Pod Insights Change Wired Breaking through your limiting patterns and seeing your blind spots - 1 research-backed tool that works across business, health, relationships Breaking through your limiting patterns and seeing your blind spots - 1 research-backed tool that works across business, health, relationships Change Wired
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About this episode Ever notice how easy it is to diagnose everyone else’s mistakes while your own patterns stay stuck on repeat? We dive into a simple, research-backed tool that cuts through bias fast: self-distancing. By stepping just a little outside your story, you cool emotional heat, spot blind spots, and see the strategic move that’s been hiding in plain sight. We start with the core problem of the inside view—how ego, fear, and history warp our decisions—and show why clarity come...
Transcript 0:09 Speaker 00 Hello and welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. My name is Angela Sharina, I'm your host, your partner in change, personal and collective transformation, your executive coach 360, someone to ready to push your edge to the next level and help you unlock more, unlock and grow and use more of your potential. On today's podcast, we, with my dear AI host Coco, co-host, going to discuss how to see our cognitive blockages, our thinking patterns that are broken, that are keeping us hostages
0:52 Speaker 00 in the looping, repeating patterns of our life, whether that's business or relationships or your personal health and fitness. I had, I was having a coffee with a friend a couple of days ago and we were talking about coaching and I told her how I like to help clients see their mental models that are broken, broken in a sense that they are, they don't allow my clients to get to the next level towards goals and aspirations that they have. And she asked me, "Oitla, how do you see that in clients and then how do you actually
1:31 Speaker 00 help them to see that and realize that so then you can work together on adjusting those?" And I told her, "Well, good listening really helps you to see where clients thinking doesn't allow them to get to the goal that they have in mind, where they are in their own way, just listen carefully." But in terms of how to help them to see that, it's kind of also like helping yourself to see your own blind spots. And how do you do that? You help your client and yourself to get out of your own mind.
2:10 Speaker 00 And there are great techniques that have been proven by some thought leaders in business and in decision making and in emotional regulation. So there are some tools, specifically, we're going to talk about one tool today that helps you to break through in your relationships, in your health and fitness, in your business, when you're seemingly just keep going through the same loops and the same patterns, thinking like, why do you track the same things? Or why keep you, why do you keep repeating seemingly again the same cycle?
2:49 Speaker 00 So without further ado, keep listening to the conversation between my AI co-hosts, which are trained on my blogs, that will help you to discover what the tool is and how you can use it, start using it today and how I used it to get some breakthrough in my business and in my relationships. So stay tuned. But before I let you go, don't forget to check out the link in the show notes, the invitation to apply to High Performance Performing Entrepreneur Reboot five day free challenge that is coming up at the end of December
3:33 Speaker 00 to give you a boost to break through any limits that you have in 2026. So check it out and stay tuned.
3:46 Speaker 01 But really, it's about this. How do we get a clear look inside our own minds? Because let's be honest, it is so easy to spot flawed thinking in other people.
3:55 Speaker 02 Oh, laughably easy.
3:57 Speaker 01 Right, you can see your coworker's blind spot from across the office. You know exactly what your friend is doing wrong. But spotting the little cognitive glitches that keep us stuck, looping the same patterns.
4:08 Speaker 02 Well, that internal lens is perpetually foggy. It's, you know, it's the classic paradox. You're the subject and the observer at the same time. So the bias is just, it's baked into the system.
4:18 Speaker 01 So that's our mission for this deep dive.
4:20 Speaker 02 Exactly. We've gone through a stack of sources here on decision making, psychology, leadership, and they all, strangely enough, converge on one deceptively simple tool. It's called self distancing.
4:31 Speaker 01 Self distancing.
4:32 Speaker 02 We're going to explore how forcing this little separation between your emotional self and a more objective viewpoint unlocks just incredible strategic insight. And it works across the board, regulating emotions, planning a huge business move, or just figuring out why you can't stick to your goals.
4:50 Speaker 01 And this is the good stuff because it's not just theory. The sources give us actual concrete things to do. We have examples from emotional regulation, from high stakes, CEO strategy. It's all here. And it delivers some uncomfortable wisdom, but necessary wisdom.
5:08 Speaker 02 It's a shortcut to seeing what's really holding you back.
5:10 Speaker 01 OK, let's unpack this. So let's start with a basic problem the research brings up. It's this question of how do you help people see their broken thinking?
5:16 Speaker 02 Right.
5:17 Speaker 01 And the whole difficulty is that thinking is invisible. We don't see the process, you know? We just see the result.
5:23 Speaker 02 We just live the result. And when we make a choice, it feels totally justified because our own internal narrative, our inside view, everybody built the perfect story for why it's the right choice.
5:34 Speaker 01 That's the core obstacle, right? That internal story we tell ourselves.
5:37 Speaker 02 Absolutely. We are just not objective when we're emotionally invested. That inside view is full of our personal history, our fears, our ego. It's like a gravitational field.
5:49 Speaker 01 A gravitational field. I like that. So you might know you should do something.
5:53 Speaker 02 You might rationally know you should start that new health routine or, you know, fire that client who's a total pain. But the gravity of that inside view, that inertia, it just keeps you stuck.
6:04 Speaker 01 And the sources are all clear on this. This isn't a personal failure. It's just how the human brain is wired.
6:10 Speaker 02 It's a feature, not a bug.
6:12 Speaker 01 So how do we get around the wiring?
6:13 Speaker 02 That's where the structured practice of self distancing comes in. It's a technique designed specifically to force that separation. It shifts your brain from what they call a hot, you know, emotional reactive to a cold state. Strategic, factual, more abstract. We're never going to be perfectly objective. I mean, that's impossible.
6:32 Speaker 01 Right.
6:33 Speaker 02 But by doing this, we get measurably better at making choices that help us in the long run.
6:37 Speaker 01 Okay, that hot versus cold distinction feels really key. And it sets up the next part perfectly because this is where it gets interesting. We see the same pattern, the same tool showing up in three totally different areas of life.
6:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's incredibly versatile.
6:52 Speaker 01 So let's start with the first one, the one we can all relate to. Navigating really charged emotions. You're furious, you're overwhelmed, you can't decide what to do, you're in that hot state.
7:03 Speaker 02 Hmm.
7:04 Speaker 01 The research from Mark Brackett gives us a really simple way out.
7:07 Speaker 02 It does. His work shows that the self distancing move here is something we can call the friend test.
7:13 Speaker 01 The friend test.
7:14 Speaker 02 The question is simply this. What would I advise a friend if they were in my exact spot?
7:21 Speaker 01 It sounds almost too simple. Like, that's it. Why does just asking that question change anything?
7:26 Speaker 02 Because it's creating neurological distance. The moment you frame the problem as belonging to someone else, you decouple it from your own limbic system.
7:33 Speaker 01 The fight or flight part of the brain.
7:35 Speaker 02 Exactly. You literally shift cognitive gears.
7:38 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:38 Speaker 02 Just changing the pronoun from I to you or they stops you from feeling the emotional swirl and lets you start analyzing it with your prefrontal cortex.
7:47 Speaker 01 That's fascinating. So all the drama, all the history, he said this and she did that, it all just kind of. shrinks.
7:54 Speaker 02 It becomes background context instead of the main event. You suddenly get access to the calm, wise part of yourself that was there all along, just locked away by the stress.
8:02 Speaker 01 You know, that's exactly what I do when I send a frantic text to a friend.
8:06 Speaker 02 Right.
8:06 Speaker 01 Half the time, I'm not even looking for their advice. I'm just creating a third party so I can give myself the advice I already know I need.
8:12 Speaker 02 That's a perfect way to put it. You're outsourcing the objectivity that your own situation just won't allow.
8:18 Speaker 01 OK, so let's scale this up. Let's move out of personal feelings and into, say, high stakes corporate strategy. The sources show the exact same mechanism at work here. But instead of emotional fog, we're fighting against organizational inertia.
8:34 Speaker 02 And this brings us to Jim Collins' work in Great by Choice. He studied these incredibly resilient companies, the ones that navigated huge turbulence and came out stronger.
8:45 Speaker 01 And he found a pattern.
8:46 Speaker 02 He found a pattern of structured self distancing among their most effective leaders.
8:51 Speaker 01 So how do they do it? What was their version of the friend test?
8:54 Speaker 02 Oh, it's a tool we can call the new CEO test. They would literally stop and ask themselves this question. If someone new, someone really competent, stepped into my role today, what's the one thing they would immediately do?
9:07 Speaker 01 Oof, I can't imagine how brutal that question could feel.
9:10 Speaker 02 It's tough.
9:11 Speaker 01 Because when you've been running something for years, certain problems just become wallpaper. They're just the way things are.
9:18 Speaker 02 Exactly, and that's what this question shatters. The sources say, fresh eyes reveal what familiarity hides. Inertia is the real killer of growth. The new CEO doesn't care about past failures or who's friends with who.
9:32 Speaker 01 They just care about what works.
9:33 Speaker 02 They just care about the most strategic move. It forces you to see the obvious thing that your own comfort zone has been hiding from you.
9:40 Speaker 01 But hold on, isn't that a little dangerous? I mean, if I'm the current CEO, I have to manage the reality on the ground, the people, the budgets. If the hypothetical new CEO says, "Fire half the company and pivot," you can't just do that.
9:55 Speaker 02 That's a great point, and it's a critical nuance. The question isn't meant to be the final plan. It's meant to break the deadlock. The new CEO gives you the strategic truth. That's the first step.
10:05 Speaker 01 The ideal move.
10:05 Speaker 02 The ideal move. Then your job as the current leader is to translate that truth into a pragmatic plan. So maybe the new CEO says, "Divest this division." You then create a two-year plan to sell it off gracefully and retrain the staff. The strategy comes from the outside view.
10:21 Speaker 01 And the execution comes from the inside view. OK, that makes sense. You break the inertia, then you guide the landing.
10:25 Speaker 02 Precisely.
10:26 Speaker 01 So that leads us right into the third domain, which basically formalizes this whole idea. We're talking about complex decisions with a lot of uncertainty.
10:34 Speaker 02 Right. This is where Annie Duke's work in How to Decide comes in. She brings the inside and outside views into direct conflict.
10:41 Speaker 01 The inside view, that's our personal story again.
10:43 Speaker 02 It is. Duke says that whenever we make a big decision, launching a product, hiring someone, we are always optimistic about our own specific situation. We think we're the exception.
10:53 Speaker 01 So if I'm opening a new restaurant, my inside view is, "My recipes are the best. My location is perfect. I'm going to crush it."
11:00 Speaker 02 Exactly. That's your inside view, full of all that rich, personal detail. Duke's framework says that before you're even allowed to write that story down, you have to first build a rigorous outside view.
11:12 Speaker 01 OK, so what does the outside view look like?
11:14 Speaker 02 It's a distant, factual, probabilistic list. You have to look at what are called base rates.
11:20 Speaker 01 Base rates.
11:21 Speaker 02 You have to ask, "What's the actual success rate for new restaurants in the zip code? What percentage of first-time entrepreneurs make it past year three?" You're basically forcing yourself to look at your project as just one data point among thousands.
11:36 Speaker 01 That feels incredibly humbling. It's grounding your personal optimism in cold, hard reality.
11:41 Speaker 02 That's the entire point. The outside view gives you the statistical truth, and the inside view gives you the nuance of your situation.
11:48 Speaker 01 And you have to document the outside view first.
11:51 Speaker 02 You have to. It prevents your own ego and your biases from coloring the whole process. You escape the gravity by making that distance mandatory.
11:59 Speaker 01 OK, let's bring this all home. The source material gives us a really specific, practical example of someone using this.
12:07 Speaker 01 A business owner was feeling stuck. Growth was stagnant. So they asked themselves the big question.
12:12 Speaker 02 The ultimate test question.
12:13 Speaker 01 If a highly competent friend took over my business for a week, what would they do that I'm not doing?
12:19 Speaker 02 And the insight that came back was, it was immediate. And it was a total blind spot. The problem wasn't a lack of skill or ideas. The weakness was the network.
12:29 Speaker 01 The network.
12:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, the source laid out this chain of connection. Trust comes from referrals. Referrals come from relationships. And relationships are built on proven value. He just wasn't building those relationships.
12:41 Speaker 01 So the outsider, the friend taking over, would see that immediately. They'd say, stop tweaking the product and start meeting people.
12:47 Speaker 02 And that diagnosis led to a strategy that felt, well, it felt really hard to do.
12:52 Speaker 01 Because of the ego.
12:53 Speaker 02 The ego and just the short-term financial pressure.
12:57 Speaker 01 And that strategy was, give away some of your best work to the right people. For free. Let's just sit with that for a second. Because when you're the one running the numbers and you feel like you're struggling giving away your time and revenue.
13:09 Speaker 02 It's completely counterintuitive.
13:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, the inside view is screaming, I need to bill every possible hour just to stay afloat.
13:15 Speaker 02 Exactly. It's immediate tangible sacrifice. But the outside view, that strategic self-distanced lens, showed that the sacrifice was actually an investment.
13:26 Speaker 01 An investment in the one thing that was holding the business back.
13:29 Speaker 02 Trust and referrals. And it wasn't just random. It was about targeting the right people who could see the value and were connected to the right kind of future clients.
13:37 Speaker 01 I love how the source material summed it up. The strategy felt painful to the ego, but was wise for the business.
13:45 Speaker 02 That's the tension right there.
13:46 Speaker 01 It's about ignoring that short-term fear to serve the long-term strategic goal.
13:51 Speaker 02 And this connects to what you hear from so many successful entrepreneurs like Alex Wormozzi. The idea of demonstrating massive value upfront. Self-distancing just helps you get past the personal financial panic and see that it's the right strategic move.
14:07 Speaker 01 Okay, so what's the big lesson here? What does this all mean for you, the listener?
14:12 Speaker 02 The main takeaway we've distilled is that our thinking is just. It's universally biased. We're wired that way.
14:18 Speaker 01 And while perfect objectivity isn't the goal, because it's impossible, these practices are proven tools.
14:24 Speaker 02 The friend test, the new CEO test, the outside view.
14:27 Speaker 01 They make us measurably better decision makers in every part of life.
14:31 Speaker 02 Right. It feels like the big discovery is that stepping outside your head reveals things that were obvious the whole time.
14:37 Speaker 01 They were just hidden by that fog of familiarity and emotion. The wisdom is already in you.
14:41 Speaker 02 You just need to create the space to access it.
14:43 Speaker 01 Self distancing is how you create that space.
14:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
14:46 Speaker 03 It's not about learning a new fact. It's about changing the frame. So we want to leave you with the final provocative question that the source material poses for you to think about this week. Where in your life, in a project that's stuck, a relationship that's challenging, or a big decision you're facing, where would stepping outside your own head, just for a moment, help you see the strategic move that's been right there all along? That's it for this deep dive. We'll talk to you next time.
15:11 Speaker 00 I hope, guys, that you really enjoyed this co-hosted episode. And now you have one powerful tool confirmed by best in business practice, decision making, emotional regulation. This one powerful tool of self distancing to help you make better, more unbiased decisions, more balanced decisions to help you break through those loops in your personal, professional life, your relationships, to keep moving forward, keep growing, keep improving, keep unlocking and using more of your potential. Thank you, guys, for tuning in. And don't forget to share, review, and give us five stars on anywhere you can find this podcast
15:55 Speaker 00 so we can reach more eager to learn ears, so we can all improve. So help me improve the world, help me change the world for the better. Share, review, rate our podcast. And guys, till next time. Keep learning, keep improving, keep growing, and keep unlocking more and more of your potential.
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