[INTRO]

Robert Gilman: [00:00:00] We need to become much more savvy about psychodynamics, especially our own. And understanding what is it that motivates us? What are the places where our cognitive biases trip us up? What are the ways in which we're constantly being shifted around by our autonomic nervous system?

Jenny Stefanotti: That's Robert Gilman. He's the founder and president of The Context Institute, and this is a Denizen podcast. I'm your host and curator, Jenny Stef. Robert's a pioneer in the sustainability space and has been thinking deeply about systemic change for many decades. He's an elder in our midst who has a lot to teach us, and I'm delighted to bring you a three part series with him exploring what he sees as three essential capabilities that we all need to have in order to shift culture, to be in harmony with life on earth.

This first episode is about psychodynamics and how we can become savvy about how our minds work rather than driven by unconscious factors. [00:01:00] Robert and I discuss how this personal work ties to cultural change and dive into how our nervous systems, cognitive biases and underlying motivations influence our behavior.

Becoming aware of these dynamics supports us in being our most compassionate, curious, creative selves. As always, you can find show notes and the transcript for this episode on our website becoming denizen.com. There you can also sign up for our newsletter. I bring our latest content to your inbox alongside information about virtual denizen events, including community conversations with our podcast guests.

I hope this conversation brings you insights into how your mind works. As always, it's an honor to share Robert's wisdom with you. 

[INTERVIEW]

Jenny Stefanotti: Robert Gilman, welcome back.

Robert Gilman: Thank you. Thank you, Jenny. I'm delighted to be back.

Jenny Stefanotti: I'm excited for us to bring a three part series to the audience, which I think is really powerful foundational content.

I'm so grateful for you and your work and in preparing for these conversations, just really appreciating how [00:02:00] much it is deeply resonant with denizen's overarching. Theory of change and the work that we're doing, and I know that you've been at this for much longer than we have, so I'm just very delighted to interweave your wisdom and knowledge into the conversation Once again, you have mentioned that historically you thought about cultural change, and then over time you realized the importance of personal change for cultural change to happen.

So can you speak a little bit more to that sentiment?

Robert Gilman: Sure. Well, if you think about culture as just this sort of abstract thing, you know, it doesn't land anywhere, but each one of us is like a holographic fragment of our culture. Culture resides in people. I. And it's the patterns and habits and ideas and all that stuff residing in people.

And so you don't change culture without changing habits and ideas and all that stuff in [00:03:00] people, because culture is this complex adaptive system. It's not a mechanistic system. We've got all of these. Somewhat independent, people running around, making their choices, adapting to other things. It also means that as we make changes in ourselves, those changes can affect a lot of others around us, and it's especially important if we're able to make changes that change patterns of how we.

Do things. This gets back to the Buckminster Fuller idea.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: That if you wanna change something, fighting against it, in many cases, just energizes it. If you really want to change something, make it obsolete. And many people find that harder work.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: Because you've got to then actually come up with something that works better.

But if you can, it's incredibly powerful. And it's also something [00:04:00] that small groups of people can do because the challenges in coming up with the new patterns that actually work, were in a time when spreading that stuff is a lot easier than it used to be.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: Not dead simple, but still easier than it used to be.

So we really need to co-evolve with the culture. Because we are the culture.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: But I do wanna say that it's helpful to have some sense of what are the patterns in you that are cultural patterns. It's easy to have a focus on personal growth that is very personal. A very, mm-hmm. Individualized and often inappropriately takes in things that are actually cultural issues and treats them as if they're just personal.

But you can approach personal growth in a way in which the implicit assumption is that the context around you is gonna stay the same, and you're just gonna improve your ability to function within that context. Whereas if you're doing personal change with the interest of [00:05:00] cultural change, you're actually doing it with the intention to change the context around you.

Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm.

Robert Gilman: That may sound sort of abstract, but I think as we get into things, we'll be able to ground that a little more.

Jenny Stefanotti: Well, you say in one of your blog posts, our experience so far is that as your behavior changes, it has a positive co-evolutionary effect on those around you. What sets up for a ripple effect beyond your immediate circle?

We have a whole episode with you called Beyond the Enlightenment. Mm-hmm. That I will point listeners towards if you have not heard it yet, let's talk about briefly the dominant culture and how that stems from the enlightenment and how we're in a moment of transitioning out of that and how the work that we'll talk about over the next three episodes is really in service of that shift.

Robert Gilman: Yeah, so actually I wanna go back a little further and say that we've got 5,000 years behind us of what I like to call the agrarian Empire era, which is really a cultural, it's a cultural pattern. It [00:06:00] isn't just a space on a calendar because there are actually a whole bunch of countries and cultures around the world right now that are still very much in that

Jenny Stefanotti: mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: Empire. Europe pattern. So that began to shift a little bit in Europe and one of the reasons why it was Europe was because Europe was a backwater and all fragmented. So the places like China and India that had strong central empires at the time were more resistant to change. They were more stable because Europe was kind of a, a weird backwater.

It. Allowed a certain flexibility that we associate with the the Renaissance, uh, you know, push it back even a little further. It's possible. The Black Death and all the disruption that it created helped to sow the seeds for some of those changes. But the changes that got going in the Renaissance, especially the beginnings of natural sciences.

The printing press, that change of [00:07:00] technology was huge. Also then kind of got its next fruition in the 17 hundreds with the, with the age of Enlightenment and in the age of enlightenment, all kinds of, uh. New concepts kind of crystallized. That's when we got market economy. It's when we really began to sink into Western science.

It's when we got representative democracy. There were a whole lot of these patterns that got started then, and I will say that. I think that the shift that the Age of Enlightenment is connected with is a dam site better than what was happening in those empire era.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: Era. Life was pretty brutal for the 90% that were illiterate and working the land.

It not that it was, it didn't improve immediately, but especially in the last two centuries worldwide. We've gone from [00:08:00] 90% illiterate to about 90% literate. We've doubled the life expectancy worldwide. We've done a whole variety of things that at a very basic level, mark, a remarkable improvement in human quality of life.

However. Successful at some level as all of that was, it's, it's pretty hard to expect that a, a set of 18th century ideas are gonna be able to adequately cope with the challenges of the 21st century. So what we've done is we, we've run the game, if you will, for what the Age of Enlightenment by itself had to offer the.

Irony in a certain sense is that much of what we can N now do to move beyond the blind spots and the issues that we are inherited from the age of Enlightenment actually come out of. Work in the sciences, other things that, that the age [00:09:00] of Enlightenment enabled. So I'm okay to, to think of this as kind of standing on shoulders, um, preserving some of the best that's there.

Mm-hmm. I mean, the other alternative, right now, it's pretty clear that the, the standard liberal establishment isn't coping. I mean, it's been clear for decades actually, that it hasn't been coping well, but it's getting worse and worse. And the authoritarians see this, I. And say, okay, this is our time. We're going for it.

We're gonna take these bastards down. And you see that happening all over the world, but there's, I'd like to think that there's a better alternative.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm. And

Robert Gilman: so that's really, my work is very much focused not on the outer structural alternative because I don't think we're, we're at a place to really deal with that.

What we need to be able to do is to get beyond. The blind spots and the limitations, and the places where the age of Enlightenment made assumptions, [00:10:00] for instance, that the world around us was this warehouse full of separate objects.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: In effect, and that if you wanted to understand things, that the best way to do it was in a mechanistic way in which you as the engineer or the designer, could stand outside the system and make changes.

I. To the system, but you weren't part of it. An awful lot of political policymaking still functions in that consciousness.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: By now we, I think it's much clearer that society is a complex adaptive system and we're participants, we're not outside engineers.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: And so that's ties right back to, as participants, we need to change ourselves.

In the process, we need to co-evolve with a change of the culture.

Jenny Stefanotti: And you mentioned three limitations of modern culture that you found to be [00:11:00] most significant, and those three map to. The changes that you propose that we make, which right lo and behold maps to the three conversations we'll be having with you.

So can you, amazing. Can you outline those three limitations that you've found to be most significant?

Robert Gilman: Sure. The three places where I feel that we're really lacking skills and actually. I hope this doesn't upset the setup too much, but, but I wanna say that there are actually three literacies that I feel that are weak for us.

And then there are three skillset capabilities. So we're gonna, in this series, we're gonna be talking about those capabilities, but I wanna mention the literacies because they're important as well. The literacies that we don't really, in the culture have well supported are an understanding of systems, especially complex adaptive systems, an understanding of, of what I and, and others like to call the human [00:12:00] operating system, which is what we're learning through neuroscience and a variety of other places.

That's, if you talk about human nature, most of the conversation around human nature that's gone on for centuries is about surface observations. We're now having a, an opportunity to understand deeper stuff so that literacy around the human operating system is important as well. And then we also need literacy around the way that culture has changed, the way that culture does change.

You know, the, we need a much better sense of what's often talked about as, as theory of change. So it's that systems, human operating system and culture. Literacies then support being able to be here. I'll describe it first in terms of the critique version.

Jenny Stefanotti: Okay. If

Robert Gilman: you will. So. With the age of Enlightenment was pretty clueless about what's known as psychodynamics, which are the [00:13:00] conscious and unconscious factors that structure, personality and motivation.

There was this illusion, if you will, that we could shift away from all this messy emotional stuff and. Just have a rational way of understanding things. It just doesn't hold up. It turns out that if you take, there's this incident with someone who, through a brain tumor operation, had some parts of the brain disconnected.

That meant that they couldn't bring emotion and decision making together, and they were incapable of making decisions. So the, the Age of Enlightenment was clueless about psychodynamics and has kind of continued that way. I know that there's getting to be behavioral economics, but for a long time, economics proceeded on the notion that everyone was this rational calculator and.

Bullshit. Then the, the second one, [00:14:00] which is I think a little less apparent to many people is that we're too fixated on language and categorical thinking. I. It's, it basically has a monopoly on our minds and our ways that we proceed. If you look at what happens in academia, if you look at the way governments proceed, all of that is based on language.

And language is essentially labels on categories, so you can't get away from categorical thinking with language. Really, the only way that you can really begin to do that is to bring in visual metaphors, because in. Visual thinking and in what I like to describe as continuum thinking, you can break out of the categorical boxes.

And then the third issue that is a real challenge and blind spot for the age of enlightenment is that they made a compromise. With the Empire Era cultures we're all based on dominator hierarchies. Yeah. [00:15:00] And based on the assumption of power struggles and adversarial relations and, you know, life was all about getting relative advantage, concentrating resources to yourself, being extractive.

And the, what the Age of Enlightenment did was to say, let's shift that so that we can have the rule of law instead of the rule of men. The rule of men being this individualized

Jenny Stefanotti: mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: Autocratic thing. It didn't work out quite as well because it's easy to game the rule of law, as we all know at this point.

So we're still this dysfunction of still using essentially adversarial ways, ways of relating, you know, outside of one small circle or whatever. So let me flip all this into what I feel is the, you know, how, how do we take it? What do we, what do we do now? So, [00:16:00] first of all, we need to become much more savvy about psychodynamics, especially our own.

Understanding what is it that motivates us? What are the places where our cognitive biases trip us up? What are the ways in which we're constantly being shifted around by our autonomic nervous system and other things of that sort? But those are three that I think are particularly important. So that's one we need to become more savvy about psychodynamics.

And if we come become more savvy about our own, we can become more compassionately savvy

Jenny Stefanotti: about the

Robert Gilman: psychodynamics of others. The second one is to become skillful with diverse modes of cognition. So categorical thinking has its place. It's very useful. The problem is the monopoly of it. But we need to be able to know how to do and when to bring in visual thinking, when to bring in somatic awareness, how to integrate intuition in a practical way.

All of these different modes of [00:17:00] cognition, if you will, are very much part of the of the human capability. And when we make use of all of them, we become more creative and much better decision makers. We're able to communicate more effectively. So that's becoming skillful with those diverse mode. I mean, cognition is both thinking and perception.

The combination of those two, and I know it's a big, heavy word, but it captures that wholeness of thinking and perception and the various different ways that we actually as humans can do it. But in this culture, we've allowed. Language and categorical thinking and perception of this warehouse with objects in it to basically having a mono, a monopoly.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: And the third piece is to become adept at win-win, [00:18:00] win collaboration, and three wins. Because it's important. Not only do you win and I win, but the surround wins. The system wins, the larger wholeness wins because it's all too easy for you and I to get together and conspire to use externalities to get the, we'll get the benefit, but we'll put the cost out elsewhere.

I. That isn't sufficient. So it's those three things. Savvy about psychodynamics, skillful with diverse modes of cognition and adept at win-win, win collaboration, that those are skill sets that by and large are not very well developed in the culture. Different people have developed pieces of those, but developing them all together create a capability to basically.

It's what we need to be able to deal with a poly crisis. It's what we need to be able to deal with all of the challenges that we have here in the 21st century.

Jenny Stefanotti: So those are the three conversations we'll be having [00:19:00] in this series. Right, right. We're starting today with, uh, savvy about psychodynamics.

Mm-hmm. Before we dig into that, which we will do in just a moment, I wanna just touch on, just to tee it up, to finish teeing it up, what all this gets us. So Denizen's vision. Is humanity flourishing in harmony with all life on earth? And I know that harmony is a very important concept in your work and your thinking.

And embodied harmony is what we get when we layer on these foundational literacies with these essential capabilities. So let's speak to that and then let's dig in on becoming savvy about psychodynamics.

Robert Gilman: Great. Super. So Harmony has this, it's all too easy for harmony to be, people hear that and and think it's kind of pastel.

That's actually not the way I'm thinking about harmony. I'm thinking about harmony is fundamentally a characteristic of a [00:20:00] relationship within a system. Harmony has to be about relationships and not just interpersonal relationships, but relationship with the environment, relationship in all kinds of different ways.

And in a system where there is what I wanna describe as harmony resilience, where the system spends a good amount of time in harmonious relationships within it, and when there's some kind of perturbation, as always happens, it's able to find either a new harmony or get back to whatever the harmony was.

We as humans have the opportunity to be. Proactive harm. So this isn't a matter of figuring out how you can be a consumer of harmony, not at this point in the human progression. This is a matter of figuring out how you can be a producer of harmony, how you can be a generator of harmony. And with those I.

Foundational [00:21:00] literacies and, uh, essential capabilities. That is my sense of if you've got those things, you're going pretty well, but it needs to be three harmonies, harmony within harmony with others, in harmony with nature or the surrounding world, or however you want to describe that larger harmony. And you need to be able to pull that off in yourself and you need.

Groups to be able to do that, and eventually we need the culture to be able to do that.

Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm.

Robert Gilman: If we did that, we would end warfare, we would end poverty, we would accomplish all of these things because they would just make sense to us.

Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm.

Robert Gilman: While some of these things may sound, oh, well, that's nice and personal, fine.

The implication, the cultural implications of these go right to the biggest global issues.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm. I appreciate the way you, uh, articulated it too. In some of your writings, you said Harmony is a fundamental systems concept. It denotes a system [00:22:00] state in which the parts are mutually supportive, enabling the system to function at its best, effectively and efficiently.

And then I think this is the perfect bridge to digging into it. The savvy about psychodynamics you say, becoming savvy about our own psychodynamics in behaviors and habits as well as our understandings leads naturally to the harmony within, at the personal level.

Robert Gilman: Right.

Jenny Stefanotti: Okay. How do we become savvy about psychodynamics?

Robert Gilman: Yeah. Well, I wish it was read five Instagram posts and you got it, or afraid it. It's not quite that simple, but it isn't actually all that hard either.

Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm.

Robert Gilman: A big part of it is, I mean, I think that the starting point really needs to be willingness to learn. Willingness to learn about yourself.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: And awareness.

We've talked a bunch about Optimals own resilience and I've got some posts on the substack [00:23:00] about that. But I would just say with Optimals own resilience and a major part of it is becoming aware of when you are triggered, being able to have enough witness state so that you can be aware of that rather than just being immersed in it.

Jenny Stefanotti: So for those who have not heard this other episode we have with Robert, we have one that is completely dedicated to optimal own resilience. It's a really important component of becoming savvy about our own psychodynamics. So we're going to address it a little bit more superficially here. I would direct people to that.

And then I would also note, as I just mentioned to Robert before we started recording, we've explored this concept in a couple of subsequent conversations since the optimal Zone resilience episode about a year ago, where we looked at trauma in the nervous system, and we also had a conversation with David Cooley about transforming relational conflict, where the through line was really about nervous system awareness.

[00:24:00] So why don't you give us the. Executive summary, let's say about optimal zone resilience. What are we talking about on the optimal zone? What is this really critical understanding of an ongoing awareness of our nervous system that is such a fundamental, central concept and capability for us to have to move forward in the world, in the way that we want the world to be.

Robert Gilman: Right. Okay. So we live with our nervous system. We wanna focus particularly on our autonomic nervous system. We live with it 24 7. You know, it's there all the time influencing us, structuring the way we feel and the way we relate to the world. And if we aren't able to partner with it, it simply drives us.

So it's really important to learn how to be able to partner with it.

Jenny Stefanotti: So this is a really important point. I just wanna underscore it that most of us are unaware of the ways in which our nervous system [00:25:00] affects how we think and how we behave. Right? Right. Most of us, most of this is unconscious. The majority of people in the dominant culture.

Robert Gilman: Yep. Bingo. And the key piece. Really is sense of safety. When you're feeling relatively safe, then you have broader consciousness capabilities where you're able to think more clearly. You're curious, you're more compassionate. All of these things come much more easily to you when you feel relatively safe.

When you feel threatened in some way or another, then you move into a triggered, sympathetic activated state. Or you may move into a depressed, what used to be called parasympathetic state. Now as much more frequently described as a dorsal Vegas [00:26:00] state that narrow your mental capabilities. Especially when you're triggered into an activated state.

It's in evolutionary terms. We evolved that capability because of life and death situations that our distant ancestors faced over the last few hundred, probably billion years as the autonomic nervous system has evolved. It's all about immediate. Physical threats, but we humans, 'cause we're more complicated, we repurpose that into imagined threats, into potential future threats into this, into that.

That actually makes us less functional in our ability to deal with the actual concern. And so this is a place where we need to learn the skills to be able to do that. And the skills are essentially skills of [00:27:00] becoming aware and then choosing to, instead of rushing to outward action, you know, you're gonna say that thing to get back at whoever just triggered you recognizing you've been triggered.

And then taking internal action to reconnect and to reregulate and to discover your internal safety. Rather than trying to create external safety first, create your internal safety first, and then you are in a much better place to be able to deal with whatever the real situation is that needs to be addressed.

Jenny Stefanotti: So tell me if I've got this right. It's a, there's a first step of just awareness, basic understanding. Again, we cover this in detail, basic understanding of your nervous system, of the fact that you get triggered. When you get triggered. You can be in different states of fight or flight or freeze. Just knowing that that even exists and that it's happening, right?

And then there's the set of practices that allow you to take that awareness [00:28:00] and behave differently in those states, right? To slow down, to notice, to do, have practices that restore you to optimal zone, right? Mm-hmm. And not, not have that sort of reactive response. And also I think really critically awareness that you're not perceiving and sense making.

In those states, you don't have the cognitive functioning in those states. Right. And so you may think you understand the situation, but you actually see it quite differently when you've returned to your optimal zone.

Robert Gilman: Right? Right.

Jenny Stefanotti: So the resilience comes from the practice of when you get triggered out of it, you can come back to it more readily.

Right.

Robert Gilman: Exactly.

Jenny Stefanotti: And because you mentioned most people are more driven by fears and unresolved traumas than they realize. Yeah. A very potent Rubio episode on trauma in the system. Our nervous systems can get stuck in. Yes, yes. Because they have homeostasis, fight or flight or freeze sometimes from childhood trauma where we just, we don't [00:29:00] even realize that this is a version of us, right, in that nervous system state, not actually who we are in our optimal zone.

So I think that's really, you know, again, it's this unconscious drivers of this unresolved trauma and the effect that it has on the nervous system state that is status quo for. I also really appreciated the point that you made, and then we'll move off and I'll direct listeners who would like to learn more to the entire episode on this, which is very valuable.

But I think really valuably also, you said that the set of skills that you gain when you're building optimal zone resilience enables you to get learning and healing out of the times that you're triggered. Right? So say more about that, because I think such a critical part of this is right, is doing the work on ourselves to understand nervous system competence and do the healing such that we.

This becomes something culture, this becomes something that we teach our children.

Robert Gilman: Right.

Jenny Stefanotti: So that they Right, behave differently in the world from a much younger age.

Robert Gilman: Yeah. Yes. I wanna say, I totally want to [00:30:00] normalize that we all get triggered. The goal here isn't to never get triggered, but we need to be able to deal with it.

And because of, as you were saying. For many people, they're kind of stuck in a defensive place. In a chronic defensive place. I don't wanna be too light about the challenges of that and the need to be able to work to loosen the hold of that. And if you become aware of what I like to call mild triggering.

Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm.

Robert Gilman: Then you're in a much more fruitful place because you aren't really thrown offline and you know, need to recover in in strong ways. You're in a much more fruitful place to pause and say, okay, what can I learn about what triggered me here and what can I learn about how I might be able to ease the grip of that by treating mild triggering as instead of something to be just pushed aside.

Which is [00:31:00] normally what people do to treat them. When you can as a gift.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: A gift of practice, a gift of becoming more skillful in your awareness. A gift when you can slow down and reflect on, you know, okay, so what really happened here? What was it that, that got stirred up? It's helpful to have some kind of support for being able to better understand that because these things are tricky.

It's not, you can't always just think your way. Out of the chronic issues, but the more you can become aware of the patterns, the more the patterns lose their hold on you.

Jenny Stefanotti: Okay, so I'm gonna direct everyone to the optimal zone resilience conversation for the deeper dive on this, but it's a very important topic, so I wanted to make sure that we touched on it here.

Let's talk about. Another really critical awareness around cognitive biases.

Robert Gilman: [00:32:00] Yeah.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. And, and so much of our institutions, particularly our market institutions, were built on some assumptions about. Rational actors Right. Didn't exactly help to be true. Behavioral economics was right. Something I was astounded was not part of the core curriculum when I studied economics and international development.

So let's talk about cognitive biases and, and what it looks like to become aware of our cognitive biases and, and how that affects how we behave in the world once we have that.

Robert Gilman: Yeah. So this is. This is another place where I wanna really appreciate what evolution has done for us. And as part of that evolution looks for shortcuts, you know?

And so our minds look for shortcuts of various kinds. And evolution has given us the the capability to have culture. And so it's we. We need to be able to supplement what biological evolution has provided by being able to do [00:33:00] cultural evolution, cognitive biases there. What are some of the examples of that sort of thing?

The anchoring bias, for instance, the way in which the first thing that you see tends to set the context and set the frame for what you're gonna expect, the confirmation bias where you. You tend to pick up on the things that confirm your existing beliefs and kind of blow past the stuff that doesn't.

There's a whole variety of things that relate to motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning is a pretty significant, in fact, it's, it's not like motivated reasoning is something that people screw up and do. It turns out that there is no thing other than motivated reasoning.

Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm.

Robert Gilman: Our choice is to become more aware of what our motivations are and choose our motivations rather than having the motivations being based out of past trauma experiences that can be based out of something that's more meaningful to us.

The cognitive [00:34:00] psychologists have had a, had a field day coming up with all these places where, you know, pessimism, bias, optimism, bias, both of them, but they show up in different situations. Coming up with all these places where. The mind takes shortcuts and the mind helps us to feel safer, even if the action it takes may not actually make us safer.

So the confirmation bias, for instance, reassures us that our ideas are, are actually being well supported by all of this information. So that makes us feel. Happier and safer. I'm not a big proponent of, you know, you gotta solve this with your will. I think that that basically doesn't work. I'm much more of a proponent of Yeah.

You know, become aware of it, understand it, compensate for it where you need to. In some ways it's doing the best it [00:35:00] can, but without your further learning, it's gonna stay at a relatively primitive level and an unconscious level. It's not like it's that huge, and even though the list is now pretty long of what people describe as cognitive biases, but once you get the concept of it,

Jenny Stefanotti: mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: It's, again, it's important to realize the cognitive biases in yourself. First and then be able to compassionately understand it in others. The advertising industry, for example, has done a fabulous job of figuring out cognitive biases and exploiting them, but if you have an understanding of your own cognitive biases, you're much less vulnerable.

Not entirely invulnerable, but you've got a better immune system.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: For being pulled in by those things.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm. I appreciate that. I appreciate you highlighting confirmation bias in particular. I feel like that's the most essential one to understand. I think really valuable in. [00:36:00] Even if you think about, okay, well what are my limiting beliefs about myself?

Right? Right. Yeah. And what are the ways in which I perceive the world to confirm those limiting beliefs think incredibly valuable in interpersonal relationships. You realize like, oh, I, I didn't repair from an incident and I have a story about that person from that incident, and now I see them through the lens of that story and that story oif.

Right, and you can cause like total reality distortions and how you perceive your most intimate relationships because you don't repair. I think it's really just important to be aware of that. And then of course you see it in the media environment and how that has disrupted politics. Where we gravitate towards.

I mean, this is what drives polarization, is gravitating towards the media that confirms what we believe, and so it's both like in our inner work and in our interpersonal work and in our systems change work. Understanding these biases is really, really critical. Really feels like essential learnings for anyone.[00:37:00]

Right?

Robert Gilman: Yeah. Again, I wanna normalize all this and say we're all works in progress.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah.

Robert Gilman: And there's nothing to be ashamed of here. It's just you want your life to be a little easier. We'll learn some of these things.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: And in the process, it's not just a personal matter of making your life easier, you're also helping culture figure out how it can move forward in a way that's just gonna work better.

Jenny Stefanotti: I appreciate that. A little bit of extra motivation to do the personal work. Yeah. Let's talk about having a good functional understanding of motivation. Beyond the ways in which our cognitive biases in the state of our nervous system might distort how we perceive things. Yeah. Let's talk about motivation.

Robert Gilman: So lots of people have come across Maslow's hierarchy, mm-hmm. Of needs, which I know when I came across it decades ago, I thought, that's cool. How can we make use of that? And along the way, I've never found that it was actually all that practical [00:38:00] because. The different levels come in all the time. So the way that I like to approach motivation is actually I.

In a, what I think of as layers of motivation, where the setup is, if you think of this in like a graphics program, a photo editing program where you can have various layers and you can choose the transparency of that layer.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: Okay. So the top most layer is what I think of as the bio needs.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: And air. If you're not getting air, there's nothing more important in terms of motivation at that point.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah.

Robert Gilman: Right. Yeah. I mean, you've got minutes to get that one sorted out. Yeah. Sleep, food, sex is pretty complex, but it, you know, it sort of comes in there as well. If you're thirsty or hungry or sleepy.

You know, those can be just incredibly motivating in that moment. [00:39:00]

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm. And

Robert Gilman: I think it's important to, you know, not get too philosophical and distant and ignore the fact that we sometimes have these really intense bio needs, but they aren't always intense. And at that point, that layer becomes transparent and we can see what's below it.

And then the motivations that really show up, I. Essentially our trauma related, our defense pattern related motivations that show up that if they're strong, they will run the show. That's a very rich area. Lots of lots of stuff to get into, but again, as connected with the optimal zone resilience, the more that we can do to, to loosen the hold of those defensive.

Patterns on us, we can begin to make that layer a little more transparent.

Jenny Stefanotti: Well, I appreciate you're also kind of this through line of unresolved trauma. Showing up both in our nervous system was just, just distorting our perception and our [00:40:00] ability to sense, make and be curious and be compassionate, et cetera, but also this sub subconscious motivation around our behaviors.

Robert Gilman: Right. And I don't want to, maybe we can go off on this a little bit. I won't right now, but it's just really those agrarian empires were all built on traumatizing everybody. Mm. It still reverberates. Sure. My sense, when you loosen that, you know the, the defense pattern layer, when you make that one more transparent, then what often shows up is relationships.

Relationships can be hugely motivating. And one of the things that the military figured out many decades ago is that soldiers fight for their buddies. They don't fight for some grand philosophy or whatever. It's because of your relationship with the people who are sharing the trench with you. That people are willing to risk their lives in the way that they are.

And there are all kinds of other examples. I don't mean that as the only example, [00:41:00] but the things that parents will do for their children, et cetera, et cetera. Mm-hmm. Relationships are, we're a social species. Relationships are incredibly important and they're very important to our sense of safety. So it may sound paradoxical, but people will risk their lives to maintain the safety of being true to their relationships.

That one's just really important and it certainly has its bright side to it, and you could, it gets tangled up with the defense patterns and, and other things as well. But then if your relationships feel good, if you're feeling, you know, all of that feels like it's at ease and that layer becomes transparent, then the layer that I get down to is what I like to describe as optimal zone motivation.

This is, I also like to describe this as love and creativity and love here. [00:42:00] Not in the I love that, but in the proactive love in the spiritual generative quality of love. As a former astrophysicist, I can say that you look out in the cosmos and what you see are these two great principles of connection and differentiation.

The whole cosmos is held together with gravitational fields everywhere and light moving around everywhere and everything there. There is no, I mean, maybe you can say inside the center of a black hole, it's separated off from the rest of us. I'm not even sure of that. Hmm. Um,

and at the same time. From what we know, start of our current universe, whatever other universes may be out there. But the start of our universe was just these, the soup of elementary particles, out of which came hydrogen and [00:43:00] helium. Very, very simple world, but those that highly hydrogen and helium formed into stars.

Some of those stars created all the other heavy elements. Those heavy elements were able to around yet new sets of stars create planets. And you know, I don't need to go through this whole story, but look at where we are now. This is an incredibly, I mean, you and I sitting here doing this is incredibly more complicated than just a bunch of hydrogen and helium atoms.

So love is our human form of connection and creativity is our human form of generative differentiation. And both of those feel to me like they're incredibly powerful motivators.

Jenny Stefanotti: Okay, so we have understanding our nervous system. Understanding how, what state we're [00:44:00] in, getting back to optimal zone. We have understanding cognitive bias and how that distorts our sense making.

Then we have these layers of motivation that you've articulated. What happens when we put all of that together?

Robert Gilman: When you put all of that together. You are able to function much more in an optimal zone sense, which means you are able to access more of your cognitive capabilities. You're able to make better decisions.

It's much easier for you to take differences of perspective and turn them into design challenges rather than conflicts. That's a really important

Jenny Stefanotti: capability for humanity.

Robert Gilman: Right. Right. We become skillful design collaborators when we're able to do all this.

Jenny Stefanotti: Well, there's this fourth point, which is really critical.

Robert Gilman: Yeah.

Jenny Stefanotti: Which is that once we understand this about ourselves mm-hmm. We have a far more sophisticated understanding of how [00:45:00] our bodies work, how our minds work and relationship to our bodies, how to do the work to heal, how to get back and stay in our optimal zone. We're also able to be more compassionate.

Robert Gilman: Yes. Not only be more compassionate, but we can, as we interact with other people, we can listen beneath the presenting story,

Jenny Stefanotti: and that's really important.

Robert Gilman: Yeah, we have a much better chance of understanding what is it that's motivating them in this situation.

Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm.

Robert Gilman: Often if we just react to the presenting story, we just generate this not very useful interaction that just ricochets back and forth ping pong.

Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm.

Robert Gilman: Around people doing their presenting stories and presenting [00:46:00] the responses and the underlying issues just never get touched.

Jenny Stefanotti: I think this is a really important distinction between reactivity and curiosity.

Robert Gilman: Yes, absolutely. Great point.

Jenny Stefanotti: I know curiosity is one of the. There's all these wonderful Cs that you get in your optimal zone.

It's like compassion and curiosity and calm and creativity, et cetera. Right? But I think this notion of curiosity is really important.

Robert Gilman: Yes. It's also a great indicator that is if you're in a situation and you feel. Curious then that's an indicator that you're in a a reasonably good place.

Jenny Stefanotti: One of the most valuable things I learned when I did a lot of work on my relational competence earlier this year, Terrance Real, I dunno you're familiar with him in his work?

Mm-hmm. He developed something called relational life therapy. He talked about being right as one of the losing strategies that people bring into marital relationships, and it is that defensiveness. Mm-hmm. And what I found really [00:47:00] potent was he talked about, and this is again, awareness, right? Stepping back and witnessing versus being in it when you find yourself wanting to be defensive, right?

One is seeing that, but, but using that defensiveness and the stories that are coming to mind as fodder for curiosity.

Robert Gilman: Right,

Jenny Stefanotti: which I thought was really powerful. Instead of saying, defending yourself against this narrative that your partner or someone else in the world has about you, get curious about why they have that story.

Robert Gilman: I. Yes. It's such a powerful thing to do to instead of pushing away, if we say, oh, I'm being defensive. I shouldn't be doing that. I'm gonna stop being defensive. I'll use my will to suppress my defensiveness. Then you're just caught in a. In an unproductive loop. Mm-hmm.

Jenny Stefanotti: And an adversarial loop.

Robert Gilman: Yeah. At that point, you're being adversarial with yourself.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: One part of yourself is being adversarial with [00:48:00] another part of yourself.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: So it's this harmony within you. You need to be normalized that you're gonna have these places where different parts of you have different perspectives, and it's not only being skillful in. Your relationship with other people to enter into a design process.

You also need to do this with your parts. Do this with your sub personalities, as it were, mm. To get everybody around the conference table or sitting in the meeting room, or you know, everybody being all, all your sub personalities or your parts, or whatever term you wanna use for it.

Jenny Stefanotti: Let's talk about this.

Robert Gilman: Yeah, I,

Jenny Stefanotti: I did Your Bright Future now course, which you're no longer doing, but a lot of that content is available on your substack. And this notion of sub personalities was one of the first things that we did. We mapped out our sub personalities, and then as we're talking about savvy, about psychodynamics, this is an important concept to surface,

Robert Gilman: right?

Jenny Stefanotti: So why don't you say more about it?

Robert Gilman: Yeah, so let me just say [00:49:00] that the way that I use sub personalities, which isn't all that different from what other people do, is to a sub personality, is the bundle of habits and thoughts and ideas and ways of being that show up in particular contexts or particular situations.

So you may very well have a, a sub personality that tends to show up at work, but doesn't show up at home. For example, or you have a sub personality that shows up in relationship with some people, but not with other people. And an important part of this is simply recognizing that we are more complex beings than we think we are.

Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm.

Robert Gilman: Back to the age of enlightenment, wanting to see the world is this warehouse full of objects and part of, uh, the characteristic of an object is object, permanence. We want the object to have one set of characteristics and just stay that way. And we want our, the people around us to just have one set of characteristics and stay that [00:50:00] way.

It's not who we are.

Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm.

Robert Gilman: We're much more complex than that. And so being able to embrace our own internal complexity is just, I find enormously helpful. I mean, you can't get the harmony within without realizing that you've got this internal complexity, and you may have some parts of you that are kind of sitting in the corner, not saying a lot, but still having a real influence.

Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm.

Robert Gilman: And those are in shadow. And as long as you've got those parts of you in shadow, they're going to make life more challenging. They're doing the best they can for when they came into being, but they may be using strategies that they created when you were two, and it's time to help them evolve a little further.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm. And this is really, um, synonymous with internal family systems for those who are not [00:51:00] familiar with internal family systems. So the concept is there's, we have different parts, or as you describe them, sub personalities that emerged in moments of trauma at various points of our lives to protect us or to cope.

And yeah, that part of us is essentially stuck. In the past motivating us, talk about motivations, these sort of subconscious motivations from trauma motivating us to behave certain ways that are maladaptive to the present. Right. So maybe motivating you to be a perfectionist or to be a people pleaser.

Mm-hmm. Or in some, you know, to hurt, hurt yourself, or various things like that. So, right. The idea with IFS is that you. Heal those parts. Right. And to your point, yeah. Understanding your triggers helps you understand those parts and, and do the, the actual healing work.

Robert Gilman: Right. And it's, you have the opportunity to, in the mode that I like to describe the part of you that I like to describe as your optimal zone [00:52:00] adult, IFS would sometimes describe as the self that.

You have the opportunity to reparent the parts of yourself that are stuck in the past. Again, I don't find it very fruitful to try to come in as a domineering,

Jenny Stefanotti: whatever,

Robert Gilman: and say, you know, go away. I wanna be done with you. When you know, throw away those, it's part of you.

Jenny Stefanotti: And this ties to what you said earlier about the Buckminster Fuller quote.

When you try to resist the system, it just actually gets more resistant. Yeah. Itself. And so with these parts, when you try to suppress them. Actually, if you look at Internal Family System, Richard Swartz talks about how he evolved. This way of thinking was from working with people and trying to suppress those parts and having them come out louder and cause more damage, and realizing that they needed to be respected.

And so the idea is there's this capital S self, right, which is effectively. You and your [00:53:00] optimal zone. Right. To tie it to what we're talking about today. Mm-hmm. And Terrence Rio, actually in, in some of his follow-on work, has a book called us, which is about moving from independence to interdependence. And a lot of it is this work too, the Y self, the capital S self you and your optimal zone tied to.

And this is where we get into consciousness, conversations and spiritual conversations where you're sort of, when you are in that zone, when you are tapping into your internal wisdom, your internal compass, that wise part of you that is naturally compassionate towards the parts of yourself. Right? Right.

Robert Gilman: Yeah.

Jenny Stefanotti: That you can respect them for the role that they played and help them understand that they're no longer needed, but it's by listening to them and what they have to tell you that you're able to do the healing. But I think really critically what what Schwartz found through his work was that consistently when he had his patients sit in this seat of the capital S, self wise, self optimal zone version of self, there's just a natural organic.

Consistent state [00:54:00] of wisdom and compassion. Yeah. That emerges.

Robert Gilman: Yeah. It's your birthright. Part of what I wanna say is there's good news here that your birthright is that you have this capability inside you. I'm gonna go even further and say, Gaia loves you. The cosmos loves you. The cosmos has gone through billions of years to create conditions for you to be able to come into being and be a compassionate, creative being, you got an enormous amount of support.

Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm. Just,

Robert Gilman: it isn't just you have the responsibility to tap into this. You have a part to play, but it's also we as a culture.

Jenny Stefanotti: Hmm.

Robert Gilman: Have the opportunity to create. We have such an enormous, people wonder why I say I've never been more encouraged about the future than I am today. And I [00:55:00] still say that.

Jenny Stefanotti: Well say it again.

'cause I'm not feeling very optimistic in this moment. No, my most aren't.

Robert Gilman: Most people aren't. But in the bigger dynamic of human evolution, and we may screw it up. You know, I mean it's, I'm sure it's possible because we're going through this time where the complex adaptive system of culture is kind of destabilized right now, and so there's this incredible range of possible futures.

I mean, we could create disaster. We could have a nuclear war and sufficiently bad nuclear stuff that it basically eliminated life on the planet for a long time. All of that is in the realm of possibility, but. Unlike what we've had, unlike what humanity has had for all of our existence up to this point, we are now at a point where we really could move to a culture that was based on.

That sense [00:56:00] of, you know, internal family system, self optimal zone, self, whatever. And if you look at all kinds of different spiritual traditions, a huge amount of the initial work is actually about helping people to get into their optimal zones.

Jenny Stefanotti: Totally.

Robert Gilman: Because it's when you're in your optimal zone that your intuition opens up.

Mm. And your consciousness connections open up. Mm. You can do optimal zone work specifically with that goal, but being able to spend more time in your optimal zone is a roar of its own.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. Let just

Robert Gilman: put it that way. And we can have a culture that recognizes that and oh, lo and behold, people are becoming much more spiritual.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: Naturally without it having to be some dogma or something of that sort.

Jenny Stefanotti: Yeah. Well, that feels like a great place to close. Have we missed anything on the psychodynamic conversation that.

Robert Gilman: I think just the thing that I'll say is that what we've talked about in terms of [00:57:00] optimal zone resilience and cognitive biases and motivation is just psychodynamics is a big territory.

I'm not approaching this as if I've got a blueprint.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm-hmm.

Robert Gilman: It's more that I've got a compass direction.

Jenny Stefanotti: Mm.

Robert Gilman: And an invitation to explore, and that invitation is extended to all of us.

Jenny Stefanotti: I appreciate the humility and curiosity that you're bringing to mm-hmm. This piece of the work. All right. And then we'll be back with the next episode to follow this on cognition, so stay tuned.

Robert Gilman: Super. Thanks Jenny.

[OUTRO]

Jenny Stefanotti: Thank you so much for listening, and thanks to Scott Hanson, also known as Tyco for our musical signature. In addition to this podcast, you can find resources for each episode on our website, www.becomingdenizen.com, including transcripts and background materials. For our most essential topics like universal basic income, decentralized social media, and long-term capitalism.

We also have [00:58:00] posts summarizing our research, which make it easy for listeners to very quickly get an overview of these particularly important and foundational topics. On our website, you can also sign up for our newsletter where we bring our weekly podcast to your inbox. Alongside other relevant denizen information subscribers are invited to join our podcast recordings and engage with the Denizen community in our online home, the Den.

We're partnered with some incredible organizations at the forefront of the change that we talk about. We share announcements from them in our newsletter as well. Finally, this podcast is made possible by support from the Denizen community and listeners like you, Denizen's content will always be free offering.

Denizen is a gift models, a relational rather than a transactional economy. Enabling Denizen to embody the change that we talk about on this podcast. I. Through the reciprocity of listeners like you that we are able to continue producing this content. You can support us or learn more about our gif model on our website.

Again, that's [00:59:00] www.becomingdenizen.com. Thanks again for listening, and I hope you'll join us next time.

‍