Over the past 16 years from his lofty perch at the Department of Psychology at The University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Dr. Seymour Epstein has been diligently investigating the fascinating subject of success. His findings, which are now becoming a hot topic in business circles, focus on the definitions of a successful life and how to achieve it, through the intelligent use of both parts of the brain, i.e., the emotional and the rational.

How to do this, the subject of this fascinating exclusive PSP interview, is both complex and, at the same time, obvious. Dr. Epstein’s advice is to monitor your own feelings the way you watch a machine’s performance, and to use your feelings as an adjunct to the rational self that performs the actual work. In this way, you can actually double your chances for predictable and continued growth and that’s the basis of all success.

PSP: What do we know about success?

Dr. Epstein: Well, the first question we have to ask is, what do you mean by success? Often, people get trapped into accepting other people’s definitions. I think it is very important for people to clarify what they mean by success and having defined it, ask themselves is that what they really want out of life? If you define success in terms of achieving personal happiness, in terms of contributing to society, you’ll evaluate what you are doing very differently than if you define it in terms of making a lot of money and achieving prestige and power. It doesn’t matter how you define it, just as long as you know what you want and that you do realize whether what you are pursuing is something you want or not.

PSP: Would you say that people reach a point, even long before adolescence, where the society, the parents, the peer pressure, the schools, whatever groups you are in, have really defined for you what success is unless something happens to you to question it?

Dr. Epstein: I think that is stated very well. Many people never question it, and they devote their lives to fulfilling what society has instilled as the thing to be sought after.

PSP: So, in the process, what modus operandi should they use for looking at the issue of success and what it means to them and what they want it to mean to them?

Dr. Epstein: This is the kind of thing that people have thought about since the dawn of history. The issue to consider is the societal definition of success, which is mainly money, prestige and power. When you are in a position to evaluate how that affects you, I think it is also awfully important to be aware that there are two minds: an experiential, or emotional, mind and a rational mind. What may be pleasing to one mind may not work at all for the other.

Knowing this, you start to respect both minds and to see how they are reacting. For example, I may tell myself that it really would be great if I became a very famous psychologist. Rationally, that makes sense, why not? Maybe that is what I want to work on being. But it could also be, if I looked into my emotions, which are going to be the barometer, the information on how my experiential mind is assessing the situation, that I am not really happy with becoming famous. Whatever little fame I achieve doesn’t make me feel better about my life. In fact, maybe it makes me feel a little more depressed. So, here I am saying, Aren’t things fantastic! I have done everything society said I should and life is wonderful. But if I look into my emotions, they may or may not confirm that. Notice, I’m not saying what is right or wrong, but what is. I am not even saying that you can trust your emotions, but that it is useful to know them. Your emotions come out of your past experience, so you have been programmed emotionally, as well as rationally. And they affect a lot of your behavior, whether you like it or not. Because, if I decide that having fortune and wealth is where I want to go, and emotionally, that is not where my other mind wants to go, it is going to be very hard for me to get to where I think I want to go rationally and when I get there, I am not going to be happy about it.

PSP: So, in other words, you will be fulfilling your desire, but you will be putting roadblocks in your own path.

Dr. Epstein: That is part of it. The other part is that you are fulfilling the rational desire, what you think you want, but at a deeper or experiential level, it is not what you really want. So, one answer to your question is what one should be motivated to do with one’s life is to at least know yourself and then you can take into account your desires at different levels. There is no easy answer, I can’t give you any rule of thumb on how to do this. But I can observe what my moods and emotions are, and say to myself, Is this what I really enjoy? or Is this what I think I ought to enjoy?

PSP: So, it is having a given experience, and then asking yourself, in a very honest way, did I really enjoy that?

Dr. Epstein: Yes, exactly.

PSP: And also asking, Do I really feel good about myself now? or Do I really have a lot of money in my hand but still feel kind of empty.

Dr. Epstein: I am not saying that the emotional level is necessarily right, but it is different. Having found that I now have the choice, do I want to go along with the intellectual decision I have made to seek fame and fortune? If so, I had better start reprogramming my emotions. But I may decide I don’t want to do that, that I should go along with my emotions. You still have the choice. All that looking into yourself will do for you is not allow you to kid yourself.

PSP: What personality traits would be more likely to create an environment where success could happen?

Dr. Epstein: I don’t see any formula that would work for all people. I think that there is the process of trying things and observing what happens and being aware that one has this emotional, intuitive, experiential self that you have to treat with respect if you want to lead a satisfactory life. But I’m not denying the importance of the rational self. I am emphasizing the other because most people in our society tend to deemphasize emotion and intuition, they kind of think of it as a weak part of the self. If you ignore those things, they don’t stop existing. We are human beings, we have emotions, like it or not.

PSP: You are saying listen to your own feelings, your own emotions and relate them to what you are doing.

Dr. Epstein: That can be tremendously valuable to people. I know I have seen it. With that information, people can solve things in much more fulfilling ways than if they tried to ignore that and work under the illusion that they are completely rational people. I like to point out that there is nothing more irrational than to argue that one is a very rational person. It is about as reasonable as saying that the sun is shining when it is raining. We are biologically made as emotional creatures. Somebody may say, I Don’t believe in any of this intuitive emotional stuff, it is nonsense, the reason that women don’t get as far into hardheaded science is that they are too emotional and intuitive. That is silly. That person is irrational because he wants to deny a reality that is part of him. To be rational, one has to accept intuition and emotions simply because they are there, and a lot of us don’t. A lot of us don’t listen to our feelings. Our feelings are always giving us signals of how we are dealing with life on an automatic level. Moods are simply prolonged feelings. So, whether you like it or not, part of you has the wisdom that your rational system doesn’t know about. That wisdom is continuously evaluating where you are in life.

PSP: The good feeling…

Dr. Epstein: Right, the good feeling. But it can be a very evasive, prolonged reaction that you can’t connect with anything. Emotions we can connect with their sources. But moods we often cannot. Somebody put it this way: moods are to emotions like the tides are to the waves. So, you lose the connection. Your emotions are a reaction to so and so did this, or this happened and this is the way I react. Your moods take into account a whole lot of things that have happened and your anticipation of your long term future. What I am saying is that you can’t beat the system. If you try to be ultimately rational, in a way that denies the part of you that is still reacting to the world and figuring out where you are in it, and controlling your moods, it just isn’t going to work. Your moods will undo you.

PSP: You are talking about being flexibly irrational…or flexibly rational.

Dr. Epstein: To recognize, rationally, that we are emotional, intuitive creatures as well as having a logical mind.

PSP: Why do you think that people are so interested in the subject of success?

Dr. Epstein: I think there are two reasons which are absolutely different. I think that there are people who, in conventional terms, want to make more money, have more power, have greater prestige. Anything that can help them do that, they want to do. I think that there are a lot of others who are very concerned with what success really is, and ask are they caught in a misguided pursuit. They want to take a fresh look at it. They recognize what they have been taught about I.Q. and rationality and so on, isn’t quite right. These may be some very successful people in conventional terms who realize that something is wrong. They have always known that, but haven’t taken the time to think about it carefully. They want more information on it.

PSP: What part does self-esteem play in success?

Dr. Epstein: Again, I will have to say that there are two levels of self-esteem. One is in your rational mind. You can say, Gee, I am making $5 million a year and I am very respected by my colleagues and I am very good at what I do. I am a great person. My self-esteem is very high. But at the emotional level is the second mind, the mind that responds to experience and doesn’t take too seriously what the rational mind says. It may see it differently. If the person does not portray an image of real confidence and security, if he or she is easily threatened, is quick to take offense. If a person says I am too important to trifle with people like you. This very view that one is important and is susceptible to threat because of one’s importance, is an indication of low self-esteem in the second mind. If people feel really secure, they would not be that defensive. They could learn from other people, they would be more interested in other people and they would not need to aggrandize themselves. You can have absolutely opposite levels of self-esteem in one or the other of the two minds. The one that is going to be important is the feeling mind, or the experiential mind. Because one’s feelings of self-acceptance relate to the deepest levels of the self, they will eventually probably impact on other kinds of success as well. That person will be a different person, he will be less relaxed, will get where he or she is going in a different way if it is through a power orientation, rather than being spontaneous, warm, and loving, and so on. There are different ways of getting ahead in the world. Some ways may cost the individual who gets ahead a tremendous price. Others may be gratifying.

PSP: When you mentioned that our society’s interest in success is generally money, prestige and power, do you think this applies equally to men and women?

Dr. Epstein: Of course it is applying more and more to women. I think they have a mixed blessing in the recent emphasis on equality with men. They ought to take a good look at whether they want to buy into what man’s world has made for men. There may be some very important disadvantages as well as advantages. The issue for women, as I see it, is how to take what is worthwhile in the model and be sure they are treated with equal dignity and advantage, but not get so desperate to copy the advantages men have that they blindly buy into a system that is destructive in lots of ways.

PSP: Over the long run, I think to be a professional who has achieved success means giving service to someone else over the long haul and not just being out for number one.

Dr. Epstein: Making a lot of money for its own sake will work for some people, and maybe they make enough so that they don’t need it over the long haul, and can invest it. However, many people who do extremely well don’t do that with their money at all. I wonder if people are becoming more aware of thinking of success in terms of fulfillment instead of only making a buck. And recognizing that they can do both fulfilling themselves and being a human being that other people respond to. At the time of sweat shops in England, they were using little children for labor, there really was a great belief that to make a profit, you had to underprivilege other people. Now we are saying that at least professional salespeople aren’t thinking that way at all. They are thinking that you get ahead by doing worthwhile things for one another.

PSP: Can you test for success?

Dr. Epstein: Well, I can test for success in terms of how I define success…I am testing for how well people are thinking in ways that are likely to promote success according to my definition of success and that is success in living, not success in power or money and so on. I have made a beginning effort to measure the kind of thinking that promotes success in human terms self-fulfillment terms. But I think it also has implications for business and prestige. In other words, if you always see the glass as half empty rather than half full, not only is it going to make you unhappy, but it is going to be hard to be successful in a lot of endeavors because you won’t want to take risks if you think you are going to fail. Certain ways of thinking will influence success in general. One of our scales measures the little superstitions you may have developed. It predicts private superstitions much better than conventional superstitions like Friday the 13th. By private superstitions, I mean these little games that people play in their heads. Such as, if something very good happens, it will be balanced by something very bad. Because they are unrealistic, one pays the price for them. But people have this in the background, they don’t even know that it is affecting how they are functioning in the world.

Another scale that I have that also gets at how ineffective people’s thinking can be at the experiential level is the scale that I call categorical thinking. If you did it at the rational level, you’d have a low I.Q., but people can avoid doing it at the rational level, they make all kinds of fine discriminations in their conscious, rational thinking. But in their emotional thinking, they frequently are categorical. For example, they say that there are two kinds of people in the world: good people and bad people. Now if you think that way, it is going to affect your behavior with a lot of people. You are going to come to quick decisions. You are going to alienate certain kinds of people, you are going to be too trusting of other kinds. You have a crude system for making distinctions rather than a more finely tuned system.

PSP: And it doesn’t allow for flexibility in a given situation.

Dr. Epstein: And it doesn’t allow for learning. Once you have classified people, they’ve had it. It takes a tremendous amount of counterinformation to change your biased characterizations. It is simply bad thinking, but it is occurring at a more automatic level when people are hardly aware that they are making such assumptions. Rationally, they may deny it. Or they may completely agree with what I am saying, that it is important to make distinctions. Yet, when they emotionally react to people, it is as if there are only two kinds of people, good people and bad people. What I am talking about is how well the second mind is functioning. You can look at it in a completely rational way as I do and say that this is a completely lousy way to function and the other way is a more effective way to function. The weirdest thing about it is that we act as if this mind does not exist, even though it is the one that determines how we relate to the world and to other people on a daily basis. That is why the smart businessman who can do everything right in terms of handling his inventory, doing the right things with his employees, may make a mess of his family life which he has to handle in more emotional ways and gets more into this other mind.

PSP: Is success repeatable? Can you build one success on top of the other?

Dr. Epstein: You can simply make yourself into the most effective human being you can. That doesn’t guarantee anything but it sure increases the likelihood that things will work well. If you are run over by a car through no fault of your own or you are driving perfectly reasonably and some person comes down the wrong lane, no matter what your thinking is, you are going to be pretty messed up. There are things in life that we have no control over. We need to learn to discipline the second mind as well as we discipline the rational mind. By discipline I don’t mean putting on a straight jacket. You have to respect it, listen to it, provide it with experiences…it learns through experience mainly. So if you learn that you are a very suspicious person, it is hard to talk yourself out of it. You can talk yourself into trying to act as if you trust people. But if you know how the experiential mind works, that it is not going to be consistent until it has real experiences, then your rational mind is smart enough to get the set of experiences. Eventually, the intuitive, emotional, second mind will come around. You can work with it, you can discipline it, but not just through an act of will power.

PSP: Let me give a concrete example. A salesperson has set up five appointments in the course of the day. He is meeting with five different kinds of people. Let’s say he has met with two of them before and three of them are new prospects. He has done research on the companies, of the people whom he doesn’t know, and tried to find out as much as he can. However, he has a fairly small amount of information except that each company that he is calling on needs his product. From the time he prepares to drive to that prospect’s office, how should he prepare himself? Should he be watching his own feelings?

Dr. Epstein: He should do whatever seems to him reasonable to do at the moment. My point is that there is not a fixed formula of what to do, but that he should continually be able to learn from what he is doing, what works best and worst under the circumstances. Let’s say one prospect says to him, Look, we are not interested in buying from a new supplier. He goes away. Now what he should do is see what he can learn from that experience.

Let’s say he says, What an idiot I am, there I go, blowing it again. I really am a jerk. Lots of people tend to think in those self-critical terms. One of the implications of thinking that way is how constructive or destructive it is. He is already miserable and now he is simply adding insult to injury by thinking more in ways that make him more miserable and contribute nothing to improvement.*

He would observe what he is doing and say, Yes, I notice I am being self-critical, that is clearly destructive, I have got to work on stopping that. I don’t know where it came from, but it is there, and it is something I would be better off without. What can I learn from this experience about how to behave next time? I should be careful about that initial line I have.

Now, he may well fail again, as he has such a well-established habit. Again, if he uses the process of constructive thinking, he will be aware of what he did and he will not react negatively to himself as a person. He will say, There, again, I goofed as I did the first time. This is a well-ingrained habit and I am going to have to continue working on it. In other words, he will approach all tasks with the view of What can I learn from this?, without being harshly critical of himself but behaving in a way that will help him become the kind of person, or salesperson, he wants to be. My guess is that he will decide, by his own judgments, that being negatively disposed to himself is a very poor way of changing his behavior. If he were trying to help someone else, he wouldn’t say, You are a stupid fool. You shouldn’t have done that. He would probably be sympathetic and indicate how one should try to change the behavior instead of castigating the person.

Another thing that is very useful to know in applying this process is that your intellect can make very quick judgments. It can catch on with insight and with lightning speed. It can recognize a mistake and say, Don’t do that, do this. But your experiential system reacts to the accumulation of experience before your feelings start to change. As a result, people tend to become very impatient with themselves and they say, I know better, why do I go on doing this? What is wrong with me? The system that I have been using doesn’t work. This constructive thinking business is nonsense. Well, you have to know how the process works. Just like if you are dealing with a piece of machinery, you have to know how it works if you want to make it more efficient. The way it works, I have found, is that you don’t change overnight. Sometimes people can change overnight, but that is very unusual. What happens is that the degree to which the destructive feelings endure keeps getting shorter. First they may last for weeks, then for days, and then for hours. I think it is very important to understand the process through which the experiential mind learns and changes; it has to be respected for what it is. It works by its own rules.

PSP: Then you can kind of predict how it is working, and you can say, Oh, now I know it is coming, my mind is going to say to me all these horrible things about myself and I can let it go and I don’t really have to believe that.

Dr. Epstein: And also I know that it is going to be reduced as I keep working on it. Now I ask my students after they have been doing this for a few weeks, How long did the destructive thoughts and bad feelings last? I want you to keep track of that. Then they begin to understand what is happening. They say, I initially always react the same way, but you are right, it is not enduring for so long now. That makes them able to stick with it and learn something about the process in general.

PSP: It is almost like getting older in a short space of time.

Dr. Epstein: To me it is like getting wiser.

PSP: Thank you.