This Tiny Habit Rewires Your Brain - Anne-Laure Le Cunff

0:00Anne-Laure Le Cunff:I'm a neuroscientist and I help people make the most of their mind, think better, live better. Let's pretend for 24 hours that you are an anthropologist, but with your own life and work as the topic of study. And for 24 hours, you're just going to observe. Why do I spend my time in this way? Why do I care so much about this? I actually don't even believe in a fixed self. We keep on changing. The world keeps on changing. You change in response. You change in response to your relationships, the encounters that you have every time you read a book, listen to a podcast, have a conversation. Let's actually experiment.

0:37Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Let's actually run an experiment. Let's try something different. What's really interesting with experiments is that you're not starting from a goal and a binary definition of success. You're saying, I'm going to try this thing because I want to learn something new. And that's it. I know meditation can be dangerous for some people. Really? Yes, absolutely. There are ways where it can increase anxiety because...

1:05Before we get started with the episode, our books are now open. If you need help getting in front of the right people, finding your dream customers or winning new business, we might be able to help. Why not outsource your sales to We Have A Meeting? Just go to wehaveameeting.com. An-Law LeCamp, how did I do?

1:25Anne-Laure Le Cunff:You did great. Okay, I'm trying my best. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. No problem. So we always start off the same way. Who are you and what problem do you solve? I'm a neuroscientist and I help people make the most of their mind, think better, live better. Nice. And people who pick up your book or interact with your work, what kind of symptoms are they normally experiencing that motivate them to look at what you do? I tend to work with people who are quite ambitious. and that because of that, the type A kind of people who tend to maybe be perfectionists or are really focused on being successful on what I call linear goals.

2:05Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And I help them become a little bit more experimental, trying new things, exploring maybe a different path, something a little bit different, letting go of that idea of traditional success. So if I'm, let's say I'm the perfect person to work with you. So I walk into your office, I'm a perfectionist, I want to think about making better decisions in life, where do I start? It always starts with observation. So when a scientist wants to design an experiment, they don't just go and write the protocol, right? They have a look at what is the current situation and it should be the same with your life and with your work.

2:43Anne-Laure Le Cunff:So I encourage people to do a little exercise that I call self-anthropology. And the reason why I call it like that is because I tell them, let's pretend for 24 hours that you are an anthropologist, but with your own life and work as the topic of study. And for 24 hours, you're just going to observe. Why do I spend my time in this way? Why do I care so much about this? Why do I spend so much energy on this? Why is that my routine and not something different without any judgment or self-blame? Because an anthropologist wouldn't judge their topic of study, right? When you do that, you'll start noticing patterns, things that you've been doing in an automatic way.

3:24Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And that can become the seed to design what I call tiny experiments, trying things that are a little bit different. So give us an example of what might the pattern be that the typical performer A might be facing in life? Okay, let's start with when you wake up. Typical pattern, I wake up, I open my laptop, I check my emails or even I start checking my emails in bed. I've seen people do that, right? You open your phone and you just check, is there anything happening? Yeah, we've all done that. Or a bit better. You don't do it in bed. But yeah, cup of coffee. You get at work. First thing you do is check your emails.

4:01Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Booking meetings back to back, not giving yourself any break in the middle. Canceling social plans or things, hobbies or things that you want to spend time on because you have a work presentation or an important meeting with a client and really in general letting your to-do list dictate how you spend your time and your energy those are the kind of patterns that I see happening over and over again in ambitious people I wonder with part of this so there's a lot of talk around the authentic self and the idea of authenticity I wonder from your work if you've noticed if it's even possible to be authentically yourself because obviously you're getting trapped in these habits and loops and maybe living a life you don't necessarily always want to live but if you were authentically yourself would that even be possible in the first place so is there such a thing as the authentic self i'm going to get a little philosophical for a second i actually don't even believe in a fixed self we keep on changing the world keeps on changing you change in response you change in response to your relationships the encounters that you have every time you read a book listen to a podcast have a conversation the three of us are not going to be the same people after we had this connection that we were before right so to me the authentic self is not really trying to figure out what is that that person I'm trying to to discover right it's more about staying in touch with yourself and constantly asking yourself what do I need right now what do I want right now what am I curious about right now with the knowing that this might change it's just for right now and that can guide your next decisions that can guide your next projects where you work on the way you spend your energy but it's also completely fine in six months to say you know what this was great i learned everything i could learn from this and i'm ready to move on so so let's say then i'm an ambitious person right and my want is to get promotion like the big promotion but actually the why I want to get the big promotion is because I want validation from a parent who maybe didn't love me enough is that still a want that I need to go for and explore or is it actually I need to be totally redirected so it really depends on why as you said the validation coming from from a parent we all need validation so I think very often we tend to just dismiss the need in the first place because it comes from a place of lack in our childhood.

6:27Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And so we say, well, I don't need validation, right? The truth is our brains are wired to seek validation from our peers. That's not going to change. This is how we survive as a society. It is part of the mechanisms. That's why we call ourselves social animals, right? So that sense of validation is going to be very hard to get rid of, except if you really, you know, you're enlightened or, and which I don't know if that's something everybody wants to aim for. So just separating, decoupling the fact that you want validation from where it comes from and then asking yourself, OK, I will probably want validation.

7:07Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Where do I want this validation, the sense of validation to come from? Do I want that to come from work? Do I want that to come from my spouse? You know, wanting to be a good parent, a good friend, that's also ambitious. We never think about it in this way. So thinking about your ambitions, where you want to get validation from, again, observing where you're currently seeking it from and then asking yourself where you want to get it from. If that's from work, I would argue that this is not a bad thing. What's bad is when it's unintentional, that we do it on autopilot without really questioning why we're doing things.

7:44Anne-Laure Le Cunff:So that's why I always tell observation first. and then if the answer is you know what I actually really want that promotion I've been working really hard and I want that validation from my colleagues for the work that I've done and I'm going to go for it then do it that's fine so how do you so say I'm imagining this CEO this high-performing salesperson in bed and the first thing they're doing is they're checking their emails and they're doing it and the belief around that will be I have to do this because x means x and I'm moving forward, I'm growing a business, we're running all of these different things.

8:18If you do the study, the experiment for 24 hours and you're like, okay, that is probably like bad. How do you start to unpick the belief of, because my mind would say, well, I need to do that. I have to do that in order to be X person. How do we start to unpick that belief?

8:35Anne-Laure Le Cunff:So it's interesting because normally people would spend a lot of time reflecting on it. And the problem is that at least with the people I work with, that a lot of ambitious people are also overthinkers. And so I try to get them out of that and say, stop thinking about it. Let's actually experiment. Let's actually run an experiment. Let's try something different. What's really interesting with experiments is that you're not starting from a goal and a binary definition of success. You're not saying, I'm going to do this thing because I want to succeed. You're saying, I'm going to try this thing because I want to learn something new.

9:09Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And that's it. So I would say if you're in that situation, asking yourself, okay, what is a potential different approach to this? And let me try it. And I have the hypothesis that it might help, but my hypothesis might be wrong. And that's okay, right? As a scientist, when you don't get the result you expected, you don't blame yourself. You just say, oh, okay, interesting. Didn't see that one coming. What can we learn from this? So I would say, pick something that you've been doing in a way that you think has been detrimental to your business, your mental health, your relationships, whatever that is, and then ask yourself, how could I do this differently?

9:46Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And the reason why my book is called Tiny Experiments is because I tell people to keep it tiny. At first, you have no idea what's going to work. So just try to do the thing differently for maybe a week, maybe two weeks max, and pay attention to what changes. At the end of the week or the two weeks, you can look back and have this honest conversation with yourself. How did that feel? We are entering a new era of outbound. Four years in, we have a meeting that has leveled up our entire offer. That's why multi-billion pound brands trust us. And we've put meetings with Netflix, Spotify, Facebook, even Barcelona Football Club.

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10:47So it feels like probably, and I love tiny experiments, but it feels like a lot of people will probably go wrong because January the 1st rolls around and actually it's not a tiny experiment, it's the biggest experiment of their life. And that's probably, so where do people go wrong when they set an experiment that's far too big for them?

11:07Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Well, you already mentioned too big. That's a big problem. I call that the maximalist brain and it's our tendency whenever we decide to do something new or to implement a change to just go for the biggest, most impressive version of it because it feels good, right? To feel like I'm making a change. And so that's why I always tell people, if you're hesitating in between running your experiment for six weeks or six days, go for six days. And always try to go for the smallest version possible that is going to be enough for you to just have a feel for whether this is helping or not. That's one problem.

11:44Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Another problem is when we copy paste our experiments from other people's experiments. So you might have a buddy who does something. That's something that happened to me with YouTube, for example, where everybody around me was starting a YouTube channel. And so I felt that kind of pressure that nobody was putting on me. I did that to myself and I said, oh, wait, I also need a YouTube channel. Right. We very often do that. And again, this is part of being ambitious. And you normally also have the kind of friends who do a lot of cool things and you feel like, wait a second. Am I a fader because I'm not doing this thing?

12:19Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Am I missing out on something? So that's another mistake. And this is also why I tell people, again, don't overthink it, but keep it quite small because you can realize very quickly that. even though your friends have been raving about this thing, maybe you don't like it. Maybe it's not for you. So those would be the two main things, making it too big and also copy pasting your experiment from someone else. Nice. What's the, I suppose for people who maybe haven't read the book, what's a good example of a tiny experiment that was maybe surprised, the outcome might surprise people? Well, I guess I'll use the YouTube one actually, because whenever I hear people say, I need to do this, instead of overthinking it, I'm like okay I'm curious let's try it so I did that with YouTube I said okay I'm going to record and publish a YouTube video every week until the end of the year and that was about two three months I did it and I thought I would like it because I am fairly creative I love writing I love working with ideas I love teaching so I did the experiment and then I always recommend paying attention to both the external and internal signals when you're evaluating whether the experiment worked for you or not.

13:31Anne-Laure Le Cunff:External signals look pretty good in terms of subscribers, likes, comments, whatever you would put in a dashboard that looked good. Internal signals, I hated it. Every time I had to sit down in front of this camera, I hated it. And because I had so much resistance around it, any day I was supposed to record a YouTube video, I was also procrastinating on everything else. So not only I didn't like the experiment itself, but it was having negative downstream effects on a bunch of other things in my life. And so what did I do at the end of the experiment? I stopped. You are allowed to do that. I stopped.

14:10Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And no, I did not get thousands of emails from people telling me, why did you stop your YouTube channel? Most people don't care. Really, everybody is busy. And so I think it's better to optimize for what actually brings you joy in your work rather than trying to please an imaginary crowd that actually doesn't care that much. You mentioned really interesting. So you talked about procrastinating. So there's like the task and then I'm procrastinating to not do the task. I think a lot of our listeners will come up against that a lot. Is procrastination typically a symptom if you're looking at it through that lens?

14:43Anne-Laure Le Cunff:absolutely it's it's just a signal from your brain that something is not quite working what's interesting though is that in our culture we tend to completely repress that signal if you go online and you look up i'm procrastinating health or how to manage your procrastination most of the articles you'll find you'll find or even on youtube will be about how to beat your procrastination how to get rid of it. It's pretty violent, actually. And it's a shame because you can learn a lot from your procrastination if you just treat it as a signal from your brain and you listen to it. You can get some very useful information that will help you not only get unstuck, but move forward.

15:26Anne-Laure Le Cunff:So I have a little tool in the book that I recommend using whenever that happens. So first, it requires a bit of a mental shift. Next time you procrastinate, you don't have to do it exactly like this, but just imagine saying, hello, procrastination, welcome back. What are you trying to tell me? What are you trying to communicate? And then you can use this tool to have a bit of a structured conversation with your procrastination. Is the problem coming from the head, from the heart, or from the hand? If the problem is coming from the head, it means that at a rational level, you're not fully convinced that you should be working on this task in the first place.

16:03If the problem is coming from the heart, it means that although you think, yeah,

16:07Anne-Laure Le Cunff:I should be doing this thing at an emotional level, you don't feel like this is going to be fun. It's not going to be enjoyable. And if the problem is coming from the hand, it means that at a practical level, you don't believe that you have the right skills or the right tools or even sometimes the right support network in order to complete the task. And what's great is that when you start having that conversation with your procrastination in a bit of a systematic way like that, you can also be systematic in the way you solve the problem. So if the problem is coming from the head, you can go back to the drawing board and ask yourself, okay, is that the right task?

16:46Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Is that actually aligned with my ambitions? Is there maybe a better way to do it? If the problem is coming from the heart, then make it fun. You can grab a friend and do a little co-working session or go to your favorite coffee shop and if the problem is coming from the hand then raise that hand ask for help and so that could be coaching mentoring or watching a video tutorial but when you know that the problem is just practical you can then go and solve that problem so when you were talking about that it makes me think of like discipline and the the it's i guess is listening to the body but but a lot of the time when you wake up at five in the morning and you're ready for the gym and maybe the baby's been crying you think oh I don't want to do this but then sometimes people will confuse procrastination with discipline so what's your take on just there are many books out there I think some of them are called like do the hard thing or get up kick yourself in the ass whatever they are things like that so how do you how do you talk to yourself in a kind of manner when it comes to doing the things that you might not want to do but you know you have to?

17:53Anne-Laure Le Cunff:I think there's a misconception, which a lot of people are feeling this idea online, that ambition needs to be hard. It needs to feel effortful. Two things. First, there is a difference in between occasional resistance, doing something that you know you want to do because of a bunch of factors. The baby has been crying. You're tired. You're not going to question the fact that you're like running because there are a few mornings where it's a little bit harder to do it. In those moments, using that kind of short-term willpower to do something that you know will make you feel good later and you just need to push through that little moment of resistance, put your shoes on and go for the run, that's one thing.

18:35Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And that I think there's no question that this can be really helpful because sometimes there's just feeling better on the other side of a little bit of pushing through. Then there is the idea of just pushing through all the time, using willpower to work really, really, really hard. And this is how you're going to be successful. First, success doesn't work like that. There are a bunch of studies showing that there is a luck factor. There is a network factor of who you know and all of these kind of things, being in the right place in the right time. So telling people just work really hard and you'll be successful is just a very toxic way to trying to help people.

19:14Anne-Laure Le Cunff:And I doubt, to be honest, that the people who say that are actually trying to help. And if you want to be successful, I believe that you actually need to enjoy what you're doing, which doesn't mean that it's not hard sometimes, right? It's not incompatible. Sometimes you can do something that's quite hard, but enjoyable. Writing my book was hard, but most of the time I actually enjoyed it. And I had to push through sometimes a little time, but it wasn't a complete slog or feeling like, why am I doing this to myself. I hate every second of it, but I want to be a book writer. And so something I would ask people who are really every single morning, it's hard to go for that run, is asking them, okay, what do you actually want here?

19:57Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Clearly, you don't want to run. What you want is maybe feel strong, have more energy, feel good in your body, right? Well, running is not the only way to achieve this also running in the morning at 5 a.m is not the only way to achieve this and so that's where i would tell them maybe try experimenting with something different is that a bit of yoga is that a going to a dance class every sunday is that are there other ways to move your body that are not going to feel like it's a drag and you hate every second of it we've had a variety of guests on this podcasts from like high-flying CEOs billionaires but I'd really love to get your opinion I guess what would your definition of success be wanting to wake up in the morning and being excited about what's to come I think that's that's the definition of success and it's not a given a lot of people are fairly depressed and and actually struggle to get out of bed in the morning to me if that's what you have that that's success wow that's a nice one there's the hook um so i i did a horrible thing the other day that i think we all do where you search things in chat gbt and you get an answer that you think oh my god is that true um and it was around how much of our lives we spend in rational mode and it said something terrifying like 30 of your life you will be a rational person 70 you'll be completely irrational and then that led me down the path of is free will a real thing and then before you know i'm wanting to throw my phone in the river and never look at it again so i suppose from your perspective what you've learned in the neuroscience are we just being dragged along by our irrational mind or is there more to it than that unfortunately a lot of that is true yes we're not rational beings i don't think it's such a bad thing i think what's really important is really to practice turning back on your rational mind in moments where it is actually important for you to make a decision that is as rational as possible.

22:04Anne-Laure Le Cunff:So it's a little bit like a muscle that you can train when you notice that you're not being rational right now. And again, it's all about intentionality. There are lots of moments in life, I don't want to be rational. When a friend tells me, hey, I just broke up with my girlfriend, I have this extra ticket to go to Peru together. Do you want to come with me? I don't want to be rational. I want to be the person who says, you know what? Yes, fuck it. Let's do it. I'll come with you. Right. So you don't want to always be rational. There are moments where you would want to. Maybe you're considering a job.

22:34Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Maybe you're considering a move to another city. And again, that's an assumption. Maybe not. Maybe you actually just want to say fuck it and go and move to that place. Right. So it's about asking yourself, is that the kind of situation where I need to use my rational mind? And if so, yes, I'll make the conscious effort to turn that back on to re-engage my prefrontal cortex and to say, let's be rational here. Knowing also that it is probably impossible to be 100 % rational. There are a lot of unconscious mechanisms that are going to make you make some decisions where you feel like you're in control and you have really thought about every single parameter.

23:11Anne-Laure Le Cunff:But we talked earlier about your childhood, that all of that has an effect, right? So I would say rather than thinking about it as a binary thing where you're being emotional or rational, more like a little dial where you kind of ramp up the, you know, turn on a bit more of the rational thinking when there's a decision that you feel like is quite important. Is that like set in stone, P? So I'm this percent rational, this percent irrational. Can you kind of cultivate the rational side of yourself? it's important when you look at those papers to know that this is based on a hopefully large sample not always they can be quite small but it's still based on a sample of different people and you will always have a bell curve where some people are a bit higher some people are a bit lower so that indicates that this is not necessarily fixed and I don't know about the percentage to be honest but what I think can be cultivated is the self-awareness of knowing when you're being a bit more rational when you're being very emotional and then just cultivating that ability to switch from a mode to another and and again i think it can also be helpful to to switch it to the other way around right maybe i'm being too rational about this you know let's just go for it we we talk a lot about people i mean i mean i could be in friends for over 18 years now we've encountered a lot of people throughout of our lives and we go through live and we we feel like we coincide with people called npcs non-playable characters and we think surely you can't be real um and then you see people and they go through their own transformation stories of this self-awareness and you you kind of alluding to earlier but can you think of any other tiny experiments if if people are listening and they're like maybe i maybe i'm a bit npc maybe i'm being dragged around by my unconscious mind any experiments that they can put into place to kind of find that consciousness and be more self-aware i think first it's really important to remove maybe the layer of self-judgment that might come from this realization this npc behavior what i call in the book being cynical where you'll say i don't care i'm not going to try i'm just going to go with whatever is just a protection mechanism and usually when people behave in this way it's because they don't want to take the risk to fail or they don't want to know more about themselves.

25:37Anne-Laure Le Cunff:When you start experimenting, you will uncover a lot about who you are, what you want, about your friends, about your relationships, about some of the decisions that you've made in the past and the way you think and the way you feel. And that can be quite scary. And it can be a lot more comfortable to not experiment and go with whatever is in front of you. So first, removing the self-judgment and saying, okay, I've probably been hurt in the past. There's probably stuff that has happened that makes me behave in this way. Number one. And then number two, again, that's the key word. Start tiny. I would really pick something very, very small, very easy in your life, where you almost want to use that as the factor to decide whether this is a good experiment or not.

26:20Anne-Laure Le Cunff:Something that feels so easy to do that there's no way you're not going to do it. And make it very short, five days, maybe. Just try something a little bit different. For some people I've worked with, it could be as simple as just changing the route where they went to work that morning. A little bit different. Just that can help you start seeing the world in a slightly different way. Get out of that autopilot mode, which then opens a door for you to start experimenting more. I love that. and then I wanted to talk to you about quitting because quitting is such a funny thing of in the sales world and the entrepreneur world like it's a case of like never quit you might just be we had somebody the other day that was talking about that diamond meme where they're like you might just be around the corner which I which I think is brilliant me and Zach have lived many different lives where we used to be in bands and then we've kind of given all of that up to double down on the business world and we said that when we were trying to do music it felt like we were constantly coming up against red lights, red lights, red lights and knowing when to stop.

27:24So we've stepped away and now we're on a new path where it feels more like green lights. So how how should people approach quitting? Because it can feel like I'm a failure. I couldn't stick at things. I've given up. I'm not as good as these people on Instagram and YouTube and all of those things.

27:42Anne-Laure Le Cunff:I call it pausing, not quitting, because you never know if you might come back to it. You guys get back together. to the bed again. You know, when you're 70s or whatever, I would come. You never know. In a few decades, you might feel like, oh, actually, I'm feeling that itch again. I want to try it again. And so I tell people, you're not quitting. You're pausing. You're putting it on the shelf. It's still there. You can come back to it whenever you want to. And the other shift I encourage people to implement is, again, think like a scientist. So what you've done is that you've collected your data.

28:14Anne-Laure Le Cunff:You tried. And that means that in the current circumstances, the data that you got is telling you that maybe this is not the right time for this. You can pause it. So I tell people you have three options when you look at the internal external signals. In your case, for example, maybe the internal signals were saying this is really fun, but the external signals, all of those red lights, right? Okay. So this is not working. You have three options. First one is persist. You can persist and keep on going. Usually I recommend that if one of the signals is very, very, very strong. But if the other one is really not working, that's usually not going to be sustainable.

28:51Anne-Laure Le Cunff:So just persist for a little bit longer. See if any of the signals is changing. But if not, at some point you need to pause. The other one is to pivot. So maybe you change the format. Maybe you do it in a slightly different way. I've seen people, for example, who instead of having a proper band where they go on the road, produce short clips for Instagram, where they just get together, record something, post it, and they get a lot of that fun without investing as much of the work. Pivot, ask yourself, is there a slightly different way for me to get the good without getting any of the friction? Or again, pause.