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920: A Masterclass in Health Insurance Benefits with Dr. Noor Ali

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Dr. Noor Ali simplifies the beast of United States health insurance—and shares insider tips for making the most out of yours.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to evaluate the biggest non-salary piece of your compensation
  2. Why you shouldn’t limit yourself to your company’s health insurance
  3. What most people overlook when it comes to insurance

About Dr. Noor

Dr. Noor is a Bangladeshi-American medical doctor turned health insurance expert from NYC. She currently runs her own health insurance consulting practice out of Tampa, Florida offering healthcare insurance strategy to female founders all over the nation. Dr. Noor is also the founder of Think Like A Woman, a platform designed to amplify the aspirations and ambitions of female founders, worldwide. She hosts a highly curated roundtable business networking brunch called The Empresaria Brunch Experience. When she is not working on  managing her current businesses or building her next retail venture, you can find her curled up in bed with a good fiction book.

Resources Mentioned

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Dr. Noor Ali Interview Transcript

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

Dr. Noor Ali
Pete, thank you so much for having me. I’m a huge fan of the show, a huge fan of the Golden Nuggets, so this is a huge opportunity and privilege for me. Thanks.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Well, I’m a huge fan of you and all the money you’ve saved me on health insurance premiums since we’ve discovered you about a year or two ago. So, why don’t we get oriented? So, you are Dr. Noor Ali, so you’re a doctor but you’re not practicing medicine, and instead you’re doing health insurance. What’s the story here?

Dr. Noor Ali
Correct. Correct. This gets a lot of people. I am. I’m a medical doctor, I trained in my home country in Bangladesh. My background is internal medicine and general surgery. And if you know anything about this tiny little country of Bangladesh, it’s very, very low resource. We’ve got a whole lot of people and not a whole lot of medical practitioners. So, I’m actually trained to treat any human from head to toe, so I can do anything from a C-section, to a delivery, to a general surgery case, to a heart attack, to a stroke.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, but you’re not doing that now.

Dr. Noor Ali
I’m not doing that now.

Pete Mockaitis
Maybe on an airplane if there’s an emergency, you’ll be the person.

Dr. Noor Ali
Right. I’ve been doing health insurance for about five years now, Pete. Now, the process for foreign physicians like myself, if you’re familiar, is we don’t have to go through medical school again when we come back to the States. We have to pass a series of licensing exams called the USMLE. Now, the first of those series of exams is, step one, the content is basic sciences. And at that point in my career, I was a superstar, rock star surgeon and there was a huge disconnect for me.

So, I studied for about two years and I missed it. I failed the test by one question which was three points at the time, and it really put a damper in my career. I went into this deep kind of depression, I lost all sense of professional identity, and I didn’t really know what to do with myself, and I just needed a win at that time.

So, on paper, I just looked like a high school graduate, Pete, because I never went to undergrad. I went straight to medical school, this accelerated medical program from high school, so I was struggling to find jobs. And the only opportunity I got was a sales role at this health insurance company and I just took it because I just needed a win in my life. So, that was the connection between going from a clinical career to insurance, but I’ve been doing it for five years, and I’ve really made a career for myself.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’ll tell you, it was my producers who found you originally because I was thinking, “I want to talk to an expert on health insurance, both for the show and for me. So, please find this person,” and you won. Like, you are a health insurance expert who is also a doctor. And it’s funny because those often don’t go together because I’ve had many conversations with doctors, “So, like, what’s the insurance going to do with this? Or how much is this going to cost?” Like, “Boy, I don’t know that. That’s a tricky one.”

Dr. Noor Ali
Yeah, they don’t teach you that in medical school, right? They don’t teach you the insurance part.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you’ve got both, and so it’s funny. Health insurance is confusing even the doctors. And I remember, I even took a course in college, it was David Sinow, and it was called Personal Wealth Management and it was a very popular course. It’s about measuring your money for finance majors, like the personal side of things. And we talked a little bit about health insurance stuff, and it was a little tricky then.

But then, in practice, I remember I was in a nonprofit board meeting, and we were just taking the steps, like, “Okay, let’s really get health insurance locked in for the employees.” And so, someone did the research and we had these options. And it was so funny because, here we are these board members, who have some pretty cool accomplishments in the world of finance and leadership and running things, and all of us are just like, “Oh, boy, I don’t know. I don’t know,” and it was striking.

So, what’s going on here, Noor? Are we just dumb or what’s going on? Is it super complicated for everybody?

Dr. Noor Ali
It is. It is because there are so many players in this game, Pete. If we zoom out a little bit and if we think like, “Well, why is it so darn complicated? And how come other countries have it together and we don’t?” We’ve got a capitalist economy, we’ve got big players in insurance, we’ve got smaller groups, we’ve got employers, and then we’ve got private companies just kind of like making up their own rules in everything.

And then in 2008, we have an administration that says, “Well, let’s try to clean it all up. We’re going to do the Affordable Care Act, and we’re going to try to house everything under one federal platform,” but that still doesn’t eliminate the private sector and all of these key players. So, because there are so many people in this mix, it makes it really complicated because you don’t know where to start, and you don’t know where to go.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s great. It’s not just me and my fellow board members. It’s tricky for everyone, including doctors, and it is just because that’s the system that we have with all the different players. So, here we are, talking from a US context. Tell me, when it comes to US healthcare and health insurance, is there any country that’s awesome on every dimension?

I’ve heard that the US flourishes when if something really gnarly happens to you, we’ve got a whole lot of high-tech great stuff to give you a good outcome with that. So, in that dimension, the US is great on healthcare. But on many other dimensions, we’re not so great. How do we stack up and how do you think about that?

Dr. Noor Ali
Yeah, great question, and it always depends on who you’re asking and who you’re having the conversation with. I’ve lived and worked in Australia, I visited the UK, Canada, I have this recurring conversation, and people ask me all the time, “Well, what is it with the US versus other countries? And, exactly, how do we stack up?” And it’s always in any situation like this, especially when it comes to healthcare, there’s going to be two sides of the coin, and whoever you’re asking, their perspective is going to be different.

So, if we use the example of the Affordable Care Act, I’m going to refer back to this again because that’s what is popularly known. Well, that’s where you go to get your health insurance, HealthCare.gov. Well, it’s not designed for everyone. If you put the population of America on a graph and you divide it into four quadrants, the population that’s winning with the Affordable Care Act is the lower income and chronically ill. If you’re higher income or generally healthy, you’re not getting a good deal here.

So, similarly in other countries, whatever system that they have or they implement, it’s going to be great for one population and it’s going to alienate another. So, the short answer, Pete, is there’s no magical solution, there’s no one country where 100% of the population is happy, and I don’t think that’s ever going to happen.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that was my next question, and you answered that lovely. I’ve heard some people say, “Oh, my gosh, Obamacare,” the name also used for the Affordable Care Act, ACA, they say, “Oh, my gosh, this is awesome. I’m saving so much.” And then other people say, “This is terrible. My last plan did so much more and I paid less.”

And so, there are some strong feelings on both ways, but I think you summarized it rather well. It’s like if you’re lower income and/or chronically ill, you’re better off now that the Affordable Care Act exists. And if you’re on the other side of that coin, you are personally worse off but maybe you feel good about how you’re contributing to the health of others, or maybe you don’t.

Dr. Noor Ali
That’s exactly right, Pete. Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, thank you, that’s that story. Now, I want to get into one of the main reasons I wanted to have this conversation because this topic is different than a lot of our other episodes. I’ve heard people say, many times, “Oh, boy, I’d love to start my own business or do my own thing, go out on my own, but, oh, I’m with this company and they’ve got great health insurance. I really need the health insurance. I’ve got a family of four,” or maybe even someone with a chronic condition within that.

“And so, I guess I gotta stay put.” To what extent is that assertion accurate versus poppycock versus something in the middle?

Dr. Noor Ali
I’m going to lean more towards the poppycock for that situation because that’s absolutely not true. Now, historically, traditionally, employers were the best source to get health insurance because the larger your corporation is, the risk can be diluted more, the actuarial risk can be taken down, and the company can offer greater benefits to their employees. In addition, if the corporation is doing well, they can sponsor more towards your premium.

So, your out of pocket, what is coming out of your paycheck looks less and less. So, I am not at all denying that you can get excellent healthcare from your employer in a large corporation. However, that is not the only place to get health insurance. There is an entire whole other world out there, outside of your employer, where you can purchase your own health insurance. And in this specific situation that you stated, Pete. I want to pick that apart a little bit.

You mentioned a family of four where one person has different needs than the other, and that’s something that I want to hone in on, it’s something that I do for some of my services is to really analyze that. What is the risk and the needs for each of the person in their family if only one person out of a family of four has a greater need? The entire family does not need to be on a policy.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, actually, Noor, that was the huge insight that you gave me that’s resulted in my own personal savings. Thank you again for that. Because you said, “Oh, okay, so you think your wife might get pregnant again. Okay, well, then some plans are really great for that but they’re expensive all the time versus you and the other kids could be on this less expensive plan, and then she’d be on a separate.” I was like, “Oh, wow, wait a minute. One family, two different plans.”

Dr. Noor Ali
“What?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it was funny. My brain was like, “Wait. We’re still a family, right?”

Dr. Noor Ali
Right, “I don’t have to divorce my wife for this, do I?”

Pete Mockaitis
“We could still file our taxes jointly, right?” I was like, “Oh, of course. Of course.” I just never thought of it that way. And so, you opened my eyes and some savings, so we’ll talk about that. That’s cool. So, then maybe I know there are so many different kinds of plans, and things change. And this may be out of date a few months, but just for a snapshot.

Okay, here we are, December 2023, let’s say we don’t even know the value our employers are giving us or what we’d have to really shoulder if we went out on our own. Can you give us a taste for what does it cost, say, an individual who’s fairly healthy, let’s say 40 years old, versus an individual who’s not so healthy, 40 years old? We’ll do two-by-two. An individual, a family of four, healthy, unhealthy, very roughly speaking, what might we expect in the range of monthly premiums if we’re shouldering it all on our own for pretty good health insurance?

Dr. Noor Ali
Okay. Well, considering that there’s no subsidy here, so no ACA government plan subsidy, a full premium price plan for a healthy 40-year-old man can range anywhere from 350 to 450 a month. We should land somewhere right in the middle, and say roughly $400 a month.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, that sounds low. Are these ACA, Affordable Care Act plans, HealthCare.gov?

Dr. Noor Ali
It could be. So, it depends on what market we’re shopping. So, if we zoom out a little bit and back up the starting point when researching a plan for yourself is, “What market do I shop in? The public healthcare marketplace, which is the ACA Obamacare, or the private healthcare marketplace?” So, the public healthcare marketplace is entirely income-dependent.

So, that same healthy 40-year-old man, if he makes anywhere between $20,000 to $55,000 a year, he can qualify for a sliding scale subsidy from the government where they’ll pay a portion of his premiums. If he does not qualify for that subsidy and exceeds that subsidy-qualifying threshold, then his premiums can look anywhere from 350 plus.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Now, let’s get a taste for an unhealthy person, if someone says, “Hey, I’ve got some stuff that I’ve got to deal with ongoing medications, condition.”

Dr. Noor Ali
So, the sad news is no insurance company wants to take on this unhealthy person with all of this stuff because insurance, even though they’re dealing in the business of risk, they don’t want to take on that risk. They just want to take your monthly premiums and want you to never use your insurance again. So, the best market to shop for someone who has major preexisting conditions is going to be Obamacare, ACA, public healthcare marketplace because this is a guaranteed issue platform. They’re not going to ask you about those preexisting conditions.

However, I should note that there are degrees of risks and preexisting conditions. The example that I like to use is an asthmatic. If you’ve got asthma and you’ve got a little inhaler that you have to use here and there, maybe an Albuterol once a day, versus that same 40-year-old man with asthma who is a smoker, overweight, has to go to the emergency room to get nebulized every time he has an asthma attack are two completely different risk profiles. So, it’s worth assessing that risk profile to see, “Hey, is my preexisting condition really as bad as I think it is? Can I still get a plan that’s less and shop for an insurance company that’ll take me, insuring me for less?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, in that very unhealthy situation, if they are going on HealthCare.gov, are they still in that 350 to 450 range because…”Hey…”?

Dr. Noor Ali
It depends on the income. It depends on the income. So, if the income is 20,000 or less, you can qualify for Medicaid, which is free healthcare in your state. Anything between 20,000 to 55,000 roughly, you can get a sliding scale subsidy, and your plan can be anywhere from zero dollars up to 350 plus, depending on that subsidy in tax credit.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And women, do they pay more because of pregnancy and these sorts of issues?

Dr. Noor Ali
Women pay more just because they’re a higher-cost to insure. They have a whole set of organs that cost a lot to maintain. So, in general, a 40-year-old woman is going to cost more to insure than a 40-year-old man.

Pete Mockaitis
And we were saying 350 to 450. What is it for a woman?

Dr. Noor Ali
Similar range but maybe a little higher, depending on the deductibles and max out of pockets could be higher. So, I would still say maybe these plans for a woman would be starting in the high 300s or 400s.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if we have a family of four, would I just multiply that number by about four?

Dr. Noor Ali
Ish. So, children cost less and there are so many factors here. I hate that I’m even giving numbers because if someone hears this and they find there are some inconsistencies, I don’t want to be attacked here because children are going to cost less to insure but there are so many variables that go into finding this, calculating this monthly premium – zip code, age, risk factors, where you live, the cost of living there, the medications that you take, if we’re calculating monthly premiums. But children usually cost anywhere from $75 to $200 monthly premium, depending on age and where they live.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so this is informative. So, just to make things simple, I‘m just going to say 500 times three-ish, so you might call $1500-ish of premium per month times 12 months, we might be talking about $18,000-ish of a family’s budget, which is potentially more than the rent and/or the groceries for people if they’re on their own.

So, I think, to the extent of, if that statement, “I can’t leave my job. I’ve got to have the health insurance,” real versus poppycock, I think the answer is, well, it may very well be $20,000-ish a year of an issue if the employer is paying it all versus not. So, that’s how I spin my perspective, it’s like, “Well, hey, if you can clear $20,000 extra doing your own thing, then you might be fine. You just got to take that factor into account is that health insurance provided by an employer is a real benefit of substantial economic value but it need not handcuff us.”

Dr. Noor Ali
Right. Correct, Pete. And you mentioned that the employer is paying all of it. There’s hardly ever a situation where the employer pays all of it. They’re paying 50-70% of it perhaps, but the rest is coming out of your paycheck so often people don’t pay attention to it. You are paying for it. You just don’t notice it as much.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. Okay. So, now what’s open enrollment? We hear a lot about it around this time of year. And what’s the deal?

Dr. Noor Ali
Open enrollment is the time of the year where insurance companies open up their arms and say, “Come sign up, enroll into our plans for the next year, you can get health insurance now.” It’s significant because it’s a sensitive window. You can only sign up for health insurance on the public healthcare marketplace typically November and December of every year for coverage for the following plan year.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, what’s that about, Noor? Why can’t we just buy something whenever we want to buy them?

Dr. Noor Ali
Because, we’re going to go back to the concept of risk, insurance needs to calculate how much risk they’re taking on for 2024, do that actuarial analyses, and run their numbers and reporting. So, people are signing up all year long, and they’re not doing any type of preexisting clause. They’re taking on random levels of risks at random levels of the year, and an insurance company cannot run its business taking on that risk.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Duly noted. So, then, if, let’s say if we got fired, or we left our job in the middle of the year, are we just out of luck, we’re just going to go uninsured until November-December?

Dr. Noor Ali
No, that would be a special qualifying life event. So, there are a series of circumstances, we’re in the middle of the year, if you just decide to move, you get married, or you just lose your job, or get terminated and have no longer have access to benefits, those would qualify you to be able to sign up for a plan on the public healthcare marketplace using the special enrollment period. I do have to point out though, on the private side, there are no special enrollment periods. You can sign up all year round.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I’m also curious to the notion of public versus private, and employer-sponsored versus individual. I’ve had the experience, I remember in Chicago, when we made the shift from my wife’s health insurance to, “Okay, I’m getting all the health insurance,” there were some plans that I just could not access if I was not associated with an employer, which I thought was wild, it’s like, “I am willing and ready to pay outrageous amounts for my health insurance premiums. I’ve already steeled myself for that reality.”

And then it’s just like, “Oh, no, you just can’t have that plan. That has all the really cool doctors, or whatever.” And I thought that was so weird. What’s the deal with that?

Dr. Noor Ali
Can you tell me a little bit more about that though before I answer?

Pete Mockaitis
I think it was something like a Blue Cross Blue Shield, Gold or Platinum Choice, Select. I don’t know.

Dr. Noor Ali
Who said you couldn’t have it though? Was it an employer, a group, or what?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, there was one plan that my wife had, and it was pretty sweet in terms of it had vast numbers of physicians and network and all that. And then, as I looked at HealthCare.gov, it was just like, “No, that’s not on the menu.”

Dr. Noor Ali
Yeah, so that’s going to be public versus private markets. So, the public healthcare marketplace, Obamacare, typically doesn’t have PPO networks, which is going to be those higher-quality plans that you’re talking about. You can only get those when you are part of a big employer, a group plan, or you go on the individual market and you basically get a private insurance plan. So, that’s one of the biggest detriments of plans on the public healthcare marketplace, is they don’t have PPO options in most states.

Pete Mockaitis
Not one, not a PPO to be had in most states on HealthCare.gov?

Dr. Noor Ali
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
And for those who are not familiar, what do these letters PPO mean?

Dr. Noor Ali
PPO stands for Preferred Provider Organization. It’s pretty much like it sounds. It’s a higher-quality access for the benefits that you have. So, Pete, you can have the most awesome health insurance plan in the world, cost zero dollars, free, co-pays, all that stuff, covers you head to toe, but if you can only see the doctor that’s 30 miles away and has availability six months later, what good use is that plan?

So, the network of access to providers, that’s what the letters PPO, HMO, EPO stands for, is where and how you can use your benefits of your health insurance policy. And you always want to choose a PPO because that’s a higher quality.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, PPO is the best. Is HMO the worst?

Dr. Noor Ali
You could say that.

Pete Mockaitis
And what does EPO stand for? What’s that do?

Dr. Noor Ali
Something just in the middle, Exclusive Provider Organization. It’s a mix of HMO and PPO where you can see the doctors you like to, but again it’s a much limited and smaller network.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how can I know the network I can access in advance of getting a plan?

Dr. Noor Ali
Well, when you look at the plan, you’ll know what network it’s on, but I think that one of the advices that I like to give that’s relevant in the situation is it’s always better to stay in network with the plan instead of finding a plan around the doctor that you love. Does that make sense? Because just to fit a plan around a provider, you might get really screwed in every other benefit, but if you have a plan that works in terms of benefits for you, then going along with the network and benefits of that plan is going to be more beneficial.

But when you’re exploring and researching plans, you’re always going to know what network that is, whether that’s HMO, EPO, or PPO.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that’s sort of the tough pill that I guess we just have to swallow, is that if you’re fond of three distinct doctors in different specialties for…it’s like, “Oh, I want to get a plan that covers all of those.” Well, the odds are not in your favor, unfortunately, to pull that off. Although, in the case of some private plans for either individuals or corporations, you might have better luck there in terms of, “This is a premium offer that happens to include your three favorite specialists in different domains.”

Dr. Noor Ali
Precisely.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s good to know. So, Noor, if we’re young and healthy, do we still need health insurance or is that a waste of money?

Dr. Noor Ali
Am I allowed to laugh and scoff in response to that?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Dr. Noor Ali
Okay, I’m laughing and I’m scoffing but I’m trying to keep it together. Yes. Yes, Pete, you absolutely do need health insurance, and the best time to get it is when you are young and healthy because that’s when you are the lowest risk, the most desirable to health insurance companies, and they’re willing to insure you for a lot less cost, and willing to give you a lot more benefits. So, that is the best time to get yourself some good insurance.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, and I know someone who is young and healthy, and then she got cancer, and it was so sad and startling and unexpected, and so then she had a heap of medical bills. And so then, they were doing some benefits and some fundraisers and some donations. And someone who was curious and courageous enough to pose the question, “So, did she not have health insurance? Or how do these bills kind of end up mounting so high?”

And then the person said in reply, “Of course, she didn’t have health insurance. She’s young and healthy. Why would she spend money on health insurance?” And so, I like that you’re presenting this, the opposite point of view strongly because that’s how I think about health insurance. It’s like, “Would you like to not go bankrupt if something terrible happens to your health? If the answer is yes, and you live in the United States, having health insurance is, unfortunately, a necessary thing that you need to enjoy that privilege.” That’s where we are.

Dr. Noor Ali
Exactly. Yup, that’s exactly it. You’re right.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if we should all have it, tell us what are some of the clever ways we might go about saving on health insurance?

Dr. Noor Ali
Yes, great question. I want to offer a little bit of insight on the young and healthy thing because this is a fallacy that I see a lot in the young and healthy population is, first of all, they think they don’t need health insurance. So, that’s mistake number one. You absolutely do. But the second thing that I notice is they go for the plan with the lowest premium and the highest deductible because that just makes sense in their head, it’s like, “Well, I hardly ever use it to go to the doctor and use it, why would I pay more in premiums?” whatever.

So, in that situation, what’s happening is, let’s say you have health insurance for two years, and, finally, something happens and you need to use your health insurance plan. You have a $200-a-month premium and you have a $10,000 deductible. That’s a typical low-premium, high-deductible plan ratio. So, for two years, you paid your insurance company $200 a month, and when you finally need health insurance because you got into a car accident or got diagnosed with cancer, you are going to have to pay the first $10,000 of bills before your insurance company is going to step in and pay anything.

So, you just ensured in that situation that you are paying, not your insurance company. So, that’s completely like the opposite psychology that you should be using as a young, healthy, low-risk person when selecting your health insurance plan. The better strategy, in my opinion, is, “What is the lowest deductible that I can afford with a comfortable premium?” And that may be 250-300, just a little bit more per month but if and when you need to use your health insurance benefits, you want to make sure that you are spending less out of pocket and your insurance is stepping in with those bigger bills.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, let’s talk about some of these words. This is like everything you want to know about health insurance but were afraid to ask. Premium, deductible, co-insurance, what do these words mean?

Dr. Noor Ali
Premium is the amount of money that you have to pay per month just for having your policy. Whether you use it, you never use it, you have to pay the premium. If you work for a big corporation, that’s typically divided up into your bi-weekly paychecks, comes out of the paycheck, but it’s traditionally calculated as a monthly premium.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And then what is a deductible?

Dr. Noor Ali
A deductible is the amount of money that you have to pay in addition to the premium before the insurance will start paying out on your benefits. Now, typically, most insurance plans only offer preventive care before the deductible. Most insurance out plans don’t offer a whole lot.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then what is a co-insurance percentage?

Dr. Noor Ali
Co-insurance is, after you meet that deductible, is the percentage of bills, medical expenses your insurance company will pay.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if it’s an 80%, then I’ll pay through my deductible, and then I will still be on the hook for 20% of what happens above and beyond that.

Dr. Noor Ali
Correct, until you reach your max out of pocket.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, max out of pocket, is that just what it sounds like, it’s like, “I will not part with any more money than this in a year?”

Dr. Noor Ali
Yes, it’s a value that states that once you pay your insurance company this amount, they’re obligated to cover the rest of the bills.

Pete Mockaitis
And is that in addition to on top of the premiums?

Dr. Noor Ali
It’s always on top of the premiums, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Very cool. What is a co-pay?

Dr. Noor Ali
A co-pay is very similar to the co-insurance. It’s either/or. Your plan can either have a co-pay or a co-insurance. And a co-pay is a fixed dollar amount that you pay for medical services before the service. So, that can be a $20 co-pay to see a doctor or specialist that you would pay that before you even see the doctor.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And what’s funny is I’ve learned from experience that co-pays are actually good. Like, I want to have $50 co-pay to see a specialist as opposed to not having one because then the neurologist might be like, “Yo, that’s actually $450 to talk with me for half an hour.” It’s like, “Oh, oops, I’d rather have a $50 co-pay.” So, co-pays are a good thing that we want to see across a broad array of services. Is that accurate?

Dr. Noor Ali
I would say, in this economy, having a fixed co-pay is going to be much better than a co-insurance percentage because of the example that you just stated. You want a fixed dollar amount rather than a percentage of a big bill.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. There you go. And then the network tells me who they are willing to give money to. And so, if I go out of network then the plan might specify, “Well, hey, you have no benefits or fewer benefits.” Is that accurate?

Dr. Noor Ali
Yes, less benefits.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we want in-network for good savings, and so we should research in advance who is in the network. And sometimes that’s harder than you think to determine because it’s like, “Oh, yeah, we take UnitedHealthcare.” But UnitedHealthcare has many, many plans underneath this brand name, this company. So, how do you recommend we do great research on getting clear answers on, “No, for real, who’s in the network, who’s not in the network?”

Dr. Noor Ali
Yeah. Well, every insurance plan will have their network directory, but, honestly, those are updated every 30 days. Sometimes they’re not accurately updated. So, the best and fastest way is to call up your doctor that you like, your provider, your hospital, your urgent care, and say, “Hey, do you guys take this plan? Are you in network?” Just ask the question.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. And you, that’s one of the services you and your team provide. You do a little bit of the groundwork, a little bit of the hustle, on behalf of your clients, right?

Dr. Noor Ali
Yes. Yes, I do. So, if you are a client of mine, and you just want to know, “Hey, where can I go?” I’ll happily do that for you.

Pete Mockaitis
And, honestly, that is just so huge, thank you, because this stuff is so complicated it makes me groan. So, this is part of why it took so long for us to get onto a microphone together is that you do some of that work, and that is awesome, and at no cost. And I’m trying not to be too much of an advertisement for you, but I can’t resist. I think you’re awesome. So, I don’t have to pay you any extra for that. How on earth is this financially workable for you, to do all this legwork, and be paid nothing to do it, to have it done?

Dr. Noor Ali
Yeah, that’s a great question. Well, Pete, to be honest, I did raise my price just a little bit since we worked together. Not a whole lot, but, yeah, it’s one of the concierge services that I provide. So, for all of my clients, things like claims, customer service, I’m happy to do that for the life of the policy just because I know how onerous it can be for you, and how easy and convenient it is for me. It’s not a big deal to me at all. The way I get compensated is through the insurance company that I end up connecting you with. They pay me a portion of your premiums for my commission. So, don’t worry, I’m taken care of.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right, yes. And so, in a way, it’s interesting. You’ll pay the same amount, whether we go to HealthCare.gov or you, right?

Dr. Noor Ali
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
And yet, when we go through you, we get these extra benefits and services.

Dr. Noor Ali
Correct, yup.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s just the healthcare provider, or the health insurance provider, who has a slightly shrunk profit margin, and I don’t mind.

Dr. Noor Ali
Me neither.

Pete Mockaitis
Sorry, health insurers. I think they’re doing okay and then giving a little slice to you, so that’s win-win-win. Okay. So, then tell us what are some of your favorite tips for saving on health insurance or healthcare expenditure overall?

Dr. Noor Ali
Yeah. Well, when it comes to finding and researching your plan, I think doing a needs assessment and risk evaluation is huge. That’s really where I start the journey whenever I speak to someone and they come to, asking, “Where do I even start?” So, some of the things that I’m going to be looking at is, “Where do you live? How much money are you expecting to make? And what is your medical or health risk profile?” And because of my strong medical background, it’s very easy for me to do that assessment quickly.

So, once I kind of profile your risk, then we decided, “Okay, public market, private market,” and there’s a type of a plan that I specialize in and I advocate for, and it works really beautifully for people in the healthier and wealthier bracket and on the private side, and it’s called a medically underwritten health insurance policy.

And this model is a pre-2008 or pre-Obamacare era where if you’re generally healthy and you’re earning too much to qualify for any government subsidies, we can underwrite you medically into a high-quality PPO health insurance plan that’s going to last you a lot longer and mirror the quality of a corporate package, or a major medical plan, at a fraction of the cost.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Okay. So, then we’ve got a great plan. Well, now tell us, how do we work it so that we don’t have unfortunate unexpected medical expenses along the way of living and using that plan?

Dr. Noor Ali
I love it. I love it. This is one of my favorite questions to answer because working your insurance plan, or milking it, is exactly what you should be doing. So, the first things to note is make sure you take advantage of all of the preventive care. Insurance companies don’t want to spend money. It’s more beneficial to them to keep you healthy. And how do we keep you healthy? Go to the doctor at least once a year, get your preventive, your annual wellness checkup so you’re not surprised with cancer because that’s what’s going to cost them and that’s all they care about.

So, take advantage of all the wellness and preventive benefits that your plan has at the very least. Then if you need to use your plan for services, start at the lowest tier, which is going to be virtual therapy and care. That is very accessible to you. You could do it from home. Now, they have trained physicians that they’re designed to send prescriptions to your nearest pharmacy without you leaving or doing anything, and they’re billing at a lot lower rates.

So, don’t go running to the emergency room for a cough and cold, stomach ache, or UTI, or yeast infection for women. Start with a virtual visit. That’s going to save you tons of money, it’s very convenient, and it’s going to help on the insurance backend.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And one of the other cool benefits of insurance—I can’t believe I said that sentence, cool benefit, okay, but I believe it—is that when you get medical bills, the explanation of benefit statements, it’ll show you, “Okay, hey, normally, we charge this much money for the services, but because you have this insurance, we’ve pre-negotiated a rate between them. And so, now it’s discounted and then your benefits cover this amount.”

So, it’s sort of like, “We knocked it down from, I don’t know, 500 bucks if you have nothing, to 320 because we pre-negotiated,” to, “Oh, hey, you have some insurance benefits,” so then you might be left with, like, 80 or something at the end. So, that’s kind of cool. But what can be tricky is, do they call it balance billing, is, like, “Oh, yeah, I am on the hook for a little bit after everything, and, oops, it’s more than I thought it would be.” How do I prevent that from happening?

Dr. Noor Ali
What I know about balance billing is that it’s difficult to predict unless you request estimates, or, “Hey, tell me exactly what you’re going to bill to insurance,” and that involves communications with the billing department before you seek services, which can be challenging in emergency situations, so I don’t have an actual answer on what to do after the fact.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. So, after the fact, good luck, but what you can do to prevent that is, ideally, you talk to them, you get the estimate. And I’ve heard that, even if you do get that surprise, you can ask and say, “Hey, I was really surprised to see this given that you’re in network, and I see the insurance paid this. So, what can you do for me?” And sometimes, they’ll just, “Oh, yeah, cut in half,” just like that. This happens.

Dr. Noor Ali
That’s a great strategy, actually, and negotiation is something that should never be left off of the table. Now, typically, negotiation is a strategy that’s used for cash-pay patients, people who don’t have insurance, they say, “Hey, I wasn’t expecting this much. What can you do?” And you always want to offer cash because facilities would always rather be paid upfront immediately than wait 30 to 90 days for a claim to process and for insurance to pay them. But now, we’ve seen it working also with insurance. If you can combine having insurance and still negotiating and re-pricing down your patient responsibility, you can do better than that. That’s amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And that also having an estimate in advance is huge for your negotiation, it’s like, “Hey, wait a minute. You said it was going to be this.” Like, “Oh, yeah, but we also had to do an ultrasound.” It’s like, “Well, why wasn’t that in the original estimate?” It’s like, “Well, you didn’t click the CPT code for an ultrasound estimate.” It’s like, “I didn’t know I was supposed to do that.” “Okay, fair enough. Just knock off 300 bucks.” Okay, just like that.

And when it comes to pricing, the way I think about options, or how do you think about it? When I’ve narrowed down to a few options or plans, I kind of like to play with the numbers, and say, “Okay, if I use no health insurance, how much cash should I be out over the course of a year? If I had a horrific accident, shattering dozens of bones, multiple surgeries, how much would I be out the year, so like the out of pocket plus the premiums and all that?”

And then what do I really expect to happen, like, “Okay, I’m going to go to the doctor a couple times and then maybe check in with this or that”? And then I look at those three total out-of-my-pocket cash amounts across the scenarios, and across the options, so it takes a while to make a call, “Okay, which plan is really my best option? Oh, that plan doesn’t exist next year, oops. Do it again.” Is this a good way to go? Or what’s a faster, easier, smarter way to assess the different plans and which one is optimal for me?

Dr. Noor Ali
That’s a fantastic exercise, Pete, and I wish that more people were more savvy like you to do that determination. The quicker faster dirtier way would just be to call me and I do that for you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, thank you.

Dr. Noor Ali
But, yeah, if you’ve got the skills, go the Pete-route, but if you don’t and you’re below average, then you can give me a call.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I would say, for all my savvy, I’ve still made mistakes and had unexpected medical expenses. Oops. So, learn in those lessons. Well, tell us, any other tips, tricks, things to do or not do when we’re buying or using our health insurance?

Dr. Noor Ali
Yeah, really just take some time to get to know your policy. Some really high-level things you got to know about your health insurance is the monthly premium, how much are you paying just to have your plan, your deductible, your max out of pocket, and really cool special little things. That’s a very personal thing to find out. Like, if you love going to the chiropractor, really know your chiropractor benefits.

If you’ve got a kid who’s active in sports, what is your accidental policy like? How much is it going to cost if your kid is going to break a leg? So, know those common situations and scenarios that’s important to you. Understand what that out-of-pocket liability is going to be. And if you don’t know those answers, reach out to the person that helped you get your plan. They’ll have those answers. And just have a mental note on that.

I’d also say to do pretty frequent assessments and evaluations even if it’s not every year. If you have a major life change, that’s a good time to evaluate your health insurance policy, “Is it still working for me?” If you’re having a baby, that’s an important time. If you have a move or a life change, that’s an important time. But, also, if new products come out on the market pretty often, so understanding, “Am I paying the lowest that I could pay? Are there any new products out there that’s going to be a better fit for my needs?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. And, tell us, what about these so-called health-share programs, like Liberty HealthShare, Samaritan Ministries? How should I think about those?

Dr. Noor Ali
Yeah, that’s going to depend on a lot of things. So, I’ll tell you my opinion on health-sharing plans. So, the first thing to understand is they’re not true insurance products, so it’s not insurance at all. And the value of insurance is going to be that max out of pocket, that clearly defined number that says, “Hey, I gave you my insurance card.” There’s worst-case scenario, cancer, all bones shattered, “This is the most I’m going to pay. Don’t ask me any more questions. That’s a contract between you and your insurance company.”

So, that’s one thing that I find to be lacking in most health-sharing plans. And the second factor that impacts a lot of people is many health-sharing plans are based on faith which require some lifestyle commitments that not everybody is prepared to commit to. So, if it aligns with your lifestyle, and you’re okay with that model, that’s fine.

The third thing I’ll say about health-sharing plans is it’s very non-traditional, it’s a healthcare alternative, it’s certainly trending, but if you come from a corporate background where you’re used to a traditional healthcare model with fixed co-pays, where you don’t have to negotiate or do any type of self-advocacy or patient advocacy, you might not like that model because there’s a lot of standing up for yourself, paying first, and then negotiating and re-pricing down, and then hoping that your health-sharing plan kind of kicks in with the rest of the bills.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s what I’ve heard. I guess my personal take is I know friends who’ve had great experiences. Like, some, I think it was a premature child, and that’s a nightmare, and them saying, “Well, hey, we’re here for you in your time of need, sir. And this is your time of need,” and he just starts crying, like, feeling super supported by them, it’s like, “Wow, great. That’s really cool.”

And there are others who say, “I don’t know if I trust that they’re really going to have my back when it’s there.” And, yes, there could be some faith things that may or may not jive with your values, beliefs, wisdom, tradition, lifestyle stuff. So, there’s that.

What do we think about vision, dental, these kinds of health insurance matters?

Dr. Noor Ali
This depends on your level of usage. If you don’t go get your eyes checked once a year, or you don’t wear glasses or contacts, do you really need vision insurance? No, probably not. If you are using eye care, and you actually buy glasses and materials, I think there’s value in vision insurance. Similarly, for dental, if you’re just going in for cleanings twice a year, you could probably be better off paying for that out of pocket at your local dentist.

One strategy I can advise is, if you’re open to a dentist, any time a new dentist office pops up, they offer an introductory rate for cleanings and preventive care. Do a cash pay. Take advantage of that. Where dental insurance really has value is if you have horrible teeth that require continuous work, like root canals, bridges, fillings over and over again, those services are billed at much higher rates, and it’s valuable to have an insurance plan to take care of most of the bill versus you doing cash pay.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good to know. So, the negotiated rates between dental insurers and dentists are much better than the cash rates. Although, a lot of dental plans I’ve seen, it seems like their maximum coverage is a little skimpy, it’s like, “Man, if things really hit the fan with my teeth, for tens of thousands of dollars, you wouldn’t really have my back to that level.” Unlike, out of pocket maximum health insurance, it’s like shatter 20 bones, “Okay, they’ve got a hefty bill and I don’t so much.”

And with the vision, I’ve learned that some of those vision insurance, you think, “Oh, I get a free pair of glasses,” whatever, but then if you buy glasses from an optometrist office, somehow all the lenses and all, sometimes somehow, even with the insurance benefits, it ends up being way more than buying them on, like, Zenni Optical, or Warby Paker, or some of these other places. So, you may be better off cash-paying for your eye exam, getting a valid prescription, and then just going to buy your glasses online, and forgetting a vision insurance benefit.

Dr. Noor Ali
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, that’s just my own experience. Is that something you’ve observed within your clientele as well?

Dr. Noor Ali
Yes, and it depends on, again, the billing practices, where you live, how much they’re charging for those frames, all of those factors go into it. But I would say, if you are looking to stretch your benefits more, that strategy that you said is pretty great. Go get your eyes checked and get a prescription, and then shop around on an online provider to get it for less.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I read a juicy story about a health insurance provider using AI to deny a bunch of claims and end up getting into some trouble. And some lawyers mentioned a factoid, which I thought was intriguing, which said that, “Only 0.2% of people appeal a health insurance denial.” Is that accurate? Or, do you know? And/or what are odds of success if your health insurer says, “No,” and we say, “No, really, yes”?

Dr. Noor Ali
This is really interesting. I don’t have data to back up what I’m going to say but I’ll share my personal experience. I would say that factoid sounds right because, yeah, I would say that people don’t appeal it. However, my clients, I am absolutely tenacious when it comes to things like that. If an insurance company is denying a claim, I am so fast to appeal that claim before the denial letter even comes through. And that’s also a service that I provide and I like to do.

And, in my experience, what has happened that in that claims, denial, and appeal process, the bill from the hospital, or the emergency room, or whatever, somehow disappears because nobody wants to deal with that process. The insurance company doesn’t want to reopen the case and reassess, and the facility or the hospital writes that off as a lost expense because they say, “Okay. Well, we’re never going to get paid for this because our patient is not paying us, and the insurance hasn’t paid us, so we’re just going to file this away as an expense.” So, it actually works out if you actually appeal.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you’ll do it for us, so that’s easy.

Dr. Noor Ali
Yes, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. Noor, wow, what a whirlwind. Any final thoughts before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Dr. Noor Ali
No, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you for your questions today, Pete.

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

Dr. Noor Ali
Yes, a favorite quote, I use this across every aspect of my life is by one of my favorite authors, Haruki Murakami, and he says, “If you read what everyone else is reading, you’ll think what everyone else is thinking.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s good. Well, speaking of what everyone is reading, what’s a favorite book of yours?

Dr. Noor Ali
Good one. Okay. The Midnight Library.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Dr. Noor Ali
Gratitude. With every step, with every breath, active, intentional gratitude.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key thing that you share with clients that they repeat frequently, they quote Dr. Noor often on?

Dr. Noor Ali
I’m going to pull something from my desk that’s for another business that I have for my company, Think Like a Woman, and I have my quote here. And my quote is, “There’s nothing more powerful than an ambitious woman aligned with her aspirations.” It’s from one of my quotes.

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

Dr. Noor Ali
My website, DrNoorHealth.com. What’s more entertaining is following me on Instagram because you can see my entire life unfold in stories. It’s quite entertaining.

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

Dr. Noor Ali
If you want to be awesome at your job, take a look at your health insurance benefits. Pay attention to what is coming out of your paycheck. If you are curious if you can do better, give me a call. Talk to me and let’s see what we can do for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. Dr. Noor, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and success in all your adventures.

Dr. Noor Ali
Thank you. Thank you so much, Pete. Thank you for the opportunity. I love this conversation.

919: How to Find Fulfillment, Drive Engagement, and Unlock Your Greatness with Sean Patton

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Sean Patton reveals his warrior mindset to help maximize your potential and performance.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to get better at feeling grateful
  2. The root of every workplace failure–and how to overcome it
  3. The coaching approach that really works

About Sean

Sean Patton’s mission is to transform modern leadership into a driver of fulfillment, abundance, and freedom. He applied these principles while growing his own companies and now helps others unlock greatness through Stronger Leaders Stronger Profits, a leadership coaching and consulting company. Sean’s leadership foundation was forged as a US Army Airborne Ranger and Special Forces Green Beret Commander, where he earned the respect of his men and chain of command while operating in hostile and politically sensitive environments.

Resources Mentioned

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  • The Management Muse podcast. Sharpen your leadership skills with Cindi Baldi and Geoffrey Tumlin

Sean Patton Interview Transcript

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

Sean Patton
Hey, Pete, I’m excited to be here, man.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m excited to be chatting. Boy, you have such a rich body of experiences that I might classify as hardcore. Is that fair to say, Sean?

Sean Patton
Yeah, we can put it in that. We’ll put it in that section of the library if you want.

Pete Mockaitis
Army Ranger, Special Force, Green Beret, a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu World Champion. That’s awesome. First, let’s talk about jiu-jitsu. That’s how Nick connected us, and Nick is quite the jiu-jitsu fan. He raves about it. Tell us, what do you love about it? And how does one get to be a champion?

Sean Patton
Well, there’s so many things I love about it. It’s interesting, jiu-jitsu is addictive. I tell people it takes about 90 days. In 90 days, you’re either going to hate it and never come back or you’re going to be in for life. And I think that jiu-jitsu actually fills a role that we don’t get filled in modern society, that’s very natural to us. We’re tribal creatures.

We’re designed to be in a group of like-minded people, with a common set of values, and a common purpose, and elders that teach us things, then we teach the people below us things, and we all believe the same things, we’re all going towards the same sort of mission, and we all have the same mindset. Like, that’s the environment we’re supposed to be in, and that’s obviously very different than the modern world we live in. It’s very individualistic and there’s conflict everywhere.

And so, in jiu-jitsu, everything in life is a filter. Jiu-jitsu is a good filter of people who want to come in and are willing to put themselves through hard things and be uncomfortable because they want to better themselves. And so, now everyone can call us around that, and it really becomes, like, a family and part of your identity. And, ultimately, because it’s so hard, it makes the rest of life easier.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, I do want to talk about hardness. So, tell us, we mission hardcore, that theme, like, yeah, each of those experiences – Army Ranger, Special Force, Green Beret commander, Jiu-Jitsu – sure do involve some discomfort physically and on other domains. Tell us, how do you and your compatriots endure this discomfort and pain regularly?

Sean Patton
I think it comes down to mindset and, more specifically, purpose. Like, I was a Special Forces combat diver so my second command was an underwater infiltration team of Green Berets, and I had to be in cold water, like, all the time. It was brutal. And there’s nothing worse in life than having to be wet and cold, and I had to be wet and cold so much.

So, that being said, I’m a complete baby now. I scuba dive. If it’s below 70 degrees, I’m not going in the water. If it’s the Pacific, count me out. I’ll hang on the beach. I’m a baby because there’s no purpose behind it. And when people struggle to, I think, overcome challenges, overcome apathy, overcome any sort of wear or friction it is in their lives, oftentimes it’s because they haven’t created enough value and the purpose and the reason behind it.

You might say, if you take, like, the mother with her kids, like, “Well, she wouldn’t harm a fly. She’s the nicest thing in the world.” Well, what if someone was after your kids? Well, then she’d be this big mama bear, she’d be crazy. So, we all are capable of greatness, we’re all capable of growth, we’re all capable of being these amazing individuals, and it’s just up to us to decide how we want to express that and what matters to us. Like, what’s worth suffering for and what’s not?

Pete Mockaitis
Can you tell us a story of you going through an experience, maybe it’s a training, maybe it’s a mission, in which you did have a whole lot of suffering but also a whole lot of purpose, and it worked out for you to persist?

Sean Patton
So, when I was in Afghanistan, we’re in the Afghan-Pakistan border, and we had in a bunch of nurses who had flown in to this rural area because, well, there’s no female doctors in Afghanistan because they can’t go to med school, like there are barely even midwives, and so there’s no medical training, and men can’t touch women. So, what that means is women have zero healthcare. There’s no one to serve them.

And so, just coming in and doing sort of routine medical care and treatment can be a huge boost for our mission there for the community. So, we flew them in and did a whole female-women’s seminar, health seminar. And then, as they were flying out, we were in an area that had a group called Haqqani, which Haqqani is like the extreme, the guys who are too extreme for the Taliban they go to Haqqani, and they were in our area, and they didn’t like the fact that we were helping women get healthcare.

And so, they had a recoilless rifle, and they tried to shoot down, almost did shoot down this helicopter full of all the nurses. And as soon as that went off, obviously, we have to respond. So, we immediately hit everyone out, and before they could break down their positions and drove out there, they were up on the mountains, we’re at between 8,000 and 10,000 feet above sea level with all our gear on. We ran up to the side of the mountain, and then we get into a firefight around between six and 900 meters. It’s a pretty far engagement but we were under consistent fire.

It was a tough firefight but the weapon they had used to almost shoot down the helicopter, we know we had to destroy. Like, we had to destroy that weapon, that recoilless rifle, because that’s something that can kill one of our tanks, that can take down a helicopter. We couldn’t let them break this thing down and take it back to Pakistan.

And so, we got in this firefight. I remember one of the crazier stories is as we’re shooting and they’re shooting back, and we have these grenades that go in grenade launchers, and we needed to, I needed to get those to the people that could shoot them. So, I’m running up and down the line, grabbing grenades from certain people and giving them to people who can shoot them. And as I’m running, I keep getting in the face with these evergreen trees, like the branches keep smacking me, smacking me in the face.

And I remember thinking, like, “What a time to be a klutz! Like, what a time. Like, come on, Sean, get it together. I know this is crazy. Things went fast. Like, you keep running into trees.” And then when I jumped behind a rock, and bullets were going around, and I realized, as I was next to one of my guys, that that was actually machine guy fire cutting down branches around me, and the branches were falling on top of me as I ran from position to position.

But that being said, we still had to get these grenades to other people, and we had to stay there until we could get air support and drop a bomb, and we couldn’t let them go. So, we were in this thing, the firefight, for four or five hours, and we had to keep them engaged so that they couldn’t withdraw. And, eventually, we were able to call in air support and drop bombs and take care of that.

But that was a mentally and physically exhausting mission that lasted almost a full day, but you get through it because, almost to come back to this, the purpose was so great. That’s the thing about the military. Is the juice worth the squeeze? Well, when it comes to defending a helicopter full of nurses trying to do their job in area where people are trying to stop them, and people trying to kill your friends and your compatriots, then you’re willing to do about anything.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, that’s powerful. Thank you. And so then, let’s make it a little bit more mundane, I suppose.

Sean Patton
Less hardcore. Down the hardcore.

Pete Mockaitis
But in the world of jiu-jitsu, so there’s discomfort there. So, what’s your purpose there that keeps you persisting to the point of becoming a champion?

Sean Patton
A few things. One, I was one of the owners of a jiu-jitsu gym and one of the instructors at the time we started up. So, there’s a leadership aspect, a leadership by example aspect that went into play, especially when I was training up for world. And I had this drive, I had gone through a really hard time. My first business had failed. I had gone from Green Beret commander, to having my first business fail and going through a bankruptcy three years later, to finding new partners and standing up, and growing a company.

And when I was specifically training for those tournaments, I feel like I had to get back to being my sort of warrior self, like I needed to prove it to myself, I needed to also set the example that it wasn’t about going out and actually winning, though that was the goal, but it was about showing the other members of the team and creating a culture where we work hard and we put ourselves out there in difficult situations, we put ourselves into stressful situations because we want to be the best, because we want to prove something to ourselves, because we want to do it for our team.

And so, that was a big driver for me during that time frame because, again, it was a hard time from a personal standpoint of my life. And so, I really dedicated all the time and effort, and said, “You don’t control outcome in life.” We don’t control whether we win, whether we lose. All we control is our process and our preparation. And so, I just try to do all those things right and lead by example, and it worked out.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. Well, so, yeah, let’s hear about this Warrior’s Mindset, that’s the name of your book. What’s the mindset and what’s the big message in the book?

Sean Patton
Absolutely. So, I went with the Warrior’s Mindset, which is maybe a little, I don’t know, off-putting, it’s a little hardcore. You said hardcore. It’s a little intense for some people but how I define a warrior is a warrior is someone who fights for a noble cause greater than himself, and I don’t mean just physically fight. It’s, like, pursues, persists for a noble cause greater than himself.

And when you define it that way, then it becomes binary, so you either have a noble purpose, a noble cause, something that’s bigger than yourself that you’re working towards, that you’re fighting for, that you believe in, or you don’t. It’s one or the other. And if you don’t, which is if we’re not intentional with our lives and we don’t set purpose, if we don’t get to know ourselves, we’re just going through the motions, and you will consciously and subconsciously make decisions that are based on, “What is going to cause me the least discomfort in the moment?”

It’s going to be a very shortsighted decision-making. It’s going to be about comfort. It’s going to be about apathy. It’s going to be, like, “Well, that feels stressful.” But, again, if you don’t have that purpose behind it, you will turn it down. And I just think that, of those two, having that warrior’s mindset and having a noble purpose, aligns with our genetic purpose and aligns with who we are as human beings, and is the path to fulfillment.

And I think the other way is a path to misery, anxiety, depression, and everything else because you lack that noble purpose. So, that’s why I use the term A Warrior’s Mindset and what I ended up doing was researching and taking my own experiences, research, there’s over 300 citations in this book, everything from neuroscience, psychology, sociology, to history, to whittle down, and say, “How small can I make the framework to achieve that?”

Because it’s one thing to say, “Have a warrior’s mindset. Go fight for a noble cause. Do all these great things,” and then they ask the question, “Awesome. How?” And so, I really set out to create as simple a framework as I could but not miss anything critical to have a system, a framework that you could work through for your own mindset that really maximize your greatness. And so, I came up with a guide called Six Keys to Greatness.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you give us some examples of noble purposes that folks can really seem to connect and engage with in their work lives?

Sean Patton
Yeah, absolutely. So, I work with a lot of companies as a leadership coach and consultant, and I’m a firm believer in a leadership culture creating fulfillment. And so, I believe in purpose alignment. Managers are worried about financial incentive alignment, which is important. I’m not saying it’s not important but money is a satisfier, it’s not a driver. And if you can get yourself and getting people on your team aligned with, “What is the larger goal of this company?” your company should exist to provide some sort of effect to better people’s lives in the world.

And so, if you can really align that purpose in your work life, you can say, “Well, personally, here’s my beliefs. I think people should, in any industry, have better access to information, and we should support mothers doing home school. And I believe that we shouldn’t censor information to help that growth,” or something like that, as an example.

Well, if that aligns with your values and your purpose, now you can find a reason outside of the transactional paycheck to work every day, and how much better. I believe everyone should – this sounds crazy in some people’s corporate worlds – you should look forward to one-on-ones with your manager, like you should look forward to having performance evaluations and counseling sessions with the people that you work for and people that you work with.

I feel like we spend so much time at work in our work lives, more and more people are, and the pandemic just accelerated this mindset of, “We want purpose in the work we do. We want fulfillment in the work we do.” And I think if you do leadership the right way, I’m a true believer that you can create both fulfillment and profitability. Those things are not mutually exclusive.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Could you, while we’re on the topic, give us a few more examples of folks you’ve seen they’ve got a purpose that’s aligning with their work, job, career, purpose, and then fireworks are happening?

Sean Patton
Yeah, absolutely. So, I’m trying to think which client example. So, I have one client I’m working with currently who had a successful company, it was a title company, he had 29 employees, doing very well for himself, but there was no passion behind it. He was just going through the motions and didn’t feel like he was living up to his potential, feel like he had sort of plateaued out for himself. And what he really wanted to do was create a vertically integrated real estate company.

And so, we sat down and we looked at, “Well, why do you want to do that?” “Well, I want to have freedom. I’ve got kids that are going to go to college. I want to be able to travel. My wife and I finally can go out and travel on our own, so I want to be able to have freedom of movement. I want to be challenged. I want to grow.”

And he also had this noble purpose of, a firm believer that for most people, especially people, normal middle-class folks that home ownership was a path to financial stability in life, and he really believed that. And so, he wanted to set up a company, everything from property management of rentals to construction, to real estate selling and title work with the idea of getting people who wanted to own a home but didn’t have the credit or do the background to do it, and then setting them up with rental situations that were stable so that they could stay there longer and then help them get to a point where they could buy their first home, and then they could hopefully buy it from him.

So, it was both profit and purpose together, and we came up with that plan slightly over a year ago, and I’m excited to see what he’s doing now. He’s got all four stood up, they’re all bringing in revenue, and he’s already got a team underneath him. And you can just see the drive and the excitement in the work he’s doing because he believes in it and he’s challenging himself.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome. All right. Well, working through The Warrior’s Mindset, you’ve got six keys to greatness. Can you lay it on us what are each of the keys? And any pro tips for getting them unlocking stuff for us?

Sean Patton
Absolutely. So, the six keys are perspective and gratitude, is number one; internal locus of control is number two; north star purpose is three; self-discipline; perseverance; and leadership. So, I’ll give you the brief overview of each, and it has to start with the perspective of yourself. Do you have this warrior’s mindset or not? Are you trying to maximize your experience of life, maximize your impact on others or not? What are your values? So, what’s your perspective around that?

And then, hopefully from that, it becomes gratitude. I see gratitude as the eternal fuel source for everything else. Like, if I’m getting frustrated, if I’m feeling confused of my life, from having relationships, whatever that can be that’s going in my life that I’m struggling with mentally, I can always come back to expanding my aperture and show gratitude for, like, how lucky we are, how lucky are we to be in this country, how lucky are we to be at this time.

Like, there’s never been a time in the history of mankind of probably trillions, billions and billions of humans that have ever existed over the last few hundred thousand years, how many have had air conditioning. Like, how many have been in some sort of democracy where they had basic rights and freedoms? How many had a car that can drive them wherever they want to go and talk to people, like we’re talking now, across spans of time, and have information at their fingertips? Like, almost none of them. Basically, none of them.

The life we have, if you really think about it, should fill you with so much gratitude that it can get you over humps and drive you when you’re feeling. So, gratitude is the baseline for everything, I think, and that really takes work. And you can do gratitude journaling, you can do mindset work, you can do meditation. You can do a lot of things. But if someone’s listening to this podcast right now, I guarantee you, you’re in the 10% wealthiest people on the planet. Like, if you’re listening to this podcast, you are.

You are in the top 10%. And let’s embrace and celebrate that, not get apathetic to it, but use it as fuel to achieve our true greatness.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that is powerful – gratitude, eternal fuel. I’m intrigued. It is true, objectively speaking, we’re super blessed. When you zoom out, I like that notion, the wide aperture. We zoom out in terms of time and place, it is just a fact that we are exceptionally blessed and lucky, and yet it often doesn’t feel that way. And so, I like what you said, we should feel grateful, and it takes work. Can you expand on that? It seems like we humans have a knack for having our expectations rise so fast.

One of my favorite stories here is I remember, once I was coordinating a conference. This was back in college. I was coordinating a conference, and I thought, “You know what, I’m really going to delight.” I had a team of maybe 58, I still remember this. It was on my resume for a long time. I had a team of 58 people on my staff volunteering, my fellow students. And so, I thought, “You know what, I’m going to treat them. I’m going to,” to their surprise, this hadn’t been done in years past, I thought, “Right. We’re doing great, the budget is cool, so I’m going to get everyone a nice little spread of bagels and cream cheeses from Panera one morning.”

And so, I did, and they were thrilled, like, “Oh, this is so cool. Thanks. Awesome. I was hungry, I didn’t know what I was going to do,” and I thought, “Oh, yes.” And so, it felt good to be liked and appreciated, and that it was a hit, a surprise accomplished. And so then, it was a very hectic day, we were taking care of a lot of things.

I was tired, and I was thinking, “Oh, wow, we’ve got a bunch of bagels leftover. Okay, that’s fine. I guess we’ll be all set for tomorrow. Great. I don’t have to do anything because I want to go to bed now. it’s been a crazy long day.” And so, the next day, they said, “So, Pete, are there bagels this morning?” And I said, “Oh, yeah, actually we’ve got a ton leftover. They’re just right over there.” They said, “But they’re not fresh.” And I just loved it.

I was like, “In all the years past, we’ve done this event, there were not bagels. Yesterday was the coolest thing ever. Today we still have those bagels, and they’re almost as good. They’re not, like, two-week old bagels. Like, one day.” I’m no connoisseur, Sean.

Sean Patton
You’re no bagel connoisseur?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m not too picky with my food but I was like, “Okay, I know one-day old bagels aren’t as great as super fresh bagels, but that’s still not bad.” And so, it was just like one day is all it took from, “This is so grand” to “Aargh, they’re not fresh, and I’m disappointed.” And I think that that is representative of me and many of us in terms of something cool happens, we feel so blessed, so grateful, “Oh, my gosh, this is awesome. I got a big promotion, big jump in income. Cool, cool, cool.”

And it’s like, “Oh, now, what do you know? It’s so hard to make ends meet. How did that happen?” It’s sort of like our lifestyle, or our wants, or perceived needs, expectations grow such that we don’t feel the gratitude associated with, “Oh, wow, what I have is oh-so-abundant.” So, Sean, I want to throw that to you. You said we should feel grateful, and it takes some work. What’s going on with this human nature? And what can we do about it?

Sean Patton
Well, Buddhism says that being human is to suffer, and the real suffering comes from, I think you said it, expectation. And so, when there’s an incongruence or a difference between what our life is and what we may want, that wanting is what’s covering, is what’s causing the suffering. It’s not external. It’s inside our own heads.

Pete Mockaitis
Dukkha.

Sean Patton
Right, dukkha. Exactly, yeah. And we don’t have to go all spiritual on this, but I think that’s part of human nature as you get accustomed to that. I have this story, another story, it’s when I just got back from Iraq, I’ve been gone for 14 months in southwest Baghdad. And I get back, I was young, I was 25, and I was excited I got to go to Starbucks. I was super stoked, like, “Oh, my gosh. I go to Starbucks.”

I get in line, and I’m waiting there, and there’s just two girls in front of me, and they’re having this conversation. Somebody said something about…Oh, no, what it was it was the fall, it was October and they ran out of pumpkin spice.

Pete Mockaitis
“I need my PSL, Sean. I totes need it.”

Sean Patton
They needed it, and they lost their minds. And one was like, “This is the worst day ever.” And I just had to cover my head and walk out after I’m like, again, objectively, you should feel grateful but they had this expectation and this quality of life. And to kind of go back to our earlier conversation about jiu-jitsu, we’re about just doing hard things, like, it’s easy. To be comfortable in America, like, let’s be honest, is it the perfect place? We have a lot of things we need to change, absolutely.

But to be comfortable? Like, it’s not that hard. You don’t have to do much. And because of all that comfort and the reward, and whether it’s social media, we feed that machine of getting gratification, of getting pleasure without putting in work, and then that becomes an expectation. And that’s a dopamine cycle that is at the root of all addiction. And we get addicted to the easy dopamine and that easy win.

And so, yeah, we have to do that work. And that’s why you have to be intentional about that gratitude. Are you going to be perfect? No. I do it all the time. It’s not, like, I’m walking around floating on a cloud with fairies over my head, and just like rainbows everywhere. Like, that’s not the case. I go through hard times, and everyone does, but it’s doing work so that when you have enough self-awareness to see yourself going down that path, and you can redirect and pull yourself out with intentionality.

And I think that’s really what it comes down to, is living intentionally. Because if you let yourself, again, that’s really the definition of a warrior’s mindset, living with intention toward this bigger goal, as opposed to being reactive to your environment, and just like, “Well, I feel awful, therefore, everything is awful.” Like, does it or do you just feel awful because you wanted your PSL, and now you can’t, and, really, you could get something else and be fine? Like, that’s a matter of perspective but that takes intentionality.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, these practices, can you share with us, let’s say, in the moment? Because I’ve done some gratitude journals, and sometimes when I write down the thing that I’m grateful for, it’s like, “Yeah, that really was so amazing, and I feel in my heart a grand sense of gratitude.” And other times, it’s like, “Yup, that was good, and that was good, and that was good,” but I don’t feel much of anything, and I’m just objectively, “Yes, that was a good thing. I am pleased that that occurred,” but my heartfelt gratitude is not ignited. What do I do with that?

Sean Patton
Yeah, I know, you’re totally right. And I think it really also comes down to, like, present-ness and sort of being in the now of it, which is part of internal locus of control, which is like an attribution of control, “Is it external or is it internal?” And so, that comes into play here, like saying, “Well, ultimately, how you feel is up to you. It’s inside you. You own this.”

And so, when you are working through that gratitude, if you can be present and not thinking about, “Well, the things I don’t have or where I want to be, or what’s going to happen in 10 minutes,” but, like, “But are you okay right now?” Breath. Slow down. And it sounds super cliché, but you don’t have to do a formal journal. Like, count your blessings. Like, how good is it right now for you compared to how bad it is other places? And I would just say do more research about what’s going on in the world.

If you want to feel lucky, like go read the news for a day, and you’ll be like, “Oh, my God, my life isn’t anything like these.” It’s almost like I hear people talk about they watch trashy reality or something because it makes them feel better about their own lives because it’s so crazy and dramatic. And so, whatever it takes, I don’t know, I guess if it’s “Real Housewives” or if it’s breath work or gratitude journaling, whatever it takes for you to get to that place.

And, again, you’re going to get off-kilter, you’re going to feel bad, and it’s okay to feel bad in the moment, that’s fine. We’re not worried about the acute feelings of, like, sadness and happiness in the moment. We’re worried about the underlying mental state that you’re carrying around.

Pete Mockaitis
So, your advice then is if I’m doing a gratitude journal, but, one, if it never does it for me, just maybe try something else. But if I am doing it, and it sometimes works for me, I’m seeking to double down on experiencing the feeling of gratitude. Is that accurate?

Sean Patton
Yes, double down on the experiencing gratitude. I’m a meditator. I actually don’t journal. There’s always different techniques, and some things work for some people, some things work for others. For me, meditation has been huge for me in my own mindset shifts and even the transition in the military, and everything.

And a simple gratitude meditation of if you’re really starting to go off the deep end, like sitting down, following your breath, and then just picture in your head things that – your family, or your friends, or the things you have, or the house you have, or the job you have, or the security you have – and reflecting on that, and experiencing that gratitude in the moment, because as soon as we ruminate on the future, that creates anxiety. Why? Because you can’t control the future.

And if we reflect on the past too much, if we ruminate on the past, it creates depression and regret because you can’t change the past. But, luckily for us, neither one of those things are real. The only thing that’s real is the moment. And so, working on your perspective and gratitude, internal locus of control, and doing things that bring you in this moment, my guess is you’re doing pretty good compared to others. That doesn’t mean you have to feel great awful things happen to people.

You should feel emotion. But, again, we’re not worried about, “This thing is happening so I feel bad.” That’s okay. But it’s about living unconsciously and not even being aware that you’re doing it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. Well, tell us then, your organization Stronger Leaders, Stronger Profits, you do leadership coaching and consulting. We talked, we had a quick overview of the keys, and then a deeper dive into gratitude. Can you share with us, when we look at a whole team or organization level, how do you see things shake out in terms of being the primary drivers of, say, poor versus amazing engagement?

Sean Patton
That’s a great question. The two things, the two Cs, if you will, if you had to say, “What’s the quickest win?” or, “What’s the one thing?” If I had to say, “You’ve got a snapshot, two minutes to look over this company, and figure out how are things going,” I would look at two things – communication and counselling.

How are your communication systems? Are they clear? Is it accurately spreading information down? Is there a system to get feedback to come up? When someone gives feedback, do they get a response? Like, how is your communication? And I think looking at that system first, that fixes so much. Most of your listeners, I’m sure, can, when I think about how to be awesome at your job, and when their job is awesome and when it’s not awesome.

When your job is not awesome, or something goes wrong, communication, or a lack thereof, or a misaligned expectation because of communication, communication is either the primary cause or a strong contributor to almost every business failure. There’s very rarely where I say, “Hey, Pete, here’s a task. I need you to finish this project by the end of the week,” and you get to Thursday, and you’re like, “Eh, screw Sean. Like, whatever. Screw that, I don’t really care,” and you just fail on purpose. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but those are pretty easy to identify if that’s happened.

So, if that’s not the case, if you were going to assume good intent, that you’re trying to do the right thing, well, then we must’ve had misaligned expectations. What you thought was done and good is not what I thought was done and good. And so, I do have one sort of framework around effective communication when you want to ask someone to do something, or give someone a task, or whatever, without missing anything. And I call it the Five Bravo.

So, it’s task, what do you want done; purpose, why do you want it done, how does it affect other people; intent, and that’s the how, like if there’s a certain way I want you to do it, is there a resource I’m going to give you, like are you going to have a team to do this, what’s your intent behind it; and then timeline, when do you need this done by, what are your for dates and end state. So, when you’re done, you come back, and you say, “Hey, Sean, I did that report for you. Here it is,” what’s that look like to me, what’s my expectation?

So, if you just go through that task, purpose, intent, timeline, end state, if you just cover all five of those when ask someone to do something or put something in an email, and then the B for bravo is back brief. So, especially if I gave that to you, “What questions do you have?” and I say, “All right. So, Pete, I probably missed something, like that’s a lot of information. What do you have? What did you hear from me?” And then you repeat it back to me.

Seventy percent of the time, you’re going to be missing something, and that may be because you missed it or maybe because I thought I said it because it was in my head but I didn’t actually say it, like all those things happen but it can be cleared up with a simple framework of the Five Bravo. And I’ve had clients take their project request forms between divisions and actually change their forms to be that layout.

Because if you communicate effectively that way, then when someone doesn’t meet expectation, well, the decision is binary. It’s binary. Then you have, which is only one of two things, it’s either they’re not capable of doing this yet, so they need more training, or they have had the training and they’re uncapable, unwilling to perform what you need them to perform, in which case, they need to do a different role and leave the organization. You can start making that determination.

But what happens most often in organizations is there was a fault on poor communication from the person giving or asking that to be done, there was misaligned expectations of what their expectation coming back was, and there’s a blame on the person for not executing the way, and not having the end state that they desired, but it was due to a poor communication.

So, this happens companies, too. If something goes wrong, the first thing I do before is think, “Did I give them the Five Bravo? Did I give them all five?” And if I didn’t, that’s on me. I can’t hold them accountable for that. It’s my responsibility to get better at communicating. But if I did, now I can take action. And so, communication is so important. And the second thing is counselling, which we can talk about in a second if you want.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, I think we know it when a communication failure went down in the moment. How do you assess the overall health of communication in a team or an organization?

Sean Patton
So, there are several ways. One, doing a good assessment and coming in and hearing from people how they feel about the communication. Are they heard? Do they have the means to give feedback? Do they understand the why behind what they’re doing? Do they understand where the company is headed and what they do? Is the mission and values and vision communicated all the way to the bottom? Do people know?

You can simply ask, “What’s your role here? What do you do?” They should be able to walk that all the way up to how the company executes its strategic initiatives. And if they can’t, you know there’s a lack of communication. But your question actually brings me to a huge part, which they’re intertwined, is counseling, which is the second thing.

And I see almost no one does this as well as they should, and it’s the number one thing that would improve the culture of any organization and team. And it also facilitates this type of communication, where instead of doing performance evaluations, that’s very transactional, again, that’s management. Like, “You had these tasks. Did you do them or not? How did you do them? Did you do them okay? Where are you at in this?”

That’s fine. I’m not saying not to do that. But if that’s all you do, you’re really setting yourself up for failure, especially in the modern workplace, especially if they’re remote and hybrid workers. If you take a developmental counseling approach, where we meet monthly, quarterly, and we’re talking about we’re not just managing the position but we’re leading the person.

We’re talking to the person, “Personally, what are your goals this quarter? Did you accomplish them? Did I do everything I said I would do to support you? What’s your goals in the future? How can I help you get there? What are your professional goals? What are your team goals? And what are those objectives? And how can I support you do that? And what are you struggling with? And here’s where I see you going? Here’s your career progression.”

Like, that’s a coaching mentality and that leader mentality of creating new human potential by changing the way people think about themselves, the organization and the world, versus management, which is efficiency of a system. And so, when you shift to a leadership culture and you shift to communication and development of human beings, being a core competency of your business, that’ll turn around almost any company.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, in most organizations, are these conversations just not happening very often? Or, what’s the piece that’s lacking?

Sean Patton
Yeah, there’s no formal construct to have this type of leader conversations, and so you have some people that are having them, and others that are checking the box. I guess we don’t want to piss off too many people the way they do things, but I see a lot of companies where we’ll go in, and, say, HR sends you a performance eval for your annual performance eval, you fill it out of how you think you did, that gets sent to somewhere or something, and then somebody talks to you about it, and maybe they talk about how that affects your bonus or where you’re looking to go next, and that’s about the end of it, “Do better here. Don’t do this.”

Like, that is such a different mentality than saying, “Hey, Pete, here’s the role, the function you play here. Why are you here? Like, why are you doing this job? Are you money-motivated? Cool, let’s talk about that.” Sometimes you talk to, like, a seller, this actually happened at my wife’s company. She was having some issues with one of her sellers. She’s a senior sales manager. And when she talked to him, yes, he’s money-motivated but this wasn’t his passion. His goal was to open up his own business. And in order to do that, he had figured out that he would need $200,000. Okay.

So, instead of her assuming that he wants to hit goal to make money, to move up in the sales organization, instead of that being the expectation, he was very clear, like, “No, my goal is to actually leave the organization and do my own thing. I see 200K.” “Cool. Well, let’s align your purpose with company purpose. How fast can we get you to 200K? How do I need to support you?” And now that person is motivated, even though they’re doing the same job they were doing before. But before, they hadn’t framed it as, “Let’s get you out of this company as soon as possible and onto the next thing.”

And so, having a formal system to have leadership conversations at a regular interval that is written out, that people are accountable for, is huge. When I was counseled in the military, we do counseling like this in the military, and it’s a big part of the leadership equation, and I can’t tell you, I had hundreds of counseling sessions. I can tell you a handful of specific moments or things that I still remember that’s still impactful.

But I can definitely tell the commanders that took the time out to actually do it and the ones who skipped over it and penciled with it, like cared enough to develop me and have that conversation about how they could support me, and where I wanted to go, and give me honest feedback on that as a human being, not just in, “Here’s your performance metrics and KPIs,” and that human component is really where we get from management to leadership.

And with the way the world is heading with our workforce, people don’t want to just be managed. And it used to be if I had a bad manager at my job, it’s like, “Well, yeah, Bob kind of sucks but I got another job offer, but I got to move the house, and the kids are in soccer, and the change cost is so high.” But with remote hybrid workers now, the only thing that changes if I changed jobs is, “What software do I log in tomorrow?” So, that’s a different set of conditions, work conditions that companies are not adapting to. They’re not realizing that 75% of the reason people leave jobs is because of bad bosses, not bad jobs.

And so, if you get this right, it increases retention, internal hires, employee engagement, all those things. And we’re right back to your company can create fulfillment and profitability together.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s good. So, counseling frequently. Is there a magic frequency – weekly, monthly? What’s the vibe?

Sean Patton
Depending on the position, whether you need to do weekly one-on-ones or not, some positions, I think, you do, some you don’t. Lower-level people generally need more weekly one-on-ones and check-ins and handholding right, like more entry-level folks as oppose to more senior folks don’t need that as much. But I think the magic sauce, what we espouse and we help our clients with, is that we do a written form every quarter that lays out the next three months, and then you adapt off that same form and you meet monthly. So, monthly counseling but you’re filling out a full new form on goals and objectives once every quarter.

Pete Mockaitis
Fun. All right. Well, now, could you tell me a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Sean Patton
My favorite quote is actually by George Bernard Shaw, it’s the unreasonable man quote, and it’s that “The reasonable man sees the world the way it is and adapts himself to it, and the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to him, and, therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

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

Sean Patton
The quintessential one for me, it’s funny, because of all the different research and stuff I looked at is still the Harvard happiness study. An 80-year study that started in the 1930s that tried to determine what are the variables that affect joy and fulfillment in life, and they’re on the second generations. So, they did it with their first subject all the way through their deathbed, then the second generation. And they, recently, just last year, revised their latest findings.

And it’s just clear that it’s not socioeconomic status, it’s not race, sex, any things that really are universally responsible for fulfillment and joy in life, and it’s absolutely the quality of your close relationships. And I think that is a really powerful thing because if you talk about motivators for different people, to get over those hard challenges like we talked about at the beginning of this episode, my nightmare is being in older age and having regret about something in my life, about something I didn’t do, and not having the time or energy to do anything about it.

And there’s actually studies that have been done that show that 70-75% of all seniors live with the regret because they lived the way someone else thought they should, or because of societal norms, or because they thought it was just the right thing to do, and they didn’t go live their life the way they wanted to, and they didn’t maintain the quality close relationships. So, that’s my worst nightmare. That’s what drives me at the end of the day, is I think that when I’m one day laying in my bed, getting ready to close my eyes for the last time, I can look back at my life, and be like, “I freaking did it, and it was awesome.”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And a favorite book?

Sean Patton
My favorite book right now is an older book but it’s The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership and I’m really getting more and more into conscious leadership right now, and some of the practices around that, and how I can implement that in my systems. Yeah, so that’s one that I’m a huge proponent of. But before that, I read Life of Joy it’s with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu who talked about how you create joy in life. I would say those two books in the last year have been two that really hit me hard.

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

Sean Patton
Another great question. I know this is the hot topic of the day, but I use a paid service called Jasper for my AI. And it sped up our workflows in so many ways because I’ve been able to come up with my original concept or framework. So, you can put your own original thought in but you can just put in bullet format and it can write you an 80% solution, and it can create captions. So, I’m fully in on using AI, generative AI, in our day-to-day to make our jobs more productive and easier.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Sean Patton
My favorite habit is, I’m going to sound so boring though, I’m going to sound boring to say this, but that’s fine, but I am all about my nighttime routine and the same times, going to bed at the same times and waking up at the same times. And so, one thing my wife and I do is, like, she’s even more into the sleep stuff than I am. She’s like Spy Kids, she’s got like a Whoop on one arm and an Apple Watch on the other, she’s like all the bio data she can get.

But we have half our lights in our house set so that at 8:00 p.m. we only have red lights from down all the way to our bedrooms to our bathroom. So, we take away all that light exposure, and that habit, that itself, whether it’s the blue light or whether it’s just a Pavlovian response to the fact of the red light, but as soon as the red lights come on, I get sleepy and I have a great rest. So, I’m really big on my night routine and going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time.

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?

Sean Patton
I think one thing I often say is that there’s an obligation of greatness. If I truly believe that, again, we are living at such an amazing time, we’re in this country, we have so much potential to do so much good, to be great. Almost everyone that’s listening, like you have the potential to be great in however you define that in your life, you have greatness inside you, and your potential for that, and the opportunity for it.

But I’m a firm believer that, with the potential for greatness, comes an inherent obligation to achieve it. So, now that’s a chip on your shoulder because, otherwise, that’s the unmet potential is not being grateful for the opportunities you’ve been given.

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

Sean Patton
So, I’m SeanPattonSpeaks on Instagram. I’m on LinkedIn. Those are my primary social tools. And then our website is StrongerLeadersStrongerProfits.com.

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

Sean Patton
I think it’s to evaluate inside of their company whether they are managing the position or whether they’re leading the person, and lean into leading the person and leading the person with intentionality. And I think you’ll see some great results not just in the company’s success but in quality of life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sean, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and warrior mindset goodness.

Sean Patton
Thanks, Pete. This has been awesome. I appreciate it, man. You do great work here.

918: How to Think and Innovate Like a Genius with Paul Sloane

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Paul Sloane discusses how to become more innovative and effective by adopting different styles of thinking.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The top question to ask when problem-solving
  2. The simple trick for improving your memory
  3. How to build rapport with anyone with one phrase

About Paul

Paul Sloane is the author of many books on lateral thinking and the leadership of innovation.  He graduated from Cambridge University with a degree in Engineering. He had a successful career in sales at IBM before becoming Marketing Director and then Managing Director at the database company, Ashton-Tate. He was subsequently the VP International and CEO of software companies. He now speaks and consults on lateral thinking and innovation with corporate clients.

Resources Mentioned

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Paul Sloane Interview Transcript

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

Paul Sloane
Peter, I’m delighted to be on the show.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m delighted to be chatting and I am excited to hear about some of your wisdom you’ve collected over a whole career with 17 books, talking lateral thinking, being more brilliant. So much good stuff. But first, can you tell us the tale of how you met Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney?

Paul Sloane
Well, no great tale to tell, really. I took my granddaughter to school one day, to primary school, and it was a private primary school in Sussex in England. And as I was walking through the carpark, a man said hello to me, and I said hello back to Sir Paul McCartney, whose daughter went to that same school as well. So, that was good.

And then a friend of mine, he sponsored The Rolling Stones. He worked as a managing director of a big mobile phone company, T-Mobile, and they sponsored The Rolling Stones on some of their major concerts. And we got to meet them, and I shook hands with Mick Jagger. He’s really quite tiny and frail. I thought he’ll never last the concert. And then he came out and he performed, and he was just brilliant. I’ve seen Paul McCartney perform, too. And they’re two of my great heroes.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s cool. All right. Just right place, right time.

Paul Sloane
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, now I’m intrigued here. You share some of your best thinking and about thinking. Have you made any particularly striking, surprising discoveries about us humans and how we do our thinking and problem-solving over the course of researching this in your career?

Paul Sloane
Well, I wouldn’t claim anything innovative or profound, actually, but I think that the most important thing I’ve found is that people think in very predictable ways, and they think in grooves, and they tend to use the same kind of thinking, the thinking that has served them well up till then. And I think it’s like a tennis player who’s got a very good forehand but they don’t have a very good backhand or they don’t volley very well. But if they play every shot with a forehand, they can be competitive.

And we’re a bit like that. We might use critical thinking, or we might use logical thinking, but not use creative thinking, or lateral thinking, or emotional thinking. But because we go through life making decisions based on the thinking style which has suited us, we get through it. It’s competent. But if you want to be outstanding, if you want to be an outstanding tennis player, you have to develop drop shots, you have to develop your backhand, you have to go to the net, you have to volley, you have to smash. And you need every shot in the book.

And to be a great thinker, to be a great, really, effective person at work, you need a variety of styles which suit different situations and different challenges. And that’s what I address in my book How to be a Brilliant Thinker. And what I’m really saying is you need to develop your skill at visual thinking, at mathematical thinking, at logical thinking, at creative thinking, at lateral thinking. A whole range of different thinking styles will make you much more competent and effective.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share with us, perhaps, any interesting studies or data or cases you’ve seen, inspiring tales of folks who have upgraded, transformed their thinking capabilities and seen cool results from it?

Paul Sloane
Well, I’ve got some personal experiences of my own where I’ve changed style, and I deliberately try to enhance that. So, I worked for IBM, I went through IBM’s sales training and management training, and had a successful career in sales and management. And then I got headhunted and joined a software company as marketing director, and I was in charge of a team of bright, enthusiastic, young people but they were chaotic. They were charging all over the place, doing all sorts of undisciplined things. And I thought it was my job to manage that and to bring IBM discipline to the place.

And one day, on a car journey, a managing director who was a very experienced guy, said to me, he said, “Paul, you’re too tough on your people.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well, you’re telling them what to do all the time.” And I said, “Isn’t that my job?” And he said, “No.” And he was right, and I was being too prescriptive in my approach, and not really empowering people and challenging them to come up with their own solutions.

Whenever somebody came to me with a problem, I’d say, I’d come up with my idea, which was often a good idea, I’d say, “Try this. Do it this way,” and telling them how to do their jobs and, in a sense, micromanaging them, and it wasn’t a good style. You don’t develop people with that sort of leadership management style. And I’d like to think that I changed, and it was like St. Paul on the road to Damascus moment for me, that I realized that I was being too prescriptive, and I needed to be more empowering and trust people.

And if somebody comes to you with a problem, instead of saying, “Here’s what you should do,” the right way to handle it, I think, is to say, “What ideas have you got?” and challenge them to come up with ideas first, and prompt them to think about different approaches and explore possibilities with them. And maybe, eventually, they’ll go with your approach, maybe they’ll come up with a better approach themselves, but that will help develop them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And in sort of the language that you’re using with different styles of thinking, how would you articulate what was your previous thinking approach in those exchanges versus your new approach?

Paul Sloane
I’d say my previous thinking approach was command and control as a style, which is a management style which is effective if you’re running a junior team, an inexperienced team, an ineffective team, people weren’t doing very well, command and control is sometimes necessary. But I think, what I would call lateral leadership is where you don’t lead from the from the front, you lead from the side as a collegial leader, and as a colleague, you empower people and trust them. And if you trust people to succeed, you have to trust them to fail as well, and you have to let go. And that’s a different thinking style and a different management style.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share with us then what’s the big idea, the core thesis, behind your book How to be a Brilliant Thinker?

Paul Sloane
It’s about that. It’s about adopting different styles, deliberately developing different styles of thinking, and choosing a style which is appropriate for you and for the moment. And to be really successful at work, to get promoted, you need to be good at managing people. And if you’re a very good data analyst, or a very good programmer, you might be using a lot of logical skills, a lot of rational skills, but you’re not using emotional skills to relate to people, and understand them, and persuade them, and motivate them.

And you’ll never get promoted unless you learn those emotional-thinking skills, emotional intelligence, as well as logical intelligence. And if you want to be a successful marketer, you have to use creative intelligence and lateral thinking, to be able to think of innovative radical ideas. So, you need this whole range of skills to develop your thinking, and that’s the basis of the book.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you lay out for us this menu? You’ve used a number of different categories or types of thinking: the emotional, the lateral, the creative, the logical. Can you lay out what are the different types of thinking in your typology? And how do you define them? And how do you improve them?

Paul Sloane
So, just to read some of the titles of the chapters, “Consider the opposite,” “Confront assumptions,” “Analyze problems.” So, I built quite a bit of problem analysis, and formal problem analysis, critical thinking, asking questions, thinking in combinations, parallel thinking such as de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, so parallel thinking technique.

Thinking creatively, thinking laterally, how to think what nobody else thinks, how to evaluate ideas, how to make difficult decisions, how to develop your verbal thinking so you can express yourself clearly, how to develop your mathematical thinking so that you can actually use mathematics as a tool, gets with probability, think visually, develop your emotional intelligence, how to be a brilliant conversationalist is one of the chapters in the book, how to win arguments, how to ponder, how to maximize your memory, how to improve your memory, how to tell stories, how to think humorously.

So, these are some of the chapters in the book I talk about common thinking errors and ways to boost your brain, and games to help you think better.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share with us perhaps what are the most common and destructive errors in thinking that you see professionals make? And how could we go about preventing that from occurring?

Paul Sloane
Well, there are a lot of errors or a lot of cognitive biases and errors, but I think one of the big things that hold us back is making assumptions. And the lateral thinker challenges assumptions all the time, and the command-and-control leader, the conventional leader, the conventional person makes a lot of assumptions. And the older you are, the more experienced you are, maybe the more intelligent you are, the more assumptions you make every day. And we see it time and time again of people being taken.

Literally, thousands of people lost billions of dollars to Bernie Madoff because they assumed he was a genius, and they assumed that he could give higher than average returns to investors year after year after year, and they made the wrong assumption. People assumed that Elizabeth Holmes was telling the truth when she said at Theranos that she’s got a much better method of analyzing blood, and it was a fraud.

Collin Powell, and the USA, and lots of other countries assumed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but he didn’t. Wrong assumptions lead us down wrong paths all the time. And lateral thinkers, creative thinkers, endlessly curious and always prepared to ask a question, and to analyze the evidence, and they believe in evidence, they believe in experiments, they believe in real-world data.

They don’t believe in conspiracy theories. They don’t believe in models. They believe in experiments and finding out and challenging assumptions by asking fundamental questions, basic questions, is one of the central tenets of lateral thinking and of my books.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Could you share with us perhaps a professional example in the workplace where you think this is happening all the time, folks failing to challenge assumptions, and some assumptions that might well need to get challenged?

Paul Sloane
Well, you see it all the time with, and it’s so easy to see in hindsight but when you’re involved in a business meeting, there are all sorts of assumptions going on, and those assumptions frame the whole view of what’s possible and what’s not possible. I want you to imagine that you work for Encyclopedia Britannica and it’s 1990, and you’re in a meeting, and they’re talking about how they can increase sales.

And you said, “Just a minute, let’s look at the assumptions we’re making here. We’re assuming that people want to buy books, and that these books contain curated knowledge, which is provided by experts and edited by experts, teams and teams of experts, and that they’re expensive, and that we go out and sell those books. And we assume that that’s the best model.”

“What if we could create a model which is completely different where we didn’t pay experts at all. We got people to contribute to the encyclopedia themselves, and we got volunteers to edit it, and we gave it away virtually for free?” And if you’d made that suggestion, it would’ve been a career-ending suggestion, I think, with the company because people would’ve been horrified that you even thought that because it challenged all the basic assumptions on which the business was built.

And yet Wikipedia is that model. They don’t use paid experts. They use volunteers to write the articles, and edit, and manage, and curate all of that knowledge and expand it all the time. And it works, and they give it away for free. And that model, a completely different business model, totally destroyed Encyclopedia Britannica’s previously highly successful business model.

If you were working for a taxi company, and thinking, “How can we do things better?” you would never have thought of what Travis Kalanick thought when he said, “Let’s create a taxi company without a single taxi.” It’s an app. And it all does is it puts people together, those who want a taxi ride and those who are prepared to give somebody a ride in their personal car for a small fee. He created Uber which became worth $60 billion, and it’s a taxi company without a single taxi, and it challenged all of the assumptions that taxi companies are based on.

Same with Airbnb. They’re a hotel company that doesn’t own a single hotel room. So, lateral thinkers, creative thinkers, are prepared to challenge the basic assumptions that everyone else in the room takes for granted and assumes is a given and must be obeyed.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. In each of these examples, we had an established entrenched player, or system, and then there was an external disruptive force that operated without those fundamental assumptions. And I guess I’m curious, in terms of cognitive biases or whatever the word is at play here, in each of those instances, the folks at the hotel chain, a taxi company, at the Encyclopedia Britannica, have a deeply invested interest in continuing to do things the way they are, “Hey, I have a fleet of taxis,” “I’ve got a beautiful set of many large, expensive, gorgeous hotel buildings,” “I’ve got decades of sales that I’m beholding in my Encyclopedia Britannica.”

And so, in some ways, if they disrupted themselves, maybe they would be in a better position and sort of leading the charge. But how do you recommend when we are entrenched in our ways? And it’s almost like, I think, in many ways, we believe what we want to believe, and we want to believe, at Encyclopedia Britannica, if we’re there at that time, that we can continue doing the cool thing we’ve been doing and keep this gravy train rolling and growing.

And so, how do you think about that, that notion of we tend to believe what we want to believe as opposed to what is true?

Paul Sloane
Well, you’re actually right. We tend to believe what we want to believe, but it’s more insidious than that because the customers mislead you. One of my favorite books is by Clayton Christensen, it’s called The Innovator’s Dilemma. I don’t know if you’re read it, but in there, he says, “What stymies great companies is that they make the mistake of listening to their customers,” and I nearly fell off my chair when I read that because I was always taught that you have to listen to customers, and you have to please customers, and that’s your purpose in business is to find solutions that customers like.

But he gives countless examples, particularly from computer disk drives where the leader at each generation was misled by customers who said, “We like your product. Give us more of what you’re doing, only better, faster, cheaper in green, or in German,” or whatever. Customers always want incremental innovations because they don’t understand radical innovations. A customer will never indicate a radical solution to you.

And if somebody else who comes along with a radical solution, and, initially, the customers rebuff it, and the next time they rebuff it, and then they rebuff it, and then, eventually, they all move over to it. There are some early adopters and then the late majority, and then everyone moves over. And the previous incumbent gets wiped out. But they were doing a single right thing, they were listening to their customers, they were following their customers.

An example I give is this. Say, you were making spectacles in the 1950s, and you said to your customers, “How can we make our service better to you?” They might’ve said, “Well, a scratch-proof lens would be good,” or, “A plastic frame would be good,” or, “A flexible frame,” “A different type of glass,” “A shaded glass.” What would they not have asked for? Not one customer in 10,000 would’ve said, “I want you to create a piece of glass that I stick on my eyeball every morning.” Contact lenses.

Not one customer in 10,000 would’ve said, “I want you to cut through my eyeball with laser beams to change the geometry of my eyeball.” Laser eye surgery. And because you’re thinking spectacles, you’re thinking physical things. The companies that are selling spectacles weren’t selling spectacles, they were selling better sight. And another way of getting better sight is with contact lenses or with laser eye surgery. But no spectacle manufacturer would ever have conceived of those ideas, and no customer would’ve indicated that.

And so, it’s very difficult, and very often it’s the outsider who comes up with a radical innovation. And I’ve written about this many times in my blogs and books that it’s the outsider that tells that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that says a lot in terms of, it’s sort of backing up, zooming out, and getting to the fundamentals can help open up a lot of this stuff. In the Encyclopedia, it’s like, “What are we really trying to do here? We’re trying to give people a broad set of knowledge about a broad set of things. Okay. Well, there’s a lot of ways we can pull that off.” Or, “We’re trying to get people from point A to point B.”

Paul Sloane
As you say, you’ve got this inventory, you’ve got all this stock, you’ve got this history, you’ve got momentum, and the question they should ask is, “What is the problem that we are solving for customers? What is the customer problem that we solve? And is there a better way to solve that problem?”

The taxi driver, they’re providing a journey for the customer. That’s what they’re providing. The hotel chain Marriott is providing accommodation for a night. And Encyclopedia Britannica was selling access to knowledge. And in each case, if they thought about that in terms of “What is the fundamental product or service we’re providing? What’s the problem we’re solving for customers?” they might’ve stood a chance, though still unlikely, of conceiving an entirely different way of solving that problem.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Thank you. All right. So, a common thing we got to do is challenge assumptions. One way to do that is to ask big questions about the fundamentals that we’re delivering. What’s another major thinking error that is rampant in professional environments that we should tackle next?

Paul Sloane
Well, another big problem is confirmation bias where we look for evidence that supports our hypothesis, what we believe, and we discount evidence which contradicts what we believe. And we see this time and time again. We saw it with COVID, we saw it with the people who believed in vaccines and don’t believe in vaccines, and the people who believed in lockdowns and don’t believe in lockdowns, and they would find selective evidence that supported their viewpoint.

Occasionally, the people that didn’t believe in vaccines would say, “I heard about a chap, and he took the vaccines, and then he fell very ill, and that shows they’re not suitable.” And it’s one example out of thousands and thousands. So, confirmation bias where we look for evidence that confirms our beliefs, and we don’t allow our beliefs to be challenged. The question I often ask people is, “When was the last time you changed your mind on a really serious issue?” And most people don’t change their minds ever.

They might change their mind as they say, “What meal are we going to have tonight?” but they don’t change their mind on a big issue, “Are we supporting the Democrats or the Republicans?” They’re tribal. And once you get into one of those groups, then they go to websites and media sources which support a certain viewpoint, and they don’t absorb information from other websites or media sources, which would challenge their viewpoint. And that is a great enemy of thinking, and of diversity, and of innovation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, confirmation bias is all over the place, it’s problematic. How do you recommend we combat it?

Paul Sloane
By asking questions, by deliberately being open minded, and force yourself to be open minded. I gave a TEDx Talk on “Are You Open Minded?” And if you go on YouTube and search for Paul Sloane TEDx, you can see it. It’s only 13, 14 minutes but it’s had a tremendous number of views. And in it I talk about this whole concept of everyone thinks they’re open minded but most people aren’t. Nearly every one of us has blinkers, to some extent. And I talk about ways to tackle it.

And one way to tackle it is to deliberately go to the opposite end of the spectrum. If you normally watch CNN, watch Al Jazeera instead. If you normally take The Times in England, take The Guardian. So, deliberately go to channels and speak to people who will give you a different perspective. So, that’s one of the approaches.

And another is to just do something different every day to deliberately break the routine, whatever routine you’re in, whether it’s the way you go to work, or where you sit, or whatever you do, deliberately do something different. Introduce the random deliberately into your life. If you go on Wikipedia, and you look on the left, there’s a random article of the day. If you go there, you’ll learn something new that you didn’t know, and it will give you a slightly different view of the world.

So, there are these techniques that you can use in terms of deliberately displacing yourself. You tend to mix with people who are like you. I said to my wife the other day, I said, “I met an interesting new chap at the golf club.” And she said, “Let me guess, is he white?” “Yes.” “Is he your age?” “Yes.” “Is he a golfer?” “Yes.” “Is he middle class?” “Yes.” “He’s not new. He’s exactly like you.”

And she’s right. I’m mixing with people who are like me. And you’ve got to deliberately step outside that comfort zone sometimes and mix with people who aren’t like you in order to understand their perspective of the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. One of your chapters, you talk about thinking humorously. What’s the value in that? And how is it done other than just, well, laugh?

Paul Sloane
Well, humor breaks barriers, and humor is very useful. In my talks, I do a lot of serious talks, but I very often start with a joke or I put some humor into the talk in order to leaven it, in order to lighten it, in order to have some light and shade. Because if you just concentrate on the heavy serious stuff all the time, it’s oppressive for the audience. And if you can mix in a little bit of humor, it makes you relatable.

And as a person in the office, it makes you more popular. As a manager, if you use humor, but not sarcasm, not cynicism, but if you use gentle humor, it makes you more interesting and approachable, and I think humor is a very useful thing in life, and it can diffuse tension in a lot of situations as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And any pro tips on how we go about thinking more humorously?

Paul Sloane
Some people say, “I can’t tell a joke.” But everyone can tell a joke, and everyone can learn some funny things, and everyone can read humorous articles and humorous writers, and learn some of the techniques that they use in order to just put a little bit in there. And the people you follow on Twitter or Facebook, there are some people who are witty and write funny things, and some people who don’t and write very dull things.

So, focus on the people who are interesting and witty, and sometimes repeat some of the things they say, but give acknowledgements, say, “I read this today, and so and so said this,” and then repeat a witty from someone else. You don’t have to be original. You don’t have to come up with all the jokes yourself in order to be a funny person.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And one of the ways you mentioned thinking was visually? How is that done?

Paul Sloane
Well, some people are visual thinkers. They think in terms of pictures. And one of the exercises I do in my workshops where I run a brainstorm is the random word. And you have a challenge, whatever the challenge is, “How can we improve productivity? How can we cut the project lead times? How can we save costs in terms of our recruitment?” whatever it is, and then you take a word at random from the dictionary, and then you get some associations of the word. And then you try and force an idea based on the word which would solve the problem.

And you’ll come up with a stupid idea, a stupid idea, a stupid idea, and then, occasionally, you come up with a really creative idea. And people don’t believe that until they see it and it works. And I demonstrate it in my TEDx Talks, so that’s another reason to watch that on YouTube. But you take the dictionary, you open it at random, and you just take that random noun, and off you go. And if the one word doesn’t work, you just go on and find another one, and you’ll never run out of words in the dictionary.

Now, that method works but sometimes I do it with pictures instead. I take random pictures: a picture of a cathedral, a picture of a candle, a picture of a dog, a picture of a polar bear, a picture of an iceberg, a picture of fun fare, anything, and I got a whole range of random pictures. And then you put the random picture up, and you say, “Right. What ideas does that picture give you in terms of this challenge?” And some of it works much better with a picture than with a word. Some people work verbally and some people work visually.

And I think if you choose those different styles, and you try thinking in pictures, thinking in cartoons, thinking in storyboard in terms of something written, it can sometimes be much more powerful and a much better way. If you’re trying to communicate ideas, then words are fine and PowerPoint is fine, but images can be so much more powerful. And images, people like video, they like image, and it can be a much more effective way of getting a message across. So, if you’re not using visuals at the moment, visual thinking, then you’re missing a trick.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s clever and I like the random prompt, like a dictionary word or previously the Wikipedia random article. I’m thinking about if you want images, I guess you could go to Google and I’m Feeling Lucky, and then images, and you’ll get any number of things.

Paul Sloane
Exactly right. You will.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, you’ve got one of your final chapters, Games for Brilliant Thinkers. I like games. What do you recommend?

Paul Sloane
Oh, I love all sorts of games, and some games are very logical. I play chess very seriously. I like chess, that’s very analytical and logical but I like lateral thinking games. There’s a game called Codenames where you have to find connections between words to suggest links to your partner in that game. That’s very good.

I like Sudoku. I like Monopoly. I like Cluedo. I like all of those, but a whole range of games. Poker is a great game too, though it’s a dangerous game because you can lose a lot of money at it. But all of those things are great, I think. Let me see, what did I say in terms of games for thinkers? I said Chess, Scrabble, Monopoly, Bridge, Cluedo, Backgammon, Poker, Dingbats, or Rebuses, as they’re called. Riddles are visual word puzzles. Articulate!, Trivial Pursuit, all of these are good. Pictionary, Charades is a lateral thinking game. We have to think of strange connections to get your message across.

And, of course, lateral thinking puzzles of which I’ve written several books, of lateral thinking puzzles, and they are things where you get strange situations, and then you have to ask questions, and you get yes or no answers from somebody who knows the answer. And that forces you to think laterally because, typically, you get stuck and, typically, you make the wrong assumptions. And it’s those wrong assumptions that hold you back so you have to test all your assumptions with the questions you ask in a lateral thinking puzzle.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And you also have a chapter called Maximize Your Memory. Tell us, how is memory still important nowadays with all of our technology, and resources, and AI, and Google Searches, and Wikipedias?

Paul Sloane
Well, you’ve got access to all those things but when you meet somebody, an employee at work, you need to remember their name, and you need to remember their wife’s name, if they work for you, or their partner’s name, and maybe their children’s names, and some issues, things that are important to them, and you can’t just go to your phone and look it up. So, remembering people’s names, have you read How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie?

Pete Mockaitis

Yup.

Paul Sloane
It’s a classic book in 1930s. And one of the things he said is, “Use people’s names.” And what I would recommend to you, Peter, is that you use people’s names, and people like to hear their name. And that’s an example of something memory is really important, and you need to work on memory. There’s lots of minor things you can write down but there’s some important things you have to remember, and the techniques,

You’re driving along, suddenly you think of something, an urgent job you’ve got to do when you get to the office, you need a way of remembering those, and that’s one of the techniques I teach in my memory course, which I do, where you make a huge visual story about the things you’re trying to remember, and you exaggerate them, and you make them very vivid and very colorful and very dramatic. And then you can remember that story when you get home, and you can remember to do those things, which would otherwise just go straight out of your mind.

So, memory is important and everyone wants a better memory, and people always complain, as they get older, their memory is going and all the rest, but we can all memorize a lot more and remember a lot more things, and I show people different ways to do this with memory pegging and the virtual journey. So, when I give a talk, I’ll stand up and speak for 40 minutes at a conference without notes but I’m doing it with a virtual journey where I go through a particular route.

And in each place on the route, I’ve posted a picture, or a person, or an image of something which I want then to talk about. And I take that journey and I remember the items. The virtual journey is one of the techniques which I describe in the book and on my workshops.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Paul, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Paul Sloane
Well, there’s a couple piece of advice I would give to people, to your listeners, and a powerful piece of advice which I wish I’d known sooner. Here’s one, and this is a phrase which you can use to get people to like you, and it works. It works with any person at any level in the organization. You’ll get your boss to like you, you’ll get your coworkers to like you, you’ll get your kids to like you, you get your partner to like you. And this is the magic phrase. Are you ready?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Paul Sloane
What you say is, “What I really like about you is…” Now, even if there’s 10 things you don’t like about your boss, there’s something about him or her that you like. You have to admit they’re really good at this. So, you say, “What I really like about you, Peter, is you’re always clear and to the point,” or whatever it is.

People like to be praised, and you can always find something good about anybody. So, if you say that, it’s demonstrated that people’s opinion of you goes up. They like you more. They’re softened to you. They’re warm to you. So, the next time you’re with somebody and you want to just improve your relationship, say honestly, and you can always do this sincerely because there’s always something about somebody, no matter how strange or odd they are, there’s always something about them that they’re good at.

And say, “What I really like about you is X.” So, that’s one tip I would give you. Another tip I would give, if you’re a manager, and this is so powerful, it’s wonderful, I was taught this on at one stage and it made a big difference, and it works for a manager, in particular, but it will also work for anybody. If you’re manager, you take your staff one by one, and you sit down with them, and you say, “I’m going to ask you two questions and I want you to give me honest answers here.” And they say, “Yes, fine. I’ll do that, boss.”

And you say, “Here’s the first question. What am I good at?” And, typically, they’ll tell you what you’re good at, “You’re very clear and you’re very decisive, and so, and so, and so.” And then the follow-up question, which is the key question, you say, “Where could I improve?” and then you shut up and listen. And you can’t disagree with them. You can’t say, “No, you’re wrong.” You could say, “Give me an example. Give me a for instance,” but you listen and you say thank you.

And because you’ve asked them the first question, what you’re good at, then it enables to answer the second question. If you start with the second question, it doesn’t work because they’re inhibited from giving you any criticism. People don’t like criticism. But because you’ve asked the first, they can balance it by saying, “Well, an area you could improve is X, Y, Z.” If you it with all your people and they come up with similar areas you can improve, you’ve learned something very, very valuable because you’ve seen something about yourself that, otherwise, you would never see.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Paul Sloane
Peter Drucker said this, and I sometimes open my talks with this. He said, “Every organization must prepare for the abandonment of everything it does.” And he said this way back in the 1960s or ‘70s, and he didn’t say every organization has to improve or have to change a bit. He said, “Every organization must be prepared to abandon everything it does.” And that is so powerful, I think, and so challenging for many people to take that on board, that I think that’s a very, very powerful quote.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Paul Sloane
Well, I would say Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, and the research he did there is very powerful, which shows how leading companies miss innovation because they are so committed to their existing methods and their existing customers. And he brings forth a lot of evidence to support that in his book.

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

Paul Sloane
I would say de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats is one of my favorite management tools because it forces you to consider a proposition from several different perspectives, six different perspectives, it’s with the six hats. And it overcomes the big problem we have in meetings, which is “I like my idea. I don’t like your idea,” and the “I am right, you are wrong” thinking.

And with de Bono’s “Six Thinking Hats,” everyone is forced to look at the thing, the proposition, from six different perspectives, including the yellow hat where everyone has to say what’s good about the idea. Even if you think it’s a lousy idea and it comes from your worst enemy in the whole organization, you have to say, “Well, it would do this. I have to admit, this is a benefit we’d get from it.”

And then the black hat, where even if it’s your idea and you love it, and you think it’s a great idea, you have to find fault with it, and you say, “Well, one drawback or one danger would be this,” and everyone has to wear the same hat at the same time. And as a thinking tool and a management tool, and a tool for improving decisions in meetings, it’s immensely powerful.

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

Paul Sloane
One of my favorites is “Implementing best practice is copying yesterday. Innovation is inventing tomorrow.” That’s one of mine. “Beware of successes. It’s a terrible teacher” is another one. I would say, “Ideas are the lifeblood of the organization. Don’t be the clot who blocks the flow of ideas.” And there are many people who block ideas and say no to ideas very quickly because most really clever original ideas sound crazy when they’re first articulated. So, there you are, three.

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

Paul Sloane
Well, I’m on Twitter @PaulSloane. I’m on LinkedIn, you can find me, Paul Sloane. My website is DestinationInnovation.com. And if you just type in DestinationInnovation.com or Paul Sloane TEDx, you’ll see my TEDx Talk, and I’m on Amazon as well, of course, so you can find my books on Amazon.com or any other Amazon.

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

Paul Sloane
Well, I would share with you the best piece of leadership advice I ever got, and this is so powerful. This is worth the price of admission on its own. This is just seven words and it’s really, really important for leaders but it also applies at other levels of the organization but particularly for leaders. And it goes like this, “Only do what only you can do.”

There are certain things that only the leader can do. Only the leader can praise people in the group, only the leader can hire new people, only the leader can work on strategy and direction. And there’s lots of other things which, as a leader, I was spending time on – firefighting and fixing problems, and things I should’ve delegated, and things I should’ve just ignored, and focus on the leadership tasks only.

And if you focus on the things that only you can do, then they’re the most important things that you should be focused on. So, only do what only you can do. And that applies whether you’re an artist, a musician, a creator, anything else, but particularly if you’re a leader.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Paul, thank you for this. I wish you much fun and brilliant thoughts.

Paul Sloane
Pete, I’ve enjoyed it, and we could go chatting forever but, yeah, I really enjoyed it.