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KF #25. Plans and Aligns Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Mar 02
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1133: The Philosophy of Scores: How to Measure What Truly Matters and Stop Playing Someone Else’s Game with C. Thi Nguyen

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Thi Nguyen draws on the philosophy of games to explain how scores and metrics impact our lives—and what we can do to use them more meaningfully.

You’ll Learn

  1. How metrics can coopt our values and behavior
  2. The hidden costs of the desire to quantify everything
  3. Why the wrong people often seem to get ahead

About Thi

Thi Nguyen is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, and a specialist in the philosophy of games, the philosophy of technology, and the theory of value.

A former food writer for the Los Angeles Times, Nguyen is active in public philosophy, writing for The New York Times, The Washington Post, New Statesman, and elsewhere.

Resources Mentioned

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Thi Nguyen Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Thi, welcome!

Thi Nguyen
Hello. Hello.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am so excited we have a learned philosopher here that, I think, the first time we’ve had a full-blown, legit, credentialed philosopher on the show, and I’m stoked.

Thi Nguyen
I’m sorry, I’m about to under-meet your expectations.

Pete Mockaitis
We’ll see. Well, your book, The Score, I found absolutely riveting, fantastic, plowed through it. And I’ve got one burning question I want to address right away, which was, you mentioned you loved just about every game you’ve played, or rather, more pointedly, the one game you regret playing was the computer game Civilization. What’s the story here?

Thi Nguyen
I think one thing I realized, one of the, actually, origin points about thinking about this, about what kinds of things that we did in our lives are worthwhile and not, is that, I don’t know, I spent a whole summer playing Civilization and I just have this memory of a vague anxiety sweat blur of like nothingness.

And when I think about other times I’ve spent with other games, like everything from rock climbing to Go to like really interesting video games, like, Baba Is You, I have this thick memory of how many interesting things happened, how many things I did. And Civilization is just, I don’t know, that time is just gone.

Pete Mockaitis
Interesting. So this kind of reminds me of the distinction between liking and wanting. It sounds like if your whole summer went away, you had a whole lot of wanting, you had to get back to it, see what happened with your trade routes or your armies or your whatever. But there wasn’t a rich memory that felt uplifting afterwards.

Thi Nguyen
Yeah, I also think, one of the things that exposed to me is something that I think we can be wrong about whether we’re having fun or having a good time. And I’ve had this in relationships, friendships, and games.

And I think my favorite example of this is my experience with the first Star Wars prequel movie, which I was so excited for at the time, in which I convinced myself that I had a great time at. And I spent a week being like, “That was awesome.”

And it took me a week to realize that I was talking myself into thinking that it was valuable, that I kind of overwritten the actual experience with my need to think of it as a valuable experience. And I think that’s actually something that can happen in a lot of places.

And I think when I play Civilization, I tell myself, “This is fun, I can tell. Like, it’s a good game, I’m into it.” But, actually, afterwards the time seems valueless.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. I think that’s so true that we can talk ourselves into it. For any number of reasons, we want to think we haven’t been duped, we want to justify the money, the time we’ve invested. And, yeah, I think we totally have the capacity, a great capacity for self-deception.

Well, let’s get into things a little bit with regard to The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. Could you maybe tell us a little bit of the backstory for how these ideas got swirling around your head and seemed like a worthwhile thing to spend years researching and putting together some great writings on?

Thi Nguyen
So, a bunch of this comes, I’ve spent a lot of the years of my life working kind of an insane path through philosophy. I’ve been obsessed with a part of philosophy that I think isn’t even supposed to be part of my field, which is the philosophy of games.

I’ve been trying to figure out what games are and why they’re valuable. And this started way back when, because I was reading a bunch of stuff with some students about video games. They wanted to know whether video games were art, and we read about, you know, a bunch of articles about it.

And most people were trying to say that video games were art because they were like a movie. And I was like, “Yeah, some games are like a movie. Some games have cool cutscenes.” But, actually, the thing that I really care about is how it feels to be playing, the fact that I get to make interesting decisions or interesting movements.

And when I was trying to figure this out, I found this moment from my favorite game designer, Reiner Knizia, he’s a German board game designer. And in one of his talks, he says that the most important part of his game design toolbox is the scoring system because it tells the players what to care about. It sets their desires.

And that, I think, is the moment where I was like, “Oh, this is so interesting. This is even more interesting than I realized.” Because games, I think they don’t just create worlds, they create alternate selves for us to plunge into.

And so I wrote an entire book about the beauty of games and how game designers use scoring systems to push around our motivations, to give us alternate ways of caring, and to create all this incredibly beautiful, rich action.

And then I started worrying about gamification because I think a lot of people were saying like, “Oh, you love games. You must love gamification. Let’s gamify the classroom and let’s gamify the workplace.” And I thought that if we actually understood what made games really valuable, we would understand why most gamification was rotten and why it sucked out what was really valuable.

And so I ended up telling a story about what is wrong with gamification, and what is wrong with thin metrics in the workplace, especially when they start to capture our values and change our sense about what’s valuable in our life.

And I got to this point where I realized I had an entire story where scoring systems in games turned out to be beautiful, delightful, the seat of joy. And then I had this story about how scoring systems in bureaucracy, government, and corporations, seemed to suck the life out of people, and I wanted to understand why.

And that’s basically why I wrote this book. I was obsessed with why scoring systems were basically responsible for my favorite parts of life and my least favorite parts of my life.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I think you do a masterful job in the book, as you say, that it hits different when we’re scoring in a game versus when we’re being scored at work or with the KPIs and the metrics associated with performance there.

Can you maybe tell us a cautionary tale for professionals of why should this be on our radar? Why should we have our antenna up to these philosophically concepts in terms of our real-world life, happiness, flourishing career implications?

Thi Nguyen
Let me tell two stories. One is personal and one is institutional, and I think there’s a lot of lessons to be learned from both. So the personal story, I mean, I went into philosophy because I thought, I mean, philosophy is a terrible career decision, right? Like, jobs are hard, pay is terrible, work is hard.

The only reason you do it is because you love it, because it’s this weird, fascinating thing. And there are particular kinds of questions and ways of asking about the world that I loved. And then I got plunged into the world of philosophy.

And philosophy, just like every other world, is a profession that has its internal metrics and indicators. There is a status ranking of journals and a status ranking of universities. And I, like a lot of other people, were brought up to aim intensely at getting articles published in the highest status journals. Let me really clear how we did that.

What you did was that you had to write a very specific, very narrow, very technical kind of philosophy on very specific kinds of topics. And it was really boring. And I, basically, spent five years in this field that I was supposed to love, working on things that were more and more boring to me, precisely because I’d come to be guided by a system that represented, not like my sense of what was important, but some kind of like external redigestion and like vomiting back of what people in general thought was important. There’s one story.

I think another one, one thing that I’ve started to think about is not just like the external metrics are external, that they’re somebody else’s, but there’s a particular flavor to them. And I think most people know what I’m talking about. They feel inhumane, in a way. They feel distant, they feel rigid, they feel like they don’t capture what’s actually important. And I’ve been trying to figure out why.

And there’s all these examples that I find really interesting. So here’s one. Sally Engle Merry is an anthropologist who studied human rights work, and she got really interested in the ranking of, so the US State Department issued something called the Trafficking in Persons Report. It’s their sex trafficking report. And they’re rating countries on various countries’ ability to combat sex trafficking.

And the primary metric is conviction rates of sex traffickers. And what Merry points out is that this is actually a terrible metric because a lot of sex trafficking is highly correlated with ambient poverty. So if a country manages to decrease general poverty, uplift the economic status of its poor citizens, actual sex trafficking evaporates.

But since it’s evaporated, there are no sex traffickers to convict. So, by the metric, an actual successful lifting of general citizen well-being, and an actual reduction in sex trafficking, counts as a failure because the thing that the metric is picking up on, it’s not actual sex trafficking, but a very rough proxy of when that kind of activity enters into the government site via a particular kind of interaction, the arrest of a sex trafficker.

I think one of her reasons she says why this happens is because actual sex trafficking is actually incredibly hard to track partially because, by its nature, it occurs out of view and because it’s really, like what counts as a sex trafficking victim and an actual sex trafficker is really, really fuzzy on the edges.

She has this incredible example. She says, imagine someone who’s starving, a woman who’s starving, who crosses an international boundary to work in a brothel. And then the next year, they bring their friend, who’s also starving, across the boundary to work in the same brothel. Is the first woman now an international sex trafficker, right?

Really hard to answer those questions. You don’t have to answer them if you go to conviction rate, right? It’s so easy. It’s so bright. It’s right in front of us. Another example nearby is the example of Charity Navigator. Do you know Charity Navigator?

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve been there many times.

Thi Nguyen
So Charity Navigator is supposed to be a nonprofit watchdog that watches on other nonprofits and rates them for how good they are at charity. And for a really long time, it’s changed recently due to these exact criticisms, but for a long time, over a decade, I think, their primary metric for rating nonprofits was a throughput ratio.

It was a ratio of how many donations were given versus how many of those domain donations emerged on the other side, and were given as resources or money to the other place, to whatever the target is.

It turns out, this is, again, a terrible metric. And the reason it’s terrible is because by that metric anything spent internal to the nonprofit counts as waste. The metric depends on this image that nonprofits are just kind of pipelines for money. And, say, any money that a nonprofit wants to spend on an internal expert, will make it plunge in the rankings.

This example is so interesting to me, because the reason that we seize on that metric is because, in order to actually rate nonprofits, we would actually have to know a huge amount about their very specific domain.

So we would have to understand, like, about the housing crisis in one particular part of the world, and the lack of doctors in another part of the world. And we would somehow have to figure out how to compare those in a clear way. That’s really hard.

Accounting, on the other hand, is really stable and nonprofits do it in a similar way. And so if you focus on that layer, right, the accounting layer, you can find a kind of similar-enough quality that automatically outputs a kind of quantitative measure.

So you can generate an objective ranking, but you’ve generated that objective ranking by shifting the target over from what actually matters to a topic matter that has been chosen precisely because it can create an easy ranking.

There’s more kind of large-scale explanation to unpack, but I think these are really interesting examples of how the process of measuring things at scale seizes on certain kinds of parts of the world and has a lot of trouble coping with the parts of the world that actually might matter.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I hope, I know the way some people’s brains just fire off. They see implications right away. And sometimes you need a little bit of a bridge. And so, as you’re saying these, and I’m hearing it, and I thought like, “Whoa, this is actually epically high-stakes transformational stuff.”

Because when you say what counts as a sex trafficker, I mean, like you bring it into a business, like, “What counts as revenue? What counts as a customer? What counts as customer satisfaction?” And then, “What is the underlying view?” Like, nonprofits are pipelines for money. You make a point here that metrics are not neutral and objective. They’re values-laden.

Like, a person decided, “This is the metric we’re going for and this is what counts and this is what doesn’t,” based upon what they were trying to accomplish. And that has major downstream amplifications or ramifications for everyone that’s engaging with these numbers.

Thi Nguyen
So I’m not a philosopher of science, but I hang out with lot of philosophers of science, and there’s philosophy of science in this other field nearby called science and technology studies.

One of the primary themes that emerges from this work is that a lot of people tend to think that a lot of scientific tools, a lot of measurement tools, and a lot of data collection systems are value-neutral. They just represent the world in a kind of neutral way, but actually these tools are value-laden. This means they represent a particular point of view with particular interests. And they often do that by what they put in and what they leave out.

One of the places this becomes really clear to me is just thinking about maps. So maps are a kind of representation. You might think that a map is neutral, but a map, by definition, deletes most of the world, right? What a map is doing is something that highlights certain parts of the world. Who chose what to highlight, right?

Maps are good for certain kinds of things and not good for others based on decisions we made in the background. So most of the maps I look at are very good for telling you how to find a business or how to drive there. They’re not really good at telling you where the places that sound pleasant are, where the friendly neighborhoods are.

And they could do that, right? You could create a map that represents where nightlife is or represents where nature is. And people do make those maps, but the standard maps leave that out. They represent an interest.

The data system, I think about this a lot, so at my school, the administration is interested in lifting student success, which sounds awesome. But student success is largely defined in terms of graduation rate and graduation speed, and it’s not defined in terms of things like reflectiveness or thoughtfulness or creativity or ethics, right?

So, for example, if your primary measure for student success is graduation speed, and I meet a student who is bored, their major isn’t doing well for them, they’re not that good at it, they’re kind of frustrated. And I convinced them that the major is the wrong one for them.

And we talk and we’re like, “Oh, that’s what they’re really interested in,” and we help them find another major that’s better fit for them, that makes them happier, that fits their skill set more, but it’s going to take another year, that counts as a failure.

Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes, the political philosopher, I think a lot of people might know that he said that morality comes down to political power, and political power comes from the tyrant, whoever has the ability to, like, get people to do what they want.

And Hobbes actually says that the real source of political power, the ultimate form of political power is not military strength or might, or even economic strength. It’s power over language. Because if you can dictate to them what success and failure mean, then you can control them from the inside. And these are the stakes, I think.

What metrics actually are, are a way of fixing what counts as success and fixing what we should all be moving towards. And if there’s some systematic slippage between what actually matters and the kinds of things that it’s easy to build metrics about, then our entire internal guidance system is going to be deeply rewritten at its core based on somebody else’s values, right, some particular person that made the measurement system.

So I was reading this paper from a philosopher named Philippi about values and measurement systems. And he was pointing out how value-laden the idea of intelligence is, right? So intelligence testing is a very value-laden measure.

So you might know that IQ tests are racially and gender-biased. That might be true, but that’s not the center of what he’s talking about. Here’s the value-laden system inside our intelligence tests. The intelligence tests we have right now all encode into them the view that mathematical and logical ability is more important than emotional sensitivity, right?

There is such a thing as emotional intelligence. But think about the fact that our intelligence tests either don’t test it or, if they test it, it’s barely weighted, right? That is a particular set of interests and a representation of how people should be that’s baked into a measurement system that then looks objective once it’s become like a kind of standard use measurement system.

People just think that’s the way the world is, “Of course, that’s what intelligence is,” But it’s a decision that somebody made to weight things that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I’m thinking about, so we missed the emotional intelligence, but we also missed some of the creativity-type intelligences, or I’ve got a posse of craftsmen who are fixing some water damage right now and doing some amazing things, and that’s a different kind of intelligence than what shows up on the ACT.

Thi Nguyen
Imagine what it would be like if we didn’t use that system. You could start to think about people as having hundreds of different capacities, each of which you could think about in a different way. Some people are good at drawing, some people are good at sensitivity, some people are good at telling stories, some people are good at logical and mathematical ability.

But instead, what we’ve done is we’ve created something that says, “No, all of these boil down to one thing.” And the idea that there’s one thing that is intelligence is a worldview that’s subtly been baked into a kind of metric.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And it’s so interesting when you talked about scoring sets their desires, and it’s true. I think about strategy games. You probably know the name for this. There’s a principle at which, if there is a dominant strategy, folks are going to do it. And so a great game, they say, is one in which there’s not a clear cut, overpowered strategy, but rather a variety that you can choose from.

And I found myself doing this. Like, I’m playing this game, ostensibly, to have fun. And yet, if I find there’s a winning thing I can do, even if it’s not fun, I do it. And I wanted to hear your take on values capture. I remember back when I was consulting at Bain, we had what’s called a sell weekend or offeree weekend, in which the folks who had received offers to work at this consulting firm come out and we try to show them a great time, and how cool it is to work at Bain and all that.

And this one person, I remember, she also had an offer from McKinsey & Co., a rival consulting firm. And she was torn, you know, between this. And then she said, “I feel like I’m choosing between happiness…” which was Bain, “…and prestige or pleasing my parents,” which was apparently Mackenzie, is what these things represent to her.

I don’t know if that’s really a fair summary, but that’s how she saw the world. But she did, she went with McKinsey. And so the scoring, in terms of like the rankings of prestige, kind of like the philosophy schools, whether they’re consulting firms or whatever, does, in fact, have the ability to set our desires, and we can just kind of default to stuff without even thinking about it.

Can you expand upon your concept of values capture? How does it happen and how do we guard against it?

Thi Nguyen
So value capture is a term I came up with to describe something I was feeling all the time, and I think a lot of people were, which is that your values are rich and subtle or they’re developing, and then you get put in some kind of institutional or social setting that presents a simplified, typically quantified version, and then the simplified or quantified version takes over in your heart.

I want to be clear that value capture is not the same as being incentivized. So I think a lot of people know Goodhart’s law, right? When a measure becomes an incentive, it stops being a good measure. And Goodhart’s law is gesturing at the same thing. It’s gesturing at this idea that incentives don’t capture what’s important.

But I think there’s a big difference between the first stage, when a metric incentivizes us, right, when we think like, “Oh, if I go to the higher-ranked thing, I’m more likely to get a job. I’m more likely to get more money.” And the second-stage thing of when the metric intrudes into you and starts to become how you conceive of the point of everything.

I think is that different? For me, like, here’s an example. I think that’s a big thing to ike, “Oh, you know, I’m on Twitter. I need to build a bigger following in order to get my message across.” But if you understand that you’re doing it just to get the kind of power to do the thing you really want, you’re not going to sacrifice your message just to get a bigger following.

But if your soul gets redefined and you start thinking like, “No, the thing that I care about in the end is just having the most followers and likes,” then that’s going to transform your entire way of interacting with that system. I’m not sure about your case.

I think there’s a big difference between a student, for example, who thinks, “I’m more likely to get a job if I go to a higher-status university,” versus a student that thinks, “Success in life is going to the highest-ranked university.”

Because once you go to the second thing, you no longer have a standpoint to reflect on whether or not the metric is working for you. If it’s the first thing, if it hasn’t gone all the way to your core, you can always think to yourself, like, “Well, I know this is important for money or resources or whatever, but is it really worth it to me? Is it really making me happy?”

And you can step back. People can step back from high-paying jobs and high-status jobs because it’s making them less happy. But if you’ve redefined in yourself that that’s what success is, then you’re no longer going to think to yourself, “I should stop doing this because it doesn’t make me happy.”

And I think that’s actually one of the cases I’m most interested in. Like, what happens when you forget to listen to your own sense of happiness or your own sense of value? And it’s gotten overwritten by this easy, clear, outside meter.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I think the easy, clear, outside meter is what’s so darn tricky about it. Like, money or compensation is, I think you call it, the most fungible of scores in terms of, yeah, you could turn that into a lot of different things, and we all understand it, and it is compared across many different opportunities.

And yet, it could be a lot harder to evaluate two options, like, “Well, one is clearly more money. Cool. But the other makes my heart come alive more, I think, but I can’t quantify heart coming aliveness on it as quite nearly as readily and directly as I can money.”

Thi Nguyen
Yeah. I mean, this is one way to put it. In many cases, I’m not saying that the metric is bad or even that it doesn’t track something real and something important. I’m interested in the fact that easily measured things tend to win out in justification fights against less easily measured things.

Like, should you eat rich cheeses high in saturated fats? On the one hand, there’s data about correlations with lifespan and heart attack rate. And on the other side, there’s the fact that it’s delicious and it makes you happy.

And it’s really hard to hang onto that in the face of those other numbers, especially when you have to have a public fight, right? This is the weird thing. Like, before I say this next thing, I just want to say I’m not anti-science. I believe science gets real truths.

But the world in which all our policies need to be evidence-based and data-based is a world in which we can only target things that are easy to count and easy to data-fy, and we lose our grip in things that are hard to data-fy. And I think, if you think that everything in the world that matters, can be counted by bureaucratic processes, then you have no problem.

But I think we have a really good reason to think that much of what’s really important tends to elude the specific institutional character of large-scale counting processes.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, absolutely. And when you mentioned there, when there’s a slippage in metrics between what we’re going for and what actually is captured in the cut and dry definitional metrics, all kinds of implications can ensue. I think, perhaps the most terrifying part of your book was when you described five conditions that, when they’re present, folks who game the system will prosper or rise. And so could you just lay this out for us?

Thi Nguyen
So this is based on an article from Paul Smaldino and Richard McElrath, who are scientists, anthropologists, and computer modelers, and they have a paper called “The Cultural Evolution of Bad Science.”

And they do a computer model of a scientific community where the following is true. One, status is connected to publication rate. Two, if you use the most rigorous, most careful method, you’re going to publish more slowly.

So the people that will gain the most status and power are the people that are going to game the system and use the least rigorous method that will get them just barely over the finish line of publication.

And then if you assume, the last assumption of the model is that if young scientists imitate people with higher-status jobs and their methodologies, then we should expect science to turn pretty crappy pretty fast. And I thought this argument generalized.

The general version is, first, if you think there’s a gap between what’s important and what’s easy to measure, and then you think that the institutions we have tend to reward people with power and resources for hitting the easy-to-measure metric, then you should think, “Look, then there’ll be two populations.”

There’ll be the people who still care about what they care about and are aware of the importance of the metric, but trade off between them. And then they’re the fully value-captured people, the people that are just going to go all out and just game the system and ignore what’s really important and just aim at the metric. And we should expect that the latter population, the narrow hyper gamers, are going to be the people that win out, right?

And if they win out and they, in particular, if they re-tune their institutions once they gain power to make the metrics even more powerful, then you should expect a terrifying feedback loop where, over time, the systems will tend to sort for the people that are willing to ignore the quiet whisper of what’s really important, and just target hell or high water the thin metric that is written, and that kind of narrowness will systematically gather all the social power. That’s the model. Then you can decide for yourself about whether it fits reality.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and it’s spooky and it’s partially explanatory for all kinds of things, you know, why the rich get richer, why we have corrupt politicians, why that idiot is the boss, you know, in terms of, “Oh, well, they were rewarded not so much based upon their inspirational leadership. They were rewarded because they hit a number,” or, “The board thought they really liked that guy and he seemed sharp.”

And so, like, there was a gap between what was readily measurable or observable versus what we would hope is the fundamental thing. And the first thing that came to mind when I was reading this was just about politicians and votes.

Like, we would hope in, like, in a representative democratic republic situation, “Well, yeah, votes are kind of the measure by which we have, and which we feel someone’s doing a good job of representing us or should represent us.”

And yet, that is a tremendously gameable metric via monies that can just blast enough advertising to, apparently, get enough votes, as well as polarizing messaging, “What gets people mad enough to actually show up at the polls instead of just sitting on the sidelines?”

And then you could just imagine this in all kinds of scenarios, like, “It seems like this person is at the top, but they don’t deserve to be?” Head scratch, “What’s behind that?” Well, I think, a decent amount of the time, it’s exactly this underlying dynamic that you’ve spelled out.

Thi Nguyen
I think a big part of the background is that I think a lot of metrics are extremely usable if used with care, if we know that they’re just a rough approximate proxy. It’s only when we treat them as all important.

I think there’s an important piece of the background puzzle, of the background picture to put in right now, which is why metrics have this character, right? I mean, one response you might have to all of this is, “Let’s just fix them. Let’s just get better metrics. And then the people that are all hell-or-high water gaming the metric, will just do what’s good.”

But I think that’s not going to work. I had this intuition that it wouldn’t work. And I think the best explanation came from a bunch of historians. So, Theodore Porter, I think, helped me understand a lot of what was going on. He’s a historian of quantification culture.

And he’s trying to explain why he thinks that bureaucrats and politicians compulsively reach for quantificative reasoning even when the metric they know is bad, right, even when it’s just a blatantly terrible metric.

His explanation was that qualitative and quantitative reasoning were different styles of thinking and justification that were good at different things. So qualitative reasoning, he said, is rich and subtle and context-sensitive and dynamic, and can capture all kinds of complexity, but it travels badly between contexts because it requires a lot of shared background knowledge to understand. And it doesn’t aggregate.

And part of why it doesn’t aggregate is specifically because it’s working on so many different dimensions, right? When I’m writing qualitative descriptions to my students about their philosophy essays, I’ll talk about their originality, their rigor, their carefulness, their curiosity, all along different dimensions. And then somebody else might write in their qualitative assessment a bunch of different dimensions. How do you aggregate those?

To make quantitative data, says Porter, we identify a context-invariant kernel and we stabilize it across context. So we make it rigid. And to make it work across context, we have to figure out the bit that everybody understands the same way, which means that bit cannot depend on specific context, specific background, or specific sensitivities.

So, for me, this is like letter grades, like A, B, C, and D. There’s not a lot of information there. But what information there is, is thin enough and simple enough that everyone can understand it the same way. And so that message travels, right? And it aggregates instantly.

So Porter’s insight is that quantitative measures communicate well and are an incredibly good way to connect people and coordinate people because they’ve been designed to communicate, right? His claim is that quantitative data is portable, it travels well between contexts. But portability is a design achievement achieved at the cost of high context, and it’s not just accidental.

Removing context is the thing that makes it extremely accessible and extremely cross-cutting across contexts. And that vision, I think, is really terrifying to me. Because, for me, this shows me that this is not a trap we can get out of, right?

The essential thing that gives metrics their juice and makes them so powerful is that they are narrow by design, and that narrowness is precisely what makes them so usable and so dangerous.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And I guess, maybe to have some hope in here, I think just having a bright light of awareness, which you are providing here, can work wonders for ourselves and our own spheres of influence, and leadership, and families, and organizations, and communities, and careers, to know, “Okay, a narrow, dogged, ferocious, focus on a metric or two or three will necessarily be incomplete and comes with some major downsides. So we got to really check ourselves and note, ‘Okay, this is a rough gauge and it gets an approximation of a thing and it can’t be the whole thing.”

Thi Nguyen
And yet, we also see why it’s so tempting to treat it as the whole thing. But, yeah, there’s not a world in which we can have our institutions work without metrics and without measures that we coordinate over, but they’re so dangerously thin, and it’s so easy to forget. And part of why it’s easy to forget is, if you use them, you’re instantly comprehensible to everybody. And I think that’s very tempting.

Pete Mockaitis
Very much. Well, Thi, tell me, as you think about this domain of knowledge, and when it comes to individual professionals navigating their work lives, their careers, do you have any top do’s and don’ts you think that come to light or emerge out of this rich set of ideas?

Thi Nguyen
I have a goofy idea I want to run by you and see what you think. So a lot of the problem of metrics comes from their being established very distantly at scale and being rigidified, right? They’re distant measures of our success.

I’ve been trying to think about various solutions. And, for me, games are an inspiration. And one of the ways they’re an inspiration is that game scoring systems aren’t distant. They’re modifiable in a few ways. You can move between them. You can change them. You can house-rule them. You can design your own.

And so I’ve been wondering if this can be applied to institutions, too. So here’s something I tried. In the age of trying to figure out how to grade students in the era of ChatGPT, in my last class, I let the students design their own grading system.

I let them design, as part of the class through a conversation, what the assignments would be and how they would be graded on them, given what their goals were and what the limits were, and how the world was changing.

So here’s one thought. Maybe in the workplace, if you’re a manager, what you can do is constantly redesign your metrics in conversation with the people that are being measured about to capture what is a value. Is this goofy and insane? Part of the problem is that you’re not going to be able to export them readily, and you’re not going to be able to take off the shelf a pre-established form of measurement, but roll your own. What do you think?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, I like it a lot. And I’m thinking about how I’m on the board of a nonprofit. And so the board always says, “Hey, Pete, so you’re going to run the performance review for the executive director, right?” And I’ll say, “I guess I’m the How to be Awesome at Your Job guy, so, okay, I’ll take that on.”

And what I think is cool is that, well, each year she has her goals, and each year the goals are different in terms of what is needed at the time. And, thusly, each year, the metrics can change. And I think, because we’re, well, it is, it’s context rich, you know.

Like, I’m in it. I understand it, like what we’re doing, what we’re trying to achieve and how these numbers are incomplete and they’re are means to an end, but also like they do have value and give us a gauge in terms of, “Does this look more or less like a win, or like a loss, or something in between?”

And so, if the numbers are way, way low when they should be higher, it’s like, “Well, yeah, that looks like a loss, even though they’re imprecise and imperfect, that will show up accordingly in the performance review.” So I think that it is, it’s very much doable. And, in a way, kind of fun, keeps it fresh and relevant. But it does, it takes a heightened level of commitment, as opposed to a one-size-fits-all, “Here’s your production goal. Make sure you hit it each quarter. Boom!”

Thi Nguyen
Yeah, and you won’t be able to compare between groups. The whole point is that it’s not that metrics are bad in and of themselves. It’s that the thing that makes them insensitive is their fixity at scale. And that’s also what lets them aggregate easily.

And so the proposal here is just at a different point in the trade-off scale. Now you’re going to be thinking in a context-sensitive way about what you care about at particular moment, and you might set up a metric for a period of time and then change it.

But you won’t be able to auto-compare teams, you won’t be able to auto-compare one person’s performance over a huge amount of time, but you will be able to generate metrics that are responsive to the details of what matters in the case. But, again, it’s a massive trade-off.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Can we hear a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Thi Nguyen
William James, philosopher, pragmatist, says, “When you’re seeking truth, there are two totally different goals that people confuse. One is to get the most truths in the end, and the other is to avoid error. And they’re totally different and they suggest different strategies.”

If what you want is a lot of truths, you might actually want to be really risky and take a lot of risks and make a lot of mistakes. Because if you take a lot of risks and try a lot of things and make a lot of mistakes, you will move more quickly towards the truth.

If you want to avoid mistakes, you should be very careful and conservative with what you try out. And these are two totally different strategies.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, that’s exciting. And I’m imagining, I don’t know who said it, but I thought there was some wisdom to it. Like, most great thinkers, a fair critique to just about all of them is, “Nice idea, but you took it too far.” And that really sounds like the first group that’s trying to maximize truths. It’s like, “Ooh, yeah, you made some mistakes, and there was some mess and dirt along the way there. But you did, you really advanced some stuff, and all of mankind is enriched as a result of having done so.”

And how about a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Thi Nguyen
I think one of the most interesting studies and a huge inspiration for this book was James Scott’s Seeing Like a State. And this is a book about how, you’ll recognize the themes, but it’s a book about states.

And by states he means governments and corporations, and about how they can only see the parts of the world that are processable through large-scale bureaucratic means, exactly what we’ve been talking about so far.

And then the second part of the study is an argument that states, “In order to make the world more processable, tend to reorder it to make it easier to count.” So they tend to want to even things out to make things easier to count. And it’s a study that crosses about 50 different historical case studies, and it’s extraordinary.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Thi Nguyen
Well, it’s in a book, it’s a paper. It’s by Annette Baier. It’s called “Trust and Antitrust.” And it’s a paper that taught me, I think about the most important ingredient in social life. She thinks that the center of human life is trust. And what trust is, is making ourselves vulnerable to some external power by putting something of ours in their power.

And that we have to do this to extend ourselves and to cooperate, but that human life is, essentially, one where we are constantly at risk because we constantly are so entangled that we’re entrusting ourselves to other people. And this, I found, just incredibly explanatory of the state of the world.

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

Thi Nguyen
I think my favorite tool is walking away. I think, sometimes, the right answer to being stuck, for me, is to put everything I’m stuck, write everything I’m stuck, on a whiteboard so I don’t forget it, and then just walk away. Leave the office. Leave the desk. Leave that problem. Go work on something else for days, weeks.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share with students or readers that really seems to connect and resonate, they retweet, they Kindle book highlight, they say, “Professor, this was amazing”?

Thi Nguyen
I often give students the argument that Bernard Suits, this philosopher of games that I was really inspired by, that he gives the end of his book. And he says at the end of his book, “Imagine utopia where we’ve solved all our practical problems. What would we do if we cured all medical problems and all technological problems?”

He says, “We would play games or we would be bored out of our minds. So games must be the meaning of life.” And, you know, it’s kind of a goofy argument, but what he’s really saying is he’s restating an old nugget from Aristotle, which is that the meaning of human activity can’t come from stuff we make or the outcomes of our actions. It has to come from the action itself. It has to come from the process of doing.

And if we drain out all the interesting processes of doing just to make a ton of stuff, then we’ve accidentally leaked away a meaningful life.

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

Thi Nguyen
My website is Objectionable.net. I’m on Bluesky @add-hawk, A-D-D, underscore H-A-W-K.

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

Thi Nguyen
Every time you look at a metric, be suspicious and ask what values it’s imposing on you.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Well, Thi, thank you. This was a treat. I wish you many, many high scores of the most meaningful sort.

Thi Nguyen
Thanks, man.

Nov 06
0

1108: How to Think, Act, and Achieve Like an “A-Player” with Rob Monson

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Rob Monson reveals how professionals can become A-players—and what leaders can do to retain them.

You’ll Learn

  1. The hard truth many leaders don’t want to accept
  2. What A-players do differently from the rest
  3. The simple trick to get a day back every week

About Rob

Rob Monson, founder of Tenfold Advisors, is Utah’s leading business growth coach. A Scaling Up and Metronomics coach, he helps mid-market CEOs install disciplined systems that transform people, strategy, execution, and cash. His clients have driven Utah’s most founder exits at a 7X EBITDA multiple, 10X profit gains, Inc. 5000 honors, and award-winning cultures. Formerly with Golf Channel and 1-800 Contacts, Rob now shares practical scaling insights as Tenfold Biz Coach on TikTok.

Resources Mentioned

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Rob Monson Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Rob, welcome!

Rob Monson
Hi! Thank you, Pete. Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I am so excited to hear your wisdom. You are privy to a lot of deep, high-stakes, personal conversations, coaching executives and business owners. Can you give us a little bit of context for those conversations?

Rob Monson
Yes, so I’ve been a business coach for eight years this month, as a matter of fact, and what I do in my role is I coach CEOs and their leadership teams to help grow and scale their companies. And I do that through helping them install systems and routines and behaviors that help them eliminate drama and focus on the right things.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds fantastic. Eliminating drama and focusing on right things are themes and powerful levers, it seems, in terms of accelerating careers and results.

Rob Monson
Yes, absolutely. And one of the big things we focus on is, “Initially, do you have 100% A-player leadership team? And how do you get to what we call an A-player leadership team? And how do you make sure and can identify whether you have non-A-players in your team? And what does that look like?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I was watching your TikTok and it’s amazing. You have a tremendous number of views for coaching insights on TikTok. Didn’t even know you could find that there, but now I do. And you got them, Rob. I was watching one of your videos, and you talked about, very quickly, eliminating C-players, and that sounds a little bit spooky.

So maybe let’s define what makes an A-player, B-player and C-player, and knowing maybe first of all that some folks feel a little bit perhaps even bristle-y about the language. What about a growth mindset, Rob? Can’t we all flourish and become A-players?

Rob Monson
They do. And this is the difficult part, is in the modern era, we try to avoid labels. However, if we cannot label the behavior and the performance, we will not grapple with it and we will not grow. And so, when we talk about an-A player, it’s someone that lives the core values 90-plus percent of the time, the organization’s core values 90-plus percent of the time, and hits KPI-driven goal 90-plus percent of the time.

So, we have a subject of measurement that’s normed over time by leaders in an organization. We share our scores with each other and we grade out our teams, which we do quarterly. And then we have an objective measurement, which is how often they hit goal. In between those two things, you find whether they have an A-player or not.

And your B-players tend to be people that live the core values consistently, but they aren’t as productive as we need them yet to be. Maybe do not have the habits, routines, behaviors. Sometimes, it’s skillset, but usually it’s embedded in the other area of habit, routine, that really makes them successful. And finally, we have C-players who do not live the core values and are not productive.

And here’s a fascinating statistic. C-players drag down each team by at least 30% productivity every single time.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! So, a single C-player can drag down a whole team by everyone by 30%.

Rob Monson
A single C-player can drag down an entire…yep, A single C-player will drag down a team’s results. It doesn’t matter what the KPI is or growth measurement, by at least 30% every time. And it’s remarkable how often that’s held up over the last eight years.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing. And so, you’re measuring that based upon the attainment of these KPIs?

Rob Monson
Yes, well, attainment of the KPIs, and also, you see some behavioral practices as well that tend to fall off in terms of how they live the core values because they’re making up for this person’s lack of behavior and productivity. So that’s why, when we identify if we have a C-player in our presence, my usual question is, “What time are they leaving today?” And I don’t mean that to be…

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, ooh, Rob, spicy. Right to the quick.

Rob Monson
I learned that from an amazing coach named Dave Baney out of Las Vegas. And Dave had it spot on, which is you’re on the clock. It’s like the NBA shot clock. You are on the clock before your A-players leave. And what you want to do above all, that’s the number one reason you’re a-players will leave is tolerance for C-players.

Number one thing you want to do in an organization is preserve your A-player team and be able to remove the C-players that drag them down. And what happens again, that’s the weight that drags us down. So, most organizations, if you follow the rules that were established about 30 years ago, or the research that was established years ago by a person named Bradford Smart, who wrote a book called Topgrading. By the way, don’t ever read that book. It’s a really rough book, but the concept is great. And in “Topgrading,” the logic and philosophy is that about 25% of your organization will be C-players.

Pete Mockaitis
You say Geoff Smart?

Rob Monson
Brad Smart, his dad. Read Geoff Smart in Who. That’s a great book.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, I was going to say we had on the show, way back in the day, episode 30 in 2016, Randy Street from ghSmart, because this language of A-player is bringing me back. And he said something kind, I think, if folks are bristling out the labels, and I think it’s true. Everybody is an A-player at something. In the right organization, in the right role, they can flourish as opposed to, “Oh, you’re just dumb and worthless. So, I guess you’re out of luck everywhere.”

Rob Monson
Absolutely. And, you know, in the modern era, because there are just so many ways now for us to make money and so many outlets, today’s C-player usually is an A-player on their own. And one of the one of the big key pieces of advice I give to people who are not flourishing and have a sort of a track record of not flourishing when you dig into their history, it’s, “Hey, you have a great skillset in this particular area and you have great behaviors in this particular area, but you just don’t flourish under someone else’s values. Go start your own thing.”

Today’s entrepreneurs were yesterday’s C-players, and A-player entrepreneurs, too. So, there’s a way to get into a great role and a great fit, even if it’s not with someone else’s organization.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s define some of these behaviors. It sounds like there is some variability in terms of the organizations and the cultures and the values. But, perhaps, could you zero in on a few universal or near-universal behaviors or things that comprise an A-player?

Rob Monson
Yeah, absolutely. So, we talked about living the core values and hitting KPI-driven goal, and the question is, “How do they do that?” And what we find is they are better at developing habit and routine, meaning that those who set their day in a predictable way, who go out of their way to figure out, to realign themselves to a set of key priorities they’ve established, hopefully for the quarter, “What am I doing relative to those priorities that I’m going to accomplish today?”

“Where am I stuck?” Understanding, “Where am I stuck and need help from others to be able to accomplish those priorities?” And then number three, “If I’m pacing behind on one of my key KPIs, what am I doing to catch up?”

And those are sort of the behavioral traits that the A-player tends to have in addition to some of the things that you talk about with on your podcast on prioritization and time management, those tend to be the hallmark of the A-player is they can prioritize, they can time-manage they can look at that set of priorities and say, “This is important. This is not important.”

What we see, really, really important, in this in this scenario is, one, successful people time-block two weeks out consistently. They block their time. They have their calendar blocked out with time, specifically spent to work on their handful of one, two, or three key priorities they have to accomplish for the quarter.

Number two, their heads are out of email or Slack or Teams. And I remember, like, the Slack tagline 10 years ago was something like, “Be more productive,” and those tools kill our productivity because they encourage us to respond to urgent instead of important. I’m not saying there isn’t any use for those tools, but you have to get into the same habit of Slack or Teams as you do with email, which is if you’re highly productive, you get into a mechanism where you’re responding three times a day.

I do it at 8:00 a.m., 12:00, 4:00, and spend a half hour doing it and economize my responses with AI or other tools, or I get into the trap of being stuck in email. And one of the most painful things we have to do as coaches, is remove leaders who cannot get their heads out of email because that’s not where we need them focused.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, these are some very specific perspectives. And, it’s funny, I’m imagining, this brings me back to a conversation I’ve had with a couple folks who are in the mortgage game and doing very well. And so, I say, “What’s the trick? How are you able to just really generate so many more loans, deals than the other folks?” And it’s like, “You know what? The thing is, when I’m at work, I’m doing my work.”

And it sounds like, “Well, duh.” But especially, when there are some activities, we feel some reluctance towards like, “Okay, I’ve got to go do prospecting in the sales universe. Like, oh, that’s kind of uncomfortable. That’s kind of unpleasant. I’m going to get some folks who are not pleased to be hearing from me.”

And yet it seems that, from my limited sampling, those who go do that, as opposed to find any other thing they could be doing on email or anything else, tend to flourish in a sales role, for example.

Rob Monson
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And there might be some people that are very task-oriented and very relationship-oriented, right? And sometimes we have to make sure we can put them in the right role. They are good at some things. Sometimes you have to have the self-awareness to be able to realize whether you are task- or relationship-oriented.

Like, that’s why I have to minimize task for salespeople, meaning the systems do the tasks for them, whether it’s follow-up or tools they’re using. They have a minimal amount of data entry because they tend to be good at relationship and not tasks. Things that are high relationship and high tasks don’t tend to have a good middle ground unless you have extremely high-level people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. Well, could you maybe walk us through a couple examples of folks you’ve seen see some transformational cool things in their career by following this kind of three-step process?

Rob Monson
Yeah, so what I’ve seen really consistently is, to your point, not everyone’s going to elevate, right? They just don’t have the ability to be able to grasp onto new habit and new routine. And it’s something sort of deep within them. It can be caused by a lot of things. It can be caused by habits growing up, childhood trauma, there are things. ADHD is a big component.

If you know the amount of people in society who suffer from ADHD, it’s about 6%. And then the number of people that suffer from slowish cognitive tempo is about 15%. That lines up perfectly with what I see among executives, which is about one out of five suffers from something that looks like ADHD, making it harder to form habits and routines.

Pete Mockaitis
Fifteen percent slow cognitive tempo.

Rob Monson
Sluggish cognitive tempo, yeah. Dr. Russell Barkley, I believe, has talked about that. That’s someone that’s a very interesting ADHD expert. I’m someone who suffered from ADHD myself. I have very good medication at this point, and that’s helped me develop habit and routine successfully, whereas without the medication, I could not do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s define a sluggish cognitive tempo. Does that just mean I’m thinking slow?

Rob Monson
It usually just means that, you know, between the ADHD receptors, right, we’re not getting quite as much of a chemical reaction that we need to. I think it’s dopamine and norepinephrine, right, or something in those neighborhoods, the same neighborhood. You’re not getting enough that you need out of those two to be able to be as effective as you need to.

So, it becomes an executive function issue, meaning we’re not able to consistently make decisions and listen appropriately in such a way where it translates into us being able to either absorb new habit or routine, or be able to prioritize and manage our work effectively so we get through things, we accomplish things we need to, and we excel, learn new patterns as we go.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. And so then, it sounds like, sometimes you find yourself in that boat, it may just be a biological matter, something in the realm of medication, in the realm of nutrition, exercise, or kind of outside of what happens inside the office.

Rob Monson
Yes. So, to your point, those situations are very difficult to deal with. Those who are successful can, basically, with a little bit of coaching, even though they might not have had in the past, to say, “Hey, let’s really focus on blocking your time out now more effectively so you have time to be able to spend focused on your priorities. Let’s make sure that you are spending way less time in email on a daily basis, that you’re only checking it three times a day, over Slack,” for instance, right?

“Let’s take those distractions that maybe you’d walk down the hall to be able to go talk to someone and let’s get those knocked out of the way in a daily huddle.” We haven’t talked about that yet, but in a daily huddle, we usually put our executives and all of our teams in a daily huddle where they can knock out things that don’t distract them later in the day.

And if you can do those things successfully, what we find is, and about 30% of leaders will be able to do that, so probably low for a lot of people, but that’s the reality is you can get about 30% will be able to develop new habits and routines, they will be able to be successful in their role.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, let’s talk about a few of the particular habits with regard to time blocking, and the process by which you identify, “Hey, what is the high-value thing? And how do I think about where the best place is to block that time?” Maybe just walk us through a couple examples of folks putting this into action specifically in their roles.

Rob Monson
Sure. So, the most successful way that it starts, by the way, is at a higher level than maybe all of us start with as even leaders or even doers in an organization. It starts with the leadership team coming up with a set of priorities. And once those set of company priorities are known, then we can actually tie our priorities back to the company priorities.

And can they always tie back? No. But in most cases, everyone can usually tie their priorities back to something that’s a key priority for the organization. That’s step number one, “Is what I’m working on tied into the most important things the organization has deemed worthy or important to work on?” That’s number one, “And do I have a handful of things tied to that?”

Then, usually, the KPIs or the measurements that I own are also tied to those priorities as well. Not always, but most of the time. So, it’s, “Am I devoting a portion of my week to making sure that I accomplish those priorities and the tasks related to them, rather than getting distracted by something that comes up like an emergency?”

Because the job isn’t to do the job, by the way. The job is to do the job better. And that’s where most people fall off into non-A-player land.

Pete Mockaitis
Expand on this notion the job is not to do the job?

Rob Monson
In a scaling company, we want A-players. And what I mean by that is we want to grow the A-player percentage inside the organization. And the percent of A-players is something that each leader is measured on. And again, that’s the person that lives core values, that’s KPI-driven goal. And what we want, and we pay for this as well, we’d rather have one great person than three average people. We’ll pay that one great person two times their average salary and still win.

And when we do that, what we expect out of that role is they will not just come in and sit in the seat and do the job. It’s they will actually excel with the job. They will be better than the role. They will wipe out portions of the role that are inefficient and ineffective. And these are things that are very clearly set as expectations up in the hiring process.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, well, could you walk us through a story of an individual who wasn’t doing the things, then turned around and started doing exactly that?

Rob Monson
Yes, so I had a member of a leadership team, and this is someone who, you know, had struggled previously before I became the coach of the organization, had struggled by getting distracted by the wrong things. With her, it was, “Hey, we’re going to be focused on things that are emergencies or things that are popping up throughout the day.” And this person was not doing what they needed to do to actually systematically work through, “How do I make sure this emergency never happens again?”

And what that meant was they, and because they weren’t accomplishing their priorities, which were directly tied to being able to eliminate those emergencies that popped up consistently, they just kept running into the same issue again and again. Once this person adopted a time-blocking routine, and by the way, was she immediately better at all aspects of time blocking? No, she gradually worked up to it. She blocked out a day, a week, you know, a week and a half and up to two weeks as she did that.

And as she got, she was coached by myself and by the CEO to be able to let go of things that were not the most critical priorities and be able to stay focused on certain times of day to respond to her email, she became one of the most productive members of leadership team and is still in her role to this day excelling.

And she’s learning not only is she able to excel and sort of think past the role, which is where we need our A-players to be, she is becoming an expert at recognizing patterns. And that skill of pattern-recognition is something that is built up over time by focusing on the most critical things.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Well, so let’s get into some detail associated with the priority and the time-blocking, how it is done better. So, we already talked about getting the alignment associated with the organization’s priorities and getting your priorities and the key performance indicators that we’re responsible for and what are the activities that will move those forward. Are there any magical questions that you find are super handy to cut through the lesser important things and really highlight the magical things?

Rob Monson
So, what we see is that most people who are successful with prioritization, they learn to do something that we teach them, which is a priority, usually, it’s a longer-term project. It takes several weeks to accomplish.

We teach them a practice of breaking down that priority by week and putting in place one major milestone they have to accomplish related to that priority in a given week, by the Friday of every week, to be able to successfully complete a priority in the time that they’ve allotted themselves.

Now again, they’ve gone through a process of sort of aligning, “Hey, is this something that’s critical and tied into one of the company priorities? Is it tied into the department priorities that I’m a part of?” And then we go through a process again of laying it out and being able to say, “Hey, how do I get into measurable steps that I can go through and be able to be more effective at hitting on a consistent basis?”

Pete Mockaitis
I dig that. And it’s funny, I imagine, as you do that, then the emergencies become even more irksome to you, such that you’re like, “No, the mission of this week is this, and instead I’m dealing with that.” And that question you asked, “How could I make this never appear again?” feels all the more weight-y, substantial, and critical that, “No, no, I’ve entertained this little interruption, annoyance, urgent thing, dozens of times. And before, whatever, I was cool, I was patient, and friendly, and no more. No more. That comes to an end now.”

Rob Monson
Yes, they get out of what we call firefighter mode, which is, and we love real firefighters that respond to real fires, but the rest of us in our work cannot be firefighters. Those jobs are all going away. So, if you believe your job is to show up and put out the fire, or to respond to the same problem again and again and again, that job will one day be erased.

What I want to get into is a role of being able to say, “How do I make the job better? How do I get rid of things that are constant pains to me and the organization? How do I do that with my priorities? How do I make sure that I’m changing the outcome in my role?”

Pete Mockaitis
And can we hear some cool examples in practice how a particular recurring emergency fire kept showing up and how a person figured out how to prevent that from ever emerging again?

Rob Monson
So, a good example of someone being able to systematically sort of see past daily emergencies and be able to sort of put out the fire is someone who works at a manufacturing organization that I coached. And we hired, we do not have a history of hiring A-players in this organization. We did manage to hire A-players in the roles in our back shop, and we had a pretty high defect rate. The defect rate was something like 6%.

And what, literally, within the first couple of months, a couple of key A-players said, “Wait a minute, why are we making the same mistake again and again and again with how we are pulling product off the line? Why don’t we, in fact, change the process of how we’re doing that so that…” in this particular case, it’s a facade that we manufacture for buildings, “…so that it occurs in a different spot than it did previously?”

And this is something that no one had ever thought of. They just kept doing what they were doing, meaning they just sort of kept wallowing in it, “Hey, it was really painful. We have a defect rate,” and rework costs companies so much money we don’t even realize it. And this was creating a very unprofitable entity, by the way.

And once they realized that, and we had all the other A-players in that role, number one, those people were thrilled and happy because they didn’t feel like they were failing every day. Number two, that organization’s profit went up by 8,000% the following year.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, 8,000. Okay, there you go.

Rob Monson
It literally went up 8,000%. That’s the craziest thing. Yep, that might be one of the crazier stories of all time, but you get your defect rate low enough, and it can just be, that’s the stuff that’s shooting ourselves in the foot. Everyone thinks they’re going to grow because of demand or competition. It’s all just stopping you from shooting yourself in the foot.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, this is bringing me back memories. I had a consulting project at one of the world’s largest cookie-manufacturing plants, and it’s wild, yes. Especially in a manufacturing world in which, if margins are slim and competition is fierce, and it often is, then, yes, a meaningful change of the defect rate is huge.

And it’s funny, now I’m thinking about there’s so many things that we just kind of accept or put up with as normal, how it is, and it takes sort of an extra level of acuity, awareness to say, “No, no, time out. That’s not acceptable.”

And so how do you develop a little bit of that wise sensibility to recognize, “Hmm, this is a reality of which, you know, humanity must deal with,” as opposed to, “No, that’s jacked up and we got to fix that pronto”?

Rob Monson
Right. So, you touched on something that’s very, very critical. By the way, there’s a great website called The Systems Thinker, which is very useful, and it talks about people that are more predisposed to linear thinking versus systems thinking. And systems-thinking people tend to be able to see patterns in things.

So, one of the key things that I will ask, when I start coaching an organization is, “What are some basic things that you’ve seen over the last several weeks or months that aren’t good that you would like to change?” It sounds really, really basic, but sometimes no one, and again, a lot of organizations are poorly managed, most are, and nobody asks sometimes.

Pete Mockaitis
“Well, last time, nothing happened. I was ignored. They bit my head off. I’m just going to keep quiet here.”

Rob Monson
Yeah, the number one thing we deal with are dysfunctional leadership teams, right? And that creates that lack of psychological safety. Or, you know, you might have a manager that’s below leadership team who still creates that lack of psychological safety, and people don’t feel comfortable doing that.

But, “Hey, it’s just, what would you change? If you could, what would you get rid of that wastes your time, right, that would actually help you have a more high-level job to be able to get you promoted in the future if you could spend more time on this?” Those are the basic things that help people realize annoying tasks that waste their time.

I ask every one of my leadership teams to say, “Tell me the top five things that waste your time.” And they write them down. And then I say, “Okay, how much of that could you automate, eliminate, delegate, or simplify?” Most will come back with half a day to a full day of time savings that they can re-deploy.

Pete Mockaitis
Per week? Per month?

Rob Monson
Per week.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Rob Monson
It is a per week savings in time when they go through that process. Because again, we just don’t proactively, in a lot of cases, or the organization hasn’t created psychological safety enough, to make it a practice to routinely think about, “How do you economize time spent on low level tasks?”

Pete Mockaitis
I love that. Could you give us a couple examples of, “Here’s a time waster we identified and how we busted it”?

Rob Monson
A couple of critical things. So, I have an example of a COO, for instance, who was struggling with time management, and I asked him to write down “What are the top five things that waste your time?” He did. And one of the most compelling things that came out of it was that none of the lists were very compelling at all. And I said, “How many of those could be delegated?” And guess what his response was?

Pete Mockaitis
All of them.

Rob Monson
All of them. Yep, every single one of them. And that’s usually kind of what you find out of that process is, you know, there are a lot of low-level tasks. It can be the time you spend polling reports where you can’t get to transactional data fast enough. It can be the time spent chasing the problems caused by your B & C players that are creating in the business, right?

People, because they have a fear of letting go, are holding onto the very low-level tasks, sometimes in very high leadership positions. So those are the kind of things that tend to hold people back in how do they use their time more effectively.

What I find in organizations, I’ll come in, and most people, I’ll tell you right off the bat, most people are at about 30% of what their true capacity is. And people say, “How is that possible? How is that humanly possible given how much I’m working?” One, we’re not focused on the right things. Two, we’re not focused on the process of automate, eliminate, delegate, simplify in how we look at work.

And, three, we’re not doing the time management things I was talking about earlier. So, when you get all those things going in an organization, you see that people have a completely different level of output and behavior, not just with themselves, but with each other if they’re an A-player.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Well, Rob, I’m curious, can you tell us any other key tips, tricks, do’s, don’ts that we haven’t covered yet?

Rob Monson
So, there are a couple of things that when we talk about habit and routine, and what we find is that, consistently, if people are not doing something daily or, at the minimum, weekly, it will not form into a consistent habit.

And so, what we want to do is, with one-on-one coaching, we try to get that into a weekly behavior, meaning you are in a one-on-one coaching session with your supervisor all the time, as much as possible. By the way, some of the worst times I’ve had in my career is when I did not have a consistent one-on-one with my supervisor.

And there’s a huge difference between organizations that will do consistent one-on-one coaching and those that will not. So, one of the things I encourage people to do is, if you’re not having a one-on-one with your supervisor weekly, I would ask for it, first and foremost. And I would get feedback on what I’m working on for two reasons. One, stay focused on the most critical things. Get aligned around that.

Two, “Behaviorally, are we both seeing the same thing? How are you growing? Where do you need help and support?” There’s a massive difference when people get both quality and quantity in coaching. And the organizations that do not do consistent one-on-one coaching, they’re always in my bottom three in terms of year-over-year results if they do not one-on-one coach on a weekly basis.

So, it’s like, “Hey, if you’re an organization that won’t coach you, that your boss keeps giving it up, you’ve probably got the wrong boss,” they’re saying, “Hey, I can’t get to your one-on-one this week because something else is distracting me,” I’d find another job.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Understood. Well, that has been my experience, that I have experienced way more learning growth development when I did have that regular recurring thing in conversation happening. And I like what you had to say about a habit. I’m reminded of, I’ve got fond memories in consulting with a teammate named Blair.

And whenever we were returning from the client trip, it was understood that he and I would be taking a cab together from the Chicago airport, Midway or O’Hare, back to the office. And folks would be like, “Oh, well, we can all get on the same cab.” And Blair would say, “No, Pete and I,” he’s from New Zealand, “Pete and I will be on this cab. We’re going to be chatting.” And so, I loved it because I felt like I was a priority for him, so I felt tremendous loyalty.

As well as it was a nice, we talk about habitual, it was a nice groove. It’s like, “Okay, this is a sensible time. We did a bunch of work at the client site. We’re now about to have more of a chill Friday with, whatever, filing expenses or whatever. And so now, while it’s fresh, we’ll talk about what we observed during the course of working at the client site week after week after week,” and it was gold.

Rob Monson
Yeah, absolutely. And what you find is that most people will say, “Well, I have no time,” or, “I have no time to coach.” And the real answer is you have no time because you will not coach. So, what we try to do is get people’s mindset around that.

And if anyone listening to this, if they’re in a coaching position, and if you’re in a manager role, that’s the job, unfortunately to some people. I mean, fortunately, for people that want to do it, that’s the job. But a lot of people will go, “Well, I don’t have time to manage my team.” Well, that’s the job.

Now you do get into these really unfortunate things like ratios when they’re managing more than, I mean, eight people is kind the maximum anyone can really coach effectively. Like, eight is a burn line. People get to 10. Weird things like insomnia and anxiety go through the roof in the leader. So those are the things you have to look out for.

You can appoint team leads or do other things to solve for that situation without, by the way, having to pay more in a lot of situations. It’s just, hey, give someone a coaching assignment. Remove the 10% of their week that was focused on those tasks that could be automated, eliminated, delegated, and simplified, and give somebody an assignment to coach their team member. That’s a great way for people to build their skills and capabilities over time.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, so that’s one critical key, weekly, behavioral, habit thing is these recurring one-on-one coaching bits. Any others that you would elevate to similar criticality?

Rob Monson
So, you heard me talk about a daily huddle. And this is something so you might have heard of Vern Harnish who wrote the book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits and Scaling Up. I was part of an organization that had a daily huddle several years ago, and we grew and scale like wildfire. And a couple of things I never heard because of that daily huddle were, “Hey, no one’s ever told me about that,” or, “Hey, we don’t know where someone is on this particular project or priority.” We were always on top of those critical things.

So, we get everyone into a daily huddle where they’re there for five minutes a day with their team members. There’s usually a minute per person on the team. It might go a little bit longer than five minutes if it’s a bigger team, right, 10-people team, 10 minutes. But, “Hey, what are we focused on the next 24 hours? Where are we stuck? Where am I with my KPIs? And what do I need to do to get them back to green if they’re not?” And that’s basically it.

Pete Mockaitis
And one thing I love about that is just the basic accountability. There’s no hiding out when that is occurring. It’s like, “Oh, Rob, it seems like you’re not doing much. Well, lucky us, we have some resource available to give you some stuff.”

Rob Monson
Yeah, and you get the non-A player responses at first in organizations which are, “Well, that might be like micromanagement.” No, we’re just going to manage the company. Most people don’t even run their companies effectively. We’re just going to have basic alignment every day. It’s going to take a couple minutes. It’s going to free you up throughout the rest of your day.

And the one thing that really changes you, and this is what’s really silly when people fight putting in place a daily huddle. At the end of the day, the five minutes of prep that you take for that particular meeting is what changes you. And again, it’s part of that habit routine we talked about earlier. It’s, “I know what I’m supposed to focus on today. I know where I’m ahead and where I’m behind. I know where I need help.”

That little thing, fundamentally, allows us to put all the other systems and tools we put in place to grow organizations. And people will fight it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, certainly. Yeah, you’ve got that perspective. It’s like, “Oh, I said yesterday I was working on this thing, but I’m about to end my work day with very little progress on that thing. And so, I’m going to have to fess up to that tomorrow. That sounds very unpleasant. Maybe I’m going to kick it into gear here.”

Rob Monson
It’s a little bit uncomfortable. And I remember back in the day, I worked at a company called Compass in Florida, and we help big universities take degree programs online, and Dan Devine was our CEO, and it was a little bit uncomfortable. And Dan was a super nice human being, by the way. But it was professional. You walked into the meeting and you were ready to go. And, by the way, being ready to go and being professional are not bad traits to be able to grow your behaviors, capabilities, how you treat other people on a daily basis.

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

Rob Monson
One of the things I’d like to say about pattern recognition, just very, very quickly, is that that is a skill that not everyone has.

Our A-players tend to have it, meaning 25% of the population will tend to have it. It can be developed over time and you have to be able to ask yourself some really key questions, which are, “Hey, what are the effects on the ecosystem around me? Have I seen this before? Have I seen anything remotely like it in my past that I can compare what I’m looking at right now to?”

Those are things that we don’t do that often in business, but those are kind of some of the key questions we have to ask ourselves to try to get more into systems thinking or pattern-recognition mode over time. And so, people can get better at those areas, but it can be a struggle if we’re more of, “Hey, this straight line gets me from point A to point B and it’s hard to think outside of that.”

There can be some great linear A-players though, to be very, very clear. I’ve worked with people like that in the past and they were amazing at keeping someone like me in the right spot when I needed it. And so, you can get some very, very highly effective A-players that are linear thinkers. They might not be as abstract as everybody else and they’re not dumb. They just think differently than the rest of us. They’re very precise in how they think about their day, their week, their month. And they don’t deviate from that too much. That’s fine.

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

Rob Monson
“Plan your work and work your plan.” And I believe my boss, Suzanne, back in the day at Compass, heard that from Johnson & Johnson. That’s one of my favorite quotes of all time because, really, that’s the essence of how to do successful work is, “I plan what I’m going to do and I fight toward it, and I get better at prediction.”

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

Rob Monson
So one of my favorite studies is the research that Bradford Smart did, Brad Smart did, back when he created the hiring process for GE, back when GE was GE, and that’s what we refer to as “Topgrading.” There’s probably a better name for that in the modern era, but that’s the same process that Geoff Smart, basically, shows us in the book Who.

But the research behind that was very accurate. And what it says is that 25% of the organization will be A-players, meaning, again, those people that live the core values, hit KPI-driven goal, 50% will be Bs and 25% will be Cs. And the crazy thing about that, when you actually tie in everything else that we talked about today, is that you could have 25% of your organization walk out the door tomorrow that were C-players and your happiness and productivity would actually go up.

I have a client that I’ve worked with recently, actually started them several months ago, and they’ve done a great job. This is going to be a very well-known nationwide brand in the very near future. And they realized very quickly, the CEO realized they had people that were not living the core values and were not productive in their midst, and they quickly changed that outcome. They did try to coach up, that didn’t work, so they quickly removed those who would not elevate.

And guess what? Everyone’s happiness has gone up dramatically, the organization is now going towards its goal tiers. Here’s the number one thing. The A-players have not left. And that’s what we want more of.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Rob Monson
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Pat Lencioni. And I have every leadership team member read that, and I wish I would have read it even sooner than I did. I read it several years ago, but wish I’d read it even earlier than that. It would have really helped me understand what my role is on a leadership team.

And that is you are on the leadership team first. You’re not the head of marketing. You’re not the head of sales. You’re not the head of operations first. That’s where we get into the most trouble as leaders is you think you’re the head of the other team first and you come to the table as their advocate and not coach them through obstacles. That’s where you get into the biggest challenges.

Pete Mockaitis
Pat was on the show. He was awesome. And a favorite tool, something you use to be awesome at your job?

Rob Monson
There’s a great toolset that I’ve used consistently lately, which is an assessment of ironclad emotional control in leaders. And one of the key behavioral characteristics we find in Sam Walker’s book, The Captain’s Class, is that leaders on sort of dynasty, very successful sports teams had some very similar characteristics. And one of them was ironclad emotional control.

And what we do is I give them a really quick 12-question assessment to see where they are with their own Iron cloud emotional control. And that’s created, not only in myself, but in my team, some of the greatest improvements in self-awareness that you’ll see as leaders. So, that’s definitely been a favorite. Multipliers assessment is also a favorite tool, by the way, if we’re talking about team members. And if anyone’s talked about it in the past, Liz Wiseman Multipliers is a great tool.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, she was on the show.

Rob Monson
Liz Wiseman, the multiplier assessment, there are some quirks with it. There are some questions that I would word completely differently, but it is the fastest dose of self-awareness that you’ll put a leader through. And it’s pretty cool when they realize that, “How much did a previous leader multiply out of me? And how much did one that was diminishing get out of me?”

And if they realize they want to be like the one that multiplied more out of them, it’s a pretty fast change for those that are willing to do it

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Rob Monson
My favorite habit is I get up. I look at everything I have to do that day and I say, “What is the one thing I’m doing tied into my top three priorities for this quarter?” And make sure that I have time, energy and effort focused on those things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, they’re retweeting and commenting up a storm on TikTok, etc.?

Rob Monson
Yeah. So, yes, there are. Yes, there are some things that resonate. And sometimes, again, it’s that things resonate because they defy conventional wisdom. And one of the things that defies conventional wisdom is to be able to remove your C-players immediately. So, for eight years, in dealing with 35-plus, almost 40 CEOs, I have not, in eight years, ever heard the phrase, “I should have held onto that C-player longer.”

And what that means is, we usually, so mid-market CEO problem is way different, by the way. I mostly deal with mid-market CEOs, way different than the big bad CEO problem that a lot of us, we might have our impression of in our mind. We have a lot of really, really, well-intended mid-market CEOs that are members of EO, YPO.

By the way, great tip for your audience, if you want to find organizations that want to find A-players, look for organizations that are in your local EO or YPO chapter, the CEOs are in that. Those who are in peer learning groups are usually way more self-aware and open to A-player hiring, paying more for the right person in the right role than others that will not.

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

Rob Monson
One, they can follow me on TikTok, @robmonson12. Two, they can find me on TenfoldAdvisors.com. That’s my website as well. So, if they’re interested in learning anything more about what I do, that’s where they would go.

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

Rob Monson
The one challenge I would leave everybody with is the email challenge, which is find a way to get yourself out of email or Slack. Really try to set a habit and routine. That’s the fastest and easiest one. It’s, “Hey, you know what? I’m going to respond. I’m going to get in here three times a day rather than have the dopamine hit of doing it all day long,” so that you can spend more time focusing on more critical things.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Rob, thank you.

Rob Monson
Thank you. I appreciate the time and getting to know you, and hope that was helpful.

Aug 08
0

790: How to Stop Being Overlooked, Underpaid, and Undervalued with Arika Pierce

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Arika Pierce reveals the simple steps to improving your visibility and value in the workplace.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The critical assumption that keeps professionals from advancing 
  2. How to properly negotiate for a raise or promotion
  3. Three rules for more visibility when working remotely  

About Arika

Arika Pierce, President and Founder of Piercing Strategies, is a leadership development coach and expert with a passion for creating forward-thinking leaders. After 15 years of corporate leadership experience, her 360 view of leadership has empowered her to help individuals hone their goals and reach their full potential.  

 

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, sponsors!

Arika Pierce Interview Transcript

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

Arika Pierce
Thanks so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m excited to be chatting, and I dig your book title I CAN. I WILL. WATCH ME.: How to Not Be Overlooked, Underpaid or Undervalued.

Arika Pierce
Yes, i.e., “How to be awesome at your job.”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. Nice healthy overlap there. Well, tell us, can you kick us off right from the bat, is there a particularly surprising discovery you’ve made about folks being overlooked from your work with clients and putting together the book?

Arika Pierce
One of the things that I hear all the time, especially with clients that I work with, is, “I want to be promoted,” or, “I want to advance in my organization. I feel stuck.” And one of the first things I’ll ask them is, “Have you had that conversation about your next steps or your interests or your desire to advance? Are you sharing your impact, your results, all of those things?” And there’s an assumption that, “No, my manager knows all of that.” I’m like, “Maybe they don’t.”

And so, sometimes people need a really clear roadmap on just how to really articulate and do the things to showcase yourself and to get to that next level. And that’s really what the book is about, it’s that roadmap because I think we assume, “Oh, I’m working really hard. Everyone knows my results, or they know that I want to work the cool projects or initiatives or lead the team,” but unless you really lay that out, especially in todays’ world, it might not be known.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And I’m curious, what’s your sense for, if you had to…maybe you’ve got some hot research or a rough sense, what proportion of professionals do you think are, in fact, overlooked, underpaid, undervalued?

Arika Pierce
I would say my informal research is probably somewhere around, I would say, 75%, and I do think that there are some groups that tend to get overlooked more than others. I work a lot with women and I think sometimes we, as women, are not as vocal or we are scared to be bragging or doing things like that. And so, as a result, we’re overlooked for opportunities or we’re not as visible.

So, I think it really comes down to sometimes some personal factors but I do think that there’s only a small segment in most organizations, in my experience, that is always making sure they’re staying at the forefront of the key stakeholders’, who are making decisions about their careers, minds.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, how do we know if we’re in that 75% or the fortunate 25%?

Arika Pierce
So, the first thing I say, I do a lot of work also around personal branding, is you should start to talk to the people who are making decisions about your career. The first thing to know is that it’s not just your boss, there are other stakeholders who have influence on whether or not you advance, whether or not you get, again, those visible assignments or projects or client work.

And so, you need to know who those people are and start to ask them questions, “Is my name coming up when there’s discussion about advancement opportunities? What are the words that you would use to describe me? How much do you think the work that I’m doing is connected to the overall direction of the organization?” Start to ask those questions. And if you’re getting a response where someone’s just kind of looking at you with, “I don’t ever think about you when I think about going far,” then you’ve got some work to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, ask the questions and we get that vibe. And I guess I’m curious, are there also, on the underpaid side of things, there’s a number of places we can go online to research, “Hey, what is competitive salary for my role, etc.?” Any favorite places you like to go there?

Arika Pierce
So, you know what, my favorite place to go is to ask other people that are in your industry, perhaps that may not work at your same organization, and to start having more transparent conversations about what they’re being paid, even if it’s just a range if you’re not comfortable necessarily always sharing exact numbers. But I think that that’s kind of the best research. There are other places online you can look but sometimes just having those conversations with those like-minded peers can be the most transparent in terms of research and data that you’ll ever get.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, if that feels awkward, uncomfortable, do you have any suggested verbiage or scripts instead of just saying, “Yo, how much money you make?”

Arika Pierce
Well, again, I think that’s why it’s important to have a strong network. And so, I think if you have, especially mentors or other peers or colleagues, it’s to say, “Do you know at your organization about the range that someone would be making?” that’s either the position you’re in or the position that you’re seeking.

Or, you could say, “I was looking online and I saw that this job, this position, typically pays around X amount. I’m just trying to bounce that around with some people who might have a sense. Does that sound right to you about what you think this position should be making or would you say it’s 20% higher, 20% less? I’m just getting that type of feedback.”

And so, that again, we get really uncomfortable talking about sometimes, money and salaries, but that’s sometimes the best way to really get a sense on what the market is paying for certain roles.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And could you bring it together with an inspiring story perhaps of someone who was, in fact, overlooked, underpaid, undervalued, and what specific steps they did to reverse that and what became of them?

Arika Pierce
Sure. So, I actually have a client that I’ve been coaching for about two years, and she came into her organization, she was new to her organization, I should say, when she came into the role that she’s in. And what happens a lot, the job she thought she was coming in, and the job that it actually was, there was definitely a delta. And so, she started doing some of that informal research where she both looked online at different places but also started having some conversations with other colleagues or peers and just, again, getting that range.

And so, when she brought the information to her boss, she really approached it as more a negotiation versus asking for a raise, and said, “Look, I really want to align the work that I’m doing because it’s not exactly the scope that I was hired for. It’s much larger. I don’t have a team. I’m doing everything myself. And based upon my market research, this range is more closely aligned with the level of work that I’m doing.”

And he appreciated, actually, the way she presented it, and she also could show her impact, her results, all the things that she had brought to the organization in just a very short timeframe, and he said, “You know what, you’ve made a great case. And I can’t do anything right now but let’s put together a package that we could present.”

And so, one of the things I always tell people is just get a commitment to the next step. It’s very rare where your boss is going to say, “Absolutely. Let me put the paperwork in right now.” But she did get a commitment that they would revisit it in 90 days, and she did eventually get a very substantial raise.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. And so, I think in terms of the starting point here, I think many of us might have some butterflies in the stomach, some jitters, not the confidence to boldly have such conversations. How do you recommend we start?

Arika Pierce
Practice. She and I practiced that conversation probably about three or four times before she actually had it with her boss. So, I recognize it’s not easy to go in and to even start the conversation but you need to practice. Have a friend, or if you have a coach, or a partner, another colleague, someone that you can actually have a good roleplaying conversation with, and practice it going a number of ways.

Practice them shutting you down immediately. Practice them pressing you for more information. Practice them saying, “You’re absolutely right.” And you knowing how to then, what are those next steps. So, you just need to definitely make sure that you’re prepared for the conversation. I also think it’s good to lay the groundwork.

So, I wouldn’t just go in and immediately ask my boss or manager on Friday at 3:00 o’clock if I could talk to him about making more money, but you want to start laying that groundwork early. Make sure that they know what you want to discuss before so they come into the conversation with the right mindset as well. And then, again, really look at it as a negotiation.

I think when we go into it, like we’re asking for something, it feels that we’re shut down immediately, that we failed, but go in and really negotiate. And some of it may be salary, some of it may be other parts of what you’re seeking. Maybe it’s more visibility to work on projects that are at a higher level. Maybe it’s a title change. Maybe it’s just better understanding, “If I’m making this, what do I need to do to get to making X?”

So, there’s a wide range of things that that initial conversation could be about but, more than anything, you want to make sure that you’re prepared. And the best old-fashioned way to prepare is just practice, practice, practice.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. All right, Arika, well, backing it up a little bit, can you share with us what is your general approach and first steps if we want to be in the groove of not being overlookable, underpay-able, under-valuable?

Arika Pierce
So, it really gets down to having a strategy. I talk a lot about, in the book and also just with a lot of my coaching clients, is that being ambitious is not enough. You must also be strategic. So, for example, when it comes to being more visible, you should sit down and spend some time thinking about what is important to your boss or your manager, what is important to your organization, and you need to make sure that the work that you’re doing can be connected to that.

Oftentimes, I see people who are so busy, they’re spinning their wheels, they’re completely worn out, and they can’t figure out why they’re working so hard, yet people around them who appear to not be working maybe as hard as they are, they seem to be always getting that promotion, or getting that visible project, or doing things that, in some ways, feel a little bit unfair compared to how “hard” you might be working.

And so, oftentimes, that’s because they are doing things that are important to their boss and manager.

So, that’s one of the first things you need to do, is connect the work that you’re doing to what’s important to your boss, what’s important to your organization. And if you can’t make a connection, then you have a problem.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you talk about making the connection, it’s funny, I’m very good at rationalizing things in my brain, and so I’m imagining that it’s more about ensuring that the stuff you’re actually doing is that which is valued as opposed to telling a good story about it. Is that fair to say or is there some value in the storytelling, too?

Arika Pierce
So, I think there’s value in the storytelling, too, but you just have to make sure you’re telling the right story. So, for example, we know a lot of times higher-level management, they manage by soundbites so you want to make sure that you’re giving those soundbites when you do have their ear. So, if you know, for example, that there’s a client that’s the client that matters the most to your boss, then think about, when you have those conversations with your boss, how can you show that you’re overdelivering or you’re doing the things that are keeping that client happy or that are retaining the client.

Or, are you spending your time talking about things that relate to another project that you know is a much lower priority to your boss? So, think about those types of things. Again, that’s where it comes to being strategic. It’s being focused and knowing what those high-visibility areas are and making sure the work that you’re doing is connected to them, but it also is about the story that you’re telling, about how you are helping to deliver whatever it is the end goal is for that particular initiative or project or opportunity.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, can you share with us some particular tactics in terms of figuring it out, like what is strategically valuable, and then shifting ourselves over to doing it?

Arika Pierce
Sure. So, the number one thing is, if you don’t know what’s important to your boss or your manager in terms of that they’re working on, that they’re doing, then you need to have a conversation and ask. Oftentimes, when we have, for example, one-on-ones with bosses or managers, those people use that time to go down, “This is the task that I’m working on. This is how I’ve been keeping busy.” And sometimes that might be appropriate, but other times you really want to be having a deeper-level conversation.

You could always send a list of what you’re working on in advance of that one-on-one time, but actually spend that one-on-one time getting more information about, again, what are the strategic opportunities that are happening, or initiatives that are going on in your organization, what’s keeping your boss up at night, what are the things that they’re working on that they feel are critical. Spend time getting more information about that, and then, again, finding ways where you can insert yourself into those projects, into those initiatives.

But, again, sometimes it’s just as easy as having a conversation. When it comes to your organization’s overall growth and strategy, most of the time that information can be found in strategic plans or just, again, having those higher-level conversations, asking boss, your manager, your peers, your colleagues, “Where do you think we’re trying to go in the next three to five years? And how do you think our team fits into that plan?”

And those are the types of people who really advance and go to that next level. So, ask those types of questions. Especially right now, it could as easy as asking if you could sit in on maybe a meeting or something that’s happening at a higher level so you can get that greater level of visibility. And then really look at your calendar, look at your meetings, look at your to-do list and the things that you’re working on. Are they all tactical things or are they things that also can be connected to those initiatives that you know really matter?

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s say we’re doing all these things, and somehow, it seems like we’re still getting overlooked. Maybe we’re in meetings and we say stuff, and people seem to just not acknowledge it, or someone else says almost the same thing we said, and then it’s like, “Well, I just said that. Why are you getting all the head nods and I’m not getting the head nods?” or maybe folks are stealing credit. Can you walk us through some of the other tricky realities that pop up even when you’re doing the right work?

Arika Pierce
Well, everything that you just said, and I’ll be honest, I have personally experienced many of those when I was in my corporate career. And, again, that’s why it’s really important to make sure that you are clear on your own accomplishments, you are clear on your impact and your results, and you really are finding opportunities to insert them and re-insert them into conversations.

I think, oftentimes, especially when it comes to having conversations about our work, our results, our impact, those happen once a year. When? During performance reviews. We have to change that. We can’t expect everyone in the organization or the people who matter for our growth in the organization to know and remember everything we’ve done over the course of 12 months. And so, making sure that you’re finding opportunities to strategically share those accomplishments, those wins, is really important.

And it goes back to what I said previously about the soundbites. One of my favorite tips that I actually learned from a woman named Sahara Downing, who does a lot of work around personal branding, is every call that you have with perhaps your team, your stakeholder, your boss, instead of when you get on, especially in Zoom, and you’re talking about the weather, like, “Oh, is it raining there? What’s the temperature?” use that as an opportunity to share a win.

When someone says, “Hey, how’s it going?” Instead of saying, “Oh, it’s fine.” Say, “Oh, it’s going really well. I just got off the phone with a client that we’ve been having a lot of trouble with, but we had a great conversation and they really gave a compliment about how committed they felt that our team has been doing to help working through a difficult time.” So, find those opportunities to really make sure that you’re sharing what you’re doing, the results and the impact. Don’t wait to be asked or don’t wait for that performance review time.

And then, also, if you feel as though you’re still not getting accountability and visibility, then those are the hard conversations that you both need to have with yourself as well as with perhaps a boss, a manager, or a mentor because those could be indicative of, “Am I in the right organization? Am I in an organization that’s going to recognize me, and that’s going to allow me to thrive, not just survive?” And, to be honest, it might not be an organization for you that you’ll thrive if you’re working really hard and still not getting visibility.

So, that’s why it’s good to do these check-ins but make sure that you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing, not just waiting for someone to say, “How’s it going? How’s your work product?” You want to make sure that you’re leading those conversations.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. And sometimes, when folks are asking you, “How are you doing? How’s it going?” that’s exactly what they mean. It’s like, “Show me progress now.” But it feels rude and almost dehumanizing, like, “Show me progress now, work robot.” So, I think that’s great to be thinking in advance about how you’ll respond to, “How’s it going? What’s new? How are you doing?” because it’s very easy to forget about something, like, “Oh, yeah, that felt good but it was three days ago.”

Arika Pierce
Right. Right.

Pete Mockaitis
But if you have that in mind, you’re thinking about that and you’re ready to go and offer that right in the moment, and that’s really handy.

Arika Pierce
Exactly. Exactly. Because we suffer from recency syndrome. We only remember what just happened. And we also suffer from we remember the bad days. So, if you have that brag list, that accomplishment list, and you’re updating it on a regular basis, I think you should update it weekly, then you have those go-to things that you can share on-the-fly because you can always just look at them, and to say, “Okay, have I shared with someone that this happened, or there was an accolade?” Everything doesn’t have to be the Super Bowl. There are wins every single day. I guarantee they are happening in everyone’s professional career.

Pete Mockaitis
And if folks are stealing credit, how do you navigate that?

Arika Pierce
Well, I think that’s also when you want to have those conversations. If you feel as though someone is taking accountability for your work, or for your ideas, or for your thoughts, I think there’s two ways to approach it. I think one way is directly going to that person, and say, “I saw that you received credit for this but I actually was the one that was leading that project. So, I want to make sure, can you explain how this is something that everyone is acknowledging you for and not me?”

But, also, again, I think this is why it’s important to be having these regular conversations with your manager and with your team so that there can be very little gray areas for people not knowing exactly what you’re accomplishing and what you’re doing. Oftentimes, it’s just the people who are more vocal. It might not even be that they’re stealing your credit but they might be just more vocal about what they’re doing, even if it’s minimal. And so, I think, at times, again, it can feel very uncomfortable but it’s good to do things that make you feel a little bit uncomfortable, and perhaps that is talking about your part and your piece of it.

The other thing I will say is that when you see this happening to someone else, I think it’s a really important exercise to always connect it back to the person who should have ownership of an idea, of a thought. It could be in a meeting where someone says something, and then someone else says the exact same thing. You should be the one to stand up and say, “Oh, that was a great idea, Pete. It was great that you added on to what Arika just said.”

And so, when you start to get into the practice of doing this yourself for other people, I do believe that others will start also to get into the practice of doing it for you, but you can also say that to someone. I’ve done that before where I’ve said something and they have said the exact same thing, and everyone is like, “Oh, great idea.” I’m like, “Oh, I appreciate the fact that you confirmed the idea that I just shared.”

Pete Mockaitis
Got you. All right. And I’m also wondering, when it comes to the remote work dynamic, if you’re remote, it seems like there’s a higher risk associated with being overlooked. Do you play the game any differently or any particular strategies you want to employ in this context?

Arika Pierce
Absolutely. So, I believe that remote work is here to stay. It’s been here for a while. I worked remote for the last five years of my corporate career, and that was before COVID or anything hit. And there’s a couple of, I think, rules of engagement for remote work and visibility. Number one, you have to be over-communicative. This is not the time to not answer emails or to not respond to instant messaging, all of those things.

I’m not saying that you have to stop everything you’re doing every time a message comes in but you have to recognize that when you are working remotely and people don’t hear from you or you’re not really responsive in a timely way, the default assumption is going to be that you’re not working, that you’re not engaged, that you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing.

And so, sometimes it can be a matter of acknowledging that you received the message and that you’re going to get back to someone in the next 24 hours or something of that nature, but it’s really important to be overly communicative. I also think this is the time, too, where you have to make sure that you are getting that time in with your boss or your manager to really talk about the impact that you’re doing.

So, again, going back to the one-on-one time, if you don’t have regular one-on-one time with your boss in a remote environment, then you should really be the one to drive scheduling it. Sometimes we feel like, “Oh, my boss doesn’t require it so we don’t do it.” I would flip that around, especially remote, I would ask my boss, “Can we set up time weekly or bi-weekly so that we can really catch up and focus on some of the work that I’m doing?”

So, don’t think just because you’re in meetings with your boss or manager on a regular basis that you don’t need that one-on-one time. It’s really important to get their focused attention. And then going back to also what I said earlier, make sure that you’re using that time effectively. It’s not the time to always go through what you’re working on.

It’s actually the time to really talk through about your impact, your results, other areas that you’d like to see yourself stretch and grow, to know what they’re working on, what they’re focused on, because, again, you may not be getting that time you would typically have in the office where you could sort of foster or nurture that relationships. So, at least having dedicated time with them on a one-one-one basis becomes much more incredibly important.

And then, lastly, I am a firm, firm, firm believer in turning the camera on. I know everyone has a love-hate relationship with Zoom and Teams and the video camera but I do believe that if we want to foster relationships and we want to make sure that we’re, again, having that visibility, being able to see someone’s face, their body language or facial expressions when they’re speaking, it makes a huge difference.

Also, when your camera is on, you are less apt to multitask, which is a huge problem right now. I struggle with it even when I’m teaching workshops and trainings, and people have their cameras off because I know that they’re doing work while we’re supposed to be focused on a particular workshop or building on a particular skill.

So, I think turning that camera on and being engaged and really participating in conversations and not checking out, I think that’s the biggest risk of remote work is that if you’re not seen, then it’s out of sight, out of mind. It’s very sort of basic premise of you have to really be seen in order to be visible. Being seen means actually being seen on that video camera.

Pete Mockaitis
And I would add to that that, ideally, not that you have to have some super fancy studio but having clear, appealing light and sound as opposed to a crispy distant sound just doesn’t have a great impression.

Arika Pierce
One hundred percent. I’m leading a communications workshop right now for a team, and I’ve shared with them, like, “If you work remotely, and this is where you’re going to be for the near future, invest in something like a microphone if your laptop doesn’t have great audio. It doesn’t matter that it’s your work laptop and that everybody else sounds horrible. Think about you.” Because that’s what I hear all the time, “Well, everybody’s audio sounds horrible. It’s the laptops they gave us.”

Same thing with your camera. You can buy an external HD camera on Amazon and plug it up and, instantly, your delivery will look different, your executive presence will look different. Thinking about things such as your background and all of those things, again, if you are someone that’s looking to go to the next level, then you have to do things that are going to set you apart.

There’s a great book I love called The 5AM Club by Robin Sharma. And in the book, he talks about the fact that 90% of people are happy being ordinary and 10% of people want to be extraordinary. And if you want to be extraordinary, it’s not as competitive because everybody is down there being ordinary but you are the one that is doing the things that everyone else isn’t doing. And so, stepping up your visual, your audio, for your Zoom or Teams meetings, if everyone else is not doing it, then you should be the one doing it if you want to be a part of that 10%.

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

Arika Pierce
No, the thing I would just add is that, again, remember how important it is to be strategic in your career. Ambition is not enough. You want to also marry that ambition with strategy. And that really means being aware of who you are. It means being aware of who people think you are because perception is the co-pilot to reality. That’s a quote by Carla Harris, and I really stand by that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now, Arika, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring? It sounds like one right there.

Arika Pierce
Well, that’s one my favorite quotes. Yeah, I would say that’s probably my favorite and the other one is by Ursula Burns, “Where you are is not who you are.”

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

Arika Pierce
I love reading the studies and the research that are done by Harvard Business Review. There actually was a recent one done just around hybrid work and visibility, and who will get promoted, can you still get promoted at the same level if you are working in a hybrid workforce.

And I don’t have the exact percentage but it was a lot of people thought, no, it’ll be more difficult to get promoted in a hybrid workforce if you’re on the side that’s working remotely. So, I thought that was interesting, and that’s why I’m always thinking about what are the strategies to align people in a hybrid space with people who are also going to be in person.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Arika Pierce
Probably my go-to, because it’s a quick read and I think so many lessons, is Who Moved My Cheese?

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

Arika Pierce
I’m going to go back to what I just said. I think a subscription to Harvard Business Review Ascend. I think it’s like $120 for a year, and you get something every single day that’s of value. So, that’s actually I think a great tool to be awesome at your job.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Arika Pierce
Probably morning meditation, just setting the tone for the day.

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

Arika Pierce
Probably about just stepping outside your comfort zones and how you think about fear. I had a client text me this morning that wasn’t going to apply for a job, and then we got down that she wasn’t applying about not getting it out of fear. And I text her back, “Fear is your homeboy,” which is also a book by Judi Holler. And so, I think just really understanding how growth starts outside your comfort zones.

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

Arika Pierce
ArikaPierce.com or also I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on Instagram but that’s the easiest place to find me.

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

Arika Pierce
I would say think of something professional that makes you feel a little scared and then do it scared.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Arika, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun in not being overlooked, underpaid, or undervalued.

Arika Pierce
Thanks so much. I really appreciate you having me.

Oct 25
0

714: How to Find Success and Purpose with Tanya Dalton

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Tanya Dalton says: "Living on purpose isn't about changing who you are. It's rising up and becoming the best version of you."

Productivity expert Tanya Dalton lays out the daily steps for a more successful and purposeful life and career.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The life-changing habit we often shy away from 
  2. Why our brains hijack our motivation and willpower
  3. The simple trick to propelling yourself into action 

About Tanya

Tanya Dalton is a nationally recognized productivity expert, best-selling author and speaker. Tanya serves as a growth strategist for female leaders in the corporate and entrepreneurial sectors. 

In addition to having her book being named one of the Top 10 Business Books of 2019 by Fortune Magazine, Tanya’s podcast, Productivity Paradox is ranked among the top 50 on iTunes. She is also a regular contributor for Entrepreneur and has been featured in some of the world’s leading publications including Forbes, Inc, Fast Company, and Real Simple. She has been awarded the elite Enterprising Women Award and has been named the Female Entrepreneur to Watch for the state of North Carolina. 

Tanya is also the founder and CEO of inkWELL Press Productivity Co. a multi-million dollar company providing tools that work as a catalyst in helping women do less while achieving success. 

 

Resources Mentioned

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Tanya Dalton Interview Transcript

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

Tanya Dalton
I’m so happy to be here. I’ve been looking forward to this.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, me, too. We’re happy to have you back. And I’m curious to hear, any pretty noteworthy discoveries you’ve made over the last two years you think that might help people be awesome at their jobs? Let’s just get that right up front at the top.

Tanya Dalton
Yeah, let’s just go for it, shall we? Let’s just start it right away. Yeah, I’ve been on quite a journey for sure for the past couple of years. I had the Joy of Missing Out come out two years ago at this point, and have had a lot of things happen to my life, notwithstanding my name change. I changed my name. I have a new book coming out. I have a kid who went to college. Lots of things, lots of shifts in my life.

You and I were chatting before we went live here, and talked about, “Okay, you changed your name. It’s kind of a big thing. It’s kind of a big deal.” And it really is especially when you have a book come out with your other name. So, my name just changed the spelling, T-O-N-Y-A, to T-A-N-Y-A, still pronounced the same, but we were talking about it and it was really important to me to really signify that I’ve been on a journey, that I’ve changed who I am spiritually, emotionally, in a lot of ways have done a lot of deep work.

And I was mentioning to you, what’s good about changing my name is this is something that a lot of cultures do. It opens up the door for conversation to talk about things like this, “Oh, you went and you did some deep work mentally.” And, for me, it really was wanted to signify that to the whole world that I’ve changed who I am and I think I’ve changed for the better and I think, because of all that I went through, I was able to write an even better book, for this new book, that’s come out On Purpose.

Pete Mockaitis
And I know in the book, there are some themes there associated with taking a look at the past and such. So, it’s called On Purpose: The Busy Woman’s Guide to an Extraordinary Life of Meaning and Success. Now, Tanya, I presume men can also find value on having an extraordinary life of meaning and success.

Tanya Dalton
Oh, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Good. Good.

Tanya Dalton
Men also need an extraordinary life as well. Most of my writing is really focused and narrowed in on women because, let’s be honest, Pete, for hundreds of years, books have been written for men. And we, as women, we’ve read those books and we make it work for us, and it’s the same thing here. This book is written for women but it absolutely applies to men.

Pete Mockaitis
Men will make it work there.

Tanya Dalton
You can read it too. I think that a lot of people can get a lot out of this book. I think it has the ability to allow everyone to see that they have an extraordinary life just waiting for them.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, would you say that’s the core thesis here, everybody has an extraordinary life just waiting for them or how would you articulate kind of the big idea?

Tanya Dalton
Oh, absolutely. I think that we think that extraordinary is this thing that we have to claw and scratch to fight to achieve, and an extraordinary life is just waiting for us. Living on purpose isn’t about changing who you are. It’s rising up and becoming the best version of you. It’s really about looking out beyond today and seeing a brighter tomorrow and then making strides each and every day to get to that tomorrow, to that vision we want for ourselves.

[03:22]

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that all sounds pretty cool. Could you make it all the more concrete for us with an inspiring story of someone who did just that?

Tanya Dalton
Yeah. Well, I love that question because, honestly, me, in my journey, is a perfect example of, really, shifting and changing who you are. In the book, we go through four different sections. We go through reflection, projection, action, and alteration. And what’s beautiful about this is they all weave together so intentionally, and I know they have in my life.

I think that reflection is such an important part of growth. It really is, that we have to look backwards in order to move forward, in that when we take the time to dive into who we were, to see how far we’ve come, we understand how far we can go, and we understand what’s possible. And I know, for me, in my own life, I’ve seen this manifest in numerous ways, in numerous times.

We talked about my name change. That was certainly one of those times. But when I closed my first business and made the decision to open up inkWELL Press Productivity Co., that was definitely me making a very intentional choice to shift and move into what I was really meant to do. I started my first business in 2008, and I started with $50, and it was just a little side business that I was doing, selling to friends, maybe friends of friends. And I had a moment where I was on a phone call with my husband.

He was doing marketing for Fortune 500 companies at the time, and he would buy a ticket called the Round the World ticket where, literally, he would leave our home in Dallas and he would fly all the way around the planet, come back to the other side, so he’d be gone for three or four weeks at a time. And we had a conversation where I was telling him all the things that the kids were doing, they were really small at the time. And he said, “I’m missing everything. I’m missing all the moments. I’m missing all the milestones. I’m missing everything.” And I said, “No, no, no, you’re not.” And he said, “No, I am.”

And I hang up the phone that night and I made a big decision in my kitchen that night, that this girl with a ponytail, with $50 that she started her business with, no business experience, was going to grow that business to the point where it could absorb my husband’s MBA income and he could come work alongside of me, so we could have that lifestyle freedom that would allow him to be a part of the kids’ life, more a part, which is what he was really wanting.

So, I sat down, I created some plans for myself, I sketched out some systems, and it was about a year I made that happen. So, he and I started working together in 2009. It was great.

Pete Mockaitis
One year. It’s pretty quick. From fifty bucks to two income size in one year. That’s well done.

Tanya Dalton
Thank you. Well, I think this is a thing, it really is about choosing and then I had that to work towards. That’s me looking bigger than today. That’s me looking at tomorrow, “Where is it I want to go?” I knew at the time I wanted him to come and work alongside me, or rather across the desk from me, which is where he still is, and have this life for ourselves.

So, that gave me the motivation I needed to dig in and figure out what it is I need to do next. And that’s what I really think is so important, is understanding where it is you want to go. So, it was great because then he and I started working together and we loved that. But then in 2013, I looked at him and said, “I love you. I love working with you, but I don’t love what we’re doing.” That big goal that I had of getting him to work alongside me, I was ready for something else. I was ready for something bigger.

I knew that I wanted to make a bigger impact, and what we were creating together with that business wasn’t it for me. It wasn’t hitting those buttons of what I was truly passionate about, what I really wanted to do in the world. I used to be a teacher and so I’m really big on influencing and impacting other people’s lives, teaching and helping others grow.

So, he said, “Okay, what do you want to do?” And I’m like, “I don’t know. I have no idea.” So, I had to do a little reflection, I had to get my little Marty McFly time machine, go back in time and reflect back on, “What is it I want to do? What am I passionate about? How do I figure out what it is I want to do when I have no idea? How is this going to work?”

So, I did that, I did this process of reflection. I tried to find activities and exercises to dive into it myself but nobody seemed to have anything that would work for me. And out of that reflection process, which we can dive more into if you want to, but I found that there were really three things that I am truly passionate about.

I’m truly passionate about teaching. I have always been a teacher even when I was like eight years old. I was teaching and educating and I love watching lightbulbs light up in people’s eyes. I love empowering women and I love productivity. I love structuring things and systematizing things. That’s how I was able to grow that business, that first business, and able to really make that work for our family.

So, through that process of reflection, I realized, “Oh, this is what I want.” So, reflection tells us why, why we want what we want, “This is what I’m passionate about.” So, then we have projection, which is what, “What is it I want?” Well, I have these three things that seem very unrelated: empowering women, educating, and productivity. What can I create out of that? Well, that what became inkWELL Press Productivity Co., my company that I started and created.

So, I projected and figured out this is what I want to do, this is where I want to go with it. I started looking to the future of where could it go. And so, that’s when I stepped into that third step of action, creating action, “How am I going to get there? How am I going to create this for myself?” So, really, creating an action roadmap for myself of, “Okay, if this is where I’m starting out with closing down a business,” mind you, going without income, this is a family of four, both my husband and I are now getting income from my business I started, making that decision to close that up and open up something brand new, that was a big choice.

So, I needed to create an action plan to make sure that I had a map in front of me, that I knew where it was I wanted to go. So, I created that action plan for myself, scaled to seven figures in less than 18 months because, again, I love systems, I love productivity, so I was able to really make that work. And then along the way, there was a lot of shifting and changing that had to happen because life happens, life gets messy, things shift, we evolve and change and grow.

And that’s where alteration step comes in where we know where it is we want to go. We know that vision, that north star. You heard me talk about before our mission, our vision, our core values, I know where that is. I’m at A right here where I am today. The Z is where I want to go, that big vision I have for myself. The B to Y is how we get there, “All right. Now, let’s figure out how we’re going to get there.”

So, I started off by offering up physical products. We started off by selling physical planners, weekly planners, daily planners, all kinds of planners, productivity tools. And then that shifted and grew into having a podcast. And then that shifted and grew into having programs and courses. And then that continued to shift and grow into having publishers reach out to me and offering me book deals which is where I am today.

So, really, it’s all aligned with where it is I want to go. But you can see through every step of that, it’s really understanding that it’s not the actions of today. It’s the actions of today that build into tomorrow, into where I want to go. And I think that’s really when we achieve that extraordinary part of the life. It’s when we’re satisfied, it’s when we’re fulfilled, it’s when we feel successful at the end of our days that we go to bed at night and feel really good about what we did because we’re working towards something bigger than just checking something off our to-do list.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Okay. So, there we have it. You are the case study, and we walked through those stages. So, let’s zoom into each of them then in terms of what are some of the best practices or questions to engage in each of these phases when we do want to understand where you want to go? How do you go about getting after that why to uncover that clarity?

Tanya Dalton
Yes. Well, that’s why I think it’s so important, I think reflection is one of those things that’s really important to do but it’s something we will avoid doing. We would rather clean the cat’s litterbox, we would rather start the vegan cleanse we’ve been putting off for six months, we’d rather do just about anything than reflect back because our past is often filled with lots of great moments but there’s also failure and trauma and frustration and things that we don’t like, and we want to push those underneath the bed. We want to just sweep them underneath the rug and pretend they’re not there, but, really, reflection is so important because that’s the fertile ground from which we grow.

I often tell people that it’s the regret that we can push against that gives us and builds up that resilience that we have. So, when we’re looking back, looking at the things that we have learned, the failures that we’ve had, the trauma, what have we gained from that? Because out of every one of those things, we gain lessons. We have a backpack that we all wear, it’s invisible, but we’re piling it full of these heavy lessons that we’re learning. And those backpacks help us in moving forward.

People will ask me, “How did you grow your business to seven figures in less than 18 months?” I had a backpack filled with experience. I had a backpack filled with knowledge and learning that I pull from teaching, from my first business I’d grown, from parenting, from all of those things. That’s what I used to allow me to grow and I think we tend to discount some of that.

And, really, it’s important to recognize that in a lot of those hurtful moments, those things that were hard, those things that feel like we don’t want to think about them, when we know what we don’t want, it’s so much easier to see what we do. We will move away from pain so much faster than we will towards pleasure.

We don’t go on the diet till our pants get too tight. We don’t stop working long hours till we recognized and realized we’ve missed dinner with the family again for the second week in a row. I know, for me, I had a period of time where I was working way too hard, and that’s a whole another story, where I was working every day, seven days a week, for 12-hour days minimum, and the kids were coming to the warehouse after school. They were coming and they were there on the weekends, and I ended that season of time and I reflected, “How do I feel about myself?” and I felt terrible. I felt like the world’s worst mom.

And it would be really easy to just say, “I’m the world’s worst mom,” and let that be the end of it, “I’m not going to think about this ever again. What a terrible mom I am.” But I realized out of that season, “If I feel like a terrible mom, how do I not feel like a terrible mom? What do I need to do to shift and change so I never feel this way again?”

So, because I had this oozy hurt that I didn’t want to think about being the world’s worst mom, how can I push against that to get to what I want? Well, I made the decision, “Okay, no more of these days where I’m working these insane hours. I’m leaving work every day at 3:00 o’clock. I own my own business so I can make that work. I’m going to leave every day at 3:00 o’clock.” That’s now a boundary for me.

And that’s been a boundary for me ever since, that’s years of me leaving work at 3:00 o’clock every day. I probably wouldn’t have believed it was possible, I probably never would’ve done that except for the fact that I didn’t want to go back to where I’d been. I didn’t want to feel like the world’s worst mom again. So, that’s what’s so beneficial and beautiful about reflection is the trophies we hold up, the beautiful things that have gone well. Those are amazing and they show us how amazing we are.

But the things that aren’t trophies, the things that feel like awful and terrible, those are amazing too because they also tell us how amazing we are, how strong we are, and how resilient we are. And we can build off of those things to get to that life we want.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s really powerful in terms of it can very much be a temptation to not think about that at all and then move along.

Tanya Dalton
Yes, easily.

Pete Mockaitis
I think when you talked about working a lot and with the kids, I saw an episode of the Supernanny. I pull things from everywhere. And so, there was a couple, a mom and a dad, they were working a lot, and their strategy was to, well, I guess for the Supernanny to come over. I don’t know.

Tanya Dalton
That’s a strong strategy right there.

Pete Mockaitis
But before that it was just buying them a lot of stuff. And so, yeah, that’s a lot easier in terms of, “Oh, I feel kind of guilty because I’m working a lot and my kids are disappointed. And so, I’m going to buy them something because I can.”

Tanya Dalton
“Because I work so hard, I can afford it.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And I think that’s common in terms of whether it’s a like a little feel good, quick Band-Aid option that doesn’t get after the stuff. So, it may be like, “Well, I’m going to have a drink. I’m going to play some video games. I’m going to have a smoke. I’m going to…” I don’t know, fill in the blank, whether it’s a healthy or not so healthy means of making yourself feel better in the moment. What they all share is that they don’t experience that pain full on and allow that to be a force for powerful motivation.

Tanya Dalton
Yeah, we don’t want to pull back the bandage because it looks gross. When we pull back the bandages, that’s when it gets air, that’s when it heals, that’s when it feels like it’s better, it scars over. And scars are not ugly, scars are beautiful because they’re part of our journey, they’re part of our path. And I think that when we start to recognize and realize that we’re all so beautifully human, which means that we are imperfect in a thousand different ways.

When we can embrace that in ourselves to know that we’re not alone, the frustrations we feel with ourselves, the negative self-talk, the trauma that we’ve experienced, we’re not alone in that. That’s a collective human experience that we share together. It really is about the healing that we do with the moving forward. Having hard things in our past does not make any one of us unique but it does make us human, and it means that we’re able to grow and we’re able to heal. And I think that’s really important to understand and to acknowledge. It’s not easy. I’m not going to pretend for anytime here on this show that that’s an easy process.

I go into some of the deep dark trauma that I’ve experienced in my life in the book to kind of show how we can overcome it, how we can dig in and understand why it happened to us, and where we want to go in moving forward, because I think it’s really powerful to understand that we have that ability. And I think it’s just believing in yourself, choosing to believe that you can move forward, that tomorrow is a brighter day.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. All right. So, we have a powerful distinction and an action we could take that many people don’t, to take a hard look at that which you’re not liking in the reflection and trying motivation.

Tanya Dalton
I can give you an easier one if you’d like because that was a tough one.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, we’ll take an easy one too.

Tanya Dalton
Okay, here’s an easy one for reflection. You can also look back at your past and think about what did you love when you were a kid before you started adulting. Because what happens is we lose sight of what we love in the pursuit of adulting. We got to pay the rent, we got to pay the mortgage, we got a car payment, we got all those things, and so we lose sight of what it was that used to fire us up, that used to light us up and get us excited.

So, really, going back and revisiting what were the things that you loved as a kid, what were the things that you got fired up about, not the piano lessons your mom dragged you to. That doesn’t count. The activities that you wanted to go to again and again? Maybe it was softball, maybe it was playing the violin. What was it? And then go a little bit deeper why did you love that.

If you loved softball as a kid, or a sport, was it being outside? Was it the camaraderie? Was it the competition? Was it the physicalness of it? Use that as a little bit of fodder to get you started because, oftentimes, our passions, even as adults, can be found in our childhood. We just lose sight of them because we’re so busy doing, we don’t stop and recognize and realize. And a lot of times, those things that we did as kids, we can build upon and grow that into what it is we want to do in moving forward. So, that one is a lighter one.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Thank you. Beautiful.

Tanya Dalton
A little less trauma, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, let’s move onto the next step. We did a reflection. And then what comes, projection

Tanya Dalton
Projection, yes. So, reflection tells us why, why it is we want what we want. And projection answers that question of what, “Well, what is it that I want? What do I want in life?” And I think what’s really interesting is we have a hard time knowing what that is. I can guarantee you have some listeners right now who are thinking, “I have no idea what an extraordinary life looks like. I have no idea what it is I want. I have no idea what goals I should set.”

And so, what happens is we look left, we look right, we look over the fence, and we see where the grass is greener, and we go, “That’s what I should be doing.” And what we really want to do is understand what it is that you want and what you look like in the future. But here’s, really, what’s fascinating, I think, is that our brain has an extraordinarily hard time seeing ourselves in the future. Our brain is hardwired for today because that’s what’s kept us alive and allowed us to avoid the saber toothed tiger, it’s what allowed us to get to the next day.

And there’s this really fascinating study where they’ve used fMRI machines on people’s brains, and they would have them talk about themselves today, and certain areas of the brain start pinging and lighting up and really showing that they’re active. And then they would have the people talk about themselves in the future. Now, the future could be three weeks from now, it could be three years from now, it could be three hours from now. But when they talk about themselves in the future, it lit up a very different part of the brain, not the same part of the brain when they talked about themselves.

What’s most fascinating is when they had these same participants talk about Natalie Portman and Matt Damon, those same areas of their brain lit up as it did with when they were talking about themselves in the future. So, in other words, to our brain, you in the future is not you. It’s a stranger who looks like you, has the same name as you, is you but it doesn’t recognize you as being you. And this is why we often fail at our goals. This is why we splurge on the Paris shoes instead of investing in the 401(k) or why we eat the cookie instead of eating the carrot because the person in the future who has to pay for that, or has to deal with the outcome of that, isn’t you, and so our brain prioritizes today over the future.

And I think when we understand that, it’s incredibly powerful to understand, “Oh, this is why I’ve struggled in the past, and, again, I am not alone in this. This is how my brain works.” So, it’s really understanding, “Now, if I can start to picture myself in the future and I can start really projecting forward into what I want in the future, then I can see myself, and then I can connect to my actions from today to what I want to do in the future.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s fascinating in terms of that fMRI study.

Tanya Dalton
Isn’t it? I found that so interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
So, yeah, that would seem extraordinarily powerful is that if we can view “future self” as sort of just as real and valid and important as “current self.” And so, it seems like you’re hinting at a pathway that’s very different other than just, “Buckle down and get to the gym.” It’s sort of like…

Tanya Dalton
Yes, that’s not what it is at all.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s more about know what you really need to see and adopt and embrace the future self as yourself. And so, how do we do that?

Tanya Dalton
Yeah, that’s the big question, right? Because it is, it’s a mental game. It is. And we love to blame willpower on why we haven’t gotten things done, “Oh, I don’t have the willpower,” or, “I’m not disciplined enough.” And it’s not discipline that you need. In fact, if we know that our brain is prioritizing wins for today over wins for tomorrow, it’s our brain that’s hijacking this, that’s causing us to do that.

So, what we can do is we can really look forward into the future and create a map for ourselves. I call this wayfinding in the book where it’s really looking forward into the future to what is your potential. Okay, what is your potential? “Like, ten years in the future, what could I possibly have in my life? Like, what could that possibly look like?” What is your potential? So, figuring that out, and then we back it up a little bit. So, that’s your potential, you want to back it up to what is possible, “Okay, if that’s the potential in ten years, what’s possible in the next three to five years on that map to get to that?” what I’d call your cathedral. What’s possible?

Then if we back that up even more, “Okay, if that’s possible in three to five years, what’s practical? What would be practical for me to accomplish in the next 12 to 18 months?” So, here, we’re talking now about long-term goals, a year to 18 months. Well, let’s back that up a little bit more on our little map. And in the book, I literally make it like a little map of, like, “You are here and there’s a roadmap.”

If we back that up any more, we can figure out, “What do I need to prioritize in the next three months, the next six months, the next nine months?” That’s how we decide what our goals are because then those goals are on that path to get to that potential that we’re dreaming of. And there’s lots of things that we can do to really help solidify that in our brain. As I just said, we have a hard time seeing ourselves in the future so we can do things.

There are all kinds of amazing technology now. You can do these things on Snapchat even and Instagram where you can use a filter to age yourself and put yourself. Let’s say that your potential is that you want to be on the cover of Forbes magazine. All right, you can create a picture of yourself in the future on the cover of Forbes magazine. Put that someplace where you can see it and then start solidifying it in your brain. Start mapping that out and seeing who you want to be in the future.

When we back that up, that’s when we begin to see, “Oh, this is the action I need to take right now. This is the goal I need to set for myself right now. If that’s where I want to go, here’s where I need to be in a month, here’s where I need to be at the end of this week, here’s where I need to be today.” And that’s when we start to make motions and take action towards that big potential out there, that big extraordinary life when we’re making those connections, when we create that map for ourselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I think make connections is the phrase because with that pathway in place, with all the dots connected, it really does feel real as opposed to, “Sure enough, I did this thing and I saw some improvement. And, thusly, I can see that if I do all of the things, they will lead me into that place, and, thusly, the future-aged person on Forbes magazine is not Natalie Portman but it is me.”

Tanya Dalton
“But it’s me,” yeah. I think it’s really incredibly powerful when you start to recognize that and you realize that. I think this is why we set goals and we’re never quite satisfied. We build into that someday syndrome, “Someday, when I accomplished this goal,” or, “Someday when I cross the finish line,” but that finish line keeps moving back, doesn’t it? Like, we never really get it crossed.

And even when we do, we have this fleeting moment of satisfaction and excitement. It’s called the goal-setting paradox, where you get a fleeting high when you accomplish a goal, and it’s followed immediately by a question of, “Now what?” “Okay, I finished the marathon, now what do I do?” “All right, I just climbed…”

I actually spoke to someone who’s climbed Mt. Everest who’s blind, Erik Weinmeyer, and he said after he summited Everest and he went on his way down, someone said to him, “Okay, now what?” He’s like, “I just summited Everest. Isn’t that enough?” But this is what we go through in our life. We accomplish a goal, and then we’re like, “Now what?” But if that goal is to connect to something bigger, to a brighter future, it becomes just a stepping stone to get us to the next one, so we get that satisfaction and we’re ready to go to the next step. And that’s how we continue on the daily basis to feel happier, more satisfied. And isn’t that really what our goals are all about?

I would argue that every goal, every dream, and every aspiration is steeped in happiness. You want to cross the finish line in a marathon? Why? So you can feel that pride and joy, that happiness of crossing the finish line. You want to lose 15 pounds? Why? Because you want to feel happy when you put your pants on. You want to get that promotion at work? Why? Because you’ll be happier when you have more money and when you have a team underneath you.

All of those things are tied to happiness. Let’s stop waiting for happiness to happen to us. Let’s make happiness happen on a regular daily basis. That’s absolutely achievable. That’s what makes life extraordinary.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well said. All right. Well, this is so much good stuff. Can you give us maybe the quick greatest hits in terms of action and alteration? What should we be doing to do those masterfully?

Tanya Dalton
They go hand-in-hand because alteration is really woven throughout. Alteration really is about building in that flexibility and that grace to allow life to happen because, if we’re honest with ourselves, we all know life is messy. And the best-laid plans allow for detours and re-routing and all of those things to happen because life demands flexibility.

So, as we’re creating action, action answers the question how, “How are we going to do this? How are we going to accomplish this?” it’s really about breaking it down into bite-sized milestones. So, you have this big thing off in the distance. It seems really far away in our future self because we know we’re not connected to it. It feels like it’s not us. So, how do we back that up even more to create little milestones we’re working towards, little stepping stones to get us closer to that life we want.

We do that by creating an action roadmap for ourselves. You’ve heard me say before here on the show, I’m sure, overwhelm isn’t having too much to do. It’s not knowing where to start. When we know where to start and we know what actions we want to take, it’s incredibly empowering and it’s incredibly confidence-building. And so, that’s really powerful for us to do.

But really, it’s about creating a plan for ourselves so we feel confident to step over our fears and create time in order to allow these things to happen in our lives, to allow ourselves to get closer to those big goals and dreams and aspirations.

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

Tanya Dalton
Yeah. Well, I would say we kind of touched on that whole idea of discipline earlier, here’s what I would say. When we people talk to me about needing discipline, I really want to encourage more people to let discipline go, to stop worrying about needing more willpower, or feeling like they have to force things to make it happen. Discipline is really just a series of small actions.

So, when you recognize that and realize that, that it’s really just small actions, little tiny steps on a regular basis that build up, that begin to look like discipline, it’s just habits that we build over and over again over time. When we start to do that, that’s when we start to get that momentum we need. So, just focus on the next small action you can do. That is honestly the way you get on that path to that extraordinary life.

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

Tanya Dalton
Oh, a favorite quote. I would say probably one of my favorite quotes is actually from Harry Potter, and it’s when Albus Dumbledore tells Harry that, “It’s our choices that show us what we are far more than our abilities.” I think, really, when we understand our choices, it’s incredibly powerful.

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

Tanya Dalton
Oh, I have a study I just stumbled upon not that long ago that I love, where they took these men out of a retirement community and they separated them into two groups. One group went to another retirement community, and the other group, they fashioned everything in the place where they were so it looked 20 years earlier, and they encouraged them to talk about things that had happened 20 years earlier, all the appliances were 20 years earlier. And so, they encouraged them to really think about who they were 20 years ago.

After less than a week, they took the control group who’d gone to the retirement community, they were still in the same place, still have the same aches and pains and all of that. They took that group who had just kind of time traveled 20 years mentally, and they found that within those seven days, they had built more muscle mass, they had gotten rid of a lot of their arthritis. Not only did they feel better, but their bodies have physically reacted.

I think a lot of times we think that mind over matter thing is just a bunch of woo-woo, but, truly, our bodies are able to change and shift when we get our minds set right, when we really think about what it is we want.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Tanya Dalton
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. That’s a great book because it really is, again, really how strong your brain is and how it can really get you where you want to go.

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

Tanya Dalton
Well, I use inkWELL Press products but that’s kind of a no-brainer there, isn’t it? I have to be honest with you though, so I do a lot of my planning obviously using inkWELL Press but we use a lot of Google Docs and we found some ways to kind of hack them so they work for us. I felt like I was using far too many different tools to do all the different things. So, we’ve kind of created a little hub in our own system within Google Drive and Google Docs so that we can make that work to get rid of a lot of our project-planning tools and all those things.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now I’m intrigued. Can you share a particular Google Doc hack that maybe many people might benefit from?

Tanya Dalton
I don’t know if I can give it really quickly, but we have a whole system that we use and we use, it’s kind of funny, because we use like emojis to kind of signify the different steps we’re in in a project. And what I love is that all the conversation happens within the Google Docs because we were getting things from Asana, and we were getting things from Slack, and we were getting things from email, and I felt like we were going far too many places.

So, we started using this icon system where if something was in process, we give it a thumbs up. And if it’s something that’s completed, we give it a check mark, if we’ve shared it. So, there’s a whole system of using these little symbols, and it’s made it, it’s so insanely simple that I think sometimes we overcomplicate things. So, that’s what we’ve done is just using all these different symbols within Google Docs.

I create a table of contents for every project that we do, and that’s our main Google Doc. Everything is, that’s become the hub. So, everything that we create off of that, other documents, other spreadsheets, other things, that table of contents becomes almost like our little bible where we click on it and it sends us exactly where we need to go, so everything is succinct and together inside Google Docs.

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

Tanya Dalton
I would tell them to go to TanyaDalton.com. You can find links to my podcast, The Intentional Advantage, there. You can also find information about both my books The Joy of Missing Out and my newest book On Purpose. TanyaDalton.com is probably the best place to find me.

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

Tanya Dalton
Yeah, I would say that extraordinary life is there. And I know where you are right now, it might seem like that’s impossible. But what I would challenge you to do right now is just take a moment and start with that reflection step that we talked about. Go the easy route. Let’s not worry about the hard things or the difficult things or the things you don’t want to think about. Let’s start with the easy things.

Let’s start by thinking about who you were before you started being an adult, like before the age of 16, we’ll say, and just make a list of the things that you loved. And then ask yourself, “Why did I love that? What was it about that that I loved? I don’t want that stuff there.” Ask why again, and then maybe ask it one more time. Get to the heart of why you loved what you did and start to rediscover your passion. Because when you start to remember and recognize that passion has been there all along, it’s so much easier to build that fire.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Tanya, this has been a treat. Thank you. I wish you much luck and fun and purpose.

Tanya Dalton
Thank you so much. This is great, Pete. We always have a good time together.

Aug 26
0

482: David Allen Returns with the 10 Moves to Stress-Free Productivity

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David Allen provides an approachable overview of his legendary Getting Things Done (GTD) system.

You’ll Learn:

  1. GTD in a nutshell
  2. The saving power of an external brain
  3. Two power questions for prioritizing

About David

David Allen is an international best-selling author who is widely recognized as the world’s leading expert on personal and organizational productivity. He wrote the international best-seller Getting Things Done, which has been published in over 28 languages. TIME magazine heralded it as “the defining self-help business book of its time.” He and his wife Kathryn run the David Allen Company, which oversees the certification academy and quality standards for Global Partners offering Getting Things Done courses and coaching around the world.

Resources mentioned in the show:

Thank You, Sponsors!

David Allen Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
David, welcome back to the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

David Allen
Pete, thanks for inviting me again. Yay, glad to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, I am too. And I’ll tell you, boy, it’s been quite a ride since we had you in Episode 15. That’s over three years ago. And so, I’d love to get a quick little update in terms of how is Amsterdam living and then what’s been sort of your new learnings over the last three years?

David Allen
Wow! Let’s see, you got a couple of years and I can fill you in but, look, I can probably tell you a freeze-dried version of all that. We loved Amsterdam from the beginning. We’ve been here a couple of times. We moved here five years ago. We didn’t know how long we’d stay but we kept falling in love with the city and haven’t fallen out of love with it and absolutely love the lifestyle here, love just lots of things about it. Kind of the perfect storm for us in terms of what matches our interests and our lifestyle and our age. So, we intend to stay. So, it’s wonderful, yay.

Pete Mockaitis
And you have a new puppy, Anouk? How is that going?

David Allen
Anouk is fabulous. She’s four months old and we found a good breeder. Catherine was sort of, “Well, we could rescue a dog, maybe,” but I so love the Cavalier King Charles kind of breed that was our last dog that we had to put down, and so I said, “I’ve got to get another one of those,” so we got another one.

She’s very shy. She grew up in the country. We found a good breeder but they were in Germany. But she had grown up for 14 weeks on a farm, sort of the noisiest, busiest thing was a goat farm next door, so we had to integrate her into the city. I mean, you don’t realize how many noises and things and moving things, and whatever there are in the city that a puppy has to deal with.

Anyway, long story short. But she’s great. She’s learning day by day, getting more comfortable with all kinds of stuff. So, we’re in the process of socializing. Today I sat out for half an hour on a bridge right on the canal that we live on, and sat there for half an hour, letting people greet her and treating her if she didn’t run away from them, and sort of helping socialize and train her. So, that’s a whole job in itself.

Anybody listening to this who’s ever been to the dog world, you know what’s involved in all that. So, that was a bit of my day today and other things. We’re cleaning up some old stuff. I kind of ran into an abrupt… Suddenly my life became very quiet. We did the GDT Global Summit about six weeks ago here in Amsterdam and that was like a two-year project and I’m still kind of decompressing from what a huge event and huge investment and huge interest and sort of engagement that I had with what that was about and why.

So, I had a couple of other gigs that I had to do after that but, otherwise, life just kind of quieted out for a while so it was nice. So, I’m in a bit of a decompression mode and I keep going back and cleaning up a whole lot of my old “someday maybe stuff” off my list and a bunch of things just kind of old. When things quiet down, it’s time to go back and clean the drawer and curate a bunch of old stuff that’s accumulated that you haven’t had time to do or interest in doing, so I’ve been doing that.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And sometimes it’s just very cathartic in terms of, “At last, this drawer is getting handled.”

David Allen
It’s like cleaning the boot or the trunk of your car, it drives better once you do that. Or that weird electronics drawer we all have that’s just collected all the weird strange things that you couldn’t throw away that you might need at some point.

Pete Mockaitis
Like all those cords and adapters.

David Allen
Yeah, all the cords and chargers and all that stuff. Yeah, for sure.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, did anything sort of groundbreaking occur at the World Summit with regard to the future of GTD or announcements?

David Allen
Yeah. You know, Pete, I think the major ground thing, and the reason I did it–I didn’t plan to do another one, we did one 10 years ago in San Francisco, and really didn’t plan. That’s not the business I’m in, just doing those kinds of conferences. But 10 years on, and now we’re officially represented by licensees and master trainers in 70 countries around the world so we’ve kind of grown to that level but nobody’s really raised a flag yet to kind of, “Hey, guys, we’re all in this game together. The train has left the station. GDT is a global event, so whether I fall over tomorrow or not, this will keep going.”

And so, I think the milestone was making that kind of global statement and having the incredible raft of 45 presenters that we had on their own time and dime that came that are friends of mine and all champions of my stuff, people like Marshall Goldsmith and Charles Duhigg and just all kinds of folks that are serious heavyweights in their own fields and in their own right. So, I think that really helped give the world the idea that, “Come on, the train, as I say, has left the station. So, GDT and a world where there are no problems, only projects, that’s a consciousness and it’s a cognitive sort of algorithm, if you will, and is now onto the planet. At least, I feel like I’ve done my job in doing that. And so, this is sort of a capstone event. Come on, I’m 73 now, Pete, so I figure I’m not going to do another one, but this was a nice way to sort of just put the, I don’t know if it’s icing. I don’t know what the term is would be but kind of icing on the cake or to make sure that it’s solid in the ground now as a global movement.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s just got to be very rewarding to look back on sort of the imprint you’re leaving on the world. What’s that like?

David Allen
Bemusing, really. It’s like, “Really? Did I do that? Wow! Who would’ve thought?” It was not a big strategic plan. I just kept holding the course in terms of my own interest and what I wanted to do and just staying as authentic as I could about what it was I was uncovering and discovering, and then finding, “Can I find people who are interested in doing this and understanding what it is, and better ways to do that?” And then discovering at some point, 10 or 15 years ago, that it was possible to potentially to scale this as a best practice methodology for people around the world. And so, that’s been a lot of what our job has been, our work has been over the last 10 or 15 years, to figure out ways to do that. optimize

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you got back on my radar in terms of this interview for the upcoming GTD Workbook, and so I want to talk about that. But, first, I think maybe I need to zoom out for those listeners who didn’t catch Episode 15 over three years ago or haven’t heard of “Getting Things Done,” GTD. Could you provide the, somewhere between 20 second, 2-minute overview for, “This is what we’re talking about here”?

David Allen
Sure. Well, basically, it was I uncovered, discovered, recognized the best practices of how do you keep your head clear, so you can stay focused on whatever you want to stay focused on. That’s the most productive state to operate from, it’s when your head is clear and you’re not distracted. But where do your distractions come from? For the most part, it comes from commitments you’ve made that are not complete yet.

And so, most people are trying to use their head as their office to try to manage reminders and things they need to keep track of, and relationships between things and prioritize, and your head is a really crappy office. So, a whole lot of what GTD is about is being able to externalize all those things that have your attention, building an external brain system so that, much like your calendar, your head doesn’t have to keep remembering where you need to be two weeks from Wednesday at 2:00 o’clock. You trust you have a system that does that and has the right content. But if that works for your calendar, why shouldn’t it work for the rest of your life?

So, this was a way to sort of build, “What’s the formula? What are the best practices and the steps to build an appropriate external brain to keep all of your commitments, all of your would, could, should, etc. out of your head so that your head is freed up to do what it was designed to do, which is make good, intuitive, intelligent choices, offer options, not to try to remember what your options are.”

So, that’s a lot of what GTD is about as I uncovered over all these years, it was a way to be able to build a system, how to keep your head empty, even though you have unfinished stuff, they don’t have to be on your mind as long as you’re appropriately engaged with them. So, I discovered, essentially, an algorithm of, “How do I create appropriate engagements with all these things that have my attention, whether it’s cat food I need, or a life I need, or a vice president of marketing I need, or the next vacation we need to plan and organize?”

Whatever it is that you can’t finish the moment you think of it but you have attention on it, you need to do something about it. I just figured out the best, the most efficient, effective way to make sure that you manage those things appropriately.

Pete Mockaitis
And you’ve got a great turn of a phrase, and I think it’s something like, “Your brain is for having ideas, not for remembering them.” Am I quoting you correctly?

David Allen
Yeah, it’s not for holding them.

Pete Mockaitis
For having, holding. Like marriage, to have and hold.

David Allen
Yeah. Well, come on, now, the cognitive sciences have validated the last 10 years what I uncovered 35 years ago, which is your head just does not do that very well. And they’ve now discovered if you’re trying to keep track of, just in your head, things you want to be reminded about, things you need to manage relationships between, and so forth, if it’s more than four, you’re going to sub-optimize your cognitive functions. You will not be able to function as well as if you have all that out of your head because your head is going to be distracted by it.

That part of your head that’s trying to hang on to that stuff seems to have no sense of past or future, so you’d wake up in the morning, at 3:00 o’clock in the morning by, “I need to buy cat food,” or, “I need an extended credit line,” and both of them take about the same space and show up at the weirdest random times when you can’t do anything about them. They just add stress to your life. So, just really, in a sense, it’s kind of a mechanical process. It’s pretty subtle but it’s just mechanical.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. When you talk about an external brain, that could be anything from a paper calendar and a set a list or some fancy technological stuff.

David Allen
Oh, Pete, it could be as simple as putting stuff in front of your door in the morning so you don’t forget it, taking it to the office.

Pete Mockaitis
Yep, sure. Absolutely. There it is. You can’t not see it, it’s in your path.

David Allen
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Well, so I want to get your take on, so I believe “Getting Things Done” came out, originally, the book, in 2001. Is that true?

David Allen
Mm-hmm.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, 18 years have passed. Have you changed your mind on anything?

David Allen
A few things. I felt that the first edition was going to start to seem a little out of date for people given some of the notations I made, some of the references I did especially to technology, as well as over 18 years, I sort of got a little more subtle and understanding the power of what this methodology was and its implications and applications. Over the years, the legions of testimonials of how transformative this has been for so many of the smartest, brightest, sharpest people you could ever meet once they ran across this. Then it’s sort of understanding a more subtle level of how powerful it was and why. So, what probably changed most, Pete, was the range of audience.

In 2001, the first edition, was really targeted to the fast-track professional. They were the ones who were getting hit with a tsunami of email and sort of the flood of corporate changes and things like that going on, and that was the world I came from or came out of for 25 doing a whole lot of corporate training and executive coaching with this material, so it’s really targeted that audience. But I knew even back then that this works for students, it worked for the clergy, it worked for physicians, it worked for stay-at-home dads, it worked for anybody, anybody who had a busy life. This was just a cataloguing of what are those practices that they want to stay clear and more stress-free about that, what to do.

So, the new edition, I literally sat down and rewrote the whole book, and saying, “Is that the way I would say it now?” And probably 50%, 70% of it, yeah, I just retyped what the first edition was because I wouldn’t say anything. I said it as good as it could be said. But there was a few nuances and subtleties and kind of change of language that I used to express a bit more of the subtleties of what GTD is and was and so forth. And I also included some of the information and the cognitive science that validates all this and some other things.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, then with the Workbook coming out, what was the impetus for that?

David Allen
I’m not a great trainer. I’m a pretty good presenter but I don’t have the patience to sit and hold people’s hand and actually walk them into how to do this. I gave them the model. Basically, I wrote “Getting Things Done” basically as a manual of 25 years of my 30 years of my work and my awareness that if you really wanted to have an absolutely clear head and stay that way for the rest of your life, here are the best practices about how to do that.

And that can get pretty subtle, it depends on how complex your life is, but I handled all of that and put all that in the manual. But for a whole lot of people that is just too daunting. They can pick it up and go, “Oh, my God, there’s too much to do.” And so, I can be a good presenter and people walk out and say, “Wow, that was really great,” but they don’t do much about it because I’m not really a good trainer or instructional designer about how to get people to — there’s a big difference between presenting and training. Training says, “Okay, how do I get people actually have a different behavior?” And then presenting is, “Ta-dah,” I just want to make people get it.

Pete Mockaitis
“You’re inspired now.”

David Allen
Yeah, and get that and they’re inspired, at least, see the model and they see there is a model out there but it doesn’t help them implement it. So, for the last 10 years, we’ve been working with a lot of instructional designers and I’ve had to kind of swallow hard and go, “Okay, they want to simplify this. I’ve got to simplify. I have to get it down to lower the barrier of entry for people to be able to get into this instead of having them sort of go out and get the whole thing and how do you start, how do you get going.” And I just don’t have the patience or awareness or education to be able to know how to do that.

So, what we’ve done is engage people in various forms to help us take our educational formats and make them much more easily available for people to actually play. So, the workbook was pretty much the model of many business books out there who have created a workbook after the fact for people to help them implement what they read, and so that’s why we did this.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, then I’m intrigued, so it’s more approachable and a lower-barrier entry. You can sort of rock and roll. So, if a current “Getting Things Done” practitioner is looking through it, how do you think they’ll be enriched, or really just be like, “You already know all this”?

David Allen
Well, it depends on, when people say they’re GTDers, I can give you about 6,000 levels of that, that people are and say they are but they actually aren’t. So, it kind of depends on where they are in that level of game. But, generally speaking, I’d say if you’re a really practiced GTDer, you probably don’t need it but I just got interviewed by a guy who’s been a serious GTDer, who’s read all my books, he’s implemented my stuff for 10 or 15 years, and he said, “Oh, my God, this is so cool. I now have a way to coach my wife into this.”

So, at least there’s a manual. So, it’s not something that was going to replace anything. We’re just giving them perhaps another model especially if they’ve got people around them, whether that’s kids or spouse or staff or whatever, to help people kind of get started with this, in the process. Because many people who are big GTDers are wondering why nobody around them gets it.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s well-said because, in a way, I think it’s sort of like you just have to taste and see with regard to, “You know that sort of low-level anxiety that’s always around you in your head? That can be gone.” It’s like, “What?”

David Allen
Yeah, and most people don’t realize that they have that or even if they do, they don’t realize they could actually get rid of it, and so that’s kind of the marketing problem we have.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I’m curious then, you lay out 10 moves to stress-free productivity, what are those 10 moves?

David Allen
Well, they’re actually, you know, I talk about them in the book. If you really wanted to implement this, in part two of “Getting Things Done” it actually walks people through the very specific 101 coaching process that I spent thousands of hours working with senior executives actually walking through that process. So, this is just kind of a starting version of what we would do with that, so there’s nothing different here other than what the real implementation is.

But, for instance, the first move is just go, “Okay, make sure you have an entry, some place to do it. Look around your desk, in and around your desk and whatever is around you, if stuff doesn’t belong wherever it is apparently, throw it in your IN-basket. Post-Its, the papers sitting on your desk, the things that are hung up on the first flat surface inside your door in your house, any of that stuff, just gather it together.” So, that’s move one.

And then move two has to do with, “Well, wait a minute, a whole lot of other stuff is in your head so you better have some sort of tool to capture stuff that internally shows up, so you need to make sure you get your capture tool.” That’s move 2.

And then you do move 3, is to empty your head into those capture tools or into that capture tool, do a mind sweep, right?

Then once you’ve done all that, then you need start to get that stuff to empty. You don’t just pile it up and leave it there. You then need to move to the, “Okay, how do I clarify what are all the notes that I took, all the stuff I gathered around that’s sitting on my desk?” Making those decisions. And then how do you do that to your email, because email is the bugaboo for a lot of people out there. If there’s some stuff they’ve captured, it’s been captured for them but they haven’t clarified or organized it yet.

And then how do you create some list, once you make the decisions and clarification of what are the actions needed, what are the projects embedded in any of this, then you need to create some list.

Moves 6 and 7 and 8 are about, “How do I organize now all the results of that?”

And then move 9 and 10 are about, “Okay, how do I kind of keep this going and make sure this stays alive and well system?”

So, nothing new, it’s just we tried to reduce it or freeze-dry it, if you will, to the basic moves about how to get started. So, you don’t need a huge investment to do what I just said but you do need to do something with it and we need to walk you through the process of how to do that pretty easily.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I do want to touch on email for a moment here because, well, I guess, over the course of my life, I have emailed you on three separate occasions, and every time you’ve picked it up and ran with it and we made something happen, so you walk the talk. You are, in fact, getting things done.

David Allen
Believe me, I’m a fellow student. Trust me, I have to do this as well as anybody just to keep their head clear.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, then I’m curious, like what is the — so we talked about the benefit, sort of the outcome. It’s like, okay, there’s a sense of peace, of maximum cognitive function, the stress and malaise of constantly remembering stuff is gone, and your mind like water, I believe is a phrase you like to use there. So, that’s a real good outcome when you’re on the wagon executing it. But could you share with us, what’s sort of the cost, if you will, in terms of the investment? What does it take for you to rock your email and more so well in terms of maybe, say, hours a day or hours a week of processing and reviewing time? How do you think about that?

David Allen
Pete, this is not extra work. I would have to do this no matter how I did it. You would too. Did you want to let it pile up until it explodes and then decide what to do with it?

Pete Mockaitis
No.

David Allen
People get mad at me for their list, and like, “Excuse me, dude, that’s not my list. That’s yours.” Right? I don’t tell people to do anything extra other than what they need to do themselves. They know that. They know they need to decide what to do about mom’s birthday. They know they need to decide what to do. They know that they need to do something about that. All I’m getting them to do is become conscious about it.

So, this is not extra work. How much time does it take to stay conscious in your life? Maybe that’s the best question.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. So, you’re saying you’re going to address that email at some point.

David Allen
Yes. Or you can do email bankruptcy, CTRL-A CTRL-X and pray.

Pete Mockaitis
It’ll all go away. You’re right. I think maybe what they don’t like is that you’re showing them reality. It’s like you’re putting a mirror right up to their faces.

David Allen
I know. I know. Come on, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
“This is what you’re committed to. How about that?”

David Allen
Right. What are you going to do about it? And what does it mean to you? Is that trash? Why are you keeping stuff you ought to throw away, dude? You know, come on. So, it’s really about just becoming conscious about things you’ve let come into your ecosystem that own a piece of your consciousness until you appropriately engage with them. And that’s really the secret of what I found out about how do you do that.

Pete Mockaitis
And I think, as we talk about the aggravation reaction there, I think there’s some richness to that. It’s sort of like you shine a mirror, it’s like, “Okay, this is all the stuff that you’re committed to.” And then I think it’s almost like the reality becomes all the more clear that, “Oh, wait, no. I can’t do all of those things because my time, energy, attention, sanity would be maxed out and overwhelmed to do so.” So, then once you’re in a good spot of, “All right, I got the lay of the land. All the stuff is captured,” how do you think about prioritizing well with regard to, “I can let that go now knowing what I know about the whole lay of the land”?

David Allen
Well, how many things are you not doing right now, Pete, while you’re talking to me?

Pete Mockaitis
I suppose everything else in the universe other than talk.

David Allen
Well, if you haven’t looked at what you’re not doing, there’s a part of you that has a trouble staying present with me. So, I don’t have any trouble being present with you because not long ago I looked at every single thing else I might ought to do, and I said, “You’re it.” But you can only see what you’re not doing when you know what you’re not doing. So most people don’t have a clue.

So, a lot of what GTD is about, “Why don’t you get a clue about all the things you’ve committed to, and then look at them and go, ‘No,’ or, ‘Not right now,’ or ‘Whatever.’ And then renegotiate those agreements with yourself moment to moment so that some part of you can feel, ‘No, it’s not time to run my errands. The stores are closed.’ Or, ‘No, I can’t talk to my wife/partner right now because he or she is out on a seminar right now,’ ‘No, I can’t do XYZ because my server is down and so I can’t even get into the internet.’”

So, just looking around, and go, “What’s my environment? What are my possible options?” But if you’re trying to use your brain to try to remember what your options are given the complexity of those contexts, good luck.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, understood. Certainly. So, context alone makes it real easy in terms of, “Those are possible right now so no need to give that a further bit of thought.”

David Allen
True.

Pete Mockaitis
But then when you find yourself in a world where there are many things you could choose from, you mentioned, “Hey, what’s your energy level or how wasted are you?” is another useful prioritizing guideline. But what are some others? Have you found, working with clients, are there any sort of like power questions that sort of separate true top priorities from the rest?

David Allen
Well, sure. One version of that is, “Why are you on the planet, Pete? What are you here to do?” And so, which email do you think is most important for you to write first tonight? So, there’s the power question, “What’s your purpose?” Like, what’s really core to you in terms of who you’re about, what you’re about, why you’re here, any of that stuff.

On a more practical level in terms of how I manage that, it’s like, “What’s got most my attention right now? And so, therefore, what do I need to do to get back to clear again?” And the answer to, “What’s got my attention right now?” maybe, “What is my life purpose?” And I need to sit down or go offsite and spend two days in silence and figure that out. Or, what’s most got my attention right now is my dog, in which case I need to go handle that so that I’m free back up so when I cook spaghetti tonight, I’ve got a clear head.

Any one of those could be the priority. Well, how many different things do you think you’re doing tonight, Pete? How many different activities or things you put your attention on do you think you will have in a 24-hour period? Because every one of those is a priority decision at that moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that’s good. And now I’m chewing on, say, what’s most got your attention. Is it awesome prioritizing bit because it’s like, “Oh, that might take 5, 10 minutes, dog is handled, and now you’re back and clear and ready to go.” I’m curious about what about some of those ruminating type things? Like, “What’s most got my attention?” “Well, it’s how am I going to, I don’t know, grow a business such that it is sufficiently profitable to provide for a growing family?”

David Allen
Well, as a coach, I’d give you a very simple question, “What’s your next action, Pete?”

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

David Allen
“What would you need to do to get clear about that? Do you need to draft ideas? Do you need to surf the web? Do you need to set a meeting? What would you do to move forward on that as opposed to sit there and spin because you’re so bright and conscious and intelligent and sensitive, you just figure stuff out by all the things you think you might have to do in order to be able to do that, so you procrastinate?”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And so, and I have found this, and that’s your experience with clients is that just by having identified the next action, there is a sense of peace there because it’s like, “Now there’s no wondering what’s the thing. It’s just there for you to pick up if you’re ready to pick it up.”

David Allen
Well, you finish your thinking. So, if there’s anything you’re committed to change or to do anything about that’s not done currently, or to have different in any way and you have any commitment about that, if you haven’t decided the next physical visible action, you haven’t finished your thinking and decision-making about it. So, that’s why it’s such a powerful thing to do is figure that. Is that a phone call? Is that a surf the web? Is that, “Talk to my wife/partner”? What’s the very next thing I need to do?

Once you made that decision, it may not be the right one, there may be a better decision, but at least you can move on that one, and you can change your mind. But at least your mind goes, “Oh, okay, I’m now appropriately engaged with it.” Assuming also that you’ve also captured the outcome you’re committed to about this, so outcome and action-thinking are the zeroes and ones of productivity. What are we trying to do and how do we allocate resources to make that happen? That’s why that’s such a key element of “Getting Things Done.”

Or, “Gee, that email, what’s the next action on it? By the way, will that one action finish whatever this commitment is that’s about that’s embedded in that?” “No, not yet.” “Okay, great. What’s your project?” “Oh, I guess I need to research whether we should hire a consultant for our financial yadda, yadda, yadda,” right?

So, outcome and action, once you decide the next step, well, great. Will that finish whatever this is about? And if not, you better keep track of whatever the outcome or the project is until it’s done. So, that’s part of the clarification step, where you’d say, “Okay, how do I get my inbox get empty?” And you do it by actually having to think. You actually have to use your mind and decide, “What the hell am I going to do about mom’s birthday?” or extend the credit line.

Pete Mockaitis
And I love it how you suggest that when you’re writing out these action lists, you don’t just write “Mom,” rather it’s a verb and it’s a clear view of sort of, “Hey, decide what to do for mom’s birthday, or call my brother to see what he’s making for mom’s birthday,” and reduces a lot of the friction and resistance there.

David Allen
Right. Well, there’s magic in the mundane. So, the kind of paradoxical thing is that I figured out, “How do you manage the mundane most elegantly and efficiently?” And in turns out that there’s a lot of elegance that happens to that and to yourself when you do that. It get you to think from a much more grounded place. It opens up a lot more of your creative thinking.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I’m going to go back to the email for a bit here. So, there’s some prioritizing questions in terms of like your life’s purpose and then what’s the next action, what’s most got my attention now. And so, then when you’ve got those things clear and you’re cranking through an inbox, I mean, are you doing anything special or is that just it, you just sort of know what’s important and you just go to town with them?

David Allen
Yes. And, basically, I do, I just have a sense of what’s important, go to town with whatever I feel like doing at the moment. But the key to that is the weekly review. Once a week I step back and look across the horizon of all of these things. Because, see, Pete, you and I don’t have time to think. We need to have already thought.

So, when you get off this call with me, you don’t have time to think. You need to have already thought, meaning it’s going to come at you, you’re going to have emails that have been piling up on you while you and I have been talking. Me too. I don’t know what the dogs do and I’m going to have to figure out what the dog is doing right now.

So, I don’t have time to think. I just need to act and respond appropriately but I can only do that if I sort of hardwired my intuitive intelligence by doing some sort of a regular recursion of stepping back and looking across all my projects, all my actions, all my calendared stuff. And that’s the weekly review, and that’s what we’ve uncovered, as you probably know. That’s a whole lot of what one of the more profound habits and difficult habits to train yourself to do is once a week, take one to two hours, and pull up the rear guard, and sort of lift up and manage the forest instead of hugging the trees.

And that’s a challenging thing to do, but if you actually can do that, if you can build in that habit, and you’ve got a reasonably good system that has enough of the content for you to review and feel comfortable, you’ve seen the whole result or the whole inventory. Then that makes it much easier to then not have to think priorities on a day-to-day, minute-to-minute basis. You need to have already done that and then trust in your intuitive responses will be appropriate.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And I find that the weekly review habit has been a tricky one in that sometimes I’m with it, sometimes I fall off, and then I’m back with it. What have you seen to be sort of the difference-makers with regard to those who consistently do their weekly review and those who do not?

David Allen
I don’t know. I don’t have the answer to that. It’s like, “Who knows?” But I think the people who really get how powerful it is, there are a few of them, have built it in very soon as just an invaluable habit where they just do not let anything get in the way of them doing that. I let it slip sometimes a week or two or three if I’m on a real roll. Yeah, I’d check in to make sure there are no burning barns that I’m going to miss.

So, it’s something to bring yourself back to because it’s one of those things you just never feel like you have the time to do. So, it’s one of those paradoxes, it’s kind of like when you feel like you don’t have time, that’s when you have to take the time to do that. It’s kind of like when you most feel like you don’t have time to plan is when you most need to sit down and plan. So, it’s one of those things where you have to sort of train yourself to say, “Wait a minute.”

A reference point inside of me, is, “When does my ambient anxiety out-pass my comfort zone?” And that’s when I need to sit down and do a weekly review.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s good. Well, David, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear a couple of your favorite things?

David Allen
Oh, no, just that people who are more interested in any of this, and wherever you’re listening to this from around the world, we now have master trainers and coaches and folks that we’ve certified to deliver this methodology in training programs and coaching, 101 coaching programs around the world. So, you go to GettingThingsDone.com, our website, look under Training & Coaching, and you’ll see 70 countries. And kind of wherever you are, you’ll see public seminars, you can see whoever our folks are in those areas. So, that’s a way to get in touch with this. If you haven’t read “Getting Things Done,” the book, it is the manual, so I highlight recommend it.

And, again, I’m not sure when this is going to air, Pete, but September, Getting Things Done Workbook will be out and available, at least in the US and I think in the UK as well. And so, those are ways to kind of stay in touch and what to do. So, that’s what I’d let people know. If this rung their bell about anything, yay.

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

David Allen
Oh, my God, a favorite quote. Dang it. I have 14,000 that I’ve collected in a quotes database.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool.

David Allen
How do I find a favorite one of those? I don’t know. Anything that Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde or Mark Twain has said is favorite.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

David Allen
I love Mark Twain’s, “My life has been full of all kinds of troubles, most of which never happened.” I guess that’s a pretty favorite one of mine.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I can think about all the arguments I’ve had with only myself. Thank you. And how about a favorite book?

David Allen
One I read recently I highly recommend, it’s called “The Antidote” by Oliver Burkeman. He’s a Brit. The subtitle is great, it’s “Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.” It’s a lot about, and actually the book is much more sophisticated than the subtitle may represent. He goes into a lot of what was the essence of the stoics and stoicism. The whole idea that, he’s kind of railing. He’s got a little bit of a rant against all the rah-rahs,
“Don’t have any negative thoughts, everything is going to be cool. Just think positive things. Whatever in life will be cool.” And yet those churches that are preaching that went bankrupt.
And so, a whole lot of it is about acceptance, kind of what you resist you’re stuck with. So, don’t try to pretend that you don’t have troubles and anxieties and stuff you got to deal with in your life. You need to accept them so you can actually move past them, move beyond them, because what you resist, you’re stuck with. So, in a way, it just validates why a lot of people resist “Getting Things Done” simply because, if we started this conversation about, a lot of it is about accepting all of your commitments and who you are, what you’ve committed to. And a lot of people don’t like that.

But, anyway, it’s a great book. It’s fun. My wife burst out laughing while she was reading. She does that very seldom with any book. And it’s well-written, fun, interesting stuff. So, Oliver Burkeman, “The Antidote.” Highly recommend it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. And how about a favorite tool?

David Allen
I’ve got a bunch. Favorite tool. I don’t know. There’s my labeler, there’s my iPad, there’s my iPhone, my Mac, my stapler, right? God, I’ve got all kinds of favorite tools around here.

Pete Mockaitis
Can I hear, is the stapler special? What makes it amazing?

David Allen
I could bang it. It’s one of those, it’s an ACE that has the little sort of where you can use your fist and bang down on it and staple it. I so much like that as oppose to those where you have to squeeze it to staple it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, gosh, yeah, I hear you.

David Allen
I love it. I love to bang and staple. That’s really cool. And my DYMO Plug and Play labeler is fabulous. I couldn’t live without it.

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

David Allen
Yeah, your head is for having ideas not for holding them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. David, thank you. This has been lots of fun. Keep on doing the great things you’re doing.

David Allen
Thanks, Pete. Been fun. Yeah, indeed.