The ancient art of rhetoric has shaped political policies, influenced social movements, structured legal arguments, and molded cultural narratives throughout history. It’s been used for three thousand years to persuade other people to change their lives.
But what if you could use it to persuade yourself?
My guest today says you can. Jay Heinrichs is the author of Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion, and he explains how the same rhetorical techniques that great leaders and orators have used for millennia can be turned inward to help you change your life. We discuss how to identify your “soul” as your internal audience, use the concept of kairos to turn chaos into opportunity, create hyperbolic moonshot goals that inspire action even if you fall short, and employ ethos, pathos, and logos to achieve the habits and goals you aspire to. Along the way, we talk about how Jay used these self-leadership tools to go from barely being able to walk to attempting an athletic feat physiologists told him was impossible.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- Jay’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #639 — Why You Should Learn the Lost Art of Rhetoric
- AoM series on Rhetoric 101
Connect With Jay Heinrichs
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Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast. The ancient art of rhetoric has shaped political policies, influenced social movements, structured legal arguments, and molded cultural narratives throughout history. It’s been used for 3,000 years to persuade other people to change their lives. What if you could use it to persuade yourself? My guest today says you can. Jay Heinrichs is the author of Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion, and he explains how the same rhetorical techniques that great leaders and orators have used for millennia can be turned inward to help you change your life. We discuss how to identify your soul as your internal audience, use the concept of kairos to turn chaos into opportunity, create hyperbolic moonshot goals that inspire action even if you fall short, and employ ethos, pathos, and logos to achieve the habits and goals you aspire to. Along the way, we talk about how Jay used these self-leadership tools to go from barely being able to walk to attempting an athletic feat physiologists told him was impossible. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/selfpersuasion. All right, Jay Heinrichs, welcome back to the show.
Jay Heinrichs: Well, thanks, Brett. It’s nice to be back.
Brett McKay: So we had you on the show way back in 2020 to talk about your book, Thank You for Arguing, which is all about reviving the lost art of classical rhetoric to persuade others. You got a new book out, but this time it’s about using Aristotelian rhetoric to persuade ourselves to be better people. And you talk about at the beginning of the book that it was sort of a midlife rut that kickstarted you exploring whether you could use classical rhetoric to improve your life and become a happier person. Tell us about what was going on there.
Jay Heinrichs: Back in my late 50s, I was suffering from this illness that should be familiar to a lot of men our age, middle age and older. I was depressed and I was feeling very sorry for myself in part because I had this physical problem. It’s called snapping hip syndrome. It’s disgusting. The iliotibial band, which is this tendon that stretches from the knee to the hip, was catching on my hip bone on both sides. And what happens when that happens is you fall down. You literally can’t move. And the reason for this tends to be when you get a really tight butt, like your gluteal muscles are contracted all the time and stress can cause that. Sitting down too much can cause it. All kinds of things can. But basically what was causing it was that I was just tight, like all wound up. And so doctors had, we’d talked about surgery and they said maybe I’d be able to walk again afterwards. So that was out. And I tried pills. I tried everything. Nothing was working until one day my doctor said she’d found somebody who would understand me because I didn’t want to just be able to walk normally again.
I was able to walk with a limp, but then my hips would catch and I’d fall down again and not be able to walk at all. This guy had a new procedure who might be able to fix me. But I thought that wasn’t enough because in order to do the incredibly painful physical therapy, I wanted to do something more than just being able to walk. And I had been a trail runner back through my 30s and 40s, not a great athlete, but an enthusiastic one. And so I thought, how can I possibly talk myself into doing all that it would take? And my wife came up with this idea, which was to persuade myself. She had mentioned the work I’d been doing with clients. I’d worked with NASA, with Harvard fundraisers. And she said, “Have you thought about persuading yourself for once?” I hadn’t, but my wife is really smart. I do everything she says. And so I gave it a shot. I made that attempt.
Brett McKay: Okay, so you’re gonna get a treatment for your snapping hip syndrome. And this treatment, it involves getting a lot of painful injections. It’s very unpleasant. And then you have to do some arduous physical therapy on top of that. And you decide, if I’m gonna be doing all that, I wanna push myself not only to walk again, but to run again. So you’ve got this big challenge ahead of you and to convince yourself to take it on and stick with it, you decide to persuade yourself to do it. And at the beginning of the book, you say this bold statement, that if you’re going to improve yourself, get a little bit better in your life, whether you want to accomplish some goal you have or overcome some obstacle, the master key is self-persuasion. Why do you think self-persuasion is the master key for us to make changes in our lives?
Jay Heinrichs: When you think about it, in order to make a change, you have to do something. And usually that means changing your habits, right? Getting rid of the bad ones and acquiring new ones. And Aristotle was the philosopher of habit. His books, almost all of them talk about habits and how to do that. Why? Because habits put you on autopilot. You don’t have to make choices whether or not to exercise if you simply do it every day. I mean, you think about it, if you floss every day, that’s a lot easier than deciding whether you want to floss in one particular day, which is, when you think about it, kind of disgusting, right? And tedious, going in between every two teeth. The same thing works with diet or exercise or practicing a new instrument or learning a new language. All these things that make a change in your life for the better require a lot of discipline, a lot of motivation. And where do you get the discipline and motivation unless you can talk yourself into doing it? And that’s where persuasion comes in. So the idea my wife had was, what if I could use those tools of persuasion on audiences in general or markets, all the work I’d been doing over the decades, and applying them toward myself to gain these habits that will allow me to make the change I wanted? That’s what this is all about.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve noticed in my own life, any change I’ve made, it’s because I actually wanted it. Like I convinced myself this is what I need to do. And we can convince ourselves with the tools of rhetoric that people like Aristotle wrote about 2000 years ago. So let’s talk about some of this stuff. So typically when we think of rhetoric, it’s about persuading an audience. When we’re persuading ourselves, we’re the audience. But what exactly does that mean? Like what part of ourselves is doing the persuading? What part of ourselves is the audience?
Jay Heinrichs: Yeah, what is the audience when you’re the person doing the manipulation and at the same time the one being manipulated? So this was a big problem. I mean, when my wife said, “Why don’t you persuade yourself?” My first reaction was, well, how can I be the rhetorician and the audience at the same time? So I did a deep dive into Aristotle, reading books I really hadn’t gone into in the past. And I came across this really weird little book titled On the Soul. And so the way Aristotle describes it, your soul is this ideal version of yourself. It’s the person you wish you saw in the mirror. So you think of what’s an ideal Boy Scout, and I was a pretty unsuccessful Boy Scout myself, but I still remember what a Boy Scout is supposed to be. See if I can just from the top of my head.
Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s the Scout law, right?
Jay Heinrichs: Is that what it is? So a Boy Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. That almost duplicates what Aristotle wrote about as the ideal soul. It’s like the ideal Boy Scout. It’s not who you are, but it’s the soul that represents your best self as opposed to your daily self that eats Dunkin’ Donuts or whatever. So the question is, how do you find that soul? You know, where is it? One philosopher claimed to locate the soul. He said it’s in your pituitary gland. But a better way to do it, a more useful way to find your own soul, is to separate your wants from your truest needs. Separate your wants from your needs. This is what Aristotle tells us to do. So our daily self wants things, but those things make us fatter or less healthy, or simply, you know, flatters our ego. We take a job because we think it’s prestigious, and even though we know it will make us miserable. Your soul is telling you, “No, don’t do that,” whereas your daily self is saying, “I’m going to take this because then people will respect me.
Your soul, because it can be such a nag if you really pay attention to it, thinking, what do I really need? What is it that’s important to me? That can be pretty annoying. I mean, when I was working on my own soul or discovering it, I kind of wished my soul would do something stupid and embarrass itself in front of strangers, you know, the way I do. But my soul is my audience, and my job is to convince myself that I’m worthy of that audience. Like, I’ll show it. I really can live up to it. And I found that to be a really powerful tool because it allowed me to use all the other tools of rhetoric, sort of thinking of my soul as an extension of me or maybe something that’s deeply internal to me, but something that’s a little different from my daily self. And that way, I had an audience I could persuade.
Brett McKay: Okay, so make sure I understand this. The daily self is the audience and your soul is the persuader, or is it the opposite?
Jay Heinrichs: It’s the opposite. So your daily self is the one every day that tries to prove you’re worthy of your soul. So, if you’re about to skip a workout, say, you say to yourself, “What’s my soul going to think?” Because I need to convince it that I have the kind of character that’s worthy of it. And at the same time, there are other things you can do to sort of manipulate the soul, and I’m hoping we can get into that. And those are the tools of ethos, pathos, and logos.
Brett McKay: I love that. So you’re looking for a way to help yourself admire yourself, in a way.
Jay Heinrichs: Exactly. And when you’re helping yourself admire yourself, that admiring self is your soul. It’s your better you. It’s like the really, the coolest, most awesome, impressive part of you that deep down is who you truly are.
Brett McKay: Okay, so your soul is the best part of yourself. That’s your audience, and your day-to-day self is the persuader. And you want to use your day-to-day self to persuade your soul that you’re worthy of it. And one rhetorical tactic that’s inspired by the ancient Greeks that can help us persuade ourselves is this idea of kairos. It’s K-A-I-R-O-S. What’s kairos?
Jay Heinrichs: Kairos is so cool. And it’s funny that so few people study it. I kind of hope they’ll start. So kairos is what helps you determine what your goals are and what your big achievements are going to be. So kairos is the art of opportunity. And it’s a way of interpreting the most chaotic moments in their lives. Now, I think we’re going through, as the world and nation in particular, we’re going through a very chaotic time. We don’t know what’s going to happen. Things are very confusing. Pure chaos. Now, what’s interesting is the ancient Greeks and Romans actually saw chaos as an opening. So a kairotic moment is this time of crisis, this chaotic moment. Those who can keep their heads can push through this opening, this gap. And in fact, the original kaos in Greek, where we get chaos from, means gap. It doesn’t mean horror. It means something that just is something you need to go through. And if you look at great moments in history or great inventions in technology, they tend to happen at the most chaotic times. And in rhetoric, that’s called the kairotic times. It’s the best time to take action.
So now where Aristotle comes in on all this is in his theory of rhetoric. So one way to understand kairos is to think in terms of the tenses. So, and Aristotle described the rhetoric of each tense, past, present, and future. So the past tense, if you’re thinking about chaos and kairotic times, like the time we’re in right now, we tend to think about going back to the past and somehow restoring the better days. But the past tense also has to do with crime and punishment. Like who made this happen? And they should be punished. What went wrong? Who’s to blame? Now that can be useful. It’s not entirely something to ignore. But then also people use the present tense, which is all about values, what’s right and wrong, who’s good and who’s bad. So we tend to attack people who are the bad people who caused all the things, the bad things we think are happening today. And Aristotle actually said, “If you want to make a change in your own life, as well as in the world, you need to focus on the future.” And Aristotle called this kind of rhetoric that focuses on the future, deliberative rhetoric.
So you’ve got the past, the present, and the future. Which is going to actually fix things? That’s what you need to focus on. And so I tell a story in my previous book, Thank You for Arguing, about how my son George, when he was 15, used up all the toothpaste in the bathroom. And when I blamed him, he was making fun of me because he had heard me lecture about rhetoric at the dinner table for years. But he said, when I yelled at him saying, “Who used up all the toothpaste?” He said, “That’s not the point, is it, Dad? The point is, how are we going to keep this from happening again?” Now see what he was doing? He was switching the tense from the past tense, crime and punishment, to the future tense. How are we going to fix things? And by the way, if you’re ever in trouble for something, or someone blames you for something, or calls you a name or whatever, you can say, “Call me whatever you want, or I may or may not have screwed up, but how are we going to fix things?” That’s deliberative rhetoric. And in a time of chaos, these kairotic moments, when we have a tendency to panic, return to the old days, or get angry at people, deliberative rhetoric lets us say, “How are we going to fix things?
How can I use this time to make things better, or to get better myself?” And so back in my own kairotic moment, when I was having this late midlife crisis, my aging body, and this depression I was in, I found very confusing. This doesn’t seem to be me. Deliberative rhetoric and this idea of kairos made me reframe the situation. I thought, I’m not drowning in a whirlpool. Maybe I’m looking at a gap. And the question is, how do I get through to the other side of that gap?
Brett McKay: I love that. So yeah, instead of thinking about, “Oh, if I could only just go back to when I was 30 or 40, or what happened? What could I have done differently?” Using that past tense in this kairotic moment you had, you thought, you focused on the future. What can I do now? What can I do to make things better?
Jay Heinrichs: Exactly. And it’s a great way to understand what the situation really is without getting all panicky and negative about it. And yeah, if I wanted to go back and be a not-so-awesome 30-year-old, it’s, in a way, thinking about this kairotically in terms of navigating some gap. You know, the gap was between my youth and old age. And what gets me through that is being an awesome old guy.
Brett McKay: And so anyone can use this. So let’s say you’re a guy and you’re in a job that’s just making you miserable. You can see this instead of like, it’s just terrible. It’s like, this is a moment of kairos. This is an opportunity to exercise my ability to harness the future, like exercise my ability to improvise and take action.
Jay Heinrichs: Right. And one way to do that is if you’re thinking in terms of gaps, what exactly are the gaps? First of all, what’s making you most unhappy at work? Can you fix that while remaining in the same job? And if you can’t, what are the solutions? And the other thing is, what’s blocking you? What’s blocking you from getting another job? What’s blocking you from fixing the things that make you unhappy at work? So you think in terms of obstacles, the obstacles don’t necessarily prevent you because there’s always some space between them. That’s what chaos is all about. And kairos allows you not just to choose where the gaps are, but when’s the best time to act.
Brett McKay: So another rhetorical tool you talk about that we can use to persuade others, but we can maybe use to persuade ourselves, are tropes. I want to talk about a specific trope here in a bit, hyperbole, but just generally, what is a rhetorical trope?
Jay Heinrichs: A trope is anything that plays pretend. I mean, if you see it that way, it pretends something is not exactly what it is. So a metaphor is the most common trope. If I say, “The moon is a balloon,” you know the moon is not some inflatable bit of rubber, but it’s like one. And so if I say it is one, you start seeing the moon a little bit differently. You think about it floating. There’s a lot of unconscious brain work that goes on if somebody uses a metaphor. Then there’s other metaphors like irony, where you pretend to be serious when you’re saying something else. I mean, every teenager uses irony when somebody drops a tray in the cafeteria and they yell, “Nice,” as if they’re complimenting the person. I mean, the Southerners, especially Southern women, will say, “Bless her heart,” you know, not exactly praising. So those are what tropes do. They pretend one thing while actually meaning another, and they can actually change people’s whole views of reality.
Brett McKay: Okay. So one trope that you used is hyperbole. Before we talk about how you used it on yourself, hyperbole on yourself, what are some examples of great rhetoricians using hyperbole in their speeches?
Jay Heinrichs: Oh, my gosh. So hyperbole is the trope of exaggeration, where you say something is bigger or more important or tinier, for that matter, than what it really is in real life, and then pretend that that exaggeration is a true thing. So if you look at every great successful revolution of every kind, they start with a hyperbole. I mean, you think about, well, the American Revolution, this gaggle of British colonies, not all of whom got along all that well with each other, decided that they were going to push off the greatest military power in the world, the United Kingdom, and at the same time create a brand new political system that everybody around the world will someday imitate. That is totally hyperbolic. So when you think about it, all the great visionaries were hyperbolists. Think of Apple Computer. That arose out of this crazy hyperbole that people would have their own personal computers at a time when massive mainframes and terminals maybe in everybody’s home was the vision of the day. So, you think about that. If you ever want to do something amazingly great, first you have to sort of believe in the impossible, and that by definition is a hyperbole, if you can get people to believe it. That’s a trope.
Brett McKay: Another famous hyperbole, JFK’s moonshot speech, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade,” because we had just put someone into space, and the idea we’re going to get someone on the moon, that’s big.
Jay Heinrichs: In a decade.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Jay Heinrichs: That is like, and we didn’t even have the technology to do that. Yeah, I mean, that’s brilliant. It’s a good, and you know, part of that speech that’s really interesting is he said, “We’re going to do this and do the other hard things,” he said. What’s really interesting about that is one way I started thinking about the hyperbole is if you have this grand moonshot goal, it actually helps you think about all the other hard things. It makes you believe you can do the other hard things as well, even if you’re failing at that one goal. I mean, imagine if we didn’t reach the moon in 1970, but it took a few years more. Even then, we would have been so far ahead in technology and beating the pants off the Soviet Union and all that good stuff that it would make us believe we could do other things. And the fact is we did achieve it, and it made us believe in all the other things as well, that we could do the hard things in general.
Brett McKay: So how did you use hyperbole in your quest to maybe overcome your snapping hip syndrome?
Jay Heinrichs: The etymology of hyperbole comes from two Greek words, hyper, which means above or beyond, and bállō, which means to throw. So bállō is actually where we get the English word ball. So hyperbole literally translated means to throw beyond. A hyperbole throws beyond actuality, which is kind of this amazing work in the imagination, but it’s more than that. And I thought personally, in my case, what if I created my own like capital H hyperbole? I would create an image of myself as this record-breaking athlete. Now, I never was a great athlete. I was an enthusiastic outdoorsman at best. But I would prove, you know, even though I couldn’t walk well and it looked like my condition may worsen to the point where I’d be in a wheelchair, I would prove my hyperbole by being the first person over 50 to run his age up this classic mountain here where I live in New Hampshire. Olympic skiers had been using it for years to test their fitness. Only a dozen people had ever run their age, which means reaching the top of this mountain in fewer minutes than their olden years. And I’d be the first old person to do it, the first over 50.
Never mind the fact that doctors had told me I’d never run again. And two physiologists told me that even if I were a good old athlete, they thought it was physically impossible to do because of the amount of oxygenation you need to have in order to run up this very steep, difficult mountain in fewer minutes than I was old in years. And that was to be my hyperbole. This was what was going to get me to do all the painful training over that time. But so just to make this clear, that was my hyperbole. But what I suggest to readers of the book is that this isn’t a fitness book. It’s about creating your own hyperbole, to create something exciting, some crazy big goal, with the idea that even if you fail to achieve it, you’re still way ahead. It’s this great motivational technique. So, imagine giving a speech in a foreign language. Instead of just learning the language, going someplace and delivering this scary talk, or learning to play the guitar and then busking performing on the streets of Manhattan, or learning to cook, and not just cooking a decent meal, but serving haute cuisine to a whole bunch of snobs to raise money for a good cause or something. Those are all hyperboles. And my book actually offers kind of a technique to come up with your own.
Brett McKay: I love that idea of creating a moonshot for yourself because it can be inspiring, and you might reach it. You reach it great, but I think the benefit is it’ll get you to do those things that are good for you. Along the way, you’ll be better for even just attempting that big moonshot hyperbole goal.
Jay Heinrichs: Exactly.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I think that’s a cool tactic. We’re going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So let’s talk about another way you used Aristotle’s ideas of rhetoric on yourself. I think we talked about this last time in our last conversation about rhetoric. It’s the three means of persuasion. We got ethos, pathos, and logos. Let’s talk about ethos first, because Aristotle thought that was the most powerful, most important one. Recap, what is ethos? And then talk about how did you use that means of persuasion on yourself?
Jay Heinrichs: So Aristotle’s ethos is your projected character. It’s what people think of you, or it’s your brand. It’s whether your audience likes and trusts you. And this is why Aristotle thought it was most powerful, because if you like and totally trust somebody, you’re really likely to basically do what they say. That’s your leader. So now the ideal ethos, Aristotle says, three characteristics. And of course, he said them in Greek, but I translated them from the Greek and simplified them as what I call craft, caring, and cause. So first comes craft. You want your audience to think you know what you’re doing. You have the knowledge and the experience to solve whatever problem there is at hand. That’s craft. The caring part of it means your audience thinks you have only their best interest at heart. You’re selfless. You’re totally not selfish. It’s all about them. Then there’s cause, which has to do with values, with your audience believing you share those same values and that you live up to them. You’re a good person, right? You have a good soul. Now, when it comes to how I persuaded myself, that audience, as we talked about earlier, is my very own Aristotelian soul.
And my job was to convince that soul that I have an ethos that’s worthy of it, that I have the craft, that I knew how to get in shape and knew how to develop the habits, that I was selfless about it. This wasn’t about what I wanted from day to day. I wanted to read books with a cat in my lap. That’s what I really wanted. But my need was deeper. I wanted to be able to run my age. And then came the cause part, what I deeply valued. And that’s what connected me most closely with my soul. And that was the biggest secret of all, this idea that I was projecting a worthy ethos to my soul that allowed me not just to create these habits and believe in them that they could actually work, but to stick to them from day to day.
Brett McKay: Yeah. One of the tools you use to do that is decorum, correct?
Jay Heinrichs: Yeah. So decorum is how you make your audience think you’re one of them. And actually several days a week during the school year, I talk to high school and college classes and law school classes. And I talk to students whose classes have adopted my books. Now, the problem I have is that my children are older than these teachers now. And so how do I make people believe I’m one of them? And so there are certain techniques you can do. One is to understand their language, not necessarily use every word of it. But the most important thing I tell people is say before you talk to any kind of audience, “I’m going to love these people.” And projecting love, believe it or not, which honors your audience and makes you thrilled to be with them, makes you appear thrilled to be with them, actually works. So now how do you do that with your own soul? I decided that the most important thing was to try to love my soul as much as I could. And I know this is getting a little squirrely here, but really what it comes down to is another tool of rhetoric that Aristotle describes in many of his books, which is this idea of phylos.
And phylos is this idea of ultimate friendship, of being willing to do whatever it takes for the other person. And that’s partly what caring is, but it’s also about what decorum is. So decorum is this idea that you’re one of them, you’re very close to them, and you’ll do anything for them. So if you think of your soul as like your very best friend, and you’ll do anything for it, and you know at the same time your soul will back you up at any time and forgive you for these temporary lapses, which are inevitable, then that’s decorum. That’s acting as if you’re part of the tribe, with you and your soul the only members.
Brett McKay: And it sounds like one thing that you might need to do if your day-to-day self isn’t there to where your soul self is at yet, is fake it. Like if you want to be healthy, think of yourself as an athlete, but you’re not there right now. Just do athlete things. And then your soul will be like, “Oh, hey, this guy, this guy’s trying. Like he’s trying to be me here, and I’m gonna like this guy.”
Jay Heinrichs: Oh yeah. So weightlifters describe this phenomenon. It’s a joke, but they call it Invisible Lat Syndrome. So your back muscles from a whole lot of pull-ups get a little bit bigger. So you walk around as if they’re 10 times the size they are with your arms out as if you’re a well-armed policeman or something. So walking around like that actually can convince you. And one of the things that I found myself doing, this is faking until you make it, but it’s also a kind of decorous act. It’s pretending I’m so close to my soul, I’m already there. And that was, I would, when I still found it a little bit difficult walking after this procedure this doctor gave me, which was weeks long and involved a lot of very painful shots to flood the zone of my nervous system so that my gluteal muscles will stop contracting. I still was walking with kind of a limp. So I turned it into a sort of swagger. So I walked around as if I was like this really cool athlete instead of this old guy with a limp. And eventually as I overcame the limp itself, in the meantime, my brain had changed and I really kind of believed that I was capable of being more of an athlete than I was in reality. So that’s faking until you make it, but it’s also getting close to my soul, like what my soul really wanted to think of myself as.
Brett McKay: You know who I think did this? Ernest Hemingway. So I’m watching that Ken Burns documentary on Hemingway. And one thing I’m watching about right now is how Hemingway, there’s like this myth around Hemingway, but he created that myth. Like he had this idea of like ideal Hemingway. And then I think he tried to do the things that ideal Hemingway would do. And I think it got him into trouble, but I think that’s what he was doing. He had this ideal of himself, his best self, and then he tried to do those things, whether that was hunting in Africa, boxing, just doing all those manly Ernest Hemingway things.
Jay Heinrichs: That is such a great example. And so in rhetoric, there’s this term called actio, which is Latin for acting. And it means acting in both senses of the word. It means playing pretend, like you’re acting a part, but also means action. So to project a certain character before you take an action allows yourself to sort of play a role that then you try to take on in real life. And Hemingway is a brilliant example of that.
Brett McKay: Okay, so we talked about ethos. Let’s talk about the next means of persuasion, which is pathos. What is pathos? And then how did you use it on yourself?
Jay Heinrichs: So pathos has to do with emotion. And in rhetoric, it has to do with your ability to change your audience’s mood. So there are lots of tools doing that. And one that worked really well for me. So by the way, to change my mood from depressed loser to like aspiring athlete and optimist. One of the things that I found that really worked was self-deprecating humor. And instead of telling myself what a loser I was every time I failed at something or made a mistake, I learned to laugh at those mistakes and sort of forced myself to do it until I did it naturally. And I actually, this is still working for me. The other day, I was asked to do a favor for a friend. I live on 150 acres and I cut a lot of my own firewood. So I’m pretty good with a chainsaw. And so this guy asked me if I would cut down a cherry tree at his condo development. So cherry trees are awful to cut down. They lean in all directions and you never know which way the damn thing’s gonna fall. And here it is, if this tree fell the wrong
Way, it would crash through a stranger’s glass door on the ground floor. So, and of course I’m cutting this thing. I made a big mistake in the angle I was cutting and my chainsaw got stuck. And I’d forgotten to bring my ax and the other tools you need like wedges to get your chainsaw unstuck. Anyway, so the chainsaw was simply stuck. I live 40 minutes away. I didn’t have time to go back and get the other tools. So I drove home, leaving the chainsaw embarrassingly in the tree so that everybody in this condo development could see some idiot had left a chainsaw in a tree that was partly cut. That night it got windy and the tree fell, missing this glass door by like two inches. I mean, it was right there with a chainsaw still sticking out of it in the worst possible way so everybody could see it. I came back the next day with my ax and my wedges and got the chainsaw out and cut the tree up and everything was fine. Now, before I started practicing the rhetoric on myself, I would have said, “You can never face these people again.
Just leave the chainsaw there and buy a new one.” And instead I thought, this is just a sort of idiotic thing you do, Jay. And the great thing is you always fix it. So I laughed, I went back and fixed it and I kind of felt better for it. And nobody in the condo, they were very kind people. They watched me as I cut up the tree and nobody was laughing at me. God bless them all.
Brett McKay: Another example of a famous person who maybe they were using pathos on themselves and they just didn’t know it, FDR, Franklin Roosevelt. So we all know he had polio. He couldn’t walk, he was in a wheelchair. And I remember reading a biography about him. And when he was in his braces, he would often fall down, especially on like slick marble floor because the metal would just scrape and he would just fall down. And instead of engaging in self-pity and just like, “Oh, I’m such an idiot.” He just acted like it wasn’t a big deal. And he kind of kept that smile on his face and he’d say, “Hey, can someone help me up here?” Like people knew that he couldn’t walk, but he just had that big grin and just exuded levity and confidence.
Jay Heinrichs: Yeah. And so, you know, it’s interesting. You see the same thing in toddlers. Where, you know, a two-year-old falls down, which happens often, and scrapes their knee or whatever. And you always see this moment where the toddler looks around at the adults, especially the parent, and sees their reaction first. And if the parent looks horrified or rushes, “Oh my gosh, my baby is hurt,” the kid will cry. And when, I’m not sure this shows good parenting on my part, but when my two children were toddlers, when they fell down and there’d be that moment, a kind of kairotic moment when you think about it, like what’s the action to take here? I would quick look at the concrete or the floor or the ground, whatever, and I’d check and see if it was okay, which would make the kid angry more often than not, but much less rarely cry. Their mother would come rushing to them and they would always cry. And there’s something about doing that to yourself where are you going to be the one who sort of jokingly checks the floor or are you going to be the one who immediately thinks, this is awful?
And that’s a way to change your mood. Now, there’s another tool I have to talk about, which is actually more effective, which is repeating the same things over and over again, to have an expression when you’re in a bad mood that improves your mood. And this is where those cheesy affirmations, the stuff they used to sell, like eight track tapes for you to play in your car.
Brett McKay: Oh yeah, like Stuart Smalley, I’m good enough, I’m smart enough and gosh darn it, people like me.
Jay Heinrichs: Yeah. And you know what? I mean, there are ways to do that. And I’m hoping we can talk about a way to use a particular rhythm to do that, which rhetoricians invented many, many years ago. But the big thing is repeating them. And there’s something that neurobiologists and neurologists have discovered, which is there’s a part of your brain, see if I can remember the term, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. That’s a part of your brain that actually controls our view of reality. And it also is very responsive to repetition. So if you repeat things often enough, or if you see things often enough on social media, even if they’re untrue, you start to believe them. It becomes your reality. And it’s that part of your brain, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, that actually starts changing the world for you. And actually repeating these stupid affirmations to yourself stops making them seem stupid if you repeat them often enough, and it becomes your idea of reality. And you can do it in very specific ways that actually change the way you see things happening around you and see the way you’re actually behaving. Now, so beyond that and what we call affirmations today, in the old days, they called charms, which were expressions that actually made magic happen.
And so to this day, you can find, people dig up all the time these leaden objects with expressions written on them that would cure people or curse people, whatever. These were charms, but they were really repeated things. You were supposed to say them over and over again, and it becomes your idea of reality. You could make magic happen. You repeated things often enough that would change reality. And rhetoric does the same thing by changing your brain. Now, there’s another factor here in terms of pathos, and that is you can actually make yourself into a kind of charm. And Aristotle wrote about this. The perfect ethos actually has a magical effect on an audience, which is charisma. And the word charisma comes from the Greek word for charm. So a charming person originally meant someone who had sort of a magical effect on people. And you see that with some Hollywood actors or when politicians like JFK or Martin Luther King, they were seen often enough in a perfect kind of character, at least according to their followers, enough that people changed the way they saw them and saw reality as a result. Those are the most powerful tools of pathos have to do with charms and repetition.
Brett McKay: So you mentioned there’s a specific way you can formulate those mantras or charms that make them more effective. What is that way?
Jay Heinrichs: Well, there’s something called the paen, P-A-E-N, which originally was a god that would protect soldiers from harm in ancient times. So when they would run in a battle, they would pray to the goddess paen. So they realized that if you do this with a certain rhythm, and actually, Marcus Tullius Cicero, this ancient orator and one of the great rhetoricians, wrote about this. If you repeat it with a series of short and long syllables, that becomes that much more effective. It’s more convincing. There’s something in the brain that’s not fully understood yet, I think someday it will be, that allows you to do this. So in Homer, he used paens a lot, like golden-haired far shooter, son of Zeus. And you repeat that often enough, and you really believe that this was a real character. Now, you can see that in basketball games in the Ivy League. People will be chanting, “Repel them, repel them, make them relinquish the ball,” which is silly. But on the other hand, it has this particular rhythm that actually works. So these charms that people dig up actually had these same rhythms on it, these paen rhythms.
So I use them myself, and I repeat them over and over again. And these rhythms become memorable. And so my own posture tends to be terrible. So I tell myself all the time, head on a swivel, not in my lap. That’s short and long rhythms with this kind of convincing way. When I was running up this mountain, this mountain Moosilauk in New Hampshire to try to run my age, in training for that, I repeat things to myself like, “My legs love rocks. I flow up rocks.” And stupid as that was, my brain changed to the point where my legs were loving rocks, which are the most horrible thing in the world. I mean, these were boulders I was running up. And I actually was convincing myself that I wasn’t kind of hopping in a weird, unrhythmic way. I was flowing up those rocks. That’s where the peon comes in.
Brett McKay: All right, so come up with your own charm by using a paen. So it starts with like a long sentence and a short sentence? Is that like the rhythm you want?
Jay Heinrichs: A long And short phrase and syllables. It’s short syllables and long syllables. You don’t have to be too precise about it. But marketers have used this all the time. I mean, the New York Times came up with the first great paen logos. All the news that fit to print. That long and short syllables that convinced people that this was a newspaper of record. And Lay’s potato chips. Bet you can’t eat just one. The quicker picker upper for Bounty Towels. I could go on.
Brett McKay: No, okay. I love that.
Jay Heinrichs: But it convinced people. It made billions for marketers and companies.
Brett McKay: Yeah, so find one for yourself and repeat it to yourself, even though it might seem silly. It can work.
Jay Heinrichs: Yeah, and part of this is talking about mood. Do it ironically in the beginning. Like smile while you do it, because it’s going to be stupid. And then repeat it often enough that it’s not stupid. I mean, another thing about irony we’re talking about. Irony is another trope. Whenever I completed these horrible workouts I had to do, I was working out four to six hours a day in order to get myself into condition where I could run my age up this mountain. My wife, bless her, would always ask me how it went. And instead of saying, “It sucked, what do you think?” I would say, “Refreshing,” ironically. And, you know, after a while, I never truly believed my workouts, I still don’t, are refreshing. Part of me kind of thought they’re not so bad, they actually make me feel better in the long run.
Brett McKay: Okay, so we talked about pathos. Let’s talk about logos. That’s logic. So what is Aristotelian logos? Because it’s not how we think it is. I think typically we think of logos has got to be these iron clad arguments, no fallacies. Aristotle didn’t think that when it comes to logos.
Jay Heinrichs: No, not when it comes to rhetorical logos, which isn’t pure logic, in fact, it can be the opposite. You know, fallacies can actually convince people, but even as formal logic has confused people for centuries.
Brett McKay: Oh man, there’s a period I went through Aristotle’s like works Nicomachean Ethics is great, metaphysics, interesting, and then I get to his book about syllogisms. I’m like, oh, just started snoring. This was not fun.
Jay Heinrichs: Oh God, topics, even worse.
Brett McKay: Yeah.
Jay Heinrichs: You know, even Sherlock Holmes gets it wrong, gets Aristotelian logic wrong. He talks all the time about using deduction to solve crimes when he’s actually using induction, which is a kind of logic that gathers facts and uses them to make a conclusion. And actually, I talk about formal logic that way because actually Aristotelian logic can let us deal with this firehose of information and fake news that comes to us through our devices. Aristotle taught us how to interpret facts and determine their value and reach conclusions without getting all emotional about it. And that can actually help in terms of improving your mood and not think that everything in the world is going entirely wrong. But using illogic to convince yourself to do the habits your soul tells you you need to do can work even better. So some fallacies I found work great on me. One of the best was the fallacy of antecedent, which has to do with, if something has always been done this way, it always will be. Or if something went well, it always will be. Or if something has always gone wrong, it always will.
So I happen to be an absolute master, and I don’t mean to brag, but nobody’s better, at least in my household of two people, at loading the dishwasher. I am brilliant at it. My wife is terrible. I swear she stands back and throws dishes into the thing. It’s hurt our marriage slightly, but now I’m the dishwasher loader and she’s allowed me to do it. But here’s the thing, this leads to a second fallacy, which is the false analogy. So I’m good at loading the dishwasher. Therefore, I’m brilliant at organization and problem solving. Because I can load the dishwasher, I could probably run a corporation, right? Same thing. So this is a fallacy. But that same kind of combination of things, I’m really good at this one thing. Now think of an analogy, however far away from that, that lets you overcome imposter syndrome or convince yourself you’re qualified to apply for a job that might otherwise seem above your station. So these fallacies can really work, again, if you repeat them often enough that you actually believe in them.
Brett McKay: Okay, so with logos, we’re gonna use logical fallacies for a positive end, convincing ourselves that we can do something, our moonshot goal that we have.
Jay Heinrichs: Exactly. And so that’s the thing, that moonshot goal, if you do it, if you set it up right, is impossible. So it’s fallacious logic or illogic that convinces you that you can even do it. Because if it is literally impossible, you won’t be able to do it. But to believe that it’s impossible and then to believe you can do it, that’s the greatest kind of fallacy.
Brett McKay: So we’ve talked about some of the rhetorical tools in your book, there’s a lot more. But I’m curious, how did your experiment go in using rhetoric and self-persuasion in overcoming this snapping hip syndrome you had?
Jay Heinrichs: Well, so I decided I would make the actual attempt on one day, my 58th birthday, August 27th.
Brett McKay: That’s Kairos.
Jay Heinrichs: That’s Kairos, very good. That was my one opportunity. I was gonna do it or I was gonna fail. And I deliberately, to test the tool, this whole experiment was to test the tools, to see if they would work, what would work, what didn’t. And I thought putting as much pressure on myself as possible would be one way to test the tools. And so one day, my birthday. Besides, when I turned 58, that gave me an additional minute to run my age, which meant running it in less than 58 minutes. So I’d have another minute. And for every minute less than 58 that it took me to make it to the summit, I would declare myself that much younger in years. So when you think about it, it makes as much sense as declaring your age in terms of number of years. So to prepare for that day, I had spent nine months in training, four to six hours a day, after this horrible procedure with this orthopedist who injected me with these hundreds of shots of dextrose, sugar water, to flood my nerves with pain. So I did everything I could with all these things of rhetoric.
And then on that one day, at 6 o’clock in the morning, I was at the trailhead of this mountain, 3.7 miles, 2,800 feet of elevation up these very slick rocks with a river running in waterfalls down beside it. Very difficult kind of run. And the conditions were bad. It was way too warm and humid. And the older you get, the harder it is for your body to deal with heat and to allow yourself to oxygenate. And the whole way up, I didn’t look at my watch the entire time. When I got to the summit and I hit the button on my watch, I didn’t even look then. I just realized it didn’t matter so much what my time was, whether I’d gotten younger by running my age or not. I discovered, and this is absolutely true. I know this sounds self-helpish, but it’s true. I was happier than I’d been in years. And that effect has lasted ever since. And this is years later. It’s taken me a long time to do the research to complete this book. But the rhetoric itself had worked. And when I looked at my watch, I then discovered, well, I won’t tell you. It’s going to be a mystery, you have to read the book.
Brett McKay: This is awesome. So it sounds like you can use Aristotle’s rhetoric to persuade yourself. So we encourage people to go check out your book. So where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Jay Heinrichs: Well, I have a Substack newsletter. If you look up my name, you’ll find it. It tells all about the tools of rhetoric and self-persuasion. But I also have a website called ArgueLab, all one word, arguelab.com.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Jay Heinrichs, thanks for the time. It’s been a pleasure.
Jay Heinrichs: Brett, this is a real pleasure. Thank you.
Brett McKay: My guest today was Jay Heinrichs. He’s the author of the book Aristotle’s Guide to Self-Persuasion. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, jayheinrichs.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/self-persuasion, where you find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give us an email on podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member if you think we’re something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay. Remind you to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.
