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.

Jun 21
0

454: Embracing Conflict as a Gift with Judy Ringer

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Judy Ringer says: "When we can enter a conversation and think 'What can I learn here?' everything changes. It all works out."

Judy Ringer explains how the techniques and principles of aikido can turn workplace conflicts into valuable experiences.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to master yourself during conflicts
  2. Three effective mindsets for resolving conflicts
  3. How to skillfully inquire, acknowledge, and advocate

About Judy 

Through interactive presentations and individual coaching, Judy Ringer helps you transform conflict by changing your relationship to it. Aikido is the metaphor she uses to become more intentional and less reactive, to communicate directly and respectfully, and to create your life and work on purpose.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Judy Ringer Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Judy, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Judy Ringer
Pete, it’s a delight already. Thank you very much for inviting me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, shucks. Well, I’m so glad that everything worked out and we’re making it happen. I want to hear about something you made happen, which was singing the national anthem at a Red Sox game. How did this come about?

Judy Ringer
Yeah. Well, it’s something I love to talk about, so thank you. I had this dream for a very long time to sing the national anthem at a Red Sox game. I’m a Red Sox fan. I live in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which is about an hour north of Boston. We go to the games now and then when we can.

I love to sing. I’m a professional singer in my spare time. I love to sing the national anthem. I just thought, “Wouldn’t it just be cool.” Just one of those crazy dreams you have, so I set about achieving it. I wrote – I went to their website. I wrote them. I found out what you have to do and how many probably thousands of people ask every year to sing for a Red Sox game at Fenway Park.

I sent them – I made a professional CD. I sent them a CD, just like they ask for, of me singing the anthem and also God Bless America. I followed up. I even sent them a couple of videos of me singing at other games that I’ve sung at more locally. Nothing happened. But every year, so I went about this for maybe three – four years and every year I’d just follow up and I found out who I needed to talk to.

Finally, what really made it happen was Dave O’Brien, who’s the announcer for the Red Sox, came to one of our Rotary meetings. I’m a Rotarian here in Portsmouth. After he spoke – and he was just a great speaker, as you might imagine – I went up to him and I said, “You know, Dave, I’ve been trying for years to get noticed by the Red Sox team. I’d love to sing the national anthem.”

I said, “I actually can sing. I would do a good job. I’ve sent them videos and audios of myself.” He said, “Well, I don’t have much control over that, but if you’ll send me an email, here’s my address, I’ll just send it along and see what happens.” That’s exactly what he did. He passed it along.

Somebody got in touch with me and there happened to be a New Hampshire day coming up at Fenway Park in July of 2017. This was in May I think that I got contacted by them. So it happened. It was an amazing event. I got there. I got to be underground with all the team. I got to walk out on Fenway Park. I got to sing for I think it was about 40,000 people that night. It was awesome. It was awesome. I practiced all my skills. Everything I talk about in the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s so cool and so interesting to me when there is a process and then it doesn’t matter. It’s like actually there’s a guy who knows a guy.

Judy Ringer
I know.

Pete Mockaitis
As opposed to, “Yes, please follow step A, B, C, D, E, F, G,” and it doesn’t – yeah.

Judy Ringer
I know. And yet I have to say that maybe the fact that they had my audio and my video, they could go to it. They could see that I was really – that I wouldn’t mess up or embarrass anyone and that all of that adds up. Maybe if I hadn’t also done all of that, I wouldn’t have had the courage to go and talk to Dave.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh certainly, right, because it does feel a little bit more audacious like, “So Dave, I like to sing. Hook me up.”

Judy Ringer
Exactly, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. I want to hear about your book Turn Enemies Into Allies and your martial arts work. Could you sort of just tell us the whole story here? What’s the big idea that you’re presenting?

Judy Ringer
That’s a great question too. Well, the big idea is that I have a model that I use when I go into organizations and help people resolve conflict. The model is based on aikido and some of its techniques and principles, like blending and redirecting of energy, for example.

I also have – part of the model is that I work with the people in conflict – usually there are two of them – and they need to be able to work together and they can’t. I work with each person individually first and then I bring them together. As I got used to doing this model and doing it many times in organizations, I would notice that I’m not doing anything that the manager couldn’t do themselves.

I decided to write the model down in a series of blog posts. This was about five years ago that I first started writing about it. Then I began expanding them and they became Turn Enemies Into Allies, the book.

The major point here is that you can do what I’m doing if you’re a manager, a leader of an organization with some skills that I describe in the book and some attitudes that I describe in the book like non-judgment, like curiosity, like appreciating where people are coming from, the ability to listen, the ability to reframe the conflict as a gift of energy that people might be able to use to actually build their relationship and become leaders themselves and apply the skills not only at work, but in life too.

That’s what I decided to write about in the book. The big idea is you can do this. You can do it fairly easily actually if you get over the idea that conflict is negative, that it’s a bad thing, and adopt the attitude and begin to practice it that conflict can be a gift if we decide that it is to get to know each other better and to learn how to solve a problem rather than needing to create a contest over it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, there’s so much there to dig into. Let’s see. Let’s start with that conflict can be a gift.

Judy Ringer
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell us, what’s great about it?

Judy Ringer
What’s great about it? Yeah. Okay, well, the premise – the book starts with the premise that if we can’t manage ourselves, we can’t manage anybody else. The first gift in conflict is that it causes me to look at myself and ask myself “Why is this getting to me?” or “Why is this person, this situation? Is it something that I have any control over and if it is, where is my power and how can I find it? Maybe I’m not expressing myself. Maybe I’ve been avoiding the conflict. How can I decide to take a more active role in the conflict?”

The gift might be first of all I have to manage myself. I have to manage my own emotional mindset. I have to center myself, as I describe in the book, and bring a centered presence into the conflict, so there’s a gift right there, learning to center myself, learning to be mindful about how I decide to be more intentional in the conflict instead of reactive to it. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, certainly, yeah.

Judy Ringer
That’s the first gift. The second gift, let’s say it’s a conflict that involves an issue at work that we’re trying to solve. The gift is how do we solve this in a way that’s sustainable and that meets the interests of all the parties involved. If it’s a team, how do I get the voices of all of my team members involved in solving it? If it’s just one-on-one, same thing, how do I find out what’s important to each of the parties in the conflict and then help them express those needs and help them find a solution that meets the needs.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. Those sound like some good things. So tell us then when it comes to aikido – well, first, could you share what that is for those who are not familiar and then what are its parallels to this process?

Judy Ringer
Right. That’s where this idea for me anyway came from. Aikido is a martial art, first and foremost. It was developed in the 20th century, so it’s a pretty recent evolution of the martial arts. It was developed by a man named Morihei Ueshiba, a Japanese man, who’s now dead, but only died in 1969.

His idea was that you could subtly transform other martial arts through aikido into a martial art that didn’t harm people. The goal is to render the attack harmless without harming the attacker. You do this by first getting out of the way of the attack and moving in to join with this energy and then redirect it.

Let’s say somebody’s coming at me with a punch. Instead of blocking and punching back, I get out of the way really fast. I join the energy by let’s say, grabbing onto the arm that’s punching me, and then I redirect it into a pin or a fall. I’m not trying to harm the opponent. I’m just trying to control and deescalate the conflict.

With that comes a metaphor. In fact, Ueshiba, the founder of aikido, had a philosophy that went along with the development of the art. He said that this is about turning our adversaries into allies. This is about not protecting ourselves from the enemy outside of ourselves, but from the enemy within, that if we could vanquish the source of the conflict within ourselves, then we would have no difficulty with those outside ourselves.

We call it blending and redirecting. We think about the attack as a gift of energy that I can use to redirect and keep the opponent safe while also keeping myself safe on the mat. Off the mat, we’re practicing aikido anytime we listen with an intention to learn with curiosity. That’s the same thing as blending and redirecting.

When I ask question – when you come at me, let’s say, with a – and say, “Judy, that’s a stupid idea,” instead of saying, “No, it isn’t. It’s a great idea” so that would be like blocking and resisting, instead I say, “Well, Pete, why do you think so? What specifically don’t you like?” or “Tell me more.”

That’s me blending, getting off the line. I’m not getting hurt and by asking a question and being curious, I find out more about what’s upsetting you about my idea. Maybe it’s that you just can’t afford the idea. Maybe you like the idea, but the budget doesn’t allow for it. We have a new way to open up the conflict and talk about it. Does that make sense too?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh certainly, yes. Well, so now I’m curious. That particular example, talk about self-management, I think there’s a challenge right there. It’s like if someone says that to you, the knee-jerk reaction is anger, defensiveness, frustration. What do you do right there in that moment, where you’re like, “This jerk. I want to yell at him.”

Judy Ringer
Yeah. I’ve got to say that I still practice this. It’s not – just because I’ve been teaching it for 25 years doesn’t mean I don’t have conflict in my life. Your question goes right to the point, what do I do, what does one do. It helps if you practice, just like anything else. You don’t pick up a flute and learn how to play it in an instant. You have to practice it.

You practice noticing first of all. That’s the first thing. If I don’t notice I’m getting reactive, that I’m starting to react and say, “What do you mean? What a jerk you are,” if I don’t notice that, I can’t stop it. That’s the first thing.

Then you stop and you center yourself. You take a breath. You just don’t say anything. You bite your tongue. You count to ten. You do any of the things that we’ve heard about over the years to center yourself.

I have specific ways. When I ask my groups, “What do you do to center yourself?” everyone says, “I breathe.” Sometimes people say, “Well, I think about a bigger perspective,” but you can tell in that that they stop themselves from reacting and decide what they need to do next.

The amygdala, the brain stem has some very strong reactive patterns programmed into it. The prefrontal cortex is what we use to think with. To make that journey from the back of the brain to the front of the brain maybe takes a half a second, maybe not even that long, if we notice and we take that breath. That’s the first step, center myself. Now I can make a more intentional choice about what I do next.

It may be – if I’m being really reactive, it may just be I say something like, “Let me think about what you just said. Can we talk in about five minutes?” so I give myself more time to be centered and be less reactive.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly, yeah. I like that. Well, so then you talk about the breath, is there any special way to breathe or what do we think about the breath?

Judy Ringer
Well, it’s basically to breathe. Most of the time, if the audience listening thinks about the last time they were involved in a conflict or something happened to them, surprising, caused them to react, chances are they weren’t breathing. They just held their breath. It often happens.

The more we can just notice that and begin to breathe again – it doesn’t have to be a huge breath. It doesn’t even have to be terribly deep. Just to start breathing again and to focus on the breath is enough. I’m doing that now because I’m a little nervous. I mean here we are a podcast. I want to say it right. I want to do everything right so that induces a sense of stress and anxiety.

It can, so every once in a while I just stop, notice that I’m breathing, and I’m standing both feet on the ground and everything is going to be okay. If I just say that mantra to myself, everything will be okay, pretty much.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so it is okay.

Judy Ringer
Let me give you a couple of other suggestions on this because I know people love to hear ideas. Okay, what can I do in the moment? That’s the question. First, you notice. Then you have a practice. If you have a practice, like I know your last speaker, the one I just listened to this morning, was talking about mindfulness.

If you have a mindfulness practice, if you meditate daily, you’re already getting into the mood of centering so that if something happens later in the day, you’ve got a sense of what it feels like to be centered from your early morning practice so you can go back to it fairly quickly. You can create rituals for yourself.

I have a client who one day she had a really tough meeting with her staff – all of her staff meeting – and she was nervous about it. I said “What are you going to do to center yourself first?” We were doing coaching. She said, “Well, I’m going to maybe look at some of the pictures on the wall.” She said, “I’m not sure what I’m going to do.”

I said, “Well,” and there was a pen on the table and I threw the pen out on the table and I said, “You could just look at this pen. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy or special. Just look at the pen once in a while.”

The meeting went really well as you might imagine. She did a great job. At the end I said, “How did you do?” She said, “I looked at that pen a lot.” Every time she looked at it she just kind of took a breath, and she recentered herself and she got physically and mentally and emotionally more stable, more balanced, more calm, and more ready for whatever might come next.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, cool. There we have it in terms of you start to notice yourself in situations all the time and then you stop and center with a breath and planting the feet on the floor, etcetera, so you’re in a good spot there. Let’s talk a little bit about some of these perspectives in terms of non-judgment, and curiosity, and appreciation. Can you share a bit about these mindsets like, what does it mean to really approach things in such a way.

Judy Ringer
Right. These mindsets are the mindsets that I recommend in the book that the manager follow when they’re listening to one of their employees. Let’s say they decide to engage in this intervention in the book that allows them to hear each person’s story first before they bring them together. What this does is that it allows the employee to tell their story in a way that they feel heard. Non-judgment is just that.

It’s impossible, of course, because we’re always making judgments, but once again, we notice we are. Maybe we favor this particular employee because they’re a high producer and we really wish the other employee would change. When we listen to each one, we try to listen without making any judgments ahead of time and just deciding to listen to the story as if it were the first time we’re hearing it.

Appreciation steps in when we think about how to appreciate the more positive intention of each of the parties. Again, I’m meeting with them separately. I’m hearing, even though they’re making mistakes and they’re going about things reactively, that they each probably have a positive intention in there somewhere.

An example might be that one of your employees tends to avoid conflict and so they haven’t said anything to the other person about what’s bothering them. The form that this takes is that they just ignore emails or they ignore requests for information because they’re afraid that they might be reactive and say the wrong thing.

If you can appreciate that the person’s afraid of conflict, that most people are afraid of conflict and the positive intention is not to make things worse, it helps to approach the coaching from this point of view as opposed to deciding that the person just has no skills and can’t do anything and nothing’s ever going to work.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Judy Ringer
Approaching it with an appreciative mindset helps everything. Another way that appreciation works is well, for example, on the aikido mat, we always find that usually one side of the body gets the technique faster than the other side.

For example, in learning how to fall, we have to learn how to roll. On one side of the body, I know how to roll really well and I don’t get hurt. The other side of the body, I crunch my shoulder every time. Instead of focusing on the side that gets hurt, I do it a lot of times on the side that works so that I can figure out what I’m doing and apply it to the side that doesn’t work.

In the workplace, this happens when we see, “Well, where are you and Jane getting – where are areas where you work well together?” in an example that I give in the book. It was with a medical practice and the team was not getting along at all.

I said, “Well, there must be some areas where you are able to work together or you wouldn’t keep working together.” They said, “Yeah, well, when we understand our roles and our goals, everything goes really smoothly.” I said, “Okay, so let’s appreciate that. Let’s figure out how we can apply that to the places in your practice where you don’t have clear roles and goals.”

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Judy Ringer
Appreciation, non-judgment, curiosity, one of the major tools that helps in conflict of any kind, whether it’s with employees or with people at home. These skills apply everywhere. How can I – well, I’ll give you an example of this.

One of the clients I was working with was quite upset with her colleague because she copied everyone on every single email. I said, “Well, what question would you like to ask your colleague?” She said, “Well, I’d like to ask why she copies everybody on every single email.” I said, “Okay, well, it’s a great question. Can you ask it in a more curious way?”

She said, “Okay,” and she worked on it. She practiced. She got to the point where she said it in a way that probably her colleague could hear it really well. I said, “Okay, so what do you have to do to be able to say it that way because it’s not just what you say; it’s how you say it.” She said, “Well, I’d actually have to be curious.” We laughed about it. It was kind of an aha moment.

The point is if you’re in conflict now, how are you approaching what you say. Even if you’re asking a question, are you really curious about it or are you just stating the question in a way that’s kind of attacking. There’s a big difference.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so then when you said ask it in a curious way, you didn’t so much mean choose different words like, “Why are you doing this?” but rather the sort of tone and vibe you’re putting out there when you ask that question.

Judy Ringer
Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly what I mean.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Judy Ringer
One of my favorite sayings and this comes from one of my mentors, Thomas Crum, that your quality of being is primary. Everything else is secondary.

If I come into a conflict conversation with you and I have a purpose to resolve a conflict, to learn what I can about how you see things, if I come into the conversation thinking, “Well, whatever’s going to happen, I’m going to learn something and I know it’s going to be better after this,” that’s my quality of being, my mindset, my emotional state. If I walk into that same conversation thinking, “This is going to be awful. I wish I didn’t have to do this,” there’s going to be quite a different outcome.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Okay, that’s handy. I’m curious when it comes to the actual listening, in terms of the bit of the mindset we discussed when you’re listening, but is there any – are there key questions you recommend asking during the course of the listening?

Judy Ringer
Yes, I can. I can recommend some generic questions that will get things started. Then what real listening does is that it continues to ask questions. It doesn’t just stop. It really – a good listener really listens for what’s being said and also what’s maybe not being said. They listen for ways like you’re doing today, Pete, for ways to go deeper into the conversation.

A generic question might be, “Can you tell me how this started?” if a manager, for example, is talking to an employee about a conflict. “Can you tell me how this started? What’s your view about how the resolution would work? If it could be resolved, what would be ideal?” Another question, just a generic question would be, “Can you tell me more about what you’re thinking?”

“I’d like to talk to you about what’s happening between us. I’d like to hear our point of view and I’d like to tell you mine. Would you like to start? Tell me what’s going on? How do I affect you in ways that are not helpful?” Now, you have to be willing to hear the answer, but that’s a great question to just ask someone to tell them how you could be more helpful, for example.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Okay, that’s cool. I suppose that these all sort of flow from that curiosity and they feel nonthreatening as result as I listen to you say them. Maybe to sort of make it all come alive and together, could you maybe walk us through an example of a conflict? You had Person A and Person B that you spoke with individually and then you brought them together and how did it all come together?

Judy Ringer
Well, one of the best things that happened in what I’m thinking of right now is that at the beginning I usually ask people on a scale of one to ten – and we’re in individual sessions now – “On a scale of one to ten, how important is it that you and Sally be able to work together,” for example. Let’s call the other person Lauren. Lauren says, “Well, it’s ten. We have to be able to work together.”

I said, “How likely do you think it is that the conflict’s going to get resolved that we’re working on together?” “Zero.” I said, “Okay. Let’s take a look at how willing are you to put yourself into this fully,” and they’ll say maybe “I’m a ten. I’m willing to do this. I just don’t think there’s any possibility.”

One of the ones that I worked on with a large insurance company, that’s the way it started. They said that they wanted to work on it, that it was important that they resolve it, and yet they didn’t think there was any chance because it had been going on so long. One of the problems is that managers let these conflicts go on too long.

Pete Mockaitis
And that’s when they bring in a ringer.

Judy Ringer
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Couldn’t resist, Judy.

Judy Ringer
Good one. I’m glad that came out.

Pete Mockaitis
You’ve probably heard it before. You’ve probably heard it before.

Judy Ringer
Oh, no. Well, once or twice.

Pete Mockaitis
They bring you in and your last name is Ringer, so. Okay, so there we are.

Judy Ringer
So there we are.

Pete Mockaitis
They want it resolved, but they don’t think it’s going to happen and they say they’re willing to work on it.

Judy Ringer
And they say they’re willing to work on it. I set up some sessions and we begin to talk and maybe three or four or five different depending on how polarized things are and how deeply resentful each person is, I listen to each party for three or four hours, like I said in individual hour-long sessions. I hear them. I’m listening.

What happens in this case, Pete, is that – I don’t know if this has ever happened to you or anyone listening today – but when you usually listen to someone and you ask them some questions and you say “Tell me more” and “How did you feel when that happened?” and “I’m really curious, when did this start and how do you see it being resolved? Do you see your contribution? How do you see your contribution in this conflict?”

When you ask questions like that and they really talk, things relax. They lighten up because maybe for the first time someone’s really, really listening to their side and aligning with them. Okay.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. You said so three to four hours for each party.

Judy Ringer
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
So six to eight hours total. I think you’re right that probably nobody has ever listened to them about almost anything for that long.

Judy Ringer
Well, thank you for that. I’m not saying I listen for three or four hours. I say I listen maybe in the first session and then I begin to teach some skills. And I begin-

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, got you.

Judy Ringer
Yeah, so it’s not all just listening for them. But maybe the first hour, most of it is listening. People love to tell how bad the other person is.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh sure.

Judy Ringer
I just say, “Yeah, I get it. I know from your point of view this is how it looks.” People also get that I’m doing that with the other party too, so they’re starting to think, “Well, if she can do this with the other party, maybe I can too. Or maybe there’s a different way to tell this because this is my story. Maybe there’s another way to tell it.” I begin that way. Then we start to bring people together. Now, when they come together, they’re more relaxed, they’ve got some skills.

One of the best things that happened in this particular situation was after they began to talk to each other and hear the other person’s story and see what they had in common and how it all got started and starting to be able to be more civil with each other and kind with each other actually, one of the women said, “I didn’t realize this is just a set of skills.

I thought I was a bad person because I couldn’t figure this out and I was in a conflict that I couldn’t figure out. It was driving me crazy. This is just a set of skills. Anybody can learn these.” I said, “Yeah. That’s right.” They’re mind-body skills and they’re verbal communication skills. As I said, quality of being is primary. I’ve got to learn how to be centered, curious, nonjudgmental, wanting to learn. I’ve got to have a learning mindset.

Then I’ve got to learn just some key skills like inquiry. How do I ask questions? How do I listen? How do I acknowledge – acknowledgement? How do I acknowledge what I hear? It’s not just I’m listening; I’m also showing you that I heard what you said. Then how do I advocate because I get a turn here too. Here’s how I see it. You don’t see it my way. This is what I see. That’s advocacy.

When everybody gets a chance to be heard, then all the information’s out there on the table. You can begin to sort through it and solve things. Basically, in that book and in my work across the board, I like to help people move from a mindset of how do I be right, how do I look good here, how do I make myself right to a mindset of what can I learn here. From a message delivery to a learning conversation. From a difficult conversation to a learning conversation.

When we can enter a conversation and think “What can I learn here?” everything changes. It all works out.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s great stuff. We’ve talked about the being and some listening and some inquiry. Can you share with us a couple thoughts around acknowledgement and advocacy?

Judy Ringer
Yeah, I can. In the book I call acknowledgement the secret sauce because we never do it. We may listen. We may think we’re pretty good listeners and we may be actually. Then we go right to, “Okay. Yeah, but,” “Right. Yeah, but,” and then we want to advocate right away.

There’s some little piece in between that’s called acknowledgement that goes like this, “What I hear you saying is,” “Is this what you’re saying?” “Can I clarify?” “If what you’re saying is true then, it would all work out if-” I just build on what the other person’s saying.

I believe the reason we don’t do this is that we have this notion that if we acknowledge what the other person’s saying, it’s some sort of tacit agreement with what they’re saying, that if I actually hear an opposing point of view, it means that I’m agreeing with it. That’s crazy. Of course it doesn’t mean that. It just means that I’m good enough to listen to you, care about what I’m hearing, and care about solving the problem enough.

Acknowledgement – okay, if you said “That’s a stupid idea, Judy. I don’t think it’s going to work. We can’t afford it.” I would say, “You don’t think we can afford it? Can you tell me more? Why not?” Okay, I’m not only acknowledgment, I’m clarifying. I’m being more curious. Just like you’re doing today, I’m going deeper and deeper and deeper until the person feels heard. Then I can advocate.

If we’re trying to change a piece of software, for example, I’m going to say something like, “So-“ – let’s say I’m for it; they’re against it. I’m going to say something like, “So Jenny, you think that this piece of software would cause more harm than good. Am I hearing it right?” “Yeah, you’re hearing it right.” “And you think that basically what we have isn’t broken, so why fix it. Is that right?” “Yeah, that’s kind of what I’m saying.”

Now they may not have said those exact words, but I’m adding on. “And is there anything else I need to know?” “No, that’s about it.” “Okay. Would you like to hear my view on this?” “Yeah, sure.” See, now they’ve lightened up. They’re maybe ready to hear my point of view.

I have to be really clear about this, Pete. This is not about manipulation. This is not about getting Jenny to hear me – pretending to hear Jenny so she can hear me so I can get my way. This is about sincerely trying to solve the problem. I have to be ready to admit that maybe this piece of software isn’t exactly what we need. However, when I’m there then Jenny’s much more likely to be able to hear what I have to say next.

Advocacy is what comes next. That’s me not selling necessarily, but educating. That’s how I like to think about it. Let’s pretend that we’re both from different planets. In fact, in some ways we are. We all come from different cultures, different upbringings. But let’s pretend that we’re really from other planets. I need to pretend I don’t know anything about what’s going on for Jenny, but I also need to know and not assume that Jenny knows anything about what’s going on for me.

When I’m advocating, I start at the basics. “Here’s what I see, Jenny. Here’s what I see the problem and the productivity that we could increase with the new software. Here’s what looks good to me about it. What do you think?” Then you go back into inquiry and you start to go back and forth now, inquiry, advocacy.

Then if you get to a point where you’ve got some form of agreement, Jenny says something that I agree with, I’m going to try to build on that. Pick something. “Well, I hear what you’re saying about you’re worried that it might cause people stress because it’s something new. What if we started out with a trial period or something like that, where we just took a few early adopters and see what they thought? Could that work?”

I try to build on something and use what I’ve learned from my inquiry to create a solution that would work for the other party.

Pete Mockaitis
You use the phrase ‘until they feel heard.’ How do you know when you’ve got there?

Judy Ringer
I know when the answer to my question “Is there anything else?” is no.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. I love it. It sounds like maybe for some the challenge is just bringing in – dedicating the time and the patience upfront that you’re really going to go all the way to the end as opposed to “Well, we have a 25-minute appointment window, Judy, so let’s hurry this along.”

Judy Ringer
Yeah, let’s get these guys together and figure it out. I know a lot of people that I’ve talked to have tried this first and usually emotions run high and things don’t get solved. That’s why I like to work with people individually first. Even just try it for one session.

One sort of fallacy about conflict that I think people have is that especially in this busy work environment that we’re all in right now is that we don’t have time for this kind of an intervention. We don’t have time to separate the parties. I don’t have time to talk with each one. Let’s just get them in the room and tell them to figure it out.” I’ll tell you, you don’t have time not to resolve the conflict.

The one that I mentioned with Sally and Lauren, that went on for two years before anybody decided to try and solve it. That’s two years.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And all the mental energy when they’re fuming quietly in their cubicles instead of doing anything productive. It’s like, “I can’t believe that she said. Oh my gosh, the nerve on her,” whatever’s kind of going on there. It’s not productive value creation. It’s sort of wheel spinning that if you could boy, just imagine if you had half an hour of that over two years mathematically, jeez, it’s like over 50 hours of productivity lost, which could totally happen when things simmer.

Judy Ringer
It’s absolutely correct. That’s not even counting the polarization that could be taking place as they complain to their teammates.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh sure.

Judy Ringer
And everybody starts to take sides.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s powerful. Thank you. Well, Judy, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Judy Ringer
I don’t think so. Some of my favorite things will be in what we’re going to talk about now because you asked me for my favorite quote and things like that.
Pete Mockaitis
All right, well let’s hear a favorite quote.

Judy Ringer
Well, I have a couple. They’re all – well, actually I have three. They’re all in the same vein. One of them is mine, which is “When you change, everything changes.” Another one is Margaret Wheatley. She has said, “We invent our environment by our presence in it.” Now Margaret Wheatley is an organizational consultant and writer. She’s written a lot of wonderful books like Leadership and the New Science.

But that “We invent our environment by our presence in it,” and “When you change, everything changes,” when I decide to walk into a room centered, breathing, positive attitude, appreciative, it’s really hard to fight with me, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Judy Ringer
The other thing – the last one is what my Aunt Mary said, which is “Life is what you make it.” If life isn’t turning out exactly how you planned in the workplace, take a look at your contribution to it and see what you can do differently.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.

Judy Ringer
You’re welcome.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Judy Ringer
I would go to Brene Brown and her work and research on vulnerabilities and the power of that. I think when we’re centered, we’re completely open and completely flexible and completely vulnerable. I think there’s a lot of power in that.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Judy Ringer
Favorite book. That is a tough one. I think – one of my favorite books actually and what got me started in this and it’s quite old now is The Magic of Conflict by Thomas Crum.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.

Judy Ringer
Yeah.

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

Judy Ringer
Yeah, and I just began to use this tool about maybe six weeks ago because so many people recommended it. I thought I’ve got to check this out.

It’s the Calm app, C-A-L-M, that helps people if you want to develop a centering practice and you don’t have a place to go or don’t have time to go to a class, this is a great app for teaching you how to meditate and for getting you involved in a practice that you can do every day very easily with just your phone and a set of earphones if you need them. You don’t even need those.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite habit.

Judy Ringer
Yeah. A favorite habit is catching myself uncentered and then recentering.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with your readers and listeners?

Judy Ringer
Yes, I think it’s this idea that conflict is a gift if we make it one. Let’s say conflict can be a gift of energy. There’s an article I wrote a number of years ago that’s getting a lot of press right now called How to Turn Your Tormenters Into Teachers. People seem to be resonating with that, that in fact, I have some power here, that I don’t just have to let these things happen to me.

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

Judy Ringer
JudyRinger.com. it’s all there. I’ve got a lot of downloadable resources, articles and I have a great blog. It’s called Ki Moments, K-I Moments about the K-E-Y moments in life. Ki means energy or life force.

Pete Mockaitis
Clever. Do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Judy Ringer
I do. I thought about this one a little bit. I would notice the red flags of blaming and justification because when we’re blaming someone else for something that’s going on or for our feelings for example, for making us angry or reactive or justifying our behavior, it limits our power. We can only change ourselves and the more we try to change other people, the more power we’re giving away.

Pete Mockaitis
Now let’s see, so justifying then is just sort of making our arguments for why you exactly as you are right here and right now are perfect and no change is required.

Judy Ringer
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
What is that song? It drives me nuts. It’s like “I don’t want to be anything other than what I’ve been trying to be lately.” Apologies for the pitch, but I was like what does that even mean and why not? You all need to change and grow. I don’t like this song. But anyway, I overthink lyrics sometimes. I’ve got to recenter when listening to the radio.

Judy Ringer
We can appreciate who we are. I don’t mean that. You know that, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly.

Judy Ringer
We absolutely need to appreciate who we are and our positive intention. The minute we start to blame somebody else or say, “Well, I have to do this because the other person, they made me be this way,” is just sort of like saying, “Well, here’s my center. Take it away. You can go away with it and just take it.” It gives up power.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Well, Judy, thanks so much for sharing this. I wish you lots of fun and luck in aikido and you’re book and all your adventures.

Judy Ringer
Thank you very much, Pete. This was a joy.

Jun 19
0

453: Why Generalists Succeed and How to Learn Like One with David Epstein

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

David Epstein says: "Breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer."

David Epstein explains why and how generalists tend to achieve more.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How focusing on short-term improvement can undermine long-term development
  2. Pro-tips for breaking through your learning plateaus
  3. The benefits of becoming a jack-of-all-trade

About David

David Epstein is the author of the book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, and the top 10 New York Times bestseller The Sports Gene. He was previously a science and investigative reporter at ProPublica, and prior to that a senior writer at Sports Illustrated. His writing has been honored widely.

David has his master’s degrees in environmental science and journalism, and is reasonably sure he’s the only person to have co-authored a paper in the journal of Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research while a writer at Sports Illustrated.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

David Epstein Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
David, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

David Epstein
Thank you very much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to dig into the stuff but, first, I want to hear about your work as an ecology researcher in the Arctic.

David Epstein
So, I studied geology and astronomy in college and, afterward, I worked in a plant physiology lab and that led me living in the Artic in the far north of Alaska, a place called Toolik Lake, where I was basically studying the radiation that plants give off in an effort to sort of help try to understand how the carbon cycle might change as that area warms and the permafrost melts a little because most of the ground is frozen there, so when there’s melt, a lot of nutrients are liberated and they can cause like major changes to the plant life which can cause changes to the carbon cycle.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. And so, how long were you there and what was life like up there?

David Epstein
Yeah, I was basically there for, well, you couldn’t be there a lot of the year because you couldn’t get supplies, so you can only really be there for like half the year basically. I loved it actually. So, it’s technically a desert and I love deserts because even though it’s lush on the ground and the air is cool enough year-round that there’s not much atmosphere and demand for water so you don’t get much rain even though there’s a lot of fog and slush on the ground.

And so, all the plant life is really low to the ground, and so in the middle of summer, when it’s basically light all day and you’re sort of seeing this, the sun go down and just come right back up and all the plant life is low, you can see really far and make for some great hiking. I thought it was beautiful. Some people felt it was desolate who were up there but I loved it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I’m curious if that isolation can serve as just amazing, creative, energizing time, or like, “I am going insane.”

David Epstein
Yeah, I’m more on the creative, energizing side, and I think like when I asked, after my first book, people would often ask, “How did you write it?” and I really don’t know how to answer that question because I’m not really sure. Every project is kind of different. And I asked my wife once, I asked her, “How did I write it?” and she said, “You went upstairs and came back down two years later.” And so, I’m pretty good at spending time on my own for projects and being quiet out in the expanse of nature. It’s definitely more creative and invigorating for me than a feeling of isolation.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. And you’ve recently channeled your creative energies into another opus, a grand tome, I’m excited to talk to you about. So, maybe why don’t we start with some of the most fun tidbits in terms of what would you say is perhaps the most surprising and fascinating discovery you made while you’re putting together your book Range?

David Epstein
For me, it was this idea that there are things that you can do that cause really rapid short-term improvement that can systematically undermine your long-term development. So, to that point about surprising, I’ll mention the single study that was probably it’s certainly one of the most surprising in the book to me was this one that was done at the U.S. Airforce Academy where they had a setup that you would never be able to recreate in a lab because basically they would get in a freshman class of, whatever, a thousand students, or several hundreds of students, and those students all had to take a sequence of three math courses: Calculus 1, Calculus 2, and then a third course.

And they were randomized to Calculus 1 to a professor, and then re-randomized for the second course, and then re-randomized for the third course, and they all take the same tests. So, these researchers recognized that this was an excellent natural setup for studying the impact of teacher quality, or teaching. And so, the finding of this study was that the professors who were the best at promoting contemporaneous achievement, that is whose students overperformed on the Calculus 1 test the most compared to the baseline characteristics they came in with, those students, then, systematically underperformed in all the follow-up courses.

So, the professors whose students did the best in Calculus 1, they rated those professors the highest, then went on to underperform in future classes. And what the researchers concluded was that the way to get the best results on the Calculus 1 test was to teach a more narrow curriculum that involved a lot more what’s called using procedures knowledge where you learn how to execute certain procedures and algorithms and you don’t learn more of what’s called making connections knowledge where the curriculum is broadened and you’re forced to kind of connect types of concepts and learn how to match strategies to types of problems as opposed to just execute procedures.

And so, when they’ve moved on into these other courses, those students who had the more narrow curriculum were systematically undermined. And that’s sort of one of the themes that runs through Range are the things you can do that seem the best in the short term sometimes undermine long-term development, and I thought that was just an amazing display of that and an amazing study.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow. It’s sort of like the items that were being covered on the final test is sort of like, “Yeah, he drilled on real good over and over and over again and thoroughly,” but sort of at the expense of getting some broader conceptual understanding of how the math number, calculus, stuff is working I guess more globally.

David Epstein
Right. And that’s what they, then, would need, that’s what then would help them kind of scaffold later knowledge, so they didn’t do as well in those other classes. First of all, that was just deeply counterintuitive finding to me, but also, so I remember, for example, the professor, out of a hundred, whose students I think did fifth best on the Calculus 1 exam, and he got the sixth best student ratings overall, was dead last in what the research called deep learning, that is how his students then did in the follow-on courses.

And so, that’s really kind of worrisome. The fact that a lot of these strategies, and that chapter four of Range is about these learning strategies, and a lot of those strategies cause the learner to be more frustrated, to not do as well in the short term, and to rate the person teaching them worst. So, that’s kind of worrisome because these professor ratings may not be a good indication of what someone is learning. Their own assessment of their own learning in the short term may not be a good indication either. So, that’s, I think, something that’s important to be aware of.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I’d be intrigued then to correlate that, if you were to sort of draw some parallels into the professional working world, in terms of how might we be shooting ourselves in the foot if we’re trying to master a certain narrow domain of work.

David Epstein
Yes, so let me give another example that came out of the research that I think relates to this. So, in this one study, people who were playing the role of, basically, simulations of naval officers, essentially, and they were being trained to respond to types of threats based on cues. And one group would practice threats where they would see a certain type of threat again and again and again and again, and they would improve and learn how to respond to it. And then they would see the next type of threat again and again and again, and so on.

The other group would get all these different types of situations all mixed up, and that’s called interleaving, and that kind of training is often more frustrating, it slows down initial progress, the learner will say that they didn’t learn as much, and all those things. And then both groups were brought back later and tested on situations they hadn’t seen before. And in that scenario, the interleave group performs much better than the other group because, again, they’re being trained to sort of match strategies to problems as opposed to just how to execute procedures.

And I think that goes for anything we’re trying to learn. I think our inclination is usually to pick up a new skill and do it over and over and over, when, really, we want to vary the challenge a lot early on so that you’re building these broader conceptual skills. And not only do you want to vary the challenge, but I think when we think about, at least in my life, the sort of formal professional development that I’ve been exposed to as opposed to kind of the informal professional development that I do on my own, is always coming away where it’s like, “Okay, here’s the topic, you’re going to learn this topic, and then you move on from it forever.”

And, in fact, the best way, we should actually use what’s called the spacing effect where you learn a topic and then you come back to it later, and that sort of helps you solidify it. So, one of the famous studies here is two groups of Spanish vocabulary learners who one group was given eight hours of intensive study on one day, and the other group was given four hours on one day, and then four hours again a month later. So, they all had the same total study.
Eight years later, when they were brought back, the group that had the space practice remembered 250% more with no practice in the interim. And so, I think we should apply that to anything we want to learn instead of just doing a topic and moving on from it. You don’t have to do it as intensively but you should wait until actually you’ve kind of forgotten it and then come back to it and do it again. And that’s how you like move it into your long-term memory basically.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s really cool. And it seems like this is drawing some connections for me with regard to, we had the Korn Ferry CEO Gary Burnison on and we were talking about their top competency that maps to all sorts of career successes, what they’re calling learning agility which is sort of the notion of sort of knowing what to do when you don’t know what to do.

David Epstein
That’s really important.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, that would make great sense because as you sort of rise in the ranks and you encounter more and more ambiguous and puzzle-some and, “I have no idea what’s going on” types of issues, the more that you struggle those things the more you’re raring to say, “All right. Well, let’s see how we go about figuring this out.”

David Epstein
Yeah, and I think that gets at sort of a link between the two things we’re both talking about in this classic research finding that can be summarized as breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. Transfer means taking your skills and knowledge and attempting to apply it into a totally new situation that you haven’t seen before. And breadth of training breeding breadth of transfer basically means the broader your early training was, the diversity of the situations you’re forced to face, the more likely that when you’re in a totally new situation, you’ll be able to will that knowledge and transfer that knowledge to that new situation.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. Okay. So, now, would you say that’s sort of the main idea or thesis behind Range or how would you articulate it?

David Epstein
No, I think that’s just part of this, the theme of Range that is, I mean, the overall theme is sort of that society may overvalue specialists and undervalue generalists. But the theme beneath that, to me, is again that these things that are the most efficient ways to get the quickest improvement, whether that’s telling someone to specialize right away, or practicing in this repetitive specialized way, is often not the way to get the best long-term improvement.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Boy, there’s just so much, so many implications to that in terms of if you think about sort of what you’re measuring and if you think about training or learning or development things. It’s sort of like you often don’t have the luxury of checking in sort of months or years later to see how we did. And so, there’s all kinds of systematic forces that would point us to doing just the opposite of that.

David Epstein
Yeah, totally. This project, in some ways, started in the sports world for me and only the introduction of Range is in the sports world but one of the things that got me interested there is that there’s this incredible drive to early specialization in youth sports. And then I went and looked at what the research says about optimal development, and it says that athletes who want to become elite, typically, have what’s called the sampling period where they play a variety of sports to gain these broader physical skills, scaffold later learning. They learn about their interests, they learn about their abilities, and they delay specializing until later than their peers who plateau at lower levels.

And I was looking at that, and then you see what was actually going on, and sort of saying, “Gosh, all these forces are pushing the opposite direction of that in the United States.” In Norway, which is like is, for me, probably the best sports country in the world per capita right now. There’s an HBO real sports on that’s showing they have embraced this stuff and changed their sports development pipelines.

But when I was living in New York until recently, there was a U7 travel soccer team that met near me, and I don’t think that anybody thinks that six-year-olds can’t find good enough competition in a city of nine million people to travel, right? It’s just that there’s these other forces at work, like those kids are customers for whoever’s running that league. And so, all these other forces militate against what we know about optimal development.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then what do you think is to be done in terms of if you’re a professional in a workplace and you want to develop well and over the long haul such that you have a fruitful career and rise and achieve all of your career dreams? What are some of the key things you recommend folks do?

David Epstein
Yeah, so let’s say you want to be an executive, which I think a lot of people would like to be at some point. LinkedIn recently did some research at looking at what were the best predictors of who would become an executive, and they have these incredible sample silos so they did this in a half a million members. And one of the best predictors was the number of different job functions that an individual had worked across in an industry.

And so, I think our intuition is to say, “Pick a job function and stick with it and drill into it and carve your niche and get specialized.” But, in fact, these people who sort of probably developed a more holistic view of their industry and how to integrate different types of skills are the ones who go on to become executives. And so, they are getting that breadth of training. And so, when it comes to having to do these more complex problems, they’re probably better equipped.

So, LinkedIn’s chief economist’s main advice was, “If you want to be an executive, work across more job functions.” And I think that’s good advice but I think you can do things short of that in a lot of ways. Like, learn what your colleagues do, learn more functions at your own work, because our natural inclination is to settle into our competencies. And as we settle into a rut and we get competent enough, I was talking to the economist Russ Roberts, he said it’s a hammock because it’s comfortable that’s why we don’t get out of it. And I was thinking, I want to make a weird analogy here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, please.

David Epstein
When I was getting into my last book, I didn’t write about this, but I was reading some scientific literature on speed typing, okay? How fast is speed typing?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’ve been looking into speed typing. Continue.

David Epstein
Really?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I had a recent guest talk about how that’s one of the top skills you can use to sort of accelerate your performance in all kinds of things because a lot of typing that’s going on. And I’m a fan of the website Keybr I think it is, which sort of helps you get fast at typing fast. So, anyhow, my interest is piqued. Please continue.

David Epstein
Okay. So, yeah, so the idea is we all, like at first when you’re learning typing you make a lot of improvement and you get to whatever you get to, 60, 70, 80 words a minute, whatever you get to. And then you plateau and we pretty much all stay there at very good but not great. And it turns out there’s all these strategies that you can use to get like twice as fast, and they’re not even that complicated. Things as simple as you’d use a metronome, you take it up a little bit, and keep up with it even if you make mistakes, whatever.

There’s a bunch of strategies to get like twice as fast. But what it suggested to me is that our natural inclination that just experience will get us to a certain point but then we stop naturally improving just with experience. We sort of settle into that level of performance. And I think that’s kind of true of everything.

And so, we’re in danger as we get more experience and get more comfortable of not developing new skills anymore. We have to try new things. And I think that’s good both because it can get you off a plateau. When I was on a plateau stuff at writing this book, I decided to take an online fiction-writing course and it worked beautifully to help with the problem I was stuck with.

And so, I think it works because it can help get you off a plateau, but also one of the other main ideas in Range is this idea of match quality, which is the degree of fit between an individual, their abilities, their interests, and the work that they do. And good match quality turns out to be very important for your motivation, your performance, and the only way to improve your match quality, it turns out, is to try some things and then reflect on those experiences and keep sort of pinballing, doing that, and with an eye toward improving that match quality.

So, like the Army, for example, has created a system called talent-based branching where they were kind of hemorrhaging their highest potential officers since basically the start of the knowledge economy where those young officers could learn skills that they could laterally transfer into other types of work. And, at first, they just threw money at those officers to try to keep them, and that didn’t work at all. The people who were going to stay took the money, and the people who were going to go left anyway. That has a half a million dollars.

And then they started this thing called talent-based branching where instead of saying, “Here’s your career track. Go upper out,” they say, “We’re pairing you with this coach-type figure and here’s a bunch of career tracks, and just start dabbling in them, and your coach will help you reflect on how did this fit with your talents and your interests. And we’ll do that so we can get you better match quality.” And that’s actually turned out to work better for retention because when people have high match quality, they want to stay. There’s a saying that I quote a research in the book, saying, “When you get fit it will look like grit because if you get a good fit, people will work harder.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m glad you brought up grit because that’s something I want to talk about. You say that there could be a problem with too much grit. What’s that about?

David Epstein
So, I think for listeners who maybe have probably heard the concept of grit, I’m guessing. But the psychological construct came out of this survey where it started as a 12-question survey where half the questions were points for resilience basically and the other half for consistency of interest. And so, you lose points if you sometimes abandon a project for another one or I think you change interest, and things like that.

And the most famous study, what was actually done on cadets going into West Point, so future Army officers. They were trying to get through what’s called east barracks, that’s the U.S. military Academy’s six-week orientation where it’s physically and emotionally rigorous. And grit, that survey turned out to be a better predictor of who would make it through these than more traditional measures that the Army used. And although most people make it through, which is great, but in the study. I feel like Angela Duckworth and her colleagues, I’d give them a ton of credit because some of the critique I write about in the book comes like directly out of their own papers and it’s kind of like lost in translation, I think, where those people in that study were highly pre-selected for a number of qualities.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Got to get that Senate recommendation, Congressional letter. That ain’t easy.

David Epstein
That is what statisticians call restriction of rank problem. So, if you’ve truncated a lot of variables by selecting a small group out of humanity, so it makes the other variables exacerbated. But they were also pre-selected for this very short-term six-week goal, right? And life isn’t a six-week goal. So, when we looked at the longer timeline, again, like half of these people basically leave the Army almost the day that they’re allowed.

And so, high-ranking Army officials said, “We should defund West Point because ‘it’s an institution that taught its cadets to get out of the Army.’” And that’s not the case, right? And those people didn’t just lose their grit. It’s that they learned some things about themselves, which tends to happen in that time period, the fastest time a personality change in your life is 18 to your late 20s, but it continues changing faster than people think over your life, and they decided they wanted to go do something else.

That’s why throwing money at them didn’t work where talent-based branching did because it’s giving them some control over their career path and their match quality, and trying things and then changing direction is basically essential to improving your match quality. And if you’re not willing to do that, then you’re just hoping for luck in your match quality. And I think if we thought of our careers the way we thought of dating, right, we would never tell people to settle down so quickly.

Pete Mockaitis
“Just stick with that gal. She’s great.”

David Epstein
For some people that might be a good idea.

Pete Mockaitis
“You have four dates. Don’t quit.”

David Epstein
I thought I was going to marry my high school girlfriend and at the time that seemed like a good idea. And then I had more experience in the world, in retrospect that wouldn’t have been a good idea. And I felt the same way in my approach to jobs. Some jobs I thought I was going to stick with, I thought I was going to be a scientist. In retrospect, that wasn’t a good idea for me, but I didn’t know that until I tried that stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I’m intrigued then when it comes to sampling, I’d love it if you could share some of your favorite kind of tactical tips with regard to, “How can I get a lot of sampling going?” So, you talked about, “Hey, talk to work colleagues who are in a completely different functional area. Maybe check out an online course.” What are some other means of sampling?

David Epstein
Yeah, I kind of take this approach from someone’s work I love that resonated with me because I had career change, or changed directions several times, from a London business school professor named Herminia Ibarra. And she has this quote I love, “We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.” Basically, what she means is this psychological research shows that we’re not like so great at intuiting our own talents and interests before we have a chance to try stuff, we actually have to try the things, and then learn about ourselves. Act and then think, instead of think and then act, as she says.

And so, for me, I kind of started a book of experiments where just like when I was a science grad student, I’ll say, “Here are my skills now. Here’s some things I want to learn. Here are things, some weaknesses. Here’s my hypothesis about how I might be able to work on this.” And then I’ll go try something and see if that works.

So, again, I mentioned this online fiction-writing class I took, right? So, I got stuck in structuring my book, and I needed to do something different. And so, I go take this class, and among the things I was made to do was write with only dialogue, and write with no dialogue at all. And after doing the no dialogue at all, I went back to my manuscript and stripped a ton of quotes and replaced them with my description because I realized I was unconsciously coming from usually doing shorter-form types of things. I was leaning on quotes to convey information in a way that is not really good writing. And that’s not even the improvement I was looking for. But just getting out of my normal mode of doing things gave me this huge advantage.

And so, I try to do that regularly. Like, people might be familiar with this research “The Strength of Weak Ties” like your new job usually comes not from the people core in your network because they’re kind of doing this, you know those options already, and a lot of them are doing things similar to you. It comes from these people that you are several degrees away from but you can get connected to.

And that’s what Herminia Ibarra’s work shows, that when people find better career fits, it always comes from some key whole view, like they take some class, or they go to some event, or they meet someone at a dinner party and sort of ignites an interest, and then they start testing it little by little, getting in a little more and a little more until sometimes they make a full transition.

And so, I’m constantly doing those experiments with my book of experiments. So, I think everybody should constantly be doing this, “What do I want to work on? Here’s my hypothesis for how I could do that. I’m going to go try that thing.” Then reflect on it and put it in your notebook and keep going forward. And I think even keeping that, what I call that book of experiments, prompts me to constantly be doing that in a proactive way, whereas there was a period when I was at Sports Illustrated, for example, where I very much settled into something I felt come to that and just did over and over for a while, and took a while till I realized, “Gosh, I’m actually not adding to my skills here.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I really like that just sort of the fun exercise you mentioned with the writing, with regard to all dialogue and no dialogue, and then how that filters in forever. And that reminds me, boy, back in my AP, I guess, English composition or rhetoric course in high school, our dear teacher Judy Feddermier, that was sort of like each week that was the challenge. It was a different kind of a challenge associated with the writing, like, “Okay, this time you are not to allow to use any to be verbs. No is, no are, no was, no were.” I’m like, “This is crazy.” And I just used one, “This is crazy.”

And so, but sure enough, I was like, “Yeah, this writing is a little awkward,” but it’s what you sort of kind of back to being able to use some. You realize, “Oh, boy, having fewer of them sure sounds better in terms of more active and exciting and lively than a bunch of is’s and are’s.”

David Epstein
Yeah, and I think it sort of just gets you out of that. Because the interesting thing is and sort of almost like troubling thing to me when I did that with the no dialogue, and went and changed my manuscript, was that until then I didn’t realize that I had been kind of unconsciously doing something I’d gotten used to. And it took doing something different for me to think about that which is annoying. I wish I were just like perceptive enough to realize that without having to get kind of knocked out of my normal mode but, really, I wasn’t.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I guess, I’m wondering then, in the whole universe of essential skills you might choose to start experimenting and dabbling in to add to your repertoire, is there a means by which you think about prioritizing them? Or is there just sort of, “Hey, there’s a glimmer of interest here. Let’s see what happens”?

David Epstein
Yeah, that’s a good question. Usually, I kind of always have some project or other that’s either in some stage of development, and my projects tend to be quite different. And so, there’s usually something related to my project that’s either like an area of knowledge maybe that where the project is kind of driving those in some way, where it’s I know I need to, that this book is going to be the biggest structural writing challenge I’ve ever had, therefore like I need to improve my skills. So, usually it comes out of something that I’m otherwise doing, and realizing what’s the new part of that challenge.

So, I will say, when I’ve taken on these bigger projects, like my first book was the hardest structurally to organize all the information writing challenge I ever had, and this book was much harder than that one. And so, I think the one thing I’ve done a pretty good job of is taking on these projects that are kind of in the optimal push zone where they’re not so over my head that I simply can’t do it, but they are definitely stretching me to the point where I have to think about learning new things.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s fun. And I’m also wondering about sort of things that you hate. So, one approach is there’s a glimmer of interest or sort of what skill is necessary to develop there. And I’m wondering about because when you’re talking about in terms of sort of this inefficiency or doing a wide breadth of things such that it’s more frustrating and less fun sort of the in the early stages, but then you have some cool capabilities later on as a result of doing it.

I guess I’m wondering to what extent would a chasing after skills that I’m just currently very bad at, I’m thinking about sort of home improvement and being handy type skills right now, so kind of the opposite of intellectual, “Hey, we’re having rich conversations and thinking about the themes and summarizing them well, and marketing and reaching audiences,” like all that stuff is like very different than, “Okay, I got to drill and I’m trying to make this thing go there and not make a huge mess.” Is there a particular value in doing stuff you hate?

David Epstein
I don’t think you should necessarily do it over and over if you hate it unless it’s really essential to something you’re doing. So, when I first started doing some lab work en route to what I thought I was being a scientist, my expectation was that I would love it and this was what I would do for the rest of my life. And what I found out was that was not necessarily the case, and that was an important thing to learn.

And, conversely, I’m a fairly new homeowner, and the last thing I would’ve thought I would ever be interested in was plumbing, for goodness’ sake. And, it turns out, it’s kind of interesting actually. Like, we had some stuff we had to fix and I started to find this sort of interesting. So, I don’t think you should do anything with plumbing if you hate it, but I do think you might find things that you a priori would think you wouldn’t really like, then when you actually try them might be more interesting than you thought. And, vice versa, things that you expected to love that maybe not so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Interesting. So, it sounds like it’s worth at least an hour or two to see what happens.

David Epstein
One of the things I write about in Range is a so-called end of history illusion. This is psychology of finding that we all realize that we, based on our experiences and everything, we have changed a lot in the past, but then think we will change very little in the future. And we do this at every time point in life, if we say we change a lot in the past, and then proceed to underestimate how much we’ll change in the future. So, it leads to all these kinds of funny findings.

So, one just sort of humorous one is, because people underestimate how much their taste will change, if you ask people how much they would pay for a ticket to see their favorite band, their today favorite band to 10 years from now, the average answer is $129. And if you ask how much they would pay to see today their favorite band from 10 years ago, the average answer is $80, because we underestimate how much our taste will change.

And the thing is personality actually changes over the entire course of your life, and one of the predictable changes is as you become older, your openness to experience, which is one of the big five personality traits, declines. But doing new stuff that you’re not used to can actually stop that. So, there are these studies where older people are in that decline phase, and this is a trait that we know is very much correlated with creativity. And these old people were trained on things like certain types of puzzles, okay? And even if they didn’t get better at the puzzles, they became more open to experience. And so, I think there’s also these personality reasons that are associated with creativity to do stuff that is just outside of anything else you’re doing if you want to stem that decline of openness to experience.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think what’s interesting about that is it might be hard to even dream up or conceive like what is that thing because it’s so not in your current world. Do you have any tips on how to kind of spark that prompt or stimulus in the first place?

David Epstein
For me, and this has been a long-running thing is I go to libraries and bookstores because those are places where I find interests that I didn’t know I had. And that’s why I value those places so much because, nothing against Amazon, but, yet, the algorithm works in a way that it sends me things I’m interested in and that I think I’m interested in, and it doesn’t send me the things that I don’t know I’m interested in basically.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

David Epstein
And so, when I do this more natural browsing which, by the way, I consider the willingness to go to libraries now like a competitive advantage for me because I think people don’t do it anymore. But those are the places where I find these things that I did not know I was interested in, and that’s why I really value them. That’s why I make sure I go to those places instead of just only ordering my reading material, and I’m a big reader on Amazon.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’m a huge fan of libraries and, boy, now, you’ve got me kind of excited just to see what would happen if you just went kind of blind into a stack, grabbed a book, and say, “I’m going to read six pages and see what happens.”

David Epstein
When I go into like a local bookstore or something like that, I don’t go, like if I really need a book right away and I know what it is, I will order on Amazon, and if I really need it quick, I’ll have it on my Kindle. But when I’m going into like bookstores, I’m not going for a particular thing. I’m going to look around and I always end up with something that I didn’t really expect.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, can you tell me, if folks are inspired, they’re thinking, “Yes, David’s Range that’s what’s up, I’m all about it. I want to get some more skills, be more interdisciplinary,” are there any kind of watch-outs or warnings or mistakes that are associated with this endeavor?

David Epstein
Well, I think people are probably pretty aware of the jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none sort of syndrome. Like, you don’t want to get cast as someone who doesn’t know anything. And I think it’s actually pretty culturally telling that the end of that phrase, that adage, jack of all trades master of none, is oftentimes better than master of one, but we’ve totally dropped that part and I don’t think we even know it. And I think that’s because there’s sort of this bias against breadth. And so, I do think there’s that danger of signaling to other people that you don’t really know anything about anything.

Pete Mockaitis
It sounds dangerous.

David Epstein
Yeah, and I think that’s actually one reason why. So, I was just at…maybe a lot of people have heard of Motley Fool. You know Motley Fool? I was just at an event of theirs, and there was a survey on a video screen and the audience could vote with their phones. And the survey was, “What do you think is the average age of a founder of a breakout startup on the day of founding, not when it becomes a breakout?” The choices were 25, 35, 45, 55, and the overwhelming favorite was 25.

And the answer is actually based on research from MIT and the Census Bureau is 45 and a half. But we sort of think of this, you know, Mark Zuckerberg, when he was 22 and famous, he said, “Young people are just smarter.” Like we think of Tiger Woods, even though that’s not the normal typical model, and Mark Zuckerberg, it’s these very dramatic stories of youthful precocity that we think of as the norm, but actually the people who become these really successful entrepreneurs usually bounce around a fair bit first.

And I think what a lot of them end up doing, I describe people like this in Range, is they get this mix of skills that maybe other people sort of look down upon, but it leaves them with this intersection of skills that creates new ground where they’re not in direct competition with someone. They’re trying to do something new, and they have to create their own ground, and they often become entrepreneurs, sometimes because they have to. And that can be really good but it can also be really challenging because you can kind of end up, and I think especially so, in this year of LinkedIn, which I think is a great tool, but also allows HR people to make a much more narrowly-defined job and still have a ton of candidates.

And so, in Range I talk about the work of Abbie Griffin who studies so-called serial innovators who make these repeated major contributions to their companies. And her advice to HR people is basically, “Don’t define your job too narrowly because you’re going to accidentally screen these people out because their traits are like they’ve often worked across domains, they have a wide range of interests, they read more widely than other colleagues, they have a need to talk to more people in other disciplines, they like to use analogies from other disciplines, they often have hobbies that seem like they might be distracting,” but that those are the traits of those people, and her concern is that HR people will see them as scattered and not as focused on any particular area.

So, I think the real concern is of the signal that might be sent to people who are in a position of making personnel decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, thank you. Well, David, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

David Epstein
I think specialization made a ton of sense when we were in more of an industrial economy, when people were facing similar challenges repeatedly and that was when those Army officers did not move outside of the Army with nearly as much frequency because other companies, specialists were facing the same challenge, and they were ahead, and you can’t catch up. But in the knowledge economy, some of the patent research I looked at in Range shows that it’s basically just since like the late ‘80s forward where the contributions of more generalists inventors.

So, in this research, the generalists are defined as people, their work is spread across a larger number of technology classes, as class is a patent office, whereas the specialists drill more into a small number or a single technology class. And both of these types of people make contributions, but the contributions of those people who are broader have been increasing with the knowledge economy.

And so, I don’t think this has always been true that generalists have these special, or broader people have these special contributions to make, but I think it’s sort of a function of the fact that with our communication technology, information is rapidly and thoroughly disseminated. And there are many more opportunities, for combining knowledge in new ways as opposed to just creating some totally new piece of knowledge.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that makes sense. Now, could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

David Epstein
I love that quote from Herminia Ibarra, “We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.” That’s one that’s like really stuck in my head because I don’t totally know what I’m going to do next, and I’m thinking about things. And so, that’s really affected the approach that I’m going to take.

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

David Epstein
Right now, I would say that my favorite book, gosh, I read a lot so this changes from time to time, but right now, I would say my favorite book is probably War and Peace, the Anthony Briggs translation, so I read multiple translations when I got really into it. And I didn’t realize, I was just reading it because like I was going through this website that aggregates all great book list, and I was trying to just like go down some of the greatest books.

And it is a novel, in the form of a novel, it’s actually Tolstoy’s refutation of the great man theory of history, and he uses Napoleon as the main character, and argues, and he does like some journalistic reporting on those events, and argues that, well, Napoleon was really an effect not a cause of these larger forces basically.

And so, he had these historical essays. And the story, his writing is amazing. But I also found that argument really interesting, and that led me to read this essay about a philosopher Isaiah Berlin based on War and Peace where Isaiah Berlin used these two types of characters he analyzes in War and Peace the foxes and the hedgehogs. The hedgehogs know one big thing, and the foxes know many little things.

And those hedgehog and fox constructs were then borrowed by Philip Tetlock, the psychologist, to do the work that’s featured in my chapter 10 of people who develop the best judgment about the world and about political and economic trends, who know many little things instead of one big thing. And so, it was really cool, you know, that research I was already interested in, to see in War and Peace sort of where those ideas of the fox and the hedgehog via Isaiah Berlin’s philosophy as it where it came from. So, not only did I enjoy the book for its own right, but it really made me think about some modern research in an interesting way.

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

David Epstein
Oh, my goodness. I would die if I didn’t have Searchlight on. That’s why I have to be a Mac user because I basically, the organization system I use is writing lots of words in various things that I think I would search if I wanted to find it. And so, I’d probably use Searchlight 500 times a day.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

David Epstein
Running, if you count that. I’m a very avid runner.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, sure thing. And is there a key nugget that you share often that tends to get sort of quoted back to you frequently?

David Epstein
In my first book, The Sports Gene there’s like I did some data analysis of body types, and this one part that mentions that if you know an American man between the ages of 20 and 40, who’s at least 7 feet tall, then there’s a 17% chance he’s a current NBA player. And, yeah, people mention that to me a lot.

Pete Mockaitis
I just think it’s funny that a very specific numerical tidbit is what people are sticking with.

David Epstein
Yeah, I tell you, I’m really bad at predicting at things for my own books that people are going to latch onto versus the things that I latch onto the most. It’s kind of an interesting experience.

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

David Epstein
DavidEpstein.com is my website, and I’m davidepstein on Twitter.

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

David Epstein
Yeah, I think if I can really talk to someone it would be managers, and say, “Do your own form of talent-based branching where you allow people to explore some of their other interest and talents, and help them reflect on those experiences.” I was on the podcast for The Ringer, Bill Simmons. He runs probably the most popular sports podcast in the world, and he used to be ESPN’s most popular writer, then he did something on HBO and that kind of failed. And now he started his own company, and it’s one of the happiest workplaces I have ever been in.

And one of the interesting things was people who were hired to edit like online articles, some of them have become like seriously famous in the sports world podcast personalities with huge followings, and that’s because once they’re in that company, he’ll say like, “Okay, come try on a podcast for a little bit and see how it goes.” And it seems like people have an opportunity to basically try their hand at whatever the company has to offer. And a couple of the people who came in, in these more kind of quotidian jobs have become like famous, and it was a happy workplace. So, I think he’s really onto something with sort of letting people try their hand at things in a way that like doesn’t really damage anything too much if it doesn’t go well.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Well, David, thanks for this. I wish you tons of luck with Range and all your adventures.

David Epstein
Thank you very much.

Jun 17
0

452: Adopting the Habits of Elite Performers with Nick Hays

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Nick Hays says: "If you are intimidated by something, that is an excellent indicator that it's exactly what you should be doing."

Former Navy SEAL Nick Hays shares practical advice on how to elevate your performance and push yourself to unlock your maximum potential.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to conquer large goals by celebrating the tiniest of victories
  2. How to find gratitude in the most unpleasant circumstances
  3. How to tune out the “yeah, but…” voice in your head

About Nick

Nick Hays is former a Navy SEAL. His operating days came to an end when he ruptured a disk while preparing for an operation in Afghanistan. Disillusioned, broken, and without means to provide for his family, Nick was left without a purpose in life. After recovery, his training kicked in, and he remembered the lessons learned from the SEAL teams and put them to the test with professional athletes. He’s helped train the Miami Heat and helped the Atlanta Falcons to a Super Bowl. Nick holds a BA from the University of Maryland, a Masters in Business from the University of San Diego, and a post-graduate degree from Harvard Business School. He now resides in California with his wife, Ivy, and their three children.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Nick Hays Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Nick, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Nick Hays
Pete, thanks for having me, man. I’m excited.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, I’m excited too. Well, could we get started, perhaps, with a thrilling tale of your adventures in the Navy SEALS? And feel free to anonymize anything you need to.

Nick Hays
Yeah, there’s a lot of interesting stuff that happened, some high points and some low points, I think. One of the most impactful things that happened while I was in the SEAL teams was—and it was in my first platoon—I was one of those guys that needed an extra little bit of love, right? I don’t think that a young frogman is anywhere as cocky as he is right after he’s gotten out of training, and has done nothing yet. It’s the most cocky you’ll ever be, and I was no exception.

It’s a funny story. But I showed up to a morning meeting one time, we’re training for this mission, and everything is pretty locked tight as far as the schedule, and I show up a couple of minutes late. It didn’t sound like a big deal, but when you’re a new guy in the teams, if you’re 15 minutes early, you’re late, that’s kind of the rule, and I had broken that.

So, my platoon chief at the time, now a platoon chief is somebody who has the most experience in the group, he’s the person everybody listens to. Well, he told me, “Hey, stick around after this. It’s not a big deal, but I need to talk to you.” So, we wrapped up the morning meeting, it’s like 9:00 o’clock in the morning, and he tells me, “Hey, man, it’s not a big deal but, obviously, you’ve got to pay the man, a little bit of a punishment.” He goes, “I’m not mad but just make sure that you make up for it by grabbing a rucksack,” which is military speak for backpack, right, “and fill it full at 50 pounds, and run up the paraloft tower,” which is a five-story building. And he says, “Do that one time for every guy in the platoon because you made them late, so I think it’s just a good way to pay it back.”

Now, I’m thinking about this, I’m like, “There’s no way this guy is being real with me. That’s a tremendous amount of work. Punishment doesn’t really fit the crime.” I was angry. But kept my mouth shut, and I went downstairs and grabbed a rucksack, and put 50 pounds in it. And he knew I was doing it, he followed me down, and he was like, “Nick, you can’t do that right now, man, in place of your workout. You’ve got to do it after work. It’s not even a punishment.” And he was like, “Come on, let’s go hit chest.”

So, we actually went to worked out together, never brought it up again. The day goes on. At the time I was working with the SDV, it’s a miniature submarine so it’s incredibly technical work. There’s a lot to do before you ever even do your training mission, so it’s a full day of dive rigs and technical stuff. We, finally splashed in the water, the sun is going down, it’s like 7:00 or 8:00 o’clock at night because we’re training for a night dive. I’m piloting the SDV, cold, wet, miserable, all that stuff, thinking about this punishment that I have in front of me the entire time.

It was similar to like when your child gets in trouble and you tell him, “Hey, go wait in your room.” That was me waiting in the room just thinking about it. So, we recover, it’s probably midnight. Insult to injury, it’s raining. Just miserable. Now, I have to get all my gear ready to go, I have to freshwater rinse the dive rigs. We’re talking about another hour of work. Finally, I go and I grab my rucksack and I’m walking over to the paraloft tower, steaming mad. I could not have been more angry than I was in that moment.

And I saw something that I didn’t know what to take. I saw my chief, Jim, sitting over there by the door of the tower. So, now, I’m thinking, “Okay, does he not trust me? Is this an integrity thing? Is he going to be sitting here with a stopwatch, saying, ‘Hey, go faster’? Is this a beat session? What’s about to happen?” and I was livid, man. But as I got closer, I saw that he actually had a rucksack sitting next to him.

When I walked up to him, he throws the rucksack on his back, and he was like, “All right, man, are you ready to hit this thing?” And I said, “Jim, what are you doing, man?” And he said, “Oh, dude, we’re in this together. I’m your leader. Like, we’re in it together. Your successes are my successes, your failures are my failures, so let’s get this done.” And he takes off up the tower.

Now, I’m sprinting to catch up to him, mind completely blown about what had just happened. He never brought it up again. That was the only thing he said about it, and he ran every single flight of stairs with me that night. It took a very long time. When we were done with it, I gave him a hug, and I just told him how much he meant to me.

And, for me, that was the course correction that I needed. And what he did in that moment was he grabbed a hold of me. It wasn’t about being two minutes late, it wasn’t about some operational military plus or minus a minute, on time every time kind of stuff, that’s not what he was doing. He grabbed a hold of me and he said, “Nick, your mine. I’m going to mentor you.”

For the rest of that platoon, I made my gear look exactly like his gear. I kept my magazines in the same place. I kept my medical equipment in the same place. I emulated everything about him because I figured, “Hey, this guy has like seven deployments. Maybe I can save some time if I just listened to him.” And I had the value of a mentor moving forward.

Now, we went onto get medals together to do some pretty amazing stuff, like even before going up to doing a mission, he and I just kind of stepped aside, said a quick prayer, and we were still in it together that entire time. To me, that was the difference between being a good SEAL or a bad SEAL. Like, I needed a mentor to grab a hold of me, and say, “Hey, we’re running full speed and we’re doing it together.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s amazing because, well, one, just sort of makes a self-sacrifice and like on top of all the stuff to do that and, two, to sort of the intuition. Like, he clearly figured out that’s what you needed, and delivered in a powerful way.

Nick Hays
A hundred percent. Yeah, a hundred percent. We’re still close friends to this day. I still run stuff past him. And, you know, what I learned in that moment wasn’t necessarily… it was bigger than needing a mentor then. It was a process that I knew I needed in my life. I knew that I was going to need a mentor moving forward. So, when I separated from the military, I was looking at this new mission, this new thing, I’m looking at business, I’m looking at all this stuff that’s coming my way. And I thought to myself, I was like, “You know what, I need a mentor.”

So, the first thing I did was reach out to as many people as I could. And I had some criteria. I wanted people that didn’t mind having hard conversations, people that would keep me in check. I knew what I liked about a mentor. I like someone that can push back and isn’t going to tell me, “Atta boy,” but instead is going to tell me how to be better. Like, it’s something I get from the special operations mindset, but you don’t want to be right, you want to be better.

It’s not, “Hey, this is the way we’ve always done it.” It’s, “How can we do it better?” So, I needed that in my life as I made that transition. And because of that, man, I have the same story, I saved a lot of learning curve costs, I had support when I needed it, there were multiple times when something that now in hindsight looks like I must’ve done something right, but really it was just my mentor, or somebody who loves me and cares about me, opening doors and making something happen, right?

I think it convicts me. Like, at any given point, you have to have a mentor and you have to be a mentor. You have to be a mentor at the same time, you have to give it back. And a lot of people say, “Hey, no, I’m too young. I don’t know enough,” all these disqualifying statements. But, man, I see my seven-year old daughter mentor my five-year old son all the time. All the time. And he needs it. It helps me out.

So, it might be somebody who’s just behind you. You might be in high school, in college, you might be a project manager on the job, or you might be C-suite. It doesn’t matter. You need to be mentoring people, and you need a mentor in your life. It’s a valuable lesson that I learned early, and I’m so thankful for that, man, because it’s helped me out tremendously.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, in your book Elite: High Performance Lessons and Habits from a Former Navy SEAL it sounds like you share a number of these high-performance lessons. And I’d love to hear kind of is there a central theme or thesis that ties them all together?

Nick Hays
Right. Like, “What is it to be elite?” I named the book after a reason. We think about the SEAL teams and we think elite. It’s synonymous with it. We think about Harvard Business School, we think elite. We think about some of these professional sports teams, we think elite. So, what are some of the things that I’ve seen at all of those venues that everybody has in common?

And I think the central theme is this, like when you look up and out your window right now, every organism that you’re looking at, in fact, every organism on this planet is either growing or dying. There is no status quo. There is no staying the same. It can’t be done in nature. You’re either growing or dying. And the people who are committed to growing, to being better tomorrow than they are today, are the elite.

It’s not about having arrived, it’s about the process. It’s about the desire to be uncomfortable, to try new things, to push yourself, right? We consider ourselves kind of rock, we’re like the stone, and the only way that we’re going to become a statue, something that we would call elite, is to allow the hammer and chisel to strip away the rough edges, to strip away the stuff that doesn’t matter.

Now, that can come in the form of efficiency. It can come in the form of structure in your life and how you structure your relationships. It can come through being thankful instead of afraid. All these concepts are certainly within the book, but it all ties back to that central theme which is you must be committed to growing. And it’s going to be painful. Growing is always painful but it is better than dying.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s an interesting turn of a phrase there – growing is painful, but it’s better than dying. And that’s the only alternative. So, then I’d love to get your take on this. So, our natural inclination is to avoid discomfort, that discomfort is not something we desire, naturally speaking, for the most part. So, how does one make that shift, either globally or in one particular context or project?

Nick Hays
Right. That’s a great way to say it. You can’t play guitar without callouses on your fingers, right? If you want to get strong, you go to the gym. If you want to learn how to play a guitar, you need to build the callouses because that’s the only way that your fingers can withstand the pressure of the strings. It always starts with something small, but the small things lead to something big.

Kind of a common buzzword phrase out there is that thoughts become beliefs, beliefs become actions, and then actions become habits. So, we can’t start by looking at the habits. Yes, we want these things to be imprinted in our life, right? We want to be comfortable being uncomfortable, but the only way to get there is to start with a thought. You got to be thinking it. You got be looking for ways to challenge yourself.

Now, I tell you right now, man, if you’re intimidated by something, that is an excellent indicator that it’s exactly what you should be doing. If you’re a little bit scared, if you’re a little bit intimidated, that’s a great indicator that that’s something that’s going to lead to personal growth. That thought is going to become a belief, and that belief will eventually become actions. It’s something that I am constantly trying to push myself with every day. It’s never over. And I’m a young guy. I’ve accomplished a few things at this stage of life but, man, I’m young. I’m just getting started. So, when I look at them, I go, “Okay, what’s intimidating me right now?”

So, here’s me putting my money where my mouth is. The book is obviously an example of this, and I could speak to that as well coming out with the book and what that means, how challenging that is, especially coming from a special operations background, and it definitely makes you uncomfortable. But, now, the book is out, everything is fun, it’s good doing podcasts, I’m like, “I’m comfortable. I’m good. So, I’m like check. What can I do right now? What can I do today that’s going to make me better tomorrow?”

One thing that I started thinking, with the help of a buddy, he was walking me through this, he’s like, “Why do you like doing what you’re doing? What do you enjoy about being a public speaker?” And I said, “Two things. One, getting on stage is a way for me to kind of supplement the feeling I used to have when I was jumping out of airplanes, so I like that. It’s exciting. It gives me purpose and passion and all that. But, man, I always gauge the audience by how much I can make them laugh. It’s like the only feedback that you can get when you’re speaking, right? You can’t see the impact on someone’s face but you can definitely get their laughter.”

Pete Mockaitis
Especially if the bright stage light is going.

Nick Hays
Yes, exactly, and you can’t see anything and you’re hot. So, I’m looking at this, and he goes, “Dude, why don’t you do a standup comedy set? You like making people laugh.” When he said that, I got so scared, just the mere mention of that, grabbing a microphone, getting up in front of people with the sole purpose of being funny. Because I can fall back to motivation and structure and practices, and the fact that I’ve been doing this a long time, and I know the material, right? But this is something entirely different. And it set me off kilter, I was intimidated. And I said, “You know what, that’s a great indicator that this is exactly what I should do.”

So, I reached out to a buddy of mine who’s connected with a comedy club, and a really prestigious comedy club too, actually The Comedy Store in Beverly Hills. It’s like top notch, right? And this guy is a young comic, he’s just getting started, really great guy, and I hit him up on direct message, and I was like, “Hey, man, I want to do a set. What do I need to do here?” And he goes, “Oh, meet my buddy. He does the booking for the store.” I was like, “Okay. Well, I was expecting Poughkeepsie, not L.A.” But I reached out to the guy, and he was like, “Yeah, we’d love to have you on, this and that,” so I went ahead and booked my first standup comedy special, not special, like I’m going to get up there for 10 minutes.

But I had it booked within like 15 minutes of coming up with the idea, and now I’m on the hook. Now, I have to prepare, now I have to get out there and perform, and now I’m excited again. It just injects passion back into the routine. So, that’s me putting my money where my mouth is right there. And it’s tough, man. I’m nervous. I’m scared of it but, like I said, it’s an indicator that it’s exactly what I need to be doing for personal growth. I’m going to grow as a speaker. I’m going to grow as a person. I could bomb. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter because my thoughts are becoming beliefs, and those beliefs are becoming actions.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s an interesting point you brought up there with regard to if you’re scared it’s a good indicator that it’s something worth doing because the scariness, the discomfort is associated with that growth territory unfolding. So, I’m wondering, is there any distinction between the type of fear or scary sensation that means, “Oh, yes, let’s do that,” versus, “No, this is wise, prudent, show caution, that you should not do that”?

Nick Hays
I love that. Yeah, you have to say it, right, because I always ask people, like, “Is fear good or bad? Is fear a good thing or a bad thing?” And most people will say, “Well, it depends,” and that’s the only appropriate answer. It depends. You consider the cavemen back in the day, and they’re looking around, like if you’re not afraid of the saber-toothed tiger—now, I don’t know if there’s saber-toothed back then—but, you know, the threat. If you’re not afraid of that, then maybe you’re not going to sleep in the cave, maybe you’re not going to roll a rock in front of it, maybe you’re not going to take precautions in your life and contingencies in your plan that are going to keep you from being destroyed.

Fear is good when it leads to positive action. But what if that same caveman was so petrified from the fear of outside that he stays in the cave and refuses to eat? Now, you have 30 days to live. Fear is bad when it leads to you being stagnant, stale, and immobilized. That’s when fear is a bad thing. Fear is a good thing when it causes you to build contingencies into your plan, and to hedge against possible threats. There’s a duality to it. It is both good and bad. And that’s something that you should always weigh when you’re trying to make these decisions, right?

“Am I improving my situation, or is my situation in decline? Am I growing or dying? Is this going to lead to an improvement or not?” And it’s that simple. So, when you’re afraid of something, ask yourself that, “Am I afraid of having this hard conversation with someone at work simply because I don’t like conflict? Or is there another implication here, something I need to be concerned of? Is there more to the story? What is the source of that fear?” And it’s simply because you don’t want conflict. Guess what? You got to do it. You have to have that conversation. The person is going to thank you for it. The relationship is going to grow. The company is going to benefit, right?

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you, yes. So, I dig what you had to say with regard to the thoughts become actions, become habits, become character, become destiny, or maybe I’m mixing from other sources. So, you’ve got a couple of little teasers in your book about how we can take control of our thoughts, become and to be tough, guard our mind. So, let’s just focus in on that. So, you’ve shared a couple tips there with regard to just one, recognizing and reinterpreting fear and being scared, so that’s great. What are some of your other best practices that you suggest for professionals who are looking to gain some additional control over their thoughts?

Nick Hays
Yeah, that’s really good. Intimidation, I think, can be a bad deal. Sometimes we want something professionally that we’re not quite there. Like, if I want to be a powerlifter and I want to jump under 300 pounds on the bench press, and I haven’t trained for it, I will be crushed by the 300 pounds. That’s the business professional who wants to be CEO, like, dude, you’ve got a long way to go. Don’t focus on the end, right?

One thing that helped me get through some of our training, SEAL training, there’s this portion of it, the selection process, it’s called Hell Week. So, in Hell Week, it’s a tremendous goal. You want to get through this week, it’s by far the biggest crucible on the road to becoming a Navy SEAL. And during that week, you don’t sleep for like five and a half days, you’re putting on somewhere close to 200 miles, you’re lifting logs with your buddies, running with boats on your head, getting like close to hypothermia by sitting in the water until you’re just freezing cold, and people quit all the time. People quit all the time.

And sometimes I’ll ask people, “Hey, what day do you think? If it starts on Sunday and ends on Friday, what day do you think they’re going to quit?” And a lot of people say, “Oh, like Thursday.” But, no, man, I mean, it’s upfront. On Monday, when you’re looking at Friday, that’s too far away. You’re already too miserable. You’re going to start telling yourself that you can’t make it. If you focus on the end, the outcome, instead of the process of how you’re going to get there, it will undermine you.

So, one of the tricks that they actually taught us while we were there, they actually gave us the answers, which was cool, was to make bigger things small, right? So, if I’m looking at the end of the week, it’s not going to work for me, but how can I break that down into smaller more attainable segments that I can actually deal with mentally? One of those tricks was, “Hey, think about your next hot meal.” They feed you really well in that program. They feed you really well because you’re burning so many calories. So, if I can just think, “Hey, I just got to the next meal.” Now, it’s going to be nice and warm in there, I’m with my buddies, we’re telling jokes, get a little bit of reprieve from the action, right?

But there’s times when that next meal is too far away. It’s too far away. I need something better. Like, if I’m sitting there in the water and I’m just feel like I’m dying in the water, I could tell myself, “Hey, I just have to get to the next evolution. If I can just get to back on land when we’re running around and everything else, then I’ll warm up. My body is going to warm up.” And it works.

But sometimes, still, it’s just not enough. Like, log PT is a portion where you’re lifting telephone poles up over your head and stuff and it’s pretty crazy. Well, at times, your shoulders are so full of lactic acid and you’re just dying, and you’re thinking, “Man, I can’t lift this thing one other time.” Well, you can break it down even smaller, and say, “Hey, they can’t work shoulders forever. They’re going to have to work legs soon or we’re going to experience casualties, right? All I have to do is get to legs. Get to legs.”

You could break that all the way down to, if you’ve ever done an intense mountain climb, like one more step, one more step. Break it down to a level that you can actually accomplish than what you’re trying to accomplish, because then, mentally, you get a win, and then you get a win, and then you get a win, and now you’re a winner.

It doesn’t matter how far away this goal is anymore. Man, you’re a winner and you’re crushing this thing, right? I think that’s one of the best things that you can do. So, how do you apply that to your professional life, right? Kind of like, okay, you’re writing a book, “I want to be a published author, so how do I accomplish that?” It’s too much. It’s too much to look at. If you look at the end, at the outcome, instead of the process, it’s going to lead to fear and you’re never going to put pen to paper. You can’t do it. You have to break that down, and say, “Hey, here’s what I can do today that’s going to ultimately get me to my goal.” Break it down in smaller and more attainable goals.

Like, “Hey, all I need today is to write for an hour. That’s all I have to do.” That’s like taking one more step, right? And then you get a win. You made a mental contract with yourself, and you kept it. If I said, “Hey, I’m going to write for eight hours a day,” and then I learn a thing or two, and I’m like, “That’s not how inspiration works,” I can readjust. It’s important. Stay there for eight hours, don’t lie to yourself. But once you check that box, say, “Okay, I’ve got to reassess. I think at three hours I felt pretty good, so I think I can accomplish three hours.” So, you adjust that goal. But now you’re still moving towards…

Like, I didn’t know how painful it would be to go through a developmental editor during the writing process when I started writing, and I’m glad that I didn’t know that because that was, by far, the most painful part of the process. When you develop this baby, and then hand it over to someone, and their entire job is to rip it apart, it’s painful. It hurts your pride. You’re going to try to get the person fired. It’s rough, man, but that’s exactly what the book needs. That’s taking the stone, putting hammer to chisel to the stone and removing the rough edges. That’s exactly what’s going to create the statue that you’re looking for, the elite image that you’re looking for.

But you can’t think about that when you’re freewriting. You just have to free-write. And then once you’re in the developmental editing process, check, I can break that down into smaller and more attainable goals and just chuck up a win after win after win. We could apply that to any scenario in business or in your home life, in your professional development, in your personal development, in your physical development. It just works.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that’s really inspiring and transformational, I think, if you can really digest and internalize that. And so, I guess what I’m thinking, in order to make that really count such that, okay, you took one more step, therefore you are a winner, like you have accomplished the goal of one more step. I think that there’s also a mental thing that can occur, it’s like, “Well, yeah, but that wasn’t really much of anything. It was just one more step.” So, how do you like genuinely, I guess, celebrate, or commemorate, or make real and present to yourself on the inside that, “Yeah, that was a real victory and it’s worth something, and I’m more of a winner as a result of that even though it was tiny”?

Nick Hays
I’m so glad that you said that, that is the perfect question, especially for me because that’s something I struggle with daily. I don’t have that figured out. I do it to myself all the time and here’s kind of how that thought process works for me. I’ll be like, “Yeah, I made it through SEAL training but I got rolled back. I couldn’t even swim. Yeah, I became a Navy SEAL, but I didn’t really get to do exactly what I wanted to do, so I ended up contracting and doing more of that.”

“Yeah, I contract but then I got hurt pretty quick, ended up busting my back up and had to get a surgery. But, yeah, I went to business school, but at the same time it was kind of a hybrid, didn’t even have to take my GMATH, no big deal. Yeah, I worked with a professional sports team, they went to the Super Bowl, but they didn’t even win. I mean, they didn’t, you know. Yeah, I went to Harvard but, I mean, really, come on, you know. I don’t even know how they let me in there. Yeah, I wrote a book.”

And by the end of it, and you start looking at it, like, “Dude, I did a lot of amazing things. Why am I disqualifying everything that I’ve done mentally? Like, how do I just sit back and resonate in the fact that none of those things came easy between every bullet point on that resume. The resume looks sick, right? But I just know myself so well, and between every single one of those bold bullet points came a thousand failures, a thousand setbacks, me talking trash to myself and listening to that little demon sitting on my shoulder, right? All these things.”

And I can take joy and pride in the fact that I didn’t let that stop me, and I just kept moving forward. See, that’s taking a process that resulted in the success and celebrating the process. And, now, I can apply that process further in my life. I’m pretty much quoting Carol Dweck right now in that book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. I know I’m not supposed to talk about other people’s books when I’m talking about mine, but I’m a reader and so I do it all the time.

But, yeah, she’s talking about the growth mindset versus the fixed mindset. When you can celebrate a process instead of the outcome, then your identity is built around finding new ways to do things, not having done everything a certain way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I really dig that. And I think what’s so fun for listeners, if they’re hearing the, “Yeah, but…” and just laughing at how absurd it sounds, it’s great because I recognize some of myself in that. I remember I did a triathlon and, first, it was like, “Yeah, but it’s just a sprint, it’s not a triathlon. It’s not a real triathlon.” And then I did a full Olympic distance triathlon, I was like, “Yeah, but my ITB Band was hurting so I was walking during part of the run, so I didn’t really do a triathlon if a part of it was walking.” And it’s just like, “Well, time out, like that’s nuts.”

Nick Hays
It is nuts.

Pete Mockaitis
I did all that prep, or it’s like, “Oh, yeah, I wrote two books but I self-published them, so that doesn’t really count,” and all these things, “Yeah, my podcast has 7 million downloads, but I just had lucky break randomly getting some iTunes rankings for no discernible reason early on.” And it’s sort of like it’s nuts, and I’m trying to kind of pinpoint the specific absurdity or fallaciousness, if that’s a word, of it. And I think it’s kind of like it sort of discounts all of your efforts and attention and labor and gives 100% of the credit to the opportunity or the exception, like you didn’t have to take the GMATH, whatever. I’m sure that the program that you did assumed that you were super awesome already and, thus, the GMATH was unnecessary, so it still counts. So, I don’t know, I’m just thinking real time here, how’s that rubbing you?

Nick Hays
Yeah, I’m thinking about it too, and I think it’s important to recognize that any given moment in time, we kind of have two selves, there’s two selves. There’s your experiencing self and your remembering self. The experiencing self is always reading and reacting and moving forward. That’s the person that’s looking out the windshield, driving the vehicle, “I see red lights in front of me, I break.” It’s constantly reading, reacting, and moving forward. And then you have your remembering self, essentially the rear-view mirror, right?

For some reason, when we’re experiencing something, we’re constantly taking information on board because it’s necessary for survival, and then we put it into action immediately. But then, when that moment gets categorized into the remembering self, we go back and we pull out the information again that’s going to lead to our ultimate survival.

So, for some reason, that can lean us to go negative with some things because we want to learn, we want to grow, we want to challenge ourselves. And I think, one, knowing that that’s what’s happening I think can set you free, and then, two, figuring out how to combat the specific enemy there and that little disqualifier that says, “Yeah, but, yeah, but.” If you know that that’s coming, you can take proactive stance in your mind, like, “No, I refuse that. This was something that worked out well.” And say it to yourself and practice it, right? Practice that and, eventually, that thought will become a habit.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that, “No, I refuse that.” That’s a good one. And we also had a great tip from this Stanford psychologist, BJ Fogg, who was talking about tiny habits, and how it’s so important when you’re doing little something to celebrate. One way or another, you’d just be like it could be dorky, or cheesy, or corny, give yourself a high five. Sometimes I will say, “Flawless victory” like on a Mortal Kombat video game,” and to just take a moment to feel good about what happened, just reinforces that so you’re all the more likely to do it as opposed to beating  yourself up for, “I said I was going to write for an hour, but it’s really only 56 minutes because I had an urgent phone call.” It’s like, I don’t know, to whoever beats himself up, I encourage you to be forgiving. The science is there that you’re better off that way.

Nick Hays
Yeah, the world’s mean enough, you don’t have to be mean to yourself. Like, you deserve better. You deserve better. And I think thankfulness is really, really the key. Like, going back to when I was in Hell Week, I remember using that as a tool to where the sun is going down, and you’re sitting there in the cold water, knowing it’s going to be a long night, well, I wanted to be a SEAL my entire life. And I remember smelling the air and feeling the wind and just thinking, “Man, I’m finally here. I’ve been trying to get here for so long, I’m so thankful, man.”

I was so thankful that I didn’t have room for the negativity to creep in. It made me resilient. And I think that’s something that we can practice for the rest of our lives, is when you start feeling those disqualifiers, instead maybe look at it through a different lens, and say, “Man, I’m so thankful that I have that experience. I’m thankful that that person stood up for me when I needed it. I’m thankful that my body didn’t fail me and I was able to get that done. I’m thankful that my ITB Band gave me some trouble because now I can adjust my training and be better. Like, good, I’m glad that happened. Let’s move on.”

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Well, I’m particularly struck by your ability to summon the gratitude and thankfulness right there in the moment. That’s pretty cool in terms of you saying, “I’m finally here.” And so, that’s really nifty to hit that, and I wonder how you can sort of systematize that. I’ve heard one person suggest you ask the question, “What’s great about this?” when you’re in a pickle, and that can sort of reorient your attention to things that you can be grateful for like “You’re finally there.”

And I guess you could say that even if, geez, I’m imagining terrible scenarios, like what if my kids were in the hospital like fighting for their lives, right? I guess you could be grateful that you have those children, that you have formed such a loving bond, that this matters a lot to you. And I guess it also speaks to the power of the imagination and visualization right now because I’m kind of tearing up because this is completely fictitious scenario that I am dreaming up. But you can find that gratitude just about anywhere.

Nick Hays
Well, I love your level of empathy there to where you put a face on it, and there’s someone out there who’s going through exactly that, and who needs to hear it. So, yeah, it’s good to understand the gravity of a situation, and, “Hey, if this works.” We’re talking about beating ourselves up even when things are going good. But, yeah, what if legitimately life happens to you? What if you’re on your back and you don’t know how to get up? What works then? If it’s this hard when everything is good when you’re in the meadow, how do you handle the mountain top? How do you handle the climb? How do you handle the brutality of the environment?

And I went through a situation that made me really think about some stuff, man. When I was contracting, working overseas, I loved it. I loved it. I was having a great time with it. I was exactly where I wanted to be. My schedule was pretty ridiculous. I was doing my two months on, two months off. So, me and my wife bought a 35-foot RV and we started cruising around, just everything was good, man. And then life happened to me, and I hurt my back. I ended up having to get a L5S1 fusion and I would never work in that capacity again.

I came home, the doctor told me that things were changing, and I had to go into surgery, and it took a solid two years to recover. They advertised six months; they’re lying to you. I lost my physicality. I didn’t want to be addicted to opioids so I got off those within a few weeks. But then I started drinking, so I was masking it with drinking. Now, nothing bad happened, I was able to pull away from that too, but, still, I’m sitting here. I lost my physicality. I looked terrible. I lost my purpose in life. I lost my passion. I had no vision moving forward, and I had to completely redefine myself.

Life gave me a couple of heavies. And there were some other stuff, that I won’t get into, at the time that fortunately didn’t involve my family. That probably would’ve been the kick to the groin that could’ve taken me to the floor, but my wife was there for me, and there with me, and we kind of suffered together. And I didn’t know what to do, and that’s kind of the best thing that ever happened to me.

Like, now when I’m looking back, it’s kind of like when I talk a lot about mountain climbing obviously. But when you’re climbing up a trail and there’s all these switchbacks, sometimes you can talk trash that you won’t make it. Like, “What are you doing? It’s right there. Why don’t we just go right there?” And you’re following these bends and switchbacks, you’re like, “Man, I don’t get it.” And then you get to the top, and you look back, and you see where the trail had made mud, you see that that switchback kept you from that chasm, you’re about to walk off a cliff, and it saved you time and pain.

That’s how it is for me looking back at that scenario specifically because there’s a saying, right, like, “That which I love will destroy me.” I think it applies really well to veterans because it’s a lot of fun belonging to a tribe, having a brotherhood, a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose. It goes a long way. And I don’t think that I would’ve seen it. I think I would’ve stayed with it. But because it was taken away from me, I have a better relationship with my wife, around more for my kids, enable to imprint on them. I’ve started going a different direction professionally that is really next level. I’m starting to see, like, “What can I actually accomplish? What can I do even if my identity has changed?” It’s the best thing that ever happened to me.

And I was fortunate that I was able to redefine that purpose, and said, “Okay, what was it that kept me going? What was it that I enjoyed about what I was doing?” And it always came back to this, to empathy, the desire to help others be better, the desire to teach. I actually loved being an instructor. When I was an instructor for a little while in the military, I always really enjoyed that stuff, and I said, “Okay, well, that’s something that I can look forward with. How do I develop that?” And then a buddy of mine actually reached out to me and was like, “Hey, do you want to join me on this? Let’s go talk to a company.”

So, I went and talked to a company. Like, four weeks later, I was working with the Miami Heat basketball team. And I was like, “Wow, I can actually do this. This is something.” And it injected me with that passion, with that fire. I was able to redefine my identity but stayed true to the purpose that had been consistent the whole time. Life happened to me, and I said, “You know what, I’m done with that. I’m going to start happening to life. This is my turn now.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Nick, tell me, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Nick Hays
Man, I don’t know, I feel good. This is fun. I like the authenticity. This is great.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Nick Hays
Let’s see. Speaking of authenticity, I love John Madden, a great coach, John Madden. He used to say that “If you want longevity in this league, first you have to be authentic.” Now, he was talking about football but I think that works in any context. If you want longevity, if you want to play the long game, you have to be authentic. That’s where you need to start. Man, there’s more to it, right? But that’s where you need to start is that authenticity.

And, for me, I’ve really taken that to heart because now that I’m kind of getting more in public and stuff, keep in mind, my job used to be the silent professional. I used to lie to my neighbors about what I do for a living and now, all of a sudden, I’m in the public eye, doing talks, like writing books, and all the stuff. It’s weird for me. And that’s my commitment is to be authentic and to tell the truth, to be myself, and not try to paint up an image that I should do because it worked for somebody else. I think that’s something that we can all take and put into our lives. Like, “How do I discover my authentic self and then how do I unleash that out in the world?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. And how about a favorite book?

Nick Hays
I have a lot of favorite books. That’s probably the hardest question you could’ve asked me. I think one of the books that’s had the most impact in my life was Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield. He writes about the Spartans at the hot gates of Thermopylae, and how the 300 Spartans and their support were able to stop a Persian army of about two million for long enough for the country to unite. Obviously, spoiler alert here, but we’ve all seen “300.” Leonidas actually, the king, gave his life and that rallied the rest of the city states to join up and go to war together, and they crippled one of the most powerful empires in all of history.

And the way that Steven Pressfield writes it, it really shows what brotherhood looks like. It shows what a team should be. The fact that when you’re sitting there in the failings, which was their alignment when they would meet the enemy, the shield of the person next to you is what’s protecting you. Your shield is protecting the person next to you. Your shield isn’t for you. Your shield is for your brothers and sisters, for your teammates. That’s such an impactful lesson that you see time and time in that book. I highly recommend that read.

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

Nick Hays
My AirPods.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good.

Nick Hays
Seriously, I’ve been plagued by wires. I spend a majority of my time, professionally communicating, and so a lot of it is on the phone and having the ability to be somewhat mobile with that. We’re so lucky to live in a time that you and I can connect from other sides of the world. You can keep people close to you regardless of the proximity, and I take full advantage of that. I’m one of those people where you can text me, sure, but I’m probably going to call you back. I like discussing. I like speaking.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with your audiences?

Nick Hays
You know, going back to the mentorship piece, I think that’s something that everyone can see upfront. The story opens them up and they see it and practice at the highest level, and this is a great opportunity for me to kind of hit that again, and say like mentorship, you’ve got to find one, you’ve got to be one. In addition to that, I’ll take it even one step further, but the way you organize your relationships and your friends really does matter.

And one thing that I highly recommend is, yes, you have your close circle of friends, right? That group needs to be small. It’s a small group. But then, of course, you have your network, your expanding circle, right? But there’s this circle in between, that somewhere in between, or I like to call that as my personal board of advisors.

So, what I’ve done is I’ve looked for people that are as different than me as possible, and then a few people that are very similar to me, different sexes, races, anything that could be a potential silo, international, whatever it is. Like, people that I really trust and connect with that are operating at a really high level, and I ask them, I make it formal, and I’ve built this cabinet. If the president needs one, then maybe I should be doing it, too, right?

And I built this cabinet so when I’m working through something, I can bounce ideas off of people that’s going to give me a 360-degree approach to it, and it always illuminates stuff that I don’t see. Different than mentorship, but having a cabinet, having a personal board of advisors that is as diverse as possible in every sense of the word takes your game to the next level, a hundred percent.

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

Nick Hays
Yes, so on all social media, I’m NickHaysLife, EliteTeams.com that’s my company, I’m available for speaking and all that stuff. So, yeah, feel free to reach out. You can DM me too, I’ll get back to you.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Nick Hays
Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Right now, in this moment, there’s something that you could do that’s going to make you a little bit more resilient. I don’t know what that looks like, but whatever is intimidating you, whatever you’ve been holding back from, embrace that truth today. Get out there and make that happen so that you can celebrate a win. And then move into tomorrow looking for another win.

Pete Mockaitis
Nick, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks for sharing the good word and good luck on your adventures.

Nick Hays
Pete, thank you so much, man. This is fun.

Jun 14
0

451: Deploying Your Mental Energy Brilliantly with Dr. Art Markman

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Art Markman says: "You have to generate a certain amount of dissatisfaction in order to do something different."

Professor Art Markman shares insights from cognitive science research for us to be smarter every day at work.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The secret to making a great first impression
  2. The pros and cons of high energy
  3. The role of dissatisfaction in motivating yourself

About Art

Art Markman is a Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. He got his ScB from Brown University and his PhD from the University of Illinois.  Before coming to the University of Texas, Art taught at Northwestern University and Columbia University.

Art’s research explores thinking. Art is also the executive editor of the journal of Cognitive Science and is a former executive officer of the Cognitive Science Society. Art has always been interested in bringing insights from Cognitive Science to a broader audience. To that end, he writes blogs for many sites including Psychology Today and Fast Company. He consults for companies interested in using Cognitive Science in their businesses.  Art is also on the scientific advisory boards for the Dr. Phil Show and the Dr. Oz Show.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Art Markman Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Art, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Art Markman
Oh, it’s great to be talking to you today. Thanks so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think we’d have a ton of fun. And I think, first things first. I got to say I-L-L.

Art Markman
I-N-I.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. It’s great to have a fellow alum in the house. And I also understand that you play sax for a blues band. What’s the story here?

Art Markman
Yes, so, in my mid-30s I decided to take up the saxophone.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool.

Art Markman
And I’d played the piano as a kid, and realized I’d never played another instrument, because when I was 5th grade, and they demonstrated band instruments, I asked my mom if I could play the French horn, and she said, “No, we have a piano. You play the piano.” And I realized in my mid-30s it was no longer her fault. So, I took up the sax and then started playing in bands after I’d been practicing for about 10 years. And it’s great fun. It gets me out of the house in a healthy way.

Pete Mockaitis
And what are the names of the bands? I love band names.

Art Markman
So, right now, I actually transitioned to playing with a ska band, and we’re called Phineas Gage who was a 19th century railroad worker who had a spike blown through his head and lived.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. I don’t know why I know that.

Art Markman
Well, it’s just one of those random facts that once you hear it once, it tends to stick with you.

Pete Mockaitis
But didn’t he have some sort of a condition as a result of it that was studied by a lot of folks?

Art Markman
Yes. So, one of the things, so Antonio Damasio makes a lot out of this because if Phineas Gage seemed to have trouble actually connecting the emotional experience of his life with the cognitive experience. And so, it was easy to take advantage of him because that little spidey sense that goes off in most of us when we’re dealing with somebody who’s a little shady didn’t seem to affect him.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Well, cognitive science is your cup of tea, and you, indeed, like to talk about applying it, too, in your latest book, Career Advancement. Could you maybe orient us a little bit to what exactly does the term cognitive science mean, and what are some kind of key concepts that make a world of difference in career advancement?

Art Markman
Yeah. So, cognitive science, it goes beyond mere psychology to say that if we’re going to understand something as complex as a mind, we need to understand the science of behavior, that’s where psychology comes in, but also how brains work, so neuroscience. It’s useful to have some computation to think through how we might build an intelligent machine, and so robotics and computer science come in, as well as culture so you get some anthropology, and linguistics to understand how language functions.

And so, when you take that much broader-based perspective, you get all of these different insights into the way the mind works. And I’m sort of a native-born cognitive scientist. My undergraduate major was actually cognitive science. And one of the things that that does is it allows you to get more perspective on why you think the way you do.

I like to point out that almost everybody I know has a mind and almost nobody knows how that mind works. And, yet, if you learn about the way your mind works, it can help you to do the things that you do more effectively. For example, one of the things that I talk about in the new book is it has to do with the way that you present yourself in a resume, that you might think, “Well, I should jam every conceivable positive thing into my resume that I can find,” under the assumption that people are adding together the total amount of goodness about you. But it turns out that when people actually look at a resume, they are averaging.

And so, if you put on something that’s good but not great, you could actually lower your average a little bit. And so, if you’ve got that honorable mention for a prize, yeah, you might want to think twice about whether you want to include that because it might actually bring down people’s overall evaluation of you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. And I think, in particular, when you’re trying to customize a resume to tell a story in terms of that’s really going to resonate for the recipient, as opposed to like, “This guy is all over the place,” versus, “Oh, this guy is a real pro and exactly the things I want him or her to be a pro at.”

Art Markman
Exactly right. So, you really want to understand the mind, not only your own mind, but the minds of the people who are going to be evaluating you so that you can be as effective as possible at impressing them.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s handy, yes. So, we’re going to talk about a lot of stuff. But I’d love to kick it off by hearing what’s perhaps the most fascinating and surprising discovery you’ve made when it comes to deploying some of these cognitive science insights for career advancement?

Art Markman
So, I would say that one of the more surprising elements of this has to do, for me, with understanding values and value systems. That one of the things that you find, particularly when you start to talk to people who’ve been in the workplace for a little while, is they get dissatisfied with their careers because they realize that the things that they thought they wanted when they were 20 are not actually the things that they wanted.

And it becomes useful to begin to think about, “Well, what kinds of things do I value? Am I the sort of person who actually cares about prestige? Or do I really care about helping others and being part of my community? And am I on a track to be able to do that?” Because you may not be able to reach all of your goals and achieve all of the things that meet your values in your first job, but, at some point, you’ve got to feel like you’re making progress towards it.

And I think that a lot of people don’t take that into account until too late, and then you experience that mid-life crisis, or you think, “I’ve just wasted all of my time.” When, in fact, you can begin to do that much earlier in your career.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s fascinating. Could you share what are some key values that folks think they want and realize that they don’t kind of often?

Art Markman
Well, so, I have a number of stories in the book because I was happy enough to be able to enlist the help of people on social media. So, as I was writing the book and had all these concepts, I would just ask people questions and they would tell me their stories. And I’ll tell you two that were kind of fun.

One is a guy named Brian. He finished college and, really, took a job that was going to pay well and give him some prestige, and he actually realized that was not what he wanted at all. He left his job, went to do the Peace Corps for a while, and came back, and really focused on jobs that were going to help others. That was actually something that he ended up being passionate about.

But there are other kinds of values. There’s another story in the book about a guy who went into a session to talk about State Department jobs, and walked out of a test that they took, and other folks were laughing at this one question about, “Who would enjoy being in a warzone?” And he realized, actually, he wanted that. He responded positively to that question. He realized that adventure was a very important value for him, and he ended up fashioning a career that put him in a lot of dangerous places, but it was utterly exhilarating to him.

So, some of us want enjoyment and adventure, and some people want stability and they want to know where their next paycheck is coming from. Some people want to be helpful, and some people really want to look out for themselves. And all of those things across the population are values that people hold. We get some of those from the culture around us, but, particularly in the United States, we’re given a lot of opportunity to really decide for ourselves how we want to live our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And so, you lay out Shalom Schwartz who crafted a set of values with 10 universal values there from power, and achievement, and hedonism, and stimulation, self-direction, universalism, benevolence, conformity, tradition, security. That was fast.

Art Markman
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
No need to dig into every one of them. But it’s intriguing, you say that there’s a couple of ways you can go about clarifying your own values and what’s most potent for you. And what are those?

Art Markman
Well, the very first thing you want to do is actually to be aware of them, to be aware that there are these values, and to begin to ask, to what degree do these resonate with you. And there are scales that you can take. I’m actually going to be putting one up online for people who read the book if they want to actually test themselves against these values.

But one of the things I think is important is periodically, throughout your career, not every week by any means, but maybe on that yearly basis, to ask yourself, “Well, how am I doing? Do I feel like I am doing the kinds of things in my work life often enough that I am making progress towards those kinds of goals? Or do I feel like my values are not being reflected at all in the work that I’m doing?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really resonating for me as I’m thinking about my first job that resembled a professional job. There was an internship at Eaton Corporation, which I’ve not heard of but is a Fortune 500 company, it’s a diversified industrial manufacturer. And I remember, as I wrapped up that internship, I thought, “You know what? This was pretty cool in terms of I learned some things, my brain got tickled and challenged a little bit, there were some great people I enjoyed sort of seeing regularly, and I got home at a decent hour. And, yeah, option was there to return.”

But I remember walking away, thinking, “You know, I think that this company could provide me a satisfying stable kind of a career,” but I really wanted a thrilling one. And so, I went with strategy consulting after graduation. And then after some years of that, I thought, “You know what? I want more autonomy. And I want maybe in-between 40 hours and 65 hours, somewhere in that zone would probably be better at that phase.”

And so, it definitely connects that both of those opportunities were great, and it’s just about seeing what’s the best fit for you and life, and what’s going on.

Art Markman
And it can change over time as well. Later in the book, I talk a little bit about another guy who, early on, was focused on developing that career and having that very stable career, but also one that had a certain amount of achievement in it. Then, in the middle of his career, his wife got sick, and he needed to really back off and put his value on his family and on taking care of his wife and his kids.

And then, later in his career, after he went back to work, after she got healthy again, and had some success, and engaged those values again, and then decided he wanted to really help others, and actually left the practice of law and ended up running a non-profit for a while. And so, you get these shifts over time sometimes as a result of life circumstances, and sometimes just as a result of changes in perspective as you see more things in your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Well, we’ve already kind of gotten into some of the meat of it, but maybe to zoom out for a moment, what would you say is kind of the main thesis or big idea behind this book you got here, “Bring Your Brain to Work”?

Art Markman
Yeah, so the idea is that if you think about your career, which is bigger than any individual job, it’s that collection of things that you truly contribute as a result of the work that you do, and has this cycle of looking for a job and getting it, then succeeding at it while you’ve got it, and then considering whether to move on or move up. That that cycle can be really informed, no matter where you are in your career, can be informed by understanding more about your mind and the minds of other people.

And that this is stuff that we don’t really ever learn in class. And most people, when they hit mid-career, realize that very little of what allowed them to succeed at work was something that they learned in a class in school. And so, part of what I’m trying to do in the book is to bring more of the research around cognitive science to help people to learn some of those things that are critical for career success that they probably didn’t get in a class.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, excellent. Well, thank you. We appreciate that effort in the world. And so, let’s dig into some of the stuff then. We talked a bit about zeroing in on what you value and figuring out how a job might align to that. But you’ve also got some pro tips in terms of acquiring the job using cognitive science insights. Like in the midst of an interview, how do you figure out kind of where the interviewer’s head is at, and what they might love?

Art Markman
Yeah. So, one of the things that fascinate me about interviews is a lot of people walk into that interview focused almost exclusively on, “I have to impress the interviewer. I need this job, and I want them to think great thoughts about me at the end.” And, of course, that’s not irrelevant. You want to go into the interview well-prepared so that you’re able to really talk authoritatively about yourself and about the way that you would fit with the company, which means you need to know something about the company.

But what a lot of people don’t do effectively is to realize how much they can learn about the organization that they’re interviewing with as a result of that interview process. So, if you get totally stumped on a question, you might think to yourself, “Well, that’s it. I’ve screwed this up completely.” But, actually, it gives you this opportunity to engage in a conversation with the interviewer and to get a real sense of, “Is this a company that actually wants to support me, that wants me to learn, that wants me to help, to think the way that they think?”

And to the extent that the interviewer actually digs in and works with you to walk your way through an interview question, they may be telling you something about their willingness to help to mentor you and to train you, and for you to understand that this is a company that doesn’t necessarily think you need to be fully formed on day one in order to succeed. On the other hand, if the company just brushes you off for not knowing the answer to a question, then, well, their communicating something completely different, right?

And so, you should be paying attention to that from the beginning to really understand, “What am I learning about this organization?” through the interview process, frankly, through the negotiation process as well, where they’re communicating a lot about what they value in the way that they treat you when you are trying to negotiate salary and benefits and things like that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. Well, that’s a great point there, is to, first of all, to broaden my question a bit. It’s not just about impress, impress, impress. It’s a two-way street. You’re picking up intelligence on their side, like, “Is this a good fit? Do you like the way they work it?” But then back to the wowing side of things, when you are putting half of the attention on that side of the equation, what are some things that do some of the wowing or help you sense what they’re really feeling?

Art Markman
Yeah, so one of the fascinating things about the interview is, more than anything else, companies are trying to figure out whether they want to work with you, because they’ve already brought you in, which means they’ve looked at your materials, they feel like you have potential qualifications for the job. And so, now, they’re trying to envision how you fit in.

And so, part of what you want to do is to really engage. So, yes, you need to be prepared but, at some point, you need to really have a conversation. Give those interviewers a chance to have a sense of what it would be like to have you as a colleague. But to do it by putting that best foot forward, every once in a while, you think to yourself, “Well, do I really have to put on an act for them? Do I have to be really my best self?” And the answer is yes. You don’t want necessarily need to show every single quirk in the interview. Right, exactly. Those things that people will find charming eventually. Maybe get them to learn to love you first.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve got plenty of quirks, Art, that’s why I’m laughing over here.

Art Markman
And so do I, right? And it’s fine. I think quirks are part of what makes us interesting in the long run. But in the short term, you want to put that best foot forward. And I think, really, believe in what’s called the halo effect. So, the better the first impression that someone gets of you, the more charitably that they interpret every other thing that you do, because every behavior that you exhibit in the world is ambiguous, right?

Are you brash and arrogant? Or are you confident and assertive, right? Well, those could manifest themselves with almost identical behaviors. But if I like you already, I’m going to think of you as confident. And if I don’t like you from the beginning, I’m going to think that you are kind of an arrogant jerk. And so, you really want to come out initially with creating the best possible impressions socially that you can in order to get people to feel like you’d be somebody that they really want to work with.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, in terms of some of the details for how that’s done, I imagine there are some basic fundamentals, like smile, make eye contact, engage, listen, shower.

Art Markman
Shower is good, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Put on some clothes that aren’t stained and wrinkled. But are there any sort of like cognitive science secrets that are some huge do’s or don’ts when it comes to making a great impression?

Art Markman
Yeah, one of them is it’s not just smile. It’s, bring the amount of energy and enthusiasm that you want that person to feel later. So, one of the things we know about conversation is that people tune to each other, even down to the level of the pitch of your voice.

Pete Mockaitis
Really?

Art Markman
Yeah, absolutely. Really, yes, they do. And if people are laughing, right, or smiling, then if one person is doing it, the other person is doing it. They will even mimic facial expressions, and if one person crosses their arms, eventually the other one is going to do it.

And so, if you’re trying to generate energy and enthusiasm, because that will ultimately be interpreted by the interviewer as enjoyment. The fact is that the higher your degree of energy, the more invested you are motivationally in something.

And so, if you come in really flat, then you’re going to get a flat evaluation later because the interviewer is going to mimic your flatness, and you’re going to end up just it’s going to be a mediocre evaluation at the end. But if you come in with energy and enthusiasm, you will create energy. And that energy actually now feeds back into the evaluation that you get.

So, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. And so, you need to bring the energy that you want the interviewer to have, particularly because many times you’re working with somebody who may be a recruiter, or a hiring manager, who might be doing 15 interviews. And so, if you don’t bring it, well, they don’t need it, right? They’re doing a ton of these all day. So, you’ve got to make sure that you create the atmosphere that you want.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, Art, I think that I am one of those people, I don’t know how if I’m in the majority or the minority here, that could overdo it with regard to the energy, like, “Whoa, that’s a little too much. Like, are you, I don’t know, a clown, or a motivational speaker?” Like, how do we think about when is it too much?

Art Markman
Well, honestly, I don’t think that the energy level can be too much. But I do think that you have to be careful when you’re energetic to still stay on topic. So, one of the things that a high level of energy can do is to allow you to overcome your filter, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Oh, certainly.

Art Markman
One of the things that we know motivationally is that we have in our motivational system what you can think of as a go system that drives you to do things, and then a stop system that gets you to inhibit things that your go system says you should do that on sober reflection might not be such a good idea. And the more that you overload that go system, which is something you can do when you give yourself a tremendous amount of energy, the more you can override the breaks which can potentially cause you to say something that you probably shouldn’t have said in an interview.

And so, the danger with too much energy is not so much the impact that it’s likely to have on the interviewer, so much as the likelihood that it’s going to cause you to do or say something that probably was not a great idea.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a good thought there, certainly. So, I imagine, so long as you’re keeping like your volume and gestures like within a normal reasonable human dimension, and you’re not just disclosing crazy things. I heard a story of a person who interviewed someone who said, “Hey, how are you doing?” He said, “Not well.” And then he went on to share quite the story of how his girlfriend threw him out of their apartment, and his clothes were thrown out of the window, and he was trying to figure out a place to, I don’t know, get a suit cleaned or something in the middle of the night. And he was like, “Okay, this is uncomfortable now.”

Art Markman
Right. I think the correct answer there would’ve been, “Fine.”

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Exactly. Okay. So, that’s handy. So, great energy but not so much that you      are doing unwise things and short-circuiting the stop system there. Well, now, let’s say you got the job, and you want to apply some of these cognitive science insights to, let’s say, communicate, collaborate, interact with your colleagues and clients better. What are some of your favorite do’s and don’ts there?

Art Markman
Yeah, so one of the things to watch out for in the modern environment is that we do so much discussion with our colleagues that is mediated by text, whether it’s email, or instant messages, or Slack, or any one of these ways of communicating just through the words alone being sent through the ether.

And the problem is, human communication is really optimized because of our evolutionary history for a small number of people interacting face to face in real time. And the further away that we get from that ideal, the harder it is for us to communicate effectively with our colleagues. And that means that if you’re going to do most of your communication with your colleagues via text, you need to go out of your way to create a certain amount of facetime with them in order to establish a relationship so that they can read the tone of what you say more effectively.

Because if I need your help with something, and I poked my head into your office, or over your cubicle wall, or whatever it is, and I say, “Listen, man, would it be all right, could you possibly make some copies for me right now? I’m running late, I’d really appreciate it.” You can make a request of someone that imposes on their time and still demonstrates to them through the words that you use and your tone of voice and the look on your face that you understand what a big imposition it is, and that you deeply appreciate what they’re doing.

When you say the same thing over text, it comes across as cold and as demanding. And so, unless they can hear your voice in their head, then you’re actually going to end up sabotaging some number of your relationships just because of the overuse of this kind of text. So, we have to find ways to create that kind of facetime.

And, as it turns out, that is often more efficient because things that can take you 10 minutes going back and forth by email or instant message, can actually often be resolved in about four seconds of real conversation.

Pete Mockaitis
And I love what you had to say there with regard to give them lots of experiences of the facetime, and then they can imagine in their own mind’s eye and ear what your facial expressions are looking like and what your voice is sounding like. This reminds me when I was consulting. We had this client and we kept getting these emails back. We asked about, “Hey, we want some data like this.” And then the client sent back some things. And we’re like, “Oh, actually, hey, thank you. But we’d really kind of want it like this.”

And then she sent something back and had some red-letters in it, like, “Oh, man, she’s angry.” And then we thought, “Why don’t we just pay her a visit?” And it was like, “Hey, what’s going on? We really appreciate you taking the time to help us, think through it, share these things. We’re trying to accomplish this and it’d be really awesome if it’s possible to do that.” She’s like, “Oh, yes, absolutely. Certainly, I can get that to you this afternoon.” Just like the sweetest thing.

Art Markman
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
And like, “Oh, thank you.” And then it’s like it just sort of reinterpreted every email that we were like sweating over. It’s like, “Oh, I guess maybe red is just a clear means of delineating and separating that text from the original email text in black or blue, as opposed to, “I’m furious at you.” And it was quite the lesson. Yeah, eyes opened.

Art Markman
Yeah, and we’ve gotten out of the habit of doing that. We think, somehow, it’s easier to be doing everything mediated by text. So, I really think that making sure that you create that relationship, I think, is just critical for success.

Pete Mockaitis
And we had Dr. Nick Morgan, a famed communications consultant, on the show earlier. He said one great phrase used often in like a phone call or sort of less rich exchange is, “How do you feel about what I’ve just said?” You know, just to get real explicit, like it may not have been conveyed so let’s figure it out. It seemed pretty brilliant to me.

Art Markman
Oh, yeah. And if I could add to that, one of the places where it’s really brilliant in the modern environment is when you’re dealing with people who have a different cultural background than you do. So, we live in a world in which we may not just be working with people in another state, but they might be halfway around the world. And there are big cultural differences in what people will generally say to each other and what kinds of things they give voice to.

And sometimes you just need to be really explicit with people, including, “I need to know exactly what you think of this,” and to summarize your interpretation of a conversation just to make sure that you actually really are on the same page. Where, if you were talking to somebody you’d known for years or grew up in exactly the same culture, you might share more of the biases and the way you think about things that would allow you to communicate effectively.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that is so good. Even just the words, phrases, idioms. I was working with someone in the Philippines, and she says, “Hey, can we meet up at this time?” I was like, “Oh, yeah, sure thing.” And she emailed back, “Thanks for giving me the time of day.” I was like, “Oh, dang, I know. I know I’ve been absent. I’ve got a new baby. I’m really sorry. I mean to be more there, and available, and guiding, and developing, and coaching.” I’m really stewing it. She’s like, “Oh, no, I just meant thank you for that time.” “Yeah, oh, okay.”

Art Markman
Oh, yeah, “I do not think this means what you think it means,” yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally.

Art Markman
Yeah, that’s fantastic.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, handy communication tips. And how about for just productivity, getting the job done, motivation, distraction avoidance, what are your cognitive science insights there?

Art Markman
Well, so one of the things that I think is really important is to recognize that the best way to motivate yourself is to create a gap between where you are right now and where you’d like to be in the future, that that gap is what creates energy. And I think it’s really important for people to recognize that there are days when they feel somewhat unmotivated. And part of that lack of motivation is that they’re just not dissatisfied enough with the way things are right now. And that you can actually, by focusing on how the world could be better, you can actually create that kind of energy and get yourself to stick with something.

But another piece to this that’s really important is you got to learn about what the Yearkes-Dodson curve. And I love the fact that these two guys, Yearkes and Dodson, wrote a paper in 1905 that is still relevant today. And the idea behind the Yearkes-Dodson curve is that the more energy you give to a particular goal, the better your performance up to a point. And you hit a sweet spot where you have the right level of energy, or what psychologists call arousal. And that when you’re in that sweet spot, you work really effectively.

But if you get hyper aroused, or you get more and more arousal, say, the deadline is creeping ever closer, then you may find yourself slipping over the edge of this Yearkes-Dodson curve, where now additional energy actually lowers your performance because you have so much energy you can’t think straight, you’re pacing, you’re panicking.

And so, what everyone needs to learn is, “Where is my sweet spot?” because that’s what helps us to figure out, “Will I get stuff done ahead of time? Do I need to have a small thermonuclear device detonated beneath my chair before I can get anything done?” And figure out where that sweet spot is and learn to live there with your project so that you find the right level of engagement and arousal to allow you to work consistently without getting so over-aroused that you find yourself unable to make progress on important things.

Pete Mockaitis
And you know that’s interesting as you talk about the curve, and I’m imagining, “Okay, X and Y axis here, and we got more and more energy, that’s good.” And then I guess you have two much energy, it’s bad in the sense you’re panicking and, I don’t know. I guess, we had Tony Schwartz on the show earlier. We talked about energy stuff, and it almost sounds like more energy there is equating to anxiety and panic, but I guess you just call that negative, high energy but a negative type of energy. Can you have too much what he might call high positive energy in terms of, “I’m really, really, really excited about this?” Can you be too much of that?

Art Markman
Yup, you absolutely can, because even with too much positive energy, you end up pacing, right? That energy creates actual energy for you that needs to dissipate. And if you’re sitting there trying to work at your desk, and you have much bubbling positive energy that you need to pace around, you’re not being particularly productive in that moment.

And so, you find sometimes people so excited about something that they need to get up, walk around, get it out of themselves so that they can calm down and actually get work done, even when that energy is really positive.

I know, over the course of my career, I’ve had times where I felt like I had just figured something out, and in that moment when I figured it out, I couldn’t write it. I had to like quickly say it into a recorder or something, and then walk around for a while, like calm down, and then I was in a place where I could actually write about it. So, yeah, it’s overall energy level, even if it’s positive.

So, panic, obviously, it can be negative energy, but just being hyper-aroused in general creates terrible performance. And you can even see this in athletes, right? When they’re so jazzed up about something that they actually can’t coordinate their motions.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, then, with the Yearkes-Dodson curve then, is that kind of like different activities or tasks that have different curves where some things are better-suited to lower energy states and others high energy states?

Art Markman
You know, it seems to be that everyone has got a sweet spot, and that sweet spot seems to be pretty similar across tasks but different people will differ in their resting levels of arousal. So, some people are naturally very high arousal people, and so they are the ones who’d start a project six weeks before it’s due. And then there are the people who are very low arousal, who really need to have a cattle prod taken to them before they start getting anything done.

And what’s really tough is when you have a high-arousal person working with a low-arousal person, because a high-arousal person gets a whole bunch of stuff done ahead of time, and then they hand it off to the other person who does nothing with it till the last moment, sends that back to the other person 10 minutes before it needs to be submitted. And that person is a pool of jello on the floor at that point because they’re just so over-aroused by the deadline. So, you have to find ways for people to work effectively together when they have different resting levels of arousal.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have any pro tips in terms of you would like to amp up or amp down your arousal in a given moment for a task at hand? How might you do that?

Art Markman
So, to amp it up, one of the things that’s useful is to create things like false deadlines for yourself, and to do things that really say, “There’s a reason why this has to get done right now,” or, really amp up your sense of how important this is to get right.

When you’re trying, though, to calm yourself down, it really is doing the kinds of things that help you to dissipate energy, which could be going out for a walk, or it could be deep breathing exercises, right, because those are the kinds of things that will actually calm you down. And, really, what you’re doing is trying to create some sense of distance between yourself and the goal that you’re engaged with so that it feels mentally further away.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I want to talk about that next is that point you made about creating a gap between where you are and where you want to be. How is that done in practice? I imagine it boils down to, you know, how you set a goal, and maybe some of this is visualization stuff, it really is worthwhile. How do you think about creating that gap and that energy?

Art Markman
Yeah, so there’s a lot of really nice work in psychology, some of it done by Gabriele Oettingen that talks about, essentially, the role of creating fantasies, and not in the kind of parlance that we often think about, “Oh, I’m fantasizing about this.” But, really, in the sense of creating that vision of the future, of, “Here’s what I could accomplish.” Or, frankly, sometimes, “Here’s what will go wrong if nobody does anything.”

And to really elaborate on that mentally, to think about how much better or worse the world could be, and then to explicitly contrast that with the present. So, you develop this vision of the future, and then you compare it to where you are right now. And it is that act of creating that contrast that actually generates that sense of the gap and that energy that comes along with it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Could you maybe walk us through an example there?

Art Markman
Yeah. So, for example, think about supposed you’ve kind of stagnated in your job, but you can’t really motivate yourself to go look for another one, right? Now, so what could you do? Well, one of the things you could do is to begin to think about, “Well, let me imagine a little bit more about what my ideal job would be. What are some of the tasks that I would be doing in my day-to-day life that I’m not currently able to do?” and to really envision that clearly, and then contrast that with the job I have right now, and to really begin to compare that, say, “Whoa, here are all the ways in which my current job is not ideal.”

And what that does is it generates dissatisfaction. And that dissatisfaction is motivating. So, it turns out that when you’re utterly satisfied in life, what you tend to do is fall asleep. And so, you have to generate a certain amount of dissatisfaction in order to be motivated to do something different.

Pete Mockaitis
And can you overdo it in terms of like you’re suddenly zapped of gratitude and bitter and anxious about how crappy everything is right now?

Art Markman
Well, you can overdo it but mostly the way that you overdo it is by creating gaps that are not bridgeable. So, I’m a big believer in what I call the bridgeable gap which means not only do you need a sense of the gap between present and future. You need to believe that there is a plan, a set of actions that you’re capable of performing that will get you from here to there.

And as long as you feel like you’re on a path that will help you to narrow the gap, then focusing on that gap is not a bad thing because you have agency. You believe that you are the author of your future. But when you believe that there’s no path from the present to the future, well, then, creating that gap creates that sense of bitterness and resentment because now you feel like, “Well, I’m stuck here. I have no control over the circumstance.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s great. Art, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Art Markman
You know what? Let’s take it where you want to go. Oh, I will say one thing, which is one of my favorite things that I got to do in the book, because I play the saxophone, I added a bunch of sections in the book that I called “The Jazz Brain,” which is basically focused on that ability you have to improvise. And I think it’s really important for people to understand that in order to improvise effectively, you need to know a lot.

I think a lot of times people feel like, “No, no, there’s the curse of knowledge. If I know too much I’m going to be constrained.” But the people I know in any field, whether it’s music or anything else, the people who are best able to adapt to a circumstance on the fly are actually the ones who know a ton of stuff, but are willing to apply lots of different knowledge to a situation.

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

Art Markman
I grew up in Edison, New Jersey, and that’s the place where he strung up lightbulbs. His lab was actually not in Edison or what became Edison. But Edison once said that, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” And while we could probably quibble about the percentages a little bit, I think there’s something important about this idea that a lot of our success is about the work we do.

Yeah, some people are more talented in something than somebody else is, but most of the difference in performance between people comes down to doing the right kind of work. And the reason that I’ve spent so much time in my life over the last 15 years, really trying to bring more cognitive science to other people is because I believe that the more you understand about minds, the more you can put in the right kind of work that can help you to be successful into things you want to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. And how about a favorite study or piece of research?

Art Markman
Let’s see, one of my favorite pieces of research that I talk about a lot comes from a buddy of mine named Frank Keil at Yale. He and one of his students, Leonid Rozebilt, did this set of studies on what’s called the illusion of explanatory depth, which is this idea that you believe you understand the world better than you actually understand the world. And so, they did this by having people describe various household devices that they thought they completely understood, and only to have people discover that there were significant gaps in their understanding about the way the world works.

And it turns out that this kind of knowledge about the way the way the world works, what psychologists a causal knowledge, is the stuff that allows you to do new things in new ways. And so, when you lack that knowledge, then all you can do is execute procedures in your work. You can’t really try a new thing. And if you’re unaware of what you don’t know, then it means you can’t work to improve the quality of your knowledge. So, I really find that study to have a profound impact on the way people should treat their knowledge.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Art Markman
Gosh, I love books, and there’s so many. But, lately, I’ve been reading quite a bit about small towns of different kinds. I’m just fascinated by it. I grew up, I’m an urban kid, born and raised, and I’m living in Austin, Texas right now. It’s a beautiful city. But, lately, I’ve been reading books like Our Towns, and Hillbilly Elegy, and things like that, just trying to wrap my head around what it’s like to grow up in a place very different than the one that I grew up in.

And I think that’s important, right? I think so much of the way we understand the world is by filtering it through our own experience, that it’s really important to find people who’ve characterized the world that’s different from the one that you grew up in, and whether it’s different within the country you grew up, or outside of it, as a way of helping you to recognize that not everything that you do is a human universal.

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

Art Markman
Gosh, I love word processors. And it’s a funny thing, right? I think we don’t appreciate some of the simple tools that are in front of us. But if my 7th grade teacher knew that I wrote for a living, I think she’d be in hysterics because of how much I hated writing as a kid.

But just having that ability to put stuff down, and then edit it easily, is such an important thing. I think very few people value the editing process enough. And having just a tool, whatever your word processor is, to have that in front of you to be able to edit is such an amazing thing. Because most of us look at good writing, and we think, “Wow, I could never write like that.” And what we really mean is, “I could never write like that the first time that something comes out.”

And what we don’t realize is nobody writes well when something just pops out of them. What you’re seeing is the result of getting something out, crafting it, polishing it, re-arranging it, deleting, starting over, and then you only get to see the final product. So, yeah, to me, it’s just what we’re able to do with a simple word processor is just, to me, absolutely amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite habit?

Art Markman
Favorite habit in the workplace. It would have to be that when I come into work, I triage my email. I answer the three emails that absolutely have to be answered, and then I shut my email off for a half hour and do something else that matters. Because I do believe that people take a tremendous amount of pride in their work, but I don’t think anyone looks back over the last year, and says, “The most important thing I did was to send these 18,471 emails.”

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And is there a particular nugget that you share that really seems to connect and resonate with readers and students?

Art Markman
Obviously, I think a lot of things are a matter of personal taste. But I think this recognition that we have a go system that drives us to act, and then a fallible stop system that prevents us from doing things effectively, because we are not good at stopping something that that go system has engaged. And that when you want to be productive, your job in life is to reprogram that go system towards habits whose accumulated impact will create the contribution you want.

To me, understanding that and living your life knowing that the best way to be effective is to reprogram that go system, is something that I think when people internalize, that changes the way that they go about their work.

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

Art Markman
So, you can find me pretty easily on social media. I love to have people finding the stuff that I write. I try to give away as much as I can. So, I write for Psychology Today, for Fast Company, for Harvard Business Review. I certainly would love for people to pick up my books. But you can find out all of the stuff that I’m writing on Twitter and LinkedIn. I have an author page on Facebook. I have a website smartthinkingbook.com that has information about all of my books, and I also post a few blog entries and things up there. So, all of those are places where people can find me.

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

Art Markman
Yeah, I think that the most important thing that you can do is to recognize that it is always about what you’re going to learn next, that no one is completely ready for the job that they have. And as I said to my oldest son when he was first going out on the job market, I said, “If you’re completely prepared for the job you applied for, you aimed too low.”

And so, we should think about our work lives as a constant opportunity for growth and challenge. And that when you do that, when you look for the next thing that you can learn, then it continues to open up new worlds and new possibilities. Because, as I say at the very end of the book, bumper sticker wisdom tells us that no one on their deathbed says that they wish that they’d spent another day at the office.

But, honestly, the people I know who look back on their careers with fondness are the ones who feel like they’ve really accomplished something over the course of their years, and they are justifiably proud of the work that they did.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you for that. That’s nice. Nice thought. Nice final words. Art, this has been a lot of fun. I wish you and the book “Bring Your Brain to Work” lots of luck and keep on doing the good stuff.

Art Markman
Well, thanks, Pete. It’s a pleasure talking with you today.

Jun 12
0

450: Spy Secrets of Influence from Former CIA Officer Jason Hanson

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Jason Hanson says: "When you show somebody you care about them... they want to help you."

Jason Hanson shares his intelligence operation secrets to “recruiting” people and convincing them to say yes.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The CIA’s SADR cycle and how it applies to the workplace
  2. Why research and authenticity are integral to successful influence
  3. How to advocate for your case at work

About Jason

Jason is a former CIA officer. After leaving the CIA, Jason became the Founder and CEO of Spy Escape & Evasion (www.spyescape.com), a company that teaches men and women how to be safe using Spy Secrets that 99% of Americans will never know.

In 2014, Jason won a deal on ABC’s hit Reality Series, Shark Tank and opened, “Spy Ranch,” a 320-acre facility to teach Evasive Driving, Pistol and Rifle Shooting, Intelligence Operations, Cyber Security and more.

Jason regularly appears as a Keynote Speaker at corporate events, conferences and conventions worldwide. Jason has appeared on The NBC Today Show, Dateline, Rachael Ray, Fox & Friends, and more. Jason has been interviewed by Forbes, NPR and The Huffington Post among others.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Jason Hanson Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jason, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Jason Hanson
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to dig into your stuff. I mean, you’ve got a fun angle. And I imagine you’re probably not going to give me any really cool stories from your time in the CIA because I’ve pressed before with Navy Seals on the show but they never gave up the goods, so good patriots you all, you guys. So, maybe you could give us a fun story about being on Shark Tank.

Jason Hanson
Well, Shark Tank was a wonderful opportunity, it was a huge blessing because, before, I was doing a lot of consulting to corporations and Shark Tank kind of opened me up to the masses and introduced me to the everyday person, if you will, so it was a great thing. I can tell you one funny quick story. I recorded right after Diamond Dallas Page, he was the wrestler who did his yoga thing, and I just remember getting back after I did my recording and hearing a bunch of screaming and yelling between people. I remember thinking, “Huh, maybe his presentation didn’t go so well.” Fortunately, mine did and, again, it was a fun ride. I had a good time.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so curious. So, I’ve seen the show many times, but are there any surprises, like, “Hey, you must not expect this, viewer, as you’re watching the show”? But it’s really like this for me. Like, just how long are you in front of the Sharks? I understand there’s a very awkward moment where you’re just standing, staring them down while they’re getting the cameras and the lights just right. What’s the inside story of how it feels to be there?

Jason Hanson
Well, the inside story is you only get one chance, so it’s basically a cattle call where they have people lined up all day. So, they say, “Hey, you’re going on at 10:00, you’re going on at 11:30,” or whatever your time is, and you only get one chance so there’s no do-overs. If you screw up, it is what it is. But I was in the Tank about 55 minutes and, of course, they boil it to less than 10 minutes. So, out of that 55 minutes, sometimes I look brilliant, sometimes I look like the world’s biggest idiot, so you never know how they’re going to blend things together.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s funny. Well, don’t you worry, Jason, we will edit out only the times that one of us look real dumb.

Jason Hanson
I love it. Perfect.

Pete Mockaitis
Usually, over 98% of the words gets used in most podcasts in my experience, so good stuff. Well, then, I want to hear what you’ve been up to with regard to spy-skill training and, particularly, how that can be useful for workers, those who want to apply some of your CIA brilliance to doing better on the job.

Jason Hanson
Well, so after I left the agency, I started my own company where I do survival training but I also do business coaching and training. And in the business world versus the CIA, there isn’t a whole lot of difference in the meaning of you’ve got to go out, you’ve got to go close deals, you’ve got to work with people, you’ve got to network, and spies are the world’s best salesmen because they’re selling a very hard product. They’re selling treason. But there’s a very distinct cycle that you go through to close deals that I’ve now applied to the business world and anybody can.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. So, I’d love to hear a bit about that and to hear about not just in sort of sales, prospecting, and customer acquisition perspective, but also in terms of the worker who may not be in a sales role. So, lay it on us, what is the cycle?

Jason Hanson
Sure. So, the cycle is the, I’ll spell it out, it’s the SADR cycle, and it stands for Spotting, Assessing, Developing, and Recruiting. So, kind of the 30,000-foot overview is if you’re in the CIA, or you’re a spy, and you’re going over to Russia, and you’re trying to recruit somebody to spy on behalf of the United States, first you have to spot them, meaning who are the best people that have access to the intelligence you want. Certainly not everybody.

Then, let’s say, you narrow it down to 20 people. Then you have to assess them. Out of these 20, who truly has access to that extreme amount of data you need? And then it boils down even further. And then after you spot and assess, you have to develop them, which really means make them fall in love with you, make them want to help you. And this wining and dining, this is buying them things, it’s like the dating. It’s courtship.

And if all goes well, after you do spotting, assessing, developing, then you recruit them and it’s basically, “Hey, my name is John. I work for the CIA. How would you like to work for us?” Now, it’s a lot more in depth than that, but that’s the cycle and you can apply it to anything and everything.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly. Well, sure thing. So, let’s talk about how we go about doing some of the spotting for starters. How do we figure out great people? And I guess that varies by your context, like great people to hire, great people to maybe buy your stuff, great people that you just want to be networked with internally to be an asset to you and vice versa. But how do you go about doing the spotting in your different context?

Jason Hanson
Sure. So, now in the business world, because of technology it’s super easy. Let’s say I’m looking to hire somebody who’s a Facebook expert, and I personally want to work with the best. So, I can go out and locate by Google searches. I’ve a very good network so I can talk to all my buddies in the business world, and say, “Hey, who are the best guys in the world of Facebook ads?” Then I can maybe get 10 names, maybe 20 names, whatever it is, so that is my “hit list.”

So, whether you want Facebook guys, or maybe you want a PR agency, or maybe you’re looking for an employee that has a very unique skillset, is narrow it down to those 20 people, 25 people, and then that’s when you start assessing them. That’s when you see, “Okay, out of these 20 or 25, who really has the goods?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. Then how does one go about doing that assessing?

Jason Hanson
Well, there’s many ways. So, it goes back to, okay, I teach lie-detection skills, so you can interview and ask them questions so you can see if they’re being honest with you. You can run background checks on them to see if they legitimately did what they said they’ve done. You, of course, talk to others, you get referrals, you say, “Hey, show me case studies, tell me references that I can call.”

So, you basically put them through the ringer, not in a bad way, but in a good way, and that quickly weeds people out because a lot of people may not want to do that, or may be arrogant, and you say, “Maybe that guy is not the person I want to work with because they’re not very friendly, they’re not a jerk.” So, obviously, it takes time but if you’re trying to grow a business and you really want to work with the best and be the best yourself, it’s worth investing this time to do the research to find the quality people.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. But I’d love to hear then, so what are some of the secret sauce then when it comes to doing the assessment? Because I think everyone is going to say, “Tell me about a time that you were in a team, and you had a conflict, and how you resolved that conflict.” So, what’s some of the special stuff?

Jason Hanson
So, one of the questions I always ask, and I always start out baselining them. Meaning, I ask them questions that nobody is going to lie about, I see how they act when they’re comfortable, so, “Hey, where are you from? Where did you grow up? How many siblings do you have? What movies do you like?” just generic stuff.

And then, out of left field, I’ll ask them a question such as, “Tell me the last time you stole something,” or, “Tell me the last time you did drugs.” So, questions that hit them hard.

Pete Mockaitis
That just sounds like fun, Jason. I’d want you to interview me.

Jason Hanson
Well, most people will be honest and say, “Hey, in sixth grade, I stole a Snickers bar from the grocery store,” that kind of thing. But when it comes to lie detection, you pay attention to the first three to five seconds of a response. Honest people answer very quickly and their face doesn’t look nervous. But if somebody starts stuttering, or they have the deer-in-the-headlights look after you asked them that question, something is wrong, and you’re probably about to be lied to.

And I have had that instance where somebody did lie to me and, finally, came clean and told me they stole a ton of office supplies from a former employer. So, obviously, I didn’t hire them. But I ask those questions because, very quickly, I can say, “Okay, is this person honest or are they already going to lie to me about stealing or about doing drugs?”

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s so funny, Jason, as you asked me, I had to think for a moment when’s the last time I stole something, and I think it’s probably, I guess if you think about time, like when you’re being paid for your time, like if I’m being paid by a client, and I’m not giving them 100% of my attention but rather 97%, it’s like I’ve stolen that 3% from them. So, that’s the last time I stole, Jason, was by entertaining distractions.

Jason Hanson
And you never stole candy from the supermarket?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think the last time I stole was probably not paying perfect attention with a client. In terms of stealing, I think maybe, boy, in college, I went on a real bender in terms of there’s something called myTunes which when you’re on a shared network enabled you to download music from other people’s iTunes. And, yeah, I probably stole more than 500 songs.

Jason Hanson
Oh, this is basically like Napster you’re stealing from.

Pete Mockaitis
Kind of like Napster, yeah.

Jason Hanson
Yeah, got it.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s some stealing there. Boy, all my sins are coming online, Jason.

Jason Hanson
You’re a criminal mastermind.

Pete Mockaitis
I didn’t bank on this being where we were headed. So, yeah, my apologies. I now have the utmost respect for intellectual property. Okay, cool. So, that’s the assessing. So, then you’re looking for, well, let’s talk about the deception for a bit since you’re a pro here. So, you establish a baseline, and you ask them a question sort of with surprise, shock and awe factor, “When’s the last time you stole something?” and then you look to see if you get a quick response, or a deer-in-the-headlights, or super nervous and stuttering. And what else am I looking for to see if there’s lying or truthfulness happening?

Jason Hanson
So, the feet, we are very terrible at controlling our feet.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, Joe Navarro was on the program and we talked about this.

Jason Hanson
And I don’t know him personally but I read his book, a fantastic book, and so I do that too. I mean, I’ll sit, because we’re used to lying with our mouths, people lie all the time with their mouths. So, I’ll see, “Okay, has the feet been still the entire time? But, now, they’re jiggling, now they’re uncomfortably tapping. Is something going on like that?” So, it doesn’t take long. There’s about nine or so things I pay attention to, and I can very quickly tell you if you’re being honest or not.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear them.

Jason Hanson
Well, again, one of the questions I ask you, when I’m dealing with people who want to JB with me, a lot of times, because I was on Shark Tank, I now get pitch deals like crazy, which is great, except 99% of them are junk, and there’s one that’s actually good.

So, I’ll get someone who says, “Hey, Jason, you know, we made $5 million last year and blah, blah, blah.” I always ask, “Okay, show me the proof,” and that shuts people up very, very quickly. Like, if you’re going to quote numbers to me, show me the proof, show me bank statements, merchant accounts, whatever it may be. But, also, when people are lying, they tend to freeze, if you want another one. So, if they’re very animated but in a liar’s mind, if you retract and stop moving, you’re like going into a tortoise shell, and they think, “Nobody will see me. Nobody will notice me.”

So, the example I like to give is if I went somewhere and left my wallet in a cafeteria, and came back and there were a bunch of people around, and my wallet was missing, and I started saying like, “Who stole my wallet?” I was angry, normal people would be exhibiting normal behavior, and be like, “I didn’t take it. I’ll help you look for it.” I would look for the person who is being the least animated and the most quiet because they would be trying to hide and blend in. They would be “freezing” and most likely they’d be the guilty verdict.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Jason Hanson
You’re quiet all of a sudden. What is going on?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m thinking about a time in which, oh, man, someone I knew, we’re in babysitting situation, so there’s a home, a homebased sort of like a babysitting daycare situation over the summer, and I was there, and I remember someone had written a nasty letter to someone else, and I knew who did it. And then when they said, “Hey, who wrote this?” I was totally like super quiet, whereas everyone else was like, “Oh, my gosh, you’re right. Who would do that?” Like, that was everyone else was doing, and I was like saying nothing. So, yeah, there you have it, in action it happened.

Jason Hanson
We are very bad liars in real life. So, when I was with the agency, I can lie because it was my job, there’s no guilt associated, but in real life I’m a terrible liar. You could see right through me because we all do the same thing, like I said, we all freeze, we all stutter, we all look nervous in the face, because it’s not normal and natural to lie.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, that’s interesting when you mentioned it was your job to lie, and so you did so. And I found that in certain context in which it’s sort of like I’m playing a role or it’s for a joke, it’s like I’m pretty good at it. But then, like impromptu, I’m terrible at it. And so, that’s interesting mindset that you speak to there. Tell me more about that.

Jason Hanson
Well, when it’s your job and, again, with the agency you’re doing it for your country, you’re very patriotic, and there’s no guilt associated with it because that is your job. But if you and I are going down the highway, and we’ve got a dead body in the back of our car, and we get pulled over by the cops, you better believe both of us are going to be sweating bullets and looking nervous because we know if they find that dead body we’re in big trouble.

So, it kind of goes, is there guilt association, where you’re going to be nervous, or is there no guilt? So, what do they say, 2% of the world, or 1%, are psychopaths or sociopaths? That’s why polygraphs are not admissible in courts because there is that very small percentage who can lie and they don’t exhibit normal behavior but 98% of us, 99% of us are normal, and you can see right through us when we’re lying because we have a guilty conscience about what we’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s reassuring that I am not a sociopath despite my music grand larceny of my youth. Okay, but you said nine things, I wasn’t counting. But have we ticked them all off or are there a couple more?

Jason Hanson
Well, some of these are when I do, and I don’t know, I don’t have any down, but I’ll tell you another one, a very easy one, and this is when something is missing because a lot of the lie detection stuff I do in corporation is when something goes missing. And so, they’ll bring you in and say, “Hey, find out who stole the stuff in the warehouse, or who the stole money out of the account.”

And if anything ever goes missing, pass a piece of paper around to everybody who is part of that group, and say, “Write down what should happen to the person that stole the money or that stole the stuff out of the warehouse.” And the person who writes the least punishable thing is almost always guilty. Meaning, if you asked you and me, like, “Hey, the person that stole a million dollars from the account, what should happen to him?” We’ll say, “Well, they should get fired. They should go to jail. They should get the electric chair. They should be banned for life.”

Well, the guilty party will be like, “Well, if they return the money, maybe they can keep their job.” Like it’s one of these things, was it the Sesame Street, like, “One of these things is not like the other”? So, you’ll have all these responses which are typical human responses, then you’ll have the one response stands out of it’s not a bad punishment because that’s the guilty party.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Well, so these are sort of fun as we’re talking about assessing people in terms of their honesty and integrity. How do you go about assessing them just in terms of, “Okay, do you really have the goods, the skills?”

Jason Hanson
So, in the CIA, or any intelligence operative, you have to be very resourceful. And it’s not like you’re in the military where you’ve got a platoon or people behind you. You’re pretty much on the street, and you’re alone, and you’re doing your thing, there’s no backups, so you’ve got be very resourceful and creative.

Well, when people work for my company, I want the same thing. I want resourceful people. I don’t want to have to babysit them. So, I like to make up something bizarre and have them either do it or tell them how I would do it. And a bizarre example, I don’t know what just jumped into my mind, is if I said, “Hey, I want a horse in my office in the next four hours. Get a horse in my office.” Could they do that? Do they have the creativity to go Google and rent a horse and figure out how to get the horse?

So, I give them some unique thing where, “Hey, you got three hours to get me this answer or whatever.” Because if they can’t figure that out, then, clearly, they’re not creative and not somebody you want to hire.

Pete Mockaitis
So, they get the job if the horse shows up or how does that work?

Jason Hanson
If Mr. Ed is in my office within four hours, we’re good to go.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, that could get a little costly, and I don’t know what horse rentals run these days. But it’s so funny, when you frame it as a challenge, I think you also get a sense about the attitude, like, “Oh, my gosh, what the heck? This is weird,” versus, “I’m excited.” It’s like, “Heck, yes, let me get on Yelp right now and see what I can do. I’ll post it on Facebook, see if I got someone who can hook it up,” and it’s sort of like, “I’m excited to spring into action to see if I can make it happen just for the fun of it, it’s like a challenge. It’s like do you have what it takes?”

Jason Hanson
Because in my business, and I run a few businesses, it’s very bizarre, meaning one day we may be doing X, one day we may be bodyguarding a celebrity, one day we may be doing training on evasive driving and crashing course. It’s all kinds of unique things. And so, the people I hire, I tell them, “It’s not going to be sitting at the desk every single day looking at a spreadsheet. You have to be able to get out of your comfort zone. I may send you to a tradeshow in Washington, D.C. one day, and then the next day you’re going and help me with an interview kind of thing.” So, if they can’t be kind of outside the box and be comfortable in many situations, they’re not going to last in my company.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right. So, that’s the assessing. And then how about developing?

Jason Hanson
All right, developing. As I mentioned, this the courtship period. This is when you’re making them fall madly in love with you. So, if you’re trying to get somebody to obviously betray their country, to make treason, you need to make sure they love you, that you’re best friends, so this can be a lot of it is the law of reciprocity, meaning I’m taking them out to dinner, I’m buying them a thousand dollar dinner. I am taking them out and buying them new clothes. I am taking them to the nice nightclubs or whatever. We’re hanging out. I’m basically giving them the life they wish they had.

So, you make them fall in love with you. By the time it comes to, “Hey, I’m ready to pitch them,” they feel so indebted to you, it’s like, “Oh, my gosh, Jason has bought this, this, and this, and this, then, yes, I’m going to get him X, or Y, or Z, whatever he requires.” Now, developing can take months, it can take years. Obviously, it’s a case-by-case basis in the intelligence operative world, but you don’t ever pitch someone, you don’t get to the point where you’re recruiting them, recruit and pitch the same thing, until you’ve developed them so well that you know there’s 100% chance they’re going to say yes. And that is the key.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I guess what I wonder with developing is so, like do they know who you are and what you’re up to like the whole time that you’re courting them? Or how does that work?

Jason Hanson
No, I’m giving you hypotheticals of course.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly.

Jason Hanson
So, let’s say I went over to whatever country, let’s just pick China out of the blue. And I would say I’m an American businessman and I maybe work for this tech company back in America, and we’re trying to learn more about missiles or whatever it would be. Obviously, it wouldn’t be missiles, but something. And then I have a big slush fund because I’m over here so they let me take people out to dinner.

So, at first, they have no idea, but the people you’re trying to recruit eventually figure it out. They don’t know 100% sure, but they’re like, “Okay, he probably works for the government.” So, when it comes to the recruiting part, the way you kind of pitch, and there’s many ways, but one way is like, “Listen, Joe, we’ve known each other for eight months now, we’ve known each other for a year, or whatever, and you probably guess I really don’t work for XYZ corporation. I work for the U.S. government and, guess what, I’m a spy. How would you like to be a spy with me? Wouldn’t that be awesome? We could both be spies.” That sounds corny but that is one of the ways you do it and it works. I’m not kidding either.

Pete Mockaitis
“Let’s be spies.” It’s like, “Let’s be friends.” All right. So, I guess in a way, well, I’ll let you comment on that. Why is that an effective way to ask?

Jason Hanson
Well, first, again, you don’t ask until you’re 100% sure, because in the spy world, if you screw up and you go asks, and the guy says, “I need to think about it,” or maybe he’s going to get back to you. Well, if he doesn’t say yes on the spot, the next time you meet him again, you may have a bag put over your head, or you may end up in a foreign prison because he goes and tells the Russian government that you just tried to recruit him.

Pete Mockaitis
Plus, the Chinese are in cahoots.

Jason Hanson
So, you know he’s going to say yes. But it’s effective because you know. In business you’ve got to know your customers, right? Well, when you’re trying to recruit somebody, you know them better than they know themselves. So, you would know in that instance that he wanted adventure, that he was a bored scientist, and that he would love to be a spy. That would be thrilling for him.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I hear you. So, you’ve zeroed in on a need and you’re delivering on that need.

Jason Hanson
Correct. So, I’ll ask you a question. What do you think, not the number one, but one of the main reasons that people spy for the U.S. if you had to guess?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I’m going to say they would love to have themselves and their family escape their nation and be in the United States instead.

Jason Hanson
Pretty darn close. It’s education for their children.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, okay.

Jason Hanson
So, when a U.S. person, when somebody betrays America, it’s almost always for money. But when we’re trying to recruit somebody from some crap old country and they’ve got kids, they want an education for their children. They want to say, “Hey, I want my kids to be able to come to the U.S. where they have the opportunity to go to a great university.” So, once you know somebody’s hot button, that’s when you push it, whether it’s adventure, whether it’s on education, and that’s what you obviously figure out over time.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, I guess they have to be able to get admitted, huh? Or you got ways to make that happen too. We’ve heard a thing or two about how that can unfold.

Jason Hanson
And you know what? I’m just going to no comment, or I can either confirm or deny, or whatever you want to say there.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. So, that’s intriguing then. Okay, so fascinating. All right. So, regarding with making them fall in love with you, so we talked about it in a spy content, but let’s talk about sort of a workplace context. So, you probably have less capacity to provide lavish dinners and entertainment, etc. So, what are the ways that you recommend people develop relationships with potential allies stateside without the government slush fund?

Jason Hanson
Well, yeah, it doesn’t take much money. The government, obviously, has unlimited funds, our tax dollars that seem to be unlimited. But, for you and me, we don’t have to spend that much. It’s the little things. I keep going back to courtship. You’re trying to court a woman, and so if you know what they like, “Hey, I know you love whatever book. I bought this book for you.” Or, “Hey, I saw this clipping in the newspaper that talked about seven ways to help your kid with reading, and I know you mentioned your kids having trouble reading.”

So, you do little things to show you care about them. So, it doesn’t cost any money to clip out a magazine or buy, spend 15 bucks on a book from Amazon. But if you’re thinking about them, like, “Oh, Jason really pays attention to me. Jason really cares about me,” and, obviously, when you show somebody you care about them, the more they want to work with you, or work for you, or help you.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Yeah, so that’s good. So, you sort of notice. I guess it’s not that different after all. You notice their need. Maybe, in the spy example, it’s education for their children. In this instance, it could be any number of things. And then you sort of proactively make it happen. And you know what’s interesting is people have needs all the time.

And I’m thinking like over the last couple of years, we bought this house and property, and it seems like we had a heck of a time finding different people for the miscellaneous renovations, whether it’s landscaping, or carpet, or carpentry, plumbing, electrical, you name it. It’s like there’s always something. And if someone were to say to me, “Hey, Pete, I found this amazing electrician who’s super reliable at a great price,” that would make me say, “You’re my best friend. You have met an urgent need that is maybe not super important, but urgent in my mind. And so, I love you as a result.”

Jason Hanson
And you’re 100% right. We’re so busy and self-absorbed in the world we live in today that nobody does the personal touch. Like, I’ll write handwritten letters to some of my best customers. I’ll send thank you notes. And most business owners never take the time.

I’ll tell you another example. I never sent a text message in my life. I don’t text. Yeah, a personal preference, I have a flip phone, I have no desire to text. But I get people who text me, every once in a while, to try and pitch me, they’re like, “Hey, I got your number from a friend of a friend of a friend. I have this great product. Are you interested?” I’m like, “You didn’t do any research on me whatsoever.” Because in multiple of my books, and multiple articles I’ve written, I mention how I never send a text, and here I am doing it again.

So, most people don’t do the deep, deep research and are lazy, but if you do, you figure out those things, and it’s much easier to close people these days because nobody else is putting in the effort.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like what you’re saying here, Jason, and I’m thinking about the context of, well, hey, just my podcast. I think the plurality of emails I receive these days are, “Hey, I want to be on your podcast,” which is flattering. Thank you. But, you know, it also just feels a little bit like, “You know what, I’m so much more as a human being.”

Jason Hanson
Yeah, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
“I feel I have so much more to offer beyond just a publicity, opportunity.” And so, I’m intrigued then. If you’re reaching out cold, well, we know what not to do is do zero research and be kind of not at all aligned to kind of how you operate. But what are some of your pro tips when you’re doing, I guess you’re talking about the spotting and assessing and developing? Let’s say that we’re developing from ground zero. We spotted them and we’ve assessed them from afar, like, “Oh, wow, that would be an amazing person to come work for me, or to buy my product, or to promote something.” How do you recommend making the very first steps in this courtship?

Jason Hanson
So, what I recommend is, in the intelligence operative world, you give people gifts and you find out what they want. So, let’s say they love Scotch, I don’t know anything about Scotch, but you give them a great bottle of Scotch, and you send it to them, and give it to them. They’ll think that’s the greatest thing in the world.

So, what I do is if I’m trying to work with somebody or somebody I don’t know out of the blue, I will send them a box of gifts along with my stuff. So, if I know they love – and I’m just making this up – railroad books, or whatever, I may say, “Hey, I’m Jason Hanson. Here’s what I do. Here is a book on railroads. I heard you love these. Also, here are some of my books just so you know who I am, that I’m not a total nutjob who reached out of the blue.”

So, it depends on how big of a customer or a client they could be, but I’ll put together a fancy, nice gift box with all the stuff, showing that I took the time to really get to know them, and spend a hundred bucks because it could be worth a gazillion times that to me. So, I like sending a big box of stuff if I’m really trying to go after somebody.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that because I’m just thinking about sort of podcast pitching. Yeah, no one has sent me a physical gift in advance. Yeah, they send them afterwards, like, “Thank you. I appreciate that,” which is nice of them. Thank you. But that’s good. So, that’s kind of like your introduction, it’s like, “Hey, I’ve learned a little bit about you and I thought you’d like this. Here you go.” And there you have it. And, you’re right, that’s quite rare. That doesn’t happen much.

So, here’s a real pedestrian question, maybe easy for a former intelligence officer. So, let’s say all you have is a person’s website or maybe even just an email address and a name, how do you get their snail mail address for this opening introductory gift?

Jason Hanson
So, yeah, I’d do research, I’d search the email in many place, I’d see if there’s anything attached to it. Now, sometimes they do not. Sometimes all you have is an email and there’s nothing else. Well, then you’ve got have a killer unique email and a totally, not bizarre, but totally unique subject line. So, in the intelligence world, if you want to get somebody’s attention, you want them to notice you, you’re not going to be boring, you’re not going to be weird. You’ve got to stand out. You’ve got to make them notice you and be like, “Hey, let’s be friends. I’m this American businessman. Can I take you out to dinner?”

So, whatever the subject line is, it just can’t be like, “I would like to ask you a question.” It’s got to be like, again, I’m not coming up with anything. For some reason, I keep thinking of horses or talk about horses.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure, we can do horses.

Jason Hanson
And you’ve got to write it like you talk. And I use the truth in mine too. I say, “Hey, Bob, I’m sorry to send you this email. I looked like crazy for your physical address but I couldn’t find it so I’m going to keep this short because you’re busy.” And I always use, I’m lucky because I’m a former CIA, so a lot of times the subject line is “Former CIA officer wants to talk to you,” kind of thing. And that gets opened the majority of the time. So, use whatever unique hook you have that’ll make you stand out from the crowd.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. All right, so that’s developing. And how about the actual recruiting?

Jason Hanson
So, yeah, this is the time where you’re going to come and say, “Hey, again, I’m not the American business. I work for the government. How would you like to spy with me? How would you like to…?” And this is where you push whatever the button is, if they want money. Like, I can give some examples. There are many countries in this world where it’s normal to have a mistress. So, it’s not a big deal, the wives know, you don’t throw it in their face, and these guys need money for their mistresses.

So, you would come with a nice fat envelope and say, “Hey, Bob, as you might’ve guessed, here’s who I work for. I’d love you to continue helping us. You’ve been a great friend. And guess what? I’ve got this $5,000 in this envelope, and I can give it to you now, and then give you $5,000 every single month for your help. What do you think?” And you take that envelope out, you put it on the table, you put your hand in it while you’re talking. You don’t just push it over, you make them really, really want it, and you make them say yes, you make them commit. Then you can slide it over to them where they can touch it. It’s not a huge event because you already know they’re going to say yes or you wouldn’t do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Certainly. So, you present it such that they can desire it all the more and it’s not yet there until they’ve said yes.

Jason Hanson
Correct.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this was fun. I have so much more to ask you about so let me see here. You talk about the concept of active awareness. That sounds great. What exactly is it and why is it good and how do we get it?

Jason Hanson
It is keeping your head up, looking around, not having your head buried in the cellphone, and basically paying attention to your surroundings. So, if you’re trying to close a deal, or even walking down the street, what I do is I play a game, or if I’m walking to the airport, I’ll just quickly describe everybody, like, “White male, red hat, blue shorts, about six foot tall.” “Black female, big earrings, sandals,” whatever it may be, so then I’m looking around, taking in my surroundings.

Most people live in zombie land where they have no idea what’s going around. So, if you’re a business person, observing, seeing what they wear, seeing their office, and really looking around, that may be a key to closing the deal if you see that little nugget of information you need. So, just pay attention. Don’t walk around like a drunk.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you’re just saying in your head, like the descriptions of what you’re seeing. Like, “Blue wallpaper,” or whatever it is, just what’s there. You’re sort of sub-vocalizing the description of the stuff.

Jason Hanson
Correct. Because it makes your mind think, your mind doesn’t fall asleep, and it forces you to look around in your surroundings so you see what’s going on. That way, you can’t be looking at your feet at whatever digital device you have.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Super. And so then, so that just sounds like a good thing. In practice, what are the advantages of having it?

Jason Hanson
Is that you’re more successful because you see what’s going on, you see things other people miss. Before, we talked about Shark Tank, I read every book they’d ever written, I watched every episode, I knew every question they asked, I knew everything about their families, I watched every interview they ever did. I knew them backwards and forwards, and I actually used that, remember I was in there for almost an hour, and they boil it down to 10 minutes, and I know some of the key things like throughout to help me get the deal because I observed their body language, how they were removing what they were wearing. And most people are probably not as observant as I was.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Well, I can’t let that go. So, body language, there’s a lot of ambiguity there, but you mentioned feet earlier. Are there any other sort of just key body language things you notice over and over and over again that prove quite useful as you’re interacting with folks in work settings?

Jason Hanson
Well, most of them are common sense, meaning, “Do they look interested? Are they smiling? Do they lean forward?” Like, when I was on Shark Tank, I could see who was leaning back in the chair, and as I said certain things, they had literally leaned forward. I was like, “All right, I’ve these two. These are the ones I’m going to focus on, dedicate more time because they’re clearly paying more attention at the moment.”

So. It’s all stuff that it doesn’t take a spy to see. All of us can quickly pick up, if they look bored, or leaning forward, or they’re crossing their arms in disgust, or they’re open and they’re being animated and talking because they’re excited so it’s easy to pick up on.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. And so then, I want to get your take on how do you recommend that we apply some of these approaches to just better advocate for ourselves in terms of we are trying to make the case that you deserve the promotion, or the opportunity, or the raise, or to be heard?

Jason Hanson
Deep research. So, deep research on everybody else. So, if you want a raise, why you deserve a raise of the other five people in your office, and what proof. So, in the intelligence business, you’ve got to have proof for everything. Meaning, when somebody says, “Hey, we need you to take out this terrorist.” Well, what’s the proof that they did something? What is the proof that they’re behind it? If you’re going to take someone’s life, or snatch someone off the streets, you got to make sure you have all the details.

So, the same thing, if you come in, “Why do you deserve a raise?” “So, I’ve been here five years.” “Well, I don’t care if you’ve been here for five years. What have you contributed?” So, have files, have all the, “Hey, I made an extra $5 million for the business off of this project alone.” So, come in, pretend you’re in front of a jury, and you’ve got to have proof beyond reasonable doubts, and if you do that, then there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to get the promotion or get whatever you’re looking for in life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so, when people try to apply some of this stuff that you’re teaching, are there any sort of ways that they mess it up, like they’re trying to implement it, and they make this mistake over and over again? What should we watch out for?

Jason Hanson
You have to be authentic. So, when you’re trying to recruit somebody, and you’re trying to make them fall in love with you, if you’re faking it and you’re not showing empathy and really caring about this person, they can see right through it. And it’s the same thing in the business world. So, when somebody is trying to close a deal on me, I can tell when they’re being fake. The old cliché of like, there’s a model sailboat on the table, and it’s like, “You like sailing? I like sailing.” And, of course, you know they don’t know anything about sailing. So, you’ve got be genuine and authentic because people are not idiots and they will spot it.

Pete Mockaitis
I like sailing.

Jason Hanson
I don’t know anything about sailing.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny. You like sailing, I like sailing. Well, that’s funny. Back to podcast pitches, a lot of times people been coached to start with a compliment, but it’s sort of like, “I don’t think you’ve ever actually heard the show. That’s just sort of something that you’re saying. All of the stuff someone told you, you’re supposed to do that.” So, that’s good. So, be authentic. Well, that’s interesting. Well, when it comes to be authentic, I mean, you do want something from them, and that is why you’re having that conversation. But you’re still authentic in the sense that – how would you distinguish it?

Jason Hanson
Well, you’re on the authentic of, “Hey, I really want to work with you.” If you’re flattering them because they’re the best at what they do, you’re not using cheesy flattering, you’re being genuine in your compliments to them, like, “Hey, I really do admire how you wrote this book,” or, “I really do admire the way you do your podcast interviews.”

So, you can be authentic and all that, and then, of course, you’ve got to offer them something. So, you don’t want to come out, like in the intelligence world, “Here’s 5,000 bucks. If you do this, I’ll give you 5,000 bucks a month.” You’ve got to have something that’s going to make it worth their while because people are busy. So, what is going to be beneficial for them to work with you? And, obviously, be able to present that.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Jason, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Jason Hanson
No, I already know your life story and how you’re a criminal, so I think we’re good to go.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s the essentials. How about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Jason Hanson
Something I find inspiring, a favorite quote. There was, I think it was a book, like, “Tough times never last, but tough people do.” And, I don’t know, I think it was a book or a quote, it doesn’t matter. So, I love that because in the intelligence world, and also in the business world, there’s always going to be tough times, but you got to keep on trucking, never give up, and those are the successful people.

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

Jason Hanson
I love psychology. I try and read all kinds of psychology books. Robert Cialdini has written some great books on that. I’m a fan of his. I read sales books because when it comes to business, and when it comes to humans, and when it comes to getting people to spy, it’s all psychology. It doesn’t change.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, Bob Cialdini’s books, Influence, Science and Practice, as well as Pre-suasion are amazing. Any others that you really love?

Jason Hanson
I mean, I’m old school. The old Zig Ziglar sales books just to learn from them, Tom Hopkins. I’m the kind of the guy who reads all kind of books because even if I get just one nugget, it’s worth it for me.

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

Jason Hanson
A tool? I’m a gun guy. I love guns. I love knives. I love flashlights. I’m like a gear junkie. If you come to my house, I’ve got tents and sleeping bags and all kinds of survival and outdoors gear.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Jason Hanson
Favorite habit? Well, I like and don’t like. I wake up at 4:30 every morning, so not necessarily that I like waking up early, but I like being productive and be able to get a lot of work done that most people are not able to.

Pete Mockaitis
And what time do you go to bed at night?

Jason Hanson
I got to bed at 9:00 p.m. if I can. The latest 10:00 p.m. but, yeah, I’m trying to be in bed at 9:00 every night.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key thing that you share that often gets quoted back to you, a nugget that you’re known for?

Jason Hanson
I teach people anti-kidnapping skills, especially how to take escape duct tape since it’s the number one way people all over the world are kidnapped, so a lot of people know me from teaching people how to escape duct tape.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and while we’re on the topic. What’s the trick for escaping duct tape?

Jason Hanson
Well, it’s going to be hard to say on the radio, but basically when your hands are duct-taped together, and you put them higher over your head, and then bring them down and pull apart as if your elbowing somebody from behind, and that will allow you escape in less than two seconds.

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

Jason Hanson
I would point them to CelebrityMethod.com because that is my website where they can find all kind of stuff about me.

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

Jason Hanson
Get up at 4:30 a.m., plan your day ahead of time, and work your butt off, and do deep, deep research because most people are lazy these days.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you, Jason. This has been a lot of fun. I wish you and lots of luck for the book Agent of Influence, and all your adventures.

Jason Hanson
Thank you. I appreciate it.