Self-Talk That Actually Works | Jay Heinrichs

31:03I, you know, I'm a Swifty and I'm proud of it. So for those in our audience who are skeptical of this concept of self-persuasion, where's the fine line between persuasion and deception? I like to call it manipulation. So when you manipulate a tool, you're hoping. When I manipulate a tool, I hurt everything. But usually, if you're using a tool well, you're not hurting what you're using the tool for. So the thing about rhetoric, the art of persuasion, is it's a dark art. It can be used for very bad things. I don't have to tell you this. So you have to have a good ethical sense. You have to do it for good, or at least convince yourself that that's what you're doing.

31:45When you're manipulating yourself, you have to manipulate yourself wisely. And my book kind of talks about that, how to do that. So what is, but when I say manipulation, I often get flamed by people with a strong ethical sense, understandably. But the important thing is when you manipulate somebody, you want to make sure they're not going to regret it next morning. So that's your job. The tools are there, but they're morally neutral. You know, it's up to you to determine whether you're using them well. But it is manipulation. And I think we're fooling ourselves if we think there's a good art of persuasion or there's a bad art of persuasion.

32:28Persuasion is just how you use the tools.

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35:55Getting to know your soul, one of the easiest ways to do that is to separate what Aristotle calls your needs from your appetites. I call them your wants. So what you want and what you need are two very different things. So a great exercise to do is to plan a vacation. Super fun to do. You're not suffering when you do that. But what kind of vacation are you planning? Is it one with the kind of bucket list everybody else has? And I mentioned in the book, if you go to the Louvre in the room with a Mona Lisa, you see a bunch of people literally jumping up and down and holding their phones as high as they can.

36:35They're checking off a bucket list. And Aristotle would say, that's a no-no. You are violating your soul's best standards because you're showing off to other people. That's your want. That's not your true need. So think about a place you would go that maybe no one else would go. And separating the one from the other is a way to discover what your soul is. Now, and there are other ways to do that as well. But once you realize what your truest self is and what your best self is, then trying to live up to that best self while trying to convince it that you're as good as it is, that's a form of manipulation that can work internally, can make you feel better about yourself.

37:23Now, you're going to screw up, obviously. So you need to reframe those screw ups. One way to do that, and by the way, I'm a master at screwing up. And I actually have corporate clients who call me when there's a major screw up. What you do is make sure you tell the truth before anybody else. You need to do that to yourself when you're screwing up to yourself, to your soul. But the next thing you do is to talk about how this violated your otherwise high standards temporarily. And then thirdly, you switch the tense to the future, which is what Aristotle called deliberative rhetoric where you make choices to affect the future.

38:04And basically, you're going to say that here's how I'm going to keep this from happening again. Now, you can do that to yourself and you're manipulating your soul, but you're doing it in all the right ways. Can I tell you a story about my son who would be my best soul if I were a lot younger? When he was 15 years old, I was standing alone in my bathroom wearing nothing but a towel first thing in the morning. and I found that the toothpaste had all been used up. And being the father of a 15-year-old son, I knew who the likely culprit was. So I shout through this closed door, George, he used up all the toothpaste.

38:41And I hear this sarcastic voice on the other side saying, that's not the point, is it, dad? The point is, how are we going to keep this from happening again? Now, he had heard me lecture at the dinner table for years without any evidence that he was paying attention that the best way to get out of trouble is to change the tense of the future. Because as Aristotle said, the past tense is about forensics, crime and punishment, like where the screw up was or mistakes in the past or actual crimes. The present tense has to do with values, good and bad, who's good and who's bad. So it's very tribal rhetoric often when you're saying what people are and who the good people are and the bad people.

39:24Aristotle's favorite rhetoric was deliberative rhetoric, where you deliberate about the choices you're going to make to solve problems for all time. And that's what George was making fun of me for, but he was actually doing it, which was he was changing the tets, like admitting his guilt, like that's, but saying he's reframing this from the crime that was committed to an interesting solution to this toothpaste problem. And of course, what I, we solved that problem by my asking him, please to go down to the basement, and get me another two, which thinking he had won the argument, he happily did.

39:59Win-win. Both of us manipulating each other, by the way. It strikes me that in order for this self-persuasion to work, your identity really has to be on the line, like your true identity. You can't just throw the ball hyperbole around things that really don't move that truest sense of self. Right. So, I mean, I think you constantly have to go back and think about what your soul ones. And also, I mean, here's the thing. If you feel guilty about something you did because of a certain set of values that you believe in, that often doesn't work very well because guilt is a kind of pain. If you're thinking about your soul as someone who is with you all the time, that sort of changes the picture a little bit because it changes your emotion from guilt to shame.

40:52And shame is a much more temporary emotion. It's how you feel embarrassed in front of an audience. And that can work so much better than thinking, oh, you know, suppose you want to lose weight and you're looking at a donut on the one hand than an apple on the other. And you're thinking, I want the donut. Of course you do. But then you think, I'll feel guilty because next day I may feel sorry that I ate this donut because there goes my diet. On the other hand, if I eat the apple, I'm not going to like doing that right now. But in the long term, that's guilt. If you say to your soul, hey, soul, which should I eat?

41:39Obviously, your Aristotelian soul is going to say, go now for the apple. You'll feel better instantly. You're going to feel embarrassed about yourself if you eat that donut. That's an immediate emotion, which is much more powerful, as you know, than something that is going to affect you in the future. For many in our audience, they get hung up on the achievement piece and not do the deeper introspection around identity. And what strikes me about your goal was, yes, there's only a handful of people who've run this time shorter than their age. But then you said something really striking. I would also get younger in achieving this.

42:17And that sense of getting younger, increasing your VO2 max allows you longevity to spend more time with your son, to be there for your family, which gets to a much deeper part of you than comparing yourself to the 12 other people who've ran this mountain. But so many in our audience really get tied to the achievement of like, oh, how I'm competing against people or checking this off my box of getting a better time. And they're not as tied as closely to their true sense of self and that identity that they're really after. Every great athlete will tell you, I'm competing against myself. And they're talking about their Aristotelian soul when they do that.

42:52Now, here's the thing. I never believed I was gonna run my age despite all the tools of manipulation. The odds were against me. Scientists were telling me it was impossible. So come on, who am I against a scientist? Even my soul can't win out there. but um i also knew that if i failed i was going to fail up and that was how i reframed things and and you know failure or your acceptance of failure in all the right ways how you interpret it and learn from it reframe it that's a form of suffering that's bearing the pain of failure so i planned to fail um i'm not going to tell you whether i actually ran my age I will hint strongly that I'm younger than you think I am.

43:42But you have to read the book. It's a total mystery up until the end. Take us to that moment, though, of actually lacing the shoes on the day that this is finally happening, because there's a lot of rehab and a lot of work and training that goes into it and self-doubt that you've overcome to show up every day to do the suffering. But then there's the actual moment of like, OK, now this is happening. Like this is reality where I think a lot of times when we get caught up in the training and the process, we don't actually think about game time. I deliberately, in order to make this experiment as interesting as possible, schedule this for one, one try.

44:20I either would succeed or fail. And I did it on my birthday in part because that would gain me an extra minute on the mountain. So I was turning 58 and I thought, you know, I was 57, but that I'd have to beat that. So 58 gave me an extra minute. I also had gone on Facebook and created a page called Breaking the Time Barrier. And I got 4000 followers and I was telling them I'm going to I was going to try to do this. So I was deliberately increasing the pressure on myself to make it more difficult so that these tools of persuasion could, you know, I could decide whether they'd really work or not by making the experiment harder.

45:03On that day, when I got up, I had reframed every part of the mountain, which, and I won't describe them, but I had assigned individual words for each one. Relax, flow, focus, and dance. The dance part, by the way, was near the top where torrential rains and weird geology had turned these rocks into like razors. And I was wearing shoes that were like slippers, you know, barefoot running, as they call it. And so in order to get across this, which, by the way, you have to do as fast as possible. It's not as steep, so you need to be really fast. While mincing across these razor rocks, I reframe that as dancing.

45:55So stupid and silly, but repeated often enough that I really believed I was dancing. So at the very beginning, as I'm standing there, I had friends with me. My run began at six in the morning. So these poor souls had to drive an hour with me. One of them was 13 years old, the poor thing, looking miserable. Now, the conditions were also terrible. It was way too warm. And so you burn enough calories on this rot to do the equivalent of converting a liter of water from ice to boiling. And so your ability to handle that heat, which is harder and harder as you get older, was a real factor. Plus it was humid, which makes your sweat not work.

46:46All of that together made me think there's no way this is going to succeed. And yet, all this work I had done, I thought, I am in my moment. I am doing what I'm meant to do. And this was my soul talking to me. I'd been talking to it often enough that I was hearing it back. And I was ready. I was ready. I mean, I hit my watch and started running. And by the way, it's a terrifying thing. The Adenaki Indians, who were the first humans to occupy this place that we know of, said that there was an angry God who squatted at the top. And so they never climbed it. They had the good sense not to try. And on a day like that, you kind of feel like that God is ready to stop me.

47:34And yet I had all this stuff to convince myself that I was this great athlete. and that's what kept me going all the way to the top. What is really interesting to me about this concept and how important it is, we've talked on the show in the past about the victim mindset and how often it robs us of our potential. And what we're talking here around self-persuasion is really moving from the victim to the protagonist and how important that is in your life to achieving the things that actually matter to you. I'm gonna steal that. That is perfectly said. I like to say in terms of rhetoric, rhetoric gives you agency, right?

48:11It allows you to gain control over an audience or over yourself. And that does get you away from victimhood. And before I started this whole experiment and discovered what hyperbole was, this throwing beyond myself, I was feeling like a victim, which, come on. I mean, I'm a privileged old white guy. I'm the last victim in the world. And yet I was feeling terrible self-pity and needed to get that out of my head. And by taking control of the conversation I was having with my soul and allowing my soul to answer back, that made all the difference in the world. Yet using these tools I was using for corporations.

48:51I mean, I wasn't on some spiritual journey. I was manipulating myself through these tools. Next up is a little song from CarMax about selling a car your way. You wanna sell those wheels? You wanna get a CarMax instant offer? So fast. Wanna take a sec to think about it? Or like a month? Wanna keep tabs on that instant offer? With OfferWatch. Wanna have CarMax pick it up from your driveway? You wanna get it done to it? You wanna do it all over again? So, wanna drive? CarMax. Pickup not available everywhere. Restrictions and fee may apply. Muteen. Adjective. Used to describe an individual whose spirit is unyielding, unconstrained.

49:36One who navigates life on their own terms, effortlessly. They do not always show up on time, but when they arrive, you notice. An individual confident in their contradictions. They know the rules but behave as if they do not exist. Muteen. The new fragrance by Miu Miu. Defined by you. let's talk kairos i know it's one of those concepts in the book that's so fun and i think for our audience to really look for ways in their life to incorporate it now that we recognize the power of self-persuasion kairos is i mean we should all be talking about kairos especially in the business world because kairos is the art of opportunity and of timing so one of the things i did that was one of the less enjoyable ways I used the art of timing was I realized I didn't have enough time in the day to do everything I wanted to do.

50:35I mean, I still had clients. I still had to work for a living. And so I thought I needed to invent my own time zone. That is as kairotic, as we say in rhetoric, as possible, like using the art of timing. And so I waited until the fall when daylight saving time turns into standard time. You gain an hour, right? But what I did was I set my alarm back so that I actually was getting up 4.30 in the morning instead of, I had gradually gotten used to getting up at 5.30. This time, it felt the same. Getting up at 4.30 was the same as 5.30. And I did it to start working out. 4.30 in the morning, I was working out.

51:25Now, in order to write the book, I had to convince myself I was doing a total writer's block. And I turned, oh, by the way, that time zone, and you can use this for yourself if you can come up with a clever name for your own time zone. I call it Jay Light Saving because I'm Jay Heinrichs. Yeah. I mean, which I thought was the wittiest thing I'd ever done in my life. And here's the other thing about besides Kairos. If you can make yourself smile, you're employing what modern behaviorists call cognitive ease, which makes you more persuadable. People who are smiling, if you can get your audience to smile, not trying to tell jokes necessarily, they don't always land, but getting them just to smile, they're more likely to be persuaded.

52:16And so just naming my time zone, J Light Savings, made me think it was a great time zone, even though I was getting up at a ridiculously early hour in the morning. The hard part is nobody else is in that time zone. So I'm really boring in the evening. Still, this all worked for me. Now, Kairos does more than that. Kairos is a way that allows you to penetrate through the chaos in any moment or era of your life, or for that matter, the life of the world. And I don't have to tell you, we're going through a chaotic time right now. How do you deal with that? Well, people who have succeeded most as entrepreneurs really don't disrupt so much.

52:57They go through the disruption. They see the confusion that's around them and they see it as an opening. And so the Romans reinterpreted the Greek word kairos as opportunitas, which is the art of opportunity. And that comes from the root word portos, meaning door. So chaos, the confusion in your own life, if you can reframe that as an opening rather than just a whirlpool that you're drowning in, that can make all the difference. And I found that my own ability to do that, to deal with all the changes in my body and my work and who I was as a person allowed me to see this as more of a gap that I could walk through rather than something I was suffering from.

53:46So what are some ways that our audience members can create those own opportunities in their life? One is to, I actually talk about, and I've done this, if you could take a piece of paper and you can talk about why your life is chaotic, and if you can actually draw the pieces that are causing you chaos as things that are sending beams or obstacles in your way, however you want to do it. And by the way, I can't draw to save my life, but I still did this. It actually allows you to kind of reframe what you're looking at because it turns total confusion, which shuts down your brain into something that seems more material, like actual objects on a page.

54:35Draw them where you think they belong. And that's up to you to figure out where they belong. So that can be the fact that you can't sleep at night or you have a kid or your work is going crazy. Take those aspects of it. What is it about your work that's going crazy? Is it a terrible boss? Is it increased responsibility? Is it responsibility over others? Is it a changed economic environment or whatever? Personally, think about your relationship to your spouse. So you're not talking as well as before. Draw that on a piece of paper and then see if there's a way to navigate through that. Now, what that requires is you may need to widen the gaps.

55:16You may find that as you're drawing this stuff, your paper fills with a bunch of garbage. Now, see if there are ways that you can erase some of it and think, why am I erasing this? Or is there a way that I can sort of worm my way through? Silly as it sounds, it's really hard to describe. If you actually do it, your brain is going to be changing and you're going to start thinking that maybe there is a way to go through. You may also discover, as I did, that you can't draw. Many of our audience members are looking for that boost of confidence in the moment, that opportunity to connect with someone, to land the deal, to create the relationship, to move towards their goal.

55:55And I think what happens for a lot of us in that key moment is we hold on to the past and tie our identity to those past failures. I wasn't confident in this situation. This person didn't like me. I didn't get the job. Take us to that moment. And what tool can we use for self-persuasion to move towards our Aristotelian soul instead of this identity tied to our own limiting beliefs? Those limiting beliefs often come from your failures in the past. And so thinking about the future is a very chirotic thing to do. In part because one of the things you could do, if you're reframing your failures, one of the biggest causes of failures is timing.

56:40You didn't do it at the right time. You could see this in business failures throughout history. Brilliant idea, perfectly executed, the market wasn't ready. The lesson you can learn from failures in the past is to think, was the timing right? And you could learn a lot about whether a market is truly ready for you. One of the things I've discovered, by the way, as I began doing the marketing for this book, working with my great publisher, was I suddenly discovered, and you guys, I think, probably discovered this way before I did, that there's a whole bunch of entrepreneurs and other people, mostly male, but not all, out there who call themselves Stoics.

57:27Oh, yeah. And so they're reviving ancient wisdom for modern reality. Well, guess what I'm doing? I mean, I'm dredging up Aristotle and Cicero and all this ancient wisdom and applying it to the day. So I may be catching a wave. A previous book I wrote, Thank You for Arguing, became a New York Times bestseller for one reason, the AP English language course that high schoolers, smart high schoolers take. Suddenly the exam took on a rhetorical component, but there weren't any rhetoric textbooks that were worth reading. All of a sudden, my book comes along teaching rhetoric, which, and I had written it for kids, suddenly became the textbook and thousands of high schools across the land started assigning it to these poor students who had to read it over the summer.

58:18I mean, you should see the TikToks of people hating the book. But their parents then read it because the kids were and that spread it. Now, that was totally kairotic, totally accidental. So if this book bombs, if Aristotle's Guide to Self-Persuasion, my latest book bombs, I'm going to blame it on the timing and not on me. And my soul will thank me for it. Well, thank you for the time today. This is such a fun conversation. Where can our audience find out more about this book and the other books that you've written? You can find it at all the fine bookstores on Amazon. And I'm all on the usual social media places under whatever.

58:57Jay Heinrichs. Just learn to spell my name and you'll get it. Thank you for joining us, Jay. Such a pleasure. Love your podcast. I'm a fan. Thank you. Thank you.

59:15All right, well, this week's shout out comes from Chris and I'll let him tell you directly. Hey, everyone. My name is Chris Raftery. I'm a financial advisor and I joined X Factor to build better relationships with my friends at work and also with my family. And X Factor really helped me not just with the course material and listening to and reading about all the ways I could improve, but also in helping me implement all of these different teachings, giving me an outlet and a network to practice these things, to troubleshoot in a way a lot of situations I was going through and really provide some real-world applications and have fun along the way too.

1:00:02And the thing I'm looking forward to the most is continuing to develop. They say iron sharpens iron and being able to work with the other guys in the group has really proved that. And I'm looking forward to continuing to build better relationships with the existing folks that I hold near and dear to me, but also meeting new people out there. Looking forward to hopefully meeting you guys in the future as you join the X Factor. It's worth it. Thank you, Chris. It's been an honor and a pleasure working with you. And we hope to see you guys in the X Factor. Yeah, I remember you. You were the bad boy.

1:00:39You threw your love away. Like you was just a toy. And you sold the world. You're a song of a tragedy. Cause you had your taste of black only yesterday. Yeah, but I remember you. Oh yeah, I remember you You remember me But I found you all right