Moment 27 - How To Become The Person You Want To Be: Prof. Steve Peters

In these ‘Moment’ episodes of my podcast, I’ll be selecting my favourite moments from previous episodes of The Diary Of A CEO. Steve Peters is a doctor, a psychiatrist, a professor and a mental coach for the world’s top athletes and business leaders. He’s also the author of “The Chimp Paradox”, which has sold millions of copies worldwide and put forward the groundbreaking ‘Chimp model’ for understanding how our brains work. In this moment episode, Steve helps us understand how our brains work and reveals what is actually driving us to do what we do and be who we are. Episode 96 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDDNI3irZMg Steve: https://chimpmanagement.com/professor-steve-peters/ 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.

• 0:03Steve Peters?

  The mind isn't one entity working. So when I ask people about self-image, I'm now going to split the mind a bit and say, what is the self-image that you feel you would like to have and that you are aiming to to present to the world? And what's the genetic self-image that your mind is giving you and the mind interpreting? Hence, I started saying you have this circuitry which is rational and logical, looking at the facts. And you have a circuitry which is emotionally based. So it's not logic and emotion. It's logically based with emotion and it's emotion based with logic. And we don't control that. So if I try, that's detail, I had to listen to that one again.

• 0:44Steve Peters?

  Is what I'm saying is we have control over the the circuitry, which I call the human circuits. And your self-image then might be that I'm a compassionate guy, that I'm a trustworthy person, that I always give a hundred percent. This is what your self-image could be when I discuss with you and your circuits are responding. However, if you've moved the blood supply and oxygen uptake into what I'm calling the chimp circuits, circuits which are quite primitive but think, you don't have any control over that. So they will generate thinking and the chimp circuits may give a very different answer. Because they're much more likely to be emotional and say how you feel about yourself rather than the reality.

• 1:26Steve Peters?

  So the feeling could be the reality, but it's it's likely not to be. So we get two images from two different circuits.

• 1:33Steven Bartlett?

  In the world we live in, especially in the social media world, it feels like our drives and our values are somewhat sometimes handed to us and we don't even know that something isn't our true sort of intrinsic driver or values. But because of, I don't know, a desire to be to fit in or to be to gain approval from people, we take it up as a value of our own or or we say if we're asked that that's something that drives us, but it's not. So we might say we want to be, we want a Lamborghini or we want to be a public speaker or whatever. But really, probably underpinning that is our desire to be to get recognition and to to be loved. I don't know. But how do you go about understanding what your true drivers are in life and not the things that you say just to?

• 2:19Steve Peters?

  Yeah, this is where, when I looked at this, as I say, a long time back, you start to see that if you ask people, which is what I do, to put away everything and just get a blank piece of paper, that's where I start. My starting point is always write down the perfect person you want to be. Because this now excludes any of the drives and a lot of what you're talking about is actually behaviours attached to drives. They're not true drives. Drives are things like the need to eat, the need to have security. These are drives, the need to be a parent. And we have these compulsive driving forces within us that get us out of our seat and make us find something. Whereas gaining approval from people is actually based in the orbit of frontal cortex, the chimp again, where it's terrified of being excluded

• 3:04Steve Peters?

  from the troop. So a chimpanzee in the wild must be part of a troop, otherwise the leopard's waiting. So lots of eyes protect you. So the chimpanzee has an inbuilt need to be with other chimps. And in order to do that, it must prove to the other chimps that it's worthy. Because if it isn't, they could exclude it, which would be death. So we carry that drive still, that we need to be approved. The problem is, the chimpanzee's got it right, we've got it wrong. The chimpanzee recognises it, it only wants approval from its immediate troop. Whereas we actually try and get approval from the whole world. You know, so one person on social media tells the world that they're not like us and we can potentially fall apart. Instead of saying, actually, they're not in my troop, so it's not important.

• 3:45Steven Bartlett?

  So tell me through that process then. So I get a blank piece of paper, I write down who I want to be. I would say things like, I want to be, and correct me where I'm wrong here, okay? Because I would.

• 3:55Steve Peters?

  You won't be wrong.

• 3:55Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. But if I say, I want to be, I want to achieve great things, is that a drive?

• 4:02Steve Peters?

  No, that's not a drive. That's something you hope for.

• 4:04Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, okay.

• 4:05Steve Peters?

  So we get the terminology right. Because if you hope for that, but accept it may not happen, that you're now working with the human circuit, which is logical and rational. So we hope to get, like I work with elite athletes, which is a privilege, and they hope to get, say, an Olympic medal. And they hope for that, they accept that you may not get this, even if you're on form on the day, somebody may be better, or you may make an error. So as long as you have that, then it shouldn't be stressing you.

• 4:29Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 4:29Steve Peters?

  It will be okay. But if you move into saying, I have to get an Olympic medal, we're now moving into the chimp circus.

• 4:37Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 4:37Steve Peters?

  Because that's not true.

• 4:38Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, you don't have.

• 4:38Steve Peters?

  You know, you don't have to, you know. But if somebody absolutely says to me, you don't get it. If I don't get, then life's not worth living. I'm not going to argue. What I'm saying is that's a choice you're making and you must also accept the consequence. So I can't put, I can't change that. So, so when you start your list, what I'm really asking for is what are your character traits?

• 5:00Steven Bartlett?

  So, so discipline?

• 5:02Steve Peters?

  Yeah. I mean, again, I would test the waters. I don't know what you're going to say here.

• 5:05Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 5:05Steve Peters?

  You're in the spotlight. I'll just do a quick one for you is to say, do you, would you like to be a really nice, good person? Or would you like to be successful? You can only be one of them. Which would you prefer?

• 5:15Steven Bartlett?

  Um, a really nice, good person.

• 5:17Steve Peters?

  So I know where I stand with you now. So we have to now make sure that you understand that's the prime reason that we're going to do the work is to get you to be the person that you want to be. This is the good news. If you write on a piece of paper, the perfect person you want to be. So give me some more character traits, traits.

• 5:36Steven Bartlett?

  All the things that come to mind are the impact I want to have on those that encounter me. So.

• 5:41Steve Peters?

  Right. So you, you want to be inspirational?

• 5:43Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, I guess that is, but also just like empathetic and compassionate.

• 5:48Steve Peters?

  Okay, brilliant.

• 5:49Steven Bartlett?

  Positive force.

• 5:50Steve Peters?

  You want to be an empathic guy, a compassionate guy, inspirational. You're probably going to add, if we go through this in our time, honesty, integrity, trustworthy, you know, respectful. When you've done all this, this is really crucial and it is a lightbulb moment. If you think about this, that if you had control of that part of your brain, which you have, and there was no interference from the rest of the brain, then that's exactly how you would be in life.

• 6:15Steven Bartlett?

  True.

• 6:16Steve Peters?

  That is you. So what I'm saying is the reality is fantastic. That is you. It's not who you hope to be. It is you. It's not a myth, it's neuroscience, it's you. What we're now seeing is that doesn't present to the world because now your chimp and the computer system, the backup to both human and chimp, now impose other things and so the world might see something different. So you say to me, I want to be compassionate. And I walk in and say, I've had a really long journey today, all went wrong. And you're busy and you just get irritated and say, oh, for goodness sakes, stop mourning. And then afterwards, you think, well, that wasn't very compassionate. So I'm not compassionate, but that's, that's misunderstanding the neuroscience.

• 6:57Steve Peters?

  You were always compassionate because your intention was always to say, sorry, Steve, that you've had a rough journey. You know, because obviously it's important, although I wouldn't be telling you. I mean, you still might wanna say, stop mourning after a while, but it's done nicely. But what happened is your chimp is saying, I don't need to deal with this. It's doing my head in, so I'll just have a go and that'll stop him. And there you see this immediate reaction without thought to consequence. So then our rapport fails a bit because I think, not a nice guy this. But actually, when I understand the science, I think, he's probably a nice guy, his chimp wasn't very good there. That's very different to you going away at the end of the day thinking, what's wrong with me? Why was I lacking in compassion? The answer was, get the neuroscience right.

• 7:42Steve Peters?

  You've never moved position, you're always a compassionate guy who's trustworthy and honest and so on, your chimp has interfered. Now, it's very critical, I expand on two points here, because the listeners are gonna go, hang on. This is not an excuse model. A hundred percent, I'm tough on people. It's not an excuse model. You're a hundred percent responsible for managing the chimp, so you need an apology. So when you know the chimp's been a bit brisk or rude, you've got to stop and say, I apologize. You are responsible. So I'm not saying blame everything on your chimp, I'm not saying that. And the second point is, you gave me an answer there by saying, I want to be this compassionate guy. And people say, surely everyone writes the same list. Absolutely not.

• 8:25Steve Peters?

  In the nineties, when I started to really pull this together and was looking at the neuroscience.

• 8:31Steve Peters?

  Clear as you probably know, I worked in the field of forensics. And if you take a typical person, so we'll take you as a typical person. And we say, what would you give? You give me the right list. Peaceful, calm, you'll go through integrity, honesty, compassion. That is really common on the list. However, when you get to the psychopath, they wouldn't put these. And when I asked them, they did not put honesty. They did not put compassion. They were not relevant. They had a very different list of who they would ideally like to be. And it wasn't pleasant. It was all about power. It was all about ego. These are what are in critical, this is what I'm going to be. So actually, the human in that person is not the good guy.

• 9:13Steve Peters?

  I used to say it's often the chimp in them that's the nice guy. The actual human's not so nice at all. So it isn't a good guy, bad guy. That is not at all what the model is. It's saying we all have these systems. Let's find out who we are, what kind of chimp we've got, because they're spread in characteristic. And then what have we got on our computer?