00:00:00 Welcome to tonight's Saturday night, special episode 56. I'm Ryan Ingolstadt from pop psych one Oh one. I encourage you to find health. And one way to be inspired to do that is by listening to this, the inspired stewardship podcast with my friend, Scott Mader. But if I hadn't actually asked them and help them uncover that reason and then help them articulate it,
00:00:32 I really didn't know. And it wasn't as simple matter of saying, why do you do this? Because oftentimes the answers that we give or the thing that we think is the reason is really just a surface level reason, and there's much more behind it. Welcome. And thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be,
00:00:55 then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling in the inspired stewardship podcast, you will learn to invest in yourself, invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world. And tonight's Saturday night special. I talked with you about the book predictably irrational. I share how this book changed, how I view myself and others.
00:01:28 And I talk with you about some of the lessons that you can take from this book. Now, one area that a lot of folks need some help with is around the area of productivity. Getting not just more things done, but actually getting the right things done can be really, really tough. I've got a course called productivity for your passion. That's designed to help you do this,
00:01:56 and then to hold you accountable and walk with you so that you can tailor productivity, not just to be getting more done, but actually getting the right things done. What's more, we take the approach of looking at your personality and how you actually look at things in the world and tailor the productivity system to your personality. Because the truth is a lot of the systems that are out there are written really well for somebody with a particular personality type.
00:02:25 But if you have a different approach to things, they just don't work, but there's tools and techniques and approaches that you can take that will work for anyone. And we help you do that and productivity for your passion. Check it out over@inspiredstewardship.com slash launch. You know, there's a handful of books in my life that have radically changed. How I view the universe.
00:02:52 There are books that I've read that have dramatically affected the way I see things in the world. And you know, one of these days I'll probably do a Roundup episode where I actually talk about those books and list them out. But today I wanted to focus on one of them called predictably irrational by Dan Ariela. And I'm probably pronouncing his last name wrong,
00:03:15 but that's, that's the best I can do. And this book, predictably irrational. I read it a number of years ago, shortly after it had come out. And it's one, I've read a few different times. I've gone back to it a couple of times and he focuses on the behaviors we have around money, which of course with what I coach in and what I'm interested in is,
00:03:37 is definitely something that caught my attention. But as I began to read it and think about it, it began to change more than just how I looked at money. It began to affect how I view you, other people and the decisions that they make. And then how I viewed myself and the decisions that I made. And I'm not going to say that reading the book,
00:04:01 you know, it made it where I'm no longer irrational in the way that I approach time or money, but it did affect those things in a very positive way because you know, the, the truth is there were nuggets that came throughout the book that I began to recognize this thing, things that I had done, that the way that he says, basically with everything you do,
00:04:28 if you exhibit repeated behaviors, if you do the same thing over and over again, you need to train yourself to question Jen, those things, not necessarily to automatically change them. It's not that habit is always bad. It's that we tend to develop these habits over time. And then we no longer question them. We no longer think about them and we no longer look at them in a critical way.
00:04:58 We just do them. We assume that we've adapted and developed our best self all the time. Even when we know we can improve ourselves, we still have this tendency to default to thinking that we've already achieved our best self and this idea of going on towards perfection, this idea of improving over time, this idea of constantly seeking to get a little well better today than I was yesterday is really counter to that.
00:05:30 And he talks about how, yes, you know, intellectually, we may arrive at that decision, but it's hard to put it into practice that you know, that at the end of the day, there were a few ideas that were really big ideas that came from the, the book. And another one that really changed how I viewed myself is the idea that we tend to focus on what we may lose the negatives more than what we may gain.
00:05:57 And again, thinking about that, being out in the, in the world and recognizing that when somebody says something, you know, that I did something wrong, I tend to focus on that. Even if a hundred people loved it and said, I did it right, that we, we tend to assume Dan says that other people see, and he talks about money transactions,
00:06:18 but I actually think it goes for broader areas than that, that other people see things the same way we do. And being able to recognize that that's not true is an important idea. And then a fourth idea in the book is that people will work more for a cause than for cash as a coach. When I'm talking to other coaches about working with people on their money,
00:06:46 I constantly try to reinforce, go back to the emotions, go back to the why. Go back to the reason behind the money. If somebody will say, you know, I want to make more money, but why do they want to make more money? Or I want to live in a bigger house, but why do they want to live in a bigger house?
00:07:04 It's not so much the practical thing that people are actually after, but usually we don't see it that way. We think what we want is more money. When in reality, what we want is some freedom or we want the ability to work less, or we want the ability to spend more time with our family, or we want the, you know,
00:07:24 it's more about the emotion and the feeling behind the item. It's what the money gets us that we're, after more than the money and this, at the time I read it really changed how I viewed things. And then the last one is this idea of what he calls procrastination, which is the idea that the short term things that we have going on day to day,
00:07:49 the, the pleasure that we can focus on that's immediate and right in front of us often gets in the way of our ability to achieve long term goals. These five fundamental ideas dramatically changed how I viewed my own behavior. They made me start recognizing that I was doing these things and that it wasn't always rational to do them, but what's more, it,
00:08:14 let me begin to look at how other people were doing things and recognize. I probably didn't really know the reasons they were doing them. I didn't know what was going on inside their head. I might think I know, but if I hadn't actually asked them and help them uncover that reason and then help them articulate it, I really didn't know. And it wasn't as simple matter of saying,
00:08:38 why do you do this? Because oftentimes the answers that we give or the thing that we think is the reason is really just a surface level reason, and there's much more behind it. So this idea that we behave in a way that is predictable, but not necessarily rational, really began to change how I interacted with other people. And because of that,
00:09:06 I began to change the way that I, that I acted. I began to be able to view other people in a more balanced way sometimes. And don't get me wrong by no means, am I perfect in this? I can fly off the handle, assures anyone. I can make a completely irrational decision and justify it 100%, but it still began to break down.
00:09:29 Some of that. It began to change the way I view the world. It began to help me become a little bit more balanced in my view of things. It began to make me recognize that I was just like everyone else doing the comparison trap. I was constantly comparing where I am to where everyone else is. And that's because that's how we're wired,
00:09:52 but it's not healthy. How that actually led to poor decision making. And then if I could do certain things, I could break that habit. I could begin to do things like break it up. So instead of looking at three choices where one of them is obviously a poor choice and that tends to drive you towards one of the other choices I could recognize what was going on and I could break it up into sections and look at each choice independently.
00:10:22 It made it where I began to be harder to fall into some of the marketing traps, because I began to recognize things like how the anchor price affects, how we view the price of things, how the word free can affect how we view things. What are the things you could really do is begin to educate yourself on the psychology behind behavioral finance. Just like we talked about on Monday,
00:10:51 how understanding behavioral finance can actually change the way you execute on leadership. It changes how you interact with people. It changes how you interact with yourself. It changes how you understand what is going on and what you do. It dramatically changes when you really understand it, how you view yourself, how you view your money, how you view your time and how you view your relationships.
00:11:18 So I encourage you to keep listening to this podcast. We'll talk about behavioral psychology and behavioral economics, but I also encourage you to go out and buy the book or get the book predictably irrational. I'll have a link to it in the show notes and take a read of it if you haven't before. And if you have read it, send me an email@scottandinspiredstewardship.com.
00:11:40 And tell me the biggest lesson that you took from the book. Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast. As a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you enjoy this episode, please, please do us a favor.
00:12:12 Go over to inspired stewardship.com/itunes rate. All one word iTunes rate. It'll take you through how to leave a rating and review and how to make sure you're subscribed to the podcast so that you can get every episode as it comes out in your feed until next time, invest your time, your talent and your treasures, develop your influence and impact the world.