The Mechanism
The Curiosity Shop is my new favorite podcast.
The recent episode on metacognition explores how thinking about your thinking helps defend against protection patterns. How attending to and regulating cognitive processes interferes with threat-based responding.
And – I kept waiting for the part that never came.
This episode does something important: it names metacognitive regulation as the skill that separates effective leaders from ineffective ones. The skill that notices what your mind does, evaluates it, and changes accordingly.
Many people take their own thoughts as gospel. A thought appears, and therefore it must be true. The task most leadership development never addresses: creating distance between thoughts and identity.
Grant names Cognitive Behavioral Therapy as a mechanism for building metacognition. CBT is built on the assumption that you have dysfunctional thought patterns, and you need to monitor them, notice them, and adjust them.
He's right. And there’s more.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy was built on CBT. And it adds the missing condition: acceptance.
Some thoughts are sticky. Even after challenging, reframing, and gathering evidence against them – they come back.
When that happens, people often conclude they’re the exception. Therapy isn’t working because something is wrong with them. And what does that produce?
Shame.
Which, as mentioned before, isn't an effective motivator for behavior change. Shame activates protection – and shuts down the cognitive flexibility metacognition depends on.
That’s where acceptance becomes necessary. Because continuing to change the same thought – over and over, with the same outcome – is just annoying. It activates shame.
Brown gives a perfect example in the episode. She mentions that she doesn't adjust her response to a particular prediction because she would, "just be bullshitting to show how much I've grown." Grant acknowledges the underlying belief hasn't changed. Brown suggests maybe her anxiety disorder is still present.
I'd add: if she practiced acceptance of that belief – acceptance that it appears consistently and predictably, without treating its appearance as flawed – she might feel less shame about the fact that it's still there.
I have endless examples of this in my own life. Let's explore one that's relevant: the thought that I don't deserve to be in the leadership development space.
Is there evidence to support it? Yes. My PhD is in clinical psychology, not organizational psychology. I work with clinical populations, not leaders. I specialize in emotion dysregulation that ends lives, not companies.
At the same time, there is evidence for the contrary. I have expertise in behavioral science, relevant to both clinical and non-clinical populations. I'm certified in DBT, the most rigorous evidence-based approach to developing regulatory skills. And I'm genuinely passionate about spreading DBT to everyone, regardless of whether they meet criteria for a DSM diagnosis. Because I've witnessed – both professionally and personally – how these skills significantly improve self-confidence, behavioral alignment, and overall life satisfaction.
So when that thought appears, I can rationalize my way out of believing it. What I can't do is stop it from appearing.
I know that shaming myself for having the thought doesn't help. I know that genuine acceptance – that this thought will emerge consistently, predictably, and frequently — is the key to separating it from fact. That acceptance regulates the emotion and calibrates what I do next.
Metacognitive regulation requires more than awareness and calibration. It requires acceptance.
Brown notes that metacognitive skills can be deliberately practiced and improved. I’d note that acceptance can be too.
Grant makes the case for a broader shift – less of "how do I solve this specific problem," and more of "let's think effectively, regardless of what the problem is."
That’s what we need more of.
Grant raises important questions: How do we help people start thinking about their thinking? Recognize thoughts aren’t facts? Separate cognitions from reality?
These aren’t cognitive problems. They’re regulatory problems.
I have an (obviously unbiased) answer: DBT. Specifically, the skills training.
That's what this episode is calling for without naming it. The awareness, the regulation, the acceptance, the skill building, the tolerance for discomfort, the deliberate practice. DBT operationalizes all of it. The evidence has existed for decades, mostly in clinical psychology, mostly outside the leadership development conversation.
They reference what David Dunning names: "when you lack the skills to produce excellence, you usually also lack the skills to judge excellence." You can't just get better at judging. You have to build the skills to produce. Both are required to calibrate accurately.
Dunning-Kruger is not a knowledge problem. People who fall into that pattern aren't failing to gather enough information. They're failing to monitor their own internal states accurately enough to recognize the gap between what they know and what they think they know.
Metacognition alone doesn't do the work.
Adam makes this point himself – that you also have to build skills in the domain. Metacognition tells you something is wrong. It doesn’t tell you how to operate differently under pressure. That insight is necessary, not sufficient. You still need to know what an effective alternative looks like and execute it when your regulatory system is most taxed.
The competence requires both. Metacognition + skill building. Neither alone.
The part nobody tells leaders: in the short term, getting better at metacognition means getting worse at the skill you're trying to build.
When you take behavior that's been mostly automatic – how you handle conflict, how you communicate under stress, how protection patterns activate – and make it conscious, performance drops. The behavior that was smooth and fast becomes effortful and halting. You start noticing what's wrong with it.
This doesn't feel like progress. It feels like you’re getting worse.
But it is. This is natural skills development – you can't modify what you haven't observed. You have to bring the automatic into awareness before you can change it. The backward step is the mechanism for unlearning habitual protection patterns.
The discomfort is not a sign you're doing it wrong. It's a sign you're doing it.
I don't think leaders avoid this process because they're unwilling. I think they avoid it because no one prepared them for what learning looks like. They don't know how to identify, predict, and accept what lasting behavior change actually feels like before it resolves.
Brown names what's needed: normalize the discomfort of building metacognitive skills. Better skills + better metacognition = better calibration. Getting to better calibration requires tolerating the temporary regression that gets you there.
They make an analogy to professional athletes, who rely on training specifically to eliminate interference during performance. Leaders need the same. The training is separate from the performance. The performance reflects the training.
Tolerating the discomfort of skill development isn't incidental to this process. It is a skill. Without it, learning stalls. Another place where DBT helps.
Because unfortunately, like Grant mentions, our brains don’t come with an operating manual. We default to taking our thoughts as gospel. We need to intentionally figure out how our brain works, what it does well, and where it lacks. Something cognitive regulation in DBT teaches.
They discuss Tim Gallwey's formula: Performance = Potential − Interference.
The interference isn't general. It's specific, predictable, and pressure-activated. The threat-activated patterns that developed adaptively happen exactly when leaders need something different.
Acceptance makes the interference workable. Not eliminating the pattern. Recognizing it, naming it, and deliberately choosing what to do instead.