Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Welcome to the Happy Stack Podcast, where we explore the science and strategies behind creating a happier, more fulfilling life. I'm Teriann Richards and I partner with organizations to address the root causes of burnout, disengagement, and stress, equipping leaders and teams with the tools they need to thrive, both organizationally and personally. Each episode we dive into practical habits, insights, and strategies to help high performers like you level up from the inside out. Let's get stacking.
[00:00:33] Hey, hey, hey. Welcome back to the Happy Stack Podcast. I'm your host, Terian Richards. And if you have ever felt stuck in your thinking, you know, stinking thinking, or you have caught yourself replaying the same doubts, the same verbiage over and over, or you are frustrated that change feels harder than you think it should, this episode is for you.
[00:01:00] There is absolutely nothing wrong with you.
[00:01:05] Your brain is doing exactly what it was designed to do.
[00:01:09] It just so happens that what it's designed to do doesn't always work in our favor.
[00:01:15] Our brains are incredible at keeping us safe. And one of the ways they do that is by holding on to the familiar stories, even when those stories or those patterns of thought don't serve us in our today's world.
[00:01:35] Because for our brain anyway, familiar feels safer than unfamiliar, right?
[00:01:44] Most of us don't wake up trying to resist growth or avoiding what's real and what's true.
[00:01:53] We wake up trying to get through the day with, for a lot of us, limited energy, limited capacity, and just so much on our plate, so much on our minds. And so what happens is your brain starts to look for patterns. It looks for consistency in those patterns, and in finding those patterns and those consistency, it starts to bridge explanations that help life feel just a little bit more predictable. Because your brain always kind of wants to know what's happening next.
[00:02:23] The problem with that is, over time, those explanations start to turn into stories.
[00:02:28] So it could be stories about who you are, stories about other people, stories about what's possible for you. It starts to shape your identity, and it starts to shape how you look at the world. And one way that this pattern shows up, that psychology has labeled it's, and you've heard it before is confirmation bias.
[00:02:49] And all that means is we tend to notice information that fits these stories we already believe, and we unconsciously filter out information that challenges it. And so this is not something you do consciously. It's not something you do to be malicious or unkind. It's literally done automatically.
[00:03:12] So this is a shortcut that your brain creates. The brain literally reduces uncertainty and any strain in your mental load by creating these shortcuts, these stories.
[00:03:25] So the problem here isn't that we have the stories. The problem is that we don't notice that they are stories. I want to bring this into sort of a. Formulate a. A story, if you will, that explains this a little bit better. So let's make this real. If you believe you are bad with money, your brain will literally turn a flashlight on and spotlight every bad decision you make financially, every financial misstep, every mistake, and it will quietly ignore anything you do. That's to the pro of money.
[00:04:02] If you believe that your relationships that you have and will have are just hard. Relationships are hard.
[00:04:10] Your brain will literally replay all the disappointments, all those icky moments, all those uncomfortable conversations, way more than any moments where things just went smoothly or with ease.
[00:04:26] If you believe you're not where you're supposed to be in life, if you believe you're behind, your attention is literally going to go towards people who seem ahead. You're going to literally watch everybody over there who's doing great things with their life, and you're going to skip over any evidence that you are actually innovating and growing as a human.
[00:04:46] Your brain is not trying to stop you or halt you. It's literally trying to protect you by keeping a familiar narrative. That's the gross part, right? And so the stories that you and I reinforce don't just shape how we think. They shape what we try, they shape what we avoid, what how much hope we allow ourselves to feel, how much we talk to ourselves or how we talk to ourselves when things don't go as planned.
[00:05:17] And over time, those stories either expand your capacity to do new, bigger, great things or it starts to shrink it. And there's so much research behind this. I just did a TEDx talk that will be coming out in the spring of 2026.
[00:05:35] Around this, I just wrote a book called becoming the 8%.
[00:05:39] Studies in cognitive psychology show that once we form a belief, our brains actively filter incoming information to support it. So anything that's contradictory, it doesn't just disappear. It literally feels less convincing.
[00:05:56] So your brain is literally anything that'll go to the negative or it'll contradict what you already believe. It'll just not allow it to come in because it'll create internal friction. And this is important to know because if we're not becoming more consciously aware of the beliefs and the stories that we're carrying around, we might just, like, actually get stuck in this hamster wheel of not growing or not doing the great things, or not allowing ourselves to change literally. Because our brains prefer coherence over anything complex, right?
[00:06:32] And so if you're stressed, which a lot of people are right now, stress makes this even stronger. When we are stressed or overwhelmed, the brain narrows its focus. It looks for simple explanations. So quick certainty, clear narratives.
[00:06:52] So when things are hard, confirmation bias doesn't just exist. It literally like 10x's, it intensifies. Which is why growing, innovating, becoming 2.0 version of yourself feels hardest when life already has so much other things that are making it heavy.
[00:07:14] And this is why feedback can also be so uncomfortable in this stage. When somebody reflects something back to us that feeds, fits our existing self story, it really, it lands, it lands easily, smoothly, no friction.
[00:07:32] But when somebody gives us feedback that challenges that story, our system actually reacts. We explain it away. We make it a them problem, we minimize it, we question the source. And it's not actually because we're being defensive. It's because our identity, the story we believe of ourselves, feels threatened.
[00:07:55] And confirmation bias doesn't just protect the positive stories, right?
[00:08:01] It protects the painful ones too. So stories like, I'm not good at this.
[00:08:07] This always happens to me. People always leave me, I always get cheated on, I never get the job, I never get the promotion. I should be further along by now.
[00:08:19] Even when saying those stories on repeat actually hurts you, they are familiar though. And that familiarity can actually feel safer than change. So the problem with this is it's not just the good stuff our brains are keeping. It's sometimes like the icky stories that we just keep on repeat.
[00:08:38] And so people don't just cling to limiting beliefs because, I don't know, because we decided that this is the way we want to be. And we're okay with suffering and we're okay with not growing.
[00:08:50] It's at some point in our past, at some point in our life, whatever those sayings are negative or positive, it maybe helped us, maybe it helped us make sense of a difficult time in our life, maybe by staying small. Once upon a time, it worked in your favor.
[00:09:08] At some point, those stories might have been protective. And so that's why our brains literally hold onto them.
[00:09:15] The struggle is that over time, we, we do learn new things and we do learn lessons, and we do start to get evidence of why some of those old stories don't need to stay around. We just don't update them. It's like we forget to, you know, like with your PC or your Mac, there's like an update that happens every little bit. We forget to update the stories, to update the beliefs that are downloaded into our psyche. And, and so the part I want to land here is that stories can be updated, they can be revised.
[00:09:52] Not something you can do overnight, obviously, but through awareness and practice is actually how you can do it.
[00:09:59] I'm not asking anybody to eliminate confirmation bias. In some ways, it's always going to be there. It's just a part of how we humans create shortcuts for things to happen a little bit more effectively and efficiently. So it's not realistic to say, hey, just get rid of all of your confirmation biases. That's not the truth. The goal here is to ease it up, like to soften its grip on your ability to become that next version of yourself. And so there are few things that you can do to start updating, you know that those stories inside your mind. And so number one is the thoughts that go around in your brain, we need to start looking at them as information, not facts, not instructions.
[00:10:47] So when a familiar thought shows up, like, I always mess up or I'm just that, not that kind of person, you need to pause and consider for a second, right? Remind yourself this is a thought, it's not a fact.
[00:11:02] Because that one pause can start to shift what you allow to maybe dictate the next habit, the next behavior, the next action that you take, right? So your thoughts are information, they're not instructions, they're not facts. And if you can start with that, that level of awareness can start to shift everything for you.
[00:11:22] Number two, ask a perspective shifting or a widening question. So when you notice a strong story that's running on repeat, ask yourself what else might be true here so it's not invalidating experiences that you've had, because I know a lot of people have had some pretty rough moments in their life. And so some of those stories are literally there to protect you. And I get it.
[00:11:46] What we're trying to do is invite some nuance here because your brain is not going to offer this automatically. It's going to have a conclusion of this is the way it. You know, every time I go to that type of place, this is the experience I get. Every time I go to this city, this is how people treat me. What else might be true?
[00:12:05] And if you go there, because again, your brain won't do it automatically, you have to request it, you may start to invite some other options, some other opportunities that slowly starts to shift that narrative.
[00:12:20] And then third, watch for any absolute language I am so guilty of this, and a few of my friends do this a lot. But anytime you hear yourselves thinking or saying out loud, always, never everyone, no one that usually 99.9% of the time confirms that it's confirmation bias tightening its grip.
[00:12:49] So reality is typically not that clean. Like things don't always happen or never happen or not everybody thinks something or no one thinks something. That's just that absolute language is. I don't even know how it came into our verbiage, but we certainly say it out loud and we certainly say it, you know, between our two ears.
[00:13:10] And then the fourth one is borrow perspectives from someone safe, underline bold. Someone safe, not somebody who's coming at you and trying to fix you because none of you need to be fixed. Somebody who is safe and compassionate and caring, who can reflect back to you what they see.
[00:13:30] Because sometimes the stories we have, we don't always notice them, right? And so it's hard to update something if we can't notice it, right? Like the only reason I update my PC is because I get a little thing at the bottom, right, that says it's time to update.
[00:13:44] Well, if there was some sort of a rhythm you could bring into your world with somebody who cares about you, who's safe, who's not judgmental, but somebody who can reflect what they see. Maybe you do that monthly, maybe you do it quarterly, and you hear in a genuine way what they're saying about potentially some verbiage you're using or some ways that maybe you're using absolute language. And then you can decide from there what you want to do with that, right? Because again, this is you. You get to decide what you want to do with that to build that healthier, happier version of yourself. We don't experience life directly, right? The way I experience it, the way you experience it is through the lens of our beliefs.
[00:14:27] And so becoming aware of what those beliefs are and in some ways softening the ones that maybe have hardened.
[00:14:36] All of a sudden what happens is you start to shift that perspective. It starts to open the world up just a little bit better for you, and it helps to reduce stress. And so my thoughts are, you know, if you're feeling stuck, if you're feeling discouraged, if you feel frustrated, ask yourself, what story am I reinforcing right now? And what might shift if I allowed myself to question it, not critically, but kindly, with empathy, because I believe full heartedly, and the data backs it up, that to be a happier version of you, a healthier version of you, it's not built always on certainty. It's built on being more open.
[00:15:23] Really hope this landed with you. Please, you know, join in on the comments, give me some thoughts on what you're thinking, add to the conversation, and if you know somebody who this may resonate with, share it with them. I hope you have a great day.
[00:15:39] Hey, thanks for listening to the Happy Stack podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share it with someone who could use a little extra happiness in their life. Let's keep stacking those wins together. See you next time.
