This Podcast Will Help You Flourish At Work

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

May 28
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1156: How to Make Great Meetings that Stop Wasting Time with Rebecca Hinds

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Rebecca Hinds discusses the simple shifts that turn meetings from time-wasters into value-generators.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why most meetings don’t feel like “real work”
  2. Why every organization needs a “meeting doomsday”
  3. The easy agenda fixes that save so much time

About Rebecca

Rebecca Hinds is a leading expert on organizational behavior and the future of work. She holds a BS, MS, and PhD from Stanford University. Rebecca founded the Work Innovation Lab at Asana and the Work AI Institute at Glean, first-of-their-kind corporate think tanks dedicated to conducting cutting-edge research on the future of work.

She is a trusted advisor to companies navigating the challenges of modern work—from meeting overload and hybrid dysfunction to the messy realities of AI adoption and organizational change.

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Rebecca Hinds Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Rebecca, welcome!

Rebecca Hinds
Thank you so much for having me, Pete. I’m looking forward to chatting.

Pete Mockaitis
Me, too. Me, too. And I am excited about making meetings fantastic. Could you share with us perhaps one of your most surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made while you’re putting together Your Best Meeting Ever?

Rebecca Hinds
I’ve long been fascinated by this phenomenon that’s called the Babble Hypothesis. Research shows that, when people talk more, talk more in a meeting, outside of a meeting as well, we perceive them to be a leader more than they are regardless of what they’re saying.

And I think, you know, so much of our meetings are performative, they’re skewed by status dynamics and power dynamics within the organization, and I think this Babble Hypothesis really speaks to the fact that we need to be much more intentional about how we show up to meetings because talking, hogging the airtime isn’t just annoying. It isn’t just frustrating. It actually skews our perception of the people in the room.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so fascinating and, boy, you’re bringing back memories of high school. I remember Robbie Klaver – shoutout to Robbie, wherever he is – told me, I was starting up a Model United Nations chapter at my high school.

And he said, “If you want to win awards, all you have to do is talk a lot.” It was like, “That’s it. It doesn’t have to be good, it doesn’t have to be insightful, it doesn’t have to be helpful. Just get in front of that microphone a lot, and that’s how you get awards.”

And it’s like, “Robbie, surely not.” But, no, it really was exactly what I witnessed. And, whatever that had implications for, I guess, people’s college applications and all that. But this high school Model UN principle rings true decades later in workplaces all over the world.

Rebecca Hinds
As does so many other things, so many aspects of high school, you know, the homogeneous people coming together and sticking together, birds of a feather and, you know, jargon, too. We’re often told to use fancy words.

I talk in the book about how that’s often counterproductive because using jargon, using big words, using technical words, as I often see in meetings, it alienates other people, and we actually trust them less because they’re not speaking our language and they’re less relatable.

And I think that the science behind all of this is incredibly fascinating, in part, because it’s incredibly human. And probably what happened in high school is still showing up in some way, shape, or form in our meetings as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thinking about high school jargon, if I may attempt, as I’m 41 years old, jargon-maxing is not good, but talk-maxing is good from your perception as being a leader, and wise, and all those things, but it’s not great from the meeting experience or the outcomes.

Rebecca Hinds
And I think maxing is such an interesting word. We’re seeing it everywhere now, certainly with token-maxing and more is better. My colleague and mentor at Stanford, Bob Sutton, will call this addition sickness, right?

We are hardwired as humans to solve problems through addition. We have a problem, we throw more money at it, we throw more people at it, we throw more meetings at it, we throw more people in the meetings, more meeting minutes, and it’s very dangerous because, often, we don’t take time to subtract.

And there’s also a great research from my colleague, Leidy Klotz at University of Virginia that shows, “If you do prime people to subtract, it dislodges that addition sickness and they start to adopt a subtraction mindset.”

It’s often not that we dislike subtraction. It’s often, it doesn’t even occur to us as an option. It doesn’t even occur to us that, as we add another person to the meeting, what we should probably think about, “Is there someone we can remove where the meeting is no longer relevant to them or as relevant as it once was?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to get your take for this notion of the person who speaks more is perceived as the leader more. Are there any compelling studies or experiments or data points to highlight just how substantial an effect this is?

Rebecca Hinds
Interesting. So I think that the study that I anchor, and in the book, I believe it was for every 34 seconds of talk time on that order, people gained an extra point as a leader.

Now this was done in a context where there was no natural leader in the meeting in terms of having a bigger title than anyone else. But it skewed the perception in the room. And what’s also fascinating is, in this particular study, and there have been other studies where they didn’t find this effect, but in this study in particular, men automatically earned an extra point for being a leader, just for being male.

And I think that’s also a key part of the power dynamics is, you know, the gender, the diversity in the room, how quickly you speak as well. If you speak more quickly, in general, you’re perceived to be more competent.

And a lot of these cues, and we’re seeing it with AI as well right now, you know, depending on the way an AI tool is framing the output, how sycophantic it is, we also know that if people agree with us, we tend to view them as more intelligent and more capable. And all of these biases, you know, they are front and center in meetings and something that we need to pay very close attention to.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, these are tantalizing tidbits. But maybe we should zoom out and say, what’s your big idea, main message, key thesis of Your Best Meeting Ever?

Rebecca Hinds
So the big idea is meetings are a product. Meetings are the most important product in our entire organization. They’re where decisions get made, culture gets built, alignment gets set, and yet they’re also the least optimized. They’re the least optimized product in our entire organization.

And when we think about great products, great everyday products, well, they have certain product design principles. We should be applying those same product design principles to meetings. So the seven chapters of the book each walk through a product design principle applied to our meetings.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so when you say product, I can read that word in multiple ways. Like, a product might be a physical item that I can purchase at a store. Or, in the tech world, products are not so much physical. They’re software things with features and experiences and a user interface. So how are you using the word product here?

Rebecca Hinds
In a few different ways and with a few different dimensions. Meetings are a communication tool. They’re a communication and coordination and collaboration mechanism within our organization. So they’re intangible in that way.

But what I’m getting at with the idea of product is intentionality. Just as we would think very carefully about how we build products and services for our customers, well, we need to approach meetings with the same discipline.

We would never launch a product to our customers without design, feedback, refinement, iteration. We do that with meetings every single day. We throw them on the calendar and they’re often our default reaction to any sort of uncertainty or ambiguity within the organization.

We don’t treat them like a product we would sell or give to our customers, which, in the context of meetings, those are the attendees in the room. They are not ourselves as organizers of the meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So the product is something that needs to be thoughtfully, carefully considered and not just knee-jerk default, “Here’s meeting,” and to put some upfront effort into crafting how that’s going to be effective. Can you share with us some additional implications of the product mindset toward meetings?

Rebecca Hinds
Countless. You know, countless implications in terms of employee engagement. We know that meeting effectiveness is a strong predictor of employee engagement within the organization, even controlling for the factors that you would think to be important, your manager, your role within the organization.

Real business results, right? I think I often work with organizations where you’ll go in and you’ll start to hear people talk about meetings as if they’re not the real work, you know, “Oh, I have to get through all these meetings and then I can finally get to my work,” right?

If we design meetings correctly, they should be the real work, right? They should move work forward. So often, it’s not the case because they’re used performatively. They’re used as a box-checking exercise and not a mechanism, not a product that moves our work forward.

And so key business results, you know, moving work forward, better engagement, better cooperation, better relationships between the manager and the direct report, you know, meetings are the most common form of collaboration within our organizations.

As knowledge workers, as desk workers, we spend 90% of our time collaborating. There is nothing that we can do as leaders within organizations that is more impactful in boosting collaboration, improving that 90% of time than meetings because they’re so ubiquitous, they’re so common, and they’re so dysfunctional.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, well said. So I like that notion of box-checking versus moving the work forward. And, boy, that’s a really good, bright line of distinction associated with, “Is the meeting real work or is it not?” You’re thinking about effectiveness on these dimensions over the relationship, as well as moving work forward.

Can you give us some more clarity on how I can assess, “Is this meeting amazing, terrible, okay, pretty good?” How do I get a gauge on how effective or ineffective a meeting is?

Rebecca Hinds
It’s such a great question, it’s a hard question. And the reason why it’s a hard question is we have what I call a meeting-suck reflex. Meaning we are conditioned to dislike meetings, and we are conditioned to believe that that’s how we should behave, right?

There are a few things that bond coworkers more than lamenting over that meeting that could have been a two-line email. And because of that, you can’t just go into an organization, your own organization, and ask people, “Are your meetings effective?” because you’re going to trigger that reflex and not the reality. And that’s why we need to be very careful about meeting measurement.

One of my top recommendations is, if you want to gut check into how effective your meetings are, the ones you run, after about 10% of those meetings, ask attendees, “On a scale of zero to five, was this meeting worth the time you invested?”

My colleague Elise Keith calls this ROTI, return on time investment, and it does a couple things. One, it’s usually, in almost all cases, anonymous, so it avoids that temptation to either inflate or deflate the ratings.

Two, unlike meetings, which are socially loaded, everyone has some intuitive sense of the value of their time, and they know more or less whether this has been a good investment of the time. So you avoid that sort of meeting-suck reflex and it’s simple, you know, it’s not after every meeting. Survey overload is real with an organization.

Finally, it’s coming from the attendees and not you as the organizer. My colleague, Steven Rogelberg has done fantastic research to show there are two people that tend to leave the meeting most satisfied, two types of people. One is the organizer and, two, as we’ve talked about, is the person who has spoken the most in the meeting.

And so we can’t ask those two people whether the meeting has been effective. Their ratings will be inflated. We need to ask the users, the attendees of the meeting, whether this meeting has been worth the time.

Often you see split ratings. Often you see a cohort rating the meetings five and four versus zero and one. And that can also be very helpful information to understand, “Okay, this meeting was worthwhile for some cohort of folks, but not for the entire attendee population. Well, now we can redesign the meeting and design it to be much more effective.”

Pete Mockaitis
Worthwhile. And I hear what you’re saying that it’s tricky because meetings have different objectives and that’s a handy gauge. I imagine every potential measure of meaning effectiveness could have some limitations.

This one is like, “Well, hey, you didn’t think it was effective, but, by golly, you needed to know that. And now you do. And it was essential that that occurred,” and emails get ignored. So I suppose there’s a big gray zone, too.

Rebecca Hinds
There is, and that’s why the agenda is also very important. I recommend framing every agenda item as a combination of a verb and a noun. So it’s not just budget discussion, it’s “align” or “decide” on the Q2 budget.

You’re being very clear about, “What is the verb we need to accomplish?” because then you can assess or you can now use AI to assess, “Have we done the thing?” because that is now a measure of effectiveness within the meeting. If you’re unclear on what you’re trying to achieve, well, it’s impossible to determine what it even means to be effective in terms of the meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m curious, if your verb is “inform,” what do we think? Some schools of thought would say, “Well, if all you’re doing is informing and it’s not a collaborative back and forth, then you should just do an email or some alternative medium.” What’s your take on that?

Rebecca Hinds
Exactly that. Information exchange is not a good purpose for a meeting. In the book, I talk about the 4D CEO rule, a two-part test to determine whether that meeting deserves to exist. First test, a meeting should only happen if the purpose is to debate, discuss, decide, or develop yourself or your team.

Information exchange, status updates, boss briefings, often these meetings are designed for the organizer, often for the powerful person in the room who either needs to consume information or disseminate information. In those settings, it is far more effective to communicate asynchronously through email, through Slack, and let attendees self-serve the information.

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s very handy and sensible and that feels true. I’m wondering about this tricky challenge of, when folks have overwhelming inboxes and too much just flood of information coming at them, but it is essential that something gets to them, I think that’s one of the top reasons folks are tempted to do meetings, like these town hall meetings.

It’s like, “No, everyone really needs to know this. So we’re going to, by golly, put it on the calendar to make sure it gets there.” I’m curious, what’s your thought on making sure, in a world where that is not communicated via meeting, how do we make sure that the memo is sent and received?

Rebecca Hinds
It’s a great point and, you know, there’s the ideal case in organizations, there’s always the ideal case, and then there’s the reality. And the reality in many organizations is workers are overwhelmed. They’re overwhelmed with information and, often, the meeting feels like the most reliable way to get people’s attention to share the information.

There are certainly cases where that makes sense and that’s the unfortunate reality of our organizations, but in the best cases, we’re designing a communication system so that employees get the information they need and are able to distinguish between what’s important and what’s urgent.

And that requires being very clear in terms of, “What is the purpose of a meeting? What is the purpose of an email?” Ideally, you’re designing the asynchronous channels to be consumable and digestible, right? It’s not a memo that’s 20 pages that employees are needing to sift through.

You make it engaging. You make the asynchronous update a video. You make it a video where the CEO or executive team is in a location that has some personal relevance and it’s engaging to people.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s TikTok dancing.

Rebecca Hinds
There’s TikTok dancing, there’s family. One of my favorite all-time sales leaders would record videos after a run, dripping in sweat.

And that’s so important right now, that connection to leaders, not feeling like they’re on a different pedestal than the rest of the organization, which is often what happens in town halls or all hands or all staff meetings is you get this very rosy picture of reality in a way that does very little to strengthen the relationships between individual contributors and the people at the top of the organizational totem pole.

And even in the context of town halls, it’s usually significantly more effective to do those in smaller group settings. We know that as soon as a meeting or any team size gets above seven, eight, nine, 10 people, people start to check out.

Social loafing kicks in, people feel less supported. And so even if you’re doing far fewer town halls, but you’re doing them very intentionally in a way that can encourage back-and-forth dialogue between the individual contributors and the managers, well, that’s going to do so much more to boost the relationship.

Pete Mockaitis
When you say designing a communication system, that sounds very sophisticated, could you give us some examples that maybe we’re not thinking of, like, “Sure, I could say an email, maybe a loom video”? Are there other elements of a communication system that are super effective but underutilized in your view?

Rebecca Hinds
So there’s a really important delineation between synchronous ways of communication and asynchronous ways of communication. And a common misconception is inherently technologies are either asynchronous or synchronous.

We often think of Slack as an asynchronous communication channel, right, because it doesn’t require real-time communication – similar, email. But the reality is any technology can either be used asynchronously or synchronously, right?

We can, and we often do, operate in a world where Slack is treated like a synchronous communication. We get the ping and we’re immediately either drawn to it or respond to it. There is an implicit expectation that you are always available and responding. It’s far more important for organizations to think not so much about the technologies but around the cultures and practices and norms associated with asynchronous communication.

In order for asynchronous communication to work, in order for you to be able to transmit, convey information through asynchronous channels, there needs to be strong, strong documentation culture, right? There needs to be single sources of truth for this information, for the meeting transcripts, for the memos. There needs to be very strong written communication cultures.

And this is something that remote-first organizations tend to do really well. They even train their employees on, “How do you communicate in an effective way asynchronous?” That often requires significantly more context than in face-to-face interactions when you can ask the follow-up question.

I worked with an organization a couple years ago where they had a norm, a company-wide norm, that employees were evaluated on around “No lazy asks.” If you’re going to ask someone for something, it can’t be a lazy ask. You can’t remove context, fail to include context, include the deadline, include the why, include the what, right?

All of these things ensure that we can communicate more efficiently asynchronous, because if there’s ambiguity, if there’s uncertainty, well, people are going to schedule that meeting to get the information they need to move the work forward.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I can’t help but think of the episode of “The Office” where the new boss asked Jim Halpert for a rundown, and he’s like, “Okay,” and so he spends the whole day worrying, “What does that even mean? What is a rundown?”

Rebecca Hinds
Yeah. And that’s the jargon, those are the acronyms, right? And we’re alienating people, in addition to adding ambiguity within the organization. And we see this all the time, you know, with the office jargon, the synergies, the circle backs.

Now with AI, people are, you know, it’s AI everything, “What are you talking about? And do you even need to include AI in what you’re saying?” It’s very important. I think written communication has never been more important, as well as verbal communication, right now.

Pete Mockaitis
And are there certain key things you’re looking at to ensure you have clarity and comprehensiveness or completion when you’re making an ask or trying to communicate a thing?

Rebecca Hinds
Deadlines are very important and, especially, I work with lot of global organizations being clear on what time zone. It sounds simple, but end of day Friday means something completely different in Japan versus San Francisco, as well as depending on your culture.

The why is very important, and we continue to see the why is significantly impactful in helping employees feel bought in to the ask. I see this especially, too, with policy, any sort of policy within an organization. We saw it with remote work, with remote and hybrid policies. We’re seeing it with AI right now.

One of the biggest predictors of whether people get on board with a policy is whether they understand the rationale behind it, even more so than whether they agree with it. And that helps them understand, “Is this worth my time? Is it worth my time to invest in this ask?”

If they can understand the why, the rationale behind it, and it’s something bigger than themselves, that’s going to motivate them to complete it, complete it well, and complete it on time.

Pete Mockaitis
And you’ve got a couple interesting concepts in your book I’d love to hear about. What is your meeting doomsday?

Rebecca Hinds
Meeting doomsday is my favorite meeting strategy to improve our meeting culture. It’s a 48-hour calendar cleanse. Employees delete their recurring meetings for 48 hours and then they re-add meetings back to their calendar in a way they think is going to be most effective.

So many meetings never make it back on the calendar. They’ve outlived their purpose. Perhaps they never had a purpose. For the meetings that have some value, they are redesigned. So thinking about the length, the cadence, the attendees, the agenda items, every meeting on our calendar can be redesigned to be most effective.

And we see significant benefit of this doomsday activity as opposed to a traditional meeting audit. We talked about addition sickness at the beginning and strategic subtraction. Well, what the doomsday does is it jolts you out of the status quo and makes subtraction the default.

When people are doing a meeting audit, they tend to justify the meetings because the meetings are still on their calendar. Whereas, the doomsday, it forces you out of the status quo and it gives employees social permission to delete the meetings in a way that removes that social guilt we all feel when we think about canceling meetings or think about not showing up to meetings.

Meetings are so personal that we often think people will take it personally, and they often do, if we cancel or don’t show up to the meeting. And so I recommend every organization do a meeting doomsday at least once a year. And, again, not just to save time, and we do see big time savings, but to reset our assumptions about what actually deserves to be a meeting.

Pete Mockaitis
So, okay, can you walk us through step-by-step in practice, if we’re saying, “Ooh, we like meeting doomsday. We’re going to do it”? How do I execute that step-by-step?

Rebecca Hinds
Lots of planning. It’s a radical effort. It requires lots of planning. It requires understanding, “Are you going to do it at an organizational level?” That’s ideal. Or, “Are you going to do it on a team level, department level?” I’ve done both. I’ve done as small as a nine-person team.

And then it’s about preparation, making sure there’s leadership buy in. The leadership is communicating the why behind this. There are clear instructions in terms of, “When are we going to do this? We’re not going to do this at the busiest time of the year. We’re going to do it in a lull period.”

How are people going to assess whether the meetings should be brought back? What dimensions are they going to use? Increasingly, I’m working with organizations to use AI to identify, flag those dysfunctional meetings. That becomes very exciting.

And then how are we going to celebrate? How are we going to celebrate along the way the success stories? This needs to be something that is fun. There’s a reason I call it meeting doomsday, right? There needs to be a rallying movement around it.

Meetings need to be the enemy. It’s not the person who scheduled the bad meeting. And we need to create a sense of energy around it. Get people bought in. And you start to see this becomes a big culture-building movement when done right.

And people become very excited about not only doing the doomsday, but also sticking to it. And meetings never are set in stone in terms of being effective. This is something we need ongoing maintenance to do. And, again, doing it at a consistent cadence every year is a way we continue to instill this practice of meeting hygiene.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So then, when they are executing this, “It’s on this day,” I guess that’s the doomsday, “On this day, all recurring meetings, organization wide are deleted.” And then the hope, and with your prep and your communication and your pre-work, is that the new meetings that are established will be good and better ones, as opposed to just, “Oh, hey, I need that meeting. Let’s put it back on the calendar.”

Rebecca Hinds
Exactly. And there’s a big difference. I’ve studied two types of organizations. One, they’ll do this doomsday top-down. They’ll write a script, the IT team will come in and do a massive wipe of the calendar. I’ve seen that. You know, Dropbox did that. Shopify did that. Slack did that.

The meeting doomsday is explicitly designed to put that determination in the hands of employees because we know that, when employees do something themselves, they feel significantly more valuable. It feels significantly more valuable to them, and they’re more likely to stick to it.

Sometimes this is called the IKEA effect, right? When we build something ourselves, whether it’s an IKEA desk, a newly built idea, a newly built calendar, we’re much more likely to stick to it and value it even if it’s a little bit wobbly.

Pete Mockaitis
And what is your rule of halves?

Rebecca Hinds
The rule of halves, inspired by two folks I’ve talked about, Bob Sutton and Leidy Klotz, it’s essentially look at the four dimensions of your meeting – the length, the cadence, the attendees, and the agenda items – and decide one, two, three, or four dimensions you can cut in half.

And often this is a valuable practice as you’re doing the doomsday, but you can take any dysfunctional meeting or any meeting that you know isn’t fully optimized, and pick one dimension, cut it in half, take that 30 minute meeting, try to run it for just 15 minutes, take that six person meeting, “What if it’s three people?”

And what you often find is you didn’t need all that time, you didn’t need those attendees. You might cut too deep, but it’s also often in those moments where you go one step too far, do you realize what was actually essential and what was dead weight.

And so I think that’s, you know, whether you’re doing it one, two, three or four dimensions, the rule of halves can be another effective way to jolt us out of the status quo. I think we often, in organizations, suffer from what’s called Parkinson’s Law, too, meaning work expands to fill the time allotted.

If we give a meeting 30 minutes, if we give a meeting 60 minutes, which is what our calendar tells us should be a meeting, well, it’s probably going to take that 30 minutes, 60 minutes because of this Parkinson’s Law. Whereas, if we cut it to 15 minutes or 30 minutes, it’s more diligent in terms of encouraging us to stick to that time. We’re more diligent because we only have that time available.

Pete Mockaitis
And what are those four dimensions again?

Rebecca Hinds
The length, so the duration of the meeting; the cadence, so thinking about weekly versus monthly, quarterly meetings; the attendees, only inviting stakeholders, not spectators or meeting tourists; and the agenda items. So thinking about, very carefully, “What are the agenda items we want to include on the agenda?”

We also know that agendas suffer from what’s called the law of triviality, meaning, we will disproportionately spend more time on the agenda items that are the least important, the most trivial. And so it’s very dangerous to add agenda items that are trivial, much less important than the higher stakes one, in part because they feel safer.

They feel safer for people to weigh in on. In general, most people want to hear their voice in the meeting, as we’ve talked about, and everyone feels more safe to weigh in on the trivial topics as opposed to the higher stakes one.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’m thinking about this a lot when it comes to, like, color choices or names of something. And it’s kind of, like, “You know, if people like it, they’re going to buy it no matter what colors on the website or what we call it within reason.” And so, yeah, that is a great observation.

Rebecca Hinds
Naming, font sizes, what do we do over the weekend, what are we eating at the offsite, you know, all of these things. And we see it all the time in meetings, and it’s a reflection of the law of triviality. The other bias is the primacy effect, meaning we will also spend disproportionately more time on the first agenda item. And so agenda design is very, very important as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And you also talk about injecting delight into meetings. What are your favorite approaches for this?

Rebecca Hinds
Yes, delight. Now, delight is interesting because delight is a combination of two things. It’s a combination of joy and it’s a combination of surprise. So, delight needs to have an element of surprise. Employees, attendees can’t be expecting it for it to work.

And so, this is something that I recommend it be 10 seconds, a minute in the meeting, an unexpected shoutout for an employee that has done something well. You’re bringing some, you know, food item. Food is a great engagement booster in the meeting that has some personal connection.

Something that is going to leave employees remembering the meeting and wanting to show up the next time. It sounds trivial, but so much of our meeting dysfunction is driven by the fact that employees dread meetings and they’re largely rinse and repeat.

Delight ensures that there’s that moment of surprise that’s positive and joyful that employees will keep coming back to and keep wanting more of.

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

Rebecca Hinds
No, I think that the common thread through all of this is intentionality and intentional design and how do we ensure that we are treating meetings as that important product.

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

Rebecca Hinds
I’ve always loved the quote, “The harder you work, the luckier you get.” And I really believe that.

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

Rebecca Hinds
So we’ve done some research over the past few years looking at the mental models through which employees approach AI.

And what we’re starting to see, we’ve seen it for years, we’re still seeing, is depending on whether people are approaching AI from the mental model of a tool versus teammate, they interact with the technology differently and they’re significantly more likely to be productive when they approach AI with the mental model of the teammate because they’re not just asking, “What can the technology do for me in a really transactional way?”

They’re asking, “What can I do with the technology?” They’re also recognizing that AI is not perfect. They’re not giving up after the first prompt. They’re pushing the technology to think and act deeper. And I think that’s at the core of a lot of the failures of AI transformation right now, is not recognizing how important the psychology is and how important that relationship between humans and AI is.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Rebecca Hinds
So I’m a massive fan of both Bob Sutton and Adam Grant’s books, so Give and Take is a key one that has influenced so much of my life, as well as Bob Sutton’s book, Scaling Up Excellence, The Friction Project.

I think “The Friction Project,” in particular, is so relevant right now in terms of, “How do we ensure that we are injecting good friction into our organization through the use of AI,” for example, “and removing the bad friction from our organization’s dysfunctional meaning?” are one great example of negative friction.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Rebecca Hinds
So I work at Glean. Glean is my new favorite tool. I use it for all things AI. It’s my first pane of glass into my work in the morning, and it’s a highly intelligent teammate that helps me do my work.

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

Rebecca Hinds
You know, I think I work with a lot of organizations on change management, and I think my mantra is always “Change doesn’t fail because of the technology, it fails because of the humans.” And as we think about AI, in particular, but also meetings and everything in between, making sure that we’re designing for the humans involved is super important.

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

Rebecca Hinds
I’m on LinkedIn. My book, Your Best Meeting Ever is at all your favorite bookstores. And my website is RebeccaHinds.com.

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

Rebecca Hinds
Do that meeting doomsday. I think it’s the single most effective way to jolt you out of the status quo and get a small team and do it together.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Rebecca, thank you.

Rebecca Hinds
Thanks so much, Pete.

May 25
0

1155: How to Escape the Procrastination Trap and Achieve Your Goals with Jon Acuff

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Jon Acuff talks about the hidden fears, assumptions, and overwhelm that are keeping you stuck in the procrastination trap.

You’ll Learn

  1. 
What it really means to have “more executive presence”
  2. How to “make tomorrow easy today” with simple preparation
  3. How to go from stuck to unstuck in 4 steps

About Jon

Jon Acuff is a New York Times bestselling author of 11 books. His titles, including Soundtracks, Finish and All It Takes Is A Goal, have sold more than one million copies. Named one of Inc.’s Top 100 Leadership Speakers, he’s delivered keynotes to companies such as Microsoft, Walmart, and Comedy Central. Host of the popular podcast All It Takes Is a Goal, Jon has inspired hundreds of thousands of people to overcome overthinking and finish what matters most. Jon lives outside of Nashville with his wife and two daughters.

Resources Mentioned

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Jon Acuff Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jon, welcome back!

Jon Acuff
It’s good to see you again, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about procrastination. You got a whole book about this. Tell us, what do you know or have discovered about procrastination that’s new and fresh and surprising and interesting that we should know?

Jon Acuff
Well, I think the really interesting thing to me is that it’s not necessarily a problem. People use it as a solution. It’s just not a good solution. Meaning, if they don’t want to tell their mom they’re not coming home for Thanksgiving, procrastination goes, “No problem. We don’t have to do that for, like, seven months. We can wait until the last second.”

Or, I’m afraid of getting negative reviews of my book. Procrastination says, “No problem. I’ll solve that. You’ll never get a negative review. I mean, you won’t get to write a book, but you’ll never get that.” So it’s not a laziness problem, which is why so many of the willpower discipline things we do don’t ultimately work.

It’s really more of a figuring out how to give yourself permission to do those things that you really want to do or really need to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Permission to do the things you really want to do or need to do. I’m also curious about the things we don’t want to do. I guess we need to do them, but we don’t want to do them. I think that’s where it gets me. It’s not so much…

Jon Acuff
Like what? What do you procrastinate on?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, boy. Well, I think there’s tax things. It’s a joke, every year, my accountant is like, “Yeah, we’re deferring, right? Yeah. Didn’t need to ask.”

Jon Acuff
Yeah, that’s funny.

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah.  there’s plenty of things in terms of, “Oh, it would be good to have…” I think that’s for me, like, “It’d be nice to have the result of that thing, but, ugh, doing the work seems exhausting and overwhelming, and I just don’t want to right now.”

Jon Acuff
Yeah, I think that’s 100% fair. I love that you admitted having the result would be great. I think a lot of people won’t admit, “You know, I’d really just like to have done the thing, but I don’t want to do all this.” For me, entitlement is when I go, “I wish my LinkedIn profile, and I had a better LinkedIn presence.” And you’re like, “Yeah, you haven’t used LinkedIn for, like, five years.” Like, “Yeah, it’s really suffering somehow with my complete lack of effort.”

Pete Mockaitis
“Yeah, go figure.”

Jon Acuff
And to me, that’s entitlement is when I go, “I want blank, but I haven’t done any of the work.” I just think, as far as doing stuff you need to do, but don’t want to do, it’s about selling yourself into doing it. Like, in the book, one of the ideas is, like, you’re the greatest, Pete, salesman in the world because, before every decision you’ve ever made, whether it was good or bad, first, you sold yourself into it.

So I think a lot of goals comes down to your ability to sell yourself into doing something you want to do or need to do, but you don’t feel like doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we’re going to need to talk about that at length, but I want to zoom out a smidge and get the big picture. What’s your overall message about procrastination and the latest insights from your in-depth research here?

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so the overall is there’s four permissions you need, and if you do these permissions in this order, it’s almost impossible to not be successful. And I want to say very clearly, I couldn’t have written this book as book two.

If, at 36, Jon Acuff wrote a book called Procrastination Proof: Never Gets Stuck, I’m an arrogant guesser. I’m going, “Maybe, I don’t know. I’ve written one book before. Clearly, I’m great at not procrastinating.”

But by book 11 at 50, I’m like, “Yeah, for someone as distracted as I am, for somebody who has such a hard time focusing to have written 11 books, I figured out how to kind of do some difficult things that maybe you shouldn’t put off.”

So the ultimate idea behind the book is permission, and the four types of permission are permission to dream, permission to plan, do, and review. So those four actions – dream, plan, do, review. And if you do those in that order consistently, everything gets really easy and often really fun.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, yeah, I want to hear about these permissions. And can you tell us a bit about the research process by which you landed there? So you did some substantial surveying, right? And talking to folks and identifying some real themes and patterns that appeared at high frequency.

Jon Acuff
Well, the benefit to my job, Pete, is that the way I write a book is I find a problem in my own life and I figure out if there’s a solution for it, and I spent a few years doing that. And then I ask, “Do other people have it?”

And if a lot of other people have it, then I go research to figure out, “Okay, how does it apply to other people, not just me?” It’s not a helpful book if it’s, essentially, how Jon Acuff beat Jon Acuff’s procrastination. That’s not a good book. That’s a manual for me.

So what happened with this book, I worked with this PhD named Mike Peasley, he’s a professor at MTSU. And so it started with, we did a study on, “How many people think they’re living up to their full potential?” meaning there’s something they really want, but they’re not doing it.

And we asked 3000 people and 96% of them said they were not living up to their full potential. So then I go, “Okay, there’s this huge audience.” And then the research kind of goes from there into testing it in a community online, testing it with real live audiences. Like, it’s one idea.

It’s one thing to have an idea in this office, it’s another thing to take it to a Fortune 500 company and go, “Hey, here’s how this permission works.” And you can tell instantly, “Oh, no, that’s not their world at all,” or, “Oh, no, the permission to dream is not helping the cattle ranchers,” or, “Permission to plan is not helping the engineers.”

So a lot of what I do is then go test it on the road and then, eventually, it ends up in a book. So it’s a longer process than my other books used to be, but I think it turns out a better product.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So then could you speak to us about these permissions?

Jon Acuff
They’re really, really simple. I mean, the first one, permission to dream, you have to have a reason to change. No one ever changes just because. I’ve helped a million people with their goals. I still haven’t met somebody that said, “I woke up today and decided to have grit. I just woke up today and decided to sacrifice.”

No one willingly leaves their comfort zone, and they shouldn’t. It’s comfortable. The only reason people leave their comfort zones is there’s something outside it worth being uncomfortable for. And it’s usually one of two things – desire or disappointment.

Desire, meaning they bumped into something they really want. Disappointment, they woke up at 42 and their career wasn’t where they wanted it to be. They lost their job to AI and they don’t have much of a choice. The disappointment finally got loud enough to go, “I got to change some stuff or this isn’t going to work.”

So that’s the dream. You got to have a sense of why you want to do something and what you want to do before you even move it into planning. And planning is you answer the question, “How will I do it?” Doing is, “Are you doing it?” And review is, “Did it work? Are we headed in the direction we want to go?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now let’s talk about the word permission in terms of it’s just me. I don’t have to appeal to some authority as the principal or a government official for the permission, the access to do any of these things. So can you unpack this word here?

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so I’ll give you an example. Somebody the other day told me they had a weight loss goal, but if they lost weight, they’d be breaking family norms. Because in their family, they grew up in their family of origin, food was comfort. Food was security. Food was family. Food was tradition.

Big Southern family, like you had big Southern plates of food, and to be health conscious felt like divorcing the family you were from. And so he needed permission to go, “No, I have permission to love my parents where they are, but I don’t have to repeat my childhood. I don’t have to. I get to lose weight. I have permission to have a healthy lifestyle. I have permission to care about what I eat and how I look and how I exercise.”

So a lot of times, even if you’re an individual, that doesn’t mean you’re free of kind of hangups that are getting in the way. So a lot of times it is that sense of like, “What are some of the broken soundtracks I believe?”

Take money for instance. Money is the last taboo we have in our country. Like, I know men that’ll tell me the worst things they’re dealing with. But if you go, “Hey, what’s the financial number you’re thinking about retiring with?” “Whoa, whoa, whoa, no, we don’t talk about that. That’s super sensitive.”

And some of them have hangups about money because they grew up in a family where money was considered evil or must be nice or, “They’re rich, we’re not.” And if you get to a certain level of success, you therefore, become greedy.

So they need a permission to go, “No, I have permission to do. I have permission to go as hard as I want at this business on this job.” So there’s so many different areas where the lack of permission holds you back.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear that. And talking about money, I guess, I’m thinking in terms of you hear so much, at least I do, in terms of scams, and scandals, and swindles, and crypto rug pulls, and extractive private equity yuckiness that feels gross to me, such that I think I’m vibing with what you’re saying is I do feel a little bit of resistance internally in terms of really going after some money-making opportunities, because it’s like, “You know what? I’m doing fine. And I don’t want to be like those mean private equity dudes. Hmm.”

Jon Acuff
Yeah, “I don’t want to step on next. The only way to get ahead is you have to take advantage of people.” Or, the one that I saw somebody asked the other day, it was like, “Why is it binary where I can either have a really great business or I can be a great dad? Why does our culture present it as like…?”

Because I’ve had friends, and I’ll go, “I think you should really start that business.” They go, “Ooh, I don’t want to, like, forget my kids names. I’ll never see them.” As if there’s only two options – not pursue your dream or get a divorce and not attend your daughter’s first communion.

And it’s like, “Whoa, there’s a lot of options. It’s just you’ve made it very binary.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So how do we grant ourselves or acquire this permission if we’re feeling some of this conflictedness?

Jon Acuff
Well, part of it is identifying it. Some of it’s just labeling it. Like, there’s a really great exercise that we talk about a lot where it’s like you write down a goal and then you write down your reaction to the goal. So you write down, “Okay, I want to retire with $5 million.”

And you write down like, “Oh, that would be impossible,” or, “Oh, I don’t have enough time for that,” or, “Oh, I’ve already made too many bad decisions,” or, “Oh, somebody who has that amount of money is always like this.”

And you start to identify, “Oh, these things are going to hold me back.” Most of the things we wrestle with in life are mindset issues. They’re not physical problems. Where we live, like at least in the Western world, I never have to fear a tiger.

I never leave my house and I’m like, “Just, hey, be careful. There’s a lot of physical predators out there.” It’s only things like procrastination, imposter syndrome, inner critic, overthinking, you know, perfectionism.

And so a lot of times, it’s identifying those things so that you can actually start to work with them. That’s a great first step to go, “Oh, this is holding me back. I’m overreacting in this situation because I have something that’s holding me back. Let me identify that so I can actually deal with it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s talk about that weight and big Southern cooking plates situation. Let’s say someone has identified that, “Okay, I would like to be slimmer, but, ooh, that feels hard, that feels risky because of these beliefs, these associations, this history,” what do I do with that?

Jon Acuff
Well, I mean, I guess it would depend on, like, if it’s an event you’re talking about, meaning, “I’m trying to be in shape, and I’m going home for Thanksgiving,” or, “I’m going home for Christmas, and I know that there’s going to be a lot of food, and a lot of food discussion.” Like, having a game plan and going, “Okay, what do I want to do with that?”

My favorite definition of discipline, which I put in the book, is “Make tomorrow easy today.” Make tomorrow easy today. What can I do today that makes tomorrow easy? That’s constantly how I’m thinking, “What can night me do to hook up morning me?” “What can Monday me do to hook up Friday me?”

So in a situation like that, if somebody said to me, “Okay, I’m trying to break these family norms,” I’d go, “Okay. Well, is it, like, related to a specific thing? And if it was, then we’d come up with a plan for that thing.”

If it was related to the decisions you were making of like, “Oh, man, every time I feel stressed, I do this and I know it’s a short-term solution.” Well, let’s change that. You know, like, let’s change the rhythm of that. Let’s find a different way to deal with stress than that. Like, if you know that’s where you tend to go, you have permission to make different choices.

And then maybe it’d be, let’s get some community. So now you have a communal sense of it. Like, for me, I worked out alone a long time, and I joined a community called F3 where it’s a free men’s workout in the morning.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, that’s fun.

Jon Acuff
And I love it. And that changed my approach to working out. Like, that gave me new norms. Now I’m with a bunch of other dudes at 5:30 in the morning. That’s a new norm for me. What’s fun is if you do this long enough, not doing it becomes weird.

Meaning, when you first work out, when you first write, when you first build a business, whatever, it’s hard and it’s uncomfortable. But then you get into such a rhythm that, if you miss a week or two, you’re like, “Oh, this isn’t right.” There’s this really sweet spot where the good habits, when you miss them become weird and it flip flops.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I totally feel that, experientially. And I think about it almost, like, a dirt road when you got the groove established. It’s easier to be in the groove than out of the groove. Like, today, I had an odd early meeting. And I knew, and actually set multiple alarms because it deviated from my regular schedule so often.

And so I dropped the kids off, and I knew I got to get right to the office for my early meeting. And, mindlessly, I’m driving to the church for, because that’s usually what I do is I hang out in the chapel for some prayer, post-kid drop off.

And I was like, “Wait, no, no, not today. That’s not…We do that almost every day, but today, I have an early meeting. So I got to get to the office right away.” And so it’s so funny how the autopilot move is just, “Oh, I turn here toward the church.”

And I think that is the case with, well, almost everything in terms of, “Oh, I’m working out in the morning, so that’s what I do.” And then it’s like, “Oh, no, no, today is a different day. We don’t do that.” And so it really tracks that, like, the first one or two or three times it’s like a force of will, effortful, intense. And then it’s easier and easier.

And I guess different people put different numbers on it. But, Jon, if I may, when do you think the groove has more momentum than the new groove?

Jon Acuff
Yeah, like, I love if you Google “How long does it take to start a new habit?” there were nine million answers, and it’s like 30 days, 90 days. I mean, for me, I think, at least, it takes a season, meaning like it takes a fall, it takes a summer.

Like, it takes a, you know, for me, three to four months chunk of time of like now F3 for me, like getting up at 4:55 is crazy. For, like, the first eight weeks, I was like, “This is the dumbest thing ever.” Now, I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I’m looking forward to it. Now I’m into it.” So, for me, it usually takes at least a season.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Got you.

Jon Acuff
How does it take you? I mean, what’s your number?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, you know, well, it’s not binary, you know? It’s hard for me to, like, establish the cutoff because I’d say the second day is easier than the first, and third’s easier than the second, and the fourth, and so on and so forth. So I don’t know where I would draw the line. But, I don’t know, maybe 40-ish.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, that feels good. I’ll hold you to that, 40-ish.

Pete Mockaitis
At this point, it feels harder to not do the thing that I started doing 40 days ago.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, yeah, I can see that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so permission to dream. And let’s talk about planning.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so where people get stuck there is dreaming runs on optimism, planning runs on realism. So dreaming, “Anything is possible. This is going to be amazing. It’s going to be huge.” And then you have to transition kind of into the real world, into reality.

And one of the simplest tools you can do is really just be honest about your calendar. I meet people all the time that’ll go, “I have these 30 different goals. I have 10 different dreams.” And I’d go, “Well, let’s put a number associated with them.”

And then they put an hour or timeframe with them, and I’ll go, “Well, how many hours of free time do you have in your week?” And they go, “Free time? What are talking about? I’m very busy. I’m slammed right now.”

And you go, “Well, you have a 12-hour goal chunk and a week that has zero hours, like that’s why you’re going to keep procrastinating. It’s not because you’re just delaying. It’s because you don’t have the time to pay that bill. Let’s figure that out.”

So that’s a big part of it for people with planning is, “Okay, how do you actually pay the price of the thing you want?” And maybe you don’t want the thing. Like, I would argue, if you won’t spend half an hour with Claude or ChatGPT having it interview you about the thing, you probably don’t really want the thing.

And maybe you’ve just carried that goal along for a long time of, “I think I need to write a book,” “Someday I want to start a business,” “I’ve always wanted to run a marathon,” but if you won’t even spend, like, half an hour kind of just investigating what would that take, maybe it’s not a goal you care about. And that’s fine. Like, I love getting rid of fake goals.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell us about this half-hour AI interview protocol. How does this go down?

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so, for me, if I have something I want to do that’s new, that I don’t know how to do, I often will say, “Okay, one, I love the whole, like, tell me how to write the best prompt to get the thing I want.” So then I’m not even really writing the prompt.

But if I might say, okay, like, an example for me is I’m doing something called Stage & Page, where it’s a one-day intensive for speakers and a one-day intensive for writers. So I might say, “Hey, you know, I’ve been doing this for 18 years. I want to be able to help people that have just started. Interview me about my first year of public speaking because I know these things, but it’s been a while.”

“You’re the best journalist in the world. You write for a magazine called Stage & Page, and I want you to ask me 10 really insightful questions about my early experience as a speaker.” And then it interviews me, and then it’ll summarize that, it’ll create content out of that. But it’s a really easy way versus just a blank piece of paper.

So if I was going to run a marathon, start a business, you know, figure out how to lose 10 pounds, I would say, “Interview me,” so that I really have a sense of why I want to do it, what I want to do, what are my limitations, “Oh, you’ve got a couple injuries. Let’s figure that out.” Like, the interview format is so much easier than just trying to willpower your way into a blank piece of paper.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. So you are engaging in that conversation to get the beginnings of some kind of plan going. Is it fair to say, you don’t expect the AI to spit out the perfect plan, but rather it gets you going so that the planning has begun and the ideas are multiplying?

Jon Acuff
Well, and, no, the problem with AI, the fatal flaws, I still have to do it. Like, I keep working with people and they’ll like give me like, there’s like this AI document arms race that happens in small businesses where I go, “Hey, I think we should try blank.”

And then somebody comes back with a 30-page document that they haven’t even read. Like, AI just created it and now we’re going back and forth on documents. So, yeah, I don’t expect AI to come up with the plan because it’s never really been a lack of information.

Like, if you don’t do the thing, you have a great library in your town. Every town has a great library. So I still have to do it, but it gets me from stuck. The book is designed deliberately to move people through it quickly, meaning it’s 71 short chapters.

And I did that deliberately, and they’re short and they’re punchy and they’re all connected. I did it deliberately because nobody wants to read a thousand-page book about procrastination. Like, if your procrastination book has 90 pages of notes, you’re not a procrastinator. You’re a monster.

Like, that’s Jane Goodall writing about monkeys. I’m a monkey writing for other monkeys. So I just want the person to get started. And if they go, “I have to figure out the perfect plan for this goal,” they’re never going to do it.

But if they say, “Can I be interviewed for a half an hour?” even a podcast, they could take you and go, “I really like Pete’s show, and here’s an episode. I like his style of asking questions. Interview me about a book that I want to write as if you’re Pete.”

And then, like, that’s the easiest, most casual way to go, “Oh, okay. Now I’m feeling a little bit.” It’s not that intimidation of like, “I got to figure this out.”

Pete Mockaitis
And then, so that gets you started. How far do you go with the plan before you do?

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so, for me, I like to do what I call audition a goal. I think a lot of goals fail because people try to commit to something for a year they’ve never done for a day. That’s like marrying somebody you just met at speed dating.

So if you told me, “Hey, I have this thing I’ve been putting off that I want to do,” and it was sizable. Like, we’re not talking about, like, you got to clean out one closet. Like, we don’t need to roadmap that. It’s like one closet. Like, I don’t want you to interview yourself. Like, “You run California closets and are asking me about how I store my socks.”

But if you had a goal that was at least a month’s worth of time, I would say, “Hey, let’s do a one-month audition. Like, what if we just tried this thing for 15 minutes a day for 25 for the next 30 days?” Because I don’t want to trigger perfectionism.

But if we tried that and it was like, “Let’s just see.” And then at the end of the 30 days, you can double down and do half an hour. And at the end of that next 30 days, you can add more time, more time, more time.

I would try to ease you into it. I wouldn’t try to get you to plan an annual thing, like, right out of the gate. Or, “From start to finish, here’s how I’m going to write and publish and market my book.” Like, no way. No way. I’d try to get you to write for 15 minutes a day for 30 days in a row, and see if you even like writing, and see if you even like this exercise at all. So, yeah, that’s the next thing I would do.

Pete Mockaitis
Audition a goal. So, like, the goal is auditioning before you, the director, who will determine if it gets the role.

Jon Acuff
“You’ve made it through. You now get to be part of my summer. Like, I gave you May and, congratulations, I just picked you up for the summer. You’ve now made it for the next summer. And not only have you made it, resources will be dedicated to you. I’m going to give you time and maybe even money. Like, oh, that’s exciting.” You’ve won the audition.”

Pete Mockaitis
Do I need to have a director’s chair and beret when I’m auditioning a goal?

Jon Acuff
I don’t think a beret ever makes a situation worse. Like, maybe a funeral. Like, if you don’t own a beret and then, all of sudden, at your mom’s funeral, you show up in a beret, lot of questions, lot of questions.

Pete Mockaitis
These are the key insights, Jon, that we count on you for. Thank you.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, I hope people are taking notes right now. I hope they pulled over. Probably pulled over on that one, like, “Wait a second. We’re going into berets now, Pete.” And you probably didn’t even put that in the description, if I know you. It’s just a surprise.

Pete Mockaitis
No, not yet. And let’s hit the permission to do now.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so the first two are great, but if you don’t actually do it, it ultimately doesn’t matter. So the thing that I like about doing that I think people have a hard time with is maintaining motivation. We tend to think motivation will grow as we work on a goal. That’s just not how it works. Motivation is often the first thing to leave.

So I spend a lot of time helping people make it through the middle, or what I call the montage. Like, we love a montage in a movie. We don’t like being in one in our own life. Meaning, we love to watch Rocky IV, and there’s an eight-and-a-half-minute scene where he trains against Drago.

A prize fight training camp takes eight to 12 weeks. So we saw 1% of the experience, but when we try to write a book, start a business, you know, parent teenagers, whatever this big goal is, there’s a lot of middle.

And so a lot of what I do is teach people how to build a motivation portfolio. Meaning, collect enough motivation so that when you’re discouraged, which you’re going to be, you have a long robust list, not just one thing.

If you only have one why, like that why won’t show up most of the days, and you’ll go, “Ugh, I’m not even going to do the thing.” But I’d much rather you have a whole list where you can go, “Oh, it took me till number nine.”

And here’s a silly example, because you said, it seemed like you were familiar with F3. Like, one of my motivations for doing it is, the night before I text three friends and say, “I’ll give you a ride tomorrow,” because I’ve just put myself into a corner.

And I know in the morning I’m not going to text three guys and go, “Hey, it turns out I’m a wimp. Never mind.” Like, I now have some accountability there. I now have that motivation to fulfill what I promised to those three guys.

So that’s what I try to help people when it comes to doing. I’m never, like, anybody who listens to this show or reads the kind of books I write, it’s not a question of whether they’ll do it. It’s a question of whether they’ll keep doing it. And that’s where you really have to lean in.

Pete Mockaitis
So I like that. A motivational portfolio, we’ve got multiple sources of support pulling upon you. One was some of that accountability. People are expecting you to show up and give them a ride there. You said nine. Give us a quick rundown of maybe a bundle of things that might go in a portfolio.

Jon Acuff
A couple others? Yeah. I mean, for me, like, I wrote this book, Soundtracks, and we ended up turning it into a Soundtracks card deck, so it’s 52 cards. So sometimes I’ll have these in my pocket, and one will say “Hills pay the bills.”

And it’s a reminder to me of, like, when I have to do the hard things, if I do them and if I climb the hills, other people don’t, I get to see vistas other people won’t. And that could be something like a canceled flight in Chicago in January, where I had to spend the night, like, at the worst airport next to O’Hare. Like, nobody wants that. Nobody.

But, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, hills pay the bills.” So sometimes it’s a soundtrack. Sometimes it’s a literal song where I know when I hear this type of music, I always feel this type of way. Sometimes it’s a movie clip. Sometimes it is a friend that I go, “This is my most uplifting friend. And anytime I’m stuck, if I call so-and-so, 30 seconds of conversation, I feel like I can conquer the world.”

Sometimes it’s 10 minutes of walking around the neighborhood because I need some endorphins and some sunshine. Sometimes it’s caffeine. Sometimes it’s like, yeah, an espresso would really help at two o’clock when I’m struggling.

So I think everyone should be a great note taker about themselves. I think you should be the best documentary filmmaker about your life because, then, you figure out how you work best, and then you can repeat that. And so that’s what I mean by a motivation portfolio.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I like this a lot. We had Dr. Ethan Kross on the show, who wrote a book, Shift, about your mood, and so this is kind of reminding me of that because he mentions music specifically as a tool. So when you say portfolio, you just have a big old list of options in terms of, “This is the thing I could remember or do to take the action.”

Jon Acuff
Well, because I know I’m not going to want to. Like, why pretend I’m always going to feel motivated to write a book? I’m not going to. Someday, the financial motivation will motivate me, I’ll go, “Oh, it’s how I pay the bills. It’s how I put my kids through college. Great.”

Some days, I won’t care about that. Some days, showing my kids an example of hard work will motivate me. Someday, it won’t. Like, sometimes I’ll be like, “They’re not even really watching. Like, I can take it easy on this,” you know?

So, yeah, collecting those and that’s, to me, part of that is just self-awareness. Like, if you have self-awareness, it’s a lot easier to accomplish your goals, because then again, you figure out, “This works. This doesn’t work. I should repeat this thing that does work. I should stop doing this thing that doesn’t work.”

Like, a simple example. Pete, if my phone is in my bedroom, I stay up later. I don’t need another test of that. I’ve checked that box. I know that. So a simple hack for me is I leave my phone downstairs when I go to bed.

Like, imagine me going, “Man, I found a sleep hack. It’s unbelievable. Here’s how to like…” It’s the simplest thing. I just realized over and over and over again, if I have my phone near me, I’m going to look at my phone, and I’m going to stay up later than I really want to.

So I found a workaround, which was leave the phone downstairs. Like, it’s not complicated. That motivates me to go to bed earlier. Like, “Eureka!”

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Jon, I love that specific example. I was once, true story, in Vanderbilt’s Sleep laboratory, having all sorts of things attached to my body. And I said, “So what are the top sleep tips?” And she’s like, “Oh, yeah, it’s don’t bring your phone in your bedroom, but no one wants to hear that,” as she continues strapping electrodes to me.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Simple as that, “Okay, that was that.”

Jon Acuff
Yeah, jeez, that’s so funny. Were you doing it for money or to fix your own sleep? Like was this a…?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we were curious if I had sleep apnea. It turns out I had mild sleep apnea. I’ve since overcome that. That was fun.

Jon Acuff
Survivor. Survivor.

Pete Mockaitis
I am. So that’s really cool. The motivational portfolio, it’s like layers upon layers upon layers of backup systems.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, I want it to be easy. I want, like, again, make tomorrow easy today. So I know, like, because nobody’s job is easy. Like, writing a book has a lot of, like, identity and emotion around it.

I’m right now in the marathon part of the book release, meaning I’ve already released the book. I sprinted to the finish line and now I’m in the marathon part, and I need to talk about it constantly and I need to promote it.

And every author loves writing a book. Most hate selling a book. But guess what? If you don’t sell it, you don’t get to write other books. And so now I’m like, “Okay, for me, in the next six months, how do I motivate myself to do 500 different types of promotion around Procrastination Proof versus I hide from it. I hope Oprah discovers it in her dentist office, whatever.”

And I was like, “No. For me to do that thing will be difficult, how do I make it easy? How do I motivate myself to stay on top of this book?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think this is so good, if I may. Could you give me three more things that can go in a portfolio to get motivation cooking?

Jon Acuff
Oh, yeah, 100%. I mean, an item you want to buy can go in a portfolio. There’s a woman I know that grew up in Indiana, kind of small town, and she always wanted to buy a Louis Vuitton purse. That was her thing, like, “When I make it, when I become an executive…”

Like, that was her symbol to the point that when she went to Paris, France with her husband, he tried to buy her one, and she said, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.” She was like, “I don’t want you to buy this for me. I need to do this. This is something I’ve thought about.”

So sometimes it’s okay, “I want to buy this thing,” or, “I want to be able to give this person this thing.” That’s a great one. Another one can be, “By this date, I want to accomplish blank.” Everybody has had the vacation moment where you get a lot of work done right before vacation.

Because you’re going, “How do I make tomorrow easy today? I want to have a really peaceful vacation. So if I clear these things off my plate, I will.” So you get a boost of energy. You could just say, “Where are some deadlines like that that I want to say before I go to this, I’ve done these three things before I go to this. I’ve done these three things?” To me, that’s another one.

And then the third one, I’d say, is like this principle of do difficult things in beautiful places. Meaning, if there’s something you’re putting off, go do it somewhere beautiful. Like, don’t try to crank on something in your office. If you’re stuck, go to a coffee shop.

Don’t run somewhere ugly. Like, make that part of the reward, like, “Oh, I’m going to go to, you know,” I don’t know, “Pinkerton Park, because I love that park,” versus, “I’m just going to run around this treadmill.” You’re already doing a difficult thing. Why add more difficulty?

And so, again, you just get creative and curious about yourself, and you’ll start to notice. Like, last one I’ll give you, I bought a Timex watch. I don’t mean to brag, but, obviously I’ve achieved some success. I bought a Timex watch that has Snoopy on it jumping into a pile of leaves.

So on the days when I feel tempted to write a boring, serious book devoid of humor, I can wear that watch and be like, “Oh, that’s charming. That’s delightful. Like, look at Snoopy having so much fun. He’s with Linus. They’re jumping in the leaves.” Very silly trigger for me. Wouldn’t work for most people. No problem.

One year, I wanted to write a book faster, so I bought carbon fiber Nike running shoes. Bright green. Obnoxious. The most expensive shoes I’d ever owned from a running perspective. Wore them every time I wrote that book. Ridiculous? Totally. Totally ridiculous. But it was another one of those things.

And the more you study high performers like you do, the more you find they’re playing games like this all the time. They’re playing little games behind the scenes to do the things that most people don’t do.

Pete Mockaitis
So if I perceive that I have many lucrative opportunities and I just need to go to work, I should put a large pickaxe in my office because there’s a gold mine that just needs me to go to work on it.

Jon Acuff
Gold, you could do that. Yeah, or get rid of your chair and do a little cart, like one of those carts they carry the gold in. Maybe you just sit in that. Maybe you, overalls, like Yosemite Sam or something. I don’t know, we’re just spitballing, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. That’s good. Well, I want to hear the one-minute version of permission to review and then how procrastination is the most well-funded fear in human history.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so the one minute is, I’ll give you the soundtrack for it, “Data kills denial, which prevents disaster.” Data kills denial, which prevents disaster. All the review is telling you is what’s really going on. And we hate a review, dude. We hate it.

The first time I saw this, I was at a restaurant in New York, everybody was going to get a crazy meal. They opened the menu and they had put the calories next to the menu. And everybody’s order changed. Everybody changed their order to sad grilled chicken salads with dressing on the side, not the side of the plate, the side of the restaurant.

So all that to say, if you want to go the direction you really want to go, become friends with data, become friends with a review.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. Now this well-funded fear, what’s the scoop?

Jon Acuff
Well, yeah, so Netflix doesn’t fund perfectionism, Hulu doesn’t fund inner critic, but every single one of those modern-day services funds procrastination. In 2017, the CEO of Netflix said, “Our number one competitor is sleep.”

They are actively funding procrastination, meaning they don’t want you to go to sleep. They don’t want you to get in shape. They don’t want you to write your book. They don’t want you to publish your podcast. They want to turn your time and attention into ad revenue.

And I like those services. That’s not a criticism of them. Just know the score. Like, it’s easier now to procrastinate than it ever has before because you have a pocket casino. Like, that’s a real thing. And in the same way that Dr. Vanderbilt told you, “Yeah, the trick to sleeping is to leave your phone in another room.”

If you said to me, “What’s the trick to writing a book?” I’d go, “Well, why don’t you open your screen time and take an hour back from your greediest, hungriest app, and apply that to writing.” Like, that’s not, even the busiest people, if you ask them to open their screen time will go, “Oh, my gosh, I had no idea I spent six hours on Facebook last week. I would have said, I would have guessed an hour.” Like, that’s what I mean by it’s the most well-funded.

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

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so we have a quiz. If you go to JonAcuff.com/quiz, that’ll show you where you might be tempted to get stuck and what to do about that. So it’ll put you into one of the four categories. You’re a dreamer, you’re a perfectionist, you’re a hustler, you’re an analyst. So JonAcuff.com/quiz will be a whole lot of fun.

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

Jon Acuff
I love Jim Rohn’s quote, “Don’t wish it was easier. Wish you were better. Don’t wish you had less problems. Wish you had more skills.” Like, that’s one of those, that’s in my motivation portfolio. Like, when I go like, “It’s so hard.” Like, “No, I wish I had more skills to deal with this challenge. Am I being invited into a skill?” That’s one of my favorite quotes.

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

Jon Acuff
Daniel Kahneman wrote about it in Thinking, Fast and Slow, where they had college kids make sentences out of words. And one group of college kids had words related to being old in their collection: slow, retired, bald, Florida, etc.

And when they tested how fast they walked later, the students who had read the words about being old physically acted old. They, unknowingly, acted like old people just from reading the words. My favorite study because it speaks to the power of your mindset.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Jon Acuff
I always say War of Art, Stephen Pressfield. That book, for me, really kicked off my own writing journey.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite nugget, something that Jon Acuff shares that gets quoted and tweeted a lot?

Jon Acuff
I often say, “Starting is fun but the future belongs to finishers.” So starting is fun but the future belongs to finishers is one of the things. And then the other one that gets tweeted a lot is, “Be brave enough to be bad at something new.”

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

Jon Acuff
JonAcuff.com is my site. I have a podcast called All It Takes Is A Goal. And I’m big on LinkedIn now. If you listened to the whole episode and just didn’t skip to this, I’m big on LinkedIn. Hit me up.

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

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so I would find somebody 10 years ahead of you and 10 years behind. The 10 years ahead, we know. It’s a mentor. It’s a time machine. Somebody who’s been to the future you want to get to, and will tell you how to do it.

Person 10 years to 20 years behind, they grew up in the new way and can teach you the new way very quickly. I grew up in the old way. I’m 50. For me to do the new way, I have to unlearn the old way first. When I connect with a 27-year-old and they show me something about AI, like, it speeds me up.

So I would just encourage you, know somebody 10 years ahead of you, somebody 10 years behind you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Jon, thank you.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, thanks for having me.

May 21
0

1154: The Fundamentals of Great Executive Presence with Elisia Keown

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Elisia Keown breaks down what it really means to develop your executive presence.

You’ll Learn

  1. 
What it really means to have “more executive presence”
  2. The sentences hindering your executive presence
  3. How to show up more confident for your next meeting

About Elisia

Elisia Keown is an Executive Coach and Founder of Keown Coaching, with 26 years of experience in Coaching, Leadership, Talent Acquisition, and Human Resources. Direct, honest, and kind, she helps executive leaders strengthen their executive presence, elevate their impact, and achieve measurable results through strategic planning. Elisia is also the host of The Executive Coaching Podcast, where she shares practical insights for today’s leaders. Known for her no-nonsense yet fun approach, she brings energy and real-world experience to every coaching conversation. She lives in Wesley Chapel, FL, with her husband and their blended family of five children.

Resources Mentioned

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Elisia Keown Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Elisia, welcome!

Elisia Keown
Pete, thank you. I’m so excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk executive presence, and I think your own clients have teed this up perfectly when they’ve actually said to you, “I’m told I should have more executive presence, but WTF does that even mean?”

Elisia Keown
Exactly. Maybe they leave out the WTF part, but they’re definitely thinking it. No, you’re totally right. Like, my audience is like that C-suite, VP-leader level, and that is one of the most common things I hear. And you and I were talking about it a few weeks ago that this theme of executive presence is so common, and it’s this blanket, I call it the atomic bomb of feedback of, like, we’re going to drop this big atomic bomb of, like, “You need to have better, stronger executive presence.”

And the atomic bomb part of it is it gets dropped and there’s no further explanation. It’s super vague. The executive kind of walks away from the conversation feeling super confused, like, “What does that mean?” And it’s one of the most vague pieces of feedback in corporate America, I’d venture to say.

And so I have made it a mission. How do we demystify it? How do we help define it? Because once you have that clarity, then you can actually work on developing that skill because it is an absolute skill, you can develop it. I do not believe you’re born with it. And then that changes everything in that leader’s trajectory.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds excellent, and that really does ring true in terms of vagueness. And we could talk all day about vague words, like, “Have more executive presence,” or, “Be more strategic,” or, “Be more proactive,” I mean, that could encompass dozens, hundreds of potential behaviors.

Can you tell us how have you grappled with attempting a definition or a decomposition or segmentation of this fuzzy term?

Elisia Keown
Yeah, totally, you’re right. It gets handed down like zero instruction, and people can feel that absence.

And when even pressed, leaders try to articulate it. I find they struggle with it, too. So I don’t think it’s the leader’s intention to be vague. I truly don’t think they go out there trying to confuse the human. But without direction, it’s useless, right? It’s incomplete.

So what I try to do is break it into concrete components. And I usually work with the executive. If they’re unclear and they don’t have the direction, we’ll try to get clues and get little breadcrumbs based on the feedback and what they’re hearing and seeing so that they can have some of those moments of clarity.

And so what I found, it usually falls into these four kind of main buckets that I’ve seen. So the first one is thinking about emotional regulation. Emotional regulation under these high pressure, high stakes environments. We all know it. The big important meeting, speaking in front of the board, having to make a big decision.

So how do you show up and how do you have executive presence when things go sideways or there’s a lot of stakes in the meeting or risk involved? How do you show up and have that emotional regulation within yourself? So that’s a big one.

The ability to be decisive and making decisions quickly even when you have very limited amount of information, that’s very common as an executive, and remaining humble at the same time. So you can make a clear decision, you can still listen to the team, your colleagues, your drug reports, your boss, you can listen to everybody, but you can have that confidence to make a decision without arrogance. Very tricky.

The third, and this is the one I think that gets kind of lumped into executive presence, but how to have intentional communication. How do you speak with clarity, not with that emotional impulse? How do you know, just as important when to speak, but when not to speak, and when to stay silent and listen? And that’s tricky, and I think that’s a lot of the times we do lump it just into blanket communication as executive presence, but I think it’s intentional, clear communication.

And then the last is just being consistent with all of this. So executive presence isn’t always just about what you do in the big meeting. It’s more about what you do every day, how you show up every day, how you lead in the moments where people observing you and when they’re not observing you.

So I think, in summary, it’s not about being the loudest, biggest personality in the room, the smartest person in the room. It’s about being, like, the most grounded in your own leadership, in yourself, and having that self-confidence and helping people understand which of those levers they need to pull.

And because, again, sometimes it isn’t all four of these things that people need to work on. It might be one more than the other but it’s believing in yourself and then moving forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that does paint a picture. Thank you. And, I guess, I’m also thinking about what’s not in there in terms of it’s not, you know, dressed like an executive with a cool suit or an expensive haircut. So I guess looking the part matters somewhat, but perhaps folks would probably just be able to say and articulate that more directly instead of executive presence, like, “Clean up. Get a suit that fits you right.”

Elisia Keown
And you’re right. I think there’s a lot of factors and a lot of things that people say will encompass executive presence. And just like you mentioned, it doesn’t mean those things aren’t important. It doesn’t mean, yes, if you work in an environment where a suit and a clean haircut and being well-groomed is important, and you don’t show up that way, of course it’s important. It’s just not everything.

And I think that’s the hard part because people think if I just solve this one piece that it’s going to encompass everything, and that’s not everything. I think it really, truly, when we say it, we typically mean one of those other four levers to pull. It’s typically not just what you’re wearing. You’re right.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, we can dig into each of these, but, I guess, maybe I’d love to get your take on. So this is a set of skills, and we talk about all kinds of skills here on How to be Awesome at Your Job. How important, in the relative pecking order of career skills development to propel you forward and advance and progress in your career, would you rank these sets of skills? Like, what’s the difference between being amazing at these things versus, “Okay, good enough, but you also have really sharp strategic thinking and prioritization skills going on”?

Elisia Keown
I think executive presence is probably one of, at least, top three because of this reason.

Executive presence, it’s not just this, again, visual effect of how you show up or a lot of people say charisma. It’s not just the personality. It really is, if you go deeper, like into it, it’s not just these behaviors or physical traits. It’s an identity shift.

And I think that’s one of the biggest things when you think about moving and shifting, you know, especially when you come out of some of those individual contributor roles or manager roles where you’re just managing a smaller team. Nothing wrong with that.

But when you leap into the executive level and you start managing leaders of leaders, it requires this identity shift from the leader.

And a lot of high performers, they’ve outgrown this version of themselves that got them to where they are. They’ve been very successful moving up through the organization. And now what’s required to go to that next level is, like, it’s almost like a death of their previous self. And you’re building that back up.

The hard part about that identity shift, though, is all of those behaviors have made you successful to this point. So because of that ego, it’s very hard to say, “I’ve got to let all that go and build upon what I have, and break into a new identity and see myself in a completely different way to level up into that executive presence.”

And so I really think it’s definitely top three when you say that. I don’t know if I can give it an exact number, but you can’t perform your way to executive presence. And I think that’s so often, as an individual contributor, you’re used to putting your head down, executing very tactical skills, all very important. By no means, definitely not disparaging that work, right?

So when I say the death or you’ve got to let go of it, it’s what got you there. But then you have to become this entire new type of leader, and the skills that are put before you, you’ve got to believe in yourself and you’ve got to have a mindset shift and look at yourself in a different way before you talk about those things you talked about like the strategic vision and the planning and the prioritization.

I think that all comes with it. But if you don’t believe that you are operating and believe in the level that you need to perform at, none of that other tactical stuff is really going to matter. So it’s this bridge into that leadership level.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I love what you said there, it’s like, you cannot execute your way into executive presence. It’s sort of a fundamentally different thing. And the picture that’s coming to mind for me is just, in TV, when we have the dork with the lab or the computers helping the crime fighters or the Jack Bauer catch the terrorists, they’ll say, “Well, I ran an analysis using matrix multiplication and we deduced that…”

They’re like, “In English!” you know, like, they get impatient, and it paints a picture like, “Oh, that person is clearly executing amazingly. Like, they know their stuff inside and out.” And yet the leaders are annoyed and frustrated. They don’t imagine that guy or gal has high potential executive future in store for them.

Because of their vibe of the ‘executive presence is lacking.’” So those are TV examples. But, Elisia, give us a real example, a story, a tale of a client who maybe got this fuzzy feedback and then did something about it and saw some results.

Elisia Keown
Yeah, you’re dead on. I love that analogy. It’s so funny, right? Because I think that’s what happens, is a lot of times clients come in thinking they need like a few tips, and what we really discover so much deeper, and it’s not just about what they’re doing, right?

So I had this client VP level, high performer. And, again, I always say this, I work with people that are already high performing. There’s nothing going wrong with their leadership, right? And some people think that it’s a remedy for something going wrong when, really, this is an accelerator.

So this person was already getting good results, already performing, but she’d get passed over for that next level, for that C-suite, the higher-level role. And what was happening was, when we started digging in and peeling back the layers, she was an over-explainer.

So the person that’s saying too many words, right, just like you said, or overly complex words, over-explaining every decision. She had a lot of hedging, and hedging is you’re saying things like, “I mean,” “I feel like,” or very passive kind of language rather than very decisive language.

And so it wasn’t about the skills problem. She had a lot of skills that have gotten her to this VP level. It was more being deferential when she was leading rather than being decisive and forward-thinking. And so a lot of what was happening though, again, as we peeled it back, it wasn’t about saying different words. It was showing up differently in terms of her identity.

She had a deep executive presence problem that was rooted in how she saw herself. And so she was still seeing herself as needing to prove herself. And we were way past that. So we really worked through thought process and identity.

And once we worked in that, within months, she was showing up completely differently in the room and then being groomed for that next level. Like, actually having conversations versus it not being on the table for her at all to move to that next level.

Pete Mockaitis
So when you say thought process and identity, what might that look like in terms of, if I’m saying, “I’m going to go work on my thought process and identity”? What does that consist of? What am I doing there?

Elisia Keown
Well, in the simplest terms, it’s the sum of the sentences that are running through your head and how you’re thinking about yourself. And so a really easy way to do this would be to, when you think about the situation, again, she was in a lot of board meetings, she was in a lot of meetings with her C-suite level leaders.

It was, “What was she thinking and how was she thinking when she was in the room, hedging, explaining herself, like, what was her thought process?” And trying to narrow it down to some of those sentences that kind of run through your brain like a stock ticker, right, and again, part of it could be as simple as, “I need to prove myself,” or, “I still need to level up, and I’m not at the level of an C-suite executive.”

So whatever that kind of sentence is that’s holding them back, that’s really what you’re trying to investigate. And if you’re doing this for yourself, it would be when you’re in some of those critical moments where, if you can identify when you’ve been told you need stronger executive presence, so if there was a specific meeting, what was some of those sentences that are running through your brain as you were getting told some of that feedback?

And, again, that’s a little bit harder to back into to undo, but I’d say the easiest way would be thinking of the specific example where you need to hold executive presence. And maybe if you were told you had weak executive presence, what was the sentence? What was the thing you were telling yourself in that moment? Because, truly, philosophically, it’s just how you’re thinking is really how you’re going to show up.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, Elisia, it’s so fun that we’re talking because you have unique vantage points into many people’s intimate thoughts, which most of us never get to hear. So lay it on us, what are some of the recurring thoughts people have that undermine their executive presence? And how do we deal with them?

Elisia Keown
I think the big one that I hear a lot of, and it’s the exact opposite of executive presence, it’s like saying that they have impostor syndrome.

And so some of the thoughts that sound like, some people will just straight up be like, “I feel like an impostor,” as simple as that. But some people will have the sentence of, “What am I doing here? How did I get here?” I’ve heard that one.

So looking around the room, seeing executives that are highly accomplished, highly tenured, multiple degrees from Ivy League universities, etc., and just saying to themselves, “How did I get into this room? I don’t belong here.” Essentially, the underlying thought could just be like, “I’m not good enough to be here.”

And so it will sound like that, it’ll sound subtle. And those thoughts could be very innocent-sounding, right, like, “Hey, let’s make sure we can perform up to the level of this room, right?” But in the essence, if we’re thinking we’re not good enough to be in that room, that can show up and start to show up in our actions.

So if we’re thinking, “I’m not good enough to show up,” or, “How did I get here?” and your feeling would, potentially, be like insecurity, lack of confidence, then you’re going to show the actions that you’ll take will be from that defensive position.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And so what’s interesting, though, is that thought in the moment is you say thoughts and identity, that thought is naturally bubbling up from a belief. So I want to hear how you go after that.

We had Dr. Valerie Young, who may have coined the phrase impostor syndrome, on the podcast. And she had some cool perspectives along the lines of, like, “Well, so is everybody just an idiot if they made the decision to hire you and promote you?”

And so just to kind of, like, reminded me of some cognitive behavioral therapy-type stuff in terms of , “Let’s evaluate the evidence. Let’s really take a look at this belief. And is it kind of bogus or so?” So that was kind of some helpful practical stuff. But I’d love to hear you in the trenches, when you’re working with folks on these thoughts and identities, how do you attack them?

Elisia Keown
What a great conversation. I’m jealous you got to have that conversation with her, but I think that’s a great tip, and I think it’s the same thought process of looking at that thought. And, again, we get real granular, right?

We get in the moment, in the room, in the thought process, and really start to question it. Basically, you look at it and you say, “Is this true? Do you belong here? Do you not belong here, right?” And, generally, where we go with it is, “Why are we telling ourselves this thought?” and understanding that as well. Like, “Why would that be coming up for us?”

And, again, it can be so different for every individual, but, typically, what happens is, when we get in some of these tough situations, leading is difficult. Speaking in front of a group is difficult. It can be challenging.

Again, you can get better at it, it can feel easier at times, but it always, there’s that challenge of that fear of rejection. Leadership, a lot of times, is we’re separating ourselves from the group, from the pack, from the herd, right? And we’re standing out and we’re separating ourselves from the group. So in its very primal essence, it can feel like survival, it can feel life or death.

And so what happens is we go through some of that fight or flight, and the brain is telling you, like, “Hey, it’s scary, Pete. It’s scary to speak out in front of thousands of people or tens of thousands of people on a podcast.” And your brain is like, “Stay safe.”

And so some of the stay-safe thoughts can be like, “Hey, we might not be good enough to do this. What are we doing here? Let’s go stay back into the cave and stay safe and get quiet and really, like, pull ourselves back from this. Let’s go cuddle on the couch with a blanket and some snacks and watch Netflix. It sounds like a much better idea, right?”

And so it’s the brain’s protective mechanism to give you some of these sometimes snarky, sometimes nice-sounding thoughts. They sound really helpful, like, “Let’s stay comfortable,” because it’s just based on survival.

And so, sometimes when you know that, when you’re like, “Oh, this is just my sweet brain trying to protect me. Is it really true that I don’t belong here?” No. You can just say, “Thanks. Thanks for that thought. We’re going to go ahead and proceed with doing this podcast, speaking up in this boardroom, doing the thing anyway, even if we feel a little bit nervous about it.”

We can carry the nervousness, knowing that it’s normal and natural, and it doesn’t mean stop. I think a lot of people think that that feeling means stop, turn around, don’t take action. When really we can just carry it with us.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s super helpful in terms of just understanding, reframing, “What is this thought, this feeling, this vibe? And what does it mean?” So that’s super handy. I’m curious about maybe some of the deeper work with regard to, it was like, “No, I really do think that I kind of got lucky to be in this role, and I don’t think that I belong and I really do think I’m faking it.” If we’re there, what do we do with that?

Elisia Keown
Yeah, totally. Well, and I think there’s two separate approaches. You know, I think if you’re thinking we really go down the path of someone has deep beliefs that they cannot overcome and they can’t see any other upside. I think, sometimes that’s where the difference between therapy and coaching comes in.

Like, if there’s some sort of hurdle that’s coming from their past or their internal beliefs from trauma or some other thing, that’s where a coach is not a therapist. That’s where, I think, sometimes you separate the application of support there.

On the flip side, another way to look at it, if we’re just thinking that’s not the situation and we’re thinking more forward thinking, it’s to say like, “Okay, where do we have evidence that that’s not true?” And I worked with a leader to say, “How do we look at the entirety in your body of work?” to say, “Okay, where can we show that that is not the case?”

And having the human come up with those things to say, “Okay, let’s start to look at our internal beliefs and be, like, really challenge them, right?” Because I think digging deeper, like you said, I think taking that, “Is this true?” a couple clicks further to be, like, “Okay, give me all the evidence that you really don’t belong here then.”

It’s funny, when they ask me that, like, “Tell me all the reasons why you don’t belong,” they’re usually like, “Well, actually, no, I’ve done this and this…” and they actually start to answer or asking questions of why they do.

And so I found that to be effective, like, “Tell me all the reasons. No, let’s stick on it.” And sometimes they really can’t. They can’t find beyond that just, like, triggering thought, like, why that’s actually true. So that can be really helpful kind of that path.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I really liked that notion of collecting the evidence, thinking about your experience. And just recently, I guess I coached myself in terms of, I was having some stuff going on. I was just like, “Oh, I kind of feel like a loser, you know?”

And so I was like, “Well, what’s the evidence?” I was like, “Well, you know, it seems like someone was upset about this, and I disappointed someone there, and I didn’t kind of get the things I wanted done on these days.”

And then I said, “Okay, so we’ve got that.” And then I was like, “Well, then what’s the evidence on the other side?” And just for funsies, I did all this research, and I was like, “Well, I mean, hey, I did that. And that was kind of cool. And really how many people really have done that?” And so I went ahead and assembled the spreadsheet.

And so what’s kind of fun, and this is true for every human. This is my latest kind of revelation I’ve been having fun with is that, if we take a look at the things that you have done, have accomplished, are good at, and how kind of rare that is, and then string together maybe 10 of those.

It’s fair to say for just about everybody that, by some measures that you’ve selected, you are the winningest human being who has ever lived, more than all 120 billion humans who have ever walked this earth. On those dimensions, collectively, if it were like a decathlon, you are the winningest person ever.

And so what was fun for that exercise with me, it’s like, I just sort of move on, it’s like, “Okay, the word loser is just like a nonsensical term that is ill-defined and not helpful. And if a loser is defined as one who never disappoints anybody and never fails, well, then there’s no such…everybody’s a loser.

Elisia Keown
Then I will own it. Yeah, right. Then just, “Okay, I’m fine, right? I’ll own that, Yeah, totally. What a great exercise. You did, you coached yourself. Good job, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, thank you. So I was collecting evidence via spreadsheets, I guess it’s a language that speaks to me. But I’d love to hear your prompts or your approach by which you facilitate this evidence collection.

Elisia Keown
Yeah, totally. Well, first off, you get a gold star. Great job. Great way to do it. And that’s exactly it. Exactly it, Pete. And I think, too, like, you said something that’s really interesting, too.

And so I want to really emphasize it, in the sense that looking back at what you accomplished and only what you could have done, if somebody else followed the playbook, they probably wouldn’t have the same results as you did, and just because all those things are making up uniquely you.

Can somebody do some of those things? Of course, they can, but they won’t be in the same magic and the way that you did it. And another way to look at this, too, is, if you’re not having failure, if you’re not feeling a little bit of the discomfort, if you’re not feeling a little bit queasy about some of things, your goals probably aren’t stretching you.

They’re probably not big in the sense of big in your own world. That can mean something different for everyone. So I’m not being presumptuous, and you have to do this, but a lot of times, as high-performing leaders or people that are entrepreneurial or accomplishing big things and setting big goals, you’re setting bigger goals for yourself and going after them.

So to expect that everything would go according to plan, that you would never feel insecure about them, or you would never fail at them, or you wouldn’t feel good enough for them, or you would feel like, “I don’t know how to do what I’m doing,” that is actually a false expectation, that we somehow believe that it’s like we do believe that everything is going to go according to plan.

We’re very optimistic, typically, as humans, a lot of those things. And when things don’t go, when we think that there’s something terribly wrong. But in your example, it’s like, “Well, yeah, I have a big fat goal and I might stumble but I’m going to still going to get it, right? I’m still going to go after it.”

“And if I’m not setting big-enough goals, like if it’s really easy, I’m probably not stretching and growing in the same way.” So a lot of it, like the coaching, I will do is to say, “Hey, some of this discomfort, some of this brain, we’re not going to solve the brain telling us that like, ‘Hey, in some instances, we don’t feel good enough.’” It’s a normal human condition. It’s part of the human condition, knowing that we can go after these big things and move through that discomfort.

That’s more what we’re trying to work towards is recognizing that in the moment. So it’s not trying to eliminate, it’s more so saying, “Oh, I see it. I can know what’s happening here. And now I know how to handle it, right?”

“Maybe I go back to my spreadsheet, or maybe I have my own method, I have my own things that I can do to work through it, knowing this is actually part of my currency. This is my currency towards success, and this is part of the game that I’ve decided to play.”

And it’s optional, right? In leadership or entrepreneurial ventures, it’s optional. So, “Do I want to put my chips in knowing this is the table stakes that I need to play or not?” Most people say, “Yeah.” They’re aspirational, they’re driven, they want to go after these things. So lot of times they say, “Yes, I’m willing to feel all of this and move through it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. Well, Elisia, this has been fun. I’ve been sort of just deep-diving into anything I found intriguing. But I want you to take the floor and tell us, what have you found to be beyond what we’ve already discussed, really just the most game-changing, powerful interventions, or exercises that upgrade executive presence in a hurry?

Elisia Keown
Yeah, totally. I’ll give you some practical tips. You know, I think the first one, definitely what we talked about, we’ll call it just like a download of your thoughts, right, a blank piece of paper, kind of like just dumping out your brain, looking at it.

So we can get it out of this, sometimes our internal spin, like just writing out what you’re thinking before you go into some high-stakes meetings or high-stakes environments to kind of look at the thoughts so you can decide, “Do I like this? Do I believe this? Do I want to keep thinking this?” And knowing that’s all optional, great exercise.

But beyond that, some takeaways that I can give the audience, just to really use in a really simplistic way without having over complex environments needed, is just going into a meeting and doing a pre-meeting reset of your brain.

So just a few minutes before the meeting, before any high-stakes situation, just getting quiet and clear on what your intention is. So thinking, “How do I want to show up in this meeting? What do I need to contribute? Who do I want to be in this room and any outcomes that I want to try to influence?”

And just being super clear, because that, again, that gets your brain focused on a problem to solve, “How do I want to show up? What do want to say? How do I want to influence? What do want to do?”

And having that for yourself, so that some of those other thoughts, again, that we’ve maybe dumped out, but they’re not going to sneak in, we have a focus, we’re clear, we can focus on how we want others to experience and receive us, rather than getting in our head about not being good enough. So, pre-meeting reset, quick, clean exercise just to go in with great intentions.

The second tip I would say, in looking at emotional responsiveness, how do you respond under pressure? So if you think about some of the highest-stakes environments you may be in, maybe it’s a really difficult conversation, like I said, a big presentation or a meeting, sometimes those moments reveal what your executive presence gaps are.

So you’re just doing your own reflection after some of those moments. Did you get reactive? Did you react in a way that you felt good about? What was your thoughts on the conversation? What went well? What didn’t? What would you do differently next time? Nothing more complex than that, but auditing yourself and your emotional regulation and executive presence.

And then the third is just watching your own language and how you’re coming across in meetings. So are you hedging? Are you over-explaining? Are you qualifying everything through the conversation, or are you being really, really clear? So how are you signaling your executive presence? And how can you practice being clear, saying less, but with more conviction in those meetings?

Again, simple audit, but why that’s important is, if you do those reflections, it will also reveal your thinking. So it’ll ladder back to, “What was I thinking when I was going into those meetings? And how was I showing up?” So simple exercises that anybody can do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, and, Elisia, you got me thinking here. Nowadays, since the AI meeting assistants are ubiquitous, Fathom and a dozen others up in there, so you’ve got the recording and the transcript, and then you could even review it yourself or you could ask AI to zero in on some things like, “Hey, I’m working on executive presence such as A, B, C, and D. Could you highlight some things in this meeting in which I said that could use some improvement?”

And, again, my take with AI is, I never trust anything it says, but it can bring something to the surface for me to reflect upon, and that is useful in and of itself.

Elisia Keown
I love that idea. And I will say, the best feedback that you can ever get is, if you’re in an environment where you can have a recorded meeting and watch it back, it’s one of the most painful pieces of feedback, but it’s the best feedback that you can ever get, is just watching yourself speak. You’ll see it right away.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. I remember, I’ve had times where I was videotaping a buddy who was doing a speech and he asked me for feedback. I said, “Well, you do this thing where you kind of kept caressing your tie and it was a little distracting.”

He was like, “What? What are you talking about? No, I wasn’t.” I was like, “Well, I mean, I saw it like 10 times. You can look at the video.” And he said, “Oh, my gosh, Pete. I had no idea.” And so, yes, it really can be quite eyeopening and surprising.

Elisia Keown
Absolutely. You uncover the habits. I hope it was a nice tie. I bet it was worth it, right?

Pete Mockaitis
It was a great-looking tie, but no matter the tie, we don’t want to see you caressing it. It’s like, “What are you doing, dude? What is going on?”

Elisia Keown
Showing that tie off. It’s so funny. Subconsciously, you don’t even notice those things, right? Yeah, it’s such a great piece of feedback. I love that.

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

Elisia Keown
You know, I think that the number one mistake that leaders try… when they try to develop executive presence, they try to outperform it. They try to get more tactical. They work on the tactics versus the mindset.

And so, again, I know we said at the top, but I say, trying to do it through actions versus thoughts first, wrong way to go about it. And, especially, if you’re trying to copy somebody else’s style. A lot of times people will be like, “Well, speak like so-and-so,” or, “Model after so-and-so.”

Nothing wrong with taking elements of people that we see speaking and emulating that. But if you’re trying to duplicate it rather than do the work from within, I would say that would be my number one tip to walk away with.

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

Elisia Keown
Yes. Right now, I’ve been loving just choose your hard. I think it might be Codie Sanchez, it’s one of hers.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you share with us a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Elisia Keown
I have been digging into recently a lot of work on the ROI of coaching. So PWC and ICF did a study that talks a lot about the ROI of coaching to include that coaching has a five-to-seven X average ROI on executive coaching for leaders.

Eighty-six percent of companies, they report that they’ve recouped the coaching investment when they invest in those type of leaders, and they see 70% of improvement in work performance, which is wild.

Pete Mockaitis
Seventy percent, okay.

Elisia Keown
And then 70%, that’s a lot. And then a 50% reduction in leadership-related turnover, meaning, “I left because I was not loving who I was working with or for.” And we all know that boss is such a difference maker in how you experience work. And so people leaving, cutting 50% of that turnover, that’s incredible.

Pete Mockaitis
So it’s the coachee that did not turn over or the leader whose underlings did not turn over.

Elisia Keown
The leader whose underlings did not turn over because of their improved leadership capabilities. So that’s huge. That’s huge. And so, to me, I’m like thinking, like, that’s real even impact. So if you think about executive presence, it’s not a soft skill. It’s absolutely, it’s a lever to pull, and there’s a direct correlation to that financial impact.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. And a favorite book?

Elisia Keown
I just read and finished Start With Yourself by Emma Grede. She is a British entrepreneur. And so she has this chapter in the book on money. I’ve read it a few times now and I’ve been talking about it with other executives, and it’s powerful. So if you haven’t read it, it’s a good one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Elisia Keown
I’m a big fan of the thought framework of The Model by Brooke Castillo. So we kind of talked about it, right? Her belief is you have thoughts that create your feelings. Your feelings will create those actions. Your actions create results. It’s a simple model, but it’s basically what we were talking about. It all starts with your thoughts. And if you can change your thought process, you can impact your results.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Elisia Keown
So I’m a big fan of time blocking, planning, time boxing. And I don’t do it in the way of you just go through a to-do list and even time blocking on your calendar. I’ll take time blocking and I say, “This is the time that I have allocated to this, and there’s going to be an outcome.” So it’s not just like, “Just research the thing,” or, “Time to brainstorm.” It’s like, “This is the output and the deliverable that will be done at the end of this timeframe.”

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I like that a lot. I probably have ADHD, but I can relate to that notion, when you have a specific outcome, it makes it kind of exciting. It’s more like a game with risk and stakes and uncertainty. It’s like, “Am I going to be able to finish it? Well, I hope so, but in order to do so, I’m really going to have to stay on point.” And it just infuses a little more zip and interest into the thing.

Elisia Keown
Absolutely. I never thought about that way, zip. A little zip and interest.

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

Elisia Keown
Yeah, easy. ElisiaKeownCoaching.com. So it’s a tricky, tricky the way it sounds versus it’s spelled. So it’s E-L-I-S-I-A-K-E-O-W-N Coaching.com. And I love all the socials. I’m on LinkedIn. I have a podcast on all the major platforms, and to include YouTube. It’s the Executive Coaching Podcast. And we talk a lot about tips like this on there. So happy to give you some free support.

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

Elisia Keown
If you want to be a leader and you want to set these big goals for yourself, you want to move forward, get comfortable with the discomfort of leading. It’s not easy. If everybody was able to do it, they would, right?

And so growing, leading, it’s challenging. And so when that discomfort bubbles up, remember, it doesn’t mean stop. It doesn’t mean we’re doing something wrong, we need to turn around.

It is a signal worth listening to, but I would say, getting comfortable with the discomfort and keep going. You’re not alone out there feeling that way. And the world needs great courageous leaders that can move through that discomfort and go after the big goal, anyway.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Elisia, thank you.

Elisia Keown
Thanks, Pete. I love talking to you as always.

May 18
0

1153: How to Confidently Negotiate for What You Want with Attia Qureshi

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Attia Qureshi shares simple techniques to build up your negotiating skills, one step at a time.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to take the fear and tension out of negotiating
  2. The simple trick to arrive at more win-win solutions
  3. How to feel comfortable making big asks and saying no

About Attia

Attia Qureshi is a negotiation and influence expert, former MIT faculty member, adjunct professor at the University of Michigan, and the founder of Attia Qureshi Consulting — where she has spent two decades helping leaders, teams, and organizations negotiate better outcomes in every room they walk into. Her work spans Fortune 500 boardrooms, university classrooms, and conflict zones around the world, where she has negotiated on behalf of the U.S. State Department in some of the most complex environments imaginable.

Resources Mentioned

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Attia Qureshi Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Attia, welcome!

Attia Qureshi
Thanks so much for having me. I’m delighted to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m glad to never settle, so I think we’ll get a lot of valuable insights here. Could you maybe kick us off? You’ve had some fun projects working with the FBI and the US Department of State. Could you perhaps no pressure, open us up with a thrilling high-stakes tale of persuasion, negotiation in action?

Attia Qureshi
So I’ll tell you about when I was in Colombia. The State Department had sent me to Colombia to get farmers to move away from growing cocaine to growing other crops like oranges. And this is a really hard sell because the cartel will come pick up the cocaine, hand you money, you can grow it on a small plot of land, and the cycle continues. They get money really easily, they don’t have to work with anyone else, and the cartel just comes and hands them cash.

But the problem is that, every decade or so, the cartel would come in and gun down the entire village. And so, while it was easy money and easy growing, the threat of violence was real. So they had an incentive to transition away. And I was at my eighth cooperative, it was 110 degrees, we were outside in a pavilion, and I have 40 middle-aged Colombian men looking at me completely unimpressed.

And they’re like, “Who is this young minority American woman who has helicoptered in to help us?” And so I start talking and, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, as soon as I’m getting started, there’s this guy in the back, and he opens up a case and out flies a drone. And it’s buzzing and the propellers are completely covering up the sound of me speaking. And I’m like, “What the heck is going on?”

So I paused for a second, and I had a translator and kind of an in-country handler with me. And I pull her aside, and I’m like, “What is happening here, Gabby?” And she was like, “Oh, well, he’s actually the co-op, he runs the cooperative, and he is also a mid-level cartel boss.”

And so what he does is at every cooperative meeting, he brings this drone, starts flying it around, telling the cooperative they’re going to get rich, from the drone, never explaining how, and distracts them so they keep growing the coca, which is benefiting him and the cartel, and never transitioning to another crop.

And so I have to do a little bit of self-work in that moment because I freeze for a second. I am a little bit scared, maybe a little bit more than scared. And I don’t know how to progress forward.

But then I take a deep breath, and that’s what I try to do every time I feel myself freeze in these types of situations, and I breathe out slowly because it reminds my parasympathetic nervous system, “I’m not under attack.” We have that fight and flight response.

So I take a deep breath. And then I have to rethink about, “Why am I here? I am here to help these farmers. I can help these farmers.” And, to be honest, someone has to stand up to this guy because these farmers don’t have the capacity, the security, any of it to do it.

So I look him straight in the eye as he starts his drone up again, and I say, “No.” And everybody freezes and everybody looks at me. Their mouths are open and they’re waiting to see what happens. And he tries to argue with me, and I’m like, “No, we have set ground rules. We have set norms for how we are going to have this conversation. If you want to participate in that way, you’re welcome to, otherwise I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

And he leaves. And there’s this palpable sigh of relief in that moment. And, all of a sudden, everyone opens up, and they start engaging with the process and talking to me about how they might possibly transition to oranges, and what a business model looks like, and how they can get it to market, and who’s going to be responsible.

And so what we do is create a business plan for them and a process for how they’re going to operate over the next year. And they all sign it and the cooperative is still functioning and actually growing oranges and using that today.

But in that moment, there was a lot of pieces that I had to pull in for my own training. And, luckily, I have the muscle memory from building those skills where I was able to conquer that fear and work through that process.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Wow! So, takeaways, if there’s a cartel operator with a drone, you tell him no, and that works. I mean, what’s spooky is if you think of it in TV world, he leaves and comes back with a scary crew.

Attia Qureshi
Yeah, and weapons.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And so I don’t know if you and the others were in fear of that very outcome in the moment.

Attia Qureshi
I will have to tell you that, so I was there with a cooperative for a couple of hours. In the moment, I wasn’t worried about him coming back with weapons, but to be honest, I was very worried for the next couple of days that he would find me in the town that I was staying in because it was very close by, and then just be like, you know, “I’m going to take care of her.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, yes. So, indeed, it does take something strong, trained, powerful within to go there. How do we pull that off?

Attia Qureshi
So everyone thinks that negotiation and confidence, not everyone, but a lot of people think negotiation and confidence is innate, that we’re born with it. And that is absolutely not true. It’s a skill that we have to develop over time and build, just like athletes and musicians build and become great at their vocation. The same thing with negotiation.

So I have built that skill and I’ve had time over the last decade to do it, but we have to treat it as a performance skill. We have to break it down into the smallest pieces and practice exercises in our daily life, in low-stakes environments, to get to that point where the muscle memory kicks in.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, what are the key skills that build up to become negotiation persuasion?

Attia Qureshi
Okay, great question because I want to talk about a few of those. The first one I’d say is the internal negotiation, the one you have with yourself, which a lot of us are failing at, and it’s what makes us quit before we even get started. And then we have understanding their perspective, data, and the ability to say no.

So I’d love to start with the internal negotiation because I think that is one of the most important ones because unless we are grounded and secure and firm in making an ask, and feeling comfortable going in and making that ask, and having a framework for how we want to do that, a lot of us feel like we’re going to fail before we even start.

We see it as something to avoid or something that we have to conquer because in movies, everyone is sitting across the table from each other, banging on the table, trying to hash it out, and it’s, you know, eat or be eaten type of situation, but that’s not how it has to be.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, to become comfortable at making the ask, is that really possible? I imagine that it would be uncomfortable, but you could do it anyway? But tell us, paint a picture there.

Attia Qureshi
So I’ll give you a little bit of a backstory for me. I grew up as a child of immigrants, and my parents were really great at being liked and building relationships, which we talk about as something fundamental to negotiation success, but they were terrible at making an ask. And my dad’s whole mantra growing up as a kid was, “Don’t rock the boat.” So I was initially very passive, but then I was bullied really severely in fifth grade.

There was a girl, Bethany. And Bethany had decided that I shouldn’t have any friends. So I sat in the lunchroom alone and I escaped to the classroom because it was so cavernous and lonely. And she had convinced my teacher I did that because I was shy. And so it was a heartbreaking year, but a really important lesson for me and the power of influence.

So I had the opportunity for a fresh start. We moved after fifth grade, and I decided not this time. I developed a really hard shell, an exoskeleton around myself where I was great at kind of faking it till I made it. I would assert a position, refuse to budge an inch and threaten to walk away, which is very positional negotiation. It’s the idea of that table and hammering it out and, you know, “Either I win or you win.”

And that had some success in the moment, but it had really terrible long-term consequences of having any relationships that lasted or wanted repeat interactions. So I went from the one side of avoiding completely to the other side of seeing it as something I had to conquer and dominate.

And then I was sitting in my co-author’s Power and Negotiation class at MIT a decade ago, and he said something that changed my world. He said I could get more out of a negotiation if I shared my interests, but also cared about their interests and built a strong relational foundation in which to work together.

And I was amazed because I realized I didn’t have to be that scared little girl inside. There was this middle ground that I call relational negotiation, or others called principled negotiation, where I could build a relationship, and we could have repeat interactions, and I could create more value, tangible value for both of us through this process.

And so to your question, “Can we change?” Yes. And I think this relational negotiation path is a way that makes a lot of us feel better about how we might enter into the negotiation because it doesn’t have to be the avoidant or the conquering.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds super. Can you share with us some best practices for doing that?

Attia Qureshi
So the first thing I would say is on the relationship side. People can always help you, it just depends on if they want to or not. So it’s a great practice to make sure that, around you, for the people that you interact with regularly, at work, at home, in your life, do you have a good foundational relationship with them?

And if there are areas where you can improve it, I like the idea of the technique reciprocity. Take them something small. Take them their favorite coffee. Take them a sweet treat. Take them, you know, tickets that you’re not going to use to some event. Anything small, it doesn’t have to cost you much, but it’s thoughtful for something they would like.

And the idea of reciprocity studies, I’ve found, is that it’s hardwired in us that we want to return a gift or a favor. So, at some point, they will want to return that to you. So what you’re doing is creating a virtuous cycle of improving the relationship so that, if down the road, you have an ask, they’re going to be much more likely to respond to it than they would if you have a negative or even neutral relationship.

But there are two caveats, because some people ask, “Well, what’s the difference between manipulation and influence?” And influences, in my perspective, it’s anytime you are trying to improve the situation for both parties, and if they found out what you were doing, they wouldn’t really care.

So improving the relationship without an expectation of anything in return is pretty great for both parties. But if you’re doing something that is trying to take something from the other party or is going to impact them in any negative way, that is what I would classify as manipulation.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So when you give something, it can be a manipulation if you’re trying to take something?

Attia Qureshi
Yeah, I mean, think about the idea of quid pro quo. Let’s say I buy you lunch and then I immediately ask you for something, that feels yuck. Like, “Come on, I know exactly what you’re doing here.” If I buy you lunch and I just want to do it because I want to improve our relationship, great. Then that’s just in itself, the whole goal is to improve the relationship. Maybe I might have an ask in a month or six months or a year, but that’s not my goal.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. Like, if you’re scheming, it does have a different feel. And, especially, if it’s very clear that you’re scheming. Understood. And we had Bob Cialdini on the show, who was fantastic. I see he endorsed your book. Perfect Choice.

Attia Qureshi
So good. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And we talked about reciprocity. And I remember it’s in the book he had, Influence: Science and Practice, maybe it was a previous version. He mentioned the phrase, “I know you’d do the same for me.” Like, don’t say, “It was nothing.” He was like, “I know you’d do the same for me.” And it’s funny. It’s, like, do you have any alternatives to that phrase you like?

Attia Qureshi
I really like to say, “Oh, it’s really my pleasure,” because I think that I don’t necessarily have to point out that they would do the same for me because, from what I’ve read, which Cialdini has done an amazing job on the research of this, it is hardwired.

So I think that they automatically have that feeling, and I want them to feel that I’m trying to do it graciously and I want to do it for them. And I think that makes people even more interested in reciprocating and responding.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that a lot because it’s true, because it really is a pleasure to give someone something that they appreciate. It just feels good. People helping people and it’s gracious. It’s win, win, win. Okay.

Attia Qureshi
Yes, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you’ve got a number of favorite negotiation exercises. I suppose, in your language, the small acts of kindness triggering reciprocity is what you might call a lemonade technique. But tell us about some of the others, like the best, fine, worst outcome exercise.

Attia Qureshi
So this goes back to the internal negotiation. And there are two things I want to talk about when it comes to exercises there. The first, we can talk about the best, fine, and worst negotiation outcomes.

So a lot of us have some sort of fear when it comes to entering into a negotiation. That’s what often stops us before we even get started or makes us freeze in the moment. And what you can do is, actually, in your head, close your eyes and think of, “What is the worst-case scenario here? Truly, like, what is actually the worst case scenario?” Then, “What is the moderate fine outcome? And what is the best case scenario?”

Because what you’re doing when you think through those, especially the worst-case scenario, is you’re inoculating yourself as you mentally think about that scenario to the fear around it and the worry of the feelings that come up with it.

And then I ask myself, when I look at those scenarios, “What is actually likely?  What is true here?” Because, then, we can start actually assessing, “What is our fear mentality that’s driving us?” versus, logically, rationally, once we diminish some of that fear and anxiety, “What do we actually think is going to happen? Likely, it’s going to be either the fine outcome or the best outcome.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I found that super handy. And I’m thinking about one negotiation I had, it was high stakes, and I was practicing with another negotiation guru, Kwame Christian, he’s been on the show a couple of times.

And it was fun on a couple of dimensions with this approach because, one, he had us do a role play. But I was role-playing my counterpart, and he was saying, I guess, what I was going to say. And it was a cool change of perspective because it’s, like, “Hey, you know what? What you’re saying is actually pretty reasonable.”

Whereas, I thought, “Oh, he’s never going to go for this. I don’t know. Oh, maybe I feel like I’m pushing too hard.” And it was like, “Oh, no, what you’re saying makes sense. And I kind of like the offer that you’re putting out there,” just as I am playing that role there. So that helped me get recalibrated to what is likely. And, indeed, that is roughly where we landed at the end of the day. So that was really cool. An eye-opener.

As well as the worst outcome. I’m thinking often I’m a bit of a people-pleaser, and we always talk about, you know, these sorts of things. Well, there’s the outcome, the money on the table, or whatever. And then there’s the relationship. And I can often be too interested in the relationship, just out of people-pleasing tendencies.

And then I really thought to myself, “You know what? If I got a great…” in this particular instance, “If I got a great outcome, but the absolute worst-case scenario is every time that person heard my name in any context ever, for the rest of his life, he screamed, ‘I hate that guy, Pete Mockaitis,’” which is totally unrealistic. I’ve never encountered any human in any context who’s done that.

But it’s like, “Even if that were the relationship damage, I’d be okay with it in this specific instance,” usually I’m not at all. And that really was handy. I wasn’t using your language, but that is a nice systematic way to cover those bases, “Well, how can I get a sense of what’s likely?” “Well, what really is the worst outcome?” “Oh, that’s actually not so bad after all.”

Attia Qureshi
Yeah, I love that. And I love practicing it with someone else and doing the live role play. That’s leveling up the skill because now you’re actually saying the words out loud and working through. And that’s even more powerful when you say it out loud, which, actually, I want to touch upon the next skill that I was thinking of, because it goes to that idea of people-pleasing, which is using an emotion label.

So we have a lot of these feelings. A lot of people feel like they are people-pleasers, that they have a hard time on the relational side. A lot of people are avoiders. They don’t want to interact with that at all because they don’t know how to respond. They feel like they’re going to freeze.

Some people are worried that it’s going to turn into a high-conflict situation and they don’t like that high-conflict stress. So what we’ve developed is an emotion wheel. And what you can do is start looking at the wheel, because sometimes we don’t know what the feelings are, not in detail.

So we start with six really simple emotions in the center, and we get more detailed as we go out. And the power in this is looking at the emotion wheel, thinking through, “What am I feeling?” Look at the whole thing and identify as many feelings as possible. And you want to write them down.

And then you want to say them out loud. And what I do, if I can, is I say them over and over again, because studies have shown, like MRI, brain studies have shown that when we do that, and we say them out loud, the feeling diminishes, and our rational brain gets re-triggered.

So our parasympathetic nervous system and our prefrontal cortex, all of a sudden, get re-triggered and we become more rational when we do that. So if I’m worried, you know, I had a big client conversation, a negotiation I had to have with a longstanding client. I’ve been working with them for five or six years now.

And I hate having the contract conversation. I absolutely hate it because I love the relationship so much and we’ve been working together for so long. And I recognized that I had avoided it for a day. I had avoided it for a week. And, finally, I was looking at my to-do list, and I was like, “Okay, I am afraid of damaging the relationship. I am afraid. I am afraid. I am afraid. I am afraid.”

And that helped me lessen that fear in my body, re-trigger my prefrontal cortex, and take the step to email them, saying, “Hey, can we chat about this?”

Pete Mockaitis
And what happened?

Attia Qureshi
Well, if we think about the best, worst, and neutral-case scenario, it went exactly as I expected. I made an ask, they countered, and we agreed upon something totally reasonable.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. That’s great. I’m reminded, we had on the show, Dr. Steven Hayes, who is famous for creating acceptance and commitment therapy. And I think he calls this notion defusion, is that if you say the word again and again, and it could be an internal dialogue, you made a mistake, you feel like an idiot, you think, “Idiot. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot,” or, “Afraid. Afraid. Afraid.”

It just kind of loses its oomph, its emotional charge and power. And then “Afraid,” or, “Idiot” just becomes…it’s just a word, it’s like, “All right. So, yeah, afraid. That’s a thing. That’s a word. It’s there.” But it’s not in charge, pulling the strings, calling the shots.

Attia Qureshi
I love that. I might start using that terminology because I really like it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. Well, he’s great, check him out, Dr. Stephen Hayes. Okay. Well, let’s hear also about the say their name technique.

Attia Qureshi
So this goes back to relationship-building, and sometimes people say, “Well, there are people that I interact with one time, right? Like, that’s just a one time interaction.” And, for me, let’s think about the airline agent because it’s a perfect example of when we feel high stress, flights are canceled, flights are delayed, we’re stuck somewhere, we’ve got to get to work, we have kids at home, whatever it is.

And we have been standing in line for 20 minutes, which is already making us really frustrated. We get to the front of the line, and this is happening, obviously, to a lot of other people. We can either vent our frustration or we can take a moment, and this is, I’ll get to say their name, but this is another skill of having a little bit of empathy toward what they’re facing.

Like, if we can pause and take that breath, and we know our interests, but can we understand what theirs are? Which, in that moment, they’ve probably been yelled at for the last hour. They probably want to just have a breather. They want to be treated like a human being, and they want someone to just talk to them calmly and see if they can figure out, because they’re fundamentally there to help them.

So understanding those interests, taking a breath. And then what I like to do is I look at their name tag, and I had this happen to me when I was going to Charleston for work, and I said, “Hey, Regina, it seems like this is a really bad travel day.”

So I used her name and I also just picked up on what I noticed going on in the environment because she had had a huge line of people, and I’d been waiting for a while. And she took a deep breath and was like, “Ah, yes, it has been one of the worst travel days of the year.”

And what I did was, instead of her furiously typing and looking at the screen, she made eye contact with me and paused for a second, and we recognized each other as humans. And that small connection, when I then went on to explain my situation, made her feel just slightly more invested in helping me.

And she did figure out, rather than getting to Charleston at noon the next day on a Monday, and I would have missed the entire opening of a conference, she got me there by midnight. And she didn’t have to go out, like no one has to go out of their way to help you. They don’t. It’s kind of their choice on how much effort they’re willing to put in.

And so using someone’s name triggers something deep within them that makes you connect to them on a human level. And so it’s a way to get to the top of their attention list, make that connection, and then it really helps open up the way for your negotiation.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m intrigued, Attia, there’s often – we’re using names, right? You’re teaching me already.

Attia Qureshi
You’re doing great.

Pete Mockaitis
This notion that they can always help you, I think that’s generally true in terms of humans, professionals, friends, colleagues, acquaintances interacting, and living life. In a particular customer service scenario, I am wondering, though, is they’ll say, you know, “That’s the policy. This is all that we can do.”

And, well, now you got me wondering, it’s like, “Is it really the policy? Is that really all they can do? Or do they, in fact, have more capacity to help me?”

Attia Qureshi
I have almost always found, I can’t think back to a time where someone was incredibly rigid with me, that there’s somewhere else we can go with the conversation. Sometimes they are at their limit, but they can usually call someone who can expand the options.

So if they are being really firm about the policy, then I would say that was ineffective influence because they don’t want to help you anymore. But if they open up the options and say, “Hey, I can call my manager. Let me check on this piece of it,” which usually people can do, then there is a path forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Okey-dokey. Yes, that’s handy. And so, in addition to using their name, forming a connection, kindness, in these specific contexts, do you have any other pro tips? Like, folks, they’re working from a script, an operational flowchart playbook, as opposed to the wide world of creative win-win collaboration is in front of us.

Attia Qureshi
Yes, that goes back to what I mentioned about understanding their perspectives and having empathy for what their interests are. And that’s another really key negotiation skill, whether with these customer service agents or anybody, because we’re actually pretty good if we can take a step back from our own lives and situations and put ourselves in their shoes.

We’re pretty good at guessing most of their interests. We might not get it 100%, but we’ll probably get it somewhere between 75 and 90% correctly. And so when you do that, what you’re doing is you can have a conversation about that as well. You can say, “Man, you must be having a really long, hard day. It sounds like there are a lot of people who are facing cancellations, and I’m sure there are people who are angry.”

And what you’re doing is just guessing and empathizing with some of those interests or some of those things that they are facing, which, again, makes them a lot more sympathetic to you because you’re taking a moment to showcase that you can see what they’re going through.

And in other negotiations, let’s say it’s a salary negotiation or a promotion negotiation, it’s even more helpful because, if you can understand your boss’ perspective in that conversation, you develop more options or more pathways in the conversation to proceed, where they have budget limitations, I’m sure, right?

They have cycles in which they are allowed to work. They have pressures from their own superiors, etc. And when you start guessing at those interests, what you can do is broaden the way that you’re thinking about a negotiation by bringing in other opportunities for conversation.

Where, if it’s salary, and you still need some tangible value, but you know that there have been budget cuts, are there other ways to talk about value? Are there ways to talk about it with equity or bonuses or childcare subsidies or transportation cost coverage? And a lot of those items come from different budget buckets.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And you also suggest that we do ourselves quite the favor by practicing negotiation in low-stake situations. Can you give us some examples of places where we might do just that?

Attia Qureshi
So let’s think about, you know, you have a friend or a partner or a spouse that you’re going to grab dinner with over the weekend. Super simple, low-stakes scenario. And what I want you to do is write down what you care about. What are your interests when it comes to an evening out with that person? And then guess what their interests might be.

And then show them your list, and see how accurate were you when it came to guessing their interests, right? Maybe you recognize that your friend is trying to be more healthy. Maybe you recognize that your partner really likes novelty and wants a new place to go.

So you can write down all of those interests and share it with them and see how close you’re getting. And it starts putting you in the mode and mentality of thinking about your own interests and guessing theirs and seeing how well you’re doing at that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s super. And any thoughts on rejection?

Attia Qureshi
Rejection is brutal. And I will say that it does get easier, but I don’t know if it gets less painful, if that makes sense. I can just put myself through rejection more frequently. And I think of negotiation is anytime you’re trying to influence the situation with another person.

So it’s happening dozens of times a day with your childcare, or with thinking about food, or thinking about your neighbor whose music is really loud, or at work on who’s going to get how much workload, etc.

So it’s happening all the time. And that means that there are many, many opportunities for rejection. That’s just how it works when you’re going into a situation and making an ask or trying to resolve something.

And I think that if we can practice seeking out rejection in little ways, we can inoculate ourselves to getting more comfortable at rejection. It might still hurt. I’m not saying it’s not going to hurt, but it’s easier for us to go and get rejected and get over that pain more quickly because we’re building up our immunity to rejection.

So, for example, you could go, and when you go out to dinner, you could ask for something off menu. You could go to a coffee shop and ask for a particular drink that isn’t necessarily available or in season. And what people will find is that it’s actually harder to get rejected than you expect. And when you do get rejected, yeah, it might suck for a second, but you get over it a lot faster than you think.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that’s handy. I remember getting lots of rejection letters for a book proposal, and it was the best thing because, like, “Hey, you know what? This is not so brutal.” And it made being rejected, I’d say, forever, after that, not as terrible.

Attia Qureshi
Yeah, and I love hearing that because I think a lot of other people have a really high fear of rejection that goes back to our feelings around a rejection and kind of what we tell ourselves about that rejection. But if we can look at that narrative we are telling ourselves and ask, “Is this true? Is it really true that I am unworthy or I am not good enough? Or is that something I’m just telling myself?”

And you can keep moving forward and continuing with those rejections that changes the whole game, because then you can go out and make bigger asks and make more asks. And, ultimately, at the end of the day, I want everyone to have more, more time, more money, more energy, more resources.

And, yes, sometimes you’re going to get rejected, but the more you ask, the more you will get. There’s this fascinating study that talks about how somewhere around 65% of people never negotiate their first salary, which will cost us somewhere between one and one and a half million dollars over the course of our career.

But people who do negotiate, somewhere around 87 to 90% of the time will get something out of it. So we overestimate the amount of failure we’re going to receive, which is meaning that we are getting so much less than we deserve.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Wow, thank you. Those are big numbers. Well, before we hear about some of your favorite things, could you share, are there any other super techniques, tactics, tips that you want to make sure you put out there?

Attia Qureshi
Yes, two more. So one is objective criteria or external benchmarks. Data shows that we hate talking about money. We don’t like it. We don’t want to bring it up. And what’s even more interesting is that people also wish it weren’t so taboo.

So what you can do, if you’re struggling with that, is go do some research, use AI, use ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini, and type in there what the context is for your situation, and ask for a range of what makes sense for that number to be. And that makes it so it’s not you bringing a number. You’re bringing data that supports a number.

But what I also want to encourage people to do is put the number out there that is most favorable to you to start. And that’s what we call anchoring because, generally, we stay around the first number that’s put out there. So data is very helpful with that piece, and anchoring gives you lot of power at where the negotiation goes.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, just to be clear with the AI, I guess I’ve just been lied to so many times by these darn things. I presume you mean you’re using that as a research tool to land at a quality verified source for the number.

Attia Qureshi
Yes, good qualifications. Yes, it’s a good starting place. Ask it for the data and then go double-check on what it’s providing you and make sure it’s verified correct.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, certainly. And you had a second one.

Attia Qureshi
A second one is the ability to say no. A lot of us, especially people-pleasers or people who like to be agreeable, care about the relationships, have a very hard time saying no. Saying yes is costing you.

It’s going to cost you down the road because it ends up creating burnout. It makes you overworked, overtired, or the other person ends up unhappy because you were unable to fulfill what you committed to.

So the power of no is really important in our lives, but it’s also important in a negotiation because they can smell it on you if you have the confidence, in your body and in your tone that, “Hey, I am willing to walk away because no deal is better than a bad deal.” You can look for another deal tomorrow.

Most of us are in privileged situations where, yes, it might suck that we would have to go look for another deal, but we could. We can. And no deal is better than a bad deal because you’ve already got the momentum going to find a deal.

So having the ability and the confidence to be able to say a no in a negotiation, and there’s a way you can practice that the next time someone close to you with a relationship that can withstand some pressure asks you for something, just say a firm, flat no.

Kind of like I did with the Colombian guy. And, of course, later, you can go back and explain and share what you were doing, but it’s a firm, flat no. No equivocating, no explaining. Because once you are able to give that flat no, giving a kind, polite no becomes way easier.

Pete Mockaitis
And I love that notion about the context of your available alternatives. And I’ve had it happen at my own entrepreneurial life as well as others that I’ve talked to. It was like, “You know what? I’ve got a lot of stuff going on. Someone’s asking me for a project.”

It’s like, “You know what? Right now, if you want me to do this project, it’s going to cost you – bam! – big old number,” and that’s like real. It’s like, “For me to assume more stress and responsibility right now, this is what it’s going to take.” And sometimes they say yes on the other side, it’s like, “Oh, maybe I should always put out that number.”

Attia Qureshi
Yeah, it’s true. It is so powerful in, first, helping us figure out what the value truly is on our end, and making sure that we are putting our resources where they are most worthwhile, and not sacrificing on relationships or our own mental health and wellbeing because we say yes too often.

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

Attia Qureshi
I think it would be, and I’m not going to say it perfectly, “A small group of people can change the world. In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

And when John and I started out, John said something to me about how he had studied under Fisher and Rye, and Fisher had been part of World War II, and had seen the destruction and calamity there and wanted there to be a better way for people to negotiate and interact with each other.

And this relational or principled methodology offers that because it’s about relationship-building and creating value for both parties. And if we could all make one move toward that, how much better is our world because we are working collaboratively to drive value for not just ourselves, but a collective.

And that is so meaningful to me and it’s why I teach in addition to consult, because if I can get my students to do that and the ripple effect of that continues on, it makes an impact.

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

Attia Qureshi
Frans de Waal started this study, and then Sarah Brosnan followed up on it, on how much we care about fairness. And Sarah did a study with capuchin monkeys on having them run a task and seeing what the results were, and getting different kinds of treats.

And what she found was that fairness is really deeply hardwired in us. We all want to be treated fairly, which goes down back to, like, do a relational negotiation, right? We all care about fairness and we’ll punish people if they are not treating us fairly. And it’s just such a great study. So I love that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Attia Qureshi
I really love, “The Alchemist.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Attia Qureshi
I don’t know, is breathing allowed to be a tool?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly, yes. What approach to breathing?

Attia Qureshi
My favorite approach is that you breathe in for three or four, hold it for three or four, and then breathe out really slowly for six or eight.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Attia Qureshi
A few minutes of meditation. Meditation has been one of the only things that has been proven to shorten the time that we stay in fight or flight.

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

Attia Qureshi
“Most people can help you, it just depends on if they want to or not.”

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

Attia Qureshi
AttiaQureshi.com. And I actually do have a static emotion wheel and then an interactive emotion wheel on my website under AttiaQureshi.com/emotions, if people are interested in having access to a tool like that.

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

Attia Qureshi
Negotiation starts small. We don’t just become great negotiators. So just pick one exercise that you heard today and try it and see what happens. And you can go from there, but just start small. Start with one small thing today and see what happens.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Attia, thank you.

Attia Qureshi
Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.

May 14
0

1152: The Five Essential Steps to Getting to Where You Want to Go with Dr. Henry Cloud

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Dr. Henry Cloud reveals the five essential components to achieving your desired future.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why the human body is our best model for achieving results
  2. The biggest power move of high performers
  3. Two questions to go above your natural wiring

About Henry

Dr. Henry Cloud is a clinical psychologist, leadership expert, and New York Times bestselling author whose books have sold over twenty million copies worldwide. Named by Success magazine as one of the top 25 leaders in the field, his work spans executive coaching, organizational transformation, and personal growth. He holds a BS in psychology from Southern Methodist University and a PhD in clinical psychology from Biola University. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Resources Mentioned

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Henry Cloud Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Henry, welcome!

Henry Cloud
Good to be here, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting with you. I loved your book Boundaries, and we’re talking about your latest, Your Desired Future. Could you kick us off by sharing, perhaps, one of your most intriguing, fascinating, counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made about this tricky gap between intention and achievement?

Henry Cloud
Well, it’s something that we all experience and something that we notice in others who, whenever we’re at one place, it may be in your career and it may be in your life and it may be even in a relationship, “Well, here’s where we are,” and we want to be in a desired future or a different place, right?

And we got to work on it, and it doesn’t happen. And what was kind of the sort of you call it the awakening, was that I noticed that, when people would put hard work in things and they weren’t getting there, they started asking the question, “Well, what’s missing? And is there a universal path that just has to be included in getting anything from here to there?”

And that’s what started the study on it many, many years ago. And that’s where this model came from. And, basically, it’s because we go about things as we are wired. And we create teams and companies and projects in our own image.

And the problem is we don’t have all of the strengths that it requires, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t make sure all of those elements are there. And that was the big awakening, just to give a map for that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, the major reason we don’t achieve that which we intend is that we’re kind of going about it just you doing you.

Henry Cloud
It’s a great phrase.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And some things, I guess we’re wired to achieve, you know, fairly naturally and other things are kind of a stretch.

Henry Cloud
Yeah, and what’s really important, you can look at people that accomplish stuff in different areas and even very different styles. You take a Bill Gates and a Steve Jobs, they started out the same time, kind of doing the same thing, very, very different styles. But if you break it down, what was it that moved them from here to there? Those elements are the same. They do it differently.

And sometimes, like you’re saying, we do those things naturally in some particular area, but we fail in other areas because they’re not present.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could you share with us perhaps a story of someone who was running into some trouble and then made some changes in alignment with these principles you’re unpacking here and what happened for them?

Henry Cloud
This is one you see all the time. It’s very common for an entrepreneur or a founder to be really good at vision and really good at engaging the talent and sometimes even good at strategy. And what happens is, when it gets a little further down the line where you start to have to really get a little bit what feels like to them in the weeds, then that’s where it kind of unravels.

And I think you’ve seen a lot of stories like this where somebody starts something, where you see it a lot is in the public companies. It goes public, and then the board says, “We got to bring in a seasoned operator.” Well, that’s because of these other components in the chain.

If you want a story, I can tell you about my own.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear it.

Henry Cloud
Many years ago, I wanted to start a psychiatric hospital that was friendly to people of faith. Because a lot of times people of faith would check into a hospital for treatment and their faith would be seen as part of the problem, not part of the answer. And I just wanted a place where that was friendly.

And so I thought, “Well, the best way to do this is to buy a hospital.” I was in my 20s. I didn’t even know that was hard. So I went out and raised the money to buy a hospital and started down that path, and ended up changing the model a little bit.

Long story short, started the company, right, and was doing one hospital, and it was doing well. But I was doing it in my own image. I wasn’t in the healthcare industry. I was a clinician, and so I set up this whole hospital company almost in a private practice model.

And what happened was, just by happenstance, I met somebody that had come from that industry, and he looked at it and said, “You have no clue what you have here.” And he started asking questions, like, “Where is your call center?” And I go, “What’s a call center? I mean, we just took calls and put people in treatment.”

And then he started asking all of these questions. And just by having somebody that could bring the other elements in of engaging the right talent and having a strategy to scale, and knowing what to measure and what to hold accountable, be held accountable to and all that, we ended up in 45 markets in the western United States.

And I would have been kind of stalled at a very limited vision if that hadn’t happened. But it took somebody else to point out to me what was missing.

Pete Mockaitis
And so these things about having a call center, how would you categorize the domain of stuff that was just sort of you were blind to?

Henry Cloud
Yeah, let me put it in then. The book is about a very simple model. I found a long time ago, if people have little models as almost like a GPS to look at, “Am I doing everything that needs to be done?” That’s where this came from.

And I had a big awakening one day, because there’s all this leadership and performance literature out there. But if you put it all together, what’s it really talking about? And I decided, “Why can’t we factor and analyze all that and get, what are the categories? What are the elements that it falls in?”

And I ended up asking a question. If you look at the human body, the most efficient, most complex, most complicated, greatest achievement machine it’s ever been designed, how does it get from here to there?

And it was incredible because if you break it down and went to neuroscience and neuroanatomy and all this stuff to ask, “How does a human body get from here to there?” Well, it starts with, what you read in the literature, your brain has something no other species has, which is the capacity to imagine a future that doesn’t exist today. We call that a vision.

Now, what was a real awakening was everybody knows about vision. But when you start to look at the brain and what it does with a vision, it has certain components to it that then creates a linear path and does all the stuff. But your head can’t go anywhere by itself.

So what it does is, number two, is it starts to engage the talent it’s going to need to help it get there. Because the brain is not going anywhere by itself. So it says, “Well, I’m going to need a couple legs and a couple eyes,” and it starts recruiting people with the talent and the skills that are gonna help them move from here to there.

Now we got it all together, you got the, “I don’t need my little finger, but I need a leg and I got eyes. And then we got to figure out, well, how are we going to get there? Well, I think I’ll call an Uber. Well, that’s not a good way to get there. How about a scooter?”

“Now if I’m going to get over the other side of the room, what’s my strategy going to be? How am I going to get there? I’m going to walk.” And now we have a strategy that begins to define the specific activities that are going to make that strategy come to fruition.

Now that becomes a big deal. And what your brain does at that point is it creates a plan with specific activities that move the needle on that strategy. And then, number four, it has already designed a measurement and accountability system.

You start walking, you start to wander off, it goes, “Wait a minute,” and it corrects you because it knows what you’ve got to be held accountable to that’s going to get you there. And, number five, if you do veer off, it quickly fixes you before that problem becomes a pattern.

So what do we have? We’ve got a very clear vision that’s got to be compelling enough to awaken a lot of systems in you and desire and other things. Number two, who do you need to help you get there? It might be talent, it might be a team member, it might be a friend, it might be a supporter, whoever. But we’d never go anywhere by ourselves.

And you got to specifically name, like Jim Collins said, “What are the seats on the bus that you need? And who are the people that are going to be in those seats?” And then you got to have a strategy. Otherwise, we start doing all sorts of random stuff, hoping we get there.

That strategy has a plan. And, number four, are you measuring the right things along the way? Because a lot of people just measure against the goal. They’re not measuring against the specific activities that are going to move the needle.

And then when you find something that’s off, you’ve got to fix it fast. Because if you don’t fix it fast, you don’t have a problem anymore. You’ve got a pattern. And patterns change the direction of where we’re headed.

So the human body knows what it’s doing. We should just kind of do what it does. And when you look at great achievements, you’re always going to find those five things. Clearly knowing where they were going, getting the right talent on board, having the right strategy, measuring the right things with accountability, and quickly fixing what you find. That’s the way we get from here to there.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say your body knows what it’s doing, you’ve got chapter 2 entitled, “Your Body Knows Best,” what do you mean specifically by that?

Henry Cloud
Well, what I mean is that it comes with all the systems that do all the right things to get you there. Let’s just take the measurement and accountability system. When you start walking across the room or you start driving a car, your brain has already figured out what it needs to hold you accountable to. You automatically steer. Well, that’s because those systems are wired in there.

What we’ve got to do, if you’re going to increase sales or increase the culture of a team, you got to start with knowing where you want to go and then knowing who’s going to play what role in getting you there, and then knowing what to do.

So our bodies just do this naturally until you start to break it down on what they are doing. The neuroscience of how your body achieves things is exactly applicable to everything we do in life.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I like that you have laid out some core foundational fundamental principles, and it seems like you’ve done a nice job of categorizing, cataloging.

Pete Mockaitis
And so it seems simple and elegant and, but, of course, with the way you lay it out this way. How do we run into trouble?

Henry Cloud
Yes. Here’s how we run into trouble. Two ways. One is everybody knows those topics. There’s nobody in business that hasn’t heard of those five things. We run into trouble because we’re not doing them in the way that they work, A. But, B, we really run into trouble because our own personal issues get in the way.

For example, take holding people accountable or holding the team accountable. Well, what if you’re conflict avoidant? What if it’s hard to have difficult conversations, what if you have fear around that?

Or back to vision. What if you come up with a, “Gosh, we could do this,” and then you got a bunch of negative voices in your head that say, “Well, what makes you think you can pull it off? You don’t have the money for that. No, that’s too hard”?

And just our simple thinking patterns and the limits we have in our own head can stifle a vision. So all of these components, the growth gaps that we need to do in getting better, those really come into play. And that’s what a lot of coaching is about, too.

You know, I work with CEOs in huge, I mean, public, multibillion dollar, they run huge things. And most of the time, it’s not that they don’t have the business acumen. It’s some kind of personal growth step that’s getting in the way. And that’s how a lot of times we get stuck.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you give us an example of a personal growth step and how that gets things back on track?

Henry Cloud
Well, I’ll give you one of a big company everybody knows. If I ask the question, “Where did Google come from?” We all think back, and if you’re old enough, “Ah, well, tech was ramping up, and the internet was ramping up, and somebody put a bunch of money up, or whatever.”

I would answer that this way. Where Google came from was a graduate student named Larry Page who went to a personal development, personal leadership development retreat, a camp, and they taught him a mantra. And the mantra was, “Have a healthy disregard for the impossible.”

And he kept saying that over and over and over. And he was trying to get rid of the natural tendency to think in some sort of limited fashion and question any idea or discount it or have objections. And he just started doing that over and over and over.

Well, one morning, he woke up and he had a thought. And that thought was, “What if we downloaded every URL on the entire internet and saved them?” Now that’s insane, I mean. Most of us would go, “Well, we don’t have enough RAM for that? I mean, where would you, you know?” All of a sudden, all these reasons why it can’t happen.

But he took a personal growth step to get some crap out of his head and then we ended up with a search engine, and then we ended up with all this other stuff. So it’s a lot of looking at oneself, looking at my patterns and how I typically go about stuff.

And are there any of these elements that are difficult for me that I should take a growth step in or I should get help with or bring somebody to the party who knows how to do this? You know, if you go back to my hospital company that I built, I was much more on the vision side of that. I engaged the talent. I brought the investors. I brought all the doctors, so 200 doctors ended up working for us and a bunch of other stuff.

But I didn’t have the strategic operational skills or even thought about that, that would ever get that to the place it went. And I probably never would have gotten there if I hadn’t brought in new talent. And that didn’t have to be somebody you hire. It could be your uncle who’s done what you’re doing.

We always need to find the right wisdom and the right help, whether it’s paid or unpaid, that can help us get to the next step.

Pete Mockaitis
And how do you identify or zero in on which of these components is our shortcoming, our gap, our personal development need?

Henry Cloud
Well, one of the ways, first of all, just look at the results. We have a lot of ways of explaining things away, “Well, the market’s bad, this or that.” Let reality talk to you. And sometimes that’s in the actual results of what you’re getting and whatever you’re trying to work on.

And you’ve got to get honest about this, “Is this thing working? Is it moving forward? Is there anything I can look at that says, yes, we’re going in the right direction?”

If there’s not, then what I would do is I would just go through the categories and start to ask, “What’s missing here? Or what have I really not focused on?” You know, a lot of times, a big one is the engaging the right talent piece. I mentioned that a few times because it’s huge.

We don’t know what we don’t know a lot of times. And what we’ve done is we’ve kind of just listened to people that are right there. And sometimes we got to get out of our own bubble or our own neighborhood or whatever.

And there’s somebody that’s done this before. There’s somebody that can look at it and know what I’m missing. And we need other eyeballs. And the best people, they get out of their closed system. They look at the way other companies, other teams, other individuals, other people are doing this that kind of expand this and can help them.

And the biggest, highest performers I’ve ever worked with, when I first went into coaching, I kind of expecting the ones that were crashing and burning to reach out to me the most because, “I need help. They’re calling me all the time,” this or that. It turned out to be the exact opposite.

The highest performers are the ones that use input from the outside the most. It is the highest performers that I hear from most often.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I have found that is rather transformational when I reach the conclusion, “I really don’t know what I’m doing here. Someone else does. I’m going to talk to them.” And so I just recently, I emailed someone who’s like, “Hey, I saw your LinkedIn. You’re a strategic advisor. I could use some strategic advice. What’s your hourly rate? Let’s do it.”

And she said, “It’s 500 bucks an hour.” I was like, “You got it.” And it was a pretty worthwhile $500 hour in terms of, “Yes, this is what I am missing and what I need. Thank you very much.”

Henry Cloud
Because what’s the value that you got from that? You know, a lot of times people look at the rates they’re going to have to pay and they go, “Well, that’s a lot for an hour,” this and that. Well, if that ended up making you, when you utilize it, multiple seven figures, it’s the cheapest hour you ever got in your life.

It’s just you have to look at the value you’re getting, always. And sometimes that value is free. Again, it might be a relative, it might be a friend. What’s important is, “What value does that talent bring to what I’m trying to do?”

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely.

Henry Cloud
Because advice is cheap.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Henry Cloud
Anybody will tell you what they think you ought to do.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think, in my experience with this, it seems like you can get an answer very quickly by asking a buddy, asking Google, asking the AI models, but it’s not what you really need. Well, I mean, it might be if it’s really quick and easy, straightforward answer, it’s like, “Okay, yep, that’s it. Got it.”

But when it’s nuanced and complicated and specialized, I find that we…what’s the expression? Is it Mark Twain or someone? “It’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

It’s like, “Oh, okay, that’s the answer. Okay, I’m just going to go do that.” It’s like, “Oops, no, no, that actually is not the move,” but, unfortunately, you’ve sort of spent a lot of time and effort, maybe money, on a path that might make some conventional sense or feels good, but it is not actually rooted in reality, best practices, etc.

Henry Cloud
I think you’ve hit a couple things on the head there. One of them is when you said it’s nuanced and everybody’s got an answer or whatever. I’m very leery, I should say, of people that have a template that they just come and apply to every situation. And there’s value to that.

I mean, there are consultants and they have a model and they go in and take that model and put it there. The people that I want to talk to are the people that have the experience base that they don’t come in and say, you know, “Look, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

So they look at every problem, “Here’s the answer,” right, because that’s what they know. It’s like you’re saying, they know that and they’re going to apply it. There’s a proverb that I love that says, “He who gives an answer before he understands is a fool.”

And I want to talk to somebody who’s got great diagnostic abilities to look at my situation and, inductively, pull out from their experience base the nuances, like you’re saying of, “This is the path. This is what I think is wrong. This is what I would suggest.” And they’re doing good diagnostic work.

And sometimes people, they already know the answer before they’ve met you, then I would I’d be a little leery of that. I want somebody that’s got enough experience and knowledge to whatever I’m struggling with. The answer is somewhere within them and they’re gonna pull it out of the box.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d love to get your pro tips in terms of are there any super high-leverage moves, like we talked about finding a great person for insight, advice, diagnostic skill to help you out? Within the other domains of a vision, strategy and plan, measurement, accountability, adaptation, problem solving, are there other high-leverage, best practice moves, tips, tricks, tactics that really do a lot of good work for us when we implement them?

Henry Cloud
Yeah, there’s one big one. Look in the mirror.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Henry Cloud
It’s, we gotta look at ourselves first. I mean, it’s so easy to explain things away, “You know, this person is not good,” or, “The market is this,” or, “You know, we got bad customers,” or, “My boss,” or something. And that’s not what great performers do.

The big power move is to first look at ourselves in that context, and ask, “What am I contributing to these results? What am I contributing to this problem? What am I contributing to keeping it from being resolved?” And to own it.

Then we can go to, “What do I need to take control of to change?” But it is a tough shift for a lot of people to make to stop externalizing what’s holding them back. Now there are external factors that we have to work with, but if we don’t look at ourselves and how we’re responding to those external factors, it’s just going to continue to stay stuck.

And it all starts with some pretty good self-awareness. And here’s what a lot of people don’t realize. Self-awareness is a fruit of other awareness. We become aware of ourselves by letting really good eyeballs take a look, and other people on the other side of us talk about their experience with me and what they see, and we got to assimilate and accommodate that data.

And so, here’s a good question. If you’re on a team and y’all suck and you’re leading a team, go to each one of your team members and ask a simple question, “So what’s it like to be on the other side of me as your leader in two areas? Relationally, how am I doing? How do I make you feel? How do I help you? How do I support you? All that.”

“And on the other side, the actual work, the tasks. How am I performing? How am I delivering for what you need from me?” That’s a great conversation to have. And ask it above you, ask it to your peers, and ask it for people that report to you. And you’re going to probably get some pretty good direction from that.

Now, you don’t listen to everybody. There’s nutcases out there, too. They have their own biases. They have their own agendas. But if you choose carefully, you’re going to probably see a few patterns emerge.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, super. So we look in the mirror and we get self-aware by getting other aware, talking to folks, asking those questions. Any other power moves that make a big impact?

Henry Cloud
What’s hardest for you to do next? We tend to move away from change that’s going to activate our fear systems, really. When we got to make a change that’s not, and these are the most valuable changes, by the way, because if they were easy, we’d already be doing them, but they’re necessary and we’re not doing them.

So that’s usually the growth step we need to take is going to feel very uncomfortable to you. And big growth steps happen from stepping into the area of your discomfort, because that’s where new skills and abilities are not only needed, but that’s where they’re going to be built.

We don’t grow without discomfort. Your hippocampus has got to be aroused in order to keep the log and the memory patterns of new whatever you’re doing to turn them into automatic. And arousal comes from getting nervous.

It’s like the Olympic swimmer who’s waiting for the gun to go off. They are aroused because it’s a big challenge, but that pulls them to greater achievement as well. Most of the big records are set in the final event. They’ve had that same swim 100 times before they got there. So step into the areas where you’re not comfortable, and that’s really where you’re going to learn.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Anything else?

Henry Cloud
Well, I open the book with a story about my dog Finley. Finley is a Doberman. I’ve always loved big working breeds. And Finley is awesome. I mean, she does her job, but she does it like she’s wired. Somebody comes to the door, she runs to the front door, she barks, scares the heck out of them until I come up and say it’s okay. And it is intimidating and she does it great and I love her.

But I’ve never heard her run to the front door and bark, and then stop and say, “I wonder if that was helpful?” In fact, a bigger question, “I wonder if barking like that is going to get me closer to where I want to be on Thursday?”

That ability to get above what we’re doing, above how we’re wired, and begin to ask the question, “Am I doing what needs to be done to get me where I want to be on Thursday?” that is something that all of the greats do. They don’t just work, they work on how they’re working and they get above it.

And that capacity for self-observation, with some kind of a path, and that’s what the book is about, you could just get above and say, “How clear have I been about the vision and communicating it to the people that have got to go with me? How much have I really worked on making sure I got the right talent around me?”

“How clear is the strategy for all of us? Have I just assumed that? Do people know every day when they wake up what they got to do that day that really moves the needle? And then are we really keeping tabs on are we doing what we said we were going to do and is it working? And then when problems come up, are we fixing them?” And if we get above that path and start asking those questions, all sorts of light bulbs come on.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, I like that a lot. And I’m thinking about, we had a guest, Richard Medcalf, with a book called Making TIME for Strategy, and he was sort of talking about just this. And often there’s a project that no one’s asking for, but it requires asking these kinds of questions to really get those tremendous improvements.

I’d love your hot take in terms of, is there a ritual, a habit, a practice by which folks you’ve seen incorporate this into a recurring rhythm and see good things on the other side?

Henry Cloud
Well, one of the important words here is rhythm. We tend to observe ourselves, but not frequently enough sometimes. The cadence of it is not enough. If you take, for example, you take a pilot and they’re going from LA to New York, well, they’ve got a strategy, they’re going to fly this plane, but they’ve got a plan and the plan, the strategic anchors are 40,000 feet, 540 knots, certain heading. So they take off.

Well, what they’re also doing is getting back to the cadence of measurement. If they drive down at 38,000 feet for more than just a blip, their accountability system is going to say, “Flight plan shows 40,000. You’re at 38,000,” instantly, they go, “Crap! I’m burning too much fuel. It’s slowing me down. I got to adjust.”

But if they wait too long for that to happen, they’re going to end up three states away or getting there an hour late. And when we’re looking at what we’re doing, some cadences, they’re too short. I mean, people don’t even have time to work before somebody is in their face again, you know, they micromanaging them all over their case.

You got to give enough space to what you’ve observed to begin to implement it. But if you go too long without self observation for you and the people that are involved, you can be 500 miles off track and now you’re down the wrong road.

Pete Mockaitis
So, is it daily, weekly? In some ways, it’s possible, I think, to overdo it. Like, we’re kind of getting into a bit of a navel-gazing or a, what is it, a state-dependent vibe, which is suboptimal, per the research and literature. So, what do you think?

Henry Cloud
Well, again, it depends on, “What are you doing?” Some things that you’re working on, and sometimes in crisis or things have gone south, that cadence can be daily for some things. I mean, it depends on what you’re doing.

Other times, a quarterly checkup. It all depends on what you’re doing and how long it takes for the change to take effect and how long it takes for it to unravel things if it’s not addressed. Those are the two factors I’ve looked at.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now let’s hear about some of your favorite things. Could you share a favorite quote with us?

Henry Cloud
One of the favorite quotes that I put in the book was one time Peter Drucker said, “There’s nothing worse than executing perfectly the wrong things.”

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

Henry Cloud
I think it was 2004, we had about 400 fatalities in the commercial airline industry in the US, 400 and some people died. The FAA came together, and what they did was they brought into one group the equipment manufacturers, like Boeing and Airbus and those people who make the planes, the pilots unions, the mechanics unions, the air traffic controllers, and kind of whoever touches this thing called flight.

And they formed a covenant of their group together. And the covenant was this, “When we find a mistake that we did, we’re going to bring it to the group, and we’re going to – lack of a better word – be transparent, confess it.”

And what they said was, “Nobody is going to get fired, nobody is going to jail, unless you try to blow up a plane or something. Nobody is going to get in trouble. We just want to bring the problems to the group.”

Here’s what happened, just take an example. A pilot comes in and says, “We had a near miss and it was really close and it was really bad.” And the group starts going, “Tell us about it. How did it happen?” They said, “Well, I was trying to adjust the switch down here and lost visuals and wasn’t looking at the radar or the screen or whatever, and there it was.”

The manufacturer says, “Oh, well, we can move that switch.” A million things like that where they’re coming together without fear.

Now here’s what happened. That was in ‘04. I think it was 12 years later. You can look up this story. I want to say, like, they went, it’s like, in 12 years, 20 billion departures, something like that, in that time period, zero fatalities for 12 years.

Now, what does that tell us about the kind of teams we need to create, the kind of relationships we need to create with bosses, with direct reports, with our peers, where we can come to the table and talk about what we’re struggling with and where we need help and where something is not working and where I screwed up? That’s one of my favorite studies.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Henry Cloud
One of them is not a business book. It’s a book called No Man is an Island by Thomas Merton. You know, I don’t even know what year this was, but Peter Drucker wrote a classic called Management. It has so many foundational principles in it. You can go through it and just over and over and over again. That’s one of my favorites.

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

Henry Cloud
OneNote.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Henry Cloud
One of my favorite ones that anchors me is I try to, somewhere pretty early, 9:00 o’clock-wise, but soon in the day, whenever I get up, I need about an hour of quiet time, and try to do that every day if possible. And it’s a spiritual time for me, it’s a reflection time, and that’s a really important one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget that you share that’s been quoted back to you many times, a Henry Cloud nugget that you’re famous for?

Henry Cloud
Probably the one I hear the most is it’s more a phrase, it’s from my book, Necessary Endings, and they will say, “Knowing about the wise, fool, and the evil changed my life.” That’s what people tell me. And it’s a little, again, a model. You don’t deal with everybody the same way, that we have three kinds of people in our lives at any point.

A wise person is a person that, when they receive feedback, they say, “Oh, you’re right. I’m sorry. I won’t do that again,” and you have a conversation, things get better. And so we can talk about problems with them.

A fool is someone that, when the truth appears to them or when they’re given truth, they don’t adjust themselves. They try to adjust the truth.

So they’re going to minimize, get defensive, blame you, the problem is never in the room. It’s out there somewhere or they’ll attack you and get angry. And it does no good to talk to them about problems. You have to talk to them about a different problem.

And the problem is, “When I talk to you about problems, it doesn’t help. So I’m not going to talk to you about problems anymore. We’re going to move to some consequences if this doesn’t change.” And the third category are people that do evil things. And those are the people that are intentionally out to hurt you. We need to always protect ourselves from that group.

So you talk to the first group. You have some limits and boundaries with the second group, and sometimes that can get to a good outcome. But the third group, it’s lawyer, guns, and money, like Warren Zevon said. You got to go into protection mode.

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

Henry Cloud
Probably just go to DrCloud.com. A lot of what I do is right there.

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

Henry Cloud
I would do what Finley doesn’t do. Don’t just keep barking. Stop barking and ask yourself, “Is the way I’m barking going to get me to where I want to be on Thursday?” Get above your ways and look at the patterns. And the book will give you a good template to look at that with.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Henry, thank you.

Henry Cloud
It’s good to be with you.