910: Mastering the Four Conversations that Transform all Your Interactions with Chuck Wisner

Pete Mockaitis
Chuck, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Chuck Wisner
Oh, it’s great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to get into your wisdom, hearing some tidbits you’ve collected in your book, The Art of Conscious Conversations: Transforming How We Talk, Listen, and Interact. But first, I need to hear about you and rock and roll. What’s the story here?

Chuck Wisner
Oh, boy. Well, when I was very young, I think I was very fidgety and probably a bit of ADD, and my mother took me to school when I was seven, and said, “This boy needs drum lessons,” because I was always (finger drum sound) sitting around doing that sort of thing. So, literally, I was trained professionally, classically, as a percussionist from seven years old.

And then I played all through high school. I was in jazz bands, rock and roll bands. I ended up being in the Air Force National Guard Band because I played timpani, and so that was my first career. And to this day, I still play in a rock and roll band, maybe better categorized as a garage band but four or five of us have been playing together for over 30 years, so we have a great, great time together.

Pete Mockaitis
That is impressive. I’m curious, with this rock and roll band or garage band, any noteworthy performances or encounters you had in your gigs and such?

Chuck Wisner
Well, I had fun when I was a lot younger when I was 18, 19 because the rock and roll band I was in, we cut records and we were on national TV, some small little thing in Ohio. But now, the fun that we have is once or twice a year, we invite hundreds of our best friends and we just have a big dance party.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome.

Chuck Wisner
Yeah. So, that’s how we do it now.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. That’s fun.

Chuck Wisner
Yeah, fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m curious to hear your book, The Art of Conscious Conversations. Boy, you talked to a lot of people about this sort of thing and collected a lot of wisdom. I’m curious, any particularly surprising, or extra-fascinating, or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about us humans and conversation and being conscious over your years?

Chuck Wisner
Well, there are several important facets that show up everywhere, whether I’m with a family, a couple, a leadership, a team. And the biggest one that often pops up – there’s two – one is authority issues, and we live in hierarchies, whether we like it or not, families have a hierarchy which is just natural hierarchy, and business has a sort of man-structured, man-made hierarchy, and the issues of power just resonate in every conversation from leadership to parenting. And so, that is something we have to pay special attention to.

And the other piece is that we grow up adopting standards. Now standards is a catchall phrase to mean our morals, what’s right or wrong, what we like, what we don’t like, what’s good, what’s bad, what’s fair, what’s unfair, but we grow up adopting standards from our families and our cultures, and believe that they are the truth, or believe that they’re the right thing, and that gets us in a lot of trouble because, often, our quarrels are because, “I think I measure success this way and you should measure success that way.” So, those two are really big.

And then the other big one is the first conversation in my book is the storytelling conversation. And if we just look at the state of the world right now, we live in stories, and like Yuval Harari’s book, A Brief History of Humankind, we evolved learning to tell stories and we adopt stories, and that’s how we create our culture and our society. The trouble is that when we’re attached to our stories, we believe them as the truth and we’ll do anything to defend them. And that’s a very common theme.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that feels like a, I think, big master key to humanity and life itself. Chuck, not to overhype it, but gives us an example of that in practice.

Chuck Wisner
Okay. Well, let’s say in business, I have situations, I have two actually very similar situations from different companies where the legal department and the finance department weren’t even talking to one another, and two departments that probably should be working hand in hand. They had different stories about what was going on in the company, and they were applying different standards to what was going on in the company, and they were so attached to their story that the other side was the enemy.

And it took bringing them into a room, and just putting, deconstructing these stories so that the finance department could see how the legal guys and gals were thinking, and vice versa. And within a couple days of working hard and playing hard together, those stories started to not be held so hard. And I think if we have a story that we really believe in, and that we think is the truth, it’s like having a story, like having a fist, like we’re telling our story, like, “This is the truth. This is the way it has to be.”

So, anyway, in that situation, deconstruct stories, get them to hear each other, and things start changing rapidly, we start building bridges. And not in business life, but in personal life, even with friends, we have stories and we judge people based on our stories. And if we believe our story is the only one, then our criticisms and our judgments really sting, and they hurt us, and they hurt the other person. So, stories abound everywhere and they cause a lot of the friction and stress that we experience.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you give us an example of an articulation of a story, maybe if it’s not too intricately detailed with the finance and legal, just so we can see how that plays out, like, “Hey, here’s the finance story and here’s the legal story. See how these implications unfold trickly?”

Chuck Wisner
Yeah, I can do that and then I would give you a very personal example, too, of how powerful it is, which might resonate a little more. I grew up with a very redneck grandfather in Pennsylvania near Philadelphia, and I had three older sisters. And when I showed emotion, or when I didn’t want to skin the deer because I didn’t like it because it made me sick, or when I got hurt and cried, the message that I always got was, “You’re not a big-enough man. Be a bigger man. Stop that.”

Now, that’s not a new story. A lot of men my age have experienced that but what I realized was that story I adopted as a child because my grandfather, to some degree my father, but my grandfather, I gave his voice authority, I gave his voice power so I believe I wasn’t a big-enough man. It wasn’t until I was 30 that I was able to bust that story.

And when I busted that story, it was like such a dramatic change because, up to that point, I was a successful architect, I have a family, but I would walk into a room of men and feel smaller than, or not as competent as, or whatever, however, I’m not a big-enough man would show up. And when I busted that story, it was like transformational.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then, that’s when you entered those rooms, you experienced those feelings, which are not pleasant, which I guess, in turn, likely reduced your confidence, your willingness to take risks, take on projects and initiatives. What are some of the other implications of that story going on for you?

Chuck Wisner
Well, I think back then was, whether we know it or not, that kind of self-limiting belief, other people read that so it affects how other people see you and then how other people treat you, and, in turn, the story they know about you. So, it does have an effect where it’s literally how you’re showing up in the world. And you may think you’re hiding it but it’s actually quite obvious to people that are paying attention. They noticed it and that affects our interaction.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how did you break free, bust loose of that story?

Chuck Wisner
All right. Well, I left architecture to study the ontology of language, which is a story of why that happened, but once I was in those studies, inside of there, in the world of philosophy of language and the study of language, there’s a term called master assessments. And so, if you’re looking at, “What master assessments do you have of yourself? Good, bad, ones that serve you, ones that don’t serve you.” This happened to be a master assessment I had in my brain, in my mind, that didn’t serve me.

So, using the ideas around language and the five speech acts in deconstructing language, I was able to sort of take it apart. And when I say deconstruct, it’s like, “Wait a minute. What are the facts here?” Well, I’m six feet tall. I’m happily married, I have two young kids, I’m an architect, and all those facts didn’t line up with the story. And so, as I keep looking into it, and saying, “So, what were the standards that my grandfather was applying?” Well, he was a redneck and that was his story about what a man was, and I happen to be the recipient of that standard that I adopted unconsciously.

And so, that’s what I did. I just sort of took it apart piece by piece until I was, “Aha, this isn’t true. This isn’t who I am.” And the next morning when I went in to have coffee with the president of the firm I was working at, we’re good buddies, it was the first time I was able to stand there, have a coffee, and I said to myself, “Holy mackerel, I am taller than Bill.” And, literally, that was like a moment that I was shocked. I was like, “All this time, I saw myself smaller then.” That’s how sort of like embodied this stuff gets.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s powerful. Thank you. Wow! Okay story. Well, we’ll probably talk more about that but maybe we could zoom out a smidge. In terms of The Art of Conscious Conversations, it sounds like we’ve got one major thread in terms of story there. Could you maybe zoom out and tell us what’s sort of the big idea, main message, core thesis? And what do we mean by a conscious conversation?

Chuck Wisner
The core idea is we grow up learning to converse, talk, listen, interact through our culture, through our family, through our education, and we adopt all the norms from those different domains but we’re never really taught to understand how conversations work with the DNA of conversations. And so, through my work and my consulting and my teaching in the last 30 years, I kept seeing clients’ eyes light up or have aha moments when they realized that their stories weren’t the truth, or they didn’t know how to collaborate, or they were abusing power, or whatever, or they adopted standards that don’t serve them.

And then they would say, “Well, where can I read about this?” And there’s amazing information out there but it’s all scattered. And so, I decided to try to take some esoteric work and some work that’s been done by people like Peter Senge and Fred Kaufman, but I decided to sort of compile it into a book, that said, “Look, here’s the fundamentals of conversations. And instead of being unconscious of how they work, let’s have some distinctions so we can become much more aware and make much better decisions about the conversations we’re in and how we want to participate in them.”

And so, one metaphor I like is, like, fish in water. There’s fish swimming, and this old fish swims by two young fish, and he says to them, “Hey, fellas, how’s the water today?” and they just ignore him and they keep swimming. And they stopped, and one of the young fish says to other, “Hey, what’s water?” And so, it’s like they aren’t even aware they’re in water. We, a lot of the times, aren’t aware that we’re in conversations, or aware or conscious of our words and our interactions, in the way as much as we could be.

So, the book presents some distinctions that says, “Okay, let’s think about it. Let’s have some new ways to look at it and see it and experience it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, when you talked about having an awareness that we’re in a conversation, you have, in fact, segmented the conversations into four universal types. Can you share what those are? We’ll just start there. Can you share, definitionally, what are these four types?

Chuck Wisner
Yes. So, I’ll do a very high level. So, storytelling, and the byline with storytelling is your stories are not the truth. The second conversation is collaboration, and the byline there is seek to understand, and ask questions to understand, and absorb other perspectives. And absorb being the keyword there. The third one is a creative conversation which is about trusting your intuition and learning to balance your left brain and your right brain, and co-create with others.

And the last conversation is commitment conversations. And that conversation is the action conversation. That’s when you and I agree to do a podcast together. That’s when my wife and I agree who’s going to pick up the kids. That’s when a team decides who’s going to lay the strategy for the board meeting. So, that action conversation is everywhere, and we don’t understand it, and we do it in a very sloppy way. Those are the four.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so we talked a bit about storytelling. Is there more you want to say there in terms of how do we get to become consciously aware of our stories and the actual truth?

Chuck Wisner
So, in conversations, we all come to every conversation with a story, with our story about what’s happening, there might be some facts, there might be all of our opinions, it might just be a bunch of assessments or judgments. We, humans, all have patterns of interacting. And I like to use the word patterns because it allows us a little bit to step away from, say, a behavior or a habit that we have, and look at it neutrally, say, “Wow, what’s my pattern around storytelling? What’s my pattern of when I enter a meeting, how I’m telling my story or what energy I’m bringing to that?”

And so, the first thing is becoming aware that your story is not the truth, and then, secondly, how you are presenting yourself and how you’re presenting your stories because we all have patterns around judging, around being perfectionists, around being critical of other people’s ways of doing things. And so, becoming aware means we can have a look, and, instead of maybe a reaction or a pattern of defensiveness, we can change that.

So, I mentioned earlier about a fist. One analogy I like is if we have a story and we believe it’s absolutely true, and it’s a really important topic that we care about, it could be business, it could be out of business, it could be political, it could be not political, but if we believe that we have the answer and we are right, we are basically telling our story with a closed fist. And under every story, there are emotions, and facts, and standards, and power issues, and desires that are really what’s the root of our story.

So, when we can change our fist from closed to open, we can be more humble, more vulnerable, and reveal our thinking under our story. Does that ring?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Yeah. Let’s talk about standards, in particular. How is a standard articulated in our minds?

Chuck Wisner
So, example, I work with women groups sometimes and, just for fun, and this isn’t anything about dissing women or anything, but, for fun, I would say, “So, how many people in the room, when they leave the house, if the beds aren’t all made, they feel like they’re not a good mom or a good housewife?” And, generally, a large proportion, the majority of people in the room, raise their hands.

And I simply ask, “So, that’s a standard. You have that standard. Where did you adopt that?” So, they adopted that standard from their mother, from their grandmother, from their aunty, or a lesson they learned in school. Who knows? But they adopted that, and I’m not judging that standard, but I’m saying to have the standard, and to investigate it, and to decide consciously, whether you want to keep it or not, is that’s where freedom comes from, that’s where I can say, “You know what? I don’t have to feel bad when I go to work because the beds aren’t made.”

And so, the standards for men, we actually are probably taught not to show our emotions. That, too, is a standard. And so, if we investigate that, we can see the benefits of finding ways to be emotionally intelligent, and to productively and effectively share our emotions. We can shift out of that sort of unconscious standard that we hold that might keep us back.

Pete Mockaitis
So, in the example of the beds not being made, I suppose, can you walk us through a little bit more of the detail of how do we look at it because I imagine that’s not a two-minute operation, “Hey, you know what, that’s silly. The beds don’t need to be made, and I’m still a great mom, huh. Well, I looked at that and that’s now behind me”? I imagine there’s a little bit more depth to it. What’s happening there, Chuck?

Chuck Wisner
Yeah. So, I mean, it can happen like that. There are people that go, “Whoa, that’s a standard I didn’t even know I had,” because, literally, I don’t know, some large number, 90% of our standards, we did not consciously choose. We adopted them from our culture and family. So, it can happen where someone goes, “Whoa, that standard, hmm, I don’t need that.”

Now, that doesn’t mean they’re going to switch overnight because it’s like we’re messing around with neuro networks in our brain, and there’s no switch to make it happen overnight. But, slowly, with awareness, maybe the next time this happens, the woman thinks to herself, “Yeah, I feel a little guilty, but you know what, I’ll make them when I get home.” And then two weeks later, she does it again, she goes, “Oh, screw that. I’m fine.” And three weeks later, she goes, “I’m going to make the beds today because I have time.”

And so, she has a totally different relationship with the standard. She can be conscious of, or choose, when she wants to apply it or not apply it. And I often say every time my clients say, “Well, I don’t want to do this habit,” or, “I want to change that standard,” and I say, “Well, if I had a magic pill and you never did that again, would you pay me $10,000?” And most people say, “Sure,” and I’d be a rich man. But there’s no magic pill.

So, it’s beginning to increase our awareness of what our patterns are, whether it’s standards or some kind of ways that we emotionally react to things, pay attention in a new way, and then begin a process of being consciously choosing how you want to shift that pattern.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a really good question there with regard to the magic pill, which reminds me, I’m thinking about the book Feeling Great by David Burns, the sequel to Feeling Good. And they asked a similar question about if I had a magic button where you’d never worry about this again if you press it, usually, often they say, “Well, no, I don’t want to press it. Like, there are times and places in which this reaction, standard, belief, story is a value to me. And just sort of severing it entirely is not ideal.”

And so, that question in and of itself, it kind of segments or puts you down a different fork path of potentially insightful exploration, like, “Huh, there’s just no place for this at all,” versus, “Wow, under these circumstances or with these nuances, it’s great.”

Chuck Wisner
Yeah, actually, and that’s being aware of and understanding the underbelly of the standard or the underbelly of the assumption or judgment so you can make a more wise choice about how to apply or how not to apply. There are times when this gets into a little bit of the power issues. At times, you can be in business and someone might say to you, “You did a terrible job.” Depending on the hierarchy, depending on your relationship with that person, you might not give a damn about what they said.

But the next day, someone else with more power, or hierarchy, or higher in the hierarchy, says something, and you trust them and you give their voice a lot of power, you care a lot about what they said. And that, too, is a choice point, but being aware of those differences makes us be able to be much smarter and wise choices.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right, so we talked about story bits. Anything that you really want to make sure to put out there about collaborative conversations and how those can go better?

Chuck Wisner
Yes. Now, if you think about storytelling, that’s the primary because that’s where the book starts, and it’s a good 50 pages at the beginning of the book because we have to start with our own stuff. We have to become more aware of our stories and where we are and how we show up in the world with them. Now, we walk into a room, and there’s two people, you and I, or five people, or a meeting of 10 or 20 people, now we have 20 people, 20 stories around the room, 20 different perspectives around the room.

And when we are entering there with a semi-closed fist, or closed fist, there’s a lot of friction and a lot of stress that’s created because everyone is trying to up the other person. And I think the fundamental pattern that we have is to, we’re educated to have the answer, we raise our hands to have the answer, and get the gold star, but the fundamental pattern is that when we enter into collaboration, or let’s just say we enter into conversations, we’re not even aware whether we’re collaborating or not, we enter conversations, we generally can enter in defensively because we want our answer to be right.

And so, the real art of the collaborative conversation is learning to not give up your position, but hold your position with an open hand and reveal the thinking underneath. Are there power issues? What are the desires you have? What are the concerns you have? What are the standards you’re holding? And when we can be a little more vulnerable and open our hands that way, we are also inviting other people to do the same thing.

So, the collaborative conversation is the art of open advocacy and open inquiry. And open advocacy means open hand. An open inquiry means asking questions that you really want to understand, better understand the other person’s perspective, versus inquiry, where you’re asking questions to prove them wrong so you can be right.

And so, there’s a dance there, and there’s no, “I can’t say do this first, do this second,” there’s a dance with paying attention, and there’s a motion, and there’s body language, and it’s this dance of opening and opening and learning together, I call it mutual learning, where multiple perspectives can surface up. And because of that, there’s space for ideas to bubble up, there’s ways that I can say to you, “Oh, gosh, I never thought of it that way.” So, that changes how I’m thinking about the problem.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, if you’re not in the headspace of feeling curious – curious, not being curious – you’re not curious and you do think someone is wrong, do you have any pro tips on how to just do a mental emotional redirect to into a better head space, groove, flow, to have a higher-quality conversation?

Chuck Wisner
Well, let’s say the best place to start is compare, state what you know is to be real, to be true, to be factual, and see if you can find a bridge with the other person about, “This is what happened,” or, “This is what’s happening,” because the facts are the safest ground we have to stand on in a collaborative conversation.

Now, we know from politics that when that ground is shaky, it’s just a freaking nightmare. So, if you can sort of calm yourself to go, “Okay, we don’t agree, and before we actually start sharing our standards and things like that, what are the facts we agree on? We agree that the…” going back to the legal and financing, “…that the company last quarter, the last four quarters had been pretty miserable, and we have to change things, and we have to push our product in a different way, or be more creative.” We agree on the state of things, and that’s a solid ground to work from.

And then, from there, we can start asking questions, like, “Well, how do you think about X? And what you think about the market share?” And so, that inquiry is how we learn what the underbelly of your judgment is or your disagreement is. It’s always going underneath to find out more, to think about your thinking, or to reveal your thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I’m curious, in the course of having these conversations, are there any favorite or least favorite words or phrases that you think really open up cool things or shut it down real quick?

Chuck Wisner
Well, I think that most of the time, what shuts things down is judgment. So, someone will maybe put something out there, and another person will rise up right away with, “Well, that will never work.” And that’s why I shy away from the term brainstorming because we all know what that means, but the downside of brainstorming is someone comes up with a crazy idea and someone else in the room goes, “Well, we tried that five years ago, it never worked,” and that closes down the conversation.

So, this sort of gets us into the creative conversation because if you and I are in a mutual learning conversation where I’m saying, “Wow, I never thought of it that way,” and we’re sort of coming to a way of having a mutual understanding, what happens is there’s space in that conversation, there’s space in our minds, and ideas start bubbling up. And together, we might come up with, an idea might bubble up that you didn’t think of, or I didn’t think of, independently, and we both go, “Whoa, yeah, that’s the answer. Wow!”

And that’s how the creative conversation functions. It only functions when all parties are willing to be in that open space, open mind, open heart space.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, “We did that last year” is not a great phrase in a creative conversation. Any other phrases you love and phrases you don’t?

Chuck Wisner
So, a phrase that’s really useful is “Help me understand your position. Please help me understand your thinking. What’s your thinking under your thinking?” That’s a very inviting sort of phrase that tells the other person you’re open to not criticizing but to truly understanding. And your other question was what some that aren’t so helpful.

So, the unhelpful are instead of asking questions, to stay in advocacy, what I call closed advocacy, where no matter what they say, your response is, “Yes, but I think…” blah, blah, blah. And so, that’s a closed advocacy where we still can’t undo that need to be right, and so that’s a real trap. And the distinction that I’ve learned from my teachers is the distinction of being a knower versus a learner.

And so, the bad side of the advocacy and inquiry and the collaborative conversation is to be stuck as a knower, and no matter what the other person does, even if they ask you a good question, you don’t want to reveal your thinking, you don’t want to open your hand, you just go, “No, this is the way it is because this is my experience,” and you’re just stuck. You’re sort of like a solid rock.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. Okay. And can you tell us what are mindful agreements and how do we get there?

Chuck Wisner
So, there’s a phrase that I have in the book, a little chapter around commitment conversations, that I called the conversational bypass. And what I mean by that is we have storytelling, and we have commitment conversations. Those are our favorite conversations. We like to tell our stories and we like to take action.

The middle two conversations – collaborative and creative – take more effort, take a little more time, take a change in how we’re showing up, and so what I’d say is because we love our stories, and we’re addicted to action, we leap from storytelling to action, and we do a bypass. So, an example might be we’re in a meeting, there’s a couple people, let’s say, someone saying, “Here’s what we’re trying to solve, here’s the problem,” a couple voices speak up, the loud extrovert speak up, the boss might say what his is, and then someone in the room, or the boss, or someone says, “Okay, what are we going to do?”

And so, we make a leap to action and decision, and often those decisions aren’t as vetted as they could be because we haven’t listened to opposing perspectives, we haven’t taken the time to come up with other possibilities. The creative conversation is about possibilities, what’s possible. And so, that bypass makes us make bad decisions.

A good commitment conversation, a good promise, means both sides understand what’s being asked, what’s being promised, and what success looks like. So, that conversation actually involves every time someone makes a request, we do X, Y, and Z, our tendency, our pattern as a culture is to default to yes. And when we default to yes, we miss, we don’t take the time to get clarity, and go, “Wait a minute. What am I really promising here? What’s the timing? What’s the condition to satisfaction? Who’s it for? What format do you want?” Whatever the questions are, we miss that because we are sort of addicted to, “Sure, no problem. I can do that.”

And an example is someone runs by your desk, and says, “Can you put some numbers together for me for Monday morning?” You say, “Sure.” You and your team spend the weekend putting a 30-page report together. Monday morning, the boss takes it, looks at the back page which is a summary, rips the back page off, “Perfect. This is just what I need for my meeting.” And how many manhours were spent because they didn’t take an extra five minutes to ask the question, “Listen, to help you with your meeting, I really want to understand what you really need.”

And now, with the rip of the last page, the boss goes off happy, unaware that 300 manhours were spent, and they’re all frustrated, and they all now have a story about the boss, and so we’re back to stories. So, we can do commitment conversations, just slow the process down a bit. Any request, make sure you have an understanding of what you’re making a promise.

And the other thing is to avoid the yes. Don’t make promises you can’t keep. I can be asked to do something, and maybe I’m not competent to do it, and I have to be willing to say, “You know, I need a week to learn how to do that,” or, “I need help how to do that.” So, there’s all kinds of ways, if we slow down the process, we might discover how we can make them a sloppy promise but a better promise.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Chuck, any final thoughts before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Chuck Wisner
Yeah, I think, for me, this is a practice. I think learning about how conversations work, there’s no switch, there’s no magic pill, but as we look at the distinctions, it gives us a new lens, and be gentle on yourself. Don’t judge yourself. Be curious about, “Well, what is my pattern and how can I change that pattern?” And that change is sort of a slow process. It’s like it might change overnight but it might take you a week, it might take you two weeks. But if you stay paying attention and patient with yourself and nonjudgmental, you can change those patterns.

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

Chuck Wisner
Well, one of my favorite spiritual teachers is Hafiz who was pre-Rumi. And I love this quote, he says, “Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that. It lights up the whole sky.”

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

Chuck Wisner
Right now, I’m liking neuroscience, and I’m not a neuroscientist, so I don’t go too deeply, but I think we’re just on the brink of learning how the brain works and how the chemicals interact and the electrical impulses, this incredible complex set of neurons, billions of neurons. And I think what it’s doing is giving us a window into why we humans act the way we do, which takes a little bit of the sting out on some of our habits so we can look at them more neutrally and with a little more compassion.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you share a favorite book?

Chuck Wisner
It’s a few years old but I love Yuval Harari’s book called Sapiens. And I like it because he tells a different story about humans, how we evolved, and how our brains and our thinking evolved. Again, it’s a fresh look at how mythology got created in concert with how our brains developed, and so we learned to tell myths so we can have bigger societies, and then we attach ourselves to those myths. Even money is a story, and law is a story. And so, it’s a way of looking at the world so we aren’t so attached to our particular perspective but we learn a little more tolerance. And the world could use a fair amount of that right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you elaborate on how money and law is a story? Because I think, to many, they think, “Well, those things are just ironclad.”

Chuck Wisner
Yeah. Well, over time, money has evolved from a point where at some time in history, shells could be a form of trade. And metals, or precious metals, even tulips, at one point, were the trade for the way that we did trade, and what had value. And so, money is a story because we all agree that this piece of paper has value. The piece of paper is nothing. The value and the power only is in our agreement of its value. And that agreement is a story that we all adopt and live by.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Chuck Wisner
Well, I say meditation is a really important tool for self-awareness and learning to understand our minds. And, at my age, yoga is really important, so I think mental and physical things like that, that help keep us awake and aware and able, are really important things to pay attention to.

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

Chuck Wisner
I think the visual in my book of a spiral, it’s like V-shaped and think of a funnel like you put a quarter in a funnel at a museum of science. And by the time the quarter gets to the bottom, it’s spinning so fast you don’t recognize it as a quarter. I use that visual to help people understand that when something triggers them, emotional trigger, an upsetting event, that, generally, what we do is we spiral down, and it’s usually fear-based. There’s some fear we have that has us spiraling down. And the opposite of fear is love at the top.

And I bring that up because that visual helps people, when they do catch themselves triggered or spiraling, they go, “Okay, where am I on the funnel?” And that stops the spin, and then we can do some investigation into our thinking and into our emotions, and stop spiraling down, and maybe move ourselves up through that awareness.

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

Chuck Wisner
My website is ChuckWisner.com. I believe they can download a free PDF of the introduction. My Instagram, chuck_wisner, and LinkedIn, and I think Facebook is the same.

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

Chuck Wisner
Yes. I’d say investigate your thinking, be kind to yourself, be tolerant, try to be less judgmental, and really practice opening your hand so you can have an open hand and an open heart, and also being aware that you have to protect yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Chuck, thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you many lovely conscious conversations.

Chuck Wisner
Same to you. Hope it resonates.