We all have to make certain choices in life, such as where to live and how to earn a living. Parents and peers influence our major life choices, but they can also steer us in directions that leave us deeply unsatisfied. This week: a favorite conversation with psychologist Ken Sheldon about the science of figuring out what you want. He says there are things we can do to make sure our choices align with our deepest values.If you're not yet a member of Hidden Brain+, this is a particularly good time to give our podcast subscription a try. We’re extending our standard seven-day trial period for listeners on Apple Podcasts. Sign up in January and you’ll get 30 free days to try it out. If you're listening in Apple Podcasts, just go to the Hidden Brain show page and click "try free." Or you can go to apple.co/hiddenbrain and click "try free.” Thanks for listening and supporting the show — we really appreciate it.
Chapter 1: What are the common struggles in finding life direction?
At the University of Missouri, psychologist Ken Sheldon studies the science of knowing what to want, how to set your sights on targets that will actually make you happy if you achieve them. Ken Sheldon, welcome to Hidden Brain. Hey, I'm happy to be here. I want to take you back to 1981, Ken. You just finished college and moved to Seattle. You wanted to become a musician. You started a band.
How did it go? rock musicians can be kind of flaky and unreliable and we were all in our 20s and everybody had different goals everybody was kind of self-centered and they might not have been committed the way we thought that they were or maybe the guitarist slept with the singer unexpectedly and You know, there's a lot of things that can just get in the way of having a smoothly functioning unit.
We just weren't able to make the agreements and follow through with them that we would have needed to make real progress.
I understand that at one point you were recording songs for a radio song contest and things didn't quite go smoothly.
Yeah, I had recorded my tracks on the song that we were going to submit to this contest. And I left for a weekend hiking trip, expecting that the bandmates would put their tracks down so we could send in the song the next Monday. And I got back and nobody had done anything. And it was very disappointing.
I remember walking in the rain, it was Seattle, wondering what to do next, and coming to the decision that this was probably not going to give me a way to make a living, and that music, or at least this particular band episode, was not going to work out. And that I needed to get serious about maybe something else.
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Chapter 2: How did Ken Sheldon navigate his early career choices?
What happened to Ken, of course, has happened to millions of people. Maybe it's happening to you right now. You set your heart on something and then find the thing you wanted doesn't look anything like the thing you thought you wanted. So Ken did what lots of us do. He flailed around looking for something new. He signed up for a master's program.
Yeah, it was a program at Seattle University in existential phenomenological psychotherapy. Wow. Yeah. That's a lot of syllables, but it is a certain tradition within existential philosophy and counseling psychology. It's a legitimate approach to helping people. And I was very interested in that program, not so much because I wanted to become a therapist.
but more because I've always just been very theoretically oriented and these were new ideas that I didn't understand that seemed like they might be very relevant to this search for clarity, the search for what to do with myself.
Again, Ken was doing what lots of us do. We look to the outside world to give us answers to questions about what we should do with our lives. Ken's foray into existential phenomenological psychotherapy was short-lived. The answers he was looking for were not forthcoming.
I really enjoyed the year. My fellow classmates, we formed a tight cohort. We did things together. I learned a lot. And the main thing I learned was that I didn't think the answers I was looking for were going to come from that area of knowledge. So what did you do? Well, I once again stopped doing that. I dropped out after the first year. And in the end, I felt kind of stuck.
I was living in Seattle. The jobs I was working were not very well paying, very high status. But here I was, a Duke graduate. You know, maybe I should be doing better than that. So I was in a sort of period of really, really not knowing what to do next.
In addition to not knowing what to do next, Ken felt like he was not measuring up. He sensed the world expected more from him and his impressive college degree. He expected more from himself. He felt lost. Still looking for answers, he signed up for a workshop that was all the rage in the 1970s and early 80s. It was called the Erhard Seminars Training, or EST Training.
Yeah, the EST training was created by Werner Erhardt. He's not a spiritual guru. He was actually a salesman who read a lot about optimal performance and communication and what is the mind and mind training classes. He tried them all. And then he created his own version called the EST training. And it wasn't a spiritual thing.
It was actually designed to train you to understand your own mind and to control it better.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation?
Chapter 4: How can societal expectations misguide our goals?
Chapter 5: What insights can we learn from Ken's research on happiness?
Chapter 6: What was the outcome of the EST training?
So one of the biggest reasons that you and others have found that people come up with the wrong goals is that we blindly follow voices in our society that tell us what we ought to want. I want to play you a famous clip from the 1987 movie Wall Street. Michael Douglas plays Gordon Gekko, a wealthy corporate trader who has some strong views about greed.
The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed... Greed is right. Greed works.
So, Ken, today we might say that Gordon Gekko goes too far, but even if we are not willing to be as explicit as this, can you talk about some of the subtler ways in which society tells us that money and power and status are the ultimate barometers of a successful life?
Yeah, well, there's many ways. We're all immersed in a material consumer culture, which is trying to get us to buy things, click things, make more money so we can acquire status symbols. Not all of us fall for this. It depends a lot on the support and relations and connections that we have.
But if you're not sure what to do, and so many of these broader cultural messages are telling you to be greedy and you're pretty prone to at least give that a try to see if it works.
Yeah, and I suppose another major way that many of us might end up pursuing the wrong things is that we choose goals set for us by other people in our lives. And very often, these might be people whom we love, you know, our parents, our teachers, our friends, people who say they want the best for us, but people who might not actually know what will make us happy.
Do you hear that from your students as well, Ken?
Yeah, that's a very common complaint. College students are still trying to figure out what they want, perhaps independently of their parents. It's their first real opportunity to get away from their parents and explore on their own. And parents often have very firm ideas about what they want their children to do. And it's not a bad thing. In many cases, they are good ideas.
But ultimately, parents are not in even as good a position as we are to experiment and find what we really want. Parents have goals of their own. They want to acquire the status of having a doctor as a child. And they sometimes can't separate that out from their love and concern for us.
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Chapter 7: How do cultural messages shape our aspirations?
Chapter 8: What findings emerged from studies on law students' well-being?
what happens is that your non-conscious mind keeps working on the problem while you're thinking about something else just because you sort of consciously posed that question to yourself and then you went away and now it's working on it and so hopefully along comes a moment of inspiration an aha moment where some stray thought or idea or image pops up And you recognize, whoa, that's interesting.
What's that about? And you start to work with that idea and you realize that it's the solution to the problem. So this is a very common sort of creative sequence. And my idea was that maybe discovering what we really want is a creative activity. And maybe we can self-prompt this activity. We don't just have to wait for insights out of the blue.
We can consciously ask ourselves questions like, why am I so unhappy? What do I really want? What's bothering me? What's happening inside of me? And when we ask those questions, we don't know the answer right away, but very often we begin to get hints.
So partly what I hear you saying is that this process of preparation is really important. It's important to actually try and grapple with the problem consciously, even if it turns out that the answer lies in our non-conscious minds.
Because by grappling with something consciously, you're setting the stage, if you will, to have a conversation with your non-conscious mind and to allow something to bubble up.
That's exactly right. And a colleague and I now are writing a review article where we're trying to make a firm connection between the phenomenology of conscious choice, of asking one's mind questions, and neuroscience. You know, what's happening in these brain networks when we do that? And we're finding some really striking points of connection supporting the idea that we're
When we ask ourselves a question, it puts our brains to work in ways that we don't know about, but that can do an amazing job of helping us.
So once a period of preparation has led to a moment of illumination, we then have to proceed to the stage you call verification. Is that right? Not every revelation we have will pan out.
That's true. Not every aha experience is the best or final aha experience. And so life is an experiment, and then we need to test the idea once we become aware of it. And we might realize that, no, we don't want to quit everything and move to Mexico and lay on a beach. That's not really going to be as fulfilling as we think. Let's keep thinking and maybe a better choice will come.
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