674: Social Psychologist, Owen Fitzpatrick on Why the Most Dangerous Propaganda Is the Story You Tell Yourself

0:27Welcome to The Super Bowl. Strategy Skills Podcast, where strategy partners teach you the tools and techniques to solve mankind's greatest problems.

0:47Welcome to the Strategy Skills Podcast. I'm your host, Grace Safarova. And this episode is brought to you by strategytraining.com. And we have some gifts for you. You can get a template of a resume we like to use with our clients at firmsconsulting.com forward slash resume PDF. You can also get the overall approach used in well-managed strategy studies at firmsconsulting.com forward slash overall approach. And if you are building or considering to build a consulting practice, you can access episode one of how to build a consulting practice at firmsconsulting.com forward slash build. And today we have with us a very special guest, Owen Fitzpatrick, who is a social psychologist who has traveled to more than 100 countries and studied propaganda firsthand in places such as North Korea, Rwanda, Afghanistan.

1:43And he has worked with leaders at Google, LinkedIn, Pfizer, Coca-Cola, studied negotiation and influence at Harvard Business School and MIT. Just a very, very wonderful person to have with us today. And I'm looking forward to diving. Maybe we can start with an overview of your journey that led you to study propaganda, which is a very unusual topic to study.

2:09Owen Fitzpatrick: Sounds great. Thank you so much, Chris. And great to be on the podcast. Great to have the chance to chat with you. So my journey starts when I was a teenager. I struggled a lot with my mental health. And in that experience, I had a sort of a moment where everything changed for me. And it wasn't that I went from being very depressed and suicidal at one point, unfortunately, to being very happy. But it was that I was convinced that I needed to end my life at a certain point when I was 14 years old. And something happened while I was in the process of actually writing a goodbye note to my parents, where I went from wanting to end it all to knowing that I needed to live.

2:48Owen Fitzpatrick: So my belief fundamentally shifted. It changed in a very short space of time. And as I said, it wasn't that the next day everything was great. It wasn't. I still struggled, but I never struggled with that decision again. And my belief shifted in a strong moment. And so from that time, I became fascinated with why was it that I went from believing I needed to end my life to believing I needed to stay alive. And that began the journey for me. I started studying psychology. I went eventually to university studying psychology. But even in high school, I'd been reading so much about beliefs and reading so much about the way we think and reading so much about psychology and everything I could get my hands on.

3:31Owen Fitzpatrick: I went and I did my master's in psychology. I started working as a therapist. And then I started to work in the corporate arena and worked with a lot of organizations like Google, LinkedIn, Pfizer, JP Morgan Chase, et cetera. And as I was doing that, I also wanted to keep pursuing the question, why do we believe what we do? So I traveled to North Korea and I talked to people and interviewed people. I went to Rwanda and talked about, you know, and interviewed people about the genocide. I went to Iran. I went to Afghanistan, all with the aim to try to understand belief systems around the world. and what we all have in common.

4:05Owen Fitzpatrick: And from this experience, it sort of helped me to understand so much more about exactly why we believe what we do, why we change our minds in the first place. And that information I was then able to bring back into the corporate world. So to help the organizations I was working with, to be able to lead change initiatives, to be able to help them to be able to make better and smarter decisions, to improve hopefully mental health in the workplace, as well as to be able to be more persuasive and influential, but from an ethical standpoint. Because a lot of the tools that I learned aren't necessarily just what you would do in propaganda states.

4:41Owen Fitzpatrick: It also speaks to what really convinces us. And the main thing that I learned was that what really convinces us is the way in which we convince ourselves. So our ability to persuade ourselves of certain things is actually the dominant force that determines whether or not other person will be open to ideas. And the more we understand about how we persuade ourselves, the better we can be overall in our lives, as well as obviously in the business world as well. So from that moment, spent a lot of time again, traveling to so many different countries and eventually moved to the US in 2019, which is where I'm based now in New York.

5:17Owen Fitzpatrick: But I'm really very proudly from Dublin and Ireland. So I visit home a lot. But the US is now my base. i know the question that came up during that dark day when you were 14 and i think it's going to be very valuable for our listeners to know what it is so during that moment when i was writing the suicide note i was writing i love you so so much to my parents and then a question came to my mind which was and i don't know where it came from honestly but in in that moment i wrote is this how much you love them. And I've been reflecting for really for more than 30, I've been reflecting for so long on why that question was the one that changed it.

6:04Owen Fitzpatrick: And initially, I thought it's because I love my parents so much. But there's lots of people that end their lives that love their parents or love their family and love their children very, very much. So it wasn't that. And I was wondering, why was that working when none of the positive thinking or none of the logical thinking where I was trying to look for evidence as to how things were good. Why did that work? And I think there's two primary reasons why it worked. The first is more subtle. It got me to recognize that this was a voice talking to me. Like as soon as a second voice was introduced that said, is this how much you love them?

6:37Owen Fitzpatrick: I was talking back to myself and I was doing so in a way to point out that everything that I was saying in the suicide letter, it was all just be you know trying to convince myself that this was the right thing i was i was acting like i was a good person i was apologizing to my oh look at you you're so good you're apologizing and that question called me out on it and because it called me out on it it instantly made me realize that what i was doing was not as benevolent as that you know i initially would have instinctively taught i was like poor me poor me poor me and i was like well in this moment it It was positioning that voice as different.

7:16Owen Fitzpatrick: But second of all, it changed the way I felt. And that was another important piece is that so often we think that we logically change beliefs by giving evidence, by stacking the deck. But the reality is we can pretty much argue almost any point. You can find evidence to prove any conclusion that you want to. And so in that moment, that question, is this how much you love them? It changed where my focus was and it created a different feeling for me. A feeling really, I suppose, of guilt. But that guilt changed the way in which I was seeing the reality or the situation. And so that became the impetus for, I suppose, the main journey.

7:53Owen Fitzpatrick: Whenever I went to places like North Korea, they changed the way you feel. They organized state media to make it so that they focus your attention on certain things to generate certain emotions. Same is true in the U.S. Depending on what news channel that you watch, they will orient your attention towards whatever they want you to pay attention to. like news is editorials so they will go okay we want you to pay attention to this because it serves our agenda therefore your attention goes on there and then they tell you a story about it and they make sure that you know what side you're on and so i realized the brain does the exact same thing as the external news does as the propaganda sources outside do and we often have this notion where we think well you know chris experiences propaganda but i don't whereas that's completely wrong we were both succumbing to some form of propaganda and that's because our brain works the same way as these news sources do it focus their attention on like in my case all the reasons to be depressed all the reasons why my life was was pointless and then my brain would tell a story about it and it was only when i was able to ask that question that it changed the channel it gave me a choice it made me realize this is not the only channel in town and again it didn't mean that my life was better at that stage, but it got me to realize I was lying to myself.

9:15Owen Fitzpatrick: I had what I called an inner dictator, and this was inner propaganda. And that was the beginning. I hadn't the labels to use then, but over time, the more I went to these places and the more I came back, the more I realized this is such a more accurate way of describing what happens to us inside our head. And that became the beginning of everything. And do you believe if there was something different about that voice than the usual thoughts? And do you think there was a spiritual aspect to that voice? I have no idea. I mean, I, you know, it's very possible that there was a spiritual part to it's very possible.

9:51Owen Fitzpatrick: It was God, you know, speaking to me in that moment, guardian angel, very possible, very possible. It was my own brain. You know, I'm, I'm kind of, one of the things I've learned to be, which is something that has helped me massively as the more I study beliefs is I've learned to be more comfortable with not knowing, right? And I think that one of the problems in society today is that we hate not knowing, right? There's a concept in psychology called the need for cognitive closure. And it kind of drives us to want to always have answers to everything. So whenever we don't know what this situation is, our brain will confabulate, our brain will concoct a story to make everything fit nicely.

10:32Owen Fitzpatrick: And this is one of the things that gets us into trouble, because in times of uncertainty, we do this even more. So the exact times that we don't have information, our brain will make up more information. And it doesn't just do this in terms of our perspective. It also does this in our perception as well. Our brain mainly constructs a lot of what we see in the world, make it seem like we're actually taking in exactly what's happening. So I don't know where the voice came from. There's lots of theories. I'm open to all of them. If at some point I get to a place where, you know, someone proves that that was this grace for me, it didn't matter as much as understanding the mechanism of how I believe what I believe and why I believed it and why it changed.

11:13Owen Fitzpatrick: and that's something I could learn more about that's something I could find patterns of from this day though maybe it was spiritual maybe it wasn't I have no idea but I'm open to whatever I'm so glad that you paid attention to that question because in my experience sometimes we get very important question coming up but we're not always paying attention sometimes we ignore it and continue on the wrong path and then later on we think oh but I had that question that would have stopped me yeah the thing about the question was it was such an emotional evocative question right it wasn't no why do you think this or how do you think this or like it wasn't a question looking for information it was a question that stopped me in my tracks because it was so it was an attack and that's the weird thing right the voice that saved me was actually attacking me but it was attacking the other side of me at that moment that was like convinced that, you know, I needed to end my life.

12:10Owen Fitzpatrick: And it was a wake up call from that perspective. But instead of like, so often, whenever we try to talk to ourselves, we, you know, we talk about mantras and we talk about being positive and, you know, I can do it. So you think that if you think to yourself, I'm not going to be able to do this. Let's say the business case is a leader. And then the voice comes in and says, you're not going to be able to do this. And you say, oh, I can do it. and said, no, you're not. Oh, well, maybe I can't. No, you won't. And so to me, it's always ended one way. Whenever I've tried to be positive, when I feel negative, the negative voice tends to win because it's stronger.

12:45Owen Fitzpatrick: It's more aggressive. It doesn't pull its punches. It knows how to be able to poke holes. It's so much easier to poke holes in an idea than it is to generate a new idea. And that's why, you know, opposition parties tend to have a lot of power in most democracies around the world because it's easy to attack when you don't have to come up with any solutions. So what I feel is, is that the question, especially an evocative, challenging question like that, got through the noise. Because it wasn't like the first time I ever tried to talk myself out of doing it. But it was that that question at such an important time when I was like, I'm so sorry, I was acting like I was the biggest victim.

13:24Owen Fitzpatrick: And that question was like calling me on it. And as a therapist, I noticed that, you know, when I work with clients, sometimes the most impactful conversations I had, or even in executive coaching when I work with CEOs, the most powerful moments aren't the time where I go on in a big explanation as to why they need to transform this. It's a question that gets them to change. I'll give you an example. Years ago, I worked on a TV show, actually, with a guy called Connor. And Connor was a wonderful man but his problem was he was spending too much time at work and it was negatively impacting his family life and this was part of a show i was presenter of called non-refours it was in irish national television and in the very first this was the very first episode and we sat in his kitchen and they were recording us and um we were talking about you know the fact that he worked for himself and he travels around the country he goes to all these different events and we came across the the idea that he missed his son's 10th birthday, right?

14:27Owen Fitzpatrick: Because he got a call the day before he was supposed to go bowling with his son. And he got a call to say, hey, listen, Connor, there's an exhibition tomorrow. You know, he sells educational books, right? So he said, there's a conference tomorrow. It's a last minute thing. Would you like to come along? So he went there. And as a result, he had to tell his son, Ben, sorry, I'm not going to make it. And so in that moment, he made that decision. He went and he was telling me this story, which only had happened three weeks before we talked. And so in that moment, I asked him, I sort of asked him a question where I said, what are you going to do?

15:03Owen Fitzpatrick: Or I said, if, let's say if I called you the next time you have a plan with Ben, right, what are you going to do in that case? And he said, well, you know, it depends how important the opportunity is, because, you know, I'm doing this for Ben. I said okay so here's what I'm asking you to do can you consider this the next time that you get a call if you for example have been asked to do something the same time you're supposed to do something with Ben can you say yes to it and then turn to your son and can you say to your son Ben I know we had plans and I know we were supposed to do something but I got a call for work and that's more important to me than you are could you do that and he visibly got angry at that moment like he sat back and you could see his face you know you could even see it on the on the on the tv show uh his face concorded into like he was glaring at me at that stage but he knew that i had put something very clearly in a way the question itself had changed the feeling inside And he sat back at that moment.

16:10Owen Fitzpatrick: And I could tell that was the moment where everything flipped, where he no longer could use the excuse, which is I'm doing it for them. I'm doing it for them. It was the moment of the question that changed his feeling. And so I think what needs to happen is that I don't think all questions come through because I don't think all questions are equally as evocative emotionally. I don't think they're as powerful. and I think that when you can find the right question, it's not saying that the questions will always work, but when you can find the right question, it certainly is more likely to work than giving them evidence or giving them reasoning or giving them data as to why they should change their mind because we know logical reasoning and data and evidence has limited effect and this is in the corporate world as well.

16:52Owen Fitzpatrick: How many times have you known that you were right but still you couldn't convince the other person and it's because in order for them to change their mind, it has to feel right, it has to fit in with who they are and only then will they make sense of it. And I think the problem is we jump straight to the logic and we forget about the emotion and the identity pieces. And it's also so complicated because maybe he needed to do it to provide for his family, but at the same time, he could have taken ban with him and kids love doing stuff like that. Yeah. And I mean, I don't, I don't even think it was, I think sometimes we use the excuse and then we all do this, right?

17:26Owen Fitzpatrick: I do this to myself and I have to try to catch myself out on it, but we all give ourselves the excuse. We're phenomenal at justification. So he wasn't going to go out of business if he didn't take one conference for his son's 10th birthday. Right. But what we'll do is we'll go to the extreme. That's what inner propaganda allows us to do. Right. Even in terms of in the media today, they demonize people. They look at everything. They try to position someone as the worst human being ever so that it serves the agenda. And our brains do that. The same thing. If if I'm trying to lose weight or I'm trying to watch my figure and then I walk past my favorite ice cream place.

17:59Owen Fitzpatrick: Right. I can justify the ice cream. I can turn around and say, you know what, Owen? You've been working so hard. You've been doing all these podcasts. You've been doing all these trainings or speeches. And you know what as well? Your brain is using a lot of calories. And, you know, you went for a run there yesterday. And you deserve this because you're so tired of it. Like, my brain will find all the reasons to let me go and get that ice cream, even though it doesn't serve the purpose of the long-term gain that I'm looking for. and i'm not saying you should never have ice cream but i'm saying we should at least know that we're talking ourselves into it we should at least know that this is what's going on because the more you recognize what's happening the more that you can do something different the more you have some semblance of control over how you're influencing yourself but the problem is i think we think everyone else is influencing us and we don't realize that we're influencing ourselves and our brain is not always on our side our brain is optimized for survival and our brain is optimized for stability, right?

18:57Owen Fitzpatrick: Making things as easy as possible. And with that comes mistakes. And with those mistakes come decisions and come, you know, bad choices that we make that lead us down the wrong road. And I think recognizing that is one of the most liberating things you can do. Because once you understand how the brain does this, how the brain deceives us, then you're in a position to go, okay, now how can I work more effectively with it? Because our brain does amazing things for us to do. But how can I work more effectively with it to be able to get the results we're looking for? Owen, what I would love for people to take away from our session today, and we still have a lot of time, which is amazing, is I think that you are very good at dismantling beliefs that are not serving you and not serving people you work with.

19:38And I would love for people to walk away with practical things they can do to dismantle beliefs that are hurting our listeners.

19:47Owen Fitzpatrick: so there's a couple of ideas that i want to throw out there to to for us all to to know about and then we'll go into a specific technique so the first idea is a concept called naive realism and this comes from psychology and it's basically based on the premise that we think that we're the ones with the truth and everyone else is deluded so we think that well i know what's going on but other people they don't know and i think the first thing is to accept that really we are just constructing reality like everybody else. Now, that doesn't mean reality isn't real, but it means that we have our own way of looking at it and everyone else has their way of looking at it.

20:24Owen Fitzpatrick: And that doesn't make us more right than other people just because it feels true. The second thing to get is that just because you believe something doesn't make it so. So, a belief is an idea you feel certain about. And that word feel is the most important word in that sentence. We feel certain. And therefore, in order for us to be able to do better in terms of challenging our own beliefs as leaders, what is critical for us is to start to ask questions that change the feeling, just like we've been talking about. And so in terms of practical techniques, the first technique is what I call the belief audit.

20:57Owen Fitzpatrick: And the belief audit, just to give you a sort of a micro version of it, is you take a belief. And normally what most people do is, let's imagine, Chris, you say to me, AI is going to destroy the world, right? Let's imagine that's your belief. And I want to challenge it. Normally, what I'll do is show me the evidence, right? So I'll ask you, how do you know AI is going to destroy the world? And then you'll cherry pick evidence. And then I'll cherry pick evidence to say that AI is the best thing since sliced bread. And the two of us will go back and forth and we'll have a discussion. And more than likely, at the end of the discussion, you'll still believe that AI is dangerous.

21:32Owen Fitzpatrick: And I'll still believe that AI is the best thing ever. And the reason is because we have a phenomenal ability to use what we call motivated reasoning, where we use things like confirmation bias to look for evidence to prove that we're right and to dismiss evidence that contradicts us. So instead of asking about that particular statement, how do you know that's true? Instead, what I often ask is, what are you trying to achieve in believing that? So what is the goal of that belief? What are you trying to achieve? And that does two things. Number one, it gets the person to recognize this is in fact a belief.

22:06Owen Fitzpatrick: But number two, it asks, what will that belief do for them? Like, what are they trying to make that belief do for them? And then I'll ask, how is that working for you? So how is that belief actually serving your greater agenda? Is this belief that you're believing helping you or harming you, right? So is believing that AI is the worst thing in the world, how is that working for you? well, in reality, what I want to do is I want to be protected from, you know, losing my job to AI. What I want to do is make sure I'm making good decisions now to be able to ensure that if AI takes over the world, that I'm okay, right?

22:43Owen Fitzpatrick: Whatever it is that you're trying to achieve, often when I ask you the second question, how's that working for you? Is it actually protecting you? You'll say, no, it's causing me more grief. Because what it's doing is it means that everyone else is getting ahead. And all I'm doing is being resentful of the fact that I'm not, you know, equipping myself with AI, right? And as a result of that, I'm sabotaging my own success in that moment. So it's not about whether the belief is true in that case. It's about whether or not the belief is useful. And I think when we talk about engineering or science, right, in order to make predictions, we have to use evidence that we have to make sure we stick to the evidence.

23:19Owen Fitzpatrick: You can't go, when you're building a plane, you can't go, I think it's that way. Now, you have to know, you have to be 100 % sure that this will lead to that. But in the everyday world that we live in, in the corporate world, when we're having conversations, so much is up to interpretation. And so much is up to how people feel. And so much is up to the stories people are selling to themselves about what's going on. And so what we need to do is recognize that when you ask the question, you know, what is that assumption you're making with that belief that you have? And then instead of asking, how do you know that's true?

23:49Owen Fitzpatrick: You start with asking, you know, what is it you're trying to achieve with this belief and how is that working for you and instantly they'll start to explain to you and articulate to you well actually this is what i'm trying to achieve and no it's not helping me and then my last question would be well what would help you more what belief could you hold on to that would still help you achieve your the results and maybe that new belief and again they need to come up with it but maybe that new belief might be well, I need to be careful and protect myself with regards to AI, but I also need to become really skilled with AI so that I can protect myself.

24:26Owen Fitzpatrick: And that might be a much more useful, much more helpful belief for them in that moment, which is really the goal. So by changing the conversation from, you know, I'm going to prove that it's true to what's the most useful way to believe in this context, it allows them the ability or the facility to be able to see things totally differently. And there's one other technique I also will share because this is one of my favorite ones. And this is, I actually learned this from, I think it was Annie Duke in her great book, Thinking and Bets. And she talks about how oftentimes we make a declarative statement.

25:02Owen Fitzpatrick: We say, oh, this is the way the world is, this is what's true. But if you ask the person, how much money would you bet on that? all of a sudden they're now evaluating it again in a totally different way it's very easy to say we believe something but it's only when you have to put money where your belief is that you're going to challenge it and so where where i get what i got from that and what i kind of tend to use quite a lot this is also related to a concept from a few hundred years ago called bayesian reasoning which is you know walking into a situation where you you know have an idea this is what I think is true.

25:36Owen Fitzpatrick: This is what we call a prior, but I'll update it with evidence. But the technique works like this. Whenever I have an assumption or an idea, what I'll do is I'll go, okay, out of 100, 100 being I would die for this because I'm so sure, and zero being I've got no clue, how certain am I? Not is it right or wrong, but how certain am I? What's my feeling of certainty out of 100? And again, 100 is I would give my life for it. I'm so convinced. And so most of the time when you ask people that question or you ask yourself that question, you'll probably get to like an 80 % or a 70 % or a 90%. And then the next question is, what evidence do I need to be able to figure out whether or not I can get this to 100 or not, right?

26:21Owen Fitzpatrick: Because when you look for evidence out there and you try to figure out what is the evidence that would bring me to 100, no amount of evidence will really bring you to 100, but all the evidence that you collect will influence that number. So you think, for example, AI is the worst thing in the world. And then you look for evidence and you find like there's a case of AI saving lives. And now you go from 80 % to 75%. And it allows you to have flexibility in the belief because there's a level of certainty. It's no longer this is true versus false. It's no longer like that sort of a arbitrary sort of binary way of thinking about beliefs.

26:58Owen Fitzpatrick: Instead, it's like the level of certainty. And we can even articulate this in language. We can say, I'm 80 % sure, or I'm mostly sure, or I have a degree of certainty that, instead of saying, this is the fact. And I think the more we see beliefs as flexible, the more we can start to work with it. We could also try motivated interviewing as well. Another sort of technique that lands on this, which is once you say 70%, instead of me saying, how did you get to 70? I might say, why is it 70 and not 100? it and then what you'll do is you'll start to go well i suppose and then you'll start to give me all the reasons for doubting that belief and because it's coming for you you're much more likely to believe it less and that's what i think we need to do sometimes we need to believe less in order for us to believe more in ourselves if we step a little bit back and talk about how to identify the most damaging stories that brain tells us and we currently believe one of the ways for it that immediately comes to mind is to see what makes you worry because there must be something around it worth investigating any other ways that are helpful so if we look at our lives there's pretty much two things that get in our way one is what goes on inside our head and what is what goes on outside our head and so inside our head is whatever makes us feel bad, whatever makes us feel stressed, whatever makes us feel worried, whatever makes us feel fearful, all of those are negative emotions and they're clues.

28:31Owen Fitzpatrick: Now, just because it makes you feel bad doesn't mean that it's wrong. Like I believe that most of what we think is actually in our propaganda. Some of it serves us, some of it helps us and some of it doesn't. So in order to figure out whether or not it does, again, we ask ourselves the question, is the feeling I'm feeling useful for me in this context? So if we're out in the plains of Africa, right and we're out in the middle of nowhere and you see a lion in that moment the fear that you experience is a good thing because that fear sends adrenaline or epinephrine to the rest of your body and that allows you to run hide and i mean it allows you to fight but definitely wouldn't recommend it with a lion but it allows you to get out of there right so in that context fear is a good thing but the problem is is if you see the word and i've had clients where they you know years ago when i worked as a therapist i've had clients where they had a phobia spiders and that's okay if you're dealing with tarantulas or black widows but if you're sitting along and you're looking at a daddy long legs or i'm not sure what they call it in the states but they're like these tiny little they look like pieces of fluff they're not dangerous at all if you look at something like that and you're like running to the other room screaming that's not useful that's not helpful so the exact same feeling is useful or not useful depending on the context and so when you're in that situation, you have to ask yourself the question, what I'm feeling right now, is this helping me or is this harming me?

29:56Owen Fitzpatrick: And if it's helping you in the sense that it's making you more alert to a problem, therefore you're taking protective action to prevent that from occurring, great. Then you keep that negative feeling if that's what it is. But if it's harming you, that's when we want to be able to look at it. So if you keep going over, you're obsessed with something over and over again, and it's like causing you to have a mental health struggle, or it's bringing you down, or it's negatively impacting the way in which you exist, then that's something we need to pare back. And once you know that, you go, what is it that I'm sure that is true?

30:30Owen Fitzpatrick: Or what is it that I believe? Because sometimes people don't articulate it like I believe. Sometimes they'll say, well, this is true. This is true. What is it that I'm assuming? What is it that I'm sure is true? What is it that I'm believing? All of those are kind of similar questions that is causing me to feel this way. And when you ask those questions, you'll start to identify the stories that you're selling to yourselves at that moment. Now, the other side is what's going on outside of you. And so what's going on outside of you are the decisions that you're actually making in the real world.

31:00Owen Fitzpatrick: And so the problem is sometimes you kind of have very positive feelings that are driving the decisions or even logical, you know, sort of more neutral emotions, but you think you're being logical, but you're making decisions based on false premises. So whenever you're making decisions in the real world that are causing you problems, you then have to ask yourself the question, what are the assumptions behind these decisions? So I've made this decision before. Let's imagine, for instance, you are always picking the wrong partner, right? You always pick someone with red flags and you always somehow make the keep making the wrong decision over and over again.

31:38Owen Fitzpatrick: Now, the feeling that causes you to make that decision isn't a negative feeling. It's a positive feeling, right? You are with somebody and you have this sense of desire and this sense of excitement. And you imagine how amazing it will be, you know, once the two of you and you, you might, some people might project themselves as, you know, married to this person on the first date, right? All of these things, getting them excited. Therefore, any red flags that they exhibit, we don't see because we're too busy in our own imagination. And so the decision that we make in that moment isn't coming from a negative feeling, but the result is we keep finding people with red flags.

32:12Owen Fitzpatrick: And so one of the things, if you notice, look, I'm always finding the wrong person, the wrong partner with red flags. I'm always seeing this. As soon as you notice this, as soon as you go, this is my pattern, then you ask yourself the question, what is it that I do? And what is the story I'm selling to myself that's causing me to do this and so usually the story goes first of all the story is this person's amazing this person this and you just lean into this idealized you know pedestal version of this person where they've got it all figured out and they they were amazing partners and they do this and oh look at how they open the door up for me i look at this or look at that but then the flip side is we ignore the elements of the red flag we conveniently justify the way and go yeah but like you know not everyone's perfect and this and that the other and we start to manufacture truth engineer really a story in our head that convinces us of a certain thing so we can get information from the bad decisions we've made the patterns we've noticed the behaviors we've engaged that don't work for us that then we ask ourselves the question what is the story that i'm selling myself that leads to this particular decision or this particular behavior so it's about internally what are my feelings and externally what are my decisions or behaviors that aren't working out well but it all comes back to how is this working for me is this useful and when that's the first question that can then allow us to reverse engineer and go okay so what's the story behind this feeling or what's the story behind this decision and one of the common beliefs that humans have to struggle with is I'm not good enough.

33:51And then trying to prove that you are good enough by working really hard and damaging your health even because you worked so hard. For that particular belief, you probably had it as something you had to deal with when working with clients. What would be your recommendation to dismantle it?

34:10Owen Fitzpatrick: Well, I think the first thing to look at that, and look, we've all, I think, experienced the notion I'm not good enough, is it's nonsensical as an idea, right? Like there's certain negative things we can say to ourselves, which is, you know, that was a really dumb thing for you to do. Or why do you always make this mistake? These are kind of, they're not useful or helpful, but they're certainly, you know, they're rational, right? But when you say I'm not good enough, first of all, there's no qualification there. It's literally like anybody in the world can say I'm not good enough, right? You could have Michael Jordan could now I'm sure he doesn't but he could easily say I'm not good enough at basketball and in many ways whenever we fall into the trap of I'm good enough it's such a convenient one because it doesn't require there's no way to defend against it right because there's no defining parameters right if you turn around and say you know I'm not rich enough right well what does that even mean are you comparing yourself to someone else that's a friend of yours or you compare yourself to Elon Musk, right?

35:11Owen Fitzpatrick: Like if you compare yourself to Elon Musk, well, every single person on the planet, all 8 billion of us, if we say I'm not rich enough, well, we're all going to be losing that battle. But if you allow yourself to look at I'm not good enough, what that means, we're not even indexing it by time. We're not even suggesting I'm not good enough yet. And so the first thing I always try to do with clients, this could be, you know, CEOs, I've talked to Olympic athletes who are, you know, basing this as a challenge, as well as, you know, therapeutic clients, is that the first question is, so when you talk about being good enough, what exactly do you mean by good enough?

35:47Owen Fitzpatrick: And often they'll say, well, I'm not as good as I feel I want to be. Okay, that's a different thing. But this notion of good enough is just such a cloudy perspective. It's very easy to say it's not so easy to actually challenge because is not so easy to know what you mean by it. So what is it that you mean by good enough? And often it comes down to where they are is not where they want to be. Okay. So if you're not where you want to be, then what strategy do you need to execute on that will lead you from where you are to where you need to be? Like I'm not good enough in almost every single way I can possibly imagine.

36:21Owen Fitzpatrick: I'm terrible at most things in life. The one thing I'm good at is psychology and the work that I do here. But even then I could easily find situations where I'm not good enough. I'm not a good enough writer. I'm not a good enough speaker. But it always depends on the standards I give to myself. And really, asking myself, am I good enough, is a useless question. Telling myself I'm not good enough is a useful statement. Instead, what we want to do is ask the question, how can I get better? And so I try to work with people and work with myself as well to really change I'm not good enough into, okay, so how do I get better?

36:56Owen Fitzpatrick: How do I improve? Straight away, no reflection on whether or not you're good enough for this because again you're comparing yourself to impossible standards that you haven't even defined and so not being good enough comparing yourself to impossible standards that you haven't even defined is just nonsense that's why i you know use the term how are you good enough and smart enough to know whether or not you're good enough right that's kind of another way to be able to tackle it but i like to just turn around and go okay so where are you right now and where do you need to be so i'm not i'm not not a good uh good enough podcast guest okay we don't know what that means but let's imagine it means being the greatest podcast guest in the history of podcast podcast guests what would that look like well it would look like this okay cool how do you get from where you currently are wherever that is to where you need to be well i need to work on my diction i need to work on my articulation i need to explain things simpler i need to get to techniques quicker i need to do this i need to do that i need to do the other great now you got an action plan but wasting time in the am i good enough you know when years ago i was in acting school in new york and i just went there for a summer but i was around a lot of you know younger folks that were just coming out of university i was like 30 at the time or a little bit over and they were there and a lot of them would come up to me go i don't know if i have what it takes and there's no way to ever know that you have what it takes because it's just you need to take it you need to spend the time doing it so this notion like we have this talent and it's like do i have enough talent to pursue in this industry well you won't know unless you actually go after it and we spend way too much time evaluating ourselves when we don't have the right criteria to do so so my policy is soon as you notice yourself making these erroneous ridiculous nonsensical um descriptions of yourself or questions am i good enough instead ask yourself the question okay where do i want to be where am i and what do i need to do to get from where i am to where i need to get to and when we train ourselves to do that it makes life a lot easier and you know sometimes we just need to give ourselves a break none of us are perfect nor will we ever be so why not just try to get a little better than you are today thank you so much on and you are an incredible writer and a very good podcast guest thank you thank you another very common issue i see clients facing and all of us faced it at some points in our lives is most of us we work so hard and over time we get wise and smart and then we look back and we think oh i should have handled it better i should have made this decision differently from the decision i made and sometimes we get into this periods when we start thinking a lot about particular period where we should have done something differently.

39:41For example, some people struggle with not putting themselves first at all throughout their life until a certain point, until the point they realize that other people are actually never going to put them first. And so they're always just sacrificing themselves. And then they look back and think, I made so many decisions in a wrong way. So how to stop that voice?

40:03Owen Fitzpatrick: My friend, Kate Donovan, she's an expert and burnout and she she's um working with people all the time but she's a wonderful saying where she says resentment is a superpower and i love that statement when she first said it i was like oh that's brilliant because what she means by that is that whenever you feel a sense of resentment for someone else it suggests that there's boundaries that you have allowed them to you know overlap on right so we resent people whenever we allow them to take advantage of us so on the outside we're like yeah no problem we're always saying yes but on the inside there's a resentment and that's the signal we need to listen to that allows us and she calls it a superpower because it gives us the ability to be able to go okay based upon this what is it that i need to do in the future right so the resentment becomes the advice or the wisdom of the gift but i think the most important thing is so often and look i'm irish and as irish people we don't tend to like talk about ourselves we don't tend to like put ourselves out there we apologize all the time if you've ever been in ireland if you brush past someone accidentally or they brush past everyone will say sorry sorry but that's sorry about this sorry and when i moved to new york it doesn't work like that right someone barges into you and they just don't say anything and it was a very different sort of experience for me because i'd be used to apologizing sorry about keeping you know taking up space and so culturally i had that all my life and i kind of love it in one sense because there's a there's a level of beauty and humility and and and sweetness to that notion the problem is that often it can create problems in like we talked about the boundaries with other people and sometimes we go too far sometimes i know people are like especially with the the new idea around you know boundaries you don't have to do anything you do everything you want to do sometimes that leads to selfishness which doesn't work well with me either i think sometimes there's too much of a push for boundaries, boundaries, boundaries, you know, whatever works for you.

42:04Owen Fitzpatrick: And I think there's a, I think it can, it can warp into a sort of sense of selfishness. So for me, two things, first of all, from a boundaries perspective, or from a not allowing ourselves to be taken for granted, we have to be very, very clear over how we let ourselves be taken for granted. Now, that's hard to do, because it means now we are taking ownership, responsibility, accountability for it. But the only way we can change it, we can't change how another person treats us, but we can change how we respond to that treatment. And therefore, by proxy, by a result of that, they're more likely to adjust the way they're behaving because we have adjusted the way we're responding.

42:43Owen Fitzpatrick: So that's the first piece. So that's whenever we feel that we are being taken advantage of, whenever we feel we're being walked all over, whenever we feel that we're, you know, subservient or not doing what we need to do, we need to go, okay, what do I need to do moving forward and how do I need to react? And we don't expect them to just acquiesce or step out of the way and stop treating us like that. We have to be prepared to keep our boundaries regardless without obviously becoming selfish. So that's how I would focus on that piece. The other piece though is when you, to your point, Chris, a great thought is what about when you start to reflect back on the past and you feel regret for the way things have happened before?

43:23Owen Fitzpatrick: And the The way in which I kind of like to think about it. And sometimes, I don't know if you've ever had this, Chris, sometimes I'd wake up in the middle of the night, right? 3.30, 4 o 'clock in the morning. And my brain starts thinking about something from like two, three years ago. And I start getting like feeling frustrated about it or worried about it or anxious about it or annoyed about it or angry about it, right? And this is all happening at a random time with some random thought. And in the morning, 9 o 'clock, you know, later on in the morning when I'm like, you know, compass mentis again, when I could think for myself, I'm like, what was that about?

43:56Owen Fitzpatrick: That was ridiculous. I can't believe I wasted any time. I was like, up for an hour in the middle of the night or trying to be spiraling about it. And whatever happens happens. But one of the most critical things is it's not what your brain does. It's the story you tell yourself about what your brain does. So often my clients that I work with as a therapist, I was effective with them, not just because of the techniques I would bring them through, but was because when they came to me, their greatest fear was they were going crazy. And my response to the most of the time was, well, yeah, that's just weird, but it's not crazy.

44:29Owen Fitzpatrick: In fact, listen to the stuff that goes on inside my head. And so often the stuff that went on inside my head was way weirder than what was going on inside their head. And therefore the story they told themselves about their own problem changed because they realized it's just a thought. And so when you think back to, you know, the situations in the past, oh, I should have done that. Well, you didn't. And now here you are, right? There's lots of stuff that we could have done as you get older, you go back and you go, oh, there's so many things I could have done, but I didn't. I did what I did. And it's like, you can wish that Game of Thrones ended differently.

45:04Owen Fitzpatrick: You can wish that, you know, whoever's in power is not in power. You can wish the economy was different. You can wish it's not raining today. but it is what it is it is happening therefore given that we focus on what can i control what can i influence you know what can i stack the deck in my favor with and then what must i accept and i think when you do that it means you look back at those situations where you were treated badly and you go you know what the story i'm going to tell myself from now on is that was what gave me the resentment that allowed me to set my boundaries now and yes i didn't make good decisions in the past.

45:40Owen Fitzpatrick: It is what it is. Now, what can I do about in the future to make the story of my life go in a better direction so I can live happier ever after? Not happy ever after because we're going to have no ups and downs, but happier ever after. How can I do that? And that's kind of what I try to help people to do. That's what I wrote in a propaganda for is to try to help people to go, this is how I convince myself of the way the world is. This is how I convince myself of reality. and this is how I make decisions and this is how I think in terms of my own mental health and this is how I influence. And the more we understand what's going on inside each and every one of us, the more we understand that mechanism, the more I think we can stop wasting time thinking about all the negative experiences that you've had in the past when you've allowed people to take advantage and you can start making smarter, better decisions because you understand fundamentally it's all a story.

46:31Owen Fitzpatrick: And the question is, what stories are you selling to yourself? And the more we realize these stories, the more it can change the trajectory of our life. Owen, anything else you really would like to share during these last few minutes we have together? Sure. So I think the most important element of everything that I've worked on is the recognition that in order for us to be able to get through to other people, and this is from a business standpoint, certainly to influence someone who has a different point of view. if you're a leader and you want to influence those who are part of your organization, your team, or indeed even in a more societal situation, a political situation, there's a polarization that's been getting worse over the course of the last 15 years or so.

47:17Owen Fitzpatrick: And it's pretty much obviously influenced significantly by social media. But the truth is that the media has been doing this for as long as you can imagine, right? The media's job is to be able to organize our attention, to focus our attention in whatever it needs us to focus on. And it's getting worse because now all of a sudden we're asked to take sides and we're becoming more and more polarized, more and more convinced of our own agenda. And it's happening because I think one of the biggest mistakes we make, which is we assume that the only way to convince someone else is to convince them through logical reasoning and evidence.

47:55Owen Fitzpatrick: And that just doesn't work. Being right is not enough. It's not enough in the business world. is not enough in the political world. What really works is changing the way in which people feel. And if you want to be able to reach out or connect with somebody different to you, if you want to be able to heal a rift, if you want to be able to bring people closer together, if you want to be able to influence somebody that normally you wouldn't get a chance to talk to, you have to start with how they feel. You have to understand how is it that they're feeling at this moment about whatever it is that you're talking to them about.

48:24Owen Fitzpatrick: Because as soon as you go in and go, oh, you're so wrong, or as soon as you challenge them, or as soon as you position yourself on one side, you lose them. And my goal is to try to reach out to every single person that's listening, every single person out there, to ask them just to check in with their own level of certainty. I have to do it myself all the time. I have lots of very strong beliefs, but I don't tend to share them publicly very often because they're just my beliefs. And I think the more we recognize how we've actually formed our beliefs, the more we can open ourselves up to the fact that other people have formed their beliefs and just as logically as us so we have a chance to get on with them and i think if we want to connect more with people the more we understand how we form beliefs the more it lets us connect better with people it lets us influence people more and i think it can bring people together and that's the main you know overarching goal the book helps you with your mental health it helps you to make better decisions it helps you be more persuasive but to me the most important thing it does is i'm hoping it will help people to come together more It will help people on very different sides of issues to be able to have productive conversations, to be able to connect at a deeper level, to go, you know what, we might have very different stories, but let's try to figure out where those stories overlap, as opposed to two different realities which aren't willing to, you know, open up ourselves to each other.

49:45Owen Fitzpatrick: So that's what I'm hoping the book will do, and that's what I'm hoping the message of inner propaganda will do. And again, a big thank you to you for allowing me to share the message. Owen, thank you so much for being here with us. I really enjoyed our discussion. Where can our listeners learn more about you, buy your book, anything else you want to share? Thank you so much, Chris. So innerpropaganda.com is the place to go for the book and you'll be able to get a free masterclass and a workbook as well if you put in your details there. You can obviously buy it on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or any bookstore across the US.

50:18Owen Fitzpatrick: there's also owenfitzpatrick.com which is my home website I'm sort of a keynote speaker and I do deliver training programs and whatnot for different corporations and I also am on LinkedIn I'm on X although not very often on X I'm on Instagram I'm on YouTube I've got my podcast Inner Propaganda podcast as well as Inner Propaganda newsletter as well at owenfitzpatrick.com so you know wherever you are on social media I'm probably there Owen thank you so much I really enjoyed our discussion. I'm so glad that you had that when you were 14, that question came to you and that we have you with us. Thank you for all that you shared today.

50:58I think our listeners have a lot to take away and that can really help them. Our guest today was, again, Owen Fitzpatrick. I hope you enjoyed this discussion just as much as I did. And our podcast sponsor today is strategytraining.com. You can get some gifts from us. you can get the overall approach used in well-managed strategy studies at firmsconsulting.com forward slash overall approach. You can also get a resume example that you can use as you're preparing, updating your resume. It works at any level of seniority and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com forward slash resume PDF. And if you are building or considering to build a consulting practice, you can access episode one of how to build a consulting practice at firmsconsulting.com forward slash build.

51:52Thank you so much for tuning in, and I'm looking forward to connect with you all next time.

52:03Thanks for listening to this episode of the Strategy Skills Podcast. Stay up to date on all of our latest training by signing up for our email updates on firms consulting.com. We look forward to helping you develop your strategy, critical thinking, decision-making, and communication skills next time here on the Strategy Skills Podcast.

52:42Thank you.