KF #29. Demonstrates Self-Awareness Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Tasha, welcome back.

Tasha Eurich
It’s so great to be back, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, it is great to be chatting with you. I am excited to talk about the insights of your book, Shatterproof. I listened to it in its entirety and then had to get the text as well. And there’s so much good stuff to get into. Maybe, could you orient us a little bit? You’ve mentioned that this is the book that you needed as well, and that’s the first time this has happened for you in your author journey. Can you expand a little bit about the health backstory and how that plays into this?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah, I mean, I think my last book I needed. I needed to become more self-aware, even though I didn’t know it when I first started out. But when I say I needed this book, in the context of becoming shatterproof, it was literally, it felt like a matter of life and death. And I look back and I know that it was.

And basically, the very, very short story is I’ve had a lifetime of mysterious health ailments that nobody could diagnose, that nobody really thought was real, like all the tests would come back normal. And I did my best to manage, resiliently, to push through, to power through, to be the fifth-generation entrepreneur that I am, and suck it up and keep going.

And starting in early 2021, when the world was starting to recover from COVID, I started getting very, very sick. And within a couple of months, I was bed bound. I had 10 out of 10 pain every day. My resting heart rate was 150 beats per minute. I was fainting all the time. I couldn’t remember what I had done 10 minutes ago or even the names of my family or my longtime friends.

And the way I started to cope with this was what I’ve always done, right? Which is, you and I were joking about our resilience spreadsheets. I had my list of practices: gratitude, yoga as much as I could, social support, reaching out, telling my husband at the time what I felt and what I thought, trying to reframe challenges as opportunities, and active coping.

I went to every single specialist under the sun, and I couldn’t help but feel like I was having more anxiety than I’d ever had before. I was more depressed than I ever was before. And, eventually, I had the experience that I eventually uncovered, as a researcher, kind of along right around the same time, where I hit my resilience ceiling, which means I sort of lost all ability to cope, and the tools that I’ve been using my entire life stopped working.

And so, I was in a position where I knew there was an alternative because we had this in our data. Some people are able to take the hardest things that happen to them and become better, stronger, wiser. And finding that answer was so personal to me that, you know, I probably spent longer on it than I would have.

I think I was able to dig into, like, the complexity of the solution and tried to make it simple. So, simplicity on the other side of complexity. But the point there was, I think no matter what all of us are facing, we all need this book. We all need an alternative to resiliently powering through, being mentally tough. There’s a point at which that doesn’t help us anymore. And if we keep trying to do it, it hurts us.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Very well said. You had a lovely quote. It’s ascribed as a Chinese proverb. Can you give it to us about when the wind blows?

Tasha Eurich
“When the winds of change rage, some people build shelters and others build windmills.”

Pete Mockaitis
And I think that just viscerally paints a picture of what’s unique and fresh and lovely about your work here. Because we just recently had Dr. Aditi Nerurkar on sharing about the five resets, and that’s all very good. Yes, indeed, exercise is great. Breathing is good.

Tasha Eurich
And if it helps, yeah, keep doing it.

Pete Mockaitis
Gratitude journaling and such. Like, these are all great, great uses of things to do to feel better, to overcome some stuff. But that shift from shelter to windmill, I think really, really captures it. Because that’s how it can feel sometimes, like, “Oh, man, I’m getting battered. Well, I got to exercise more. I got to breathe more. I got to do some more yoga.” Yeah.

And as you identify, sometimes that just runs out, it’s like, “Oh,” and that’s a spooky feeling, just like, “Uh-oh.”

Tasha Eurich
It is. It is. And what I’ve found, in talking to high achieving-people, you know, of kind of all walks of life, is it is the most distressing for the strongest people because we look back, and we say, “Gosh, maybe this isn’t even the hardest thing I’ve ever been through,” which was the case for me. I’m like, “Why can’t I just show up with my gratitude journal and do my meditation and find some relief?”

And then you start to do something that I called grit gaslighting, right, which is where we blame ourselves for struggling under the weight of the very real difficulty of living in this world in the year 2025.

And so, yeah, I think, especially for high-achieving people like your listeners, part of what I want to do with this conversation is normalize that you are not failing at resilience. You are hitting your resilient ceiling, and everyone has one.

Pete Mockaitis
And, boy, the grit gaslighting is something sometimes I even do to myself, it’s like, “Oh, come on, Pete. Like, I mean, your business is like stellar. Compare this to, like, seven years ago, man. Like, this is great. You’ve got three wonderful children, a wonderful wife, a nice house.”

It’s like things seem like they’re rocking here, and I have been through some tough stuff, and then, throughout history, it seems like folks had it way tougher. You read about the folks fighting the Revolutionary Wars, like, “Oh, jeez.”

Tasha Eurich
Yeah, “What am I whining about, for God’s sake?”

Pete Mockaitis
And yet, and I don’t want to linger too much here because it’s kind of like the nonfiction, the obligatory nonfiction book intro, “Today is, like, so difficult and unprecedented, and that’s why this book is exactly what you must buy.” So, I mean, in a way, that’s quite obvious.

Tasha Eurich
And yet it is.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if we could maybe briefly hit us with, “Okay, why could we be okay with being not okay in the current climate? And why are we not just weenie babies who can’t tough it out? Like, the folks fighting the Revolutionary War or dealing with ‘real hardship’”?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah, like Marvel characters and business casual, right? So, there is a thing, so I’m a scientist. I am a quantitative scientist at heart. And when I first started this research program five years ago, I wanted to answer that question. Because what I was seeing all around me, and I’ve been coaching CEOs for 20 years, was a completely new level of exhaustion, chaos, stress, demands, and not just professionally, personally, in all of their lives, and in my life, too.

And so, what I wanted to see was, like, empirically, was that true or did it just feel that way? And I stumbled upon this excellent, very, very sort of scientific metric called the World Uncertainty Index. And it uses a variety of factors to come up with every year, basically, and it plots the level of uncertainty.

And what I thought I would find was kind of crazy, like, after 9/11, it went down; went kind of crazy during the Great Recession, maybe went down; COVID, it spiked, went down. But what I found was, like, a pretty consistent high level of uncertainty until 2023, 2024, and it went like this, “Boop!” exponentially higher.

And when I show it, when I get to speak about this book, and I show it to audiences, people’s eyes get wide, and they go, “Oh, it’s not just me.” And so, I think you’re right. There is always the sort of drama of the beginning of a nonfiction book. But, for me, as a scientist, like, it’s real. You’re not imagining it. It’s real.

Pete Mockaitis
So, the Uncertainty Index, and it’s intriguing. So, 2023, 2024, it doesn’t seem like anything happened. Or, am I overlooking something that happened?

Tasha Eurich
Well, it’s worth going to their website to look. It really gets crazy this year, which is interesting, right?

Pete Mockaitis
With AI, that’s kind of wild.

Tasha Eurich
AI is pretty wild. In the business world or organizations, a lot of sectors are being disrupted that people never thought would be disrupted because of a lot of external factors, and the effects of COVID are still being felt. I think all of that together, along with just the pace of life. Like, think about right now, at this moment, the number of people that need something from you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, geez, I don’t want to.

Tasha Eurich
Right? Like, if I think about that too hard, I start to flip out because it’s like, “Oh, well, this thing I was supposed to have to them a month ago, and this other thing.” And so, even something as “simple” as the cumulative demands, they don’t stop. Like, nobody’s saying, “Well, I’m going to just really need all this stuff from you, and then I’ll go away, and you can go on vacation for three weeks.” So, that’s the piece of it, is the chronic compounding stress across multiple areas of our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
That really gets me. And I’m thinking about the email inbox, which I struggle with. My buddy, Brent, shout out, listener, sent me one of those Someecards, it said, “Congratulations on hitting inbox zero. Oh, sorry about that.”

Tasha Eurich
Brent for the win. That’s awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s how it is, like, “Oh, yeah. Oh, at this very moment, I am caught up. Oh!” And it lasted about nine   seconds.

Tasha Eurich
That is such a great example of this, right? It’s, like, this is Sisyphean, for anybody who’s into philosophy. We’re pushing that boulder up and the boulder rolls right down, and we’re back to zero.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I guess we got that in terms of modern humans. The folks who had their own challenges of poverty, starvation, war, extreme challenges, no doubt that is brutal. We, however, have our own flavor of brutality being waged upon us that they did not. And it’s so unprecedentedly high levels of uncertainty. And you mentioned in your book that we humans have a real hard time with a lot of uncertainty. What’s that about?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah. So, human beings were not designed for the world that we live in right now. If you think about it, our ancestors were, you know, their lives were difficult. They’re sort of hunting and gathering. They don’t have the comforts that we have now. But they were punctuated by danger, but things would sort of go back to normal.

So, you imagine you’re out hunting, and you see a tiger, and your stress system goes crazy, your cortisol goes up, all of your stress hormones, your fight or flight, and you’re able to escape the tiger. And then you go on with your day, and you go back home, and you have a nice night by the campfire. But the way that we are living now is our bodies actually are built to perceive a passive-aggressive email from our boss, for example, as that tiger running towards us.

And then if you multiply that email with all of the other emails just in your inbox, we have stress hormones coursing through our bodies all the time. So, we were sort of designed to have that danger, go back to normal, and our bodies can restore themselves. But what I say in the book is living in perpetual fight or flight mode isn’t just stressful, it drains the very resources we need to cope with stress.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s brutal. So, the traditional resilience practices are useful. They have their place and they do some things, and yet they can run out. And you reveal there is another path for us. What’s the path?

Tasha Eurich
So, the best way to think about it is to contrast it with resilience, okay? So, resilience is about putting our heads down, powering through so that we can bounce back. And that’s really important. So, resilience is the capacity to bounce back after hard things. That’s kind of the agreed upon consensus in, at least, for researchers.

What becoming shatterproof means is proactively channeling adversity to grow forward. And we don’t do that by powering through our pain. We do it actually by harnessing the broken parts of ourselves to access the best version of ourselves. And there’s a great analogy, like conceptually, and we’ll talk about what that looks like practically, but, conceptually, have you ever heard of the Japanese art of Kintsugi?

Pete Mockaitis
I have a couple of times. Why don’t you paint the picture?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah, so it’s this beautiful art form where the artist repairs a broken piece of, usually, it’s like pottery or ceramic, with lacquer and precious metal. It’s usually gold. And, basically, like, mending broken objects with precious metal. What that does is it creates a whole new object that is stronger at its broken places.

And the question I always ask is, like, “Instead of powering through our pain and our cracks and our breaking points, what if those became fodder for us to identify what in our environment is tripping us up?” to understand, “What are the needs that we have that are going unmet? What are the self-limiting patterns that we’re showing up with that are making things worse for ourselves? And then how can we actually use that opportunity to pivot?”

And not change everything about who we are, but to try to find new ways of getting our needs met? That’s the idea, is kind of leaning into those cracks, not in a way where we’re pain shopping or anything of that nature, but to lean into those cracks as an opportunity for, you know, I say it’s self-awareness walking.

It’s finding those moments in our worst times where we can find unique insight about ourselves, how we interact with our environment, how we make our choices, how we live our life, so that we can access that best version of ourselves. And I think that’s what we all do, right?

All we want is to be happy and to enjoy our lives, and to find that version of us that we know is there, but that feels like it’s being, you know, it’s handcuffed to a furnace somewhere, and, like, locked up because of all the chaos that can’t come out.

So, that’s kind of the contrast between resilience and shatterproof is don’t just grit your teeth and push through to gain back a status quo that probably wasn’t that good anyway. Use this as fodder for self-examination and self-improvement. And that’s the contrast I make is it’s bouncing back for resilience. When you’re shatterproof, you grow forward.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, when you say needs, you’ve identified the three to thrive. Can you share what are these needs? And how, of all the needs we might have, Tasha, do we know these are the three to thrive?

Tasha Eurich
Yes. Well, the good news is it is not I who has uncovered these needs. It is hundreds of researchers over more than a half century that have been researching this theory, that it’s actually my favorite theory in psychology. It always has been, and I’ve worked with it, gosh, 20 more years ago in grad school. It’s dating me. It’s called self-determination theory.

And the theory itself asks a really simple question that I think is so unbelievably practical, it’s, “What brings out the best in humans? And what brings out the beast in humans?” And what they’ve identified, and the main researchers are Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, is that there are three biologically programmed psychological needs that every single human existing on earth is programmed to seek.

I’ll tell you what they are, and then I’ll tell you what happens when we get them and when we don’t get them. So, the needs are, number one is confidence, and that’s the need to feel like we’re doing well and we’re getting better. We’re kind of showing up. We’re meeting challenges.

The second is choice. And what that’s about is feeling a sense of agency in our lives, as well as authenticity, “I can be who I am. I can be centered around my values. I don’t have to pretend or fake.” The third need is connection. And that’s a sense that we belong, and that we have close and mutually supportive relationships.

And what they found, these researchers in self-determination theory, is when these three needs are met, we are the best version of ourselves. No matter what is happening in our lives, no matter what fresh chaos is erupting around us, we can rise to the occasion.

But when any one of these needs are, especially, actively frustrated, not just unmet, but being frustrated by the situation we’re in, that’s what brings out the worst version of ourselves, the reactive version, the person that falls back into comfortable but self-limiting habits in the face of these sorts of triggers all around us.

And so, it’s so interesting because, when I was doing this research, it took me a couple of years. It took our research team of 12 people a couple of years to finally figure out that that was what separated shatterproof people from everyone else, was this idea that, “If I’m not getting my needs met in my environment, I need to find new ways of crafting them myself.”

And it sounds so simple. But if you think about the world we live in, that’s sometimes cast as selfish, right? Like, “Well, why are you meeting your own needs when everybody needs something from you?” And it’s the opposite, right? When our biologically programmed psychological needs are met, we become better for ourselves and better for everyone. We can be a better spouse, a better parent, a better employee, a better leader.

So, I think we sort of get it wrong. It’s like the idea that, “I’ll finally be happy when…” It’s like, “I can finally focus on my needs when…” But you have to reverse the equation. That’s where you have to start.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think this is so powerful, and I find it reassuring. It took y’all a couple of years to get into it. It’s because I think that many of us have probably dealt with that question, like, “Man, what’s my deal? Like, why can’t I just be awesome like I was last year or whenever?”

Tasha Eurich
Yup.

Pete Mockaitis
I mean, it’s sort of like mysterious. And yet, when you just look very clearly, it’s like, “All right. Well, let’s see. Well, how well are my needs, these needs being met – my needs for confidence, my needs for choice, my needs for connection.” It’s, like, “Oh, well, that’s my deal. That is my deal. There it is, right there.”

Okay. And so then, I would love to hear, within the research, because I’ve heard different typologies for needs. So, we got Forrest Hanson and his resilience book, talking about safety, satisfaction, and connection. So, I see some overlap. And I remember my teenage idol, Tony Robbins, had a rundown of, like, six. Like, certainty, uncertainty, significance.

So, could you maybe expand a bit about, so self-determination theory, what’s some of the most compelling evidence that, “Yup, these are the three as opposed to not nine, not maybe this other thing over here. But, no, no, focus on these three”?

Tasha Eurich
So, I want to differentiate between self-determination theory and every other theory of human needs.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Tasha Eurich
Self-determination theory. The first paper was published the year I was born, 1980. And if you go to Google Scholar, and you type in self-determination theory, it is article after article after article where, and it’s, actually, it’s not even a theory. They call it a meta theory.

There are so many facets to it that have been rigorously empirically supported that it sort of rises above any theory of needs as a meta theory. So, Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Everybody sees that as like the end all, be all, of human needs. There is almost no empirical research to back that up. So, it’s one thing to have a model. It’s another thing to have 50-plus years of rigorous empirical research being done by hundreds and hundreds of well-respected academicians.

And from my standpoint, there’s just no comparison. And, again, it doesn’t mean that we can’t pull from multiple theories. But I think about, you know, I talk about this in the book, a CEO I was coaching as I was writing the book, was leading his company through this massive organizational transformation. He and his wife were caring for aging parents. There was so much going on, and he didn’t have a sense of confidence.

His board was at his throat all the time. His employees were unhappy. Everyone was just saying, like, “Why can’t you be doing this better?” He had very little choice, which is strange as a CEO, but he was constrained by so many things. He was constrained by the health challenges that he was helping to manage.

And then connection, you know, it’s lonely at the top. It’s shockingly lonely. And he would always say, “I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine,” and I knew he wasn’t fine. And one day, he called me and, he was like, “Guess what happened? I just got on a call with my team and, like, through the most minor thing that just happened, I started screaming at them. So, I guess I’m not fine, right? I guess I’m not fine.”

And he said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” And my response is the response that I would give all of your listeners and that I try to remember myself, which is, “There’s nothing wrong with you. You are a human being whose biologically programmed needs are under threat. And what that’s telling your body is you’re being chased by a tiger.”

So, the good news is there are ways to move through that. But the way, one way to not move through that is to resiliently power through.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Thank you. You mentioned Nietzsche said, “Whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” And you mentioned in Nietzsche’s, in fact, very own life, he disproved that shortly after writing it. Can you tell us that tale? And then unpack, well, what does determine whether or not an injury makes us stronger or weaker?

Tasha Eurich
I love that question. It really gets to the heart of it. So, this is probably my favorite story in the book. Nietzsche, what I tried to do is trace that expression, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger,” as early as I possibly could. And I found in one of his books that was published in the late 1800s

And so, he published “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” A month later, he was strolling through a square in Turin, and he came across a horrible scene, a man beating a horse. And for some reason, something snapped in Nietzsche at that moment. Something just snapped. He started hysterically crying. He rushed over.

He threw his arms around the horse. People started gathering. The crowd started gathering. The police were called. Someone was sent to, like, escort him home. And the next day, he was taken to what they called, at the time, an asylum and basically went mad, and he never emerged again. So, what I think is so powerful about that story is saying things, saying things that sound right or that sound good, doesn’t always make them true.

And I think we have to start pressure testing some of this commonly held wisdom about navigating adversity, “Does it sound good or is it actually the right advice?” And I think that, to answer the second part of your question, if I boil it down, the difference between resilient people and shatterproof people, the most fundamental difference is instead of powering through, they use that opportunity to proactively reinvent themselves.

In other words, pausing, observing, looking at some of the things within themselves that might not be the best things, and then intentionally pivoting to find, as we were talking about, new ways of meeting our needs. But I think it’s this orientation of, you know, “There’s got to be a better way. And even if I don’t know what it is, I’m going to set out on this path.”

And, by the way, I give four steps of the shatterproof roadmap in the book, “I’m going to set out on this path to build a better me and what might be one of my worst moments.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, we love bettering here at How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Tasha Eurich
Better is great.

Pete Mockaitis
And you mentioned that personal growth, self-betterment, is just about the tops, a way that we can find positive psychological outcomes. Can you expand on that?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah. So, I talk about, I call it the shatterproof six. And there, in the book, is a list of empirically supported goals that if we start however small, like whatever small step we take, but if we start to pursue them, we’ll meet our deepest psychological needs. Those three to thrive needs that we talked about.

And self-development is one of them. Especially, if our need for confidence is being frustrated, if we commit to personal growth, to expanding our horizons, what the research in self-determination theory shows us is, just by pursuing that goal and by asking, “What’s one step I can take today to get a little bit closer to feeling confident and, like, the best version of myself?” that feeds our needs no matter what’s happening in the situation around us.

And I don’t say that lightly. There’s been research showing that three to thrive need satisfaction works for people who are living in extreme poverty or who are refugees. There’s one really compelling study that was done with Syrian refugees, that showed that a really simple intervention where they pursue these sorts of need-based goals, their entire lives get better. And not in a sort of toxic positivity way, but you start to feel real fulfillment that feeds you during these tough times.

Pete Mockaitis
So, let’s walk us through this four-part process.

Tasha Eurich
So, the first step is to probe your pain. And what that means, in a nutshell, is to pause and say, “Pushing through my pain or avoiding it is going to give me temporary relief, but there’s two problems.”

Number one is this thing researchers have called negativity rebounds, which means that when we sort of deny the emotional reality that we’re experiencing, especially when it’s really negative, we’re okay for a minute, and then it comes back in full force. So, that’s the first problem.

The second problem with not paying attention to our pain is we’re missing really valuable data, right? So, the question to ask is, well, there’s two. The first is, “In the last week, what are the negative emotions that I’ve been experiencing that are kind of higher than my baseline? So, maybe I’ve been feeling a lot more shame recently, or I’ve felt anger, or I felt sadness.”

And then the second question is, “What is that pain trying to tell me?” So, for me in my health journey, I sort of, I hit my resilience ceiling, I gave up for a couple months, it was not pretty. But one day, I kind of woke up and I started asking myself this question, like, “What am I feeling? I’m feeling helpless. I’m feeling powerless.”

And what I realized was my pain is trying to tell me that I have totally lost control over my life, right? There’s no cavalry that’s going to come save me. I have to save myself. So, that leads us to the second step, which there’s so much richness to this, but again, I’m going to try to boil it down, which is trace our triggers.

So, we look internally first at our pain. Then the next thing we have to do is say, “Okay, what is happening in the world around me that is sort of creating this internal state?” And sometimes we don’t help, but almost always there’s going to be some kind of external trigger. So, it might be, and there’s different triggers for different need frustration.

Someone might have criticized us, hurts our confidence. We might have a micromanaging boss, which hurts our choice. We might have recently ended a relationship, which kills our connection. And so, once we have that trigger, we’re not done. We don’t just get to blame it on everything external. We have to go back inside and say, “Okay, what need is that trigger getting in the way of?”

So, for me, what I realized was the trigger was sort of just being pushed through this healthcare system that is designed for patient volume and not patient helping, right, and being told over and over that what I was experiencing wasn’t real. And that was triggering my choice need. I was massively undernourished in the choice department, and I wasn’t helping myself.

So, that’s actually what leads us to step three, which is to spot your shadows. What happens in the face of triggers, what happens in the face of need frustration, is we have these instinctive responses that feel helpful, but that are actually pushing us further and further away from our need. So, in my example, I was, and I talk about different ways these shadows can show up in the book, but just as an example, I was giving up.

So, there’s some of them that are really counterintuitive. Like, “Why would I, when I’m totally powerless, when by the way, I make a living bossing around CEOs, why would I give up? It makes no sense.” But what I’m doing there is sort of, like, assuming that I’m not going to be able to fix it, and conserving energy, and saying, “I’m not a doctor, I can’t diagnose my rare disease, so I’m just going to sort of go along to get along.”

But what that shadow was doing was leading me further away from a solution. So, the question I always tell people to ask if you’re trying to spot your shadows is, “How is my behavior right now different from when I’m at my best?” And the example that I just gave is a good one, of like, “Normally I do this, but right now I’m doing this.”

So, that brings us to step four, which is pick your pivot. Pivoting means proactively moving away from these familiar shadows that make us feel better, and towards new paths to need fulfillment. And we do that through something called need crafting. And the good news, for step four, is we sort of already talked about this, right? These shatterproof six or the goals, where if we say, for me, like as an example, instead of letting myself give up, my number one goal in life is maximizing my physical health.

And that’s one of the goals that’s been shown that if we pursue, we will have greater need fulfillment, specifically in this case with choice. So, what did I start to do? I changed the way I was showing up. I changed the way I was engaging with doctors. I spent 30 minutes, this is pre-ChatGPT, I spent 30 minutes a day researching rare diseases.

And, eventually, it took me a minute, a couple months, but then I had a list of these are the diseases that I might have. And then I finally had like the one that I knew I had, and I started changing the way I engaged in doctor’s appointments. I would show up with a summary, with a list of objectives. And they would open their mouth and I would say, “Thank you so much for being a participant in my care. Here’s what I would like to accomplish in this appointment.”

And some of them didn’t like it and I had to find new doctors, but I had to become the CEO of my medical journey. And the beauty of this process, just to kind of put a period on the end of a sentence, is, it wasn’t right away, because I had to find the right specialist, but within a few months, I finally had the diagnosis that I knew that I had through my research, which is something called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which is a genetic connective tissue disease where your body can’t produce the two proteins that are in every system of your body.

And so, it leads to these really kind of unrelated, confusing symptoms that usually show up as normal in diagnostics. And I can say with 100% certainty, that if I had not discovered this in our research, I certainly wouldn’t be here talking to you. I’m not sure I’d be here at all. And if I was here, I would be a shadow of my former self.

And so, when I tell people this works, there is no better way for me to share that than to say, “You know, I didn’t sort of find this as a dispassionate researcher. I found it as a human being whose life felt like it depended on these solutions.” So, that, my friend, is the shatterproof roadmap.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful.

Tasha Eurich
So, there are six kinds of overall objectives. And then, for each of them, there’s a couple of options. So, the first is to rise. And that is making myself better. We already talked about self-development. That’s a perfect example of a shatterproof goal. And those, again, are largely geared towards building confidence.

The second kind of category is to flourish. And that’s making my life better. The health goal that I mentioned is in that category. Something as simple as joy, like rediscovering the love of the game by immersing myself in something I like to do. The third is to activate. Oh, and by the way, sorry, flourish mainly focuses on rebuilding choice, as does the third, which is activate, and that’s kind of making things happen around us.

And I’ll give a couple of examples, because this kind of has different flavors. One of them is advocacy, right, speaking up for myself, making my needs known. Another one is agency, making my own choices, being my own person.

Then we’ve got another choice-based aim, which is to align. And that’s kind of making authentic choices. The best example of a goal under this is authenticity. It’s not going along to get along. It’s not sort of pretending to be something that I’m not. It’s expressing my values and showing up as who I really am.

And then the last two shift over to connection. So, if your connection is thwarted, you might decide to relate, which means that you’re making meaningful connections. I’ll give you a couple examples under this because I think it’s so rich.

One is closeness. So, that’s kind of deepening close relationships by giving and getting support. It might be reactivating a connection that you’ve kind of let slide because of your busy, stressed out, striver lifestyle. Or you might choose forgiveness. Letting go of old grudges, not for them, but for my own wellbeing.

And then another one I really like under this is spirituality. Whatever that looks like to you, religious or not religious, connecting to something greater than ourselves is kind of a powerful but underutilized way of maximizing connection.

The sixth, and final shatterproof kind of category, is contribute, making the world better. And when we engage in service, we’re actually powerfully meeting all three needs. So, you think about Adam Grant’s work when he wrote Give and Take, his first kind of big mega hit book.

There is so much behind that, where when we give, when we contribute to the greater good, when we try to make positive change, it’s satisfying our deepest fundamental human needs. So, when we give, we get. And I think that’s why it’s the one objective that meets all three needs.

Pete Mockaitis
And is it your recommendation that we pick a single goal?

Tasha Eurich
Yes. My goodness, yes. Sometimes people are shocked when I tell them that, in my job of coaching CEOs, we pick one behavior to work on, one high-impact behavior for an entire year. And everyone’s like, “Well, I mean, could that possibly be helpful? Why don’t you do more?” And the reason is, in my experience, if we have any more than one thing we’re trying to focus on developmentally, we’re not going to do it.

I’m coaching a CFO right now who brought me his development plan that we were going to kind of blow up and rethink, and he’s like, “It has five components.” And I covered up the paper, and I said, “Name them.” He couldn’t name a single one. And we both laughed. We said, “Uh-oh.” So, that’s why making your growth and development easy isn’t a crime. It’s a present to your future self.

So, one shatterproof goal, even break it down to one shatterproof habit. Like, for me, it was those 30 minutes a day researching rare diseases. Start there. Keep it something that you can regularly focus on. And that’s something that you go crazy on for a week and then get so overwhelmed that it becomes the last thing on your list.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you give us some more examples of a single behavior of a senior executive for a whole year, just so I get a sense for the scope of a “behavior”?

Tasha Eurich
So, I’ll give you one from someone I just got off the phone with who is doing an amazing job. He’s killing it. His CEO is thrilled, which is improve collaboration with open-mindedness and empathy.

And sometimes it’s even simpler than that. Sometimes it’s, “Listen better.” But if you think about it, if you’re a CEO and you’re not very good at listening and, all of a sudden, you start listening to people, the ripple effects are endless, right? So, I think it’s counterintuitive, but as long as you’re picking something that, in this case, like, your stakeholders are saying is limiting you, it can have a bigger impact than we think.

And I think we just try to overcomplicate development because we’re all type A overachievers, but that’s not how breakthroughs happen, in my experience.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And just to follow this through a little bit more, if we did pick listen better or whatever, what might that mean in terms of, is it a daily behavior that we settle in on next or what’s the very next step?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah, so this is kind of getting away from the shatterproof framework, but I think this is a great way of operationalizing it. Usually, what we’ll do is we’ll come up with that development goal, and then we’ll have an action plan that is 10 to 12 specific behavioral elements that they’re going to try to do every day.

So, it might be specific to a certain relationship. It might be how to show up in meetings. Like, the executive I just mentioned, his goal of improving collaboration is asking a question before he provides his opinion. Like, that level of specificity. Or, “Making sure that I find something to agree with before I disagree with someone.” So, it’s 10 to 12 things like that, and then we actually track them.

Most of my clients have a checklist every day. And this is from the Marshall Goldsmith School, “Did I do my best to listen before I talk?” “Did I do my best to amplify others’ contributions?” So, yeah, breaking it down into that level of detail, I think is, again, it feels tedious. It feels something. But that’s how change happens.

And the data are there, like, that process on its own. There’s a reason I have a money back guarantee. If I’m coaching a senior executive and there isn’t quantitative improvement in their targeted behavior as rated by their stakeholders, theoretically, never had to do it, they get their money back. So, that is how serious I am about this process and how much it works.

I think there’s going to come a day when it’s going to happen, right? And that’s what it’s going to be, but I’ve been doing this for 20 years now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so then, when we were talking about the operationalizing, so if we’re zeroing in, it’s like, “Okay, betterment is the thing.” And then I’ll maybe take another step of specificity into, it could be fitness, it could be listening. You sort of, then, identify a sort of specific daily thing that you’re going to be getting after.

Tasha Eurich
That’s it. And it is not a crime to make it simple, easy, and fast. For me, 30 minutes a day, that’s all I had to do. And I talk about other examples in the book of people who maybe had a little bit more, like, resources mentally and physically at the time. Like, I talk about one woman who had five sort of daily habits, but they were really simple.

It was, like, “Wake up.” She had just gotten out of a really toxic marriage. And one of the things on her list was, “Wake up every day, grateful for the freedom that I now have,” right? Or, “Make sure I ping one or both of my sons and tell them how much I love them.” And all these things to kind of reconnect with herself and her life beyond her ex. I think if we keep it simple, it’s even easier.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And that’s just the magic. I’m thinking now about the 80/20 Rule, in general. So, in terms of, if we have in the entire universe of what’s your malfunction, what’s your deal in life, it’s like, “Oh, okay. Well, hey, it’s within the zone of the psychological needs of confidence, choice, or connection.” It’s like, “Okay, we’re already eliminated a lot of noise.”

Tasha Eurich
We have.

Pete Mockaitis
But even further, we got, “Okay, hey, it’s choice. Choice is the thing.” And then we can get even, even further, it’s like, “By golly, I’m going to be renovating this house I hate,” or whatever.

Tasha Eurich
Whatever, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And that, in fact, can become transformational.

Tasha Eurich
Over time, like, think about it. If you get one percent closer every day to a full sense of confidence or choice or connection, and if you do that most days, I’m a realist, not all days, most days, you’re going to see some pretty significant improvement in a shorter amount of time than you think.

Pete Mockaitis
Fantastic! Well, Tasha, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about a few of your favorite things?

Tasha Eurich
Oh, one thing that I want to mention, because it’s very cool and it’s in service for your listeners, is if anybody is curious about that idea of my resilience ceiling and how close am I to my resilience ceiling, for the launch of Shatterproof, we put together, it’s a really cool tool. It takes about five minutes. It’s an online survey.

You actually have the option of sending it to someone who knows you well, if you want their perspective on how you are kind of showing up, and you get a report back showing you your overall, like, how close you are. You get dimension scores. You get tools. So, if anybody wants to take that, I’m sure you’ll put it in your show notes, but it’s totally free, no strings attached. It’s Resilience-Quiz.com.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Now can you share a favorite quote that you find inspiring?

Tasha Eurich
“Whatever you do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” And I love this quote so much by Goethe, it is tattooed on my body. So, that’s my favorite quote.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite study?

Tasha Eurich
Well, I would go, just because it’s fresh in my mind, but that study that I talked about with Syrian refugees and need crafting, this whole idea of crafting our own needs is so new in the research. It took a brilliant young woman named Nele Laporte to kind of introduce it in 2019. But there’s so much promising research around that. I just think it’s so powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Tasha Eurich
I would say nonfiction is Doris Kearns Goodwin’s A Team of Rivals. And I would say fiction, without question, number one, The Great Gatsby.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Tasha Eurich
Favorite tool, ooh, we didn’t talk about this, the 222 tool. So, when you are super overwhelmed, you feel like you’re hitting your resilience ceiling, you take a deliberate time out. You ask yourself, “What do I need in the next two minutes, two hours, and two days?” So, the two minutes is psychological first aid. It’s breathing. It’s splashing cold water on your face. It’s saying out loud, like, “I am struggling and I feel overwhelmed.”

Two hours is something that is just for you, something that makes you happy, that relieves the pressure a little bit. Netflix marathon, happy hour with a friend, going to the gym. Two days is a deliberate pause on ruminating, analyzing, and problem-solving, as much as possible, with the thing that’s pushed you to this point.

I use this tool all the time and what I find is, because our subconscious mind is still working on it, but if we give ourselves the space to just relax and be, when we come back to it, not only have we helped a little bit with our need satisfaction, we usually have a better perspective on the problem. So, again, the 222 method, I use a shockingly large amount of days. I think I’m on, like, three by now, so. yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Tasha Eurich
My favorite habit is drinking water.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that people really resonate with, they respond to, they retweet in your speeches and such?

Tasha Eurich
Yeah, the grit gaslighting idea seems to be really resonating with people. It’s giving language and permission to experience something that, I think, we shame ourselves for.

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

Tasha Eurich
Oh, goodness, I’m everywhere. TashaEurich.com. Every social media. I’m trying to build my Instagram, so if anybody wants to come hop on there with me, that would be amazing. But, yes, very findable.

Pete Mockaitis
And a final challenge or call to action for someone looking to become awesome at their job?

Tasha Eurich
Two-part question, “What would the best version of you do? And what if you could be you, but better?”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Tasha, thank you. This was fantastic.

Tasha Eurich
Thank you so much. Great to be here again with you.

Pete Mockaitis
Gino, welcome!

Gino Wickman
Thank you, Pete. I am thrilled to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m thrilled to be chatting. I’ve heard your name many times and you have done a lot of stuff, written a number of books, and I’m fired up talking about your book, Shine. And could you kick us off by sharing any particularly surprising and fascinating discoveries you’ve made about humans, professionals, leaders while putting this together?

Gino Wickman
Well, the big idea is that it is possible to be driven and have inner peace. And so, what we teach are 10 disciplines that will maximize your energy, impact, and inner peace. And we teach three discoveries to help you free your true self. And so, you and I were talking a little bit before we started, and so a great word is, you know, how to stay in flow, how to be more productive, make more of an impact on the world while experiencing more peace.

And you use the word flow, we actually have a word in the book we call “flowt,” which is spelled F-L-O-W-T. It’s the combination of two words – the word flow and the word float, because the reality is, when you implement what is in this book, you will be in a better state of flow while working and making the impact and doing the stuff that you do in your work-life, while, at the same time, feeling like you’re floating through life, and that’s that inner peace. And it’s this beautiful combination of making an impact while having inner peace.

Pete Mockaitis
Gino, that almost sounds too good to be true.

Gino Wickman
I love that.

Pete Mockaitis
So, tell us how’s that done?

Gino Wickman
Yeah, you bet. All right. Well, let’s do that. I’m going to create a big picture context and then I’m going to follow your lead in terms of how deep you want to go. But the big picture context is this. It starts with understanding these 10 disciplines, and these 10 disciplines have evolved. They started with what I call an outer-world focus.

And so, in this conversation we’re going to have, we, human beings, we all have an outer world and we have an inner world. And those two things are very different from each other. And so, when I created the 10 disciplines originally, it was all about outer world focus, being more successful in your outer world, only to discover, over time, they also help you in your inner world.

And so, what the 10 disciplines are is they create a foundation that allows for time and space to do what I call inner work, which then takes us to the three discoveries for freeing your true self, which is where the real fun work goes, it’s where we really go inside. And there’s one of the discoveries that I’d really love to focus on in our time together. But, again, they’re called the three discoveries for freeing your true self.

Now what I’d like to do, that’s the big picture, I just want to take it down a little bit and just get really specific in terms of what the discoveries are and what the disciplines are so that there’s a high-level understanding because then I’d love to just kind of drill down on one or two with the limited time that we have.

But, very quickly, the 10 disciplines for maximizing your energy, impact, and inner peace are, number one, 10-year thinking; number two, take time off; number three, know thyself; number four, be still; number five, know your hundred percent; number six, say no, dot, dot, dot, often; number seven, don’t do $25-an-hour work if you want to make six figures; number eight, prepare every night; number nine, put everything in one place; and number 10, be humble.

So, that’s a mouthful, but I wanted to share those because I want to put as much out there as possible. But when you implement those 10 disciplines in your life, you create this incredible foundation, like I said, that creates space and time to then do the inner work, which is where flow really happens. And those are the three discoveries.

And so, again, the three discoveries for freeing your true self, discovery number one is, “I am driven.” And so, for us driven people out there, it’s a blessing and a curse. It’s important to understand exactly what we are. Discovery number two is that all decisions are made out of love or fear. And we take you to the root of fear- and love-based decisions. And that’s where I’d love to kind of drill down on today with your audience.

And then discovery number three is where we started. And that is, that it is possible to be driven and have peace. And so, there’s the big picture, if you will, and we can drill down on any of that wherever your gut is taking you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, with regard to the flow, which of these 10 disciplines or discoveries gives us the most of that?

Gino Wickman
So, I wanted to start with discovery number one, which is 10-year thinking. And with each one of these discoveries, I always love to do three things. Number one, I’m going to start with a bold statement, that if you’ll just give me blind faith and do this, you will get all the benefit from the discipline. Second thing I want to do is share all the benefits. Third thing I want to do is give you an action that, if you do this, you will start to get the benefit.

So, with 10-year thinking, the bold statement is, if you just do this, and that is, shift your mind from short-term thinking to thinking in 10-year timeframes. Now the benefits. If you do that, time will slow down for you, a peace will come over you, you make better decisions, you will actually get to where you want to go faster, you will have more clarity, more alignment.

And then the action I urge is a great little exercise to get the neurons in your brain to shift, because that’s what it’s all about, is to simply write the date, your age, and a goal 10 years from now. So, write the date 10 years from now, how old are you going to be, and what’s the number one most important goal. And just doing that starts to shift your brain.

But then there’s a fun little secondary exercise, is when you look at that goal, think about all of your actions and decisions right now, here today, and are they all in alignment with that goal? For most people walking the earth, we’re short-term thinkers.

We want everything now, now, now, now, now. And if we can shift that to thinking in 10-year timeframes, I discovered it at 35 years old and it changed my life, all of a sudden, like I said, time slows down and, ironically, you get there faster. And there’s a great quote that says, “We tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in a year, but we greatly underestimate what we can accomplish in 10 years.”

So, there’s a whole bunch of stuff we can accomplish in one good decade, we just got to shift our mindset because we tend to be making short-term decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Well, could you give us an example of someone who was doing some short-term thinking, they shifted to a 10-year horizon, what that 10-year goal was, and how that ended up being transformational for them?

Gino Wickman
I think about myself, all through my twenties and my early thirties, and I just was very impatient and I wanted everything immediately. And I set way too many goals and I wanted everything really fast. And so, as a result, I was making bad decisions. I was making these short-term decisions.

So, for instance, in its simplest form, if you want to be healthy 10 years from now, today, if you eat that piece of cake or drink that soda, that’s an action that is not in alignment with where you want to be. And so, the shift to that is exercising, eating well. And so, you want examples, and I’m trying to give you the best ones I can, but when I shifted to what I really wanted out of my life – relationally, physically, business-wise, income, net worth – I started making decisions today.

So, it’s as simple as how much I saved every single day, week, month in the short term. Again, how I took care of myself, how I treated my loved ones. So, if I want to be in a great marriage, if I want to have great relationship with my friends and family, today, that thing I’m about to say, I say it a little bit better, a little bit different than I would have just kind of living in the now and short-term thinking. So, does that help?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, you can see more, I guess, weight, importance, consequence, implication of your action when you are beholding the compounding, aggregated, multiplicative effect of the thing over many years.

Gino Wickman
Exactly. Yeah. Well, I’ll stop there, so I think you’ve got it, but please ask if you want to dig deeper.

Pete Mockaitis
So, then when it comes to the flow, tell me more.

Gino Wickman
And so, we’re talking about energy and managing energy, which is certainly flow. So, like I said, when you shift to 10-year thinking, all of a sudden, your body calms down. You’re no longer having angst and feeling that urgency and that impatience, because now you realize there’s a lot you can accomplish in 10 and 20 years. When you lengthen that time horizon, all of sudden, your body calms down.

And in that calm state, just imagine what that just did to your energy. Now, all of a sudden, you’re making better decisions. You’re thinking better. You’re clearer. So, just the difference between feeling that urgency and feeling a calm in that state of calm, you are making much better decisions.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s interesting. And sometimes I can think about these states just naturally arising when I’m trying to crush the email inbox, you know, like all these messages, “Let’s go, go, go, go, go. Move, move, move. Send, send, send. Archive, archive, archive. Forward, forward,” all that. So, there’s that state, which is fast, rapid, and can conjure up some angst along the way.

As opposed to if you’re at a strategic planning retreat and you’re just staring out the window and pondering what are the strategic goals and visions to be done over the years. And so, I could feel that emotional contrast and it is more fun and enjoyable to be in the big dreaming vision, strategy retreat, setting.

I guess I’m wondering, it could be easy to fall into old habits. And in the heat of battle, in the moment of urgency, do you have any pro tips on pulling it back up?

Gino Wickman
Well, actually, your example that you just gave was perfect in helping me give a clearer answer about that. Because, when I say shift to 10-year thinking, I’m not talking about going to a strategic planning retreat and sitting there staring out the window.

I’m talking about when you are sitting and ripping through those hundred emails that sucks, quite frankly. Two mindsets. One mindset is you are short-term thinking, you’re worrying about all your short-term problems, you want everything now, now, now, now, now, you are not looking past next week, compared to you are thinking in 10-year timeframes.

You clearly know what you want your life to look like 10 years from now, and you know you can get it because in 10 years you can accomplish anything. When you rip through those hundred emails, the answer, the response, the tone, the quality of the answer will increase with long-term thinking than short-term thinking.

So, that email is a great example, but now let’s go to every interaction and touchpoint between all the people you interact with on a day. Your friends, your family, your loved ones, your coworkers, your boss, whatever it is, when you are thinking in longer-term timeframes, when you get your body to calm down and see life in a longer timeframe, you respond better to people. You make a better decision in that moment, just like you would in answering those emails.

Pete Mockaitis
And I suppose I’m thinking about the actual internal physical state there. It’s good to have that perspective, and that does influence the state itself right there. I guess I’m just saying, it seems that it’s quite possible to get caught up in the moment all the time, any kind of context, whether you’re talking to somebody or you’re irritated by something.

Gino Wickman
Yeah, absolutely. And I’m not talking about something you’re going to snap your fingers in one minute and shift to 10-year thinking. This is a discipline. That’s why they’re called disciplines. You’ve got to change your neurons. Ninety-five percent of the planet’s neurons are only capable of thinking short term. And so, they’re making all these short-term decisions that most of them are not great.

To shift those neurons to thinking in long-term timeframes, you’re going to make better decisions. The other thought that comes to mind is, like, when I’m sitting in a meeting, whether that’s on Zoom or live or wherever it is, I just have this ability to cut through everything and see everything so clearly because I’m so calm in the moment. I’m not feeling any urgency. And for some reason, better answers come.

You’re tuned in more to everything going on because, again, you’re taking a long-term outlook. You’re not feeling like you have to accomplish everything right now. And so, it’s like, I feel it in my body right now, both sides of it. For the people that sit there in angst, feeling so hurried, they’re just not making great decisions for the long-term.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that’s a lovely statement there. It’s like, “I feel no urgency,” which is wild to hear from Gino Wickman, because I think a lot of us in entrepreneurial world, we think, “That’s one of the top things a leader entrepreneur needs is sense of urgency in order to execute and make things happen.” And you’re saying, “Well, quite the opposite.”

Gino Wickman
Yeah, exactly. And so, I like the word driven. So, you’re still going to be as driven as ever and you actually become more driven when you find this inner peace and have this calm. But absolutely, you don’t feel that urgency. And I get that it’s hard to believe if you’re sitting there in an urgent state right now, but I’m here to tell you, it’s possible and that’s why it’s one of 10 disciplines. There’s only 10, and when you apply all 10, look out, baby, because they have a synergistic effect on each other as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, do you have your pro tips, sort of like a stop, drop, and roll? If you find yourself getting hooked, sucked into the urgency, how do we shake it off?

Gino Wickman
Step one, take a deep breath. Just take a deep breath. It takes less than 10 seconds. Number two, remember your 10-year thinking. Remember your 10-year vision. Remember what you want. And then, all of a sudden, the right answer is going to come out. So, take the deep breath and shift to 10-year thinking and the right answer is going to come out.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Understood. Well, let’s talk about being still.

Gino Wickman
You bet. Well, so this is a nice little tie to the deep breath I just talked about. So, driven people, by design, most really struggle with being still. And so, the discipline is being still. It’s discipline number four. Again, I just want to start with that bold statement, then the benefits, then the action. And so, the bold statement, if you will just simply sit in silence for 30 minutes every day.

The benefits, you will get more energy, more clarity, more creativity. more ideas, stuff comes up and down, I like to say, I’ll explain that to you in just a second here. You get downloads, you shed layers, you experience true freedom, calm, and your nervous system calms down. And so, the action is simply do it tomorrow morning.

So, tomorrow morning, we urge you to just maybe start with 10 minutes if you really struggle with this, but this is really hard for most people. Because, when we get still, when we truly get still, now this is one of four things. It’s meditation, it’s contemplation, it’s prayer, or it’s journaling. Those are the four we recommend. There’s a hundred other ways to do this, but start with one of those four.

For me, it’s mostly meditation, but I do all four of them, but it’s just being in stillness. And so, in meditation, in silence, the reason it starts to get uncomfortable for people is when we get still, all the stuff starts to come up. In other words, our bodies start to talk to us. So, the angst that we tend to feel, there’s stuff going on inside of us that happened through our life. It’s trauma that we’re carrying around.

And so, for me, most of them, when it’s in my chest, it has something to do with the past. When it’s in my stomach, it’s something about the future, but you will have sensations that come up, and your job is to pay attention to those sensations. Your body’s telling you something, and things will come down. I call them downloads.

When you really are in stillness and it’s a practice, you will get downloads. You will get answers to problems you’re trying to solve. You will hear things, see things. You will literally get downloads. And the net effect of all of it is your central nervous system calms down. Now we’re back to that flow state, being more calm when things are very intense, you’re making better decisions, you’re seeing everything where most people aren’t.

And so, I’ll shut up and let you ask your questions.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing. So, sitting in silence, 30 minutes, prayer, meditation, contemplation, journaling, so I suppose, let’s cover all the things that we’re not doing. I suppose we’re not looking at any form of a screen along the way.

Gino Wickman
You got that right.

Pete Mockaitis
And we are not eating. We’re not talking to another human. So, that’s the idea, is that there is silence and we are, in a way, we’re mostly not doing much at all.

Gino Wickman
Right. Well, you’re not doing anything. So, yes, yes, yes to everything you said. So, total stillness, total silence, uninterrupted, so you are locked in some room that is silent and quiet. It’s okay if you’re hearing birds chirping or wind blowing, things like that, but, yes, you are uninterrupted. This is time for you and yourself to connect to your body in a big way. But, yes, yes, yes to every statement and question you just asked.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, then do you start with a question, or a prompt, or an intention, or it’s just nothingness, just blank-slate opening.

Gino Wickman
Yeah. And it depends on which form of stillness. So, let’s take them one at a time, okay? So, meditation, you know, there are a thousand meditation apps. There are a thousand meditation books. So, meditation, there are so many ways to do it. So, I’m going to give its simplest form, but just know there are many ways to do this.

But meditation is all about, again, sitting in silence, sitting in a chair, whether your back is leaning against it or sitting up, that’s okay, you’re going to hear a lot of different philosophies around that, but it is absolutely silencing your mind. And so, for me, it takes about 10 minutes for my mind to stop racing and go ultimately completely calm. And I get to a place where I can literally go 20 minutes without a single thought.

So, that’s where you want to get to. But believe me, if this is new for you, your mind is going to race for a while so just stay with it. So, yes to your question there because it is absolute nothingness in meditation. The goal is to have no thought, and when thoughts come up, you just stay aware of those thoughts and they pass. They come and they go and they pass. You’re just observing those thoughts. So, that’s meditation.

Contemplation is different because contemplation is you’re really contemplating something. You might be trying to solve a big problem. When I’m doing writing or solving, I will spend time in contemplation. A lot of great answers will come to me. In prayer, you’re talking to a higher power, whatever you believe in. So, yes, you’re saying words either out loud or silently.

And then in journaling, you’re sitting there writing. And the goal there is to just, it’s called hot-penning is just to write. You don’t want to do too much thinking, but you’re just literally writing. So, that’s where they’re each very different. And it’s, ultimately, about finding your own formula. I spend the most time in stillness and meditation, but I absolutely contemplate, pray, and journal when necessary.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m intrigued, as we talk about flow, I’m thinking about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and finding that balance associated with not being too lethargic, low energy, bored, dragging, and not being too anxious, hyped-up, whatever, as well as finding an appropriate difficulty, like, “This is not so easy, I’m bored. And not so overwhelming, I’m freaking out.”

So, we talked about a couple of approaches here along the lines of taking the 10-year perspective, taking a breath, having some silence to sort of bring it down, which is probably more necessary as you’re working with a very driven entrepreneurial population so often. I’m curious about the times when we need to pump it up. It’s like, “Oh, we’re feeling sleepy. Not into it. Just one of them days.” It’s like, “Ah, there’s a hefty dose of I don’t want to,” going on for whatever reason. How do we crank it up if we need to?

Gino Wickman
Well, if we’re still on the subject of stillness, because I can give you a couple other answers, but I want to stay on stillness with that, is sit silent for 30 minutes. So, when the race horse is burnt out and tired, sit in stillness for 30 minutes. It will, literally, recharge your batteries. It will re-energize you. You are burnt out.

Now, all of the 10 disciplines applied to your life will avoid all the burnout. So, I want to be careful not to teach all of them in answering your question about feeling burnt out, but start with 30 minutes of silence, and just do that for the next seven days, and you are going to feel your battery recharged. You’re burnt out because you’re going so fast and hard and you’re not taking a break. The 30 minutes of stillness is that wonderful break that recharges your batteries, and again does so many other things that I’m describing but it will recharge your batteries.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Gino, tell me, any other top do’s or don’ts you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Gino Wickman
Well, I would jump to the three discoveries now. Discovery number two, all decisions are made out of love or fear. And what I want to teach there, it’s a very deep, heavy topic, but it’s so powerful and simple when you understand it, and it gets to what I was just talking about. And it’s understanding that our egos have been trying to protect us for a lot of years. And as a result, it has created protective layers that are not serving us well.

And so, every decision, emotion, thought, feeling we have is coming from love or fear. And that angst that I talked about, most of my decisions were coming from fear. Most of them now come from love because I went to the root of what was causing that. And what is at the root is to understand that your ego is hanging onto stuff from the past, protecting you from it ever happening again, and you can shed that.

It’s simply known as an energetic block inside of you that you need to remove. And when you remove that block, you start making better decisions because you don’t feel the need to protect yourself anymore. And so, it’s all about getting the ego to relax. Again, very deep topic. It’s the lengthiest chapter in the book, but a very, very powerful concept to remove the angst and to start to shift to more love-based decisions.

And then we go back to the emails you talked about, and the meetings that you’re in, and all these things going on. When all of those responses are coming from love, you are going to have a better life. You are going to have people that want to follow your lead. You’re going to get a better response from people in your life. And so, that would be the last little nugget I would throw out there.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, that’s a nice sort turn of a phrase, the ego relaxing, like, “Hey, chill out, dude. It doesn’t need to be all about you and being impressive, or winning, or shining, or performing, or dominating, or standing out, like, whatever, so just chill.” So, that sounds very useful. I’m curious, do you have any top perspectives, prompts, pointers that can get that ego chilled when it’s flaring up?

Gino Wickman
You bet. So, we offer 30 resources for shedding in the book. There are thousands of resources for shedding, as we call it. And so, again, now that you’ve grasped the concept that our ego has us hijacked and held in a prison, and it’s just simply trying to protect us, so, please, its intentions are good. It is still trying to protect us from saber-toothed tigers because it thinks every threat now in business and in life is a saber-toothed tiger, so it’s trying to protect us. Its intentions are good.

And so, great disciplines are to be aware. So, just be aware. That’s the final root of that second discovery that I’m talking about. When you start to become aware that this decision, thought, feeling, emotion came from fear, or this thought, feeling, emotion, decision came from love, it’s just an awareness thing. And when you notice the ones that are coming from fear, you can start to chase it back to what’s really going on.

And so, awareness is the first thing I would suggest. This takes practice. But, you know, assuming talking to your audience out there, on average, you’re going to be around for another 40 years. Invest a year in this. Invest a year in just being aware of watching your ego operate, and it will start to relax. Become aware of when it’s trying to protect you.

When you find yourself being reactive to someone else, something they said, that is your ego. You should never react to anything. You should and can respond to things. But when you’re reactive, then they’ve got a hold of something going on inside of you. So, just be aware. That would be the first tidbit I would offer.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, now let’s hear a little bit about your favorite things. Can you start us off with a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Gino Wickman
Yeah, so my favorite quote is, “You get everything out of life if you help enough people get what they want.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Zig Ziglar, very nice. And a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Gino Wickman
We talked about stillness. And there was a study done with hundreds of people that would go into a room and there was a button that, if they hit the button, it would give them an electric shock that hurt. And so, what they were told to do is sit in stillness and silence for 30 minutes.

And if they didn’t hit the button, they receive some financial reward. And so, in that study, most people hit the button, and they all received the shock before the study so they knew the pain of the study. So, all agreed they do not want to feel that pain again. But sitting in stillness for 30 minutes, most hit the button because it was more painful for them to sit in stillness, like we talked about where things come up.

And one particular, I wish I could remember the number, but one particular subject, hit the button something like 63 times. I mean, some ridiculous number. So, just that really powerful insight in how we human beings struggle with being with ourselves.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Gino Wickman
Letting Go by David Hawkins.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite tool?

Gino Wickman
My legal pad. I’ve been running everything in my life from a legal pad for 37 years.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Gino Wickman
Favorite habit is we talked about, is stillness meditation.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget that you’re known for, a Gino sound bite that gets quoted often?

Gino Wickman
Probably the most common one is “Vision without traction is hallucination.”

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

Gino Wickman
Yeah, I would say two directions. So, if you love what you heard and Shine is appealing to you, I would pick up the book Shine. You can get it at any retailer. But if you go to our website, The10Disciplines.com, you’ll find out about all things 10 disciplines. But you could also go to my website, which contains all of my content that I’ve created, GinoWickman.com.

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

Gino Wickman
Well, what I would suggest is go to the website, The10Disciplines.com, and just download the free chapter and read those first 27 pages and see if it pulls you in.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Gino, thank you.

Gino Wickman
My pleasure.