on the main menu and um I know people can contact you about the certification for coaches um and also the Habit Mechanic Keynotes as well via the website is that is a One-Stop shop if you like so Jon Let’s uh let’s dive into chapter five then um if we can uh as I said at the start um one word uh I suppose is at the core of the chapter learning and it’s a word people might think they understand um again when I read this I was um really blown away I think by the profound insights that are available and and that are shared in the chapter um fundamentally I suppose that the headline we can all do better because learning is at the heart of our personal development and growth please tell us more if you could yeah well the clues in the title learning is your secret superpower um the title of the chapters you are on secret superpower it’s spoiler alert it’s learning we are designed to do it it’s pretty invisible to us when we’re born we can’t do much

sir the things that we can do today we’ve had to learn to do them and the surprising as it sounds that includes things like smiling because when you’re born you don’t know how to do that and there’s very good sensitive data showing that babies learn how to smile via them there are neurons their mirror the people looking at them and their smile back if they’re being smiled up so I think we’re conditioned to think about learning is something that we do at school maybe something that’s very formal something that’s often quite difficult to do but actually it’s happening all the time and whatever you’ve learned from listening to this podcast so far is an example of the things that you’re learning whatever’s on the news today that you didn’t previously know whatever the latest gossip gossip is whatever’s going on in the latest episode of the show you’re watching this is all learning learning’s at the heart of what we’re designed to do ultimately because fundamentally we’re designed to survive and in order to do that we have to get good at controlling our environment and that means really we have to be good at problem solving so we’re designed to move around and solve problems problems relating to survival problems really relating to controlling our environment and that means that we have to learn whether that’s learning how to create fire for the first time that was quite important landmark in uh species Journey or learning how to create a new curvy vaccine this is happening all the time a bit sort of a big level there’s some quite lofty things creating fire and covered vaccines but also you know learning today uh young children will be in school learning the alphabet or other people’s names Etc so we’re learning all the time and it’s our secret superpower because when we live in a world where the only constant is change in order to keep adapting to that change we have to keep learning and refining um our approaches and ultimately our Habits yeah when you think of learning in that way Jon is it is a profound Readjustment it certainly was for me and um it’s it’s um everything you say of course makes complete sense when you when you think about it in that way how as Humanity we’ve had to learn and adapt Through the Ages and I think I think the idea of fire versus the covid vaccine is a good one because I suppose at the time they were both fairly Keen to um the human race moving on and prospering you might argue covid uh was not such a threat but it was certainly had a profound effect on all of us anyway um it’s it’s a fascinating comparison you draw there um in in the book in chapter five you talk about um the nature of the brain being uh why why we’re able to learn and and it has a characteristic um that that’s um well people might might find the word interesting tell us more about that if you would yeah and this this Insight when I first came across this idea of the power of learning which was framed via uh the preeminent and um layer Professor andazariksen within his ten thousand hours of deliberate practice theory was how important learning can be at getting good at things when I first heard that this idea of this feature of brain function we’re going to talk about wasn’t well understood we were excited distantly being remembered sitting in a class in my Master’s Degree where the lecturer was telling is about andaz Erickson’s Theory and we were sort of debating whether this was true or not um and in another class we were starting to be introduced to a concept A New Concept um called neuroplasticity brains are changing all the time they’re malleable they’re like plasticine and that’s what neuroplasticity means our brain is made up about 100 billion neurons so neurons uh plasticity just means plastic but not we think of maybe plastic as sort of quite robust and unshapable things think more like plasticine type plastic that you can reshape and remold so our Brewing is changing all the time by this process of neuroplasticity new neurons are growing see whatever you’ve remembered from the podcast so far you’re starting to develop new neurons in your brain for those ideas you’re growing and you feel them growing in your bread yes you know there’s a hundred billion of them um so you’re not going to feel them growing but it’s real it’s happening in your brain you move things from your short-term memory um so you hold an idea in your short-term memory for about 30 seconds you can hold five to seven bits of information in there approximately if you don’t do something with them within 30 seconds your brain dumps them so we learn slash grow on your neurons in our new neurons in our brain by repetition repeat to remember remember to repeat but when I was at school and when lots of people listened to this podcast we’re at school it was and even after I’d left school actually um the top neuroscientist in the world were pretty compelled that when you stopped physically growing your brain stops changing in any reasonable way in any important way so you essentially when you stop physically growing that was it you were sort of set whatever you have at that point that that’s all you that’s all you had what they might have called your talents or something like that and then the purpose I was reading um in my masters a lot of them were coming out of France because the French government had decided to invest in functional MRI scanners so they had a lot of proprietary research using that technology thought was absolutely new insight into human brain function so I was learning about Ericsson’s theories and neuroplasticity at the same time um and buff what you know what were quite new ideas and I remember thinking yeah but you know but then when you when when you go forwards when you start to really understand our brains work what we’re designed to do what learning really means it makes absolute sense that we’re gonna get good at what we practice because practice changes our brain ultimately yeah you touched on something there and you said what I would describe as the t word Jon Talent um this this Insight that we now have that we can all learn our brains change because of this neuroplasticity and the process and I might just ask you to to talk about the the process of neurons being developed in the brain in a moment but people will often say well I haven’t got the talent for that or I wish I was talented uh or he’s he or she is talented um and what you’re saying is we all have the potential to do better and improving any given any any given Endeavor as it were yeah well the idea that the actual origin of the word talent is is a Talon which is a monetary unit so it’s like it infers you’ve been given something it’s a it’s a it’s a it’s a valuable asset that you’ve been given and

I’ve I’ve done a PhD on talking about Talent Development ultimately the biggest myth in talent development is that what you’re good at today predicts what you’re going to be good at in the future that is the biggest myth because the that isn’t the biggest predictor of what you’ll be good at in the future the biggest prediction of what you’re going to be good at in the future is what you’ve practiced today and what you practice tomorrow and what you practice the day after that and what you practice today after that and the day after that so practice is the main effect variable the most important thing essentially in predicting outcomes um and I forget the question because I went off on a PhD Talent run then no no I was just saying you know people do say that they say I’ll never be as talented as but you’ve just yeah what what you’re saying is we can develop because we can learn we can develop and grow yeah and it’s really interesting so my hypothesis in my PhD work was that the main effect variable if you take a step back from practice is actually the ability to regulate your emotions so it’s those people that can regulate their emotions the best that are gonna fulfill their potential in simple terms so I studied some of the best 18 19 20 year olds in the world of what they did just because they’re all the best in the world when they were 19 18 20 that did not guarantee they would even be good enough to be full-time Professionals in those same Sports they’re three four five years later it’s it’s interesting um I know that some sports teams they only recruit young people who’ve had adversity in their lives because they see that as a marker that they’ll be able to overcome setbacks and keep persisting and be better at their emotional regulation my approach to that is that you can teach people to deliberately do that whether they’ve had you know setbacks or not you teach them with the skills um so you can learn in fact in a way to think more helpfully for yourself that’s what you’re saying they can learn to think better yeah you can learn how to keep persisting and how to keep engaging in the sort of practice that you need to engage in in order to get really good at things but

we I think one generic thinking for in human beings me included is that we’re very quick to dichotomize things for example I’m either sort of professional standard footballer or I’m not very good at football maybe that’s not a great example people say am I I’m an absolute disaster at this or I’ve really got it down I’m great at maths or I’m rubbish at maths or I’ve got loads of confidence or I’ve got no confidence and in fact it’s just not that’s not real there’s a Continuum and you’re somewhere on the continuum so one of the Continuum is you’re perfect the other end is your poor and for every important thing in your life you’re somewhere on that that we call it the P2 Continuum you could um perfect could be a hundred or it could be 10. um or can be zero and you’re somewhere and continue so you give yourself a score what the sign says it doesn’t say for example that everyone can be used to embol it says however quick you are at running now with the right type of practice and this is important it’s not just any practice it’s a very specific type of practice we call it Focus practice Erickson talked about deliberate practice where you focus hard and you make mistakes and you learn from your mistakes that’s key but with the right type of practice you can learn to run faster with the right type of practice you can learn how to build confidence with the right type of practice you can learn how to manage stress how to sleep better how to become a better leader how to become a better team member how to become more focused and productive so but the thing to remember is that we’re always practicing it’s just that often it’s not very deliberate but just being conditioned by the world that we live in and increasingly that’s making it really easy for us to practice lots of brilliant helpful things yeah but you you say you said something there that’s really interesting and and in the book um you expand on it and you talked about we’re always practicing I think if you could just talk a bit more how that could mean for people they might be practising feeling bad about themselves because they’re seeing somebody’s open inverted commas better live close inverted commas on Instagram on a regular basis yeah absolutely so right now many many people are getting better at their destructive Habits beating themselves up more often Across The netting more worrying more getting stressed sleeping less well exercising less eating more poorly they’re getting better at all those things they’re not doing it intentionally they didn’t wake up this morning and say right to DARE I’m gonna get better at beating myself up they’re just mindlessly practising these things

Yes so that’s the reality we get good at what we practice and because of the way our brains are wired in the sense of we’re not very self-aware we only have two percent Consciousness at best and often it’s zero percent consciousness we’re not aware of those destructive Habits so it’s really easy to keep practicing them and I see people doing this all you know all the time their practice the thing that they’re telling you they want to get better at and eradicate from their lives so it really is real that we are whatever we are practicing today we are reinforcing it neurobiologically and the things that we used to be good at and so the neurons that we’re used to have in our brain if we don’t use those networks anymore they get pruned away they get cut off so for example when people were at primary school or Elementary School the chances are it’s a real high likelihood that you knew everybody’s name in your class I bet you don’t know those names anymore you might know some of them but you’ve written on most of them why because the neurons that you used were pruned they’re dead they’ve died away now you can relearn the names but you forgot them because the neurons in your brain dies yeah I I again when I discovered that Insight by reading the Habit Mechanic book um it was um very important for me because I I studied German a long time ago and uh I I realized I hadn’t used my gym and I hadn’t spoken German so I tried to read immediately start looking at a little bit of German every day and you talk about being poor to perfect and on a continual I’m not saying I’m fluent by any means but I I would certainly say I’ve retained a bit more German Now by that understanding of use it or lose it yeah and I think that learning is at the heart of the Habit Mechanic approach which I think is unique when I look at other it’s called let’s call them systems or approaches that are promising to help me to be your best I don’t see that’s the say I don’t see it it’s not the same and that’s why they’re flawed because this is that what we’re actually trying to help people to do and help them to build better Habits is actually we’re trying to help them to get better at Learning learning how to automate better ways of thinking and doing so it’s absolutely essential that you understand how learning happens and I think in the Habit Mechanic we got deeper on learning than I’ve seen anywhere else but you know in a real user user friendly way.

And the reason we’ve done that is because we’ve well we haven’t just made this up in a couple of years this this is over 20 years worth of work and I’ve seen that when where teaching this to people that it’s really important that they understand how Learning Works luckily for me I I studied motor control from the first year of my undergraduate degree which is the science of learning so I have really strong foundations to build on but in that regard I I taught that University level I wrote modules in motor control University level um so it’s the absolute Central pillar if we want to help people what what the the way that you develop your Habit Mechanic intelligence is by getting better at learning and if you understand how learning happens and you know we got even deeper into learning in chapter 26 of the book today we’re talking about chapter five which we introduced some co-learning ideas but we got really deep in chapter 26. well if you understand how learning happens it makes being your best so much easier yeah and uh if we can just in a way go back slightly then he talks about how learning happens in chapter five and we’re talking which we’re talking about on this podcast you identify this process uh which takes place in learning of knowledge to skill to Habit um and that that’s uh again a really uh useful practically beneficial Concept in the book talk to us about that if you would Jon please yeah so if you want often um well let’s take a step back from that we know that most of what we’re thinking doing most of the time is Mindless automatic behaviour in other words thinking and doing it’s at least 98 often it’s 100 so if we want to help people to be happier healthier at their best more often better leaders better team members it’s about helping them to build better Habits but often when where we’re trying to do better we’re trying to become better but we’re trying to become healthier happier our best more often Etc we’re just giving you knowledge and that’s where it stops that’s why I got to. I got told that if you can get people to know what they need to do to be at their best you’ve cracked it you’ve done your job.

And I use this example a lot but I’ll say it again we see that in the UK a national level where most people know and many agree it’s a good idea to walk 10 000 steps a day and doing five portions of fruit and veg and most people don’t do it because that’s the thing we don’t do what we know we should do we do or in the Habit of doing so but it’s a in order to build a bad Habit you need some more knowledge first of all so if I want to build a better sleep Habit I need some knowledge about well what is sleep how does it work if you go to chapter 19 of the Mechanic there’s more knowledge about why we sleep how you can start to get better sleep some I think there’s like 18 things you can try out for example but knowing that is fine what what can I then do with that information so how do I practically apply the information that’s what I think of as a skill so we’ve created a tool called the desk swap the diet exercise sleep swap which is great fantastic but just having the knowledge and the skill isn’t enough I need a mechanism to help me to turn doing the desk swap knowing how to do the desk swap to turn that into a Habit and that’s why we have for example The Habit building plan and if you look at chapter 20 we have the example Habit building plan for the decimal so we need to move from knowledge to skill to Habit most education programs stop that knowledge um and that’s why they’re not very effective and that’s why what we do is different.

Yes you also use an example of of learning and developing knowledge a a really interesting metaphor in chapter five um which I I think is really helpful for people and it relates relates to to this process but uh that the metaphor um is of uh shall we say frozen water tell us more about that Jon yeah so we think about

we talk about this idea of neuroplasticity about the idea of moving information from outside of your head to inside your head where you store the information in neurons so for me the process is a bit like you’re freezing these these neurons in your brain and actually it’s not just one yarn it’s a collection of neurons so we think about freezing them as ice cubes so we go from knowing where you’re starting to consolidate some of the information to your brain the skill we’re starting to practice and reinforce those neurobiological connections but then once you when you when it becomes a Habit it’s like you freeze it as an ice cube in your brain and then we connect the idea to building up igloos in different areas so you talk about the learning to speak German there are multiple ice cubes that you need to freeze in order to build a robust igloo of German speaking so imagine the the igloo is your Germans German language confidence profile and then the more complete the igloo is the more confidence you have in that area so you’re going to have to have some rudimentary basic foundational ice cubes in there like the ability to read the ability to write the ability to speak and then I’m sure you’ll have your basic German grammar and verbs and all these other things that you build up over time and that goes back to the idea of the P2 Continuum so it’s not that we’re either good at Greater German or we’re completely rubbish where somewhere in between and the igloo metaphor can help us to understand that um and kind of help us to build confidence in what we’ve already got in our German learning but it also allows us to Target the next thing that we need to work on yeah I think the uh the ice cubes to igloos metaphors really really useful just a brief digression I think my German grammar Igloo is certainly missing a good few ice blocks in the roof so more more work needed there for sure but yeah it’s it’s again another helpful metaphor to help people practically apply these Concepts um one thing um in another thing in the chapter that really I found incredibly profound and really made a massive impact on me it came out of the page like a an uppercut if you like was this idea that you can we’re talking about learning we’re talking about developing new skills new abilities new attributes you can learn to be happier um and I think it’s great to to for people to understand that there’s a really tangible way they can immediately see this in action in The Habit Mechanic University with the daily tea plan please explain more about that for us Jon yeah and it’s worth saying that um if the igloo example got your attention read chapter 23 of the book where it really fleshed out in the context of building up confidence and the the tool that we introduce in chapter five is actually the three to one daily reflection which is aware of helping us to get better at paying attention to more things that are helpful for us so that’s a really important part of being happier he’s spending more of your time with your attention on things that are helpful for you instead of only dwelling and beating yourself up and yeah if you’re going to the I have a Mechanic University app which is free available on uh in the App Store and also in Google Play Store you’ll see people posting their daily tea plans which is in chapter one of the The Habit Mechanic book which we covered a few podcasts ago but also you’ll see people posting their three to one daily Reef end of day reflections so the idea of the three to one is that you write down three as a minimal you can write more if you want three helpful or positive things that have happened to you today can be as basic as you enjoyed a really nice cup of coffee you enjoy the people that you work with you got chance to have family breakfast with your family you may have achieved something of particular importance out there so just writing those things down so you’re making yourself pay attention to those things because that isn’t our brain’s natural tendency if if we’re not feeling very happy with ourselves and then this the fourth thing that you do is you write down one thing that you could do even better in um the next 24 hours and I find that one really interesting it’s all the three to one because people default to the three to one as they they complain or they dwell on something that hasn’t gone well that isn’t the purpose of the of the one in the three to one it’s to say okay I recognize whatever problem was but what can I do better in the next 24 hours to give myself a better chance of being at my best so we’re being proactive so I might say I’m gonna get 10 more minutes sleep tonight than last night or I’m going to create a willpower story it’s a more efficient and effective with my time tomorrow

that kind of thing so that’s the three to one yeah and I think if not to labor this but that is what you’ve just outlined Jon is this process of learning to to to feel better to be happy you’ve made it tangible um obviously uh perhaps it rushed ahead and pointed out to this practical tool that’s available on everyone’s phone now but in the chapter you talk about it as a daily three to one reflection it’s now become the tea plan um that that is the the method for learning to think more helpfully yeah it’s not the tea plant the tea plant is a distinctly different tool to the three okay sorry I I do associate the three to one reflection yeah um with with that because of the of the um yeah the listing but but I I guess there’s an inter an interrelation between the two there yeah so I would do the teapot at the start of the day I’d do the three tool at the end of the day yes yes different tools yeah but yeah in a nutshell knowledge to skill to have it yes yeah you’ve got the knowledge about the three to one now you can go in there into the into the the app or you can you can get I think you can download a PDF um if you look in the book of the sort of a weekly three to one template so you can practice doing your three to one practice the skill but in order to consolidate that you could create a Habit building plan and I think if I’m not wrong at the end of the Stress Management chapter chapter 22 there’s an example Habit building plan uh to create a daily three to one reflection so yeah that’s it’s not just um here’s an interesting idea we’ve got a movie from knowing to skill to Habit and that’s the key and that’s why this is different it’s not a nice conversation where I might feel a bit better about myself afterwards The Habit Mechanical approach is all about building new Habits that automate your health and your happiness and your performance um at the heart of that is learning yeah and uh yeah if I say forgive me Jon it was a tripartite nature of each one that was was confusing me but I just wanted I think it’s so important for people to listen listen for people listening to this podcast just they can immediately try this idea out you know I mean please do read The Habit Mechanic book in its entirety read chapter five or listen to it for free as you say Jon by The Habit Mechanic University then you can see this process of how um you you can tangibly start to to use this this attribute we all have of learning a neuroplasticity to start to learn to think more helpfully so it is a it is quite an exciting possibility I think for all of us um just moving on then moving around the chapter um another thing I think is really fascinating is that even even identified 10 what you call intelligence factors that can really block learning and be problematic or can supercharge our Learning and Development if you could talk to us about those that’d be fantastic I think yeah yeah I feel these are really important because again we we have this idea of intelligence some people are intelligent some people are not more recently the idea of multiple intelligences have emerged but with my scientists sat on and I always want to strip things back to their most rudimentary form so I can understand what are the variables at play when we’re trying to learn in this case and if we understand those variables we can get better at making them work for us instead of against us and I think here in the chapter I’ve got which I’ve got in front of me I think I give a dictionary definition of intelligence um which

yeah from the Oxford uh dictionary so the definition of intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply Knowledge and Skills in other words it’s a person’s ability to learn and then use what they have learned so learning and intelligence are interconnected so I wanted to really make this very clear to people so yeah I mean I’ve spent a lot of time learning myself over the course of my three formal degrees and I feel like I’ve probably done I’ve done one formal PhD I think I feel like I’ve done a few more informal PHDs as well along the way um but I’ve also spent a lot a lot of time helping others to get better at Learning and I think my well my experience has been there are 10 distinct things that drive learning that allow us to learn or hinder us from learning the first thing is your motivation to learn something so if we just imagine sort of a classic example of well I suppose we can use a Habit Mechanic example because we could we could imagine that um

the tougher Minds that well we can imagine that you’re coming to the The Habit Mechanic Keynote um so how much you’re going to learn from The Habit Mechanic Keynote well the first Factor will be how motivated you are to learn so they have a Mechanic if you come into that Mechanic Keen it’ll be framed that you’re going to be it’s going to be helping you to be happier and at your best more often you may have no interest in doing of being happier or being at your best more often so straight away you’re not going to get much out of the process closely connected to that is your belief that you can so if you don’t believe you can be happier you don’t believe you can improve your performance you’re not going to be motivated to want to do it either so those two things are interconnected that’s why I say in the book your motivation to learn including your belief that you can learn and that’s why we have chapters like the chapter we’re covering in the book because we’ve learned that if we want to help people to be at their best we need to help them to really understand how their brain works that they do have this fantastic superpower of learning to get better so motivation is the first Factor the second factor is free people’s diet exercise and sleep Habits because that relates to brain function if your brain isn’t working very well you’re not going to be able to learn and as I wrote down in chapter 19 of the book that exercise sleep and diet or to have huge in huge roles in learning so when you sleep that’s a really important part of your learning system if you don’t put the right uh Foods into your body it will impede learning when you exercise you release um proteins neurotransmitters that make it easier to learn so if people turn up to have a Mechanic keynote and their brain’s not working very well because they’ve not been sleeping eating and exercising properly their ability to learn will be hindered third is your emotional state immersions drive attention for the tension drives learning so if our emotions are distracting us because we’re dwelling and we’re being ourselves up and we’re thinking about something other than the thing that’s in front of us that we’re trying to learn then it’s going to impede our learning so again if I’ve just had a big argument with my boss and I come to The Habit Mechanic keynote my chances of getting a lot of it will be limited because I’ll probably be distracted by the argument I just hang with my boss for these activation levels so I explain a fully impact activation in chapter 21 for me activation is just as important as sleep diet and exercise it’s about mental alertness it’s about how primed your brain is for learning does it have the right neurotransmitters in there dopamine your adrenaline Etc so for example um every morning the first thing I do is I go for a run so that when I get to my desk and uh do my focus clever what I call eye sculpture building work I’m ready to go because I’ve got the right neurotransmitters in my brain so if people have just done a massive lunch and full of simple carbohydrate hydrates and they’re coming to have a Mechanic cleaner the chances are they’re activation level is it gonna be where it needs to be in order to um optimize learning and that’s often why we start our training sessions for example with activation starters Etc getting people moving around but activation is key five is attentional styles so our attention or Style is driven by our by our genes um because there’s a lot to do with eye structure so in very simple terms you can think of attention or Style on a Continuum one end it’s very broad so you naturally see more in your peripheral vision that’s really helpful for playing field sports like soccer rugby hockey netball Etc where it’s really helpful to be able to see space the other end of the Continuum is very narrow Focus that’s really helpful for academic learning because everything’s right in front of you the words on in the book the teacher at the front of the class the words on the screen or whatever sir your attention or style will impact um your ability to learn something well we can learn to manage our attention or style so we can learn how to broaden our attentional Focus they do that in Institutes of sport we can learn how to narrow our attention or Focus we teach people how to do that but it’s an important factor the next one is your memory a memory recollection sorry your working memory and memory recollection capacities so this is back to the idea of holding something how long can you hold something in your short-term memory for which is sometimes called your working memory we talk about 30 seconds five to seven bits of information we can strengthen these capacities so we know that I’ve seen a a rise of people being labeled with adult ADHD and children with ADHD which is a very complex um diagnosis but one of those factors is about memory we can learn how to strengthen our our memories via practice next one the brain friendliness and quality of the learning material this is connected to how we incurred information sir think of watching a blockbuster Hollywood movie versus reading a really boring academic textbook one is often easier to learn from than the other so it’s going to be easier to learn something if the if the if the if the training material is really brain friendly and because we know our brains work we try to embed brain friendliness into our learning that’s why we tell a lot of stories Etc but we give people practical things to do number eight is the skill of your teacher sir let’s say you want to learn to drive you can either get lessons from someone who’s just passed that test or someone who’s been teaching people to drive for the last 20 years you know who’s going to give you who’s going to be the best teacher so the skill of our teacher is really important um I’ve been doing this for over 20 years now so hopefully when I’m teaching people I’m giving them a good chance of learning number nine is what we call the volume and quality of your prior learning what you’ve already learned so in a simple example you can learn how to do long division if you don’t know how to add subtract and do short division so that we have we have learning building blocks um I think it’s harder to learn how to become a Habit Mechanic if you don’t understand how learning works that’s why we put this building block in nice and early and the final 110 is the volume remember it’s not just it’s not just practice it’s the volume and quality of your current learning sir there’s a difference between sitting down to read a book I mean there’s a difference between turning up for a keynote and really engaging in that keynote asking questions taking notes working out what you’re going to do with the information it’s on a Continuum I could sit in the room and be absolutely passive and almost be not even paying any attention to what’s going on or I could be in that room I could be really applying myself really engaging the learning process so they’re the 10 intelligence factors they are the superchargers but also the blockers for our learning and like most of these things they’re absolutely invisible to us you know why wouldn’t you teach every teacher those factors because they’re invisible we don’t really know them I’ve not seen these these factors detailed like that anywhere else we’ve had to like many of the things in the lab Mechanic approach we’ve had to innovate this ourselves we’ve had to create our own models and our own Frameworks because they didn’t exist before but why not give that now to everyone who’s whose job it is to help others to do better and that and why not equip every child in the country with those insights because that’s going to then Empower them to take more control of their learning yeah it’s certainly uh certainly hard to argue against uh doing that Jon as you say a very very compelling argument indeed if we can we’re coming to the end of the podcast but remember we’re going to talk about uh something that’s uh broken in the world of tech that’s uh very interrelated to to what we’re talking about and also we’ll be taking one of your questions but just just before we move on towards that Jon just like to take you back to a couple of the with the 10 intelligence factors you’ve just taken us through in in a really practical interesting way um you talked about working memory and memory recollection capabilities and that can that can be how that can be improved I’m sure people will be fascinated I I think in particular by that one how can we start to improve that can you remember what the what three to one two list can you remember what the T stands for came and bought eight brim means so by learning The Habit Mechanic approach you will supercharge your working memory and memory recollection capacities so that’s what it means you know there’s a very common uh saying which is when it comes to mental performance use it or lose it sir often when you retire or you you know often now

people can just get into a rut in their profession they just get into that they’ve learned their job they just turn up for work every day and they just do what they’ve always done so they’re not testing themselves they’re not practicing Etc um so yeah it’s like memories of muscle and you have to work it out in a very deliberate way so not just not just consuming interest and engaging uh funny cat videos on Tick Tock or whatever you get your social media stream from but really really testing and challenging yourself and that that’s a huge part of the eudemonic experience of um that’s a really important pillar of being happy so The Habit Mechanic approach gives you the perfect opportunity to do that if you’re going to learn about something you want to learn about yourself and how how to do things better so that’s what I would say in relation to working memory and memory recollection capacities take a much deeper dive into that in a chapter 26 where I really unpack these factors yeah okay well that that’s um yeah an interesting take on it and I think use it or lose it is a great takeaway for people uh uh as I tried to allude to earlier in in the podcast about my uh ongoing efforts to improve uh my wants uh almost fluent German language anyway uh the the final one I’d like to ask you about Jon is this idea of the Hollywood Blockbuster movie versus a a mundane presentation of something I think that’s going to be really useful for people uh maybe in the business world or in the education world or I suppose in an East field if you want to make an impact on people um you want to help them learn something think about how you present it yeah so in um chapter 24 of the book we share our expanse learning plan so expanses an acronym and it’s designed with brain friendly friendliness in mind so we use that to create all of our training materials but we’ve also taught that to teach us to help them to create more engaging lessons Etc.

So some of the work that we’ve done at Colfe’s school for example so brains have a preference of what they like to pay attention to for example we know that our our eyes are much more dominant than any other sense um because our eyes are much older it’s a really interesting study by um which I which I’ve come across by the great neurobiologist uh Jon Medina and there’s a this experiment was testing the expertise of expert wine testers so they’ve got some expert wine testers um into a room and they gave them some red wine but in fact it wasn’t red wine it was white wine dyed red every one of those expert wine taste is reported what a fantastic red this was and explained all the features of this fantastic red wine shows you how powerful your eyes are um to again common parlance a picture paints a thousand words Etc so there are all these rules that drive our brain we understand what they are we’ve created the expanse learning plan so you can see one example of how I use those insights in my presentations in our in our Keynotes as an example in chapter 24 which is the performing on the pressure chapter yeah that’s fascinating and that the wine tasting example with with people being overridden they’re good sense if you like being overridden by what they see is absolutely fascinating so uh yeah I think I think that that will bring a smile to many people’s faces well Jon thank you so much for taking us through chapter five um I would encourage everyone to read it in full um and of course read The Habit Mechanic book in full but yeah um an amazing profound um look at uh the way we the way we work and and this this idea of learning as a really transformational concept for all of us so thank you very much for that Jon um just like to move away now from The Habit Mechanic book to uh talk about something um that we’ve been hearing about in the news recently um specifically in the world of tech which is becoming uh the news for all of us the main news um and that’s um a story about uh let me get this right if I can the open AI chat GPT it’s a it’s a chat bot uh which I think most people will start to recognize is is your computer or your device talking to you in an intelligent way artificial intelligence of course is is the key to this um and there’s been some controversy there’s been some coverage what’s your what’s your take on this story Jon yeah I think overarchingly it’s showing well it’s it’s a big important step in unleashing the power of artificial intelligence um or artificial intelligence that is more human-like you know because some would say that well someone say it’s real you’ve got artificial intelligence all over your house already like your washing machine you know that’s an artificial intelligent mechanism but this is more this is like human-like artificial intelligence it sort of mimics what a human could do um I think it’s really exciting I think it’s gonna have a huge impact on how we work especially when it starts to get embedded into the Microsoft um word excel PowerPoint tools for me so the way that in chapter 25 of the book where we talk about focus and productivity and getting awork-life balance we we have a few models that we introduce one is the fact that our brain’s a bit like a battery and it operates in three broad steps one is recharge one is medium charged one is high charge.

What the sort of work that artificial intelligence is doing is Medium charge work and in Medium charge work this connects to another model we we do our what we call our Ice Cube freezing work so we separate the sort of work that we do in have a Mechanic approach we separate the the everyday jobs that we do into two categories one is freezing ice cubes which is busy Habitual type work the other is building ice sculptures which is focus clever problem solving work we can use our medium chargeable instead to freeze the ice cubes and what I see that this the tools like chart GPT doing it’s helping us to do some of the Ice Cube freezing work but what it isn’t doing is the ice sculpture building work in order to do that we need to use our high charge brain but the way I think of the of chat GP the the big interesting point is that you can ask it a question so I think it gives you a quite sophisticated answer so most people are familiar with search engines things like Google and they understand the idea that you type something we used to have something called Ask Jeeves but now it’s uh Google so you type into Google a question and it spits out loads of web pages and sometimes it gives you a few more sophisticated answers now chat GPT is almost a step up from that you ask it a question and it gives you a human-like response not a list of website it actually tells you the answer in a structured coherent way um sometimes it’s not so coherent but the average is it gives you something that’s quite coherent but all it’s doing is it’s a bit like if when someone asks you a question as a human being someone asked me what what is what do you mean by a Habit Mechanic so in a highly complex process that we don’t fully understand is that I somehow go back into my brain and I activate the neural networks connected to what I understand about the Habit Mechanic approach and then I verbalized that and I tell you the answer that’s all chat GPT is doing but its brain is the internet or the database that it’s plugged into so it’s only as good as the internet or the database it’s not sophisticated as a human brain nowhere near um but it’s the first big step in that direction so yeah I think it’s really interesting it’s really exciting and I think it’s something to be scared of But ultimately if you don’t want tools like chat GPT to take your job it’s more important than ever that you become a Habit Mechanic and you start to get better at building those ice sculptures every day stir that you are future proofing your skills against technology yeah I think it’s fascinating that you as a brain expert if you like Jon uh in that in that very uh succinct way of putting it gives that analysis of this interesting development which people may see as as threatening um and and very potentially dangerous I guess for their for their jobs and livelihood but uh using the Ice Cube analogy um it’s great that you’ve set it in that context just interestingly a very quick one I noticed um perhaps a bit whimsically uh people have been asking um the chat GPT to write poetry and write songs and to test its humanness if you like and I think um uh the singer Nick Cave who’s probably quite a laconic opinionated character from what I can gather said that uh its efforts at songwriting were a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human and I’m quoting him so um perhaps he’s agreeing with you then that it’s got certain capabilities but but not all of them although maybe songwriting uh it ties in with what you said about the the dipping into your database yeah well there’s more to a great song than being a great song isn’t that you’ve got to get people to listen to it and talk about it and uh you know marketing and sales is key to any successful tune but yeah for me the key thing is if we want to Future proof ourselves and if we want to be happier and have more meaningful lives The Willpower story tool in chapter 25 is really powerful I use that every day um and it’s gonna make it easier for you to actually recognize where you can use tools like [ __ ] chat GPT to help you out but also it’s going to help me to build the sort of Habits that you need the consistently build up those ice sculptures every day you know and I I had some what are the practical uses of things like chat GPT I heard one company saying you know they employ a full-time person that writes content for their website for SEO a search engine optimization they said that person used to be able to write one block per day now using chat GPT they can write three three blogs per day because they’re getting chat GPT in my language and haven’t Mechanic language to do more of the Ice Cube freezing work and they’re freeing up um the person to do more of the ice sculpture building work yeah absolutely fascinating and uh perhaps you’ve uh identified the formula for for Humanity’s uh Cooperative working with these uh very very rapidly emerging Technologies so that that’s a a great benefit and equally fascinating as well uh well before we conclude the podcast today Jon um we take questions from you please do submit your questions to us um you can do that via social media Twitter or Instagram to search for tougher minds or LinkedIn as well of course uh or via the website tougherminds.co.uk just send us a question via the contact Section of their website there and and we will certainly have a look at those and try to answer some of them on this podcast um and we’ve got a question here today Jon which I think uh connects with this idea of learning and how um people can can start working to improve this is this is from thrina and she asks um so much of what my team does in creating their own Habits is done outside of work at their in their own homes so she asks how can my efforts to improve everyone’s Habits or encourage improved Habits possibly compete with what people do when they leave the workplace yeah it’s a great question and I think it shows why learning is at the heart of everything that we’re doing For Better or For Worse so essentially if I can help people to learn some helpful things in my work environment how do I stop them unlearning that stuff when they leave the environment and I think that points towards the complexities of the world that we live in and how challenging it is to be at our best as a throw ahead to the next podcast that we we’re gonna do is about chapter six which focuses on the learning War which means that we’re always learning we understand that but big corporates are getting really good at getting us to learn the things and Habitualize the things that they want us to be spending our time doing and thinking by consuming more content on social media or consuming more from our streaming services or practicing and Habitualizing the wrong types of food Etc so the question really shows how complex it is to change Behavior but why I think that the only way to actually help people to be at their best and for us to individually to be our best the only way to do that is to become a Habit Mechanic because we have to empower the individuals to proactively be working and managing themselves you know and it’s that that question also and I think it’s meant in this context but it’s also very um familiar to the hybrid workplace context that we’re seeing and so we’ve done a lot of work in that space and continued to do so with our clients and I think for example that you can sort of sum up the challenges of of the hybrid with hybrid work into three interconnected areas one hybrid work next team work harder because when you physically get together as a team it’s easier to communicate and collaborate because you have a technology in our brain called mirror neurons the heart of teamwork is communication and collaboration which allows us to solve problems together so Teamworks harder the second thing is that leadership’s harder many leaders for example have been promoted to their positions because they’re really good at getting to a room with people and bringing energy and influence that way obviously when you don’t see your people every day it’s much harder to lead than with one sad Behavior and the third fact of them that leads on from those two and is connected is that it means that we’re now more dependent on people managing their own behavior and that means we need to give them the toolkit to be able to do that in other words we need to help them to become having Mechanics because we’re unplugging people from the work that the work culture that they used to turn off every day and now they’re in this hybrid state where they’ve got their home culture and the benefits and sometimes negatives that can bring that’s influenced in their behavior every single day so yeah it’s complex and that’s why we’ve got to empower people to become Habit Mechanics but we’ve also got to use the nine action Factor um system you know that’s a lot of the work that I do is I’m helping senior leaders to use that non-action factor system within their teams within their organizations so that that can make it as easy as possible for their people to build the Habits whether they’re working at home in the office and or both to to consistently build long lasting Habits and what I see time and again is that when you get those action factors right you can improve people’s happiness and performance by at least 25 quite quickly in months um which essentially means they spend more of their day doing focused clever creative problem solving work the sort of work that we need humans in our organizations to do we don’t need them to be doing busy Ice Cube freezing work or we don’t need them to do as anywhere near as much as that as they used to do because we can automate more of that work now and free them up to do more of their for their uh ice sculpture building work so yeah it’s a great question and I hope that sheds some end times yeah I think it does Jon and thank you very much for that and and Trina thanks very much for the question as I say do please keep your questions coming in uh via social media or contact us via tougherminds.co.uk by the contact Section there on the site and we’ll do our very best to get through some of your questions on this podcast.

Well Jon thanks so much for your time once again um absolutely uh transformative for me chapter five when I first read it and thank you for talking about talking about it in such great detail and taking a deep dive into it learning um the science of learning and how we can all get better and improve by using that understanding and applying it thanks so much again Jon anything you’d like to say in closing before we draw this podcast to a close yeah well one I agree for me chapter five is is profound as well and I was listening back to that over the weekend it’s so important that’s why it’s at the front of the book because learning is at the heart of being healthier happier and at your best more often the whole point of the Habit Mechanic approach is that you learn how to become a Habit Mechanic by developing your Habit Mechanic intelligence um and that once you can do that you can help others to learn how to become Habit Mechanics so yeah it’s a really fantastic chapter and as I said you can go you can go deeper in chapter 26 on the learning piece well I’d just like to say thank you so much for listening thank you for everyone who’s in the app and showing up regularly and supporting every other everyone else and also you know I’ve been prepared to share what’s going on in your life because that’s really helpful for other people to see how this is playing out in real time for others and I know that being your best being our best is more difficult than ever but remember you’re only ever one Habit away.