Thank you so much. It's always fun to talk to you either privately or in a webcast like this. I'm just honored and excited to be on the show. I think it will be fun and maybe provide some helpful direction for the people who are watching.

Well, that aspect actually developed really early, surprisingly, back in the 1970s when we were first creating and developing cognitive therapy. The basic idea was your emotions result from your thoughts in the here and now, what you're telling yourself at every moment. When people are depressed, they're giving themselves negative messages like, "I'm not good enough, I shouldn't have screwed up. I'm a loser. I'm a failure. I should be doing so much better with my life." One of my students' boyfriend rejected her, and then she told herself, "I'm worthless, I'm unlovable, I'll be alone forever." It's those kinds of distorted, cruel messages that cause depression and anxiety. We were always wondering what causes people to have those distorted messages. Where did they come from? How does that happen?

The idea is that we all have certain beliefs, our value systems at perhaps the deepest level. There are certain beliefs that can set us up for failure and for pain. I've given a list of 23 common self-defeating beliefs like perfectionism, perceived perfectionism, achievement addiction, love addiction, approval addiction and so on. The way it works is, we have these beliefs going on all the time in our minds, like many of the people watching right now have the perfectionism or the achievement addiction, which is, I should always try to be perfect or second best isn't good enough, or my worthwhileness as a human being depends on my achievements and my productivity.

If you have this achievement addiction and you're doing well, then you're going to be really happy because you'll say, "Oh, my gosh, I'm achieving therefore I'm a worthwhile person right now because I just had a success with project X." But we would predict that you would be vulnerable to anxiety and depression when you're in danger of failure. One of the ideas behind the original cognitive therapy that I wrote about in Feeling Good was that, if you can change these self-defeating beliefs as well as the negative thoughts in the here and now, that has the ability to make you miserable, then you'll be less likely to have painful mood swings in the future. Not only can you recover, but you can move to a deeper level in your life in terms of your spiritual growth or personal growth or however you want to look at it.

Yeah, that's right. For me, this perfectionism under treatment of addiction was one of my many flaws and afflictions. Early in my career, I was walking with a friend John Rush, who was in my residency class at Penn. He was a brilliant guy. He was one of the pioneers in cognitive therapy and developed a tremendous career in biological psychiatry at Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas or in Texas. He was saying to me, "Oh, I feel sorry for these people to think they have to be able to cure every patient". I said, "Oh, John, you're right, that's such a stupid thing." But in my mind, I was saying, "No, John, you're wrong. But people like you shouldn't try to cure every patient. But people like me can cure every patient." I was in a kind of a rush. I'm going to achieve this greatness. There is a kind of an addiction, because in the early part of my career, I got referred to all these extraordinarily difficult patients from Dr. Beck's clinic. I thought he was referring all these patients to me because he thought I was great. Then I discovered that his intake group would refer to me anyone they didn't want, they felt was too difficult.

When I would be able to cure these incredibly difficult patients, I'd get a rush. I say, "Oh, my gosh, this is great." It propelled me to improve my skills and I developed tons of techniques. The downside of that was that when I had a patient who said, "You know, Dr. Burns, you're not helping me." It was a threat to my ego, to my sense of self-esteem and brought tension into the therapeutic relationship.

One day, I finally decided to try to let go of this perfectionism and a patient said to me, "Dr. Burns, you're not helping me." Instead of trying to prove that I could help them, I just said, "You know, what you're saying is right and it's painful for me because I really like you, I respect you, I care for you. I believe that we can do tremendous work together and get you out of this depression. But so far, I've failed terribly and I feel sad and ashamed. You're probably angry and ticked off and disappointed. Tell me about those feelings. I really want to hear what you have to say." At that moment, I was surrendering my sense of self, my sense of trying to achieve, my sense of trying to be perfect. Then suddenly the heavens opened up and the patient began to cry, opening up to talk about his feelings. All of a sudden, we were on the same page and got connected. Then the therapy opened up and he did tremendously well and recovered.

I began to discover that this belief system that I had, which on some level brought me a lot of success, motivated me to work my butt off, my research and my clinical work had a kind of sneaky downside to it. That began to shift my thinking in pretty radical ways. It helped me when I was writing my new book, Feeling Great, which had just been released. I had worked on it for several years, because there's all these new developments since I wrote my first book, Feeling Good. But when I was writing that, I wasn't thinking about, "Oh, how many books are going to sell? Who's going to be impressed with this?" I was just saying this is fun because I can connect with my readers, I can share these ideas. I don't really care how many books it sells or how successful it is. For me, the joy is in the process of doing what I'm doing and connecting with someone who's reading it, who is in a tremendous amount of pain.

It just makes life for me so much sweeter, so much more pleasurable, so much more rewarding. That's what the Buddha called the death of a self. Unfortunately, we don't remain dead for long. We get reincarnated. Reincarnation is something that occurs when you're alive. Maybe it can occur after your body has died, but you can certainly die and be reborn over and over during your lifetime. But the ego comes back and we get trapped back and you think, "Oh, I've got to be so great." And you got hooked.

Have you ever seen the movie The Devil's Advocate? Isn't that a great one? It is about the ego. That's what it is all about. It is letting the self-die and people are afraid of the death of the self, afraid to give up these ideas, afraid you're going to somehow lose your motivation or that something terrible is going to happen. So, we fight for a life. When you die, it's like a magical discovery. When your-self dies, you instantly come back to life. It's not the great death, it's the great rebirth. It's like suddenly you're alive and life becomes filled with so much joy and opportunities for connection with people.

Yeah, that's right. I love this spiritual talk, which is fantastic, so exciting and so valid. But the problem is most people don't get it. They just hear words and what is happening and death and rebirth itself. It's like seeing the Grand Canyon for the first time. You see something that you'd only heard about or you saw it on a postcard or on TV, a helicopter flying over the Grand Canyon. But you can't you can't get it until you've seen it. The first time I saw it, I was with a friend from college. We were hitchhiking from my home in Phoenix back to Amherst College. We had this old jalopy we were supposed to drive to Chicago. The first night we drove, we got to the edge of the Grand Canyon. Although I was living in Phoenix, I'd never seen the Grand Canyon. We parked there, we had sleeping bags and we put them on the ground next to the car and went to sleep. When I woke up, I realized we'd put our sleeping bags within 6 inches of the edge of the Grand Canyon. When I woke up, my head was on the edge of the cliff and the sun was coming up and I saw the Canyon for the first time and it took my breath away. I thought, "My gosh, I heard it was a big hole in the ground. I never knew it was like this." That's what the death of the self is like. It's like suddenly seeing something fantastic for the first time.

What I've done with my career is to focus on the scientific and practical aspects. How do we lead people step by step to this awareness? I've sent you the list of 23 self-defeating beliefs and also what I call a cost benefit analysis. What are some specific steps that people could take right now if you wanted to pinpoint your own self-defeating beliefs? There's a whole lot of them. It's not just the treatment of addiction. There's 23 of them. What would be the steps, if you want it to change one of these self-defeating beliefs so that you'd have more joy and peace and love in your life.

Sure. Sure. There are different categories. The first 3 are the achievement cluster. Perfectionism, perceived perfectionism, which is a term I coined. This is another affliction I have that people will not love and accept me as a flawed and vulnerable human being. I believe that for many years, the achievement addiction. My worth depends on my achievements.

Yeah, that's widespread. But another in the culture in general is the love cluster, the approval addiction. I need everyone's approval to be worthwhile and the love addiction. I can't feel happy and fulfilled as a human being unless I'm loved. I must have love to feel happy enough, to feel joy. The fear of rejection is so common too or pleasing others or submissiveness. I should always please everyone. Conflict phobia. People who love each other shouldn't fight. I've seen so many people whose lives were really dealt a heavy blow because of conflict phobia and thinking they're not allowed to be angry and they should always be happy and joyous. Another one in your population would be number 23, the superman, superwoman. I should always be strong and never be weak. I should always be successful. That demandingness in this cluster cost us relationship problems. If you show me a 100 people with relationship problems, troubled marriage or checked off at a colleague or family member, 80% or 90% of the time, they'll be blaming the other person.

Yeah, we'll leave it for now. Yeah, absolutely. Blaming others and entitlement. I think I'm entitled to have people treat me in the way I want. That huge.

Yeah. That's right. This is becoming a national epidemic. We got the pandemic, but we got the epidemic. The blame epidemic. Seeing yourself as superior to other people, looking down on them, thinking they need punishment, thinking that everything is their fault and not looking at your own role in the problem. That's another form of enlightenment. That's the second death of the self. This is a very painful death of the self to look at your own role in a problem. I hate doing it myself. When I'm ticked off at someone, I'm certain it's the other person's fault. That belief just makes the problem worse and worse. And finally, I stop and say, "OK, David, use your tools. Look at your own role in this problem." When I see it and it's there. 100% percent of the time, it just kills me. I feel extremely ashamed when I see my own insensitivity and my own flaws. But if you're willing to endure that pain and to share that with humility to the person who you're ticked off at, that's another death of the self and another rebirth, because when your defenses come down, their defenses will come down. You both end up in heaven.

It's a death of the self that many people are terrified of and will put up a lot of resistance to examining their own role. You hear that in politics. You don't hear people saying, "Here's the errors that I've been making." All they say is, "Here's where you screwed up, here's where I am, right? You're wrong, you're to blame. I'm innocent. I'm perfect." That works in a sense. People are looking for someone who knows all the answers. Just as our perfectionism and achievement addiction addicts us with certain rewards, this narcissistic hostility and splitting people into groups also has rewards. Because some people want to hear that. They want to line up behind this narcissistic guru or leader who is all powerful and knows all of the answers. That leads to the other kinds of suffering, the suffering of cruelty, of war, hostility, marital conflict. We could do a great show on that.

Well, let's see if we can cure a couple of people.

That's exactly right. That's how we get hooked. I've also attached a cost benefit analysis. Why don't we do a group cost benefit analysis for the belief, I should be perfect. My worthwhileness depends on my achievements. There are many ways that that belief can help you. There are many benefits to having this belief. Let's see if we can list what they are. One bit of a subtle point, we're not going to list the advantages and disadvantages of achievement. There's no disadvantages of achievement. We're going to list the advantages and disadvantages of linking your sense of self-esteem, your worthwhileness with your achievements or with being perfect or trying to be perfect.

If you're watching the show right now, you can just take a piece of paper, which is how I'm doing. I just took a piece of paper because I don't have that printed one. I just drew a line down the middle and labelled the left-hand column advantages and the right hand column disadvantages. What are some of the advantages? Perfectionism and linking your self-esteem to your achievements. If you have this achievement addiction, it will motivate you to work hard. Number 2, your hard work will lead to increased productivity, that's how it was, early in my own career with my research. I kept telling myself, this research has to be fantastic. When I thought my research was going well, I would get euphoric and say this is going to be the greatest study in the world type of thing. When the data started not coming out right or something wasn't working or I couldn't answer some puzzle in the lab, I would really get panicky and crash and go down in the dump. Those are two benefits. What are the others Hitendra? What are some additional advantages of perfectionism and basing your self-esteem on your achievements? Because there's a ton of benefits.

Yeah. We put on the advantages column. Life becomes a beautiful quest, a magical journey. That's a fantastic thing. What are some other benefits of basing your self-esteem on your achievements and trying to be perfect?

This stuff is all absolutely valid. When you win, people love a winner, so you'll get a lot of adulation. People will also admire you just for your work ethic. I remember when I was little, the neighbor asked me to rake the leaves or something. I must have been 6 years old. I was very perfectionistic. He was giving me 25 cents or something. It was this big yard and I was just raking and raking. It took me forever. I remember somebody said, "If you ever want a job done right, give it to David." People really admire that about you.

Another thing that people haven't mentioned is that when you say, "I'm going to be perfect." If you're projecting the idea that you're one cut above other people, that you're in that superior group because you wouldn't expect an average person to try to be perfect because, that's not going to be realistic for you. You are kind of attaining this status of one of the beautiful people, one of the superior people. There's all of that and probably more. But I've got at least 12 or 13 things listed in my advantages.

Now, what are the disadvantages? Is there any downside to basing our self-esteem on our achievements and trying to be perfect?

I'll say one just to get it started. It is that when you fail or when you're in danger of failure, you're going to crash and be in danger of pretty intense anxiety when you think you're maybe going to fail as well as depression and that feeling of inadequacy or inferiority or worthlessness when you fail. You'll have a fear of failure. Any other disadvantages?

Oh, it's great. I'm really excited about what's happening. It's always so much fun to work with you. I just feel like what we're doing is just so vital and so fun. Another thing going along with that fixed mindset is, from a Buddhist perspective and I know nothing about Buddhism, but I love to bullshit about it. That seems good enough for most people. But there's no such thing as success or failure. Those are just mental constructs. From an experience or failure, it can be a tremendous opportunity to learn and grow.

In my teaching at Stanford, I have a free weekly seminar, a training group for community therapists as well as Stanford psychiatrists, psychologists and students to practice and to learn superb empathy skills and way more effective forms of psychotherapy. We do role plays and we teach the disarming technique, the thought of empathy and feeling empathy, agenda setting which are pretty powerful, but hard to grasp techniques. We model them and show how easy and beautiful they are. Then they have to break into groups of two and three and practice and get a grade instantly. Most of them have pretty bad grades pretty much every time. It is shocking that they discover their empathy skills are very poor. These are people who are successful therapists in the community. It's kind of a shock to the system.

We practice the concept of joyous failure or learning through failure, that if you check your ego at the door, then those exercises can add fantastic dimensions and scale not only to your therapeutic skills, but to your personal life and your relationships with colleagues as well. But that's another thing that you lose when you're not allowed to fail when you have to be perfect.

There could be healthy things, too. I know a young woman who is an incredible achiever, a beautiful, a gracious woman who is very hardworking, very accomplished, but she struggles with migraine headaches. Now, I don't know if there's a cause and effect there, but somebody said that there is this stress, this internal tension.

Well, we could add to the list. Then the thing to do is there's two circles at the bottom of your lists. I'll put two numbers in those circles to see what's greater for you here? The benefits of achievement addiction and trying to be perfect or the disadvantages. Put two numbers that add up to a hundred. For example, if they're about equal, it would be 50/50. If the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, it might be 60-40 or 90-10. If the cost of these beliefs is greater then, it might be, 40-60, or 35-65.

Do your rating now so we can report what they are. Then I'll talk about what you do next based on how these numbers come out?

One advantage could outweigh five disadvantages or vice versa. But, there's real benefits. When I had this system up in my research, I won the top award in the world for an investigator younger than 35 years of age for research on neurochemistry or basic research on how the brain works. That was a tremendous benefit of my perfectionism. I studied a paper from the National Institute of Mental Health. I found that their methodology was poor. I thought they'd come to the wrong conclusion. It was a pretty complex study of brain chemistry; the so-called chemical imbalance theory and I redid the study in a very perfectionistic way and came to the opposite conclusion. That's the paper that I won the award for. The benefits are real and then the downside is real. How do they weigh out in your mind?

If the advantages are greater, I like to think of the Buddha who sits with open hands. To me, the open hands mean I can accept you and show you the path to enlightenment. That's what you want. But I can also let go, I don't need to have you follow my teachings or receive what I have to offer. If it's working for you and I know for me it was working for years, then there's no reason to change. My role is to help people who are hurting.

If the disadvantages are greater then we can take the next step. The next step is just an intellectual step. Then after that, we want to take an emotional step. The intellectual step is, if you're going to give up this achievement addiction, this perfectionism as a value system instead of telling yourself I have to be perfect or my worthwhileness as a human being depends on my achievements, what new belief could you substitute so that you could keep all of those advantages? Because we want all those advantages of being creative and working hard and producing tremendous work. But to get rid of all of these disadvantages, could we just change the wording of that belief? What could we tell ourselves instead of my worthwhileness depending on my achievements or should I always try to be perfect? This is just a kind of a 5th grade level modification, but it can be a little challenging. Then once we've got a new belief, how do we turn that into an emotional reality?

Yeah, a new value set that my worthwhileness depends on my achievements. What can I tell myself instead of that? Or I should always try to be perfect? What can I tell myself instead of that? Is there another way to look at it to where I can still be motivated to work hard and love creativity and love achievements and bring out the best that I have to offer the world without this system that might not be working so well for me.

That's a good one. I love that one.

By the way, sometimes we can edit these. I never try to do my best. You know why? Because you'll only do your best one time in your whole life.

I'm not trying to do my best right now. I'm trying to have fun with Hitendra. But, that's a good step in the right direction, for sure.

That's one step away from enlightenment. You're still trying to be perfect, but maybe just instead of in everything, in one thing. I'm always making sure I'm not perfect in anything.

Yeah, perfect. The day you achieve perfection, that's the day you want to die. There's no more adventure and excitement. I screw up every day in so many ways, it makes me sad. Some of them are just trivial, but those are the opportunity for growth and for intimacy. I have so many flaws, but sometimes I can be insensitive. Sometimes I can be extremely sensitive. When I'm insensitive, I hurt somebody's feelings and what I see is that it causes so much pain for me. Then I can talk to that person and say, "I really hurt your feelings and I just want you to know I love you and I really care about you." It can be a path to a greater intimacy as well as to a far greater achievement.

Absolutely. The mindset that is helpful for me is, I can really enjoy work, productivity, achievement and creativity, but if I achieve something terrific, that doesn't make me more worthwhile than anyone else. If I fail, it doesn't make me any less worthwhile. Failure can be a great opportunity for learning and growth. I'm not striving for perfection. I can still strive for doing something outstanding or doing exceptional work. What would we be without an Einstein or Edison who worked tirelessly in the relentless pursuit not of perfection, but of productivity and achievement? That would be the type of thing to give yourself a value system.

I can still really love being creative. To tell you the truth, since I've given up this achievement addiction and perfectionism, my productivity has just skyrocketed. There's so much going on now in my life that's exciting and creative and productive. I can barely keep up with it, to be honest with you. I'm no longer afraid of failure or making mistakes. I'm working on an app with some colleagues. One of the things I love about our cultural climate that we've created is that it's OK to be wrong, to fail. I edit things and I send them to my colleague, Jeremy, and he said, "You know, this kind of sucks here. It's getting boring." I said, "You're right. How could we liven this up? Let's make it dramatic. Let's make it exciting." Then we come up with a cool, cool idea. It gives you so much dynamism.

I mentioned I learned a lot of this from my cat Obie, who was my spiritual teacher. He was this feral cat who used to come into our yard and tyrannize our cats. He was aggressive. He was living in the woods behind our house. I would scream at him and we'd chase him out of the yard. Then one day, he came to our kitchen door, which is a glass door to the back. He was at that door. I said, "Why would he come? He's afraid of me." I looked at him and he looked like he was about to die. He has suddenly become like a concentration camp victim. He had become skinny. He held his paw to me. I know he was so afraid, but he held his paw so I could see it. It was swollen as big as his head. He had been in a fight and he was on the verge of death because he could no longer hunt.

My wife and I captured him which she wanted and took him to the vet. They did surgery and saved his life. They found an infected puncture wound. To make a long story short, he kind of decided with much ambivalence that we would adopt him. But he was terrified. He was wild. You couldn't get within 10 feet of him without him hissing. If you tried to get close to him, he would bite you really aggressively. But eventually, we lured him into the house and he became my best friend in the world. He just became so trusting. They say a feral cat can never become trusting, but he became my best friend. He would sleep on my chest and get up in the middle of the night and start kneading on my chest. Then he'd start drooling on me. He drools so much, he'd shake his head and it was like being on a drool shower.

If you're not a cat lover, you don't know how wonderful that can be. But he was not special. He wasn't perfect. He was just a cat from the woods. We used to call them alley cats. I wasn't special. I'm just getting old, I can't even jog very fast anymore, I'm so slow. I call it slogging, slow jogging. But when I was with Obie, it was like the heavens opened up and I wasn't trying to be special. He wasn't trying to be special. But the world became special.

It was such a beautiful lesson. He was with us for eight or nine years. He was feral and he wanted to go out for a couple hours every night and do his hunting. He would usually come into our bedroom door at 6 and rattle the screen, and then we'd let him in. He would get in bed with us. One morning at 6, he was not there. I knew probably the mountain lion behind our house had gotten him. We never found him and I lost my best friend in the world, but I always remember him. He was my teacher. Every day when I go out and jog, I shout out, "Obie, Obie" a couple of times. I know he won't come out from behind a bush, but I think well, maybe he's in some kind of cat heaven and can hear me and know how much I love him.

My new book, Feeling Great is dedicated to Obie and his picture is in there. When you're ready to learn something, I guess they say a teacher appears. He was a real teacher for me.

Yeah, there is a deeper level that is hard to see when you're young, when you're striving and achieving. I guess the message is that seeing this has not made me less effective in productivity, but more effective even in my teaching. I used to think I've got to impress people. I'm such a great teacher, I've got all these techniques I've developed. But I find that when I express my vulnerabilities and talk to my students how I failed with this patient or that patient or with my family or whatever. Oddly enough, that's when people seem to appreciate me the most. Again, that was a huge shock to the system.

Another beautiful thing to find out because that's when the magic happens. It is when I work with all my students live and do therapy in front of the class as a way of teaching them. These are Stanford students and they're all trying to be perfect. What if someone finds out how insecure I feel inside and then when I reveal that finally we're doing live work, generally they're cheerful and admitting. Then they think everyone is going to judge them for not being good enough. They're always shocked when they get the greatest outpouring of love and support from other people. They discover that their vulnerability, their flawed side is their path to enlightenment, to love and to inner peace. That's another paradox.

Great summary. Thank you.