Emily Falk

Well, I don't know if he had read my work specifically, but I think it was a strategic way to frame things.

Exactly.

And so, you know, I will admit I'm not like doing speed workouts all the time.

But after learning a little bit about what I was capable of by doing that with my brother and with my sister, now at the end of my run, sometimes I will work in a little bit more, you know, I'll push myself for the last couple blocks to see how fast I can run or do those little things that over the long run, they promise me are going to make me a faster runner.

And when I do that in my runs, then it gets incorporated into my identity.

And there's this feed forward cycle of the more that I think of it as something that I do, the more I do it.

That's right.

So let's say that you have somebody that you work with who is really nervous about making a big presentation and they don't necessarily think of themselves as being a great presenter.

But you've seen them at the office party and you know that they are an extrovert who is the life of the party.

And so you might help them see the connection between that way that they are able to connect with other people in a crowd in one situation with that same kind of connection that they might have in other situations.

Um,

And so as we think about, you know, what are the goals that we have and what are the things that are getting in the way, one of the things that might be getting in the way is if we think, well, I'm not a person who does X. And in reality, we can shift to think about, like, well, what are the things that are true of me that could support being able to do that thing?

Social proof is the idea that we are influenced by what the people around us are doing or thinking.

And so when we see that other people are doing something, then that makes us think that it's a good idea.

And social proof influences people often outside of their conscious awareness even.

So, for example, in California, researchers studied the energy use of different people, of different households.

And what they found was that when they asked people what they thought was influencing their energy use behaviors, that people said that, you know, their costs and other factors were influencing it.

But they didn't actually think that their neighbor's energy use was particularly impactful in their decisions.

And yet, when the researchers looked at what was actually influencing their decisions, it turned out that other people's energy use behavior was pretty predictive of what those folks were doing.

And so based on that, what the research team did was