122: Nourishing Good Habits and Attitudes with Eric Zimmer

Pete Mockaitis
Eric, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Eric Zimmer
Thanks Pete, thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think it would be fun if you maybe kicked us off by telling us a bit of the story with your partner-in-crime Chris Forbes on the show, The One You Feed. How did you get to know each other and end up with a hit show?

Eric Zimmer
Alright. Chris and I have known each other a long time now. I hesitate to even say how long ’cause that will tell you how old I am, but upwards of 20 years that we’ve been friends. And so when I got the idea for the show, I don’t really know quite how it came to me, but I’d been interested in online marketing because I’d owned a solar energy company that I was thinking of trying to totally change what we did and do more things online, blah blah blah.
Anyway, I just got the idea for the show somewhere, it just kind of hit me, and then from there I called Chris and I just said, “Are you interested in doing this?” and he was like, “Sure”, and we kind of started the next day. Chris used to be an audio engineer so he’s kind of responsible for how good the show sounds. And part of my motivation in wanting to do it was I figured we’d spend more time together, because as you get older, the busier life gets the less time you carve out for friendship. At least that can happen. And so I was like, “This is a great way to do something that I want to do that’s productive and spend more time with a friend that I really like being with.” So, it kind of worked out great in that way.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. And so, tell us a little bit about the title of the show and what do you mean by the Good Wolf and the Bad Wolf?

Eric Zimmer
Yeah, so the show is called The One You Feed and it’s based on an old parable of unknown origin, although most people attribute it to the Cherokee Indians, but I don’t know if that’s correct or not; no one really knows. Anyway, I’ll just read the parable because otherwise I’ll end up saying it in many more sentences. So, the parable – basically there’s a grandfather who’s talking with his grandson and he says, “In life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a Good Wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other’s a Bad Wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear.” And the grandson stops and thinks about it and he looks up at his grandfather and says, “Grandfather, which one wins?” And the grandfather says, “The one you feed.”
So, that’s the kickoff point for the show, is I read people that parable and I ask them kind of, “What does that mean to you? How does that apply to the work that you do? How does that apply to you in your life?” So that’s the parable. And I liked it because I thought it was a nice jumping-off point to be able to talk to a lot of different people. I have wide-ranging interests. But be able to at least tie it back to a common theme or at least a common jumping-off point. So that’s sort of the parable, and I think you then asked me kind of what it means to me right?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah, please do.

Eric Zimmer
I think for me what makes something a parable is usually you hear it and you immediately know what it means and it conveys a lot of information in a very small space. And so I think it’s kind of obvious on one hand, like, “Oh, okay. We all have different inclinations inside of us, we have good and bad.” Or you could use a Buddhist term if you wanted – if you don’t like “good and bad” you could use “skillful and unskillful”.
But we have differing urges, and the one that you give more attention and energy to is the one that’s going to come out on top, or the one that’s going to reflect your life better. And so I think the parable talks about just doing that. At a very simple level that’s what it is. At a slightly deeper level – ’cause I’ve had to read this thing at least 150 times, if not more, and talk to people about it – at a deeper level I think it conveys a couple of other things that I think are really interesting.
And one of them is that the grandfather sort of says, “We all have this inside of us, it’s between a Good Wolf and a Bad Wolf, and which one wins…” So it’s set up as if it’s a close battle. It’s a close battle, and the one you feed wins. So I like that ’cause I think it normalizes the human condition to some degree, right? We live in a culture that is so focused on perfection in so many ways, and a culture that says if you’re not in a great mood there’s something wrong with you. There is this pathology towards always being perfect or always being happy or always being in a good place, and we’re not that way as people.
And I like that the parable normalizes that and says what you’re going through – the struggles you’re having – are what everybody goes through. That’s part of being human. So, I like that part of it, and I also like that it doesn’t talk about starving or caging the Bad Wolf. Those are parts of us that we have. Jung called it the “shadow side”. There’s different ways to look at it, but it doesn’t talk about having to do that. It just talks about encouraging the good parts of yourself. And I found that to be a much better way to make changes in my life – encouraging good things in myself versus trying to eradicate or stamp out things I don’t like about myself. So there you go.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good, thank you. Yes, it does feel like you’ve found something that is an excellent launching point and interesting and has some real depth to it. And so I’d love to hear, during the course of your own experience and all of your guests – what are some of the best practices or key ways that you can feed your Good Wolf? I think that there’s so many different, I guess, subsets or factors or components that we could say that the Good Wolf encompasses. So, if you had to prioritize a bit, I would say elements of the Good Wolf that could help one become more awesome at his or her job?

Eric Zimmer
I think awareness is the number one thing, because if we’re not aware we’re not even necessarily conscious that we’re making choices. It’s perfectly possible to live a human life on what I would call “autopilot”, where we just kind of follow what gets put in front of us, and we follow our moods. “I’m in this kind of mood so I do X, and when I’m in Y kind of mood I do Y.” So you can do that.
I think it’s awareness that allows us to switch from that to looking and being conscious of the choices we make, whether they be about how we behave towards other people, whether they be about how we talk to ourselves, whether they be about how we much effort we put into our job, what things we should give effort to. All that takes awareness in what we’re doing, and so I think that’s kind of the key unlock there for everything else that follows, is to become more aware of where we are, what we’re doing and what are the stories that are going on in our heads.

Pete Mockaitis
Eric, I love what you’re saying so much here. And I’m thinking right now, I’ve been reading Dr. Robert Cialdini’s most recent book, Pre-Suasion, which is excellent. And he talks about sort of the media who are not so great at telling us what to think, but they are great at telling us what to think about. And it so happens in just the case of our human psychological brain-workings that what we pay attention to, we tend to naturally just sort of infer that that thing matters, that it’s important, that it sort of grows and that there’s an upward sort of cycle that’s occurring there, which is why I love the wolf metaphor even more as I think more about it right now – that you’re feeding it and it’s growing.
And so, if you put your attention on something, you think that thing’s important and you tend to put more attention on it. And I’ve gotten caught up in, “What’s the humidity level in my humidor?” This little box, and I smoke like two cigars a year. It so doesn’t matter, but it’s kind of interesting and engaging and I’m getting close and I’m dialing it in and then I’m reading things. I was like, “Time out. This is unworthy of my limited attention.”

Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I agree 100%. I read part of that book too and I was struck by that part also, about how the media focuses on what we give attention to. We can think about that thing how we want, but it really frames the debate. And so I thought that was fascinating, and I think it’s great the way you’re applying it to what we’re talking about. I think that yeah, awareness of how we’re spending our time is important. I think that we also have to be careful, and I will fall into this trap of, every single minute has to be spent in the ultimately productive way. And that is another trap.
And so I think there’s some degree of, “How do I allow some being to do what I want to do, what interests me in the moment?”, sometimes I think is a good idea. So you may be interested in your humidor and may be spending a little time on that. It’s okay. What I’m really after and what I work with a lot of my coaching clients on is, you can spend your time anyway you want; there is no right or wrong answer to this. Just be conscious of it. Be conscious of what you’re choosing to do with it, because most of us aren’t, and the time just flies by.
And the next thing we know 2, 3 weeks have gone by and we’re like, “What have I done? Well, I’ve watched a lot of Netflix.” And again, that might be fine, right? That might be okay; it’s just about being conscious of it. And I can almost feel it in myself now, when I’m more conscious of how I’m spending my time, and other times where I feel like I’m underwater in some way, like I’m not really seeing the bigger picture or I’m not thinking clearly about what I’m doing and I just kind of go through things. So I think it is the awareness of it and then making choices, realizing…
Because a lot of times the Bad Wolf, at least in my experience, is simply just not making a good choice; just following the default pattern that comes up. Because to your point earlier about what we think is important is what’s presented to us – I watch very very little TV. I’ll watch Netflix or I’ll watch movies but I watch very very little TV. And the reason I do is A) I have way too much to do to spend much time on it, but B) I’m very susceptible to the commercials.
Now, I don’t rush out and buy the thing. It’s not like I see that stuff. But I just keep getting presented the message that I get from commercials over and over is how I look makes a tremendous amount of difference to everything, and how much money I make also makes a tremendous amount of difference. And I don’t have enough of either. That’s kind of the message that I get when I unconsciously consume a lot of advertising, which is exactly the message they want me to get, by the way. And so, I stay away from it ’cause I recognize how susceptible I am to it.
Back to the media tells you what to focus on – that’s where my focus goes. And I suddenly start believing that everything on the outside is what’s important, and not necessarily the good things on the outside, like my relationship with my mom or my relationship with my friends, but the things on the outside like my clothes or how clear is my skin or what car am I driving or how many great vacations am I taking. Again, nothing wrong with any of those things, but for me they get me in trouble because at least the way I’m wired internally, there’s not a lot of substance there – those things don’t really make me happy; they are a substitute for what’s really important. But I can chase them for a long time if I’m not careful.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s powerful language, when you talk about substitutes, and whether that’s fast food or pornography or whatever, they tend to leave folks unsatisfied, like the quality real stuff, and so it’s potent. So I’d love to talk a smidge more about when you mentioned following the default pattern. I read this fascinating study about some Israeli parole judges and how it turned out that their decisions to grant release of prisoners was very predictably related to what time of day it was, like toward the beginning of, just after having rejuvenated with a break or toward the end. So the default judgment for parole judge is, “You stay in prison.” And more and more of those decisions get made when the judge is just tired, like, “Yeah, I don’t know. We’re not going to risk it.”

Eric Zimmer
That’s why I always bring a Snickers bar when I’m on trial. Give it to the judge – “Here you go, buddy. I know you’re feeling a little low.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that is perfect. “Hungry? Well, it could result in your freedom.”

Eric Zimmer
That’s exactly it, yup. I’m not trying to bribe him, I’m just trying to get his mood up to a level where he can think.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s so money. Well, so now I’d love to hear then, what are some of your practices or maybe things you’ve learned from your guests associated with being prudent, to make sure your attention doesn’t get hijacked, to make sure that you don’t end up making the low-energy default decisions but rather the optimal decisions?

Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I think there’s a variety of things that go into it. Again, to be repetitive, it’s about awareness. And so for me, I train awareness by meditating – that seems to be the thing that helps me to be more aware. And then just practicing being aware when I’m out and around. I have a little thing where I try as often as I can – and I don’t do it that often – but to stop and sort of just ask myself, “Where am I? What am I doing and why am I doing it and is it what I want to be doing?” Just pausing and asking those kinds of questions has a lot…
I think planning out a schedule is very very useful. I think spending time to reflect on what’s important to you and what your goals are is important. And there are so many different ways that you can do that. A really simple exercise that I love that I don’t know where I got it from, probably 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which is a masterpiece. One way you can do this is to start your week by looking at all the roles that you play in your life.
So, in my case I am a father, I’m a son, I’m a brother, I’m a podcast host, I’m a consultant, I’m a dog owner, just so on and so forth. And if I do that, then I can look at each of those things and try and plug in how I do something for those roles each week. Now, they’re not going to be equal. The amount of time that I spend on certain of my roles, like being a brother, is not nearly the time that I put into being a father, as an example. But if my relationship with my brother is important, then as part of my conscious planning I’m looking at that and going, “Okay, I want to make sure I get some time in there for him.” And if this is important I want to make sure I’m getting some time.
So that’s a very easy way to make sure that we’re spending time on the things that matter, by being very thoughtful about the roles we play in life and what we want to do with them. So I found that to be a very simple, very helpful practice that doesn’t involve sitting down and writing long mission statements and clarifying your values and lots of other things that can be good and can also just be a rat hole. I find that one to be imminently practical as a way to direct my attention in the right way.

Pete Mockaitis
This is powerful, thank you. And it’s interesting – I find that lately as I’ve been doing things, some of those questions have followed up, in terms of, “What am I doing? Why? Is this optimal? Is this putting me to the path that I want to be?” And I find that most often my answer is, “I can’t think about this right now, I just got to get this done.”

Eric Zimmer
Yup, yup. Well, I really do highly recommend 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, ’cause it really put a couple things in my mind early on when I was young that I think helped me with my whole career. There’s just some key concepts in that book. But another one of them that I’m pretty sure this is where I first heard it, and it’s such a true statement and it makes so much sense, and it’s about managing time.
And the story is, you’ve got a professor sitting up in front of a class and he’s got a big glass bowl. You’ve probably heard this one. And he puts a bunch of big rocks in until he can’t get any more of the big rocks in, and he asks, “Is this full?” And everybody goes, “Yeah, it’s pretty full.” But of course it’s not, ’cause then he dumps in a bunch of smaller rocks. He puts all the small rocks in he can and he goes, “Is that full?” Well, looks like it, but no, then he starts pouring all the sand in, and then finally he pours water in.
So you can get a lot in there. The moral of that story, or the learning of that story is that if you put the big rocks in first, everything else will find a way to get in there and get done. The big rocks being the things that are important to you. But if the other hand you go the other direction and you start and you fill that up with water, which is the unimportant stuff, you can not get big rocks into that thing. And so, that’s really about time.
And I think what you just said points to some of what we get into, which is that whatever shows up in front of us is what gets our time and gets our energy and gets our attention. And by doing that we’re giving all our time to things that are maybe not that important but appear urgent, and they appear urgent because they showed up. It doesn’t mean they are, but they appear that way.
Versus spending a lot more time thinking about the big rocks, getting those in, and then allow the other time to filter around those. And I found that’s an incredibly helpful way to live a life that you’re accomplishing the things that are important to you, is to get what’s important to you scheduled, know when you’re going to do it, have it all in there, and then let life mix around that, versus the other way around.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. That’s so on the mark. And the lesson or the moral of that is not, “You could always cram something else in there.”

Eric Zimmer
Right, right. Exactly. But it does say that if you… Yeah, I think it’s a parable, people get it, right? Make sure you put things that are important to you, schedule time for them; otherwise they’re not going to get done.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And so I’d like to hear a little bit in terms of with all the guests you’ve chatted with, and their means of feeding the Good Wolf, I guess I’ve just been on a kick lately thinking about BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits, which is an amazing TED talk. And when it comes to things you’ve discovered from folks and the means by which they’re feeding the Good Wolf, what are a number of your favorite tidbits, maybe Tiny Habitable kind of activities that have really struck a cord with you and seem to have your guests say, “This is one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself”?

Eric Zimmer
Well, we had BJ Fogg on the show, and I agree very much – I think that guy has refined and shaped how I look at changing behavior a great deal. But it was interesting – it was our, I don’t know which, it was one of our first few interviews we had a guy named Dan Millman on, who wrote Way of the Peaceful Warrior, and he said it right then – start small and connect the dots. And that’s BJ Fogg with Tiny Habits, right? Start a habit so small that you can accomplish it and build from there. And that’s a theme that’s been running through the show so far.
A guy named James Clear writes about habits on the web, and he has a phrase that I used to say it as, “A little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing.” Which meant “Do something.” If I’ve got a habit that I’m trying to run every day and I can’t run – well, at least walk around the block. James says it much more eloquently, which is, “Reduce the scope, stick to the schedule.” And so for me that’s a huge one in staying on track with the behaviors that I want, is, “Okay, I was going to go to the gym for an hour and it’s not going to work. I got out of work late; I’ve got 10 minutes.” Most of us just say, “F- it. Forget it.”
But we can do something with that 10 minutes for our physical health – we can, like I said, walk around the block a few times, we can do 50 pushups or 100 pushups. And that is so important, not because walking around the block or doing the 50 pushups makes a huge deal of difference in our physical health over a long period of time – it’s negligible, right? But we’re keeping the habit going.
One of the things BJ Fogg talks about, and I use this all the time with people that I coach is, he makes the analogy of a plant, and a habit is like a plant. And there are times that you’re giving that plant lots of attention. So if it’s working out – you’re working out and you’re tracking your workouts and you’re getting all your protein and you’re just crushing it.
And then there are other times where the goal is just not to kill the plant. You go on vacation – that’s a time for a lot of people where the habit or the plant gets killed, right? You go on vacation, you stop doing what you’re doing, and when you come home you’ve lost all your momentum and you’re done. Or something happens in your life – your kids get really sick, you get really sick, you have to go to the hospital with your mom for three days – those are the sort of things that during those times you can’t devote the time to your habits that you want.
Or I guess you can, but it’s probably a fairly selfish thing to do, right? So you can’t do it, but what you can do is find, “What is the little thing I can do to keep this habit going? So I’ve got to be here at the hospital with mom for the next three days. I’m not going to leave her and go to the gym. But you know what? I am going to walk up and down the hall and the stairs 20 times. I’m going to give something to this habit to keep it alive until I’m back in a position where I can really nourish it and grow it again.”
So that’s another version on James Clear’s “Stick to the schedule, reduce the scope”, or as I say, “A little bit of something is better than a lot of nothing.” That’s how you keep habits alive. It is those places that most of us come unglued, when it comes to habits. Most of us are able to start a habit and do okay with it for a while, but inevitably life starts getting in the way, and instead of adjusting the habit so it fits within what life is, and it’s not ideal but keeps us going, we usually just give up. And then we take another one of those moments where we go, “I can never stick with anything”, or, “I’m the kind of person who always quits.” We start to have these thoughts about ourselves that really aren’t true. We just don’t know necessarily how to navigate the challenges that come along.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you, that’s so good. Well, you’ve already sort of teed up the next question I’d like to hear, and that is – with my guests often they’ll say things that just really have stuck with me and transformed the way I think and behave in a lasting way. So I’d love it if you could reflect back on 160-ish guests, if a couple of big ideas leap to mind that you haven’t already mentioned that could really be transformational for those looking be more awesome at their jobs.

Eric Zimmer
That’s a great question, and I’ll use one that I think can make people better at their jobs. So we had a guest on, her name’s Glennon Doyle Melton; she’s been getting a lot of attention lately for her new book she wrote. She’s been on Oprah and different things, but we had her on before all that occurred, although she was pretty popular at that point too. But she said something that kind of blew me away, and she has a tendency to way over-share. Hilarious examples of this – when she goes to a cocktail party with her husband, she’ll see him across the room giving her a cut sign across her neck, like, “No, too much.” So that’s the tendency she goes to.
But what she said was – and I think this just kind of stopped me in my tracks when she said it – and she said that if you stick to surface things when you’re talking to people, you’re going to have a harder time connecting to people, because there’s so many different surfaces out there. But if you take the time to go deeper with people, if you take the risk to go deeper with people, you connect with many more people because you go a few layers down, we’re all the same. And that just kind of blew me away.
And the way that is applied to me in my work – ’cause I own a solar company, I’ve been in lots of startups, I do consulting for large retailers – the way that’s played out in my own life is that when I was younger I tried to bring the version of myself that I thought fit best there. Now I wasn’t being someone I wasn’t, but I was being a very reduced version of who I was. This is the part that I think is acceptable to show in this situation. And I’m not suggesting that we abandon that completely and start showing up to meetings in tank tops and with our dog, although I used to bring my dog to work a lot, it was a great job.
But what I realized as I got a little bit older and I got a little bit more comfortable with who I was, when I started letting the parts of me show, it’s a big word these days – vulnerability – but when I started being more myself at work and taking a few chances to sort of not say what everybody else was saying or to show that I think differently about certain things, what I found is I got way better at my job. And the reason was, so much of being successful in a professional career is about the relationships you have with other people. How well do you work with other people? How persuasive can you be? All that stuff. And connection is what builds that.
And what I realized was that when I was bringing only a little bit of myself, I could only make a little bit of a connection, but when I started bringing… Again, don’t go to the extreme with this, but when I started bringing who I really was and taking chances at showing that to people, the connections deepened because there was more of me there to connect. And as those connections get better, I get better at the work I do because the work that I do with folks is largely not about, “Can I write good code?”; it’s about, “Can I get groups of people working together very well to accomplish things? And can we figure out what’s most important and can we communicate?” And that helps in that way a ton.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, absolutely. And just that notion that now they like you and they are more engaged, they don’t want to disappoint this person who’s like a friend. And then they trust you, so they’re more able to speak their mind and say, “Hey, I have these concerns.” And so you’re less likely to have some blow ups down the road because they were holding on to a spooky indicator early but didn’t say anything. So that’s so good, thank you. Well you tell me, Eric – is there anything else you really want to make sure that you put out there before we shift gears and talk about a few of your favorite things here?

Eric Zimmer
I don’t think so. You’ll probably link to us in the show notes. I’m proud of the show that we do. We won a 2014 Best of iTunes award, we’ve been listened to over 5 million times, so I’m really proud of the show so I’d love people to just check that out. And then from there if the stuff we’re talking about resonates, I do offer coaching programs and we have a Facebook group and la la la. But the show really for me is the thing I’m most proud of.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s fantastic. So now we’ll definitely link to all that good stuff. So, could you start us off by sharing a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Eric Zimmer
Yeah, I probably won’t get it right but it’s, “Start where you are, do what you can, use what you have.” And I think it’s by Arthur Ashe, although with quotes you can see them attributed to lots to different people. And I may have the order wrong there but that’s the essence of it: “Start where you are, do what you can, use what you have.” And I love it just because it says wherever you are, you can start right now on making progress towards the thing that you have, and you have enough to start. You may not have everything you think you need to get to the finish line, but you have enough to start. And so do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And how about a favorite study or experiment or a piece of research?

Eric Zimmer
Boy, that’s a good one. I do like the one you quoted about the judges. The one I heard most recently that fascinated me, and it’s one of those that I go, “Well, is that true?”, but I’ll share it anyway because it appears to be peer-verified work. It talks about the power of our mind to affect what happens. And it’s a study that followed a group of hotel maids.
And so they divided them into two groups and they said to one of the groups, “Hey, you know what? The work that you do every day is really good for you – you’re doing exercise, you’re in good physical shape, you’re exercising”, all that. And then they just said nothing to the other group. Well, the group that was told that they were getting benefit out of their exercise that they were doing, when they followed up later found sure enough, those people were getting more physical benefit out of it – their blood pressure was better, the various indicators of health were all better.
And so that’s kind of a fascinating study. It points to one of two things, and it’s probably a combination. One is our brain’s ability to sort of do things beyond what we think it can do. I had a guest on last week, we talked about the placebo effect and it’s insane what our brains can do. Or those people just suddenly started going, “Boy, if this is exercise, maybe I take another step here, another step there.” But I love it because it shows without changing much of anything except the way they viewed what they were doing, they started getting different results. And I’m a big believer in you do need to change your behavior and your action, but I’m also a big believer that how you think about what you’re doing matters too.

Pete Mockaitis
So good, thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Eric Zimmer
Well, we talked about 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, so let’s run with it. Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I’ve got like three or four top books. Depending on when you ask me is the one you’ll get, but that’s the one for today.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ll take it. And how about a favorite tool, whether it’s a product or service or app – something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Eric Zimmer
I love Evernote. Evernote was a big deal for me because I am absent-minded on a level that is difficult for me even to conceive. It’s just I think we all have strengths and weaknesses; mine is I am absent-minded. I mean I’m the kind of person that will walk away and leave my phone sitting somewhere three or four days a week. I mean it’s just terrible.
But Evernote for me, once I finally made the decision that, “You know what? Everything is going in here” – once I did that, my life got so much better in so many ways, ’cause everything that I need, whether it’s for home or the show or the consulting work that I do or whatever other weird thing I’m interested in – all goes in there and then it’s all available to me whenever I need it. I’ve got my phone, it’s got Evernote on it. My computer’s got Evernote on it. If I’m at your house I can get on the web.
It has helped me so much to be able to find and get to things that are important to me, whether it be I put down the parking place I am where I parked at the airport, or whether it’s the fact that all the questions I’ve asked every guest are all in Evernote and I can go back and look at that stuff, or all the notes I’ve taken from all the books I’ve done with guests are all in Evernote. So from the simple to the really important, it helps me.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good, thank you. And how about a favorite sort of resonant nugget – something that you share, an Eric original, that really seems to get folks nodding their heads, re-tweeting and connecting with folks?

Eric Zimmer
That’s a good one. I’ll go with one that’s a little bit off topic but it’s the one that I think I have talked about lately with certain people and really seems to resonate, which is that, “Depression hates a moving target.” And so, I wrestle with depression; I think a lot of people that I know – entrepreneurs tend to be a group of people that wrestle with depression – but it doesn’t even have to be severe depression. But I’ve just found that when I’ve got a low mood, that if I can get moving, that helps so much, versus being stuck in my brain wherever I am. An environmental change often can unstick my brain, so even getting from inside my house to out walking can often cause that uptick where I go from being sort of stuck to feeling better.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And what would you say is the best place for folks to reach out or learn more about you?

Eric Zimmer
OneYouFeed.net. From there, everything else is there – shows, Facebook, Twitter, etcetera. So that’s the place to go.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. And do you have a final parting word, challenge or call to action for those seeking to be more awesome at their jobs?

Eric Zimmer
I think, yeah. One of the things that I think I have gotten into in the past is looking at… We were talking just a minute ago about how the way you look at something really matters. It’s very easy if you have a job, as an example, to get into, “I have to, I have to, I have to”: “I have to go to work, I have to go to work, I have to do this, I have to do that.” And the truth is, no, you really don’t. “I have to go to work because I’ve got kids to support.” Well, you don’t really have to support them. I mean, you could get on a train tomorrow and go to California. You might get some child support bills, but…
We can choose to do anything we want. Now, the consequences of those choices most of us don’t really like. But it helps me enormously when I realize that I don’t have to go to work and earn this money so that I can pay for X, Y and Z for my son. I choose to do it ’cause it’s important to me. And so, that really helps me. ‘Cause I’ve got the show that I do, I have got the coaching I do that I deeply love, and then I do some other consulting work, which is really great work.
I mean don’t get me wrong. It’s not my passion though, and if I’m not careful I can get stuck into resenting that work and feel like, “I have to, I have to, I have to”. And the truth is, I don’t have to; I’m choosing to because of what it gives me. And so anytime I can make that switch in my mind, it helps me so much get out of this stuck victim-mode mentality and realize that I really am, to a great degree, sort of the author of my own life.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful closing thought. Eric, it has been such a pleasure. I wish you tons of luck, and keep on feeding the Good Wolf!

Eric Zimmer
Yeah, thank you, Pete. I really enjoyed the conversation too. You do a great job!