This Podcast Will Help You Flourish At Work

Each week, I grill thought-leaders and results-getters to discover specific, actionable insights that boost work performance.

May 07
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1150: How to Reclaim Your Schedule and Own Your Time with Laura Vanderkam

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Productivity expert Laura Vanderkam shows you how to take charge of your schedule so that you can make time for what truly matters.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why you feel like you don’t have enough time–and how to change it
  2. How setting aside 15 minutes can change your whole workday
  3. How to become the ringmaster of your schedule circus

About Laura

Laura Vanderkam is the author of several time management and productivity books, including Off the Clock, I Know How She Does It, What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, and 168 Hours. 

Her 2016 TED talk, “How to Gain Control of Your Free Time,” has been viewed more than 5 million times. She regularly appears in publications including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Fortune. 

She is the co-host, with Sarah Hart-Unger, of the podcast Best of Both Worlds. She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and four children, and blogs at LauraVanderkam.com.

Resources Mentioned

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Laura Vanderkam Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Laura, welcome back!

Laura Vanderkam
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about Big Time. You’ve got a simple path for us for time abundance. And we talked a little bit about this notion of time scarcity versus abundance last time. Tell me, what have you discovered with your new research adventures?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah. Well, Big Time is all about moving beyond a sense of time scarcity, and what happens when we truly believe that we have enough time for the things that we want to do in life. I really do think it is possible to fall in love with our schedules, and I’ve got lots of practical tips, talked to lots of people who are making it happen. I think that time can, ultimately, be our friend.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds enticing. Can you share with us some of the on-the-ground investigative research studying you did to discover these bits?

Laura Vanderkam
Well, one thing I did is looking at how people spend their work hours. And how people feel about work is a very complicated question.

You know, if you ask people, in general, how do they feel about their jobs, most people will say they’re reasonably satisfied. If you look at people’s happiness during the day, like in a 10:00 a.m. staff meeting, they tend to be pretty unhappy. Like, they are watching the clock, hoping that time is moving faster.

So we have this, you know, gap between, like, we’re reasonably happy with our jobs overall, but during the hours we are spending at our jobs, we may not be as happy as we could be. And I really hate to have people wishing time away in their lives because time is so precious.

So one of the things I had people try out is a couple of strategies for making the experience of working hours better. Like, are there things you can do during an average work day to have you watching the clock less? And they’re pretty simple strategies.

I mean, one was spending one more hour per week on your favorite sort of work. We all have things we don’t like about our jobs but, hopefully, there’s something that drew us to the job in the first place. And so spending one more hour a week on that.

Spending just 15 minutes deepening a work friendship. So even if you’re not enamored with your job itself, like you probably have at least one colleague that you could be friendly with, and building a relationship with that person can make the experience of time at work a lot better.

And, finally, taking intentional breaks, taking two short breaks each day that you have decided ahead of time what to do with, turns out can also vastly increase the happy feelings at work. And so taken altogether, when I had a couple hundred people try these out over the course of three weeks, their workday satisfaction rose significantly.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really intriguing because, if folks are in a situation where they’re not enjoying their job, the idea of spending more time working, like your first tip there, might seem very unpleasant, like, “Heck, no. I don’t want to spend one more minute than I have to.”

Laura Vanderkam
No, not that you need to be clocking 41 hours a week instead of 40. No, I mean, re-purposing some of the time that you are already working. And even when people don’t have a ton of control, a ton of discretion over how they spend their working hours, there are often still things you can do to change it on the margin.

Whether that’s asking your supervisor to assign you to something different than what you’ve been or to spend a little bit more time on one project and try to be a little bit more efficient on something else.

There’s always things you can do just on the margins to increase the number of minutes spent on enjoyable activities versus less enjoyable activities.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, so the re-purposing, that’s a great distinction. Although, I might suggest, you tell me, that even if you do spend the 41st hour instead of 40 hours, well, I’m thinking of Mary Poppins got that tune in my head, “A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.”

Laura Vanderkam
That’s true. That’s true. It might be worth a 41st hour just to change the experience of work. You know, it’s so true. I mean, there was one ridiculous study I read with psychology that had people put their hands in freezing cold water.

And when they made it slightly less cold at the end, people rated the experience as so much better. And so maybe it’s the same thing if you spend the last, you know, 15 minutes of your work day, but maybe even if you work 15 minutes later on something you really enjoy doing, maybe that could make the whole experience different.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, certainly, and the notion that you’re taking control as opposed to work is happening to you, it’s like, “No, no, no, this is the 41st hour. I am choosing to do this discretionarily.”

And in so doing – and I’m just totally making this up, so give me your hot take – that you can have some transformative impact on your own associations and relationship to the experience of work by going there.

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, and I think having that mindset of, “I have some agency over this situation,” is huge. And, again, I know a lot of people don’t have complete control over their work or their working hours. But even if you don’t have complete control, you have some. And using whatever agency you have to make your time better can just change how you feel about life in general.

I mean, we don’t spend the majority of our waking hours working. There’s that adage that, “Oh, you spend the majority of your waking hours working.” Most people do not. But, that said, we do spend a fair number of hours working.

And so if there is something you can do to move those hours out of the wishing-time away category and into even the neutral category, that can be a major life satisfaction boost. And something like deepening a work friendship.

I mean, you think about a friend as somebody that you would spend time with off the clock. So wouldn’t it be exciting to be able to spend more time with somebody that you enjoy on the clock? And, in general, friendships are built through the accumulation of relaxed, pleasant time spent together. So the more you can throw at that pile, the better.

Pete Mockaitis
And with regard to these categories of the experience of work, can you unpack a little bit of the names of the categories, how you kind of think about which vibe is appropriate for a given activity, the tracking, a little bit of the nuts and bolts for these bits?

Laura Vanderkam
I think one way to think about how you’re spending your time at work and how you’re feeling about your time at work is to give yourself, honestly, a mood score or an energy score as you go through your day.

I’m a big fan of time tracking, in general. I’ve found, through other research I’ve done, that when people track their time for a week, they tend to feel better about their time overall because it turns out that many of the catastrophic stories people tell themselves about their time are not true, right? Life isn’t actually all that bad.

We don’t work around the clock. We do get some sleep. We have some time for ourselves, even if it’s not as much as we want. And so as you’re tracking time, you could also keep track of, “How do I feel about my time? Am I happy?” Is it all clouds and rainbows and unicorns? Or is it, “I’m hating the universe?” and sort of somewhere between zero and 10. And probably most of the things we do in life are around a five or a six. But maybe some stuff is better.

And if you are going through your work day and you find that some categories of work are edging up, like you’re feeling like this is maybe a seven or if it’s in certain circumstances, it might be even an eight, well, obviously, if you can come up with a way to spend an extra hour of the week in that seven or eight category, as opposed to maybe a two, three, four kind of category, you’re going to see a big boost in overall satisfaction.

Same thing with energy. Actually, it’s interesting, because one of the problems that creating intentional breaks helps solve is that people’s energy dips a lot through the day. People have been working for a while, and then you feel like you need a break, but if you don’t take an intentional break, you’ll probably take an unintentional one. For many people that looks like scrolling around online, checking email after you just checked it five minutes ago.

And so if you find yourself with your energy dipping, like that’s trending down, maybe 10 as you’re ready to run a marathon and zero as you’re flat on your back, that’s a good sign that it’s time to build in something that would boost your energy, something like taking a quick walk, talking with somebody you like, getting some fresh air.

And as people try that, they’re going to find that the numbers after that break start trending higher.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you give us just plenty of fun stories in terms of practical, tactical, experiential, individuals who figured out how to make that switch to re-purpose an hour to have more engaging goodness, what they did for their breaks, and how that was transformative?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, sometimes it’s about noticing the work that is already there and savoring it when you’re doing it, because so much of life can just be mindless. Like, you’re going through the day, you’re doing stuff, but your mind is somewhere else, so you’re always thinking about the next thing.

So, for instance, one health care provider who was part of the study would take a minute to look at her schedule coming up and what was going on. And she realized that some of her favorite visits were with babies, right? She loved to have babies come into the office and take care of them and talk to the new parents about how they were doing.

And so when she would see these on her schedule, she would consciously be like, “Oh, yeah, I’m looking forward to this, right? I’m getting to do this favorite work coming up in one of my patients this afternoon, and would savor it while it was happening and take a moment afterwards to pause and be like, ‘Yes, I love doing that. That’s my favorite kind of work.’”

And, you know, the kids were on the schedule anyway, right? The same patients are coming no matter what, you know, if her mind is somewhere else or if she’s fully absorbed and enjoying this. But her experience of work was so much different by anticipating, experiencing, savoring in the moment and reflecting on it afterwards.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s super – the anticipating, savoring, and looking back. Boy, that’s powerful. You can do that with just about every day, there’s something worthwhile.

Laura Vanderkam
It could be even that you had a great conversation with a colleague before a meeting.

Like, you can pause and notice that, be like, “Oh, yeah, I like that person. That was a moment in my job that was a wonderful thing.” And it’s the same with you mentioned the breaks, like, stories of people taking breaks. This was almost people had to teach themselves to take good breaks.

I always say people take breaks anyway. People cannot work straight through. Even if it’s just to go to the restroom, there’s some break happening in any sort of work. The problem with a lot of information work is that they are unintentional breaks.

Like, you are going along, doing your work, you get distracted by something, you’re on your phone for a minute. Next thing you know, you’re cycling through headlines, you’re checking your WhatsApp messages. These are breaks, but it doesn’t feel rejuvenating at all.

So I was having people really learn to take real breaks. And some people were very nervous about it at the beginning. Like, I had people, you know, somebody printed out an e-book so it looked like they were working on a document while they were taking a break.

But I’m happy to report that, over the course of trying this out for a while, people realized like the earth does not crash into the sun when you take a 10-minute break. Most of us are just not that important. So you can do it.

And somebody would go outside and sit and look at the sky for 10 minutes and come back in. And it’s pretty hard to tell yourself, “I am starved for time,” when you’ve had 10 minutes to just kind of watch the clouds. And just little things like that can change your entire experience of time.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really good in that, by physically doing a thing, it’s like your brain gets the memo, “No, actually, you’re not wildly scarce in time because look what just happened.”

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, we could change our story like that all the time. Our time narratives are based all on what we are noticing. So training our brains to notice things that are not just these stressful moments can completely rewrite the story from one of time scarcity to time abundance.

Pete Mockaitis
And when it comes to these breaks, so you say two 10-minute breaks and just build them into the day, is that like one in the afternoon, one in the morning?

Laura Vanderkam
Sure, whatever works. I kind of think of these as in addition to a meal break that people might take in the middle of the day. But, obviously, you could add on a few minutes to take a longer lunch break instead if that works better for your schedule.

Some breaks are formal. Sometimes people are, like, you take it at this specific time. For a lot of people, it’s more you catch it when you can. But looking at your schedule ahead of time and kind of proactively choosing when might work is another very smart way to exert agency over your schedule for the day.

Because that sort of strategy is what can then have you say, like, “Oh, well, look, I actually have a longer break between these two meetings, and I could do something else. I could work on some of my favorite work in addition to taking a break.” And when you start to see those kinds of things, you take more charge of your working day.

Pete Mockaitis
And can you share with us some breaks that folks have just been loving in terms of finding them super rejuvenating? Staring at the sky sounds fun. What else do you recommend?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, well, anything that can get you moving physically is going to be a big win. There’s some pretty solid evidence that people who engage in physical activity will see their energy levels go up quite a bit, even through very short bursts of energy.

So if it is possible to get outside and go for a brisk walk, that is going to be at least two things right there that will boost your mood and energy. If you can take a work friend with you, good. That’s even, like, three. That could be even better.

But so people definitely enjoyed that. Now, obviously, you can’t always get outside. But are you somewhere that you could go up and down the stairs even? That would make people feel much more alert than they had.

You know, I had people take, like, little adventures. If there is, say, a park near your office, you might be able to walk out the door, walk there for 10 minutes and come back and have the boost of seeing something different in the course of your day.

But it could be other things. It could be calling a friend. It could be listening to something inspirational like a soaring movie soundtrack. People might find that a little bit exciting. Meditation works for people. Reading something, especially something upbeat.

Even if you, like, read something fun for 10 minutes twice a day, that’s 20 additional minutes of reading you’ve gotten in your day. And if you do that five days a week, that’s 100 minutes, which is an hour and 40 minutes. Like, this is a lot, you know, it does add up. You could probably read an extra book a month that way if you wanted to.

People looked at art online. Even, you know, watching funny videos, as long as you’re doing it intentionally. I think a lot of people are just sort of, you know, pull up YouTube shorts and see what’s there, which, you know, I get it.

But if you have maybe saved up a clip from a favorite stand-up comedian or a clip from a favorite sitcom that you used to watch back in the day, those can be the kind of things that will make you laugh, and a laugh will boost your energy quite a bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that a lot, and I’m a believer in breaks. In this office, it’s wild. I’ve got like a little basin of water I will dip my face into. I’ve got a little rebounder trampoline I’ll just jump on. I’ve got an acupressure mat. I’ll lie on it. I’ll stand on it. I joke that it’s the recording studio and wellness spa with all these amenities.

And it’s so true. When I really stop and engage with these things, it creates a great energy boost as opposed to, if you blast straight through, it’s like the body will demand a pause. And so often, yes, it is a scrolling of some sort. I like your phrase – an unintentional break asserts itself.

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, I refer to that as our electronic hobbies, right, because it fills so much time. And a hobby could be a great thing to do on a break, particularly if you work from home some days. I mean, you know, 10 minutes you could go play a musical instrument.

You could go do some knitting, or needle point, or color in one of those adult coloring books, or even go outside and weed a few things in the garden, if that would be, you know, something you’d find relaxing. But instead, we tend to default to these electronic hobbies of scrolling around, reading social media comments, opening your inbox again, even though you just opened it five minutes prior.

And by naming that as a hobby, I think it gives people pause, because it’s like, “Well, that’s not what I’d choose to do as my hobby.” It’s like, “Okay, well, then we need to re-purpose that time for something that you find more enjoyable.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s super. Let’s talk a little bit about the tracking of time. It seems there are many tools that would love to avail themselves in this domain. What have you found works great for you and for others in doing this?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, so I’ve been tracking my time for about 11 years now. Nobody else needs to do that, but I have been doing that because I find it very useful and it’s also very easy. And I just check in three to four times a day, write down what I’ve done since the last time I checked in.

Each check-in takes me about a minute. You know, three minutes a day, same amount of time I spend brushing my teeth. So it is not something that I find incredibly onerous. But I just use spreadsheets. It is a basic Excel, standard thing.

It’s got the days of the week across the top, Monday through Sunday, half-hour blocks down the left-hand side, 5:00 a.m. to 4:30 a.m. So 336 cells representing the 168-hour week, and I just fill it in as I go.

However, that’s not the only way you could do this. There are lots of time tracking apps on the market.

My podcast co-host on “Best of Both Worlds,” Sarah Hart-Unger, was having trouble tracking her time for years, even though I was constantly preaching the benefits of it. And she came across Toggl, T-O-G-G-L, which has a free version that is a more digital version of this.

Like, you just… it’s on your phone, you say what you’re doing, start and stop. You can go back in and correct the record later if you’ve forgotten to hit stop, and so you’ve been commuting for the last six hours. You can go back in and change it later.

But she found that fairly intuitive and something that fit in with her busy life. So that’s something that people could give a whirl. You could also walk around, like, with a little notebook. You want to look all artsy, like, “I look at my journal as I’m going through the day.” That works too.

Like, the tool itself doesn’t really matter. It’s more like, “Can you do it? Will you do it? Will you stick with it for at least a few days?” and, ideally, a week. And if you do, I think you’ll learn a lot about your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, and I’d love to zoom out and get some of your big-picture perspectives. You’ve got a mindset or metaphor of being the ringmaster. Can you expand on this?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, this is probably one of my favorite metaphors for time and how we think of our lives. So when people tell you, “My life is a circus,” they tend to mean it is chaotic. But that is such a slander against circuses because circuses are the most organized performance you will ever see.

Nobody is getting shot out of a cannon at the wrong time, right? If there are supposed to be tigers in one ring, they are not in another ring. They’re not coming on at the wrong time. They are there when they are supposed to be there, right? And so I think we should aspire to have our lives be as organized as a circus. A circus is complex, but it is not chaotic at all.

And so I’ve developed this metaphor of, like, I am the ring master in charge of my life. My life has three rings, right? So this is a three ring circus of career, relationships – so meaning friends and family – and self, the things I need to do for my own physical, mental, spiritual, emotional health.

So all the time, you are monitoring all three rings, you are making sure that what is supposed to be happening in each ring is actually happening, that the logistics are thought through, that this all looks like a good time. And one of the additions of this metaphor is that a lot of circus performers, acrobats and stuff, perform over a net. And the net is there for when things go wrong.

And, to my mind, a net is a net, but I have interviewed circus performers and they have informed me that, “Oh, no, no, no, no, the net has to be very well thought through. The net is exactly where it’s supposed to be. The net is inspected frequently. We train ourselves on how we land in that net so that we don’t injure ourselves if we fall or something goes wrong.”

And so I was like, “Wow, that’s a good metaphor for life, too. We all need nets under ourselves. We need backup plans for when things go wrong. We need to actually think of those backup plans. Like, do they work?”

It’s not just, like, “Oh, I think maybe if my kid is sick on a day I have a big presentation, I could avail myself of this backup plan.” It’s like, “Well, no, no, no. Let’s make sure. Let’s test that net. Let’s make sure it’s there.”

But when you do that, the circus can go off with much less stress, with much less worry that when something goes wrong, it turns into a disaster.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s super and inspiring. Like, we should be so lucky to have it.

Laura Vanderkam
We should all be a circus. We should be a circus. And not just that, you want to manage it for delight, right? Another part of the metaphor is that a circus isn’t cool if it’s all drudgery. Like, if people are just going through with no smiles on their faces as they’re doing their tricks.

You want to make it look like it’s enjoyable. And as we manage the complex but not chaotic three-ring circus of our lives. We want to make it look like a real performance and truly enjoy it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what’s your philosophy on embracing your golden hours?

Laura Vanderkam
So the golden hours are the hours after work and before bed. If you think about how people talk about the golden years for retirees after they stop working, they have time for leisure and family, it’s the same that we get a miniature version every weekday evening.

After you’re done working, you get time for leisure and family. However, many people find this time incredibly hard to use well. And that is because we are tired, right? We’ve used up a lot of energy in the course of the day. In many cases, it’s this march toward bedtime. And sometimes people are even counting minutes as they are getting through the evening.

And again, time is precious. I hate to have people wish any time away. So I am all about embracing our golden hours. Partly that’s just a mindset. If you think of that time after work and before bed as your golden hours, you’re going to have a different mindset than if you’re thinking of it as a second shift or just the time that’s left over after work.

I think it’s a good idea to set just small, possibly low energy intentions for the evening so it feels like something happened, right? So it’s not just all this time passed between the end of work and bed. It’s like, “Oh, well, I did a puzzle for 30 minutes,” or, “I went for a walk outside with my family for 30 minutes,” “We had ice cream on the patio because it’s nice outside tonight.”

And if you have something you can point to that you enjoyed that actually happened in the evening, you’ll feel more like this time exists and life isn’t all just these have-to-do’s. There’s some want-to-do’s in there as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Golden hours, golden years. Understood. I guess I’m thinking about, in the universe of time tracking, I find that sometimes our hangups are not so much about having the time available to deploy on something, but finding the will, the audacity, the motivation to push past resistance or avoidance to go make amazing things happen with time.

So it’s, like, sometimes time is the bottleneck resource, and other times it’s more of like an emotional will type vibe. How do you think about these two resources in conjunction with each other?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, I think time gets blamed for all sorts of things, that it is not really a time matter. When I have people track their time, often people find that they have a reasonable amount of discretionary time. It’s just that a lot of it happens in chunks that we haven’t thought about, right?

We haven’t thought ahead of time, like, “Oh, yeah, I’m going to have four hours after work and before bed. Only two of those are going to be spent on childcare,” for instance, “I’ve got two hours after that. What would I like to do with it?”

But, you know, by that time, you’re kind of tired and at the end of your rope and feel like you’re out of energy and out of sorts, and that’s the end of it. And so nothing happens except those electronic hobbies, as we talked about earlier.

I think intention goes a long way. So if you know that this evening you are going to go play a board game with your partner or something, like, you’ve got that on your brain, you’re managing your energy toward it so you’re not surprised by it and feeling sort of resistance to it in the moment, even though it’s something you actively chose to want to do.

So knowing it ahead of time is often helpful for sort of getting ourselves in the mindset for doing something. When my kids were little, I would sometimes even think about that, like coming into the evening, “What could I suggest that we do that I wouldn’t hate so I don’t get, like, ambushed by the request to play Candy Land, which I definitely did not want to do?”

So it’s that kind of thing. Like, can you go into it with an intention? Because the intention will shape how you handle your energy going into it. I think, also, you got to be careful about making sure you’re setting intentions for yourself to do things you truly want to do.

And I think a lot of people just have not thought about this. The things they say they want to do are not things they actually want to do. And so it’s like you get to that time in the evening, you’re like, “I need to learn Spanish.” Do you actually want to learn Spanish? Like, is that something you’re telling yourself you should do?

Or, you know, is it just, you know, the thing that feels responsible and productive to do with your leisure time, like, “I should be on Duolingo”? Well, you know, maybe you don’t want to be. Is there something else that you feel less resistance to?

And if that is the case, maybe you should re-shape your goals to be more in the direction of things you truly do want to do, like things that make you feel more energized when you think about them, as opposed to thinking like, “I don’t want to,” in the moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s a really good distinction. And we might have any number of “shoulds” that, like, “I should learn this language,” “I should build big muscles,” “I should learn AI, apparently.” Do we all need to know AI?

Laura Vanderkam
That’s another one. We’re all going to be behind the game on that one.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So any pro tips on distinguishing between a should and a genuine desire of our heart, our values?

Laura Vanderkam
I think paying attention to that energy that you feel with something. If you think about like, “Ooh, that sounds exciting,” or, like, “I feel a little bit more energized as I think about it.” I’m not saying it’s going to be automatically easy, but like if you saw it on your calendar, like somebody had put “Spend two hours doing X,” like, would you be excited about it?

You know, some things I would, like having dinner with a friend. Absolutely. Like, reading one of my favorite books. Yes, I would. Learning Spanish, not so much. That’s not one of my goals. So I think that can help quite a bit.

In general, in life, I’m always encouraging people to spend less time on the things you are trying to talk yourself into. You might want to spend a little more time on the things that you are trying to talk yourself out of, because it sounds logistically difficult, or it’s outside your comfort zone. Like, those are things you can deal with.

Where that comes up and people are like, “Oh, you know, it would be so cool to sing in a choir again. I really enjoyed that in college, but I’m a busy person. I have a job. I have a family. I can’t make time for that.”

But that’s when you’re talking yourself out of something. Whereas, if you’re talking yourself into it, like, “Well, I should learn Spanish,” “I should be doing this,” those are things that maybe are not the direction to go.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is a master key right there. Wow! It’s so funny because that really does cut to the heart of it. When you’re talking yourself out of something, it means that you have a desire. It’s there and you’re fighting against it, by definition, it’s like, “Oh, that’s not practical. That’s too expensive. It’s like, I’ve got all these other responsibilities.” So that’s really intriguing. And I guess, sometimes, I see a two-by-two matrix in my mind’s eye, Laura.

Laura Vanderkam
Oh, boy.

Pete Mockaitis
You can’t take the consultant out of me. There’s the internal desire and then there’s the argumentation. And sometimes you don’t argue with yourself at all. It’s like, “I should really get a burrito. Yeah, let’s do it.”

Laura Vanderkam
“Let’s do it. We’re on it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s that. And then it goes in every combination of the two-by-two. And so, yeah, I think that you’re right. That really is a zone of opportunity there in terms of you have the desire and yet you’ve been talking yourself out of it. Maybe go ahead and give it a try.

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, you know? I mean, logistics can be figured out. You can always try something for a while and see how it goes, too, right? You can go back to life as it was after a trial period or whatever, but you might be surprised at what you can fit in.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Well, Laura, tell me, any critical insights you want to make sure How to be Awesome at Your Job listeners hear before we hear about your favorite things?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah. Well, I’m always preaching the time tracking. So if anyone’s listening to this and thought, “Well, hmm,” I’m going to say, well, that’s maybe a should that we should try at one point in our life.

Because I do think many of us walk around with stories about our lives that just aren’t true, that, “I work around the clock,” or, “I’m working late every night,” or, “I spent my entire weekend working,” “I never see my family,” “I don’t get enough sleep,” or, “I sleep terribly all the time,” “I never have free time,” all these things, “I spend my life doing housework,” various stories that people tell themselves.

And almost universally, time tracking will show that those stories are incomplete, right? Even if you work long hours, you are probably not working around the clock. There are probably some other hours where you are awake and not working. And so you can see where those happen and maybe start thinking about, “Well, what would be the best thing for me to do during that time?”

You may have a bad night or two. Many people do, but often, over the course of the week, we tend to average out toward what our bodies are needing. And when you see that, you might start thinking, “Huh, well, given that I’m not saving any time by sleeping less on Tuesday and crashing on Saturday, maybe I could try to get the same amount of sleep every night and feel better and more energetic overall.”

You might see that there is some discretionary time, but, you know, what you spend that doing is kind of up to you, and that’s the nature of discretionary time. And sometimes we’re spending more of it than we like on our electronic hobbies, but we can do something about that, right?

We can challenge ourselves to do things that sound a little bit more fun, rejuvenating, relaxing, you know, for just a few minutes before going toward that YouTube binge for the rest of the night. So I really do think that time tracking will make time feel more abundant.

And you can believe me or not, but I did have several hundred people try it and they felt better about their time afterwards. So I take comfort from that.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Now could you share your favorite quotes, something you find inspiring?

Laura Vanderkam
So many years ago, one of the first people I interviewed about how she spent her time told me that “I don’t have time” means it’s not a priority, and that has stuck with me forever.

And there may be consequences to making different choices, but it reminds us that time is a choice. And also it means that I never tell anyone now that I don’t have time to do something.

Pete Mockaitis
You just tell them they’re not a priority?

Laura Vanderkam
It’s not a priority, sorry. I try to be nicer about it, but, you know, that is fundamentally what it comes down to.

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

Laura Vanderkam
I would say that the one I mentioned earlier about people just getting short bursts of activity, like, five, 10 minutes of physical activity, their scores on an energy scale went from, like, a three to an eight or something. It was, really, I’m misquoting it here, but the idea is that it doesn’t take much. And we can’t make more time but we can definitely change our energy levels.

And when you feel more energetic, you can just do more than if you feel less energetic. So even though you can’t make more time, you can sort of have the equivalent of making more time by paying attention to how, you know, where your energy levels are and what you can do to get them back up again.

Pete Mockaitis
And, to be clear, five-ish minutes of activity raises the energy level for hours, or…?

Laura Vanderkam
At least an hour. I remember from that particular study, people took like five minutes to do a burst of activity. And then their levels right afterwards, I think, it was a nine. And then an hour later, it was still north of a six. So if you go from a three to the rest of the hour spent north of a six, like, how could you not be getting more done? That’s the difference between feeling like you’re flat on your back and feeling like, “Hey, I can do stuff with my life.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. And a favorite book?

Laura Vanderkam
This is, honestly, what I read in the course of writing Big Time is I read War and Peace, and I loved it.

Pete Mockaitis
I just got War and Peace.

Laura Vanderkam
Okay, you should read it. Yeah, I mean people look at it, and it’s like, “That’s a really big book,” and it’s true. But it is very accessible. It has 361 very short chapters. So if you read one chapter a day for a year, it only takes a couple minutes each day and you’ll get through it.

Pete Mockaitis
And a key habit?

Laura Vanderkam
So I have started listening to, like, all the works of a particular composer over the course of a year for the past three years. So this year, I am listening to Mozart in the car.

And that’s a lot better than other things I could probably be listening to. And so it has definitely upgraded the running around that tends to happen in my life. So that music choice habit has definitely elevated my listening game.

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

Laura Vanderkam
Please come visit me at LauraVanderkam.com. You can learn more on my website about my books and podcasts. You can get time tracking spreadsheet if you want to do that. You can also reach out to me at Laura@LauraVanderkam.com. I love hearing from people.

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

Laura Vanderkam
Maybe today you could think about what your favorite sort of work is and challenge yourself to spend just a few more minutes on that favorite sort of work, and then reflect afterwards on how it went. And I think you’ll change the experience of your work day completely.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Laura, thank you.

Laura Vanderkam
Thanks so much for having me.

Apr 30
0

1149: How to Stand Out, Multiply Your Opportunities, and Win People’s Confidence with Justin Humphries

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Justin Humphries reveals his fundamental principles for rapidly growing opportunities and income in an uncertain job market.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to multiply your inbound opportunities
  2. The simplest way to expand your professional network
  3. The key that keeps people coming back to you

About Justin

Justin Humphries is a dedicated Loan Officer with experience since June 2021, specializing in VA, first-time homebuyer, and DSCR loans. A Nashville native, Justin is deeply motivated by personal and professional growth, drawing strength from his faith, family, and a passion for building meaningful relationships. He takes great pride in helping clients align their mortgage strategies with their life goals, aiming to support them in building long-term wealth. Justin values the opportunity to develop lasting connections with customers who return to him year after year for their mortgage needs.

Beyond his professional work, Justin is actively involved in his church community, serving on the parish council and volunteering with the Society of St. Vincent DePaul to assist families at risk of homelessness. He is happily married to his wife Stephanie and is a proud father of three young children, including twins.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Justin Humphries Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Justin, welcome!

Justin Humphries
Hey, Pete, great to be here. Appreciate you having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am excited to be chatting. We’ve known each other for just about five years now here in Tennessee. And, boy, I say this and I mean this, not just because we’re pals, but it sure seems that you’re awesome at your job.

Justin Humphries
Well, much appreciated. I think you’re awesome at yours as well, and I’ve enjoyed listening to your podcast over those last five years, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Now your job, specifically, is you’re in the mortgage game. You’ve assisted me with some real estate mortgage-y lending things, and I was very impressed at the way you delivered. But what I got you on here today for is, you know, here we are in 2026, and people speak about the job market being terrifying, and here you are, a younger feller, still in your 20s, and you recently made a switch and found yourself with a hefty signing bonus.

And I was like, “Well, is this an anomalous character or what’s going on here with Justin?” Please, can you orient us a little bit to you’re in the mortgage game, and you took a new role, and what’s going on?

Justin Humphries
Yeah, so, essentially, the way that I look at mortgage as a self-producing loan originator, I control my own pipeline, I control my customer relationships, I control my referral partner relationships, but what that also means is I control revenue to the company that I work for.

So it’s less of an employee-employer relationship and more of a decision, a strategic decision on my part as to which platform is going to benefit my business the most. And, of course, they need and want that revenue because without my revenue, they don’t have any revenue.

So they are, what I found in that job search is that you did have companies that were willing to, essentially, advance, so to speak, a portion of their revenue, their future revenue based on my past production in terms of a sign-on bonus for some guarantees that I would stick around for a little bit.

So it’s a very different type of a job search than what you would traditionally think of where you go and you apply for multiple jobs online, but it was more of, “Hey, I had companies that were chasing me that wanted that production and that revenue into their own businesses.”

So being able to control that revenue stream, I found gave me a good amount of negotiating power on the front end.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so originator, producer, revenue, we are speaking in a language in sort of sales-ish.

Justin Humphries
That’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
So it’s not so much that you’re just super swell at taking care of the customer, although you are, but rather you’re a bit of a rainmaker, if you will. With you, come relationships and the prospect of, “Oh, we’re going to get more mortgages in the door and more revenue for this business.”

Justin Humphries
Yeah, that’s right. So being a rainmaker is a great way to put it, right, in terms of that control over the relationships and the partnerships because I’m not so much selling a product of the company that I work for, as much as I’m selling myself and my personalized services and value that I bring my referral partners and my customers.

And I want to make sure that the platform that I’ve worked for, i.e., my company that employs me, is going to provide them with as much more value than the previous company that I worked for.

But it’s not as, yeah, it’s not as black and white as I’m just selling a product that the company provides for me on company relationships.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. Because, in many ways, there’s a range of products in terms of lending, whether it’s a VA loan, or an FHA loan. And then all kinds of little nuances associated with it, or this is actually non-conforming in the US sense of the word to the Fannie Mae and the Freddie Mac world.

And so you know a lot of stuff. And, in fact, I’ve been impressed. You often tend to surprise real estate agents when you call them about their own listings and inform them about some cool lending financing opportunities that could exist for that property that they’re not even aware of.

Justin Humphries
Yeah, that’s right. So, well, and the beauty of mortgage is it’s a very commoditized business. So I’m not selling loans that another company necessarily is completely incapable of doing. It’s more or less a commodity and the service behind it is me and my team and what we bring to the table for that referral partner and for the customer and the client experience.

So, most every lender is going to do in FHA loan, they’re going to do a conforming loan, they’re going to have some of the non-conforming goodies, special loan products, you know, 20, 30, 40, 200 different loan products, right?

Some of which are very niche-y and required specialized knowledge. Others are, you know, something we encounter on a daily basis. So having that specialized knowledge, I found that it does help out quite a bit when you’re having those conversations with those referral partners.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so can you tell us a little bit about, so you made a switch recently to another mortgage company? Now, how did that come about? In a world where some people are really spooked and they feel like jobs are scarce and layoffs are happening, you had a few people vying for you at the same time.

Justin Humphries
Yeah, so it ended up being You know a combination of a couple things, right? I’m always being recruited. My production is public knowledge, so can go and pull it up with my licensing information. And so the numbers and the the quantitative value, so to speak, to a company is publicly available and people are constantly reaching out and constantly calling.

So it’s, hey, there’s always the optionality to move. So there were a couple things that were happening with the platform and a company that I was with before that were, I think, suboptimal.

And so I had expressed that they were suboptimal, was willing to work to help make things workable in the way that I thought they should go, was rebuffed a few different times on that. So, eventually, decided, “Hey, I don’t think I’m happy staying here. I don’t think this is the platform that’s going to bring the most value to me and my referral partners and my clients. So I’m going to move.”

And then once you make that decision, you start listening and hearing for those opportunities. So just like if you’re looking for a vehicle, I mean, I have a truck, so I have a Toyota Tundra, and when you start looking for a new car, looking for a vehicle, you start seeing Tundras, Toyota Tundras. You start looking and seeing the vehicle that you are searching for constantly?

The reticular activating system, I believe is what it’s called. And so I started getting that. I started noticing those spam calls that were just spam calls a month prior. And now they’re like, “Wow, this is an opportunity.” So I started taking some of those. So I landed with about seven or eight different opportunities on my plate.

Pete Mockaitis
Eight? Okay.

Justin Humphries
Yeah, just from listening, right? And two or three of which, about three turned out to be really good and pretty appealing, either way. But what ended up happening is I ended up finding my role through a networking event. So through my BNI group, which I know we may have mentioned when we talked, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
BNI? Business Networking International created by Ivan Misner, guest of the show. Hey! Hey!

Justin Humphries
So, through BNI, there was a referral partner and a real estate agent, BNI, that had known a company and, specifically, a team that was looking to hire somebody in our area here.

All the calls and all the listing that I did in the marketplace, boiled down to, “Okay, let’s have a conversation.” And that conversation turned into really three firm offers on the table. And I went with the platform and the terms that were most beneficial.

So all of it happened, I mean, in a relative short amount of time. It was very interesting how that all came about when it comes to just keeping my ear to the ground and just looking for the opportunities that were there the entire time, if that makes sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that is good. So I’d like to zoom out just a little bit for those who are saying, “Okay, Pete, I don’t do mortgages. I don’t do sales. What can I learn from this Justin fella?” I think it’s intriguing, a couple of points there.

One, you said your production is common knowledge. So someone people are logging in, I guess that’s why you’re getting all these calls from randos, is they’re saying, “Okay, who’s doing a lot of mortgage loans? Okay. This is Justin character. Oh, that’s a good number. Wait, he hasn’t been doing this that long. Oh, intriguing. All right.”

So that’s pretty nifty is that, in a way, numbers, black and white, very appealing, but I’m thinking that there are many ways we can have our expertise, our value, what we can bring to the table in a public format in terms of maybe they are listed, maybe you’ve got a blog or a podcast, some content stuff, or maybe you’ve got patents or papers or science things.

I’m thinking about Zuckerberg going wild, giving fat offers to all these AI scientists. They were known, like, “Hey, I am a guy who can get some AI breakthroughs, and this is what you need.” And so Mark Zuckerberg comes knocking at the door to get those kinds of folks.

Justin Humphries
Yeah, I mean, even LinkedIn, too, is a platform for showcasing, you know, in the bio section, what you do, putting some numbers to it, making it quantifiable, I think is key. In my industry, everything is quantifiable, right? It’s all about the numbers.

And they really do make a big difference when the decision is, “Okay, am I going to be on kind of a standard or more average or mediocre level? Or is this going to be, you know, my number is going to be top 10%, top 5%?”

Because I think that’s when you start really getting sought after, is what I found as well. When my numbers climbed from, “Okay, I’m kind of average or median early on, first couple of years,” to, “Okay, now we’re not elite-elite yet,” and I’m still not, working towards that, but top five to 10% is when people really start seeking you because the top 1%, oftentimes top half of 1% never move.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Okay. Well, that’s interesting, and I like what you say about the numbers. And I say this a lot when it comes to working with resumes. Back in the day, I’ve looked at many many resumes and that was often a huge opportunity for improvement in terms of, if you could say, “Oh, I provide excellent customer service.” Like, okay.

As opposed to, “Oh, I spearheaded these initiatives that improved our net promoter score from 21 to 53.” Like, “Whoa!” Like, folks who are in the know, who are thinking about a net promoter score, NPS, they say, “Holy smokes! That would be amazing if this person could drive that kind of improvement over for us.”

Or in terms of being public available, now I’m thinking about, “Is it contributing…?” for software people, like, I don’t know the lingo, the GitHub, their repos and their commits and their stars. Like, that world that people get the memo, like, “Oh, this person has an impressive track record. They are generating a result that is quantified and clear that I like, need, want in my organization.”

Justin Humphries
Yeah, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was also intrigued by just the networking piece. So you’re in the BNI, Business Networking International Group, and so you’re actively investing there. And I know that you’re also in a mastermind group full of real estate type folk. And so you’re putting some real dollars into that as well as real time and travel to deepen those relationships.

Justin Humphries
Yeah, I mean, to me, you’ve heard the saying, right, “My net worth is my network,” or, “My network is my net worth.” I think the reverse is a correct one. But that has been so true in my business. And everything I do is relationship-driven. It starts with that point of trust with either the client or the referral partner, whoever I make contact with first, especially with referral partners, everything is relationship-driven.

It’s all about, “How can I protect my relationships? How can I grow my relationships? How can I create new ones, nurture current ones, maybe rebuild or build old ones?” And the BNI group is a huge part of that.

Now in the investor group, that’s a very different type of networking, right? Because it’s a crowded room with a lot of people that do what I do, but it’s also a high-trust, high-transaction room. So you have people in that space that are transacting on the real estate investment side, 100 plus times per year, right?

And, obviously, those people like to work with the same people that they’ve been working with, right? So that is less a, “Okay, send me a referral that’s going to close one client,” to, “Hey, land a client or two, and build that relationship, build that trust with them, be consistent over time to grow a relationship there.”

And that’s a little bit longer of a time span in terms of revenue being generated. I found that BNI, because, again, it’s a higher-trust, higher-transaction, non-exclusive room, too. This is two very interesting, very good networking opportunities for me but also very different.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and it’s intriguing. And so outside, again, mortgages or real estate or sales, I’m just thinking about how there’s a lot of studies done about the power of the weak tie, the relationships, it’s not your immediate friends, family, folks that you see in community organizations, but someone, oh, you went to college with somebody, you met them at an event and you kind of stayed in touch, and that opens up opportunities when they occur.

And that has, in fact, happened to me in terms of Podcast Movement. I went there and I’ve met people and we continued to collaborate in all kinds of ways. I was at my podcast mastermind group meeting in person last week, and it was awesomely fun.

And we are continuing to share knowledge and best practices and, “Oh, here’s a great publicist, and here’s a great book agent, and here’s a great guest for your show, and here’s a cool tactic I’ve used to grow my show.”

Like, all that knowledge-sharing stuff and relationship-building stuff, I think, is tremendously powerful when you’re in the job, just doing better, as well as highlighting new opportunities where you might land.

Justin Humphries
Yeah, you talked, I like the phrase you used “a weak tie,” right? And something else that I’ve noticed where weak ties, a seemingly weak tie, is particularly powerful where you may not even know them whatsoever, would be affinity groups, right?

You mentioned college, which is, so I went to the University of Alabama, we’re all tied. But somebody that went to the University of Alabama, that’s an affinity group, you know, an alumnus there. Religious organizations, churches, that’s an affinity group where you don’t even have to know that person, but there’s a built-in trust by the nature of you both belonging to that same group, even if it’s large and largely, like you mentioned, a weak tie.

So I’ve noticed that in my own business and within networking, too, that ability of those weak ties and sharing affinity groups just to strike up and create conversations and conversations leading into revenue and closed business.

Pete Mockaitis
And now, of course, a key thing for these relationships to really be fruitful from a career or a business perspective is trust, and a key part of trust is just your competence, your awesomeness. And I’ll just brag on you for a moment, Justin. You do this amazingly.

I was trying to refinance a situation and they were just so slow. It was taking months. And I was like, “Justin, what’s the deal here?” And you said, “You know, I think the deal here is they probably miscategorized or something, something, something, and run into trouble with this and that. So what you’ve got to do is you got to…”

And so you told me what to do. And I told them, “Hey, man, we’ve got a few days. If you can’t pull it together, I’m just going to go over to Justin.” And, go figure, they kind of, you know, kicked into gear from there. And then we did a subsequent real estate deal, which was cool.

And you just know your stuff, and realtors often tell you this, you know stuff that they did not know. And you’re wildly quick in terms of, “Hey, I need a letter to put together in my offer.” And I think I timed you once, it was like four minutes from “I call you” to “I have a letter.”

Justin Humphries
It’s not always that fast, but sometimes, yeah. You catch me at the right time.

Pete Mockaitis
And so it was just wild as nine days compared to the other lender that I was trying to work with. And so, sure enough, that means I am singing your praises. It’s like, “Oh, dude, hey,” and I have numerous times, it’s like, “If you’re ever doing anything mortgage-y, you just want to talk to Justin. You just do.”

And I mean that wholeheartedly, and so that speaks volumes. Because if you were kind of phoned it in, and just kind of barely sort of kind of getting it done, but in a way that was in no way remarkable, we wouldn’t be so fired up to recommend you.

Justin Humphries
And I’d say, you know, one thing I learned early on in my career, I didn’t come up with this, I forget who did, but it was somebody noteworthy, much more noteworthy than myself. But people do business because they know, like, and trust you, right?

But they keep doing business with you because you solve problems that they have. And so that’s always been my focus is, “What’s the problem here?” whether that’s the client, the customer, or the referral partner, right?

With the customer, with you, Pete, you needed that letter in two minutes, three minutes, four minutes so that you could execute on that house. That was the “problem” right, in your circumstances. For the referral partner, it might be, “Hey, they want to grow their business, but their conversion rate is not super strong. So how can I help them convert more clients?”

Or it might be, “Hey, I want to just keep the business I’ve got, but I want to do it with less time and with less headache.” So, like, “Okay, that’s their problem. How do I work on that?” So that first step, the first half of that equation to generating that sustainable business referrals, etc., is people have to know you, right?

Obviously, marketing, top of the funnel is huge. They got to like you. You got to be likable. You can’t be rude, mean, etc. You can’t be incompetent. They got to trust you with their transaction. That’s earned. And then the second half, and the more important half, to maintain that relationship is you have to solve their problems.

And you got to keep solving them. Because there’s always somebody, and in my industry this is definitely the case, there’s always somebody knocking at the door of that client, that referral partner relationship that says, “Hey, I can do this and I can do this, and I’m going to promise the world.”

You can lose that partnership, or you can lose that client in a heartbeat if you waver in your execution. And that is not a fun experience, as a whole.

Pete Mockaitis
For anybody.

Justin Humphries
No, for anybody, right? But, as a whole, it’s like, “Hey, if you’re consistently working to execute at a high level and you don’t leave that opening for the competition to jump in there and take your client, take your relationships, etc.,” that is much better.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, why don’t we get a little bit practical, tactical, super specific on what’s executing at a high level means. Now that’s going to vary in different roles, different positions. But one thing is responsiveness. You were super quick with me, that made an impression, it’s like, “Wow, very cool.”

I remember, other times, you have known things that other people did not know. And you’ve acquired that knowledge, as far as I can tell, by you show up at the events, the trainings, and you’ve actually read a startlingly large proportion of very long, very boring governmental documents associated with loan-compliancy matters. You’ve actually read the things, and they’re huge.

Justin Humphries
Yeah. So the HUD handbook, which is FHA lending guidelines on loans, I don’t know, it’s north of a thousand pages, but I might’ve scanned that one, for the full disclosure. Scan the sections that are pertinent when needed, right?

But, again, going back to solving problems, the excellence in that commitment, going back to your original question, I think, it depends on the situation, right? So sometimes it is that communication piece of it where, “Hey, I’m getting back within X amount of time.”

Sometimes, I may be able to leverage that knowledge and expertise and guidelines and kind of the get-it-done knowhow is what I call it, right, to do things that others either don’t think they can do, they can’t do, they won’t do it, to just get the loan done.

And that’s the problem that’s solved there, where we had somebody last fall that was denied by three other lenders, I think it was, and she was about to lose this house, called me, within eight calendar days, we had her loan closed. It was just a regular FHA loan.

Any of them could have done it, but they didn’t leverage the expertise and knowledge of FHA guidelines the way that they ought to have. I don’t know if that fully answered your question or not.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you know, that’s really good. Yes. And I’m thinking now about a physical therapist. I haven’t met him in person, but I’ve watched a lot of his videos, Dr. Aaron Horschig, of the YouTube channel Squat University. His book is called “Rebuilding Milo.”

And so he’s got these videos in which someone says, “An athlete had a shoulder problem. They went to four physical therapists and they weren’t able to fix it. But we fixed it with these two easy exercises.” I was like, “You have my attention.” And, sure enough, like that is an experience I know people have had because our bodies are miraculously wildly complicated.

It’s no surprise that a lot of physical therapists take a crack at a diagnosis and it’s not quite right, not zeroing in on the exact right little tendons or whatever. And yet, a real master of the craft is able to do it. And, holy smokes, it gets referred, like, quick.

This book has 4.9 stars on Amazon with 4,000 reviews. But it seems like the guy is, actually, has that excellence in terms of, “Hey, when this body does this, this is often the thing, so let’s try the thing,” and, holy smokes, that worked and it’s amazing. We tell everybody.

Justin Humphries
Yeah, creativity and persistence is what it boils down to, willing to dig a little bit deeper than others will, go the extra mile, so to speak. It’s a bit of a cliche, but it doesn’t make it wrong. Now we’re able to come up with solutions that others may not have thought of.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally. And sometimes you get it. And it’s so funny, you actually, you get pretty excited about it. Like, sometimes more excited than I care to hear about it. No offense.

Justin Humphries
That’s okay.

Pete Mockaitis
You know I love you. But you’ve probably heard this feedback before. You’re sharing what’s going down with a loan, and you’re kind of excited because, sure enough, you have cracked the code in terms of, “It turns out, what we need to do is just make sure they had a tenant in place in one of their properties so that we could then count that rental income against it. And so that gets us over the debt-to-income threshold, so now it qualifies.”

And so, but that took some extra work and thought and conversation and back and forth and questions with them, as opposed to just looking at the application like, “No income number, not good enough. Pass.”

Justin Humphries
Yeah. I mean, I know we didn’t maybe talk about going this direction, but I’d love to take it this direction if you’re open to it, that’s what’s going to separate, you know, in my field and AI universe. Not just the creativity and the problem-solving because AI is good at it, and we’ll get better better, right?

Creativity and problem-solving are half of it, and the relationships is the other half. And still knowing that this is an incredibly emotional transaction for anybody. Getting a mortgage, buying a house, whether it’s first time, second time, or fifth time, investors are significantly less emotional about it.

But, still, anytime money is on the line and you have a personal stake in it, it just feels heavy, and it’s high-trust position. Some people, some home buyers care less about that and some care much more, but those that are experts with the trickiness, I think, are going to be who’s going to be successful in the long term.

Because I’m looking at this, the average profile of somebody that does what I do is they’re in the mid fifties, they’re a white guy, and I’m a white guy, too. The thing is it’s white guys. But I’m 27, right? So they’re not thinking on a 30-year time scale of this industry more than likely like I am.

I’m sitting here, going. “Hey, is this going to be here in five, ten years?” Certainly, that’s important. I think it’ll be here in some form or another for the next 10-ish years at least. But what does the job look like in 20 years? What does it look like in 25 years? What does it look like in 30 years when you can push button, get mortgage?

You know, it’s simplified a lot since the internet, but it’s not yet at the point where it’s push button, get mortgage, right? You have some regulatory moats around the industry. But regulatory moats often get crossed and don’t last forever.

So, at the same time, as those that can make personal connections and think outside the box, think creatively understand people, in a way that I don’t think AI will ever truly be able to understand a person, are going to be the ones that stay successful for the next 20, 25, 30 years.

And, I mean, that’s a huge piece of how I’m looking to position myself going forward is, “How do I future-proof the business that I rely on, my family relies on?”

Pete Mockaitis
And when you said AI, that got me thinking about just sometimes there’s a rash of AI-generated comments in social media platforms, and I do not care for them.

It’s so unpleasant. But you’ve done this game where you’re solving problems, you’re building relationships with total strangers on social media, in terms of if someone has a situation, and then you really get into it. Like, you spend some time, you write some paragraphs about, like, “Oh, well, in this situation, consider this and this and this. You might want to do blah, blah, blah. Happy to chat.”

And, like, you’ve shown me, like, people are wowed like, “Wow, can we get on a call?” All of a sudden, total stranger on the internet wants to be talking to Justin, and that’s just good for your business.

Justin Humphries
Yeah, I mean, it’s awesome, and that’s something I only recently started doing, the last month, two months, that I’ve never even, I mean, I’ve considered it but I’ve been like, “Eh.” I looked at content, I do some content and stuff here and there, some batched-out stuff, which is awesome.

It’s mainly authority building and it’s not generating any leads, which is unfortunate, but I’m not getting anybody saying, “Hey, I loved your video. Like, can we…?” But when I make a comment on a post that’s particularly insightful, that does drive inbound leads, where it’s responding to a specific concern, “Hey, I had this happen.”

And there might be 60 comments on that post, right? And some of them are, “Hey, I would love to help. Reach out to me. Great.” I mean, so the mindset that I have going into those types of situations on Facebook, Facebook groups, marketing and networking in there, Reddit, whatever it is, is, “How much can I give away for free?”

Like, “How much value can I provide?” I want to provide so much value that, one, the OP, the poster the, of the question-comment, whatever, reaches out to me, ideally. And if they don’t, somebody else sees it, and they’re like, “Wow, that was pretty insightful,” or, “Wow, that’s a good rate,” or, “That’s a good…” whatever, “That’s a good strategy,” and I get inbound leads.

So, I’ve had several that have converted at a surprisingly high rate because you think internet lead and you think, “Okay, call center, 1% conversion, 1-5% if you’re excellent,” and that’s not what I’ve seen at all.

So it’s just a different kind of marketing and different kind of strategy where it’s “How much knowledge do I have and how much of that can I put into words and convey, even if it takes me a few minutes?” As opposed to you have some canned AI posts and comments.

So some will reach out to me and some are, like, the canned AI responses, I’m like, “That’s not even correct.” And I’ve had a couple that were AI-assisted writing when they get longer that I’ve gone back and edited, and that’s worked okay. But I’ve found, when I write it, it does convert higher. So I’m experimenting with some of that.

I don’t know if you, I know you work with Claude some, but I think it is Claude. Yeah, it is Claude Anthropic that now has a Chrome extension. So I’ve utilized Claude to basically read some of the posts in these Facebook groups, and help me respond, but always guiding and further kind of honing that response, if I do that.

We got here by talking about AI, that’s my tie back in, but it’s been particularly interesting. I do recommend, I’m not sponsored, but do recommend the Claude Chrome extension as it can kind of drive for you and post and comment and aid with that and kind of speeding it up.

I’ve noticed if I do it well, cuts my time in about half on doing those, but I’m still spending some good time with them.

Pete Mockaitis
And what does the Claude extension doing exactly?

Justin Humphries
Yeah, so Claude can read the post. So, like, if you’re on Facebook, Claude can read the posts and then you can instruct it, “Hey, read this comment. Type up a response around ABC thing, kind of making these points and clean it up a little bit,” right?

So I’ll guide it, but it’ll read the post, it’ll compose a comment, it will paste the comment in, and it will actually post a comment for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing. And I suppose if you connect that to like a real base of your knowledge inside a Claude project or whatever, I don’t know if you can, but that becomes much more substantial because I think the worst is the AI comments that actually say nothing, like, “Well said, Justin. And trust is such an important ingredient in today’s technological marketplace.” Like, you didn’t say anything at all.

Justin Humphries
You mean the patronizing AI crap, yeah. So, I listened to a keynote a couple months ago on AI, and you may have to bleep this out or not, but he had a good comment that, when you rely on AI for your strategic thinking, which I no longer do as a result largely of listening to this, you’re getting your strategic thinking, your big picture, thousand dollar an hour work or whatever hourly rate you want to assign to that, guiding your business based on what he called the opinions of the masses of asses.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Yeah, I heard the subject in the study and they realized that, no matter what context you put in for a strategic problem in front of the AI, it just went with what the masses said, even if it’s a completely different context. It wasn’t actually “thinking.”

They used the term trend slop like, “Hey, that is the trend. That’s what a lot of people are saying. It sounds pretty good when you put it together, but you weren’t actually thinking. You were just grabbing words near the other words kind of around the thing.”

Justin Humphries
Well, and you lose your competitive differentiation, too, right? If you outsource your big thinking, your strategic thinking to AI, I mean, you lose a piece of that tactically. And going back to mortgage for a second.

I had a coworker recently that had, he asked me, he goes, “Well, hey, can I do this.” He goes, “Well, ChatGPT told me.” I’m like, “No, it’s just not correct. So he laughed and, well, I laughed because I’m like, “No, no, man. That’s not…” I won’t use his name.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s straight up doesn’t work with the law.

Justin Humphries
I’m like, “That is just not correct.” So now he has a file that’s DOA right now because he relied on ChatGPT to give him loan guideline advice, and this is an originator. Hopefully, he’s not a listener. But, no, I told him, troubleshot for him, and told him what he needed to do and whatever, and that I think is going to be fine.

But, yeah, you don’t want to use your ChatGPT for your strategic thinking, right? I think, inherently, we know this, but we have to retain – I’ll get off my soapbox on this here in a second – but we have to retain that which makes us human, and that which makes us competitive in the marketplace.

Pete Mockaitis
Well said. Well, yeah, that seems to be a real thing – competitive in the marketplace. Like, you solve a real problem. You bring forward revenue. That is publicly known and understood. That is published and it’s quantified and it’s unambiguous.

And, in so doing, you’ve got to put yourself into a power position, as opposed to you are not one of 600 people clicking the easy apply button for a job that they hope you can maybe do, so much as you have said, “Behold, world, it is on a matter of public record that I can do this for you. You want that done? Oh well, then maybe we can talk.”

Justin Humphries
Yeah, that’s right. And that’s been a huge, huge piece when I look strategically at my work. And I look at, “Okay, could I go through this under role that’s maybe a bit easier, maybe a bit less stressful, maybe not as high pressure?”

I look at that and I go, “There’s a trade off there.” When you’re since going from outside sales, outside loan officer relationship to inside me, like say your preferred lender works for a builders lender, whatever that might look like, you have a captive business.

Then you lose that ability to be in that power position in the negotiating table because you don’t own the book. You don’t own the relationships. You don’t own the business channels. So now I know that’s not going to apply to all of your listeners one to one, but I think you’re right on.

Like, when you can quantify your value that essentially, “Hey, you would, otherwise, not have this revenue had I not been with you, and had I not brought this piece of this relationship, this piece of expertise, this experience to bear,” and thinking about those things as you’re on the job hunt is huge.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, Justin, tell us, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Justin Humphries
No, I mean, I think we hit on it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Well, now, could you share your favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Justin Humphries
A favorite quote has to be, and I’m not going to name the Bible verse because I don’t know it off the top my head, but it has to be that God will never give you more than you can handle.

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

Justin Humphries
Yeah, so one of my favorite experiments that, you know, and this is not related to mortgage in the sense whatsoever, but has been Universe 25. So, I think, it’s ‘68 to ‘73, some experimenters at the National Institute of Mental Health kind of created a mice utopia, mouse utopia, where they didn’t have any lack of food, water, or anything, so it was this perfect world. No suffering. No issues whatsoever.

So it, eventually, happened. And I’m really summarizing here, which is okay. They all went crazy and they died out. And so the lesson that I take from that is, because they had no predators, they had all abundance of food and water, everything they could need, all the space they would need, is that in the universe and in the natural world, suffering, in a sense, is universal. And not only is it universal, it’s necessary.

So that would be mine that I’ve actually applied that to my business, too, going, “Okay, I’m going to endure the suffering of whatever it is, the thing I don’t want to do, the activity that is maybe the most profitable, yet the most unpleasant activity that I could do that day. I’m going to endure that.

Pete Mockaitis
Like this podcast you’re enduring it

Justin Humphries
And that’s, yeah, a hundred percent. Like, the podcast. I’m going to endure that activity so I can have success in my business, but also because I know that in the long term, it makes me a better person. That’s an interesting experiment.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Justin Humphries
Yeah, favorite book, I’d say The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I mean, it’s huge. I love the concept of continuous improvement and sharpening the saw from that book. It’s kind of guided a lot of my personal and professional life, of just continually doing better.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Justin Humphries
You know, it’s really simple and it strikes me as rather basic just to say it, but just having an alarm that wakes up at the same time every day, regardless of the day, you know, Monday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I found that, I mean, it’s a cornerstone.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that is a bit of a mantra or slogan that you roll with?

Justin Humphries
It’s funny because I think about this, and one of the key mantras I find myself saying is something my dad told me when I was about five years old, I was on a football field. And as I dissected, I think about it and I’m like, “Hmm, this may not be a good thing.”

But it is the idea that if you start something, you finish it. And so whatever that looks like. Now, maybe that means that in business, you start something and you iterate, and you iterate, and you iterate, or you make the decision to stop if it doesn’t work.

But this idea of always taking the start of the journey to its completion, whatever completion that may be, I think, is huge. Just that persistence, as something I mentioned earlier, persistence. And if you start something, you finish it. It sticks with me.

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

Justin Humphries
Yeah, so they can always, my cellphone, being a mortgage lender, is always open and public knowledge. So cellphone is the best way. Call, text, 615-438-8125. I do have a website, JustinHumphries.org. I’m sure that’ll be in the show notes as well. And an email address that I’m sure Pete will throw in the show notes. So feel free to get in touch with me at any time, all things mortgage, or any other items.

Pete Mockaitis
And can you actually say the email address?

Justin Humphries
Yes, the email address is jhumphries@loanDepot.com.

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

Justin Humphries
Just everything that we’ve talked about today. When you’re on the job search, putting yourself in the driver’s seat, creating and continually maybe keeping a record of those quantifiable moments in your job career as they happen.

So if that’s, “Hey, I improved this by ABC amount.” So kind of create and track a record so that as needed, you can draw upon that, put it on paper for the job search. I would challenge everybody to have that running record.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Justin, thank you.

Justin Humphries
Yeah, thanks, Pete. Great to be on here. Great chatting with you today.

Apr 27
0

1148: How to Build Cultures Where Everyone Knows They Matter with Barry-Wehmiller’s Bob Chapman

By | Podcasts | 2 Comments

Bob Chapman reveals the foundational leadership principles behind Barry-Wehmiller’s stunning success.

You’ll Learn

  1. The case for caring as a business strategy
  2. The one skill to transform your relationships
  3. How to dramatically boost team morale with one simple practice

About Bob

BOB CHAPMAN is the chairman of Barry-Wehmiller, a $3.6 billion global manufacturing company. Under his leadership, the company grew from $20 million in revenue to over $3.5 billion while pioneering “Truly Human Leadership”—refusing to lay off employees during the 2008 recession and instead implementing shared sacrifice that saved $20 million while protecting everyone’s livelihood. 

Featured in a Harvard Business School case study taught at 70+ business schools worldwide, Chapman has addressed the United Nations, Congress, and leading academic institutions on human-centered leadership. His approach has been validated by research showing that workplace stress is the fifth leading cause of death in America, and that good bosses create more wellness than wellness programs do.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Bob Chapman Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Bob, welcome!

Bob Chapman
It’s good to here. It’s good to have this exchange.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am excited for this truly human exchange we’re about to have and to hear about your truly human leadership. What on earth is that?

Bob Chapman
It captures kind of the transformation we’ve been going through for the last 20 years. It’s kind of contrary to my education and my experience in the business world, which is about using people to achieve results.

Truly human leadership flips the lens through which we see those people we have the privilege of leading, to seeing them as somebody’s precious child and treating them with respect and dignity, which is truly human leadership, understanding the impact we make on people’s life, their health, and the way they go home and treat their families. So, truly human leadership is a totally different way of looking at the people you have the privilege of leading.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds good and wholesome and the way it “should be” in terms of the human experience. Tell me, what is the alternative? What is the norm?

Bob Chapman
Well, you know, I look back on my business education, I took management classes, got a management degree and got a job in management so I thought my job was to manage people, to achieve results. And if we needed to lay them off, fire them, you know, it’s just business, you know? And so, I saw people in my education and my experience, they were functions for my success.

I was a nice guy. We had a nice company, but the way you see people impacts the way you treat people. And so, you know, our education system doesn’t prepare us to care for people. It prepares us to use people to achieve results, and people don’t get promoted for caring for people. They get promoted for achieving results.

So, it’s a totally different way of looking at leadership as a profound responsibility to the people you have the privilege to have in your span of care.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now that’s interesting. You mentioned layoffs is one place where the rubber meets the road. So, in your world, layoffs don’t happen or under what circumstances would they happen?

Bob Chapman
Well, I think the best way to look at it is, again, we’re taught it’s about achieving financial results. And as you know, I think in 2025, layoffs are at an all-time high. Only 2020 had so many layoffs. So, you’re seeing major corporations using layoffs, announcing layoffs to send a message to the shareholders that they’re going to make more money. And we use people to achieve that signal.

Because why would a company announce they’re going to lay off 10,000 people? Why would they announce that when they’re going to, we know psychologically the damage done to the people who get laid off is horrible? And we know the impact on the people that don’t get laid off that are still there, they don’t feel safe because they could be next.

So, again, we never discussed layoff in my education, in my experience. It was just things we do. And so, the transformation was, when we saw people not as functions for my success, but we saw them as somebody’s precious child, a revelation I had, you can’t lay off your kids.

And so, I would say to you that it’s, you know, having been in business leadership for 50 years, the first half of my career was pretty much, “That’s just things you do. It’s not pleasant. You don’t really want to do that, but it’s the way you make numbers work and the market rewards you.”

So, layoffs hang over most people’s heads. They don’t feel safe, “How can I decide to raise a family, buy a home, get married, if one day they’re going to walk in and say, ‘You know what, to improve our earnings, we’re going to have to let you go. I know we recruited you, but right now we’re going to have to let you go.’”

So, a lot of people in our country feel a lack of dignity because they don’t feel safe. They feel they’re being used. I think Tom Friedman said it beautifully to your audience and they’ll like this. He said, “More than a poverty of money, we have a poverty of dignity.” And when people feel used, not cared for, they feel a sense of humiliation. And when you feel a sense of humiliation, you’ll see anger and unrest like you’ve never seen before.

So, what are we seeing right now? We’re seeing anger and unrest that confuses us. Why? We have a very prosperous economy but we don’t know how to care for each other. And that is the foundation of truly human leadership. And layoffs are just one of those tools that we are taught in business school and rewarded for by the public to achieve financial results. And that, it’s sad.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, let’s talk about, perhaps, that tension there. I think that there may be a subset of folks who say, “Well, Bob, I mean, that sounds really nice and pleasant and enjoyable, and, yeah, I’d like to work in such a place, but in reality, we have a duty to maximize the shareholder value and, accordingly, costs need to be kept at their minimum relative to the revenue that is attached to them, etc.” So, when folks push back, what’s your response?

Bob Chapman
Yeah, well, then I’d say to if you want to optimize your profitability, which is our responsibility, because the business model, it’s interesting, and I think I want to get this message across to your audience. When Harvard wrote the case study on our company about 10 years ago, they invited me up to be in the class and then the professor asked something I never thought of. He said, “Is Barry-Wehmiller’s success its business model or its culture?” And they voted. Seventy-five percent voted our culture was the key to our success. And then Jan Rivkin, the professor, looked at me and said, “Bob, do you want to comment?”

And I got up and I said, “I understand why you think our culture is the foundation of our success, but let me tell you how I would answer it. The foundation of our stewardship of our people is the business model. It’s not about getting the right people on the bus. It’s about building a safe bus, which is your business model. And then having drivers who are your leaders who know where they’re going and how to drive that bus safely. And anybody that gets on this bus is going to be safe.”

So, it is the responsibility of leaders to design a business model and to keep that business model efficient and to not use this brutal tactic of layoffs and rightsizing and downsizing and justifying that we failed to do that. We failed to keep this company efficient and we had to hurt people to achieve the efficiency.

You know, I was on a panel with a CEO of a major bank, a very impressive gentleman, and he said they went from, and I think this case, from 300,000 people to 200,000 people without a layoff by using natural attrition. When somebody retires, they brainstorm how they can redesign the work to not have to replace that person.

And if you do that every day, which is a matter of, you know, “I don’t want to gain weight so I don’t have to lose weight.” So, it is a way of viewing your responsibility. If you think your responsibility is only to the shareholders and you don’t care about the people that you impact, that’s sad. Your responsibility is to all the people who put their trust in you – shareholders and all other stakeholders.

But again, it’s not just about being nice. It’s making sure you have a good business model, and that a business model stays efficient, not has to be hammered once in a while with 20,000, 30,000 layoffs. Layoffs are a tool that the market likes, and it rewards you because you’re going to be more profitable. But if that is all you’re in, that’s sad.

We are absolutely destroying our country for economic gain and not human gain. So, we’ve got the most prosperous economy in our history and have the highest level of depression, anxiety, and suicide we’ve ever had. Why? Because people don’t feel they matter. They’re just tools for somebody else’s success.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so can you, perhaps, unpack for us what an efficient business model that has no need to ever do layoffs looks like, as compared to a more typical business model that has layoffs just in part of the cycle?

Bob Chapman
Well, I think the story that most people tell about Barry-Wehmiller, in our book and a lot of people talk about is ‘08, ‘09, which hit all of us. And we had developed what we call the Guiding Principle of Leadership, kind of the constitution of our culture. These are things that define and guide us in our culture.

And I was flying around the world, talking to our team members about this. And the more you talked about it, the more it was implanted in my heart and soul. And ‘08, ‘09 hits, I walked in to our board meeting in January of ’09, and my board looks at me and said, “Bob, don’t you need to lay off people?” And I said, “Why do you say that?” They said, “Well, everybody’s laying off people, Bob.” And I said, “No, I think with our backlog, we’re going to be okay.”

About a month later, I was in Italy, visiting our operations in Italy, I get an email from the United States, our largest customer, major customer, put on hold a major order we had that was giving us significant work. It’s one thing not to get a new order. It’s another thing for the orders you’ve got to disappear. And I sat in my hotel room.

Prior to us having these Guiding Principles of Leadership, I would have done what everybody else did. I would have said, “Well, we need to let people go. We need to let 20-30% of our people go because we don’t have work for them.” But because I talked about, “We measure success by the way we touch the lives of people,” which is our guiding, our North Star, I sat there in my room, and said, “What would a caring family do if a member of the family was in stress?”

We would all take a little pain so that family member would not have to take that pain. That stimulated an idea I had never heard of before, never considered, and it was, “What if everybody took a month without pay, whenever they wanted, so they could be with their family, their friends, time of year? We’ll give you a month without pay, and we’ll get through this without letting anybody go.”

I emailed back to the United States, flew back to the United States a few days later, they were ready to implement it. The reaction of our team members was unbelievably positive. They were more than willing to take a month without pay. A, they got the time with their family, but, B, they felt they were helping their fellow team members keep their job. This cloud over their head disappeared because, all of a sudden, they felt safe.

We even had people volunteer to take somebody else’s time off because they knew the other person wasn’t in as good a financial position than they were. It was unbelievable the environment we created. And it was only because we had this North Star that said, “We measure success by the way we touch the lives of people.”

And after that, we learned what’s called Business Excellence Staffing Model. As much as you want to design your products to be efficient, cost-effective, you need to design your organization to be cost-effective. And that’s a powerful tool. And so, we constantly are monitoring, when somebody retires or moves away or whatever reason somebody leaves, that natural attrition, we brainstorm, “Is there a way to redesign that work, not to dump it on somebody else, but to redesign it, to eliminate it?”

So, it’s a constant process of being efficient so there’s no need to let people go because you didn’t gain any weight. You are trim and fit to fight. So, again, that’s what a major financial institution did that I was incredibly impressed with. We learned about it through a Lean event up in Canada, but it is profound.

So, it’s a failure of leadership when we lay people off, but the market rewards us and the boards see the share price go up. So, it’s a hard struggle because they weren’t taught to care. They were taught to use people.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is a very beautiful story. And I love, one, you asked a novel question as opposed to, “Hey, we lost an order. I guess we got to shrink the staff. Badda bing. Badda boom.” Wait, stop, pause, think, ask a fresh question, “If in a family, what would we do? Okay.” And that gives rise to a novel solution.

And, boy, I can sure imagine that, yeah, when you are thinking about that decision-making and your own autonomy is preserved, “Okay, do I want to take a month off and which month? Okay, and maybe multiple. Got it,” that feels a lot better. And it’s, in a way, a win-win when you don’t have the money, but it’s like, “Okay, I’m helping my colleagues out and I’m getting to be with family or do a cool thing with this time.”

And I could really see how that can dramatically improve the connectedness among teammates. So that’s very cool, Bob. Lay it on me, what are some additional principles and practices, specifically, that folks in all kinds of organizations can implement?

Bob Chapman
Well, seriously, again, I had never heard of this practice until our team came up with it. But every organization should look at, “Are the people I invite into our organization, with the expectation of being with our company, are they safe? Is our business model designed such that there is a job for them and they can trust us?” That is a foundational responsibility when we invite people into our company.

And so, we work extremely hard to stay financially, absolutely, rock solid, which we are, okay? And I’ll just add, our share price has gone up 12% compounded for 25 years, okay? And so, you’d say, “Well, gee, we outperformed some of the legendary investors in this country because we are good stewards of our business model.”

So, you know, business needs to be more human. And again, we originally called it People-Centric Leadership, leadership focused on the people we have the privilege of leading. But Simon Sinek came along and said, “No, no, Bob, this is truly human leadership. This is the way we are called to treat others.”

Again, when you see the issues that we face in our country and the people who, you know, 65% of all people would give up a salary because if they could fire their boss. We have TGIF, “Thank God it’s Friday,” get the hell out of this place and have a beer and kill the pain. I imagine a day, as you will understand, where we have TGIM, “Thank goodness it’s Monday. Get away from the kids, the spouse and be with a group of people who I really enjoy being with, okay?” That is my goal, TGIM.

And again, this is not an American issue. This is a global issue. People don’t feel they matter. And when people don’t feel they matter, you get this poverty of dignity. And I’m sure your audience will understand that because leaders weren’t taught to care for people. They were taught and rewarded to use people.

So, it’s just a totally different mindset and takes extra responsibility to make sure your business model, when you invite somebody in there, you can look them in the eye and say, “You are safe in my care.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. I also learned that one of the top things you teach throughout the organization, in order to have the great powerful culture, is empathetic listening. Can you speak to this?

Bob Chapman
Yes. Through these series of revelations, I had three revelations that converted me from management to leadership, and we realized that we had been blessed with a vision of the way that would heal the brokenness in the world. And a young man, about 20 years ago, said to me, “You know, Bob, what is your greatest fear?” Now I’m an eternal optimist, so I had to think a minute and I said, “My greatest fear is we were blessed with a message that could heal the world and it would die with me.”

So, we got up the next morning after that dinner, and said, “Okay, what do great religions do to survive over centuries?” They articulate their beliefs and they have disciples that carry those beliefs forward. So, I said, “We need to create some disciples. We can’t send them back to universities because universities don’t teach people to care. They teach people to use people and reward them.”

And so, we decided we had to create our own university. I mean, this was just a breakfast conversation. And the good news is we had a whiteboard, no preconceived notion. And so, when we decided, “Well, how are we going to create disciples?” This incredibly talented team came up with three things, and the foundation, the one you mentioned, a gentleman named David Vandermolen said, “We’re going to teach empathetic, which is the greatest of all human skills, okay, to listen without judgment.

When you listen without judgment. You don’t listen to debate. You listen to validate the worth of others. I thought when you cared for somebody, you went over and talked to them. It turns out, when you listen to somebody instead of talk to them, it profoundly changes the person you care about. So, it’s just the opposite of everything I was taught and learned.

So that is the foundation of truly human leadership. That, plus recognition and celebration. We spend a lot of time teaching people how to let them know they matter in thoughtful, appropriate, timely ways all over the world, and then a culture of service. Bill Ury uses the word, “We need to move from a me-centric world to a we-centric world, where people genuinely care about others, not just themselves.” So those three classes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, we got the three lessons. So, within these three revelations – empathetic listing for validation, recognition and celebration, and culture of service – could you give us the rapid-fire, quick do’s and don’ts within each, just a couple powerful bullets?

Bob Chapman
In empathetic listening, the rapid-fire is don’t listen to the words because 80% of all communication is nonverbal. Don’t listen to the words, listen to what the people are really saying. That is the key, to look behind the words with the combination of their face and how they express it because a lot of times people will tell you what they think they mean, but there’s much deeper. And that’s one of the skills we learn.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us an example for what that looks, sounds, and feels like in practice?

Bob Chapman
I’ll give you a personal example that I think makes it really simple. When our son was young and about to move in his own bedroom, I walked into the house after work, and my wife, Cynthia, said, “I want to show you this wallpaper I picked out for Kyle’s room.” So, we walked up to the bedroom where he’s going to stay, and she holds this wallpaper, and said, “What do you think?”

And I’m trying to be a good husband, trying to be very thoughtful, and how do you misinterpret, “What do you think about this wallpaper?” You can’t really misinterpret, “What do you think?” So, being very thoughtful, I said, “You know, it’s really an interesting wallpaper, but don’t you think it would look better in the family room because I couldn’t imagine it being in my son’s room?”

She took the wallpaper and threw it to me, and said, “If you’re so smart, you pick out the wallpaper.” And what I realized is what Cynthia asked me, she didn’t even know it, what Cynthia asked me is, “As your wife, am I capable to pick out wallpaper for our son?” And what did I tell her? “No.” So, she didn’t even know what she was asking. I see this all the time.

There’s a lot of deeper meaning what people are asking than when we superficially think. So, taking some time to listen and think and flex to the personality type of the person are keys. Again, we’ve taught this to 20,000 people around the world, and the most common statement is, “It changed my life just to learn to listen without judgment.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really intriguing because, yeah, there’s words, but, in that example, I think it points to a common reality, which is there are deep-seated emotions, values, stakes, that feel rather personal in many, many things that we’re talking about all the time.

Bob Chapman
And I will tell you, it is the most powerful thing we have ever learned in our 22 years journey.

Because when we look at the world we have today, we teach people how to speak, articulate your beliefs. We teach people how to debate, “I’m right and you’re wrong.” But guess what we don’t teach people? We don’t teach people how to listen without judgment.

So, again, the key to me was, I am astounded 22 years later, we have taught over 20,000 people around the world to listen without judgment. And what’s equally amazing to me is that we did this in a business context. We were trying to convert managers into leaders, people who manipulate people to people who care for people. And 95% of the feedback when we began teaching these classes, was how it affected their marriage and their relationship with their children.

It never occurred to me that the way I would run Barry-Wehmiller would affect your marriage and your relationship with your children. So one of the expressions of our book is “The way we lead impacts the way people live.”

So this message of truly human leadership, given all the issues we’re facing in this country right now, is the way we could heal all of the brokenness we’re feeling in our families, in our communities, between our countries, because we would learn to listen without judgment, to learn to listen, to understand, as opposed to, “I’m right and you’re wrong.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, so let’s hear it. So this empathetic listening for validation, we’re listening without judgment, and that’s super transformational. Can you share with us some tips on how that’s done?

Bob Chapman
Well, what we do is we do a DISC profile, which is basically an X-ray of your personality, okay? And then we begin, start the class with everybody kind of looking at their DISC profile, and we find you’re uniquely different.

I knew that, in life, that people are born with different hair color, different eye color, different skin color, but it never occurred to me you were born with a different personality. And that personality, you didn’t choose anymore than you chose your eye color, it creates a lens through which you experience the world, okay? A lens through which you process data.

That is why two people, two perfectly find people, can see the same exact facts and see them entirely differently. But we don’t teach people to understand how you see it. We teach people to say, “The way I saw it is right.”

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Now, within the listening class, could you share a transformational takeaway or exercise or thing that they do that is so valuable?

Bob Chapman
Well, I think it starts with that, what I said to you earlier, when you do the DISC profile, and you look at it, and you say, “Is this me?” And we say, “Why don’t you go home and ask your spouse?” And they come back the next day and say, “Oh, my God, this is me.”

So I think the revelation, the biggest revelation is when you see an X-ray of your personality, and you had no idea that you had these traits. And we call it style flexing.

You can’t deal with everybody the same. The golden rule is, “Treat others as you’d like to be treated.” What we realize is you need to treat others as they need to be treated, not you need to be treated because you are uniquely different.

You know, I thought, you could have a positive attitude or a negative, but when you do the DISC profile and you see the personality of people, and they then understand why they behave the way they do because of their personality, it is revealing. I mean, it gets emotional.

So that is probably the most revealing aspect of it, and also effective confrontation. It’s called Bend the Knee. How do you tell somebody what they could do to help you deal with them in a better way. It’s called effective confrontation.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now could you share with us some best practices for great recognition and celebration?

Bob Chapman
That’s a great question because what we found is, in business, the expression is, “I got 10 things right and I never heard a word. I got one thing wrong and I got my ass chewed out.”

And so what we developed was this cadence of looking for the goodness in other people, holding it up and saying, “Thank you,” in thoughtful, meaningful, timely ways. And it is profound because people said, “I had no idea that you thought that of me.”

It’s not about, “Okay, your five-year anniversary, top salesperson.” It’s about looking for the goodness in others, and in thoughtful, timely ways, holding that up for everybody and saying thank you. And it becomes part of your DNA to constantly be looking for the goodness in people, not the brokenness in people, the goodness in people. So that is a key to recognition and celebration.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you see it, how do you celebrate it?

Bob Chapman
It’s called FBI – Feelings, Behaviors, and Impact. We pause and we let somebody, an individual know that they have been very significant to your life. And if you just watch the body language, I mean, people say, “It’s the most meaningful event I’ve ever had because I never knew people thought this of me. It meant so much to me.”

So, it’s a skill. Again, it’s not about five years anniversary with the company. It’s not about top sales. It’s about being a good person and people wanting to say to you, “You know, you’re a good person. Let me tell you why.” And you stand there in front of a group of people gathered, And it just creates this cadence of goodness.

This cadence of always looking for the goodness in people, because we leave this world and we’re inundated through the media with the brokenness of the world. And so when we send people home, constantly being involved in recognition events, where we pause and say, “Thank you for who you are. It’s meant a lot to me.” It just gets part of your DNA and it makes a huge impact on the organization.

Again, not some big badge once a year. The cadence of this is spontaneous and it’s called Shine the Light. Shine the light in the organization, look for the goodness and hold it up and say thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that structure in terms of the feelings, like, “I feel this way because of your behaviors, and it just made this impact.” And then it is quite potent, I imagine, to be on the receiving end of that. It’s like, “Oh, this guy is totally authentically sincere about this. And these are facts, at the same time, I did do those things, and I didn’t know it made that big of an impact. Wow, that’s really cool. That just sounds like a fantastic thing to hear.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now let’s hear about your revelation about culture of service. Any best practices or do’s, don’ts you’d like to share there?

Bob Chapman
Yeah, that really came from probably 20 years ago. It occurred to me that we work with our customers to try to convince them to buy our product. We’d take them to dinner, we’d give them the information they need, and finally the customer says, “Okay, we’re going to buy your product.” And we’d say, “That’s great.” And we move on to try and get the next customer to buy it.

And, all of a sudden, it occurred to me, “What if we actually treated our customer better after they made the decision to buy it, rather than to get them to?” So I challenged this young lady, a very talented young lady, “How can we treat people better after they make the decision rather than to get them to make the decision?” And she ended up, probably spending six months, studying the idea of service.

And she ended up with an expression, “Seizing the opportunity to serve others.” Moving from, “It’s all about me,” to, “It’s all about I care for others.” And I’ll give you a trite example from my specific experience.

Cynthia and I were playing golf, and we were on a particular hole and on the green, and I said, “Cynthia, don’t forget your iron that you left on the side as we walked off the 18.” And thinking of culture of service, seizing the opportunity to serve others, instead of telling her, “Don’t forget to pick up that iron,” I went over and picked it up and handed it to her.

And, to me, business, these organizations could be the source of healing in the world if we didn’t just use people to achieve our goals but we actually became stewards, and we actually gave these people the skills to care for others as we achieve these goals.

So, again, all I can say to you, 22 plus years into this, nobody has ever debated what I just shared with you. People feel it is the key to the world the way it was intended to be, and it could heal this poverty of dignity we have in the world, where we have economic prosperity, but we don’t have human prosperity.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, now could you share with us a favorite book?

Bob Chapman
My favorite book was a book called The One Minute Manager by Ken Blanchard. And it made leadership seem so simple about caring for people. It was probably 30 years ago I read it.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you share a favorite habit?

Bob Chapman
Pause and think. Too much to me of people’s lives is reacting to how to impact as opposed to creating their future.

One of things I would leave your listeners with is, in the context of these questions, is write your eulogy. What do you want people to say about your life someday when that comes that you’re going to leave this world, 100 years from now? But think about, what do you want people to say about your life? And then go make it true. Live life with kind of a North Star about who you want to be.

Because I find that most people, 95% of people, simply react to what happens, as opposed to putting it in some context of where you’re going. Because if you don’t know where you’re going, how do you know how to deal with things? So writing your eulogy is a critical aspect, to me, of living life with intention and purpose so that someday, when your day comes, you look back and say, “I did my best and used my skills fully in the service of others.”

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

Bob Chapman
Well, we have the Chapman and Co. Leadership Institute where we are sharing with companies around the country about how to embrace this. We have the Chapman Foundation for Caring Communities, and we have Barry-Wehmiller Outreach.

So there’s a massive amount of information on the internet about this journey. And, obviously, the book is a story of my journey from management to leadership and then how to do it. And then the latest edition came out with what is the impact.

And, again, the way we lead impacts the way people live. And we can begin to heal this brokenness we’re all feeling if we embrace our profound impact we have on other people’s lives, moving from a me-centric world to a we-centric world where we care for others.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Bob, thank you.

Bob Chapman
Thank you for your interest in the message. And my hope is that your listeners will wake up tomorrow with a better hope for the future that we can heal this brokenness in the world if we learn to care for each other.

Apr 20
0

1147: How to Optimize Your Space to Thrive with Leidy Klotz

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Leidy Klotz shares simple shifts for creating more spaces that improve well-being.

You’ll Learn

  1. The three core needs that well-designed spaces meet
  2. How to feel in control of spaces you can’t control
  3. How to harness the “home turf” advantage anywhere

About Leidy

Leidy Klotz is a behavioral scientist and engineering professor at the University of Virginia who studies how and why humans design. He has written for the Washington Post, Fast Company, Scientific American, and Harvard Business Review; has published his work in top journals like Nature and Science; and has been interviewed on Hidden Brain, Freakonomics, Mindscape, and The Atlantic’s How to Build a Happy Life. Klotz has advised clients ranging from the Departments of Energy and Homeland Security to CapitalOne and Amazon.

Resources Mentioned

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Leidy Klotz Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Leidy, welcome back!

Leidy Klotz
Thanks, Pete. It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about your latest work, In A Good Place. Last time, we were talking about subtraction and how that can enrich our lives. Now we’re talking about locations. Could you kick us off with a particularly surprising or fascinating discovery you’ve made about this stuff?

Leidy Klotz
One of the things, when I was going through the research for location, that just struck me was there’s a study of nursing home residents, and they found that in the study that they did, one group of residents was able to, like, customize their space and another group was not.

And then they came back to the people 18 months later, and of the people who couldn’t customize their space, they were 50% more likely to be dead. Like, we all know that space is important, right? But the degree to which it was important in that case was really striking to me.

Pete Mockaits
Yeah. Well, that’s so fascinating and alarming. And what’s interesting is that customizing your space, boy, it’s almost like that’s hitting multiple key human needs all at once, you know? Like, autonomy, agency control, as well as, like, beauty and mobility.

Leidy Klotz
Growth and, like, learning, right? You’re learning how you like it. You’re learning that you can move things around in the world. So, yeah, all of those things. I think that probably with the nursing home study, a lot of it had to do with kind of agency and feeling like you still have a say in the world around you. But, yeah, so it’s not a trivial thing to be able to interact with your surroundings.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and part of me is wondering, and I’m sure we’ll get here, many of us have the ability to customize our space, but maybe we haven’t thought to bother much. Can you make the case? So if we’re not in nursing homes, we’re living our lives in homes whether owned or rented, as well as workplaces, offices, what’s kind of at stake with us thoughtfully optimizing these spaces versus just going with the flow?

Leidy Klotz
Yeah, I think it really comes down to whether or not our core psychological needs are met. And like you said, these core psychological needs, basically agency, growth or competence, and connection. And these are all things, right, that we hope we get at work and everywhere else.

And we think about them as important, but we often think about them in terms of, you know, tasks that we’re doing. The original way that we met these needs was through our interactions with our surroundings, right?

If you think back to our ancestors trying to survive against predators and the elements, the ones that were compelled to shape their surroundings to provide shelter, the ones that were compelled to figure out how their surroundings work, were more likely to survive and become us.

So these are like long-standing, deep-rooted psychological needs that we have, and we can meet them in other ways, not just in our surroundings, but we still can meet them right there in our surroundings. So that’s the case. It’s like here’s this amazing opportunity that we have all around us that we can take advantage of to thrive.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, let’s talk about these three needs. This reminds me of self-determination theory. I’ve heard of different adjectives used for these three components. Tasha Eurich talked about some of this in her book Shatterproof, which was rather potent. So can you expand on these?

Leidy Klotz
Yeah, and I’m so glad you brought up self-determination theory. Sometimes people don’t want to know the theory. The theory is really important here because this isn’t just Leidy’s research figuring this out. This is decades of people studying this across different contexts in different cultures. And self-determination theory is, like, the best understanding of motivation that we have and agency.

So this is our ability to have a say in our surroundings, so the ability to do something about the world around us, that’s agency. Competence is actually doing it, right? So competence is showing other people that we can affect change in the world around us or that we can interact with the world around us.

And then connection is maybe the easiest one to understand, you know, connecting with other people, but also just connecting with something bigger than ourselves. And that’s, you know, spaces are part of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you tell us a story of someone in a professional context who had an okay space, but they thoughtfully put some effort into making it extra awesome and what happened for him?

Leidy Klotz
I’ll give you an extreme story. So Nelson Mandela, we know that he was imprisoned on Robben Island. And one of the things that I learned he did there, obviously, you’re incredibly constrained with your agency when you’re imprisoned.

But when he was in prison, he found a space on the roof that was bathed all day in sunlight, he wrote. And he negotiated with the guards to be able to have a garden up there and then go up and tend to the garden.

And obviously, Mandela is one of these people who you think of never getting rid of his agency no matter what, right? Even when he was in prison, he was still campaigning and getting information out, but he also exercised the agency in his surroundings, right?

And I think we’re not, hopefully, imprisoned but when you find your agency being constrained in one way, like, I’m like everybody else. I’m in an office. I can’t just go tell my boss that I want a different office or that I want my space renovated overnight.

But if I’m frustrated by that, I can realize it and then find adjacent freedoms, right? I can go work somewhere else if it’s nice outside, or I can move the arrangement of my desk to face the window. And now, all of a sudden, I’m taking back control in that environment.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can you share with us, what are some key shifts that can make a boatload of difference in our spaces?

Leidy Klotz
For me, the biggest one is, and this seems to resonate with people when I talk about it, is to make use of the spaces that we have available to ourselves, right? I’ll use myself again because this is a self-depreciating example.

I live in a house, I could work anywhere in that house, and I find myself sitting in the same chair and typing on my computer no matter what the task is, right? But if I think about it, I’m like, “Well, I could move over to this desk that’s facing the window, and write on a notebook when I need more creative ideas.”

I could shift my seating based on, you know, how my body feels. I could move throughout the day based on how the light’s moving. So there’s this example where I have all this space available to me, and just by my tried and true habits, I’m only using a small slice of it. And I think that’s a principle that can help everybody.

And we immediately jump to, “Okay, how do I change this space? How do I renovate this space?” And before we’ve thought about like, “Well, here are all the spaces where I could go. Let me make use of those before I start changing things.”

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that a lot. It’s funny, I have a camping chair that has a little bit of a recline and a swing, a rocking to it. But what’s really fun about it is, sure enough, you can put that anywhere in terms of, like, a park, by a window, in different zones of a backyard or front yard.

And I don’t often think that I have that option available to me. Although, there was a season in which it just lived in my trunk, and from time to time I was like, “You know what, I’m going to do my work over here now because I can.” And it’s a good feeling.

Leidy Klotz
Yeah, yeah, it’s good, because you’re comfortable, but also you made it, right? Like, you’re making the world how you want it to be. So I love that story because it’s very small, but you’re making your space in all these different places.

Pete Mockaitis
And sometimes, I’ve also had the experience, I’m thinking about, I’m just tidying up an area that’s long been untidy, and it really does feel like it’s meeting deep psychological needs because it’s, like, I’m finding like a deep sigh of rightness and peace.

And I’m not like a neat freak by any means. My wife and others can attest to this. And yet, when I go there, it’s often I’m surprised, like profoundly edifying. And I think Marie Kondo, she wrote a book with title, right, “The Life-changing Power, Magic of Tidying Up.”

Leidy Klotz
Yep, “The Life-Changing Magic.”

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah, can you speak to this notion?

Leidy Klotz
There’s a lot going on there, but I think the number one thing is probably back to this, like, agency and competence, right? That psychologists, and I’m not a psychologist, but like one of the things that they’ll prescribe for depressed people is to say, like, “Hey, you just reorganize a room,” or, “Tidy up a room.”

And it’s not necessarily that the tidy room makes you less depressed. It’s that the act of feeling like you have control over some aspect of your life starts to make you feel better. And then, hopefully, that feeds on itself, so you feel you have control in tidying.

And then you realize, “Okay, I have control in these other ways,” and then you start to kind of get yourself back. So that’s probably the main thing that’s happening there. I also think that there’s some small bits and pieces.

You know, a tidy space is going to have less distraction, less cognitive load on you so you’re not coming in every time even if you’re not noticing. In my house, it’s shin guards and boxer briefs strewn about.

And even if you’re not noticing them, they’re, like, taxing you a little bit mentally. But the main thing is just, “Hey, I can do something about my situation.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay, so first point, principle, just use all the space available to us. We might just totally be forgetting, “Oh, yeah, I have all these options available, and I just never use them.” Where do we go from there?

Leidy Klotz
Well, and also I’ll just give one more. At work, right? Like, so many of our offices are designed to, you know, there’s your office or wherever you’re supposed to sit, but then there’s all these spaces that are meant for other things. And I think that, you know, we’re not fully taking advantage of those a lot of times.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, those architects and contractors were paid a pretty penny to get those in there and we’re not using them.

Leidy Klotz
And your bosses are thinking about it, right? They’re like, “How do we make this space so that people like it?” And yet, we never get past that barrier of, “No, you can actually use it.” Even something as simple as the conference room, right?

Like, every time you go into the conference room, technically, you could set it up differently for the meeting at hand. And yet, how often does that happen? Usually, you’re just accepting it the way that it should be.

But if you showed up 15 minutes early and set that conference room up, you’re getting a hit of agency, plus you can make sure that you’re sitting next to the people that it’s important to sit next to in the meeting. So there’s just a lot there.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, while I’m visualizing a conference room, what are some little tweaks that can enhance my experience of being in that conference room?

Leidy Klotz
Well, I mean, I think like there’s all the power dynamics stuff, you know? But I think everybody knows the kind of, “Put yourself in the position of power, and sit at the head of the table.” And I think most of what we’re trying to do in a conference room is, typically, kind of put people on equal footing.

And so, say you’re a boss, and you want to get people’s input in the meeting, don’t sit at the head of the table and maybe set up the room so that it kind of makes everybody feel like they’re sitting around a campfire where we’re all kind of equal. And then you will be more likely to get that input from people, right?

The conference room can be an example of this principle where, like, you’re saying one thing, and the space is saying something totally different. You’re saying, “Oh, we want all your input. It really matters.” And then you march in, sit at the head of the table, everybody else is just staring at you, and you control the slides. And do you really want people’s input? So I think that is one example.

Pete Mockaitis
So, Leidy, I should stop making every other seat in the conference room way shorter than my own? Because that’s what I do every time I go into a meeting. I should stop doing that?

Leidy Klotz
That trick is so hilarious. I mean, do it if you want to. It just depends. So it’s, like, move among the spaces we have access to. I think there’s another principle that’s, like, align the space with your goals. And sometimes the goal in the conference room is to be dominant.

Sometimes the goal in the conference room, hopefully, more often, is to have an exchange that helps everybody’s ideas move forward and get better. And so thinking about what those goals are and then lining the space up to suit it.

One of my favorite studies that’s, like, along these lines, there’s a study of negotiations and they wanted to see like Home Field versus Away turf negotiating. And this is, we know that location matters in negotiations. Diplomats will negotiate the location before they negotiate the treaty.

But the study was brilliant in its simplicity. All they did, they had two groups, the control and experimental group. In one group, they had sit in a room for 20 minutes, and then they had the other group come into that room to negotiate.

And the group that had been in the room for 20 minutes achieved better outcomes in the negotiations. That’s something that anybody can do. You can show up 20 minutes early for the meeting and just feel more at home. And, apparently, that is going to help. So, yeah, it’s powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
I have had that experience when I’m doing keynote speeches. It feels very nice to get into the room early, not just for the sound check, you know, AV stuff, all that, but even before those people are there, and to just walk through the whole space, and the seats, and just behold that large, empty space, and to feel like it is mine.

I don’t have any hard scientific evidence on it, but I really do feel more comfortable, confident, and ready to own the stage and the whole auditorium because it’s, like, “Oh, well, you are my guests because I was here first.”

Leidy Klotz
Yeah, no, that’s a great example. And you’ve probably done more of these than I have, but if I can’t do that, if I can’t have enough time to, like, totally take in the space, I’d rather be dropped in right at the end.

The worst situation is when you’re there for, like, 30 minutes and you’re watching the person before you, and you’re sitting in the audience and you don’t have enough time to kind of, like, fully appreciate the space, and then you have to run and jump up on the stage.

So the other option, I call it just kind of getting off the bus and play. Like, you go to the green room and then you just come out on the stage, and you know you’ve done your talk so many times that then you’re not, like, kind of inundated by these external forces in the space.

There’s science here. Probably the best science for yours and getting acclimated is, I mean, it’s not a scientific study, but all these sports teams, right? Their whole profession and livelihood and success depends on winning or losing. And they will all get there at least a day before the game and do a walkthrough on the court and try to make it as familiar as possible.

And then, on the other side, where if you don’t have time to kind of fully take it in, try to avoid the awkwardness of what’s happening when you come into a new space, is you’re trying to figure out the new space, right? Your brain is going to that.

And our brains have limited resources. And if our brain is trying to figure out the space while trying to think about how to deliver a keynote, it’s not going to go well. And so we want to not have the space taxing our mental resources when our job is to connect with other people, whether it’s from the stage or whether it’s in a conference room.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. What else should we be thinking about here?

Leidy Klotz
Growth. I think that growth or competence. So we’ve talked a little about agency and then connection. But growth is, like, we grow from interacting with our spaces. We learn. We were talking about kids earlier.

When you watch kids, as a parent, one of the most freeing things was to realize how much they were learning from the world around them, because I was worried that, “Okay, I’m going to have to describe to them how all this stuff works,” right? They just watch and they watch you, and then they interact with the world.

And so, maybe kids playing with a sand castle on the beach seems like they’re innately drawn to it. But, like, when my daughter is building a drip castle, for example, she’s learning about the fluid mechanics of the drip of the water.

She’s learning about material properties of sand and water mixed together. She’s learning about herself, right? She’s learning that, you know, if there’s some adversity, like her brother knocks down the castle, she can build it back and she’s going to feel good from overcoming that adversity. So this is, like, how we learn by interacting with the world and seeing what happens.

And I think we talked about screens last time. I think one of my favorite stories was yours, talking about subtracting TVs from the bedroom. And you can go back and listen to the subtract episode about why you would want to do that.

But so much of our life is on screens now which is convenient in a lot of ways, but when you’re navigating with your phone, for example, you’re not really taking in the city the same way you would be if you were trying to find it based on street addresses or just trying to walk based on directions that somebody gave you. And so we’ve engineered out a way that we might, otherwise, kind of learn about the world around us.

And I get that that’s probably an example where I’ll keep using my Google Maps because I want to just get there as quickly as possible. That’s convenient. But we’re also, then, engineering out these kind of opportunities to stretch our brains, and to work that learning muscle. And so I think growth through our spaces is something that we need to pay attention to.

Pete Mockaitis
So just the navigation in and of itself. What are some other ways we grow by interacting with our spaces?

Leidy Klotz
There’s the navigation. There’s the renovations that you talked about before, where if you are kind of setting up your space, and you’re realizing that, “Okay, that doesn’t work. I don’t like it, and I can change it back.” So now you’re learning things that you like and don’t like, but you’re also learning about yourself and that you can do these things.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I’m thinking a little bit back to my conversation with BJ Fogg on the show, and we’re talking about making things easier for behavior design. Like, if we make something easier, we’ll do more of it. And I notice, it’s so funny, in my office, which I really love, I found myself having a little bit of resistance to just going down and sitting in the chair and doing the work, even though, “Hey, I’ve got a great monitor. I’ve got a sit-stand desk.” It’s so good.

It’s like, “What’s the deal? This should be like the top place I want to sit and do work, instead of over on the couch on my sort of smaller screen laptop situation.” And I realized that my wheeling office chair, you know, the wheels on it, were getting kind of stuck in the carpet a bit, and so it requires a little bit of, “Ugh!” like, awkward effort to shimmy it out of the ruts to get into where I want.

Well, it’s funny because it’s a visceral thing. It’s a little thing, and yet, it’s something that can pass right through my conscious awareness, but have these associations. And so I said, “Well, by golly, I got to get a mat.”

And so I did, I got the mat. And now there is less resistance. And so I’m more likely to get in my battle station with all the goodies and the big monitors because, “Oh, there was a tiny thing missing, a mat under the rolling chair.”

Leidy Klotz
I’m so glad I couldn’t think of a story and you chimed in with yours that was much better than what I would have said. You’re also illustrating this beautiful concept of, like, how these principles that were originally physical principles.

Like, friction, right? How many people are talking about friction in the workplace when they’re talking about task completion and like removing friction or adding friction. You, literally, identified physical friction on the chair as the thing. So I think, yeah, and that’s a great tip that was one of the other ones is just like kind of removing constraints, right?

Like, thinking about your space and what are the constraints that are holding you back in that space. And that’s something. If you walk into the office on Monday morning, whether you’re an employee or the boss, you will find things that are constraining you that you can then remove immediately. In your case, you removed the friction and make your space better. That’s a beautiful example.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I like that a lot. And so now I’m thinking about, you know, it could be the temperature, it’s like, “Can I adjust that, or can I hold a cold bottle of water, or, like, have a little hot pad under my butt?” Or it could be the lighting, the temperature, the sound with noise canceling headphones and/or earplugs. What are some other constraints that show up that we might want to do something about?

Leidy Klotz
I think there are unwritten constraints, too, where you kind of assume that this space is for that thing, and then you don’t question it. This is probably less about in your home, but more at the office. Like my editor actually, she had a space in her office that was supposed to be a flex space. It was a super nice flex space.

But the problem was there was, like, an executive in her office who would use it periodically. And it wasn’t like all the time, but it was enough that people were like, “Is that actually flexible space or am I going to…is the exec going to think that I’m trampling on their territory or invading their territory?”

And so I think if you’re in a position where you can articulate to people, like, “These spaces are for these things, and we really want you to use them,” but then also, if you’re willing to experiment yourself and kind of like try things out in your office, then go use spaces for different things and to be a leader, right? If there’s a room, a conference room, or a flex space that’s never being used, try using it and see what happens.

So that one is more about like just having more clear definitions about what can be done in the spaces and not assuming. So the constraint there is in our heads.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, certainly. Or, we just have these assumptions, like, “Well, the conference room is for conferencing, and so it would not be appropriate for me as an individual solo person to get up in there.” It’s like, “Well, that may or may not be true based upon the needs of the organization and the space.”

Leidy Klotz
Exactly, yeah. And, I mean, there’s all this work trying to make offices more flexible and suitable for different tasks. And again, part of that is in the physical world, but part of it is in our heads, right? Have we tried using it for the task and seeing how it works?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, one thing that’s coming up a lot is in terms of like our own needs and desires and what works for us and customizing. I’m curious if you had any discoveries about, like, universal good things for a space in terms of is it light or nature? Or is there anything that just about all humans do better when these components are in the space or are not in the space?

Leidy Klotz
I have another example from my editor’s office. She’s going to have to listen to this podcast. But she said that they wanted to bring more nature in, so they put like AstroTurf on the steel columns to try to make it feel more natural.

But that’s not the kind of nature that’s helpful. So it’s less about, like, bringing nature inside, and more about trying to mimic the patterns that are found in nature. And one thing that’s in nature a lot is this kind of balance between order and complexity.

So there’s this classic interior design advice that’s, like, kind of layering the materials and textures and fabrics, but also having kind of, like, an underlying, “This is the idea.” And I think the kind of the way that that design advice has been backed into, and the way it works, and the reason it works is because we like being surrounded by things where there’s, by the natural world.

And in the natural world, there’s like, you know, a pine tree, the way it grows. It’ll grow in fractal patterns where little small pieces of the pine tree look very similar in terms of like the shape as the larger scale. And so there’s this regularity, but it gives rise to something that looks more complex.

And if you look at, like, a brick facade, for example, I mean, it’s the same thing. It’s this big, massive facade that you don’t pay much attention to and, generally, feels pretty natural and soothing, but there’s also an underlying pattern, whether it’s the bricks are staggered by one half on each level, or maybe one is stretched long ways and one is stretched short ways and then you keep repeating the pattern.

So there’s complexity but it’s resulting from a simple pattern. Is that too abstract or is that okay?

Pete Mockaitis
No, I hear you. And then I’m thinking about, I’m just looking at a bookshelf right now. And I had a buddy, once we were at a party. He was looking at the bookshelf, he said, “What’s up with women organizing their books by color?” which is a huge generalization. I’m sure men do it, too. But I thought it was kind of funny because both he and I have bookshelves and plenty of books and do not organized by color.

But yet, I got to say, when I was beholding this bookshelf, visually, it looked quite lovely. But if you can’t recall what a book spine looked like, you might have a harder time fishing it out of that bookshelf. But I think that speaks a bit to the pattern, is there is a certain order and beauty that is peaceful to having the books organized by color.

Leidy Klotz
Yeah, that’s interesting. That’s totally an example, right? You can see that this looks aesthetically pleasing and it’s because, “Okay, I see that there’s some logic here to the pattern.” And if you do it by a rainbow, then that’s something that’s actually found in nature. So that’s the kind of the deepest one.

I would say the other kind of general rules about what we like is we like where we’ve been. There’s this research on mirror exposure in the most extreme. The most interesting study, I think, is one of the original ones.

They put chicken eggs that hadn’t hatched yet and played music. And then when the eggs hatched, they had the ones that had heard the music and hatched chicks that hadn’t heard the music, and they put them in a pen and played music from one end. And the chicks that had heard the music went to the music.

So what’s happening, it’s like this demonstration of that, like, familiarity breeds liking. So if you’ve been surrounded by certain things throughout your life, you’re probably more likely to like them in the future. Like, I live in a house that has angled bedroom ceilings, a gravel driveway, and a kick wall for a soccer ball.

And that’s like some of the same features as the house I grew up in, right? And so the things that we’re kind of familiar are going to just take less cognitive effort and then we’re drawn to them as a result.

And then the last little piece is, this is, I think, the most freeing one, is that we’re also wired to like what we’ve chosen. So if you’ve picked the thing, like if you organized the books the way that you want to organize the books, Pete, don’t change it, right? Like, you are going to kind of justify it and like it because it’s you who did it.

And I think that’s as many kind of general rules as I think are worth thinking about when we’re thinking about our spaces.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, there can be a certain delight in that. And I think you maybe see this in maybe couples arguing about how to load the dishwasher. It’s, like, each way feels very right to each of them. And you can argue, I don’t know if dishwasher engineers would have a point of view on what’s optimal from a cleansing perspective.

But we can get really, really attached to how we’ve arranged things. And I guess, as you opened us up with everything, it could be life or death, potentially, in terms of the ability to be able to arrange things to our liking.

Leidy Klotz
Yeah, I mean, we’re laughing about, well, not laughing, but, the nursing home study is an extreme example. But in some of these studies of self-determination theory in the office and in large scale in, like, across different examples, they correlate agency, growth, and connection and, like, health outcomes. And there’s a correlation there, so it’s a big deal.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, is there anything we should talk about with regard to connection in our spaces?

Leidy Klotz
I think that we’ve talked a little bit about, like, home and away, right, and thinking about how the space is going to make you perform. Is it an away space? Is it a home space? I think, “How can you make it a good space for connecting?” is maybe something that we should just hammer home because, most of the time, what we want to do in the space is have meaningful interactions with the other people who are in it.

And so if you think about people coming to your office, you don’t want them maybe distracted by a mess in the space. And the mess could be, like, the mess that our parents talk about, but also it could be a mess where the space is just not easy to navigate, right? It’s hard for them to get around and, therefore, they’re worried about that, and, therefore, they’re not being able to focus on you.

So I think, you know, how do we make the space as kind of neutral as possible? And sometimes, I think, that’s, for me, the thing that works is, you know, I’ll go outside my house and then just open the door and say, “Okay, I’m coming into this as a visitor would and now I’ll start to notice some of the things,” and then I can remove them and make it so that my guest is able to connect with me and vice versa.

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

Leidy Klotz
Just one really powerful thing, I guess, is that the space is a really awesome way to advertise your values, and it’s advertising that never turns off. We think about how we present ourselves with our clothes. We think about how we, like, articulate what’s meaningful to us. And yet, our surroundings are also sending messages about those things.

And so I’m not telling you what your values should be, obviously, but I’m saying your surroundings are a way to share those values. If you’re the company that says you care about employee input, and yet there’s cubicles for certain people and, like, nice executive offices around the outside, well, your space is saying something different than your mission statement. And it’s the same on an individual level.

So I would just say that this is an opportunity to, like, put your values into the world, and it’s an opportunity that never, never stops broadcasting once you’ve got it right. So just some motivation for people.

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

Leidy Klotz
One of my favorite quotes are different versions of that it’s less about what happens to you, and more about how you react to it. I guess a Viktor Frankl version of that most recently about life, like, it all being in the space between the stimulus and the reaction. But I really like those.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Leidy Klotz
The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath.

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

Leidy Klotz
I think the biggest key nugget is that people find it empowering to take advantage of the spaces to which they have access. And I think people realize that they do, in fact, have more options than they thought.

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

Leidy Klotz
LeidyKlotz.com, and then the book In a Good Place is available wherever you buy books. All the good stuff is in the book, but if you want to learn more about me, I’m easy to find on the internet.

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

Leidy Klotz
Notice. So take in the spaces around you and just pay attention to how they’re affecting you, and get some joy out of them, too. There’s beauty in the world around us, and something as simple as just the way the light reflects off the wall in different times of the day can be a source of joy. And that’s something that our screens, fundamentally, can’t give us. So notice and enjoy.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Leidy, thank you.

Leidy Klotz
Thanks, Pete.

Apr 16
0

1146: How to Reclaim Your Focus and Unlock Your Genius with Memory Champion Nelson Dellis

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Memory champion Nelson Dellis shares simple techniques to upgrade your thinking to genius level.

You’ll Learn

  1. The core skills behind genius-level thinking
  2. How to learn faster and better using one powerful tool
  3. Why you shouldn’t write off your intuition

About Nelson

Nelson Dellis is a six-time USA Memory Champion, two-time Guinness World Record holder, Grandmaster of Memory, keynote speaker, and world-renowned memory coach. He teaches at the university level, holding degrees in computer science and physics, and is also an accomplished mountaineer with four Mt. Everest expeditions. 

Beyond the classroom and the mountains, Nelson has medaled in international competitions, contributed to remote viewing research on stock prediction, and even played on a professional card-counting Blackjack team that won over $100,000. He shares his passion for unlocking the mind’s potential with over 300,000 YouTube subscribers, where he makes complex skills practical, fun, and accessible to anyone willing to train their brain.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Nelson Dellis Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Nelson, welcome!

Nelson Dellis
Hey, thank you. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to talk about becoming more of an everyday genius. You are a six-time memory champion. Could you tell us one of your most amazing feats of memory ever?

Nelson Dellis
Let’s see, I’m most proud of having memorized 10,000 digits of pi. That was a good one.

Pete Mockaitis
10,000 digits. Wow! Now that sounds like a record to me, I don’t know.

Nelson Dellis
Oh, it’s not. Although, you know, if we’re talking about how many digits someone has used their memory to store, it’s many tens of thousands. The unofficial record is, like, a hundred K, but the official record is 70,030. Yeah, both are insane.

Pete Mockaitis
That is wild. How does a person do such a thing?

Nelson Dellis
Well, first you have to have the desire to do such a thing. I’ve known of people who have done it without really much of a technique other than brute force repetition and a lot of time. That sounds horrible. And I would ask the question, “How?” That sounds crazy.

But those who are more well-versed in memory techniques would look at numbers and have some way of converting them into more meaningful things, things that are easier to visualize in your mind than these abstract symbols. And then encoding it all into some elaborate story that connects them in order.

And that is the basics of memory techniques in a nutshell, honestly.

Pete Mockaitis
So now I remember reading a book about this in terms of, like, each digit becomes a letter or sound, like one becomes T or D, and two becomes N and so forth. Is that what you’re talking about in terms of making them more meaningful?

Nelson Dellis
That’s one of the methods. With abstract symbols like numbers, for example, the system is to, yes, convert it into words that, then, you can visualize, right? You look at numbers, it’s maybe hard to visualize them, maybe not individually, like, if I see a seven, I can visualize a seven or seven things.

But if you are talking about a huge sequence of numbers, there’s only 10 different digits. So if there’s a lot of digits, you’re going to get a lot of those repeating. So it’s hard to think of, like, “Oh, I’m picturing a seven, then I’m picturing an eight, then I’m picturing a seven.”

It would be easier if you could collect groups of numbers and then have images preset for certain combinations. So instead of saying, I don’t know, 124, I see Michael Jordan, maybe, you know, that would always encompass with one and two and a four together, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, okay. So, like, he’s number one, and his number is 24. So he’s one, two, four.

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, you’re not too far off. My system is a little…

Pete Mockaitis
Wait, wasn’t he 23? Wasn’t 23 his number? And I’m not a sports guy.

Nelson Dellis
Exactly, No, no. So 024, the 24 is Kobe Bryant. That actually was his number. So all of the 24s, this is the way I do it. There are different ways to do it. Some might argue that my way is a little more complicated, unnecessarily, but it works for me.

Anyways, so 024 is Kobe Bryant. So all the 24s, things that end in 24 are shooting guards in the NBA. So 124, I made Michael Jordan because, you know, after Kobe, he should be number one, right? Yeah, and then I just go through a bunch of different NBA stars there for the 24s.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that was fun. So then you’ve taken some time in advance to construct this whole rubric.

Nelson Dellis
Language, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s like a Nelson only. It’s pure custom, what does 24 mean to you? What’s one-four mean to you?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah. And that’s the most important part about coming up with visuals to remember is the more meaningful they are to you, the more rich they are with associations to you, the better they’re going to stick.

So, yes, somebody could learn my system. And, again, this is, yes, a pre-learned system so that when I’m encountering numbers in competitions or day-to-day life, I have a way to look at them and already have something set up to visualize instead.

But it is maybe not advised to take my system and learn it as is because there’s going to be a lot of images for numbers that mean nothing to you. Like, I have my personal friends in there. I have characters from books and shows that I’ve enjoyed throughout my life.

Some people might have never seen those shows, you know. Or, basketball, maybe nobody cares about basketball. And while you could, I guess, learn to visualize Michael Jordan, but why not choose something that’s, you know, you like to visualize or that’s easy for you to visualize?

Pete Mockaitis
But I think that speaks to a principle. Well, you tell me, a potential principle in terms of, if something is deeply meaningful and emotionally resonant to you, it is more memorable. Yeah, sometimes, people say, “Pete, you have the most amazing memory that you remembered this thing.” And I was like, “Well, no, that thing was very important to me in that moment of my life,” versus, I guess, for everyone else, was just like, “Yeah, whatever.”

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, exactly. Our brains are designed to remember novel things that stick out, and then the stuff that’s every day, commonplace. Like, it decides usually to drop that information. It treats it like noise.

And if you think kind of evolutionarily way back when, our brain was designed to remember these novel things, because it usually was tied to survival, right? Like, “This plant here has this pattern on it,” visual, “if I eat this, I will die because it’s poisonous with this pattern on it,” right? So simple things like that.

Nowadays, there is so much information, I think our primitive brain doesn’t do a very good job of isolating the things that are actually important because it’s not so tied to survival anymore, versus things that are noise.

Even though you may have the intention of you’re completely interested in this thing, your brain might be not so convinced, you know? And so it doesn’t stick, even though you’re paying full attention to it.

So it does start with things that you’re more interested in, that are paying attention to, tend to be memorized better, but it’s a complicated world out there, and our brain is trying to figure it out.

So if you can tap into kind of its evolutionary traits, which is we remember pictures that are associative and filled with sensory information and are meaningful, those are the things that you’re going to remember.

A great example is like, think of 9/11, right? We all remember where we were, what we were doing, sometimes even what we ate that day, what we were wearing that day, what somebody said that day, and that’s because that day was all of those things.

It was memorable. It was emotional, terrifying, scary, and it was out of the ordinary, for sure. We saw things on TV that we will never see in our lives probably, so it sticks out. Versus, you know, last Tuesday, what did you do?

Probably went to work. Did the exact same thing you usually do. Maybe a slight variation here and there, but nothing to the effect of something that dramatically different.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so we learned, your subtitle is “Hacks to Boost Your Memory, Focus, Problem Solving, and Much More.” We talked about a hack for numbers, which is kind of interesting.

But I’m guessing for your person who is interested in becoming awesome at their job, memory contests are not their job, but you’ve got some goodies for us. Tell us, what’s sort of your main message or big idea in the book, Everyday Genius?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, so the main point of the book is that I believe that there are plenty of mental abilities that we can train and learn that are associated with genius. And in the process of learning them and mastering them, you tap into that and could even convince yourself that you have a higher intellect, that you are genius, or can tap into genius from time to time.

What I learned over the years doing the memory thing, I didn’t have a background in memory techniques. I had an average memory, but I learned about them. I trained them obsessively, to a point where I could win these competitions and do break records and such. But it wasn’t a gift I was born with.

And that was always an amazing thing that, “Oh, wow. I thought memory was a fixed thing. And that super smart people had good memories and dumb people had bad memories,” right? But it’s not like that. It’s memory is a skill. And that was a huge thing for me to kind of unlearn.

And then, over the years, doing 10,000 digits of pi or 20 decks of playing cards in an hour, crazy feats of memory, people will throw out that label of genius just because they don’t understand it or don’t think it’s possible.

And I hate that. I’m not a genius. Like, I’m just like anybody else. I just have a skill that I learned. And I could teach you how to do this skill, and the person down the street, how to do this skill.

So genius is definitely a subjective term, ultimately, you know? People use it very flippantly. If they see something that looks smart, you consider someone smart, but that might not be the end of the story. Someone might not actually be as smart as you think. They just showed some quality of intelligence in a moment, in some situation. but I think we all can kind of uncover that.

And that’s what the book explores, the different pockets of mental abilities that can be taught and learned if you spend a bit of time on them, or understood how they worked. And then you can have some fun with it, right?

You can do it for show. You can do it for improving your life. You can do it to just be a better person. It’s up to what you what you want to do with it, but we all have access to it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you lay out a few core skills of genius. Can you share those with us?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, so I started the book off, the first half of the book kind of laying this foundation, which, and again, this is largely my opinion, but I think many people might agree that memory is a cornerstone of genius.

I think if you have a good memory, you can do a lot with that to do some genius kinds of abilities. So that’s talked about at the beginning of the book. And in tandem with that, long-term learning, better study tactics. So being able to take your memory and use it for the long-term.

Reading faster. I think if you can read more, that’s how you learn more. That’s how you learn more about the world. So if you can consume more written content, more books, you can increase your knowledge base.

I also talk about focus and attention. So if you can master the ability to hone in on something when it counts and to block out distractions, you, of course, can put more efforts into learning things or outputting more, right?

And then, using those foundational techniques, I go into more nuanced parts of genius. Social genius, like how to interact with others around you. Mental calculations, so being able to calculate with numbers faster. Creativity, problem solving, even in the last chapter, it’s a little woo-woo out there, but intuition.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, that’s a lovely lineup. Well, let’s hear, when it comes to, let’s talk about memory and social at the same time, if I may. How can we do a better job of remembering people’s names and faces?

Because I think that can make a huge impression in terms of like, “Oh, wow, like that person, he remembered my name and he said it to me. He seemed happy to see me.” It’s just like it skyrockets your likability real quick. So give us some hacks for this one.

Nelson Dellis
I mean, Dale Carnegie said that the most interesting person is the most interested person. And I think there’s nothing more than, bigger than, or showing more interest than if you remember somebody’s name. And it’s just a little memory trick, right?

And it’s such a small thing, it’s just this little word, sometimes a longer word, but a word that represents this person, but it’s so powerful and so meaningful. So I treat it as this very special, delicate thing that a person can present to me.

And I want to know this thing. I want to store it in my mind because I know how powerful it could be. And so memory techniques will serve you perfectly for this situation. And, again, tapping into what I mentioned about the numbers, you’re taking some piece of information. It’s not a number this time. It’s this word, this label of a human that’s in front of you, and turning it into a meaningful picture.

And so what that typically means is you hear a name, hopefully, maybe, but sometimes maybe not, it reminds you of something. Maybe a person you know, close to you, or a celebrity, or someone, an athlete, whatever has that same name. You can think of that person. There’s a picture suddenly in your mind for that name now.

Or, maybe if you don’t, maybe if you can take a syllable, the first syllable of the name, or a couple of the syllables, and those individual atoms of the name, maybe come up with a picture, create a picture for you. Like Nelson, maybe you think of Nelson Mandela, okay?

Maybe you don’t, maybe you’ve never heard the name before. So what could you do? Well, Nell, Son, okay, maybe Nell makes you think of like a nail, like a hammering nail. And then Son, sun in the sky.

So both are pictures, right? Either Nelson Mandela, even maybe Nelson from the Simpsons, if you’re a Simpsons fanatic, he’s a character on the show, or you have this image of a nail being driven into the sun. So that’s a representative thing for the name. That’s a little more tangible than this collection of letters that’s somewhat abstract.

The next thing is to find a way to always be able to reliably pull it back when you need it, pull it out of this person when you have to call them that name to remember it. And that’s where this other part of memory is super important, which is how we organize and store information.

There are methods to do this, and we don’t really think about it when we try to remember something. But one of the techniques, and this applies for names, is anchoring it to something that will be helpful to retrieve it.

And for names, it’s the person. The person is who’s going to show up, whether it’s online in the form of a picture or in front of you at a party. They are the one that shows up, and at that point is when you usually have to remember their name, right?

So you can attach it or anchor it to a physical feature. I think that’s the best way to do it because you’re usually looking at the person in the face, so why not choose something that you notice on the person’s face?

So whether it’s a big nose, like a five o’clock shadow, a big forehead. I’m just pointing out my flaws here. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even have to be a flaw. It’s just whatever you notice. Maybe they have pretty eyes or like a little dimple or a little wrinkle, whatever.

And you could come up with a story or some kind of way to attach the image to that feature. The weirder, the better, the crazier, the better, but that’s what makes it memorable, unforgettable.

So if I imagine Nelson Mandela jumping off the edge of my huge nose, the next time you see me and my big nose, you’re going to think, “Oh, there’s Nelson Mandela jumping off his nose. Nelson.” You say this all in your mind though. You don’t say this out loud. You can get into some trouble there.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, talking about getting into trouble, I’m wondering, like if I did choose your five o’clock shadow, and then you showed up clean-shaven, like am I out of luck, like, “Oops”?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, I would lean towards not choosing things that could change but, again, yeah, somebody could get a facelift, too, and then what do do, right? But I honestly think that the technique is really good for in the moment, getting the information in your mind quickly.

And then a big part of being able to remember it, say, the next time is a bit of review. So when you’re learning the person’s name and interacting with this person and talking to them, or you’re perusing around the party, like schmoozing, learning other people’s names.

When you come back or say goodbye to that person, or maybe you look around the room and you see that person, tell yourself, “Okay, this person, that was Nelson, okay,” you review. Like, we need to review things to remember them for the long term.

The technique I just said is very good for getting information in your mind quickly, and it often imprints for quite a while. But if you truly want to remember names for a long time, you have to be super intentional about all of it. You have to review it.

I do a tremendous amount of review for the people I meet. I’m a different story because, as a memory champion, of course, everybody expects me to remember everybody’s name. So there’s a lot more riding on me remembering a name than most people.

But I keep, like, a name journal, so when I meet people after the event or the party or whatnot, the meeting, I always keep track of the mnemonics, and the names, and the people and the context of those people, and I review that from time to time.

And some of those people in that book, I will never see again. They’re just filling up pages in my name book for no reason. But in the off chance I bump into one of those people, and I can say their name months later, years later, it’s so powerful, right?

They’ll think like, “Wow, that person remembered me? Whoa, I must have made an impression,” or, “What an interesting person. Wow! It shows a lot that he thought about me,” and who knows what they’ll think, but it’s usually a good thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Well, now can you give us a hack for just learning better, in general. Like, I’m trying to pick up a skill, whatever that might be. It’s coding. It’s AI. It’s copywriting. I’m trying to figure out some new stuff.

Nelson Dellis
So now you’re getting into the process of learning, right? And so to learn, obviously you got to have techniques to remember things quicker. That helps. The review part is so much more important because, if you truly want to know something to your core, it needs to be almost automatic, right?

So there’s this idea of two kinds of memory. There’s declarative memory, where you can pull things out, think about it, and then declare it. Kind of like remembering somebody’s name. And then there’s procedural, which is another fancy way of saying muscle memory.

So let’s take the example of remembering somebody’s name. This is a good example. When I’m learning somebody’s name for the first time, I’m using this technique, right, to store their name. And then, when I see them, I’m going to have this effort to kind of collect it, to declare it.

But there’s a point where, let’s say, you know, you just started this job, you started working with this one person, you learned their name using a technique, and you use it every day, and they become close to you, you become friends. You’ve worked together for five years.

In five years, let’s say you are very close to this person, you know this person’s name, you don’t have to declare it anymore. They are Bob instantly. Like, it’s part of you. You don’t even have to think about it. Like, think about your siblings and your mother, like you know their name. You don’t have to pull it out of your brain. It’s just there, right?

That’s procedural. It’s something that’s rehearsed so much that you just know it, right? So the goal is, with long-term learning, whether you’re learning a language or some programming language, you want to get it to a point where you don’t have to sit there and get it out of your brain.

But there will be a point at the beginning where that has to happen. That’s just how our brains work, unfortunately. So the question is, “How do we hack getting things from our declarative, which is always the first step, into a procedural process, into muscle memory?”

And, unfortunately, while declarative has tons of little hacks, all these little memory techniques, and that’s what all of chapter one is about, the procedural isn’t as easy to hack. The best strategies we have are active recall. So actively trying to access the information in our mind.

So by closing your eyes, and you don’t have to close your eyes, but just to prove the point further, you know, when you’re trying to get the information out, the more you access it, the more you kind of fire those neurons, those connections, the better it’ll become automatic.

And that shouldn’t be a surprise to many people, right? The more you do something mentally, the more automatic it becomes. You strengthen those neural pathways and then it becomes more automatic.

But a lot of us, when we study, we think about it wrong, right? We think we have our notes in front of us and we just look at it again and again and again. And you feel like you have this sense of familiarity with the information. You’re like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got it.”

You’re going even through it and you’re maybe even ahead of where you’re reading saying, “Yes,” and saying it before you read it. But that’s not active recall because you have the information in front of you. It’s not true declarative, right?

So if you can put that information away and struggle to get it out, which it always is a bit of a challenge, but that’s where the magic happens, right? When you do that active recall, go through that process of the nitty-gritty of pulling it out, that’s where you are building these neural pathways, strengthening these neural pathways to procedural.

Space repetition, so there’s plenty of studies around this where, if you are doing everything, studying for something all in one session, well, yes, you could use memory techniques and it might work for the short term. In the long term, you will forget more of it.

Our brain likes to work on things for a little bit, take a break, and then come back, because I guess there’s that, in that moment when you come back to it, you do have to kind of struggle with it to get it back to where it was. And I think that repetitiveness of, or that repeated action of going back to it, almost starting a bit more from scratch is where you strengthen those neural pathways again.

And then the last tip on that is something called interleaving. So if you can, in a study session, let’s say, interleave, in a similar set of what you’re studying, different kinds of things.

So let’s say if you’re studying for a language, and you do a lot of problems or questions or quizzes or testing yourself on verb conjugations, and then maybe you just do straight up vocabulary training, and then maybe, I don’t know, you study basic phrases or something like that.

They’re all different, right, but they all have to do with you learning language. But if you can go in between and kind of alternate, maybe every 15, 20 minutes, that is proved to be better than just studying for one big chunk of time, say, verbs, right?

So we found that if we switch up the task, but keeping it in the same domain, actually we learn better. And I think it’s a similar principle to space repetition. But, yeah, it’s a tedious process to learn. But if you understand how to hack the brain in that sense, you can learn more efficiently and faster.

Pete Mockaitis
And what’s interesting with active recall, in some ways, you need a little bit of a prompt in terms of like, “What is that thing I’m retrieving?” And so, I suppose there’s many ways you can do this. Like, people use flashcards, or I guess now with AI, you can just say, “Hey, this is what I’m trying to learn. Ask me questions now, one at a time. Go.” And so then you’re practicing the active retrieval.

But I’m hearing you that the key point there is I’m not looking at the thing. I am hiding, I’m covering up the thing, and I am depending on my ability to pull it out from the depths of my memory.

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, that’s better for learning, and there’s different ways to do it. As you mentioned AI, you know, it’s proven to be, or increasingly been proven to be detrimental to our memories because we’re doing a lot of cognitive tasks, using the tool rather than ourselves.

But, I think, as a sparring partner, as a coach, or a quizzer, I think it could be super powerful because it can give you all sorts of ways to do that active recall. Another great method, I don’t know if it was invented by him, but it’s been coined as named by him, it’s the Feynman method.

So Richard Feynman was a legendary physicist who was really well-known for being able to explain things, complicated things, in physics really well. And the technique is, basically, when you’re learning something, try to explain it to somebody else in the most basic way possible.

And as you explain it, you’ll quickly find out what you truly know and don’t, and it’s a way of kind of refining the weaknesses and strengths of what you’ve studied. And, again, it’s active recall in disguise.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. Well, now let’s hear about focus in terms of just being able to hunker down and do stuff.

Nelson Dellis
Well, in this day and age, it’s extremely difficult to focus, and so I feel like a big part of finding how to pay attention to something is figuring out what are the points of distraction for you, and being ruthless in kind of eliminating them preemptively.

Thinking about there’s, like, this planner in your mind that says, “Okay, in the future, Nelson needs to focus on this. So I’m going to make sure that, when he’s working, the distractions are at bay.”

And there’s plenty of tips on how to do this. It depends on what is the source of your distraction, but, oftentimes, it’s the internet or your phone or some device. So blocking that in some case, maybe going analog during a session, putting your phone out of sight while you work on a task.

The goal with paying attention, you want to have this deep work at your disposal. And oftentimes, we’re really doing what’s called shallow work, where we’re like low value, low focus tasks that don’t really push you forward, like you’re checking your email, you’re responding to messages. You’re not doing the deep work that you need to do, the deep focus.

And it often comes to your environment. Like, put yourself in a place isolated and work on this problem or thing that you need to get done, and you’ll have tremendous focus on that thing.

Another thing is we get tired, especially nowadays, where we’re so used to being stimulated all the time. It’s not our faults. Devices around us are designed to distract us as their main purpose.

And so, if you can put these things at bay, but also train your mind to work for longer and longer periods of time without being interrupted or needing to kind of satisfy yourself with dopamine hits somehow, so there’s this idea called a Pomodoro technique, where you can set a timer, preferably an analog timer so you don’t have your phone near you, but for 20, 25 minutes.

And the idea is that you work intensely for 20, 25 minutes, and that’s doable, right? If you can say that to yourself, “I’m just going to work hard, focus on this one thing, nothing else for 20 minutes,” and then you get a five minute break to do something mindless.

And then you dive in back again. Do another Pomodoro session for maybe 20, 25 minutes again. And you can stack these, and then every maybe three or four, you can take a longer break.

And it turns out it’s a lot easier to get work done. And, oftentimes, you maybe get started with 20 minutes, and you end up working for an hour because you just needed to get started.

So, oftentimes, the focus thing is a trained ability. And the more you work on it and the more you set yourself up to have success without getting distracted, the longer you’ll find that you can focus on things more intently. And when you can do that, you can get more work done, you can have better memory, read more, all those things.

Pete Mockaitis
Now I’ve heard with this, it’s cool, we can practice, we can get better and better. I’ve heard that the quote, “human limits”, given ultradian rhythms, is something like 90 minutes. Like, you probably need a break by then.

Although, occasionally, I don’t know, every once in a while, I get uber fascinated by something and it goes way longer. So what’s your take on this one?

Nelson Dellis
I agree. I mean, I think we all will get burned out at some point. And so I think, over time, I think prepping for that eventual mental deterioration in the session by breaking it up, it’s like in a workout, you have a lot of reps to do. It’s tempting to just get them all out of the way, but you might crash pretty quick versus breaking them up early into sets of 10.

Something that seems too easy, but you could do 10 at a time, and you could almost never stop, right? So I think the same kind of idea applies mentally that, even though it seems like, “Oh, I’m going to get an hour and a half of studying in,” it might be better to break that up into multiple shorter sessions so that you can actually be productive, fully productive, really not mentally fatigued for longer, and make more progress that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And this speed reading, how much of that is a real thing?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, I’m careful about that term, and even though I call the chapter’s title “Speed reading,” I quickly changed it to “Focus reading” because I am aware of some of the associations or the connotations with speed reading.

There’s a lot of history in scam-y programs and bogus claims of people being able to speed read thousands of words per minute. The average person is somewhere between 300, 400 words per minute.

And so what my chapter is truly about is learning how to optimize or make your reading more efficient, and having the skills to be able to turn up the dial of your speed and to turn it down, right, because not everything needs to be speed read or read fast.

There are going to be things you just need to drink right and chug, versus like a fine wine where you’d rather smell it, take a sip, enjoy it, maybe even go back and have another glass, you know?

So I think reading is really up to what the person is trying to get out of it, and being able to kind of work with how they know their mind works and how to read better, and remember what you read better using some basic strategies.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what are the strategies?

Nelson Dellis
Well, there’s a big part of, again, paying attention, so putting yourself in the right frame of mind to read, having an intention to read. A lot of people want to read a lot of things, but they just pile up books.

So being more intentional about getting through the books you’d like to actually read, which means making time for it. There are so many things that we spend time on that do not advance us in our books.

And if you can just make it more of a thing that you purposefully do every day, whether that means you have to carry a book around with you all the time, I always do that, or you have always got a book by your bedside or on your desk, and you take five minutes here, even just to get like a little chapter out of the way.

You’re always reading in some form. It’s like what you do. Just like maybe you’ve made working out an exercise just as important in your life. Reading should be as well. And I think there are so many benefits to reading. So it’s hard to tell me that maybe that’s not a good thing to read so much.

There are some other more physical, tangible techniques. For example, if you want to increase your reading speed, some suggestions in the book are, if you use some kind of pointer, I know it sounds very infantile, but what happens to most readers is, if they don’t have some kind of guide, they’re often subject to their eyes bouncing around the page or backtracking a lot.

So if you can have some pointer, whether it’s your finger, a pencil, a spaghetti noodle, I don’t know.

Pete Mockaitis
Uncooked, yeah.

Nelson Dellis
An uncooked spaghetti noodle, to guide your eyes across, you’ll find that you backtrack way less, if at all, and you can make more progress through the pages, the chapters that you’re trying to go for.

Another thing to keep in mind is that, when we read, we don’t read every single thing. Our eyes are constantly jumping in what’s called saccades. And if you look at somebody, for example, if you look at someone on a train looking outside of the train, you’ll see their eyes are like jumping, jumping, jumping, jumping.

That’s because it’s kind of trying to track the moving landscape. And even though the person looking out the window doesn’t feel like their eyes are like jumping like that, that’s just naturally what our eyes do. And we do it when we read as well.

And so what you can do, since we don’t need to read all the words, we’re actually skipping around a lot because we can cluster words, we can actually see things in our peripheral as well, and oftentimes we can piece together clumps of words, like just by context, right?

We know what’s going to come next, so do we actually need to read the word? Sometimes we aren’t, even though we feel like we have to. So what you can do is play around with this. I like to draw some, with pencil, some margins inside. Maybe, like, you can start kind of shallow, so maybe a half inch or an inch on each side of the page.

And then as you’re guiding yourself, you just stay between those lines and you realize that, “Oh, shoot, I’m not reading the outskirts of each line of the page. Like, I’m maybe missing hundreds of words per page if I do that,” but you still can remember and read what is on the page partly because peripheral is picking up on that, but also again, context, you can figure it out.

And so if you can even narrow that further, you find you’re just, like, reading a very central narrow part of the page, you can still read the page. It’s really fascinating and fun to play around with.

And this is just to train you, right? Like I’m not saying go through all hundreds of pages of your books and put margins. But if you can train a little bit, this purposeful practice, again makes you better, this training, you can get better at doing that kind of automatically without having to guide with your finger all the time and write these margins in there.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Nelson, tell me, what are some of the top hacks that absolutely most professionals could benefit tremendously from adopting that we haven’t already covered?

Nelson Dellis
I’m a big fan of the chapter on intuition. I know it’s a less of a thing that you can kind of hold and, like, purposefully grasp in your mind the results. But I think there’s some kind of intangible thing to it where people can recognize that it’s doing something for them or not.

And so that whole chapter is about tapping into kind of, like, this gut feeling and how to listen to it better and to hone it better for things that don’t necessarily seem like they’re in your vicinity to make decisions on or perceive.

And I know that sounds a bit out there, but there are techniques out there to hone that. And I don’t want to get too deep into it because it gets a bit weird, but I think the short of it is to listen to your intuition more.

Not that it’s always correct, but if you do listen to it more and open up to it, you’ll find that it often has something important to say, whether it’s about a deal you’re about to say yes to, or some turning point in your life, or the people that you hang out with.

I think if you listen to them, you get those bouts of intuition. I think you get more information about the world, and then you can have more at your disposal, right, more information. I think about what’s happening around you can only be better.

So I’m really happy about that chapter in the book. And I encourage people to kind of explore that a little more.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I think that there’s a lot to that in terms of intuition. I don’t know the neuroscience, but I think I’ve heard, or at least my hot take is that our advanced brain nervous system has just oodles of associations all over the place from all of our experiences. And sometimes it’s not yet conscious.

Like, I could not articulate why I’ve got a weird feeling or a bad feeling about this contract or this deal. And yet, there’s something to it. And I like what you said. It’s not necessarily correct, like, “Oh, absolutely, trust your guide every time. It’ll never lead you straight.” I don’t think that’s true.

But it is surfacing information, and I think it’s funny. It’s almost like, well, I’m thinking about, we had Joe Navarro, the FBI agent who does body language stuff. And I think he said it well, in terms of like, you can’t like prosecute someone based on, like, a body language situation, like, “Judge, jury, there you have it, you know? He crossed his legs at the wrong time. He’s guilty of sin.”

But what you can do is say, “Hmm, this thing right here seems worthy of additional investigation, additional resources. Let’s go search the apartment of his mom. Oh, and what do you know? We found the key item there because we listened to those clues from from the body language.”

And, likewise, I think that when you listen to your intuition, and say, “Hmm, something about this deal feels off. I’m just going to run it by a lawyer.” And the lawyer says, “Oh, my gosh, this is a terrible deal. Look at all the things you have to do, and almost nothing that they have to do. Do not sign.” It’s is like, “Oh, okay, well, it was good move that I checked my intuition.”

Or you might talk to multiple trusted advisors, and said, “Ah, yes, it could feel sketchy. But, in fact, that is just how this whole industry operates, so you got to choose. Are you down with that or are you not?”

And then I think it really can be a valuable tool or indicator to point you into where we’re going to dig deeper.

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, and I think, more than anything, our brains are very logical and rational, and we tend to always think with that, and I think that’s great. I mean, we should be logical about the real world and information around us.

But our brain isn’t always, like, what we think logically. It’s not always getting it correct, you know? There are many things that can alter what we think is correct, and the brain is not quite getting it correct.

So I think this mix of having a well-founded logic in life, but also using intuition when it needs to and listening to it more often, again, not necessarily to make the decisions, but to maybe factor in as part of your decision-making can really make a difference in how you navigate your life or your job, how to be awesome at your job.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. Well, anything else you want to share before we hear about your favorite things?

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, no, I’m so happy with this book. I always talk about memory, and over the years, I’ve just been always fascinated by the brain, clearly. And I’ve kept little notebooks of all these cool tricks, mental tricks that I’ve been taught or stumbled upon because of my memory explorations, and it’s all in this book.

And I’m so over the moon about this book. And I think it’ll help a lot of people. And it can be fun, it can be serious. You can use it in so many different ways. And so I hope people go and check it out.

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

Nelson Dellis
This is always changing, but this one has always stuck with me, and it’s by Albert Einstein, who I talk about a lot in the book. and it’s that, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

And I’ve always loved that because, especially coming from him, you know, you’d think like of Einstein, he just knows so much. That’s how he figured everything out, but he actually figured everything out his staple discoveries from just imagination exercises.

And oftentimes, silly ones that, like, broke the boundary of what you’re supposed to think about, I guess, for some physics examples. And that’s how innovation came about for him. And I think that’s, in general, how innovation comes out is by bending the rules, which can only happen in your imagination.

And so I think if you think that way, that it’s more valuable to have these imagination, visualization skills, which you can train and practice, it’s often more important than what you know.

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

Nelson Dellis
Yeah, I’m a bit biased, but I was a part of a study at Washington University in St. Louis, where they were, you know, there’s been memory studies forever, and people have been subject to fMRI scans to look inside the brain, but they’re largely uncomfortable machines to sit in for very long.

So, typically, studies in the past have taken a lot of large quantity of people in the machine for very short periods of time, and kind of taking averages. They’ve never really done in-depth long hours in the machine study.

So they took me, how many hours did I do? It must’ve been at least 15 to 20, maybe more. And then they have maybe 10 controls, who also volunteered. I don’t know who these people were. They must’ve been incentivized, somehow.

But anyways, the results are finally, they were published this year, and they’re trying to get it published in some well-known journals. But, ultimately, what came out of it, there’s a few things that came out of it, but one of the most striking or kind of, I don’t know, controversial, but against what most people might’ve thought is that the hippocampus for most people is where the magic happens with memory.

There’s a lot of activity when somebody is using their memory. And for a lot of the tasks they had me do in the machine, it showed a very different structure, that I’m actually not using, well, I am using my hippocampus, but I’m using more of my brain, that the pathways and the parts of my brain that I’m using when I’m memorizing is completely different than the normal person.

And this is trained, right? So the ultimate finding of the paper is that memory training literally rewires your brain. And that’s always been said, you know, anecdotally, but now there’s proof.

This is literal proof that anybody can change the way their brain works. And also that memory doesn’t fully work the way we think it does because how can Nelson here be memorizing all these sorts of crazy things, and it’s not through the conventional systems that we see when people use their memory.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Nelson Dellis
I’d have to say Godel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Nelson Dellis
My brain, seriously. You know, it might be easy to say, like, “Oh, I have this app for this, and then I use tech or AI for this.” But, honestly, my favorite tool is my brain, and I really try to use it whenever I can, even though there might be an easier way, more efficient way. I don’t want to lose the ability to use my brain and to think.

And I feel more terrified than ever in modern day, just because I feel like we’re losing the ability to think. We’re outsourcing it so much that I don’t know what our future looks like, honestly. So I’m loving my tool in my head that I’m purposefully using to keep it strong and to fight the trend.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Nelson Dellis
My favorite habit is just always working out early in the morning. The first thing I get out of bed, and I do some intense exercise, that, to me, I don’t even, I mean, yeah, it’s just what I’ve programmed myself to do. And if I don’t get that done, my day just is shot. When I get my workout in early, it’s just sets the tone for productivity throughout the day.

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

Nelson Dellis
Yeah. I mean, I think it’s using your memory, being intentional about memory, and understanding that the memory is something that can be worked on. If you say to yourself that, “I don’t have a good memory. I forget names. I’m just that person who is forgetful,” yeah, sure, you’re going to be that person.

You get to decide what your memory is. And I find that’s the most profound thing people get out of my talks or my content is that the brain is malleable, and that nobody has a bad memory. They just have untrained memories. And that’s usually the nugget that changes a lot of their perception on what their brain is capable of.

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

Nelson Dellis
Best is just to go to my website, NelsonDellis.com. You can find everything about me there, my books, my coaching, memory coaching, my YouTube channel. A lot of content out there teaching how to do this stuff, and, yeah, exploring my books. But NelsonDellis.com, you’ll find it all.

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

Nelson Dellis
Yes, use your brain more. I know it can be challenging right now, and oftentimes, you use it and you’re maybe let down, but it’s, again, it’s plastic. It can be molded. It can be trained. So the more you use it, the stronger it gets. So give it a shot. You won’t regret it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Nelson, thank you.

Nelson Dellis
Thank you so much.