Living for the Future Keeps You in the Past

[Applause]

somebody in this room could walk away

with an

extra 100 in your pocket today

now that means you could be getting

lucky today just not with me

here’s the thing i want you to ask

though if you had a hundred dollars if

it was

somewhere under your seat and don’t

start looking right now

somebody may have dropped it but what

would you do

with a hundred dollars and if you and if

you don’t want to

like quantify that then i want to give

you an example that’s like buying

five not four but five fortnight

profile skins that’s right mind blown

but in reality what i want you to do is

i want you to envision be as creative as

possible

because maybe for some of you using that

a hundred dollars

might look like taking out your family

maybe even your distant family and you

haven’t really spent time with them and

you want to make some positive memories

or maybe another person it might mean

that you have this really annoying leak

that’s just been dripping for months and

you finally got some extra cash and you

want to fix it

or maybe for the other person

maybe you’re like i want to upgrade my

love life so

i’m going to go from tinder regular to

tinder premium because i got more swipe

rights and swipe lefts

let’s be honest they’re all fun to do

but what is lurking what is hiding

behind all of these the

uniting element that brings all of your

examples and my examples together

is the reality that we know that once we

get what we think we want

we’re gonna want something more that it

doesn’t give us the satisfaction that we

think it’s going to give us now in the

field of psychology

it’s referred to as effective

forecasting

and that’s you and i day in and day out

creating

these imaginary scenarios where

we think once i get this once

i own that once i meet her mr writer mrs

right now

they’re going to change my life they’re

going to alter my identity

and they’re going to change my whole

narrative

and yet it doesn’t always happen that

way does it

and so we live our lives in this

perpetual groundhogs day

minus the fun of bill murray

and why why is it that we are

constantly driven by using a faulty tool

a faulty mechanism

that gives us a false sense of

satisfaction

a false sense of purpose and ultimately

a false sense of freedom

i’m going to tell you why in a second

but to solidify this a little bit more

how many of you are aware of have seen

or maybe even have heard of the

more famous looney tunes cartoon while a

coyote and the roadrunner raise your

hands

you may even have the dvd collection do

not raise your hands

you will lose street cred immediately

but as you might know if you’ve ever

even seen more than one episode you’ll

know

that within within five seconds at the

beginning

begins the same and the ending ends the

same it’s with

wiley our kind of antagonist who is

using all of these faulty tools and

mechanisms and strategies to get

what he thinks he wants that will give

him this false sense of happiness

right but he never gets it he never

ever gets it however what if

what if while a coyote had effective

forecasting on his side

what if he were able to project into the

future and create a scenario where he

actually got what he wanted

would his life have been different well

we can all now be grateful to family guy

because

a few years back they created this what

if scenario and

some of you may be aware of it and you

can find it on youtube

but it follows wiley coyote directly

after

catching and killing and eating

obviously he was not vegan

the roadrunner and

here he is i’m gonna set the scenario

here he’s sitting in this diner-esque

scenario

and he’s sitting in this chair and he’s

bloated and his

neck is looking up at the ceiling

and he just goes on this massive

diatribe of

i’m so glad i caught what i finally was

waiting to catch

and i got what i wanted now sitting in

the center

is the symbol of him getting what he

thought he wanted

and on the other side is another coyote

now let’s be honest whoever created the

looney tunes did not have the ultimate

baby book of names sitting next to them

because you got wild e coyote and the

roadrunner

not brain science but what happens

in the middle of his bloated diatribe

looking up at the ceiling

having his symbol of getting what he

thinks he wants there’s a moment

of punctuated silence and in that

silence

his anonymous coyote friend leans in and

says

now that you’ve got what you want

what are you going to do with the rest

of your life

now that’s a question we’re always

asking day in and day out even if we’re

not thinking about it

but this sends poor wiley in to an

existential crisis and sends him on

a huge exploration of who he thinks he

was and

then he converts to a religion and

that’s where he finds his happiness

now if you haven’t seen him yet he might

be knocking on your door elder wildly

but why is it what compels us so deeply

to use a faulty mechanism like effective

forecasting

why do we commit to our own

self-sabotage day in and day out

so let me give you a few examples that

might hit home for you

so maybe for you effective forecasting

looks like this

hey boss i think i deserve a promotion

i have been working really hard

and i think i want to show that to my

family and i want more time

with my family and i want to just run

with my kids

i want to spend time with them more and

i think this promotion will do that

and so after a few months go by three

six months

you begin to realize something that

promotion

didn’t exactly give you what you wanted

in fact it gave you the opposite you

wanted freedom

it gave you a prison

maybe for another person it might be

like hey i’ve been waiting to get that

car for the last

15 years i’ve had kids along the way

now i’ve got some extra money and now

i’m going to sit here and

ride and enjoy this new car

and you think your life is going to be

altered and it’s going to be changed

and everybody around you is going to be

like that guy looks awesome

but in reality nothing changes and in

fact what you end up finding out that

six months later down the road while

you’re changing a tire is

dang it i bought a lemon

or maybe others you might have thought

you know what

oh man i cannot wait to meet the man or

woman of my dreams

they’re going to change everything and

they might have

but you begin creating these false

scenarios

and you inject your emotional desire

into that

it’s it’s going to change who i am it’s

going to change everything it’s going to

make me happy

right but then what happens maybe a year

down the road

when you’re sitting there across from

each other and a table

and you begin to realize something she’s

not who

she said she was maybe

i’m not who i thought i was

and i noticed that some spouses are

getting nervous looks at each other i

just

want to go on the record and say that’s

not my fault and good luck um

but what is it that drives us to

continuously commit to these narratives

of limiting ourselves our potential what

is it

that keeps nagging at us to say it’s

okay

use effective forecasting create these

what-if scenarios

keep truncating your own limitation and

potential as a human being

well new research in the last few years

has come out within the field of

psychology

that has i actually discovered that the

source

of what guides this faulty behavior

is trauma it is

our trauma your trauma everybody in this

room

has a form of trauma in one way shape or

form

and it could have came from a childhood

experience

it could have came from something that

one of your teachers said

when you were very young

maybe it could have come from a boss

maybe it could even have come from a

spouse

but all of us have trauma and the nature

of trauma is that trauma begets trauma

trauma does not beget your own

liberation

it does not give you healing it will

actually

justify its presence in your life so

much so

that it will give you the parameters of

what you think it means to be human

and happy and satisfied

so in one sense you are using a tool

that will give you and set up

illusions of happiness

but in reality we’ll be keeping you from

it

and there’s another element to how

trauma works

is that sometimes

your trauma is not yours it was given to

you

now i’m a behavioral experimentalist

which means

i have the fun of tinkering with social

environments and working with

communities

to build out social scenarios that help

us get to the root of

why we do what we do what drives us

to commit to our own limitations

i want you to meet joe joe

is this amazing senior citizen

who we got to meet and actually spend

time with him and learn about his trauma

but to understand joe’s trauma you have

to understand a little bit of his

history

because joe’s trauma was not his own it

was given to him

but it affected him in such a negative

way

so his history includes his grandparents

and parents

being a part of the italian diaspora in

the 1880s

where there was a massive influx of

italian immigrants moving from italy

to certain regions within canada

and so i got the opportunity to be a

part of this project

it was an amazing time it was an amazing

experience

and during my time during this project

we got to meet joe we got to spend time

with him hear about his trauma

and the thing was is because there was

so much anti-immigrant sentiment

not very unlike what we’re dealing with

today

joe took on the narratives of his

grandparents and parents to the point

that his parents would never let him

leave the house

and so by the time we met joe he was

already in his late 70s

he had lived his life as an agoraphobic

for those of you who may not be aware of

what that is that simply stated that

it’s someone who

is so afraid of the possibilities of

being hurt or in danger

of the outside world that they will

literally lock themselves

in their house so joe’s trauma was not

his own

but he took it on as his own

and he began owning the limitations of

someone else’s story

and it embedded with who he was

now that is the very nature and drive of

trauma

it will tie itself to who you think you

are

and it will limit every essence

of any of your potential that you want

to align with it it is

really like the ultimate fomo the fear

of missing out

because it makes you think as long as i

have

this thing as long as i get this person

my life will make sense and i will be

fully satisfied

and so we will continuously use this

tool

which isn’t really there to help us at

all

because we never deal or respond with

our trauma

i want to tell you one more story

there’s a young boy and

he lived on the streets no he wasn’t

oliver twist he lived there

with his family

and they would oscillate between living

on the street and

in temporary housing

just so you get it living on the streets

temporary housing

his life continuously

got worse to the point that

their life was so unstable that his

parents decided to

use drugs but not just use them

sell them and also try to encourage the

kids

be like me and use them with the kids

now in the age of not having ebay they

didn’t really get as much commission

on their sales and so it wasn’t very

stable income

and you would have thought it would have

stopped there but his trauma continued

because then his mother

moved to the streets and became a

prostitute

my mother moved to the streets and

became a prostitute

that story of the young boy is my story

now each and every one of us has a story

we all

have trauma that we’re dealing with we

all have trauma that we’re responding to

and i want to tell you there is a way

out and you need to hear that

you need to embrace that because

by the end of this year according to the

world health organization

someone will give their life up every 20

seconds

by the end of my talk that’s around 75

people

who will commit suicide because we

have encouraged a culture of silence

we have almost made it normal

to never talk about our trauma so i’m

here to say

talk about your trauma because this is

about your liberation

your emancipation into who you’re meant

to be

and if you do if you decide to face your

trauma

head-on do not

back down

because lying on the other side of that

first step

is freedom who has been standing there

all along

who has been shouting and punctuated

whispers

i am here i am now

i am real come

and embrace me

thank you