Ken Sheldon
Appearances
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
And the first thing we found was something that had been shown before, that their sense of well-being really plummeted quite dramatically and their levels of depression went up quite a bit over the course of the legal career in ways that are more extreme and more concerning than in other professional education. Another thing we found was that
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
It was this paradoxical thing where the students who began with the most idealistic motivation tended to do well. They got good grades in their first year of law school. But that had a sort of corrupting effect where being the highest graders, they became the highest status students. And their values shifted in the direction of looking good, having status instead of helping others.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
And so their idealistic motivation turned into much more self-centered motivation over time.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Yeah, we were looking at everything about lawyers that we could think of that might affect their well-being. That most people would think are most important, like how much money do they make? How high status is their job? Did they make partner? But we also included these more psychological variables that we thought would be more important, like do they enjoy and believe in what they're doing?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Do they feel like they're making a contribution to the world in what they're doing? And what we found was that, yes, in fact, income correlated with happiness, but it was a pretty small effect, a surprisingly small effect. A much larger effect was happiness. their motivation for doing the job. Was it something they wanted to do? They believed in it.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
They felt like they were contributing to the world by doing it. And that was a much larger determinant of how happy a person they were.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Intrinsic motivation is just doing something because you like to do it. It's rewarding. It's interesting. Doing it is its own reward. Extrinsic motivation is when you don't really like it. You don't like doing it, but you like what you get from doing it. So you're trying to get a reward from the behavior that'll only come after you're finished.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
How did it go? rock musicians can be kind of flaky and unreliable and we were all in our 20s and everybody had different goals everybody was kind of self-centered and they might not have been committed the way we thought that they were or maybe the guitarist slept with the singer unexpectedly and You know, there's a lot of things that can just get in the way of having a smoothly functioning unit.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Ed was one of the first people to show that not only is intrinsic motivation real, it really matters to be engaged and interested in what you're doing. He also showed that intrinsic motivation is kind of fragile. It can be spoiled pretty easily. He called that the undermining of intrinsic motivation.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
And so he did his classic experiments showing that when you pay people to do something, it makes them not want to do it anymore.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
So if you're solving what should be a fun puzzle that almost everybody likes to do, but you're doing it because you get a dollar for each correct solution, and then you're left alone in the room for a five-minute period and you can either do more puzzles or you can pick up a magazine, In that condition, you pick up the magazine, or today you bring out your cell phone.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
On the other hand, the participants in his studies who were just told, hey, check out these puzzles, see if you like them. There was no mention of money. When they were left alone in that room, they kept on trying to do new puzzles. They retained their intrinsic motivation. And this has huge implications for how we get people to do things.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Do we try to sort of bribe and coerce them using external rewards? I mean, sometimes that's necessary, but it's also very powerful medicine that can spoil an activity maybe for life for a person. Your child starts to take piano lessons and you increase their allowance when they practice a certain amount.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
That may keep them practicing for a while, but in the long run, they're probably going to lose interest because they've lost touch with the inherently enjoyable part of playing the piano.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
What do you find, Ken? What we were trying to do was show intrinsic motivation undermining that lasts for decades, not just a few minutes, right? So DC's early studies showed in that five-minute period, you wouldn't pick up the puzzle. What we wanted to see was during that four-year period of college when you were getting everything paid for, did that ruin that sport for the rest of your life?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
And what we found was that the varsity athletes up to 30, 40 years later were much less interested in playing the sport in the present day or even paying attention to what was happening in the sport, you know, in the colleges or the professional leagues, whereas the students who only participated as walk-ons originally retained their interest in the sport.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Yes, it is strange. You would think that they're so good at the sport. They've spent so much time practicing it. They were able to earn a scholarship. They should be the ones who really continue to like it. The reason that they don't comes down to the fact that they felt very controlled during their college years. They felt like they had to do it. They'd lose their scholarship if they didn't.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
People were talking about them on the discussion boards. The fans were criticizing them. The coaches were bossing them around. And so when people feel controlled by their environment or their situation, that really tends to undermine their intrinsic motivation. And so as soon as it appears that it's okay to stop doing it, they're prone to go ahead and stop.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
We just weren't able to make the agreements and follow through with them that we would have needed to make real progress.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Yeah, I think this might be one of the most profound problems that we human beings face. The fact that we are kind of stuck in a psychological world that is sort of a simulation of what's going on underneath. We can only be conscious of a limited amount at any moment. And the things that we think and are conscious of can be very influenced by outside forces and pressures, as we've discussed.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
And so it takes quite a bit of time and work to figure out what you really want to do.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Yeah, there's a large tradition in motivation research and in other areas of psychology that have sort of revived the idea of the non-conscious mind. Not saying that it's Freud's idea of the place where the nasty stuff is hidden. Instead, it's the place where we have habitual inclinations, emerging intuitions. motives that we kind of go after, maybe even without our own awareness.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
And so it's pretty important to learn to hook up the two minds as much as we can to get our conscious selves to accurately reflect what's going on in there at a deeper level.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Yeah, I had recorded my tracks on the song that we were going to submit to this contest. And I left for a weekend hiking trip, expecting that the bandmates would put their tracks down so we could send in the song the next Monday. And I got back and nobody had done anything. And it was very disappointing.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Self-concordance is simultaneously a simple and a complex concept. People pursuing non-concordant goals are often doing something mainly because somebody else wants them to, somebody who's important to them. It could be parents, it could be a spouse. Other times they are trying to be something that they themselves think they should be.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
They've got this idea maybe that goes way back in their lives of what kind of person they are and what they need to do to be that kind of person. And the problem with both of these types of motivations is it makes it difficult to hear more subtle signals that are coming up from our non-conscious minds that might help us to realize that this isn't quite it yet.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Yeah, this was a very interesting connection that occurred to me at one point because I used to study creativity. It was my dissertation research topic. And there's an important idea in creativity theory of the four stages of creativity that you start by asking yourself a question. You don't know the answer.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
You want the solution to the scientific problem or the new approach to painting that seems to be in there. Something intriguing is calling to you. So you ask yourself this question and you don't know the answer. And so then there needs to be an incubation period where you go and think about something else.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
what happens is that your non-conscious mind keeps working on the problem while you're thinking about something else just because you sort of consciously posed that question to yourself and then you went away and now it's working on it and so hopefully along comes a moment of inspiration an aha moment where some stray thought or idea or image pops up And you recognize, whoa, that's interesting.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
I remember walking in the rain, it was Seattle, wondering what to do next, and coming to the decision that this was probably not going to give me a way to make a living, and that music, or at least this particular band episode, was not going to work out. And that I needed to get serious about maybe something else.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
What's that about? And you start to work with that idea and you realize that it's the solution to the problem. So this is a very common sort of creative sequence. And my idea was that maybe discovering what we really want is a creative activity. And maybe we can self-prompt this activity. We don't just have to wait for insights out of the blue.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
We can consciously ask ourselves questions like, why am I so unhappy? What do I really want? What's bothering me? What's happening inside of me? And when we ask those questions, we don't know the answer right away, but very often we begin to get hints.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
That's exactly right. And a colleague and I now are writing a review article where we're trying to make a firm connection between the phenomenology of conscious choice, of asking one's mind questions, and neuroscience. You know, what's happening in these brain networks when we do that? And we're finding some really striking points of connection supporting the idea that we're
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
When we ask ourselves a question, it puts our brains to work in ways that we don't know about, but that can do an amazing job of helping us.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
That's true. Not every aha experience is the best or final aha experience. And so life is an experiment, and then we need to test the idea once we become aware of it. And we might realize that, no, we don't want to quit everything and move to Mexico and lay on a beach. That's not really going to be as fulfilling as we think. Let's keep thinking and maybe a better choice will come.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
One of them is to use mindfulness meditation where you're just trying to do nothing. You're just being a blank conscious screen and you're trying to watch what pops up and you're trying to stay present and not be sort of sucked away by the next thought or the next fear or emotion.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
And the usefulness of mindfulness for discovering what you really want is that you're learning how to notice these subtle signals that might be lurking on the fringe of consciousness. You might not recognize those until you develop this skill of really kind of picking up on these subtle things that are happening if you'll just shut up and listen.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
As a college student, Amy was very influenced by a friend who encouraged Amy's interest in the environment and influenced Amy to join groups with her and work for the environment. So that was a big part of Amy's life in college.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
But then she went to law school and did very well, but she fell prey to this problem I described earlier that the high-performing law students tend to become sort of corrupted by their success. And she ended up as a wealthy partner, extremely successful by conventional standards, lawyer working in a big firm in a big city. But she was miserable. And she had no idea why at that point.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
One weekend, she talked to her brother at a family gathering, and his brother asked some difficult questions. Well, if you're so miserable, why are you still doing this? And that caused her to start thinking in the way I've described. It set her unconscious mind into motion. And the first effects of that process was when
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
The thought of the woman that she knew back in college popped into her head one day at work. And it had been 25 years. Why was she thinking of her now? And she finally got to a point where she Googled that person, discovered that they ran their own consulting firm for environmental issues.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
And it took a while for Amy to go from this knowledge to saying, well, maybe I'll reach out to her and see, you know, I'll email her and see how she's doing. But when she finally got to that last point, the friend was very glad to hear from Amy, thought that Amy had skills that she needed and invited Amy to come work with her. And so Amy changed her job. She took a 50% cut in salary.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
She moved to a different city, but she's way happier now than she was before because she has gotten back to those early adult interests in making a difference in the world.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Nothing happened until she started to ask herself, what's the problem? What do I really want? And then nothing happened after that for quite some time because it was a big problem and it took a while for her non-conscious mind to process it. But then that mind found ways to bring to her attention this relevant image from her past. But she still needed to recognize the aha moment.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
And then she still needed to elaborate it and follow it through and contact her friend and so forth. But the whole sequence fits this model that we've discussed quite well.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Yeah, it was a program at Seattle University in existential phenomenological psychotherapy. Wow. Yeah. That's a lot of syllables, but it is a certain tradition within existential philosophy and counseling psychology. It's a legitimate approach to helping people. And I was very interested in that program, not so much because I wanted to become a therapist.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Yes, it is true. They're all important. And the process can be stalled anywhere along the way. One of the biggest problems Amy had was when she had this invitation to join her friend's company, was making the cut from her old job because she knew that her old colleagues would see it as a step down, you know, working for so much less, so much less status.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
And so she needed to muster the courage to go ahead and take the step anyway.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Yes, Peter Goldwitzer in his great research has shown that at some point we cross a Rubicon of decision. And what that means is we make up our minds. We're no longer thinking about what we might want. We've now made a choice and we're going to go ahead with it. And what his research shows is that once we cross that Rubicon from deliberation to implementation, our minds operate very differently.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
We're no longer questioning what we're thinking. Instead, we're trying to make plans. We're trying to preserve the goal. We don't want to wimp out on it. We want to take the next step. We don't want to have to go back to that uncomfortable position of wondering what we want.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
That's exactly right. We don't want to think that I chose the wrong thing. That creates dissonance. It's uncomfortable. And so we protect ourselves from that thought. And many times that's a good thing. We don't want to let ourselves worry too much. We want to get on with things.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
But sometimes that dissonance can be a valuable signal, as we've been talking about with Amy, that can let us know that maybe it is time to go back to the deliberation phase.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Yeah, this was really interesting data. The most dramatic thing that happened was that their intrinsic motivation to do the hike plummeted over the course of the summer. It no longer seemed so interesting and challenging and fun at the end. Instead, it was much more of a kind of a slog for most people who were able to go that far.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Yeah, identified motivation is the kind where it's not that you're doing it because it's fun and interesting. Instead, it's you're doing it because it's meaningful, it expresses your values, and it's important to you. And so even when intrinsic motivation fails, identified motivation can still keep going because it believes in the journey, even if the journey is now becoming more and more painful.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
but more because I've always just been very theoretically oriented and these were new ideas that I didn't understand that seemed like they might be very relevant to this search for clarity, the search for what to do with myself.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
It's true, and that is something that we all need to know how to do better. It's something that our schools don't teach us, our parents don't teach us. We're self-programming organisms. We are creating our lives via our choices, but we are not taught how to do it well, not taught how to ask ourselves the questions that will get us the answers that we need.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Thank you, and thank you for inviting me. I've had a great time.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
I really enjoyed the year. My fellow classmates, we formed a tight cohort. We did things together. I learned a lot. And the main thing I learned was that I didn't think the answers I was looking for were going to come from that area of knowledge. So what did you do? Well, I once again stopped doing that. I dropped out after the first year. And in the end, I felt kind of stuck.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
I was living in Seattle. The jobs I was working were not very well paying, very high status. But here I was, a Duke graduate. You know, maybe I should be doing better than that. So I was in a sort of period of really, really not knowing what to do next.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Yeah, the EST training was created by Werner Erhardt. He's not a spiritual guru. He was actually a salesman who read a lot about optimal performance and communication and what is the mind and mind training classes. He tried them all. And then he created his own version called the EST training. And it wasn't a spiritual thing.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
It was actually designed to train you to understand your own mind and to control it better.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Yeah, well, the way the training was set up, you'd be seated in a ballroom. They'd rent a hotel ballroom and they'd have chairs lined up. And so there would be two or three hundred of you lined up in your chairs. And then the trainer would come out and there would be volunteers who would bring microphones to people to speak into when they wanted to say something.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
And the trainer led us through a variety of explorations, processes, activities designed to show us how our minds work and how they're currently not working and training us to work them better.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
That's right. That was actually the thing that attracted me to it most. I wasn't sure that I needed a self-help training, but that promise of guaranteed enlightenment, I was fascinated to find out what that was going to be.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Well, so we're on day four. It's Sunday of the second weekend, and it's sort of building and building, and you're getting closer and closer to the material that they really want to hit you with at the end. And the moment of enlightenment was being told that this is it. You're already enlightened. There's only the present moment. This is it.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Yeah, I mean, it sounds like a bait and switch almost. So after the trainer told us this, people were like, what do you mean this is it? This isn't it.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I would say that I've had a lot of self-doubt that I've struggled with. But a big part of the self-doubt involves the knowledge that it's only you who is making the choices in your life. And that's kind of scary. It's all up to me. And I wasn't sure that I was good enough to do what maybe I was capable of doing.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
This wasn't probably until my fourth year that Robert Evans arrived, and I was a little bit adrift up to that point. But once Bob showed up, I recognized that the research he was doing was fascinating, and I really wanted to learn about it.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
And so what he was doing was a new approach to studying personality, where instead of giving people a trait questionnaire, how extroverted are you and how agreeable and so forth, he gave people a blank sheet of paper. And he said, tell me what you're striving to do.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
And so there'd be, say, 15 blank lines and the participant would write down, you know, 10, 15, as many as they wanted, things that they are striving to do in their life. And that really intrigued me because it's what I had been trying to do my whole life was figure out what to strive for.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Yeah, it is a blank piece of paper and people write things down. And if you think about it, how do we know or how do they know they're writing good stuff down? Maybe they're just writing down what their mom told them or their friend told them or what society has told them.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
And so it was only thinking later about what is the meaning of these goal statements people are giving us that I started to wonder, what if they're writing down the wrong things?
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
One of the main things we find is that people are not very good at all at knowing how achieving their goals will affect them. They can have a completely off-base feeling that this goal, if I finally get it, is going to make all the difference for me. But then when we actually come back and measure their happiness later on to see how it's been affected or not affected, we often find no change.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Yeah, well, there's many ways. We're all immersed in a material consumer culture, which is trying to get us to buy things, click things, make more money so we can acquire status symbols. Not all of us fall for this. It depends a lot on the support and relations and connections that we have.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
But if you're not sure what to do, and so many of these broader cultural messages are telling you to be greedy and you're pretty prone to at least give that a try to see if it works.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Yeah, that's a very common complaint. College students are still trying to figure out what they want, perhaps independently of their parents. It's their first real opportunity to get away from their parents and explore on their own. And parents often have very firm ideas about what they want their children to do. And it's not a bad thing. In many cases, they are good ideas.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
But ultimately, parents are not in even as good a position as we are to experiment and find what we really want. Parents have goals of their own. They want to acquire the status of having a doctor as a child. And they sometimes can't separate that out from their love and concern for us.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
In his view, in law schools, there's intense competition. There's grading on a curve so that even if you learn almost all the material, you might still only get a C. You're trying to get the prestigious positions. You might end up accepting a job because it's the highest paying, even though once upon a time you might have thought you would have hated doing that type of job.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
So it can be really confusing for students, and Larry was trying to humanize legal education.
Hidden Brain
Wellness 2.0: Who Do You Want To Be?
Yeah, we've published several studies. Our first came out in 2004. We were able to track a sample of law students over their entire three-year career to see what changes occurred in their well-being and in their mental state.