World Leading Therapist: 3 Simple Steps To Remove Your Negative Thoughts: Marisa Peer

Marisa Peer is a world-leading therapist who specialises in helping people discover their best self, who doubles as a speaker, therapy trainer, and multiple best-selling author of You Are Enough, Tell Yourself a Better Lie and Ultimate Confidence. Marissa has worked with thousands of people to help them overcome trauma in their lives, sometimes trauma they didn’t even know they had. According to her revolutionary theory, it’s only when people look into their own lives that they can find what’s holding them back in the outside world. So, look within you. With Marissa we can go on a journey to retell and remould the story we tell ourselves about our own lives and our own journey. With persistence and perseverance, we can begin to tell ourselves a better lie. Follow Marisa: Twitter - https://twitter.com/MarisaPeer Marisa’s book - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09PRMSBGV/ Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I've been a therapist for 35 years. I worked with millionaires and movie stars and I realised that they have the same problem. I just don't feel enough.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Britain's number one hypnotherapist. The founder of Rapid Transformation Therapy. Best selling author. Marisa Peer.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  People who are depressed have a very interesting belief. One is, there's no cure, you know, it's genetic. And even if there was, it wouldn't work for me. Can you change that belief very quickly? Yeah, but you have to take a look at where did this happen?

• 0:29Steven Bartlett?

  How does one go about identifying which of these stories are the root cause?

• 0:34Speaker 00

  Well, I think the first thing is.

• 0:37Steven Bartlett?

  You must have also faced some pretty heartbreaking cases. Tell me about one that comes to mind when I say that.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  I think my saddest case was a boy of 14. His father was hitting him with a belt. Nobody needs that. Oh, just excuse me for one minute.

• 0:53Steven Bartlett?

  All right.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  It's no one's job to make you feel good. It's your job. And if you give someone the job of making you feel good, then guess what? You give them the job of making you feel bad. If you can give yourself the certainty you're looking for, instead of looking for it somewhere else. The shift isn't subtle, it's profound.

• 1:16Steven Bartlett?

  So without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett and this is the Diary of a CEO USA edition. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.

• 1:34Steven Bartlett?

  Marisa, first and foremost, thank you for being here. As you will know, I'm a big fan of your work. I included much of sort of something really pertinent that you'd said in my book as well. And I think that's how we kind of came, became connected. You spend so long helping other people and understanding them. I wanted to start today by understanding you a little bit.

• 1:54Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:55Steven Bartlett?

  I want to go right back. I know that, so I did a little bit of childhood psychology as well. And this is why your work is particularly resonant with me. But take me back to your childhood. I read this, this quote you'd said, which I thought might be a good stage setter, which was, "When I was growing up, I struggled with the belief that I wasn't enough. This belief followed me through my teens and right into my twenties."

• 2:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, it certainly did.

• 2:17Steven Bartlett?

  So who was that child?

• 2:18Speaker 00

  Well, you know, I had an interesting childhood. Later someone in therapy said, my god, your childhood sounded absolutely crazy. But it wasn't crazy, but it was interesting. I had a very beautiful mother who was deeply, deeply unfulfilled. Beauty gave her nothing. She wasn't a woman who could stay at home and be a mother. I had a father who was deeply, deeply intellectual. He was a head teacher and he loved his career. And it was interesting watching this stranger. My father loved his career. He helped kids every day. He gave him such. My mother was totally unfulfilled, always ill, a little bit hysterical. And I watched that and I remember thinking, you know what? You have to have a great job.

• 3:01Speaker 00

  You've got to get a job that's compelling and engrossing because it protects you from the pain. It wasn't if there's pain, it was there's going to be pain. My parents' relationship was a car crash, but if you've got an amazing career, then you'll be okay. So I always wanted something engrossing and fulfilling. But my father was very interested in other people's children because they were easier to work with than his own. So it was certainly an interesting life. But I don't regret any of it because it gave me the ambition to also think, wow, you can help people. My father used to always say helping people is what life is all about because it was for him. He wasn't very good at helping my poor mother, but that's okay. So it was, but there were lots of elements of my life that were strange.

• 3:46Speaker 00

  So for instance, I felt different. I was the head teacher's daughter and I went to his school. And I realized later that is the bane of people's lives to be different because we're all hardwired from birth to find connection and avoid rejection. When you feel different, then that can be really, really strange. But it made me understand human psychology very early on, what it's like to be different, what it's like to not fit in, what it's like when it looks perfect on the outside, but it's not really like that on the inside. So it stood me in very good stead. I think my childhood was the perfect background to be a therapist.

• 4:25Steven Bartlett?

  And where did you, in hindsight, pick up the belief that you weren't enough?

• 4:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, I remember being in my father's school and he actually was my history teacher. He wrote in my history book, I think I was eleven, I remember it to this day. He said, "Oh, this is amazing work. I had no idea you were intelligent." And I think he wrote that to please me, but I was not pleased. I remember thinking, wow, my father doesn't even know who I am. And so the not enoughness came from living with a father who was invested in other people's children, living with a mother who was always in hospital, living with a brother who was very clever and went to pri- both my sister and brother went to private school and I didn't because I wasn't the smart one. And my sister was a cute little, beautiful little baby. My brother was the first born smart boy. And

• 5:12Speaker 00

  I just felt like this thing, this kind of freak, if you like, in the middle. But now I'm glad about that because he gave me that, that understanding. But I did have one thing. I had a grandmother who really believed in me, thought I was a genius. And I remember thinking then, that's actually all you need, one person. When I became a therapist, I'd worked with a lot of, I always called them the lost boys, like fifteen year old kids who were so angry. And they, they say, no one believes in you. I said, but that's not true. I believe in you and you can believe in you. That's already two people. And I've always believed that if you have one person to believe in you, your life can be amazing. So I always had my grandmother. She lived three hundred miles away, but she really believed in me.

• 5:56Steven Bartlett?

  And at that age, what did you want to do with your life? Did you, did you have a hypothesis or a vision?

• 6:01Speaker 00

  So I wanted to be an artist. I was very good at art. My, my daughter's now an amazing artist, but I wanted to be an artist. My parents were like, no, no, no, you can't be an artist. You can't go to art school. That's just for druggies and dropouts. I still love illustrating and I was always writing stories, which is quite funny now because I wrote stories, my mother kept them all. They were always about dysfunctional families and unhappy families. And that was so interesting that I wrote that. Now, of course, I write, I wrote that book's all about the stories of unhappy people. So I always thought I'd be an artist. And my father said, you should be a teacher like me. That would be amazing for you. So I went to teacher training college. And no, I'd love to be

• 6:42Speaker 00

  a teacher. But then I realized that I didn't want to be a teacher after all. So. I left that and went off to work for Jane Fonda here in LA, which was much more fun. And I loved that. I went fully into the diet, weight loss, fitness industry. But even then I realized how abusive that industry is, how cruel it is to people, how it tells them that your worth is entirely judged on the number on the scales or the number on the tape measure. And I saw working for Jane, that it, you know, anorexia and bulimia, mental illness, there's body dysmorphic is a mental illness. And they were trying

• 7:22Speaker 00

  to cure it with aerobics and living on protein shakes and diet soups. And so then I came across this wonderful guy called Gil Boyne, who was a hypnotist. And I trained with him and thought, well, this is amazing. I've got all these people. I'm teaching aerobics. In the eighties, it was a huge thing every day. And my class is war to war with anorexics, bulimics, body dysmorphic, exercise compulsives, orthorexics, which is people who only eat clean, organic food. And I thought, wow, I didn't even have to advertise for clients. And I didn't. And so then I had this amazing life teaching for Jane during the day, seeing clients in the evening. But then I got so busy, I had to actually stop working for

• 8:06Speaker 00

  her because I just couldn't cope with the amount of clients that were coming through my door. Because I found something that really fixed eating disorders. And that was such an amazing thing.

• 8:18Steven Bartlett?

  So you meet Gil Boyne, when you, Gil Boyne, isn't it?

• 8:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, Gil Boyne.

• 8:21Steven Bartlett?

  When you got to.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  LA, yeah.

• 8:23Steven Bartlett?

  And you talk about this individual being a really pivotal person. He was a hypnotherapist?

• 8:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, he was.

• 8:29Steven Bartlett?

  And what was it about him and what he taught you that stayed with you?

• 8:32Speaker 00

  You know, Gil was one of the people I loved the most. He broke all the rules. He swore like a trooper. He'd bang his fist on the table. But he was deeply, deeply religious, believed that God worked through him. He was just such a fascinating character because he was a street fighter from Philadelphia who worked with Sylvester Stallone and hypnotized him to write The Rocky. And realized he was on to something and then developed this amazing school teaching hypnotherapists. And he so believed in it that he would guarantee that if he trained you and somebody sued you, he would turn up in court and defend you and pay all the costs, which stands to phenomenal belief. So I trained with him.

• 9:15Speaker 00

  And then I became a hypnotherapist and I loved it. And then over time, he did ask me at once if I wanted to, as he got older and retired, run his business. By then, I'd found my own method, my own technique. I always think that when you train to be a therapist, any kind of therapist, about how amazing your teacher is, and I now teach amazing therapists, but you have another teacher. Every client you see will teach you something profound and amazing. So then my own clients became my teachers and taught me so much. And they'd come back, you know, that one thing you did, that changed my life, that one thing you said, oh my god, that was a game changer. So I started to collate the one thing, which is different, of course, of every client. They never all said the same thing.

• 10:00Speaker 00

  And then collating the one thing that gave them a stunning turnaround, I then created my own method, which I called rapid transformational therapy. People say, but that's not right. The words therapy and rapid don't go together. Why? Well, it has to be long and painful. Who said that? If I turned up, I did turn up at ER once, I broke my arm, and they didn't say, well, we got to build a relationship of trust to heal you. I didn't go to my dentist, say, you know, I've got an infection here. They went, well, we need the trust, you see. And I always thought people in pain, emotional pain is no different to physical pain.

• 10:39Speaker 00

  If I've got a headache or a broken arm, I've got irritable bowel, or blushing, or I can't find love, or I stutter, that's really painful. And I thought that therapy should be like going to the emergency room, that we should offer immediate help.

• 10:58Steven Bartlett?

  So much of the underlying thesis about, you know, in your new book and I guess behind your rapid transformational therapy is this idea that there's stories that are within us, that are from our childhood or whatever, and they are sometimes and often very stubborn stories. So I imagine, as you've said, the reason why people think it's hard for it to be rapid or quick is because those stories are so deeply ingrained and stubborn and etched into us.

• 11:25Speaker 00

  And we make someone else's story our story. My mum always wanted a boy. I was the fourth girl. My dad wanted me to go into the family law firm, but I wasn't smart. And so I see two things a lot, someone else's story. My mum said, don't even trust your own shadow. But that's not your story. That's someone else's story. So the first problem is that we make somebody else's story. My teacher said I'd never amount to anything. That's not your story. My teacher said that to me, but that wasn't my story. But the second thing that's even more painful are the lies we tell ourselves. And the biggest

• 12:07Speaker 00

  lies, I'm not enough, I'm not lovable, I don't matter. And what happens with small children is they come into the world, they don't actually have a lot of needs. They need to feel safe, loved, significant. They need to feel they matter. But when you're a small child, if your parents cannot meet those needs because they're alcoholics, they're mentally ill, they're doing three jobs, they're a single parent, they're stressed, whatever it is, the child never stops loving them. They immediately stop loving themselves. If only I was better, my mum wouldn't be crying. If only I was good, my dad wouldn't shout. If only I was something, my dad would see me at the weekends. And once they buy into

• 12:52Speaker 00

  that, oh, it's my fault, that becomes a lifelong sentence. But it's very easy to unpick that by saying to us, I mean, look, you know, you're looking at this through the filter of a five-year-old. One of my clients told me that she was walking with her mother in Ireland and her father's friend came and he said, it's a disgrace that you haven't given your husband a son. He'll never be a man, you know, because he doesn't have a son. What a strange thing for him to say. But this little girl heard that and thought, oh, I should have been a boy. I've caused both my parents this tremendous grief and then she became very masculine. She worked as a fire officer. In fact, she was head of a fire crew.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  And she wouldn't wear makeup. She wouldn't let her husband put up a shelf. She had very short hair and that was okay, except she said, I feel very conflicted because I just can't be the person I want to be. And I feel I've got to do everything perfectly. And my husband, I have so many arguments that I want to drive the car. I'll pack, I'll carry everything. And just going back to remember that scene was a real aha moment. Oh, I heard something at five. Your husband will never be a man because he hasn't got a son. That last charge should have been a son. But you see, she interpreted it with the mind of a five year old. At thirty five, take a look again and maybe understand that you were meant to be a girl. Your father was thrilled to be a girl.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  And even if you wanted a boy, somebody wanted you to be a girl. So we see things with a filter of a child. He's been on the planet for four years. What do they know? I'm not good enough. I'm not lovable. I was a disappointment. So looking at it again as an adult, you get the chance to say, oh, I see. I believed something then that felt true, but it wasn't true.

• 14:47Steven Bartlett?

  Can that change in beliefs be rapid, though? So say in that case, that can be a

• 14:51Speaker 00

  Really rapid, yeah. I don't know if you read the case about Ryan, the alcoholic, whose father rejected him because he was gay. And he always felt so sad. He attracted men that were abusive to him. And when I had him have an imaginary conversation with his dad, who said, I feel inadequate. When I had a gay son, I just felt more inadequate. It's not you, it's me. He began to realize that he wasn't a broken person at all, but he'd had a broken parenting. And I think I said that to him, Ryan, you're not broken. But your parenting was broken, you're not flawed, but you had flawed parenting. But there's a huge difference, you are not flawed.

• 15:34Speaker 00

  But your parents, who were young and his mother got pregnant, they weren't suited. You had a flawed upbringing, but there's a huge difference. And then he was able to make his peace with that and stop drinking completely. He's never had a drink since. So if you think therapy is long, it can be like that. If you can look at a scene and reframe it and go, oh, I thought that, but that wasn't even true. Then it becomes a game changer and it can take 21 days for them to do it. It can take 21 seconds. If you can look at something, think, oh, I see, I thought that, but actually that was an incorrect thought. And I can go back and correct an incorrect thought.

• 16:15Steven Bartlett?

  If at the crux of our lives and our behaviour exists these like fundamental self-stories we've told ourselves about ourselves, about who we are and about where we are, significance in the world, et cetera. How does one go about even identifying, unless they have a wonderful therapist? How do they go about identifying which of these stories are the root cause of the symptoms they're seeing in their lives? Whether it's addiction, depression, anxiety, whatever it might be.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Well, I think the first thing is, is, you know, just start to observe your thoughts. Do you have those what I call limiting thoughts? I'm not enough, who's going to want me? I'm not lovable, no one cares about me. And think about the thoughts and then ask yourself a question, where did this thought come from? No baby is going, don't look at me, I'm naked, I've got no teeth, I've got milk swords, I've got these triple knees here and I'm not enough. So what happened to that belief? Well, someone chipped away at it, a parent, a relative, a teacher, somebody. And because children are so suggestible, it's very easy to make them think they're not enough. But can you change that belief very quickly?

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, but you have to take a look at where did this happen? You know, I never say, well, what's wrong with you? I always say, what happened to you? They go, well, I was a perfectly normal weight until I was 11. And then what happened? Well, I went to school, I got bullied. People started to make really weird sexual comments about my body. And I just got fatter and fatter. And then they never did that again. So now we see, oh, so somehow what was happening had a role and a function. And every thought you think isn't a thought, it is a blueprint that your mind, body and psyche work to make real. I think if you take a thought, you know, for me, I was always late as a kid for everything. I missed the bus to school every day. And as an adult, I was always late.

• 18:08Speaker 00

  If I had 10 hours to get somewhere, I'd be, I missed planes, I missed appointments. And one day I suddenly realized that when I was a kid and I missed the bus to school, my father, I'd have to walk home, he'd be furious. He wouldn't even speak, but he'd get out the car and drive me in silence to my school's three mile drive. I never missed the bus coming home, by the way. Then I thought, oh, of course I did that for attention. But my father is now deeply proud of me. And even if he wasn't, I don't need that attention of me. And it just stopped like that because I suddenly saw the role of it, the job, the function. And many times, if you can just ask yourself, if this headache or this blushing

• 18:50Speaker 00

  or this asthma or this feeling had a job or was trying to help me, what would it do? And it's really amazing the answers that come up.

• 19:02Steven Bartlett?

  Is that why you say, when you think about the sort of the core principle of RTT, it says, don't just treat the behavior, treat the purpose, the behavior is serving.

• 19:09Speaker 00

  Always treat the purpose. You see, if someone.

• 19:12Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean? How do I make?

• 19:13Speaker 00

  Well, let's imagine that you binge on cakes or you're the kind of person, when something goes wrong, you eat pizza or a cake or something. And most of us go, tell you what's wrong with that. But I would say, hey, what's right with it? You're an alcoholic, tell me what's good about that? What do you mean? Well, you keep going back to it. And they go, actually, now you mention it, it does give me comfort. I can always depend on drink. It takes away the pain. I get comfortably numb. I can come home and just block out, or I can come home and eat five doughnuts and then I just go into this kind of sufferific place. And so I don't treat the symptom, which is I'm eating cakes every day

• 19:55Speaker 00

  or drinking alcohol or binging on Netflix, I'm using drugs. I treat what I call what lies beneath. Why are you doing that? What does it give you? When did you start that? Why do you think it helps you? I worked with someone who was a chronic alcoholic. When I talked to him, he said, you know, I never saw my dad. At sixteen, he took me to the pub and he got me drunk and he went, you're a man now. And he began to take me to the pub every weekend. And I thought, oh, this is great. My dad likes me because I'm a man. And they had a very bonding time over beer. And then the dad died and he continued drinking beer because he believed that he was bonding with his father, even though he was dead. And so what was right about drinking beer, it has a memory.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  That's how my dad bonded with me in the pub with his mates getting drunk. And so when you see, oh, so the role of the drinking was to keep a memory going. Yeah, but you can remember your dad. He doesn't live in a pint of beer. You can think of all the things you did do together and you don't need to drink. And so it's, it's coming to the realization that something that we hate, if something you hate keeps coming back. I keep dieting. I always gain the weight back. I've been to rehab eight times, but I still keep drinking. You've got to stop treating the drinking and treat the cause of the drinking, the role of the drinking, the benefit of the drinking, the purpose of the drinking.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  And when you do that and get it right, you can change it forever. Like with Ryan, who's never had a drink since he realized that he felt worthless because his father rejected him because he was gay.

• 21:37Steven Bartlett?

  And it starts with that awareness that you described, right?

• 21:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:39Steven Bartlett?

  And which is, I think is such a difficult thing for some people, for many reasons. I think some people live in this kind of self-defense state where they didn't, they, the awareness is too uncomfortable for them to even contemplate.

• 21:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:53Steven Bartlett?

  You know, I'm sure you've seen this in your practice, but either people don't want to come.

• 21:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:56Steven Bartlett?

  But when they're there, they don't want to go to certain places.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:59Steven Bartlett?

  In terms of, they don't want to reveal certain things. They'd rather just ignore opening that, that box and live in, you know, a state of, I don't know, bliss, naive bliss.

• 22:11Speaker 00

  Ignorance is bliss. I mean, this, there's a story in there of a girl called Terry, who lost two babies, died one at birth, one at a few weeks, and her two existed and one had a congenital heart defect. And the first thing she said was, don't take me back. I don't want to revisit that pain. And I said, okay, I won't, I promise I won't. So while my job is to take people back, I call it being a good detective, someone's turned up and said, well, I, I don't know why I keep sabotaging. I have no idea. I guess I'm just messed up because I sabotage every relationship, every job I get, I procrastinate, and I always get fired. And I don't know why. So I've shut myself away and I don't even want to look at that.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  But you can still go back and find it out because in fact, Terry had a very functional heart. All it knew how to do was keep repairing itself. And she had a massive breakthrough just in a half an hour conversation because she understood that being numb, it's like, you can't not feel. But she was living in a world of not feeling and it was exhausting. So I always think what I do, wears three different hats. The first hat is Michael being a good detective. You're an investigator. You never say what's wrong, you say what happened? Why do you feel like that? Why do you want to change? What would it look like to change? I often say to people, straight away, tell me about your family. I've got three sisters, they're all great, it's just me.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  Or they might go, oh, they're all messed up. And then you know straight away that something's gone very wrong with this parenting, or something's just gone wrong with this child. So when you put your investigator hat on, you know, a detective will lay out images and look at them and go, look at that scene, that scene, that scene, that scene. And they work out what happened by looking at information. And a good RTT therapist is the same. We gather information. You have lots of aha moments, lots of ear prick up moments, lots of things that come up that you think, oh, yeah, I'm going to go here, I'm going to go there. And after you've done the investigating and found out, usually in minutes, why that

• 24:21Speaker 00

  person is the way they are, you then switch to almost being like a dentist, extracting all that toxic stuff, removing it. And finally, you become like a coder. It's like someone who's upgrading someone's software and you code in and wire in and fire in, totally different beliefs. But the skill is doing it all at the same time. Many people go to therapy and just talk about what's wrong with me, what's wrong with me, I don't know, maybe I can find out. And others go and maybe just do suggestion therapy, but let's give you a different belief. But in fact, you have to do all three seamlessly together because that's the perfect recipe for change. I understand, I can let that understanding go.

• 25:06Speaker 00

  And at the centre, I'm going to put in something completely different.

• 25:09Steven Bartlett?

  You know, with all these, a lot of the sort of mental health disorders, you know, depression, anxiety, et cetera, there's been a lot said about the recent and the just apparent increase in the amount of people reporting to have these illnesses. Do you believe that there has been an increase? And if so, what do you think has been the cause?

• 25:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would say there's definitely been an increase in depression. You know, I've found in my experience, it's only my experience, that the major cause of depression are a couple of things. One are harsh, hurtful, critical words that we say to ourselves on a regular basis. That is guaranteed to make you depressed. The second is being disconnected. And we have an epidemic of disconnection because everyone is on their phone and their screen. We work from home in COVID, some of us are still doing that. We go to the store and we do a self checkout. We go to the bank and we check out with a machine. So we are becoming disconnected. And human beings are wired for connection, not disconnection.

• 26:11Speaker 00

  And the other thing I find is a massive cause of depression is failing to follow your heart's desire. Doing something because, well, the family expect it, the pay is good, it's a solid job. So those three things, I think, are the massive cause of depression.

• 26:28Steven Bartlett?

  On that, on that first point about people telling themselves negative stories, we all know people that are very self disparaging. Is that, and it's interesting because, I mean, I don't know where that originates from, but I know so many people that are incredibly self disparaging. The first thing they'll say to you is, oh, I'm sorry, I look bad today.

• 26:45Speaker 00

  I know, I messed that up, I'm just a mess, I always fail, I'm so sorry, you know. They look in the mirror and they go, oh my god, look at me. Or they go, I'm gonna do this, but it won't work. Where it comes from, funnily enough, is our tribal need, you know. We're still inside tribal people and we need to connect with a group. And so bragging, I'm better than you, I'm smarter than you, I've got more than you, is disconnecting. And so people learnt to connect by not having that tall poppy syndrome. We have to be the same, you know, children at school bond by being the same. And I found many clients, you know, my parents were rich or dirt poor.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  I was the only kid with glasses and I felt different, like being the head teacher's daughter. So it comes from there. So it's a strange thing that a few, a hundred years ago, a few hundred years ago and beyond, being negative actually saved your life, looking for danger, looking for snakes, looking for lions, looking for weird people. You might do it because they believe it protects them from hurt and pain.

• 27:51Steven Bartlett?

  If they reject themselves first.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, if they reject themselves first, no one's ever gonna like me, see, I knew it. And now it doesn't hurt, but it really hurts. And so our job is to show people that no happiness is there. You might as well expect the best. You know, Muhammad Ali said, I told myself I was the greatest before I even was. And then something amazing happened, I became the greatest. He could have said, I'm not much good, me, I'm useless, really. It's all a fluke. But he said, I am the greatest long before he was. And that was so good for him because people think of him as undefeated, which isn't true. But that's the idea of him. Because he told himself a better lie. And if we could only all do that, our lives would be so much better.

• 28:37Speaker 00

  Mostly because the mind doesn't know or care if what you're telling it is true or false or good or bad, it just lets it all in.

• 28:47Steven Bartlett?

  It's like, as you say, you said, you know, thoughts are actually blueprints. And I was thinking about them as like, they are code going into a sat nav.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 28:56Steven Bartlett?

  If I tell myself I'm beautiful and I'm going to be successful and I'm going to get married, then my mind and my being will take me in that direction. Maybe even subconsciously, my actions will further me in that direction. I will say yes to things that are conducive for that outcome. And it really goes to show, doesn't it, the power of, as you say, the limiting beliefs we tell ourselves, because we all say them. I've gone through my life telling myself that I'm really unorganized.

• 29:22Speaker 00

  I know.

• 29:22Steven Bartlett?

  Because I grew up in a really unorganized home where my parents were never there. So everything was just a mess.

• 29:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I'm not wanted or I don't matter. You know, I was working with a kid a couple of years ago who was in the Chelsea junior team, Chelsea Football Club. And every day their coach would say, you've got a 2% chance of getting into the main team, playing for Chelsea, just 2%. You've got to shape up. But you see, most kids, when they hear that, think, oh, I got a 98% chance of failing here, 2% is tiny. I said, listen, you've just got to say, I'm in the 2%. Someone else told me that their doctor said, you have a 20% chance of surviving cancers. That's great, I'm in the 20%. I'm in that 20%. You might think that's foolish, but.

• 30:07Speaker 00

  When you set your mind to something and look at being in the percentage that makes it, actually, your mind and body start to work at a level that make you stay in that percentage. If you do the opposite, well, I'm in the percentage of failures, the same thing happens. Your mind and body work to make you stay in that percentage because the strongest force in humans is that we act in a way that totally matches how we define ourselves. When you say, I'm a loser, I'm a hot mess, I'm a train wreck, everything I touch doesn't work. If only we knew how we are making those thoughts real and how our mind's job is to actually start making our thoughts real, we'd probably stop them.

• 30:50Steven Bartlett?

  But it's not, I guess it's not so easy just to make someone an optimist.

• 30:56Speaker 00

  No, that's true.

• 30:57Steven Bartlett?

  If we think about the pessimists in our lives, and I've, I mean, I've got friends that are pessimistic about, it just seems to be their default. And no matter, I mean, none of us in our friendship group are therapists, but the efforts we've gone to to try and make this individual not pessimistic in every situation have never ever worked. Thinking about a friend I have back home, who always, and used to work for me, who always defaults to just pessimism and everything's going wrong and whatever, but I, you know.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  But then you have to ask them, what's, if you said to them the same thing I say to alcoholics, what's good about it? They'd say, I'm never disappointed.

• 31:33Steven Bartlett?

  What's good about your pessimism?

• 31:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, what's good about it? If I said to my mother, what's good about being a hypochondriac? She'd say, well, I get lots of attention, I love being in hospital, everyone's so worried about me, people come to visit me. So you have to ask her, what's good about being a pessimistic? And he'll say, I don't let people down, people don't expect anything of me. And so.

• 31:56Steven Bartlett?

  It's that expectation.

• 31:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's a little bit more than the thought, because if you imagine a stack, I have to use my fingers to explain it, that's the thought, and thought always comes first. And then you think a thought, and when you think a thought, you then feel a feeling, and then the feeling dictates how you act. So imagine you thought a thought, which is, I'm not enough. The biggest cause of issues in the Western world is this not enough-ness. If I thought I'm not enough, and I went straight to the next ladder, the next stage, how would I feel if I thought I'm not enough? I'd feel sad, dejected, demoralized, maybe angry.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  Maybe resentful, maybe bitter. So I've thought a thought, I've got some feelings that come with thinking the thought. But then what actions come from thinking that thought and feeling those feelings? Often no actions, I don't take risks, I don't ask people out, ask for a promotion. I'm actually angry and defensive, so now I've got actions and behaviours. I'm angry, I'm defensive, I'm reclusive, I'm a loser, I don't bother. And then we justify it by going back because I'm not enough. But if you switch that to I am enough and just took out the not, okay, if I thought I'm enough, if I said it, even if I didn't believe it, but said it, said it, said it. What would I feel? Well, I might feel optimistic, I might feel confident, I might feel reassured, I might feel hopeful,

• 33:18Speaker 00

  I might feel excited. And then what thought, actions would I have? Well, I would take some risks, I'd ask people out, I'd ask for that promotion, I'd follow my dreams, I'd behave differently and I'd justify it again. It's like a loop, thought, feeling, action, behaviour, thought. So although it sounds very Pollyanna, oh, you're just thinking great thoughts. It's much more than that because when you think a thought, you feel a feeling and then you act on that thought and feeling and you behave in a way that's linked to that thought and feeling. And a lot of things, so let's change the behaviour. Stop drinking, stop smoking, stop sabotaging, stop procrastinate, stop acting out. But the behaviour is the last thing to change.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  You have to go back and change the thought first and then it's easy.

• 34:08Steven Bartlett?

  Does the thought or like the underlying belief come from some kind of subjective evidence or experience we've had in our life? I always, I always think about all my beliefs and I always think that they are all based on some, whether right or wrong, whether true or false, evidence. So, you know, I struggled with relationships, we've talked about that a lot on this podcast, but I struggled with relationships and that meant that I was avoidant. Even if I was attracted to someone, even if I pursued someone, the minute they asked to commit to me, I would. dissuade them and tell them all the reasons why we should not be together. And I, and I look back and at my childhood and really the evidence that was at the centre of my belief was watching my parents screaming at each other every day, really awfully. And this belief that my dad was in prison that I always had. And I was always trying to bail him out of prison from my mum screaming at him.

• 34:52Steven Bartlett?

  So the way that I viewed it was, once I became aware of this faulty evidence I had in my life, my childhood, honestly, from writing and doing this podcast, it finally dawned on me where I'd learned what love was and how identical the feeling I felt about being imprisoned was similar to the seven, six year old Steve looking at his dad, being screamed at. So for me, what I thought happened was I became aware. And then the awareness of it allowed me to not, the trigger, which would be someone asking me to be in a relationship with them, no longer held enough power over me, which allowed me to get into a relationship, to rewrite new evidence.

• 35:29Speaker 00

  Because really, you stopped thinking the thought that a relationship is a prison. That's what it really goes back to. You began to understand that you weren't born with that thought. You acquired it and anything you require, you can release. So you worked out, oh, I've been seeing this with the filter of a six year old. A six year old filter says a relationship is like prison, especially for a man. But then you realised you weren't six and there's lots of other evidence that says that's not true. And you changed your thought. You see, when you question a belief, you don't believe it. That's why in religion, you may not question the priest or the abbot or the immense. Not allowed to do that because we understand when you question a belief, you begin to doubt it. That's why people who are deeply religious never question it. I know God exists.

• 36:14Speaker 00

  How do you know? I just know. When you question a belief, like when you see your children, my little girl saying, mommy, but how does Father Christmas get down there? How does the reindeer get down the chimney? They're that big and the chimney's that big. And how can you get all around the world in one night? And no, they're beginning to doubt, which is a great thing. If you question a belief, you introduce doubt. And that's what a great therapist does. It says, really, are you always a failure? Were you really meant to be an accountant to please your dad? Is that why you're here on the planet? Do you really think that everything you touch fails? Do you really believe there's no one in the world that can love you?

• 36:54Speaker 00

  So when you start getting able to question beliefs, you open up a little glimmer of, oh. Right, yeah, that doesn't have to be true and it doesn't have to be true for me. And that's why it's important, which you did so eloquently. You looked at the belief of a six year old and thought, but that's not me. One of the things I talk about in the book a lot is having clients say, that's not me because. And they have to justify why that isn't them. Oh, that kid that wore secondhand clothes and mum was never there. That isn't me. I've got a wardrobe full of clothes. I don't have to do that anymore. But, you know, we play the only part we've ever known.

• 37:35Speaker 00

  And then we make that part our own and we don't even know that there's many other parts we could take on if we wanted to.

• 37:43Steven Bartlett?

  Even those beliefs, that imprisonment belief that I had, that relationships were prison. I felt it, the power of that belief deteriorate over time.

• 37:52Speaker 00

  Good.

• 37:53Steven Bartlett?

  But I still believe that it's there somewhere. And that kind of makes me wonder if those very sort of deeply held childhood beliefs ever really completely vanish? Or if they are still capable of being triggered? So for example, if I was in a relationship now and my girlfriend started, say, shouting at me in the same way my dad shouted at my mum. I could very well see myself just getting up and leaving. Not shouting back, just getting up and leaving, trying to like flee, flee the jail. And I just wonder with these, you know, even with the clients that you have and the patients you see, whether they really ever fully overcome?

• 38:31Speaker 00

  I think a lot of them do. I think it's a work in progress. It's about, you look to that little boy who said, relationships are prison. And you realise that was a statement, that for you is a statement of truth. It wasn't a question, it was a statement. And then what you have to do is start making a different statement. The mind learns by repetition. Relationships are wonderful. Because I mean, marriage is such hard work. I'm like, I don't think so. I found it hard being single. I got the flu. I've got to get out of bed. Go to the pharmacist myself, make myself some soup. In a marriage, in a relationship, someone else will say, I'll get that, I'll do that, let me do that. So you question the belief that you have, but then you have to also change it.

• 39:15Speaker 00

  And you have to keep repeating the changes. You know, I worked with somebody once who said, I have no coping skills. My mother was hypersensitive to light and noise. I couldn't open a packet of potato chips without her going mental. We never went to the cinema or the swimming pool or the beach. She didn't like light. She didn't like noise. She didn't like people. And then she said, and I have no coping skills. And I made her say, I want you to say I have phenomenal coping skills. And so she had to say that every day. She didn't believe it, but she said, you know, it's amazing. I say that every day and I've become this person who feels she can cope with anything. So you have to look at your question, your statement, and just change it. I don't matter. I matter. I'm insignificant.

• 40:00Speaker 00

  I'm significant. I'm not lovable. I am lovable. I'm not enough. I've always been enough. And if every person in the world could wake up and just say, I matter, I'm significant, I'm enough, and I'm lovable, that would change. Well, I know that to be true because I've got many anti-bullying programs in schools all over. And they all say the same thing. All the kids say that every time, enough. They've made a little plaque for their desk. And bullying has almost disappeared in this school, just from those simple statements. Because bullies don't feel enough. It isn't enough to work with a bullied child. You must work with a kid who's doing the bullying. What's going on with them? Nobody says, oh, my life is so great, so wonderful. Who can I bully today? I'm having a great time. I

• 40:45Speaker 00

  think I'll go off and troll somebody. So we know that the not-enoughness is the core of so many of our beliefs. But since the mind doesn't know or care what you're saying, if you switch, I'm not enough, to I am enough, the shift isn't subtle, it's profound.

• 41:05Steven Bartlett?

  Just the subtlety of words. You seem to assert that. It makes a tremendous difference. Just one word that we use.

• 41:13Speaker 00

  Just one word.

• 41:14Steven Bartlett?

  Because we go through our lives saying things. So we go through our lives, I'll say like, you know, I'm not organized, or I'll say, I can't do that. You know, and a lot of the time, the truth is, I probably could. But we're in this culture of just the flippancy of words, where we say, I can't, that's not me, I'm not that person, I am this. These kind of like, binary definitive statements. Are they dangerous?

• 41:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, when you say so, they go, not bad, I'm all right. How was your weekend? Not bad. So they're really minimizing anything that's good. And I think you have to turn it right up. But often the one word, many years ago, one of my clients said, I wish you'd see my mother. She has a hell of a life with my dad. He hits her, he's aggressive. But she's very invested in, you know, the front of a marriage. In came the sweet little old lady. And she kept talking about her husband, saying, he's a good husband. I said, but he's not a good husband, darling. He's a good provider. I want you to switch the word husband to provider. Because he hits you, he's abusive, he diminishes you. That's not a good husband, but he is a good provider. I know that's important. You've got a nice home, three kids, you went all left.

• 42:20Speaker 00

  So she began to say, he's a good provider. She said, you know, it's amazing, I went home, within three months I divorced him. Because I thought, oh, well, I don't need to be with a provider. We've already got this house, I got my pension. So for her, that one word.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  He's only been a good provider in my entire marriage. And he's actually hurt me a lot. And do I need him to provide? I've got a pension, I've got a house, I've got friends, I've got my children. He can't provide anything I can't provide myself. He's not a good husband at all. And so for her, just taking off the blinkers and having someone tell her the truth, that's not love.

• 42:52Steven Bartlett?

  Isn't that crazy?

• 42:53Speaker 00

  Love doesn't hurt like that. People say, oh, my boyfriend loves me so much, he hits me. That's not love. You may believe it's love, it's passion, it's not love. My dad hits me because I don't behave. That's not love. And often you have to educate people in a very nice way. And change one word, I'm useless. No, you're smart. I don't matter, you matter a great deal. And going back again to all these teenage kids who say, no one loves me. I don't matter. I go, look, if your life was a clock. You're talking about the first five minutes of the clock. The first five minutes is horrible. But you've got the whole rest of the clock to have an amazing life. You know, this is your life today, but it's not your life.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  Your life today is you're being bullied at school, your parents don't seem to care, and no one's there, and that's horrible for you. And that is your life, but it's not your life. Your life's going to be amazing, and then you have to help them stand up to bullies and believe they matter and not tolerate it. But it all starts again. You know, there's a great song called "It Started With A Kiss", but nothing starts, it starts with a thought about a kiss. Everything goes back to a thought. And if you can keep peeling back to the thought, like your thought, marriage is prison, then you think, but I have the power to change that thought at any stage, no matter how long down the line it is. If you change the thought, you change everything,

• 44:22Speaker 00

  because the law of control begins with thought. You can't control the weather or the traffic. You can't even control your body, or you'd never get a cold. But you can always control your thoughts. And when you control your thoughts, it changes your whole life. And I know it sounds easy or simple, but that's because it is simple. You know, I've been doing this five-day challenge in schools, and it's called the "I Can't To I Can", and it's just five days where every day these children go from "I can't" to "I can". They have an imaginary cheerleader that does somersaults and bang cymbals and cheers them on. And they've all said, "It's made such a difference", because they realise they can. That when you say, "I can't", what if nobody likes you? What if I fail? What if I get it wrong?

• 45:07Speaker 00

  Well, you might, but you also might get it right. And if you get it wrong, you've learnt something. You know, if you never make a mistake, you've never made anything. Because the only way you can learn is often by getting it wrong. You think, "Oh, I tried that, I didn't like it. I never want to do that again."

• 45:24Steven Bartlett?

  Being a therapist and speaking to a wide variety of people, you must have also faced some pretty heartbreaking outcomes and cases. Tell me about one that comes to mind when I say that.

• 45:37Speaker 00

  I think my saddest case was a boy of 14. His father was very physical with him, but he lived with a mother. And he didn't have any skills to handle that. So he became very violent at school and was being expelled. And when I saw him, I said, darling, your dad's not allowed to put his hands on you. You know that. He said, but I can't. I said, but you can stop him. You have to. So he practiced rehearsing a lot that he would say to his dad, you may not put your hands on me. And then I said, I think you have to not see him for a little while. And then the mother said, but he needs a dad. I said, well, not like that, that's hitting him with a belt. Nobody needs that. And he does need a dad, but he needs a dad that respects him.

• 46:18Speaker 00

  So we had to all have this little family conversation that they were going to go home and ring him and say, I can't see you until you get help. And the father was so childish, he smashed up his Xbox and dumped it in the garden. But he didn't see me, stood his ground. And then the father wanted to see him. And I said, you know, every time you must say to him, you cannot put your hands. And if you do, I can't stop you. But when I leave, I will call the police because I got to get you some help. You can't be like this. And actually, it was amazing. I did feel sorry for that kid because the father was so dismissive. But eventually, the father realized that the only way you could see him was to stop being violent because I had to give this little boy the power.

• 47:01Speaker 00

  You're only 14, but you're smarter than your dad. You're more educated than your dad. You're more grown up than your dad is a child. And you have to be the man here and say, I won't let you hit me because it's damaging for you as well as me. And often with kids, it's giving them a voice, giving them the power to say no when someone is abusing them, molesting them, taking their lunch money. You know, and that's often the case. So many kids just don't have the power to say no. Because when they said, don't you say no to me? When people say to me, my kid's so annoying. I said, that's how they learn. I mean, my kid argued with me all the time.

• 47:42Speaker 00

  And I always think I'm secretly rather pleased that she could stand up for herself and defend herself and wasn't a yes person. And we forget when we won't let our kids have a say, they go on to the world and they don't know how to have a say. And that's a terrible injustice for them.

• 48:01Steven Bartlett?

  I was reading in your book about children and just more broadly about the,

• 48:07Steven Bartlett?

  some of the mistakes parents make when they're raising children. And one of them, as you kind of cited earlier, was about telling them not to feel things, right?

• 48:15Speaker 00

  Yeah. Don't cry.

• 48:18Steven Bartlett?

  Don't cry.

• 48:18Speaker 00

  Be a big boy. Stop being a baby.

• 48:21Steven Bartlett?

  That's definitely what I had planned to do with my kids.

• 48:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:24Steven Bartlett?

  Tell me where I'm wrong.

• 48:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, I said to my daughter, don't be a baby. She goes, mommy, I am a baby. And I thought, oh, my God, she's so smart. She is a baby because she was my teacher. And then I remember to say to when she hurt her leg, oh, that really hurt, didn't it? Ouch, that hurt. She goes, yes, mommy, it hurt. But then she'd be okay. But when you said, don't cry, you're a big girl now. That didn't hurt. Stop making a fuss. What you're saying is don't feel your feelings. Swallow them, push them down, pretend you're okay. Put on a happy face and then people walk through the world and say, well, I can't tell anyone what I'm feeling because we've trained them in the same way we train kids to finish everything on their plate. One of the best gifts you can give your children is letting them feel,

• 49:08Speaker 00

  you know, that hurt. You're a great kid, but today you're being really mean. She says, what's going on? And then they'll say, you said she was my favorite. Years ago, I took my little daughter, we were lambing, and she pushed my nephew, pushed him off a haystack and my brother was very cross. I said, why did you do that? And she said, you said he was your favorite. I said, no, I said, he was my favorite nephew. You're my favorite. You'll always be my favorite. He's my favorite nephew. And you cannot do that and you have to go and apologize. And she did. But I was really quite pleased that I was able to say, what just happened then? You can't always do that. Sometimes you have to intervene, but

• 49:47Speaker 00

  good kids do bad things, smart kids do stupid things. And rather than saying you're so annoying or naughty or bad, you say, what's going on? What made, why did you just do that? And they'll tell you something that you would never expect. And then Then they feel safe sharing what's going on and you children need you to be their safe place, they need you to come to you and say, hey, my friend's taking drugs. My daughter came home and she goes, mum, my friend's brother, we went out and he's much bigger and he was stealing all these baseball hats and he made me wear them. I didn't want to wear one. I said, oh, that's your feelings telling you it's wrong. You must always listen to those feelings and when that happens again, you must say, I

• 50:30Speaker 00

  don't feel I can wear that baseball hat. And so I was very pleased that she come in and tell me stuff about drugs and sex and shoplifting and some of this, literally your eyes literally pop out on stalks. But you have to not judge your kids. It's very easy to say, not so easy to do, but you just have to take a deep breath, even if it's another time, and ask them, what's going on?

• 50:55Steven Bartlett?

  There's something that I garnered from all of that, which I'm, I think is really applicable to business and generally like leadership and I guess friendship as well, which was typically we come with answers and we come with statements. Whereas the approach you seem to take even with your daughter there is much more question centric. It's asking questions and being kind of removed from having a bias or a presumption. So, and I was thinking about that from a leadership perspective, if you, when there's an issue in your business with an employee or something, instead of coming with statements and presumptions, it's probably wiser to come with a question at first.

• 51:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, what's going on? I said that to my P A there. Then he said, I just am overwhelmed by something in my personal life. So when you can say something, you know, what's going on or, yeah, it's easier, you know. I was meeting my daughter in London recently. I hadn't seen her for ages. I was so excited. She turned up at this restaurant. She was in a really bad mood. And I said, do you want to, and I don't like that. Do you want to go? No, I hate that. And I felt like saying, you know what, I'm just going to go home. I don't know why I've come here, but I just said, well. Anything, you know, I don't like anything here. And then I said, well, let's order a coffee. So she, and then she, and then she says, mommy, I'm so glad that you understand me because it's not you. I've had a big fight with someone and I'm in such a bad temper. And I was just being really defensive and, and I felt great too, because I learned to not think,

• 52:17Speaker 00

  how dare she talk to me like that. I might as well go home. I thought, oh, something's going on with her. Why don't I just sit here, drink my own coffee and just wait for her to work it out. So if you can sit with someone and not judge them and say, I mean, everything obviously shouldn't want it, but I just left that, then usually they'll tell you what's wrong, but you can't interrogate people. And sometimes you just have to give them a little while to come around. But I think when you stop judging people, which isn't always easy. It makes it, when, when you have a workforce that mess up or are super defensive, you, you know, try that, try a little tenderness because you get much better results.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  You know, my husband and I have this great thing where I'll say, oh, what's the story you're telling yourself? One day we were driving in the car. And I think I was driving and he was on his phone. I was talking. He wasn't listening. I talked again. I went, oh, I'm telling myself a story here that you're not interested in anything I have to say. And he went, oh, that's really funny because I'm telling myself a story that you're annoying me. Cause I've just got a message from our accountant saying our, our account's been hacked. And I'm feeling really panicked and I'm looking at this message and you're, yap, yap, yap. So we both, I'm telling myself a story that you're not allowing me space to read this very important message. And my story is, you're not listening, but I told that on a podcast and this girl wrote, and she said, well,

• 53:45Speaker 00

  he was wrong. He was definitely having an affair because banks don't like to say you've been hacked. In fact, it was our accountant that sent him a text saying you've been hacked. But that was so funny because there was a third story in there, someone else's story, which was, oh, he's definitely cheating on you because. And so I thought that was so funny. That didn't upset me because we all tell ourselves the story. You don't love me anymore. You forgot my birthday. You don't give me the attention you used to. You're not interested in me.

• 54:16Steven Bartlett?

  The significant shift there as well is responsibility.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:19Steven Bartlett?

  You're even in the car example, like I, it sounds like a conversation I had with my girlfriend recently where I was trying to do something and she tries telling me something. I'm going through a crisis on my phone.

• 54:31Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 54:31Steven Bartlett?

  And I'm telling myself that she doesn't understand my world.

• 54:34Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 54:35Steven Bartlett?

  And she's telling herself that I never listened to her when she's talking, saying important things. Thankfully, because I'm in a slightly more mature phase of my life, we're able to have the conversation.

• 54:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:46Steven Bartlett?

  As you've described, where I'd say, this is how I felt and I was telling myself this.

• 54:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:51Steven Bartlett?

  You know, but a lot of people don't do that. Blame is much, feels much easier.

• 54:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:56Steven Bartlett?

  And it takes a certain type of maturity in person to even be able to take responsibility in the first place. I tend to believe that people who are, who have, I don't know if this is accurate, it's just a belief I have, but that have like lower self-esteem are less capable of allowing themselves to look in the mirror and take responsibility for things.

• 55:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:15Steven Bartlett?

  They are the most like protective of.

• 55:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're much more adept at blaming, refusing to budge because they believe that if you're right, they're wrong. It is easy to be defensive and blaming and never admit you're wrong because we think being wrong means that we're weak. You know, it's why men will never say, I'm lost. Because if you're a hunter, you were useless to the tribe. If you say, I'm lost, I don't even know how to find my way back. And so it's the, it's the fear of being wrong. And but how to get it around and say, listen, here's the truth. You're flawed. I'm flawed. The best we can ever be in the world. Is two flawed people having a flawed relationship. I call it being flawsome. So if you can decide, hey, I like being flawed.

• 56:01Speaker 00

  You know, I tell all my clients, the unhappiest people I've ever worked with, without a shadow of a doubt, are the ones who try to be perfect. And they're always the loneliest, too. Because they can never say they're wrong. It's always your fault. You did it, you made them. But if you can't be wrong, you're going to be alone. Because the basis of all friendship is this, we choose people who share our vulnerabilities. If you haven't got any, then you also won't have any friends. So it is a defensive mechanism to never admit you're wrong. It can be very hard to say, no, I was wrong. Better to say, I made a mistake. I messed up. I didn't handle that very well. I saw my husband's daughter once say, you know, I messed up.

• 56:43Speaker 00

  I was so proud of her, she said, I messed up, I didn't handle myself well at all. Really sorry. But you go up in someone's estimation when you can do that. We all know when Bill Clinton apologized, people liked him more.

• 56:56Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  They didn't, they'd like him less because they didn't do anything wrong.

• 56:58Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  So the fear of being wrong creates a lot of problems, especially in teenagers. Until we can say, look, even in the Bible, it says, to err is human, to forgive is divine. I always think to err is human, but it feels divine. So we have to not punish people for making mistakes, especially our own kids or parents. Say, look, yeah, you did mess up, but it's okay. I'm glad you recognize that. And I felt like this when. It all comes back again to can you communicate? And do you have healthy self-esteem? Because people with healthy esteem will say, I was wrong. I made a mistake. That was my error. People with low self-esteem say, no, it was your fault. It was all your fault.

• 57:45Steven Bartlett?

  So true. And I think that point about how you go up in people's self-esteem when you take responsibility is so unbelievably true.

• 57:52Speaker 00

  Because that's what it means. Responsibility means an ability to respond. That's what it is. It's an ability to respond. And we want to have an ability to respond better.

• 58:02Steven Bartlett?

  It's incredibly trust building as well, isn't it? When you know that someone is able to say, like, I'm responsible for that, or I made a mistake here.

• 58:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:10Steven Bartlett?

  It kind of allows you to understand that they are self-analytical and that they can, they can be left to assess themselves almost.

• 58:20Speaker 00

  And also, so many people just want to be heard. When they go to their mother and say, you know, you really hurt me. They go, well, what about my life? You know, you had a... And then they don't feel heard. So when your kid or your husband or your wife comes in or your friend and says, you really hurt me when you forgot my birth, they all forgot how important that was or cancel at the last minute, you have to say, oh, yeah, I hear that. I'm really sorry. Even if you think they're being ridiculous, you still have to say, I hear that that hurt you. And I'm sorry that hurt you. Because being heard is so important to us. When we feel heard, we feel valuable and we feel significant. You know, again, our needs are

• 59:01Speaker 00

  to feel significant and worthy and enough. So if you can hear someone, you make them feel significant and worthy and enough. And if you don't hear them, go, oh, you're just being overdramatic, you're overreacting. Not that again. Why don't you just get over yourself? Then you don't feel significant, you don't feel worthy, and you don't feel heard. So we all want to have higher self-esteem. And if you can tell people, oh, yeah, I can hear how I upset you. I really feel bad about that. You're growing their significance. And then when you can feel heard, you feel more significant too. So it's such a gift to give someone, just hearing them. And even if it doesn't make sense to you, still saying, yeah, I get it that you feel like that. I'm really sorry.

• 59:46Steven Bartlett?

  In your book, when you're going through the case study of Joe, I believe it was, you talk a lot about food and diet.

• 59:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:52Steven Bartlett?

  We all have the belief, and even I do, and I work out every day, pretty much every day, about six days a week, and even I know who I want to be in terms of my diet. I know that I want to lose fat. I know that I want to not eat the Pringles.

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:04Steven Bartlett?

  I'm very clear on this. I think about it a lot.

• 1:00:06Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:00:07Steven Bartlett?

  But I still eat the Pringles and I still have the chocolate and I still don't seem to be able to live in accordance with what I know, or at least what I say I want to do. And also, as you've articulately said, we all know what good food and bad food is. But we still continue to make the wrong choices.

• 1:00:28Speaker 00

  But from an evolutionary point of view, sugar is a good food. You know, if you were living thousands of years ago and you're out on the prairie, if you found honey or fruit, it was probably going to be very safe and had a lot of fructose and it would keep going. If you found some lettuce, that wouldn't be the same and bitter stuff is more likely to poison you. So we're actually hardwired to prefer sugar because it gives us a lot of nutrients, a lot of calories, a lot of energy for something small, whereas something else wouldn't do that. And our primitive brain still believes that we'll run out of sugar, which is why no one says, I've got that lettuce in the fridge, calling me no, but that Ben and Jerry's, that cake, those cookies, I keep going back for more.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  And so it's very hard to fight your primitive wiring. You are hardwired to remember where sugar is and finish it. You're hardwired to eat food when you see it because if the hunters came home with some fish and you said, I don't really fancy fish, two days later you would be kicking yourself because you should have eaten it when it was in front of you. We're wired to be scared of hunger. If you're scared of hunger, you can't be rational. Also wired to go for fat, you know, so Pringles and potato chips are the new cigarettes because we love the fat. We love the crunch because we have stress receptors here that love biting and crunching. So everything we think was wrong about food is actually from our minds, but no,

• 1:01:57Speaker 00

  it's right. You should eat when you see food. You should load up on calorific food because we lived in feast and famine for years. But if you can understand it, you can change it. And the whole diet industry is based on absolute abuse and self hatred. You know, we talk about punishing those pounds, doing a punishing workout, living on a shake diet, or powdered soup diet that just tastes disgusting. We go to groups where we get weighed and shamed in front of people. We talk about food as sins, and we've had a naughty day, or I've been good, been so good, I haven't eaten. Now I've been really bad, I ate a cookie.

• 1:02:39Speaker 00

  And that, that is why to make you feel like a massive, massive failure. Even you saying, you know, I shouldn't eat the Pringles, I shouldn't eat the chocolate. You know, the way you eat is only down to the pictures you make in your head. If the picture's right, you eat. That's why vegans can't eat meat, because the picture is wrong. Jewish people can't eat pork, because the picture is wrong. So if you want to succeed, you've got to maybe set fire to some Pringles, or do something, make some glue with jelly sweets. And then when you make the picture different, you'll never want to eat it again. But you can't succeed at that by beating yourself up.

• 1:03:16Steven Bartlett?

  That's so very true. The thing that stopped me drinking Coke was watching a clip that someone had shared, and they just boiled Coke. And they showed the residue that was left behind, and it looked like oil. And this picture I have in my head now is that if I drink Coke, I'm putting this gloopy black oil in my body. And I'm scared of that.

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  The way you feel about everything, everything is down to only two things, the pictures you make in your head. And the words you say to yourself, and I think I've now trained thirteen thousand therapists in our TT all over the world, and they all say, you know, that's such a condensing therapy into a moment. The way you feel is down to the pictures you make and the words you can say, which you are free to change. I can't get on a plane, it's killing, it's dangerous. Well, actually, the most dangerous part is the cab ride to the airport. It's the state of mind. They feel free. And so if you can just look at every time you think of something or feel something, think, what are the pictures and words? What am I saying?

• 1:04:18Speaker 00

  And if you can change them, it changes everything. And of course, they are your words and pictures. I'm going on a date, I might be rejected, but I could be with someone amazing who just thinks I'm the most amazing thing. I'm going to this, I could fail, but I could also get this amazing job of my dreams. We've all been told that human beings are very complicated and that the mind is very complex, and it isn't. It's very simple. You only have to know three things about your mind. One is, the way you feel about anything is down to the pictures you make in your head and the words you say. The second is that your mind is hardwired to keep returning to what's familiar while running away from what's unfamiliar, which, and that's true, but you can make anything.

• 1:05:00Speaker 00

  You can put a bit of silicone on your finger and shove it in your eye every day and it becomes so familiar. But at first, using lenses is very unfamiliar. But the most important thing about the mind is that it does what it thinks you want. And you've got to sit down and think, you know, but what do I want? I want attentions, I've got a nervous twitch, I want attention, I'm getting all these illnesses. Oh, I see, I should have said I want positive attention for being really smart, or really kind, or really evolved. So... Really, you don't need to study in humor, but you need to know those three things. And if you know them and apply them, you can make sense of your life and everyone else's lives.

• 1:05:43Speaker 00

  But also, you can make your life so much better by thinking, I can change the pictures. I can take sugar out of my coffee and make it familiar very quickly. And if I tell my mind like a spy school what I really, really, really want, but I'm very clear. Like, you know, I want more money. Well, what's that? 10 bucks? I want passionate relationship. For how long? A week? So if you just keep always going back to those three things and looking at them, you can have whatever you want, once you can look at those three things and make them work for you and not against you.

• 1:06:21Steven Bartlett?

  When I talked about the Pringles there, you talked about the kind of, this initial stage being that acceptance of understanding that this is my hardwiring. And this is, you know, I'm not, I'm not a bad human. In fact, I am a human.

• 1:06:35Speaker 00

  You're doing what nature wants you to do, actually.

• 1:06:37Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, and that acceptance is, you talk about it when you talk about Terry in your book, when you're talking about dealing with hard feelings, this AAA sort of process. Can you give me a little bit of illumination on that?

• 1:06:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love AAA. I invented that. A lot of things I invent is, first of all, makes it easy for me. But when I'm teaching therapists, it's easy for them to think AAA, what does that mean? It means be aware of what you're feeling.

• 1:07:01Steven Bartlett?

  So this is a formula, almost a three-step process for dealing with hard feelings?

• 1:07:05Speaker 00

  So any hard feelings, or indeed any feelings, and it doesn't have to be hard. Be aware of what you're feeling and accept it. That's the second. People think, what am I feeling? I'm feeling jealous. I shouldn't feel jealous. I need to eat a cake. I'm feeling a feeling in my stomach, the seat of all emotions, and I shouldn't really feel that feeling. Let me eat it, drink it, smoke it, shop it, Netflix it. But when you say I'm going to be aware, I'm aware that I'm feeling incredibly jealous of someone else whose book is selling more than mine. Oh, I feel really jealous about that. Now I've got to accept it. Yeah, I'm feeling a little envious. But you know what? My book's doing good. Not as good as theirs, but I've got to accept it. Then I've got to articulate it. I've got to say out loud.

• 1:07:49Speaker 00

  I'm feeling really a little envious about that Paul McKenna. Got so much bigger numbers, but you know, Paul deserves it. He's worked really hard. He's not me, I'm not him, our books are different. And if you can just do that triple A, always start with the awareness. What am I feeling? People say, oh, you shouldn't feel that. And you go, what? But my feelings are the most real thing I have. How can I not feel it? I was having a conversation, I said, well, you shouldn't feel that. I'm like, shouldn't feel it? The feelings are real. I can't not feel it. It's like saying you shouldn't be diabetic. So first of all, I'm feeling it. And you can't tell me I can't feel it because I'm feeling it. So I'm aware I'm feeling it.

• 1:08:32Speaker 00

  And I'm going to accept that I'm feeling it. And then I'm going to articulate, right now, I'm feeling this rage towards my boss, who's taken my idea and passed it. And I'm feeling this rage towards my sister or my partner because they're not listening to me. So I'm aware, I accept, I articulate. But if you do those three, it goes away because feelings are like children going, hey, notice me. And if you don't notice them, they regroup and become stronger. When you eat your feelings, shop your feelings, Netflix or drink or drug your feelings, they don't go away. They regroup and come back. But when you feel them, when you are aware of them and you accept them and you articulate, and they actually go away really quickly.

• 1:09:17Speaker 00

  So many people come in and say, I just feel so angry, so sad, so frustrated, so disappointed. Well, okay, let's feel that right now and let's say it out loud and then it will go away. And if only we all knew that, it makes such a difference to our life.

• 1:09:36Steven Bartlett?

  We see it in men, don't you? Men express themselves the least and kill themselves the most.

• 1:09:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, the highest suicide rate in the world is young men. And actually, they always, someone has always made them wrong. It's always someone has made them wrong before they take that action.

• 1:09:50Steven Bartlett?

  Someone has made them wrong?

• 1:09:51Speaker 00

  Wrong, yeah. Someone has made them wrong. Someone else has been right and they feel very wrong. They've been dumped, they've been rejected, they failed at something exam, they've been humiliated. They feel wrong.

• 1:10:05Speaker 00

  But yeah, and but they don't feel that they're allowed to have those feelings. You know, men don't cry, you're running like a girl, stop being a big girl's blouse. We have all these expressions for men, man up. And all they say is, don't feel. And and that's killing people, not feeling. It's, you know, we've got people that are glut of people taking antidepressants to be numb because they don't want to feel. And yet, your feelings are the most real thing you have, and they will do you an immense favour if you tune into them. Sometimes you think, you know, what am I feeling? Actually, I'm feeling really nervous. I'm about to give a speech and I'm feeling kind of nervous. What can I do? Well, I can remember that I always feel like that before a speech, but I always do them.

• 1:10:50Speaker 00

  And in five minutes, it will all pass, it will be gone. And I'm just talking myself into it instead of talking myself out of it. So I'm going to accept, I feel nervous, I'm aware of it, and I'm going to say, oh yeah, here's that old nervous feeling again. Actually, it's adrenaline, it's excitement. And I always get this, and it's always gone. You can always talk yourself into something or out of it. Talk yourself out of the negative and into the positive ones. It will change your entire life.

• 1:11:20Steven Bartlett?

  Incredibly, incredibly inspiring, and I relate to a lot of that. And we have a, we have a closing tradition on this podcast.

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:11:29Steven Bartlett?

  Where the previous guest writes a question for the next guest.

• 1:11:32Speaker 00

  Okay, how cool.

• 1:11:34Steven Bartlett?

  So the previous guest has written you a question. They didn't know who they were writing it for.

• 1:11:38Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:11:39Steven Bartlett?

  I won't tell you who they are.

• 1:11:40Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:11:42Steven Bartlett?

  You're gonna have to riddle this one a little bit, but the question is, are you experienced, question mark? If so, what did you learn? And then they've done an asterisk at the bottom that says, in the Jimi Hendrix sense.

• 1:11:55Speaker 00

  Oh, I love Jimi Hendrix. Are you experienced? Yeah, I am experienced. You know, people say to me, but you're not a doctor. You're not a psychologist, you're not a psychiatrist. But I've been a therapist for thirty-five years, my entire adult life. And I feel I am very experienced in understanding human pain. And what did I learn? I learned that almost all my clients' pain comes from not believing they're enough. It's why I have all these I'm enough braces. It's why I created the I'm Enough movement, because I worked with millionaires and Olympic athletes and sports stars and movie stars. And I realized that they have the same problems. So what my experience taught me from starting as a therapist, working with, you know, everyday

• 1:12:37Speaker 00

  people, schoolteachers and police officers and stay-at-home moms, to working with billionaires, taught me that we're all the same and we all have the same core issue. I just don't feel enough. But that isn't true. But if you keep saying it, it becomes true because it feels true. And so if we can just change those thoughts and feelings. So my experience taught me that therapy is not complicated. And it taught me that this belief, oh, someone's got depression, that's very complex, so the treatment's complex too. No, it isn't. Treatment can be really fast and effective because it comes from, again, the not-enough-ness that's so insidious.

• 1:13:22Speaker 00

  But it's not even real. But it's like saying my headache is psychosomatic. That doesn't mean it doesn't hurt. It's just the same as a headache that's caused by an exposure to toxic chemicals. They both hurt the same. One is real, one is psychosomatic, but they feel the same. And so my experience taught me to treat people and to simplify. Simplify therapy, simplify the cure. You know, the word cure comes from the word curious. And if you're curious, and if you treat every client as if they are fascinating and compelling and interesting, you'll always unravel in your curiosity. I mean, we're not allowed to say we cure people, but still, I love the fact that cure comes from the word curious.

• 1:14:07Steven Bartlett?

  Marissa, thank you so much and thank you for writing such a brilliant book. It's the first time I've read a book like this that was centred around case studies of patients and because you're telling real stories of patients and really dissecting them, it's much easier to follow and to relate to than if you were just like, you know, if it was a textbook. Because I read those textbooks in school, the childhood psychology textbooks and psychology textbooks, they were difficult.

• 1:14:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:32Steven Bartlett?

  The diagrams and stuff, but this felt very, very human and I think that's what made the book so.

• 1:14:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I wanted people to think, I identify with Terry, I identify with Joe and if I see Terry's story, I can see my story and in Terry's transformation, I can see how to transform me because we all relate.

• 1:14:49Steven Bartlett?

  Exactly.

• 1:14:50Speaker 00

  So I wanted people to relate to it and get the same benefit.

• 1:14:53Steven Bartlett?

  It's a very different approach, but it's an incredibly powerful one and I think it's an incredibly important book for everybody to read. Thank you as well because, you know, your, your work influenced my, my first book in a, in a big way. And just the, when I saw that clip going viral online where you talked about people not feeling like they're enough, it was, it was exactly what I'd felt for my, my whole childhood and it was really just an illuminating thing that allowed me to behave in a different way and cure some of my own sort of insecurity, shall I say.

• 1:15:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:15:22Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you.

• 1:15:22Speaker 00

  So the simpleness of it was the, people think if it's simple, it can't be profound, but the strength often is in the very simplicity and it can be so profound.

• 1:15:32Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's always easier when it's simpler.

• 1:15:34Speaker 00

  Thank you, I'm so pleased and touched that I could help you.

• 1:15:38Steven Bartlett?

  Not just me, many, many millions. Thank you, Marissa.

• 1:15:42Speaker 00

  Thank you too, it's been lovely, thank you.