Winston Churchill and Powerhouse Myth Busts on Encouragement
Before Winston Churchill became Britain's savior in World War II, he was a political disgrace and a blowhard. He was known for being a bragger with a huge mouth. Or as David Lloyd George, the prime minister in 1916 put it, Churchill would make a drum out of his own mother's skin to sound his own praises. And that's coming from one of Churchill's greatest political supporters. Before Churchill was flawlessly coordinating the allied efforts between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin, and before he was giving rousing speeches about fighting Nazis on the beach and in the streets, Churchill was getting kicked out of high office in the first world war. As the first Lord of the admiralty, Churchill had sent a sizable chunk of the British Navy to the Dardanelles.
We could dedicate an entire episode to Churchill's failure at the Dardanelles, both of the strategic importance of what he was trying to do and how heavy the allied losses would be. To put it very briefly, Churchill asked the Navy to do the unthinkable. He asked them to thread their ships through the eye of a needle and shoulder their way through a minefield that already destroyed six major ships. Churchill also put Constantinople, the Turkish Capital, under siege. Had it worked, it would have been the masterstroke of the first world war. Churchill was young, though. He planned by the numbers, not by the man. He couldn't have guessed how hesitant his Admirals would be. Seeing the Dardanelles and the mines in front of them, Admiral Sackville Cardin had a nervous collapse on the deck of a ship. The British war office refused to send the troops Churchill asked for, and the Admiral’s replacement ordered a withdrawal before the Navy could push through. The Dardanelles was an utter disaster, and it would cost Churchill 46 thousand allied troops.
Churchill was forced to resign in disgrace, and the words, ‘remember the Dardanelles’ would haunt him for the rest of his political career. His opponents in Parliament would shout it, but Churchill was not a man to be discouraged for long. In later years, he would shout back just as loudly, “The Dardanelles may have saved millions of lives. Don't imagine I'm running away from the Dardanelles. I glory in it.”
_________________________________________________________________________
We all remember those teachers and mentors who went the extra mile to give us honest specific encouragement. Those were the mentors who saw our gifts and encouraged us to hone in on them. Or even better, coaches who saw us stumble and talked us into getting back up. You probably also had bosses who believed more in negative encouragement than positive. People believe wholeheartedly in the pressure cooker style of management. So today, we want to break down encouragement - what works, what doesn't, and we're starting with three myths.
Myth 1: How does encouragement work on the brain? What's more memorable: negative encouragement or positive? And if we remember negative encouragement longer, why not use it?
Joe: Do you feel like encouragement means more when it comes from somebody who has fallen on disgrace, who has taken that big trip?
Todd: Someone who can empathize with what they've been through? Absolutely, and I think when they say it, their sincerity shows more.
Joe: Have you ever gotten encouragement from people who you can clearly tell have never had a hardship?
Todd: Yes, and it infuriates me.
Today's whole episode revolves around if encouragement works, such as mentors and self-help podcasts like this one. Overall, people tend to think they don't need it and are self-aware and confident enough to do it independently. Let's start by talking about the home-field advantage. When you have a home game, you have 20-40K of your fans along with the noise of them and the colors of your jersey. When you go to a live game, you can almost feel the love. It's a real weighted thing in the stadium. Now, you can also feel the hate for the visiting team. When the offensive team has the ball, the crowd screams so loud that they can't hear themselves think. When the home team goes up to play, it's dead silent. The home team tries to scream the focus out of the visiting team, so they perform poorly. This is why these players practice with noise to get used to it on game day. To back this, a Washington Post article states that the home-field advantage was not actually a real thing, but it is still questionable. I'll let people who have read that article argue with 538. The statistical website 538 says the home team wins 57% of games. I encourage everyone to look at our notes to read why, but the home-field advantage concept certainly seems real.
Now, it is important to note that your best encouragement sometimes comes from people who are not masters of their field but people who are about six months ahead of you.
We're going to jump into the science of encouragement and the actual physical effect of encouragement physically and mentally. For starters, sincere praise is like being given a gift, as long as it is sincere. So, if you are encouraging somebody, sincerity seems to be the big golden standard. The reason is that there is a part of the brain called the ventral striatum, and it’s the circuitry for reward behavior. Basically, anything you do in life that your brain wants you to do more of fires off dopamine. As for encouragement, the ventral striatum that lights up when we receive literal money or romantic attention light up with dopamine when we get genuine encouragement. If you get the proper encouragement, it is like receiving an actual physical gift, comparable to a romantic thing.
Part of the reason why this is important is that dopamine high of being encouraged properly gives your brain the reward to tell you to do it again. If you get encouragement again and repeat the activity, you get the same sort of echo of dopamine. Encouragement compliments also boost long-term memory. This is a more modern research thing called memory consolidation. If you got encouragement that made you feel good during the day, you'll remember better. Your brain will be encouraged to put that circuit to work, and you may even dream about it that night.
We have both gotten sincere compliments in the past. It feels kind of good at the moment, but the more you analyze it, the more you realize that person probably didn't mean it. There is an effect in the research that talks about how you get the same dopamine surge, but it builds distrust. Your brain recognizes that, and it starts stressing out a bit. It makes you distrust that person and nullifies almost completely the effects of the praise, letting the cortisol kick in.
To sum this up, imaging researchers found that the same social rewards section lights up as getting good old-fashioned praise. This is book called Hardwiring Happiness by Dr. Rick Hanson, and he talks about how the brain has a negativity bias. Have you ever heard of what he called risk aversion, such as people remembering negative things longer and positive? You could meet a thousand polite people, but that one person who isn't is the person you will remember the most. It is worth mentioning that we are built to recognize and remember losses and criticisms longer, but that doesn't mean you should praise less. That doesn't mean you should use the negative part as a training tool.
I'm going to give a quick shout-out to the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. He talks about the Israeli Air Force trainers trying to get Air Force pilots to perform better. He said that one of their standard training techniques was to scream things like in the military - correcting you with negativity. Generally speaking, something caught him, which was that we regress to mean when you are being screamed at. If you are trying to correct somebody's performance by yelling at them or being negative, eventually everybody regresses to their own mean. They will eventually regress to the mean and they'll return to their average performance. Ultimately, negative encouragement doesn't do anything except make you a memorable dick, and it doesn't improve performance at all.
Myth 2: Pro runners have fans cheering them at the finish line. Basketball players have cheering sections, and soccer players have rowdy armies ready to storm the field. Clearly encouragement affects physical performance, right?
Does yelling at people at the gym work to boost their performance? If somebody is pushing up a heavy dumbbell or benching, does screaming, ‘you can do it’ behind them actually make them lift the weight? I think it helps when you are working out with a partner, but I think it's more about that person being there with you than them screaming for you to reach your potential.
We have a couple of studies we want to cover, and one of them is from Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania that you can read more about here. They took 28 students, put them on a treadmill, and had them try to reach maximum effort without any verbal encouragement. At the end of the exercise, they were rated for their performance. They then had another segment where they were given verbal encouragement, and they found that it led to significantly greater maximum effort. There are counter studies, such as one listed on the Harvard Business Review. They reported in their own study that they found the opposite. They said that people performed better when they were silently assisted and that words of encouragement did not help them. They said that the people who had silent partners did planks 33% longer while those who got encouraged when about 20% longer. We took away from these two studies arguing with each other that having somebody there is important regardless. Having someone who's been through whatever you're doing and is in your corner helping makes the difference, regardless if they are shouting encouragement or not. Everybody just wants a dad-like figure standing behind them, nodding quietly while they do a plank.
Myth 3: What's the limit of what encouragement can do? I mean, there's only so much hope you can give someone in a hopeless situation, right?
Alright, so what’s the maximum that encouragement can do for us? For this one, we want to cover a study that we have mentioned before. As a disclaimer, anyone who's listening who might have a warm heart for animal cruelty, you may want to take a moment to get some fresh air. This gets a little bit dark as far as mice go and how anti-depression studies work with mice. We covered a very classic study between mice and antidepressant medication during our episode about Grant. One way they tested antidepressants is by taking mice and monitoring how long they can swim in a clear glass with no way out. They filled it with water, put a mouse into that water, and they just let it swim. This is a good test for antidepressant medication because depressed mice that are low on dopamine will only swim for a couple of minutes before they give up and drown. However, the mouse that is on good antidepressants will continue swimming, sometimes for hours. Also, the mice that humans raised had more hope and would swim the best.
The way they give mice hope is by picking them up out of the water, trying them off, and then putting them back. The ones that were handled by the lab assistants swam the longest, meaning giving them encouragement of any sort extended the length of time that they could swim before they gave up. All in all, regularly encouraging the mice and being handled allowed them to have the hope to swim for almost a full day. Translating that to humans, the people that have the most hope and achieved the most tend to have people that take them out of the water and give them some love and encouragement to continue on. You may be talking to somebody tough, but I guarantee they made it as far as they have by being encouraged by all kinds of different people along the way.
Final Thoughts
Loss and criticism are more memorable. They stick with us, or we hang on to them like a bad habit. But this doesn't mean we should use encouragement less. In fact, it's just the opposite. We should use encouragement far more because when given in sincerity, encouragement and praise can hit the brain with the same intensity as giving a physical gift. When you give encouragement, you are giving a reward.
The jury is still out if we perform better at grueling tasks by receiving constant encouragement versus silence. However, we know that having a workout partner or study buddy can increase our exertion and output, especially if they're a little more experienced than us. Finally, if it's fair to compare mouse behavior with human behavior, then hope and encouragement can mean the difference between sinking or swimming, literally. This is especially true if the person encouraging you has been neck-deep in it before and can empathize with you.
The best mentors and the most encouraging words come from men and women who have overcome their own failures. Because when someone like Churchill encourages you to pick yourself up and fight on, they know what it took for you to get back up in the first place. Or, as Churchill put it - success is not final, and failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.