Dr Jon Finn discusses the career of one of England’s all-time great cricketer James ‘Jimmy’ Anderson to highlight the significant limitations of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Dr Jon also busts some myths about ‘talent’.
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Transcript (automatically generated)
Hello Habit Mechanics. It’s Dr Jon Finn here. I hope you’re having a great week. So far, this is a Habit Mechanic short, and it’s the first of a new type of short that we’re going to be releasing, and it’s about the psychology of the things that we see in our everyday lives, and today I want to talk about the psychology of James Anderson, who is a world record-breaking English cricketer, and what James Anderson’s story teaches us about the limitations of CBT, which is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, which is erroneously labelled as the gold standard of psychological support, and I will talk more about that later.
Dr Jon Finn: 1:05
So, as I speak, james Anderson, who is the person who’s taken the most test wickets in cricket ever and for those of you who don’t know a great deal about cricket, that means that he’s bowled out more people than anybody else in the history of the game has done in test matches and test matches are the longest form of cricket and it’s often thought of as the most challenging format of the game. James anderson I think he’s 41 or he’s 42, so he’s played for a long time. I think he’s maybe been playing for england since he was about 21, but, but right now it’s actually the last um game he’s ever going to play for england. So he’s retiring. He’s currently playing right now at Lourdes in London against the West Indies. So it’s the end of a phenomenal cricketing sporting career. And you know, he is a GOAT, as they say. He’s a great of all time.
Dr Jon Finn: 2:20
And because he’s retiring, the BBC lead cricket correspondent, jonathan Agnew, did an in-depth interview with him, which I was listening to, yesterday, and he was talking about his career. And what I found fascinating about that interview was how Anderson was talking about how he very deliberately learned new bowling skills throughout his career to keep him relevant, to keep him moving forwards, to give himself the best chance of helping the team win test matches, whether that’s in Australia or South Africa or India or in the West Indies, wherever they’re playing. And what I found even more interesting because, just to take a step backwards, we just assume that James Anderson is naturally gifted and it was always going to be that way, that he was always going to be a great. But when you listen to the interview, you see how much hard work, persistence, resilience, but what we call focus, practice played in his success. And he spoke very specifically about learning different bowling techniques.
Dr Jon Finn: 3:40
So bowling is a very varied skill. We have spin bowlers, we have swing bowlers skill we have spin bowlers, we have swing bowlers, we have pace bowlers. Jimmy anderson actually started as a pace bowler and he’s probably now more regarded as a swing bowler. But he was talking about how he developed different techniques and how he learned to do that by watching other bowlers and he said that’s how any new technique he develops. So he started as a paced bowler and then developed a bit of swing and then what’s called the wobble seam. He always started by seeing another bowler do it and then just trying to work out how they’d done it and, over time, practicing that technique until he was comfortable to use it in a pressurized situation and what again. What struck me was actually, in one example I think it was the outswinger. He said that, having sort of seen someone bowl that, and he named another world-class cricketer that he’d seen bowl it and thought I wouldn’t mind adding that into my game. Between him seeing well, making the conscious decision that he was going to add the outswing to his game and actually using it in a first class cricket game, it wasn’t a week, it wasn’t a month, it wasn’t a season, it was three years later where he first then unveiled that new skill, first had the confidence to use it.
Dr Jon Finn: 5:10
So I’m talking a lot about cricket here and James Anderson. What’s this got to do with cognitive behavioural therapy, cbt? Well, what James Anderson’s story spotlights to us is the essential role of focused practice in getting good at anything. And in chapter five of the habit mechanic book and remember, you can get a physical, a free physical copy plus shipping just go to the habit mechanic website and we’ll get the book sent out to you. In chapter five, I go deep in learning very deliberately, very early in in the book sent out to you. In chapter 5, I go deep in learning very deliberately, very early in the book. And in chapter 26, I go even deeper. Learning is the central process of getting good at anything and the vehicle to help us learn is focused practice. And that’s what’s so great about the james anderson story just spotlights time and time again and you know there are multiple case studies that I use in the habit mechanic book about the role of focused and deliberate practice in helping people that we just believe were naturals and talented in actually spotlighting. Actually, the vehicle for them being successful was focused in deliberate practice. So James Anderson’s story is just another example of that. And Another thing that I was doing yesterday was I was preparing an academic paper and I’ve known for a long time that cognitive behavioral therapy is nowhere near as good as we’re led to believe it is.
Dr Jon Finn: 6:54
It’s talked about, it’s the gold standard of psychological support and it was the central component of all my three psychology-related degrees when it comes to learning how to change someone else’s behaviour. And it’s a really well-intended theory developed by dedicated scientists and applied by dedicated practitioners. But it is fundamentally flawed. But it is fundamentally flawed and the reason that it’s so prominent still is because it’s it’s just a dominant theory that is, I suppose, easy academically to keep pointing towards, to saying that works better than anything else, that works better than anything else, because it’s been around for so long. Um, and if we, if we, if we look at the, the theoretical model, or the theoretical models that cognitive behavioral therapy are based upon, they’re from at least the 1950s. And you know, in the 1950s we were still 50 years away from being able to look inside the human brain in real time at scale, so we could do some proper research on actually how brains worked.
Dr Jon Finn: 8:25
So CBT is based on black box theories and it massively overestimates the power of knowledge and education in changing people’s behavior. Knowledge and education in changing people’s behavior because if you, what you get taught to do when you learn how to deliver cbt is, yeah, there’s a bit of talk therapy involved. You listen and you get to understand people’s problems, but then you might show them a skill to do and the expectation is that you go and you practice that skill and that’s going to make you better. What I found, um, when I was writing my academic paper yesterday, was a research, a recent research, uh paper, which is a meta-analysis. So meta-analysis is it’s a study of lots of other studies. So I think the number of people across all the studies that were part of the research experiments, I think it was about 60,000 people. So this meta-analysis is looking at the impact that CBT interventions the gold standard apparently, apparently the gold standard of helping people to do better psychologically. So 60,000 people had been exposed to CBT training and this meta-analysis showed that very clearly that CBT was not helpful at all for wait for it, 58% of those people, all for wait for it 58 of those people and that doesn’t mean it was helpful but it doesn’t mean it was transformative. For the other um 42. It just spotlights that it’s very, very limited.
Dr Jon Finn: 10:15
And if it wasn’t for cbt, I would not have created tougher minds and I would not have created the habit mechanic approach. Because when I went into those feel, into the field of elite sports psychology all those years ago, which was the start of my professional career, I quickly learned that things like cbt and close relatives like uh, nlp and things like CBT and close relatives like NLP and things like I think action and commitment therapy is the right term, that they’re really well intended but they are just not designed to actually help people to break ingrained, unhelpful subconscious behaviours, in other words, habits, and that’s why I made it my mission to create a framework and a methodology that actually did help people to change. And going back to the James Anderson story, what models like cbt and the other ones I mentioned do? It’s like the equivalent of james anderson seeing that person bowl the bowl that he wanted to be able to bowl, whether that was, um, the wobble seam or the out swinger. And it’s the equivalent of him seeing someone do that and then thinking that if I just go away and I practice it once or twice, or if I know how to do it and I work out what the technique looks like, I’ll be able to do it and I’ll be able to habitualize that technique. But of course that wasn’t the case exactly as he explained. It took him three years of working on it to get really good at it.
Dr Jon Finn: 11:57
And this is the hidden thing that we don’t see with our own behaviour and it’s why we always start the habit mechanic approach with our proprietary habit metric tools is that we don’t see that actually all the time we’re practising very deliberately, although it’s subconscious. We’re practising really, really unhelpful things like worrying and beating ourselves up and procrastinating and not sleeping properly and not eating properly and not exercising properly and not communicating with our team very well and not being a very good role model for our team members and all the other things that we would call destructive habits. We’re practicing those things all the time because they’re on automatic loops in our brain and if we want to get rid of them, knowing what we need to do is never going to be enough and just having a couple of skills that we can use or loads of skills or the tips, tricks, hacks we can use will never be enough. You know, we see across the western world that people are struggling. Cbt has not come to the rescue, it hasn’t transformed their life.
Dr Jon Finn: 13:19
And it’s not surprising because, you know, back in the 50s, back in the 1940s, when these theoretical models were developed, we didn’t really understand understand how brains worked. We massively underestimated the role of neuroplasticity and, essentially, learning. We can learn, we can change. We are not dominated by our genes. It’s nature plus nurture. We get good at what we practice. We didn’t understand that our brains are wired for threat detection and for worry. We didn’t understand the powerful role of the social status plays in our automated ways of thinking and doing so.
Dr Jon Finn: 14:03
This is not a slight on the scientists that created those models. It’s not a slight on the practitioners that are practicing those models. It’s just we’ve got to keep moving forward with how we help people to be at their best, and that’s what the habit mechanic system is all about. So that’s why we created our own behavioral science model, which we call the Nine Action Factor model. So we talk about well, we have a framework that we call personal change management and at the heart of that is our nine action factor model. And you know, knowing skills, not knowledge, and skills is just one of the nine factors that we need to activate if we want to do better. So, yeah, it’s important, but it isn’t everything. So if we want to do better, we’ve’ve got to acknowledge first and foremost that it’s going to be about practicing things differently, consistently, so that we can reprogram our brain to automate different ways of thinking and doing. And that’s what Jimmy Anderson did. James Anderson, I’m sure he’ll be a sir at some point soon. That’s what he did to improve his bowling techniques.
Dr Jon Finn: 15:19
And I think that when it comes to getting better at physical things, it’s just more obvious to us the role of practice. So we get that If I can’t even do one press-up now, if I start with maybe one half press-up and then I do two half press-ups tomorrow and then three half press-ups the day afterwards and I build up slowly, I understand that that’s going to physically change my muscle tone and my body’s ability to do press-ups and my body’s ability to do press-ups, and before too long I’ll be able to do a full press-up and then two press-ups and 10, and so on. But I think, when it comes to the way we think, it’s much harder for us to understand that our brain is actually just like a muscle in the sense of it’s a physiologically adaptive system and it gets good at what we practice. But unfortunately that knowledge is not getting what I would call applied neuroscience, applied behavioral science. It isn’t making its way into the tools and systems that have been promoted to us to help us to do better. And again, that’s why the habit mechanic system is unique it is transformative for people’s lives. We’ve worked with so many people that have tried other approaches, like cbt, and they explain to us why the habit mechanic system is different because it actually makes it easier for you to practice the things that are going to help you to automate new subconscious ways of thinking and doing, in other words, build more super habits and destroy more destructive habits so you can be healthier, happier and at your best more often. That’s what I think James Anderson, record breaking England cricketer, who is retiring this week from international cricket, can teach us about the limitations of CBT. So I hope you found that interesting.
Dr Jon Finn: 17:29
Let me just do a quick summary of where you can learn more about what I’ve talked about inside of the habit mechanic book. So I’ve mentioned chapter five, where I first of all introduce um learning and go deep into learning, and actually I’d also suggest that you read chapter four as well. If you want to go even deeper into learning, then I’d suggest reading chapter 26, and if you want to learn about our nine action factor model, then I’d recommend reading chapter 18. And if you’re a leader and you want to understand how to how to use those nine factors to help your team, then I’d read chapter 35 of the book. And also all of chat, all of what’s in step four of the book, which is chapters 27 through to 35, will be really interesting to you. The reality is is that reading about this stuff is not going to change your behavior. The habit mechanic book is very powerful it’s as powerful as we could make it but it’s only a book. At the end of the day, it’s not practical that that book can activate all of the management factors for you. That’s why we have the Habit Mechanic University app.
Dr Jon Finn: 18:49
I’m really excited to announce actually for the first time here on this podcast that we are opening our one-to-one habit mechanic coaching up to everybody. We haven’t done this before. We’ve only ever coached our clients while we’re working on bigger bespoke projects, but now we are opening up our one-month and our three-month habit mechanic coaching programs up to everybody. So if you’re interested in getting coached by one of our expert habit mechanic coaches, then you can. You can go to our website and just book a free call and we’ll we’ll help you to analyze your habits and we’ll help you to start building new ones for free, and then if you want to work with us, you absolutely can. Also this isn’t new, but more and more people are signing up is if you want to learn to become a certified mechanic coach. We do that as well. So if you want to create your own business, or if you’re a senior leader or you want to add a different skill set to your current business, then becoming a certified habit mechanic coach could absolutely be for you. So if you’re interested in that, contact us. Remember, we also do keynotes and we have team power program. We have leadership programs. We create bespoke programs. So if this is interesting to you, get in touch and we will be delighted to help you and your people destroy more destructive habits and build new super habits. So I hope that’s been insightful and it’s got you thinking.
Dr Jon Finn: 20:25
Remember, you can get a physical copy, and the physical copy of that mechanic book is striking. I’ve heard that time and time again, so you might have an e-book or the audio book. Get the physical book. It’s free. You have to pay a little bit of money for shipping, um, but it’s far cheaper than buying it on somewhere like amazon. So you go to our website, you can get a fee, a free physical copy and then you can start, annotate it and make notes and stick post-its in, like I do and I know lots of other people do. So you can get that from the website and wherever you’re at with your thinking and doing, your behaviour, your habits. The good news is that you’re only ever one habit away from being healthier, happier and at your best more often.
