Early on, we can learn to feel a certain way in a certain context. That can mess up our entire lives. Nowhere is that more powerful in the context of school than the feeling of stupid. Yep. Stupid is a feeling. It’s the feeling of shame. The problem is that shame is the LEAST HELPFUL response to mistakes. It causes us to avoid them...which really causes us to repeat them again and again. As Hunter shares, we had to learn that lesson the hard way. You shouldn’t have to and we’re here to make sure that you learn this the easy way.

While we’ve been taught to think of subjects in school as different, your brain doesn’t distinguish. That’s because the underlying power of your ability to learn rests on one thing: automaticity. If you do anything often enough, it will become automatic. The fact that you’re listening to and understanding this podcast tells us that your automaticity works. So, what else do you want to automate? Because if you’ve learned one thing, you can learn anything!

Your attention is your most valuable resource, but it doesn’t just float free of anything else. There’s a thing that shapes and controls your thinking. It’s your emotions. That’s right. Feeeeeeelings aren’t just for hippies, kids. They’re actually some hardcore neuroscience. Thinking and feeeeeeeling are ALWAYS linked. That’s why it’s not a choice between having good grades OR being happy in school - you can do both. You just have to realize that your emotional well-being is totally connected to how you do in school. Time to talk about your feeeeeeelings...and rewatch the amazing Pixar movie Inside Out.

Of course, while everyone has automaticity, not everyone automates everything. In order to master things, you have to control how you use your most valuable resource: your attention. Your attention is the brain “spotlight” - that’s how you control what you automate. In this podcast, we break down how your automaticity and attention make it possible for you to master any skill.

Humans are hypersocial animals. We’re desperate to be liked and belong because in the distant past that was how we survived. We need our group. So that’s why we spend so much time in school trying to look smart and impress people. That makes us want to cover up and try to deny our mistakes rather than getting them out in the open so that we can learn from them. The crazy thing is, trying to look smart actually sets you up to become dumber in the long run. The long-term strategy to becoming smarter is getting your dumb mistakes out in the open so we can fix them.

Our heads are filled with stories about amazing geniuses like Newton, Mozart, and Einstein. The problem is, those stories are fake news. They take a little bit of truth and distort the picture. In reality, it took these geniuses at least 10,000 hours and they had a huge support network behind them. Newton and Einstein were part of large and active communities of scientists and mathematicians who all built on each other’s ideas. Mozart and Michael Jackson both had stage dads. And Edison and Steve Jobs understood that making themselves out to be visionaries was just good marketing. However, just like photoshopping supermodels, that gives you a distorted picture of what realistic expectations are. Other people overselling themselves leads you to undersell yourself. Don’t believe the hype! Pull back the curtain and examine what is really there.

We all hear stories about ourselves all the time; who we are and what we can or can’t do. Those stories can end up running our whole lives and making our choices for us... if we let them! In this first episode, Katie and Hunter share some of the stories that have driven their lives, and the lives of their students. And why it’s time we all questioned who these stories are really serving.