031 Optimize Your Words | Ft Gregg Hull
"I Like People More Than I Like Myself"
My friend Gregg Hull said that out loud like it was the most natural thing in the world. I like people more than I like myself. He wasn't looking for sympathy. He wasn't performing vulnerability. He was just being honest about something he'd lived with for nearly forty years — and hadn't fully named until recently. Gregg and I have been friends for almost twenty years. We've had a lot of conversations. But this one — the one we recorded for Episode 31 — might be the one I'll think about the longest.
How the Words Get In
Gregg grew up as a nerd. Star Wars. Lord of the Rings. Comics. All of it. And like a lot of kids who don't fit the mold, he found himself on the outside of the friend groups, never quite part of the clique. The words people said to him started to accumulate. And at some point — and this is the part that matters — those words stopped being things other people said to him and started becoming things he said to himself. That's the shift. Outside in, then inside out. By the time Gregg was an adult, the external voices had been replaced by an internal loop running on repeat. And here's what's insidious about it: you say more to yourself in your own head than any other human being will ever say to you. By a factor of ten. By some estimates, three thousand words to yourself before you even get out of bed in the morning. Most of those words, for most people, aren't kind. The pattern Gregg described isn't unique to him. The specific content might differ, but the greatest hits are pretty universal. I'm not enough. Nothing I do is good enough. You'll find someone better. I'm not worth it. These aren't random thoughts. They're beliefs. And beliefs don't just float around — they become your identity, the lens through which you filter every compliment, every act of love, every attempt by someone who cares about you to get close. That's why negative self-talk doesn't just hurt you in isolation. It pushes people away. When someone tells you you're amazing and your core belief is I am worthless, the only two explanations you can offer are: they're lying, or they don't know the real you. Either way, you get to keep your belief intact. Either way, the connection you needed to begin with gets blocked.
The Self-Fulfilling Proof
Gregg told me something on this episode that I think deserves to be sat with. He's been married three times. Both of his divorces ended in cheating. And he said — clearly, with the kind of clarity that only comes after years of honest reflection — that he believes those outcomes were shaped by the words he told himself before they ever happened. You're just going to cheat on me. You'll find someone better. You'll trade me in. He said it. Over and over. For years. And eventually, it happened. Now, I'm not saying this is mystical. But I don't think it has to be mysterious to be real. There's something in Episode 2 about this — the expectation effect, the nocebo effect — where the belief itself creates conditions for the outcome. You pull away. You signal your unworthiness. You sabotage before you can be rejected. You make the prophecy come true, not because the universe conspired, but because you did. Gregg is also a science person. He needs facts. And the thing that cracked something open for him was a study on plants — two identical setups, same light, same water, same everything. One plant received affirmation. The other received contempt. Over time, the affirmed plant flourished. The other withered and died. Same conditions. Different words. He said: go home and try it. Talk to one plant lovingly and neglect the other. Watch what happens. Then ask yourself which room you've been living in.
The Reverse Engineering Approach
When Gregg and I were talking about application, we both laughed at the same mental image — standing in front of a mirror in a Superman pose, rattling off affirmations while cringing at yourself. When you're deep in negative self-talk, that kind of advice sounds like a joke. So here's what I actually did. The negative thoughts felt completely overwhelming. Thousands of them a day — there was no way I was attacking that. So I reverse engineered it. I committed to one thing: I will not say these things out loud. That's it. Not fix my thoughts. Not reprogram my brain overnight. Just stop letting the words out of my mouth. And I recruited people. I told my wife and a few close friends — if you hear me say something negative about myself, call me out. Most people were thrilled. The accountability was real, and it was immediate. And something unexpected happened: stopping the verbal habit started reaching back into the thought patterns. Not quickly. Not all at once. But the spoke word is a feedback loop too, and cutting it off on one end started affecting the other. Glenn Lundy said it in a way that's stayed with me: you can't always control your first thought. But you can control your second one. The first one arrives before you have a chance to choose it. The second one is yours. Gregg's anchor was the gratitude practice — Danelle Delgado's four G's, which he now does every single day with his students as a first-year teacher. He said it doesn't pull you out of the pit, but it takes you away from the brink. Sometimes one thing you're grateful for is enough to interrupt the spiral. And over time, the direction of the snowball starts to change.
Three Things Worth Trying
These aren't prescriptions. They're things that worked, shared honestly. The first: list the negative things you actually believe about yourself. Write them out. Then rewrite each one in the affirmative — not I am not worthless but I am someone of value and purpose. A therapist told me once that the brain responds better to a positive pull than a negative restraint. Frame it toward what's true, not away from what isn't. I kept mine in my office and read it daily. Sometimes I'd read it aloud. Sometimes I'd highlight it and have my phone speak it back to me while I listened. The second: message people whose opinion you respect — people who have said good things about you that you've deflected or dismissed — and ask them directly: How do you see me? How do I add value to your life? Tell them it doesn't have to be long. I sent that message to about fifteen people. The responses were pages. Directions I hadn't expected. Themes I couldn't have predicted. I fed it all into ChatGPT and asked it to find the common threads and give me one page. I read that page every day too. The third: look at what the Creator says about you. Our church gave us a bookmark. You can ask ChatGPT to pull every chapter and verse about how God sees his people. Read it. For anyone whose identity is rooted in faith, replacing a false identity with what the one who made you says about you is not a small thing. It's a foundation. None of these are fast. Neurons that fire together wire together, and if yours have been firing the same way for twenty or thirty years, you are not going to undo that in two weeks of gratitude journaling. Be patient. Have grace for yourself. Which brings me to the last thing.
Grace Is Not Weakness
One of the most repeated things in this conversation — and in my life lately — is grace for yourself. Not lowering your standards. Not abandoning the drive to grow. Just recognizing that you are not the center of the universe, and that tripping over something or making a mistake does not define you permanently. Alex Hormozi has a version of this: in a hundred years, none of this will matter to anyone. So feel it, examine it, ask if it's true — and then let it go. Gregg said it plainly: it took him forty years to understand that. That a mistake wasn't the end. That he could try again. That other people weren't secretly keeping a score he couldn't see. What he's found since — as someone who's done the hard internal work — is that the words that changed inside started overflowing outside. He walks into his classroom now and his students gravitate toward him, not just the ones in his current class but ones from last semester who come back just to talk. People want to be around the person who speaks life. Even people who don't believe it about themselves still seek it out in others. That's the return on this work. It doesn't just change what you say to yourself. It changes what you have to give.
The Question That Started All of This
How many of you say things to yourself that you would never utter to another human being? That question was posed to me by a mentor a long time ago. I've thought about it hundreds of times since. Because the answer was obvious, and the implication took a while to land. If you wouldn't say it to someone you care about — if you'd refuse because it would damage them, because it would be unkind, because a good person doesn't talk to people that way — then why is it acceptable when the person on the receiving end is you? It isn't. That's the whole thing. Start there. Not with the Superman pose. Not with a hundred affirmations before breakfast. Just start asking: would I say this to someone I love? If the answer is no, you already know what to do next. Growth happens when you take action. Daily anything changes everything.
Resources
Related Episodes
Episode 2 — The Expectation Effect — The science behind how belief shapes reality. Directly connects to everything Gregg and Josh discuss here. → Watch on YouTube
Episode 21 — The Four G's ft. Danelle Delgado — The gratitude framework Gregg uses in his classroom every single day. → Watch on YouTube
Episode 4 — Progress Over Perfection — The perfectionism thread runs directly through this conversation. → Watch on YouTube
Episode 7 — Gratitude — The full episode on why gratitude works and how to build the habit. → Watch on YouTube
Books Mentioned
📖 The Expectation Effect — David Robson (affiliate link)
Listen to the Full Episode
This post is drawn from Episode 31 of the Optimizing Beyond Podcast: Optimize Your Words ft. Gregg Hull.
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Daily anything changes everything.