Speaker 1: 0:07

Welcome to the Design Thinker podcast, where we explore the theory and practice of design, hosted by me, donnie, and me Peter. Hello everyone and Happy New Year. We are kicking off the year with another series of episodes. This time, we are going to be talking about storytelling. In this episode, we're specifically going to talk about the stories we tell ourselves, so let's jump in. Hi, peter.

Speaker 2: 0:45

Hi Danny, how are you?

Speaker 1: 0:46

Good, how are you?

Speaker 2: 0:47

I'm well, thank you, it's great to see you.

Speaker 1: 0:49

Good to see you. What are we talking about?

Speaker 2: 0:54

Today we are going to talk about the stories we tell ourselves. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1: 1:02

This is an interesting topic because the stories we tell ourselves show up in all aspects of our lives, right From career, family, health, fitness, everything. I particularly find it interesting that the stories we tell ourselves in the design process are a problem-solving process, and particularly how the stories we tell ourselves hold us back. Yeah, this will be a good topic to dive into.

Speaker 2: 1:33

Yeah, and I think maybe it's the our old human brain being wired for preservation, survival and defense that both of us thought of the stories we tell ourselves that hold us back. Yeah, it feels like that's the part of the brain that's at work when we're thinking of those. Yeah, so the stories we tell ourselves. Usually we go into definitions here, but I don't think this could be a definition in the internet dictionary of stories we tell ourselves, but maybe we'll have to share our own on the fly.

Speaker 1: 2:09

I wonder if it's worthwhile defining what story means.

Speaker 2: 2:13

Oh, okay, yeah, I think that's a good point. Let's give ourselves a bit of a solid starting point have a go.

Speaker 1: 2:20

So consulting Google, I feel like we need something like a Okay.

Speaker 2: 2:26

You just did it perfect. Say it again.

Speaker 1: 2:31

That's my robot voice.

Speaker 2: 2:33

Okay.

Speaker 1: 2:33

So there's a couple of definitions, just trying to see the first one that came up when I googled story is an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment.

Speaker 2: 2:49

Oh, okay, okay.

Speaker 1: 2:54

And then it goes on to say could also be a piece of gossip or rumor. A story could also be a false statement or a lie, An account of past events in someone's life or in the development of something, a particular person's representation of the facts of a matter Any of these hitting the spot for you.

Speaker 2: 3:20

Definitely. I'm very glad you decided to look at the definition of story there, because some of those words popping out for me like imaginary or real facts or false statements Entertainment was interesting. Lots to kind of go on there. Yeah, the stories we tell ourselves, and who is it and which part of us is it entertaining? You've also made me think let's look up self or ourselves while we're at it, because I think in the context of our work, and especially our design work, I think, yeah, I'd like to talk about this.

Speaker 2: 3:56

Right, we tell ourselves as individuals and that's you, me and everybody, because everyone's telling themselves stories all the time but also expanding the definition of ourselves to the people we're working with. We can do that if we've got time Ourself. So the definitions of ourselves. It says it's used as the object of a verb. This is interesting. It's not quite as snappy as our usual definitions. Danny's just warning you Used as the object of a verb or preposition when this is the same as the subject of the clause and the subject is the speaker and one or more other people considered together.

Speaker 1: 4:36

This is like taking me back to elementary school, grammar.

Speaker 2: 4:40

Me too. Or alternative. This is a bit more helpful. We, or us personally used to emphasize the speaker and one or more other people considered together there we go. That's what we're looking for.

Speaker 1: 4:54

We are us personally. I want to share this one because it so it goes used instead of myself by a sovereign or other person in authority. Okay, taking us off topic, but I just it's like the royal we.

Speaker 2: 5:13

Is it our sales, the stories one tells oneself.

Speaker 1: 5:19

I Like that second definition you do you want to repeat that again?

Speaker 2: 5:25

Yes, we, we are us personally. And in brackets it says used to emphasize the speaker and one or more other people considered together. That's from the Oxford dictionary of English.

Speaker 1: 5:36

Let's go with that First story. I really like the definition around a particular person's representation. I think it's a representation of a situation. The definition says it's the representation of facts, but I don't always know that a story is factual, particularly stories we tell ourselves.

Speaker 2: 5:59

Yeah, oh yeah. I Definitely agree with that, and I think that's where a lot of the Problems start to arise. And so death definition Yep.

Speaker 1: 6:10

Yeah, so we have a definition. Now what well, why don't we talk about a few examples of stories we tell ourselves, particularly in the problem solving process?

Speaker 2: 6:19

Yeah, in the process and yeah, okay, um. So stories tell ourselves. I think some of the stories we can get into are not quite giving up but Anticipating, anticipating challenges or blockers or obstacles even getting started. So you know, and I'm Unless somebody's coming to me asking for help and so, if the situation is, I see an opportunity and there is, yeah, I see an opportunity to help, yeah, I can get into the story of Finding the right person or to kind of understand that I can provide help. This to the story I can tell myself is that's going to be challenging and then having the conversation end up with that person accepting the help or wanting the help and wanting help in the particular way that we can Provide is going to be a challenge. I guess that maybe the summary or type of story is me is anticipating or creating imaginary obstacles before they've actually been established as factual. Maybe I've just summarized up every single unhelpful story we tell ourselves.

Speaker 1: 7:29

Well, I think within your story are a few things we can unpack, right it's. I know that Sometimes in the design process we might think people are going to be resistant to this approach. We might think that the one that I come across often is that we can't use, like design won't help solve our problem.

Speaker 2: 7:50

And I see you nodding your head, so I'm assuming you're definitely, and you made me think of another kind of classic. Yeah, I mean we could do like the top 10 greatest it's gonna be making album a bit, but the other another one it's gonna take too long.

Speaker 1: 8:01

Yes, it's going to take too long. I find that story really fascinating because Something I've been kind of unpacking lately is like there seems to be this focus on delivery, delivery, delivery, without really thinking about the impact of the delivery, like it's almost like it's gonna design. Thinking is gonna take too long, so let's just do it the way we've done it, but then, knowing the way you've been doing it, it hasn't been working, but let's go do it again.

Speaker 2: 8:32

Anyway yeah, yeah, which is I'm imagining the story that's playing out in someone else's Semine door. Another group of people are, I guess, in our framing telling, telling themselves that story, yeah, so design won't help us or it's gonna take too long, yeah, this, let's categorize it as kind of resistance. So the story we're telling ourselves is like anticipating Resistance, where there might not be any or their stories, whether what do you find, what's another, any stories you find yourself, I mean, I can adjust right into, like before you even get started. This is the sort of story that can start to play out in my mind. And but then there's, there's probably others during our design process, the roller coaster that it might be.

Speaker 1: 9:15

I think there is this like I'm not a designer, so I can't use design thinking. That's a story I hear often.

Speaker 2: 9:22

Okay.

Speaker 1: 9:23

There's also the all or nothing story. Like I think there's a misconception that Design thinking is a step-by-step process and you've got to start at step one and go all the way to step six, and but there are ways to bring in elements of design thinking to any situation.

Speaker 2: 9:41

Yeah, nice Actually, and we use it, or nothing thinking, yes, the story of needing to do the whole in inverted commas, design thinking process is definitely true, but then all or nothing thinking again through any part of life, in particular in a design process. That can be a kind of stumbling block story as well, where you think that it needs to be definitely 100% this or 100% that. That's another yeah, unhelpful, unhelpful story. As I'm describing these actions, I'm thinking, yeah, the design helpfully, design thinking has our kind of toolbox and capabilities and mindsets have kind of built in antidotes to these and alternative stories as the course we can call them so, but we'll come on to that.

Speaker 1: 10:24

So I think that's probably some good examples to kind of ground what we mean by the stories we tell ourselves in the design process. So naturally humans do have sort of a script that I think sometimes we have some of the best conversations in our own heads. Some of the best some of the most volatile conversations happen in our head.

Speaker 2: 10:46

Okay, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 10:48

It's something that our brains just naturally do. We love to catastrophize, we love to. You know, we are very creative imaginary creatures and I think this whole storytelling for ourselves is part of that. If we wanted to kind of go down our framework of you know what, why? The question that I would want to answer here is why is it important to understand? So? So we can't stop the stories we tell ourselves, but I think it's a matter of like how do we become aware of them? And then what do we do? So why is it important to understand the stories we tell ourselves?

Speaker 2: 11:26

Yeah, nice, the awareness and then, and then the final step of what do we do about them. So what? Why is it important? Well, for me I think it's important to pay attention and to the stories that are playing out in my head, to, I guess, learn which ones are. I guess it starts starting to kind of identify what kind of stories they are, maybe giving them some sort of label or category, and, you know, doing that as early as possible, before you get too attached and into the story that you know. Ultimately, the purpose would be to examine the story and identify whether one it's helpful or not, and to, I guess, how much is imaginary and how much is real in the story. Because you know, I think I mean certainly from my experience I don't know about any of us, but I imagine other people you know you can find yourself spiraling into a story and staying in that story over a long period and getting wrapped up in it and not doing anything about it, and then eventually you might realize that you're getting kind of stuck in this story. That's just not helpful and, as it turns out, it's not true once you start to investigate and question parts of the story. So I guess the why is it important to understand? Is because right at the beginning, we said stories that hold us back, like nobody wants to be held back. Do we want to be moving forwards and growing, or I do. I don't want to be held back, although I do want to learn.

Speaker 2: 12:52

I'm slightly distracted everyone because Danny did a me and reached behind her and pulled a book off her bookshelf, maybe for the first time ever. What you got there, danny? What's the book that's come to mind? Learned Optimism. Okay, that's the old dim. What's his name? Again, and Martin Seigelman. Seigelman, yeah.

Speaker 1: 13:09

The reason why this book came to mind when you were talking about this is you're right that we tell these stories to ourselves. They're all they're. Most of the time they're assumption based, right, or they're based on an experience that we had at some point. And we take that one experience in a specific context, in a specific situation, and we generalize it. So it could be true that there was one project where using the design thinking process took a really long time, or it could, you know, there might have been one project where everybody was really just did not want to use design thinking. And then we take that one experience, that one incident, and we generalize it and go oh, design thinking takes forever, without looking at that situation and going what are the things that made that happen? Or what are the things in that situation that made people resistant?

Speaker 1: 14:07

So there is this model that from the Learned Optimism book that it's called the ABCDE model. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. Basically, you kind of talk about so A is for adversities, so you kind of talk about the thing that you're facing against. B is for belief, so you talk about what is the belief that around that, and then what's the consequence of that belief. C is for dispute. So this is kind of giving an argument. So this is like putting yourself in the position of arguing the opposite.

Speaker 2: 14:44

Oh, yeah, okay.

Speaker 1: 14:45

And one of the ways that you could do that is actually looking for evidence that supports the opposite argument. Right, yeah, yeah. So that's why I pulled that book out, because I think we often get into these modes of operating under assumptions or not, you know, and the story we tell ourselves is purely assumption-based, and sometimes, to break that cycle, I just find that a really useful tool.

Speaker 2: 15:10

Yeah, that's really cool. Thanks for sharing. That Sounds familiar. We may have chatted about it briefly in another episode, but I don't remember which. So thanks for bringing it right back into the front of my mind. And I wonder shall we have a go at making that concrete? Let's work. Can we do that? Well, let's work through this unhelpful story about, let's say, either I'm not a designer, so I can't use design thinking, or the one around, maybe this is going to take us too long.

Speaker 1: 15:40

Let's do the first one, I think that's. Yeah, okay. So the A here adversity would be I'm not a designer, so I can't use design thinking. So what's the belief? That's the story we tell ourselves. So what's the belief?

Speaker 2: 15:55

Well, I imagine that some you know there's lots of different beliefs here. That could be everything from I didn't go to design school, I don't have a formal design qualification to. You know, my job is something completely opposite to design, so I no longer have any imagination when it comes to the work that I do. What else? I'm kind of speaking on behalf of other people that are more about me.

Speaker 1: 16:20

Why don't we go with? This is not a skill I have.

Speaker 2: 16:22

Okay.

Speaker 1: 16:22

That's the belief, right. All right you believe it's not something that you have the capability to do Okay. So that was B so C. What is the consequence of this belief?

Speaker 2: 16:34

The consequence of believing that it's not a skill that I have is that I won't attempt to try. Yeah, I won't even start.

Speaker 1: 16:43

Yeah, so you won't try, you won't start, you won't even just try to engage in you know any of it because. So what are some things that you can use to dispute that argument? So you're now trying to play devil's advocate, right? So, what are some things that can dispute belief?

Speaker 2: 17:03

Well, I guess a helpful one is everyone's got to start somewhere. One of my favorite credo's the Wright Brothers ancestor didn't have a pilot's license. Everyone starts knowing nothing and not being able to do anything. So that's one angle of dispute, and another one might be there must be some skills and experience I have that can be transferable into this particular domain. Another one might be I'm a fast learner. There you go, there's a few.

Speaker 1: 17:35

There's quite a bit there. The last one that you said is I'm a fast learner. So what some evidence that you have that you're a fast learner? Like a concrete example?

Speaker 2: 17:48

Oh well, maybe I've used Duolingo in the past to learn a language and quicker than the average through a particular Duolingo module to learn a language.

Speaker 1: 17:59

So, now that you've gone from an adversity of believe, a consequence, a dispute and some evidence, is there a new story you could start telling yourself?

Speaker 2: 18:10

Oh, nice, so you've turned this into a bit of a cycle. Okay, so maybe the new story might be. Well, the new story might be. I'm not a designer. I haven't. It's not a skill that I have. I know that I can learn things, pick things up and learn things quickly, and it's something I enjoy. So I'm good to start learning how to use design thinking and I can pick it up quicker than other people. Is that something like that?

Speaker 1: 18:36

There's a couple of tweaks I would make to that story, though I'm not a designer yet.

Speaker 2: 18:42

Oh, yes, yeah, until that magic three-letter word yeah.

Speaker 1: 18:46

When you start adding the word yet to any negative thing you say to yourself, it just changes. It just changes the mood of it. Right when I was a PhD student which is a time in your life where you tell yourself a lot of stories I used to come back to I was not particularly the best math student. I barely passed algebra two and I was learning how to do some pretty sophisticated statistical analysis. And the story I kept telling myself is how can you do this? You couldn't even pass algebra.

Speaker 2: 19:28

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 19:29

And to the point, like one of my professors had to really say to me, like you just need to let that go.

Speaker 2: 19:35

Yeah, okay.

Speaker 1: 19:37

I had to start telling myself a different story, because it was really impacting my ability to actually learn the material that I was really keen to learn, I wanted to learn, and also from the feedback that I got from professors and advisors. I had a knack for it.

Speaker 1: 19:55

I just understood certain things about statistics, but the assumption I was making is because I was bad at this type of math, I was going to be bad at this type of math. So for me that word yet was very transformational, right? I don't understand all of the things I need to know about statistics yet.

Speaker 2: 20:14

Yeah, and it's from what you're saying kind of it opens up automatically kind of triggers in your mind, starts your mind kind of thinking about exploring what are the ways that you could actually become or achieve that or attain, acquire that skill, whatever it is, what about? So I do like this model. I'm wondering, and, as we're sharing and sharing the stories, I wonder if you've got any experience of having a group kind of use that model, because I've been in situations before, whereas as a team, as a design team, whereas you know, even during a piece of design thinking work, maybe a sprint, we can find ourselves in a little bit of a lull or facing obstacles, or I was going to say pit of despair, which is quite, is the extreme version, but you know, in the trough and partly through a piece of work, and often that can be down to something imaginary rather than something real.

Speaker 1: 21:15

The answer to your question is yes, and I'll give you an example. I'll talk about using a synagro the other thing I want to mention, though, is that the reason that we use the word belief is belief is a very powerful thing and we need to be really careful of not labeling beliefs as real or not real, because if you believe it, it is real for you. Just a little caution on that.

Speaker 2: 21:43

CB. So it's the thing we are choosing to believe.

Speaker 1: 21:45

LR, you might believe that you cannot design something, and whether that's true or not it doesn't matter, because to you, because you believe that, and until you believe something differently, that is real. You can absolutely use this model in a team. I often use it when teams feel like they're in a stuck position, and it kind of veers away from what Martin Sigmund designed it for initially or maybe it's just different applications of it, but I find it really useful to get people unstuck If we define what the adversity is, or the stuck point, or whatever you want to label it, and then you start going through it, and what's really interesting is, particularly when you go through okay, what are the beliefs that we have around this problem? It's really interesting how you can start to see patterns of how the things that individuals believe, how they can click together and create a really powerful coalition that keeps us in the stuck space.

Speaker 1: 22:57

If you're going to run this in a group, though, I recommend the writing of the adversity you could do as a group. All of the other ones I recommend kind of running an exercise where people write down their own thoughts and then everybody shares. So it's a really good post-it note exercise, yeah, so I find it a quite a powerful tool to get teams moving.

Speaker 2: 23:21

Yeah, cool.

Speaker 1: 23:22

The other thing I was going to say is the same way that collective beliefs can hold us back, collective beliefs can also move us to doing things that we think are impossible.

Speaker 2: 23:33

Oh, yeah, okay, so the complete opposite. Maybe this is a bit of a side tangent, but what about collective beliefs compelling us, propelling us to do things that are not the right thing to do, where there's probably a whole other episode. We did talk about ethics in another one, but, yeah, I guess there's a bit of a cost-turing note around that. So what you're saying, though, is we can, in the same way that collective beliefs can hold us back, they can actually do the complete opposite and propel us forwards and amaze ourselves about what we can actually do. What I was going to say was just talking this through both individually and from a group perspective.

Speaker 2: 24:12

I can imagine this working and being really powerful, and actually a couple of the components of this is something that I use in a design process anyway.

Speaker 2: 24:21

So, for example, at the beginning of a particular piece of work that I'm bringing people together to look into a problem or opportunity, then one of the things I'll help them do as individuals, then as a group, is bring everybody's beliefs and perspectives, and maybe hypotheses, on this particular design challenge.

Speaker 2: 24:41

Let's bring them out and into the surface and share them. So that's on the kind of external problem we're trying to solve, but you've helped me imagine and see that you could do exactly the same thing. But for the way that the work is going or a particular sticking point in how we're approaching the work, whether that's within the team or externally within the organisation, I can see this being really powerful. I mean, I know you talked me through an example and I think maybe the key point is the finishing part of that kind of cycle is translating or transforming this previous story about adversity into something that is more positive, has the kind of possibility in it rather than the impossibility or the obstacles. Is that right? Is there a useful frame or template for that kind of end statement or the new story? I guess how to describe it as.

Speaker 1: 25:42

It's really reframing the stories we tell ourselves, right.

Speaker 2: 25:45

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 25:47

And this framework that we've gone through helps us to reframe our thinking. The trick is, though, every time that other old story like, we just have to repeat this new story, enough that it becomes norm and learning to let that old story go, and I'll share this. This is an exercise I learned a while ago, which was to name that voice in your head that always tells you these stories, so I've named my voice Gertrude. Apologies for anyone that's named Gertrude, it was just the name that came to mind, so, when I find myself telling myself these things, I kind of just signaled to myself like shut up, gertrude, what do you?

Speaker 2: 26:41

know about this.

Speaker 1: 26:42

Gertrude, and it's just kind of it's just a silly thing you can do, but it just helps disconnect, you know, just helps interrupt that thought pattern.

Speaker 2: 26:53

Yeah, and introduces a bit of humor and maybe sort of diminishes in a helpful way, the voice that you've called Gertrude and thank you for sharing that, Danny I also have a voice. I've never given it any and this comes back to that. One of the first definitions that included entertainment. So you know Gertrude is getting entertainment from the stories that Gertrude is telling, I imagine, and they're not entertaining or helpful to you.

Speaker 2: 27:24

And it makes me think of the book by Dr Steve Peters, and I'm going to remind myself of the title as we're talking. The book talks about how he uses a model to help us understand our minds and divides the mind into three kind of components. There's the mind we think of as us, then there's the computer and then, in this context, the important part is the monkey, so the monkey mind. The chimp paradox is. So he talks about the chimp mind and one of the key takeaways from that book was that if you're waking up at you know, three or four o'clock in the morning, often with stories playing through your head, then be aware that that's him, the chimp, or maybe Gertrude, having a good old yarn around the campfire. And you've just happened to be able to be. You know, you've just been woken up and tuned into it. The message that Steve Peters gives is don't pay attention to the stories that you hear the chimp or Gertrude is telling you at three or four in the morning. Okay, so we've covered what the definition of stories and ourselves is. We've touched on you know why it's important to understand and I think it's really given us a really helpful framework from learned optimism around, once we've kind of become aware of and realise that a story isn't helpful, then a way to have a conversation with ourselves or transforming that story and refraining it, and we've talked about applying that in the group setting. So maybe, as we've been talking about this and it's something I mentioned earlier about, the stories we're telling ourselves can be in relation to or about other people, and especially at work, and especially when we're encountering adversity and challenges at work. Often it's about how other people are responding to us and especially, you know, as designers, as design thinkers, you know, because it's not 100% familiar to most people, then sometimes we can come across kind of resistance, passive or active.

Speaker 2: 29:23

I guess in this conversation made me think of a couple of things. One is I'll always be aware that other people have got similar stories playing through their minds. So part of you know our job, I guess, is to take a step back and try and understand their stories. And for me, there's two things that I've learned to do to get out of negative stories and they are really both about focusing on. One of them is about focusing on other people and and it's simply, and the other one is about Trying to get out of my head. So the first one in getting out my head is doing something physical.

Speaker 2: 30:00

So if you find yourself like going around in a story spiral and not getting out of it, then Do some something that gets you Connecting your mind and body, and that could be simply standing up and walking around or going for a walk or Stretching or yoga, or something that really reminds you that you have a body as well as a mind and the world is Not just between your ears.

Speaker 2: 30:25

It's so much more than that. But then, more importantly, in terms of you know design and Connecting with other people, in particular, connecting with other people in the work that you're doing, getting out, oh, have your own head and starting to understand somebody else's and can be real breakthrough step, because some of that imaginary storytelling you've got often turns out to be completely Well. Well, a great story if it was written in the book and if it was a piece of fiction, it might be a bestseller, but in reality it's never as quite as exciting or dramatic as you're You're imagining. So maybe what I'm saying in a very long-winded ways just get off your bum and go and speak to the person, try and understand them, find out what they believe is an adversity, trying to understand their beliefs.

Speaker 1: 31:13

What so, just as a little bit of a thought experiment, so say, the scenario is that you have a Imaginary workmate named Bob and you've built the story up in your head that Bob doesn't really appreciate design thinking and he's not gonna want to use this Approach and yeah as a thought experiment. What would it look like if you went to Bob and say, hey, I Get the impression that you may be resistant to using design thinking to solve this problem. What might that look like if you actually did that?

Speaker 2: 31:48

Well, that would be, I think, first of all, if you simply ask that question in a normal Working context for nobody's gonna die, that's a good starting point and, working back from there, what Bob would probably give you like an honest answer, I imagine, if you framed the question and in a way like that, that's kind of inviting them to share their perspective with you and a non-challenging and Threatening way and maybe even better than that, they would give you an insight into what they're worried about and maybe what they, what they need, and from there you can start going.

Speaker 2: 32:25

Well, if this is what success looks like to you, then actually, yeah, you're right, we can't help you, but design thinking is gonna help you succeed, but maybe there is some way that we could. Yeah, so it's gonna open up the conversation and also, in the context of this episode around unhelpful stories, is gonna help you, I Guess, get certainty around the story, and it's funny thing, once you start getting certainty, then the story that starts to disappear, that our minds no longer start telling us the story. So we can either Understand that Bob, you know, is interested and and we can work with him, or and realize that, yeah, bob is, is Not, not interested and we can't help him and we've onto the next Person.

Speaker 1: 33:12

I want to point out that there's two types of stories that we're talking about here, right Okay. There are stories we tell ourselves about other people. Mm-hmm that are based on assumptions, and then there are stories we tell ourselves about ourselves.

Speaker 1: 33:28

Yeah so the example that we walk through is not. I can't use design thinking because I'm not a designer. I can't learn statistics because I barely passed the algebra to. These are stories that we tell ourselves. They're both equally limiting. But I just want to point out that Not only do we have these stories we tell ourselves, but we also have these different types of stories we tell ourselves.

Speaker 2: 33:54

Yeah yeah, nice distinction there. Bring you back to the Seligman ABCDE. I guess that's applicable to both kinds of stories. Yeah, yeah nice.

Speaker 1: 34:07

It is a really versatile model and once you kind of understand it and you've used it a few times, you'll find yourself using it, hmm, more and more.

Speaker 2: 34:16

Mm-hmm. Well, you can guess what my takeaway is gonna be.

Speaker 1: 34:21

You also mentioned. You felt like we talked about this before, so we have talked about this before in our Situation. Optimizing episodes Because this is the ABCDE Exercise is one that I use to help people develop their situation. Optimizing muscle nice nice, okay.

Speaker 2: 34:45

So this is definitely my takeaway. It's a situation optimizing we, you know you, we could say that's both equally applicable to our internal world as our external world nice and well.

Speaker 2: 35:00

This has been one of these episodes, danny, where I feel like I'm Getting coaching or therapy. So thank you for that, and I'm certainly feeling a lot more optimistic and I can touch with a couple of tools and even just simple words like yet, how powerful is that for these things that I can use to help myself and also help any groups that I'm working with? What if I got anything else for now?

Speaker 1: 35:26

So we also usually talk about how Like the design thinking capabilities that show up. Yes, I'll cry yeah the obvious one that we've been talking about is situation optimizing.

Speaker 2: 35:39

Yep, I also think there's something in you know that last kind of idea had around. You know, talking to the person or the people, whoever they are, that are part of your story, that's, you know, that's definitely part of empathetic exploring, like empathizing with their colleagues is so powerful and and maybe you know there's potentially something around. Well, I mean, if we're working through An unhelpful stories, a group, than that's definitely allings and part of collective collaboration, but then into it's like that getting back out of the unhelpful story cycle and actually, you know, creating more and more evidence for the the more helpful story. That's, you know, curious experimentation definitely feels like that plays a part there. Yeah, as ever, there's the you know, more than one capability and play At any one time.

Speaker 1: 36:30

Absolutely this. We could simply answer this always by going well, they're all applicable, yeah, but it's kind of picking out one of the things that are most applicable. Yeah, I agree with you empathetic exploration. The only thing I'll add to that is that sometimes empathetic exploration is internal as well, Because we have to. You can't empathize with others, or?

Speaker 1: 36:54

your ability to empathize with others is limited by how well you can empathize with yourself. So sometimes, when we're in those situations where you believe you cannot do something, a little bit of empathetic exploration within yourself can be quite powerful. In those situations where we have beliefs about other people, absolutely go talk to them, and go talk to them in a way that's not judgmental right. So, truly in the spirit of empathetic exploration and curious experimentation I think this ties back to the whole idea of curious experimentation is, rather than sitting there and thinking about it, go do something. Essentially, I mean there's more to it, but so one of the most effective ways we could get out of the stories we tell ourselves is to start telling ourselves things and just go try something.

Speaker 2: 37:43

Yeah, go yeah.

Speaker 1: 37:45

And to bring that home. I shared with you my struggles of the stories I was telling myself. The thing that I started doing is I said, okay, well, I'm just gonna go run some analysis and see how I do. I know that I tend to learn what I'm doing anyway. So I just had some practice data and I said, okay, I'm gonna learn how to do this analysis and yeah, that's how you got your statistics. That's how I got Gertrude to shut up.

Speaker 2: 38:17

Nice, yeah. Well, the way I quite my job is again by getting up and doing something I can, and often that's just going on and speaking to somebody. You're starting to understand them and starting to work ideas up and together and exploring the possibilities within both of our kind of perspectives. Doing something, I think yeah, just do something, I think that's it. It brings me back to one of my favorite every quotes don't get ready, get started. So helpful when we're stuck. Just do something, doesn't matter what.

Speaker 1: 38:47

All right I think that brings us to the end of this episode. What's your takeaway today, Pete?

Speaker 2: 38:55

Well, I'm gonna have to actually one of us just remembering the word yet and putting that on the end of sentences can be so powerful. But the main takeaway is a reminder of Martin Seligman's ABCDE model. I'm good to start looking for opportunities to apply that which. I can and learn to use it and turn it into some sort of go to or habit. How about you?

Speaker 1: 39:20

Mine is actually Stephen Peter's work. I haven't looked at. I haven't read his work in a long time so going back and looking at some of that. So thanks for sparking that thought and adding to my reading list.

Speaker 2: 39:36

Yeah, no, I always say always on reading list. Nice. Oh well, we've given each other a bit of inspiration this week, danny, great stuff.

Speaker 1: 39:46

Nice. Well, till next time. Thanks for listening.

Speaker 2: 39:50

Thanks for a chat, danny. Thanks for listening everyone. See you next time, Bye Peter. Bye, bye, good luck.