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Jan 17
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735: Cultivating the Mindset of Motivated and Successful People with Jim Cathcart

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Legendary speaker Jim Cathcart shares powerful wisdom for overcoming the self-limiting beliefs that keep us from thriving in work and life.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The simple secret to motivating yourself and others
  2. A powerful phrase to motivate you to be your best
  3. The four steps to breaking bad habits

About Jim

Jim Cathcart, CSP, CPAE is a person who has achieved every major milestone in professional speaking: President of the National Speakers Association, Speakers Hall of Fame, 22 published books, 3,300 highly paid speeches worldwide, speeches in China, South America, Europe, and in every one of the 50 US states. He received the Golden Gavel Award from Toastmasters International which was also presented to Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar,, Earl Nightingale and Walter Cronkite. He received The Cavett Award from the National Speakers Association, and more.

Jim is also a guitarist and singer/songwriter who performs often in clubs, at conventions and special events. A fitness enthusiast who has logged over 10,000 miles of running mountain trails after age 60, and a lifetime member of the American Motorcyclist Association. A newscaster once said, “Jim Cathcart is what ‘Fonzie’ from Happy Days would have been if he had gone to business school.” To that end, in September of 2021 Jim received an honorary business degree from High Point University in North Carolina.

Resources Mentioned

Jim Cathcart Interview Transcript

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

Jim Cathcart
Hey, it’s a great place to be. Thank you for inviting me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s so fun to be chatting with you. I was reading you when I was a teenager, and here we are talking. That’s wild.

Jim Cathcart
It is.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I’d love to get your take, having lived through, boy, with some of the greats, a great yourself, when it comes in the speaking biz as well as hobnobbing with other just sort of legends, rock stars, Zig Ziglar, Tony Robbins.

Jim Cathcart
Yeah. I grew up in the human potential movement. If you look at the 1960s, ‘70s, ‘80s, that was known as the human potential movement because it was the first time that society in the US got really interested in self-development and success, motivation, and that whole general field. And the primary players were Napoleon Hill and Norman Vincent Peale and Dale Carnegie, and then Earl Nightingale and on and on.

And then Denis Waitley and I came along about the same time, and then Zig Ziglar was just before us, and along with us, for that matter, and Og Mandino and W. Clement Stone. And then Tony Robbins came later and Brian Tracy and Les Brown, so it’s been a heck of a ride. And I know all those folks. I mean, I didn’t know Napoleon Hill, but all the rest that I’d mentioned, I’ve known them all and worked with most of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell us, any funny anecdotes or stories or surprise tidbits that you think listeners might get a kick out of if they’re familiar with some of these legends?

Jim Cathcart
Yeah. In 1976, in November of ’76, I was at the Oral Roberts University big arena, and it’s called the Mabee Center. And there were 11,700 attendees at the positive thinking rally, and the speakers were Paul Harvey, Dr. Robert Schuller of the Crystal Cathedral, Earl Nightingale, Art Linkletter, Zig Ziglar, Cavett Robert, the founder of the National Speakers Association. And the emcee was Don Hutson out of Memphis. And Don and I had met through a training organization and he invited me backstage to meet my hero Earl Nightingale.

So, I went backstage and shook Earl’s hand and had the appropriate goosebumps and loss of breath and everything that would go with being star struck. And then, Don and I walked out, and we were standing behind the big stage, looking out at the sea of bodies up in the stands, and Don said, “Jim,” he called me JC. He said, “JC, we’ve got this.”

I said this, “What do you mean we’ve got this?” He said, “All these speakers on this program, they’re 20 or 30 years older than us. We’re next,” and he was right. And he went on to become president of the National Speakers Association. So did I. We were both inducted into the Professional Speakers Hall of Fame, Sales and Marketing Hall of Fame. I’ve written 22 books, he’s written a big handful of New York Times bestsellers himself, and I was just collaborating with him yesterday on a new business deal.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool.

Jim Cathcart
And all the others are gone now. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Well, our respects to them. And thank you and congratulations for your success and contributions to the field. We’ve got a whole boatload of things we could talk about. My producers found you specifically to talk about motivation and The Power Minute: Your Motivation Handbook for Activating Your Dreams & Transforming Your Life. So, that sounds awesome. Tell us, what’s the big idea behind this book?

Jim Cathcart
Well, first up, motivation needs to be understood as motive and action. Motive, action. Motivation. It’s easy to remember. So, if you think, “I’m not motivated to do something,” well, if you haven’t acted on your motive, then you’re right, you’re not motivated to do it. You might have a motive, but until you take action, it’s just a dream, a wish, or an impulse, or a preference.

So, how do you motivate somebody? Well, you do not bring motives to them. You find motives in them. So, if I put a gun to your head and asked you to give me all your money, if you don’t want to continue to live, you probably won’t give me your money, you’ll just say, “Take your best shot,” right? So, you got to have the motive for me to be able to stimulate it and get the results I want.

So, if I put a gun to somebody’s head and they don’t care if they live or die, then that’s not going to work. I got to find another way to appeal to them. If I offer somebody a vacation in Acapulco and they’re not interested in international travel, it may have been a great reward for somebody but not for them so they’re not motivated. So, if I can learn to read people day-to-day and listen more acutely to what people say and what they express interest in, I can identify their motives because people will teach you how to motivate if you’ll just listen. And so, then I know how to appeal to you.

So, it might be it’s like in couple’s therapy, they talk about love languages. Some people feel really loved when you’re listening intently just to them. Some people don’t think that much of that one. They feel really loved when you give them a thoughtful little gift. Some people feel really loved when you mention them to other people and brag about them, and there are a lot of other ways.

 

Same thing is true for motivation. Some people are motivated by things, some people are motivated by experiences, some are motivated by interactions and relationships, and so forth. So, there are lots of ways to motivate someone. That’s why I wrote The Power Minute, which is your self-motivation handbook. And The Power Minute is 336 one-minute ideas for how to motivate yourself or others.

Now, how do I know they’re one minute? Because I originally wrote them as one-minute radio clips, and so they have to be timed exactly to that and the script was that tight. And so, I put them all together, and I said, “This would make a pretty good book but it needs some more work.” So, I worked on it and had 365, and out of 365, about 30 of them were pretty lame and obvious, so I eliminated those and kept 336, and that became the book. And I was writing the book as if I was teaching my grandchildren how to look at life and live a fulfilling and rewarding life.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I love it. So, share with us, I like how you could cut 29 and don’t allow yourself to put out inferior content just to hit a sweet 365 number, which should be tempting for many of us. So, tell us, because I’m thinking now about the 80/20 Principle and how 20% of them could have 80% of the juice, and maybe 4% of them, even 64% of the juice, fractal style. So, can I put you on the spot to give me your top, we’ll say, five.

Jim Cathcart
Let me give you one that summarizes the whole book and most of my philosophy in life, “Become a magnet, not merely an arrow.” In other words, cultivate in yourself the qualities of the person who would live the life you want to live, get the rewards you want to get, have the experiences and the relationships you want to have. Be the kind of person the people you admire would love to hang with, and those people will be more attracted to you. Be a magnet for what you want.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that’s the magnet. And what’s an arrow by contrast?

Jim Cathcart
Well, an arrow goes outward from you toward a target. So, that’s when you work diligently to achieve a goal. That’s fine. You find the goal, you identify the steps, you do the discipline day-to-day until you get there – that’s an arrow. But a magnet develops the qualities that make them the sort of person that others want to do business with, that others want to hang around with, that others would seek out the advice of.

When I joined the National Speakers Association in my 30s in 1976, I was right at 30 years old. That makes me 75 today, by the way, save people the math because some of them are doing it in their heads. So, 30 years old, I joined the National Speaker Association. That’s, at that time, only a few hundred members but they were my heroes, the big names, the big-deal people in the world of human development, and I had none of the credentials that I have today, and I didn’t have much career experience either.

So, I decided to be the most generous, the most grateful, the most helpful, the most flexible, the most willing supporter and encourager that they could find. I went to the convention, offered to move chairs, put out signs, greet people, take tickets, do whatever was necessary, drive someone to the airport, if necessary, although I didn’t have a car at the time, that kind of thing. And I was included into the conversations with the big guns as if I was an equal.

And when they would ask about me, I’d give them a very brief answer, and then I asked about them because I didn’t want them learning about me. I wanted me to learn about them so I could become, someday, one of them.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. That’s cool. And so then, that magnet principle is fantastic when it comes to people in terms of, “Yeah, this Jim guy, I like him. I like the way he works it. I like the way he’s helpful. I like being around him. I like the way I feel in his presence, so fantastic.” I guess I’m also wondering…

Jim Cathcart
Oh, I got a quote for you.

Pete Mockaitis
We’ll take it.

Jim Cathcart
This is from the first president of the National Speakers Association, Bill Gove. He, in a speech, one time, said, “The greatest compliment I’ve ever heard in my life is this, ‘I like me better when I’m with you.’”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is nice.

Jim Cathcart
Ain’t that a great example?

Pete Mockaitis
I had a friend who once told me, “Pete, you make people love themselves,” which was among my all-time faves, and that memory there. So, yeah, that’s cool. And so then, that magnet principle is fantastic for people-y goals in terms of you want…I’m thinking about sort of like a career in leadership and folks want you in the room, and to be present, and to trust you with some responsibilities and things. I’m curious about goals that are less people-y. Let’s talk about maybe fitness or sort of powering through a bunch of stuff you don’t feel like powering through. What are some of your favorite principles there?

Jim Cathcart
I can definitely address those. Well, in 1975, I weighed 200 pounds on a 5’9” frame that should be 150. Fifty-two excess pounds at the time, and I had never been fit, never been an athlete, and I wanted to be, and I had set some big goals for my life and my career, and I’ve looked at my life totally, wholistically – mental, physical, family, social, spiritual, career, financial, emotional – and I knew that I had to grow in each of those areas, and that’s eight areas, and many of those areas needed work, and one of those was fitness and health.

And so, I’d quit smoking a couple of years before and I’d gained a little weight, and I decided it’s time to make a change so I’m going to lose weight. Well, I knew I could diet successfully. I’d done that half a dozen times but I always gained it back in the next year or two. So, I decided I’m going to become a slender person. And people that knew me said, “What’s the difference?” I said, “Slender people never have to go on diets.” They said, “Well, yeah, some people are lucky.” “No, no, no, no, no. Slender is not luck. Slender may have something to do with your metabolism but you can also live a slender life by choice.”

So, I re-thought the way I lived my day-to-day life, the kind of food that I kept in the refrigerator, the kind of drinks that I used for refreshment, the places I went and the way I participated. For example, I had never considered water to be a real drink. I thought it was the default if nothing else was available. And I’d never had coffee or tea without sugar in it. And in coffee’s instance, I had cream as well as sugar, so it was basically a mocha milkshake.

And I decided I’m going to learn to like black coffee and I’m going to stop drinking sugared soda, Cokes and things, and instead of substituting it with diet soda, I’m going to learn to enjoy water. And I did, and that was 1976. By the way, I lost 52 pounds over about a three-month period, became fit – and I’ll tell you about that part of it in a second – and have been slender ever since. So, my waist is 30 inches, and I’m 75 years old, and it’s been pretty close to 30 inches for the last 40 plus years.

And I enjoy water. In fact, sometimes when we go out to dinner, I’ll just have water with the meal – no ice, thank you – and I’m perfectly content with that. And when I drink coffee, it’s always black coffee, but, at first, I didn’t like just water and I didn’t like black coffee. So, I re-trained my own taste buds and my own preferences, and I went on, at first, what I called a FABS diet. I made it up.

No fats, meaning animal fats, no alcohol, no bread, meaning white flour, and no second helpings. F-A-B-S. Second helpings are exactly twice as fattening as first helpings. I’ve noticed that. And I was always saying to my wife, “You’re not going to waste that, are you?” If she didn’t finish something on her plate, I would W-A-I-S-T waist it by putting it in my body.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Zing.

Jim Cathcart
See, all food goes to waste. It either goes into the trash or it goes around your middle.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right.

Jim Cathcart
So, you have to choose which one do you prefer, and people say, “Well, it’s just wrong. It’s sinful to throw away food that’s still good.” Well, then put it in the fridge and eat it later or wait till it molds and then throw it away, but don’t store it around your middle. It takes too long to get rid of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thank you. So, with that example then, we’re still applying that magnet principle except it’s not so much the people that are drawn to us but the results, and it still comes from the work of reshaping your core, like identity perspective, you are a slender person, and by being that, “How does a slender person think and operate and behave?” and there you go.

Jim Cathcart
Exactly. And that was the big thing because your mindset leads to your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits are your reputation, because a reputation is simply observed habit patterns. And your reputation determines which relationship doors open to you and which ones close. And the relationships you’re able to form determine the size of a future you’re capable of because nobody does it alone.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. That’s right. And if there are any skeptics in the audience, like, “Oh, that’s the motivation-y stuff,” I’ve been quite impressed with the work of psychologist Albert Bandura talking about self-efficacy, which is that these linkages are, in fact, pretty robustly evidenced in research that it’s not rah-rah.

Jim Cathcart
Oh, yeah, there is a lot of proof. The way a person thinks determines the actions they will choose. If they think they are unworthy and unlikable, then they will build up defenses and look for ways to game a system. If they think they are worthy and able to be valuable to other people, they will look for opportunities, and they will reach out.

If they feel they cannot recover from a failure, then they will do everything to mask themselves and their performance so that no one notices their failures. If they feel they can bounce back from a failure, the failure is not a scar or a permanent stain, it’s simply action that didn’t pay off the way you wanted. If they feel they can bounce back, then they will stay in the game and keep trying other things. They’ll be open to new ideas. So, mindset leads to actions, and actions repeated become patterns, which are habits.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so, Jim, then, let’s go right to the core there. So, if you do have a belief or a mindset that isn’t leading you down the actions/habits pathway onto results that you’re looking for, like if you think…

Jim Cathcart
Yeah, leading you downhill instead of uphill because you got the same chain uphill and downhill. It’s what I call a causation chain. And so, it’s mindset, actions, habits, reputation, relationships, future. And if you go down the stairs instead of up the stairs, then it’s mindset, limited actions or wrong actions, bad habits, bad reputation, no relationships, small future or dim and dismal future.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, let’s say, if we do find ourselves, like we notice in ourselves a belief or a mindset that is pointing us in a downhill direction, and maybe we think, “I’m just fat,” or, “I am a loser,” or, “I’m too shy. I’ll never be able to run the big thing.” So, whatever limiting or unpleasant or downward-pointing mindset, belief, we have – and sometimes I think they are very conscious and front of mind for us, and other times are kind of buried, a little bit under the surface…

 

Jim Cathcart
And, also, we’ve been listening to people tell us things about ourselves, and many people just say, “Okay, that’s a fact because so and so said so.” That’s not true. That’s their opinion, their point of view based on the limited experience they’ve had with you. Like, if your parents tell you you’re a loser, that you’re never going to be a competitor, or that you’re not good at math, or you’re whatever, name your category. If you’ve been labeled or blamed as not being worthy in that category, and you accept that, then that’s your life. Sucks to be you. Sorry.

But if you say, “Well, man, that hurts and I don’t like that. How do I get past that?” The way to get past that is a different mindset, a different point of view, a different way of thinking about yourself, your world, your relationships, your potential, and other people, about life in general. I recognized, growing up in a working-class household where dad was a telephone repairman and mom was a homemaker, and we had my invalid grandfather in the front bedroom, who spent seven years in a hospital bed, never spoke or moved from the bed because of a stroke.

We had a loving household. But I wasn’t encouraged to think big. No one said, “Boy, Jim, you’ve really got potential. Man, if you apply yourself, you could do anything you want.” Nobody said that to me.

So, one day, I heard Earl Nightingale on the radio, Earl was a dean of personal motivation in the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, and he said, “If you will spend one hour extra each day studying your chosen field, in five years or less, you’ll be a national expert in that field. And in seven years, with an hour of focused attention extra on that each day, probably one of the world’s leading authorities in that field.” And I thought, “Wow, that’s 1,250 hours if you figure the minimal approach to five years, 1,250 hours on one subject beyond the job, yeah, even I could do that.”

And then I didn’t know what I wanted to do for a living because I was working as a government clerk for the housing authority, and then it hit me a few weeks later, “I want to do what he’s doing but I don’t know what that means.” And so, I started studying human development, applied behavioral science, psychology, things like that, fanatically. I’m talking 12, 15, 20, 30 hours a week listening to recordings, reading books, going to the few seminars that existed back then, just getting around anybody that knew what they were talking about in those fields, and my world transformed.

And I bought a whole series of recordings from Earl Nightingale and listened to them fanatically every day to reprogram my own mind over time to seeing the world in a much more positive and intelligent way.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. And I completely buy that incidentally in terms of the hours because I think some people would say, “Oh, Malcolm Gladwell, 10,000 hours, whatever,” and that’s a bit of a different phenomenon, like violin practice versus knowledge in a domain because I’ve heard it said that if you read the top five books in your field, you’re beyond, like 90 plus percent of folks.

Jim Cathcart
You’re in the top 3% already, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So, that’s just five books, which might be like 15 of your hours, clock it under a month. So, I totally buy that. So, hey, good on you, How to be Awesome at Your Job listeners. You’re going places. Well, that’s one pathway to answer the question. If you find yourself with a mindset that’s not doing the trick for you, one path is to just dig, dig, dig deep into learning about a thing.

And so, are there other pathways you’d recommend in terms of, let’s say, “I think I’m just shy and I’ll never really be able to have a commanding presence in a room because that’s just not my gifting. I’m kind of behind the scenes, operational person, and that’s fine. We need all sorts.” What do we do with that?

Jim Cathcart
Yeah, let’s drill down. Let’s drill down to the underlying assumption. I found that there are two primary mindsets in the world that tend to easily separate the vast majority of subjects into this school and that school of thought. And the underlying mindset is there is a loving Creator, whether you call it a universal intelligence, or God, or Mother Nature, or whatever it is. There is a loving Creator in our lives. We’re meant to be. That’s one mindset or worldview.

The other one is, “No, there’s not. And once you’re dead, it’s over.” Okay. So, let’s take one of those assumptions and start organizing all the input that comes into a person’s life based on that underlying assumption. The assumption is, “There’s not one. This is it. And when it’s over, it’s over.” Okay. “It’s everyone for themselves. Get what you can while you can. And anything you can get away with, cool. Just do it because…” The other side says, “No, you should be nice to people because that’s what works best.” “Okay, if it works best. If it doesn’t work best, to heck with them. This is your only shot. Go for it.” so, that’s one mindset.

The other mindset is there is a reason for humans to be alive. We are so profoundly different from all other lifeforms that this must be somehow meant to be. And if that’s the case, then we’re not the sheep of an angry god that wants us to submit, because how shallow would that be for something as powerful as a god to just want servants and just wants submission? You follow that through to the thoughtful end of it, and it just doesn’t make sense.

So, if there is a source of creation, a source of life, and that source of life meant for us to exist, then what is sin? Sin would be not living well, fully, in the ways that you’re designed to live. In other words, there are thousands, if not millions, of contributions you could make to the world to make it a better place, a happier place, a more loving place, a safer place, etc. And if you don’t do those things you are capable of doing, or learning how to do, then you deny your creation, you say, “No, I was a mistake. I’m a factory second. Just let me get out of the way. I’ll die soon. Don’t worry about it.”

Or, you can say, “If I’m meant to exist, and I can do a great deal of good, it would be a sin, not in a Biblical sense, but in a cosmic or philosophical sense, for me not to do the good I could do. If somebody needs to be pulled out of quicksand and I’m walking by and I’ve got a rope, and I don’t do it, I can take partial blame for their death because I didn’t do the good I was capable of doing at a time when I could’ve done it.”

So, I think there is a reason for people to exist. I think that the essence of life is living fully, that that’s our job, our assignment, and that that means physically, mentally, spiritually, interpersonally, etc., and that we should live the most abundant life we’re capable of. They’ll, “Yeah, but I’m not good at math.” Yet. See, that’s the word that all these people leave out.

Sudoku, just play around with friends or go to Mathnasium where my grandson teaches, and learn to be better at math, “Yeah, but I just don’t like people.” No, you don’t like you and you’re afraid of getting around other people because you don’t think they’ll like you either. Well, true. Or, “I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve got the bandwidth to do smart things.” Do you know how to avoid pain? “Yeah.” Do you know how to eliminate danger, like if a kid is running into traffic, you stop them or you stop the traffic? “Yeah.” It looks to me like you’re a useful being. Go forth and multiply.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so that’s fascinating and deep and profound in terms of like zeroing in on a singular belief and you brought it to a Creator. And I guess, I don’t know, we could debate whether this is one belief.

Jim Cathcart
Yeah, the danger here is when you say the word Creator, people say, “Oh, God, church, Bible, strict, rules, judgment, shame.” And you think, “What? Where the heck did that come from? I never brought up any of that stuff,” but they go, [makes noise] right down into that deep dark hole, and that’s not what it’s about at all. Not at all.

There is a life source. Everybody would pretty much have to agree that there’s a source that causes life.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And I guess when you bring about the life source, I guess I’m thinking the notion of responsibility is what hits me in that it’s like either you feel, you believe you are responsible to become all you can be, to contribute all you can, or you think it’s more of a hedonistic do-whatever eat-drink-and-be-merry-for-tomorrow-we-die kind of a vibe.

Jim Cathcart
Yeah. Well, one of those goes outward and the other one comes inward. See, the outward is the service and the doing, and the other one is the receiving, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. And I guess I’m thinking it’s conceivably possible that you might not have a unique view…you can have a different view of the Creator but also feel the responsibility. But, regardless, I hear what you’re saying in terms of we’ve got…that is a foundational mindset pathway differentiator right there. And so, if we are on the…

Jim Cathcart
And it has a profound domino effect once that shift is made.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if we are on the responsible stewardship contribution pathway, and then we have more of a minor mindset difference, like, “Oh, I’m just shy and I’m not going to be able to do whatever,” it’s like you gave us one master key, which is throwing a yet in there. It’s like, “At the moment, that is the case. However, that is not fixed and we have the opportunity,” Carol Dweck’s growth mindset action, “to grow and flourish.”

Jim Cathcart
Yeah, things are learnable.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, that’s one master key. Any other perspectives there? You find yourself with a troubling mindset and you want to shift gears and directions, what can we do?

Jim Cathcart
If you feel that life is unfair, that, somehow, you’re a factory reject, you were the bad product coming off the assembly line and there’s not much hope for you, then your life is going to be defensive. Your life is going to be sad, of course, and scary but you’re going to take that assumption and reinforce it daily with actions that kind of build on that belief. So, how do you interrupt that belief? It’s not just the other. How do you interrupt that belief? Because any pattern that’s not working needs to be interrupted. And if you don’t interrupt the pattern, you get more of it.

So, if I’ve got a pattern of eating too many sweets, let me look at that pattern. Where do I keep the sweets? “It’s all around the house.” Why? “Because I like to eat them.” Okay, do you like the result of eating them? “No.” Okay, could you restrict them to one place in the house and eat fewer? “Yeah, if I didn’t have them on the coffee table and the kitchen counter and the other places, I probably wouldn’t impulse-eat as often. So, yeah, if I put them on the cabinet, always had to go in there and never put them out on the table, then I would probably eat fewer sweets.” Okay, what if you didn’t even put them in the house? What if they were in the garage, in a cabinet?

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Jim Cathcart
“Well, that’s just silly.” No, it’s not. This is simply a self-management technique. I came up with a little formula I call MADE, and I say it’s your mindset and your lifestyle must be made. And it’s going to be made by someone else or by you, so why not take charge of it? So, M mental picture. What do you focus your attention on? How do you envision your future? How do you talk about your future and so forth?

A, affirmation. That’s the words you use, the actions you take, that reinforce one mental picture or another. So, if I say, “I’m not very coordinated physically. I don’t learn new skills quickly.” Okay, I get that. Every time you say that, you strengthen that belief. Every single time you say it, you strengthen the belief in it. And every time you strengthen that belief, you increase the likelihood of undesirable actions.

So, mental picture, affirmation. The D in MADE is daily successes, and that means doing little tiny things every single day that leads in the direction you want instead of the direction you want to avoid. And the E stands for environmental influences. So, it could be something as simple as having a motivational slogan on your wall, or a photo of your dearest child or grandchild in front of you on your desk, or a reminder, or a saying, or something – environmental influences. Also, the people you hang with are environmental influences. The places you go are environmental influences.

So, I thought I was naturally inclined to be a fat guy. I spoke that way and I acted that way. So, I had to change my mental picture, and say, “I commit here today to become a slender person,” and then I had to notice my language and interrupt the pattern of talking myself down, and say, “I’m becoming slender.” Someone said, “Jim, you’re fat,” “Yeah, but I’m becoming slender.” And so, I adjusted my language and I talked in terms of what I wanted and intended, not what I feared or hated.

And then daily successes, I found that I couldn’t get myself, at first, to exercise on a regular basis, so I made an absurd commitment that turned the trick. I committed, and I don’t mean I decided to do this on a superficial level. I committed to putting on my running shoes and walking to the curb every day, 365 days a year, no matter what the weather, no matter what the agenda. And you’d think, “Well, that’s just stupid. It’s so trivial.” No, that was the first olive out of the bottle. That was the first lick on the ketchup bottle that got it to start flowing.

By walking to the curb with running shoes on, every day I had to make a second decision, “Do I go for a walk or a run, or do I go back in the house and eat ice cream?” And some days, I went back in the house and I ate ice cream, but most days I said, “Well, I’m going to the corner. Well, I can go to the next mailbox. I could make it to that tree before I stop.” And before long, I was running five miles a day easily, and the weight just dripped off of me because I was still on the FABS diet regimen, and I was learning to like water and black coffee. And I dropped 52 pounds, I got in great physical shape, and people started talking about me as an athlete.

I remember the first time a guy said, “He’s skinny like Jim,” and I thought, “Oh, my gosh, I am thin. I’m skinny. Wow! Thank you.” And that was 40 years ago.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool.

Jim Cathcart
Forty plus, as a matter of fact.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool. Kudos. Kudos.

Jim Cathcart
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Jim, this has been a lot of fun. I want to make sure we get to hear some of your favorite things. Can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jim Cathcart
A favorite passage from the Bible – I’m Christian – is John 10:10, but you don’t have to take this in a Biblical sense. You can take it in a philosophical sense. John 10:10 is where Jesus is quoted as saying, “I’ve come that they would have life, and have it more abundantly.” Well, I embrace that as my life purpose. I want my life to help others live more abundantly, live more fully, more meaningfully, more satisfying, because they got ideas that I was sharing. So, that’s my purpose.

The greatest quote I can recall right off the top of my head is from Zig Ziglar. Zig said, “You can get everything you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.” And ain’t that the truth, right?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And could you also share with us a favorite book?

Jim Cathcart
I’ve got two and they’re very similar in nature. One is The Greatest Salesman in the World by Og Mandino, which stood for Augustine, and that was his nickname, Og Mandino. And Og was a friend of mine, he sold tens of millions of books. And The Greatest Salesman in the World is not just for salespeople, it’s for anybody, but it’s an inspiring book set in ancient times with people, nomads wandering across the desert and all that sort of thing. And it’s about a young camel boy that ended up becoming fabulously successful. So, The Greatest Salesman in the World.

And then another one that’s similar in nature but much more contemporary, and that’s by Giovanni Livera, and the book is called Live A Thousand Years. And it’s like a Disney movie when you read the book but it’s all about goal-setting and self-awareness and healthy relationships and living a meaningful life. And it’s just so well-written. So there’s two.

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

Jim Cathcart
Well, I’ll point them to my name, Jim Cathcart. If you do a Google search on that, you’ll end up with like 300,000 links. And I’m Jim Cathcart on YouTube, on Instagram, on Facebook, on LinkedIn – Cathcart Institute on LinkedIn also – Vimeo. Man, I’m out there. The only thing you won’t find me on is Twitter. I canceled that account. I got frustrated with Twitter. But Cathcart.com is my website, and I’m pretty much omnipresent.

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

Jim Cathcart
Well, I would just challenge them to take some of the ideas we’ve been talking about and start applying them in writing, keeping a record, dating your written record, right now, for the next 30 days or the next however long you can get yourself to do it. Just start applying some of these ideas and notice the payoffs that you get. And if you need my help, come join me.

In February, I’m going to Nashville. I’m going a program called Going Pro. In June, I’m going to Machu Picchu, Peru and doing a program on knowing yourself and understanding all the things that make you who you are based on my book The Acorn Principle. So, come with me and let’s see how much more successful you could be.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. Jim, this has been fun. Thanks so much for taking the time and keep on rocking.

Jim Cathcart
It’s a joy for me. Thank you. And go to GuitarMusicLive.com and listen to and watch some of my videos where I’m playing and singing. I’ve got 19 songs on there, and I don’t know how many videos, but it’s all free. Just go there and enjoy yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. Thank you.

Nov 22
0

722: How to Hire and Get Hired Masterfully with Lou Adler

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Lou Adler says: "Don't make excuses. Get it done."

Seasoned recruiter Lou Adler shares insights from his decades of professional experience to help you hire and/or get hired.

You’ll Learn:

  1. What’s wrong with most job descriptions
  2. The real 30% increase you should be seeking
  3. Why you shouldn’t apply for a job directly

About Lou

Lou is the CEO and founder of The Adler Group – a consulting and training firm helping companies implement “Win-Win Hiring” programs using his Performance-based Hiring℠ system for finding and hiring exceptional talent. More than 40 thousand recruiters and hiring managers have attended his ground-breaking workshops over the past 20 years. 

Lou is the author of the Amazon top-10 best-seller, Hire With Your Head and The Essential Guide for Hiring & Getting Hired. Lou has been featured on Fox News and his articles and posts can be found on Inc. Magazine, BusinessInsider, Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. 

Prior to his executive search experience. Lou held senior operations and financial management positions at the Allen Group and at Rockwell International’s automotive and consumer electronics groups. He holds an MBA from UCLA and a BS Engineering from Clarkson University.

Resources Mentioned

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Lou Adler Interview Transcript

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

Lou Adler
Hey, happy to be here, Pete, and thank you for inviting me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to get your wisdom on both sides of the hiring table, the hiring and the getting hired. And I have a feeling that in your work over the years, you’ve probably encountered some interesting stories. Anything particularly memorable or fun or touching or hilarious that leaps to mind as you reflect on your career here?

Lou Adler
Well, I don’t know if it would be fun or hilarious, but important is probably a dozen, but since you’ve only asked me that question 15 seconds ago, I have to scramble pretty quickly. But I do remember one and it was 30 years ago or maybe even longer. I was talking to a candidate, and I was a recruiter at the time, my background has been diverse, but certainly when I was a recruiter in the early days, I thought I was going to place this one candidate who’s a remarkable person as a plant manager.

And at the time I was a contingency recruiter, and I would get full fee, and the compensation today would’ve been 100,000. So, if you multiply 30% by that, that was the fee I would’ve gotten, so not insignificant fee. So I just listened to him, and say, “John, I was devastated literally.” You lose that money, I didn’t have it, but I lost it anyway because I already, in my mind, spent it.

I said, “Why are you taking the other offer?” and he listed his whole list of five or six, seven reasons why. And then, this is the important part, as I listened to it and I regained my composure, I said, “John, you’ve just made a long-term career decision using short-term information.” He said, “What are you talking about?” I said, “John, everything you just said, the compensation, the title, the location, has to do with what you get on the start date. Not one thing did you say is what you’re going to be doing and becoming as a result of taking that job. We’re talking about a 15-minute drive each way, so we’re talking about a half hour.”

“You’re talking about a slightly better title, you’re talking about slightly more money but the big thing you’re missing is you’re working in a company that’s going downhill, that’s in an old state electronics versus new state-of-the-art making displays. So, what you do in the next two to three years will affect the rest of your life. And if you take that offer, admittedly it’s a little bit more money, slightly better title, VP manufacturing instead of plant manager, but you’re putting yourself on a career deathtrap.” I might not have used those specific terms.

Then I said, “John, did you already accept the offer?” And he said, “No, but I want to call you first because I told you I was going to do it and I feel badly that I’m not going to take the offer.” I said, “Well, why don’t you think about it before you call the other company up?” And I thought, at that time, that I might’ve convinced him to at least think about it, but I didn’t think I was going to get the offer so I was pretty devastated.

He calls me up the next morning, he says, “Lou, I’m going to take your offer.”

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Lou Adler
He said, “Everything you said is 100% true. Working in old line manufacturing means two to three years from now, I’ll never get any better than this.” He took the offer, and nine months later he called, and said, “Lou, I’ve just been promoted to VP operations for six plants both in the United States, and we’re now building in China,” which was when the big Chinese movement took place, “and everything was absolutely the right decision.” And I still remember those words today, this is nine months later when I said, “You’re making a long-term decision using short-term.”

And, to me, that’s an important lesson that I tell all candidates, it’s in all the books I write, is too many candidates hire for what they get on the start date, or accept jobs what they’re getting on the start date, not the work they’re going to be doing and what they could become if they’re successful. So, to me, that’s the epitome of everything I train, I advocate, and I listen for, and I actually ask candidates, “Why did you take job A and go to job B? Why did you go from job B to job C?” And they always say, “Well, they promised me this, they promised me that.”

I said, “No, they don’t promise you. You have to do the due diligence yourself to get that information. And if you don’t get it, you’re making a long-term decision using superficial information.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I love it and that’s very easy to overlook in terms of you see what’s right in front of you, and it feels pretty close, pretty visceral, pretty emotional, it’s like, “This is my livelihood, this is my experience of work, this is what’s going to happen when I get in the car on Monday morning. This is what I’m going to see on my business card. This is what I’m going to see in the cheques or direct deposits that appear in my bank.” So, yes, that makes a lot of sense that we can naturally fall into some short-term right-in-front-of-you myopic thinking and we need someone like Lou to point us into the long term. Very cool.

Lou Adler
As part of my most recent book, which is called Hire With Your Head, the theme of the book is called win-win hiring. And it’s the idea that hiring managers, recruiters, and candidates alike should think about success measured on the first-year anniversary date not the start date. Hiring success means, hey, the candidate on the anniversary date says, “Well, I’m glad I took this job and I’m still glad I have it.” And the hiring managers says, “I’m glad I hired that person.”

Achieving that win-win hiring outcome is hard to do but critical to do regardless of whether you’re a recruiter, a hiring manager, or the candidate accepting that offer or not. And very few people do it. But that’s the essence of what I’ve been advocating and what I’ve been teaching, that’s called win-win hiring, achieving those kinds of outcomes.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s a great perspective, win-win hiring, one year. So, tell us, Lou, what are some of the core principles that make that the case, that one year later, folks say, “Yeah, I really am glad I hired that person and/or…”

Lou Adler
Now, I’ll give you another story. Now, my history is I didn’t start thinking I’m a recruiter but I became a recruiter before just about 99% of the people listening to your podcast were born. It was 1978.

And I remember my first search assignment was, again, a lot of the work I had done was in manufacturing. It was for a company in the automotive industry and I knew the president, and I knew that when I became a recruiter, this was going to be my first assignment, so I met him the second or third day as a recruiter. And Mike was the president of this company in southern California, and he said, “I’m looking for someone with ten years experience, has a degree in engineering, probably would be great if that person had an MBA, and results-oriented and good communicator,” and all the stuff that you always see on job descriptions.

And I looked at that job description, and I said, “Mike, this is not a job description. This is a person description. A job doesn’t have skills, experience, and competencies. A person has that. Let’s talk about the job before we’re about the person doing the job.” And I said, “Let’s put the job description or the person description in a parking lot. What do you want this person to do? What would this person need to do to be successful in the first year?” And he said, “Turn around the plant.” I said, “Fine. Let’s walk through the plant and figure out what that person needs to do.”

We spent an hour walking through the plant – labor performance issues, scrap issues, processing issues, layout issues, inventory, management. It was a crummy plant. I said, “We’ll find somebody who can turn this plant around.” I have never used a job description that defines skills, experience, and competencies. It always defines the work as a series of performance objectives – build a team to put together an international reporting process within six months; make quota; design a new circuit that can accomplish A, B, and C and would fit in this kind of parameters and meets these kinds of criteria. It’s always outcomes with the idea being if a person can accomplish that work, he or she is perfectly qualified.

What changes it is the mix of skills and experiences, and I tell my client, “They obviously have to do the work. That’s not compromising but give us some relief on the skills and experiences. Having the skills and experiences means the person can do the work or motivate to do it, but if you can find someone who’s competent and motivated to do that work, you’ve got the right person. You just opened a talent pool to everybody who can do the work. Black, white, old or young, green or yellow, physically-challenged or not, it doesn’t matter.” And I’ve talked to numbers of labor attorneys but the number one labor attorney in the world contends that’s the most accurate way to hire. That’s objective criteria.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, and I was thinking that if in the unfortunate world that it doesn’t work out a year later, that feels pretty bulletproof in a courtroom – I’m no lawyer – but in terms of, “Hey, this is what they were hired to do. It didn’t happen so we’re looking for someone else who can do it,” as opposed to, “If they were people…”

Lou Adler
Conversely, if you find that’s what you’re looking for, you just dig deep, and to, “Hey, Pete, we need someone who can turn around the plant. Tell me about the biggest turnaround operation you’ve ever been involved with,” and spend 20 minutes digging in and understanding that. Or, “Hey, we’re going to build a team of accountants to put an international reporting system,” “Hey, we’re going to develop a new interface that accomplishes A, B, C using this skill. Walk me through anything you’ve done that’s related to that.”

So, your question was, “How do you create a win-win opportunity?” Well, first, you got to define the work that person has to do over the course of the year that would result, at least from the hiring manager’s perspective, a win-win hire. Then you got to find candidates who are motivated and competent to do that work and find it the best career move up competing alternatives.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I love it. Lou, you just break it down, the step-by-step. So, let’s hear about that next step in terms of how does one go about finding those folks once we’ve clearly defined what a win-win situation looks like?

Lou Adler
Well, that’s a great question. You must read the book. No, seriously, the next step in, first, define the job, a series of key performance objectives. Then find candidates, or I call them semifinalists. You don’t need a lot of people to hire a great person. You just need the right people. So, our high-touch process is spend more time with fewer people as long as they’re prequalified.

And I was with a hiring manager last week, and he was looking for a software developer to do some backend stuff. It was pretty complicated. And I just said, “What do you want this person to do, Harry? What do you want accomplished?” And he told me, “Well, a couple of tasks that were big.” So, I said to him, “If I can find someone who’s done comparable work, it won’t compromise on that ability to be performance qualified,” that’s one step, “and the candidate has been recognized for doing that work and in that top half or top quartile or top third of a peer group, or top 10%, would you at least talk to the person on the phone?” He said, “Absolutely.”

So, part of sourcing is you look for, “Who would a hiring manager want to talk with if they could do that work and they were recognized for being exceptional at it?” I said, “Even if the person had a different mix of skills and experience.” Hiring manager said, “I don’t care. If they could only do the work and motivated to do it, I’d want to see him.” Then I said, “But, now, we’ve got the other side, is we’re going to look for a discriminating candidate who would see that job as a career move.”

So, then we look for, as we find candidates, we look for candidates who see that job as a move, maybe going from a big company to a small company, working at better projects, someone whose growth has slowed down, go to a place where the growth is accelerating. So, there’s a lot of things you can do and there’s a lot of technology to get you to find candidates but you have to be kind of clever at it, but we look for performance qualifying, meaning they can do the work, some super skills; achiever terms, meaning they’re in the top half, top third, top quartile in a peer group; and, from the candidate-facing-decision, hey, the job is a clear career move.

Then you engage in a conversation, “Hey, Pete, would you be open to talk about a situation superior to what you’re doing today?” I tell recruiters, “Don’t sell the job. Sell the conversation. But if you’re dealing with the right person, they’ll engage in the conversation. You take the time pressure off and you discuss this is a career move so the candidates get the…” And I tell candidates, “We’re going to have a conversation to see if we can achieve a win-win hiring outcome. It’s going to take a little more time but let’s just engage in a conversation.” And most candidates are, “Of course. It makes logical sense.”

But you have to know the job to have credibility with the candidate. So, that’s where, taking the intake meeting, and I say, “Here’s the job, Pete. We’re looking for someone who can do A, B, and C and here’s the situation. Here’s the resource.” You really know what you’re talking about. So, recruiters who don’t know the job and just source active candidates who they find either through a job posting or an email, it’s just pure transactional and pure blind luck if they hire a good person. And in pure blind luck, if the person is going to be there a year from now.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I get what you’re saying with regard to, “Hey, find those semifinalists. It is going to take a little bit of more work up front, but the good news is we don’t need to look at hundreds of resumes. We can look at a handful.” Are we thinking five, ten? Is that what we’re talking about here roughly?

Lou Adler
Absolutely. Maybe 12 to 15 but you got to be persistent to talk to everybody because most candidates don’t think you’re different so you got to kind of prove that through the process of pestering, engaging.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. That feels a lot better as a candidate in terms of, “Oh, cool. So, at worse, I’ve got 14 contenders clamoring for this opportunity as opposed to hundreds. Okay. Well, yeah, Lou, that’s worth 10 minutes for me to just see what you’re thinking but maybe a lot more.”

Lou Adler
Sure, maybe just 10 minutes.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. And so then, can we hear about how do you, on the recruiting side, go about finding these people and confirming that they’ve got the performance qualification, that they can do it, and that they’re in the top half, third, or fourth?

Lou Adler
Well, first off, there’s a lot of ways to do it. A lot of my books and interviewing, we train hiring managers on the whole process – defining the work, finding candidates, interviewing candidates, and closing the deal, and even the onboarding process. But from an interviewing standpoint, so if I was going to call you up, and say, “Hey, Pete, let’s just have a conversation.”

And I said, “Pete, part of this assessment is to make sure this job represents a career move. And to be a career move, it has to give you at least a 30% increase.” “Thirty percent, did you say?” “Well, yeah, but it’s not money. Thirty percent is a combination of job stretch, meaning a bigger job; faster growth, a job with more impact; and more satisfying work. And that’s a complicated decision to make but that’s what I want to go through. So, let me just review your background in general, see if there’s a fit, and if so, we can get serious.”

So, during that process, I dig deep into the candidate’s accomplishments to see if they’re comparable and see if the 30% opportunity exists, and I say, “Pete, this looks like it could be there with bigger team, faster growth. This is the kind of work you like to do. Let me get the hiring manager engaged in this process and we’ll move forward.” But I also say this from a closing standpoint, I say, “Pete, if you’re really the candidate, and you’re going to get an offer two or three weeks from now, it’s high probability you’ll get one, 20%-30% possible, I’m going to ask you a question.”

“I’m going to say forget the money. Forget all the day-one stuff. Do you really want this job? And if you do, tell me why. And if you can’t describe that 30% in your own words, because that’s the information you have to get over the interviewing process, I’m going to suggest you don’t take the offer even if it pays the most because that will not drive your satisfaction growth and lead to a win-win hiring outcome.” So, it’s incumbent upon you, the candidate, to get that information, and is incumbent upon the hiring manager and the hiring company, to give you that information. And if there’s a clash there, fine. Don’t move forward. That kind of has the whole pieces tied together.

Pete Mockaitis
As we have this conversation, Lou, it’s just I keep myself in the candidate shoes, and thinking, “Yes, I like that. Okay, that’s distinctive.” And 30%, that just feels right in the gut in terms of, “Hey, if it’s an 8% bump, is it really worth all the time and effort and hassle and change and disruption to your life and routines to go chasing after it? I don’t know. But 30% is like, well, yeah, that is…”

Lou Adler
But, again, it’s not in monetary. Money won’t be on top of that. But the idea is that if you really get 30% of the compensation will increase at the same rate year after year. So, if you look at, “Hey, what’s your compensation a year or two from now?” it’s going to blow if you really get the non-monetary increase. Your compensation will be there a year or two from now just like this fellow John. He called me up and said his compensation was far greater, title was far greater because we put him on a better career path.

Pete Mockaitis
And then how do you go about confirming whether, in fact, a candidate is in that top half, third, or fourth?

Lou Adler
Well, there’s a lot of ways to do it, basically. And I’m doing a training session so I had to do some recording, doing some recording on some online training on a Friday, no, excuse me, Thursday. So, I said one thing that I look for is a dozen techniques. One of them is, “What kind of recognition did you get for that project?” Well, one thing from a technical standpoint, which is pretty interesting, I call it the Sherlock Holmes deductive technique, is good candidates are always assigned stretch projects early in their career, “Hey, Pete, when you took on that job, what kind of projects did you get assigned?”

Now, if you were assigned, after three months, menial work or average work, consistent with your peer group, then you’re probably an okay person. But if you’re probably starting to get stretch assignments, assigned to more important teams, those teams started recognizing you and asked you to be on other teams, there’s a lot of evidence that you can use to determine if someone is a high achiever. The point is too many interviewers, or hiring managers in particular, judge a person and that person’s raw technical insight, and using a lot of subjective material, “A smart person should do this.” But that’s not…

I’m not technically competent in any of the jobs but I’m a great technical interviewer because I look at what other people thought of that candidate. If you’re a good person, if you’re a sales rep, you get assigned tougher clients. If you’re an accountant at a big accounting firm, the partners in your job don’t give you menial accounts. They give you important accounts and they expose you to important people. If you’re a marketing person, you get assigned bigger projects.

And as a result of being successful, you get assigned even bigger projects, more important product lines that are involved in the company. So, you look for those kinds of things that, “What would likely happen if this person was really good doing that work in that company?” And you start picking up the evidence. They got a president’s award, they got a nice letter, they got a bonus, they got a promotion more rapidly.

So, it’s those kinds of obvious things when you think about it, say, “Of course, that’s what would happen.” You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to do that. You just got to think logically of, Pete, you make a personal judgment. Other people have made a judgment about that person, and that person has made a judgment about him or herself. So, look for that kind of evidence that would be indicative of what a high achiever does.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Lou, I’m just going to put you on the spot and make it a little challenging. I think that it’s funny that what you say that sounds like, “But, of course, we should all do that,” and yet we don’t. And what’s common sense is often not common practice. I’m curious about if you’re hiring someone from an organization whose kind of processes and meritocracy is just kind of broken, and these deductive clues we’d like to lean on as Sherlock Holmes are not giving us the indicators we’d like, what are some other sources you’d use?

Lou Adler
Well, it depends. Maybe the candidate is not any good.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s one possibility. I guess I was just looking for what are some extra indicators or clever approaches that we can get that validation, that check mark.

Lou Adler
Yeah, I don’t know that there’s a clever approach. I think I’m pretty deductive. And I don’t want to say deductive in any kind of intellectual sense. I just look for evidence. If I don’t find the evidence, I pass. I can’t afford the risk.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Fair enough.

Lou Adler
When I ask a person, “Why do you change jobs?” and if they always change jobs for short-term reasons, that, to me, is the indicator the person is not really focused on career-oriented, a career-oriented focused person. So, there are things you can look at that would get you some insight and validate that the person is really an okay person but not a high achiever. High achievers want to progress. They self-develop. They work hard and they do get assigned projects. And even if once or twice, it was a screwup, so be it. That’s fine. So, there is evidence that you can look for.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Sure thing. Well, so let’s say we got our semifinalists, and then here we are in the interview phase, can you help us think through on both sides, what are some do’s and don’ts?

Lou Adler
Well, the thing to me, over the years I developed what I call the hiring formula for success. And the hiring formula for success says, so it’s how you actually evaluate candidates. It’s ability to do the work in relationship to fit, drives motivation, and because motivation is so important, it’s squared. So, the do’s and don’t are, “Hey, if you want to achieve a win-win hiring outcome and hire someone in the top half, they better be motivated to do the work you want in the context of your job, the fit factors.”

Of that formula, ability to do the work, which is a combination of hard skills and soft skills, but most people only measure the technical skills, they ignore the soft skills – organization, planning, team collaboration, understanding. They just focus on the hard skills. But if you get at the hard and soft skills, the next one is the fit factors. Fit with the job. Does the candidate really want to do that work? Fit with the hiring manager style. In my mind, I was pretty independent and I had a hiring manager, the group president whom I worked for, was a micromanager, I said, “Fire me if I don’t do the work. Just leave me alone.”

There are other people who want a manager and subordinate who align better on what they need. So, one fit factor is the managerial fit. Another fit factor is the culture of the company. Another one is the pace of the organization. Another one is the sophistication of the organization. But those context issues are critical. There are a lot of confident people but if they don’t fit the fit factors and they’re not motivated to do the work, they’ll underperform.

So, that’s getting pretty complicated but the way we do that, we break the interview down in different pieces, we dig into the candidate’s accomplishments, and then we group around a formula around that hiring formula to make sure that we have all the components measured accurately. So, that’s the secret sauce of how you find candidates who are going to excel in that circumstance. Ignoring the fit factors, it’s, again, problematic if you want to achieve a win-win hiring outcome.

Pete Mockaitis
And you said motivation was squared?

Lou Adler
Yeah, ability to do the work in relation to fit times motivation squared. If you just kind of go through the basics of it, you’ll get some done. But if you’re motivated to do the work, you’ll get a lot more done.

Pete Mockaitis
And in the course of the interview, how do we assess whether one is, in fact, motivated, or, on the flipside, as a candidate, to reveal that you are motivated?

Lou Adler
Motivation to do the work, not get to work, and that’s a critical step here in this process.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, how do I assess whether, one, a candidate has motivation, or convey that I am a motivated as a candidate? You know, it’s funny, I remember I had a friend who was really into a consulting opportunity, and then he got some feedback from his interviewer, he’s like, “You know, you just didn’t really seem into it.” He’s like, “I’m very into it. This is my number one company that I really want to work for.” But, somehow, it didn’t get conveyed. So, how do we convey it? And how do we check for it?

Lou Adler
Well, see, that’s the issue. The fact that someone is quiet and low key has nothing to do with motivation to do the work. Unfortunately, candidates, or hiring managers and interviewers judge you by how motivated you are there during the interview and how extroverted you are. Totally inappropriate. The way I do it is I dig deep in the candidate’s accomplishments and ask many questions, “Hey, what did you do in this accomplishment? Where did you take the initiative? Where did you go the extra mile?”

And I ask that constantly as part of different accomplishments so I start seeing a pattern on the types of work that naturally motivates the person to excel. That’s how I get at it. And I see the pattern of, “Hey, this person always goes out of his or her way to build the team, always takes these architectural design issues, always does this without prompting.” Very few people do everything without prompting all the time. But I start seeing this pattern of activity.

Now, how does a candidate do that? And I don’t want candidates, and I tell candidates, me as a recruiter, unfortunately, my technique is not universal, I tell candidates, “I don’t care if you’re a good interview. I care if you’re a good performer. I’ll try to clean you up to make you the best interview possible. But I’m going to represent you if I think you’re good.” Then we have a course, and you can look on WinWinHiring.com. It’s how to prep for an interview where I tell candidates how to do the best job they can of presenting themselves for a specific job.

And the way to do that is if you feel you’re being superficially assessed, I say to candidates, time out very quickly, and say, “Would you mind telling me some of the major accomplishments related to this job because I’d like to give you examples of work that I’ve done that are most comparable?”

Pete Mockaitis
“Let me do your job for you, interviewer.” That’s funny and I’m laughing because it’s kind of sad but sometimes necessary. Like, as candidates, it’s like, “Let me do your job for you, interviewer. I think what you want to know is the following.”

Lou Adler
Yeah, but most of the time it is. But at least the fact that you just asked that question, indicates that you’re proactive, even if you ask in a low-key way, “Oh, that’s a pretty good question. What are the resources for that job? What’s the timeframe for that job?” And you start asking these questions that say, “Wow, this person…” Even the quality of your questions and proactively asking them, brand you as, “Hey, this person is pretty aggressive.” Your answers the other part, “No, I did some work that’s comparable. And what did you say the biggest problem was in that? You said that design issue to build the tool to do A, B, and C? Let me give you some examples of work that I’ve done related to that.”

So, the idea is, find out what the work is and proactively ask about it. Even if you ask in a low-key manner, it’ll, “Wow, this person is really competent. He really knows what he or she is talking about.” So, I think those are the issues. If you just wait, assume that you’re going to be assessed accurately, the chance of that is five-to-one against you’ll be judged on personality traits and your depth of hard skills.

Pete Mockaitis
And I like that question for getting after motivation. It’s like, “Where have you gone the extra mile here? Where have you gone the extra mile there?” because you’ll surface, I imagine, some patterns. And, hopefully, the answer is not, “Oh, uh, no, I don’t know.” And that can really get you thinking. As I reflect, as I’ve asked myself that question in different endeavors, it’s like, “Where have I gone the extra mile?” it really does reveal, “Oh, yeah, that’s where I was motivated.” And where have I not gone the extra mile is like, “Oh, that’s where I didn’t care and I did the minimum I had to do to comply with the law,” or whatever needs compliance rather than my proactive vigor.

Lou Adler
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell us, Lou, any other top tips you would suggest? I think let’s give the candidates a little bit more love in terms of if we want to stand out to become found, to dazzle our prospective employers, what are your top tips on that side?

Lou Adler
Well, first off, my big tip is do not, do not, do not apply for a job directly. Chances are 3% you’ll get interviewed; 1% you’ll get hired, so it’s just a waste of time. On the other hand, if you see a job that you like, I would find out, “Hey, is there any way I can get a referral into that specific job?” That would be great. And it could be a second- or third-degree connection, but you try to see if you can do it, “Okay, what’s this company doing? Do I know anybody? Do I know anybody in my school?” You start looking on LinkedIn.

And the beauty of LinkedIn, it’s a network of 700 million people, not a database of 700 million people. And I don’t think recruiters or candidates take advantage of that. So, now, let’s assume that’s probably going to happen that you’ll know somebody for that job 10%-20%. It’s not going to be high, but you never know. If you get a professional background with an accounting firm, or bigger company, you might be able to get some connection.

On the other hand, 50%-70% of the time, you’ll be able to find out who the vice president is for that department, or director for that department, even if it’s not over that specific job. And I remember talking to this fellow, this has to be five or six years ago now, or maybe ten years, but he was Italian, he had his MBA from some school in Milan, he wanted to work for a telecommunications company in Europe, and he named the top three or four, “I want to work a job here. How would I get it?”

And I said, “Well, it’s easy enough to find a VP of marketing in any of those jobs. Why don’t you do a little MBA-like case study, putting each of their telecommunication systems, if that’s the area you want, and some kind of little competitive matrix, company A, company B, company C, company D, and some of the key features by product line?” So, this person wants to be a product marketing person.

I said, “Then just do a little summary with one or two pages, and then send that off to the VP, and say, ‘I’d like to work in product marketing, and this is what I’ve done. And I’ve found some key weaknesses in some of your products. I’d like to have a chance to chat with you about them.’” He said, “That’s a good idea.” And he called me up once or twice over the next two weeks, and said, “I’m just starting to send out emails, and I think I’ve got one interview already.” I hadn’t heard from him again for like six months, said, “Lou, I got that job with that one company.”

So, there are ways you can find the names of people, do a mini-consulting project, and just arrange to have a conversation, and say, “Hey, I’d like to do this.” And on LinkedIn. There’s an article I call 15 Ways to Hack a Job. So, if you look up Lou Adler, Hack a Job on LinkedIn, you’ll see an article, and it talks about using the backdoor to get the interview, to get to the top of the resume heap. And if you want to apply, unless you’re a world-class person with exactly the skills, it’s a low probability event. I would rather spend more time with fewer postings rather than applying to hundreds of postings.

Same thing with candidates. Don’t spend a lot of times with hundreds of candidates. Get to the right candidates and spend more time with them per candidate. Spend time on jobs you want. And if you put some effort into it, you will get a conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you think that most people spend too much time fine tuning their resumes and LinkedIn profiles, and they can spend that time better elsewhere? Or, what’s your take there?

Lou Adler
That’s a good question. I would say the thing is, and I do look at resumes, so I guess here would be the advice. And this was like 30 years ago, I had a training for candidates. I don’t know how I did it, I figured I just wanted to train candidates on how to get a job, so this was pre-internet, pre-job boards too, so it had to be 1990-ish.

And I said, “Take your resume,” I had everyone bring a resume, and I said, “Give it somebody whom you don’t know.” And I said, “Turn it over and give it somebody whom you don’t know.” Then I said, “I’m going to give everybody 30 seconds to look at that resume.” Maybe it was 15 or 20 seconds. I said, “When I turn the clock on, I want to say turn the resume over and just circle the things that stand out,” maybe it was 10 or 15 seconds. “And then turn it back over and give it back to the person you got it from.”

So, I then said, look at the candidates, and said, “Now, look at what’s circled. Is that enough to get someone to read your resume because you only got five or 10 seconds or 15 seconds where somebody sees your resume and decides to read it?” So, now, I take that same advice, and a lot of people had their name in big bold letters, their address in big bold letters, the title of summary in big bold letters. I said, “Is that going to get someone to read your resume?”

So, now, you take that same advice, so, “Hey, you’ve got 10 or 15 seconds,” recruiters only get 10 or 15 seconds per name, maybe five or six, they got a whole list. Some machine is going to score it in priority order, but assume you get to the top of the list. Well, what’s going to stand out? It’s that first line, which is usually that description. So, if that description turns out, so that’s what I do. I don’t even look at the person’s name.

I just look at the title they give themselves, “Expert in a job of developing something or other.” If it’s kind of cool and interesting, “Oh, that’s kind of interesting, pretty clever.” I highlight something. “Coaching thousands of people on how to do A, B, and C.” “Oh, that’s pretty cool. I got to look at that.” So, I would say that’s probably the most important thing is the first line below your name on LinkedIn. I don’t exactly know how it turns out to look at but I just don’t remember how it does.

But I guess I don’t know if anybody can just look at LinkedIn and look what it looks like, but, to me, that would be the thing. And then I highlight one or two major accomplishments and probably the academics or the track record that somehow show the promotions very quickly, say, “Hey, this is an achiever.” So, some of those achiever terms quickly and some of the projects the person has worked on.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, how about a favorite quote?

Lou Adler
Stephen Covey who wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, is my favorite author of all time. He came up, and this was 30 years ago, seven habits that a team, like exceptional people, all have. One of them was “Begin with the end in mind,” “Think win-win.” And “Seek first to understand before you’re understood.” So, I’d say those three are critical, “Think win-win,” “Seek first to understand to be understood,” and then “Begin with the end in mind.”

But if you think about the comment I made, Pete, about, “How do you control the interview if you’re a candidate?” it’s to start asking questions, “Begin with the end in mind,” “Hey, Pete, what do you want done in this job? What will success look like? And I’d like to give you some examples of work that I’ve done.” That is proactive enough to force the interviewer to tell you, and they’ll be impressed by the fact you asked that kind of question. You have to give a decent answer, too, but, nonetheless, you’re in the game if you ask the question.

So, you’re beginning with the end. Why answer questions that aren’t relevant? Why not answer questions that are related to the real job. So, force the person to do it. But I use those quotes a lot and refer to Stephen Covey a lot, so maybe that is my favorite quote.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a study or experiment or bit of research?

Lou Adler
I went to a number of companies that process resumes, they’re called applicant-tracking systems, and I validated the number. And one company had all their users there, and they said, “Over the last five years, since we’ve been in business, we’ve processed 75 million resumes. And of that, 750,000 people got jobs.” And everybody clapped.

And I said to myself, “That’s 1%.” So, they’re spending 99% of all the people applied did not get a job. I then ultimately asked, and that’s what I got. The likelihood of applying is random chance. And then I validated that with two other applicant-tracking system companies. They weren’t as big as that one. But in 30 or 40 resumes, it was about 1% of people who applied get a job. Three to four percent get interviewed.

Then you say, “Where do these other 96% of the jobs get filled?” And most of it is referrals, or internal promotions, or through a trusted recruiter, or from a second-degree connection. So, then that’s a lot of that stuff evolves on, you just look at the statistics, it says, “Hey, the way to get a job is to do your own due diligence. Don’t assume that a posting on Indeed or a posting on ZipRecruiter is going to get it, get you that great opportunity, and applying to hundreds and hundreds of jobs a week. That’s not work. That’s a waste of time.”

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Lou Adler
Oh, that would be Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

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

Lou Adler
For me, a tool is LinkedIn. When I was a recruiter, I could find anybody on LinkedIn in 24 hours. It was easy. No, it’s another tool that I would actually say. I don’t know if you know this. It’s called a phone. You have to talk to people. And I think too many people try to make it impersonal, whether you’re on the company side or the candidate side.

Hiring is a serious personal business. It’s an important decision. And if you try to make it a technical role, you’re going to be unsuccessful. You try and make it a personal relationship; you’ll be very successful. That’s why I say spend, combine high tech with high touch. Don’t just rely exclusively on high tech to make important hiring decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget that you share that people quote back to you often, or that you’re known for?

Lou Adler
Define the job. Or, “It’s what people do with what they have, not what they have that makes them successful.” It’s what people with what they have, not what they have that makes them successful. So, during the course of the interview, I understand, “What do you have in terms of skills and experiences and opportunities, and what have you accomplished with those?” And I’m looking for people who have accomplished more with less.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Lou Adler
And that really reveals a lot about that person’s capability.

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

Lou Adler
I would go to WinWinHiring.com. WinWinHiring.com is a training course, an online training course. But I’d also go to Amazon and search “Hire With Your Head.” The book just came out, fourth edition from Wiley. Whether you’re a candidate or a hiring manager or a recruiter, you’ll find it invaluable in terms of planning your life and your career.

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

Lou Adler
Well, to be awesome, yeah, I say don’t make excuses. Get it done. It doesn’t matter if you’re committed to do it. Don’t blame others. Just do it. And I see that all the time. And one thing I hate is people who make excuses. I like people who get the job done. And getting it done on time, even if it’s not perfect, is more important than saying or making excuses on why you didn’t make it perfect. Get it done in some level so people can use it. Meet your deadlines. Don’t make excuses. Get it done. That would be my motto for being awesome at your job.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Lou, this has been a treat. I wish you lots of luck and fun in all the ways you’re getting it done.

Lou Adler
Great. Thank you, Pete. Nice chatting with you.

Oct 11
0

710: How to Regain Control of Your Time, Energy, and Priorities with Carey Nieuwhof

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

 

Carey Nieuwhof says: "Start focusing your best work in your best hours."

Author and podcaster Carey Nieuwhof talks about how we’re all living at an unsustainable pace and how to combat burnout through better energy management.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to tell if you’re experiencing low-grade burnout
  2. The best hours to do your best work
  3. The key to saying no well

About Carey

Carey Nieuwhof is a bestselling leadership author, speaker, podcaster, and former attorney. He hosts one of today’s most influential leadership podcasts. His podcast, blog and online content are accessed by leaders over 1.5 million times each month. He speaks to leaders around the world about leadership, change and personal growth. Carey and his wife, Toni, live north of Toronto. 

Resources Mentioned

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Carey Nieuwhof Interview Transcript

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

Carey Nieuwhof
Well, it is great to be with you, Pete. Thank you so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Well, I’m excited to talk about your book, At Your Best: How to Get Time, Energy, and Priorities Working in Your Favor. Can you tell us, as you’ve kind of thought through this, talked to people, worked with people, researched, what’s one of the most surprising and maybe counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about people and trying to be at your best?

Carey Nieuwhof
We’re all in the same boat, we can start there. Almost everybody I know, including myself for a long season, felt overwhelmed over work and overcommitted. It just seems to be almost an endemic in our culture these days, so I think that’s a big surprise. The other thing that really led to the writing of the book, for me, Pete, and really the reorganization of my life, and helping thousands of other people do the same, was everybody talks about time management. But the problem with time management is you’re managing a fixed commodity. Like, nobody is giving you a 25th hour in the day. Nobody’s floating you an 8th day a week.

So, I was pretty good at time management, and I burned out. So, the big surprise for me on the other side of burnout 15 years ago, as I reconstructed my life, was I started to focus on energy management, not just time management, and that’s where I started to find exponential returns is when I thought about how my energy level, and it’s a human condition, everybody’s energy level goes up and down over the course of the day. And when I started to manage that, that’s when I started to see exponential returns in productivity, and started to regain a lot of margin in my life. So, I think that’s probably the most surprising thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, I definitely want to talk about energy management. So, maybe could you give us, first, a broad picture perspective on what’s sort of like the big idea or core thesis behind the book At Your Best?

Carey Nieuwhof
Yeah. So, most of us are living in an unsustainable pace, and the big idea of the book is to learn, and I’ve got a system that we can unpack in as much detail as you want. I developed a system to help you live in a way today that will help you thrive tomorrow. And for my first decade of leadership, I was in law then I moved to church world. I’m a person of faith.

I was leading a rapidly growing church, and after a decade in leadership, I burned out, and it was real struggle for me. And I was living in a way most days that made me struggle tomorrow, made me barely survive tomorrow. And if you talked to most people today, whether they’re stay-at-home parents, whether they’re working part-time, whether they’re full-time, whether they’re in the C suite, or whether they’re entry level, almost everybody goes home feeling overwhelmed, overworked, overcommitted, and I was just exhausted. I would get home. I’d flop onto the couch.

So, on the other side of burnout, I started to ask the question, “What does it take to not do that anymore, like, when you’re not feeling well?” And I spent the summer of 2006 really probably clinically depressed because of burnout, and now, 70% of people every year identify with symptoms of burnout, going, “Yeah, I’m kind of burned out or I’m very burned out,” so it’s a real problem. But when I was in that space, I thought, “I don’t want to go back to normal. I want my life out of burnout,” but, like, normal got me burned out. So, how do I create a new normal?

And that’s when I started to really think, “Okay, I want to live in a way today that will help me thrive tomorrow.” And it comes around how to manage your three principal assets. So, if you think about every single person, whether you’re retired, or in preschool, or in a C-suite level job, you have you’re managing time, you’re managing your energy every day, because we all know there are certain parts of the day where we’re kind of dragging and other parts where we feel better, and you’re managing priorities.

And technology has really made it complicated because, suddenly, it’s super easy for everyone else to get their priorities onto your agenda. So, I started to rethink how I approached those three assets. So, when you’re in what I call the stress bio, when you’re overwhelmed, overworked, overcommitted, basically, your time is unfocused, you’re not thinking about how to use your time, your energy goes unleveraged, you treat every hour as though it was exactly the same, you don’t really think about your energy levels, and you will allow other people to hijack your priorities.

And so, it took me about three to five years but I built something that I now call the thrive cycle. And on the other side of burnout, I started to think, “Okay, what if I focused my time, what if I started leveraging my energy, and what do I need to do to realize my priorities?” And when I started doing that, that’s when I saw 10X returns in terms of my productivity at work, my level of joy in life, and also the amount of margin I had, like just the free space, the freedom to do what I really felt called to do.

Case in point, in my 30s, everyone said, “Carey, you should write a book. You should write a book.” And I always wanted to write a book but, before I burned out, I just always said I didn’t have the time. So, that was 15 years ago. In the last decade, I’ve written five books. This is book number five. Actually, I wrote six because one I never published. I found it the other day, I’m like, “Oh, I forgot about that one.” It might see daylight some other time. But I’ve written five books, and it greatly expanded my capacity.

So, that’s the overview, that’s the nutshell, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s inspiring. So, there’s a beautiful sort of after state in terms of five books and joy and margin and freedom. Can we visit briefly the before state in terms of burnt out, didn’t want to get off the couch? What was life like just before you’re like, “Whoa, I’m burnt out” and in the midst of the burnout?

Carey Nieuwhof
Well, it was strange, and I don’t want to paint an idyllic picture. I still have days where I’m stressed. I still have days where it’s like, “Whoa, that was too much.” Last week, I had a really busy week. But I think the key that a lot of people lacked is the ability to recalibrate quickly. Going to bed on time, getting up the next morning, you’re like, “Oh, battery back up to 100%.” And so, that’s what I’ve been able to navigate for over a decade now on the other side of burnout.

Prior to burnout, it was getting to the point where I had a terrible formula. So, I started our church, and I’ll use that as the case study because that’s what I was doing full time, started with a half dozen people. Well, I started with three little churches, three little baby churches. Half dozen attended one of the churches, the average attendance was 14 at the second, and the mega church had 23 people.

Pete Mockaitis
Mega. All right.

Carey Nieuwhof
So, very manageable. It’s like running opening day on a business, you have five customers. It’s like, okay, you can handle that. It wasn’t that bad. I remember getting bored the first week I went to work. By Wednesday, I had my sermon written and I thought, because I trained as a lawyer, I’m like, “I don’t even know what you’re supposed to do.” So, I called the chair of our elder board, and he goes, “Well, go visit people.” I’m like, “Oh, okay.” I got lots of time.

But then, almost instantly, the churches started to grow, and at first it was sustainable. Till we got up to about 200, I just put 200 people. I put my pedal to the floor, and I’m a pretty energetic Enneagram 8, if you follow that stuff. Like, I got a lot of energy and it was fine. But the problem with that is it doesn’t scale. And so, I started to get more and more tired, and my bad broken formula was more growth equals more hours. Well, that just doesn’t scale.

So, our church grows from a handful of people to a hundred people, to 200 people, to 500 people, to 750 people, 800 people. At this point, I can’t remember people’s names, I’m up five nights a week, but I think, in my 30s, “I’m superhuman. I can handle this. I can do this.” On the inside, I should’ve seen the warning signs. I didn’t. People kept telling me, “Carey, you’re going to burn out,” and I thought, “Burnout is for weaklings. I’m not weak. The rules don’t apply to me.” So, there was that, and that’s definitely looking back on it. That was arrogance on my part.

I also ignored warning signs like I was starting to feel numb. Life is emotional. People go through good times and bad times. And when someone said they were getting married or having a baby, which should be really joyful, I had a lot of muscle memory, and I could kind of like smile and nod.

Pete Mockaitis
“That’s great.”

Carey Nieuwhof
Yeah, “That’s great.” But on the inside, I’m like, “I don’t feel a thing.” And, conversely, if somebody came up to me on the weekend, even someone I knew, unless they were really close, and said, “I got a terrible diagnosis this week. I have cancer,” I knew what to say but I couldn’t feel it anymore. And that was really, really alarming to me, but I hadn’t been in that state, and I’m like, “Well, someday this will work out.”

So, ironically, you asked what was it like before I burned out. To some extent, I was on top of the world. Church was the largest it had ever been, I had started speaking outside of the church because we’re growing quickly, and people would ask me questions. So, I remember I flew down to Atlanta, and I spoke in front of 2500 people gathered from around the world at a conference, worked really hard for months on that talk, it was the biggest audience of my life to date. And by all accounts of everyone in the room, I crushed it, like knocked it out of the park. I’m, like, amazing. My wife and my boys were with me. And when I flew back to Toronto from Atlanta, when I got off the plane, it’s like I fell off a cliff and it’s like my body went on strike.

So, that numbness that had been building for a couple of years, the turmoil in our marriage, we were fine on the outside but there was struggle on the inside, the lack of sleep, all of that caught up with me, and it’s like my body said, “Well, that’s it. We sent you all kinds of warning signs, but now we’re strike.” The body was on strike. And I didn’t declare a finish line so my body did. And I went into what probably, had I gone for a diagnosis, and I went to a counselor, I didn’t see my doctor about it, I should have, he probably would’ve said, “Carey, you’re depressed.” And I lost all my passion. And I’m a very passionate person. I became very cynical. I kind of thought life was over, and it was painful.

And I got up most days, you hear these stories of the guy who can’t get out of bed. I got up pretty much every day, maybe a little bit later, and I’d go to work and go through the motions, but there was nothing on the inside. And you can get away with that for four months but you can’t do that for four years. And by the grace of God, the first flickers of passion started to return in the fall of that year. That happened in May of 2006, where my energy just tanked.

By the fall, I felt the first flicker of hope, and it’s like my heart beat for a millisecond again, and I’m like, “Oh, emotion. This is good.” And then it was gradually, but it took years, like three to five years to really find my new footing to say, “Okay, I think this is the new normal,” and for my heart to fully function again. And I’m so grateful it did, but, man, anybody who’s ever burned out, like it is awful.

And now, I read a Deloitte study, summer of 2021, if I get this right, it was in the 80s. I think it was 82% of senior executives leave work every day emotionally exhausted and physically drained. And according to a study done before the pandemic in 2019, 70% of adults in their 20s and 30s say that they experienced some of the symptoms of burnout in the last year. So, I think we’re just living at this pace where it’s kind of like, “I was feeling like me 15 years ago.” Now, it’s like, “Whoa, there’s a lot of people, like millions of people are in that state every day.”

The other thing I would say is I’m not a doctor, I’m not a psychiatrist, but I’ve created this category I call low-grade burnout, having taught thousands of people about this. And low-grade burnout, the working definitions are the functions of life continue but the joy of life is gone. In other words, yeah, you’re getting up, you’re shipping podcast episodes, you’re taking the kids to soccer, to dance, you’re socializing with friends, you’re going to work every day, maybe you’re even setting records, but there’s no joy in it. You’ve built a life you want to escape from. And I think that’s a kind of burnout that’s just in the water supply these days.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow. Well, thank you for sharing. That’s powerful stuff and a wakeup call for many in terms of like numbness or joy, whether it’s all the way gone or like halfway gone. It’s like, hmm, to note that as an indicator, like, “Something is amiss here. Adjustments need to be made.”

Carey Nieuwhof
Pete, it’s almost a human condition now but my point is it doesn’t have to be. Like a lot of us, you get into your late 20s or 30s and you grow a little bit cynical, and you think, “Oh, I guess this is life.” There’s that old movie with Jack Nicholson, I think it’s Helen Hunt, this is, “As Good as It Gets.” And a lot of us to that point, and that’s the whole point, right? We’ve built these lives and we’re like, on the outside, I had it all. Like, I had a beautiful wife, great sons. We were the church everybody would travel to, to see, because it’s where it was going on. But on the inside, I was dying.

And I think there are so many people now who are in that place where it’s like, “Got the house, got the car, got the job, got the family, got the girlfriend,” whatever your life situation is, “…but how come I’m so flat on the inside?” Now, I think, as a person of faith, some of that is spiritual. And you’re not even going to be able to figure out what that is until you get a level playing field, and you can say, “Okay, let’s get time, energy, and priorities working for me, and then I can actually see, ‘Is this the right job for me? Is this the right relationship for me? Is this the right life circumstance for me?’” Because if you can’t feel anything, you can’t assess anything, but that is now what passes for life for so many people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, all right. So, joy, that’s a huge a motivator, a huge why to try out some of your goods, Carey. And if that wasn’t enough, your approach also liberated for you a thousand productive hours a year. Can you share with us sort of that math and how it results in such a staggering result?

Carey Nieuwhof
It’s a little crazy, and when I wrote it down, I remember the first time I quantified it, I thought, “I feel like that infomercial guy.” But it’s actually what happened to me, and it’s got a bit of street cred because, before I wrote the book, I taught this to leaders around the world and also offered a course that we ran, I think, 3500 leaders through. And the results are three hours a day to three hours a week.

Pete Mockaitis
Somewhere in that ballpark you’d expected that level of result.

Carey Nieuwhof
Somewhere in that ballpark. So, three hours a week, it’s like, yeah, I became somewhat more productive and I freed up three hours a week. You know what that boils down to? That’s about 160 hours a year, which you think, “Well, that’s not that much.” That’s like getting a month of vacation, like your next four weeks are free because you’ve eliminated so much of the clutter in your life. If it did for me, and it’s done this for hundreds of other people, maybe thousands now, three hours a day, it is not hard to waste three hours a day. It’s the same with your time as well. Like, it doesn’t take that long.

And the biggest section of the book is on priorities. The first part tells you, “Here are some tips on how to use your time. Here’s how to leverage your energy,” which seems to be the big gamechanger. But the bulk of the book is actually on priorities because, otherwise, you have a good theory. And what happens every day is you start in reactive mode. First thing you do is you look at your phone, then you dig around in your inbox, then you’re on social media. And, suddenly, what you’ve allowed is other people’s priorities to determine how you spend your day.

And then you’ve got that really important thing to do at work, the project you’ve got to turn out, the report you’ve got to give in to your boss, the client you’ve got to meet with, the deal you’ve got to land, but you didn’t get to it. And the reason you didn’t get to it is because, “This guy called and then I got called into a surprise meeting, and then I’ve got 17 texts I haven’t responded to yet. And, oh my gosh, I looked at my inbox, it’s a disaster. It’s on fire.” And then you got pulled into another meeting, and someone knocked on your door, and said, “Hey, can I just have five minutes of your time?” but it wasn’t five minutes.

Or, you’re in a cubicle and everyone is distracting you every three minutes. The next thing you know, it’s 4:30 in the afternoon. In my law days, you’re still not ready for court tomorrow, you’re still not ready for whatever that big project is, and now what do you do? You take that home with you. And so, what the “At Your Best” system does, the thrive cycle does, is it makes sure that you get your most important stuff done. And then, all of a sudden, you’re like, “Oh, okay, I am now in a place where I got the big stuff done. Yeah, there were some flashfires and, yes, I had that impromptu meeting at 2:00 o’clock.”

But you can walk out of the office at 4:00 or 6:00, or close your laptop if you’re working from home, at whatever your normal signoff time is, and you’re like, “I’m done. I’m going to go for a bike ride. I’m going to go out for dinner with friends,” and you’re not thinking all the time about that giant project you have to get done. So, that’s what really where the claim comes from. And if you do that, if you reclaim three peak productive hours in a day, that’s 1,095 hours in a year.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. So, then three hours that have been frittered away in a meeting that didn’t need to happen, or an email checking, or social media frittering that didn’t need to occur, by liberating three a day, we get over a thousand a year. Understood. Well, so then, let’s get into it. What are some of the like top practices that are so transformative for folks?

Carey Nieuwhof
There’s a million time-management books out there, a lot of which I’m huge fans of, and some of the authors of whom endorsed this book, like Greg McKeown, Cal Newport, David Allen, I’ve interviewed him for my podcast. Probably the breakthrough for a lot of people when you’re looking at “At Your Best,” is I call my own language out. And the language I hear a lot of people use, it’s simply this idea that, “I don’t have enough time.” The whole idea of time famine.

So, when it comes to managing your time, it’s pretty easy to say to yourself, like I did all through my 30s, “Pete, I don’t have time to write a book. You don’t understand how busy I am. These things grow like crazy. Like, I haven’t got time to write a book.” And then, one day, I had this realization, and I don’t know why, everybody knows this, but it just hit me like a ton of bricks one day, it’s like, “Carey, you have the same amount of time as any other human being on the planet. If you’re running a Fortune 50 company, nobody gives you a 25th hour in the day. Like, it just doesn’t happen. You have the same amount of time as everyone else.”

And then I started to think about how productive some of my heroes were, and made me go, “What gives?” And so, what I made myself do, and this is what I would encourage every listener to do, is start admitting, or stop saying, I should say, stop saying you don’t have the time. Start admitting you didn’t make it. So, just stop saying you don’t have the time. You actually have the time. What do you want to do? And I’ve asked lots of leaders about that, like, “What do you want to do?” and people are like, “I want to launch my own podcast,” “I want to write a book.”

Or, I remember one person said, “You know what I want? I want a weed-free garden. Like, my garden used to give me so much joy, and I just never have time to weed it.” I’m like, “Well, you actually have the time, and you can do that.” Other people want to paint, and they want to do different things with their life, “I want to learn how to cook,” “I want to learn how to ski,” or whatever it is. You actually have the time, “I want to crush out the next quarter’s goals before midnight on the day before they’re due.” Okay, great. Well, you can do that. And so, stop saying you don’t have the time, start admitting you didn’t make it. So, that’s time.

And then energy. So, you have 24 equal hours in a day, but, as you know, not all hours feel equal. People like Daniel Pink and Cal Newport have identified, using brain research and science, that most people seem to have about three to five peak productive hours in a day. If you really think about it as a writer, having written books, all my author friends would tell you they cannot write for 17 hours a day. It’s just not true. Well, you could but by hour seven, you’re spewing garbage at that point.

And if you’re up against a deadline, “Yeah, sure. Okay, I can work till midnight if I have to because I have to get this chapter in,” but you’re not producing your best work. Most writers would say success is a thousand good words a day, which doesn’t sound like much but that may take you three to five hours. So, you’ve got three to five hours in a day where, I’d argue, you’re at your best. So, we usually think about this as like morning people, night owls, or people who hit their peak midday. What would you say, Pete, I’m curious, are you a morning person, a night owl? I call that your green zone, your best. What are your best hours in the day typically?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you know, it’s funny, and, I don’t know, I don’t think this is always the case, but over the last, I don’t know, six years, it really seemed like it is the morning…and we had a couple sleep doctors on. And so, in the earliest of mornings, we’ve got what one called groggy greatness in terms of, “I might not be super alert, but, wow, I’m getting a lot of good ideas. I don’t know if they’re good yet, but I’m getting a lot of ideas which I’m parking to later evaluate to see if they’re good.” And then maybe an hour into the day, it’s like, “Okay, let’s get after some stuff.”

Carey Nieuwhof
Yeah. Could you put it on a clock? When people think about this, they usually find they can. So, is it like 5:00 a.m., 7:00 a.m. for you, 8:00 a.m.? When does your green zone start?

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah, if I wake up at 6:30, I feel really raring to go at 7:30.

Carey Nieuwhof
Yeah, great, 7:30. And then when do you start to fade? A little bit mental clarity, a little bit of brain fog, like when does that hit?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, in some ways, after maybe around 90 minutes of doing something, it sure is time for a break, but then it’s not over. I would say, well, I’ll put it this way. At 1:30 p.m., I sure don’t want to schedule something important. It’s, like, I am sleepy and I will be, hopefully, lying down for a power nap, if possible, around then.

Carey Nieuwhof
Thanks for being so honest about that because I think, in the ‘90s, when I came into the workplace in law, there was this idea that we were robots, we were superhuman, and sleepy was for wimpy people. And what you just admitted, along with every single person listening to this podcast, that you’re human, and that’s the way humans operate. So, my hours are 7:00 to 11:00 a.m. That seems, these days, to be my best. If I’m lucky, after a power nap at lunch, I’ll get another incredible hour, and that would be my green zone.

Cal Newport says we have four of those hours a day where you can really do deep work. Daniel Pink would agree that it’s a very limited window. And even if you’re a night owl, I was talking to my wife, she was talking to someone who says her best hours are between 8:00 and midnight. It’s like, “Wow, more power to you.” But at that point, if I’m on a sofa, I’m probably falling asleep in the next 20 minutes. Like, that’s just me.

So, you have green zones, those are your best hours. And I’d encourage you, even if you can’t say exactly where they are, like pick a zone. Is it morning, afternoon, evening for you as a person listening to this show? Then you also have, on the other side, red zones. It sounds like 1:30 in the afternoon could be a red zone for you. 4:00 to 6:00 in the afternoon is getting into my red zone.

So, we’re having this interview later in the afternoon, so I had a little quick nap at lunch, and then I went for a 30-minute bike ride before I jumped on because I wanted to be mentally clear, kind put some paddles on the heart to get me going and make sure that I was going to deliver for you and your audience. But, normally, 4:00 to 6:00, it’s either I need a nap or I need to get my body moving.

And then everything in between is just yellow. You’re not at your best, you’re not at your worst. And the way to think about it, and this is the Archimedes lever for almost everybody who’s tried this system, if you’ve got your best hours, start focusing your best work in your best hours of all the things in your job description. Let’s say your job description has ten things in it. Even if you’re a founder, you know this. It’s like you still have parts of your job that you’re not very good at and that aren’t that important. That’s like every single job, there is no dream job where it’s all 100% everything you want to do and you’re still good at it all the time.

I know for myself, right now, I write books and speak and run a digital communication company. If I write well, that’s number one, that’s what I’m best at, that’s what I’m gifted at, I’m a communicator. If I have a clear and compelling vision, if my staff are aligned, and if we have the money to do what we’re called to do, then everything is going to be okay. If I start writing poorly, if the vision is fuzzy, if my team starts to fight or bicker or gossip, or if we run out of cash, we have problems.

So, what I do in my green zone is I try to focus on the things that move the needle in those four areas. Write killer content. If I’ve got an issue with the staff or I’ve got to clarify vision or the future, I’m going to do that in my best hours in the morning, and I’m going to protect those hours. I used to be the king of breakfast meetings, and I’d go to a breakfast meeting, and you know how those worked.

You get up at 5:00, 6:00, whatever, make it to the restaurant for 7:00, you’re supposed to be done at 8:00 but it went long, it’s now 8:30. Then you stop by the coffee shop, grab a coffee to go into the office, you get into the office, five people stop to talk to you, and then you get in, and you look at your phone, you got like five texts, you’ve got a whole bunch of unread emails. Next thing you know, it’s 11:30, it’s time for lunch.

Well, if that’s my life, I’ve got like a chapter to write, or when I was a preacher, a sermon to write, or I’ve got a vision document I’m working on, now my best hours are gone. I just burned that fuel. It’s gone and it’s not coming back. And then if the afternoon is a whole bunch of like reactions and meetings and all that stuff, by 4:30 in the afternoon, I haven’t moved the needle. I’ve spent the entire day doing not what I’m best at. What is probably inconsequential and not that important, I now go home and I’m like, “I got to write that chapter.” And then I see my wife and she’s like, “What are you doing tonight?” It’s like, “Sorry, I got to work again.” When my kids were young, it’s like, “Got to work.”

So, that’s time and energy, and we can talk about priorities separately because that’s a big thing. But those are the big ideas. And so, what you do is you protect those peak three to five hours whenever they are from outside distractions, and you do what your best at when you’re at your best. That’ll move the needle.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. And what I’m thinking about is like then there are some things that, I don’t know if there’s a word for this, Carey, but I think there needs to be. Maybe there’s another language. But it’s almost like fertile-ness, or like fertility. It’s sort of like there are some activities, like writing a chapter for a book, that’s perfect. Thank you. If you do that with great energy, you get a better result versus there are other activities that it doesn’t matter what energy you bring to them, like you still check the box, regardless. Like, maybe it’s a mandatory training that…hey, you and I like training. We do training. But there are some trainings or like…

Carey Nieuwhof
Your fire drill training.

Pete Mockaitis
I think there are some sort of like compliance-y things, like you have to check the box in order for it to be checked. And it is checked, and, thusly, you can proceed. But it doesn’t need to be like masterfully checked. Like, you don’t get a better result if you bring more brilliant time, energy, attention to it, to a certain task. And other tasks, it makes all the difference in the world. Like, “Hey, I’m going to make some decisions about my priorities, and my vision, and what projects I’m going to pursue versus not pursue.” Boy, that matters a ton, if you’re doing that sort of like attentively and brilliantly, or half in the bag. Like, that’s huge, versus other things don’t.

So, is there a word, Carey, for like the condition in which something yields more the better you attend to it versus the opposite, like, “It doesn’t matter as long you get that box checked”?

Carey Nieuwhof
No, that is a really good point. I’ll bet you the Germans and the Japanese have a word for that because they always have great words. I speak neither Japanese nor German, but I would call it, you used the phrase, I think, inconsequential. There are things. So, for example, I’m not my executive assistant. I have an EA. Her job, because we get hundreds of emails a day into the inbox, her job is to do a really good job responding to all of the emails that need a response. That needs to be her green zone.

Email, for me, tends to be transactional. Pete saying, “Hey, do you want to be on my podcast?” it’s like, “Yes, I would like to be on your podcast.” I want to be polite. I want to be nice, but that is not the highest value-added work. Me showing up prepared for this interview, to have a good conversation, that’s actually important.

So, what I would say the word that I would use, there’s inconsequential things. Email is relatively inconsequential. I can do that in my yellow or red zone when my energy isn’t at its peak because I’m just saying yes or no or being kind to people, and I can do that on autopilot. Writing a chapter for a new book, that has impact. So, the word I would choose is impact. And the thing to think about, I’ve got a Venn diagram in “At Your Best,” and if you buy the book, you get all these downloads for free with it off the website. But imagine three circles, so: gifting, passion, impact.

So, gifting can be your skillset. I’m, by nature, a communicator. When I was a kid, I was like in public speaking contests. When I was in law, loved being in court. I was in court almost every day. I was only in it for a year but, man, I loved being in court. When I was a preacher, guess the part of the job I like the most? Growing a church and preaching. I loved the communication part. Guess what I’m doing now? Podcasting, writing books, writing articles, connecting with leaders. Communication is a gift for me that I think I was given, and it’s also something I really enjoy doing most days. Most days I really enjoy it.

It also happens to have the greatest impact, that when I communicate well, everything goes better. When I communicated well in law, my clients won. And when I was preaching, the church grew, when I was preaching well. When I’m writing well, I wrote a post yesterday, it’s funny you mentioned you get ideas at 5:00 o’clock in the morning, I’ve been trying to figure out how to write this post for a while, and I woke up at 5:10, and I said to my wife, “The post was fully formed in my head. I went downstairs, wrote it down really quickly.”

Like, that kind of rest and margin allows your brain to be free. And, sure enough, this one did connect with leaders and tens of thousands of leaders read it in the first 24 hours. I’m like, “Awesome.” That’s a good example. So, there you have impact. So, ask yourself, “What is the biggest impact of that work?” Like, when your boss says, “Well done,” was it because you filed your expense report on time? Well, maybe, if you’re in accounting, yes. But it’s really probably for those things that move the bottom line of the company forward. What is it in your job?

If you’re a receptionist, super important to do customer service well. And, by the way, the bar is so low on that these days. All you have to do is be a kind human. If you’re a kind human on those phone calls, if you’re a kind human, and when somebody comes in, and says, “Hey, would you like a glass of water, or a cup of coffee, or that kind of thing?” man, that goes a long way. I say to our customer service people, like, “Just be kind to people. Just give them a timely response. Like, that has such an impact.”

We do online courses, and we offer a 30-day money back guarantee. The industry standard on refunds for online products is 10-30%, depending on your field. We get a lower than 1% return rate. Why? Well, first of all, we give it to anybody who wants it. No questions asked, so they know it’s there. Secondly, we try to over deliver on value. That has a super high impact. That’s important. That deserves your green zone.

So, think about, “Where is my biggest impact? Where is my gifting? Where is my passion?” You get those three things going together, that’s how you use your green zone. That’s how you use those peak three to five hours a day. And then, finally, for personal application, Saturday and Sunday maybe you’re not in the office, but I used to give my wife the leftovers. I’d mow the lawn in the morning or I’d wash the car in the morning. Well, if that’s my green zone, maybe we should go for a breakfast date, and then I can wash the car later. I can mow the lawn when it’s like, “Hmm, should I have a nap or should I mow the lawn?” You see?

So, you start to rethink that because my wife is more important than my lawn, as much as I’m like a lawn guy. Definitely more important than the lawn. So, you can start rejigging your priorities, in that way you start showing up more for the things that really matter in life.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Okay. So, right there, green, yellow, red, have those three to five peak productive hours on super high impact stuff that where the things align there. So, then let’s talk about priorities. How do we think through and establish what is top and what is middle and what is low?

Carey Nieuwhof
So, priorities can run in two directions. One is to think about, “What is of greatest impact?” so definitely do that exercise: passion, gifting, impact. And that could lead into a promotion or a new job for you one day. But, again, if you can determine that, you know your priorities. The priority section of the book is really designed to help you get this from theory to reality. Because if all you do is implement what we’ve talked to today, and you’re like, “Good. I’m starting that tomorrow,” you’ve heard it already, you know what to do, I promise you it’s going to blow up in your face.

And the reason it’s going to blow up in your face is everybody else is going to ask you to do something else. You’d probably say, “I’ve got two meetings in my green zone five days a week. What do I do with that?” We can talk about that. Or, even if you don’t have meetings, you’re like a morning person, you’re like, “Yeah, my first meeting is at 11:00 a.m. that’s ideal,” you will distract yourself. We have devices now that just buzz and chirp and distract us 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including in our green zone, and then you’re sitting down, maybe you’ve turned off all notifications on your phone, but you’re sitting down, someone knocks at the door, “Hey, Carey, can I have five minutes of your time?” It’s like your green zone goes up in flames.

So, priorities is really as much about, “How do you stop the world from hijacking that green zone?” Because if you use it well, and you get those three to five hours in, some days it’ll be three, some days it’ll be five, but you get those in and you start using them consistently, you’re going to start feeling like you could go home by lunch because you’re like, “I got the report in,” “I’ve solved the problem,” “I created the new pivot table that’s going to change accounting.” Whatever you’re doing, you got it done and you’re like, “Oh, it’s just a meeting this afternoon. It’s just an inbox this afternoon,” like everything else feels easy.

But the world will conspire against you to hijack your green zone. So, first thing I would recommend is stop distracting yourself. Even when you get into that green zone, you get into a comfortable environment, a quiet environment, if you’re in a cubicle, put headphones on. Headphones are the universal, “Don’t bug me” symptom.

Nir Eyal, who also endorsed the book, he writes in his book Indistractable, you can talk about in your office, put like a little traffic cone on your desk, a mini one, and when the traffic cone is there, it’s like, “Hey, I’m in my zone. Please don’t bother me until after.” So, you’ve got to set up some signals to stop distracting yourself. So, I would suggest turn off all notifications on your phone.

By the way, if you’re wondering how to do that, and you’re listening to this in real time, iOS 15 just released some amazing features where you can now set different levels of privacy for different times in the day. Just released days ago as we record this, but I’m excited to try out these ideas with red, yellow, and green zone because a lot of people are afraid to totally protect their green zones, turn off their phones, shut off all notifications because they’re like, “Well, what if my kids need me or what if my boss needs me?”

We used to have to set up favorites to do that. Now, you could set up a green zone feature on your iPhone, if you have an iPhone, and you could say, “These three people are allowed to reach me during my green zone. That’s it.” So, if it’s your boss, your spouse, a child, that’s fine. And they’re probably not going to call you very often, but block the rest of the world out. It’ll be there later in the day.

So, you want to stop distracting yourself, and then you’ve got to stop…you’ve got to learn how to say no so you don’t overcrowd your calendar. Happy to talk about that if you want to go there and talk about mastering the art of saying no.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you, Carey. That was absolutely on my list. So, how do you say no well?

Carey Nieuwhof
Well, it’s hard. One way is to determine, Pete, what you need to say yes to and what you need to say no to. And Greg McKeown talks about this in Essentialism, I’m paraphrasing him, but imagine all the requests that come your way as being somewhere between a zero, “Definitely don’t want to do that,” and a ten, “Oh, my goodness, I can’t wait. I want to do this so bad and it’s the right thing to do.” So, zero is like “No way,” ten is “Fantastic!”

Most of us are smart enough intuitively to get rid of the zeroes to fives, it’s like, “Yeah, I don’t really want to do that,” “No, that’s not a really good use of my time,” “No, thank you so much, but I’m okay.” Our lives get filled up with sixes, sevens, and eights. And what Greg McKeown says is if it’s not a nine, it’s a zero. And that was really hard for me. Even as I was developing this material, I have so many opportunities and I want to say yes, but that filter of, “If it’s not a nine, it’s a zero,” is a really, really powerful filter.

So, what I would say is start using a new filter in your decision-making. And another way to look at it, I think Seth Godin came up with this, but ask yourself the question, because six months from now, someone is asking you to do something in February, you look at your calendar, and, by the way, if you implement this system, your calendar will not be blank six months down the road. But most people’s calendar is blank, you’re like, “Oh, yeah, I have time in February.” But then February comes and it’s all filled up and you don’t have any bandwidth for it.

Seth Godin says, “Would you put it on your calendar tomorrow?” If the answer is yes, then it’s probably a nine. If the answer is no, then it’s probably not a nine. It’s probably six, or seven, or eight. So, a lot of us get somewhat moderately excited about an idea, it’s a six out of ten, and we say, “Yeah, I’ll do that in January,” and then January comes around, and it’s like, “Oh, why did I let that on my calendar?” And I think there are a lot of people who are like, “Why did I let that on my calendar?” create a new filter. And then what you do is you master. Now you know what to allow on your calendar.

And then the second thing is, “How do you say no?” Well, we say no every day just because it’s the size of the audience. And I think what you say, if you can say this honestly and with a clear conscience, say, “You know, I’d love to do that. Pete, I’d love to help you with that project. Unfortunately, in light of my current commitments, I’m unable to do so. But thank you so much for asking me. I really appreciate it. I wish you well. Carey.” That’s short. Simple. It’s clear. It’s not like, “Check with me in two weeks,” because then they come in two weeks, you’re like, “Yeah, I still can’t really do it.” It’s just clear.

And Steve Jobs famously said what was best about Apple’s innovation was not what they said yes to, but what they said no to. And by having that undistracted time, by having a focus that was pretty legendary, he and the team at Apple were able to come up with products that nobody else could come up with. And that was the singular focus on saying no so that he could say yes to a phone that changed the world, or to a device that played a thousand songs in your pocket.

And if you get that kind of margin in your calendar, if you get very good at saying no, you have to overcome FOMO in everything, you will find that you probably can start to realize things in your life and at your work that will astound you and surprise you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Carey, this is awesome. Anything else you want to make sure to say before we hear about a couple of your favorite things?

Carey Nieuwhof
No, I would just say ask yourself this question, “Are you able to run at this pace forever?” And most of us would say, “I’m not able to run at my current pace forever, maybe not even another month, maybe not another week.” And the problem there is if your life, if you’re saying to yourself, “Well, Carey, it’s just a busy season,” seasons have beginnings and endings, and if your season doesn’t have an ending, it’s not a season. It’s your life. And do you really want to live that way? And if you don’t, I’d love to help.

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

Carey Nieuwhof
Okay. Winston Churchill, “Success is moving from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

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

Carey Nieuwhof
I love what Daniel Pink did in his book When, when he analyzed surgeons and discovered that even they struggled with what we’ve been talking about today. Did you know that if you have your surgery at 8:00 a.m. you are far less likely to have complications? And if your surgeon operates on you at 4:00 p.m., there’s a 400% spike in challenges with surgery in the afternoon over the morning because we’re all humans.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a good study.

Carey Nieuwhof
Yes, a very good study.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Carey Nieuwhof
Favorite book? I love Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Leadership in Turbulent Times. Fantastic book.

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

Carey Nieuwhof
Oh, I use Evernote a lot. I have just thousands of notes in Evernote. Been around for a long, long time but it’s a go-to.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Carey Nieuwhof
Habit would be going to bed early. My wife says she married an 85-year-old man. But I love sleeping in on the frontside. I think it makes me better in the next day, so I try to get to sleep by 10:00 every night.

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

Carey Nieuwhof
Yeah. You know, the one that keeps coming back is “Time off won’t heal you if the problem is how you spend your time on.”

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

Carey Nieuwhof
Yeah, you can go to AtYourBestToday.com, that’s the gateway into the book. And we’ve got some special offers there for people, so just AtYourBestToday. Don’t forget the today part. And then you can find me at CareyNieuwhof.com. A very hard name to spell, but if you butcher it, Google will probably get you there.

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

Carey Nieuwhof
Yeah, I would say you can do this. Find those peak three to five hours, protect them, and you will see results starting pretty much overnight.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Carey, this has been a treat. Thank you. I wish you much luck and fun and adventures at your best.

Carey Nieuwhof
Thank you so much, Pete. It’s been a joy to be with you today.