The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Life of Purpose: Sasha Heinz | Taking Human Performance From Good to Great

Join us for our Life of Purpose series this month as we revisit some of our most impactful episodes. Dive deep into expert insights and practical strategies on health, performance, and community, helping you achieve personal and professional fulfillment.

Sasha Heinz took inspiration from her time in athletics for her approach as a life coach in psychology. An actual coach in any sport doesn’t approach a player as someone who’s broken and needs fixed; they view them as a person who is whole and just needs to be taken from good to great. And that’s the approach she takes to psychology. Hear her story, how she developed her approach and uses it now, and more.

Sasha Heinz is a developmental psychologist, life coach, and founder of The Science of Unstuck.

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Duration:: 1h 24m
Broadcast on:: 17 Jul 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

As you probably noticed this month, we're bringing you our "Life of Purpose" series and revisiting some of our most transformative episodes, tune in to explore expert insights and practical strategies on help, performance, and community well-being, all aimed at helping you achieve personal and professional fulfillment. If you sign up for the newsletter, you'll not only get recaps of the key ideas in each interview, but at the end of the series, you'll receive our free "Life of Purpose" ebook. What you have to do is go to unmistakablecreative.com/lifepurpose. Again, that's unmistakablecreative.com/lifepurpose. Sasha, welcome to the unmistakable creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us. Madam, thank you for inviting me up. Yeah, it is my pleasure to have you here. So funny enough, I was trying to figure out how I was introduced to you. I know that somebody wrote in, I don't know if it was a publicist or somebody, but they told me about your work. And when I went and read your about page, I think what got me was the fact that your work was rooted heavily in research, and I'm always interested in people who do personal development, new work and self-improvement work that is largely based in research. So we will get into all of that, but before we do that, I want to start with a question that I don't think I've ever asked anybody before to start the show. And that is, what was the very first way that you ever made money? Oh my gosh, the very first way I ever made money was, well, besides doing chores in my my father tried to pay me to read when I was little, which by the way, now we know from research that that is a deterrent, that that creates extrinsic motivation, which is demotivating. So you shouldn't have done that, but I found some old, I found a hilarious, promissory note from when I was in maybe third grade and my dad was trying to bribe me by chapter. You should be by the chapter. But the first way I actually received a paycheck was waitressing. Okay, interesting. What did you learn about people and human behavior that you feel impacted your life going forward from that job? Interesting, I was a terrible waitress because I really was, I was terrible because I would get sucked into certain tables and love and enjoy talking with them and just sort of, you know, I'm a psychologist, it's what I do. I talk to people all the time, so I would have one table that I loved and then completely neglect the other tables, so that made me a decidedly bad waitress. But I enjoyed it a lot because I would, because I got to know people who were traveling, I was living in actually until you're out of Colorado, this is a ski bum. So I would get to meet all these interesting people that are coming through town. And I loved that part of it. But I'm sure there were plenty of people who were very frustrated that their meals were taking a long time to get to me like you were craving connection with the people that you're serving. Yeah, I mean, I think that I've always been interested in social science from day one. I've always been interested in subcultures and why people do what they do and trying to understand what motivates and what motivates and drives people has always been something I think is interested me from the beginning. Okay, I couldn't let this ski bum thing go because I'm an avid surfer. So I get this like just absolute obsession with anything that results in that much flow. And it's so bizarre that you brought that up because I was just going back through Stephen Kotler's book Rise of Superman this morning to kind of see where I could make alterations to my day based on some of the things that I had heard him say in an interview. How long have you been skiing? Oh my gosh, I've been skiing since I can't I can't even remember learning how to ski. But my brother is this is this or I call my brother Chandler Casino from North Shore, the movie North Shore, the soul surfer. I don't know. It was an 80s classic. Totally. But my I come from a skiing family and I just started skiing. I think I was probably three when I first started to ski and it's just been a huge part of my life. It's a huge part of my husband and my life together and our kids too. They learned I think both my kids started skiing when they were about two. So with the little harness, you know, bringing them down the hill. So you know, one of the things that I've always wondered about as somebody who learned both to snowboard and surf as an adult at the age of 30. When you're a kid, do you have the sort of understanding of the fact that there's this incredibly spiritual and deep side to it that causes this flow or is it just something that you see as fun? Like do you have any sense for why it's so addictive and it hooks you so much when you're that young? And how has it changed with time? And what have you learned from skiing that you have applied in other areas of your life? Which I realized like three questions in one. Yeah, I kind of said, there's so this questions are great. I hadn't thought about it in this way. I think the reason I love to ski so much as a kid was that skiing represented such freedom to me. You know, you go on the mountain and it's this altered universe where your parents basically say, see you later. You know, here's some lunch money. What is like five bugs back then? Here's money to get lunch. And then off you go and you're skiing with friends or skiing and ski school, which is, I mean, looking back, those instructors are probably 22 years old, right? It's fairly unsupervised. And I never had that in any other area of my life. It was just complete freedom to do whatever I wanted all over this huge mountain. It was just such an incredible thing. And I played sports pretty competitively as a child. So it was the one sport I did just for the love of it, just for the fun. And I think there were, I mean, I have so many thoughts about the Bell Middle psychology to me. I have a lot of thoughts about what we're doing with kids and sports nowadays. And I think it's not great. But, you know, we professionalize sports now at such an early age. And that was even happening in the, you know, in the 80s and believe 70s or early 80s too. And but skiing was that one thing that I got to do just for the intrinsic value of it, because it was fun. And it was, you know, you're the feeling of your body going down so fast on the mountain, especially when you learn to ski before you even have any fear, right? It's like walking to you. It feels like just part of who you are. This is just a great experience. And I think, unfortunately, there's two, there's not enough sport is that's exactly what it is, right? It's play. And so, and we know so much about positive emotion now about why human beings have positive emotion from an evolutionary perspective. It, you know, it slows down what we call the thought action repertoire. So between the thought and the action, there's an emotion and positive emotions flow that down. So it's where you find, you know, it's, it's where you find creativity and, and broader perspective. And so these activities that help us get into that positive space are so important. And often, I think when we're playing sports with like a very different mentality around, you know, if it's sort of pressured and it's, it doesn't, it, it doesn't have the same effect. Yeah. Which is why I think people get so obsessed with, I mean, surfing, I think, is surfing and skiing seem to be the two sort of lifestyle sports. Well, it's interesting because my, you know, I always tell people, but the reason I gravitated towards these sports is because that if my performance sucks on any individual day, it doesn't affect the performance of everybody else that's with me. Whereas on a basketball court, where I was the most improved player on my seventh grade basketball team, which really just means you're the shittiest player on the team. I noticed that. Okay. Now I'm in the grid area. You can't think of that. Who knows? Maybe knowing everything I do about human performance now, I might have become a pretty decent basketball player. But that was what appealed to me so much was the fact that that, you know, that there was a component of it that there was no sort of bar that had to be met in which your performance was measured. The only person that you're competing against on a regular basis was yourself. But I'd imagine also that skiing, you mentioned that this notion of skiing before fear had developed. So I had to ask about that and how that is different as adults and what we can do to navigate taking on incredible challenges, you know, when fear has already developed in certain areas of our lives. Yeah. I mean, this is, it's really interesting because I just have no fear with skiing whatsoever. And then I've had friends that have learned later on in life and you can and you watch them and the only difference between a child learning how to ski and an adult learning how to ski. I mean, there is development of all things that change like once we go through puberty, it becomes more difficult for us to learn these new skills, just becomes technically harder. But the, but the main, you know, psychological difference is an adult is scared and a kid is scared, right? His kid is falling and getting up and trying it again and, you know, maybe get a little bit frustrated, but it's just, they're, they're not registering like I am about to die. An adult is having that thought, right? Yeah. And like, this is a bad idea. I'm going to break the leg. Like they have an entire narrative in their head is creating a lot of fear, which also probably makes it less fun. So, you know, when we're learning something new, you have to really manage your thinking because your thinking is what's creating the emotion of fear. All right. So, so that's like, that's like when the reason to learn something new as an adult on some level is to go through the process of having to work through their, you know, the, the thoughts that are creating these emotion and hold us back. Yeah. So, I have to ask you about a certain experience that I had based on this. So, it was interesting because I had Kristen Olmer, who's the world's best extreme, you know, female skier here as a guest. Oh, wow. And we're talking about her new book, The Art of Fear. And in our conversation, I told her, I said, Hey, I'm actually going to be in your neck of the woods next week for a snowboarding trip. I was going to Utah. So, I got to, you know, spend about a week at Park City. And one of the days we went to Snowbird, and I don't know if you've ever skied Snowbird, but the places like Mountain Doom, especially on a day when it's cloudy. Yeah. Snowbird and alta are amazing mountains. They really are. And I remember, and I've been snowboarding for probably three years at this point. I'd hit my first Black Diamonds earlier in the year. And I got up to the top of the mountain at Snowbird, even just like looking up, you know, I was looking at the gondola that day. It was cold, it was windy, the visibility was really bad. And I just had like a temporary meltdown, like I just freaked out. And I couldn't push myself up to even stand up on a snowboard, despite the fact that I was doing 35 mile an hour runs the day before. What happens in those moments? Like what in the world causes somebody to be that paralyzed when they clearly have had experience with something like this? Like it wasn't, it didn't seem rational to me to be that scared. Oh yeah. I mean, let me disabuse you of the idea that human beings are rational. Yeah, not rational. I mean, yeah, the only thing that's happening is you're having a thought, like you're having a thought that created that fear and it can be extremely powerful. The circumstance is essentially the same, right? The what you were doing was the same. You were skiing the day before you're skiing today, but then all of a sudden you had a flood of, you know, you probably had a flood of thoughts. I don't know what they were, but that they were creating paralysis. I can tell you were triggered it. Oh yeah. I think I know there was a sign on the gondola about speeds. It was it was at the bottom of the lift as people are getting in line for the first, you know, lift first chair of the day. There was a sign that said it was about man, you know, controlling your speed. And it was about a guy who was going something like 60 miles an hour and a hit a five year old girl and killed her. And I was like, of all the places you could put this sign seriously. Okay. So this is such a good example of what I do. I mean, this is, for example, of how our brain works. And so, you know, there was a really brilliant psychologist named Albert Ella and was one of the fathers of cognitive behavioral therapy. And he had a model which he called the ABC model. So there's an activating event which triggers a belief and the belief creates a consequence. And I use a model like this was my clients. It's I've you know, augmented this model, but this premise is the same, which is there was an activating event, right? The activating event was you read this sign, right? And it triggered this thought. Oh, like, I could actually kill someone. My doing this, right? If I'm not in control, I might kill somebody, which is way the stakes are now so much higher. Right? But the truth is, nothing has really changed about the external, the event or the sort of, you know, the externalities of it are not nothing changed. They're you're skiing the same mountain the day before. And that event with this skier and the girl was had happened, had already happened. Right? Yeah. But you didn't have a thought about it. So there was no fear. Yeah. Right. The next day, you read something. And now you have a new thought. And the new thought is, you know, oh, you know, if I if I ski too fast, I could I could seriously injure myself and I could harm somebody else, which is, you know, now that as I said, the stakes are the stakes are raised, which so it was those, the new thoughts would created the fear, right? Generated fear. Yeah. So it's really about, but if you were in that situation and you're like, I am now at the top of the hill and I'm completely paralyzed and I can't get down, right? The, the trick is you have to, you're feeling fear at the moment. It's hard to do it, right? Yeah. Because fears can really take over your body physiologically, but yet to pause and asking yourself, what am I thinking that's creating this fear? Uh huh. Right. And being able to question your like, we have to question our thinking. We assume our thinking is rational, but often it's not rational at all. I have a secret. I wore the wrong foundation for years. Then I discovered Ilma Kiaj. Their AI powered quiz makes it so easy to find a perfect match customized for your unique skin tone, undertone and coverage needs. With 600,000 five star reviews and 50 shades of flawless natural coverage, this foundation is going viral for a reason and with try before you buy, you can try your full size at home for 14 days. Take the quiz at ilmakiaj.com/quiz. That's i-l-m-a-k-i-i-g-e.com/quiz. Hi, it's Mark Bitman from Food with Mark Bitman. Friends, a word from the folks at Whole Foods Market. 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Go to bombas.com/acast and use code ACAST for 20% off your first purchase. That's bombas.com/acast, code ACAST. Yeah, I mean, I had this just flurry of thoughts that suddenly flooded my mind. And one, I couldn't get, I literally couldn't push myself up even though I had done it 100 times the day before. And then there are those traverses that you have to get, which are a pain in the ass on a snowboard, because if you lose your speed, you'll make it down. And I kept thinking, okay, well, this traverses super narrow. If I fall over the edge, I'm going to fall off the mountain and die. And luckily, some old guy kind of just guided me down to a point where there was a bit more wide terrain. And from there, I kind of got back into my groove. But I mean, it took almost half a day to get back to normal. Oh, yeah. I mean, our emotions are incredibly powerful. But I think what we forget often is we just assume that our emotions are sort of their facts. Like they're just, they're true. It's about how, you know, our feelings are our facts, but our feelings are derivative of our thought almost all. I mean, you know, this is the some all models are wrong. Some models are useful. This, I think like this cognitive model is very useful, but there are instances that are, it's not necessarily doesn't work like that, where perhaps the, you know, that you can put a pencil in between your teeth and turn up the corners of your mouth, and you, and then there's, you know, they've done studies to show that that is a can significantly improve mood, right? And so people can, you can physically act your way into feeling better, but more often than not, I would say, you know, most of the time our emotions are derivative of our of our thoughts. And so learning how to manage those thoughts is absolutely essential. One other question about this, you know, about the skiing piece, which is been really interesting to me, and I'm trying to figure out why this happens, and maybe as a lifelong scary, you could, you could, and these psychologists, you could set the mind on this. Why is it that you get this sort of level of motivation from action sports that bleeds into other areas of your life? And I'll give you an example. So prior to surfing, I was incredibly undisciplined, couldn't finish most of the things that I've started, very often picked up new hobbies and quit within a very short amount of time. And over the last 10 years, as, you know, as a byproduct of becoming a surfer, I am very convinced that this is the case. I also became a prolific writer, wrote multiple books, developed the habit of writing a thousand words a day, built on mistakeable creative. And I've always wondered if the the journey, the fact that these two journeys are parallel is just a coincidence. And since you're a psychologist, who is a lifelong skier, I really wondering, you know, if you can shed some light on this for me. Well, I mean, I think I wonder, and again, like, this is not, you know, this, I'm just my conjecture, but but I would really imagine that for you, surfing really brought into a state of flow. Yeah. I mean, I've heard this my, as I said, my older brother's a surfer, he's just, it creates this, I think the flow state that people get from surfing is so addictive. And so, and it's because it's a visceral, it's hard to get yourself into a state of flow, right? I mean, it's, it's like, this elusive for a lot of athletes, it's an elusive state. So if you're, if that's, if surfing was really helping you get into that place in sports psychology, we call this, you know, in the zone, right? You're so, where the level of challenge and your skill level are fairly evenly matched. So you're in this, it's a way of aligning and organizing your brain, right? So when we're psychic entropy is when our brain is all over the place and it doesn't feel very good. When our brain is, you know, and our mind is kind of aligned to one end to one focus, it feels great. But it actually doesn't feel like anything, which is really strange. It's this strange state where you don't actually feel any emotion, you're not even conscious of feeling anything. And it's in retrospect where you look back and you're like, oh, that was amazing. That felt awesome or that was such a great experience. But in the moment, you're so focused on what you're doing that you're not actually conscious of your emotional state. And I think more than any other sport surfing seems to be the one that gets you ends up, you know, because you're you're dealing with some pretty serious natural elements with water, right? So you have to be, you have, it requires a level of focus that maybe other sports don't. And so by learning to surf, you know, you are inducing this state of flow. And perhaps that had the spill like once you realize you could get yourself into that state, you know, perhaps like craving more of that in every other area, like writing is definitely flow activity for a lot of people. Yeah, definitely. Interesting. We'll come back to some of this because I still have a lot of questions about this. But I want to talk about how you get from sort of, you know, waitress slash ski bum to developmental psychologist, how in the world did you get to this point? Like what were the significant inflection points and what led you down this path? Yeah, that is a good question. I, so I had taken you off between high school and college. And I had gotten in early to school early action. So I applied early to Harvard. It was my myopic focus was to get into Harvard. It's what I wanted for the time I was a little kid. I know that sounds so weird, but I was that I was that kid. I really wanted to go to Harvard. And when I got in, I sort of realized I didn't know what I wanted, what I cared about, what I was actually interested in my whole life and been focused on the goal and not the journey, not the journey. And once I got the goal, I sort of didn't know what to do with myself. So I took a year off and I was playing. I was a squash player, so I was training and playing squash. And then I took some time off to go skiing and live and tell you right. But when I got to college, you know, here I was, like I in my for my version of my life, like this was the this was the great pinnacle, like the great achievement. And when I arrived in Cambridge, it was such a letdown, you know, because I didn't really, it didn't solve any problem. I was it didn't really make my life any better, right? It was just like, I checked the box, I did it. And I'd assumed my whole life that getting, you know, achieving that feat would then make me feel great. But it didn't really work. Right. And now, I mean, now I know why this is the way that our brains were, right? But that was so disappointing for me to be, you know, here I was in this great, you know, academic institution. And I was just really not that happy. And it was sort of this protracted, you know, face plant that was college. And I think when I graduated from college, I actually vowed I would never go back to school. It's just famous last words ended up going back to a lot more school. I graduated. But I would I became fascinated with we what okay, so if the externalities aren't going to solve the problem here, right? Like, if I'm going to achieve all these goals, and they're not going to make me feel better, yeah, then what is like, what is the point? And I became so interested in what does it mean to live a good life, a happy life? What does it mean to thrive? What does it mean to, you know, how do you put your head on your pillow and be proud of your day and feel like you could live a good day that I, you know, I became completely obsessed with understanding that. Because it I felt so confused and lost and a mess when I was in college. What, what did you do after college? I went, I worked in, well, so in college, I had wanted to be, I was a social anthropology major, we call it concentration, but yeah, major in college. And I, so this, the subcultures, I was studying was Christian motorcycle ministries. So I traveled around the, you know, U.S. in the West, like the in Colorado and Texas, all these and going to biker rallies and did was filming, you know, they were ex-outlaw bikers that had the massive conversion. And now we're ministering to people at these big rallies, like in Sturgis and South Dakota. And so I, at that point, I thought, well, I really want to be a documentary filmmaker. That's what I want to do is when I left college, I worked in various, I worked in production companies and, and did a lot of film production before. And then just by total dumb luck, really, I had read Marty Seligman's book, who's at Penn, who's the father of positive psychology. And I'd read his book authentic happiness. And at that point, after college, I'd hired a coach, which by the way, like tooth, it was 2001. Nobody even knew what a coach was. If you felt like the only coaches that were anyone, you know, you even thought of were sports coaches. So the idea of a life coach was totally bizarre. And, but I loved working with her because I'd been an athlete. So this idea of, you know, instead of kind of endless therapy and endless navel gazing and kind of trying to understand the antecedents, the sort of how I'd gotten to where I was, I love this idea that we were going to act. It was more future oriented that I could just take myself as I was in the moment and move forward. Right? I didn't have to sort of, you know, reconcile and fix my past. I could just take where I was today and chart the course. And I don't know that entire pair, like that idea was game changing for me because I thought, like, yeah, this is what I, this is really what's going to work for me because I had been in, you know, in therapy and, you know, and I just sort of felt like I was rehashing over and over again this, you know, the stories of my past but not really getting anywhere. Interesting. I'm glad you brought up the coaching and then you tied it to the fact that you were an athlete because they, oh, yeah. So this, my coach is the one who'd recommended that I read authentic happiness. And when I read it, it was this idea like, you know, you don't have to roll around and like the idea that in psychology, right, that we're rolling around in our mock to get clean. It doesn't actually make sense. And that and this Marty Seligman was the first psychologist that I had read who was interested in, okay, you know, the psychologist has been traditionally set up to get you from, you know, the negative end of the spectrum to the zero point, right, to cured. Okay. He felt right. But there was nothing that was about, well, how do you get from zero to the positive end of the spectrum, right? Yeah. What does it even look like? It was completely new at that time. And that really resonated with me. And I think, you know, I really took to it. And I buy it. And I was saying the dumb luck was that he had happened to be starting a master's program. And I just immediately thought like, okay, I applied for it in secret. Yeah, but I couldn't bear to tell my family and friends that I was actually going back on my word that I was never going back to school. Well, I actually told people that I would never do anything related to the internet for my job post business school. Famous last words. Yeah, exactly. You know, I'm really glad you brought up the fact that you understood the value of a coach from having been an athlete because I, you know, I meant to ask you about coaches that you would have had in high school from being an athlete and the impact that they had on you and what lessons you learned about coaching that is sort of impacted your perspective from being an athlete. Well, I think that I think coaching in the in terms of our psychological health, I deeply believe in it. And I mean, we can go into a whole conversation about like how the field, you know, could be professionalized and all that. But I think that the idea of coaching to me is a very powerful one because, you know, at any given moment in the United States, I think the statistic is something like 17% of the US population, it has clinical psychological disorder, like that's pretty high number. That's, you know, close to two out of 10 people are suffering from some clinical psychological issue. That still leaves eight out of 10 people as, you know, what I would call the walking wounded, right? Functional, taking care of the sort of daily lives living, living a functional life, but are still dealing with the condition that all of us have, which is having a human brain. And there was not a psychology like there hadn't been a psychology that was addressing the needs of that of the 80%. So the, the sort of what I got out of coaching, like when I was saying, you know, I really took to coaching because I had been an athlete was when you're an athlete and you have a coach, the premise is not like, Hey, you're broken. I'm going to heal you. I need to fix you. Something's wrong with you. No, right. You make a team. And the code, the premise of the relationship is, you're good. I'm going to make you great. Yeah. Right. And so I love that idea of, you know, when you're working with a client, Hey, you're coming to me, your whole and you're an intact whole person, right? You're not broken. You have all the tools in you to take care of yourself and to you know, take care of your life. I'm going to give you and help you develop the tools and the skills to take it to a higher level, right, to perform at a higher level. Yeah. It's very different. It's a, it's a, it's a kind of, it's a different contract, you know, between two people. Definitely. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. With the price of just about everything going up during inflation, we thought we'd bring our prices down. So to help us, we brought in a reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a thing. Mint mobile unlimited premium wireless. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch. 45 dollars up front for three months plus taxes and fees, promoting for new customers for limited time unlimited more than 40 gigabytes per month. Slows, full turns at mintmobile.com. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. 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Let's reclaim our peace and put an end to those spam text messages and other data privacy issues once and for all. Interesting. So let's shift gears and actually let's start talking about those tools. But I think I want to frame it in a different way by asking two things. One, you had mentioned that you thought the goal of accomplishing the goal of getting into Harvard would make you feel all these things. I feel like I've had this conversation with multiple people and I'm still not satisfied with the answer I've gotten. So why do we think that? Why do we feel that when this external thing happens, everything is going to be amazing. So for me, it's been, okay, when I meet a long-term partner or when my book becomes a bestseller or when I get a publishing deal. Yeah. And it's funny because the publishing deal happened. The high lasted for you know, a little bit. And then life got back to normal pretty soon after that. And I was like, that's exactly right. I'm like, now this void that I thought was going to be filled is still empty. Okay. So why is that? And what are the tools that get us from being good to being great? And there's one quote that I want to ask you about, but I'll ask you after you answer this question. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think what happens is that we have a few annoying features of our mind. And one of them is that, well, often our greatest instincts are just incorrect. So we think that, you know, we are going to walk out. And if we were hit by a car and become a paraplegic, that our life is going to be awful, right? That would be terrible. And that would make our lives miserable or much less happier than they are now. But that's just wrong. You know, the data shows that when we follow people that have been in catastrophic accidents and have become paralyzed, they go through a period where their wellbeing does dip. But then it comes back to pretty much the set point it was before, right? You know, we assume that making, you know, some distant relative, you know, that we didn't know very well passed away, left us with like a hundred million dollars that we would be enormously happy. And our life would be forever altered for the better. But this is not true. Like our instinct is that that's the case. But it's not true. The data shows that, you know, we, if we inherited that, we would be there would be a momentary blip, kind of like in a wellbeing boost, as you as you said, and then it goes back to kind of the same old same old. And what happens is that we this is what we call, you know, hedonic adaptation that our brain is that we adapt to inhibit your weight, both positive and negative stimuli, such that the emotional effect of it is is blunted right over time or attenuated. And this is actually great. It's great that we do this because it means the negative, say, is the tough stuff. We also adapt to that. So it doesn't, you know, it's not as bad as we think it's going to be. But it mean that the positive stuff is not as good as we think it's going to be, right? It doesn't have the same wellbeing. It doesn't have the powerful wellbeing boost we think it's going to give us. And this is, is not an alliance, like it's completely contradicts what we're being told in living in a capitalist, you know, society, which we do, we're constantly given messages that, you know, these externalities will make you feel great, right? Like they're always selling the lifestyle, right? So it's completely counterintuitive. So we assume like, oh, these external things, like getting the book deal and, you know, having the, you know, having the relationship that you see on the zales from first of all, you know, Kay Jeweler, but that's going to make us so much happier. But the truth is that, you know, yes, it does for about two years, we're in like two years, marriage increases our wellbeing, and then we go back to our normal levels, right? That's it. And so, you know, it's it really serves us in some ways, because the the lows aren't actually as bad as we think they're going to be, but then the highs that we assume are going to make it so great, actually, aren't as, you know, great as we think they're going to be. And even more annoying about our mind is that we never learn from this, right? So we go, we like this, this hedonic adaptation that I get every increase of achievement or every increase in our wellbeing. We adapt to that. It just becomes the new normal, right? We don't learn from this. So, you know, despite the fact that, you know, I got into Harvard, well, like, that that became like the new normal, and it wasn't that exciting anymore, right? Yeah. And I would also imagine, too, is that like your reference group has probably become more eye-achieving, too. Well, I talked to people like you all day, so my reference group is wildly skewed. Right? And so we don't judge stuff anything in our life. I mean, we don't, human being, our brains don't judge anything on a absolute scale, right? That's not how we judge stuff. We judge ourselves and compare ourselves on a relative scale based on, you know, against the most salient reference point. So if you have, I mean, this is why they've done these amazing studies where they show this, it's always the silver medalist who's most unhappy, right? It's like, if you look at pictures of people on an Olympic podium, it's really funny. The gold medalist is like beaming ear to ear, and by the way, so is the bronze medalist, and the silver medalist is picked. It's so funny, you say that. Sorry, I'll leave you back here, but I was just thinking, I missed all state band by one chair when I was a freshman in high school. And that was my worst possible outcome. I was like, I would rather be dead last and had no shot at all than being the first alternate. They took three and I was number four. Right. And the reason why is because if you were dead last, I didn't have a chance. Yeah, your most salient reference point was the people around you. Like everybody. I still remember the name of the guy who beat me to this day. Of course you do. Right. Exactly right. And by the way, I'm sure if they did, you know, if they were looking at Olympic medalists and, you know, they would probably, the person who's in fourth place is also probably really pissed. Yeah. You know, I'm really unhappy. But for the bronze medalist, the most salient reference point is I'm, I got on the podium. Like I almost didn't get on the podium. Right. So they're thrilled. They almost were in fourth place and aren't going to get a medal at all. But for the silver medalist, the most salient reference point for the silver medalist is losing the gold. Right. So I'm, objectively speaking, the gold medal should be the happiest and the silver medal should be second happiest and then the bronze medal should be the least happy. Right. That's what we should see. But that's not what our brains do. That's not how the human brain works. Right. We have, you know, we compare ourselves to our past, our past performances and we compare ourselves socially and the social comparisons are, you know, they're not objective. They're not based on an absolute scale. So the higher you, the more you achieve, then the smaller you're kind of the group that you are of people that have achieved around you, you know, like you're comparing yourself to those people. So like the bar is always being raised. Yeah. So how do we deal with the fact that these reference points are constantly changing without losing our minds? Mm-hmm. Well, this, I mean, this is why there was a couple tricks you can do. I think, you know, being very deliberate about your experiences and making sure that you do things that are, you know, awesome and fabulous and amazing. And then also deliberately staying in things and places that aren't as nice are going to visit places that aren't as like fancy or highbrow, right? Like you that you give yourself kind of high and low. This is, you know, the value of maybe going camping and being without for a little bit, right? Like that resets your reference point. Like you want to constantly be doing things that level set, to kind of bring that reference point back down. So it's not this ever increasing, you know, standard. So like the first time, I mean, I think traveling on an airplane is such a good example. We're also annoyed about airline travel. It's like, if you lose in Clark, how they would feel about getting on an airplane and traveling like an hour to get something that took that a year to do. You're like, that would be the best thing on the world, right? Like there's there would be nothing better than being able to board an airplane and arriving, you know, in an hour. And you're like all disgruntled about being delayed for, you know, a two hour delay. Right. But the problem is, is that because we've adapted, right? We've hadonicy, you know, the hedonic adaptation. We've adapted at this level of convenience. And so now the two hour delay is extremely irritating. So go on a road trip, like travel somewhere by car. It might make you appreciate your next trip on the airplane, even if you are delayed for two hours, right? So you want to be actively doing things that are like that are bringing that new normal back down, you know, so the. Okay. So we've talked about changing, uh, ref you dealing with, you know, reference points in a hedonic adaptation. What are the other tools that get people from sort of baseline to grade? Oh, from base. Well, I mean, I think that truthfully, I mean, what's really happened is that I spent all of this time studying, you know, health well being optimal functioning, human flourishing. And there's a lot that we know about what high achievers do, right? Like there's a lot of research out there that shows what's predictive of success and what's correlated with success. Like we know a lot of that. But what I became fascinated with, um, and I would see this with my students at Penn. And I would see, I see this a lot with my clients. And I would, and I saw this, you know, obviously most salient with myself, but it's one thing to know how to, you know, what one should do. And it's a very different game to get yourself to do it. Mm hmm. As are two different issues completely. And I thought that positive psychology had so much to offer in terms of, um, you know, I mean, the descriptive research and, um, of understanding like what zero to 10 looks like, um, and is, I mean, it's just blown up in the last 20 years, our knowledge of, um, episode of, you know, in a, in a nutshell, like what's right with people is so much greater. But that's completely different than the science of behavioral change. Like, how do you get actually get people to do it? I mean, look at dieting, right? And wait, everybody pretty much knows how to lose weight. It's not a mystery. Yeah. Right. But this is the success rate with diets, like 3%. Mm hmm. Right. That is not promising. Deption. It's not that there's not a knowledge gap. That's of the issue, right? Mm hmm. It's a, it's a mindset gap because you're the, it's not the, you know, the technical stuff is solved for. We know what you do, right? We know what you need to do. The question is like, how do you apply that and actually get the results and get, and me, blasting change, like it's completed. It's a totally different game. So my interests really shifted because I, you know, if you go to Penn and you teach at Penn in the positive psychology program, it's like a happiness Olympics. Yeah, I know. Cause a lot of those people have been guests here. Right. Like everybody that well being is extremely high, right? Everybody is like, there's, there, I might even say that there's some pressure to be like, you know, high affect, have high affect. Right. So, but, but I would, I found that a lot of my students over the course of the year would, we're having trouble applying what they were learning. And that to me, it's completely different issue. It's like the whole question of behavioral change. Like that's, that's a very tricky nut to crack. Do you think we've cracked it? I think there are some, you know, Robert Kagan at Harvard, I think has done some amazing work into his immunity to change model. But I, yeah, I think this is in my opinion, this is the more underdeveloped area. Right. I think, and this is one of the reasons why I think self-help can be self-help can be unhelpful sometimes for a lot of people. I think self-help can end up being a little bit like diets going on a, you know, the diet world, like a 3% success rate, because you're, you know, people become self-help junkies and we're reading all these books and not able to actually apply them. I think that actually ends up leaving people feeling worse. Yeah. So how do you, I mean, how do people start to bridge that gap? I'm guessing that's the question that's on everybody's mind. Yeah, I mean, I think the way that you have to bridge the gap is, and it's, it's not, you know, it's not sexy. It's effortful. But it, we know so much more about, I mean, I think that the most interesting research that's coming out is about the power of our mind. And all the research on mindset, there's an amazing, you know, researchers at Stanford, Carol Dweck's research, Alia Crum, who've done incredible stuff, looking at the power of our minds. I mean, it changes, I mean, if physiologically changes us, our minds, I mean, there's all the placebo research as well. But you can apply the same rigor in managing, like learning how to manage your mind and changing your mindset as you can in any other thing, right? So if you're, if you're an athlete and you're, you know, training for any sport and you're perfecting your, let's say your tennis player, you're perfecting your swing, right? You have to apply the same rigor and practice in learning how to shift and manage your mindset. Because there's, you're, we're always a thought away from changing our life. Like the thing that holds us back is, you know, we have, we have a mindset that there's a competing commitment, right? That you're, you're, there's some kind of battle going on in your mind where you, you want to make this change, you earnestly want to do it, yet can't seem to get yourself to apply it, which like, you know, often my clients would describe this as like, you know, feeling like they're living in Groundhog's day. Yeah. Like, boy, how am I here, right? Like, their, their New Year's resolutions are laminated. It's the same thing every, the same thing every year, right? And the, what, what actually, you know, lasting behavioral change is always an expression of a mindset change. You have to believe something different to do something different, right? And I think often we try to solve the problem by just changing the action, changing the behavior. But that requires way too much willpower for us. And, you know, willpower is great in short, in the short term, but it's not a lasting solution on the in the long term. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. I think about, you know, how I developed the habit of a writer, and I think just deep down, I was like, I had the belief that, okay, this will leave to something good. Because I already knew that, you know, just, you know, the, the fact that I semi developed the habit already led, you know, quite far. Absolutely. And, and I think this is what people really forget is, you know, we, we have this whole world of positive affirmations, but often those positive affirmations are too far away from us, right? So we, it's like, going from, you know, I hate my body too. I love my body or from, like, I'm a failure to, I'm a success, whatever, right? Like, it's way too far. Yeah. And so what ends up happening is, you know, that, you know, the affirmation or like the new thought, you don't believe it. So you're saying it to yourself, but there's a voice in the back of your head that's like, yeah, that's true. Yeah. You know, like, uh, you're right. And so it ends up backfiring because all it's really doing is it's reinforcing your, your, you know, the old mindset, like the existing mindset, which is I'm a failure. Yeah. That's fine. So I think, you know, what have, what you need to do is find more neutral thoughts that can lead you to bridging the gap between like the, you know, the operating system that you're in now and the operating system that you want to have, which is I'm a success. But you've got to, you've got to traverse that kind of what I call the river of doubt. Wow. Okay. So a couple other questions come from this. This is a quote that I saw in your website. I was reading your about page and this caught my attention immediately. You said it's malpractice for a therapist to see you for 15 years without moving past the same place you started. And if your friends and family don't notice it changing you, I'm not doing my job. And yet, yeah, this is our status quo in society is years and years and years of people in therapy. Uh, why is, why is that? And you know, why do we, why do we find that it takes so long to, to get a change? I'll give you an example. Um, people had a breakup that made a mess of my head. And I felt like literally every week I would go to the therapist's office. I'm like, why the hell is this taking so long? Like, I should be over this. This happened a month and a half ago, and it took six months. Yeah. So why is that like, why is this our status quo? I think that we take our thoughts way too seriously. I mean, we have it. I, I stand by that 100 percent. Like, I, I just think that we have this idea that we're supposed to be excavating every single past herd and injury and trauma in our life and that this is somehow going to explain like how we've, um, who we are and how we've, you know, sad, but why we continue to sabotage ourselves and all that. And I do think, you know, yes, it's interesting and it's important to sort of understand the biography of our belief, current belief system. Like, how did we get here? How did we develop these beliefs? It doesn't happen in a vacuum, right? We have cultural, um, messages and then messages from our family of origin. Like, that's all important, but it's important to understand, you know, how you develop them. But that's more of a theoretical exercise because the way, where the rubber meets the road is, oh, I have this current belief system. Like, you know, whatever that may be that's holding you back. I mean, let's just pick, you know, the most common one. At the end of the thread, it's always some not enoughness, right? Not smart enough, not pretty enough. Not, you know, good enough. Um, but not funny enough, not clever enough. I mean, you name it like it's always some version of not enoughness that's at, for most people, it's like at the core, right? And unless you're dealing with that belief, then that's like, you have to deal with, you have to root those beliefs out, right? Like, that's what you're working, you got to work at that level. I mean, there's always a reason why we developed those beliefs. But, you know, I think when we come to an understanding that this is like a pretty universal human experience. I mean, this is the universal human experience, right? That we, um, we all struggle with these, with our irrational minds, you know, we're all screwed up, fallible, irrational creatures. And our thinking, um, pretends to be true, but very often our thinking is completely baseless and it makes no sense, right? So we have to become really good at questioning our, our thoughts. And I think what happens in therapy is sometimes we end up massaging our thoughts. Like, you know, like we dig deeper into them as if we, we like, we reify them and make them more important than they actually are. Like we have total freedom to believe whatever we want about ourselves. Yeah. We can't, like we can shit anyone, we believe whatever we want about our identity, who we are, what we stand for. You know, I mean, we can, there's no rules. And in the, the, like the, the booth, hey, the smorgasborg of, of thought in front of us, very often we pick up the worst ones and we hold onto them with, you know, we hold onto them dearly. But when you actually look at it that way, like we have this incredible freedom, right? It's, it's almost like it's, it's our brain like can't actually compute and we have this kind of fur right up. So two questions for you that I want to finish with. You mentioned earlier that your parent and as a parent and developmental psychologist, what impact has the work that you do had on the way that you're raising your kids? And, you know, I, like the reason I asked this is because I'm under the impression that if I had parents who are completely well educated and super conscious about this stuff, I would have turned out as a normal, fully functional, like, high achieving, you know, off the charts, human being. Right. And you being in the position that you are and being a parent, I'm really interested in what you have to say about this. And what advice do you have to parents who are listening? Oh my gosh. I mean, I, I couldn't go in. I mean, for a brief second, I thought maybe I would work with parents on working with them, you know, consulting them on parenting and development on psychology. And I know way, no way, because I am a parent. And that's just way too much. It's like, you know too much. So if you're talking about judging yourself, my comparison group was best practices. That's like, that's deadly. So I was like, I can't do that. Because, you know, we're parenting in real time. And that means we all make mistakes and you're dealing with kids with different temperaments and different personalities. And what works with one child is the, you know, the opposite of what works for the other one. So I mean, I think ultimately what we're hoping to create is psychological flexibility. And, and psychological fitness. And that means that you can pick yourself up from what goes wrong and learn something from it and move on, right? Because there is no perfect, it just doesn't exist. There's no perfect parenting, there's no perfect living, there's no perfect living of life, it doesn't exist. And, and I, and I think that sometimes like we professionalize parenting it. I mean, I think this has occurred in like the last 25 years, we sort of professionalize parenting, which leads to this false assumption that you can somehow be the perfect parent and you can do this perfectly. Like, that's crazy. Oh, and all of the, all of the hurt, all of the trauma, all of the mistakes, like all of that has just enriched my life. It has made me have more empathy, has like made me see something in a deeper, more full way. It hasn't been easy. It's not, you know, certainly, you know, life is difficult for sure. And, and the full spectrum of emotion is what we sign up for as human beings, right? Like, that's, that's what we, you know, on the other side of love is lost. Like, you can't have one without the other. So, I think that it's, it's a mistake to not allow ourselves to just have a human experience, which means we screw up all the time. But what we want to have is develop greater, you know, as I said, like greater psychological flexibility and fitness so that you're able to kind of recover from those setbacks or recover from those experiences more quickly, and gain something from them more quickly, right? And not, and not rather than ruminating in them and sort of feeling like, and, and would, you know, makes us feel, and when we're feeling bad, normally, you know, that feeling bad leads to a lot of dysfunctional behavior. And out. All right, two last questions. Yeah, this is something that I've been asking a lot of people because it is likely going to be the subject of my next book. And also was the subject of an article that I wrote recently for those of you who haven't checked it out. What do you think we should learn in school that never did? Oh, my gosh. I mean, unequivocally, how to manage your mind. I mean, it is, it is blows in my mind that we are taught arcane things that we'll never use. And the one thing that will change your life is understanding how to shift your mindset. We do not address this, right? It's, it's, it makes no sense to me at all. It's the, it's the one thing that we, everybody should be pulled aside in high cool. Okay, let me just share with you how you actually can change your mindset. And you can change a thought that doesn't serve me very well and isn't getting you a very good result. And we can teach you how to shift the mindset. Like that's profound. I mean, especially when you look at Angela Duckworth's research on, you know, self-discipline outperforms IQ in terms of high school achievement. And, and what is self-discipline? It's like, managing your mind. Right. So, being able to direct your brain to serve you is an essential skill that we don't learn. And I think it's a shame. Wow. Well, this has been amazing. So I have one last question for you. Just how we finish all of our interviews, the unmistakable creative. What do you think it is that makes somebody or something unmistakable? Oh my gosh. What do I think it is that makes someone unmistakable? I think it's just that, that same thing, that, that's ability to sort of pick yourself up. No matter what, right? Like, no matter what's happened, no matter how how like the base plan to be able to pick yourself up, that to me is the most remarkable human quality. Awesome. Well, I think that makes a really fitting end to what has been a very interesting and riveting conversation. Where can people find out more about you and your work? Oh, on my website, which is DR, Dr. Sasha Hines, the DR S-A-S-A-S-H-A-H-E-I-N-Z. And on Instagram, same handle at Dr. Sasha Hines. Yeah. Awesome. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Unmistakable Creative Podcast. While you're listening, are there any moments you found fascinating, inspiring, instructive, maybe even heartwarming? 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Sasha Heinz is a developmental psychologist, life coach, and founder of The Science of Unstuck.

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