Transcription
Here's six steps that are going to change your whole freaking life if you if you do these six things.
We're typically three different people, all of us. The kid who writes all these permanent scripts, they put them in a backpack and carry them all the way into adulthood. When you start hearing these patterns repeating in your head, force yourself to hear the voice of a kid.
Can we go into this childhood development thing really quick?
Sure. I think it's super important for people to know.
Sure. And I'm I'm a behavior profiler and if if anybody listening didn't know that. And one of the things that I teach everybody is this thing called the childhood development triangle. So, it's just three sides of this triangle. So, when you're growing up, what did that child have to do most of the time to earn and keep friends? So, friends is one. And then to feel safe. What What did the kid have to do to feel safe? For some kids, safety was like I don't know, somebody gives me a hug at the end of the day. For some kids, it was like, am I going to eat today? For some kids, it's like cracking jokes. Yeah. And I'm going to crack jokes and keep friends. I'm going to feel safe by becoming really loud and dominating the room. I'm going to become safe by getting really small and shrinking so nobody notices me. Or I'm going to become safe by being hyper vigilant because I don't know if dad drank before he got home or if he's going to start drinking when he got home. So, it's like what did that child What are the scripts that that child needed to run on autopilot to feel safe, to make friends, and then to get rewards? And that would be the third side. And the rewards for some kids might just be like appreciation. And it's typically just appreciation, affection, love. And that tends to get written in childhood and the kid who writes all these permanent scripts, they put them in a backpack and carry them all the way into adulthood. And 90% of us are walking around with this exact triangle governing our life.
And if you look around at people at work, you see this woman who every time there's a meeting, uh she wants to speak up a lot, but then she shuts her mouth and her body shuts down and all that kind of stuff. You're seeing an 8-year-old who got yelled at at a family dinner table. Mhm. That's all. But, you're just seeing it in a grown-up body.
I have two examples that are super front of mind that completely align with what you've just said. I have two colleagues that I work with. And I got 6 months into working with one of them and I could always tell that there was something not quite right because whenever I was in the room, they would they would stare at me a lot and um they would be a little bit more on the pessimistics pessimistics side than I'm used to. And one day at dinner, I was talking to them about their childhood and they offered up that their dad was his mood could change rapidly and he was always pointing out why something would never work and why and he was an extreme pessimist. And suddenly this person who who's in my life suddenly made sense. I completely understand it cuz you grew up in that environment where to be safe um you agree with it.
had to pay attention to to the authority figure and then yeah, you had to also you learned maybe that, you know, pessimism was a way to safety. Yeah, safety.
And then there's another colleague who's actually in the room over there and I'll ask her before we publish this if I can say this publicly, but similar thing. She she expressed to me that she had a a dad that was his mood would change rapidly. I said to her one day, I said um I call her Sarah. I said, "Sarah, you're always staring at me." I said, "Whenever I look at you, you're already looking at me. And it's like you're like overanalyzing and overthinking." And she explained to me the same thing. She said, "When I grew up, my dad's mood would just change like this. So, every time I'm preempting, I'm like a radical preempter. I'm thinking 20 steps ahead of like what might go wrong or, you know, which makes that exceptional at her job. But, I would you know, you know, one might assume that that comes at some kind of cost. Yeah. So, safety. Yeah. Very true. Very true.
And the the way that I explain this, if somebody wants to like it's not where you can kind of go back and like sit there for 5 minutes, put it on a post-it note, and then figure your whole life out. I wish I had a cool a trick to do that. But, the way that like I want people to think about this is going back to your childhood, a lot of those things those are just contracts that were written in a child's voice. And when you start hearing these patterns repeating in your head, force yourself to hear the voice of a kid. That's all it is. It's just a kid who made these choices. It's not an adult.
So, we're typically three different people, all of us. We have a work self like a professional kind of self. We have a home self and we have a self with friends. And what is that as a kid? That's classroom, playground, home. So, I'll typically take people through this process of where were you around authority figures, which is like classroom or home. What were you around when your all your friends were around? You got made fun of or you had to become really small. And that that goes on the friends side of the triangle. And that that talks about how the social patterns that are going to show up for me. And somebody says, "Well, I keep attracting these negative people into my life. Why do I do that?" And that that goes to these patterns because if I do this, I know this is going to happen. I know that's going to happen. It's just completing a story archetype. So, that's the childhood development triangle and it is really powerful to start understanding our own patterns. And I'm not saying that you can go out there and there's like, here's six steps that are going to change your whole freaking life if you if you do these six things. The awareness is what you want. You want massive like self-knowledge and and self-awareness. Mhm. Uh with the side agreement of I am not special. And I'm completely okay if I'm never understood. Because most of what happens uh when we get into arguments with our spouse, we get into these arguments with people at at work, it's our argument to be understood more than it is for us to come to a solution. I need [clears throat] you to understand me. So, getting okay with the idea that you might not never ever be understood is like step number one. Number two, I am not special. And that that helps us to open the door to start coming into a lot of these things.
But, if you if you're a leader at work, you can start seeing these patterns in your employees and you can be like, I see an 8-year-old there. And if you get to a point where you're seeing some of these uh behavior that might have pissed you off in somebody that works for you and you're like, wait a second. Now I can see exactly what's going on because this, this, and this probably happened. You don't need to make some prediction or fortune-telling thing about their childhood, but you're starting to see these patterns and you know now how your team's going to respond in conflict. And if the if it's a conflict and it's social, you're seeing all their friends patterns. If it's a conflict and somebody might be losing their job, you're going to see their safety patterns come out. And you'll see your own.
So, do you think I should go to the key people in my life, maybe my team, and ask them these questions about around how did you make friends? Is that the question? What did you do to make and keep friends? What did you do to make and keep friends? And what was the safety question again? Like what what did you need to do or avoid to feel safe? And the rewards one? What did you feel and this one's always you want to put the word feel in there. What did you feel like you had to do to earn rewards? And what were rewards to you? Okay. It was appreciation or somebody that's like hyper sig- significance driven. Like I've got to have the Rolex. I've got to have the Ferraris and all of this kind of stuff. They never got rewards because their parents ignored them unless they brought home a certificate. Their teacher called and said they did a good job. They played the piano recital and did a great job and lots of people were acknowledging them and clapping for them. They only got acknowledged when they were socially significant.
And am I right in thinking here that these are fundamentally interlinked in many ways because when you're talking about safety, I was running through my head the things that made me feel safe and they were rewards that I could tell my friends about. Yeah. So, I like I touched all three of them. And part in part because we you know, I was thinking I was very different to my social group when I was younger. We were the black family. There wasn't another black family that I knew of um um [clears throat] other than maybe one other kid I think in the area in Plymouth in 1994 or five. Um so, some of the material things I wanted like the the shoes that everyone had made me feel safe cuz they made me fit in. Yep. And that you know, and that got me friends. Yep. At least I thought it did. So, like for me, it really was like an interconnected triangle. Yeah, that's just one of many examples that I could think of. It does tend to do that. And I will typically wait for somebody to figure that out. And as they're filling it out, they're they're kind of like, oh, I did this because of this to get to this. Mhm. And it you'll see a little cycle start happening. Uh but, it's great for self-knowledge, but if you're a behavior profiler, that's what's going to run people. You're going to know how they're going to respond to conflict. You're going to know what they're going to avoid. You're going to like if you're putting teams together, I know what people I want to have working with each other. And it doesn't have to be some complex 9-hour thing. Like you can see this stuff in everyday life.