Here is the full transcript of personal development consultant Jeff Gaines’ TEDx Talk: Why is Everyone So Fat, Broke and Busy? at TEDxAlbany 2010 conference.
First of all, are we fat, broke, and busy as a nation? Let’s look at some statistics. 65% or more of America is overweight or obese. 65% or more of Americans are in a bad financial situation. And again, over 60% of Americans are by their own standards busier than they want to be.
So as I go around the nation, talking to people about, you know, throwing out to audience this notion of fat, broke, and busy, I have yet to have anybody say, you know, “how dare you say that?” Usually people say, yeah, that’s kind of us. You know, people aren’t usually surprised by the statistics. In the shorter presentation I’m not going to go deeper into them, but trust me, there’s more, right?
But really who would go around the country calling people fat? I mean, what kind of person says such a thing, right?
So let me be clear on where I’m coming from with that angle. It’s not the school-run bully version of fat we’re talking about. I think part of what we’re going to need to address as we understand what’s causing this is the change of mentality, change of mindset we need to have around it, right? It’s a growing issue, it’s a growing crisis. And I think it’s one that not all people know about; it hasn’t really risen to the point of people taking action yet.
And you’re going to hear a lot in my presentation, throughout the day about, what it takes to get to the tipping point where people actually act, people actually do something about it.
And so the jovial version of fat, if you will, my apologies if it’s offensive. But let’s talk about a study — a study that was done and there is a fascinating amount of science and research coming out about the brain and human behavior. I’m going to just use one as an example. They called it the Magic Drink study where they took three groups.
Group one, they called the full SoBe; you’ve heard of this drink SoBe, right? $5 bottle has whatever it has in it. And they took this — you know, it used to be that psychological experiments were performed on animals but that was deemed inhumane. So now they’re performed on college students.
So they took these three different groups of college students, and they took Group 1 and they said, “All right, we’ve come to believe that when you drink SoBe, because of the ingredients in it, it temporarily increases blood flow to the brain and it makes you smarter. So what we’re going to do is give you some Sobe, have you drink it and then put you through some tests to see how you do. But we’re are University, so we’re kind of broke. So you need to pay for your SoBe”. So they deducted from their meal plan the five bucks or whatever it is. Given the SoBe, let it soak in and then they take the test.
Now, Group 2: this is our controlled group. No SoBe. They didn’t tell them about SoBe, they just brought them and said, “We’re going to give you these tests and see how you do?” So they have a means of comparison.
Group 3: The cheap SoBe group. Same spill with the SoBe, they give them the SoBe, tell them it’s going to make you smarter and all that. But they say we got a great deal on SoBe. We got some discount SoBe for you. So your SoBe is only 80 cents. And then they test and see how they did.
Now who do you think did the best group: one, two, or three? Let’s find out.
Turns out that compared to the no SoBe group to controlled group, the full SoBe group did slightly better. Now what does this say about the human brain where we could take people, give them a drink and say this is going to make you smarter and they’re actually smarter! I mean, isn’t that amazing?
But what was even more amazing to me is the cheap SoBe group did significantly worse. Now why would that be? They fell into the typical American consumer mindset of: if I got something on the cheap it’s probably not as good, right? So they’re thinking where did they get my SoBe from? Probably fell off the back of a truck. It probably got E coli.
So really what this shows is a couple of different very important things when it comes to understanding our behavior. One, all of these groups got exactly what they expected to get. So it really shows the power of beliefs, the placebo effect, right? You’ve seen things like this.
But it also shows another interesting driver of humanity and it puts forth a hypothesis, if you will. And I would submit to you that the human brain is it’s vastly overrated, right, that it is really not the finely tuned beautiful machine that we sometimes think of it. It is full of flaws and problems and difficulties. And as is evidenced by this and the statistics on how we’re doing is, we’re not always making the right choice.
And so let’s talk about what gets in the way of making those choices and making the choices that we often know would be the right choice to make and then talk about how we can get to making those, right?
First of all, let’s talk about where our results come from. Where do our results come from? Behaviors. Behavior produces results. What you do gives you what you get. We could stop right here and we would be comparable to how most people live their lives and we would be as emotionally intelligent as most people, right?
You call up a friend here as you say I’m not happy with my job, what will they tell you?
Quit. You can do better than that, right? Say I’m not happy with my relationship, what would they tell you? Dump, I never liked them anyway. Really what they’re going to say is if you don’t like your results, change your behavior, because what you do gives you what you get.
This right here is why I hate January in my gym. Why do you think that is? All the new year’s resolution people write, every January the place is packed full of people with new shoes and new shorts, huffing and wheezing up and down the court. By February they’ve all either quit or died and we can get back to life as usual.
Most people’s approach to changing the results in their life comes from behavior modification, which is why most people don’t succeed at changing the results in our life. If you really want to make change, we’ve got to be smarter than to just try a different behavior.
Now you do have to change the behavior. But more importantly than what we do, we’ve got to get into why we do it. Why do you choose the behaviors you choose? Let’s talk about where they come from.
There are three main drivers of behavior. The first is called the Robot. We’ll talk about each of these in greater detail. But the robot is basically unconscious programming, your memory and all those kinds of things. So when you do things without thinking about it walking, talking, you’re not consciously thinking or the robot is in charge, if you will.
We also have a thing called the Motor, right? When your motor is in charge, that’s when you are driven by your emotions and emotions drive different decision-making: urges, desires, wants, fears, drives different kinds of decisions than the robot might do.
Or then our third driver which is the Thinker, the often under-used or misused part of our brains, that has reasoning and foresight be the basis of our choices.
Let’s do an example of how these three play together and then we’ll dive a little deeper into each of them, OK.
For example, let’s say, exercise. Let’s say, you get home four, five, six o’clock whatever and you’re contemplating exercise. What happens as you begin to have a conversation in your head of these three different drivers and they all have different roles to play and they all have different desires and urges and things that they do.
Let’s talk about how they come together. So you start to consider exercise and it turns out that the motor is the primary driver, not all that surprising at this point, right? So the motor contemplates exercise, hmm and it goes into the memory, and it says, OK, robot, what do we think of exercise? And the robot says you hate – crying, whining, maybe some bleeding, not something you like, right?
So your motor says, Ew, why would we do that? Thinker, why on earth would we exercise? And the thinker says, well, turns out we’re fat. And we have this high school reunion coming up and let me give you a picture of what it’s going to be like to walk into that high reunion right now. And the motor says ew, I don’t want that. Thinker, here’s the deal. Figure out a way that we can like going into that high school reunion without having to exercise now.
And so the thinking part of your brain goes to work and says, well, you know it’s five, six o’clock at night; it’s dark out. You know, there’s a lot of traffic on the road. It wouldn’t be safe to go out and run in that kind of situation. It’s a health consideration. What we need to do is get up tomorrow an hour before work and then exercise, then it’ll be quiet, right, we need a great start on our day, it will feel wonderful. Your motor says, that’s a a great plan; what’s on TV?
Next morning, the alarm goes off an hour early, the motor goes, oh, heck no, thinker, get to work. Thinker says, well we could exercise at lunch, right? Anybody able to relate to this dialogue in your head, right? We do this around spending money, around eating, around scheduling. We do it around work, relationship — every part of our life. We have this constant rolling dialogue conversation going on. And for the most part we’re unaware and unconscious of it. So let’s become conscious of it and learn the three players involved.
First, we have the robot. Let’s do some visual aid. I do my own graphics. Here’s the robot, that’s not very roboty. So let’s make it look more roboty, we’ll give him a square head and some little arms so we can do the robot dance, right? So there’s our friend the robot. What the robot is is an information filter – I’ll give an example of this in a minute, and also assigns meaning to events, nothing means anything until we decide what it means. And it also stores our memories; beliefs, values are all programmed and stored in a robot, also perform learned behavior: brushing the teeth, things like that, you don’t have to think about; the robot’s in charge.
let’s talk about the motor – visual aid for the motor. We’re going to have a happy motor today and our motor is going to have a bad hair day. Yeah so here’s the motor. The motor has got a couple things it does. It’s really concerned only with the present. So when we’re in an emotional state we’re not thinking future; we’re just thinking what will make me feel better right now.
The motor also sees only what the robot and thinker show it. That’s crucially important to understand. Let’s do a visual aid to represent it.
Here’s what most people think happens. We see the world sight, sound, taste, touch, smell through our senses and we think that we take those senses in and then emotion to respond to them, and that’s not in reality what we do. What we do in reality is our senses go through our robot and then the robot interprets filters, assigns meaning to and then puts them up on a screen for the motor to see. So our emotional response is not based on the events around us, our emotion response is based on our unconscious robotic programming of events around us.
Let’s do an example. Let’s say every time my whole life I ran across somebody wearing a green T-shirt. They came up, punched me in the nose. Not saying that has happened but hypothetically speaking, if that had happened and someone walks in right now wearing a green T-shirt, what would I do? Run, save yourselves, right? Because my robot would see that person and put an image up on the screen, you’re going to get punched in the face. I would have an emotional response to that. You would see me have that response. Look at the same person, your robot will put a different image on the screen and you’d be confused: what’s the matter with Jeff? That’s just Bob; he’s a good guy.
And to me, I would look at you and think you’re crazy; why aren’t you running? Can’t you see the green T-shirt, right? And so what happens is we each have a very different emotional experience of life. Those emotions drive us stronger than anything. And most people are almost entirely unaware of where their emotions come from, let alone what to do about them. We’ve got to learn how to master this screen.
Let’s finish out the story here. A couple other things the motor does. The more unhappy it is, the more it will drive. So when we’re feeling good we don’t mind waiting, right? I hear a lot of — the problem with Americans is instant gratification, right? We presume the answer is delayed gratification, to which I always think good luck. I don’t think anybody is good at delaying gratification. I think what happens is there are some people who are gratified now, so they’re willing to wait for a different gratification later. But if I don’t feel good right now, I’m going to grab the food, I’m going to spend the money. I’m going to do whatever I need to do to feel better as quick as I can.
So when the motor is unhappy, it’s harder to manage, right? Back here we feel the easier it is to wait. Also how it feels shapes what it sees. The motor will ignore contradictory evidence and fabricate supporting evidence. For example, let’s say you work with someone that doesn’t like you. Hypothetically speaking, I’m sure it’s not possible. But if they didn’t like you and then you do a great job at something, what are they going to do? In their head, they’re going to have a conversation and they’re going to make up excuses. They are going to ignore that great thing you didn’t say, oh they just got lucky, you know probably took credit for someone else’s work. And you do something else great and I’m going to say, Oh any moron could have done that. Or they’ll start fabricating evidence, they’re probably embezzling, right?
Because if we feel something emotionally, we tend to want to prove it. We’re just coming out of election season now and trust me the people who run elections and know how to pull your emotional chains. That’s what they do, because people are driven by emotions.
Let’s finish the story out. We’ll do a couple more examples here. We have the thinker. Let’s do some visual aid for the thinker. We’re going to go with the intellectual stereotype of glasses making you smarter and the pocket protector. And we’ll wipe that smile off his face because the thinker doesn’t feel, the thinker’s just raw logic. And the thinker is not just about the future, the thinker also can see past and present and reinterpret it. You did a different interpretation, change what it means, what it thinks of past events of our memory and change how we’re looking at things right now. And therein lies really the power and control of our lives.
Thinker has got a couple things it does. It can see past, present and future. It has a number of jobs, needs to know where you’re going, needs to compare the reality to the motor’s response. So we have the ability in our brains to watch what we’re doing and then question it. So if we’re freaking out, because a green T-shirt person, the thinker can say, well maybe this green T-shirt is different than the other ones, and that rational part of our brain can question our emotions.
The thinker can also manage the motor and that’s one of the ways it does that. Notice the word manage, not control. The reason so many people are unsuccessful at changing the results in their life is they try and control their emotions. They try and use willpower to force ourselves and I’m going to do this, I’m going to save, I’m going to spend, I’m going to exercise, that willpower doesn’t last. We do an example of that.
So let’s play this out here, of how we might actually begin to manage that motor and how we might actually begin to change some things. Friend of mine is driving along and someone comes along, cuts him off in traffic. He has — his motor sees this, puts an image up on a screen, his motor– his robot translates this is big jerk, his robot actually translated a little different than that but if you will. So he’s driving on, oh you big jerk, right? His wife says, “I’ll bet they’re rushing off to the hospital to be with their sick child.”
My friend says, “Oh, no, that guy is just a big jerk. That’s all that is.”
His wife says, “What makes your fantasy any more real than mine?” Because what she was able to do is have her thinker step in and change the screen, because the thinker can take charge of the screen as well. You can consciously choose a different perception, a different interpretation. You can choose to perceive a different reality and when you do, you feel different. And instead of having to go against our emotions, we can go with our emotions, right? Most people try and fight against the tide of what they feel and what they want, what they desire, what they fear. Instead what we need to do is change the programming, change the underlying sponsoring beliefs and interpretations that are causing those emotions in the first place.
Let’s take a quick look at how you actually change the robot, because if we can change the robot’s interpretations of things, perceptions of things, we will feel different. If you felt differently about exercise, you might love to do it. And it would take no willpower whatsoever. If you felt different about the food you were eating, you would change the way you eat with no willpower whatsoever.
So how does it take to change — what does it take to change that robot? The first two, you probably knew. If you want to change a habit, change a behavior, you need to come up with a new behavior you’re going to, talk to mentors, get some education — there’s a lot of great behavior plans out there. The problem is most advice books you read, all they give you is behavior advice. They say do this behavior, you’ll be successful. They don’t tell you what it’s going to take to do that behavior. But we need to do a new behavior. We need to do it for a period of time. How long does it take? 21 days, 30 days, you’ve heard that. That’s a myth. It takes the brain longer to change that. Sometimes it doesn’t take that long at all, right?
So it just depends on how deeply ingrained that behavior is for you to make a change in it. What you really need is this third ingredient that most people lack — and to illustrate this, we’re going to go back in time to a movie called WarGames; Matthew Broderick, if you remember that. Those of you that are too young to heck with you.
So they had this scene in the beginning of WarGames. It got two guys down in this missile silo, this bunker. And their job was to wait for the alarms to go off and then turn the key and fire their missile. So they’re down there and the alarms start going off and the calls come in, fire your missiles, so they’re going through all their check codes and everything they get ready and there’s two different guys with two different keys and they can’t turn both keys at once. You need two people to launch a missile. That way one person can’t just freak out, have a bad day and launch his missile.
So they’re getting ready to launch the missile and they both have their keys in there and they say, three, two, one, turn, one guy turns this key, the other guy doesn’t. The guy says turn your keys, they’re going, turn your key, fire, turn your key, we got to launch a missile. No, do it again, do it again, was a very exciting scene. And then you know it did wound down, it was just a drill and clearly that guy got fired.
But what it shows is a wonderful illustration of why so many people aren’t successful at creating change in their life, because in our brains we have the thinker and the motor and both of them have to turn their key for the robot to change. It goes like this: your thinker decides we’re going to exercise, sneaks up on the motor, clubs it over the head, throws it in a bag, stuffs it in the trunk and starts driving to the gym, right? Along the way to the gym, the thinker says robot, remember this, we’re exercising every day for the rest of our lives. Get used to it; it’s going to be programming now. And the robot says uh-huh, hey motor, what do you think? The motor goes, we’re not doing it, we go home.
So as long as your thinker and your motor are in conflict, your brain will not take it as programming, it won’t store it as memory, it won’t overwrite existing programming and memory and things to do. It isn’t until both the thinker and the motor turn the key that your robot’s going to change. And once your robot changes, creating the change you’re looking for, creating the behaviors you desire become something you want to do instead of something you feel like you have to do.
