Ellen Langer: The Mother of Mindfulness

29:31Noticing change. That's what being mindful is, is noticing. And so we take people who have big diagnoses. We haven't done with cancer, but we have multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, stroke, big things, right? And what we do is we call them periodically and simply ask them, how does it feel now? Is it better or worse than the last time we called and why? And we do this a few times a week in the course, well, a few times a day in the course of a week, and maybe two weeks, depending on the disorder. Now, three things happen with this. The first is, let's take pain. People who are in pain think they're in pain all the time.

30:13No one is anything all the time. So when we call them and they say, oh yeah, right now I'm not in as much pain, they instantly feel a little better. Second, by asking people why now and not before, why are you a little better or a little worse, they're doing a mindful search. And as I've already told you, when we make people more mindful in this active noticing way, health improves and they actually live longer. The third is that I believe you're much more likely to find a solution if you're looking for one. So let's say, Guy, that you're one of these people who thinks you're stressed all the time.

30:50No one is stressed all the time. So now I call you and somebody else is calling you periodically to find out when are you more or less stressed? And you discover you're maximally stressed when you're talking to Ellen Langer. Okay, the cure is simple. Don't talk to me. All right. It's good for you to go on this search. You don't feel helpless. you're actually noticing things. The neurons are firing, which I said is literally and figuratively enlivening. And across all these different diseases that we've looked at, we find a significant improvement. There's something else that I talk about in the book that supports the mind-body as one, mind-body unity idea.

31:34Remember the borderline effect? In the borderline effect, let's say for argument's sake, guy, you and I both took an IQ test. And let's say you get a 70 and I get a 69. The way psychologists look at that is now I'm cognitively deficient. I have problems. Nobody in their right mind would think there's a meaningful difference between our scores. 69, 70, I could have sneezed and gotten the question wrong. But from that point forward, we go six months out, our lives will be enormously different. People will treat you, you'll treat yourself as if you're normal. I will treat myself and be treated by others as if I'm not, and it snowballs.

32:16So we did this with cancer, and we did it with diabetes, where we looked at people who were just a little bit above, just a little bit below the diagnosis, whatever the measurement was. So there's no difference. But yet over time, there is a difference. And the only way to explain that is by psychology, that there are ways we can aspire against ourselves. And just by knowing that that doesn't have to be so may go a long way in helping us stay healthy. One of the topics you brought up, and as a marketer, and as an entrepreneur, or I found so interesting is you talk about empathy. And to use business examples, Toyota has this concept of go and see, which is if your factory is not operating well, instead of just looking at reports, you actually go on to the factory for and look.

33:13Okay. And then our friend, Martin Lindstrom, he has a theory of go and be. So not just watch the factory, but be one of the workers, which is even better. So I think that's where we're crossing into radical empathy. But then you completely... I take it a step further. Okay, take it. Go from here. I think that anything that leads us to understand each other better is obviously good and something I'd be in favor of. But this is something I learned a while ago that is probably the one thing that's been more important to me than anything else over these 45 years of research on mindfulness. And that is that behavior makes sense from the actor's perspective or else the actor wouldn't do it.

34:02What that means is that every time we're casting aspersions, putting somebody else down, belittling them, we're being mindless. Let's say, for example, guy, you might not like me because I'm so gullible, which I am. But that's because from my perspective, I'm trusting. I can't bear you because you're so inconsistent. From your perspective, you're flexible. So it turns out for every single negative ascription we have for people, there's an oppositely valence. So you say negative, a positive, that's equally strong. And then what happens is we don't want to change each other quite as much. And then this experience happened to me that's, okay, so I'm at the house here and we have a big basement and we're expecting a large load of furniture to be stored.

34:53And there's a guy here, remember now, I'm a genius, all these wonderful things, right? And he, by all accounts, he's uneducated, he's depressed, he doesn't think he's worth very much at all. All right. I am sure there's no way they're going to get all that furniture in the basement. He not only gets it all in, but gets it in so that every single piece there is available to be used. It's incredible. And then I thought, well, it's just not fair. And so then I wrote a little song that I'm not going to sing to you. I actually wrote it for my grandkids, but I have my Harvard students sing it, which is that everybody doesn't know something, but everybody knows something else.

35:38Everybody can't do something, but everyone can do something else. And that once we recognize that all these people that we see as less than or in a company, they don't have anything to offer, we can start to view them differently, value them, and then we all prosper. I was giving a talk to some group in South Africa, and I was staying in this very fancy hotel. So one afternoon, I went down to the pool, and I wanted to be separate from everybody. I don't know why. And I noticed that there was a tremendous amount of real estate, so to speak, that the hotel owned that was totally unused. It was only the cabana boy, the quote, lowly cabana boy who had this information.

36:26And had he been respected enough, he would have had a way to give this information and increase the bottom line, which is what most businesses are really used to doing. But when we take ourselves apart, it's the same thing, that we did what we did because it made sense when we did it or else we wouldn't have done it. And rather than looking back at it and looking at myself as gullible, for instance, are you looking at yourself as inconsistent to recognize that you did it because of your being flexible or my being trusting. You end up with even more empathy than you would have just saying to yourself, well, gee, let me try to think kindly about this person.

37:13And sympathy is the worst because that says, boy, they really have this terrible thing. And what you're going to do is acknowledge that they have it and try to get past it rather than recognize the virtue that it actually brings with it you want me to give you a chance to talk

37:36i will have to mention that you are the first guest in 200 that got to the recording half an hour early. You've established a new record. No one ever has done that. Up next on Remarkable People. Most people are making decisions pretty much the way they should, but they suffer terribly worrying about are they making the right decisions. Become a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People. It's found on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. you're listening to remarkable people with guy kawasaki i love the discussion of empathy and radical empathy but you threw a wrench into the works when you discuss the prince and the pauper which is to say the prince acts like a pauper radical empathy and all that but at the end of the day the prince goes back to the palace right and the pauper is still a pauper so now what do All I do is, are you saying radical empathy is overrated?

38:44No, I think what's called radical empathy is better than a little empathy. But I think that a mindful empathy is even better. That when the prince is putting on the clothes of a pauper and walking the streets, yes, the main difference is that he knows he can stop being a pauper at any time. And this is the one thing the pauper can't change. And so when Martin Lindstrom, it's wonderful, let him go be a worker. But he also knows that at any point as the prince, he can say, OK. And so there's a limit to just how much information we can get by that. But certainly it's worth seeking. If you want another Martin Lindstrom story, he's been on this podcast and he told the story of being retained by a pharmaceutical company who wanted to, quote unquote, get closer to the customer.

39:37And so what he did instead of hiring McKinsey or Arthur D. Little, what he did is he took those executives and he made them breathe through straws. And after they struggled, he said, this is what it's like to have asthma. But as you just pointed out, after that exercise, they threw away the straws and they went back to normal living. Martin is terrific. And I think that's a wonderful exercise. but as we've just said, that to notice its limits, he then, I assume, would discuss that with the drug makers, that while you suffered and couldn't breathe, at least you knew that you take out the straw and you're fine.

40:20People don't have that possibility. So it's saying you're getting some information, but don't for a minute think that now you know what it's like being in somebody else's shoes. And the whole idea of walking in somebody else's shoes, you know, if I've been walking in my shoes, so to speak, for 70 years, 70, how old am I now? 76 years. And you're going to put my shoes on for five minutes? How dare you think you know what it's like? So there. Now, jumping back a little bit, because I feel like you're Hercules and you're diverting a river And I'm just trying to swim upstream and trying to not drown in this interview.

41:02So you talk about examining people's intentions and from their side, what they're doing is making sense. So how far can you push that? Can you look at January 6th and say, oh, I understand why those thousand people attacked the Capitol? Sure. if you were taught, let's take one step even worse if there is, you know, which is Nazi Germany. If you grew up and you were taught that Jews are vermin and they carry disease and the only way to get rid of vermin is to kill it, and you're brought up this way for a short lifetime, then I think it makes sense that you would then, when face to face with a Jew, try to kill the person.

41:48Now, clearly, as a Jew, I can say that I'm not suggesting that this is proper. I'm not suggesting with what people did in DC, that the law should look the other way. But I am suggesting that if you want to change a situation, the best way to change it is to find out why the person is engaged in it in the first place, which we often don't. You know, that if you want me to stop being gullible, no matter how many times you persuade me that people are gullible, seem weak and so on. Oh, yeah, I don't want to be gullible. But then I'm going to fall back into it. Why? Because I'm not being gullible. I'm being trusting.

42:30So you want me to stop being gullible? Get me to not value being trusting. If I want you to stop being inconsistent, I have to get you to not value being flexible. Or else what would more likely happen is we'd accept it. But we're not going to accept murder and murderous acts and transgressions that are costly to people. How do you make mindful decisions? Most people are making decisions pretty much the way they should, but they suffer terribly, worrying about are they making the right decision. And so look more closely at decision making and realize several things. First, you can't possibly sensibly do a cost-benefit analysis because there's an infinite regress.

43:18So how do you decide what's a cost? And how do you decide what that's a cost? And how do you decide that? And so on. That's the first thing. The second, and it's so important, especially when we're talking about stress, that events are neither positive or negative. We make them positive or negative by the way we understand them. So let's say, guy, to celebrate your birthday, you decide the two of us are going to go out to eat. And the food is wonderful. Yay, it's a hit. Now, if the food is awful, yay, that's a hit for me because I'll eat less and that'll be better for my waistline. All right. If it's the case that in equal measure, again, every positive is a negative, every negative is a positive, you can't add them up to see what to do because it's going to add up to zero.

44:06if it's equally positive and negative. So you can't be and shouldn't be doing that. Second, that even if you thought you could do that, nobody tells us and there's no natural endpoint to the information you could bring in to make the decision. I can't decide whatever you've asked me because I have to take the next three years to think about it. When is enough enough? There's no rule for that. When you add all of us together, which is hard to do, but before I give you the bottom line, let's go back a half a step. You make decisions based on predictions. I predict that saying yes to being on your show is going to be a good thing.

44:45I say yes to your show rather than do something else with the time. Turns out that predictions are illusions. In The Mindful Body, remember I said to you that it started off as a memoir. So I have this story about my interaction with Hell's Angels, and I'm not going to give it away, but it was harrowing to say the least, that at each moment in the book, when I'm telling the story, I stop. I say, okay, what would you do? After the fact, it's very easy to know what to do. And we all know the expression Monday morning quarterbacking, but we really don't realize that with respect to everything, you know, you see two people arguing at a party.

45:26If I asked you right then, are they going to get divorced? Who knows? People argue. Now, if I didn't ask you that, and the next day you find out, hey, they're getting divorced, you say, ah, I knew it. You should have seen them go at each other at the party. I use this example in the book with my graduate students in a seminar on decision making. I tell them, I have taught a version of this course for 40 years. I have never missed a class. Am I going to be here next week? Predict. So we go around the room, and these are Harvard students. So they say silly things. Like I said, 97%, because we know they're not supposed to say 100%.

46:04But so essentially, they all say, yes, I'm going to be there. I say, okay, now let's go around the room. And each of you give me a good reason why I won't be here. The first one always says, well, for 40 years, you've been here, you deserve the time off. The next one says your dog has to go to the vet. The next one says your car got a flat tire. And they give me 1215 good reasons why I won't be there. I say, okay, what is the likelihood I'm going to be there next week? And now that 100 % drops to 50%. Going forward, we have no idea. Looking back, it's quite easy to make everything make sense. All right, so if you can't predict whether you're actually going to like this thing, we're trying to decide which restaurant, all right?

46:49And one restaurant was a restaurant I've enjoyed in the past, but that doesn't mean I'm going to enjoy it now or anymore. My tastes have suddenly gotten more sophisticated or whatever. So if the way we think we should make decisions is that you know what's going to happen, what's good or bad about different outcomes, you add them up in some complicated way. And then you do what that cost benefit analysis leads you to do. Wrong. Nobody does it. It doesn't make sense to do it. So what's the bottom line? Okay, Guy, you tell them. What's the bottom line? This is a test. I'm getting tested by my Harvard professor.

47:29The bottom line is we go to this restaurant. It has terrible food. And we make the best of that decision, which is, oh, we won't stuff our faces. Oh, we won't oversleep. Oh, we won't get a hangover. Food isn't so good. We get more time to enjoy each other and to seriously think about what the other person is saying. So the upshot, since you can't make the right decision, is to make the decision right. You could flip a coin. And we did this. I had people spend a week not making any decision. Just the first option that comes to mind, do it. Or flip a coin or roll dice, whatever it is you want to do.

48:11And at the end of the week, how was it? It was great. I didn't have to worry about making a decision. Then I had another group. I said, make everything a decision. And should I put my right sock on first or my left sock? My right shoe, my left shoe. And at the end of the week, they also had a fine time because part of the stress that comes from decision-making is that we don't make that many important decisions. So if I gave you an exam and you had one question, oh that's a little scary because you get that question wrong you fail if you have a hundred questions you can make a few mistakes and it doesn't matter and so that's why making a decision every minute also puts each decision in a different perspective but people should try it just randomly choose whatever it is because you can't know because everything is changing everything looks different from different perspectives prediction is an illusion and whatever it says, do and make it right.

49:11And data for this comes from some other people, entirely different, on regret. That people tend to regret the party they didn't go to, the whatever it is that you're rejecting. Because once you accept it, you make it work. Oh gee, it was a good thing I was there, and Guy and I got together and we had a wonderful conversation. You know, he's a surfer, and I learned all about him. And if I didn't go, I wouldn't have that information that I'm eventually going to use to tease you with. I kid you not, when I read this sentence, don't try to make the right decision, make the decision right, I swear to God, Ellen, that was like the light went on.

49:54It was a turning point in my life this morning. I'm not exaggerating. That is humongous ramifications. one one right in front of madison and i right now is we're writing a book based on this podcast about how to be remarkable and we have three names as the final candidate the remarkable way how to be remarkable think remarkable like the apple ad and after i read your thing i said you know what we're just going to pick one and rather worrying about whether the decision was optimal more and right. We're going to make the decision that we made the right decision. Yes? Isn't that the application? Yeah, that's right.

50:37Now, so if you like one-liners, I have two others that are useful. The one that probably most useful since people suffer stress, and I think stress, by the way, is the major cause of illness. That if we took people who all just found out they had cancer, any kind of cancer. Now, nobody's going to be happy about that. But let's say three weeks later, we start measuring their stress level over and above nutrition, genetics, everything. I think that stress would predict the course of the disease. Okay, so here's the one-liner. Ask yourself, is it a tragedy or an inconvenience? It's almost never a tragedy.

51:17I missed the bus. The dog ate my homework. I couldn't finish the report. And once you ask that, you sort of just relax. And the other is that I don't think people will get as much out of this, but I think it's important that we have to stop using yesterday's solutions to solve today's problems. Which means what? Which means that everything we're doing, everything we decide to do is based on what worked yesterday. And so what we need to do is sit up and pay attention now. So when you're hiring somebody in, I don't know, managers, okay, or anybody in business, everything you're doing is based on the world as it existed last week, not tomorrow.

52:04And so I think that what we need to do is hire people who are mindful or teach them to be mindful, because that's the only way we can take advantage of all of the positive changes. So in a sense, you're saying hire the best athlete, not the proven athlete. I'm not saying anything about an athlete. I'm saying even with an athlete that if we had five athletes that we couldn't decide which was the best, I would hire the one that was most mindful because they're changing their performance ever so subtly rather than saying, ah, now I've guided and just keep performing in the same way. My last question, and probably not your last answer, but my last question.

52:54After I read your book, I have come to the somewhat semi-facetious conclusion that the best case is that I or the listener or the reader not have read the book, but my friends and family have. So my friends and family have read your book. They learned about placebo. They learned about variability. They learned about uncertainty. They learned all these great concepts. And now they apply it to me because now that I read your book, I know all these things and I'm thinking, oh, is this the placebo effect? Is it real? Am I doing the decision wrong? So it would be better if people around me knew all these things.

53:39No, I know. I write these books because of the deep belief that the world will be better, my life will be better once everybody becomes more mindful. And an interesting part of the book is some of the new work that's wild. I'll just take a minute to talk about it, about mindfulness being contagious. If it turned out that your family and all the people around you are mindful, you would end up mindful whether you wanted to or not. So that's good. That means in our hiring, we don't have to make sure to the one the person is mindful. But I can say, given that when you're not mindful, you're not there.

54:15And my belief is if you're going to do it, you should be there for it. And being there for it should be fun. Why you would want just the people you love to become more mindful. I don't know if you saw it. I think this is a great video. It's called Piano Stairs. And people who did this did it in Scandinavia. I don't know just where. But they went down to subways. And in many places, as we have here in this country, you have an escalator and stairs. And they videotaped this. And you see everybody's taking the escalator. Only a few young boys take the stairs. Then what they did was they put down a piano keyboard on the stair.

54:55As you're going up the stairs, you're making music. Okay. Now, in almost no time at all, everybody gets off the elevator and they're taking the stairs. And what I say when asked, if I'm talking to an audience or tell my students, why wait for somebody to put a keyboard down? That we can make virtually everything fun and interesting and meaningful. And again, I say, if you're going to do it, be there for it or don't do it. I tell my students, if they're going to write a paper, if they're not going to find it interesting, make it meaningful to them, don't write it. Life is too short. And they know this.

55:35We have now, different from when you and I were younger, we have all of these people like Jobs and Bill Gates who dropped out of school and did just fine. They know that if they're going to be in school, they don't need to be there. Make it matter. And I think now with AI, there's this big thing at Harvard, probably in schools around the country. Oh, my goodness. AI chat, GPT-3, 4, 5, can write the paper for them. And so what if they all cheat? And I think that we don't want to prevent people from using technology that's extraordinary. What we want to do is to teach them how to use it so they prosper from it.

56:18And just letting somebody else write your reports, you'll get the A, but you'll never feel good about yourself. And the downside also with chat is I'll say something that's wrong and you'll have no idea and that will be the end of your career. But who am I to speak? Well, as an aside, I will tell you that chat GPT and Bard and Claude, which is the big three that I use, there is no doubt in my mind that they have made me a better writer. And I don't tell it to write my book. I use it as a research assistant. No, and I think it's extraordinary. And so let's say you were hiring right before any of these came on market.

56:58and the person you're hiring would not necessarily be the same person you'd hire today now that we have chat to do it for example and the same thing with tomorrow things are always changing and so i think that we want to hire the people who can accommodate appreciate be aware of all the change and facilitate that in other people and what if somebody says is chat GPT &I is going to be the death of mindfulness because it's going to make people not have to pay attention and just put in a prompt and not even think about it. Yeah, I can't imagine that that would be so. And people are ever so resourceful that if chat were able to do all of your work, hopefully, I'm sure the people who are more mindful would then spend their time in other meaningful ways.

57:54So for me, I'd paint, I'd play more tennis, I do lots of activities that I enjoy as well as I enjoy writing books and teaching. We had one where we were going to have, we didn't do this study, but tell me what you think of it. We were going to have people who have learning disorders, disabilities, choose a person who they would like as their teacher. So, Guy, you might want Jerry Seinfeld to teach you. And so, Chad would take the lesson and teach you as if he's Jerry Seinfeld. And I think then you'd learn better. that all of us are capable of learning once we put aside the diagnoses we've been given and our thoughts of ourselves as being less than we might otherwise be.

58:38If we come to that, I'm going to pick you and Carol Dweck and Phil Zimbardo as my teachers. Okay, that's great. Carol and I went to graduate school together and Phil Zimbardo taught me psychology. I was Phil Zimbardo's Psych 1 proctor at Stanford. Oh, okay. Yeah, and he's an incredible teacher. Oh, he was the best. I think I got as much as my brain can handle. So now, just pitch your book one last time. This book is a culmination of my research over 45 years on mindfulness without meditation that essentially shows through lots of research how everything is mutable. everything can be changed to make it work better for us, that even our diseases, that once we put the mind and body back together, we have enormous control over our bodies.

59:42And that sets us up for enormous control over our well-being. And may I just say that every parent needs to read this book. and I'm being repetitious now but I will tell you this sentence which I have bold faced on my notes is don't try to make the right decision make the decision right is an absolute game changer in life so there you have it how your mind can impact many aspects of your life including some that you would not have thought could be affected by mindfulness. This has been Ellen Langer, professor of psychology at Harvard University. Her latest book, The Mindful Body. Check it out.

1:00:30Now I would like to thank the remarkable team because there's that magical word because they make this podcast what it is. The team is Jeff C, Shannon Hernandez, Madison Nismer, Louise Magana, Fallon Yates, Alexis Nishimura, and Tessa Nismer. These are the people behind Remarkable People. And don't forget our sponsor, Merge 4, the world's coolest socks. Promo code FRIENDOFGUY. Until next time, don't just think different. Think remarkable. What a great title that would make for a book. Mahalo and Aloha.

1:01:29This is Remarkable People.