Escape the Goal Trap: Embrace Curiosity and Tiny Experiments with Anne-Laure Le Cunff

In this episode, Anne-Laure Le Cunff, discusses how to escape the goal trap by embracing curiosity and using “tiny experiments.” Most advice about self-improvement assumes you know where you’re going, but what if you don’t? Anne-Laure suggests that’s not a flaw, it’s actually the starting point. Her new book, Tiny Experiments, offers a way to explore change without chasing outcomes. In our conversation, we talk about curiosity as a guide, how to stay engaged in uncertainty, and what it means to choose persistence.

Key Takeaways:

• Importance of curiosity and exploration in personal growth
• Conducting small experiments to challenge the status quo
• Embracing uncertainty and learning from emotions
• Distinction between passive and active acceptance of challenges
• The concept of “field notes” for self-reflection and observation
• Understanding and labeling emotions to reduce anxiety
• Addressing procrastination through curiosity and exploration
• The iterative process of growth loops and adjusting one’s trajectory
• The significance of taking actionable steps in the present
• Developing mini protocols or “pacts” for personal experimentation

Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, former Googler and founder of Ness Labs, writes to 100k+ about evidence-based ways to achieve more without sacrificing your health – a topic dear to her after trying to schedule a life-saving surgery around her corporate calendar to avoid letting up on her goals. She’s been in Forbes, Refinery29, and Entrepreneur, and her new book is Tiny Experiments.

Connect with Anne-Laure Le Cunff:  Website | Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn

If you enjoyed this conversation with Anne-Laure Le Cunff, check out these other episodes:

The Power of Visualization to Achieve Your Goals with Emily Balcetis

Why We Stop Noticing What Matters and How to Feel Alive Again with Tali Sharot

By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you!

If you enjoy our podcast and find value in our content, please consider supporting the show. By joining our Patreon Community, you’ll receive exclusive content only available on Patreon!  Click here to learn more!!

Episode Transcript:

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:00:00  You actually don’t need to overhaul your entire life in order to reconnect with curiosity, with exploration, with being open to uncertainty, with those liminal spaces. You just need to conduct very small little experiments where you question the way you’ve been doing things, and you try a different way of doing those things.

Chris Forbes 00:00:31  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:15  Most advice about self-improvement assumes you know where you’re going. But what if you don’t? Anne-Laure Le Cunff suggests that’s not a flaw. It’s actually the starting point. Her new book, Tiny Experiments, offers a way to explore change without chasing outcomes. In our conversation, we talk about curiosity as a guide, how to stay engaged in uncertainty, and what it means to choose persistence. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi and Laura, welcome to the show.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:01:48  Thank you so much for having me.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:50  I’m excited to have you on. We’re going to be discussing your wonderful book, which is called Tiny Experiments How to Live Freely in a Goal Obsessed world. And I mentioned that I have followed you online for a while. You’ve been writing for years and I’ve always found what you do really interesting. So I’m glad we get to have this conversation. Before we get into the book, though, we’ll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:21  One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:02:48  I find it fascinating because it is kind of based on the idea that some emotions are inherently bad, while others are good. And I think that any emotion is just data. It’s just a signal from your brain trying to communicate something. And so I agree that you should not feed the ones that are going to make you feel worse, but you can still learn from them. And if you start being curious about those different emotions that you feel, including the very uncomfortable ones, including the ones where you might have a little bit of shame around them, you can actually learn a lot and grow a lot, I think.

Eric Zimmer 00:03:27  Yes, yes. As you were talking for the first time, something crystallized in my mind, which was that we talk about them as emotions, greed and hatred and fear, and they are. But there are also ways of acting. And the distinction there obviously is you’re going to have all kinds of emotions. It’s what you choose to do with them. Right? It’s it’s which ones do you choose to say, all right, I’m going to work with this in my little container. And which of these am I going to project out into the world? And I think that’s where the more conscious choice and the ability to pause comes in.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:04:06  Absolutely. This is fundamentally the difference between living a conscious, intentional life versus living a life on autopilot.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:15  Yeah. Yeah. Okay. The place I want to start is entirely selfish for me. So it’s this. You have often talked about ways of managing all the information that we come across. I think you might call it gardening. Digital gardening. Am I and I’m curious.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:36  I’ve used, I mean, all kinds of tools Evernote, notion, roam, research. Right? Like, right now I’m looking at roam. It’s it’s the best book prep way I know how to do things. And AI is upending all of it. And I’m curious what for you Have there been any new tools that you’ve been like, oh wow, this is this really changes the game in the way that I organize information that I’ve got and put together.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:05:05  I still use room research to capture all of my information and knowledge, and anytime I’m reading something, I want to save information. But it’s become more of a quick capture tool for me and a way to connect with different pieces of information. I do a lot of my thinking in 1 or 2 different AI tools these days, because I feel like I can actually have a conversation with the information, you know, in a way that you can’t quite do it with a note taking poll. I’m going to share one fun tool that I discovered recently that was created by Stanford University.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:05:40  That’s called storm. And the way it works is that you ask it about any topic you want, and it will create a custom Wikipedia like page for you around this topic. And what I love about it is that you can basically create your own rabbit holes to fall into.

Speaker 4 00:05:58  It’s like we need more.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:06:00  Yes, exactly. But instead of pulling into random ones, you’re pulling into your own highly curated rabbit holes. And so that’s an AI tool that I found incredibly helpful. It’s fun to use, and it’s a way to be more curious and creative at the same time.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:16  Yeah. Because I think, listeners, I promise this is just going to go on for another minute or two. Then we’ll get into the rest of it. But I’m sure all of you, all of us think about what do we do with all the information that we get? How does it become useful to us? And, you know, roam is a tool that was intended to sort of connect disparate ideas on its own.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:36  And I don’t think it fully realizes that promise. but I think I at some point, I mean, already to a certain degree does and can. The question is, how do you expose everything that you’re thinking about and consuming and reading to I so it can make connections that you don’t see. And I think that’s the question I’m still trying to figure out.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:07:00  And that’s the problem at this stage, is that although for a lot of the the pro versions of these tools, you can actually connect them to your documents and your drive. So you can do that. We are still currently at a stage where you need to prompt AI and ask it questions in order for it to do something useful for you, and so it is not necessarily going to help with the kind of emergent knowledge and exploration where you don’t know what you don’t know. And so in that way, to me, it is still more of a thinking companion that is helping me explore things I’m curious about versus doing a lot of the thinking from you, which it cannot do right now.

Eric Zimmer 00:07:40  No, it cannot do, although at least for me, if I ask, hey, I’m giving you 3 or 4 different things here. Find connections between them that I may not be seeing and it finds connections. Now, some of them are garbage, right? I mean, they’re not any good, but every once in a while I’m like, oh, wow, okay. I treat it sort of like you do, like as a thinking companion. It’s just I just assume I’ve got a really smart and incredibly smart person next to me that will be infinitely patient with all the questions I want to ask it, you know, and away I go. So anyway, okay, now let’s get into the book. The heart of the book is about how our way of thinking about goals up till now is not the best approach for us moving forward in today’s day and age. Share why that is so.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:08:35  I describe the types of goals that we’ve been using so far. The traditional way of doing goal setting as linear goals and a linear goal is a goal that is based on the assumption that in order to be successful, you need to have a clear vision and a clear plan.

And then if you work really, really hard, you’re going to get there.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:08:58  The problem, obviously, is that we know that in this day and age, this doesn’t really work because the world keeps on changing. You keep on changing. Maybe in the first place you don’t really know what you want and where you want to go. And so this idea of having a very clear vision of where you want to go kind of breaks down in today’s modern world. So I advocate for replacing this very linear approach that gives you this illusion of control and this illusion of certainty with a more experimental mindset, where you embrace the fact that you don’t really know where you’re going. Things are changing all the time, and maybe that uncertainty is not such a bad thing. Maybe you can actually learn from it.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:43  So you started your career at Google. And you made the decision after several years there, that you were on this locked in path at Google. It was very clear where you were going to go, what you needed to do to get there. You had your blinders on and you were just charging full speed ahead and that for you, that didn’t work right. That wasn’t the right thing. So you left and then you started. You did what you know, everybody does. When you leave something like Google, you start your own company. And so you created a startup and found yourself in essentially the same boat again. Right? It’s just, you know, it’s your boat this time, but you’re still pointing in one direction, going as hard as you can with the blinders on. And from there, you then launched the next phase of your life, which has been a lot of different things. A question I have for you is, how does this idea that we’re going to explore more in the book around these tiny experiments and a curiosity based, you know, exploration approach work for people who don’t do something as radical as you did or as I did, like leaving a career to, you know, mess around out here in the, you know, in the media world or whatever.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:59  I’ve got a career goals. I’m in an organization. I’ve put I’m putting my time in, I have somewhere I think I want to go. But I also recognize, you know, the blinders are on and I’m not I’m not growing. I’m not learning. I’m bored. I’m, you know, how do we take your model and and put it into that?

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:11:18  Yes. two things. First, I don’t think, looking back, that I had to leave Google in the way I did, where I was just like, I’m done, I’m going to do something different. And now I’m going to build my startup. And I’m very aware that, unfortunately, this is a very common discourse that we get in the media where people say, quit your job, do your thing, follow your passion, which I think is actually quite dangerous and I was quite young at the time, and so I thought that’s what I had to do. So that’s one thing. Don’t necessarily do what I did and I don’t say in the book, and I never say do that because I think it’s actually quite risky to do something like this turned out to be okay for me, but it’s not always the case.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:11:58  One thing. The second one is this is why the book is called Tiny Experiments, because you actually don’t need to overhaul your entire life in order to reconnect with curiosity, with exploration, with being open to uncertainty, with those liminal spaces, you just need to conduct very small little experiments where you question the way you’ve been doing things and you try a different way of doing those things, and where you stay very open to whatever the outcome is going to be. So instead of having that linear goal where you say, this is what success looks like and I need to get there, instead, you start from a hypothesis. You ask yourself, come. I think this might work. I think I might enjoy this. I think this could be interesting. What kind of tiny experiment could I design around that question, that hypothesis, so I can find out. And if it turns out that it’s not for me and I don’t like it, that’s not failure. That’s just data.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:16  Hey, everyone. I haven’t had an open spot in my coaching practice in over three years, but right now I’ve got a couple. But I work best with a certain kind of person. So if you’re a thoughtful business owner, creator, or leader and you’re ready to move from scattered progress and simmering self-doubt to aligned action, strategic clarity and real momentum, this might be the right time through something I call the align progress method will turn inner alignment into real world results so you can grow your revenue, reclaim your time, and finally, trust yourself as much as others already do. If that speaks to where you are, you can learn more at oneyoufeed.net/align.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:00 That’s how this podcast started. I had a solar energy company that ended up failing, and I was back in the software world doing consulting, and I just got the idea to do this thing. And so I just did it. And without a whole lot of thought. I mean, once I had the idea, then I put work in steadily, you know, a little bit. But there was there was no expectation that this was anything more than, let’s try it and see if we like it.

Eric Zimmer 00:14:25  And when I was doing coaching work with people, sometimes we would do exactly what you said, which is they would think they want to do x, Y and z. So we would start doing x, y and z, and then they would find out that that’s not what they wanted to do. And that in some ways feels like a loss. And it might be if it’s been this cherished thing you’ve thought you wanted to do. But ultimately it’s freeing, because now you can point your energy towards what is actually for you. And I just love the idea of tiny experiments. You know, just try something. I always think about this idea of, like, if you’re standing at the edge of the woods and there’s a path going in and about five feet down, it curves and you’re like, what’s around that path? What’s around that path? You’ll never know. By standing at the edge of the woods. You only know by taking a few steps in. And that’s, I think, kind of at the heart of your book.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:15:16  I love that, and I love how you mentioned how freeing it is, because that’s why the subtitle of the book is How to Live Freely in a goal obsessed World. It’s really the idea that once you free yourself from all of those what ifs that you treat in more of a paralyzing way, where a lot of people might think, oh, what if I changed jobs? What if I did that thing differently? What if I explored a different city, a different way of of being and of living? But because they see it as this very big change, they end up not exploring it at all. Yes. And there’s always, always a tiny, more experimental version that you can explore this question and actually find out. And as you said, if it turns out this is not for you, you’re actually freeing up mental space, creative energy that you can direct towards something else.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:07  Yeah. My partner and I, we live in Columbus, Ohio today, and there were reasons that we had to remain in Columbus up until about a year ago. And and now we’re in the where do we want to live? We could live anywhere in the world dilemma, right? And so part of our process, though, is just like, let’s go somewhere that is on the list for a couple of weeks, and most of the time we end up just crossing it off. Nope. Nope. Nope. We’re overly picky. I think that’s probably part of the problem. And there’s no right answer, which is I think the other thing that ties into kind of your book is that I think we get paralyzed because we think we need to make the right choice, the right decision, when that’s not really the way reality works.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:16:53  Exactly. And very often this obsession we have with making the right decision actually gets in the way of ultimately making the right decision, because we’re not allowing ourselves to iterate.

Eric Zimmer 00:17:06  Yes. Okay. So you recommend or you talk about in the book, going from this idea of linear goals to growth loops. Describe a growth loop.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:17:16  So if you keep on conducting the exact same experiment without learning from the data you’re collecting, you’re just going to go in circles.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:17:25  A growth loop is when you take the time to reflect on what you learned, and you adjust your trajectory based on all of these lessons that you had from the previous cycle of experimentation, and for each cycle, you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t have that fixed destination, but you can trust that you’re going to grow. And this is why they’re called growth loops. Each loop you complete, each time you ask a question, you say, I’m going to give it a try, and I’m going to learn from this trial and then decide what to do next. I’m going to grow.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:01  The next thing in the book that ties to this is this idea of, instead of goals or habits or New Year’s resolutions or huge projects that we make pacts. It’s pacts, not like pacts of wolves, but pacts just for listeners. So there’s not not not confusion. What is a pact?

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:18:26  A pact is a mini protocol for personal experimentation. It’s a very simple format that allows you to design tiny experiments, and it’s based on exactly the same format scientists used to design their experiments.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:18:42  So if you think about an experiment, you only need to know two things. And then obviously giving you a very simplified version of that. But you need to know what you’re going to test and the number of trials. That’s basically all you need to have. The essence of what the experiment is going to be a packed very similarly is deciding what action you’re going to explore for what duration. And so it follows this format for better. And so it follows this format I will action for duration. So for example I will write a weekly newsletter for six weeks. I will meditate every morning for one month. I will meal prep every Sunday for two months. I will action for duration. And this is a pact. I call it a pact because it is really a commitment. It’s a commitment to complete the experiment, to perform that action for that duration, and to withhold judgment while you’re conducting the experiment.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:49  Yeah. There’s so many things about that framework that I really love. You talk about. It needs to be actionable, using current resources rather than like elaborate preparation.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:01  And one of the phrases I’ve always loved, and it’s been attributed to everybody from, you know, Snoopy to to God is something like use what you have, do what you can, you know, with what you have. I’m butchering it, but that’s it basically, you know. Yeah. And I love that idea of doing what we can with what we have right now. Right. Versus because how many of our dreams get deferred by when X when I have this, when I have that, and I think it’s so important. And I love this idea of time bounding it because you’re not making a commitment for the rest of your life. I’m a recovering heroin addict and alcoholic, and we had a concept of one day at a time, which is an extreme time bounding, but it’s an extreme problem when you’re first trying to to come out of addiction. But it’s a way of not getting overwhelmed by the fact that, like, is this really the right thing for me to do for the rest of my life? What am I going to do when I get married? What about like, all these things? You just go, well today.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:07  And I love that idea because the pact does that on a more reasonable level. But it also allows you, since you’re committing for a period of time, to find out about it, because meditating for two days, you don’t have enough information to make a decision about whether meditation is for you or not. But that’s where most of us live. We live either like I do it and I if I don’t get immediately good feedback, I give up. Or I chain myself to the idea that I have to do this thing forever. And I love that you’re you’re painting this middle way with these pacts.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:21:43  Yes. And, what are you talking about? Reminds me of of habits where I find it fascinating and a little bit crazy that so many of us decide to commit to new habits for the rest of our lives without having ever tried them before. And so I also think that having this experimental approach and saying, I’m just going to do a tiny experiment first, as you said, it’s going to be short enough that you can actually do it long enough that you can actually collect data.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:22:17  And it’s a way to figure out, is there anything I might want to turn into a habit that I can try it first? And it’s not because everybody around you, all of your friends, are raving about running, for example, that this is something you’re going to enjoy. So you can give it a try. Yeah. And then if it doesn’t work, it’s okay. There are so many other forms of healthy body movement. It doesn’t have to be that. And so you can try something different. So I think it’s also allowing yourself to figure out what actually works for you. Instead of copy pasting what the imagery is saying is good for everyone.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:54  Yes. And it keeps you pointed in in a direction long enough to be useful, because that’s the that’s the opposite of the commitment to everything is I just bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce between lots of different things all the time. So what you’re saying is having a long term goal way out there doesn’t make sense in the same way that it used to.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:15  And there’s lots of things that happen when we do that. And having no direction is also a bad idea, right? And so I’m a I’m a big middle way kind of guy. It’s one of my, you know, it’s part of my brand, I guess. And and this is such a middle way approach.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:23:33  Yes. Very often in the middle way is actually a pretty good answer. And, and I think in this case, that is that is the case long enough that you can figure out what works for you and short enough that you can actually do it. And as you said, having a sense of direction, but also not having the illusion that you actually know exactly where you’re going, precisely.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:56  You know what you’re going to do for a period of time. And you talk about it also being continuous, involving repeatable actions. Right? That’s again, back to the the book I’m writing. You know, how a little becomes a lot, right. It’s that that sort of thing. So I love this pact idea. I want to ask about field notes. Tell me about what field notes are and how you use them and how they’re useful in this overall framework.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:24:26  A question I often get is how do I even come up with an experiment that’s interesting to explore? And how do I make sure that this experiment is something I’m actually curious about, and not something I’m copy pasting from other people around me? And so for people who ask me this question, I recommend a little exercise that I call self anthropology because I invite them to pretend for just one day that they are an anthropologist, but with their own life as the topic of study. And so what does an anthropologist do? They go and they study a new culture, and they know nothing about this culture. And so they have no preconceptions, no assumptions. And they take a notebook with them and they take field notes, observations, again, no judgments. They’re just taking notes and asking questions like, why are these people doing these things like that? Why do they care about that? Why does this thing? Is why is this thing so important to them? You can do the same thing with your own life.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:25:28  Asking yourself, why do I spend my time like this? Why do I use my energy like that? Why do I care so much about this? Just like an anthropologist taking little field notes and asking yourself, why are things done the way they are in my life currently? No judgment, just observation. Those observations I guarantee you I’ve worked with lots of people using this little tool. I guarantee you you will notice things that you’ve been doing in a certain way just because. Because routine, because habits, because that’s the way things have been done around you, whether it’s in your company business or in your personal environment. And when you start questioning the way you’ve been doing things, when you know how things are, you can start imagining how they could be, what could be different. And this, this is the seed for a tiny Experiment.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:21  What I love about your field notes. I love the idea in general, and I think many of us have heard some version of this, which is you’ve got to be reflective or you, you know, keep a journal or.

Eric Zimmer 00:26:32  And so I was like, well, what does she mean by field notes? So I went out to your Nest Labs website, and I looked up your field notes, and I found an example of field notes. So I just want to read a couple of these to listeners, because this is different than the way I imagine being reflective. 10:04 I’m going to finish the first draft of the Combinational Creativity article. 10:46 I fell into a Wikipedia black hole again. Who knew so many inventors got killed by their own invention?  I didn’t read that clearly until now.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:05  God. That’s good. I just lost half our listening audience. They’re going to be like, whoa. Okay, I got to check that out. Chris, my editor, I guarantee you 100% is just not going to edit now until he looks at it. How many inventors got killed by their own invention? 1145 made good progress. Need to get ready for my workshop. I’m not going to go through all of these, but hey, between the public speaking and getting VA, I feel like I’m starting to increasingly value investing in good tools and systems.

Eric Zimmer 00:27:34  So it’s just these it’s not this grand sitting down and puzzling out everything that’s happening and trying to make meaning out of it all. It’s, as you say, it’s observational notes about what happens during the day. What did you do? In what ways did you not do what you thought you were going to do? How did you feel as you were doing X, Y, or Z? And I just think this is a great approach, an easier way to approach being reflective than sitting down and having to puzzle out meaning.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:28:05  Yeah. And the reason why it works so well for a lot of people is that a lot of the, the reflective tools that people recommend require you to sit down every day for month or for the rest of your life again, to do this. What I like about this little exercise of field notes is that whenever you feel a little bit stuck, or whenever you feel like you might want to do things differently, or if something is not quite right, but you can’t put your finger on it, you can do this for just 24 hours, 48 hours at most, and you take those little notes throughout the day, and then you look back at them and you will see patterns emerge.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:28:41  And so it’s also a form of reflection that is very action oriented in the sense that you’re capturing these observations. So you can then decide what to experiment with. But it works for people who haven’t really had success with maybe daily journaling, morning pages, those kind of formats. It’s a little bit more surgical where you can do it four hours, 48 hours and you get what you need out of it, and then you go on to experimenting.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:23  Do you have any recommendations for how people could remember to do these? I think that’s the for me, I feel like I would take without consciously designing this. I would take one field note at the beginning of the day, and I’d take another at the end of the day, and that would be it. It would be all the in between where I forget to do it.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:29:41  That’s the key word in between. So the idea of having timestamps was actually inspired by an existing journaling method that is called interstitial journaling, because you’re actually right in between. And so the technique, and that’s why you only do it for 24 hours or 48 hours, is that you write something every time you switch tasks.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:30:02  So anytime you go from one thing to another, or anytime you notice you’ve been off task. So that’s why you have one in here where I’m on the Wikipedia rabbit hole. So and that’s it. And so if you just apply this I’m switching task. I write one line, or I noticed that I haven’t written in a while because I’m actually doing something else I should not be doing right now. You write something. That’s it.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:24  Wonderful. There’s so many more things in this section that I could talk about, but I want to move on to the idea of disruption and uncertainty in our lives. Certainly there are big and little disruptions that we all go through. Right? The big disruption is you lose your job, your relationship ends, or you have several of those things happen. What Bruce Feiler calls like a life quake. So there’s those. But then there’s also just smaller disruptions. And then there is, in many cases, a lot of uncertainty that we exist with. Tell me how you think about working with those things.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:31:07  For me, the most important step and the first one before you do anything, when you’re faced with that kind of uncertainty or disruption is just to understand that the instinctive response that we have, the response of fear and anxiety is completely normal. And that from an evolutionary perspective, our brains are designed to reduce uncertainty as much as possible because this is what helps with survival. And so removing a little bit of the self-blame that we might be experiencing when we have fear and anxiety and when we say, why am I reacting like this? I shouldn’t be able to feel in control. I should be calmer. I think it helps to just accept the fact that it’s just your brain trying to do its job, and it’s completely okay. Once you’ve done that, then you can start actually applying some of the more practical tools that will allow you to actually deal with disruption.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:02  So you talk about moving from a response one to a response two I think that’s what you just sort of alluded to there. But but talk to us about how so?

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:32:13  When you think about any kind of disruption, they have two kinds of effects on you.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:32:19  The first effects are subjective. They’re your actual response. As I say, fear, anxiety, worry not feeling in control. And so it’s important to start with these. For this there is a tool psychologist called effective labeling. And it’s a fancy word. Psychologists love their jargon. But really what it means is just naming your emotions. It’s really putting a name on the emotion. And that could be I’m scared again. I’m worried. I’m stressed. I did not include that in the book because it’s so easy to find if you look it up online, but there are lots of those emotional wheels that you can use if that’s helpful for you to name those emotions. For some people, a bit of journaling can be helpful, but that’s the first part. And there’s research showing by when we just name those emotions where we just label them. We already reduce a lot of the anxiety around that, and a lot of the negative impact that it has very often is just a lot of the anxiety is around not really knowing what we’re feeling.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:33:26  So that’s the first step, which is dealing with the subjective experience. Once you’ve done that, and only once you’ve done that, you can then move on to the second step, which is dealing with the objective consequences. And you can only do that if you’re in a state where you’re calm enough that you can actually look at what is happening here. Again, what’s quite interesting is that sometimes we try very, very hard to fix whatever problem is happening, when in reality doing nothing is the best solution, which is very hard to admit because we’re in a state of panic and we feel like we need to feel in control.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:07  So I want to ask you a neuroscience question. And it is really about whether an oversimplification that I tend to think about makes any sense. And it’s basically similar to what you just talked about, which is that when the more emotional parts of our brain, the limbic system or the the the fight or flight system, I’m not quite sure the best way to refer to it, but when that part is super activated, it takes resources away from the prefrontal cortex, where we’re able to think through and come up with creative solutions and put things in perspective and and do all that.  Is that a reasonable oversimplification of the way things work?

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:34:52  It’s slightly different, and I think it’s helpful actually to make the distinction.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:34:58  So the problem mainly comes from the fact that when the amygdala is over activated, it also reduces connection with the prefrontal cortex. And so it’s actually okay to experience stress and anxiety if you’re also still connected with your prefrontal cortex that is able to recognize that anxiety for what it is and to still make rational decisions. And so it’s not so much that it’s taking energy from the prefrontal cortex is that it’s really just not listening to it, and almost like shutting it down and making all of the decisions. And so to me, that’s why the reason why I make the distinction, and I always try to really communicate it in this way, is that it is not about shutting down that amygdala response, because, again, it’s such a natural, deeply ingrained response. It’s a survival response. It’s more about reactivating that connection with the prefrontal cortex so you can see it for what it is and still make rational decisions, even though you will still feel a little bit of anxiety.

Eric Zimmer 00:36:03  So that’s sort of the effective labeling then that’s what that is intended to do. Right. It’s connecting. It’s reestablishing that connection. And however, what I find interesting, though, is that in some cases, when the emotional activation is really, really strong, I guess it’s the same thing you’re saying. What I have also found is that in addition to something like effective labeling, that sometimes some sort of somatic practice, whether that be movement or self-soothing touch or there’s I mean, there’s a lot of them that that also helps. And the way I’ve thought of that is it turns down the, you know, over activation back there so that that communication can start happening.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:36:50  In both cases, what they have in common, affective labeling and any kind of somatic processing practice that you have is that you’re not trying to repress the emotion, you’re not trying to solve anything. You’re reopening that door, Actually, you are letting the emotion with a somatic practice. You are, in effect, letting the emotion move through your body.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:37:12  And with affective labeling, you’re recreating that connection with your prefrontal cortex. And this is why those practices work, because you’re not trying to shut down that emotional response. You’re accepting it. You’re integrating it.

Eric Zimmer 00:37:26  Yeah, I really love that because emotions don’t just shut down. It doesn’t work that way. I mean, I’ve often said that like, I feel like in any situation there are like a few different things. You, you know, you’ve got thought, you’ve got emotion, you’ve got behavior, and emotion just doesn’t have a lever that you can grab and pull, as my experience thought does. Right? I mean, I can’t stop what pops into my brain, but I can I can work with it. And behavior has a lever also. So those are the things that I that we have to use because we can’t just turn off the emotion. It just doesn’t work that way.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:38:04  Yeah, absolutely. And, we can actually learn a lot at a cognitive level from our emotions if we decide to listen to them and, to work with them.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:38:17  And so, as you mentioned, there is the somatic processing that we can use if the emotion is very strong. And so that’s a way of processing it. But if we feel like we’re in a state where we can do that, actually being curious about your emotions can be incredibly powerful as well.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:35  Yes. Curiosity seems to be the, the the wonder drug that I, you know, keep hearing about again and again and again. But it makes sense. It makes sense. Let’s talk about since we’re talking about neuroscience a little bit, let’s talk about the neuroscience of procrastination.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:38:55  Yeah. So it is actually related to what we were just talking about. And when we’re procrastinating Fascinating. There is actually this lack of communication happening in between your prefrontal cortex and the more emotional center. So let’s just go back to what is procrastination in effect? Procrastination is not doing the thing that you feel like you should be doing. And what happens when you procrastinate? You blame yourself. You feel like, why am I not doing this thing that I should be doing? And so it’s the opposite response to what we’ve just described, right? You’re not curious about the emotion.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:39:33  You’re not curious about the procrastination. You’re just blaming yourself. And so in this chapter in the book, that’s really the question I ask. What would it look like if instead of having this response of self-blame and shame and trying to push through using willpower whenever we’re procrastinating, we actually looked at it with curiosity instead. What would happen if we just ask, hey, hello procrastination, what are you doing here? What are you trying to tell me? What are you trying to communicate to me? And I share a very simple tool in this chapter that people can use to have this conversation with their procrastination. So the tool is called the triple check. And what you’re asking is where is my procrastination coming from? Is it coming from the head? Which means that there is a resistance at a rational level where you don’t think that you should be working on this in the first place? Is the problem coming from the heart, which means that at an emotional level, you don’t feel like this is going to be fun or interesting or exciting, or is the problem coming from the hand? Which means that although at a rational level, you think like, yeah, I should do this at an emotional level, you feel like this looks like fun.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:40:51  At a practical level, you don’t believe that you have the right skills or the right tools or the right support network in order to complete the task.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:01  Yeah, I’ve not heard that framework and I love it. I think about this question a lot, which I mean, we can call it procrastination, but the question I think about is a little bit broader, which is why do we not do the things that we think we should do? And obviously the first problem is in that sentence, right. Should we need to be clear on why we’re doing what we’re doing and be doing the right things? Because if we’re not, then everything’s going to be challenging. But I’ve always broken it into two sort of components that I think you’re you’re deconstructing into a third. And the first is sort of structural, like, do I know what what the very first thing I should be doing is like, my tendency is I put something on the task list, like do taxes, which is like a 12 step process, right? So have I deconstructed this thing to a small enough thing that I know what the right thing to do is, is my environment set up and structure.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:58  You know, like there’s a lot of structural things that we can do. But then there’s the moment of doing. And in that moment, I’ve referred to it more as emotional, which is there’s something that’s happening in your I think you’re calling it mind and heart, right? There’s some thought process you’re having or doubt or fear or whatever that that is happening. And I think part of the benefit of at least trying the structural method is that it gets you to a point where you are at a choice point, because then if you’re at a choice point, you can explore what’s happening. If we never if we just if we stay out in vague civil right and things remain vague, we never get to really zone in on. We ask big questions like why do I procrastinate? Instead of why do I procrastinate this thing at this time?

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:42:51  Yeah, and I love how you’re really focusing your attention on this thing at this time because you’re already in problem solving mode. When you do this, you’re also decoupling your sense of self-worth from the fact that you’re procrastinating.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:43:08  And this is really the most important part is really again, seeing that, yes, it’s almost as if, you know, instead of saying, I’m procrastinating, saying procrastination is happening. Why? I’m trying to figure out.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:21  Yeah, yeah. And you talk about the Buddhist parable, the second arrow, right where like the first arrow is, we’re procrastinating. And that has its own suite of problems that come along with it. The second arrow is that we now feel bad about procrastinating. And if we think about the discussion we just had, one of the things that I think that that self-blame and that self-criticism does is it stirs up the emotional energy and then breaks that connection that we’ve talked about or lessens, that connection. And so it’s why why Curiosity is so useful because it turns again, turns that emotional temperature down. And one of the things that I always think about this too, is like, I think about this stuff as like a puzzle. People tend to be like, I’m just the sort of person that procrastinates or I always procrastinate, or why do I always do this? Or I’m always going to be this way.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:16  And I look at it more as we just haven’t arranged the various pieces in the right way that works for you. And I just think that’s a much more optimistic and hopeful way to look at things.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:44:27  Absolutely. And just a kinder way as well. More self compassionate way.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:32  Yes, absolutely. You talk about a listening failure in that chapter. Is that what you mean about that disconnect between the the the prefrontal cortex and the more emotional parts of our brain? Is that the listening.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:44:42  Really.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:44  One of the parts of the book that I was telling you before we hit record that really caught my attention heavily is around acceptance. I mean, I write a lot about acceptance in the Wise Habits course that I’ve taught. We have a whole module on acceptance, but I’d never come across the framework that was in a in a study that labels it this clearly which is active versus resigning acceptance. Help me understand what those two terms mean.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:45:15  So you will hear a lot of people say that whatever happens, they they accept the situation.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:45:21  What scientists found is that there are actually different modes of acceptance that we have in difficult situations. One of them is the one that I think most of us think about when we say, oh, I’m just I’ll just accept whatever is happening, which is the resigned version of it, which is very passive and where you just, you know, you accept whatever is going on and you know, it’s going to have negative consequences and it might be a bit challenging and difficult and you’re just waiting for it to to go away. Hopefully whenever it does the active version of acceptance, active acceptance is where you actually accept that there is a problem. There is a challenge that’s completely fine. You’re not going to, you know, rude on it or the like, there’s anything wrong with with you or with the way you’ve done things, but you’re also going to try and shape what happens next so you can accept what is right now and also actively say, okay, that’s the current situation. This is fine. It doesn’t mean I don’t have any sense of agency in terms of shaping what might happen next.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:46:33  And so this is the active form of acceptance, which is linked to better mental health, better well-being in general. And so which is the one that you really want to practice whenever you’re facing a difficult situation?

Eric Zimmer 00:46:44  Yeah, I love that listeners will be probably we’ve heard this a thousand times, but how can we hear too much about this? A question that I think sits at the center of our lives, which is, you can call it the Serenity Prayer, you can call it Epictetus Doctrine or Control. You can call it Stephen Covey Circle of Concern and Influence. It’s all about recognizing what you can do something about and what you can’t. And it just occurred to me that engaging with that question in an honest and heartfelt way is active. I’m actually really thinking about, okay, what can I do here? Is there some influence? I may not be able to control the outcome, but I can have an influence, or I can work on how I’m going to respond or what I’m going to do.

Eric Zimmer 00:47:28  But even the process of getting into that, that framework of the Serenity Prayer is an active form of acceptance. Even if you come out the other side with the okay, I don’t think I have much choice here but to work on acceptance.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:47:44  Yes, exactly. And another step to this, which can be really interesting to explore and very empowering. Also is asking yourself what am I best placed to do in this situation? Me with my experience, my knowledge, my current situation. What is one thing that I could do and that might be more difficult for someone else to do, but that is something that is easier for me to do. And so not only you reconnect with your sense of agency, but again, it’s very empowering to think and to feel like you can actually do something very unique that only you maybe can do.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:22  Yeah, I mentioned I was in 12 step programs and and there used to be a page in the AA Big Book. It used to be page 449. It’s changed now because there’s multiple editions.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:32  This is 30 years ago, probably, but people used to say and people used to always say like for 49, man, you need to do for 49. They get bumper stickers with for 49. Well, on page four, 49 was the phrase acceptance is the answer to all my problems. And it used to drive me crazy because I was like, no, it’s not. No, it is not. It is the answer to some problems, but for many problems, the the actual answer is that there is something you can do and will be you will feel better when you do. So I’ve always been sort of, you know, against the active resistance, you know, and one of my core like life strategies is if I’m worried or upset about something, I try and just say instead of sitting here and being worried and upset, what what little thing can I do that makes that situation better? Like, what thing can I do now instead of spending the energy worry, and what thing can I just do this minute? And I always find that when I turn some amount of my energy and attention to, to solving the issue, if it’s if there’s something I can do, I feel better, you know, because I’m back in a place of agency to some degree.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:49:47  And it’s a very powerful question, too, especially if you decouple the outcome of what you do from what you actually do. Right. Yes. It’s the idea that you can just do something. And if it doesn’t work, if it doesn’t change the situation, you’ve at least done something. And very often, just as you said, doing something, going from being stuck in paralyzed to being in movement again is enough to feel better.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:13  Yeah. Like I remember in the past when I didn’t manage money well at all, and I would start to get stressed about it because my main problem was I just didn’t open any bills. I just let them pile up. This was back before electronic bills, right? And I’d let them pile up. But just going and opening the bills helped, right? It wasn’t that it solved the problem. I still owed the money, but it was a step. I did something right. And so I think that speaks to what you’re saying. You got to it’s not about the outcome.

Eric Zimmer 00:50:44  It’s about something in us as humans that feels good when we don’t avoid our problems. But we do something where we where we face them to the best of our ability in whatever little way we can.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:50:57  It goes back to that balance, that middle ground that you described earlier in the sense that human beings don’t really well with full stagnation when we do nothing. There’s also, on the other end of the spectrum, when we start having this kind of hectic mess running around because we’re anxious. And so having this intentional kind of, again, active acceptance where you do something not running around like a headless chicken, panicking because you’re really worried about what’s going on, but also not being completely stuck, paralyzed and doing nothing. This middle ground is the healthiest reaction you can have.

Eric Zimmer 00:51:37  Yes, I, I agree. Tell me about steering sheets.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:51:41  So when you’re done with an experiment. You’ll probably ask yourself, okay, what’s next? The steering sheet is a way to answer that question. So there are three different routes that you can take when you’re done with an experiment.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:51:56  The first one, which I think is quite interesting how a lot of people resist that option, is to just keep on going with your experiments the way you’ve been doing it, because if it’s working, why not keep going? And I call this option persist. And I chose this word very intentionally because I feel like it is persistent. It requires a little bit of courage in today’s society. You say, I’m not going to scale this up. I’m not going to go bigger. This is working for me. I’m just going to keep going as it is. So option one persist. Second option pivot. That is when things are kind of working. But you feel like it’s not perfect yet. So maybe you’ve been doing daily meditation in the morning, but you feel like it’s hard for you to do it in the morning. Do you want to go for another cycle of experimentation where you do it during your lunch break or in the evening? And so you tweak things, and this is where you can actually, if you want, scale up, scale down, change the parameters and try something slightly different.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:52:59  And the last option is pause. And I call it pause, not quit because you might want to come back to that experiment in the future, but it’s really just acknowledging the fact that based on your current circumstances, your current priorities, your levels of energy, your other commitment, whatever it is at this moment in time, this experiment is not working for you. And so you can just park it away, put it on the shelf, and perhaps go back to it in the future. But for now, you’re going to pause it.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:31  I love it, I love it. That’s a great way of thinking about it. And you made it alliterative to the three P’s.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:53:38  Oh yeah, I did work on that.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:40  Yes. I think his authors were always like, all right, I gotta I gotta tighten this idea up a little bit. Well, thank you so much for joining me on the show. I’ve really enjoyed talking with you. As I told you before, I thought your book was outstanding, and it opened things in me that I hadn’t seen before, which is rare in my line of work.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:00  So thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure.

Anne-Laure LeCunff 00:54:02  Thank you so much for your amazing questions.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:05  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom. One episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.