The Dark Side of Goal Setting: Unhealthy Hyper-Achievement

00:00 Jeffrey Besecker This is The Light Inside. I'm Jeffrey Biesecker. Our Goals. They are often thought to define us as human beings. Setting goals and working to achieve them helps us to define what truly matters in life. We see our goals as the pathway to accomplishment or as a means to fulfill a dream. In order to adapt, evolve and grow to reach our optimal self, setting clear, healthy goals with sustainable engagement is essential. It's often said that action breeds results and that momentum carries us through to success. However, there's also a darker side to goal setting. Why are we often willing to do anything and frequently attempting everything in order to reach our objectives? Expending unfruitful energy and accumulating anxiety and stress. The outcome? That panic-ridden drive for action as we feel the fear of missing out. Today we look at how the action bias frequently serves as the basis of this fright-inducing response to anticipatory anxiety. We also dispel some of the myths surrounding the less is more ethos, empowering you with a relaxed approach to goal setting that allows you to live more fluidly and with greater peace of mind. Learn how to transform this core pattern that often drives our pursuit for unhealthy hyper-achievement when we return to The Light Inside. When it comes to money, relative certainty and security about our investment's future is something we often wish for. As Chief Financial Advisor at Veritas Wealth Management, Chad Hufford is helping oil field professionals overcome uncertainties about their financial future. Although these endeavors can be tedious and stressful at times, we often find ourselves driven by anxiety. And as a result, we're left searching for quick and easy solutions. However, this is not always the best option. And what Chad hadn't fully realized until recently is this. His job was always more about behavior management than money management. Chad, you had quite an adventurous journey to becoming a financial advisor. Would you share a bit of your story with us and how you found yourself as a financial

02:18 Chad Hufford advisor based in the oil fields of Alaska? So my background is about 17 years in the financial services industry as a financial planner. I started 2007. We got licensed just at the peak of the market before we sank into the Great Recession, right? The biggest market decline since the Great Depression of the 1920s and 30s. Really great timing getting started. I had a baby on the way. Jeffrey, what I did not realize as much when I got started is my job was more about behavioral management than money management. Over the last 16, 17 years, I've actually studied more of performance psychology, coaching, you know, various things around that, because that's actually what's necessary. The analogy I kind of give people, I'll make this quick, is kind of giving somebody access to a gym. We all have access to all the investment tools out there. Some of us have better genetics than others. But most people aren't going to get the results not because they don't have access, it's because their own behavior. So that's why I started studying all these things. And I have a weird story to get here. My degree is actually in biochemistry. My plan was to go into medicine. So I was familiar studying a lot of some of the neurological things and that type of deal. But this type of conversation, this type of study, I found is absolutely foundational to being a better advisor, because at the end of the day, I'm coaching people. I'm coaching people to manage their own behavior, to create better habits, and to stick to that indefinitely. So that's why this conversation is so interesting to me, because it fits so well into some of the things that we do professionally. But it's something I had to learn, because they don't teach you this stuff. You go into all the financial classes.

04:14 Jeffrey Besecker They teach you about the tools, but not how to get somebody to use them more effectively. It's kind of neat to see that revolution, revelation in human knowledge in general. We're starting to realize where some of these gaps are in our core existence. So that's something I've experienced myself throughout our career path, our career journey. Thirty plus years in business is most of those core problems, as you mentioned, relate to human behavioralism issues. We often over-identify with our businesses to begin with and take that on as a part of who we are. So it stands to reason that some of that disconnect then starts to creep in.

04:55 Chad Hufford Well, and a lot of people talk about you being more educated and you're more knowledgeable. That's important, but a lot of times, knowledge is not our biggest issue. My office is right next to a McDonald's, right? It's about just after 8 a.m. So right now, there's a line out the street of people lining up to start their day with a bad decision. Nobody is going in that line thinking, I'm going to get something great and healthy for my body. People know, but it's getting them to do what they know to do that's the biggest challenge. Now, education may be a part of it, or it is a part of it, but it's getting people to choose better, to act better. So again, I could go on and on about that stuff, but yeah, that's why I'm interested to have this conversation and listen to a couple of the different shows that you've done recently. Yeah, it's just fascinating stuff. I've been thrilled and honored to be able to take some of those cognitive type ideas and blend them into the world of finance where they're not typically welcome because it's like a soft science kind of.

06:05 Jeffrey Besecker We want hard numbers and charts and graphs and charts and graphs only go so far. In that regard, I'm so glad that we have that opportunity to share this journey with you today. Let's jump right in if we can. Chad, as humans, we've been thought to be defined by our goals. As you mentioned, we see those goals as a crucial component to our growth and evolution. Nevertheless, we sometimes become rigid and steadfast in that pursuit. As a result, we sacrifice anything and everything sometimes to reach those objectives, even if it means our behaviors become unhealthy and counterproductive, much like you mentioned in that lead in with that choice to engage with a fast fix of fast food. Defining the action biases as our guide today, I'd like to examine how our unconscious pattern, in particular this unconscious pattern of action biases, presents us from forming healthy and balanced perspectives with our goals. So Chad, when it comes to your perspective on personal development, how would you define the action bias and why is it important to discuss its impact on self-actualization and our personal growth?

07:25 Chad Hufford Well, Jeffrey, it's a great question. I think we live in a society and culture where everything is so fast paced. We're used to activity. We're used to interaction. We're used to things happening. It's kind of a microwave society, right? We want to push buttons and have things done. And I think there's a tendency for folks, a couple of things. One to lack patience. Sometimes I think we feel like with more activity, with more action, we can speed up a process. Whether that's a relationship, whether that's learning a new skill, whether that's getting a business off the ground, whether that's education. A lot of times we lack the patience to go through the steady plotting necessary. But I also think, too, we are inundated with things that are completely outside of our control. And I believe a big part of the action bias to do something, just to create some activity, goes back to our need to want a sense of agency and autonomy. We want to feel like we're calling the shots in our life, like we have control and influence over how our lives are shaped. And I think that tendency not forces us, but it might compel us to reach for activity that isn't necessarily in line with where we want to be. But it's within our immediate grasp. So we take hold of it.

08:50 Jeffrey Besecker I think that harkens back to that fact that the action bias refers to that tendency for an individual to take action even in the face of ambiguity and uncertainty, even when the data and information present might say otherwise, when it might not necessarily be the most fruitful outcome. So in that regard, I think it's a fairly common belief to assert that introspection or self-reflection is essential for our growth and self-actualization. What is the role of the action bias in our decision-making process?

09:26 Chad Hufford And how does that hinder effective introspection and self-reflection from your perspective? Well, I think a lot of times that action bias is very much reactionary. We're not acting on a predetermined plan as much as we are reacting to the environment around us. And so it allows us to work outside of a different portion of our brain. And one of the things where introspection and even stillness can be so beneficial is it allows the cognitive part of our brain to catch back up. It allows the thinking, logical reasoning part of our brain, whereas we can react out of a lot of different emotions, both positive emotions, negative emotions. When we initiate action, when our knee-jerk response is just to do something, we short-circuit that process. And we go into reactive mode. A lot of times, I think we end up losing perspective on what we're actually trying to accomplish.

10:27 Jeffrey Besecker And it's really easy to choose the easy right over the hard wrong. In that regard, do you feel we sometimes might be overconfident in our self-assessments and the introspection illusion as a biased heuristic might come into play in many regards? Does that sometimes limit our ability to self-assess?

10:49 Chad Hufford Absolutely. But I think it's interesting you mentioned our overconfidence. I think a lot of times our overconfidence actually sometimes stems from a little bit of an insecurity. And in action, action allows us to numb or to drown out some of those insecurities. We feel like we're doing something because we don't want to hear that little voice saying, ah, we should take a couple steps back. We should think about this. We should plan, prepare, whatever. Maybe we're not quite ready. And I know that those fears can have their own issues. But I think action allows us to not hear, to kind of quiet some of those insecurities. And we move in a direction. And I think action a lot of times, or activity, I should say, is misinterpreted for productivity. We feel like we're accomplishing something just because we're moving around, we're busy. Denzel Washington talked about, you can run on a treadmill all day, but you're not going to get anywhere. It's something his mom used to tell him. And I think when we are busy just spinning on that treadmill, spinning on that wheel,

12:02 Jeffrey Besecker we're able to not have some of those difficult thoughts and conversations with ourselves. Sometimes we get on that hedonic treadmill where we're feeding that emotional cycle, that is cycle of reactivity where we ruminate, we overthink, we start to self doubt. Let's look at some key factors that might shape our introspection from your perspective

12:26 Chad Hufford and how that influences how we self reflect or self assess. Well, I always like to bring people back to objectives and before they act, what is the outcome? What are we trying to accomplish with this? In fact, I was just playing football with my boys last night and I was asking my son, why did you do this specific move? Why did you do this thing? And he didn't really know. To be honest, I think he thought it looked cool. So I actually videoed him to show, here's what you were doing. And he's like, wow, that is ridiculous. I'm like, well, yeah, but before you make a move, before you act on something, have an outcome. What is the outcome that you want to achieve? And I think that does two things. First of all, it forces us to get, again, going back to what you said, being introspective, it forces us to get our actions in alignment with that long term goal, the objective, the who we want to become, what we want to do, where we want to end up type situation. But again, it also, it pulls us out of the emotional center of our brain and allows the reasoning center to catch back. It just slows us down. Just breathing techniques do that same thing. It allows the thought process to catch back up to the emotion.

13:43 Jeffrey Besecker So we're less likely to act out of emotions. So often we get caught up in those rumination cycles that are driven by our implicit and explicit memory. Those implicit memories being imprinted by those emotional interactions, those past emotional experiences, and we store those largely unconsciously back there kind of in a repressed pattern of memory. Looking at that aspect, to me, that signals the importance of ego development and our ego filters. So we have somewhat of a subjective view a lot of times on what we're conditioned to

14:21 Chad Hufford believe ego development involves. Well, you touched on something super important because it's that self-awareness. Because a lot of our reaction, our tendency towards a certain type of action, I think does come from past experiences, past behaviors, past patterns that we've developed. And like you said, they're essentially habits. They're tendencies or proclivities that we may not even be aware of. But becoming more aware of that allows us, when we are faced with a difficult circumstance, we are faced with a decision, we do need to act, we hopefully take pause and say, okay, I know I am more likely to react out of anger or out of fear or more likely to lean towards this type of bias within that reactivity. And I think that's where being self-aware is really important. Again, that comes from introspection. I think it comes from even talking to people, having friends who are willing to be kind rather than nice, to tell you what you need to know, not necessarily what you want to hear. And working through something, saying, hey, when I'm in a stressful situation, how do I typically behave? What do I do? Because those patterns exist and the brain doesn't necessarily dissociate different types of stress. So when you're stressed out about finances, you're stressed out about a relationship, you're stressed out about work, there's going to be patterns in there based on how you've been shaped and molded. So I think getting clear about what our natural tendencies are really important when we're faced with a new situation. It gives us that pause to say, okay, I'm probably a little bit more likely to react or overreact

16:10 Jeffrey Besecker in this type of way. You made a great point there about that perception of the two different types or different types of stress. So often we get frontloaded with that singular concept of stress as either good or bad, that kind of black and white thinking. Rather than looking at healthy stress, you stress in that kind of more destructive stress, for lack of a better way to put it today, that we typically associate with chronic stress or distress.

16:38 Chad Hufford Well, there's a concept of stress. Yeah. I mean, often it's negative, right? You think about the fasting, it puts a certain stress on the body, but it can actually be beneficial. We're working out, you're stressing your body. But how you react to that stress, how you engage with that stress often determines whether that's going to be a net benefit or a detriment to your life. And I think that's important for us to look at too is, yeah, how are we engaging with the stress? Because stress is inevitable, right? But what patterns do we have to deal with that stress? And going back to this idea of action bias too, if we're reacting directly to the stress, usually we're going to get caught up in some sort of detrimental behavior. Not always, but oftentimes. But if we can harness that moment and look at that stress and what can I learn from it? How can the shape me? I think it can change how we interact with stress, but also when we do act or when we choose not to act, it's more likely to be in line with what we're actually trying to accomplish rather than, again, that knee-jerk reaction, that heuristic, where we're often not even addressing the question that needs to be answered. We're answering an easier question because we're going through a mental, emotional shortcut rather than dealing with the problem at hand.

18:08 Jeffrey Besecker You mentioned there that role of emotion in managing those healthy levels of eustress and what sometimes tends to become those chronic or unhealthy levels of distress. What role from that perspective does emotional self-regulation play in forming our sense of agency in that regard?

18:29 Chad Hufford And how might our emotions influence the processes of volition and efficacy as a result? Oh, it's so critical because once the emotions take control of our decision making, there's so many studies that show this. Even looking at functional MRIs, we can watch blood flow, the concentration of blood flow change going from our prefrontal cortex where we process information, go to the more emotional centers of our brain. And this doesn't have to be fear. It can be greed as well. It can be a lot of different things. But when emotions take over, our ability to make decisions has a pretty precipitous decline. And just think of how you ever met a teenager, you know that emotions don't necessarily help you make great long-term decisions. And that's where we can also, I think, get in trouble with this action bias is a lot of times easy short-term decisions have an immediate payoff. You know, bad habits or unhealthy habits oftentimes have a short-term immediate payoff where you get a dopamine hit. You bite into that piece of candy. There's that pleasure sensation. It tastes good. And the long-term effects are longer lasting, but they don't show up right away. And I think that can get us in trouble a lot because a lot of times those healthy behaviors actually end up having a temporary cost. There's a temporary price to be paid for that long-term benefit. And emotions can cloud that where it can pull us into making decisions in that moment for that moment, which again are usually not good because we're getting that immediate gratification of whatever that that reaction is rather than saying, you know, I'm willing to make a temporary sacrifice based on where I need to be long-term. Does that make sense?

20:32 Jeffrey Besecker Yeah, you mentioned watching that role of those shifts happen through videography, you know, through actually seeing where those shifts in the blood flow go. You know, we can watch where we start to shift from that kind of logic based thinking, the reasoning in the prefrontal and those explicit memories, you know, in the subconscious seeping back into, you know, our unconscious areas of the mind that take us offline, that take us out of that reasoning and trigger us into those emotionally reactive responses. When we watch that processes go further, we can actually see how our brainstem shuts down and we start to react from purely central nervous system, autonomic response. All logic is shut down and we're merely acting off of stored past trauma in many regards. We're completely offline from our brain.

21:31 Chad Hufford Well, you you had a guest on I'm trying to remember his name, Dustin. He is the author talking about basically blame shifting and how we are we're so quick to point fingers, not take responsibility. And he brought a lot of that back to fear and fear causes us to point fingers, to blame it, to kind of victimize ourselves. And and I think it can have a lot of those same repercussions in this in this sense, too, where fear causes us to to react again is that that action bias, we can turn down the alarm of fear when we're active, when we're busy in doing something. But a lot of times those fears stem from past experiences being dredged up. And if we are reacting to that fear, then we're not acting on the situation anymore. And again, back to that idea of heuristics, where we're no longer dealing with the actual problem. We're reacting to to a sideshow, in a sense. And and I think that's where that's where people can get derailed very, very easily distracted where we we don't react to the risks at hand appropriately because we've misidentified them. They've been colored or shadowed by past experiences or even the experience of people around us. I mean, just I was thinking about this the other day, like three and a half years ago, the world started shutting down with Covid, right. And we didn't know the impact it was going to have. We didn't know how it was going to spread. We didn't know how dangerous it really was, who was going to get it, who is at risk. But we all went out and started buying toilet paper for a respiratory situation. There were legitimate food shortages and other things like meatpacking plants shutting down, all that. And I guess I'm thinking like, well, if if you can't eat, the toilet paper situation kind of figures itself out. Like if nothing's going out, we were reacting to what everybody else around us was doing. And, you know, Jeffrey's buying toilet paper. So I should probably buy a toilet paper. If we sat down and logically thought about it, we would have much different choices that I think a lot of us would have made. But we were stressed. We were under pressure. We were in a brand new situation. And we oftentimes look to see what are the people around me doing and acting on that. So I think in that sense, kind of that the herd mentality can often be worked into the action by us, too. When we don't know what to do, we're more likely to just do what everybody else around us is doing. So we're reacting to, yes, those past traumas and emotions and things like that, past experiences. But a lot of times it's we're being very heavily influenced by what everybody else around us is doing. And it's like following somebody else's roadmap. We don't know what somebody else's goals are, but we take directions from all these different people when we don't know what to do. We just feel like we need to do something.

24:43 Jeffrey Besecker So often we use that action in that regard as an emotionally avoidant coping mechanism. We think by taking action, we're kind of taking control in some regards. We're trying to respond to the situation. We're trying to sometimes just simply avoid the action of feeling what we need to feel or what might be present in our natural field. Sometimes we have to create that healthy psychological space to pause and allow those feelings to be to simply accept them, vulnerably acknowledge them and allow them to process through.

25:19 Chad Hufford If you if you stop at a stoplight and you'll see people you're there for 20 or 30 seconds, the first thing people do, they're on their phone, they're doing something. And I've seen people doing like videos of themselves at a stoplight. Like we can't even sit with our feelings or thoughts for 30 seconds, 60 seconds. And I think as society, Jeffrey, we we don't interact with our thoughts and feelings, but we don't feel them. There's so many ways of numbing. And I'm not just talking about drugs or alcohol, but entertainment and busyness. I don't think a lot of us sit with our feelings. And when we do experience some of those things, we don't know how to interact with those emotions, how to even even name and identify what it is we're actually feeling. We have a tendency to suppress that and then and then move on.

26:15 Jeffrey Besecker You know, Chad, in that regard, when it comes to action bias, do you feel it's learned or innate and what portion of this pattern arises as a result of either conditioned programming or selective reinforcement?

26:29 Chad Hufford OK, that's a huge question. I think it's both. So you mentioned the central nervous system and the brain stem. And some people refer to it as like the lizard brain, like this most basic part of of our brain that is designed to react. Because, you know, if you hear rustling in the bushes 10,000 years ago, it yeah, it might be a squirrel or a rabbit and that's your next meal or it might be a lion in your it's next meal. And you don't have time to sit there and go through the probabilities and think through and maybe we should do maybe a study and a research to get some statistics. And you just react because it kept you alive in the moment. So I think that that lizard brain, it does obviously a lot of good things for us. Like you don't have to put your hand on a stove and think about, I wonder how hot that is. It pulls your hand off before you've had time to process it. So that reactivity is very, very important, but it has to be managed. So I think it is it is very much innate. It is very much ingrained in each one of us. We're born with that. You can look at a little baby and see how a baby is wired for action. I've got six kids. I've seen it a lot. So there's a lot of activity at our house. But I think also it's very much a learned behavior, like we were just talking about a few moments ago with watching the actions of everybody else. One of my favorite illustrations of this, I'm not sure if you're familiar with with Fabius, Quintus Fabius Maximus was a Roman general and he was basically appointed dictator. You are the most powerful guy in the world appointed by the Roman Senate. And this was at the time that Hannibal was trying to invade Italy and he was crossing the Alps. And Fabius's strategy was to engage Hannibal a little bit, little skirmishes, almost baiting him. But he refused to go take his army and meet Hannibal. His plan was to let Hannibal come through the Alps. And it was really a battle of attrition. So Hannibal had a lot of things up against him. He had the conditions, the geography. He was cut off from supply lines. He also had his army was a lot of Spanish mercenaries. They weren't about the mission. They were about they wanted to plunder villages. And what Fabius did is he had people pull all their possessions. They were burning crops. Basically, they didn't give Hannibal anything along the way. But the Senate, the Senate became increasingly frustrated with Fabius because they felt like he wasn't doing anything. He wasn't taking enough action. And to speed this up, just make a long story short, with the Senate does, they eventually remove Fabius from power and they replace him with a guy named Gaius Varro. And under pressure of the Senate, Gaius goes and takes this army and engages Hannibal directly. And it's a catastrophic defeat. His army is decimated. They're embarrassed. And only too late did they realize that Hannibal was like this storm, like a like a hurricane coming across land. The further he came, the less power he had. He was he was losing steam as he came through the Alps. And if they had simply waited and prepared, they would have been so much better off. But it was that collective action bias. So I think to your question, it is it is very much innate, but it's also learned behavior. We see it going around. And you look at this, you think of the Senate, all very smart, educated men, but they were all feeling this tension, wanting to do something. It was really hard to sit there as as one of the most powerful armies was crossing the Alps. There was a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety, a lot of trepidation. They probably saw it in each other. And they collectively let their action bias take them astray. So I think this may be a very long way of answering that question, but I think that illustrates both the ingrained nature of that, but also how it can be learned from others because everybody respond, the Senate responded very much to what they were feeling

31:04 Jeffrey Besecker emotionally rather than the best way to to to execute their objective. We often view life as that rush into battle, the call for immediate action and response. There are times, however, when we should pause, reflecting on our actions and decisions, when introspection and consideration call into question our strengths as humans. And the need arises to take a breath before we charge ahead as we consider how our choices will affect us and the people around us. It's in those moments that we gain insight into our true motivations and what we value most. Doing so allows us to make more conscious decisions that mirror our values and take into account the consequences of our actions. Deliberation and calm contemplation help us to take the time to consider our decisions more thoroughly and weigh the potential outcomes that result. And it is within these moments we truly rise. I think that's an excellent story to interject today to illustrate how we often leverage the action biases to engage that illusion of control. You know, and here we see how that effective action would have transpired had we engaged a healthy window of emotional tolerance, had we quieted some of that inner voice of doubt and allowed the action to play out, allowed for healthy risk to take place. In that regard, chat, how does the action bias affect our willingness to take healthy risks?

32:43 Chad Hufford Hmm. So how does the action bias interplay with our taking of healthy risks? That's what you're asking? OK. That was kind of ambiguous. The action bias can distract us from the true risks. And I think it can cause us to misidentify risk. And I'll just give an example from my field. So every time the stock market goes down, everybody knows about it. And if we are in a prolonged decline, it's all you see on the news. I mean, last year it was every single day the market did this market's going to do that. And the end is coming and the sky is falling and Chicken Little is running around and all these different things. But a lot of people don't realize is that markets are always involved. And the S&P 500, we use that as an example. And that's just the broad US stock market. It's kind of the barometer for the US stock market since 1980 has gone down on average almost 15 percent a year on average. There's a decline of almost 15 percent a year. But that's what everybody's paying attention to. And until a couple of years ago, what people miss, what they don't pay attention to is the slow and steady decline of purchasing power. So in the last 62 years, the dollar has lost 90 percent of its value. It takes a thousand dollars today to buy what one hundred dollars did 62 years ago. I'm using 62 just because that's the average age of a typical retire, somebody retiring this year. And the volatility, that's what gets our attention. It's what gets our emotions going. It's what the media plays up. But that's not what keeps us from our long term goals. Those temporary declines do not stop the permanent advance of capital and long term investments. But it's that slow erosion of purchasing power for most people. That is one of the biggest, if not the primary risk to their long term security. But it's not what gets our attention because it's slowly happening in the background. It's subtle. And what the action bias does that causes us to, oh, my goodness, the sky is falling. I better pull out, put all my money in cash or bonds or something like that. And what it does is like jumping out of the frying pan into the fire because you're jumping out of something that is very volatile, but can grow net of inflation into something like cash that gets eaten alive by inflation. So you actually make the situation worse. You're going in the exact opposite direction because the action bias, I think, short circuits that pattern. Again, we get that immediate gratification. We get relief from the volatility. We get relief from whatever stress we're feeling in the moment. But it often causes us to be even more exposed to the real risks. So it clouds our vision. And I think a lot of times doesn't allow us to helpfully identify risks because we're looking at it through an emotional lens rather than through objective lens. Does that answer your question?

35:57 Jeffrey Besecker Yeah. Yeah. I love how you pointed that out in our pre-conversations, how that kind of hyperbolic discounting or reaching for that quick, easy return sometimes diminishes our ability to return on that consistent, emotionally regulated, invested long-term outcome.

36:15 Chad Hufford Well, I think the action bias oftentimes gives us temporarily relief. If it doesn't give us some sort of temporary payoff in the sense of pleasure, it oftentimes gives us a temporary relief and payoff in those terms. So whether it's having a difficult conversation with a loved one, maybe a spouse or a boss, something like that, we choose not to have that. We know we should. But there's relief in that moment where we're not in conflict anymore. We're taking a break, whatever. And sometimes that may be necessary. But a lot of times that relief is extended for way too long. Think about somebody maybe trying to get in shape. And it's a lot easier to have bagels for breakfast than it is to have kale or whatever you do with kale in the morning. I don't know how to have breakfast with it. But there's a relief from some sort of stress earlier. But there's some sort of stress or some sort of pressure that we're often feeling. And I think when we are reacting to that, again, taking in the action biases is our subject for today, what we're often seeking is immediate relief from something, but it rarely solves the problem. It's like giving a gunshot victim morphine. It doesn't solve any of the issues. And in fact, it may exacerbate the issue, but it does give temporary relief. And that's why we're so drawn to it.

37:49 Jeffrey Besecker In that regard, what role do you feel as an unconscious factor social conditioning plays in how we view that ability to take healthy risk and then also maybe address it with direct action?

38:04 Chad Hufford I think that as a society, we've conditioned ourselves to very much live in the short term, very much live in the moment. So that conditioning is very, very strong because we see it all around us and it's very easy for us to justify that seeking of relief in the short term, even if there's a long term cost. You know, it's like the payday loan, right? It relieves temporary financial stress at the cost of much, much more stress spread out over the long run, almost like it's happening to another person. So I think there's two things at play here. So number one, because our society at large is very prone to making those same decisions, we can easily justify it because we know somebody that's done the very same thing. We've seen it modeled around us. This comes back to your question about nature versus nurture. So I think that's one part. But the other part is a lot of us don't have a great relationship with our future self. We make decisions for us in the moment, almost as if the person in the future, like future Chad, future Jeffrey, as if they're different people than us. And Jerry Seinfeld had a hilarious bit about morning time, morning guy versus nighttime guy and how nighttime guy is always making life more difficult for morning guy. And it's funny because it's so true. We look at this in these, the today version of you and the tomorrow version, you're 24 hours apart, not even 24 hours apart, but we're still, we're still so tempted to make decisions that make our life not harder five, 10 years from now, harder tomorrow. And we still do it. So I think that goes back to that, just how we're wired. We are wired to react, to survive in the moment, to do what's easier in the moment and let long-term consequences work themselves out almost as if long-term consequences are being paid for or dealt with by a different person, as if the future me is a different human being.

40:11 Jeffrey Besecker Now it's easy to look at that and see how something like dissociation and unhealthy over-identification comes into effect. We see ourselves in that regard as two different people, even though essentially we're the same core person. I see that playing out for you a lot, perhaps as a financial guy, that idea of social conditioning with inflationary practices in particular, that kind of chicken little effect where, you know, inflation's going up, the sky is falling, the sky is falling. What do we do with our finances now? So often we're stimulated by that bandwagon effect to take some sort of action. We realize this kind of assumption of everybody else's collective anxiety and feel that need to act. Yes.

41:02 Chad Hufford That idea that everybody else is doing it, therefore it must be okay. And I don't remember who said this, Jeffrey, but there's a quote that I read recently that most people would rather be wrong in a crowd than be right by themselves. And that very much plays into this too. And you're right. I think dissociation plays a big part in this, right? Like I've never met the future version of me. I don't know him. I hope he's a nice guy. I would like to think that he is, but I've never met him. So I'm going to make decisions based on me here in the moment today. And you mentioned some of those financial decisions. I'll just give you a couple other examples. Like if we do dissociate from our future selves, you see a couch on sale and it's like, no payments till 2024. And it's like, well, 2024 that's happening to somebody else. To me, it's a free couch and 2024 chat can pay for it. And then on the other side of that, whether you're paying down debt or what you're adding towards retirement, that can feel like a cost in the moment. I'm when I put money into my 401k, I'm paying the future version of me. But if I don't have an association, a connection with that, it does. It feels like a cost. It feels like a payment I'm making to somebody else, not building my own future. And then when you add the stress of what's going on in the world, people worried about recession, people worried about China, people about Russia, people, people worried about whatever it is they're worried about. It causes that dissociation to be even wider, I think. And we double down on the here and now. And we are even more distance from the future and what the long-term consequences are. I don't think people naturally look at second, third order consequences. It's, Hey, I'm going to act now. This is the immediate payoff. This is the immediate relief. This is the immediate pleasure. And we often don't go very much further than that, especially when we are acting out of emotion, circling back to what you and I were talking about at the beginning of this conversation, that reasoning logical part of our mind gets quieted, the emotional centers get really, really loud, and a lot of times we aren't thinking past that immediate action.

43:18 Jeffrey Besecker Yeah. To me, that signals from my perspective, my awareness, where we kind of engage some of those ego filters of pre and post conventional ego development, where everything is happening to me. Oh yes. As we embrace an awareness of post-autonomous ego development, post-autonomous, meaning we're not associating so much with that sense of self and we're able to see ourselves through that filter of a fourth person perspective, we're able to see ourselves separate from that interaction and simply see the various possible outcome.

43:56 Chad Hufford Well, I think, I think that is a great point, Jeffrey, and the idea of things happening to me, so we talked about agency a lot and, and I think having that outside, looking at that outside perspective, you're able to see like, what is a positive step you could take? It might not solve the problem. What is a positive step you could take towards a resolution, but we often don't get there, especially when we are looking at as everything happening to me. There's a sense of victimization that happens. And I think that when it taken to extreme, if we get in the habit of, of relinquishing our agency, we can get to a point of learned helplessness where we are no longer looking for solutions anymore because we don't believe we're in a position to bring those solutions to fruition. And I think it's really easy to focus on what we can't control rather than looking, looking introspectively at the behaviors, the variables that we can influence. And just look at, look at the news on any given day. I mean, it's so much as focused on the things outside of our control. And I think that, that does lead to that, that victimization, that sense of look at all these things happening to me.

45:19 Jeffrey Besecker From that perspective, we're so often making a lot of our life decisions based on our self concept, our sense of agency in that regard, what role do you feel healthy, constructive, and empathetic outside feedback play in shifting our perspective and maybe disengaging from some of that action we feel to take on our own.

45:43 Chad Hufford Well, I think going back to what you already said about, about viewing from trying to view your situation from an outside perspective, we're never going to be able to view it completely objectively, but I think it helps, it helps us filter feedback when we are trying to view it from that least like fourth person perspective, but we're less likely to react defensively. We're, we're less likely to push back against that feedback. And I think, I think we talked about this in the pre-conversation, you know, my background was in biochemistry and it was, we always, we're always doing experiments and we weren't so, we weren't so married to the outcome. It was about learning from the process. And there, we, we realized there was a lot of variables we either couldn't control or we just didn't know how those variables were going to interact. So it wasn't so much what the outcome of this experiment was going to be. It was learning from the process and gaining that feedback. And I think a lot of people, when they're engaged, especially in maybe a stressful situation, they aren't looking at the feedback and what insight they can gain from the process as much as they are trying to leverage an outcome that may not be completely in their control. And what ends up happening is we get outcome focused and we lose the attention of the inputs, the inputs being the actions and behaviors that we can influence, the variables that we do have some control over. And it leads us to this, this place of, again, the loss of agency, but when, when we are trying to control things we can't control, like the outcome of a situation, I think that's where action bias gets really stirred up because we just, we're trying more things and sometimes we're just doing more of the wrong thing. It's like finding we're going in the wrong direction and figuring, well, we better go faster, like what we're doing isn't working, let's do more of it because maybe that will help us. And in, we end up, we end up losing sight of what are the things that I can do in this moment that can actually bring me closer to where I want to be. And, and we have to be willing to take in that feedback to learn and looking at our life almost as experiment of sorts and not taking those things personal. And that's super hard. As I'm saying this to you, I'm realizing like even in my own life, that's so hard when, when you get feedback that you don't want to hear and looking at it from, almost like you're reading this in a narrative in a book and, and not looking at, at not reacting out of my own self preservation, my own ego, my own hurt. Um, and looking, okay, what can I learn from that experience? And we've both heard the phrase you learn a lot more from, from losses than from wins, but I think that's only if we're willing to.

48:44 Jeffrey Besecker So often, as we mentioned earlier, we get caught in that chicken little effect. And we eventually are running around like that chicken with our heads cut off, simply trying to find a way to suppress what's going on. Chad, this has been such a great talk today. I want to take a moment if we can, and as we're creating kind of this healthy psychological distance to step back from things and allow some space for action to happen. What are three tips or three insights you can kind of sum up today that allow us

49:20 Chad Hufford to more effectively engage that state? The first thing I would say is focusing on inputs and outcomes, kind of like I just mentioned, taking a step back from the desired outcome and looking at what can I do to better leverage that? So I'm just going to give you a quick example. Like let's say my desired outcome is I need to lose 10 pounds. That's not completely under my control. There are a lot of things that are going to influence that. But today, what I can do is I can not have the soda for lunch or I can go to the gym after work or I can not eat after six o'clock or whatever it is. But those are the inputs that I can control. I don't necessarily have complete control of the outcome, but it's looking at what are the inputs that I can leverage that do work on the outcome, even if they don't completely control it. Hopefully that makes sense. So it's focusing on inputs rather than outcomes. I think the other thing would be to take time of self-reflection. For some people, that might be meditation. For some people, it might be breathing. For some people, it might be working out. Sometimes it might be just counting towards three in the middle of a difficult conversation. But learning a technique and again, there's a lot of ways to do this. Breathing techniques, a lot of different things that just allow that cognitive part of your brain to catch back up. So you are less likely to react on the whirlwind around you and you're better able to take appropriate action, even in the midst of uncertainty. Third thing, I would say getting clear on what you want the outcome to be. So even if you can't completely control it, it's like having a if you're building a house, it's like having a sketch or rendering of what you want that house to look like when you're done. So if you do make a decision, you can see does this decision align with what that future product is going to look like, knowing that that's that future product that might evolve, that might change, that house might not look exactly the way that I've designed it the way I want it to. But does my action today line up with that? And again, it's pulling us out of the moment and in trying to to close the gap between who we are today and where we want to be, who we want to become in the future. So there isn't as much dissociation. So what is what is the objective? What am I hoping to gain from this decision, this outcome?

52:02 Jeffrey Besecker And I want to thank you for such thoughtful and encouraging insight today. We all want our numbers to add up as we travel this journey of self-actualization and personal growth, our financial situation playing a large role in that. Where can our listeners go to to reach out to you, Chad, and get some insight on how to make their financial numbers add up for future growth?

52:27 Chad Hufford I appreciate you asking that. Our website is VeritasAlaska.com, just because we were founded here where we have folks all over the nation and a few folks internationally as well. And our biggest social platform is probably LinkedIn. You can just search Chad Hufford Veritas and you'll find us on there. And one of the things that I've seen, Jeffrey, is finance is such a big part of life. And if we can make better financial decisions and create a better relationship with our finances, our money, it requires so much discipline, perseverance and patience to do that. It's amazing when we see people take control there, how other areas of life start falling into place. So finance is just a tool that I've been able to use to help people pursue a more fulfilling and a more intentional and purposeful life. I love a lot of what you've done on your show, doing the same thing. And you're using different mediums, but I think we're both after the same goal. So it's been a pleasure to be here and to chat with you and to speak into the lives of

53:31 Jeffrey Besecker your audience. And this has been an honor. Thank you, my friend. This certainly has added up to a very enlightening and engaging conversation. So thank you for sharing that, my friend. Namaste. The light in me acknowledges the light in you. Let's do this again soon.

53:48 Chad Hufford I would absolutely love it. This has been a lot of fun for me. I appreciate your questions. Some were very challenging. Hopefully I was able to give some good answers. You kept me on my toes. And this was a lot of fun. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

54:02 Jeffrey Besecker I have to. Likewise, my friend, I look forward to having many more conversations. Thank you. Thank you. My pleasure. Many blessings. Exploring the unconscious patterns that drive this behavior, Chad and I have shared how the action bias often hinders our goals and inhibits our ability for self-actualization. Using the skills of behavioral management frequently utilized to grow our monetary assets, we've illustrated the impact this detrimental, heuristic place in our ability to make more effective decisions and take more assertive action. Chad also shared how healthy risk assessment and taking the time to pause often create more beneficial outcomes throughout our life, empowering you to engage in calmer, more confident and fruitful action. Now we'd like to hear what you found meaningful in today's show. Tag us at social media at the Light Inside podcast, sharing your key takeaways and insights. We'll share us with a friend or loved one who you feel will find value and meaning in this message. As always, we're grateful for you, our valued listening community. This has been the Light Inside. I'm Jeffrey Biesecker.