Transcript of Most Replayed Moment: The Childhood Scripts Still Running Your Life! Chase Hughes

When people say "authenticity," we should note that what we call—most people call—authenticity is a costume of childhood beliefs. Like, my authentic self and how I act is typically what I was in childhood: how I deal with conflict, how I make friends, how I stay safe. All these little patterns that I learned when I was 8 or 9. I'm still repeating a lot of that stuff. So when we say authenticity, it's always important to think that it's authenticity plus a removal of ego, and a willingness to receive social injury.

Cody Sanchez said something to me which has stayed with me. She said—again, I'm going to butcher it—but words to the effect of, "I won't be friends with anyone in private that won't say something in public that will cost them something." And going to your point about social injury, I think what Cody's actually saying is, like, that's how I know that they're authentic, is they're willing to risk something for something they believe.

Yeah.

I also think this is how you know a brand's authentic. Like, are they willing to cause social injury in the near term for something they believe in the long term?

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah. And a lot of what—a lot of the recent brand debacles that we've had is they thought they were doing something to avoid social injury that caused a massive social injury.

Because people said, "You're not being authentic to your audience."

Yeah.

Yeah. When they tried to do, like, get into identity politics and stuff like that, and—okay, like—like extreme virtue signaling and stuff like that, yeah.

Yeah.

Which backfires.

Can we go into this childhood development thing really quick?

Sure.

I think it's super important for people to know.

Sure.

And I'm a behavior profiler, and if anybody listening didn't know that. And one of the things that I teach everybody is this thing called the childhood development triangle. So it's just three sides of this triangle. So when you're growing up, what did that child have to do most of the time to earn and keep friends? So friends is one. And then to feel safe. What did the kid have to do to feel safe? For some kids, safety was like, I don't know, somebody gives me a hug at the end of the day.

For some kids, it's like cracking jokes.

Yeah.

And—

I'm going to crack jokes. And keep friends. I'm going to feel safe by becoming really loud and dominating the room. I'm going to become safe by getting really small and shrinking so nobody notices me. Or I'm going to become safe by being hyper-vigilant because I don't know if Dad drank before he got home or if he's going to start drinking when he got home. So it's like, what did that child—what are the scripts that that child needed to run on autopilot to feel safe, to make friends, and then to get rewards? And that would be the third side.

Yeah.

And 90% of us are walking around with this exact triangle governing our life. And if you look around at people at work, you see this woman who every time there's a meeting, she wants to speak up a lot, but then she shuts her mouth and her body shuts down and all that kind of stuff. You're seeing an 8-year-old who got yelled at at a family dinner table.

Mm-hmm.

That's all. But you're just seeing it in a grown-up body.

I have two examples that are super front of mind that completely align with what you've just said. I have two colleagues that I work with, and I got six months into working with one of them, and I could always tell that there was something not quite right because whenever I was in the room, they would—they would stare at me a lot, and they would be a little bit more on the pessimistic side than I'm used to. And one day at dinner, I was talking to them about their childhood, and they offered up that their dad was—his mood could change rapidly, and he was always pointing out why something would never work and why—and he was an extreme pessimist.

Agree with it.

—had to pay attention to the authority figure. And then, yeah, you had to also—you learned maybe that, you know, pessimism was a way to—

Safety.

—yeah, safety. And then there's another colleague who's actually in the room over there, and I'll ask her before we publish this if I can say this publicly, but similar thing. She expressed to me that she had a dad that was—his mood would change rapidly. And I said to her one day, I said—I call her Sarah. I said, "Sarah, you're always staring at me. Whenever I look at you, you're already looking at me. And it's like you're, like, over-analyzing and overthinking." And she explained to me the same thing. She said, "When I grew up, my dad's mood would just change like this. So every time I'm preempting, I'm like a radical preempter. I'm thinking 20 steps ahead of, like, what might go wrong or, you know, which makes her exceptional at her job.

Yeah.

So safety, yeah.

Very true. Very true. And the way that I explain this, if somebody wants to, like, it's not where you can kind of go back and, like, sit there for five minutes, put it on a Post-it note, and then figure your whole life out. I wish I had a trick to do that. But the way that, like, I want people to think about this is, going back to your childhood, a lot of those things, those are just contracts that were written in a child's voice. And when you start hearing these patterns repeating in your head, force yourself to hear the voice of a kid.

Mm-hmm.

With the side agreement of, "I am not special, and I'm completely okay if I am never understood." Because most of what happens when we get into arguments with our spouse, we get into these bitchy arguments with people at work, it's our argument to be understood more than it is for us to come to a solution. "I need you to understand me." So getting okay with the idea that you might not ever be understood is like step number one.

So do you think I should go to the key people in my life, maybe my team, and ask them these questions around, "How did you make friends?" Is that the question?

What did you do to make and keep friends?

What did you do to make and keep friends? And what was the safety question again?

Like, what did you need to do or avoid to feel safe?

And the rewards one?

What did you feel—and this one's always you want to put the word "feel" in there—what did you feel like you had to do to earn rewards? And what were rewards to you?

Okay.

It was appreciation or somebody that's like hyper-significance-driven. Like, "I've got to have the Rolex, I've got to have the Ferraris," and all this kind of stuff. They never got rewards because their parents ignored them unless they brought home a certificate. Their teacher called and said they did a good job. They played the piano recital and did a great job, and lots of people were acknowledging them and clapping for them. They only got acknowledged when they were socially significant.

And am I right in thinking here that these are fundamentally interlinked in many ways? Because when you're talking about safety, I was running through my head the things that made me feel safe, and they were rewards that I could tell my friends about.

Yeah.

So I, like, I touched all three of them. And part—in part because we, you know, I was thinking I was very different to my social group when I was younger. We were the Black family. There wasn't another Black family that I knew of, other than maybe one other kid, I think, in the area in Plymouth in 1994 or '95. So some of the material things I wanted, like the shoes that everyone had, made me feel safe because they made me fit in.

Yeah.

And that, you know, and that got me friends.

Yeah.

Or at least I thought it did. So, like, for me, it really was like an interconnected triangle.

Yeah.

That's just one of many examples that I could think of.

It does tend to do that. And I will typically wait for somebody to figure that out. And as they're filling it out, they're kind of like, "Oh, I did this because of this to get to this." And you'll see a little cycle start happening. But it's great for self-knowledge. But if you're a behavior profiler, that's what's going to run people. You're going to know how they're going to respond to conflict. You're going to know what they're going to avoid. You're going to, like, if you're putting teams together, I know what people I want to have working with each other. And it doesn't have to be some complex nine-hour thing.

And you're not saying that I need to radically change?

No.

But what if one part of this triangle or one behavior I've learned for safety or for rewards or for friends is making my life worse?

Yeah.

You know, it could be ruining my life. Like, it could be the thing standing in the way of me having a romantic relationship or getting promotion or building a business. It's like getting in the way now.

Yeah.

What do I do, Chase?

So you've identified the pattern. Let's assume that you've got it. You're like, "Oh, I've got this shit that's happening on repeat." The part two of this is I need to focus on that being a kid. That belongs to a child. And I need to write down, like, "Here's how that child wrote the contract, made the promise to themselves, developed the contract." And then even if you make it up, like, when—let's—I'm going to write down a little thing. When did this kid bring it into adulthood?

There's two parts to this. I love this, and there's two parts to it that I think I wanted to talk about. The first is, in doing so, in waking up in the morning and seeing my wallpaper that says, like, "My kids don't deserve a great life," or whatever, of course, it's going to motivate me to take action, which is then going to start to build new evidence once I take action, once I win that big client and I realize that everything's fine, which is going to change my life. And then the second point I wanted to point out is, like, people listen to podcasts like this, and they write this stuff down, and then they have relapses, and things don't change fast enough.

Yeah.

Is, like, turn down their ability to make the decision.

That's it. That's it. You've totally got it. And I would say this for anybody out there, that you're trying to go through this and you're having a hard time. I get it. It's totally tough. The number one way that we influence another human being—let me just kind of metaphor this for one second. When you watch a hypnotist—and hypnosis is fun—anybody can learn to do it. It's a pretty easy thing. So it looks very dramatic, but one of the things you'll see me do at the beginning of that is, like, go ahead and give me your hand, and I'll hold their hand for a second.

It reminds me of that famous study they did where they got people to give electric shocks to other people via Milgram obedience experiment.

Yeah.

And they managed to get a member of the public to give another member of the public lethal electric shocks just through sort of micro-compliance, but also through authority because the experimenters were, like, wearing white jackets, white overalls, et cetera.

And here's the second thing in that experiment that's going to perfectly tie back to this. So this experiment that you're talking about happened at Yale University. It was 1962. And we—I mean, there's tons of data on it, but essentially, strangers would shock another person seemingly or what they thought was to death just because some dude in a lab coat told them to. But what they didn't account for—and even Dr. Milgram's book was called Obedience to Authority. They thought it was all about the authority, the lab coat, the guy's tall.

Novelty meaning?

Something unexpected is occurring. So, like, if you walk past the same bush every day 10,000 years ago and your job is to carry fish from the river, and suddenly you walk past that bush and you hear a big-ass stick snap, all of your focus, all of it, is on that stick. It's not on your kids. It's not on your health. It's not on anything that's going on. It's to this new, unexpected piece of information. That hijacks our brain. Anything novel hijacks our brain.

Yeah. I think this is one of the great secrets of good marketing is that it beats your brain's wallpaper filter. And I wrote a little bit about this in my last book about this idea of beating the wallpaper filter. I think we talked a little bit about it last time, but I talked about a study where they got a rat and put it in a maze with chocolate at the other end of the maze, and they looked at the rat's brain as it went through the maze the first time, and they saw that the rat's brain was, like, exploded with activity. It's smelling the walls. It's trying to figure it out. Like, and then they put the rat in the maze the second time, and there's, like, almost no brain activity because it's on autopilot.

Yeah.

But you would have paid attention if you walked down there and your, like, sofa wasn't there. And how does that then apply to marketing? So, like, how do you surprise people is, like, a central question of anyone who's trying to build a personal brand, start a podcast, or do marketing, but I guess also to persuade people. It's one of the things I think about a lot when I talk on stage.

Yeah.

Is I know I'm competing with your mobile phone, your Twitter feed, or your TikTok. So I have to do something almost, like, every 10 seconds to, like, catch you off guard. And Mr. Beast, I guess, is the great master of this, and it's probably why he's got half a billion YouTube followers because the minute that video starts.

Oh, boom.

Yeah.

We're hooked in. You're hooked. But this—I mean, that's the power of novelty. I would challenge anybody to take this challenge. If you're scrolling through short-form content, watch for something that, like, jerks your attention, like some kind of weird novelty thing that happens. And that video is probably a short 20, maybe 40-second video that captures your focus through novelty. The next video, watch for an authority figure, a famous YouTuber, a celebrity, a politician, a pop singer who thinks that they know politics, all that kind of stuff.

Wow.

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