Mindset Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Daniel, welcome back!

Daniel Coyle
Hey, it’s good to be back, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about flourishing. You’ve done some great work here with your book and a lot of research. Could you kick us off by sharing what’s perhaps one of the most surprising and fascinating discoveries you’ve made about us humans and workers and flourishing?

Daniel Coyle
Two of them. One is that it’s still happening. It feels like we’re living in this dystopia sometimes, but, man, there’s a lot of good stories of human flourishing. And by flourishing, we should kind of define it, I guess, which is joyful, meaningful growth. Joyful, meaningful growth, like the highlights of our lives, the thing we all want for ourselves and our kids and our work and our colleagues.

And the biggest surprise of it, when I went into this sort of researching, finding people who were flourishing, I had the assumption that I had learned, which was that kind of you flourish alone, like it’s up to you, right? We’re in this individualistic culture. It’s like my deal.

And what I found over and over again was that’s not how it works. That’s just not how it works. There’s no hermits in caves in Switzerland who are like kicking ass flourishing. We require other people to bring out the best version of ourselves. It’s we are pre-wired for this. You can try all you want and grind all you want and try to be the solo mountain climber but, in the end, flourishing is a human ecosystem and it’s interdependent.

And if we think back on the times in our lives where we’ve grown the most, I’ll bet you dollars to donuts, as they say, that you weren’t by yourself. You were surrounded by people. When we look at stories of great success, the narratives we receive are often stories of the solo hero. But scratch that just a little bit, just look half an inch beneath and you will find ecosystems of support. And that’s what those places are building.

They’re building community. It’s the power of community. And where that gets really interesting is applying it to our workplace because a lot of times our workplace are built under that similar assumption that everybody’s you’re on your own, man. You get promoted by yourself, you get reviewed by yourself, but the places that I visited were really good at creating that kind of connective energy and that group brain that makes one plus one equal ten.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I love that so much, and it’s funny that I think I’m coming around to realizing something that has been on my mind for 28-ish years. And it was this, back in high school, I participated in a marching band. I was in alto sax, if you’re curious. And I was amazed at marching band camp.

So here in the summer for about two weeks, like 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.-ish, we just played music and tried to move to different spots on the football field over and over and over again. And so, yeah, and so we’re talking about seven hours, day after day after day to put together a little marching band show.

And so I always thought, “You know, this is fun.” I was there. I liked meeting people, you know, it was a thing to do, my brother did it, and I just had a good time just hanging out with people and playing some music, doing a show.

But I always thought, during marching band camp and many times afterwards, “Boy, if I could just buckle down by myself and put that kind of energy and attention and time into an endeavor, the way we do in marching band camp to do a little music show on a football field, what kind of incredible things would I be able to achieve? What kind of flourishing and growth could I encounter?”

And, well, you know what, Daniel, it may not surprise you, you’ve done the research, 28 years later, I still can’t do that by myself.

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, right. It’s true. That’s how we’re wired. It goes deep. Think, let’s just move the camera back a few hundred thousand years, right? Who’s going to survive? The group that can cooperate and do their marching band, call it killing a mammoth or whatever, or the lonely, strong, courageous lone wolf guy? I mean, there’s no question.

So when we play a game, let’s say we’re trying to do something and we’re both wired up to some machine that measures our overall happiness and energy and our brain waves, our shared success lights us up way more than our individual success.

Like, if you want to tap in, if you see your life as like a journey where you need a lot of energy and a lot of ideas, don’t do it alone, right? Really finding these ways to connect, finding these communities. And the power of community, that’s a word that I always thought was such a boring word, like you’d see community meeting on a sign and it would kind of be like, “Oh, snooze,” you know?

But what I’ve realized in looking at these flourishing places is that they don’t see community as a noun, they see it as a verb, as a set of actions. If you’re going to form a community, it’s not just, “Oh, yeah, we swim in the same area at the same time.”

Super intentional about creating these little pauses where people come together in the workplace. Super intentional about creating spaces where people can explore questions, simple questions like, “How should we march across this football field? Like, how should we play this song?” The workplace version of that.

And they’re not operating as lone wolves. They’re creating spaces where they can come together and explore that mystery, and all their brains are lighting up and they’re growing and changing and they’re creating these little, I don’t know, like little gardens, right? And like what happened with you.

And I think everybody has their own marching band camp experience back there where you come out of it and you say, “I’m kind of different now. Like, I grew and I helped other people grow.” And that’s like the most core human energy.

And what’s interesting is that we’ve kind of like hollowed it out of the workplace. Like, all the fun and energy that is possible for humans when they come together to do projects, our workplace has been really good about, like, eliminating that in some ways. There are a lot of works that feels very hollow.

I’ve heard it called the emptiness epidemic where it’s like, “Oh, man, I know exactly what I have to do. I have all the information. I have exactly my markers, you know, my KPOs. I’ve got everything that I need, but I just don’t have any meaning and I don’t feel like that energy and I don’t feel that connection.”

And so these places are kind of the antidote to the emptiness epidemic that I think a lot of us are feeling around the workplace right now.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, there are so many places to go there. So if you find yourself in that spot, exactly as you described, you’ve got all the marching orders, the clear KPIs for evaluation, and it’s just kind of lifeless, what’s to be done?

Daniel Coyle
Well, you know, what’s to be done? What’s to be done? It’d be great if I could be like, “Here’s a silver bullet that will solve all the problems.” That doesn’t exist. Two things I would say, though. First of all, reflect on where you are getting a sense of aliveness.

There’s a little litmus test that you can give in terms of flourishing, which is, “Who do I feel most alive with? Is there anybody in this? Who do I feel most alive with?” And the second is, what are you growing together? What are you making together? What are you growing? So ask that.

Find locations in your life. Find the spaces, the conversations, the relationships where you feel that energy in that sense. That’s the first thing. And then start experimenting a little bit. Your culture, your community is the 15 feet around you all the time.

And these little moments, I call them yellow doors, little moments that maybe green doors, for sure we go through them, red doors we don’t. Yellow doors are kind of this where you’re not sure whether you should go through it or not.

And what I saw in these places is that they had the habit of reaching out and, you know, we talk about relationships like they’re a machine, like, “I’m going to go build relationships.” Relationships grow. They grow in tiny moments of warmth, eye contact. And they grow in questions, just asking questions, “What’s energizing you about this podcast right now, Pete? Like, what are you responding to?”

Like, questions that are in the moment where it actually makes people come alive and respond. And, all of sudden, you’re on a different depth with them. You’re on a different level. And the third thing I would say is get good at pausing. Like, our workplace life these days resembles a race, right, an information race and a project race.

And the places that I visited and the people that I visited were exceptionally good at stopping and zooming out a little bit. And when they zoom out, they’re asking questions like, “What does this mean? Like, where is this headed? Who might help me here? What is this going to look like?”

And I really began to see pausing as like the ultimate ninja skill. Anybody can work harder and faster. And in the age of, obviously AI, we’ve got all the answers are right here. We can just go, go, go, go, go and sprint. Every day is a sprint.

But the places that I visited had this ability to say, like before a team would go out on a project, they wouldn’t reflect. They would preflect, like do a pre-flection where it might be like, “Oh, what do we want this to, what’s the ideal outcome? What’s the end state we’re going for? Let’s talk about that for a second. Let’s talk about what’s energizing us about this project. Like, what are you most curious to learn? Where are you curious? And then let’s talk about like, what if everything goes sideways? What does that look like? Like, how will we know we’re screwing up?”

And then afterwards they would do an AAR, similarly, a pause. It feels like a waste of time. The project’s already done, right? But the pause afterwards where you say, “Okay, what went right? We all share. What went wrong? We all share. And what are we going to do differently next time?” It takes like five minutes. Navy SEALs do it. A lot of high-performing organizations do it. Do a preflection and then an AAR.

And they’re just these moments that inject meaning and relationships to what could be just cold, hard KPIs projects. And if you don’t get good at investing at creating those moments, which just take a short amount of time to put some, like, life and oxygen and curiosity and realness and authenticity into them. And that happens in a pause. That happens by everything I just did, was a series of questions, right, “What are you curious about? What do you want to learn? What could go wrong?”

Like, I think we’re so good in our culture as being as worshiping at the altar of the answer, like, “Oh, that guy’s got all the answers. She’s got all the answers. That’s great. They’re so good.” That’s cheap. Like, I’m sorry, but the world has always changed and the answers are going to be different tomorrow than they are today. So having an answer is less valuable than it ever has been in the history of the world. You can get answers a lot of places.

Having great questions, however, is becoming more and more and more valuable. And those questions don’t just exist as informational questions. They exist as spaces for people to come together and explore those questions together to say, “What’s really going on?” so that they can actually build shared mental models and build shared relationships.

Those relationships are the energy source that powers you in your career, in your personal life. You could take all the studies of long-term adult development and they’d add up to one thing – relationships, relationships, relationships. That’s all that makes us happy. That’s all that makes us fulfilled. And so if we approach everything as transaction, we end up kind of hollowed out.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally. It’s like, Well, yes, that was the top thing. I remember we had Robert Waldinger on that very long-term study of Harvard graduates, and that was the thing. It’s like all about love and relationships. Also watch out for alcoholism.

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, don’t drink too much and don’t worry about much else. Like, it’s more powerful than genetics, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Totally. Okay. So that’s a lovely piece in terms of it doesn’t take a ton of time to inject meaning and relationship human bits into efforts. And I’m thinking about that ritual of always checking in how it went. And I remember I was stunned by, we had a mega church pastor, it might’ve been Clay Scroggins or someone on the show – we’ll put in the show notes – who said that that was a thing that they did after every Sunday worship day, like on Monday, that was just like, “Hey, how did that go?”

And I remember I was so struck by that because it’s so beautiful in that you can really create some cool compounding results in terms of, “Oh, man,” like I’m thinking about this James Clear Atomic Habits type stuff.

Daniel Coyle
Yes, right.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “Oh, shucks, if we get 2% better at putting this thing together each time, then, my goodness, I guess that’s how churches could become mega. This is a pretty amazing experience.”

Daniel Coyle
That’s how everything becomes mega, isn’t it? It’s like everything is a spiral, Pete, you know. This shape, it’s a natural shape. It’s not a machine, but all natural learning, like your learning, my learning, your listeners’ learnings.

If you really think about it, they’re doing just what that pastor did, which was like, you have an experience, and then you got to go back and get a little feedback about it, and that elevates you a little bit, and then you do another one, and then you get a little feedback, and that elevates you a little bit. And that spiral upward is what we’re all seeking.

And the problem is that we mistake it for a ladder. We mistake it for like a straight line thing and it’s never straight because there’s going to be some wrong turns, there’s going to be some failures. And one of the most useful concepts, there’s been a concept that I learned during this book that just blew me away and I keep thinking about it all the time as a parent, as kind of an entrepreneur, as a writer, and that’s the distinction between complicated and complex. Is that a familiar distinction to you?

Like, I always thought that was the same, like you. I thought they were like similar, like it’s complicated, it’s complex, same thing. It turns out that’s deeply wrong. Like, complicated things come together the same way every single time. Like it’s building a Ferrari, right? If I give you all the parts of a Ferrari and I give you the instructions and you put them together in that way, you will get a Ferrari every time.

Complex things change. Complex things, when you interact with them, they move and they respond. And so the mental model is like, “Is this more like building a machine or is it more like raising a teen? Like, there’s no instruction book. Everything I do changes the dynamic.”

And so our lives, our careers, our learning is way more complex than it is complicated. And so adapting it, knowing that our path is going to be curving, knowing that we’re going to fail, knowing that failure is going to teach us something, knowing that the only way you can figure things out is to kind of act your way into them.

Actions and experiments are incredibly powerful for that reason. That’s why science is so strong. It’s actually trying to figure out what’s there, probing, and then learning, and then probing again, and learning, and probing again.

And when we take that kind of stance toward the learning in our career development, it puts you in the front seat more, like it’s a more active thing and you start to see failure not as a verdict but as a learning process where it’s like, “Oh, totally, that conversation went off the rails, but guess what? I’m never going to make that mistake again, you know?” That was powerful.

And change in that stance can be, I’ve just seen that over and over again in my career of hanging around with high-performing organizations, that learning bit, you know, we kind of always tip our hat to it. It’s good to be a learner, but, man, this world changes fast. It’s not just like morally good to be the learner. It is, by far, the most powerful stance you can take toward reality.

Pete Mockaitis
And I also love that notion that if teams are regularly having these exchanges with one another, that goes miles in terms of – well, I guess growing, not building – growing the relationships.

Well, so as I think about these relationships growing and getting stronger and having these kinds of exchanges, I think that’s also just going to do loads for psychological safety. Amy Edmondson was on the show talking about that, and we’ve had others who put it very simply.

People see stuff that’s dumb all the time but they’re probably not going to mention it unless you’ve got some sort of relationship or belief that that’s going to go somewhere.

Daniel Coyle
That’s so deep, isn’t it? And that word safety is a tricky one a little bit because it implies that we’re going to make everyone feel very secure. But, in fact, it’s about courage. Like, the courage to say, “Oh, I noticed that was off and we can fix it.”

And so what I’ve seen leaders do over and over again, because we’re naturally like hierarchical, right? So for all the young leaders out there, the most important words you can say are like, “Hey, I screwed that up before,” or, “Hey, what do you think?”

If you could change one thing to actually go kind of overboard in taking off your crown of power and inviting people into, again, let’s go back into question space, where they can explore it together, that’s where relationships are built in that exploration when we’re stepping into that uncertainty.

And the deeper level of that is really all about how vulnerability works. Like, I think our story in our head about trust and vulnerability, we’ve got it deeply wrong. Like, we normally think, “Okay, Pete, I’ve got to trust you before I can be vulnerable. So I’m kind of looking to see if you can earn that, right?”

We’ve got it backwards. Moments of vulnerability are what create trust. It’s called a vulnerability loop. When you’re vulnerable, that gives me permission to be vulnerable, and now we’re closer. And think about your best friends in the world. Are they people that you earned the trust of? Or are they people that you were, like, thrown into struggle with and people that you were very vulnerable with?

Those are our best friends because that’s how vulnerability works. It doesn’t come after trust. It comes before.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, could you share perhaps a story with us of folks who were not so much flourishing and then they incorporated some of your pro moves here and saw a real increase in that flourishing?

Daniel Coyle
Pro moves, I like that. So there’s one story, I guess this might resonate. I’ve been consulting with the Cleveland Guardians baseball team for the last 13 years. And when we started, they had just started a large organizational effort to build the organization around the general, and basically, back context here. They’re one of the poorest teams in baseball.

In baseball, there’s no salary cap, so the Yankees can spend four times as much money on their players every year. So the Guardians can’t buy players. They have to make players, grow players. And like every baseball team, they’ve got a sort of a school system of there’s minor league teams, single A, double A, triple A. And it’s like a giant baseball school. And so we have to figure out, “How can the Guardians compete in such an unfair game?”

And so we created a generative question, which was, “How do we help every player improve?” And we oriented all the departments around it. And we quickly realized, “Man, if players are going to improve, we need to really improve our coaches. Our coaches need to be learning fast.”

And so our first move, we said, “Well, let’s bring in expert coaches. We’ll tell them how to coach.” We brought in Michael Phelps as coach. We brought in NFL coaches, Navy SEAL guys, and it felt good. It felt like it was a really smart thing to do.

But then as we watched it, the coaches did what everybody does, which is they kind of resisted. Nobody likes being coerced from the top down. Nobody. Nobody likes that. Go tell your kid to clean their room and see how fast they clean their room. It doesn’t work.

So we flipped it. We flipped it around. We created a question space. We put the coaches in small groups and said, “Okay, guys, who is the best coach you ever saw? And what did they do?” That was it. All of a sudden, at these tables, the conversation starts to bubble like champagne. All of a sudden, they’re throwing out stories and ideas and concepts.

And we went from like top down saying, “Do this expert stuff to…” “You guys, we’re going to value you. You’re really smart. Let’s bring those out.” We turned that into our model of excellent coaching, which we still use to this day.

And there were a million other little programs like that, whereby, sort of flipping the polarity from “Here are the experts. Here’s best practices. Follow these instructions,” from coercion to, “Whoom! Let’s explore this together. What energizes you right now?” and aligning that with what the academic studies and what works with coaching.

And over the last 13 years, we’ve made the playoff eight times. We’ve won as many games as the Yankees and spent $1.3 billion less. We’re adding up to more. We’re growing. We’re getting a little better at growing players. It’s not easy, and we haven’t won the World Series yet, but it has been alive. It’s been energized. It’s been challenging, but it’s been really joyful.

And so that’s kind of the piece where I see it happening. And when I see that happening at the highest level of sport, where everything is quantified and where things are extremely difficult, it gives me some hope that it can happen where the places that are maybe away from the bright spotlight.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. And I love, though, the notion of we flip it and then you ask the question. So can you share with us, you’ve given us a couple fabulous questions, can you give us a few more of your faves that unlock some cool flourishing action?

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, no, I really like flight checks. It’s a concept out of IDEO. Flight checks is you do with your team. And all of these are all social, right? You can do it by yourself if you want to, but it’s always better to do with other people.

Pre-flight, you know, “We’re about to do a project, let’s do a pre-flight, let’s do a mid-flight, and let’s do a post-flight.” And the questions are always really basic, it’s like, “What’s been the biggest positive? What’s been the biggest negative? Are you still energized by where we started out? What did you learn?” These basic sort of check-ins.

There’s one question that I really like before a team gets together because, you know, lot of times you’re coming together, you don’t know each other. And there’s an exercise called the 4HS that’s really powerful.

And it’s kind of a relationship builder or relationship grower, rather. Let’s use our language correctly here, Pete. 4HS, you get to a small group and everybody shares their history, just a little bit about their history, “Where are you from? Where is your family from?”; their heartbreak, “What’s something that broke your heart?”; their hero and their hope for the coming year. Super simple. Take a couple minutes. You go around the horn.

But what’s happening is you’re turning off your narrow attention system and you’re opening up your relational attention system. You’re creating connective energy in that moment. So that’s one that I really like. It’s really basic.

And there’s one more that is more for individuals. It was taught to me by a Columbia University psychologist, Lisa Miller. It’s called the Counsel Exercise, and I’ll just describe it or we could actually do it if you want. What do you want me to do? Do you want me to walk through it?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s walk through it.

Daniel Coyle
All right, let’s walk through it. Close your eyes, picture a wooden table, just a simple wooden table, and around that table, picture people living or deceased who truly have your best interest in mind, who are truly deeply on your side. And let them come and take a seat.

And now picture yourself walking in and taking a seat. And now ask them if they love you and listen to their response. And now ask them, what is it that is important for you to know right now about where you are headed? What is it that is important for you to know right now about where you are headed, and listen to their answer?

And now you can open your eyes. And that’s it. It’s a little grounding exercise. How did it go for you?

Pete Mockaitis
Daniel, I bet people cry when you do this.

Daniel Coyle
Yeah. I know.

Pete Mockaitis
Yep, I’m tearing up a little here. And it’s so funny, it’s, like, that’s always inside of us. And yet, unless you pause and really go there, because in some ways it’s, like, we like to rush. We like to get their answers, like, “Do I really have to visualize the table? And now I’ve got to visualize people. And now I to visualize me walking in the room, you know?” As opposed to just, “What’s the answer?” And yet it makes all the difference in terms of it hitting home.

Daniel Coyle
It makes all the difference. It hits home, right? I love how you said that. Those people are always with you and yet we don’t sort of stop and turn and listen to them. And so a lot of this stuff is about getting in deeper touch with what we really value, what’s really beautiful in our lives, what’s really true in our lives, and creating space in our work, in our home life where we can stop and do that.

And our ancestors stopped a lot more than we did, right? Old-time life was filled with moments like that, rituals where you’d think about the people who came before and think about what they meant, and look at treasured objects and symbols. And our life has been like kind of ruthlessly stripped of a lot of those pauses.

And so it’s up to us to smuggle them back into our life, to take a second and feel that powerful stuff that’s, like you say, it’s waiting for you. It’s not something you had to build. We all have got, that’s called your counsel. We’ve all got a counsel. They’re with us all the time.

And listening to them at those moments can, it’s not just comfort. For me, the powerful part of it is the clarity that you get from that because you get a new sense of what matters and what doesn’t matter. And that’s actually incredibly stabilizing in this world where it feels like we’re always chasing something, chasing shiny objects.

It is incredibly stabilizing to have a moment where you can stop and activate what you’re born to do, you know, let go of control, and connect to what’s really there. It’s just like the most powerful skill and it’s half an inch beneath the surface waiting to come out.

Pete Mockaitis
And what I love so much about this is, you know, I’ve had guests and they say things like, “Oh, form a personal advisory board.” I was  like, “Okay, that’s good advice. Yeah, sure. Good thinking, uh-huh.” And then we’ve had Tara Mohr on the show who did some great thoughts about thinking about sort of like an inner mentor, a wiser, maybe older version of you who cares about you, and you do a visualization, you speak with them. And that’s cool and powerful as well.

What I like here is you kind of, wooh, merge those in a groovy way. And, well, for me, just to share, it was sort of a notion of having some worries, concerns, anxieties associated about the future state of some things. And then to feel the reassurance from these people that, you know, my capabilities are vast. In one way or another, we’re going to figure this thing out and there’s really no need to to get all worried about all this stuff.

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, I know. It’s a good feeling, right? It’s just stabilizing. I just love that. Grounding, right? It’s grounding.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Daniel Coyle
So you got that for a big one, and then you’ve got all kinds of other little ones. Like, there’s a little deli in Michigan that has grown into a $90 million community of businesses that does a nice job of teaching this stuff. And he talks about, Ari Weinzweig, who’s the CEO, he talks about SBA, which is stop, breathe, appreciate. Like, to have a minute where you stop, breathe, and appreciate – SBA.

It’s another good one, but it’s just like, I think most of us could use three or four of these things in our holster, you know, some to do in a team context, some to do in an individual context, some to do in kind of a more, “I’m going to retreat and think about things” context. But, yeah, the world wants to lift us off the ground, and so we have to have our own tools for grounding ourselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, you also have a turn of phrase, nurturing beautiful messes. What does that consist of and how and why should we do that?

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, when I visited these places, I thought when I’d visit them, they’d be tidy. I thought that these flourishing places would like have all the answers. And as we’ve said, what they had was a lot of questions. And then what they would do is explore those questions in a messy way.

Like, to go back to the Guardians and the coaches gathered around trying to come up what the best coaches did. That was not a nice, neat process. There was a ton of slack in it. There was a ton of little rabbit holes that people chased down because that’s actually how growth works.

Think about a time where you grew the most. Was it a time where you didn’t fail? No, it was probably a time where you failed a decent percentage of the time, right? Was it a time where you understood or you could execute every single plan that you came up with? No, it was a time where you were probably forced to improvise a little bit.

And so with these flourishing places and these flourishing people and this flourishing community, what there was was this kind of self-organizing around obstacles that was invariably messy. Because if it’s not messy, you’re not doing it right. If it’s not messy, you’re not giving people the freedom to self-organize and take a role.

We had a moment over Thanksgiving where my wife and I were putting on a dinner for our family and maybe 25 people. And turkey was about to come out of the oven and nothing was ready. The table wasn’t set, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

And I kind of looked around, you know, sort of did the father thing, like kind of skeptical, like, “Is this going to come together?” And then, you know, all of the kids and all their friends, it was like one of those Walt Disney, like fast motion things.

Everything’s perfect. Candles are lit in a tiny amount of time, way more than if somebody had said, “You do this, and you do that, and you do this.” It was a little messy and that’s what gave it the energy. Mess isn’t actually mess. Mess is agency. And when you give people agency in a space, you end up with a much better result than if you kill agency.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that makes a lot of good sense. Okay. Daniel, as people think about this flourishing stuff and we’re getting excited and, like, “Yes, that’s cool. I want that more. Yes, please,” what would you say are your top do’s and don’ts for professionals who maybe don’t have leadership, managerial authority, but want some more flourishing and they want to get it going and want to avoid any missteps?

Daniel Coyle
Yeah. Well, the do would be get a three-by-five card and make a mark on it for every day, and start paying attention to where you feel most alive and where you feel you’re contributing to stuff, to something that’s kind of alive and growing. Just notice that. That’s all. That’s the first step.

Like, if anybody gives you like a set of instructions on how to flourish, then that means it’s not actually a good set of instructions, because it is up to you. It is not something, but that’s a guidepost. Look at what’s already happening in your life. Where are you feeling that energy?

And as far as a don’t goes, I think the biggest don’t would be to don’t do it alone. Like, share your story with other people, and share your journey with other people, and share your struggles with other people. That is the thing that will create the energy that will allow you to get through. We live in a world of self-improvement, but shared improvement is way more powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I totally resonate with that. And I’m thinking about, I’ve had times with accountability groups, some men’s groups, my podcast mastermind group, and it’s been transformational. And what’s really cool is you don’t necessarily have to have these humans in your own workplace.

Ideally, you could, if you have some great fun team experiences and, hopefully, you can move in those directions if that’s not currently happening. But even if nobody wants to play ball, you can tap into some of this goodness with your other communities and relationships around you.

Daniel Coyle
Exactly. It’s a whole ecosystem, so explore it.

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

Daniel Coyle
I love, I always go back to, I think it was William Faulkner who said, “Only connect.” Only connect. The clarity of that and that has always made, at the end of the day, what’s it about? It’s about that.

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

Daniel Coyle
You know, I keep getting taken with this, it was a priming one. A lot of the priming experiments have been a little bit debunked, but the difference between when you’re approaching a task, the difference between saying “I’m nervous” and “I’m excited.”

Like, I feel that in my body. When I say I’m nervous, it just gets worse and when I say I’m excited, it’s a reframing of that. And some of that reframing stuff I find to be like personally super applicable.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Daniel Coyle
The Right Stuff. It’s the book that made me want to be a writer. There’s a feeling when you’re reading some books where it just feels like you can feel the top of your head coming off. And I don’t know if you ever felt that with a book or a song or anything, but it’s like that, that knocked me out. Tom Wolfe.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Daniel Coyle
I like a great pencil, a great mechanical pencil.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I have the same one!

Daniel Coyle
Come on, dude.

Pete Mockaitis
I got multiples.

Daniel Coyle
Check it out. That’s awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
This is a Graph Gear by Pentel, for our listeners.

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, for our sponsors. But it’s great, right? Like, I really get a lot of joy out of that. You know, it’s like that stuff matters. It’s a little sacred.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Daniel Coyle
I think I got to say, like trying to get it, I don’t do it every day, but when I do have a workout, like a hard workout, that is like, makes me feel so much better.

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

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, you know, culture isn’t something that you say or something you are. It’s something that you do. It’s a set of relationships moving toward a goal.

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

Daniel Coyle
DanielCoyle.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?

Daniel Coyle
Yeah, I would say that the call to action would be to make one random reach out to somebody who you haven’t connected with in a long time for no reason. Just reach out, an old friend or something like that, and see what happens. That would be the challenge. It’s like renewing those acquaintances ends up just being the highlight of a day.

Pete Mockaitis
I want to dig into that a little bit because I think that folks naturally can feel some emotional resistance, like, “Ooh, that’s kind of weird. We haven’t talked in like three years. They’re going to think I’m trying to rope them into a multi-level marketing scam. How do I say it?” You know? What do you say to folks who are having a little bit of emotional resistance to this thing?

Daniel Coyle
You know, try it. I mean, everything good is on the other side of fear, period. So that you’re feeling fear is absolutely appropriate, right? But I would also turn them to the work of Nick Epley at the University of Chicago, who has people do this at scale.

And you can see the numbers where it’s like the people who are asked to talk to other people on the train are really pessimistic about it. They think, “Oh, this is going to suck.” Guess what? Highlight of their day. People who are asked to, “Just stay by yourself on the train. Just prepare for your work. Focus on yourself,” they end up enjoying it a lot less than they thought they would.

So there’s this flip. We think we’re not going to enjoy these interactions, but we are built, you are pre-wired to enjoy and appreciate and be energized by them. We can’t help it.

Pete Mockaitis
I love it. Daniel, thank you. So much good stuff.

Daniel Coyle
Super fun, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Chris, welcome back for round four.

Chris Bailey
Round four, Pete. Are you serious?

Pete Mockaitis
It is. It is round four. The last round was, oh, about five years ago, so it’s been a while. But we are using the same pen and the same microphone so I feel like, since I respect you and think you’re a genius, that maybe I, too, am worthy of some sort of props, but maybe that’s reading too much into things.

Chris Bailey
Has the pen helped?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s been pleasant. This is the Pilot Precise, by the way, RT, for those listening.

Chris Bailey
It’s the best pen.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, you raved about it in a previous episode, and I was like, “Oh, let’s check it out.” It was like, “Yep, I’m just going to buy dozens of these things.”

Chris Bailey
Yeah, I have friends who are into fountain pens and they have all these fancy pen rituals, pencil rituals, all these different weights. They send me these pens. They’re all garbage. I’m sorry if you’re a pen person. They’re all garbage, except for the Pilot Precise V5 RT. Come at me, pen people.

Pete Mockaitis
Noted. We’ll put that in the pulled highlight quotes there. So, well, I want to hear, we’re talking about your book, Intentional. It’s been about five years since we chatted. Tell me, what’s the most powerful thing you’ve learned in your life of productivity over these last five years?

Chris Bailey
About values. Now, before your eyes glaze over, whenever I’ve heard the term values, my eyes have glazed over. I am not exaggerating. When I hear the word values, I think of the corny corporate exercises I’ve done in the past where somebody like brings in a sheet of paper and there’s a hundred values and they say, “Circle the values,” and I like them all, you know, grace, humor, whatever. And there’s very little research behind those.

But it turns out, there is a fascinating body of research behind what we value on a fundamental human level, and that there are 12 main values that drive pretty much everything we do. And that when we don’t want to do something, we’re usually going against the grain of our values. And so, I’ve been into this idea. You know, we’ve chatted about this three, going on four times, this idea of becoming intentional.

I’ve always wanted to write a book on becoming more intentional, but I’ve never found enough stuff around values to share, stuff around intention to share, until I encountered values, which are the research shows, that’s been validated across 60 different countries, hundreds of thousands of participants, full credit where credit is due to Shalom Schwartz for discovering this methodology of motivation, essentially.

It was kind of the missing piece that pieced together all of the things that I’ve been incubating on intentionality over the last decade. And it was an unlock for me. It was as if everything was aligned. And I don’t want to oversell. I don’t think I’m overselling.

Once you see what the values are and stuff and how the different levels of intentionality in our life fit together, there’s beautiful, fascinating science behind it. Of course, we don’t always accomplish our intentions, which is a whole other thing, but it’s fascinating, it’s beautiful, and it’s powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing. And part of me is tempted to say, “Give me the 12 now. List them.”

But first, you say it’s a big unlock and there’s hard science and research. Can you tell me what are some of the main discoveries of this research and what impact does it make when you apply it?

Chris Bailey
So, there’s different fundamental motivations we have in our life. There are two kinds of axes of motivation that we have that motivates us in our work, in our life, any context that we’re in.

There’s whether we’re motivated to enrich other people or ourselves. And there’s whether we wish to conserve things as they are or improve things as they are. And so, these are the fundamental motivations in our life that our values fit inside of.

And the key to keep in mind is that, with all 12 of these values, we’re all different. Your values are different from mine. Although good pens aren’t a value, but there are associated values actually with a good pen and good microphones. We have the same microphone.

The key to keep in mind is we all have all 12 at a different level. So, there’s self-direction, which is going our own way. There’s stimulation, which is enjoying novelty in the moment. There’s pleasure, which is, you know, sense pleasure, it’s a good meal or a good bath or something. There’s achievement, so accomplishing good things.

There’s power, right, a power over resources and other people. There’s face is another one of the values, which is how we come across to other people. There’s security, so personal security and societal security.

Tradition is another value, so the customs that surround us. Conformity is very, interestingly, to me, a fundamental human value, you know, kind of this fundamental conservation of living within the expectations of other people. Humility is a fundamental value.

Universalism, I find to be a beautiful value, which is protecting and advancing the welfare of people and of nature. And benevolence is the final 12th value, which is kindness and serving others. And so, across, and all these values fit into those kinds of four motivations, ourselves or others, or improve and change.

And so, we all have all 12 in different extents. And anything that we could be doing in the moment, anything we could possibly be doing in the moment, fits inside of these values. A good pen is pleasure. That’s the pleasure value.

Pete Mockaitis
Pleasure. Stimulation. Power.

Chris Bailey
That’s stimulation maybe a little bit because it feels so good. Self-direction, if you chose it yourself. If you heard it from a friend, if everybody you know is using this same pen, that fits with conformity. Humility, using a simple $3 pen, or, however much this costs, instead of a fountain. Everything we do is motivated by these values.

And so, our values are the broadest intentions in our life. They’re what we ultimately hope to accomplish. And so, the more that the goals we have fit with these values, the more we actually care about them. And the more they feel like a natural extension of who we are. And then it goes down to the various levels of intentionality in our life, but this is at the very top.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, Chris, you know, as you were speaking, my natural consultant brain, thinking, “Is this a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive categorization set? Can I think of anything that does not fall into them?” And, well, I’ve only been thinking for about 40 seconds and I was having a hard time digging one up. So, we’ll say it’s pretty good.

Chris Bailey
Well, I can name one or two. I can name one or two.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s hear it, yeah.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, health is one that doesn’t fit. But these values, they’re a motivational continuum. So, they are what could be possibly motivating us in the moment. And health is interesting. That was a big question I had when I looked at this theory, it’s like, “Okay, where is health in this?”

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s power. I’ve got the power to get out of bed, the power to have the energy for the day, the power to walk up a flight of stairs.

Chris Bailey
Well, that’s the interesting thing. It depends on the person. So, women are more likely to see health as a pleasure value because they feel good in their body.

Pete Mockaitis
Being in pain sucks. Fix that shoulder with a physical therapist. Ugh.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it’s self-direction, right? You can go your own way. Some people see it as that achievement. Other people see their body as an achievement that they can, yeah, bro.

Pete Mockaitis
“Muscle ups, bro.”

Chris Bailey
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, they’re a true motivational continuum. It’s beautiful that these are what drive everything we do. So, uncovering the ones that actually motivate us is paramount for achieving the goals that we set.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it is interesting because I’ve noticed that I really like feeling like a winner – achievement – and I really don’t like feeling like a loser. And some of this can even be neurotically nonsensical, you know, in terms of, like, if I’m taking out my trash and I can’t fit the week’s trash into my trash bin, I feel like I am being a poor steward of the earth’s resources because it’s like, “Oh, you know, this huge garbage bin wasn’t enough for you, huh? So now the whole world has to see, ‘Oh, that family can’t handle consuming a moderate amount.’”

And so, it’s like, “But, like, who cares? Like, nobody actually cares.” And yet this is, this is inside of me. And it’s kind of, and I guess there’s maybe conformity, right, “Hey, all of us fit our stuff inside the trash bin.”

Chris Bailey
Yeah, there’s universalism in there, wanting to protect the nature. There’s face, right, looking at how you come across other people. There’s achievement, wanting to crush the garbage down to a certain extent. It’s all in there. And so, this is the fascinating thing about values, is because they’re essentially our ultimate intentions in our life. They’re what we care about most.

But every single intention that we set, whether deliberately or not, because that’s another curious thing, intentions don’t have to be deliberate, they can be automatic. A habit is our brain forming an intention that will do something automatically for us. Maybe that’s too much to get into on the podcast, but in every moment, especially when we make these deliberate intentions, we’re automatically evaluating a series of options before us using our top values as a trade-off.

And so, the values that tend to win out in the moment tend to be our strongest values. It’s interesting. They’re behind the scenes of our life pulling, because, of course, we don’t always follow through with our intentions. Intentionality, it’s incredible, it’s beautiful, but the road to hell is also paved with good intentions. But these values are behind the scenes because they’re our true motivational nature, pulling on the strings of what we will do and what we won’t do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, what’s so intriguing is, as I’m thinking about, yeah, with any goal you could feel them at war. And I’m thinking about, I’ve been on both sides of the overweight threshold, according to the body mass index. And food, I mean, boy, it is stimulation, it is pleasure, it’s so good.

And yet, when I am having, on a hot streak of weight loss, what’s doing it for me is achievement in terms of, I’m tracking those calories, like, “Look at that, another day a deficit. Winning!” It feels good. And so then, they’re at war. It’s like, “Well, do I want the pleasure of this cheesecake or do I want the pleasure of winning a caloric deficit for the day?”

Chris Bailey
Yeah, and that’s the thing with these, like, weight loss goals, is an interesting one because 40% of the world’s population at any given time are trying to lose weight, so about half of us are. But we tend to go about goals like that the wrong way. So, we set a goal, ‘Yeah, I’m to lose 10 pounds this year so I look good, have six-pack abs by beach season.” We have this idea of ourselves.

But a goal like that is built around face, right, the value of face. It’s how we come across to other people.

But if your top value is pleasure, and maybe self-direction or something, a different goal would be better, right? Like, instead of that lose the weight to have six-pack abs by beach season built around face, maybe it’s, like, experiment with three different ways of eating – self-direction – to find the one that’s most enjoyable.

And so, you can have the same set of actions that lead you to different goals, but they are actually motivated. And this is something that is also interesting about intentionality, is there are many, and I love this idea. I love this idea.

So, there are many different layers of intentionality in our life. So, we set intentions across all kinds of different timelines, right? We have our values, which are our ultimate intentions. They last the length of our lifetime. Then we have the intentions that are a bit shorter than that, which are called our priorities. Like, “Be healthy” would be a priority.

Then we have intentions that are shorter than that, still, which we call goals, things we want to accomplish in our life, stories of change that we’re creating. Then we have, you know, we kind of go down in timeline. Then we have the plans that we have. Goals should ultimately lead to the plans that we set.

And then we have the smallest of intentions at the very bottom of this. I call it the intention stack in the book. It’s just, essentially, all the layers of intentionality in our life. And at the bottom, the very bottom, we have the present intentions we have in the moment.

So, somebody listening to this podcast, the present moment intention might be, “Listen to the podcast and enjoy it.” Then the plan might be, it might fit inside of a broader plan, like a chore to wash the dishes or something. Then it might fit inside of a goal, like in, you know, “Learn more about self-development and how to be awesome at my job.”

Then it fits inside of a priority, which is “Make a bigger contribution,” which fits inside of a value of, let’s say, benevolence, helping other people, plus achievement. And so, there’s always this stack on top of what we’re doing in the moment. But sometimes it’s aligned to what we care about. Other times we don’t care at all.

And so, it’s fascinating when you begin to deconstruct intentionality and look at the science of it, what it’s shaped like, and how it works, and how we can kind of, I got to say harness, it’s kind of a corny word, but like harness it to do the change that we want.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah. And I think this is, it opens up, and you called it an unlock. It does open up a lot of possibilities in terms of, “Oh, I wasn’t even thinking about approaching this thing with that value as a lens, but because I’m really into that value, it may well behoove me to explore how can I do such a thing to provide for more humility or universalism or benevolence or whatever the thing is.”

Chris Bailey
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Chris, I want to maybe take a little time out here because it almost feels as though some of these values are good-er, more morally virtuous, right, true, noble than others in terms of, like, let’s say universalism, benevolence, humility. We think, “Oh, what a swell fella, or a gal, who exhibits a lot of those things,” versus, “You know what I’m really about is pleasure and power and looking awesome. That’s kind of what’s important to me.” That almost feels hollow or like a less good life.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, I talk about this in the book, too. My top value is self-direction. It’s not even close. But my number two is pleasure. I love nothing more than to…well, I like self-direction more, but I love nothing second more than to just lie on the couch after a busy day and put on a good show or a podcast, and order some Uber eats, like a big sushi platter and just indulge for the night.

And this was a very reflective process that I went through in piecing together this book is, “Are there good values? Are there bad values?” And I’ve, ultimately, come to the conclusion that, “No, there aren’t good values or bad values. There are certain values that are more conducive to certain goals.” But if you’re able to accommodate the values of others, in addition to the values of yourself, I think you’ll be fine.

Power is one that comes to mind, too, because out of all the values, out of all the listed values, it’s the very least common. It’s at the very bottom across the population level, and, sure enough, it is for me, too. I never want to have power over any other person ever in my life.

But, power, if you look at the world around us, it has a place in what we do. Any organization that has a hierarchy, for example, you have different layers of the hierarchy, and you need power within that organizational structure. Every charity has a CEO. Every nonprofit has a CEO. Every congregation has a priest.

So even the most virtuous of places, these values have a place. Conformity, right, maybe also a frowned upon value. But there’s a great benefit to going along with the expectations of others in certain scenarios, right, for accommodating other people. I’m the most self-directed person you might ever meet. And I don’t want to listen, you know, if somebody else tells me to do something, it makes me not want to do it.

But I remember my grandma telling me, like, “Wash the dishes now,” and I’d do it because I had such a respect for her. And that conformity and tradition, all these values live relative to one another, too, which is interesting. They live right next to each other in these values pie, this pie hierarchy – pie-archy.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that is a really intriguing perspective there that these values, they’re motivational forces and they don’t necessarily lead to great or catastrophic outcomes for civilization or humanity when they all kind of come together. And what’s interesting about power is you said, you define it as, it is power over others or yourself or circumstances.

Chris Bailey
Or resources, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Or resources, yeah. I’ve got a, my buddy Ronnie, he had a funny saying, he said, “Laundry is power.” I was like, “What?”

Chris Bailey
What does that mean?

Pete Mockaitis
And then I think, one day, I had done all, I mean all of my laundry, and I’m beholding this dresser full of organized socks matched and shirts folded, underwear. And then, as I beheld this arsenal of complete laundry, it’s like, I really did, I was like, I’m ready for anything. I’m ready for anything. I felt powerful in that moment. I understood what he meant.

But I, like you, have no interest in controlling the legions of people. In fact, that sounds like a huge headache, like, “Oh, my gosh, that administrative load would be such a stressor.”

Chris Bailey
And that’s the interesting thing. I don’t want to, like, overload people with this value stuff right now, but I break it down more into, like, you can break down the 12 into 19, actually, of them, where you can break down power, for example, into power over resources and other people. Self-direction, you can break into self-directed thought and self-directed action.

And so, it’s very interesting that there’s this. It’s just a fundamental organization to human motivation that we don’t understand. But when you do understand it and you can fit through these different layers of intentionality, the goals that you have with your values, and then see how those goals connect with the daily actions that you need to take, what you get is your goals become a vessel between who you are on that fundamental level, so what motivates you, and what you do on a daily basis.

And so, we are sharing the fat loss example. Same set of actions, but with a different frame around them, with a different motivational frame around them. Imagine if your goals were all like that. This is actually the thing that bothers me about a lot of goals and goal books and stuff like that, is when you look at the actual research on goals, we have to achieve them by becoming more intentional across the different layers of intentionality in our life.

But we so often see them as static, something that shouldn’t change. But goals should evolve. We should be editing them. We should be dropping them. We should see them as fluid things. And goals, in my view, they’re basically just a story of change that we’re in the middle of creating in our life. And we need to see them as more fluid and ready to change, because so often a goal is really no different from a prediction of what we believe will happen.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, this is really juicy, and so, conceptually, we can hang here for a long time, but I’d love to perhaps shift gears into, “Okay. All right, Chris, my mind is blown with regard to these values, they’re important, and I should be considering them thoughtfully as I’m trying to go about making stuff happen.” Could you share with us a little bit of the step-by-step in terms of, “Okay, I got a list of values. That’s kind of cool. I got some things I want to be achieving, what am I doing with that?”

Chris Bailey
Yes, okay. So, let’s get tactical with this stuff, because, yeah, we have to be. So, you have your values, maybe you do a values test. I partnered with a company to build a test for the book. You don’t have to take that though, because there are certain ones that’ll kind of attract you more, and others that’ll naturally repel you.

And so, what you’ll find is that, when you look at those 12 values and the pie that they’re a part of, you’ll naturally gravitate to some and be repelled by others. Look to the ones that you naturally gravitate to and pick the top two, let’s say, two, three. Stop there. These are what you build your goals around. And then you have a list of goals, right?

How often do we actually sit down and capture the goals that we have that we’re in the middle of creating? And so, I highly recommend a weekly review where you sit down, you capture, and then you review, on a weekly basis, all the goals that you’re in the middle of creating.

And so, every goal, so in the book, I call it the intention stack. So, at the top, it is values, then priorities, then goals, then plans, then intentions, daily, weekly intentions. And, ideally, during this weekly review, or whatever cadence it makes sense for you to review these goals on, you want to look at both your values, which is the motivational force, and the actions, which is how you actually make progress towards these goals in the first place.

So, I think step zero is realizing that goal attainment, the process of goal attainment, is it’s not 99% action. It’s like 80% action, 20% planning. We need to plan more and act a little bit less, because by planning more, we actually act more over the longer arc of time, especially once the initial burst of motivation wanes.

So, during that weekly review, edit your goals, edit your goals, edit your goals. How can you edit them, like with that weight loss example, how can you edit your goals so that they fit more with what you value, so you actually care about them, right? Because the easiest way to tell if something’s a priority to you is you’ve achieved it already, right?

So, the fact that something is yet to be achieved, probably means, on some level, that it isn’t a natural fit for who you are, because it doesn’t fit with that motivational force, right? We do what it makes intuitive sense to do in the absence of intentional action.

So, during that weekly review, how can you edit your goals so they’re more in line with what you value? And how can you bite off a little bit of the goal until your next review, whatever cadence you’re doing this over?

So, if you’re doing it over a week, what do you want to bite off in the next week? Make sure it’s enough that you can chew, or not too much that you can chew, whatever the analogy is there, and schedule time blocks for it.

Practice intentionality on a more granular level. Set a few weekly intentions. Every day, set a few daily intentions so these intentions can actually flow down into one another. So, edit your goals. And, as well, if you find that a goal isn’t motivating that you can’t edit it to the point that it fits into your life, consider dropping it.

Because then we get a chance to try more goals on for size that are actually a fit with what we want to get out of our life and our motivational nature. So that’s one way is that goal review where we bridge, essentially, who we are with what we do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, very cool.

Chris Bailey
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
And then I’d love to dig into some of your perspectives for, if we’ve got a goal that is not so appealing, well, one, you might learn via the editing process that it needs to be dropped. But before that, do you have any cool examples of folks who were able to just turbocharge motivation and progress by thoughtfully tweaking their goals so they are better fits for their values?

Chris Bailey
This is interesting, right? Because is gray intentionality such a beautiful idea? And then the rubber meets the road, right? The road to hell is also paved with good intention. So, intentionality is both vital because any time we act towards our goals, there was an intention behind it.

But sometimes, it’s also useless because there’s a lot of times when we set an intention only to not follow through, or procrastinate on an intention, or lack the desire to accomplish it. And so, there’s essentially two factors in a goal, in an intention, in something we want to do, that attract us or repel us away from that thing.

So, there’s aversion, which, you know, it’s like, “Get this out of my face, this goal out of my face.” And then there’s desire, which attracts us to a goal. And both of these are forces that work with every single goal that we have. And they’re different over the timeline of a goal, right?

So, if you’re at the very beginning, the very inception of a goal, your desire is going to be through the roof. Your motivation level is going to be so, so high. But then reality sinks in, “Oh, there goes gravity,” and then our motivation level plummets, and our desire can turn into aversion.

So, a lot of it’s like realizing where you are on that timeline of goal attainment. But aversion is a very interesting feeling that we experience along the way, because aversion is what leads us to procrastinate on something.

So, the more aversive something happens to be, which is a combination of “How boring is it? How frustrating is it? How unpleasant is it? How far away is something in the future? How unstructured is it? How meaningless is it?” so lack of connected with our values, the more of these triggers that a task has, the more likely we are to procrastinate on it.

And so, that’s another key is realizing that and understanding what triggers a task sets off. So, if something’s unstructured, like meditation is a great example of this. We were chatting a bit about meditation before we hopped on the horn here and hit the record button.

It’s one of the most aversive things that you can do, right? It’s helpful because it’s so aversive, right? If you can focus on your breath, you can focus on anything. If you can become engaged with your breath, you could become engaged with anything because it’s so boring, because it’s so aversive.

But when you accommodate the fact that it’s so unstructured and unpleasant, by working within the aversion, so a simple example of this, shrink your resistance to it. So, this works for meditation, it works for anything you don’t want to do that takes a little bit of time.

You might have a conversation with yourself like, “Okay, do I want to meditate for half an hour today? No. No, I don’t. What about 25 minutes? No. What about 20? No way in hell. What about 15? Yeah, I could do 15.”

And so, you essentially shrink the task until you no longer feel that resistance level so that you’re at a point where you can get started on the thing. And that increases your desire to actually moving between different levels of this intention stack. You move from that goal layer to that action layer that’s at the bottom.

And so, when something’s unstructured, that’s a sign you need to add structure. When something’s meaningless, it’s a sign you need to connect a goal with your values. Edit it so it’s aligned with your values. When something’s boring, frustrating, it might be a sign you need to step back and plan out on a logical level how you want to become more intentional about that thing.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m thinking about, well, these procrastination triggers, I think I learned them from you as well as what are the top researchers on procrastination. What was the book? I think we both read it.

Chris Bailey
Was it Tim Pytchyl?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s the one. Thank you.

Chris Bailey
Oh, Tim is fantastic, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and he lists those out, and that’s helpful to think about it on those dimensions. And I guess that’s what, to your point about doing more planning, that’s what you can, you can get kind of meta with this. It’s like, “Huh, I have not done these three weeks in a row. It seems something is amiss here.” And so, rather than say, “Well, I just got to knuckle down and buckle up, you know, to get after it.” It’s like, well, maybe there’s some redesign that needs to be working here, or maybe the goal needs to be abandoned.

Chris Bailey
It’s interesting, in writing this book, I chatted with lot of monks, as well as scientists, because monks study intentionality on a different layer than scientists do. They’re not observational, they’re experiential. They observe the causes and effects and conditions in our mind, and we can learn a lot from them.

And one interesting thing that I asked one of the monks, I was deep into the research on where intention comes from, because we set all these intentions, right? And some of them we set automatically, which I call our default intentions.

‘Cause some come from automatic sources. We are on a road trip, we need to go to the bathroom, and so we set an intention at the next pit stop, “I’m going to go to the bathroom.” We don’t even think about this. We do it automatically. So, biological sources, sources to avoid pain and experience greater pleasure also lead to a whole other wealth of intentions.

The lessons we have learned in the past. So, the things we have learned changes, they change our relationship with what we know to be true, which leads us to set an intention differently the next time, whether we do it out of habit or energy, or whether we do it deliberately.

But one source that a monk mentioned that wasn’t in the research that kind of allowed me to piece together other areas of the research was – and he phrased it so beautifully – is our self-reflective capacity.

Our self-reflective capacity, by looking inward, asking questions of our inner world, we are able to set different intentions from the ones that we would do out of biology, or out of basic pleasure and pain, or out of lessons we have learned, to truly go our own way and set the best intentions that lead us to the outcomes that we want, whether we want to be more accomplished at work or lead a more enriching, meaningful life by connecting with our values at work, at home.

We need to tap into that capacity more often. And so, it doesn’t just have to look like meditation or journaling or something. It can look like just going for a walk and then letting your mind go to where “What problems are you in the middle of? How can you solve them with setting intentions that are more conducive to what you want?”

They could look like brainstorming with somebody, so somebody that really gets you thinking. It can look like asking questions of your inner world and looking at what arises out of them. Like, we all have these moments where we go from autopilot mode to being deliberate about what we do.

So, if your whole family was gone for one morning or something, and you woke up and your phone wasn’t there, and so you couldn’t rely on habit in bed and you just laid there. Eventually, a moment would come where your mind would set an intention to do something, where you would set an intention to do something, whether it was a habit or whether you waited for a little bit longer to look at what you truly wanted to do in that moment.

It’s the same like if you’re listening to music and a song ends, pause, and then eventually your mind will set an intention to listen to the next one, which will end up being more enjoyable than the one that you were just listening to on autopilot.

Life is the same way, right? It’s by charting this deliberate course that we experience more meaning because it’s in connecting with that self-reflective capacity that we can be with what we value. And so, our values that compete with one another in each moment, the ones that are truest to us can win out, and then we can truly, truly go our own way.

Tthe truest intentions that we can set, like you were getting at, they come from not just acting, but reflecting, whether that’s on a logical level or on a more intuitive level where we look and connect with that self-reflective capacity that we all have.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. Autopilot is, in some ways, the opposite of intentionality. I mean, even if we establish those habits intentionally and we’re executing, living them out in an autopilot mode – I’m getting philosophical – on some dimension, the autopilot is intentional, but from like a presentness way of looking at it, it’s not so much.

Chris Bailey
Well, this is why, in the book, I delineate between our default intentions and our deliberate intentions, because we have these default intentions that we have. Habits are great. Habits are amazing. But when you look at an intention as just a plan that we will do something, this habit energy, as I refer to it in the book, and as monks refer to it actually, there’s quite a bit of power in that.

We don’t have to worry about making ourselves a cup of coffee in the morning. Our brain, our body goes through the motions automatically until we’re sitting there like with a cup of coffee. We don’t even have to be fully awake enough to notice it.

But you’re right that, eventually, that moment comes. It’s kind of like the movie montage where, like, somebody’s living their dull humdrum life and the scene is gray and it’s raining outside, they’re going through the same motions. But then, like, boom, somebody dies, or something pivotal happens, where that character has a fit of awakening and decides to do things differently, and decides to go in a different direction from the one that they were going in.

And then like cut to the badass working out montage, or like somebody writing for hours through the night, or piecing together some math problem, you know, something like that. But we all have these similar fits of awakening.

And all that is, is going from the habit energy of relying on our default intentions to the deliberate intentions that we can all set in the moment. Well, here’s something mind blowing about default intentions.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes, please.

Chris Bailey
Our values are constructed out of our default intentions. Like, seeing that in the research, it sent shivers down my spine, I’m not going to lie. It all came together. Our values are who we are on a fundamental human level. They’re what motivate us on a fundamental human level. And what motivates us more than who we are by default? Our default intentions.

And our deliberate intentions, the life we want to live, the contributions we want to make, the work we want to do, that’s the layer of deliberate intentions we layer on top of who we are by default. So, it’s, really, when you look at the science of intentionality, it explains everything that we do, everything that we think, and everything that we are. And molding that is the ultimate skill, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
Whew, that’s good stuff and worthy of chewing on and reflecting upon in depth. I know we’re at our last few minutes, but I want to hear two quick things from you. One, tracking goal progress, something that you’re into, you write about. Do you have any favorite principles or tactics or systems in that zone?

Chris Bailey
Oh, yeah, tracking your goal pace is one of my favorites. So, I use this whenever I write a book, where I make a spreadsheet. Two lines. One is my pace line and the other is my progress line. And it works for any cumulative goal, miles ran, for example. And all you do is you print it off and so you track between today and your target day.

You have a pace, say you want your book to be 70,000 words, so you have the pace line that goes up at this beautiful linear pace. And then you have your actual word count relative to that. Simple tactic, but incredibly helpful for goal tracking.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve made the spreadsheet myself in many contexts.

Chris Bailey
Oh, man, we’re living the same life, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Bailey
Same pen, same mic, same sheet.

Pete Mockaitis
And you have said it a few times, and I love it, that any productivity intervention must earn back the time that you spend on it, or else it is counterproductive. Since I like to talk about favorite things at the end of each episode, can you share with us a couple favorite tools, tactics, productivity interventions that just crush it on this metric of yours?

Chris Bailey
Okay, I feel I’ve mentioned this on a previous one, but it’s five years ago, so maybe your listenership has cycled out or something. No, they’re probably still out here.

Pete Mockaitis
Never. They’re still there. They’re still there.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, okay. Hey, everybody, again, I hope you remember me five years ago. Rule of three. At the start of each day, fast forward to the end of the day, what three things will you want to have accomplished? It’s my favorite intention setting ritual. I do it every day, every week, every year, so that when I do my daily intentions, they can feed into the weekly and the yearly ones. They all work together like beautiful magic.

Tools. Tools. Man, you know what? I’m going analog these days. I love having a physical book, because I feel my eyes are glazing over from looking at screens all day long, and just practicing a bit of interstitial journaling between tasks. It allows me to really just reflect for one short little paragraph, “What do I really want to get out of what I’m going to do next?” So, an analog pen, of course, the Pilot Precise V5 or V7 RT.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. All right. Well, any final thoughts, Chris?

Chris Bailey
After looking at the research on intentionality, I used to think intention is beautiful, and you see how complicated it is. And it’s in that complicatedness that I think we see our humanness, right? And so, I really think that it’s intentionality that makes us human.

And by connecting with that, you know, talked a lot about deliberate intent, we got to love our defaults, too. They’re who we are. They make up our values. Love your defaults and then you can layer on even better goals, better intentions on top of those.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Chris, thank you.