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KF# 37. Drives Vision and Purpose Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

919: How to Find Fulfillment, Drive Engagement, and Unlock Your Greatness with Sean Patton

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Sean Patton reveals his warrior mindset to help maximize your potential and performance.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to get better at feeling grateful
  2. The root of every workplace failure–and how to overcome it
  3. The coaching approach that really works

About Sean

Sean Patton’s mission is to transform modern leadership into a driver of fulfillment, abundance, and freedom. He applied these principles while growing his own companies and now helps others unlock greatness through Stronger Leaders Stronger Profits, a leadership coaching and consulting company. Sean’s leadership foundation was forged as a US Army Airborne Ranger and Special Forces Green Beret Commander, where he earned the respect of his men and chain of command while operating in hostile and politically sensitive environments.

Resources Mentioned

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Sean Patton Interview Transcript

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

Sean Patton
Hey, Pete, I’m excited to be here, man.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m excited to be chatting. Boy, you have such a rich body of experiences that I might classify as hardcore. Is that fair to say, Sean?

Sean Patton
Yeah, we can put it in that. We’ll put it in that section of the library if you want.

Pete Mockaitis
Army Ranger, Special Force, Green Beret, a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu World Champion. That’s awesome. First, let’s talk about jiu-jitsu. That’s how Nick connected us, and Nick is quite the jiu-jitsu fan. He raves about it. Tell us, what do you love about it? And how does one get to be a champion?

Sean Patton
Well, there’s so many things I love about it. It’s interesting, jiu-jitsu is addictive. I tell people it takes about 90 days. In 90 days, you’re either going to hate it and never come back or you’re going to be in for life. And I think that jiu-jitsu actually fills a role that we don’t get filled in modern society, that’s very natural to us. We’re tribal creatures.

We’re designed to be in a group of like-minded people, with a common set of values, and a common purpose, and elders that teach us things, then we teach the people below us things, and we all believe the same things, we’re all going towards the same sort of mission, and we all have the same mindset. Like, that’s the environment we’re supposed to be in, and that’s obviously very different than the modern world we live in. It’s very individualistic and there’s conflict everywhere.

And so, in jiu-jitsu, everything in life is a filter. Jiu-jitsu is a good filter of people who want to come in and are willing to put themselves through hard things and be uncomfortable because they want to better themselves. And so, now everyone can call us around that, and it really becomes, like, a family and part of your identity. And, ultimately, because it’s so hard, it makes the rest of life easier.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, I do want to talk about hardness. So, tell us, we mission hardcore, that theme, like, yeah, each of those experiences – Army Ranger, Special Force, Green Beret commander, Jiu-Jitsu – sure do involve some discomfort physically and on other domains. Tell us, how do you and your compatriots endure this discomfort and pain regularly?

Sean Patton
I think it comes down to mindset and, more specifically, purpose. Like, I was a Special Forces combat diver so my second command was an underwater infiltration team of Green Berets, and I had to be in cold water, like, all the time. It was brutal. And there’s nothing worse in life than having to be wet and cold, and I had to be wet and cold so much.

So, that being said, I’m a complete baby now. I scuba dive. If it’s below 70 degrees, I’m not going in the water. If it’s the Pacific, count me out. I’ll hang on the beach. I’m a baby because there’s no purpose behind it. And when people struggle to, I think, overcome challenges, overcome apathy, overcome any sort of wear or friction it is in their lives, oftentimes it’s because they haven’t created enough value and the purpose and the reason behind it.

You might say, if you take, like, the mother with her kids, like, “Well, she wouldn’t harm a fly. She’s the nicest thing in the world.” Well, what if someone was after your kids? Well, then she’d be this big mama bear, she’d be crazy. So, we all are capable of greatness, we’re all capable of growth, we’re all capable of being these amazing individuals, and it’s just up to us to decide how we want to express that and what matters to us. Like, what’s worth suffering for and what’s not?

Pete Mockaitis
Can you tell us a story of you going through an experience, maybe it’s a training, maybe it’s a mission, in which you did have a whole lot of suffering but also a whole lot of purpose, and it worked out for you to persist?

Sean Patton
So, when I was in Afghanistan, we’re in the Afghan-Pakistan border, and we had in a bunch of nurses who had flown in to this rural area because, well, there’s no female doctors in Afghanistan because they can’t go to med school, like there are barely even midwives, and so there’s no medical training, and men can’t touch women. So, what that means is women have zero healthcare. There’s no one to serve them.

And so, just coming in and doing sort of routine medical care and treatment can be a huge boost for our mission there for the community. So, we flew them in and did a whole female-women’s seminar, health seminar. And then, as they were flying out, we were in an area that had a group called Haqqani, which Haqqani is like the extreme, the guys who are too extreme for the Taliban they go to Haqqani, and they were in our area, and they didn’t like the fact that we were helping women get healthcare.

And so, they had a recoilless rifle, and they tried to shoot down, almost did shoot down this helicopter full of all the nurses. And as soon as that went off, obviously, we have to respond. So, we immediately hit everyone out, and before they could break down their positions and drove out there, they were up on the mountains, we’re at between 8,000 and 10,000 feet above sea level with all our gear on. We ran up to the side of the mountain, and then we get into a firefight around between six and 900 meters. It’s a pretty far engagement but we were under consistent fire.

It was a tough firefight but the weapon they had used to almost shoot down the helicopter, we know we had to destroy. Like, we had to destroy that weapon, that recoilless rifle, because that’s something that can kill one of our tanks, that can take down a helicopter. We couldn’t let them break this thing down and take it back to Pakistan.

And so, we got in this firefight. I remember one of the crazier stories is as we’re shooting and they’re shooting back, and we have these grenades that go in grenade launchers, and we needed to, I needed to get those to the people that could shoot them. So, I’m running up and down the line, grabbing grenades from certain people and giving them to people who can shoot them. And as I’m running, I keep getting in the face with these evergreen trees, like the branches keep smacking me, smacking me in the face.

And I remember thinking, like, “What a time to be a klutz! Like, what a time. Like, come on, Sean, get it together. I know this is crazy. Things went fast. Like, you keep running into trees.” And then when I jumped behind a rock, and bullets were going around, and I realized, as I was next to one of my guys, that that was actually machine guy fire cutting down branches around me, and the branches were falling on top of me as I ran from position to position.

But that being said, we still had to get these grenades to other people, and we had to stay there until we could get air support and drop a bomb, and we couldn’t let them go. So, we were in this thing, the firefight, for four or five hours, and we had to keep them engaged so that they couldn’t withdraw. And, eventually, we were able to call in air support and drop bombs and take care of that.

But that was a mentally and physically exhausting mission that lasted almost a full day, but you get through it because, almost to come back to this, the purpose was so great. That’s the thing about the military. Is the juice worth the squeeze? Well, when it comes to defending a helicopter full of nurses trying to do their job in area where people are trying to stop them, and people trying to kill your friends and your compatriots, then you’re willing to do about anything.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, that’s powerful. Thank you. And so then, let’s make it a little bit more mundane, I suppose.

Sean Patton
Less hardcore. Down the hardcore.

Pete Mockaitis
But in the world of jiu-jitsu, so there’s discomfort there. So, what’s your purpose there that keeps you persisting to the point of becoming a champion?

Sean Patton
A few things. One, I was one of the owners of a jiu-jitsu gym and one of the instructors at the time we started up. So, there’s a leadership aspect, a leadership by example aspect that went into play, especially when I was training up for world. And I had this drive, I had gone through a really hard time. My first business had failed. I had gone from Green Beret commander, to having my first business fail and going through a bankruptcy three years later, to finding new partners and standing up, and growing a company.

And when I was specifically training for those tournaments, I feel like I had to get back to being my sort of warrior self, like I needed to prove it to myself, I needed to also set the example that it wasn’t about going out and actually winning, though that was the goal, but it was about showing the other members of the team and creating a culture where we work hard and we put ourselves out there in difficult situations, we put ourselves into stressful situations because we want to be the best, because we want to prove something to ourselves, because we want to do it for our team.

And so, that was a big driver for me during that time frame because, again, it was a hard time from a personal standpoint of my life. And so, I really dedicated all the time and effort, and said, “You don’t control outcome in life.” We don’t control whether we win, whether we lose. All we control is our process and our preparation. And so, I just try to do all those things right and lead by example, and it worked out.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Beautiful. Well, so, yeah, let’s hear about this Warrior’s Mindset, that’s the name of your book. What’s the mindset and what’s the big message in the book?

Sean Patton
Absolutely. So, I went with the Warrior’s Mindset, which is maybe a little, I don’t know, off-putting, it’s a little hardcore. You said hardcore. It’s a little intense for some people but how I define a warrior is a warrior is someone who fights for a noble cause greater than himself, and I don’t mean just physically fight. It’s, like, pursues, persists for a noble cause greater than himself.

And when you define it that way, then it becomes binary, so you either have a noble purpose, a noble cause, something that’s bigger than yourself that you’re working towards, that you’re fighting for, that you believe in, or you don’t. It’s one or the other. And if you don’t, which is if we’re not intentional with our lives and we don’t set purpose, if we don’t get to know ourselves, we’re just going through the motions, and you will consciously and subconsciously make decisions that are based on, “What is going to cause me the least discomfort in the moment?”

It’s going to be a very shortsighted decision-making. It’s going to be about comfort. It’s going to be about apathy. It’s going to be, like, “Well, that feels stressful.” But, again, if you don’t have that purpose behind it, you will turn it down. And I just think that, of those two, having that warrior’s mindset and having a noble purpose, aligns with our genetic purpose and aligns with who we are as human beings, and is the path to fulfillment.

And I think the other way is a path to misery, anxiety, depression, and everything else because you lack that noble purpose. So, that’s why I use the term A Warrior’s Mindset and what I ended up doing was researching and taking my own experiences, research, there’s over 300 citations in this book, everything from neuroscience, psychology, sociology, to history, to whittle down, and say, “How small can I make the framework to achieve that?”

Because it’s one thing to say, “Have a warrior’s mindset. Go fight for a noble cause. Do all these great things,” and then they ask the question, “Awesome. How?” And so, I really set out to create as simple a framework as I could but not miss anything critical to have a system, a framework that you could work through for your own mindset that really maximize your greatness. And so, I came up with a guide called Six Keys to Greatness.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you give us some examples of noble purposes that folks can really seem to connect and engage with in their work lives?

Sean Patton
Yeah, absolutely. So, I work with a lot of companies as a leadership coach and consultant, and I’m a firm believer in a leadership culture creating fulfillment. And so, I believe in purpose alignment. Managers are worried about financial incentive alignment, which is important. I’m not saying it’s not important but money is a satisfier, it’s not a driver. And if you can get yourself and getting people on your team aligned with, “What is the larger goal of this company?” your company should exist to provide some sort of effect to better people’s lives in the world.

And so, if you can really align that purpose in your work life, you can say, “Well, personally, here’s my beliefs. I think people should, in any industry, have better access to information, and we should support mothers doing home school. And I believe that we shouldn’t censor information to help that growth,” or something like that, as an example.

Well, if that aligns with your values and your purpose, now you can find a reason outside of the transactional paycheck to work every day, and how much better. I believe everyone should – this sounds crazy in some people’s corporate worlds – you should look forward to one-on-ones with your manager, like you should look forward to having performance evaluations and counseling sessions with the people that you work for and people that you work with.

I feel like we spend so much time at work in our work lives, more and more people are, and the pandemic just accelerated this mindset of, “We want purpose in the work we do. We want fulfillment in the work we do.” And I think if you do leadership the right way, I’m a true believer that you can create both fulfillment and profitability. Those things are not mutually exclusive.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Could you, while we’re on the topic, give us a few more examples of folks you’ve seen they’ve got a purpose that’s aligning with their work, job, career, purpose, and then fireworks are happening?

Sean Patton
Yeah, absolutely. So, I’m trying to think which client example. So, I have one client I’m working with currently who had a successful company, it was a title company, he had 29 employees, doing very well for himself, but there was no passion behind it. He was just going through the motions and didn’t feel like he was living up to his potential, feel like he had sort of plateaued out for himself. And what he really wanted to do was create a vertically integrated real estate company.

And so, we sat down and we looked at, “Well, why do you want to do that?” “Well, I want to have freedom. I’ve got kids that are going to go to college. I want to be able to travel. My wife and I finally can go out and travel on our own, so I want to be able to have freedom of movement. I want to be challenged. I want to grow.”

And he also had this noble purpose of, a firm believer that for most people, especially people, normal middle-class folks that home ownership was a path to financial stability in life, and he really believed that. And so, he wanted to set up a company, everything from property management of rentals to construction, to real estate selling and title work with the idea of getting people who wanted to own a home but didn’t have the credit or do the background to do it, and then setting them up with rental situations that were stable so that they could stay there longer and then help them get to a point where they could buy their first home, and then they could hopefully buy it from him.

So, it was both profit and purpose together, and we came up with that plan slightly over a year ago, and I’m excited to see what he’s doing now. He’s got all four stood up, they’re all bringing in revenue, and he’s already got a team underneath him. And you can just see the drive and the excitement in the work he’s doing because he believes in it and he’s challenging himself.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome. All right. Well, working through The Warrior’s Mindset, you’ve got six keys to greatness. Can you lay it on us what are each of the keys? And any pro tips for getting them unlocking stuff for us?

Sean Patton
Absolutely. So, the six keys are perspective and gratitude, is number one; internal locus of control is number two; north star purpose is three; self-discipline; perseverance; and leadership. So, I’ll give you the brief overview of each, and it has to start with the perspective of yourself. Do you have this warrior’s mindset or not? Are you trying to maximize your experience of life, maximize your impact on others or not? What are your values? So, what’s your perspective around that?

And then, hopefully from that, it becomes gratitude. I see gratitude as the eternal fuel source for everything else. Like, if I’m getting frustrated, if I’m feeling confused of my life, from having relationships, whatever that can be that’s going in my life that I’m struggling with mentally, I can always come back to expanding my aperture and show gratitude for, like, how lucky we are, how lucky are we to be in this country, how lucky are we to be at this time.

Like, there’s never been a time in the history of mankind of probably trillions, billions and billions of humans that have ever existed over the last few hundred thousand years, how many have had air conditioning. Like, how many have been in some sort of democracy where they had basic rights and freedoms? How many had a car that can drive them wherever they want to go and talk to people, like we’re talking now, across spans of time, and have information at their fingertips? Like, almost none of them. Basically, none of them.

The life we have, if you really think about it, should fill you with so much gratitude that it can get you over humps and drive you when you’re feeling. So, gratitude is the baseline for everything, I think, and that really takes work. And you can do gratitude journaling, you can do mindset work, you can do meditation. You can do a lot of things. But if someone’s listening to this podcast right now, I guarantee you, you’re in the 10% wealthiest people on the planet. Like, if you’re listening to this podcast, you are.

You are in the top 10%. And let’s embrace and celebrate that, not get apathetic to it, but use it as fuel to achieve our true greatness.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that is powerful – gratitude, eternal fuel. I’m intrigued. It is true, objectively speaking, we’re super blessed. When you zoom out, I like that notion, the wide aperture. We zoom out in terms of time and place, it is just a fact that we are exceptionally blessed and lucky, and yet it often doesn’t feel that way. And so, I like what you said, we should feel grateful, and it takes work. Can you expand on that? It seems like we humans have a knack for having our expectations rise so fast.

One of my favorite stories here is I remember, once I was coordinating a conference. This was back in college. I was coordinating a conference, and I thought, “You know what, I’m really going to delight.” I had a team of maybe 58, I still remember this. It was on my resume for a long time. I had a team of 58 people on my staff volunteering, my fellow students. And so, I thought, “You know what, I’m going to treat them. I’m going to,” to their surprise, this hadn’t been done in years past, I thought, “Right. We’re doing great, the budget is cool, so I’m going to get everyone a nice little spread of bagels and cream cheeses from Panera one morning.”

And so, I did, and they were thrilled, like, “Oh, this is so cool. Thanks. Awesome. I was hungry, I didn’t know what I was going to do,” and I thought, “Oh, yes.” And so, it felt good to be liked and appreciated, and that it was a hit, a surprise accomplished. And so then, it was a very hectic day, we were taking care of a lot of things.

I was tired, and I was thinking, “Oh, wow, we’ve got a bunch of bagels leftover. Okay, that’s fine. I guess we’ll be all set for tomorrow. Great. I don’t have to do anything because I want to go to bed now. it’s been a crazy long day.” And so, the next day, they said, “So, Pete, are there bagels this morning?” And I said, “Oh, yeah, actually we’ve got a ton leftover. They’re just right over there.” They said, “But they’re not fresh.” And I just loved it.

I was like, “In all the years past, we’ve done this event, there were not bagels. Yesterday was the coolest thing ever. Today we still have those bagels, and they’re almost as good. They’re not, like, two-week old bagels. Like, one day.” I’m no connoisseur, Sean.

Sean Patton
You’re no bagel connoisseur?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m not too picky with my food but I was like, “Okay, I know one-day old bagels aren’t as great as super fresh bagels, but that’s still not bad.” And so, it was just like one day is all it took from, “This is so grand” to “Aargh, they’re not fresh, and I’m disappointed.” And I think that that is representative of me and many of us in terms of something cool happens, we feel so blessed, so grateful, “Oh, my gosh, this is awesome. I got a big promotion, big jump in income. Cool, cool, cool.”

And it’s like, “Oh, now, what do you know? It’s so hard to make ends meet. How did that happen?” It’s sort of like our lifestyle, or our wants, or perceived needs, expectations grow such that we don’t feel the gratitude associated with, “Oh, wow, what I have is oh-so-abundant.” So, Sean, I want to throw that to you. You said we should feel grateful, and it takes some work. What’s going on with this human nature? And what can we do about it?

Sean Patton
Well, Buddhism says that being human is to suffer, and the real suffering comes from, I think you said it, expectation. And so, when there’s an incongruence or a difference between what our life is and what we may want, that wanting is what’s covering, is what’s causing the suffering. It’s not external. It’s inside our own heads.

Pete Mockaitis
Dukkha.

Sean Patton
Right, dukkha. Exactly, yeah. And we don’t have to go all spiritual on this, but I think that’s part of human nature as you get accustomed to that. I have this story, another story, it’s when I just got back from Iraq, I’ve been gone for 14 months in southwest Baghdad. And I get back, I was young, I was 25, and I was excited I got to go to Starbucks. I was super stoked, like, “Oh, my gosh. I go to Starbucks.”

I get in line, and I’m waiting there, and there’s just two girls in front of me, and they’re having this conversation. Somebody said something about…Oh, no, what it was it was the fall, it was October and they ran out of pumpkin spice.

Pete Mockaitis
“I need my PSL, Sean. I totes need it.”

Sean Patton
They needed it, and they lost their minds. And one was like, “This is the worst day ever.” And I just had to cover my head and walk out after I’m like, again, objectively, you should feel grateful but they had this expectation and this quality of life. And to kind of go back to our earlier conversation about jiu-jitsu, we’re about just doing hard things, like, it’s easy. To be comfortable in America, like, let’s be honest, is it the perfect place? We have a lot of things we need to change, absolutely.

But to be comfortable? Like, it’s not that hard. You don’t have to do much. And because of all that comfort and the reward, and whether it’s social media, we feed that machine of getting gratification, of getting pleasure without putting in work, and then that becomes an expectation. And that’s a dopamine cycle that is at the root of all addiction. And we get addicted to the easy dopamine and that easy win.

And so, yeah, we have to do that work. And that’s why you have to be intentional about that gratitude. Are you going to be perfect? No. I do it all the time. It’s not, like, I’m walking around floating on a cloud with fairies over my head, and just like rainbows everywhere. Like, that’s not the case. I go through hard times, and everyone does, but it’s doing work so that when you have enough self-awareness to see yourself going down that path, and you can redirect and pull yourself out with intentionality.

And I think that’s really what it comes down to, is living intentionally. Because if you let yourself, again, that’s really the definition of a warrior’s mindset, living with intention toward this bigger goal, as opposed to being reactive to your environment, and just like, “Well, I feel awful, therefore, everything is awful.” Like, does it or do you just feel awful because you wanted your PSL, and now you can’t, and, really, you could get something else and be fine? Like, that’s a matter of perspective but that takes intentionality.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, these practices, can you share with us, let’s say, in the moment? Because I’ve done some gratitude journals, and sometimes when I write down the thing that I’m grateful for, it’s like, “Yeah, that really was so amazing, and I feel in my heart a grand sense of gratitude.” And other times, it’s like, “Yup, that was good, and that was good, and that was good,” but I don’t feel much of anything, and I’m just objectively, “Yes, that was a good thing. I am pleased that that occurred,” but my heartfelt gratitude is not ignited. What do I do with that?

Sean Patton
Yeah, I know, you’re totally right. And I think it really also comes down to, like, present-ness and sort of being in the now of it, which is part of internal locus of control, which is like an attribution of control, “Is it external or is it internal?” And so, that comes into play here, like saying, “Well, ultimately, how you feel is up to you. It’s inside you. You own this.”

And so, when you are working through that gratitude, if you can be present and not thinking about, “Well, the things I don’t have or where I want to be, or what’s going to happen in 10 minutes,” but, like, “But are you okay right now?” Breath. Slow down. And it sounds super cliché, but you don’t have to do a formal journal. Like, count your blessings. Like, how good is it right now for you compared to how bad it is other places? And I would just say do more research about what’s going on in the world.

If you want to feel lucky, like go read the news for a day, and you’ll be like, “Oh, my God, my life isn’t anything like these.” It’s almost like I hear people talk about they watch trashy reality or something because it makes them feel better about their own lives because it’s so crazy and dramatic. And so, whatever it takes, I don’t know, I guess if it’s “Real Housewives” or if it’s breath work or gratitude journaling, whatever it takes for you to get to that place.

And, again, you’re going to get off-kilter, you’re going to feel bad, and it’s okay to feel bad in the moment, that’s fine. We’re not worried about the acute feelings of, like, sadness and happiness in the moment. We’re worried about the underlying mental state that you’re carrying around.

Pete Mockaitis
So, your advice then is if I’m doing a gratitude journal, but, one, if it never does it for me, just maybe try something else. But if I am doing it, and it sometimes works for me, I’m seeking to double down on experiencing the feeling of gratitude. Is that accurate?

Sean Patton
Yes, double down on the experiencing gratitude. I’m a meditator. I actually don’t journal. There’s always different techniques, and some things work for some people, some things work for others. For me, meditation has been huge for me in my own mindset shifts and even the transition in the military, and everything.

And a simple gratitude meditation of if you’re really starting to go off the deep end, like sitting down, following your breath, and then just picture in your head things that – your family, or your friends, or the things you have, or the house you have, or the job you have, or the security you have – and reflecting on that, and experiencing that gratitude in the moment, because as soon as we ruminate on the future, that creates anxiety. Why? Because you can’t control the future.

And if we reflect on the past too much, if we ruminate on the past, it creates depression and regret because you can’t change the past. But, luckily for us, neither one of those things are real. The only thing that’s real is the moment. And so, working on your perspective and gratitude, internal locus of control, and doing things that bring you in this moment, my guess is you’re doing pretty good compared to others. That doesn’t mean you have to feel great awful things happen to people.

You should feel emotion. But, again, we’re not worried about, “This thing is happening so I feel bad.” That’s okay. But it’s about living unconsciously and not even being aware that you’re doing it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Thank you. Well, tell us then, your organization Stronger Leaders, Stronger Profits, you do leadership coaching and consulting. We talked, we had a quick overview of the keys, and then a deeper dive into gratitude. Can you share with us, when we look at a whole team or organization level, how do you see things shake out in terms of being the primary drivers of, say, poor versus amazing engagement?

Sean Patton
That’s a great question. The two things, the two Cs, if you will, if you had to say, “What’s the quickest win?” or, “What’s the one thing?” If I had to say, “You’ve got a snapshot, two minutes to look over this company, and figure out how are things going,” I would look at two things – communication and counselling.

How are your communication systems? Are they clear? Is it accurately spreading information down? Is there a system to get feedback to come up? When someone gives feedback, do they get a response? Like, how is your communication? And I think looking at that system first, that fixes so much. Most of your listeners, I’m sure, can, when I think about how to be awesome at your job, and when their job is awesome and when it’s not awesome.

When your job is not awesome, or something goes wrong, communication, or a lack thereof, or a misaligned expectation because of communication, communication is either the primary cause or a strong contributor to almost every business failure. There’s very rarely where I say, “Hey, Pete, here’s a task. I need you to finish this project by the end of the week,” and you get to Thursday, and you’re like, “Eh, screw Sean. Like, whatever. Screw that, I don’t really care,” and you just fail on purpose. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but those are pretty easy to identify if that’s happened.

So, if that’s not the case, if you were going to assume good intent, that you’re trying to do the right thing, well, then we must’ve had misaligned expectations. What you thought was done and good is not what I thought was done and good. And so, I do have one sort of framework around effective communication when you want to ask someone to do something, or give someone a task, or whatever, without missing anything. And I call it the Five Bravo.

So, it’s task, what do you want done; purpose, why do you want it done, how does it affect other people; intent, and that’s the how, like if there’s a certain way I want you to do it, is there a resource I’m going to give you, like are you going to have a team to do this, what’s your intent behind it; and then timeline, when do you need this done by, what are your for dates and end state. So, when you’re done, you come back, and you say, “Hey, Sean, I did that report for you. Here it is,” what’s that look like to me, what’s my expectation?

So, if you just go through that task, purpose, intent, timeline, end state, if you just cover all five of those when ask someone to do something or put something in an email, and then the B for bravo is back brief. So, especially if I gave that to you, “What questions do you have?” and I say, “All right. So, Pete, I probably missed something, like that’s a lot of information. What do you have? What did you hear from me?” And then you repeat it back to me.

Seventy percent of the time, you’re going to be missing something, and that may be because you missed it or maybe because I thought I said it because it was in my head but I didn’t actually say it, like all those things happen but it can be cleared up with a simple framework of the Five Bravo. And I’ve had clients take their project request forms between divisions and actually change their forms to be that layout.

Because if you communicate effectively that way, then when someone doesn’t meet expectation, well, the decision is binary. It’s binary. Then you have, which is only one of two things, it’s either they’re not capable of doing this yet, so they need more training, or they have had the training and they’re uncapable, unwilling to perform what you need them to perform, in which case, they need to do a different role and leave the organization. You can start making that determination.

But what happens most often in organizations is there was a fault on poor communication from the person giving or asking that to be done, there was misaligned expectations of what their expectation coming back was, and there’s a blame on the person for not executing the way, and not having the end state that they desired, but it was due to a poor communication.

So, this happens companies, too. If something goes wrong, the first thing I do before is think, “Did I give them the Five Bravo? Did I give them all five?” And if I didn’t, that’s on me. I can’t hold them accountable for that. It’s my responsibility to get better at communicating. But if I did, now I can take action. And so, communication is so important. And the second thing is counselling, which we can talk about in a second if you want.

Pete Mockaitis
And so then, I think we know it when a communication failure went down in the moment. How do you assess the overall health of communication in a team or an organization?

Sean Patton
So, there are several ways. One, doing a good assessment and coming in and hearing from people how they feel about the communication. Are they heard? Do they have the means to give feedback? Do they understand the why behind what they’re doing? Do they understand where the company is headed and what they do? Is the mission and values and vision communicated all the way to the bottom? Do people know?

You can simply ask, “What’s your role here? What do you do?” They should be able to walk that all the way up to how the company executes its strategic initiatives. And if they can’t, you know there’s a lack of communication. But your question actually brings me to a huge part, which they’re intertwined, is counseling, which is the second thing.

And I see almost no one does this as well as they should, and it’s the number one thing that would improve the culture of any organization and team. And it also facilitates this type of communication, where instead of doing performance evaluations, that’s very transactional, again, that’s management. Like, “You had these tasks. Did you do them or not? How did you do them? Did you do them okay? Where are you at in this?”

That’s fine. I’m not saying not to do that. But if that’s all you do, you’re really setting yourself up for failure, especially in the modern workplace, especially if they’re remote and hybrid workers. If you take a developmental counseling approach, where we meet monthly, quarterly, and we’re talking about we’re not just managing the position but we’re leading the person.

We’re talking to the person, “Personally, what are your goals this quarter? Did you accomplish them? Did I do everything I said I would do to support you? What’s your goals in the future? How can I help you get there? What are your professional goals? What are your team goals? And what are those objectives? And how can I support you do that? And what are you struggling with? And here’s where I see you going? Here’s your career progression.”

Like, that’s a coaching mentality and that leader mentality of creating new human potential by changing the way people think about themselves, the organization and the world, versus management, which is efficiency of a system. And so, when you shift to a leadership culture and you shift to communication and development of human beings, being a core competency of your business, that’ll turn around almost any company.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so, in most organizations, are these conversations just not happening very often? Or, what’s the piece that’s lacking?

Sean Patton
Yeah, there’s no formal construct to have this type of leader conversations, and so you have some people that are having them, and others that are checking the box. I guess we don’t want to piss off too many people the way they do things, but I see a lot of companies where we’ll go in, and, say, HR sends you a performance eval for your annual performance eval, you fill it out of how you think you did, that gets sent to somewhere or something, and then somebody talks to you about it, and maybe they talk about how that affects your bonus or where you’re looking to go next, and that’s about the end of it, “Do better here. Don’t do this.”

Like, that is such a different mentality than saying, “Hey, Pete, here’s the role, the function you play here. Why are you here? Like, why are you doing this job? Are you money-motivated? Cool, let’s talk about that.” Sometimes you talk to, like, a seller, this actually happened at my wife’s company. She was having some issues with one of her sellers. She’s a senior sales manager. And when she talked to him, yes, he’s money-motivated but this wasn’t his passion. His goal was to open up his own business. And in order to do that, he had figured out that he would need $200,000. Okay.

So, instead of her assuming that he wants to hit goal to make money, to move up in the sales organization, instead of that being the expectation, he was very clear, like, “No, my goal is to actually leave the organization and do my own thing. I see 200K.” “Cool. Well, let’s align your purpose with company purpose. How fast can we get you to 200K? How do I need to support you?” And now that person is motivated, even though they’re doing the same job they were doing before. But before, they hadn’t framed it as, “Let’s get you out of this company as soon as possible and onto the next thing.”

And so, having a formal system to have leadership conversations at a regular interval that is written out, that people are accountable for, is huge. When I was counseled in the military, we do counseling like this in the military, and it’s a big part of the leadership equation, and I can’t tell you, I had hundreds of counseling sessions. I can tell you a handful of specific moments or things that I still remember that’s still impactful.

But I can definitely tell the commanders that took the time out to actually do it and the ones who skipped over it and penciled with it, like cared enough to develop me and have that conversation about how they could support me, and where I wanted to go, and give me honest feedback on that as a human being, not just in, “Here’s your performance metrics and KPIs,” and that human component is really where we get from management to leadership.

And with the way the world is heading with our workforce, people don’t want to just be managed. And it used to be if I had a bad manager at my job, it’s like, “Well, yeah, Bob kind of sucks but I got another job offer, but I got to move the house, and the kids are in soccer, and the change cost is so high.” But with remote hybrid workers now, the only thing that changes if I changed jobs is, “What software do I log in tomorrow?” So, that’s a different set of conditions, work conditions that companies are not adapting to. They’re not realizing that 75% of the reason people leave jobs is because of bad bosses, not bad jobs.

And so, if you get this right, it increases retention, internal hires, employee engagement, all those things. And we’re right back to your company can create fulfillment and profitability together.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s good. So, counseling frequently. Is there a magic frequency – weekly, monthly? What’s the vibe?

Sean Patton
Depending on the position, whether you need to do weekly one-on-ones or not, some positions, I think, you do, some you don’t. Lower-level people generally need more weekly one-on-ones and check-ins and handholding right, like more entry-level folks as oppose to more senior folks don’t need that as much. But I think the magic sauce, what we espouse and we help our clients with, is that we do a written form every quarter that lays out the next three months, and then you adapt off that same form and you meet monthly. So, monthly counseling but you’re filling out a full new form on goals and objectives once every quarter.

Pete Mockaitis
Fun. All right. Well, now, could you tell me a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Sean Patton
My favorite quote is actually by George Bernard Shaw, it’s the unreasonable man quote, and it’s that “The reasonable man sees the world the way it is and adapts himself to it, and the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to him, and, therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

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

Sean Patton
The quintessential one for me, it’s funny, because of all the different research and stuff I looked at is still the Harvard happiness study. An 80-year study that started in the 1930s that tried to determine what are the variables that affect joy and fulfillment in life, and they’re on the second generations. So, they did it with their first subject all the way through their deathbed, then the second generation. And they, recently, just last year, revised their latest findings.

And it’s just clear that it’s not socioeconomic status, it’s not race, sex, any things that really are universally responsible for fulfillment and joy in life, and it’s absolutely the quality of your close relationships. And I think that is a really powerful thing because if you talk about motivators for different people, to get over those hard challenges like we talked about at the beginning of this episode, my nightmare is being in older age and having regret about something in my life, about something I didn’t do, and not having the time or energy to do anything about it.

And there’s actually studies that have been done that show that 70-75% of all seniors live with the regret because they lived the way someone else thought they should, or because of societal norms, or because they thought it was just the right thing to do, and they didn’t go live their life the way they wanted to, and they didn’t maintain the quality close relationships. So, that’s my worst nightmare. That’s what drives me at the end of the day, is I think that when I’m one day laying in my bed, getting ready to close my eyes for the last time, I can look back at my life, and be like, “I freaking did it, and it was awesome.”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. And a favorite book?

Sean Patton
My favorite book right now is an older book but it’s The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership and I’m really getting more and more into conscious leadership right now, and some of the practices around that, and how I can implement that in my systems. Yeah, so that’s one that I’m a huge proponent of. But before that, I read Life of Joy it’s with the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu who talked about how you create joy in life. I would say those two books in the last year have been two that really hit me hard.

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

Sean Patton
Another great question. I know this is the hot topic of the day, but I use a paid service called Jasper for my AI. And it sped up our workflows in so many ways because I’ve been able to come up with my original concept or framework. So, you can put your own original thought in but you can just put in bullet format and it can write you an 80% solution, and it can create captions. So, I’m fully in on using AI, generative AI, in our day-to-day to make our jobs more productive and easier.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Sean Patton
My favorite habit is, I’m going to sound so boring though, I’m going to sound boring to say this, but that’s fine, but I am all about my nighttime routine and the same times, going to bed at the same times and waking up at the same times. And so, one thing my wife and I do is, like, she’s even more into the sleep stuff than I am. She’s like Spy Kids, she’s got like a Whoop on one arm and an Apple Watch on the other, she’s like all the bio data she can get.

But we have half our lights in our house set so that at 8:00 p.m. we only have red lights from down all the way to our bedrooms to our bathroom. So, we take away all that light exposure, and that habit, that itself, whether it’s the blue light or whether it’s just a Pavlovian response to the fact of the red light, but as soon as the red lights come on, I get sleepy and I have a great rest. So, I’m really big on my night routine and going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same time.

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

Sean Patton
I think one thing I often say is that there’s an obligation of greatness. If I truly believe that, again, we are living at such an amazing time, we’re in this country, we have so much potential to do so much good, to be great. Almost everyone that’s listening, like you have the potential to be great in however you define that in your life, you have greatness inside you, and your potential for that, and the opportunity for it.

But I’m a firm believer that, with the potential for greatness, comes an inherent obligation to achieve it. So, now that’s a chip on your shoulder because, otherwise, that’s the unmet potential is not being grateful for the opportunities you’ve been given.

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

Sean Patton
So, I’m SeanPattonSpeaks on Instagram. I’m on LinkedIn. Those are my primary social tools. And then our website is StrongerLeadersStrongerProfits.com.

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

Sean Patton
I think it’s to evaluate inside of their company whether they are managing the position or whether they’re leading the person, and lean into leading the person and leading the person with intentionality. And I think you’ll see some great results not just in the company’s success but in quality of life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Sean, this has been a treat. I wish you much fun and warrior mindset goodness.

Sean Patton
Thanks, Pete. This has been awesome. I appreciate it, man. You do great work here.

828: How to Reach Your Epic Goals and Unlock Elite Performance with Bryan Gillette

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Performance expert Bryan Gillette reveals the foundational principles for epic achievement.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The five pillars of EPIC performance
  2. What you can learn from elite athletes to find your own peak performance
  3. How to quantify tricky goals 

About Bryan

Bryan Gillette knows what it is like to reach the peak as he has stood on the summits of many mountains and successfully completed many physically and mentally challenging ultra-distance endurance events. He’s reached several ‘summits’ in his career as well and before founding his own leadership consulting practice was the Vice President of Human Resource. Bryan has over 25 years of experience in Human Resources and Leadership and Organizational Development with executive-level responsibilities in small and large companies. His experience also includes consulting, speaking, coaching, and teaching all levels.  

Bryan is also a dedicated endurance athlete and has cycled across the United States, run 8-marathons back-to- back, and ridden his bicycle 300 miles in one day.  

When he is not traveling the world with his wife and two boys, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Resources Mentioned

Bryan Gillette Interview Transcript

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

Bryan Gillette
Well, it’s nice to be on the show, Pete. It’s good to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m so excited to talk to you about epic performance and one epic achievement I have to ask about right away. So, you ran eight marathons back-to-back within a 76-hour window, sleeping for less than two hours during this feat. First of all, is that accurate?

Bryan Gillette
It is accurate. Yeah, it’s 205 miles around Lake Tahoe. So, Lake Tahoe is one of the premiere high-elevation lakes in the Sierra mountains, and there’s a 200-mile race around it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, you did that. Well, congratulations.

Bryan Gillette
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
That is astounding, almost unbelievable so I had to confirm that we’re getting the claim correct, first of all.

Bryan Gillette
You’ve got your information correct.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I guess we’re going to get into some of the core principles for how such epic achievements unfold. But, maybe for this specific tale, could you share with us a key thing you did before or during this event that you think made all the difference for you?

Bryan Gillette
There were a number of things, but if we just focus on one thing, it’s making sure I’m training well and I’m prepared. People often ask what’s the hardest part of running 200 miles, and they’ll think, “Oh, the hardest part is getting to the finish line.” In this case, the hardest part is getting to the start line. Getting to the start line prepared, getting to the start line healthy and injury-free. It’s the nine months leading up to an event like that that’s the hard part.

Pete Mockaitis
It only takes nine months to prep for that?

Bryan Gillette
Well, it takes a lot longer when I started. So, nine months prior to it, I had completed a 100-mile run in 24 hours so I was in pretty good shape when I started my training. So, for the nine months leading up to it, I started that in really good shape, so I started out with a really good base. And then I spent the next nine months really focusing on that one run.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, this is not a running or fitness podcast, but I just got to ask. How does one remain injury-free? Because it seems like I’ve always got something that acts up. Even when I start cranking about five miles every other day for a few months, something happens, “Oh, my IT band is doing whatever,” and it’s I’ll just like disappear for weeks or months. So, how is that even done?

Bryan Gillette
I wish I had the magic answer to that one and could clearly say, “This is how you stay injury-free.” I can tell you what I have done for all of my events, mainly all of my running events because I’m also a cyclist as well, is if all I did was run in order to prepare for the 200-mile run, I would not have been able to stay injury-free. So, I ran, I bicycled, and so I would mix it up a little bit.

And when I would notice something was starting to hurt, I would kind of assess, “What’s going on? Do I need a new a pair of shoes?” because you’re going through shoes quite quickly in something like that, and really understanding your body well. And I think it applies to everything. Do you understand kind of what’s working, what’s not working? How do you tweak things? And if you’ve got an injury, how do you stop and try to do something different so you don’t over-injure it even more?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, thank you. Well, now, let’s get into some broader lessons.

Bryan Gillette
All right.

Pete Mockaitis
Your book EPIC Performance: Lessons from 100 Executives and Endurance Athletes on Reaching Your Peak, ooh, that’s exactly the sort of thing we love to hear. There’s a lot of lessons but could you kick us off with a particularly shocking, surprising, fascinating, counterintuitive, dopamine-releasing discovery that you unearthed when you dug into this research quest?

Bryan Gillette
So, I spoke to a hundred people, and most of them were C-level folks, and about 75% were C-level folks, and then about 25% were ultra-distance endurance athletes, so somebody that has done an IRONMAN or equivalent, but people that…and, in many cases, the ultra-distance athletes were C-level folks.

Pete Mockaitis
And you don’t mean Cs in academic performance. You mean chief information officer, chief operating officer, chief executive officer.

Bryan Gillette
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I’m with you.

Bryan Gillette
Yes, thank you for clarifying that, Pete. Yeah, these were CIOs, CHROs, CEOs, all that C-level work. And what surprised me the most was how humble they were. These were some very accomplished people but I thought, at some point when I identified that I want to reach, talk to a hundred people, I thought, “How many people am I going to have to ask in order to get a hundred interviews?”

And what surprised me is I only had to ask a 102 people. Only two people said no and everybody else, was they were so willing to do it, spend the time. I spent a minimum of an hour with everybody, and it was something like, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” And when I would ask them, I’d start the interview, they would often start off and, it’s like, “Why are you interviewing me, Bryan?”

And it was that humbleness that really surprised me the most. But then the other thing along those lines was that all but two people said yes. If you don’t ask somebody, if you want something and you don’t ask, the answer is going to be no. But if at least you go out and ask, and that reinforced that concept even more in my head. If you at least ask, there’s a greater possibility of you getting a yes than if you don’t ask.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now there’s maybe a whole another podcast episode here about cold outreach because I’m imagining you probably got a number of ghost replies as in no reply whatsoever as opposed to a clear no or a clear yes.

Bryan Gillette
Surprisingly, so when I went out to people, a bunch of the people I knew personally, and so I could call them up, I could send them an email, and they all responded. And then at the end of any interview, I would ask one question, it’s like, “Is there anybody else who you think I should talk to?” And they would say, “Oh, yeah, you got to talk to Marilyn.” I said, “Can you do make a connection with me? And here are some information you can send to her and make that connection,” and so, I didn’t get those ghosts.

So, I literally sent out 102 requests or called 102 people, and only the two people, of the two, one of them said, “There’s a lot of family issues I’m going through. Now is not the best time.” I said, “Okay, I get it.” And then the other person, I actually never heard from.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that is mighty impressive. And then I suppose it’s also kind of fun. It was flattering, it was like, “I wanted to figure out how one becomes an epic high-performer like you,” so that’s just…

Bryan Gillette
I mean, I agree. I teach a graduate course at the university on leadership, and one of the things that often the students will come up and we’ll be talking about career and career advice, and they’re asking me questions. And what I’ll often tell them is, “Do some informational interviews. If you’re interested in, if you want to work in nonprofit, go out and do some informational interviews.”

And most people, when you say, “Hey, Pete, can I interview you on what it means to be a podcast host?” chances are you’re going to say yes because it is very flattering to the person. So, ask people, and it’s flattering to be asked, and chances are you’re going to get a yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, cool. Now, onto EPIC performance. Let’s hear the scoop. What is kind of the core thesis, message, big idea we should take away from this?

Bryan Gillette
Yes. So, EPIC performance, there’s five behaviors of EPIC performance. And EPIC stands for, E is what are the big things in life you envision? How do you envision those things that you want to accomplish? Not just one or two years out, but three, four, or 30, 40 years out. That’s E as envision. P is, “How do you put a plan in place in order to accomplish those big ideas?

I is, “How do you iterate to that plan so you don’t start off running 200 miles, you don’t start off running a marathon?” You start off running two miles or four miles. You don’t start off at the CEO of a company. You start off a much lower level. So, that’s iterate, “How do you work your way up?” The C is, “How do you collaborate with somebody who’s done this before?”

So, if I wanted to start my own podcast, I’d call you up and say, “Pete, what does it take to start a podcast?” And then the last one is, “How do you go out and perform it?” That’s EPIC performance. So, the performance is, “How do you deal with the hard times? How do you you get from the start line to the finish line? How do you deal with those challenges?” And then, once you’ve accomplished, you’ve reached kind of that peak, how do you think about what’s next?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share with us a story of someone who did just that in terms of pushing beyond their limits, achieving something epic, and, ideally, in the professional or work context? Kind of walk us through their steps and the result they saw.

Bryan Gillette
Yeah. So, I’ve an assessment where people can assess how well they are at the five different areas. And, generally, what I found is somebody is probably really good at two of the five areas, and they know how to compensate for the other ones. So, for example, there’s a gentleman I work with, he’s one of my clients, and he’s also the CEO of this fairly decent-sized economic development arm here in California.

And he is phenomenal at envisioning things, and he can see stuff, and he works really hard to go and kind of get it accomplished. He’s not necessarily the best person to put the plan together, and he’s not necessarily the best person to iterate, but he can collaborate well and he can perform well. And so, part of it is understanding, “Where are you good at?”

And so, as I was talking about the envision part and trying to understand, you know, part of envision is understanding your why, understanding your purpose and how you can see that future. And as he’s building this business, I asked him, I said, “How do you deal with the challenges? How are you able to kind of see that future and then overcome some of the many obstacles you’ve come with?”

And he talked about, he goes, “I’m very clear on my why. I’m very clear on the purpose,” and that’s what envision is. And I said, “Where does that come from?” He goes, “Part of what I want to do with this organization is I want to be able to build up the economic arm of these 15 to 20 cities that make up this region.”

“And the reason I want to do that is because when I was a kid, I saw my dad lose his job because the economy wasn’t doing well, and the city that we were in, it was depressed. I saw him lose his job and I saw him lose that luster for life, and I never want that to happen to me or to other kids, and so that’s why I know that why really well.”

And so, that’s what that envision is, knowing that why, knowing your purpose, and being able to kind of stay focused, so when it really does get hard, you can go back to those types of situations. So, that’s one example of when somebody really understand kind of that vision and their purpose.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, then let’s walk through the whole picture then. So, envision, plan, iterate, collaborate, performance. Can we hear a little bit about the definition and some best practices within them?

Bryan Gillette
Yeah. So, envision, it’s being able to think out. Most of the time, and when I work with companies, it’s thinking about one, two, three years out. And so, what I want people to do and kind of help people get to is, “How do you think in 10, 20, 30 years out?” a little bit further. And part of that is being clear, we just chatted about the vision part, being clear about that, being clear about what your purpose is, but then also looking out, “What do you want to accomplish in 30 years instead of just looking out a couple of years?”

And often what holds people back is we think, “Oh, I can’t think out 30 years because we can’t do that. And the problem is we can’t do that today.” So, the iterate part is, “What do you have to do in order to get to that point where you can drive to that bigger goal?” So, for example, if you just go back to our marathon example, you don’t start off running a marathon.

And so, a lot of people, if you ask them, “Hey, could you run a marathon?” they would say, “No, I can’t do it.” I was like, “Okay. So, what is it you could do today to move you closer to being able to run that marathon next year or the following year?” Well, today, you can run two miles or three miles. And then next week, maybe you can run four miles. So, that’s what the iterate is.

The plan is once you know what that long-term goal is, if it is to run the marathon, “What are the steps you need to put in place in order to get there?” And then the collaborate is, “Who are the different people? Who could you learn from?” Now, you think about a lot of times, people say, “Oh, what I’m doing, somebody has never done before.”

And I talked to a lot of CEOs who started up their own company, and they never said, “Oh, what I’m doing, somebody has never done before,” because somebody has started up their own company, somebody started up and done something in a similar space. It may not be exactly what you’re doing, but learn from what they did, learn from those people’s successes, learn from their failures.

And then, lastly, is the perform, how do you go out and you do it. And that’s all about how do you persevere through the difficult times. How do you stay focused on your goal is what you’re trying to do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, can we hear another example of a professional who achieved some awesome things, and walk us through each of those steps, how they envisioned, they planned, they iterated, they collaborated, they performed?

Bryan Gillette
So, another example on the professional side is there was a CEO who I was talking to, and early on in his career, kind of as he was coming out of college, one of the things that he wanted to do in life is he wanted to run a hunting lodge. And so, that was what he wanted his career to do.

And so, he started, and this is kind of that iterate side, he started to go out and work for hunting lodges. And as he was working for one, so it was hunting and fishing was kind of where his passions were. And so, he went and he was working for one company, and he knew that, “In order to do this, I’ve got get better at finance.” And the CEO of the company brought him in, got him involved in some of the financial aspects of the business, so he started to learn finance.

And then he started to learn kind of that customer, that front-of-the-house type of management, how do you manage the customers. So, he was building up those skills that were all going to be important when he ran his own hunting and fishing lodge. Now, what happened is he started to get into that, started to learn about finance, started to learn about marketing, started to learn about the customers and what their needs were, and he realized, “I didn’t really like managing the hunting or fishing lodges.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Bryan Gillette
And so, he had to pivot a little bit, but still, hunting and fishing, really, fishing is at his core, so he figured out, “Okay, what do I have to do differently?” Then he went to work for a large fishing manufacturer, a large outdoor kind of company that focused on fishing equipment and fishing gear, and he worked his way up in different areas, in marketing and sales. And, eventually, he became the CEO of several well-known kind of outdoor apparel companies.

So, it starts off where you start off where it’s like, “My goal is I want to do something in my career around fishing,” because that’s what was his passion, and he got into it, and he realized, “I don’t like some of these aspects but I still want to stay in the industry,” and he kind of learned the different parts of what it took to run a business and, eventually, the CEO.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s cool. So, there I’m hearing the iterate loud and clear with regard to, “Oh, I guess this doesn’t quite exactly the thing,” in terms of when we look at the realities of that. I’m thinking about a lot of people in their careers, they think they want to do something and then they realized that, “Oh, the reality of that is actually different than what I imagined.” Like, law is an example, “Oh, I want to be in the courtroom like the TV shows, doing dramatic persuasion of a judge or a jury,” and then they realize, “Oh, shoot, most lawyers are primarily creating documents. Huh, well.”

Bryan Gillette
Right. It’s the iterate part of that, Pete, as well as the collaborate part of that. Because if you’re going to be…if you want to be a lawyer and you’re thinking about going into law school, go out and talk to a bunch of lawyers. There are different types of law. There’s family law, there’s business law, there’s contracts, and so there are differences there, so go out and talk to those people.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely.

Bryan Gillette
And so, you may not like litigation but maybe you like contract law. And so, understanding, and then that’s all what collaborate is, go out and talk to those people, “What do they like? What do they don’t like?” And it’s also talk to the people that were successful, but talk to the people who may have had some failures to understand what they did or what they didn’t do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I like these particular tips in terms of the do’s and don’ts when it comes to iterating and collaborating. Could you give us a few of those for each of the steps? What does great envisioning look, sound, feel like versus what are some common pitfalls and so forth within each of the steps?

Bryan Gillette
Yeah. So, great envisioning is you’re clear on what your purpose is. At the end of the day, you know what your purpose is. You’re also clear on what your values are. You’ve got to understand what’s important to you. Those people that know this, they know what’s important to them, they know where to say yes but they also know where to say no.

Great at envisioning is being able to put yourself into situations where you may be uncomfortable. And so, “How do you stretch yourself a little bit further?” is what you’re trying to accomplish. And one of the ways you know that is if you’re looking to try something new, does it make you nervous? It’s that nervous quotient I always like to focus on.

So, the way you know you’re thinking bigger, the way you know you’re pushing yourself, is because before you do it, you get nervous. And it’s not that nervous that stops you from doing anything. It’s that nervous that’s like, “Okay,” and you just kind of hold back a little bit, but, still, nervousness is a good indication that you’re stretching yourself.

Another key part of envisioning is, “Do you have some sort of strategy that allows you to write those big ideas down and you come back to that every once in a while?” So, I’m sure you’ve gotten, or your listeners have gotten ideas of, “Oh, I’d love to do X.” Do you have a place where you write that down and then maybe come back to it in a year, because maybe you’re not ready to do X?

I was talking to my kids the other day, and I said, “What are some of the things you want to do?” and one of my kids said, “I want to go on the Vomit Comet.” And if you’re not familiar with the Vomit Comet, it’s that airplane that goes up and it does a parabolic flight, and then for a short amount of time, you are experiencing weightlessness.

And I said, “Just write that down somewhere. You may not be able to do it today, but maybe in 10 years you can come back to it.” I keep a list of all the places that I want to go, all the places I want to travel. And every year, we go back and we look at that list. So, those are a couple of things for envision.

For plan, often we wait to put this big plan together before we get started, and I think the biggest thing is if you have this idea of something you want do that’s big, just do one thing no matter how small it is that moves you forward. Just do one thing in the next 72 hours, and that’s one of the things I’d encourage the guests to do. If there’s something big you’re thinking about, what one thing can you do in the next 72 hours that will move you forward with that idea? And then do something else.

We often wait to build the full-out plan before we get started, and you don’t have to. Just start moving forward now. And then, also, start to assess what obstacles and risks may be in your way. Look at the risks, write them down, figure out how you can break them down even smaller and understand that. One of the executives I talked to, he invests in a lot of the real estate in the San Francisco Bay Area where a million dollars is not going to buy you much of the house, so it’s really expensive, and at one point, he was 90% leveraged.

A lot of risks that he had going. And what he did is he took that risk and broke it down into smaller segments, and he kind of broke it down to, like, “What if I lose my job? What if I lose a tenant? Or, what if I need to do a major remodel?” He broke each of those down, or he broke those down into three components.

And that breaks the risk down into smaller components, and then you can break it down even further to understand, “Okay, how much risk is there? Where can I better manage?” Because when you think about the big picture, sometimes that’s daunting, but if you break it down into smaller chunks, you can manage it a little bit better.

With iterate, I always look at, “How do you practice with intention? How are you very focused on where you’re going to spend your time and where you’re not going to spend your time?” There was one of the executives I talked to, he’s a CHRO, so chief human resources officer, he’s also an IRONMAN, so he’s extremely busy, and he goes, “When I am looking to train for an event, I know I need about 11 hours out of the week because I can find 11 hours out of a week, and that means I have to say no to some things.”

And so, how are you looking at your calendar? How are you looking? Where are you spending your time and really assessing that, and then putting a plan in place that makes you very intentional on how you’re going to go about iterating to that? And how are you looking at data? What’s the data you need to know? If you’re doing a sports event, you’re probably looking at speed or time. If you’re looking at a business, then what are the financial data elements you ought to look at? And you don’t have to look at everything but find out those key datapoints that will indicate that you’re being successful, or indicate you’re moving in the right direction, and identify those.

With collaborate, find a few mentors, find a couple people that you can talk to, bounce ideas off, will push you. And I always like to ask folks, “Who are the mentors in your life? And do they offer a different perspective?” One of the assignments I have for folks in my class is I say, “Write down who are all the people, the mentors in your group, and then look at where they’re different. Are they different in gender? Are they different in ethnicity? Are they different in maybe marital preferences or sexual preferences? Are they different in some like business, some like education?”

Think about how different they are because you want to get different perspectives and learn from those different perspectives. And then, lastly, when we look at perform, is, “How are you really focusing on what your goal is?” And so, that takes you back to the envision, “Do you know what that goal is? Do you know what that peak is? And when the times get tough, how are you focusing on that goal and being very clear on what that goal is?”

Pete Mockaitis
And are there some best practices for refocusing on that goal?

Bryan Gillette
Yeah, it’s, first of all, you should have it written down somewhere. Have that goal written down where you can look at it, and constantly go back and evaluate, “Are we on track?” Now, I like to put some objectivity to a goal. When you think of it, we’ve often, most of us have probably heard the smart goals, “Is it specific? Is it measurable? Is it obtainable? Is it relevant? And is there time bound to it?”

And that helps put some objectiveness to your goals, and it also helps you to evaluate whether, “I’m on track or I’m not on track.” And so, the more objective, the more specific you can be with those goals, then it’s going to be easier to evaluate with whether you’re on track or you’re not on track.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Bryan, I’d love to get your take on when it comes to objectification, quantification of goals. It seems that some are far easier to do than others with regard to sales, or finance, or wealth, or lifting weights, or achieving feats of distance, or speed. I’m curious if you have any pro tips on how we might go about objectifying, quantifying goals that can feel fuzzy at the start, like, “I want to be happier,” or healthier, or more energetic, or in a better mood, or more present.

I think these are aspirations many listeners have, and I’m motivated by quantification and seeing progress, for sure, but some goals fall into a tricky zone there. Have you seen some clever approaches to quantifying them?

Bryan Gillette
Well, I think you have to continue to ask that question. So, if you say, “I want to be happier,” the question I would pose is, “All right, what would happy look like for you? Because what happy looks like for you and what happy looks like for me are different. So, what would happy look like for you?” And continuing to ask kind of a question until you get to something that’s a quantifiable.

You know, I was talking to a client yesterday, and they want me to facilitate one of their executive retreats. And one of the questions I often ask is, “What would success look like? So, if we were highly successful in this retreat, what would it look like?” And often they’ll say something that’s a little bit fuzzy, and then I’ll kind of ask, “Okay, what would that look like?” So, take your example, so, what would, for you, what does happiness look like?

And it may be, “I come back from my job and, four days out of the week, I just feel jazzed.” And so, how you do put some objectivity to that situation, is really what we’re trying to do. So, let’s get the fuzziness out of it as much as you can.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. Well, I’d love to play with that demonstration a little bit more. So, four to five days, we feel jazzed, I think, so, we have a number four out of five, a fraction, 80%. Cool. So, then how do we put that into the system with regard to further eliminating fuzziness and getting numbers? Like, I suppose we have to define jazzed.

Bryan Gillette
You do.

Pete Mockaitis
Lay it on us, Bryan. What does jazzed mean in this example?

Bryan Gillette
Yeah, and that would be the question I’d ask. So, what would ‘jazzed’ look like? We know when we come home whether we’ve had a good day or a bad day. And it could be just as easy as, all right, when you come home from work, because there are some people that they want to…we’re going to put a quantity to everything.

And some people that, “You don’t have to have actually a number of 3.67,” but when you come home from work, can you check off that this was a good day, this was a great day, this was a bad day? And just put in a check mark on a whiteboard, on a piece of paper that said, “Great day!” And then the next day you come home, it’s like, “Eh, this was a good day. Good day.”

And so, if part of your goal is, “I want four of the five days to be great,” then what I would do is like, “Okay, for how long? Let’s see, first of all, where are we? Right now, let’s look over the next couple of weeks, and where are you now?” If that’s what’s important to you, just track it. And then, so look, after doing it a couple of weeks, and you find out that, “You know, right now, I come home and only three of the days, or only two of the days I can mark off as a great day. Okay, what’s going to get us to mark off three days? What do we have to do differently? What do you have to do in your job?”

So, it’s really, you have to, when you find a fuzzy word, ask yourself, “What could make it less fuzzy?” And how do you further kind of de-fuzzify that word?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now, I want to get your take on when it comes to EPIC. Some might think about hustling, working super hard, digging deep, pushing it. How do we think about the exerting effort versus resting domain of this? Can we overdo it? And what are the telltale signs that we might be overdoing it or some rules of thumb, safety guidelines, to say, “Oh, watch out. This might be too much”?

Bryan Gillette
Can we overdo it? Yeah, we can overdo it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Bryan Gillette
It goes back to kind of what your values are. There are times in my life where it’s like, “Okay.” I’m a cyclist at my core, and, “Okay, I did a hundred miles. Now, let’s do 200 miles. Now, let’s do 300 miles.” And you can continue to push it. And you have to understand, “Is that what you’re trying to do?” And for a period of time, that’s what I was trying to do.

You have to get to the point where you understand where some of your limits are. And what I often say is you can probably go a little bit further if you want to go a little bit further. So, if we go back and use that marathon example, there’s a lot of people that will say, “I could never run a marathon.” And my view is, “Do you want to run the marathon?” Because if you say yes, then I’m going to argue, “You probably could.” If you say no, then I’m going to say, “Don’t do it and go find out what you want to do.”

So, it’s being able to get to that point to understand kind of what is it that you really want to do, what’s most important to you. I don’t know that I’ve got a great answer on, “How do you know when you’re pushing it too far?” On sports, it’s much easier. On work, “Are you succeeding in what you’re doing? Or, are you failing? And if you’re consistently failing, maybe you need to kind of back off a little bit and really assess that. And then, all right, maybe you kind of go back and iterate at a lower level.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now what is it for sports? I’m imagining you’re going to drop some, “Well, when your heart rate variability drops by over 31%…” like, what is it on the sports domain?

Bryan Gillette
No, I think if you find yourself injured.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, there you go.

Bryan Gillette
I mean, we talked about that earlier. If you find yourself, you’re injured too much, then you’re pushing it too hard and you have to go back and reevaluate what’s going on. If you find yourself in a hospital, you’ve probably gone too far. How do you learn from that one?

Pete Mockaitis
“Call Bryan Gillette.” Okay. Well, any other guidelines? So, failing a lot, hospitalization, injuries, too far. Anything else?

Bryan Gillette
Well, it goes back to understanding to what is your criteria for success. And do you have those three or four measurable criteria that’s going to show you’re driving forward? And if you’re consistently not getting to that point, then you have to figure out, “Why am I not getting to that point?” And then kind of reevaluate what you need to do differently, or maybe you need to lower the bar, or you need to adjust some things.

So, I do think it’s good to have some data elements, and you don’t have to have a hundred, but what are three, four, five things you’re working at? And even as former vice president in the human resources, and it’s hard to measure success, people often have a challenge, “How do you measure success on the HR side?” And there were times we would measure turnover, and there were times we wouldn’t measure turnover, depending on what was important at the course of the maturity of the business or what we were trying to accomplish.

There were times when we would measure leadership, and we’d had to define what that look like. And so, again, it goes back to figuring out, “What are those measurable things that you see as success?” So, if I were to ask you, “What does success look like?” I’m going to continue to ask until we can get to something that is we can hold in our hands and is a little bit measurable.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Any particularly clever measurements you’ve seen in your day?

Bryan Gillette
One of them was it was a woman I was talking to, and she wanted to work for a highly successful kind of growth company, and she wanted to be seen as the key leader, this is in human resources. She wanted to be seen as a respected leader in the human resources for that company, and she put a measurement of, “Being able to work for a company where I could be involved in ringing the bell at one of the stock exchanges,” whether it’s NASDAQ or New York Stock Exchange.

And it wasn’t because she wanted to ring the bell, but it showed that she was working for the type of company, she was seen by the executives as the type of person that she wanted to be. And so, I just loved that. That’s what her measurement was. It’s like, “Okay, I’m ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange.”

Pete Mockaitis
I really do appreciate that example because we take something fuzzy, “What do you mean by like a high-growth or cool company?” “Oh, okay, the kind that goes public. All right.” And then, “What do you mean by a key leader?” Like, you’re in, I’m thinking about the pictures I’ve seen in this, that you don’t get 80 people up there during the bell, it’s a smaller crew. So, I think that’s a cool example of going from fuzzy to un-fuzzy. And it sounds like, Bryan, that could take some real reflective time and not something you might be able to come up within five or ten minutes. Is that fair to say?

Bryan Gillette
It’s very fair, Pete. And it’s also not something that’s going to happen overnight. She had been working at that for years in order to do that. And it takes her to realize it, okay, when she went from one company to the other, it’s like, “All right, I was working at this public company, chances are I’m not going to be ringing the bell anytime soon.” And so, it starts to identify what’s important to her, the type of company she should focus on, so that was one that I really liked.

Another one that I liked that is less work-related but it was a colleague of mine who wants to hike all of the 14,000-foot peaks in Colorado. And I forget how many there are. And so, he has a picture of all of the peaks, kind of on his wall, and so it’s got a listing of all the peaks. And every time he hikes one, he’ll go and he’ll put a pin in each of the peaks. And so, it’s a visual representation that sits on his wall above his desk, and he can look up and see, “Okay, I’ve done 10 so far,” “I’ve done 11 so far.”

So, that’s another important thing, is, “How do you make your goal somewhat a visual representation so you see it every time you walk in your office, or walk in the room, whatever it is?” One of the examples I had is I wanted to travel around the world, and I wanted to take an extended period of time off, and so I bought this world map, I put it up on my wall, and it was one where I could write on with a dry erase pen.

And so, I would circle countries I was interested in, so every time I walked into my office, I would see that map and it would remind me of what my bigger goal was. And so, how do you have some visual representation of what that goal is that makes it really easy and it reminds you every single day?

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

Bryan Gillette
No, I’m looking forward to the favorite things.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, can you tell us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Bryan Gillette
Yeah, one of my favorite quotes is, “There’s nothing more rewarding than completing something you were too crazy to start in the first place.”

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

Bryan Gillette
I like reading about how people push themselves, whether it’s the study of the brain. I just read an article called “Train your brain to make you faster,” and it was in a swimming magazine. And it’s how do you stress the brain out in normal times so when you are going and doing something, your brain is prepared for that stress. And they were talking about swimming but it also talks about in the corporate world as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Now, Bryan, I have to ask, how does one stress one’s brain? The first thing that came to mind was Wim Hof breathing. That’s insane and fun. But what do they recommend?

Bryan Gillette
Well, there are different puzzles that you’re kind of doing while you’re working on something.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, okay.

Bryan Gillette
So, if you’re working on one thing, you’ve got these puzzles that you’re trying to test your brain in, and so that forces you to use your brain while doing something else. So, that’s one way you just stress the brain out a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis
So, I’m thinking about chess checkmate in three puzzles while also running or walking briskly at an inclined on a treadmill. Is that the kind of idea we’re talking here?

Bryan Gillette
Yeah, could be.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right.

Bryan Gillette
Yeah, good example.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Bryan Gillette
I love autobiographies or biographies. So, I think three books that came to mind, and I know you asked for a favorite book, but I love Endurance, which is the Shackleton story. Ernest Shackleton went down to Antarctica. Unbroken, which is about Louis Zamperini’s story, Laura Hillenbrand is the author. He’s a World War II veteran. And then, most recently, Liftoff, which is about Elon Musk. A lot of people that can complain about him but he’s wicked smart. And so, it’s how he was able to build up SpaceX.

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

Bryan Gillette
A favorite tool. I was thinking more of a habit. I think one of the tools that I use, I use OneNote all the time. Microsoft OneNote just to track ideas, keep track of conversations I’ve had. And, realistically, I have a bucket list that I keep on OneNote, and I go back and use it all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Bryan Gillette
A favorite habit? So, this is not work-related but every time my wife and I go somewhere, where if she’s going off to the store and I’m staying home or we split apart, we always kiss each other. And it just keeps us together.

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

Bryan Gillette
Yeah, one of the things I often hear is we don’t all deserve a trophy. And there’s this view that everybody deserves a trophy, and I’m not of the view that we all deserve a trophy in everything. But find those things that you’re good enough to deserve a trophy.

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

Bryan Gillette
So, they can go to my website, they can to EpicPerformances.com. They can go on LinkedIn and connect up with me, but EpicPerformances.com is probably the best way.

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

Bryan Gillette
Yeah. So, I do have the EPIC Performance assessment where if you go to EpicPerformances.com, there is an assessment, and you can evaluate how well you do each of the five different behaviors: envision, plan, iterate, collaborate, and perform. And if they type in…so they go to the assessment, and you can do it for free. It’s going to ask you for a company code, just type in AWESOME, and that will be the company code that allow you, it’ll generate some results. Send it to me and I will send you back your report.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. Thank you. All right. Well, Bryan, this has been a treat. I wish you lots of fun and epic performances.

Bryan Gillette
I appreciate you having me on the show, Pete.

811: How to Lead Positive Change and Grow Your Influence with Alex Budak

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Alex Budak shows you how to initiate change at any level.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why you don’t need titles to be a leader 
  2. The five influence superpowers
  3. How to build your leadership skills–one moment at a time 

 

About Alex

Alex Budak is a social entrepreneur, faculty member at Berkeley Haas, and the author of Becoming a Changemaker. At UC Berkeley, he created and teaches the transformative course, “Becoming a Changemaker,” and is a Faculty Director for Berkeley Executive Education programs.

As a social entrepreneur, Alex co‐founded StartSomeGood, and held leadership positions at Reach for Change and Change.org.  He has spoken around the world from Cambodia to Ukraine to the Arctic Circle, and received degrees from UCLA and Georgetown. 

Resources Mentioned

Alex Budak Interview Transcript

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

Alex Budak
Hey, Pete, thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to be chatting about changemaking, Becoming a Changemaker, your book and expertise. Could you kick us off with a particularly inspiring example of changemaking that you find extra touching personally?

Alex Budak
There are so many. I spend my days surrounded by inspiring changemakers but I’ll tell one story. This is Ibrahim Balde, he was a student of mine in my class at UC Berkeley. He took the class as a freshman. And one of the things I teach in my class is be the ex you wish you had, be the friend you wish you had, be the leader you wish you had, be the mentor you wish you had.

And so, at Berkeley, as a black student, he felt like there wasn’t enough community, not a lot of resources, and so on office hours, we talked about that. And so, in the class, he decided for his changemaker project, he would start a small little pilot program, just a small way to find ways to better support the black community at UC Berkeley.

Over the four years, he was at Cal. The idea grew and grew and grew. And by the time he graduated, it turned into its own standalone startup. It’s called Black Book University. And what I love about it is that we often think that changemaking has to be this big ambitious initiative, and to be clear, Ibrahim was very ambitious, but it all started with a simple idea, leading from where he was, and saying, “Hey, I think that things can be better for myself and for my community.”

He took action and he kept taking action again and again and again, until it got to the point where it’s now a scalable startup that’s gone beyond Berkeley to other universities as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Interesting. And so, is he running that startup? Or are other folks at the helm? Or, where is that now?

Alex Budak
Yeah, he’s the co-founder but he’s got a team around him, but he continues to be involved. And I think it’s super inspiring to see the way that he’s taken the idea and scaled it.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Okay. Well, so then that’s one discovery right there, is that we can start small and it doesn’t have to be super dramatic, and it’s just one step at a time. It grows. It’s cool. Can you tell me any other noteworthy, counterintuitive, or surprising discoveries you’ve made about changemaking from your work and research?

Alex Budak
Well, here’s the thing, so I, of course, teach at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, but I think the way that we often teach leadership, especially at business schools, is kind of broken. We often like tell the story of the single heroic leader. So, maybe we talk about Lech Walesa scaling the wall, we talk about Steve Jobs pulling the iPhone out of his pocket, and those are important and inspiring moments of leadership to be sure, but so often we see those acts of leadership, and many of us can say, “Well, I’m not actually as outgoing as them. I’m not an extrovert. I’m not charismatic like them. Is leadership for me?”

And what my original research shows and what my experience teaching changemakers around the world shows is that each of us can be changemakers. I think we need to stop thinking of leadership as an act.

Alex Budak
So, here’s a fun one to believe that I found in my research, it’s that leaders might be scarce, but leadership is abundant. There might only be one CEO, only five vice-presidents, but all of us can practice leadership from where we are. We need to start separating acts of leadership from titles of leadership and start seeing that each of us can lead change from wherever we are.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. That sounds good. All right. Well, then that kind of sounds like the big idea for the book Becoming a Changemaker: An Actionable, Inclusive Guide to Leading Positive Change at Any Level. Or, is there another core thesis you want to put out there?

Alex Budak
Yes, so the red thread that drives through all, the beating heart of this book is the theme of inclusivity. In the book, I tell the stories of over 50 different changemakers, ranging from a sales associate at Walmart who fought for equal parental leave between both associates and executives. I talk about social entrepreneurs. And I tell the story of a guy who’s just really passionate about composting and wanted his whole team to start composting.

And so, I think that’s the crucial theme, is that changemaking is for all of us. And then, of course, in the subtitle, it’s this idea it’s not change-thinking; it’s changemaking. And so, that each of us can find that sense of agency to lead change from where we are.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so zooming in to the level of professionals who are looking to make some changes in their workplaces, what are some of your top tips or your do’s and don’ts for how we go about making that happen?

Alex Budak
Yes. So, your listeners might be looking at this, and going, “Cool. Changemaking. Sounds interesting but also sounds a little bit fuzzy.” And I get it. So, I set out to do the first ever longitudinal study looking at, “How do changemakers develop over time? And what are some of the key characteristics that the most effective changemakers have in common?”

And I went into it just with curiosity just to say, “Can people develop as changemakers?” and the data are conclusive. Absolutely, yes. We’ve also started to see themes. Things emerge that the best and most effective changemakers do. Now, the one that stands out above all others is this idea of being able to influence without authority.

We often think leadership is about collecting as much power as you possibly can, and then telling people what to do, but we find that the most effective changemakers are those who practice influence. But, again, I think the way that we teach influence is often not really the right way to go about it. It can often feel kind of sleazy or transactional. It’s like the reciprocity effect. Pete, I do a favor for you, then you feel pressured to do a thing for me.

Pete Mockaitis
“I’m sure you’d do the same thing for me, Alex.”

Alex Budak
Exactly. And I want to think about how we can influence more sustainably and for the long term. And so, based on the research, based on my experience, coaching, mentoring, advising changemakers, I drew up what I call my five influence superpowers. These are ways of influencing that are sustainable and for the long term, ways of bringing others into your change efforts. And I’ve seen it working with changemakers, middle managers, senior managers. These are ways you can get other people excited about your change efforts. So, I’ll go through them quickly so we can get a sense of what these five influence superpowers are.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, let’s do it.

Alex Budak
The first is empathy, so being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Patty Sanchez wrote in Harvard Business Review, finding that one in two C-suite executives, when they’re leading change, they don’t take into account how people on the frontlines will appreciate that change. It’s crucial, before you lead change, that you understand, “How might others appreciate that? Are they new to the job and scared trying to make sense of how things work? Are they overwhelmed and overworked? Where are they coming from when they get this change?”

It’s not enough to just be right. How you influence makes a huge difference. I think empathy starts to unlock your ability to engage people in that change.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And so then, we take into account how others are impacted, how they’re feeling it. Can you share with us a tip or two or a tactic or approach to get a better view of that?

Alex Budak
Here’s a super popular one which ties into the second of the superpowers, which is safety, making it safe for others to be part of change with you. So, I’m at UC Berkeley, that’s a big bureaucracy. And, as you can imagine, there’s a lot of people who are a bit hesitant to pursue change efforts. And so, one of the things I’ve learned is to lean into empathy, so understand where they’re coming from and get that maybe they’re a bit more risk-averse than I am.

And so, I go to them and say, “Look, I know that this is a risk you’re taking to come along with me, but here’s my promise. If this works, I promise you will get the praise. And if it doesn’t work, I promise that I will take the blame.” That’s a small way you can make it safe for others to be part of your change efforts. That’s all rooted in, first, empathizing with them and understanding where they’re coming from.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And the praise and blame, I suppose we can talk about safety. There’s a number of dimensions. So, one is the social consequences, I guess is the word, associated with how something goes down, if it’s a smashing success or a disappointment. So, there’s the social bits. And then I suppose, to the extent that there is, I don’t know, re-work or extra time, money, effort that has to be applied to fix, to undo, to re-jigger whatever you’re changing, that you’re willing to make it safe for that person by volunteering to be on the hook for all that.

Alex Budak
Yeah, that’s right. You’re finding ways to support them and getting the resources that they need. And that really ties into the third influence superpower, which is vision, which is that when you’re bringing in a lot of different people together along on your work, it’s so crucial that they feel how they’re part of the larger mission.

I like to talk about vision as painting a picture of the future that’s so compelling that people can’t help but want to be part of it with you. And so, part of your job when you try to influence folks is to find ways to help them see how this one little thing that they’re doing, which might feel so tangential, it’s actually core to the overall work the organization is doing. So, leaning into that vision, helping paint that picture, and helping people see that it’s not just busy work. That this busy work is actually leading to something much more meaningful and bigger than themselves.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And what’s the fourth?

Alex Budak
The fourth is relationships. So, this is the classic example of something that is a long-term play. You can’t just try to parachute in and build a relationship and then jump out. But if you honestly get to know people over time, you’ll unlock so much ability to influence and bring them into your change efforts. I think about a buddy of mine who was recently raising money, running a race to raise money for a rare disease that had infected a loved one.

And when he asked me to support him, I was very happy to do so. I jumped in at the chance. But if you asked me, “Alex, where would you rank this disease, and you’re ranking the most important diseases to solve?” It wouldn’t be in my top ten, not that it’s not important. Just it’s not on my radar but I was so happy to support him because of our relationship. He’s such a good guy and I wanted to be there with him.

And that’s a good example of where relationships make a big difference. Someone might not be completely sold on your change effort, but if they’ve seen that you’re a hard worker, you’re competent, that you often have great outcomes, you know who they are as a person, you care about them as an individual not just as a worker, that unlocks their ability to come along with you on your change journey.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And the fifth?

Alex Budak
Fifth is passion, and here’s where authenticity matters because you can’t fake passion. I’m super passionate about helping people become better leaders and stronger changemakers. But imagine I were at Haas and teaching accounting, not that that would ever happen, but if I were trying to teach accounting, my passion just wouldn’t be there because it’s not authentic to who I am. But if you’re truly passionate about a change initiative, lean into that passion.

There’s often pressure at work that we have to sort of be buttoned-up and be very serious all the time, but if we’re truly passionate about a cause, and I find that the best and most effective changemakers often are, sometimes it comes from a personal experience or a vision that they have, but lean into that. Don’t be afraid to share with people why you care so deeply about this, why you’re willing to commit your time, your energy, your resources to investing in it, and other people will feel compelled to be part of something that excites you as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, those are great principles. I’m curious about what are some common pitfalls, traps, mistakes, things to not do as we’re trying to provide empathy, safety, vision, work or relationships and passion? What should we not be doing?

Alex Budak
Yes, and this is one of the great tensions of being a changemaker is that we have to hold these multiple polarities at once, that we’ve got to have the sense of urgency because, if you look at our world today, so many things are calling for change. But also recognize that change takes time, that change doesn’t happen overnight.

I love the words of Matthew Kelly who wrote in the book The Long View that we tend to overestimate what we can do in a day, underestimate what we can do in a month, overestimate what we can do in a year, and underestimate what we can do in a decade. And so, sometimes as changemakers, especially new emerging first-time changemakers, we have this great sense of urgency, which, again, is kind of a helpful instinct, but we tend to want change to happen overnight immediately, and then we tend to give up quickly when it doesn’t come, when we don’t start feeling that traction.

And so, I think it’s crucial as changemakers, when we try to influence others, that we play the long game. You might get a no the first time you try to influence someone. You might have to change direction. You might find that, “Well, hey, I thought that passion is the superpower I would use, but I tested it out and I found, well, actually, vision is really what’s inspiring people to be part of it.”

You’ve got to have a bit of that longer-term view here, I think, especially when it comes to change initiatives, and be willing to test and iterate these superpowers to find the one that works for the right person at the right time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then I’m curious, you have something you call the changemaker index. What is that and how do we use that to help us grow?

Alex Budak
So, the changemaker index is the research that I mentioned just at the beginning of this interview. This is the original longitudinal research looking at, “How do changemakers develop overtime?” If your listeners are curious to take it, you can actually go to ChangemakerBook.com/index and you can see for yourself what the questions are that we asked, and you can see what your greatest strength as a changemaker is. You can be part of the data, part of the research, and get some insight on what you do best as a changemaker.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, now I’d love it if we could just hear a couple more examples in terms of going through all five of these principles. Like, someone wanted to make a change, ideally in a professional context, and then we see, “Oh, here’s how they had some empathy. Here’s how they conveyed that things were safe, here’s the vision, etc.”

Alex Budak
So, a favorite case study I talk about in the book is Jon Chu. Jon is the director of the film “Crazy Rich Asians,” a wonderful movie on its own and also important, in many ways, because it’s the first major American motion picture in over 50 years that had an all-Asian American cast. And so, as he’s putting together this film, he said, “Okay, there’s one song that I need for this amazing emotional final scene of the film. It’s got to be the song ‘Yellow’ by Coldplay.”

Yellow, of course, is often used as an anti-Asian slur, and growing up in the Bay Area, he said that that song changed his whole perception, his whole identity on what it meant to be Asian-American, so it’s clear he had to use this song for his film. Only one problem. Coldplay was the biggest band in the world, Jon had his people reach out to their people, and he got a big fat no. So, this is the…

Pete Mockaitis
So, it’s like, “It doesn’t matter what kind of licensing or royalty or whatever dollars, we’re just not interested in having our song used in this fashion.”

Alex Budak
Just got a big no. I mean, maybe they were concerned about the implications of the term yellow for a movie, or maybe they just didn’t want to share it with an unknown director at the time. Who knows? So, there Jon Chu was, and he had no authority over Coldplay, to be sure. The only thing he had was influence. And while Jon has never taken my class at Berkeley and, as far as I know, he hasn’t actually read my book, he put into practice all five of these influence superpowers to an amazing end.

So, he had no connection to Coldplay, but he figured what could he do. Well, he could write a letter to them. So, he wrote a letter and it’s the most influential letter I’ve ever seen. So, let’s take a look at how he used those influence superpowers in practice. He starts with empathy, and he started in a counterintuitive way. You could imagine, if you’re trying to convince Coldplay, you come in hot. You come with, “These are all the reasons my movie is amazing. These are all the reasons you should support me.”

He actually goes counterintuitively, he goes, “Look, I’m an artist too, and I get it that you probably get a lot of these requests each day, and you’re probably inclined to say no. I get it. As an artist, you probably are scared of attaching your art to someone else’s. I get it.” What a refreshing way to use empathy. Imagine how many people are pitching Coldplay, and going, “Here’s why I got to use this.” But Jon Chu put himself in Coldplay’s shoes. He understood they must get tens, dozens of these pitches a day, and goes, “Okay, I get where you’re coming from.”

From there, he started building a relationship. Of course, he didn’t have an existing relationship but he used the tool of vulnerability to start sharing a bit about himself. He talked about how, growing up, the song changed his life, changed his outlook, changed the way he thought about what it meant to be Asian-American, talked about the impact that their song had on him as a person. He was revealing a bit of himself, his own personality, his own experiences as a way of building that relationship with the band members.

From there, he pivots into passion. So, he talks about the impact that their song could have on an entire generation of Asian-Americans, saying that he wants all of them to have an anthem that makes them feel as beautiful as Coldplay’s words and melody made Jon feel when he needed it the most. It’s clear he’s not faking it. It’s clear he really, really means it with this song.

And he used his vision. And what I love here is that he makes it clear he’s not just trying to get any Coldplay song or just being able to say, “Hey, look, check out the soundtrack. I’ve got Coldplay on it.” No, he’s got a particular vision. He talks about that final scene in the film and how the song would be used over what he calls an empowering emotional march. He paints the picture for Coldplay so they can understand how he would be using their song, not just so it’s a Coldplay song, but in a very particular artistic fashion.

And then, finally, he ends with safety. So, at the time, of course, he’s an unknown director but he does what he can to make it safe. He mentions how the film had received some early accolades, and also how it’s based on a bestselling book. So, he sends off this letter directly to Coldplay, and less than 24 hours later, he gets the approval. He gets the okay from Coldplay, “Yes, you can use our song.”

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

Alex Budak
So, I want to put forward this idea of micro-leadership. It’s a new concept I put forward in the book. And, like we talked about, where we need to separate acts versus titles. I think it’s crucially important that we, as leaders, break leadership down into its smallest meaningful unit, which I call a leadership moment.

And so, my belief is that we have these leadership moments that appear before us dozens of times per day, little moments when we can step up and serve others in a meaningful way. It might be in a meeting, a colleague has been quiet for the most of the meeting, and you say, “Hey, we haven’t heard your voice here. No pressure, but would you like to share your perspective here?”

Or, maybe it’s having the courage to say no when everyone else on the team is saying yes. Or, maybe it’s been willing to stay late and help a new colleague clean up after their first event. These are all small little leadership moments. And my challenge to you is can you practice what I call micro-leadership? Can you seize these moments that are in front of us?

So often we wait for someone else to give us permission to say, “Okay, now you can go be a leader.” But, instead, the lens of micro-leadership is a lens of agency. It’s your ability to step up and lead from wherever you are, when these moments appear before you, to take them, to seize them, to take that opportunity and to make things better for those around you.

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

Alex Budak
So, my favorite quote and one that’s, I think, inspired me in my career, and I read it when I was eight years old and it stuck with me. So, my favorite changemaker is Jackie Robinson, and he has a quote, which is, “A life is not important except in the impact it has on others’ lives.” And that’s always really stuck with me about, “What could you be doing with your life to have a positive impact on those around you?”

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

Alex Budak
So many of them that I love, but one that I’m a huge fan of is Italian researchers looked at entrepreneurs who are in an incubator in Italy. And so, these are people with startups, people with ventures, and they only did one simple intervention. The only intervention was they took half of them and they taught them the scientific method, so hypothesis testing, and they saw what happens as a result.

Here are the findings. Those that had learned the scientific method were more likely to pivot, so more likely to change directions, make a strategic switch, and also more likely to generate more revenue. So, why is that? The way I teach it in my class at Berkeley is that when leading change, when we’re leading anything new, we tend to put so much of our own identity into it, and when something doesn’t work out, we feel like a failure. It makes us scared to take chances because we know, “If this doesn’t work out, well, that reflects really poorly on me.”

But think about a scientist. A scientist in a lab has a hypothesis. When she tries a test and it doesn’t work, she doesn’t say, “Oh, I’m a bad scientist because it didn’t work out.” No, she goes, “Okay, cool. I learned something from this, and now I’ll try another experiment, and another, and another.” And what we find is that when this is applied to entrepreneurship, or I would say changemaking, more broadly, it helps us take the sting out of failure because we just lean into our curiosity, we say, “I wonder if…” “What would happen if…?” And that allows us to be more creative, to take more risks, and to not take things so personally.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Alex Budak
Tons of books but my favorite, I think, one that I just re-read for the first time in a few years is a book called Life Entrepreneurs. It’s by Gregg Vanourek and Christopher Gergen, and it’s all about how you can use the tools of entrepreneurship not to scale a business or a nonprofit but to build a life that you want, to build a meaningful life. I find that really moving, and it’s a book that I read just as I was beginning my own changemaker journey and one I return to every few years for a bit of inspiration.

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

Alex Budak
So, I love the tool Superhuman which is an email client. Complete gamechanger. I think all of us spend more time in our email inbox than we would like, and this app truly lives up to its name. It makes me superhuman when I’m sending tons of emails. You can set reminders. You can delay emails so I’m not sending emails at midnight. Just a super, super tool and well worth it.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Alex Budak
Walks. I’m a big believer in taking walks. My wife and I have a 22-month-old at home, and so you can imagine life is pretty crazy. But she and I both prioritize making sure that each of us get a walk at almost every night. Sometimes I listen to music, sometimes I listen to a favorite podcast, like this one, or sometimes I just walk without anything in my ears. And it’s an amazing way to get a little bit of physical activity, get a little bit of space, a little bit of fresh air, and a little bit of time to yourself. And so, that’s a habit that I cannot imagine doing without.

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

Alex Budak
I think the way I start my Berkeley class, the way I start my book Becoming a Changemaker is with the words, “The world has never been more ready for you.” And that’s my fundamental belief, which is that there’s never been a better time than right now to go lead a positive change. When you look at the world today, there’s all too many challenges, all too many barriers, all too many injustices. You look at the work world, there’s all too many things that need to be changed. But I believe there’s never been a better time than right now for each of us to step up and become changemakers.

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

Alex Budak
So, love to connect with you. Find me on LinkedIn, which is my main social network. Check out the book at ChangemakerBook.com, and my personal website AlexBudak.com.

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

Alex Budak
So, here’s my challenge to you. Based on the research I shared with the Italian researchers, go out and fail at something. Go try something. And even if the risks are that it probably won’t succeed, go give it a shot. Use that scientific method and put yourself out there. I think you’ll find that, like lots of my students when I give them this challenge, they’ll find that failure isn’t fatal. And sometimes, even though we’re sure we’ll get rejected, we actually get a yes. So, my challenge to you is to go practice some failure. Go put yourself out there and see what happens as a result.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Beautiful. Alex, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and fun in your changemaking.

Alex Budak
Thanks, Pete. Really enjoyed the conversation.

797: How to Find and Do Your Great Work with Amanda Crowell

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Amanda Crowell shares practical wisdom on how to make time and space for the work that matters most to you.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to get clarity on the work that fulfills you most 
  2. How to say no to the commitments eating up your time
  3. How to stop procrastination from sabotaging your goals

About Amanda

Dr. Amanda Crowell is a cognitive psychologist, speaker, author, and the creator of the Great Work Journals. Amanda’s TEDx talk: Three Reasons You Aren’t Doing What You Say You Will Do has received 1.5 million views and has been featured on TED’s Ideas blog and TED Shorts. Her ideas have also been featured on NPRAl JazeeraThe Wall Street JournalQuartz, and Thrive Global. 

Amanda lives in New Jersey with her husband, two adorable kids, and a remarkable Newfiepoo named Ruthie. 

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, sponsors!

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Amanda Crowell Interview Transcript

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

Amanda Crowell
Thank you. I’m so excited to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited as well. I really want to dig into your book Great Work, but, first, I need to hear about clown school in Spain. What’s the story here?

Amanda Crowell
That’s funny. Well, I had finished my master’s degree, this was in between my master’s and my Ph.D., and I had had kind of a rough couple years, which I think probably everyone listening can relate to, and I felt like I wanted to go somewhere where I couldn’t talk to anyone and no one could really talk to me. So, I went to Spain, I went to an island off the coast of Spain. Tenerife, it’s actually off the coast of Africa but it’s a Spanish island, and I did language school for about, I don’t know, maybe it was three weeks of language school.

And then I planted myself in Santiago de Compostela, which is just a little part of Spain above Portugal, and was looking for things to do. So, I saw that one of the local theater companies was offering a clown school, and I thought that would be fun, not really realizing that my maybe minimal understanding of Spanish would sort of get in the way.

And I found that it both did and also didn’t because clowning is very…it can be very physical but there was one experience where I didn’t realize it but we were playing a game where the person who’s the focus of the game stands in front of the room, and everybody else in the class stands on the other side, and as long as you’re funny, they will stand still, but if you stop being funny, they will move forward, like rush you, like an army.

Like, somehow, my mind knew this because I started telling the story of Finding Nemo the movie, which had come out that summer. And they had this very perplexed look on their face the whole time, and then finally they got it together and started rushing me. And later, they told me in our conversational Spanish-English thing that we would do that I was repeating the same thing that the person who came before me had done but I had no idea he also told the Nemo story.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, what are the odds?

Amanda Crowell
Well, apparently my brain totally heard it, I was like, “Oh, we’re talking about Nemo, so I’ll just tell that story too,” which they did find funny for at least a little bit.

Pete Mockaitis
And so, did you have any clown performances afterwards?

Amanda Crowell
We had a clown performance at the end of the two weeks of clown school, and then the person who was running it invited a friend of mine, and I had to go to a clowning performance, like on the coast, which is like 45 minutes, I guess, west of Santiago de Compostela so we got on a car and went there. and I didn’t perform but I was part of the troupe that was like sort of hanging around backstage and stuff, so that was fun.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you put your clown skills to work in future times?

Amanda Crowell
Well, as a mother, my clown skills are required every day, and as a professor, I think my students do find me to be engaging and funny, and I’m quick on my feet. And the main rule of clowning, much like improv, is that you have to just do what you are invited to do. If you’ve been invited to walk around on your hands then, to the best of your ability, you have to. In improv, they call that “Yes, and.” It’s basically the same in clowning. It just tends to be a little bit more physical. And being forced to do something just because you’ve been asked to do it, because that’s the rule, is very freeing. It creates a different kind of habit of participation that I found very useful in all of life.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! Never would’ve guessed. Okay, clown takeaways. Powerful. All right.

Amanda Crowell
Powerful clown takeaways, yes. I guess we’re done here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m curious to hear some powerful takeaways from your book Great Work: Do What Matters Most Without Sacrificing Everything Else. Can you start us off with any particularly surprising or fascinating or counterintuitive discoveries you’ve made along the way as you put this together?

Amanda Crowell
Well, I think that the cornerstone, like the piece of insight or the foundation of the book as a whole is a little bit in reaction to what I would call sort of high-performance productivity hacks, which I, like everyone sort of, love. Like, tell me exactly how Steve Jobs was able to do that. Tell me what Tim Ferriss does in his 4-Hour Workweek.

But there’s a way that that kind of high-performance productivity stuff keeps you always racing against the clock. You could be more productive, more productive, more productive. And that’s how I lived my life and had a couple of sort of full-body rebellions and sort of mental health concerns, feeling anxious. I wasn’t feeling satisfied.

And it wasn’t really until I realized that there’s another way to be powerfully productive that I took on. And then what surprised me, this is the big surprise, is that doing it that other way, that not high-powered doing more like really striving to be busy, striving for more accomplishments, that when you let that go and you do it this other way, then you actually gain access to what you want the most, which is your great work, which is the work you’re being called to do, the work that requires your full capacity in order to break through the human condition and put that work out there – the art, the scientific discoveries, the businesses you want to build. There’s a way to do those things much more quickly, much more powerfully, much more successfully for most people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, what is that way?

Amanda Crowell
Yeah, that’s a great question. So, that way is what’s outlined in the book. So, it’s got the different pieces of it. On the one hand, it’s about doing much, much less. The sort of high-performance productivity idea is you can do so much more and you won’t be super-stressed, sort of like the promise of it. And, actually, the number one step of this other way is to do tons less, to back out, say no, protect your time so that you are creating space for resilience, because you have to protect your resilience, which is your number one resource, and create a vacuum of space into which your great work can build, and bloom, and like take up space in your life.

People, I find, try to squeeze their great work into the margins of their life, but it’s their most important work. It’s the work that they want to be known for, it’s the work they want to create their legacy, and yet they’re like, “Well, I’m trying to do it on Saturday mornings, and if I had an hour after work, I’d try to do a little of it then,” and that’s very backwards. That’s prioritizing the expectations of others and not being strategic about your time so that you create actual time and actual resilience in yourself to do that work.

And then there’s just figuring out where your great work is, which is a certain amount of visioning, and believing what you hear, and trying to understand the voices in your head and differentiating them from each other. And, honestly, I already said it but I’m going to say it again, like really believing what you hear.

I find that a lot of very creative, innovative people will tell you that the thing they want the most is just not possible for them, “I’ve already got a family so I really can’t be an entrepreneur,” or, “I’m a lawyer, I can’t be an artist, I can’t write a book,” or whatever. And really learning to believe the voice that’s calling you from the inside is a big part of figuring out where your great work is. Often, people know what it is. They just refuse to believe it. They refuse to give it any credence.

Once you know where your great work is, then it’s the steps to turning it into reality. And that piece of it is about understanding the relationship of the ideas, like you feel like, “I want to change the face of medicine,” and you have an hour. How do you change the face of medicine in an hour? And so, there’s filling the space between those two so that you understand what a vision is, and then there’s other levels. Accessible aspiration that you can do in a year, what you can do in 90 days, what you can do this week, and what you can do today.

And then you know that your efforts are accumulating towards your great work, so there’s that practical kind of time management piece of it. And then the last piece is really developing self-expertise, which is also about allowing the productivity advice that you hear to be relevant or not, and putting together your own elixir of what really works for you. And that’s where a lot of the mindset stuff comes in as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Alrighty. Well, starting with zeroing in on what is the great work and the calling and the vision and stuff, how do we arrive at that and get real clarity on, “This is the thing, and this is not the thing”?

Amanda Crowell
Yeah. And there will be multiple things. So, sometimes it’s like, “Well, I love all of these things,” and it’s not a matter of denying parts of yourself. It’s a matter of prioritizing and choosing, and giving one of those things enough time to actually grow into something. So, I think I mentioned, like, sometimes people don’t know what their great work is, and they are really uncertain that they have great work inside of them, “Some people have great work but I’m just not one of them. I’m all over the place, and I’m kind of lazy, this isn’t resonating with me.”

But I have found that in every conversation, truly with people who want to talk it through and figure it out, that great work is in all of us. So, sometimes it’s a matter of doing some sort of searching. So, you can do sort of auditing of your prior experiences, “What’s always true?” One really key indicator that something is part of your great work is when other people do it, you feel really jealous.

So, I remember there is this story of, this is really resonating with the whole clown thing, one of my bosses in the past was Little Mikey on Sesame Street. So, you know how they have kids on Sesame Street who talk to Kermit the Frog. So, my boss was Little Mikey talking about what is love with Kermit the Frog in the ‘70s, which means that the puppeteer doing Kermit the Frog was Jim Henson himself. And I literally could not handle that that had happened to him.

And that feeling of just waves of whatever you want to call it, envy or jealousy or just, “Why didn’t it happen to me?” or like yearning is a real indication that there’s something in that that you really want for yourself. So, looking at the things that you’ve been envious about over time, childhood dreams, like re-invigorating, “I’ve always wanted to be a writer,” or, “I’ve always wanted to be a musician,” or, “I’ve always wanted to cure cancer,” or, “I’ve just always wanted to be a businessman,” like the Warren Buffett of the future.

Those give you the clues. And sometimes you can’t nail it down before you get into action. It’s often the case that taking steps in the direction of what you think you might want quickly clarifies, “I do not want this,” or, “Wow, this is amazing. I light right up. I start to feel satisfied again. I feel excited. I want to find the time to do it. I’m not watching as much Netflix or playing as many video games because I’m called, I’m drawn to do this other thing.”

Once you know what it is, then you have to protect that time, and that’s where saying no and doing less starts to become the game because if you’re good at what you do, people want you to do it for them, and you should. There are lots of opportunities. If it’s a great opportunity that takes you in the direction that you want to go in, I’m all for it, but there’s lots of sort of random one-offs.

In the book, we talk about how to evaluate whether an idea is a good one, whether it moves you towards your great work. And it really just comes down to, like, “Can you see the connection between what you’re doing and your great work, like as you’ve defined it?” And the example we use is, like, building a pergola in your backyard, because this actually happened to us.

We just decided we wanted a pergola in our backyard, which is actually something you can buy off the internet and they send you all the wood, and they say, “Oh, you can do it in a weekend,” but, of course, that’s not true. It’s going to be many weekends of trying to put up this wooden grape arbor thing in your backyard.

And it’s like, whether or not building a pergola in your backyard is your great work depends on how it fits into this larger system of the things you spend your time doing. So, if you’re in the middle of flipping your house and you want to get big return on investment, you feel like you’re going to get more money for your house, then building a pergola is a great use of your time because you can see the connection.

But if it just feels interesting but, really, you don’t spend that much time in the backyard and you only thought it was cool once, then no matter how compelling it is in that moment, you can step in and say, “I need to protect my time so that I have the time to do what I’m really here to do.” It’s a skill. It’s a skill that’s developed over time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, could you share an example of a client or someone who found themselves overwhelmed with all the stuff and then trimmed it down and pursued great work to cool results?

Amanda Crowell
Yeah, so many. And I’d say that that’s one of the strengths of the book is that it’s just filled with case studies. So, people find themselves in all kinds of situations. Like, we come to our great work when, like today, it’s always just today, and every day is filled with things. So, sometimes people find themselves really stretched very thin around expectations that people have, like they’ve got children. I’m not saying expectations as though those things don’t matter, because they do. You do have to take care of your children.

If you’re in the sandwich generation, where you have both children and parents who need care, that’s a real thing. It takes a lot of time to do that. If you also have a business, and your husband has a business and he wants your help with it, so that’s the example that’s in the introduction of the book, actually. It’s a woman who was in that exact situation. She had heard me speak, and she stayed on the Zoom length until people had left, and then was just like, “I’m hearing everything you’re saying, and you’re absolutely right, but I can’t.”

I think she wanted me to convince her that she could but she was maxed out. She was taking care of her mom. She was helping her husband because he wasn’t very good with the books of his business. She had a coaching business of her own, and that’s what she wasn’t getting to. She wasn’t writing the books she wanted to write and she wasn’t creating the program that she wanted to create, which is like, “I just can’t get to it.” And I’m like, “Of course, you can’t get to it because you’re doing all of these things.”

So, she is an example of somebody who knew what they wanted but couldn’t get to it. That’s very common. And so, that, over the course of a couple of years, talking to her and encouraging her to piecemeal, bit by bit, release herself from all this overcommitment, so, like, she found someone at her church to take her mother a couple of days a week and that released her from it.

And then there was a really big conversation with her husband where she said, “You have to find someone else to do your books because I can’t get to what I need to get to,” and he was very disappointed and felt kind of betrayed, but that was her reality, that she was never going to get to what mattered to her until she was able to put some of his own burden back on him because she had accepted it all, and now she needed to give some of it back. And so, in bits and pieces like that.

A lot of what I do is very, like, as long as you’re doing something today that aligns to what you wanted to do this week, which aligns to what you wanted to do in 90 days, you’re doing it. Because the other thing that I think, for her in particular was really powerful, was knowing she was done because she never ever felt done, just this endless to-do list. And it was the feeling of, like just, “What am I striving for? Like, I’m exhausted. I never exercise. I don’t eat well.”

And so, once you’ve done the things aligned to your great work, and you’ve met the expectations that you’ve drastically pared back, your life changes even before you’re doing the great work. You feel so much better. And I talked a little bit about resilience being your number one resource, this is where that kicks in.

When you start feeling better, the things that are hard – innovation and creativity, problem-solving, collaboration – all the things that are the skills of the 21st century economy, you’re better able to do them when you’re not exhausted, hungry, in pain, and just maxed out and brain dead. So, for her, doing all of those things made it possible to start actually making progress, and she has gotten very far, I would say, in the time since we worked together.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And do you have any pro tips on how one goes about exiting burdens, and reducing the load, and saying no and these sorts of things?

Amanda Crowell
I do, yes. Some of it is making a list of the things you’ve agreed to do, the projects, is what David Allen would call them in Getting Things Done, like anything that requires more than one step is a project. So, what projects do you have ongoing? And if you’re, walking your sister’s dog, and you’re planning the school party for your kids, and you’re the person who does birthdays at work, and you sing in the choir, those are all commitments.

And then looking at that list of commitments, some of them will be the obvious elephants in the room, like, “I don’t want to do it. It doesn’t make me happy to do it. I’m just doing it out of obligation. And the person that I’m feeling obligated to is not that really important, it’s not my mother. It’s the woman at church who handed it off to me and refuses to take it back every time I try to give it to her.” Those are the sort of topline things that can create instant relief and make you feel tons better right away.

So, in that case, it’s about having the difficult conversations. And sometimes if you have a coach, going through that, and a roleplaying thing can be really helpful, but, really, it’s about the rubber hits the road. You open your mouth, and say, “I’m really sorry. I know I said I would do it but I can’t.” And what’s interesting about those kinds of conversations is that they cause a lot of edge ahead of time. But the minute they’re done, the relief and the joy and the happiness that you don’t have to do it anymore is so awesome, it sort of drives you forward into the other things. So, that’s one. That’s like literally saying no to things that you’ve committed to, backing out of them.

That’s the hardest and so that’s where we always start. But there are other things that don’t require so much overt acknowledging of what you’re doing. I like to call it doing B-minus work, which is where…like, I was in consulting for a number of years before I started back as a professor at a university, which is what I do now in addition to the coaching and consulting and speaking stuff that I do. But when I was in consulting, which is a very billable hours kind of environment, it was very overwhelming the number of tasks that you had to do, and you felt you had to do all of them really well.

And I noticed that there were a lot of those tasks that, if you look at them in smaller pieces, there were parts of them that you could do just good enough. Now, those particulars are very particular for the job. Every job has them. This is what I’ve learned in coaching all these people over all these years, is, for example, hospice nurses.

They travel around, they get out of their car, they go into the house, they meet with their client, they come back out, they have to write up notes in between…they’re supposed to do it in between the clients but they all do it at night at home because they need to get off to the next client. They’re probably driving their car.

So, the typical advice given to them is to, “Do your notes before you leave the house,” but if you go into that and think, “Which exact pieces of the notes do I need to do, because when I try to think of it later, I’d forgotten a lot of it?” you can figure out that, “There’s just three fields that I should fill in. And then when I come back to do it at night, it’s much faster.”

So, things like that, where you don’t have to do it in this full-trotted, full-throated way, “I’m going to do all my notes as fast as I can, and somehow be this superhuman.” “I’m just going to do just these three because those strategically are the ones that matter.” Every job has little pockets where these things matter and these things matter less.

In consulting, one of the things I noticed was these emails that we would send, we would have these big group meetings, and we would send agendas ahead of time, and we would send notes afterwards. The agendas mattered a lot. People came, we had better meetings when the agendas were good and they got them on time.

Nobody, not a single person, ever opened the notes documents that came afterwards. And so, I started writing those as B-minus work, where it was a description of who was there, because you need that for contract work, and how long it was, the location, and then three bullet points of the topics that were covered, and not a single person noticed it didn’t impact the workflow, “My boss didn’t care.”

And so, instead of 30 minutes, it was 5 minutes, and 25 minutes of my time is back. So, there’s bits and pieces of your workflow, when you look at it in smaller pieces, that can release you from this overwhelming feeling without actually changing anything, or nobody even notices that you’re doing something differently but you experience it really differently, and it can be very helpful.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool. All right. Well, you have a fun turn of a phrase, you mentioned three horsemen of the goalpocalypse. What’s the story here?

Amanda Crowell
Yeah. So, I think at one point in this interview, I said something about overcoming the human condition to do your great work. That’s really what I was talking about. We have these things that, when we get tired, we get exhausted, when we get nervous or fearful, they kick in and they’re protective. So, procrastination is one of those horsemen, like, “I want to do it but I don’t want to do it,” “I want to do it, I totally forgot I wanted to do it.”

Perfectionism is one of those, “I’m going to do it perfectly and I’m going to take forever, and I’m never really going to get it out the door because it’s never good enough.” And then overworking is one of those. So, overworking, procrastination, and perfectionism, so like, “I’m going to work myself until I’m a little nub of a person, a little pile of ashes,” and that keeps you from doing your great work, too, because, “I’m so busy. Now is not the time. I have to wait until all these things line up.” These are like sort of things we do to self-sabotage our goals. That’s why they’re the three horsemen of the goalpocalypse.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then, is the thought then if we have trimmed out the other stuff and we have a good vacuum to work with, those just disappear? Or, are there particular prescriptions for them?

Amanda Crowell
A lot of it is mindset work, like reframing your thoughts about things. The ability to do that mindset work is much more possible when you’re not maxed out and totally out of resilience, and burned out, or overworking, that kind. So, for example, procrastination, I have this TED Talk, you can put a link to it in your show notes or whatever, and it’s very popular. It has like, I don’t know, maybe close to 2 million views now.

And I think the reason that it’s so powerful, it’s about procrastination, really, and it talks about what the source of procrastination is, which is this thing called defensive failure. And defensive failure is the idea of how, as humans, we defend ourselves against real failure by failing ahead of time, by procrastinating. So, like, why do we procrastinate? Is it just a strategy? It’s a defense mechanism, but what’s underneath it?

And that’s what the TED Talk is about, and it’s the three mindsets that stop you from doing what you say you will do. So, one is, “I don’t believe I can. Like, other people are athletic but I’m not, so no matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, I won’t be able to be a runner,” for example. And so, you set these exercise goals, you don’t do anything about them because in your own heart and mind, you think you cannot, that there was something granted at birth, you didn’t get it, and all you’re ever going to do is fail at this, and you’re just not up for that. So, that’s one, “I can’t. I cannot. Like, I literally cannot.”

Then there’s, “People like me don’t do things like this,” which is the belonging one, which is like, “If I do this thing, what does it mean about me? And if it’s in conflict with my identity in some way…” My favorite example of this one was when I was learning how to sell my coaching, I was like, “I’m a heart-centered helper type. I’m never going to be pushy.”

So, the thing I wanted to do and how I saw myself clashed. And when that happens, it triggers defensive failure because we never want to be in conflict with ourselves. Our brain really does not allow for it, so you need to resolve that, you need to say, “Oh, there’s room in my identity to be a heart-centered salesperson,” for example.

The solution for the first reason we procrastinate, “I think I can’t,” is to learn all about the brain and understand that everything through effort, over time, with help, anything is possible. Immediately people are like, “You can’t be Einstein.” Fine. Anything normal is possible with effort, over time, with help. Those are the three things. If you’re willing to do those three things, you’re good. So, that’s the resolution to the first.

And then the second is, like, make room in your identity, like resolve it, go meet people, talk to people, read the magazines. Like, learn more about the thing that feels so counter to who you are and find a place for yourself in it, and then procrastination, it does give way. And the final one is, “I don’t want to do it. I just think I should want to do it.”

And this is where everyone tells you, “Oh, you should just…” The world tells you, “You should want to lose weight,” but, actually, you’re like fine with how you look, so you make these goals, “I’m going to go keto,” but you don’t actually care about it. You don’t really want to do it. It just feels like you have to say it because the world says you have to. That’s never going to work because actual real change is very difficult, and if you really don’t want to do it, you’re not going to do it.

So, a lot of that is letting go, like, if you’re happy with how you look, like, let it go. Until the doctor tells you that you are not going to live if you don’t change your behavior, it’s like, follow your own body, whatever. But if you do want to do it but you don’t want to do it, but you do want to do it, like, if you’re stuck in that whole thing, then it’s about building intrinsic interest for it. Find something that interests you. Connect it to your long-term hopes and dreams. Find a way to have actual interests, curiosity, connection, build it up intentionally. Like, go do that work, and that will help the procrastination to go away.

So, those three things are why we procrastinate, so that’s like the resolution, depending on which one it is, for that horseman of the goalpocalypse. And there are similar thoughts and stuff all outlined in the book for the others as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, how does one intentionally build interest and curiosity? I think some folks think, “Hey, you got it or you don’t. Either this thing is interesting to you or it’s not.” If you want more interest and curiosity, how do you build that up?

Amanda Crowell
Yeah. Well, I think, as humans, we can kind of be interested in anything. Think about this. When was the last time you watched a movie that was totally outside of your interest but the story was so good and the characters were so real? And I’m experiencing that right now with the book Ready Player One which is about virtual reality video games, and I’m the last person to play a virtual reality video game. But the story is so compelling that I’m like, “Okay, teach me about this so that I can follow this story.”

When you find an angle on something, you can get excited about it. So, the TED Talk is all built around the fact that I was never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever going to exercise, and then I had these two kids and my body was all messed up, and so I decided I better put all my money where my mouth is and figure out how to exercise. And then I did, and I did triathlon and half marathon. That’s like the structure of the TED Talk.

And I remember having the exact same question that you just posed, which is like, “If I don’t like exercise, I just don’t like it.” But I found that thinking about exercise through a scientific lens was an angle in on it for me. And I found out by reading Runners Magazine, and seeing what kinds of interesting things do these people talk about, and I was like, “Oh, well, that’s interesting.”

I learned all kinds of things about the blood vessels in your fingers, like way out in your extremities, the only way to get them to grow is to do intense cardiovascular fitness stuff, and my fingers were always cold, so I was like, “Well, okay, let’s do a six-mile run. Because if that actually grows blood vessels out into the tips of my fingers, like, okay, I’m interested. Tell me more.”

So, it doesn’t always have to be the big doorway people walk through to be interested in something. I don’t have to watch sports, thank God, because I don’t like them. I didn’t have to watch sports, I didn’t have to be competitive, which I’m not, but, like, all the main things that sort of describe athletic people didn’t work for me. But the science of fitness, the physiology of it, the communities that build up around the little group of people I rode my bike with and the little group of people I learned swimming from, like those things, the sort of tangential parts really worked for me, and I developed quite a lot of interest in exercise.

And the same thing happened with nutrition. When I had an autoimmune flareup thing and I needed to discover how to manage my inflammation naturally, and I suddenly had tons of interests and curiosity and talking to people. So, I think believing that you can find something interesting is sort of step one, and then go talk to the people, read the magazines, see what they’re talking about. Something will catch your eye. If it doesn’t, you always have in your back pocket the connection to your long-term hopes and dreams.

So, my favorite example of this is taxes. There are very few people who are going to be super interested in the tax code, and all of them have already become CPAs. The rest of us are not going to be, like, “Ooh, tell me about this particular deduction and the changes between 2020 and 2021.” None of us feel that way. But we can draw a really clear kind of bright line, “Like, a bright line between doing my taxes and keeping my expenses updated and whatever to my long-term hopes and dreams.”

And really building that out can be enough to help with interest and curiosity, like, “I want to have a stable-enough financial system in place for my business, that if I grow quickly, it won’t overwhelm me, or I won’t find myself in a pickle, or I won’t get audited and freak out. Like, those kinds of bright lines, “Now, I’m going to sit down and do this even without the usual interest and curiosity,” because you can’t build it intrinsically.

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

Amanda Crowell
Only that there’s a journal, the Great Work Journals, there’s three of them. One is like The Great Work Journal, and sort of life-based, and then there’s one for entrepreneurs, and there’s one for students. And it can be a really good way to kind of coach yourself through the process of getting started, staying at it, not procrastinating, helps you build a good gratitude practice.

And those are really, I think, great ways to start once you’ve read the book, and you’re like, “How do I do this?” Get the journal and try to follow it because the people who love it, report that it can be very transformational. So, I just want to make sure I mention that.

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

Amanda Crowell
I like the quote, and I’m not entirely sure who said it, maybe Albert Einstein, that’s like in my brain somewhere, but it’s “Ninety percent of success is showing up.”

It’s like do find that if you just show up and then show up again, you don’t get nowhere. You get somewhere. And then that somewhere can hit the hockey puck or the hockey stick, I guess they call, the exponential curve, and there is no way to hit that if you’re not showing up. And I think it takes the drama out of like, “I need to show up and do big things.” No. Just show up.

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

Amanda Crowell
Yeah. So, the one I talk about the most that I think had the biggest impact on me, and my clients and the schools that I worked with when I was a consultant, is the notion of a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. It’s so fundamental and it gets oversimplified, I think, in the media, into this like, “If you think you can, you can.” And it’s really not about that.

It’s really much more the opposite of that, is much truer, which is if you think you can’t, you won’t. Like, your literal brain will shut you down. If you’re like, “I’m never going to get this math homework done,” your brain is going to reduce all the activation. All the problem-solving centers are going to shut down, like, like you’re not going to do it.

But if you believe that you can, then you get into all the stuff we know about cognitive neuroscience. Like, what does it actually take to learn? What are the skills and strategies? And if you are willing to put in effort, over time, and get help, new strategies, new ideas, new ways, different ways to engage with it, you can learn almost anything.

And it’s incredibly freeing. It takes us all out of this prison of our own making, of like, “I need to do what I’m already good at,” and instead places us in a place of possibility that feels uniquely human, and I think helps us heed the call of our great work.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Amanda Crowell
Well, this has nothing to do with cognitive neuroscience, my favorite book is Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

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

Amanda Crowell
Yeah, what I really like is the DONE app.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, that’s a good one.

Amanda Crowell
It is a good one. I like it and it’s pretty and I feel like looking at it, and I’m so happy to see streaks. I love it.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Amanda Crowell
I like time blocking but not in a super intense way, just like blocking the mornings for creative work, and then blocking time around meetings to return to the ideas. Like, that’s very helpful for me. I use my calendar, like I’m dogmatic about it. I can’t imagine not having a very seriously organized calendar for time blocking.

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?

Amanda Crowell
Well, I think that the idea that there is another way. Like, you don’t have to hustle and grind to do great work. That’s what people seem to come back and say, “Okay, I need to know how to do that. I’ve tried the other way. It didn’t work for me.”

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

Amanda Crowell
I would point them to AmandaCrowell.com. I have a podcast called Unleashing Your Great Work, and you can find a link to that on the website, and also all the buy links to the book. I really think the book is probably the best place to start to really get a sense of who I am, and then listen to the podcast to hear other people talking about their great work so that you can build the courage to actually pursue your own, which is really what it’s all about.

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

Amanda Crowell
I would say it’s, believe what you’re hearing on the inside. If there’s a piece of your job that you’re sort of want to do more of, listen to that and ask for the opportunity to do more of it. if there’s a part of your job that is not really hitting on all cylinders for you, begin the conversation about offboarding that part of it or replacing it with something that’s more your jam, because the more closely aligned you are with your jam, or your great work, the better the work you’ll do and the more valuable you’ll be to the company as well.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Amanda, thank you. I’ve enjoyed this chat and wish you much luck with all your great work.

Amanda Crowell
Thank you so much.

731: How to Harness Motivation…According to Science with Ayelet Fishbach

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Ayelet Fishbach reveals insights into motivation to help you achieve your goals.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The top variable for motivation 
  2. How to find motivation when you’re just not feeling it
  3. How to make incentives really work 

About Ayelet

Ayelet Fishbach is a psychologist and a professor at the University of Chicago. She’s the past president of the Society for the Study of Motivation. She is an expert on motivation and decision making and the author of Get it Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation. Ayelet’s groundbreaking research on human motivation has won her several international awards, including the Society of Experimental Social Psychology’s Best Dissertation Award and Career Trajectory Award, and the Fulbright Educational Foundation Award. 

Resources Mentioned

Ayelet Fishbach Interview Transcript

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

Ayelet Fishbach
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I’m excited to talk about motivation with you. First though, I need to hear about your nine-year old calls you an expert on how to fail. Tell us about this.

Ayelet Fishbach
Yeah. So, I’ll share the story with you. Doing my own things at home and my son is playing video games, and this is not when you usually expect parents to do anything, like this is what we let our kids do so that we can do something else. So, he’s playing these video games, and the monster keeps killing him, and he’s getting frustrated. As you know, this monster, they’re terrible. They’re just killing those innocent kids in the video game.

And I can see that he almost has tears in his eyes, so we asked him, like the entire family, like, “Do you want someone to be there with you?” And then my daughter suggested that she will sit with him so that he can better cope with those monsters, and he replied saying that he wants mom to sit with him because I know how to fail better than anybody else. I was proud.

Pete Mockaitis
So, with him in the failure zone, he’s like you were sort of the expert to assist in that territory. Is that the vibe?

Ayelet Fishbach
Yes, I have a lot of experience with learning from failure, and I think I take it to heart but not as much as he does. So, he realizes that if I’m around, we’re probably going to make fun of this and not take it too much to heart.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that is kind words and something to remember maybe when in tough times. So, I’m excited to talk about motivation and your book Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation. And maybe to kick us off, one of my favorite questions is to hear, when you’re researching a topic for many years, what’s among the most surprising and fascinating discoveries you’ve made about human motivation?

Ayelet Fishbach
We found that giving advice is more motivating than getting great advice from the expert.

Pete Mockaitis
So, if I give advice, I’ll be motivated more so than if I receive advice.

Ayelet Fishbach
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Ayelet Fishbach
And that was kind of cool to us. We predicted that but still it was nice to see that it doesn’t matter what is the domain, whether it’s controlling your finance, or finding a job, or controlling your weight, or studying, those who are struggling are more motivated by giving someone advice than by getting advice back, which was nice.

We found that what predicts adherents to basically any goal, in particular, now we’re looking at New Year’s Resolutions because it’s soon, is how much people are enthusiastic about doing the thing, how much they enjoy doing the thing, and not how important it is, which was surprising for us because you do something, you set a resolution because it is important, not because it is fun to do. Nevertheless, how important that is for you can predict so much.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that’s juicy. And Katy Milkman, we had on the show, in her book How to Change, we talked a little bit about some of those principles in terms of being enjoyable, and that’s sort of like old-fashioned exercise advice, “What’s the best exercise? The one you enjoy and you stick with.” It’s like, “Okay, no, but seriously, what’s going to give me faster or big muscles,” or kind of whatever your outcome you’re shooting for, or lose weight, you name it. But there’s something to it, the adherence, you’re telling me that that’s the top variable you found for tracking adherence is how much you enjoy doing the thing?

Ayelet Fishbach
Yes. And I basically think about it as immediate rewards. And it’s interesting that you mentioned Katy Milkman because we did our research independently and we did get to similar conclusions. Yes, it’s how much you get some immediate feedback that this is working, that this is enjoyable, that you are in it. It’s not just enjoyment. It could be something else that is immediate, like, “It immediately makes me feel proud.”

We recently published a paper that found that even if there’s a slight discomfort, if it’s immediate, then that’s better than nothing. So, realizing that, “This is working because I feel like I’m slightly struggling is good. It motivates.”

Pete Mockaitis
Right. As opposed to, I’m thinking about supplements, it’s like even if it feels a little weird, it’s like, “Okay. Well, it’s doing something as opposed to just nothing,” so that maybe gives you a dash of hope. And what’s funny, what comes to mind now is, as we speak, I just happen to be in one of my best ever weightlifting grooves of my life, and I think that’s exactly what’s going on here, is that because we got some structural and environmental things working in my favor so I have some consistency, and I’ve got a really lovely app called RepCount, which makes it so easy to track what I’m doing, it’s so exciting, rewarding, fun to see, “Oh, I bench-pressed as much as I could last time, and I could do this weight four times. Oh, but this time, I could do it five times.” So, it’s like, “I am stronger than I’ve ever been before. Yes.” And it just feels fantastic.

And then, of course, exercise in its own endorphin-y, positive, biochemically way does what it does, but then I’ve got that immediate reward. So, I really do, it gets me coming back again and again and again because I want to keep breaking records and feeling awesome each time I do, which, at this stage in the game, thankfully, is almost every time. So, I’m into it. And, yeah, my adherence is high because my immediate positive enjoyable feedback is high.

Ayelet Fishbach
Yeah. You actually mentioned out a bunch of things that all contribute to motivation.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, unpack it for me.

Ayelet Fishbach
So, the one thing that you mentioned is that this is immediate, like you do this and you immediately get the feedback that this is working, that you just broke a record. And we know that whatever is immediate is much more motivating than some delayed outcomes that will happen in a week or a month or in a year.

Then another thing that I like about your example is that you looked back, and you say, “Well, I only did three last week, and four earlier this week, and now I can do five.” And looking back is often the way to keep yourself going. If you always look forward then you might never quite be where you want to be, so that might be hard. We often tell people, like, “Look back. Look at how much you have achieved. That will increase your commitment.”

In studies, like students that look back were more motivated to study in particular when they were unsure whether they want to do the thing. Customers standing in line, when they look back, they appreciated more the thing that they’re waiting for. So, looking back is good. And then the last thing that you mentioned is having a miracle target, like, “I want to be at five or at six,” which is also a very good strategy to motivate yourself. So, you just found a combo.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Well, it’s working because sometimes I find myself daydreaming, like it’s Tuesday evening as we speak, I was like, “Oh, boy, Wednesday is a day away. I’m already excited for tomorrow morning to go to the gym.” And I find other times in my life where that was not at all the situation with regard to thinking about the gym.

Well, cool. So, we kind of got a little bit of hodgepodge of fun discoveries and practice how they’re working. So, maybe you could share with us sort of the core thesis of your book “Get It Done” and any key principles that we haven’t hit yet?

Ayelet Fishbach
All right, yes. And so, when I looked at the field of motivation, and I’ve been a motivational scientist for a long time, I feel that what is common to all the interventions, all the strategies that we developed is that they change the situation in order to change the behavior. And so, basically, if we wanted to change someone else’s behavior, we would change their situation, we would change how we present the information to them, or whom they’re going to do the thing, or we are going to give them certain incentives to behave in one way, or a punishment for behaving in another way.

We can apply this to ourselves. We can be the person that shapes our own behavior if we systematically think about the situation in which we put ourselves and how we think about these situations. And I started with this, and then I looked at all the strategies that we have been studying for many years, and thinking that they really fall into four buckets.

And so, when we think about changing our situation in order to motivate ourselves, first bucket or first element is setting a goal. How do we set a goal? Is it a motivating goal? Is it a “do” goal as opposed to a “do not” goal, which might seem urgent but is not fun to pursue? Is it an intrinsic goal? Everything on that. The second element is “How do we monitor progress?” Do we get feedback? Do we look back? Do we look forward? How do we learn from setbacks, from negative feedback? So, all these interventions.

The third element is, “What do we do with everything else?” “I might plan to exercise but I also plan for other things for this early hour in the morning when I thought I would exercise, so that doesn’t work.” How people design their environment for everything else. And then the last element is social support and all the interventions that get people to find other people that will help them.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. So, that’s a nice menu there, bits there to work with. And so, boy, it seems like we talked a good bit about the monitoring of progress in our earlier example. Let’s talk a little bit about setting a goal such that it is a motivating one. I’m thinking we recently interviewed Michal Bungay Stanier who was talking about making goals really juicy and epic that get you going or worthy. What does the research suggest makes a goal more motivating versus less motivating?

Ayelet Fishbach
So, yes, I agree that juicy is good, a goal that is enticing. We find that goals that are intrinsic, that feel good to pursue are motivating. We find that goals that are challenging are more motivating. And so, ideally, you should think about setting a goal that you have maybe 80% chance of achieving on a daily basis. You will not always be successful but you will also not be so unsuccessful that you will give up. The error can be on both sides, and the study shows that when people are in this zone, where they are not sure that they can do it, but if they work hard, they will. In this uncertain zone, this is where you see the energy level picks up.

We want people to set “do” goals more than “do not” goals, or approach goals not avoidance. The early research on this actually looked at thought suppression and Wiseman described that the study seemed intuitive. It’s much easier to ask people to think about something than not to think about something.

I can ask you to think about brown bears. You can do this. If I asked you not to think about white bears, that’s impossible. I can ask you to think about your current partner. You can do this. If I asked you not to think about your ex, you think about your ex, I think. It’s really hard not to do that. And, indeed, do-not goals are harder. They seem urgent, so if you want to do something immediately, then avoidance goals are maybe a good fit, but usually try to avoid them.

Pete Mockaitis
Avoiding avoidance goals.

Ayelet Fishbach
And a number, put a number on it is something that is pulling you toward it. One of the nice studies on that looked at marathon runners. A marathon runner tried to run the marathon under four hours, and so there are many more people that finished the marathon in three hours and 59 minutes than in four hours and one minute.

Pete Mockaitis
I bet, yeah.

Ayelet Fishbach
Right? Because it’s just like you really want to do this under four hours, so you just try to push very hard toward the end. It’s such a nice demonstration of the power of goals.

Pete Mockaitis
So, you mentioned four key principles there. One is sort of what do we do with the other stuff, like in the morning example, like there’s other stuff that happens in the morning. What are some of the best practices there?

Ayelet Fishbach
So, we never just want one thing. I would say that, to begin with, we need to realize that we want several things simultaneously. And we can think about identifying activities that achieve several things simultaneously. And so, a good way to pursue a goal is such that you also get something else out of doing it. If you bike to work, you get your commute and your exercise and saving money at the same time.

Some activities help some goals but interfere with other goals. If I make my lunch at home, well, I will be eating healthily and I will save money, but this is going to interfere with my goal to get to work on time because I have a lot to do in the morning and I’m slow.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. We’re socializing when the colleagues go out to Chipotle or wherever.

Ayelet Fishbach
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “Oh, well, I just have this, so, sorry.”

Ayelet Fishbach
Yes. And so, thinking about the impact that your action has on multiple goals is important. So, some activities achieve several goals, and they are good. We call them multi-final. Sometimes we fare to the saying, “Feed two birds with one scone,” if you will. Think about it.

Pete Mockaitis
This is very clever. Scone, stone, wow. This is an original. I like it.

Ayelet Fishbach
Thank you. So, other activities are what we call equifinal. This is all roads lead to Rome. So, there are several activities to achieve the same thing and when you think about this superficially, it feels like, “Well, why do I need more than one path to pursue a goal? Why do I need another way of exercising?” given that you just identified this thing that works so well for you. Well, we need that as a backup plan, and we need this to increase our confidence.

And so, when people identify several ways to do the same thing, they are more confident. One of the studies that I like, found that for new gym goers, new people at the gym, learning that there many options to get their exercise increase their motivation. For those that have been there for a while, that doesn’t really matter.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “Yeah, I already knew that. Thanks.”

Ayelet Fishbach
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay.

Ayelet Fishbach
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
And then social support? I’m all about accountability groups, or people challenging and inspiring and being workout buddies, or whatever. What are some of your top do’s and don’ts when it comes to social support?

Ayelet Fishbach
So, there are a few ways in which we should think about social support. There are some goals that we are doing with others, and many of the important things that we do, we do with others. I do my research with others. I raise children with my spouse. I work with colleagues. We do things with other people. And then we should think about, “How do we make sure that we are efficient in our division of labor, how to combat social loafing?”

And many of the strategies that motivation scientists think about are meant to combat social loafing. How do we make sure that, when several of us are doing something together, we are not doing less? The classic studies found that when you put a few people and ask them to do something, either to pull a rope or just make a lot of noise, more people, less work that everybody is doing. And so, we think about how to make contribution identifiable, how to increase the identity of a person as a group member so that the presence of other people will not make them work less hard.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. You know, this brings me back to thinking about band in high school because I was pretty mediocre as a saxophonist, not the best, not the worst. But then, boy, when there were times when each person had to individually go into the room and play the piece for the director, the practicing really happened because there was no hiding in the crowd as to the sound. It’s like he knew what you could do and what you couldn’t do, not that he was going to scream at you but you just didn’t want to be the guy who didn’t know how to play the stuff. That’s just not a pleasant feeling.

Ayelet Fishbach
Yes, as long as you remember that you need to listen to these kids individually sometimes, then you could keep the motivation high. If it’s hard to identify who’s doing what, then we tend to procrastinate.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Ayelet Fishbach
Then the other aspect of social support is just the people that are helping you with your own goals. So, they are there, they want more of the real estate, they want you to do well. You really need those people to keep going. It is actually impossible to adhere to any goal when the people around you think this is fully so unnecessary.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so these are some great principles. And I’d love it if you could help me get creative about applying them into some career situations. I guess I’m thinking about the stuff that tends to get left behind. And maybe it’s the email inboxes that never seems to hit zero, or maybe there are some strategic thinking and things I want to run after, or maybe there are some goals that show up in my annual review and I never seem to find the time to actually advance them until it’s a bit of a scramble towards before the next annual review.

So, in these sorts of fuzzy things that might be hard to put a number on, etc., and might not even be things we are interested in intrinsically, how do we work some magic to tap into an extra level of motivation on the tricky ones?

Ayelet Fishbach
So, these are ongoing goals. The problem with email is exactly as you mentioned. It never ends.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Ayelet Fishbach
You might get to zero emails at some time in your life. It will probably last till like 30 seconds, so it’s really just keep doing it. It’s not reaching the end of it. And when goals don’t have a clear beginning or end, they are much harder to pursue. I talk in the book about the middle problem, which happens for goals that do have a beginning and end. But in the middle, motivation is not great, like, “I started the project. I was all into it. I’m about to submit the project. I’m super energized, but in the months in between, I can’t bring myself to work on that thing. This is hard.”

In our studies, we found that people relax their performance standards, they even relax their ethical standards. In one study, like, we found the people literally cut corners in the middle. That is we gave people five shapes, like drawn on paper, and a pair of scissors, and they had to cut them. And the first shape looked great. The last shape was pretty decent. In the middle, they literally cut corners. They were not good at their job.

And I think that this is a bit with like the problem with email, “It’s just that it doesn’t feel like I’m accomplishing anything. I’m just like on the treadmill, keep going.” It helps to find some markers, some beginnings, some ends, that sets your daily goal to answer a certain number of emails or address a certain aspect of the work so that you can achieve it and get to something that you can accomplish, to some end.

I also want to add that we ran a study a few years back in an advertising company where we asked people that was in Seoul, in South Korea, and we asked half of the people to reflect back on what they achieved, and the other half to reflect on what they have yet to achieve. So, either look at what you’ve done or what you still have to do.

And what we found is that those who look back were happier with their job, and those who looked ahead were more motivated to move forward. They had a higher level of aspiration. And so, yes, they were more thrusted with their current position but they were also more eager to do something else that’s even better. And I thought that that was good.

Pete Mockaitis
So, they’re both getting some good vibes. Can we recap? So, with people looking back, felt more what?

Ayelet Fishbach
Felt better about what they do. They liked what they do more.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so maybe more satisfied with where things stand. And then those who looked forward were more hungry to get after it. Is that fair to say?

Ayelet Fishbach
Yeah, they wanted to be on the next level already. They wanted to progress.

Pete Mockaitis
interesting. Well, I guess now I want to know in terms of their behaviors afterwards because, in some ways, feeling good sometimes results in us taking care of business. In other times, feeling good results in us chilling out and not pushing it as much.

Ayelet Fishbach
Exactly. And we can predict when we will see each one of them. The less committed people tend to work harder when they feel good about what they do, when they look back, and they say, “Well, I already did some,” they work harder. The fully committed people are more motivated when they get feedback on what they have not yet done. Although, in this study that I told you, we didn’t really look at commitment. Everybody was pretty committed. We really just wanted to see how high is their level of aspiration, how much they want to already be doing the next thing.

Pete Mockaitis
That is great. So, we got a lot of nice foundational fundamental principles to bear in mind as we’re designing goals and chasing after them and how we pursue them. I’m curious about sort of in the heat of battle, in the moment, it’s like, “Aah, I just don’t feel like it.” Any tips, tools, stuff to do then and there?

Ayelet Fishbach
I would ask why you feel like this.

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, I didn’t get a great night’s sleep. Oh, I’ve just been going at it for a while. I’m just kind of tired of it.”

Ayelet Fishbach
Yeah. Well, so you say that you didn’t get enough sleep, but the way you were, pretending to be that person that’s unmotivated, it sounded like you’re just not excited about what’s ahead of you. You look at your day and it seems kind of boring. It’s not intrinsically motivating. And if that would be my diagnosis, now, notice that I encourage people to run their own diagnosis. But in our play here, I’m diagnosing that what you do is just not exciting for you, so either you bring excitement to what you do or you do something else. You find another path to be successful at your job.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, okay, so how does one bring excitement to what you do when it’s not there naturally?

Ayelet Fishbach
Something that you can do, actually, pretty easy, you can try to listen to music while you work. You can try to make your environment more enticing, so put around you images of things that make it more fun. In one of our studies, we encouraged students in a math class to listen to music while they were working on their problems.

The teachers were unhappy with us but the students were doing more math problems. I don’t think that they were more excited about the math. They were more excited about the music, or some support, some color of pencils, so it kind of made it a party. So, you can make your office more like a party without changing the actual work that you need to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s true. I guess I’m thinking about there are times when I’ll take a phone call while walking, and so that’s kind of more interesting. Or, if I don’t need much brain power, like while organizing an area, a space, tidying up so it’s sort of like, “This call, I’m not looking forward to, but there is something that I can feel better about in doing that that works for me.” So, that’s cool. Thank you.

Ayelet Fishbach
And if you think about it, many people go to work to be with other people that they like, so it’s really not about the task. I’m not saying that you should not do something interesting. I think that everybody should try to find something interesting to do that the work in itself is rewarding. But in terms of an immediate change that you could do, you could do it with people that you like.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure. What colors you like, colored pencils for the math problems. I think a great pencil makes an impact. Sure. Okay. And then do you have some thoughts when it comes to when we’re motivating ourselves versus trying to motivate others? Do kind of like the same rules and principles apply or are there some distinctions and ways we want to play the game a bit differently based on the target?

Ayelet Fishbach
That’s an interesting question. The main difference is when we look at incentives. Research on incentives, it’s easier to think about how to incentivize others than to incentivize yourself. Of course, you can use the wrong incentives for others as well as for yourself. In the book, I give the story of French colonials in Hanoi. They were trying to get rid of the rats that were all over the city, which was partially because the way that the French colonials built the city but, anyways, there are rats everywhere, and they decided to have a bounty system by which they give people a cent for a dead rat, actually for the tail of the rat.

Terrible incentive systems because the way to make money is by bringing dead rats, and the way to have dead rats is by, first, having live rats, and so the residents of Hanoi were breeding rats in order to get the money from the government. So, incentives can backfire and cannot do what we intended them to do, whether we incentivize others or ourselves. But when we incentivize ourselves, that’s, in particular, hard because we often find it hard to think how will we do that. And this is where often we see people struggling, like, “What do I give myself? And how do I make sure that I don’t give it to myself when I don’t deserve it?” Not impossible, but harder. And the other end, self-control is much more when incentivizing ourselves.

Pete Mockaitis
You’re right. It’s almost sounds like you need a referee in terms of like, “I’m going to have some chocolate when I accomplish this thing.” But if you have the chocolate in the corner, it’s like, “Well, it’s right. I guess I can just have it now regardless of whether I do the thing.” So, I don’t have any clever ideas other than having a referee, a gatekeeper, holder of the chocolate or whatever, monitoring things. Are there any other tricks?

Ayelet Fishbach
I think that you are referring to having another person helping you, and absolutely having other people is always helpful. Giving gifts to yourself, a thing that you would not afford on a daily basis, like this coffee that’s way too expensive so you only give it to yourself when you feel that you have done something special, or going to the spa because you exercised a certain number of days this month, which, again, might be something that you, well, you can afford every week but is a reward. That’s harder.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, if it’s indulgent and kind of inaccessible, then that just sort of makes sense in terms of you’re less likely to say, “Well, I’m just taking a spa day here on Tuesday. Just that what’s happening.” That, of course, requires a little bit of thinking and planning in terms of like the obligations of the day and, yeah, I guess you’d feel more lame if you just took the incentive prematurely as opposed to chocolate which is something you might do anyway.

Ayelet Fishbach
Yes, exactly. Yes.

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

Ayelet Fishbach
Gosh, so you already realized that I am thinking about many things that people can do to keep themselves motivated. I will follow your question because if you just let me talk, we are going to just like, “Aargh.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, how about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Ayelet Fishbach
Oh, a favorite quote. Let me go with Gramsci, “History teaches but it has no pupils.” The way I take it is that there is a lot of feedback out there but we often don’t learn. And I am particularly reminded of this when I look at how much people learn from negative feedback and from setbacks. And we often think about negative feedback and setbacks as something that you should just ignore and keep going. And I say, “Well, there was some interesting important lesson there. Have you learned that? Maybe not.” So, I will go with “History teaches but it has no pupils.”

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

Ayelet Fishbach
We did a study in which we wanted to explore people’s aversion to investing in means, like people want to invest their resources in this thing itself, not in a means to the thing.

And so, we auctioned a signed by a University of Chicago economist to some people, and they told us how much they’re willing to pay, and the highest bid is going to get the book. Then we took another group of people from the same population, and we auctioned a tote bag, actually a fancy tote bag that contained the same book.

And so, we asked these people, “How much are you willing to pay for the bag that contains this book?” People were willing to pay around $25 for the book and around $12 or $13 for the bag and the book. In economic terms, the value of the bag was negative. And so, that was a very cool illustration of how much we don’t like to invest our resources with a thing that is not the thing itself, that is a way to get there.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’m just going to chew on that for a while. Thank you. Whew, that just makes me think about so many businesses in terms of you can buy a virtual assistant, that’s another business I run. You can pay for a virtual assistant, or you can pay for a podcast production. And that person is doing that thing, and yet how you present it can have wildly different implications for willingness to pay and such. And that’s kind of mind-blowing. Thank you. Whew!

All right. And how about a favorite book?

Ayelet Fishbach
I read a lot of novels so I would say my favorite book, anything by Elena Ferrante – how does it work? – “The Lying Life of Adults.”

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

Ayelet Fishbach
So, that was an important question. Go to my webpage AyeletFishbach.com. Everything is there, information on my book, on my social media, on my research, my publications, my teaching, this podcast hopefully soon. Everything is on AyeletFishbach.com.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?
Ayelet Fishbach
Okay. So, how can you work better with other people? How can you bring someone to help you, bring someone who is your role model, do something in order to connect to a person? Your challenge will be to do something with another person either in order to do it better or to connect better to that person.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Ayelet, this has been a treat. I wish you much luck and motivation in all your pursuits.

Ayelet Fishbach
Thank you very much. I hope so and I very much enjoyed talking to you.