KF #2. Action Oriented Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Sébastien, welcome!

Sébastien Page
Thank you. I’m very excited to do a podcast. I don’t get to do that many, and it’s a lot more relaxed than what we usually do on live national TV when we talk about markets.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. Well, it’s funny, you talk about markets a lot, but you got a book about The Psychology of Leadership. What’s that about, Sébastien?

Sébastien Page
You know, I get that question a lot, “Why would a finance guy write a book about self-improvement and high-performing leadership?” I’ve been a leader myself for about 25 years in business. And, to me, I started working on this because, myself, I felt very stressed at work, and I was beating myself up for being stressed. So, I was stressing about stressing.

And, Pete, I talked to a sports psychologist who introduced me to a lot of fascinating research, and that was the beginning. The first time I met him, he had this story because the sports psychologists, it turns out, is a pro-athlete as well, 40 national titles in the sport of handball. And so, that’s the sport that looks like squash but you smack the ball with your hands. Forty, four-zero, national titles, and he’s a sports psychologist. His name is Dr. Daniels Simmons.

This is the origin story of the book, “Why would a finance guy end up writing a book on self-improvement and leadership?” He tells me the story of his best match ever, and it’s a match that occurred 10 years ago but he remembers everything about it. He remembers every point, where he was at every point, where the ball was. He has a tear in his eye. At some point, he’s on his knees, he makes an extreme impossible shot.

And then, Pete, it’s an absolute letdown because he goes, “And then I lost the next two points.” And I go, “What? You lost the game?” And that’s the mindset of a sports psychologist, where you have 40 national titles, and your best match ever is one that you happen to lose, but that’s not really relevant. To him, that day he realized he could play at a higher level because he was playing a stronger opponent.

So, I became fascinated with this mindset of sports psychology. So, that’s how the book started. And then I just dug into the research.

Pete Mockaitis
So, it was it his best game ever in terms of his own performance or his delight in it because he realized that he had achieved at a higher level?

Sébastien Page
It was mainly the latter. It was the realization that he could play at a higher level. And, to me, it was the realization of a mindset, which, by the way, relates to money management as well. You can’t get everything right in money management. Sometimes you lose. It was an illustration of that mindset and how you handle it.

But, for him, it was, “Look, I’m now a stronger player. It doesn’t matter that I won or lost.” It doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about winning. It’s just a different way to approach uncertainty and failure.

Pete Mockaitis
No, it’s a good one. One of our guests, Michael Bungay-Stanier, who wrote The Coaching Habit and others, said his favorite quote is, “The purpose of life is to be defeated by ever-greater things,” or some of that notion of ever-greater things.

Sébastien Page
I like that.

Pete Mockaitis
And that you can feel good about that, in terms of “Okay, hey, I still lost but, wow, my golly, look at what it took to take me out. I’m really getting better. That’s awesome!”

Sébastien Page
I like that a lot. And I often think back on Roger Federer’s commencement address that went viral about six months ago. He was speaking to students. And Roger Federer is one of the top tennis players of all time, and he goes, “I’ve played 1500 matches in my career. I’ve won 80% of them.” But then he asked the students, “What percentage of points do you think I won?”

What do you think, Pete, is that percentage, percentage of points that Federer won in his career? Not to put you on the spot.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I don’t know how tennis scoring works. I was going to wildly guess, 61, Sébastien.

Sébastien Page
So, you’re not far. It’s 54%. So, Roger Federer, top tennis player only won 54% of the points. And then he looked at the students, and he said, “Whatever game you play in life, you’re going to lose.” Effortless winning is a myth and it’s your mindset when you lose. You actually learn more in sports psychology, from losing than from winning.

In fact, I write this in The Psychology of Leadership, sports psychology is not about winning at all. It’s about losing and what you do with that loss. And I really liked what you said earlier about losing to ever-greater things or ever-greater opponents. That’s exactly the conversation that sparked my interest in sports psychology and how it can apply to leadership, to business management, and to money management as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I was thinking about money things as well. It might’ve been Mark Cuban, who said, “You only have to be right once,” in terms of, like, your entrepreneurial career. Yeah, you can fill many things but your one big win, and, whoo, you’re doing awesome.

Sébastien Page
Yeah, that’s an analogy in venture capital, and it’s the same idea. You have to accept the fact that a lot of your bets are not going to work. As long as there’s one that goes 10X, you’re going to be a successful venture capitalist.

But in terms of self-improvement, we don’t like losing, and we have to kind of get over that. As leaders, when you look at business environments, accepting that you’re going to have setbacks, and just focusing on what you do with those and how you move forward. That’s where the mindset shifts.

And, look, I think, Pete, in general, sports psychology is greatly underrated. I wrote the book also because the positive side of psychology is kind of still on unexplored in business. If you go on Google Scholar, and you searched for articles in clinical psychology, you’ll probably get about the same number of articles as in positive psychology. To me, that’s fascinating. The business world has only scratched the surface here of the positive side of psychology.

Let me give you an example. Does the name Felix Baumgartner ring a bell?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, he got the red ball really high up stunt.

Sébastien Page
Yes. Here’s the stunt. He goes on a helium balloon, up 24 miles to the edge of space, he steps out of his capsule, and he skydives for 10 minutes, four minutes in freefall. The first human being to break the sound barrier. I mean, it’s amazing what he did. But what most people don’t know is Felix Baumgartner was coached every step of the way in preparation and through the day of that skydiving from space stunt by a sports psychologist.

So, I used this sometimes as an introduction to, yeah, psychology is super important to treat clinical anxiety and depression, but it’s also really important for ultra-high performance. And that’s where the business world hasn’t really come around to this much yet. And it just brings so much tools to deal with setbacks and the stress that comes with high performance, because it’s stressful to deliver high performance in any area of life.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, you’ve got a number of really cool principles that you put out in your book, and I want to jump into speaking about these bits, about mindset. You said we should identify and manage our core beliefs. Tell us, why and how is that done?

Sébastien Page
So, a core belief is the way you interpret the world. Think of it as rules of thumb. They might not be entirely conscious but it’s how you interpret events, and how you tend to make decisions. In the research in psychology, it’s often about a traumatic event that changed your core belief.

So, imagine someone who was betrayed in a major way in their life. They might’ve developed a core belief that everybody is out to get them, and that’s how they’re going to interpret situations and go through life with that core belief.

Now, in business, we have core beliefs. “The consumer is always right,” is a popular one. In money management, we have core beliefs, “The trend is your friend,” or, “Buy low and sell high.” And the thing about core beliefs in business, in leadership, for yourself, is that they’re, oftentimes, unexamined.

Do you know, Pete, what your core beliefs are, how you tend to react under pressure, how you tend to interpret the world? Not necessarily. You might have core beliefs that you haven’t realized you’re using to make important decisions.

So, in that principle, I encourage people, for themselves, for their teams, for their company, to write them down, examine them, discuss them, “What do we believe in? How do we interpret the world?” And here’s the key. Some of them, you’re going to want to get rid of. Other ones, you’re going to want to foster within your team or within your organization. And that’s where you start managing core beliefs, and it’s incredibly powerful in setting the right culture for high performance.

I had a core belief earlier in my career, my boss used to say that I heard high frequencies, and this was about corporate politics. What he meant was, you know how dogs hear certain noises that humans don’t hear?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. I’m thinking about the Superman movie with Gene Hackman, and that dog with high pitch thing. But Superman and the dogs could hear it.

Sébastien Page
Yes. So, he would say, “You hear high frequencies, like you’re hearing political noise, or you’re worried about things that are really just high frequencies.” And he would remind me of this every time I get worried. And my response was usually, “Well, it’s not paranoia if they’re really after you.” That’s kind of a famous quote that people use sometimes, “It’s not paranoia if they’re really after you.”

But that was a bad core belief. It was a bad core belief to think that, to not assume good intentions. And I kind of managed and replaced that core belief with, “Start by assuming good intentions.” It’s just a good starting point, even if you’re wrong. It’s a better way to start when you’re managing team dynamics and corporate politics.

So, that’s an example of examining core beliefs, changing it for a better one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can you walk us through the practice in terms of how you identify a hidden core belief, and then if you see it, you say, “Ah, actually, I don’t like that. That’s not so helpful”? How do you jettison it? Because I imagine that’s perhaps easier said than done.

Sébastien Page
So, people in clinical psychology, when they might have really unhealthy core beliefs, they just go to therapy, and that’s a way, through discussion and through the therapeutic to identify your core beliefs but I think you don’t need to go to therapy to identify your core beliefs.

I think, as a team setting, say in a business environment, what you want to do is observe how people behave, think, make decisions, interpret events during moments of high pressure, during moments when it’s tough decision, and there’s emotion in the room. That’s usually where we default to some core beliefs.

And then what you do is you discuss these. Let’s take money management. Markets are crashing, “Are we prone to just sell and panic or buy more or sit tight?” And there’s probably a core belief behind that. And so, you identify those moments of pressure, and then you see how they come out, they surface, during those moments.

It’s also often written down in a company’s founding or there’s a lot of companies that will write, “We believe…” statements. And those are usually a bit cheesy and motherhood and apple pie, and they sit on a PowerPoint somewhere, and they’re cliché, and we don’t really read them or believe them. But you know what? These things really matter day to day.

Not necessarily the curated PowerPoint, but, “What do we believe as a team?” whether it’s a sports team, whether it’s a family. You’re a leader in your family. You don’t have to manage people in a business to be a leader. So, in The Psychology of Leadership, I give some examples of company core beliefs or team core beliefs, and just writing them down is very helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
So, let’s hear a real belief, written down, that’s powerful and has a galvanizing real impact on a team.

Sébastien Page
So, for us in business, if we’re disagreeing on something, the best way to win the argument, say it’s a product development or an investment decision, is to make the case on behalf of our clients. So, there is a core belief that everything we do, everyday we go to work, is to make money for our clients so they can get better retirements, pay their bills, put their kids through college.

That’s the mission of a money manager. You go to work and you want to make money for your clients. So, that’s a core belief. We write it down often, we talk about it, and we resolve disagreements with them, is that we’re acting as fiduciaries for our clients.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very good. And then you also have a principle about “Be disagreeable sometimes.”

Sébastien Page
So, in personality psychology, we all know whether we’re introverts or extroverts, and that’s actually popular in the business world nowadays to talk about introversion, but there are these other traits, and agreeableness is one of the traits that I talk about in The Psychology of Leadership.

Agreeableness is a great trait to have. It just means that you like to get along, you’re a good listener, you tend to not confront people head on, but like any personality trait, it has downsides. If you’re too high in agreeableness, you’re a people-pleaser and you’ll put other people’s needs before yours, and that might not be productive for your own career and even for the benefit of the team.

So, some people score high in agreeableness, some people score low. In The Psychology of Leadership, I actually publish my own scores. I’m tempted to put you on the spot, Pete, to see if you would score yourself high or low in agreeableness.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m too agreeable, it’s a problem. I need to, sometimes, not give a “Good God, gosh, golly” about other people’s perspectives in order to do what’s optimal, yeah.

Sébastien Page
You hit the nail on the head. If you want to be a good leader, an effective leader, you can’t spend your days just trying to build consensus and making everybody happy. You’re going to have to make some decisions where you’re going to have to be disagreeable.

And I say 10% of the time in The Psychology of Leadership, this is a book that’s full of research. All the principles are research-backed but the 10% is my intuitive recommendation, know when to be disagreeable at the right moment, when you need to put your foot down. Only then you’ll be an effective leader.

You can’t just go through your day-to-day as a leader just constantly trying to make everybody happy. It’s a desirable thing, though. That’s why I say 10%, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Wel, it’s true. And as I think about, if you hear the stories of great leaders through history, there are often those moments in which all or many of the advisors around them are pushing them in one direction, and they say, “No, absolutely not. That could result in nuclear annihilation. So, we’re not doing that. We’re doing the opposite,” and they firmly, with backbone, go ahead and do the thing. And we’re still alive today, so thanks to good leadership backbone.

So, I guess the hard part, Sébastien, is how do we know, “When is that 10%?” How do you know, “You know what? I am, indeed, putting my foot down, and the perspectives I’m getting are incomplete or just plain wrong. And so, we’re going my way this time”?

Sébastien Page
Well, let me give you two cases. One is you, as the leader, have information because you’re connected to the board of directors or the clients. You might have information that you can’t share for one reason or the other.

But there’s an information asymmetry and you know what the right decision is, or maybe you have a unique talent, and only you. But be careful with that because that can turn into arrogance. But you have an edge in making the decision. Like, in your example. You’re going to be disagreeable.

The other part of it, number two, is that the job of the leader, often, is to resolve conflicts. And you’ll have people come at you with recommendations that disagree. So, one person wants the organization to go left, the other person wants the organization to go right, “Leader, what are we going to do?” It can be absolutely exhausting and counterproductive to just try to create some kind of consensus or keep everybody happy. If the organization needs to move fast, you have to use your 10% right there.

So, you use your 10% when there’s an information asymmetry or really convince you have the right decision and others don’t, and then you use it when, and maybe a bit more often, when you need to help resolve disagreements. Because if you don’t, over time, it builds, and it builds, and it builds, and it becomes your full time just dealing with the disagreements because they fester, they just keep going.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. So, by taking a stand and resolving it, we sort of nip it in the bud.

Sébastien Page
Yes. And remember also, I talk about goal-induced blindness in the book. And with goal-induced blindness, people lose sight of what’s not related to their goals. They just focus narrowly on the goal, and they might sacrifice their health, their family, or their sense of ethics. So, they’re, famously, companies, business leaders, or sports leaders and athletes, that cheat because they have goal-induced blindness.

And so, when you as a leader, you really have to put your foot down, and say, “Okay, you need to go home and rest. This is perhaps a disagreeable way. I know you want to stay here and keep going,” or, “This is an ethical grey area and we don’t go nowhere near that. And, therefore, I’m putting my foot down.”

So, exercising leadership is a lot about inspiring people, is a lot about building consensus, is a lot about being agreeable, but 10% of the time, and that’s my own rule, 10% of the time it’s not, and that’s a crucial part of the job.

Pete Mockaitis
Goal-induced blindness is a fun turn of a phrase. And I’m curious if there are any early-warning signals you look for to see, “Uh-oh, it looks like we are starting to tip-toe into blind territory.”

Sébastien Page
You’re going to start seeing it through people getting exhausted, through morale, through customer feedback, but let’s just define goal-induced blindness clearly. It’s well-researched in psychology, and let me give you an example, Pete.

I was in front of about a thousand students, giving a talk, about two months ago. And I asked the students the following question. I’m going to ask you, too, although I think I know what you’re going to answer. Imagine I give you a bowl of a hundred gummy bears. Four of them are poisoned and they’re going to kill you. So, you have a 4% chance of dying.

And my challenge to you, Pete, is would you eat one gummy bear for $100,000?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’d have to run all the numbers but I’m guessing no because it would take vast sums for me to think it’s worth trading my life, and our numbers aren’t good enough here, Sébastien.

Sébastien Page
So, look, I offered the students, hypothetically, a million. That was my opening. And I saw 15-20% of the room raised their hands. And in surveys, when you ask Millennials, for example, there are good surveys on them, 81% of them say that their life goal is to become rich, which, by the way, is not a bad goal. Go for it. Like, measurable goals, traditional goals are motivating, go for it.

But the caveat about goal-induced blindness is that, I mean, what? Eating one of those gummies is complete goal-induced blindness. Like, no amount of money is worth doing this. And here’s why I used four gummies that are poisoned out of a hundred.

The literature in psychology refers to Mt. Everest deaths. If you want to summit Everest, you have a 4% chance of dying in the process. And when you read about psychology and goal-induced blindness, there are lots of examples of people who die on Everest because they have the summit in their sight, and they lose sight of everything else, the risk they’re taking.

So, at the end of one of my principles, I go, “If you’re going to take any advice from this entire book, take the following. If ever you feel like climbing Everest because it’s there or some other reason, my advice to you is ‘Don’t.’”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, it’s funny because Everest, we think about money, I suppose my frame of reference for even entertaining the gummy bears is that if I think about my life as a gift or contribution to family, nonprofit, others, like, “What is the impact I would like to give? What’s the impact I would like to create by putting my life in service of folks? And then what might be the comparable impact of a vast sum of funds going to, you know, starving or whatever, folks in need?”

So, I guess that’s how I’m thinking about it. Because we might say, “Would you eat a gummy bear if it meant you’d save many lives in the neighboring room?” And so, I guess that’s how I’m thinking about it. Whereas, Everest, yeah, I mean, one, I’m not that into mountain climbing, even though it’s kind of fun.

You’re right, I think that’s excellent to think about goal-induced blindness, is you just want it really bad, and you’re excited about it, and to heck with the risks.

Sébastien Page
Look, you found the perfect counterargument to what I was saying, which is you might have altruistic goals that you are behaving in a way that looks like goal-induced blindness but it’s a completely different framework, it’s to do something good. And there, we get philosophical. And there’s the theory of utility, and “How do you achieve the greater good for the greater number of people?”

Psychology is not much about philosophy. My son is 17, happens to be really interested in philosophy, so we talk about these things. But, Pete, you gave a really good counterargument there. My general recommendation is to pursue goals, go for it. Like, measurable goals work. They work. They motivate. We take people to the moon. We want to go to the moon. That’s the goal. And it works. And it’s okay to want to make money.

And I think, even better, if you want to make money for altruistic ends because, in that case, also research in psychology, in positive psychology, shows that that is much more likely to make you happy, Pete, to help others than making more money per se. And there’s a lot of research about “Does happiness increase with money?”

If you’re in poverty, it definitely does, but then it does not much after a certain level. That’s also well-published research. But the problem with goal-induced blindness is that it happens. So, I’m arguing for having goals, for being aggressive in pursuing them, but for being mindful of “Are you still taking care of yourself? Like, are you healthy? Are you sleeping? Are you eating okay? Are you exercising? And don’t cheat, ever. It’s not worth it. Yeah, you’re playing a long-term game.”

And recognize when you’re slipping into goal-induced blindness. That’s a risk for high performers, not for low performers.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s good to note that, sometimes, as you pursue a goal, we realize the costs are much greater than originally anticipated. And it may be wise to pause, and say, “Hmm, new information has come to light. Perhaps this goal is no longer worth pursuing,” although that is a bummer, and make sure you don’t let your ego get into it, like, “I’m not a quitter.” It’s like, “Okay.”

Well, I think about that with Everest, in terms of folks, they get in that position where they pretty close to the summit, and they realize, “Uh-oh, we’re entering a high-danger situation,” and some folks will wisely turn back even though they were so close to the peak, and those who are like, “Doggone it, I’m so close, I can’t give up. I’m just going to go for it. I’m going for it.”

Sébastien Page
Look, quitting might be the most underrated skill in business. We think of leaders as those that never give up and stick to the goal, but there are plenty of occasions in business when the facts change and the future profits from your project have changed, and you have to quit even though you’ve invested a lot in that project.

Annie Duke has a fantastic book that she titled Quit, and it’s about how quitting is an underrated skill in business. And I refer to her research in The Psychology of Leadership as well. So, I’m glad you bring this up. Pete, the other example I like to use when talking about goals is my friend, Phil. So, that’s the story of my friend, Phil. Phil made a billion dollars.

Pete Mockaitis
Shout out, Phil.

Sébastien Page
Yeah, with his cryptocurrency company, and he decided to give everything away to charity. And the next morning, he was eating his cereal in his kitchen, and an angel appeared to him. So, this is usually where I disclose that it’s not a true story, but it’s illustrative.

Pete Mockaitis
“What an interesting life Phil has had. He earned a billion dollars. Sees angels.”

Sébastien Page
You might’ve been wondering where this interview was going.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I bet, I’m an angel, Sébastien, so, okay, fiction with you.

Sébastien Page
It’s a made-up story but I use it to frame goals. So, the angel said, “Oh, you’re such a good person. I’m going to give you one of the following three gifts. I can give you infinite power, I can give you infinite wealth, or I can give you infinite wisdom.”

So, I don’t know, let’s encourage our audience to think about which one they would choose. Pete, which one would you choose – power, wealth, or wisdom?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m tempted to say, to paint how we define the terms, infinite wisdom may lead you to, if you so desire, infinite wealth and power in addition. So, it’s like a three-for-one deal with the wisdom.

Sébastien Page
Or it may lead you to not desire those things.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, yeah.

Sébastien Page
Who knows? But that was the interesting part about that story, is that Phil chose wisdom. And so, for the first time in human history, someone had infinite wisdom. There was a giant press conference, cameras in his face, lightbulbs flashing. What would the person with infinite wisdom say? We’ve never heard from anyone with infinite wisdom.

And the story goes, Phil said, “I should’ve taken the money.” And this is the frame that I use to talk about goals and long-term goals, and how we think about, “Which goals will make us happy?” And this is where positive psychology comes in.

And Andre Agassi, for example, had the clear goal of being one of the best, or the best tennis player. He was miserable his entire career. His autobiography is one of the best books I’ve ever read, Open by Andre Agassi. He was absolutely miserable. He hated playing tennis. And when he left tennis, I think he became much happier.

So, we set these goals and we don’t take the time to think about “What long-term goal will truly make me happy?” So, positive psychology says, when they followed people for their entire lifetime over 80 years, eight decades, this is a study out of Harvard, and they go, “What makes people thrive over their lifetime? What makes them happy? Let’s ask them, on a regular basis, how they’re doing.” A bunch of questions, “How are you doing? How are you feeling? How’s your life going?”

And then there’s generations of researchers, as you can imagine. There’s no study like this. It’s fascinating. Eighty years running, it’s still running. Robert Waldinger out of Harvard, he’s fantastic, and he’s still running that study.

But what they found was people, during their lifetime, who climbed the social ladder, who were healthy, who made money, were not necessarily statistically happier than those who lost their job, who got sick, who went to prison.

It’s just so fascinating that all these traditional goals did not make people happy. And there was one dimension, though, that showed to be very powerful in people’s ability to thrive in the long run and feel happy with their lives.

I don’t know if you’d talked about it in your podcast with Robert, but it is those that had the most positive relationships in their lives self-reported the higher levels of happiness over their lifetime. So, relationships are important.

Now, we’re getting into notions of happiness and positive psychology, and here I am, a business guy, talking about these very abstract concepts. What does it mean in business? It means a ton. If you have a bad day at work, it’s probably because of a relationship issue. I would say, nine out of ten times, you’d come home and you just had a bad day at work, it’s probably relationship-related.

If you want to run a high-performing organization, a high-performing soccer team, a high-performing orchestra, a large proportion of the success of the team is going to be the quality of their relationships. And it’s not about being nice and feeling good every time, but it’s trust, it is mutual respect, it’s how you give feedback to each other. Those things are absolutely necessary for strong leadership and strong team performance.

So, we go from this theoretical, positive, nice-sounding positive psychology stuff to really practical business practices in terms of how you give feedback, how you receive feedback, how you talk about culture, why culture matters, how people interact within a team, why trust is so important.

And I say set goals that are longer term, that will generate organizational happiness, set goals for yourself that are positive in nature, and here’s how you go about executing against those goals.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, we talked about agreeableness a little bit. I also want to talk about neuroticism. You’ve got a bit about learning to love to worry. Tell us why and how do we do that?

Sébastien Page
We talked about why I wrote this book, initially, why I got interested, particularly in sports psychology. I felt stressed. And I was beating myself, well, for feeling stressed, I thought, “I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I’ve had more stressful jobs. Why do I feel stressed at work?” And there, sports psychology is incredibly helpful because you learn to embrace a certain amount of stress.

I explain in The Psychology of Leadership that optimal performance does not occur at a stress level of zero. In other words, stress can increase performance up to a point of optimal performance, after which, performance decreases, mental health gets impacted, you choke, it impacts your physical health as well.

But this idea of going through life trying to operate at zero stress, first of all, is absolutely impossible. And the top athletes, I guarantee you, speaking to a sports psychologist who trains them mentally, they get absolutely stressed. Now, sports psychologists like to reframe stress as activation or arousal. In the literature, there are different ways to define this.

I’m using the term stress loosely here. But this idea that there’s a curve, that stress to a certain amount, with activation, will improve, not decrease, your performance is super fascinating. And, by the way, those curves, they’ve been studied for almost a hundred years, and they are different for different people. So, your stress curve might be different from my stress curves, and they’re also different for different tasks.

For some tasks, you’ll perform really well when you’re really stressed, when you have the adrenaline pumping. If you’re going to run a 5K, you’re probably going to get your best time with a very high level of activation and some adrenaline coursing and some, yes, some stress before the race. You’re going to perform better.

If you’re going to do archery or something complex or solve math problems, you’re going to need some activation but your optimal performance is going to be at a lower-stress level.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that makes sense. As I think about when I’m really fired up, my hands are kind of shaky. So, precision archery isn’t the best. Well, you got me thinking about biathlon athletes which is the fun-nest sport. The funniest idea for a sport, “Let’s go cross-country skiing, and then pause and shoot, and then do it again and again.” And so, there you have it, they’re playing both games at the same time.

Sébastien Page
I love that example because, to ski, I mean, the technique is pretty straightforward. They got to be pretty activated. And then they need to bring it down really quick for the shooting. So, it combines two stress curves, and the ability to toggle between the two is part of that sport. That’s a great example, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
I want to hear your piece about thinking about death.

Sébastien Page
So, does that sound positive or negative to you if I just say that?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I mean, there’s some ancient stoic philosophy about the benefits of remembering, thinking about your death. So, yeah, on the surface, it feels a little spooky and unpleasant, yet there could be rich goodness under the surface.

Sébastien Page
Look, Stephen Covey has one of the best-selling self-improvement books of all time, The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People. One of the habits is “Begin with the end in mind.” And he does talk about thinking about what you want to reflect on at the end of your life.

And then Covey argues once you figure that out, it guides your values, and you bring that back to today and it’ll help you make better decisions that are more aligned with your long-term goals and long-term values. So, I love that.

In fact, one of the early titles of the book, instead of The Psychology of Leadership, was “The End in Mind.” I actually wanted to give a nod to Covey.

But so, you’d think about death, it helps you think about positive psychology. There’s a model in positive psychology that spells P-E-R-M-A, PERMA. It was developed by Marty Seligman, father of Positive Psychology. I hate acronyms because we use way too many of them in business, but I love that one. So, P stands for positive emotion, and then ERMA, E stands for engagement, R for relationships, quality relationships, M for meaning, and A for long-term accomplishment.

When you think about your death or when you think about what you want on your tombstone, what you’re going to reflect on has a lot more to do with ERMA – engagement, relationships, meaning, and long-term accomplishments – than what day-to-day you and I and everybody in our audience, we’re all seeking, which is basic positive emotions, a good glass of wine, a laugh, a like on social media. We’re all addicted to the positive emotions.

But if you put this in the context of thinking very long term, think about death, stoicism, the end in mind, however you want to frame that thinking, you introduce notions of positive psychology that are incredibly powerful. We don’t really talk about this in business, but there are lots of ways to think about applications of this in business.

For example, engagement. More than half of employees in surveys in our country are not engaged at work. So, how do you use research in psychology to improve engagement? And you introduce the notion of flow, how you set the goals, how you set the milestones to put people in flow, and so on. Meaning is incredibly important in business, and some are underrated sometimes.

So, I could go on but this whole idea of starting from the end point is a big part of The Psychology of Leadership, of goal-setting, and of executing against goals.

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

Sébastien Page
I would say, first of all, thank you for having me on your podcast. You know, I mentioned, in my day job as a money manager, I have to go and talk about financial markets in the space of two to ten minutes, and it is high pressure and it’s live national TV. I’m super happy that you got me on here, to have more of a conversation. It was a lot of fun. I hope our audience liked it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. Well, now let’s hear about a favorite quote.

Sébastien Page
Okay. Marcus Aurelius, “You have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.”

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

Sébastien Page
There’s some research that shows that social comparison is a more powerful motivator than positive encouragement.

So, here you go, Pete. If someone else has a podcast that you feel you’re competing with, and they’re getting more views, better ratings, it should be, theoretically, based on that research, more motivating to you than if I just called you, and say, “Hey, Pete, you’re doing a great job. Keep going.”

And so, it’s counterintuitive. We look down on social comparison but it’s actually very powerful. And if you can gamify it and enjoy competition, it could be a super powerful tool.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Sébastien Page
I got to go with David Goggins, either of his books, Can’t Hurt Me or the follow-up. And I read so many books but there’s no author like David Goggins that is going to motivate you to do something about your physical health and exercise.

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

Sébastien Page
Favorite tool in my day-to-day life, very underrated, I feel, is a calorie counter. I think it’s really hard to eat a decent diet. I don’t think we should all, like, try to be perfect. But counting your calories is pretty much, at least in my life, the only way that I could get a decent diet going, is to actually look at it and count it. So, those are, like, really helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Sébastien Page
This is going to sound unusual, I suppose. It’s important to me to have a streak for exercise, and I’ve basically exercised every day for more than 12 years, for at least 30 minutes. Sometimes, when I’m tired, I just go on a slow jog.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key Sébastien-original soundbite that you’re known for, or people quote back to you often?

Sébastien Page
The most critical lesson in leadership that I’ve learned over the last few years, and I’ve been a leader for 25 years, is summarized in four words, “Talk less. Listen more.” We think leaders have to be outstanding communicators, and that is part of the job, but listening is what is going to really push your leadership skills upwards.

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

Sébastien Page
PsychologyofLeadership.net or LinkedIn.

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

Sébastien Page
Set big goals.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sébastien, thank you. This is fun.

Sébastien Page
Thank you. Likewise.

Pete Mockaitis
Dave, welcome back!

Dave Crenshaw
Pete, it’s great to be here. I always enjoy talking with you. We always have a good time.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, maybe too good of a time. You’ve introduced me to “Slay the Spire,” which has cost me hours of fun.

Dave Crenshaw
It didn’t cost you. You gained all that, right?

Pete Mockaitis
It cost me. There was gain and cost. And my son, Johnny, likes it now too. So that’s cool. Thank you for that.

Dave Crenshaw
Oh, that’s fantastic.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we’re talking about procrastination and taking action despite, you know, internal emotional resistance and reluctance. And as a backdrop for this, I’d love it if you could kick us off with, you have a deeply vulnerable and powerful annual practice. And I bumped into a seven-minute video from you on LinkedIn. I wasn’t expecting, but was like, “Wow, this is this is powerful stuff.”

And the comments, likewise, were resonating and finding actionable wisdom for some of their own difficulties, but in terms of mental health or taking care of business when they don’t feel like it. So, could you share a little bit of that context?

Dave Crenshaw
So I’ve dealt with a variety of mental health challenges throughout my life. And a big element of that has been depression. And the way that I heard someone describe it is– and part of what I’ve dealt with, in conjunction with that, is pretty recurrent suicidal thoughts. But, in particular, one year, it was just bad. My body chemistry was completely compromised. And so, I had to work with a psychologist, to work with a psychiatrist, get medical help to solve the issue. And as I was coming out of that, Pete, there was a moment where I had one foot in and one foot out. Meaning I saw what I was like and I saw where I was going and the things were getting better.

And in that moment, I realized I had an opportunity to help people because I was in both worlds and I could see what it was like to not deal with that, but also the pathway that I was taking to get out. And so, I recorded one video, and then later on condensed it, and started to share the strategy that I used to get out of that with the goal that this is going to help someone.

Pete Mockaitis
That is beautiful, powerful. Thank you for sharing that. And, yes, I, too, have dealt with suicidal thoughts from time to time, and it is tough and unpleasant.

Dave Crenshaw
I’m sorry that you had to go through that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you.

Dave Crenshaw
It’s a terrible feeling. 

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. And I think, like, this provides maybe perhaps the most intense or dramatically possible backdrop for thinking about procrastination or emotional reluctance, resistance to doing stuff. Because I’ve had, you know, more often than suicidal thoughts, like sort of just like a malaise in terms of, “Oh, I don’t feel like it and these things seem so hard.” And it’s like I’m thinking and moving slower.

And yet, even when th is happens, I have found it is possible, and often not fun, but sometimes surprisingly fun, to go ahead and take care of some business.

And you have a transformational tactic that you’ve shared, and folks are really vibed with. Can you tell us about it?

Dave Crenshaw
Yeah, and I’ll give a little bit of a context for this. As a time management guy, because that’s what I do, one day, I was coaching a client, this is where this thought came from. And he was talking about vacations, and about how he would take a vacation and he’d rush to get everything ready. At the end of the vacation, and then he would have to catch up and do all this other stuff at the other side of it.

And he said the phrase, “If it weren’t for the last minute, I wouldn’t get anything done.” And that is a very common thing for people who experience ADHD and a variety of different psychological challenges. And I think it’s just human as well. And I thought about that and I thought, “What if it was the other way around? What if it was, ‘If it weren’t for the first minute, I wouldn’t get anything done’?”

And that was something that I immediately made a part of my time management training. And the idea is simply this. When we look at a project, we look at a task, we feel overwhelmed, we say, “This is going to be difficult for me to do.” I was coaching someone who was in sales, and this was back in the day, I’m dating myself. He would actually open up the phone book and call people, right?

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, cold call is not dead, Dave.”

Dave Crenshaw
I’ve got a mentor who still does it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, Blunt’s in my ear right now.

Dave Crenshaw
So, he would say, “It’s really hard for me to start making cold calls.” And I would say, “Well, what’s the first minute? What’s the first action that you need to take?” And he’d say, “Well, I need to identify who I’m going to call.” I said, “No, no, no. You’re thinking five, 10 minutes in. What’s the first minute? What’s the first action?”

And he said, “I just need to open up the phone book.” And I said, “Okay. In your calendar, schedule that. Block out how much time you think you’re going to have to take, whether that’s an hour or two hours or whatever. Block it out. But in your calendar, write the phrase, ‘Open up the phone book.’” And the moment he did that, he was like, “Oh, I can do that. That’s easy.” And then he immediately was able to flow right into starting to make the calls.

And so, a big part of my training, and my processing, in my course, “Time Management Fundamentals” and elsewhere, I tell people to schedule the first action, the first minute of activity. And that’s a way to just jump over all that emotional baggage that we have and just trick yourself into starting to be productive.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. So, literally, on the calendar, we see, “Open up the phone book,” or whatever it is. Or, “Sit at desk,” in terms of, like, the first minute, the first action. And I think that’s great, even if you have not scheduled it or you’re in the midst of a thing, and it’s like, “Oh, I should do this task, but, oh, I don’t want to. It’s so complicated. There are all these different stakeholders, and then I don’t want to step on any toes, that I’m probably going to offend someone. And who needs to be included?”

So, you got all the stuff that pops up showing why this is difficult or unpleasant. And then I think it really helps, for me, if I think about the first minute, or like the tiniest step, it’s, I’m like coaxing myself like a child.

It’s like, “Okay, Pete, you know what? We don’t have to finish all those things. No, no, no. All we’re doing, we’re going to read that email. We’re just going to read every word of that email. And then we’ll just pause there. That’s all that’s happening.” And then if that feels too hard, it’s like, “I’m going to open that email. We’re just going to open it,” and then it’ll be on the screen, and then you can do what you want from there.”

And so, I am like coaxing and coaching myself into the tiniest step. If one minute’s too hard, maybe the first four seconds.

Dave Crenshaw
And there’s an interesting thing about emotion. Procrastination is driven largely by the emotion that we feel. Let’s say that there’s a big goal that you want to accomplish. Let’s run through the different time periods and the emotion that you feel, the emotion you feel about it.

So, let’s say that I’m going to create this goal that I’m going to get promoted. When I think about the goal, what’s the emotion that I feel? I feel good. It feels great. When I start doing the work, what’s the emotion that I feel? Usually, I feel pretty good once I’m in the motion of doing it. And then when I accomplish the goal, how do I feel? I feel really good when I did that.

So, emotion is good when you think about it. Emotion is good when you do it. Emotion is good when you complete it. Where is emotion not good? Where does the emotion feel the worst? Just before we start the work, right? So, we have to trick our brain to jump over that emotion, to just ignore it and start the process.

And that’s what the first minute does. It just helps us remove emotion from the equation so the brain can’t bog us down. And then once we start working, we start feeling good again.

Pete Mockaitis
Boy, Dave, I’m seeing in my mind’s eye sort of a graph or infographic or picture. Maybe you’ve made one and I’ve seen it in one of your books or courses, I’m not sure.

Dave Crenshaw
I haven’t, but I should. That sounds good. I’ll make a note of that.

Pete Mockaitis
On the X axis, it’s like we’ve got time, and the Y axis we’ve got feel good. And then we can sort of see, like, at the start, or stop watching Netflix and begin doing the thing is our lowest, most unpleasant time. But then there are several maybe milestones of feel good in terms of, it’s like, “Okay, I’m in the groove,” “Okay, I’m making some progress,” “Okay, I’ve got an insight,” or, “Okay, I’m looking back and feeling kind of proud about what I’ve accomplished over this period of time.”

So, it’s like there are numerous phases or eras over the course of this thing. And yet, our brains can vary adeptly, zero in on a short sliver of a minute or two or three that is most unpleasant. And that’s kind of a distortion in and of itself. That is not an accurate representation of the overall emotional pleasant or unpleasantness of the whole arc of the thing.

Dave Crenshaw
And let’s tie just a little bit of science into this. Our brains are hardwired to resist change. That’s an evolutionary advantage. That’s a good thing because it allows us to take things that normally would take a lot of work and make them easy. For example, brushing your teeth. I don’t have to think, anymore, about how I’m going to brush my teeth, and that’s because the brain has created a pattern that says, “This is how it’s done.”

And so, because my brain doesn’t like change, it also makes it easy to continually do the things that it should do. The problem is whenever we try to do something new, our brains go, “What are you doing? You’re messing up the system. I didn’t exercise at 6:00 a.m. in the past. Why are you making me do it now?”

And so, that first minute of activity can play an element in forming new positive habits.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. So, by thoughtfully, conscientiously designing, selecting, choosing what we’re doing with that first minute is very powerful in terms of trajectory. It sends us down and the habits and patterns and grooves that get formed.

Dave Crenshaw
Yeah. And we can trick ourselves into creating new habits, new patterns, just by doing that first minute over and over. And you do that repeatedly for a month, and pretty soon what used to be something your brain resists is now something that your brain embraces and just pushes the momentum to it.

So, you can use that that gift both directions. You can use it to prevent yourself from doing what should be done or you can use it to create a new habit, and then your brain locks in and it becomes easier in the future.

Pete Mockaitis
That is really solid. And thinking, linking it back to the suicidal thoughts, I deliberately chose a replacement in terms of, if I was feeling super tired, stressed, overwhelmed, just, “Aargh,” I might have the thought like, “Ugh, I want to die.” And so, it was like, I’ve said, “Well, no, no, no. More accurately, what I want is rest.”

So, that’s the new thought. The “I want to die” thought, I am choosing to replace with, “I want rest.” And it is more true and accurate. And it creates a much better internal vibe for me, you know? It’s like, “Okay, well, let’s make a plan to figure out how to get some rest in the near future.”

Dave Crenshaw
It’s interesting. I hadn’t planned on bringing this up, Pete, but I think there’s another principle that I teach that relates here. I have a book called “The Power of Having Fun.”

And there’s a principle that I teach in that called head-heart-mouth. And head-heart-mouth is designed to program your brain. Because a lot of people now, if you say, “What do you like to do for fun?” and, first, they’re going to have a hard time with it, but maybe they do something that’s a break, that’s relaxing, but they don’t feel it. They don’t take it in. And, boy, I can relate to that as dealing with depression, right? I’m doing something that’s supposed to be fun and I’m feeling miserable.

So, head-heart- mouth says, “Do something and then…” head, “…think intellectually, ‘This is a good thing.’” “It was good for me to do that work.” Intellectually, I say in my head. You don’t have to feel it, right? You just say it.

Heart means, “Why was this good?” You ask an emotional question, “Why should I feel good about this? Why would this feel like a good thing?” Well, it’s good to make progress. It’s good to move forward. And I feel like I’m a productive person or I feel like I am adding value to the world. There a lot of reasons why.

Mouth is expressing it in some way. So, you might say, “Hey, I did some work today, it was really hard and I did it anyway.” Or, you might write down in a journal, “I did this thing and it was rewarding to do that.” So, you just get it out of your head. And the more you practice head-heart-mouth with the things that are difficult, the more you start to retrain your brain to feel the positive emotions that are occurring. And then you start to recognize them.

So, whether it’s doing work, you start to feel that work is more rewarding. If it’s having fun, you start to feel that “Slay the Spire” is more gratifying and it’s giving you positive impacts in your life. Whatever it is, spending time with family, you can use that head-heart-mouth to reinforce the power of that first action that you took in the first minute.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s lovely. And this reminds me of the practice of savoring, which is so powerful and yet so easy to not do. So, the head-heart-mouth approach, I like it just makes it explicit in terms of “What are we doing here?” with regard to the savoring as opposed to, “I guess this is cool.”

Dave Crenshaw
It systemizes it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s so easy to just skate right past it, and yet when you systematically have these three pre-planned moves, it just locks it in.

Dave Crenshaw
It’s easy to skate over these things when we are constantly doing multiple things at the same time, when we are media multitasking, when we are not paying attention to the people around us, we start to just create this surface-level skimming of every experience in our life, and I’ve tried to make an effort to not media-multitask anymore, where I’m using my phone and I’m watching a show at the same time.

And I’ve been like, “Okay, I’m not going to do this.” And it’s interesting, like, all of a sudden, these shows that I was watching to take a break started to become more rewarding. And I started to feel happier just simply by not playing “Gems of War” while I’m watching “Severance.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, you know, it’s so funny, Dave, when you said “Severance,” because I love this show so much. I was, like, “Sacrilege! Media-multitasking during ‘Severance.’” Part of me is like, I guess my philosophy or current practice is, “I mean, if the show is, you know, whatever, you know, some 10-year-old sitcom that just has some laughs here and there, you know, no big deal. But if it’s a work of high art, oh, it must be savored.” And you’re saying, “No, don’t media-multitask on anything.”

Dave Crenshaw
Yet, that’s not just about shows, it’s about everything that’s happening around us, the people around us. Even the work that we’re doing, the meetings that we attend, everything starts to become just a little more meaningful and we start to feel more connected when we choose not to multitask.

Where we’re trying to do two attention-requiring tasks at the same time, things take longer, we make more mistakes, we increase our stress, and we damage relationships.

And, you know, I’ve always talked about in terms of those four things, but having this conversation, Pete, I think there’s a fifth cost. And the fifth cost is the impact on our mental health. We damage our mental health and we train our brains to skim through life.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Well, so let’s zoom right back into the moment of, “All right. I got to do a thing and I don’t want to.” Any other pro tips for us in that moment?

Dave Crenshaw
I think the other thing that you want to consider, we’ve talked about the negative emotions that stop us from doing things, but there’s also a positive emotion or a positive mindset that keeps us from doing it, and that’s imagination. So, a lot of people who listen to your show, Pete, they’re highly intelligent, they’re imaginative, they’ve learned how to set goals probably for many of the guests that you have.

And so, we set these goals, we create these resolutions, right, every year, and we say, “I’m going to do it.” And again, the emotion is fantastic because we see this big picture of how my life’s going to get better. The problem is, along with that imagination, we’re also seeing all of the work that needs to be done to get that.

So, I think what I would weave into this is what I teach about goal-setting and achievement, which is just keep splitting the thing in half until it gets as small as possible. So, if I say, you know, I could use any example, let’s say, “I’m going to write a book in a year.” So, then the question is, “Where do I need to be six months from now? Well, six months, I should probably complete my first draft.”

“Where do I need to be three months from now? Well, maybe I should have completed the first chapter. Where do I need to be one and a half months from now? Well, maybe I have a table of contents,” and I just keep splitting it down and down and down and down, until I’m down to “What do I need to do today? What do I need to do in this next minute, in this next second?”

And we take these big goals that we want to accomplish and we break it down into just turning on the computer and looking at the first page.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. That’s super. And so, then when you’re feeling the overwhelm, that’s a great thought, “Well, how could I cut that in half?” And until it’s halved enough times that it’s easy.

Dave Crenshaw
Eventually, you’re going to get to a place where it’s just so darn easy, that’s “Why won’t you do it?”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly.

Dave Crenshaw
And we can do it for the next day, “What do I need to do tomorrow? What do I need to do by the end of the week? And then what’s the one minute that’s going to move me closer to that thing this week?” You know, it’s interesting, this is kind of related to the concept. I did a podcast, I’ve wrapped it up now, and I also have a course on LinkedIn Learning called “Success Stories with Dave Crenshaw.” And I interviewed a really, really interesting character.

Are you familiar with the name Ed Greenwood?

Pete Mockaitis
I think so.

Dave Crenshaw
Many people aren’t but they probably have seen his work. Ed is the creator of “The Forgotten Realms” for “Dungeons and Dragons.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, okay.

Dave Crenshaw
So, all of the characters that you see, the world that you see, all of that was created by Ed. And he was talking about his writing process. And I know that most people here aren’t writers, but you can apply this principle to what you do. He said that he would not finish at the end of a chapter. He would finish with, like, the first paragraph of the next chapter.

So, what happened was, when he would sit down to write the next day, he already had some words on the pages. And I think that’s a great thing to do is sometimes we look for those natural break points, which we should, but then at the end of it say, “What do we need to do to just push this 1% further, just a little bit more so that tomorrow when I pick it up, I can look at it and go, ‘Oh, this is exactly, I know where I’m supposed to be’?”

I thought that was a great principle that I had never heard before, but I think we can do that in a variety of different ways with our work and the projects that we’re approaching.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I like that it’s almost like when you have an open loop in your brain, like unfinished business, then there’s a push to want to close it, to get that kind of wrapped up and into a good stopping point. But to intentionally flip that on its head, it’s like, “Let me go to a terrible stopping point because that is an outstanding starting point.”

Dave Crenshaw
Yeah, it’s going to make that first minute a lot easier. It’s just sort of an extra little tool in the belt to make that simpler the next time you come.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And you can apply that to all sorts of things in terms of if there’s a project, I am going to open up all of the windows associated with doing that task. And so, that’s just there waiting for me when I return to the office the next day. Or, I would lay out all of the physical items necessary to complete a thing. And then, if like the phone book is open, and a sticky note with an arrow is affixed to the name, or the CRM, as the case may be in 2025.

Dave Crenshaw
Yeah. And the other thing that’s really interesting, too, is I’ve started using AI that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Go on.

Dave Crenshaw
So, maybe I have to work on a project and I’ve got all of these random thoughts in my head. What I can do is just dump them into ChatGPT. That’s what I use, and we have like a team thing. And the great thing about that is when you own a corporate plan, it protects it, right, that keeps it from going out there. So, we can put everything in there.

And I’ll have all these ideas, these random ideas, and they’re just not quite cohesive. And I just dump it in, and I say, “Can you put this into a logical order,” right? I’m not asking it to do the work for me. I’m asking it to order my thoughts for me and give me a starting point. And then I see the order and I go, “That is exactly what I was trying to do with all that chaos that was in my head.”

And now I can take that outline, or whatever it is, and I can start to order. It can’t replace my creativity, but, boy, it can make it really, really easy to give me that starting point so that I can get to work.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. And we’ve had Jeremy Utley on the show talking about AI stuff. And I think that what you’re doing is dead on in terms of thinking about it as a collaborator that’s a cool way to collaborate there.

Dave Crenshaw

And it’s a cool way to beat procrastination, which is the topic, right?

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

Dave Crenshaw
“Every time you devote time to practice, you haven’t lost. You’re always a winner.” And that is from Bob Ross.

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

Dave Crenshaw
Well, certainly, lots of work by David Strayer of the University of Utah about multitasking. I cite that a lot in my books, and the importance of focusing on one thing at a time.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Dave Crenshaw
I like “Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide” by John Cleese. It’s a great little book that teaches you how to come up with new ideas.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Dave Crenshaw
Everybody asks me, “Dave, what’s the best app to use?” And the best app to use for productivity is your calendar. I just love the calendar. It’s so simple and it’s probably underused by most people.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell us, what’s something people are not doing with their calendar that they ought to?

Dave Crenshaw
Two things. One, they’re not scheduling all the things that are happening in their life. And so, that’s like spending time on a credit card. You don’t really know if you have the ability to do the things that you’re committing to. So, when you use your calendar for everything, it shows it. But that also has to be accompanied with one that seems contradictory, but it’s important, which is scheduling buffer time. Scheduling lots of time for nothing so that you have room to breathe for all of the interruptions in between.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Dave Crenshaw
I used to not do very well with exercise. I started to exercise very simply, just a little bit more each time, which kind of goes back to the thing. I just started shooting baskets, and then I started to shoot jump shot baskets, and then I started to use the treadmill, and I just added a little bit more and more over time, and now it’s pretty consistent. And I’m probably in the best shape of my life and it makes a big impact on everything.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect with folks and you hear quoted back to you often?

Dave Crenshaw
And this could be a quote as well from one of my mentors, David Winford, “Do what you said you would do by the time you said you would do it.” That is the most important rule of success, and most people, if they just did that one thing, they’d be more successful than 90% of the people around them.

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

Dave Crenshaw
I love connecting with people on LinkedIn, Dave Crenshaw, connect with me there. I put out updates all the time, and that’ll also, I share videos from all of my LinkedIn Learning courses as well.

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

Dave Crenshaw
Just put into practice what we talked about. Think about something that’s difficult for you to do, something that’s daunting, maybe something that you’ve been putting off, and just say, “What’s that first minute?” and immediately put this into practice. That way you move from just hearing this conversation to making it a part of your life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Dave, thank you.

Dave Crenshaw
Thank you, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Greg, welcome!

Greg Chasson
Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m so excited to hear about some of the wisdom you’ve got for us in your book, Flawed: Why Perfectionism is a Challenge for Management. But first, I think we need to hear a demonstration of your beatboxing skills and a segue for how that relates to perfectionism. No pressure.

Greg Chasson
Well, I think it relates to perfectionism in that I stink pretty badly at beatboxing, so it’s a bit testing my perfectionism at heart. Are you really putting me on the spot for this one?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I mean, I’m curious.

Greg Chasson
All right, I am warning everyone, it is not amazing, but here we go. I don’t know how good that sounds on a podcast, but there you go.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m fired up. I kind of want to hear the other lyrics that are kind of getting integrated from there.

Greg Chasson
Yeah, I’m not Rahzel by any stretch of the imagination, so.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think you said something there, and I think it’s my own experience, is that it could feel good or even therapeutic for me to do something I’m terrible at and feel okay about being terrible at it in terms of my own relationship to perfectionism. Is that a common thing?

Greg Chasson
Absolutely. It’s a tremendous exercise and it’s something that I think there’s a spectrum of it. You can do things in a goofy silly way, getting on the dance floor, and just being a total goofball and not really caring, or if you do care, doing it anyway, how badly you’re dancing. You can take those principles to a place like work and, I like to say, make mistakes on purpose.

And that is part of the way that I approach perfectionism based on some of the research literature and the treatments that we do for people with really severe cases. But the principles also can really trickle down and be useful for people that are experiencing some levels of perfectionism that might not reach that severe level but still has an impact on their life.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s cool. And it’s interesting, Greg, when you say severe cases, I think a lot folks will say, “Oh, I’m such a perfectionist.” Could you paint a picture for what a severe case of perfectionism really looks, sounds, feels like in practice?

Greg Chasson
I’m really glad you asked that question because a lot of people don’t really understand what perfectionism is. They sometimes even think it’s a good thing or kind of a cute thing. They might even answer their interview question, “What’s your greatest weakness?” they might say, “Perfectionism.” And, truly, when you see some of the most severe cases, it will change your perspective on what perfectionism is.

I run a clinic at the University of Chicago for behavior therapy for OCD and related conditions. Now, real quick, not all people with OCD have perfectionism, and not all people with perfectionistic tendencies have OCD. So that’s an important distinction. There’s a nice Venn diagram overlap there, and that’s why I see a ton of cases of perfectionism at the severe level. Because when it gets severe, it becomes paralyzing.

People can’t get their work done, their procrastination becomes profound, they’re constantly checking and rechecking and seeking reassurance, thereby sucking in everyone around them, causing resentment and frustrations. So, it really can become very toxic and debilitating to the point where people can’t even get through college or hold down a job.

Pete Mockaitis
My goodness. Okay, so then let’s talk about that Venn diagram overlap between obsessive compulsive disorder and perfectionism. I guess I could see a little bit because when I imagine OCD, I think about, it’s like, I have to triple check, quadruple check, “Did I turn off the oven?” or “Have I arranged these things in just the right way?” or “I just have a feeling, I may know it’s not rational, but if I don’t lock this four times, something terrible might happen.” So that’s what I think of as OCD.

And you could tell me, you’re the expert if that’s an accurate picture of it. And then perfectionism seems, I could see a bit of that overlap in terms of, “Oh, I need to make sure this is just so, or I have a great deal of anxiety about it not being so.”

Greg Chasson
Yeah, you characterized OCD very well. And, really, OCD is defined by two things: obsessions and compulsions, which is inherent to the name. Obsessions are just thoughts, images, or impulses that pop in your head. They feel really alien to you. They feel like they’re trespassing. They’re inconsistent with how you see yourself, your sense of self, your values. And so, in that sense, they’re very distressing, and because of that distress, people do things to try to bring that distress level down. They try to calm themselves and get relief. Those are the compulsions, which I call safety behaviors and lump them into one giant category of compulsions and avoidance and escape behaviors.

These behaviors are done with a function of calming yourself because of your obsessions. And so, when you look at perfectionism, you can see overlap with OCD in the cases in which people are having these intrusive thoughts about needing to do things just right, in just the right way, or getting a just right feeling where it needs to feel just right, or they worry that they’re going to get something wrong even though they know it’s not that important or that they did it correctly, that they’re worried about it anyway and they’re almost obsessing about it.

And when it really feels excessive and inconsistent with what you want to be thinking about and doing, and it’s causing you to do all of these compulsive behaviors, like checking and reassurance-seeking and internet researching, and it really can look a lot like OCD.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. So, I think you’ve painted a picture for what a maybe severe or clinical kind of picture looks like. I don’t know how you define it in terms of a continuum or spectrum in terms of, I think some would like to say, “I’m perfectionistic and it’s a good thing…” but I guess they would define that differently, “…because I have a high standard of excellence and I demand it from myself and from others.” Can you help draw a real clear distinction or guideline for, “Okay, yeah, that’s cool, but here’s where that’s problematic and/or dysfunctional”?

Greg Chasson
So, I think it’s an excellent question, “How do you draw the line?” And I think it’s important to note that perfectionism is not the same thing as high standards or high expectations. Perfectionism is characterized by two primary things. One is excessive expectations. So, these are expectations that most people would find to be beyond what is reasonable or is feasible.

The second piece is that you have a certain level of rigidity to your thinking. You have a hard time being flexible and shifting your gears and moving from one thing to another and being nimble and adapting, and other synonyms that I can’t think of in the moment.

But the idea is that you have those two things together and it’s a really, really problematic recipe, because you have people who are just continuously trying to reach for things that are not feasible, maybe even impossible, and they have a hard time shifting gears when the feedback is telling them, “Look, this is not possible.”

And so, they’re just constantly hitting their head against the wall like a hamster on a wheel. And it’s really very different than having high expectations because high expectations, in and of themselves, are perfectly fine. I would never tell someone not to have high expectations. It’s really the rigidity around it, and then are those expectations unreasonable and infeasible?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that definition a lot in terms of that combination, because you may very well be trying to do something cool, innovative, never before done, and it’s like, “This may very well be impossible, but we know that going in, and if we discover that it’s impossible, we’re not going to flip out about it. We’re just going to say, ‘Oh, shucks. I guess the way we were pursuing that just isn’t going to work. We’re going to have to try something very different in order to pull off this never-before-accomplished thing we’re after here.’”

Greg Chasson
Totally. And so, what you’re describing is the very essence of innovation and risk-taking, and I think perfectionism stifles that more than just about anything. It really puts a dead stop to creativity and innovation and smart risk-taking. In fact, when I give talks to organizations and groups, or even patients, who are struggling, they really struggle with this sort of term that’s been floated out there called “fail forward.” The idea of, “It’s okay to fail. Take those failures and grow from them, do it quickly, and do it a lot, and move forward, and learn from it.”

The problem is, I’ve learned, that nobody knows what “fail forward” means in terms of how to implement it. No one knows what to do in order to fail forward. They get the concept, but it feels almost like a hollow cliche because there’s no framework. So, I think I’ve drawn on from a lot of the perfectionism research literature and some of my clinical work to really develop, I think, the foundation of a fail-forward framework that just hasn’t been explicated yet.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Well, we must hear that. But first, maybe just to continue getting the context. In your book, Flawed, could you give us sort of the big picture, main idea?

Greg Chasson
The book’s main idea is pretty simple. Perfectionism is not your friend, and it’s not great for your business. It’s not great for your teams. It’s not great for the bottom line. It’s not even great for the culture in which your teams are working. It really has an adverse impact on all of those things, and it’s not to be underestimated. I think we don’t really keep a great eye out for it. And, in some ways, I think the culture and the company environment and the messaging reinforces perfectionism instead of tries to reduce it and open the floor for innovation and creativity.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, then it’s not just an individual problem, but rather it’s a problem across the whole organization, workplace management. Could you maybe paint a picture for how you see that showing up frequently, or if there’s any numbers on just how pervasive and damaging this is to kind of get our arms around the problem?

Greg Chasson
I don’t have data on perfectionism in the workplace, but I can tell you that perfectionism in the population at large is increasing over the generations. So, we’re seeing this increase, I think, it’s in large part because of the achievement culture that has kind of sucked us all in even from childhood. And I think we see some of that extend into the company culture, and the sort of mentality give it your all.

And there’s this fear of making mistakes and not doing your work properly and costing the company, something like costing them money or costing them reputation, and then really worrying about your own status at the company, “Am I going to get fired? Am I going to be seen in a negative light?” And so, there really is a messaging that you can use in your workplace that I think allows people to feel a little bit more open to taking those risks and to making mistakes instead of, essentially, being closed off to those opportunities.

Think of a marketing team with a sales team, and they’re basically creating a whiteboard of all the most impressive sales numbers and sales people for that month, like a star monthly whiteboard, where they go through and they celebrate the top sales and the top salespeople.

The problem with that is that there are going to be people who work their tail off, and perhaps it’s because they didn’t have the right circumstances or they didn’t have the right resources to get the job done, to get on that winner’s list, but they might feel particularly demoralized by the fact that all this praise is being thrown at somebody else and not themselves.

And that really, I think, reinforces an environment of perfect performance that I think can be demoralizing for a lot of people, and that’s not to say incentives and praise is entirely bad. But I think what it does, yes, Pete, I think you have to be careful in terms of how it’s communicated in that kind of environment. 

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’d love to dig into some potential solutions and tips here, maybe both at the individual level and in the organizational managerial level. I’m curious, you mentioned in terms of perfectionism, you’re worried about perhaps losing your job “If I don’t do this just right.” And I’m thinking of a buddy of mine who worked at SpaceX, and so Elon Musk, really, is pretty hardcore and fires people kind of a lot.

And so, part of me thought, “Huh, maybe that is a completely valid, rational fear, or maybe it’s not.” Because I, too, have had the fears that, “Oh, the worst could happen,” but they were not. So, any pro tips on how we kind of get anchored into reality, and if we are catastrophizing, get back in a good spot?

Greg Chasson
I think it’s important to recognize that you’re not going to have all the information you need to be able to understand the situation, and that sometimes you’re going to have an accurate reading of the situation. If you’re working with Elon Musk and you think you might get fired, you might be right. This is the reality of the world. You can’t always predict, and in a lot of ways, anxiety and control go hand in hand.

I think control tends to be highly overestimated. People with anxiety overestimate their control, and so they’re constantly trying to do things to take over the situation and make sure that they can predict what’s coming next. And the problem is most things aren’t predictable or controllable, and so you end up with a lot of anxiety, especially over things that you can’t control.

And I would tell people, use your values as a guide in the situation, figure out what’s really important to you, and then use that as an indicator of which things to take risks on and which not to take risks on, and understand that a risk is a risk for a reason. You might be wrong and be comfortable with the possible end result. If not, then I would be very careful even doing it in the first place. So, I wish I can say that everyone is catastrophizing in these situations, but that’s not true.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I think that sounds very wise in terms of, like, “You’ve done this before, Greg.” Anxiety and control going hand in hand, and a desire to predict what’s going on or to control what’s going on when you can’t. That feels like a potential Holy Grail right there, is if we can develop some comfort and peace with just the hard reality that many things are outside our control, and the future is kind of unpredictable, and we could just kind of do our best to influence things, and the chips will fall where they fall, and then to become okay with it. That sounds like an amazing mental health place to be. If we’re not there, how do we get there?

Greg Chasson
I think that’s exactly right, and it goes in multiple directions. So, I think anxiety is the misperception of having more control than you really have. Whereas, I think depression is the misperception that you have less control than you really have. So, people with depression often don’t think that they can do much to control the situation. They end up getting hopeless, when, in reality, there are some potential things they could do. It just doesn’t feel that way.

Whereas with the anxiety, they’re misperceiving their control. They think they have more than they really do. And so, you really have the seesaw going on, and in the end, both of them are illusions of control. And so, really, we just need to make sure that we’re not letting control, control us. And how do we do that? That was your question.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Greg Chasson
And, really, I think it is, again, I’m going to keep talking about this, figuring out what are the things that are within your power. Those are the things that you then need to check in with yourself about. And then even though you may have the power to change them, that’s not where the story ends. The story then continues with, “What is worth my efforts? What is worth the attempt to control?” because not everything is.

I have something that I call the emphasis framework, which has three different levels: emphasis A, emphasis B, and emphasis C. And this is really a framework for understanding effort allocation for tasks. So, if I want to do something perfectly, give it my all, 110%, that’s emphasis A. Emphasis B is to just get it done, just the get it done strategy. Doesn’t need to be garbage, doesn’t need to be perfect, doesn’t need to be amazing, doesn’t need to be beautiful.

And then there’s emphasis C, which is not to do it at all. And you might think, “Well, some of those sound better than others. Emphasis A obviously is better than B.” Actually, I take a step back and I’m agnostic to that, judgment free. Because there’s a time and place for all three of those. Emphasis A certainly makes sense if something is very important to you.

Maybe you’re getting married and you want to plan your wedding day. It’s super important to you and your family. Maybe you’re studying to get into law school, and the LSATs, the entrance exam, is really important to you, so you want to put in an emphasis A effort.

Emphasis C is also a totally legitimate strategy. And I never, ever answer the customer satisfaction survey at the end of my call with AT&T. I just don’t because it’s just not important to me, right? I’ve used my values as a judgment call. And so, that was a strategic selection of Emphasis C to protect my time and my resources.

Now, to be honest with you, Emphasis B is what most things warrant most of the time. Not everything can be that important to you at all times and really gets and deserves all of your attention. It’s just not sustainable. And the problem with perfectionism is that people with perfectionism try to emphasis A everything, and what happens is that you can’t do that.

So, what ends up occurring is that they attempt to emphasis A everything and it ends up pushing things aside, and so they end up emphasis C-ing things because they can’t get to it. And so, essentially, their perfectionism has selected their priorities and chosen for them rather than their values.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, that’s powerful. This reminds me of insights from our previous guest. David Allen says you could either handle things when they show up or when they blow up, and/or if you don’t, you’re going to just be dealing with whatever is latest and loudest.

Greg Chasson
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
So, like the AT&T survey, that’s there, that’s there right now, they’re asking for it right now, “Oh, okay,” you know, and so you didn’t actually make a choice. It just sort of you happened to be in a spot where they asked for a survey, and you did it. And you could make that choice in terms of, “You know what, I am all about everybody I encounter having the opportunity to learn and grow and improve every time, and so this is in accordance to my values, doing this survey.” Or, you could say, “No, that’s my value, but I don’t think they’re ever going to use my survey, so I will achieve that value better by calling a friend instead with that time saved.”

Greg Chasson
Well said.

Pete Mockaitis
And then we also had a guest, Morton Hansen, who said, “Do less than obsess,” which I think is so perfect in terms of those few things that are emphasis A. And then I guess you’re just going to discover naturally that we’ve got some just hard boundaries in terms of my time and my energy and my availability and my duties and responsibilities. It’s, like, “There’s only so many hours of brilliance I have available to deploy in a week. So where are they going to go?”

Greg Chasson
And, especially for someone that might be in the sandwich generation, dealing with kids and parents, juggling a job and family, I mean, this is a tough life sometimes. There’s a lot going on. It’s hard to keep up and you have to be judicious about where you allocate your time and energy. And that’s the problem with perfectionists. They have a really hard time doing that.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, but I think it’s so liberating if you sort of define that up front and in advance. I remember one time, I think I was in college, I kept getting in the habit of picking too many goals or tasks on the to-do list for a spring break, or a summer break, or a winter break, and so I just list all the things I just felt like I had an expectation to do them. But then at the top of the list, I wrote, “I am in no way committed to achieving all of these things,” and I felt amazing. It’s like, “Okay, this is just a menu of things I might choose to do, and that’s fine, and it feels great this way.”

Greg Chasson
I would maybe even say that you got more done than you would have had you not.

Pete Mockaitis
I think so, yeah.

Greg Chasson
Right. Because it puts you in a much better mindset. This is the thing. I call perfectionism the irony problem, because the more you try to perfect something, the more you end up kind of ruining it and making it not perfect. I have a story I tell about when I was a kid where I was working on a picture of Spider-Man, drawing Spider-Man, and he has this really very specific web design on his costume.

And I would just keep trying to get this right, and I would sit there and just erase time and time again, and I was so frustrated. And by the time I was done, I had completely destroyed this picture, completely annihilated it. I mean, Spider-Man looked like he had spaghetti arms by the time we were done. And it was a perfect example of how perfectionism is so ironic.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. All right, Greg, any other top pro tips, do’s and don’ts on perfectionism at the individual level before we shift gears to the managerial level?

Greg Chasson
Yeah, make mistakes on purpose. I use a framework called exposure therapy, which is a terrible name but it really is a gold standard treatment. It is highly supported by the research literature. It’s extremely effective, and you could use the principles to fight perfectionism. And this really requires you to, in a systematic way, face some of the things that are anxiety-provoking about not being perfect, and often that is making mistakes.

And so, I will have people make mistakes on purpose, and I know it sounds ludicrous, but I will start somewhere doable, and these will be smaller mistakes from our perspective, maybe not from the perfectionist’s perspective, and they might do something, like sign off their name with a typo, or send it to the wrong Jim in Accounting, something to that effect, and sitting with the anxiety that they really botched this up, and that they have to learn that they can tolerate that anxiety, that they won’t crumble. And maybe also learn that it’s not as catastrophic as they thought it would be.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot. and I’m imagining all the ways that could actually be kind of fun, and you could start with like the lowest of stakes, like you’re at a restaurant, and instead of ordering a chicken sandwich, you asked for a “sicken chandwich,” you know, just like mixing up a couple letters, completely inconsequential, and then just sort of go. Is that your recommendation, sort of tiny bit and then a little more, a little more, a little more, a little more?

Greg Chasson
Yeah, that’s a great example. The problem is, the person with perfectionism typically doesn’t find it particularly fun or enjoyable. They tend to be pretty upset about these kinds of things because, to them, this is their worldview. We might find it fun because we realize that the stakes are just not what they think that they are. Whereas, they’re in that world and they’re really struggling. But I do think that starting at that level, that kind of mistake is what I’m envisioning.

I’m not expecting you to go accidentally take $20 million from your company and throw it in the garbage. That’s not what I’m talking about. These are things that are relatively tiny from most people’s perspective, but from a perfectionist’s perspective – which is hard to say really fast, 10 times, perfectionist’s perspective – I really think that you can loosen up their thinking. It’s about that rigidity. It’s about the risk-taking and fighting that fear of failure and learning from it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Understood. Anything else at the individual level you want to make sure to mention?

Greg Chasson
I think it really just takes a little bit of collaboration and making sure that the person has some insight around their perfectionism. It can be sometimes difficult to approach an individual with perfectionism and have that conversation. This is probably the number one question I get, “How do I approach so-and-so with this perfectionism?” And in an organization, you have to be careful right because it’s a different setting than if this was a friend or a romantic partner or a teammate. It’s a little sticky.

And to approach them, I often tell people to focus on the distress. Don’t focus on what you think is ridiculous about it, or that they’re not understanding, or that they’re being rigid. Instead, focus on the fact that they are probably suffering at some level with anxiety or frustration around the worldview that they have just been pounded with since they were a kid, feeling like they can’t take a breather, they can’t stop. They have to do this perfectly. That almost always comes with tremendous anxiety. And so, being able to tap into that and say, “Look, this anxiety, you don’t have to experience it like this.”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Okay. Well, so now let’s think a little bit about some management, or team organizational level things. What are some top do’s and don’ts there?

Greg Chasson
I think the top do is to make sure that you’re communicating what perfectionism is, and I would do this very explicitly. I don’t know that I would do this in a subtle way. I would recommend talking about perfectionism and fear of failure, if you need to use language that’s a little bit more understandable, and talking about how that kind of a culture can really lead to stagnation, and how, “Here are the things that we encourage in our workplace.”

Taking calculated, intelligent risks, get the support of the people, talk it over the risk and what it might mean, but don’t hesitate if it’s actually an idea that could lead to the latest innovation and could take this company to new heights. So, I really think that this failure fear is something you could address very specifically in an employee handbook or in your mission statement or values, and you could really hammer it home.

Of course, that would then need to be embodied in your behavior in the organization. I think everyone can sniff out a perfunctory mission statement or value and it doesn’t actually translate. But if you could actually translate that with the way that you are responding to people’s mistakes, encouraging them to take big leaps, these are the kinds of things you can do at the cultural level that I think would help protect against perfectionism.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I’d also love your view in terms of in a world in which we have public recognition, like, “Here’s the top five sales people,” or whatever, how do we think about that in terms of providing…? In some ways that incentivizes competing against your teammates and colleagues, and sometimes folks find that quite motivating, “I want to win and be number one.” But maybe that is problematic, and even more so for perfectionists. How do you think about motivating, recognizing, and these kinds of things?

Greg Chasson
Yeah, great question. It really depends very much on the individual, at the individual level. For some people, that kind of system really can motivate them and move them forward, especially if they’re flexible in their thinking and anti-perfectionistic, because they’re not always going to meet every goal. They’re not always going to be the top. And if you’re not, you need to be able to pick yourself up quickly and try to learn from it and go do better.

The perfectionist really struggles with this. They really struggle with getting positive feedback. They might be told that they’re the best at what they did this month, but they will find a way to not be happy with it. It’s part of the perfectionism is that they’re generally not satisfied with their performance. They’re the type of student that will argue when they got a 99% on an assignment instead of a hundred.

And so, when you have these kinds of public displays of who’s done the best in a way that you think will motivate your employees, it very well could motivate some, but the perfectionist is in the corner beating themselves up, even if they’re number one on the list. So, it really isn’t a one-size-fits-all, and I think it’s really important for people in management and leaders to understand that not everyone is going to respond well to that kind of a mechanism, and that you might need to be a little careful about tailoring it to that perfectionist in the corner.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, then what might be some superior ways if we have a mix of perfectionists? And maybe I should have asked this earlier Greg, what proportion of us, U.S. professionals, are, in fact, perfectionists?

Greg Chasson
A very difficult question to answer because it depends on how you define that and where you draw the line. I’ve seen estimates from a quarter, 30%. I’ve seen some samples up to 80, 90%. I think the one thing I could definitely say with longitudinal data is that we are seeing an increase in cohorts over time. So, there is something going on that is making us more perfectionistic over time in terms of cohorts.

So not that I’m necessarily getting more perfectionistic over time, but 18-year-olds are getting more perfectionistic over time.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Okay. Well, so if we operate with that assumption that in a team situation, perhaps a quarter plus of folks are perfectionistic, how might we want to do some managing and some communicating differently? One thing was to be just very explicit, it’s like, “This is what’s going on.” And then how about some of the day-to-day stuff in terms of how we interact with folks?

Greg Chasson
So, one thing that I recommend is something that would drive people bonkers, but I think it really could be useful for reinforcing a flexible mentality in the workplace. So, if you’re in a work setting where people are extremely stuck on routine, everything is the same every single day, “There’s this task A, task B, task C,” and it’s sort of done in the way at the same time every day, I tell people to use a random work schedule to get people loosened up and flexible and learn that they can pivot and adjust.

So, when someone comes in at random, you pick which tasks they do in which order, assuming that that’s feasible or possible. Sometimes you task-require one is done before the other, but you can sort of randomize this in a certain way. And the bottom line here is to really reinforce this idea of flexibility. The more you can do things that push this idea of flexibility and get them to practice, the more, I think, you’re going to benefit from people being nimble and being willing not to get stuck on the hamster wheel.

Pete Mockaitis
You know what’s funny, Greg, is I’ve done that in my own world, just with my own to-do list with a roll of the dice, and I actually find I liked it because it just sort of eliminated the, “Huh, what should I do next? Well, maybe this or maybe I’m feeling a bit more energetic around here.” It’s like, “No, we just cut through all of that. Number six, okay. Doing number six.”

Greg Chasson
Exactly. In one chapter of my book, I call it process paralysis. It’s when perfectionism really gets a hold of the process, the planning. So which steps do you do in which order? And how do you be efficient versus not getting stuck being inefficient? And so, you get stuck on this, and it really could become paralyzing. And what I talk about is sort of the flexibility of sometimes you choose to be inefficient on purpose just to get it done, just to move forward.

And this is where I use that emphasis framework. Instead of emphasis A, the planning, sometimes you just got to emphasis B the daylights out of it, and like you said, roll dice and see what happens and go for it. And I think if you can start to do that more and more, you will start to loosen. Your rigidity will start to loosen. And I think if that culture is put forth in the workplace, you really can support people who are really working on that.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear some of your favorite things?

Greg Chasson
Yeah, a couple of things, if you don’t mind. The first is something I didn’t get a chance to talk about, which is other-oriented perfectionism. This is where you tend to project your perfectionistic standards onto other people instead of yourself. And I dedicate a couple of chapters to this, both in terms of how to deal with a coworker who has other-oriented perfectionism and also how to deal with a boss who might have some perfectionistic tendencies.

Now, I really focus on something called “moralism” because sometimes our perfectionism really gets us stuck on morals. “That person is being immoral,” and you end up really getting stuck trying to correct people based on what you think is correct and moral or not moral, and it really can look self-righteous, and that is another problem that we see in the workplace.

This is the person in your workplace who you find is obnoxious or policing people based on what they think is correct or okay, and that moralism sometimes can come from a place of perfectionism. And so, I often encourage people in the workplaces where I give talks or I train, is keep an eye out for some of these scenarios where you have this toxic interpersonal dynamic. There could be perfectionism at play.

The second piece that I would like to add here is that perfectionism is not all bad. I want to be very clear. I would not recommend ridding perfectionists from the workplace. I want to highlight that perfectionism comes with some tremendously positive characteristics. Now, I personally don’t think that those characteristics depend on you also being perfectionistic. So, I think you could work on your perfectionism and not lose all those positive qualities. But there are things like loyalty and conscientiousness.

And if there’s one ingredient I would want in one of my employees, it’s conscientiousness. Honesty. They tend to have some honesty that you might not find in other people. They’re detail-oriented. These are some great characteristics that you want in your employees. They’re the hardest working people that are on your teams.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t bring that up because I don’t want people to make this a witch hunt. I would absolutely hire a perfectionist, and my goal would be to leverage their strengths and to work on helping them with their difficulties.

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

Greg Chasson
I think my favorite quote really is about control. Shocker, right? It really is this idea of breaking the illusion of control, that we need to see when control is actually controlling us, because that’s when we need to do something about it.

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

Greg Chasson
Some of my favorite research is around this idea of doubt and uncertainty, which is very close to this concept of anxiety and perfectionism. And there has been a ton of research that shows, and I love this, it’s so paradoxical, the more you check something, the more you doubt it. You know, checking the stove that we turned it off, or checking that we didn’t make a mistake, or checking that we pushed record on our podcast, these kinds of things actually make us doubt even more than have we not checked in the first place.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Greg, this is so meta in real time, but when you said record on the podcast, I did check, and then having checked, I felt less sure than I did before you even mentioned it.

Greg Chasson
You’re embodying the very research finding that I described. Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Greg Chasson
The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, and it flipped my entire understanding of human nature and biology upside down on its head. And I would say that that book has transformed me more than any other book that’s out there.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And habit?

Greg Chasson
My favorite habit is something I tell my kids because they have a hard time with it, but having systems at home so that you’re not losing your keys and your wallet because I’m finding them all over my house. I’m sure any parent can understand that. And so, my favorite habit is just having these systems in place so that I never lose my stuff.

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

Greg Chasson
It really is this idea of anxiety being a misperception of control. I know I keep pounding that home. But that’s the thing that has resonated the most with people, that anxiety is overestimating control, whereas depression may be underestimating control. And when you can start to calibrate that a little bit better, you can start to see yourself lift from anxiety and depression.

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

Greg Chasson
I think the best way to get in touch and to learn more about the message that I’m trying to spread, the movement I’m trying to create around perfectionism, is to join my mailing list, which you can do on my website at GregChasson.com. And I’d love to hear from people, so feel free to email me and let me know what you think of the podcast. Let me know what you think of the book and content that I put out there on the blog and the website. And if it’s something of interest to you for your organization, I do love coming and spreading my message and helping organizations get unstuck from their perfectionism and fear of failure.

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

Greg Chasson
Make mistakes on purpose. That’s what I would say. Go and lean in to making mistakes, and learn from opportunity and innovate.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Greg, thank you for this deeply flawed conversation.

Greg Chasson
Deeply, deeply flawed, I’m sure. Thank you very much for having me.