A Neurobiologist's Guide to Mind Manipulation
Watts, Casey
A useful-psychology double-whammy: (A) Developers are great systems thinkers. Surprise: your brain is a system too! Reframe frustration into accomplishment, and become a more effective and bubbly person using a frontal cortex feedback loop. (B) Want your team to be the happiest, most productive team around? Recent psychology research reveals one key attribute of the most successful teams, and it's within your influence.
 All right, close your eyes. Everyone close your eyes for a second. All right, open. There's a gift for you. One of my hobbies is blowing bubbles. I had a bubble party in a park in DC. Last weekend, I had 100 people show up. An image from that. I'm also really into dancing, like partner dancing. And I lead and follow both. I'm kind of proud. I work for Heroku. We actually use Ember on our dashboard site. And if you want any help getting fast food set up, it's pretty straightforward to do an Ember on Heroku. So let me know. I play in a marching band, the Purple Clarinet. And I have a cute little adopted nephew. And I'm the adopted uncle, really. He's a family friend. Look, he's so adorable. I also studied neurobiology at Yale University. And I have a few papers which are kind of irrelevant to this talk. They're kind of cool. All right, so the meat of the talk. I'm going to give this talk to you in two parts. The first part, cognitive restructuring, is about you and how to manipulate your mind yourself. The second part is about how to influence groups you're in to make them more effective. Throughout the presentation, I have articles and posters and images that I want you to look at later. So I have this document online, a Google Doc that I made published, visible online. And I want you to bookmark this. I'll tweet it, too. I'm going to assign homework. You all better do it. Cool. Let's start the first half. So I'm going to break it off into three parts. One, I'm going to show you some example opportunities in which you might want to manipulate your own mind. Then I'm going to shift gears and talk about neurobiology and how the brain works and give you a system way to view your own self. And then we're going to talk about cognitive behavioral therapy, which is the meat of the talk, which is really how to do the manipulating. And I'm going to start with the opportunities. I'm going to give you three examples. And you can either manipulate your own mind in the moment of this event that's happening or, after the fact, reflect on it. And it despise all of them. Let's say you're at work and you have an idea, but your coworker has a different idea and you don't agree. You're having an argument. And you might get kind of heated once in a while. Like, you both know you're right. That's one example. We'll get into what you might do to make yourself more effective there. Imagine you're a parent and your kids aren't doing that thing. Ooh, you could snap at them. Recent example for me, I was headed to a meetup, but I hadn't eaten dinner yet and I found out there was no pizza at that meetup. Like usual. Usually we have pizza. It was wet. It was raining. I stepped in a puddle. I was just like, whoa. That was the worst. So I should have and did use CBT type ideas for that. We'll get into that later. Shifting gears. Let me talk about the brain. You might break the brain into left half and right half atmospheres, but I don't like that. That's not as useful as inner versus outer brain. Let me illustrate the difference between these two halves of the brain with a GIF. That poor kitty. I feel really bad for this. Don't do this to your cat. They get really stressed. So there are two halves of the brain, the inner and the outer brain. Ladoo is a researcher who described a dual pathway of fear, which is a pretty specific to that cat situation. The thing generalizes pretty well. So one half of the brain, the inner brain is the older half of the brain. The animals have this part too for sure. It's the part where you feel feelings like fear, and it's much faster than the other part. You see the little black arrow there? It goes from one part in the middle to a nearby part. That's kind of a short arrow compared to the outer brain's got a long path to go through. It's much slower. That's the part of the brain where you actually think thoughts. Your conscious mind, the part of you that is I, Casey Watts, is probably the outer brain and I happen to know what's happening in the inner brain as a separate part of me. Cool. So that's inner versus outer brain. Shifting gears again. Another perspective. Our systems thinkers, we break things down into systems all the time, like a function has an input and an output that's a piece of a system. The simplest form of a system to me is this diagram I learned in eighth grade engineering class, which is every system has input, output, process in the middle, and the most important and often skipped part is a feedback loop, something that changes the environment. An example of this that I had in that eighth grade class was a thermostat. It changes the temperature of the room. The temperature of the room is the new input, and it determines whether it should keep eating or not. We can model an animal and human with the same kind of thing. We can, that's not quite true, but animals just respond to their environment. They don't really think thoughts. That's what we say, at least. So they're kind of the simplest diagram. It's just an input, output, the process. We don't have access to it. We don't know what's going on there. It doesn't really matter. They don't do much in the insides of the brain. But humans, we like to think, we definitely think thoughts and feel feelings in the middle of our brain. Except kind of when we're an autopilot, they're just kind of automatic. When you're not an autopilot, it feels very different. Like you're in control. You're thinking the thoughts actively instead of just automatic. So I'm going to break this down into, sometimes you experience automatic thoughts and feelings. They just happen. They're basically inputs to your function, because you don't control them. They just happen to you. And then you can have deliberate thoughts and feelings. Well, you can't quite have deliberate feelings, but you can have deliberate thoughts that affect your feelings. Sometimes these automatic or deliberate thoughts and feelings can cause a feedback loop, a downward spiral. So when I stepped in a puddle, that made my bad mood already worse, and I thought, I'm stupid. That made me feel worse. And then I thought worse. And then I said, worse things. I thought worse things. It was worse. Ooh. That's a downward spiral. That's the kind of thing I think we want to avoid. And if you can control your mind, you probably control not doing this so you can be more effective and actually think more clearly about the situation. Let's say we want to intervene inside of this downward spiral situation. How do we do it? So now we're going to start with the behavioral therapy, which is our next. All right. What is CBT? CBT is a treatment for mental illnesses. It treats so many of them. It's super effective. It's like one of the... When I was studying psychology and undergrad, the test answer was always C, cognitive behavioral therapy. Like you just always circle that one. That's always the correct answer. It's amazing. It's as effective as antidepressant drugs for treating depression. So ideally you should have both because that's even more effective. They work together really well. But I don't like to think about it as just something for people with mental illnesses. It's really useful for literally everybody. It benefits everyone to understand your thoughts and feelings better. All right. Let's say you want to do CBT. That sounds good. You want to be a more effective person. Let's do it. Install this. Unfortunately, though, a node isn't supported in my brain. I don't know about yours. So we're going to have to get a next closest thing. By the way, if you want to make something this, just something funny and silly, let me know. I'd love to work with you on it. All right. So here's how I describe CBT. We'll go through each of these. But zero is you have to get into a state of introspection. And then once you're there and thinking about yourself and monitoring, and you're like in a debugger inside your own brain, then you can think about your input, emotions, and thoughts. All right. So how do we get inside this introspective state? I recommend using the whoop technique, which is something I developed with my mom. My mom was yelling at my little brother. He didn't do something that he was supposed to do. And she felt bad about it afterwards. So I told her, next time you're yelling at my little brother, you should notice it. Notice that you're upset and frustrated and you're in this negative state. You don't really want to be there. Whoop! Once you notice you're frustrated, I don't want you to literally whoop out loud because it's funny. It kind of relaxes the environment a little bit. It puts you into a different state. And you can finally be ready to think about why am I so frustrated with Doughton right now. He just, it wasn't a big deal, but I'm very frustrated. And she can finally introspect herself while she's in the whoop state. My family picked this up. My little brother and father also whoop my mother often. But she whoops herself the most, really. When you're starting to learn how to get into the whoop state, I want you to congratulate yourself anytime you notice that you should whoop yourself. Say, good job, I noticed. This is a moment in which I could be introspective and I could control my own mind. It's often really hard to do the next step and actually control it and do the processing, the emotions and thoughts. But if you can even just notice it, that's a huge first step. Maybe that's the hardest part of this whole thing, actually. All right, let's say now you're in the whoop state. You're about to yell at your son, but you caught yourself. How do we get here? Let's talk about the inputs. Some inputs include stimuli from the environment. Like that my little brother didn't shut the door that one time. It could be anything that happened earlier in the day. She woke up late. She didn't have a cup of coffee. The events that happened to her are one type of input, so you can think about that. Another type of input feels really different from that. Just your automatic thoughts and automatic emotions. The fact that she thought, oh, Dalton, not again. That's an automatic thought that she has. She didn't choose to think that thought. Well, there she was thinking it. That's kind of like an input too. She felt frustrated in that moment. Another type of input is one of my favorite things, the bodily state. You've probably heard this word before. Angry. Usually when my mom yells at my brother, she's angry because she works too hard and skipped a meal. And when she realizes she hasn't eaten, she says, I haven't eaten, so I don't. And then she can move on and not yell at him as much. And that's more effective for the relationship. That's good. All right. So we can now notice the inputs. We're in our group state. We've thought about all the inputs that are possibly affecting us. We're ready to grasp the emotion that we're experiencing and look at it and figure it out. To get better at that, I recommend expanding your emotional vocabulary so you can describe your emotion in words. That's really powerful. That really helps you, first of all, understand it and accept it and be able to work with it. So this is one of the things I think you should probably print this out. This is on our notes. Just like expanding your vocabulary using lists that help is one way to do it. There are some even more effective ways. These are processing techniques to get better at processing emotions. Like talking with close friends. If you don't have a close friend you can talk to about your emotions. You need to get one. It's really important for your health. Like psychology studies prove the more close connectedness you have, the healthier you are, the longer you live, the less stress you feel. You need to have probably five or 10 close friends. You can literally just call up and say, I'm frustrated. Will you listen? And then they'll support you and say, yeah, you make sense. You'll feel way better for it. Get friends to do that for you. And you should offer for your friends that if they ever want to talk about an issue they're having, you can listen. That's the best technique. That's my favorite one. But let's say friends aren't always available. And sometimes you don't need a friend to get through it. You can journal to yourself. I do this by opening a Gmail draft because for some reason that's faster to open than a Google Doc. So I Gmail draft myself. I pretend I'm writing in a letter to Casey Watts of the past or future or a friend or no one and then I just write all my thoughts out, all my emotions. I'm feeling frustrated about this and that and that made me disappointed and I try to use really specific emotional words so I can really understand it. Another technique to improve your ability to process emotions is reading fiction. So like reading books that peer into someone else's mind really helps you understand how a mind works and how they describe their own mind and that's super helpful. People who read more fiction literally have higher emotional intelligence. So try it. It's not useless. While you're manipulating emotions in your mind and like holding them and thinking about them, it's important to view that as data. It's like a type of input. It's really way too easy to be frustrated and then be frustrated that you are frustrated and then make it even worse. So it's important to try to be able to not judge the fact that you had that automatic emotion. It's like a separate thing from you. You are the thinking part that has deliberate thoughts. The automatic emotion is a separate entity. That kind of idea is covered a lot in mindfulness meditation. So if you feel like this is a skill you want to develop, that's not a bad way to work on that. All right. Now we can manipulate our thoughts. This chart is the number one thing I have you print. This is a list of ways you can think that are not helpful. They each have a name. We'll go through some examples. Let's say I'm putted to my meetup and I stepped on a puddle and I'm upset. I could say, wet shoes are the worst. And then I say, uh-uh, Casey, that's magnification. They're not literally the worst. If I'm late, I should just not go. That's black and white thinking. You know there's a gray area that's probably okay too. I'm like, yeah, you were right. Other Casey brain. Or I could say, today sucks. That's over generalizing the entire day, disqualifying the positive things that happened earlier in the day and fortunately telling that the rest of the day is also going to be bad. Casey, what are you doing? I feel like these statements are useful because they express to someone else that I'm having an emotion. But I might do the weird thing of saying I am feeling frustrated. And that feels less cathartic, but it's more accurate and stops me from downward spiraling someone else. Or I could remind myself that hangariness will go away when I eat or that when I get there I can take my shoes off and dry my socks off if I'm literally wet shoeed. Nobody's going to mind. And I'll feel awesome once my feet are dry. So print this. Get used to these 10 things. I feel like this is the most useful thing I learned in psychology. Cool. So now you know how to get into the whoop state. You have some idea of what inputs to look for and how to deal with emotions and thoughts a little bit better. With all these put together you can choose a response that's more maybe more effective and productive and makes you happier and stops you from downward spiraling and you are now more in control of your mind. You're a mind manipulator. Congrats. If you want to get even better at this. There are some other tools. I recommend if you think this would be useful to see a therapist. Even if you don't feel like you are a person who has a mental illness. If it's going to help, it's going to help. Therapists are super good at CBT and literally probably all of you have like some level of anxiety higher than the average person. I would suspect. If you don't want to see a therapist, there's a book that's pretty good and highly recommended by some therapist's friends of mine. Feeling good and that's linked to in the notes too. There are also two apps that I want to call out. One is Headspace which is a mindfulness meditation app and the other is Joyable which is an app that does CBT for social anxiety. So being in a conference or talking on a stage sounds like it will make you really anxious. This type of app would help a lot. I have a friend who did it and she's changed a lot. It's been amazing. That's it for part one. Part two, we're shifting gears some. We're going to talk about groups instead of an individual person. The topic of the second part is psychological safety but I want to start by telling you what it's not. It has the word safe in it but it is not equivalent to safe space. I love space spaces. I want to be in them and make spaces that I'm in be safe but it's a different idea. A safe space I define as anyone would feel safe in this group with respect to their identity. So new people coming in would feel safe. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a psych safe group which is that current members feel safe in the group. So you could have a group of people who are super bigoted like this team of four people who are super bigoted. They don't like anyone who's not like them but they like each other plenty. They could be an effective team. I'll give you a more specific definition of psych safety by Amy Edmonds and the researcher who did a lot of the research on this originally. It's a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. So it's safe for taking risks with your peers. It's not going to make fun of you and think you're bad and terrible at things. At the same time, Google was doing research. What makes their teams perform better? They did a ton of research. A lot of things did not correlate that you would think would. Personality types didn't correlate as much as you thought. As they thought. Skills, backgrounds, management style, experience. A lot of things didn't correlate nearly as much as they thought. But the one thing they couldn't quite put their finger on was the group norms. They would describe, well, the group just feels this way. We do things. This is just nice. But when this other person comes in, the bossy guy, our group doesn't feel as nice. The group norms totally change. Amy Edmondson's research distills this kind of idea into two parts. One is about communication. The other is about empathy. Communication in terms of do all members on the team communicate with each other throughout the day or week about the same amount. Like they're all expressing their ideas and not keeping their mouths shut. And empathy in terms of the average social sensitivity of people on the team. Now where they are of each other's feelings. And so a team that has these two psych safe traits at a pretty high level and they're safer for interpersonal risk taking, you could say they have a higher collective IQ. All people are contributing to the team. That's going to be a better team than as if two people literally don't feel comfortable talking. They're not contributing. You're missing two brains out of the pot. So if you can make your team feel more psych safe, you can make the team more effective. Crazy IQ. It's just you want that, right? This is good. Yeah, so six out of six voices on a team heard. It's going to be way smarter than five out of six. One person doesn't feel comfortable. All right, we share this goal. How do we do it? I'm going to go through 10 techniques in 10 minutes. I'm going to go pow, pow, pow, pow, pow. I hope you take some of these away with you. Let's get it jumped in. First five are about the communication half of things. Although like the bleed over happens. So like they're not, these categories aren't that important. But here's five. Earn dogmatism effect is one of my favorite psychology terms. Someone is exhibiting this effect if they are really experienced in what they're doing and they are closed minded. They don't want to hear other people's ideas because they know what they're thinking is the right thing. You probably have some coworkers who are pretty closed minded and think they're right a lot. Yeah. And some of you people in this room are that person. It happens to me sometimes too. I'll admit. Oops. The way to get around this, if someone is being super closed minded about an idea, I would recommend helping them understand that there's information they're missing. There's something that they don't know. And as soon as they realize that and realize you can help them see that, they'll be more willing to open that information too and then maybe change their idea. Or vice versa, maybe they're being closed minded because they know things you don't know. But then it's important for you as someone on their team to figure out why they're choosing that. Cool. So the antidote to the Earn dogmatism effect is reveal that there's information missing and then hopefully the team can work together. Development teams are usually pretty good about declaring unknowns, especially when you start a project. Say, all right, what are the risks involved? What could go wrong on this project? What things do we not know about? So developers, good job us. We're pretty good at this one. We're not always good about doing it after the fact. After the planning meeting, we don't always remember to keep declaring unknowns out loud. Or sometimes maybe it's embarrassing. Like I had to realize this project that I said I could do really quickly easily, I realized I don't know how to do the auth for it. Auth is super hairy and complex. What am I going to do? So if you're comfortable telling your team, oh, we don't know how complex auth is. It could maybe not go that well. And then the team now knows they can work together on it better. Better than if you keep it quiet yourself, kind of struggle. So to create a team culture where you declare unknowns more often is probably helpful to increase the amount of communication you do with each other. If something goes wrong, you could frame it as bad, wrong, bad, terrible, which is the default thing that humans like to do. Or you could frame it as a learning opportunity. When the server went down last week for a day, that helped us realize that our deployment infrastructure really wasn't ever bust. And we can improve it. So we learned that it should be improved. Good job to us. It's probably helpful to feel a little bit bad, but you don't need to feel so bad that you're downward spiraling and embarrassed and not talking about improving it so much. Or if one person ends up clamming up because they feel like they were too involved, then you don't have their brain power anymore. So it's important to help them feel comfortable like they can still contribute and say things. Tell people that you make mistakes. Tell your teammates. If I... Let me read this, too. I make mistakes and I know it. Tell me what you notice. If you can say that to your teammates and feel comfortable saying it, then they're way more likely to give you feedback, like things that they see that might go wrong. But if you're going to be defensive about it and be like, I know what I'm doing, don't tell me the things. You're going to miss that information. Last one for communication is modeling curiosity. So you can also increase communication of ideas in your team by asking more questions yourself. You can create a culture of your team asking a lot of questions to each other, and then that'll increase communication. So next time somebody's working on a project that's not quite related to what you're doing, but you don't know what's going on and you are kind of curious, go ahead and ask that question, ask them to explain what's going on, and they'll... It'll help them, too. It'll make them say it more clearly. You might have some ideas, what might go wrong, or some experience that you have. Generally communicating more is more useful. Although I guess I can give the caveat, don't communicate too much, but I have not seen people do that. So that seems like a very severe risk. Next section is about empathy. This is another one of my favorite psychology terms, propinquity. Propinquity means social closeness. So you have high propinquity of someone you live with who you talk to a lot. You have low propinquity with your neighbor who you never see, even though they're technically close to you. You have higher propinquity with someone who sits at the desk next to you, higher propinquity with people that you have lunch with at the same half hour, hour chunk of the lunch hour, lunch time. You have higher propinquity with people who are in fluffy chat Slack channel where you post cat pictures to each other. There are a lot of things that can increase how often you naturally interact with people. And people that you have higher propinquity with, you will end up trusting more, too, and you can communicate more easily with them and have higher empathy connection to them. So if you're having trouble working with a particular coworker, perhaps your propinquity is low and you could improve that, which would increase your ability to communicate generally. I have a mnemonic for this in case this idea is sticking with you, you got it, but that's a weird psychology word. Propinquity in the brain. Propinquity in the brain. Any time you're talking to someone, there are two channels on which you're communicating. The task channel, which is the content, the things that you're actually saying, you're always thinking about that generally. The second channel you might forget is there. Maybe you never quite knew it was there, like it's a fuzzy thought. And the part that you're communicating relationship type information to the person. So if you tell someone that their idea has some issues and you don't already trust each other a ton, they might hear some pretty bad things about how they are as a person or how you feel about them. So there's a structure that I like, some psychology researcher made called PURLS. I'll just talk about the first one. You can look at this in the notes. If you're working with someone and they are feeling defensive and you want to help talk on the relationship channel a little bit better, you could say something like, I really want to work on this with you. I'm really excited that we are working together on this. This is exciting. This idea has some issues. And then all of a sudden, maybe they're not so defensive. They're really able to hear your suggestions and ideas because you've communicated on the relationship channel instead of letting it be implied. If you have a really close relationship, you might not need to be explicit about the relationship channel because you just already trust each other a ton. That's probably why close friends, you're more able to get feedback from on a presentation you rehearse, for example, than some stranger because you just value each other a lot. You know it. You don't need to talk about it. But if it's a coworker you don't know that well, communicating on the relationship channel explicitly is super useful. So then there's more. I recommend you read this article. It's pretty good. Next one, validation. You probably think you know the definition to this word. I hope I can change your mind a little bit. Validation is the recognition and acceptance of another person's thoughts, feelings, sensations, and behaviors as understandable whether or not you agree. So if you can put yourself in their shoes and assume that they have the background of working in a monolithic code base and the thing they just worked on last week took two more weeks than usual and something else about their situation and all these put together, then of course you'd be afraid to try this new thing or making up an example. And if you think someone else is doing something stupid, which to me translates to you don't understand why they're doing it, that probably means you're missing some information that goes into why they're choosing to do that thing. And it would help probably if you validated their thoughts, it would help them be less defensive and more able to communicate with you. I have some specific recommendations on how to communicate validation to someone. Here's a list of six ways. Number six is the most powerful way to validate someone. Number one is the least powerful, but it's still useful. Imagine somebody's grandmother just passed away and you don't know what to say, but you're just sitting next to your friend comforting them. That's helpful. If they're telling you how they feel and you can reflect it back to them, oh, you feel very sad and confused right now, then they'll feel a little bit better. You can read their mind and guess how they're feeling. Like, are you feeling really sad? They're like, yeah, that's even better. That's another level of validation. All the way up to if your grandmother passed away recently and they know you feel pretty similarly to how they feel now, that's super comforting, super validating. There's more levels in here, too, that I won't go through. This article also totally changed the way I communicate to even my friends, like on a daily basis. If I can do five instead of four, I'll basically choose it now and it gets great results. People like five better than four, four better than three, all the way down the list. Next one. When I suggest an idea at a team meeting, people love to call it Casey's idea from then on, or Casey's first idea and Casey's second idea. I'm always like, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want my name on this thing. I don't even know if it's good yet. I haven't figured out how it would work at all. I get a lot of resistance to this and I'm not quite sure why. I like to replace it with idea A or the off idea that uses Ember Simple Off, like something really descriptive to the problem. This has a couple good things. It decouples my ego from the project so I don't feel bad if people are complaining about it. That also helps other people be able to say negative things or critical things about that idea too without feeling like you're going to hurt me. It opens the discussion up a little bit to depersonalize ideas. Here's my last one. Vulnerability really increases the amount that people can trust each other. If you can share some anxieties you have about the project or about work or personal life with a coworker, that will increase the amount that you trust each other. Your closest friends are people that you're most vulnerable with. I'm not saying you should tell everyone your whole life story at work all the time. There's an extreme there. If you can be slightly more vulnerable to a coworker and feel safe with them, you'll be better, easier to work together. There's so much research into how vulnerability is useful and good at the workplace and there's some links in my notes, surprise. Some videos and articles you might want to read. Cool. So those were some ideas how to increase psychological safety. Here's the two columns. All my ideas I just gave you. I'm giving you guys some homework. I'm not totally kidding. I'd love for you to bookmark this document, which is where I have all these links. There's a lot more than that screenshot, of course. A couple of them I have marked in purple that are printable that people have told me they printed and it's been really helpful for them. So I think it might be for you too. And I recommend you read at least one of the articles. I might recommend the validation one if you just pick one. I have two frequently asked questions that I can throw in. Why doesn't everybody already do CBT, the first half of the talk? Well, it takes a lot of effort. It takes training. You have to know what you're doing. And it takes time and effort and energy to do. It's not a natural human brain thing to do. But I believe in you guys. You can do it. Another question I get a ton is how do I get other people to do this? You can't make other people do this. You can't even make yourself do any of this. You can just influence. That's it. But you as an individual can definitely influence the culture of your team just by the actions you do, by modeling curiosity and all those things. You can also maybe show this presentation to your team or coworkers and maybe get some of the ideas to rub off on them. That could help. But you can't make them do it. You can only influence. That's it for me. Thanks, everyone. Thanks.
 All right, close your eyes.  Everyone close your eyes for a second.  All right, open.  There's a gift for you.  One of my hobbies is blowing bubbles.  I had a bubble party in a park in DC.  Last weekend, I had 100 people show up.  An image from that.  I'm also really into dancing, like partner dancing.  And I lead and follow both.  I'm kind of proud.  I work for Heroku.  We actually use Ember on our dashboard site.  And if you want any help getting fast food set up, it's pretty straightforward to do  an Ember on Heroku.  So let me know.  I play in a marching band, the Purple Clarinet.  And I have a cute little adopted nephew.  And I'm the adopted uncle, really.  He's a family friend.  Look, he's so adorable.  I also studied neurobiology at Yale University.  And I have a few papers which are kind of irrelevant to this talk.  They're kind of cool.  All right, so the meat of the talk.  I'm going to give this talk to you in two parts.  The first part, cognitive restructuring, is about you and how to manipulate your mind  yourself.  The second part is about how to influence groups you're in to make them more effective.  Throughout the presentation, I have articles and posters and images that I want you to  look at later.  So I have this document online, a Google Doc that I made published, visible online.  And I want you to bookmark this.  I'll tweet it, too.  I'm going to assign homework.  You all better do it.  Cool.  Let's start the first half.  So I'm going to break it off into three parts.  One, I'm going to show you some example opportunities in which you might want to manipulate your  own mind.  Then I'm going to shift gears and talk about neurobiology and how the brain works and give  you a system way to view your own self.  And then we're going to talk about cognitive behavioral therapy, which is the meat of the  talk, which is really how to do the manipulating.  And I'm going to start with the opportunities.  I'm going to give you three examples.  And you can either manipulate your own mind in the moment of this event that's happening  or, after the fact, reflect on it.  And it despise all of them.  Let's say you're at work and you have an idea, but your coworker has a different idea and  you don't agree.  You're having an argument.  And you might get kind of heated once in a while.  Like, you both know you're right.  That's one example.  We'll get into what you might do to make yourself more effective there.  Imagine you're a parent and your kids aren't doing that thing.  Ooh, you could snap at them.  Recent example for me, I was headed to a meetup, but I hadn't eaten dinner yet and I found  out there was no pizza at that meetup.  Like usual.  Usually we have pizza.  It was wet.  It was raining.  I stepped in a puddle.  I was just like, whoa.  That was the worst.  So I should have and did use CBT type ideas for that.  We'll get into that later.  Shifting gears.  Let me talk about the brain.  You might break the brain into left half and right half atmospheres, but I don't like  that.  That's not as useful as inner versus outer brain.  Let me illustrate the difference between these two halves of the brain with a GIF.  That poor kitty.  I feel really bad for this.  Don't do this to your cat.  They get really stressed.  So there are two halves of the brain, the inner and the outer brain.  Ladoo is a researcher who described a dual pathway of fear, which is a pretty specific  to that cat situation.  The thing generalizes pretty well.  So one half of the brain, the inner brain is the older half of the brain.  The animals have this part too for sure.  It's the part where you feel feelings like fear, and it's much faster than the other  part.  You see the little black arrow there?  It goes from one part in the middle to a nearby part.  That's kind of a short arrow compared to the outer brain's got a long path to go through.  It's much slower.  That's the part of the brain where you actually think thoughts.  Your conscious mind, the part of you that is I, Casey Watts, is probably the outer brain  and I happen to know what's happening in the inner brain as a separate part of me.  Cool.  So that's inner versus outer brain.  Shifting gears again.  Another perspective.  Our systems thinkers, we break things down into systems all the time, like a function  has an input and an output that's a piece of a system.  The simplest form of a system to me is this diagram I learned in eighth grade engineering  class, which is every system has input, output, process in the middle, and the most important  and often skipped part is a feedback loop, something that changes the environment.  An example of this that I had in that eighth grade class was a thermostat.  It changes the temperature of the room.  The temperature of the room is the new input, and it determines whether it should keep eating  or not.  We can model an animal and human with the same kind of thing.  We can, that's not quite true, but animals just respond to their environment.  They don't really think thoughts.  That's what we say, at least.  So they're kind of the simplest diagram.  It's just an input, output, the process.  We don't have access to it.  We don't know what's going on there.  It doesn't really matter.  They don't do much in the insides of the brain.  But humans, we like to think, we definitely think thoughts and feel feelings in the middle  of our brain.  Except kind of when we're an autopilot, they're just kind of automatic.  When you're not an autopilot, it feels very different.  Like you're in control.  You're thinking the thoughts actively instead of just automatic.  So I'm going to break this down into, sometimes you experience automatic thoughts and feelings.  They just happen.  They're basically inputs to your function, because you don't control them.  They just happen to you.  And then you can have deliberate thoughts and feelings.  Well, you can't quite have deliberate feelings, but you can have deliberate thoughts that  affect your feelings.  Sometimes these automatic or deliberate thoughts and feelings can cause a feedback loop, a  downward spiral.  So when I stepped in a puddle, that made my bad mood already worse, and I thought, I'm  stupid.  That made me feel worse.  And then I thought worse.  And then I said, worse things.  I thought worse things.  It was worse.  Ooh.  That's a downward spiral.  That's the kind of thing I think we want to avoid.  And if you can control your mind, you probably control not doing this so you can be more  effective and actually think more clearly about the situation.  Let's say we want to intervene inside of this downward spiral situation.  How do we do it?  So now we're going to start with the behavioral therapy, which is our next.  All right.  What is CBT?  CBT is a treatment for mental illnesses.  It treats so many of them.  It's super effective.  It's like one of the...  When I was studying psychology and undergrad, the test answer was always C, cognitive behavioral  therapy.  Like you just always circle that one.  That's always the correct answer.  It's amazing.  It's as effective as antidepressant drugs for treating depression.  So ideally you should have both because that's even more effective.  They work together really well.  But I don't like to think about it as just something for people with mental illnesses.  It's really useful for literally everybody.  It benefits everyone to understand your thoughts and feelings better.  All right.  Let's say you want to do CBT.  That sounds good.  You want to be a more effective person.  Let's do it.  Install this.  Unfortunately, though, a node isn't supported in my brain.  I don't know about yours.  So we're going to have to get a next closest thing.  By the way, if you want to make something this, just something funny and silly, let  me know.  I'd love to work with you on it.  All right.  So here's how I describe CBT.  We'll go through each of these.  But zero is you have to get into a state of introspection.  And then once you're there and thinking about yourself and monitoring, and you're like in  a debugger inside your own brain, then you can think about your input, emotions, and  thoughts.  All right.  So how do we get inside this introspective state?  I recommend using the whoop technique, which is something I developed with my mom.  My mom was yelling at my little brother.  He didn't do something that he was supposed to do.  And she felt bad about it afterwards.  So I told her, next time you're yelling at my little brother, you should notice it.  Notice that you're upset and frustrated and you're in this negative state.  You don't really want to be there.  Whoop!  Once you notice you're frustrated, I don't want you to literally whoop out loud because  it's funny.  It kind of relaxes the environment a little bit.  It puts you into a different state.  And you can finally be ready to think about why am I so frustrated with Doughton right  now.  He just, it wasn't a big deal, but I'm very frustrated.  And she can finally introspect herself while she's in the whoop state.  My family picked this up.  My little brother and father also whoop my mother often.  But she whoops herself the most, really.  When you're starting to learn how to get into the whoop state, I want you to congratulate  yourself anytime you notice that you should whoop yourself.  Say, good job, I noticed.  This is a moment in which I could be introspective and I could control my own mind.  It's often really hard to do the next step and actually control it and do the processing,  the emotions and thoughts.  But if you can even just notice it, that's a huge first step.  Maybe that's the hardest part of this whole thing, actually.  All right, let's say now you're in the whoop state.  You're about to yell at your son, but you caught yourself.  How do we get here?  Let's talk about the inputs.  Some inputs include stimuli from the environment.  Like that my little brother didn't shut the door that one time.  It could be anything that happened earlier in the day.  She woke up late.  She didn't have a cup of coffee.  The events that happened to her are one type of input, so you can think about that.  Another type of input feels really different from that.  Just your automatic thoughts and automatic emotions.  The fact that she thought, oh, Dalton, not again.  That's an automatic thought that she has.  She didn't choose to think that thought.  Well, there she was thinking it.  That's kind of like an input too.  She felt frustrated in that moment.  Another type of input is one of my favorite things, the bodily state.  You've probably heard this word before.  Angry.  Usually when my mom yells at my brother, she's angry because she works too hard and skipped  a meal.  And when she realizes she hasn't eaten, she says, I haven't eaten, so I don't.  And then she can move on and not yell at him as much.  And that's more effective for the relationship.  That's good.  All right.  So we can now notice the inputs.  We're in our group state.  We've thought about all the inputs that are possibly affecting us.  We're ready to grasp the emotion that we're experiencing and look at it and figure it out.  To get better at that, I recommend expanding your emotional vocabulary so you can describe  your emotion in words.  That's really powerful.  That really helps you, first of all, understand it and accept it and be able to work with  it.  So this is one of the things I think you should probably print this out.  This is on our notes.  Just like expanding your vocabulary using lists that help is one way to do it.  There are some even more effective ways.  These are processing techniques to get better at processing emotions.  Like talking with close friends.  If you don't have a close friend you can talk to about your emotions.  You need to get one.  It's really important for your health.  Like psychology studies prove the more close connectedness you have, the healthier you  are, the longer you live, the less stress you feel.  You need to have probably five or 10 close friends.  You can literally just call up and say, I'm frustrated.  Will you listen?  And then they'll support you and say, yeah, you make sense.  You'll feel way better for it.  Get friends to do that for you.  And you should offer for your friends that if they ever want to talk about an issue  they're having, you can listen.  That's the best technique.  That's my favorite one.  But let's say friends aren't always available.  And sometimes you don't need a friend to get through it.  You can journal to yourself.  I do this by opening a Gmail draft because for some reason that's faster to open than  a Google Doc.  So I Gmail draft myself.  I pretend I'm writing in a letter to Casey Watts of the past or future or a friend or  no one and then I just write all my thoughts out, all my emotions.  I'm feeling frustrated about this and that and that made me disappointed and I try to  use really specific emotional words so I can really understand it.  Another technique to improve your ability to process emotions is reading fiction.  So like reading books that peer into someone else's mind really helps you understand how  a mind works and how they describe their own mind and that's super helpful.  People who read more fiction literally have higher emotional intelligence.  So try it.  It's not useless.  While you're manipulating emotions in your mind and like holding them and thinking about  them, it's important to view that as data.  It's like a type of input.  It's really way too easy to be frustrated and then be frustrated that you are frustrated  and then make it even worse.  So it's important to try to be able to not judge the fact that you had that automatic  emotion.  It's like a separate thing from you.  You are the thinking part that has deliberate thoughts.  The automatic emotion is a separate entity.  That kind of idea is covered a lot in mindfulness meditation.  So if you feel like this is a skill you want to develop, that's not a bad way to work on  that.  All right.  Now we can manipulate our thoughts.  This chart is the number one thing I have you print.  This is a list of ways you can think that are not helpful.  They each have a name.  We'll go through some examples.  Let's say I'm putted to my meetup and I stepped on a puddle and I'm upset.  I could say, wet shoes are the worst.  And then I say, uh-uh, Casey, that's magnification.  They're not literally the worst.  If I'm late, I should just not go.  That's black and white thinking.  You know there's a gray area that's probably okay too.  I'm like, yeah, you were right.  Other Casey brain.  Or I could say, today sucks.  That's over generalizing the entire day, disqualifying the positive things that happened earlier in  the day and fortunately telling that the rest of the day is also going to be bad.  Casey, what are you doing?  I feel like these statements are useful because they express to someone else that I'm having  an emotion.  But I might do the weird thing of saying I am feeling frustrated.  And that feels less cathartic, but it's more accurate and stops me from downward spiraling  someone else.  Or I could remind myself that hangariness will go away when I eat or that when I get  there I can take my shoes off and dry my socks off if I'm literally wet shoeed.  Nobody's going to mind.  And I'll feel awesome once my feet are dry.  So print this.  Get used to these 10 things.  I feel like this is the most useful thing I learned in psychology.  Cool.  So now you know how to get into the whoop state.  You have some idea of what inputs to look for and how to deal with emotions and thoughts  a little bit better.  With all these put together you can choose a response that's more maybe more effective  and productive and makes you happier and stops you from downward spiraling and you are now  more in control of your mind.  You're a mind manipulator.  Congrats.  If you want to get even better at this.  There are some other tools.  I recommend if you think this would be useful to see a therapist.  Even if you don't feel like you are a person who has a mental illness.  If it's going to help, it's going to help.  Therapists are super good at CBT and literally probably all of you have like some level of  anxiety higher than the average person.  I would suspect.  If you don't want to see a therapist, there's a book that's pretty good and highly recommended  by some therapist's friends of mine.  Feeling good and that's linked to in the notes too.  There are also two apps that I want to call out.  One is Headspace which is a mindfulness meditation app and the other is Joyable which is an  app that does CBT for social anxiety.  So being in a conference or talking on a stage sounds like it will make you really anxious.  This type of app would help a lot.  I have a friend who did it and she's changed a lot.  It's been amazing.  That's it for part one.  Part two, we're shifting gears some.  We're going to talk about groups instead of an individual person.  The topic of the second part is psychological safety but I want to start by telling you  what it's not.  It has the word safe in it but it is not equivalent to safe space.  I love space spaces.  I want to be in them and make spaces that I'm in be safe but it's a different idea.  A safe space I define as anyone would feel safe in this group with respect to their identity.  So new people coming in would feel safe.  That's not what I'm talking about.  I'm talking about a psych safe group which is that current members feel safe in the group.  So you could have a group of people who are super bigoted like this team of four people  who are super bigoted.  They don't like anyone who's not like them but they like each other plenty.  They could be an effective team.  I'll give you a more specific definition of psych safety by Amy Edmonds and the researcher  who did a lot of the research on this originally.  It's a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal  risk taking.  So it's safe for taking risks with your peers.  It's not going to make fun of you and think you're bad and terrible at things.  At the same time, Google was doing research.  What makes their teams perform better?  They did a ton of research.  A lot of things did not correlate that you would think would.  Personality types didn't correlate as much as you thought.  As they thought.  Skills, backgrounds, management style, experience.  A lot of things didn't correlate nearly as much as they thought.  But the one thing they couldn't quite put their finger on was the group norms.  They would describe, well, the group just feels this way.  We do things.  This is just nice.  But when this other person comes in, the bossy guy, our group doesn't feel as nice.  The group norms totally change.  Amy Edmondson's research distills this kind of idea into two parts.  One is about communication.  The other is about empathy.  Communication in terms of do all members on the team communicate with each other throughout  the day or week about the same amount.  Like they're all expressing their ideas and not keeping their mouths shut.  And empathy in terms of the average social sensitivity of people on the team.  Now where they are of each other's feelings.  And so a team that has these two psych safe traits at a pretty high level and they're  safer for interpersonal risk taking, you could say they have a higher collective IQ.  All people are contributing to the team.  That's going to be a better team than as if two people literally don't feel comfortable  talking.  They're not contributing.  You're missing two brains out of the pot.  So if you can make your team feel more psych safe, you can make the team more effective.  Crazy IQ.  It's just you want that, right?  This is good.  Yeah, so six out of six voices on a team heard.  It's going to be way smarter than five out of six.  One person doesn't feel comfortable.  All right, we share this goal.  How do we do it?  I'm going to go through 10 techniques in 10 minutes.  I'm going to go pow, pow, pow, pow, pow.  I hope you take some of these away with you.  Let's get it jumped in.  First five are about the communication half of things.  Although like the bleed over happens.  So like they're not, these categories aren't that important.  But here's five.  Earn dogmatism effect is one of my favorite psychology terms.  Someone is exhibiting this effect if they are really experienced in what they're doing  and they are closed minded.  They don't want to hear other people's ideas because they know what they're thinking is  the right thing.  You probably have some coworkers who are pretty closed minded and think they're right a lot.  Yeah.  And some of you people in this room are that person.  It happens to me sometimes too.  I'll admit.  Oops.  The way to get around this, if someone is being super closed minded about an idea, I  would recommend helping them understand that there's information they're missing.  There's something that they don't know.  And as soon as they realize that and realize you can help them see that, they'll be more  willing to open that information too and then maybe change their idea.  Or vice versa, maybe they're being closed minded because they know things you don't  know.  But then it's important for you as someone on their team to figure out why they're choosing  that.  Cool.  So the antidote to the Earn dogmatism effect is reveal that there's information missing  and then hopefully the team can work together.  Development teams are usually pretty good about declaring unknowns, especially when you start  a project.  Say, all right, what are the risks involved?  What could go wrong on this project?  What things do we not know about?  So developers, good job us.  We're pretty good at this one.  We're not always good about doing it after the fact.  After the planning meeting, we don't always remember to keep declaring unknowns out loud.  Or sometimes maybe it's embarrassing.  Like I had to realize this project that I said I could do really quickly easily, I realized  I don't know how to do the auth for it.  Auth is super hairy and complex.  What am I going to do?  So if you're comfortable telling your team, oh, we don't know how complex auth is.  It could maybe not go that well.  And then the team now knows they can work together on it better.  Better than if you keep it quiet yourself, kind of struggle.  So to create a team culture where you declare unknowns more often is probably helpful to  increase the amount of communication you do with each other.  If something goes wrong, you could frame it as bad, wrong, bad, terrible, which is the  default thing that humans like to do.  Or you could frame it as a learning opportunity.  When the server went down last week for a day, that helped us realize that our deployment  infrastructure really wasn't ever bust.  And we can improve it.  So we learned that it should be improved.  Good job to us.  It's probably helpful to feel a little bit bad, but you don't need to feel so bad that  you're downward spiraling and embarrassed and not talking about improving it so much.  Or if one person ends up clamming up because they feel like they were too involved, then  you don't have their brain power anymore.  So it's important to help them feel comfortable like they can still contribute and say things.  Tell people that you make mistakes.  Tell your teammates.  If I...  Let me read this, too.  I make mistakes and I know it.  Tell me what you notice.  If you can say that to your teammates and feel comfortable saying it, then they're way more  likely to give you feedback, like things that they see that might go wrong.  But if you're going to be defensive about it and be like, I know what I'm doing, don't  tell me the things.  You're going to miss that information.  Last one for communication is modeling curiosity.  So you can also increase communication of ideas in your team by asking more questions  yourself.  You can create a culture of your team asking a lot of questions to each other, and then  that'll increase communication.  So next time somebody's working on a project that's not quite related to what you're doing,  but you don't know what's going on and you are kind of curious, go ahead and ask that  question, ask them to explain what's going on, and they'll...  It'll help them, too.  It'll make them say it more clearly.  You might have some ideas, what might go wrong, or some experience that you have.  Generally communicating more is more useful.  Although I guess I can give the caveat, don't communicate too much, but I have not seen people  do that.  So that seems like a very severe risk.  Next section is about empathy.  This is another one of my favorite psychology terms, propinquity.  Propinquity means social closeness.  So you have high propinquity of someone you live with who you talk to a lot.  You have low propinquity with your neighbor who you never see, even though they're technically  close to you.  You have higher propinquity with someone who sits at the desk next to you, higher propinquity  with people that you have lunch with at the same half hour, hour chunk of the lunch hour,  lunch time.  You have higher propinquity with people who are in fluffy chat Slack channel where you  post cat pictures to each other.  There are a lot of things that can increase how often you naturally interact with people.  And people that you have higher propinquity with, you will end up trusting more, too,  and you can communicate more easily with them and have higher empathy connection to them.  So if you're having trouble working with a particular coworker, perhaps your propinquity  is low and you could improve that, which would increase your ability to communicate generally.  I have a mnemonic for this in case this idea is sticking with you, you got it, but that's  a weird psychology word.  Propinquity in the brain.  Propinquity in the brain.  Any time you're talking to someone, there are two channels on which you're communicating.  The task channel, which is the content, the things that you're actually saying, you're  always thinking about that generally.  The second channel you might forget is there.  Maybe you never quite knew it was there, like it's a fuzzy thought.  And the part that you're communicating relationship type information to the person.  So if you tell someone that their idea has some issues and you don't already trust each  other a ton, they might hear some pretty bad things about how they are as a person or how  you feel about them.  So there's a structure that I like, some psychology researcher made called PURLS.  I'll just talk about the first one.  You can look at this in the notes.  If you're working with someone and they are feeling defensive and you want to help talk  on the relationship channel a little bit better, you could say something like, I really want  to work on this with you.  I'm really excited that we are working together on this.  This is exciting.  This idea has some issues.  And then all of a sudden, maybe they're not so defensive.  They're really able to hear your suggestions and ideas because you've communicated on the  relationship channel instead of letting it be implied.  If you have a really close relationship, you might not need to be explicit about the relationship  channel because you just already trust each other a ton.  That's probably why close friends, you're more able to get feedback from on a presentation  you rehearse, for example, than some stranger because you just value each other a lot.  You know it.  You don't need to talk about it.  But if it's a coworker you don't know that well, communicating on the relationship channel  explicitly is super useful.  So then there's more.  I recommend you read this article.  It's pretty good.  Next one, validation.  You probably think you know the definition to this word.  I hope I can change your mind a little bit.  Validation is the recognition and acceptance of another person's thoughts, feelings, sensations,  and behaviors as understandable whether or not you agree.  So if you can put yourself in their shoes and assume that they have the background of  working in a monolithic code base and the thing they just worked on last week took two more  weeks than usual and something else about their situation and all these put together,  then of course you'd be afraid to try this new thing or making up an example.  And if you think someone else is doing something stupid, which to me translates to you don't  understand why they're doing it, that probably means you're missing some information that  goes into why they're choosing to do that thing.  And it would help probably if you validated their thoughts, it would help them be less  defensive and more able to communicate with you.  I have some specific recommendations on how to communicate validation to someone.  Here's a list of six ways.  Number six is the most powerful way to validate someone.  Number one is the least powerful, but it's still useful.  Imagine somebody's grandmother just passed away and you don't know what to say, but you're  just sitting next to your friend comforting them.  That's helpful.  If they're telling you how they feel and you can reflect it back to them, oh, you feel  very sad and confused right now, then they'll feel a little bit better.  You can read their mind and guess how they're feeling.  Like, are you feeling really sad?  They're like, yeah, that's even better.  That's another level of validation.  All the way up to if your grandmother passed away recently and they know you feel pretty  similarly to how they feel now, that's super comforting, super validating.  There's more levels in here, too, that I won't go through.  This article also totally changed the way I communicate to even my friends, like on  a daily basis.  If I can do five instead of four, I'll basically choose it now and it gets great results.  People like five better than four, four better than three, all the way down the list.  Next one.  When I suggest an idea at a team meeting, people love to call it Casey's idea from  then on, or Casey's first idea and Casey's second idea.  I'm always like, no, no, no, no, no.  I don't want my name on this thing.  I don't even know if it's good yet.  I haven't figured out how it would work at all.  I get a lot of resistance to this and I'm not quite sure why.  I like to replace it with idea A or the off idea that uses Ember Simple Off, like something  really descriptive to the problem.  This has a couple good things.  It decouples my ego from the project so I don't feel bad if people are complaining about  it.  That also helps other people be able to say negative things or critical things about  that idea too without feeling like you're going to hurt me.  It opens the discussion up a little bit to depersonalize ideas.  Here's my last one.  Vulnerability really increases the amount that people can trust each other.  If you can share some anxieties you have about the project or about work or personal  life with a coworker, that will increase the amount that you trust each other.  Your closest friends are people that you're most vulnerable with.  I'm not saying you should tell everyone your whole life story at work all the time.  There's an extreme there.  If you can be slightly more vulnerable to a coworker and feel safe with them, you'll  be better, easier to work together.  There's so much research into how vulnerability is useful and good at the workplace and there's  some links in my notes, surprise.  Some videos and articles you might want to read.  Cool.  So those were some ideas how to increase psychological safety.  Here's the two columns.  All my ideas I just gave you.  I'm giving you guys some homework.  I'm not totally kidding.  I'd love for you to bookmark this document, which is where I have all these links.  There's a lot more than that screenshot, of course.  A couple of them I have marked in purple that are printable that people have told me they  printed and it's been really helpful for them.  So I think it might be for you too.  And I recommend you read at least one of the articles.  I might recommend the validation one if you just pick one.  I have two frequently asked questions that I can throw in.  Why doesn't everybody already do CBT, the first half of the talk?  Well, it takes a lot of effort.  It takes training.  You have to know what you're doing.  And it takes time and effort and energy to do.  It's not a natural human brain thing to do.  But I believe in you guys.  You can do it.  Another question I get a ton is how do I get other people to do this?  You can't make other people do this.  You can't even make yourself do any of this.  You can just influence.  That's it.  But you as an individual can definitely influence the culture of your team just by the actions  you do, by modeling curiosity and all those things.  You can also maybe show this presentation to your team or coworkers and maybe get some  of the ideas to rub off on them.  That could help.  But you can't make them do it.  You can only influence.  That's it for me.  Thanks, everyone.  Thanks.
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All right, close your eyes. Everyone close your eyes for a second. All right, open. There's a gift for you. One of my hobbies is blowing bubbles. I had a bubble party in a park in DC. Last weekend, I had 100 people show up. An image from that. I'm also really into dancing, like partner dancing. And I lead and follow both. I'm kind of proud. I work for Heroku. We actually use Ember on our dashboard site. And if you want any help getting fast food set up, it's pretty straightforward to do an Ember on Heroku. So let me know. I play in a marching band, the Purple Clarinet. And I have a cute little adopted nephew. And I'm the adopted uncle, really. He's a family friend. Look, he's so adorable. I also studied neurobiology at Yale University. And I have a few papers which are kind of irrelevant to this talk. They're kind of cool. All right, so the meat of the talk. I'm going to give this talk to you in two parts. The first part, cognitive restructuring, is about you and how to manipulate your mind yourself. The second part is about how to influence groups you're in to make them more effective. Throughout the presentation, I have articles and posters and images that I want you to look at later. So I have this document online, a Google Doc that I made published, visible online. And I want you to bookmark this. I'll tweet it, too. I'm going to assign homework. You all better do it. Cool. Let's start the first half. So I'm going to break it off into three parts. One, I'm going to show you some example opportunities in which you might want to manipulate your own mind. Then I'm going to shift gears and talk about neurobiology and how the brain works and give you a system way to view your own self. And then we're going to talk about cognitive behavioral therapy, which is the meat of the talk, which is really how to do the manipulating. And I'm going to start with the opportunities. I'm going to give you three examples. And you can either manipulate your own mind in the moment of this event that's happening or, after the fact, reflect on it. And it despise all of them. Let's say you're at work and you have an idea, but your coworker has a different idea and you don't agree. You're having an argument. And you might get kind of heated once in a while. Like, you both know you're right. That's one example. We'll get into what you might do to make yourself more effective there. Imagine you're a parent and your kids aren't doing that thing. Ooh, you could snap at them. Recent example for me, I was headed to a meetup, but I hadn't eaten dinner yet and I found out there was no pizza at that meetup. Like usual. Usually we have pizza. It was wet. It was raining. I stepped in a puddle. I was just like, whoa. That was the worst. So I should have and did use CBT type ideas for that. We'll get into that later. Shifting gears. Let me talk about the brain. You might break the brain into left half and right half atmospheres, but I don't like that. That's not as useful as inner versus outer brain. Let me illustrate the difference between these two halves of the brain with a GIF. That poor kitty. I feel really bad for this. Don't do this to your cat. They get really stressed. So there are two halves of the brain, the inner and the outer brain. Ladoo is a researcher who described a dual pathway of fear, which is a pretty specific to that cat situation. The thing generalizes pretty well. So one half of the brain, the inner brain is the older half of the brain. The animals have this part too for sure. It's the part where you feel feelings like fear, and it's much faster than the other part. You see the little black arrow there? It goes from one part in the middle to a nearby part. That's kind of a short arrow compared to the outer brain's got a long path to go through. It's much slower. That's the part of the brain where you actually think thoughts. Your conscious mind, the part of you that is I, Casey Watts, is probably the outer brain and I happen to know what's happening in the inner brain as a separate part of me. Cool. So that's inner versus outer brain. Shifting gears again. Another perspective. Our systems thinkers, we break things down into systems all the time, like a function has an input and an output that's a piece of a system. The simplest form of a system to me is this diagram I learned in eighth grade engineering class, which is every system has input, output, process in the middle, and the most important and often skipped part is a feedback loop, something that changes the environment. An example of this that I had in that eighth grade class was a thermostat. It changes the temperature of the room. The temperature of the room is the new input, and it determines whether it should keep eating or not. We can model an animal and human with the same kind of thing. We can, that's not quite true, but animals just respond to their environment. They don't really think thoughts. That's what we say, at least. So they're kind of the simplest diagram. It's just an input, output, the process. We don't have access to it. We don't know what's going on there. It doesn't really matter. They don't do much in the insides of the brain. But humans, we like to think, we definitely think thoughts and feel feelings in the middle of our brain. Except kind of when we're an autopilot, they're just kind of automatic. When you're not an autopilot, it feels very different. Like you're in control. You're thinking the thoughts actively instead of just automatic. So I'm going to break this down into, sometimes you experience automatic thoughts and feelings. They just happen. They're basically inputs to your function, because you don't control them. They just happen to you. And then you can have deliberate thoughts and feelings. Well, you can't quite have deliberate feelings, but you can have deliberate thoughts that affect your feelings. Sometimes these automatic or deliberate thoughts and feelings can cause a feedback loop, a downward spiral. So when I stepped in a puddle, that made my bad mood already worse, and I thought, I'm stupid. That made me feel worse. And then I thought worse. And then I said, worse things. I thought worse things. It was worse. Ooh. That's a downward spiral. That's the kind of thing I think we want to avoid. And if you can control your mind, you probably control not doing this so you can be more effective and actually think more clearly about the situation. Let's say we want to intervene inside of this downward spiral situation. How do we do it? So now we're going to start with the behavioral therapy, which is our next. All right. What is CBT? CBT is a treatment for mental illnesses. It treats so many of them. It's super effective. It's like one of the... When I was studying psychology and undergrad, the test answer was always C, cognitive behavioral therapy. Like you just always circle that one. That's always the correct answer. It's amazing. It's as effective as antidepressant drugs for treating depression. So ideally you should have both because that's even more effective. They work together really well. But I don't like to think about it as just something for people with mental illnesses. It's really useful for literally everybody. It benefits everyone to understand your thoughts and feelings better. All right. Let's say you want to do CBT. That sounds good. You want to be a more effective person. Let's do it. Install this. Unfortunately, though, a node isn't supported in my brain. I don't know about yours. So we're going to have to get a next closest thing. By the way, if you want to make something this, just something funny and silly, let me know. I'd love to work with you on it. All right. So here's how I describe CBT. We'll go through each of these. But zero is you have to get into a state of introspection. And then once you're there and thinking about yourself and monitoring, and you're like in a debugger inside your own brain, then you can think about your input, emotions, and thoughts. All right. So how do we get inside this introspective state? I recommend using the whoop technique, which is something I developed with my mom. My mom was yelling at my little brother. He didn't do something that he was supposed to do. And she felt bad about it afterwards. So I told her, next time you're yelling at my little brother, you should notice it. Notice that you're upset and frustrated and you're in this negative state. You don't really want to be there. Whoop! Once you notice you're frustrated, I don't want you to literally whoop out loud because it's funny. It kind of relaxes the environment a little bit. It puts you into a different state. And you can finally be ready to think about why am I so frustrated with Doughton right now. He just, it wasn't a big deal, but I'm very frustrated. And she can finally introspect herself while she's in the whoop state. My family picked this up. My little brother and father also whoop my mother often. But she whoops herself the most, really. When you're starting to learn how to get into the whoop state, I want you to congratulate yourself anytime you notice that you should whoop yourself. Say, good job, I noticed. This is a moment in which I could be introspective and I could control my own mind. It's often really hard to do the next step and actually control it and do the processing, the emotions and thoughts. But if you can even just notice it, that's a huge first step. Maybe that's the hardest part of this whole thing, actually. All right, let's say now you're in the whoop state. You're about to yell at your son, but you caught yourself. How do we get here? Let's talk about the inputs. Some inputs include stimuli from the environment. Like that my little brother didn't shut the door that one time. It could be anything that happened earlier in the day. She woke up late. She didn't have a cup of coffee. The events that happened to her are one type of input, so you can think about that. Another type of input feels really different from that. Just your automatic thoughts and automatic emotions. The fact that she thought, oh, Dalton, not again. That's an automatic thought that she has. She didn't choose to think that thought. Well, there she was thinking it. That's kind of like an input too. She felt frustrated in that moment. Another type of input is one of my favorite things, the bodily state. You've probably heard this word before. Angry. Usually when my mom yells at my brother, she's angry because she works too hard and skipped a meal. And when she realizes she hasn't eaten, she says, I haven't eaten, so I don't. And then she can move on and not yell at him as much. And that's more effective for the relationship. That's good. All right. So we can now notice the inputs. We're in our group state. We've thought about all the inputs that are possibly affecting us. We're ready to grasp the emotion that we're experiencing and look at it and figure it out. To get better at that, I recommend expanding your emotional vocabulary so you can describe your emotion in words. That's really powerful. That really helps you, first of all, understand it and accept it and be able to work with it. So this is one of the things I think you should probably print this out. This is on our notes. Just like expanding your vocabulary using lists that help is one way to do it. There are some even more effective ways. These are processing techniques to get better at processing emotions. Like talking with close friends. If you don't have a close friend you can talk to about your emotions. You need to get one. It's really important for your health. Like psychology studies prove the more close connectedness you have, the healthier you are, the longer you live, the less stress you feel. You need to have probably five or 10 close friends. You can literally just call up and say, I'm frustrated. Will you listen? And then they'll support you and say, yeah, you make sense. You'll feel way better for it. Get friends to do that for you. And you should offer for your friends that if they ever want to talk about an issue they're having, you can listen. That's the best technique. That's my favorite one. But let's say friends aren't always available. And sometimes you don't need a friend to get through it. You can journal to yourself. I do this by opening a Gmail draft because for some reason that's faster to open than a Google Doc. So I Gmail draft myself. I pretend I'm writing in a letter to Casey Watts of the past or future or a friend or no one and then I just write all my thoughts out, all my emotions. I'm feeling frustrated about this and that and that made me disappointed and I try to use really specific emotional words so I can really understand it. Another technique to improve your ability to process emotions is reading fiction. So like reading books that peer into someone else's mind really helps you understand how a mind works and how they describe their own mind and that's super helpful. People who read more fiction literally have higher emotional intelligence. So try it. It's not useless. While you're manipulating emotions in your mind and like holding them and thinking about them, it's important to view that as data. It's like a type of input. It's really way too easy to be frustrated and then be frustrated that you are frustrated and then make it even worse. So it's important to try to be able to not judge the fact that you had that automatic emotion. It's like a separate thing from you. You are the thinking part that has deliberate thoughts. The automatic emotion is a separate entity. That kind of idea is covered a lot in mindfulness meditation. So if you feel like this is a skill you want to develop, that's not a bad way to work on that. All right. Now we can manipulate our thoughts. This chart is the number one thing I have you print. This is a list of ways you can think that are not helpful. They each have a name. We'll go through some examples. Let's say I'm putted to my meetup and I stepped on a puddle and I'm upset. I could say, wet shoes are the worst. And then I say, uh-uh, Casey, that's magnification. They're not literally the worst. If I'm late, I should just not go. That's black and white thinking. You know there's a gray area that's probably okay too. I'm like, yeah, you were right. Other Casey brain. Or I could say, today sucks. That's over generalizing the entire day, disqualifying the positive things that happened earlier in the day and fortunately telling that the rest of the day is also going to be bad. Casey, what are you doing? I feel like these statements are useful because they express to someone else that I'm having an emotion. But I might do the weird thing of saying I am feeling frustrated. And that feels less cathartic, but it's more accurate and stops me from downward spiraling someone else. Or I could remind myself that hangariness will go away when I eat or that when I get there I can take my shoes off and dry my socks off if I'm literally wet shoeed. Nobody's going to mind. And I'll feel awesome once my feet are dry. So print this. Get used to these 10 things. I feel like this is the most useful thing I learned in psychology. Cool. So now you know how to get into the whoop state. You have some idea of what inputs to look for and how to deal with emotions and thoughts a little bit better. With all these put together you can choose a response that's more maybe more effective and productive and makes you happier and stops you from downward spiraling and you are now more in control of your mind. You're a mind manipulator. Congrats. If you want to get even better at this. There are some other tools. I recommend if you think this would be useful to see a therapist. Even if you don't feel like you are a person who has a mental illness. If it's going to help, it's going to help. Therapists are super good at CBT and literally probably all of you have like some level of anxiety higher than the average person. I would suspect. If you don't want to see a therapist, there's a book that's pretty good and highly recommended by some therapist's friends of mine. Feeling good and that's linked to in the notes too. There are also two apps that I want to call out. One is Headspace which is a mindfulness meditation app and the other is Joyable which is an app that does CBT for social anxiety. So being in a conference or talking on a stage sounds like it will make you really anxious. This type of app would help a lot. I have a friend who did it and she's changed a lot. It's been amazing. That's it for part one. Part two, we're shifting gears some. We're going to talk about groups instead of an individual person. The topic of the second part is psychological safety but I want to start by telling you what it's not. It has the word safe in it but it is not equivalent to safe space. I love space spaces. I want to be in them and make spaces that I'm in be safe but it's a different idea. A safe space I define as anyone would feel safe in this group with respect to their identity. So new people coming in would feel safe. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a psych safe group which is that current members feel safe in the group. So you could have a group of people who are super bigoted like this team of four people who are super bigoted. They don't like anyone who's not like them but they like each other plenty. They could be an effective team. I'll give you a more specific definition of psych safety by Amy Edmonds and the researcher who did a lot of the research on this originally. It's a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. So it's safe for taking risks with your peers. It's not going to make fun of you and think you're bad and terrible at things. At the same time, Google was doing research. What makes their teams perform better? They did a ton of research. A lot of things did not correlate that you would think would. Personality types didn't correlate as much as you thought. As they thought. Skills, backgrounds, management style, experience. A lot of things didn't correlate nearly as much as they thought. But the one thing they couldn't quite put their finger on was the group norms. They would describe, well, the group just feels this way. We do things. This is just nice. But when this other person comes in, the bossy guy, our group doesn't feel as nice. The group norms totally change. Amy Edmondson's research distills this kind of idea into two parts. One is about communication. The other is about empathy. Communication in terms of do all members on the team communicate with each other throughout the day or week about the same amount. Like they're all expressing their ideas and not keeping their mouths shut. And empathy in terms of the average social sensitivity of people on the team. Now where they are of each other's feelings. And so a team that has these two psych safe traits at a pretty high level and they're safer for interpersonal risk taking, you could say they have a higher collective IQ. All people are contributing to the team. That's going to be a better team than as if two people literally don't feel comfortable talking. They're not contributing. You're missing two brains out of the pot. So if you can make your team feel more psych safe, you can make the team more effective. Crazy IQ. It's just you want that, right? This is good. Yeah, so six out of six voices on a team heard. It's going to be way smarter than five out of six. One person doesn't feel comfortable. All right, we share this goal. How do we do it? I'm going to go through 10 techniques in 10 minutes. I'm going to go pow, pow, pow, pow, pow. I hope you take some of these away with you. Let's get it jumped in. First five are about the communication half of things. Although like the bleed over happens. So like they're not, these categories aren't that important. But here's five. Earn dogmatism effect is one of my favorite psychology terms. Someone is exhibiting this effect if they are really experienced in what they're doing and they are closed minded. They don't want to hear other people's ideas because they know what they're thinking is the right thing. You probably have some coworkers who are pretty closed minded and think they're right a lot. Yeah. And some of you people in this room are that person. It happens to me sometimes too. I'll admit. Oops. The way to get around this, if someone is being super closed minded about an idea, I would recommend helping them understand that there's information they're missing. There's something that they don't know. And as soon as they realize that and realize you can help them see that, they'll be more willing to open that information too and then maybe change their idea. Or vice versa, maybe they're being closed minded because they know things you don't know. But then it's important for you as someone on their team to figure out why they're choosing that. Cool. So the antidote to the Earn dogmatism effect is reveal that there's information missing and then hopefully the team can work together. Development teams are usually pretty good about declaring unknowns, especially when you start a project. Say, all right, what are the risks involved? What could go wrong on this project? What things do we not know about? So developers, good job us. We're pretty good at this one. We're not always good about doing it after the fact. After the planning meeting, we don't always remember to keep declaring unknowns out loud. Or sometimes maybe it's embarrassing. Like I had to realize this project that I said I could do really quickly easily, I realized I don't know how to do the auth for it. Auth is super hairy and complex. What am I going to do? So if you're comfortable telling your team, oh, we don't know how complex auth is. It could maybe not go that well. And then the team now knows they can work together on it better. Better than if you keep it quiet yourself, kind of struggle. So to create a team culture where you declare unknowns more often is probably helpful to increase the amount of communication you do with each other. If something goes wrong, you could frame it as bad, wrong, bad, terrible, which is the default thing that humans like to do. Or you could frame it as a learning opportunity. When the server went down last week for a day, that helped us realize that our deployment infrastructure really wasn't ever bust. And we can improve it. So we learned that it should be improved. Good job to us. It's probably helpful to feel a little bit bad, but you don't need to feel so bad that you're downward spiraling and embarrassed and not talking about improving it so much. Or if one person ends up clamming up because they feel like they were too involved, then you don't have their brain power anymore. So it's important to help them feel comfortable like they can still contribute and say things. Tell people that you make mistakes. Tell your teammates. If I... Let me read this, too. I make mistakes and I know it. Tell me what you notice. If you can say that to your teammates and feel comfortable saying it, then they're way more likely to give you feedback, like things that they see that might go wrong. But if you're going to be defensive about it and be like, I know what I'm doing, don't tell me the things. You're going to miss that information. Last one for communication is modeling curiosity. So you can also increase communication of ideas in your team by asking more questions yourself. You can create a culture of your team asking a lot of questions to each other, and then that'll increase communication. So next time somebody's working on a project that's not quite related to what you're doing, but you don't know what's going on and you are kind of curious, go ahead and ask that question, ask them to explain what's going on, and they'll... It'll help them, too. It'll make them say it more clearly. You might have some ideas, what might go wrong, or some experience that you have. Generally communicating more is more useful. Although I guess I can give the caveat, don't communicate too much, but I have not seen people do that. So that seems like a very severe risk. Next section is about empathy. This is another one of my favorite psychology terms, propinquity. Propinquity means social closeness. So you have high propinquity of someone you live with who you talk to a lot. You have low propinquity with your neighbor who you never see, even though they're technically close to you. You have higher propinquity with someone who sits at the desk next to you, higher propinquity with people that you have lunch with at the same half hour, hour chunk of the lunch hour, lunch time. You have higher propinquity with people who are in fluffy chat Slack channel where you post cat pictures to each other. There are a lot of things that can increase how often you naturally interact with people. And people that you have higher propinquity with, you will end up trusting more, too, and you can communicate more easily with them and have higher empathy connection to them. So if you're having trouble working with a particular coworker, perhaps your propinquity is low and you could improve that, which would increase your ability to communicate generally. I have a mnemonic for this in case this idea is sticking with you, you got it, but that's a weird psychology word. Propinquity in the brain. Propinquity in the brain. Any time you're talking to someone, there are two channels on which you're communicating. The task channel, which is the content, the things that you're actually saying, you're always thinking about that generally. The second channel you might forget is there. Maybe you never quite knew it was there, like it's a fuzzy thought. And the part that you're communicating relationship type information to the person. So if you tell someone that their idea has some issues and you don't already trust each other a ton, they might hear some pretty bad things about how they are as a person or how you feel about them. So there's a structure that I like, some psychology researcher made called PURLS. I'll just talk about the first one. You can look at this in the notes. If you're working with someone and they are feeling defensive and you want to help talk on the relationship channel a little bit better, you could say something like, I really want to work on this with you. I'm really excited that we are working together on this. This is exciting. This idea has some issues. And then all of a sudden, maybe they're not so defensive. They're really able to hear your suggestions and ideas because you've communicated on the relationship channel instead of letting it be implied. If you have a really close relationship, you might not need to be explicit about the relationship channel because you just already trust each other a ton. That's probably why close friends, you're more able to get feedback from on a presentation you rehearse, for example, than some stranger because you just value each other a lot. You know it. You don't need to talk about it. But if it's a coworker you don't know that well, communicating on the relationship channel explicitly is super useful. So then there's more. I recommend you read this article. It's pretty good. Next one, validation. You probably think you know the definition to this word. I hope I can change your mind a little bit. Validation is the recognition and acceptance of another person's thoughts, feelings, sensations, and behaviors as understandable whether or not you agree. So if you can put yourself in their shoes and assume that they have the background of working in a monolithic code base and the thing they just worked on last week took two more weeks than usual and something else about their situation and all these put together, then of course you'd be afraid to try this new thing or making up an example. And if you think someone else is doing something stupid, which to me translates to you don't understand why they're doing it, that probably means you're missing some information that goes into why they're choosing to do that thing. And it would help probably if you validated their thoughts, it would help them be less defensive and more able to communicate with you. I have some specific recommendations on how to communicate validation to someone. Here's a list of six ways. Number six is the most powerful way to validate someone. Number one is the least powerful, but it's still useful. Imagine somebody's grandmother just passed away and you don't know what to say, but you're just sitting next to your friend comforting them. That's helpful. If they're telling you how they feel and you can reflect it back to them, oh, you feel very sad and confused right now, then they'll feel a little bit better. You can read their mind and guess how they're feeling. Like, are you feeling really sad? They're like, yeah, that's even better. That's another level of validation. All the way up to if your grandmother passed away recently and they know you feel pretty similarly to how they feel now, that's super comforting, super validating. There's more levels in here, too, that I won't go through. This article also totally changed the way I communicate to even my friends, like on a daily basis. If I can do five instead of four, I'll basically choose it now and it gets great results. People like five better than four, four better than three, all the way down the list. Next one. When I suggest an idea at a team meeting, people love to call it Casey's idea from then on, or Casey's first idea and Casey's second idea. I'm always like, no, no, no, no, no. I don't want my name on this thing. I don't even know if it's good yet. I haven't figured out how it would work at all. I get a lot of resistance to this and I'm not quite sure why. I like to replace it with idea A or the off idea that uses Ember Simple Off, like something really descriptive to the problem. This has a couple good things. It decouples my ego from the project so I don't feel bad if people are complaining about it. That also helps other people be able to say negative things or critical things about that idea too without feeling like you're going to hurt me. It opens the discussion up a little bit to depersonalize ideas. Here's my last one. Vulnerability really increases the amount that people can trust each other. If you can share some anxieties you have about the project or about work or personal life with a coworker, that will increase the amount that you trust each other. Your closest friends are people that you're most vulnerable with. I'm not saying you should tell everyone your whole life story at work all the time. There's an extreme there. If you can be slightly more vulnerable to a coworker and feel safe with them, you'll be better, easier to work together. There's so much research into how vulnerability is useful and good at the workplace and there's some links in my notes, surprise. Some videos and articles you might want to read. Cool. So those were some ideas how to increase psychological safety. Here's the two columns. All my ideas I just gave you. I'm giving you guys some homework. I'm not totally kidding. I'd love for you to bookmark this document, which is where I have all these links. There's a lot more than that screenshot, of course. A couple of them I have marked in purple that are printable that people have told me they printed and it's been really helpful for them. So I think it might be for you too. And I recommend you read at least one of the articles. I might recommend the validation one if you just pick one. I have two frequently asked questions that I can throw in. Why doesn't everybody already do CBT, the first half of the talk? Well, it takes a lot of effort. It takes training. You have to know what you're doing. And it takes time and effort and energy to do. It's not a natural human brain thing to do. But I believe in you guys. You can do it. Another question I get a ton is how do I get other people to do this? You can't make other people do this. You can't even make yourself do any of this. You can just influence. That's it. But you as an individual can definitely influence the culture of your team just by the actions you do, by modeling curiosity and all those things. You can also maybe show this presentation to your team or coworkers and maybe get some of the ideas to rub off on them. That could help. But you can't make them do it. You can only influence. That's it for me. Thanks, everyone. Thanks.
brain works and give you a system way to view perspective. Our systems thinkers, we break most important and often skipped part is a and feelings can cause a feedback loop, a this so you can be more effective and actually way too easy to be frustrated and then be are a person who has a mental illness. If it's one of the articles. I might recommend the of your team just by the actions you do, by