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Sep 18
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899: How to Speak Smarter When Put on the Spot with Matt Abrahams

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Matt Abrahams outlines six steps to improve your spontaneous speaking skills.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to feel more comfortable speaking on the spot
  2. Four tactics to keep speaking anxiety in check
  3. The easy formula for great self-introductions

About Matt

Matt Abrahams is a leading expert in communication with decades of experience as an educator, author, podcast host, and coach. As a Lecturer in Organizational Behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, he teaches popular classes in strategic communication and effective virtual presenting. He received Stanford GSB’s Alumni Teaching Award in recognition of his teaching students around the world.

When he isn’t teaching, Matt is a sought-after keynote speaker and communication consultant. He has helped countless presenters improve and hone their communication, including some who have delivered IPO roadshows as well as TED, World Economic Forum, and Nobel Prize presentations. His online talks garner millions of views and he hosts the popular, award-winning podcast Think Fast, Talk Smart: The Podcast. He is the author of Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You’re Put on the Spot. His previous book Speaking Up without Freaking Out: 50 Techniques for Confident and Compelling Presenting has helped thousands of people manage speaking anxiety and present more confidently and authentically.

Resources Mentioned

Matt Abrahams Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Matt, welcome back to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Matt Abrahams
Thank you so much for having me back. I’m excited to chat with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited, too. It’s been five and a half years.

Matt Abrahams
You can tell by the lack of hair and the more gray I have that it’s been a while.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. Well, way back in episode 253 when the show was but a pop was when we covered that. I’m curious, in your world of research and communication, have you discovered anything new that was surprising and striking to you?

Matt Abrahams
Yeah, so I’ve spent a lot of time since we last spoke thinking about several concepts: how to be more engaging, how to be more concise, and with the new book I have coming out, really, an amalgamation of those, combining those, and the notion of how to speak more effectively in the moment. A lot of our communication happens spontaneously. Yet, if we ever receive any kind of training or spend time thinking about it, it’s always for planned communication – pitches, presentations, meetings with agendas. And, yet, most of what we do in our personal and professional lives happens in the moment and on the spot.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And that’s just a great title here for your book Think Faster, Talk Smarter. And you’re bringing back some fond memories for me when I was in a high school speech team. Impromptu was my jam, although you still got, I think we had to divide eight minutes of prep and talking, and, ideally, it’d be about less than two minutes of prep with your notecard, so it’s still not quite on the spot. That’s more time than, “Hey, Pete, what do you think about this?” than you get in most circumstances.

Matt Abrahams
I love that you did impromptu speaking in high school. There was a time when I left High Tech before I started what I do today where I taught high school, and I actually coached some kids in impromptu speaking. And it’s a great way to learn how to be better on your feet, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so then, tell us, when it comes to Think Faster, Talk Smarter, overall, what’s the big idea here?

Matt Abrahams
Well, first and foremost, I think the most counterintuitive idea is that you can prepare to be spontaneous. That’s the big thing. And then the second thing is that many of us feel that there are people who are just born with the gift of gab, and they can communicate effectively regardless if it’s planned or not. And I’m here to tell you that you can actually learn to get better at it.

And most people can improve dramatically by taking some time, putting in some practice, and adjusting their mindset to do this in a way that they might not have thought to do it. So, really, you can practice to get better. Everybody can do it. And the book and the process that I teach has six steps to it. The first four are really around mindset, and the last two are around what I call messaging.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’m excited to dig into these six steps. Maybe before we do that, can you share with us a cool story of someone who felt pretty flustered when they were called upon to speak, and what they did, and the transformation they saw?

Matt Abrahams
Yes. So, I have worked with a great number of people from seasoned executives down to just everyday people, students, for sure, and there are numerous examples of people who have been put on the spot. So, one that comes to mind is an individual who was attending a meeting, he was just an engineer in the company. He was going to learn about the future releases of the product and different people around the table were sharing their pieces.

His boss, who was supposed to share his work, you can see where this is going, didn’t show up. It turned out that his boss’ wife went into labor, and he was obviously doing what was most important for him, but that left the person who was working with me in a moment of utter panic. He had to now represent his whole team’s work without having prepared to do so.

He did okay. It wasn’t the end of the world but he was definitely stressed out about it and a little bit traumatized, and that’s what brought him to do some work with me. And when I walked him through the methodology I introduced just a few moments ago, he later had a subsequent situation, not the same situation, but another situation where he had to step up and speak.

His team was doing a tribute to that part of the project he represented several months prior. They were celebrating what they did, and he was put on the spot by his boss to stand up and say something as a way of congratulating the team for their success, and he was able to do it with much more confidence and it came out much better.

So, just in a few short months, he developed the ability to speak better on his feet. He felt really, really good about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. All right. Well, let’s hear what are these six steps?

Matt Abrahams
So, when we start, we first have to start with mindset. And the very first step in mindset has to do with managing anxiety. Regardless if it’s planned or spontaneous, anxiety looms large in communication so we have to first take steps to manage our anxiety. The second step has to do with the way we strive for perfection. Many of us want to get it right when we communicate. I make the argument that there is no one right way to communicate. Certainly, better ways and worse ways but no one right way.

Step three has you reframing the circumstances you find yourself in. Many of us see these situations as threatening, we’re put on the spot, we have to defend our position, and that can actually make it very difficult for us. Step four in the mindset category has to do with listening. It sounds ironic but some of the things that help us best communicate in the moment is to listen more deeply and better.

And then we switch from mindset into this notion of messaging. So, I am a huge proponent of structure. I think frameworks help us in all communication but, especially, in the moment when we have to speak on the spot. And, in fact, the whole second part of the book is dedicated to different frameworks and structures you can use for different situations, like introducing yourself, making small talk, answering questions.

And then the final step, step six, also has to do with messaging, how to be clear and concise. One of the big problems when we speak spontaneously is we ramble because we’re discovering our content as we are speaking, and we tend to say more than we need to. So, being focused, clear, and concise is critical in all communication but, especially, spontaneous communication.

So, those are the six steps: mindset and messaging.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, maybe let’s tick through each one of these. For the step one, what are the top do’s and don’ts for managing anxiety?

Matt Abrahams
So, when it comes to managing anxiety, we have to take a two-pronged approach. We have to manage both symptoms and sources. So, symptoms are what we physiologically experience. Some people feel their heart really pounding, others sweat and blush, some shake, and there are some things we can do to manage those symptoms. I’ll give you examples in a moment. But we also have to think about sources. Those are the things that initiate and exacerbate our anxiety.

So, when it comes to sources, let me give you three quick things we can all do. Number one, take deep belly breaths, the kind you would ever do if you’ve ever done yoga, or tai chi, or qigong, where you really fill your lower abdomen. And, interestingly, what’s most important is the exhale not the inhale. So, you want your exhale to be twice as long as your inhalation.

Second, and this is a mental thing, remind yourself that you are speaking in service of your audience. Often, when we are asked to communicate, it is because we have something of value to provide to those that we are speaking to. If we really listen in to our self-talk right before we speak, we say lots of negative things to ourselves, like, “You better not screw up,” or, “You should’ve prepared more,” or, “That person who just went is far better than you are.” So, if we can remind ourselves that we actually have value to bring that the audience can benefit, that can cancel out some of that negative self-talk.

And then, finally, what we need to be thinking about is our body and how our body is reacting. So, if you blush and perspire, you need to cool yourself down. If you shake, you need to do some purposeful movements, like stepping in if you’re standing up. To cool yourself down, holding something cold in the palm of your hands will reduce your core body temperature. The palms of your hands are thermoregulators for your body. So, those are some just quick tips of what we can do for symptoms, and there are many others.

The second side of the equation is sources, and there are many sources of anxiety. One source is that we’re very nervous about not achieving the goal that we’re trying to accomplish. So, if you’re an entrepreneur, maybe you’re trying to get funding. If you’re one of my students, maybe you’re trying to get a good grade. If you’re working in an organization, maybe you’re trying to get support for your cause.

What makes us nervous is we start thinking about what will happen if we don’t achieve that goal, and that can make us very nervous. So, what do we do? We have to get present-oriented because worrying about a goal is worrying about something in the future. So, becoming present-oriented can short-circuit that. For example, you can do something physical. Actors and actresses will shake their body out. You can walk around the building. If you get in your body, you’re not in your mind.

Second, you can listen to a song or a playlist, it helps you get very present-oriented. A very simple way to get present-oriented sounds silly is to say a tongue twister. You can’t say a tongue twister right without being in the present moment, and it warms up your voice. So, lots of things we can do to manage symptoms and sources to help us with the first step of the spontaneous speaking methodology.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Manage anxiety, understood. We got the symptoms, we got the sources, and that’s handy. In terms of getting present, I’m intrigued, are there some additional ways that you recommend folks get into their body as opposed to their mind?

Matt Abrahams
Yeah. So, a great way, if you have an opportunity, is to connect with people, have conversations. So, if I’m ever in a physical space with other people where I’m presenting, maybe I’m running a meeting, or I’m giving a presentation where I know I’m going to get Q&A, and it’s appropriate, I’m out talking to the people, just getting to know them. It’s very hard to have a conversation with somebody and not be in the present moment. So, I’m listening, I’m connecting, that helps.

Another simple kind of fun way is to start at some hard number and count backwards by an even harder number. So, start at 100 and count backwards by, let’s say, 17s. That can be very challenging. So, there’s a lot that we can do to get ourselves present-oriented.

Pete Mockaitis
Seventeens.

Matt Abrahams
Yeah, try it. you can do the first one, that’s 73. Oh, I’m sorry, 83, and the rest are really hard.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And now let’s hear about the second step when we’re thinking about striving for perfection.

Matt Abrahams
Yes. So, when many of us speak, our goal, we feel, is to do it right, to say the right thing, to be perfect. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves. Society doesn’t help. If you ask people, “Who’s a really good speaker?” they will typically pick people who are professional communicators. They’ll say some TED speaker from doing a TED Talk, some politician, actor, actress, and that sets an incredibly high bar for the quality of what communication should be like.

Now, we seem to forget that these folks have been trained, and coached, and practiced a lot. In the case of TED Talks, sometimes they’re even edited. So, we need to be thinking about the criteria we use to judge and evaluate our communication because we set the bar really high. That said, we try to achieve it and we want to be perfect and right. And we can disabuse ourselves of that.

I start my Stanford MBA course every quarter I teach with this saying, I say, “Try to maximize your mediocrity in your communication.” And let me tell you, Pete, these folks’ jaws drop. They’ve never been told in their lives to be mediocre. But the value of this is when you strive just to get it done, you put less pressure on yourself, which actually boils down to cognitive load.

Your brain is like a computer. It’s not a perfect analogy but it works. And you know on your laptops and or phones when you have lots of apps or windows open, your system performs a little less well. It’s not performing at its top speed because it’s doing too much at once. The same thing is true with you when you communicate. If I’m evaluating and judging everything I say, that means when I communicate, I have less cognitive focus and effort in what I’m actually saying.

So, you can reduce that by just telling yourself, “Hey, dial down that judgment and evaluation.” I’m not saying never judge and evaluate. You should. But if you dial that down a little bit, you can just focus on getting it done. And when I explain this to my students, I end the class by saying, “Maximize mediocrity so you can achieve greatness,” and they get it. They understand that the pressure they’re putting on themselves actually works against them.

So, that’s step number two. Just get the communication done. And, in so doing, you’re likely to do it very well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. And how about the third one, service as an opportunity?

Matt Abrahams
Yes. So, many of us, when we think about our speaking situations, and we think about, “Oh, you’ve got to answer questions on the spot,” for example, or, somebody asks you for feedback, or to introduce somebody in the moment. Many of us don’t say, “Oh, this is a great opportunity.” We think, “Oh, my goodness, I’m going to screw up. I can’t believe I’m in this situation. I have to defend myself or my position.” So, we get very defensive.

And that affects not just how we hold our bodies. We get tight and tense. Our tone gets more curt. Our answers get really short and brief. We can adjust that by reframing the circumstance even in the most difficult spontaneous speaking. Let’s imagine a Q&A session where somebody is just coming at us, fast, furious, spicy. We can still see that as an opportunity to learn, an opportunity to connect, an opportunity to potentially find areas to collaborate, and, in so doing, it will change our approach.

We become more open in our body posture. Our answers become more detailed. Our tone becomes more collaborative. All of that will help us do better in the interaction. So, reframing these situations not as hostile and challenging but as opportunities can fundamentally change how we approach this.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Let’s hear about listening.

Matt Abrahams
Well, so I host a podcast called Think Fast, Talk Smart. I’ve not done nearly as many episodes as you’ve done. We’ve just come up on our hundredth, and it’s all about communication. And across these hundred episodes, what has been very clear to me is that listening is critical. We absolutely have to listen better. Most of us do not listen well. We listen just enough to understand what the person is saying so we can then respond, rehearse, evaluate, and judge. We need to listen deeply.

I once heard a video where somebody was talking about jazz and jazz music, and he talked about a teacher he had. And the teacher told him that when he’s listening to jazz music, to really understand it, he has to listen until he sweats. And I love that. When you listen to really connect and in the moment with somebody, you have to listen intently. Listen until you sweat.

So, when it comes to listening, I have a framework that I borrowed from a colleague of mine at the business school, his name is Collins Dobbs. And he talks about, in crucial conversations, three things. And these three things apply to listening beautifully, so I borrowed it – space, pace, grace. To listen truly well, you have to give yourself pace, space, and grace. By pace, I mean slow down.

All of us move so quickly and we have so much going on, we distract ourselves, so we need to slow down so we can really listen. We need to give ourselves space, not just physical space. Move into an environment where you can listen well, but also mental space. We have to give ourselves space in our minds to really focus, be present, and pay attention.

And then grace, we have to give ourselves permission, not only give ourselves pace and space, but to listen internally to our intuition. So, when somebody says something, if you said to me, “Hey, Matt, I’m doing great,” well, the words might say one thing but my sense is the way you said them might mean something else, and I need to give that some credence, and then act upon that as well.

So, the ability to listen minimizes the likelihood that you will respond poorly in a spontaneous speaking situation. For example, you come out of a meeting and you look at me, and you say, “Hey, Matt, how did you think that went?” And, all of a sudden, I hear, “Feedback. Pete wants feedback. Well, Pete, you did this poorly. You could’ve done this better. This should be different next time.”

But if I would’ve really listened, I might’ve noticed that you came out the back door, not the front door, that when you asked me, you were looking down, your tone of voice was very different. What you really wanted in that moment was support. You didn’t want feedback, and I missed it, and I made it actually worse not better. That’s why we have to listen really well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then when it comes to some of your frameworks, what is the framework for introducing yourself?

Matt Abrahams
Well, let me give you an all-purpose framework first, and then I can give you a specific one when you do an introduction toast or tribute. So, my favorite structure in the whole world is three simple questions: what, so what, now what. The what is your idea, it’s your product, your service. It could be the person you’re introducing, including yourself. The so what is why is it important to the people you’re talking to. And then the now what becomes what comes next.

So, if I were introducing you, Pete, I might say, “I’m really excited to introduce you to Pete. He’s a very talented person. He does many things, including host a podcast. In talking to Pete, you’re going to learn so much from his vast experience. Now, I’m going to turn the floor over to Pete.” Did you see I just did what, so what, now what as a way of introducing you?

Now, if you’re doing a toast or a tribute, where you’re introducing an idea, a product, maybe a group of people, another structure can work really well, and that is what I call WHAT. What is, “Why are we here? What is the event?” The H is, “How are you, the person doing the introduction, connected to the event?” The A is an anecdote or story you might tell that’s relevant and appropriate for the group. And then the T is some kind of thanks or gratitude.

So, imagine you are the MC, the master of ceremonies at a wedding. You would start, you wouldn’t have to necessarily say why you’re all here. People can figure that out as they see everybody all fancy dressed and probably came from a ceremony. But you might want to explain how you’re connected. You might say, “I’ve known the bride and groom for 10 years. In fact, I introduced them.” And then you would give an anecdote or story that’s relevant and appropriate, and then you would thank everybody, and then maybe bring up the next speaker.

So, the WHAT, why are we here, how are you connected, anecdote or two, and then thank you can be a helpful way of introducing people or an event.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, could you show us that in action? Let’s just say there’s a project kickoff, everyone’s getting together, and they’re going around introducing themselves. Matt, could you show us the introduction of self in action?

Matt Abrahams
Yeah. So, I hate the, “Let’s all go around the table and introduce ourselves.” I think there are so many better ways to get to know each other and names. But if you have to do that, so what I like to do, I do a slight variation of what, so what, now what, in that I start with something provocative. Rather than saying, “Hi, my name is…” That’s boring. Everybody sort of tunes out.

So, I’ll start by saying, “I’m somebody who’s passionate about communication. My name is Matt, and I am a podcast host, an author, and a teacher. And I look forward to sharing with you what I’ve learned about communication and, more importantly, learning from you what you know about communication.” That’s how I would introduce myself. It’s a little more engaging. It allows me to animate and demonstrate my passion. And it really sets up the next step of the interaction.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And now let’s talk about being clear and concise.

Matt Abrahams
Many of us, when we speak spontaneously, we discover what we’re saying as we say it. So, we say more than we need to. My mother has this wonderful saying that really helps get to the crux of this. And I know she didn’t create it but I certainly attribute it to her. And her saying is, “Tell me the time, don’t build me the clock.”

Many of us are clock builders. We say way too much either because we want to demonstrate how much work we’ve done, or how smart we are, or just so into whatever it is we’re talking about, we give way more information than people need. And, in so doing, we can bore them, we can cause them to get confused, we can lose our place and where we’re trying to head. So, really being concise is critical, and there are lots of ways to be more concise.

The two that I like to start with is, one, you have to know your audience. You have to understand what’s important to them. The more relevant you can make your content, the more likely you can focus it on the needs of your audience. That’s number one. And number two, you really have to think about your goal. Whenever you communicate, you have a goal, and you have to think about that goal such that it will help you focus.

And, to me, a goal has three parts: information, emotion, and action. In other words, what do you want your audience to know? How do you want them to feel? And what do you want them to do? And even in the moment, when I’m walking into a situation where I have to speak spontaneously, I can quickly say what I want them to know, feel, and do, and that helps me focus what I say.

I bet, when you were doing impromptu speeches in high school, at some point, before you started speaking, you would think to yourself, “What is it I’m trying to accomplish here?” And whatever that answer was helped you focus your communication so you were clearer and more concise.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Matt, this is quite a lovely rundown here. So, those are our six steps. And so, I’m curious then, maybe we’ve done all that prep, and yet, still, someone puts us on the spot, we’re drawing a blank, what do we do?

Matt Abrahams
Yeah. So, the number one fear people report to me is, “What do I do when I blank out?” And we can reduce the likelihood of blanking out by having a clear goal, thinking about our audience, and leveraging a structure. Because, if you think about it, a structure gives you a map, and if you have a map, it’s hard to get lost.

So, I might know, not remember, or know exactly what I want to say next, but if I’m using a structure like what, so what, now what, and I know that I’ve just covered the what, I know that so what has to come next. So, it helps give me directionality. So, we can avoid blanking out by, first, really leveraging a structure and knowing our audience.

Now, let’s say the worst happens. Even though you’ve got a structure, even though you’re feeling good about your communication, for whatever reason, you blank out. In that moment, there are two things I recommend you do. One, go back to go forward. Repeat yourself. When you repeat yourself, often you will get yourself back on track.

It’s like when you lose your keys or your phone, what do you do? You retrace your steps so you can find your way. Same thing works. Second, if that doesn’t work, distract your audience. You just need a few seconds to get yourself back. Here’s how I do it.

Pete Mockaitis
“Look over there.”

Matt Abrahams
Not so much that way. Not the smoke and mirrors distraction. But here’s what I do. When I teach, I teach the same strategic communication course multiple times a year at the Stanford Business School, and sometimes I’ll forget, “Did I say that in this class? Have we covered this already?” And I just need a moment to collect my thoughts.

So, I’ll just stop wherever I’m at, and I’ll say to my students, I’ll say, “I want to pause for a moment. I’d like for you to think about how what we’ve just covered can be applied in your life.” And when I say that, my students don’t think, “Oh, Matt forgot.” My students think, like, “Oh, how could I apply this. It’s important. We should apply it. It’s nice that he’s giving us time to do that.”

I think all of us can come up with a question that we could ask pretty much anywhere in our communication that would give us just a few seconds. So, imagine you’re in an update meeting, a product meeting, you could pause, and say, “What’s the impact of what we’ve just discussed on our timeline or on the product we’re coming up with?” People will think about it, and in that moment, you can collect your thoughts.

So, if the worst happens, repeat yourself. If that doesn’t get you back on track, ask some kind of question, assert something that gets people thinking in a different way, and that gives you time to rethink what you’ve got to do.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. And then I’m thinking of the project management or project kickoffs setting, it might be any number of great things to prompt people to think about it. Now, I guess in some ways, if the question is too far afield from what you were talking about, they’re like, “Huh? Why were you asking us to do this now?” Like, “I’d like for you to anticipate some of the sticking points as you imagine this playing out in process.” Like, “Really, you’re telling us about the financial projections? I don’t know why we’d do that now.”

Matt Abrahams
Yeah. Well, of course. So, of course, there are certain constraints but you could certainly say in the midst, you can say, “Now I want everybody to think back to the previous project. What were some of the sticking points that got in the way? Or, what are some of the financial issues?” Depending on whatever it was, people will start thinking.

And you could even say, “We’ve got some new people on the team. They don’t remember what it was like last time. I’d like each of you to just turn to somebody and share what a big issue it was for our last release, and then we can start talking more about where we’re going.” I don’t think a single person would question that at all, and it will help you be more effective.

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

Matt Abrahams
Yeah. So, I would just like to re-emphasize the fact that everybody can get better in their communication. The process I’ve delineated might sound intimidating, might sound like hard work. It’s not. You can do it in bite-size pieces. You can practice. The reality is this: the only way you get better at communication is the way you get better at everything else in life – repetition, reflection, and feedback.

If you’ve ever played a sport, a musical instrument, you had to practice. And then you had to reflect, “What’s working? What’s not working?” And then, finally, seek advice, guidance, and support from others so you can get better. I’ve seen it in my own life, I’ve seen it in the people I teach and I coach. You just have to take the time. You take small steps forward and it makes a huge, huge difference.

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

Matt Abrahams
So, a quote that I love, Pete, and thank you for asking this, is a quote by Mark Twain, and it’s got a little tongue in cheek here but it proves a point that I just made about how we can work to get better at spontaneous speaking. And Mark Twain said, “It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.”

And the point behind this is you have to put in work. You have to practice to get better at spontaneous speaking. Mark Twain knew it a long time ago. It still holds true today. And it puts a smile on my face every time I think about it, and I think it helps others understand what’s possible when it comes to spontaneous speaking.

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

Matt Abrahams
I have lots of favorite research points but I’ll share some research from a friend and colleague, her name is Alison Wood Brooks. She teaches at Harvard Business School. And a while back, she did some research that looked at how we can reframe our anxiety around speaking not as something that makes us anxious but as something that excites us.

It turns out that our physiological response to excitement and anxiety are exactly the same. Our bodies have one arousal response and we can reframe that and relabel it. So, instead of saying, “Oh, I’m so nervous,” we could say, “Hey, I’m really excited to do this.” And we can attribute those symptoms we’re feeling to excitement. And it actually ends up with us performing better, that is we feel better about how we did. And the audience sees us as doing better. So, I love that research.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Matt Abrahams
So, one of my favorite books of all time is a book called Improv Wisdom. It’s a book by Patricia Ryan Madson. I know Patricia, I’ve gotten to know her over the years. A very skinny book but it’s got lots of life changing advice that comes from the world of improvisation.

There are very few books that I have read where, upon closing the book, I have fundamentally changed my life based on what I’ve read. And this is one of those books, and it’s a book I return to often. So, it’s called Improv Wisdom Patricia Ryan Madson.

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

Matt Abrahams
So, I’ve already alluded to a few, there are two. Actually, you know what, there are several that I use. Let me share the most useful tool I think I use, and that is paraphrasing. I think paraphrasing is the Swiss Army knife of communication. You can use it for so many things. As a podcast host, I use it to really clarify what I heard my audience members say, my guests say.

I also use it as a tool to distribute airtime in a meeting. So, if somebody’s talking too much, I’ll paraphrase and throw it over to somebody else to talk some more. And I also use paraphrasing to clarify in my own life what it is I just heard somebody say. So, if one of my teenage kids, or somebody else in my life says something, and I want to validate that I heard it, and make sure that I got it right, I’ll use paraphrasing. So, that is the single most useful tool I use to be awesome at what I do.

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

Matt Abrahams
Well, first and foremost, I invite people to listen into Think Fast, Talk Smart, that’s a podcast I host. It’s short episodes all about communication. Definitely consider checking out the book Think Faster, Talk Smarter. I’m not that creative with my naming. It’s all about spontaneous speaking. And then if you go to MattAbrahams.com, you’ll find a whole bunch of resources I’ve put up there for all things communication. And if you’re a big LinkedIn user, feel free to link in with me as well.

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

Matt Abrahams
I challenge everyone to think about the impact communication has on the work that you do, and on the others that you work with, and I encourage you and challenge you to work on your communication so that you can be a better version of yourself, a better colleague, a better partner, a better parent. Communication will help you do that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Matt, this has been a treat. I wish you many fast thoughts and talks.

Matt Abrahams
Awesome. Pete, it’s been great to be back with you. Keep doing the good work that you do. Keep thinking fast and talking smart. Thank you.

Sep 14
0

898: How to Reduce Workplace Drama and Ego with Cy Wakeman

By | Podcasts | One Comment

 

Cy Wakeman discusses why engagement is overrated and what really drives results.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How your ego ruins 2.5 hours of each day
  2. Three questions for breaking free from your ego
  3. Why to stop saying “should”

About Cy

Cy Wakeman is a drama researcher, international leadership speaker, and consultant. In 2001 she founded Reality-Based Leadership. She is the author of four books: Reality-Based Leadership: Ditch the Drama, Restore Sanity to the Workplace and Turn Excuses Into Results (2010), NY Times Bestseller, The Reality-Based Rules of the Workplace: Know What Boosts Your Value, Kills Your Chances, and Will Make You Happier (2013), No Ego: How Leaders Can Cut the Cost of Workplace Drama, End Entitlement, and Drive Big Results (2017), and her newest release, Life’s Messy, Live Happy.

Deemed as “the secret weapon to restoring sanity to the workplace,” Cy Wakeman was voted in the top 100 leadership professionals to follow on twitter for 7 years in a row. In 2021, 2022, and 2023 she topped the Global Gurus list of Top 30 Leadership Professionals across the globe, coming in at #1.

Resources Mentioned

Cy Wakeman Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
I am excited to be here as well and I have so much I want to learn about drama, and ego, and entitlement, and accountability, and results. So much juicy high-stakes stuff, Cy. But, maybe, first, could we back it up and tell us there’s a tale in which you had an accidental discovery which led you down the path of being a drama research. Could you tell us this story?

Cy Wakeman
Absolutely. I was doing some academic work, my Master’s degree, but also, at the time, managing position offices. I had 19 clinics and I was a pretty young leader, and wanted to combine my work with my studies so I could kind of do two things at once. And so, I was wanting to study how physicians were adapting to a lot of medical records, and I thought I would do a quick time study just to see if using dictation and moving to the computer where they had the keyboard would really change their productivity negatively.

So, I put an observer in every room and I had them time how much time the physician was spending with the patients or how much time they’re spending typing because I had a baseline from their dictation how much time they spent on recording. And I just wanted to see if the new electric medical record had really slowed physicians down as much as they were telling me that was the case.

And, very quickly, I got a call and I had only given the group two ways to record time – time with patients and time with the keyboard – and they pointed out they really wanted a third column, and I really wanted the research not to be changed. I just wanted to write my paper, graduate from graduate school, and be done. And they convinced me I would really lose out on a huge discovery if I hurried the completion of that course.

And I asked them, I got curious, “So, what would the third column be?” And they said, “Well, we record time with the patient, time with the keyboard, but the third column would be how much time the physician spends complaining about the keyboard and the patient.” And that was so juicy that I said, “Oh, my gosh, I’m a psychology social work background, I want to know this.” And it came out to be an astounding two and a half hours a day per person.

Pete Mockaitis
So, these doctors were spending two and a half hours a day complaining about how dumb it is that they had…and I guess this was in the early stages, it’s a new change. I guess, like, they would get old, I imagine, after some weeks or months.

Cy Wakeman
It doesn’t.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, years in, they’re still complaining for two and a half hours a day.

Cy Wakeman
Yes, the average person. So, when I found out that the average person, and it’s not just venting, but it’s internal, “This is freaking wrong. This shouldn’t be happening.” I thought, “Maybe these physicians, it’s a new change or they’re just whiners.” And I went out and I looked at nursing, I went out and looked at other healthcare, technical roles, I looked in finance, I just kept repeating this research, and the average person, good performer, spends about two and a half hours a day walking around, going, “I’ll do it, but I shouldn’t have to, and this is sick and wrong, and somebody should figure out a better way. And I was a consultant and no one asked me,” and it’s just this huge emotional waste, this source of emotional waste.

And so, that eventually ends up it’s 816 hours a year. And it’s not even about productivity because people can work while they complain. It’s about time spent being miserable needlessly because most of what people are complaining about, their suffering comes from story not actual reality. It’s their story of how things should be, not the real inconvenience of how it is. So, it just really opened up a lot of people’s minds to the emotional wastes that is really a problem.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. So, two and a half hours a day, and so some of this time is spent complaining and working at the same time, so it’s not necessarily all two and a half hours of that time…

Cy Wakeman
It’s not like we’re taking a break to vent, although some people do. But an example, as a senior vice president in a health system, we had a policy that really saw a patient or their family loss, we would be service oriented, we call it wayfinding. No matter your position, you would greet the patient and ask them where they want to go, or their family, and you would personally walk them there because hospitals are confusing complex places. It’s not always laid out very clearly.

So, while I’m doing that, with a smile on my face, “Where are you going? How’s your care here?” internally, I am thinking, “Screw all this. I have a paper bag. How hard could it be to do a GPS app to get people where they need to go. The signage around here is absolutely ridiculous.” But, outwardly, I’m kind to people but burdened because I shouldn’t have to be, “This is somebody else’s responsibility. I’m surrounded by jerks and idiots.” And it’s just that constant judging that separates and erodes, and it’s really the source of ego. It comes from ego.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, fascinating. So, some of this complaining is internally, inside our own headspace. You’re not verbalizing it externally.

Cy Wakeman
A lot of it is. A lot of it is judging. Yup, judging not helping. It is even creating a story about someone so that it inhibits your collaboration because your mind is saying, “I already know what this is about. They’re out to get me. I’m a victim. They want to disprove me with my boss.” Like, there’s so much dialogue internal and external. But what I’ve come to do with my research is teach people two things.

I teach them how their mind works so they quit getting played by their ego, and they quit believing everything they think as if it’s true, and I teach people how the world works so they stop arguing with reality, which is an argument you’ll lose, like, 100% of the time. Two colossal wastes of energy when people really could have an impact.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, boy, Cy, there’s so much to jump into here.

Cy Wakeman
Is that by topic?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, the book is called No Ego: How Leaders Can Cut the Cost of Workplace Drama, End Entitlement, and Drive Big Results. So, maybe first, let’s just define ego. What precisely do we mean by ego?

Cy Wakeman
So, ego is not a bad thing. We all have it. The way I talk about it is it’s a part of your mind that can provide protection, it helps you when you’re two years old, separate out from your mom, and come to know that you’re separate in the world. And, as human beings, we tend to really overuse it. It’s a very primitive part of our brain. Its job is really to keep us safe and be pretty paranoid, and not give people benefit of the doubt.

The way I explain it is, like, if you imagine having a light switch on your forehead, like a toggle switch, an old-fashioned switch, not a dimmer, not Alexa, like just a toggle switch. And when it’s toggled down, you’re seeing the world through the lens of ego, and it’s like wearing a pair of glasses, prescription glasses, but it’s the wrong prescription. It distorts your view of the world.

So, when you’re getting information in through the lens of ego, you see fact plus story, fact plus color commentary, and your view of the world is very distorted. You see the world as more dangerous. You come to the conclusion, usually, that you’re the victim, somebody else is the villain, and you’re helpless, and it’s distorted information upon which you make pretty outlandish decisions based on, and then you co-create the very thing you probably feared.

So, let me give an example. I’m driving down the road, and all I know if I told you the facts were that someone appear to be male, driving a pickup truck, bumper stickers which I disagree with on the pickup truck, saying things that I would not support, moves into my lane of traffic, allowing me less room than I prefer. So, all this happens on my morning commute as I was driving, and someone, who I described, moves into my lane of traffic, and I prefer more room than that person driving gave me.

Now, if that’s all the information I have, if I just keep it right there an accurate view of reality, I would make good choices. I would say, “Oh, my gosh, I prefer more room, so I will slow down and allow this person in, and continue my beautiful commute. There’s nothing to be upset about, there’s nothing to be mad about.”

However, many of us experience those facts and we add story, “He’s a male chauvinist. Obviously, he doesn’t care about human life. He’s the problem with this country. He doesn’t care about human life. Got up this morning, he doesn’t respect me, tried to kill me as if he owns the road. It’s absolutely ridiculous.” And it sparks in me what feels like real emotion and anger, but the anger didn’t come from reality. Our suffering isn’t from reality. It’s from the story we make up about reality.

So, what choice do I make? “I prefer safety and room between us, but given his behavior, game on, I speed up. If he wants it unsafe, I’ll show him unsafe.” And now I co-create the very thing I said I stood against, so I get to work. It’s not very bonding to say, “You know, Pete, my commute, just a lot of it is adjusting to other people moving into my lane with less room than I prefer. How was yours?” There’s no bonding to happen.

But if I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, thanks for asking. Attempted murder. This guy, like, literally, tried to take me out, and it was absolutely ridiculous and it escalated.” And now, what my ego has got me doing is just crunching on dopamine, crunching on like a brain cocktail, and actually believing everything I’m saying. And we operate at that heightened distorted view of the world.

And the conclusion I come up with is, “I was an innocent victim. He’s a villain,” and that we have to have very harsh consequences, two people who act like that. And we just keep separating it out. At the time at work, we need to be collaborative, we need to be inclusive, we need to be turning towards one another, and putting all ideas on the table. We’re judging, not helping.

And so, when you’re toggled down, you’re using the most primitive part of your brain and you usually don’t have very many options. You have fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, so what people do is they say, “There’s nothing I can do.” They disengage. They create impact. They disengage, they can’t have impact, and so then they feel, like, work is not engaging them but it’s actually their story that’s not engaging.

But when we’re toggled up, because we have another option, you’re bringing coherence, you’re using high levels of consciousness, you’re seeing the world as it really is. And when you’re toggled up, you have a thousand more choices, and it doesn’t feel like such a burden. And so, as you toggle up, you’re naturally your best self, you’re most evolved, you’re highly accountable, you’re collaborative, you’re resembling all the things that you could be to really co-create some amazing things.

But most people toggle down, outsource their happiness and their circumstances, rather than toggling up, seeing reality as it really is, and looking for ways they can plug and play that rebuilds and has impact, and is inclusive and collaborative, and creative and innovative. And so, once I can teach people how to run their toggle switch, which is simply through the act of self-reflection and questioning your own thinking, once I can teach them that, the same job is very different, the same colleagues are partners.

It’s not toxic positivity. It’s not just thinking better about people. It’s seeing reality as it really is so you realize most of what you thought happened never did. So, it was just your brain trying to protect you.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right. So much good stuff here. So, toggle up, toggle down is like we sort of have a switch or a gear shifter, and we got the down mode, which is our primitive lizard limbic stuff, fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. I understand fight, that’s aggress, “Let’s rip into it.” Flight, “You know what, I’m out of here. Forget it,” leave the room or check out.

Cy Wakeman
Or quiet quitting, “I stay and just quit.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Freeze, that’s just sort of like you just sort of disassociate or do nothing. You’re just sort of like do. And, now, what’s fawn? I don’t know about this one.

Cy Wakeman
Fawn is when, let’s say, we stop at the gas station, the guy goes, “Hey, sorry I cut you off.” And I’m like, “It really wasn’t any issue. I didn’t even get upset about it. I understand. It’s hard to drive a pickup, especially with all those bumper stickers on it. It might be difficult.” It’s that fawning is really a passive-aggressive approach.

So, like, in a meeting after the meeting, you talk really aggressively about what happened. And then when somebody asks you directly, “Do you want to add any comments or talk about the risk of this idea?” you’re like, “No, I think it looks amazing.” So, it’s really kind of self-abandonment, fawning is.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and it’s interesting to think of it in the same context of those other options because it almost feels more devious and conscientiously chosen.

Cy Wakeman
And people say, “Our culture is just nice. We treat people like family.” I’m like, “That sounds a pretty dysfunctional way to treat family.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. And then toggle up, so I like it. There’s a limited set of options versus toggling up. I’ve got a whole broader set of options, like, “Do I engage? Do I give a gift? Do I problem-solve something?” So, there’s a whole lot of ways we can go about that. All right, understood.

Cy Wakeman
And, usually, when you’re toggled up and you’re in high levels of consciousness, you’re helping not judging. You’re curious, you’re compassionate, you’re open-minded, open-hearted, “How can I give a person the benefit of the doubt? How can I turn back towards them? How can I approach this with curiosity?” because you’re not being driven out of, “I’m in danger and I have to do drastic things.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Cy Wakeman
I think your listeners want to know if they do this, go on social media, read some posts you disagree with, and look at how you respond. So, if you agree with me, and write, and like, “Heck, yeah, Pete, great post.” If you don’t agree, I just put an emoji, like a calf and a poop symbol, and go, “I hate for this woman to be my manager. She sucks,” after a one-minute video. And instead of, “Tell me more,” or, “How might you apply this to this particular situation?”

Like, so many of the algorithms in our daily lives drive us towards polarization and settle in cognitive dissonance where many things can trip us in time with simplistic polarized yes-no, “Whose camp are you in?” and then, like, “What if we can sit if there’s only one camp?” It’s like the world and the human race. There’s all these divisiveness, and that’s really the work of the ego.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, so then what are the tools we would use to do the toggling up to get out of some of the drama and unpleasantness here?

Cy Wakeman
Really simple. There’s these great questions that will set you free, and the first question I like to ask myself is, “What do I know for sure?” And that loosens the ego’s grip on my view of the world. Like, “You tried to kill me,” like, actually, I don’t know that for sure. “He’s a male chauvinist pig,” I don’t even know if it’s his pickup. I don’t even know if he believes the bumper stickers. I really don’t know what those four words mean to him.

So, when I ask, “What do I know for sure?” it gets me back to reality. And then the next question, now that I’ve stopped judging, I can ask myself, “What could I do next that will help? If I say I want world peace, what can I do next to be peaceful? If I say I want safe commutes, what could I do next?” And now it brings us back into helping, not judging, and personal accountability. And sometimes what I can do is just bless them or give them the benefit of the doubt. It doesn’t have to be any action.

And then a really final call for me is I often ask, because I want to live according to my principles and integrity, is, “If I were great right now, if I were my most evolved self, what would my next right action be?” And those three questions, those questions live in me. I just walk with them and I ask my teams a lot. So, when they come in and they’re mad at that colleague, I’m like, “What do you know for sure? Now, that you’ve stopped judging, what could you do to help? And if you were great right now, what would great look like?”

And that, people in their higher self, they usually come up with really helpful things that will move things along in the direction we all hope for.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, maybe could you give us an example? Let’s say someone is upset, they feel like they should’ve been included on an email, on a meeting. They feel undermined, cut out, excluded, something along these lines. It’s like, “I was not consulted, and I don’t like it.” How would we work through that?

Cy Wakeman
So, I would first premise with is a lot of people are like, “I just need to vent,” and they think venting is sharing feelings but venting, really, is a behavior, and it’s not sharing feelings. Venting is feelings plus story. So, feelings are like, “I’m frustrated.” A little context is, “I understand there’s a meeting that happened that didn’t include me, and I have some expertise in that area. My preference would be getting included.”

The venting is the respite, “They did this crap on purpose. They’re purposely excluding me. They want to discredit me. They’re trying to get by with something. And then you go back in history, they’ve done this 18 times. I’ve kept score.” That’s the venting part. So, let’s say my team member Alex comes in, and for my team, we’ve committed to note third options. You can either step in and impact. You can radically accept and extend grace, mercy, and tolerance.

But the third option where they don’t want to do either one of those, they just want to vent about it, most really great spiritual teachers, if you want little suffering, say, the third option, you can impact, and not control, its impact, or you can radically accept. Alex comes in, and says, “I’m so frustrated.” And as a leader, I want to validate his feelings, his experience, I’m like, “You look frustrated. What’s up?” “Well, Sara didn’t give me the information I needed for my report tomorrow. I’m going to have to stay late and I’m going to miss my kid’s ballgame.”

So, I can validate for him his experience, “Gosh, that sounds frustrating.” What I don’t need to validate as a colleague, a friend, or a leader, is the sense his ego is making of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, “Boy, she really did you dirty there.”

Cy Wakeman
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
We don’t go there.

Cy Wakeman
Feelings sharing is like, “I see you’re frustrated,” but when he goes on to say, “She does this crap on purpose. She’s just trying to discredit me. Ever since she got that promotion, she thinks she’s all that bag of chips, and doesn’t realize that we’re still equal.” And I’m like, “Time out, time out. Two choices. If you were great right now, what would great look like? Please step up and impact this.” And he might consider that because self-reflection, you can’t vent and self-reflect at the same time. Your brain cannot do that.

That’s why it’s such a good hack because you can’t vent and help at the same time. So, I’m like, “Consider this question. If you were great right now, and you really wanted to impact your working relationship, that you were included and informed, what would that look like?” And he’s like, “Ahh, I could just simply like maybe put a reminder on our calendar three days before due date every month I needed the information, and to reach out to her to see if there’s any issue.”

I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, awesome. Go be great.” He’s like, “Yeah, but I shouldn’t have to.” The ego came calling. And I go, “Oh, my gosh, you were almost great.” The ego makes up rules that aren’t real and then when people violate it and we get really mad about it, like, “I shouldn’t have to put a reminder on a colleague’s calendar that’s helpful.” So, I said, “No problem, you don’t have to impact it. Then your other choice is can you radically accept it, that some days are like that? Have you ever been in a position where you missed a deadline? Can you extend mercy, grace, and tolerance?”

And his heart softened. He’s like, “Oh, my gosh, yes. She’s a good team member. We’ve had a lot going on. She helped me out before.” And I said, “Perfect. Like, can I help you? Like, if you have to stay late, I’ll pull some numbers for you. What do you need?” And we start working on that, and Alex goes, “Well, wait a minute. So, she’s just going to get away with it?” And I’m like, “So, you’re not letting it go? So, you’re going to impact it.”

And when you put the bagel in a squeeze box like that, you can see it grows more and more ridiculous, “So, you want her to pay for it and you don’t want to help her remember it, and you want an engaging great place to work without you being willing to do any part in helping your human companions?” And so, that whole piece of it, in the beginning, people get really mad because the ego can’t find a place to be a victim in there. It’s like adulting. It’s how the adults step up to impact. Yeah, it’s like adulting.

Pete Mockaitis
These are fantastic distinctions which just really clarify and crystallize things. So, sharing feelings plus context is different than venting. Venting is creating a big old story, it’s like, “I felt this associated with these things.” Okay. And then the main choices are: make an impact, change the situation, radically accept this is how it is, and extend mercy, grace, and tolerance, which feels nice. But don’t vent because then you’re just sort of giving ego fuel and being a victim, and that’s not really great for anybody in terms of our emotions, our engagement, our feeling good, our work relationships, etc. So, that’s cool.

Cy Wakeman
Exactly. And that’s a great point because a lot of people, I’m like, “So, why do you want to vent?” They’re like, “I want to feel better.” I’m like, “I have a more scientific way proven to feel better, which is accountability.”

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Yes, I’ve seen some of the research.

Cy Wakeman
People are like, “I want to feel better,” but venting comes with a hangover. And the more you vent, the more you’ve trained your neural pathways that you need cheap dopamine and heightened disgruntlement. And for the ego to stay alive, it needs to stay mildly disgruntled. It eats anger for lunch. So, now you have to look elsewhere in the world for something that is wrong. And what we start doing is we outsource our happiness, “I’ll be happy when I have the perfect boss who’s never human. And I’ll be happy when everyone works exactly like I do. I’ll be happy when everyone agrees with me.” I’m like, “Well, your world has got to be pretty small then for you to get happy.”

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. That notion, “I shouldn’t have to,” and you said we make up rules, and then are angry when other people don’t follow them. And I’m thinking, I got a book on my shelf, Feeling Good, Dr. David Burns, talking cognitive distortions and ‘shoulds’ is a big one. I would love for you to dig into this territory a little bit. How should we think about ‘shoulds’? And what is an optimal approach when we hear our brains firing off that stuff?

Cy Wakeman
I’m so glad that you bring up on your podcast the solid evidence around cognitive distortions and all the ways that we do that. I think the best way I can explain my view on should is a question. So many people come to me as a therapist, it was about marriages, “Should I stay? Should I go?” And at work, like people come to me all the time, like, “Should I stay here and put up with this crap? Or, should I just leave and find another job?”

And what I tell people is, “If those are your questions, you’re never going to get good answers. If you want better answers, get better questions.” And when you’re using should, “Should I?” it’s a problem. One, it’s external focused, “What would you do?” or, “What would another person do?” or, “What would a good girl do?” or, “What would God have us do?”

It’s also very conditional, “I have a good week at work, then I should stay,” “I have a bad week work at work, then I should go.” So, it really keeps us externally focused. It’s so conditional, made-up, and silly. I would ask people, “What’s your soul craving right now?” or, “What do you hope to see happen? And then, how can you get that using your words and your actions, and evolving yourself to move through the world more skillfully to get that more often?”

Because that should piece has so many implications, like, “The world owes me something. There’s a formula on how the world should work. And I’m in charge of how people should behave. And I had some agreements, somebody’s ripping me off because my birthright is a perfect boss.” It really gets you into territory that you’ll be chronically disgruntled.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So, if we catch ourselves in a should, is there sort of like a stop, drop, and roll or key protocol or steps you recommend we do?

Cy Wakeman
When you get into should, know that you’re absolute into story of how you would prefer the world to work, but you haven’t even questioned that. You may not even prefer it that way. But when you get into ‘shoulds,’ it is the key indication that you are externally attached and you’re into ego, your view is distorted, and you’re trying to dictate and control people, places, and things, and it will lead to complete and utter misery. It’s like co-dependency.

So, the minute you just start hearing that in your language about, “Here’s what they should be doing,” or, “Everyone knows that this is how it should happen,” just back out of it, and just say, “What is it that I want to be part of creating? And if I were doing that splendidly, what would I be doing right now? Invite other people to join me in that creation.” Like, get that internally focused. Get focused on, “What if we could? And how could we?”

And, for me, those stop, drop, and rolls are energy management. So, a lot of people are putting their energy into, “Why I shouldn’t have to.” If an organization has this strategy, like, “Well, they shouldn’t ask us to do that. And here’s what we shouldn’t have to. And here’s why it won’t work,” and I say that leaders today aren’t there to manage the work of people. They’re there to manage the energy of people away from why we can’t and why we shouldn’t have to, to how we could. And people get fired up about being part of the creation process.

And so, it’s like, “Well, let’s dream and scheme what would great look like. And what if we could, how could we?” and you re-plug people’s energy into that, now people have impact, which is what we all crave, and we’re in high levels of consciousness, and we’re out of ego. We’re seeing a lot of options that we didn’t see before. We’re into creativity and we’re into some big energy stuff. Very nourishing anti-burnout stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And I think when it comes to should, in my own head, some of the most loud, or resonant, or powerful, emotionally feeling ‘shoulds’ involve things that are, I guess, associated with the law, like, “They should not be breaking the law,” or, “They should not be lying,” or sort of legal, or moral, or just like abundantly obvious resource things, that cost ten times what it could.

Cy Wakeman
It could be. I think what happens with should is it’s the way we feel justified in judging because I really believe that people are innocent till proven guilty. And so, I’m like, “They deserve a fair trial,” and I’ve already tried them and decided that what they did was wrong, or if a jury of your peers has said that by all accounts seems they have broken the law, then we support the consequence society has agreed on.

But we tend to take it out of the judicial system or out of the consequence system and put it in our own judgment system, and that’s where I have an issue. I wish people would replace the word ‘they should’ with ‘I prefer’ because that’s really owning it. That’s really owning it. Like, I grow as a therapist and social worker, and if you look at many of the people incarcerated, we can get from a privileged statement that’s really judge-y, and like, “They shouldn’t have broken the law.”

And so many times I want to say, “Come with me, give me all your money, give me all of your defenses, you grew up in a crappy environment, you have no boundaries, you’ve been traumatized, you’ve been sexually abused, your brain doesn’t work right, and you need position, power, food, something. Where’s the ‘should’ come into that?” Like, it’s very predictable when there aren’t those support systems there that the same people believing their same thinking will commit the same thing.

And that’s why most people who are saying ‘should’ have so much hypocrisy in their lives. Like, “People should not steal,” “And I cannot put something in my taxes because it’s not a big deal, and it’s not going to get caught. And the IRS is really underemployed,” or, “People should not lie.” And I lie every day. Actually, it’s a federal offense when I lie. I go into security at the CDC or NIH or NASA, the places I get to work, and if you lie to a security officer upon entry, it’s a federal offense. And they ask for my ID. And every day I turn over my driver’s license that says I weigh 150 pounds.

And so, all I’m saying is that when we are really focused on what other people should and shouldn’t do, we have these moral stances, it’s really just trying to protect ourselves in trying to control the world. Instead, I could say, “I would prefer we all seek to be more honest with one another.” That’s a more inclusive turning towards one another, but it happens a lot, too, at townhall meetings. Leaders should be kind and transparent, and create psychological safety, and make the world safe, and listen, and include.

Like, the list for leaders is long, and then in a townhall meeting, people are standing up, and are like, “Well, I don’t have all the facts, that I know that you’ve lied about this, and you fired that person,” and there are behaviors from employees that are not kind, or psychologically safe, or demanding answers, and it’s like their anger at leaders should include them, and we can also include in our leaders. Leaders should never lie to us, “Did you say when you called in sick that you weren’t sick, that you just really want to go to the Taylor Swift concert?”

And that’s where I think we need to be careful at ‘shoulds’ because ‘shoulds’ lead to shame but internally. We’re trying to shame others for not living up to it but they lead to internal shame because once I ‘should’ you, I’ve just guaranteed that probably a standard for you that I could never live up to.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well said. Well, so while we’re hopping around your worldview, you also say that we should reject the fads of engaging employees and meeting their needs. What do you mean by this? And what should we do instead?

Cy Wakeman
Yeah, this is often taken out of context. What I have found out is that we really over-rotated on engagement. It’s like, “How can we create this workplace where people don’t have to face any sort of hardship and we can take care of as many needs as possible?” And while it’s beautiful, if it’s not balanced with personal accountability, it will lead to entitlement.

And so, I want people to create great engaging workplaces for high accountables. And the reason I say this is the same behavior will not please someone who’s in the state of low accountability and high accountability at the same time. So, if we need to make changes in our organization to stay competitive in the marketplace, if we slow change down, high accountables are like anxious, like, “Why aren’t we implementing this to stay competitive?” But if we speed change up, low accountables are getting anxious, like, “Why do we keep changing things? Why can’t we keep it the same?”

So, to think that we can engage people in a state of low accountability is really just not supported in the evidence. I can only work with the willing, and engagement has a lot to do with my shared accountability to lead. And what we found in the research, people in states of high accountability are more reasonable and they engage more easily in the same workplaces that people are in, say, low accountability are disengaging, that there’s a big part of engagement that is a choice that says, “I realize reality will be imperfect, and I would like to join you in relationship where we can move through that skillfully.”

And a lot of people, their minds are very conditional, “I’ll buy in as long as I get communication and I get this, and no one ever adds something on, and we’re all paid the same, and we’re always given enough notice.” And I’m just like, “What are the odds that that world is ever happening?” And it’s like, “Then what are the odds of you ever engaging?” And the part about that when you disengage is that you feel separate and you feel not part of something. And if you are a disengager, you will disengage at many relationships over time.

That’s just my therapist background, “I just show up at work and do no engagement. I do nothing. I hate it there. My life at home is amazing.” And I’m like, “Probably statistically impossible.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then when it comes to engaging employees, it’s not so much that, “We’re going to do a thing that’s going to engage them,” but rather…

Cy Wakeman
“I can’t buy you love.” “I cannot buy your love,” that’s co-dependency.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And, likewise, meeting their needs, it’s sort of like there’s an independent sort of responsibility piece that cannot be fulfilled by an external third party. Is that kind of your main message there?

Cy Wakeman
It’s my main thing. And I’m not anti-engagement. I think the people that work for me would tell you that it’s a fantastic place to work. We have very few rules. We just deliver great things. But the prerequisite is that you’re an adult, and a high accountable, and have a lot of skills to move through the world with a lot of loving kindness, inclusivity. The key is I can’t buy you in. Buy in is a verb. If you buy in, then we all have a responsibility to create a wonderful workplace.

And so, here’s a great tool to see where you’re at on this. A lot of people do engagement surveys, and then the leader comes in and says, “Okay, here’s what you said in the survey. Let’s make a list of what we need, what you want here at work. Like, what do you want? What would great look like? What do you want created?” And people come up with a really gold-plated list, like, “We want everybody included, and everybody should be consulted. Decisions have to be made quickly, and even if we don’t have expertise, and even if we have no stake in it.”

And this list is long, and most people want the leaders to take that list and go fix reality and deliver that. And a real question is, “Before I take that list to somebody’s leader,” I say, “Well, here’s the second part to this assignment. What are you personally willing to do to get it?” And a lot of times, that list is really short. The list is long that they want, and what they’re personally willing to do is, like, “Wait for it,” or, “Be here when you get back with it,” or, “Participate if everybody else does it.”

And I’m like, “What are the odds of that working?” And we just fill that list more robust where that’s personal accountability. And then our really awesome list is the third list, “Now that we have people participating, what can I, as your leader, what can the organization do to support all of this?” And that’s called attribution in a healthy way.

When high accountables are stressed or suffering, they first look to themselves, and they go, “What’s my part in this?” Like, I was betrayed in a marriage. Everybody could think he was the bad guy. I had a part in that. I abandoned myself long before he abandoned me. Like, I compromised on some. Like, if I don’t learn that, then I can’t really trust anybody in a relationship. I had to learn that.

So, once people identify that, then it’s like, “Here’s what we’re willing to do. What can the organization do?” So, when a high accountable suffers, they go, “I’m in pain here. What’s my part in it? And then what do I need from others?” And then they use the words and they don’t demand it. They request it and work to a solution.

If somebody is in low accountability, and they’re struggling, they skip that part where they attribute anything to themselves, they’re like, “I’m struggling. My leader sucks,” or, “I’m struggling.” What the ego does is it intellectualizes feelings, like anxiety into grievances. I wake up today anxious. I do a body scan, and I’m like, “I feel anxious. And so, great information. How can I move through today knowing I feel anxious? I can be more careful with people. I can really remember that they don’t read my mind and ask for what I need, and move through with that information.”

A lot of people have outsourced their happiness. They wake up, and go, “I feel anxious,” and then they intellectualize it, they’re like, “Why? Oh, I know, because my leader doesn’t tell me anything.” And so, we’re intellectualizing so many things into grievances, and now we’re outsourcing, we’re dependent upon everybody else for how we feel, we’ve outsourced that.

And I’m just inviting people. This isn’t blaming the victim. A lot of people get in, like, “Oh, she’s gaslighting.” And I’m like, “That would be your ego trying to discredit. Just stay curious for one minute longer and just wonder if your life might improve if you just reflect on what is also your part in this, and how can you partner differently with the people that can help you.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Cy, this is a refreshing completely alternative way to run the brain to a common practice and culture, and I dig it. Tell me, anything else you really want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Cy Wakeman
I really invite people to do what you did, the books on your shelf. Get to know you as a human being. Where is your co-dependency? Where is your dysfunction? Where is your trauma? Where is your own cognitive dissonance and limiting beliefs and ways your brain is playing you? And as you discover that, a whole new world sort of opens up to you. So, I just encourage people to become a student, a curious person.

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

Cy Wakeman
Okay. Favorite quote, most of them that I love are from Rumi, a poet. And favorite quote is, “Out beyond the ideas of right-doing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” And that’s just really a call for me to get out beyond judgment and just meet people where they are, and love people up, and call people up.

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

Cy Wakeman
My favorite study is the study that showed the observer effect, where as they shut light, it acted differently when it was being observed than when it wasn’t being observed. And it really just shows that we’re always involved in a process of co-creation. So, take your part of co-creation very seriously. We’re always affecting the outcome.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that experiment is so trippy.

Cy Wakeman
It’s mind-blowing.

Pete Mockaitis
Some folks are like, “This is proof we live in a simulation.” I was like, “You know what, I don’t know if we can jump to that conclusion.”

Cy Wakeman
It’s mental blue pill Matrix. I’m like, “No.”

Pete Mockaitis
It certainly makes you scratch the head, like, “What is going on here?” And a favorite book?

Cy Wakeman
My favorite book is, I’m huge into poetry, so my favorite book is anything by David Whyte, probably Consolations.

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

Cy Wakeman
I’d say it’s still low tech, my journal. If it needs to be self-reflected on, or remembered, or attended to, it goes pen to paper. I really think all war internally belongs in the ear. Once you get out beyond the ego, you can see it for what it really is. So, it’s got to be pen and paper, Byron Katie from TheWork.com talks a lot about that.

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

Cy Wakeman
Yeah, your ego is not your amigo, and stop believing everything you think, every question. If you think something that causes you, like you’re hooked, or you’re sure, or you’re out of curiosity and compassion, I would question them.

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

Cy Wakeman
I am at Cy Wakeman everywhere. Our newsletter is fantastic and you can sign up for that at RealityBasedLeadership.com/newsletter. We don’t sell you stuff. We just give you a great short content to consume and use with your team, friends, and colleagues.

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

Cy Wakeman
My final challenge would be tune in more to your own thinking and be an observer of your thinking. You are not the thinker. You’re the observer. And a lot of us are moving through life pretty unintentionally.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Cy, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and love and minimal ego.

Cy Wakeman
Thank you. And thank you for the honor of being on the show. It’s fun to talk about these things. So, thanks for what you do.

Sep 11
0

897: Jon Acuff: The Three Steps to Achieving Any Goal

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

Jon Acuff reveals why we often struggle to meet our goals—and shares practical advice for achieving results.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to make your loftiest goals more reachable
  2. The “right” amount of goals to pursue
  3. How to stay motivated when things get tough

About Jon

Jon Acuff is the New York Times bestselling author of nine books, including Soundtracks, Your New Playlist, and the Wall Street Journal #1 bestseller Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done. When he’s not writing or recording his popular podcast, All It Takes Is a Goal, Acuff can be found on a stage as one of INC’s Top 100 Leadership Speakers. He’s spoken to hundreds of thousands of people at conferences, colleges, and companies around the world, including FedEx, Range Rover, Microsoft, Nokia, and Comedy Central. He lives outside of Nashville, Tennessee, with his wife and two daughters.

Resources Mentioned

Jon Acuff Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Jon, welcome to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m looking forward to it.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m looking forward to it, too. I’m excited to get your latest hot takes on goal-setting, goal-achieving from your latest All It Takes Is a Goal: The 3-Step Plan to Ditch Regret and Tap Into Your Massive Potential. But first, I think we need to hear a little bit about you and tap dancing. What’s the scoop here?

Jon Acuff
Oh, yeah, I was super popular in high school. I took tap dancing. You knew you were cool and popular if you were also into tap dancing in high school. So, I went to an all-boys Catholic high school, and we would have a musical review where we would partner with other schools that only had girls. So, it was only time to ever, like, dance with a girl. So, I was like, “I’ll do that if it requires tap dancing, let’s go.” And I genuinely enjoyed tap dancing. And I don’t tap anymore, I’ve kind of retired, but, yeah, I love tap dancing. I was a big tap dancer.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you only did the tap dancing in high school or did it carry on over?

Jon Acuff
Only in high school. No, I live in nowhere, you would, in college. Imagine you’re some roommate and I bring tap shoes to college, like in my dorm room, and in the hallway just like working on routines. Yeah, no, it began and ended in high school, 100%.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think it looks and sounds really cool whenever I’m beholding it.

Jon Acuff
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you don’t want to see a lot of it. It’s like four hours of it is too much.

Pete Mockaitis
That it is. Well, I’m excited, you’ve got so much wisdom when it comes to goals. And you’ve got a fresh book here All It Takes Is a Goal. Can you tell us, anything novel, surprising, counterintuitive that you discovered while putting this one together?

Jon Acuff
Well, I always try to write books that start with a challenge I’m having in my own life, and something I’m trying to figure out, and then I see, “Do other people have the same challenge? Like, is it worth turning into a book?” And we asked 3,000 people, there’s this PhD guy, Mike Peasley, he’s a professor at MTSU here in town, if they feel like they’re living up to their potential. And 96% of people said no.

So, I was surprised at the size of that, like, that there’s a general sense that people feel like they could do more with their lives but don’t know how to. So, that kind of, I would say, that surprised me, the size of that.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, that’s intriguing. Do you think it’s that they don’t know how to or they think, “That just seems like a lot of work, I don’t feel like it”? What’s your vibe there?

Jon Acuff
I think it’s a variety of things. I think it feels complicated. I think we have broken soundtracks. Like, I wrote this book called Soundtracks about mindset, soundtrack being like a repetitive thought. And one of my broken soundtracks is “Mo money, mo problems.” Like, if you build a successful life, more problems, more money. Like, success comes with so many complications. It’s going to be so difficult. And then you end up playing smaller because you’re afraid of these fictional complications.

So, I think some people go, “I could if I wanted to but it sounds like it’d be stressful.” I think a lot of people just don’t know if it’s even possible. They live in a town where nobody wrote a book, so they don’t even have a concept in their head that you could be an author if you wanted to be. Like, you could just do that. And so, I think people pull back from their goals and their opportunities for a variety of reasons.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so then, what’s the big idea or main thesis behind your book there All It Takes Is a Goal?

Jon Acuff
Well, the main thesis is essentially if you have this big desire and you want to accomplish it, all you have to do is turn it into a goal. And you can turn anything into a goal, and there’s practical steps to do it. So, one of the surprises, this wasn’t a surprise of writing the book, but because you asked that question about, like, what surprised me, I’ve been surprised how many podcast interviews have pushed back against the idea of guaranteed goals.

So, in the book, I talk about there’s three different types of goals. There’s easy goals, there’s middle goals, there’s guaranteed goals. And so, I’ve had a bunch of people say, “Well, what do you mean, how can you guarantee a goal? There’s no such thing as a guaranteed goal.” But, for me, I always respond, “I couldn’t have written about that idea in book one because I hadn’t done it. I didn’t know this idea was possible. But this is book nine, and they haven’t happened because of magic. They’ve happened because I took this desire to write books, and I turned it into a goal.

And, like, when this book came out, I turned in a tenth book in the same week. And so, there’s going to be an eleventh book, there’s going to be a twelfth book, not because it’s magic or I’m extra creative but I turn something I really wanted to do, which is write books, into a goal, and I was able to execute it. So, I think that’s one of the core ideas in the book, is you can accomplish almost anything with the right steps and really enjoy it along the way.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, just to be fully clear, what is it that you mean by a guaranteed goal?

Jon Acuff
So, here’s the metaphor that I’ve been using. Most people, when they think about a goal, imagine a ladder, and it’s only got two rungs. So, they go, “I want to start a podcast,” “I want to run a marathon,” “I want to write a book.” And you have a 12-foot-tall ladder, there’s one rung at the bottom that says, “Day one,” and there’s one rung at the top that says, “Publish the book,” or, “Grow a million-listener podcast.”

And if I said to you, “Okay, Pete, you have to get to the top of that ladder,” you’d go, “This is going to be…goals are really hard. I guess I just have to jump and try to grab it.” And what my approach is: what if you had rungs that were six inches apart all the way up the ladder? Like, would that be an easier ladder to climb? Do you think you can accomplish that?” And people go, “Yeah.” And then I say, “Okay. Well, great. Well, let’s take this massive thing and then find out how to make the steps easy. Let’s do some easy goals.”

So, an easy goal has a one to seven-day timeframe. You do an experiment. You’re not going all in. People tend to go, like, “I got to go all in. I got to do it all.” Like, you’ll see people buy expensive YouTube cameras without figuring out what they want their channel to be. So, they’ll go, “I’m going to buy, I’m going to go all in,” but they don’t do the easy things first, so they lose momentum.

So, my plan is, “What’s an easy goal? How do we succeed? How do we get some proof that it’s worth turning into a middle goal?” A little more time. A little more investment. A little more effort. And then, eventually, you get to where it’s a guaranteed goal where it’s going to happen. So, an example of that would be I have a friend who wants to have a million subscribers on YouTube. He’s got about 800,000 right now.

There’s no planet where he doesn’t end up getting with a million subscribers. Like, he’s in motion. Like, there’s no, “I’m going to sell a million books in my career.” I have sold 860,000-ish books. That’s going to happen because I’m in the middle of the ladder. I didn’t say at the very bottom, “I’m going to sell a million books.” That would’ve been egotistical and silly. But I’m on the middle of this journey. I’ve done a lot of easy goals. I wrote a lot of small blogs. I’ve done a lot of small writing. And then I turn them into middle goals.

I wrote some short books, and then I wrote some longer books, and then I sold some other books. So, now I’m in the middle of the ladder. I know that’s going to happen. That’s what I mean by a guaranteed goal. It’s got factors like the results are in your control. A bad guaranteed goal would be me saying, “Pete, I’m going to hit the New York Times’ bestseller’s list.” That’s a terrible goal. Anytime an offer tells me that’s their goal, I go, “I get it. I get it. I’m so glad I hit it but you don’t control that. You have zero control over that.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, the competitors and what do people buy.

Jon Acuff
No, it’s a formula. Like, it’s a formula you don’t have access to. Like, you could sell more than 10 people on the list but if you don’t hit the formula, it doesn’t matter. So, not even just the competitors. You could sell more than every competitor but if you haven’t hit the formula that they keep private, it doesn’t matter. So, you don’t control that.

So, a guaranteed goal is you control it, it’s measurable so you’ve got some…you can measure what you’re doing. You’ve got proof of middle goals and easy goals that have succeeded. So, that’s what I mean by a guaranteed goal where your effort ensures the results.

Pete Mockaitis
Got you, yeah. Well, that’s clear, the effort ensures the results. Got it. All right. Well, could you maybe share an inspiring story of some folks who weren’t making much progress, they felt like they weren’t hitting their potential, their goals were stalled, and they saw things transformed?

Jon Acuff
Yeah, so one of my favorite stories in the book, this woman named Susan Robertson. She got her Bachelor’s Degree in the Car Rider pickup line. And what I mean by that is she’s a super busy mom like a lot of moms are super busy. And she found 10-minute, 15-minute, 20-minute segments of time where she could figure out, over a period of time, how to spend that time towards a bachelor’s degree. She finished a bachelor degree in the car rider pickup line.

And I love her story because it pushes back against the excuse we all have of, “I’m too busy. I’ve got…I’m too busy. I’m too busy. I’m too busy.” So, she’s probably one of my favorite stories.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. All right. Well, so then, tell us, we have goals, or we don’t yet have goals, or we feel the sense that we’re fallen short of potential, what are the fundamental drivers or reasons behind this?

Jon Acuff
Yeah, one reason would be you’re chasing fake goals. So, you’re chasing things you think you want to do but you don’t really want to do them. So, you’ve told people for years you want to write a book but it’s been 10 years and you haven’t written a book. Maybe you don’t want to write a book, and that’s okay. Like, that’s perfectly fine.

Maybe you inherited a goal. I meet people at times, especially college students, that’ll say, “I’m a senior about to go to law school. My mom told me I’d be a good lawyer. I don’t want to be a lawyer. Like, what do I do?” They inherited that goal from their mom, and they’re not going to really enjoy that goal. Another is impostor syndrome. That’s a really common thing. You start to work on something, and impostor syndrome goes, “You’re not a real entrepreneur,” “You’re not a real writer,” “You’re not a real runner.” “Like, you can’t go lose weight. You’re not an athlete. You have to be an athlete.”

Another one would be perfectionism. You’re trying to do it perfectly, which is impossible. And so, anytime you make a misstep, you feel like, “Okay, this isn’t the right goal for me, or I’m not the right person.” Overthinking is another one, you end up overthinking what you really want to do. I would say there’s any number of villains that get in the way, and a lot of them do boil down to you’ve got fear about the process, you’ve got fear that it’s going to hurt, you’ve got fear about the result, you self-sabotage. There are so many things get in people’s way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, having identified these, what are some of the solutions?

Jon Acuff
So, my favorite solution, let’s just take impostor syndrome. The only instant cure to impostor syndrome is to do the work. It’s the only thing that cures impostor syndrome. And an example of that would be when I first started writing, impostor syndrome said, “Ahh, you’re not a real writer. Like, you’re not a writer. Who are you to share ideas? You’re not a writer.” And it said that. And then I wrote and it got a little quieter.

And then the second day, I wrote, and it was still there, and the third day, and the fourth day, but, eventually, I looked up and I had published a book. So, when impostor syndrome came in, it was like, “Hey, you’re not a writer,” I was like, “This is awkward because I’m holding a book. It’s got my picture on it. It’s got my name right on the cover. I think I might be a writer.”

At this point, on book nine, it can’t whisper that to me because I say, “Well, there’s a stack of them. They’re in 20 languages. Like, I think I might actually be a writer.” Like, the work generates results, and results are impostor syndrome’s Kryptonite. I didn’t get over impostor syndrome and then write. I wrote until I got over that form of impostor syndrome. So, that’s a really easy example. And the fun thing is the work is available always. And the second you do even a little of it, impostor syndrome gets a little quieter.

You go to your first gym class; impostor syndrome gets a little quieter. You launch your first podcast episode; it gets a little quieter. So, that one, to me, feels really, really solvable in a really, really simple way.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And what if the hangup is just like, “Ugh, I’m just kind of comfortable. That seems like a lot of work. I don’t know about all that”?

Jon Acuff
I agree, dude. I agree. Here’s what I’d say, Pete. The only thing easier than doing a goal is not doing the goal. Like, it’s really the only thing easier. The only thing easier than writing a book is not writing a book. Or, the only thing easier than going to the gym is not going to the gym. So, I think the trick here is that nobody just decides to have willpower. Nobody wakes up and goes, “Today, I have grit. Today, I’m going to be disciplined.” Nobody just wakes up and changes their life that way.

What usually happens is one of two things. You get out of a comfort zone either from an involuntary crisis, something happens outside of your control, like a parent gets sick, you lose your job, and, “Oh, I got to find another job,” or a voluntary trick, like you figure out, “I want this thing more than staying the same. I’m going to trick myself into changing. Like, I’m going to find a way to actually change.”

So, for me, when I was 34 years old, I had two kids under the age of four, a full-time job at Auto Trader, Atlanta commute, an hour and a half each way, I had freelance clients, a bunch of responsibilities, but I started a blog, and I really liked it, and I was like, “Wait a second. This seems kind of neat. Like, I wish I could do more of this.” Like, I got this small little desire.

And then I started to look at each hour of my day like a log, and I wanted to throw more of them into this burning fire, this blaze. And so, I didn’t stop watching TV as much because I was disciplined. I just wanted that time to go to this thing I absolutely loved, and I couldn’t find enough time to throw at it, so I started to get up early in the morning, I started practicing speeches in the drive to work. Like, I started throwing as much time as I could into it.

So, a lot of times, if somebody goes, “Ahh, it seems like a lot of work,” I agree. It just means you don’t have a thing you really desire yet. Like, if you had something you really desired, it would woo you into changing. It would make you want to change, not, “I have to figure out how I make myself change.”

Pete Mockaitis
And for those whose passion, desire, is at a low ebb, any pro tips for surfacing? Where is that thing?

Jon Acuff
Well, I think part of it is you might…it depends on if you’re practicing being low. And what I mean by that is nothing happens awesome accidentally. Like, nobody accidentally gets in shape. I’ve never met a single person that goes, “Yeah, I was just binge-watch Netflix, I look up and I was doing burpees. I don’t even remember getting off the couch.” Like, everything that’s awesome takes work.

An awesome marriage takes work. The default of marriage is to be pulled apart in separate directions and get a divorce. That’s the default. You have to work to have a good marriage. There’s no such thing as an accidentally awesome marriage. It takes work. Same with positivity. Same with negativity. So, an example of that is if somebody said to me, “Jon, I feel really low, I feel really down,” I’d go, “Well, tell me about what you’re practicing? Like, what are you practicing? Like, are you practicing positivity? Are you practicing negativity? Like, where are you making choices that feed one or the other?”

So, for me, I’m a very naturally negative person. Like, I’m super pessimistic, I’m very low naturally. I always joke like I have a counting crows-like temperament, like just very moppy, very jaded, cynical. But I’ve tested positivity, and I’ve tested negativity, and the ROI of positivity is so much better. Again, it’s so much more productive, like I get books written, I get to accomplish goals. Negativity never dreams. It can’t dream. It only sees the negative side of things.

So, when somebody says to me they’re low, it’s often like they’re saying, “Jon, I feel really hungry,” and I go, “Well, did you eat anything today?” and they go, “No, I haven’t eaten anything in three days.” And I go, “What? I’m going to blow your mind. I know why you’re hungry. You’re hungry because you haven’t eaten anything.”

So, if you say to me, “Jon, I feel low, I feel negative,” and I go, “Tell me about how you spent your day.” “Well, I hate my job. I was on social media arguing with strangers about politics. I listen to murder podcast episodes to work and back from work. And then at night, I watch documentaries about murders.” And then you’re like, “I don’t know why I feel negative.” I’d be like, “I know in my shirt, the clothes I wear say ‘Namaste in bed.’ Or, ‘I can’t adult’ today.”

You wore a reminder limiting yourself for an entire day, and you’re like, “I don’t know why I feel low.” I know why. You practiced that for an entire day, maybe even an entire year. What if we started practicing some other things? What if we just start, not massive things all at once, But if you have something, if this isn’t working for you, let’s practice something else? If it is working for you, like keep getting those results. That’s fine.

Like, sometimes people say to me, “This stuff is common sense. It’s common sense,” which I always push back, and go, “If you’re doing those things, it’s common sense. If you’re in the best shape of your life right now, it’s common sense. If you have more money in your 401k and retirement, if you love your job, all of these things are common sense. If you don’t have that type of life right now, this is extraordinary because you’re not doing any of it.” So, like, engage in it if you want to, or just stick with the results you have, that’s your choice. You get to choose that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, let’s say we do have the desire, we got something going, and we’re like, “All right, Jon, I got a goal. Tell me, what is this three-step plan? How do I get after it and maximize the odds that I will achieve it?”

Jon Acuff
Well, the first thing we do is we would break it down into small actions so that we could actually practice it. So, we would probably do a 10-hour test. I’d say, “Okay, here’s your massive goal. You want to find a different job. We would go what are some easy ways to start with that? Like, not find a different job tomorrow, not become a different person next week?”

What’s funny with goals, we understand some goals take time and other goals we want fast results. So, nobody ever says, “I’m going to learn Italian this week. Or, I’m going to learn Italian this month.” They know that takes time but find a new job, they go, “I got to find a new job this week. Like, an amazing new job. I got to find it this month.”

So, the first thing I do is say, “Okay, what are some actions we can actually do? How do we make it some easy goals that you can accomplish?” That’s step one. We’re going to escape the comfort zone. Step two would be, “Okay, how do we avoid the chaos zone?” Because what happens is people, when they start a goal, they get a little bit of momentum, and they want to do it all at once.

So, they go from not trying anything to, “I’m going to do everything,” they get inspired, and they land right in the chaos zone, which is too much action, too many goals. It’s why we have the phrase yoyo diet in our country because people yoyo back and forth. What happens with people is they don’t do any goals, they get a little inspired, and they try to do everything.

Like, I meet people at times with a podcast, and they’re like, “I’m going to do a daily podcast. I’m going to go all in like John Lee Dumas. I’m going to do a daily podcast.” And I go, “Have you ever done, like, a weekly? Have you ever done like a bi-weekly?” And they go, “No, I’m going for it. I’m inspired.” And I know you’re going to do seven episodes and realize podcasting is challenging, but you’re in the chaos zone, and so how do I help you get out of that chaos zone?

And then the third thing is, “How do we live in the potential zone?” which is the right amount of goals, the right amount of actions. That’s the three-step, is you escape that comfort zone, you avoid the chaos zone, and you live in the potential zone.

Pete Mockaitis
And how do we know the right amount of goals, the right amount of actions?

Jon Acuff
So, people want me to say a number. Like, people go, “How many goals should I chase?” and they want me to say, “Seven point eight. Pete, you need to do 9.3.” That’s not the answer. The answer is as many as you can do successfully. So, it’s an individual answer. So, there are some times where I’ll meet people that’ll go, “I’ve got a full-time job, I’ve got two kids under the age of five, I’ve got all these commitments.” I’ll go, “Cool. How many hours do you have to invest in your goals?”

The problem, Pete, is people go, “I got these 10 goals I want to do,” and I’ll say, “Okay, how many hours do you think it would take a week to, like, do those well?” And they’ll go, “Well, I don’t know,” and they’ll come up with a list, “It’ll take 20 hours.” And I go, “Cool. Cool. Cool. Right now, on your average week, how many hours of free time do you have? Like, right now, like is it are you dealing with too much time, like you don’t have enough things?” And they’ll go, “No, I don’t have any time.”

And I’ll go, “Okay, so you have 20 hours of goals you want to do. You have a two-hour slot every week. Which one is going into it? Like, which one?” Often, the goal is divorced from the calendar and it never happens. So, you have to say, “Here’s how much time I have, and if you’re not happy with that, here’s where I’m going to go find more time.” But that’s one of the most honest metrics. I think time is probably the most honest metric because it tells you the truth, and it’ll tell you pretty quickly what you actually have time for.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And speaking of time, before, you mentioned the ten-hour, what was your term, the ten-hour…?

Jon Acuff
I said a ten-hour experiment.

Pete Mockaitis
So, what is…is it just we go after some actions over the course of ten hours and then we reflect? Or what do you mean by the ten-hour experiment?

Jon Acuff
So, I’m constantly trying to help people limit the number of goals they’re working on so they can be successful, and then build more into their life. So, again, what happens is people go, I got to do the survey, and the people that read my books, nobody who reads my books comes to me with zero goals. That never happens. The people who don’t have goals don’t read a book called All It Takes Is a Goal. They don’t even know that section of the bookstore exists. They don’t listen to podcasts like yours.

It’s like no one who’s not engaged in getting better and learning and growing is listening to podcasts like this. They don’t even know these kinds of…like, they don’t come to this category of podcasts. What happens is they tend to have lots and lots of things they’re excited about. So, part of my job is to go, “Okay, you got 22 things you’re interested in. Let’s figure out how to narrow that down a little bit so we can actually get some wins and accomplish some of these.”

So, there’s two ways you can do this, there’s probably 50 ways you can do this, but the two that I like are one I’d go, “I want you to write down a list of all the things you’ll get if you accomplish that goal.” “So, write a book.” “Okay, tell me the things you’ll get.” “Start a business.” “Tell me the things you’ll get.” Because I’m trying to get a sense of their real desire because, again, nobody changes just because. They change because the desire makes the thing worth it.

I don’t like delayed flights. I don’t like missing flights. I don’t like airports or hotel travel, but I love being on stage. I love being a public speaker. I do my entire year to be on stage 50 times a year. That’s the trade I’d make because I love it that much. I don’t even care about a delayed flight. I’ll sleep wherever in the Baltimore airport because I love doing that.

If I hated my job, the littlest inconvenience would set me off. I’d go, “Aargh, I can’t…aargh, it’s not worth the commute.” So, I initially try to get a sense of somebody’s desire. So, if I say to you, Pete, “Write down 10 things you’ll get if you do this goal,” and you go, “Ah, I can’t do it.” Great, we can cross it off the list. Like, if you can’t even to that part, you’re going to hate the rest of it. This is the easy part.

So, I do a desire check, and go, “Okay, what do you really care about?” And then I’ll do a 10-hour check, “If you want to invest 10 hours into it, you’re not going to invest the thousand it takes.” Like, if it takes me 500 to a thousand hours to write a book, that’s a pretty big investment. But I can test at the beginning, “Am I willing to even try 10 hours?” And if the 10 hours takes you three months to find, you really don’t want to do the goal. Awesome. Let’s clear that one out. I want you to have a short list that you can actually do, and actually win at, and get some momentum, and then add a bunch to your life.

Pete Mockaitis
So, the 10-hour experiment, the thing we’re testing to see if it’s present is desire. And so, we’ll know, “Hey, we did 10 hours,” or you didn’t do 10 hours. That’s telling in and of itself. Or, you did 10 hours, like, “You know what, actually I hated that.” “Oh, okay.”

Jon Acuff
Yeah, and you might know two hours in. You might know automatically, like, “No, this isn’t the thing.” Like, one of the things I say is, “I want you to find a desire you love so much that it makes Netflix boring.” Like, that’s the thing. You asked me why don’t people accomplish goals. Part of it is we haven’t given companies enough credit.

There are 50,000 people at Facebook right now, and their goal is Pete’s time. Like, that is their goal, it’s, “How do I get more of their time?” Like, the distraction industry has scaled much faster and bigger than our ability to focus. So, we don’t give companies enough credit that you go, “Man, why is it hard to do goals?” Because Netflix and Instagram are very easy. It’s not accidental that you go to look at one photo, and an hour later you’re like, “What just happened? Like, why am I on YouTube looking at, watching a video that had nothing to do?” That’s not accidental.

So, some of the reason it’s hard to accomplish goals is that there’s an entire industry working against you. Netflix doesn’t want you to have a good podcast, Pete. No, they want you to watch more Netflix, and they should. That’s their company mission. Like, Instagram doesn’t want you to get in shape. Like, that’s not their goal. Their goal is you spend 10 hours.

Like, the average American right now watches 34 hours of TV a week according to Nielsen. So, the Nielsen rating is 34 hours of TV a week. So, when somebody says, “Man, I just don’t have enough time for my goals,” I can usually help them find some time, but that’s part of why it’s challenging. That’s part of why it’s difficult.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so then, we are pursuing the dream, we said, “All right, we’re past the 10-hour experiment. Okay, cool, cool, cool. We’re after it.” Give us some perspective on how we go about translating things into micro actions? Like, just how micro are we talking? And can you give us some examples of breaking things down that way?

Jon Acuff
Yes. So, one of my goals was I wanted to be a better friend. I realized during COVID, I was kind of isolated, I worked at home, I want to be a better friend. I want better connection. I always joke that I know I’m isolated when I over-talk the UPS guy. Like, he’s, “I just want to drop off a box,” and I’m like, “How’s your family? How’s Pam and the kids?”

So, I want to be a better friend. That’s a fuzzy goal. I can’t really operate on that one. It’s not measurable. I can’t really do anything with it. So, then I was like, “Okay, what if I can make that into a daily goal, like a small daily goal?” So, I thought about it, I worked on it a little bit, and I said, “Okay, I’m going to text one person an encouragement every day for 30 days in a row, 30 different people, 30 different encouragements.”

So, okay, now I have a measurable goal. So, then what’s a small action related to that one? Well, what if I made a list of my friends I’m going to text because I know if I get on day four, and I have to go, “Okay, okay, who am I…? Who am I…?” I’m going to quit. I’m going to get distracted by something else. So, I said, “Okay, one of the small actions is I’d make a list of 30 people I want to connect with. And that wasn’t hard, I went through my contacts, and said, “Okay, here’s 30 people I haven’t connected with lately.”

So, then I did that. So, then I made a little chart, I’ve got a little checkbox that says, “For 30 days. I would write a short text to people.” And I made it easy on myself. I didn’t say I’d write 30 handwritten notes. That’s not an easy goal. I got to find stamps and mail and addresses. So, I did that for 30 days in a row, and there wasn’t a single person that responded back, and said, “I wish you hadn’t said that today. Like, today is the worst day for you to tell me that encouragement.” Ninety percent said, “You don’t know how much I needed that today. That was really encouraging.”

So, at the end of the 30 days, it had become a guaranteed goal because, Pete, if I encouraged 30 people for 30 days in a row, I’m guaranteed to be a better friend. Like, 30 interactions with 30 different people, like I am a better friend at the end of the 30 days. That’s not a mystery to me. So, then I go, “I want to be a better dad.” Like, I’ve got two teenage daughters. I want to be a better dad. It’s not easy to raise teenagers.

So, I’m like, “What if I took that principle and I made it apply to just my kids?” So, for 30 days in a row, I encouraged my kids, and I made a list of things that I think are really special about them. So, then I make a list, and I go, “You know, McRae was really brave about this. L.E. was really funny about this,” and then I’m like, “What about actions? What if I helped them in some small ways?”

So, then I come up with a list of that. I’m like, “I could clean McRae’s…” she’s got a small fish, she’s got a betta fish, “I’ll clean the fish bowl once a week.” Like, it takes me 10 minutes but it’s one of those things that a teenage daughter doesn’t want to do. She’s busy. She’s like, “Ugh, that stupid fish,” I’m like, “Oh, I could do a list of actions.

At the end of the 30 days, we have a better relationship. Like, that’s not…again, it’s not complicated. It’s just I went out of my way and spent some time as a dad to think about things that are special about them, to remind them of those things, to do kind things for them. I’m a better dad at the end of that experience than when I was before the experience. So, that’s an example of taking something super fuzzy, like be a better dad. What does that even mean? And making it practical and actionable, and it changed our interactions.

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

Jon Acuff
No, no, I have a podcast where I talk about a lot about this, called All It Takes Is a Goal. So, if you’re a podcast person, and you are because you’re listening to one, check out All It Takes Is a Goal.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, maybe before I do that, I’d also want to get your take on with regard to keeping the motivation going, celebration, rewards, not celebrating, not doing rewards, pushing through the moments when you’re just not feeling it. How do you think about the motivational arc over the long term? And what can be done there?

Jon Acuff
Well, motivation is the flightiest thing in the world. Motivation tends to disappear on day two of a goal because that’s when the work shows up. So, I always tell people, “You have to bring your own motivation.” What I teach is you need a motivation portfolio. People tend to think they’re going to find their one why or their vision quest, their reason, their true north and that’ll be enough.

What I found is you need lots and lots and lots of sources of motivation, so a portfolio of motivation. So, when I work with people, I say, “Okay, what are 10 things that you’re going to enjoy about this? What are 10 forms of motivation? What are 20 forms of motivation?” Because some days, one through five won’t even move the needle.

Like, there are some days where it all takes, like, “I’m so close to the motivation, like a song gets me. Like, all right, let’s go. I listened to this song, it’s motivation.” There are some days I can listen to 10 songs and be like, “This is dumb anyway,” and I need a different form of motivation. So, I practice motivation. I don’t see motivation as a checkbox. I expect it to dissipate, I expect it to disappear at times, and I work against that, and I’m deliberate about that, and say, “Okay, I have to practice it. I have to have lots of forms of motivation.”

And the other thing is that I remind myself that excellence is boring. Like, real excellence is boring at plenty of times. So, writing thank you notes to people that nobody sees, that you’re doing all the little things, following up with people, the emails, the details, like people get to see the 30 minutes on stage but there’s 50 other things I’ve done to make that moment happen. And those things are often, like, I just have to do them. They’re small and sometimes annoying.

So, for me, I remind myself of that, and I plan a ton of motivation. I don’t expect motivation to stay long. I know it’s going to leave, and so I always say BYOH, you’ve got to bring your own hype. And so, I work at motivation pretty aggressively.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, let’s dig into that. The working on motivation. Having a portfolio. One thing might be the songs. So, you actually have documented, listed somewhere, “These are my pump-up jams.”

Jon Acuff
Yeah, totally. But, like, I’ll have a list where it’s okay. Like, I made a list the other day. Let me just…I’ll just turn to it. I’ll just tell you what’s on this list. So, I went through, and you can tell I’m a big list guy, I’m a fan of the list. I just love to kind of get ideas out of my head and onto a piece of paper. So, the other day I was, like, “Okay, if I work on building an excellent business, what will I get? What will keep me motivated? What are my forms of motivation?”

So, one of them is I can pay for my daughter to go to London. My oldest daughter got accepted to study abroad for a semester in London, and that’s awesome. And if I do my business well, I get to pay for stuff like that. Like, that’s super cool. I control my calendar. If I run my business well, I have a lot more control over my calendar. I love that.

I get to spend time with team members like Jean and Caleb. I can afford to have team members. I love that. I get to plan vacation days. I get to spend time with clients I love if I’m deliberate. So, in addition to things that are traditional, like, “Okay, this music encourages me. A walk around the block encourages me. This person encourages me. Like, a friend that I text with encourages me,” I’ll be really deliberate and go, “Man, if I work hard, I get to afford a personal assistant.” Like, that changed my life.

Seven years ago, like hiring a personal assistant, game changing for me, but I had to learn how to pay for that person, and how to help lead that person. And so, the little things like that, I go out of my way to go, “What happens if I do this well? How do I stay motivated to this?” Because, again, some of those items aren’t going to move me some days. Like, there are some times where the goal is really challenging and I have to go, “No, I’ve already committed, and I committed to somebody that I want to honor the commitment to them.”

Because if you have an accountability coach that you don’t care about, you’ll break that all day. So, you have to have some degree of, “I want to be held accountable to this person. This person matters to me.” So, yeah, I have a pretty robust list of motivation because I’ve just seen it time and time again, if you think it’ll be there, it never grows during a goal, it only shrinks. I have to be the one that grows it.

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

Jon Acuff
So, one of mine is from Brad Montague. Brad Montague is the creator of this Kid President campaign, really fun, blew up online. I asked him, “How do you do that creative endeavor with Beyonce, Obama – it was huge – and then do your next one, because there are some times, there’s a creative letdown from the next one?”

And he said, “I have to know whether I’m creating from love or for love.” He said, “When I have an idea, am I sharing it from this amazing amount of love I have for this idea? Or, am I trying to get people to love me via this idea? Am I looking for adoration? Am I looking for attention? Because that’s not going to be a very good idea. I’m not going to feel very good. Or, am I creating something because it’s so big inside me, if I don’t create it, I’m going to burst?”

And so, that’s one of the ways I look at my projects, is like, “Is this from love or for love?” And so, that’s always been a quote that’s been helpful.

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

Jon Acuff
NYU, Daniel Kahneman talked about this in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow where they took two groups of college students and gave them a word bank, and said, “Create some sentences.” The second group, they had hidden words, trigger words related to being old, like retired and slow and bald and Florida.

And so then, they say, after 20 or 30 minutes, “The second part of the test is down the hall. That’s where the real test started.” They secretly timed the students walking, and the students who had read the word about being old physically acted old just reading those words. So, I put that study in my book “Soundtracks” because it’s a great reminder how powerful your thoughts are, that your thoughts can change your physical actions.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Jon Acuff
The War of Art Steven Pressfield. That’s the one. I love that book.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, man, I listened to the audio version. The title is perfect, it’s like, “The war of art. Like, you really, really, really will feel resistance to doing the thing, and you have to declare war upon that.”

Jon Acuff
Yeah, it was one of those books that got me through my first book. Somebody gave it to me. And so, it’s one that I’ve come back to a few times. And Seth Godin The Dip. I really like The Dip. It was a short book that had a big message for me.

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

Jon Acuff
Notebooks. I’m a big notebook guy. I’ve read you a list from an actual notebook. There’s a brand called Leuchtturm. They’re better than Moleskine, in my opinion. And so, I love notebooks.

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

Jon Acuff
Exercise. I need endorphins. My wife will sometimes say, “You need to go for a run,” and that’s her way of being like, “You’re kind of being a huge jerk.” So, yeah, exercise, for me, if I don’t exercise for a few days, I get super low. So, I would say exercise is a habit I use.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they Kindle book highlight it, they retweet it at your speeches and such?

Jon Acuff
Yeah, two would be “Never compare your beginning to somebody else’s middle.” So, when you start your thing, like, when you start a podcast, don’t go look at like Joe Rogan’s podcast, and be like, “Man, my podcast isn’t big enough.” And then another one would be, “Leaders who can’t be questioned end up doing questionable things.” So, if you surround yourself with yes people, you eventually implode.

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

Jon Acuff
JonAcuff.com and then All It Takes Is a Goal is the book. It’s sold anywhere books are sold. And I read the audiobook and there’s 10 bonus chapters in it. So, if you’re into audio, and if you listen to a podcast, you probably are, check that out.

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

Jon Acuff
Yeah, here’s what I’d say. You can’t half-do your day job and then think you’ll hustle in your dream job. You’re one person. If you practice being lazy all week, you won’t turn it on on a weekend. So, when I was jumping from jobs, back and forth, back and forth, I think that I had eight jobs in 12 years. And when I finally realized, “Oh, wait, if I actually perform well at this day job, I’ll also perform well at my dream job. Awesome.” And when I kind of connected those things, my job changed.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, Jon. Thank you. This has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun and goal-dream achievement.

Jon Acuff
Thanks. I had a blast doing it, Pete.

Sep 07
0

896: Finding More Success and Joy in Everything You Do with Suneel Gupta

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Suneel Gupta shows how to find more joy and success every day by drawing from the wisdom of ancient Indian traditions.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The eight essential practices for daily success
  2. How to reset your energy in just five minutes
  3. Why you achieve more with only 85% of the effort

About Suneel

Suneel Gupta lost his Dharma and then found it again. He is the founding CEO of RISE and co-founder of the Gross National Happiness Center in the United States. As an author, a visiting scholar at Harvard Medical School, and host of a hit documentary series, Suneel studies the most extraordinary people on the planet to discover and share simple, actionable habits to lift our performance and deepen our daily sense of purpose. His work has been featured by major outlets including CNBC, TED, and the New York Times.

Resources Mentioned

Suneel Gupta Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Suneel, welcome back to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Suneel Gupta
Hey, Pete, it’s nice to be back.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to get into the wisdom of your book, Everyday Dharma: 8 Essential Practices for Finding Success and Joy in Everything You Do. But first, I love, in your bio, it says, “Suneel Gupta lost his dharma and then found it again.” Tell us this tale, and those who aren’t familiar, what does the word dharma mean?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah. So, you may have heard dharma used in different contexts. Usually, when I talk to people, they’ve kind of heard the word before, but not exactly sure, or they’ve heard different definitions of it. Sometimes people refer to dharma as a purpose, sometimes they refer to it as a calling. If you go back to one of the original definitions of dharma, that takes you to the Bhavad Gita.

And the Bhagavad Gita is the ancient storied scripture from India which defines dharma as your sacred duty. And then the question really becomes, like, “Duty to what? Duty to whom?” And the answer really is duty to yourself. It’s duty to that fire that is burning inside of you, that some people call that your gift, some people call that your calling.

My grandfather, who first introduced me to the word dharma on his porch in New Delhi when I was seven years old, referred to dharma as your essence. It’s the expression of this thing inside of you. And the equation that I’ve come back to in the year since when I’ve lost my dharma and went looking for it again, is that dharma equals essence plus expression. Essence is who you are, and expression is how you show up in the world. And when you can combine the two, you’re in your dharma.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, you lost yours and you found it. What’s the story here?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, I think, probably like you, Pete, I went through a lot of years in my life where I was chasing something, and I didn’t realize it but what I really sort of felt at that time was that I was going to reach this level of success and wealth and status. And after I got to a certain threshold, I was going to feel all kinds of good things inside. I was going to feel meaning. I was going to feel joy. And all that stuff was going to last, and pretty soon I found myself on sort of the treadmill that, I think, Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar at Harvard University sometimes calls the arrival fallacy.

And the arrival fallacy is if we just get that next job, if we get that next thing, if we get that next deal, well, then we’re finally going to be happy. And, at some point in time, I think we realize that the formula is not really working that way. And I think some of us realize that later on in life, some of us realize it earlier. Personally, I think that we’re actually starting to see that people are recognizing this earlier and earlier in their lives. I think it’s why we have so many people in college or people entering the workforce now, Gen Zers that are asking some, I think, very important questions, the deeper questions.

But, for me, I started to ask that question really after I had gone through three startup experiences, two of them had failed, one of them succeeded. And the one that succeeded exited and I finally had money in the bank, and finally had the image that I had been trying to create for myself as this successful entrepreneur. I realized that that stuff, that the feeling that was associated that lasted for, like, a few weeks, and then I was kind of back to, “What’s next?”

And it was, like, for me, kind of a scary feeling because I had been chasing this thing all along, and when I finally got it, I realized that wasn’t it. And now you’re like, “What now?” And to be honest with you, I really felt like I was alone, like I was being selfish, I was feeling something that most people don’t feel. Like, most people can get to a level of success and just be happy with that. But I felt like, “Look, I’m still ambitious, I still want to do things,” and as a result of that, I still had this inner void.

And so, I wanted to figure out what I was doing that was not making me happy. What was I doing that wasn’t allowing me to feel this sense of inner gratitude and inner peace? And I started to look beyond what was in front of me here in the Western culture, the books that I was reading, the podcasts I was listening to, and I went back to this principle, this body of wisdom that I had learned as a child, and I said, “What does this ageless wisdom that has been practiced and passed down generation after generation, that has found its way from East to West, what can it offer me today?”

Pete Mockaitis
And what can it offer for you today?

Suneel Gupta
Well, that’s really the book. I started to take lessons of dharma and I started to kind of just say, like, “All right. Well, how does it fit in a culture of hustle? How does it fit in a culture of grind?” And I think that the biggest thing for me is that I really saw success as an accumulation of status and wealth and all the things that come with that but I hadn’t really considered the idea of what I now call inner success. Outer success and inner success.

Inner success is really meaning, and it’s status, and it’s joy. And I think the mistake that I made is believing that outer success was somehow going to lead to inner success. It was going to fill up that void that I was feeling. What I learned throughout the course of the book and writing this book, and coming back to this wisdom, was that not that outer success is bad, that ambition is bad because sometimes we can read philosophy or read wisdom, and sort of feel almost shameful for having the ambition that we have.

I don’t think that that’s true in the case of dharma. You can have outer ambitions, you can want outer success, you can want things in your life, but the wisdom of dharma is really about reversing the flow. Instead of starting with outer success, you begin with inner success, you begin with what really, really matters to you. And by focusing on what really matters to you, and tapping into that essence, you are able to express that in a much more vibrant way to the world. You become much more creative. You become much more imaginative.

And as I go out and I study leaders, and this is what I do for a living now is study some of the most extraordinary people, I think, on the planet, what I realize is that all of them, at some point in time, or I should say the vast majority of them, at some point in time, learned how to reverse this flow. Instead of saying, “I want to become a unicorn founder,” or, “I want to become the CEO of a company,” they started with, “I really love to tell stories,” or, “I really love to lead people who develop people in a really profound way.” And when you start with that, when you start with that essence and you begin to express that to the world, you really come into your dharma.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful. Well, thank you for sharing your story. Do you have another story of someone who managed to find their dharma and then see some cool things? And what changes did they make to have that unfold?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, chapter one of the book, I think, really is all about, “How do we now start to kind of come back to our dharma?” And the essence of that learning is what my ancestors called sukha, which is your true self, your authentic self. And the idea behind elfles is that when you go and search for your dharma, you don’t have to search for it on the outside. Because sometimes when we hear words like dharma, or even purpose or meaning, very existential sort of words, and you almost sort of feels like you have to leave everything, go to the Himalayas, meditate, and figure this out.

And the reality is that your dharma has always been with you. Like, there are certain qualities and certain things about you that have always been true. And one of the most important things you can do, when it comes to finding your dharma again, reconnecting with that place, is actually really talking to people who knew you when you were a kid. And sometimes hearing the stories about what you were like and what you loved to do can be really important indicators towards what you genuinely love, towards this essence that we’re really looking to dig up in chapter one.

It happened for this person, Mila, in the book, who I talk about, who’s a project manager. She was a working mom, and she didn’t like her job. And the thing about Mila, as she was working as a project manager inside a big tech company, and the thing for her is that she really wanted to become a teacher. Like, she knew that in her core she was a teacher. The problem was that she didn’t have the capacity in her life to quit her job, go back and get a teaching certificate, she had a family that relied on her, for her compensation, for the salary she was making, for her health benefits, and it was just really hard for her to do that.

So, she had kind of accepted this fate of, like, “I am not going to become a teacher, and I might as well just suck it up and do my job.” And, as a result, she was showing up day in, day out, but she was doing it for a paycheck not because it was a passion. But what happened for Mila was as she started to dig beneath what I call the occupation mindset. The occupation mindset where it’s like, “We are our job. We are a doctor. We are a lawyer. We are teachers.” And she started to go beneath that to her essence, “What is it about teaching that she really loves? What is it about teaching that makes her come alive?”

And, ultimately, what it came down to is she loves to grow people, she loves to teach, she likes to see people grow and help in that development. And what was interesting is that when she shared that insight, when she finally got to that place and shared that with her family, her family was like, “Yeah, no kidding. Like, you’ve always been that way. You’re the little girl who was helping other kids in the neighborhood learn how to ride bikes. You were the one who’s teaching her baby cousin how to crawl. Like, developing people and investing in people is something that was at your core. It always has been.”

And so, now that she had arrived at this essence, beneath the occupation and into the essence, she could start to think of, like, “What are the other ways that I can express that essence to the world?” Teaching, obviously, was one of those, but teaching was very hard so what were some others? And what she started to realize is, like, “Wow, there are actually some opportunities inside my very company that I could actually pursue that would allow me to express this essence of growing and developing other people. I could really kind of make a push for being part of leadership, which would allow me to lead a team. I could make a lateral shift to HR.”

What ended up happening is, after she realized her essence, she started to have coffees with people, she started to say, “Hey, look, I know at my core I like to develop people. What are some options out there for me?” And they started to bring some back to her. Eventually, she was asked to lead a program that was recruiting graduates, like graduates who had top potential, into a program that was all about developing their leadership capabilities, and they asked her to run the program.

But she was only able to get to that place because she was digging beneath the occupation, “I want to be a teacher,” and able to go into, “What was it about being a teacher that made her come alive?” Then, from that place, figuring out what are the other options that allow her to get there.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, I was just about to ask you about your three-step process. It sounds like we’ve got a demonstration. Could you recap what step one, step two, step three for living out the dharma?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah. So, I think step one is let’s go beneath the occupation. Let’s put aside occupation for a second and come back to your essence, this thing that you love to do. And one of the questions that I think you can ask yourself during that time is, “What is it that I would do for free? What are some of the things out there that I actually would do with no compensation?”

I find that to be a really important question, not because I think that we need to go and work for free, but because I think when we actually have a sense of, “What is it that we would actually do without compensation, without reward?” we start to get a much clearer sense of our essence. That’s step one.

But then, from that place, step two is to say, “All right, what are the possibilities? What are the other possibilities out there?” And it’s very interesting because sometimes when you get to this essence, you’ll start to see possibilities that you hadn’t considered otherwise. You can start going to have coffees with people, and asking people, and you can say, “Hey, I love storytelling at my core. I’m a project manager right now, or here’s my job but I like storytelling at my core. What are some ways to express that to the world?” and you’re going to start to collect these ideas. So, you’re in sort of the possibility phase in step two.

And then step three is when you actually start to whittle it down. You start to take these possibilities, and you start to say, “All right. Well, I can do anything but I can’t do everything, like not all at once, at least. So, let me start to really hone in on one.” And for that, for step three, I really like to use a tool I call the dharma deck. And what that basically means is that every time a possibility comes up, every time I come across a new way to express my essence that I really love, that means something to me, I’ll write it down in an index card. And I’ll continue to do that as these possibilities arrive.

So, over time, what I’m developing is a small deck of index cards. I call it my dharma deck. And every couple of weeks or so, when I’m in this exploration stage, I’ll sort of take some reflective time, I’ll usually leave my phone behind and go into nature, and I’ll take this little deck with me of index cards, and I’ll just sort them from top to bottom. At the top of the deck are the ideas that are really kind of pulling at my heart the most, all the way to the bottom.

And what I notice is that, over time, one or two of those cards, usually tend to retain their placement at the top of the pack. And those are the ideas that I feel are not just pulling at my head but they’re pulling at my heart. These are the things that I really think tap into my essence and allow me to express it to the outside world.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you give us some examples of things that might be written on the cards in the dharma deck?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, absolutely. So, for me, I’ll bring it back to me for a second. Like, I was working as an IT consultant when I started trying to figure out my dharma. But I knew at my core, at my essence, that I love to tell stories. Now, storytelling and IT consulting are not symbiotic. Where I was, was not a place that necessarily valued storytelling. Storytelling wasn’t in my description, but I started to really think about, like, “What are the different ways and possibilities to be a storyteller, to express myself as a storyteller?”

So, in my deck, on these index cards were writing, writing blog posts, writing books was another one, doing a podcast, like you, Pete, was another one, being on stage, doing standup comedy even at night was another one. I had this full deck of possibilities, ways that I could express myself as a storyteller, some of which were asking me to sort of shift my job but others were, like, “Hey, you can do this right now and still be a consultant. Like, you could be doing this in your own time as well.” And those were the cards that initially sort of formed my deck.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Well, so let’s hear about the subtitle here, “8 Essential Practices for Finding Success and Joy in Everything You Do.” What are these eight essential practices?

Suneel Gupta
So, chapter one is sukha, we talked about sukha, and that is really about your authentic state. And then chapter two is really called bhakti. And the idea behind bhakti is full-hearted devotion. Full-hearted devotion is really about this sense that, oftentimes, when we think about our dharma, we often tend to think of, “How do we sort of become fully scheduled with something and not fully hearted with something?”

Sometimes we make the mistake of believing that if we love something that we have to spend every minute of every day with it, but we don’t necessarily. Like, we can provide full-hearted devotion for partial moments of the day. I bring up the example of my wife and I. We have two kids. We’re scrambling now with our duties and our jobs and raising kids. But we make sure that we have 15 minutes every morning of just like really connected time with each other, or sitting there, we’re having coffee before the kids wake up, and that’s our act of love, that’s our act of devotion to one another.

And, again, we’re not spending every minute of every day just as monks who are dedicated and devoted to meditation don’t meditate every minute of every day. But the act of bhakti, the act of having devotion to your dharma means that you’re having touchstones with it all the time every day. You’re, in some small way, doing what you love. You’re, in some small way, touching this thing that you really appreciate at your heart. So, if you love to draw, you’re spending just a little time, even if it’s a few minutes and drawing. If you love to lead other people, you’re spending a few minutes checking in with somebody else. It’s something that’s important to you.

Chapter three is prana, and that’s really about energy, it’s about, “How do we start to now bring real energy into our practice of dharma?” because sometimes we tend to confuse time with energy, meaning that we optimize our schedules, we think about the number of hours that we bring to a task instead of the quality of the energy that we want to bring to each hour. So, how do we start to manage our energy now in a way that actually brings full heartedness to our dharma?

Chapter four is called upekkha, and upekkha is comfort in the discomfort. How do we actually find some space between the things that really irritate us in life? Because it’s those things that irritate us in life that actually take us out of our dharma. And so, knowing how to be in the fire, knowing how to be in the discomfort but also able to find comfort in that discomfort is a practice. It is something that we all need to learn how to do. And I’ve had to learn how to do, especially when it came to fulfilling my dharma because, oftentimes, the anger and it’s the irritation that pulls me out of it.

Chapter five is called lila, and lila is high play. And, basically, what that means is, “How do we start to blur the lines between work and play?” Phil Jackson, who I start the chapter with, has this amazing quote. He says that, “My goal is to make work my play, and play my work.” That’s the mantra that he took into being a player in the NBA, but then eventually coaching people like Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, and leading teams to many national championships. That was his mantra, “Blurring the lines between work and play.”

And there are some really important types of things, sort of ways that we can do that. It’s one of my favorite chapters, actuall, is lila. Seva is the next one, which is all about service. It’s what my ancestors called selfless service, seva, which is all about forgetting yourself in order to find yourself. And that was a quote from Mahatma Gandhi, which he said the best way to find yourself in life is to lose yourself in the service of others.

Chapter seven is tula, which is all about, “How do we let go but also take charge?” And those are two sometimes competing philosophies. If we let go, well, then are we really taking charge? Are we just kind of being loosey-goosey and letting sort of life take us where it wants to take us? Not necessarily. We can actually let go, we can loosen our grip, and, at the same time, be intentional about what we want to do and where we want to be, and that’s what tula is all about.

And then, finally, chapter eight is all about action. Like, how do we now put all this into practice and take action? Because none of these matters unless we’re actually taking action. And yet, sometimes, the way we operate is through what I call the game of someday, which is that we wait for courage in order to take action. And what I’ve learned in doing my career is take action first, and let courage catch up along the way.

And one of the techniques and practices I offer in that chapter is what I call sort of the two-way doors. And this came from a mantra from Jeff Bezos, who said that, “Hey, life is basically a set of one-way doors or two-way doors.” And there are certain decisions where, if you walk through a door, a one-way door, you’re not going to be able to come back. But the vast majority of decisions and choices in our lives are actually two-way doors. If you walk through it, it doesn’t work, you can always come back.

But the problem is we sometimes mistake two-way doors for one-way doors, and so we hesitate and we really try to collect as much data as we possibly can. We procrastinate on making the decision. But the reality is that the courage that we’re looking for isn’t all that necessary. You don’t actually have to build all that much courage in order to make a choice when that choice is reversible. And so, a lot of this chapter is about recognizing that we can lead our lives through these two-way doors, knowing that if it doesn’t work out, look, it’s still growth, you’ve still learned something from the other side.

So, Pete, I’ve never been asked to summarize every chapter in the book before, but there you go.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Suneel, that’s just how I roll. I love that. So, with this overview, I now want to dig deeper into the energy and the comfort and discomfort points. Tell us, do you have any best and worst practices when it comes to bringing great energy to things?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, so let’s talk about comfort in the discomfort because I think it’s really, I mean, for me, I think, personally, the hardest thing. Viktor Frankl, who had this just amazing sort of way of looking at life, and Frankl was a holocaust survivor. He was a neurologist. He wrote the book Man’s Search for Meaning. And he had this quote in the book that always just knocks me back, which is that, “In between impulse and response, there is a space. And inside that space lies our freedom.”

So, impulse being all the little triggers in life, like screaming kids, annoying colleague, angry emails, all these irritations, people who cut you off on the road. What he’s saying is that in between that and the way that we respond to that thing, there is a space. And if you can increase that space, even just by a millimeter, like, at a time, you will find yourself with just much more vast levels of freedom, like internal freedom in life.

That’s been hard for me. And the reason I think it’s been hard for me, and the reason I think it’s hard for others that I coach and I work with is because we’ve been sort of, I think, like conditioned to act very quickly. Like, look at how fast things are moving today, and especially like in an age of generative AI where we’re sort of spitting things out very quickly, and asked to respond to things at lightning speed at work. Like, it’s tough. It’s tough to build that space in.

And yet, even just having a couple of seconds sometimes can be the difference between making a good decision and a bad one, or saying something you might regret, or saying something that you’ll be proud of. It’s just that little space in between. So, the question becomes, “How do we harness that? Like, what do we do about that?”

One of the characters that I loved writing about in this chapter was Hank Aaron. And Hank Aaron was a player who was absolutely ridiculed by players in the stand. He had a very, very difficult time. He had death threats. And yet he was still able to come back to this space inside of him each time it happened, and walk up to the plate confidently, and he was the one, as you might know, who broke Babe Ruth’s record because he was able to find his place of composure, this comfort in the discomfort.

And one of the ways that I think that he was able to do that is by finding a homebase inside of him. So, every time something was triggering him, rather than just quickly responding to it, he would actually go inside first. And there are ways that we can actually start to channel that for ourselves. For me, I know that just closing my eyes and taking a couple of deep breaths is magic. It’s an absolutely magical thing to do.

If I’m finding myself tense and reactive, literally, just taking a couple of breaths is sometimes the most important thing I can do. It sounds simple but it’s profound. And yet sometimes I find myself in meetings where that’s not possible, like you can’t necessarily close your eyes in the middle of a meeting and take a few breaths. People might wonder what’s going on with you.

So, another thing that I like to do is, literally, just like put my hand over my heart. I will, literally, just take my hand and I give my heart just a little bit of almost like a love tap, like with the palm of my hand, and I just kind of give it a little massage. And it takes maybe two or three seconds to do but it’s my way, it’s almost my little sort of reset button to remind myself, to go internal for a moment, take a breath, take a moment, before I respond to this thing.

Now, Pete, there are certain things that you want to respond quickly to. Like, if my kid is running towards traffic, like, I’ve got to respond quickly. There’s no hand over heart thing. But the vast majority of things, we don’t need to be that lightning fast. We’ve just been conditioned to believe we need to be that lightning fast, and I think it’s time for us now to kind of reprogram ourselves back to this place of peace because, when we do, that’s when we find that sense of freedom.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, when you say increase the space by a millimeter, I’m thinking about, literally, units and measures, so space, yes, we would increase that by a measure of length or width or height, a millimeter. Also, I guess time would be a measure, if we think about the space in terms of rather than instantaneously milliseconds or after a stimulus, just sort of firing out the response, just sort of taking some more time with the breath or the hand over the heart.

And in so doing, describe the increased freedom feeling or experience. What does that look, sound, feel like in practice when you have increased the space, and you have increased freedom? What does that really mean for you?

Suneel Gupta
I think it means that I’m more myself. I think that when we are reactive, it’s very easy to become something that you’re truly not. That’s the kind of premise of regret and doing things that you regret is that you’re in a condition, sometimes under extreme pressure, you responded to it, and you did things that didn’t feel like yourself. And you look back on it and wish you would’ve done things differently.

And sometimes we can’t avoid that. Sometimes it’s very difficult to avoid that. But I think the premise of what Frankl was arguing, and I think my ancestors were really talking about when they talked about upekkha, was oftentimes we can, and we can through these little moments, like just these very tiny little moments where we can choose, “I need to respond quickly or can I actually take a moment here?”

And even just like asking yourself that question can be enough. Like, as you get irritated, and you are about to respond to something, you can even just ask yourself, “Is this something that commands my immediate response? Or, do I have a little space here?” What I’ve found is that there have been a lot of situations where I kind of mistakenly thought I needed to respond quickly, but I didn’t. And I could actually take a moment.

I’m in a text thread with somebody, and it’s getting a little bit edgy. Do I need to respond quickly to what the person says next or can I actually take a moment? Can I take a breath? And, usually, the answer is, “Yeah, you’ve got plenty of time,” but we don’t always take that time. And, Pete, to your question, like, when you get to take that time, what it allows you to do is really what my grandfather called coming back to the center. And when you can come back to the center, come back to who you are, well, then you’re acting from that place.

That doesn’t always mean you’re not going to act angry. Maybe you want to be angry in that moment but, at least, it was intentional. You were able to come back, you were able to take a moment, and decide what you wanted to do rather than let the moment decide for you.

Pete Mockaitis
“After careful consideration, I’ve concluded that the best course of action is to scream at your head off.”

Suneel Gupta
And it might be, honestly.

Pete Mockaitis
Right, in those particular circumstances, uh-huh.

Suneel Gupta
The point of all this is not to suppress any emotion. That is not what we’re doing here, because it’s all human. It’s all part of who we are. The point is more, rather than letting emotions control you, you control the emotions. You can actually start to examine these things, and you can decide which one really feels right to follow. Because, in that case, frustration and anger might be the right thing but, again, you were in the driver’s seat when that decision was made, not the emotion itself.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, now let’s talk about energy.

Suneel Gupta
One of the things that I learned from my research from my last book, and even from this book going out and really spending time with leaders is, like, if you compare people who have gained momentum in their lives and their careers versus those who, I think, tend to fizzle out, tend to sort of lose momentum in their lives and their careers, the people who lose momentum very rarely do they run out of time, very rarely do they run out of talent.

What they almost always run out of is energy. They just get too exhausted. There’s not enough gas in the tank to go do what they want to go do. And if there’s not enough gas in the tank, if you’re exhausted, then you can have the best idea, you can literally have a brilliant vision for what you want, and yet you’re not going to reach that potential.

And the reason all that matters, the reason I say all this, Pete, is because I think we’ve been conditioned to really optimize for time but we haven’t really sort of been taught how to optimize for energy, meaning, like if we’re taking on an important project, what we tend to think about is, like, “What are the number of hours, the number of days, the number of years, that’s going to take to get this thing done?” But what we rarely think about is, “What is the quality? What is the quality of energy that I want to bring to each one of those units of time? What is the quality of energy that I want to bring to each one of those hours?”

And so, for me, one of the most important rituals in the book really comes in this chapter, which is what I call rhythmic renewal, which basically says that instead of waiting for vacations, or waiting for long breaks, what high performers tend to do is they tend to take breaks, mini-focused breaks every single day. In fact, the average high performer that we studied takes somewhere around eight breaks every single day.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s what I love to hear, Suneel.

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, it sounds extraordinary, right? I bet there are at least some people listening to this right now, being like, “That’s crazy because look at how crammed our schedules have gotten, and now you’re telling me to cram it even further with these little breaks?” But the thing that I want to offer you is a very tactical practice, it’s what I call the 55-5 model, which is that whenever possible, for every 55 minutes of work, you’re taking five minutes of focused deliberate rest.

And that five minutes can be anything. When I asked people, like, “What do you do during five minutes to take a break?” I get the best answers, like, “I take a dance break,” “I do some pushups,” “I take a walk in nature,” “I just drink a cup of coffee.” You can do anything you want during those five minutes. The key is that you’re just not multitasking it with work. You don’t have your phone in your hand, getting things done while you’re taking a break. You’re just purely focused on that break.

And the reason that this is so magical is because while it may seem like you’re actually cutting your time down, what that five-minute break is doing is it’s making the other 55 minutes so much more effective, so much more imaginative, so much more collaborative and creative. And the reality is that whatever you do in 60 minutes, you could probably do in 55.

And so, if we save these little five-minute breaks in between, we start to boost the energy that we bring to all the other sort of meetings, all the other work sessions that we have in the day. And when I talked to people who put 55-5 into practice, one of the most common things that I hear is that, “For the first time in my career, I am actually experiencing as much energy at the end of the day as I did at the beginning of the day just by taking these breaks in between.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Suneel, I love that, and I want to hear some more examples of these crazy breaks. It’s so funny, as I’m in my office, I’m looking at, I’ve got yoga blocks. I like to do pushups on yoga blocks because I can go deeper and have more of a stretch, it feels good, as well as a little tub of cold water I dunk my face into.

Suneel Gupta
Yes, that’s very common. I hear that more and more.

Pete Mockaitis
Is it really? I thought I was a freak.

Suneel Gupta
No, I hear that more and more. So, obviously, cold plunges are all the rage. Like, I’ve had people tell me, like people who work from home or in a hybrid schedule, “I’ll just go take a cold shower just for three minutes.” Somebody, the other day, told me, “I take a cold shower, turn off the lights inside, put on music, do a little dance party inside the shower,” and, literally, it’s five minutes, very, very quick. Come out and it resets their state. But definitely the face in the cold bowl of water is another one.

The other day, somebody told me that they, literally, were, like they talk to themselves is what they said, “I like to talk to myself,” is what this executive told me. And I said, “Well, what do you mean? Do you work from home?” And he’s like, “No, no, we’re back to work now.” And I said, “Well, do you go in your office and close the doors?” He said, “No, no, what I do is I put my AirPods in, and I walk around, and people think that I’m on a call with somebody else but I’m actually just talking to myself. And I find that to be very therapeutic.”

So, if you ask people, like, “What’s an out-of-the-box thing that you do to reset yourself?” you’ll get the best answers.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Suneel, I’m glad I asked. I do love these answers. And if you could give us a couple more, I’ll take them?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, okay. So, I think, for me, breathing is great, and I know that sounds obvious because meditation has been talked about so much, but you don’t have to be a meditator. And one of the things that I love doing is what I call the alternate nostril breathing technique. If we’re on video, this would be a little more visual, but I’ll describe it to you.

What you’re basically doing is you’re inhaling through your left nostril and exhaling through your right nostril. The way you do that is by using your thumb and one of your other fingers to basically, like, gently block one of the nostrils. So, as you’re inhaling through your left nostril, you’re blocking your right nostril. And then you’re exhaling through your right by blocking your left nostril, and then you reverse it. Inhale through the right, exhale through the left. Inhale through the left, exhale through the right.

This is a millennia-old technique. It’s thousands of years old. And the reason that it works, and it’s rooted in science, you’ll hear even behavioral scientists talk about this alternate nostril breathing is because what it really does is it resets your nervous system. But what it also does, we’ve heard of the left brain and right brain before, and oftentimes, especially those of us who are in analytical positions and we’re using our minds a lot at our work, we start to drift away from our heart. We go all head, no heart.

What this tends to do is it tends to equalize both sides of the brain. The left side in charge of analytics, the right side more is, you are heart-centered, focused more on creativity, and it starts to bring these two into alignment. So, this alternate nostril breathing is, I think, just a great one.

The other thing, you mentioned pushups. I like planks. And the reason I like planks is because, for me, pushups are fantastic but they’re repetitions, right? And every time you do a repetition, you’re kind of escaping the moment. So, I find it easier to do pushups than to hold planks because it’s repetitive and it’s giving me something to do.

Planks are really interesting because they don’t allow any type of escape. You’re just kind of holding a plank just for a period of time. And when you hold the plank for a period of time, what that challenges your mind to do is basically come to the moment, come to the present, because you have nowhere else to go. And so, I find that if I want to reset myself with an exercise, like something physical, and I’ve got less than five minutes to do it, I’ll hold the plank.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now I got to hear, what’s the 85% rule?

Suneel Gupta
So, yeah, the 85% rule is it comes from the running world, actually. And Carl Lewis was the person who kind of really, I think, brought this to the forefront. Carl Lewis was an Olympic racer, Olympic sprinter, I mean, just amazing. He won all sorts of medals and is considered one of the more prolific racers of his generation.

One of the things that they found about Carl Lewis though that was unusual is that he would always start in the back of the pack. And kind of the conventional rule for racing was that you had to blast out front right away in order to win a sprint because a sprint isn’t very long. But in Carl Lewis’ case, he would almost always start in the back of the pack and then work his way up.

And a sprint coach started to study kind of what was going on here. And what he found was that Carl Lewis was never really deviating in the way that he ran. He was starting at 85% and he was running at 85% speed pretty much the entire race. So, while other sprinters were kind of coming out of the gate at a hundred and then, almost inevitably, kind of losing a little bit of gas over time, he was at 85% steady throughout the whole thing.

And the 85% rule was talked about in running but it found its way to other worlds. Like, I heard Hugh Jackman, the actor, talking about the 85% rule the other day. And it’s coming to the world of music and acting and business as a way of approaching things because, oftentimes, we think that we have to go at 100% in order to get things done, but the problem is that if you’re at 100%, if you’re all on all the time, you’re going to burn out.

So, the alternative is to actually dial it down to 85%, to a very sort of comfortable measurable way of relaxed but intentional leadership for yourself and for the people around you, where it’s not like you’re giving up by any means, 85% is still strong, but what you’re optimizing for is the longer term. Because, look, if you want to get something done in a week, grit it out, hustle hard, and you’ll get it done.

But I think most of us are not looking to get something done in a week. We’re looking to build something over time, whether that be a product, or whether that be a business, or whether that be our own career. We’re optimizing for the long term. And if we’re optimizing for the long term, then we don’t want a model that’s actually built around the short term, which is getting things done in a short term, burning out, and then not having the fuel, or exhaustion to keep going, or coming back but not quite being the same as you were before.

And so, 85% is an alternative way of thinking about really kind of loosening your grip. And the metaphor that I love, a Buddhist monk actually introduced me to this metaphor, is racecar driving. When racecar drivers first learn how to really get competitive, oftentimes, the premise they come in with is that you have to grip the steering wheel very tight, especially during those tight moments. Like, if you’re taking a tight turn, you sort of squeeze the wheel tighter.

But one of the most important things that you have to learn as a racecar driver is that you have to actually loosen your grip in those moments. During the tighter turns, you’re actually going looser and not tighter so that you can stay more emotionally in control between the car and the relationship to the road. Then, I think, the way that we operate our odds is very much the same. Our tendency is to try to squeeze when we’re in these tense moments. But what Carl Lewis and the 85% rule shows us is that if you can learn to loosen in those moments, you can go faster and even further.

Pete Mockaitis
So as I visualize sprinting, it’s a very clear measure in terms of what’s 100%, what’s 85% in terms of the numerator and denominator, and, okay, we got the speed straight up, like miles per hour running, if you will, as a measure of speed. What does an 85% effort look like, say, if I am in a meeting, or processing emails, in contrast to a 100% effort?

Suneel Gupta
Yeah, I think what it means is that during these tense moments, you’re able to sort of lighten your sort of grip on what’s happening. And so, for me, the way that that shows up is I find myself sitting at my desk and I’ll actually forget to breathe, like, all of a sudden, I find myself sort of gasping for breath. I was so interested in this the other day because I was like, “Is this just me? Does this only happen to me?”

I’m right now in faculty at Harvard Medical School so I pinged a couple of my colleagues, and I’m like, “What’s going on here?” They’re like, “No, no, no, that’s totally natural.” Most people when they’re in front of their phones or they’re checking email, you actually hold your breath. Like, we tend to hold our breath and we, all of a sudden, find ourselves sort of gasping for air. But, also, if you pay attention to it, you’ll sometimes find that you’re starting to feel stressed out, and there’s not really a total reason for that. There’s nothing in particular that’s triggered you into this moment of stress.

What we find is that we’ve actually been holding our breath, and that’s the reason that we actually feel stressed in that moment. And that kind of follows the pattern of breathing. When you’re stressed out, you tend to take shallow breaths or you stop breathing. When you’re not stressed out, when you’re more in a calm position, you’re taking smoother, calmer sort of breaths. You’re just kind of in this more state of flow during that time.

But the reverse is true, too. If we start to kind of hold our breath, we can actually almost fake our minds into thinking that something is wrong, that we’re actually stressed out. So, going back to your question, Pete, with the 85% rule, it’s just smoother energy. It’s a smoother energy. There’s less grasping, there’s less table-pounding, there’s less grit and hustle. And the thing that I would say is if you’re listening to this, and you sort of feel, “Well, that just sounds like a recipe for non-ambition. Or that sounds like a recipe for letting people walk over you.”

I encourage you to try it. I encourage you to try it for a week where you’re walking into meetings, and you’re loosening the grip just a little bit. And, again, we’re not saying giving up here, I’m not saying throwing your hands up. Loosening your grip to what you consider to be an 85% level, and just seeing how that plays out. Because, for me, what it creates is a smoother, more relaxed energy. I start to feel more free. I start to feel more creative. My mind is thinking a little bit more clearly. I’m also more collaborative.

Because, look, when somebody is really intense, and they’re gritting their teeth, and they’re 100%, like, that’s not always a lot of fun to be around. But if you can relax a little bit, and you can sort of be, again, creative and engaged and intentional, but not like that gritty-hustle personality that can sometimes tend to burn not only themselves out and everybody else around them, pay attention to what the effect is. Did you really lose productivity, or did you gain presence?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And as I’m thinking about it, it’s true. There are times when I’ve approached, let’s just call it processing emails, almost like a pumped-up, cranked, eye-of-the-tiger, jump up and down, “Let’s do this thing,” partially just because I’ve procrastinated for a while, and I think that’s the answer is to just overcome my resistance by being super fired up about it. But other times, you can do the same task with an energy that I think of more like a Bob Ross energy, like painting happy little trees, doing happy little emails. And the output is comparable.

Suneel Gupta
And I think it’s such a good point because, also for me, I find that the reason that I’m resistant to sometimes like going, like blasting through emails, is because I know that I’m going to be putting myself in this hustle-and-grind mindset. And if you know you’re going to put yourself in a hustle-and-grind mindset, that’s not always fun, and, oftentimes, the resistance comes from, “I don’t want to go there.” But what if you didn’t have to be that way?

And what if you could actually, like gently, get through your email, and you’re reminding yourself to be sort of gentle with yourself throughout that? What would that look like for you? And did you lose anything? Because, sometimes, the belief that we have, and I think this is a very sort of like conditioned way of thinking, I know I’ve been conditioned to believe it, is the less grit we put into something, the less ambitious or intentional we’re being about it.

But is that true? Like, is that real? Or do you find that when you actually loosen up a little bit about things, you can be fully equally intentional and, in fact, more creative, more imaginative. You can actually bring a higher level of energy to that task and you’re more fun to be around.

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

Suneel Gupta
I think maybe some of my favorite things and some of the stuff from the book will come up anyway, so let’s go there.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. How about a favorite quote?

Suneel Gupta
My favorite quote was from my grandfather, my bauji. And what bauji told me is that, we, as humanity, is like a sitar or a guitar with billions of strings. You are a string. I’m a string. Each of us is a string. And every time we learn how to play our own string, every time we tune into who we are, and we express that to the outside world, every time we come into our dharma, not only does that have an effect for our life, but it has an effect for everybody else’s lives as well. Every time we play our string, we bring the rest of the world a note, just a little bit more of harmony.

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

Suneel Gupta
I’m still a fan of the scar experiment, which you may have heard of. It came out of Dartmouth University in the 1990s. And with the scar experiment, what they did was they basically had these people in a room, and they painted on an artificial scar on their face, this hideous-looking blemish on their face. And then they were to go into the next room, one by one, and interact with strangers just to see how strangers would react to their scar.

But right before they went into the room, the makeup artist went to them, and said, “Hey, can I touch up your scar, just touch up a little bit of the makeup?” And they said, “Sure.” And, without them knowing, they actually wiped the scar off entirely. So, now if you’re part of the experiment, you walk into the room believing that you had this scar on your face, and you don’t. And then they ask the subject afterwards, like, “How did people react?” And nearly everybody said, “Oh, my God, they couldn’t take their eyes off the scar. Like, they stared at it, they were disgusted by it, they were like…”

And it just sort of goes to show that sometimes we tend to see ourselves through other people’s eyes. We tend to sort of like look to people for the feedback on who we are. And I love that experiment because it just brings it to life in such a visceral way.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Suneel Gupta
That’s a hard one, and I really think that Be Here Now by Ram Dass has to be the one, I think, because it’s just had the biggest impact on my life. I return to it probably more than any other book.

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

Suneel Gupta
I think my favorite tool is the act of putting my phone down. And I hope that doesn’t sound like a cop-out because my instinct, when you first asked me the question, was to think of a technology, was to think of what’s something that’s helping me be more productive. And there are plenty of tools that I use, from OmniFocus to all these other sorts of things I use to organize my world. I use ChatGPT every once in a while. Like, honestly, man, my favorite tool is, literally, just the practice and the act of putting my phone down, and having some present time with a blank sheet of paper.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Suneel Gupta
My favorite habit is the 55-5 rule. For every 55 minutes of work, take five minutes of focused deliberate rest.

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

Suneel Gupta
Well, I think that the idea of being able to let go but also take charge is something that often people talk to me about. And, for me, it’s really kind of like two very different philosophies coming together. It’s really kind of the Eastern side of me and the Western side of me. The Eastern side of me, I would go to temple, and it was all about letting go. I would read the Bhagavad Gita, and it was all about letting go. Whereas, the Western world was all about sort of taking charge and gritting it out.

And so, for me, as an Indian kid growing up in the United States, I was always sort of oscillating back and forth between these two worlds. I’d have my Eastern identify and my Western identity. And I never really thought that those two things could come together but I really do believe that they can. And that’s really kind of where I think Phil Jackson and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi with flow, and there’s a lot of practices in the book on how to actually be able to let go to a certain extent, but also be very intentional about it.

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

Suneel Gupta
Just come to my website. Come to SuneelGupta.com. I spell my name S-U-N-E-E-L G-U-P-T-A.com. And there’s a bunch of tools out there for you, and I’d love to connect with you.

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

Suneel Gupta
I think being awesome at your job is one and the same as being awesome with who you are. And sometimes we forget that character is how you behave when nobody is watching. It’s the things that you do for yourself internally in order to succeed externally. And sometimes we get pulled into a world where it seems like external success is the only sort of way to achieve the things that you want to achieve.

But I think if you can sort of start to come back to, like, what really matters to you, like what is that essence, and, “How do I express that essence to the world?” not only is that sort of a way of making yourself come alive, but I really believe that it’s a way of doing your best work.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Suneel, this has been such a treat. I wish you much luck and fun and adventure with your dharma.

Suneel Gupta
Thank you so much, Pete. I wish you luck with yours, and I appreciate you having me back on the show.

Aug 31
0

895: The Keys to Continual Growth and Improvement with Eduardo Briceño

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Eduardo Briceño reveals the fundamental factors that accelerate your growth and improvement.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How focusing on performance actually hurts results
  2. The one feedback method that always tells the truth
  3. The five key elements that drive growth

About Eduardo

Eduardo Briceño is a global keynote speaker and facilitator who guides many of the world’s leading companies in developing cultures of learning and high performance. Earlier in his career, he was the co-founder and CEO of Mindset Works, the first company to offer growth mindset development services. Previously, he was a venture capital investor with the Sprout Group.

His TED Talk, How to Get Better at the Things You Care About, and his prior TEDx Talk, The Power of Belief, have been viewed more than nine million times. He is a Pahara-Aspen Fellow, a member of the Aspen Institute’s Global Leadership Network, and an inductee in the Happiness Hall of Fame.

Resources Mentioned

Eduardo Briceño Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Eduardo, welcome back to How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Eduardo Briceño
Great to be here, Pete. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to hear some of your insights and wisdom that you’ve captured in your book, The Performance Paradox: Turning the Power of Mindset into Action. But, first, I want to hear, talking about growth mindsets, wow, is it, in fact, true that you did not have any prior public speaking experience before you did your TEDx Talk?

Eduardo Briceño
That is true. And I would have never thought, I mean, becoming a public speaker, which I do now, it just didn’t even cross my mind growing up or in my young adult life, but I had started an organization, MindsetWorks with Carol Dweck and Lisa Blackwell, and a board member encouraged me to go out and have people get to know me and know who I was.

We were evangelizing growth mindset, and she thought that as part of that, I needed to kind of become a leader in the industry, and people needed to know who I was. So, I actually thought, “Hey, I don’t have time. I have so much work to do. I agree with you,” but when Carol Dweck was asked to do a TEDx Talk, she couldn’t do it.

So, then we decided, and I thought, “That would be a good opportunity to put a lot of work into 10 minutes. I can do 10 minutes. I can work really hard to prepare a great script and deliver it.” And so, I worked really hard with Carol and with others, and I was so nervous during those 10 minutes. I, the whole time, looked at the back wall and the lights and not at people’s eyes because I thought that I would just blank out if I tried to figure out what people were thinking.

So, that was my first public speaking experience was that TEDx Talk. And then that became pretty popular. It’s being over 4 million times now.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Yes, far more than the most TEDx Talks, and it’s featured prominently on the TED proper website. Well, it’s funny, I just rewatched that, and you didn’t look that nervous.

Eduardo Briceño
Yeah, I don’t know, that was surprising to me. I went on the stage, and I thought, “Okay, I’m prepared. I’ve done everything I can. And now, what’s going to help my performance is to relax. I know I’m not going to look at people, so I had a plan.” And that helped me be relaxed, and I was more relaxed than I would have thought.

And then, a few years later, four years later, I did another TEDx Talk that became a TED Talk, and that also has been viewed over 4 million times. And that was the basis for the book that I wrote, The Performance Paradox.

Pete Mockaitis
So, tell us, what’s the big idea in the The Performance Paradox?

Eduardo Briceño
The performance paradox is the counterintuitive fact that if we fixate solely on performing, our performance suffers. So often we’re really encouraging ourselves and others to just focus on executing, doing the best we know how, trying to minimize mistakes, and that hurts our performance. That is the counterintuitive fact, that is chapter one, is the problem, and the rest of the book is about the solution, how to overcome that problem.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you elaborate on the pathway? How is it that doing the same thing and trying not to make mistakes makes our performance worse?

Eduardo Briceño
Yeah. So, the best way to understand this is if we kind of step out of our everyday context and look at people who are fantastic at what they do, in domains where performance can be objectively measured, so sports, chess, performing arts, incredible acrobats. If you think about how an acrobat, for an example, what they do, when we see them perform, they do these incredible acrobatic things, they do it beautifully, and they rarely make mistakes.

And we tend to kind of have this vague idea that the way they became so good is by spending a lot of hours doing that thing that we are seeing. But actually, the way they become so good is by doing something very different from what we’re seeing. When they are behind curtains, at the gym or at the studio, they are making a lot of mistakes, they’re missing the timing a lot because they’re focused on what they haven’t mastered yet, they’re focused on the next level of challenge, and the show is always evolving.

And so, it’s the time they spend in what I call the learning zone, which is when they’re focused on improvement that allows them to build their skills and to be so excellent in the performance zone. Same thing in sports, if you’re playing a championship final, you’re having trouble with a move, you’re going to avoid that move during the match. But after the match, you go to your coach, you say, “Coach, I have to work on this move,” that’s a very different activity and area of attention than what we do during the match.

And what often happens for a lot of us is that we spend most of our time, if not all of our time, in the performance zone, just trying to get things done as best as we can, trying to minimize mistakes, and that works okay when we’re novices because we’re so bad, we don’t need great learning strategies to get better. But once we become proficient, we stagnate, we don’t continue to improve, and we think the reason is we can’t improve, that’s a fixed mindset, but the reason really is that we’re not engaging the learning zone.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a really great distinction because I think some of the folks would say, “Well, of course, I’ve seen myself get better the more I do a thing. That’s sort of self-evident in my own experience.” And I love what you had to say there, like, “Well, yes, that works just fine when you are really clueless.”

Eduardo Briceño
Yeah, and it is amazing that we do learn that by experience. If I want to start to play tennis, I could go into the court and just play tennis with a friend, then I will get better. And so, we learn by experience that that’s the way to improve but then we stagnate once we become proficient, and then we conclude that we can’t get better. We develop a fixed mindset when we haven’t developed the skills and the habits in order to continue to improve and become excellent.

Like, if you look at an Olympic gold medalist, they’re the best in the world but they will then engage in deliberate practice to go beyond what they can do to continue to get even better. They don’t just play games and matches.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Eduardo, in a way, this is really haunting, as I think from a meta perspective of just podcasting. I think that was accurate for, maybe, I don’t know, several hundred, I don’t know, 300, 600, some number of hundreds of episodes, I think I got better just by doing more episodes and talking to folks. And then I have had a little bit of a sense of stagnation here.

And I thought it was just in my head, and I’ve heard people say, it’s like, “Oh, wow, you were pretty good when we started, and now you’re amazing.” I say, “Well, thank you. I appreciate that.” But I have felt like, “I don’t think I’m actually getting better at this,” and that just makes sense. Like, “Well, before, just doing it more times was sufficient to help me get better. And now, that is no longer sufficient to help me get better.”

And so, to use your terminology, if I were to enter the learning zone as a podcaster host, interviewer, what might be some activities I do other than just simply do one more episode?

Eduardo Briceño
Well, I have some ideas I can share but you know a whole lot about learning. So, tell me, what do you think you might do to get better?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think it’d be closely listening to some episodes and making some notes in terms of what I might have done differently. I think it could be closely observing some of the finest interviewers around to see what they’re doing. Ask for feedback and perspective from either coaches or masters of the craft, or listeners, it’s like, “Hey, Pete, I’ve heard you hundreds of times, and I have some thoughts.” But pete@awesomeatyourjob.com, lay them on me. Lay them on me, I’m listening. Thank you.

So, those are some things that leap to mind there.

Eduardo Briceño
Absolutely. Those are great ideas, and they are different than just doing episodes, and they don’t take a lot of time. And so, the great performers, whether athletes or others, they do watch their videos. Like, Beyonce watches videos of her performances after she performs, and identifies what to change and shares notes of that with her colleagues.

At ClearChoice Dental Systems, they do dental implants. They have video cameras in their consult rooms so that the people who work there, when they’re interacting with patients, after their consult, for the patients that agree to this, that agree to be recorded for this purpose, they can watch the videos afterwards and go to a particular part of the conversation that they were working on and watch themselves, and kind of think about what they can do differently and how what they tried work or didn’t work.

And one thing that they say that I love is that…sometimes when we receive feedback, feedback is amazing, feedback, I think is the most powerful learning-zone strategy in the workplace but, sometimes, especially for some people, when we receive feedback, we might reactive defensively and think, “This person doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or they didn’t really see what I saw,” but what they say is that video always tells the truth.

So, if you listen to your recording and reflect on it, and it doesn’t have to be the whole thing, it can be just how you started the recording, or how you end it, or a particular part of it, then that’s a fantastic way to think about, “Okay, like what can I do differently next time?” And one key thing, when we’re going about our work, is in order to improve, we have to change. Like, we can’t improve and not change.

So, if we do the same thing today than we did yesterday, we’re not going to get better, so we have to always be thinking about, “What is something that I can try differently?” And for that, like you said, we can observe experts, whether they are other podcasters, or we can read books, or listen to podcasts to get ideas, and identify, “Okay, what can I try differently?” and then feedbacking whatever form, like you said, is a fantastic, fantastic powerful strategy.

Pete Mockaitis
Another fun thing about that, the notion of that distinction there, is that when you’re new doing anything helps you get better, then you have to get precise. It seems like that’s analogous to what happens in physical training as well. It’s like when you’re out of shape, walking anywhere, lifting anything improves your fitness but then, at some point, that’s just not going to cut it.

Bringing the groceries from your trunk to the kitchen isn’t going do, and we need to get sort of more precise with a deliberate practice and learning in terms of, “I’m going to need to lift this level of weight this many times, in this kind of emotion in order to get an adaptation because the easy gains have already been grabbed.”

Eduardo Briceño
Absolutely. And there’s another benefit to that, which is that when we are kind of just doing and exploring an idea, an activity, and tinkering with it, just kind of doing it, we can play with it, we can try it out, we can see if we would enjoy it. And that is really important because it kind of doesn’t make sense to engage in deliberate practice and put a lot of effort into improving into something that we are not going to enjoy and that is not important to us.

So, early in our process, kind of trying an activity, playing with it, tinkering with it, is a way to improve but also it’s a way to explore whether it’s something we want to do and get better at.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I already love this stuff in terms of, “Yeah, ooh, what are some fun ways I could spend some more time in the learning zone? And what might I be doing while I’m there?” I suppose, fundamentally, in order for anyone to have any motivation whatsoever to spend some time in the learning zone, they have to believe that learning and growth is possible, and so you spend much time sharing the wisdom of the growth versus fixed mindset. For folks who are not as familiar with that, could you give us, like, the super quick crash course?

Eduardo Briceño
Yeah, absolutely. So, for those who have heard of the term growth mindset, I ask you to think about what it means to you. What do you think it means? Because when we ask what it means, even for people who have kind of been tinkering with it for a long time, people often say things, like, “It’s working hard or it’s persevering, or even is having a positive attitude, or is being open-minded.” And a growth mindset is none of those things.

A growth mindset is a perspective about the nature of human beings, specifically it’s the belief that people can change, that we can change and that other people can change, that our abilities or our qualities are malleable, that we can develop them. And the reason that’s important is that lots of research has shown that when we believe that we can change and that others can change, then we do the things that are necessary in the learning zone in order to improve, if we know how the learning zone works, which is another key component.

But if we don’t believe that we can change, then we’re never going to do anything to change, we won’t change, and we will confirm our fixed mindset. Similarly, if we believe that somebody else can’t change, we’re not going to share any information with them that they can learn from, so they won’t know to do anything, they won’t change, and that will create a self-fulfilling prophecy and confirm our starting belief.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, the opposite of a growth mindset is a fixed mindset, to believe that rather than things being changeable and growable, that, “Hey, you’re either good at this or you’re bad at this.” Like, “I’m just not a math person,” whatever. I’d love to get your perspective. Sometimes maybe I’m a little sleep-deprived, maybe a little stressed, and I’m interacting with something that’s tricky. I’m thinking like assembling furniture, and I get frustrated, and I feel like I’m stupid, or like I’m a loser, and I don’t like feeling that way.

And I know from all this stuff, like, “Oh, Pete, it sounds like you’re engaging in fixed mindset-type thinking, a type evaluation of this stuff,” and I’d rather not. I guess I’m curious, if we’re generally on board, like, “Yeah, growth mindset, that’s real. I generally believe that,” and yet we find ourselves drifting into thought patterns that sound more fixed mindset-y, any pro tips for how we can, I don’t know, install the growth mindset all the more deep down in our operating system so it’s alive and well and kicking and dominating?

Eduardo Briceño
So, the first thing is to acknowledge that we all experience a fixed mindset some of the time, just like you described, and a fixed mindset is part of being human. We see sometimes some abilities as fixed, or some people as fixed, and that is normal. And the really important thing to do is to notice it, like you are, and saying, “Oh, I am thinking that I can’t get better at this right now.”

And we might react with an emotional response right away, but we can observe it, let it kind of put a little bit of distance, pause a little bit, and think about, “Can I get better at this?” or, “Can I examine my mistake, to learn from my mistake?” or, “What different strategy can I use? What learning-zone strategy can I use to get better at this?”

And so, pausing, noticing our fixed mindset, and thinking about, “What can I do in the learning zone in order to improve if that’s something that I want to do?” It doesn’t mean that we should try to get better at everything. It means that whatever we do want to get better at, we can figure out what strategies are effective for that and engage in those strategies.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if I’m assembling furniture and it’s not going well, I can choose to be, like, “This is not an area, an endeavor of activity or skill that I am going to choose to really invest big in and master. I can just let that go, and that’s fine.” And, at the same time, if it’s like, “If I feel…” Well, maybe this is a broader question for all sorts of learning activities. When you’re in the midst of doing something that is hard and not going well, and you’re screwing up, and you’re frustrated, and you feel dumb, what should we do?

Eduardo Briceño
Well, say that you’re in the situation you described, that you’re trying to assemble furniture, you’re getting frustrated. You said you’re sleep-deprived, you’re tired. You can think about that maybe in the moment, if you can, maybe pause. But, at some point, when we reflect, we can think about, “First of all, what is most important to me? Why am I assembling furniture? Is that important to me? Like, is it that I want to have a beautiful home? Or, is it that I want to kind of update my couch? And why am I trying to do that? Am I trying to foster a feeling of kind of calm in my home? And how can I get better at that?”

So, sometimes what happens is that we get frustrated with mid-level goals or low-level goals, like assembling furniture, that might or might not be important to you. Sometimes we can quit at those things if that’s a better way to achieve a higher-level goal, like achieving calm, or achieving an uncluttered space, if that’s important to you.

Or, sometimes that might be the right way. It might be, “I can get better at assembling furniture, and that’s something that I want to do. It’s going to make me feel good.” But part of the answer might be, “Okay, I am sleep-deprived. Like, should I be changing my sleeping habits? Should I be going to bed earlier? Should I approach my mornings differently?” So, what is leading to my challenge right now rather than only focusing on the immediate challenge, thinking about, “What’s most important to me and what are different ways that I could get better at that most important goal?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, in so doing, you’re learning about something. You’re making some learnings and improvements on a thing that’s even more important and broader-reaching.

Eduardo Briceño
Yes, sometimes people associate growth mindset with grit or being persistent, which there’s definitely a close association, but it doesn’t mean that we need to be gritty around everything we’re doing. It means we want to be gritty and most growth-minded about the goals that we most care about, and so we need to identify what are those goals.

There’s something in psychology called the hierarchy of goals, which is like a pyramid. And at the top is what we care most about, and at the bottom is our low-level strategies around the things we do. And so, to go up the pyramid, we ask why we care. And to go down the pyramid, we ask how. And we want to be most gritty and most growth-minded about the highest-level goals because, then, our answer and how we get better at those things might be different than what we’re currently attempting.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool to get a broad perspective and not get too fixated on something that maybe doesn’t matter all that much. Okay. Well, when it comes to mistakes, you say these can really propel our growth, and you’ve categorized four kinds of mistakes. Could you lay these out for us?

Eduardo Briceño
Yeah. So, I think most of us have a sense that we can learn from mistakes but, first, most of us don’t realize how important mistakes are. So, when we are in our mid-20s, the way the neuroplasticity in our brain works changes. Before our 20s, our brain changes based on experience. We walk around the street, we observe things, and our brain is reconfiguring.

In our 20s, the brain doesn’t do that as much from then but the main way that we can drive our neuroplasticity and become smarter and more capable is actually by making mistakes, is by when the brain makes a prediction, and that prediction turns out to be wrong, that’s the main way that we can proactively elicit our own neuroplasticity. That’s how important mistakes are.

But, on the other hand, so mistakes are really important, but also, mistakes lower performance. Great performances are performances where we don’t make a lot of mistakes. Like, right now, you and I are having a conversation, it’s a conversation about learning so I’d be comfortable making mistakes but, in general, like we want to not say things that are not true and not make mistakes if we are performing for others, to try to add value to others.

And so, how do we reconcile that, that mistakes are valuable but, also, they lower performance? And so, I unpack four different kinds of mistakes. That’s what chapter five is about. And so, the first, there’s the stretch mistakes, which are the mistakes that we make when we are trying to do things we haven’t mastered yet, when we are in our learning zone. And those are mistakes that are super valuable, we want to be doing a lot of those mistakes. We want to elicit those mistakes, not by trying to do things incorrectly but by trying to do things that are challenging.

But we want to try those things when mistakes are not going to create a lot of damage. So, the second type of mistake is the high-stakes mistakes, which are the mistakes that would create a lot of damage. So, if we are driving a school bus, we don’t want to make a mistake. If we’re in charge of a nuclear plant, or if we’re packing a parachute, we want to do what we know works and minimize mistakes. And that’s when we’re in the high-stakes mistakes, we want to get into our performance zone and sometimes not worry about learning at all because the stakes are too high.

The third type of mistake is the sloppy mistakes, which are when we do things that we already know how to do, and we should’ve known better. And often when we make these mistakes, first of all, often they’re not that important or they might not be important at all, and I think these mistakes can bring kind of joy and humor to our lives. Like, if I spill a smoothie all over my shirt, and I’m home, I can either choose to get upset or I can laugh about it, and I can take a picture of it and send it to my family and friends, which is what I often do.

And so, I think mistakes can bring joy and humor to our lives, but sometimes sloppy mistakes do cause damage. And so, we can reflect on, “How can I avoid the sloppy mistake in the future?” And often, when we reflect on that, the answer is there are ways to foster more focus or to change our systems and tools in order to avoid those mistakes. I could change where in my desk I put the smoothie so that I don’t spill it, for example.

And the final kind of mistakes is the aha-moment mistake, which is when we do something as we intended but we then realize it was the wrong thing to do because we have an aha moment. So, for example, my wife might be upset about something, I might calm and try to console her, and problem-solve with her, and then I might learn that she didn’t want me to problem-solve. She just wanted me to empathize and to be there with her.

And so, I did what I meant to do but I realized it was the wrong thing to do. And aha-moment mistakes are precious. When they happen, we need to just learn from them, reflect on them, and extract their precious gifts, but we can’t proactively elicit aha-moment mistakes so much, although we can, by soliciting more feedback, but the stretch mistakes are really what we can proactively drive by doing things that are challenging and changing the way we do things.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. And it is so true that the sloppy mistakes can bring joy and humor to our lives. In fact, I don’t think this Twitter exists anymore, which is a darn shame. But this theme exists, like, on Reddit and some places, that you had one job. And it’s just all about just ridiculous mistakes. Like, one of my favorites was the SpongeBob SquarePants episode description, like on Netflix or something, but they had this really dark murder mystery description, and then the caption is like, “Oh, I must’ve missed that SpongeBob episode.” And it just tickles me something special.

And, yes, that is fun, and we can celebrate that. And, particularly, I think that learning zone/performing zone distinction is so handy there in terms of, “Oh, yes, we’re learning now. and, boy, that is goofy and hilarious.” Well, you and I, we’re both friends and fans of Mawi Asgedom. Shoutout, episode number one. And I remember we were trying to name a company that we had started together by just combining words. And I think one of them was so just goofy, Dolphin Secrets, so I just made these memes out of that because it’s goofy, and that’s okay.

And I think, well, you lay it on me, is it fair to say that when we can laugh and be relaxed, and take joy and humor and lightheartedness about mistakes, will that actually help us learn faster and better?

Eduardo Briceño
Yeah, because we can observe them better, we can talk about them better, we can also avoid kind of getting triggered and having, like, a fear, an away-reaction from them. So, absolutely, in general, positive emotions help us learn. Like, sometimes, stress can be helpful, too, especially if it’s not chronic or like super high, but positive emotions can help us engage in the learning process.

And, at the end of the day, again, what is the highest goal? I think, for me, a highest goal is, like, happiness, fulfillment, and appreciation. I want to appreciate life. I want to enjoy life. So, not only is laughing about mistakes helping me learn, it’s also helping me enjoy life, which is even more important.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, anything else when it comes to learning that you want to help distinguish, clarify, myth-debunk, things that we should know when we’re in the learning zone to get the most out of it?

Eduardo Briceño
Well, there are a lot of things we could talk about. One is that sometimes we think about growth mindset or learning zone as something that is about the individual quality, is about us fostering the beliefs and the habits in our brain and in our bodies to be motivated and effective learners.

And there’s a lot of truth to that but we are social beings, and so we need to build cultures and teams and relationships where we can engage in the learning zone together because, at the end of the day, these beliefs about whether people can change are highly influenced by each other, by the people who are around me. What messages are they sending? What behaviors? Are they acting like lifelong learners or are they acting like know-it-alls? That affects my beliefs and it affects my habits.

And so, we need to kind of talk about these things with our colleagues, and think about, “Is the learning zone something that we’re doing well or not doing well? Can we get better? What do we want to work on?” and do it in collaboration because, at the end of the day, we learn a lot better in collaboration with others than on our own. More brains think better than one brain. We have different experiences, different skills, different tactics, different tools, different perspectives, we can see things from different angles, we can give and receive feedback.

And so, what I would encourage people to think about is what habits can you work on as you’re on your own, but also can you bring others into your process and build relationships that are going to lead to better learning and better performance.

Pete Mockaitis
Fantastic. And can you walk us through the growth propeller concept?

Eduardo Briceño
Sure. The growth propeller are the five elements that each of us can think about continuing to develop in order to become fantastic learners and performers. So, picture a propeller with three blades, and in the center of the propeller, the axis, there are two components: our identity and our purpose.

And in terms of our identity, sometimes in terms of a fixed mindset, we might see ourselves as fixed in a particular way, like, “I’m just a natural parent,” for example, “And that’s part of my identity,” “I’m a flawless athlete,” or, “I’m a natural athlete.” And that can get in the way of learning. But what we can do, and what’s most important around the identity, is to develop the identity of being a learner, being somebody who evolves over our lives, and it’s always continuing to change. So, once we can incorporate that into our identity, we’re a lot more effective as learners.

In terms of purpose, having a reason why we do things, why we care about improvement and performance, is really important because both learning and performing involve effort. And so, why are we going to spend that effort? Why do we care? So, developing that purpose as an individual and with our colleagues is something that is necessary in order for us to become great learners and performers.

The three blades are, one is our beliefs, the other ones are habits, and the other one is our community. So, in terms of beliefs, a really important belief that we’ve talked about is growth mindset versus fixed mindset. Another belief is transparency. We learn and perform a lot better when we make our thinking transparent to others because, then, they can give us feedback, they can learn from what we’re thinking.

And so, the fact that transparency is something we want more of, and we want to share more of ourselves, is something we can kind of think about. Also, agency, “To what extent do we have influence over our world rather than are we victims of the world?” is something else to think about in terms of beliefs.

In terms of habits, sometimes we think about growth mindset as something that is about learning from mistakes. So, when we make a mistake, “Do we learn from them?” That’s a very reactive or responsive habit. What I would encourage people to think about is, “Can you develop more proactive habits where changing is the default?” So, what are you doing every day in order to drive your own change and your own evolution?

And, for me, an example, a very simple example that is really powerful for me is, every morning, I remind myself of what it is that I’m working to improve, and that just primes the growth mindset. I am looking for opportunities to do that throughout the day, and it’s super powerful. And then, in terms of community, we need to build trust, we need to build a sense of belonging, and we need to work on collaboration rather than competition in order to both kind of learn and perform.

And so, the growth propeller is chapter seven, and it talks about those five components. And so, the part of the community blade is about the relationships we have with others. So, part two of the book, chapters eight through twelve, is about how we do that in our workplaces, how we build teams in organizations, that make learning the easy default.

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

Eduardo Briceño
Well, I would just mention I really appreciate your podcast, Pete, and just your focus on learning, the workplace, makes the world a better place. It’s awesome to be on the podcast a second time. So, thanks for all you do.

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

Eduardo Briceño
Yeah, the quote I have at the bottom of my email is, “The self is not something one finds. It’s something one creates,” by Thomas Szasz.

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

Eduardo Briceño
Sure. There are many. One is, there’s a meta-analysis from Harvard that looked at 62 research studies that looked into, “How much medical doctors improve in their patient outcomes the more years of experience they have in the profession?” And what they found is that, on average, medical doctors got worse over time. Their patient outcomes became worse because they were so busy in the performance zone, seeing patients, diagnosing, prescribing, and most of them, on average, don’t engage in the learning zone on a regular basis.

And so, as a result, they forget information that’s relevant to infrequent diagnoses, for example, and that decreases their performance. But, of course, there are some doctors that do get better over time. But this points to the difference between experience and expertise. Experience is something we just get by doing an activity a lot. And expertise is something that we build through the learning zone, and that can happen at any age.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Eduardo Briceño
Favorite book, Mindset by Carol Dweck really changed my life. The Art of Happiness by the Dalai Lama changed my life as well. I’m reading a wonderful book right now, it’s called The Clan of the Cave Bear, which is about prehistoric humans. It’s super interesting.

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

Eduardo Briceño
I love Roam Research. It’s a second-brain tool, whereas my knowledge management system tool, there’s a lot of other second-brain tools now. And I also love Otter. When I listen to podcasts, I download the MP3 and I upload it to Otter which transcribes it, and I listen to it through there. And what I love about that is that I can highlight kind of gems in the conversation. And after I listen to the episode, I can kind of do something with that. Either put it in my knowledge management system or send it to somebody else who would appreciate it, for example.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Eduardo, that is walking the talk. That is hardcore and I love it. Thank you. And a favorite habit?

Eduardo Briceño
Well, I mentioned one of reminding myself every morning of what I’m working to improve. Before that, the first thing that I do every day is my most treasured habit, and it is just expressing gratitude for the things that I deem most important, which is life, health, love, and peace. Noticing one of those things that are in my life and in the world just puts me in a great emotional state and makes me grateful to be alive and for what is.

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

Eduardo Briceño
If we fixate on performance, our performance suffers. That’s the performance paradox.

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

Eduardo Briceño
So, my monthly newsletter is on my website, which is at Briceño.com, my last name, dotcom. I’m also active on LinkedIn. And my book is called The Performance Paradox: Turning the Power of Mindset into Action. I worked really hard the last three years to write all the things that we talked about today. So, that’s another way to learn more about my work.

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

Eduardo Briceño
My challenge would be to, “Can you engage in the learning zone a little bit more with others? Could you start a conversation with your colleagues about whether you want to continue to progress in your learning zone habits together and what you want to work on next, that you can bring other people into collaboration with you to learn and perform and accelerate that over time together?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Eduardo, this has been a treat. I wish you much good learning and performing.

Eduardo Briceño
Thank you so much, Pete. It’s been great to speak with you.