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Aug 05
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984: Building Skills Better in an AI-Driven World with Matt Beane

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Matt Beane reveals how the quest to optimize productivity is harming our learning and growth–and what you can do about it.

You’ll Learn

  1. The trillion-dollar problem with trying to optimize everything 
  2. How to modify ChatGPT to help you learn better 
  3. Three counterintuitive ways to learn better and faster 

About Matt

Matt Beane does field research on work involving robots and AI to uncover systematic positive exceptions that we can use across the broader world of work. His award-winning research has been published in top management journals such as Administrative Science Quarterly and Harvard Business Review, and he has spoken on the TED stage. He also took a two-year hiatus from his PhD at MIT’s Sloan School of Management to help found and fund Humatics, a full-stack IoT startup. In 2012 he was selected as a Human-Robot Interaction Pioneer, and in 2021 was named to the Thinkers50 Radar list. 

Beane is an assistant professor in the Technology Management department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Digital Fellow with Stanford’s Digital Economy Lab and MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. When he’s not studying intelligent technologies and learning, he enjoys playing guitar; his morning coffee ritual with his wife, Kristen; and reading science fiction—a lot of science fiction. He lives in Santa Barbara, California. 

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Matt Beane Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Matt, welcome.

Matt Beane
My pleasure. I’m delighted to be here. Thanks for the invite.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to learn how I can save human ability in an age of intelligent machines.

Matt Beane
I think we all should be, and I’ve been trying to be excited for a good long while now. So glad to be here and chat about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Well, kick us off, you know, there’s a lot of chatter about AI all the time. Can you maybe tell us something that is surprising, counterintuitive, kind of over- or underappreciated in the field since you really know what’s going on and the rest of us are just parroting the Wall Street Journal and New York Times?

Matt Beane
So, the core, the middle third of The Skill Code, the book, talks about a threat that I discovered initially in robotic surgeries. I was studying how you learn how to do that thing and how that’s different from how you learn how to do the good old-fashioned method of surgery, one way or another, and dear listener, trust me, I’m not going to get any more graphic than that.

But the short story there that I found really, really fast, standing in operating rooms at the top teaching hospitals around the world, is that intelligent technology in that case, AI-enabled robots, the AI there was very mild compared to what we’re all dealing with now, but it was there, that that was fantastic in many ways for productivity, for quality. A surgeon said it was like bumper bowling compared to traditional surgery, and it’s really true, actually.

When I’m in the operating room, it’s pretty amazing, especially when somebody’s really good at it. And novices, residents, would show up, help set up the robot, help attach it to a patient. They get a little bit of hands-on experience, and then they just sit down and watch for a four-and-a-half-hour procedure they’d be lucky to get 15 minutes of time on task because the robot allowed that surgeon to do the whole job themselves.

And that right there, I’ve spent the next nine and a half years looking into whether or not this is a generalizable problem and, dear reader, it is. That’s the whole point of the book. This is cutting across all sectors of the economy that I could find. I’ve been across more than 30 different kinds of occupations, different technologies, organizations, and so on now.

It turns out that we are needlessly, I think in many cases, sacrificing novice involvement in the work on the altar of productivity. That’s the basic deal that we’re striking right now, whether it’s with generative AI, whether it’s with robotics, many different kinds of technology now. And the short reason as to why is that that tech allows that expert to just do more, better, faster, some combination of those things, and part of the way you get there is you need less help.

Novices are, by definition, slower and make more mistakes, and they take coordination costs, mentoring and so on. It takes effort, time, attention. And so, in the short run, organizations love that deal, experts love that deal because, even if it’s a 5%, 8% productivity increase, you’re in more control. Experts love using their expertise. So, it’s attempting short-run target, and that’s the sort of hidden problem in the economy right now.

The best analysis I’ve been able to do, I think that is literally a trillion-dollar problem for the economy, it’s just that it shows up with a lag. You’re only going to find out a little later when those novices aren’t ready for duty.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Matt, there are so many, so many ways we can go with this. First, I think it’s beautiful in that.

You’re highlighting something that I’m really not hearing anywhere else. It’s, like, we are missing out on the opportunity for novices, apprentices, to do the initial helper, low-skill work, because at the moment, that’s kind of what AI is okay at. Like, I will say, “Hey, AI, give me 20 potential titles for this podcast episode.”

Matt Beane
You got it.

Pete Mockaitis
They’re still not as good as my team, just saying. Thanks, team. You’re awesome. But it does give me a little spark. It’s like, “Okay, that’s a good phrase. I’ll take that phrase and work that into something else that we got. Okay.”

Matt Beane
Yep, and that translates into, not always, but often the default deal is a little bit less struggle for that person who is trying to give you that feedstock. A little bit less complexity they have to deal with. In the lingo of the book, this is the skill code that’s up front. There’s three basic components to healthy skill development.

One of them is challenge, “Are you working close to but not at the bounds of your ability?” You do that, you’re literally sweating, you’re not doing as well as you could, but that’s where we learn mostly. It’s uncomfortable. It’s not fun. The middle one’s complexity, which is, “Are you not just getting a task done, but are you engaging with the broader universe of tasks you’re embedded in?” The other people’s jobs around you, the other technologies, asking broader questions, not just focused. That’s going sort of broad where a challenge is more deep.

And then human connection, human relationships, warm bonds of trust and respect between human beings. Those three things, you take that subtle, small, in your case, “just help me along a little bit” deal, which by the way is a much nicer version of what’s generally going on out there. You’ll just do it yourself in many cases if you can. Then all three of those things take a hit, but not for you. It’s for that next person trying to work up the chain.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And now you say this is a trillion-dollar problem. I’m curious what industries or professions do you think it’s going to hit the most hard? And, selfishly, are there any sort of market investment opportunities we should be exploiting, Matt? That’s what it’s all about, right?

Matt Beane
Yep. I’ll give you the one I care about most, which is to say there’s a huge potential upside here, yeah. So, you can sort of short the market. There are plenty of places where you should expect things to be more readily automatable with these technologies faster. And this fits in, I’ve got a piece in Harvard Business Review coming out in two or three weeks, or maybe a month on this.

Anything that is remote work right now means you don’t have to use your body to do it. In other words, it’s “Receive some information, process that information, communicate about that process, and send a changed work product off,” but it’s all digital. That’s a lot more straightforward for these kinds of technologies to handle, especially if it doesn’t involve multimodal data, just like text.

Some folks will lose their jobs there and that’s a serious issue for those affected. We should care about it. But they’re going to see, most folks are going to see a ton of job change. Like, what it means to do my job is going to radically change for that person who could entirely be remote versus somebody who has to show up and use their body for something. So you can go looking there, and you can look in places in the economy where the exposure to these technologies and the potential upside of using them is really high and concentrated in a job. A colleague of mine, Daniel Rock, who’s at Wharton, he recently, with co-authors at OpenAI, published a paper that maps this exposure across the economy. And if you want to make a smart bet about where there’s going to be the most change, look at those places.

The upside, though, is the one that I wrote the back third of the book about, basically, which is we like to romanticize this master-apprenticeship relation as if it’s somehow the peak of what humans can do in terms of transferring and developing skill, and we’ve relied on it for literally 160,000 years, so it ain’t broke exactly, but it can suck. And could it be better?

I think I’m very convinced, I’m trying to build technology like this now, that we can use the very technology that’s part of the insult to build new systems that, in fact, make that connection richer, better, more flexible than it ever was before, so that skill development functions better and from now forward than it ever could have in all of human history.

Companies that try to figure that out, reconfigure their systems so that just by using it, you’re nudged towards healthier skill and you get your productivity, that company’s going to kill. I mean, that’s such a great story. So, anyway, I think there’s opportunities in both directions.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds really cool. Could you paint a picture for what that looks like? And is that happening somewhere right now?

Matt Beane
It’s funny, you should ask, only a few folks have asked. I am now CEO of a startup called SkillBench. In about a month, we’re going to come out and put up a stealthy website or whatever. But we are building a technology that helps an organization see this joint optimization problem based on rich data from inside their own firm.

Like, think of those as two dimensions. You’ve got productivity that comes out of AI, like, “How much juice are we getting out of this stuff?” By the way, it’s going to be less than you expect. We can show you that.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s my vibe, yeah, impression.

Matt Beane
Yeah, but it’s not none, and sometimes it will be negative, but seeing what that is, is actually not trivial. But we frame it as a joint optimization problem, and we get data that will help you show, “Fine, you get plus one utils productivity-wise out of implementing AI. You’ve bought your 20,000 licenses like everybody else. What’s the simultaneous interdependent effect of that on the human capital, the people who repeatedly have to do that job that now involves AI? Are they getting up-skilled or down-skilled? Are they more or less motivated? And are they more or less connected with each other?”

You know, these kinds of things, we’re building a tool to automatically help organizations just get a live dashboard of that so that they can figure out, “Do we like the trade-off that we’re making?” In some places they will, and that’s fine, right? Sometimes it’s the right thing to do to sacrifice building human capital for sake of a giant productivity gain, if you’ve got one. But right now, you just said it, I think, earlier, maybe three, four minutes ago.

It’s not a problem you’d ever really heard of that this is a joint optimization problem. There’s this trade space between how much productivity boon are we getting out of this thing. Oh, but that’s also interrelated with what happens to the humans that are left in that job after we change that job. Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s up in both territories, in both categories.

But it’s like driving with no rear-view mirror. Organizations are not in the habit of gathering data on that second one at all, or interrelating them two together. So just getting a window on what the heck is going on in that trade space is what we’re doing. But there are numerous firms out there trying to build technology to use AI, for instance, to make better, high-quality, briefer matches between an expert and a novice on a specific project.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Can you zoom into a particular industry, like how we’d see that in practice?

Matt Beane
A good instance is in chip design, one firm that I recently got some data on. Basically, when you’re trying to lay out a new chip, the state of the art in the last, say, 10 years or so is you’re going to use automated software to sort of do this optimization problem of mapping out where all the different components go on that chip.

And so, increasingly, over those last 10 years, basically that junior engineer, who would have been sort of sleeves rolled up over a diagram and doing math that contributes upwards to that senior engineer, who’s doing the block diagram and laying things out, they’re just going to have less opportunity to play in that interaction of designing that chip. They might do some isolated analysis, and actually, the dynamic’s very similar in investment banking.

Well, it turns out that that is not true for all chip projects, for all types of components at all phases of the game. So, in fact, if somebody is a junior engineer, and they’re working on power optimization, that part of the problem, like, “How do I make sure there’s the right amount of power going to this certain amount of the chip?” maybe the chip that they’re currently working on, they would just lose out on that opportunity.

But, in fact, there’s somebody in a fab in Jakarta right now who is working on a chip that could use a little manual help because it’s an ASIC, for instance, which is just a custom piece of silicon as opposed to something you’d produce, mass produce. Well, in the world that we inhabited before this kind of information was available, no human could know that for this one- or two-week window, there’s a senior engineer in Jakarta who could use the help of a junior engineer in upstate New York.

But now you can get that real time work data and say, “Hey, no, this is not done. The capabilities here are underbaked.” But there are firms that have realized, “Oh, this is some sort of problem I got to manage, and maybe there’s a way to make better sort of work-related matches as opposed to just matches across a hierarchy.” That’s the old school way of doing it, that many firms are still deploying, and that’s not bad, but it’s just very coarse.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. And with regard to, when you mentioned these things, like surgery, investment banking, chip making, which by the way, I read the book The Chip War. Extreme ultraviolet lithography is the most complicated thing I’ve ever heard of, and it blew my mind, which is actually a shoutout.

Matt Beane
It is pretty incredible, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Book recommendation there. But that really does paint a picture in terms of, at the at the highest level, yeah, there are some expertise that’s pretty high stakes – life or death, millions or billions of dollars, huge factory waste or safety matters – that, “Yeah, we’re going to be super careful associated with having a senior person and then a novice apprentice kind of learning under them and doing some work as they’re developing those skills.”

And, yes, it does seem kind of spooky that we could find ourselves in a place where those lesser experienced people don’t have the opportunity to do that thing anymore. And so, I’m curious, if some of us are already starting to find ourselves in that position, what should we do?

Matt Beane
First of all, in order to take effective action to address this problem, you got to know what an effective solution looks like. Like, “What would it look like if things were good for me, or the people that report to me, or the people that are in my profession, for building skill?”

There hasn’t really been a lot of proliferation of different views about what skill is, how you build it, and so on, and big theories that, sort of, “First, you do this, then you do this, then you do this, then you do that.” And I just realized this book was not going to be able to do that. Like, there are too many different ways of working now, different technologies and so on, different modalities of interacting.

But the raw ingredients, sort of like, and I use a DNA metaphor, that’s what’s on the cover of the book, if I could give you the amino acids of skill development, and they’re going to show up in different combinations in your setting, they’re going to show up in different sequences, different emphases. But for each one of those three things – the challenge, the complexity, the connection – I give you a 10-point checklist in the book.

You can immediately go look at your work scenario and say, “All right, how healthy is challenge for me? How am I doing on this, like, 10-point quiz? How healthy is complexity? How healthy is connection? And if it’s not great, then I, at least, know how and why it might change, because each one of those items is a specific set of interactions.”

For instance, in challenge, your challenge is healthiest when you have an expert nearby who can help you deal with the frustration that comes with not performing at your best. You can struggle on your own. You can get really far. A lot of autodidacts have shown us, like, you don’t really necessarily need someone to build skill but you need them to get superb progress towards skill.

And if you have an expert around who can help frame the difficulty you’re embedded in, in a broader context, like you want to be able to hit a fastball at major league speeds, well, the first goal is, “Why don’t you just try to even make contact? Like, forget about a fair ball. Get up and try to do that, and then you hit a foul ball, and instead of going, ‘Good job, dummy. That’s a foul ball,’ they can say, ‘Okay, you can hit a foul ball in the major leagues. Tomorrow we’re going to work on…’” right? They can sort of help you put that in context.

So, that’s just one tiny little micro example. That, I hope, the first three chapters can help anyone, in any role, in any job, look at that situation and say, “Is it healthy or is it not?” The next move that’s peppered throughout the book is, “Okay, assume in some cases, in some part of your life, in some part of your organization, this has been good or is currently great, what is it that is allowing for things to work well over there that’s not working well over here?”

Like, “The job I had last year, I was learning so much. Now, not so much.” What was happening back then that you could port? Or if you’re a manager in an organization, “Fine, skill development’s great over here. Why is it?” Because the job rotation program is so annoying. It turns out that rotating people through different jobs, no one likes that, and it is incredibly beneficial for your skills and career development. It gets you engaged with that complexity thing I was talking about in the middle of those three Cs.

So, lots of notes, angry notes, like, “I have to rotate through yet another function.” It’s like, “Yeah, you do.” And the job of the leader then is to say, “This is actually really critical for your career and it is no fun. So, I’m right there with you on it and we’re definitely doubling down on that,” that kind of thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, understood. So, it’s not so much, necessarily, that the wise expert mentor person has to be pouring forth, necessarily, expert nuanced insight wisdom, so much as they just have a bit of a broad perspective associated with, “Yeah, this sucks, it’s uncomfortable, it’s unpleasant in these ways, and also it’s useful.” And just that, in and of itself, is a huge value because the learner is able to then persist through the frustrations and rock and roll.

Matt Beane
Yep. And then, you know, I mean, technologists, people who are building these technologies that are currently enabling all this new potential productivity, and in some cases actual, they have a big choice about like how do they want to design their tech, how do they want to sell it. There are ways of doing that, the default ways, that will appeal to this monetary productivity-oriented logic that’s deeply embedded in business and firms, and they can win. And yet that doesn’t have to be that way.

I have a post on my Substack called “Don’t Let AI Dumb You Down.” And in the back third of that post, there are specific changes you can make to ChatGPT through its custom settings to have it nudge you towards more skill while you’re getting productivity out of it. It’s very straightforward. The interface is available, but that takes every single user doing that for themselves. That’s no way for the human species to win.

Like, OpenAI or Anthropic or Google, if they just made a few tweaks to that UX, anybody at the end of the day would be mildly annoyed, maybe more, by the technology because it keeps asking, “Do you know any other human beings you could connect with about this skill, rather than just me?” And it’s like, “No, I don’t want to debrief this interaction.” “No, I don’t want a harder version.” “No, I don’t want to try it myself.”

But if that’s the option, how many people, if it was turned on by default, would turn it off? Some, but a whole bunch of other folks, millions probably, would just know more about musicology at the end of the week for having used ChatGPT, or have made connections with other human beings in their local area.

This happens to me. Like, I am now connected to a rocket enthusiasts club in the Santa Barbara area because we all like to watch the rocket launches out of Vandenberg Air Force Base, and I just went into ChatGPT, asking for some code to predict when they were going to land the boosters back here in Santa Barbara. And because I had configured it that way, it said, “Is there any other human being locally you might connect with about that?” I’m like, “Oh, yeah, good one.” So, the tech, just so much power in the hands of the folks rolling this tech out, so it’s such easy changes.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really intriguing, this notion of these little nudges and how just transformational their impact can be. Like, 401k savings, it’s like, “Well, the default is this much is deployed into your 401k savings.” And people say, “Okay,” which is wild. You know, it’s like, “This is your money.” It’s like, “All right, sure, 8%, cool. Oh, you said, okay, nine? All right, nine, sure.” It’s like, “Whatever.” Like, most people just sort of roll with that default, and that’s interesting.

It’s funny, I have a calorie-tracking app, and I just changed the default to like, “Just assume that I burn fewer calories naturally.” Like, the threshold at which it turns green versus red is now different. And I know, I know I set it up to do that, and yet it does nudge me, it’s like, “Okay, maybe I’ll have a healthier snack so I can stay green because I want it.”

And so, that’s really clever how if we’re engaging frequently with ChatGPT or some of these things, if we can make the default setting to be one that nudges us in positive ways, we will benefit. And it’s funny, it’s sort of like, “Yes, I know talking to other people is generally a cool thing,” but it doesn’t occur to you in the moment. Likewise, it’s like, “Yes, I know I could look at the manual to figure this out.” I was like, “But, actually, yeah, maybe I will. I’d do that.” Because it said it, I was like, “Yeah, actually, maybe I’ll learn something else if I get the whole PDF manual of this appliance that’s giving me trouble right now.”

Matt Beane
Exactly. And, in fact, to the opposite, I lay out in the book, like there’s many cases where we grab for the manual and that hurts your skill development. It turns out that with, and in the book, I cite the research on this, that reading the manuals can be hazardous to your health of your skill. Basically, folks do it too soon, too early. We front load all kinds of explicit knowledge and learning into school, into work, formal training classes, checklists, SOPs, all this kind of stuff, when it’s generally better to get the minimally sufficient amount of explicit information and then just dive in the pool.

And then, after you’ve had a good struggle and a stroke and managed to get heaving and scuffing up to the edge of the pool, then somebody could say, “You want to learn a little bit about strokes now?” Humans are better at learning that way. So, a system like this, if you asked for the PDF, it could say, “You’re a little early in trying to deal with it. How about you just try a little harder? It’d probably be better for you.” I mean, it wouldn’t do that, because people would say, “No, go to hell, give me the PDF.”

But there are ways of doing that where, if you, as the user, specify, “Here’s my trade zone between getting my productivity,” and it’s like your 401k contribution. By the way, the returns on your skill are much better than the returns you will get by putting money in a 401k. So, if you set that slider, “So today I want to be pretty darn annoyed and learn a lot,” or, “I want to be not annoyed at all and not learn anything,” that’s your choice. But the technologists can make that available to people is the point. Like, that’s just a huge missed market opportunity, from my point of view.

Pete Mockaitis
And you say we can go ahead and do it ourselves. Is there a magic copy-pasted thing you recommend we shove in there? Or how do we get it done?

Matt Beane
Yes. I boiled down the entire book into two short paragraphs that I dumped into the custom instructions in ChatGPT, and that is in the bottom third of that post on my Substack. Substack is called WildWorldofWork.org, and the post is called “Don’t Let AI Dumb You Down.” I can send the URL after we’re done. But, yeah, the literal contents of those boxes, even as of today, I keep updating it whenever I make changes, is sitting right there.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, cool. And so, that’s nudged you to go meet some rocket people and has some other good impacts on your life as well?

Matt Beane
Yes, absolutely. And, you know, if I I’m perfectly candid, and most of the time, the thing says, “Hey, if you want more challenge, what about this? If you want more complexity, what about this? And how about some human connection?” And I wave it off 90% of the time, 94% of the time something. I could go get the data. And it’s always there though and I don’t not notice it.

And, by the way, what I have put together is the most basic ham-fisted, ridiculously coarse approach to this problem so it’s helped me. Yes, I have, for instance, I’ve learned a bunch more about coding because it itself suggested that I leave, you may have seen this yourself if you’re doing the sort of work where ChatGPT, or Claude, is generating code. You can turn a radio button on where you can watch that code getting written.

And it writes it at reasonable, it’s like 2x human speed or something, 2.5x, which is like listening to a podcast, you can track. And so, I’ve learned some stuff about coding just by watching, too. Like, I wasn’t ever a professional coder. I took some classes in graduate school. It had been 10 years for me or so since I’d tried to write any code to do anything, and now, kind of casually use code to solve problems. But you don’t learn anything about that if you just let the machine do its thing and take the output.

So, leaving that window open is a way where I just am like, it’s like pair coding, by the way, the best learning about how to code comes from sitting physically side-by-side with somebody where they’re coding and you’re watching and you’re chatting through the problem, that kind of thing. The best coders at Google are pair coding, side-by-side.

Anyway, this is all just one guy’s semi-random, I mean, fine, I wrote a book on the topic, and I know some stuff, but, come on, the world can do better than one guy. Like, we have to take wholesale effort. We have a huge opportunity to nudge all of humanity in a healthier direction on skill while getting crazy cool new things out of AI.

Pete Mockaitis
And it makes you wonder kind of about everything that we allow to be done for us, and like, “Is this trade-off worth it? And is it worth it every time? The dishwasher washes my dishes. Thank you, dishwasher.” But, in some ways, it can be kind of mindful, cathartic, Zen-like, just hot soapy water, physically cleaning some stuff, and sometimes that’s the right answer.

Likewise, the calculator or the GPS or anything that does anything for us, yeah, it productively accomplishes that thing faster. Cool. Thanks. But there may very well be times and places when I’d say, “No, no, autopilot. I want the control.” And it is enriching me in a skills development kind of a way and some other ways because I have wrest back control.

Matt Beane
Yes, exactly right. And it’s not obvious where you win by giving up the tech and in what ways you give it up. There are other cases, by the way, let’s be real clear, where by using the tech in its fullest capacity, you are going to build ridiculously more skill than you would have otherwise. So, in fact, there’s a win-win there where you were like just stabbing for productivity, and because you get to skip some stuff that is actually repetitive, annoying, you get to deal with the cool complex parts of the problem.

And so, we don’t pay a price at all. In fact, you learn a whole bunch more, “Oh, but maybe I’m sacrificing that novice’s involvement. Gosh, darn it, there’s no free lunches there.” So, it’s not just an optimization problem for me, Matt Beane, or you, Pete. It’s like, “I’m winning, but what about the people around me? What about the people who want to come up the ranks?”

It’s really, that’s a tall order to ask any one expert to be looking out for their own results and seeing that, in fact, if they don’t actively do something to support that novice, that person is out to sea. Whereas, in the past, to cycle, I skipped way past it in the beginning, like the traditional mode of doing surgery is a lot like doing lots of kind of work, which is, if you and I were doing it and you’re my mentor, there are four hands required for that job.

Like, somebody’s holding that patient open while the other person is doing something inside of them and that takes four hands. So, I can be at the shallow end of the pool, so to speak, if you decide I’m not really ready, but I’m not doing nothing. I’m on task the whole time. And so, that radical shift is the difference.

Like, that kind of shift as we’ve used new technologies to automate small parts of the work, the calculator for instance in accounting, that wasn’t such an extensive chunk of the work that the junior accountant was left hung out to dry. In minor ways, but that they were making up for by other forms of involvement. That’s the intensity and the pace of the change is really the main thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, if we could maybe think outside of AI entirely, when it comes to acquiring skills, we’ve laid out some of these fundamentals, the challenge, the complexity of the human connection, are there any particularly underrated do’s and don’ts you think that make a world of difference as we’re trying to develop skills?

Matt Beane
So, number one, when you are not performing at your best, when you are not having fun, and you are struggling to the point where you might be sweating and really can’t hear if somebody’s talking to you, like, you’re totally focused, that’s the domain where you’re appropriately challenged and will be learning the most.

So, it’s not a space that, you know, the minute you tell this to anybody, you’re like, “Yeah, there was that time where I kind of got a years’ worth of learning in four hours because everything was riding on me doing a good job. I did not do a great job, but, hey, I did it, and now I know how I can handle that situation, right?”

So that challenge, we, in many ways, have unintentionally created a sort of, the world of work has become a bit of a padded playground a little bit on this front. Like, being uncomfortable and real struggle is a status threat, like, you don’t look like you’re doing so hot, and so maybe you’re going to avoid doing that in front of people when you want to maintain an impression kind of thing. Or there are policies that will literally keep you away from challenge and so on.

Anyway, challenge is no fun, and it is absolutely necessary, and an expert, by the way, can really help you eat a lot more challenge than you could on your own. So having somebody there who can, if you can throw a flag to ask for help, or who can give you some key guidance at key points, there’s ways of amplifying, you know, eating even more of it. That’s one.

The second sort of counterintuitive one has to do with the complexity bit, which is getting your job done faster because of technology allows you, unintentionally, to skip by a whole bunch of collateral work and understanding that’s necessary for you to not have fragile or brittle skill. So, I did some research in warehousing, for instance, recently, and the people who really were good managers of their area were good because they knew about things like seasonality in the business. They knew about different vendors that they were using for staffing.

They knew about the technology, like the taping machine, and why that thing is rickety and how to shim it so that it doesn’t shake the packages too much as they go through. These are not things that you should be paying attention to in your job, but these people not only tried to get good at being a manager of a small group, but they wanted to understand more and more of the different jobs, different work, other skills that were connected to it so that when a shock came, for them, it was like, “Oh yeah, it’s wintertime, big jackets come through the building. We got this. Here’s what we do.”

And, usually, the way to do that is do not, first, go to the rulebook, do not, first, try to explain to a newbie in detail everything to expect. Give them the least information they need to get out on the field and try. So that’s kind of the opposite. Corporate training is show up. What’s the first thing you do? New employee orientation and training.

And that just front loads a bunch of concepts and knowledge into people’s heads that usually is just going to melt away, and then, at worst, they’re going to be clutching the rulebook while they’re out there for the first week trying to do whatever, instead of just trying to pay attention, do a good job and learn.

And the last one is that we write off human relationships as if they are somehow unconnected to how we build skill, and in particular, like trust and respect between human beings, when, in fact, it’s the main event. Like, number one, nobody’s going to give you a chance to build skill unless they trust and respect you, at least a little bit. So, if you’re not earning that, you don’t get to play. So, there’s an access bit.

But the other part is motivation. Like, I can point to the places in my career, but, also, it’s clear in the research. The reason you’re motivated to build that skill is because usually there’s somebody around whose trust and respect you want to earn, like you have a manager or an expert you work with, and you want to do a good job and you want them to recognize and see it, and say, “Hey, that was good.” Or, you know, “That was good, chef, and don’t do that again,” right?

You’re getting real feedback from somebody and you want a better chance to do something cooler next time, and so you’re going to work extra hard. You’re going to get up early in the morning to do a good job because of that human connection, not because of some, like, “I want to be competent,” abstract goal. Those are things that are important, of course, but like, un-divorce human relationships from your skill, like, they’re bound together.

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

Matt Beane
I’ll go for one that has been oriented my career for a long time, which is “The future’s already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.” People attribute that to William Gibson, a famous sci-fi writer, and he, it turns out, fun cocktail party fact, does not remember saying that, and thinks he never said it.

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

Matt Beane
The Milgram experiments with people’s willingness to obey an authority figure and administer potentially lethal shocks to somebody across a divide.

Obviously, that study has been debunked in a number of ways and so on. But seeing that as a 12-year-old kid, the video, I was just shown that in a class, woke me up to you can do research about this stuff, and, “Dear, God, people will do what for what reason?” Like, that just really just woke me up intellectually in a way that few pieces of research since have done.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Matt Beane
Well, the one I tend to go off about still, a couple years after reading about it, is one called There Is No Antimemetics Division by an author with no vowels in it, QNTM. They prefer to remain anonymous. I’ll leave it at that, because that book will, if you are into sci-fi at all, that will literally melt the head off your body. It is incredibly creative. It’s fantastic.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Matt Beane
That’s got to be sitting in the morning, almost every single morning, with my wife having coffee before the day starts. That’s sort of a sacrosanct thing that she and I have established over the last, like, 15 years.

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

Matt Beane
Yeah, “We’re sacrificing learning on the altar of productivity.” It’s one that I came out with for my TED Talk, and that’s one that I hear back a fair number of times, yeah.

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

Matt Beane
MattBeane.com. M-A-T-T-B-E-A-N-E.com. That will get you access to the book. It’ll also get you access to the Substack that I mentioned before. If you want the latest rulings coming out of my brain, that’ll take you to Twitter or X, whatever you want to call it, but it’s all there, sort of a central hub.

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

Matt Beane
Yeah. So, just figure out for yourself what kind of deal you’re making with AI around productivity, and what it might be costing you or others around you in terms of skill. It could be great, bully for you, and then your job is to help other people figure that out, but it probably isn’t. Go take a second look.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, Matt, thank you. I wish you all the best.

Matt Beane
Thank you very much. I appreciated the opportunity.

Aug 01
0

983: Making the Most of Your Limited Time Before Death with Jodi Wellman

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Jodi Wellman shares how reflecting on our scarce remaining time of life helps us live free from regret.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why you need to befriend the Grim Reaper
  2. How to feel “astonishingly alive”
  3. How to break out of a rut

About Jodi

Jodi Wellman is a former corporate executive turned executive coach. She has a Master’s in Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, where she is an instructor in the Master’s program and a trainer in the world-renowned Penn Resilience Program. She is a Professional Certified Coach with the ICF and a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach from CTI. 

She has coached and spoken with clients like American Express, Fidelity, pwc, Royal Bank of Canada, BMW, and more, and runs her own business, Four Thousand Mondays. She’s also known for her inspirational TEDx Talk on how death can bring you back to life. She lives between Palm Springs and Chicago with her husband and cat, Andy.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

  • Jenni Kayne. Use the code AWESOME15 to get 15% off your order!

Jodi Wellman Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jodi, welcome.

Jodi Wellman
Thank you for having me here. I’m excited.

Pete Mockaitis
I am excited, too. I understand you say you’ll have about 1,822-ish Mondays left of your plans here.

Jodi Wellman
Well, I got to tell you, that number’s down by two weeks since you read that. So, I’m down to 1,820, but this clock is ticking down, and, yeah, big plans. I mean, that’s the point, right? It’s like, when we get a little bit granular with that math, that fabulous mortality math, it does make me and many others go, “Wait a sec, how am I going to spend that diminishing time?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, what are some of these big plans?

Jodi Wellman
Well, they’re usually bucketed. It’s funny you ask that because, in terms of research and then the way that I look at my life, they’re in categories. So, there are different domains of life. There’s the fun and recreation side of things, which can further categorize into travel. So going to the south of France in the fall, that’ll be exciting. And so, there’s a whole category around recreation. What are we doing with our leisure time?

And so, looking at starting new hobbies, I’m going to be getting more into trying to learn a new language. And so, really, I’m looking to either refine French or Italian. So that’s just one category, and so that’s a good start, I think, lest I bore you with the gory details.

Pete Mockaitis
No, I appreciate that, that’s fun. That’s fun. Well, lay it on us, you’ve been researching our mortality. Your book, You Only Die Once, a compelling title. Any particularly surprising or fascinating discoveries you’ve made about us humans and our lives, our mortality, that professionals need to know?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, I definitely think so. So, we all know in the work we do, for example, that, oh, there’s nothing better than the power of a deadline. It’s like we will tend to procrastinate until we know that the strategy session is coming up on the 17th or we’ve got a big project due at the end of the quarter, etc. And it’s so true with our lives.

So having this distinct and, okay, fine, maybe a little bit morbid sense that we are finite is precisely the thing, by having that deadline that does kick us into gear to get on with, I say, the business of living. So, it could be the things we do at work, all of the initiatives we might just keep postponing, but also the things we do outside of work, all the joys and things we might do, again, for recreation, socially, etc., that make us more well-rounded when we come back into work.

So, the research is called Temporal Scarcity, and it’s this idea that whenever we have an asset, okay, like life, that we become heightened, frightenedly aware that it is temporary or rare. Our perception of its value goes through the roof. So that is why I get us to count our Mondays, and that is the heft in terms of empirical evidence behind how we do need to have, unfortunately, that rankling feeling of, “Ugh, scarcity” in order to take action and have that deadline, or else we’ll just float along the lazy river of life and have good intentions, maybe, but not really take as much action on them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, a deadline is quite literally here, there will be a day in which we die, a deadline.

Jodi Wellman
You caught it.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, morbid, yeah, I mean, that’s how some people could react to it, but you seem to have a very different emotional energy vibe association to this. Tell us about it.

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, I definitely do. I mean, I’ve never been super scared of it. I recognize, and in doing research, of course, and working with groups and individuals that some people would much rather not talk about death than anything. Many people would rather public speak. We’re very afraid of dying in the discussion.

So, my openness to it and my mission in life, really, is to de-fang it, make it something that’s like, “Yeah, it sucks. Yeah, definitely. Nobody wants to think about the fact that we’re not going to be around much longer,” relatively speaking. And so, how do we use that and take a more amusing approach to accepting, “Yeah, it sucks to be us,” and yet let’s use it pretty darn quickly to move over to the life side?

So, I talk about the Grim Reaper. I love it. I love the whole topic of mortality because I know it’s a tool. It catapults us not to keep talking about death but to talk about life. So, I make the switch pretty darn quickly. It helps that I doodle, you know, the Grim Reaper and tombstones. It helps to lighten it a little bit, and I tend to give out the most ridiculous, hilarious prizes in my workshops, again, to create levity.

But it’s like a fact of life that we do a fabulous job of denying and deferring and avoiding, and I just say, “Guys, let’s just accept it. Let’s talk about it for a minute. Let’s do the math, let’s do the thinking, and then use a table. I’m curious, like, how does that motivate you to maybe spend your time differently because there’s so much power there?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so maybe could you give us an example of how a person walked through the math, they took a look at it, and then that transformed the way they approached their work, and their life, what they’re up to?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, I give so many examples in the book, and I do that because we do like to hear and learn vicariously through other people, right? So, there’s one leader I worked with who used to do, in the nature of his business, he acquired companies. And when he stopped and counted, not just his Mondays left in life, but his. Mondays left in his career, he didn’t really have formal retirement plans, but he had a sense about, “By this age, I want to be able to say no and say no a lot, unless it’s a really cool project.”

So, he did the math and he looked and said, “Okay, I do however many acquisitions, mergers per year.” And he did that and worked backwards and said, “Wait a sec. Like, I’ve been thinking, deluding myself,” because that’s what we do. I mean, this is what psychology is. We just try to fool ourselves into happiness. You know, we got to cope somehow.

And so, he was thinking, he knew he wasn’t going to live forever or work forever, but when he did the math and he realized, he really had five good deals ahead of him, like really good juicy ones that he loved to live for, it put everything else in perspective. And it helped him focus in on the kind of work he wanted to do, the kind of deals he wanted to negotiate, the kind of team he wanted along the way, because he was just dilly-dallying and having people around him that weren’t necessarily the lifers, as he now called them.

And so, it helped him prioritize, “What kind of work do I want to do? What kind of work do I not want to do?” because we all know sometimes that’s where the meat on the bone is. So, it can really help sharpen what our priorities are just by way of one example.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then for our math, can you walk us through it? How might we compute that? Do I need to whip out an actuarial table? Or, what’s the sequence by which I arrive at my Mondays left?

Jodi Wellman
Right. It’s a lot easier than you think. Now, the good news is I have a page on my website called Resources that does the math for you, if you don’t want to waste your precious time in life doing math, but it’s pretty easy. So, if you identify as male, start with 78 years, that’s the average life expectancy, and then you minus your age, and then you multiply by 52 just to keep it easy.

Now, if you are a little more fortunate to have been born a female and you identify as such, then your average age is 83, and then you minus your current age and you multiply it by 52 weeks a year. And then if you don’t identify with either, just average it at 80 and minus your age, and again multiply it by 52. And I think you could probably add in a few Mondays just because you listen to How to Be Awesome at Your Job. I mean, I do think that that should buy you…

Pete Mockaitis
Life extender.

Jodi Wellman
It is. It is, at least a couple weeks, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Life giving. Okay. And so, then when you see that number, it’s like, “Well, shucks, here we are, we’re maybe 1,000-ish, 2,000-ish,” and then it’s even more real when we get precise like 1,822, like you had there. And so, you see that. And then what’s most people’s reaction to beholding this figure?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, it is usually a bit eye-opening, like, literally, eyes-widening, like, “Oh,” because we are used to the language of years. We’ve already rationalized, “Yeah, I’m going to live to about 80. My grandma lived to 90. Oh, shoot, but my Uncle Reg died at 71,” and you average it out somewhere. But when we talk about the weeks, and I’m super nerdy because that’s why I call my company 4,000 Mondays.

When you even think of it in terms of Mondays, which have a very different feeling than a Friday, you know, Fridays are slam dunks, like, life is easy. But when you think about it with a Monday, and you quantify and say, “Am I really doing the stuff that lights me up if I’m going to be waking up for just that many more Mondays?” that’s where it creates the eye-opening and wakeup call that I’m looking for people.

So, it does tend to create enough discomfort. I’m not afraid of a discomfort. I want people to feel just enough of the poke in the ribs to feel like, “Oh, I got to get on with this.” And this is the thing, Pete, and you know this from all the work you do and the research you do, and with me with my positive psychology background, I would love the idea that we could all just be motivated enough by the pursuit of something awesome. You know, the, “Oh, I want to live this kind of life and I’m going to go for it.”

And some people are intrinsically motivated enough to do that, but the rest of us, we need a prod, we need a nudge, we need something that is, unfortunately, just a tad negative, which is why I talk about scarcity rather than abundance in this context. And so, that is the eye-opener for people that we think, “Oh, I didn’t want to see it that way, but now that I see it and I hopefully can’t unsee it. What does it motivate me to do?”

And that’s where the conversation gets good. It’s like, “So now what? This precious life. This dwindling, diminishing existence you have. What do you want to…?” Throw that in. I mean, you’ve got to heighten the drama, “But what do you want to stuff it with?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Jodi, it’s funny. This might be the most intense episode of “How to Be Awesome at Your Job” ever. It’s like, quite literally, life and death is all we’re talking about. But what you say really does connect. A friend of mine shared with me he had some family members with some health challenges. One was a child of his, which was very scary. And another was his mother, and he said, “Boy, just experiencing that really kind of made me think about what I want to be doing with my career, instead of like postponing my dreams.”

And so, he just like went for it, he’s like, “I’ve always had this cool business idea, and so I’ve got some people together. We made a pitch deck and we approached an investor. And then he’s in for a couple hundred thousand dollars or a few hundred thousand dollars for a few points of equity.” So, he’s got like a multi-million-dollar evaluation. It was like, “I just talked to you like a month ago. What is going on here? It’s amazing.”

And so, I’m proud and impressed and, just like that, I mean, he had the idea bouncing around his head for a long time, and then a few scary situations with family members’ health, the guy was, “You know what, let’s just see what happens. Let’s just go for it.” And then, wow, he’s off to the races.

Jodi Wellman
Oh, this story is profound, and I love it. This is the research that I do that just lights me up beyond belief that I hope to also shine that light on others. This is the wakeup call with this gentleman. And it takes a really unfortunate situation to see that light. Especially, because I talk a lot about the wakeup calls we receive personally. Like, if you get a health diagnosis that ain’t so hot, that usually tends to snap us to attention, and we want to live differently, and research is so clear.

I always love this phrase that psychologists, existential psychologists use, that when people have had a brush with death, they experience what’s called a roar of awakening. It feels so visceral, right? And so, whether it’s our own precipice moment with the great beyond, or whether it is because a family member or a dear friend, or we’ve had some very salient moment to realize, “Oh, gosh, like, we are mortal,” that can be the thing that catapults us.

And, ultimately, what it comes down to, and I think you even embedded the words in your anecdote, it’s like, “What are we waiting for?” We delude ourselves into thinking that we’re going to have time later, and I am getting to get all hot and bothered here, but we need to talk about it because I think we believe we’re going to have time to do the new initiative, or open up the New York office, or do the cool thing, or open up the spinoff business, or go to Prague, “We’re just going to get to do it later.”

It’s either in this category of when work dies down, we’ll, like, let’s all get laughed together at that notion, because we’re working hard at making work more productive and busier often, which is not about dying things down, another metaphor about dying things down. And so, we’re either waiting for that, lull, “Well, it ain’t going to happen,” or we’re waiting for retirement, which to me is like, “Don’t you dare.”

Yeah, plan a cool retirement, do that, too. But if you are deferring your existence for a later that just may not arrive, oh, honey buddy, I just want to take you, in somewhere between a hug and a throttle, it’s just like, “What are we waiting for? Don’t wait for your kid to get sick. Don’t wait for you to get thankfully in remission from a cancer that you just were trying not to think about. Don’t wait to get to retirement when, all of a sudden, your gout is so bad that you can’t even climb the Spanish steps that you’ve been longing to climb since you were in your early thirties that you just put off.” See, I’m getting all worked up, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
No, I hear you. Well, it’s heavy and it’s intense. And, in some ways, you’ve got something novel on your hands, like the math and the number of Mondays and whatnot. In another way, this is a very ancient wisdom concept, you know, memento mori. I think that’s Latin. I was a Latin student. That just means remember your death. Is that correct?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, remember you’re going to die. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Remember your death. And so, I know Ryan Holiday has done a fine job of, I think, he’s got a cool coin as well that says that on it. I think there’s a skull or something. Cool stuff from Ryan Holiday. So, tell us, what’s sort of like the ancient wisdom on meditating upon this? And what’s your new fresh stuff that you’re bringing to the table?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, it’s all rooted in the ideology that some call it stoicism as a philosophical endeavor. Philosophers, depending on their camps, for centuries have been extolling the virtues of remembering that you’re going to die, and in some cases, it was so that they could control the population for ways of being virtuous or for religious means. But being in tune with the end is not a new idea.

Just like with most of us, we all rationally know we have an expiry day. We don’t know when it is, but we all understand it. But it’s the reminder that we need to keep in mind and keep fresh. So, in more modern times, I referred a moment ago to some existential psychologists, and there’s a whole new branch of psychology called existential psychology, and it really is the study of our experience of not just the positive psychology side, which is a lot of my background around like what it takes to live the good life, but it’s also the nuances of how we will defer and avoid and deny, and what the cost is of that.

So, the more modern take on it is let’s just try to be open and honest with ourselves about it, and have conversations with our families, and our friends, and just like, for me, it’s like that’s the best happy hour ever. It’s just talking about a bucket list and holding each other accountable about, “What are you going to do?” “Did you book the trip?” “Did you book the online course?” “Did you set up the LLC like you said you wanted to do?” Because again, what are we waiting for?

So, it’s all rooted in the ancient times. And in the modern times, I think there’s not really a lot more we can do other than create a habit around talking about it and thinking about it and remembering it. So, this doesn’t just become a, “Huh, interesting conversation I listened to on your podcast that floats away.” We have to embed it into our routines, if you will, and that’s the stuff that helps make it stickier.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us another example? So, we’ve heard about a couple folks in the deal-making or entrepreneurial zone. Any other dramatic wakeups that you’ve witnessed?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, there was a woman I worked with three years ago, she was in her early 40s, and she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she ran her own company and it was an eye-opener for her. She beat it, and that was fantastic, and that had inspired her to come alive and start a foundation as part of her organization.

So, a lot of what this does is it instills this idea about like legacy thinking, which is really important I think for leaders, but not even just for leaders but people thinking about, “How am I showing up at work? And how am I showing up at life? Like, how do I want to be remembered?” So, for this woman, Christia, she felt really compelled as a result of having her life threatened in front of her, to say, “I want to start raising money for women with breast cancer who didn’t have access to some of the means that I had.”

Because she knew coming from the south side of Chicago, that she had a history where she knew other people were suffering in ways that her financial means were allowed her better access to some care and convenience. So, now the truth is, if I was just to fast-forward to take this to a different direction, but on purpose, is that she was re-diagnosed and, unfortunately, a couple of years ago she did pass away, and she was 42 when she died.

And I still work with the company, the fabulous team there that inherited the business from her. Her sister and her niece are running that company. They’re called Thank God It’s Natural, and they are phenomenal. But for Christia, it opened her eyes up to “What kind of business do I want to run? Where do I want to prioritize our operations? And where do I want to not focus?”

So, another woman, here in Palm Springs, where I’m currently based, also had a breast cancer experience for herself. She started a nonprofit that helps survivors. And the way she worded it is that, “I was given a second chance at life.” And she said that in her experience of sitting and doing something like 24 rounds of chemotherapy, I wrote about this as an example in the book and drew a doodle about it, I called it Shay’s Circle because she said, “I took a fresh journal page and I drew a big circle.”

“And I said to myself, ‘I’m making it through this cancer situation, but I’m going to be very thoughtful about the life I’m going to live moving forward, this second chance I’ve been given. What do I want and who do I want in my life?’” And she was very deliberate and wrote names of people, some of the priorities with her work, activities she wanted to focus on, things with her kids in the circle, and she was very thoughtful about, “And I will no longer…” and she had a couple names, and she had a couple of tendencies, like pleasing tendencies, saying yes to being on committees and all the things that we just do because we’re not conscious that our life is finite.

So those are extremes, people having had scares that did, unfortunately, take them, but also scares that did, I think, we learned from that. Like, my goal is for us to have wakeup calls without having to go through any of that drama of having a near-death experience because there’s so much gold from people who have been there or have been close. So, we can refine our priorities. I think that’s one of the biggest opportunities, in addition to being grateful for life. But we’re refining our priorities and the big businesses we work in and things we do, sometimes that’s key.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m fascinated as I just imagine the listeners hearing this, like, some people have already turned off this podcast and have asked out their dream guy, their dream partner or send an email to be like, “Let’s talk about this business that we’ve been picking around.” They’ve already taken the action. They’re so fired up. They’re inspired, like, you’re transforming them. Boom. Already done.

I think there’s others, and I’m finding myself in this boat a little bit right now. It’s like, well, you know, Jodi, I mean, I guess I’ve been quite blessed. I mean, in many ways, I’ve had a lot of dreams, and then I have realized them. It’s like, I’ve got a family, and they’re amazing. I’ve got a dream job, and then I got a job that was better than that dream job, and then I got a job that was better than that, better than that dream job. It’s like, I’m talking to fascinating people whose books I would just read, and this is turning into income, and then other entrepreneurial things are turning into income, and I’m working with cool people I like.

In a way, it’s like I don’t feel like I’ve postponed anything major, and yet I have a feeling there’s more for me here because I don’t, frankly, spend much time thinking, “Oh, I’m going to die soon.” I don’t do that. And as you’re saying it, it feels heavy and intense, like, “Yeah, whoa, for real, a limited number of Mondays. Okay.” But I’m not yet electrified to charge in any given direction. I was like, “Huh, these are pretty good. I guess I should just keep doing that.” What about this segment?

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, I love what you’re saying. So, I have quadrants like any good empirically based situation has quadrants, and so you are in…

Pete Mockaitis
As a former consultant, absolutely, they do.

Jodi Wellman
I know, exactly. You got the Bain in you, right? So, you’ve got widening your life with vitality is one dimension, and that’s literally the idea about, “How can I add more fun and interest and experience and cool stuff and pleasure and happiness?” Okay, so for many people who have really busy profound jobs, this is the dimension and, in fact, this actually is where most people in my research will identify as.

They’ll say, “I’ve got enough meaning in my life but I need more of this widening vitality. I need more fun. I feel like I’m not going out as much as I used to do the fun things in the restaurants, or going to a concert, or trying that new printmaking class, or the things that might feel kind of cool and make me feel more alive in a different way, rather than maybe the more one-dimensional existence I’ve been living, which is like rocking my business.” So that’s just one axis is widening your life with vitality.

The other one is deepening your life with meaning, and that is that sense of having a purpose, being connected to people, maybe something bigger than you, like in the spiritual realm. It’s defined as kind of doing good, as opposed to just feeling good. And so, when you mash these together, you’ve got four quadrants.

Pete, you are in what I call the astonishingly alive category, which I know, it’s a big word. I know, but here’s the deal, because why this is, is that you are, you seem to be, you’re living a good life where you’re plus, anywhere positive, even if it’s 0.10 on meaning, and plus on vitality, and so you’re in a good place. There are a lot of people out there, a majority, because, by the way, my research is clear, like 11% of people identify in the astonishingly alive category currently.

And so, most people are in that zone of like, “My job’s meaningful,” or, “Rearing my kids is meaningful, but I’m so freaking bored.” Or, it could be the reverse, which is, “I am having fun. Like, I’m out there. I am traveling. I’m on the yacht, but I go home and I feel like I’m an empty hollow shell. Like, what am I doing this for?” So, there are variations on those themes, but I don’t want to say now that there’s no fun for you, that you can’t do more with this.

Pete Mockaitis
“You’re done.”

Jodi Wellman
No, exactly. Cash in your chips. No, because here’s why. This is why you do this podcast. You’re in a good situation, you’re living life, and yet you are yearning to learn more. You want more. So, nobody I know who’s in the astonishingly alive category is just content to put your feet up and be like, “We are done here.” You want more, and so that is where I do think some of these exercises can be useful.

So, for you, counting your Mondays may not be resonant in a way that you’re like, “No, but I’ve done cool things.” That’s what we’re looking to get to, is that feeling like, “I killed it.” Like, if you got to the end, you’d be able to say…

Pete Mockaitis
So much depth, Jodi. Like, “You’re just going to die.”

Jodi Wellman
That’s where you’re at, like, “Okay, fine. I nailed it. Like, I lived this life. I extracted it. I did it.” You might be able to say that now, and yet, there are also things where if you did play the game with me about the deathbed regrets, or if you knew you had 18 months to live, what would be things that you would, all of a sudden, think, “Oh, I want to do that”?

Those are all just cues and clues to either yearnings or inklings that you might want to get moving on now, and I call them pre-grets. I know it’s super cheesy, but, like, if you identify a regret, you might be like, “Oh, man, I always wish that I had volunteered at that library,” or “I always wish that I had gotten back to playing the violin,” or fill in the blanks. There’s no shortage of examples.

That’s an example of like, “Hey, the good news is, last I checked, you still have a pulse, and if you really want to pick up the violin again, like, dude, it’s yours to pick up!” And then you just get to be the one to decide, like, “Eh, it was a passing fancy, no big deal. My life is great without doing that,” or, “Yeah, you know, I would feel proud of myself if I actually did pick that up,” or go and read to kids from 4: 00 till 5:00, Tuesday evenings, whatever it is. Those are opportunities, I think, to just add even more astonishment to your astonishingly alive life.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. And I like that notion a lot in terms of with the two axes. I’m thinking of a buddy he’s doing a lot of cool things. Like, yeah, he’s into drumming in a band. He’s brewing beer, and going to beer-tasting events, and like golfing and improving his golf. And then his mom said, this is like a very mother thing to say, she’s like, “Oh, you know, all those hobbies aren’t really a vocation.” He’s like, “Oh, that’s heavy, vocation.”

But, yeah, that sort of speaks to meaning, and there’s some truth to that, like all the fun and games with these activities can leave you feeling hollow and/or you might say, “No, I’ve got the dream family, but, oh, my gosh, when do I get to get out of this home and just be wacky”?

Yeah, so two dimensions, you can widen, have more fun widening your vitality, but you might feel hollow, or you can be super fulfilled, but, “Ooh, where’s the fun?” And that does remind me, yeah, I guess the things that are sort of left undone, I mean, some of them I’m just sort of pursuing, like, wouldn’t it be kind of cool to be lighter and stronger at 41 than I was at 21? Well, I’m on my path. I think we’re getting there and it’s sort of exciting to feel the progress from like a fitness perspective.

But then there’s also things that just sort of got left by the wayside, like, you know I always thought it would be cool to learn how to sing, and I’ve never really done that very well. Or, I’ve always been mystified by when I go bowling, which is rare, like one throw of the ball is a strike, the next is a gutter ball, and I don’t think I did anything different. Like, what’s behind that?

Like, I thought it would be fun to spend a day with a bowling coach for no reason, just to solve this plaguing mystery, but, like, though I may only go bowling three times a year for the rest of my life, and it doesn’t matter if I win or lose to me in the least.

Jodi Wellman
Right. This is the cool thing. You are giving examples that I think we, in our rational brains think, “But this isn’t really a thing, is it?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it doesn’t really matter.

Jodi Wellman
And we can call it corny. And that’s one of the things I notice actually in the workshops and work I do, is that people will feel the need to kind of explain away or say, “I don’t even know why I want to do this, but I do,” and it’s like we just have judgments about things. And I’m here to say there’s nothing that is too small or silly.

Because when you look at the span of your life, and remember, I’m the one that gets fanatical about calculating time, usually calculating it backwards, but every single moment of our lives is a little tiny fragment, whether it’s a five-minute or 10-minute, or a bowling excursion, or going out for Thai food, or spending time in a meaningful conversation with a colleague, they’re all just 30 minutes attached to each other.

And so, in our lives, we underestimate that if I was to take, “Hey, what if I did book a bowling guru session?” First of all, that sounds to me like it would be hilarious, and I’m always a big fan of having a good story to tell later. But that could be a thing. It’s a fun thing. Now, this is an example you could probably whip up, and this is what I do in workshops with people.

It’s like, “Get your list going. The things you might come up with first may not make your cut, or you may find it interesting today, and then tomorrow, when you’re seeing the light of day, or you’ve ranked ordered other things, you think all that, “Meh, you know what? I don’t really need to go to the Florida Keys, whatever.”

But at some point, when you have a working list, it gives you the actual solid chance to make choices about your life. Because right now, in the absence of having something that’s concrete, like your list of things that bring you joy, your list of things that would be cool to do, that again I like to organize them on those axes, about fun stuff, deep stuff, vitality, meaning. But now at least you have a menu to choose from about how to design your life.

And life will pass us by. We know this full well. We get to the weekend and, well, first of all, we’re always glad it’s the weekend. But we get through our weeks and they feel like blurs. It’s a very strong signal that we aren’t doing anything that’s unique or different with our time. And in order to even just create the perception of time slowing down so that your 1,822, or however many Mondays you have left, are well spent, it’s about being super conscious and saying, “You know what? I’m going to book that bowling lesson.”

Or, “You know what? I am going to go and plan that road trip that I’ve been talking about for ages.” Or, “I am going to finally schedule that team retreat that I’ve been dreaming about but I just like, am I an all talk no action kind of person? No, I’m going to just book it because it’s on my list, and I’ve said like this is something that I would feel really cool if I did. Would I regret it gravely on my deathbed? Maybe, maybe not.”

But the point is we need to start capturing some of these desires because, otherwise, they will float away and we’ll get focused on the things that are sometimes important, but mostly urgent, Covey style, and the next thing you know, it’s three years later and we’re not any younger. So, this is just really about getting deliberate with what it might take to make a life worth living.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah And, Jodi, I think as folks go through this exercise, they could have moments of inspiration, like, “Yeah, these are all the cool things I’d love to do.” And then disillusionment in terms of, “Oh, but you know, I got to pay the bills, and we got the mortgage, and the kids need these things. And I can’t just abandon my duties and responsibilities.” So, we get excited and then there’s a dose of reality and practicality that’s like, “Wah, wah.” So, how do you deal with those?

Jodi Wellman
How do we deal with that? I am fanatical about making sure that at least, like, do a list of 30 things, 25 at least have to be things that are very doable in a day or a week. So, it needs to be within your resource plan. Like, it can’t be, “Oh, you know what makes me really happy is when I am sailing around the Mediterranean.” Yeah, you and everybody, but that’s not going to be likely. Like, I’m looking for things that are actually very bite-sized on your list. Like, for many people, it’s that they go for a walk on a Saturday morning in the forest preserve.

Like, last I checked that was free. Okay, maybe you have to pay for parking. I don’t know what we’re talking, like five bucks. And sometimes I know busy parents are like, “Dude, when was the last time you had a Saturday morning free?” But I would still challenge you, and say, “Do you have 35 minutes to go and sneak that into your day?”

Identifying things that give you, again, small little bouts of joy. Like, for some people, it’s as simple as, I’m looking right now, of course, at a book. And this comes up a lot when I work with professionals. We read a lot of business books, as we should. They’re amazing. Lots of cool ones. Lots of great self-development books.

And yet, it is a real source of almost guilt but joy about people saying, “I would just love to read a fiction book for a change,” or, “I would love to read a biography, just something kind of mind-expanding.” And that is an example where, what if you read a chapter in the morning over coffee and your piece of peanut butter toast, and you just shook up your routine a little bit?Because we haven’t even talked about novelty, but like having variety in our life is one of the lowest-hanging fruit options out there to shake up our lives, and add just a little bit more, again, of that vitality because we just get into routines. And we’ve been trained by lots of really smart thought leaders that habits and routines are the way. And I’m going to challenge that because I think that it is because we get into the rut, and one of my favorite quotes is by Ellen Glasgow, “The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.”

Like, we will routinize our lives to the point where they’ve lost sort of the flavor. It just becomes, “I know what I do on Tuesday mornings. I go into the office. I nod at Marcy. I get my coffee. I do the report. I have a status update meeting at 2:00 p.m. and then I go home.” Like, the shaking things up even in ways that we will, again, underestimate the value of, like, going outside.

I just heard from somebody that was at a workshop. They decided to go and spend part of their lunch break walking to a little food stall because they were in a bit of a funk, like, “Let me go walk to a food stall, shake it up a little bit.” They got a taco. Again, we’re not talking about big bucks to live a life that feels really cool, and, like, “Oh, interesting. This is like a new area. I’ve never been here. There was a little bit of sunshine. And I got out, and I came back, and I have a new lease on life to attack my afternoon.”

And those are small things where, again, we’re not talking about doing the bucket list about you have to move to Paris, and you have to divorce your deadbeat spouse, and you have to make these massive plans, like change your career and go back to school. If you feel the urge to do those things, don’t not do them. But for most of us, it’s not about the grand sweeping gestures. For most of us, it’s about deliberate little tiny things that we can pepper our days with that will add up to a life that feels more lived than one that just, again, was like a glossed-over, zombie-version of the life that I think we all deep down really want to be living more alive.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jodi, this is powerful stuff. Tell me, any other do’s and don’ts or things you want to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Jodi Wellman
Well, definitely, the biggest do of all is do befriend the Grim Reaper. He will take your last breath away in the end, and so I understand the need to keep a distance, but he is absolutely the portal to living like we mean it. So do keep him close by, being aware, count the Mondays. And I’m going to reiterate what I just said. Like, don’t underestimate that small things matter and pick one small thing to take action on. We know this through every business adage we’ve ever found, every to-do, every self-help to-do. It’s like, don’t try and take on the world.

If you can blow your life up and start something. I know a client who said, “I’m leaving my job.” She’s in New Jersey. She’s like, “I quit. I moved down south and I’m opening up an Etsy shop.” That was a lot of life change in an instant, but for her, she needed to make a big signal to herself. But was it like that for most of us?

No. It’s like, what is one thing you can do by the end of this week that is going to make you feel just a little more alive? Is it making a new playlist? You know, is it pulling out the spice drawer and being like, “Oh, my gosh, when was the last time I used garam masala?” Or is it calling your old friend from college and being like, “Dude, we keep talking about getting together. When are we going to…? Okay, October the 9th? Booked.” Like, do a thing that makes you feel like you voted to live. One small thing.

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

Jodi Wellman
Oh, my gosh. Hunter S. Thompson, “Life should not be a journey to the grave in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, ‘Wow, what a ride!’”

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

Jodi Wellman
I’m always a fan of the research that reinforces death reflection helps us be more grateful. So not death awareness, which is just seeing a funeral procession go by. That does freak us out. But, actually, stopping and thinking, “Huh, I have this many Mondays left,” being thoughtful. And then what that does is it does make you more grateful for not just the experience of being alive but for the good things in your life. So, death reflection pays off in multitudes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Jodi Wellman
I would say anything by Irv Yalom. Y-A-L-O-M. He’s a psychologist that does really cool work. So, Staring at the Sun is a really good example. And it’s this idea about being willing to contemplate mortality.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And a favorite tool?

Jodi Wellman
I’m going to come back to count your Mondays and keep some sort of talisman nearby, they will be your reminder about your fabulous temporariness.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Jodi Wellman
No habit. Remember, habits dull the edges of our existence.

Pete Mockaitis
I love the multiple perspectives here. And a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Jodi Wellman
This idea that sometimes the fear of death is rivaled only by the fear of living.

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

Jodi Wellman
Thanks for asking. I’m over at FourThousandMondays.com.

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

Jodi Wellman
Yeah, think about your legacy. How do you want to be described when you’re long gone? Not just because you died. Maybe you got promoted. Maybe you got moved to the fancy office in the Southwest. Go do that. How do you want people to think of you when you’re gone? Oh, and, yes, at your funeral. And that is the reverse way to engineer a life that you love and that you are proud to be living.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jodi, thank you. This has been very, very fun. Jodi, this has been aliveness-boosting. I wish you 1,800 plus joyful Mondays.

Jodi Wellman
I super appreciate it. Thanks for this time well spent.

Jul 29
0

982: How to Build Trust, Repair Relationships, and Make Collaborations Great with Dr. Deb Mashek

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Deb Mashek reveals the critical factors that make workplace collaborations less painful and more productive.

You’ll Learn

  1. The key ingredients of great collaboration
  2. Why hiring good collaborators isn’t enough
  3. The key questions to kickstart great collaborations

About Deb

Dr. Deb Mashek, PhD is an experienced business advisor, professor, higher education administrator, and national nonprofit executive. She is the author of the book Collabor(h)ate: How to build incredible collaborative relationships at work (even if you’d rather work alone).

Named one of the Top 35 Women in Higher Education by Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, she has been featured in media outlets including MIT Sloan Management Review, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Inc., Forbes, Fortune, The Hechinger Report, Inside Higher Ed, Reason, Business Week, University Business Insider, and The Hill. She writes regularly for Reworked and Psychology Today.

Deb is the founder of Myco Consulting LLC, where she helps networked organizations (e.g., consortia, collaboratives, associations, federations, etc.) avoid the predictable pitfalls of complex, multi-stakeholder initiatives so that they can drive impact and achieve big visions. A member of the Association for Collaborative Leadership, Deb has been an invited speaker on collaboration and viewpoint diversity at leading organizations including the United Nations, Siemens, and the American Psychological Association.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

  • Jenni Kayne. Use the code AWESOME15 to get 15% off your order!

Deb Mashek Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Deb, welcome.

Deb Mashek
It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m so excited to talk about collaboration and/or collabor(h)ation with an H, silent or not silent, but we’ll get into that. But I’d love it if you could kick us off by telling us a super fascinating, intriguing discovery you’ve made about us humans and how we collaborate well and not so well.

Deb Mashek
I think the most interesting finding in my research over the years and then writing the book Collabor(h)ate, is that we’re not taught how to collaborate well. So, it’s critical to our jobs, workplace employers, they demand it, this is what they’re hiring for, they’re expecting us to be great at it, but we’re not actually educated in how to do it.

So, it’s kind of like all these other social relationships we have, whether it’s how to be a good friend, or how to be a good parent, or how to be a good spouse, most of us don’t receive direct education and training on how to do that. The same thing is true for collaboration, and I find that gap absolutely fascinating, that it’s an essential skill. It’s required by workplaces, and yet we’re not learning it in college, we’re not learning it in business school, and we’re not learning it on the job.

Pete Mockaitis
So, we’re not being explicitly directly educated in the art and science of collaboration. So then tell us, maybe in the US professional workforce, roughly speaking, what’s the state of collaboration? Are we generally doing okay, terribly, fabulously? What grade would you give us and why?

Deb Mashek
So, we know from the US Bureau of Labor that people in the United States spend more hours in the workplace working than they do on all other waking tasks combined, so we’re doing a lot of work. And in my research, when I asked people, “Okay, so tell me about your thoughts and feelings about collaboration.” Whether I’m giving workshops or running, facilitating teams, or actually conducting research with people, I say, “What are the three words or phrases that best describes your true feelings about collaboration?”

And people say these really deliciously positive things, like it’s exciting, it’s essential, it’s about possibilities. And alongside that, they list these really negative things like it’s grueling, it’s painful, it’s miserable, it’s horrendous. So, I find that really interesting. And when I was writing the book one of the things I did is send out surveys to a bunch of people who were in the workforce who were collaborating, and I said, “Have you ever been part of a collaboration that was absolutely horrendous?”

And something like seven out of ten or eight out of ten, I forget the exact number, said, “Yeah, yeah, I absolutely have.” And I also said, “How about, have you been a part of a collaboration that was thrilling and positive and amazing?” and a whole bunch of people, I think that one, that was also really high, like seven or eight out of ten, said that as well. So, most of us know the highs and the lows of collaboration.

We know that it sometimes feels amazing, it goes great, I’d call it “collabor-great,” and other times it hurts. We want to get out of it. And those are the relationships, those are the experiences that we come to collabor(h)ate.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m intrigued. So, we’re talking about this on the dimension of the experience of doing it, so certainly we would like to have more positive, fun, enjoyable collaboration experiences. That would be delightful. At the same time, I’m thinking about how sometimes an uncomfortable collaboration is just what the doctor ordered in terms of having a little bit of friction, a little bit of disagreement, a little bit of different perspectives and tension bring us into a place of growth and achieving more than what we could have if we were nicely aligned. So how do you think a little bit about that distinction between the feeling of collaboration and the “true” effectiveness of that collaboration?

Deb Mashek
I think the distinction I would challenge us to make here is that collaborating, should I agree, absolutely involve conflict and tension, viewpoints coming together, figuring out how to optimize across perspectives. That’s different than feeling like your ideas are never being listened to, that the other person is going to take you down no matter what they do, that your outcomes are so tied to another person’s that you don’t trust them or like them, such that, whether you like it or not, they’re taking you over the bridge.

That’s really different because you can have conflict and viewpoint diversity and challenge within a container of mutual respect, of trust, of realizing we actually do have a shared goal in common that we’re jamming toward. And so, pulling those constructs apart, I think, is useful there. I’m curious if you agree.

Pete Mockaitis
I absolutely do. And, in fact, you have a matrix. Tell us about it.

Deb Mashek
I’ve developed a lot of models of collaboration, and there are also just a lot of others out there in the world. And the one that I highlight in the book is called the Mashek Matrix, because why not have a little alliteration? And the idea is this, that if you think about what makes for a high-quality collaboration, there are really two independent dimensions.

The first one is relationship quality. And relationship quality is just your subjective sense. It really is, in your heart, “How good or bad is this relationship with a particular other person?” And, fascinatingly, so my background is as a social psychologist who studies close relationships, and in the close relationships literature, this idea of relationship quality is the most studied construct in the entire literature, which is fascinating.

And we know that – I’m stepping outside of work relationships for a second – we know that in romantic marital relationships, people who have higher relationship quality heal faster and have lower mortality compared to those who have lower relationship quality. So, there’s this whole stress response and the protective nature of positive relationships. When we think about then in the workplace, where we’re spending, again, a whole lot of our waking hours, why would relationship quality not also matter there?

So, this is, anyway, one dimension and it involves things like trust, feeling a sense of interdependence, and, at some point, we can go through all these different ways that you can actually improve relationship quality in the workplace for collaborations. But the point at this stage is just to know that relationship quality is one of these two dimensions.

Now, make another dimension, I go left to right, X-axis on the other dimension of interdependence. Interdependence is the extent to which your outcomes are tied to the behaviors of another person. So, they start to control what resources you have access to, perhaps, or they start to influence it, they start to influence what sort of rewards you’re getting for your work, what sort of accolades, attention, raises, it can be all sorts of things. So, you’ve got these two dimensions, and you can imagine now these two dimensions making four quadrants.

When relationship quality is really, really high and interdependence is high, it feels amazing. This is the quadrant I label “collabor-great.” This is where I know if I toss the ball, you’re going to catch it. We both know our roles and responsibilities. We do it. We trust each other. We have really high accountability. I give you honest feedback on how things are going, and I know that when you’re giving me feedback, I’m not taking it as critique or I’m not taking it as attacking critique, but as challenge that’s going to make me better. So, this is a beautiful quadrant to be in.

In contrast, when you have really, really low relationship quality and interdependence is really high, that’s the quadrant I label collabor(h)ate. This is where we’re miserable because we don’t like the other person, we don’t trust them, and we don’t think they’re doing good work. We don’t think they understand what our needs and interests are. They’re not taking our needs and interests, our abilities in mind. They might be stealing turf. They might be taking credit or placing blame. There are all sorts of really bad behaviors that can bubble up in that quadrant.

Deb Mashek
So then when you have this low relationship quality and low interdependence, for example, what would be the case when someone first joins a team? So, they first joined the organization, they don’t know anybody, they’re not really on any projects yet, so you have low-low. This is, I needed a very neutral word to label this quadrant, and I just labeled it emerging.

There’s potential here but it could either shoot over to that collabor(h)ate space if we start putting people onto super interdependent teams and projects before we’ve given them a chance to build relationships with other people, or it can move in the direction of what I called high potential. So, these are where you already have high relationship quality but you haven’t yet turned the dial to increase the interdependency in those projects and those relationships.

So, any questions about those quadrants before I talk about maybe how to move through them, depending on where your relationship is?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, as I think about the word interdependent, I mean, sometimes that feels structurally just in the nature of what’s up. Like, “I’m more interdependent with my wife than I am with the person at the DMV.” And then we have some level of interaction, collaboration, but much more in my home than over there at the DMV. So, but you suggest that increasing our interdependence is a thing we might want to do. What might that look like in practice as a means by which we increase interdependence?

Deb Mashek
Yeah, so I want to touch on your DMV example first because you do have some sort of a relationship with that person, at least for, I’m going to say, five minutes, but more likely two hours that you’re sitting there. And one of the ideas that you’re starting to touch on there is to, “What extent is a relationship exchange-oriented versus communal-oriented?”

So, when you’re in a more exchange-based relationship, it’s very tit-for-tat. So, I give the bus driver my $3 and they drive me across town, or I pay my gym membership and I get to go use those cool ropey things. Just kidding, I don’t use the ropey things because I can’t figure out how to do it, but theoretically I could. So, those are more exchange-oriented relationships.

Communal relationships, we’re not tracking inputs and outputs. It’s not, “Your turn to take the meeting minutes and my turn to take the meeting minutes.” It’s not about, “I sent around the agenda last time, you have to do it this time.” It’s really about looking for ways to improve other people’s experiences at work, to make little contributions, not because you have to or because it’s your turn, but because you know that, in the long haul, things are going to balance out, that other people are going to be contributing to you in equal measure as you’re contributing to them, and you don’t need to be monitoring this. So, this is a more communal orientation.

And it turns out that that setting up that, you know, more communality is one of the ways we can increase relationship quality. So, I wanted to mention that because the DMV example is so fantastic. Now to the point of, is it good to increase interdependence? The answer is not always.

So, if you’re already in that collabor(h)ate quadrant of the model, or if you’re in that emerging quadrant of the model where you have low relationship quality and low interdependence, you don’t want to jump right in and rev up interdependence by having you engage in more diverse activities together, or making the outcomes more contingent on the other person’s performance, or what would be another one, making you spend even more time together. All those interdependence moves can actually set the situation up for negative collaboration experiences.

So, when do you want to increase interdependence? You want to increase interdependence when relationship quality is already high. So, I know you said most of your listeners are not necessarily in leadership positions yet. Is that right? So, this is really interesting because if you think about when you came on to your job, what did onboarding focus on first? Was it about focusing on, “Here is the org chart,” “Here is, you know, you need to do a deep dive on the projects,” “You need to figure out how to use our project tracking system, our CRM”?

Or did it focus on, “You know what, your job this first week is to go have coffees with everybody else on your team. It’s to figure out what makes other people tick. It’s to give yourself a chance to be known by other people”? Those are all moves that increase relationship quality, and that I advise the leaders I work with to give that space and, say, you’re onboarding for people to know and be known as individuals before they’re just known as an avatar of some role and responsibility. So that’s just some initial thoughts on when you want to increase interdependence.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, those are cool thoughts on interdependence. Thank you. And I want to talk a little bit about approaches to boost relationship quality. But first, I’d love to get your take on just how much is really possible when boosting relationship quality? I think many of us might think, “Ah, that person’s just a jerk, and I guess that’s what I’m stuck with.” Could you inspire us with a tale of a team that really saw some tremendous strides in boosting their relationship quality?

Deb Mashek
One of my favorite examples of someone who, this comes from the story of a leader, who saw a challenge and this is how they navigated it. So, it was a large international manufacturing firm, and they had two people, so they were cross departments who needed to work together often, but, really, it was an oil-and-water situation. They were not getting along well, and every time they were in the room, the snide comments would start, eye rolls would happen, and there was just friction.

What the leader decided to do was ask one of them, “Would you be willing to move over to this other division for a while?” Then the two people who were oil and water, they were invited to come and do various relationship-building activities, and we can talk about what some of those looked like. So, what you’re hearing here is that they worked on relationship quality separate from interdependence. So, they totally severed, there was no more interdependence. They were in totally different places.

They got to know each other, they got to understand things like, “What do you care about? What variables are you optimizing for in your work?” So, some of us might be optimizing for quality, others might be for on time. Some might be optimizing for, “It’s really important that we engage everybody.” And others might be optimizing for, “You know, it’s important that we get the best decision possible as quickly as possible.”

And what they realized is that the two individuals hadn’t taken the chance at all to understand where the other one was coming from, what their work even looked like, what their roles even were. So, other than, “Here’s your title. Here’s what I think you do.” But they sat down and had conversations like, “Okay, walk me through what your day looks like. What are the pressures? What are you really juggling with? What happens if you don’t do your job? What’s at stake there for you, for your team, for these products that we’re trying to manufacture?”

In other words, it was a whole lot of empathy-building, closeness-building, getting to know, and coming to understand. So, love that story because then what happens is the leader, after it was something like six months, it was like, “Oh, we’re going to do another reshuffle,” brought them back together, and now their relationship quality is actually high, and they’re able to engage in that interdependency with a lot of vibrancy, with a lot of energy, cool ideas coming up. So, I love that story. Can I share another example with you?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yes, please.

Deb Mashek
So, this one was, she’s actually a friend of mine, Susan, who started a job at an advertising agency, and so she was new and she is a total fangirl of collaboration, so she’s all gung-ho, “You know we’re better together,” and it’s all about “Let’s bring together our strengths, and we can make amazing things happen.” So, she loves collaboration, she’s really good at it, she’s conscientious, all these good things.

So, she joins this team, and within, I don’t know, it was like maybe the first month, it’s time for her to work on the first big project for one of their big clients, and the whole team gets together, they set up their timeline, they say, “Here are our milestones. We’re going to do this. And I’m going to do that. And here’s who needs to do what by when.” So, it was all beautifully laid out. Everybody agreed to this timeline, including her supervisor, John. Everybody was involved in designing it. Everybody signed off on it. Awesome.

So, the first big deadline comes, I think it was maybe a month later, and, Susan, she knocks it out of the park. She has her deliverable in place by Monday, just as planned, and she hands it over and is expecting feedback from John by Thursday. Crickets. She doesn’t hear anything from him. Friday. Nothing. Monday. Nothing. And, eventually, like sometime in the next week, John finally gives feedback, but, of course, now the turnaround time for the big client moment is now just a few days away.

So, Susan has to decide, “Gosh, what do I do here?” because she was supposed to be having weekend plans, and she had to decide, “Do I say I can’t do it because you got your feedback to me late? Do I say I’m going to have to half-ass this and just do sub-quality work, but that’s going to let the team down? It’s not going to show me in my best light, it’s not going to be great for the client? Or do I forego my weekend plans and work my butt off over the weekend to make up for this gap that John has created by not doing what he said he was going to do?”

And she’s the new person, she wants to show what she’s got. So, she changed her weekend plan. She worked really hard. The deliverable went out. The client loved it. Great. Next time there’s a new client, John does the same thing, and of course at this point, Susan’s getting pissed. She’s like, “Why am I giving my all if supervisor guy can’t hold up his end of the bargain and get the kind of input he needs to give in order for us to deliver this big project?”

Now we’re talking about the third big client. This is like a year into the job. Same sort of, or she goes into it as she’s working on the project, she’s not actually giving it her all. She’s cutting corners, and, she’s basically sitting there with her arms folded, looking petulantly like, “Yeah, I’m not going to even invest in this. It’s not worth it because I know John’s going to flake off anyway.”

And so, this example of we’ve got someone who is really, really skilled at collaboration, she’s a rare bird, she’s really, really skilled at this, and feeling antagonistic and checking out. And if I am an employer, I’m also starting to wonder at this point, “Wow, is this person a flight risk? What else needs to happen in order to use this incredible skillset and leverage it for our team, for our clients?”

So, I love that example, too, because it shows that it’s not enough to hire good collaborators. That’s like the first thing you should do, but you also need collaborative cultures, you need collaborative processes, and there are ways of getting all of those wrong.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Deb, I have to know what happened. So, we have three incidents of the same behavior being troublesome and her response or reaction is that, “You know what, forget this. I’m kind of tuned out. I’m not as into it.” So, then what happened?

Deb Mashek
She did the right thing of trying to have the conversations about, “Here are my expectations, or here were the expectations we set together. Here are the behaviors that I observed. Help me understand how you make sense of this discrepancy. What are you going to do differently next time to address this?” And, eventually, I mean, she lasted, I think, two years in that position, and then she was like, “Never mind, I’m going to go to another team.” So, in fact, she was a flight risk.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, Deb, my curiosity is just insatiable. So, I think that’s a fun turn of a phrase, “Help me understand how you make sense of this discrepancy.” If I’m on the receiving end of that message, I’d be like, “Yeah, I’m sorry. I just kind of got overwhelmed with all my other stuff, and I put you in a tight spot and that wasn’t cool and I’m really sorry about that. I’m going to try to make sure I got some space on my calendar so that we’re in a better situation next time. And, by the way, if there’s a day you could take off to try to have some fun on the weekday, to make up for some of the weekend plans shattered, please, take that.” So, anyway, that’s how I would imagine receiving that message.

Deb Mashek
That sounds lovely. That sounds really lovely, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
How did John receive it?

Deb Mashek
I don’t even remember. Honestly, that degree of repetitive, I’ll just call it flakiness because I think that’s what it is, tends to be driven by things like, and I don’t remember how he, in particular, received it, but it tends to be driven by just people are juggling way too many things, or a time pressure issue. It can also be a function of when we decide who needs to give feedback when.

Sometimes it ends up looking like everybody’s trying to be involved in everything, and so he might be overwhelmed in part because too many projects need minutiae sort of feedback as opposed to organizing projects in the first place so that, depending on where they are in development and review, to actually get out the door, you need different levels of feedback.

It could be that he just hasn’t taken his commitment seriously or that he hasn’t thought about the impact of his behaviors on the experiences and ability of his teammates to really shine, to do their thing. I’m a parent, I’m a pet owner, I’ve been a teacher, and what we know, this is like one of the biggest truisms of psychology, is that what gets rewarded gets repeated. And so, I would also wonder about what in John’s learning history has rewarded that sort of behavior? And has there been an absence of negative consequences that, as a result, it’s keeping that behavior in place? Because the same is true of kids, of pets, of students, what gets rewarded gets repeated.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s just sort of our own personalities in terms of, “How profoundly uncomfortable do you find that conversation as a learning experience?” Where it’s like, “Ah! She’s kind of upset. What are you going to do?” You know, like it rolls off the back versus, for me, it would trouble me maybe more than is ideal for mental health and wellbeing, but it would trouble me pretty substantially. And so, do we call that agreeableness, or neuroticism, conscientiousness, maybe a combo of them all? But, yeah, it hit me.

Deb Mashek
It really gets to that point of, “Can we depersonalize feedback and imagine it’s not an attack on the core self? It’s a critique of a behavior.” And I struggle with that too, and I’m always trying to remind myself, “Don’t take it personally. Don’t make assumptions about what this person is saying,” and see if I can separate those, but it’s not always easy. Some days it’s better than others depending on what else is swirling about, and where my energy and focus is.

But I agree with you. That can be challenging feedback to hear. And it can help, before we give that sort of feedback, to reaffirm our commitment to the shared goals first, of like, “This is what we’re after, and this project’s important to me, and I really want to shine for our clients. With that in mind, this discrepancy I noticed, how do you make sense of that? And what can we do differently next time to make sure that you’re able to give your feedback, I’m able to have my weekend, and most importantly, we’re able to really just knock it out of the park for that client?”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, tell us, Deb, before we hear about some of your favorite things, could you tell us some of your tippy-top absolute favorite things that are pretty easy but make a world of difference in boosting relationship quality?

Deb Mashek
My favorite one, and I feel like I’m cheating because this is also my favorite quote, so maybe we’ll just skip that part on the favorites, but my favorite one is simply to ask, “How do you see it?” So, what you’re doing there is inviting another perspective in. You’re doing it without ego or commitment to your perspective, and it invites collaboration because it’s like, “Oh, now we show how we’re seeing the world differently and we can integrate that.”

Other things, asking people, listen, I feel so silly even offering this as a suggestion, but I really believe it, “How are you?” And if they ask you that, and you answer that question in less than 30 seconds, I think you’re doing a poor job. So, “How are you?” is an opportunity to let yourself be seen and to be known. And so, when they answer, hopefully they’ll say something other than “Oh, I’m fine” and flip it around. So, it’s that very rote, this is just how we tend to how we tend to respond. We’re, like, trained socially like, “Oh, you just give the two-word answer, and you get out of there.”

But, “How are you?” is an opportunity, if the other person tells you something, to get to know them as a person. It’s an opportunity to follow up with them. When they say, “Oh, gosh, I have just had the most chaotic weekend,” and they tell you that on Monday. And then on Friday, you see them again, and you’re able to say, “Is the chaos settled a little bit? Do you think this weekend’s going to be better?” And what you’ve just done there is you’ve told them “I listened to you. I paid attention to what you said. And I care enough about you as a person to just check in on that.”

And you don’t need to be creepy about it, and be like, “You said you had this at two o’clock on Tuesday. Did that go?” You don’t want to be a stalker about it, of course. But curiosity and genuine interest in other people is a fantastic way to build relationship. That idea that I call the tip, really, here is to bring the donuts. So that idea of investing in the communal good by doing things like, you know, your office mate’s chair is super squeaky, you happen to have a can or a jar, what’s it called?

Pete Mockaitis

WD-40.

Deb Mashek
Yeah, WD-40, and you’re like, just bring it in this week, that way it’s not squeaking, and it didn’t take you any extra effort to do that. I mean, it took you a little bit of extra effort and maybe that person would totally appreciate it. Or when you’re on the Zoom call and you realize that someone’s mic has gone out, just typing and telling them like, “Hey, your audio dropped.” And so, you can do little things just to take care of each other and that increases relationship quality and that empowers that ability to really unlock what’s possible with collaboration.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot, taking, just remembering, or maybe even just jotting it down if you’re inclined to forget over a four-day window about asking for the next weekend, and just to be a little bit more proactive and think. I love that rule of thumb, maybe just because I love numbers, 30 seconds is a good gauge for go ahead and share that much or more in response to the question, “How are you?”

Which, it’s funny, I’m thinking now, it’s like, “Oh, how might I answer it the next time if someone asks?” It’s like, “Oh, I’m doing pretty well. I had a cold for a while, which is really annoying. And so that is almost over, and it feels good to be back in this almost swing of not feeling sick anymore.” Okay. There’s a little bit more than fine.

Deb Mashek
Yeah, and that’s such a great example too, because some people will say, “I don’t want to reveal my inner self or my inner soul. I don’t want to tell people about the divorce I’m going through or how my kid is really, really sick, and is having a major medical. I don’t want to share that.” That’s fine, but the example you just shared, you told us something real and it wasn’t particularly revealing or vulnerable, and it felt appropriate for the podcast where the public is going to hear it.

If you and I were colleagues and we’ve been working together for a year, we might be engaging in deeper self-disclosures at that point. Maybe, maybe not, because it does depend on the comfort level of the individuals. But the idea is that there are ways of being honest and open with other people that are context-specific and relationship-specific that are still really valuable for developing relationship quality.

Pete Mockaitis
And now I’m thinking about it, flipping it to the other side, so there’s, you know, go ahead and disclose. Is there a question that might be more probable to get us a bit more of a self-disclosure response as an alternative to “How are you?” Because in some ways it’s almost autopilot, “How are you?” “Fine.” It’s just like, “I didn’t even think about your question. This is just what I respond to as a knee-jerk reaction.”

Deb Mashek
Can I tell you? I have a 14-year-old and I love talking with him and his friends in the car on the way home from the mall or wherever it is, and I never ask, “How was it?” It’s always, “What was the most surprising thing you saw somebody else do while you’re at the mall?” So, give them something specific to react to, or of the things you purchased, whether it was the coffee drink, “What one brought you the most joy? Why?”

It’s just like, and I’m making these up on the spot. It’s not like I have a set list of questions that I ask, but I avoid “How was your day? How was school today?” It’s usually something like, I might say like, “What’s something that pissed you off today?” or, “What’s something that brought you joy?” or, “How did you make the world a better place?” or, “What’s something you felt grateful for?”

And you can use these in the workplace, maybe not exactly worded like that, but “What’s bringing you satisfaction in your work right now?” or, “What’s something you’re looking forward to over this next quarter in your work or in what the team’s doing?” “Where are you feeling a little frustration or tension that you’re looking to resolve?” And those start to open up some really good conversations.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that so much, and questions are fun. Podcasting, I like questions. And, surprise is a fun one just because we’re getting in. It’s by definition, surprise is almost the most interesting thing that there is, and you can say, “What’s the most interesting thing that happened in the mall?” And it’s like, “Oh, I don’t know.” But you call it surprise, it’s easier to like, “Oh, yeah, this thing, that was kind of crazy,” “The coffee drink is now $8.” “What? When did that happen?” And so, then you’re off to the races, as it were, in that conversation.

And then I’m also thinking about, sometimes I might feel uncomfortable to just go there right away, but other times, folks ask questions that bring about self-disclosure, and yet also have utility for the team or the business. I’m thinking, is it Peter Thiel who has a question something like, “What’s something you strongly believe that 99% of people believe the opposite?” And that’s cool, it’s like you’re going to learn something when you go there both from self-disclosure as well as, “Huh, okay, there’s an opportunity that had never occurred to me. And as an investor, that’s good to have a broad knowledge of such things.”

Or, like, “What’s the most fascinating thing you’ve read recently?” If you’re talking to a group of podcasters, “Hey, what’s a new development of podcasting that struck you?” “Oh, there’s this company called Introcast, which is a really cool way to potentially discover new shows and grow a show on a paid basis, whatever,” and off you.

Deb Mashek
And, honestly, those same questions are fantastic in networking situations, where rather than, “So, tell me what you do,” and people launch into their elevator speech. You can ask instead, “What has your attention? What are you most excited about coming up?” For me as a relationships-person, I see more opportunities to connect in a more authentic way with people when there’s authenticity there.

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

Deb Mashek
So, back to good questions, you can ask it after the movie, after the book, after the meeting, after the, you know, someone pitched the project. Whatever it is, just, “How do you see it? How are you thinking about this? What strikes you about this?” I love that as a quote and a question.

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

Deb Mashek
This one, also, my mind’s thinking in the direction of self-disclosure. Art Aaron and his colleagues, back in the day, created this protocol that they call Fast Friends, and it eventually became the study that went viral via the New York Times article about 36 ways, or 36 questions to make you fall in love. These questions were never designed to make you fall in love. They were designed to increase closeness and intimacy, meaning, sense of connection.

And in this study, Art and his colleagues, within the protocol, takes about 45 minutes to an hour to administer, and all you’re doing is bringing total strangers into the room together and staging a series of self-disclosure questions that are reciprocal. So, I’m sharing and you’re sharing. And over those 45 minutes, the nature of the questions escalates in how vulnerable they are asking you to be.

So, for instance, at the beginning it might be like, “What did you have for breakfast this morning?” and by the end, the questions are things like, “How do you think you’re going to die?” Really, like it gets core, some core mortality salient stuff there. But what I love about this study is it gives us empirical evidence of the value of self-disclosure, and it tells us how to structure it.

One of my favorite factoids, and I happen to have been a graduate student in Arts Lab, so it might be one of the reasons I love this study. But one of my favorite factoids is that one of the stranger couples, so they came in as strangers, they were paired together as a couple for this activity. That’s how they met. They eventually got married. So, in that case, they did fall in love. But empirically, what they showed in the study is that people, on average, felt closer to that stranger after just an hour of this intense self-disclosure that a lot of them did to their best friends. So, it’s a real powerful strategy.

Pete Mockaitis
It is. It’s a great set of questions. And though they weren’t made for people to fall in love, I did once do that with a girlfriend on Valentine’s Day, and it was cool. It was really cool.

Deb Mashek
It’s so cool. And not surprisingly, there are so many question decks out there and relationship intervention decks that are focused on this precise mechanism. I love them. I do them too.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Deb Mashek
I love Liane Davey’s, The Good Fight, and it’s about how to fight well in the workplace, and it’s fantastic.

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

Deb Mashek
I love thinking visually, so whether I’m writing a talk or anything, I like to have the picture of it. So, I have totally fallen in love with these digital whiteboards, like Miro, where it’s just infinite and I can drop pictures and drop links and move things around and have connections. And I have one for every project, whether it’s a personal project or a work project. I love that tool.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit, something you do that helps you be awesome at your job?

Deb Mashek
I never have my phone on. I mean, it’s on but it’s always silenced. There are no notifications. And I do this because I don’t like the idea that other people can be in charge where my attention is, and this is to me such a sacred resource. And so, I choose, you know, kind of a sacred reclamation idea. Like, I have, for a long time been committed to when I decide I want to break, I’ll check my phone. And it is so good because I really get to fall into my thinking, into my doing in a way that my friends say they can’t.

And it does create some challenges and some relationships where some people wish that I was responding to them the second they send a text, but I can’t do it. I don’t want to do it, and I’ve chosen to celebrate my ability to hold my own attention.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m 100% with you, and I do the same thing. And is there a particularly resident nugget, a Deb-original quote, that people really dig and quote back to you often?

Deb Mashek
Yeah, people like, when I’m talking about collaboration, I often say it’s not rocket science; it’s relationship science, and people, really, they like that one. They also like just when I point out that we’re not taught how to collaborate, and it’s a big surprise. It’s difficult and challenging, and it’s learnable.

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

Deb Mashek
I would go to DebMashek.com or Collaborhate.com.

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

Deb Mashek
Be “collabor-great.” I mean, this stuff is so worth it for you and your happiness, but also helping other people unlock their capacity, and helping your team do amazing things, and helping your organization, whether you’re at a non-profit or a for-profit or wherever you’re working, we’re able to do together better, or when we’re able to do together better, we’re really able to have a great impact and change the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Deb, thank you for this. I wish you much “collabor-greatness.”

Deb Mashek
Back at you. Thanks for having me.

Jul 25
0

981: Using AI to Enhance Your Reading, Notes, Memory, and Decisions with Kwame Christian

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Fellow podcaster Kwame Christian giggles with Pete as he shares his insights and lessons learned on a novel notetaking approach.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to listen and understand audio at 3X speed 
  2. How notetaking improves your decision-making 
  3. How AI can make a fun soundtrack for your life 

About Kwame

Kwame Christian is a best-selling author, business lawyer and CEO of the American Negotiation Institute (ANI). 

Following the viral success of his TedxDayton talk, Kwame released his best-seller Finding Confidence in Conflict: How to Negotiate Anything and Live Your Best Life in 2018. He’s also a regular Contributor for Forbes and the host of the number one negotiation podcast in the world, Negotiate Anything – which currently has over 5 million downloads worldwide. Under Kwame’s leadership, ANI has coached and trained several Fortune 500 companies on applying the fundamentals of negotiation to corporate success. 

Kwame was the recipient of the John Glenn College of Public Affairs Young Alumni Achievement Award in 2020 and the Moritz College of Law Outstanding Recent Alumnus Award 2021. He is the only person in the history of The Ohio State University to win alumni awards in consecutive years from the law school and the masters of public affairs program. That said, Kwame’s proudest achievement is his family. He’s married to Dr. Whitney Christian, and they have two lovely sons, Kai and Dominic.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

  • Jenni Kayne. Use the code AWESOME15 to get 15% off your order!

Kwame Christian Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Kwame, welcome back.

Kwame Christian
Hey, thanks for having me, buddy.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is fun. We are not going to talk about negotiation, or persuasion, or psychology directly, or diversity. We’re talking about taking notes, and we both are so excited.

Kwame Christian
So excited. So excited because we’ve been friends now for like five, six, seven years, and one of the things that brought us together is our nerdiness. And so, this is an opportunity for us to talk about this stuff we talk about all the time offline, so I’m pumped about this.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, so you told us something that blew our minds in our podcast mastermind group, we got together. You were playing a text-to-speech audio on your phone at super high speeds, such that a couple of us said, “There is no way you understand what is being said there.” And you said, “I absolutely do.” And we’re like, “What? What is the story?” So, tell us, you started doing a note-taking thing. First of all, why? What were you trying to accomplish by doing that? And then we’ll walk into a little bit of the details of what you’re doing.

Kwame Christian
Yeah, man, it’s a fascinating story because it goes all the way back to undergrad. I had a friend who was blind, and he became blind in undergrad. So, he had to learn how to be blind, which was a really tough thing for him. And so, he was shadowing another lawyer, and instead of reading using Braille, she was reading using text-to-voice. And he said it was so fast that he wasn’t even able to identify that text, that voice as words. It was that fast.

And so, what I learned from him telling me that story is that you’re processing speed is a skill. With time, you can get it faster and faster and faster. So, from undergrad, I’ve been training myself to go from listening to things in regular speed to 1.25 to 1.5, and now, on Audible, it’s up to, I think, 3.5. That’s the max. But then, with the note-taking apps that I use, you can go up to, like, 600 words per minute.

And so, for me, the reason why I do this is because I’m an avid note-taker. When I read books, I take tons of notes, like 20, 30, and sometimes up to 60 pages of notes, size 12, single space. But I recognize that reading is nothing without retention. So, I want to make sure that I’m reviewing those notes with regularity, but I want to do it quickly. And so, this helps me to really not just consume a lot of information, but also retain a lot of information because I can review it really quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, so 600 words per minute, I think you said, which is about 4x, if we’re thinking about 150 words per minute as a typical speaking rate. And so, first of all, it just sounds amazing, like for a superhuman ability. So, you are telling, you’re going on the record, this is, as you know, being recorded, that you can understand words played at 600 words per minute.

Kwame Christian
Yes, and let me put a little caveat here, because you will, for sure, miss a couple of words every sentence. So, if it’s a text I’m completely unfamiliar with, with zero context, I won’t be able to do it. But, if it’s notes that I’m somewhat familiar with, and that I have some idea of what it is that we’re talking about, then I can follow it enough to retain the meat of the information. And if you want, I can pull it out and show listeners kind of what it sounds like. You want to do that?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, let’s do it.

Kwame Christian
You want to?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I do. I do.

Kwame Christian
Okay, cool. Let’s see. Ah, philosophical articles. Great. And let me make sure the tempo is at the right thing. This is 605 words per minute.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right now, Kwame, what did he just say? Or she, I can’t tell.

Kwame Christian
You can’t tell. So, he was talking about Socrates and his philosophical approach, and then going deeper into other philosophical like ideologies, mindsets, thought process, things like that. And so, for me, it’s like, “All right, I read that previously, and so I just want to make sure I’m getting refreshers so I can keep it top of mind because I know that memory decays after time.” So, I know for the things that I really want to retain, I need to revisit them with regularity in order for it to really become encoded in.

So, for me, I know that this is something that I have visited before. So, this is me revisiting these notes, and so for me, memory is nothing without retention. So, I want to make sure that I’m going over these things with regularity so it becomes encoded in my memory at a deeper level.

Because, for me, as a content creator, so as a podcaster, it’s helpful to be able to go back and talk about studies and different methodologies for negotiation, and then also as a speaker too, and a recovering lawyer, I feel the need to cite my sources. So, if I’m talking about different perspectives and different approaches, I can say, “Well, this person approaches it this way, but on this topic, another person approaches it this way. And here’s a book reference for each of those so you can go deeper if you want to.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and I think that really is distinctive in terms of making content great, so that’s super cool. So, if anyone’s in disbelief about the speed thing, I have been playing. So, you use the, I believe, Voice Dream Reader app, and there’s a few I’ve seen out there. This one has a lot of history and a lot of street cred, it sounds like, with the blind community from the reviews I was gathering.

And so, I started doing it in terms of reading books, which it can do as well, and I was fascinated to see it didn’t take years to develop the skill of being able to understand rapid speech, but rather I was able to crank it up pretty good, like over 400, sometimes 500, so well over 3X, and understand what was happening. And it was fun for me, I was training that skill by also looking at the text because it highlights the text as you move down at the same time.

So, what I found interesting was it’s almost like when you can ride a bike in different gears and go faster depending on how much energy and oomph you’re ready to put into that thing. And so, too, I found, “Hey, my brain is ready to go. Let’s do this thing. I can go fast.” And I actually appreciate going fast. Like, it matches my state, and I’m not bored by what I’m reading. Instead, it’s like, “Hold on tight. Here we go.” And it’s cool.

Or other times, it’s like, “You know what? That just seems overwhelming right now. I don’t want to go there. That’s fine. We’ll slow it down to something a little bit more reasonable,” which still might be like 2x, 300 words per minute. So, that was eye-opening for me, just playing around with that a little bit and feeling like, if your brain is tempted to distraction, which mine certainly is, when you’re reading and you start thinking of something else, like, “Oh, wait, what did I just read?”

When I’m looking, the line is being highlighted and I’m hearing the audio, it’s like we’re not deviating from this text, and it’s very effective when you don’t want to read something, it’s like, “No, no, we are powering through this, every line right now.”

Kwame Christian
Oh, that’s smart. I’ve never thought about looking at it as I go, but I think that multimodal form of digesting would lead to greater retention, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think so. I think it has and I dig it. So, okay, we know it’s possible to listen at rapid speeds. You’ve done it. I’m kind of doing it. Blind people have done it for a long time, and it’s been helpful for you to retain stuff. So, give us a picture for like how is life different as a result of you having this as a regular practice? You take a lot of notes and you listen to review those notes at rapid speed. Is this just another Kwame quirk? Or to what extent is this truly enriching you and how?

Kwame Christian
Well, I think, like I said, the retention is big but it allows me to consume more information more quickly. So, I’ve shifted from not just doing audiobooks in this way, but also doing everything. Like, when we hung out in Washington, a couple months ago, you heard me reading my emails that quickly, and so it allows me to consume more information just in general, because now I’m putting everything through a program like that.

But the other thing that I found was an interesting side effect is that I feel like it helps me to be a better listener because, for me, I can listen and still be fully engaged with that person while thinking of what a follow-up question could be. And a lot of times, when people are acting like they’re listening but not really listening, they’re thinking about what’s going to come next, but now I’ve found that I can actually wholeheartedly engage with what the person is saying while anticipating what might be coming and then coming up with a follow-up question.

So, it’s made me a better podcaster because it feels like everybody is talking in slow motion. It’s really, really fascinating. And so, that also comes with a little comical downside, too. It also makes me incredibly impatient with content that is not accelerated. If something is just in one-time speed, I’m like, “I am wasting so much time here. Can you please go faster?” But in everyday life, when you’re actually engaging with people, it really does feel like a superpower, because listening feels less effortful.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. Let’s hear more about the potential downsides. So, you’re irritated by 1x content sometimes. That happens. What about just like the potential toll? I’m wondering, if feels like if you’re reading fast or listening to things fast, like you’re demanding more of the machine that is your body and nervous system and brain.

It’s almost like you’ve had a huge workout and you’re maybe fatigued afterwards. Is that a thing you’re noticing, in terms of like, “Whoa, more of my energy was sapped in that hour because I consumed more words in that hour,” much like more of your energy would be sapped on a fast bike ride of an hour than a slow bike ride of an hour?

Kwame Christian
Pete, I wish we would have had this conversation years ago because that was an element that I never considered. But this last Christmas break, every Christmas break, I take time to review my notes in 500 times speed and think through everything that I’ve done because I don’t just take notes from the books that I’ve read and the articles that I’ve read. I am kind of like my life stenographer. I’m sitting here just writing down every thought that I care to revisit, anything that I’ve learned that I want to retain, any insight.

So, I’m constantly taking notes, dictating notes into my phone, and then listening to them later. So, every month it can be over 100,000 words of Kwame notes that I’ve created. And then I started to realize a pattern. I started to realize that there was a pretty consistent cycle of burnout that was occurring at predictable times.

And so, for me, as a keynote speaker, constantly traveling, that takes a toll, and I started to recognize that I wasn’t recovering from those trips as quickly as possible. So, I need to reschedule the way that I do things, like making the days afterwards to have a little bit more space. So that helped with burnout. But I was realizing there’s still something else that’s taking a toll. I couldn’t figure out what it was, and I realized that it was this pace that I was keeping with reading and retention.

And so, for the past few years, my goal has been to read – I use audiobooks, so I’m using the term reading loosely here – consume a book every week, taking those notes, and in the morning before I go to the gym, I would listen to those notes, I would review the book notes from the previous books that I’ve read, and during the day I’m listening to the book and taking notes, so it’s a lot on my brain, and I did not fully appreciate the toll it was taking. And to the point where, this year I’ve actually decided to pull back on the amounts of books that I’m reading because it was becoming just too much for me to do while still being well.

So, I’ve found that my mental health has improved as I’ve scaled back a little bit. So now I do it as I need to spot-learn specific things at specific times, but not really forcing myself to keep that pace. One book a week, reviewing the notes in the morning, it was just too much to keep up with, and it was leading to burnout. So, fatigue is real with this, because it does take a lot more to consume information in this way.

Pete Mockaitis
So that’s good to know, and you have that set of options then. You could choose to listen at a variety of speeds based upon your energy and other demands for the day, for the week, and you got that going for you. So that’s pretty nifty. With regard to your note-taking, can you get a little bit precise with regard to, Voice Dream Reader is how we’re listening to or hearing the notes, but you say you’re dictating them to capture them? Or, what’s the capture side look like?

Kwame Christian
Capture side is pretty basic, just the iPhone Notes app. So, I would put it in the iPhone Notes app and then I would just copy and paste it into Voice Dream. And, actually, it might be helpful to go into the types of notes that I’m taking, because I talked about a couple of those things, but I can go a little bit deeper too.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, so it’s any thought you might care to revisit, and stuff from books that it was good. That’s what we got so far.

Kwame Christian
Yes, so those are the things, and then also decision-making. That’s been a big focus for me, because, for me, my philosophy, I believe that we just live life decision to decision, and so the quality of our life is going to be contingent upon the quality of the decisions that we make. So, if I can learn how to make better decisions, then I will have a better life. Pretty simple.

So, I would read a lot of books on decision-making, but then I recognized that those books are great and they have a lot of studies that study other people but there’s nobody studying me. That’s my job now. So, any decision that I make, Pete, like any decision that I make that was suboptimal, I write that down.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now we got here some juicy examples, Kwame, suboptimal decisions.

Kwame Christian
Everything. And, listeners, as well, this is how you know that I know Pete, because I know Pete likes to optimize. And when I used the term suboptimal, I know that word to be your fancy, okay. So, this is great. So, I’ll give an example. It goes down to the most mundane decisions. So, I was doing a keynote in Vegas earlier this year, and I was going down to breakfast, and I was closing the door to my room, and I said, “Ah, I forgot my Chapstick. It’s okay. I feel fine.”

I go down, I eat breakfast, and now my lips are dry because we’re in the desert, and I said, “I should have unlocked that door, opened it, and got the Chapstick because now I’m going to waste five minutes getting back upstairs in this massive hotel. I will never make this mistake again.” So, when I’m talking about every decision, that’s an example of how mundane these decisions go.

But then I think about business decisions, and I think about mistakes that I’ve made in the past, and then, you know, hindsight is 20/20, and I look back, and I say, “How did I not see this coming because it seems obvious to me?” But then when I review the notes, I recognize the emotions that were going through my mind, that were in my body as I was going through this process. I think about how I was feeling, I write down what I’m thinking and what led to the decision. What I was feeling, what led to the decision, who I talked to and how I felt before that conversation, and how I felt after the conversation.

And then I started to recognize patterns. I’m saying, “Okay, this was a bad decision, and I recognize that even though I had the data to make the right decision, I made the wrong decision based on emotionality. Why? Oh, in this situation, I had a conversation with this person, and then they complimented me. I’m recognizing I have a vulnerability, where if somebody compliments me, it makes it hard for me to make a decision subsequently that is not in their favor.”

And so, now I’m more mentally prepared to protect myself to separate the decision from the compliment. So, I’ll put more space between a decision if I feel particularly good about a conversation that I had about a person. And so, like those are the type of decision-making patterns that I want to pay attention to, because once you start to identify those patterns, you can start to anticipate when a bad decision will come, and then you can start to force yourself to put yourself in a better mental and emotional position to make a better decision in the future.

Pete Mockaitis
That is very beautiful. And I’m thinking, even the minute ones can pack big insights. I’m thinking about a time that I had a friend, and there was a bachelor party fun, woo, going on, and I remember I was kind of thirsty, and I thought, “Oh, I should go get some water from the bartender there.” But then I thought, “Oh, no, I don’t want to inconvenience them with just water, which is free and doesn’t produce any income for them or their establishment, or tip for them, and so I just won’t bother them. You know, I can make do and just drink some water later anyway.”

So, the next morning I was feeling very not great. Dehydrated plus, if you will, and I was thinking about, “Boy, I really should have just asked to get the water.” And I was like, “What’s that about? Why am I not doing that?” And then you realize, “Oh, here’s a pattern for me.” It’s like, “I really, really, really feel uncomfortable about putting people out, having them feel inconvenienced for the sake of my needs and preferences.”

And so, that’s good information and to really have at the fore when you’re making a subsequent decision, it’s like, “I feel not comfortable. I feel uncomfortable about this.” It’s like, “Well, maybe that’s because you’ve got this weird hang-up associated with inconveniencing other people to meet your needs, as in not asking the bartender for some water.”

And so, that kind of reflection and note-taking is handy to surface those things. It could be a tiny stimulus or prompt – Chapstick, cup of water from a bartender – and yet have a huge insight on the other side of it that has ripple implications for many decisions.

Kwame Christian
Absolutely. And that’s when it becomes really fun, when you start to see these hidden patterns, and that’s the type of information that you can only get from evaluating and investigating yourself on a deep level. Because we can read all of these books, you and I both have podcasts, so we can talk to these incredible people who have incredible insights. But imagine if one of those incredible people was solely dedicated to investigating your life and trying to make it better.

And I recognize that has to be our responsibility because the ripple effects of these small things can be significant, and a lot of times you might not recognize it until you take the time to investigate it. And one of the things that’s really funny to me is when I sometimes go back to journal entries from years ago, like 2017, 2018, sometimes I will see the original thoughts that led to something that I do with regularity that I take for granted right now.

And that’s always really insightful because it shows me how you are with every decision, everything that we learn and then subsequently put into practice, we are really shaping who we are and changing our identity. So, right now, Kwame of 2024, I can listen to this and I can say to myself, “Yeah, this is how I see the world. This is how I navigate it. Obviously, why wouldn’t I?”

But then I forget how much time it took for me to build this part of myself up to make this a regular type of thing. And sometimes it takes multiple entries and multiple attempts to learn and put these things into place for it to become part of you, but I recognize that the more intentional I am about investigating things, the better I can be when it comes to making tough decisions.

So let me give a tangible example. So, for me, as an entrepreneur, I recognize that sometimes there are going to be times where, if I’m running a company, I want to have the best team possible, and that might require me to have to change the dynamics of my team by removing somebody from my team. And I remember the first time, we’ve been in a mastermind group for like five years, so you were seeing me go through this. It was like an existential crisis having to fire somebody because I had this belief that relationships should last forever. It’s an indictment on me as a leader to not be able to have this person with me till the very end.

And I recognize, through talking with you and the guys and lots of journaling, that it’s a problematic belief. It’s not true. I can overcome this. But I recognize that it took a lot of time and thought and intentionality to really evaluate those underlying beliefs that were leading me to feel the way that I’m feeling now. And so, now fast forward to this year, I had to let a couple people go. And each person, there’s a different emotional thing that was holding me back from making that decision.

And so, I was able to make, to do that evaluation much quicker, and, at the same time, at a much deeper level through this process to recognize those patterns of thinking that led me to make bad decisions in the past, to this time make the right decision. It was still very, very emotionally challenging, but I was able to get to that conclusion faster because of this process of self-evaluation.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s powerful. And those are definitely tricky emotional matters. And it’s funny, thinking about some of the mastermind group conversations, that’s often the case in terms of there’s a thing that we’re mostly sure should probably happen or not happen, and yet there is a little bit of uncertainty, but a lot of discomfort, and so we just stall for so long in terms of like launching this thing or shutting something down, and it goes way longer than it needs to because we are rational, cognitive creatures and also emotional creatures.

And it’s so helpful to, well, one, hey, I recommend mastermind groups for everybody, just as a general thought, as well as journaling and self-reflection. These are some of the top tools by which you can see what’s going on and, in fact, have a look in the past and see, “Oh, that’s pretty cool how much I’ve grown, how far I’ve come,” because in the day in, day out, you may not even realize it, just as you said, it seems like, “This is just how I operate. This is how I’ve always been.” No, it’s not.

Kwame Christian
Nope. Yeah, it’s powerful, man, and it’s very exciting, too. I think one of the things that was really helpful when it came to making better decisions, especially those emotionally heart-wrenching decisions, is I would journal how I would feel leading up to the decision, I would journal how I felt as I was making the decision, and then I would journal how I felt immediately after, and then as time passed. And so, it’s so interesting. It’s almost like watching a little kid jump into a pool for the first time, “I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to do it. I’m so scared. I’m so scared. Okay, I’m going to do it. Oh, that was scary. That wasn’t that bad. No, I feel really good now. Why didn’t I do that before?” And so, for me, one of the most empowering things is how I feel after the bad, the good decision. And I recognize that my emotions will lead me to make bad decisions that might feel good in the moment but feel bad for a very long time, and then I can set myself free with a good decision.

Now, the good decision will feel bad in the moment but will feel good after the fact. And so, when I see that freedom afterwards, I’m saying, “I’m not going to focus so much on the decision as I am going to focus on the future feeling of freedom after making the good decision.” And so, I’m like, “I want to make future Kwame happy. What would make future Kwame happy? I know Kwame in the present will feel really bad as he’s making this tough decision, but the future version of myself will appreciate it.”

And so, when I think about it through the lens of making future Kwame happy, that also helps me to have the right perspective, because I’m trying to play the long game. Usually, when it comes to good decision-making, it really comes down to prioritizing long-term benefits over short-term rewards. And when I continuously remember that, and I can see evidence of that throughout my life in this journal, then it helps me to feel confident in the decision, even if I don’t feel like doing the right thing in the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Wisdom. Wisdom. So, you’re taking these notes, and I’m curious about the nuts and bolts here. Are they tagged by these categories? Or is it just one giant chronological situation? How do you find the relevant stuff from months past? What’s kind of the system that makes it work? We know how that gets captured. We know how it gets reviewed at rapid speed. How does it get organized such that it’s workable for you?

Kwame Christian
All right. Now, Pete, be ready to be disappointed because the organization is not strong. It is just a big old blob of notes, and that’s really what it is. But what I’ve started to do with time is categorize it by month. So, what month am I in, so I could go back into specific months now, but before it was, I would just put all of these notes into one iPhone notes document until the note became so big that the note wasn’t functioning anymore.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, wow, I’ve never gotten there before.

Kwame Christian
And then I would say, “Oh, okay, time to start a new one.” And so, the last year, I think it was eight different notes, like journal entries that were big, and each of them was probably and listening at, because I was listening at it for a long period of time so I was at like 400 or 500 words per minute as I’m reviewing that during Christmas break. Each one is about 10 to 12 hours long, so it’s a substantial amount of notes.

And so, I did the word count for the last year, it was over a million words of notes that I took. But this year I’m trying something new that’s been really helpful, and it was categorizing by month and giving every month a theme. So, what is the theme? And so, February, I had to let some folks go, so it was red February.

I had to make some really tough decisions, so I’m like, “Listen, okay, so I need to make these tough decisions in my company. What other tough decisions do I need to make in my life? What other things do I need to let go of?” So, I was focusing on some bad habits, some other things. I’m like, “All right, cool. I’m going to make some cuts this month.” And then I realized, red February hurts a lot. So, I said, “March is all about mindset. It’s mindset March. What can I do to be well again, to be more at peace?”

And so, I started to try to approach business as a meditation, approach life as a meditation, “How can I focus on my breathing through all of the decisions that I’m making, through all of the activities that I’m taking? And the worse that I’m feeling, the more I’m going to focus on my breathing. Can I turn life into a meditation?” And so that’s what March was about.

And then we were launching a program, Negotiate Anything Premium, and so April was all about just focusing on revenue. So how can I focus on making decisions that are geared towards revenue? Because going through the notes, I recognized that a lot of the decisions that I was making, they were about status. They were about image. They look good from the outside but the revenue really wasn’t there to substantiate the continuation of a lot of those strategies.

So, I’m like, “Let me evaluate this from a really focused business perspective. What can I do to focus on increasing revenue and increasing impact that we make with that revenue?” And so, that was the focus. So going through these months thematically has been really, really helpful because it’s not just an evaluation of what is occurring, it’s also helping me to make decisions in a way that help me to move my life in a specific direction with more intentionality.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s phenomenal. And so, then when you look back on things, it sounds like you just periodically are just listening kind of like often. But if you’ve got something from 18 months ago, you’re probably not going to listen to that, are you? You’re probably listening to the things you had one or two or three months ago. Is that accurate?

Kwame Christian
Yeah, 100%, because there’s limited utility in going that far back unless, honestly, if I just want to be entertained. But I try to go through it within 12 months, but this year I’ve been trying to go month to month. So, once I finish January, I’m going to review January and February, review February and March and so on. But again, that was leading to a lot of exhaustion, and so I’ve been actually challenging myself to make fewer notes and listen to the notes less. So, I’m still listening to it, but just trying to be in the moment.

Because part of what I discovered about myself in March is that a lot of times I can get so in my head about these things, it’s led to some overthinking in places where I should be in flow. So, when you think about just the psychology of flow, when you’re in that flow state, you’re not actively, really consciously, logically thinking about things. Your body and mind, they’re just kind of responding and reacting, and I know that I’ve consumed enough information, I’ve learned enough through my life that I can flow really well when I let go.

And so, it’s almost like I’m at this point where I’m trying to balance that depth of thoughts and my analytical thinking with my ability to let go and flow a little bit more. And so, to your point about avoiding burnout, I recognize that I have to kind of slow down with this retention, this process, because it’s been leading to burnout, and flow has been a focus.

So, I’ve actually, the last couple of months, this is going to sound very bizarre, but the last couple of months, I’ve been challenging myself to listen to more music and do less, and that’s actually been more rewarding, because I find, when I’m in conversation, when I’m on stage doing keynotes, when I’m doing podcasts and things like that, even when I’m just playing with my sons Kai and Dominic, I’m more present because I’m not over-analyzing things. So, it’s about finding that balance, because anything done out of proportion can be problematic.

Pete Mockaitis
And I don’t think you’re alone with that music comment. I remember at one point, Apple Music had a podcast advertising campaign, so it was on, they were advertising Apple Music offer when it was newer on Podcasts. And I was like, “Boy, there’s so much talk and noise and stuff going on. Like, boy, you know what’s great? Music.”

And I just thought that was such a novel like, “Wow, do you need to sell us on listening to music? It’s like an ancient human delight.” It’s like, “You know what’s great? Eating food. Give it a shot.” But, no, it’s like they’re meeting them where they’re at, “Hey, regular podcast listener, remember music? That’s a great thing to listen to as well.” So, you’re not alone there, and it’s good to be reminded.

Kwame Christian
Absolutely. And now, Pete, I am not perfect. Now, I don’t think I’ve told you this, this newest nerd move that I’ve been doing. So, I’ve taken the notes that I’ve written, like all, like millions of words, and I’ve put it into ChatGPT, and I said, “Okay,” because there are these new apps that are AI music generators.

And so, I don’t know if you’ve ever used these things. The one that I use is Suno AI, and you can give it lyrics and describe the vibe that you want to create, and then it’ll make the music, just brand-new music just off the cuff. And so, I told ChatGPT to take the themes that come up the most frequently in my journal, “What are the top 10 themes?” It’s like decision-making, family, legacy, business, those type of things, just, “What are the top 10 things? All right. Now I want you to make lyrics for music off of those things.”

So, I take those lyrics and put it into Suno AI, and so now a lot of times, where I’m like, “I’m going to vibe to some music, but I want to make sure my music has a good message, and I’d love it if it was talking about things that are relevant to me. Because, I don’t know, when I’m working out, I’m a family man, I try to help my community, talking about drugs and murder in my music. That’s not really the vibe, but I just like the beat.” But now I can take my journal entries and turn them into cool lyrics. It’s motivating.

Kwame Christian
It’s so powerful, I love those things. And, Pete, if you want to, it takes 60 seconds to make this. You want me to make you something, a song for you real quick? I can do that right now.

Pete Mockaitis
So, yep, let’s roll with it, see what happens. 

Kwame Christian
Yeah. Well, now, this app, it has the integration in there. So, it’ll make it yourself. So now, I’ll give it the inspiration. Let’s do customize. I’ll just give it some lyrics. It’ll randomize it. I’ll just say, “Create an inspirational song for my friend named Pete Mockaitis. He is a family man, a businessman, a hard worker, a deep thinker, always looking to optimize decision-making and life in general, and he loves to help people.”

Pete Mockaitis
Can it be a country song?

Kwame Christian
Oh, yeah.

Kwame Christian
So, I’ll say country song, male vocals, you know, inspirational, you want inspirational?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, yeah.

Kwame Christian
A little vibe. Okay, the song title it chose is “Rise and Shine, Pete.”

[Song playing]

♪ Rise and shine, Pete ♪ ♪ Family man, true and sweet ♪ ♪ Hard work in the ground, deep thinker, sharp mind ♪

Kwame Christian
It’s not bad. It’s not bad.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it’s good enough so I want to know what comes next.

Kwame Christian
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
I was like, “Why did you pull away from the microphone?”

Well, now you got me thinking about affirmations, like if you could put those to music, that might make it more interesting or more impactful, because that’s, ideally, what music should do. It stirs within you emotion and the human spirit. So, that’s fun. Okay. Wow, Kwame, you’re putting all of us to shame, right? We’re just brushing our teeth in silence, and you’ve got custom AI generated inspiring songs and/or rapid playing notes of brilliance. I just feel honored that I was able to draw you in a game of chess. That’s my greatest achievement with this great mind.

Kwame Christian
That was such a good game. It was a great game, and I think it was the perfect ending too. It was a draw. It was a lot of fun.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think you could’ve beaten me if you really wanted to put in the time, but I’m glad you didn’t. So, anything else we should mention before we hear about another round of your favorite things?

Kwame Christian
Yeah, so check out Negotiate Anything Premium. Of course, we have the podcast Negotiate Anything. It’s the number one negotiation podcast, but we have a premium offering for subscribers who could listen ad-free and some bonuses, “Ask me anything,” so you could ask me questions. I answer your negotiator-related questions. But that’s the main thing that we’re working on right now. We’re really excited about the way it turned out.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Now, could you share with us a favorite quote?

Kwame Christian
Yes. So, for me, one thing that I’ve been enjoying, and this is a quote I made up, “You don’t get bonus points for not using your resources.” And I feel like a lot of times, when it comes to the difficult situations that we find ourselves in, we almost think that there is some kind of valor in not accepting help from others and not using the resources available. And the people who are the most successful are the people who utilize the resources at their disposal.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, Kwame, that’s really, I love that. That’s hitting me.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And how about a favorite study?

Kwame Christian
So, my favorite study that I’ve been referring to a lot for my negotiation clients is a study on the principle called anchoring. So, I believe it’s the most powerful negotiation technique at our disposal and it’s really more of a psychological principle. It’s like a priming effect. And so, with anchoring, what you do in negotiation is you start off the negotiation with the most aggressive request that you can reasonably justify with the data available.

And so, what they found is that just having a more aggressive first offer dictates the outcome more than almost anything in negotiation.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding.

Kwame Christian
I kid you not. And so, well, they did as study in real estate, and so they found that with anchoring, even with experienced realtors, it worked for them. So, what they had them do is go into a home and look at the home, and then there would be a list price. And so, look at the list price and then look at the comps. And then you would make a decision on what you think is a fair price for this home.

And so, in the study, what they did was they said, “All right, the list price is, let’s say, $200,000 in this scenario,” and then in the other scenario, the list price was $250,000. In the other scenario, the list price was $300,000. But the comps were all the same. And so, they’re like, “All right, come up with your estimation for what you’d think is a fair price for this home.” And, not surprisingly, based on the psychology of anchoring, the people who were primed with that anchor of 200 guessed an  average less than the people who were primed with 250, who then guessed an average less than the people who were primed with 300,000.

And so, my favorite anchoring study was actually the Gandhi study. So, what they had them do is they separated people into two different groups, and so they asked them ridiculous questions but they asked them the same question, the same second question. So, the first question they asked to Group A was, “Do you think Gandhi was older than or younger than 13 when he died?” Right? Ridiculous. Every picture we see of Gandhi, he’s very old.

And then the other group, they said, “Do you think Gandhi was older than or younger than 130 when he died?” Again, ridiculous. He was old, but not 130. And then they asked them the same second question, “How old do you think Gandhi was when he died?” And the group that was primed with 13 guessed on average 20 years younger than the group that was primed with 130.

So even when there is not legitimate information to back it up, the priming effect from anchoring still works. And so, that’s why, for me, with my negotiations, this is the simple rule that I follow. If I have as much information or more information than the other side, I’m always going to make the first offer because anchoring is so powerful.

If I have less information than the other side, I don’t have enough information to give a competent anchor because I might undervalue it unwittingly, so I’ll counter in that case. But anchoring is so strong, I always find a way to make the first offer if I have enough information to make a competent first offer.

Pete Mockaitis
Undervalue it unwittingly. Well, I guess if you’re on the purchase side, the buyer side, you would want a lower price.

Kwame Christian
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it’s like, “Hey, this isn’t going to work unless I can get a customer acquisition cost of less than $1,000.” So, that’s a form of anchoring. It’s like, “Okay. Well, hey, we got the impressions and the conversion rates and da-da-da, so you’re exerting the pull.” I’ve heard that even judges who see irrelevant numbers, like a housing street address, different housing street addresses in a document, can, in turn, impact their judgment for what’s an equitable distribution of assets. It has nothing to do with the case at hand, it’s just a number. It got in your brain and then it’s in there.

Kwame Christian
Yup. And, Pete, with these studies, it’s like the researchers almost got playful with it because it seems like they’re saying, “How far can we push this nonsense?” Because they did a study where they anchored with the last four digits of a phone number. So, the people who had nine, eight, and seven, as the first number, they were anchored different from the people who had like 0, 1, 2, or 3, just based on those numbers.

So, back when I was practicing law more frequently, when I was making demand letters, if I was asking for a lot more money, I would write the date out numerically. I would write it with as many numbers as possible. But when I was asking for a lower number, I would just write out the date, and say January 1, you know, and not even put the rest of the date because I’m like, “Everything has an impact. I don’t know what that impact is, but I know what anchoring is going to do, so I’m going to go small numbers if I want a small number, big numbers if I want a big number.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Hey, I know it said 10,000, you were hoping for $50,000? But $10,000 is a lot more than January 1, so, I mean, in a way, it’s a bargain.” Well, yeah, that is wild, and I think a good lesson. And that’s also a good lesson just in preparation, in terms of knowing we are hyper-susceptible to these.

Do your research in advance to determine what is a number you can truly live with so you have that influence inside of you, as opposed to, “Well, you know what, we’re going to take a call and just kind of see what they come up with.” It’s like, “That’s kind of playing a dangerous game. You may find that you accept an unreasonable thing as reasonable just because you didn’t get yourself settled somewhere sensible in advance.”

Kwame Christian
Yeah. And, again, Pete, this gets really deep too because, you know, I like to make jokes every once in a while, but in a negotiation, I might make an anchoring joke, right? So, imagine you’re negotiating for a higher salary, and so you go into your boss and you act all serious, and you know a reasonable price might be, let’s say, $150,000 is reasonable. You’re at $140,000, you’re trying to get to $150,000 that’s a reasonable leap.

And so, you say, “Well, I know this might be a little bit awkward but I wanted to have a conversation about compensation.” “All right. Well, what did you have in mind?” “Well, I was thinking is would I want $653,000? No, I’m just kidding, I’m just kidding. But honestly, what I think is reasonable, if we could get to 155,000, that’s what I’d like.”

So, if you say something ridiculous as a joke, you have a little bit of tension that is diffused with a little silly humor, and then you give the real number, the contrast principle still has an effect, “I’m going to do a fake anchor with a joke, then do the real anchor, base it with data and science and the research.” But then it makes whatever you’re asking a lot more reasonable in content, when you consider the contrast principle there, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, then that gives you so much leeway with your joke in terms of if you say, “Well, I saw an article about a prompt engineer getting paid $360,000. And I said I know how to talk into, or type into ChatGPT, so that’s kind of what I was hoping for. But the market comp suggests to me…”

Kwame Christian
Exactly. Because you can think about it on the other side. Like, the anxiety, like the adrenaline will start pumping, they’re like, “Are you seriously going to ask? Oh, thank goodness.” And one of the best emotions to feel that’s truly undervalued is relief. Give them that feeling of relief, and now it just changes the whole vibe but also has a significant psychological impact.

Pete Mockaitis
And, you know what’s funny, I’ve also done that with my wife. If I have to deliver some bad news, it’s like, “Okay, so everybody’s safe. There were no injuries. We are financially secure. The structure of the home is still intact. However, I broke this thing and I’m sorry.” It’s like, “Oh, okay.”

Kwame Christian
Exactly. That’s a perfect example. Great example.

Pete Mockaitis
Because it does. It’s like, “Okay.” Because in terms of relief, she’s like, “Everybody’s safe.” “Okay. It must be pretty bad if that’s where we’re starting. Oh, okay. You just broke the dishwasher. Okay, that was dumb. You shouldn’t have broken the dishwasher, but I’m not going to give you a hard time about it because I guess you’re right, in the grand scheme of things, we’re okay.”

Kwame Christian
I love that example. That’s good.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Kwame Christian
Favorite book. Right now, I am really liking Unlearning Silence by Elaine Lin Hering. So, she is a Harvard law grad.

Pete Mockaitis
We had her on the show.

Kwame Christian
Oh, you had her? Oh, great. That’s great. Yeah, Elaine is amazing. And so, with her approach, it’s not just about the negotiation excellence because she has that in spades. It’s also about recognizing that sometimes people don’t feel comfortable standing up and speaking out about the things that are really meaningful for them. So, with that book, she analyzes what could be holding you back and then what you need to do to have that conversation and then how to have it more effectively.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Kwame Christian
Favorite tool right now, I mean, it would be hard not to say tools like Voice Dream and Suno AI and ChatGPT after this conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
You got it. And favorite habit?

Kwame Christian
My favorite habit right now is I’m really enjoying going to the gym. That’s something we bond over, too. I’m recognizing that it is a keystone habit for me because, for me, like the gym has been a core source of socialization. And you would love this because I recognize there was a hole in my social game when it came to creating relationships out of thin air. Like, if there’s somebody that I don’t know at all and have no connection with, I didn’t know how to just go up to that person and start a conversation.

So, as I was working out, I was learning how to do that because I read in a book written by a spy, The Code of Trust, Robin Dreeke. He talked about how spies would approach people and start organic conversations out of nothing. And I was like, “No way it’s that easy.” So, I started to hone that skill at the gym. And so, for me, after five years of doing that, because of course I’m keeping track, I have a list now of 306 people that I have met in the gym over the past few years.

Pete Mockaitis
This is one facility, 306 people.

Kwame Christian
It’s two gyms now, two gyms.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, my gosh. Wow, hardcore.

Kwame Christian
But yeah, that’s still a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
You go to two different gyms for your working out?

Kwame Christian
Well, I moved. So, it’s like 10 minutes away, right? It’s the same gym, different locations, but it’s been great. And what’s been funny, Pete, is that I’ve made some really great relationships there. I’ve had people who became employees of the company. That’s how I closed Chase Bank as a client with just making these relationships from the gym. So, yeah, physically, it’s been great.

It’s been helpful in terms of pushing myself harder in the gym. It helps me to understand how I can push myself harder in life, make these social connections. I feel a lot smarter because I have more energy during the day, and my family and my colleagues at work, they can tell days that I miss the gym. They’re like, “Hmm, something’s off Kwame. Did you go to the gym?” I was like, “No, I didn’t go to the gym today.” Yeah, they can tell. So going to the gym has been really, really helpful, not just for physical health but also mental health.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, I’m curious. Well, we got to have you on yet again, because I’m imagining, so let’s just say here I’m filling up a water bottle, and you are also in line to fill up your water bottle, what might you say to me here in this gym situation where we find ourselves in?

Kwame Christian
Ah, yes. Okay, so this is the move. This is the move. What you do is you make an observation that both of you can appreciate or recognize.

Pete Mockaitis
“Water is good, huh?”

Kwame Christian
Yeah, “Water is pretty cold today, right, buddy?”

Pete Mockaitis
But, no, seriously though, it’s kind of tricky, like I can’t. I’m in that situation. Like, maybe you want to talk to somebody for any number of reasons, and that’s what I think come up with is something really lame like, “I sure am thirsty. How about you?” And then I think, “Don’t say that. That’s dumb.” So, what do you come up with?

Kwame Christian
So, sometimes it is as simple as like, “Hey, I’ve seen you in the gym so many times, I feel like I should introduce you myself. Hi, I’m Kwame.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s it?

Kwame Christian
That usually works. I usually would do that with guys. Approaching a woman is different. Because of the dynamic in the gym, you have to be really mindful of that. But sometimes it’s a unique exercise that they might be doing and it’s just genuine curiosity. None of it is fabricated. I’ll say, “What? I’ve never seen that before. What do you…what do you…what does that…what does that do? Like, why do you do it that way?”

So, I’ll ask for advice, and they say, “Oh, yeah, it works the rotator cuff in that way.” I was like, “Ah, I’ve had shoulder problems. That’s really helpful. My name’s Kwame, by the way.” Or if I see shoes that I’ve never seen before, I’m like, “I really like that pattern. I’ve never seen that color combination.” “Oh, thanks, man. I appreciate it. I got it because of blah, blah, blah.” Start the conversation there. And then just say, “Oh, I’m Kwame, by the way.”

And so, whenever you introduce yourself, then people always reciprocate, and then you just build from there. And so, now it’s just like gym, “Hi’s” turn into, “Hey, how are you doing? Oh, what are you up to?” and then the relationship deepens. But you definitely want to respect people where it’s like, “Oh, you make that introduction, but you can recognize they prefer to be left alone.” You can get that vibe, and I think the background and negotiation and body language can help too because you pay attention to the person’s feet and the orientation of the feet.

So, if their feet are staying square with you, they want to stay engaged in the conversation. If I say see the feet start to shift in the other direction, I recognize they want to leave, and then I say, “Hey, well, listen, let me let you get back to the workout. I just wanted to introduce myself. I hope you have a great day,” and then that’s it. And then you just build from there.

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

Kwame Christian
LinkedIn is the best place. So, if you want to connect, I post on LinkedIn every day. Of course, we have the podcast. The podcast comes out every day, and if you like cute children, follow me on Instagram. That’s another place I frequent, too.

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

Kwame Christian
Yeah, I would say start thinking about your decision-making process. What is it that really moves you to make decisions? Because a lot of times, you’ll be surprised. Because I used to think, I am a deep thinker, clearly, because of the conversation, but I didn’t recognize how much emotion was my emotions were swaying my decisions, and especially what emotions were swaying my decisions.

Because I often thought about negative emotions swaying decisions negatively, but a lot of my bad decisions were made because of the positive feelings I was feeling at the moment too. So, just start taking notice of the decisions that you’re making, and how you were thinking and feeling, especially feeling leading of that decision, and that’s how you can start to optimize decision-making so you can start to have a better life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Kwame, this has been a treat once again. Keep on rocking.

Kwame Christian
Hey, my pleasure. Thanks for having me, buddy. Appreciate it.

Jul 22
0

980: Building the Habits of Mentally Strong Leaders with Scott Mautz

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 Scott Mautz shares powerful strategies to stay confident and in control when negativity strikes.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to wisely managed doubt–and confidence 
  2. The early warning signs of self-acceptance being degraded 
  3. The three-step solution to reset negative chatter 

About Scott

Scott Mautz is a high-octane speaker expert at igniting peak performance and deep employee engagement, motivation, and inspiration. He’s a Procter & Gamble veteran who successfully ran several of the company’s largest multi-billion dollar businesses, an award-winning/best-selling author, faculty at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business for Executive Education, a popular instructor on LinkedIn Learning where his courses have been taken over 1.5 million times, and a frequent national publication and podcast guest.

Resources Mentioned

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Scott Mautz Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Scott, welcome back.

Scott Mautz
It is so nice to be back. It’s so nice to try to be awesome on an awesome podcast that has awesome in the title. I’m grateful for it all.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think you’re awesome at it, which is why you’re back for a third time. You got it going on.

Scott Mautz
Right on. Yeah, you take what you can get.

Pete Mockaitis
Your latest piece here is called The Mentally Strong Leader: Build the Habits to Productively Regulate Your Emotions, Thoughts, and Behaviors. That sounds handy. Although, Scott, some might ask, “Isn’t this for kids? Don’t kids learn this stuff? Aren’t we done with that when we’re like nine?”

Scott Mautz
Maybe they don’t. It all depends on your kid. Well, if you start with a definition of it, Pete, and then let’s get into your question here, the title obviously is The Mentally Strong Leader, which presumes that it’s about mental strength. Mental strength is the ability to regulate your emotions, your thoughts, and your behaviors productively, no matter what. For us adults, it’s how we manage internally so we can lead better externally.

And to your question now, I think as adults, we intuitively understand that if you want to succeed and be a good parent, and a good leader, and good in life, you have to be able to regulate your emotions, and your thoughts, and your behaviors. But here’s where the rub comes in for kids, guess what? It’s really, really hard to do that as a parent, and even as children.

You layer on how hard it is to grow up in this world, it becomes even harder. So, yeah, mental strength is something we all know we need to succeed. But, man, Pete, it is really, really hard to do. It’s why I wrote the book “The Mentally Strong Leader” to provide that help.

Scott Mautz
I was kind of teasing a little bit about the kids because we had Mawi Asgedom on, who wrote a cool series of books called the “Inner Heroes Universe,” which has like action-hero comic book folks doing stuff and teaching lessons about this for kids, but we had them on because it absolutely is applicable for grown-ups, as we’re called.

And it’s funny, I’ve noticed in my own inner life, sometimes it’s quite easy to manage emotions and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes the frustration rolls off the back and sometimes the frustration eats at me, and it’s not even, I think, necessarily, about the strength of the frustration itself.

Scott Mautz
That’s a really important point you’re bringing up, which is it doesn’t even have to do with the strength of the frustration itself. It’s just really, really hard to manage our emotions, our thoughts, and our behaviors.

And I have found that the key to doing this is you really have to build the proper habits to help you become mentally stronger, so you could train your brain for achievement, which I’ll get into later, but train your brain in general to have the kind of outcome that you want. And habit-building science teaches us that if you want to build a habit, a habit is essentially, Pete, repetitions, right? It’s systems and frameworks that you put in place.

And in The Mentally Strong Leader, I’ve built in over 50 plus systems and frameworks to help you with that difficulty you’re talking about. It helps you build, take that first small step to building a new habit to becoming mentally stronger. It helps you figure out what to do in moments of weakness when you can feel your frustration leaking out, even if it’s not a huge frustration.

Because of that, it’s why, you know, the subtitle of “The Mentally Strong Leader” is “Build the Habits to Productively Regulate Your Emotions, Your Thoughts, and Behaviors” because of the very nature of what you’re talking about, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love it if you could maybe kick us off with an inspiring story of someone who was able to really see some powerful upgrades that made an impact for them by pursuing some of this stuff.

Scott Mautz
Yeah, it’s interesting, Pete. I bet if I had, you know, I don’t even know, if I had 500 people to ask to share a mental strength story, they would all share stories, they would all boil around six core mental muscles, and I’m going to pick a story within the context of that for you. But the six core mental muscles that make up mental strength are fortitude, confidence, boldness, decision-making, the ability to make a decision, to be decisive and make a high-quality decision, goal focus, the ability to stay focused on your goals, and even what I call messaging, the ability to stay positive-minded with your messaging even in the face of supreme negativity.

It’s those six mental muscles that make up mental strength. So, I have collected so many stories from so many people, but I’ll share one quick story that focuses on the fortitude muscle, because most often, Pete, when people think of mental strength, one of the things they might think of first is, “Oh, that’s got to be fortitude. That’s got to be resilience.”

And one woman that I interviewed for The Mentally Strong Leader was a business leader at a packaged goods company, and she would not give in to the demands of a particularly big retail customer. They wanted better service, they wanted lower prices, they wanted differentiated packaging. If she gave up all that to the big customer, it would mean a short-term sales gain and that would be great, but a substantial decrease in profitability over the long term.

And so, through a series of kind of really intense meetings, the retailer called her bluff, and said, “Okay, you’re not going to meet my demands and, fine, you’re out of distribution, and I won’t share the company, I won’t share the retailer for many reasons.” But they said, “You’re done.” And Sharon stuck to her guns, and she said, “All right.”

She got tremendous pressure to get that customer back to grow business aggressively, to get them back and to say, “Hey, make amends. Say you made a mistake.” And she just wouldn’t do it. It meant a 15% catastrophic drop in sales. And I remember she told me this story, Pete. You could see the tears forming in her eyes that it wasn’t an easy choice, and the pressure she was receiving from her chain of command to reverse the decision was brutal, but she refused to play the victim.

She held tight, and she really started to exercise her fortitude muscle. She reframed the loss as a huge sales opportunity to grow with other smaller customers that were more strategic for them, “Hey, forget this big customer,” Sharon told everybody, “Forget them. We are going to get that back and more by operating with people that are more strategically aligned with us.” And so, she kept reframing the opportunity over and over again. She would have tough conversation after tough conversation. She would really attack things with a problem-solving spirit, and despite everybody pounding on her, “Get this big customer back.” She used her fortitude muscle.

And some of the tools that I teach in the book The Mentally Strong Leader to do that, to really, at the end of the day, grow her business even faster than she did without that big retail customer, and she never went back to them. Now I just happen to talk to her a few months ago, and the business is stronger than it’s ever been and more profitable, and had a lot to do with her and her fortitude muscle.

Pete Mockaitis
That is beautiful, and I like that story on so many dimensions because it’s not life or death. You said a 15% drop in sales. And it’s funny, depending on your point of view, you might gasp, “Oh, dear.” Well, the other hand is like, “All right. Well, no one’s bankrupt.” It sounds like there aren’t brutal layoffs harming everybody. But, as a business owner, if I were to get a 15% drop in sales, I would be quite troubled by it, and she persisted.

So, it’s not catastrophic, and yet it does feel very uncomfortable, particularly when you’ve got folks piling on you from all sides, and you can sort of see it in the numbers right there. And it takes some real faith, in terms of it’s like, “Yes, right now, we are making far less revenue. That’s just very clear. However, I believe there’s something that we can do that will be even better.” And so, it’s like, “Well, hope you’re right.” That’s an unpleasant spot to be in.

Okay. Well, so then tell us, you said there’s six big mental muscles here. Can you maybe give us a quick definition of each of the six?

Scott Mautz
Yeah, sure. Okay. So, of course, we have the fortitude muscle. And I think, Pete, fortitude is probably the one that most people could most easily define for themselves. It’s our ability to push through challenges onward to achievement. In the face of adversity, you don’t let it get you down. You keep pressing forward. Fortitude, that’s the most obvious, biggest mental muscle that people first mention.

The second is confidence, which is probably exactly what you think it is, with one exception. Confidence is, the definition of it, is not the absence of doubt. It’s your ability to monitor your relationship with doubt, because we all have a relationship with doubt.

The boldness muscle is probably exactly what you think it is. Boldness paves a direct pathway to growth and it forces us to push our thinking, to get out of grooves, to press past discomfort. And boldness is a huge part of mental strength, as is messaging. Now as a leader, as I often like to say, people are always taking cues from you, Pete. You live in a fish bowl. People always wrap it on the glass to see what you’re going to do next, especially in times of adversity and negativity.

The messaging muscle is all about, as a leader, staying positive, even in the face of negativity. Staying engaged, even when your brain is elsewhere, so that you send the right positive message to the troops, and that they take energy from that message rather than the alternative. There are two more mental muscles.

Decision-making, and I think the best way to explain this is to say that emotion and bias and undisciplined thinking are all enemies of good decision-making. And self-regulation skills, like mental strength, are really required to be decisive and to make high-quality decisions. So decision-making is a huge part of mental strength.

Another mental muscle is goal focus, meaning the ability to really set aside wayward thoughts, emotions, and anything distracting you from the goal at hand, and getting back to focusing on what’s going to make the biggest difference in moving things forward towards your goal. So, there you have it: fortitude, confidence, boldness, messaging, goal focus, and decision-making; the six mental muscles of mental strength that also equate to the highest level of achievement.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s talk about our relationship with doubt, shall we?

Scott Mautz
We shall. I have a tool in the book called the doubt continuum, Pete. And I’m getting tremendous feedback on this tool already, and then I’m going to talk another tool afterwards on confidence, but it’s helpful. I want your listeners and your viewers to think about this thing that I call the doubt continuum. It’s a tool in the confidence chapter of The Mentally Strong Leader.

Think about the continuum with two ends, and on either end are danger zones. On one end of the doubt continuum is overconfidence. You’re blowing through red light signals. You operate in a vacuum. You don’t think you need help from anybody. You just keep doing your own thing. You’re operating in an echo chamber. That’s not good. That’s the opposite of self-doubt. You’re way too confident.

The other side of the scale is also a danger zone, which is where you’re paralyzed by fear. Doubt has overcome you to the point where inaction sets in, and fear takes over, and you have a hard time making a move of any kind. In the middle on this continuum are two areas where you want to be. Either perfectly confident, where you have the right balance between gut and data to inform your decision-making, between experience and just taking a risk and going for it.

Or, also in the middle is where you learn to embrace healthy doubt. This is where you learn to park those doubts that you have in the backdrop. You don’t let them overcome, and maybe this is the most important thing here about this, Pete, is that embracing healthy doubt means knowing that you don’t have the answers to everything. That you’re going to learn along the way, you’re going to find out more as you go, and you believe in your ability to do that, to figure things out as you go.

So, the doubt continuum is really about self-awareness, getting you to understand, “Am I either letting fear take over or am I too confident? How do I sit in the middle, and either be perfectly confident or embrace and work with doubt in a way that’s productive and healthy?” Does that continuum make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is very good, really good. And I think about that overconfidence reminds me of one of my favorite quotes that I really resonate with, which is from former U.S. Secretary of Treasury, Robert Rubin, who said, “Some people are more certain of everything than I am of anything.” And I think that those people are in that overconfidence zone and it’s dangerous because, this is one of my, I don’t know if you call it pet peeve, or one of my things lately, I’m sort of astounded by the confidence at which people say certain things.

It’s like, “Do you have a crystal ball that predicts the future? Have you ever been wrong or experienced the emotion of surprise before? Because I am amazed that you are so sure that it’s going to work out just the way you predict.”

Scott Mautz
Pete, isn’t it why we have a hard time even agreeing on the facts in today’s society, right? It’s because of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Because we’re very confident about our own facts.

Scott Mautz
Yeah, that’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
Or our theories, we think they’re facts, but they’re really hypotheses, perhaps we should say. And so, I think that’s really great, a really great tool right there to know that a lot of us are operating in a danger zone.

So, the doubt continuum is really handy in terms of, if you are super confident all the time, you are, in fact, in a danger zone. And if you’re avoiding something, that is a variety of fear paralysis that has you. So, help us out, Scott, if we find ourselves in one of the extremes of the continuum, what should we do about it?

Scott Mautz
Yeah, there’s another tool that kind of goes along with this. It’s a kind of partner to help you on the confidence front. So, if you’re on either side of the scale, you’re obviously trying to get to a place where you can embrace healthy doubt. You can’t do that until you have greater self-acceptance, Pete. So, there’s a really powerful tool that’s a partner to this in The Mentally Strong Leader to help you build your confidence, that I call the self-acceptance scale.

Now, I want you to think about a different scale, Pete. On one side of this scale, visually, picture this, you have this term called self-acceptance. It’s nirvana, right? This is the highest form of self-regulation where you’re not allowing unpleasant thoughts and emotions and behaviors to be unproductive in your life. You’re regulating yourself in a place where you accept all that is true about you. You’re in a place of self-acceptance. That’s where you want to be on the spectrum, on the self-acceptance scale.

Now, on the far right of this scale, and we’re going to talk the in-between in a second. On the far right is the opposite of that, which is what I call imposter syndrome. This is where you’re not accepting your skills and your accomplishments. You downplay them. You question how you got to where you are. It’s the lowest level of self-regulation because you’re allowing unproductive emotions and thoughts and behaviors make you question. You’re allowing them to question who you are.

Now, in between, there are degradations of self-acceptance that happen along the way. And the point of this scale, Pete, is to help people increase their self-awareness of, “What happens when I’m in a space of self-acceptance? How do I start to erode myself over time all the way to the point where I can be as bad as imposter syndrome?” And it starts with self-awareness, knowing the points on the scale.

The first point to the right on the scale of self-acceptance, that first degradation in confidence, is approval seeking. When you start to chase the approval of others, when you start to chase approval instead of authenticity, being the authentic you. That’s the first sign that you’re not really accepting yourself. You need others to tell you that what you’re doing is okay.

The next degradation is when you start to compare to others. Sometimes hear that, the only comparison that matters is to who you were yesterday, and whether or not you’re getting better each and every day. And, yes, of course, Pete, some comparison is good. I’m sure you compare yourself to other podcast hosts and say, “Oh, he or she is doing this, and I could do that to be even better.” And that’s good.

The comparison I’m talking about that’s painful is irrelevant comparisons. Like on social media, when we compare ourselves to some model version of some other person, when we compare our blooper reel to everyone else’s highlight reel, and it starts to really gnaw at our confidence, when we assume that that person in social media got to where they are because of circumstances that were perfect for them, or because of how skilled they are, and I’m not there because of all the bad things about me.

Then the next degradation is negative inner chatter that kicks in. We start to beat ourselves up, forgetting that sometimes the enemy is the internal me. One last degradation, and then I want to get your reaction to all this. One farther point over on the scale is when we actually stop and say and believe, Pete, “I’m not enough.”

And I want your listeners to hear this, and if you’re viewing this for any clip, I want you to look in the camera when I say this. You are enough and you don’t have to take on everything by yourself. And so, the self-acceptance scale helps you to understand and raises your awareness of all the ways our self-acceptance degrades over time. The more aware you are of these, the more equipped you are to resist each and every one of them. And you’re better suited to be self-accepting, you’re better suited to overcome doubt, you’ll be more confident. That’s a lot. Does it make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Well, Scott, I love this in that we’re talking about self-acceptance, and we talked about a scale. When you said degradations, I think, “Oh, I think he meant gradations.” But, you know, it is a degradation. It is the degree to which it has been degraded. And it is also a gradation in terms of, “Where along the scale are you on that journey?”

So, first of all, and it’s funny, and, for me, personally, it’s kind of volatile, you know? Like, there are some days where, boom, total self-acceptance, awesome. And then other days where, yeah, I do. I do want approval or winning or beating in competing and comparisons. And so, it’s intriguing how, and I don’t know what’s behind it. It’s just like not enough sleep or what is behind the volatility. So, I’ll ask you that first. What are some of the drivers that make it such that, on some of these things, we have good days versus bad days? Like, what are the variables, the X factors behind the scenes?

Scott Mautz
A lot of what my research has shown me on this front, Pete, is, first of all, a lot of it has to do with the human story. First of all, the fact that every day won’t be consistent. Always playing in the background, is this some level of self-doubt. And people are always surprised when I say confidence is not the absence of doubt. It isn’t. I could tell you. I’ve interviewed, I can’t even count the amount of people I’ve interviewed for The Mentally Strong Leader.

And I could tell you, even the most confident executives that I talked to will not tell you that they never experienced doubt. It’s there. It’s how you manage it. So, this human experience means doubt is always parked in the backdrop. So, it’s natural for it to surface in multiple ways over time, and we forget that. We think the human experience needs to be the absence of doubt, that Pete Mockaitis never has a bad day, that he’s always fully self-confident.

But if that was true in your mind, Pete, I would say you’re probably lying to yourself because the human experience is not that. It is to experience the peaks and the valleys. Now you layer on top of that the environment that we’re exposed to every day, the social pressures that we’re facing, the fact that we have a hard time even agreeing on what the facts are anymore, the fact that there’s more distractions in our universe than there have ever been, the fact that there’s more social tension around the planet, and a lot of more and more things to worry about.

It all adds to this quiet addition to doubt about other things that makes it only natural, Pete, that you’re going to have those kinds of days that are ups and downs. You just need the habits and the systems and their frameworks to help you better self-regulate them, not to eliminate them. Mental strength is not about making emotions disappear. It’s not about necessarily minimizing your emotions. It’s about better managing your emotions, your thoughts, and your behaviors.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that, not minimizing, but managing. And so, to that end of volatility, it’s funny, with that message of “You are enough,” sometimes if I hear that, I go “Yeah, right on. Thank you.” And other times, my response is “Enough for what?” So, lay it on us, Scott, what do you mean by “You are enough”?

Scott Mautz
When I say that, it’s more of a self-evaluative term. I’m not saying “You are enough to be an Olympic gold athlete, Pete,” “You are enough to be the best podcaster on the planet, Pete,” “You are enough to be the best partner to anyone in life, Pete.” I’m not saying any of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like this. Keep it coming.

Scott Mautz
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Am I approval seeking right now?

Scott Mautz
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you’re going to cut all the rest of that out and just play this part over and over and over again. What I’m really saying here, Pete, is “You are not a complete human being, but where you are in your journey is 100% okay.” And I don’t want to go so far as to say it’s exactly where you should be right now, because only you know that.

But what I’m saying, you know, when I say you are enough is to understand that you’re an imperfect being, and that’s okay, and that you don’t have to be everything to everyone all the time. It’s okay to focus on the you-universe, Y-O-U-universe, and not the universe all the time. That’s okay. Where you are in your development is right where you should be as a human being, perhaps. At least we can allow that, you know, of ourselves, and not to think about you are enough compared to any other external standard.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. So, then help us out, if we are having one of those days where self-acceptance, we are not too high on the scale, what do we do about it?

Scott Mautz
Yeah, a good tool, I think, is the way that manifests itself a lot, Pete, is really the middle of the scale where we beat ourselves up with negative inner chatter. And whether it’s you’re seeking approval, you’re comparing yourself, you’re saying you’re not enough, or you’re just outright beating yourself up over and over again, which, by the way, I teach this stuff, Pete, and I still do the opposite of that sometimes.

There’s another tool in the book, that I call taking a self-compassion break, and it’s really, really important and it’s also really, really simple to do. Here’s how you work. When you catch yourself in that moment where you’re beating yourself up, first, you got to get better at catching yourself. And I don’t know how good you are at this, Pete. I’m still working on it. There are days where I’ll be like, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve been beating myself up for like the last five minutes, and I don’t even realize I’m doing it.”

So, you have to get better at that, and I don’t know what letter grade you would give yourself on that. I’d give myself only a B. I’m working on it. I’m getting better at it. In the moment though that you realize that, there’s kind of three steps you take. First of all, stop beating yourself up for beating yourself up. If you catch yourself doing it, accept it, acknowledge it, quickly move to step two, which is, in that moment, to talk to yourself like a friend in need.

And I’m sure this isn’t the first time your listeners have heard this advice, but it’s really powerful to consider. I’ll give you an example before we go to the third step, Pete. Let’s say you and I are chatting, right? We’re old friends, you know, this is my third time on the show, and I start telling you about a podcast I was on that I didn’t feel like I was good on, right? And I’m clearly looking for compassion with you. We’re old friends, right?

So, I start telling you, “Pete, man, I got off this podcast. There were some points I really wanted to make. I didn’t feel like I articulated them well. I forgot to say this other thing. I feel like I came across like an idiot when I was trying to bring value,” on and on and on. After five minutes, you know I’m looking for compassion.

After five minutes, Pete, would you do this? Would you interrupt me and say, “You know, Scott, I’ve heard enough and I’ve come to a conclusion, that you’re a complete loser”? Would you talk to me like that when I’m clearly in need? I don’t think you would. So, it begs the question, “Why would you talk to yourself that way ever?” It’s not productive.

Pete Mockaitis
What you’re surfacing here for me now is sometimes I can be too quick to jump to solutions in terms of like, “Well, you know, Scott, what happened one time is I actually had a guest who thought they did a bad job and they said, ‘Hey, Pete, I don’t think I did a good job. Can we do a do-over?’ And I said, ‘Hey, thanks for asking. Sure, we can.'” So, anyway, there I am, I’m sort of, you’re looking for compassion, and instead I’m offering you problem-solving. But I think the funny thing is I can do that to my own self as well.

Scott Mautz
Absolutely. And oftentimes, that problem-solving thing is something that I do, Pete, and I have others that will tell me, “Hey, dude, I’m not looking for you to solve this. I’m just looking for you to listen.” And sometimes we’ll interrupt with that because it’s easier for us because we feel uncomfortable in what they’re sharing with us, and we want to make it easier for us, when all they really want is just to feel heard, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, absolutely.

Scott Mautz
And so, in that moment, it takes you to the third step in this, which is to remember the 90/10 rule, and it’s based on an article I wrote that went crazy viral a few years back. And the 90/10 rule is simply this, Pete, this is the third step in the self-compassion break. It’s to remember the ratio for how you should value yourself on any given day, which is to say it should be based 90% on self-worth, 10% on assigned worth.

How you value yourself should be based 90% on self-worth, self-appreciation, self-love, self-respect, self-acceptance, 10% on assigned worth, what others think of you, that occasional slice of external validation that we all need. The problem arises, Pete, when, in our minds, in our formula, that 10% external validation rises to 90%, 100% of who we are, and people say, “Well, Scott, shouldn’t you be teaching the 100-0 rule, though, that 100% of how you value yourself is based on what you think?”

And I think that’s a nice theory, Pete. I don’t think that’s the way it works in life. We all need that 10% occasional slice of external validation. But the problem is when that 10% goes to 100% of how you value yourself. The problem arises when you start chasing approval instead of authenticity. The problem arises when you begin focusing on winning love rather than giving love.

And when you remember that 90/10 rule, it really helps to round out and think like, “You know what? I’m going to stop that negative inner chatter because it’s not servicing me in the way that I need to. I need to get back to a place of 90% self-worth, self-appreciation, self-acceptance, and self-love.” And I have been told many times, Pete, that it’s a very powerful tool, a very powerful process for helping folks that need to get past that negative inner chatter.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s interesting is, as I think about my own negative inner chatter, it’s almost never super intense, super dark stuff, although I’ve come to learn that it’s actually quite common in the human condition. It’s just like, “You’re such a worthless, stupid loser.” It’s very sad that there’s a lot of inner chatter like that that happens. And if that’s any listener, I recommend you take a look at that and work on it, because it can be really transformational.

I’m thinking about Peter Attia’s book, Outlive, a very powerful section about emotional health, in which he shared some of his practices there that I found touching. But my negative self-talk is more like, “Ugh, I’m just not up for all of the stuff I got to handle today. It’s too much for me today.” And I don’t quite know what’s the optimal self-response to that.

Because sometimes, it’s like, “Oh, come on, Pete! We can do this! Come on! Let’s do some Rocky music! Let’s do some, I don’t know, Tony Robbins power moves! Come on! Let’s get after it!” Sometimes that works, the psych up, and then sometimes like, “Oh, well, maybe let’s just take a nap.” And sometimes that works, and sometimes neither of those work, but I want to hear the Scott Mautz approach.

Scott Mautz
What if I told you, if you change one word, one word in your thinking process, it could make a world of difference?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I love it. Lay it on me.

Scott Mautz
And I’ve proven this to work, and it’s very specifically for exactly what you’re talking about, Pete. One of the most common forms of negative inner chatter is like, “Oh, my God, my duties, they’re getting me down. There’s so much to do. I am not in the mood to do all this stuff today. I understand my job is this, and I get it.” Ready for this, Pete? Try this trick. I promise you it really works. I do it. I do this all the time.

I think, “Okay, Scott, I don’t have to do this. I get to do this.” And the one-word reframe is incredible, and I’ll give you an example. Part of my life is to travel around the world as a speaker, an author, a trainer, a work-shopper. And I was in the airport not so long ago, on a layover, and travel is the one part about what I do that I just cannot stand, and I was feeling really down, Pete. I was in Denver Airport, and the flight was delayed. It was going to be a five-hour flight. I was already in a grumpy mood, people were being people the way they can be in airports when flights are delayed, and I didn’t feel like getting on the plane. I just wasn’t in the mood for this.

And I remember thinking, “Wait a minute, Scott. You don’t have to do this. You don’t have to go get on a plane. You get to do this.” By me getting on a plane, that would mean very shortly, within two hours of landing, I would be able to be on a stage in front of, in this case, you know, thousands of people, sharing insight, sharing something that I had learned, and it happened to be a talk about mental strength from the book The Mentally Strong Leader.

And it can really help, Pete, if you just stop to say, “It’s about understanding the privilege and what you still get to do.” And it puts the thinking, “I get to do this” versus “I have to do this,” flips it very quickly to the things that you can appreciate about what you’re doing, and bring you back to the purpose of why you’re doing it to begin with.

Pete Mockaitis
Scott, that’s good stuff. Well, there’s a whole lot of goodies in your book, and I like how you’re just surfacing the tools everyone tells you they love the most. So, Scott, can you give us one more dealer’s choice, whatever you’re feeling?

Scott Mautz
There’s one other tool that I want to share that, I don’t know, may or may not surprise you. It’s not about any one of the six mental muscles per se, but it’s an overall tool, which is the Mental Strength Self-Assessment that is a part of the book The Mentally Strong Leader, and it is a 50-question questionnaire that you take. It takes you about 15 minutes of quiet self-reflection and introspection. And when you’re done with that test, and I have worked with data scientists to build the test to make sure it correlates as tightly as it can with mental strength.

When you’re done with the test, it gives you an overall mental strength score, and then you’ll find out which tier do you score in for mental strength. There are four different tiers, all the way from novice, you’re just learning about the idea of mental strength and building, all the way up to you’re a beacon of mental strength, other people draw from you because of your mental strength, and then there’s the in-betweens.

Besides the mental strength score, it also gives you a score for each mental muscle, so you’ll know, “Oh, wow, my fortitude isn’t quite what I thought. My boldness isn’t where I want it to be. My decision-making needs to be stronger.” And then you can build accordingly your own customized mental strengths training program, which is important because when you go to the gym, Pete, you don’t go to the gym to work every muscle all the time. It would be a 19-hour workout every day. Wednesday is leg day. Thursday is, I don’t know, arm day. Friday is back day, whatever it is.

With understanding what muscles you need to work on, you can choose over time where to pull the levers and where you want to level up in your mental strength. And the mental strength self-assessment can help you to do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, to take that, how do we proceed?

Scott Mautz
A couple of things, of course. Obviously, you can get the book The Mentally Strong Leader which you can find at ScottMautz.com, but I also put together for your listeners a gift. If they go to ScottMautz.com/mentallystronggift, you can download the Mental Strength Self-Assessment for free. It’s actually a 60-page PDF that not only includes the assessment with all 50 questions, it also has prompts in there to help you get the most out of the book The Mentally Strong Leader. So, if they go to ScottMautz.com/mentallystronggift, you can get your hands on the Mental Strength Self-Questionnaire to help get you primed up to get the most out of the book The Mentally Strong Leader.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. Free stuff. We love it.

Scott Mautz
Free stuff is a good thing.

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

Scott Mautz
Yeah, I really believe in this thought of chase authenticity, not approval. I find that to be very, very important to me. And I also like the quote from Eleanor Roosevelt, who said, “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

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

Scott Mautz
Well, very quickly, I did a study for The Mentally Strong Leader. It took me quite a while to complete, but I asked over 3,000 executives a single question, “Thinking of the highest-achieving organizations you’ve ever been a part of, that achieved the most, that overcame the most obstacles, how would you describe that leader?”

When I asked that question, time after time, between 90% to 91% of people described the same leader, a mentally strong leader that has fortitude, confidence, boldness.

And while they might not use the term mentally strong, Pete, when I say, “Oh, wow, so you’re describing these same six mental muscles that they’re flexing. Would this word describe them?” When I put mentally strong in front of them, you could see the eyes lighting up. Even when I hide the term and I say, “Okay, pick a word out of this list that describes the person you just described to me,” they find the words mentally strong, and they circle it, and it tells me that that research really helped me to see, like, I’m really onto something that mental strength may be the leadership superpower of our time.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Scott Mautz
Oh, my favorite book is, I’m not going to give you a business book. I just finished reading Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo. I’m a big fan of the fantasy genre. So, I just read that and I love it. And it’s a close match with the all-time classic The Hobbit, which makes me officially a nerd, I think, Pete.

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

Scott Mautz
My favorite tool is called Unsplash. It’s a great website that you can find free images to use, whether it’s on your website, whether it’s in your presentations or whatever. They just ask that you assign credit to the photographer. So, it’s a very win-win thing. Everybody wins by using the tool Unsplash.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Scott Mautz
My favorite habit is using the self-acceptance scale and really working hard on reminding myself to stop seeking approval of other people, and working on the habit over and over of revisiting that scale to remind myself “I fall into the trap of comparing to others and I need to stop doing that and stop seeking approval.”

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

Scott Mautz
ScottMautz.com. You can learn about my keynotes, my books, my workshops, and all the things I do there at that site, ScottMautz.com.

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

Scott Mautz
Yeah, just to remember that don’t be intimidated by the concept of becoming mentally stronger. The opposite of mentally strong is not mentally weak. We all have a baseline that we work from. And if you can take the mental strength self-assessment, understand where you stand, figure out where you want to level up, and use the tools, use the habits in The Mentally Strong Leader, you too can be mentally strong starting immediately.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Scott, thank you. I wish you many strong days.

Scott Mautz
Stay strong, as I like to say, Pete.