The Importance of Understanding Your Mind

Dr. Rebecca Fortgang is our guest on the 346th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Dr. Becky is a clinical psychologist, an instructor at Harvard Medical School, and a research scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Just a light background, huh? Kira knew Dr. Becky had to be on the show after taking her class, and she did not disappoint. Take a peek inside the conversation: Is willpower a muscle? What’s all the debate around willpower?  What do willpower and love have in common? Researching topics with inconclusive and incomplete data – this work has to start somewhere.  Tools creative entrepreneurs can use to be more productive. Why do people really quit on their goals? What to do when lapses happen and what are they trying to tell us? How to avoid spiraling and what we should do instead.  What’s a goal cleanse?  Are you a failure if you quit a long-term goal? How to find alternate goals if you can’t let goals go.  The clear-cut approach to setting goals and achieving them. What is “gripping the table” self-control and how can we do less of it? How your future self can motivate you in completing your goals TODAY.  Is sacrifice needed to attain goals?  Strategies to stop procrastinating and how to tap into your willpower.  Can you convince yourself to be in the right headspace?  How can you prioritize mental health in your life? Tune into the episode to listen to all the insights. The people and stuff we mentioned on the  show: The Copywriter Think Tank Kira’s website Rob’s website Rebecca's website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Free month of Brain.FM AI for Creative Entrepreneurs Podcast Full Transcript: Rob Marsh:  Most copywriters we know share an interest in psychology and figuring out what makes people tick. After all, if you're writing something to convince your prospect to buy or to take some kind of action, you need to understand them. But our interest in psychology often goes well beyond persuasion tactics and mental heuristics. Our guest for today's episode of The Copywriter Club podcast is Dr. Rebecca Fortgang, who specializes in willpower, goal setting and mental health. Just as a quick side note, she was Kira's professor last year in a class she took, and I like to point out that it was at Harvard University, the CURE Harvard student. We talked with Rebecca about the ins and outs of willpower, overcoming procrastination, mental health, and a lot more. We think you're really going to like this episode. Kira Hug:  But before we jump in, we are going to promote something because that's what we do. So today, Rob, I want to talk about our new-ish course, not like brand new but new as in couple months ago. Our AI for copywriters course, which is available to all writers. And the reason I want to mention it today is because we're adding a certification to it, a prompt engineer certification, because we know as we've been talking to a lot of startups, especially on our new podcast, AI for Creative Entrepreneurs, we're interviewing different startups and they're talking about the need for prompt engineers and that it's hard to find prompt engineers right now, and writers are really set up to succeed in that role because we ask good questions. We think about prompting in a creative way, and there is no university that has a prompt engineer program right now. There's this new need in the marketplace and there aren't enough people to fill that role. We're creating the program that you need to train you to not only provide the training, but also to give you a certification, and that usually means a boost of confidence for you to go out there and maybe even update your LinkedIn title to include prompt engineer and maybe even pitch yourself or go after opportunities that you wouldn't normally have gone after. And so you can work through that certification. It's not easy. Rob's making it very difficult to get it, but it's a tough certification because we want you to feel confident and well-trained before you actually achieve it. Rob Marsh:  It's not easy, but it's also not honors. It's not something you're going to have to sit in a classroom for four or five hours and work through. We teach all the information in the course that you need. As long as you go through that, do the practices, read the prompts and things that we share, you'll have the information that you need to get that certification. But it's also not the kind of thing that you'll be able to just show up and do without doing the work. And that's really the way certifications should work. So if you want to earn a certification as a prompt engineer, as a copywriter who knows what they're doing when it comes to writing prompts for large language models like ChatGPT, go to thecopywriterclub.com/ai4c, that is the number four C, and you can find the program there and the certification that we've just included recently. Kira Hug:  Okay. Let's kick off our episode with Dr. Rebecca Fortgang. I am curious to hear how did you end up as a clinical psychologist? Dr. Rebecca Fortgang:  I actually really did not mean to, my parents are both clinical psychotherapists, so growing up when I was a little kid, I did want to be a therapist just like them or a hairdresser, but then through adolescence I was pretty committed to forging my own path. And when I went to college I studied linguistics. But I think that for people who actually are fortunate enough to be raised by psychotherapists, it's a really wonderful thing and it hooked me. It's a lens on the world that I kept coming back to. And by the end of college I really had, I did a thesis on schizophrenia and language and then by the end of that experience I was more committed to pursuing an interest in mental health and in psychology broadly. I think it's just an endlessly fascinating topic that there's no one who probably doesn't find some element of their own minds or other people's minds interesting. I continued, after college I had a position at the National Institute of Mental Health and I was in a lab that focused on schizophrenia. And by the end of those two years I was really hooked by a few key topics that actually still guide my career now. One of them was schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. One is impulsivity and self-control, and the third is suicide, suicidal thoughts and behaviors. And suicide of course is an outcome that's tragic and that's far too often the result of impulsive decision making. And so that's the constellation of things that I got interested in at the beginning and continued to be interested in. And I followed that path to graduate school at Yale and then a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, and then now I'm early career faculty at Harvard Medical School. Rob Marsh:  That's amazing. You mentioned psychotherapy as a lens on the world. And I know it's really hard for us to step out of our own lenses to compare it to maybe what another lens would be, but I'm interested in going deeper on that. How does that change the way that you see the world versus someone like me who maybe doesn't have that same kind of training but is maybe still interested in that? Dr. Rebecca Fortgang:  Absolutely. I think psychology broadly is more the lens on the world, maybe even more so than psychotherapy in particular. And when I say that, I mean psychology includes also the study of the human mind and not only that interaction with someone to try to improve their lives and promote healing. I think both of those have been really important parts of my career and are really special to me and endlessly fascinating. And what they both share is a focus on people's internal experiences as part of understanding their behaviors and possibly promoting change. So even when someone does something that really annoys me, my first impulse is to try to understand what's going on in their minds that led to those behaviors that are bothering me. And so that's what by a lens on the world. I cannot stop myself from trying to understand what is going on in the internal worlds of other people and how that helps to explain their own individual behavior, how those behaviors come together to create social systems and larger systems in our world. I think that's how psychologists typically think. So for people who are really drawn to that lens, trying to understand their own minds, the minds of others, sometimes it can be just an inescapable career path, because for some of us it's so clearly endlessly fascinating. Kira Hug:  I want to talk about willpower, because I was lucky enough to be in your class in the fall where we focused on willpower for the entire semester. You are the reason I went vegan-ish. Dr. Rebecca Fortgang:  Are you still- Rob Marsh:  Speaking of willpower. Vegan-ish, yes. I love that. Kira Hug:  The ish gives me a 10% wiggle room there, but yes, still there. But could we talk about, I guess starting by defining willpower and what maybe you've discovered over the last year or two through the class and through your studies and research about willpower that's been surprising. Dr. Rebecca Fortgang:  Willpower, it's defined typically as the self-control that can be used to do something that you might not feel like doing or to restrain impulses that you do feel like, to avoid immediate gratification in order to pursue longer term goals or to move your behavior also in line with your higher order values. It's choosing the future rather than now. It's overriding your immediate impulses in order to pursue something that's important to you but doesn't line up with those immediate impulses. And it's true that you were in my class. I was so lucky to have you as a student,