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Mar 27
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1044: Becoming the Boss that Everyone Wants to Work For with Sabina Nawaz

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Sabina Nawaz shows you how to cope with the pressures that come with leadership.

You’ll Learn

  1. The perils of getting promoted
  2. Why asking for feedback isn’t enough
  3. The power of shutting up

About Sabina

Sabina Nawaz is an elite executive coach who advises C-level executives and teams at Fortune 500 corporations, government agencies, nonprofits, and academic institutions around the world. During her fourteen-year tenure at Microsoft, she went from managing software development teams to leading the company’s executive development and succession planning efforts for over 11,000 managers and nearly a thousand executives.  She is the author of YOU’RE THE BOSS: Become the Manager You Want to Be (and Others Need).

 

Resources Mentioned

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Sabina Nawaz Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Sabina, welcome!

Sabina Nawaz
Thanks so much, Pete. Looking forward to this.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited. You have studied managers up close and personal and in the trenches with them. Could you start us off by sharing one of the most particularly surprising and fascinating and counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about us humans and managing from all your years at work here?

Sabina Nawaz
So, this book is not about how to become successful. It’s how to remain successful, and it’s about not all the things that people know, but what do they not know, as you said, counterintuitive stuff. Three of those.

One, being promoted is the riskiest time in your career. It is not power that corrupts, but pressure that corrupts. Pressure changes, not only stresses you out, but changes your actions. And power then blinds you to the impact of those actions. So, the higher you go, the less you know about the impact your actions are having on other people.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, those are big, and those are heavy. Well, I’m excited to dig into all of these promptly. But maybe, first, before we do, can you maybe just orient us to what’s the big idea or main message behind the book, You Are the Boss?

Sabina Nawaz
The main message is that pressure and power can be used for good or for harm. It’s your choice. And the choice comes from not needing to get a personality transplant, or to go on retreats for weeks on end, or to study emotional intelligence for the rest of your life, which I would still recommend you do, but by making a choice to use some simple tools and strategies to tackle the combined effect of the diabolical twins of power and pressure. The higher you go, the more important this becomes.

Pete Mockaitis
Diabolical twins. Okay. We’re sounding the alarm. We’re raising the flag. Okay. Well, so maybe could you share with us a story of the destructive potential that might be lurking for us that we’re not even aware of? So how about you give us a twin tale? Let’s hear a tale of surprised destruction, and a tale of disaster averted through prudent preparation.

Sabina Nawaz
Well, I’ll start with my own tale, because I tell a lot of tales in the book about a number of my clients, and I am not immune from this. I was a lousy manager at Microsoft, but that wasn’t always true. At first, I managed software teams and most of my people said I was the best boss they ever had, I cared for them, I coached them. Those were great years. And then everything changed.

I was running Microsoft’s management development when I was about eight months pregnant. My boss left the company so I took on her job responsibilities, and on my first day, as I’m getting ready to get back to work from parental leave, my assistant Lori calls me, frantic, “Where are you? Steve’s expecting you in 30 minutes.”

She reads the memo I’m supposed to discuss with Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, as I’m hitting warp speed on my way to the freeway. And that set the tone, Pete, for overflowing inbox, packed calendar, infant at home, no peace, no sleep, no patience. I’m sure this sounds familiar to you and to your listeners. And, in a moment, I went from being caring and compassionate to snippy and short. Still 5’3″, but now short-tempered.

In my rush to meet those deadlines, I had no time for detailed instructions or to repeat myself, and I thought I was being efficient. I also micromanaged because I was worried that my team or I would look incompetent to these high-level executives. So, I’m thinking, “I’m killing it. I’m being efficient. Look at how much we’re getting done for the senior-most people in the organization,” until my colleague, Joe, comes to me.

And I take one look at Joe and I know he’s about to give me bad news. My shoulders are tightening, and then Joe says, “Zach is crying in his office because of what you said.” And my gut falls to the floor. Joe has my full attention, not multitasking as usual, and I feel my whole body turned hot from shame, I cannot make eye contact with Joe, I feel so guilty, and I think, “How did I get here? How did I go from being caring and compassionate to this, somebody people apparently fear and really don’t like?”

So, I take a drink of water, I walked across the hallway, knocked on Zach’s door, “Will you go for a walk with me?” And a minute into the walk, I say, “Zach, I’m so sorry. There’s no excuse for how I reacted in that meeting.” And Zach’s eyes brim with tears. And it was in that moment of connection, Pete, I realized, “This is what I want, to treat people with humanity.”

But why had I started behaving badly all of a sudden? Why did I have no idea about it, the impact it was having? And why did more people not tell me? Because pressure corrupts. I wasn’t a bad person. I was a boss behaving badly. But the worst part is I had no idea because power then insulates us. So, that would be a story where things did not go well.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. And, Sabina, I hate to bring you into, it sounds like, a genuinely traumatic experience for you. But for the question mark lingering of curiosity for our listeners, they got to know, what did you say to Zach?

Sabina Nawaz
It wasn’t just one thing. The problem was it was a whole stream of things, which sounded like a stream of being discounted and insulted to Zach. So, he was about to bring up a new idea, and I said, “Nope.” And not only did I say it, I had my hand out there, right almost at his face, going, “We don’t have time for that,” expletive. “We need to get going. Did you not hear me the first time? We are under a really tight timeline.”

So, my voice is elevated. I’m cursing. My hand is out there in front of his face. And then another, a little later in the meeting, Zach says, “It’s okay if you say no to this idea, but can I bring it up?” And I said, “Yes.” And he brought up another new idea, and I said, “No,” right away. No, “Thank you for thinking through ideas. What made you suggest this right now?” None of that.

So, it was this very abrupt, shutting-down action that I reacted to. I stopped thinking. I certainly wasn’t leading. I wasn’t even thinking, and I’m just reacting, reacting to my circumstances and the pressure in an inexcusable fashion. And, you know, of course, as I’m sure you’re aware, when managers treat employees badly, employees then go back to their office, not just crying, but they play video games or research shows that they even deliberately sabotage results.

Pete Mockaitis
Update their LinkedIn, take a look at the opportunities out there.

Sabina Nawaz
Yes, start a secret group chat about you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure. Yeah, and thank you for sharing that. What’s really intriguing here is that, I think we hear stories associated with bosses behaving badly in these ways. And I’m thinking about Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk, where he talks about demon mode, or, you know, tales of Steve Jobs, or any number of famous hard-charging executives. And I think what people often tend to assume is like, “Oh, that’s just their personality. That’s just their management style.”

And so, you’re posing something quite fresh, and it’s like, “Oh, no, perhaps we have a whole lot of humanity buried under there, and it’s these diabolical twins that is going to work on some of these people, and that’s why we see these behaviors manifesting.”

Sabina Nawaz
Absolutely. Absolutely. With very rare exceptions, just like there are no purely good people or purely bad people, we all have good behaviors and bad behaviors in us, there are no purely good bosses or bad bosses. It’s our reaction to the circumstances. That doesn’t mean it should take us off the hook, but it’s not inherent in our personalities.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay. Well, so then, by contrast, could you share with us a tale of someone who got the heads up and didn’t end up succumbing?

Sabina Nawaz
Well, I’ll share the tale of somebody who did succumb, then got the heads up, because that’s what usually happens. I come in; the feedback I’d gotten about this person was he was terrible to work with. He was a bully, people called him a thug, and much worse, words that I won’t use on your show. And we worked together.

Now, this guy, Adam, suffered from what many of my clients suffer from, where they think they’re successful because of some of these traits, not despite these. So, they become innocent saboteurs in their own fate and the fate of their organizations, and that was certainly the case for Adam. He made jokes because he thought that was encouraging people. He used sarcasm to motivate them. Of course, this was all coming across as bullying behavior.

Once he recognized that, so this is why I was saying the heads up comes after the fact often, because nobody wants to tell the person in a position of power what they think they don’t want to hear.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, especially when they’re behaving in a way that says, “I might get my head ripped off for this.”

Sabina Nawaz
Exactly. “Who in their right mind is going to do that? Not only get my head ripped off, I might lose my job.” So, you continue on thinking you’re doing just fine, because, of course, people would give you feedback. You’ve asked for the feedback, haven’t you? Asking for feedback is a waste of time when you have high authority. You’ve got to deploy some other techniques.

And so, in Adam’s case, when I interviewed a bunch of his co-workers and got this devastating feedback, he did work to turn that around. By the way, I never experienced Adam as a bully or a jerk. I experienced him as a wonderful human being, because, of course, we didn’t have that power gap in our relationship through which everything gets filtered as more dire, more directed personally at us either.

And a year later, I interviewed people again, and then people said, “Oh, I was dreading having to work for him again. He’s so much more respectful. I trust him so much more. He is a thousand percent better.” So, that was a beautiful ending to that story.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, indeed. Okay. So, well then, let’s dig into these particular truths that you shared. When we’re promoted, it’s the riskiest time in our career. Can you expand on that?

Sabina Nawaz
Well, of course, it’s also a time for celebration when you’re promoted, but once the bubbly settles, what you might realize is that the very strengths, the superpowers that have gotten you there, are now going to be seen in a very different light. So, for example, as a manager, you can say exactly the same things you said before, but now they’re going to take on a harsher light, a louder tone, a more personal note for the next that are craning up. Their views are less charitable.

Let me give you a couple of examples. Let’s say you are somebody who’s assiduous about details, how might you be seen as a manager?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, a micromanager.

Sabina Nawaz
Yes, a micromanager. Let’s say you’re really calm under pressure, how might that come across?

Pete Mockaitis
You don’t care. You’re not invested.

Sabina Nawaz
Exactly. Ooh, we could keep going back and forth like this, but you get the idea. Strategic becomes manipulative. All of these things can be seen in a whole different light. You need to start to look at your strengths not from how you see them, but how they’re going to be seen from people below. The higher you go, the more that view gets distorted, like a funhouse mirror.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what do you recommend we do when we find ourselves in such a spot?

Sabina Nawaz
One of the first things you can do is, actually, inventory your strengths and start writing down ways in which others might describe it, and put yourself in those shoes. So, one of my direct reports, what would they say? One of my skip levels, what would they say? Somebody who’s a junior employee who reports to one of my peers? Somebody from the outside who now sees my bigger title? So, imagine those soundbites coming at you, and once you see that, you can start to temper things.

Somebody I worked with was very, very strategic, and she would take her time speaking up in meetings because she wanted to see where the thread of the conversation was going, who was speaking, who wasn’t speaking, what was the tone, what was the vibe of the meeting, and, people started thinking that she was very political instead of strategic. They said, “Oh, she’s going to go where the wind is blowing. She wants to see what people above her are saying,” and so on.

Once she recognized that piece of feedback, she went back to her team to explain to them what she was doing, “This is why I’m doing what I’m doing. I have a rule. I don’t speak up right away. And then let me show you, let me demonstrate to you how that has benefited. For example, I was going to go to this meeting and I went in with this particular point of view, but it wasn’t until I heard the third person speaking that I realized this point of view is actually incorrect and it’s going to antagonize, unintentionally, three people in that meeting. Wasn’t it better not to speak up first in that particular case?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s handy. Okay. Well, so it sounds like the master keys there are just let’s get a sense of what is the perception and then let’s provide some context, some explanation. It’s funny, that takes humility on both sides of that there.

First, to put yourself in a position where you’re willing to hear it, and then, secondly, to explain it. Because you might say, if you were less humble, “I’m the boss. I don’t have to explain myself to these folks.” And yet, it seems that, in order to be a great manager, maybe you very well do, in fact, need to.

Sabina Nawaz
Absolutely. Absolutely. And if you’re a manager who has a “yeah, but” raging at the moment, saying, “Yeah, but I don’t have time to do it,” think about how much time you spend undoing things and that it would take a fraction of the time to do it instead.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And you said simply asking for feedback doesn’t work. What’s the means by which we get to the truth?

Sabina Nawaz
Yes, this is really tough because here you have a boss who has no idea how they’re coming across, and an employee who’s not willing to tell you because of the fear that they have across this power gap. So, simply saying, “Hey, would you give me feedback when you notice something?” employees are going to say, “Yes, boss,” and all they’re going to give you is very mild stuff, cushioned in praise.

So, when they tell you everything is fine, what they’re actually meaning is, “Oh, what an ass.” So, you have no idea. So, first of all, any feedback you get, you might want to add a couple of numbers to it to upgrade the severity of what they’re saying. But here’s the other thing, you can actually ask more specific questions, because the quality of feedback you receive is directly proportional to the quality of the question you ask.

If you simply say, “How did I do in that presentation or that meeting?” people are going to say, “You were fantastic. In fact, you should get on the TED stage next week,” because that is not asking for feedback. That is simply asking for reassurance. Instead, if you said, “On a scale of 1 to 10, where was I?” Let’s say they say 8, which you know is going to actually mean a 6 or a 5.

Then you can say, “What would it take, what’s one thing I could do to get to a 9, to get to a plus 1? What’s one thing I did that worked well? What’s one thing I can do to get to a plus 1?” Don’t ask for too much feedback. If you cut it down to one thing, people are more likely to be able to give you something, and you’re more likely to be able to act on it.

One other way to ask for feedback is to externalize the ask. So, instead of saying, “Pete, what’s one thing I could do better at on this podcast?” I might say, “Pete, if you were to channel your most skeptical, your crustiest listener, what would they say about the one thing I could do better?” Now, Pete is freed up, it doesn’t impact our relationship. In fact, it looks like Pete is working for me by channeling some of his listeners.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that a lot, especially when you’re the one asking for the feedback and you suggest the third-party voice. That seems like a real powerful combo. And I’m reminded of, well, some interviewers, I think John Stossel, in particular. He’s just always devil’s advocating, John Stossel. It’s like, “Well, some might say that this is just a means of bringing costs down, and that’s necessary.” He even has the voice, you know, which just cracks me up.

And so, it almost feels a little bit less than courageous when he says, “Hey, I’m not saying it, but it’s some third party,” which, at the same time, as an interviewer, can make your interviewee feel more comfortable, and so, you know, it works. But it’s even better to invite them to think about that third party.

Sabina Nawaz
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very good. Well, so then, in terms of, like, the asking, is this sort of in person, via survey, email, all of the above? What’s the mechanism of collection that you favor?

Sabina Nawaz
All of the above is great. I favor direct conversation, in-person or virtual, of course, these days, especially, but somewhere where we are making eye contact, looking at each other and having a live conversation because you can start to read the cues of the person who’s providing you with that feedback as well, and you can tone it down a little bit more.

You can make sure you’re conveying nonverbal feedback at all times, because they’re, of course, hyper-aware of any twitch that’s going on on your face, because they’re going to go, “Oh, my gosh, I’m fired.” So, it allows for more information to be exchanged as you’re doing this process. It also shows that you truly care. You’re willing to invest live time for it as opposed to a survey.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. Well, thank you. Well, now let’s dig into a little bit the second thing you dropped there with regard to it’s not the power but the pressure that corrupts. Can you expand on that?

Sabina Nawaz
It’s just like when I had all that pressure in that job and I started acting out. So, by corrupting, I mean your behaviors change. Your behaviors change in a way that impact other people adversely. You raise your voice. You have a tone to your voice. You provide harsher criticism than necessary. You cut people off. You interrupt them. All of those things show up when you’re under pressure.

Now, of course, there’s not a single person on the planet who’s not under pressure both at work and outside of work. And I’m sure, Pete, that you have moments where you’ve been under pressure and you’ve done something you’re not proud of, and, gosh, it would be mortifying if that was caught on video and put up on YouTube or TikTok.

And so, it’s no different for bosses. The problem is that the higher we go, the more pressure we have on us, and the more likely we are that one of those is going to subvert our actions and take over.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then when we are in that spot where we are feeling the pressure, what are the best practices to not being a jerk?

Sabina Nawaz
The first thing is to just shut up, and I have this term called your shut-up muscle. And as a manager, it becomes important to buff up your shut-up muscle. So, there’s a shut-up exercise which has many steps, but a couple of those. First of all, be, at least, the third person to speak. There’s no reason for you to jump in the minute somebody asks a question.

All you’re doing there is training everyone to become over-reliant on you and take the back seat, be lazy, or not grow, or feel disempowered on the other side. So, be the third or later to speak. That would be one way to exercise your shut-up muscle.

Another, when you’re on video calls, put yourself on mute by default. So, when you have that fast twitch desire to speak, you can speak, and people are going to go, “Oh, you’re on mute.” And by the time you unmute, you can go, “Oh, actually, that train has passed. I’m good.” It gives your brain a moment to get out of that reactive mode and get back to your senses to be more strategic, and say, “Do I really need to say this thing? Not really.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. The shut-up muscle, that’s really good, because sometimes, in my experience, I am quick to speak because I’m excited, it’s like, “Oh, oh, that thing that you said. Also, this!” And so, I can see what you’re saying when you compare it to a muscle, is it takes some discipline, some restraint, some strength to say, “Yes, I’m very excited. And I can share that in 90 seconds, if it still seems valuable then, and that’s okay.”

Sabina Nawaz
And that’s another key piece, if it still feels valuable then. Another tool for the shut-up muscle is to take margin notes. That is, you’ve got your notepad, and, then in the margin, write down all of your ideas that you’re so excited about, that are getting in the way of you being fully present and likely to cause you to interrupt other people.

If you wait for a while, let’s say you have five notes in your margin, three of those might be suggested by somebody else. That’s great. That means that they’re taking initiative. They’re going to start working harder than you for a change and reduce some of the pressure on you. And the two things that haven’t been said, maybe only one of them needs to be said.

Now you’re going to have a lot more impact because you’ve gotten rid of what I call a communication fault line, which is verbal overkill. If you have just one thing to share and that one thing is shared just by you, it’s not an idea other people thought about, that’s a way you can truly add value in a meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. And can we hear about the power blinding us?

Sabina Nawaz
Well, it’s the part about “Who wants to get their head bitten off?” And also, with power comes the, well, power to take away or give things to other people that matter to them: a raise, a promotion, their very jobs. As a result, people are not going to say things to you that they think will displease you and that don’t feel safe. So, as a result, you’re cushioned by people who are saying yes all the time, cushioned by a lot of praise.

A CEO I worked with, it was the day before their CEO ship was going to get announced, and they said, “You know what, tomorrow I’m going to become the funniest person in this company,” because your jokes suddenly are funny, your ideas suddenly are brilliant. So, you get blind to what else might be going on.

Pete Mockaitis
And what shall we do in that scenario?

Sabina Nawaz
The end of the book has an assessment of 40-plus questions called “360 Yourself,” and it looks at every power gap, every kind of power gap and every kind of pressure pitfall you can fall into, and ask you a few questions to say, “Which of these do you fall into the most?” If you don’t have time, 15 minutes or so, to look at those 40 questions, think about these few.

One, you never receive pushback or different ideas once you’ve shared your idea. That might mean you’re in one of those blind power traps. People think you’re funnier, smarter, faster than you know you are. You justify all of your actions with a “yeah, but.” All of these so you can self-diagnose, “Hmm, yep, that’s happened, that’s never happened, this always happens, therefore, it must mean I’m surrounded in my own echo chamber.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, good to know. Well, Sabina, tell me, any other top do’s and don’ts you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Sabina Nawaz
Because pressure corrupts, and it’s so important to allow pressure to help you shine, like we sometimes do, you know, when we have that deadline and we’re at our most creative, we want pressure to fuel us, not eviscerate us. Our tendency when we get into pressure-full situations is to work harder, to hunker down.

So, my favorite strategy here is to employ what I call blank space, which is actually do nothing. It’s two hours a week, back-to-back, that you schedule to unplug. No reading, no online presence, no conversations. You simply sit and think. And if that’s too much for you, do it in baby steps. Start with 15 minutes or even 5 minutes or 30 seconds. We are human beings, not human doings, but we’re very uncomfortable just being.

Those clients who have taken that time to do blank space have had transformational results. They’ve transformed their companies, they’ve averted disaster from the competition, they’ve even changed their careers completely. It’s a game changer. It takes the calendar management discipline to actually take that time. And then you can do a variety of different things to make use of that time.

You could simply do nothing. You could go for a walk. You could lie in a hammock. These are all things people have done that have worked with me. You could doodle, mind map, draw pictures, whatever, because research shows that our best insights come when we switch off this very busy working part of our brain, right? We’re in the shower. We’re running. We’re commuting. Those are the times where those answers come.

So, when you’re under pressure, thinking, “I’m such a loser. When am I going to get fired? I’ve got to double down,” stop and do nothing and trust that you already know the answer. All you have to do is let the noise die down so that the signal becomes amplified.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So then, it sounds like there’s a variety of things that are acceptable during doing-nothing time, but what’s not okay is talking to other people or engaging with our digital devices.

Sabina Nawaz
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you can walk, you can lie, you can sit, you can have a notebook, and then just roll with it.

Sabina Nawaz
Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And then, in so doing, that’s when these brilliant, transformational, creative ideas just emerge. It’s during the do-nothing time, or is it after the do-nothing time? Or is it both?

Sabina Nawaz
Both. Sometimes you come back, I had somebody who had a near panic attack before his first blank-space time, like, “What do you mean? Tell me again. I’m supposed to do nothing? Nothing at all? How is that going to work?” I said, “Just trust me. Just go do it.” He came back, he’s like, “Nothing happened.” I said, “Well, you know, at least your brain was better rested.” Guess what? After three blank space states, magic started happening. So, it might take a while, or it might be instantaneous.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now can we hear about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Sabina Nawaz
My favorite quote is from the author who wrote The Little Prince, and I cannot pronounce his name. And it says something to the effect that perfection is not when there’s nothing more to add, but when there’s nothing more to take away.

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

Sabina Nawaz
It would be the one I referenced earlier, which is when employees are treated badly, they deliberately sabotage results. Now think about that, Pete. That means they’re screwing themselves over just to diss the boss. And I read about this in a book by Bob Sutton called The No Asshole Rule.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, we had Bob on the show. And a favorite book?

Sabina Nawaz
I am not monogamous in favorite books, and so it shifts quite a bit. Currently, my favorite book is Martyr by Akbar Kaveh.

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

Sabina Nawaz
I use the Pomodoro technique often, which is setting a timer for 25 minutes and using that as focus time so I’m not monkeying around with every little distraction that comes along.

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

Sabina Nawaz
The one they quote back is actually the shut up, shut up more, and sense more as a result. Say less, sense more. Sense more what is going on because no one else is going to tell you.

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

Sabina Nawaz
Take one thing that you’re going to do to improve, and you already know what that is. Everybody does. In fact, you have probably a list of a dozen things. Break it down into the smallest, most ridiculously small unit and do it every day as a micro habit.

So, if you are going to be awesome at your job by being a better listener, once a day, your job would be to paraphrase somebody, or, for five minutes a day, to detach yourself from your phone, leave your phone in another room.

If you’re going to be awesome at your job through better health and well-being, instead of thinking you’re going to go to the gym for 30 minutes a day, do one push-up a day. That’s what a micro-habit is

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sabina, thank you.

Sabina Nawaz
Thank you, Pete.

Mar 24
0

1043: How to Uncover Your Hidden Aptitudes and Choose the Work You’re Meant to Do with Betsy Wills

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Betsy Wills shares the science behind aptitudes and how to use them for a thriving career.

You’ll Learn

  1. Where most career assessments fall short
  2. Why a low aptitude score shouldn’t discourage you
  3. The root of boredom, frustration, and burnout

About Betsy

Betsy Wills is the co-author of Your Hidden Genius and a pioneer in democratizing aptitude assessments. A co-founder of YouScience, she helped bring formerly expensive assessments online, now serving over 25% of U.S. high schools and 600+ colleges. With a master’s in Leadership and Organization from Vanderbilt, Betsy specializes in career guidance, helping individuals align work with innate abilities. Her book empowers adults to uncover their strengths, make informed career choices, and lead fulfilling lives.

Resources Mentioned

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Betsy Wills Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Betsy, welcome!

Betsy Wills
Thank you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting about your work, digging into innate talents, aptitude, Your Hidden Genius. Marshall Goldsmith was raving about the book deal you had, so it must be good, Betsy, right?

Betsy Wills
It’s very good and very necessary for people. Very unique.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, tell us what is unique? I think people think, “Well, I’ve done a Myers-Briggs. I’ve done a DiSC. I’ve done a StrengthsFinder.” You got another one of these assessments, Betsy. What’s sort of fresh here?

Betsy Wills
Okay, I just love that question more than anything. Actually, the assessment is not new, but what it was, was extremely expensive. The assessment is from Johnson O’Connor, which is a career center that you go to in 12 different cities around the country. It costs about $750 to do it. When you do it, you’re doing these exercises that you cannot game on your aptitudes.

And most people do not understand what aptitudes are, and, basically, they’re hidden from people. You may have an inkling that you have certain abilities that are innate, but this is the scientific way to prove that. So, the book includes the aptitude assessment with a code to take online, and that is what’s unique.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, super. So, now when you say aptitude, this is bringing back memories, SAT. Does that stand for the Standard Aptitude or Scholastic Aptitude Test?

Betsy Wills
Originally, it was called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, and the people that make that test realize it is not an aptitude test. It’s not about your innate abilities. It was actually the Scholastic Achievement Test. And so, the term has kind of stuck and been conflated, if you will. But even the Scholastic Achievement Test rebranded itself to be called just the SAT, if you look into that history.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, inside scoop.

Betsy Wills
Inside scoop. So, we have sort of shifted in and moved in our terminology for these things, but aptitudes you cannot study for. They are innate. So, there’s actually 52 that can be measured and they range from, you know, glare factor. Some certain people are really bothered by glare and other people not so much on a continuum. It’s an actual innate ability. We don’t test that because it only really matters if you’re a truck driver or you’re flying an airplane.

Pete Mockaitis
Or a jet fighter, yeah.

Betsy Wills
Yup, it does matter, and they do test it in the military but it’s not one of the pieces of this particular battery. But what we do assess are things that really matter in the world of work. And these are things that typically school does not recognize, things like your spatial ability. Some people are able to see things in 3D very easily, and other people are more abstract. I know we’re going to talk about that in a minute.

And then there are certain cognitive things, like people’s reasoning skills or memories. But all of these things combined can give us great insight into where we’re going to find satisfaction in our work, as well as our best advocations, which I think are quite important.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, 52 aptitudes that we know about so far from science. Now that’s just incredible.

Betsy Wills
Yeah, and there’s others that are coming, believe me.

Pete Mockaitis
So, where might we go to just find the rundown, the list of these little tidbits from glare factor and more?

Betsy Wills
Another good question. So, the other thing that’s been hidden from people or they didn’t realize is the US government and the Department of Labor and Statistics has been tracking every single job and built, basically, a Rosetta Stone of information with each of the 52 and the amount of each 52 that are ideal for each job. So, think of it as this huge dataset.

But until I know your data on your aptitudes, I can’t really give you great career suggestions, and so that’s the purpose, in many ways, of having your aptitudes assessed because it maps to this enormous database, almost like a Match.com for your jobs. So, just like medicine, which has become extremely personalized using data, now we have the wherewithal, if we can have our aptitudes assessed, to find out where we would best fit in different types of jobs.

Now, let me be clear, there’s not one job for one person. There’s many, many options, but it helps you sort of narrow down what is basically a tyranny of choice and the misguidance of saying to people, “Follow your passion,” or, “Do what you are.” You’ve got to know what you are, and this gives you an enormous amount of data to make better decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, Betsy, we don’t do an NPR-style journalistic narrative situation, but now you got me curious about this secret government conspiracy that has constructed the career Rosetta Stone, and we don’t know about it.

Betsy Wills
Right. Right.

Pete Mockaitis
Is it published somewhere deep in a backwoods site?

Betsy Wills
No, no, anybody can access this, and it’s not nefarious at all. It’s called O*NET, and I talk about it in the book, you can see that, but here’s the rub. When you were in high school, and I was in high school, and since the 1960s, they have been using a survey called the interest survey. You took it, I took it, pretty much every high gave it because it was…

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I kind of remember that.

Betsy Wills
Yes, and it asked you, Pete, “Like, on a scale of 1 to 5, do you like building cabinets?” Or, “On a scale of 1 to 5, how do you feel about medical terms or something?” Well, at 17, who the heck knows? You know, we’ve been exposed to almost nothing. But they called it career guidance, and that assessment mapped to O*NET.

And when it mapped to O*NET, with very little information that you self-reported, it would give you career suggestions, like be a funeral mortician hairdresser, or a forest ranger, or a doctor, or a lawyer, things like that. But it was using very scant data to do that that you were self-reporting. So, the database has been very refined and it’s very powerful, but the stuff we were putting into it with those high school surveys, that acted like a boomerang because it was just you telling the survey and it you something back, that’s pretty bad.

And now we know that that information was essentially career malpractice. You really need to have much better data. It’s like if you went to the doctor and you told the doctor you have cancer, and the doctor said, “You know what? I agree. Let’s start the chemotherapy.” You’d be like, “What?” You’d say, “Aren’t you going to run some tests or get some information?” I mean, you don’t self-report yourself like that, and this is the same with careers at this point.

So, that’s really what has happened is this is Career Guidance 3.0. Finally, we’re in an era where we can scientifically understand what we’re hardwired to do, where our best opportunities are, and where we’re going to find the most satisfaction by understanding what our aptitudes are. And that’s why this book is so, so important.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, that’s good, and I love that line about the doctor. You tell the doctor what you have, and they say, “Yep, you got it.”

Betsy Wills
“You’re sure right.” Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So well, so much good stuff. You said they didn’t have a sense of the ideal amounts of aptitudes of different types for different jobs. So, now when you say ideal amount, that triggers me to think, “Hmm, so it’s not just more of everything is better? We’d be worse off having more aptitude in being in certain jobs?”

Betsy Wills
These are the most miserable people. There’s not very many who basically have powerful aptitudes in all of the things you can measure, and nobody does have that. But what you’re looking for and what’s wonderful about understanding what your aptitudes are is you’re looking for a combination of things as unique as your fingerprint.

So, let me give you an example. Idearate, you took it, Pete, and it told you, you were a brainstormer. We gave you a question and you remembered the assessment. I don’t want to ruin it for your listeners, but your result was you were a brainstormer.

Pete Mockaitis
I didn’t know. I was typing things. Was that a lot of things? I have no context.

Betsy Wills
Yes, that was a lot of things.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that was a lot of things. Okay. Go, me.

Betsy Wills
People who score like this, they tend to, you know, it’s like ideas come out like a flood. They almost have trouble turning it off, okay?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s right.

Betsy Wills
At night, I need a glass of wine sometimes to turn this off, okay? So, it’s lots and lots of ideas that are coming to you at one time. The other side of the continuum, people who don’t score as if they come up with a lot of ideas, are called concentrated focusers. So, people who score like you do, make great podcast hosts, salespeople, marketers, journalists, writers, teachers. Pete, you don’t want your surgeon or your pilot to have this, okay?

Pete Mockaitis
“Here’s a fun idea. What if, instead, we cut this other part for funsies?”

Betsy Wills
“Yeah, yeah, like, let’s saw him up this way, you know?” So, the point is that is, oftentimes, the things that are not as strong for us are what unlock our best opportunities. So, think of your aptitude scores as looking almost like a soundboard. You’re going to have certain things that are way up here and certain things way down here. It’s that combination that makes the music sound so great, and that’s really how aptitudes work. So, we’re not looking for A+’s, you know.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s so funny, I was just thinking something about myself I’ve noticed kind of recently is, boy, I love designing processes, but I hate following them. It’s, like, does that make me some kind of a hypocrite? Like, “Listen, employees, you do these things that I’ve spelled out, but I don’t want to do these things,” because it gets boring for me. I want to mix it up.”

And to the notion of having optimal levels, not necessarily just more and more and more, we were talking with a Navy SEAL, Rich Diviney, about what he calls attributes. I’m seeing a little bit of overlap here. And he used, for example, the attribute of empathy, we think, “Oh, that’s a good thing. I want to be empathetic.” But he said, “If your role is being a stand-up comic, you don’t want to have high empathy.”

Betsy Wills
That’ll be highly distracting when you’re trying to make that sarcastic remark.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, you’re going to be offending a segment by necessity in order to be funny. I get maybe it’s possible to be kind to everybody in your jokes, but often those are like fifth-grade pun books, which are not that funny, in my experience with my kiddos. So, I think there’s a lot to be said there. Yes, those aptitudes, it’s intriguing how, if you have a whole lot of a thing, it might not feel like a great fit.

Now, well, you’re making me get all these flashbacks here. I remember I was at a Bain party because I used to do strategy consulting. And so, well, I think there was an event where beverages were flowing liberally, and folks were just sort of speaking their mind. I remember our corporate librarian person said to me, “I don’t know what you’re doing here, Pete.” I was like, “What? That’s not what I want to hear.”

Betsy Wills
“This isn’t a job review, I hope.”

Pete Mockaitis
“I’m trying to advance my career.” And she’s like, “You just have so many creative ideas. The consulting thing, this doesn’t really seem like you.” And I thought, “Hmm, you know, it’s interesting,” because, in a way, I totally vibed with my fellow consultants in, like, the problem-solving, find the insights, communicate it.
But then, boy, once we had to polish that PowerPoint deck for a sixth iteration, I was like, “Aren’t we done? Can’t we just move on?”

Betsy Wills
“No, I’m out.” Well, people, again, that are brainstormers like you, they tend to like to have multiple projects going at one time, and that’s probably what did attract you in Bain Consulting. But I will say, for you and your scores, because I appreciate you taking the assessment and investing in yourself, you scored as a diagnostic problem solver in the inductive reasoning assessment.

Which, if you recall, if anybody out there plays the New York Times Connections game, it’s quite similar the way this is assessed. People who like to draw connections with a lot of ambiguity and not all the information present. And that is how a lot of consultants score because they love problems where not all the information is necessarily in front of them, and they can draw inference well.

So, you scored like that, for example, Pete, and it’s not necessarily that usual to score like you did. In fact, not a high percentage of people score with that diagnostic problem-solving score, and so, congratulations. You should be leaning into that as much as possible.

And some people might tell you, because all of these aptitudes, wherever you score, there’s going to be an Achilles’ heel. And in the book, we talk about the positives and also the challenges for everybody’s course. And in your case, people who score as diagnostic problem solvers, they can tend to procrastinate actually because they work best when there’s urgency. They love when there is kind of a mini crisis or something to solve where they can, you know, the time pressure is on them.

And so, when there’s not enough time pressure, sometimes they create situations where there is time pressure because they like the thrill. I don’t know if that happens to you. I’m not saying you do that because not everybody exhibits the characteristics of some of these Achilles’ heels. I call it aptitudes gone wild, but it is good insight.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, what I really like this notion is you can have a high aptitude on a thing, and that just sounds good, like, “Yeah, I want a bunch of high aptitude. I want to be like limitless, you know, or Jason Bourne. Oh, these guys are so awesome. They can do anything. So capable, speaking all these languages, sniper-ing people far away.”

So, that sounds great, but you’re really highlighting here that you may have a high level of an aptitude, and that does have a shadow side to it. And then, likewise, a low level of an aptitude, things I just sort of felt, ashamed might be a strong word, but in the ballpark of ashamed. So, on the test, there was a “holes being punched into folded paper” situation for spatial reasoning, and I just utterly bombed it.

I could tell, for the first one, which I think was supposed to be easy, I still didn’t understand what I was doing. And I remember I’ve had these experiences.

And I do get lost without GPS, and people say, “Oh, just come back the way you came.” I was like, “That’s not going to be good enough. I’m going to need some more information on how to return from the bathroom to the doctor’s office.” Like, “Oops, which way did I turn on these hallways corridors?”

Betsy Wills
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
I feel, like, embarrassed. Like, I have something wrong with me.

Betsy Wills
Not a bit.

Pete Mockaitis
And you’re saying, “Well, hey, there’s a low aptitude on spatial reasoning.”

Betsy Wills
Spatial reasoning. It’s fine. I mean, that’s actually the one, Pete, that people feel like throwing the computer out the window. And a lot of people, even if they do well at that particular assessment, they don’t realize it in the midst of it. They all kind of come back and go, “That one was so hard.” And I’m like, “Well, you scored as a 3D visualizer.” Or, in your case as an abstract thinker, it wasn’t that easy.

But that fork in the road for people tells us a lot about, for instance, the types of careers we’re going to enjoy. People who score like you do, as an abstract thinker, they tend to be very good at reading emotions of people. They’re very good at so many different things that are more in the idea world, the theory world, the concept world. They like to think in the world of ideas and thoughts and emotions.

Whereas, people who score as 3D thinkers, it’s almost like a scratch that needs to be itched. And when we see that score, we ask them, “You know, what are you doing in your life to use this?” And if you’re a parent, so you know, you can start to see this aptitude emerge very young in children, actually. The kid who’s making the Taj Mahal out of LEGOs at four, and then, you know, me, if I’m trying to do something out of LEGOs, you wouldn’t know what it was even today, you know? It’d be such a mess.

But it’s just fascinating that we can parse these aptitudes and how much they tell us about our satisfaction in our jobs and in our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Betsy, it’s interesting, you’re also illuminating for me, I think, one of the great mysteries of home ownership, which is, “How is it that a contractor or a plumber or an electrician or a carpenter, is just amazing doing things I could not imagine to doing myself?”

Betsy Wills
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
And yet, I often have a heck of a time getting them to pick up the phone, show up? I was like, “Maybe there’s just too much demand for a limited number of tradespeople, and so we’re all just kind of in this boat.” But I think, Betsy, what you seem to be illuminating, this is my theory, there’s some abstract thinking for you.

Betsy Wills
Yes, that’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
My theory is, “Well, hey, they’re great on an aptitude I’m not good at, and I’ve got an aptitude that they’re not so great at. It’s relatively easy for me to pick up the phone and make an appointment, show up, do the things.

Betsy Wills
Come up with the idea, you know, all those types of things, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
But, actually, showing up and making great cabinets wouldn’t work so well for me.

Betsy Wills
And what a waste of time. And that’s also part of the point here is, you know, whether you’re managing a team or managing yourself, why stay on the struggle bus? There’s no point. We call the book Your Hidden Genius because everyone really does have these hidden abilities that they sometimes have recognized or maybe discounted in their lives because school didn’t reward them for it or they just thought, “Oh, everybody can do that,” and that’s really not the case at all.

Pete Mockaitis
No, that’s a huge takeaway right there. And we talked with some folks who are experts in the StrengthsFinder, and that’s sort of a funny thing about strengths is because they’re easy for us, we just assume, “Oh, this is easy for everybody,” but no, no. It’s because we have these strengths, we have these aptitudes.

And it’s also intriguing, “Why stay on the struggle bus?” I guess this might be hopeful or desolate, Betsy. Is it fixed? Like, there’s just spatial reasoning is not going to be improved by me no matter how what kind of exercises I try to do?

Betsy Wills
Well, that is a great question. No, we can do anything with practice, and that is the other good news about knowing what your aptitudes are. It’s often an indicator of where you may need to spend more time, or, for some people, learning a job is harder than actually doing a job, like acquiring the skill may take them longer and be more of a struggle, but all of us can do anything with practice.

But the point, too, is why would you? We all have things we’ve got to get competent at, but why spend a lot of time trying to perfect it or apologizing for why we’re not the best at it? So, I’ll give you an exercise I gave Marshall as well, and that was, you know, do you have a pen handy?

Pete Mockaitis
I sure do.

Betsy Wills
And if your listeners do, take out a pen and just write your name. Right, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
I have a feeling I know where this is going.

Betsy Wills
You probably do, but why not? So, now, switch hands.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty.

Betsy Wills
Okay. I know you’re going to enjoy this.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Betsy Wills
Okay. So, how does your non-dominant hand signature look?

Pete Mockaitis
You almost said left, which is correct. Well, it’s sloppy, it’s silly, it took longer, it was harder to do.

Betsy Wills
Right. Slow. Okay. Pete, if you lost use of your dominant hand for some terrible accident, I hope that never happens, and you had to use your non-dominant hand for the rest of your life, even by the end of today, you could get better. You would get more relaxed doing it. You could practice and get better. But you’re never going to be a calligrapher, okay, no matter what you do. So, that’s the way aptitudes work. You can become competent, but spend more time on the things that come naturally and easily to you versus constantly being frustrated.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that seems accurate that if something is hard for you to improve on for a long time, the odds are slim you will ever become exceptionally world-class at that thing.

Betsy Wills
Right. Well, think of it as also like you don’t become a musician at 35 years old, all of a sudden, because you work really hard at it. People have natural abilities that allow them to enjoy doing it and to get better and better at it the more they practice. But if your running start is at a different spot, it’s going to take you longer and become more frustrating as you go.

And that, again, doesn’t mean if you’re not a great musician from birth you can’t enjoy music or do well. But we all know, there are certain people who just it comes easily to, and that’s great. And there are things that are easy for you that aren’t easy for me, and that’s okay, too.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, with the book Your Hidden Genius, you’ve got the link to the code that lets you do the test and learn these things. And then there’s the O*NET from the government.

Betsy Wills
Matching, yup.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I mean, hey, I think it’s a great move to buy the book, do the assessment. If folks just aren’t going to, how do we take advantage of some of these insights without it?

Betsy Wills
Well, if you read the book, we did design it such that if you didn’t take the assessment, which I don’t know why you wouldn’t, but if you didn’t, we tell stories. And so, we explain these concepts and we talk about, you know, we talked to over 80 different people from ages 75 down to 18, because by the time you go through puberty, your aptitudes are fixed. So, you wouldn’t take an aptitude assessment any earlier than when you’re sort of in high school. But if you take the assessment, you’re going to score the same at 17, 37, 80.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding?

Betsy Wills
Yes, because, again, we’re not testing what you know. We’re just looking at the baseline. So, it’s kind of fun to take them, but if you get into the book, we’ll go through all the different aptitudes and tell stories and talk about how they come out with different people’s careers and their advocations as well. But you talked about other aptitudes people were discovering. We have a chapter on that which I think is kind of cool. I’ll tell a story if you are interested about smell, which they’re really researching these days.

Certain people can smell things better than other people. This is why certain people enjoy wine or cooking in a different way. And there’s a woman, many people may have read this story, maybe you did, who had a husband with Parkinson’s disease, and he died. And she went to the doctor after and she said, “You know, I could smell it on him,” and he was like, “What do you mean you could smell it on him?” She goes, “I could smell it on him for years.”

And so, they got interested in this, and they gave her 24 T-shirts, and they said, “Tell me which of these people have Alzheimer’s.” I mean, have Parkinson’s, excuse me. And she picked out 12, and they said, “Well, that is remarkable because we have 11 candidates with it, and all 11 were in your pile. That other person not, but that’s remarkable.”

And two months later, the 12th T-shirt wearer was diagnosed. And it’s just phenomenal what they’re able to now study around people being able to smell diseases. And it is actually, I believe, an aptitude. It hasn’t been proven, but it’s things like that that are fascinating to me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it is fascinating, and I just can’t let it go. If one smells Parkinson’s on somebody, I am assuming the person with Parkinson’s, biochemically, has a smellable thing going on.

Betsy Wills
A disease.

Pete Mockaitis
And non-Parkinson’s sufferers don’t.

Betsy Wills
That’s the implication.

Pete Mockaitis
But we don’t know what that is yet, like a film on the skin or like a…?

Betsy Wills
I guess. I’m just now yacking away here because I think it’s interesting, but look up the story. But they do a tremendous amount of research on smell. But this is back to what I’m saying. These are science-based, research-based aptitudes that makes this quite different. You can’t self-report that “I’m good at this or good at that,” or have this aptitude. You do have to take these game-like exercises. And as you know, it took 87 minutes to complete, so it’s not a quickie fill-in-the-blank kind of assessment. Did you have fun doing it?

Pete Mockaitis
Most of it.

Betsy Wills
Okay. Well, it wasn’t all fun because it shouldn’t frustrate you, but, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, interesting. All right. So, let’s just summarize some of these implications. We got these aptitudes. They are not skills or knowledge or abilities. They are things that, dare I say, innate within us. We’ll know, and they’ll be unchanged post-puberty for the rest of our lives, and it behooves us to seek out opportunities that line up nicely with our amounts of aptitudes in different styles, like a Rosetta Stone, it maps just right, and we will struggle more if we are pursuing opportunities that are a mismatch to our aptitudes.

Betsy Wills
Yes. And further, you will be bored and frustrated if you are not using your aptitudes, and that’s really the challenge, is letting things sit dormant. Because a lot of people’s sort of boredom and depression and things like that is, oftentimes, because of an undeveloped aptitude. So, remember, when you discover what your aptitudes are, the onus is on you to apply learning and practice to develop them.

Motivation is sold separately, so you’re understanding what your opportunity set is, where your learning rate is going to be that much faster if you apply the aptitude. So, it’s clues for things you’re going to enjoy. It’s positive news. It’s not a dream killer. It’s all about, “Here are so many opportunities I might have left on the table. Here’s how I can pivot if I need to. Here are the skills I can develop that are going to feel great.”

It’s positive news, and that’s really the purpose of the book is to give people great motivation and excitement around what their possibilities are, rather than, what I would say, is continue to be the walking dead because a lot of us are sort of give up weirdly early about our development, and this will energize you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, to do a bit of a recap, you mentioned that there’s a core four aptitudes: spatial visualization, idea generation, inductive reasoning, and sequential reasoning. Can you share what makes these the core four, first of all?

Betsy Wills
Well, those are just hugely, again, like forks in the road for people, like big ones that if you’re not using them, it’s going to bother you, or if you’re over taxing them, you’re going to feel burnout and exhaustion. So, knowing where you fall on those continuums is really, really helpful. The others are important, and some people have outliers.

Like, one that can be assessed is certain people can identify color really well, hue discrimination. So those are specialized aptitudes, and those can be super important if you have them. But those core four are going to impact most of us in our decision tree, and then the others are sort of like ornaments on that tree. Very helpful to know.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that, that metaphor there. And, it’s funny, well, hue distinction, I’m thinking about physical therapists. I guess this is my poor spatial visualization going on because I’m talking about Katie will say, “Does it look like this shoulder is higher or lower than this?” I was like, “I couldn’t tell you. I am clueless. They look normal to me.”

And, whereas, physical therapists, I’m often very impressed, like, “Oh, do you see how you’re doing this?” I was like, “No, not at all do I see how I’m doing this,” but they do.

Betsy Wills
See, they do, and there’s a perfect use of their spatial visualization, they just see it, you know?

Pete Mockaitis
So, maybe if you could lay it on us in terms of, if you could archetypically share what might be a great role or a terrible role for someone high and low in each of the core four. So, spatial visualization, we said, hey, great physical therapists, maybe great.

Betsy Wills
Oh, yeah, architect. Okay, let’s get into it. Architect, landscape designer, graphic designer, anybody working with a lot of charts, for sure, crafts people, anybody you know in the building trades, potters, you know, people. Let’s talk about avocations. Like, if you have a spatial visualization, you might enjoy things like sailing or even golf where you’re estimating space or there’s a whole list of things in the book that talk about each aptitude and where you fall but that would be one.

People who score in the abstract world, like I said, they tend to like things that are more theoretical in nature, even the law, a lot of typical types of law, like constitutional law would be an example, maybe not patent law, which would need more spatial visualization, if that helps you understand it. And then, by the way, there are people who score in the middle of each on this continuum. So, we break it down into three groups. And you will learn something in the book about that, too, wherever you score on that continuum. So, that’s spatial.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And idea generation.

Betsy Wills
Okay, idea generation: teachers, journalists, public speakers, comedians, actors, improv, salespeople, certain types of consulting, for sure, appeals to that, that’s brainstormer, strong idea rate. One of the Achilles’ heels of being a brainstormer might be that you may have a habit of interrupting people because you just can’t get all those ideas out at once.

Concentrated focusers, which is the other end of this continuum, tend to be excellent at implementing ideas. They tend to be the “Let’s pick an idea and run with it and go with it.” They tend to enjoy things that take a high amount of concentration, if you will. Anesthesiologists, for example, airline pilots, those would be examples. But there’s many, many things that utilize that concentrated focuser score.

Inductive reasoning is the next one we might pick. So, this is the one I talked about where you’re very comfortable drawing a conclusion under time pressure. Basically, if you’re an inductive reasoner, you need to be on a game show because you love the, you know, got to make a decision under time pressure.

But think of an ER doctor where someone comes in with three symptoms and they’ve got to really make that decision quickly, or a Wall Street trader. Sometimes an investigator might be a diagnostic problem solver. Consultants, for sure, like you were. The other opposite end of that continuum is fact-checking, a fact checker. That’s the people who really are not comfortable making decisions under time pressure.

Oftentimes they need to be pushed into the pool. They’re going to look at a hundred colleges before they’re going to make a decision because they’re looking for that one piece of data they may not have. They make great risk managers. They make wonderful HR managers because, when you’re hiring someone, you can’t infer from three different pieces of information and make a decision, or you shouldn’t. You’re going to need to do the background check, and they’re going to be the people who are going to complete all those steps. So, again, value with every score.

And then the last one is sequential reasoning. I don’t know if you remember that one where you were putting boxes in order. Sequential reasoning is interesting. A lot of people who score as sequential reasoners tend to have messy desks because all of their file cabinets are in their head. They don’t need organizational structures as much. They tend to be able to put things in order. They’re like, if they’re going to write a paper, they don’t need an outline. It’s all kind of organized in their head.

The people on the opposite end of this, we call process supporters, and they’re excellent at maintaining systems. Think about librarians. Think about people who, you know, don’t move their cheese. If you’re going to change a system, you’ve got to really explain it to them. But they’re going to make sure that system is followed to a T, and they’re excellent at it. And we need all types on our teams. If I may, I’ll tell a quick story also about that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, please.

Betsy Wills
There was a guy named Charlie Plumb, who was a war hero and he took off from his aircraft carrier and was ejected from his airplane on a parachute and shot down into enemy territory and spent about two years, I think, in solitary or something, and got out and went and made all these speeches.

And one time, he was giving a talk at a restaurant, and a man came up and tapped him on the shoulders, and he was a sequential reasoner, Charlie Plumb was. And he said, “I was on the aircraft carrier with you.” And he said, “Oh, well, soldier, I’m glad to meet you,” Charlie Plumb did. And he said, “You know, I’m the guy who packed your parachute.” He was a process supporter.

He didn’t come up with a new way to pack the parachute. He did it the same way every time, and this is just like teams. We need all different types of people with all different aptitude scores to make us successful. So, in the end, this is all about empathy, and it’s about love. It’s about not seeing other people as a flawed version of us. It’s really valuable information.

Pete Mockaitis
Well said. Yeah, that feels like that’s a transformational key right there for many of our relationships, not to see others as flawed versions of ourselves.

Betsy Wills
Especially your spouse.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, but rather a person who has their own unique profile of different levels of aptitudes. Beautiful. Well, now could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Betsy Wills
“A wink is as good as a nod to a blind mule.” Barney Fife said it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Betsy Wills
I’m reading Hampton Sides’ The Wide Wide Sea right now. So, my favorite book is always my last book that I’m reading. I would recommend it to anyone. It’s about Captain Cook’s travels. Captain Cook ended up being cannibalized on Hawaii in the 1790s, and it’s a fascinating read.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Betsy Wills
Right now, it’s ChatGPT.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Betsy Wills
It creates images for me, which I think is a lot of fun.

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

Betsy Wills
Network.

Pete Mockaitis
One word, okay. Do it! And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Betsy Wills
I would say go to YourHiddenGenius.com and purchase the book, and you can reach out to me that way as well.

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

Betsy Wills
Bring your best opportunities to your jobs and advocate for doing activities that meet your aptitudes and shed the things that don’t.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Betsy, thank you.

Betsy Wills
Thank you.

Mar 20
0

1042: Self-Improvement through Personality Change with Olga Khazan

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Olga Khazan discusses the surprising findings on how personality change can be possible and beneficial.

You’ll Learn

  1. The problem with “authenticity”
  2. The surprisingly simple secret to changing your personality
  3. The simple interventions that make us less neurotic 

About Olga

Olga Khazan is a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author, previously, of Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World. She has also written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Vox, and other publications. She is a two-time recipient of the International Reporting Project’s Journalism Fellowship and winner of the 2017 National Headliner Award for Magazine Online Writing. She lives with her husband and son in Northern Virginia.

Resources Mentioned

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Olga Khazan Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Olga, welcome!

Olga Khazan
Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m excited to talk personality. We are going to get into the goods. Could you kick us off with a particularly fascinating discovery you made while putting together Me, But Better?

Olga Khazan
One finding that really surprised me is that when introverts are told by researchers to go out and act like extroverts for a little while, so to socialize with people for a few minutes and then come back, and they’re like, “Okay, how did that feel?” And they’re like, “Now I feel happier.” Okay, so the introverts feel happier acting like extroverts. And they said something else that was interesting, which is they also said, “I feel more true to myself.” So, they actually feel truer to themselves when they act like extroverts.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, yeah, I could chew on that one for a while. Like, what is true, then? What is self?

Olga Khazan
I know, right? Yeah, that’s kind of where the book goes. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, so that’s intriguing right there. So maybe, what’s sort of the big idea with the book, Me, But Better?

Olga Khazan
So, the idea is that our personalities are the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that come most naturally to us but they also help us achieve our goals. So, your personality can help you get a promotion. It can help you stay calm in times of crises. It can help you make more friends. And so, if your personality is not helping you reach your goals, if it’s kind of standing in your way, it’s actually possible to change your personality.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, it is, in fact, possible to change your personality. Olga, tell me, what about being authentic and true to yourself? Aren’t those noble virtues?

Olga Khazan
Yeah, so the problem with authenticity is that what is most authentic at any given moment is not always what is best for us. So, if you think about it, what might be most authentic to you on a Friday night after a difficult week at work is to just be at home on the couch by yourself, watching TV, and drinking a bunch of wine. That might be the most authentically you thing to do.

But if you do too much of that, that’s not healthy. And what the research shows is that, actually, in that moment, what might be kind of best for your mental health is to actually reach out to someone else or to do something a little bit more active or at least more socially connected. So, this is kind of challenging the idea that we should always be doing whatever is… feels most “authentic” rather than whatever will kind of help us follow our values and achieve our goals.

Pete Mockaitis
Interesting. So, well then, this is getting philosophical rather quickly. What does authentic even mean? How are we defining that?

Olga Khazan
So it can be sort of just whatever you feel inside and, like, who you really feel you are, but it can also be the things that you get good at over time because you apply yourself to them and you get practice doing it. So, I talked with one researcher, Sonja Lyubomirsky, who explained that. She now is a runner. She’s like an avid runner. She runs all the time.

But she actually took a while to get into it. Like, in those first few runs, she didn’t really feel like doing it. It wasn’t an authentic thing for her to do. But now that she has gotten better at it, she’s gotten more experience, probably figured out what shoes are the right ones, she does feel like it’s authentic to her to go running. So, what’s authentically us can actually change over time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, indeed. If we think about authentic as just meaning what you feel like doing and what’s comfortable and natural to you, then, certainly, that would flex and move and shake, versus if authentic is living in alignment with your values, that’s a very different view of what authentic is, versus authentic is just not straight-up fraudulently telling lies.

Olga Khazan
Yeah, exactly. And those values can kind of require us to take on new personality traits to fulfill those values, and I can go into more detail about that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. Well, when we say the word personality then, I get all about the definitions here, what do we mean, specifically, by this term?

Olga Khazan
So, personality, it’s made of five traits. Most psychologists think it’s made up of five traits. You can remember them with the acronym OCEAN. So, O for openness to experiences, C for conscientiousness, E for extroversion, A for agreeableness, and N for neuroticism, which is the bad one. You’d want to be low on neuroticism and you want to be relatively high on some of the other ones.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, so the Big Five, this is great juicy areas of debate, and I’ve read some of the articles. So, as compared to, say, the Myers-Briggs type inventory, that is another thing people use to say, “Oh, this is my personality. My preferences are extroversion, intuition, feeling, judging.” And so, how do you think about the Big Five relative to other personality typologies?

Olga Khazan
So, a lot of people are really invested and really into the MBTI, the Myers-Briggs, and also the Enneagram, like they have a lot of fans and people, like, really know their INTJ thing, and they’re like, “That’s who I am.” So, I really don’t like to yuck people’s yum, or like take that away from them if that’s like really, really important to them.

There is a little bit of scientific basis behind it, so I wouldn’t say it’s just like totally fake, but most scientists steer clear of personality tests that put people in categories like INTJ or like an Enneagram number, because most of us actually don’t really fit very neatly into categories. We kind of fall along a spectrum of all five personality traits.

So, you might be mostly an introvert, but you might be like 30% extroverted, so you’re not totally like an introvert. It’s not like you can never be extroverted. And so, really, what they prefer is to kind of show how you rank compared to all the rest of humanity on these five traits, because they all see them as a spectrum.

Pete Mockaitis
And, tell us, where can we go and see where we fall against the spectrum of humanity on each of these five traits?

Olga Khazan
So, what I used is a website designed by a researcher named Nathan Hudson. It’s a website called PersonalityAssessor.com, and he actually posts well-validated personality tests that other scientists use as well. He just put them in a web-friendly format so you can click through and get a score instead of like leafing through psychology studies and like the index or whatever. So, he’s put it up online but it’s called the IPIP, and it’s usually, like, either 120 or 300 questions depending on which version.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And it’s free?

Olga Khazan
Yeah, it’s free. He uses the data, I think, in his studies, but you don’t have to tell them your name or anything.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool. All right. Well, that’s super. And then, yes, that debate is juicy because I have led Myers-Briggs workshops in which people were debating, “Oh, I don’t quite know which one fits, which one fits.” And so then with this system, you just completely sidestep this, and although I would say I got to give some pros to the Myers-Briggs for it’s really hard, I think, in a team setting to say, “Oh, I scored really high on neuroticism. How about you?” Like, “Oh, really? No, not at all. You’re the neurotic one,” it seems. And so, that could be sort of an off-putting experience in a team setting.

Olga Khazan
Totally.

Pete Mockaitis
But for a pure introspection situation, I mean, all for it. Let’s go where there’s a boatload of research here, and Big Five has got that going for it.

Olga Khazan
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the Myers-Briggs is definitely more fun, and I think for, like, usually corporate environments like it, because it kind of also talks about, like, how people like to think about problems and resolve problems, which is not really what the Big Five is doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yep, understood. Well, so could you give us a quick rundown definition of what do we mean by openness, what do we mean by conscientiousness, etc.?

Olga Khazan
So, openness is like this kind of ambiguous trait. It’s basically like imaginativeness and creativity. Political liberalism is also part of it and, like, verbal intelligence, but not mathematical intelligence.

Pete Mockaitis
If I may, is that actually a part of the thing that they’re measuring, or just a fun correlation they seem to find out there?

Olga Khazan
It’s a fun correlation. What they’re measuring are things like, “I like to debate abstract ideas,” “I like poetry.” Open people tend to like kind of really avant-garde music and art and like foreign films. Like, they’re not watching The Avengers. They’re watching, like, whatever came out at the indie theater last week.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Olga Khazan
So, there’s that. Okay, so conscientiousness is sort of like productivity, organization, meeting deadlines, being really diligent. Extroversion is things like friendliness and cheerfulness, and also just like activity. Like, extroverts are just always on the go. Agreeableness is sort of like warmth and empathy, and also trust in others. And then neuroticism, which once again is bad is depression and anxiety.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, someone who is high in neuroticism might find a given challenge or experience to be more triggering of depression and anxiety feelings. Is that what we mean?

Olga Khazan
Yeah, exactly. So, when I noticed this in myself, it was sort of like, I would have a perfectly fine day, nothing especially upsetting happened, but minor frustrations would kind of start to stack up, and I would kind of start to use them in a story where it was like evidence that, “I’m just cursed and everything bad happens to me. And my life is just bad and it will never go well.”

And so, that’s kind of the cycle I was hoping to break out of, is sort of this, you know, neurotic people that just, like, really latch on to those negative thoughts, very, very hard to see the silver lining, and it kind of sucks the joy out of life, because, really, the amount that you enjoy life is determined moment to moment and day to day, and not sitting back on your deathbed and thinking like, “Did I get stuck in traffic like 12 times or 13?” you know, or whatever else.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, understood. Okay. And so then, your big idea here is that you can take these assessments, PersonalityAssessor.com or wherever, and you can see where you land, but that’s not the end of the story. We have the capability within us to say, “Hmm, I would prefer to be less neurotic, and that is an option for me.”

Olga Khazan
Exactly, yeah. And it’s, basically, so this research, once again, by Nathan Hudson, and a few other researchers have replicated it in Switzerland and other places, is what it basically shows is that if you behave in a way that aligns with the kind of person that you’d like to be, you can actually shift your personality in that direction.

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds important. Let’s hear it again.

Olga Khazan
So, if you behave in a way that aligns with the kind of person you’d like to be, you can actually shift your personality in that direction.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that sounds a little bit like fake It till you make it.

Olga Khazan
Yeah, that’s, I think, one of the titles of one of his studies, or like one of the takeaways. He’s like, “Fake it till you make it is an appropriate way to change your personality.” Or, he says it in some very academic way, but, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it’s, like, if I would prefer to be less neurotic, I would behave in the fashion like a less neurotic person would behave.

Olga Khazan
Yeah, and neuroticism is one, so, yeah, you can just simply think to yourself like, “Oh, man, this day was so terrible. I got stuck in traffic,” and some of the exercises would be like journaling, “Okay, but what are three good things that happened today?” Or, “What’s a different way of looking at this that’s less negative?” So, I did do some of that journaling, but most of the kind of actionable recommendations for neuroticism are actually various forms of mindfulness and meditation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, mindfulness and meditation, it seems like there’s a boatload of studies saying it’s good. Can you share with us any of the particularly striking findings here?

Olga Khazan
So, the meditation class that I took, which is called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, I think it’s like an 8- or 10-week class, and it’s actually been found to work as well as Lexapro for depression and anxiety.

Pete Mockaitis
So, this is an eight-week course. Where does one go about doing it?

Olga Khazan
Anyone can sign up for it. I think you just Google MBSR, and they’re virtual. They’re all over the country. You can go in person. You can go on Zoom. I did mine over Zoom because the pandemic was still kind of going on. But it basically consists of a 45-minute meditation every day, and also a class that is sort of, I want to say, like “Buddhism for Dummies.” It’s very, very watered-down, broken-down teachings from Buddhism presented by the teacher.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, just doing that eight weeks later, you’re less neurotic.

Olga Khazan
So, yeah, for me, it did work. It did bring down my neuroticism, especially the depression component of my neuroticism. But I don’t totally get why, because I didn’t ever really enjoy meditation. Like, I kind of always resisted it. I found it really boring. Even at the very end of the class, we did a retreat just in our houses, but we meditated all day, and I found that really grueling. But, yeah, something about it just like it made me less depressed. I don’t know how.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is such a rich example and experience. I’m glad you’re sharing it with us because I have often had this experience of, they say, “Oh, yeah, mindfulness meditation is very good.” “Okay, yeah, I should do it. There’s a lot of benefits. It’s going to be worth it. There’s a clear ROI on my time. Okay, let’s do it.” And sometimes it’s very peaceful and pleasant. It’s like, “Okay, yeah, I’m glad I did that.”

But other times it’s a brutal slog. It’s like, “I would rather be doing anything but this right now,” and it’s brutal. And so, it’s encouraging to hear you say that you, too, were not feeling it in the moment, and yet, on the other side of it, you’ve got just an emotional experience that is more enjoyable just all the time.

Olga Khazan
So, Jon Kabat-Zinn, who kind of invented MBSR, for lack of a better word, he wrote a book about it. And but one of the things he suggests is, like, it’s best to go into meditation without striving to feel better. Like, you’re not supposed to really be pushing for it to work. You’re supposed to just kind of do it and let it, like, kind of work in the background. And so, that’s sort of what I tried to do, and I guess it did work, like, I don’t know, in its weird, magical way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so that’s pretty cool, 45 minutes a day. Sounds intense, but it’s only for eight weeks, and then the benefits are lasting without maintenance?

Olga Khazan
I think you do have to maintain it to some level, but I will say that I do not have time to meditate anymore because I had a baby right after I finished the book so I have not kept up my meditation practice. And I’ve found that when I don’t get to any kind of mindfulness, even like mindful walking or yoga, whenever I have like a week or two without anything like that, I do start to feel more just like jumpy and irritable.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, it takes a good week or two, in your own experience. I guess it probably varies person by person, for you to go back to the jumpy spot, but it’s not 45 minutes a day.

Olga Khazan
Yeah, but I would say I wouldn’t tell people that if you don’t have 45 minutes every day that you shouldn’t even bother with this, because there’s a lot of meditations out there that you can do in 10 minutes, 15 minutes, just when you have time. I kind of don’t like this all or nothing feeling about meditation, where it’s like unless you’re committed to do it an hour every morning, like don’t even bother. I think you can just kind of try to fit it in whenever you can, and that’s good.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. And there’s a study that put a dollar amount on just how good this can be. A reduction in neuroticism can be quite substantial and even put into some monetary equivalency terms. Olga, can you speak to this?

Olga Khazan
Yeah, one study found that even a small reduction in neuroticism was like earning $314,000 more dollars a year, which I think just goes to show how much neuroticism can really grind away at people, and how living this way and just being constantly plagued by negative thoughts can really bring you down so much that it’s like you’re like earning very little money, or if you didn’t have that you’d be basically rich. Because, honestly, our happiness is kind of determined by our level of neuroticism.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this reminds me of a quote from Epictetus, “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.” And that so rings true for me, as I’ve lived high-income and low-income years in the course of running business. So, it kind of doesn’t seem so outrageous. It’s like, “Yeah, if you have less neuroticism and are less worried about all sorts of things, it’s like $314,000 can sure take care of a lot of worries, but so, too, could worrying less.”

Olga Khazan
Yeah, exactly. And, I mean, one of the kind of takeaways that I have from the book is that you can improve your life even if nothing in your life really improves. And that’s kind of what happened with me. Like, I had the same exact job before and after this project. I live in the same house. But I, honestly, feel like a lot better and more fulfilled. And, to me, that’s sort of the difference that a small amount of reduction in neuroticism can do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, there’s the mindfulness-based stress reduction eight-week situation. Were there any other key interventions that were transformational for you there?

Olga Khazan
On that trait specifically? So, I would say, like, honestly, this is strange, but one of the most effective things about that class was that “Buddhism for Dummies” kind of like little aphorisms and things that they would teach us. So, one of the things that my meditation teacher would always repeat is, “Things happen that we don’t like.”

And I know this sounds strange, but I had been going through life thinking that everyone else can make it so that bad things don’t happen to them. They can, like, control their lives to a degree where only good things happen to them. And whenever something bad would happen to me, I would get kind of mad at myself for failing to avert that.

And I think there was just something really freeing. Of course, this is like a group class where we’re all sharing like negative experiences we’ve had, so it’s like even more powerful. But there was something really freeing in being told that some things are just out of our control and that you can’t always prevent bad things from happening.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s a big lesson to internalize, which will have big impact, no doubt. All right. Well, let’s hear about some of the other personality dimensions, if we’d like to be more extroverted or more conscientious or more or less agreeable. Sometimes I think I’m too agreeable, and I would be better if I felt a little bit more comfortable holding my ground, and saying “No, that doesn’t work for me. You’re going to need to fix it.”

Olga Khazan
I actually brought this up because, as I was working on agreeableness, I noticed that a lot of my friendships were falling apart, and I kind of thought, “Oh, if I become more agreeable, my friendships will stop dissolving.” And that one way to do that is just to do whatever my friends want. Right? Like that’s agreeable.

But that’s actually not really true, and I talked with this friendship expert who really drove home the power of boundaries within agreeableness. So, being agreeable doesn’t mean that you just let people walk all over you. It does mean having strong boundaries. So, as an example, in the midst of this project, I had a friend text me and tell me that I wasn’t texting her enough and that I needed to commit to texting her at least once a week to check in with her.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve never had a request like that.

Olga Khazan
Me neither. So, I was like, “Huh.” And so, kind of my natural reaction was like, “Oh, my gosh, of course. Like, I will text you every week, like, no problem.” But I actually knew, internally, at the same time, that I was never going to do that because I actually don’t like texting. It’s not like a mode of communication that I like, and I also don’t like text check-ins. Like, I really don’t like having to remember to check in with someone when there’s nothing wrong and there’s nothing going on. So, I, basically, immediately fell off of this plan.

And so, I asked this expert, Miriam Kirmayer, I was like, “What was I supposed to do in that situation?” And she said I should have said something like, “Hey, I’m sorry that you’ve been feeling like I don’t text you enough. The truth is, I actually don’t really like texting. Is there another way we can keep in touch? Is there another way that I can meet my needs, but also meet your needs?”

And so, that’s really like the heart of agreeableness is setting boundaries with people so that you are treated well and you do get a say in the relationship but, at the same time, showing people that you value them.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that sounds dead on. And so, if we need to, it seems like that that’s the master key is kind of the fake-it-till-you-make-it situation, is if we think that we have been a bit on the doormat side and need to establish boundaries, we would act as though we were a person who were a bit less agreeable to everything.

And it will feel unnatural and uncomfortable and weird in the moment, like, “Oh, my gosh, was I a total jerk? Oh.” You might feel that way when you’re establishing a very reasonable boundary. But then, if this path follows the way it seems like it goes, you’ll say, “Oh, actually, I’m glad I did that. I stood up for myself. I feel good and proud, and maybe even more like myself.”

Olga Khazan
Yeah, exactly. And it’s also a good way of kind of working on agreeableness and working on deepening your friendships with people without feeling like a doormat, which is, I think, one reason why people are sometimes reluctant to try to become more agreeable.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. And how about conscientiousness? I would like more of that, I think.

Olga Khazan
Yeah, most of us would. Conscientiousness is like the trait everyone wants to increase on. It’s the trait that employers really love because conscientious people get to work on time and they do everything really fast and really thoroughly. It predicts like greater wealth and health and all this other stuff. So, I would say a really poignant example of conscientiousness, for me, was this guy, Zach Hambrick, that I talked to.

Zach is a guy who got to college from this small town in Virginia, and growing up he had never really studied and he had never really written a paper or, like, applied himself to school in any way. So, he gets to college and, suddenly, you have to study or else you will, like, fail college and would have to go home. So, he’s kind of lost, but he realizes that he would like to finish college and succeed and get into a grad school program for psychology. He decides he wants to be an academic psychologist.

So, he actually sits down and finds another student just like him who is like someone who doesn’t have a very scholarly background, and they actually study together and learn tips from each other of how to study better and how to, at one point, he bought a book that was, like, how to make A’s or something like that. They would stay up late, like, reading and highlighting these dense psychological textbooks, and it actually worked, like, not right away.

I think his first GPA was like a 2.7 or something like that, but, gradually, he actually did really well on the GREs and he got into Georgia Tech, and, actually, he is now a professor of psychology. And this kind of all happened because of this concept that, sometimes, doing things alongside other people, or learning from your peers, can actually be more effective than having it taught to you by a teacher or trying to do it on your own.

There’s research out of the University of Pennsylvania that shows that when people are told to go learn an exercise strategy from their peers versus just being told by the researchers, like, “Hey, here’s how you can fit more exercise into your life,” the people who learn from their peers actually end up exercising more because there’s something about it, like friendly competition, or just like seeing someone just like you apply those same skills, or, honestly, just having some solidarity, I don’t know. But it actually does work, and it worked for Zach.

So, that’s one strategy that I’d recommend, is like if there’s something you’re working on when it comes to conscientiousness, find someone else who is working on that same thing and learn from them.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I want to find someone who’s working on conscientiousness as opposed to someone who’s just already supernaturally just conscientious.

Olga Khazan
You could try to talk to someone who’s just super-duper conscientious, but I would pick someone who has, like, gained those skills in a way that they can explain to you. Don’t just pick someone who was like born meeting all deadlines and never had to think about it, you know?

Pete Mockaitis
“You just sit down and you do it. That’s all.”

Olga Khazan
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Nifty. Well, tell me, any other key things you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Olga Khazan
Also, for conscientiousness, something that I found really worked for people is this strategy called episodic future thinking, which is where you envision very clearly what’s the positive outcome will look like. So, let’s say you’re really having trouble motivating yourself to get through a spreadsheet, a PowerPoint, whatever else it is, boring work project, you can kind of think about what it will look like to present that PowerPoint.

What are you going to be wearing? How will your boss react? Where is he going to take the team out for lunch to celebrate afterward? And it’s not just like The Secret, like if you can see it, you can achieve it, because it’s actually just motivating you to get through that slog of doing something really rote or really tedious or something that conscientious people find really hard in order to get to that outcome that you really, really want. So, that’s another thing I would recommend for people who struggle with that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Episodic future thinking sounds fancy, although I think others would call that simply visualization. Are there some nuances or distinctions to be made between the two?

Olga Khazan
I think it’s just whatever you’re working on now needs to be connected really clearly with whatever you’re envisioning. So, it can’t be just like, “Oh, if I finish this spreadsheet,” and then imagine yourself flying around in a private jet with models and stuff. It has to be a realistic, positive outcome based on what you’re doing now.

It could also be a negative outcome as long as it’s not so negative that it’s paralyzing. So, for me, when I was struggling in journalism school, I had a really dead-end job right before I went to journalism school, and I would always just envision myself having to go back to that dead-end job and do these boring tasks that I was doing before I went to grad school. And that would always motivate me to be like, “Hey, okay, I really need to get to my interviews on time,” or whatever else it is.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that. So, the dead-end job, it’s negative enough to be motivating, but it’s not, like, horrifying, like, “I’m going to be homeless, sleeping in the ditch!” It’s like that may very well be paralyzing for you.

Olga Khazan
Yeah, it can’t be something where you’re, like, you know, if you’re the kind of person who’s like made so anxious by kind of like bad outcomes that you’re like, “Oh, my God, I can’t do anything now,” just don’t go there. Focus on the positive stuff. But some people I talked to did find negative outcomes really motivating.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you’re bringing me back to the early days of getting my business going, and it was kind of spooky just like having no income and watching savings deteriorate month after month, while getting going. And it felt as though, “Oh, my gosh, if the savings goes to zero, I’m dead. It’s like game over.” It’s like, “No, no, no, that just means I have to get a real job. I’ll go do…”

I would always tell myself I would end up doing cheese strategy at Kraft Foods just because I felt like a lot of Bain people went to Kraft after their Bain tenure in Chicago. It’s like, “So, I would be excited about it but I could probably find some joy in cheese strategy but I’d really rather not, so let’s go ahead and make this thing work out.”

Olga Khazan
Yeah, I had a similar thing when I did journalism school during the recession, and then I graduated, like still in the recession, and I was like, my thing was always, “Oh.” I was like, “Am I going to have to do PR for people who pour acid into the eyeballs of puppies,” and like spin that to be a positive thing. And I was like, “Well, you know, maybe the puppies don’t really have a lot of feeling in their eyeballs.” I didn’t end up having to do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. You know, Olga, I will hand it to you. Not once in over a thousand episodes has any guest referenced pouring acid into any animal’s eyeballs. This is a first.

Olga Khazan
Well, you said you wanted it to be memorable.

Pete Mockaitis
It is memorable. It’s fresh. It’s original. I appreciate it. So, understood. Well, let’s round it out. Can we hear about the extraversion as well?

Olga Khazan
Sure. So, for extraversion, this is the simplest one, you just have to get out and talk to people. You don’t have to be good at it. You don’t have to be the life of the party. You, honestly, don’t even have to talk that much. Just go to a group activity that involves other people, preferably one that occurs regularly, and you will gradually become more extroverted.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And openness?

Olga Khazan
For openness, the non-drug kind of option is travel. So, just traveling to cultures where you don’t speak the language, talking to people who you don’t totally understand. That kind of thing can really increase openness.

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

Olga Khazan
So, this quote appears in the book, and it’s from David Axelrod, the political consultant, and what he says is, “All you can do is everything you can do.” So, you can set yourself up for success, you can check all the boxes, you can make all the phone calls, you can work super-duper hard, but then, at a certain point, you just have to let go and hope for the best. And, for me, that was really, I don’t know, comforting, especially as someone who was launching a book.

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

Olga Khazan
I like this study, also from the book, where researchers, they asked older people, “Have you changed in the past 20 years or something?” And they were like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve changed in all these different ways, I’m so different now.” But then they asked younger people, “Do you think you will change in the next 20 years?” And they were like, “No, I don’t think I will. I think I’m going to stay this way forever,” which just goes to show, like, we do change, but we think that we won’t. So, I thought that was, like, pretty poignant.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And could you share a favorite book?

Olga Khazan
I really liked How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair. I thought it was just really beautifully written.

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

Olga Khazan
I use TapeACall Pro. It’s kind of janky, but it’s the best we got. That’s what I use to tape interviews.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Olga Khazan
My favorite habit is putting everything I need to do in a given day into Todoist, which is also an app, and that just helps me stay really organized, and I just don’t know where I’d be without it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks?

Olga Khazan
I think people really like the idea that, you know the summer between high school and college, how everyone kind of reinvents themselves, and they’re like, “When I go to college, I’m going to be cool, and I’m not going to be the loser anymore.” I think you should be able to do that whenever you want. It doesn’t have to be when you’re 18.

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

Olga Khazan
I would point them to TheAtlantic.com, which is where I’m a writer, and my Substack is at OlgaKhazan.substack.com. And you can find my book, Me, But Better, wherever books are sold.

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

Olga Khazan
Sign up for an improv class.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Olga, thank you.

Olga Khazan
Yeah, thank you so much. This was fun.

Mar 17
0

1041: How to Tell Compelling Stories and Build Brands with Alex Neist (CEO of Hostage Tape)

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Alex Neist shares principles of storytelling and branding that help Hostage Tape –and you.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why brands like Hostage Tape and Liquid Death resonate
  2. The defining element of an inspiring story
  3. The downside to making your story amazing

About Alex

Alex Neist is the founder and CEO of Hostage Tape, the best-selling mouth tape. The company has helped over 200,000 customers worldwide and has strong partnerships with the UFC and The Joe Rogan Experience.

Prior to founding Hostage Tape, Alex was an Arena Football League quarterback. He later ventured into sports technology, building a seven-figure business which was eventually acquired.

Resources Mentioned

Thank You, Sponsors!

Alex Neist Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Alex, welcome.

Alex Neist
Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, it’s great to be chatting with you. And I will tell you, I am a Hostage Tape customer and lover. So, first things first, for the uninitiated, what the heck is Hostage Tape?

Alex Neist
Hostage Tape is mouth tape, okay, quite simply. And for those who have never heard of mouth-taping before, what it does is it forces you to keep your mouth shut so that you breathe through your nose. It sounds absolutely wild and crazy, I know, but I promise you’re not going to suffocate.

We were born, we were made to breathe through our nose, and it seems to be something that we just lost over the last 20, 30, 40 years, especially with a lot of changes to our diets, what we’re eating, all sorts of things that have kind of changed us. And over 70% of people in this country are mouth-breathing at night when they sleep, and we shouldn’t be.

And so, mouth tape shuts your mouth, forces us to nasal-breathe the way that we were made to, and it does a whole host of things. We get more oxygen. We wake up feeling better. We don’t have mind fog. We don’t annoy the heck out of our partner. And just everything opens up and you feel like you’re 20 years old again. You feel like you found the cheat code.

This is how I explain it. It’s like when we were younger, you played Nintendo and you had that Konami code, up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B-A-B-A, start. It’s like you found the cheat code from Nintendo, but for life, and now you feel like you’re 20 years old again.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, Alex, I love so much of what you’re saying here. And it’s funny, we’ve had sleep doctors on the show, and this is actually not really a sleep episode, although that’s a freebie, huh? We’re getting some bonus goodies here, Alex.

Alex Neist
Totally.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve read in the research, because I’m such a dork for this, that mouth taping is particularly excellent for individuals with mild sleep apnea, and I was such an individual, and I was not feeling the CPAP machine, but I needed a little something. I need a little something, something, Alex, and the mouth taping and some other interventions combined did the trick, so I’m off the CPAP machine, and I’m having great sleep, and I’m a fan.

Alex Neist
So, what you’re describing right now, Pete, is a pretty common thing where, again, I’m not a doctor. Ironically, I grew up in a doctor’s family. Like, my dad was a doctor, so I come from that whole world of medicine, but I’m not a doctor, and I think CPAPs are over-prescribed to people because I think the reality is, from what I’ve seen with all of our customers, is that there’s a certain person that definitely needs it, and those are the people who are like severely overweight.

Guys who are really overweight, who’ve got excess weight in their neck and everything, that’s pushing down, they definitely need help, but I think for, like, the average guy who’s not overweight, man, it’s as simple as just keeping your mouth shut. Assuming you can breathe out of your nose and it’s not like severely impacted, it’s just keeping your mouth shut and breathing through your nose. And we don’t need a CPAP for that. We really don’t.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you.

Alex Neist
The amount of people who have used a CPAP and then now they don’t because they wear Hostage Tape, countless. But there’s also people who, they’ll use their CPAP and the Hostage Tape helps it work better because it keeps their mouth shut so that there’s no air leak.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true, especially like a nasal-only CPAP. We’re getting into the details. And if folks have sleep apnea who are not overweight, I just want to give you a shout out. I know that also happens with anatomical things, neurological things in the mix as well. But, yes, great sleep is important. We’ve covered that with a few sleep docs before, and we’ll just check that box, and mouth taping might help.

I want to talk about branding and storytelling, because, Alex, you’ve done a heck of a job. I remember my favorite CPAP influencer, and there are many, will be Uncle Nicko from SleepHQ.com. And he said it very well about you guys. He’s like, “Great job, guys! You made mouth taping cool!” He’s Australian. Apologies for the poor accent impersonation.

And it’s true, and it’s so interesting. In terms of brand, I have so many questions, but why don’t we start by, tell us the tale. What made you think, “Let’s call this thing Hostage Tape” was a good move?

Alex Neist
Yes. So, here’s the story. So, I actually went through a low point in my life and I hit rock bottom. And it was at this point of hitting rock bottom, where, my wife and I were actually separated and we divorced, and so I was living in another house at the time.

And when you go through a divorce, it’s messy, it’s crazy, assets freeze, you know, all that kind of wonderful stuff that happens. But I was in my aunt’s house. I was living in her basement at the time, okay? And I said to myself, “Okay, I need to really work on myself. How do I become a better man, a better father, a better leader, a better business owner, all those things?”

And I call it my Jocko-moment of extreme accountability, like I need to take extreme accountability for me and work on everything that I can control. And I started with my health, specifically my sleep, because I snored so bad for so many years that it pushed my wife out of the bedroom. And I explained it like this. It’s kind of like Indiana Jones running out of the temple. You got this boulder coming after you, and, at some point, it catches up to you, overtakes you, and then you don’t know what to do.

Because snoring is one of those things where it causes all these issues, it’s like an accelerant of all these other things that happen that just kind of get out of control. And then before you realize it, it’s out of control, and you just can’t fix it, and you can’t get it back. And so, that’s what had happened. And so, then I looked at my sleep, and I went, “Okay, what do I got to do to fix my sleep?” And I went down this rabbit hole of mouth tape, of all things.

And when I started the mouth tape, whenever my kids would be over, I would say, “Okay, guys, kids, if you bust into the room, and you see me, it’s going to look like I’m being held hostage, so don’t freak out, okay?” Because anybody that you see is mouth-taping, it looks really, really strange, really weird. And so, there was that part of it.

And, at the time, I didn’t know that I was going to start a mouth tape brand just yet, let alone call it Hostage Tape. But then I realized that, “Wait a minute, there’s this like double-sided coin to this here. Yes, you look like a hostage when you’ve got tape on your mouth, but we’re actually tapping into this core emotion people feel. People feel held hostage by poor sleep or their partner, and they don’t know what to do. So don’t let bad sleep hold you hostage.” That became the idea. And I was most importantly inspired by my favorite water, Liquid Death.

Pete Mockaitis
I was literally talking to your publicist about Liquid Death and branding.

Alex Neist
Yes. So, I explain this to many people, and a lot of times when we meet with retailers or anybody else that’s interested in the brand in some way, I say, “We are the Liquid Death of the sleep space.” And they go, “Oh, okay, I get it.” Because, inevitably, there’s always somebody that goes, “Wait a minute, why would you call it that? That’s really weird. That’s really polarizing.” And then I say, “Liquid Death,” and they go, “Oh, okay, I get it.”

So, it takes like a giant, like what Mike did with Liquid Death, for people to truly understand, “Oh, I get it. Okay.” Because I knew, in this day and age, Pete, it’s all about attention, right? And I saw a quote the other day, that when you think about products, things that people buy, mouth taping, it’s not a fad. It’s not one of those fads that’s like, here then gone tomorrow, because it’s based on fundamental core principles of our body, and it’s solving a clear problem. So, it’s not a fad.

And it’s gaining awareness right now. With the amount of money that we spend on marketing, more and more people are gaining awareness of it. You’re seeing it on TikTok, because we’ve had other copycats try to do what we’re doing, and more people are going, “Mouth taping. I keep seeing this. I keep seeing Hostage Tape everywhere.”

So, because that awareness is growing, what happens, it’s kind of like the 95/5 rule, right? 5% of your people are in market to buy. The other 95% are not. But for those 95% of people, when they are in market to buy, what do they do? They buy the brand that they remember. And who are they going to remember when it comes to, “Oh, yeah, I keep seeing mouth tape. You know what? I’m going to try that. I’m going to buy Hostage Tape.”

Because when you see Hostage Tape come across your feed, you never forget it. Ever. I’ve never met somebody that didn’t go, “Oh, Hostage Tape. Yeah, I’ve heard of them. They’re that mouth tapering.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s black, and it can look a little scary, and it’s intriguing. When you said polarizing, I think, I want to dig into that for a bit. Like, I remember I was telling my cousin, Carrie, that I was doing some mouth taping, and I was like, “Yeah, I love my Hostage Tape.” She said, “Wait, it’s actually called Hostage Tape? Wow, they’re really leaning into it.” And I was like, “Well said, they are really leaning into it.”

And I think that it’s so intriguing because you say polarizing, and that’s the word, because I think some might say, “Alex, hostages are no cheeky, fun, laughing matter. Right now, there are hostage situations in the world. And it almost seems like you are kind of poking fun at it a little bit.” And so, help me out there with polarizing, because I don’t know if you’ve ever gotten furious messages or if that’s just me.

Alex Neist
Oh, we get it all the time. Yeah, we get people all the time. In fact, somebody DM’d me on LinkedIn the other day who said exactly that. And I think you have to look at it like this. Like, the wonderful thing about language is that context matters. We have all these words, we have all these amazing ways to use language, and context matters. Intent matters.

So, when I use a word like hostage, Hostage Tape, look at the intent, look at the context. It’s not poking fun at those awful situations. Just like Liquid Death, how many people die and get murdered? Like, a ton of people. “Liquid Death, murder your thirst,” like they’re just as bad, if not worse, than we are with this term death and murder, right?

But when you look at what they are, who they stand for, and the authenticity behind it, look at the authenticity behind our brand and why I started it, I’m not just some no-name, no-face, like brand that said, “We’re going to poke fun at this.” I’m a real guy. You do a little bit of research and you see me everywhere. You see me talking about it. You see me telling my story about feeling held hostage.

And then once you explain that little bit of the term hostage, everybody relates to it. Then that’s the genius behind it, is that everybody can relate to feeling like a hostage from their partner or their sleep, and they feel helpless. So that’s why it’s so good, is, again, context and the intent behind it.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s intriguing, I was listening to an interview with the Liquid Death guy. What’s his name again?

Alex Neist
Mike, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And it was really interesting, he said, “Well, our water, it’s in a nice aluminum can, and it’s tall, and it’s from a natural spring. So, there are some kinds of objective matter material elements of it that that make it seem quality relative to alternative packaged waters.” And he said, “And yet, the bulk of the price premium for it is just for the brand, the associations, the experiences, the hilarious marketing that is attached to it.”

And it was really interesting, he got me thinking hard, he said “That’s kind of how I define brand is it has a value for its associations,” I might be using my own words here but it has a value for associations in your brain, above and beyond the actual matter inside the package.

Alex Neist
You want to know why?

Pete Mockaitis
Lay it on us.

Alex Neist
Because people don’t buy with logic. They buy with emotion. That’s why. So, what people do, the way that our brains work, is anytime we make decisions on buying things, you know, especially if it’s not something that costs, you know, thousands and thousands of dollars, that’s a little bit of a different decision process, but something as small as mouth tape, Liquid Death, whatever, we might buy on emotion.

We do buy on emotion for the most part because we’re connecting to something about it, and with a brand like Liquid Death and a brand like Hostage Tape, people are buying on emotion. There’s something about the brand that’s attaching to their psyche or the way that they are. And then after you make a decision on emotion, then you validate it with logic, “Oh, yeah. Well, of course, I bought it because of A, B, and C.”

And so, that’s, I think, what Mike was really talking about there with Liquid Death, is that you’re creating this emotional connection with people, and that’s what makes a strong brand.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s interesting. And I say before I had encountered Hostage Tape, I was using some 3M micropore tape, and that kind of works for keeping your mouth closed, but it doesn’t stick as well. It’s not as comfortable. It’s hard to get just the right size. So, these problems are relatively minor but I will hand it to you, you solved all of them. It’s like this is more comfortable, it’s quicker, it adheres better, it even has just a little bit of holes or perforations or whatever, so it’s like…

Alex Neist
Yeah, because it’s a fabric, it’s completely breathable. And that’s what people think when they think, “Hostage Tape? Mouth tape?” They think it’s like duct tape, but in actuality. It’s a flexible fabric. You can breathe through it, so, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it’s interesting in that your product cost more than the generic micropore tape, and it has some performance characteristics that are superior but there’s also all this emotional stuff, and I just find it fascinating how that works because I don’t think I’m very good at brand, branding, both in terms of when I market stuff and when I buy stuff, I think it’s like, “Oh, this costs 10 times as much. Is it 10 times as awesome?” Well, maybe, yeah, in terms of when I’m sleepy and I don’t want to be fiddling with my tape for an extra 30 seconds, I value that substantially. But, again, maybe I’m just doing that post-emotion rationalization you were speaking of in the moment.

Alex Neist
Well, think about it like this too, right? So, when I built the brand, I had that dilemma that everybody has when you start a new business. You go, “Wait a minute. Is there a business here? Could I actually build something that’s worth my time and money to put into this because it’s just tape? Like, it’s a commodity. Is there a moat here? Can I actually build this?”

And then it was looking at Liquid Death. In fact, it was Liquid Death, but it was also so Moiz Ali is famous for the Native deodorant founder, okay? And I’ll never forget, he was talking about, when you go down the aisles of Target, and you look at a wall of, let’s just say, white of a product, there’s an opportunity there. There’s an opportunity because the TAM is there to create a product that stands out, that’s different.

And that logic, to me, went, “Okay.” Now granted, there wasn’t really a market for mouth tape, but there’s tons of tape, so I knew I could take something and I could improve upon it. And guess what? There’s 70% of people in this country that have this problem, so it was a very clear problem solution. And I had experienced it, that I went, “This is too big. This is too big not to be able to build something, but it all hinges on brand.”

So, I knew, the point I’m getting at was I knew that nothing about micropore tape, 3M tape, inspires you to go down to Walmart, Walgreens, Target, or even on Amazon, and buy mouth tape. It doesn’t inspire you at all, because that’s not really how we all make the decision to begin with, like, at least consciously.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you got to be desperate, like, “I need something, and I’m out. I guess I’ll go, not like I’m excited or inspired.”

Alex Neist
Well, and mouth tape, to begin with, because it’s so weird and new and different, you’re not going to see an ad for 3M micropore tape and think, “You know what? I should use that and put it on my mouth.” And even if it was advertised, you would think like, “Well, that’s just weird. That’s not cool. I don’t want to do that. That sounds dumb.”

But then you see this, like, really cool story that’s relatable, that you go, “Oh, I’m going through that same problem, too. My wife’s sleeping in the other bedroom. You mean to tell me he solved it by taping his mouth shut? Oh, man. Well, that’s kind of weird, right? Well, but that looks actually kind of cool. I like it. Okay.”

And then you start connecting the dots, connecting all these emotional barriers, and then, boom, you’re now inspired to go online and order Hostage Tape because it’s cool, it makes you feel cool, it makes you feel like you’re actually solving a problem, which you are, and you don’t feel weird because you’re putting medical tape on your face.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you said, when you go walk down Target and see white, do we literally mean the color white? What do we mean by you see white?

Alex Neist
So, it could be anything.

Pete Mockaitis
Like a gap or blankness?

Alex Neist
Let’s use, like, deodorant as an example. Like, you might go down a section in Target where it’s just the deodorant aisle, and they all look the same. That’s the point, if that category exists and they all look the same, that means the TAM is big enough.

Pete Mockaitis
Total addressable market.

Alex Neist
The opportunity is big enough, and you have a chance to stand out to create. It’s, like, Dr. Squatch is another really good example. Dr. Squatch said, “We’re going to take soap,” which is like, you know, this behemoth, huge behemoth in soap, and it’s just soap, right? But that guy took it and went, “I’m going to make it different, all natural, but I’m going to create this amazing brand around it.” And now look at them, you know, they’re huge, right?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so now I’d love it if you could bring it into the realm of the average professional. So, all right, we’re not building, we’re not inventing brands, new products, but we are seeing opportunities and certainly having to make a case, build a story, conjure up some emotion for support of initiatives and whatnot. So, tell us, how do we apply some of these perspectives to our everyday conversations and persuasions?

Alex Neist
The first thing that pops into my mind that we could riff off of is, like, when people are thinking that they want to start a business and they want to build something, they always ask, “Well, how do I start? Where do I start?” And I always tell people, “Look, the best place to start is like solve a problem, number one.”

And then when you solve that problem and you figure out what that business is, then there’s a story around it. That then you have to learn how to tell the story for that particular product in business, and then tell it in a way that’s relatable. And I’ll be honest, I launched this business, Hostage Tape, three years ago, and it’s taken me three years to craft the story in a way that’s relatable for people.

Very early on, I would tell the story, and I don’t think it was relatable enough, and I kept telling it, and then I kept hearing it, and I’m like, “Who can relate to that? Like, yes, there’s elements of shock and amazement that are interesting, but at the end of the day, people aren’t going to buy into something that they can’t relate to and see themselves somehow looking back at them.”

And so, I’ve morphed how I tell the story in a way that, “How do I bring out the right pieces of the story that are relatable to people?” So, I keep evolving it in a way that is not so grandiose. In fact, you probably know, the guy that I love is Matthew Dicks. He has a book on storytelling. And this dude, he wins all these awards for these competitions he goes to where he tells a story.

And one of the things he talks about in storytelling is, you don’t need to tell an amazing, oddball, wild story to have a great story. Most of the time, it’s a story about the most simplest thing that happened to you in your day that most people are going to think, “Well, that’s not interesting,” but it actually is interesting. You just have to learn how to tell the story, and then you make it relatable in a way, and also, you’re showing change.

A great story shows a change, “At one point, I was this, then this happened, and now this.” And so, that’s it, that’s another key there with that storytelling that you’re talking about, is that so many things happen to people during the day that you can tell stories on rather than just reciting back, “Well, this happened.” Well, that’s boring, like just reciting back anecdotally what happened to me today.

It’s telling it in a way that says, “I changed,” or “Something changed.” That’s what captures people’s attention, right? It’s like that when I tell the mouth tape story, I like to tell the story about how, “Before mouth taping, I was this. And then that first night I mouth taped, then I woke up and my whole life changed in that moment. And I knew that, now, I was going to be a different person. I was going to be able to get to here just from that one night of mouth taping.”

And for anybody listening to that, who can relate to having bad sleep, goes, “Wow, that’s crazy. I can resonate with that because I feel the same way. I felt the same way. And maybe if I just put a piece of tape on my mouth and shut my mouth, I can feel the same way too.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I mean, I’m a believer in sleep, so it does not strike me as hyperbole at all. The difference between terrible sleep and great sleep is night and day for mood, productivity, all the good stuff. So that’s intriguing. So, a good story, change, you reminded me of, I think, in Dan Harmon’s Story Circle. I’ve actually worked through that with my kids a few times. And so, yes, and then the character returns changed at the end, and it’s fun to watch Community, because they are deliberately doing that with every character in every episode.

So, change and relatable. So, help us out. If the story’s evolved, can you share with us a suboptimal, prior version of a snippet of the story, and then give us the improved version, and tell us why is that better?

Alex Neist
Exactly. Okay. So, I used to be a professional athlete. I was a professional quarterback, and part of the story that I tell is I used to tell it where, so when I discovered the fact that I was mouth-breathing, I basically read a book. It was a book by James Nestor called Breath. And in this book, he details this experiment.

And part of the story is, as I talk about this experiment, reading this book and how it opens my mind, and I say, “How have I been a professional high-level athlete my entire life and my coaches never taught me this?” And so, then later I went, “Wait a minute, being a professional athlete has nothing to do, like it doesn’t matter to the story that I was a professional athlete, and nobody listening to that story is thinking, ‘I was a professional athlete, too, and my coaches never taught me that.’”

There’s a sub-small percentage of people that have ever gotten to the level of being a professional athlete that can relate to it. So, then most people then might feel alienated, and thinking like, “Well, I’m not a professional athlete, so I guess I don’t really know how I could relate to that.” But now, rather than say I was a professional athlete, I just say, “Look, I was an athlete my whole life. I played football, I played sports growing up, and my coaches didn’t teach me that.”

How many people played sports growing up and were athletes? Almost everybody did, in some capacity. So, that’s way more relatable that people now can connect, they can lean in, and go, “Oh, yeah, I was an athlete, too. Yeah, and my coach has never taught me that. Wow. Huh, this is crazy.” So that’s a really good example of something that I’ve adapted.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s funny, and not to critique your story life here, Alex, but I guess I have the hubris to do it. It’s like, I’m thinking that what you’re saying is perfect because, like, “I was a professional athlete,” it’s like, “Okay. Well, we’re not vibing with that.” But what’s interesting is we had Anjali Sharma on the show recently talking about this storytelling principle just like this.

It’s like, “You think you want to have it dramatically awesomely whoa remarkable, but you don’t want to be remarkable. You want to be relatable,” because it is remarkable that you were a professional athlete. And it is all the more remarkable, shouldn’t someone have known, with all the recovery information that’s so important for high performance?

Alex Neist
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
So that makes it more remarkable but less relatable. And so, I’m intrigued, as someone who didn’t play very many sports, just that the notion that I’m relating to most about is it’s like, “Hey, shouldn’t someone have told me?” Like, I almost feel betrayed or shocked, disappointed. Like, “Shouldn’t someone have told me you can enable shortcut keys in Gmail? Everyone knows I love productivity and I use Gmail.”

Or, “Shouldn’t someone have told me that Severance is an amazing TV show?” So, yeah, I like that a lot in terms of we’re going to drop some of the most amazing wow factor pieces in pursuit of more relatability.

Alex Neist
I’ve got another one, too. This is another one that I used. Okay, so the other part of the story that I used to really lean in on was, I mentioned it earlier that my wife and I, we had gotten separated, and then we divorced, okay? And we actually got back together. So, I used to tell that part of the story, and I used to say that, “You know, six years ago I had it all and then I lost everything, and my wife and I went through a divorce.” And then at the end of the story, “After building this thing, then my wife and I got back together.” And then I’m like, “Actually, you know what? How relatable?” Like, divorce is relatable to 50% of the population, yes. But still, you’re still alienating 50% of the people who haven’t gone through a divorce, and, to boot, getting back together.

Like, how many people get a divorce and then get back together with their partner? That almost never happens. So, then I’m like, as amazing as it is, and as amazing as the reactions I get from people when they hear that story, they’re like, “Oh, my God, that’s wild!” it is not relatable at all to anybody because it just doesn’t happen.

So, now, I’ve started really kind of dropping those points and leaning more in on the idea that, “Here’s what is relatable about that. The fact that I snored so bad that it pushed my wife into the other bedroom, and we slept in separate bedrooms. It killed the relationship, it hurt us, put a wedge between us. And then you know what? I discovered mouth taping. Now I don’t snore anymore. I feel amazing. And my wife and I now sleep in the same bed again.”

That’s a more relatable story, and it’s all true. I just left out the most amazing parts of it that actually don’t make the story better, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s interesting in that, now, what’s juicy about this is, unlike the first example, it’s sort of like nothing feels lost in terms of like, “Okay, we don’t know as much about how awesome you were as an athlete, Alex, okay. So, but that’s okay.” But here, it almost does feel like something is lost because it’s like, it almost makes the Hostage mouth tape less of a hero.

Alex Neist
It could be.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “It saved a dead marriage” sounds more awesome than what you’ve described. So, now it’s interesting. Now I feel like we have a real juicy trade-off here between the relatability of the story and the amount of heroic impact the product can make. How do you chew through that one?

Alex Neist
I think you could argue that, while heroic it is, like, I’m a phoenix rising from the ashes, I think that, there’s a hero’s journey, though, that I can tell, the true story of this hero’s journey of that bedroom tale that every man and wife, more men and women are going through that story. That hero’s journey that I can help them become the hero of their story.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, got you.

Alex Neist
So, I think that’s way more impactful.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. Because we might have less of an emotional spike, but we have a broader set of folks getting into it. And those broader sets may actually have more of an emotional vibe.

Alex Neist
And here’s also the risk, because I’ve seen a ton of it. I’ve gotten a ton of feedback and responses over the years, the past couple of years here. The story sounds so unbelievable that people think it’s fake. Like, “Oh, it’s so fake. No way that happened.” I mean, it happened, it’s true, and I can understand why it sounds fake, but it’s so wild that it sounds fake.

And so, that’s the risk of it is that, again, now I’m alienating because of the craziness of the story. Now I’m alienating, again, too many people that I don’t need to alienate, that I could just tell a much more relatable story that still has the impact and goes the distance.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I’m reminded, I think, Ramit Sethi was talking about copywriting, and he said this product or offer of his really did have some epically transformational results for folks in terms of additional income or business revenue or whatever, but some of the results were so huge it was beyond belief. So, naturally, he wanted to say, “Look at the success of these students,” but he’s like, “Well, if I do that, I lose the credibility, even though it’s true, so I’m going to have to back it down.”

Alex Neist
Yeah, totally.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Alex, so much good stuff here. Any final thoughts on storytelling, branding, persuasion?

Alex Neist
I guess all I would say is, again, that everybody has so many stories that you can tell every single day that happened to you. You just have to pay attention to them, and they’re there, and just understand the key to a story is change. That’s the key. That’s what makes merely reciting facts versus telling a compelling story is change.

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

Alex Neist
It comes from my mom. And she taught me that you can do anything you want in life. You just have to be willing to work for it.

And along with that what I’ve added to it when I tell my kids, is I always tell them that, “Don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t do it. If you want it, go get it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. And a favorite book?

Alex Neist
It is Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Alex Neist
Sauna.

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

Alex Neist
Go to HostageTape.com. You can find it on all the socials, Hostage Tape, Hostagetape.com. If you’re going to try to buy it on Amazon, you can, but it’s not the best place to get it. Just go to the website, HostageTape.com, and you can find your best deals. And don’t let bad sleep hold you hostage anymore.

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

Alex Neist
We’re in an age of virtual digital meetings worlds. I would challenge people to actually upgrade their equipment. Have a better camera. Have a better microphone. It makes so big of a difference when you’re on Zooms or you’re on Google Meets all the time, and you can actually sound great and you look great. It makes all the difference in the world.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Alex, this is fun. I wish you much luck and good sleep.

Alex Neist
Awesome. Thanks, Pete. I appreciate it.

Mar 13
0

1040: Building an Unstoppable Mindset with Alden Mills

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Former Navy SEAL Alden Mills shares his battle-tested strategies for building mental toughness.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to push past fear
  2. How to master the mindset loop
  3. How to direct your emotions

About Alden

Alden Mills is on a mission to help 100 million people Be Unstoppable. He is a three-time bestselling author, the Inc. 500 CEO of Perfect Fitness, and the founder of multiple businesses. Throughout his time as a businessman founding and leading multiple companies, he has been awarded over 40 patents. A former Navy SEAL, he is a three-time platoon commander and ranked #1 platoon commander each time. Alden teaches people, teams, and organizations to Be Unstoppable. Entrepreneur magazine recently ranked him the #1 top virtual speaker.

Resources Mentioned

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Alden Mills Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Alden, welcome back.

Alden Mills
Pete, it is so great to be back. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m excited to dig into your wisdom. So much good stuff. So much unstoppability. This time we’re coming in to chat about Unstoppable Mindset. So important. And I’d love to kick us off, because I know you’re good for it, could you set the scene for us with a dramatic, exciting, high-stakes tale of when you had an unstoppable mindset at work doing something awesome?

Alden Mills
Oh, so there I was, I’d raised a million and a half dollars, only to learn $1,475,000 worth of ways not to launch a product, I was broke, and I finally decided to pivot away after four years of toil on the first product, and the unstoppable mindset arose when the team of five of us couldn’t raise any more money, decide we’re going to launch this product with $25,000, $500,000 of debt to a manufacturer, only 90 days of runway for benefits. And we decide we’re going to break this down one obstacle at a time.

And with 90 days, most people are like, “It’s not even going to happen. It’s not even close. You can’t even cut steel to make a mold. And let alone, where are you going to get a couple hundred thousand dollars to build the product so you could even make some money when you put it on a container?” Well, one obstacle led to another, led to another, led to another, but we were able to overcome each of those.

And 87 days later, we launched a product called the Perfect Push Up. And a lot of people are familiar with the Perfect Push Up. I know about 20 million people in the United States alone were. And that was the third product in this series of failures that I had beforehand, and that product was always one conversation away from never happening. That product, through almost three years later, we do almost 100 million in sales, puts us on the fastest-growing consumer product company, number four overall on the Inc. 500.

And I would say that was a monumental, unstoppable mindset by all five of us that decided to go after bringing that product to market.

Pete Mockaitis
I knew you would deliver, sir. Thank you. That’s juicy. So, wow, let’s zoom into that moment there in which you got this idea, but it seems like the odds are slim. Not enough time, not enough money, not enough people, resources to have a reasonable shot at this. And yet, away you go. What is going on inside your brain, inside that unstoppable mindset right there? It’s probably not, “Oh forget it, it’s no use. This is never going to happen.” What does that internal conversation sound like?

Alden Mills
That internal conversation was going between two basic fears: the fear of staying put and the fear of moving forward. In this particular case, the fear of staying put was very specifically called out by these five investors that I went to raise money from, and they’re like, “You have one option and one option only. Let me show you this chart. It’s called a cashflow statement. You don’t have any. There’s only one option for you. You have to go bankrupt. Your wife is pregnant with child number three. You’re not making any money. You have to go get a job.”

It wasn’t even a question of, “Oh, there was a slim chance.” It was like, “It’s over.” And when you ask a question, “Okay, so what’s going through your mind?” it became very clear that if we go behind door number B, called bankruptcy, we know exactly what’s going to happen. We’re going to flush the last four years of hard work.

But if you look at the A door, the alternative, and the alternative was, “Hey, what do we still have available to us?” Well one, we had a good relationship with our manufacturer. He knew what we were dealing with, and he liked the new product and he was willing to take more equity because that’s what we had left in the business. And he was able to float us the first couple of containers, and he was able to cut the mold, the steel, much faster than 90 days. He got it done in 26 days.

And when people started to realize, like, “Hey, this is it. We’re going bankrupt,” or “We can give you a little equity, and if you want to come along for this wild ride with us,” a lot of people chose to do the wild ride and chose door number A. So, when we talk about the two basic fears, I really think of it like this. Until the fear of staying put is greater than the fear of moving forward, you’re going to stay put.

I did not want to star in the bankruptcy movie, and I was willing to go way down the line of venturing on the unknown to see what would happen and what we were capable of. And one conversation would lead to another. One day led to two, led to four, led to a week, led to six weeks. And that’s how we tackled that. And, literally, the same analogy of climbing a mountain. One step at a time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that question a lot, “What do we still have available?” because it’s very grounding and very real. Because it feels like the opposite question is, “How are we screwed? Let me count the ways,” it’s like a poem, and the brain just rattles it off. It’s very untethered. It’s precarious. It’s floating. It’s drifting. But, “What do we still have available?” that’s very concrete and that’s grounded.

And you sort of look at it, write it down, assess it, and note like a great relationship with the manufacturer doesn’t just mean he thinks we’re cool, we think he’s cool, he gets our stuff kind of fast, and we’ve got good credit terms. It means, “No, he might actually become an equity player and provide some levels of flexibility and goodness that is absolutely atypical of a typical manufacturing customer.”

Alden Mills
You know, I think it’s very important to take inventory, and you learn that early on in SEAL team about taking inventory of, “Okay, what do we have available to us? What are the weapons?” I’m using that quotation wise, “And what are our assets? What are our skills? What are our strengths?” For every negative, there is a positive. It just comes in a different wrapper, and you have to look at it from a different perspective.

And I really find where you decide to put your focus is where your direction gets determined. Focus determines direction.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, share with us a little bit of the how-to then. Any key insights, discoveries you made as you were kind of reflecting on these experiences and synthesizing the goods into the Unstoppable Mindset?

Alden Mills
The first thing I really want everyone to understand is that there are very few controllables that we have at our disposal. We can’t control the weather. We can’t control our kids, that’s for sure. We can’t control our colleagues. We can’t control the business environment. But we can control our thoughts, where we put our focus, and what we decide to believe in.

And if you think about those three mental controllables– now we have some others. We can control our emotions. We can control our physical capabilities, if we’re blessed enough to be able to use our arms and legs and our minds. And then we can control our faith. What we decide that we really want to put our faith into from a spiritual perspective. Okay?

And what I really want to hone the conversation on is the first one, the mindset, the mental controllables of thoughts, focus, and beliefs, and make sure everybody understands how they build upon each other. They work in what I call a loop, a mindset loop. Thoughts direct your focus. Focus drives to an action. And beliefs power a thought based off of an action that you or I just took or about to take.

And when you start to appreciate, and let’s start with thoughts. Every single one of us has a conversation, and it was the conversation that you just asked me in the very beginning off of that story, “Hey, what was going through your head?” Remember the conversation you just asked me? And that conversation, I call out in my latest book, there are two main voices, the whiner and the winner.

The whiner is your negativity bias. My whiner, when things are getting hard or I’m struggling and I’m tired and I’m starting to have a pity party for myself, sounds like a 10-year-old, “You know how hard this is going to be? Why do you think you can do it? Who do you know who’s done this before? Everyone else thinks you should go this way. No!”

And the whiner in your conversation, it wants to look in the rearview mirror. It knows what it knows from the past. It wants to bring the past into your present. Now that’s a danger because if you’re using something that’s restrictive or limiting from your past into your present, what do you think that does for your future?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it limits it.

Alden Mills
Yeah. Right? It lowers your ceiling. Because that whiner is living out of the comfort zone, the comfort zone of familiarity, which it breeds mediocrity. Now, once you get this thought, and then you got the winner, the winner whispers. The winner will say things, especially when you’re doing something new to you, and that’s what I really want to focus on.

When you’re doing something new to you, where you don’t know the outcome, you’re taking a risk, but you’re like, “You know, what if, what if I could do this thing, accomplish this goal?” The winner, when you do that in the beginning, it whispers to you because you don’t quite have the confidence yet, and it might say things like, “Hey, try again. Get up. Go another way. You can do it.”

And you have, all of us, we all have that conversation to deal with. And I call that conversation our first leadership decision. And it’s the first leadership decision of deciding whether I can or I can’t. And you have to know the deck is stacked against you. It’s stacked in the form of “I can’t,” that’s negativity bias. Neuroscientists will say, on average, we have about a 3-to-1 ratio of negative to positive. And we have that because it’s a survivability mechanism to keep ourselves safe.

Here’s the good news. Most of us don’t have to worry about staying safe anymore. It’s not just about surviving; it’s about thriving. So how do you override the negativity of your negativity bias that came from a couple million-year-old survivability mindset inside your brain?

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say 3 to 1, that means just in the course of my internal mental chatter, I’m likely, on average, to have three times more negative thoughts like, “This is dumb. I hate this. I’m tired. I want to quit,” than I am positive thoughts of, “Booyah! Let’s rock and roll.” Is that what you mean?

Alden Mills
Yes, and I can go a step further. There’s a study that I talk about in the Unstoppable Mindset book about a UCLA neuroscientist who goes through and figures out one negative thought needs three positive thoughts to offset the impact of the negative. And if you want to be in the plus column, you’re going to need somewhere around five positive thoughts.

So that’s how incredibly important it is when you’re starting to have that conversation, and the whiner is coming at you, to really flood your brain with, “Okay, we’re going to figure out ways we can do this. Let’s take our inventory. Let’s take a look at what we have available to us. Let’s remember that there’s always a positive to a negative.”

One of the tools that I use and talk about in the book is playing the opposite game. What I mean by the opposite game is when a negative confronts you, an obstacle that seems insurmountable to you, play the opposite game and give yourself, force yourself, force your team to come up with two reasons why this obstacle is a positive for us, “What are we going to learn from it?”

And when you do that, you’re going to get people to shift their focus. You’re going to force them to shift their focus. Sometimes, if you hear a lot of negative banter and you’re sitting around in a meeting room, like, “Oh, this can’t be done for this reason and this reason and this reason,” you’re like, “Okay, great. We’re done with the ‘can’t be done’ meeting. Everyone, get up. I want you to walk around the office space or walk around the building, and come back here in five minutes.”

“And once you’ve done that,” that’s a state change, by the way, moving, getting oxygen to your mind, “I want you to be thinking about the can-do reasons why we can do this and what that obstacle is going to do positively for us,” and watch what happens. It will take a while because you got to get people to look at it from a different angle, but you can find at least two positives. It wouldn’t surprise me if some came back with three or four.

So that’s on thoughts.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, I’d love it if you could give us a couple examples. Like, this thing seems bad and I got two positives on it.

Alden Mills
Okay. Gee, really negative that we’re going near to bankruptcy, like, this is the only stop we have. Give me two things why my investors said, “Hey, your only option is bankruptcy.” You sit around the table, and like, “Well, it’s going to get us really focused.” You know, one of the big problems was when I raised a million and a half dollars, I didn’t have a massive sense of urgency to hit our timelines.

When you have just $25,000 left in some credit cards, you have a real sense of urgency and it brings everything into clarity very quickly. So, we got clarity from the fact that there was bankruptcy. Number two, when you go to a supplier, and say, “Hey, your only other option is bankruptcy,” they don’t want you to go bankrupt. They start to lean into you, if they like you and you’ve been honest with them, and they started to work with us and give us new ideas that we hadn’t gotten in the past.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Understood. All right. And so, what I’m hearing is with the two positive reasons, it’s actually actively positive as opposed to, “Well, it could be worse. Well, I guess it’s nice that we have bankruptcy protections in this nation and I don’t have to be thrown into debtors’ prison.” I mean, I guess, yeah, it could be worse, but that’s not what you’re saying. It’s like, what we’re saying is, “No, this is actively positive.”

Alden Mills

Yeah. And I want to be clear to everybody about positive. Sometimes when I’m up on stage, I will ask people, “Hey, raise your hands if you’ve done 23andMe, or some variant of genetic testing?” A bunch of hands typically go up. And then I’ll ask somebody out of the audience, “Hey, you that just raised your hand, tell me, did you screen positive for the positive gene? Did you get the positive gene?” And they’re like, “Uh, I don’t remember.”

And I go, “Well, let me tell you, it’s right above the leadership gene and just below the success gene.” And then they kind of get it, and they’re like, “Oh, uh, no, I don’t get that.” And I’m like, “Obviously you didn’t, because there’s no such thing!” And when I talk about the positive, let me be specific here, I’m talking about can-do positivity. I’m not talking about just saying, “Hey, let’s be a cheerleader for cheerleaders’ sake.” I’m asking you to look at this from the perspective of “What can we do?”

Pete Mockaitis
And, indeed, how does this circumstance enable us to can-do it better than if it were absent? Bankruptcy yields focus, and that’s handy.

Alden Mills
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, yeah, let’s hear about the focus.

Alden Mills
So here it is, we’ve had this conversation, and we’ve generated some thoughts. We’ve generated a bunch of negative thoughts because that’s what the whiner is really good at. And then we’ve got some positive thoughts and can-do thoughts, like, “Hey, okay, so now we got a tight timeline. Time to get to work. We’re going to cut out all the slough of what we need to do, and just focus on how we’re going to bring this product to market.”

A thought is neither helpful nor hurtful until energy gets attached to it. Neuroscientists today will say we generate somewhere upwards of 10,000 thoughts a day, and I don’t know how they’re counting that, but a minimum right. It’s a large number of thoughts a day. Thoughts come in three main categories: past, present, and future. But how do we add energy to a thought? We do it through focus.

Well, how does focus work? The way focus, this is the way I communicate how focus works, is that it acts like a funnel. It funnels energy to a thought that drives us to an action. The action could be, “We’re going to sit on our hands and feet. Sit on our hands and do nothing.” Or, it could be, “All right. We’re going to call up that manufacturer and see if that manufacturer will work with us and help us with this new product.”

The important thing is thoughts are constantly going over our focus funnel, which we all have. And until we put the thought into our focus funnel and apply energy to it, thoughts are neither helpful nor hurtful. Now, here’s how I want people to think of it, and I offer five different solutions. And I love acronyms, and I created an acronym called FOCUS. And I’ll give you the F of FOCUS as one of five different ways to hone your focus when dealing with a thought.

I’d like you to think, on top of your focus funnel, that you have an adaptive screen. You can open and close that screen. You’re in charge of what thought you want to give energy to it. Now, let’s just do a little thought classwork. If we focus on a negative thought in the past, what do you think that leads to?

Pete Mockaitis
Emotionally? Maybe bitterness, resentment, regret.

Alden Mills
Yeah, those are all components of depression. They lead to depression. If we focus on a negative thought in the future, what does that lead to?

Pete Mockaitis
Like, worry, anxiety.

Alden Mills
Anxiety, okay? That’s the power of our leading ourselves. Everything we’re talking about here, Pete, is leadership, and it is leadership of what I call the first level. The last time I was on here, we talked about second-level leadership. That was team leading, right? The level before team leading is how you lead yourself. In these first initial leadership decisions, okay, picking the thought, then we’re deciding, “Okay, where are we going to put our energy? Where are we going to put that focus?” That’s leadership decision number two.

So, when we get this adaptive screen that’s on top, and we put a thought in there, how do we sort out all these thoughts that are going into our funnel? Because we only really want one, and we want the one that’s going to be most helpful to getting us to our goal. So, I have this very simple question that I ask people, and I’ve even made-up little wristlets so people can remind themselves of it, “Is this helpful or hurtful towards the direction of the goal I’m going?”

Case in point. Is it helpful or hurtful to focus on going bankrupt? Or is it helpful or hurtful to focus on, “How can I figure out a way to cut steel in less than 90 days so we have a shot at launching the product?”

Alden Mills
Now, you may say, “Well, Alden, that’s remarkably simple.” And you know what? It ain’t complicated. It’s just hard, as a good old Navy SEAL instructor have us want it done. And that’s what we’re after here, is I want people to walk away from our conversation today with a couple of very simple tools that they can ask themselves or their team members, “Hey, every time you come in here and talk about everything we can’t do, do you think that’s helpful or hurtful to trying to accomplish the company goal that we’re all being measured against?”

It’s like throwing cold water on somebody. And then when people start to go, “You know what, I guess it’s hurtful.” I’m like, “Yeah. And if you’re saying that inside your mind, and now you’re saying it out to infect everybody else, remember the old adage, ‘One bad apple spoils the bunch’?”

Pete Mockaitis
Right, yeah.

Alden Mills
That’s negativity bias. It’s the same thing we’re talking about here.

Pete Mockaitis
So, let’s zoom in. So, we’re living life, you know, we’re having idle moments of me in the shower or driving, and then a thought comes into the mind, like, “Oh, I might go bankrupt and we might have to downsize, sell the house, and get a tiny apartment somewhere.” So, I guess that’s a future negative, anxiety-producing.

And so, I can ask myself the question, “Is that helpful or hurtful? Oh, it’s hurtful. It’s making me anxious instead of, like, focused and zeroed in.” And then what? Do I just kind of try to have my list of go-to helpful thoughts to return to? Or how do you recommend we manage that in these moments?

Alden Mills
Great question. First of all, we’re human. What does that mean?

Pete Mockaitis
We have feelings.

Alden Mills
It means we’re imperfect. It means we can’t do it all. It means that our focus funnel, that Alden just talked about, it’s porous. It can sprout holes on the side. And it can sprout holes from external forces of different people saying, “You can’t do that. It’s never been done before. No, that won’t work.” And, all of a sudden, energy gets pulled off the side of your focus funnel, so you’ve lost your laser focus.

Or you have internal focus funnel hole-makers, that are saying, “What are you doing? You can’t do this.” They’re based off of fear, things of doubt, or questioning beliefs. And when you get to those points, the key is being aware enough to be like, “Hey, hey, hey, that’s a negative hypothetical. If I’m thinking about something in the future, if I can’t do this, then I’m going to have to move to a smaller apartment, and I’ve just gotten married, and my wife’s going to hate me, and I’ve burned through all of this, and, oh, my God, I’m going to look like a loser, and I’ll never get a job. Whoa, I should stop right now. What am I doing?” Right?

That is projecting a negative hypothetical into the future. Pete, helpful or hurtful, negative hypothetical?

Pete Mockaitis
Hurtful.

Alden Mills
Yeah, right? But you, the listener, has listened to Alden and Pete talk about this and say, “Hey, that’s something in the future. I can’t control that yet.” The only thing you can control is what you decide you want to create for your own future. And at that point, you get to go back and say, “Hey, flush the funnel. New idea. Alden, what is helpful that I can do today to take action to accomplish this goal? What one thing can I do?”

And when you start having that conversation hourly, sometimes by the second, example, going through Hell Week in SEAL training, where they give you a total of three and a half hours of sleep over five and a half days, you get to a point where all you’re saying is, “Can I take another step? Yeah, I can take another step. I’ll take another breath. I’ll do one more step.”

Climbing Denali at 50 in 15 days and I didn’t get to see the summit until 45 minutes before we made the final turn. Do you think it’s helpful or hurtful to say, “Where’s the summit? I can’t see it.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Are we there yet?”

Alden Mills
“Are we there yet?” Right? No. No, it’s not. But you got to be like, “Hey, forget about that. I’ve got to stay in the moment and not focus on the mountain.” And that’s a phrase that I use a lot. And then talk about staying in the moment versus the mountain. Use the mountain of work in front of you as a way to measure the yardstick of your progress because you’re still making progress.

Even if you’re like Thomas Edison and you fail 10,000 times in inventing the light bulb, you learn 10,000 different ways not to light the light bulb, right? Stay in the moment and ask yourself, “What’s helpful or hurtful to get me a step closer to my goal?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. Thank you.

Alden Mills
You’re welcome.

Pete Mockaitis
And then we got belief.

Alden Mills
We got beliefs. So here it is. We’ve now taken an action. An action we think, hopefully, is helpful in the direction of the new goal, the new thing. We have dared to try to do something new to us. When I’m doing all of this conversation with you, those are the people I’m speaking to that have been willing to set a goal that’s audacious, that sometimes they have no idea how they’re going to accomplish it, but they know if they accomplish this goal, this could be transformative for them, or at least a step in the direction of something transformative for them.

So, we take the action. And, lo and behold, we fall flat on our face. We create this product, we cut steel, we spend all this money, and the damn product doesn’t work, or people don’t like it, or it doesn’t do what we thought it would do. I’m using that as the example. We have a decision to make. We look at that action, and we say, “Oh, my God, I’m a total failure. This is never going to work,” and we accept that as fact, and then our thoughts get in alignment with our focus, and we create a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. Step one.

Or step two, we look at it, and go, “Yeah, it didn’t quite work the way I thought it was going to work, but, hey, we learned how to cut steel, and we got a product that we didn’t have before, and now I can go around and get feedback from people to tell me what they don’t like about it because it’s so much easier to have the hard good in their hands versus just talking about it on a PowerPoint, right?”

And then we start thinking to ourselves, “Wait a second, I got a couple other ideas,” and we develop a different belief. What is a belief, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, a belief is an assertion that you hold to be true.

Alden Mills
Amen. Bingo. Hundred points for Pete today.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.

Alden Mills
That’s all it is. It’s something we have determined that is true. We’ve determined it. Now maybe we’ve picked it up from other people because beliefs come from all different portions of our life. Beliefs can come from the environment we grew up in, from our parents, from our brothers, our sisters, our coaches, our teachers, on books we read, the TV shows we listen to, or watch, the podcasts, whatever. They come all over the place.

And here’s the wonderful thing about beliefs. We can decide which ones are true or not, and we get to change them. Leadership action number three – we get to decide. I decide what I can or cannot do. Nobody else. You might allow other people to do that, but at the end of the day, it’s your leadership that decides “What I want to believe in.”

Alden, born with smaller than average sized lungs, asthmatic since the age of 12. I remember my mother said, “No, you can’t go to the Naval Academy. They don’t like asthmatics. You’ll definitely never go to SEAL team. Forget about it. You’ll never be a Division I athlete. You won’t be able to try out for the Olympic team. Are you kidding? You have smaller than average sized lungs.”

You know a couple of things they didn’t even know back then? If you really work aerobically, you can increase the volume of your lungs. They know that now. They didn’t know it then. Huh?

Pete Mockaitis

Cool.

Alden Mills
Interesting, right? So, what’s that got to do with thoughts and focus? Beliefs come in two, this is how I think of them. They come in two major genres: limiting or empowering. Is the belief I’m deciding to be true helpful or hurtful toward my goal? Imagine starting off in a company going, “Well, I’m raising all this money, but I really don’t think it’s going to work.” Would that be helpful or hurtful?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s hurtful for your motivation and belief in doing all the things you’re trying to do.

Alden Mills
But why would you do that? But you know what? Half my SEAL class, who took, on average, two years to show up and get to the starting line, when push came to shove and they had already passed a PT test, physical fitness test, four times, they got one more time to do exactly the same test. This is the lead story in the book, right in the beginning, 122 of us, 64 passed the test. You know why?

Pete Mockaitis
Tell me.

Alden Mills
Because they had a belief that they really couldn’t be there. They really couldn’t do it.

Pete Mockaitis
So, they passed it four times previously, and the fifth time…

Alden Mills
But the fifth time, when it mattered to class up and actually start training, because all of the other stuff was just pre-phase training, they don’t class.

Pete Mockaitis
That is surprising.

Alden Mills
Belief, it’s an operating system. It’s our basic operating code. And here’s the rub wrong with the belief? A belief acts like a seed, and the more we empower it, fertilize it with our thoughts and focus, it drives us to take an action. That action is called a behavior. We decide like, “Hey, you know, I think I could run a little bit faster,” or, “I think maybe my manufacturer will give me a little money, or maybe they’ll accept. I’ve got to try, I’ve got to ask, I’m going to take a behavior and I’m going to try something different.”

And then over time, that behavior can turn into a habit. Now habit is an interesting challenge. It’s what keeps me in the coaching business, because a lot of people, the habit becomes so automatic that they don’t even know about it anymore. The automatic could be, well, the first thing that comes up is that, “No, this can’t be done.” They listen to their whiner. They’re talking like the whiner, and they’re the one that’s holding back the whole team.

And then they call in somebody like me, to say, “Hey, Mr. or Mrs. Executive, if you don’t fix that, you’re not helpful on our team anymore.” And that is where you’ve got to go to work on your belief. So how do you do that? Well, you do it the way we initially started when you asked me that big question, and you say, “Hey, we have to ask ourselves these two basic fears, the fear of staying put, or the fear of moving forward.”

And you run an outcome account in your head. What’s an outcome account? Basically, “Hey, what happens if I allow this belief that I think I should accept as true? Am I accepting the fact that it will hold me back from achieving this? Am I comfortable with the fact that I don’t achieve this?” If you’re comfortable with the fact that you’re not going to achieve it, you’re going to stay put.

But if you’re not comfortable with that outcome, and you say, “You know what, the risk of going out there and trying, and maybe, you know, some people laugh at me for failing, or maybe this, that, or the other thing, I got to believe that we can try.” Then that’s going to empower you to look at your beliefs in a different way.

Now the other thing you can do, and I call this confess and assess, is you find somebody, a swim buddy, a close friend, someone that’s not going to judge you, and you call up your buddy, Pete, and you say, “Hey, Pete, I’m struggling here. I can’t seem to see the light of day here, but something’s holding me back. This is what I’m dealing with.”

Pete asks a couple of basic questions, like, “Well, tell me more. Why are you thinking like that? Are you okay if you take that action or don’t take that action? How does that make you feel?” “Oh, no, that would be miserable. I’d hate that.” That’s the confess. When you get your judgment, that inner narrative that’s driving the belief out on the table, and then you use you and your buddy to assess it, that can help you on the path of what I call the “I Can Belief” loop.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s cool. And I’m thinking, we had a hypnotist, Dr. Marc Schoen, a clinical psychologist, who also practice hypnotherapy, given his credentials. And I asked him about what are some of the suggestions or beliefs that are kind of core and super powerful, useful, all the time in many, many contexts, and just to carry with you everywhere.

And I’d like to ask you the same thing. Are there a couple go-to super beliefs that are just so handy in so many circumstances that you cling to?

Alden Mills
Yes. So, I would classify those beliefs as mantras. And that is absolutely one of the things that I encourage, and I talk about it in the book on how to build mantras that help you with your focus of, “Is this helpful or hurtful?” And one of the mantras is, “I decide what I can or can’t do.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Alden Mills
“I’m unstoppable. I can do this.” And you speak in the present tense of what it is you’re trying to do. I love to help people achieve things they didn’t think they could do. That’s kind of my term about being unstoppable. And, by the way, to be unstoppable means you first have to have been stopped. And let’s say, in your case, Pete, you want to be a best-selling author. I would say to you, “Okay, Pete, the very first thing, I want you to create a new mantra for yourself, ‘I am a bestselling author. I write books people want to read. I write books that help people unlock their potential.’”

“Pete, throughout the day, anytime you’re sitting down, and you’re thinking about writing, I want you to start talking to yourself in that present tense, and give yourself that mantra because that’s the goal we’re after. I want the mantra to be in alignment with the goal you’re after in the present tense.’” So that’s one of the techniques.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, I also want to get your quick thought on, you said we can control emotions, and I think some might say, “Can you? Is that possible? What about depression? Isn’t that a thing where we cannot?” What’s your hot take on controlling emotions? And any quick tips on how to do it?

Alden Mills
Emotions. What is an emotion?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you know, it’s funny. I was reading Ethan Kross’s book, and apparently, it’s somewhat complicated. But I’m going to simplify it, and just say it is a feeling and thought existing within us.

Alden Mills
There’s something called a feeling-thought loop, right? Thought gives energy to it, generates a feeling. Emotion derives from it. The definition that I enjoy most about emotion actually comes out of a book from Conscious Leadership that is called E-motion. It’s energy in motion. Now, if you have an E-motion, and something that has been driven from a thought and a feeling, you first need to know the root cause.

If I sit here and spend a lot of time stewing on, “Somebody ripped me off,” I’m making that decision to go down and create that emotion. Can you control every single emotion? No, we’re imperfect, right? But can you control emotions? A hundred percent, you can. It’s in your control, but how do you do that?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I guess the pathway then sounds like is, if there’s an emotion I would like to experience, “I would like to feel inspired and motivated,” I’m going to choose a thought that’s in the inspirational motivational zone and resonant for me, maybe an experience, a memory, a goal, and I’m going to put focus and energy upon that thought. And, in so doing, I will often, but not always, conjure emotion.

Alden Mills
Yeah, and make it even simpler, “Hey, you know what? I’m feeling kind of blah right now. I’d like to feel a little bit better. What’s a simple way to do that? Oh, I love American Authors’ ‘Best Day of My Life’ song. I’m going to listen to that.” Boom! What just happened there? I just changed my emotion. I did a state change, “You know what? I don’t feel that great. I feel low on energy and I feel kind of blah. I’m going to go for a run. I’m going to get on the rowing machine. Get a workout.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, sure. Get a glass of water. I mean, I guess when you raise the question, you naturally say, “Oh, there’s several options that I can immediately take right now.”

Alden Mills
A hundred percent. And, by the way, that’s you leading you, right? So, in the case of when you get ambushed, and I talk about this in the chapter I used, one of the hardest Navy SEAL training evolutions is practicing an ambush. They’re violent, they’re terrifying, they’re unexpected, and you got to think clearly when you get ambushed, but we ambush ourselves all the time.

We let our thoughts run wild. We’re not paying attention because we’re doing something else or looking at our phone, and, all of a sudden, something pisses us off. Before we know it, an emotion comes out and we’re all fired up. So, you got to learn to move that emotion. Now, what is a big challenge when we get an ambushed emotion? Well, that fires the amygdala, the amygdala, the little almond-sized piece of our brain that has to deal with fight, flight, or freeze.

And the problem with when the amygdala gets fired is it changes the blood flow from the prefrontal cortex, the front of our brain, where executive function and compassion and collaboration live, and put us in a state where cortisol and adrenaline are firing through our veins. Cortisol, so we can just go to the sugars. Adrenaline, so we can get up to speed or whether we’re going to fight or flight. And then we’re not solving anything creatively, and then more emotion can stack on there.

The quickest way to move that, and you have to work on this, is through a box breath is one example. Breathing through the nostril, holding, exhaling, holding. Moving, doing a state change, getting yourself to calm back down from that emotional ambush.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s good.

Pete Mockaitis
Well said. Well, tell us, anything else you want to mention before we hear about a few of your favorite things?

Alden Mills
I really want people to understand they are their own best leader. Every single one of us is a leader. We have to lead ourselves to get up in the morning. We have to lead ourselves to listen to this podcast. We have to lead ourselves to decide what we can or can’t do. And you have to lead yourself to decide, “What’s the helpful or hurtful thought? Where am I going to put my focus? And what am I going to decide to believe in?” If you learn to lead yourself through those, watch how many people will learn to lead to follow you.

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

Alden Mills
Of course. Seneca, “Success is a matter of belief.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Alden Mills
I’m really geeking out on this book right now, “A Calendar of Wisdom” by Leo Tolstoy. Daily little wisdom to get your mind in the right place, your thoughts, your focus, and your beliefs to start the day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Alden Mills
Telling my kids I love them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with audiences, something they quote back to you often?

Alden Mills
“Is this helpful or hurtful?”

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

Alden Mills
Alden-Mills.com.

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

Alden Mills
Yes. I want you waking up every day asking yourself, “What’s one thing I can do that’s going to push me out of my comfort zone, that’s going to drive me to do something courageous, audacious, something that, over time, will change my life?”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Alden, this is so powerful. Thank you.

Alden Mills
Pete, great questions. I always love being with you. Keep inspiring, brother.