Jeremy Stevenson on The 12 Levers for a Better Life

Guest Intro:

Swami (00:01.272)

Hello everyone. Welcome to another edition of the Contra Minds podcast. In this episode, I’m talking to Jeremy Stevenson. Jeremy is a clinical psychologist, a researcher at Sparkwave, and he has recently co-authored a book along with Dr. Spencer Greenberg, mathematician and entrepreneur on what is called as the 12 Levers of Life. 

The book named 12 Levers identifies the most important psychological techniques that can help you improve various aspects of your life. What they have found out is that when you really look at all the research around self-help book that have been published, all of them fall under these 12 levers.

I began my conversation with Jeremy on his calling for being a clinical psychologist because he graduated in international finance. I really asked him about the moment when he decided he is not going to do finance but look at diving deep into clinical psychology. Then we spoke about the book in detail, but what I really dug deep into the book was around three or four areas which I thought was very very interesting and most important in my view. The first one was the guiding foundation. Most often what I find is that we really don’t spend too much of time around our values and the intrinsic value that we really think are important and that has an implication of what you do every day.

So one of the levers that Jeremy Stevenson talks about in the book is how do you really identify your guiding foundation. Once you identify your guiding foundation, the next lever that we spoke about was how do you really actualize it. We also talked about the productivity equation where, most often productivity is aligned with efficiency. Productivity is not about efficiency, but it is also about the factor of importance in your life and that has a huge implication on improving productivity. This lever is something that we spoke about. We then also spoke about the alignment of the body and mind and how do you break down problems and look at incremental improvements in setting up your goals and their own framework of how you can have a targeted goal and build a feedback loop into improving various aspects of your life. Over to my conversation with Jeremy Stepenson.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Q1

Swami (01:15.672)

Jeremy, the first question that I had and it was quite intriguing for me is that you have a background in international finance and you pivoted into a clinical psychologist. So tell me what was that moment that you decided that you wanted to move from international finance to clinical psychology?

Jeremy Stevenson (01:26.318)

Mm-hmm.

Jeremy Stevenson (01:42.991)

There were a few moments. I I remember being in my second semester of international finance, just sinking into my lecture seat and just staring at this boring lecture and just thinking like this is not where I want to be. But I still finished the degree and I honestly didn’t know what I wanted to do. I just went off traveling for a while and yeah, the long story short is that in my adventures outside of uni, I stumbled into cognitive behavioral therapy. And I I talk about this in the book. I found a book called A New Guide to Rational Living, which was written by a couple of psychologists. One of them is considered the one of the pioneers, the grandfather of CBT called Albert Ellis. And it introduced me to the basic theory of cognitive Behavioral therapy of you know the way you think affects how you feel. And it just had a profound impact on me. Like it really helped to relieve a lot of my own suffering. And I actually do remember the moment I was I had my exercise book and I was challenging my negative thinking. And I remember looking up from the book and just thinking silently to myself, like I I want to help other people do this. And that started the journey to get into to to go back and study psychology and ultimately to do do a PhD in ClinSych.

Swami (03:25.205)

Interesting. So what did you learn and unlearn out of this experience? Because I’m sure people would have told you, you know, whether this is the right decision to make and clearly there was something that you would have thought about. So what did you learn and unlearn out of this experience?

Jeremy Stevenson (03:46.231)

out of the experience of of studying international finance or?

Swami (03:49.644)

No, out of the pivoting that you’re doing because most of us, you know, get into some profession, you realize that that’s really not your calling. And then some of us continue to do the same thing while being frustrated. Very few of us have the ability to take the risk and jump off the rails and take up something that you’re really passionate about. So you’ve done that, honestly, and that’s that’s the reason I’m asking this question.

Jeremy Stevenson (03:57.965)

Yeah.

Jeremy Stevenson (04:16.374)

Yeah, yeah. Well, I there were a few things I learned. One is that I think if you don’t know too much about who you are, which was definitely the case for me in high school, and I I go into this also in the book about how I was just so concerned about the getting approval from other people. I was really concerned about the opinions and of others. And that had serious consequences. It meant that I hadn’t really clarified my own values and preferences and goals about what I wanted to do with with myself. And so when it came to choosing a you know a degree that I wanted to study, I I just kind of went with the flow and did what seemed logical. There were also some unhelpful I don’t know if you guys have this over in India, but that you you get these career questions that you can go through and it spits out the ideal job for you. And I just did not it it just was not a helpful result. And I again I think it’s because I didn’t know myself, I didn’t know what I liked and disliked, so I was just answering the questions quite generically. 

So I mean it yeah, if I could go back in time and give advice to my younger self. I just would have told myself to go and well f firstly, let go of the approval seeking. Like it’s not it’s not helping you, it’s causing a lot of suffering. And then to go out and experiment and just try a whole bunch of things to figure out what you what you actually enjoy doing. That’s what I ultimately did. It just took me a a lot longer to get there than I think it does for a bunch of other people.

Q2

Swami (06:05.623)

Interesting. Your PhD thesis I saw was around self-compassion and social anxiety, right? And what made you really look at these two topics and what have you learnt out of this as you started practicing your profession and as you meet your clients and I think you’ve done a whole host of work around the last many, many years around this. So what is it that you have learned about self-compassion and social anxiety that you believe is extremely valuable to the audience who are listening today? And literally the reason I believe this is important is social anxiety is only increasing, right? So therefore I think it just gives you a perspective of your PhD thesis versus what you really do as a clinical psychologist.

Jeremy Stevenson (07:04.012)

Yeah. Well, the reason I was so interested in that topic is I I personally had had the experience of going from really intense approval seeking and concern about others’ opinions of me to letting go of that and accepting myself more and being more compassionate towards myself. And as I went on that journey, like I didn’t have any clinical levels of social anxiety, but I had a fair amount of social stress and I definitely could have social anxiety at times. And a lot of that fell away the more I started to accept myself. And yeah, when I looked into the literature, I couldn’t see much had been done in that area. And the connection was pretty logical to me. So I just wanted to explore it. And and self-compassion was this growing area and it did seem to offer something on top of what cognitive behavioral therapy was offering. But as you probably know, CBT is more of this rational approach. Like you identify your unhelpful beliefs and you challenge them. Whereas compassion introduces this more this this approach that focuses more on, you know how what’s what’s your attitude towards yourself? Like how warm are you? What what’s the tone in which you’re talking to yourself? 

So yeah, I wanted to explore in my PhD if it could help with social anxiety and it did in a nutshell. So the the main study I did was comparing it was a short intervention comparing cognitive restructuring, which is one of the main techniques from CBT, where you reframe your thinking, versus self-compassionate letter writing and seeing if there was a difference. And yeah, the both were effective for treating social anxiety and there were no significant differences between them. So it just added a bit more evidence to this emerging idea that self-compassion and compassion focused therapies can be helpful for problems like social anxiety.

Q3

Swami (09:33.986)

Fantastic. I’m going to dive into the book really, the 12 Levers that you have just written and published. What’s interesting to me, Jeremy, is that…you almost went through close to 106 self-help books, close to over 60 techniques, over 500 papers, and then you kind of summarized it, saying that there are just 12 levers out of all these self-help books. What was the, I would say the driving reason for actually going through this history and the body of work that got done in the past many many years and why did you think this was critical for the book to come up as 12 Levers.

Jeremy Stevenson (10:38.722)

Well, th there were a few entry points. So yeah, like we say in the book, a lot of it began with our own suffering. Like we wanted techniques to use, you know, in Spencer’s case, he had a lot pretty intense social anxiety. Like I mentioned for myself, it was a lot of approval seeking and feeling inferior and inadequate. And we were lucky that in our early twenties we started to find effective technique. So we knew there was good stuff out there, but it can be pretty hard to find, as I’m sure you’ve probably experienced, a lot of your listeners have experienced, you have to wade through a lot of different materials to find good stuff and to find the techniques themselves. And even when you do find good techniques and good resources, the yeah the other entry point was we just started to notice patterns independently. So before we knew each other, Spencer and I, in my personal life, I’d read self-help books and some of them were good. But yeah, once I got past the theory and stories and motivational stuff, I’d get to the techniques and they just seemed familiar. It’s like I’d seen them before. Even they even if they had different names, I felt like I’d seen them before. 

And then that became more solidified when I did my PhD and I would learn about new therapies and they sounded new and exciting, but a similar thing, like you know, an example would be cognitive processing therapy for for PTSD, which I was learning when I was in this PTSD clinic. And I thought it would be this brand new thing, but when I actually looked into the protocol, it was essentially cognitive restructuring. Like that was the bulk of the the protocol. It doesn’t mean it’s not effective. It’s a very effective technique for PTSD, but it was just a great example of these patterns. So Spencer and I had had independently noticed these these patterns and then our paths converged and we had to do a few other projects first. But then we wanted to dive into this and just see like what i is there actually some framework that does underlie all of these techniques so that that was what motivated us to do the research.

Q4

Swami (13:10.583)

So you’ve talked a lot of times around social anxiety, you talked about self-approval. Talk to me about self-approval and social anxiety and what does it do to people and what does it…really affect in terms of people and their behavior. I just wanted to dive a little bit deeper into these two aspects.

Jeremy Stevenson (13:41.773)

Yeah. Yeah, I I think it is an important connection to make and it’s part of my story that I I had just been like f firstly I was just unaware for the longest time that I was approval seeking. I was just habitually going through social interactions and trying to impress people and not really conscious that that’s what I was doing.

And then secondly, I wasn’t aware of the connection between approval seeking and social anxiety and stress and feeling inferior and inadequate. And I think at a micro level, and you know, you could use one of the techniques from the book, like the ABC analysis from Lever One, where you’re trying to understand the problem. 

If you broke it down, approval seeking, you know, that there would be beliefs and thoughts going through your mind of like, I need to get this person’s approval. If I if they judge me negatively, that would be horrible. And then in terms of, you know, behaviorally, what what you’re doing in these situations is you you kind of micro-monitoring what you’re saying to see how they’re responding to that. And then you’re changing how you’re talking based on their response. And it it’s it’s this performative process that can be really stressful rather than just authentically trying to connect with the the person. So you you tend to hide who you are, which is a kind of safety behavior that teaches your brain that, you know it would be, you know, if if I did truly express who I was in these interactions, something terrible is gonna happen. Like that that belief can be maintained because you’re not truly testing it out because you you’re not being authentic in the interactions. So I think it it’s something that a lot of us can do subconsciously and then it’s something that a lot of us can be unaware actually connects to a lot of distress.

Yeah, I think if you think about it in terms of different goals we can have in social interactions and different goals have different consequences, it’s the kind of social goal that is just pretty stressful to have because social interactions become a kind of performance. And, you know, if if things are going okay and you’re getting approval from people, then know, that’s all good, but a lot of the time people’s responses can be ambiguous. You know, some people have pretty neutral faces or pretty, you know even Spencer will acknowledge like he he ha his face is actually quite difficult to read. So you know, that that’s gonna make for pretty stressful interactions. So I just don’t think it’s a very sustainable way to go about you know socializing and yeah for for me socializing just became far more relaxing and enjoyable once I let go of that burden.

Q5

Swami (01:45.166)

Interesting, interesting. As we get into the book, I really like this whole point. I am not going to cover all the 12 points because I believe people need to really spend time in the book, but I am going to pick up one or two aspects of the book that I found interesting. One is really this productivity equation that you speak about, right? So talk to me about the concept of productivity and what is it that in productivity people miss actually looking at.

Jeremy Stevenson (02:23.141)

Yeah, I really like the equation because I think when people are trying to increase their productivity, we can be quite narrowly focused on, you know, boosting our efficiency, like finding a way to work more quickly as we’re working or at other times we’re trying to find a way to just work more, more hours. We’re trying to cut things out of our day, you know, commitments so we can just work for longer. And those things are fine. They they’re good, you know, time and efficiency. But as you know you’ll see in the productivity equation, there’s a third variable, which is importance, which I think is often neglected. And I think there’s almost a hierarchy of you know where the ceiling is with these different variables because time, we’re very limited with time. We’ve only got 24 hours in a day.

Efficiency, I think the ceiling is a bit higher. you know, if we eliminate distractions and we arrive more prepared at our desk in the morning and we learn to overcome roadblocks with problem solving and breaking tasks down, I think there’s a lot of room for increasing efficiency. But I think there’s even more room for increasing productivity through importance. You know, the extreme example is i if we’re if we’re just working on something that is not aligned with our values at all, well it’s it’s not it’s not actually gonna increase our productivity, at least in the way we define it. 

We we define productivity as creating more of what you personally valued. So that and I think that’s a healthy definition of productivity. So if you can change what you’re working on so it’s far more aligned with your values then you know you can in principle a 100X your your productivity. So I I think that’s a good thing to to focus on. And and we in the book we we go into yeah, there’s you know big picture importance, trying to optimize that, which is what I’m talking about now, which comes down to just being quite deliberate and thoughtful about what projects you choose to work on, not rushing into them because you heard a friend you know, they’re they’re learning a language, so you jump on board and learn a language. It’s taking a bit more time to choose what you want to do. And then there’s the more smaller picture optimizing of importance, which is just every day trying to choose what’s actually gonna move you forward toward your larger goal. And there’s different versions of this y you can find. I think Tim Ferris talks about this, like trying to just choose the one task that if you didn’t get anything else done during the day, at least you got that one task done. So yeah, those are some some other angles to consider with productivity.

Swami (05:31.159)

Can you just for the benefit of our audience explain the productivity equation?

Jeremy Stevenson (05:38.608)

Yeah. 

So the way we write it out is productivity equals time multiplied by efficiency multiplied by importance. So you’ve got three variables there that contribute to productivity. And it is a mathematical formula. It’s it’s not like a metaphorical formula like, you know, happiness equals you know, expectations minus reality or wh whatever that one is. Like you you can, in principle, if if you have numbers, you can input them into the equation and you will get meaningful answers. And importantly, if any of them are zero, like you’re working on a project that is not important to you at all, then productivity by definition will be zero as well. And same thing for working zero hours or not working efficiently at all. 

Yeah.

Q6

Swami (06:35.277)

So if I’m an individual contributor or if I’m say an independent consultant, I have the ability to really manage these variables, right? But if I’m working in an organization, my productivity is directly correlated with maybe the, you know, the 3000 people that I’m working with, right? Sometimes I really don’t know whether the value is aligned. Sometimes I really don’t know if it’s important. My boss tells me that this is important when I believe this is not important. And then there is a, I would call a decay in my productivity. So how do I really manage this contradiction? Because at one end, I know this is the way I can be more productive, but in an organization setup,

I don’t set the priorities and I don’t set the importance and therefore there is a productivity lag as I would call it. How do I really balance that?

Jeremy Stevenson (07:39.505)

Mm.

Jeremy Stevenson (07:43.258)

It’s a good question and i it’s a reason why we didn’t want to be too prescriptive in this chapter, especially because there’s gonna be a lot of different contexts that people are working in. And I think it’s it’s true that there’s gonna be some constraints to this, especially in a work context where you can’t fully choose what projects you’re working on.

I mean, I I think that hopefully if we’re in a decent work environment, our bosses are gonna be very interested in helping us work more or work more efficiently. And hopefully they’re gonna be open to talking about the importance variable as well. Like if if you think you can make a strong case that the project you’re working on isn’t actually aligned with the company’s values, then hopefully you can raise that and have a conversation around it. But I mean yeah, the in the book where we don’t want to be naive to the constraints of of life. And sometimes we’re in a situation where we just have to keep working the job we’re in and we might just need to focus more on the productivity of the the business as opposed to personal productivity for a certain period. 

But you know if if you’re in this long term struggle with your company and you do have the ability to find different work that is more flexible, that is more aligned and you can optimize the importance variable importance variable more, maybe it it is something to consider to to shift where you where you work.

Swami (09:28.749)

interesting. 

Q7

So which brings me to a fundamental lever that you talk about which is really “uncovering your guiding foundations”. Right. And very often what I find is this is something that people are not really aware of. Right. Because I would say, you know, my parents told me to do engineering. I I did my engineering. I realized that that’s not my interest, but I’ve already got a job somewhere else, but that’s not driving me. Then I don’t operate at my optimal capability.

I then go join a company where my values are not aligned with their values, but I have lifestyle considerations or commitments. So it just goes on and it never stops. So this whole challenge of unraveling your guiding foundation. How do I do that? Because it’s so hard to really come into, I would say, resonance with what I want versus what am I doing. How do you get there?

Jeremy Stevenson (10:45.937)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, there’s a reason why we put this lever so early in the book. Like technically you can jump around wherever you want in the in the book, but there’s a bit of an order. Like you lever one is understand the problem, that’s really foundational. But lever two, uncover your guiding foundations is really foundational also because once you clarify what your values are, then you can get direction in life and it can help you make the big decisions of what you want to do and study and the people you want to spend time with and so on. More concretely, the way we talk about it is there’s different types of guiding foundations. You’ve got intrinsic values, which are really core to Spencer’s philosophy of of life. Like his philosophy of life is literally called valuism. Where it’s about uncovering your your intrinsic values and then pursuing them. 

But you’ve also got principles, you know, rules for how you want to behave in life, and then priorities, which are domains of life that you’re trying to change or improve. And the simplest way to go about it, especially if intrinsic values resonate, and intrinsic values are things we pursue for their own sake, not because they’re instrumentally getting us other things. You know, so happiness or fairness or honesty might be intrinsic values, whereas, you know, money might be an instrumental value. So if if that resonates with you, then the simplest way is to do on the Clearer Thinking website, you can do the intrinsic values test. I think it takes about 20 minutes and it boils down seven intrinsic values you might have. That’s the most concrete way. 

But in therapy, what we often do is we might have a list of different life domains. And then we might get the client to write down, okay, what kind of person do you want to be in this domain? And we might also get them to rate their current level of success. So, you know, that they might have relationships, you know, they want to be a caring partner. Okay, out of ten, how successful are you being with that right now? And that disparity because often we’re not perfectly aligned with our values… can that can be a guide of what to work on now. And if you’re if you like the idea of just going through this more slowly and thoroughly, then there’s a but there’s five exploratory questions we provide in the book as well, like, you know, when you were a kid, what did you want to be? Or when you feel strong emotions, positive and negative, what’s going on? What triggers it? And those questions can also help you dive deeper into okay why did I want to be a you know a rock star when I was a kid like what is there some value underlying that like you know I I like performer I like mastering things like instruments so those kinds of questions can can help you dig in and we we recommend trying to boil it down to like ten or even eight maximum core values because otherwise you can just be pulled in too many directions.

Q8

Swami (14:16.621)

So I am already in this treadmill of life, right? And maybe I half way through it or I am maybe one fourth through it, 25 and I am one fourth through it. I have still not understood my intrinsic value or my co-values or my… instrumental value as you call it. How do I pull back and how do I reset it? Because it’s very hard for me because I’ve just got into the treadmill. So people find it very hard to pull back. So have you seen examples of how people pulled back and then got to what they want and living up to their potential? Can you give me some examples? You don’t need to name the people but how they did it because it requires a know I would call it a control or delete right and then reset the whole process. So How do people do it?

Jeremy Stevenson (15:16.219)

Ha ha.

Jeremy Stevenson (15:21.733)

There’s a cool story in Lever Three, actually. We we kick off the lever with this story of John Salter, who’s this this British guy, and he was floundering in university, just lost and just playing video games all day and procrastinating. And I think he he doesn’t actually remember where this technique came from, but at some point he just decided to sit down at his desk. And write down his core values. So I guess that was the moment he pulled back and reset. And he wrote down five things, like, you know, improving his happiness and improving the happiness of other people around him and so on. And then not only that, he built a habit out of that where each morning he would sit down and write down those values. And he did this again and again. And that transformed his life in the course of a year. He, you know, gained a bunch of muscle. He got on top of his grades. He started working towards a concrete vision in the future. And he now runs this global I think it’s a mental health charity and he points to that intervention when he pulled back as the the single most important moment of his of his life. 

So that that’s a good example of just trying to interrupt the try trying to jump off the treadmill temporarily, just so you can figure out what’s actually important and then you can jump back on the treadmill and keep going.

Swami (17:01.909)

Interesting. Any other example of that’s more during college, during you know when I’m studying. I am in the mid stage of my career and I know I’ve kind of got into this but I’m just not doing things that my optimal productivity, right? And I see I’m in banking, but I’m more a people’s person. I’m just giving you as an example, right? But I’ve really grown in this profession, so now I can’t pull back, right? So I know my co-values are not in sync with what I’m doing. How do I reset it? How do I do it? And are there ways in which I can, I would say move the gear, you know, slowly change lanes and do it. Is there a way you think this? Because I think there’s a very fundamental point that you are making, which is what is your guiding foundation? And many people go through the… treadmill of life without having a thought about this at all. That has an implication on the performance, that has an implication on the intensity with which they do things. So therefore, if I have to change lanes, what would you recommend as one or two steps that I need to take, especially on this lever?

Jeremy Stevenson (18:15.675)

Mm.

Jeremy Stevenson (18:33.541)

Hmm. Well, I think it depends where the person’s at. Like I think there’s a a couple of steps. Like the first is if they don’t know their values already, it would just be simply setting aside time to do that. And we talk about this in the book, how a number of things can get in the way of knowing what your values are, but a a really big one is just not setting aside time to clarify them. Like it’s not it’s not rocket science or anything. It it’s just that we rarely set aside time for it. And it’s really understandable. Like I I know what it’s like. I think we all know what it’s like to be on the treadmill and it it just seem it just feels like we don’t have time to do this. So I think that that’s one really simple step is just to set aside time. Let me actually sit down and clarify what my values are.

And then I think the the second step is like we we mentioned before, actually rating how aligned you are on those values. And yeah, if you’re working in banking and you really don’t want to be, like that’s gonna show up when when you do like a if you I think we in some earlier drafts of the book, we we actually included a technique where you do like an audit of your values, but it was just getting a little bit too complex for the level of detail we we needed. But we we often do this in therapy where yeah, like I mentioned before, you list your values which might be in the life domains and then you you rank them and you rate how successful you’re being with them. And that can expose misalignment and give you direction. And I think the the next step would be like you can’t change everything at once.

But if there’s a huge disparity there, like if you value you know, working with people or something like that, like a nine out of ten, and you’re just completely misaligned with that. You’re working in banking and you’re in your own own office, not engaged with people at all all the time, that might be the discrepancy that you’re trying to close. And then that this is why we put lever three straight after after clarify your values of okay, you need to actualize your values because then you could start talking about goals, habits, choice points. How do I actually start moving towards closing that gap and increasing my alignment? So yeah, that’d be a whole another conversation of how to how to do do that.

Q9

Swami (21:13.771)

Interesting. So clearly, Jeremy, one of the key points I’m taking out of this conversation is before you set a goal, understand your guiding foundation is really what you’re saying because many a times what happens in organizations or what happens with people is the goal comes before the guiding foundation, right? So what I’m learning out of this conversation is spend time on the guiding foundation a lot more before setting the goals. Is that a good takeaway that probably you will do it? Because then when you actualize it, if you don’t have the right guiding foundation, you will actualize the wrong thing, right?

Jeremy Stevenson (21:59.992)

Yeah. Yep. I think that’s spot on. And again, I think that probably all of us can relate to the experience of hearing about someone else working on some new cool goal. You know, they’re Gary’s running a marathon, therefore I wanna run a marathon or something, but it’s just social contagion and it’s not actually driven from our own values and those kinds of goals aren’t gonna last long and they’re not gonna be very fulfilling either if they’re not coming from our own values.

Swami (22:39.159)

So assuming that I spend time on understanding my guiding foundation, what are the steps that you recommend to actualize?

Jeremy Stevenson (22:53.413)

Yeah, this was a really satisfying part of the the book to come up with this l because in self-help and therapy it’s so you hear about smart goals, all these different goal frameworks, you hear about habits, and it was quite satisfying to pull all of these things together and okay, they’re all essentially ways to actualize your guiding foundations. They’re all ways to increase your alignment between your behavior and your values. So yeah we get into four different methods in this lever and one is goals, of course. You can’t you know have a self-help book without goals. But there’s some interesting nuances here. Like you know we often think about SMART goals, you know specific measurable, achievable, and so on. but there are actually other goal setting frameworks out there. And and when we went into them, we found that there’s it’s more than just smart goals. We actually came up with our own acronym that’s a bit of a synthesis of these different approaches. 

So ours is VAST and there’s Four T’s there if if you like. So vi the V is for valuable. the A is for aspirational. the S is for streamlined. So you’re trying to only have a small handful of goals, and ideally one primary goal. And the T is for targeted. so you you want it to be targeted in the sense of you know the the timelines and you want to clarify a few other things, especially like the repeated actions. Like the repeated things are going to move you towards your goal. And that’s how it connects nicely with habits. Habits are you know the repeated behaviors. So habits are a second way to to look at it, and and we go into a a system that again where we synthesize the different habit frameworks into know, step one, you want to clarify, okay, w what is the action I’m trying to do? It’s it’s a lot easier to form a habit when you’ve it’s not exercise that you’re trying to increase. It’s doing twenty push ups per day. That’s it’s a lot easier to action. And then the second step is creating a trigger. So this is where you might have heard of things like habit stacking, where, you know, after I get out of bed in the morning, then I’ll drink this glass of water, which is the new habit I’m trying to form.

And then the third step is, well, e even when we are clear about what the action is and we know when to do it, we still often don’t do it. You know, we just feel lazy and unmotivated. So there’s got to be a way to overcome the resistance that that comes up. And we talk about this in terms of those fundamental principles of you know making the action relatively less painful and relatively more pleasant.

We’re we’re careful here to not say like you’re not you’re not trying to eliminate all pain. Like if your habit involves working out, there’s gonna be some pain there. But you’re just trying to make it relatively easier to to do because then you’re gonna get it more down pat and regular. And there’s a bunch of techniques for for doing that. You know, temptation bundling might be the classic one of you, you know, you’re walking on a on a treadmill while watching your favorite TV show and there’s y really interesting research that Spencer and his team did actually at Clear Thinking, where you might have seen this, they went through a they did a study on a bunch of different techniques. And the number one technique that came out was this simple technique called habit reflection, where you just reflect on what’s helped you in the past, what’s worked in the past in terms of forming a habit, and then you try to implement that into your the new habit you’re trying to form. 

But I the …the novel method in this chapter that I really like comes from acceptance and Commitment therapy where, you know, most of the day we’re not going to be working on goals and habits. Like most of the time we’re just on the treadmill. We’re just living life. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t many, many small opportunities to act in line with your values. And it could be the smallest thing, like our partner asks for help or asks for our opinion, or just makes a bid for affection. You know, these tiny little things. And then in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Act, they often boil it down to this binary choice point of you can choose something that moves you toward your values or something that moves you away from your values. And that can be a nice way to simplify these ordinary moments. And it’s it can be quite motivating. and it can just make you appreciate that there’s a lot more opportunities than we might think to align ourselves with our values in in daily life. and yeah, for for me a good example of that was honesty. I I read Sam Harris’s little mini book on called Lying. I don’t know if you’ve heard of of that one. And he just yeah, he just makes the strongest argument for being honest and and even not telling white lies and it really changed my mind about that and I adopted honesty as a core value. And yeah, honesty is not something you implement through goals and and habits. It’s more through choice points. You know, someone asks how you’re feeling you you you then choose to move toward your values by being honest that you’re upset or angry or whatever it is.

Swami (28:46.924)

Yeah.

Q10

Swami (28:59.543)

So talk to me about choice points. So what did you mean by choice points?

Jeremy Stevenson (29:06.223)

Yeah, so if you if you think about, you know, the sixteen hours or whatever it is we’re awake for and we’re on the treadmill just going about ordinary life, there’s actually a whole bunch of small decisions we’re making. And a lot of these are completely inconsequential. Like, you know, do I have chamomile tea or Royboss tea or something but like we were saying, a lot of them are gonna be more consequential, like when my partner asks if I’m upset with her, how do I respond to that? And a good way to reframe those choice points is they offer the opportunity to move toward or away from your your values. And we we all we often go through this in in therapy. You can draw it up on the whiteboard, a nice like V shape, like, you know, okay, what does it look like to move away from your values? Well, I’m gonna be dishonest, I’m gonna avoid this situation, I’m gonna go doom scroll on my phone. But then what does it look like to move toward your values? Well, it’s probably gonna be a more uncomfortable in the short term, but it’s you know, that that is in line with my values being honest and open and so I’m gonna share that I’m feeling upset, but I’m gonna try and do it in a healthy way that’s assertive and not aggressive. so that that’s a way to make it a bit more concrete.

Swami (30:43.789)

Very good. 

Q11

One of the challenges that I see in this actualize your guiding foundation is when it comes to say fitness, there are, I would say markers, right? Which is clearly saying, hey, you know what? I am obese, I need to reduce my weight, I need to do 10,000 steps, I need to run five kilometers, which are very metricized, right? But… some of the points that we talk about which is very soft, which is

honesty as you rightly say or one of the value systems could be that I need to learn and become the best in what I do. Is not I can’t say you know what is the best right because that’s really not metricized. So how do you really then actualize it because I don’t know if I’m improving or I’m stagnating and therefore I’m sitting there not knowing where I am. And suddenly I realized a couple of years had passed.

Jeremy Stevenson (31:52.338)

I think it really depends on yeah what what you’re working on because yeah, certain things like exercise just are more measurable. And this is part of the, you know, the the T in vast goals is making them targeted is is clarifying what are the, you know, what what’s the broad goal you’re working towards and what what are the sub goals and you’re trying to make them as specific as as possible. So yeah, no no doubt some of those are just going to be easier to measure. But I still think it’s possible to measure other things too. Like with honesty, it might be a bit more qualitative. You know, you might be doing a review at the end of the day and you’re just casting your mind over, okay when I was in interactions with people, was I honest or did I slip up and tell some white lies? And then you could reflect on those and plan, okay, how could I do things a bit differently next time? So I think most things you’re going to be able to make concrete enough to to work on. But yeah, I think we just have to acknowledge that some things are gonna be a bit trickier than than others.

Swami (33:18.455)

Yeah. But what I’m picking up Jeremy is what you’re really talking about is the feedback loop that you’re constantly reflecting on. I’m picking that up as a learning out of this conversation.

For example, I want to be a better listener. I can’t metricize listening, but what I need to do is if that’s the value that I want to build as a listener and I’m a leader in the company and I keep talking, I don’t allow anybody else to talk. And I just believe that I have to be a better listener. Then the metrics for that is not so easily measurable. But what you’re really saying is, take some time off after the meeting and then say, hey, did I listen or did I, what percentage of the meeting did I listen or what percentage of my time was I talking? That is a good feedback loop technique. The vast

metrics that you really talk about, that whole methodology that you talk about, the targeted one. For the qualitative ones, I pick up, because when I read the book, my learning was around these, because I said, okay, the feedback loop is very important. Wherever I believe there are hard math metrics, do very well. Wherever there are soft metrics, the progress is not very clear and then suddenly you realize that many years have gone by. So I think what I’m picking up from you is get your guiding foundation, actualize it, reflect on it through the day because it’s not like you’re doing a one hour walking every morning. You’re doing it every day, which means that every moment you have a choice point of living your values. And it could be a conversation. It could be a presentation that you are making, could be interaction that you are doing with a colleague where you say, respect is very important for me as a value and am I doing that? And did I do that in this interaction? So that’s really what I think you’re talking about as a feedback loop and actualizing my guiding conversations, guiding principles. 

That’s really how I’m taking it. Would that be right in my assumption?

Jeremy Stevenson (35:26.865)

Mm.

Jeremy Stevenson (35:33.947)

Mm.

Jeremy Stevenson (35:50.918)

I think that’s spot on. And that that also brings in the the fourth method of actualise your guiding foundations, which is doing reviews. Because they’re often something we we neglect as well. we’re we’re talking about in that lever doing reviews say every quarter of the year where you sit down and think about okay, what how successful was was I, you know, what got in the way, what can I learn? What can I change next time? But that’s just one suggestion. There’s no reason why you couldn’t do reviews every day, like every evening, sit down and and reflect on how you went. And I think the other thing that I would just piggyback on that you mentioned is this principle of focusing on what you can actually control. Like it yeah, it might be harder to measure listening, but in terms of habits like specifying the actions, there might be things that you’re keeping in mind during interactions of okay, I’m I’m trying to form this habit of like making better eye contact for longer, asking follow up questions, you know, resisting the urge to talk even though it’s there. So that’s another useful principle as well.

Q12

Swami (37:10.061)

The other point of the levers that I found interesting, I’m not going to cover every lever but I’m going to pick up a couple of them so that this becomes a reason for people to pick up the book and spend time and read about this is shifting the body and shifting the mind. I really found that to be interesting. So what did you mean by that and what happens when you do that as way of improving your life?

Jeremy Stevenson (37:42.758)

Yeah, the the core principle that drives this lever is your mind and body are connected. And if if I’m honest, but I think Spencer and I were both a bit squeamish about using this principle because it’s it is overused a bit, you know, the mind-body connection, but it’s also just true. Like there’s a strong connection there. So we chose to keep it in. And yeah, I think that sometimes we can get a bit carried away with mental techniques. We’re just focusing on reframing our thinking or being mindful. but I think there’s a lot of benefit we can get from the the physical techniques, and there’s a lot of them out there, and they can be used for different purposes as well. And in this lever, we we kick off with the some of the foundational ones like sleep. 

And sleep is a good one to cover because you can you can go through the the big, you know, the main sleep hygiene advice, which we boil down to keeping your schedule and avoiding overstimulation and close to bed. But then the third one is getting stimulation early in the day, so especially bright light. It can be good. This is very relevant to me at the moment. I just got back from overseas and I’m really trying to get out in the morning to get as much light as as possible to reset my my body clock. So that that’s good, but the the the different thing we try to give in in this section is not just the standard sleep hygiene advice, but also what do you do with more severe sleep problems? So if you’re s if your body clock is completely out of whack, what do you do? So we go into bright light therapy and break it down into concrete steps that people can use. And then of course the biggest sleep problem is insomnia. So we go into that and I guess it’s the the ethos of this book is we’re trying to focus on okay what what’s the the most important thing here and with insomnia it’s generally sleep restriction which can be a pretty brutal approach. My my mum I included a quote from her in the book. She tried it and she her quote was hated it, just did not like doing it because it does involve temporarily reducing the amount of time you’re in in bed. So you change your association with bed. So your brain’s no longer associating being awake and being in in bed. 

So sleep is one component, but then there’s relaxation techniques as well, like slow breathing and progressive muscle relaxation. Those are especially good for agitated kind of states like anxiety. Then there’s energizing breathing as well. The classic example is Wim Hof breathing. We try to introduce energizing breathing, but also be very cautious about it. There are stories of people you know, doing in dangerous positions like near water. And then there’s another category which you might call healthy stress or hormesis and cold exposure is a great example, very much in vogue at the moment. it’s interesting because the the research is a bit mixed with cold exposure. It’s still new, and there’s still some promising findings there, but the way you hear about it spoken on podcasts these days, you you would think it just works all the time for everyone, but it’s not actually the case. I think it’s still very much worth experimenting with. And it has been used for decades in a more clinical context. 

So dialectical behavioral therapy, DBT, they have this great technique where if you’re really distressed, you can fill up a basin of of water, hold your breath, put your face in it for 30 seconds, and then you get the combination of cold water, which is which can be relaxing, and the dive response where our heart rate goes down when we’re holding our breath underwater which can yeah soothe the distress. But we finished with exercise, which is probably the most boring technique in terms of the physical techniques, but it’s got by far the most evidence. And it’s good for general health benefits, but it’s good for emotion regulation as well. Like it’s again in DBT, which is which specializes in helping people with really severe emotion emotional dysregulation. just a few minutes of exercise can be a really helpful thing to calm yourself when emotions are going crazy.

Q13

Swami (42:32.525)

So to summarize our conversation, out of these 12 levers, you talk about techniques that are key to these 12 levers, right? So I think the most important point that I’m picking up out of what you’re saying is the way you structure the 12 levers is really around understanding the problem getting your guiding foundations right, actualizing those foundations and then working towards them across each of these levers, right? So it’s almost like, I would call it a ladder kind of a model where you’re actually saying, you can actually go in and do the technique on the 10th or the 11th lever, but clearly if you don’t understand the problem and if you don’t really decouple the problem and get your guide, guiding foundations, right? Anything that you do, you are not touching the root of the problem, right? So therefore, clearly what I seeing out of this book, Jeremy, is that the fact that you got to be a lot more mindful, you got to be a lot more self-aware and I think mindful is used too many times, so I am not going to be using it the fact that do you understand your values? Do you understand your behavior? Do you understand what it does to your mind? Do you understand what does it do to your body? How do you really build the targeted metrics for soft development? I think these are some of the things that I’m taking up. And if you were to kind of help me summarize in say because I know you did a three minute thesis of your PhD. So therefore if you were to give me a three minute thesis of what are the key takeaways that people should look at, how would you summarize the book that you have written?

Jeremy Stevenson (44:24.305)

Ha ha ha.

Jeremy Stevenson (44:38.949)

Well, I think it gives you a bird’s eye view of what psychological strategies are available to improve your life. And each individual can choose which ones they want to focus on. They can jump around as they like in the book, but like you’ve mentioned, it can be really helpful to start with the first fundamental levers like understanding the problem because that can inform which other levers are going to be helpful to use as intervention so you know first understand then intervene so I think that’s true. and yeah the final thing I would urge people to do is to take action. So yes, like I think there’s something very intellectually satisfying about the book. You get this broad framework, you can probably then understand all the other different books and therapies you’ve seen before and see where they fit into. But I would also urge people if if there’s a lever that resonated then go to that chapter, go to the key actions, pick one, try it see how it goes. You know, not every technique is gonna work for every person in every situation. If so if it doesn’t work, grab another technique, try that, and yeah, you probably will find something that does have a a significant impact.

CLOSING

Swami (46:23.394)

Thanks Jeremy, that was a fantastic conversation. I really loved reading the book. I’m still digesting parts of that book. So let me tell you that I’ve jumped deep enough into each of these levers, but this conversation has given me reasons to think and reflect on these levers. But thanks for taking time and talking about the various levers and really if you have to move towards improving your life, these 12 levers give kind of a framework for us to look at and set the foundation and dive deep in. So thanks a lot and really, really appreciate you taking time and talking to us.

Jeremy Stevenson (47:12.283)

Thanks so much. It was a pleasure being on and it’s great to talk to you. Thanks.

END.