1098: How to Achieve Your Biggest Goals through Self-Persuasion with Jay Heinrichs

Pete Mockaitis
Jay, welcome!

Jay Heinrichs
Thanks, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I should say welcome back. It’s been nine years, and I’m still podcasting. You’re still talking about persuasion. So here we are.

Jay Heinrichs
Yet you don’t look a day older.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you’re too kind. I’m sure that’s not true. Three kids and more have materialized in the intervening period. But I’m excited to chat about your latest work, Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion. And, yeah, I think that really resonates because, I think, many of us find ourselves wishing we were more persuasive with ourselves to get to the gym or any number of things.

Could you share with us, perhaps, one of the most surprising discoveries you’ve made about us humans and self-persuasion over your years of researching this stuff?

Jay Heinrichs
Yeah, you know, I was really stuck with this because rhetoric, which is my beat, as you know, the art of persuasion, has to do with manipulating other people without their knowing it, essentially. It’s a dark art. And what do you do when the audience, as we say in rhetoric, is you, is your own lame, not gym-going self?

So, I was kind of stuck in life for some years ago when my wife said, “Why don’t you apply all those cool tools of persuasion on yourself?” She was thinking, maybe this would put me in a better mood and get me in better shape and all that good stuff. And I said, “Well, you can’t. You can’t do that with yourself.” But my wife is really smart, I do everything she says.

So, I went back and did a deep dive in Aristotle, who wrote the original book on rhetoric, as you know, and discovered a book I hadn’t read by him, crazily called On the Soul. And I say that’s crazy because his idea of the soul is nothing like what we hear about in church or temple. It has to do with, like, your most noble self, the person you wished you saw in the mirror. And Aristotle actually thought that might even be an organ in your body.

A later philosopher said he found it, he said, “Your soul is located within your pituitary gland,” so now you know. But so, the fact that that soul, if I could really understand what that meant and then convert that soul into the audience, the person I was trying to convince, that I was better than it seemed to be, then maybe that was a way I could persuade myself. And it led to a really, really interesting year, in particular, where I experimented on myself.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s very intriguing, indeed. Okay. Well, we just can’t let it lie. How’s the soul in the pituitary gland now?

Jay Heinrichs
Well, I think it has to do with things that sort of trigger your motivation. But I am no biologist and the guy who said that was Rene Descartes, who lived a long time ago, so I’m not sure he knew either.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, got you. Well, but, in a way, I think there’s some wisdom to that, in that which we naturally intrinsically find delightful or dreadful has a tremendous steering force into the shape of our destiny.

Jay Heinrichs
No question about it. The other thing is what we feel ashamed of, and that long-term shame we call guilt, that stops us from things. Also, our sense of identity, like who we are. It’s funny, because I brag about how good I am at napping all the time. I’m a champion napper. And when I tell people that, after they get past that big napping ego of mine, they, invariably, say, “I’m not a napper,” or, “I don’t nap.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s who I am.

Jay Heinrichs
And that’s a way of saying, “My soul doesn’t nap. I am not the kind of person who naps.” That’s an identity thing. And so, by getting in touch with the part of you that’s not screwing up daily, but actually is someone who would be meeting your goals, your best self, you actually can, by trying to convince your soul, that you actually are a napper, you become a better a napper. Your identity actually can change a little bit.

So, yeah, you’re right. It’s what we feel good about, what we feel bad about. But more than that, it’s sort of what satisfies us the most, what’s most important to us. Now, not to drone on too much about this, but this is what we’re talking about. One of the ways to detect who that soul is, who you really are deep down, is to plan your next vacation, which is super fun.

And if your vacation, like your dream vacation, is the kind of place people already go, I mean, I talk in the book about the Mona Lisa. You go into the Louvre and, you know, it’s in a room and everybody is jumping up and down, holding their phones up so they could record the moment. What are they doing? It’s actually kind of a small picture. You can’t really see it all that well. It’s better to go online, you know, and see it.

Why are people doing that? It’s because that’s what’s expected of them, what they think a good educational vacation must be. That’s hearing from other people and not from your truest self. So, if you think about the things that you would really love to do that other people don’t, that’s not prestigious, you know, that doesn’t make a good Instagram photo, that’s what your soul is telling you. And that’s one of the ways you can detect what that soul is, according to Aristotle.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a good one. Or, I’m thinking about, when people sort of self-deprecatingly refer to themselves as a total nerd or dork for such and such a thing, I think that’s actually profoundly insightful in terms of, “Yes, you recognize that this thing that does not delight the vast majority of humans, intensely delights you. Go for it,” if it’s your nerd or dork, for productivity, or for the gym, or for process optimization, or for air flight, airline baggage processing. I know someone like that. I mean, that’s awesome. Like, lean into that.

Jay Heinrichs
I wish I had written that in my book. That is a great way to put it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, shucks.

Jay Heinrichs
This idea, where if somebody is saying, “I’m such a…” unless they’re saying, “I’m such a loser.” You are connecting yourself with your soul when you even think that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, could you tell us maybe a fun story of either yourself and/or others – let’s do both, please – in which people, in fact, did some Aristotle-style self-persuasion and were able to see some cool transformations from it?

Jay Heinrichs
Well, let’s talk about me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly.

Jay Heinrichs
And the reason why is, I actually was skeptical about this very idea that I could use these tools of rhetoric for myself? Now, my background is as a journalist, so naturally I’m skeptical of everything, and I’m not just going to jump into stuff without really getting the facts right. Well, how do I do that when I’m talking Aristotle?

Well, what I did was I decided I would have a year-long experiment, where I would try to convince myself to do something stupid and pointless, and really, really hard, and make myself believe that it was the most awesome thing I had ever done. I mean, that’s a way to persuade myself.

And then, in order to accomplish that goal, I had to completely change my habits, my diet, my whole workout strategy, and all the rest.

Pete Mockaitis
Stupid, pointless, and hard.

Jay Heinrichs
Stupid, pointless, there’s a book title for you. So what I did, and talk about my being a nerd in the truest Aristotelian sense, when I’m stuck on anything, my secret delight, well, not so secret now, is to go to the Oxford English Dictionary and just look words up.

And I thought, “I wonder if hyperbole is a trope?” Now, why was I doing that? It was because I’m really interested in tropes, which change people’s idea of reality. If somebody says, “This is shovel-ready,” a project is shovel-ready, that changes people’s opinion of what that project might be. When we’re going to invade a country, we talk about having boots on the ground. We’re not throwing boots out of helicopters. Boots are involved, but not that directly.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s very visceral. You imagine, “Yeah, there’s a shovel going into there,” or, “There’s people marching. Okay, I’m right with…” or, “We’re wheels up.” It’s like, “Okay, I got what you’re saying. Not just, we’re kind of ready to go. It’s like, straight up, the wheels are up.”

Jay Heinrichs
You get it, yeah. So, it simplifies things but, at the same time, it changes your idea of what that even is, and it creates a kind of a vision in your head. So, I was wondering, “Isn’t hyperbole that?” in the sense that, when someone exaggerates something, they start seeing something different, they start thinking bigger, in a way, even while they’re being skeptical about whether this thing is just exaggeration.

So, anyway, I look it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, and I knew that hyper comes from the Greek. It means above or beyond. What does bole mean? Well, it turns out, it’s where we get the word ball from. Now, talk about being a geek, I’m doing that right now. And it also means to throw. And I thought, “Hyperbole means to throw beyond.” And the Greeks were so good at this in coming up with things.

Like, this is the trope that throws beyond things, goes farther. And I thought, I had this instant image in my head of being like a dog who can throw its own ball. I was going to throw this ball into the distance and chase after it, and see if I could catch it. And I thought, right away, something I’ve always wanted to be able to do is to run my age up a particular mountain.

There’s a mountain in New Hampshire where Olympians test their oxygenation, their VO2, and their lactate removal and all that stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Jay Heinrichs
Only a dozen people had ever run their age up this mountain, which is running to the top of this 2,800-foot elevation gain, 3,800-foot mountain in 3.6 miles in fewer minutes than they’re old in years. In other words, if you can go from the trailhead to the top of this mountain and you are 30 years old and you do it in 29 minutes, you have run your age, if that makes sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you better start soon.

Jay Heinrichs
Exactly. And I’m way too old for it. Now, the good news is, the older you get, the more minutes you have to run this mountain. But no one had ever done it over age 50. And two physiologists had said, they thought it was probably impossible. That your body can’t remove the heat, the lactate, your oxygenation is going to be, your VO2 is going to go lower from year to year, plus, the power you need goes down pretty dramatically after age 30.

They were telling me all this stuff about why it’s impossible, and I thought, “That’s perfect.” You know, all I need to do is to convince myself, in a way, that makes me put in the effort. And if I don’t achieve it, well, I have a great story. I’ll still write a book about it. Well, so I spent the next year losing 28 pounds, and I was already fairly skinny, so I had less to hoist up the mountain.

I was working out four hours a day. Our income went down dramatically, along the way. And the whole time, I was coming up with all these rhetorical strategies, these tools to convince myself that this is awesome, that I’m the kind of person who can do this. I actually reset my time zone so that I would start getting up at 4:00 in the morning in order to have the time to do this. And I’m still in that time zone. I call it Jay-light saving.

So, the only problem with that is no one else is on that time zone except for my wife. So, it makes me very boring at night. It’s like, “That’s not my time zone. I’m not going to that party.” But as a result, I ended up achieving more than I ever thought I could, in part, because I was using all these very particular tools. So maybe we can talk about some of them. But I won’t tell you whether I actually accomplished that goal. You have to read the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, look at you now, Master Rhetorician. What do we call that, the withholding of something to stoke intense curiosity? There’s got to be a word for that, Jay.

Jay Heinrichs
Well, in Greek it’s called the tease. No, that’s English.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s very straightforward. Jay-light savings time. Well, it’s so funny, boy, you say that challenge, I was like, “This feels like this was made for Peter Attia to work on.” If you know that guy.

Jay Heinrichs
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So, understood. Stupid, pointless, and hard. First, I got to double-check that. When you first conceived of this, did a part of you light up, like, “Oh, that’d be so awesome”?

Jay Heinrichs
I have to admit, yes, I did. In part, because I had, in my youth up until mid-40s, been an avid trail runner. I mean, I loved the outdoors, and I wasn’t great at it. I was an enthusiast. And every year, I had been the last person to run up Moosilauke on the annual time trial up the mountain. I was terrible.

In fact, to show you what kind of an athlete I was, no one ever thought of me as an athlete until, one day, on that very mountain, the night before, I had had a book come out, and friends held a book party for me to celebrate the publication. And late in the evening, a really good friend showed up with a bottle of Scotch. I’d already had quite a bit of champagne.

We killed that bottle of Scotch at about 3:00 o’clock in the morning. And at 11:00 o’clock, I was running up, or trying, to run up this mountain. I actually made it to the top where I was violently ill. And the coach who was timing the finishers at the top, who knew me, came over and asked if I needed an evacuation. And I said, “I’ve been evacuating all the way up the mountain. You don’t want to go down that trail.”

Pete Mockaitis
Hotdog.

Jay Heinrichs
And so, all these amazing ex-Olympians, afterward, down at the base when I staggered back down, holding my stomach, they had heard what I had done and they couldn’t believe that I had done that much drinking almost all night and still got to the top of that mountain. They didn’t care what my time was.

From then on, they started inviting me to run with them, and I was like part of them. All of a sudden, I was an athlete and it was because all I had accomplished was struggling up to the top. Now, I thought, when I was reading the Oxford English Dictionary, and thinking about hyperbole, I thought, “What if I actually could do something truly athletic, like be the first geezer, old guy, you know, to run his age up to that summit?” And that became a different kind of goal.

Now, why is this important in an Aristotelian sense? It’s because my soul, my truest sense of self, is an enthusiastic outdoorsman and the athlete I never was. And one of the things that Aristotle talks about is in order to be happy, you need to be able to separate your daily self from your truest self, your soul. In other words, all your bad habits aren’t your truest self. Your good habits are. And what are they and how do you get there? Well, that’s how you have this, you know, dialogue with your soul.

And so, I really was thinking about this immediately with that term hyperbole, to throw myself beyond, “Well, who’s myself? And how am I throwing it?” Well, my truest, deepest self is way better an athlete than I had ever proven myself to be with my daily habits. And that led to new daily habits that I continue to this day.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, before hours of training a day and substantial income sacrifice, I, first, got to ask, what did the wife think about this process?

Jay Heinrichs
My wife makes benefits. That helps a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
But she was encouraging you along the way?

Jay Heinrichs
She was. She said the scariest four words I’ve ever heard when I told her what I wanted to do. She said, “I believe in you.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow.

Jay Heinrichs
And it was like, “Oh, my God, now I really have to do it. And I have to do it well,” you know? So never mind my soul, it’s my wife, for crying out, my soul mate.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, let’s hear some of this rhetoric. I imagine there are days when you didn’t feel like doing the training. What does one say to themselves in such situations?

Jay Heinrichs
Well, so one of the biggest things, Aristotle was the original and still the best, I think, philosopher of habit, and he kind of talked about how to do that. And one way to do that was he created what I call the lure and the ramp. The lure is something you really want, an outcome you would love to achieve or get. The ramp is this idea that you don’t launch yourself into doing awesome pushups right away or working out for four hours for that matter.

So, the first thing I thought was, “Okay, I need time. I need to carve out a particular amount of time, and this would be time for me, starting with two hours.” And so, I waited actually until the time zone changed to Standard Time from Daylight Saving, where the US government grants you and me with an extra hour every day before they take it away with Daylight Saving in the spring.

So, already, all I had to do was set my watch back or keep it the way it was, essentially, to get up the same time I had been getting up, regardless of what the time zone told me. And that already saved an hour. And then I ratcheted it up again another hour after a while. Now, I didn’t start working out. I didn’t start doing anything for meeting my goal of running up a mountain except for reading.

I read inspiring books about running and the outdoors and trail running and that sort of thing. And then I segued to harder books on physiology to see what I could do. Not working out. Then gradually, I got so bored with the physiology books that, actually, an indoor workout started sounding pretty good. And then after a while, I really wanted to go outside. So, I started running outside with a headlamp in the early dark.

And so, just little by little, over a course of about nine months, I finally built up to the full, brutal four-hour a day schedule. That’s the ramp. So that was one thing. Too many people make this mistake when it comes to any kind of habit during the day, I think. One is they set their goals too low.

When you hear about exercise from your doctor, the doctor is so used to patients just not doing anything they’re supposed to do, they’ll say, “You know, walk 20 minutes a day. It won’t do a lot of good, but it’s better than nothing. And that’s all you might be able to do if I can get you to do that.” Or, other people will set unrealistic goals and then launch into them immediately and realize how hard it is. And every time they reach a setback, they decide they’re incapable of it.

And that’s where the ramp really can come in. So, one of the things I encourage people, for any new habit that’s going to take time, carve out the time. And one way to do that is to think, “What’s the most wasted time of the day?” And for me, it was watching videos at night, like total waste of my time. Plus, you know, the streaming services now kind of suck. The content has gotten worse.

Pete Mockaitis
You’ve already seen all the good shows.

Jay Heinrichs
Exactly. After COVID, they stopped making a lot of it. So, anyway. So, carve out that time by simply going to bed earlier and getting up earlier. And I decided to glamorize the whole thing by calling it Jay-light saving, my very own time zone. That’s one thing, you know, the time and then just gradually building up.

Now you mentioned what happens if you’re kind of stuck and you just can’t motivate yourself. I was almost ashamed to write about this because I was reading also a lot of neurology books, talking to experts, brain and mind experts, and reading a lot of journals to see where rhetoric intersects with science, which I’ve been doing for many years.

And you know about affirmations, that things you tell yourself, actually they work. And here, I wanted to come up with this innovative new stuff. One of the best things to do was I deliberately came up with stupid expressions that I knew would make me embarrassed to say them aloud, and I would say them aloud. Again, this is a way to kind of talk myself into believing things.

Pete Mockaitis
Is it more helpful if they’re stupid?

Jay Heinrichs
I mean, yes, in one sense. There’s this concept that Aristotle wrote about called receptivity, and modern behaviorists call it cognitive ease. And if you’re smiling, you’re more persuadable. If you could get people, see, I’m persuading you right now, you’re smiling. So, saying something stupid can make you smile, even if it’s an embarrassed smile, and that actually kind of changes the brain and makes you more receptive to new information or new ideas.

Now, here’s the other thing I discovered though, which is, the ancients had this expression that’s very rhythmic called the paean, which now means, you know, song of praise or a speech that praises somebody. But what it originally was, was a god of healing, or a god that protected all the other gods on Olympus, or wherever.

And soldiers, as they were running into battle, with their spears and shields and everything, would pray to the god Paeon to protect them. And at the time, they believed that if you did it with a kind of rhythm, the way a lot of our prayers and hymns are now in, say, church, it would work better. Like, the god would listen if we did it with a rhythm.

Later, Cicero, the Roman rhetorician and orator, said what that rhythm was, and it was like this combination of short and long syllables. I know this is getting in the weeds, but it really worked for me because, if I could do things that maybe rhymed or had a particular rhythm, it would work better. And if you look at Madison Avenue of slogans, and by the way, those paean war cries became known as slogans, which was the war chant was originally a slogan.

If you look at corporate slogans today, “Bet you can’t eat just one,” that is a perfect paean. That has the same rhythm as what, apparently, ancient Greeks were running in a battle to murder each other saying aloud. Same kind of rhythm. Now I did that saying to myself, “I’m strong and light and taking flight,” and a bunch of other things I did.

And what I did was I repeated them over and over and over and over again, and, “My legs love rocks. I flow up rocks.” And I would do that, and the repetition itself strengthens the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain that interprets reality. In other words, you can literally change the reality in your head through repetition.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, so, “Bet you can’t eat just one.” Give us a few more examples so we can feel that rhythmic groove as we’re crafting our own.

Jay Heinrichs
New York Times, “All the news that’s fit to print.” Bounty, “The quicker picker-upper.” So, it’s a combination of short and long syllables, and you don’t have to get too precise to do it. I mean, what Cicero said was it should be a combination of short and long syllables. I see no evidence in science, not that it’s been tested that much.

But, yeah, I mean, the idea is to come up with something that sounds rhythmic, and rhyming can help as well, that gets you out of a daily pattern of speech. I think that’s what it’s really about. It’s got to sound kind of different and weird, in a way, and that makes it stickier.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, boy, this is reminding me of so many random little tidbits. And I’m thinking about Cal Newport, a guest of the show, Deep Work. He says something kind of silly at the end of his work day, as he’s sort of like wrapping up, finishing the last emails, shutting down the computer. And he says something like, I think even robotic, like, “Shut down sequence complete.”

And so, you know, it’s goofy, but sure enough, I mean, it has cemented that habitual work groove of, “Yeah, and I don’t check my devices after work. I’m with my family, I’m doing things, and it’s working fantastically for me.”

Jay Heinrichs
That is a paean, “Shut down system complete.” So, the nerdiest basketball fans are in the Ivy League. If you watch an Ivy League basketball game, you’ll hear people yell the perfect paean, “Repel them. Repel them. Make them relinquish the ball.”

Pete Mockaitis
Relinquish, a lot of syllables there.

Jay Heinrichs
And that is really like, “Shut down system complete.” It’s the same kind of thing. And I bet it does him wonders when he does that. It makes him feel as if he has truly accomplished something during the day.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m also thinking about how we had Dr. Steven C. Hayes, who’s famous for promulgating ACT, acceptance and commitment therapy, talks about these words, phrases. Defusion, he calls the practice. If you say a word over and over again or put it to music, it sort of changes your emotional relationship to that, or if you replace it with something.

And he also mentions about perfectionism. Often when we do something, and if you struggle with perfectionism, it’s like you hear the critique of someone else’s voice about how you’re doing it wrong or not up to their standards. And this is recent, and talking about the silly things we do, before, I used to get in this mental habit loop, which is not at all productive, where I’d hear some other voice criticizing me for something.

And then I would get defensive, it’s like, “Well, no, it’s necessary because of this and this and this. I’m not concerned with that right now. And right now, the focus is that…” whatever. And so, then you are kind of worked up, it’s like you’re having an argument with nobody. And so, now I’ve recently decided, just to be silly with it, I sing.

And if I hear that critical voice, I respond with the song, “The Reason” by Hoobastank, because I thought it was just sort of, you know, cheesy lyrics, “I’m not a perfect person, there’s many things I wish I didn’t do.” And so, it just makes me chuckle like, “Ha, ha, ha, that’s silly.” And then I can just move on much faster.

So, you’re really connecting some dots in terms of, if we make it silly and repetitive, we really do have a different internal emotional response, which flows into downstream results.

Jay Heinrichs
And not only that, but it slightly shifts your whole idea of reality and your own identity when you do that. And there’s lots of science that backs this up. So, that idea that you’re singing something really silly, I mean, to me, the pointless and stupid part of the goal was partly responsible for my believing that I could achieve it.

Because it wasn’t just like, “It’s impossible. It’s physically impossible. Who am I? I’m no physiologist.” Physiologists tell me I can’t do this. And yet, you know, when I smiled, thinking about it, it made all the difference.

The other thing is, you mentioned perfectionism, and one of the things I was deliberately trying to do was to factor in failure. So, the question was, “Is this goal so awesome that I can fail up?” I was 58 years old when I attempted this run up the mountain, and I did it on a single day, which happened to be my birthday where I gained an extra minute to run up this mountain overnight. I had an extra minute.

And I thought, “Well, if I run it in, like, 59 or 60 minutes, does that make me a bad person? That is a really good time to run up that mountain.” And I thought, “Yes, it would be a failure. I would not have achieved my goal of running my age. I couldn’t brag about being the 13th person in history ever to do it. On the other hand, it’s pretty awesome.” And I think that that’s something when you create.

I actually talk about a capital H, hyperbole, like, “What’s your Hyperbole? What do you want to do?” And it could be, it doesn’t have to do with athletics or anything. It could be learning a musical instrument and then heading to Paris and busking on the streets, you know. Or, you know, learning how to cook for the very first time and serving this amazing meal to a crowd of people you don’t know, you know, something that just sounds ridiculous and impossible.

But the whole idea of what your Hyperbole is ought to build to, “All right, if the dish fails, if you can’t get on the streets, if nobody throws money into your hat, or whatever, on the streets when you’re singing, is that a failure?” Yeah, it is. You have to recognize that. But it also gives you a very different opinion of what failure is. You’re so much better than you were before.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I like that a lot. And it’s, as opposed to some failures, it’s like, “Well, now I’m in a tight spot because I risked all my money on that venture. Whoopsies.”

Jay Heinrichs
Yeah. Well, and there is a matter of framing. That’s another rhetorical tool that I found to be hugely important, which is, “All right, what is that tight spot, really? And what is there to be gained from that spot?” Such as, “This is not a failed company. It’s an education. And I would have spent that much on college.” I mean, that would be one way to reframe it.

In my case early on, one of the problems I had, when I planned to run my age up this mountain was, I was having trouble walking. I had this terrible ailment called snapping hip syndrome, an extreme version of it, where your iliotibial band, the tendon that runs up your leg into your hip, was catching on the hip bone on both sides. And when it did that, I’d literally fall to the ground.

The first time it ever happened, I was actually in a meeting back when I had a legitimate job as a manager. I was chairing this meeting. I got up at the end of it, and I literally fell to the floor, and I had to go to do a presentation. My staff ran out and bought me a cane. How embarrassing is this? The cab driver, this is pre-Uber, helped me into the cab. And then I sort of limped, like on one foot, into this client’s meeting where I had to do this presentation in severe pain.

So, nothing worked, by the way, to get me past this. And my doctor said, “I know a guy who might do something with you.” And this doctor had only performed this experimental procedure once, and he said, “Hey, you got nothing else. You want to try it?” “Sure,” I said. And it had to do with several hundred shots of dextrose sugar water in my hips and buttocks.

A hundred-fifty shots the first time to sort of flood the zone of the nerves so that what was happening is, and this is common with a lot of hip problems, the pain causes your muscles to tighten up, and when they tighten up, that pulls the tendon even tighter. So, in order to get me to be less tight, he had to cause severe pain over and over again. It actually worked.

But as I’m lying there, I started thinking, “This isn’t just painful. It’s not PT. This is part of my training. This is the first part of my training. This is what’s going to get me up the mountain.”

I also thought, I went back to what I’d learned from the ancients who said that suffering is a skill. Suffering is not something that you feel sorry for yourself for. It’s something you can feel proud of because you can get through it. You can overcome it. And the more pain and setbacks in your life, the more that proves what your soul really is.

And I was thinking, “I can get through this. I’m pretty good at pain,” you know, even while I’m brightly crying. I’m saying to myself, “You know, I’m really good at withstanding pain.” And running up a mountain is a very painful thing to do. This is preparing me for it. All this is reframing, changing the definition of what the issue is.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Well, I’d also be curious, if we’re having some internal dialogue that sounds sort of like imposter-y sort of vibes, imposter syndrome, like, “Who are you to think that you can possibly blah, blah, blah, blah?” What would be the self-persuasion approach to tackle those?

Jay Heinrichs
Aristotle would say to think analogously, which is to compare one thing that you can do with something that you don’t think you can, and find that there’s a connection there. So, for example, the first time I ever took on a really big management job, where I was responsible for a total of 300 people, and I am an off-the-charts introvert. I actually don’t like managing people, so this seemed not me in any way.

And I thought, “Well, what is managing people? What does that start with?” It really starts with a kind of organization and getting people to understand what that organization is, how all the parts fit together as a kind of system. If people buy into that, they can feel part of something larger than themselves. That’s not, I will never write a business book about this, but that was the way I was thinking at the time.

And I thought, “The problem is I’m not that systematic a guy, and I have no idea where to start with this job.” But then I thought, “Other than napping, my greatest skill is loading dishwashers. I am really proud of it. Ridiculous as it is, I’m proud of it.” And I thought, “That’s organization. I know how things move together with different shapes.”

And I thought, “This is what management is. It’s dealing with people with different personalities and skillsets. And sometimes people are in the wrong place. Sometimes they need to be moved around a bit, or maybe their purpose has to change or whatever. And that’s just dishes in a dishwasher.”

Now, it’s not, but the fact that I started thinking that way, that made me, helped me overcome my imposter syndrome, because I was thinking, “You don’t suck at organization. You’re really good at it.” And just keep repeating that to yourself, “Think dishwasher and you’re good to go.” That’s my belief.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. Well, Jay, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Jay Heinrichs
Let’s just talk about my favorite things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Can you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jay Heinrichs
“Audi Alteram Partem,” which means, “Hear the other side.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Jay Heinrichs
I listen to nonfiction audiobooks. And the one I’m totally in love with, I had never gotten around, is The Boys in the Boat about this rowing team in the Berlin Olympics in 1938, of these ne’er-do-wells who won the gold medal.

And it is a book about not just teamwork, but goal-setting and motivation. I think anybody who works for a living should read this book, especially if they want to become a manager. It’s absolutely, and it’s a page-turner, though it’s an audiobook.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Jay Heinrichs
The biggest go-to I hear from my readers is the idea of paying attention to whatever tense you’re in, especially in a difficult conversation. So, you want to be able to switch, to pivot the tense to the future, because the past has to do with blame and mistakes that were made, or that never worked.

The present has to do with good and bad and who’s good and who’s bad. And it’s where you get a lot of name-calling going on and tribes forming. If you can say, you know, “Let’s switch to the future. Let’s talk about how we’re going to solve this problem,” good things happen.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Jay Heinrichs
Jay-light saving, man. Just become very unpopular in the evening, but accomplish goals in the morning.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Jay Heinrichs
I’m on Substack, like so many people, but I do a weekly email about motivation and persuasion, that sort of thing. I have a website, JayHeinrichs.com. And then you’ll find me in all the fine social media places.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Jay Heinrichs
I would encourage that idea of time zones. Create your own, I’m serious about this. It’s the single thing that changed my life the most. And I think I would have been better back when I had legitimate jobs if I had done that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jay, thank you.

Jay Heinrichs
Pete, it’s such a pleasure. I love talking with you. Let’s wait less than nine years.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m in, yes.