What's one of your tools or ways to make better decisions about the future?

I'll give you the sort of four-parter, which each have their own framework, but just a four-part framework that I use in the book, and it's called the four Ds.

And the first one is diffusion, and this means diffusing the emotions.

In a nutshell, we don't make good decisions when we feel strong emotion.

And I'm not saying negative emotion, but I'm saying strong emotion.

When you're elated or when you're depressed or when you're anxious or when you're fearful or when you're terrified, you're not likely to make the best kind of decisions.

Because the feeling is so strong, it can often get us to make decisions on what we want to be true, even though we've no evidence for it, or we make decisions just to keep us safe, even though they aren't the best decisions for us.

What about influence? If you wanna influence another person of a concept, of an idea, of a solution.

I can see myself as a leader making these mistakes, ma- doing these things that you talk about." So I've littered the entire book with personal stories as well as publicly known stories from, you know, from big organizations, uh, global organizations.

And if you look at it, like Amy Edmondson, an amazing, you know, thought leader that's endorsed your book, her work in psychological safety.

If you look at Mel Robbins, very different, not as academic as, you know, either.

Um, if you look at Adam Grant, if you look at Brené Brown, these are people that are what I call belief leaders, not just thought leaders, but belief leaders.

Because they're convincing people, like Adam Grant, the importance of thinking again, uh, the importance of, you know, uh, what it means to be original and the fact that sometimes procrastinating can have benefits, right? You know, uh, givers do better than takers overall, but can actually do worse as a...

Like, all of these are ideas, but the main goal of those books is to convince people in such a way that people believe it.

And so as a leader, we also have ideas.

Why would we fear success?

How does that inform the art of telling stories for you? Like, stories that actually grab an audience and keep them.

Well, I like to say I'm obsessed with story, and that's because I use a acronym called OCD to be able to describe the three neurochemicals that are involved in terms of storytelling.

The first is oxytocin, and oxytocin is a chemical that's connected to pretty much-- It's known as the love hormone, the cuddle chemical, the trust hormone, but it's fundamentally a chemical that causes us to feel a sense of bonding with others.

And whenever you tell a story, the most important thing that you need to start with is grabbing the attention of the audience so that they genuinely care about what happens to the person, so they have to align themselves with the protagonist.

So whenever you share a story, the story should be set up so that whoever you're telling the story about is someone that the audience can identify with.

So it should be some-something that the audience says, "Oh, I can relate to that." And it doesn't mean that the audience-- If you're telling a story about an astronaut, right? It doesn't mean that the audience has to go, "Whoa, I've always wanted to be an astronaut." It could simply mean that you're connecting with something, uh, with someone that has a goal, like they've always wanted to be an astronaut.

Everything about them has wanted to be an astronaut, and yet they're finding that this one difficulty is preventing them from doing it.

Talk to us about that inner voice and how we stop ourselves from comparing ourselves to everyone in the room who might be 15 years ahead of us, from feeling like we're not good enough, and so on.

Yeah.

And that question was so powerful because it almost, like, in a cynical way, forced me to imagine what I was doing to them, and it changed the feelings that I felt at this moment.

And so it wasn't the fact that I loved them that saved me, because lots of people end their lives and they love the people and the people love them, but it's the fact that it drew my attention and it caused me to feel quite strongly that there's no way I could do this.

And I think in many ways, it changed my belief in that moment from believing I needed to die to believing I needed to live.

And I think all my life that's what I've been searching for.

All those journeys to, you know, or, uh, countries like North Korea, all the work I've done from a corporate perspective as a therapist when I work with thousands of clients, it's always been working on this notion of how do you help a person to change beliefs? And I believe fundamentally we need to look at it from three gates that we go through.

The belief has to feel right, it has to fit in with who the person is, and only then will it make sense.

Yeah

So talk about how we can start to look at our identity as maybe leading us astray and what we can do to actually get back on track.

Beautiful.

So first of all, our identity is simply a set of stories we sell to ourselves about who we are, and those stories are based upon our behavior, but they're also based upon, crucially, our interpretation of our behavior, and they're also influenced by the stories other people told us about our behavior, other people told us about who we are.

So we're dealing with a whole host of all of these different things.

When you both work with people and you help them with regards to their social intelligence and their ability to be able to be better at communicating and reading the room and understanding themselves more effectively, the reason that's so impactful is because, to your point, it changes how they see themselves first and foremost, and that frees them up to be much more effective in the way in which they communicate, and therefore they become more persuasive, not just because they've learned some tools or techniques, but because their very presence is more persuasive because of who they are, and they become a more persuasive person as a result.

And I think there's three types of identity I kind of look at, and I'll give you the, the, the third one is the one that we all want to work towards, and I'll give you a couple of things that can help us to be more like that.

The first is perceived identity.

Maybe describe a situation where you recognized that there had to be a belief shift for you, and pull on that thread for us and walk us through how you became antifragile in your view.