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

Pete Mockaitis
Rich, welcome.

Rich Diviney
Thank you, Pete. It’s good to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to hear about some of your wisdom associated with The Attributes, but I think I’m going to put you on the spot and ask that you kick us off with a thrilling, riveting tale related to your time in the Navy SEALs and/or training that’s also instructive and tees us up. So, no pressure, but I want you to check every box with your opening story.

Rich Diviney
All right. Well, so I went into the Navy SEALs. I joined the teams in 1996. I graduated at Purdue University, was commissioned as an officer, went straight to training, and then got through training, which is always a good thing because it’s about a 90% attrition rate at SEAL training, which is called BUD/S, Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL Training.

And so, I went through, got through in ’96. Beginning of the career was, you know, it was normal, but there was nothing going on. Of course, 9/11 happened and things got very busy and kinetic. But what happened between 2005-2010, is I went to one of our very specialized SEAL commands, and that selection process was unique and intense. And I actually took over that selection process in 2010. And in doing so, really had to figure out what we were kind of looking for performance-wise.

So, in other words, to get to this command, you had to have stellar performance reviews, you had to have recommendations, psychological exams, physical tests, all that stuff. And when you went, you went through a nine-month course, a selection course, and 50% of the guys who went through didn’t make it, right? So, 50% of the top Navy SEALs did not make it through, and that’s okay. Every selection course implies attrition, but I think what was not okay and what they asked me to do was that we weren’t able to effectively describe or understand why guys weren’t making it through.

We’d say something like, “Well, the guy couldn’t shoot very well.” Okay, well, you tell a Navy SEAL that caliber, he can’t shoot very well. That’s like, I mean, this guy’s probably shot more rounds than most people in the military. So, it’s disingenuous to him and disingenuous to us. And so, they asked me, they said, “Rich, we need you to look at performance and figure out what’s going on.” And so, I had to really deconstruct performance.

And the couple stories that I’ll kind of harken back to, that hammered this home for me in terms of what I needed to look at, were these. So, in basic SEAL training, in BUD/S, you spend hundreds of hours running around with big boats on your head, you spend hundreds of hours exercising with 300-pound telephone poles, running around with those things, freezing in the surf zone. I was doing this work in 2010 and I had already been on hundreds of combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I can tell you with certainty, never on one of them did I carry a big heavy boat on my head or a 300-pound telephone pole, right?

So, what I recognized in that moment was that they weren’t training us in those moments to be Navy SEALs. They weren’t training us in the skills of being SEALs. They were actually teasing out these qualities. They were putting us in these environments to tease out these qualities to see if we had what it took to do the job.

So, then I kind of thought back and I remembered a story I’d heard from an older instructor, and he said, “Rich, you know, years ago, a kid showed up to SEAL training, and he walked into the instructor’s offices, and he said, ‘I want to be a Navy SEAL.’ And the instructor said, ‘Okay. Well, you have to do a swim test.’ And the kid said, ‘Fine.’”

So, they took him out to the pool, and it’s an easy test, like 50 meters, so 25 meters to one end, 25 meters back to the other end. He gets all ready to go, and as soon as he jumps in the pool, he sinks right to the bottom of the pool. And at the bottom of the pool, he begins walking across the bottom of the pool to one end, he touches one end, he walks across the bottom of the pool back to the other end.

He comes up, he’s gasping for air, the instructor looks at him and says, “What the heck are you doing?” And the kid is still trying to catch his breath, looks at the instructor, and says, “I’m sorry, instructor, I don’t know how to swim.” And at that point, the instructor looks at him and pauses, and then he says, “That’s okay, we can teach you how to swim.”

And the idea is “Why did the instructors say that?” The instructor said that because he knew, if this kid had the attributes, the qualities to show up to Navy SEAL training, one of the most elite maritime units on the planet, and he didn’t know how to swim, he had everything inside of him to be a Navy SEAL. Teaching him the skill of swimming was going to be easy.

So, that was really the big story, the big “aha” for me in terms of bifurcating the terms between skills and attributes, and the fact that if we look at just skill, we’re missing a huge percent of the performance picture because we have to look at these qualities that people bring to the table if we want to understand performance at very elemental levels.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, yes, let’s dig in to some depth in a moment, the distinction between skills and attributes. I think that’s really thought-provoking and useful. But first, I’m curious, with your specific charge, in terms of, we’ve got to get to the bottom of why. Why are half of these super highly trained, experienced operators not getting through? What was the answer?

Rich Diviney
Well, the answer was, we were looking for some specific attributes, and the guys who weren’t making it through either didn’t…well, they just didn’t have enough of them. So, for example, a couple of the attributes I talk about in the book are the mental acuity attributes, which are situation awareness, compartmentalization, task switching, and learnability.

When you are doing, for example, the level of operations that we’re doing, in this case, close quarter combat, where you’re going in and clearing rooms to rescue hostages, it’s a very rapid, a very fast, very dynamic environment, inside of which you have to do live fire, you have to take instruction, you have to learn, you have to upload it, you have to be very cognizant of your buddies, you have to move quickly, you have to hit your targets.

And I think what was happening, most of the guys would drop out during that phase, and I think what we found was that they were, again, they didn’t have none of these, none of us have no attributes or zero attributes, but, in this case, they didn’t have enough of an ability to run into environment, be situationally aware enough to pick a target, focus in on that target, address that target, and then switch to the next target rapidly.

So, it was, I think that the attributes that we didn’t see that were the most predominant in predicting failure, or at least attrition, were enough of those mental acuity attributes. And then another one would just be resilience. Resilience is defined as this ability to bounce back to baseline. It’s not really getting back up when you get hit, it’s to be able to bounce back to get back to baseline.

So, you think about that rubber band, you stretch, you let it go, it goes back to its original shape. Can you bounce back from hardship or even success? And the guys who would be screwing up and they’d get the spotlight on them and just get hammered, hammered, hammered, some guys would just be able to wash that off and bounce back. Other guys would just go into a spiral.

And so, that was, if we saw that, that was certainly an attribute that we needed to see a predominance of because we can’t have folks who can’t bounce back to baseline rapidly enough. So, those were probably some of the most predominant ones, and then there were others that we kind of identified too, but less predominant.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, I’m intrigued, Rich, we talk about attributes versus skill, is this mental acuity stuff and the resilience bounce-backing stuff not a learnable, trainable, developable skill?

Rich Diviney
So, it’s developable. It’s not teachable. Let me just identify the terms here just really quick for the audience. A skill is not inherent to our nature. In other words, none of us are born with the ability to ride a bike or throw a ball. We’re taught to do those things; we’re trained to do those things. Skills direct our behavior in known and specific environments, “Here’s how and when to throw a ball or ride a bike.”

And then skills are very visible. They’re very easy to see, which means they’re very easy to assess, measure, and test. You can put scores around them, statistics, and otherwise. You can put them on resumes, which is why we get seduced by skills often when we’re picking teams or performance evaluating.

But what skills don’t tell us is how we’re going to show up in stress, challenge, and uncertainty. Because in an unknown environment, it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to apply a known skill. So, this is when we lean on our attributes. So, attributes, on the other hand, are inherent to our nature. In other words, all of us are born with levels of patience, situational awareness, adaptability.

Now, you can develop them over time and experience, but you can see levels of this stuff in very small children. So, anybody who has small kids or has, you know, experienced small kids will agree with me when I say there are one and a half year olds who are patient, and there are one-and-a-half-year-olds who are impatient. So, there’s a nature/nurture element to attributes.

Attributes don’t direct our behavior; they inform our behavior. They tell us how we’re going to show up to an environment. So, my son’s levels of perseverance and resilience informed the way he showed up when he was learning the skill of riding a bike and falling off a dozen times doing so. And then finally, because they’re difficult to see, they’re very difficult to assess, measure, and test, but they come up the most viscerally, and viscerally during times of stress, challenge and uncertainty.

So, the idea is we all have all of the attributes. The difference in each one of us are the levels to which we have each. So, if we take adaptability, for example, and seven is high and one is low, I’d be a six on adaptability, which means when the environment changes around me outside of my control, it’s fairly easy for me to go with the flow and roll with it.

Someone else might be a level three. If the same thing happens to them, it’s difficult for them to go with the flow and roll with it, there’s friction there. They’re still adaptable because all human beings are. It’s just harder. So, if we’re trying to line these up like dimmer switches, we’d all have different dimmer switch settings.

So, the idea is, yes, you can take an attribute you’re low on and develop it, but you can’t do it the same way as a skill, because…and just one more thing for your audience, a way to distinguish between an attribute and a skill is to ask yourself a question, “Can I teach it or can it be taught?” If the answer is yes, it’s probably a skill. If the answer is no, it’s probably an attribute.

So, Pete, you could say to me, “Rich, I want to go to a range and learn how to shoot a pistol and hit a bullseye.” I could take you to the range and teach you how to do that in a couple hours. That’s a skill. Or you could say, “Rich, I want to learn how to be more patient.” I can’t teach you that, all right? That has to be self-developed.

So, to develop an attribute you’re low on takes three factors, three things. The first thing is you have to know you’re low on it. The second thing is you have to have a need, desire, or motivation to develop it. What do I mean by that? Well, we have to understand that just because you’re low on an attribute does not mean you need to develop it. In fact, developing that attribute may be detrimental to what you’re trying to do.

I always say the stand-up comic with too much empathy is going to be a lousy stand-up comic, right?

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, I’m sorry. You didn’t like that joke?”

Rich Diviney
That’s right, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
“Really, boy, I feel terrible. Let’s just call of the set.”

Rich Diviney
Or, I don’t even tell the joke. So, yeah, just because you’re low doesn’t mean, you know, in fact, you’re being low might be exactly why you’re so good at what you do. But assuming both are true, you’re low on and you feel like developing will actually help your niche, the third is the most important. To develop an attribute, you must go find environments and place yourself environments that tease and test that attribute.

So, if you want to develop your patience, you have to go find environments that test and tease and develop your patience, whatever that looks like for you. It could be, “I’m going to drive in traffic. I’m going to deliberately drive in traffic.” Or, “I’m going to pick the longest line in the grocery store to stand in.”

I always say “Have kids. That’ll develop patience.” But whatever that is, you can do that for any attribute. So, those dimmer switches are not, and our attributes aren’t immutable, but they certainly take more efforts and consideration in terms of developing them or increasing them.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you there in terms of, I think the two-hour shooting example is handy because it’s not like, “Hey, there’s just a few guidelines associated with lining up the sights, or your breathing, or whatever. The fundamentals are there, “Okay. Now I know those things and I’m going to do those things. And, oh, wow!”

Because I think maybe one thing that’s coming to mind is you’ll see transformational results from zero to just a few hours later. It has been my experience with learning skills, like, “Oh, I had no idea.” It’s like, “Oh, okay. Well, now I kind of know the fundamental things. I’m just going to do those things, and now we know the results are way better.”

Versus patience. Yeah, you’re right. It’s not like, “Okay, in two hours, I’m going to teach you deep breathing and thinking about where they’re coming from, and now you’re done. Your patience has been tripled in quality.” I hear you. It doesn’t tend to work nearly that quickly in practice.

Rich Diviney
Yeah, does not work, I guess, linearly. And we have to think about attributes. The reason why attributes are so important is because it defines who we are at our most raw, our raw selves when you-know-what is hitting the fan, when the plan doesn’t go, the plan goes out the window, we’re steeped in uncertainty and chaos, these attributes are what rise to the fore. All the rest of it goes away.

I always kind of joke, and you and I talked before you hit record, about personality tests. I think most of them are fun and great. The only thing about personality we have to consider is that when the you-know-what hits the fan, personality goes out the window, and we, at our most raw, are running on these attributes.

And I think the gift I was given in SEAL training, and my teammates were given, is that we, from day one of SEAL training, started to understand who we are at our most raw and started to understand who each other were at our most raw, because then we knew, okay, when everything is dropping in chaos and uncertainty, we know exactly who’s going to show up and we know when to lean on each other and when to support each other and all that stuff. That’s the importance of this stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Okay. Well, so I took the assessment, and it was impressive, 250 items, but it went by super quick. And I got a kick out of how I have taken a number of these as well, such as StrengthsFinder and more, and the results sort of have some confluence, you know. So, I mean, I guess, while we’re distinguishing, we got skills, we got attributes, we got personality, how about strengths? Where do we put that into this?

Rich Diviney
So, I’m glad you asked, because when we talk about attributes, we don’t talk about good or bad. What we talk about is your performance fingerprints, what’s your unique performance picture. And the reason why we don’t talk about strengths and weaknesses is because your top attributes, your top five attributes are just as meaningful and have done just as much for your success as your bottom five. In other words, you being low on your bottom five is also why you’re successful.

Now, when we look at it honestly, what we say is, let’s do some honest introspection and ask ourselves, “Okay, these are my top five, these are my bottom five, or these are my order ranked, whatever. What are ways that this has served me? But what are also ways that this can maybe not serve me?” because that’s when we have to understand some blind spots.

So, the attributes equation is not about strengths and weaknesses. It’s about where you show up performance-wise, and where you might want to either dial down or dial up certain attributes or even develop attributes if you so desire. But there’s no judgment, which is powerful because it takes judgment out of the picture, which makes teams run faster and better.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s interesting, so there’s 41 of them in the report. But as I read through the names, they all seem, like, good. Like, I’d like more discipline, charisma, confidence, courage, empathy, adaptability.

Rich Diviney
That’s exactly right.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, “Oh, yeah, that sounds great. I’d love to have more of that.” But you’re saying like, well, having a whole lot of something is not always beneficial in a certain context, nor is having a very low score on something detrimental in a given context.

Rich Diviney
That’s right, yeah. Any one of the attributes, we could make an argument for pros and cons for that attribute, and we could also make an argument where at extremes, we could certainly have detriment. But the idea is the pros and cons are what you look at, and you start to say, “Okay, this is how and why I perform the way I do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s funny, I’m thinking right now, so in my attributes, my highest, we’ve got creativity, cunning, innovativeness, open-mindedness, integrity. And it’s funny, because right now I’m going through a process of getting a mortgage, and from my perspective, it’s just kind of like, “Okay, guys, so you can see I got credit, I got assets, I’ve got income. So, like, we’re good to go here, right?”

Rich Diviney
That’s right, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
But the answer is no, like, “We have to comply with all of the things perfectly so that, in the United States the way it works, because we’re going to resell this to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who need to have their standards complied with to a T, and that’s why there’s a low cost of capital associated with this.”

“So, your creative ideas associated with how you might prove this or that is not what I want. I want you to go to your bank and ask them for this very specific document, and then include that along with 12 other very specific documents, and then we’re good to go.”

Rich Diviney
So, it’s funny you should say that. By the way, your results are great. I’ve never seen creativity, cunning, and innovativeness all in the top five. All three of those are attributes that involve imagination, but they’re different to an extent. And this is where we have to get precise with the language-ing. This is one of the things we find very powerful about the attributes content, because we’re very precise with the etymology of each word.

So, creativity is the ability to create something into existence that otherwise didn’t exist. This is the artist with the blank canvas, the writer with the blank sheet of paper, the sculptor with the lump of clay. You’re able to create new ideas that didn’t otherwise exist. Innovativeness, on the other hand, is the ability to take something currently in existence and use your imagination to iterate on it and make it better. And then cunning is the ability to use imagination to problem-solve in ways that are outside-the-box thinking.

So, you have a very powerful trio there of using imagination on all different fronts and facets. The other thing about this is you’re also high on integrity, which means, you know, cunning, people, a lot of times, view cunning as pejorative, but cunning is not pejorative. Cunning is just outside-the-box thinking.

But I always say the way we use cunning can be pejorative. In other words, you can use cunning malevolently, that’s Bernie Madoff, or you can use cunning benevolently, that’s Oscar Schindler. The fact that you’re high on integrity means you’re going to use all this stuff in a benevolent way, which is pretty cool.

And then, of course, your open-mindedness does not surprise me because, as someone with all three of those imaginative attributes on top, you’re someone who is constantly taking in and open to new ideas because it probably just informs your ability to use more imagination. So, I think it’s a fascinating top five. What are your thoughts when you see the top five?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it does ring true in terms of StrengthsFinder, I think Ideation was my number one, and I do find that when I am in settings, like teamwork settings, that’s what lights me up the most, is that, “Let’s figure out the new, cool, creative way to do the thing.” And what is less exciting to me is, “Okay. Well now we know what that is, so just do that hundreds of times repeatedly for the next decade.” It’s, like, “Ooh, can someone else please execute that? Ugh.”

Rich Diviney
Right. By the way, let’s just talk about now your bottom five. What you just said there is also indicated by your bottom five because you’re low on patience, which means you don’t really like to…you won’t bang your head against the wall, and then persistence. Persistence is an interesting one. It’s defined as a kind of a firm steadfastness in understanding there’s a course of action and sticking to the same course of action over and over again because you know it’ll work.

So, I usually say it’s the stonecutter approach. The stonecutter basically taps that rock in the same place a hundred times and nothing happens because he knows that after the 101st or 107th tap, it’s going to break. That’s persistence.

You’re someone who’s constantly trying to ideate, which means you like new ideas, and you have little patience for sticking to the same course if it doesn’t make sense or if it’s boring. You will shift very rapidly. Where it could be a blind spot for you is you have to say to yourself, “Okay, well, there might be times where staying the course is, in fact, what needs to happen.” And that might be where you have to lean on someone else in your team who’s better at persistence, who can basically say, “Hey, Pete, we need to just stay the course.”

Your high imagination may find you in a position where you’re just constantly inundated with new ideas and it’s tough for you to take one and stick to one because you’re just constantly having new ideas. And again, this is not that these things do happen. These are just blind spots that may happen based on the way these attributes line up.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s really true, and if I am not seeing some level of results when I’m doing a thing in my own world, I feel like I need some pretty robust evidence that this course is ultimately correct. It’s like, “I did the thing three times, I haven’t seen any good results or effects flow from it yet.” So, I’ve coaxed myself, and everyone says, “Well, Pete, take a look at these impressive results on the random control trial, you know, that lasted six weeks, so let’s give it the six weeks first.”

Rich Diviney
Yeah, give it some time. Give it some time. And again, this is stuff you can do. Again, it’s not that you don’t have these attributes. They’re just prioritized in your behavior lower than the other ones, which means you have to do more, you have to have more deliberacy in when you have to dial them up. Like you said, you have to consciously make the effort to say, “You know what, I just need to stay to this.” It’s a conscious thing. Whereas, if you’re just acting without thinking, you’re likely going to shift.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, this is fun for me. I’ve got a big report. So, what if people who don’t have that? What do they do?

Rich Diviney
Well, yeah, they could always take the assessment, but I think one of the things folks can do is they can begin to interrogate their performance. And the way we do that is we look back at our performance, especially during times of stress, challenge, and uncertainty, and only because that’s when these things are most visible and visceral, and start asking ourselves some honest questions about how we showed up.

So, if we went through a situation and we say to ourselves, “Well, as everything was changing around me, I was upset and it didn’t feel good and I couldn’t really flow. It was hard for me to flex and flow.” That might indicate you’re a little low on adaptability, and that’s okay. It just gives you an idea of where you stand on these.

And you can start to think about these attributes in terms of how you’ve performed. You could think about how you perform in every day, all day, but especially during stress, challenge, and uncertainty. Experiential knowledge is the most powerful in this case. And I would even encourage those who do take the assessment to look at their results and then begin to think about times in their lives where these attributes have served them or have not served them, and start to say to themselves, “Okay, I can see now, experientially, how and why these show up the way they do.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then I guess I’m curious, if you find yourself in a context, maybe it’s a job, or role, project, where it kind of seems like the attributes you have are not a great match up, “Maybe I am a super empathetic stand-up comic.”

Rich Diviney
Yeah, no kidding. Yeah. Well, I always say, I mean, I like to think of human beings as cars, just like the movie. Some of us are Jeeps, some of us are SUVs, some of us are Ferraris, and there’s no judgment because the Jeep can do things the Ferrari can’t do, and the Ferrari can do things the Jeep can’t do. But it behooves us to lift our hood and figure out what we’re running with because the friction in our lives, that we’re talking about, might be because we’ve been a Jeep trying to run on a Ferrari track this whole time, or a Ferrari trying to run on a Jeep track.

And so, I think what folks can do, if there is significant kind of friction in one’s life, they may, in fact, be in a position, in a role, in a job, in a niche that is not suited to their normal attribute profile. And what’s happening there is they’re going to the job and they’re having to consciously behave differently, consciously dial up or dial down their attributes so that they can actually conduct the job, which you can do, that’s okay, but it doesn’t feel as good.

So, the idea would be, ask yourself, “Okay, what are my attribute sets? How does that performance picture look? And what might be some niches inside of which I could use this to excel?” And then if you’re a leader of people, you have to start looking at performance differently. In other words, low performance might not be because that person doesn’t know what they’re doing. It might be because their attributes don’t line up properly.

And that happened to me when I was commanding officer of a SEAL command, and I had a supply department. I had eight people; four people in this future look kind of innovative type cell, and then four people in the logistics kind of admin bookkeeping cell. And I had one sailor in the innovative cell that was not performing, bringing down morale.

And I brought her in, I started talking to her, and within 10 minutes I recognized her unique attribute set was a complete misfit for what I had her doing, but it was perfect for this other thing. So, all I did was shift her. I shifted her roles, her performance skyrocketed. So, it is about helping people get in the right seat on the bus as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we have 41 attributes, and if you don’t have a report in front of you, is there a bite-sized, manageable way you can think about these in a few categories so we can kind of map ourselves out a little bit?

Rich Diviney
The attributes themselves, I’ve broken into categories. Certainly, in the book, there’s five categories. The work we do now, we have nine. You can find those on the website, but those categories are like the grit category. So, what attributes make up grit? Mental acuity. What are the attributes that describe how our brain processes the world? Drive. What are the attributes that make up the driven person?

We have vision attributes, which have to do with creativity. We have service attributes, which have to do with our ability to serve other people. Social intelligence attributes, leadership attributes, and team ability attributes. And so, all those are grouped so that the attributes can clump kind of in a nice organized fashion.

It’s not to say that those attributes are strictly in those categories. I mean, even though courage is a great attribute, one could make an argument for courage also being a leadership attribute, but it helps them bin and organize the attributes in a little bit different way. I would say, though, if someone does, in fact, take the assessment and understand their rankings, I would offer and recommend people to look at their top five, bottom five.

This is one of the reasons why the assessment pulls those out because, the top five, bottom five starts to really describe and help one understand some unique aspects of their performance. The middle attributes, basically, are those attributes that you tend to easily shift in the polarities, between the polarities.

So, in other words, I just have to look at yours, but we take something like charisma. Charisma is something that you’re someone who can at times be charismatic and at times you’re not charismatic. You can kind of shift between those polarities, versus when you start seeing where they’ve been top and bottom, those are the ones you’re most often like or most often not like, if that makes sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it’s funny. I mean, there are times when people, they say, “Pete, I want you to be the master of ceremonies for this event.” It’s like, “Well, okay. Let’s put on the tuxedo, and let’s, you know, the big smile, and away we go.”

Rich Diviney
Yeah, that’s right.

Pete Mockaitis
And then there are other times where it’s like, “That’s fine. I don’t need to be the center of attention. I’d be happy to arrange the items at the event as well, if that’s what you need to do.”

Rich Diviney
Yeah, you shift in the polarities, which is what the middle ones indicate which is good. So, they’re all useful in terms of understanding.

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say this is how we are under stress when it all hits the fan, maybe we could zoom out a little bit and share, are there general best practices, no matter what your attributes are, that are ideal for when we find ourselves in these intense situations?

Rich Diviney
The answer is yes. In fact, you’re throwing out a nice preview for my second book, which is coming out in a few months called Masters of Uncertainty, where I give some tools and techniques for, in fact, what we can do in stress, challenge, and uncertainty. So, there are ways we can actually use our brain and our physiology to step through stress, challenge, and uncertainty better.

One of those ways is just a way we can actually interrogate an environment and manage our autonomic arousal. One of the biggest things that happens to us in stress, challenge, and uncertainty is we get autonomically aroused, i.e. our amygdala gets tickled and our arousal goes up. This happens to a degree that can, eventually, if unchecked, reach what we call amygdala hijack or autonomic overload, where we’re acting without thinking.

That type of amygdala hijack is very handy when we are getting out of the way of a moving train. We won’t have to think about what we’re doing. We just want to move and act, right? Not as handy in most other everyday stress and anxiety because we want to put conscious thought into our decision-making process.

What happens as our autonomic arousal goes up is our frontal lobe begins to take a back seat to our limbic, and when we reach the point of amygdala hijack, or autonomic overload, the frontal lobe has now gone back and we’re operating on our limbic without thinking. So, the key in challenge, stress, and uncertainty is to keep that frontal lobe engaged, and one of the ways we can do that is to ask conscious questions about our environment constantly.

So, in other words, “What can I focus on right now at this moment?” Even something like, “How am I feeling right now?” This is why “name it to tame it” is a very useful emotional technique, an emotional tool, because it’s pushing your limbic back a little bit, bring your frontal lobe online.

So, I think the idea is, as long as we’re managing our arousal by keeping our frontal lobe engaged, and we can do that with better questions, it’s a way to step through our environments of uncertainty, challenge, and stress.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you walk us through an example of some “naming it, taming it,” great questions?

Rich Diviney
Yes. One of the best questions you can ask in an environment of stress, challenge, and uncertainty is, “What could I control in this moment?” And what’s cool about the brain is the brain is designed to answer questions. It’s constantly doing it. And so, if we deliberately put a question into our frontal lobe, our brain will immediately begin to come up with answers. And so, if you put that question to your frontal lobe, you’re going to start to get answers that allow you to say, “You know what? Okay, I’m going to focus on this.”

Here’s a real-world example. It’s a SEAL training example, but it can be relatable. In SEAL training, like I said, you spend hundreds of hours running around with big, heavy boats on your head. And I remember, it was the middle of the night, we’ve been running with these boats on our head for hours and hours, and it was miserable, and we were on the beach and we were running next to the sand berm.

And I remember being miserable under the boat, and I said to myself, “Okay, you know what? I’m just going to focus until I get to the end of the sand berm. That’s what I’m focused on. I’m just going to get to the end of the sand berm.” What I did in that moment, unbeknownst to me, but I deconstructed later, was I immediately took control of an uncontrollable situation. I gave myself a focus point and I basically said, “Okay, end of sand berm.”

And as soon as I did that, as soon as I gave myself a goal, once I hit that goal, my brain gave me a dopamine reward for that. It’s inevitable. When we set goals and accomplish a goal, we’re going to get dopamine reward, which allows then for us to do it again and ask another question. So, we can actually start setting these horizons in any environment, and asking better questions about our environments so we can step through.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a really cool one. And I find that that’s true with regard to any number of unpleasant tasks, “If I could break this down into, I’ve got one page and I’ve got it into a dozen pieces and I’ve got my green is my pen color of completion. I don’t know, it just is. Green means done, money, victory. Then, yeah, it feels good.” It’s like, “Okay, well, there’s one piece,” as opposed to if you didn’t have the segmentation, you’re just like, “Oh, I just got one big mess that I’m dealing with.”

And I’ve also found that handy for exercise, even in indoor sterile environments, I don’t know, like a StairMaster or a treadmill or a bike or an elliptical, I find myself doing that just with numbers, like, “Hey, it’s a 30-minute workout.” It’s like, “Hey, if we get past 15, that means we got the majorities behind me. That’s awesome.” And so, I’m just making it up, and yet it helps.

Rich Diviney
And even that process, so neuro-scientifically, this is what we call DPO, duration pathway outcome, something that a good friend of mine, Andrew Huberman, who has a popular podcast called the Huberman Lab, he and I put together a few years ago, but the brain is constantly looking for these three factors in our environment to define it.

One is duration, “How long is this is going to take?” Two is pathway, “What’s the route in or out?” And then, three, is outcome, “What happens at the end?” And so, in the absence of one or more of those three things, that’s when we find ourselves in uncertainty, challenge, stress, anxiety. So, what’s happening there is we are literally creating our own DPOs, whether it’s you in the gym, me on the beaches of BUD/S, we are creating a duration pathway outcome, and we’re taking charge of this focus point, and we’re creating something to focus on and then strive toward.

I call this process moving horizons because these horizons are constantly shifting, and the distance or the size of each horizon has to be subjective to the individual and subjective to the intensity of the task. So, in other words, a more intense task, it’s probably going to be a shorter horizon. If I’m In SEAL training, in the surf zone, just freezing my butt off, and they’re keeping us there for hours, which happens, I remember saying to myself, “Okay, I’m just going to count 10 waves.” My horizon was short.

There were other times where I remember saying, “You know what? I’m going to just make it to the next meal,” the horizon shifts. The key, in terms of the dopamine reward system, is that you have to pick a horizon that’s meaningful for you. In other words, not too hard, so you run out of steam on the way, but not too easy, so when you accomplish it, you don’t get a doping reward. That’s highly subjective.

And so, as you do that in the gym, in life, on the beaches of BUD/S, you’re shifting those horizons constantly and asking yourself, “Okay, what’s the next meaningful horizon?” subjective to your own experience.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s handy. And I’m thinking about just daily work in which you have to focus, because it seems unlimited. It’s, like, there’s an unlimited pile of things that you could do, and then the day could be long. So, then what do you do with that? I actually have a timer that I use, it’s set to an hour or whatever, and then I find that very helpful in terms of, “Okay, I’m just going to crank on this for an hour.”

And sometimes it’s like, “No, I’m tired. 45 minutes is all that’s going to happen this time.” And then it feels very satisfying, it’s like, “I did the thing. That hour is complete and now I’m having a break and it’s all good.”

Rich Diviney
Yeah, you’re creating your own horizons and the timer’s helping for that. What you’re doing also is you’re practicing compartmentalization, which is one of your bottom fives, but the fact that you use a timer means you’re actively practicing, which is a good tool to use because that’s handy and it helps you kind of set those DPOs.

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

Rich Diviney
No, I just encourage people to just start exploring their attributes. If they want to visit us on our website, it’s TheAttributes.com, and we’re going to give your audience a discount code for the assessment as well.

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

Rich Diviney
The one that pops to mind is one from Einstein, because he has so many good ones, and it goes something, I don’t want to murder it here, but it goes something like, “Everybody is a genius, but if you try to teach a fish to climb a tree, it’ll look like an idiot.”

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

Rich Diviney
Recently, I heard of some folks in the AI space who have been starting to deconstruct the language of animals. How about that? They started to understand the language of elephants, whales, and different animal species, which I think is utterly phenomenal.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! And a favorite book?

Rich Diviney
One of my favorite books is probably Sapiens by Harari. I go back to that quite a bit. That’s a great one.

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

Rich Diviney
I honestly try to put together and arrange habits or times, periods where I can just be in my own head, whether it be if I’m jogging in the woods or even on an airplane, I can look out the window. But times I can really just be in my own head and think about and process ideas, I think that’s a gift that we should give ourselves, we should all give ourselves more.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a particular nugget you share that people really resonate with and quote back to you often?

Rich Diviney
When it comes to leadership, the one I hear the most is that being in charge and being a leader are two separate things. Being in charge is a position. Being a leader is a behavior. And the one I hear the most is I tell people you don’t get to self-designate. You don’t get to call yourself a leader. That’s like calling yourself good-looking or funny. Other people decide whether or not you’re someone they want to follow based on the way you behave. So, if you want to be a leader, behave like one.

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

Rich Diviney
TheAttributes.com. So www.theattributes.com has everything there, the book, the assessment, a bunch of stuff we do with companies and things like that. So, yeah, feel free to go check it out.

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

Rich Diviney
Yes. Growth is found outside of our comfort zone, so always make it a project to step outside the comfort zone often because that’s where you’ll grow and that’s where you’ll learn, and it’s a great place to be.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Rich, this is so much fun. Thank you. I wish you all the luck.

Rich Diviney
Cool. Thank you, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis

Dr. Sam, welcome.

Dr. Sam Rader

Hi, Pete. I’m so happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, I’m happy to be here as well. Mawi sang your praises so strongly, I was like, “Well, I’ve got to hear what all this is about.” So, let’s jump right in and tell us, what is Source Code in your parlance and lingo?

Dr. Sam Rader

Sure. So, Source Code is a new technique and theory that I’ve developed over the last 13 years. I was a psychologist for 18 years, and during that time, I started seeing all these patterns in all of my clients across everyone, no matter their walk of life, where they’re from, who they are. They all seem to have the same 12 problems. And once I saw these patterns, I started working with those instead of any other old ways of diagnosing things. I just saw them as these patterns.

And over time, I found that the ways to heal them are quicker when we bypass the mind and just work with the patterns themselves as sort of symbolic energies, and I can speak more about that later. But as we’ve done this, I’ve developed this new way of healing. It’s an alternative to coaching and therapy, and I call it Source Code. And Source Code is based on the premise that in our first five years of life, our early experience writes a code deep within us. And that coding kind of becomes the algorithm that runs our matrix of reality for as long as we live.

So, we keep reliving the same patterns and problems that we had from our family system when we were little, keep attracting and reenacting it, and we’re not even aware of it. It’s kind of like living in an invisible prison. And what I do is I help people jailbreak. We kind of liberate ourselves from these life-long unconscious patterns so that we can finally feel truly free and feel more connected to our essence of love and joy and peace.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, boy, intriguing stuff. Okay. So, more love, joy, peace. Sounds great. I mean, I think we could all sign up for that, but I got to be true to the ethos of the show, “But, Sam, how’s that going to make me more awesome at my job?”

Dr. Sam Rader

I know, it’s so good. It’s such a good one. Well, so, Source Code is based on the premise that we live in a fractal universe, and let me explain what I mean by that. Fractals are, probably, your audience has seen 3D renderings of them online. They look kind of trippy and psychedelic and beautiful, but it’s really a mathematical equation representing how there’s a pattern that repeats at scale.

So, when you look at a fractal image, it’s got a certain amount of squigglies and doodly dots, and if you were to zoom all the way in microscopically, it’s that same exact pattern. Zoom all the way out, same pattern, all the way to the left, all the way to the right. It’s the same exact pattern that keeps repeating. So, when we’re encoded in our first five years of life with these patterns, these what I call our coping styles or the glitches in our matrix, they keep repeating at scale in every area of our lives, including our work life.

So, if we’re always a pushover because we had a parent that was highly dominating, we are going to attract best friends who dominate us. We’re going to attract lovers who dominate us. We’re also going to attract bosses at work who dominate us, and we’re going to keep doing that pushover people-pleaser thing and feel like we can never say no and never hold a boundary. This is just one of the 12 potential glitches that I’m outlining now, and it deeply affects our work life. It deeply affects our finances, how we show up at work, the circumstances we attract at work, what we’re capable of, and the money we’re able to make is all determined by our coping styles.

Pete Mockaitis

Intriguing. So, that, in essence, it sounds like I could have one or maybe multiple. Or, what’s your take?

Dr. Sam Rader

We all have several of the coping styles because none of our parents were able to get it right so many times because they were working with their own coping styles. So, I personally had all 12, which is what allowed me to be the conduit for the work. Most people have like a dominant, maybe five or eight of them. But, yeah, we all have a combination of them.

And another cool thing about the fractal is like that whole thing, “as within and so without,” that, let’s say, you’re a business owner. If you have a certain holding pattern in your energetic system that repeats in your life, your business is going to be an exact reflection of that same holding pattern inside of you. So, when I do coding work with CEOs and business leaders, when we code out all the glitches inside of them, lo and behold, all their clients start acting differently, their employees start acting differently, the money starts flowing, the whole organization feels completely different because the organization is just an extension of them.

So, whatever we’re embodying, whatever patterns we have, those patterns are going to show up exactly reflected in our work and in our businesses.

Pete Mockaitis

Could you give us a cool example of someone who identified one of these patterns, took some actions, and then saw some cool transformation unfold in their career life?

Dr. Sam Rader

Absolutely, yeah. I was recently working with this CEO and founder of a consumer product company, and what we discovered was that his core wound was what I call the “withstanding subtype of the frustrated coping style.” So, let me break that down for you.

When we’re little, around 10 months of age to 4 years old, we’re developing our will. We’re developing our sense of what we can and can’t control with our will. If we are overly frustrated, during that time and our will doesn’t get to matter, we won’t be heard, things are really hard around us, we become frustrated. We develop the frustrated coping style and it haunts us through life. But there’s four subtypes to frustrated, and the one this man was working with is called withstanding.

Withstanding is when we grew up in a family that was kind of extremely harsh, things were really hard. Maybe we were abused literally or emotionally. It was like high neglect or high abuse, just like really painful stuff, right? And so what we do on the inside to cope with that is that we become withstanding, resilient, durable, unbreakable, unbeatable, “I’m going to be so firm that none of that pummeling from the outside is going to break me or destroy me,” right?

And so, for this client, as we started processing it for him, he said he identified with the Man of Steel, like Superman, right, who can withstand anything. But the thing is, when you’re in the Man of Steel embodiment, because you’ve had to withstand so much abuse from the outside, that Man of Steel embodiment is paired together with a villain on the outside. There’s no superhero without a villain. He’d just be Clark Kent, otherwise, right?

So, what would happen in this man’s business is he’d be going along, thinking he was doing the right thing, and then, all of a sudden, the other businesses he was doing deals with, they would do these sinister, villainous, damaging things to him, and he would have to be that resilient, durable, withstanding Man of Steel because that’s the fractal pattern he was living inside of. So, he kept attracting and reenacting these circumstances where he’d be beat down, and disappointed, and the rug pulled out, and pummeled, and he’d have to just keep withstanding it.

So, once we were able to do the work and soften all that need to withstand, and realize that there can be an entirely new reality beyond the harsh, beyond the hard, where things actually get to be easy, which is the antidote to withstanding. Each coping style has a corresponding antidote. When things get to be easy, all of a sudden, the business starts taking off in a more effortless way and business partners and associates are coming in with kindness, fairness, gentleness, collaboration, playfulness, warmth, instead of that pummeling from the outside that was so familiar.

So, we were able to switch the story he was living in, and recode his matrix so that now he’s living in a world that’s easy and in flow instead of hard and challenging and “Aargh!”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, cool. Thank you. I dig that story. And it was funny, as you were talking, I was thinking a little bit about David Goggins’ book, Can’t Hurt Me, in terms of that’s very much the story. We had some abuse and then he became the hardest mother-fer alive, is kind of his tagline, and I don’t know the particulars as to his business partners or what has gone down there. But, yeah, I can sort of see how, indeed, certain experiences could form us to cope, have a coping style in a certain way.

I guess what I’m wrestling with a little bit is, talk to me about this word “attracting” in terms of what is the pathway or mechanism by which that unfolds in reality?

Dr. Sam Rader

Yeah, so if someone is showing up in meetings and in life as the Man of Steel, or whatever that guy’s book was, “I’m a badass mother-fer,” right? If you’re showing up into meetings and in that embodiment, “Come on, bring it on,” what is that going to elicit from the outside? A fight. A struggle. It’s just natural. It’s just instinct. You’re showing up ready for a fight, “Come on, try to break me,” and then that’ll happen.

And if you show up soft and present, and in a different kind of power, a power that’s not like, “Try me!” but a power that’s like, “Let’s try this. Let’s work together. This is my power.” It’s an invitation for the other to be collaborative, to be gentle, to be harmonious and synergistic in how our powers can work together. So, you can just think about, “Man, how I show up in my body and my energy really does impact what happens next in my story.”

Pete Mockaitis

Absolutely. So, let’s hear the rundown, perhaps, just the couple-minute version of what are the 12 coping styles, just like the listing, and then the alternative, just so we could hear the definition and perhaps see ourselves, or start to a little bit, like, “Oh yeah, that does feel kind of familiar to my experience”?

Dr. Sam Rader

The first coping style I call “disconnected,” and the disconnected coping style is when we essentially learned that we wouldn’t be understood by our caregivers, and so we figured that maybe we don’t belong in this world. So, we feel separate in some indefinable way than the rest of society. We feel like an outcast, we feel like an alien or a weirdo, we feel like we don’t belong in this time and space and place and planet.

And so, we found ways to disconnect, and we really struggle with feeling misunderstood a lot, feeling like an outsider, feeling like there’s no point in even trying to explain ourselves because no one could fully understand. And that causes a lot of ruptures, and it’s really not easy to maintain connection because connection feels really confusing and bad, and disconnecting is the only thing that feels safe.

So, if we’re disconnected the antidote is to become connected. And to do that we learn how to feel our feelings, share our feelings, repair the ruptures, take the risk to let people know what’s going on for us, let them know what we need so that we can actually get in that loop of connection and communication where things get to be a fit.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay.

Dr. Sam Rader

The next coping style I call frictive and it’s when there’s a lot of intensity and energy in the body. We feel like we can never stop going, and moving, and doing, and thinking, and it’s because, subconsciously, we’re quite afraid of disappearing. This comes from not having enough physical containment as a little one. And so, the physical containment being squeezed and held from all sides, especially as newborns, is what allows us to feel like we have a body and have a self and we’re not disappearing.

And so, without that kind of physical containment, we feel like we’re always at risk of coming apart and fragmenting, and so we have to create a friction that keeps us tethered to this world so that we don’t essentially fall off the edge of the earth and die. So, that friction means we never get to rest or pause because, in the silence and stillness, it feels like there’s a void that could swallow us up. It’s a very existential wound.

So, what it looks like as adults is you’re just kind of anxious, and manic, and talking fast, and doing a lot, and really can’t slow the self down and rest. And if you’re frictive, you think about at work, you know, it’s like work always has to be some drama. There’s always a rush. There’s always a drama. There’s always a challenge and the friction and this, because it’s the friction that makes us feel alive and feel connected to something. So, the antidote to frictive is to be spacious where things can be really easy and gentle and quiet and kind of effortless and things don’t have to be so high drama anymore.

The third coping style I call omnipotent. And this is when, well, the word, let’s break down the word. Omni, all; potent, powerful. So, when we’re omnipotent, we actually feel so out of control because everything affects us so deeply, we’re hypersensitive, everything in our environment impacts us so deeply, we need everything just so, or else we feel very, very reactive and very frightened and get very angry very fast. And so, we feel we need to try to have complete control over everything and everyone around us. That’s omnipotent, all-powerful.

And that’s actually secretly because we don’t know how to self-soothe. We don’t know that, instead of controlling everything out there, we could actually just take care of ourselves in here and start to feel safe. So, instead we become very bossy and demanding. And at work, we might find that our employees are scared of us, they perceive us as bullies or dominating, and, really, we’re just trying to prevent the chaos. Like, as omnipotence, it feels like, “If I don’t have everything just so, it will devolve into total chaos.”

And so, the antidote to omnipotence is to feel safe. And we do this by kind of creating a psychic skin that we didn’t get to develop as little ones, where we know that something outside isn’t actually us. We don’t have to control it and we don’t have to change it. We can actually just relax and calm ourselves down inside, and know that that thing out there that’s out of place isn’t going to kill us and isn’t us, and that we’re okay even when it doesn’t feel okay.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay.

Dr. Sam Rader

The next coping style I call deprived. This is a big one for people in their careers, but deprived is exactly what it sounds like. It’s when we don’t feel connected to the good stuff. So, it really feels like, “Other people can get the good stuff, but not me. I’m the unlucky one. I’m the one that experiences a lot of limits and lack, and I don’t ever get to be fully resourced. I’m always grabbing and grasping and wanting and longing for the good stuff, but it always stays just out of reach.”

And the antidote to deprived is to become resourced. So, when we’re deprived, it’s often really hard to get ahead financially, because no matter how much money we get, it doesn’t seem to stick around. For some weird reason, we always hover around that zero balance because we’re so used to feeling empty inside. But when we come out of deprived, and we become resourced, we learn how to drink in the infinite well of goodness that’s inside and outside because this universe is so abundant and benevolent.

And when we start to experience ourselves as living in that buoyant state of fulfillment from all that resource that we’re resourcing on, lo and behold, the world starts to reflect that by giving us more income, when we feel more valuable and good inside instead of feeling broken, bad, or empty inside. When we feel good inside and feel full inside, the outside starts to reflect that by us making a lot more money, having a lot more opportunities, and being fulfilled in life.

Pete Mockaitis

All right.

Dr. Sam Rader

So, the next coping style I call symbiotic, and this was the one I was kind of bringing up at the top of the hour where we become pushovers and people-pleasers. We’re really afraid of conflict. We’re afraid of ever saying no, firming up, taking shape, disagreeing, having our own point of view, being separate.

So, we tend to attract a lot of people who are dominating and we become kind of their sidekick, and their yes-person, and we kind of give up ourselves to have them, and we pretend like we have all the same preferences but actually we’re betraying ourselves to do that and to be in that twinship with them. And then after a time, it gets really annoying, and so we bail, and we cut and run, and we’re like, “I got to get rid of you to have me.”

And then the pattern just continues because we find the next dominating person, and we do the same exact thing over and over and over. It’s absolutely exhausting, and you can imagine what happens at work. It’s just, we get totally emptied out, totally used feeling, and then we have to quit and leave and go to the next place and do it all over again.

And we often don’t feel totally respected because we don’t respect ourselves. We often don’t find a lot of value monetarily because we always are in that kind of assistant mentality and embodiment where we can’t really get ahead because we don’t know how to firm up and take aim and be kind of potent because we just have to stay limp and malleable in order to stay in those fused connections with people.

So, the antidote to coming out of symbiotic is to become truly solid. And when we’re solid, we know that we have all the resources and all the capability inside to be able to feed ourselves, and trust ourselves, and have our own compass, and have our own agency. And when we can do that, then we can be more honest with people. We can say no, we can set boundaries, we can become in healthy relationships that are a two-way street, where there’s room for two people negotiating and collaborating rather than losing ourselves in the connection with others.

The next coping style I call premature, and this is when we had to sort of grow up too fast as little ones and take care of other people in the families when we were still kind of babies on our own, kind of toddler times. And so, what we do when we’re premature is we’re over-givers, we’re overachievers, over-doers. So, we’re the ones always planning, contributing, giving, volunteering, nurturing, cooking, caring.

We’re the ones always providing, and so all of our energy goes out to feeding others, and we go hungry. Our needs are always last on the list, and eventually it leads to a lot of burn out, so we can feel very, very drained. Even though it feels really good giving to others, because it generally does feel good giving, if we just keep depleting ourselves and we never nourish ourselves, we never take in any of the goodness that we’re giving to others, it’s an equation that doesn’t really work and it leads to burnout.

So, the antidote to coming out of premature is to become nourished, where we learn that it’s actually okay for us to need and feed. When we’re premature, we worry that our needs are too much and they make us needy, and so we wouldn’t want to ask anyone for help or be a burden. But when we come out of premature, we know that it feels just as good to other people to feed us as it does for us to feed them, and then it becomes a loop of nourishment, and it’s sustainable and very fulfilling.

And this definitely plays out at work if you’re the one picking up the slack for everybody, staying overtime, doing everything for everybody, and you’re starting to feel really drained and depleted, you may have the premature coping style, and it’s time for you to be nourished.

Pete Mockaitis

All right.

Dr. Sam Rader

Okay, the next coping style I call idealizing. And this is a wound about identity, really. But it’s when we’re really hyper-focused on our outsides, meaning anything we could measure or write down on a paper about ourselves, like our looks, our achievements, our status, our level of intelligence, our level of success, and we are constantly caught up in this rat race of comparing ourselves to people who are above us or people who are below us.

And what we never get to do is just stand eye-to-eye and heart-to-heart with people and get to be human, which is the antidote to idealizing. So, when we’re human, we’re more in touch with our sentience, the fact that we’re living beings with thoughts and needs and feelings and values and our essence energy inside of us, which is so much more who we really are than any of those outside things you could measure, which always do, by the way, go up and down, “Maybe today I got the best score on the quiz, and maybe tomorrow I don’t.”

And that ping-ponging up and down between “I’m the best, I’m the worst, I’m the best, I’m the worst” is so painful. When you’re more connected to your humanity and your insides, there’s no ping-ponging because you can’t compare essences. And there could be a lot of freedom in that in the workplace if you’re no longer the one always trying to beat everybody, beat your opponents, get the gold star, be the best, and it really starts to become about your own humanity and your needs, it could really change the game for how work starts to work for you.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay.

Dr. Sam Rader

All right. The next coping style I call frustrated. And I started to speak to this a little bit when I was giving the story of the CEO who had the withstanding subtype of frustrated. But frustrated is a will injury, where, as we’re developing our sense of will, of what we can and can’t control as little ones, we need to feel that we can control some things, that we’re not always crushed and thwarted and blocked by our parents, but we’re allowed to have a say, we’re allowed to make choices, we’re allowed to have a will.

And if for whatever reason our will is blocked, we become frustrated, and there’s nowhere for our power or our anger to go, and so it gets turned inwards, and it actually turns into self-sabotage. This is major for the workplace. If we’re always feeling like “Life is hard, I’m stuck, I can’t,” can’t is such a key word for frustrated, “Things are hard,” “I can’t,” all of that, that is a frustrated experience. And the truth is, that’s how it was when we were little, we couldn’t. Like, the thing outside, the parents were so much bigger than us. Of course, we couldn’t, right?

But we’ve been carrying that baggage with us and calling it true now as adults, which is what was happening with this man who felt he had to be the Man of Steel, and life is hard, and all these challenges. And it’s like once we melted that and we brought him into a state of ease, he was able to get in flow, which is the antidote to frustrated. Coming out of frustrated means owning our no and saying no to things we don’t want to do, and saying yes to things we do want to do.

And so, I say, we’ve got to say no to get in flow. So, if you find yourself at work feeling frustrated, like things are not going the way you want them to go, things aren’t fair, things are unjust, things are such a struggle, think of the places that you haven’t yet said, “You know what? No, I have a boundary here and I don’t want to do X, Y, and Z.” Once you hold that no with your universe, boom, things get in flow and you start to get what you do want, instead of always getting what you don’t want, which is the frustrated coping style.

Pete Mockaitis

Alrighty.

Dr. Sam Rader

And the next coping style is kind of a pair to frustrated. It’s another will injury, but it’s the opposite, which is when our will is actually overindulged. Instead of overly frustrated, it can also be overly indulged. I call this the indulged coping style. This happens when we’re either neglected so no one’s there to block our will, or we’re overindulged by our parents, but basically, whatever we want, we get. And these are kids who kind of would fail the Stanford marshmallow experiment of the “If you don’t eat one now, you can have two later,” right?

We never developed that capacity in our frontal lobes to have any self-restraint. We just want what we want when we want it, and we want to get it, and we want to get it now, and we want to get it at any cost, and we’re not aware at all of how we impact others. And so, that entitlement, that indulgence, that impatience, that “Me, me, me,” it’s really, really rough. And if you find yourself at work, feeling like other people don’t trust you, or they’re kind of shunning you, or they’re kind of like, “This one’s not a team player,” you might be struggling with the indulged coping style. In some ways, it’s one of the most shameful coping styles to have. I had it.

This is how I’ve discovered all 12 is because I have found them in myself. It’s a hard one to reckon with, but if we find the courage to reckon with it, it is a revelation because, really, when we’re indulged, we were just lacking a village. We were lacking a sense of belonging because when you know you belong to a tribe, then you know how you impact others, because you all impact one another. And so, we’ve been living in solitary confinement as empty, lonely consumers, so, of course, we just want to fill that hole. It makes so much sense.

But coming out of indulged is to enter the antidote of interbeing. Interbeing is a term coined by the late Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and it means that within every being is every other being that, in this computer that we’re talking through, the silicon parts were mined by miners, and it was part of the dirt and the earth where trees were growing, and all of those things are inside of this computer that we’re looking at each other through. Like, everything that is, is interwoven, inextricably interwoven with everything else. We’re all interconnected.

And so, coming out of indulged is realizing, “Hey, it’s not just me here. I’m part of a larger whole.” And when we do that, we work so much better with our teams, and we actually end up getting what we want, truly want, in a more holistic way than when we’re just grabbing in the moment in that impulsive, entitled way.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And number 10.

Dr. Sam Rader

So, the next one I call the squashed coping style. This one could really be at work, too. So, this is one, as we were developing our sense of power and beauty and magnetism as little ones, somebody was jealous, and so they actually squashed us. They didn’t want us to have that beauty and that power and that shine, and so we now inadvertently squash ourselves.

We keep ourselves small. We dim our light. We hide our shine. We play small. We’re always being the nice one or the invisible one or the one who doesn’t want to step on toes or threaten anyone. And it’s kind of like the archetypes of Cinderella or Harry Potter, and when we’re squashed, we’re usually not aware at all that we have this special sauce, that we’re a Cinderella or a Harry Potter. We don’t realize that we’re actually so beautiful and so powerful and so radiant and so potent that it makes other people envious. We’re not aware of that, but we do keep ourselves small unconsciously.

And so, coming out of squashed is to finally be erect, is to stand up into our full height, and be as radiant and potent and beautiful and powerful as we really are so that we start to become a true leader and an inspiration rather than this fear that we’d be a threat.

So, when we own that we are the radiant, beautiful bell of the ball, things really start to work for us in a new way and other people start to respond to us in a new way, and we’re no longer bullied and we’re no longer shunned, and we actually become a real leader and inspiration. So, this could be huge for people at work. If you’re like, “Why does everyone else seem to get ahead and I always have to play the nice guy?” you may be squashed and your story is not over. You can play in the big leagues. You can go to the ball. It’s time to go to the ball.

Pete Mockaitis

All right.

Dr. Sam Rader

The next coping style I call provocative. If we’re provocative, unfortunately, our parents play out a love triangle with us, where one of them was our object of desire and they kind of overindulged that and played into that with us of like, “Yes, you are my special one and I wish mommy would go away,” or whatever the vibe is, and then the other parent was jealous.

And there is a way to come out of provocative and become clear. That’s the antidote to provocative. So, when we are clear, we understand where the boundaries are “Okay, this person’s my business associate, this person is my secretary, and this person is my lover, and those things are very different, and I’m going to act very differently with those different people because I’m clear.”

Pete Mockaitis

All right.

Dr. Sam Rader

And the final one I call constricted. So, this is when during that time of proto-puberty when we’ve got all this exciting mojo coming through our little bodies, and we are no longer these chubby toddlers, but we want to run and jump and play and, “Tag, you’re it” and “Come, chase me” and be competitive and excitable during this time, how our parents respond to this animal-alive part of us determines how we feel about this part of us.

Whether our parents are overly controlling of that, they say, “Don’t do that. Put your head down. We don’t do this. This is bad. Aggression is bad,” whatever that is, or, if we had parents who were overly amorous, and we saw that that animal part of them got them in trouble in either case, if they were overly controlling, us or if they were out of control, in either case we learned that the animal instinctive wild part of ourselves is bad, and that controlling that part of ourselves is good, and now we’re constricted and we’ve got to hold everything in.

We can’t spill out. We can’t make a mess. We can’t be too wild. We can’t be aggressive. We can’t be expressive. We can’t be tender. We’ve got to keep it all held in, because if we don’t keep it all held in, maybe someone would judge us as weird, or bad, or wrong. And in all of those cases, we would feel humiliated, possibly shunned, and none of that feels okay to us. So, we’ve got a tight lid on ourselves. We have to be hyper-controlled. So, in the same way, an omnipotent person tries to control everything and everyone outside, a constricted person tries to control everything inside, like, “I should never fart,” “I should never scream,” “I should never do anything weird. It’s all got to be held in.”

And the antidote to constricted is to become free. And when we’re free, we get to trust our animal nature, and trust that everything we do and everything that we are is innocent, and that no judge out there has the right to decide what’s innocent or guilty, that we can have an inner authority, and we know that we’re innocent, and we know that our instincts are actually holy and beautiful, and will lead us exactly where we want to go. We don’t have to control them.

It’s actually the repression of them that causes them to act out. But when we know that all these animal parts of us are so good, there’s nothing to restrict or constrict around, then they only do good.

So, when we’re coming out of constricted, we become free. We’re able to express and desire and follow our instincts, and be more animal and alive and vibrant. And when we would stop resisting the flow of life, we can finally feel all the pleasures of being alive. And how this shows up in work is that things start to be a lot more creative, and flowy, and less literally constricted. Like, all the ways that it was like, “Uh-oh, we can’t do this, and we can’t do that, and we can’t do this.” It’s like, “Wait, the sky is the limit. The world is our oyster. Let’s do anything that we feel like doing. I’m free.” And it’s like, “Oh, my God, the workplace becomes so different and the results become so different at work once we’re free.”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, beautiful. Well, I really appreciate you going into the full rundown of the dozen here. And what I like about this lineup is these are patterns I think that we can recognize, like in ourselves or others, like, “Oh, yeah, I know someone who’s kind of like that. I know someone who’s kind of like that,” and it’s sort of handy to have some language and some categories to operate with.

I’m curious, beyond just sort of listening and reflecting, how do we know which ones are active in us? And then what do we do once we know that?

Dr. Sam Rader

Yeah. So, you can go to my website, DrSamRader.com, and take the free quiz, it takes like two minutes, and that’ll give you your “top coping style,” your most prevalent one. And once you do that, there’s like a really sweet little $11 mini course you can take to start unraveling and dissolving and resolving it. And then you can also take, once you get inside that mini course, you can take a full-length test. They can give you all of your coping styles and to what degree you have them, and you can start working on all of those as well.

But it’s funny, you also mentioned the thing about people at work, because once you start to understand the coping styles – and, by the way there’s also a free pocket guide on my website that describes all of them so you can kind of have that handy – you start feeling less annoyed with other people when you understand that it’s just a coping style and where it comes from.

So, for example, if there’s someone at work who’s frictive, who’s always like, “Hey, hey, hey, can I have your attention? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” and they’re really like needy and intense, and you’re like, “Oh, that person won’t leave me alone,” you can be like, “Oh, they’re frictive. They didn’t have enough physical containment as little ones. Maybe I can just give them a squeeze and a hug, and, wow, they’re much calmer now. Wow, they’re bugging me a lot less.”

So, once you start to understand the motivation of other people’s behavior, it also causes really great team building, you’re much easier to manage others, and be managed by others when you understand what makes them tick, and how you can support them in being a little less in their coping styles and a little more in the antidotes.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, now could you share a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Dr. Sam Rader

One of my favorite studies was of a troop of orangutans in Africa, who, all the alpha males contracted a disease from eating from a garbage pile that was infected, and they all died. And so, traditionally, when new adolescent males join a troop, they’re sort of hazed by the alpha males and the females are not allowed to groom them. But once all the alpha males died out, when the new adolescents would come from other tribes, because that’s what happens to adolescents, leave their troop to go to a new troop so there’s no inbreeding, they would be welcomed by the new matriarchy who would groom them and touch them and welcome them. And they created a completely peaceful, egalitarian, anti-hierarchical troop that survived for nine generations forward that just had a completely different culture.

And why I love that study so much is that even though things can seem so effed up right now on the planet, all it takes is one shift in how we treat one another to create an entirely new culture here on Earth, and that’s my wish for humanity.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite book?

Dr. Sam Rader

I love the Hafiz, the Sufi poet, and this book translated by Daniel Ladinsky called The Gift. It’s Sufi poetry.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Dr. Sam Rader
“There are no bad people, only hurt people hurt people. And we all need more love, not less.”

Pete Mockaitis

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

Dr. Sam Rader

Come to my website, www.DrSamRader.com, or you can follow me on Instagram @drsamrader. I would love to hear from you. Feel free to DM me. I’d love to chat about what you loved about this interview or not. Or, I’d love to just meet all of you.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Dr. Sam Rader

Yeah. See if you can spot any patterns, the things that are bugging you about your vocational life. See if you can spot a pattern in that that is familiar, that it’s not just now, it’s not just in this job, but it’s been haunting you and with you for as long as you can remember. And then see if you can trace that pattern back to actually your early experience as a little one, how that’s actually in a reenactment of a drama from home.

And when you do that, sometimes just that awareness and seeing that it is a pattern, it’s not just this one thing that’s happening today at work, but it’s actually the pattern, that once you recognize that pattern and just hold it for what it is, sometimes that alone can start to dissolve and resolve it on its own.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Lovely. Well, Sam, this has been fun. I wish you much luck in transformations with you and your clients.

Dr. Sam Rader

Thank you for tolerating my woo, and it’s been a pleasure.

Pete Mockaitis

Marsha, welcome.

Marsha Acker

Thanks, Pete. I’m happy to be here.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, I’m excited to talk to you, hear your wisdom. And first, I got to know, your pitch claimed you had the answer for “Why do organizations have the same conversations over and over again without getting anywhere, feeling frustrated?” So, I’m just going to put you on the spot right from the beginning. What’s up with that and what do we do about it?

Marsha Acker

Well, I think that so much of what we do every day is about having conversations with one another, and I think many of us would look at conversations and communication as not something that we need to go get any kind of development around it because we already do it. I mean, we do it all day every day, and I think many of us likely think we’re good at it.

But what, in the work that we do, I have found there’s a model that we use to help all of us look at the structure of conversations, and the structure can actually predict the outcome of the conversation. So, maybe a quick litmus test would be to think about “How often do you feel like you have the same conversation over and over again?”

Like, you had a conversation a couple weeks ago, and now you’re back in a conversation, and you’re starting to have that kind of Groundhog Day moment where you’re going, “Hey, wait a minute. I think we’ve been here before.” So, a lot of times I think many of us have those moments, but we don’t really know what to do about it. So, real quick, I think what we could do is, if you want to play with me for a moment, we could lay down a little bit of the theory, and I can tell you a story about how I apply it.

Pete Mockaitis

Yes. Well, I guess, first, I want to tee up the stakes here. Is it, in fact, possible to exit this? Because I think it was Dr. John Gottman who was talking about married couples, he’s like, “You’re going to be basically having the same couple arguments for decades until you die,” which, in a way, was heartbreaking. But in another way liberating, like, “Oh, okay. Well, then I guess we’ll need to figure out how to disagree in an effective, loving kind of a way.” But are you suggesting that, “No, we are not doomed to this fate”?

Marsha Acker

I think that if we notice that we keep coming back around to the same thing, the way I think about conversations is there’s likely something that, each one of us is thinking, but not really saying, or not saying it in a way that the other person can hear it.

And so, that leaves both of us, in some way, kind of leaving the conversation with a piece that we’re thinking but not saying. And I think that’s part of the work to do, is, “Can we be in the conversation and actually be authentic and be effective in how we’re communicating with one another?”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. So, is it your premise that should we find a means of effectively articulating the unsaid, then we will escape the groundhog loop?

Marsha Acker

I think when we’re able to really fully name what’s happening for us, yes, because we can escape the groundhog loop because both of us are able to work with new information or new data that comes into the conversation. So, that’s partly what enables us to change the nature of the outcome.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, cool. And so, you said then, in order to pull this off, you want to cover some conceptual territory?

Marsha Acker

Yes.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, go for it.

Marsha Acker

So, it’s work that comes from David Kantor in his theory of structural dynamics, theory of face-to-face communication. And, basically, what it says is that everything that we’re saying can be coded, and if we can code a conversation, that’s partly what will allow us to change the nature of it. So, there’s quite a bit of depth to it, but the very simplest way to start is in action. So, really, everything that we’re saying can be coded into one of only four actions, everything in conversation.

So, the four actions are, one is to set a move, which is to set direction in a conversation. So, move often points. You just made a move when you said, “Let’s hear what you have to say about the theory.” That would be a move. The second action is to follow. So, the follow gets behind or supports what’s happening in a conversation.

The third is to oppose. So, oppose offers correction. It says, “Hey, hold on. Stop. Wait a minute.” And then the fourth is a bystand. And a bystand offers a morally neutral comment about what’s happening in a conversation. So, to bystand, I might say, “I’m noticing I’m really engaged in a conversation right now.” It just puts some data into the conversation.

So, someone could make a move and say, “Let’s go get ice cream.” Someone could follow and say, “That sounds good to me.” Third person might say, “Nope, don’t like it, don’t want to go.” And a fourth person might say, “Well, I’m noticing we have two different ideas about what we’re going to do. What do we want to do next?” So, it’s sort of prompts for a new move.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m fixating on the, I think, did you say innocent? Or maybe I just added that myself, because innocent bystander tends to go together, like in comic books or something, “Innocent bystander.”

Marsha Acker

Yeah. No, just to bystand.

Pete Mockaitis

To bystand, you said that it’s just an observation. It doesn’t have judgment to it. But I got to know, in some ways, I don’t know, it almost feels like it can, like, “I’m noticing that your eyes are dimming and you are growling.” It’s sort of the implication is almost, like, “You’re behaving angrily and inappropriately in this context.” So, I don’t know, maybe I’m missing too much detail.

Marsha Acker

No, it’s great. So, here’s what’s really great about it. So, what you’re naming is, a lot of times, I think in conversation, what happens is we say one thing, so we voice one thing, and if you were just simply coding the conversation, you might code that as a bystand. But I’m on the receiving end of it and I’m going, “Hmm, that doesn’t feel…” like, I’m not experiencing it as a morally neutral statement because it feels like it’s loaded up behind it.

And so, a lot of times when that’s happening, what we’re doing is we’re saying one thing but we intend another. So, I’m speaking a bystand, but I’ve got judgment behind it, and so I’m really intending an oppose.

Pete Mockaitis

I see. Okay. Levels and layers.

Marsha Acker

Well, that’s the tricky part. So, I’ll tell you a quick story. My daughter, when she was much younger, I called it our Groundhog Day conversation, but it would be the, “Get your shoes on, please” conversation. And I would make a move, and I’d say, “Hey, Lauren, the bus will be in here in 10 minutes. I need you to get your shoes on.”

And her response will be, “Okay.” Walk away. Come back. “Bus will be here in five minutes. Need you to get your shoes on.” “Okay.” Five minutes later, at the door, and when I would turn around and say, “Lauren, the bus is here. Let’s go.” And there’s a little girl at the end of the hallway screaming because she says, “I don’t have my shoes on.”

And so, we had this pattern. I was making moves, and she was voicing a follow. She said, “Okay,” but she intended an oppose. It’s not what she meant. And it sets up this pattern of we’re saying one thing but we mean another. And it creates what we call, in the structure of coding it, it creates a covert action. So, what happens is the oppose, both in your example of you are bystanding, but what’s really behind it is a covert opposition.

My daughter was doing the same thing. She would voice a follow, but she would intend an oppose. Now, you know, why is that? Well, somewhere along the way, I might have laid down the expectations that “You’re not allowed to tell me no,” or, “I need you to do something different.” So, what I learned was that was really much more about…she’s a teenager now and we can still get into this pattern because every time when…so what happens is that we’ll have one or two of these actions that we can tend to do more in our behavior, particularly in different systems. So, in my home space, I’m often the one with her making moves, and I’m sort of expecting her to follow. But what’s not helpful is that she’s quite independent, even as a little person, definitely as a teenager, she’s quite independent.

And so, one of the ways that I started to change our stuck conversation, our stuck Groundhog Day conversation, was I stopped being the one making all of the moves, and I’d start to enter that conversation differently with the intent to give her the space to make the move that I could follow. So, our conversations would sound a little different, I would start to do more bystands, and I would say, “I’m noticing it’s 10 till 7:00. The bus is going to be here in 10 minutes or 15 minutes. What do you need to get done?”

And she’d think about it for a moment, and she’d be like, “Well, I need to put my shoes on.” And I’d be like, “Great. So, do you know where your shoes are?” So, I started to bring more bystand into the conversation and allow her the space to make a move. And it took a little bit more conversation in that way. But eventually, what she would come around to do is say, “Well, I need to get my shoes.” I’m like, “Great. So why don’t you do that? You’ve got 15 minutes. So, when do you want to do that?”

So, where I could, I began to shift the conversation, and it helped to change the nature of how we were engaged in that conversation. And I use that because I think it’s just such a really simple example, but it happens so often in leadership teams, across our workplaces. Particularly in American business, I think we have managed out or trained out the voice of opposition.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s intriguing on so many levels. And you said this happens thousands of times. I was like, “Yes, I have asked my children thousands of times to put their shoes on.” What’s intriguing in a number of dimensions, like one, just general coaching principle. If you pose a question and they think about it, then that is more active and engaging and more likely to feel rewarding. Like, “Oh, I figured out that I need to get my shoes.” And then they did, and like, “I’m taking care of things.”

It’s funny, my kids right now, they’re five and six, and one and a half, but the five and six-year-olds, it seems like they’re relishing these little tastes of independence. They could say, “I’m going to make some toast.” All right, you go for it. And so, they’re into it. They really just plow through bread because they enjoy making toast and it’s delicious.

But I think, even more than that, they like that, hey, they can’t use the stovetop on their own, they can’t use the oven on their own, but even the microwave can be dicey. But the toaster is like, “Okay, I push the button and then I walk away, and then there we go.” But in many ways, I think, Kwame Christian said, he was on the show, he’s awesome, Negotiate Anything is his podcast. In many ways, we have an inner toddler within us, and so that’s strong.

And I’m intrigued by, when you say covert action, with the shoes, I think that sometimes what’s going on is that they’re thinking, “Well, I’m not opposed to putting on shoes. But at the moment, I’m very engaged with this little mouse character or whatever.” And so, I think that’s funny because covert action makes me think of, “Okay, I’ve got a spy who’s like sneaking into enemy territory.”

But I guess that, too, can run a whole spectrum associated with, “How much am I willfully saying yes when I mean no because I’m hoping they’re just going to shut up and forget about it,” versus, “How much am I like, ‘Oh, yeah, sure. Cool, yeah. Sure, I mean I’ll get to that soonish, so it’s fine, yeah’?”

Marsha Acker

What I’m often going for is wanting leaders to become more aware, more self-aware, of their behavior, how does their behavior, it’ll likely be different how we behave at home, talking to our children versus how do we behave in our leadership team, versus how do we behave in our development team when we’re collaborating with eight, ten peers.

I think it’ll be different, there will be spaces. And I think a lot of it happens, it gets laid down for us at a very early age, in our formative years, we develop. One of my childhood stories is not to oppose because it’s rude. And so, that got laid down very early on for me. The way that translated into adult and business life is oppose has often been my least used. It’s been the one for me to work on the most. Regardless of the role that I was in, it would be the one, kind of unconsciously, that I would use some of the other actions.

Or, sometimes I’d just make a new move. If I didn’t really want to directly oppose you, I’d just change the subject, which is another pattern that sits underneath of this. Or, many teams fall into the place of they’ll just agree, they’ll say, “Yes,” or, “Sure.” Or, they’ll say, “Sure,” and then they go out of the room after they finished talking to you, and they tell six other people what they really think of your idea, but they don’t bring that conversation in the room.

So, ultimately, what I’m all about, because I think it’s what changes the nature of the conversation, is, “Can we bring the offline conversation online? And can we be more aware of what our behavioral tendencies are, and where we go to say one thing, but we actually intend something else?” and catching sight of the difference between the action and the intent.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, that’s intriguing. And I guess, as you have this language and you can start to view conversations in this way, that’s intriguing. So, your goal is to get the offline, online, and get it in there. I think sometimes I follow, maybe often, I follow, I use the words okay, and I do the thing. But internally, I’m thinking, “This is so stupid.”

And I don’t know if that’s valuable, but I guess I’ve also had the internal conversation of, “But it’s pointless to bring this up because it’s not going to affect anything. So, the most efficacious, expedient thing for me to do is to just comply, even though it’s going to result in a worse outcome, but fine.” And I guess maybe sometimes there’s a time and a place where that’s just the reality, and so live it, but go ahead.

Marsha Acker

You and many, many, many, many other people. I watch it over and over. And I often say to folks if you’re in a group of people, and you’re not going to be with them for an ongoing basis, you’ve stepped in, somebody’s made a move, you’re following, like the juice doesn’t feel worth the squeeze, so you just say, “Yep, I disagree or I see it differently, but I’m willing to do it.”

I think doing that intentionally is one thing. Doing it out of a habit is another. And I think those things that you are thinking, what I would offer is those things that you’re thinking are actually quite valuable. But it definitely takes a system, like it takes a group of people that you’re working with on an ongoing basis. Because I think what matters is not that it happens one time or in one moment or with one group, but when it gets to be a stuck pattern, like when it’s a Groundhog Day conversation.

Because I think that’s where you’ll, if you talk to people, all the things that are in the news today about quiet quitting, and people are just burnt out, and they’re tired, and they’re exhausted, and they don’t feel connected, and it’s super hard to connect on Zoom. I hear all of that, and I go straight to this model of, “Yep, because we’re not having the real conversation.”

And people get really exhausted, “At the end of the day, if all I’ve done is have surface level conversations, I’ve not really been able to say what I think, I don’t think anybody wants to listen, so I just sort of fall into this victim mode or this apathetic mode, and I get into doing this sort of I’ll just show up and do the thing until I can do something better.” Like, none of us want to work in that kind of setting or in that kind of situation.

So, I always bring it back to, “Well, I wonder what the pattern is. I wonder which of these actions is being voiced and which are missing,” because those patterns, like things that keep recurring, there will be data in that. And so, I’m a huge advocate for teams, leaders at any level, building the muscle of, “Can we have the real conversation? Can we bring the real conversation online?” And it takes time. It’s not a one-time fix.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s good. So, that’s the main thing is having the real conversation. This reminds me, we had Amy Edmondson on a couple times, talking psychological safety. Any pro tips for how we can have the real conversation more often? One, so we got some coding, we got some awareness, that’s cool. Anything else in terms of building our own conversational courage and/or creating an environment where people feel more comfortable speaking up?

Marsha Acker

Well, I think the work is highly correlated to Amy’s work. Actually, Amy Edmondson and David Kantor worked together at Harvard, so both of their theories are quite distinctly linked. It does take container-building or creating the space. I often say sometimes it can be just helpful to introduce your team to the four-player model as a way to name that, actually, we need all four of these actions in a conversation in order for them to be effective. So, sometimes just all of us starting to gain awareness that we need all four and be watching for when we’re not hearing one of them. So, I think that’s one way.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, that’s great. That’s pretty simple. You just highlight, “Hey, this is what’s up.” And then someone might say, “Hey, I noticed that nobody opposed anything over this whole three-hour meeting. That’s interesting. All just coincidentally in unilateral consensus agreement? What are the odds? Or is someone not saying something that needs to be said?”

Marsha Acker

And, actually, Pete, what I love about what you’re doing is that you’re doing it with a little bit of humor, and I think that that is key to some of this work is to find a way to make it light and humorous, rather than…I realized really many years ago as I was starting to introduce this model to teams and leaders, so they’d take it and they’d be so excited, and then go off to the next meeting, and it was like, “You, you have made too many moves. You need to stop that,” with a bit of finger pointing.

And I was like, “Well, that’s not really what we’re after.” Like, it’s a model to create awareness, but I don’t think it’s really effective if we use it to sort of poke people in the eye with. So, I love the way you’re sort of tongue-in-cheek saying that.

Pete Mockaitis

Oh, thank you. And when it comes to opposing, I’m curious, do you have any, because I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but I imagine for many, that might be the spookiest of the four to step up and do. Any pro tips or any magical words or phrases that are great for opposing? I imagine you’re like, “No, you’re wrong!” is probably not the best way to do it.

Marsha Acker

Well, actually, there is. Well, so two things I’d say. One is we likely all know someone who’s really good at it, so just think about the person. It won’t be hard for everyone. It is definitely based on our behavioral model, like our viewpoint of how we grew up and how we think about the voice of oppose and what it does. So, likely there’s at least one person usually in each group. We sometimes load them up and we call them the devil’s advocate or the naysayer, which I’d encourage everybody to just stop using the labels because I don’t think they’re helpful.

But if you find someone who’s really good at bringing oppose, you can just watch and listen. Sometimes, though, for people who are stuck in opposition, the thing that will be challenging for them is to make a new move. So, they can be really good at opposing, but not good at the suggestion.

So, a really effective oppose, like a way to bring a really effective oppose, is to actually start with more follow and bystand because those are the actions of more inquiry. They’re also the places that, so if you’ve made a move, and you’ve said, “I think we need to switch all of our computers out, and go from Macs to PCs.” And if I want to oppose that, if I just come right back and say, “Nope, I disagree,” it’s helpful because it’s a really clear oppose, so that’s great.

But really, if I just say no, and I push back without voicing anything else, then we’re kind of stuck because now you’ve got an idea and I’ve got an idea, and we’re actually put ourselves in this debate or clash about, “Which one of us is going to have the winning idea?” So, a more effective way for me to oppose that might be to start with a follow, so what’s something about what you’ve suggested that I actually do align with.

So, I might say something like, “Pete, I really appreciate, and I actually share your value about keeping us up to date in technology. I’m with you on that.” I might bystand and say, “You know, I’m noticing that that would create…it would be really expensive. And it’s the first part of the year, we’re not quite sure where our revenue is at.” What’s my clear oppose? “I disagree with doing all of them right now and in this time frame.” But my new suggestion, my new move would be, “What if we looked at it, doing it five at a time?” or something like that? So, what’s my new suggestion? Then it would be back over to you.

And now what’s happened is I’ve actually put some of what I’m seeing, what I agree with, into the conversation, and the idea is that now we can continue a dialogue because I’ve put new data in, and it gives us something to build off of.

Pete Mockaitis

That’s good. Thank you. All right. Well, in your book, Build Your Model for Leading Change, you spend a good portion talking about self-awareness. And I wanted to hear your perspective on why self-awareness is important for change, when, really, Marsha, it’s the other stupid dummy heads who are the problem.

Marsha Acker

I know. I think life would be so much easier if everybody else would change, and then the world would work according to how we view it and what we want to do.

Pete Mockaitis

Exactly.

Marsha Acker

Yeah, I’m a big proponent of self-awareness. And I think that there’s so much to be gained from even just building on…so one aspect of Build Your Model for Leading Change is having a way to look at behavior because I think that behavior drives, like everything that you and I’ve been talking about, behavior and how we’re showing up in communication. Everything starts and ends with how we work with other humans.

And knowing, “Why do I do what I do? And where did I learn to do that? And why do I have such an affinity for following and bystanding in a conversation? And, more importantly, where can I grow my leadership range? Where can I expand my behavior so that it’s more effective?” And I think the way to go about doing that is through getting to know ourselves in various ways, and how we change based on the different contexts that we’re in, because I think context matters.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, so you actually delineate seven critical junctures of functional self-awareness. Could you give us the one-minute version of what are each of these critical junctures?

Marsha Acker

So, the junctures actually expand on the theory of structural dynamics. And without going through each of them, what I would say is they’re about “Where are you able to identify what you do? Are you able to expand your behavioral range? And are you able to notice, kind of growing the muscle for noticing in the moment, when the conversation isn’t working, like, when you’re clashing with someone?”

There’s another piece of it is “Beginning to understand when the stakes rise for me and how my behavior changes when the stakes are high.” We talk a lot about what’s happening today in leading from high stakes, which I think many of us are doing, and how when we’re not at our best, so, “How do we lower the stakes?” And then I think the big piece of it is, “How do we expand our tolerance for difference?”

Pete Mockaitis

Okay, sure thing. Well, I’d love it, so there’s a lot that we could dig into. Could you share with us, I believe, was it Tasha Eurich, we had on the show, who says, “You’re not as self-aware as you think,” is her assertion? Can you tell us, is there a particular zone in which many people overestimate their self-awareness? And how do you recommend we get after that?

Marsha Acker

I watched many leaders believe, like even if we just look at the four actions, many leaders believe that they are good at communicating, number one, with others, and that they are being clear in their communication. And I think the biggest gap that I watched people discover is where they’re not being clear. So, just the small examples, like we talked about today, where I think I’m saying to my daughter, “I need you to get your shoes on.”

Like, I think I’m communicating, but really, I’m doing something entirely different. It happens to me all the time, even with my own team. I’m fascinated. I’ve built a structure where we can give one another feedback in the moment about that. And so, I think it’s noticing when I think I’m doing one thing, but I’m actually doing something else, and it’s being interpreted really differently than what I intended.

Pete Mockaitis

Okay. Well, could you give us an example of a common way this unfolds?

Marsha Acker

So, we have a monthly team meeting, and often the purpose of that monthly meeting is really for us to carve out some time and actually slow down our conversations so that we can talk about how we’re working together. And so, I had come in with a move around some reflection questions that I was actually teeing up for everybody to think about as we led into the conversation about thinking about how we were working together as a team.

And I have a colleague who would have agreed that the purpose of our meeting is to align on how we’re working together, talk about how we’re working together, but this particular person at that moment wanted to be involved in creating the agenda for the conversation, not to have me come in with some pre-canned questions. And so, the feedback to me in that moment was, you know, I hold on, “I think we set out with the intention to have a conversation about how we work together, and I feel like I’m being driven to your agenda, not a collective agenda that we would create together.”

And I think the stakes were pretty high for that person because it’s risky to say that. I think it’s really risky to name it. I, in that moment, so the stakes were pretty high for me in that moment because I kept thinking, “It’s not what I intended.” I felt quite misunderstood, and I felt like I was being accused of something that was really not my intent at all.

And so, it was in the moment of actually being able to park any further forward movement and talk about where the mishap was, where the misunderstanding was, that we were able to take what was a fairly high-stakes moment, and then I began to realize, “Okay, so it’s not so much an opposition. It was an oppose but not necessarily the intent, but it was definitely an oppose to how I started it off.” And it became a really, really fabulous conversation afterwards, so that sort of friction moment led to a much deeper conversation about how we work and where some of that pattern, even that dynamic that showed up, how it shows up in other places. But it was really challenging, and I am fascinated by the number of times that I watch that happen in teams.

So, when teams have the ability to name it, high stakes are happening all the time for us, and it either leaves us to keep talking about, like, I think about it, it’s like moving deck chairs around on a sinking ship versus talking about what’s really going on.

Pete Mockaitis

Yeah, it’s intriguing. And it was cool that they voiced it, and so you got to go there. And I remember, it is fascinating, one time I was coordinating in this leadership conference, and I just said something like, “All right. Hey, guys, now we’re off to the sketch session,” and then one of the volunteers, their mom, I heard this third hand, their mom said, “Oh, I think Pete just lost Matt as a volunteer for next year.” I was like, “What? What? I just said now we’re going to walk over here.”

But apparently, for Matt, it was rather an important tradition that he – I think he was dressed in a costume of some sort – like, I marched them over, and that was one of his favorite things, and I’m like, “I had no idea.” I looked at the clock, I said, “Oh, it’s time for us to go there.” And then I was completely oblivious that that mattered. And had I known, I’d be like, “Oh, well, let’s wait for a moment for Matt to return with his costume.” Just kind of a goofy camp kind of vibe.

So, you’re right, like we can just be utterly clueless about such things and, yeah, that’s really eye-opening to make sure that we’ve sort of built in those checks associated with asking questions in that context, like, “Hey, what’s the most important for your volunteer experience this weekend?” It’s like, “Okay, good to know.”

Because, I mean, hey, they’re volunteers, right? I owe them everything in terms of when this event occurred, I want to make sure that they’re getting what they need. But I was like, “Oh, I just didn’t make the agenda in terms of the weekend.” So, I’m just rolling the dice, basically. You don’t know who you’re alienating and why if you don’t take the time to get the info.

Marsha Acker

And I love your example because, here’s the thing, none of us will ever be able to plan or attend all the places that we could just make a mess. And unless we have people around us who have the communicative competency to really raise their hand and say, “Hold on a second. Like, that’s not what I thought we were doing,” or to say it rather than go out of the room and stew about it. We will never know, and I don’t think we can ever plan for all of that.

So, I think about navigating all the change and the turmoil that exists today. Like, we’ve got to have people around us that can say, “Hold up, we’re about to go over the edge,” or “I really see something differently here. I think we’re about to miss something important.”

Pete Mockaitis

That’s great. Well, Marsha, tell me anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about your favorite things?

Marsha Acker

No, I think we’ve covered a lot, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis

Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Marsha Acker

It comes from James Humes, and he says, “The art of communication is the language of leadership.”

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marsha Acker

I ran across this research, actually, a couple of weeks ago, and it really resonated, still along the same lines, but it was done by ZipDo. So, I think you could go to Google and search it, it was done July of last year. They found that 85% of employees at all levels experience conflict to some degree, and that 60 to 80% of difficulties in organizations come from strained relationships. So, I found that information fascinating.

Pete Mockaitis

And a favorite book?

Marsha Acker

There’s a book by William Isaacs, it’s actually been around for some time, called Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marsha Acker

A journal.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. And a favorite habit?

Marsha Acker

I wake up each morning before everybody else, I have a nice cup of coffee, and I journal.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marsha Acker

I’m known for saying this phrase a lot, “Awareness precedes choice, precedes change.”

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marsha Acker

You can find me on LinkedIn, Marsha Acker, so I’m happy to connect with folks. And then you can read about the book at BuildYourModel.com, and you can also find me at TeamCatapult.com. And if you go to TeamCatapult.com, there is a Re-D-Room, so re, dash, d, dah, room, you can download a handout about what we’ve been talking about today.

Pete Mockaitis

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

Marsha Acker

Find a way to elevate dialogue.

Pete Mockaitis

All right. Marsha, this has been a treat. I wish you many enriching conversations.

Marsha Acker

Thanks, Pete.