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945: How to Master Your Inner World and Flourish During Stress with Mawi Asgedom

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Mawi Asgedom shares four tools anyone can use to master their emotions and thrive.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Easy ways to keep your cool when things go awry
  2. The key investment that improves both happiness and success
  3. The powerful reframe that makes you feel unstoppable 

About Mawi

Mawi Asgedom is an award-winning author and expert on Social Emotional Learning (SEL) who has inspired over 1000 audiences with his uplifting speeches. 

Mawi founded Mawi Learning, an organization that unlocks human potential through evidence-based social emotional learning. Under Mawi’s leadership, Mawi Learning won the prestigious CODiE award for excellence and innovation in educational technology, and achieved CASEL-designation for evidence-based Social Emotional Learning.  

In 2023, Mawi launched his newest venture to help youth unlock their potential: Inner Heroes Universe, a media company that helps parents, educators, and therapists equip kids with crucial mental health and social emotional skills. 

Resources Mentioned

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Mawi Asgedom Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Mawi, welcome back.

Mawi Asgedom

Oh, it is so good to be back, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

This is crazy. So, you were episode number one. That was a wild eight years ago on the show. We’ve been talking in between, but nobody else has been listening.

Mawi Asgedom

Hey, it is incredible. It’s hard to believe. I still remember that first episode. And what is it 800 episodes later now? Like, you’ve been at it 900. How many done?

Pete Mockaitis

That’s right, 940-ish. Totally.

Mawi Asgedom

Oh, my goodness. Well, it’s been fun to see the growth. I’m proud of you. It’s so cool. I’ve got to ask you, Pete. You’ve talked to so many world-class people throughout the years here, what has been the one most important or interesting learning that you’ve gotten? Let’s flip the table on you, get you to answer a question right off the bat. When you think about all the journey that you had here, the whole journey.

Pete Mockaitis

If I boil it down to one thing, it’s caring.” It’s like, “Do you care? Do you care about your job, your colleagues, your teammates, your boss, your customers, your stakeholders, the investors? Do you care or do you not?” It’s like, “I just got to get through the day. I got to try to get through the day, get to the paycheck.”

Versus when you care, it opens everything in terms of, “Well, why do I spend the time to learn this thing? Oh, because I care. Why do I really try to listen and understand where someone’s coming from? Oh, because I care. Why do I invest in learning this stuff when it’s hard or it’s uncomfortable or it’s unpleasant? Oh, because I want to improve it.”

So, I think it just makes all the difference when folks are plugged into that versus just trying to get through it. And so, many of the tidbits of advice in terms of being likable or being persuasive, if you just keep drilling down to the why, why, why, it’s “Well, because this just matters to me.” And being awesome at your job is sometimes, quite literally, a matter of life and death, and other times you’re making an impact on a smaller level.

I was just chatting with someone who sells lots and custom homes for planned developments, and she says, “For me, family is the most important thing, and a house is one of the most important things for a family’s experience of family and togetherness, so it really matters to me.” And it shows in terms of how excellent she was at what she was doing. So, that’s my soapbox, is it really boils down to caring.

Mawi Asgedom

Thanks. So, you reminded me as you talked, Pete, I gave a keynote a long time ago, maybe 15 years ago, at Vernon Hills High School in Illinois. They’d all read my book, Of Beetles and Angels, and I gave what I thought was a great speech, and everybody was saying, like, “Wow, that was great.” And then one of the kids came up to me and said, “Hey, are you happy right now, because you don’t seem like you’re really happy up there?” I was like, “Wow, this kid could see right through me. I’ve been having like a bad streak, I hadn’t been doing self-care,” and I really wasn’t happy, and it showed.

And to your point, it’s a tough thing to hear from a kid after you’ve been paid to go present at their school, right? But then it forced you to hold up the mirror and answer the question that you just asked, really, like, “How much do you care right now?” And if you’re not where you need to be, in terms of your happiness, joy, energy, what you bring to the table, well, you need to step back and do something about it. And so, that is one the stories I’ll never forget from over the years.

Mawi Asgedom

Yeah, that’s great stuff. Well, it’s good to be back, Pete. Man, the world of podcasting has changed. It was pretty nascent still when you were doing it. It was pre-pandemic when we did the first episode a while back. And to see just how much it’s changed and grown. And to be a part of that must be pretty cool for you.

Pete Mockaitis

It has been, and new fun opportunities have opened up, and it’s been fun to explore those. And I want to talk about your new fun, cool thing, The Inner Hero’s Universe. It’s a series of books for children. So, first, we should address why are we talking about this on “How to Be Awesome at Your Job?” And it’s not just because we’re buddies. Even though we’re buddies, I don’t let people on here who don’t have something to say that sharpens the universal skills required to flourish at work. So lay it on us, you got a book series for kids. I can see how it’s useful for us grown folk, but tell us what are we doing here today?

Mawi Asgedom

Well, look, I just asked you what the sum wisdom was that you collected from people in your 900 interviews with all sorts of leaders and CEOs about how to be successful in the world of work, and it came down to caring, which is really something that we should pick up, start picking up very early when you’re three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, how you’re raised, and the things you’re taught. And there are enduring lessons about all these things.

And so, in any case, the whole Inner Heroes Universe actually has tremendous application, I would argue, for the world of work and just for the world of humanity, of just being adults in life, because it’s really rooted in psychology. And what I wanted to do, Pete, was, my first company focused on what’s called social-emotional learning, which is the way that kids learn about things, like mindset, relationships, goal-setting, all the personal development kind of stuff that you talk about on your podcast, but from an education and kids’ lens.

With the pandemic and the challenges that our country has had in the mental health area, I wanted to translate the world of psychology, that clinical world of psychology, into simple, easy tools that kids could use, and those same tools can be used by your listeners. And we can talk about what that means in each of the four areas of psychology that we started with, but think of us as the Marvel universe of the inner world.

Like that movie “Inside Out” that Pixar did, Pete, where it showed that young girl’s inner journey, but it only focused on emotions. We’re bringing the entire inner world to life through books, through media. And as we continue to talk, I’ll share how these things are so relevant in four of the initial areas of our inner universe.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, that’s so cool and it’s powerful. And I totally resonate with that. And we had Kwame Christian on the show, he’s got the podcast Negotiate Anything, and he’s so cool. I think in his book, Nobody Will Play With Me, he talks about our inner toddler. And I totally connect that notion, is that when I observe my own children, and they’re upset and yelling or crying because they can’t play a game that they wanted to play, and we see we’re not really above that.

I think we are experiencing the same kinds of feelings of disappointment, frustration, “Oh, I was really looking forward to that, and this is being taken from me, and I don’t…aargh, it’s not fair,” we’re feeling all those things, and we just dress it up a little bit more professionally in terms of like, “Oh, this is a disappointing change in schedule. Is there a way we could return to the original agenda?” And so, I think that there’s loads of truth to we have an inner toddler, and the messages that connect for children, and sometimes are among the most profoundly impactful to us at a deep, I don’t know, limbic or something, level of our human experience.

Mawi Asgedom

Exactly. I’ll give you one specific example of how that works. In education, in kid psychology, one of the things that we talk a lot about is regulation and dysregulation. And a good way to think about it is that, as human beings, whether we’re kids or adults, whether you’re a five-year-old or a CEO of a major company, when we go throughout our day, we all detect threats, right? Like our nervous system, our bodies, the way we evolved has learned to wonder, “Hey, is that a lion over there? Is that lion going to come for me? Or is that just a tree?” Like that kind of thing, right?

And so, we all respond differently when we see those threats. A lot of times when we’re a kid, what psychologists talk about is, the kid will go into like the red response or the blue response. That might be a kid who, all of a sudden, runs out of a room and the teacher doesn’t know where they went. Or a kid gets really angry and won’t let go of a point, like they keep arguing, they have low inflexibility, they will not stop talking about something.

I’m wondering if any of your listeners have ever worked with someone in their jobs that is inflexible, that gets attached to something, they won’t let it go, they just will not let it go, or when a conflict comes up, they just kind of like leave, they retreat, and they close off and they lose. What’s happening there is that we’re actually, like when you said limbic, we’re losing access to our thinking brain, and we’re going more in that survivor mode.

Well, with Inner Heroes Universe, what we do is we teach kids very basic, simple strategies to first reconnect with their bodies because it’s the body that’s dysregulated. We try to talk to someone logically, right, and say, “Oh, Johnny didn’t mean to say that to you,” or, “They didn’t mean to exclude you.” You’re using logic. What really needs to happen is we need to connect to the body first. We teach kids things like spider fingers. We teach kids things like box breathing.

And you know what? Some of the best leadership thinkers working today with adults and CEOs, like, I don’t know if you’ve had Shirzad from Positive Intelligence on your podcast.

Pete Mockaitis

Not yet.

Mawi Asgedom

You got to get him on. He’s one of my favorite thinkers. He sits down with CEOs, and he just tells them, “I want you to take 10 seconds and just feel each of your toes. Okay, just feel each one of your toes.” What’s he doing? He’s turning the thinking brain off for a second and reconnecting people to their bodies. And when you do that, you actually think at a higher level.

Like, for type A folks, like us and maybe many of your listeners, who are used to believing that logic and thought and what our conscious brain can do is the sum game of progress and how we should think about things, it can be difficult to accept that these breathing exercises, regulating our bodies, doing things like spider fingers, they’re as important for the 36-year-old, 56-year-old, as they are for the 6-year-old, and it helps us lower our stress. It helps us kind of moderate the temperature of our bodies and our thought. And that’s a very specific example, Pete, of where the world of kids is actually not that different from the world of adults.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Mawi, I’ll totally second that, and it’s really fun. We talked about spider fingers. My daughter, Mary, has done this, and I actually was not familiar with spider fingers before reading this book. And if listeners have not heard of it, it is the practice of simply touching your thumb to each of your fingers in succession, “My thumb to my index, my thumb to my middle, my thumb to my ring finger, my thumb to my pinky.” And just doing that with some awareness of, “This is how my body, my fingers are feeling,” gets your brain in a different gear.

And if you’re feeling angry and you can’t go take a walk, you could do spider fingers anywhere and everywhere. And I had not heard of this before. I have found that it’s useful, and my daughter Mary has done it numerous times. So, it was really cool. It’s like these books are full of, like, superheroes, super villains, battling inside the kids’ minds, and yet I’m learning useful stuff here, so spider fingers. Well, Mawi, tell us, where do you even discover it? Like, I Googled it and it wasn’t all that common.

Mawi Asgedom

Yeah. So, the way I discovered it is, so with Inner Heroes Universe, I hired a team of mental health experts that I work with very closely, and my criteria for them was they have to sit down with hundreds of kids every week – like I didn’t want someone who wrote research papers off in some university, no offense to those folks who are listening, but they weren’t grounded in the reality of what kids experience every day.

And what my mental health experts told us is, the kids they see, they’re having problems because someone is messing with them and they can’t control their reaction to that, and they’re getting in a lot of trouble in school. Or, they’re having problems where they’re not able to pay attention and their mind is wandering a lot, and they’re getting in trouble for that. Or, they’re having deep anxiety and they’re afraid to go to school for any of a number of reasons.

And so, the spider fingers were, actually, created by one of my mental health experts, a woman named Carrie, came up with it, and my son uses it. I use it. But it’s really like, “How do we translate all these clinical tools that you have to go to a counselor to get them, typically, or read a dense book on mental health? And how do we translate them and make them accessible for everybody using like art?” So, like this example of a book. Here are some art with the characters and making it interesting and fun.

Pete, let me give probably my most stunning example of regulation from my career, okay?

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, please. All right.

Mawi Asgedom

I was working on the most important deal, up to that point in my life, the most important deal I’d ever worked on, and I was having a lot of problems, a lot of problems. It was going very poorly, and I was really struggling. I consider myself to be somebody who gets along with everybody, but sometimes when the stakes are really high, that other part of who we are comes out that we don’t want to acknowledge. Maybe your listeners can identify with that. Like, “Hey, I’m usually a nice person. Everybody loves me. What just happened? How come I’m having all these battles and people don’t seem to like me anymore, and I can’t get…?”

Well, a lot of times it’s because something is at stake and you have to negotiate things and you’re fighting over things. And what that does is that gets us more in that survivor brain I was talking about, and your thinking brain gets compromised. You think you’re being logical, but you’re not. So, I described all this to a friend of mine who’s a very, very wise woman named Ranjini, and I just said to her, “I don’t understand why I’m not getting any progress here?” And you know what she said to me? She’s a woman who teaches at a top business school. She didn’t give me any business advice.

She said, “I want you to start every single day praying for the people that you feel are tormenting you and the problem with this thing not moving forward.” I was like, “It ain’t going to happen. Forget about it. Why would I do that? I’m right, they’re wrong. It’s pretty simple, okay?” A neutral outsider looking into the situation, 99 out of 100 times would say, “Mawi is correct. They’re wrong.” I truly felt like that.

Maybe some of your listeners… Listener, can you identify with that? And in situations where you’re pretty sure you’re right, you’re being jacked up by some folks who shouldn’t be doing whatever they’re doing, and you’re stuck there. And the last thing you’re going to do, the last thing you’re going to do is waste a minute in the morning praying for these people. I was desperate, Pete. I was at a point of desperation where I’ve tried everything else. But I tried it, Pete. No joke. Everything moves forward within like five, six days, things start moving forward.

It turns out, unbeknownst to me, my own energy was having a lot bigger contribution than I thought. And by me praying for them, put that aside. What is that? That’s a regulation technique. That’s like I was dysregulated and didn’t know it. I always thought I was being logical. I thought I was using my best intelligence; I was right. And then this is a simple technique of taking things away from my perspective, a simple act of getting on my knees and praying for someone else who I didn’t think should be prayed for, changed my body, changed my energy, and the transaction ended up being one of the best in my career.

Pete Mockaitis

All right.

Mawi Asgedom

So, if it was just as smart as me making an Excel sheet and mapping out the pros and cons, and that was the only way to think about business, then you wouldn’t need something like Inner Heroes Universe. You wouldn’t need that world of things, but it’s not like that, right?

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s powerful. So, now, well, hey, I’m a believer in the power of prayer. But as you understand it, it’s not so much that the Almighty parted the seas for you, so much as you were putting out some, I don’t know, hostile, contentious, unpleasant, difficult, inflexible – don’t let me throw you too far under the bus here, Mawi – energies in the course of the negotiation, the conversations, with this deal, and it was just getting things sort of jammed up.

You’re like, “I don’t really know how to make progress with this guy over on their side,” is what was going on. But then through the prayer you got into a more chill vibe that you were able to have some back-and-forth and progress. Is that an accurate summary of what went down there?

Mawi Asgedom

Yeah, definitely. Another way of thinking about it was in my previous state, I had access to 70% of my intelligence. Like, my previous state had got me so worked up I thought I had access to 100%. And once I started praying, my energy shifted, I started to think differently, and I regained the 30 additional units I would need to understand where I was being inflexible, to understand, “Oh, well, if I don’t like this person, I’m going to find ways to still get it done rather than just being mad at them.” Like, you’re able to kind of make additional distinctions.

So, it wasn’t that the Almighty did this, necessarily, not that I doubt the Almighty. I think that if there is a lesson from the Almighty here, it’s that, “Hey, there might be a plank in your own eye, as the scripture says, while you’re looking at the peck of dust in somebody else’s eye,” and we have to take responsibility for that as leaders. Well, this is the same thing that we can teach a kid. If you’re upset with somebody else, don’t focus on them for a second, like, “Hey, let’s do some box breathing, let’s do some spider fingers, and then after that, we have a few strategies for you that you can use to exit the situation that are now available to you, now that you’re not completely dysregulated.”

And so, it’s similar because we all have bodies, we all have emotions, we all have feelings, and we all get stuck. The inflexible thinking is a big part of it. Inflexible thinking is a big problem that happens when you get so into somebody, like being against you, or out to get you, or the enemy for a particular thing happening, we kind of get stuck in that quicksand of inflexible thinking that I think that prayer helps out. Yeah, and I think that would be something that would work, Pete, in my opinion, for someone who is an atheist, if they took time to just pray and think about, wish good things upon that person’s the way, I would say it, and shift one’s own energy, like that kind of thing. That makes sense?

Pete Mockaitis

That is good. And when you said box breathing a couple times, so just in case folks are not familiar, Mawi, what is box breathing?

Mawi Asgedom

Yeah. So, I’m still learning a lot about this from the mental health experts, and it’s a variety of breathing techniques, like box breathing, 4-7-8 breathing, where you’re just counting your inhales and your exhales very intentionally. And you could say something like, for example, here’s this book that I have here, shaped like a box, you could say that, and you could breathe in and out, as you’re noticing the contours of the box and feeling that alongside your hands. You could count as you’re doing it.

But the point is you want to pay attention to your breathing. So, it’s all these strategies that are intended to interrupt your thinking through your body or your mind. So, for example, another one, Pete might be something like this. Hey, Pete, tell me your three favorite neighborhoods in the city of Chicago.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, sure thing. Let’s just go with East Lakeview, Wrigleyville, and Old Town.

Mawi Asgedom

Okay, so that’s an example of something called ABC mindfulness we teach kids. You just ask someone to list off three things that you know they know about. And as they’re thinking about those things, their mind kind of moves away from what they were focused on. And that’s very useful for kids where you’d be like, “Hey, tell us your favorite Pokemon.” As they’re reciting their Pokemon, their five Pokemon, or if the kid is into rollercoasters, “Tell us your five favorite rollercoasters.” They recite those rollercoasters, their bodies are calming down because they’re being distracted, and then when they come back, you can ask them to engage in the problem.

So, whether it’s the spider fingers, whether it’s the breathing techniques, whether it’s ABC mindfulness, each person listening to your podcast should have a repertoire of, like, five to six things that they can do. Like, one simple one that I like to do, that Shirzad talks about from Positive Intelligence is just take your fingers and rub them closely so you can feel the contours of your fingers very closely, and you can kind of feel it.

I would literally do that under the table at certain meetings when I was getting stressed out. When someone was saying something that I didn’t like, I would just do that, calm myself before responding. Nobody knew I was doing it because it was under the table, like while I’m sitting at a meeting, I’m calling myself, reminding myself, “Hey, let’s do a little regulation before you jump into something with somebody.” So, that’s kind of like what that world of regulation is all about. Have a few strategies that work for you.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And so, you mentioned that these books cover four areas. We’ve talked a good bit about the soothing, the regulation, which is handy if we’re stressed, overwhelmed, getting angry at folks, and not having our full intelligence. What are the three other areas?

Mawi Asgedom

Yeah. So, we picked regulation because we’re seeing so many challenges post-pandemic, with that in schools and in society at large. Another one that’s massive for today’s world, Pete, is relationship and connection isolation.

And so, two of our characters deal with…one of our characters, bad guys is, one villain is named Iso, we call him Khans, his name is Iso. Then we have Link, whose job is to connect with people. And, Pete, if there’s anything we learned during the pandemic, I would say it’s that we need each other. We need human connection.

And the Surgeon General has said that loneliness and being isolated is the same as smoking, or just being a heavy smoker in terms of what it does for your life expectancy, for example. It’s a devastating kind of issue. So, I would say relationships are a key area. Like, if regulation is the first area, relationships would be the second area, and I can double-click on that if you like.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, yeah, so could you just give us a pro tip or tool that fits in there, sort of like we talked about spider fingers for the regulation? Any relationship power tools?

Mawi Asgedom

Yeah, definitely. A couple power tools I would say is that, one is that pay attention to who your real champions are. What I mean by that is there’s three to five people in your life, Pete, and in every listener’s life that, for whatever reason, these people have been there for you above and beyond what you might even think is deserved, are there.

These people are your ultimate champions. You might view yourself, let’s say, you just like have amazing self-concept, and you think of yourself as a 10 out of 10. These people think you’re a 50 out of 10. They throw opportunities your way that are 50 out of 10. They treat you like that. And God has provided these people to each of us, I would say it’s like angels that help us, but a lot of times we don’t really value them. We don’t connect with them. We don’t thank them.

And following the 80/20 rule of understanding who these people are, really over-invest in them, I would say, is a top relationship strategy. And I think everyone here can think about two or three folks in their network that have really done that for them. Another one, Pete, is that one thought that’s been really helpful to me, professionally, is that I know a lot of people, I’ve made a lot of friends professionally, it was hard for me to admit, Pete, that my relationships were atrophying, that my relationships were, over time, depreciating.

I still know a lot of people, but I haven’t talked to that person in seven years. I haven’t talked to that person in four years. They moved to a different country and they now have like, you know, they’re busy caring for their kids, or whatever it might be, or they did this. And the reality is if I called them, they might be like, “Why is Mawi calling me?” because they thought either someone died, or you just haven’t talked for so long. So, we have these rich relationships over our time but then understanding that, like, “Hey, we have to continuously intentionally renew and build up our relationships.”

And so, I was talking to you before, briefly before our interview, and I was telling you, for example, I joined a club that does cost money, a decent amount of money, that has been really helpful to me over the last year and a half, it’s called 3i, that has really helped me connect with people all over the country, really fun, and it connects me with people that are more in my current stage of life.

Like, I sold my company, I’m post-job right now, really, in how I live my life. And being able to connect with a lot of folks who are in that same kind of stage of life, and have some of the same interests as me, has been a great fit for me. It doesn’t mean I don’t have my old friends or that I’m not connecting with folks, but I kind of like analyze, currently, from my current stage of life, what do I need?

And I would ask every listener to do that. And I would just ask them, for your current stage of life, like what are the new relationships you have to create? Where have things atrophied? Where have things depreciated? Where do you need to step up and really invest in it? I have four kids, Pete, if they were to ask me what’s the single most important thing that I can tell them, other than their life philosophy around their faith and things like that that will help them the most, it’s the people they have around them, without any doubt. That’s the thing in life that makes you happiest and most successful, is having those relationships from mental health, from professional, from happiness.

And so, that’s why we focus on this area. It’s critical for kids. A lot of mental health challenges are rooted in relationship challenges, or accelerated by them. And as adults, we have to nurture our relationships, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, we got regulation. We got relationships. What’s next?

Mawi Asgedom

I’d say a growth mindset is critical. Growth mindset has been defined many ways by many different people. I actually had a chance to work with Dr. Carol Dweck, who wrote the book Mindset. I created an online class with her, went to her office at Stanford, and so I feel like I got really a bird’s-eye view of just everything that was happening at the industry, but also learning directly from her and her team.

And a growth mindset is really the idea that our skills and abilities, they’re not fixed. They’re malleable. They can always grow, that we can get better at anything. And the fixed mindset is that we can’t grow, we can’t get better at things. And we want to teach kids these concepts because a lot of them think they’re not as good at math, or something like social anxiety where, “I don’t have any friends.” Well, we can help you make a friend.

Like, if any of your listeners who are anxious, for example, there’s a lot of anxiety out there, one of the most powerful therapies and solutions is you don’t run from the things that make you anxious, you get exposure to it. A lot of the counselors we work with, they actually help people take little steps to gain exposure to those things so they can build those muscles and grow.

So, professionally, the best one example I can give you, Pete, of how this mindset really mattered for me, and I’d ask your listeners to think about this, is when I was selling my company, I engaged with DLA Piper to help me sell the company. It’s one of the top law firms in the country. And there was a part of me that wanted to think “I’m just going to let DLA Piper handle this, okay, because that’s what I’m paying them for, they’re the best.”

Then, one of my friends, who’s a lawyer, who I really respect, a really smart guy, works at a private equity firm, and one of my high school friends, he told me, “Hey, you need to understand every single word in that contract even if you didn’t go to law school. Like, it could be hundreds of pages. I don’t care. You have to take it upon yourself as an intelligent person who believes they can learn about anything.”

So, Pete, I did that. Like, I made sure, if I had questions, I got them all answered. And actually, you’d be surprised how many people I found out signed something without having understood everything that’s in it, like, “Well, I’m agreeing to do this for this amount of money.” Well, it’s only because I had a growth mindset that I was able to do that, that I knew about growth mindset. Don’t be intimidated. Don’t be afraid. Don’t say things like, “I didn’t go to law school, so I can’t understand this.”

Well, if something’s important, assume you can get better at it and learn about it. And that actually made the deal a lot better because then I could ask a lot of questions and unearth sources of value and not be intimidated. So, I’d ask the listeners, is there an area where you’re currently intimidated, or you think you can’t learn it, or you think it’s only for the pros to learn about and you can’t do it? That’s a fixed mindset. You should assume, even if you don’t have the same knowledge as a lawyer, you can get smart enough, like you can get smarter, you can get better at it, to be able to make some progress in that critical area.

So, that’s why a growth mindset is critical for kids and adults. We all have to be aggressive, avid learners. I actually take it personally, Pete, even with my kids, they’re like, “Well, calculus, they’ll take that when they’re 17.” I’m like, “Nope, I’ll take that challenge. I’m going to teach my five-year-old the basics of calculus. I’m going to get a couple boxes, and I’m going to show them how to calculate the area outside, then we’re going to add those up, and that’s basically what calculus is, kid. And you’re going to be able to use this to estimate how much water is in that water tower in a few years when you take a class on this.”

But if you have that orientation that, “I’m so committed to believing that things can be learned,” that I will even take on the challenge of assuming I can start to teach a four-year-old calculus or a six-year-old calculus, I’m not going to back down. It becomes part of one’s professional orientation and life philosophy.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s super. And when it comes to growth mindset, it’s funny, I think that in some ways, folks think, “Well, yeah, okay, I understand there’s a growth mindset, there’s a fixed mindset, and the growth mindset means I believe that I can grow, learn, change, and improve. And fixed mindset believes, ‘Nope, you’re either good or bad at a given thing.’”

And so, what I think is interesting, as I’ve reflected on this lately, is it’s a lot more than just philosophically aligning yourself to the notion that, “Yes, a growth mindset is true in terms of what humanity is capable of and an individual,” but rather like a day-in, day-out experience or mental discipline of, like, sometimes something happens, like, “Oh, I feel like a loser. I’m just not any good at this.”

And it’s funny, like, I will hear myself say these things to myself, and I know that that’s “wrong,” like, “Oh, that sounds like a fixed mindset. That’s incorrect. I’m supposed to have a growth mindset.” So, do you have any pro tips if folks are like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know what a growth mindset is, but sometimes I just totally fall back into thinking about things in a fixed mindset kind of a way”? Any hot takes for when you’re in the heat of battle there, what to do?

Mawi Asgedom

Yeah, no, definitely. It’s one of those terms that’s become a platitude that, like, everyone, “Oh yeah, growth mindset, I have a growth mindset.” A lot of folks have no idea what it is or how to think about it. And, quite frankly, there’s a lot of definitions of it flying around out there, so I was particularly grateful that I had the opportunity to work with Dr. Dweck and do a lot of research on it in my own life.

Pete, one of the most useful ways I think about it that’s really helpful is think of a circle, like imagine my fist here is a circle. Let’s call that the can-do circle. That represents all the things we can currently do right now. Like, I can speak a certain level of Spanish. I know how to make these kinds of friends. And what we teach kids and we find to be really powerful is then to tell them, “Hey, look, outside of that is a not-yet circle, there’s things you haven’t mastered yet right.”

And when you’re feeling that feeling of frustration and despair, what we teach kids is that’s actually like a really exciting thing, and that’s where we can train ourselves to say, “Hey, that emotion that I’m feeling, that despair that I’m feeling, that’s the signal for, eventually, maybe not that second, we’re going to process that, but that’s where our inner dragon slayer is going to come out, and say, “I can grow through this and pass this.” It’s like an exciting thing.

And also understanding, as human beings, it’s only normal to fall back to the can. Everything you just described is perfectly part of the human experience. It’s, “I have a challenge.” “My business is not getting the sales I want it to get.” “I’m not getting the promotions.” “I’m trying to learn this new programming language, and I’m not learning it.” And that’s when we have to ask ourselves, “Hey, are we going to push through?”

And so, having those visuals of the can-do circle that’s right there, but then right outside of is that not-yet circle, and then what I like to do, Pete, is I like to set a small goal into my not-yet circle. Like, let’s say I’m trying to grow sales. I’m not achieving my sales goals. I’m really frustrated. I’m feeling bad.

Well, what I can do is I can set a small goal into my not-yet circle, and go into what we call the almost-circle, just outside your can-do circle, it’s right there, and we’ll set a goal, “You know what? I’m just going to reach out to seven people who I’ve already worked with in the past who know me, to get advice about how I can think about this and how I can expand this. Maybe some of those will turn into sales, maybe some of those won’t.” And then from there, I’ll continue to grow. So, I find, Pete, that taking those little actions in the almost-circle, just outside the can-do circle, helps us to continuously grow at the margins and the edges, and that helps a lot.

One of the tools we taught kids in my previous company that we still teach kids was we’d say, “Set a MAD goal, a measurable, attainable with a deadline, a goal that’s measurable, attainable, and with a deadline.” Smart goals are too confusing. There’s too many to remember, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

There’s five letters. You can’t deal with that.

Mawi Asgedom

It’s too many. It’s too many. What do you think this is? I’m going to have a fixed mindset there and say, “I’m going to go to MAD goals, there’s only three, reduce that,“ but that’s what I’d say. Set a MAD goal just outside your can-do circle and get into it that not-yet circle.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And then the fourth area?

Mawi Asgedom

Fourth area is my favorite, Pete. You heard me talk about the turbo button for a long time. And what that is it’s this area of agency, that as human beings, we’re meant to be agents. That there’s all these external thin

And all that does is it takes away our agency. It makes us feel like we can’t do anything.

And so, it’s a skill, it’s a skill to constantly put oneself back into what we call the turbo zone, like hitting your turbo button, taking action, being able to move by focusing on what you can do. And we teach kids this because a lot of times kids feel like they’re powerless. They live in a world that adults create, and adults are making all the rules, tell them where to go, they got to raise your hand to go to the bathroom, they got to sit in a certain place, they got to eat the like adults do, so they feel like they have no agency, but we show them how to capture that agency and how to recognize that.

I actually thought that one of the most provocative things I ever heard in the world of leadership was when Stephen Covey, in his book, I believe it was The 7 Habits, he says, “The person who takes action, the person with high agency, they’re not a little bit more effective, they’re 5,000 times more effective.” It’s a massive shift, which is a tall claim to make, I mean, to go from twice as effective.

And I actually have found that to be true, that when we’re not acting as agents, Pete, we lose all access to our intelligence, to our relationships, to our connections, to our problem-solving because we’re thinking about something outside of us, by definition, that we don’t control. And so, being able to shift back into agency land is a critical and fundamental tool for any professional who wants to accomplish a lot of things in their life.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s cool. And I want to hear your favorite perspectives on how that’s implemented, but one thing I find really handy is if I’m just sort of like, you know, tired, not feeling it, unmotivated, stressed, under stress, whatever, like all the things. I guess, you know, “Hey, there’s some self-regulation.“ But the question I like to ask myself is, “How can I make all this suck 1% less?”

Mawi Asgedom

Ah, I love it.

Pete Mockaitis

Because when I’m in that space, I don’t feel like dreaming big dreams. I don’t feel like much is possible, but I know there’s always a little something I can do. It’s like, “Well, you know what, I can drink a glass of water. You know what, I can stretch. You know what, it’s dreary and rainy outside, and my eyeballs would appreciate some light, so I’m just going to point my eyes at a light bulb for a little while, and that’s a little bit rejuvenating.”

And, sure enough, I find that you just build that momentum, and so it’s like little thing by little thing by little thing. It’s like, “You know what? I’m feeling okay. Let’s go do something.” And likewise, I think that’s often the case with any number of domains. It’s like, “It’s true, we don’t have control over worldwide geopolitics. We don’t. But what do we have control over? Oh, well, I guess I can tidy up this desk, and then I feel like I’m in control. I’m ready to rock and roll.” So, anyway, that’s how I think about agency. What are some of your favorite moves?

Mawi Asgedom

It’s a big one. And you’re right, a lot of agency, the good news is that we can actually plan for a lot of these things. Like, for example, for our podcast today, I know I just perform better in general for anything that involves other people, anything that’s recorded, anything when I’m speaking, if I’ve done a couple things.

One of those things is like if I’ve done a workout. So, I always do a workout before I have any, and that’s an act of agency. Like, I don’t have to wait till I’m tired, or depleted, or having to recover. I just do that, and so I find that even 15 minutes is better than nothing. When you’re talking about like, “Oh, I feel like I can’t do enough,” 15 minutes makes a big difference. If I really get my heartrate up for 15 minutes, bam, I’ll just do that in a hotel room. If I don’t have any weights with me, I’ll do squats, pushups, some circuit training in a room real quick.

Pete, I have this master account, like Google Doc for my life that I recommend to people. It has five or six tabs, but one of those tabs is things I’m grateful for, not just made-up stuff, like, “Oh, yeah, I got to be grateful.” Like, things that I’m genuinely, like, “Wow, like I’m really grateful for…” I have one of the tabs, Pete, has my worst-performing financial year of my history since I was 22. And the reason I look at that is I can’t help but feel tremendous gratitude. I say, “Hey, God, I’m not any smarter today than I was before. I’m not working any harder.”

And that Mawi got that response, got that, and then this other Mawi got this, I’m just going to choose to be grateful for that. And when you see those stark numbers of dismal, abysmal, like, I’m looking at cell phone plans I can switch to, to try to save an extra $3 a month to survive kind of thing, then you feel really grateful because you remember that.

So, I feel you can build things into your life, and I try to look at that Google Sheet each morning while I look at the different tabs, including where I’ve been grateful, where things have been challenging but where things have gone my way. Like, I have a meditation in there, Pete, that I really like, that I look at each day.

And so, I think we can exercise a lot of turbo and agency in recognizing each day presents its own challenges, and we can also put some things in place to boost ourselves each day, to elevate our things each day. There’s certain music that I listen to. It’s not accidental that where I’m doing this call, like the way I structured my office, Pete, is, it’s like out by some windows because I love light. And there’s a guitar right behind me because I’ll screw around on that a little bit.

So, I try to build into my work environment that, if I needed to, I can just look out the window and feel a little happier, because I love light. I got a little guitar I can screw around with really quick, if I’m in one of those moods you were talking about, it’s literally two feet from me. I’ll just grab it. I’ll strum something really quick. I’ll feel better. And so, I think these are the kind of things that I would encourage your listeners to think about how can you surround yourself with those little things? 

One thing I’ll ask myself, too, Pete, is for any situation, if I have the wherewithal and I feel stuck, I’ll just say, “Okay, how can I turbo this thing?” And that just means, “How can I operate from an internal locus of control instead of external locus of control?” Because when you operate from the internal locus of control, it’s like you’ve got that turbo energy. Like, those movies where someone hits a button in the car and it zooms and flies, has all this energy that no one knew was there until that button got hit. Well, I’ll ask myself, that’s a good metaphor for me, Pete. I’ll say, “How can I turbo this thing? Like, I’m stuck right now. I feel bad.”

And it could be, “Play that guitar real quick. Look out the window. Take a walk.” Like, all those little things. It could be like, “Call a friend.” That’s a big one. “Call a friend” is a huge one. They’ll change a different perspective. I’ll be like, “Oh, that’s a good point. I hadn’t thought of that.” So, I think we all got to develop that toolkit to kind of boost ourselves in those moments, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mawi Asgedom

All right, Pete. So, I know you got a lot of listeners out there, Pete, who are at different stages of their life, and now that I’m becoming a few years, I’m going to be 50, Pete. I got four kids. I’ve got a kid who’s a teenager. So, you know what happens when you get a little older, Pete? You start to think, “Man, what are some of the things that I wish I would have known?” So, I actually wrote some of those down when I was a little bit younger, that I would love to share with your listeners, just purely as an act of like, hey, maybe this is the only time I’ll connect with them, and this will help somebody out there.

A couple things that I think are interesting, and this is random, okay, random stuff that I came across. Pete, I think it’s really interesting that my biggest financial mistakes I’ve ever made in my life have been after I had my biggest financial wins. There’s something that lulls your brain, I believe. Like, right after I got on the Oprah Winfrey Show when I was younger, and I had a big book deal with a publisher in the same year, I was on top of the world, I had more money than I ever thought, I made the dumbest financial moves, and it wasn’t that I bought a Ferrari. I wish I would have. I just made really bad investments and things that I thought would work out and they pretty much all went to zero. I felt like an idiot.

And I say that with humility to all your listeners, to say, “Hey, right when you have your biggest win, be extra humble and talk to your friends.” What would have saved me was if I would have talked to my friends more, smart friends. Talk to your friends, take your time, don’t rush. Just don’t rush. You don’t got to do anything. So, that’s one, Pete.

And another one that I would say is, in terms of entrepreneurship, I’d say my biggest leadership mistake, like CEO mistake, was being attached to things that weren’t working for too long. Meaning, like I would work on the same thing for five years and not pivot when the data was really clear that it wasn’t getting traction.

And that thing I had in my heart from being a former refugee of never give up, it actually can be really bad idea. There are times to give up. When the data is all pointing in the same way, it’s foolish to keep doing it again and again and again. You should pivot. 

It doesn’t mean you’re a failure. It doesn’t mean you’re dumb. It doesn’t mean that what you did should have never been done. It just means you’re being intelligent. And I didn’t understand that, Pete, because I was trained to always be a hard worker, and I believed one should never give up, and I believed if I could just work harder, things would work out, and that just was fundamentally wrong in some of those situations.

And then in terms of I would say the thing that helped me the most, conversely that is, where I showed the most wisdom was, I noticed in a couple key instances when something was working better than it should have. And then once I saw that it was working better, I over-invested in that. That’s how my company got into online education, and we became the market leader in social-emotional learning from an online perspective, where we trained more students than anybody else before we sold to ACT.

But that was all an industry I knew nothing about in terms of being online but I kept kind of reinvesting in it as the data came in. So, I’d say it’s the converse of what I learned with the first business is, it’s really like, be very curious and listen to the data, and don’t be over-attached emotionally, particularly if you’re passionate about something. Be willing to shift, be willing to shift, and I say that because I’d hate for there to be a brilliant listener out there who could have so much impact had they pivoted a year earlier, two years earlier.

And then they might think, “Well, I just wasn’t cut out for that business. I wasn’t good enough to succeed in that business,” or “I couldn’t make it.” Actually, that’s not true. You could have made it. You were smart enough. You just need to adjust a little quicker, that’s all, and you would have been fine. That’s why I point that out. That’s just something that I experienced as an entrepreneur.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Mawi Asgedom

One that has been very useful to me and my four kids, are those experiments, Pete, that basically show how addicting variable rewards are.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, yeah.

Mawi Asgedom

So, if you give a mouse some cheese, and it’s predictable, it’ll stop asking for the cheese. It just won’t. But if you vary when it gets the cheese, it’ll keep hitting that lever until it dies basically. And I show that to my kids because I wanted them to know that’s how their phones are set up. Like, all those notifications that come up, every time I sign up for a notification, they’re giving permission to somebody else to send them cheese and addict them at that person’s choosing for their own interest.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Mawi Asgedom

In the world of fiction, which I’m a big fantasy science fiction advocate, there’s a tremendous author named Robert Jordan. Really sad kind of thing though. He wrote this 15-book series but he died after the 14th book, so somebody else had to finish the book 15. It’s like a huge mega-seller. Actually, Amazon is making a series of his called Wheel of Time. You can watch a couple season of that. It’s really cool.

But his best book that he wrote, in my opinion, is called Dragon Reborn. And the reason I like that story, Pete, is it’s just an incredible fairy tale for adults.

And then, in terms of personal development, the book that I think had the most impact on me, although I didn’t like it the first time I read it, I really didn’t. I thought it was just boring, I couldn’t get through it. But then, I read it again, and I mentioned it before, but I really liked that The 7 Habits book. I like that The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. That book makes a lot of sense to me, Pete. 

Pete Mockaitis

Well, tell us, do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Mawi Asgedom

A lot of us end up doing what we’re doing because we thought it’d make our parents happy. We thought it’s what we should do. We felt like we had to do it. 

And I’m at a spot now where a lot of my friends are asking, like, “Hey, did I even want to do this? Like, why did I do this in the first place? I never wanted to do this.” It’s been pretty tough for me to kind of help my friends think through that. So, I’d say, particularly for those who are younger, but at any age, really like, are you doing what you really want to do? Because we only live once. And it would be really sad to have spent that entire time not at all doing what you want to do. To me, that’s sad. And so, think, take some time to reflect, and think about, “What do you really want to do? What is it?” And it’s not something that anybody else can answer. Nobody else on the planet can answer that other than the listener who’s hearing that question, and being honest with yourself.

And then if you’re not doing what you want to do, well, what are you going to do about it? It doesn’t mean you have to quit your job, but what are you going to do about it? And being honest with yourself about that, because that’s been one of the joys of my life, Pete, I would say, is I have gotten to do what I want to do, and it’s been a joy to like work with kids and to feel like I’m doing what I wanted to do. Even when I was broke, I could wake up and say, “Hey, I’m doing what I want to do,” which gave me a lot of joy.

Pete Mockaitis

Beautiful. Well, Mawi, this is fun. Keep doing your awesomeness, hitting the turbo button, being an Inner Hero. This is awesome.

Mawi Asgedom

Hey, fantastic to be on with you again, Pete, and I look forward to the next time, maybe episode 1,742 we’d be back on.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s a good one.

Mawi Asgedom

That’s a good one, right? We’ll be back on. Thank you. Keep it up, Pete.

944: Becoming a Leader that People Want to Follow with Jon Rennie

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Former submarine officer Jon Rennie outlines the leadership principles that make people want to follow you.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to deepen your connection with your team
  2. Why to let your colleagues fail more 
  3. Your fastest path to standing out 

About Jon

Jon is the Co-Founder, President & CEO of Peak Demand Inc., a components manufacturer for electrical utilities. He is a former U.S. Navy Nuclear Submarine Officer who made seven deployments during the end of the Cold War.

Before starting Peak Demand, he led eight manufacturing businesses for three global companies. He is the author of three best-selling leadership books and hosts the Deep Leadership podcast.

Resources Mentioned

Jon Rennie Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Jon, welcome.

Jon Rennie

It’s good to be here, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

I am excited to have this conversation. I’d love for you to kick us off with a riveting tale from your days in a nuclear submarine during the Cold War. Bring us into the scene.

Jon Rennie

Well, can you imagine 155 guys getting on board a submarine, then locking the hatches for 100 days, where you deploy out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean for 100 days, and you’re with the people that you deploy with, you have to get all these very difficult things done? We had 24 nuclear missiles, a nuclear reactor, and the average age was about 20 years old, and I did that seven different times in my life. So, it’s kind of an interesting experience. It’s certainly a great place to learn how to deal with people, how to get along with people.

Pete Mockaitis

Absolutely. And, jeez, you know, Jon, do people ever just go nuts down there? Like, how does that work? How do we prevent for that? Because that seems like there’s a reasonable probability that at least a couple of those folks would just mentally lose it. I don’t know if I could handle it. Like, how do you train for that?

Jon Rennie

I don’t know if they train for it, but they do screen, they do a lot of psychological evaluations, but here’s how they really test you. On your first deployment, they actually have you climb inside of a torpedo tube all the way with a grease pencil to write your name on the end, on the outer door of the torpedo tube, and then they shut the inner door while you’re in there. And that’s their test to see if you’re claustrophobic.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, so you’ve got a couple books here in terms of sharing what business professionals can learn from sailors and their experience in submarines.

Could you give us a cool example of a story, of a principle that you know you’re right, you teach about it, and how it really came to life and transformed someone in their profession, or, in particular, into a leader worth following?

Jon Rennie

So, one of the big things about being on a submarine is that there’s a shared level of responsibility, so every sailor is critical to the operation of a submarine at sea, and no person is more important than another. So, we have a shared responsibility to operate the submarine correctly, complete the mission and get home safely.

Now, the other side of it is we have a shared vulnerability, so if anything goes wrong, if your most junior sailor turns the wrong valve, everyone perishes. So, there’s not like one person dies, we all die. So, there’s a shared level of responsibility and vulnerability that is kind of unique to just about any other organization.

And you can imagine, when I came out of the military and went into the corporate environment, I didn’t get that same feeling.

There were certain people that had certain privileges and other people that had other privileges. And when things went bad, the people with the lower privileges are the ones that get laid off. So, the manufacturing workers or the call center people, they’re the ones that always got the brunt of whenever there were layoffs.

But when I started running manufacturing businesses after I got out of the Navy, I took that philosophy of “We’re all in it together and we need to have a shared level of responsibility and accountability to the business results.” In fact, my second belief, “All in the Same Boat,” because, literally, I learned leadership in a boat, all of us together working towards a common objective.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And could you share with us a tale of a time where you shared these principles with folks and someone really latched on and incorporated it, made it their own, and put it into practice, and saw some cool stuff happen?

Jon Rennie

Yeah, my first plant that I took over, I was young, 32 years old, I was the youngest plant manager in that plant’s history. And I came there and I noticed that there was an us-and-them attitude in the manufacturing plant. So, the hourly people kind of stuck to themselves, they had their own bathroom, they had their own areas where they congregated, and the salaried people had their own areas, too. And I kept thinking to myself, “How do we become one team?” We have sort of two separate areas, we live two separate lives, we didn’t have a lot of shared experiences.

And I wanted to get back to those days, like, for example, on a submarine, you stood long watches, six hours at a time, with your coworkers, and you really got to know them, they understood what your challenges, you understood their challenges. We just didn’t have that in the corporate world in this manufacturing plant.

So, I implemented this process called Fridays on the floor, where the first Friday of every month, I went out on the shop floor for four hours, and I work, and every month, I go to a different department and I work. And so, I’d actually operate the equipment, I would get to know the people, they would get to know me, and I learned that there was a tremendous amount of information on the shop floor that most of the salaried, most of the manager, they weren’t even aware of.

So, it was like there were two different worlds we live in. We weren’t one boat; we were two separate boats. And when I started doing that, I kept learning more and more about the way things operated, and the concerns that people have, tooling that was bad, procedures that were bad, all these things that I learned when I was doing it. And when I would come back and talked to the other managers, they didn’t understand my passion, they didn’t understand what I was talking about.

So, over time, we actually created Fridays on the floor for all of our management team, so we all would go out every Friday, we’d rotate different areas. And then after those four hours, we’d come back into one of the meeting rooms, and we would talk about what we learned. And what was interesting is that we basically started bridging that gap between the hourly and salaried people on that site, and we started fixing all these problems that have been going on for years and years that kind of have been ignored.

So, just by doing that, by getting out on the shop floor, and actually spending time with people, we actually built that bond, we built a connection, and we sort of built a common view of the businesses. And so, we ended up on that business, well, I was there for almost four years, and we were able to just improved our processes, reduced our scrap. We ended up having record-level of sales, record-levels of profitability, and a very high-performing operation, and we became sort of the top factory in our division.

But it was all about connecting the people. Instead of having two worlds, we brought them together into one world. And this came straight from the ideas from the military.

Pete Mockaitis

That is good. Back in episode 149, we had a guest S. Chris Edmonds, who said, “People in the organization see stuff that’s dumb all the time.” We see stuff that’s dumb, and then, whether or not that gets shared or implemented upon is, I guess, there’s all kinds of variables that might speak to it in terms of what’s the culture, what’s the psychologically safety in the organization.

And what’s fun about your approach there is we don’t actually have to rely on someone speaking up to get the information. And, hopefully, as you do that over some reps, we build some real trust and communication lines that go both ways so that people will just say, “Hey, our mallet is worn down.” “Oh, got you. Okay. Well, boom, here’s a new one.” So, you see these sorts of ongoing improvements in the communication, the culture, and the ability to fix the stuff they see that’s dumb all the more quickly and readily instead of waiting for years to get a fresh mallet.

Jon Rennie

Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing, too, is I think we built shared experiences, and that’s one thing that we had on the submarine, is we had all these shared experiences where I’d noticed, when I got to the corporate world, they had different experiences about what work life was like. A lot of people on the shop floor didn’t even know what the people in the office did, they’re like, “I don’t know. There’s just a bunch of people over there. I don’t know what they do.”

And so, part of it was them getting to know what we did every day. And I think that was one of the eye-opening things about this Fridays on the floor, is that the people were actually thankful, they were like, “I never knew what you guys did all day long. I never knew what marketing did. I didn’t know what accounting did. I just knew there’s a bunch of people in the office, they got to sit. I had to stand all day.” Really interesting, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, so I want to hear about you got a few books. The title I love the most was I Have the Watch: Becoming a Leader Worth Following. A fantastic subtitle. Generally speaking, how does one become a leader worth following?

Jon Rennie

Well, it comes with the title, which is “I Have the Watch.” I was a Naval officer, and part of that, when you took over the watch, you’re responsible for the mission and the people. So, if I was the officer of the deck, for example, I was responsible for six hours for the mission of that submarine and everybody inside of it.

So, in the case of, maybe, the midwatch, the captain was asleep in his rack down in his estate room, and I was responsible for that shift, everything that happened on that shift for those six hours. And so, it’s the idea of mission and people, and that’s really critical, because a lot of times people get promoted into management jobs, and they sort of go back to what they were used to doing, maybe as an individual contributor. They do emails, they go to meetings, and they forget that it’s about the mission and the people.

And so, the idea of “I Have the Watch” is that you have responsibility, you take ownership of the mission, you take ownership of the people, and that’s a really critical part of leadership. And a big part of this book I talk about is that leadership is a people business. It’s about people. So, if you are doing and not leading, then you’re really not doing your job as a leader. So, your job is to lead, your primary function is to lead.

And it’s different than when you’re an individual contributor, like maybe an engineer or an accountant. When you become the manager, you have leadership responsibilities, and sometimes we forget about that. Oftentimes, I saw it in corporate that people forgot their people responsibilities.

Pete Mockaitis

Could you share with us an example of a common people-responsibility that people forget?

Jon Rennie

So, the big thing I saw is busyness. So, we stay busy as managers, and in a lot of cases, it’s fear-based, where managers really don’t want to deal with people because people are messy. I always say that, too, people are messy so they don’t want to deal with it, so, “It’s easier to be in my comfort zone and answer emails, or be on the phone all day, or be in conference rooms all day than going out to the uncomfortable place where my people work, and they may have complaints, or they may have concerns.”

And maybe you’re overloaded, maybe you got a lot of things on your plate, and you don’t want to spend that time getting out and talking to the people so you isolate yourself. And I see a lot of managers, in my 22 years in corporate, I saw the managers isolating themselves, and mostly it was fear-based. They just didn’t want to take the time and listen to the challenges that their employees are having.

And so, I always challenge managers to get out, to go where your people are. It’s an essential part of what we do, is to get out of our offices and spend time to where our people are. So, I have a manufacturing company that I run, and in the afternoons, I always push myself away from my desk, and I go out. I pretty much can work any job on the shop floor, so I’ll just jump on the line and help out the employees. And I’m not there to help, I don’t really do a lot helping, but I’m there to listen, I’m there to talk, and I’m there to communicate because that’s really what’s important. We have to be present as leaders.

Pete Mockaitis

Now, Jon, I’m wondering, so manufacturing is really cool because, well, one, it’s just fun to watch how stuff gets built and it’s unfolding along the process. It’s a beautiful thing to witness.

If folks are in other industries that are a little bit less hands-on or tactile, how might we implement that with regard to that joining together on the frontline and observing? I’m just sort of imagining, I’m thinking about my audio people, like, “So, how do I hop in on that?” It’s like, “So, you’re many miles away from me, and you’re doing audio stuff and software, which I appreciate, I love it.” How might I apply some of these Jon principles in these contexts?

Jon Rennie

So, we’ve seen a lot with remote and hybrid work these days, and the concept, by the way, is not something that I developed. It’s called Gemba, it’s part of the Lean Manufacturing principles that come from Toyota. And the principle of Gemba is to go where the value is added. And, usually, in the case of any type of business where most of your people are, that’s where the value is added. So, you want to go to where your people are.

So, now the question is, “What do you do with hybrid and remote work?” Well, you have a normal check-in process. So, you have a check-in process where, in this case, I would say probably more like once a week where you check in on individuals, and you have a one-on-one, and you say, “How are things going? How are things going with this project?” And you have that chance to be able to touch base. It’s a little different than pushing yourself away from your desk and walking out to where your people are.

So, it’s the idea of Gemba where the value is added, go where the value is added, and it’s going to be different for every type of business.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Thank you. I guess I’m also thinking about sort of screen-sharing type stuff, like, “Hey, here’s what’s up. Here’s a software I use, etc.” and they could just behold, “Oh, what’s going on there? Oh, wow, that’s really cool.” It’s like, “Wow.” But I think you could still learn some things, like, “Wow, it seems like you’re spending a lot of time dealing with this.” Like, “Yeah, man, we get the audio, it’s a mess.” It’s like, “Oh, I’m sorry. I had no idea. Maybe I should be sending guests microphones,” and we do.

Okay. Cool. You’ve got a number of interesting turns of phrase, which I like to dig into a little bit. What do you mean when you suggest that we let people fail?

Jon Rennie

Failure is a powerful teaching tool. We don’t like to fail, right? So, as humans, we don’t want to fail. We want to succeed in everything we do. One of the things the Navy taught us was that was the best way to learn was to fail. And the way they did it was they put you in a position as junior officer of the watch, so you would have like an officer of the deck, and you have a junior officer of the deck.

And so, when you were junior officer of the deck, you were under the supervision of a more senior watch stander. And so, typically, then you take that junior position, and they would throw all sorts of different casualties at you – flooding, fire, you name it, an incoming torpedo. And they wanted to see how you fought the ship as a junior watch stander. And, inevitably, they would throw everything at you, and you would fail because it was impossible. They threw too many things at you.

And then they would stop the drill, we’d get the ship safe, and they would start talking to you, “What do you think you did right? What do you think you did wrong?” And it was the teaching session, the coaching session, and through that, we became better watch standers because we failed, we learned, and we got better at each of these individual tasks.

Now, what do we do in corporate a lot of times? And one of the things I noticed, kind of coming into corporate, is that we take our really difficult jobs and we give them to our senior people because we don’t want any mistakes, we don’t want failure. We take our junior people and we give them grunt work, and we make them do grunt work until you’ve been around long enough to take on a more important task.

And I think we miss out on opportunities to give younger people challenging assignments and a mentor to help them through that process, so they get exposure to the difficult things in business instead of just doing grunt work. The problem when you give a junior employee grunt work for two years is that they get frustrated.

They might come into your company very excited, very happy to be there, with a lot of passion, and that goes away as they continue to just do stuff that’s beneath maybe their skillsets, or beneath the things that they trained for in college, or maybe they got a certification in something that they never got a chance to use.

So, I really do believe that we need to allow our employees to fail in a controlled manner if we want them to learn and develop and become better.

Pete Mockaitis

Can you give us some examples in practice of folks failing in controlled manner, specifically in terms of what’s a person’s normal responsibilities versus new stretch responsibilities? And how is that controlled manner executed?

Jon Rennie
So, in my case, I’m always looking for leadership potential in employees, like someone that can maybe step up to the next level. And so, one of the things I like to do is to give them a stretch assignment. So, this might be anything from, “Develop a marketing literature for this new product that we’re coming out,” or, “Give me a market study for this particular region for this product,” or, “Lead this effort to setup pricing for this new product.”

So, I’ll give them a stretch assignment that might be outside, which is almost always outside their comfort zone, and then I want to get a chance to meet with them and assess how they do with that, so how did they with the project that was outside their comfort zone. And you learn a lot from those sessions, so you get a lot of feedback. A lot of times, the employee is excited, they get an opportunity to do something different. They’re going to mess up and it’s a great chance for coaching.

You find some employees aren’t ready to step up, and they even say that, like, “Wow, that was way beyond what I want to do. I’m maybe not interested in that.” And others are just energized by it, “Can I do it again? This was fun. This was what I want to do in my career.” So, I think finding great employees and giving them stretch assignments is a great way to evaluate their skills and give them a chance to do something kind of exciting and different.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, then with the marketing study, for example, I suppose if they give you a terrible study, nothing disastrous has happened there, it’s just like, “Okay, we’re not going to use this information to make any decisions,” like nobody has died, injured, or millions of dollars have been destroyed. Like, they just said, “Okay, you’ve produced a document that is of no value,” so that is a failure, but it’s controlled in the sense that no major damage has been done. Is that how you think about it?

Jon Rennie

Yeah, I think so. And, again, the more you get a chance to see somebody in action, the more you’re going to give them more responsibility that may have higher risks associated with it. But, yeah, so you do where failure is not going to be fatal.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, so failure is not going to be fatal. And then you’re sharing with them great feedback associated with, “Hey, thanks for taking a crack at this marketing study. Here are some ways you can make that useful for us, etc.”

Jon Rennie

And also, too, is the feedback of learning from them, like, “How did it go? Where did you struggle? Where did you have a hard time finding information? How do you think you did on this?” Just hearing their experience helps you understand kind of their mindset going into it and coming out of it, and how you can coach them to even be better.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And do you have pro tips for how you do deliver that coaching?

Jon Rennie

I think it’s kind of being honest. I think being honest is really important. Obviously, you’ve got to be sensitive to people’s feelings. I’m maybe a little more sensitive to that. I don’t want to be too harsh but I do think we need to give them the honest feedback. And I would tell you, I’ve had people where I’d given them stretch assignments, and they have failed, and when I say to them, “This isn’t really working out,” and they know it’s not working out, they’re like, “Yeah, I recognize that, and it’s probably not something I want to do more of.” So, I think both parties recognize when this is not a good fit.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Jon, just for thought, I’d love to zoom in. Let’s say I handed you a marketing study, which clearly appeared to be assembled in 45 minutes with Google and ChatGPT and had factual inaccuracies but a couple of cool-looking charts, and so it’s no good. How do you share that with me?

Jon Rennie

Yeah, I would ask the process, “So, how did you develop this? Where did it come from?”

Pete Mockaitis

“Oh, I did some research across the internet.”

Jon Rennie

“Yeah. Well, what kind of research?”

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, I was looking to see different competitors and their potential revenue associated with these offerings.”

Jon Rennie

“Did you talk to anyone else as you went through the research? Did you talk to anyone in the marketing department or anybody in our sales department?”

Pete Mockaitis

“Oh, no, I didn’t talk to anybody.”

Jon Rennie

“Okay. Why not?”

Pete Mockaitis

“Oh, it didn’t occur to me.”

Jon Rennie

“Hmm,” so I think there’s the discussion, there’s the sort of finding out what and where that they could do…where they see the aha moments, like, “Maybe I should’ve talked to more people.”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And so, I’m wondering, how do you also convey kind of the standard or what good is?

Jon Rennie

Does it answer all the questions we’re looking for? Typically, with an assignment like this, we have things that we want to get out of it, and if they fall short, then we’re going to have those discussions.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, there you go in terms of, “Okay, the study to go into a little bit more detail, these are the particular questions we were looking to get answers for, and this deliverable does not presently answer those questions, or has false answers to those questions.”

Jon Rennie
Right. Exactly, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. You also have the turn of a phrase “earn your oxygen.” What does that mean and how do we apply it?

Jon Rennie

So, we have an expression on the submarine that was, how do I say it, it’s a little controversial because there was a high level of positive peer pressure on a submarine. I mentioned earlier, every sailor has to have, “We have to trust you with our lives.” And so, when you first come on a submarine, we call you a nob. A nob is a non-useful body. Until you could earn your oxygen, until you could be responsible for some area of the submarine, then you were a useful body.

So, you were taking in the oxygen and the food from people that were useful, and so there was a high level of positive peer pressure to get qualified, to become a qualified operator. And so, what qualification meant on a submarine was for the sailors, junior sailors, to work with more senior sailors to prove their competencies in various operations, procedures, watch standing.

And so, as they prove their proficiency, they would actually have, what’s called, a qualification card, a qual card, and they would get signatures that, “Okay, a senior watch stander says this person understands how to use the torpedo launch system. This person knows how to repair a steam fitting.” So, you would get qualified over time and become qualified.

So, earn your oxygen means that everywhere you go, not even in the Navy, but in the civilian world, “What are you doing to earn your oxygen? What are you doing to add value to the business that you work for, the organization that you work for?” So, I often talk to high school students, and that’s one of the messages I say, is, “Don’t be a nob.”

And so, the concept there is that there are so many people in our world that are consumers and not creators. They’re consumers and they’re not builders. And so, I really encourage high school students to “Not be a consumer, not spend your time online just entertaining yourself. What are you doing to build? What are you doing to grow? What are you doing to add value?” So, the idea of earning your oxygen is becoming valuable to your organization, whoever you work for or whatever you’re doing in the world.

Pete Mockaitis

And I think that’s important to consider. And I think about in business-y terms, there’s the value you consume associated with there are costs, associated with keeping you employed with a salary and benefits, equipment, office space, etc. and then there’s value you, hopefully, are creating through your work. And so, I guess if you talk about oxygen versus dollars, it’s interesting that in some fields it’s very clear, like sales, like, “Okay, man, this is what you sold, this is what I’m paying you,” or a fundraising, it’s very clear.

And then it gets a little fuzzier the farther away it gets from that in terms of, it’s like, “Oh, well, I am doing accounting or finance work.” And so, it’s like, “Okay, well, that needs to be done, we have to stay compliant, that’s valuable.” And so, it’s tricky to precisely assess that, and yet I think, it’s my belief, as we see layoffs and such, that the more clear and massive the value you’re contributing is, the safer your job and the more likely you’re going to be on an upward trajectory there.

Jon Rennie

Yeah, absolutely. And I would say a lot of people will kind of come into a job, and they say, “Well, this is your job responsibilities,” and people will do the bare minimum, or they would just do that job responsibility. And I also say look for the extras that you can add value to in the organization. So, I started out in corporate world as an associate design engineer in a cubicle. And five years later, I was running a manufacturing plant.

Well, it didn’t happen that I just magically got there. It was through earning my oxygen and adding value in everything that I did. And, in my case, going from a cubicle to the corner office was all about volunteering, learning new skills, being there when the company needed me, and doing anything I could to support the organizational objectives. And that eventually got me the opportunity to lead a plant.

But I think if you haven’t put the extra work in, you say, “Well, I want to be promoted, I want to move up the corporate ladder but I’m not willing to put the work in,” you’re not going to get there. It does take extra effort if you want to get noticed, if you want to achieve goals that you have in your career. I didn’t necessarily have a goal to run a manufacturing plant at 32 but it happened because I was adding a lot of value in everything I did.

Pete Mockaitis

And, Jon, I’d love to hear the counterpoint to that in terms of if employees are doing that and have seen, “Hmm, the meritocratic forces do not seem to be operational here. My added value appears to amount to squat and it feels like I’m just sort of burning the midnight oil for no extra compensation, and it feels like a raw deal,” how do you speak to that perspective? And how do we assess whether extra efforts are likely to result in extra goodies?

Jon Rennie

Well, it doesn’t always work out that way, does it? So, I have a good friend, John Brubacher, who always said, “Go where you’re celebrated, not where you’re tolerated.” And I think a lot of times that we are in positions, or in organizations, that don’t recognize that kind of extra effort, you have bosses that don’t care necessarily, or they’re looking out for themselves and not looking out for their team, so there are times when you can do a lot of extra work and not get noticed, and maybe that’s not the right organization that you should be in.

But I think it’s good to have a discussion. You’re always going to have those opportunities to have a one-on-one with your boss, and a lot of companies it’s once a year. During annual performance review, you get a chance to sit down with your boss. And at that point, you can have that discussion, “Hey, I’ve been trying to do this. I’ve got this dream, or this desire, or this goal, to get to this level. I’ve been doing a lot of extra work. What else could I be doing to try to earn or move into the position I’m looking to do?” Have that frank conversation. But I would also say is be willing to move to find those opportunities.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Thank you. Well, Jon, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Jon Rennie

I think the one thing I would say to this, when it comes to like a similar analogy from the Navy to the businesses is that without a crew, the ship is just a hunk of steel sitting in the harbor. It takes a crew to bring a ship to life. It takes people to bring our businesses to life, our plans to life, the things we’re trying to do. So, I think people are very critical to our business, and without them, we’re not going to go anywhere. So, I think we sometimes overlook the importance of people in our organizations.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Jon Rennie

Well, I like Teddy Roosevelt just as many of the things he said, but “The Man in the Arena” quote is probably been best for me. So, the idea of being in the arena is where I want to be, not a critic in the stands. And I always say be a builder, not a critic. It’s hard to be a builder. It’s easy to be a critic.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And could we hear a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Jon Rennie

I’ve been doing a lot of work right now in my Ph.D. program on perseverance and grit, and, especially, in small teams, “How do you develop grit in a team?” So, Angela Duckworth did a lot of work on grit. I love her work. So, yeah, perseverance has been something I’ve been into lately.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite book?

Jon Rennie

First, Break All the Rules by Marcus Buckingham. It’s the one book that sort of changed my outlook for how leaders can lead.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite habit?

Jon Rennie

I get up at 4:00 a.m. every morning. So, I write until 5:00, and I work out from 5:00 to 6:00. So, I’ve been doing that for about 10 years, and so I feel like I get a lot done in the early morning.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear them quote it back to you often?

Jon Rennie

The big one is leadership is a people business. I see that quite a lot.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Jon Rennie

My website JonSRennie.com, and I’m on every social media @jonsrennie. I’m pretty active on Twitter, so. X, I guess, now.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Jon Rennie

Hey, you want to be awesome at your job, don’t be a nob, don’t be a non-useful body. Be useful in everything you do.

Pete Mockaitis

All right, Jon, thank you and good luck.

Jon Rennie

Thank you, Pete.

943: Crushing the 9 Barriers to Taking Action with David Nurse

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David Nurse reveals how to identify and overcome the roadblocks preventing you from taking action.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to bridge the gap between knowing and doing
  2. The nine reasons why we don’t take action
  3. The force that’s more powerful than motivation 

About David

A former professional basketball player, David Nurse is today a mindset coach who has trained over 175 NBA athletes including seven-time All Star Joe Johnson, “Linsanity’s” own Jeremy Lin, NBA champ Brook Lopez, Domas Sabonis, Norm Powell, Keegan Murray, and Top 10 player/All Star Shai Alexander. As a coach, David also took the Brooklyn Nets from 28th in three-point shooting percentage to 2nd overall in the NBA in just one season.  

David is also the author of the best-selling books Pivot & Go, Breakthrough, and the 2023 release, Do It: The Life-Changing Power of Taking Action. He was named by Real Leaders as one of the Top 50 Motivational Speakers in the World, and his podcast, The David Nurse Show, is one of the fastest-growing podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. David resides in Marina del Rey, California, with his wife Taylor Kalupa. 

Resources Mentioned

David Nurse Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

David, welcome!

David Nurse

Pete, it’s an honor to be here, man.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m so excited to dig into your wisdom. But first, I’d love it if you could kick us off with a super riveting tale of your adventures with folks in the NBA.

David Nurse

All right, here it is. 2018, it’s the summer, it is NBA pre-draft. So, NBA pre-draft is before the players are superstars, they have to go through the draft process. Some players get the benefit of having great hype and potential and not having to do NBA pre-draft, but there was a kid who walked through the Santa Monica gym doors, his name was Shai Alexander. Shai Alexander from Kentucky, no one really thought he was going to be this top player, like he would have a good career and people thought maybe, you know, middle of the first-round draft pick.

Now, with pre-draft, I always like to crush the players on the very first workout. You got to test them, “How much do they have? Are they able to go through this grueling process of working out for team after team? Do they have that insatiable drive?” The insatiable drive, I slow down to say that term because I think that is the factor that nobody looks at for NBA players to determine their greatness. I’ll tell you more on that afterwards.

So, Shai walks in and I put him through this workout. It’s like two and a half hours and he’s soaked in sweat. It’s grueling. It’s difficult, and most of the time, at the end of the workout, the players, they kind of, you know, just lay down on the court, or they go to the locker room. The last thing they want to do is more drills. But Shai comes up to me after that workout, he says, “Coach, when are we going tonight?” And I knew from that moment Shai Alexander was built different. I knew he had insatiable drive. The desire to continue to improve even when somebody’s not making you.

The desire to improve even when it’s not on social media. Nobody knows about the workout. It’s the unseen hours put in. Shai Alexander had that. We went every morning, every night, throughout pre-draft. Now, currently, four or five or whatever years it is later, Shai is on pace to be the MVP of the entire NBA. He is arguably one of the top three players in the entire NBA. This coming from a guy who did not have the hype, he did not have many people who knows who he is, he’s also created this incredible brand, he’s like the fashion guy of the NBA with millions and millions of followers.

The point being is, if you have a desire for greatness, you have to have that insatiable drive. You can’t become great at something without this internal fire burning inside of you, and I can tell within the first five minutes of working out with an NBA player if they have it or if they don’t have it.

Pete Mockaitis

Intriguing. Intriguing. Okay, so he said, “Coach, when are we going tonight?” was the indicator to you that it’s there. But it sounds like it may be even beforehand, you witnessed what’s happening within the minutes of the workout. So, can you paint a picture for us for what does a “having it” workout look like like versus a “not having it?”

David Nurse

Well, there’s also a term that I’ve developed over working out with NBA players and training them for 12 plus years, it’s what I call the 17-second rule. It’s mental dictatorship, basically. So, this goes back, and then I’ll bring it back here, of training players for 12 years, I would bring a stopwatch with me because I was interested. I always thought at first that every NBA player loved training, they loved practice, but that’s far from the truth.

So ,when they did not want to work out that day, I would press the stopwatch to see how long it took them to be able to get past that moment of, “Oh, I don’t want to do this,” and then they’d be okay, and on average, it was 17 seconds, meaning by the time I said, “Start the workout,” and I could tell they weren’t feeling it, they did their first few drills, they did their first few shots, then they were okay. They got past that initial sticking point, and that’s huge for people. Like, think about it, most people won’t go work out because they don’t want to start. Most people won’t do something because the start is hard.

After you start, after you do the first couple of reps in the gym, it’s easy. Your body gets in the flow. Your mind gets in the flow. After you make the first few cold calls, if you’re a salesperson having to make cold calls, the first suck. They’re not easy, but after that, you get in the rhythm. So, coming back to the workout with Shai is like I had my stopwatch ready, but there was no need for that. He had the desire. You could see it just in his body language, in the way that he attacked the workouts, the way that he was present, the way that he was asking questions.

And the workout, I mean, I don’t remember exactly what the workout was, but it’s every difficult drill, like defensive slides, all these different conditioning drills, shooting when you’re tired, physical body contact. I used to have this big BOSU ball, if you can imagine doing ab workout in the gym and the guys would have to drive to the hoop, and I would just level them with that ball to see if they could take the contact and finish. All types of physical, mental, the most challenging drills that I could do. And when I knew that a player was able to embrace those, and want more of those, and not shy away from those, then I knew it was different.

And then it goes on to their competition against NBA current players. So, this is going on past the workout when you can tell, like, “Okay, this guy, does he have the killer instinct?” because that’s another one of the attributes that I don’t think you can really teach somebody. I’ve tried to teach it for years in all different fields. You either have the killer instinct or you don’t. You can probably increase it a little bit, but killer instinct meaning, “Do you want this so bad that you will give anything for it?”

So, when Shai was in workouts with the NBA, the current NBA players, like NBA All-Stars and Superstars, a lot of times young players will kind of shy away, like, “I’m not there yet. These guys are the authority. I better just play my role.” Not Shai. He was trying to win every single drill. He was going for their throats. He didn’t care if they’d been a nine-time NBA All-Star. He was going at them. That’s the killer instinct. So, there’s two aspects. You can help somebody develop them but you can’t give somebody these if they don’t have them, and that’s the insatiable drive and the killer instinct.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Understood. Well, so you’ve put a number of this wisdom in your book, Do It, or, “Don’t Quit,” depending on how you read the cover. Very clever, David. So, when I read “Do It,” I can’t help but think of Shia LaBeouf’s video in which he’s screaming, “Do it!” So, is that what you had in mind as you were assembling this work?

David Nurse

Yes, I wrote the whole book based on Shia LaBeouf and his…No, actually, I did not know that about that until you told me about it. But I will take any type of marketing that comes to it. Anytime somebody says “Do it,” or “Don’t quit,” you now think of the book. I’m planting that seed in everybody’s mind.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, we will link in the show notes to Shia LaBeouf’s screaming, “Do it!” repeatedly in front of a green screen, very meme-able, and you’ll think of this book.

David Nurse

I love it. But the reason that I chose that title, I mean, I’ve got to give credit to my wife who is the creative genius in our family, for sure. She’s an actor, a producer, has done a lot of big work, and I always look to her for creative advice. But the reason it’s “Do It” and “Don’t Quit,” if you look at the cover of it, people are motivated in different ways. You’re either motivated by you want the positivity, you want to see what the gains can be, or you’re motivated by the resistance of failure. That’s the “Don’t Quit.”

If somebody say, “Hey, you got to do this. You can’t quit.” That will motivate somebody. Or, “Hey, go do it. You can achieve this.” So, it’s either the positive or the negative side. People are motivated by different things. So, if you read it, you see it in the way that you read it.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, is it fair to say that the difference between taking the action and not taking the action makes all the difference in terms of other results? Is that kind of your main thesis here?

Pete Mockaitis

Absolutely. I think it’s the biggest misnomer today in society, is there’s so many people that are just taking up so much knowledge. There’s content, content, content, YouTube, podcasts, going to Masterminds, events, and you soak in all this knowledge, but the huge disconnect is the difference between knowing and doing. So many people will know and know the right thing to do, but very few will actually do it because this bridge between knowing and doing, there’s a valley. And in that valley, there’s roadblocks, there’s resistance, there’s the unknown, the uncertain, and ultimately everything is based on the fear of the results.

So, “If I take this chance, if I actually take action on this, what will happen? I don’t know. That’s uncertain.” And true taking action, confidently taking action, is taking the step without knowing where it’s going to land. It’s having the faith that if you do take action, something positive will come from it, but most people hold themselves back based on the nine different archetypes that I outline in the book. And what I mean by an archetype is, “Which type of action-taker are you? What holds you back from taking action?” Everything is rooted in fear. That’s literally why people don’t take action. They are afraid.

And the different reasons, some of those reasons are what I call the allodaxophobic, and that simply means fear of other people’s opinions, “Do you not take action because you are worried what other people will think of you?” Fear of the being burnt by the past, meaning, “Do you not take action in the present because something of your past did not go the way that you wanted it to, so you are taking that past example, bringing it into your present?” There’s a thing called traumatic age regression. That means somebody had something happened in their past, they have not addressed it, they have not forgiven that situation, and it holds them back from actually taking action in the present. Seventy percent of Americans have this traumatic age regression.

So, like, hey, you got dumped by somebody you thought was going to be your spouse. You’re not going to put your heart on the line again because you got burnt in the past. That’s a very common one. And there’s many more. There are seven more archetypes that I outlined. And the point of this is you read through, and you see which ones you align with. It tells you what’s actually neurologically going on in your brain of why this is happening, these are real things. And what is going on in your heart or the feeling of it so you’re able to see, “Okay. Well, yeah, you know, what I suffer from perfectionism. That is what’s holding me back. I think it has to be perfect,” or, “I underestimate myself,” “My parents never did anything great,” “I come from this small town. Like, why should I have something?” And you align with these.

Now, the great thing is, on the other half of it, you’re able to see a tool for, “All right, if this is what I struggle with, if this is what’s holding me back from where I am today to where I want to be tomorrow,” that ultimately is the mission everybody is on, whether you know it or not, you are where you are today currently, that’s obvious, and there’s somewhere you want to get tomorrow. In between that is this radical strategic action. So, you read through it, you understand, “Okay, this is what I struggle with, this is how I get over it,” and there’s also a story from some historical figure that you probably haven’t even heard of honestly.

When I first read Malcolm Gladstone, everybody probably knows Malcolm Gladwell, I was really intrigued with the way he told stories of historical figures, you’re like, “Where did you find this story? Who the heck is this person?” I did something similar where I found somebody who struggled with this exact fear archetype, each one of the nine, and I told their story leading up to the point where they had this decision to make, the decision, “Do I go for it even though the odds are stacked against me? Or do I just go with the flow, and do what everybody else is doing, and don’t change the world?”

They obviously make the decision to go against any of the easy route, and they end up changing the world and I show how that is done. Like, for example, a guy named Lewis Latimer, probably haven’t heard of him. Lewis Latimer was the person who pushed forward Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone and Thomas Edison’s invention of the incandescent light bulb. Without him, he was the guy who made this happen. It was an incredible race. It’s a fascinating story. They should make a movie about the race for the incandescent light bulb, and Lewis Latimer was the one who pushed it forward for Thomas Edison.

But he also had been burnt many times in the past. So, he was the action archetype of the burnt. He thought about it. He debated it. He talked with his wife about it. He almost did not take on this challenge. But he did, Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, because of Louis Latimer.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, so let’s talk about the nine archetypes here. You say all of them, they’ve got a fear of results, and it sounds like there’s a different kind of a result that each is fearing. So, the allodoxaphobic is fearing others negative judgments; the burnt-in-the-past person is fearing, “Oh, this bad thing that occurred last time I did something like this is going to happen again, and it’s going to hurt and suck all over again, just like when I was dumped or whatever.” So, could you unpack for us the other seven types and what it is they’re fearing?

David Nurse

Yeah, the inopportune. So, the inopportune is you just think it’s not the right time, you thought, “You know, I’m just too young for this,” or, “Ah, I’m just too old to start this.” It’s never the right time and it will never be the right time. So, there is no right time to take action, you’re not too old, you’re not too young. And a great way to take this away from your mentality is just do a Google search of people over the age of 50 who have done something great, and it’s an incredible list, or people under the age of 20 who have done something great, so you can align with either side that you’re on.

The blamer is another one where you’re blaming somebody for your situation. You’re blaming your parents. You’re blaming where you were born. You’re blaming God. You’re blaming somebody. It’s so easy to blame and it’s not very often that someone’s going to come back at you, and say, “You know what, that’s actually wrong.” It’s like in the court of law, there’s always a cross-examination. In the game of blaming, there’s not a cross-examination, you’re just pointing the finger at somebody else.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s a good point. Folks will rarely just interrupt you to tell you that you’re wrong.

David Nurse

Yeah, they won’t.

Pete Mockaitis

Like, “I can’t do this because my dad never believed in me and dah, dah, dah.” It’s like, because people you’re talking to have little to gain and much to lose by saying, “No, actually, you’re full of malarkey, sir. And this has nothing to do with your father.” It’s like, “Whoa, dude, who are you?” as opposed to the reaction will very rarely be like, “You know what, thank you. That is a wakeup call that I really needed, and you were a bright light of truth for me.” Probably not going to be received that way if you were to speak up.

David Nurse

No, it really isn’t. I mean, you can blame and people are going to let you off the hook. Unless you have a group, and I say this, like, seek wisdom from the wise. Have people in your life that you know that you can come to with something and they’ll give you the honest truth. That doesn’t mean it’s your mom or your dad. They’re going seek your safety. They’re not going seek your best interest.

So, have people in your life that you can say, “Hey what do you think of this?” and they’ll say, “You know what? That’s terrible, that sucks. You shouldn’t do that,” or, “That’s great.” Seek wisdom from the wise. Don’t just seek wisdom from anybody that’s going to agree with you, or be your yes-man, or feel your remorse in your blaming situation.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. So, now with the inopportune and the blamer, the inopportune says, “It’s not the right time,” the blamer blames parents or God or someone. So, what is it that they fear? They fear that there’s just no way this is going to happen for them because of these circumstances?

David Nurse

Yeah, their fear is there’s no way it’s going to happen for them because it’s almost, too, that they’re afraid of success. Have you’ve been around those people that they just blame themselves into a way that if they find success, they’re going to work their way out of it? It’s almost that they’re scared of this success. They’re scared of, “Well, what happens if something does good happen to me?” And they fall into this rut of constant blaming. Or they just really don’t want to put in the work, and it’s easier to blame than it is to actually go through the process.

Pete Mockaitis

And, David, tell us about this fear of success. I mean, why would we fear success? Success is a good thing we want, isn’t it?

David Nurse

It is until you get it, and then a lot of people don’t know how to deal with it. That’s why so many people crash and burn when they do taste success because they don’t know how to appreciate it, and they don’t know how to live with it. Like, an example that I give is one of my close friends is Jeremy Lin, and he went through this time called “Linsanity.” And this was when he was almost cut from the NBA, and he got put into the game, and he just blew up.

He took off. He had an amazing game and he was going on game winners, and 30-point games, and this incredible streak, and he was the number one trending thing in the world. He was on top of the NBA world for weeks and weeks and weeks, and he’d never had that success. He never tasted that, and when he got there, he didn’t necessarily live in the appreciation for that moment. He was living in the what-ifs,
“What if I can’t keep this up? What will people think of me?”

So, when people reach success, who aren’t ready for it, that’s what they think of. They’re like, “Okay, well, what if this goes away?” They think worst-case scenario thoughts and the “what ifs” that ends up eating them alive, and they normally self-sabotage.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Understood. Well, let’s hit the rest of the archetypes.

David Nurse

So, the fifth one is the test believer. And the test believer, it sounds kind of ironic saying the test believer when this kind of looks like an Enneagram type of test that we’re going through, but far too often, people will see, “Oh, it’s there,” they read their zodiac or their Myers-Briggs or even their Enneagram, and they label themselves with that’s who they are. That’s how they have to act because that’s what the test says.

Similar to the example that I give is, “Are you an extrovert? Are you an introvert?” So, people will say, “No, I’m introverted so I can’t go talk to anybody.” But introvert doesn’t have anything to do with, “Are you able to go talk with people in communication?” It has everything to do with how you recharge. So, it’s an excuse people make that they’re not able to connect with others because they say they’re introverted, and that’s just a label somebody has given themselves and they live into.

So, if there’s a label that you’re giving yourself, whether it’s a test believer, or it’s you label yourself according to your profession, you think you are what you do, that’s where you need to eliminate that from because that will never fulfill you. It will ultimately fail you. So, that’s the fifth one.

Pete Mockaitis

How about the perfectionist?

David Nurse

So, the perfectionist, I think a lot of high performers, this is the one that they struggle with that holds them back. I think they have to have everything perfect before they even start, but you can never achieve anything great unless you actually start. And people will hold themselves back, they think, “Well, I can’t put this out there into the world if it isn’t perfect,” and, really, it will never be perfect. It’s always a work in progress, anything that you do. Perfectionism also goes hand in hand with the term procrastination, which has been actually something that people have said, “Oh, I’m more creative when I procrastinate. I can think better if the buzzer is coming up.”

Well, actually, there’s been many studies done, and there was a study done on thousands of people in Canada, that they found that 90% of people that procrastinate are much more stressed and anxious than those who don’t. So, yeah, maybe you’ll produce a better-quality product at the buzzer but you’ll also live a life of increased stress and anxiety, which I don’t think anybody wants to do. So, the perfectionist just comes down to the mindset of “Ready, fire, aim,” where it’s never going to be perfect. You put it out there and then you continue to.

Refine and define it, and that’s like anything with life. It’s never going to be perfect. You just got to start, and it’ll continue to work its way there. But it holds a lot of people back, especially high performers.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And then the scarcest.

David Nurse

Yeah, so the scarcest is this mindset of you’ve got to hold on to whatever you have. It’s there’s a 100% of the pie. If you’re looking at a pie with a 100%, you got to take your little slice and you got to hold on to it. This was the whole mentality of hoarding, or people in 2020, they went to the grocery store to get toilet paper and just hold on to it because there’s never going to be any more.

It’s the same thing when they think of opportunities, why people will just hold on to what they have and not give anything else to anybody else because they live in this mindset of there’s a scarcity amount when, in reality, there’s an abundant amount. So that pie that you were taking, that little slice of, and holding on for dear life, like it’s only yours, think about a pie that’s a double-decker pie, or you put a la mode ice cream on top. Like that is why these burger chains, In-N-Out and McDonald’s, and why they’re all together next to each other. It’s not because they’re competing against each other necessarily, but they’re actually competing with each other.

If someone knows, “Hey, this is the area of town to go for a burger,” they’re going to get more traffic there. So, my concept here is what I’ve seen worked so many times, is not the competition directly against somebody else. It’s competition with, “Can you get other people within your industry, in your market, to be on the same team you compete with, and you end up completing with each other?” So, completion through competition leads to more abundance than it will actually the scarcity mindset.

It’s the same thing with if you have the scarcity mindset with money. Usually, if you’re just trying to hold, hold, hold, hold, hold, that’s the best way to never actually earn any or gain any revenue or long-term money by just holding on to it and hoarding it.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And then the distracted and the underestimator.

David Nurse

Yeah, so the distracted is, this is the one I struggle with the most. And when I say distracted, I don’t necessarily mean it’s distracted by notifications, or your phone, or your tablet. But more so the distracted for this is distracted from, “What is your great? Like, what is the thing that you are on a mission to do?” That is your vision. That’s “great.”

Now there are so many shiny objects that are going come along the way, these opportunities, there’s all these goods that can take you away from your great. That’s what the distracted is. And I feel this a lot, like, I get blessed with many, many opportunities, like, “Hey, do you want to do this business?” “Hey, do you want to go to this mastermind?” “Hey, you got to be here.”

It’s almost like the FOMO that sets in. And if you continue to take these opportunities that you off the path of the mission that you’re on, you’re never going to eventually get to that mission because it’s not the enemy of great is bad. That’s pretty obvious. The enemy of great is good, and that’s the distracted that keeps you away from what you were called to do.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And the underestimator?

David Nurse

And the underestimator is simply the mindset of you’re either a person who views life as a why-me person, or “Why do I deserve this? Why little old me? I don’t deserve anything great.” Or, you’re of the mindset of, “Why not me?” Somebody’s got to do it. Somebody has to be the top in their field. They have to be the best at what you want to do. Someone’s got to do it. Why not you? And it’s simply looking at any kind of decision or anything that comes upon in your life of which way do you view it?

Do you underestimate yourself? Do you already count yourself out? Do you self-sabotage before it even happens because you view yourself as a why-me person? Or do you view yourself as, “Well, somebody’s got to do it, why not me?” And there’s a lot of things that can go into being an underestimator, but ultimately it comes to that and there’s only two camps of people. You’re either in “Why me?” or “Why not me?”

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, so now, David, as I think through this lineup, I’m trying to categorize myself. And my situation is I just don’t feel like doing a thing. So, let’s just say watching the calories and the weight. I think I have successfully gained and lost 10 pounds, maybe five or six times. And so, I know what it takes, and I think, “Okay, the name of the game is tracking those calories and eating less food. That’s what does the trick.” And so, I think, “Okay, that’s what I can do. That’ll make it happen, I think, but I don’t want to.” That sounds unpleasant and annoying to do that, and it’s more comfortable and enjoyable to not do that. Where do we plug this one?

David Nurse

Yeah. So, the question I would ask you is, “Why do you want to lose weight? Why do you want to lose the 10 pounds, or get in better shape? What is the end result of that?” So, you say that you do, but why do you want that?

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m a bit more energetic, a bit more confident. I like the way I look in the mirror. I could enjoy not stepping on the scale and not being labeled overweight, according to the body mass index, which makes me kind of feel like a loser. I am overweight by two pounds, David, because of the body mass index said so, and I don’t like underperforming in anything.

David Nurse

Yeah. Well, there you go. I mean, there’s two things right there that you just said in that sentence, which could go into the allodoxaphobic, fear of other people’s opinions. It doesn’t actually have to mean just people. It could mean the society norms and what they have placed upon it, and also the perfectionist, where you don’t want to underperform in anything. So, there’s two that can work together in that one.

But I also would say there’s three different levels to it as well. There is the motivation, which will show you the “there,” which is the motivation is there to lose weight, get in great shape. There’s also the discipline, so that’s the second level of it. The discipline will get you there, and you’ve got there. You’ve said it before, you’ve got there before. So, you have the discipline.

Now, the third level to this is devotion. So, devotion means, “Who are you devoted to? What are you devoted to?” That’s the next level of it. Like, “Are you doing this for a bigger purpose?” If you’re only doing this for yourself and the aesthetics of it, it’s probably going to waver. But if you’re saying, “Hey, I am going to get in great shape and stay in great shape for an amazing example for my kids,” or, “Because I have to be the healthiest and most energetic, I can possibly be at my job.” It’s the devotion that’s the long-term.

Motivation is a spark. Discipline is an up-and-down kind of riding the waves but devotion is the long-term. And once you make that commitment to devotion and you understand why you’re holding yourself back, “Is it, okay, this is the society says this, or I need to be perfect in this, or maybe I’m blaming something in the past of, well, I did it before but this happened?” And you work your way through that.

Now, you decide, “All right, I’m devoted to it,” and you make that devotion, you make that declaration of devotion, it’s almost signing a contract with yourself, and you’ve got a much better chance. I’m not saying it’s not going to still waver but you’ve got a much better chance.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, that’s interesting. So, it seems like what’s going on there for me is more, like, “I don’t actually care all that much about this outcome.” It’s like, “Whether the body mass index says I’m three pounds overweight, or I’ve got three more pounds to go before I hit the threshold, I don’t actually care that much about what the BMI has to say about me.”

David Nurse

That’s good, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

And so, when push comes to shove, it’s like, “Well, I could track all my calories but I don’t feel like it so I won’t.” And it sounds like that that, too, can be an acceptable choice. It’s like, “Go pick something that’s more worth your time and effort.”

David Nurse

It’s exactly it. You can’t be devoted to everything. If that’s not the thing, like it’s the difference between if you see a bodybuilder, who is literally tracking every single macro, and weighing on the scale, like, to me, that looks miserable. It sounds like that sounds miserable to you as well. So, that’s not your choice of devotion. You can’t be devoted to everything.

You pick and choose what’s the most important things to you, and you’re choosing lifestyle, life rhythm, over being an incredibly crazy person out to eat where you can only eat broccoli and chicken breast, let’s say. Yeah, you’re not that interested in being a bodybuilder, and I don’t think you’re performing on stage at the World’s Strongest Man competitions coming up.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m insulted but…

David Nurse

Maybe. Maybe.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, thank you. Well, now maybe could you share with us a story of someone who went through this process, in a professional work type of context, in terms of they weren’t doing it, they were quitting, and then they had some insight, like, “Aha, what’s going on? This is the category I fit into,” and what unfolded?

David Nurse

Yeah, totally. So, I’ve been working with a CEO for the past year, and when I started working with him, he’s at a massive company, runs an amazing Fortune 500 company, and he was going through a very difficult time, and just feeling really down, personally in his life and in the business, so we had to figure out, like, “Okay, why? Like, what is the cause of this? You grew this amazing business. Now, what is happening?”

So, we realized that there were certain people that had been hired and they looked like all-stars, they came from other great companies, and they brought the business down. They weren’t on the same mission as he was. It was more for, okay, how much money can they make, but they didn’t really care about the end result product. So, he found this out and now has become blaming-the-past situation that he couldn’t get past. So, it’s very hard especially for someone that successful when you get hit with this, when you have a major roadblock in your career and your life.

So, really, we just had to forgive this situation, had to address it and had to say, “Well, you know, what did we learn from this?” So, one of the most important things from the blaming situation is not just go over it and pass through it, but it’s, “What did we learn from this situation?” So, we really went in depth on this, and the takeaways, the positives that came from very incredibly big losses and negatives that could have driven somebody to just quit or give up altogether. So, worked through the blaming situation to find out, “Okay, now I need to figure out the right team that I have.” So, that was one of them.

But it was also a part of underestimation, too, where there had been repeated history of these types of failures, if you want to call them, and just come over the fact that these don’t have to happen, like, “People aren’t always going to fail. You don’t have to underestimate you or your team.” He built this amazing company despite having these types of action archetypes holding him back from living the life he’d want to live.

And when I say that in terms of the underestimating, it was also the underestimating of giving himself permission to enjoy the journey. That’s a really important one for high performers, or any driven person, giving yourself permission to enjoy the journey. Even if the journey is a struggle moment, if it’s difficult, if you’re going through a fire, you can still enjoy the journey of it because it’s never going to be easy. God never said, “Hey, you’re just going to have this easy life.” No, it’s going to be difficult, but it’s going to be worth it.

So, having that underestimator, working through the underestimator, individually, personally, in his own life, and also the blamer, the things that had happened to the company in the past, to be able to move through it, knowing that there was going to be, you know, it’d be difficult to work through that, but they’d eventually get through it, and now he’s thriving, the company is doing amazing, stock prices are up.

So, it was a, yeah, working through those two archetypes, and I’ll continually go back through all of these with them to make sure, “Are you good here? Or, is this one coming in?” because it can change. It’s very actionable. That’s the example that I give it’s an actionable version of kind of like the Enneagram.

Pete Mockaitis

All right, thank you. Well, David, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

David Nurse

Just check out the book. I think it’s helped a lot of people. It’s a fun read and it can really show you, “Do you have any roadblocks?” I always go back through it because there’s different things that will come up in my daily life and I’m able to identify it, the self-awareness, and then work through it. So, I would just encourage you to check out the book for no other reason than, honestly, it will help you. If it doesn’t, please reach out to me and tell me it’s the worst thing ever and I’ll get you your refund.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, now can you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

David Nurse

“What would you do with your life if there is no way that you could fail?”

Pete Mockaitis

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

David Nurse

I’ve got another book coming out in, I don’t know exactly when it’s going to come out, but it’s a very immersive study that I’ve started into now on the focus and flow, putting those together, and how you can find the deepest flow state, and tap into it more regularly and for a longer time. So, now that’s becoming my next study and research project.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. And a favorite book?

David Nurse

Essentialism, Greg McKeown, has been one of my favorites; The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, John Mark Comer, it’s a great one; The Energy Bus by a good friend of mine, John Gordon; any of my other books that I wrote, of course, are at the top of the list. Those are some of the best.

Pete Mockaitis

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

David Nurse

I use the power of the “I am” statement. So, I start my morning off with coffee because I love coffee, prayer time. I’m reading something from the Bible or a devotional, and spending my first time in the morning, the first few minutes in the morning with God, but then I write down “I am” statements.

And I think these have been really powerful for me because the doubt comes in the morning a lot, “Can you make it through the day? Can you do what you want to do? Is it really going to happen?” And when I write down “I am” and then I fill in the blank with what I’m voting for in that day, it gives me a lot of confidence, it gives me a lot of boosts, a lot of self-belief.

It eliminates these self-talk negative thoughts, which they say there’s 50,000 self-talk thoughts daily, and 80% of those are negative. So, I’m eliminating those from the start. So, I’ll simply say, “I am courageous,” “I am brave,“ ”I am going for this dream,” and it’s a vote for myself in the morning. So, that’s one of my favorite tools that I use, have been using for years.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, and a favorite habit?

David Nurse

A favorite habit of mine also is, in that morning routine when I’m writing, I write, “How can I pour into my wife? How can I fill my wife’s love tank, Taylor’s love tank?” So, I write in there, when I’m doing this morning journaling, of one thing a day that I’m going to do to fill my wife’s love tank.

Pete Mockaitis

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

David Nurse

Website, DavidNurse.com has everything on there. Podcast is right there too. I have daily confidence boosts that I put out five-minute episodes daily on the David Nurse Show. Social media, DavidNurseNBA, or come out to Los Angeles and, you know, we can kick it and eat some great food.

Pete Mockaitis

Yum. And a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

David Nurse

I would say, “Just what is that thing that’s been on your heart that you want, that you’ve wanted to do, that you keep putting off, you keep finding an excuse for why not to do it?” Just do it. Take that first step. The first step is so powerful. The momentum of one step forward daily, I mean, think about this. I’m not a math major, but the one math equation that I do know is 1 to the power of 365 is 1, but 1.01, 1% more, one step forward, to the power of 365 is 37.8. That’s how powerful just taking one step forward a day is. Sometimes it’ll feel like you’re dancing on clouds with that step. Sometimes it’ll feel like you’re trudging through mud, but just keep taking that step forward.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. David, thank you. I wish you much luck and fun with all the things you’re doing.

David Nurse

Thanks, Pete. Appreciate it, man.

942: How to Reach Better Team Decisions with Less Drama with Janice Fraser

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Janice Fraser reveals her secrets to team decision-making with less drama.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to get to the root of any argument
  2. How to know if your decision is good enough 
  3. Why a low consensus isn’t a bad thing 

About Janice

Janice Fraser has coached teams and delivered workshops to organizations around the world, including startups, governments, non-profits, mom-and-pop shops, venture firms, and top business schools.

She built a storied career as a Silicon Valley startup founder, product manager, and confidante for entrepreneurs and enterprise executives alike. Her hobbies include healing generational trauma, challenging the patriarchy, and icing migraines.

Janice and her co-author husband Jason split their time between San Francisco and Minneapolis, where they live with a derpy dog, a bitter cat, and a very tall college student.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Janice Fraser Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Janice, welcome.

Janice Fraser

Thank you so much for having me. I’m so glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, me too. I’m excited to be chatting about Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama. And I’d love it if you could kick us off with a tale of a time you were enmeshed in a whole lot of drama.

Janice Fraser

Oh, boy. Well, you know, honestly, life will throw drama at you no matter what. I mean, we’ve all just lived through a whole bunch of drama, whether it was the pandemic or, you know, what have you.

So, you know, I’ve been through, let’s say, 3 economic meltdowns in my professional life. So we had going way back, we had 2000 when the dot com bust. I live in San Francisco, so the dot com bust ruined everything. And then, you know, 2008 was another time of total, like, right? Everyone thought the sky was falling, and it was.

I was raising money for a startup company that year. And I’ll tell you, I had no idea how I was ever going to hold my head up again because let’s see.  Get heavy for a minute, in February, my father died.

And then in May, my brother died, same year. And then 3 months later, the economic meltdown happened. And here I have this team of people who have come to help me build this company, and there was not gonna be any money. And I had to lay them all off and close the company.

I handed back a check to one of my investors. It was a really hard time.  And, you know, I was just crushed, and I thought I would never recover. I thought that this is it. Like, my career’s over.

You know, I was, what, 30 something, 35, and my career felt like it was over. And you know what? You put one foot in front of the other. And, you know, you cry in your beer to your friends and you keep going. And I, as an independently employed person, right, as a startup founder, I got a couple consulting gigs, and I connected with some friends, and I made some phone calls, and I reached out.

And it took a lot of courage to stand up. And then I started another company. It was the best one I ever did. And I sold it to a bigger company. And, you know, careers were made and life was happy again.

But, you know, when I say, like, less drama, the world has so much complexity to it. I want us all to be able to be as effective as we possibly can be, not in a, like, hustle culture kind of, you gotta work yourself to the bone kind of way. But, like, I just think it should be easier to get more done because you never know what’s going to happen, and there’s enough drama coming from the outside we don’t have to make our own. So, the idea of Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama is about just letting the easy things be easy, helping us to move with flow so that we have more resilience when the unexpected comes down the pipeline.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, that sounds like some great outcomes we would all love to have. Can you tell us any particularly surprising means by which this is done?

Janice Fraser

So, I think that the surprise for a lot of people is how simple it all seems. I’m often taken, my attention is grabbed by methods that feel easy to use, easy to repeat, easy to adapt and pick up, but then they’re kind of under the surface, they’re hard to practice. It’s kind of like if you think about meditation. Well, what is meditation? So, we all do yoga or whatever, and you think, “I’m just going to sit and be quiet for a minute,” and that’s easy but meditation is actually hard because you’re doing it mindfully.

So, here’s an example, point A, point B. From the first job we have, we’re taught about goal-setting, “You have to set a goal. If you don’t set a goal, you’re not going to get where you want to go.”

I absolutely believe that, and we have lots of ways to do goal-setting but no one has ever mentioned or taught, at least not for me, that you have to start with understanding where you are right now, and no one has given me a framework or a tool for understanding, “Here’s where we are right now,” so that we can all reach that goal together. So, in business, you hear a lot of words like alignment, or buy-in, and “How do we get buy-in for something?” and all of that is about we want to get someplace together, so we want to reach that goal together.

But let’s say my team, half of my team is Denver, half of them is in Miami, and I need to get everybody to Albuquerque. Well, I live in San Francisco. If I give them driving directions from San Francisco to Albuquerque, my Denver and my Miami people aren’t going to get there. We’re not in the same place, so even though we know our goal, Albuquerque, we have to start by knowing where are we together, what is our starting place.

And so, I’ve developed and adapted some techniques for defining point A and getting alignment around point A, “Where are we starting from?” It goes like this. Situation, complication, then question, and answer. So, the situation, “We all need to get to Albuquerque.” Complication, “We’re in different cities starting out.” Question, “How do we get there?” Okay, now we can tell the answer.

So, situation, complication, question, answer, I did not develop that. That was developed by this wonderful woman in the ‘60s, her name is Barbara Minto. I think she’s an unsung hero. She was in the first graduating class of women coming out of the Harvard Business School, so she was in the first graduating class of women, and she went on to work at McKinsey Consulting, and really defined how they do strategy communications. And it’s called the Minto Pyramid Method.

So, situation, complication, “What is true right now? And what makes this moment complicated such that it’s a work to achieve our goal, our point B?” So, point-A-point-B thinking can help you have better meetings, it can help you with your project planning, it can help you manage your career, it has helped me be a better whatever, parent, partner, human.

So, point-A-point-B thinking, super, super simple and straightforward but you avoid so much drama if you just take a moment and say, “Are we all driving from Denver to Albuquerque?” “No, some of us are in Miami.”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, we talked about driving from different locations to Albuquerque. Could you share with us how this situation, complication, key question, answer stuff can unfold in a real-life situation and be useful for folks?

Janice Fraser

Sure. Well, there’s an example that I like to use because it’s so relatable. I started a company with seven founders. This is going back 20 years. And we started that company at a time when our service offering was in great demand, it was a services company. We have more inbound interests than we could possibly handle. And I was the CEO and lead salesperson of this company, and I was just drowning.

Our close rates were really high, and others were involved in sales meetings here or there, but for the most part, I was kind of running the process. And I went to the partners and I was like, “I need to buy a printer,” $300, we were an all-virtual company, so they didn’t really see that I was drowning, but we’re all a virtual company. And I said, “I just need $300 to buy a printer. Are we all cool with that?”

And I’ll tell you, we argued for 10 minutes for six months why I want to buy a stupid $300-printer. It was excruciatingly painful.

Pete Mockaitis

Ten minutes for six months, like 10 minutes a meeting?

Janice Fraser

Ten minutes at our partner meeting every Tuesday because it was on the agenda. So, here I am like clawing my eyes out, like, “Ah, just let me buy a printer.” And, honestly, if I had to do it over, I would’ve just bought the printer.

Pete Mockaitis

And you’re the CEO with seven partners.

Janice Fraser

Yeah, but we were equal partners, and it was a CEO role and I didn’t get to wave my magic wand. Anyway, the problem there was that I had framed it up so the situation was I did not define the situation for my partners very well. I asked the wrong question, and I asked the wrong question because I hadn’t teed up, “What is the situation? What is the complication?”

The situation is lots of inbound interests. The complication is I was having trouble keeping it all straight, and juggling all of the big piece parts. The question that I should’ve asked is, that I should’ve brought to my partners is, “How can we support this level of sales without burnout forever? I have a suggestion. The suggestion is blah, blah, blah.” Suggestion is, “Other people should be participating.” Suggestion is, “I want a printer,” suggestion is whatever.

And so, the framing of the question led to the wrong debate. That’s it.

Pete Mockaitis

So, framing the question, just like, “Just let me buy a printer.”

Janice Fraser

“Can I buy a printer?” Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

Just like you want one.

Janice Fraser

“Janice wants a printer because she’s a prima donna.” Right. Like, whatever the story was that they were telling themselves in their head, rather than, “How can we make our sales operation more sustainable?” And probably there were two or three other things that could’ve been done to make it a more sustainable operation.

Pete Mockaitis

So, this is so fascinating to me. What sorts of objections does one hear to, “I want $300 to buy a printer”?

Janice Fraser

So we were a consultant company, so it was a low-margin business, and this is me, I’m with my business person’s hat analyzing why people were doing what they were doing, which is always easier in hindsight than in the moment. And, literally, like one person was highly motivated by wanting to be a paperless company, absolutely from a kind of philosophical standpoint, they were just simply opposed to printers, whatever.

Another person literally said the words, “One-seventh of that money is mine.” Yeah, right?

Pete Mockaitis

“You can have one-seventh of the printer when we’re done with it.”

Janice Fraser

“One-seventh of $300 is not going to make or break you.” But people are motivated by different things. Some people thought that we just shouldn’t need it, “We didn’t have an office because we were an all-virtual company, and we’re going to put a printer in one person’s office? That doesn’t make any sense.” Again, these were dumb things. Like, I said, none of these makes any sense in retrospect.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, it is dumb, and yet I think it is richly instructive for us to dig into this in incredible detail, which might sound odd. But it’s like, in all of our organizations, there’s dumb stuff that’s going on.

Janice Fraser

Yes, and it’s so human. It’s just so human. Everyone’s point of view here was legitimate to them.

Pete Mockaitis

And so, thusly, if you’ll indulge me to go in tremendous detail about this printer discussion, I think it can be illustrative for us all. So, your opening was just, “Hey, I want a printer,” as opposed to sharing how that could be an enabler. If you could give us an example of that, “Hey, this will enable the sales and such”? Can you spell that pathway for how having that printer will enable the sales team to be more effective?

Janice Fraser

Sure. So, the sales team, remember, so this is, at this point, was an eight-person company. We had employee number one. So, it’s seven co-founders, so equal partners in a partnership, and one employee, and no professional salespeople, like I was the sales lead, and we had a couple of other partners of those seven were participating in sales operations based on me setting up meetings, inviting them to the meetings.

And so, we had all these inbound interests, and I was spending as much time on our losses as our wins. And you can imagine, I’ve got, let’s say, four to six customers at any one time running through the sales process, with four to six participants on the customer side. So, now you’re at 24 to 40 people, humans, that I’m keeping track of in my mind, that I’m interacting with.

Now, I’ve got 40 people living in my head, as many as, living in my head all the time on a rotating revolving door basis. How do we keep that straight? And so, for me, what I wanted was to have kind of a stack of folders, physical folders, where my most important, most recent notes were on top. And so, for me, I would, like, be on a sales call, and I would type, type, type, type, type. At the time, I was doing this myself.

And I would summarize that stuff, and I would want to print that out so that the most relevant information was always at the ready so that if I needed it, I could context-switch simply through physical manipulation of stacks of paper.

Pete Mockaitis

Understood.

Janice Fraser

So, that’s what I wanted.

Pete Mockaitis

So, you just got to print notes, “So, I could stick them in folders and move them around. That’s what I want.”

Janice Fraser

Like, I just needed a way to keep my brain straight. I was, like, my brain was coming out of my ears.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s right. Okay. But you didn’t offer that kind of context or path. It was just sort of like, “Hey, I want a printer. Can I just get a printer?”

Janice Fraser

Yeah, I didn’t.

Pete Mockaitis

And you probably didn’t think it was going to be that hard, “I need a printer. Can we just do that? Okay. Oh, we can’t. Oh, really? Oh.”

Janice Fraser

Exactly. I thought it was a trivial ask.

Pete Mockaitis

So, you had to bring the big guns in terms of laying out the pathway. So, then did you ever get that printer, Janice?

Janice Fraser

I did. I did eventually get the printer. And like I said, if I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t have asked permission. I’d just go buy the printer.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, totally, “The receipt is in the reimbursements. Are we going to fight about it now? Well, I got the printer.”

Janice Fraser

Yup, live and learn. Live and learn. Live and learn.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Lovely. Well, I think that is instructive in terms of if we frame up the situation, complication, key question, and answer in a way that is resonant for the different stakeholders and the different things that they value and care about, that’s really cool, and then that’s a compelling story, like, “If I have this printer, we are going to significantly increase the revenue that can come through this because I am, in some ways, a bottleneck as the single sales professional in the midst of overwhelming demand.”

So, there we have it. All right. Well, that is just one of many tools that you share in your book. Can you lay out a couple more with us? You say you’ve got one tool to rule them all. It’s a two-by-two. What’s this one?

Janice Fraser

This is another one that if you’ve done any work time in consulting companies, you’ll recognize it. We call it the two-by-two. It goes by many names, and it is, I think of it as a virtual or physical sorting grid. And the way that I prefer to use it is, at a blank wall, I literally stand at a wall, and I take blue painter’s tape, and I make a big plus sign. So, there are four quadrants, and the way that I organize it is a little different than kind of you may have heard of before.

I choose two different criteria, one for each axis. And on the vertical axis, it’s whatever the criteria it’s an obvious yes-no, “Is it important? Is it not important?” Like, if it’s not important, I don’t want to think about it. So, find whatever my criteria that’s a yes-no, I put that top to bottom, yes on top. And then, on the horizontal axis, I think of, “What is the criteria that is a yes-maybe?” And I put the yes on the side, on the right side, and the maybe on the left.

And if you construct your two-by-two sorting grid this way, you can take whatever your ideas, your options, you can plot them into these four quadrants based on, “From one perspective, this is an absolute yes. But from another perspective, that, I’m not sure.” So, I think an easy-hard. So, let’s say you’re building software. You have 20 product features that you know would be great additions, or you think would be great additions, that everyone has requested.

So, a product manager has the job of prioritizing, “Which ones are we going to build and not build?” Well, from one perspective, it’s easy to do but from another perspective, it’s not that important. It doesn’t help the user or the business at all. So, you’ve got easy but unimportant. Well, that’s going to fall down to this one quadrant, this bottom right quadrant. And even if it falls in the bottom right quadrant, this is the stuff I call seductive distractions.

From one perspective, it is, “Yes, it’s easy to do.” From another perspective, it’s a, “No, it’s not important. Why would you bother?” You’d be shocked to know how many unimportant things end up in a product backlog and waste your time, waste your developer’s. And so, these are the things that cause people to argue.

Imagine that you’re in a product prioritization meeting, and you don’t have a tool like the two-by-two that makes this very obvious that there’s a no. You could easily get into a 30-, 50-minute discussion, argument, debate about whether or not to include this feature, “Well, it’d be easier to do, we should just throw it in there.” But you shouldn’t do it because it’s not important.

And so, what a tool like this does is it puts the real depth of conversation on, “What are the decision criteria that we agree to?” So, rather than having the real conversation be, “Should we build this feature?” That’s the wrong question. The right question is, “How should we choose which features to build?” Well, it’s only, “Build the ones that are important.” Okay, that sounds like a no-brainer, “Okay, let’s build the ones that are important.”

So, now if you’re using this two-by-two diagram, this sorting grid, is what I call it, then you’re only going to have a debate about the ones that are an obvious yes from one perspective, but a maybe from another perspective so you eliminate 75% of the discussion required because it’s just so obvious the right thing to do.

Pete Mockaitis

Intriguing. So, what’s distinctive about this is one of the axes is pretty much binary, and so it in terms of like, “That’s it. Almost no user cares about this feature. Ergo, it’s not important so we just don’t even need to, or put our little heads about it for a minute, or not even a minute.” So, you can get right into it. Now, can you share with us some other contexts where this can be illuminating?

Janice Fraser

So, we use this in pretty much every aspect of life, and I’m not kidding.

Pete Mockaitis

“What should I eat for lunch? Is it delicious and nutritious?”

Janice Fraser

“Is it delicious? Do I have the materials? Can I make it?” We’ve done two-by-twos for everything. Everything from kind of disruptive strategy at very, very large companies. Or, actually, I did this with the Navy Seals training command. 

So, I taught this, I led a workshop where I could not actually physically see any of the two-by-twos that they were creating. I simply coached them through the steps and answered their questions as they went because it was a highly secure environment. So, it can apply to any situation where there are many choices, and you have to be able to reveal which choices makes sense, and which ones do not.

And so, in the preparation for one of these kinds of high-stakes facilitations, I worked with my clients to figure out, “What is the body of ideation that we want to do? What is the range of ideas that we want to generate, or thoughts that we want to elicit from our participants?” And then, “What are the choice criteria that will help us to know which ones are the correct ideas to move forward with and which ones we ought to let go of?”

And, usually, I can find a way to layer in three or four different criteria. So, it could be importance, easy-hard, urgency, what have you. And so, if we want to go from a wide range of ideas represented down to, let’s say, four or five things that we intend to do that we’re actually going to do, in one hour I can get 20 people to generate 200 ideas and come down to six using this two-by-two method.

And the way that you do it is you say, “All right, I’d like everyone to come up with 10 ideas, one idea per Post-It note. And in 10 minutes, you’ve got 200 ideas, and then you spend the next 50 minutes reducing that from 200, to 100, to 50, and we do that using the two-by-two.

Pete Mockaitis

All right, that’s cool. And I think it’s nice because you really put a spotlight on, “What are the criteria that we’re using here?” And if that is left beneath the surface, poor criteria can rule the day, “It’s easy. It’s fun. I’m really just interested in this kind of project. This seems cool.” And so, it’s like, “All right. Well, that’s notable but what’s the goal here? Is the goal just for you to enjoy yourself? Or is the goal more of an economic profits-minded kind of a thing?”

And so then, you can recognize whether it seems cool and fun and easy and interesting is a valid criterion that we should utilize here, or if we should say, “Oh, I guess we actually have to be disciplined grownups and put our personal preferences to the side on this particular context.”

Janice Fraser

Well, so much friction and wastes results from people arguing over something that they’re not actually explicitly saying.

So, we end up with this proxy that the friction and the waste and slowness often is the result of a proxy argument. You’re arguing over something on the surface but, really, there’s something underneath that that’s more of the issue. And if you could just have that conversation, you could resolve it. So, for instance, you could say, one of the yes-no axis is, “Does it cost more than $100 or not? Like, if it costs more than $100 that’s an obvious no because we’re broke.” You see.

So, instead of arguing over the thing that’s the proxy, you can have a meaningful conversation to align on the things that really matter.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s super. And I’m curious, do you have any favorite words, or phrases, or means of going deeper there? Because if folks aren’t surfacing their real concern, they may very feel kind of sensitive about it. How do you recommend we go there?

Janice Fraser

So, I think a lot about, “What are the prompts?” When we ask a question that inspires people to come up with new thinking, that’s what I call a prompt. I actually think a lot about prompts. I craft them very deliberately because I want to elicit information from the people that I’m collaborating with. So, putting this back in a work context, what we’re talking about here is collaboration to make progress.

And when I write the prompt, I’m thinking about, “What is the underlying question?” again, we’re back at point A, “What’s the underlying question that will help us orient honestly in the present moment?” And that’s why I ask questions like, “How will we know, how might we recognize the right thing to do? Like, what are the things that matter most in making this selection?”

And I value those conversations, and sometimes it can feel, to people who aren’t familiar in working with me, it can feel a little bit slow at first, but then the wrap-up happens so easily that we make up for all that time. So, if we spend 10 minutes having a conversation about, “What are the decision criteria? How will we recognize something that is the right answer?” we’re going to get our heads on straight together and that’s going to make it easier for us to recognize the right path forward, the right thing to do.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Okay. Well, so you mentioned this waste. In your book, you highlight two pernicious kinds of wastes. It sounds like we hit one. What’s the other?

Janice Fraser

Yeah, okay. So, when it comes to decision-making, there are really two big ways that we waste. There’s the kind that happens before the decision is made, and the kind of happens after the decision is made. So, there’s before a decision is made, we end up with these slow decisions, and it sounds like, “Oh, they’re never going to make a decision. We’ve been talking about this forever. Six months, we’re talking about a freaking printer. Are you kidding me?”

So, when a decision is taking a really long time, it’s often because we’ve set the wrong kind of standard, and it’s like, “Is this the right thing to do? Is this the best decision? Do we all agree?” Those three sentiments all set this very, very high standard for the quality of decision and the amount of support that the decision has. And what that leads to is deliberation. So, that’s how you get extensive talking.

So, with the printer example that we talked about earlier, it was, “Do we all agree this is the right thing to do? Is it really necessary for seven people to have complete agreement, and that is unequivocably the right thing to do?” “No, no, this does not rise to that level of importance.” Compared to like, “Do we all agree it’s the right thing to do to pull the plug on grandma?” Like, “Okay, now, we should probably all have consensus, and we should all know that it’s right, unequivocably.” So, that’s the first kind of way, is setting the wrong standards for the quality and alignment of our decision.

After a decision is made, the other kind of waste is the waste that happens if a decision is like a snap decision that’s made by fiat or that’s made by gut instinct. Have you ever been on a call and on a Zoom meeting, and you’re watching all 25 talking, all 25 heads, and a decision is made, and you could just see the looks on their face. They’re going to go back to their desks and do whatever they want because they don’t agree with whatever, but nobody is going to say anything.

So, if a decision is made in too-cavalier a fashion without sufficient attention being paid to building support and depth of understanding, then what you end up with is decisions that are reversed, or they’re reversed and nobody talks about it so now there’s chaos. And what happens there is that you erode trust and belief in the quality and nature of the decisions that get made in your organization.

And so, that breeds resentment, and lack of trust, and a lot of churns, and people doing things in conflict with one another because person A doesn’t believe in it, so they’re going to go off and do their own thing, person B is going to do the same thing but without talking to person A about it, so you end up with this entropy chaos-type of situation.

So, what we want instead is to think about decisions, like as, “What could a middle ground be?” And I ask two questions. One, “Can we all live with it?” because if no, if you can’t live with it, that’s important to know. If your lawyer is like, “I cannot live with that. That exposes us to too much risks.” That’s super important information. So, “Can we all live with it?” is a really helpful thing to ask.

And, “Does it move us toward our point B? Does it obviously help us make progress?” because if a decision is something that everyone can live with, that obviously makes progress, it’s probably a good-enough decision.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s nice in terms of good enough as opposed to…

Janice Fraser

Right or best.

Pete Mockaitis

…striving internally for optimal, universal acclaim by consensus may be a fool’s errand in certain contexts.

Janice Fraser

Right. I just can’t, I can’t even. It really drives me nuts when people are, like, debating, as if continuing to talk will actually give us new insight. Sometimes we need to just stop talking and move forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I like that. There’s a time and a place where we want to raise the bar. I think about my conversation with Greg McKeown here in terms of essentialism, in terms of if you’re clearing out your closet, “Might this ever be useful someday?” is a very low bar, and you’ll not get rid of very much stuff. Just everything might be useful someday. Versus a Marie Kondo question, “Does this spark joy?” Okay, now there’s a very high bar. Not a lot of things are going to go there.

And so, here, we’re sort of playing it in reverse. It’s like there’s a time when we want to have a very high bar for this decision, and the consensus, and everyone jazzed about it, and then there’s a time where we should have a lower bar, and there’s a little bit of an art of leadership there in terms of making that determination for where this falls along the continuum.

Janice Fraser

And you mentioned the spark of excitement, and one of the things that keeps us in a really boring middle ground is not being willing to take risks. And sometimes, I think, when we start to see organizations shifting how they frame up decisions, and, “Do we all agree this is the right decision to make?” like, if we all agree it’s the right decision, we’re never going to take any risks.

I made a highly controversial decision at one point in my career. Again, I was a leader of a company, just a small company, but it was tiny but mighty. And we made a product, and we ended up selling it to Google within a year of developing the product. It was such a cool outcome. And shortly after the transaction was closed, and we returned a nice big check to all of the shareholders in the company, everyone was excited, one of the shareholders was very upset, and said that it was the worst decision the company had ever made. The worst decision the company had ever made because it put us at such risk.

And it really landed with me because I was feeling so proud of what we had accomplished, and I was so pleased with the decision-making acumen of the board of directors that allowed us to take that decision, even though one of the shareholders was so risk-averse. Because if we all have to agree that something is unequivocably the right thing to do, we’ll never do anything bold.

So, I’m still really proud of that product, and that set of decisions, and that way of bringing something new to market, and helping everyone make good-enough decisions that kept the company safe enough that we could take a calculated risk.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Janice, that’s really a beautiful perspective that you have as you reflect on this because I think myself, and others with some people-pleasing tendencies, might look back on that, and sort of wonder, “Oh, I don’t know, is that person right? And did we make the wrong call after all?” Whereas, you said, “I love the fact that we went after this, and one person was really upset. That’s really cool of us.” So, I love that perspective.

Janice Fraser

And, honestly, like he took home a cheque for like $400,000.

Pete Mockaitis

There you go.

Janice Fraser

Like, “Dude, it’s fine.” I’m not happy that he was upset. I’m happy that we were able to have a vision and move forward even without consensus. So, there was some research done about the best venture capital investment decision-making. And what turned out to be true was high conviction, low consensus led to the best outcomes in venture funds.

So, that means that, at the partner table, all the people that are sitting around, debating whether or not we should invest in XYZ company, what you needed to really have good outcomes was somebody had to see outrageous potential, outrageously positive potential. And even though everyone couldn’t see it, if somebody saw that there was outrageously possible potential, then there was a capacity, like that potential could be realized.

So, high conviction but low consensus means that it took a leap of faith to believe in it. And I look at the challenges that we have as a planet right now, whether it is war in multiple places, or economic uncertainty, high inflation, climate change, political divisiveness, these are really big challenges. This generation, I think a lot about, my son is 22, my daughter is 35. So, she’s peak Millennial, he’s peak Gen Z, and I think about these young professionals that are coming into the workplace, and we need them to be bold. We need them to help us through some really difficult challenges.

And so, I want us to embrace high conviction, low consensus opportunities to explore big leaps forward in our culture, in our world.

Pete Mockaitis

It’s intriguing that low consensus is advantageous, like, that is better than high conviction, high consensus. Can you unpack this pathway for me a little bit more? Is it that it’s because of VC funds, and VC funds tend to prosper when they have a few bets that pay off massively as opposed to the majority of their bets do pretty well?

Janice Fraser

They don’t tend to. They only prosper.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, like that’s the way of the VC fund, as opposed to a mortgage lender. It’s a different risk gain.

Janice Fraser

So, I’m going to say it’s not just the way of VC funds. It is the way of anything innovative, actual innovation, all innovation across. And this is something that I spend a lot of time looking at. The numbers are in, the math works. If you’re trying to disrupt the status quo, then you will be taking risks, and a small number of those risks will pay very high returns. And I don’t just mean financially. I mean, in whatever.

A lot of the organizations that I work with are, like I worked with the Air Force, like they’re not necessarily profit-making contexts. It’s about creating disruptive results. And the thing about disruption, and I mean this in a sort of business school sense of disruption, like there’s a guy, Clayton Christensen, who developed disruption theory.

The thing about it is that is a fundamentally optimistic act. Our innovators, whether they’re economic innovators, political innovators, they are imagining a world that is different and somehow better. And that imagination, we need to have ways and methods for harvesting the insight and imagination of people who imagine better, and who are willing to wrestle with the status quo in order to make improvements in the world.

Pete Mockaitis

And so, I guess, in a way, low consensus is, in a way, an indication of the innovativeness of the thing. Because if everyone says, “Yeah, that’s a great idea. Everybody, all loves it.” Well, odds are, if everyone feels that way, it’s probably already done, or it is so obvious that it is not disruptive.

Janice Fraser

Well, if it’s so obvious and it is disruptive, there’s some reason that it’s not been done, and so, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I guess I’m just thinking for listeners, like a takeaway is, “Hey, everyone thinks this is a terrible idea but I’m really gung-ho about it, and Janice said that’s exactly what I want.” Is that the takeaway? Or how should we view high conviction, low consensus?

Janice Fraser

No. So, it’s not “I want.” It’s “What if this were true, how good would it be?” So, the framing, again, it’s, “What is the framing? If this were true, how good would it be? And then, what would we need to learn in order to find out whether it’s true, whether it’s possible?” And that’s where you get things like, there are terms like MVP, where it’s the smallest thing you can do to test out the critical path idea, that kind of thing.

So, it’s not “I believe in this, therefore, I’m going to shove it down everybody’s throat.” It’s, “I believe in this. What’s the smallest thing we can do to figure out whether it’s right?” So, it comes with a degree of humility, that high conviction, conviction doesn’t mean blind faith. Conviction means, “I’ve seen some indicators that there’s real potential here. Not everybody sees it yet, but I do.”

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Well, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Janice Fraser

So, there’s actually a quote from my book that I sit with a lot and I pay a lot of attention to, and it goes something like this, “We no longer believe in work-life balance. It’s all just life. And what we want is to make it a life filled with confidence, security, love, and meaning.”

And it’s not because I believe in hustle culture, and I think that you should have no boundaries between work and the rest of your life. It’s actually kind of the opposite. It’s more that I want life to infect your work. Who we are at work, what happens to us at work, the pains and joys that we experience at work, the kinds of decisions we make at work, they alter who we are as people.

And if we can be really attentive and mindful to being ourselves wherever we go, we will end up building a life that is so much more fulfilling and satisfying. And if we have a planet filled with people who have fulfilling satisfying lives, I believe we’re going to make better decisions on that global geopolitical kind of scale.

So, I think that that is the thought that I would want to leave people with, is that you’re allowed to have a life filled with confidence, patience, security, love, meaning. These things really do matter, and they matter at work as much as at home.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Janice Fraser

Well, my favorite tool that helps me be awesome at my job is Google, Google Docs, the Google Suite. I have a long, long, long list of tools, and the one that I could not live without is G Suite. And I’m surprised by how few people notice how powerful it is. You could do everything on G Suite.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit?

Janice Fraser

When I get up in the morning, I sit for one hour and do something I love.

Pete Mockaitis

For example?

Janice Fraser

Usually, it’s I drink coffee and I read a book, and I pet my cat in a favorite chair with the curtains open and the sun shining in, but I spend one hour every morning doing something I love, sometimes it’s social media, let’s be honest.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; you hear them quote it back to you often?

Janice Fraser

Yup, figure out the truth. Figure out what’s true and make it a good thing.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Janice Fraser

JaniceFraser.com. J-A-N-I-C-E-F-R-A-S-E-R.com.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Janice Fraser

Well, the call to action is I would love it if you would take a look at the book. If it looks interesting to you, give it a try. I read the audiobook, so if you want to hear me talking in your ear, that’s the best way to do it.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Janice, this has been fun. Thank you. I wish you much speed and little drama.

Janice Fraser

Thank you so much, Pete.

941: The Best Way to Hire Top Talent with Mike Michalowicz

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Mike Michalowicz reveals a surprising strategy for finding and retaining top talent.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The more effective alternative to job interviews 
  2. The key signs someone is perfect for your team 
  3. The three drivers of commitment and engagement 

About Mike

Mike Michalowicz founded and sold two multi-million dollar businesses by his 35th birthday. He is the bestselling author of Profit First, The Pumpkin Plan, Clockwork, and Fix This Next. He has built two additional multimillion-dollar companies and has become one of the world’s most popular speakers on small business topics. Fabled author, Simon Sinek deemed Mike Michalowicz “…one of the top contenders for the patron saint of entrepreneurs.” 

Resources Mentioned

Mike Michalowicz Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis

Mike, welcome back.

Mike Michalowicz

Dude, it’s awesome to be back. Thanks for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, it’s awesome to be chatting. I have enjoyed so many of your books over the years, and I’m excited to hear about your latest All In: How Great Leaders Build Unstoppable Teams. Lay it on us, I know you go deep with your research. So, tell us the tale of how you came to understand the problem and the solutions that you’ve put forward in your book All In.

Mike Michalowicz

So, basically, what I do in my research, I say, “What’s the desired outcome we have in a circumstance?” So, in this case, it was recruiting high-performing employees, people that are super engaged, great people for our company. Then what’s the actual outcome? And most businesses have horrible outcome.

When we have a desired outcome, and the actual outcome is far off, I look in the middle, which is the method we follow, I call the DMO, desire method outcome. And the method we’re using is interviews. So, this is not a shocker but the solution is. It’s no surprise that most people we interview don’t work out for the long term or aren’t high performers. The percentage, which shows about 5% of people we hire are rock star employees for long term in our company.

But what I found is the solution kind of blew my mind. So, I said, “Well, is there any example of any organization that doesn’t use interviews or use a different method, and has a high percentage rate?” Well, sure enough, there’s an industry, it won’t be a surprise in a moment, but they’re over half a trillion dollars in revenue, that does not run a single interview, they only do performance-based and what they call workshops or camps, and the output is like 95% extremely high performers.

So, here’s the industry. Sports. And that’s not the surprise now, it’s like, “Well, of course.” If I’m a football team, I won’t go, “Hey, why don’t you come for an interview? Where is the green light?”

Pete Mockaitis

Actually, throwing balls, catching balls, running with balls?

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, you get on the field and do. But there’s two forms of interviews. There’s one where I’m considering a candidate and I want to see your functional skills, but there’s an even greater level, and this is the big opportunity for all of us. There is what’s called potential assessments, and it’s not done in the interview process. It’s through an education process.

So, I’ll give a personal example because I didn’t really appreciate experiences. I played Lacrosse in high school, and, admittedly, I was not such a good athlete but, whatever, I played. I went to Hobart Lacrosse campus, which is in the northeast where kind of where I lived, and this is like the preeminent school in this area, there’s 300 kids there. And while we were practicing over this week’s period, certain students were tapped on the shoulder, brought to another field, and invited to play more advanced skills, whatever.

The people who had potential in the beginning were quickly vetted out to perform on more competitive fields and try new skills. By the end of the camp, I think two or three students were invited to play for Hobart, this elite team. I was not one of them. But here’s what’s cool. I played Lacross in college, and it’s in the big part because of what I learned at Hobart. The lesson is this, that we, as employers, can put on camps, an educational event, where everyone gets elevated and used also as an observational medium to cherry-pick the best candidates.

Now, the last thing I want to share, because I get so excited about this. This is happening in the real business world, just not enough. And for the folks listening, I bet you no one’s doing workshops right now, but I’ll tell you a major company who is, it’s Home Depot. And the next time you hear they’re doing a Build a Birdhouse workshop, that is a recruiting platform, and this is how it works.

You see this ad, Build a Birdhouse, Bring a Kid, whatever, and you go down there, and you have experience. They’re there to educate you, you’re having fun, you get ingratiated at the store, it’s cool, we build a birdhouse. They have an employee there that’s observing participation, and if you’re the parent who is learning quickly, helping other parents, asking good questions, really enthusiastic about it, they will tap you on the shoulder, and say, “You’re the exact candidate we’re looking to work in Home Depot. Have you ever considered us?”

So, here’s the lesson. Don’t setup an interview platform, saying, “We’re interviewing people to build birdhouses.” Simply say, “If you’re curious, you can learn,” because the best candidates are curious. The other thing that’s interesting is it’s a recruiting platform that doesn’t follow where the standard fair is going. Everyone is going to the platform DuJour, or Indeed, or whatever it is nowadays. We go there, and everyone keeps going after the same 2% of unemployed people and a few people that are looking for a job right now.

But in an education format, I can go to my competition. I can go to anyone, and say, “Are you looking to get better at what you currently do?” Because, at the end of the day, top performers are always looking to learn. They’re learners. So, put on a learning environment, now people come, they learn the skills that you are looking to hire for, or they have the prerequisite skills and you’re giving them new education, and now you can observe and cherry-pick the people you want. I mentioned in the book, we were testing this other company, and, sure enough, we had a bookkeeping agency that, to a great effect, they preschool, the last organization is using this now.

Pete Mockaitis

Mike, I love so much of what you’re saying here because, well, I actually own a podcast production company, and that’s how we do hiring, is we just put people through sort of a gauntlet. They’re from all over the world, so it’s hard to get them together physically but we’ll just have a series of things, it’s like, “Okay, show me what you can do here and here,” in terms of one of my favorites is “Tell me what’s wrong with this sentence and write a better one. What’s wrong with this sentence, and write a better one? Summarize this podcast episode, etc.”

And so, then when we get together, it’s like, “Holy schmokes, you really sure know how to write very well. Go figure. And I guess you have to in order to pass this gauntlet of assessments.” And then this is also connecting in that I have coached many, many candidates through what I call case interviews for consulting jobs in which they have to solve real-time, live, a business case in front of the interviewer, like, “Hey, our client is this business, their profits are down, what do we do?” and they have to do this all dance of asking clarifying questions, and doing and putting forth a structure, and doing some calculations, ultimately generating a solution.

And, go figure, the folks they hire at the consulting firms tend to work out and not leave early. But I think the coolest experience of this was with, have you heard of the Fossey Foundation?

Mike Michalowicz

I have not.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, this is a nonprofit and, on their website, they identify and recruit and train individuals with extraordinary leadership potential, and Fossey scholars get full tuition leadership scholarships from their colleges and universities. And so, the idea is they want diverse students in colleges, and their students’ brilliance may not show up on the ACT/SAT GPAs. And so, I volunteered several times. It’s so fascinating.

Mike Michalowicz

That’s cool.

Pete Mockaitis

So, we observe high school students as they engage in these activities and we’re all just watching and writing down who’s impressing us with the leadership things they’re doing and who is not.

Mike Michalowicz

I love it.

Pete Mockaitis

And then when all the students leave, we talk about them. And so, that’s like one way that this talent is surfaced, and it’s like a camper workshop for “How do we find great high school talent that should be going to college who isn’t showing up on the ACT/SAT GPA?”

Mike Michalowicz

And you used that term students, which is perfect. So, when you talked about the gauntlet, that’s what’s called a skill assessment. The challenge of the gauntlet is these are people who are already applying for a job so they know they’re in a test environment, and it is a powerful tool. It’s kind of, like, I’m looking for a football player throw-catch-run, but there’s also camps, and that comes prior to this. This is for students, so this is people that they don’t know they’re being vetted, and that’s not even the primary intention, it’s to educate.

So, I can run a workshop, saying, “Learn to be a podcast editor,” or whatever it may be, and now I can invite in my competition, I can invite all these people, and they learn the experience. A couple keys to running a great workshop. Charge for it because people who are curious will pay, and it is educational. Give a certificate of accomplishment. Now they have a piece of paper, or digital paper, that they can use, if you decide not to employ them, maybe you can benefit them with another employer, but in the process always observe.

And that last example, as we said, they are students. So, they’re going through an education and learning, but we’re cherry-picking. The analogy I use, I put this in the book, is pretend you and I, Pete, we want to start a rock band, and we want just like trashing guitarist, and we’re like, “You know, let’s pick a guy from the ‘80s, let’s pretend Eddie Van Halen is still alive. We want Eddie Van Halen.” Now, how do you find Eddie Van Halen without knowing who he’s going to be?

We already know Eddie Van Halen is a qualified person, and if we called him, he would reject us, he’d laugh. The A players are gainfully employed, they’re making Goku box, and they’ll say no. But if we could have Eddie Van Halen when he is 12, that’s when he discovered guitar, I bet you we could’ve secured him. So, the big question, of course, is “How do you know Eddie is going to be Eddie Van Halen?” Well, you do a workshop. We could put on a guitar shop. If we need a future guitarist, we need a great guitarist. Let’s put him in a workshop.

I actually play a guitar but I don’t play it well. We need somebody that’s really a trasher, maybe you do, but we’ll bring in someone from the outside, and say, “We’re going to pay you for a five-day workshop, or one day, or one hour online, whatever it is,” then we reach out to all 12-year-olds, and say, and their parents, “A hundred dollars, learn to play a trashing guitar.” Then we look for the indicators of potential.

It’s always in three stages. Curiosity is the first stage, “Oh, I will do this or not.” So, people vet themselves out right there. Second stage is desire, it’s like, “Oh, I really like this.” Eddie couldn’t put the guitar down. He’s asking tons of questions. That’s what Home Depot was looking for, the parents that help other parents, ask questions about building birdhouses. The final stage is thirst. Thirst is, “I can’t stop.” It’s almost an addictive level. The job of the instructor is to provide an education so everyone comes out better.

Then, or additionally, observe for desire and thirst. When you find those people, that’s when you pull Eddie aside, and say, “Hey, by the way, we happen to be starting a band. Thanks for joining our class as a student here. Do you want to join a band? Do you ever think about that?” That 12-year-old Eddie may have said, “Yeah.” And we don’t know he’s going to necessarily be the Eddie he became, but those desire and thirst are the strongest indicators that he has that potential to become that guy.

Pete Mockaitis

And in the setting of the workshop, I can see curiosity, what are some of the telltale signs, “Ooh, there’s some desire. Ooh, there are some thirst”?

Mike Michalowicz
So, usually, if there’s homework assignments, they actually do the homework. Another part is lots of questions. So, curiosity will come after questions, but desire is also indicative of questions. It’s the person who’s raising their hand the most. The second one is attendance. So, you’ll see if someone is really into it will often arrive early, stay late. They’ll usually be distraction-free. That’s actually the biggest indicator.

When people try to multitask, it means they’re not engaged with the task at hand, so they’re trying to do other things. So, you can see someone online, or wherever, if they turn their cameras off, those are awesome indicators. In a workshop, someone is checking their phone regularly. Well, when someone gets immersed in it, it becomes this tunnel vision. So, we’re looking for the tunnel vision effect.

Thirst may not present itself right away. It may come later on but thirst is an inability to quit. It’s the person that stays for an extra five hours. It’s the professor that says, “Oh, my God, I wish this person will go home now,” or the instructor will go home. That person who can’t quit it has thirst, so we look for those elements.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s so phenomenal. And this reminds me, I was doing a workshop for a pharmaceutical company, just a series of workshops, what you said about the homework was striking. And I thought, “I need to encourage these folks to do the exercises outside of our workshops.” And so, I thought, “Okay, we got gift cards,” I thought a little bit of accountability, a leader board might embarrass them, like, “Hey, your boss and everyone is going to see that you’re not doing the exercises,” and that didn’t really motivate very many people.

Mike Michalowicz

Unbelievable, huh?

Pete Mockaitis

I was surprised, like, “I’d be so self-conscious about my name being at the bottom of the leader board.”

Mike Michalowicz

I know.

Pete Mockaitis

But, sure enough, there were two people who were smoking it, like, with great consistency, getting it done. And so, we stayed in touch, and they might be listening to this show. Hello, guys. And it was so funny, they said, “Hey, you know what’s really interesting, Pete? The two of us were the ones who got promotions, and we were also the ones who scored highest on doing all of the homework.”

Mike Michalowicz

No surprise.

Pete Mockaitis

And I was like, “Yes, that is interesting.”

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, very interesting.

Pete Mockaitis

Because they had the desire, it’s like, “Ooh, I really want to develop these professional skills,” and they went after it, and then they signed up for my email list and other stuff afterwards because they were just into learning these skills, and it so happened that those skills are the ones they needed to flourish in their careers, which is why that was the subject of the workshops in the first place. And so, that’s really telling. If I can give, set a stage to create an opportunity whereby people can distinguish themselves by choosing to proactively do the thing or not, that’s supremely telling. I love it.

Mike Michalowicz

I remember I was doing a presentation last week in front of 200 folks, and these are all business owners. And I said, “Who in the room here is an A player?” And I said, “Please don’t be bashful. This is an opportunity to brag, if you feel that’s appropriate.” And every hand went up. And they defined A player, drive and all the stuff. And then at the same group, I said, “Keep your hand up. I’m curious, what percentage of the population is A players?” And they’re like, “Five percent, 2%.” The most gracious was 10%.

I said, “Okay, we have 100% of the people who are A players, yet, at the same time, saying 10% of the population is A players.” So, this is some bizarre statistical phenomenon happening. There’s some warp in the universe right now, or something is not right. And what I believe is not right is everybody is an A player in the right circumstances. These people, and we all see the best, we all have the potential to see the best in ourselves, some people don’t, but we do have the potential to see the best in ourselves but we have to be put in the right environment.

Eddie Van Halen is probably a pretty crappy, or was a pretty crappy bookkeeper. And so, we’d say, “He sucks.” Yeah, but you give him a guitar. The thing is my little business, I got 20 people here, I have maybe one more role available in the next year. Of all the people in this planet, there’s a small percentage they will be a match for that. But what I had to realize as a leader, as an employer, everyone coming in is an A player. The question is, “Are they an A player for my needs?” And it does change the perspective.

When we think most people aren’t a fit, it’s all about just, “Oh, everyone sucks.” When we think everyone is great, then we start saying, “Well, what will be an indicator of their greatness in compliance with what I need or in alignment with what I need?” It just changes the vision a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis

It is, yes. And it feels more kind and hopeful.

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, totally. And I think it’s the truth. Pick any person, in the right role, they can crush it. And I’m not saying everyone is going to be great nine to five. Maybe some dude, all he does is sleep all day. Maybe he can test mattresses. Like, you got to figure it out.

Pete Mockaitis

“Dude, get in a sleep clinic.”

Mike Michalowicz

He’s a sleep clinic tester.

Pete Mockaitis

“You’ll be giving so much data for the scientists.”

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, or maybe he watches training videos to see if he can stay awake to any training videos. And if he does, he’s a great tester.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, Mike, you’re so fun. I love these perspectives. Okay. Well, that’s such a huge takeaway right there, is creating these workshops or camps. I’d love it if we could get a few more examples for how this can be turned into reality. So, Home Depot, build a birdhouse, sports camps, we talked about the Fossey Foundation. What else?

Mike Michalowicz

So, we worked with a preschool, and this preschool is what’s called site directors. This is a multi-location preschool and they need teachers that can review the performance to ensure all standards are being achieved in their multiple locations. And the prerequisite is you need to be a teacher already. And so, you can get people with advanced skills by having prerequisites.

So, what we did is we reached out to all the competition. And this is the beautiful thing, the competition will send people. We said, “We’re putting on an educational event,” it’s always educational, “We’re going to charge $150 or whatever it was, for a one-day training on site directors services and how you’d manage it. The prerequisite is you must be a teacher for five years, blah, blah, blah.” Our competition sent teachers, so now, at our location, all the competitors’ teachers there, and we teach in this process, we start observing who shows desire and thirst.

By the end, everyone has a certificate, they had accomplished the prerequisite skills or the tests, whatever, but we also identified three of those teachers, we said, “Well, gosh, you’re perfect to be a site director. We happen to be hiring,” but they’re also ethical, we said, “Hey, listen, you have a current employer. If they have a site director opportunity, it is clearly your talent. We invite you to talk with them and consider that, but if there’s not an opportunity and this is something you want to pursue, we’d love to have a conversation with you.” We got our best two site directors that way.

There was another case where a company of bookkeepers, they’re based out of the US, the founder, her name is Tuesday, she is originally from Kenya, an African country. I think it was Kenya. And she teamed up with the University of Nairobi, and said, “I’ll give you a bookkeeping course, all remote.” Actually, she even prerecorded the videos. She had an adjunct professor, she taught bookkeeping. They didn’t offer this course before at this particular university. I think it was a dozen students who went through it.

By the end, the onsite director, she gave them direction, saying, “As an adjunct professor, give me feedback on who’s doing the homework, who’s engaged the most, and I want to talk to those people, and I’ll start doing one-on-one coaching.” So, they did additive education, and she started coaching them individually, and she vetted down about three people that she hired. They’re her best performing employees. But the beauty of that story is the remaining nine people all got jobs as bookkeepers at other companies.

Now, here’s the last thing I want to share, this kind of feels overwhelming. I got to put on a course, I had to do a webinar. Even if it’s an hour, I don’t have the skills. Here’s the ultimate shortcut. Whatever position you need to hire for, find the workshop, the course, the education, the class that’s teaching it, and go as a student to observe the other students. That’s the shortcut. Just go and watch the others, seek desire and thirst, talk to them, and say, “Hey, I’m looking to hire, not deal.”

Pete Mockaitis

This is beautiful. All right, workshops is huge. Well, keep it going, Mike. What are some other pro tips on building these unstoppable teams? And I want to hear, generally speaking, interviews aren’t the method between desire and outcome that we’re after. Workshops are a cool alternative means of selecting folks. What are some other things you suggest that are not interviews?

Mike Michalowicz

So, the most common other thing I heard, and this was also mind-blowing to me, is the desire was, “I want my employees to act like owners.” The method was if you achieve certain goals, you’ll get rewarded. And the outcome is most employees see their job as just a job and don’t function as owners. They don’t put in that extra effort because they don’t have a desire.

What I found is a concept that was buried away in the 1970s-1980s called psychological ownership which is ignored by leaders, but, my gosh, it’s the tool that makes any of us, leader, owner, or not, to feel like owners. What it’s called is psychological ownership. So, there’s two types of ownerships. There’s legal ownership and psychological.

Legal ownership is just a contract of sorts but it doesn’t give you the feeling. Psychological always does, and we need to amplify it. The best example is I own stock in Ford, a hundred shares. I recently drove by a Ford factory, and I was just driving by, I didn’t look at it and say, “Oh, my God, I own three of those bricks on that building.” I just drove by, and I go, “Oh, there’s Ford. Where’s my money?” which is entitlement even though I have legal ownership.

Now here’s the irony, I also own a Ford pickup truck, and I feel that I own it but I actually don’t. The bank owns it, I’m making installments but I feel like I own it. So, the question is, “Why do I feel that way?” Because I treat it with such care. The reason is three elements. First of all, I have the ability to personalize it. I can program the radio stations the way I want. I can put bumper stickers on the back. When you can personalize something, you feel a sense of authority over it, and it becomes part of you. It’s an expression of identity.

The second part is I have control, authority, meaning I can park it where I want to park it, I drive whenever I want to drive it, all those elements. And the last part is I have intimate knowledge, I know all the bells and whistles. I went through the whole manual. I know what every button does. So, the more intimately we know something, the more we can personalize and put authority or control into it, the more we sense ownership.

So, as employees in an organization, within the confines of their job, where can they assert control? Part of it is idea generation. When someone comes up with their own idea, they feel control. Say, “Hey, here’s where we want to move our company, here’s your capacity in it, what do you think you could do or want to do to help us move the business forward?” So, now you’re asserting control, “How can you make this more your own? How can it be an expression of yourself?”

One thing we do when we have an SOP or standard in our own company now, I used to have the person that does it, currently teach it, and everyone follows a script, no control, no authority. Now, we do is we have a script, we give it to the new person, and say, “Learn from this. And then how can you enhance it and create the new training video because it’s going to be your standard?” The irony is the best student in every room is the teacher. So, they’re teaching, which means they’re learning, but also because it’s an expression of themselves, they have more ownership in the role.

Pete Mockaitis

I want to put you on the spot with, like, this really tricky example. Like, let’s say, “Hey, there is a standardized process by which this needs to be done for the sake of compliance or for the law.”

Mike Michalowicz

Right. Right. So, you can’t change the coding or anything.

Pete Mockaitis

So, there’s a few things that are kind of immovable. But could you give us some cool examples of how, even within such environments, folks manage to feel a lot of that cool personalization, control, and intimate knowledge?

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, so a quick simple personalization tip, trick, is to change the name of something, maybe not publicly but internally. So, if there’s some kind of compliance document, I can call it Kelsey’s compliance, and right there, with the assigned names, you have a sense of authority, and really personalization over it so you can give it unique names and lingo. It’s a real simple technique.

Intimate knowledge, I would exploit that. So, I’d say, listeners, “Rules and regulations, we had to follow it to the tee. I want you to be the master at this. So, research it, study. Can you find loopholes, which is an opportunity?” When you find a loophole, it’s a technique of personalization, it’s like, “Oh, there’s a little button here that no one knows about that I can get through.” So, explore it. But even if they don’t find “loopholes” the fact they know the protocol better than anyone else, they’re building intimate knowledge.

Control and authority. There may be protocols they have to follow but can they control the submission times? You can say, “Hey, when is the optimum time to get this in? Does it always have to be Monday at 10:15 a.m.? Or, can we work with a schedule that suits you?” That’s giving them a sense of control so you can assert it. Again, what we’re looking for is for them to say, “This is my responsibility. This is my job,” and that means they’re sensing that authority.

I will give one word of warning though. There is a risk here of fiefdoms. And what a fiefdom is it’s where a person has so much knowledge that they start blockading other people from access. That’s dangerous. So, we want to move to a higher level of psychological ownership which is called collective psychological ownership.

What we do here is you have multiple parties involved, you make teams around it, so if there’s something, a risk of a fiefdom being built, invite multiple people to work in concert, in that way you prevent those walls from being built.

Pete Mockaitis

And it’s funny how into things we can get in terms of if you feel like you’ve got your own little touch on it. In terms of like if I am getting into my own audio editing, which I do from time to time, here and there, even though I’ve got great supportive teams, I love to do certain things which are just sort of my little style. It’s like I’d like to do a gentle downward expansion to attenuate the intensity of a breath sound as opposed to a harsh noise gate that have layers of rich complex gradations of silence. It’s like, “Okay, that’s so dorky but I own it. I am invested in this.”

Mike Michalowicz
Amazing.

Pete Mockaitis

And it’s funny, if someone were to take that away, in terms of, like, “No, Pete, that’s not how we do it here. Actually, you’ve got to comply with the situation where we use XYZ software,” I wouldn’t like that.

Mike Michalowicz

Totally, right, because when someone asserts control or authority on you, we start building resistance. I was saying, when forced to comply, we seek to defy.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, Mike.

Mike Michalowicz

The classic study, and this works from poise, but the classic is with rental cars because we’ve all experienced this. The next time you go to Herts or wherever, you go through a protocol of compliance requirements. First, you got to fill out a hundred forms for an hour. Secondly, if you don’t return with a full tank of gas, we’re going to penalize you by charging $10 a gallon for us to fill it because it’s so hard. Secondly, no scratches, no dents. Third, must be clean. Fourth, good luck passing the DMZ zone where there’s going to be flashing lights, spikes coming up, and some dude coming out with a gun asking for your ID, all that compliance.

So, when forced to comply, we seek to defy. What do we do the second we pull out? We do donuts in the parking lot, or we fly into the light and skid in sideways, or we punch it when it turns green. We definitely drive it more aggressively. Rental cars get beat up on compared to our own car, where we’re, “Hey, this is my car. We’re going to take care of it.” No one washes their rental car before returning, but we wash our own car. Why is that? When forced to comply, we seek to defy.

And this is one of the things that great leaders realize. Most leaders focus on compliance, achievement, and so employees are seeking for elbow room to get back at the boss. Great leaders embrace the internal human and allow them to take charge. Yes, there’s rules and confines. You can’t let people just go wild. We have to work as a team collectively. You can’t have a football team where you say, “Everyone just run any way you want.” We have to serve the plays.

But if we can give them self-expression, they can expand.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, then as we speak, there’s a world of work, there’s these back-to-office mandates. Tell us, as we think about personalization and control, what’s your hot take on these?

Mike Michalowicz
Is that in the best interest of employees? Sometimes you have to require something that actually serves people, and you’ll get resistance, a.k.a. if you ever had children, that’s the world of raising children. My kids, “You have to take a shower at our house after a week.” There are some minimum requirements. These stink bombs walk around, and it’s really in their best interest.

Some employers are doing this because we’re losing the socialization at home. Everything is going virtual. And we’re losing that tactile experience. So, the employers that are requiring come back to the office to promote socialization are building connectivity among people.

It’s funny, they used to wonder that the water cooler, that business got done there, good ideas. No, business didn’t get done there. Connection happened there. People talk about their kids. When we have connection, we understand each other from a tactile level, we have trust. So, it’ll actually rebuild trust. But employers that are mandating it because they want to track time, or trying to assert authority, “I got to make sure you’re producing, so come on in.” That’s not going to work. People are going to, when forced to comply, they will seek to defy. That definitely won’t work.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, it sounds like what you’re saying is there are certain rules, guidelines, times, places, contexts where it is good, right, proper, and necessary for there to be some, “Hey, we’ve all got to be here” stuff going on, but if it’s from a perspective of authoritative, “I’ve got to watch you,” we’re in for bad news.

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, if there’s a kind of a nourished, flourishing, comply to fly. So, if you are nourishing people, have demanded to come back because you’re going to nourish the team, “Go team,” and it’s really in the best interest of people, they will flourish, that’s a great move. If you’re doing to force compliance, measurement, control, authority over, you’re going to get that resistance, and it’s not going to work long term.

Pete Mockaitis

Awesome. Well, Mike, tell us, anything else we really should know before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Mike Michalowicz

So, one last thing, it’s about safety. Leaders have to build a safe environment. Now, I’m not just talking only about physical safety. But ironically, this is a concern with many companies, including mine, and I didn’t even know. We’re a knowledge-based business, we’re writing books and speaking engagements, and other stuff like courses and classes. So, how can I have a safe environment?

Well, we ran a survey, and my colleagues said, “You know the back alley that goes to the cars…” we have a parking lot behind the building, “…is dark at night, and it’s kind of creepy going out into the pitch-black walkway.” I’m like, “Oh, my gosh.” So, starting at 3:00 o’clock in the afternoon, the sun sets in the winter by 5:30, people get nervous about going home, I’m like, “This is crazy.” We just put lights up, string lights, it’s always bright.

And now my colleagues are like, “Oh, I can see what’s going on. I feel safe.” So, we got physical safety, but the bigger thing is relational safety. Do people feel comfortable expressing themselves as they are? Because if they can’t show up as they naturally are, they’re going to start faking it, and now you get a depleted version of that person.

The leaders got to express themselves naturally. Lead with humanness. Show the warts. I’m not saying have a cry fest and talk about how miserable you are. What I’m saying is you can share your struggles. Be integral about your own experiences in life and talk about the wins and the losses, and you’re going to encourage your team to do the same, which actually builds connectivity.

Pete Mockaitis

Lovely. Well, Mike, could you share with us now a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, this is attributed to Oscar Wilde, “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Mike Michalowicz

My favorite research is, oh, there’s a book that came out called The 3.3 Rule by a guy named John Briggs. And what he did was he researched out productivity and found that people can work up to three hours max without needing recoveries, safe recovery, and you need 0.3, which is 30% recovery time. So, if you work three hours, you’re going to need 90 minutes of recovery time, if that works right, and so forth, 3.3.

Pete Mockaitis

Three times 180 minutes.

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, I mean it’s not 90 minutes, but you know what I’m saying. It’s maybe 48 minutes. So, yeah, 30% of the time used is needed to recover. So, if I worked for one hour, it’s going to be 18 minutes or whatever that works out to be of recovery and so forth.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Mike Michalowicz

I just finished reading 10x Is Easier Than 2x by Dan Sullivan. Really opened my mind to perspective.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite habit?

Mike Michalowicz

My favorite habit is sauna, I do it with my wife. And I’m going to try to convince her to do it again tonight. I will tell you this, when you’re in a hot box, it is so hot you can’t have your phone in there, which is great. And the only thing you can do is talk, and it’s hard to think. So, when someone is talking, you’ve got to listen deeply. It’s like the best connection device ever.

Pete Mockaitis

And is there a key nugget you share that folks retweet and they quote back to you often?

Mike Michalowicz

Yes. What I say often is that the number one job of an entrepreneur is not to do the job. It’s to be a creator of jobs. So, I get that retweeted often.

Pete Mockaitis

And, Mike, if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where shall we point them?

Mike Michalowicz
MikeMotorbike.com because, similar to your last name, no one can spell Michalowicz. MikeMotorbike rhymes with motorcycle. Everything is there. I got book downloads. I used to write for the Wall Street Journal, you can get those articles, plus I have a podcast archive there.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Mike Michalowicz

Yeah, your clients want you to be profitable. And this isn’t just a final thought, but when you look at your clients, are you proud of your surviving check by check, to say, “I’m barely making it. I’m struggling,” or, “I’m very profitable”? I’ll give you context. Say you had an emergency, and you go, “I got rushed to the hospital. I have a heart attack,” or something. Doctor one comes down, and says, “I’m making no money. I need clients. I need patients. Let’s get this done quickly.” Or, doctor two says, “I’m very profitable and wealthy because this is all I do and I’m exceptional at it. I have all the time in the world to do this with you and do it right.”

Who do you choose? Option two. When your life is on the line, you want to be catered to. When your life is being altered or served in some capacity by us, we want to be catered to. Your clients want to be your number one customer. They want your undivided attention. And if you aren’t profitable, you can’t do that, so they want you to be profitable. You should be profitable.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Mike, thank you. This is a treat. I wish you many, many fine colleagues who are all in.

Mike Michalowicz

Thanks, brother. It’s been a joy.