618: Finding Greater Clarity Amid Uncertainty with Jodi Hume

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

Jodi Hume
Great. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom about decision-making. But I think, first, we have to hear about your truck pull champion performance. What’s the story there?

Jodi Hume
You want to jump right into the truck pull?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Jodi Hume
Well, actually, that probably would be a great decision-making story because it involves a lot of not making decisions. It was just sort of one of those things where a thing happens, and then you do the next thing, and then you do the next thing, and then, all of a sudden, you’re doing a truck pull. But to make a very long story short, because I’m 47, I’ve never been an athlete, I was a theater kid, that was just not my thing in the world.

I was going to a gym where we were doing like deadlifts but we were using the dumb bells, and I was frustrated because I knew I could lift more than I was but my grip strength was not great. And the guy mentioned that if you took the actual barbell class, how to learn how to really do it properly, that you could use the Olympic barbell kind of thing, and then you could lift a lot more. And that led into, apparently, they ended that with this mock lift meet which I was, “I am not doing a mock weightlifting thing. That is not happening.” But I did it.

And from there, I got talked into doing this fundraiser Strong Woman competition which I don’t know if you are familiar with, like the Strongman/Strongwoman competitions, but they are a hoot because all of the things that you compete in are all so awkward, like none of the things are like the normal things. You’re like throwing a tire, or you’re doing these overhead presses with these circus dumbbells they call them, so you have to tilt your head really far to the right, and it’s all very awkward and weird. So, you really have to separate yourself from all concern about looking like an idiot and just do the thing.

And a couple of the things you really couldn’t even train for, like we didn’t have a truck we could practice pull. We did other things but there’s this whole training thing beforehand. And who knew it, but I somehow ended up winning first place in a truck pull, pulling a seven-ton bread truck.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! So, I don’t know why in my brain, when I read truck pull, I was thinking about a tractor pull.

Jodi Hume
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
But this is actually very different. You are physically, with your own strength, pulling a truck.

Jodi Hume
Pulling a truck, yeah. So, I will tell you, interestingly, there were events that were way harder, because that’s one really just about getting it moving. There’s a fantastic business metaphor here, by the way, because it’s a seven-ton truck. And if it wasn’t on wheels, and you actually had to pull a seven-ton truck, that is not an event that I’ll be participating in. That doesn’t happen. The trick to the truck pull is simply to just get it rolling. once you overcome that very initial inertia, which was particularly tricky because it was on cobblestones in a part of Baltimore here where it is, then it’s just about keeping it going, and it becomes super, super, super fast.

So, the real backstory here is, the reason I won first place, part of the reason, is a lot of people just couldn’t get it moving. They just couldn’t. So, again, the number of people who actually got it moving, then it came down to how fast you did it, but it was just, “Could you get it going in the first place?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, is there a trick to that, or you just…?

Jodi Hume
Actually, the trick was the way you hold the rope because your grip strength, again, is a real limiter in a lot of things, and you were allowed to wrap it around your wrist so that you could really use your whole body, but, for some reason, people weren’t doing that but I did.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, good.

Jodi Hume
See, I grew up where manual labor was, quite often, a part of our childhood so I know how to push and pull big things, I guess.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is handy.

Jodi Hume
Not a thing on my resume but who knew.

Pete Mockaitis
Pushing/pulling big things. Well, hey, sometimes decisions really do feel like big things that need to be pushed or pulled because they’re stuck, and maybe stuck for a long, long time.

Jodi Hume
Especially, in 2020, man.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s what I find most intriguing in your bio. So, providing on-call decision support. That just sounds like a lot of fun.

Jodi Hume
Doesn’t it?

Pete Mockaitis
Tell me, what does that mean?

Jodi Hume
Well, that’s a great question because there’s no easy word for what I do. I have been a coach, I have been a consultant, I’m a facilitator, I have other business background experience and whatnot, but, really, what it is now is this on-call decision support. And just recently, and I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me before, but some of my earliest memories were doing this for my mom. My mom was an entrepreneur, both her parents were entrepreneurs, they didn’t hide any of those things from us. And I think, looking back, I certainly didn’t have this realization at the time.

But while the obvious things that I learned from all these conversations were the pieces of wisdom, or knowledge, or whatever you’re learning about how businesses worked, what I really, really came away with is how uniquely lonely business owners and leaders and people trying to guide anything can feel because they don’t always have someone to talk to. And it’s not even, when I say that, I don’t always mean like a therapy conversation. Just even to mentally process it, to get other feedback, there’s such pressure to feel like you’re supposed to know everything already and have all the answers.

And so, I was just really aware of these questions that my mom would get all snarled up in. And, as she would talk, I would just be asking all these questions to kind of untangle and separate facts from fictions or fears. And I don’t know if that’s just my version of “I see dead people,” but it’s kind of triaging down to, “What’s the real issue here? And which things are like stories you’re making up that’s making it more complicated? Or are you actually trying to decide, like, eight steps down when it’s really like an issue here?”

And, over time, I realized that that was really at the core of what most people in business need, is not some big, heavy coaching arrangement, or even a therapist, or a consultant. Most of the time they just need somebody else to bounce a thing off of and ask them some really good questions, validate the parts that make sense, challenge the parts that maybe don’t or should be questioned, and sometimes telling them to go take a nap, which happens more than you might realize, especially this year.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Jodi Hume
And it’s fun. It was the part I like the most.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, there’s so much fascinating good stuff in there, and that really rings true in terms of that is often what’s needed, and, you’re right, it doesn’t quite fit tidily into a lot of sort of preexisting categories we have for support, coaching, consulting, therapy-ish.

Jodi Hume
Yeah, because all those things feel like a big deal, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Jodi Hume
Like, somebody talks about, “I’m going to hire a coach,” and it’s like, “I have to find the right one, and it’s going to be expensive. And if it’s not working, I have to break up with them or same with therapists and whatnot.” It’s got like all this heavy weight to it and I don’t think it needs to be that. Seth Godin has this fantastic quote that says, “If you have a problem you can’t talk about, now you have two problems.” So, I like to have people not have two problems.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then, maybe could you give us a cool story to make this come to life, in terms of, you know we could keep the confidentiality going but…

Jodi Hume
Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Someone, they were stuck, and how they managed to get unstuck?

Jodi Hume
Yeah. I will make a comment about the nap thing first and then I’ll tell you an actual story. But a great portion of time, because I feel this one is really usable, like as a self-evaluation thing that won’t get too hung up, and, “Is that story like mine? Is that story not like mine?” There is a great number of times that when somebody calls me to run a thing by me, I can just immediately tell by the tone of their voice, the way like there’s a heaviness in both of the things that they imagine are their two choices, there’s just a lot of different clues about it because sometimes you can tell that they’re dragging their feet because, down deep, they know something is a really bad idea.

And sometimes they’re dragging their feet because, down deep, they know something is a really good idea but it’s just really scary. That sounds completely different than the other way does. There is a specific kind of where just everything sounds heavy and nothing feels good or light or exciting where I really do think that if I offer…they’re so exhausted, that if we were trying to decide between a hamburger or a cheeseburger, they wouldn’t be able to decide. And that is when I say, “You have to find some way, whether it’s a nap, or whether it’s taking a day off, or just take an evening off, or whatever it is, whatever sliver of renewal time you can find. There’s really no point in us talking about this until you get some rest.” And there’s all sorts of neuroscience behind this. This is not a luxury thing.

Your brain cannot, when it gets that depleted, it cannot even access that part of your brain that can get to the real nuanced important thinking part, and so you are kind of at half-mast. So, I always sort of say to people, if I have one piece of advice, like, “Check in if you need a nap, or if you need a break, if you need to go walk around the forest for a little bit, or something, and just see if that makes your problem easier because a lot of times just sort of magically there’s an easy decision on the other side.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s powerful. And I think it’s interesting in that I think most of us are at some level of tired.

Jodi Hume
Oh, it’s chronic right now. There are so many, first of all, and I promise I will get back to my story. Never, at least in our history, I mean, certainly way, way, way back when, but in the time any of us have been alive, it doesn’t feel like every single decision is potentially a life-and-death decision. It’s a little bit less so now, but for months, going to the grocery store felt like this huge weighty thing, my kids saying, “Can I see a friend?” I’m like, “Oh, I don’t know. That’s a lot of so many things to consider.”

We’re not used to and we are not built for that level of constant threat of considering that many things where there’s so much uncertainty, so little guidance on what the right thing to do is, changing variables, not to mention the emotional weight of isolation and not getting to do the things that we look forward to. That’s a huge one. I don’t think anyone really understood the value and importance and nutrition we get out of having things to look forward to. There’s not a lot you can even bank on to look forward to right now because it might get cancelled. And so, there’s just all these things that we never really realized were important that fed us, and things that are more heavy, and so, yeah, exhaustion is a chronic, chronic thing right now, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
And I guess that all rings true. And to that end, I’m curious, so they’re so exhausted they couldn’t choose between a hamburger and a cheeseburger, and I imagine sometimes it’s exaggeration, sometimes it’s not, because I’ve been there before. Then is there sort of an acid test, a rule of thumb, or guideline you use for too tired, inadequately rested, try again later?

Jodi Hume
Yeah. So, I thought about drawing this out almost like a Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, but how to know if you are just, “Stick a fork and be done.” Like, anytime you’re spinning your wheels on a thing where you’re just turning and turning and turning, it’s good to check in, like, “Do I need a nap?” If everything starts to feel heavy and not fun, that’s another time where if you sort of, I think in metaphor a lot. If you do a 360 spin around everything in your life and nothing is like, “Oh, that’s a place where that feels good,” that’s a really good sign you just need to get out.

And I want to be super clear about something. I preach this talk, I stand on this soapbox all the time, and I am just as bad about this. We went on a vacation in August sort of, I mean, it wasn’t even a real vacation. That’s kind of the point. And we could only get this little cabin in the middle of nowhere. It’s from Monday to Friday, and that felt like a vacation. I knew we needed to get out of here because we’ve been in here for weeks, and months and months, and that felt like a long time, and I didn’t really through the fact that you check into the cabin on Monday at like 4:00, and you check out like 10:00 on Friday, so, really, it was only like three days so it didn’t really quite scratch my reset itch.

And I came back over the weekend, and I did some work on Monday, and I really needed that renewal and I wasn’t feeling it. But on Tuesday, a friend of mine called me to see if I wanted to go for a hike. And, of course, what’s my immediate thought? “I can’t take the morning off. I was just gone for a week. I got to get back to work.” But it was the only day that week that was going to be nice, and so I went. And here’s why I’m telling you this story because I feel like it provided me quantitative evidence of what happens neurologically speaking when you are, basically, your brain is like a watered-up piece of paper.

Because I love to take pictures, I love taking pictures, and when I got home from this hike, this three and a half-hour hike, the first half of my camera roll, the first half of the hike on my camera roll is two pictures, and they’re the most boring, obligatory, like if somebody said, “Jodi, you have to take pictures of the trees and pictures of the sky,” and that’s it. There’s nothing of interest. And then, by halfway through, I start taking like a few pictures. Last, like half hour, or 40 minutes of the hike, I take like 70 pictures, and they are some of the coolest, most interesting, like, really, I love these photos.

And for the next three days, I was like on fire. I got more done, decisions were easy, everything seemed simpler, and it’s like that camera roll. I just watched my brain unfold back to its normal shape, and I felt it. Like, I felt more relaxed. So, the other thing, too, is I would just say you don’t have to…you don’t necessarily need validity that you need a break. It’s not going to hurt you to get like an extra break, so just take a break and see if it helps, and use that as evidence to give yourself permission to take the next break.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And I think that’s great advice for a lot of people.

Jodi Hume
It’s so hard to take though. It’s so hard.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I guess what I was just driving at is so there’s one place that’s like just clear, it’s like, “Nothing seems fun or interesting. Okay, check. Definitely, I need some refreshment.” I’m having a hard time making even the most basic of decisions, like, “What do I feel like eating?” All right. Another great indicator. Rest is urgently needed. Anything else that leaps to mind for you there?

Jodi Hume
Just staying a little bit more attuned to your energy level before it gets that depleted because it takes more at that point. So, I think of it, in business we talk a lot about financial capital, and I think a lot about energetic and emotional capital, and just paying attention. It sounds kind of corny but I check in, I won’t say into it every day. I’m just not that routine about things. But every couple of days I kind of check in on, “What is giving me energy and what is taking energy?” And it’s just a math formula, “Are there more things giving me energy than taking energy?”

And not every day is going to be like that. You’re going to have days where there’s more taking than getting. It happens. But the sum total has to be that you, for it to be sustainable, is that you’re at least neutral if not positive. And I use that to judge the mix of clients I have at any given time, or the type of work that I’m doing, or even in parenting. Like, my husband and I both have…I sing in a band, my husband plays in a pool league. We do those things because we’re better parents if we’re happy humans. So, just making sure that you don’t get depleted along the way so that you don’t actually need a litmus test because you’re just making sure. It’s just nutrition really, making sure the good things are going in.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then let’s give an example then. So, when stuck, and then we disentangle, and it’s all clear.

Jodi Hume
Yeah, just like that. That’s all there is to it. Just like that. No, so, here’s one of my favorite stories actually. So, a few years ago, I had a client call, because it hits on some of the reasons why this work feels so important to me. A client called me, I’d known him for quite a while, but we hadn’t worked together in a little while, and he said, “I want to run this by you because everyone in my life says this thing is a really good idea. And on paper, I know it’s a really good idea, and I’m dragging my feet, and I don’t know why.” I was like, “All right. Let’s dig into it. Tell me what’s going on.”

And so, the deal was that he had an opportunity to, I forget whether it was a merger or an acquisition, kind of doesn’t matter, to like merge with this other company. And on paper, almost no one in the world would say it was a bad idea. Like, on paper it looked like a really good opportunity financially speaking, growth of the business, all these kinds of things. If you sort of flip over to the personal side of his life, because of those things, his wife was super excited about it even, she’s like, “This is great. This is the growth you’ve been looking for, and blah, blah, blah.” So, he’s getting support from there. His business friends, he was in a peer group, were all saying like, “How could you say no to this? This is a fantastic idea.”

And he said, “I lie in bed awake at night,” which is where a lot of the stories that come to me start. I often hear, like, “This is what I’m worrying about at night.” “So, I’m lying in bed awake at night, and I just get sick to my stomach when I talk about doing this thing.” So, I do what I do. I poke around, because it’s not like…I’m no oracle. It’s not like I know all the answers.

So, I kept asking him questions, I kept kind of poking around, looking under this rock, looking under that rock, sort of pulling on one thread, that didn’t untangle anything, pulling on this one. And then, all of a sudden, it hit me, and I said, “Hold on a second. How old is your son right now?” And he was going into his senior year. And I said, “What is your next year going to look like if you go ahead with this deal?” And he was like, “Oh, I’m going to be gone. I have to travel here. I have to travel there. I’m going to be in Phoenix for this amount of time and whatnot.” And I was like, “Huh,” and he was like, “Why?” I was like, “Didn’t you say at one point that it was really important for you to be around these last couple of years of high school?” And there was this long pause, and he was like, “That’s it.” That was the thing that was like stuck in the back that this personal detail, which doesn’t show up on sort of the business conversations.

And this is one of the most important things for me is that there are things that have to do with this specific company that are all really, really important. Then there’s a list of questions and curiosities that have to do with the business in general, or the sort of family circumstances, and then there’s the person themselves and their weird quirks and strange things they care about. And if you’re really curious about all of them, you kind of dig down to a thing that, all of a sudden, zings on it.

And he didn’t want to miss that last time, and so, basically, that was sort of sticking this oar in the water. And the minute I mentioned his son, he got it. He’s like, “Oh, my gosh, I don’t want to miss this time.” I’m like, “Right.” And the cool thing about this is that didn’t mean he didn’t do the deal, because it was still a really great thing, but with that knowledge and that awareness he was able to do it in a way that didn’t completely ruin that entire year. He was able to stay here more. That meant it not being as great a deal because he had to make some concessions but that was okay because this really mattered to him.

And so, what it is, what I think is important here for decision, in decision support, is any way that you can make the invisible more visible, to bring those things into light so that then you can use them to decide better.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful. It’s like we know things in our body, in our emotions, in our subconscious, in our intuition, that we can’t yet articulate. But there’s something there that’s real, and so that’s kind of magical.

Jodi Hume
You do not step over it. That’s the thing. It’s like if you step over that, if you step over whatever it is that’s making you drag your feet, there’s a cost to it. And the interesting thing is sometimes what’s hanging you up is just a fear or a story you’re making up. That whole threat of things comes up a lot where when somebody’s telling you what’s going on, to me it kind of feels like a peanut M&M, it’s a terrible metaphor because, in this case, chocolate is bad, or not bad but just not useful and so I struggle with that here.

But when somebody’s telling me a situation that they’re trying to figure out, there’s always this, you know, the peanut is like the nugget of truth. There’s always this truth that is really real that’s in there if you listen. But then they often, and by “they,” I mean also me sometimes, you wrap it up in suppositions about other people and assigning intent on, “This happened, and, clearly, she said because X, Y, Z,” and then they tell you this elaborate story, that you’re like, “Wow, I couldn’t have made that connection if I tried. Like, those two things are not synonymous.” And then they’d layer on all these things, and then they create this like swirls of stuff that makes it really hard to decide, but only some of that is factual, and some of it is story. And the story might be right but when you conflate them altogether it makes it really hard to decide.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I’m sold. So, Jodi, go ahead.

Jodi Hume
Well, I was just going to say, doing this work is simply like watching someone else parallel park a car. And the cool thing is almost anyone can do it for you with just a tiny bit of structure. And so, the one thing that I will tell people to do, because, like I say, I mean, you can try it for yourself, and sometimes I can do it for myself. It’s really hard. But it’s just simply for the first, I don’t know, five, 10 minutes, just a little bit a time. They’re only allowed to ask you questions, and that also means you can’t say a suggestion by just like raising your voice at the end so it sounds like a question, like, “Have you considered dah, dah, dah, dah?” That’s not a question.

Just be what I think of as like stupidly curious. Because, a lot of times, when people are talking to us, we want to sound really smart, like we want to be helpful and give great insights and whatnot. And I’m a big fan of asking questions that you think you might know the answer to, like being brave enough to ask, “Well, how does that feel?” when something is like you think you’re supposed to know how it feels. Because doesn’t everybody feel happy or sad when that thing happens? Well, guess what? Maybe not.

And being brave enough to just ask questions and be super curious and dig into a thing, you will often…because the other magic trick is that there’s a great portion of time where somebody is actually working on the wrong problem. Like, they want to work on this problem because they’re trying to avoid a different one. And so, if you listen for that, and get down to that one, a lot of times the decision is easier.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, already, we’re getting some takeaways here. One, find a partner. It doesn’t sound like they need to be a genius or have any special credentials or training beyond your pro tips right now. All right. So, find a partner. And then, let’s say, maybe we want to be that partner for somebody or we want to give instructions for, “Hey, partner, here’s what I need you to do for me,” lay it on us, what do we tell them in terms of how that’s done?

Jodi Hume
Biggest thing is start off asking questions and just be really curious. The second one is a little bit, it can be a little bit harder for some people, although I actually think a lot of people are much better at this than they imagine, which is paying attention to your intuition, which is when I say that I mean the actual physical experience. Like, if when somebody is talking, you feel a little bit sick to your stomach, it doesn’t mean that they’re nauseating you. It just means that something is amiss there. Like, they might be skipping over something, or, I don’t know, there’s something going on there that’s worth being a little more curious about and asking some other questions. Or even saying like, “Hey, that felt weird.”

The same goes for if something doesn’t make sense. Trust that you are smart enough to follow along and that you do not need to understand every single little intricacy of their business to really hear what’s happening. And it’s kind of like listening. You know, those visual puzzles where if you relaxed your eyes, the image comes out?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, the stereograms?

Jodi Hume
Oh, good job. I would’ve never come up with that in a million years. But let’s call it that. Yeah, where you relax your eyes and then a horse comes out or something. It’s like listening like that. You don’t have to listen like you are solving a puzzle. You listen with like all of you and just notice what happens. Because here’s the most important thing, there may come a point in the conversation where throwing out your adviser experience might be helpful, but do not assume that the same will apply.

I worked with lots of companies who have been there, done that millions of times. You might have the same kind of company but because X worked over here, it does not mean X will work over here. And so, just resist the urge to sort of leap in as Galahad with the answer, feeling like that’s what scores the points. What scores the point is getting down to what really matters to this person in this situation, and helping them just see the landscape a little more clearly, and then they can find their own way out. That’s really what matters, is helping them see more clearly because they have all the answers. They just can’t see them at the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And with some of these questions, what are some of your favorite go-to’s?

Jodi Hume
That’s a really great question. Some of them sound really lame. I said one before, like, “What’s that like? Or how do you feel about that?” Sound like really cheesy therapy questions or something, but you’ll be shocked at what comes out. The other thing that I often ask about is when if you listen in a story, if somebody feels like they jumped from point A to point Z, and it feels like they’re being super ADD and just like pinballing around, notice that and ask them. Like, “How are those things related?” because they jumped. They made that jump because there is a correlation there. And it might seem like, “Oh, I’m bouncing all around.” Like, “No, no, no, you were laying out breadcrumbs on a path of what you are worried about or concerned about.” And so, asking about those leaps is another really good one.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is great because there is a connection there or, else, they wouldn’t have made the leap, and that could be powerful to identify.

Jodi Hume
And probably the most important thing though is to remember that if you are trying to play this role for someone, or if you’re telling someone how to play this role for you, but I’ll stay in the context of if you are trying to play this role for someone, this is not about having the answers for people. That is not what’s happening here. You are just providing the space, and the permission, and the curiosity for them to figure out their own thing because, otherwise, you’re a consultant. That’s the distinction. Like, you’re not there as the oracle that they’re coming to for advice. You’re just creating the space.

And it always reminds me of this story for when I was like probably seven or eight years old, and we went to a vacation Bible school for the summer. And I came home with one of these little white stars on cups where some sort of plant planted in. I don’t remember what the lesson was, but my sister and I both have one. And it was six weeks later, her little plant was like six inches tall, mine nothing. Like, not even a little loop of a thing coming out of the dirt, and I was, of course, devastated. I don’t know why, but I was. I remember being really sad, looking at it on the window, and hers was growing. I was probably competitive but, whatever, it doesn’t matter.

And I remember my mom coming in, and now that I’m a mom, I’m sure she was just crushed for me because I was clearly sad. And she looks over, and she goes, “Hmm,” and she reaches over. And with just like her pointy finger, she flicks this little clump of dirt, like just this little tiny clump, whatever that is, of dirt, and, boing, up comes my plant, which was nowhere as big as my sister’s. But it was growing, it was doing everything it needed to do. It just had this little clump of dirt that was a little bit heavier than it had the strength to be. And when she just flicked it out of the way, it got about the business of continuing to grow and it didn’t even need our help.

And that so often feels like the work of being someone’s decision support or like watching them parallel park a car, you’re just kind of pointing out the things, but they are doing the work. It is not your job to be like the rescuer here or the answer provider. You’re just facilitating their answer for themselves really.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Thank you, Jodi. Tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention about energy, or decision-making, or supporting other’s decision-making, before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Jodi Hume
Just that the thing that I would really watch out for that ties all these things together for me is there’s that stupid phrase that came up somewhere in leadership where it’s like lonely at the top. And I think in business, it’s stupid for it to ever feel lonely. I don’t know how we made it so taboo to have any conversation in business that doesn’t look like, “Everything is great. We know all the answers and we’re killing it.” It’s a huge disservice to the growth of the company and to the growth of the people who are trying to grow the company. And so, finding these places where you can have these conversations that don’t have anywhere else to go, is I just think is powerfully important for the individual people but also for the company’s as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. Well, now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jodi Hume
Yeah. So, definitely, my favorite quote is that Seth Godin’s quote, that, “If you have a problem you can’t talk about, now you have two problems.”

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

Jodi Hume
That one would definitely go to the neuroscience of sleep and how being, I’m going to make this very short, but being…just switching to like six hours of sleep at night not only has just as bad of effective as being awake for three days, but in comparative studies to those two groups, the people who switched to six hours of sleep, not only did they lose 15 points in IQ testing on the cognitive testing, like the before and after, but the really scary thing was the people who had been awake for three days were very aware of their impair ability and felt like, “I shouldn’t drive and I don’t feel so good.” The people who had just switched to six hours were equally impaired but reported zero awareness of that impairment.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s very fascinating. Now that impairment, so 15 points decline in IQ test scores, I got to believe, in some ways, those who were sleep-deprived for three days were more impaired on some dimensions.

Jodi Hume
You would think so. You would think so. It’s been quite a number of years since I read the actual study but I know that they had comparative…now, what they may have had is differences in the areas of impairment. That may have been zero, that may have been the case. But they had equivalent overall degradation in cognitive ability from the umbrella standpoint.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you.

Jodi Hume
And scary that they weren’t aware of it. I think that’s the part that I really honed in on, it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, and they didn’t even know it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And how about a favorite book?

Jodi Hume
My favorite book, if it’s not one of the how not to have hard conversation books that I love, would probably be this little book that somehow ended up in my mailbox one day called Winning with Accountability. It’s by Henry Evans, I believe. And what I love about it, I can tell you in one fell swoop, which is the whole book is about using accountability not as an after-the-fact punitive measure of like what you do to people after they screw up, but, instead, how to frontload accountability as a culture in an organization so that you don’t get off the rails in the first place, which I just find so much more valuable than, “Well, how do we hold people accountable?” I’m like, “You mean to whack them with a stick? They’re grownups. I don’t think that’s very helpful.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, sticks are not the tool.

Jodi Hume
Sticks are not the tool.

Pete Mockaitis
But is there a favorite tool that helps you be awesome at your job?

Jodi Hume
My favorite tools were whiteboards and sticky notes and helping people visualize and see what was previously fuzzy. And so, that is all gone the way of the dodo this year in 2020. So, there’s a couple of online tools, both Miro and Mural that I have been using that are pretty cool. I’m actually almost liking them more than my by-hand facilitation tools to help people kind of see things that are bouncing around in there, but it’s such a blur because it’s just bouncing all over each other. So, you kind of lay it out for them, they’re like, “Oh, okay. Now I get it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit, something you do to be awesome at your job?

Jodi Hume
I like to call it strategic hooky. Kind of goes back to the conversation we were having about when I just feel like beating my head against a wall, or I’m slogging, and I’m not even joking. I think it’s a strategic habit to know when to play hooky, and go play guitar for the day, or go for a hike, or do something to get my head back in its normal shape. And I have never once regretted that, and I end up getting…The excuse is, “I always have too much to do to do that.” That’s always the excuse. But I get 10 times done a thousand times faster if I, on the regular, take some sort of hooky break.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you frequently?

Jodi Hume
There are probably two things that get quoted back to me the most frequently. One is that progress usually looks like a new set of problems, which sounds kind of depressing but it’s really not. It’s the recognition that as you grow a thing, that you will encounter newer and different problems. And those really aren’t usually as frustrating and as like drag you down-ish as it is to just be hitting the same problems over and over again.

And so, I will often joke with my clients, and then they will joke, they will email me, I will get little messages from old, old clients sometimes, they’re like, “Yay, we have even new problems.” But if you can’t enjoy the new problems then growth of any kind is going to be a double-edged sword for you. So, the faster you can kind of embrace that, that every solution comes with its own new set of problems, and just enjoy it, the better.

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

Jodi Hume
The easiest place is at LeadingClarity.com, and you can read about the work that I do, you can subscribe to my podcast that I have each week. But the other thing that I offer, just to listeners of these interviews that I do, is a 20-minute time with me that they can schedule. And I want to be super clear about something. That is, not only is it not a sales call but I, literally, will not discuss with you on that call working with me. If that’s something that interests you, we have to do that on another call. I want it to be that clean. It’s just I’m beta-testing.

I’m doing it for two reasons. One, if people feel like they don’t have a place for conversations to go, I want them to at least get a little bit of a taste of what that can feel like, and maybe even brainstorm where they can get that in their lives. And, two, it’s also helping me out a little bit because I am beta-testing how to do that availability at more of a scale. And I just want to see, like, “What’s the tiniest little bit of having space for that that is even helpful?” And so, I’ve had quite a few of them so far, and I’m absolutely loving them. They’re a lot of fun.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. So, how do we get one of those?

Jodi Hume
It’s right on the page. Like I said, it’s not a public page that you have to know the link to get there. And so, anyone can schedule the 20 minutes.

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

Jodi Hume
I don’t want to beat the dead horse about like, “Go talk to someone.” But I probably am because, right now, this year in particular, not only is it a hard year, but the thing that I think affects people the most is when all of their issues blur together because then you don’t have as much clarity on what to do about them, and it’s almost like everything in life conflated in on itself.

So, if you weren’t absolutely in love with your house, you’re super feeling it right now. If there’s any crack in your relationship, you’re super feeling it right now. You’re spending tons of time with your kids, you’re also being their teachers, the economy is unstable. I mean, there’s so much that as much as self-care or getting what you need, all those kind of conversations have sometimes gotten kind of where you’re side-eyed from some people, it is even more important right now that you do whatever it is that you need to like fill back up.

So, whether that’s spending time playing with your guitar, or going outside, or running, or whatever it is, you have to find time for that. It’s not sustainable without it.

Pete Mockaitis
Jodi, this has been powerful. Thank you so much for spending the time. And I wish you lots of luck and great decisions.

Jodi Hume
Thanks, Pete.