Dr. Gleb Tsipursky on Future Proofing and Our Blindspots | PoP 552

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Dr. Gleb Tsipursky on Future Proofing and Our Blindspots
Have you heard of future proofing? Can you utilize the principles of future proofing to maximize benefits and minimize conflicts in both your business and in your relationships? Why should you think twice about being “empathetic” in business?
In this podcast episode, Joe Sanok speaks with Dr. Gleb Tsipursky about Future Proofing and Our Blind Spots.

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Dr. Gleb Tsipursky on Future Proofing and Our BlindspotsMeet Dr. Gleb Tsipursky

Dr. Gleb Tsipursky is an internationally-renowned thought leader in future-proofing and cognitive bias risk management. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which specializes in helping forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities.

A best-selling author of several books, Dr. Gleb is well-known among business leaders for his national bestseller, Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Career Press, 2019). He also wrote the best-seller on effective professional and personal relationships, called The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships (New Harbinger, 2020). Earlier, he wrote The Truth Seeker’s Handbook: A Science-Based Guide (Intentional Insights, 2017), on how to overcome cognitive biases in all life areas. His new book is Resilience: Adapt and Plan for the New Abnormal of the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic (Changemakers Books, 2020).

Visit his website and connect on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube.

In This Podcast

  • What is future proofing?
  • The underbelly of intuition
  • “The empathy gap”
  • Gleb’s EGRIP 5 steps
  • Gleb’s advice to private practitioners

What is future proofing?

Future proofing has to do with scanning the horizon for a variety of threats: it might be ones as large as the pandemic, or it might be ones as small as having a series of conflicts with your business partner and your business partner leaving. That’s a pretty big threat for you but not for anybody else. (Gleb)
Future proofing has to do with forecasting threats, addressing them in advance and also forecasting opportunities and addressing those in advance as well.
For example, telehealth was a opportunity that some therapists had the chance or insight to get on board with before the strength of the pandemic was truly known.
Essentially, future proofing is about addressing potential threats and possible opportunities in advance. This is in order to either minimize or avoid damage, or to maximize benefits and further opportunities.
As many people know, who are therapists or have looked at this issue, we are full of cognitive biases. Our minds are unfortunately not wired for another environment … our gut reactions, intuitions and decision-making processes are wired for savannah environment, where we lived in small tribes of 15 to 150 people: that’s what our gut reactions are wired for and that is major reason why we suffer from a number of judgement errors called cognitive biases. (Gleb)
These dangerous judgement errors are what we need to address when we future proof. Because in a world where we would be ideal decision-makers, we would not need to future proof. In that ideal world, we would be considering and evaluating all possible options at all times with total clarity and with total consideration of potentialities.

The underbelly of intuition

Even though we are often told to go with out gut, to follow our heart and do what feels right, these processes come from a time when our brain was wired directly for survival in the wild. When our decisions would mean life or death, food or no food, conflict or peace. By following the example of tribalism, it can be understood why following our gut reactions might not work as well in the current millennium.
  1. These decision-making processes might have kept us alive back then, but they are no match for the present moment. Now, instead of the savannah fighting a lion, we stand in an office and need to think clearly about the future of the company and what we can do to help it thrive. These processes are also rooted in staying close to the tribe at hand. Which does not mean being loyal, it means being exclusive, and in a multicultural, global, multilingual society, this is exactly the opposite approach to take when you are wanting to expand your reach and the comfortability of your business.
  2. Within tribalism, there is status-seeking. There is internal fighting and conflict because people care more to be on the top instead of working well in a team. This is because people are still working with the cognitive bias of thousands of years ago, instead of grounding themselves in the present.
In modern times, instead of reacting blindly without consideration, it is a time to slow down and consider all the options before taking any leap or making any change.

“The empathy gap”

The empathy gap has to do with our feelings, it has to do with how we feel and how other people feel. When we think about ourselves we [consider ourselves] as rational creatures, making decisions with our mind. Unfortunately, that’s not the case at all. We make decisions primarily with our emotions, 90% of our decisions come from our emotions, our intuitions and the same goes for other people and we don’t realize that. (Gleb)
The empathy gap has to do with people greatly underestimating how other people’s emotions and motivations guide their decision-making. People do not think about the fact that in order to effectively influence someone or change someone’s mind, one has to influence their emotions, not their thoughts.
It is a problem that we have to appeal to people’s emotions in order to get them to make a change, or to be a part of a change. This is different to sympathy which is caring about what other people are feeling. Empathy is simply about getting them to understand where you are coming from.

Gleb’s EGRIP 5 Steps

This is about how to get someone who holds rational beliefs to shift them towards [more] rational beliefs: this is not about [arguing] with someone, this is about when you see someone holding clearly irrational beliefs … what you want to do is understand “hey, in order to hold these irrational beliefs there’s likely some emotional blocks going on”. (Gleb)
  1. Emotions: You want to assume that there are some emotional blocks, and you need to find out what their emotions are. What are they feeling about the situation? Are they scared? It is usually going to be some combination of negative emotions.
  2. Goals: What are goals that you both share? This is important to figure out because when we focus on what connects us we are more united, instantly.
  3. Rapport: Build rapport by reinforcing that you share goals by using empathetic listening, echo their emotions, your connection to the shared goals and highlight how you are both on the same side of the issue.
  4. Information: Here is where you share the information which would be the first step in a “typical” argument. You would share some uncomfortable facts in the context that you care for their emotions and want to assist, not threaten.
  5. Positive reinforcement: You do not want to have these conversations all the time because they take time and emotional labor. You want to give positive reinforcement to the other person for changing their mind and show them how it was a difficult thing, they accomplished it, and that it was admirable that they were able to do so.

Gleb’s advice to private practitioners

You really need to get their clients to not trust their intuitions because they are simply not wired for the modern world and that is nothing to be ashamed or guilty about. You can tell them that in order to make good decisions in the modern world, they can adopt some mental habits that might seem counterintuitive but are truly effective.

Books mentioned in this episode:

Useful Links:

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private practice consultant

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Podcast Transcription

[ALISON PIDGEON]
I’m Alison Pidgeon and along with Whitney Owens, we are business consultants for Practice of the Practice.
[WHITNEY OWENS]
And we’re here to tell you about Group Practice Boss. If you have a growing group practice and are looking for ongoing business support, we have a new membership community, especially for you.
[ALISON]
Every month, we’ll be taking a deep dive into topics group practice owners need to know, like how to manage people, how to manage your money and marketing and branding.
[WHITNEY]
For more information, go over to practiceofthepractice.com\grouppracticeboss.
[JOE SANOK]
This is the Practice of the Practice podcast with Joe Sanok, session number 552.

Well, I hope you are doing awesome. Today, we have an amazing guest. Today we’re going to be talking with Dr. Gleb, who I’ll tell you about in just a second, and he is going to be talking about future-proofing, but wherever you are, I hope your week is going great. I hope you are finding that balance between slowing down and killing it, slowing down and killing it. We know if we optimize our brains and slow down, then it’s so much easier to kill it. Well, without any further ado, let’s dive into this interview with Dr. Gleb.
[JOE]
Well, today on the Practice of the Practice podcast, we have Dr. Gleb Tsipursky. Gleb is an internationally renowned thought leader in future-proofing and addressing cognitive biases. He serves as the CEO of the boutique future-proofing consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts, which specializes in helping forward-looking leaders avoid dangerous threats and missed opportunities. Gleb, welcome to the Practice of the Practice podcast.
[GLEB TSIPURSKY]
Thank you so much Joe. I really appreciate you welcoming me.
[JOE]
Well, even in that bio, I imagine there’s some people that say, “Future-proofing? I’ve never heard that term.” So why don’t we just start there? So what is future-proofing?
[DR. GLEB]
Well, folks should probably have a thinking about the term in terms of the pandemic. People probably did not realize and expected that there’s a pandemic and they didn’t think about how to protect themselves, proof themselves from a pandemic or other sorts of disasters. Future-proofing has to do with scanning the horizon for a variety of threats. So it might be ones as large as the pandemic, or it might be ones as small as your business partner to having a series of conflicts with your business partner or your business partner leaving. So that’s a pretty big threat for you, but not for anybody else and so many others in between minor, larger threats. Future-proofing has to do with forecasting threats and addressing them in advance and then forecasting opportunities and addressing them in advance. So for example, for therapists, there were a lot of opportunities in virtual therapy that were going to come and the ones who seized most effective advantage of them in the pandemic are the ones who are winning out right now. So that’s one of the ways of future-proofing yourself for opportunities. So you want to look at threats, you want to look it up opportunities, forecast them effectively, and address threats in advance, maximize opportunities in advance.
[JOE]
Yes. So how do people do that? What are some ways that they can really look at those different threats and try to future-proof?
[DR. GLEB]
So that was the other part of my expertise, is cognitive bias, crisis management. As a number of people know who are therapists, who have looked at this issue, we are full of cognitive biases. Our minds are unfortunately not wired for the modern environment. So our minds, our intuitions, our gut reactions, our decision-making processes are wired for the Savannah environment. When we’ve lived in small tribes of 15 people to 150 people, that’s what our gut reactions our intuitions are wired for. And that is a major reason why we suffer from a number of dangerous judgment errors called cognitive biases. So that’s my area of expertise. Specifically, my expertise is how to defeat cognitive biases, how to overcome them. I’ve spent 15 years of academia studying these subjects, including seven years of professor at Ohio state, looking at how do we defeat dangerous judgment errors.

And so dangerous judgment errors, these cognitive biases that cause us to make decisions, that deviate away from the optimal ones are what we need to address when we future-proof. Because if we were ideal decision makers, we wouldn’t be need to future-proof. We’d just be looking all the time and effectively and correctly addressing threats and maximizing opportunities, but that’s not how the world works. We unfortunately are not that. We don’t make very good decisions. For example, when you’re looking at the world, we tend to look for information that confirms our preexisting beliefs and ignore information that doesn’t. That’s called the confirmation bias. One of over a hundred cognitive biases that I describe in my books. For example, The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships is a book focused on cognitive biases that cause us problems in relationships. So when you look at confirmation bias, you tend to look for things that your business partner is doing well and likes you, and wouldn’t have any conflicts with you and ignore information of growing problems, growing tensions, growing stresses.

That’s an example of how confirmation bias would cause us to miss these things. And of course it applies in the relationships very much as well. I mean, how many people there are therapists themselves, or of course the clients of therapists, how, when they are in a marriage or in a long-term relationship, when they’re surprised by one spouse saying, “Oh, we’re having real difficulties.” One partner saying we’re having real difficulties and the other partner completely not realizing it. That’s the confirmation bias is one of the causes. That’s one of over a hundred of these cognitive biases that we really need to be looking for and addressing in order to future-proof ourselves effectively.
[JOE]
Yes. So in your book, you talk about how we really shouldn’t trust our heart, we shouldn’t go with our gut, follow our intuition and doing that in relationships is a bad idea. So tell me a little bit more about that because a lot of relationship gurus, therapists, people say, ‘Trust your intuition.” And I mean, to me, that feels like there is something to that point of view that my intuition, there’s things that I can’t explain that I feel sometimes. And you’re pushing back on that. Tell me more about that.
[DR. GLEB]
Of course. Your intuition by definition is what you feel. We feel very comfortable with our intuition. Our intuition, our gut reactions, our emotions, we are very comfortable with them because that’s how we’re wired to be. The feeling of comfort. Our gut reactions is what causes us to go forward and go along with what our gut tells us. And you know, people like Tony Robbins tell us to behave like our authentic selves, to be primal, be savage. Malcolm Gladwell tells us to make our decisions in the blink of an eye in his book, Blink. Well, they tell us to do what feels good and you know very well that will people buy what makes them feel good. So if you give them the answers that they like to hear, they will tend to accept these answers. And that’s very unfortunate. And therapists of course know this very well. It’s very unfortunate that this is what happens.

But this is exactly what happens. Our gut reactions are often very wrong. They’re not wired for the modern environment. Now think about what they’re wired for; our intuitions, tribalism, that they’re wired for an environment. When we’ve lived in small tribes of 15 people to 150 people, we had to be very tribal in that environment. Very tribal. If we weren’t sufficiently loyal to our tribe, that small tribe, we’d be kicked out of our tribe. And then we die. And who weren’t sufficiently hostile to people who didn’t, who were not part of our tribe, who didn’t look like us, who didn’t think like us, who didn’t have our values, our appearances. Well, they take over our tribe and we die as well with the descendants of those people who did not die. We’ve thrived, they thrived in the reproduced and we are their descendants.

So tribalism is a very important part of who we are. And that causes us to make very bad decisions about people who don’t share our values, who don’t look like us, who don’t have the same preferences and predilection that we do. That’s a bad idea in a modern world and a very complex multicultural global environment. That’s for example, why we have various forms of discrimination in the modern world that are irrational, that are harmful, that are damaging to our society. They would have been functional in that Savannah environment, that tribalism, but they’re not functional at all in the modern environment. So that’s kind of one dynamic.

Then the other dynamic with intuitions that causes us to have bad problems in our modern society is how do we function within tribes. Within tribes, the way that you within your own tribe, the way that you survive, thrive and reproduce more that you carry your genes forward is status seeking. So getting up, getting higher status, getting reputation, and then going forward. And so right now, a lot of people are very competitive with each other and make decisions based on competitions. The person who dies with the most toys wins, as people say. And that causes us to make very bad decisions about our relationships within the dynamics that we are and people who we like and with whom we are in relationships. In our current tribe, we make bad decisions because of these competitive pressures.

And there’s so many other dynamics that cause us to make bad decisions. For example, when we’re communicating with others, one of the fundamental things that the research on communication has shown is that we like to argue. We’d like to debate when we think that other person’s wrong, arguments and debates and so on. Well, when you look at the research and what arguments and debates are about, they are actually not ways of discovering truth. We like to believe that they are about discovering truth, discovering who’s right and so on, but that’s not what they’re about. They are actually about dominating the tribal hierarchy and who wins the argument is the one who is going to be on top of the tribal hierarchy. And so they are, these are fights in other ways.

These are about power games and dynamics. They’re not about changing minds. Arguments, very rarely change people’s minds. It’s more about showing your power and your strength using not physical power, but mental prowess. So if you want to change someone’s mind, my book, The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships, talks about how you can do so in therapeutic relationships or just in your personal interactions, much more effective ways that do not involve arguments, but the research shows are effective. So arguments are not effective. And so many other dynamics, but let me stop there and see if you have questions about that.
[JOE]
Yes, I know that you say that one of the most powerful mental blind spots that we have is the empathy gap. Maybe can you unpack the empathy gap and maybe tell us more about that bias.
[DR. GLEB]
Happy to. So the empathy gap is one of the problematic ways that we do not make good decisions about people. The empathy big gap has to do with our feelings, has to do with how we feel and how other people feel. When we think about ourselves, we think about ourselves as rational creatures, as logical creatures, making decisions with our mind. Unfortunately, that’s not the case at all. We make decisions primarily without our emotions. 80% to 90% of our decisions come from our emotions, come from our intuitions. And the same goes for other people. And we don’t realize that. So the empathy gap has to do with us greatly underestimating the extent to which emotions motivate other people’s behaviors and thoughts. There are separate dynamics about how we underestimate the emotions that motivate our own thoughts, but the empathy gap has to do with us underestimating other people’s emotions and motivations.

So we don’t think about the fact that in order to change other people, in order to influence them effectively, we have to influence their emotions, not their thoughts, not so much their thoughts. We need to understand what their emotions are and we need to appeal to them. That’s a big problem. So when you’re thinking about efforts to change people, to change organizations or change group dynamics, you need to think about emotions. You need to change people’s emotions and that is a fundamental aspect of what you need to do. In order to change their emotions you need to empathize with them. And that is a step empathy, when I’m talking about empathy, to be clear, I mean, understanding what other people are feeling. That’s different than sympathy, which is caring about what they’re feeling. Both of those are good, but let’s just define the term empathy.

So understanding what they’re feeling. You want to understand what their feelings are, what is motivating them to do what they’re currently doing. If you want to change them, you want to understand what’s motivating what they’re currently doing. So you want to learn how to put yourself in their shoes and use effective social intelligence, which is the practice of understanding other people’s emotions, and then being able to influence other people’s emotions. So that’s really a key dynamic of where you want to go forward. You want to understand how other people function, their mental models, their emotional models and then be able to influence them. So that’s what I wanted to say about the empathy gap.
[JOE]
Now when you think about how people actually do that, you know to understand other people’s emotions more, to dive in deeper, to really overcome that empathy gap, what are you seeing work for people?
[DR. GLEB]
What I see work for people is, first of all, trying to understand how they would feel in that situation, but not assuming that other people would feel the same way. There are two dynamics here. The first dynamic is that we rarely try to put ourselves in other people’s shoes. That is something that is really important. So don’t think about your own needs first. Try to think about the other person’s needs. What are their emotions in this situations? So the first step to doing that would be to say, “Hey, what would I feel?” Distance yourself from the situation, let go of your biases, whatever your preferences are and say, “What would I feel in that situation?” And a good way of thinking about that is, “How would I be, if I was in that person’s shoes, what would make me feel like I’m a hero in the story?”

Because people don’t think of themselves as villains. You might think of the other person whom you’re trying to influence as a villain, as bad, as problematic, or you might not. You might not be thinking of them as a villain, but you want to be, when you try to put yourself in the other person’s shoes, you want to think about, “Okay, how would I be a hero in this story? What emotions would push me to believe myself to be a hero? So that’s kind of one step that you want to take. Then you want to take a second step. You don’t want to think about simply how would I feel in this situation? But you want to think about how this person feels in this situation. And that’s a second further step to build up your emotional model of the other person. How does the person feel?

The other person, their feelings might be very different than yours and that’s really important to realize in order to understand their feelings. You want to see where they’re coming from, what their goals are, what their incentives are, what their stories about themselves are. The stories, the narratives that we tell ourselves about ourselves are fundamental for determining our emotions. So what kind of stories do they tell themselves about themselves, their background, how they came to be here, how those stories pushed them to experience certain emotions. And then think about their stories, then think about their personality traits. Personality traits are quite important in determining what emotions you feel. So for example, I tend to be a very optimistic person. And in fact, there is a bias called the optimism bias, where people, that’s one of the cognitive biases where people like me tend to be very optimistic, see the world as full of opportunities, see the grass as green on the other side of the Hill.

So I would look for opportunities and I tend to be too risk-blind. That’s a problem for me, as in someone was optimistic. So someone who is optimistic would have one set of emotions. Someone who suffers from the opposite bias, the pessimism bias, they tend to see the world as more full of threats, full of risks, full of opportunities to cause, not opportunities, but they ignore opportunities. They’re looking at the risks and they’re trying to be a risk, they’re very risk averse. People with that personality trait would, the pessimism bias would have a different set of emotions. So then that’s kind of your baseline where you’re trying to think, “Okay, this is what their emotional model might be like.” And then of course, you’re making certain assumptions. You want to test those assumptions.

So you want to then use those assumptions and say, “Okay, here’s what my current assumptions are. I need to update them and test them against reality.” And then you talk to the other person, you ask them how they feel about the situation, keeping in mind your emotional model of them. And you might want to make the question specific to your emotional model saying something like, ”Okay does this make you feel, for a pessimistic person, does this make you feel like there are too many risks in the situation? “And so asking them a feeling question, not a think question or do question is the next step. You want to test out whether your emotional model makes sense or correlates to reality and then see what they say and make sure to listen to them actively, listen to them empathetically, listen for the emotional words that they’re using.

When you ask people about their emotions, people like to talk about themselves. They like to share about their emotions. So they’re likely going to share about their emotions and then you can update your emotional model of them effectively, as you’re listening to them, you want to make sure to show them that you’re hearing them otherwise they will stop sharing them. They will stop being vulnerable. So you want to echo and empathize with what they’re saying, echo, meaning, repeat what they’re saying in your own words, kind of rephrase it in your own words and in shorter statements and empathize saying things like, “Oh, that must be hard.” Or, “Oh, that must be scary.” Using, your, showing that you hear their emotions, especially. So those are steps that would help you understand more effectively their emotional model.
[JOE]
So in your book, you talk about how someone might notice that there’s certain false biases and they behave irrationally due to their cognitive bias. And you have five steps that you talk through. You talk through emotions, goals, rapport, information, and lastly, a positive reinforcement. This is kind of the last bit segment of the interview. We’d love for you to walk through those five steps and just give us some kind of quick tips and thoughts on those five steps.
[DR. GLEB]
Happy to. So this is about how to get someone who holds the rational beliefs to shift them toward holding more rational beliefs. So again, this is not about someone where you’re trying to argue with someone in a situation. This is about where you’re seeing someone who holds clearly irrational beliefs, ones that are at odds with their own goals, with your goals. And plenty of people have those sorts of beliefs. What you want to do is understand that, “Hey, in order for them to hold these irrational beliefs, there’s likely some emotional blocks going on.” And that’s why you want to use a technique called EGRIP, which you just went through, emotions, goals, rapport, information and positive reinforcement. So technique called EGRIP, with five steps. That’s when, so instead of arguments, I mentioned before that arguments don’t work very well for changing people’s minds. They work for showing dominance and showing aggression and winning in terms of your tribe, but they don’t work well at all for changing people’s minds.

So if you want to change people’s minds use EGRIP. So emotions, the first step, you want to assume that there are some emotional blocks and you need to figure out what are their emotions. We just talked about how to figure out someone’s emotional model. You need to use that technique, you need to use the techniques that I mentioned before to figure out someone’s emotional model. What are they feeling about the situation? Are they scared? It’s usually going to be some combination of anxious and negative emotions. Are they scared? Are they upset? Are they confused? Some kind of emotions that are negative problematic, you know, if they’re confused, they might feel defensive. They might not want to admit their confusion and they might be having a negative reaction because of that. So there’s a number of emotions that might be going on, but usually it’s going to be deeper ones like fear, anxiety, anger.

So that’s the first step. So you figured that emotional model, emotions, that’s the first of EGRIP. Then goals. What are goals that you both share? So the goals that you both share are really important to figure out, you know when you think about all the human beings, we really focus on the differences between us when we interact with others, but really there’s so much that unites us. We all want comfort, safety, we want to be loved, we have certain needs that are very basic to us as human beings. We want to be cared for. And so there are goals that we all share. You know, if we’re talking about in the political spectrum even the most conservative and the most liberal people would probably say that they want Americans to be overall better off, something like that, that you can talk about.

Or if you are in a community group and you are disagreeing about a certain path forward for the community group, you can still say, “Well, we all want this community group to grow bigger, broader.” Or if you’re in a relationship and you’re disagreeing about something like buying a house or something like that, then you talk about how well we both want to make sure, to spend our money effectively. And there are many other things that you want to bring out to a broader goal that you both share a way from specific disagreements where the other person has certain rational beliefs. So establish those broader goals.

Next, build rapport. For building rapport, that’s the third step of EGRIP. So E G R, the rapport. For the rapport building part, what you want to do is reinforce that your shared goals, show your shared goals, use empathetic listening like you did previously, echo the other person’s emotions, the other person’s goals, highlight how you’re both on the same side of the issue. Draw back from the specific disagreement and highlight the broader shared goals and shared emotions. Show how you care about the other person’s emotions and the other person’s goals. So that’s building rapport.

Step four of EGRIP. So I, this is about information. Here is where you share the information that would be the first step in the typical argument where you say, “Here are the facts.” Believe those facts and magically, the other person believes those facts, and they change their mind and everybody is happy. That’s not the way the world works. Here is the fourth step where you share information. You shared some uncomfortable facts in the context of you caring about the other person’s emotions, you having some broad goals, and you just shifting the tactics in how you achieve those broad goals, in how the other person that achieves those broad goals. That’s what the information should be about. It should be about achieving those broad goals, but shifting the tactics so that their irrational beliefs are going to shift to a more effective tactic of reaching those broad goals.

Next, after you shift, after the other person hopefully agrees or moves somewhat closer to you, you know, that’s what usually happens, they might not agree all the way at all, but they might acknowledge, “Okay, there’s some valid points. I will rethink this. I will shift somewhat toward your perspective,” because you show you care about them, you share the same goals, you build up rapport, you give them some information that they previously did not consider very effectively, and then you want to use positive reinforcement. That’s the last step of EGRIP, positive reinforcement. You don’t want to have these conversations all the time. They take time, they take effort, they take emotional labor. Of course, the empathetic listening, that’s the emotional labor that you’re modeling. You’re doing a lot of emotional labor. You’re being the mature adult in the room. That’s not something that’s easy to do. So you want to give positive reinforcement to the other person for changing their mind. So show them how it’s a difficult thing it’s not easy to shift your perspective and that it’s admirable that the other person was able to do so. So that’s the last step of EGRIP, positive reinforcement.
[JOE]
Wow. So glad. The last question I always ask is if every private practitioner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know?
[DR. GLEB]
I would want them to know that they really need to get their clients to not trust their intuitions, to not trust their heart and to trust their gut. I mean, they wouldn’t be going to a therapist if their gut and fair intuitions, if their decision-making always led them in the right direction, correct? But fundamentally you want to show them that their gut is often going to be wrong because it’s just not wired for the modern world. And it’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s not a thing to be guilty about. Lots of people feel ashamed and guilty that their gut reactions are leading them into making some bad decisions. It’s natural for that to happen. It comes from your Savannah intuitions. So you want to show them that, you want to tell them that, “Hey, in order to make good decisions in the modern world, you need to adopt some counter-intuitive mental habits that involve things like addressing cognitive biases, using EGRIP, and so many other techniques that are counter-intuitive, but very effective, according to the behavioral science research on this topic. So that’s what I would encourage them to do.
[JOE]
Awesome. Well, Gleb, how can people connect with you? How can they get your book? And yes, if they want to read more, what should they do?
[DR. GLEB]
The Blindspots Between Us: How to Overcome Unconscious Cognitive Bias and Build Better Relationships is available on online bookstores everywhere, Amazon, Barnes & Noble of course, and many other bookstores and in Barnes & Noble and other physical bookstores. So it’s published by New Harbinger, which is the largest publisher for therapists and just general therapeutic behavioral science, psychological literature. So check that out, whatever books are sold. Then for my own resources, I want to share with you a course on making the wisest decisions, which would be great for therapists to take and share with their clients tips from that. It’s going to be disasteravoidanceexperts.com/subscribe. So that course is going to be at disasteravoidanceexperts.com/subscribe. And in general, that website disasteravoidanceexperts.com is where you can find my blogs, videos, podcasts, newsletters, and so on. But the course is what I’m going to recommend. Again, disasteravoidanceexperts.com/subscribe.
[JOE]
Awesome. Well, Gleb, thank you so much for being on the Practice of the Practice podcast.
[DR. GLEB]
Thank you so much for inviting me Joe. I appreciate it.
[JOE]
Well, if you’re looking for a community of people that are going to help you get to that next level, our Group Practice Boss curriculum, community, and experts are here for you. Alison and Whitney are our two Group Practice Boss leaders. It’s a community of people that are all group practice owners. So they’ve done their first hire, they’ve already launched their group practice, and they are in it. The conversations going on within this community are just phenomenal. It’s helping you get to the next level. It’s 1099 versus W2, it’s how do you do compensation, all sorts of things that are the nitty gritty that people have done before. There are some cohorts opening up soon. You can read more over practiceofthepractice.com/grouppracticeboss. Again, that’s practiceofthepractice.com/grouppracticeboss.

And as always, thank you for letting me into your ears and into your brain. Have an awesome week.

Special thanks to the band Silence is Sexy for your intro music. We really like it. And this podcast is designed to provide accurate authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.