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Welcome to Minisoad Monday.
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Happy to be here with you, kicking off the week with something quick and actionable that you can implement right away.
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This stuff will make you more magnetic and effective, and of course today we re back with Raj Raghunathan once again, talking about how some decisions should be made with our mind and others with our gut.
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two different types of brains, I guess, and used to think about certain types of decisions.
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Raj, one other idea that I thought was really fascinating is you have the idea that some decisions should be made with your brain and some should actually be made with your gut.
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Can you walk us through that process?
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Tell us why and tell us which types of decisions we should use which part of our body.
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Yeah, so many smart and successful people think that you can arrive
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at a better solution to any challenge or problem that you face by thinking a little more about it.
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And so we end up committing what I call is the sin of mind addiction, right?
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Overanalyzing things, getting into analysis paralysis, not being able to kind of stop thinking about something, ruminating about things over and over and over again.
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What turns out to be the case is that this belief that you always arrive at a better solution by just thinking a little more,
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is actually not true.
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In fact, in many circumstances, you might actually make an inferior decision if you thought a little bit more.
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Why is that?
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The reason is that our gut, our, you know, instinctive kind of feelings towards things actually packs a lot of information in it.
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You know, we have evolved over a long period of time and we have inherited as a species and as a living thing, actually, more broadly, a certain set of intelligences that are already there within us.
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And so that s what our gut is all about.
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It s trying to tell us what is the right thing to do in a situation, you know, what to avoid or what to consume, for example.
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And what happens when you commit the sin of overthinking or mind addiction is that you re separating yourself, distancing yourself from this inherent intelligence that you already have.
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And that s not to say, by the way, that in every situation you have to depend on your gut, right?
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Obviously, we all know that that s not true.
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So, for example,
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if you want to figure out where to invest in stocks, right?
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You have a bunch of extra money you want to invest somewhere.
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And your aim, of course, is to make profits.
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Then you shouldn t be going with your gut.
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You shouldn t go, look, you know, I love the way the Apple logo looks.
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So I m going to invest in Apple.
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That s not the right way to do it.
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Or, for example, if you want to identify the best fertilizer, right, for your crops, let s say you re a farmer,
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you shouldn t go with your gut there.
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You shouldn t say things like, that fertilizer looks cool, I m going to use that.
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You should in fact spend some effort and thoughtful deliberation in picking out the best fertilizer or the best stock.
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But for every situation like that where you re better off expending some thought and thinking through the problem or issue you have, there are just as many situations in which it s better not to overthink it.
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So for example, there was one study done where
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they offered a choice among five different posters to these participants in the study, and they basically split the participants into two groups.
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One group, they said, here are five posters, choose any one that you like.
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So basically, these students, these participants chose a poster that they instinctively liked.
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The other group, they said, think very carefully, and we re gonna ask you to justify your choice of the posters after you choose it, before you choose it, but think very carefully.
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So what happened is, the second set,
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were far less satisfied with their posters than the first set, right?
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I mean, and even, you know, after the whole semester was over, they took the posters home, put it up in their dorm rooms.
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They contacted these participants like four or five months down the road and asked them, how satisfied are you?
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It turned out that the participants who made a gut level choice were far more satisfied than those who thought really long and hard about it.
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What this tells you is that in situations in which what you re looking for is an emotional benefit, right?
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It s an experiential benefit that you re looking for.
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So for example, in relationships, what you re looking for is enjoyment of spending time with this partner.
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You re not looking for, well, a match of, you know, perfect set of attitudes.
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If you start kind of creating an Excel spreadsheet and figuring out all the different strengths that you have, all the different strengths that you re looking for in your partner and calculating the overall utility of spending time with person A versus person B, and then, you know, selecting the person that is going to give you the overall utility.
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you re going down the wrong direction.
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Because if you re looking for an emotional experiential benefit, your gut already has a lot of information and intelligence that is pointing you in the right direction, and it should go with your gut.
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Likewise, another example might be choosing a house, right?
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If you re choosing a house to live in for experiential purposes, you want to feel like the house is a home that you can come back to, right?
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Where you can spend a lot of time, enjoyable time,
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you should really go with your gut.
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You should kind of go into the house and ask yourself, how do I feel in this house?
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As opposed to a situation where you re looking for a house to buy as an investment, right?
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Then you should look at, okay, what s your location, what s your prospect for growth, what s your school district like, and so on and so forth.
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Is it gonna make me money in the end?
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So that s one broad kind of dimension you should think of.
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Is this an emotional benefit I m looking for, or is it a more functional benefit I m looking for?
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And if it s a functional benefit, then expend all the thought you want.
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But if it s an emotional benefit you re looking for, then you re better off relying on your gut.
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Another dimension or kind of circumstance, context that has relevance to this question is whether other people are involved.
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Imagine that you re making a decision on who to hire as a colleague.
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There, it s a little bit
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difficult to figure out.
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I mean, looking for an experiential benefit or a purely functional one.
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I mean, clearly you want to get along with a colleague.
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You know, you want somebody who s pleasant to get along with.
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So there is an emotional aspect to it.
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But at the same time, you also want a colleague who s good at what they do.
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Right.
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But let s say that you re part of a committee that s making a decision on who to hire.
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In that context, it turns out that voicing your opinion and saying things like, you know what, I choose Sandra because I don t know.
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I mean, I just like her.
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Right.
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I just like the way she looks.
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That won t
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generally speaking, go down that well with your other people making the decision.
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Because we somehow as a society, and maybe it s got to do with our education, we are uncomfortable not having what might be called rational reasons for making our choices.
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You re much better off saying something along the lines of, you know, Sandra is a much better people person.
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You know, I can see her interacting with our clients and actually kind of making those sales.
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And her personality, her winning personality is going to come in really handy for making profits, as opposed to saying, I just like her, you know, I just don t know why, but I want to choose her.
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So in other words, I think that, you know, the broad story that I m trying to kind of portray here is that emotions do have a lot of intelligence.
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And there is such a thing as overthinking things that can actually get you away from making the best choice.
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And in deciding which you need to rely on or how much to rely on,
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emotions and gut instinct versus thinking through things, you should ask yourself two questions.
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One question is, what is the eventual benefit I m looking for?
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Is it an emotional slash experiential one, or is it a functional, practical, utilitarian one?
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And if it s the first, then go with your gut feel, go with your instincts.
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If it s the second, then think a little bit more.
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The second question you have to ask yourself is, do I need to justify this choice to other people?
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Am I part of a committee making a choice?
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And if it is, and you have to justify your choice, then you re better off thinking through things.
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Even if in the end you make an emotional decision, at least for the sake of coming across as being a more reasonable person in the eyes of other people, you should think of reasons that sound non-emotional, because somehow people seem to want that.
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I hope that s useful.
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It is very useful.
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There s a lot there, but definitely different times to use different regions of the body to make certain decisions, and I hope that people bear that in mind when they re looking for a certain type of result.
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If you use your gut when it s supposed to be done with the brain and vice versa, you could end up with a subpar outcome, or at least one that you didn t intend.
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Thanks so much, Raj.
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Special thanks again to Raj for that, and don t forget about the Art of Charm Challenge.
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It ll help you connect better with others, create more productive personal and business relationships, and of course includes step-by-step challenges every week to help you move forward.
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Text CHARMED to 33444 in the USA, or go to theartofcharm.com slash challenge and get rocking.
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Here s producer Jason with this week s upcoming episodes.
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Thanks Jordan.
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Tuesday we re talking with marketing professor and author Jonah Berger from the Wharton School.
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We dive into his latest book, Invisible Influence, The Hidden Forces That Shape Behavior.
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We talk about influence on ourselves, on others, and specifically how it s invisible and undetectable to us most of the time.
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How this affects how we act, what we do, what we buy, and how we live our lives.
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Also, how to harness this influence to persuade and dissuade, and much more.
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On Thursday, we re joined by Dr. Joe Marchant, author of Cure, a journey into the science of mind over body.
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We talk about the placebo effect, how emotional states influence our health, what the mind can really do, how it works and why it works, and how we can use these latest findings in our own lives and harness our own placebo effect.
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As always, we ll be back with Fan Mail Fridays, answering your questions and dropping some knowledge.
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To make sure you re getting all of the latest
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episodes, make sure you re subscribed to The Art of Charm and your favorite podcast player.
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For tips on how to subscribe, you can hit us up at theartofcharm.com slash subscribe.
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Have a great Monday.