The Discomfort of Change Part 1

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to humanizing the podcast that liberates you from the programming you've received from cultural evolution. We just want you to be the best person you choose to be, not what you were ever told to be. And today that's quite a pertinent theme because we're going to discuss and dig into and play around with the discomfort of change. Hello and welcome to humanizing the podcast that allows you to understand how you've been programmed by both evolution and culture so you can liberate any behaviour you choose and be who you would like to be. Today I'm Ginny, I'm the map holder. I'd like to introduce Marhin. Hello. Marhin is the explorer and together we will journey through this programming so you can understand through the questions you ask and definitely the questions Mahin asks, how to liberate yourself and be the most amazing person that you choose to be. Right, so you wanted to do this one today? Yeah, because we did actually sit down and write a whole list of things we wanted to discuss. And then we sit down when we record this podcast and Lahene goes, right, we're going to do this one. So today. So tell me why. What was it about this one you really wanted to look at? [00:01:47] Speaker B: I think it's because it's probably very personally pertinent at the moment. I'm going through change and it's uncomfortable. There is discomfort associated with it. It's not always the most fun thing in the world, but it's necessary, it's important. It's also growth, I suppose. So it's one of those things. [00:02:12] Speaker A: It's evolution. I think this is interesting because not all change is about moving forward, but that's something we've been taught, that change should be about improvement, moving forward, doing this, when actually a lot of the time it's undoing things that have been done to us or wanting to, like we've always talked about. A lot of this program is feels like wearing terribly ill fitting clothes that you've been told fit you and you know you want to change them. But it's so difficult to change something when you've actually been told that's what it should be like. So it should always be uncomfortable. Or as a woman, you should always put other people first, or as a non binary person that even the way you think about yourself is wrong. So there are a number of directions we could go in here and I want to understand what will work for you best. Do you want to look at change from an evolutionary perspective first and how we actually change as people, not as individuals? Or is it the cultural programming? [00:03:32] Speaker B: I think we should go evolution and then culture. [00:03:34] Speaker A: Okay, right. [00:03:37] Speaker B: But I would like to offer one thing that I have noticed. [00:03:44] Speaker A: This human condition of change is that. [00:03:50] Speaker B: In nature, change is unforced, embraced. Every season there is change and it just kind of ticks on. [00:04:01] Speaker A: It does. [00:04:03] Speaker B: And I think for us, because there's the emotions attached to change, maybe it can sometimes feel a bit more painful. And actually, if we could do a bit of the embracing of the nature bit, maybe we'd have a nicer time. [00:04:26] Speaker A: Yes, I suppose sometimes we can't really talk about the human beings and evolution and change without sometimes is commenting on how it makes us feel today. I mean, we've been told that change is wrong, change is bad, change is negative. That's not how any other. It's not human. Or we are the arch evolvers, right? We've changed and transformed for millennia, or we wouldn't be where we are today. But isn't it interesting to think that if someone tells you you can't change, they get to keep you where you are, right? So they get to keep you there because they've told you change is difficult. So don't bother. So it's interesting to see that as a type of control, there are almost three ways you've been programmed that, as you say, make it really uncomfortable to change. One's what you've actually been told about change and transformation. Two is how your current culture, or how you've been brought up, taught you. Three is how your brain then reacts to the fact that you are doing something different. And four is how evolutions looked at change. Okay, but that doesn't help unless it makes sense for you here today. [00:05:57] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:05:58] Speaker A: Where should we dig into? Because we looked at, briefly, at what gets in your way sometimes, is you've been told it's bad and nasty and hard. [00:06:11] Speaker B: The definition of change, earn, is an actual process. This is the verb, obviously, is the actual process through which something becomes different. [00:06:21] Speaker A: It doesn't sound too bad, does it? [00:06:24] Speaker B: No. If you look at it from a nature perspective, a flower becomes an apple. Pretty lovely. From a personal perspective, we go from baby to adult. That's our change from a cultural perspective. And I suppose underneath that sits all the ways in which we change, how we feel and our emotions and our programming and as you say, what you've been told and then the brain's reaction to change. [00:07:00] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I suppose what you might sort of be arguing for is the fact that if we didn't have this consciousness bit where we think and interact with stuff, we'd be all, okay, which is probably very true and might get us into the nature of consciousness and why it exists. But one of the reasons, or one of the things our conscious brain does, is it's here to keep you safe. So, as we've discussed before, you can look at this evolutionary and our programming like a great big iceberg. And at the top of the iceberg, just peeping above the water, is consciousness. And consciousness literally is here to collect data, information, and knowledge from the environment to make sure that we're safe permanently. And it interacts with all those other programs. So when it sees something it can't predict, it goes, hold on there a second. Not sure how this is going to go. Please find me some more information. But what's fascinating about the system which drives you finding more information which is sat in your amygdala. Sorry for those. I'm pointing to the back of my head because that's where it sits. What's fascinating about that bit is that it's programmed only to look at three outcomes. Run. Fight, flee. Sorry. Run. Freeze, flee. Therefore, it's always looking for something negative. So when things start to change in your environment, your can keep me safe mechanism kicks off and goes, oh, it's changing. And it literally only asks you to look at things that are negative. So naturally, you always look at things that would then fuel that negativity. There's nothing you can do about it. It just does. And that could be the simplest thing, as your drive home from work has changed, and it is, it's different. So most people's initial emotional engagement with change is it makes you feel uncomfortable, but that's nothing more than your brain going calculate something different in the environment. [00:09:18] Speaker B: This is an unknown. [00:09:20] Speaker A: Please tell me it's not going to hurt me. But the only things it goes to look for are negative, because that's the system it's looking which is driving that search. It doesn't go, look for all the nice positive things that are going to keep me that I know are okay, it goes, I've only got three settings I need to look. Do I run? Do I fight? Do I freeze? And in that case, please find something that tells me one of these three things I need to do. And therein lies your initial challenge with change. [00:09:57] Speaker B: So it's about feeling safe. [00:09:59] Speaker A: Well, no, it's not about feeling safe. You'll never feel safe. You can't, because you can never satisfy that system. Unless, of course, you don't move, okay? It's you as a conscious human being going, if my brain chucks up all these negative thoughts, it's because that's what it does. It's a bit like you can't stop the menopause, or you can't stop it doing those things, but knowing it means when they appear. You're just trying to keep me safe, aren't you? But if you thought safety, the brain would feel safest, or that system would feel safest if you never moved and didn't do anything. [00:10:40] Speaker B: So it's about resilience, trusting. [00:10:43] Speaker A: I don't like that phrase, personally. It's just about knowing why. Resilience. Resilience, to me, always sounds like I'm fighting against something. It's just knowledge. It's knowing the fact that your brain will do those things. There's another thing the brain does as well, which makes you feel sometimes a failure when you try and change things, which is when all of this system was designed, the things it uses to lay down new pathways in your brain. The molecules were not available a lot, so it's protein, right? So what your brain does is it sits there and it goes, wait, going to have to reprogram. You're doing something new, you're learning something. I'm going to have to change what I've already programmed down, whether that's something you've learned how to think about yourself or even an action, going to learn something new. It goes, oh, great, how many times you're going to do it? Because if it's only once, I don't need to waste the energy, sort of goes through this payoff. Oh, no, you've done it again. Oh, and again. I can't keep. And if you keep doing it, what it does is it says, I can't hold this processing in consciousness, because I need that consciousness to watch the environment. Just in case anything around here is going to hurt me, I'll have to wear it down. I need it to be subconscious action. And therefore, if you don't do slot, I mean, I'm sure you remember learning how, learning to drive a car, most people do, and how difficult it was at in the beginning. And then these days you can probably drive a car, hold a conversation, listen to the radio, read directions all at the same time, because all of those actions and how you're scanning the environment to drive that are now programmed into, and it's not a habit, it's subconscious behavior. It's literally wired down the subconscious. So those two things. Oh, something's changed. In the environment, I need to be worried about it, or do I need to be worried about it? If I can't predict it, perhaps I do. And bloody hell, it takes an awful long time to wire down the new behavior. And it's really expensive. And it is a bit like a recalcitrant child. It sits there and goes, do I have to? [00:13:06] Speaker B: Yes. [00:13:07] Speaker A: And all of this is going on without your knowledge, as in without your conscious knowledge. It's a bit like your body digesting protein. We don't think about it, it just gets on and does it. But what you're trying to do right here, right now, is change something about how you act in the environment or with people. [00:13:25] Speaker B: So you're trying to interrupt your subconscious. We're telling people there are subconscious things in the background that are going on that are fueling your behavior. [00:13:38] Speaker A: They will never go away either. It'll always be difficult. However, the other thing which is really positive, though, about evolution is it gave us a mechanism. And this mechanism is completely contradictory to everything we've probably been told in our lifetimes, is that you don't change by yourself, you change with other people. [00:14:04] Speaker B: Could you extrapolate on that a little bit, please? [00:14:07] Speaker A: So human beings have always worked together in groups. Well, when I say always, probably for between 6.5 and 7 million years. Right, we're group, we working group a while, a while. And we've also evolved as groups. So it appears that there is a mechanism we use to bring in new inventions, new ways of doing things. And literally they become part of culture and society and who we are. Whether that's been tool use, whether that's been learning a language, all of these things have actually been inverted commas invented, but they're now part of who we are. And in some respects they're part of our dna. And it would seem to make logical sense that we should only bring things in that are good for us and they add value to us. And if they do, how do we keep them over time? How do we maintain them? They become part of our story. So it looks like change how change works. And the underlying change curve, which is from a chap called Rogers in the bell shaped curve, and people have used it in a way to say you get early adopters and then you get rest of them who are all pain in the ass. Well, actually us, the evolutionarists, look at that completely differently and go, yet people who invent things, you get people who play with them till they break. Optimizers, they optimize them. You get people who then look at all of that lovely new stuff and look at the rest of the population go, boy, I've got to teach you how to use this and support you and coach you and influence you to change you. Then get people who look at that stuff and go, yeah, come on. Then I'll try it. I'll give it a go. And then you get people who sit there and go, I'm not doing it till nine people out of ten I know doing it. They're second waivers. First waivers are the people who go, I'll try. Right. They've been convinced with someone like me because I'm a coach or not, early adopter, I'm a coach. And then you get, so we've got inventors, optimizers. What were the other two inventors? Optimizers, coaches, first wave, second wave. And then the people at the end who are actually probably some of the most important people and yet they've been, again, created negatively called laggards. It even sounds nasty, doesn't it? As a word? Yeah, but these are the people who, if we've decided to do something, they make the rules, they literally write it down and then they police the rules because that then means we've locked it into who we are. We've now got rules about how we do this and how we behave. And you see this playing out in any technology transformation, any place where we do things where you and you will know people who will fall into those categories. One of the easiest ones I always seen, especially in technology, are optimizers because these are the people who go out and buy all the latest stuff. They didn't invent it, but they go out all and buy all the latest stuff and then they play with it and they look at it and they'll tell you what's wrong with it. But as soon as you look like you're going to buy it, they're onto the next thing. So literally their role is to optimize. So therefore we dim change and transformation, evolution as groups. And this plays out for you again in two ways, because if we've always done group transformation and you rock up one day to your family and go, I'm going to do something differently than we've already always done. They all sit there and look horrified, or you might go to your local friendship group or whatever, I want to lose weight, and immediately the thing back will be, oh, you're fine as you are, why are you bothering? And again, that's another barrier. And they're doing that because they're completely aligning with their evolutionary role is they're not asking you to stop, they're asking themselves, why should they? [00:18:28] Speaker B: This has been, I think, one of those life changing conversations that we've had off the podcast. Yeah, we do have to tend to. [00:18:38] Speaker A: Have those where this came from, let's be fair. [00:18:42] Speaker B: Well, exactly. And it's that idea of, you can go to your people, your family, your friendship group, whatever that tribe looks like, and go to them with something and they can inadvertently hold you back. [00:18:59] Speaker A: Of course they will. Because if you rock up to a group, that group of people, these are the people who know you, love you, support you, but you're a group. And group dynamics, and we've touched on some of that, are really powerful. This is about being human and you rock and you go, I'm going to do this immediately. Their brain is going to go, sugar or shit. I don't want that hard work. I'm going to have to change this. I'm going to have to think about myself differently. I don't want to do that. If we don't let them do that. And again, it's all unconscious. If we don't let them do that, it's not a problem. Immediately, out of their heads come the whole world wouldn't do that if I were you, because it's not about you, it's about them. So one of the easiest things I ever talk about with anyone, or if I'm ever working with anyone and they go, want to change this, I say, go and find other people who want to do it. Go and find those people who want to change or challenge themselves or look at something different and they've got the same thing. This is why, for me, why things like Alcoholics Anonymous and weight watchers and various groups like that work, not because of the process, because other people are there. And a, you don't feel alone, b, they'll have similar challenges to you, and c, they're either on the journey, done the journey, or are at a different place to you on that journey, but your brain then goes, oh, we're all doing this. This is a thing. I'm happier doing it now because I'm with all these other people who are doing it. [00:20:35] Speaker B: It makes perfect sense that you would want to surround yourself with people who are doing the same thing as you or have done what you're trying to do to get support and encouragement and to feel part of a group that is going to impact you positively. If you're doing something that you really want to do, hopefully support you, you're. [00:20:57] Speaker A: In that space where you are using the abilities that humans have developed positively for yourself, knowing that there are certain things that are obviously going to stand in your way, how your brain is wired to do change stands in your way. We've discussed, a, it's different. Fear mechanism kicks off. I can only think negative. B, it's expensive, right? Got to rewire a new behavior. Rewire a way of thinking about myself then. [00:21:27] Speaker B: And we don't mean expensive as in no, expensive from a monetary fuel. So it can be. [00:21:33] Speaker A: It's expensive from a fuel perspective for your brain to wire down your new neuron connections in a world where it was developed to do that in because there wasn't a lot of protein around. We have more than enough protein around now. [00:21:49] Speaker B: Okay? [00:21:49] Speaker A: We've got more than enough stuff around for your brain to do that. But it was designed in a world where there wasn't. So it keeps on asking you to keep going, and therefore you feel like a failure if you fall off and it's got nothing. It's just your brain doing brain stuff. But on the positive side, if you do that with load of other people who are trying to do the same thing, they'll go, yeah, I find that too. So you get the positive human side of being in the group who's transforming, overriding some of the negative things. Not negative. Some of the things you're just going to have to sit, feel and feel uncomfortable with. [00:22:30] Speaker B: Is that where what your culture tells you comes? [00:22:33] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. That feeling as well? [00:22:36] Speaker B: Yeah. Sitting in discomfort. A lot of people don't want to sit in discomfort. A lot of people will actively move away from sitting in discomfort or feeling uncomfortable because it's uncomfortable. Who would want to be uncomfortable? It's not a nice feeling. [00:22:54] Speaker A: It's interesting because we're taking a feeling and attaching a word to it. If we took a feeling like that, like, oh, I'm changing and attached a different word to it, we'd feel differently about it. It's a bit like if you were. [00:23:07] Speaker B: Excited about your change. [00:23:08] Speaker A: To be fair, that adrenaline rush we get when we're fried or excited is exactly the same biological basis. What gets in the way is how we think about it. [00:23:21] Speaker B: So a person slimming down for their wedding. [00:23:26] Speaker A: Okay, so this is different because you've chosen two things, which is you're supposed to look x in y situation. [00:23:34] Speaker B: The discomfort of that change. I know people who did bonkers, I mean bonkers things in order to look a certain way on their wedding day. Like bonkers. One of them was this, like fully liquid diet that was lasted for about three months with the introduction of solid foods after six weeks and things. And I remember thinking at the time, you've been in a relationship with this person for years. They proposed to you looking the way you look, like what's happened here, going through the discomfort, going through the physical and mental discomfort of that diet to facilitate a physical change, because culture tells you you should look a certain way or be a certain way or have this sort of. [00:24:22] Speaker A: Well, for me, that's not very human. Right. Because what you're actually doing is responding or trying to do something to yourself, because a rule or regulation external to yourself created by other people which says this is what you're supposed to look like, drives you. That's not change. That's submission to power. [00:24:43] Speaker B: Okay? That's conformity. [00:24:45] Speaker A: Yeah, it is. It's submission to an external force telling you how you should feel or look about yourself in a very particular space in time. For me, that's not changed. That's about submission and control. [00:25:00] Speaker B: These are nice differences to sort of pull out. [00:25:03] Speaker A: Yes. I mean, one of them as well is, I think it's quite insidious, is you have to do certain things at certain times in your life. [00:25:12] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, forget that. [00:25:13] Speaker A: Exactly. It's about control. And when you see it as not a change or transformation, but someone trying to control you, when I say someone, the system or whatever defined the system is trying to control you, you can then choose, and this is a change, you need to be able to choose to go. If that's just a rule and regulation or something, I've been told, is it something I want to do? [00:25:42] Speaker B: Right. There is sort of that moment, isn't it? That's the kind of power back it is. [00:25:47] Speaker A: And if you're then taking power back, it's far easier to then go and find your tribe to go and do your transformation, perhaps, versus that because you have decided you are not going to conform or you're going to be a rule breaker. So, for example, and we keep coming back to women, there are other examples out there, people. But Marheen and I both have very similar experiences, being very similar ages, women. But I was a single mum. That was so frowned upon. But believe it or not, it was easier to be a single mum than a widow. [00:26:23] Speaker B: I remember talking about this with you for the very first time and that blowing my mind because I would have thought that being a widow would have pulled out the best in people. [00:26:35] Speaker A: Oh, good God, no. There were only that because loads of people don't die anymore. We have no social structures that are modern for being a widow. So everyone had reverted back to things they know or back. So you were either expected to run home or go and hide or just fall apart in a heap on the floor. Right. And the other thing, which was really interesting, and I thought it was just my experience, but I spoke recently to someone whose husband had also committed suicide and very young. And the first thing she said to me was, God. And then all the women hated us and saw us as a threat, didn't they? And I said, wow. Yes. I thought it was just me. And it's not. It wasn't just me at all. And it's because they had no program, no structure to put you as a widow in. And because you had a child, they'd immediately assumed you were after their husband, as a supporter of you, right. As someone who could keep you safe and look after you. And it's like that is probably the furthest thing from anyone's mind who's ever had to go through that. [00:27:55] Speaker B: My very good friend of mine, her father, passed away very suddenly when she was young. And her mum shared much later, in what would have been my late teens, when I got to know her, that that's what she found. She found that she hadn't just lost her husband, she'd actually lost her friends and their friendship group. Those people that she was going to lean on and get comfort from and be supported by started to slip away because the women saw her as a threat. I don't want to be so generalizing as women see her as a threat, but there was this idea that she was suddenly going to want what they had. And I don't know whether that was from the women or their husbands behaving differently. I don't. [00:28:41] Speaker A: I mean, I can only talk about my experience that it was the women, it's definitely the women, and it was horrendous. And it was easier to move away and go and live somewhere else and invent a new story than stay where it was. And this is, again, about change, because it was. And this is two different types of change which we haven't touched on yet. There's a difference between traumatic change and planned change. So traumatic change is something that, like being a widow, like someone dying, is done to you before you have no control over, and therefore you have no way of knowing it's going to happen, planning for it. And you're left in this space where literally 1 second of the world was one shape and now it's a different shape. And that's completely different way of looking at change and having to handle it. But plan change, as in something you chose to do. Actually, your brain doesn't know any different, okay? They just change. But if you think about it too much, you'll stop yourself doing for the things we've talked about practically anything, because your brain then gets involved and goes, do you know what? This will be far too much like hard work. I really don't want to do it. Whereas traumatic change, as in something, and it's probably, let's go unplanned, not necessarily traumatic, you just get on with it. Right? You just go with it. Like moving house as a kid, you couldn't do anything about it. You just get on with it. [00:30:03] Speaker B: Or driving. [00:30:04] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:30:06] Speaker B: You stop, you move around, you preempt the thing in front of you. There's a cyclist, there's a pothole, there's. [00:30:13] Speaker A: Whatever it is you do and you trust your own skill. And this is what really gets me, is the fact that we are all incredibly brilliant about doing change and transformation, and yet if we continually tell ourselves or have been told that we're bad at it, then we're going to fear it. And for me, I go back, this is the ultimate form of control, to leave you where you are in those ill fitting clothes, because we've told you change is so difficult, you're not going to do it. And by the way, even if you try, you're going to fail. How controlling is that? [00:30:53] Speaker B: Yeah, if you try and you fail, that's apparently it done. You couldn't go for a second go or a third go. [00:31:01] Speaker A: Have you ever watched a toddler learn to walk? Baseball executive times. We tell them how wonderful they are as soon as we get people to school. If you're not perfect first time, you're a failure. Really. [00:31:14] Speaker B: It's definitely something that I was speaking about with my parents, actually, last weekend. The pressure of exams, getting it right the first time, how it sort of manifested itself in the back of my head or the front of my head, wherever it goes. But this idea of something that we have talked about a lot is like perfectionism, the fear of getting it wrong, the fear of failure. [00:31:39] Speaker A: Yeah. And that does bring us back to that episode. But this is the way all of these things are linked and that so much of what we find hard is how we've been taught to be not actually what is truly and utterly human. Okay. Yeah. I hold my hands up. There are some crack mechanisms in our heads that get in our way. The fact that it's not something you can predict. So your brain goes, oh, Jesus. And it only can look at three negative things or the fact that it's hard. Your brain's got to be convinced to wind down a new skill. That's only it, but it balances it with this whole thing that you change as groups so you get support, so you feel safer, so you feel more secure, so you learn from other people. And yet what we've been taught in the 20th and 21st century is you have to do stuff by yourself. It's really difficult. You are bound to fail, which for me says you're still controlling me. You're telling me I'm a failure before I've even started, so why would I try? [00:32:42] Speaker B: And I think it probably is very much the reason why we have seen such a huge increase. This also might be because of the way that the world is now with technology, but a huge increase in coaches and transformational speakers and we could name a ton of names of men and women who are out there in the world telling people, look inside yourself, find your values, be brave, take the leap. This is the community of people who are also doing it. So you're not on your own, but live true to yourself, be who you are. There's a space for you in the world trying to hold you in. [00:33:18] Speaker A: My only, biggest challenge with all of that and all of the self help books is for me. No one ever told me why, right. And I think there's a huge power in why does that work? Right. What's going to get in my way on that journey? So you can find your tribe. Yeah. Jack, jet, well done. But you're still going to find this stuff difficult. Right. And no one tells you that. For me, it can be very american. Yay. We're all brilliant. We'll do this, we'll get together. Yeah. No, still, shit's hard work, right? But it's hard work internally and that's never going to change. You can't undo the DNA bits. You can just know that you will feel something, but you don't have to react to it. When you're doing this stuff. Right. You're going to feel frightened. If you stopped, you'd feel safer. But it's got nothing that's not actually realistic. Right. It's just there because it's going, hold on a second. Are we doing the right thing? Oh, yeah. And also, if you then surround yourself with people who are doing it at the same time, your brain will naturally go, oh, yeah, everyone else is doing it. I perhaps have to get on and do it as well. Okay, I'll do it. Doing it. Isn't that wonderful? I'd love there to be some research about how much easier it was to change in a group than as an individual. No one's ever done that psychological research yet. I'm quite sure it'd be really nice to. But then I'm not sure it's ethical to stick two different people in two separate groups. Go, look, they're doing really well. You're shit. It's like one of those drug trials where everyone in the placebo group gets worse and everyone in the drug trial gets better. They literally ethically have to stop the trial, but it's that sort of thing. And I'll come back to that individual bit again, because it's the one of the things that drives me insane, which is it's just you, right? If you're going through something, you're not supposed to share it. You're not supposed to ask for help. Ask for milk to eat. Really. We are the most effective cooperators in history. We do things together. [00:35:43] Speaker B: This is really interesting, as we've talked about before, I'm a muslim, and I pray that, for me, is asking for help. I'm actually quite happy asking for help. More so at this point in my life than I was when I was younger. Is that true? Yeah, I think so. [00:36:05] Speaker A: Will we rephrase that? I think when we ask for help, we're asking for someone else, because you go, help. I need some help to do this. And actually we talk to other people who are doing it. They'd help you anyway. [00:36:16] Speaker B: Yeah, because I think actually we do care about each other. [00:36:23] Speaker A: But it's whether. [00:36:24] Speaker B: The people you're asking for help have the tools with which to help you or the tools with which to give you the help that you require. [00:36:31] Speaker A: Again, I would go back to this. We are obsessed with, oh, have I got the right knowledge? Have I got the right tools? Right. You just need to be with other people and you'll work it out together. This complete deference to someone else who knows more is a product of the fact that we sell knowledge. We make people pay for knowledge. Therefore, we have this really od perspective that if someone has a certain title or a certain shape, that they must know more than us. And they're right. That also, for me, is very weird. But that comes about from knowledge is power, which is another episode. But I would still go back to. I think human beings are very, very good at doing this by themselves. If we could only liberate the fact of being human gain and get away from the fact that we need to always be with someone else who apparently might know more. In the end, it used to be held in the elders in other community and passed on by stories. [00:37:33] Speaker B: My niece, I taught her to swim. [00:37:38] Speaker A: Oh, wonderful. [00:37:40] Speaker B: And it was something that was really important to me because I think swimming is a wonderful, wonderful thing. But she was always quite nervous, right? And she would always say, and she was three. She's only just four. She was three when we started because of COVID it was a bit delayed. I can't do this. Over and over again. I can't do this. I can't do this. I can't do this. I can't do this. And she would be doing it while telling me she couldn't do it. She's holding onto the float. She's kicking. She's moving herself forward. I can't do this. I can't do this. I'd be like, you're doing it. You're telling me you can't do something while you're actually doing it. And so I'd have to keep saying to her, stop telling me you can't do something you're doing, or say, I can't do it yet, or, I don't feel like I'm doing it yet. Because I remember thinking, I have to change this. There's something in here that I've got to change. And she's so small. Where has it come from? Her younger sister leapt into the water and we were all like, well, you actually can't swim. Grab her and slow her down, and has never faced any of the same things. But my older niece, to this day, will tell me that she can't do something that she's never tried before, has no knowledge of being able to do or not. And then when I say, well, let's try, it's really got to be phrased in the right way, encouraged in the right way, with language and not too much pressure. And I feel like there is a discomfort. [00:39:15] Speaker A: Well, yeah, it sounds like she's afraid of failure, and it depends where she's picked that up from, but that's exactly what she sounds like. There is an inherent risk quotient in all of us. Okay? So to be able to do all that change and transformation, our ability to risk is different for different people. So optimizers quite high don't mind risk will throw themselves into a risky situation really quickly, whereas light guards won't or people who make the rules or police the rules. So you have a natural risk quotient right. If I think about mine. And the easiest way to work out your own quotient is look at a situation where you only spend your own money and your own time, let's say like going on, on holiday. You also have to caveat that with live stage because I am the sort of person who'd rock up to the airport with a bag of my passport and goes, where's the next flight out? Amazing. Except when I had children, when I was a little bit more concerned about where I would rock up. Okay, we're really high risk quotient, right? There are so many people who want to go the same place or the same type of place and do the same type of thing year in, year out. So it might be that on one way your niece is reacting to the fact that her risk quotient is quite low, coupled with the fact that she's attached a fear. It sounds really deep that a fear to doing something you are risking that will come from something that she has learned. And you would then get your other niece, who happens to be younger, who will throw herself off anything at any time. Right. And people always go, oh, it's the difference between oldest children and youngest children. No, it's not. My sister never wanted to do anything, whereas I would be the first person always at the front of the queue. Always, yeah, I'll do it. Let me. Outlook don't care because the experience for me overrode any fear factor I might have. So when you're looking at how people react, number one, you will have an inherent risk quotient. So now I've got three things going on in the brain. We've got something you can't predict kicks off your fear mechanism. We've got the fact that the brain doesn't like to spend energy wiring down a new thing, and then you've got your own inherent risk quotient, which is related to how people change as a group. But it would have been interesting to put your niece, oldest niece, three year old, into an environment where there were lots of other children, the same age, lonely, in a group that were all learning together. I mean, that's how I was taught to swim. [00:42:11] Speaker B: Well, that's how I did it. We were in a class with lots of other children. She seemed, I mean, to be fair, I never ever said, well, look, they're all doing it. Why aren't you? Because I don't really ascribe to that notion of that sits to me in building shame. I think it doesn't matter what any person over there is doing. [00:42:33] Speaker A: Don't worry about that. [00:42:34] Speaker B: Are you okay? Are you comfortable? Let's get you to the place where you need to be at your speed. It doesn't matter what anybody else is doing, sort of either side. Life is not about comparison. [00:42:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I didn't want her to be in a group which has been managed, maintained by an adult. I'd like to have seen her in a group of children who were just swimming and talking to each other. Because that's where human group dynamics works best. Not when there is an outside adult managing, controlling. Because technically, you're taking the locus of control external again, instead of internal to the group. Because if they're all conforming to what an adult says, or they're all wanting to be good for that adult, or first for that adult, because that's where trust, power and truth lie. They're not managing themselves as a group, which is the most human way of doing it. I mean, I must admit I learned with all my. Although we had some swimming lessons, it was going down to the local lakes as a group of between three and eight year olds. We used to take ourselves off. No one knew what we were doing. Everyone swam. No one saw it of positive or negative. It's like, well, we're all going swimming, and we all helped each other, right? That's the group. And it's sometimes very, very difficult to be able to imagine a world where we stand back from something that isn't controlled, structured or organized by someone else. [00:44:02] Speaker B: So coming to a sort of quite a topical thing of change. [00:44:06] Speaker A: Oh, yes. I hate it when you do this, because I think she's put me on the spot again. Gladiel. [00:44:12] Speaker B: And we talk about things that we are consciously aware of and unconsciously are going on in the background, and how we can interrogate those things and how we can grow and where do we end up? Unconscious bias is a massive thing that obviously we're talking about in all areas of our life nowadays. It's huge. And it's lovely that it has a name. I think it's lovely that it has a name, because it means that you can identify it should you be willing to do so for all of us. We all have it. So it's actually a unifier. It's not to make anybody feel like they are outside the group. I actually think it's a great unifier of all the people in the world. And the way that we've been programmed is that we all have unconscious bias. [00:44:56] Speaker A: And interestingly, if I was going to put my science hat on, you're unconsciously biased against loads of things, not just people. Right? [00:45:07] Speaker B: Absolutely. [00:45:07] Speaker A: Biases are a way that the brain works in order to. It's an algorithm. It's learned to calculate risk really fast or defend its position. So if you buy something, you will defend your purchase versus someone showing you something new and better really strongly because you've invested time and money in the thing you've bought. So your brain says it's got to be better. That's actually a well known bias. So I'd like us to split the difference between bias, unconscious bias, and then how it's applied to people who don't look like us, think like us, or the group, or act like us. That's different. And it's an algorithm, it's a program, right? What populates that program is what you learn, usually between the ages of zero and ten, but it's a program. This is going to be hugely controversial. The last time I said this, I had a whole tirade of people going, no, training matters. As we've just discussed, you can't train out something that is not a skill you learn. You can't train people not to be unconsciously biased. Bias is not trained, it's not a skill you've developed over your lifetime. It's how your brain works. What we call have termed unconscious bias, is the fact that for most of evolution, and we're talking millions of years, people who didn't look like you, act like you, sound like you, wear what you did, look like you were probably not where you were from and brain were dangerous, or could be why? [00:47:00] Speaker B: Yeah, I think this is the part that is really interesting to me. Why did it go to danger and not curiosity? [00:47:07] Speaker A: It won't, because it's out group. And therefore, if someone who doesn't look like you, act like you, behave like you, it's out group. So it's people who aren't you. Now, depending then on your cultural interaction mechanisms, you see that as positive or negative. So an awful lot of work in indigenous populations and anthropology says that people welcomed outsiders, right? So the aborigines did it. So the inuit population, the native american population, welcomed outsiders. Right? It's the way that certain philosophies in what is called the west, which is Europe, have taught you that anyone who doesn't look like you, act like you, sound like you, is negative. So you take a little program and then you attach something you've been taught to it. And to be fair, that one we've been taught has gone on for a very long time in what is called the west. But it doesn't have to be. These are those things. But it's an algorithm not. And it's an algorithm which takes its data and information from concurrent cultural dynamic. If your concurrent cultural dynamic, like language was to learn English or to learn that an outsider group is an aste, that's all it does. But you can't then untrain it. It's very difficult to unspeak English as your first language or unlearn unless you've been very, very small and you've learned six or seven languages at the same time. You can't train it out. You have to learn to be uncomfortable all the time and know that you're all right. Yeah, it's not going to hurt you. But your concurrent cultural mechanism rule tells you outsiders are bad. And ten minutes of training delivered by some corporate organization tell you no, they're not. Ain't going to change anything. [00:49:08] Speaker B: It's interesting when you think about outsiders being good or bad. Yeah. From a really basic level of, I suppose, skin tone or something like that, where the person actually could culturally be completely the same as you. But you're making a very quick assumption. Obviously what we're talking about unconscious bias where you would assume there's things about them that's different. [00:49:34] Speaker A: What your brain is actually recognizing is a different culture. Right. It does that naturally. There are four emergent characteristics that your brain ever looks at. Oh, they're different. You then ascribe bad to different. You then have been taught that it is uncomfortable to change something from a place of. If it works really well for me, why would I give up and share something if that means I'm going to have less? In a world where I've been taught that it's all about me, this is where all these things start to intersect. Yeah. And that's why it's interesting. [00:50:21] Speaker B: I think it's why equality is struggled with a huge amount. Because for a demographic of people, equality means that they lose, right? They don't want the world equal. They're used to sitting a bit higher than everybody else. So if we are all equal, they. [00:50:38] Speaker A: Stand to lose and they won't want to do that because they don't know. [00:50:44] Speaker B: Why would you give that up? [00:50:45] Speaker A: Well, actually in human societies then, that was never a thing. It's only in the past 5000 years of certain specific religious structures and patriarchal control, which means that the many serve the few. If you look far deeper into the anthropological record, and there's some really interesting stuff around that right at the moment, sort of around about as deep and dark as we can get around the Stone Age. Looking at the fact that when trustparent truth is held by one person or a number of people, that wasn't the consistent model for most of human evolution. Leadership changed to the state the group had to be in. So if we're all working together to build Stonehenge and we all came together, there could have been one, but we are doing this together. But then we broke up into smaller bands and became hunter gatherers again. Right. Which then again needs a different form of leadership. What we've had or what we've been taught, is that leadership is about a person, not a process. And it's about a single, usually male, 99% of the time, male being. Right. No one has a monopoly on the right answer. And how the hell can one person know what's best for hundreds of thousands of people? We've got completely off the topic of change, and then it impacts on what's called dynamic cultural memory as well, and how we remember who we are and where power sits. [00:52:24] Speaker B: How can we get comfortable with change? [00:52:28] Speaker A: Number one, really have a good look at what it is you're trying to change. Right? So I would ask if you're going back to the people who lost, and you didn't say if they're female or male, which is great, huge loss of weight when they got married, right. That's conforming to a rule that's not actually change. Or you go back to something that, I don't want to do this anymore, or, I don't want to think about myself in this way anymore. I don't want to prescribe to this way of thinking anymore. First of all, you need to work out how deeply it is inscribed in your brain. Is it something you learned in this lifetime? Is it a biological program? Right. So when we talk about the donuts, you cannot change the fact you, like fat or sugar, take them out of your environment. Think about them in a different. It's going to be hard, right. However you can. And also, then they call them knowing your triggers. Right? But the trigger is usually biological. How deep is programmed? Is it a program I can change? Is it a program I can't change? If it's a program I can change? How long ago did I learn to think about myself in this way? So, for me, it's actually about having a value to anyone, because I was taught I didn't unless I did exactly what someone else said when they said it. And when they said it, it's probably taken me to the last five years to. And I've been challenging myself since I was 18 to really start to get to the bottom of that and undo it. And I wish now I knew far more about how change happens, because I'd found more people who had the same problem. Because then I'd have a new group to attach to. Then I'd have a new group to work this through. And for me, it doesn't even matter if that group knows how to do it, right? It just has the intention that it will. That's all that matters. Right. Because usually someone else's knowledge about how to do something has been developed in a patriarchal, structured, controlled manner. None of that's very human. And I don't mean this as taking down the patriarchy. It's the fact that that's just the way our culture has structured for a long time. Okay? There are other ways of looking at the world. [00:54:49] Speaker B: So learn to be uncomfortable. Don't be frightened of discomfort. [00:54:53] Speaker A: Learn to be uncomfortable. Work out where that is. Is it something I can't do anything about as it's a biological thing or is it not? Find a group who want to do it, and just turn up and keep turning up. Just turn up and keep turning up and keep that where you want to go in mind. And also be prepared. If this group's not working or doesn't work fast enough for you, find another group. You are human. This is what they do. But if you stay in the group you're in, whether that's your local family or that don't support that change, and they won't, because it's not you, it's them. And it could be, let's say it's food and you want to be thinner. But your mother's always been told that if she doesn't feed everyone, she's a failure. And if you don't eat, she's a failure. And yet she'll also tell you're supposed to be thin and pretty. We're screwed from day one. But having that knowledge, knowing she's not doing it on purpose. Yeah, I think it's quite liberational, because then you have the ability to go, I can choose. [00:56:02] Speaker B: Knowing you can choose, I think, is possibly the most powerful thing in the world. [00:56:07] Speaker A: Yes, completely. And knowing why that is now a choice, that's what it's always been for me. Why does this happen? Why am I being told these things? What is it I can do about it? But I wish I'd know that there was the group stuff. I would have spent so long beating myself up about. I can't do it. [00:56:31] Speaker B: Thank you so much. [00:56:32] Speaker A: Thank you. I hope that's helped. Thank you for listening. [00:56:41] Speaker B: Thank you for coming on the journey with me, with us. [00:56:45] Speaker A: Well, you're the explorer, Marheen. [00:56:47] Speaker B: I'm off. I'm bashing into the undergrowth of our. [00:56:52] Speaker A: Brains and into all that programme prodding around, gallivanting within that programming. What we want to do, as we've always done with this, is help you understand why you feel the thoughts that you do and then the behavior behind that. So you have a choice of how you behave and who profits by it. And if it's not you and it's not humankind, then stop and think and go. Who's controlling who's behind my steering wheel? So I want to invite you back, whether you're on a walk, going for the train, on that commute, taking a bath, even cooking, driving a car. Wherever you find yourself, come and find us. We will be waiting.