Steven Hayes discusses how our instincts mentally trap us—and shares powerful tools for liberating your mind.
You’ll Learn:
- The benefits of psychological flexibility—and how to develop it
- Why you need to put your mind on a leash
- The key to taking the sting out of negative words
About Steven
Steven C. Hayes is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno. He’s the originator of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). He’s authored 48 books including Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life (which reached #20 on Amazon’s best-seller list) and A Liberated Mind, which explains why psychological flexibility helps us navigate the world. Methods he has developed are distributed worldwide by the World Health Organization and other major agencies, and he is among the most cited psychologists in the world.
Resources Mentioned
- Book: Walden Two by BF Skinner
Steven Hayes Interview Transcript
Pete Mockaitis
Steve, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.
Steven Hayes
I’m so happy to be here with you.
Pete Mockaitis
I’m so happy to be here with you, too. I’ve been enjoying your book and your interviews, and I think we have more that we could possibly cover in the time available, which is a great problem to have. So, I think, first of all, we got to hear about your extraordinary pushup practice. What’s the scoop here?
Steven Hayes
Well, it’s gone backwards fast, right? But I have long tried to do at least my age in pushups every day. Unfortunately, my son is getting awesome at it, said, “Dad, you’re doing cheater pushups,” so now I’m doing the perfect, absolutely to the floor, nose on the pushups, and suddenly I’m only at about 25% of what I was before, but I’m still committed I’m going to get back to my age, which will probably take me a little while but every day.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was listening to your book, A Liberated Mind: How to Pivot Toward What Matters and I heard you say, “Yes, I do 70 pushups a day.” So, is that 70 cheaters?
Steven Hayes
Yeah, it turns out I don’t actually get all the way down to nose-kissing, so I bought the kind of things that lifts you up so that you can safely hit a pad because I don’t want to smash my face onto the carpet, then I get tired. But it’s just one of those things where an arbitrary thing, like pushups, but it’s just a symbol of, “Can you make a commitment?” just stick to it, and just create a habit that’s values-based and worthwhile, and when you fail, you keep coming back to it. And the move to the perfect part is keep upping the ante. It’s not just the numbers that counts. It’s trying to do it in a quality way.
Pete Mockaitis
And, recently, it seems like you’ve had some very rich moments in terms of you shared with me your Mother’s Day exchange as well as some exchanges leading up to your retirement from the University of Nevada, Reno. Could you tell us a bit about these?
Steven Hayes
Well, the retirement thing kind of links over. I’ve been at this for 47 years, and I got up in front of the student group and, spontaneously, said, “Give a few words.” Of course, you don’t give a microphone to a professor, you deserve what you get, so you get a 20-minute rant. But what I found myself saying to my students as my last word, my last meeting, was that love and loss is one thing, not two.
And that when you really love your job, as I have, the way to do that full out is to know that it’s finite and will pass, and to have that be part of it. That’s why we cry at weddings, why we cry at births, because we know there’s things ahead. There’s a bittersweet quality to life but if you inhale that at the beginning, then you can play all out because you know, in the end, you’re going to be waving goodbye and people eventually will forget you. But, so what?
If you moved the ball down the road, it’ll be there maybe, and in some tiny way for your children’s-children’s children, and that’s worth playing hard. So, I think we often think of winning as some sort of permanent thing, and losing as a horrible thing and such but I think it’s kind of a mixed thing, and the love and loss part is that knowing from the beginning that you’re raising your children for them to leave you. You’re loving the people around you, knowing that they’re going to die. You’re creating a business, knowing that it’ll be passed on to somebody else.
You’re not going to have it forever. So, that’s okay. That’s called life, and it’s, to me, an empowering message. It means we can play full out just like we were when we were three, and we ran to touch that tree and gave it every little ounce of effort without asking the question of, “Oh, is this really important? Will it last forever?” One question.
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I love, in your reflections there, you mentioned that all these things are loving. In the universe of professor-ing and publishing, you’d said that that is also love, publishing articles. Can you expand on that?
Steven Hayes
Yeah, I remind those students that when you do a job like that and do it well, you will love your job if you do your job lovingly. That will go together. I guess unless you’re a professional hit person, all of our jobs are about somehow contributing to the wellbeing of others. And so, could you bring that into your life’s moments so that when it’s 2:00 in the morning and you’re working on this stupid reviewer who asked you to do stupid things with your article or it’s not going to be published, can you really connect with doing even that with care?
It’s like an awesome opportunity to bring the capacity to bring love in the world, into your world and to the world of others by doing a really, really good job, absolutely the best job you can do, without paralyzing in place, that it has to be perfect or you can’t do it. Now, as I say, the love and loss is one thing. It tells us that failure is part of it. Slipping and falling is part of it. When you learned to walk, how many times did you fall down in an average day? A hundred and ten times.
Pete Mockaitis
All right.
Steven Hayes
A hundred and ten times on your diapered butt. And unless you had some sort of nerve injury or something, you eventually learn to balance and walk. So, could you approach your work with that kind of quality of doing it in a way that’s focused on the good that you do for others but not in this perfectionistic, self-critical, heavy, “Oh, my God, what if I fail?” that paralyzes us?
Pete Mockaitis
Well, I love that so much because it’s connected to psychology and insights that are research-based and somewhat modern, and yet also ancient in terms of wisdom traditions. And I’m thinking in my own background of Catholic Christian, thinking about Mother Teresa, do small things with great love, and that’s just a whole lot of goodness to be pursued in that way.
Steven Hayes
Yeah, I was raised in that same religious tradition, and I know all those rituals and stories, and all of our wisdom traditions and religious traditions, all of them, at their best, include this really wise advice, but the human mind needs guidance. Very, very easily, you can turn it into a slog or some sort of narcissistic grand thing, and you forget that it’s the small things that are going to matter, and being part of something bigger than yourself is part of what makes life worth living.
Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. Well, so you are known for the notion of psychological flexibility and acceptance and commitment therapy. And so, it’s funny, in this context, you’ve said in the book that you’re not God’s gift to psychological flexibility, in that that’s something, it’s an ongoing journey. And yet, in a way, your contributions have, indeed, been a gift to all of us, so I want to unpack some of them for us.
First of all, what is psychological flexibility? And how can that help people in general, and, for this show, help us be more awesome at our jobs?
Steven Hayes
Well, it’s the smallest set of things that we do, processes we call them, just from the word, meaning a parade or procession, the sequence of things you do that leads to an outcome. The smallest set of things we do that do the most good things in the most areas known to behavioral science.
And it’s very, very simple. It’s a matter of being more open, aware, and actively engaged in life. If you’re going to be more open, you have to open to the world inside and out. That means your emotions, your thoughts, your memories, your sensations. What does it mean to be open? It means to be able to feel them, to go deeper into them when it’s useful, and respectfully decline the invitation to spend a lot of time on the ones that’s not useful. Being able to sort of see it as just part of the journey.
What does it mean to be aware? It means to be here, consciously present, right here, inside and out. Here’s what’s going on and I’m noticing it. I’m consciously noticing, and I’m noticing you. We’re connected and conscious, we’re working together, we’re creating a cooperative system, or a partnership, or whatever. And then actively engaged, well, actively engaged in the values-based life, creating habits that are focused on what you want your behavior to reflect to the world and to yourself. That’s it.
So, it turns out that those three things each have two things that are part of it, but they’re all really one thing, we call it psychological flexibility, or inflexibility when it goes awry. And in the area of work, for example, if you want to avoid burnout, you want to be effective, if you scale these processes socially, you want to create work teams that have those kind of qualities, creating a psychologically flexible workplace, the environment supports it, and work team so that team reflects it, of workers so the individuals have those skills and they’re actively developing them, you are going to be far more successful as a business, as a business person, as a leader, as a manager, and just as a human being.
So, one of the things that’s really cool, because this small set goes everywhere, you can care about your family, you can care about your kids, you could care about your health, you can care about the world, and you can be massively successful at work with the same processes. You don’t have to turn into somebody else and forget your wisdom training, or your religious background, or how important your family is, and how loving your kids makes a difference to you.
You don’t have to because the processes that empower human beings in one place, empower them another place, when you break out of this normative, categoric way of thinking, that one size fits all deal, or where you are at a Bell curve, and what percentile are you, and all this kind of thing of “Oh, woe is me. I’m too low,” or “Oh, I’m great and grand. I’m so high.” No. What are the things that you do that move your life up or move your life down? Watch it, learn it, observe it, use it, do it. You’re on a journey to success everywhere you look.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, we’re going to get into a couple very specific tactics. And it’s fun, sometimes I like my advice weird, and you got a couple of them, which has a wealth of science supporting it in terms of the efficacy of these tools and approaches. But maybe before we go granular and tactical, can you give us your four-line ditty that summarizes your life’s work?
Steven Hayes
Well, I have a four-line ditty that summarizes everything that I’ve worked on in terms of the human mind and how it works, which is, “Learn it in one, derive it in two; put it in networks that change what you do.” We’re the creatures who can relay anything to anything else in any possible way. That’s what we’re doing right now with language.
We’re able to put a world together in this vast cognitive network, and it took us a long time to do that, almost for sure, it was happening even before homo sapiens.
But this is a tiger that we’re riding because, as soon as you can think about anything in almost any possible way, and create futures that had never been, you can take the same skills and say, “Yeah, I’m successful but I could’ve been so much more successful. Oh, I’m a failure because…”
You can turn good into bad, bad into good, and you can walk yourself into a mental health struggle regardless of whether you’re a billionaire or a pauper, regardless of whether or not you’re loved by many or by virtually no one. That’s a weird skill, and we better learn how to manage it. If we can’t put our mind on a leash, it’s going to put us on a leash.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And can you give us an example of something in our lives that we can learn in one, derive in two, and how that can take us two very different paths?
Steven Hayes
Well, okay, let’s say you’ve had a success experience, and you said, “I’m great.” Okay, that’s great.
Pete Mockaitis
So, that’s me deriving it there, “I’m great”?
Steven Hayes
You derived it, yes, or somebody said it, “Boy, you’re so smart.” Remember the first time, and a lot of the people who were successful who are listening, they had that. They had the teacher, or somebody said, “You’re so smart.” That’s fine. But then it can turn, flip it back the other way to, “Anything I do is smart,” and I’ve never met anybody who everything they do is smart. They may be ‘smart’ in the sense they’re able to learn quickly or so forth.
But once you have kind of bought that, sort of like sawing a fishhook, and it’s hooked into you, you can be that manager who, no matter what other people say, you don’t need to consider their opinions, you’re the smart one in the room, you knew that before you walked in the room.
And you kind of internalized that’s who you are, rather than just a description of what you did, that later on could be a different description. And, yeah, we’re trying to learn how to do smart things, of course, we would. But when you buy into it, “That’s me. It’s like a skin I wear,” there’s a reason why the word personality means the mask that you put on, in Greek. It’s the face that you present.
And once you’re there and you’ve forgotten it, boy, you’re dangerous. You’re going to have a lot harder time listening to other people’s ideas, being genuinely curious about them, exploring them, having a conversation where the whole team can work together, where you can be shown to be smarter as being part of a group because other people have ideas sometimes that are better than yours. That’s just one example.
Derive it in two, “I’m smart. Okay, because I did this, I’m smart. Okay, now, because I’m smart, everything I do is like that.” No, that’s not true, and you better hold that lightly. Learn that first step of learning to be open. Just be open to thoughts that are helpful and thoughts that aren’t, ideas that work, ideas that don’t, emotions that are useful here, emotions that don’t deserve a whole lot of attention right now.
So, that flexibility of taking what’s useful and leaving the rest requires a certain kind of humility and learning by experience. You kind of metaphorically have to fall down on your cognitive diapered butt multiple times before you can get through your thick skull that some thoughts are useful and some thoughts aren’t, some of your ideas are good, some aren’t, and to learn how to really be an effective manager, be a creative leader who can bring it every day, but also empower the team to do the same.
Pete Mockaitis
And so, the putting it in networks is “I’m relating this notion ‘I’m smart’ to all kinds of other things in the world.” Is that also maybe sort of a neuroscience network neuron concept as well?
Steven Hayes
It is, although we know so little about how the brain really works. It’s a huge network. So, the networks of cognition, let’s say in emotions and memories and so forth don’t go one to one. There are underlying networks that build the human brain. But we do know that the underlying neurobiology of what I’m saying is positive.
If you take something like psychological flexibility skills, when you can apply those in your world, you’re much less likely to be dumping stress-related hormones. It’s much easier to build new brain circuits. You’re not pushing the start button on these survival circuits of almost ingrained kind of automatic reactions of finding safety, or attack towards others.
So, even down to the point of being able to have slower age-related decline in your cells. You can keep your body tuned by helping your mind be attuned to creating a safe place for you to have a history that includes difficult things. We’ve all had potentially traumatizing-inducing events, if not actual trauma. Just turn on your television, look at your smartphone, and you have potentially trauma-inducing events all around you in the modern world.
How are you going to be able to sort of not go into that almost alligator brain stem freeze or flee or fight kind of system? You’re going to have to learn how to have modern minds for the modern world, the meditators, and the Christian mystics, and the Buddhist, and all of them. All the wisdom traditions all have ways of reining in this kind of alarm-based, safety-based mind.
And so, yeah, I think the networks involved, networks of habits, thoughts, emotions, etc., that all come together as one empowered person who’s able to get better and better. It doesn’t mean you’re great and grand, as you kindly mentioned. I’m no shining star of psychological flexibility. If you want proof of that, talk to my wife. But I’m working on it. I’m working on it.
Pete Mockaitis
Well, and, again, we’re going to get into some of these tools. I think, maybe, the favorite thing I’ve read from you is, “You hurt where you care, and you care where you hurt.” Can you expand on this for us?
Steven Hayes
Yeah, if you want to find out, really, what motivates you, there’s four ways that I know of – sweet, sad, stories, and heroes, and one you mentioned is the sad one. If you take the things that are hard for you and you flip it over, it tells you what you care about, otherwise, why are you upset about it? So, if you’ve been betrayed, let’s say, and that stabbed you through the heart, that a person you thought was loyal and trustworthy betrayed your love, let’s say, your mind tells you to stop being vulnerable. Avoid intimate relationships. They’re not safe.
But that’s what your heart yearns for. So, we hurt where we care, exactly why it stabbed you through the heart is that you wanted something. So, instead of doing what the mind says, “Let’s all solve that problem,” just don’t want that anymore. And so, you start having superficial relationships, or de-tuning relationships that could open your heart again. You put up defenses and so forth.
Instead, could there be another way to carry that hurt, and that it actually motivates us, “Precisely because it hurt to be betrayed, I know how important it is to me to build an intimate committed relationship. Okay, can I work on how to do that, how to open my heart again”?
But the other method as well, digging into the sweetness of life, and noticing what that suggests, or looking at your heroes, and asking yourself, “Why do I look up to them?” and you’ll find values there, and you can ask the question how do you put that into your life. So, I think a guide to success is inside our deepest failures. It tells us, at least, what we care about and what we want.
Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. All right. Well, let’s now maybe have an overview of there are sort of six key, do we call them tools, skills, processes? Can you give us this overview?
Steven Hayes
Well, I gave you the three, and each of them have two, so that gives you six. But this experiential openness, that means accepting your emotions without clinging, open to difficult ones, don’t hang on desperately to positive ones. Allow emotions to come and go, and other experiences, too, like memories and sensations. Backing up from and noticing your mind with a little sense of distance so that you can see it as a thought without just looking at the world structured by the thought, without disappearing into the thought.
Like, if you have a thought like, “This is awful.” Have a thought this is awful. Don’t disappear into the awful world. The world is the world; you said it’s awful. That’s two different things. That’s not one. That’s two. And some of that may be just a habit that you don’t need of awfulizing about things. Coming into the present moment but consciously. In the present moment, inside now, that doesn’t mean that you don’t have thoughts about the past, or worries about the future, but it means you don’t get hooked by them and disappear from the moment almost like how you do on the freeway sometimes, and you’d become a mindless driver, and wake up you’ve gone miles down the road.
You don’t want to do that with rumination and worry because the opportunities are always in the present, that’s where we live, that you’ll miss it. But from this more conscious part of you that I think is really where we connect with others. When you were a baby and your mama looked at you, you dumped endorphins at birth, natural opiates that basically say to you, “Ahh, this is what I want.” When you saw those kind eyes, you knew you’re connected.
We yearn to be connected in consciousness with others. We’re the social primates. And so, consciousness itself comes out of that, and yet so easily we can use it for closing down or pretense persona, “Oh, I’m so awful,” or, “Oh, I’m so great,” instead of the, “Ahh,” being connected to other people. So, those are two more in the present consciously.
And the final one is “What are the qualities of being and doing that you want to put in your life that you want to be intrinsic?” I’m talking not about goals, goals are great, but values-based goals, what it’s really about. Is it really about the money? It isn’t really about the degree. It isn’t really about any concrete thing. It’s about the direction, owning that and create habits built around it, so that even when you’re not being mindful, which we’re all mindless some of the time, we can kind of trust our instincts to be doing actual things with our feet, values-based behavior that is building opportunities, extending on our lives.
So, open, aware, and actively engaged has two aspects each – acceptance and we call it defusion. So, with emotion and cognition, present-moment focused consciously and a values-based creation of habits and goals. Put all those together, boy. Now, there is one final thing you have to do, is extend it socially so that if you really want to be, for example, emotionally open, that means having compassion towards others, and being interested in what they feel.
Like, in the work setting, one of the things, when I’m called in to kind of consult with managers and things like that, I ask questions like, “Who works with you? Where do they live? Who are they married to? What are their names? And how many kids do they have and what are their names?” And you can just take things like that to the bank as to whether or not you got a manager who’s in a two-way street of communication with people who are important to the network.
You wouldn’t have friends where you didn’t know where they lived, whether or not they had kids, or what the name of their spouse was. You’ll do that to a secretary you’ve had for 10 years. Why? It’s not because you had to be their friend. It’s because you socially extend these issues of values. You want to be that kind of person who really knows others, of consciousness. You really want to be connected as a person with the people you work with.
Emotional openness. You want to know what their insights are like. So, I think those six, socially extended, and then take care of your body. That’s it. When we’ve done research, those things I just named account for about 80% to 90% of everything we know about how change happens.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s dig into you mentioned putting your mind on a leash, that you have a turn of a phrase for the dictator within. What’s that about?
Steven Hayes
Well, that voice within that assumes, when we become conscious, we sort of take that perspective-taking skill of being able to go behind the eyes of others, we kind of step outside and look at ourselves, and that’s fine. We even start talking to ourselves, and it’s great. But that voice, if you just let it boss you around, will become a dictator.
It’s very much like if you just give them the rope to do it, they’ll do it. They’ll get you all entangled, “What about this? What about this? And you do this, and you do that.” And sometimes it’s helpful and sometimes it’s not. Why? Because you have a lot of wisdom that you can only touch intuitively. Your verbal part is not everything. That thin cortical overlay is only quite recent. You didn’t have a felt sense of what works. Based on what? On your experience.
I’ll give you an example. If I asked you to put your body in the shape of you at your worst with dealing psychological issue, and just do it as like you did when you’re a kid when you’re playing statues or something. But you’re like a sculpture, and we’re going to take a picture, and then I say, “Okay, same issue. Don’t change the content at all. Now, show me with your body, you at your worst.” Because it’s not always one. Yeah, sometimes you’re at your best, sometimes you’re at your worst.
We’ve done this with hundreds of people around the world. No matter where in the world we do it, something like 95% of the people show you, without any training, without any conversation, just what I told you, a body that is more closed at your worst versus open, less aware at its worst versus aware, and less actively engaged. In other words, by experience, you know everything I’ve just said in this interview. You could show it with your body.
But here’s the problem, you’ve got between your ears, that little dictator within that’s constantly just treating your life as a problem to be solved, because that’s what that voice is about, “How do I solve problems? How do I break it down and figure out what’s a better way forward?” That’s fine but it’s not all of it. Sometimes you have an intuitive sense that this job is not for you, that working with that manager is not really what you want to do.
I don’t care what the money is, you know, you feel it, you sense it. If you closed yourself after that, good luck because you now are left with nothing more than a list of pros and cons and all the other things that could be helpful but you’ve got to be careful because that dictator within can sometimes give you pretty unwise advice.
Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And you share a number of very specific tools, which are fascinating. And in the world of defusion, you call it, for instance, if you just say out loud, so if I got this right, “I cannot walk around this room, I cannot walk around this room,” while you’re, in fact, walking around the room, directly contradicting the dictator within. Folks in studies were able to keep their hands in really hot water for 40% longer just because they demonstrated to themselves, “No, no, those thoughts are not reality, dictating what is possible.” And that’s all it takes, it’s like the tiniest little thing made a world of impact.
Steven Hayes
Yeah, you’re going in a business meeting where you know you’re in there with many people who are really, really famous, and you’re not. They have great power that you don’t have. And you know, just based on your experience, you’re going to have thoughts like, “Why am I even here? They don’t want to listen to me. Maybe my ideas aren’t good enough, dah, dah, dah, dah.”
And you can fight it back, “No, no, that’s not true. No, no.” Meanwhile, where is your attention? On the meeting, on what’s being said, or the argument inside your head? You don’t want to be arguing inside your head in that meeting. What if you do this? What if you could just practice things, like, have the thought, “I can’t lift the pen in front of me on the desk”? And really get it clear.
And when it’s really clear, while that’s still going on, pick up the pen. You can do that, right? This is your life. It’s not your dictator’s life. It’s not those words’ life. Those words are just in your life. They’re not your enemy, but they’re not your friend, and they’re not who you are. You’re a whole human being. So, what if we then go into that meeting, and when you notice the chatter, thank your mind very much for that, “Thanks for trying to help me with that, reminding me that I don’t belong here but I’ve got this covered”?
And go in there and allow those thoughts to come by just like the thought that you can’t pick up the pen. And then when the moment hits, you make that contribution, you make that comment, you make that statement, you present that pitch deck, or whatever it is that you have to do, and get out of your own freaking way. Your mind could be helpful in that, in that sense of worry to get you to prepare, etc. That’s great, “Oh, what if I’m not prepared? Okay, let’s go prepare.”
But when you’re in there, you may need those skills in defusion. Those are made-up words. For tools, there’s hundreds of them. You can make up your own that diminish the automatic hammer blow domination of literal thoughts in your head over what you do, what you feel, what you focus on, what you think about, so that you have greater freedom, you have a little space opened up where you could do things more in the way that you want to do them or the ways that your gut sense guides you.
This is the moment to make that comment. This is the moment to be quiet and allow yourself to go into a flow, the kind of places people go when they’re very successful. Look at athletes and others, how do they really get to be high performers? They don’t do it by constant chatter in the moment. And so, you need to put that mind of yours on a leash.
And the defusion methods, as I say, there’s hundreds of them, but that one of just the poke of eye in terms of the dictator, or the tug on the cape of Superman, of, “You think you can tell me what to do. Okay, tell me what to do, and I’m going to do the exact opposite. You stop me. Ha, ha, ha.”
Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And you say there’s hundreds of tools, one of my favorites is word repetition. How does this work?
Steven Hayes
Take a thought that really pushes you around, distill it down to the smallest set of words you can get to. If you can get it to one, it’s the very, very best. Then say it out loud, at least once per second, or a little faster but at the point at which you start to lose the ability to say it clearly. Make sure you can say it clearly out loud, and do it for at least 30 seconds, even better would be 60. It’ll be the longest 60 seconds of your day but to say it over and over and over again.
Kind of give you an example, a little story, it’s in the book, probably right when I was Stanford. I gave a talk, and I was talking about how much money was spent on sleeping medications, how much we’ve made even normal things that every creature on the planet know how to do, into something that’s a big fight every night. And it’s up in the billions of dollars for sleeping meds, and I showed a graph but it didn’t have a clearly labeled graph, and I said, “And it’s now $3 trillion.”
Three trillion dollars is ridiculous but I somehow missed it and said it. Much sleep, our mind is listening because I print bold upright, it said, “$3 trillion. Are you out of your mind? They were recording it. I was going to talk at Stanford, oh my God. I’m an idiot. I’m an idiot.” And that little that I said it twice reminded me of what to do.
So, I sat on the edge of the bed, and I said the word stupid, actually is, for 60 seconds or so, and I went back to sleep. What are you going to do when your mind is hitting you with these kinds of judgments? One of the things you can do is just to allow the word to be a word. And, “Yeah, okay, lesson learned, label your graphs next time, Steve. You’ll be less likely to make a mistake in a PowerPoint presentation.” That past moment, I’ve learned the lesson, I don’t need anymore of reminding myself how stupid some people thought, if they were quick thinkers, I was in the moment. It was stupid.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, you’re saying the word again and again, “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”
Steven Hayes
“Stupid, stupid, stupid.” A little faster. A little faster.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay, “Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.” And in so doing…
Steven Hayes
You know, you only did about four seconds.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay, you do it in 60 seconds.
Steven Hayes
Yeah, you got it. Do it in 60 seconds. And we actually have some bunch of research on this, it was embedded by Titchener, one of the fathers of American psychology a hundred years ago. We were the first, it’s called semantic satiation. It’s what they called it. We were, I believe, the first to ever use clinically.
And what happens is immediately the distress starts coming down. After you start doing it for 30 seconds, the meaning goes away. Did you ever had a thing where you have a word and you almost…? Ted Lasso does this all the time, and he knows this method. I wonder if he came across it because the writer for Ted Lasso, because he does this, and he actually mentioned semantic satiation on one of his shows.
But when you take words that are so dominant that push you around your whole life, and within 60 seconds you can drain out the distress, and even the point that it becomes almost meaningless as just a sound. You’re going to let your life be run by that? Really? So, you get a little, you’ll go back, you’ll know what stupid means after 60 seconds or whatever it is, but you’ll also have that memory of, “Oh, yeah, it’s a word. I’m saying a word to myself right now. Okay, like that’s something I have to not do? That’s something that has to dominate my next hours and hours, or days and days, or weeks and weeks?”
But, yeah, people will let words like that dominate months and years of their life mindlessly. “I’m a loser” can make you function as a worker who’s trying to prove they’re not a loser. In so doing, so greatly restrict your ability to be a good worker, to be part of a team, whatever, that you’re not able to show what you have. So, yeah.
Pete Mockaitis
And I’d also like to think about that in a context of procrastination, like, if the thought is, “Ugh, I don’t want to…” or, “Oh, I’m just so tired. This is going to be boring.” So, likewise, we could just sort of pick whatever is most, I don’t know, activating or linked up to emotion, whether it’s maybe, “I don’t want to…” I don’t know, it might be too many words.
Steven Hayes
It might work. You could say it.
Pete Mockaitis
I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I don’t want to.
Steven Hayes
“I don’t want to. I don’t want to.” Absolutely, it’ll work there. Put some other ones. You could take that and sing it to your favorite rap song. Have your little “I don’t want to” rap, and it will lighten the whole load here. You’ll have more openness and choice, “You can’t make me” opera or whatever the thing is. And next thing you know, you’re out there just doing it.
You could have it said to you, like, “I don’t want to.” You can say it out loud in the voice of your least favorite politician, or say it in the voice of Donald Duck, “I don’t want to.” Whatever. The point isn’t to ridicule yourself. You’re not ridiculous. You’re just human. The point is to liberate yourself. You’re not just words in your head.
Look, I can put words in your head so freaking easily. Your parents did it. Commercials do it. If words in your head are what you’re going to do, how are you going to have a life that’s directed. I can give you three numbers. If you remember them, I’ll give you a million dollars an hour from now. Here are the numbers – one, two, three. Can you repeat them back?
Pete Mockaitis
One, two, three.
Steven Hayes
Awesome. That’s great. That’s a million bucks. I’ve got a little donor who’s good with me. They knew this is such an important podcast, I had to do it. So, I’ll say, “What are the numbers?” and you’ll say…
Pete Mockaitis
One, two, three.
Steven Hayes
Awesome. I lied. There’s no million bucks. A day from now, do you think you could say it?
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.
Steven Hayes
How about a year from now?
Pete Mockaitis
I’ll probably remember Donald Duck more so than one, two, three.
Steven Hayes
But it’s even possible. I already did it twice. It’s possible, isn’t it? When I come up to you, and say, “Hey, what are the numbers?” you might say, “One, two, three,” right?
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.
Steven Hayes
All right. Well, what if it was your mama saying, “You’ll never amount to anything”? Except she didn’t say it twice, she said it 20 times, or 200. We’ve got people listening to me right now who had that history. You may have had that history. But what are you going to do with that? It’s in your head. There’s no delete button in the nervous system that’s healthy, short of brain injury, or aging, or age-related cognitive decline. It’s not going away.
Once it’s deeply in, even two might be enough. I guarantee if we do it a little more, I can get one, two, three stuck in there for the rest of your life. How about this? I’ll think of something different. Okay, think of another set of numbers. What are the numbers?
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m going to give you numbers?
Steven Hayes
Yeah, but they can’t be that because we’re going to do something new. We have a new grade of thought. What are the numbers?
Pete Mockaitis
Two, four, six.
Steven Hayes
Okay. Did you do what I asked? I told you to come up with something other than those horrible numbers we were talking about earlier, it turns out.
Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I did, and I gave you different numbers.
Steven Hayes
You gave me different numbers. How did you know you gave me different numbers?
Pete Mockaitis
Because I can recall the previous numbers and know.
Steven Hayes
Exactly. So, now you have three trials. You see the problem? You had one, two, three, one, two, three, and then was it two, four, six?
Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.
Steven Hayes
What was it?
Pete Mockaitis
That’s right.
Steven Hayes
Which is correct because it’s not…
Pete Mockaitis
One, two, three.
Steven Hayes
Yeah, there you go. Now we got four times. Do you see the problem?
Pete Mockaitis
So, in trying to do another thing, you’ve reinforced the prior thing.
Steven Hayes
Yeah, it’s not logical but it’s psychological. And if you go into the work environment, for example, and you’re trying to convince yourself that you have confidence, you end up training yourself not to have confidence because you don’t do what the words says. With faith, confides, fides in Latin means faith. You want to have faith in yourself? Okay, you got one, two, three in your head.
Mom said you’re never going to amount to anything, or that coach, or that manager. I had a department chair when I was an untenured assistant professor, who said I was a dilettante who would never amount to anything. He’s dead now. I won’t say his name. But he looked at my research career, and said, “You’re never going to be anything.” I have the evaluation sort of on my shoulder. I read it periodically.
Okay, so I can connect with that, that one, two, three, but I don’t need a two, four, six to fight it. If I, instead, would react, “Okay, I’m going to take my one, two, three and I’m writing this next paper,” or, “I’m doing this podcast.”
Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, you’ve got so many tools and suggestions. I’d love it if you can maybe share one more that, in your experience, you found that it is super transformational for folks in terms of liberating goodness, energy, aliveness, and yet it’s pretty darn easy to do.
Steven Hayes
Well, here’s one that fits a work environment, especially if you’re in a kind of managerial or kind of context, or you’re looked to for leadership and so forth. Take just a moment before that next interaction to take the perspective of the other person, and remind yourself of the values that you want to put into your interaction.
So, let’s say you’re waiting, so 30 seconds before you know the knock on the door is coming, a person is going to come in and talk to you. Just picture them, as a way of preparing, of them walking towards that door, and go outside your body, just like you did with those movies, like Harry Potter had the little light out of his head, and go behind the eyes of that person walking towards you.
What are they feeling? What are they thinking? What do they want from this meeting? What’s hard for them? What are they afraid of? Then come back, and before that door knock comes, what are the qualities that you want to put into that interaction? What do you want to reflect in your behavior? I don’t mean just the goals you’re trying to get to. I mean the deeper purpose that you want to reflect of who and how you want to be in this interaction, and the deeper purpose of this interaction.
But knowing, just for a second, what’s going on in the other person, what they’re bringing into the room. And I do that regularly when students are coming to meet me. I’m retiring now so I’ll stop doing it but I’m going to…I do that before a podcast. I try to be in the position of the persons I’m interacting with, and it grounds the interaction to something that’s bigger than just a performance or kind of just saying stuff to get through.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Steve, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?
Steven Hayes
I guess one thing I would just mention is that if you view your life as, in part, a task of learning how to be more fully you, this open, aware, and actively engaged mantra can give you a guide. And so, I would just like to leave the idea that science is doing a better job of digging down into what’s the essence of the wisdom traditions, the religious traditions, the best of our cultural traditions, the best of our leadership training, and so forth.
Focus on the really important ones and see how far it takes you. Essentially, viewing part of your job as a continuous never-ending process of learning and sort of peeling back the onion so you can gradually be more fully you, and bring it every day.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?
Steven Hayes
What I really like, actually, Margaret Mead, who’s a political consultant. I worked with her a long ago before I became a graduate student, a labor organizer, who taught me, which is something like, I’m paraphrasing it, something, like, “Don’t underestimate the power of a committed group to change the world. And, in fact, they’re the only thing that ever has.” So, I like it.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?
Steven Hayes
Oh, God, I’m going to quote one of my own because my favorite over the last three years is one where we looked at every single study ever done in the history of the world that had a randomized trial focused on the mental health outcome that properly assessed how did change happen. It’s called the mediators of change, it’s geek statistics. We don’t need to walk through that.
It took me three years to do it, 50 people working with me, my colleague Stephen Hoffman, Joe Serochi, Germany and Australia, international team. And why is it important? Because what I’ve just talked about when I said that’s 80% or 90% of everything, learning how to be more open, aware, and actively engaged, but then socially scaling it and taking care of your body. Look, that’s 80% to 90% of everything we know about how change happens.
So, that’s such a small set. I could say that in a long sentence. Time is up. Back to that last comment where your life is a learning thing. I think this is all the studies ever done, no matter what the name, no matter what the goal, let’s learn them. We’ve got a small enough set. We can all work on learning those things.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?
Steven Hayes
A book that changed my life, actually, was Walden Two, BF Skinner’s book. And I took it not to be a utopian novel. It’s written many years ago. But I took it to be this idea that you could take principles and processes and scale it up even to how we should arrange our world. And wouldn’t that be cool? And I do think we have a chance over the next hundred, 200 years, whatever, of knowing enough about, really, what lifts us up, that we can begin to design our world on purpose and evolve on purpose.
And if you look at our challenges of climate change and immigration, political division, and all the rest, we better get busy with it because we sure got a lot of challenges but we also have awesome tools and kids who are ready to do something really new.
Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?
Steven Hayes
Love isn’t everything. It’s the only thing. It’s a rip-off of Lombardi, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing,” and kind of meant to be a poke at that win-at-all costs. If I’m going to do something at all costs, I’d say love at all costs.
Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?
Steven Hayes
If you’re interested in my work, just go to my website, it’s just www and my name, Steven, with a V, middle initial C for Charlie, my dad’s name, H-A-Y-E-S. So, StevenCHayes.com. But if you’re really interested in psychological flexibility, or the kind of things we’ve been talking about, you can Google it and find a whole bunch of stuff for free out there. Even the World Health Organization gives it away for free. So, you don’t have to spend anything to learn more about these processes that I’ve been talking about.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?
Steven Hayes
Yeah, I think the challenge is to live your deepest values. That’s the challenge for every single one of us, I think, is how do we become the kind of person where others look to us and see in that values that they would like to have manifest in their life. How do we live our deepest values? And in the area of work, I’ll just say this, if you really want to love your work, do your work lovingly because when I dig down to your deepest values, I don’t want to put words in everybody’s mouth, but whether it’s appreciation of beauty, or contributing something to others, or alleviating suffering, or really making an awesome product that other people can use, to me, those are all phases of love.
They’re about how we support each other in this journey called life. And when you have your work, be about that. Yeah, it’s not always going to be candy land. I don’t mean love your work like smiley face, Ren & Stimpy, happy, happy, joy, joy, morning to night. No, you have challenges. It’s not always going to be smiling and candy land. But love in that sense of meaningful, important, worthy, honorable. If you want to love your work, do your work lovingly.
Pete Mockaitis
All right. Steve, this has been such a treat. I wish you much love and joy in retirement.
Steven Hayes
Awesome. Thank you for the opportunity.
