297: Hidden Potential

Chris Sandel: Hey, everyone. This week on the podcast, I am looking at Adam Grant’s book Hidden Potential. it was a book that I read in January time and absolutely loved. I’ve got photos on my phone that I’ve been meaning to turn into an episode for a while of pages from that book that I’ve taken stuff out of. So I finally got round to doing it, and that is what this week’s episode is about. It is me looking at his book and the things that we can take from it that are useful in recovery.

So if you’ve read the book, great. I think you’ll get a lot out of this anyway. And if you haven’t read it, this is a great way of finding out the nuggets of information from that book that are applicable for your recovery. I’ll have a link in the bio or there’ll be some way that you can get that episode sent to you next to this video. Check it out. I know you’re going to benefit from it.

Welcome to Episode 297 of Real Health Radio. You can find the show notes and the links talked about as part of this episode at www.seven-health.com/297.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Real Health Radio. I’m your host, Chris Sandel. I’m a nutritionist and a coach and an eating disorder expert, and I help people to fully recover.

Before we get on with the content of today’s show, I just want to make an announcement that I have a couple of spots available for working with me, working together. This is something that’s going to be opening up more and more as the year goes on. I made a similar announcement to this back in March time and the spots got snapped up, so I’m just continuing to create more space so I can do more of this work.

I am an advocate of full recovery. I don’t want people suffering any more with eating disorders. I don’t really believe in harm reduction because I believe people can get to a place of full recovery. So if this is you and you want to get to a place of full recovery, I would love to help you. You can live a life where you get to call the shots, where it’s not the eating disorder dictating how you spend your days, and you can have fun and joy-filled days where thoughts about food and exercise and your weight no longer dominate your mind.

Full recovery is completely possible, and after working with clients for over 15 years, I’m very good at helping people to achieve this. If you are tired of living with an eating disorder and you’re really ready to do what it takes to fully recover and have complete freedom, then I would love to help. You can email info@seven-health.com and put in the subject line the word ‘coaching’, and then I can send over further details. It’s info@seven-health.com. Include the word ‘coaching’ and I’ll get the details over to you.

Let’s get on with today’s show. This is a solo episode, and this is actually one that I’ve been wanting to do for a while. It’s actually all about the book Hidden Potential by Adam Grant. This was a book I think came out around maybe November-December time last year. I heard Adam Grant interviewed. I think it was the Armchair Expert podcast. I’ve known Adam Grant for quite a while; I read one of his previous books about grief, and I’m now blanking on the title. I should’ve looked this up before I started recording this, but I will include it in – hang on, let me hit pause. Yes, I looked it up. It is Adam Grant and Cheryl Sandberg, called Option B. It’s all about Cheryl Sandberg, who lost her husband very unexpectedly to a heart attack and dealing with the grief connected to that. It’s an incredible book. So I knew Adam Grant from that. I’d heard him on a number of podcasts leading up to this about other books he’d written.

And then I got Hidden Potential – I think I bought it in the December time, and then when I went away in the January time, I took it with me. It was one of those books that I read pretty quickly and I really enjoyed. It was one of those ones where you’re on holiday and you can get through a book pretty quickly. I took a ton of photos that were in my phone with different pages of things that I liked from the book and what I’ve now done is finally sat down and gone through all of those different pictures and pulled out different pieces from that.

This isn’t going to be a deep dive into every aspect of the book, but there are a few things that really stood out to me from the book and that I thought are very relevant in terms of eating disorder recovery. The general idea of Hidden Potential is that we are all capable and all have this potential within us, and a lot of the ideas that we have around the people who are successful versus the people who aren’t are incorrect, and there are a lot of things that go against the grain or might be not necessarily something we want to do, but actually are really helpful in terms of getting better at various things.

As I said, I think this is very relevant to eating disorder recovery. So what I’m going to do is go through some of the pieces from the book that I think are relevant and talk about why I think they’re relevant or share quotes from the book. I would highly recommend checking it out. I think it’s a really great book. I haven’t listened to the audio version, so I have no idea if it’s Adam doing the audio version, if the audio version is any good. I love Audible, so I listen to a lot of books on Audible. I tend to consume more of these kinds of books in written form; there’s something about me being able to easily flip back and look at the pages and reference it. It feels a lot easier. But I love Audible and use it a lot. So in whichever way you want to consume this book, I would highly recommend doing it. I’m just going to highlight some of the bits I really liked.

One of the reasons why I think this version over the audiobook is there’s a person called Liz Fosslien, and she’s done some incredible illustrations in the book. You can go to her website, which is fosslien.com, and she’s got loads of really cool illustrations. She’s done TED Talks, she’s written books herself. She has done lots of illustrations in this book. I can’t obviously share them on a podcast; it doesn’t work in this format. But it was great going through and looking at those because it really added another layer to the book.

What I’m going to go through today, I’ve spilt into a couple of different categories.

00:06:54

The importance of discomfort

The first one I’m titling as ‘the importance of discomfort’. There’s lots of topics he covers around this. The first thing is there’s a great quote from Helen Keller: “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.” One of the things he talks about is to create the nerve to face discomfort as a character skill – so someone who’s able to go again and again into creating discomfort, it takes three different types of courage.

The first is to abandon your tried and true methods. The second is to put yourself in the ring before you’re ready. The third is to make more mistakes than others make attempts.

I think this is true if I’m thinking about eating disorder recovery. For so many people who’ve been in an eating disorder – and this could either be something that’s been going on for a year or something that’s been going on for 20 years – they have tried and true methods of doing every day, of listening to the eating disorder, of avoiding these certain things, of not avoiding these certain things and doing these certain things repeatedly even though they aren’t necessarily adding to the quality of one’s life.

To really start to face discomfort is putting that stuff to the side and starting to try something new.

To put yourself in the ring before you’re ready – I think this is one of the things that often gets in the way of recovery. People feel like “I have to have confidence first, and then I will go out and then I’ll be able to start to do these things.” It just doesn’t work that way. It really works in reverse. “Hey, I put myself in this challenging situation, I didn’t feel ready, and now because I’ve done this again and again, I now do feel more ready.” But it doesn’t happen first that you feel ready. It’s actually by putting yourself in the ring, metaphorically speaking, that you learn that you can do these things.

The other one is to make more mistakes than others make attempts. Again, this trap with recovery of “I want to know exactly how things are going to pan out before I start making any moves. I’ve got to have this clear idea of exactly what’s going to happen” – and the problem being with that is the eating disorder will then have lots of things to say about that, will give you all the reasons why this best-laid plan isn’t the best-laid plan, and “What about this thing and what about that thing?” There really is no plan or strategy that you can create where the eating disorder is not going to have its input about why you shouldn’t be doing this thing.

So really, the goal should be about “How do I start making changes?” where these changes are just an experiment. Like, “Let me run this experiment. Let me be curious. Let me see what happens” as opposed to “I’m going to do this thing and it has to be right the very first time that I do it; otherwise I’m never going to try anything.” I think that then becomes a real block to making changes.

One of the examples that Adam uses in the book is he talks about polyglots. This was a term I didn’t know about, but these are people who are able to speak multiple languages. I think polyglot means that you’re able to then think in that language. You’re not trying to run everything through your native tongue and then put it back into this new language; you’ve got to an ability with that language that you’re now able to think in that language.

He was looking at people who are learning language after language after language. There’s many clients I work with in Europe and I’m always very impressed that they are able to speak three and four languages and that is a fairly normal thing for them. From Australia, Sydney, I remember learning Italian and German and French and all of these things through school and I can barely speak a lick of any of those things. I’ve done Duolingo Spanish and I can do a couple of words, but I’m just not very good, or my belief has always been I’m not very good with languages.

What Adam talks about is that just isn’t true. It’s just normally how people are actually trying to learn languages. One of the things he talks about – and this is through also interviewing a lot of the polyglots who are very intentional about learning languages – is the way that they learn them is speaking them in person and making the most mistakes. When they are barely starting with a new language, rather than focusing on “How do I learn all these different words? What is the right sentence structure? What’s the right feminine or masculine?”, all those different things that we’ll often focus on, it’s “Okay, I’ve learnt a little bit; let me go out and try and speak it.”

He said that you’ll make a ton of mistakes, but you will actually learn way, way, way quicker in this. There’s a quote that says “The popular adage is ‘use it or lose it’ and this doesn’t go far enough. If you don’t use it, you might not gain it in the first place.” So there’s a real focus on “I know the most barebones minimum about this language and I’m going to put myself into a really challenging experience”, and it’s through that experience that these people are able to learn new languages in a matter of months and to get very proficient at it, because they put themselves in these really challenging experiences.

And challenging only because you’re going to make a lot of mistakes. For a lot of them, yes, there can be this fear connected to it or worry connected to it, but they do it again and again and again and it becomes more and more natural for them to put themselves in that kind of environment.

I think this is so true, again, with recovery. Often it’s like, “How do I make this tiny little incremental change, and then when I feel comfortable with that, I’ll make the next tiny little incremental change?” as opposed to “Hey, let me put myself in a difficult situation and realise that I’m actually able to do this, realise that I’m able to make this change even though it felt scary.”

There was another bit of research that he references connected to this, and I’m going to quote it. “There was an experiment done with people who were doing improv. They were split into a couple of different groups, and the ones who persisted the longest and took the most creative risk weren’t the ones who were encouraged to focus on learning, but the ones that had been advised to intentionally pursue discomfort. They were told, ‘Your goal is to feel awkward and uncomfortable. It’s a sign the exercise is working.’ That was their instruction. Once people saw discomfort as a marker of growth, they were motivated to stretch beyond their comfort zones.”

Again, I think what often happens is with recovery, there’s this framing of “I’ve got to get this thing right” as opposed to “My goal here is to run an experiment, but my goal here also is to get uncomfortable and to get okay with being uncomfortable.”

This is actually advice that I am taking myself. I had a recent trip over to Phoenix. I’m part of a business mentor group – I don’t know how I would describe it, but it focuses on lots of different things connected to business, whether that’s how to structure a programme, how to do your messaging or marketing, but a huge amount of it is actually around personal development and personal growth, with the core idea being that the more you are able to grow personally, the more your business is able to grow.

I had a couple of different suggestion with different people recently, and a take-home message that I received from many of those people is “You are very professional, but you are very stilted. You’re not really emoting enough. You’re not sharing enough of who you are and letting people in.” This is something that I’ve known for a while and it’s actually something I’ve been working on a lot over the last couple of years. It’s something that I’m really now putting a focus on. I want to get better at being able to be open; I want to get better at being able to show my emotions. I think I’m very good at being able to talk about things, but talk about things very much in a disassociated state, so there’s this detachment from it as if I’m telling a story as opposed to being in that story.

This is really where I’m wanting to do a lot of my own work. How can I start to open up about things and have the reaction from people of “Hey, this doesn’t make us not want to work with you; this actually makes me want to work with you more, or this makes me understand you better”? There’s a huge amount of that work that I want to do in that area. So getting better with being in that discomfort of being open or being vulnerable So I’m taking my own advice on this one from this book.

00:16:16

2 types of exposure therapy

nother thing that he talks about connected to this is the idea of exposure therapy. He talks about exposure therapy where there are two different types, or at least two different ends of the spectrum when we’re thinking about exposure therapy. One can be systematic desensitization. That is where you do things in a very progressive state where you take something that’s a 1 out of 10 and then you do that, and then you do something that’s a 2 out of 10 and you build your way.

He uses the example of if someone has a phobia around spiders, it could be: first we’re going to just talk about spiders; second, we might talk about an instant that you had around spiders. Or the next one might be, we’re going to look at a picture of some spiders. You’re doing this in the order of things that are least scary to most scary, and over time, you build up to get to a point where you’re now sitting in a room where there is a spider, and then the next step up from that is now someone’s putting a spider on your hand. So you’re doing it in this very systematic way.

The other version of that, at the other extreme end of the continuum, is flooding. Flooding is like “Hey, we are throwing you straight into the deep end. We are giving you your 10 out of 10 experience” with the idea that if we do that and you then realise, “Hey, I was able to survive this”, it means that everything that is less than that, you’re able to cope with.

He uses an example of himself. He wanted to get better at public speaking, and he talks about the fact that he is incredibly an introvert, naturally shy person. He said in lectures in class, he would struggle to even put up his hand and ask a question because he was that shy and nervous, and yet he wanted to get good at being a public speaker. So the way that he did it, rather than say, “I’m going to do a 2-minute talk somewhere”, he instantly spoke to a friend and then agreed to give a series of lectures at an undergraduate class.

So he went really in the deep end to start with, and he said from that experience he very much learned pretty quickly how to become a better public speaker. He asked for feedback on this – and he got some pretty brutal feedback. There was one piece that he shared in the book of someone said, “Your breathing reminds me of Darth Vader when you’re speaking.” So got some very strong feedback about how he wasn’t doing particularly well as a public speaker, but he persevered. He was like, “I want to make this something that I’m very good at, and I’m going to keep throwing myself in the deep end so I can get better at this.”

I think he now teaches at the Wharton Business School, if I’m remembering correctly, and year after year is rated as the best teacher there. So he is incredible as a teacher. When you hear him on a podcast, he’s very eloquent – but also very fun, tells jokes, is also very good at being able to push back or have a good conversation with someone where they disagree about something and that doesn’t flummox him. He’s able to do that. So if you listen to him give a talk, if you watch any of his TED Talks, if you listen to him on a podcast, you wouldn’t know that this was his demeanour just because this is something he’s become very, very good at, and he got there by simply doing something again and again and starting from the deep end.

00:19:54

Perfectionism + 3 things perfectionists get wrong

The next area is perfectionism. This was something that I think is really important because so many people who are dealing with eating disorders consider themselves perfectionists. This perfectionism was there well before the eating disorder, and then it just gets worse when they’re in that situation.

There’s a really great quote from this. He said, “Research suggests that perfectionists tend to get three things wrong. One: they obsess about details that don’t matter. They’re so busy finding the right solution to tiny problems that they lack the discipline to find the right problems to solve. They can’t see the forest for the trees.” This, again, is something that is so common within recovery – getting in the weeds of all these tiny details and all these ‘what ifs’ and all these ‘but what about this thing and that thing?’ There’s all this trying to create the absolute perfect plan, so there’s colour coding, there’s Excel spreadsheets. There’s all of this thinking about things that actually really don’t matter. We could be getting started with this with something much simpler where we just get going. So I think this is definitely a trait where people really obsess about things that don’t matter while missing the big important things that do.

“Two: they avoid unfamiliar situations and difficult tasks that might lead to failure. That leaves them refining a narrow set of existing skills rather than working to develop new ones.” Again, he talks a lot about the fact that with perfectionists, they get very, very, very good at a very narrow set of skills. And this isn’t because these are the things that they absolutely love and they’re absolutely the best at, so that’s why they’ve whittled it down to these things; it’s much more around the fact that there’s this fear of failure, and “I now have a real difficult time getting out of the narrow band of things that I feel very comfortable and confident in, and if I try and get out of that band, it’s so overwhelming that I just shrink back to going to what I know.” Again, this is what often happens with recovery.

“Three: they berate themselves for making mistakes, which makes it harder to learn from them. They fail to realise that the purpose of reviewing your mistakes isn’t to shame your past self. It’s to educate your future self.” This, again, is really what I’m working on when working with clients. Like, how do we get out of that place of “I need to get this thing right” and more into a place of “This is an experiment. Let’s be curious. Let’s see what we can learn about this.” And what we can learn about this, again, not to shame yourself or to be self-critical, but to be self-aware and to then learn what we should do going forward or what could be helpful to run the next experiment on going forward.

I totally agree with these three areas of perfectionism, and I think if you’re someone who thinks of yourself as a perfectionist, just looking at these three areas and thinking, “How can I start to do something different in these three areas?” is really important.

There’s a great visual illustration done by Liz connected to this, and it’s entitled ‘The Perfectionist Spiral’. This thing repeats going inwards and inwards. I’ll tell you the different steps along this perfectionist spiral, and then just imagine a circle – it’s going round in a circle, but the circle’s getting smaller and smaller and smaller, spiralling in.

Anyway, the first step is ‘Try something new’; the next step is ‘Make a mistake’; the next step is saying to yourself, “I’ll never do that again”; and then the next step is ‘Your comfort zone gets smaller’, and then you repeat that. You then try something else new, you make a mistake, “I’ll never do that again”, your comfort zone gets smaller and smaller. Repeat, repeat, repeat until it gets infinitesimal and you’ve got this very, very tiny ability to do something.

I had a recent client use the analogy that her life was the size of a pinhead, and I think this is a really good visual. It was a pretty accurate description of where things were at.

One of the other pieces he talks about with perfectionism is that we often make the mistake of thinking that people who are really good at something start out as being really good at something, and that sometimes can be true – I’m a very avid golfer, so I’m thinking about Tiger Woods. You watch videos of Tiger Woods at age two and he’s a very good golfer at age two and just gets better and better. There’s these incredible stats of what he was able to do at age five and age seven. He was then able to sustain that and do that all throughout his career, and he is one of, if not the best golfer of all time. So yes, there are people who start out being very good at something who then continue on to be very good at that.

But that’s actually not true for the vast majority of people, and actually the people who are very good at things often don’t start out as being the real obvious candidates for this. The quote is “The people who go on to become masters in the field don’t often start out with perfect grades in school.” In a study of world class sculptors, it turned out that they were mostly average students. Two-thirds graduated high school with B’s and C’s. He uses examples connected to either sports or architecture; there are other fields where basically the people who are the best in those fields, a good percentage of them – we’re talking two-thirds or above – didn’t start out being the ones that everyone thought were going to be really good.

Again, my mind is going to golf and using people from that, but there are many golfers who are very, very good who didn’t take up the sport until they were in their mid-teens, and yet they then became world-class golfers. And yet there were others who were starting at age three or four who also became very good at that sport, but it’s not that you (1) have to have taken this thing up from a very, very young age, and (2) you don’t have to have shown this exceptional talent from a very young age.

It’s more about, are you able to put yourself in uncomfortable situations? Are you able to keep trying different things? Are you able to receive feedback and use that feedback? There are lots of things that go into it, and this is basically what the whole of Hidden Potential is about – finding all of these other things that actually make more of a difference than just you having to be naturally good at something.

00:26:47

3 key areas when seeking feedback + support

The next area is around getting feedback or coaching or support. Again, there’s a really good visual with this looking at getting feedback – getting feedback where you’re looking at, “Who are the people that I should trust when I’m getting feedback? Who are the sources that when they’re giving feedback, I should actually listen to that feedback?”

He said that there are three areas that matter, and actually you really want all three of these. If you’ve got a Venn diagram, it’s where all three of these are overlapping in that centre piece that if these people have these three things, this is who you want to trust.

One, people who care. It’s people who care and they want the best for you. If people care and they want the best for you, this is someone who you should be or might want to pay attention to if they have these other two characteristics.

The second one is then credibility. Do they have relevant knowledge and expertise in the area that they’re giving you advice on?

The third one is familiarity. This is someone who knows you well, knows you individually. I was thinking about this in terms of the coaching piece and the work that I do. I definitely care about this. I want, wholeheartedly, the best for everyone that I work with, everyone who listens to this podcast. I take a lot of time and care in terms of the information that I give out because I want people to recover, I want people to fully recover. I want people to end the suffering that they’ve been going through. This has been going on for however long, whether it’s something that’s started recently, whether it’s something that’s been going on for decades. I truly care. I really want you to get better.

Credibility, I have spent a long time studying this stuff – and studying it in many different ways, whether that’s reading books, doing courses, working with people, getting my expertise that way. I think of myself as very credible when it comes to eating disorder recovery and helping people to get to a better place.

And then the familiarity piece. One, I can be familiar with someone because we started to do the one-on-one stuff together, so I really do know them as an individual, so when we’re having conversations, I can reference things that I know have occurred in their life or I can reference things that we’ve talked about in other conversations, so there is this familiarity.

But I also think familiarity can work at a distance. What I mean by that is someone can tell me a few little pieces and I’m familiar because there is so much overlap with everyone who has an eating disorder. It’s a very, very rare occurrence for someone to tell me something and I’m like, “Hmm, I’ve not heard that before.” There are so many commonalities, so even if I’m not familiar with you in terms of I’ve heard your exact experience because you’ve told me that story, I’m very familiar with what this looks like because the same things happen again and again and again. If we’re thinking about it on a continuum, there can be familiarity because I have this knowledge base and I’ve worked with so many people, and then going along that continuum would be familiarity because I’ve had that exact conversation with you and you’ve given me the exact details of that.

If you are then thinking about, “Who do I receive feedback from? And when I do get that feedback, who do I implement that feedback from or who do I take that feedback onboard from?” – it would be someone who cares, someone who has credibility, and someone who has familiarity.

Again, if I’m thinking about this from an eating disorder standpoint, so often people will say, “I heard this bit of nutritional information and it really sidetracked me and I started getting in my head about this thing about blood sugar or this thing about dementia or this thing about” (fill in the blank of what this person was talking about). The thing that I always ask in that situation is, “Was this person talking about this from an eating disorder perspective, and an eating disorder recovery perspective?”

Something can be true for the population level or true at a context level of “In this situation, this thing is really helpful advice”, but in another situation is not very helpful advice. It could be true that doing regular walking each day and getting out and doing whatever steps it is or whatever minutes of movement is helpful. If you have a broken leg, that information is not helpful. If you are in recovery from an eating disorder, that information might not be helpful.

So it’s really understanding the context of that information. Yeah, someone can be credible, but are they talking about something that is credible that is in the context of what you are dealing with? So often, this is where I think people get into trouble where they hear this information and that information and they forget that their context is very different. The most important thing that you can do for your health is not have an eating disorder, so if that is your context, there’s a lot of information that is going to be totally irrelevant because it’s just not the thing that is most important for you.

With this idea around coaching or support, he talks about this concept of heeding our own advice. He used a great example with his daughter. He was going to give a TED Talk; I think this may have been the first time he was giving a TED Talk. He was really open with his daughter – she was eight years old at the time – and saying, “Hey, I’m quite nervous about this talk I’m giving. It’s kind of a big deal. What advice would you have for me?” And his daughter said, “Just look for one person in the audience who is smiling and nodding.” So when he gave the TED Talk, that’s what he did, and he said it went really well. He came back and said to his daughter, “Thank you for that advice. It was really helpful for me.”

He said at some point in the future – I can’t remember if this was a couple of weeks later or a couple of months later – his daughter was then at her school play. He said he could see that she was nervous before the school play, and he didn’t even have to say anything to her. When she got on stage, she just scanned the audience for people who were smiling, and she scanned the audience and found her parents, who were sitting there, who were smiling, who were nodding, and he said she then naturally had this big smile on her face and she got into the performance and did really well.

So there was this effect of “I gave this advice to someone; I then found myself in a similar situation and I was able to take my own advice.” There’s been research connected to this. He shared research around high schoolers earned higher grades – and this is in lots of different subjects – when they were randomly assigned to give advice to younger students on how to stay motivated or how to avoid procrastinating. Really, the take-home was by reminding others of the tools that they already possess, we realise that these are tools that we already possess. In a sense, we raise our own expectations of ourselves.

This is something that I’ve been aware of for a while now, and it’s why with my coaching now and a lot of the shift that I’m making is around the fact that there is a group component to the coaching that I’m now doing. Even when I’m doing one-on-one stuff now, it always combines group coaching. This is the way that I’m moving things because by being able to be in a group environment, you’re able to see that (1) the things that you’re going through are not something you’re going through alone and isolated; these are things that are very common with other people – but (2) the example I’ll often use is there is a community support area for clients and for the programme I’m running, and people can go in there and they can share their goals, they can share their wins, they can ask questions, they can share stuff that they’re struggling with.

What I love most is that what typically happens before myself or one of the members of my team can get in there and put in a response, there are responses from other people who are also clients or also in the programme giving this person the support that they need. And they’re able to give them the kind of advice that they may struggle to give themselves.

The thing is, the more you do this again and again and again for other people, you start to realise that “Hey, this doesn’t just apply to other people; this applies to me. So when I’m telling someone, ‘I know that you’re scared, but I think you should still be having that snack’ or ‘I know you said you didn’t want to go over this calorie amount, but actually that’s going to be really helpful as part of your recovery’” or whatever it may be, they’re able to see that “I was able to give this advice for someone else” or “I was able to see that someone else is struggling with this, and then when I put myself in this third person, where it’s not my struggle but I’m actually moved away from this, I know the advice that would be really helpful for that person. The more I start giving that advice for others, the more I start to take it onboard for myself.”

I think that this is a really useful thing in terms of helping with recovery. You can even do this as a journalling exercise. Imagine a friend came to you with this problem that you’re now struggling with. What advice would you have for that friend? How would you suggest that your friend support themselves, or what action would that friend take? Typically, when you’re able to change it from yourself to a friend, you’re able to come up with all these different ideas about what would be really helpful in that situation.

And yes, there can be times where you still feel a little bit blocked or like “I don’t really know what the right idea is”, but I would say 9 times out of 10 you’re able to know what it is; it’s more about “That feels uncomfortable; I don’t know if I would want to do that” and we’re then back into the realm of what I talked about earlier in terms of putting yourself in uncomfortable situations and the power of discomfort.

00:37:09

The impact of playing Tetris after a difficult experience

There were two extra pieces from the book that don’t really fall under particular categories, but I’m just going to mention both of them.

One – and this is something I haven’t actually tried out with clients; I don’t know how it works outside of how it’s referenced here, but it’s something that I think is really interesting. He talked about the fact that if we watch something upsetting, so maybe watch a horror film or we watch something upsetting on the news or this upsetting clip, over the next week, the individual or whoever has watched that will typically have six or seven disturbing flashbacks.

I don’t know how they’re categorising disturbing flashbacks; I don’t know how unsettling the film has to be to fall into this category. But I’m remembering this thing a number of times and that’s creating some kind of emotional reaction when I’m doing that.

What they found is if you randomly assigned someone to play a few rounds of the game Tetris right after watching that upsetting scene, it cut the flashbacks in half over the next week. So there is something about the act of rotating and moving and dropping the blocks in a game of Tetris that shields us from those intrusive thoughts and the aversive emotions that then come up.

I think this is a really interesting thing to think about, like, is this something that could be played around with with making different changes as part of recovery? So “Hey, I’m going to have this challenging snack, and then afterwards, yeah, I’m going to give myself permission to have this uncomfortable feeling, be there, and I’m not going to try and do things to instantly remove it – but I’m going to play some Tetris and see what happens when I do that. I’m going to do that so that it changes the way that that memory is remembered or stored or what happens as part of that.”

As I said, I haven’t explored this in terms of doing it with clients. Now that I’ve read back through my notes and remembered it, it’s something I’m going to start to implement and try out and see what happens. But I think it’s a really interesting thing to think about. And I don’t believe it’s going to be just Tetris. There’s probably something in that as to why that is helpful, so maybe this is where to start because there is some evidence connected to it, but there could be other things that could be useful to do afterwards.

Again, I don’t know if this is just connected to something that you’re visually seeing or if it still works if this is an activity that you’ve done (e.g., having a difficult meal or snack), but something to try out, and if anyone tries it out and notices a difference or doesn’t notice a difference, I would love to hear from you. You can send an email to info@seven-health.com and let me know what your experience with this is.

00:40:10

Why taking action matters, even if nothing seems to be changing

The final one I want to mention – and this is a throwback to a podcast that I did. I can’t remember how long ago I did it. It was with Colleen Reichman. In that conversation with Colleen, she talked about this analogy that she would often use with people around bamboo. I think it was an analogy she used, but also how she thought about treatment. She is an eating disorder therapist, so the way she would think about therapy.

The analogy is that with bamboo – and I think if I share the quote from the book, it says, “When you plant moso bamboo seed, you can water it for many months or even years without a single sprout. It looks like nothing is happening until one day it bursts through the surface. Then, in just a few weeks, it shoots up over 20 feet. What you couldn’t see is that underground, the seed was sprouting roots and storing energy. It was growing slowly but surely beneath the surface.”

I think this can be very true with recovery. There can be a lot of time where it feels like not much is happening, and then in a very short amount of time, some real drastic and dramatic changes can take place. I’ve often likened recovery to compound interest, because there’s the same kind of impact. In the beginning, even though it is compounding, it’s compounding in a very small way where you don’t really notice a difference. But at some point, it goes exponential and really takes off.

I like this as an idea because I think this can be true. I guess the one thing I would add is that you don’t need to try and make it like this. I think often there can be this idea of “Hey, I want to go really slow and steady to start with and then we can build up some pace over time, and then we can have it grow quicker at the end” or something along those lines. What invariably happens is you make really tiny changes or you don’t really make any changes at all, and it then takes a huge amount of time to start with. Then at some later point, yeah, maybe there is some faster growth, but it didn’t necessarily have to be that way.

So yes, I do feel like sometimes there are things that happen that it feels like nothing’s going on, but actually it is you learning lots of different things – and not just learning in terms of intellectually understanding something, but learning through action-taking. If we come back to the idea of learning a new language or the idea of discomfort, it could feel like in the beginning, “There’s all of this discomfort but I’m not actually getting any real benefit from it” or “I’m trying to speak this new language and it feels like all I’m doing is making mistakes, and yet nothing’s really coming of it.” And then suddenly it all takes off.

I’m definitely for that style of bamboo growing, where actually you are doing a lot of things even though it doesn’t necessarily feel like it’s getting you anywhere. But you’re at least doing things that have the potential to really help you. Not making tiny, insignificant changes that aren’t going to get you anywhere, but trying out things that give the opportunity or the potential for something to really take hold, and if you do that enough, even if in the beginning it feels like we’re not getting anywhere, it will then take off.

So that is it in terms of the stuff I wanted to share from the book. I really enjoyed Hidden Potential. I think Adam Grant is a really solid writer. He’s an awesome speaker. I always enjoy listening to him on podcasts. So I would highly recommend checking out the book. Those are some of the things that I jotted down or at least took photos of that I feel like are really relevant to recovery, but there’s lots of other stuff in the book that is less relevant to recovery but just very good in terms of relevant to “How do I become better at whatever I want to be doing?” or “How do I show up as the kind of person I want to be showing up as?”

That’s it for the show. As I mentioned at the top, I’m taking on new clients at the moment. I would love to help you to get to a place of full recovery, and if that’s something that you want to do, then please send an email to info@seven-health.com. Put the word ‘coaching’ in the subject line and I’ll get back to you with the details.

That’s it for this week. I will catch you again next week with another show. Until then, take care of yourself, and I’ll see you soon.

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