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