Why Your "True Self" is Holding You Back (The Alter Ego Effect) - E161

Most people believe that success comes from being authentic and staying true to who they are. But what if the identity that you call your true self is actually the thing that's limiting your performance? My guest today is Todd Herman, globally recognized performance strategist and mental conditioning coach who has spent over two decades now working with Olympic athletes, Super Bowl champions, UFC fighters, Fortune 500 CEOs, and elite entrepreneurs. He's the author of the most amazing book called The Alter Ego Effect and that's a groundbreaking book that's rooted in cognitive performance, research, identity theory, and neuroscience. Todd teaches us that you don't rise to the level of your goals, you perform to the level of the identity that you step into. In this episode, we're going to explore identity-driven transformation, symbolic embodiment, and the neuroscience behind self-distancing. We're going to unpack why overcoming fear and hesitation isn't about fixing your flaws, it's more about activating a consciously designed alter ego that allows you to access courage, clarity, and conviction on demand. Personally, this conversation is extremely fascinating. Why? I've been speaking to you from the standpoint of my alter ego known as The Dragon. I'm very, very excited to deep dive into The Dragon's lair today. Have you noticed that the world that we live in has been doing most of the thinking for you? That your beliefs, perceptions, reactions, fears, and doubts have been shaped by unsolicited outside noise? How easy it's been for you to slip into that default sleep-walking mode and label it as life and reality? Yeah, that ends here. Welcome to the Make Sense with Dr. JC podcast. This is your opportunity to start thinking for yourself, reclaim control, and step back into that role as the shock-caller and dominant force of your own reality. It's when you change the way that you look at things that the things that you look at begin to change. So let's wake up, let's rise up, and let's make sense of why and how shift happens. Make sense. Welcome to the Make Sense with Dr. JC podcast, Mr. Todd Herman. And thank you for being here. Mr. I never get a Mr. much anymore, especially not for my kids. Even better is when people call me Mr. Dragon or Dr. Dragon sometimes. Yeah, Dr. D, there you go. So one of my favorite questions to ask, question nobody's asked you, so it's one of those. What's it like to be Todd Herman these days? Oh, I would say that I'm very fortunate in the opportunities that come my way. Yeah, I'm blessed with a lot of great people that I'm able to work with right now, and I'm very happy that I would also say that I've worked so freaking hard on trying to master my own mindset and attitude because we're going into another major shift in society and culture. And I think that I'm going to be equipped to flow through it. So yeah, grateful, I would say. It's what it sounds like. And that would be on the list of things that I like about Todd Herman now. That's awesome. What's interesting, I'm an affirmations guy, so just keep as many coming as you could possibly can. I love it. And what's interesting about it is just what you just said, is it's one thing to look at what we're going to talk about and identify the alter ego and we're going to dive into that, but it's probably more important than ever. I would assume that a lot of people are reading your book right now and just really, really feeling that it was timely. So emotional intelligence and emotional mismanagement is at an all-time high. So if we can find out a version of ourselves that can handle adversity better, it's great. It's funny that you bring up that. So what you'll see in the next five years is that the number one trending topic or training that people will consume or corporations will be buying is going to be emotional regulation skills. From the nature of my world of running training and coaching companies for a long time for almost 30 years now, and then I own a software platform that coaches and trainers called upcoach can build and deliver their programming through, I get access to a lot of different data points. And it is a huge, fast-growing part of the expertise market. And it's the demand that's there because of the nature of the times that we're in. Typically, lead off when I do a lecture, I say, isn't it mysterious how God and the universe have inconveniently placed everything that we desire most on the other side of a big pile of shit? And then everybody kind of giggles like that and laughs. And I say, so it's my observation that what we really need to do, and this is what my book is about, is become shit navigators. We have to learn how to navigate that. I knew of you, but it's different when you meet somebody, and then there's the book. And there's kind of a funny story because Todd had a whole bunch of books there at the Limitless Live event, and they all sold out. But I grabbed one because I was the emcee just so I could use it to interview. And the guy that was selling the books chased me the whole day. And he's like, hey, we need that book, we need that book. So I lost the book. I had to go get my own. But for somebody that doesn't know about your work, what exactly is the alter ego effect? And more importantly, how does it differ from somebody just faking confidence? Okay, so the backstory on the book, when I started a mental game coaching and training company in 1997, kind of long before the coaching industry became the coaching industry. And even before mindset, a long before mindset or mental toughness training became even close to mainstream. As I was growing this business, one of the sort of golden threads that was weaving the highest performing and most consistent athletes I had the chance to work with was they would bring up something like it, you know, I step into this persona, I have this character that I have when I go on the field, or the ice or the pitch or the court. Because I was working with athletes across many, many, many different sports. And that's an important point to make about why I ended up kind of discovering the alter ego as a mechanism. So they would say things like persona, character, secret identity, alter ego, all these different words. At first, I didn't really notice it. It was more of just a curiosity of like, oh, that's really cool. I did the same thing because I played college football and other sports at a pretty good level, like nowhere near what my clients were, but at a good level. And I would just sort of connect with them over it and share what I used and how did they do it. And then when I was preparing an athlete for the 2004 Olympics, a couple of years ahead of the Olympics, it was just the way that she had mentioned her persona that she would have when she would get into the water as an Olympic swimmer. And all of a sudden, all of the different dominoes dropped in my head and connected these other conversations. And I said, wait a second, this is a thing. Like it's not just a cool, neat device. Now, this seems like a human construct that we would use. So then I went back and I interviewed past clients, existing clients, I'm like, hey, how do you do it? Why did you do it? Why did you build it? Kind of try to get their motivation, what they used, you know, how much of it was a big part of their mental kind of game or inner game. And there was varying degrees to everybody. And from that, I started to build out a methodology. And very quickly after that, I got introduced from one of my mentors, Harvey Dorfman, who's known as the Yoda of baseball to Kobe. And it was because Harvey had said, hey, I think you need to work with this other peer of mine because of the nature of your problem. Because he has this thing called, back then I called it identity based performance, where we would build a specific identity for that particular field of play that you have in your life and in your world. It was such a powerful concept because, you know, like, as you know, there's so many great ideas in the world of personal development or self help or personal leadership. But a lot of times, they don't have a container for you to hold them inside of in order to improve yourself. Because you go, hey, I just need to get better at it. And we just think of ourselves as this whole being, I just need to get better. Well, from what I've learned and experienced, it's that's a pretty ineffective way of trying to help someone transform. It's a lot more helpful to constrain it down into a specific role in your life and go, let's take this thing that's really important to you. And let's just work at that. Let's not work at the whole version of Todd. Let's just work on this. Because then what happens is if we get momentum and confidence in another area of our life, it can spill out over into other areas and domains. So the alter ego effect is that there is a power in using a secret identity to help transform your life. And in reality, because of the model that I built, and as you know, everything's inside the book is that it ends up bringing out of you the most real version of you that you most want because you're the one who's driving it. If you start building an alter ego to try to impress other people, or for any sort of outside social status type thing, it will end up ruling you because nothing in the world is only good. Like I'm not here to say alter egos are always only good. Well, just like anything in life, there's habits that can be really bad. There's attitudes that can be bad. There's attitudes that could be good. Alter egos can be both good and bad. I just give you the model and the method on how to do it so that it drives you to where you want to go and the experience of life or whatever domain it exists inside of is what you want. Super cool. I watch a lot of anime with my kids and there's all these talk about shape shifters and everything. As they get better at their superpower, the kids are always like, oh, he's shape shifting with ease now. He doesn't have any. So it seems like that might be the goal. One of my favorite quotes, and it's one of the tenets of my the makes sense ecosystem, is that it's who you are that determines how well what you do works. Very often people are out there doing a lot of things and not getting the results that they would like. And I say, well, maybe you're not the right person for the job yet. And we get into this conversation of this different version of them. So I just love the way that this rolls. I've heard you say that we don't rise to our goals, but we perform to the level of our identity. What I love about that is it's something that's already inside of us. Sometimes people have to identify it. But well, I read your book. Pay attention. Can you explain the identity theory and cognitive performance research behind it? That's what I'm interested in. Yeah. So there are so many different levers that we can pull in trying to improve and develop ourselves. And a very popular one and easy for people to understand as habits. And the challenge for some people is they might be building a habit on top of an identity or a way that they see themselves that they just fundamentally have this very negative attitude or belief about their own capability to go out and continue on with the habit or could be even a belief. So the way to kind of think about it is like a concentric circle that keeps on spinning out. And at the very center of it is we have an identity. And then attitudes and beliefs start to form on the outside of an identity that we have. And then outside of the attitudes, beliefs, and even values is the level of behavior that we have. So that could be the habits and again, behaviors or routines that we end up doing as that identity. And then outside of that, human beings, we act in context. This is what I would encourage people to remember from this conversation is we as human beings, we act into the context of our environment. So just like the dragon is really specifically built for a specific area of your life, there's another side of you that is built for being around your family or when you might go out and compete in a sport. These are all parts of us that get amplified in a different way. So human beings are very contextual. So if you look at identity, attitudes, beliefs, and then behaviors and actions, and they sit in the context of our environment. So explaining that to people, we actually have multiple identities. There's not just one central identity that a human being has because we have many roles that we play. And in the world of psychology, one of the main kind of, one of the founding foundations of most psychological treatments in the last 70, 80 years was that is this idea of single self theory, which is that the people with the lowest rates of anxiety and stress disorders saw themselves as having one single self, one identity that kind of they carried with them in every context of their life. Now, for me, that made no sense because I'm really actually working with people on the six inches between their ears. And my athletes would come off the field and they of course be different. And, you know, like they might be in the context of their sport, like a killer out on the ice or the football field, but then when they come off, they're very quiet and reserved and, you know, different things. So the idea of a single self never resonated with me. And then in about 2008, the world of psychology flipped itself on its head. And one of the fastest growing fields of psychological study was this idea of multiple self theory, which was now getting in more of the domain of where I operated already, which is that the people with the lowest rates of stress and anxiety disorder actually had multiple cells and they were aware of them and they knew where to bring them in their lives. So it's one thing to have awareness about them. Now, the secondary thing is to be intentional with the character traits or attributes that you most want to be bringing out into those different cells that you have. Like I have a very different and intentional self that I want to bring to my kids as a dad to them. And the model of inspiration that I use to kind of carry myself towards an aspirational idea is Mr. Rogers and my own father. And the great thing about them is they actually sat when I was building out this kind of alter ego for myself, they sat at the very opposite end of a spectrum of how I perceived myself as a coach, you know, because I'm working with really big personalities around the globe who have some very large, not even egos, but super egos. And they need it in order for them to face the demands of their sports. So I was a challenger and still am a challenger coach to people because I need to break through the heart exterior of that ego and get into the soft gushy core so that I can help to shift and shape those clients. But I didn't want to be a challenger dad to my kids. So now, well, Mr. Rogers, you would never think of as being a challenger to people. So now I've got these really two strong identities that I am able to switch between, well, like automatically, because they're just a part of who I am. The great thing about it is the Mr. Rogers version of me, patient, kind, caring, understanding, all those qualities that I see in him and my own dad, they've actually been carried into now my coaching self as well. Does that make sense? Oh, totally. And what I love about all that you're saying and also your book is anybody that dives into it, it's just one of those books that is talking about you. It's so easy. Like if you walk you can walk up to anybody and ask them a question about their alter ego, it might take them a couple seconds, but they'll know what that means. Right. But what we're doing is we're getting a little bit more into the science. It's funny what you said. It's very true that the dragon has a specific task, you know, maybe we'll have time to get into that. But the dragon has multiple personalities. This is an interesting alter ego, because it's like, that's my baseline version. But like when the dragon is talking to my wife, who by the way, we call the chicken, it's really funny house. And when she gets crazy, we call her fried chicken. But the dragon that talks to his wife is known as draggy, like cute draggy, right? But it's the same thing. So a lot of, yeah, well, and then even that the great, I think you and I had talked about this. And if you hadn't, then I was talking to myself about how it's fine, because I've built out dragons as alter egos for other people. Oh, yes, yes, you did tell me because of the nature and the mythology of dragons. There is unlike other animals, thing that's unique about dragons is that there are colors associated with dragons in mythology. So like even you, you can have like, I got the green dragon, and that's the that's the dad or that's the husband version. And then I've got the red dragon, and that's the guy who just needs to breathe fire of execution and get shit done. And then there's the black dragon, and he could be the strategist. Like there's the cool thing about dragons is you can use the same kind of core, I love it, elemental idea, but expanded using colors really. And it's funny because colors is actually a big part of the framework that I build out with athletes and Kobe's a great example, because we didn't start with the black mamba, we started with a snake, and then the snake evolved into the black mamba about eight months after we had built out the sort of central idea. That is super, super cool. I mean, it really resonates and you use the word mythological, because it's kind of fun for people to create a creature or a name, you know, our friend Jim Quick has personality tests that you find out if you're a dolphin or a cheetah or something like that. And people like to identify with things like that. But why do you think that is too? From your own experience and you going through it, what do you think helps to resonate? I know the answer, but I also like to know what other people's answers are. I mean, I'll just speak for myself that you mentioned the word mythological. What I found fascinating about dragons before I became the dragon was that many cultures talked about them, but no one's ever got proof that one existed. So my evolution into who I am today, I chose a mythical creature because I am a mythical creature from the eyes of who I used to be. So that's kind of where that was. But I would say that it gives me confidence. It definitely changes my clarity. But because the dragon used to represent something I was afraid of, now that I've embodied him, it's become a superpower. So it makes me courageous and fearless. I like to say unfuck with the bull. Yeah. And so you're kind of playing around from what I would consider to be a central plot for human beings, which as you were asking before about, hey, what's the science and why this exists? And I appreciate those questions. Neurologically, I want to know what's happening in the brain. Explain what's going on here. What are the actual, not even psychological, neurological switches that are going on? Because there's so many phenomenons that human beings have. But I've always tried to find ways of explaining it with science. But the one thing that we need to recognize that a part of the human experience is that we are storytelling beings. We create meaning and story from things. And it is a reflex that we have, good, bad, or indifferent. So the power of it, then, is that I'm giving someone a mental model to use, a little bit scientific then, because we, as human beings, we like to organize stuff. So an alter ego, it helps us with our own storytelling in our heads. And the storytelling is to empower us to go and take action towards the thing that we would most like to bring into the world. So it's honoring these two ideas of science, reality, groundedness, practicality. And then there's just, we're storytelling. And the cool thing about a dragon is it's your story. I can't sell an alter ego off of a shelf. It has to be something that is meaningful, connects to the emotion of someone. And that's the fun artful part of the work that I get to do. I was a chiropractor for almost 20 years. And I remember I used to come up with these really creative questions to see if somebody was right for the job. And one of the questions I used to ask, it was, what animal do you connect with the most? And they would say like horse and stuff. And then I would say, why? It's pretty fascinating to get that information. I was trying to find out their personality traits and stuff like that. Yeah. Mine's a fox, by the way. Is it right? Clever. Yeah. Because Todd in its root heritage form is a Scottish name, meaning a fox. Clever and sophisticated. But my other one is Donkey. I love it, don't love Donkey. Donkey are one of the few animals on the planet that do not have a natural predator. And they're one of the few animals that you can give it a job on any continent and it will do the job. If you want something carried over a mountaintop in Afghanistan, give it to the donkey, the mule, right? If you need something carried across a desert or the plains of North America, give it to the donkey, the mule. Yeah. It's this practical side of, you know, my own psychology, I guess. Very much the role of a dad. You know, I definitely play the role of a donkey in this house sometimes. So in your title, it kind of suggests, I speak a lot and a lot of people talk about being authentic and, you know, letting their authentic self come out. It's like people just have so much comfort in thinking, like, that's the goal. But your title suggests that sometimes our authentic self can actually hold us back. I know what you're going to say, but I just love this because it's just so shocking that one of the primary goals that would be like saying, like, yeah, living in the present moment could be what's holding you back, you know? So tell me a little bit about, like, why is that that your authentic self could be the thing that's holding you back? Well, just structurally, the two words kind of create a prison for you right off the bat. One, going back to what we discussed earlier, let's just go to the word self. There is no one you. There's kind of the best frame that I can give other people is at our core. Like, if we are, if everything in the universe is energy, then in the human form, what comes out as energy from us are traits, qualities, attributes. That's really what we're able to bring forth through an identity in a given area. So going back to, like, Mr. Rogers, the traits and the qualities that I most want to bring out as a dad to my kid, like I said, is, you know, patience, curiosity, fun, humor, kindness, like, these are the qualities that I want to make sure that I'm bringing to my kids to help amplify them in whatever way they're going to end up growing. So it's more useful to think not as a, we're just a container of a self. There's qualities that we are trying to bring out. So that's one thing that is a struggle with that phrase and then authentic. Well, in the root word of the word authentic, it actually means in reference to an object. Okay. So right off the bat, whoever came up with the term authentic self, right away created a prison for the people to be kind of viewing the world through, because authentic is actually supposed to be meant if the root word is Greek, meaning authentic, does it have a certificate? Can that object, can we prove that that object is true in its form? It's like a non fungible token of some sort. Yeah. And so we're not objects, we're subjective. And we're subjective beings because of the fact that we shift and morph and change slightly because of environments. I just don't operate with the word authentic self. And the other thing is too, I'm always very curious as how successful are the people who came up with these terms? Like, you know, what's their level of sort of life mastery, so to speak. And I'm not posturing that I've mastered life. I said, I don't even believe in that anyway. I think it's just we're always developing ourselves anyway. But there's a lot of very popular personal development self help ideas. They sound wonderful. But it's like cotton candy, tastes good, but it does not have any sort of nutritional sustenance to it whatsoever. And there's a lot of that stuff in the world of personal development. So authentic self by just its root is not a great frame to be operating through. That doesn't mean that I don't want people to be real or to feel grounded in who they are and what they're trying to bring to a situation. But the pursuit shouldn't necessarily be authentic self because right away, I think it'll trap a lot of people. I just love this because one of my favorite observations, more now than ever. And I've taken part in it myself, but I'm more of an observer these days, is just the whole realm of cognitive bias. You know, I mean, when somebody says, Hey, that's just who I am, take it or leave it. It's funny because they're completely sleepwalking through this idea that they're just protecting potentially a limiting belief that they have, you know, one of the things I talk about in my book is how for the most part, we're not really calling the shots in life, the world is calling them for us, you know, we're not playing the game as much as the game is playing us. And we just don't even know it. So when somebody stands for their religious beliefs or their core values or something like that, they're unaware that somebody else taught them that, but they're calling it authentic, you know, to protect what I would say is probably a limiting belief. I'm all right. Well, and the flip of that too is because we're such and again, this going now going into my world of, you know, really mental game training with people. Right. I mean, from a kind of foundational set, what I'm trying to do with my athletes is to help them develop, it's called perception and cognition training. So my point is like, we're pattern recognizing machines. And we're also pattern affirming machines to ourselves as well. Now, I actually hate to use the word machine because I'm also of the mind that people love to use the metaphor of, oh, garbage in, garbage out, we're like computers and we're not. Because again, this is the art side of the human experience. There's a lot of people who've come from the exact same experience, but they've gotten different results than someone in. So it's not just garbage in, garbage out. There's some other phenomenon that are happening, but we do live through patterns. And so when we can recognize that even about ourselves, we can start to question our own pattern as, oh, if I just start to develop this new pattern, and I'm patient with its process, eventually that new pattern will become the new filter, the new lens, the new perception that I have on the world. It's just as a quick example for my own life in using alter egos. When I started my business, I was very young. I was 21. And it came about very accidentally. I didn't go into it going, I'm going to build a mental game coaching and training business. It was just a mom asked me after a football game because I was now coaching at a high school and spending a lot of time with the kids and kind of giving them strategies on helping them with their own mental game, just because it was the thing that really helped me develop as an athlete. And then she just said, well, hey, can you mentor Kirby? And I was like, yeah, sure. And then she was just like, she leaned in and said, how much would you charge Todd? And I was like, oh, how about $75 for three sessions? And when I said it, I was like vomiting in my throat. I was like, no, that's like, that's a million dollars. Such a ridiculous idea. And she's like, okay, great. So here I am, I start working with the athletes. And I was like, oh, people started spreading the word and started to get some business. And I'm like, but is this even a real thing? I wasn't smart in business by any stretch at that point in time. So I resolved, okay, well, I'm going to do as many speeches as I can in the next 90 days to see if this is an actually validated idea. Because I was the only skill that I actually had was speaking on stages, got a lot of success with it. But when it came to the side of my business where I needed to be calling people up and trying to book things, I would go to bed at night, resolved that I was going to, you know, make tomorrow a great day, you had big plans, big convictions. And then I would end the day not doing those things. And then I would beat myself up again at the end of the day because I didn't do the things that I said yesterday that I was going to do. And I repeated that cycle over and over and over again. And then one afternoon, three o'clock in the afternoon, I was killing time by watching an Oprah Winfrey episode. And it's actually ended up being, I found out later, one of Oprah Winfrey's favorite episodes with this lady, Johnny Jock, who was unpacking a story of how Oprah had these end of year kind of auction events of selling off some of her favorite things from her wardrobe or whatever. And this lady could only afford a pair of Oprah's shoes. So she bought a pair of Oprah's shoes. And Oprah's like a size 12 or something like that. And this woman was like a size seven. And she would put them in the corner of her room. And on the days where she didn't think that she would be able to get through the day, she would go and quote, stand in Oprah's shoes. It was a really lovely story. It was beautiful. And years later, they did a return to see how her life changed and transformed. And she became an incredibly successful social worker in her community, somewhere in the kind of mid north, like Indiana or Cleveland, I think. Anyway, but I was sitting there watching, I'm like, oh, wait a second, I used an alter ego. Like I did the same thing sort of when I played football. And why don't I just, oh, wait, I can't use the same alter ego. His name was Dronimo for my business, because he's kind of more built for football. So well, who would I become? And I immediately I thought, oh, super Richard, my first name's Richard. And because someone was like, oh, Todd just sounds like a juvenile name. And Richard sounds a little bit older. You gotta remember, I'm 21. I look like I'm 12. So all of these insecurities were the causation of what caused me to build the alter ego, which by the way, is typically the cause for most people's desire to build out another identity for themselves is insecurities that they have about the current version of me can't go and win. But if I had this version of me, that would. And these are all very natural thoughts. I share them with people because I want one of your listeners to go, oh my God, like I had I felt the same way. Or you know what, I used to do that. And I never realized that that was a thing. I want to normalize this. It's a very normal part of the process of the human experience. So I did super Richard. And he was the composite of Superman, who was one of my heroes, 1970s, 80s version, Benjamin Franklin, who was always one of my like, massive inspirations. I mean, you talk about someone who shape shifted through his life. Right. He had seven phenomenal careers in his entire lifetime. By the way, Charlie Munger, in one of his final final interviews, one of the richest men ever, Warren Buffett's partner, talked about how really his mentor in his mind for who he modeled his entire life after was Benjamin Franklin as well. And then the third one was Joseph Campbell, who you'll know who that is, right? Well, literally the book on the power of myth. So and I and I chose specific traits and qualities from each of them. Super Richard went out and I bought a pair of non prescription fake glasses, because I was going to do, you know, I'm putting on my cape, right? And when I would practice that, and I would practice that. Why? Because I was not promoting my business. That's why I was doing it. I was not making I was good as a coach, but I wasn't good as promoter of the business. I had a hard time talking about quote myself in that way. But Super Richard, he was specifically hired to be the advocate for Todd's stuff. That was his mission. That was literally what I wrote. He is the advocate for Todd's stuff. He is not Todd is. I was already using disassociative words, which now is I teach and train and have for 25 years on the power of that language that you can use. Okay, so I'm deliberately practicing being Super Richard getting on calls, forcing myself to do it. It was very felt very weird and unnatural in the very beginning, but it got a little bit easier. Okay, so fast forward six months. I end up getting off of two calls consecutively where I book myself a couple of really good gigs myself back when you actually hung up phone. I hung up the phone. And then I looked down on my desk and my glasses were sitting on my desk. I wasn't wearing them anymore. I share the quote in my keynotes where Kerry Grant, the famous golden era actor of the 1940s and 50s and 60s, who was known as being very debonair and charismatic and a real gentleman said, I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until I finally became that person or he became me. But at some point we met. And that's what I like to kind of give to other people is you do something long enough, you become the thing. The key there is let's make sure that we're moving towards the thing that you most want to be, what you want to be, not what someone else says that you need to be what you want to be. And then we use alter egos or whatever you want to use as a device to help make that happen. First thing I want to, before I forget is I want to go back to that day when you asked for 75 bucks and just recognize that that was the last day that we let Todd ask for money. Frankly, it wasn't the last day Todd stuck around asking for the same price for three years. Definition of insanity would be to use the wrong alter ego over and over and over again. I love that. I love so much about locking in because I have naturally, you were talking about if you do something long enough, you become it. I no longer portray myself as the dragon. And I actually am the dragon to the point where people laugh because I talk about myself in that person. And it's not something that I like to train myself or practice my alter ego. It's like my wife calls me dragon. My kids call me dragon. My wife calls me draggy. But I've got my glasses on right here. And what people, it takes them a little bit of a time, but they don't have any lenses, my glasses. And it's kind of a funny thing because people look at them. But what they don't understand is I popped my lenses out because I just made a decision that I no longer wanted to view and perceive the world through any outside forces. That was the gimmick behind it. For the listener, what JC did is that's a story and a meaning that means something to you that drives hopefully a positive association and an act. It empowers the totem. It empowers you to take the actions that you want to take or to perceive and see the world through a tone that works for you. And the funny thing about it is that, first of all, people have trouble understanding this, but when I put these glasses on, I actually can see better. So there's no science behind that, but that's not like a... There actually is. I shared in the book, there's studies that have been done on just the effect of glasses, not even the lenses, the glasses and how... Oh, I didn't pick that up. Yeah. The first study that was done was in the U.S. military with Air Force pilots and how it changed vision. Well, look at my eyes. Like when I take my glasses off, it looks like I took my glasses off. Yeah. But these are... So in any case, what I'd love to talk about a little bit is, I guess we would call it or you call it symbolic embodiment. Why is it that physical totems, like my glasses, uniforms, rings, costumes, act or can act as a trigger? I mean, Superman goes into the phone booth and he comes out with this. Yeah. So because somebody listening right now might have an alter ego, but they might not know how to bring it about. I mean, I wear these glasses for the most part all day. I have to remember to take them off when I go out into public with my kids. They're like, Dad, you're wearing the glasses without their hands. It's a great dinner right now. So tell me a little bit about the totem concept. Yeah. So as a part of the method that I ended up building out over time was the importance of trying to find something in the physical world that we could use as a helpful ritual for the person to become intentional. Especially again, I'm starting out in athletics and then the idea spiraled out into so many other domains of life around the world. And again, I want to make sure that I'm honoring this properly. I did not ever build the concept of the alter ego. I think it is a human form that has been there. Cicero coined the term in 44 BC in a letter to a friend when he talked about, he's the first one to kind of give it the name alter ego, which means the other eye or trusted friend within all I did was I kind of noticed it as an actual device and then kind of tried to codify it for other people. So as a part of the method in helping to really step into and honor the idea or honor this identity, it was helpful to have a physical thing totem artifact, something that someone could wear. And then the other side of me, the researcher side goes, well, why is this a thing? What goes on in the human mind to help make this happen? Well, it turns out that there is one psychological switch that it's flicking. And it's called enclosed cognition. And enclosed cognition is this weird phenomenon that human beings have. And again, it kind of explains it in the storytelling side of us that because we add meaning and story to objects around us or to uniforms and clothing and different artifacts that we see other people wear or have on, the funny thing about us is when we put on that thing, we will naturally, really without even thinking, we will encode ourselves, encode our mind in the traits and the abilities of whatever story we have about that object. So case in point, can I share a quick little study? Yeah. So the Kellogg School of Management wanted to kind of put this idea to the test. And they brought a bunch of university students into this lab. And on the wall was this thing called a stoop test. And a stoop test is, people have seen this before, it's actually something that tests for any sort of like dyslexia or ADHD and things like that. Okay, so it's got a bunch of words, colors, words of colors. So like yellow and red and blue, all in lines and columns. But each word is done in a different color than the word itself. So you might have the word yellow, but it's done in red. And the job is to try to get through all of these words by saying the color that you're seeing, not the word. And it's because the brain processes words before it processes colors. So it's kind of like a bit of a hiccup that happens in your brain. So they bring in these students and they test them, go through the stoop test, track how fast they do it and how many mistakes that they make. Okay, now a second group comes in and they have, they hand them a white coat, like a painter's coat. And they say, put on this painter's coat. So they put it on. And then they give them the test, track the data and the results. Then they bring in a third group. They send them the exact same white coat. But this time they tell them it's a lab coat. And they put it on and then they do it. What were the results? Well, the people who were wearing the lab coat were able to do it in less than half the time and made less than half the mistakes as both groups. The painter's coat group had the exact same results as everyone else. Okay, well, what explains that? Well, it's that when we get put on a lab coat, we're enclothing our mind in the traits and the abilities of someone who's a lab tech or a doctor. And because we have deep meaning behind what it means to be a doctor, art, discipline, studious, detailed, it just so happens that those traits help you to do what? The task of going through a stoop test. Being a painter or wearing a painter's coat, which is creativity, expression, all those traits don't help you to do that test. They did another test subsequently, which was more of a creativity type test. The people were wearing the painter's coat. All of them, out of the way, the results go up. The people wearing the lab coat, same results as people in their plain clothes. So that is a bit of a, you know, example of this idea of enclosed cognition. So when we're building out, and like you did with the glasses, there's a bunch of other story and meaning and beliefs and attitudes that you have about putting on glasses. Some of them, again, going back to the early part of conversation, they weren't given to you. They're just there. They're in culture. One of them with glasses is that people who wear glasses are smart. That was one of the reasons why I went out and got a pair of glasses is because I wanted to be a peer smart because I looked, I felt like I looked so young. So I wanted to look a little bit older. That was one of my intentional reasons. What I didn't realize was a bunch of other positive effects that I was getting from putting on the glasses, just the intentionality of it. So when we're building out any identity, whether you use an alter ego or not, I don't really care, but this is actually a very powerful process of building a strong identity. Think about having a uniform. Think about using an object. It doesn't just have to be a pair of glasses. It could be, I've got clients who have pebbles and stones taken from an area that's important to them, a farm that they grew up on, their grandparents farm or ranch, a place that they used to go to with their dad when they would go on hikes, a river that they used to go to, or that they are near right now, or they're just someone who really deeply believes in being connected to the land or nature. And they have, they keep the rock or pebble in one pocket. And then when they're about to go and do something, go into a meeting because they really want to bring a certain type of leadership presence, they will intentionally move it into the other pocket. So there's all sorts of ways that you might kind of unpack inside the book. Here's a few different ways that you can use this idea of in cloth cognition or using totems and artifacts or uniforms as a way of showing up and bringing the most powerful version of you to that particular field. I love talking to you about this because you can read the book and you can think that you understand it and grasp it and say, oh, this is what I like about it and stuff. But what I'm noticing is that you have this way about you that gets me to recognize even more of it. And I speak about this, but it's a little bit on the personal side. But a big part of my story is that, you know, it's the first chapter of my book, first time I ever let it out there. But I was in a very dark place in my life where I wanted to close the curtains and turn the lights out. And I went and I went through this experience with a therapist that unveiled to me that I had bought into a perspective that was making me think that that's what I should do. And then all of a sudden I came back online, hence the word makes sense. And I, oh my God, I made sense of things. And I experienced what it was like to have a shift in perspective turned me completely back on track. So for me, that's what the glasses were for is they were, but you're unveiling a little bit more to me that there's an intelligence factor to it and, you know, yeah, all that. But for me, the glasses, when they go on, it's just a way of me reminding myself to choose the way that I look at things not be persuaded to. So we don't watch a lot of TV here and things like that. So I wish that I had this conversation with you before I wrote the book because I would have added that, but maybe part two. Yeah, well, I mean, we all have aspects of our books that we would go back and I mean, I'm in an author mastermind with a mutual friend, Jim Quick. And we, there isn't one author in that room and everyone in there has sold million plus copies that we don't know. Oh, I would change this about the book. So, you know, another perspective for you just knowing how, you know, I would say you have a very high EQ IQ around kind of your spiritual connectedness is what if the really deeper, deeper soul part of you is the one who puts on the glasses to help to remind you of like trying to give you the perspective of what it sees of you. Yes. And and I share that with a lot of, I just got chills because I was, I was just talking about that with one of my other, not every client is spiritual. I've got clients who are atheist in their approach, I guess, or agnostic in their approach. I don't care for the person, but I was talking to a client of mine, superstar in Champions League football over in Europe. And that's what hammered him like a belt ball peen hammer right between the eyes. You know, what if the action that you took for us to come together and work together was because there's actually a deeper, deeper part of your soul reaching out across the airwaves because we came together in a very odd way. And really urging you that there's a deeper sense of what you're capable of out there. And I got chills again because I could just see him shift in that moment where any chance I can get and helping someone recenter themselves to a very deeper portion of energy. That's just the most fun. I can chill. So again, that's just the most fun part of what I did. That's the best kind of dopamine hit is when you, when you help, you know, you guide somebody. So I got to ask an AI question. Yeah. You know, I just spent like a week with John Lee, who does like everything through AI. It's so funny. Like he doesn't, you can't even have a conversation with him like, as friends without him asking his phone something. So, so we're in this world where we're offloading cognition and we're seeking efficiency and mistaking it as intelligence. And so my question would be in an AI driven world where machines are kind of handling things like logic and efficiency. What is it that becomes the unique human advantage in that whole mix? I've got my own opinion of this. And how does the alter ego effect potentially amplify it? Yeah. Great question. The, I'll share a quick little thing that I've noted. I'm lucky that I get to operate in a few different worlds. I have a lot of high level business clientele. And then, of course, my athletes and to a smaller extent, people in Hollywood or entertainment as well. And the one thing that I've noticed in the last year and a half is this deterioration of self-trust amongst the business clientele. These are really smart, high powered individuals. And because they've offloaded a lot of their thinking or decision making in some ways to AI to help walk them through something, they've lost what would be really reasoning power in their cognitive front load. MIT's even started to do some studies around the effects of, it's almost like doom scrolling, but doom chatting, I would say. And whereas in the athletics world, it hasn't hit the athletics world. My athletes still have to go out there and perform. They can't stop in the middle of a hockey game and then go to their chat and say, hey, what should be my read on this particular play? It doesn't work that way for them. So that's just an interesting thing is, to your point, people are offloading their ability to reason. And I've seen it, JC, on stages, on panels where I've seen people who are, quote, experts on AI and their ability to in the moment answer something in an erudite clear way is not very strong now. But if they were able to respond by an audio message 15 seconds later, their chatbot would have helped them to answer the question. So what's the space, art, creativity, the humanness of things? I have got a good friend who is one of the top and most followed psychiatrists, psychologists in the world. He is a massive supporter of the book, said lovely things about it. He has it in all of his clinics. He gets all of his technicians and therapists to train on it. He's actually built a bit of a training program around it. And he funnels, he works with a lot of celebrities and pro athletes as well. So he sent me a new client recently, and they had built out an alter ego last year. And he sent me the PDF document on everything they built out. And I know he told me that he built out a GPT for it. And so I'm looking at it, and I'm like, you know what? It's nailed all the beats, but it doesn't have that. I'm looking at a human quality, like this emotional resonance, because it has to be there in order for the person to drive it into their being. And on the very first call with the new client, I was talking about the work that they had done. And I knew that there was a gap in that person's real volition and commitment to it. And I was able to close that gap pretty quickly. But AI would have an extraordinarily difficult time being able to mimic the human. It can model it in some way, but I can detect it really quickly. I don't know about you, but that's, I think, a part of the space that we have with the gaps in AI right now is just the human-human quality of something. I got deep into this with John. What's interesting is he speaks openly about this. He actually has this version of himself that is the AI guy. But what you come to learn is that it's because, just by the greater majority of his life, as it's severely dyslexic, barely can read. So there's a version of him when he's tapped into chat GPT or all of these platforms that puts him on stage and makes him extraordinary. It's pretty interesting. Got this conversation about AI and technology. I'm a parent and stuff, and I know you are too. It's something I'm very, very interested in. I just interviewed Wendy Suzuki was just on here, and she talks a lot about exercise and bathing the brain and things like that. We were talking about brain rot and how unknowingly, and it's not just kids, it's adults too, that we're just offloading the thinking. Now we're walking around with opinions and concepts and core values that we stand behind with our authentic self. Meanwhile, you have no idea that it's just been programmed. My question now is, if somebody, and I say if somebody, there's a lot of people out there that probably feel stuck between their potential, like this conversation says, oh, that sounds great, and they might be making a mistake about which alter ego is right for them. Somebody might be stuck between their potential and their performance. What's the one mindset shift, is what I'm trying to say, that they might want to hear right now to kind of prompt them. Okay, so I can give you a couple one. The word that you just used between potential and their performance, I would, the word potential, and this isn't a knock against you, the word potential is banned inside of my company. I don't use it. And it's because words end up just like kind of the word authentic has become a bit of a posturing word. The word potential, when I first started in working with athletes, I would sit in the stands and listen to parents talk about their kids. And again, I'm young, and I would hear two dads talk about, okay, he's got so much potential, or she's got so much potential, but she just doesn't work hard enough. And so the word potential became banned for me because I see a lot of people use it as a very judgmental term against other people, which means that if we're using it in a judgmental term against other people, we're probably being very judgmental with ourselves as well. So I don't talk to people about their potential because it's a bit of an ethereal idea. So the word I use with people is capability, because capability just sounds like it's got some more substance to it. Plus, it sounds like it's something that you already have, because that's my view is you already have these things. My job is to just be a thinking partner with you and help sort and sift that stuff and help you to get clarity so that you can take the action that you want to take. So I'd say capability is one thing. So that's one thing I would actually say as a mentors, start using the word capabilities with yourself because you have capability. You might not have a lot of capability and skill yet, but you have capability and energy. You might have capability in your desire to make a shift happen. So there's all sorts of different types of capability. The second thing is even going back into the AI conversation, the people who are going to win, no matter what's going on, whether it's AI or whatever the next evolution of something is going to be, is the people who are the most flexible and adaptable. And that's actually what I give people as what mental strength or mental toughness is. It is your ability to be flexible and adaptable, despite what you're getting as circumstances. It's because the people who are the most flexible and adaptable, they're going to find a new way, you know, and that's how I want to view myself like, Hey, I'm going to figure it out. No, yes, is there going to be a lot of chaos and complexity and ambiguity and uncertainty? Sure. But I'm going to figure it out. What does that do? It helps to emotionally regulate who I am or who you are as well, so that you can see things with a little more clarity and without a lot of stress or anxiousness that's there. And for someone who feels like they're stuck between capability and what their performance is, I would say to draw tiny circles, draw smaller circles for yourself. Most of the time when people are caught in that type of a loop, we start to doom it into something I am a failure, I am. And we make we make our entire identity as if it is caught in this firestorm or this tornado, as opposed to let's draw a tiny circle. Let's let's say life is fucked up right now. Okay. But what's an area of your life or your world that you could make some progress towards shifting and changing? You can think of it in, hey, what role is really important for me that, yes, it feels like everything could be off track, but this one, I'm going to get on track. Because what I know is the very act of getting something else on track in a human being's life actually helps to get other things on track. It's counterintuitive. They want to try and go full bore, and I'm going to shift my entire life. I don't put on workshops like that. I don't do that for other people because that's just not the way that human experience works. I try to use physics and physics is about momentum. Let's go momentum in a tiny circle of your life and start to allow that thing to create a ripple effect across multiple areas. So those would be kind of a few different mind frames for people. I love it. You made me think of one of my favorite books, Susan David's Emotional Agility. That's a great book. I haven't read it. It's delicious. Yes, it's a great book. I mean, because it's just that piece right there, just talking about that as a superpower. The only problem with you is that there's so many things that, you know, the way that the dragon's brain works is that I very much listen and I'm a very open and curious person, and I want to go down all these tunnels and things like that. So that being said, anybody listening right now. There we go. Maybe I can lock myself in as a recurring guest now. Well, yeah, maybe once a week or something. But to all of the sense makers out there, this is a book that you guys will just love. It's like a slice of pizza. It's just a yummy, yummy book. And like I said before, it'll just totally resonate with you. So my final question is, it's not that there's a finish line or an end goal, but when it comes to the alter ego, we can look at it as an evolution. And by the way, the concept of capability in our community, we always say, we believe that people are very capable but scattered. So what we choose is to obtain clarity before action. So that's the whole concept of my book and stuff. So preaching to the choir there. So final question is, is the goal, as if there was a goal, is the direction to eventually outgrow the alter ego or master the ability to step in and out of identities at will? Yeah, I would say that, what a funny term, I just caught myself, I would say, well, I'm about to say it. So I am going to say that's why using the purpose of the identity is so powerful because knowing that it's eventually going to become a natural part of how you perceive things, how you act, it becomes this amazing, the purpose of the alter ego. When I think about the goal of it, is to master the ability to constantly evolve very, very quickly in the direction that you want to take. Because if you look at identity as more of a tool, that's how I try to frame it is identity actually can become a tool for you. Instead of me being ruled by words like, I am a coach or I am a speaker, I actually don't think of myself in the context of say like a noun, I've trained myself into thinking of myself in the context of a verb. So even on my homepage on my website, it says, I coach, I build, I write, I speak, because that's what I do. And no one can ever take that away from me. If you're an entrepreneur, that can get taken away from you. How? You could lose your business. A lot of very good friends who were on awards lists in 2019, their businesses, didn't have a business in 2020 because COVID came in and wiped them out. Right. So now they have a loss of what? Identity. But if you're entrepreneurial, no one can take that away from you. Because I had a friend who I made that mindset shift with him on March 27th of 2020, because he was losing his retail businesses. Huge business. And I said, ah, you're not an entrepreneur, you're entrepreneurial. And the great thing is, you can go and take those skill sets into any of our friends' business while you figure out what your next move is going to be. So there is no loss of identity. There was just an underoptimized way that you were viewing yourself, let's say. So I would just kind of pause it to other people that the ultimate goal of this is to get very good at knowing how to shift and shape and reshape your sense of who you are quickly in the direction that you most want to go. I'm going to send you a copy of my book. You're going to probably laugh a bunch because you'll see how much. And I promised that I did not write this book. I wrote this book before I met you. You'll see a lot of alignment. But a lot of my stories, you'll be able to say, oh, he's doing this here. He's building the story. I love that idea. I'm very, very open to that. Love this conversation. And I just know, you know, I get so excited because I know my listeners and I know what they're interested in and they're just going to love this. And can I just say one thing to your listeners too is you found a very thoughtful host. I've been interviewed. I think this is like over 900 times now. And there is a very, very, very, very tiny few people who in the kind of lead up to a podcast go through the lengths that you go through to try to make sure you put together the right episode. So as an interviewee, I appreciate that and just want to make sure that the listeners understand that you put a lot of effort and work into these. You just don't show up on a Tuesday and hit record because you invited someone yesterday to do it. This was kind of months in the making. So I appreciate you for that. And for those that are wanting to be a podcaster or a good interview one day, here's the real secret. Of course, you have to do your work. And I want to give some credit to my team that knows everything about Todd Herman and helped me with that. But the real secret is to only interview guests that you're actually curious and interested about. Yeah, that helps. Because then the conversation is like it is right now where I have many, many more questions. Todd, obviously, we're going to put the book out there, but I know that you have coursework and you've mentioned several times that people hire you. So what's the best place for people to go and stalk Todd Herman? Well, Todd Herman.me is my homepage on the interwebs. Todd Herman.me. Dot me. Yeah. Yeah. I'm a yeah, the dot com guys. Those guys were like the 72nd or something like that URL ever registered on the internet. I tried to get my I tried to get my name back in 1994. And there's a consulting group out of North Carolina. And we have to liaise back and forth all the time because sometimes they get people that are inquiring about me. And so Todd Herman.me is my homepage. And then on social media, Todd underscore Herman. And yeah, I'm always interested and especially from the podcast, if you if you're listening to this on Spotify, like screenshot it. Right. And then if you whether you tag us on social media and have your favorite takeaway, I just like to hear what resonated, what worked, what question do you have ping me in the DMs of social media? Because either I'll be getting it or my team, we go through them every single week. And it helps us to create good content and get back to people as well. Yeah. And if you want to keep your finger on the pulse of all things Todd, he's got a newsletter. I get it. And you know, it's it's a good ecosystem to be part of. So I want to thank you so much for being here. What a joy. And we had a couple of attempts to to get you here just because of family stuff. He's a family man. You know, he's not that he doesn't put his work before his family. But it's been an honor and privilege having you here. And I'm happy that for some reason, out of the 8 billion people in the world, you know, we have Jim quick to think about this, but that we bumped into each other and had this great conversation. I'm looking forward to continuing to connect to this is Todd Herman. And this podcast makes sense. That's it for today. To support the make sense with Dr. JC podcast, be sure to subscribe, like and share, as well as follow the make sense sub stack for free daily quotes, live streams and blogs. And remember, learning without action is just another form of distraction. If something hit home and you learn something today, give it away. That's the only way it's going to stay. See you next time. Hmm. Makes sense.