Under the Spotlight: How to Stop Overthinking What Others Think – Transcript

00:00:00 – Introduction to the Spotlight Effect

full episode

Brent: You know, recording the show is a lot of fun. I get to hang out with my good friends. I get to tell jokes and generally let my mouth run on and call it a good day’s work. But when it comes time to clean up that mess, when it comes to editing the show and doing the transcripts, I have to face the fact of all the weird things and mistakes and mispronunciations I’ve made. And it’s kind of like rubbing my nose in all the things I’ve done wrong. I mispronounced this word. I misstated this. I said that Joseph Campbell. So there was 27 steps in the hero’s journey when in fact he was only 17. And then I just feel like a knucklehead. And I feel like, oh my gosh, everyone heard me say that. They’re probably calling their mom and their grandma. And it’s on the grapevine now what a knucklehead I am. And none of that’s true. But I started to wonder, why is it that our brains are like this? Why do we always feel like we’re under a microscope and everyone’s watching our every move and waiting for us to make a mistake? And come to find out, Bracketeers, there’s a name for that. It’s called the spotlight effect. And this episode, we’re going to talk about that.

Announcer: The Full Mental Bracket – 1:07

Brent: Today in the stunt-host chair.

Aaron: In the spotlight.

Brent: In the spotlight, in the corner.

Aaron: One of the spotlights that’s shared.

Brent: Yes. You’re in the spotlight, you’re in the corner. You’re not losing your religion, but you’re over there.

Aaron: Yes.

Brent: All the other R-E-M lyrics apply.

Aaron: I can at least sing a couple other words from that song.

Brent: Yes. Orange Crush, that was a different song, nevermind. And then my friend Aaron Schaefer, surfer, skate park builder, international man of mystery.

Aaron: Scientist.

Brent: Scientist.

Aaron: Yes, all those things, all of the above.

Brent: All of the above.

Aaron: Not always necessarily all at once, but at some point.

Brent: Like a Swiss Army knife.

Aaron: Yes.

Brent: Choose your… I love it. I love it.

Aaron: Of course. Choose your weapon.

Brent: You invited me. What were you expecting? Yeah. All right.

Aaron: Jack of all blades.

Brent: We’re launching into another episode. We’re going to talk about the spotlight effect. But let me take this opportunity, Bracketeers, to remind you that all our shows are available on the Bracket website. Fullmentalbracket.com. We have show notes, we have links to all the stuff we’re talking about, we have transcripts where all our words are there on the page, and occasionally corrections where maybe I said something wrong. And it’s all there. We have a lovely website. You should go. It links to all the cool lists. If you want to find, subscribe to our show on any other platforms, you can find it from the website. Come there, visit, make it your new home.

Announcer: This is the Full Mental Bracket – 2:52

Brent: With no further ado, The spotlight effect is that constant feeling or the unconscious assumption that people are as is focused on what I’m thinking about and what’s going on in my life as I am.

Aaron: Which I’m sure we all at some point in our lives feel like someone’s watching us. I’m watching you right now, but that’s a whole other story.

Brent: I always feel like somebody’s watching me.

Aaron: Yes. But I have no

Brent: …privacy.

Aaron: Yes, thank you.

Brent: Oh man, it doesn’t count if we don’t sing. I always feel like somebody’s watching me.

Aaron: But ain’t got no privacy.

Brent: Yeah, that’s it. See, that’s it. That’s why you tune in, Bracketeers. It’s for this kind of, this, the heart, the soul.

Aaron: The spotlight theme song.

Brent: Yes. So the thing about it is that we are so focused on every detail of our lives that it’s hard to imagine that other people are not. We intellectually know that other people aren’t, but the emotional truth of that doesn’t really translate to how we see the world.

Aaron: I think the word you have written down somewhere is egocentric.

Brent: It is an egocentric bias. That’s what psychologists call it. There’s a series of egocentric biases and they all boil down to the same thing, that you see the world a certain way, and you intellectually know that other people see the world a different way, but you cannot compensate enough to compensate for how differently other people see it. And it throws off your judgments.

Aaron: Yeah, I think it’s just, it’s a lot of work seeing from different vantage points, right?

Brent: Yeah. I mean, and just, it’s in the, it’s in the, the word nerdery, it’s in the word, it’s egocentric. Centric being everything is around me. Ego means me. So you don’t mean to be, you’re not trying to be egotistical, but without thinking, we talked about, you know, system one and system two and the, your automatic judgments are, oh yeah, he must be looking at that blemish on my face because that’s the only thing I can think about.

Aaron: Right, so that egocentric bias we would also put into system one.  Just like we did the negativity bias. Yes.

Brent: Yes. It’s just these things that automatically happens.

Aaron: Knee-jerk, almost.

Brent: So, you know, let’s talk about that. Let’s go a little bit into biases. This is another thing that Kahneman would talk about is that it ties into I love the science of biases. It’s probably a sickness. I should probably be treated.

Aaron: It’s ok.

Brent: But I love it. But he talks about the anchoring and adjustment process. So you anchor, your brain never makes anything up. It anchors on a value. If I give you a number and ask you what price, you’ll go to that number. So your anchor, when egocentric biases is your anchor is your own experience. Then you know you need to adjust from that. but then you never adjust enough. So the anchoring is system one process, you just jump to a conclusion, and then your system two process is, okay, I know that can’t be right, so I’m gonna compensate by 10%. But in reality, you should have compensated by 90%.

Aaron: Or did you need to use that anchor at all for that situation?

Brent: Well, I don’t believe that you have a choice. Your brain anchored, your brain…

Aaron: So are you saying we have multiple anchors, or you’re just talking about…

Brent: I’m talking about…

Aaron: the different experiences I would think would create different types of anchors growing up.

Brent: Yes, there are different types of anchors. And to be honest, in the background, I’m brewing up a whole episode about this, but the brain functions on anchors. You know, we have a light meter where we can measure there’s 27 photons in this room. We have a sound meter, we can measure the decibels, but everything in the brain is relative.

Aaron: So, it’s like a reference point.

Brent: Yes. We always have to, we say, okay, that’s brighter than this, that’s louder than this, that’s saltier than this, that’s heavier than this, but we can’t tell you what this is. It just, it’s relative to something else. So you have an anchor, and then you, you have a relative…

Aaron: So is that like kind of like the idea of like extrapolating from that anchor?

Brent: Yes. Okay. And your brain does that. And that’s what the anchor, my anchor is my experience. Like I’m thinking certainly everyone understands that there’s a wrinkle in my shirt. No, I’m the only one that realized that there’s a wrinkle in my shirt, but I’m, I know intellectually other people aren’t, but I don’t, I can’t bring myself to compensate enough to be a realistic judgment. And like our previous biases, it makes your judgments unrealistic. It distorts your judgments. And that’s the real problem here.

Aaron: So is this, the spotlight effect, is it a learned behavior or is it just something like what causes us to automatically assume that people are thinking about us more than they are?

Brent: I think it’s probably a little bit of both. I think it’s very natural, but I think maybe there’s some socialized cultural value that can might strengthen it or reduce it. But it’s a natural, as far as I can tell, it’s a natural thing that happens to everybody.

Aaron: And you think, like, globally speaking, that most cultures have this issue, or is it?

Brent: Yeah, I think so.

Aaron: Okay.

Brent: I think people can’t break out of their own experience. And I think that’s part of what we’re…

Aaron: Sure. Yeah, I could see that.

Brent: What we’re talking about today. So, for instance, one way to look at how it works is that it’s very difficult for the mind to disregard what it knows. The large amount of information that we have about ourselves distorts our judgments in lots of ways, particularly when it comes to taking the perspectives of others. So like, I’m trying to think about what Aaron thinks about me, but all I can think about is what I think about me.

Aaron: Right. Based on your own experiences.

Brent: I try to take your perspective. I try to go in your head and think with your brain, but I can’t. I assume that your brain and your thinking is much more closer to mine than it really is. Even with close friends. or even spouses, you assume you know what they’re thinking, then you find out, you’ve been married for a while, you’re like, I did not know what she was thinking, I thought I did. Surprise! That was a bad surprise.

Aaron: And I can, I really see that, I think, coming into play, having had two boys that are now young adults, but we often think far less, I think, than our, of what our kids, what our boys are doing when we catch them doing something or, or we don’t know what they’re doing, but maybe we assume that they’re not doing something good and that may have been because maybe we weren’t doing something good when we were kids.

Brent: Oh, yeah. And you’re not putting yourself sufficiently inside their headspace and look at it from their point of view.

Aaron: Realizing they’re pretty young, just pretty, not innocent, I wouldn’t say, but pretty naive still.

Brent: Yes, I do have adult children and it’s tricky because they’re adults and yet they’re still children. And it’s hard to try to get that blend. It’s very difficult. Very difficult.

Announcer: This is the Full Mental Bracket. – 9:21

Brent: So let’s talk about a couple examples of what the spotlight effect might look like. So I was looking for a great movie example, and I came across this movie. It’s a Steve Martin movie. It’s called The Lonely Guy. You’re waiting for me to tell you how great this movie was. It was terrible. It was absolutely terrible. So there’s a scene that I saw on YouTube, and maybe we’ll link it in the show notes. And Steve Martin.

Aaron: Maybe just that one scene.

Brent: Yeah, that scene was good. So his girlfriend breaks up with him. He’s this lonely guy. I assume in New York or LA or something, and he’s wandering around. In this clip, he walks in the restaurant, and the maitre d’ says, it’s a very fancy restaurant, the maitre d’ says, how many in your party, sir? And he says, I’m alone. And suddenly, everyone in the restaurant stops talking, and their heads turn, and they stare at him, and literally a spotlight comes on to him. It was like this old EF Hutton commercials. When EF Hutton talks, like, and everyone stopped talking. Yeah, and then so he walked to his table, like, here is your table, and the spotlight followed him, and everyone looked to him, and…

Aaron: You knew he was lonely or alone, I should say.

Brent: Yes, and it was a ridiculous movie, and I couldn’t finish it. We got that far, because I knew that scene was in it, and we got to that scene, and we turned it off. I’m sorry, Steve Martin, it just wasn’t good.

Aaron: Well, he can’t bat a thousand. Yeah, no one can be perfect.

Brent: Yes, try fail cycles early in his career. Maybe it was a fail. But it was a great illustration of how we feel. We feel like there’s a spotlight. You’re like, everyone in this restaurant knows that my girlfriend broke up with me. They can just tell by looking at me that I’m lonely and broken and a shell of a man. But none of that was true.

Aaron: So I would imagine at some point in all of our lives, we have had the spotlight effect happen to us where people have paid attention to us, or we haven’t felt extremely embarrassed, or if someone may really have laughed at us, and that could really potentiate that or cause us to overcompensate.

Brent: And one of the core themes of this show is the importance of decoupling humiliation from failure. Like this experience you talked about, you did something and someone laughed at you, and so this failure is now associated with humiliation. If that happened a lot, like maybe in my life, then you have a very strong attachment there and you’re less likely to try something because you don’t want to fail. Which is what we’re going to get into with the problems of the spotlight effect. But you’re going right to the meat of the issue right there. It does happen sometimes. Sometimes people do notice, but statistically far, far, far, far less than we think it is.

Aaron: I mean, because you can probably I’m on one hand.

Brent: I wasn’t gonna bring this up, but I’ll give you a real-life example. I remember a time that I’m in high school, and I’m gonna I see this person and I’m gonna talk to them in class. And I seriously flashback like nope in the third grade I fell over and tripped over this embarrassing thing while he was watching and he’ll remember that and so I’m not gonna open myself up to that. No one remembered that but me. And I could have reached out, we could have been friends or something, but no, I was insistent that everyone in my life was taking close notes.

Aaron: I won’t let that happen again.

Brent: And like, on March 3rd, 1974, did you or did you not? And no one was doing that. But even as a kid, I was convinced that that was, that everyone was keeping track of all my failures and were just waiting for me to be vulnerable so they could laugh at me.

Aaron: Right, which gets, I guess, goes back to that kind of that fight or flight encoding, like maybe because of that negativity bias, we encoded that experience as being far worse. than it really was.

Brent: That’s true. That’s true. It’s the interaction of the biases. I like that.

Aaron: Right. So it’s like, yeah, it’s like, yeah, that was, that was a near death experience. It’s like, not really. Someone just made fun of you. But your body’s like, no, that was a crisis.

Brent: Yes. And it might uh…

Aaron: Having never experienced a real, like real life crisis of life or death.

Brent: Side effects might include heart palpitations. Sudden explosions. Developing a dark sense of humor.

Aaron: Or worse.

Brent: Might be talking about myself. It’s all good. All right, so another movie example, and this is more the Truman Show. So the Truman Show is not a spotlight effect. It’s actually the real, it’s what it would actually be real like if everyone in the world was actually watching you. This is what it feels like. Everyone in the world was actually watching him, and he’s like, they’re like, oh, don’t be silly. You just think it’s a spotlight effect. No one’s really watching you. But this is how we feel. We feel like everyone’s watching us. But if you watch the Truman Show, you saw how much work it was. And there was the largest soundstage in the universe, a crew of thousands. There’s just no way that people are doing that to you.

Aaron: Yeah, that’s a lot of work to set up a spotlight in one person.

Brent: Although I did read that this is now like some sort of psychiatric condition, the Truman Effect, where people believe that the whole world is recording them.

Aaron: Maybe it’s replaced the spotlight.

Brent: Maybe it is. Maybe it’s a version of it. We have to dig deeper into that. That’s a good idea. And then one other movie is the Emperor’s New Groove, which is a favorite in my family. And Emperor Cusco.

Aaron: I don’t think I’ve seen that one.

Brent: Oh, we’re going to fix that, weird. Stop the show. No, we’re going to fix it. Moment of silence for Aaron, who’s been deprived.

Aaron: Okay. Please enlighten me without spoiling it.

Brent: So basically, Cusco is a spoiled emperor, and the whole empire revolves around him. And then some, for reasons, for plot reasons, all his countrymen think that he’s dead, and they have a brief funeral. And then his second-in-command says, well, he ain’t getting any deader. Back to work, everyone. And he’s very depressed to realize that people really didn’t give a crap about him. As soon as he was gone, they didn’t. It’s the same boss, new boss, same as the old boss. It was the Who song. They didn’t care. And so he was also very disappointed. He thought the whole world was literally revolving around him.

Aaron: Yeah. Everything depended on him.

Brent: It was not.

Aaron: Life goes on. I’m sorry.

Brent: So why do you think, we kind of touched on it before, but why do you think the egotistic, the spotlight effect is a problem in our life?

Aaron: I think, you know, just the amount of energy we spend trying to guard the narrative in our life, because, and the question is, the issue is, is we’re guarding against something that doesn’t really exist.

Brent: I like that, guarding the narrative. Ooh, I like that, I like that.

Aaron: I think we all try to do that, like maybe make a story that’s presentable, that will please people, that will keep us, you know, maybe keep us out of the spotlight. It’s a lot of work trying to stay out of the spotlight too. And it prevents growth. You know, there’s times when you need to be courageous and you need to speak up and it’s, yeah, I think it just prevents growth overall in a person.

Brent: Definitely. It keeps you from, from taking chances. It keeps you, it makes you maybe want to self-censor yourself. There’s an awful lot of story things that you could be taking advantage of that you tend not to if you think that everyone’s watching you and they’re going to just laugh.

Aaron: Yeah, and self-censoring. Yeah, that’s what I would call guarding the narrative.

Brent: I like yours better.

Aaron: I like them both. I mean, that’s what guarding the narrative is. It’s just you’re always self-censoring. If you’re self-censoring, then you’re not really… Back to that, what Brody was talking about, like at concerts, like if you’re always taking videos of a concert you’re at, you’re not actually experiencing life in the moment. Because you’re too busy trying to censor yourself or make sure people-

Brent: Oh, never his mind where he was at, the whole yoga thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like that.

Announcer: Full Mental Bracket.

Brent: So something we like to talk about, we’ve talked a lot on the show, is Seligman and the three Ps of Seligman. He talks about failure is personal, permanent, and pervasive. And I think the spotlight effect really leans into that. It makes people less likely to take chances because it makes failure feel personal. If I do something, everyone’s watching. If I do something, they’re never going to forget. It’s going to be permanent. And if I do something, even if I try something different, they’re going to say, oh, weren’t you that guy that failed in the third grade? And like, oh, no, it’s pervasive. It’s filled my entire life.

Aaron: So we’re we’re believing that we’re assuming that that whatever we’re doing falls under the auspices of being pervasive. permanent and personal.

Brent: I think so. I think you don’t think about it consciously, but I think the spotlight effect really pushes pressure on those things. It makes them feel more permanent, more pervasive and more personal than it really is. And we have to fight to make sure that to remind ourselves that those aren’t true. And the spotlight effect is pushed on the other side.

Aaron: And I guess that would be, that would be the bias. Wouldn’t it be, it would be the bias towards those three Ps. Okay. Gotcha.

Brent: And then so I think, and we were talking about this earlier, when you feel failure, and then you’re feeling that’s going to result in embarrassment and shame, you know, you’re less reluctant to undertake the quest to become a protagonist. And it’s harder to keep a healthy perspective on try-fail cycles. We know that as any good story, you’re never going to get it right the first time. You keep trying, you get it partially right, you fail a little bit, you get maybe a little bit right, maybe you completely fail, but you get up again. But if you think that everyone’s watching you, keeping score, getting ready to laugh at you, you’re very reluctant about the try-fail cycles.

Aaron: Yeah, I would say you don’t even get to the try.

Brent: Maybe not. Maybe not.

Aaron: Because the try may… I don’t know. It depends. It depends where you feel like you’re going to be most discovered or exposed, I should say. Maybe it’s during that failure. I don’t know, during the failure part of the cycle.

Brent: Failure is how you learn, so if you’re reluctant to fail, then you don’t grow, and so it puts your whole growth on hold. This is honestly the, so we’re breaking up. This is not on the script. He’s going off script, look out. So we’ve got the growth mindset and we’ve got the fixed mindset. And the fixed mindset, and this is all according to Carol Dweck, the fixed mindset believes that it’s talent, it’s intelligence, it’s abilities are a fixed attribute and they define the limit of who that person is. And if you go past it, you fail and you’re embarrassed and you should have known better because you’re only good for this circle. The growth mindset is, this is where I am today, my circle is constantly getting bigger as I grow, and failure is not something that we hide from, failure is how the circle grows.

Aaron: Right. It’s the actual, the failure is the actual mechanism for growth.

Brent: You take the practice test and you get some questions wrong, but then you learn what you were wrong about and you go back, you do the try-fail cycles, you make it halfway to the throne room, but you had to go down a side hallway, but it made you that much closer to the goal. So the failure is, is the path. And if you’re afraid to fail, then you’re not on the path and you just don’t ever grow.

Aaron: Yeah. That’s it, I mean, I think you were much more vulnerable to people’s opinions with that.

Brent: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Aaron: Fixed growth mindsets. Is that what you call it? The fixed growth mindset?

Brent: The fixed mindset.

Aaron: Fixed mindset where people tell you what your limitations are.

Brent: And you own them. Right.

Aaron: And then people literally can box you in and tell you what your ability is. That’s powerful, too. We have people in our lives where they’ve done that. They put certain labels on you. and you’re like, okay, I guess that’s what I am.

Brent: I’m speaking from experience.

Aaron: Me too.

Brent: If you’re, theoretically, I don’t wanna claim, I don’t wanna, I can either confirm or deny, but should you go through grade school and find yourself in the Talented and Gifted program, and suddenly you think that you have this intelligence that you have to steward, and then you aren’t allowed to fail because you’re smarter than everybody else, and then you start failing, and then you pull back. You’re like, no, I’m not gonna go and take things that might, I might fail, I might embarrass myself, I have to maintain my status as a super genius. But no one’s a super genius at 12. There’s so much to learn. Like, no, I can’t afford to learn because I’ll fail. And you get in this whole thing where you’re afraid to actually, you don’t learn anything, you don’t grow anything because you’re defending the narrative.

Aaron: Correct. There you go.

Brent: You’re defending the narrative.

Aaron: You’re defending that image or whatever you think you are. And it goes the other way too. If you’re in that other class, it’s not gifted. It’s like, oh, clearly my boundaries are much smaller in terms of what I can do.

Brent: Yes, that could be, or they could be not limited by the boundaries at all. If they, if they can learn a growth mindset, if they can, if they’re un, if they’re unhindered by that ego or whatever, and they just like lean into it. But yeah, I guess some people like, I’d actually, I’d run into that sometimes. It’d be, well, this is as much as I’ve ever done. And it’s like, Today.

Aaron: Yeah, and they can get that from their parents or they can get that from friends. It doesn’t take much to start hardwiring that sort of lack of growth mindset.

Brent: Yes, but it’s never over. It’s never permanent. Your genetics and your socialization culture, they’re a strong influence. but they’re not the last word.

Aaron: Absolutely not.

Brent: You can grow, you can improve, you can always be more.

Aaron: Absolutely.

Brent: And something that we try to bring up on every single stinkin’ episode, your identity is a snapshot. Your identity is where you are today. Today, I don’t know how to do that yet. Doesn’t mean I’m forever not going to be able to do that. I’m historically not good about that, but I’m getting better about that.

Aaron: There’s always this notion that we’re improving.

Brent: But the people that say, I’m just like that. I can’t do that. That’s just not who I am. It’s like, that’s not an observation. That’s a decision. You’ve decided that’s who you are. You’ve decided that you’re not going to work on it. You’ve decided that you’re going to guard that narrative instead of taking any chances.

Aaron: So I guess that would be another episode when, how do you get out of that fixed mindset?

Brent: Well, part of it is you compensate for the spotlight effect because it sure ain’t helping. All right. So I came across, that is a good point. We need to make an episode about that. Our episodes just keep spawning and multiplying. All right. So I came across a quote that really, really helped me. So this guy, David Foster Wallace, I have to admit that I haven’t read his books because they’re long even for me.

Aaron: He sounds legit.

Brent: It’s like thousands of pages long.

Aaron: It sounds Australian.

Brent: Yeah, I think it’s in the book Infinite Jest, but he says, and I read this quote, I’m going to warn you, Bracketeers, I read this quote, and it changed my life and I printed it out and it’s literally on my wall right now. It says, you will become way less concerned with with what other people think of you. I’m going to start that again because I’m not giving this. David Foster Wallace, you deserve better than this. I’m sorry. I’m failing you, but I’m learning through it. It’s some growth. You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.

Aaron: A moment of silence for that.

Brent: That people are almost never thinking about you.

Aaron: No. How do you say that in a positive way?

Brent: That was, I don’t know. I like that two by four approach.

Aaron: It’s almost like no one really cares about you.

Brent: Your problem is that you think you’re all that. And if you get over that, the rest of it will be, will clear itself up. It’s like, I like, oh my gosh, everyone’s paying attention to our flailing podcast. And I looked at the numbers like, oh, far, far, far from everyone. I think we’re okay here. There really aren’t that many people paying attention to our flailing right now. So yeah, I guess that’s all right. The spotlight’s growing. It’s all right. And that’s good. And that was good. It just, but it was a reality check.

Aaron: Yeah. I think that can be, yeah, a real transformative notion, but it depends how you look at it. It could be, you could take it negatively.

Brent: Well, it’s, it’s, you can, but I mean, honestly, it’s yeah. So it feels harsh. It’s like, you know, Aaron‘s going to go home and he’s going to go back to his life and he’s not going to wake up at three o’clock in the morning. I wonder what Brent‘s doing right now. It’s like, he’s sleeping. You should be too. Leave me alone. That kind of, you know, it’s just, that’s how you move on. You have your own problems. You have your own life. You’re busy in your own spotlight. The reason why you can’t spotlight me is because you’re busy thinking that I’m spotlighting you.

Aaron: Correct.

Brent: It’s like, did he notice that my glasses were dirty? I totally did. No. Sorry. No…

Aaron: But that was a cue, wasn’t it?

Brent: No, no. People just don’t have to that much bandwidth to think about you. Yeah, and yeah, so it sounds harsh…

Aaron: Because they’re so busy guarding

Brent: Okay, so there are some people like your mom or your spouse or whatever they have more bandwidth for you, but your average person is not gonna notice that your socks are mismatched No, well, maybe women might I’m certainly not gonna man notice that your socks are mismatched

Aaron: Or that you haven’t taken a shower for 10 days

Brent: Uh, maybe 5, but at 10, you might notice. Yeah, that could be a good experiment. It’s always more obvious to you than it is to them. And even if they do remember, even if they do notice, they’re not going to remember. Like, all right, I got to work on all these 12 different projects, and then, oh my gosh, there’s a text on my phone. I don’t remember any of that. It seems like Aaron did something silly this morning, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what it was.

Aaron: Yeah. Anything that’s rather subtle, they’re not going to remember.

Brent: To me, this is…

Aaron: Which is not so subtle to the person who thinks, you know, the other people are watching them.

Brent: Well, that’s the thing is it’s not subtle to you. It’s this huge thing.

Aaron: Exactly.

Brent: It really is. I have a huge volcano zit on my forehead. And it’s like, hold on, let me get the magnifier. That’s what you were talking about? Oh, come on. But to me, I know it might be a little sad, but to me, it was hugely liberating to realize that not everyone was studying my every move. I don’t even want that.

Aaron: No, it is.

Brent: I don’t even want to be a celebrity. I would hate for that to happen.

Aaron: In fact, you can make really good YouTube videos on the fact that the spotlight effect is not real. And that’s a lot of fun. There’s tons of videos out there where people do obnoxious things that really people are not paying attention to.

Brent: What if we just shot, shown a spotlight into the camera and all I saw was the light? Right now you’re being, never mind, I’ll work on that.

Aaron: But yeah, I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of those videos where they just do ridiculous stuff and it’s amazing how much, yeah, what you have to do. You know, like the dragon, like the dinosaurs that pop up around the corners.

Brent: Or like the attention, inattention blindness, the invisible gorilla. You have the test where you’re like, watch how many times they pass the ball, and there’s a guy in a gorilla suit that walks in the background, and 80% of the people never notice. Or they have a thing where-

Aaron: That was a gorilla that just walked by.

Brent: They did a different study where someone, they had a lady with a clipboard asking this guy a question, and a piece of plywood came, and they changed the ladies, a completely different lady, and they didn’t notice. Oh yeah, and cheese is my favorite. Yeah, that’s totally my favorite. And you just, I didn’t even see that, that’s a great connection. We just are in our own world. And we pay far less attention to things.

Aaron: Yeah. And there’s a whole sector on YouTube that has flourished as a result of the lack of the spotlight.

Brent: Yeah. No, I think that’s a great observation. So in case you doubted us, just think about the invisible gorilla. Not only do people not notice your mismatched socks, they didn’t even notice a gorilla in the background of the scene.

Aaron: Yeah. So use your imagination for how you can’t get noticed.

Brent: I mean, it’s not that people are terrible or they’re selfish, they’re just, they’ve got a lot going on. They don’t have a lot of bandwidth to think about the tiny little, oh no, I didn’t, I didn’t, my nail color doesn’t match my, like, didn’t even notice. Didn’t even notice.

Aaron: I might have to try that at work sometime.

Brent: See if your nail color matches?

Aaron: Yeah, or I was thinking socks to start with socks.

Brent: Okay, socks.

Aaron: But maybe the nails.

Brent: You hand someone a Petri dish and they’re like, did you paint your nails? Well, yes. It’s Burke Umbra.

Aaron: I’ll start with clear.

Brent: Your fingers are a little shiny today, Aaron.

Aaron: Thank you.

Brent: What’s going on? It’s the keratin that really works on the cuticles.

Aaron: It’s all the protein I’ve been eating.

Announcer: This is the Full Mental Bracket.

Brent: So here’s some ideas. How do we beat the spotlight effect? Well, as we kind of hinted at before, you have to lean into your growth mindset. When you remind yourself and you continue to adopt the idea that your ultimate goal is to improve, not necessarily to impress.

Aaron: So leaning into your growth mindset, is that just meaning just going outside your comfort zone? Is that what we’re talking about? What does that mean, Brent?

Brent: It’s in this sense, and we could probably do some more practical takeaways from that. But in this sense, the idea of just a constant reminder, because it’s like the the system one and the system two. You have this automatic thing, and then the system two is the deliberate thing. You deliberately remind yourself.

Aaron: So that mind, you take back to the mindfulness.

Brent: You could be similar to the two, you know, like a growth, a gratitude journal or some other journal, or some other deliberate process where you remind yourself, I am not here to impress other people. I’m not in competition with other people. My only competition is where I was yesterday and last month. My identity is a snapshot. I’m always moving forward. And the great thing is, is that if you improve by accident, you’ll probably impress. But if you get all your, if you spend all your energy trying to impress, you never get around to improving because that’s just that fixed mindset.

Aaron: So you just short circuited the creative process.

Brent: Yeah. You’ve short-circuited the creative process, you’ve short-circuited the growth process. You’re afraid to fail, so you don’t grow, because you’re busy trying to impress everybody. Now, it’s not bad to impress everybody, but you impress by not aiming for it. It’s a secondary result. If you try to make it the primary result, then you don’t get the primary result that creates the secondary.

Aaron: Right. Similar to chasing the wind.

Brent: Yeah. Yeah.

Aaron: Good luck.

Brent: So another way is that you can lean into your tribe. If you’re feeling really self-conscious, you can talk to your friends and your allies and your mentors, and they can validate your feelings, like, man, I felt that too. Then give you a reality check. It’s like, man, I totally did not notice your mismatched socks. If you hadn’t said anything, I wouldn’t even notice. Matter of fact, I’m looking at them and I still don’t notice.

Aaron: They still don’t look mismatched.

Brent: So you can get a reality check.

Aaron: Can you get pink and green next time?

Brent: I feel really skylined right now. Can you tell me if this is true or not?

Aaron: Right, just getting that, yeah. Getting multiple perspectives from your tribe.

Brent: I should probably explain that. Skylined is a military term where you walk along the horizon between the sky and the ground and it’s the most contrast and it’s the best way to get shot because you’re like making yourself the perfect target. So that’s part of my-

Aaron: You really stand out when you’re skylined.

Brent: That’s part of my thing with the spotlight effect. It’s like, I’m making myself a target. I need to, you know, I have a lot of different associations between-

Aaron: So skylining, spotlighting.

Brent: Yes, very similar.

Aaron: Under the microscope.

Brent: Under the microscope, yes, yes, yes.

Aaron: Okay. All very interchangeable. Self-conscious terms.

Brent: What happened when the jarhead met the lab scientist? Well, one was under the microscope, and one was on the skyline. But instantly, they knew what they were talking about.

Aaron: Okay, can I have some water, please?

Brent: Alright. So, another trick is to find some psychological distance. We use our story tools here a lot. If you can take your situation and try to extrapolate that into a character in a story, it’s like, alright, so it feels really personal to me, but What if, what if I, what, how does that, how does Aaron deal with that? Or how does a fictional character deal with that? How does that someone else deal with that? And how do they feel when they’re doing it? And you can kind of get outside the maelstrom of your own emotions.

Aaron: So exiting that immediate situation.

Brent: Yes.

Aaron: Getting outside again.

Brent: Get some psychological distance, leave the painful emotions behind and just try to get some perspective on it.

Aaron: Yeah. That sounds like going back into the reflection mode.

Brent: And if all else fails, and something I’ve done before, is you just, if you think someone’s paying a lot of attention to your mistakes, you just kind of start up a conversation. Hey, so what’s on your mind? And then, you know, they’re like, your socks! And like, almost always isn’t your socks.

Aaron: Or they start talking about something in their life.

Brent: Yeah, you realize that they were, yeah.

Aaron: They were totally somewhere else.

Brent: Worried about their kid’s cookie sale or bake sale, and they didn’t have any bandwidth for you at all. And then you’re like, oh, so you don’t have to like, you don’t have to out yourself.

Aaron: You don’t have to be like, wow. Maybe try that, like, Frequently. Yes. Until it finally gets into the system. System one’s like, yes, no one is thinking about you. They like you, but they’re not thinking about you.

Brent: Oh, that’s a good, that’s a good, I like that. They like you, but they’re, yeah. I like you, but not that way.

Aaron: I like you, but I’m not thinking about you.

Brent: No, I like you, but I’m not obsessing about you.

Aaron: Right, that’s even better.

Announcer: Full Mental Bracket

Brent: We have some takeaways for this episode for you to take away. What is an issue that you’re feeling self-conscious about? Now ask yourself, do you really think that people are paying that much attention? And just think about it, take some time to reflect. Once again, the reaction is a system one and then your response is system two. And then the last question, maybe you’re holding yourself back due to a distorted view of reality. If you saw reality a little more closely and about how much attention people are paying to you and how focused that attention is, perhaps you’d stop holding yourself back and self-censoring and protecting the narrative. Because that’s really what we want you to do. We want you to get out there and grow and learn and let your narrative grow and change and stop trying to protect it.

Aaron: Yeah. And enjoy the process, you know? Just enjoy the process of growing. And, like, I think what the last point would be for me would be consult your tribe like you were saying Brent. Get some other perspectives.

Brent: And I like enjoying the process. Once you, it was for me, once I realized that I wasn’t in the Truman Show and not everyone was taking notes. He’s exiting on stage three. It was very great for me. I was like, oh my gosh, I can do all kinds of stupid stuff and hardly anyone’s gonna remember.

Aaron: Yeah. and go watch some YouTube videos of people making fools of themselves while no one else is noticing. Or, and then you realize it’s true.

Brent: Or if you’re Aaron, go and watch the Emperor’s New Groove.

Aaron: Yeah, that’s true.

Brent: All right, Bracketeers, we thank you for your time and your attention. We will remind you that you can contact us at contact at fullmentalbracket.com. We are on Instagram. We’re on the Facebooks. We’re on threads, we’re on TikTok if it’s still around by the time you see this episode. We’re everywhere. Come and contact with us and chat with us and let us know what you’re thinking. Thank you and goodbye.

Aaron: And goodnight.

Brent: And that’s the way it was. Goodnight.

Announcer: Full Mental Bracket podcast hosted by Brent Diggs. Executive producer, Brody Scott. Art design, Colby Osborne. Interact with the show at FullMentalBracket.com. This is the Full Mental Bracket.

This is a Brody Scott production.

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