The Secret to Overcoming Imposter Syndrome - Mel Robbins - #1027

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Yeah, so, Keynesian Beauty Contest. People are asked to rank who is the most beautiful, but they're also then asked to rank who they think other people think is the most beautiful.

**Mel Robbins** (0:10)
And then, is that also the thing where you're then told that the stuff is screwed up and you're seeing the data, and then you come back and you rank the same people differently because you were shown how other people are like?

**Chris Williamson** (0:20)
Maybe, there might be a twist on it. So, this guy's actually done it, but he's done it for real life.

**Mel Robbins** (0:24)
So, he basically has the most incredible data set that shows that people agree on 88% of the things that are important in life. Now, we may disagree on policy and how to get there, but people want exactly the same things. And right now, we're in this massive moment of collective self-silencing. And part of the reason why, and it's super fascinating when he talks about the brain, since we're so wired for connection and social rejection feels like pain, that when you see that, I don't know what the stats are today, because it's an old study, but you're probably familiar with that study that looked at Twitter, and how I think it was like 80 or 90% of the content came from 10% of the accounts. And right now, if you look at what's going on in social, the 5% of the most extreme voices on both sides dominate 90% of the conversation. And everybody else is sort of in the middle, going, can my fucking parents just stop screaming at each other?
And everybody is self-silencing because nobody wants to get into it with anybody, and we are under the collective illusion that, because you're not saying something, you agree with what's happening. And his data is so important and so hopeful and meaningful, and then he has this incredible historical example about the Velvet Revolution that happened, which was the revolution that happened, I believe, in the 80s. It's the only time a communist government was overthrown without a single bullet being fired or a single person dying. And there's an 80-page free kind of historical paper about it. It all began with somebody writing a play that basically started to poke fun, but just subtle enough, so that the communist regime did not see it coming, that had people in the audience laughing and going, this is ridiculous. And then that invited people to step back into their lives in a more authentic way. So I think he's one of the most important people that I have interviewed in terms of the state of the world right now, and giving people a research backgrounding to be able to start to speak openly again and to be more authentic in terms of how they're communicating and in the hope that I believe we all need right now.

**Chris Williamson** (2:58)
Suggests that the intervention should be quite simple because people don't fundamentally disagree. If they fundamentally disagreed, that would be a much higher hurdle to get over. The fact is, we do agree, but we are worried about what other people will think of us. Will my side cast me out because I say a thing that is inconvenient to the message? Will the other side see me as an unreliable ally to my own, and I'm a vector of weakness into the chink of the armor, et cetera, et cetera?

**Mel Robbins** (3:23)
God, you're very intellectual. Yes.

**Chris Williamson** (3:25)
Thank you. I mean, actually, that might not be a compliment.

**Mel Robbins** (3:28)
No, it is. No, it is that it's, and I think it goes deeper than that. So when I really look at what I think is this undercurrent of every single issue that is going on right now collectively and individually, do you remember when we were in the pandemic and the experts that study, whether it's psychology or it's health or it's human behavior or it's physiology, were saying, we're not going to know the impact of this quarantine and this sustained level of threat and anxiety. We're not going to know the long tail impact of this for a while. And what I believe part of what we're seeing now is we're seeing the impact of human beings being put into a state of chronic stress, where your amygdala is the thing that's run in the show. And whether you realize it or not, you are quietly on edge. So you're like a car at a stoplight and the engine is revving. And it's because it got turned on during the pandemic and quarantine. And we are not built to sustain that much uncertainty for that extended of an amount of time in work and life.