1152: The Five Essential Steps to Getting to Where You Want to Go with Dr. Henry Cloud

Pete Mockaitis
Henry, welcome!

Henry Cloud
Good to be here, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting with you. I loved your book Boundaries, and we’re talking about your latest, Your Desired Future. Could you kick us off by sharing, perhaps, one of your most intriguing, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about this tricky gap between intention and achievement?

Henry Cloud
Well, it’s something that we all experience and something that we notice in others who, whenever we’re at one place, it may be in your career and it may be in your life and it may be even in a relationship, “Well, here’s where we are,” and we want to be in a desired future or a different place, right?

And we got to work on it, and it doesn’t happen. And what was kind of the sort of you call it the awakening, was that I noticed that, when people would put hard work in things and they weren’t getting there, they started asking the question, “Well, what’s missing? And is there a universal path that just has to be included in getting anything from here to there?”

And that’s what started the study on it many, many years ago. And that’s where this model came from. And, basically, it’s because we go about things as we are wired. And we create teams and companies and projects in our own image.

And the problem is we don’t have all of the strengths that it requires, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t make sure all of those elements are there. And that was the big awakening, just to give a map for that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, the major reason we don’t achieve that which we intend is that we’re kind of going about it just you doing you.

Henry Cloud
It’s a great phrase.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And some things, I guess we’re wired to achieve, you know, fairly naturally and other things are kind of a stretch.

Henry Cloud
Yeah, and what’s really important, you can look at people that accomplish stuff in different areas and even very different styles. You take a Bill Gates and a Steve Jobs, they started out the same time, kind of doing the same thing, very, very different styles. But if you break it down, what was it that moved them from here to there? Those elements are the same. They do it differently.

And sometimes, like you’re saying, we do those things naturally in some particular area, but we fail in other areas because they’re not present.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you share with us perhaps a story of someone who was running into some trouble and then made some changes in alignment with these principles you’re unpacking here and what happened for them?

Henry Cloud
This is one you see all the time. It’s very common for an entrepreneur or a founder to be really good at vision and really good at engaging the talent and sometimes even good at strategy. And what happens is, when it gets a little further down the line where you start to have to really get a little bit what feels like to them in the weeds, then that’s where it kind of unravels.

And I think you’ve seen a lot of stories like this where somebody starts something, where you see it a lot is in the public companies. It goes public, and then the board says, “We got to bring in a seasoned operator.” Well, that’s because of these other components in the chain.

If you want a story, I can tell you about my own.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear it.

Henry Cloud
Many years ago, I wanted to start a psychiatric hospital that was friendly to people of faith. Because a lot of times people of faith would check into a hospital for treatment and their faith would be seen as part of the problem, not part of the answer. And I just wanted a place where that was friendly.

And so I thought, “Well, the best way to do this is to buy a hospital.” I was in my 20s. I didn’t even know that was hard. So I went out and raised the money to buy a hospital and started down that path, and ended up changing the model a little bit.

Long story short, started the company, right, and was doing one hospital, and it was doing well. But I was doing it in my own image. I wasn’t in the healthcare industry. I was a clinician, and so I set up this whole hospital company almost in a private practice model.

And what happened was, just by happenstance, I met somebody that had come from that industry, and he looked at it and said, “You have no clue what you have here.” And he started asking questions, like, “Where is your call center?” And I go, “What’s a call center? I mean, we just took calls and put people in treatment.”

And then he started asking all of these questions. And just by having somebody that could bring the other elements in of engaging the right talent and having a strategy to scale, and knowing what to measure and what to hold accountable, be held accountable to and all that, we ended up in 45 markets in the western United States.

And I would have been kind of stalled at a very limited vision if that hadn’t happened. But it took somebody else to point out to me what was missing.

Pete Mockaitis
And so these things about having a call center, how would you categorize the domain of stuff that was just sort of you were blind to?

Henry Cloud
Yeah, let me put it in then. The book is about a very simple model. I found a long time ago, if people have little models as almost like a GPS to look at, “Am I doing everything that needs to be done?” That’s where this came from.

And I had a big awakening one day, because there’s all this leadership and performance literature out there. But if you put it all together, what’s it really talking about? And I decided, “Why can’t we factor and analyze all that and get, what are the categories? What are the elements that it falls in?”

And I ended up asking a question. If you look at the human body, the most efficient, most complex, most complicated, greatest achievement machine it’s ever been designed, how does it get from here to there?

And it was incredible because if you break it down and went to neuroscience and neuroanatomy and all this stuff to ask, “How does a human body get from here to there?” Well, it starts with, what you read in the literature, your brain has something no other species has, which is the capacity to imagine a future that doesn’t exist today. We call that a vision.

Now, what was a real awakening was everybody knows about vision. But when you start to look at the brain and what it does with a vision, it has certain components to it that then creates a linear path and does all the stuff. But your head can’t go anywhere by itself.

So what it does is, number two, is it starts to engage the talent it’s going to need to help it get there. Because the brain is not going anywhere by itself. So it says, “Well, I’m going to need a couple legs and a couple eyes,” and it starts recruiting people with the talent and the skills that are gonna help them move from here to there.

Now we got it all together, you got the, “I don’t need my little finger, but I need a leg and I got eyes. And then we got to figure out, well, how are we going to get there? Well, I think I’ll call an Uber. Well, that’s not a good way to get there. How about a scooter?”

“Now if I’m going to get over the other side of the room, what’s my strategy going to be? How am I going to get there? I’m going to walk.” And now we have a strategy that begins to define the specific activities that are going to make that strategy come to fruition.

Now that becomes a big deal. And what your brain does at that point is it creates a plan with specific activities that move the needle on that strategy. And then, number four, it has already designed a measurement and accountability system.

You start walking, you start to wander off, it goes, “Wait a minute,” and it corrects you because it knows what you’ve got to be held accountable to that’s going to get you there. And, number five, if you do veer off, it quickly fixes you before that problem becomes a pattern.

So what do we have? We’ve got a very clear vision that’s got to be compelling enough to awaken a lot of systems in you and desire and other things. Number two, who do you need to help you get there? It might be talent, it might be a team member, it might be a friend, it might be a supporter, whoever. But we’d never go anywhere by ourselves.

And you got to specifically name, like Jim Collins said, “What are the seats on the bus that you need? And who are the people that are going to be in those seats?” And then you got to have a strategy. Otherwise, we start doing all sorts of random stuff, hoping we get there.

That strategy has a plan. And, number four, are you measuring the right things along the way? Because a lot of people just measure against the goal. They’re not measuring against the specific activities that are going to move the needle.

And then when you find something that’s off, you’ve got to fix it fast. Because if you don’t fix it fast, you don’t have a problem anymore. You’ve got a pattern. And patterns change the direction of where we’re headed.

So the human body knows what it’s doing. We should just kind of do what it does. And when you look at great achievements, you’re always going to find those five things. Clearly knowing where they were going, getting the right talent on board, having the right strategy, measuring the right things with accountability, and quickly fixing what you find. That’s the way we get from here to there.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say your body knows what it’s doing, you’ve got chapter 2 entitled, “Your Body Knows Best,” what do you mean specifically by that?

Henry Cloud
Well, what I mean is that it comes with all the systems that do all the right things to get you there. Let’s just take the measurement and accountability system. When you start walking across the room or you start driving a car, your brain has already figured out what it needs to hold you accountable to. You automatically steer. Well, that’s because those systems are wired in there.

What we’ve got to do, if you’re going to increase sales or increase the culture of a team, you got to start with knowing where you want to go and then knowing who’s going to play what role in getting you there, and then knowing what to do.

So our bodies just do this naturally until you start to break it down on what they are doing. The neuroscience of how your body achieves things is exactly applicable to everything we do in life.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I like that you have laid out some core foundational fundamental principles, and it seems like you’ve done a nice job of categorizing, cataloging.

Pete Mockaitis
And so it seems simple and elegant and, but, of course, with the way you lay it out this way. How do we run into trouble?

Henry Cloud
Yes. Here’s how we run into trouble. Two ways. One is everybody knows those topics. There’s nobody in business that hasn’t heard of those five things. We run into trouble because we’re not doing them in the way that they work, A. But, B, we really run into trouble because our own personal issues get in the way.

For example, take holding people accountable or holding the team accountable. Well, what if you’re conflict avoidant? What if it’s hard to have difficult conversations, what if you have fear around that?

Or back to vision. What if you come up with a, “Gosh, we could do this,” and then you got a bunch of negative voices in your head that say, “Well, what makes you think you can pull it off? You don’t have the money for that. No, that’s too hard”?

And just our simple thinking patterns and the limits we have in our own head can stifle a vision. So all of these components, the growth gaps that we need to do in getting better, those really come into play. And that’s what a lot of coaching is about, too.

You know, I work with CEOs in huge, I mean, public, multibillion dollar, they run huge things. And most of the time, it’s not that they don’t have the business acumen. It’s some kind of personal growth step that’s getting in the way. And that’s how a lot of times we get stuck.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us an example of a personal growth step and how that gets things back on track?

Henry Cloud
Well, I’ll give you one of a big company everybody knows. If I ask the question, “Where did Google come from?” We all think back, and if you’re old enough, “Ah, well, tech was ramping up, and the internet was ramping up, and somebody put a bunch of money up, or whatever.”

I would answer that this way. Where Google came from was a graduate student named Larry Page who went to a personal development, personal leadership development retreat, a camp, and they taught him a mantra. And the mantra was, “Have a healthy disregard for the impossible.”

And he kept saying that over and over and over. And he was trying to get rid of the natural tendency to think in some sort of limited fashion and question any idea or discount it or have objections. And he just started doing that over and over and over.

Well, one morning, he woke up and he had a thought. And that thought was, “What if we downloaded every URL on the entire internet and saved them?” Now that’s insane, I mean. Most of us would go, “Well, we don’t have enough RAM for that? I mean, where would you, you know?” All of a sudden, all these reasons why it can’t happen.

But he took a personal growth step to get some crap out of his head and then we ended up with a search engine, and then we ended up with all this other stuff. So it’s a lot of looking at oneself, looking at my patterns and how I typically go about stuff.

And are there any of these elements that are difficult for me that I should take a growth step in or I should get help with or bring somebody to the party who knows how to do this? You know, if you go back to my hospital company that I built, I was much more on the vision side of that. I engaged the talent. I brought the investors. I brought all the doctors, so 200 doctors ended up working for us and a bunch of other stuff.

But I didn’t have the strategic operational skills or even thought about that, that would ever get that to the place it went. And I probably never would have gotten there if I hadn’t brought in new talent. And that didn’t have to be somebody you hire. It could be your uncle who’s done what you’re doing.

We always need to find the right wisdom and the right help, whether it’s paid or unpaid, that can help us get to the next step.

Pete Mockaitis
And how do you identify or zero in on which of these components is our shortcoming, our gap, our personal development need?

Henry Cloud
Well, one of the ways, first of all, just look at the results. We have a lot of ways of explaining things away, “Well, the market’s bad, this or that.” Let reality talk to you. And sometimes that’s in the actual results of what you’re getting and whatever you’re trying to work on.

And you’ve got to get honest about this, “Is this thing working? Is it moving forward? Is there anything I can look at that says, yes, we’re going in the right direction?”

If there’s not, then what I would do is I would just go through the categories and start to ask, “What’s missing here? Or what have I really not focused on?” You know, a lot of times, a big one is the engaging the right talent piece. I mentioned that a few times because it’s huge.

We don’t know what we don’t know a lot of times. And what we’ve done is we’ve kind of just listened to people that are right there. And sometimes we got to get out of our own bubble or our own neighborhood or whatever.

And there’s somebody that’s done this before. There’s somebody that can look at it and know what I’m missing. And we need other eyeballs. And the best people, they get out of their closed system. They look at the way other companies, other teams, other individuals, other people are doing this that kind of expand this and can help them.

And the biggest, highest performers I’ve ever worked with, when I first went into coaching, I kind of expecting the ones that were crashing and burning to reach out to me the most because, “I need help. They’re calling me all the time,” this or that. It turned out to be the exact opposite.

The highest performers are the ones that use input from the outside the most. It is the highest performers that I hear from most often.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I have found that is rather transformational when I reach the conclusion, “I really don’t know what I’m doing here. Someone else does. I’m going to talk to them.” And so I just recently, I emailed someone who’s like, “Hey, I saw your LinkedIn. You’re a strategic advisor. I could use some strategic advice. What’s your hourly rate? Let’s do it.”

And she said, “It’s 500 bucks an hour.” I was like, “You got it.” And it was a pretty worthwhile $500 hour in terms of, “Yes, this is what I am missing and what I need. Thank you very much.”

Henry Cloud
Because what’s the value that you got from that? You know, a lot of times people look at the rates they’re going to have to pay and they go, “Well, that’s a lot for an hour,” this and that. Well, if that ended up making you, when you utilize it, multiple seven figures, it’s the cheapest hour you ever got in your life.

It’s just you have to look at the value you’re getting, always. And sometimes that value is free. Again, it might be a relative, it might be a friend. What’s important is, “What value does that talent bring to what I’m trying to do?”

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely.

Henry Cloud
Because advice is cheap.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Henry Cloud
Anybody will tell you what they think you ought to do.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think, in my experience with this, it seems like you can get an answer very quickly by asking a buddy, asking Google, asking the AI models, but it’s not what you really need. Well, I mean, it might be if it’s really quick and easy, straightforward answer, it’s like, “Okay, yep, that’s it. Got it.”

But when it’s nuanced and complicated and specialized, I find that we…what’s the expression? Is it Mark Twain or someone? “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

It’s like, “Oh, okay, that’s the answer. Okay, I’m just going to go do that.” It’s like, “Oops, no, no, that actually is not the move,” but, unfortunately, you’ve sort of spent a lot of time and effort, maybe money, on a path that might make some conventional sense or feels good, but it is not actually rooted in reality, best practices, etc.

Henry Cloud
I think you’ve hit a couple things on the head there. One of them is when you said it’s nuanced and everybody’s got an answer or whatever. I’m very leery, I should say, of people that have a template that they just come and apply to every situation. And there’s value to that.

I mean, there are consultants and they have a model and they go in and take that model and put it there. The people that I want to talk to are the people that have the experience base that they don’t come in and say, you know, “Look, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

So they look at every problem, “Here’s the answer,” right, because that’s what they know. It’s like you’re saying, they know that and they’re going to apply it. There’s a proverb that I love that says, “He who gives an answer before he understands is a fool.”

And I want to talk to somebody who’s got great diagnostic abilities to look at my situation and, inductively, pull out from their experience base the nuances, like you’re saying of, “This is the path. This is what I think is wrong. This is what I would suggest.” And they’re doing good diagnostic work.

And sometimes people, they already know the answer before they’ve met you, then I would I’d be a little leery of that. I want somebody that’s got enough experience and knowledge to whatever I’m struggling with. The answer is somewhere within them and they’re gonna pull it out of the box.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to get your pro tips in terms of are there any super high-leverage moves, like we talked about finding a great person for insight, advice, diagnostic skill to help you out? Within the other domains of a vision, strategy and plan, measurement, accountability, adaptation, problem solving, are there other high-leverage, best practice moves, tips, tricks, tactics that really do a lot of good work for us when we implement them?

Henry Cloud
Yeah, there’s one big one. Look in the mirror.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Henry Cloud
It’s, we gotta look at ourselves first. I mean, it’s so easy to explain things away, “You know, this person is not good,” or, “The market is this,” or, “You know, we got bad customers,” or, “My boss,” or something. And that’s not what great performers do.

The big power move is to first look at ourselves in that context, and ask, “What am I contributing to these results? What am I contributing to this problem? What am I contributing to keeping it from being resolved?” And to own it.

Then we can go to, “What do I need to take control of to change?” But it is a tough shift for a lot of people to make to stop externalizing what’s holding them back. Now there are external factors that we have to work with, but if we don’t look at ourselves and how we’re responding to those external factors, it’s just going to continue to stay stuck.

And it all starts with some pretty good self-awareness. And here’s what a lot of people don’t realize. Self-awareness is a fruit of other awareness. We become aware of ourselves by letting really good eyeballs take a look, and other people on the other side of us talk about their experience with me and what they see, and we got to assimilate and accommodate that data.

And so, here’s a good question. If you’re on a team and y’all suck and you’re leading a team, go to each one of your team members and ask a simple question, “So what’s it like to be on the other side of me as your leader in two areas? Relationally, how am I doing? How do I make you feel? How do I help you? How do I support you? All that.”

“And on the other side, the actual work, the tasks. How am I performing? How am I delivering for what you need from me?” That’s a great conversation to have. And ask it above you, ask it to your peers, and ask it for people that report to you. And you’re going to probably get some pretty good direction from that.

Now, you don’t listen to everybody. There’s nutcases out there, too. They have their own biases. They have their own agendas. But if you choose carefully, you’re going to probably see a few patterns emerge.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, super. So we look in the mirror and we get self-aware by getting other aware, talking to folks, asking those questions. Any other power moves that make a big impact?

Henry Cloud
What’s hardest for you to do next? We tend to move away from change that’s going to activate our fear systems, really. When we got to make a change that’s not, and these are the most valuable changes, by the way, because if they were easy, we’d already be doing them, but they’re necessary and we’re not doing them.

So that’s usually the growth step we need to take is going to feel very uncomfortable to you. And big growth steps happen from stepping into the area of your discomfort, because that’s where new skills and abilities are not only needed, but that’s where they’re going to be built.

We don’t grow without discomfort. Your hippocampus has got to be aroused in order to keep the log and the memory patterns of new whatever you’re doing to turn them into automatic. And arousal comes from getting nervous.

It’s like the Olympic swimmer who’s waiting for the gun to go off. They are aroused because it’s a big challenge, but that pulls them to greater achievement as well. Most of the big records are set in the final event. They’ve had that same swim 100 times before they got there. So step into the areas where you’re not comfortable, and that’s really where you’re going to learn.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Anything else?

Henry Cloud
Well, I open the book with a story about my dog Finley. Finley is a Doberman. I’ve always loved big working breeds. And Finley is awesome. I mean, she does her job, but she does it like she’s wired. Somebody comes to the door, she runs to the front door, she barks, scares the heck out of them until I come up and say it’s okay. And it is intimidating and she does it great and I love her.

But I’ve never heard her run to the front door and bark, and then stop and say, “I wonder if that was helpful?” In fact, a bigger question, “I wonder if barking like that is going to get me closer to where I want to be on Thursday?”

That ability to get above what we’re doing, above how we’re wired, and begin to ask the question, “Am I doing what needs to be done to get me where I want to be on Thursday?” that is something that all of the greats do. They don’t just work, they work on how they’re working and they get above it.

And that capacity for self-observation, with some kind of a path, and that’s what the book is about, you could just get above and say, “How clear have I been about the vision and communicating it to the people that have got to go with me? How much have I really worked on making sure I got the right talent around me?”

“How clear is the strategy for all of us? Have I just assumed that? Do people know every day when they wake up what they got to do that day that really moves the needle? And then are we really keeping tabs on are we doing what we said we were going to do and is it working? And then when problems come up, are we fixing them?” And if we get above that path and start asking those questions, all sorts of light bulbs come on.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, I like that a lot. And I’m thinking about, we had a guest, Richard Medcalf, with a book called Making TIME for Strategy, and he was sort of talking about just this. And often there’s a project that no one’s asking for, but it requires asking these kinds of questions to really get those tremendous improvements.

I’d love your hot take in terms of, is there a ritual, a habit, a practice by which folks you’ve seen incorporate this into a recurring rhythm and see good things on the other side?

Henry Cloud
Well, one of the important words here is rhythm. We tend to observe ourselves, but not frequently enough sometimes. The cadence of it is not enough. If you take, for example, you take a pilot and they’re going from LA to New York, well, they’ve got a strategy, they’re going to fly this plane, but they’ve got a plan and the plan, the strategic anchors are 40,000 feet, 540 knots, certain heading. So they take off.

Well, what they’re also doing is getting back to the cadence of measurement. If they drive down at 38,000 feet for more than just a blip, their accountability system is going to say, “Flight plan shows 40,000. You’re at 38,000,” instantly, they go, “Crap! I’m burning too much fuel. It’s slowing me down. I got to adjust.”

But if they wait too long for that to happen, they’re going to end up three states away or getting there an hour late. And when we’re looking at what we’re doing, some cadences, they’re too short. I mean, people don’t even have time to work before somebody is in their face again, you know, they micromanaging them all over their case.

You got to give enough space to what you’ve observed to begin to implement it. But if you go too long without self observation for you and the people that are involved, you can be 500 miles off track and now you’re down the wrong road.

Pete Mockaitis
So, is it daily, weekly? In some ways, it’s possible, I think, to overdo it. Like, we’re kind of getting into a bit of a navel-gazing or a, what is it, a state-dependent vibe, which is suboptimal, per the research and literature. So, what do you think?

Henry Cloud
Well, again, it depends on, “What are you doing?” Some things that you’re working on, and sometimes in crisis or things have gone south, that cadence can be daily for some things. I mean, it depends on what you’re doing.

Other times, a quarterly checkup. It all depends on what you’re doing and how long it takes for the change to take effect and how long it takes for it to unravel things if it’s not addressed. Those are the two factors I’ve looked at.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now let’s hear about some of your favorite things. Could you share a favorite quote with us?

Henry Cloud
One of the favorite quotes that I put in the book was one time Peter Drucker said, “There’s nothing worse than executing perfectly the wrong things.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Henry Cloud
I think it was 2004, we had about 400 fatalities in the commercial airline industry in the US, 400 and some people died. The FAA came together, and what they did was they brought into one group the equipment manufacturers, like Boeing and Airbus and those people who make the planes, the pilots unions, the mechanics unions, the air traffic controllers, and kind of whoever touches this thing called flight.

And they formed a covenant of their group together. And the covenant was this, “When we find a mistake that we did, we’re going to bring it to the group, and we’re going to – lack of a better word – be transparent, confess it.”

And what they said was, “Nobody is going to get fired, nobody is going to jail, unless you try to blow up a plane or something. Nobody is going to get in trouble. We just want to bring the problems to the group.”

Here’s what happened, just take an example. A pilot comes in and says, “We had a near miss and it was really close and it was really bad.” And the group starts going, “Tell us about it. How did it happen?” They said, “Well, I was trying to adjust the switch down here and lost visuals and wasn’t looking at the radar or the screen or whatever, and there it was.”

The manufacturer says, “Oh, well, we can move that switch.” A million things like that where they’re coming together without fear.

Now here’s what happened. That was in ‘04. I think it was 12 years later. You can look up this story. I want to say, like, they went, it’s like, in 12 years, 20 billion departures, something like that, in that time period, zero fatalities for 12 years.

Now, what does that tell us about the kind of teams we need to create, the kind of relationships we need to create with bosses, with direct reports, with our peers, where we can come to the table and talk about what we’re struggling with and where we need help and where something is not working and where I screwed up? That’s one of my favorite studies.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Henry Cloud
One of them is not a business book. It’s a book called No Man is an Island by Thomas Merton. You know, I don’t even know what year this was, but Peter Drucker wrote a classic called Management. It has so many foundational principles in it. You can go through it and just over and over and over again. That’s one of my favorites.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Henry Cloud
OneNote.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Henry Cloud
One of my favorite ones that anchors me is I try to, somewhere pretty early, 9:00 o’clock-wise, but soon in the day, whenever I get up, I need about an hour of quiet time, and try to do that every day if possible. And it’s a spiritual time for me, it’s a reflection time, and that’s a really important one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget that you share that’s been quoted back to you many times, a Henry Cloud nugget that you’re famous for?

Henry Cloud
Probably the one I hear the most is it’s more a phrase, it’s from my book, Necessary Endings, and they will say, “Knowing about the wise, fool, and the evil changed my life.” That’s what people tell me. And it’s a little, again, a model. You don’t deal with everybody the same way, that we have three kinds of people in our lives at any point.

A wise person is a person that, when they receive feedback, they say, “Oh, you’re right. I’m sorry. I won’t do that again,” and you have a conversation, things get better. And so we can talk about problems with them.

A fool is someone that, when the truth appears to them or when they’re given truth, they don’t adjust themselves. They try to adjust the truth.

So they’re going to minimize, get defensive, blame you, the problem is never in the room. It’s out there somewhere or they’ll attack you and get angry. And it does no good to talk to them about problems. You have to talk to them about a different problem.

And the problem is, “When I talk to you about problems, it doesn’t help. So I’m not going to talk to you about problems anymore. We’re going to move to some consequences if this doesn’t change.” And the third category are people that do evil things. And those are the people that are intentionally out to hurt you. We need to always protect ourselves from that group.

So you talk to the first group. You have some limits and boundaries with the second group, and sometimes that can get to a good outcome. But the third group, it’s lawyer, guns, and money, like Warren Zevon said. You got to go into protection mode.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Henry Cloud
Probably just go to DrCloud.com. A lot of what I do is right there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Henry Cloud
I would do what Finley doesn’t do. Don’t just keep barking. Stop barking and ask yourself, “Is the way I’m barking going to get me to where I want to be on Thursday?” Get above your ways and look at the patterns. And the book will give you a good template to look at that with.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Henry, thank you.

Henry Cloud
It’s good to be with you.