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Oct 28
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1006: A Navy SEAL Shares the Hidden Attributes Enabling Optimal Performance with Rich Diviney

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Rich Diviney reveals the hidden drivers of optimal performance: attributes.

You’ll Learn

  1. The crucial difference between skills and attributes
  2. When your “weaknesses” are “strengths”
  3. A neuroscience hack for focus and overcoming stress 

About Rich

Rich Diviney developed his expertise in human performance during his over twenty-year career in the US Military, during which he completed more than thirteen deployments overseas and held multiple leadership positions.

While serving as the officer in charge of selection, assessment, and training for a specialized Navy SEAL command, Diviney was intimately involved in an extremely elite SEAL selection process, which required pairing down a group of exceptional candidates to a small cadre of the most elite optimal performers.

He also spearheaded the creation of a mental performance directorate that focused a strong emphasis on physical, mental, and emotional discipline to optimize individual and team performance, allowing operators to perform faster, longer, and more effectively in all environments—especially high-stress ones.

Resources Mentioned

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Rich Diviney Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Rich, welcome.

Rich Diviney
Thank you, Pete. It’s good to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to hear about some of your wisdom associated with The Attributes, but I think I’m going to put you on the spot and ask that you kick us off with a thrilling, riveting tale related to your time in the Navy SEALs and/or training that’s also instructive and tees us up. So, no pressure, but I want you to check every box with your opening story.

Rich Diviney
All right. Well, so I went into the Navy SEALs. I joined the teams in 1996. I graduated at Purdue University, was commissioned as an officer, went straight to training, and then got through training, which is always a good thing because it’s about a 90% attrition rate at SEAL training, which is called BUD/S, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training.

And so, I went through, got through in ’96. Beginning of the career was, you know, it was normal, but there was nothing going on. Of course, 9/11 happened and things got very busy and kinetic. But what happened between 2005-2010, is I went to one of our very specialized SEAL commands, and that selection process was unique and intense. And I actually took over that selection process in 2010. And in doing so, really had to figure out what we were kind of looking for performance-wise.

So, in other words, to get to this command, you had to have stellar performance reviews, you had to have recommendations, psychological exams, physical tests, all that stuff. And when you went, you went through a nine-month course, a selection course, and 50% of the guys who went through didn’t make it, right? So, 50% of the top Navy SEALs did not make it through, and that’s okay. Every selection course implies attrition, but I think what was not okay and what they asked me to do was that we weren’t able to effectively describe or understand why guys weren’t making it through.

We’d say something like, “Well, the guy couldn’t shoot very well.” Okay, well, you tell a Navy SEAL that caliber, he can’t shoot very well. That’s like, I mean, this guy’s probably shot more rounds than most people in the military. So, it’s disingenuous to him and disingenuous to us. And so, they asked me, they said, “Rich, we need you to look at performance and figure out what’s going on.” And so, I had to really deconstruct performance.

And the couple stories that I’ll kind of harken back to, that hammered this home for me in terms of what I needed to look at, were these. So, in basic SEAL training, in BUD/S, you spend hundreds of hours running around with big boats on your head, you spend hundreds of hours exercising with 300-pound telephone poles, running around with those things, freezing in the surf zone. I was doing this work in 2010 and I had already been on hundreds of combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I can tell you with certainty, never on one of them did I carry a big heavy boat on my head or a 300-pound telephone pole, right?

So, what I recognized in that moment was that they weren’t training us in those moments to be Navy SEALs. They weren’t training us in the skills of being SEALs. They were actually teasing out these qualities. They were putting us in these environments to tease out these qualities to see if we had what it took to do the job.

So, then I kind of thought back and I remembered a story I’d heard from an older instructor, and he said, “Rich, you know, years ago, a kid showed up to SEAL training, and he walked into the instructor’s offices, and he said, ‘I want to be a Navy SEAL.’ And the instructor said, ‘Okay. Well, you have to do a swim test.’ And the kid said, ‘Fine.’”

So, they took him out to the pool, and it’s an easy test, like 50 meters, so 25 meters to one end, 25 meters back to the other end. He gets all ready to go, and as soon as he jumps in the pool, he sinks right to the bottom of the pool. And at the bottom of the pool, he begins walking across the bottom of the pool to one end, he touches one end, he walks across the bottom of the pool back to the other end.

He comes up, he’s gasping for air, the instructor looks at him and says, “What the heck are you doing?” And the kid is still trying to catch his breath, looks at the instructor, and says, “I’m sorry, instructor, I don’t know how to swim.” And at that point, the instructor looks at him and pauses, and then he says, “That’s okay, we can teach you how to swim.”

And the idea is “Why did the instructors say that?” The instructor said that because he knew, if this kid had the attributes, the qualities to show up to Navy SEAL training, one of the most elite maritime units on the planet, and he didn’t know how to swim, he had everything inside of him to be a Navy SEAL. Teaching him the skill of swimming was going to be easy.

So, that was really the big story, the big “aha” for me in terms of bifurcating the terms between skills and attributes, and the fact that if we look at just skill, we’re missing a huge percent of the performance picture because we have to look at these qualities that people bring to the table if we want to understand performance at very elemental levels.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, yes, let’s dig in to some depth in a moment, the distinction between skills and attributes. I think that’s really thought-provoking and useful. But first, I’m curious, with your specific charge, in terms of, we’ve got to get to the bottom of why. Why are half of these super highly trained, experienced operators not getting through? What was the answer?

Rich Diviney
Well, the answer was, we were looking for some specific attributes, and the guys who weren’t making it through either didn’t…well, they just didn’t have enough of them. So, for example, a couple of the attributes I talk about in the book are the mental acuity attributes, which are situation awareness, compartmentalization, task switching, and learnability.

When you are doing, for example, the level of operations that we’re doing, in this case, close quarter combat, where you’re going in and clearing rooms to rescue hostages, it’s a very rapid, a very fast, very dynamic environment, inside of which you have to do live fire, you have to take instruction, you have to learn, you have to upload it, you have to be very cognizant of your buddies, you have to move quickly, you have to hit your targets.

And I think what was happening, most of the guys would drop out during that phase, and I think what we found was that they were, again, they didn’t have none of these, none of us have no attributes or zero attributes, but, in this case, they didn’t have enough of an ability to run into environment, be situationally aware enough to pick a target, focus in on that target, address that target, and then switch to the next target rapidly.

So, it was, I think that the attributes that we didn’t see that were the most predominant in predicting failure, or at least attrition, were enough of those mental acuity attributes. And then another one would just be resilience. Resilience is defined as this ability to bounce back to baseline. It’s not really getting back up when you get hit, it’s to be able to bounce back to get back to baseline.

So, you think about that rubber band, you stretch, you let it go, it goes back to its original shape. Can you bounce back from hardship or even success? And the guys who would be screwing up and they’d get the spotlight on them and just get hammered, hammered, hammered, some guys would just be able to wash that off and bounce back. Other guys would just go into a spiral.

And so, that was, if we saw that, that was certainly an attribute that we needed to see a predominance of because we can’t have folks who can’t bounce back to baseline rapidly enough. So, those were probably some of the most predominant ones, and then there were others that we kind of identified too, but less predominant.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I’m intrigued, Rich, we talk about attributes versus skill, is this mental acuity stuff and the resilience bounce-backing stuff not a learnable, trainable, developable skill?

Rich Diviney
So, it’s developable. It’s not teachable. Let me just identify the terms here just really quick for the audience. A skill is not inherent to our nature. In other words, none of us are born with the ability to ride a bike or throw a ball. We’re taught to do those things; we’re trained to do those things. Skills direct our behavior in known and specific environments, “Here’s how and when to throw a ball or ride a bike.”

And then skills are very visible. They’re very easy to see, which means they’re very easy to assess, measure, and test. You can put scores around them, statistics, and otherwise. You can put them on resumes, which is why we get seduced by skills often when we’re picking teams or performance evaluating.

But what skills don’t tell us is how we’re going to show up in stress, challenge, and uncertainty. Because in an unknown environment, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to apply a known skill. So, this is when we lean on our attributes. So, attributes, on the other hand, are inherent to our nature. In other words, all of us are born with levels of patience, situational awareness, adaptability.

Now, you can develop them over time and experience, but you can see levels of this stuff in very small children. So, anybody who has small kids or has, you know, experienced small kids will agree with me when I say there are one and a half year olds who are patient, and there are one-and-a-half-year-olds who are impatient. So, there’s a nature/nurture element to attributes.

Attributes don’t direct our behavior; they inform our behavior. They tell us how we’re going to show up to an environment. So, my son’s levels of perseverance and resilience informed the way he showed up when he was learning the skill of riding a bike and falling off a dozen times doing so. And then finally, because they’re difficult to see, they’re very difficult to assess, measure, and test, but they come up the most viscerally, and viscerally during times of stress, challenge and uncertainty.

So, the idea is we all have all of the attributes. The difference in each one of us are the levels to which we have each. So, if we take adaptability, for example, and seven is high and one is low, I’d be a six on adaptability, which means when the environment changes around me outside of my control, it’s fairly easy for me to go with the flow and roll with it.

Someone else might be a level three. If the same thing happens to them, it’s difficult for them to go with the flow and roll with it, there’s friction there. They’re still adaptable because all human beings are. It’s just harder. So, if we’re trying to line these up like dimmer switches, we’d all have different dimmer switch settings.

So, the idea is, yes, you can take an attribute you’re low on and develop it, but you can’t do it the same way as a skill, because…and just one more thing for your audience, a way to distinguish between an attribute and a skill is to ask yourself a question, “Can I teach it or can it be taught?” If the answer is yes, it’s probably a skill. If the answer is no, it’s probably an attribute.

So, Pete, you could say to me, “Rich, I want to go to a range and learn how to shoot a pistol and hit a bullseye.” I could take you to the range and teach you how to do that in a couple hours. That’s a skill. Or you could say, “Rich, I want to learn how to be more patient.” I can’t teach you that, all right? That has to be self-developed.

So, to develop an attribute you’re low on takes three factors, three things. The first thing is you have to know you’re low on it. The second thing is you have to have a need, desire, or motivation to develop it. What do I mean by that? Well, we have to understand that just because you’re low on an attribute does not mean you need to develop it. In fact, developing that attribute may be detrimental to what you’re trying to do.

I always say the stand-up comic with too much empathy is going to be a lousy stand-up comic, right?

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, I’m sorry. You didn’t like that joke?”

Rich Diviney
That’s right, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
“Really, boy, I feel terrible. Let’s just call of the set.”

Rich Diviney
Or, I don’t even tell the joke. So, yeah, just because you’re low doesn’t mean, you know, in fact, you’re being low might be exactly why you’re so good at what you do. But assuming both are true, you’re low on and you feel like developing will actually help your niche, the third is the most important. To develop an attribute, you must go find environments and place yourself environments that tease and test that attribute.

So, if you want to develop your patience, you have to go find environments that test and tease and develop your patience, whatever that looks like for you. It could be, “I’m going to drive in traffic. I’m going to deliberately drive in traffic.” Or, “I’m going to pick the longest line in the grocery store to stand in.”

I always say “Have kids. That’ll develop patience.” But whatever that is, you can do that for any attribute. So, those dimmer switches are not, and our attributes aren’t immutable, but they certainly take more efforts and consideration in terms of developing them or increasing them.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you there in terms of, I think the two-hour shooting example is handy because it’s not like, “Hey, there’s just a few guidelines associated with lining up the sights, or your breathing, or whatever. The fundamentals are there, “Okay. Now I know those things and I’m going to do those things. And, oh, wow!”

Because I think maybe one thing that’s coming to mind is you’ll see transformational results from zero to just a few hours later. It has been my experience with learning skills, like, “Oh, I had no idea.” It’s like, “Oh, okay. Well, now I kind of know the fundamental things. I’m just going to do those things, and now we know the results are way better.”

Versus patience. Yeah, you’re right. It’s not like, “Okay, in two hours, I’m going to teach you deep breathing and thinking about where they’re coming from, and now you’re done. Your patience has been tripled in quality.” I hear you. It doesn’t tend to work nearly that quickly in practice.

Rich Diviney
Yeah, does not work, I guess, linearly. And we have to think about attributes. The reason why attributes are so important is because it defines who we are at our most raw, our raw selves when you-know-what is hitting the fan, when the plan doesn’t go, the plan goes out the window, we’re steeped in uncertainty and chaos, these attributes are what rise to the fore. All the rest of it goes away.

I always kind of joke, and you and I talked before you hit record, about personality tests. I think most of them are fun and great. The only thing about personality we have to consider is that when the you-know-what hits the fan, personality goes out the window, and we, at our most raw, are running on these attributes.

And I think the gift I was given in SEAL training, and my teammates were given, is that we, from day one of SEAL training, started to understand who we are at our most raw and started to understand who each other were at our most raw, because then we knew, okay, when everything is dropping in chaos and uncertainty, we know exactly who’s going to show up and we know when to lean on each other and when to support each other and all that stuff. That’s the importance of this stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Okay. Well, so I took the assessment, and it was impressive, 250 items, but it went by super quick. And I got a kick out of how I have taken a number of these as well, such as StrengthsFinder and more, and the results sort of have some confluence, you know. So, I mean, I guess, while we’re distinguishing, we got skills, we got attributes, we got personality, how about strengths? Where do we put that into this?

Rich Diviney
So, I’m glad you asked, because when we talk about attributes, we don’t talk about good or bad. What we talk about is your performance fingerprints, what’s your unique performance picture. And the reason why we don’t talk about strengths and weaknesses is because your top attributes, your top five attributes are just as meaningful and have done just as much for your success as your bottom five. In other words, you being low on your bottom five is also why you’re successful.

Now, when we look at it honestly, what we say is, let’s do some honest introspection and ask ourselves, “Okay, these are my top five, these are my bottom five, or these are my order ranked, whatever. What are ways that this has served me? But what are also ways that this can maybe not serve me?” because that’s when we have to understand some blind spots.

So, the attributes equation is not about strengths and weaknesses. It’s about where you show up performance-wise, and where you might want to either dial down or dial up certain attributes or even develop attributes if you so desire. But there’s no judgment, which is powerful because it takes judgment out of the picture, which makes teams run faster and better.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s interesting, so there’s 41 of them in the report. But as I read through the names, they all seem, like, good. Like, I’d like more discipline, charisma, confidence, courage, empathy, adaptability.

Rich Diviney
That’s exactly right.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, “Oh, yeah, that sounds great. I’d love to have more of that.” But you’re saying like, well, having a whole lot of something is not always beneficial in a certain context, nor is having a very low score on something detrimental in a given context.

Rich Diviney
That’s right, yeah. Any one of the attributes, we could make an argument for pros and cons for that attribute, and we could also make an argument where at extremes, we could certainly have detriment. But the idea is the pros and cons are what you look at, and you start to say, “Okay, this is how and why I perform the way I do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, I’m thinking right now, so in my attributes, my highest, we’ve got creativity, cunning, innovativeness, open-mindedness, integrity. And it’s funny, because right now I’m going through a process of getting a mortgage, and from my perspective, it’s just kind of like, “Okay, guys, so you can see I got credit, I got assets, I’ve got income. So, like, we’re good to go here, right?”

Rich Diviney
That’s right, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
But the answer is no, like, “We have to comply with all of the things perfectly so that, in the United States the way it works, because we’re going to resell this to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who need to have their standards complied with to a T, and that’s why there’s a low cost of capital associated with this.”

“So, your creative ideas associated with how you might prove this or that is not what I want. I want you to go to your bank and ask them for this very specific document, and then include that along with 12 other very specific documents, and then we’re good to go.”

Rich Diviney
So, it’s funny you should say that. By the way, your results are great. I’ve never seen creativity, cunning, and innovativeness all in the top five. All three of those are attributes that involve imagination, but they’re different to an extent. And this is where we have to get precise with the language-ing. This is one of the things we find very powerful about the attributes content, because we’re very precise with the etymology of each word.

So, creativity is the ability to create something into existence that otherwise didn’t exist. This is the artist with the blank canvas, the writer with the blank sheet of paper, the sculptor with the lump of clay. You’re able to create new ideas that didn’t otherwise exist. Innovativeness, on the other hand, is the ability to take something currently in existence and use your imagination to iterate on it and make it better. And then cunning is the ability to use imagination to problem-solve in ways that are outside-the-box thinking.

So, you have a very powerful trio there of using imagination on all different fronts and facets. The other thing about this is you’re also high on integrity, which means, you know, cunning, people, a lot of times, view cunning as pejorative, but cunning is not pejorative. Cunning is just outside-the-box thinking.

But I always say the way we use cunning can be pejorative. In other words, you can use cunning malevolently, that’s Bernie Madoff, or you can use cunning benevolently, that’s Oscar Schindler. The fact that you’re high on integrity means you’re going to use all this stuff in a benevolent way, which is pretty cool.

And then, of course, your open-mindedness does not surprise me because, as someone with all three of those imaginative attributes on top, you’re someone who is constantly taking in and open to new ideas because it probably just informs your ability to use more imagination. So, I think it’s a fascinating top five. What are your thoughts when you see the top five?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it does ring true in terms of StrengthsFinder, I think Ideation was my number one, and I do find that when I am in settings, like teamwork settings, that’s what lights me up the most, is that, “Let’s figure out the new, cool, creative way to do the thing.” And what is less exciting to me is, “Okay. Well now we know what that is, so just do that hundreds of times repeatedly for the next decade.” It’s, like, “Ooh, can someone else please execute that? Ugh.”

Rich Diviney
Right. By the way, let’s just talk about now your bottom five. What you just said there is also indicated by your bottom five because you’re low on patience, which means you don’t really like to…you won’t bang your head against the wall, and then persistence. Persistence is an interesting one. It’s defined as a kind of a firm steadfastness in understanding there’s a course of action and sticking to the same course of action over and over again because you know it’ll work.

So, I usually say it’s the stonecutter approach. The stonecutter basically taps that rock in the same place a hundred times and nothing happens because he knows that after the 101st or 107th tap, it’s going to break. That’s persistence.

You’re someone who’s constantly trying to ideate, which means you like new ideas, and you have little patience for sticking to the same course if it doesn’t make sense or if it’s boring. You will shift very rapidly. Where it could be a blind spot for you is you have to say to yourself, “Okay, well, there might be times where staying the course is, in fact, what needs to happen.” And that might be where you have to lean on someone else in your team who’s better at persistence, who can basically say, “Hey, Pete, we need to just stay the course.”

Your high imagination may find you in a position where you’re just constantly inundated with new ideas and it’s tough for you to take one and stick to one because you’re just constantly having new ideas. And again, this is not that these things do happen. These are just blind spots that may happen based on the way these attributes line up.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s really true, and if I am not seeing some level of results when I’m doing a thing in my own world, I feel like I need some pretty robust evidence that this course is ultimately correct. It’s like, “I did the thing three times, I haven’t seen any good results or effects flow from it yet.” So, I’ve coaxed myself, and everyone says, “Well, Pete, take a look at these impressive results on the random control trial, you know, that lasted six weeks, so let’s give it the six weeks first.”

Rich Diviney
Yeah, give it some time. Give it some time. And again, this is stuff you can do. Again, it’s not that you don’t have these attributes. They’re just prioritized in your behavior lower than the other ones, which means you have to do more, you have to have more deliberacy in when you have to dial them up. Like you said, you have to consciously make the effort to say, “You know what, I just need to stay to this.” It’s a conscious thing. Whereas, if you’re just acting without thinking, you’re likely going to shift.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, this is fun for me. I’ve got a big report. So, what if people who don’t have that? What do they do?

Rich Diviney
Well, yeah, they could always take the assessment, but I think one of the things folks can do is they can begin to interrogate their performance. And the way we do that is we look back at our performance, especially during times of stress, challenge, and uncertainty, and only because that’s when these things are most visible and visceral, and start asking ourselves some honest questions about how we showed up.

So, if we went through a situation and we say to ourselves, “Well, as everything was changing around me, I was upset and it didn’t feel good and I couldn’t really flow. It was hard for me to flex and flow.” That might indicate you’re a little low on adaptability, and that’s okay. It just gives you an idea of where you stand on these.

And you can start to think about these attributes in terms of how you’ve performed. You could think about how you perform in every day, all day, but especially during stress, challenge, and uncertainty. Experiential knowledge is the most powerful in this case. And I would even encourage those who do take the assessment to look at their results and then begin to think about times in their lives where these attributes have served them or have not served them, and start to say to themselves, “Okay, I can see now, experientially, how and why these show up the way they do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then I guess I’m curious, if you find yourself in a context, maybe it’s a job, or role, project, where it kind of seems like the attributes you have are not a great match up, “Maybe I am a super empathetic stand-up comic.”

Rich Diviney
Yeah, no kidding. Yeah. Well, I always say, I mean, I like to think of human beings as cars, just like the movie. Some of us are Jeeps, some of us are SUVs, some of us are Ferraris, and there’s no judgment because the Jeep can do things the Ferrari can’t do, and the Ferrari can do things the Jeep can’t do. But it behooves us to lift our hood and figure out what we’re running with because the friction in our lives, that we’re talking about, might be because we’ve been a Jeep trying to run on a Ferrari track this whole time, or a Ferrari trying to run on a Jeep track.

And so, I think what folks can do, if there is significant kind of friction in one’s life, they may, in fact, be in a position, in a role, in a job, in a niche that is not suited to their normal attribute profile. And what’s happening there is they’re going to the job and they’re having to consciously behave differently, consciously dial up or dial down their attributes so that they can actually conduct the job, which you can do, that’s okay, but it doesn’t feel as good.

So, the idea would be, ask yourself, “Okay, what are my attribute sets? How does that performance picture look? And what might be some niches inside of which I could use this to excel?” And then if you’re a leader of people, you have to start looking at performance differently. In other words, low performance might not be because that person doesn’t know what they’re doing. It might be because their attributes don’t line up properly.

And that happened to me when I was commanding officer of a SEAL command, and I had a supply department. I had eight people; four people in this future look kind of innovative type cell, and then four people in the logistics kind of admin bookkeeping cell. And I had one sailor in the innovative cell that was not performing, bringing down morale.

And I brought her in, I started talking to her, and within 10 minutes I recognized her unique attribute set was a complete misfit for what I had her doing, but it was perfect for this other thing. So, all I did was shift her. I shifted her roles, her performance skyrocketed. So, it is about helping people get in the right seat on the bus as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we have 41 attributes, and if you don’t have a report in front of you, is there a bite-sized, manageable way you can think about these in a few categories so we can kind of map ourselves out a little bit?

Rich Diviney
The attributes themselves, I’ve broken into categories. Certainly, in the book, there’s five categories. The work we do now, we have nine. You can find those on the website, but those categories are like the grit category. So, what attributes make up grit? Mental acuity. What are the attributes that describe how our brain processes the world? Drive. What are the attributes that make up the driven person?

We have vision attributes, which have to do with creativity. We have service attributes, which have to do with our ability to serve other people. Social intelligence attributes, leadership attributes, and team ability attributes. And so, all those are grouped so that the attributes can clump kind of in a nice organized fashion.

It’s not to say that those attributes are strictly in those categories. I mean, even though courage is a great attribute, one could make an argument for courage also being a leadership attribute, but it helps them bin and organize the attributes in a little bit different way. I would say, though, if someone does, in fact, take the assessment and understand their rankings, I would offer and recommend people to look at their top five, bottom five.

This is one of the reasons why the assessment pulls those out because, the top five, bottom five starts to really describe and help one understand some unique aspects of their performance. The middle attributes, basically, are those attributes that you tend to easily shift in the polarities, between the polarities.

So, in other words, I just have to look at yours, but we take something like charisma. Charisma is something that you’re someone who can at times be charismatic and at times you’re not charismatic. You can kind of shift between those polarities, versus when you start seeing where they’ve been top and bottom, those are the ones you’re most often like or most often not like, if that makes sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s funny. I mean, there are times when people, they say, “Pete, I want you to be the master of ceremonies for this event.” It’s like, “Well, okay. Let’s put on the tuxedo, and let’s, you know, the big smile, and away we go.”

Rich Diviney
Yeah, that’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
And then there are other times where it’s like, “That’s fine. I don’t need to be the center of attention. I’d be happy to arrange the items at the event as well, if that’s what you need to do.”

Rich Diviney
Yeah, you shift in the polarities, which is what the middle ones indicate which is good. So, they’re all useful in terms of understanding.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say this is how we are under stress when it all hits the fan, maybe we could zoom out a little bit and share, are there general best practices, no matter what your attributes are, that are ideal for when we find ourselves in these intense situations?

Rich Diviney
The answer is yes. In fact, you’re throwing out a nice preview for my second book, which is coming out in a few months called Masters of Uncertainty, where I give some tools and techniques for, in fact, what we can do in stress, challenge, and uncertainty. So, there are ways we can actually use our brain and our physiology to step through stress, challenge, and uncertainty better.

One of those ways is just a way we can actually interrogate an environment and manage our autonomic arousal. One of the biggest things that happens to us in stress, challenge, and uncertainty is we get autonomically aroused, i.e. our amygdala gets tickled and our arousal goes up. This happens to a degree that can, eventually, if unchecked, reach what we call amygdala hijack or autonomic overload, where we’re acting without thinking.

That type of amygdala hijack is very handy when we are getting out of the way of a moving train. We won’t have to think about what we’re doing. We just want to move and act, right? Not as handy in most other everyday stress and anxiety because we want to put conscious thought into our decision-making process.

What happens as our autonomic arousal goes up is our frontal lobe begins to take a back seat to our limbic, and when we reach the point of amygdala hijack, or autonomic overload, the frontal lobe has now gone back and we’re operating on our limbic without thinking. So, the key in challenge, stress, and uncertainty is to keep that frontal lobe engaged, and one of the ways we can do that is to ask conscious questions about our environment constantly.

So, in other words, “What can I focus on right now at this moment?” Even something like, “How am I feeling right now?” This is why “name it to tame it” is a very useful emotional technique, an emotional tool, because it’s pushing your limbic back a little bit, bring your frontal lobe online.

So, I think the idea is, as long as we’re managing our arousal by keeping our frontal lobe engaged, and we can do that with better questions, it’s a way to step through our environments of uncertainty, challenge, and stress.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you walk us through an example of some “naming it, taming it,” great questions?

Rich Diviney
Yes. One of the best questions you can ask in an environment of stress, challenge, and uncertainty is, “What could I control in this moment?” And what’s cool about the brain is the brain is designed to answer questions. It’s constantly doing it. And so, if we deliberately put a question into our frontal lobe, our brain will immediately begin to come up with answers. And so, if you put that question to your frontal lobe, you’re going to start to get answers that allow you to say, “You know what? Okay, I’m going to focus on this.”

Here’s a real-world example. It’s a SEAL training example, but it can be relatable. In SEAL training, like I said, you spend hundreds of hours running around with big, heavy boats on your head. And I remember, it was the middle of the night, we’ve been running with these boats on our head for hours and hours, and it was miserable, and we were on the beach and we were running next to the sand berm.

And I remember being miserable under the boat, and I said to myself, “Okay, you know what? I’m just going to focus until I get to the end of the sand berm. That’s what I’m focused on. I’m just going to get to the end of the sand berm.” What I did in that moment, unbeknownst to me, but I deconstructed later, was I immediately took control of an uncontrollable situation. I gave myself a focus point and I basically said, “Okay, end of sand berm.”

And as soon as I did that, as soon as I gave myself a goal, once I hit that goal, my brain gave me a dopamine reward for that. It’s inevitable. When we set goals and accomplish a goal, we’re going to get dopamine reward, which allows then for us to do it again and ask another question. So, we can actually start setting these horizons in any environment, and asking better questions about our environments so we can step through.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a really cool one. And I find that that’s true with regard to any number of unpleasant tasks, “If I could break this down into, I’ve got one page and I’ve got it into a dozen pieces and I’ve got my green is my pen color of completion. I don’t know, it just is. Green means done, money, victory. Then, yeah, it feels good.” It’s like, “Okay, well, there’s one piece,” as opposed to if you didn’t have the segmentation, you’re just like, “Oh, I just got one big mess that I’m dealing with.”

And I’ve also found that handy for exercise, even in indoor sterile environments, I don’t know, like a StairMaster or a treadmill or a bike or an elliptical, I find myself doing that just with numbers, like, “Hey, it’s a 30-minute workout.” It’s like, “Hey, if we get past 15, that means we got the majorities behind me. That’s awesome.” And so, I’m just making it up, and yet it helps.

Rich Diviney
And even that process, so neuro-scientifically, this is what we call DPO, duration pathway outcome, something that a good friend of mine, Andrew Huberman, who has a popular podcast called the Huberman Lab, he and I put together a few years ago, but the brain is constantly looking for these three factors in our environment to define it.

One is duration, “How long is this is going to take?” Two is pathway, “What’s the route in or out?” And then, three, is outcome, “What happens at the end?” And so, in the absence of one or more of those three things, that’s when we find ourselves in uncertainty, challenge, stress, anxiety. So, what’s happening there is we are literally creating our own DPOs, whether it’s you in the gym, me on the beaches of BUD/S, we are creating a duration pathway outcome, and we’re taking charge of this focus point, and we’re creating something to focus on and then strive toward.

I call this process moving horizons because these horizons are constantly shifting, and the distance or the size of each horizon has to be subjective to the individual and subjective to the intensity of the task. So, in other words, a more intense task, it’s probably going to be a shorter horizon. If I’m In SEAL training, in the surf zone, just freezing my butt off, and they’re keeping us there for hours, which happens, I remember saying to myself, “Okay, I’m just going to count 10 waves.” My horizon was short.

There were other times where I remember saying, “You know what? I’m going to just make it to the next meal,” the horizon shifts. The key, in terms of the dopamine reward system, is that you have to pick a horizon that’s meaningful for you. In other words, not too hard, so you run out of steam on the way, but not too easy, so when you accomplish it, you don’t get a doping reward. That’s highly subjective.

And so, as you do that in the gym, in life, on the beaches of BUD/S, you’re shifting those horizons constantly and asking yourself, “Okay, what’s the next meaningful horizon?” subjective to your own experience.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s handy. And I’m thinking about just daily work in which you have to focus, because it seems unlimited. It’s, like, there’s an unlimited pile of things that you could do, and then the day could be long. So, then what do you do with that? I actually have a timer that I use, it’s set to an hour or whatever, and then I find that very helpful in terms of, “Okay, I’m just going to crank on this for an hour.”

And sometimes it’s like, “No, I’m tired. 45 minutes is all that’s going to happen this time.” And then it feels very satisfying, it’s like, “I did the thing. That hour is complete and now I’m having a break and it’s all good.”

Rich Diviney
Yeah, you’re creating your own horizons and the timer’s helping for that. What you’re doing also is you’re practicing compartmentalization, which is one of your bottom fives, but the fact that you use a timer means you’re actively practicing, which is a good tool to use because that’s handy and it helps you kind of set those DPOs.

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

Rich Diviney
No, I just encourage people to just start exploring their attributes. If they want to visit us on our website, it’s TheAttributes.com, and we’re going to give your audience a discount code for the assessment as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, beautiful. Thank you. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Rich Diviney
The one that pops to mind is one from Einstein, because he has so many good ones, and it goes something, I don’t want to murder it here, but it goes something like, “Everybody is a genius, but if you try to teach a fish to climb a tree, it’ll look like an idiot.”

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

Rich Diviney
Recently, I heard of some folks in the AI space who have been starting to deconstruct the language of animals. How about that? They started to understand the language of elephants, whales, and different animal species, which I think is utterly phenomenal.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! And a favorite book?

Rich Diviney
One of my favorite books is probably Sapiens by Harari. I go back to that quite a bit. That’s a great one.

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

Rich Diviney
I honestly try to put together and arrange habits or times, periods where I can just be in my own head, whether it be if I’m jogging in the woods or even on an airplane, I can look out the window. But times I can really just be in my own head and think about and process ideas, I think that’s a gift that we should give ourselves, we should all give ourselves more.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a particular nugget you share that people really resonate with and quote back to you often?

Rich Diviney
When it comes to leadership, the one I hear the most is that being in charge and being a leader are two separate things. Being in charge is a position. Being a leader is a behavior. And the one I hear the most is I tell people you don’t get to self-designate. You don’t get to call yourself a leader. That’s like calling yourself good-looking or funny. Other people decide whether or not you’re someone they want to follow based on the way you behave. So, if you want to be a leader, behave like one.

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

Rich Diviney
TheAttributes.com. So www.theattributes.com has everything there, the book, the assessment, a bunch of stuff we do with companies and things like that. So, yeah, feel free to go check it out.

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

Rich Diviney
Yes. Growth is found outside of our comfort zone, so always make it a project to step outside the comfort zone often because that’s where you’ll grow and that’s where you’ll learn, and it’s a great place to be.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Rich, this is so much fun. Thank you. I wish you all the luck.

Rich Diviney
Cool. Thank you, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Oct 24
0

1005: How to Feel Energized Every Day with Dr. Michael Breus

By | Podcasts | One Comment

Dr. Michael Breus cuts through the noise and discusses the three most important wellness habits: sleeping, drinking, and breathing.

You’ll Learn

  1. The top habit that leads to better sleep 
  2. Just how much water your body needs 
  3. What many get wrong about breathing 

About Michael

Michael J. Breus, Ph.D.,is a double board-certified Clinical Psychologist and Clinical Sleep Specialist. He is one of only 168 psychologists in the world to have taken and passed the Sleep Medicine Boards without going to Medical School. He is also the founder of sleepdoctor.com.

Dr. Breus is the author of four books with the newest book (2021) Energize! Go from dragging Ass to kicking it in 30 days, adds the concepts of Movement (not exercise), and Intermittent Fasting to his already famous Sleep Chronotypes. And it was recently named one of the top books of 2021 by The Today Show. In his 3rd book (2017) The Power of When, which is a groundbreaking biohacking book proving that there is a perfect time to do everything, based on your biological chronotype (early bird or night owl). Dr. Breus gives the reader the exact time to have sex, run, a mile, eat a cheeseburger, buy, sell, ask your boss for a raise and much more based on over 200 research studies.

He is an expert resource for most major publications doing more than 400 interviews per year (Oprah, Dr. Oz, The Doctors, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, and more). Dr. Breus has been in private practice for 23 years and recently relocated to and was named the Top Sleep Doctor of Los Angeles by Reader’s Digest.

Resources Mentioned

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Dr. Michael Breus Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Michael, welcome back.

Michael Breus
Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here eight years later.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, indeed. It’s been a while. You were one of the first and one of the longest episodes because I had so much I wanted to talk to you about sleep. So, thank you for bringing it.

Michael Breus
Of course.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d love to hear, any really fascinating new discoveries that you’ve made in the world of wellness, energy, sleep, drinking, and breathing that you’re excited about to share right off the top?

Michael Breus
Well, you know, I’ve got a new book coming out and I’m pretty excited about it. I mean, let me tell you why I wrote the book because I think that’s really the most important part, is I just think wellness is too fricking complicated. Like, I was at the gym the other day and this woman, she kind of finished an exercise and then she was just, like, sitting there, like, you could tell she was visibly confused at what was the next thing she was supposed to do. And I feel like all of wellness has sort of started to turn into that.

Everybody’s asking me, “Should I buy a sauna? What green drink should I have?” And they’re not even looking at, “Are they getting enough sleep? Do you have enough water in your body? Do you know how to breathe correctly?” So, I started thinking about it after I read a book my friend Joe Polish wrote called Life Gives to the Giver, and he was talking about these skills that you gain over time, and that one skill, sometimes a particular skill will, once you have it, will kind of topple over and then maybe make some other skills a little bit easier.

They called them dominoes, so I was like, “Well, I wonder what the dominoes of wellness are?” What are the fundamentals? Like, what is the DNA of wellness? What are the two or three things that you just got to get right for everything else to make sense? And sleeping, hydrating, and breathing kind of made sense to me.

If you look at the world’s records, the longest a person has ever gone without sleep is about 11 and a half days. Started hallucinating. It was pretty, pretty messed up. It wasn’t pretty. Pretty much kind of in a corner, sort of shaking to the side. But you look at how somebody can last without water, which, by the way, I do not recommend to anyone, three days is about as far as you’re really going to get. And then when you look at breathing, how long are you going to last without breathing? Without assistance, I think that the record is something like 11 and a half minutes, 12 minutes underwater, something like that.

But I started to think about, like, “What are the fundamental things that our body can only live without for a very short period of time?” Believe it or not, we can go without food for, like, 30 days. We can go without exercise for a lifetime, I think. I think a lot of people have proven that one. You can go a long time without doing a lot of stuff.

And so, then I said to myself, “Okay, these three feel like it. Let’s dive into the literature and see what there is to see.” Obviously, I know the sleep literature pretty well, but this book is not a repeat of that. What I really decided to do more of was look at, “Okay, well, what are the five big mistakes? Like, what are the five things that people are just screwing up with their sleep?” If they just fixed one or two of them, I swear to you, life would be so much easier.

Then I started to really dive into hydration. And, to be fair, I was never a hydration guy until I started to become a runner and live in Arizona at the same time. So, I really had to know and understand that from a runner’s perspective, but also started to really wanted to learn about hydration from an overall perspective.

I’m 56 years old now, and a lot of my contemporaries are finding that hydration is a bit of a challenge, and so really understanding what are my hydration needs, and then breathing, and then you start to think about breathing, like, “All right, come on, Michael, like, how bad could I be breathing? I mean, I’m alive, right? Like, this really shouldn’t be that difficult.”

If you start to look at the Indian and the Ayurvedic culture and history, you start to learn that some of the yogis and some of the people way back in the day, they’ve been doing some pretty interesting breathing techniques for a very long period of time, and they get incredible results. There’s breathing that slows you down, makes you sleep, turns on your parasympathetic nervous system. There’s breathing that hypes you up and turns on your sympathetic nervous system, and we use these techniques today.

If you go from standstill to running across a field, trust me, you’re using some breathing techniques, hopefully, fairly efficiently and fairly quickly. So, I started to say, “All right, can I make it easy? Can I make it straightforward?” So, what I did was I said, “Look, I’m going to set my alarm five times a day,” and I did this for myself just to kind of test it out, and I chose the times based on my chronotype.

And then during each one of those little five-minute periods of time, I have water, I do a breathing test. I’m focusing on something for my sleep, and, honestly, it’s now become ingrained as a habit, and it’s wonderful. Most of my patients tell me this is a great starting line for wellness, and I think that’s really what’s great about it, is you don’t have to worry about, “Do I have an exercise routine? How much protein should I have? Do I need creatine?” You know, it’s more like, “Hey, dude, just breathe and sleep and hydrate, and guess what, you’re like 50% there.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, fascinating stuff. And I’m curious, you mentioned your patients, do you have a tale of transformation in terms of a professional who’s like, “Yeah, okay, okay, okay, sure, sure, sure, sleeping, hydrating, breathing, got it,” and then they did it? And what kinds of results can unfold for people who think they’re doing it fine, but then put some attention on it and to do it masterfully?

Michael Breus
Yeah, you know, it’s interesting. I think the devil is in the details, for sure, when it comes to people and how they follow it and how they adapt it. I found some really cool adaptations for people. As we get older, we start to lose touch with some of our thirst signals, we don’t realize that we’re thirsty. And so, I had one woman who really, you know, she just forgot to drink all the time. And so, what we did was we paired television – she liked to watch her shows at night – with tea, and so not caffeinated tea, obviously, because that would be bad for her sleep, but we used to call it tea and TV.

And so, we would actually just put on her phone a reminder, “Tea and TV.” And it was something that was that simple for her that allowed her to become hydrated. And then, to be honest with you, she started to become more motivated for her weight loss goals. Now I’m not saying that this is some miraculous recovery, and I’m not saying that she lost 50 pounds because she started doing tea and TV. But what I am saying is that something as simple as hydration can kickstart other behaviors that you’re just not motivated to do.

It’s very, very, very hard to be motivated when you’re tired, when you’re dehydrated, and when you’re out of breath, it just doesn’t work well. Now, as far as, like, looking at some pretty drastic people, I belong to a men’s group, and on every Sunday, we go for a hike, which is awesome. We have a great time, and it’s beautiful here in California, there’s a million places to go hiking. And we have a varied age range in our men’s group. We have guys that are probably in their late twenties, all the way on up till their eighties.

And so, for the older guys, we always make sure that we’ve got people in the front of the line, people in the back of the line, a little extra water, things like that, just to be thoughtful. And this one guy comes on the trip and he is a fairly robust guy, and he’s like, “Oh, I’m a camel. I don’t need to drink water.” And we’re like, “Bro, you need water,” and we kept trying to give him water, trying to give him water. Three-quarters of the way up the trail, he totally bonks. We have to call EMS. It’s a mess. So, those are the situations that you obviously want to avoid.

Now, the good news was, for that particular individual, he came back to do hikes a few weeks later, and we had absolutely no problems with him because he was able to stay hydrated. So, I think there are some pretty cool stories out there about people who are definitely finding something new about themselves from this, but I think it’s one of those things that you didn’t think about. So, I have had a couple of patients turn to me and say things like, “I’m not as grouchy all of a sudden,” which is kind of fascinating. Again, not something that you would have expected.

I had one spouse tell me that they were much more interested in being intimate with their partner because the partner just seemed like a different person. Their mood had changed, their ability to communicate was better, all of these different things. Now, I’d like to blame it on the Sleep, Drink, Breathe program that it was going to be fixing all of your marital woes, but I’m not convinced it will. I will tell you though, if you do it with your partner, it’s a fun thing to do together and it’s something that a couple can do to get healthy together.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that sounds very pleasurable. Thank you, good doctor. Well, so let’s talk about these in sequence. When it comes to sleep, I’m curious, how big a deal is it if we get okay sleep, you know, maybe six and a quarter-ish hours a night versus great sleep, seven and a half plus hours a night? Is that fine or is that pretty consequential a difference?

Michael Breus
So, here’s what I’ll tell you, is it only matters when it matters. So, as an example, if you’re getting six and a quarter hours, and then, all of a sudden, you get five, you are screwed. But if you’re getting seven and then you get five, you can snap back from that very easily and be pretty good that day as well as the next. So, it really has to do with compliance and consistency, I think, is the two biggest things with sleep.

Because if you can just build a steady, solid base of good quality sleep, and it doesn’t have to be…I mean, again, we’re talking about minutes here. I’m talking about quality, right? So, I don’t care if you have six hours of sleep, as long as it’s super high quality, if that’s what works for you. But remember, the deal here is it’s not to get the least amount of the good stuff, right? Like, people seem to think it’s this kind of game.

Remember, sleep is recovery. This is what your body needs to do in order for you to get to your next step. So, by ripping it off, by limiting it, whether it’s through time or caffeine, is kind of foolish when you start to think about it because you’re going to need that body to repeat that activity again and again and again.

Pete Mockaitis
Now when you say “screwed,” what exactly does that mean in practice?

Michael Breus
Well, I mean, so for example, it really can depend. I mean, I have some people who, as an example, let’s say you’re normally getting seven hours of sleep and something terrible happens and your flight is delayed and you’re sleeping on the floor of the airport and you get five hours and then you have to go on television the next day, you’re probably going to be just fine, right? Because, yeah, you’re not feeling so great, but you’ve been getting seven hours of sleep.

If you’ve been getting six hours of sleep and that’s really not what your body needs, your body needs seven, your anxiety is going to increase significantly with this new added stress of not having slept well, on top of now being in a stressful situation. My guess is that, usually at that point in time, a lot of people reach for stimulants in order to kind of counteract that level of sleepiness.

And so, once you start to go down that path, you end up overstimulating because your body is, unfortunately, dehydrated because it hasn’t slept, and now you are kind of in this little bit of a death spiral where you’re amping up your anxiety while you’re amping up your caffeine. Usually, the performance is probably a B, B-minus, of what you would want it to have been had you been sleeping probably seven hours, where it could have easily been a B-plus or an A-minus, again, just from a rebound.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And what I found is the consequence can be even greater in so far as when I’m well rested, and tell me if there’s some cool science on this so it’s not just my anecdote, when I’m well rested, I’m ready to take on the important but not urgent and not pleasant task that have tremendous strategic value.

Michael Breus
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
And when I’m kind of sleep-deprived, it’s like, “Nah, I don’t feel like it. I’ll maybe do that later.” And so, in a way, if good sleep makes the difference between doing those things and not, over the course of a career, it could have a multimillion-dollar impact.

Michael Breus
Absolutely. And I think we see that with hydration and with breathing as well. So, I mean, I 100% agree that if you can have your body kind of in a flow state, in a mindset where… it might not be perfect, it might not be all, I’m getting my best ideas every single second, but it might be, “Hey, I’m going to do the blocking and tackling that needs to be done of trimming this email list, or creating better copy, or doing more editing,” or whatever it is, absolutely, I think, sleep, hydration, and breathing, all of which, again, if you can put it on kind of a schedule, it makes it so much easier.

It’s interesting, when you look at entrepreneurs in particular, and you look at people who are like, “Grow, grow, grow. I got to get my business going,” some of them have some of the worst wellness habits you’ve ever seen. They’re all coffee junkies or energy drink, I mean, I shouldn’t say all, there’s a lot. And that ends up playing a big role when, in fact, if you slept well and you were hydrated, you’d be shocked at how much energy you have. So, I think there are some things in there that I think could be super-duper valuable at any stage of business.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s funny, you know, Michael, I don’t know how many podcasters you chat with who have, in fact, read dozens of full-text studies, randomized controlled trials of different sleep interventions, but I have because I’m a fiend for this sort of thing. And what I find interesting or sad, I don’t know, is that often sleep hygiene education is used as the control and sees almost no result as compared to the active intervention. So, how do you, in the position of educating, help make an impact here? Like, what do we need to do if sleep hygiene education is so lame it’s the control?

Michael Breus
So, number one, I love the fact that you brought this up, and it’s important that you’re thinking about it this way as well. So, number one, let’s be super-duper clear for your audience members, sleep hygiene just by itself, in and of itself, it barely does shit, like, let’s be fair. Now, if you do the opposite of sleep hygiene, like if you have a drum set in your bedroom, of course it’s not going to go well, super-hot room, lights all on, I get it, okay? That seems like it’s kind of like the no-duh of sleep is sleep hygiene to me.

But I think there’s something in between, like a sleep disorder, and I guess what you’d call disordered sleep, which is just sort of, like, “I wish I had some guidelines. I wish I had some evidence. I wish I had a few things that would really work that I could follow that were straightforward and simple to be able to allow me to get better sleep.”

So, one of them is, no matter what your chronotype is, if everybody out there just wakes up at the same time, seven days a week, not five days a week, seven days a week, biologically speaking, you set a process in motion so that your melatonin production becomes consistent at a very specific time every single night. It is exactly 14, roughly 14 hours, I shouldn’t say exactly, roughly 14 hours after you wake up.

So, if you wake up at 6:00 a.m., 14 hours later is 8:00 p.m. and that’s when your melatonin is going to go on board and start to work. That’s why people start to feel sleepy around 9:30, 10:00 o’clock. However, if you wake up at 6:00 a.m. during the week and 9:00 o’clock on the weekends three hours later, melatonin production is three hours later, which means your brain doesn’t even going to think about going to bed until 1:00 o’clock in the morning.

So, by keeping just this one habit, like this would be a better habit than listening to almost all of the sleep hygiene, again, don’t sleep with a drum set in your room with lights on in a very hot room, but if all you did was keep your wakeup time consistent, notice I didn’t say bedtime, but wake up time consistent, you could actually make a biological process in your body consistent that helps you fall asleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I love it. Number one, that’s your top.

Michael Breus
That’s my top. And it doesn’t matter what your chronotype is. Now, I’ve mentioned the word a couple of times, and I know, Pete, you know what chronotype is, but for your audience members, I created a system called chronotyping, where you can take a quiz, you go to chronoquiz.com, and it’ll teach you what type of sleeper that you are.

So, there are four different types. Early birds are now called lions, night owls are now called wolves, and we figured this out. Now, what’s even better is waking up at the right time based on your chronotype. So, chronotype turns out to be genetic and it’s something that I can show you. It’s a quiz. It’s like 30 questions online. Like, it’s not very long and it’s fairly accurate. We’ve had over 4 million people take the quiz now, and so we’ve really been able to kind of dive deep and get some interesting data out there.

And it’s quite fascinating to learn about these different chronotypes because it tells you a lot about the person’s personality and things like that. So, not only waking up at the same time, but if you wake up based on your chronotypical wakeup time, it’s even better. In truth, you end up needing less sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s beautiful. And what’s interesting is, between the last time we spoke and now, I spent a night in the Vanderbilt Sleep Laboratory hooked up to a lot of things.

Michael Breus
Oh, nice. Tell me. Tell me.

Pete Mockaitis
They informed me, much to my surprise, and being a regular weight, a normal weight, that I had a mild case of obstructive sleep apnea.

Michael Breus
Oh, what were your numbers? Do you remember?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you for asking. My apnea hypopnea index was 9.1.

Michael Breus
That’s not very much.

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah, it is. So, it’s mild, but I was experiencing sleepiness in the day, and so I’ve been doing some things and that has helped.

Michael Breus
So, what did you do about it?

Pete Mockaitis
But as I’ve learned, this sleep apnea business is apparently pretty widespread.

Michael Breus
Oh, it’s amazing how many people have sleep apnea that is undiagnosed. Now, here’s the thing, is you have to really understand sleep apnea and its consequences to really gain an appreciation for it. So, first of all, mild sleep apnea in somebody who’s fairly lean, like you are, is something that, in most cases, we may or may not decide to treat. But, as an example, for somebody who may have been a bit bigger, then we might’ve said to ourselves, “Hmm, they’re already putting a load on their heart because they’re a little bit bigger, so, cardiovascularly, that could, in the future, be problematic.”

We want to make sure, even with mild sleep apnea, that that isn’t putting an extra load on the heart. So, therefore, even somebody with the exact same numbers as you, let’s say nine, but let’s say had an additional 60 pounds on them, we would probably consider treating it at that point. Also, to be fair, their symptomatology would probably be much worse than yours. You just said anything that you reported was kind of mild, whereas somebody with 60 pounds on them at your height would probably have significant different symptomatology, I would gather, probably more severe. So, it’s interesting when you start to look at it.

For folks out there who want to know a little bit more about what we’re talking about, an apnea hypopnea index means the number of times that you stop breathing or almost stop breathing divided by the amount of time that you spend in bed per hour. So, Pete stopped breathing in his sleep or almost stopped, according to the numbers he reports, as roughly nine times an hour. Now, you might say to yourself, “Holy crap, nine times an hour, that’s once every six minutes. That seems like a lot, Michael.” So, let me give you the scale.

So, it’s 5 to 15 is mild, 15 to 30 is moderate, 30 and above is severe. Also, one thing that we don’t know about Pete as of yet is how low did his oxygen desaturate while having these events. That can also be a severity criteria as well. If I have somebody who stops breathing in their sleep nine times an hour but their oxygen dumps into the 80s, I’m treating that immediately because I’m concerned that they may have other things that could be going on.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, thank you for asking. About 92-ish.

Michael Breus
So, that’s fantastic. So, we never want to see it going below 92, if at all possible. 90 is kind of like that lower rung where it’s like, “Okay, let’s just make sure it’s above 90 and then you’re okay.” But 92 is actually a better number to have. And on room air during the daytime, you’re probably 96-98.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, all that’s to say, so we’re getting into it, but I think it’s important, so if folks have no idea that they might have sleep apnea…

Michael Breus
Most don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
…what would be some telltale signs? And I’m going to say it, Oura Ring let me down on this one. Other people may love their Oura Rings and I think it’s great for other purposes, but it left me at the door.

Michael Breus
Well, it’s not diagnostic. Yeah, it’s not diagnostic for sleep apnea, number one. So, first of all, if we’re thinking trackers, everybody probably knows that Apple Watch just came out and is now actually tracking for sleep apnea. So, they actually will tell you, supposedly, if you’ve got sleep apnea. I don’t have the app as of yet, so I haven’t tried it out.

So, if you’re looking for trackers, that’s one that might be possibly helpful to do so. But to be fair, usually your bed partner will tell you. The person sitting next to you is going to tell you if you’re snoring, they’re going to tell you if you stop breathing in your sleep. You may actually experience it as well. You could wake up and be like, “Ahh,” and gasping or choking from air and trying to do that. So that could be a telltale sign.

If you wake up in the morning with a headache, that is absolutely a sign. It usually is due to oxygen deprivation causing that kind of swelling in the brain, which is not good. Also, depression, anxiety, moodiness, things of that nature, that up-and-down nature of that, of it all, that can certainly be a symptom or a sign of sleep apnea, and then of course daytime sleepiness, so just being tired, falling asleep at work, not performing, things like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if folks are thinking, “Hmm, that sounds like me,” I’ll say one of the easiest things I’ve discovered to assess this is just like the SnoreLab app, you get an audio of yourself, like, “Hey, there’s me stopping breathing. Whoa! Okay.” And, two, you could just get, like, sleeplay.com has an overnight test.

Michael Breus
Yeah, we sell them actually from Sleep Doctor as well. We have a full line of tests. It’s literally, you push on a button, and we do a full telecommunication with one of our doctors, so you actually meet with one of our doctors, talk about your symptomatology, they decide if it’s appropriate, send a test to your house. Believe it or not, the tests now are disposable.

Pete Mockaitis
I thought that was weird. I thought that was weird. But I’ll tell you my results from the test were almost identical to my results from the Vanderbilt Sleep Lab, and, oh, so much cheaper.

Michael Breus
Right. And easier, right? And in a better environment, I would argue, an environment more tailored to what your natural sleep would look like, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Very good. Okay. So, there you have it. You might have sleep apnea, you don’t know it, take a look at that and the dividends could be huge. Waking up at the same time. What else would be maybe your number two hottest tip for improved sleep?

Michael Breus
I’ll be honest with you. I think it’s kind of the not tip. It’s the, “Don’t think that it’s just going to go away on its own because it’s not.” Everybody thinks that, “Oh, you know, I’m just stressed out and I’m supposed to sleep like crap right now,” or, like, “I’ve got three kids, I’m supposed to sleep like crap.” That’s actually not the case. So, it’s not going to go away on its own.

If you are not happy with either the quality or the quantity of your sleep, and, by the way, don’t confuse the two. Don’t think that just because you sleep more, it’s going to be better, because it might not. So, understand how things like caffeine, alcohol, affect your sleep. Possibly follow my 3-2-1 rule, which is: three hours before bed, stop alcohol; two hours before bed, stop food; one hour before bed, stop fluids. That will save you some trips to the bathroom and, hopefully, make you have some better sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Well, now let’s talk hydration.

Michael Breus
You bet.

Pete Mockaitis
Good Doctor, you said that we can lose touch with our thirst signals as we age, but if we’re in the prime of our careers, can’t we just drink when we’re thirsty and call it good?

Michael Breus
I wish it worked. Unfortunately, as I take a sip, it doesn’t. So, what happens in a lot of cases is if we are sleep-deprived, and I think we’ve pretty much established that we are a sleep-deprived society, the signals don’t come as often as they should. So, believe it or not, our thirst meter, if you will, is off if you’re sleep-deprived. So that’s number one.

But let’s say you’re well-slept and your thirst meter should be on the mark, part of the problem is that we don’t have a solid understanding of what that amount should be. I started diving into the literature because, honestly, it was really kind of foreboding. And I’ve seen everywhere from 50 ounces a day to 130 ounces a day recommended. So, like, the problem is that nobody knows what they’re shooting for.

So, I actually developed a formula based on your weight and what’s called your uptick, so your ability to absorb water and then how much you would actually need in order to do that based on your weight, so, it’s quite simple. So, you just take your weight, you multiply it by 0.6, and that’s the number of ounces that you should drink.

Pete Mockaitis
My weight in pounds and not kilograms?

Michael Breus
That is correct. Pounds. And so, if you’re a 100-pound person, you should have 60 ounces of water. If you’re a 200-pound person, you should have 120 ounces of water. Now, you want to add 12 ounces for every half hour of exercise. That’s it. That’s the whole formula. Weight times 0.6 and then take that number and add 12 ounces for every half hour of exercise, and that will get you pretty much right as rain. The key here is to sip not chug it, and you want to get at least 30, I’m sorry, 40 ounces before noon because otherwise it’s tough to get all that water down without having to pee all night long.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s very clear and direct. Thank you. All right.

Michael Breus
I like to prescribe water. I think it’s the best supplement out there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, water, is it always water? Other beverages are just as fine or not as good? Or what’s your take?

Michael Breus
Well, you know what? That’s a great question. So, number one, there’s a lot of types of water, believe it or not. There are water enhancers, by the way. We can talk about that. But I think you can throw a couple of cups of coffee in there. I don’t have a problem with that. I would prefer if you could stay away from the sugary stuff.

So, if you like sparkling water, that’s great. If you like carbonated water, I don’t have a problem with it. I’d stay away from soda, if you possibly can. But I’m also here to tell you that if you’re not going to drink and the only thing that’s going to get you to drink is a Diet Coke, fine. Drink your Diet Coke. I’d rather you get the fluid than not.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then let’s talk about these enhancers, these electrolytes, the powders, etc. Are they handy? And under what context?

Michael Breus
Yep, so that’s exactly how you should think of them, as handy and only under certain contexts. So, I did a little comparison in the book, looking at things like liquid IV and LMNT and a few others, and here’s what I can tell you. First of all, there’s a lot of sodium in these, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but here’s the thing. What they’re trying to do is create a barrier with the water-salt balance in your body. Because when you get too salty, your body wants more water. When you have too much water, your body wants more salt. So, that’s basically kind of how the whole thing works.

These packets of electrolytes are mostly salt, so you want to be careful, especially if you have high blood pressure, about dumping these things into your water bottle every day. Why I said I like the word “handy” is because you should have a packet with you, but you should use them sparingly. So, I would say, as an example, if you’re a runner and you run five miles every day, and you do a long run on the weekends, then I would use it for the long run on the weekends.

So, times where you’re going to be extra exposed or have a significant more energy expenditure, I think it makes a lot of sense because that helps keep that hydration going. But I want to be also clear about something, is using one of these products does not preclude you from drinking more water.

So, what a lot of people will do is they’ll pour this thing in, and they’ll think, “Oh, I don’t need to have my however many ounces because I’ve put my hydration multiplier in.” No, no, no, no, no. You still need the same amount of water. You just need to really think about these times and when to use it, and I would argue you probably already know when those are.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then I’m thinking if I am consuming this much fluid, for some that could be quite the uptick. Am I going to have to go to the bathroom all the time? Or are there some strategies for this? What do I do?

Michael Breus
Yeah, so it turns out that you don’t have to go to the bathroom all the time. So, it’s kind of interesting. There’s a section in my book that looks at bladder control, actually, and here’s what’s fascinating is, as you learn to drink more water, your bladder and your body absorbs it quite nicely and can control it. So, you won’t see a huge uptick in bathroom breaks. You will for the first two weeks, but by the third week it levels itself out quite nicely and it’s not really any more than usually what you’re used to. Here’s an interesting little factoid, is that no living mammal can pee for longer than 21 seconds.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I want to try it. I don’t think I’ve ever timed it before.

Michael Breus
Well, you will never not time it now. Everyone who is listening, I can assure you, is now, the next time you pee, you’re going to think about it. But if you pee for 21 seconds, you have truly emptied your bladder.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Michael Breus
Challenge out there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, the stopwatches coming out. That seems kind of short, intuitively, but, I mean, I don’t know. We’ll see.

Michael Breus
Wait till the next time you pee, and it’s like, it’s not a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. It’s a 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, you know, that kind of thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then is there a certain amount of fluid that I can only…? You said don’t gulp or guzzle. Like, is it 16 fluid ounces an hour? Or is there a guideline for, like, what’s going to be just more than what your body can deal with?

Michael Breus
So, here’s what I tell people, is you want to think of your body like a sponge. So, you know when you walk out in the morning to the sink and there’s this kind of shriveled block and it’s pretty hard you could probably hammer something with it, that’s your sponge, right? That’s your body when you first have water. And if you pull the spout and you put water on it, if you put a lot of water on it, it just rolls off. It doesn’t really get absorbed.

But if you have a slow stream, it slowly gets absorbed, absorbed, absorbed, and then the whole thing grows, and then finally, when it gets too much water, it basically overruns. That’s exactly how you should think about drinking. You’re the sponge. You don’t want to throw 20 ounces down your gullet because it’s not going to get absorbed. But if you sip it, you’ll be surprised.

So, my favorite technique for doing this is, every morning, one of my morning routines is, I call it the three 15s, where I sit on the edge of the bed and I take 15 deep breaths, then I get 15 minutes of sunshine, and I drink 15 ounces of water. So, while I’m getting my 15 minutes of sunshine, every minute I just take a gulp, and I’m outside, I get the sunlight, I get the vitamin D, it turns off my melatonin, and I’m breathing. Like, I don’t know how many that is. It’s past a quadruple.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, all at once. All right. Well, any other do’s and don’ts when it comes to hydration?

Michael Breus
Well, one thing for people to know, and this is kind of weird, but it’s actually a truism, you can actually drink too much water, and this can happen. It’s happened actually at a fraternity hazing and things of that nature. You can actually make somebody toxic by putting too much water into them or into your body. As a matter of fact, was it Brooke Shields, actually had this happen? She was overhydrating and she overhydrated so much that she actually went unconscious and passed out. So, you can go to the other side of water. So, again, balance is sort of key here.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s talk about breathing.

Michael Breus
Yeah, let’s talk about it. It’s amazing how many people don’t know how to breathe, it’s actually quite remarkable.

Pete Mockaitis
So, what are we doing wrong, exactly?

Michael Breus
Well, that’s the right question. It’s like, “Well, Michael, are we doing something wrong? I mean, we’re alive, right? So how wrong could it be?” I would say some of the biggest things that we see people that are doing that are actually just not helping with their breathing, number one is their breathing is too shallow. Number one, that puts much bigger load on the heart. Number two, you actually get about half as much air. Taking a long, deep belly breath, and then kind of letting it go through your diaphragm, actually extends the lungs and allows your heart to slow down, which is much more healthy, generally speaking.

So, one of the things that we do is we breathe in a too shallow of a way so it’s just very light repetitive breaths. The other biggie that we do is we’re too mouthy. Too many people are mouth breathers. That can be due to congestion. That can be due to people just not really thinking about it, but in a majority of cases when people are mouth-breathing, it’s basically like putting leaded gas into the engine because you get every bacteria, virus, particulate, everything is coming right through the mouth, straight into the lungs, and kind of gumming up the works.

And then I think the other big one, and there’s actually six breathing problems, but I think these are the big three. People forget to breathe. Do you ever do this, Pete? I have this happen to me every once in a while. Like, if I’m concentrating, like if I’m playing a video game or I’m watching something, I’m just there and then, all of a sudden, I realize, I’m like, “I forgot to breathe.” I start to breathe again. Do you ever do that?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m sure.

Michael Breus
So, that’s something that people do as well. And, again, getting people more thoughtful about breathing, in general, turns out to be a great idea. And the yogis and the Ayurvedics and that culture has done such an amazing job of teaching us so many different kinds of breathing. I utilize several of these different types of breath work in the book, and it’s fun. It’s fun to actually try some different things out.

I’ve tried the hyperventilation breathing called Kundalini breathing. That was quite an experience for me. I’ve also tried the 4-7-8 breathing. This is a technique that I utilize actually in the middle of the night for many of my patients. So, people who wake up in the middle of the night can’t return back to sleep. My favorite technique then is 4-7-8 breathing.

So, it’s exactly what it sounds like. Slowly breathe in for a count of four, you hold for a count of seven, you breathe out for a count of eight. This was a technique that was developed by Dr. Andrew Weil for the Navy SEALs to help them lower their heart rate so they could shoot in between heart rates for long range snipers. So, this is a great technique you can utilize.

I utilize it before I go on stage. I utilize it in the middle of the night. It’s one of those great things that will just dump your heart rate super-duper quick and allow you to breathe better. So, I think there’s a lot out there. There’s more out there than you might imagine on breathing, in general.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if we’re breathing through the mouth, we have some negative impact associated with just sucking in the microbes, pathogens, etc.

Michael Breus
You bet.

Pete Mockaitis
I guess I’m curious, like what’s really at stake when we breathe optimally, versus we breathe with just kind of without any thought to it?

Michael Breus
So, oxygen transport, and so it all has to do with energy. So, for folks out there who want more energy, shallow breathing is never going to get you there unless it’s super-duper forceful. So, I would argue that all of your energy, remember, oxygen is the fuel that lights the sugar fire that is your energy. So, when we eat something, it all gets broken down into glucose and then stored as either fat or glucose, and so we need something to light that on fire to create energy. That something is oxygen.

And so, by taking small, shallow breaths and unfiltered breaths, what ends up happening is we get bad quality air, and we don’t get enough air, which means we don’t have enough fuel for the fire and we don’t have enough energy.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. And then, you’ve got a few changes you recommend, so we’ve already covered the using your nose and bring it into the diaphragm. Any other top things we’re getting wrong?

Michael Breus
Well, I think just being thoughtful about breathing and thinking about it is probably one of the biggest things that I want you to do. And let’s be fair, you don’t have to do something crazy, okay? Like, a lot of people turn to me, like, “Oh, Michael, you learned all these crazy breathing techniques. I’m not a meditator. I’m not a yoga person. I don’t know how to do those things.” Wrong. This is just breathing we’re talking about.

One of the techniques is you breathe. You hold one nostril closed, and you breathe in through one nostril, and then you breathe out through another nostril. That’s the technique. This isn’t hard stuff, but what it does is it allows you to be purposeful in your breath work. It allows your heart rate to go up and down in ways, shapes, and forms that causes other things to happen in your body, like melatonin to be produced, or cortisol to be produced, or things like that. So, it’s really quite powerful. Honestly, I was kind of surprised, because when I went into this, I’m like, “What am I going to learn about breathing?” I was shocked.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, one of your suggestions is to strengthen your diaphragm, and I’d love to get your hot take on, I guess they call it respiratory muscular training, RMT, with tools like The Breather, but do you think that’s worth doing?

Michael Breus
So, here’s what I think. I don’t think it’s worth spending a ton of money on a bunch of fancy gadgets and gizmos. There are actually some things that you can buy on Amazon for 20 bucks that can actually help strengthen your breathing quite nicely. But the big thing to do is, again, in the Sleep, Drink, Breathe programmatic book, where we have these five separate times throughout the day where we have you do different things, you’re breathing at all five of those times, you will naturally begin to strengthen just by doing some deep diaphragmatic breathing, even if that’s the only technique that you do.

So, the good news here is, I think if you if all you did was buy the book and follow the program, your diaphragm is going to get stronger.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Michael, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Michael Breus
Well, here’s the deal, is I feel like the book is a little bit like a ticket. So, if you buy the book, you actually send me a copy of the receipt and I then send you all this cool stuff. So, I actually have got several lectures that I’m doing live that you’ll be invited to join. You get the plan immediately for free right there, so even before the book comes out. There’s a couple of different things in there that I think you’ll like.

Also, you are entered into a drawing for a free mattress. So, we’re going to have several mattresses that we’re going to give away for people who are doing that. So, it’s going to be a lot of fun. We’re definitely looking forward to it. So, if you get a chance, go to SleepDoctor.com/book, and check it out.

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

Michael Breus
So, I heard Nelson Mandela once say, “I never lose. I only win or learn.” 

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

Michael Breus
I think, for me, the most interesting research that came out was when they started studying narcolepsy to help insomniacs. So, they started to learn, genetically speaking, what was going on with narcoleptics and make them feel so sleepy to try to understand how we could help people with insomnia. I thought that was a really cool application of the science.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is cool. Now, I have to know, is there a one weird trick from narcoleptics that helps them snap into sleep immediately?

Michael Breus
Well, so it opened up a whole line of genetic work and possible new drug therapy, actually. So, there are actually several companies now that are looking at the on switch for narcolepsy as a potential on switch for people with insomnia, but not at that level, of course. And so, it’ll be interesting to see what happens next.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Michael Breus
Well, my all-time favorite book is Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. But I just read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, and that was just powerful.

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

Michael Breus
Probably my pillow because I’m a sleep doctor. I love my pillow. I actually have several pillows that I utilize. One is from a company called InfiniteMoon. I have no affiliate anything with these companies. InfiniteMoon, they make a cool, really good pillow called The Curve and then something called Sleep Crown. Now, this is weird. This is a pillow that I actually put over my head and it actually helps. I don’t know why. It’s just so damn comfortable and I really enjoy it.

Pete Mockaitis
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?

Michael Breus
Sleep is a lot like love. The less you look for it, the more it shows up.

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

Michael Breus
Head on over to SleepDoctor.com and check out my book. You’re welcome to ping me on Facebook, TikTok, all of those. And I have a YouTube channel where I’m now doing some really fun, interesting videos. So, if you get a chance, check it out there, throw me some comments.

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

Michael Breus
Here’s my final call to action, is do yourself a favor and just consider your sleep, your hydration, and your breathing, in what it could do for your overall performance, whether that’s your work performance, your relationship performance, or your personal performance, and see if it’s something that might be interesting for you. You might be surprised.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Michael, it’s been fun once again. Good luck and good sleep.

Michael Breus
Thank you. I appreciate it. Wishing you some sweet dreams, Pete.

Oct 21
0

1004: Seth Godin on How to Maximize Your Impact and Deliver Work That Matters

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Seth Godin shares insightful stories and perspectives to help us think strategically and create meaningful change in a complex world.

You’ll Learn

  1. The mindset that makes you indispensable
  2. Why to embrace that you’re an impostor 
  3. Three questions to ask with every project 

About Seth

Seth Godin is the author of 22 books that have been bestsellers around the world and have been translated into more than 35 languages. He’s also the founder of the altMBA and The Akimbo Workshops, online seminars that have transformed the work of thousands of people. 

He writes about the post-industrial revolution, the way ideas spread, marketing, quitting, leadership and most of all, changing everything. You might be familiar with his books Linchpin, Tribes, The Dip and Purple Cow. His book, This Is Marketing, was an instant bestseller around the world. The newest book, The Practice, is out at the end of 2020 and is already a bestseller. His newest project is leading a worldwide group of volunteers creating The Carbon Almanac. 

In addition to his writing and speaking, Seth has founded several companies, including Yoyodyne and Squidoo. His blog (which you can find by typing “seth” into Google) is one of the most popular in the world. His podcast is in the top 1% of all podcasts worldwide. 

In 2018, he was inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame. More than 20,000 people have taken the powerful Akimbo workshops he founded, including thealtMBA and The Marketing Seminar. 

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Seth Godin Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Seth, welcome back.

Seth Godin
Thank you for having me. It’s good to see you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I am excited to dig into some of your insights and wisdom and stories and fun that you got cooked up in your latest book, This is Strategy: Make Better Plans. Could you kick us off with a particularly fascinating, surprising, counterintuitive nugget that you’ve come across as you’re putting this piece together?

Seth Godin
Potatoes.

Pete Mockaitis
Potatoes. That’s surprising.

Seth Godin
There were no potatoes in Europe until 1500 or so. They evolved and were hybridized in Peru. Well, when potatoes arrived, it’s worth noting that potatoes are twice as efficient at creating calories and food for humans as any other food that you can grow.

But when potatoes took off, Dublin, in the 1800s, was the most densely populated place on earth and has never retained, become that densely populated since. So, potatoes are the key to all of this. Anyway, because the people in Europe were colonialists, they looked down on things that were strange, it wasn’t high status. Potatoes came close to being banned in England, and they were banned in France.

And a guy, an entrepreneur, wanted to get potatoes into the diets of people who were starving and who needed food. He had access to the court, so he got Marie Antoinette to wear potato flowers in her hair, just as a little signal that maybe potatoes would be okay, but that wasn’t enough. So then, he rented some farmland a few miles away from Versailles and planted a whole bunch of potatoes and hired armed guards to stand watch over the plot all day but at night, he sent them home.

So, of course, the peasants, seeing that this high value item wasn’t guarded, stole potatoes, ate them, discovered that they were just great. And that’s how France was saved. The lesson of this is strategy is your philosophy of becoming. What moves will you make? What tasks will you take on to change the system, to see the system, and then change it? And it’s all about status, and affiliation, the freedom from fear. It’s time all woven together so that we can do the work we’re proud of.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful, and there’s a lot there. I want to maybe get a contrasting story. Tell us the tale of your hot take on how organ donation should work.

Seth Godin
Well, a relative needed a kidney and so I got to learn a lot about the system. It turns out, in the United States, kidney donation is opt-in, and it turns out that every year millions of kidneys are buried that could go to somebody who needed them, and this leads to a shortage and a waiting list. The problem with the waiting list, of course, is that people are dying to get on it, and they’re dying when they’re on it.

So, lots of things have been suggested. Most of them are horrible, like paying poor people to donate their kidneys when they’re dead. And I got to thinking about the game theory here, the strategy that you could bring to the system, and Dr. Jonathan Sackner-Bernstein, a well-regarded cardiologist, worked with me. We wrote a paper, published it in Transplantation Journal. We did everything right, and even though my idea is correct, it didn’t get adopted. And in the book, I outlined exactly what we did wrong.

But the short version is this. Right now, opting in to donate a kidney has some fear associated with it because you have to acknowledge you’re going to die, and you have to think about how your family is going to engage with that. If we just added one shift to the rule set, which is your priority on the wait list is based on how long you have signed up to be a donor because now there’s no moral issue, right? If you’re not willing to be a donor, you shouldn’t be willing to be a recipient.

If that is the case, that there’s a priority to people who donated early, everyone’s going to get on the list as soon as they can because you would be afraid of being left out. Tension, and status, and affiliation. As a result, the shortage would go away and we wouldn’t need a list. But – and this is the lesson – the people who are in charge of the list are risk averse. The people who are in charge of the list don’t want to go first. The people who are in charge of the list, the worst thing they can imagine is screwing things up.

So, in order to get them to say, “Yes,” I would have needed to spend four years on the road, going to conferences, writing papers, going to meetings, dealing with committees, doing tests, and I wasn’t willing to do that sacrifice. And that is a key lesson in how we make change happen, which is don’t try to start a log on fire if the kindling you have is too small.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. And what it’s hitting home for me here is that your kidney idea and potatoes are both fabulous. I love them both. I’m a good Lithuanian boy. We love our potatoes. And it’s intriguing, I think, and this might be sort of a no-duh for many, but I think a number of professionals who strive to be awesome at their job, kind of get a rude awakening at times that just being great, having a fantastic idea or product or offer or solution or skill set isn’t adequate to make it happen.

Seth Godin
Correct. Well said. And that’s why the first two ideas that I just shared with you are not about your job. They’re about projects. But most of us have a job and we have a choice. Either our analysis is, “My job is to do my job, to wait for instructions, just like I did in school, and to do the tasks that are put in front of me.” The alternative is to view my job as a series of projects where I go to people and I enroll them in working with me to make the change I seek to make.

The problem with the first path is, while it might give you peace of mind in the short run, particularly in a changing world with AI and everything else, you’re going to be a cog in a system that doesn’t care about you. Whereas, if you can adopt an awesome mindset to say, “I want to be a contribution. I do projects. I make change happen,” the doors are wide open.

And the CEOs I talk to from companies big and small, that’s what they want from their employees. Unfortunately, they act in a way that doesn’t signal that. They act in a way that makes it feel like third grade and you’re just trying to get through the day.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, you zeroed in on a few of these key principles, difference makers, status, affiliation, fear. And, yes, I think there, I think I see them front and center in terms of, “You know, if I stick my neck out and do this kind of weird thing that nobody else seems to be talking about, so maybe it’s not important, then I could very well look like a total idiot here, and so my status could be down, my affiliation could be down, people not asking me, inviting me to cool stuff anymore, and I’m just afraid of that. Ultimately, you know, getting fired, losing income, got to sell the house, got to downsize, all the things that could unfold.” So, help us, how do we kind of navigate through those core issues?

Seth Godin
So, you’ve nailed it. And the one thing you left off the list that people are motivated by is the freedom from fear. Not actual risk, but the freedom from feeling like we are taking a risk. And it turns out that work has amplified our fear. That’s how they get us to comply and it’s a trap because, the people who get the joke and are willing to encounter the feeling of fear, actually have the most stable and resilient jobs.

So, my first job, I didn’t know any better, I was 23 years old, I was lucky enough to be working with Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Michael Crichton, I launched a whole line of science fiction adventure games, and it was a job, I wasn’t the boss. And the packaging was absolutely beautiful but I needed a way to seal the package for the stores because Target and Lechmere and other mass merchants didn’t want this fourfold gate thing open.

So, they said, “You have to shrink wrap it,” and I didn’t want to shrink wrap my beautiful packaging. So, I ordered 10,000 little tiny Velcro dots to hold it shut. The problem is that 10,000 little tiny Velcro dots do not adhere and stick to coated cardstock. And as a result, my peers happily made fun of me for months. And the thing about it is the 10,000 tiny little Velcro dots probably cost the company $400. And because I was willing to dance with that, I launched more than a dozen gold or platinum level pieces of software in the time it took my colleagues to launch one or two middling products.

Because my posture was the best surfers find good waves. Here’s a wave and it’s not fatal. I can lean into possibility. I can do projects that could be generous if they work and aren’t about my ego but are about making a change. And I knew that the downside was, yes, maybe I was going to get fired. I came within a day of getting fired.

But if I was going to get fired, it wasn’t going to be because I was timid and it wasn’t going to be because I was selfish. It was going to be because I was bringing possibility to the table that made people uncomfortable. But I knew that that’s the definition of being awesome at your job. We don’t need you to comply more than everyone else. I can go to Upwork for that. I can go to Fiverr for that. What we need from you is to push and to imagine because that’s what’s worth paying for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really powerful. And so, zooming in on, I guess, the fundamental mindset that you had cooking with regard to the dots is whereas, others in that same position say, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know. I guess shrink-wrapping is the thing that we do. So, hey, that’s a shame, but, okay, shrink-wrapping, here we go.” So, they might just go down that pathway.

But because you’re willing to take the occasional oopsie and embarrassment, you are liberated and emboldened to charge ahead and do a lot of great stuff and get way more big wins than a couple of little scuff losses along the way.

Seth Godin
Yeah. So, here’s one way to think about it, and I learned this accidentally at business school. A business school professor has a challenge where they’re teaching a case. They’ve got 60 people in her class, and she has to call on people to move the conversation forward. And I showed up at business school, I was one of the younger people there, and it became clear to me that the spreadsheets and the two-thirds of the case that was about crunching the numbers, it was going to make my eyes bleed. I was never going to be good at it. I didn’t want to be good at it.

So, I decided that I was going to invest all my effort on reading about the personalities and the situations, and not even open the spreadsheet that came with it. And I made it clear through my actions that if a professor wanted that kind of analysis, that’s the day to call on me. That if they wanted to embarrass me and ask me about the numbers, they were welcome to, but that would ruin the… that gets old. They don’t want to do that. They don’t want to set me up to fail. I want to set them up to succeed.

So, if you earn the reputation at work that you’re the person who does interesting things with energy, that you’re the person who contributes and raises the quality of conversation, if you’re the one who asks hard questions, you can hire a boss that wants you to do that, and now you have job security forever. Whereas if you are, you can pick anyone, and I mean anyone, trying to fit in all the way, the minute they can find someone cheaper than you, I promise they will.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a hard reality check, a true one. I’m reminded, we have a conversation publishing shortly, with Duncan Wardle who worked at Disney, and he developed a reputation for making impossible things happen, which was so fun because they just kept giving him these super cool out-there jobs, and he just kept getting to do them and getting cool results and building a career reputation, and now consulting practice and books and all those things.

And so, that’s quite beautiful how you get a bit of a, the word personal brand feels a little shallow for this. It’s a reputation, it’s an oomph, it’s an ethos, it’s a vibe, it’s a thing that you carry within you and is recognized by others and that perpetuates more phenomenal opportunities.

Seth Godin
But let’s be very clear, this is not about talent and what you are born with. You begin this by being the person who orders lunch better than anybody else, because ordering lunch is hardly fatal, and the people who order lunch and always order the same thing, boring thing wrapped in the shrink wrap and everything else, those people, you can count on them for boring lunch.

But if they come to expect that you’ve done your homework and you realize that two of the people are vegans and one person is gluten free and you found this place, and dah, dah, dah, and lunch was great, you haven’t pigeon-holed yourself as an admin. You have pigeon-holed yourself as someone who cares. And from that, you will get better at caring and being seen as caring.

And so, it’s not that, you know, “Seth started doing this at the beginning of his career, so I will never be able to do it.” It’s, I just was lucky enough to be present with people who challenged me to be challenging. And once I got a little better at it, I could do it more. And so, that’s what we seek to do. And I don’t think I tell this story in the book, but one of the key bits of development I had in my career, it’s the first day of work at Spinnaker Software. It’s my summer job. I am the 30th employee. The company would grow to have hundreds of people and then get acquired and stuff like that. But I walk in, there’s no voicemail, there’s no email, the fax had just been installed, and on the receptionist desk, is this plastic carousel with 50 slots in it and a Dymo label maker to put each person’s name on one slot.

So, you would walk in after lunch or you would walk in in the morning, you’d spin and spin and spin this thing until you found your name and then there’d be the pink message slips. You had to do this three, four, five times a day. It wasn’t in alphabetical order. It was in the order people had been hired. That makes sense because otherwise you’d have to rebuild the thing every time you hired someone. And I walk in and I look at this thing, and I go, “I’m going to have to look at this thing five times a day spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, spinning, so does everyone else.”

So, I reach over to the receptionist desk, and she has a one of those magnetic things filled with paper clips, and I pull out a paper clip and I put it next to my name. So, now all you got to do is spin to my paper clip and I’ll be able to find my message, and the people who know they’re near me can spin to my paperclip and save time. Well, within 24 hours, it was festooned with different-colored paperclips and pipe cleaners, everyone had a little flag over their thing.

I saved the company many, many, many hours of spinning. It wasn’t fatal. It was awesome, and no one told me to do it. No one said, “You’re the senior vice president of paperclip affixing.” Instead, I saw a problem and I solved it. I didn’t have to take credit for it. I didn’t have to send out a memo. I just took responsibility, and if someone had said that was stupid, I would have taken my paperclip out.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful and very resonant. My mom ended up becoming the CEO of the local credit union because she noticed the former CEO was vacuuming after everyone left, and she’s like, “Well, I know how to vacuum.” And so, to your point, she did not get a reputation for, “Oh, Jan can clean.” It’s like, “Oh, Jan cares. She’s invested in this facility and what we’re about. Well, okay. I’m going to give her some more responsibilities,” and then one thing leads to another.

Seth Godin
Go, Jan, go.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, absolutely. So, let’s talk about this fear business. Freedom from fear, it’s interesting because I’m thinking about Dr. Casey Means makes an interesting point about feeling safe. She’s like, “To be incredibly clear, you and everyone you’ve ever loved will die. So, in one way, none of us are really safe.”

Seth Godin
Correct, not to mention the asteroid. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Uh-oh. Now I’m fearful, Seth. So, in a way, none of us are really safe. However, feeling safe is associated with all kinds of wonderful benefits. There’s creativity and health and freedom from chronic disease and all these things. So, likewise, with regard to freedom from fear, none of us are truly free from all risk. Like, we may very well get fired and someone may very well say, “That’s a very stupid idea and you’re not allowed to come to these meetings anymore.” That can happen. But if we have freedom from fear, boy, we unlock a lot of goodness. So, do you have any pro tips on getting to the other side of that?

Seth Godin
Well, we need to talk about resistance, but first I just want to do a small asterisk about fired, which is, I remember a few decades ago when Ford Motor Company saw that sales of the Ford Explorer were slowing down and they fired 10,000 people in one day. Here’s the thing. If their union had been smart, the UAW, a year earlier, would have said, “You’re making junky cars. We’re going on strike until you design a better car.”

Because the fact is those 10,000 people didn’t deserve to get fired. They got fired because other people designed a lousy car. That’s the risk we face, actually, when we show up at work; the risk of complying, not the risk of leading. So, this freedom from fear. If you talk to people who run the marathon, the first thing you’ll discover is that some people quit at mile 20 and other people finish.

And the difference between quitting at 20 and finishing is not how fit you are. It’s, “What are you going to do with the tired?” because they all get tired, but the people at 20 don’t know what to do with the tired so they have to stop, and the people who make it to mile 26, their coach didn’t teach them how not to be tired. Their coach taught them what to do when they feel tired. And the same thing is true with the fear.

Resistance, the thing that holds us back, writer’s block, Steve Pressfield’s great term for it, makes us feel like an imposter. And imposter syndrome is real, that when you get asked to do something, where you are confronting the future, something that hasn’t been done before, you will feel like an imposter. And so, the question which you just asked is, “How do I make imposter syndrome go away?” And the answer is, “You can’t.” And the reason you can’t is you’re an imposter, and so am I.

If you are making assertions about the future, you can’t be sure. You can’t guarantee that you are right. So, if you’re being honest with yourself, you’re simply pretending that the future will be the way you say. And so, when we feel that show up, we can’t make it go away, but we can dance with it. We can welcome it. We can invite it to sit down for tea. We can use it as a marker and a symbol that we might be onto something. And if I don’t feel afraid when I’m doing my work, then I know I am not trying hard enough.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Can you expand on that a little bit because that shows that you care, that you’re trying something new and challenging on your edge, outside your comfort zone, like these kinds of things?

Seth Godin
Yeah. Well, how long does it take to type a 200-page book? And the answer is a day, maybe four days if you’re Robert Caro, but not that much longer. So why does it take so long to write a book? And the answer is, “You don’t know what the next sentence is supposed to be.” That the work you’re getting paid for is to explore what the next sentence is, not to type.

But a whole bunch of people signed up to do a job where they’re in the typing pool. And the problem is the typing pool is no longer filled with employees. That the miracle of AI plus outsourcing is that if I can write down a job, I can get someone to do it faster and cheaper than you.

Pete Mockaitis
If I can write down a job. Yeah, I could chew on that for a while. What is write-downable and what is not?

Seth Godin
Correct. So, I can say to somebody, or to an AI, “Please read this 100-page document and highlight 20 of the quotes.” And if all I need is the quotes, that’s mechanical. I can write that down. If it’s, “Please highlight the 20 most important quotes,” that’s worth paying a human for. Because the decision of what are the most important ones, the choice to leave the other ones out, that’s risky. There’s no guarantee you’re right. Fear arises.

And so, where I get into trouble with AI, where I get into trouble with Upwork, is if I ask someone to do a job where I can’t write down all the steps, because then, inevitably, I get disappointed. But if I can write down all the steps, I would be a fool to hire an expensive human to do it when I got a computer that’ll do it all night for free.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, pick the best quotes, or the most engaging quotes, or the most viral quotes, or the most thought-provoking quotes. So, if someone on Upwork were to say, “Okay. Cool. Sure thing, Seth. How do I determine which ones are more thought-provoking than the others?” then that is supremely not write-downable.

Even if you could write down, it’s like, “Well, you know what? It might have, like, an interesting contrast, like ‘Ask not what your country can do, but what you can do for your country.'” You know, so it might. So, any document or guidance you could produce would be incomplete, and, thus, in your parlance, not write-down-able.

Seth Godin
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Yeah, that’s juicy. Okay. So, we’re all impostors, so we dance with it and it’s not going to disappear. And, in fact, we could hopefully learn to embrace it as an indicator of something good and positive and exciting.

Seth Godin
Yeah, that’s our job. That is actually what it is to be awesome at your job, is to do things that are not write-downable, and this doesn’t mean you have to be a super fancy executive. So, there’s a fancy hotel chain in the US and the chambermaids are the lowest paid people in the organization. They’re the people who make up your room every day. Every one of them gets a $250 per guest budget to spend any way they want to please a guest.

So, they’re the front line. If they discover a couple really upset about something, they can just interrupt while they’re making the bed, and say, “Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. Why don’t you just go have lunch? It’s on us.” And they just made a decision that is not write-downable in the moment, and this is somebody who’s getting paid minimum wage.

If you don’t trust your frontline people to do that, you’ve decided to make a commodity and to race to the bottom. The alternative is to race to the top, is to stand for something and to trust your people to understand the strategy and help you get there.

Pete Mockaitis
Seth, I love that so much. My very first W2 job-job was at Kmart, and Pantry Pete, they called me. And when I learned in the training video that I had “the power to please” you know, like, “Oh, sorry, we’re out of the Pepsi 24-pack, but I can give you two 12-packs for the same price as the 24-pack,” I thought that was the coolest thing ever. And I even wrote down in my schedule, “not work, but exercise power to please,” or EPP because I was dorky.

But it really was the funnest thing I did in terms of, I guess it was the autonomy and pleasing people feels good and I think that’s just a thing that I wish every team, organization, had more of, that capacity to do that.

Seth Godin
And Kmart closed its last store last week, and the reason is because they took that piece away and raced to the bottom. They tried to out-Walmart Walmart, out-Amazon Amazon, and that’s really hard to do, because if you race to the bottom, you might win.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I love that language, out-Walmart Walmart, out-Amazon Amazon, and they sure didn’t out-Target Target. Sorry, Kmart. I mean, I’m a loyalist, got the apron, but, yeah, Target really wiped the floor there. So, let’s talk about you have a great quote in your book, “We mistakenly spend more time figuring out how to win the game we’re in instead of choosing which game to play in the first place.” I think there is just loads of wisdom in this. Can you unpack that a bit for us?

Seth Godin
Well, so we’re surrounded by games. Social media is a game. How many followers do you have? Whichever project you’re taking on is a game. Your career is a game. How much money do you get paid? These are scoring mechanisms that imply what the game is for, that there are people, billionaires, who think that what the world is for is for them to make as much money as possible.

And the thing is, if you confront a game that you cannot win, that is making you unhappy, trying harder to win that game is probably the wrong path. And so, the smallest viable audience gives us the freedom to pick who we are working with and for, and to ignore everyone else. And that gives us the responsibility to pick a game we want to be responsible for, as opposed to just saying, “Well, I’m playing the same game everybody else is.” Everything goes back to high school.

When you were in high school, you could have played the game of “How do I become Homecoming King or Queen?” or you could have played the game of “How do I get on the football team?” or you could have played the game of “How do I become first chair clarinetist?” Those are totally different games. And if you’re playing one of those games really, really hard, but the only reason is because you need to win it, you haven’t thought about which game is good for you and your world, you’re probably making a mistake.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And so, in the professional context, I’m just thinking about folks who just ran down the path, “Go be a doctor. Go be a lawyer. Go be an engineer. Oh, shoot, I hate this. Uh-oh.”

Seth Godin
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us some more examples of folks who have made this mindset paradigm shift and it’s been transformational for them?

Seth Godin
Well, one of the keys to the shift is to ignore sunk costs. Sunk costs are all the things you’ve invested in – a law degree, building something, buying something – and defending them going forward. You’re 35 years old, you’re a dentist, you hate being a dentist. It’s not going to get any better. You’re still going to hate being a dentist, but you keep doing it because you’ve already invested 10 years of your life and all this money in being a dentist, which means you’re sacrificing the next 40 years of your life to defend a choice that might’ve been a good one in retrospect when you made it, but it isn’t a good one anymore.

And the response is, “All sunk costs are gifts from your former self.” The Pete of yesterday, or 10 years ago, did something for me today, and you are allowed to say, “No, thanks.” You don’t have to accept the gift. Now you can make a new decision with new information. I could take this gift of a dental practice and this dental degree, or I’m going to say, “No, thank you,” and I could go become a tree farmer.

And shifting like that turns out to be good-decision science, but it’s also great for our heads, because every day you go back to your job, every day you go to work, you are re-signing up to accept the gift from yesterday. But if the gift isn’t helping you, don’t do it. So, yes, I know people who graduated from Harvard Law School but are now podcasters and life coaches. I know people who had a really good run doing something in Silicon Valley, but now they’re busy building boats because they didn’t give up, and they’re not retired. They’re creating value. They’re just playing a different game.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Some gifts need to go to Goodwill, and that’s totally fine. That’s acceptable.

Seth Godin
Yeah, it’s critical, actually.

Pete Mockaitis
A lot of this rich thinking we’re doing here seems to only exist, from my perspective, outside the realm of the urgent, the here-and-now next action. How do you think about dealing with urgency and getting the headspace to think wisely and strategically?

Seth Godin
So, you either live in the last minute, the next minute, or the best minute. Those are the three choices. So, what does it mean? The last minute is whatever is the highest on my urgency list is what I’m going to do right now, because there’s always going to be something that’s the highest on your urgency list. That lets you off the hook. You don’t have to be responsible for any of your choices because the urgency list determines it. That’s doing everything at the last minute.

The next minute is offered to everybody, every day. We get the next minute. What will we choose to do with it? And the best minute is yesterday you had one minute that was the best minute of your day. Everyone did. How can you make it so that your best minutes stack up? How can you make it so you have more of those? Because very few people who spend their life working at the last minute have many best minutes to report.

The short order cooks don’t usually have a lot of highlights from their day because all they know is someone ordered some eggs, they made some eggs, and then they went back to the next thing. And the power comes from taking a deep breath, leaving the urgent alone, it will take care of itself, and focusing instead on “How do I make this a best minute?” And you can’t work enough hours to defeat everybody because there’s only 24 hours in a day, but you could work less hours and make a bigger difference if you did the right thing with your time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Seth, I love that question, “How do I make this the best minute?” Your book, This is Strategy, is filled with useful questions. Could you share a couple of them that you think might be the most frequently useful and transformative?

Seth Godin
Well, the ones I keep coming back to are “Who’s it for?” “What’s it for?” and “What’s the change I seek to make?” Because “Who’s it for?” makes it very clear who my client is, who my boss is, who my customer is. Ignore everyone else. “What’s it for?” is why do they need this from me? What are they dreaming of when I show up? Where’s the empathy of what I did for them?

And the third question is, “What is the change I seek to make?” because if you’re not making a change, then you’ve just signed up to be a cog. You are here to make a change. Our work is actually projects. Our job is getting paid by somebody to consistently do projects, but your projects are here to make a change happen. Can you point to the change you are making?

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, Seth, tell me anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we hear about a few of your favorite things?

Seth Godin
I would say the single best thing people can do, if any of this has resonated, is to find someone not related to you, and meet with them once a week by Zoom to tell each other the truth, to answer these questions together because what you will discover is, knowing the meeting is coming, you will change your behavior so that you can report in the meeting that you’re onto something. And just having that sounding board can open the door to make a difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Seth Godin
In the classic self-help book, Dune, the Bene Gesserit say, “Fear is the mind-killer,” three words probably worth tattooing somewhere on your body.

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

Seth Godin
I think that understanding what the marshmallow test really measures is really helpful. The marshmallow test has been seen as saying that if a three-year-old can sit for five minutes with a marshmallow so they’ll get two, that self-restraint leads to 20, 30 years of happiness. So, therefore, people who are “born” with self-restraint are destined for greatness.

And some of that is correct, but it’s worth understanding that a kid who grows up in a household that’s under stress, where there’s trauma, where there isn’t dinner on the table, where parents are doing their best but can’t always keep their promises, those kids understandably eat the marshmallow because who knows if you’re going to come back with two marshmallows. You probably won’t.

So, I think we need to give people a little bit more grace and a lot more support because we don’t all win the birthday lottery. And what we can do as a culture is create the conditions for people to become resilient and to find self-restraint so that we can all maximize the joy we have and that we create for others.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Seth Godin
You know, it’s really fascinating to me that you’re not supposed to talk about your own book, but I listen to my own books all the time, because if I’m headed to a meeting or I’m feeling stuck and I put on The Practice, it gets under my skin again. But if I have to pick another book, I think if you haven’t read The War of Art by my friend Steve Pressfield, you need to do that right now.

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

Seth Godin
You might not have a spokeshave at home, but a well-sharpened spokeshave is your first choice for woodworking. And for my job that involves typing, Claude.ai is so much better than ChatGPT. It’s harder working, it’s kinder, it’s not arrogant, and if you’re not using it every day, you’re being left behind because the future is arriving very fast.

Pete Mockaitis
If I may, I do have a ChatGPT premium subscription, and I’m thinking about switching. Have you looked around to all of them; the Gemini, the Perplexity, the dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, and Claude’s your winner? Or you just found Claude and said, “Yep, I’m sticking with you”?

Seth Godin
I use Perplexity every day. If you’re using Google, you’ve made a mistake. Perplexity completely defeats Google. I’ve tried Gemini a little bit. It’s really fun if you want to tweak Google, to ask Google to compare things. Like, type in “Pop-Tarts versus Doberman Pinschers,” and it will give you a little essay about the difference between a Pop-Tart and a Doberman Pinscher, as opposed to say, “That’s a stupid question.” Claude would say, “Why are you asking me that?” and do it in a kind way.

So, I haven’t tried all of them. What’s magic about Claude is they spent a lot of time trying to create something that will challenge you to do even better with the next time you interact with it. Whereas, ChatGPT, to me, feels like it’s always doing me a favor, it does the minimum amount, and it argues, it really argues with you when it’s wrong, and that just pisses me off.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s like, I say, “Hey, give me this answer,” and it tells me what I would do to get the answer. It’s like, “Yes, I know. Go do that now, please.”

Seth Godin
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Seth Godin
I would say that my favorite habit, if people know me, is that I have habits. That I have intentional habits. That I eat the same thing, I get up at the same time, but most of my habits are about wearing an actual uniform and having a practice when it comes to my job. I do not wait to be inspired. Tomorrow, there’ll be a post on my blog, not because it’s the best post I ever wrote, but because it’s Friday. And knowing that these are things I do, frees up my mind to make a different sort of decision. And we all have habits, but if they’re not intentional habits, I think they’re probably getting in the way.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to especially resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often, they Kindle book highlight, they retweet to the high heavens?

Seth Godin
My most successful blog post is also my shortest. What a surprise. You don’t need more time. You just need to decide.

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

Seth Godin
Seths.blog, there’s 9,000 blog posts, one a day for a very, very long time. And if you go to Seths.blog/TIS, you’ll find out everything you need to know about this new book.

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

Seth Godin
You’ve already done the key thing, which is listening to Pete’s podcast, which is showing up and announcing you want to be awesome at your job. The challenge is, “Can you actually say what it would mean to be awesome at your job?” Because if you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter how fast you’re going there.

Pete Mockaitis
Seth, thank you. This was so much fun. I wish you much luck with your book, This is Strategy, and I hope you have many excellent plans well-executed.

Seth Godin
Thank you, Pete. Keep making this ruckus. It matters.

Oct 17
0

1003: How to Be Both Empathetic and Effective as a Leader with Maria Ross

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Maria Ross reveals how leaders can drive growth and improve performance without sacrificing empathy.

You’ll Learn

  1. How everyone wins with more empathy 
  2. Why leaders struggle with accountability—and how to fix it 
  3. How to practice empathy without devolving into people-pleasing 

About Maria

Maria Ross is a keynote speaker, author, strategist, and empathy advocate who believes cash flow, creativity and compassion are not mutually exclusive. She is the founder of Red Slice and advises organizations on how to leverage empathy to better engage and connect. Maria has authored multiple books, including her most recent, The Empathy Edge and hosts The Empathy Edge podcast. Maria’s forthcoming book, The Empathy Dilemma: How Successful Leaders Balance Performance, People, and Personal Boundaries arrives on shelves in September 2024. A dynamic speaker, Maria has delighted audiences at leading conferences and organizations such as TEDx, The 3% Conference, The New York Times Small Business Summit, and Salesforce and her insights have appeared in many media outlets, including MSNBC, NPR, Entrepreneur, Forbes, Newsweek, Huffington Post, and Thrive Global. 

Resources Mentioned

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Maria Ross Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Maria, welcome.

Maria Ross
Thanks for having me, Pete. I’m excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited, too, to hear about some of your wisdom about empathy in professional contexts. So, I’d love to start by hearing, if there’s a particularly surprising or shocking discovery you’ve made about empathy in professional context since you’ve been researching this stuff for years and years and years.

Maria Ross
Yeah, so many. I mean, there’s so much data and research out there that shows that being an empathetic leader and colleague boosts engagement, performance, innovation, results in better customer loyalty, better customer lifetime value. I think what was most surprising to me in the early days was discovering that, for some companies, there’s a link between their empathetic culture and their stock price being favorable.

So, we all know, personally, that when we’re dealing with people that are empathetic or dealing with brands that are empathetic, we do feel seen, heard, and valued, and that actually translates to bottom line results. So, it’s been a fun mission to go on, to show people that empathy is a strategic advantage and by no means is it a weakness.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s beautiful to hear you say that because, I don’t know, I’ve just been on this YouTube kick in which I’ve been hearing about the playbook of big tobacco and big pharma and big food and big chemicals, and it seems like, “Okay, someone says there’s a safety problem and you just deny, deny, deny and infiltrate research and all that.”

That kind of seems like the opposite of empathetic leadership, is that, like, we’re not trying to understand, “Oh, shoot, we might be causing harms,” but rather, it’s like, “No, no, no, no, you’re all wrong, and it’s not what’s up.” But I’m thinking even in these contexts, we think an empathetic culture would be a more lucrative one.

Maria Ross
Yeah, actually. And it’s funny because, yes, of course, we can all find examples of companies and leaders who are the opposite, the antithesis of empathy, and yet they are succeeding. But I think my message is all about you can be both empathetic and high-performing. You can be empathetic and achieve amazing results. You can be empathetic and hold people accountable, and that they’re not either/or. I think the examples you’re citing are the examples of companies gone awry, and organizations that are harming people rather than helping people.

But from a sustainability perspective in the long run, employees are looking for cultures. It’s sort of table stakes for them, “Will I be seen, heard, and valued in this culture?” But also, brands are now needing to appeal to generations of people that actually want to know what’s going on under the covers. They want to know what’s going on under the hood. And so, they actually do care about how you’re treating your employees, how you’re treating the planet, how you’re treating your community.

And we saw in the pandemic, through several studies that were done through an organization called DoSomething.org, that especially Generation Z buyers and younger Millennials were actually making purchase decisions based on how well companies were, I guess, responding to the needs of their employees and their communities.

I know when I was 17, I didn’t really care, but these generations do care and they vote with their wallets in terms of who they will support and who they won’t. And so, when we look at long-term viability and long-term sustainability, some of those outdated tactics may work for a while, but eventually those organizations are going to die out.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, what’s coming to mind here is I’m thinking about some friends who worked at a medical devices company, and there are some stories in which the leadership of such companies say, “Hey, take a look at someone. They’re going to come on stage for our annual meeting and we’re going to see how we saved their life and meet their spouse and their children.” You’re like, “Wow, look at what we do with our work.”

And then other leaders are just, like, all about EBITDA and cash flow projections and growth and da, da, da. And so, they’re doing the same thing, they’re making medical devices, and yet the presentation in the big meetings has a very different flavor, “Look how this enriches people” versus “Look how this enriches shareholders.” Well, the folks that I know left the company that is all about the shareholder enrichment view. So, I think that is very resonant in terms of engaging that stuff is powerful.

Maria Ross
Absolutely. And there’s a host of research, it’s sort of tangential to the work that I do around how purpose-driven organizations drive more innovation and drive higher retention and higher engagement from their employees for exactly the reason that you cited. It doesn’t get us excited to do our best work for a company that we know is just making a few people at the top much richer.

So, what is our actual purpose? What is our actual mission? Why are we here dealing with the slog of everyday work life if not for something that motivates us and inspires us to be our best selves? And that’s not just something fluffy. That’s about, “Do you want your team operating at maximum cognitive ability? Do you want them coming up with new ideas and being innovative? Or do you want the people that do that to go work for your competitor?”

That’s really the choice that a company is making if they choose to just focus solely on the money-making aspect, because that might be very inspirational for those that are benefiting from that at the top, but it’s not beneficial or enough of a motivation for the people that are within the organization. And as an example, recently a study came out that comes out every year. It’s in its ninth year. It’s called the State of Workplace Empathy Report. It’s done by an organization called Business Solver. And you can go check it out. It’s free.

But one of the things that they consistently find over and over again is that when employees are asked, “How does your company show empathy to you?” They actually cite some benefits as empathetic. And the top benefit that they cite is not higher work compensation. That’s like 13th on the list. The top ones are flexibility and also employee assistance programs. So, getting the support they need and also having workplace flexibility is more important to many of our best workers. Now that’s not to say we underpay everybody, but it is to say that that carrot of money only takes you so far.

Pete Mockaitis
And just to be clear, employee assistance, is that money or is that something else?

Maria Ross
Employee assistance programs are like mental health benefits.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, got you.

Maria Ross
“Do I have somewhere to go within the organization to get help that I need?” Assistance for new parents, assistance for bereavement, “What are those employee-assistance programs that you have in place to support me as a whole person and not just a body at a desk?”

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay, so empathy is great. Your book is called The Empathy Dilemma. It doesn’t sound like a dilemma, Maria. That just sounds like a great thing to go do a lot of. Where’s the dilemma?

Maria Ross
It does. So, the first book on the topic was called The Empathy Edge, and that was really the business case of the ROI of empathy for your organization, for your team, for your brand. And what I was hearing from people over the last five years, because that came out in 2019, right before the pandemic lockdown, I was hearing from people, “Great, we’re sold. We are converts, right? But here is where trying to be a people-centered leader gets really hard. Here’s where it gets challenging for me.”

And especially in the environment we’re in right now, we’ve got this group of managers and leaders in the middle who are being squeezed by the expectations of the business and the demands of their people, and they’re trying to be human-centered leaders, but they are burning out. They are experiencing a lot of poor performance. They’re seeing quality slip, and they’re wondering what they’re doing wrong.

And so, The Empathy Dilemma is really about helping people balance the needs of the business with the needs of their people by presenting five foundational pillars that will help them be both empathetic and effective at the same time without burning out, which is the key.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you tell a story to illustrate that picture? What is me having so much empathy that I burn out and become ineffective look like in practice?

Maria Ross
One senior director I remember speaking to was talking about the fact that she had an underperformer on her team, and she had bent over backwards during the pandemic to provide flexibility and support to her team, and all of that resulted in good things that we don’t want to go back on.

We are talking about mental health more at work, we’re understanding that, again, people don’t park their humanity at the door when they come to work, and things going on in our culture, in our society, in the world, impact our ability to populate an accurate spreadsheet at work. We don’t forget those things. And so, all of those conversations were good, but what was happening for this particular senior director is that she had one employee who was constantly taking mental health days, and constantly citing, “This crosses my boundaries. This does this. This does that.”

And her response as a leader was, “What am I doing wrong? I need to support this person better.” And her idea of support was not having difficult conversations with her, not wanting to confront her, wanting to take on the work for her. And what she finally realized was that, in the name of empathy, she was actually not doing empathy. She was people-pleasing, she was caving in, and she wasn’t having confident and tough conversations head-on. And what that was doing was that that was not empathetic to the rest of the team who had to pick up the weight of this person constantly failing in their role.

So, when she finally was able to have a direct conversation with this person, and say, “Look, these are the expectations we’re holding you to, and you’re not meeting them. So, tell us what’s going on for you. Is this something where you need to be in a different role? Do we need to build different skills?” And in that situation, that employee was actually not responsive to her at all, to the point that they ended up parting ways because that person could not succeed at work. And nobody wants to come to work and fail every day.

So, what happened with this leader was she thought she was being empathetic the whole time, and what she was, was something else, and that’s what I talk about in the book, about the differences between empathy is not people-pleasing, it’s not caving into unreasonable demands, and it’s not even agreeing with someone. So, you can still make a difficult business decision, but it’s how you do it.

How do you communicate? How do you show up? How do you build a culture of trust so, when something like this happens, you’re able to have a really difficult conversation with someone, and say, “I’m not going to put it off. I’m not going to put it off because it might hurt their feelings. I’m going to have the conversation I need to have because I need to protect the rest of the team, and I’m here to do a job. I’m here to deliver something to my organization.” Those two things are not mutually exclusive. You can do that and still make tough decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, do you have any guiding principles, or maxims, mantras, distinguishing guiding lights to help us as we’re making these distinctions or, I don’t know if it’s a tightrope, or if it’s a two-by-two matrix, or how you conceptualize this so that we’re playing the game just right and not falling into the zone of being a jerk versus a people-pleaser, but we’re being empathetic and effective at the same time?

Maria Ross
I think the biggest thing people need to understand is that empathy is anything but weak. Because for you to be able to take on another person’s perspective or point of view without defensiveness or fear, that actually requires a very strong person. And so, empathy for others actually begins with working on yourself. So, are you self-aware enough? That’s actually pillar one, self-awareness.

Are you self-aware enough to know how you show up in an interaction and in a conversation? Do you know what your strengths are? Do you know where your weaknesses are? Do you know what your emotional triggers are? That’s a hard one for people. I spoke to a CEO this past year who, very successful business, finally did some sort of personal development and some self-assessment, and realized that one of her biggest triggers was actually not being believed.

And so, I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a situation where someone accuses you of something, and you immediately start searching through your sent mail of like, “No, no, I know I didn’t say that,” or, “I know I said that,” or, “I know I have proof of this.” That was setting her off with people that really were just communicating that they didn’t understand something or that they had a misperception of something. She would sort of go off the deep end.

She realized this about herself and she realized that in those moments she wasn’t showing up as her best leader self. She was showing up very defensive and very much from a place of fear, to even hear what the other person was saying. So that’s what we mean by understanding our triggers. And so, when we work on ourselves first, we can show up in the conversation with more grace, with more patience.

It’s kind of like, you know, I have a 10-year-old, and I am the worst mother in the world when I’m hungry and tired, when I don’t have my own well full, when I don’t have my own battery charged. And so, in order to be empathetic with someone and stand strong, you need to make sure that you’re taking care of yourself, that you are re-energizing yourself, helping yourself think in different ways. That’s why the second pillar is actually self-care.

So, self-awareness and self-care can help you create the foundation you need to have a more empathetic exchange with someone without blowing your top.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood, yes. And we had, boy, one of the early episodes, we talked to Jim Tamm, and he kept coming back to managing your defensiveness is just transformational in terms of having effective conversations and working through this. And some of those parts boil down to self-awareness and self-care.

I would like to chat about the five pillars, and maybe, since we’ve already introduced self-awareness and self-care, could you give us perhaps a top do and don’t, associated with each pillar based on what you are seeing most frequently and what seems to be the most effective or disruptive?

Maria Ross
I love it because there’s a lot of strategies and then actionable tactics that people can try in the book. And I do want to just offer this, you don’t have to do all of them all at once. And they’re not meant to be linear, but if you do start with self-awareness, you can uncover “What are my weaker pillars of the five?” And you can mix and match and experiment with a few of the tactics within each of those pillars to see how you can shore up your empathy and show up as a more confident leader who can also make room for compassion at the same time.

So, self-awareness, the biggest tip is, take a self-assessment. There are a bazillion of them out there. There’s Enneagram. There’s Myers-Briggs. There’s DISC. Whatever could work for you, put your ego aside. Ego kills empathy. Put your ego aside and say, “I know that there’s got to be things that I could work on,” and help pinpoint what some of those things are. And that also can include seeking feedback from others and being okay enough with accepting some negative or constructive feedback.

With self-care, it’s making sure that you make time and hold it sacred for what charges you up, what lights you up. Self-care doesn’t have to be passive. It doesn’t have to be massages and manis and pedis. It could be, for some people, it’s rock climbing. For some people, it’s being in a play or doing improv. For some people, it’s knitting or running or whatever it is, training for a marathon. So, make sure that you’re making time for the things outside of work that light you up.

The things where you’re in flow, the things where you’re thinking about the present, because the more mindful you are, the more you can actually be present for someone in a conversation and read their cues, read their body language, hear their tone of voice, see what they’re doing in terms of, like, they’re fidgeting or their gestures. You can only do that if you are charged up. So that’s self-care.

The third one is clarity. We cannot hold people accountable to an expectation that we’ve never set. And too often, we, as leaders – I’m guilty of all of this too, by the way – we, as leaders, think we’re being clear about something, or we’re making assumptions that everyone in our organization or our team knows what professionalism means, or has the same definition of it, or understands what we mean by effective communication, or what we mean by hierarchy, or whatever the term may be.

Spelling out those things when you work with a team is really important to make sure that you’re coming back to shared goals. So, do we have like a document that goes beyond like the pretty bullet points of our values on the office wall? Do we have something that says, “This is how we communicate. This is how we run meetings. This is how we honor each other’s time. These are the expectations of our culture”? And make sure that that’s documented and it’s clear. Because if it’s not clear, you can’t hold people accountable to it.

The fourth one is decisiveness. And this is a good one, and you might be able to relate to this, and so will your listeners. But many of us, in the name of empathy, we understand that multiple points of view hold value. We understand that we make better business decisions. There’s a whole host of research around that, around diversity and inclusion, and belonging in terms of what makes a really good business decision. When we have diverse voices at the table, we can uncover opportunities we’ve never seen, we can avoid risks we might have missed.

The challenge is when you try to be an empathetic “leader,” you think that making a decision means making everyone happy, and that’s not what it means. There’s no such decision that will get unanimous consensus. I guess unless it’s, “Hey, you all get a million dollar bonus this quarter.” But what it’s about is being able to swiftly synthesize multiple points of view, make a decision, and then be able to communicate that decision back to your team in a transparent way, “Here’s why we made this decision. Here’s why, Pete, we weren’t able to implement your idea, but please keep those ideas coming because they’re useful.”

And being able to communicate in a way where people can say, “Okay, I disagree, but at least I commit.” Disagree but commit, “Can I at least get on board with the decision because I understand how it was made?” And the fact that you made it, that you didn’t just let it fester because it was uncomfortable or hard, or because you were waiting for the right sign from above to tell you it was the right decision, that leaves people in limbo. That stresses them out. That makes them anxious. They want to know what the plan is going forward. And so, being able to be a decisive leader is actually empathetic.

And then, finally, this one you might really enjoy, the fifth pillar is joy. The fifth pillar is creating levity, creating comfort, creating an environment where people can relax and be themselves is an important part of building an empathetic culture. Because when you do that, you build trust, you build psychological safety, and brain science shows us that when we are under stress or we’re being punished for something, our executive functions shut down. They’re not working because we’re in survival mode. So, no one’s going to learn, no one’s going to grow if they’re in an environment of fear and anxiety and heaviness all the time.

So even if the work is not always fun, we can create an environment where we can have levity, where we can laugh at ourselves, where we can have awards for the best failure of the week, where we can have fun Slack channels that say, like, “This is the curated lunch channel, and show us what you had for lunch for our remote team.”

There are so many ideas and so many leaders that I spoke to for the book that shared some really interesting ideas with me, but the possibilities are endless. And you can solicit those ideas from your team. You don’t have to just, as the leader, come up with all the ideas for how to make work more fun. There is research out there as well, again, tangential to my work, that shows that if you have a friend at work, you’re more engaged, the quality of your output is better. And in environments where it matters, safety goes up.

So, do you have a friend at work? Not all your workmates need to be your best friends, but do you have a friend or a best friend at work? That actually goes a long way to creating an environment where people actually want to show up and do the work.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I feel like I’ve got a good sense of some top do’s and don’ts for self-awareness and self-care. Could we hear a couple of your faves on the last three: the clarity, the decisiveness, the joy?

Maria Ross
Clarity, I actually offered up, which is to create a document for your team of, like, a memorandum of understanding, is what one company called it that I interviewed for the book, but sort of a code of, not a code of conduct, but sort of a rules of engagement for your team. Document that, “What will we put up with? What don’t we put up with? What are we asking of people?”

It could be something like, “We do not have to check our emails on the weekends, but if there’s an emergency, the leader is allowed to text someone.” It could be, “On Fridays, we don’t have meetings.” It could be, “In meetings, don’t get upset if we challenge your idea. That’s part of our culture is to be additive and to always try to up-level everyone’s ideas. It doesn’t mean you’re being attacked. It means we’re adding to it.” So, things like that, whatever is true of your culture, there’s really no one example, but being able to document that.

We often talk about like the unsaid rules of our team or our culture. Don’t make them unsaid. Write them down. Make sure everyone understands them. Decisiveness, one tactic I came across that I really liked, was putting a limit on your decisions. Meaning, if you know you have trouble making decisions, put a decision date on your calendar as a task, and say, “I will make this decision by next Friday,” and let everyone on your team know, “Hey, I’m making this decision by next Friday, so weigh in before that because I’m going to be making the call on Friday.”

That actually gives you a forcing mechanism that now people are expecting you to make a decision, and they know they better get their input to you before then or it’s not going to be factored into the decision. And then for joy, I gave you some examples of companies that are using some really creative Slack channels, or doing really great team-building exercises that are not forced team building, forced fun for people. But can they tie their team building back to either a skill they’re trying to build or to their mission?

Can they do a community event that supports their mission? Can they do something that also is inclusive of everyone in the organization? So, when you’re planning, the default is, “Let’s do a Friday happy hour.” That’s not really that kind or empathetic to those in your organization who might be recovering alcoholics. It might not be kind to someone who’s got to go pick up their kid at daycare at 4:00 o’clock. So, are you doing a mix of activities or modalities for injecting joy into the workday so that it accommodates people with different needs?

Pete Mockaitis
Could I hear about a particularly brilliant team-building thing that’s not happy hours or forced fun?

Maria Ross
So, I interviewed a woman named Teri Schmidt. She runs a company called Stronger to Serve, and I interviewed her for my podcast, The Empathy Edge, because she had such a unique take on team building. They have created seven experiences that you can choose from, or you can work with them to customize your own, where they’re tying the activity into a company’s purpose or mission.

And what they’re doing is, the first half of it is actually a skill building, a professional development exercise. So, let’s say, one of her packages, it is helping folks deliver difficult performance reviews or deliver difficult information. So, at the beginning, they worked on delivering how they could up-level their ability to deliver tough information in a nurturing and compassionate way and in a confident way so it didn’t leave people confused.

And then the second half, and it’s escaping me what it was, they did some sort of a service project around that that helped them use the skills they had just learned at the beginning in the project they were doing, and they were doing a service project as a team. And her research shows that when you engage in service, in acts of service together, it actually bonds you as a team.

So, I thought that was a really clever way of trying to, like, feed, I hate to say kill birds with one stone anymore, so I say feed birds with one scone. Not only does it check off professional development, it checks off team-building, and it checks off acts of service related to your mission or your purpose. So, it kind of ticks all the boxes for people and creates a memorable experience that they can bond around, but that actually has meaning to their day-to-day work.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. I dig a lot of these, and what I’m thinking the most about now is with clarity, it’s astounding how one word can mean completely different things to different people. And I remember I was chatting with a buddy of mine, and he said that he was thinking about his culture of his company. He was disappointed that someone quit and they gave two weeks’ notice.

And he said, “I understand that this is a norm in organizations and employment, but in our organization, we’re all about setting each other up for success, and this really didn’t do that because it put some folks in a tight spot. You try to replace and backfill and reshuffle things.” And he felt like that was a bit of a failure in terms of communicating the culture, is that apparently this message didn’t apply because they didn’t even, like, apologize or acknowledge, like, “I know.” It’s just like, “Oh, yeah, hey, I’m moving on, so, okay.”

And so, he sort of took that on himself, like, “Well, we really got to be clear about what do we really mean about setting each other up for success.” And I think that’s, in many ways, what makes cultures fun and interesting and distinctive from organization to organization. It’s like, “Hey, this is a normal practice in many places, and here it’s not acceptable, and this is why, and what’s behind it, and what setting each other up for success means in our vernacular.”

Maria Ross
Right, “And what does it mean here?” That is such a great example, Pete, because that’s a thing about assumptions. And that’s also an assumption based on generational. That’s an assumption based on maybe what group you’re from. So that is such a great example of the fact that when we make these assumptions about these unsaid rules, we set ourselves up for failure.

And there’s a great book I’m going to recommend, not mine, that’s called Unlocking Generational CODES. It’s by a generational expert named Ana Liotta, who you should have on the show, and it’s one of the clearest breakdowns of the differences in the generations, not because one’s right and one’s wrong, that we’re all formed by generational operating systems.

We’re all informed by our generational operating systems that usually stem from, within the generation, something, some seminal event that happened around we’re 10 or 11 years old. It actually shapes the way that we view things. And so, it went all the way from what she called a traditionalist, which were like way older, like my parents’ generation, like ‘30s, ‘20s, ‘30s born, down to what she called Nexters, because she actually wrote the book before the term Gen X or Gen Z came out. And also, she gave, like, tips on how to get around those communication snafus that you have. But what I loved about it was it talked about for each generation, within their operating code, what were the differences around how they view information, for example, how they view communication, how they view professionalism.

So, one example is some of the older generations look at information as something to be hoarded. It’s an aspect of power. It’s “The more information I have, the more important I am.” It’s not right or wrong. It’s just what was part of their DNA, part of their generational DNA.

If you look at Millennials and Gen Z, they see information as a catalyst, “The more people that have information, the more innovative we can be, the more we can problem-solve, the more we can get creative.” So, you can imagine someone with that perspective trying to talk to someone with the other perspective about making decisions or transparency or, “Why didn’t you tell us that was happening?”

All of those things that cause all of these barriers to us being able to connect and, more importantly, perform, it comes down to clarifying what do we mean by these things, and understanding that people will have different definitions of their own based on where they come from, based on their own experiences, based on their ages, based on their sexual orientation, based on so many factors that it behooves us, within a culture of a team, to say, “These are our rules for operating together, and we don’t want to make any assumptions.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’d love to get your take, Maria, for folks who are all in on empathy, and so much so that maybe they even struggle with non-empathy, people-pleasing behaviors, and that’s just in them, any pro tips on how to shake that off and be empathetic and more effective in those times in which it’s you got to call someone out, to hold folks accountable, to point out mistakes or development opportunities and difficult things?

Maria Ross
As you go through the self-awareness phase and understand your behaviors and your actions and your triggers and your strengths and your challenges, you can then determine, “What are the other pillars that I need to shore up in order to be in a position where I can have these conversations without giving away the farm, without taking on extra work because I feel sorry for someone?”

Once those foundations are shored up for yourself, you have a bigger likelihood of success of having an empathetic interaction with someone that still gets the job done, that still holds them accountable. I spoke to one leader for the book, who is a CMO, a chief marketing officer, and I had worked for her at one time. And her ability to get to know her people was by design.

She would keep, you know, this sounds kind of creepy, she would keep files on people, like family’s names, kids’ birthdays, interests, all that kind of stuff so she could have more meaningful interactions with her team, so she could get to know them outside of work, and understand, “For this person, this is how I need to motivate them. For this other person, this is how I need to motivate them.” And she was a master at actually managing up as well, being empathetic to her managers and her bosses, because empathy flows both ways.

And when I spoke to her about this dilemma that a lot of folks are experiencing, especially around leaders who say, “Oh, my gosh, I have so much work to do, and now you want me to be a therapist?” she was very candid and said, “I am very clear that my role is to generate revenue and drive growth. My role is not to be a therapist.”

“I can still get to know someone personally so that I can motivate them and inspire them and have fun with them, and be clear with them in a way that they can understand because I know them. But I’m very clear that my primary goal is this. And I’m not here, I was not hired to help you figure out your boundaries with your mother-in-law. That’s for someone getting paid $300 an hour who is an actual therapist.”

So, what I loved about that is that we conflate these things that actually make it harder for us to lead with empathy because we don’t have to be someone’s therapist. It’s not the same thing as getting to know someone on a personal level. And so, I think that that’s one of the biggest tips I could give is make sure that you understand the difference between where your role and your goal ends, and some other modality or some other intervention is required.

And for this particular leader, she was very good about understanding that “If the conversation gets to that point, then I need to direct that person to the resources or the employee assistance programs that the company provides. That there’s a line between what I’m able to do as I’ve gotten to know this person and motivate them and have fun at work, to what this person might really need.”

And I think if we’re more aware that there is a line, that we don’t sort of bleed into the people that we are managing, I think that’s a better way for us to more strongly set our boundaries. And I really like sharing that story because it’s about clarity of boundaries, but it’s also about clarity of role and clarity of goals, and why she is there in that company, what she’s there to do, and what she’s not there to do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Maria, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Maria Ross
No, I think we covered it all.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now let’s hear about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Maria Ross
A favorite quote of mine is from Eleanor Roosevelt who said, basically, I don’t remember the lead into this, but it’s how it’s so hard to please everybody because you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. So do what you think is right. That has actually been a really big driving force for me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Maria Ross
Drive by Daniel Pink, and it’s about understanding the secret factors that motivate us. So, I just think that whole field of motivation is fascinating and his books a great read. It’s called Drive.

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

Maria Ross
I think it might be the closing tag to my podcast, which is something I came up with when I was writing The Empathy Edge. It’s that “Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive.”

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

Maria Ross
They can visit my main hub at Red-Slice.com. They can find all the socials there. I’m on Instagram @redslicemaria. And my podcast is at TheEmpathyEdge.com, or on your favorite podcast player.

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

Maria Ross
Yes. Do not fall into the false narrative that empathy is weak. Bring it into your career, bring it into your work, bring it into your life. And if you practice it at work, it may just spill over into your personal life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Maria, this is fun. I wish you much good empathetic moments.

Maria Ross
Thank you so much for having me. This has been fun.

Oct 14
0

1002: How to Inspire Great Performance and Increase Team Satisfaction with Anne Chow

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Anne Chow demonstrates how embracing inclusion enhances performance and transforms workplaces.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why busyness destroys opportunities
  2. How inclusion boosts success 
  3. Why consensus is over-rated

About Mitch

As the former CEO of AT&T Business, Anne Chow was the first woman and first woman of color to hold the position of CEO at AT&T in 2019, overseeing more than 35,000 employees who collectively served 3 million business customers worldwide during her time there. She is currently the Lead Director on the board of Franklin Covey, serves on the board of 3M and CSX, and teaches at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

Resources Mentioned

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Anne Chow Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Anne, welcome.

Anne Chow
Thank you so much, Pete. Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting with you. You are as senior a leader as they come. So, no pressure, we’re going to expect senior-sized insights from you, Anne?

Anne Chow
I don’t know. I used to be, perhaps, Pete, so I think it’s all relative. I’m currently employed by myself, which I think is something that lots of us can relate to, so.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, so we’re talking about your book and more, Lead Bigger: The Transformative Power of Inclusion. Could you kick us off with a really phenomenal, dramatic story that illustrates, indeed, just how transformative this inclusion power stuff is?

Anne Chow
So, this is actually how I opened the book. So, many of us can sort of reflect on what was the very first job we had where we realized that leadership was a thing. Many of us entered the workforce, whatever that may be, in a small business, medium-sized business, or a big company, and we’re going to work and we have a job. But leadership is sort of this abstract thing. It’s the people above us, people making the decisions, that are not like us doing the work in any way, shape, or form.

For me, I realized that leadership was actually a thing when I first had this job in customer service. And it was the first time that I had a large team that was sort of a seminal experience if you were in telecom, if you were an up-and-coming leader, that they wanted you to lead an actual big group of people that was geographically dispersed, demographically very different than yourself. Many of them were union workers as well. And so, that was the first time that, for me, I realized that leadership was a thing.

I kind of came in with a lot of, I would say, dare I say, Pete, cockiness, that I was coming in as a new, fresh leader, and I knew where I was going to take the group, and credibility wasn’t instant, let’s put it that way. Most of these people had so much more tenure than me, they were over twice my age, and much more seasoned and much more wise. And what I realized that there was a difference between leading and managing.

I had previously managed lots of things. I was responsible for projects and tasks. But in this case, I wasn’t just responsible for the job of the customer service function of my multi hundred-person organization. I was responsible for the people who were doing the work. And, ultimately, that’s what leading bigger is all about. It is really taking a very human-centric approach to your work, to your tasks, to everything that you do, not just about your workforce, but also as it relates to all of your stakeholders, whether it be your customers, your investors, your partners, your suppliers, or even internal partners and other organizations that you might work with.

And so, for me, that was a huge realization because I realized that I could not get the job done all by myself but I had to figure out how to lead bigger through widening my perspectives, by including more people in my purview. And that was all towards the objective of, one, being awesome at my job, but, importantly, having greater performance and a much greater impact on the business.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you have the aha moment, leadership is for real. It’s a thing that you’re living and experiencing, and you can’t do the job by yourself. You needed to work through the folks and make it happen and take a human-focused approach. So, understood. So, then, did you see some transformative power with inclusion? Or what went down when you found yourself in this situation for the first time?

Anne Chow
So, first, I was hit and met with I wouldn’t call it quite a brick wall, but it almost felt that way in the sense that I didn’t have instant credibility with my team. I thought, naively so when I was, this is when I was in my 20s, that, “Hey, my title, my role would instantly gain me some respect and credibility,” and it didn’t. My people gave me kind of a wake-up call, they said, “Hey, what makes you think that you know what’s happening here? We’ve had leaders like you before. You’re just a young whippersnapper. You’re going to come in here and just kind of do your check mark and then move on.”

So, what I found myself having to do was truly listen, truly empathize, truly try to put myself in their shoes to understand, one, “Why were they so non-trusting in management?” Two, “What were the issues that they were facing in terms of not being able to do their job well?” There were many barriers. Most of them were outside of their control, which is where I would come in, whether it was relationships with other work groups like sales. And I think in many organizations, there’s friction between sales and service.

Sales are the people who get the commission for making the sale. They don’t have to make the service actually work or put it in. The service people are left holding the bag, trying to deliver what the salespeople committed on. Service people are there when something breaks. You don’t call a salesperson to fix something. You call a service person. And so, I had to get underneath those issues, actually represent them in front of other stakeholders, sort of transform how we were working with other teams, both internally and externally, because we had external suppliers and partners as well. And that completely changed the amount of agency we had.

It completely changed how they viewed me, quite frankly. They put a lot more trust into me. They realized that I was there to help them, to support them, not to micromanage them, but to empower them and remove barriers and enable them to be more successful, both as individuals but also collectively as a team. So those are just some of the examples of when you lead with inclusion, when you lead bigger from the front and with people in mind, it absolutely works.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you had a change of heart in terms of, “They’ll respect me because of my title,” to, “No, they’ll respect me when they see that I’m for them, I’m serving them, I’m making their lives easier and understanding them.” I’m curious, was there a particular turning point or issue, and we can zoom way in, in which you really keyed in on a pain point or a frustration or a something, and then delivered something for them, and they said, “All right, here we go”?

Anne Chow
Yeah, there was. I’ll just riff on the example that I just gave between sales and service. So, sales was a constant pain point for us, and we would have chronic sales teams that would constantly bring in something that was overcommitted, we were not involved in any of the upfront planning process, and it was that kind of that old adage, Pete, that you’ve probably heard as many of your listeners have heard in terms of “Poor planning on your part does not a crisis on my part make.”

This was our life in customer service. We actually had, over time, we developed this wall of fame and wall of shame. The difference between the sales teams that were on the wall of fame, they had learned to work with us in a strategic way, in a proactive way. We actually felt like we had a partnership. The sales teams that were on part of the wall of shame were last minute, everything was always a crisis, we never had enough information, and we were always put in a bad position as it related to serving the customer and delivering what we need to do.

And so, in that front, what I did very specifically was target those sales leaders, my peers and my colleagues over there, to attempt to compel them to change their behaviors, to attempt to compel them to work inclusively together to realize that we are on the same team, this customer is our joint customer, and we will both be better off, and our teams will be better off if we actually work together.

So, I worked tirelessly to try to get as many of these sales teams, because this is where we would get our orders from, was from sales, from a delivery standpoint, and that was really a big part of the effort, very specifically, that I worked on as their leader, as their supporter to help my team get their role done.

Pete Mockaitis
Now when you say wall of fame and wall of shame, I’m literally imagining a wall with portraits of individuals. Was this physically present in the facility?

Anne Chow
Yeah, it was. It was the day before digital signage, so it was very much paper-driven and marker-driven, and could be easily removed, let’s say, if your leaders or customers might walk through the site. You wouldn’t want to see something like that. You’d want to see leaderboards and much more sort of cheerleading type of stuff. But no, it was in fact visible.

And what I think one of the most powerful things it did for my people, as it relates to how they perceived me, was that I was actually authentic and recognize what they were going through as opposed to giving them some corporate party line of, “Oh, well, yeah, we got to deal with it somehow. You know, it’s not their fault,” but to really be there for them as part of the team and really being part of a solution to help us all deliver better and lead bigger.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And I’m thinking it’s fairly common to hear dismissive corporate talk, and it has so many flavors, but it all serves the same end, to be like, to convey, “I don’t really care what you’re whining about. Go ahead and make it all better.” And so, Anne, could you give me some choice phrases, like what a blow-off sounds like from that leadership?

Anne Chow
Well, Pete, I’ve strived my whole career to not lead this way, so I’m going to dig deep here. I’m going to dig deep here, although I will confess to you and our listeners and viewers that I have been accused from time to time of using corporate jargon. So, some corporate jargon that, these are some of the phrases that I, quite frankly, can’t stand, although I am guilty of saying them in a time or two. How about, “It is what it is”?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah.

Anne Chow
That’s just not helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. It’s basically saying “I will do…” Like, in response to they’re raising an issue, a complaint, a concern to you, and you’re saying, “It is what it is,” it’s basically like, “Nothing can be done. Next.”

Anne Chow
Right. And how actually ridiculous is that, right, which is nothing can be done. Something can always be done. And I think that when I think about that phrase or even catch myself wanting to say that phrase, I have to reframe myself and say, “You know what? There is stuff that we can control. We need to focus there. There are things that we can influence.”

“That is my job as the leader is to help drive influence where we may not have control. I know there’s also a ton of stuff we care about, but we can neither control nor influence it. Worry is a very unproductive emotion, and we all kind of go through this as humans. So, worrying about the stuff that we can neither control nor influence just hurts us all.”

So, part of I always felt, instead of saying “It is what it is,” is to get your team focused on “What can you control? What can we influence? And how can we influence it? And, yes, there’s a whole bunch of other stuff we care about, but it falls outside of our responsibility and our influence, and so we do no good expending calories and energy in lamenting about it.” So, I always found those situations as an opportunity to refocus my team, and also refocus myself, quite honestly.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that. And I also like that there’s three categories and not just two. There’s control, there’s influence, and there’s out of control, as opposed to just control and no control.

Anne Chow
And, Pete, the engineer in me would say maybe there’s probably four categories. There’s control, there’s influence, there’s stuff you care about, and there’s stuff you just totally don’t care about, all of the other stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure.

Anne Chow
But our care-abouts are usually much, much greater than that which we can control, and sometimes we confuse the two. And in a workday or in any day in your life when you think about this, your time and energy are finite resources. So how are you going to spend that time and your energy? And do you align that time and energy against that which gives you the most powerful outcomes and impact? Or are you just busy?

I never really like this word “busy,” because activity is different than productivity. And so, that’s sort of another area is that, “Oh, you know, gosh, we’re so busy,” or, “I’m too busy for that,” that’s another one, or, “Oh, we’re too busy right now. We can’t look at that.” Busy doesn’t mean that this other thing that’s coming in might not need to take a greater priority.

Busy just implies, “All right, you’re just doing stuff. Is this stuff productive? Are you even open-minded enough to listen to other perspectives, to understand what this other opportunity or crisis or challenge might be, that it should, in fact, rise to the top of what you need to focus on, what you and your team need to focus on?”

So, I think that’s sort of another one, is to not fall in that trap of just “Oh, we’re too busy right now. We’re too busy to consider that new dataset. We’re too busy to go and read that additional research report. We’re too busy to go and take that field visit and join you in that customer meeting that might actually tell us something about whether or not our products and services are working in the minds of customers.”

So, I think that’s also another sort of corporate trap that we fall into, is that the craze of the day, the busyness takes us away from really thinking about having impact. And whether or not that busyness, what is it that we’re working on, the time and energy and effort that we’re placing, is it really aligned with the greatest performance and the greatest impact that you, as an individual, can have, but also you, as an organization, a team, or even a company, depending on what your role is?

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. So, busy doesn’t tell us much at all other than you have a lot of activity occurring currently.

Anne Chow
Right. And maybe you’re actually not that good at prioritizing. I am guilty of this. I think we are all guilty of this when we have days, weeks where we just feel like we’re, you know, what’s the analogy, the hamster or the gerbil in that wheel, that that’s like we’re going, we’re going, we’re going, but we’re actually going nowhere. And I think we’ve got to catch ourselves when we find that to be the case.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, if we’re talking about inclusion, can you share with us, what do we mean by the word inclusion in terms of how you define it, and how it’s often defined just generally in corporate speak? How are we thinking about this word?

Anne Chow
So, first, let me say that this book that I just recently wrote, Lead Bigger: The Transformative Power of Inclusion is a leadership book. It is not a DEI book. One of the intents of me writing this book was to approach inclusion with a much more strategic perspective, aperture, than it is currently perceived by some. A quote actually from the book is, “Inclusion itself has been made too small, stuck at the end of the DEI acronym.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Anne Chow
So, here’s what inclusion is to me. Inclusion, and I use leading bigger pretty synonymously with inclusive leadership. All that is, is widening your perspectives to have greater performance and greater impact. And the ergo, the therefore from that is, one of the easiest, most straightforward ways to widen your perspectives is to widen your perspectives by including as many different kinds of people as you can in the work that you’re doing, whether it’s your employees, your team members, your partners, your customers, or otherwise.

Every business is a people business. And so, to take this very people-human-centric approach to your leadership and to your business. And who doesn’t? I mean, think about it. Who doesn’t want to widen your perspective so that your performance is better and that your impact is greater, however you might measure it in the scope of your job, or your career, or your life?

Why do I say inclusion has been made too small? There are different groups of people who view that DEI, which stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion, means certain things. And I think that it is often misconstrued by certain groups of people to mean issues of gender and race representation at the cost of everything else.

One, in actuality, this is Anne’s view. This is Anne’s view of DEI. One is the acronym does us a disservice because it oversimplifies three different important strategic leadership imperatives. While they may be interrelated, they’re not one thing. Diversity is just simply the reality of the modern world. Every generation that comes forward becomes more and more diverse. Our elements of diversity go far beyond our gender and race, our gender identity, and our racial and our ethnic identity.

Who would have ever thought that an element of diversity in the workforce would be, whether or not you wear a mask, or whether or not you have a vaccine, but these were new and emergent, during the pandemic, aspects of diversity in terms of how you had to think about your team, dynamics, how you would run your workforce, how you handle your workplaces. And this is just ever-changing, and my book explores many of the different dimensions that shape us as individuals.

But of course, Pete, no two of us are the same, and that’s the beauty of diversity. Diversity just is. You can choose to embrace it and lean into it because the diversity, the evolution of the diversity of the world will impact your workforce. It will impact your customer base and your evolving customer base. It will impact your investor base. It will impact everything about the work that you’re doing today, will be impacted by it.

The question is, “Do you lift your head up out of the sand and sort of run toward that to try to understand it so you can get ahead and grow? Or do you just kind of let it happen to you, and consciously or unconsciously ignore or exclude certain parts of the world because of your frame of thinking?

Equity is just simply fairness. So, for each of us as leaders, we have to decide what fairness we want. Do we want making it up? Do we want equitable access to health care for all of the members of our team? So, equity to me is just an outcome, and it means a fairness of some kind of outcome, and each leader has to decide what that is.

Inclusion, which is where the magic is, requires action. When you think about it, if you want to lead, act, behave in an inclusive way, it requires that you open your mind, that you open your perspective, that you open, in some cases, your heart, and that you do something differently, and it is about widening your perspective. Ultimately, what we want is more diverse, more innovative perspectives to help us come out with better outcomes, making better decisions. I mean, that’s what we want.

That’s how you become awesome at your job is that you make better and better decisions. You do that by surrounding yourself with the best people possible. You do that by delving into as many data sources, valid data sources as possible, and you collaborate. You collaborate. And if you’re responsible for an organization or a team, you build cultures that are agile, that are resilience, because the only thing that is constant is change.

So that is my view of inclusion, is quite simply widening your perspective, and inclusive leadership is about, and leading bigger is about widening those perspectives so you can have greater performance and greater impact. That’s it.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, there’s a lot of really good stuff to think about there. So, can you bring that all the more real and practical in terms of our mindset and our way of thinking and interacting with the world? What are some habits or approaches that are working against us, maybe don’t even realize we’re doing, that fail to widen, but rather constrict our perspective to our detriment?

Anne Chow
Yes, very much so. So, I actually had an opportunity a couple years ago to co-author a book called The Leader’s Guide to Unconscious Bias, and the way that we opened that book is with this sentence, and that is, “To be human is to have bias. If you were saying that you don’t have bias, you would be saying that your brain is not working.” So, bias basically sits in the functioning of our brains and neuroscience because we experience so much.

We’re taking in so much data in every moment but our brain can only process a very, very small fraction of it. And so, how we handle that is we form biases. Biases are predispositions for preferences. It may be even prejudices against certain things, groups, people. It could be associated with food. I mean, think about if you had a bad experience eating a certain kind of food, you will have a bias and not eat it ever again.

Why is it that if you happen to be exploring, let’s say, a different kind of cuisine than you’re used to, and you’re going with somebody who is very, very experienced in it, you want to ask them, “Well, what is that?” They’re not going to tell you, because if they tell you that it is, this is a true story that I experienced, if they tell you that it’s goat brain, you’re not going to eat it, because you have a bias as to what it is.

But if you try it, you may find that you actually like it. I mean, this is kind of how it works, right? On the flip side of that, in terms of the positive, think about the feelings that all of us have. If we meet a total stranger who’s from the same hometown we are, or how we might react when we bump into somebody or meet somebody who’s from the same alma mater, we have a natural affinity to those people because we always like to seek common ground.

Where we can fall into traps with this is imagine if you’re recruiting for a position that people have equal skillsets, maybe one of them even has better skillsets, but they didn’t go to the same school that you did in the same program. Might you inadvertently say to yourself, “I know exactly what program that was because I went through it, and it was super hard, and I’m going to pick that person over the other person who maybe has some of these other skills but I weigh those, the fact they went to my alma mater and went to the same program I did, higher because I have inside knowledge, and it’s something that relates to me,” right?

That would be almost a very natural reaction for many of us, but you may not actually be picking the best talent for the role if you let that bias rule. So, we have many situations like that, that we go through our regular workday, where we have to catch ourselves on, “Are we thinking with a narrow perspective? Are we leaning towards what’s comfortable? Or are we seeking wider perspectives? Are we making ourselves and the team sufficiently uncomfortable that we know we’re challenging each other enough, that we’re doing the due diligence around the debate of any particular issue so that we come out with the best decision and the best outcome?”

It doesn’t mean that we’re ever going to get consensus. In fact, one of the things I touch on in the book is the difference between collaboration and consensus. We always want collaboration. If, in fact, you have a truly diverse team and you’re really getting in the weeds of a difficult issue, you may never get consensus.

Some of you may be out there thinking, “Well, then what do you do?” You can get alignment. You can develop alignment if you’ve built an environment and you’ve cultivated an environment of constructive discourse, healthy debate, smart risk-taking. But consensus should actually never be the objective if you’re dealing with something really, really, really difficult and complex.

You’re going to have many different perspectives about it, but you want to vet all the different scenarios that you possibly can, the various risks, the intended consequences, think through the unintended consequences. And so, these are just a couple of examples of how we might, in our everyday lives, at work, or even out in our community, find ourselves falling into the trap of comfort.

Pete, this is a very interesting stat that may not surprise people, but over 70% of leaders pick protégés that are of the same race and gender. That’s pretty significant, that number. And when you consider it, think about yourself, who are you most comfortable with a lot of the times? Who might you not be comfortable with and why, even if you don’t know the people at all?

This is the power of really thinking more inclusively, acting more inclusively, behaving more inclusively, because if you don’t, you are, I absolutely believe that you’re going to ultimately lose to a leader who is leading that way. You will be out-competed, absolutely, in my view.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know, it’s funny, as you say this, I’m thinking about the podcast and like what I’m comfortable with, and it’s like, “I am not comfortable with TikTok,” for example. It’s, like, I don’t like being there. Like, it’s weird to me. It goes fast. I feel like my brain is getting dumber, and so I don’t want to deal with it. And, at the moment, there are no How to be Awesome at Your Job shorts on TikTok.

And yet I can see in my own data that my listeners, generally, are not big into social media. They kind of are, you know, they’re like me. And, as I do the surveys, it’s like, “Oh, the average age of my audience is growing faster than time is passing.” And TikTok does skew to younger folks and, I guess I’m 41 now and time is flying.

And so then, I see what you’re saying with regard to our comfort. It’s just like, “Eh, I don’t like TikTok.” And so, it’s like, “Oh, so that’s it? So, I guess I’m not going to mess with TikTok, we’re not going to get into TikTok, and we’re not going to draw in young folks who like using TikTok who have no idea that this show exists, and it is to our detriment just because of my preferences and comfort levels.”

Anne Chow
That’s right. And when you think about it, Pete, not to scare you, but I’m sure you’ve looked at all the demographic information because you’re now mulling it over. You as a Millennial, because you’re a Millennial, this is the first year in the workforce that Gen Z is either equal to or outnumbers Boomers. So, Gen Z-ers who are all over the TikTok, and if you talk about Alpha, who is coming behind them, coming after them, it’s all about the TikTok, do they not want to be awesome at their job? Of course they do.

But what are the vehicles and platforms that serve them to get what I think are timeless conversations that you have lifted up through your podcast, entirely relevant to them? But they will not ever know, nor will they ever move backwards in terms of using their mother or fathers, the elders. I have two Gen Z children, so one is already in the workforce, one is, knock on wood, going to enter after she graduates in December, and they actually call us the geriatrics. And I’m a Gen X-er.

So, I mean, I’m an old Gen X-er, mind you, but I’m a Gen X-er but my children actually call us the geriatrics. And I fancy myself to be pretty technology savvy but I’ll confess to you, since you confessed to me and everybody else, I don’t do the TikTok either. No, I don’t. And I’m specifically calling it “The TikTok” because it makes me sound even more geriatric but I’m kind of playing it to…

Pete Mockaitis
“All these youngsters and their TikToks!” So, that notion about being uncomfortable and widening the perspective, I think is very helpful because it’s possible for it to just blow right past us in terms, like, “Yeah, I don’t really like TikTok, so I’m just moving on.” It’s like, “Oh, well, we’ll timeout, like ideally, you’re having a wider perspective and including people who will challenge you a little bit along those lines, and say, “Okay. Well, TikTok may or may not be an optimal channel for you to invest in, but it’s worth a fair shake given just the vast quantity of hours that people are spending on TikTok, even though you’re not one of them.”

Anne Chow
Right. And, in your line of work, How to be Awesome at Your Job, more and more workers that are entering the workforce are on there, so you’re actually missing a big part of your target audience because of just this shift. And I think that really underscores a point I made earlier, which is you could do that, I could do that, but, ultimately, we will lose to somebody who is the next-gen Pete or next-gen Anne, and who is already on there, who’s going to disrupt us. Our audience will dissipate and we will become irrelevant, even if our content is better because, simply, we’re not there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Miss Excel is crushing it on TikTok, for example. So, they’re out there.

Anne Chow
Yeah, they are. They are. They are, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
So, we talked a lot about TikTok, but I’d love to hear about other examples in which we can kind of, oopsies, forget to widen the perspective, and not get the inclusive goodness that leads to our peril.

Anne Chow
So, this is actually the last chapter in the book, and it’s about flexibility. So, some of us in today’s world will think, “Okay. Well, flexibility is important. Yeah, we want to work in a place that’s flexible and in a work environment that’s flexible.” Some people may say, “Well, you know what that means? That means that you get to work at home, I get to work in my car on the road. It means a flexible, hybrid work environment.”

I actually think that flexibility in a work environment. Flexibility and leading bigger means the following, and you’re going to be able to tell I’m an engineer because I’m going to give you three other concentric circles. The first circle is your job, the second circle around that is your career, the third circle around that is your life.

To me, flexibility means leading in a way that acknowledges and respects the fact that every member of your team has a job in the context of their career, in the context of their life. I’m going to sound like a geriatric now. Back in the day, when I first entered the workforce, you had your professional life and your personal life, and they were very much bifurcated. Workforce was a place that you went to. It wasn’t something that you did. We didn’t have this incredible technology that enabled you to be connected at all times, to be able to get stuff done, and check in, and do whatever it is you need to do. That world is gone. It’s over.

We now live in a world, and the pandemic really accelerated this, as we all know, where we all know that we have one life. It has some personal dimensions and professional dimensions. We can do work wherever it is that we live. We have to recognize, if you’re choosing to be a leader that your interactions with other people are specifically about their job and your job, but they have bigger aspirations. Their job sits in the context of their career, which sits in the context of their life.

And I think that the data says that we work, we spend about a third of our lives working, another third sleeping, so work plays a very significant role. So, unless you, as a leader, respect and seek to understand and have this broader perspective of, it’s not just about “Get the job done. Get the job done. Get the job done.” There has to be empathy involved, there has to be authenticity involved, there has to be grace involved.

These are words that, ten years ago, were never, ever thought of entering the workforce or in the context of leadership. These are now much more important skills in leaders today, and our next-gen workforce actually expects these traits in their leaders. So, to think much more broadly, to widen your perspective of what flexibility actually means, and that, ultimately, no two people are the same, you might not have a working agreement with somebody who is not a high-performer, is not going to be the same as you are with a high-performer who’s more experienced, who’s demonstrated, that they can have a much more fluid approach to work.

And so, I think this is a level of, if you will, sophistication in our thinking about what flexibility actually means. An example of that is safety. When we think about safety first, in my generation, that meant physical safety. That workplaces had to be safe, that if there was a spill, it had to be cleaned up, that there were rails on the stairs, handrails on the stairs, and you had to hold the handrail on the stairs, these kinds of things.

But today, equally as important is psychological safety, and psychological safety in the workforce. So, we all play a role, if you’re choosing to be a leader, to create environments where people feel safe to express themselves, to take smart risk, to have constructive debate. Because, how are you going to widen your perspectives if you don’t create an environment where people actually feel comfortable and safe to do so?

So, you cannot have an environment that is toxic or one that punishes “failures.” You have to have freedom within some kind of framework and some type of expectation, and this is just a very different way of leading. It’s a very different way of thinking about how you do your job and how your job relates to other people’s. I actually tend to think it’s really, really exciting and even more meaningful. But those are also some of the things I think for people to think about.

Pete Mockaitis
Anne, I’d love it if you could share any specific actions or tactics or do’s and don’ts associated with some of this goodness.

Anne Chow
So, here’s what I would say, I’ll address this from two different perspectives. If you happen to be a manager of a person today, so you have a responsibility for a team, people, whatnot, when you do your performance reviews with them and you give them performance feedback, you’re giving them feedback very specifically on their job. But part of your responsibility is to ensure that you have some line of sight to what their career aspiration is.

So, part of your role as their manager, as their coach, as their supervisor, if you will, to use some old-school language, is not just to focus on their performance development and performance management. You also have a responsibility to focus on their career management and their career development. I’m still shocked by the number of times that I worked with people, and they say, “Oh, I just got blindsided. That employee just up and left because he, she, or they thought that it was going to be better. They got a job that they thought they could have more upside. They just never brought it to me that they actually aspired to get promoted or they wanted to move from this function to that function.”

So, you as the manager, you as the supervisor, you as the leader have a responsibility to not just focus on the job but to help prompt and understand career aspirations, because I can tell you that individual, I mean think about yourself, you’re not just doing your job to do your job. You’re doing it because it’s going to lead to something.

And even if it’s you’re doing your job today to put food on the table, to get healthcare, for your family and yourself, you are doing that so that you can serve some other passion, whether it’s in the same line of work, whether it’s some, what is maybe today a side hustle compared to your day job, but you’re doing it for a purpose, and that purpose, your career is whatever that life’s purpose is, whatever your calling is, and that may or may not be directly related to your job.

And I think that we, as leaders, have to respect that, but we actually have to embrace it if we want to cultivate talent and have the best workforce out there. So, Pete, that’s one example of what you can do very differently. It doesn’t change the fact that you’ve got to continue to give performance feedback and performance-develop your people, but it also says you also have to think about their career development and their career management as a separate but parallel thing, because they are, whether you like it or not, and they’re going to.

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

Anne Chow
So, one of my favorite quotes is, “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” It’s a quote from Gandhi, and I think it’s a quote that, for me, embodies the fact that we are all adults, and we take ownership of the choices that we make. And if we see something that we believe needs to be changed, you’ve got to become part of that positive change. You’ve got to be part of the catalyst to make it happen. And so, that is one of my favorite quotes.

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

Anne Chow
One of the ones that I have used constantly since it came out, and they just celebrated the 10-year anniversary, the 10th one just came out, actually, I think just very, very recently, and that is the McKinsey Lean In, Women in the Workplace study that started a decade ago.

One of the reasons why I find this set of research so groundbreaking is that it very specifically goes into multiple facets of women in the workplace, slices and dices the different demographics, talks about the different stage of the evolution of women in the workforce at various different levels, and peels the issues and the opportunities back, not just by identifying the problems, but it also offers solutions for companies and organizations to consider, to continue to cultivate women in the workplace. So, I think it’s been one of the most groundbreaking, consistent set of research done over multiple, multiple years.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Anne Chow
A favorite book of mine is How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton Christensen. I think this book is so revolutionary in the way of, you know, there’s been a lot of study shown that we, as people, are not truly happy unless we’re helping others. You know, this whole idea of happiness at work and joy at work, I mean, it tends to be sort of so simple. When you think about jobs and careers, it’s so quantitatively-focused, so ambition-focused, but ultimately what brings you joy in your life?

It really is extremely, extremely provocative in terms of helping you, maybe even catalyzing you to think through this question of “How will you measure your life?” We each have one life to live. We do not have a professional life. We do not have a personal life. We have one life. It has professional and personal dimensions, and we’ve been given a gift of this life. So, what is it that you want to accomplish in this very, very short time that we have in this world? And my hope, of course, is that you choose to lead bigger, not just at work but in your life.

Pete Mockaitis
And a key nugget you share that really connects and resonates with folks?

Anne Chow
I’m going to reinforce something that I just said because I think it’s such an important one. We each have one life to live. We don’t have a professional life. We don’t have a personal life. We have one life that has personal and professional aspects. And so, the challenge, the opportunity, the gift we have each is to figure out what we want to do with that one life, and there is no time like the present.

Time is that most precious resource that we all tend to waste and squander. Once time has passed, we can never get it back. And so, if there’s something that you aspire to do, be, help with, become, the time is now. There’s no time like now.

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

Anne Chow
I would point them to my LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn, or my website, which is TheAnneChow.com, The-A-N-N-E-C-H-O-W.com.

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

Anne Chow
Yeah, I would challenge every single person here to think about how you can lead bigger. What is the one area in your job that you would like to learn more about, where you know that widening your perspectives will help you, you just haven’t taken the time or made the effort or even thought about how to go about doing it? Is it with your team? Is it with a platform, a tool, a part of the market that you want to pursue, a set of investors that you know are out there, but you haven’t figured out how to connect with them yet? So, find one area first with respect to how you might widen your perspective and start there. So that’s the one challenge, a homework assignment that I give everybody out there.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Anne, this is fun. I wish you much great big leading.

Anne Chow
Thank you so much. You too, Pete. Cheers to leading bigger.