195: Wise and Effortless Decision-Making with Michael Nicholas

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, thanks so much for joining us here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Michael Nicholas
Oh, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am excited to be talking about decision-making with you, and you’d mentioned that in your own life of career and decision-making you had a bit of a flip-flop. What’s the story there?

Michael Nicholas
Yeah. Well, one of the interesting things about our decisions is that we tend to think of ourselves as rational, don’t we? So some of our most difficult decisions, we like to do these pros and cons list and made these decisions that seems to be explainable and make sense. I like to think back to when I was at school and I had some career advice from an advisor that came into the school. He seemed to think that I was well-suited to be a teacher.

And I’ve got to say that was as diametrically opposite to our plan for my life, and I say our plan deliberately which I’ll explain in a moment, as it really could’ve been and seemed ridiculous, to be quite honest. And I went on to be an engineer like my father. I did many things like my father actually, and it all made sense.

And it was only about 25 years later that I finally left my engineering career to become essentially a teacher running workshops and doing coaching and writing books. And the sort of irony of it struck me afterwards because what felt like logical and sensible actually was clearly emotional in nature and it was based on a set of expectations that we haven’t really examined. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Expectations from your father, or family, or for yourself to be like him? Or what do you mean?

Michael Nicholas
Well, it’s hard to know, isn’t it, because these things are unconscious and that’s the nature, and I expect we’ll go into that in some detail on this call, the nature of how we get beyond some of these unconscious patterns. But my dad was in a technical field, he worked for IBM for 28 years, and I’d admired him and probably wanted to be like him, and that probably seemed like a good option. I was studying sciences. And so it all made sense. Logically.

And yet, somehow, it seems this career advisor saw something different in me based on some answers I gave, which were probably about what my interests were and what I enjoyed doing, and those were completely dismissed by the expectation that we collectively somehow set.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, intriguing. Well, yes, I do want to dig into this. And so maybe frame it up for us from the very beginning. What is your book here The Little Black Book of Decision-Making all about?

Michael Nicholas
Yeah. Well, The Little Black Box of Decision-Making is probably misleading because it’s not very little actually although it’s a little format. What I’m trying to do with the book is to address the modern challenge of decision-making. Because if we look at how decision-making has evolved over the last 300 years or so, we’ve become more and more rational/logical and that’s the kind of accepted approach.

And very often when people talk about intuition it’s like they feel, it’s gut feel, but they know when it comes to business decision and stuff like that that we have to have a rational logical explanation. So the question is, “Which should I trust?” And even if you go to a reputable source like the Harvard Business Review what you find is there’s an article one month which will be something like Learn To Trust Your Gut, and then there’ll be another month which it will say Don’t Trust Your Gut.

So we see this rational logical debate, the rational local debate is the intuitive debate everywhere and one of the things is there must be a common ground, there must be somewhere, a middle ground, where both of these arguments are valid, and then it’s about applicability and appropriateness so we can know which to reply and when to make more appropriate, more reliable and more solid decisions more often.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like that. And so if it’s not already immediately clear, can you share why is that important? Why is making the optimal decision more frequently matter?

Michael Nicholas
Well, think of an area in your life that’s not affected by the quality of decisions you make. Whatever we have spent our life studying, our ability to apply those skills or that knowledge or that experience effectively will come down to our decision-making, especially a lot of the softer aspects of our decision-making that we might call judgments.

You know those moment-by-moment decisions that we make, we probably make thousands of decisions every day from very small to very big, many of them without even stopping to really consider it’s a decision. It’s like an automatic program that runs to enable us to handle a certain situation. And depending on the quality of our programming, therefore, we will make decisions which we may well not really investigate to work out whether they’re getting us the results that we’re looking for.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love the way you phrased that, the automatic programming. I’m thinking like there have been so many times in life where I had to fly out for a client or a speaking engagement or training or something, and then I take a look at the clock and I just have this really weird window of time, it’s like, “Huh, I’ve got three hours here before I can check into my hotel or before I need to go be in the airplane.”

Or I’m doing like a weird transfer, and I think to myself, “Why on earth is this my travel plan? Why did I do this?” And I’m thinking, it’s like, “You probably saved a hundred bucks on a flight somewhere, Pete,” because you’re automatically going, “The cheapest flight is best.” You know that programming is just in there.

Michael Nicholas
Yeah, that’s the way it works.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d rather have the hundred bucks out of my bank account and just have the schedule that make great sense so I can use those hours for more meaningful client work or intellectual property development or just being with friends and family.

Michael Nicholas
Absolutely. And, in fact, your food choices, your health choices, your exercise choices, your choice of friends, where you like to hang out, the whole lot.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, boy, so that’s powerful. So then lay it out for us, we got the reason, perspective, logic data-driven goodness, and then we’ve got the intuition side. So one way to make the choice for which way it wins out is, I guess, which issue of the Harvard Business Review you’re reading that month. But what’s your recommended approach to navigate those two different sides of things?

Michael Nicholas
So not a lot of people think about the issue but there is a very famous study that was done by a guy called Philip Tetlock where he looked at the ability of experts to make predictions in environments of uncertainty.

And the reason this is important, of course, is because our predictions form the basis of most of our decisions. One of the things that we realized in psychology over the last 30 or so years is that we don’t actually base our decisions on what’s happening now. What we do is we use what’s happening now to project forward and try and work out what we think is likely to happen next, and therefore it’s that prediction what will happen next that we use to make our decisions. And mostly, of course, that’s happening incredibly quickly in our unconscious brain.

But when we’re looking at something like a business decision that might involve some sort of analyses, Tetlock looked at the ability of experts to do accurate predictions, and his sort of high-level summary caused a lot of attention because of the way he phrased it, which was he said, “The average expert is slightly less good than a dunce or a chimpanzee,” which kind of is quite surprising when you see the number of times the experts are interviewed, asked for their opinion about what’s likely to happen next.

And there’s a really big event in the UK recently which summarized this whole discussion which was about on whether or not to stay in the European Union. And when you look at that, everyone in the country got to make a decision about what they thought was going to be the best, and both sides of the debate were presenting their arguments for why their side was likely to work out better as though they actually knew what was going to happen.

And then people made the decision. But, of course, those decisions weren’t really rational. They were very strongly emotional as it became clear the next day when people talked about why they made the decision they made. And what’s now become even clear is, those supposed experts who were telling us about the pros and cons of either side of that debate, really have no clue, especially the people who recommended we come out. They knew nothing about what it would mean for us to leave the EU.

So, basically, people have made an emotional decision under the guise of a series of experts trying to present a picture which was made up because they didn’t know. And that is the environment that we are now facing more and more, is as the phase of change in the world increases the level of ambiguity and uncertainty is increasing all the time, and it’s changing the fundamental nature of the way we need to approach decision-making. And that’s the kind of foundation upon which I’ve built the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, it’s a spooky place to be in terms of that and feeling good about any decision that you make. So what should be some of our step-by-steps in terms of getting to good decisions with higher probability?

Michael Nicholas
Well, the first thing to recognize is when our old form of decision-making, that we’re probably conditioned to use, so we talked a little bit about conditioning. We’re conditioned from when we went to school to be rational and logical in the way we approach decision-making even though we’re not rational and logical as human beings, and neuroscience has clearly demonstrated that our emotional brain is always engaged in every rational decision that we make.

But we like to think of ourselves as rational and not affected by these things. But the first question really is, “To what degree will the past enable you to predict the future?” And you can see a lot of environments where there is a sort of stability and there’s a level of repeatability that means if we do X we’re quite likely to get Y. And then a slightly higher level of complexity where we can see that there are tradeoffs, but an expert will start to understand how to use their skills to predict outcomes even with large numbers of variables and tradeoffs involved.

And then we’d cross this critical line where we actually need hindsight in order to understand what was going on. So data will explain why something happened in the past, but it won’t enable us to predict it in advanced. And it’s that line, it’s the critical line, because when you cross that line you can’t use the classical left brain rational decision-making approach anymore. You have to start to use a different approach, and that’s a lot of what the book is about.

And, essentially, it’s an approach based on creativity because we’re seeing into something new and unknown, and so the old won’t work very well so we need something new.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s very, very intriguing. And, I guess, I don’t know, I’ve had those moments where I’m in the zone in terms of I just have the sense for what’s going to happen and it happens and it feels awesome in terms of, you know, I just feel so brilliant and astute and perceptive but maybe I just got lucky. I don’t know.

And so then that is quite intriguing, that’s a great rule of thumb, is to just take a critical eye toward to what degree do we think the past events will be predictive of the future events and to note where data has its, I guess, endpoint of usefulness. So then are there some key rules of thumb to assess or assert, “Hmm, this looks like a highly volatile unpredictable space as opposed to a predictable space”?

Michael Nicholas
I’m not sure there’s a rule of thumb you could apply because it’s going to be one of those things where you learn by experience. This is what the nature of intuition is about. It’s like there’s things that you don’t know that you know that you picked up through your life give you a feeling for what’s happening. And the question is to what degree do you trust that?

So even be asking the question, the key is that we have to start to be able to interrupt our automatic processes, the automatic decisions that we’re making that we unconsciously assume will continue to serve us. And to do that, we have to bring a high level of awareness into the choices that we’re making. If there’s a rule of thumb, that’s where it’s heading. It’s starting to take the attention from those externals to our internals so we can start to look at, “Well, why am I looking at it the way I’m looking at it? And is that still appropriate under the circumstances or have something changed?” And this is phenomenally hard to do.

I’ve given a couple of examples in the book of how people, even people who spend a life focusing on something, will get completely sidelined by change and not really notice the significance of it until someone else comes along and wakes them up.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, please share one.

Michael Nicholas
Yes. Well, a great example of it actually is what Dick Fosbury did at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico. And, of course, he’s had his particular technique now named after him which is the Fosbury Flop. And he turned up at the Olympics and went over the bar backwards instead of the technique of the day which was called the Western Straddle where people led with the leg and rolled over facing downwards across the bar.

And the initial reaction of the crowds was to laugh at him but that stopped quite quickly when he won. But the interesting thing about this, so if you actually delve into it, it was that Fosbury, he didn’t really plan this approach. It sort of emerged because he wasn’t a very good high jumper and he’d actually chosen the high jump because he actually wasn’t a very good athlete and he wanted to do something.

But in high school, he couldn’t even make the qualifying heights in some of the competitions, and he turned up at the competition with his best jump at five-foot-three and he was six-foot-four so that wasn’t massively good. And already the bar was above his personal best, and he just kind of knew he had to do something different, so he went across the bar backwards, and it worked.

So you kind of think logically, “Hey, you think you might be onto something. I’ll go away and practice that.” But because it broke the mold and broke the conventional wisdom of the day, he and the coaches decided in practice he should continue practicing the Western Straddle, and then he would just use his flop in competition because he couldn’t compete using the straddle.

And, eventually, his coach videoed him and videoed him and saw him clear the bar by six inches and, thought, “Hmm, there must be something in this.” And that was when he started practicing it. But it’s a good example of this old phrase that, “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Mostly, we’ll only start to get creative and think of new ways to do old things when we have to.

And, essentially, what I’m saying is the challenge of the modern age is to start to do that proactively. So before we have to we will start to challenge our conventional wisdom and the way we’ve always done things in the hope that we can come up with something new that will give us an advantage, because if we don’t, the chances are someone else will because technology is increasing so fast and the pace is increasing, and the ability of others to compete with low bars to entry is increasing, and all manner of variables, which mean that we’re all facing an environment in which change is happening much more quickly, so we have to respond in our decision-making.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so that notion of challenging yourself before you have to, I think that’s just sort of deep inside our nervous systems or something in terms of call it entropy or conservation of energy or something. It’s like, “Well, we don’t want to expend all that effort and energy. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” So are there any cool tips and tricks for putting a little bit of a forcing function on that to get it going earlier?

Michael Nicholas
Well, classically, psychology view that there’s two reasons why we change, and one is that we want something enough to motivate us to do something new. And the other is that the current environment becomes sufficiently painful that we’re forced into it. And, unfortunately, the second of those is more powerful. So you can see this clearly just through observation that most people are reluctant to change until they have to.

But what we’re saying here is that you have to start to want it enough. And we can generate these things in our mind potentially by challenging ourselves to realize the consequences of not change. Because there’s an old saying, and I’ve asked thousands of people this question, “If you always do what you’ve always done, what happens?” And people will say, “Well, you always get what you always got.” And I’ve had that repeated back to me literally thousands of times. But the problem is it’s actually not true.

Because it’s only true under the circumstance that nothing else is, and nobody I’ve ever spoken to would say nothing has changed. So if we always do what we’ve always done we’re actually going backwards to the exact degree that the environment is progressing. And so if we’re not in pain yet, we will be soon, and things can catch up with us and we suddenly realize we’ve become irrelevant, our business is being surpassed or made irrelevant, and we’ve not even necessarily realized it’s happening until too late. And I think the reflection on those sorts of issues can motivate people to be much more alert to think about being more creative, bringing innovation into what they’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Yes. And so you’re saying, then, that simply by looking at the facts or case studies or illustrations that point to it all hitting the fan because folks were kind of business as usual when they shouldn’t have been is a good way to, I guess, productively freak yourself out and do something about it.

Michael Nicholas
Yeah, essentially, because you’ve got to create the motivation in your mind. When you find successful people you find this is what they do. People who are creative, they’re not creative immediately. They’re creative after much effort. So tenacity is one of the key requirements for people to actually produce meaningful and useful good ideas. And that comes back to overcome the disappointments, and the multiple repeats is normally necessary to come up with something new.

And where does that tenacity come from? Well, it actually comes from wanting it enough. Well, how do you create that? Well, you’ve got to create it inside out. Nobody can give that to you. And so we’re in a world where, from a leadership perspective, in the old world you could get the basic productivity that was necessary to deliver results by essentially demanding compliance of people.

But we’re in a world now where we need discretionary effort, we need people’s efforts and commitment to do the best they can do and bring their value. And for that the rules have to change. And we’re trying to inspire people from the inside out as oppose to telling them what to do outside in, and that makes a world of difference.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, yes, tell us with this inside out challenge you’ve got cooking, what’s that about?

Michael Nicholas
Well, the reason I talk about inside out challenge is because our highest capabilities actually come from our unconscious brain, if you think about it. So anything that anybody is highly-skilled in, they become skilled in it by training their brain to do it automatically so it feels relatively effortless. And if you see people who are performing at the very highest levels, typically they will require less effort to do so than a novice would to do the same thing badly.

Think about a learner learning to drive a car and the effort it takes to drive that car, and then you think about the world champion motor-racing driver and he probably requires a lot less effort to drive, apart from it the very highest level to drive at a much higher level because his brain has been trained to do that.

And the way that works is through a process of repetition. So what fires together wires together is sort of mantra for neuroscience. Every time we fire and pass a circuit in our brain, those circuits then fire more easily the next time. And so we need to be firing the circuits that help us with decision-making so that our decision-making will start to become more automatic. Because the problem is much of what we’ve learned to do may be flawed but we won’t actually know it because there’s no warning signal when we get it wrong, and this is one of the essential challenges.

If you think about your decisions, when you make a decision, you make a decision because it feels right, and it’s only later you realize that it was wrong. And so, essentially, that decision feels right even when it’s wrong. So a good decision feels the same as a bad decision in other words, and that’s because our unconscious mind is programmed that way.

So we have to learn to change the way that those deeper patterns of our mind are programmed in order to enable more effortless but better decision-making. Just the same as if we wanted to improve our tennis forehand, we’d have to practice a new swing until it became automatic. We’re going to have to do the same thing with our decision-making.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so then, I guess I’m not quite clear yet then on how do we get the connection between, “Oh, that’s a good decision. Keep it up,” versus, “Ooh, that’s a bad decision. Let’s tweak it”?

Michael Nicholas
Well, yeah, and for that we need awareness, don’t we, Pete? So we’re talking about increasing awareness. So the journey here is the journey which takes us from essentially unconsciousness. We make a decision automatically to a place of awareness where we start to understand that we’re doing something that may not be optimized, to a place of self-awareness where we start to understand why we’ve made that decision. And that’s what then gives us the ability to make changes.

And I think it’ll probably be quite useful if I gave an illustration of this because I know that is a concept. There’s quite a lot of concepts I talk about which probably aren’t common language because we’re trying to do something, we’re trying to develop an approach to decision-making which isn’t the norm but which I’m suggesting is going to have to become the norm for people that want to considerably add value in the future.

So this was actually an example of a client of mine, a coaching client, and I’ll call her Susan just for anonymity. And she approached me for help because she’d successfully turned around the business, she’d been growing the business, she’d been taking in more direct reports, more staff, the business had doubled in size in two years.

And, essentially, the challenge she was facing was it was requiring more and more of her time. So she approached me and she said, “I need some help because it’s time management really so that my diary isn’t starting to encroach on my home life so much.” And I kind of wanted to say to her, “Well, that’s maybe not as simple as you think it is,” but you can’t say that, can you? You have to take people through a process of self-realization. So this is the inside out nature.

One of the first questions I asked her, obviously, was around delegation and how well you’re authorizing and giving authority to your staff and giving them responsibility for taking on new work, and she had a belief that she was very good at this. So you ask questions around this for quite a while and there’s no real answers coming out. She’s a bit stuck in this mindset that the problem is a problem relating to time.

And, eventually, to try to un-peal it, I asked if we could just take a look through her diary to see if there were any patterns I could recognize that she couldn’t recognize. So at this point she’s clearly unconscious. She know she’s got a problem but she doesn’t know what’s causing it. And when I started to look through the diary, there were more meetings with direct reports than you’d expect. So I just asked her, “Well, why have you got so many meetings with your direct reports?” And she said, “Because they like to review decisions with me before they make them.” Okay?

So now, as a coach, I’m sure you know this, you would test that but not challenge it from the basis of, “I don’t believe.” You’re just going to test it. So I said to her, “Well, if that’s true then the suggestion would be, if you went on holiday for, say, two weeks, it’ll then become a bottleneck. This won’t be something where they would carry on without you. Is that true?” And then we had this very long pause. And the next words out of her mouth were, “If I do what you’re suggesting,” well, I haven’t suggested anything clearly, I just asked. But she said, “If I do what you’re suggesting, what does the business need me for?”

Pete Mockaitis
Alright.

Michael Nicholas
So there’s a bit of an assumption I have to make now about what happened, but I’m assuming that pretty quickly she went through a period of awareness, “Okay, I’m not delegating as well as I thought because I’m clearly not actually delegating authority for these decisions because whilst I believe I have I’m not actually happy for them to make their decisions when I’m not here.” So she’s gone from unconsciousness. I didn’t realize this was a problem, to awareness. Now I know there’s a problem.

And quite quickly, just in her own mind, without even interacting with me, she started to question, “Why am I not happy?” And the conclusion she reached changed her life literally because this idea, “If I do what you’re suggesting, what does the business need me for?” she now realized that the reason she wanted to be involved in their decisions was because that was how she demonstrated her value to the business.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Michael Nicholas
So it was going to be, we could’ve talked about time management forever, and she would’ve continued to make the same decisions about the way she did that because it was being driven by a much deeper need or value, which was the desire to demonstrate her value and her contribution to the business. And once we knew that we were able to talk about what she could do that would be more valuable than any of that and then she would automatically go and do those things.

So her behavior switched, and the decision she made on a daily basis about how to use her time switched once she had the self-awareness to understand why she was making the old decision. And so that’s why we need to make this journey from unconsciousness through awareness and into self-awareness about the type of decisions and the nature of the decisions and what’s actually driving it. And that’s why I described it as an inside out challenge.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. I see. And so I’d love, then, before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things, to hear some of your most kind of hard-hitting tips and tactics to do just that, whether that’s accelerating the journey to awareness, to getting clearer on what’s going on deep down, to minimize the risks of bias. What are some of your go-to prescriptions?

Michael Nicholas
Yeah. Well, the key to this is being able to direct attention. So when we look at what actually we need to change, the heart of it is what I call intentional attention, the ability to direct our attention in a way that we can consciously control. And that turns out to be a flexible skill and something that’s trainable, and the more we practice it, like anything else we practice, the better we get at it.

And we need to do this for a whole host of reasons because if we’re going to become creative, one of the things we have to do is become more relaxed. Because, if you think about it, I’ve asked, again, hundreds of people this question, “When do you have your best creative ideas?” And nobody said, “When I’m stressed.” Everybody said, “Relaxing in the bath,” or, “Four a.m. when I wake up and I’m relaxed and these ideas pop out.”

So we have to be able to deal with our stresses because that stress is the time when we’re most likely to pull an old reactive pattern. And to do that we have to start to be able to look at just why we see things the way we see them. So we have to be able to give our attention to where our mind is directed, and this is the intentional attention.

And it’s a very exciting time actually for studying this particular area because we’re learning a lot about how the brain works and what’s happening in the brain when we start to focus attention deliberately. And it turns out we activate a particular part of the brain just behind the forehead which is called the prefrontal cortex, and this is the part that’s responsible for just about all of our high human capabilities like our ability to empathize, our self-awareness, our decision-making, our ability to regulate or even to understand our emotions and then to regulate our emotions.

And when we direct attention consciously, we develop the part of the brain that does that and at the same time we suppress the part of the brain that causes stress and triggers us into our reactive patterns. So the question then becomes quite a simple one, which is, “How do we practice the ability to focus attention with intention?” And this is this inside out transformation that I’ve been talking about so that we can increase our levels of self-awareness, not avoid completely but start to become much more aware of how our reactive patterns and the automatic nature of our programming is taking us down to certain paths.

And there’s a name that is commonly used for that type of focusing of attention, to practice of focusing attention. And the old name for it is meditation. Medication has long been associated with religion but it has actually nothing to do with religion. It’s a practice of focusing the mind deliberately on a certain point. And what it creates is one of the biggest buzzwords around business, I think, in general right now. You probably have someone on who’s talked about it, which is mindfulness.

Mindfulness being the ability to have a present moment awareness, that’s relaxed and open, flexible and creative and non-judgmental. And we can practice that deliberately and hone it and develop it in a conscious way. And when we do that there are all sorts of benefits which we simply don’t have the time to talk through the detail of it now, there’s quite a lot of it in my book.

But what I’ve tried to do is to get to a place where I’ve explained to people the value in terms of changes that take place in the brain when we practice focusing our attention with intention. And it creates numerous shifts, it makes it more effortless to focus attention and it makes us less distract-able so that in this world of multiple distractions, where we’re getting information from all directions, we become better able to focus our attention and hold it focused and to do that with less effort.

When you do all those things, your decision-making is going to improve for certain, and it’s going to improve because the change is in the brain, the changes that will do that or make that automatic. So it’s not something you have to actually try to do. It’s more like something that you would try to be. So the best practice is actually one of, essentially, creating, re-wiring of the brain so that we automatically will make better decisions and have a lot more fun doing it as well because we’ll feel a lot more relaxed and open in the process.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s so cool. Thank you. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Michael Nicholas
Yeah. Well, there’s a couple of quotes that relate to what we’ve been talking about, and the first is a quote from Carl Jung. I’m sure you’ve heard of the esteemed psychologist who said, “Until we make the unconscious conscious it will rule our lives and we’ll call it fate,” which refers to how these patterns just produce results in our lives and we may not be aware of it.

And the second one relates to the way that we create our perceptions because we see the world a certain way and we won’t necessarily understand that. There’s a chapter in the book I’ve called The Reality Delusion to point to the fact that we don’t really recognize what’s out there because we see what we are. And there’s a lovely Sufi saying which encapsulates that, which is, “When a pickpocket meets a saint, all he sees are pockets,” to reflect the fact.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Michael Nicholas
I really struggle with this question, Pete. I’ve got so many favorite books. I think I’ll probably go first with Eckhart Tolle book in terms of the power of presence to transform your experience, The Power of Now and A New Earth are such great books on this subject. But if we just wanted to talk about becoming comfortable with our ambiguity and learning to recognize maybe the world isn’t the way we thought it is which is a foundational requirement for handling ambiguity effectively, there’s a book called The Field by a lady called Lynne McTaggart which I absolutely love because it challenges so many multiples and understandings about how the world works.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, great. Thank you. And how about a favorite tool?

Michael Nicholas
Well, I have to say mindfulness on this, don’t I? Or meditation. The tool of being present moment awareness and bringing yourself into the present by inserting a pause, because the more the world speeds up the more important it becomes that we slow down. And so if we find that we sort of, again, slightly carried away, I think the value of being able to take maybe just three breaths consciously, neuroscience has shown, will allow our brain time to reorganize so that we can balance that rational intuitive better.

So that idea of just taking a pause to take three conscious breaths, and be aware of the breaths, is incredibly powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, indeed. Thank you. And is there a particular nugget that you share in your workshops or your writing that seems to really connect and resonate with people, getting them nodding their heads and taking notes?

Michael Nicholas
Yeah, I love this idea. I think it originally came from Einstein who said something like, “The most important question we can ever answer is whether the basic nature of the universe is friendly or hostile.” And that really caught my attention when I first read it because I didn’t understand it basically, I think, years ago when I first saw it. And it’s intrigued me enough I kept thinking about it.

And now I kind of think it’s true because it relays this idea that the world is nothing until we make it something through our perception. So the world, nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so, is what Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet. And whether we see the world as friendly or hostile will determine how much stress we experience and how creative we’ll be able to be. And that comes down to our perceptions, and we can learn to retrain our perceptions to shift our experience of reality. And when we do that, we can totally transform our ability to handle all manner of situations.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch with you, where would you point them?

Michael Nicholas
Well, initially, obviously, I would point them to the book we’ve been talking about, The Little Black Book of Decision-Making. Otherwise, to my website MichaelNicholas.com, and if they wanted to connect with me that way and, hopefully, receive sources of inspiration, they’ll call me, that would be great.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if you have a final challenge or call to action for those seeking to be awesome at their jobs what would it be?

Michael Nicholas
Well, I’m going to, when I present this sort of information we’ve been talking about here, one of the most common responses I get is, “Well, I’m just not creative.” And I want to say to everybody that’s not true. You may have conditioned yourself to focus automatically on another direction or another area of strength of your brain, but we all have the capacity to be creative, and it will start to happen automatically if we develop the underlying mental traits that are necessary which are basically this tenacity I mentioned earlier, and an openness to new ideas, and a willingness to tune into and recognize our intuitive feelings, and the messages from our intuition. And we all have that capability.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s great. Well, Michael, thank you so much for taking this time. That’s so cool. I wish you lots of luck with the book and all your workshops and all your upcoming adventures.

Michael Nicholas
Brilliant. Thank you very much, Pete. It’s been such a pleasure talking to you.