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Mindset

Oct 12

356: Living Out the Wisdom of Napoleon Hill with Jeffrey Gitomer

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Jeffrey Gitomer says: "Don't try to attract me with a sales message; attract me with something I want."

“King of Sales” Jeffrey Gitomer discusses his new book Truthful Living, a compilation if the wisdom of Napoleon Hill. He also hashes out his tips for persuasion and personal development.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Why Napoleon Hill is still worth listening to 100 years later
  2. The number one thing people don’t do that will benefit them
  3. The five most important words in the English language according to Napoleon Hill

About Jeffrey

Jeffrey Gitomer is the New York Times bestselling author of some 15 books on personal development, attitude, and sales, including The Sales Bible, The Little Gold Book of Yes! Attitude, 21.5 Unbreakable Laws of Selling, and award-winning The Little Red Book of Selling, which has sold more than five million copies worldwide and is cited as an essential work in The 100 Best Business Books of All Time. Widely known as the King of Sales, Gitomer is a dynamic keynote speaker whose social media footprint reaches millions. He is based in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Pete Mockaitis
Jeffrey, thanks so much for joining us here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Jeffrey Gitomer
It is my pleasure.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, mine too. And I want to get us started by orienting a little bit. You have the title or nickname “The King of Sales”.

Jeffrey Gitomer
That’s a great orientation at the beginning.

Pete Mockaitis
How did that come about?

Jeffrey Gitomer
That’ll make everyone angry. I grew up in a business household. My father was a businessman, my grandfather was a businessman, and I define them as non-entrepreneurs because it’s from a lineage of business people. And entrepreneur is somebody whose dad worked for General Electric for 40 years and his mom is a teacher, and he bought a franchise. And that’s how I look at entrepreneurship.
But I started my own businesses at the age of 21 and I began cold calling in Manhattan, and I made very large sales, literally millions of dollars’ worth of sales by either cold calling or by being pre-prepared for a sale. And when I left that, I started to do consulting to companies and I realized that they didn’t know how to sell. So I began to teach them my strategies, and then in 1992 I began to write them. I wrote for the Charlotte Business Journal and about 50 other business journals around the country every Friday for about 15 years.
And when you do that you develop what’s known as “a body of work”, and that has been the fuel for many of the books that I’ve written. I’ve written 13 books to date, and two more on the way before the end of the year. And it’s been a very hard challenge. I wake up every morning and I write. I do what I say, and then I go out or talk to companies. I was just in Chicago yesterday, giving a talk to leaders and giving a talk to salespeople, and I’ll do that probably 20 times between now and the end of 2019 in public. And then I do corporate ones as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Three months. There you go.

Jeffrey Gitomer
I’m pretty booked.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, certainly. We’re going to talk about your latest, Truthful Living. But before we get there, I’d love it…so, since you have generated and codified and written and published so much sales wisdom, I can’t let this opportunity slide to put you on the spot. If you had to give me your single most critical recommendation or the two, three or four and a half most critical recommendations for selling more effectively, what would they be?

Jeffrey Gitomer
My number one rule of sales is, “People don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy.” You have never gone to a car dealership to get sold a car. You have never gone to a department store to get sold a suit or a television. You go to buy one. Salespeople don’t quite get that, and when you get there, they want to tell you stuff rather than ask you stuff. So, people don’t like to be sold, but they love to buy.
Ask before you tell. Find out why they want to buy before you start to talk about what it is that you do, because they may not be interested in it. All things being equal, people want to do business with their friends. All things being not quite so equal, people still want to do business with their friends. And so, the challenge for the salesperson is, become friendly and likeable and trustworthy before you start. It ain’t that tough.
But actually there’s a caveat to this now, because in today’s business world, you have to engage people socially. You attract them, then you engage them, and then you connect with them. So I challenge people to attract with some value message, and then you engage with by being real, and something that I can actually use – my content. And then I connect with them because you perceive a future value of some kind, then at some point they may be willing to buy something. But don’t try to attract me with a sales message; attract me with something that I want.
So I’ll give you an example. If I’m wanting to be on your podcast, I might send you “25 Things That People Do to Have a Great Podcast”, and then a week later “25 Things That People Screw Up to Have a Lousy Podcast”. Then I call you up and say, “Would you like to know the five things I didn’t tell you?” And if my 25 things were valuable, you’d say, “Hell, yeah.”

Pete Mockaitis
Totally.

Jeffrey Gitomer
But if I call you up, if I email you, LinkedIn you, whatever, and say, ”I’m the greatest guy on the planet. I’ve written a lot of books that are really interesting. I’m a great guy. I think I’d make a great guest for your people and I think I could create a lot more listeners.” You don’t give a sh*t about that. You’ve heard that from everybody, haven’t you?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s true, yes. Many, many messages like that have come my way.

Jeffrey Gitomer
So, I would challenge you that if there’s not a perception of value, then there’s no real reason to connect. I’m not going to buy your television set because you’re the cheapest. I’m not going to buy your car… In fact, when you’re the cheapest, it makes me doubt. How could you possibly be $500 cheaper than somebody else?

Pete Mockaitis
“What’s wrong with it? What’s missing? What am I overlooking? Are you lying to me?”

Jeffrey Gitomer
Yeah. They use the words “just like”. “Well, it’s just like an iPad.” “Okay, then I’ll take an iPad.” I don’t understand, why would you compare yourself to something that’s clearly marketed better and branded better?

Pete Mockaitis
Gotcha. Well, thank you.

Jeffrey Gitomer
No problem.

Pete Mockaitis
I appreciate getting the overview of that. Now I want to dig into a bit of the book here. It’s called Truthful Living, and you are featuring some goodies from the classic writer Napoleon Hill. Could you orient those who don’t know who that is? Who is this guy and why is his old stuff worthwhile?

Jeffrey Gitomer
He has written more words on personal development and achievement and wealth than any other human being on the planet.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding!

Jeffrey Gitomer
Yeah, that’s number one. Number two, he wrote his opus, Think and Grow Rich. It was published in 1937. And the foundation and I’ve had a relationship for more than a decade. They unearthed his earliest writings, his earliest lessons that he gave at the George Washington Institute in Chicago, lesson by lesson in a course called Truthful Advertising. And at the end of each one of the lessons, he had an “after the lesson visit with Mr. Hill”. And those “after the lesson visits” were the foundation of Think and Grow Rich.
So when I saw what they had, I edited out all of the sales advertising stuff and was left with the fundamental elements of what went into Hill’s life’s work. And it was phenomenal, because it was raw and real. Never published, never edited. I compiled all of the documentation, and all I did was I added a beginning to each chapter so people could understand what they were about to read. I would occasionally put an annotation in each of the chapters to clarify some of the things, because the book is 100 years old. There may be some lexicon clarification that’s needed. And then I ended the chapter with how to put this into your life. All the rest of the words in there are 100% Napoleon Hill authentic.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool, yeah.

Jeffrey Gitomer
It’s way cool. And it was a labor of love for me. It took me a couple of years to do, and when it was completed I knew that this was going to be major. I just knew it.
And it’s fun for me. I’ve been writing and publishing books for 25 years. This is by far the best experience I’ve ever had.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great to hear. Then let’s hear a little bit about some of the content here. So, any sort of surprises or particularly potent takeaways from Napoleon Hill? I’d say particularly in the context of suggestions that would help professionals be more awesome at their jobs.

Jeffrey Gitomer
It starts out with Chapter 1: Success Is Up to You. It’s like a warm slap in the face. Not a cold slap in the face; just a warm slap in the face. And then Lesson 2 is Finish What You Start. How obvious can that be? No one’s going to go, “Wow, finish what I started? Never heard that before.” But Hill shows you and tells you the importance of it. Why is it important to become known as someone who finishes what they start, and how does that help build your wealth?
And in each one of these cases, whether it’s chapters like How to Think or The Value of Self-Confidence, and then his cool chapters like, The Law of Harmonious Attraction. Come on, dude. That’s so cool. What he’s saying is, hang around people that you can get along with well, and together you’ll achieve more. The book just makes sense, and I think that’s probably the most eloquent thing that I can say about it. It is an easy book to read, and even easier to apply. But it takes work. And my statement has always been, most people are not willing to do the hard work that it takes to make success easy.

Pete Mockaitis
And could you give us some examples in terms of some of the hard work that is not done by many folks?

Jeffrey Gitomer
Well, I wake up every morning, as you do… Do you have a morning routine?

Pete Mockaitis
Right, yes.

Jeffrey Gitomer
Does it involve writing?

Pete Mockaitis
No.

Jeffrey Gitomer
Does it involve reading?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Jeffrey Gitomer
Think about it. My morning routine has been the same five things for 25 years. I read, I write, I prepare – one of those three things, or all three – and that causes me to do the other two things – think and create. So I’m a thinker and a creator. I’m not an email reader, I’m not a news watcher, I’m not a time-waster. I’m going to be productive for my first hour of the day. And I don’t want to hear whiny people telling me that they have a kid, because I have a 9-year-old every other week. She gets up at 6:30 so I had better be rolling at 5:30.
And people say, “I’m not a morning person.” Well, there’s a reason. Actually everyone is a morning person, except for the people that drink beer and watch television until 2:00 in the morning. Those are not morning people. Those are people that drag their butt out of bed and make some excuse about having a headache or a bad day. And blame the weather for their day.
And this is a book about taking responsibility, not blaming. Success is up to you. Now, any one of your listeners can get a free chapter of the book. We’ll send you the URL. Do you have the URL for the free chapter? I’ll get it to you. You can download a free chapter, the first chapter, which is Success Is Up to You, so that any one of your listeners can have access to that information so they can see it for themselves. It’s in an e-book. Just put your email address in there, done. I’ll get that to you later today or first thing tomorrow.

Pete Mockaitis
Got it. So then, I’d be curious to hear maybe in your own experience, what were some of the most transformative elements in this that you found really made a world of difference in terms of, you learned it, you latched on and it did the trick in great effect?

Jeffrey Gitomer
Keep in mind, I’ve been a student of Napoleon Hill for 45 years. And not only did I have to edit it, but I had to read it. And then I had to record it, which means I had to read it aloud. It was, for me, an additional transformation. It’s not going to change your life, but it will supplement everything you do in your life. And there’s a full-page quote: “Ambition is a contagious thing.” Okie-dokie. How ambitious are you? Because people that have been in the same job for 20 years have lost a lot of their ambition.
And he has laws and words. There are five words that he considers the most important words in the English language – imagination, desire, enthusiasm, self-confidence, and concentration. There is a chapter in here called The Magic Key, which later on became a book called The Magic Key by Napoleon Hill, 30 years later. And it’s all about the word “concentration”. How well can you focus? They call it “mindfulness” now; I don’t know why. And then he has something which I think is really, really cool. Let me see if I can find it here real quick. It’s called the “5-point rule”. Can I read it?

Pete Mockaitis
Sure, yeah.

Jeffrey Gitomer
“Success may be had by those who are willing to pay the price. And most of those who crave a $10,000 a year position…” Now remember, this is 100 years ago, so that would be about $250,000 in today’s money. “Who crave a $10,000 a year position, especially if they are engaged in business, may realize it if they are willing to pay the price. And the price is eternal vigilance in the development of self-confidence, enthusiasm, working with a chief aim, performing more service than you are paid for, and concentration. With these qualities well-developed, you will be sure to succeed. Let’s name these qualities the ‘5-point rule’.”
Now, think about that. First of all, concentration is in the five most important words, and the 5-point rule. So, he is making certain that every reader understands. Repetition leads to mastery. So he’s playing the word “concentration” as much as he possibly can because he defines it… Let me see if I can find the definition real quick.
“Concentration is your contractor and builder, the overseer of the boss carpenter and all the other forces, the purchaser of materials and supplies.” In other words, if you’re building a house, you need that one person to make sure the focus remains intact and that everything gets built. Otherwise, stuff stands around, people are late for the job, you’re missing this, you’re missing that. Somebody has to keep everything together, and that’s what Hill wants you to do. He wants you to focus in on everything that’s important to you. That’s where we’re at.
There’s nothing in here where you guys say, “Oh my gosh. Concentration? I never heard that before.” No, everything in here has been heard about before. The question is, or the challenge is, how do you put it all together to be able to turn it into money? And that’s what this book does – it creates a game plan for wealth, not just success.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d love to hear some of these points then, in terms of, these are the five points. How does one rapidly go about developing each of these – the self-confidence, the enthusiasm, the concentration?

Jeffrey Gitomer
Well, the word “rapid” is a tough word, because things don’t happen like a Domino’s Pizza delivery. You don’t get great at success in a day. You become successful day by day. People go, “Jeffrey, how did you do that?” I say, “Well, I worked my ass off for 20 years and then all of a sudden I became an overnight success.” So, people don’t see the ”work your ass off” part; they only see the success part. Or I’ll say, “Well, I’ve got 112,000 Twitter followers.” And they say, “That’s easy for you to do.” I said, “No, it’s not easy for me to do.” I started with one, like everybody else. I have 28,000 LinkedIn connections. I started with one in 2008. So, I’m relatively late to the game. I fought it for a while, and then realized that I could develop a community and help even more people by recording things for YouTube, by going on LinkedIn.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So, we’ll sort of strike the word “rapidly” I guess from the prior question. So then, what are some of the optimal practices, activities, behaviors day-by-day to build up the self-confidence, the enthusiasm, the concentration?

Jeffrey Gitomer
Well, if I tell you success is up to you, and then I tell you you have to believe in yourself, and then I tell you that you have to develop self-confidence – those are qualities that happen on a day-by-day basis, especially in sales, when you make sales. You can’t always develop that quality if you’re in some kind of a managerial position, because it’s very difficult to measure. Sales you can measure in a heartbeat. “What did you do today?” “$100.” “What did you do today?” “$1,000.” “What did you today?” “$50,000.” It’s measurable. And it’s further measurable by how many referrals did you get and how many reorders did you get. I’m pretty confident that as a salesperson I can measure my own success.
And when Hills says “Success is up to you”, then you as a person, regardless of what kind of job you’re in, you have to determine, write down what it’s going to take for you to succeed, because it may be that you just want to be the best teacher of all time. Okay, great. Can you win the “Best Teacher” award this year? That’s some indicator that you’re on the right path, because if somebody else wins it, you can’t go and say it was political. That’s sour grapes. Either you’re the best or you’re second best. And second best doesn’t win the prize. There’s no participation medal in sales.

Pete Mockaitis
Gotcha, yeah.

Jeffrey Gitomer
So, I’m looking at it as, it has to be a daily thing. What are you doing every day to be enthusiastic on a regular basis, to be self-confident on a regular basis? And you practice. If you want to practice being a great communicator, just join Toastmasters. So, take lessons in what it is that you’re trying to achieve, but do it consistently.

Pete Mockaitis
And what would be the analogous or equivalent lessons or activities or practices when it comes to the enthusiasm and the concentration, for instance?

Jeffrey Gitomer
Well, when you wake up in the morning, you have a choice. You can have a crappy day, a good day, or a great day. It is a clear choice. “I’m going to have a great day.” You tell yourself that in the morning and then everything you do has some kind of positive response to it. If you hate your job, today is the day you’ve got to quit. What are you miserable for? If you have a bad boss, go get another boss. The best part about America is, you’re free to choose.
So I’m free to choose my attitude, and I’m going to read something on attitude every morning to get me going, or I’m going to watch something on attitude every morning to get me going. I’m going to write something about how I feel, I might tweet something. There are all kinds of things that I’ll do. I’m going to prepare, like I had to prepare yesterday for my seminar in Chicago. And that’s going to cause me to think and create. And if I think in the positive, then the answers will be in the positive, the words will be in the positive, and I will create my own outcomes. I’m here to create an outcome for me. And it’s a selfish thing, but if I want to be the best dad on the planet, the first thing I have to do is be the best person. Otherwise I’m going to have, quote, an “attitude” about it.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m curious, are there particular resources that you go to time and time again to spark the positive attitude? You said you’re going to watch something or read something or look at something.

Jeffrey Gitomer
I don’t have a consistent resource. I’ll read something 100 years old. I’ll write down what I’m thinking about. I have a book called The Little Gold Book of YES! Attitude. There are 220 pages on attitude that it took me 60 years to figure out. So, I’ve created a book that sold 300,000-400,000 copies in America, millions of copies around the world. And I’m happy with that. But if I want more information, then I’ll go back and read Samuel Smiles, a paragraph or two, or a page or two on character or self-help. Or I’ll read something by Orison Swett Marden, a page or two, from Every Man a King. Or I’ll read something by Dale Carnegie on how to win friends and influence people. I go to my library and I can pick out anything. I don’t go to the library, I have a library. Books are not just for reading; they’re also for reference. So, I have a massive library that I call on, and I’ll maybe only read five pages, but it’s enough. And if you are doing it for 25 years and you read five pages a day, you’ve read a lot of stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely, adding up.

Jeffrey Gitomer
That’s why I said “day by day”. I achieved my positive attitude in 1972 by listening to Earl Nightingale, The Strangest Secret, watching a movie called Challenge to America by Glenn Turner, and reading one chapter per day of Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich for one year. And there are only 15 chapters in the book.

Pete Mockaitis
Mathematically, yes, over 20 times then.

Jeffrey Gitomer
Bingo. Well, I took the weekends off.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, gotcha. I also want to get your take on, one thing about your writing that I’ve always found intriguing is that in your lists you will have a decimal. For example, one of your books, 21.5 Unbreakable Laws of Selling. What’s your thought process behind this practice?

Jeffrey Gitomer
I did consulting early on in Charlotte before I was writing anything. And one of my clients wanted to do a leadership course, because he’d already been doing time management. And I created a list of things for him. I literally created a speech for him about the qualities of a great leader. And I got to the end of the list and I go, “The glue that puts this together is the word ‘commitment’.” So I made it 0.5 – “8.5 Qualities of a Leader”. And I showed it to him. I was so enthusiastic, I couldn’t stand it, about what I’d done. And the guy said, “I don’t like it.” I said, “Okay, I’ll use it myself.” You can go on Google right now and look at the “8.5 Qualities of a Leader”. I guarantee it’ll pop up someplace, because I wrote it.
And I’ve been using 0.5 ever since. I trademarked another 0.5 list from Jeffrey Gitomer. I have been using 0.5 as the glue piece for whatever it is that I’m trying to put a list together for, so that I can tie the whole list together with one point, whether it’s as simple as “Have fun” or “Do the right thing”, or more complex, in the case of 21.5, or in the Little Red Book of Selling 12.5 was “Resign your position as General Manager of the universe”. You don’t have time to manage the world. Just manage your own closet and your backyard and your kids and your family.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. So with a trademark, the 0.5, does that mean I can’t make a list with 0.5? I’m stepping on your intellectual property?

Jeffrey Gitomer
You can, but I will sue you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, will you? But we’re friends now.

Jeffrey Gitomer
I’ll call you first and say, “Please remove that.” Some people violate that. I’m not the world’s policeman. If they want to do it, that’s their karma. But people know me by that and have known me by that since the first thing I wrote.

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

Jeffrey Gitomer
I would. Just from a standpoint of the book, I’ll just say a couple of things. You can pre-buy it right now. Is Jen there? What’s the URL that I’ve got to send people to? I think it’s HillsFirstWritings.com. And that will take you to a landing page, and if you enter your email you’ll get the first chapter free.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Jeffrey Gitomer
You could stick that in the show notes. We’ll email it to you anyway. You might want to consider talking to people about our podcast, Sell Or Die. We have gone daily, because the podcast is so popular, it’s unbelievable. Jennifer Gluckow and I do it; she’s my partner. And it’s engaging and it’s fun. It’s not over the top. It’s expletive-rated; they call E-rated or something. Say what you want to say, sometimes the guests are a little bit explicit, and sometimes I am. But Jennifer, never. She’s a pristine, first-class New York City babe. But I think that there is an ability for your listeners or your fans to take another look at a podcast that I think can affect them, if they’re in sales or they’re in business, because we have really good guests. And you can be one of them if you’d like.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m honored. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Jeffrey Gitomer
We get a lot, a lot of action. We’re over 100,000 downloads a month now and we’re shooting for the moon.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. Kudos and congrats, and good luck!

Jeffrey Gitomer
Thanks. Luck. There’s another thing in one of the chapters.

Pete Mockaitis
Luck or Pluck.

Jeffrey Gitomer
Exactly. You either work hard and create your luck, or you are buying lottery and wanting to win and hoping and scratching your number off and going, “Oh, crap, I lost again.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, understood.

Jeffrey Gitomer
I don’t know why people play the lottery.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s not a great investment, in terms of your ticket.

Jeffrey Gitomer
No. From what I’ve seen of it, if you have all your teeth, you can never win.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s fun. There’s one tidbit I want to share. So, you know Dan Kennedy.

Jeffrey Gitomer
Of course. I love him, by the way.

Pete Mockaitis
I thought you would.

Jeffrey Gitomer
He has brass balls, and he’s accurate.

Pete Mockaitis
He had a great bit; I think it was factual. Someone had the winning lottery ticket, and he was anticipating that everyone was going to start asking him for money. So, after he got the winning lottery ticket, he called up all sorts of friends and family and said, “Hey, I’m in a tight spot. I can’t really explain it, but I need to borrow $1,000 right away.” So, just about nobody helped him out. So, the next day it’s announced that he has the winning lottery ticket, and sure enough he dramatically cut down on his inbound requests for money.

Jeffrey Gitomer
That’s incredible. I love that.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. So now, let’s hear about some of your favorite things. How about a favorite quote, something that you find inspiring?

Jeffrey Gitomer
One of the quotes I wrote is, “People will rain on your parade because they have no parade of their own.” That is time immemorial, not just in business, but in politics. That’s number one. That’s my best- written quote, other than “People don’t like to be sold but they love to buy.” But quotes that I love: “You become what you think about all day long” by Earl Nightingale is probably the best of the personal development quotes that I’ve ever, ever read. The Zig Ziglar quote of, “Make every day is productive as the day before you go on vacation”, if you’re looking for a productivity mantra. I live by quotes; I have thousands of them. In fact, any of your listeners the want my Retweetables book, there are 365 140- character quotes that they can use in a heartbeat. Not just by me, but by lots of people.

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

Jeffrey Gitomer
I wrote The Patterson Principles of Selling, based on the life and times of John Patterson, who is known as the Grandfather of Salesmanship in America. Because he didn’t sell anything, he created pull-through marketing by advertising for women to go demand a receipt when they bought stuff. And the merchant would say, “We don’t have a receipt.” And then three days later a cash register sales guy would come by and go, “Do you guys need receipts?” And literally sold a million cash registers between 1900 and 1911.
I’m in awe of him the same way I’m in awe of Steve Jobs, who created things that we don’t know we need and now we can’t do without. He created the redistribution of music, he created the laptop that everyone tries to… I had a T-shirt that said, “Windows 95, Macintosh 85”, and that was pretty much what the deal was. So, I like the innovator, I like the person who’s trying to be first at anything, whether it’s Roger Bannister running the 4-minute mile, or Neil Armstrong being the first guy on the moon, although that’s a little controversial as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And how about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Jeffrey Gitomer
Everybody in our place uses Asana. We’ve graduated from Slack, although we still slack one another. I use Microsoft Word. I love Google Docs, because I can share some of my stuff with other people, but when I’m writing myself, I find Word is the most comfortable thing for me to create in. The best tool that I’ve ever found in my technical life is Dragon for Mac.

Pete Mockaitis
For Mac? I’ve heard people say that Dragon for PC rocks, and Dragon for Mac breaks all the time and it’s super annoying and they hate it. But you’re saying you’re loving it. It’s getting it done. It has 100% delivered for you.

Jeffrey Gitomer
Yes, and it’s only about 97% accurate. But I use it and I’m very successful at it and I love it, because I’m not a good keyboard person. So, my last three books have been done with Mac.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome, cool. Good to know.

Jeffrey Gitomer
It’s Dragon for Mac. And if you like the subtlety of it, I think it’s very important to understand this as a writer. If I’m talking into the screen and it’s taking my words and I take a few minutes to edit it when I’m done, I don’t have to think about anything with my fingers. I don’t have to think where the P key is, where the Return key is, none of that. I’m concentrating on my words, not on the keyboard. And that’s a significant part when you’re writing with a stream of conscious.

Pete Mockaitis
And as I’m thinking about it, you even have the ability to jot down a quick note. It’s like, I’m saying one idea and I’ve already got another. And so, I’m going to write that down and that’s going to be there for me next.

Jeffrey Gitomer
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool, thank you. And how about a favorite habit?

Jeffrey Gitomer
I think my favorite habit is probably hanging out with my family.

Pete Mockaitis
Right on.

Jeffrey Gitomer
That’s the best habit I could get. My fiancée and I are going to have dinner tonight that she doesn’t know about yet. And that’s becoming a habit. It’s a wonderful time to just sort of clear the air and talk about life in the big city, or life in Paris, which is even a bigger city.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. And tell me, is there a particular nugget you share that seems to connect and get retweeted over and over again?

Jeffrey Gitomer
If you go to my Twitter feed you’ll see a bunch of them. But the one I just tweeted, which I think is going to be a pretty important one: “Don’t give your children advice you don’t take yourself.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s a command. “Don’t give your children advice you don’t take yourself.” [laugh] I’m sorry, I’m just thinking, I keep saying, “Johnny, don’t poop on the new carpet.” [laugh]

Jeffrey Gitomer
But here’s the deal – make a friend. “If you make a sale, you make it commission. You make a friend, you earn a fortune.” And that has been a real lifelong retweetable for me. I’ll tweet it out once a month or so and I still get tons of response.

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

Jeffrey Gitomer
Easy. Go to Amazon to get the book. Just go Truthful Living and it’ll pop up. And go to my website, Gitomer.com. And listen to the podcast Sell Or Die and you’ll get all kinds of information on a daily basis for free.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And thanks so much for the invitation. That’s very kind. I’m excited.

Jeffrey Gitomer
My people will reach out to your people.

Pete Mockaitis
Wheeling and dealing. Cool. And do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking be awesome at their jobs?

Jeffrey Gitomer
If you don’t love it, make tomorrow your last day. Go find something you love, and you’ll make 10 times more money, even though you have to sacrifice something in order to make it happen.

Pete Mockaitis
Gotcha. Awesome, thank you. Well Jeffrey, this has been a treat. I wish you tons of luck in your Kingship of Sales and with Truthful Living.

Jeffrey Gitomer
Pleasure for me.

Aug 17

334: How to Stop Freaking Out and Keep Moving Forward with Maxie McCoy

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Maxie McCoy says: "If something is moving you forward... so much possibility is there."

Maxie McCoy advises dropping the grand plan of your life in favor of simpler questions to move you forward.

You’ll Learn:

  1. Two exercises for discerning your direction
  2. Why you should keep a gratitude journal
  3. Five wise questions to ask your support network

About Maxie

Maxie McCoy is a writer and speaker obsessed with giving women the tools they need to believe in themselves. She writes weekly inspiration on maxiemccoy.com, and is the host and executive producer of the live-audience show Let Her Speak. She specializes in creating meaningful offline experiences for top brands and conferences. Her work has been featured on Good Morning America, Bustle, Fortune, TheSkimm, INC, Business Insider, Yahoo, Marie Claire, GlassDoor, The Huffington Post, Women’s Health and many others.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Pete Mockaitis
Maxie, thanks so much for joining us here on the How To Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Maxie McCoy
Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think we’ll get into a lot of really good stuff, and perhaps the best place to start is with your flower obsession. What’s the story here?

Maxie McCoy
You know, where all great podcasts start. So my flower obsession – I really just have this dream of myself in the future where I’m going to own a flower shop at the age of 80. But really where that came from is, I have a ritual every Saturday morning – I go to the farmers market here in San Francisco at the Ferry Building. We’ll get into rituals later, because it’s such a key piece of figuring out where we’re going. And I basically only allow myself a certain amount of cash and I spend it all on flowers. And then I come back and I fancy myself a flower designer and cover my one-bedroom apartment full of flowers. So it’s just flowers galore in here. I can’t really explain it, other than it’s a really fab ritual.

Pete Mockaitis
That is really fab, if I may. I don’t have much in the way of flowers; most days are flowerless in our home.

Maxie McCoy
Oh, no. We need to change that. It’ll bring your home alive.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, one thing I’ve noticed is that every time I pass eucalyptus branches, I go, “Ooh, I really like that!” And so, that seems like a nice little gateway drug, if you will, into bringing them into my home. But someone freaked me out, like, “You want to watch out for mold and for bugs.” It was like, “Uh-oh.” What should I do if I want to get eucalyptus into my life, in the home? Are there any safety tips I need to follow, or what’s the story?

Maxie McCoy
I really think that that’s amazing. First of all, I’m the girl that could kill a cactus. So if I can do it, I feel like you can do it and not have to worry about bugs. But isn’t eucalyptus the one that dries and then stays in a vase for a really long time?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s what I thought.

Maxie McCoy
Yeah, you picked a really good one. And also, eucalyptus makes the air smell amazing.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes! It’s so fresh and alive. It’s like, I’m a little bit more energized, and I love being more energized.

Maxie McCoy
See, and we’re going to talk about that too. So I think that you just need to follow the energy, Pete, and get yourself some eucalyptus.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Well, already unlocking transformation.

Maxie McCoy
Right here on the flower anecdote.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so with inspirations – you’ve got a lot of them written up at your website MaxieMcCoy.com. And I was sort of cruising through them and enjoying them. What would you say are some of the biggest recurring themes that show up again and again as you’re doing your writing?

Maxie McCoy
There’s a few of them, and I think in order to understand where they come from, it’s important to understand why I started writing to begin with. I actually was spending about 90% of my time on the road, talking to women, building out offline networking communities. So I was building out curriculum and facilitating workshops, and really just focused on having these conversations with young professional women. And there were just so many universal themes that kept coming up.

I was a writer first and writing has always been my first love. I was like, “I have to capture this somewhere”, because these conversations that we’re having in anywhere from groups of 10 to groups of 300 could be brought together for other people to glean from. And what really came out of that, and it’s what you see as you’re cruising around on my site, is this incessant doubt around our future. There are just a lot of these themes of, “Am I doing the right things? Is what I’m feeling normal? How do I handle this doubt? Where the heck am I going with my life?” And really the writings there are one giant love letter to women that they’re not alone, that we’re actually all feeling these things and asking these things, and most of it comes into career as a cornerstone in our life in my writings. So those are some of the big ones.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And so, our audience is mostly women, but not all. I’d say gentlemen too experience some of these questions – the “Where am I going with my life?” obsession, you call it. And so, your book, You’re Not Lost tackles this. And how would you phrase the main idea behind You’re Not Lost?

Maxie McCoy
You’re Not Lost came because in all those conversations I was referencing, it was the one thing – and I’m sure you have this with our podcast also – it’s the one thing that I just kept hearing over and over and over again. And it brought me to the main thesis and the solution that I was trying to create from having heard this so much. It’s just simply that you don’t have to know where you’re going in order to begin; that we can find our way when we tap into a really deep sense of self-belief in order to take small step after small step after small step.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I dig this. And I see that you on your site have a reference to Tara Mohr, and we’ve had her on the show, and she’s awesome. That’s one of the top, top downloaded episodes – fun fact – the Tara Mohr episode.

Maxie McCoy
It doesn’t surprise me. Just this morning actually I was sharing on Instagram about this visualization of  my future self, which I actually found from Tara. The amount of comments already this morning on that are just… She resonates so widely with me, with my audience also, and just that concept of some of what we want to figure out in our life, we can do by going forward first.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And so, for the listener, that was the “inner mentor” exercise, where you imagine an older, wiser version of yourself in a pleasant setting, and just see what does your older, wiser self tell you. And it’s almost freaky. I was like, “Wow, that was really wise and helpful.”

Maxie McCoy
So, did you do it?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, and I just made that up. It’s like, “That’s all from me! Whoa!”

Maxie McCoy
“It all came from me.” Wait, I have to know – what was your inner mentor’s name? Because in the visualization exercise, for everybody listening, you have to name your future self. Do you remember what your name was?

Pete Mockaitis
We did it such a rapid pace; it was sort of real time on the show. And so I more just had a visual picture, as opposed to a name. I just thought of him as Peter.

Maxie McCoy
Yes. Kind of like Maxine.

Pete Mockaitis
And I more so resonated with his gray hairs and wrinkles, and yet sort of smiley, joyous demeanor. I was like, “Okay, what does this guy have to tell me?” [laugh]

Maxie McCoy
“Let’s talk about this guy.” Same. I had a very similar experience. It was cool, because kind of what you just said –  we have all of our answers. And a lot of the messaging that I work around is really to help people get to peeling back that onion and just figuring out our own answers. And this is one amazing exercise to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So we got the, “I’m lost. What am I doing? Where am I going with my life?” – that obsession. You say one of the very first steps is to just accept it’s okay to start before you have the whole masterplan step by step laid out. So, what are some of the other first steps that folks should take when they’re wrestling with this one?

Maxie McCoy
I think when you are just kind of obsessed with that question, there’s a lot of people out there that are going to tell you to find your passion or figure out your purpose, which honestly – and I don’t want to offend anyone – I kind of think it’s B.S., because we’re all really smart people; if we knew the answer to that, we’d be doing it already. And so, it really is more of getting us into action, to a place that we’re going to be able to really level up the answer to some of those really big questions. And at a macro view kind of figuring out, “Where is my life going?” really is about dropping the obsession with the big picture and stepping into the unknown.

I am a reformed goal junkie and then some. I used to live my life by a masterplan, but there’s a number of things that happen when you do that. We’ve all been there, where we’ve achieved the goal, then feel completely empty about it, whether we’ve done that at work or whether we’ve done that in our own lives. We’ve set this bar for ourselves and we get there and it’s like, “Well, this doesn’t really feel like anything.”

Or we don’t have the ability to even conceptualize the masterplan. The feeling of loss comes from both of those, and just at a macro view, when we can tap into our own power and be willing to step into the unknown, we’re going to create the path as we go. That is what starts to open up the, “Oh, I actually do know where this is going.” But you’re not going to think your way to that answer.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig that, I dig that. And I think sometimes people will identify a passion, like, “I love the violin! Oh, but that’s really not practical. You can’t make a career on the violin. Only a dozen people per town.” Whatever, it can go to a symphony. So, I’m intrigued by that. You say if you knew it, then you’d be set.

Maxie McCoy
You’d already be doing it, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m thinking, sometimes you have some inklings, but it feels sort of impractical or not possible. So, what do you do with that one?

Maxie McCoy
You’re totally right, that there are some of these that can feel impossible. However, if something is moving you forward, actually so much possibility is there. I’d even say in my own life working in women’s leadership and talking to women for a living really… My background was sports broadcasting even though this was always my passion – really did always feel outlandish until some of the small decisions and choices that I made led me here.

And I think instrumentally these high-level, like being a pro athlete or a concert pianist – those things could absolutely be hard to achieve, and to make a life and to grow, but in the context of our own jobs, when we’re able to tap into that inkling and know it may not be about the fact that you love playing the violin and that’s where you want to make your living; it may just be that you want to be a bit more creative. You might be in a data job, but the violin is really speaking to you, and then really understanding why is that, what are the qualities about this that are pushing me forward? And I think when you start to tap into that energy and ask yourself, “Why?”… We’ve heard the exercise – I’m sure all of us – you ask yourself “Why” three times and it can really get at what that inkling might be able to tell you, even if it feels really not remotely possible. There’s some kind of nugget there.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. So with the violin piece – when you go into some “Why’s”, let’s just see how this might work. You might be, “I love the idea of being able to be immersed in something for hours at a time without interruption, and feeling like I’m being pulled in 10 different directions from all these different stakeholders who want a piece of me.”

Maxie McCoy
And I ask you, “Okay, Pete. But why?”

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. I don’t actually play the violin, so I’m trying to imagine a violin player.

Maxie McCoy
You want to know what’s funny? I do play the violin.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding! Maybe my subconscious picked that up as I was reading about you.

Maxie McCoy
It’s kind of incredible. It’s by my feet, which is amazing. That’s so good.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, you tell me. So maybe the “Why” associated with that – I’m just going to guess – and then you give me another example. So, with the violin, “I like the sense of going deeply immersed into something and not be pulled in many directions, because I feel like I am getting a sense of learning and growth and mastery from getting to spend that extensive focus time.” And if I go “Why” again, it can be like… Or in some ways I almost feel like …, “Because that sensation is awesome, and I’d love it.”

Maxie McCoy
Yeah, and you’re feeling very alive or very energized. And it does come back to that sensation. I think what builds into so much of the joy that we have in our careers is like, “Where are we spending our time and the feelings that we’re getting out of that?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, totally. So, give us maybe another “three why” example that you’ve seen with some folks you’ve worked with.

Maxie McCoy
So I think that when you’re breaking down, whether it’s energy or expression, really figuring out who we are, is a really amazing first step in progressing this question along. I am always asking myself and others, “How can you be the highest possible expression of yourself? What does that actually look like?” And then when you are able to distill down what the expression of you looks like and ask yourself, “Why that matters, why that matters, why that matters”, you can really get at all of the molds and the limits that were keeping you from being that person.

And the reason I think that this is really important in the grand scheme of figuring your path out is, there’s so much telling us to be different and there’s so much telling us that we need to change before we begin, but actually we just need to take all of the things that people have told us to do differently and to be differently, flip it on its head, and you actually have an inverse formula, specifically for being the highest possible expression of who you are, which is going to directly correlate to the things that energize you. And I think when you can ask yourself “Why” three times, and doing this often, it really gets down into, “Why does it matter that I am the most me, and who does she or he actually look like in that?”

Pete Mockaitis
And when you say “inverse formula”, can you talk a little bit more about that? What are we doing?

Maxie McCoy
Yeah, so we’re basically converting all of the things people have told us to change and flipping it on its head. So if I’ve been told that I talk a lot, or that I’m loud, or that I’m taking up too much space – it’s really just flipping it and doing all of those things, and doing more of those things, of the things that come so innate into who we are, they make up who we are. And those become what an expression of us looks like, and not changing them, and not trying to fit into other people’s molds, because molds are just limits. They pull down on who we are.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s intriguing. And I think in some ways, you want to exercise a bit of prudence there, because on the one hand if someone says, “Pete, you’ve always got your head in the clouds. You’ve got to be more practical” – I can imagine inverting that like, “Coming up with new ideas and innovation is a real strength of mine. And so, I’m going to run with that and make it happen.” Versus if it was like, “Pete, you drink so much, you embarrass yourself and everybody else around you” – I’d rather not flip that, like, “This is who I am. Deal with it.”

Maxie McCoy
No, I think an asterisk is really important. You give a perfect example of where those things can really matter and where they cannot really be relevant to as much of a career conversation. But yeah, you’re totally spot-on. I think it’s more values and characteristics-driven as we’re trying to apply our talent into whatever it is that we’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. Alright, so those are some great steps to get the wheels turning in some really positive directions. I’m wondering, once you’ve begun, what do you do next?

Maxie McCoy
What do you do next? I’m really glad that you asked that. I think once the wheels are turning, there’s a couple of things and exercises that are just really powerful to get you to continue moving. We talked a little bit about going forward and talking to that future self, per Tara. But I think coming back to this “What energizes me” conversation, because that’s going to point you like a compass where it is that you should be stepping.

Reflecting here is really, really powerful. I think looking back at your work – if you’re in a place where you feel stuck or your feel a little bit unhappy or you’re feeling like you have no idea where you’re going – going backwards and asking yourself, “Where are all of the places that I’ve felt the most energized?” Energized can be a little amorphous, so I think breaking that down even further and asking yourself, “Where have I felt proud? Where have I done things where I’ve completely lost track of time?” We hear that one a lot. Where have you really felt deeply connected to your power? And just listing out whatever comes up, you’ll start to see that there are probably a lot of similarities in some of the types of work that you’re doing.

And then to put action around those, because that’s what actually matters. Just what you were saying, getting that wheel turning is not so much about creating the grand plan, but just asking yourself the simple question of, “What is the absolute smallest thing I can do right now to put any of that energy into motion?”

In my own life, one of the biggest life-changing things that’s ever happened to me came from a tiny, tiny decision. And a lot of what happens in our life isn’t because we took this giant big leap; it’s because we made one really small decision that ended up setting us off on a very exciting and different course, and we kept taking those steps and we kept taking those steps, but it started somewhere. For me that was about six and a half years ago. I’d been in sports broadcasting, I wasn’t yet in women’s leadership. I was feeling more lost than I had ever felt, and I was like, “Shoot. I have got to go back to the things that make me me, the things that I really care about.”

And I took myself actually through some of this, “Where have I felt the most proud and energized in my life?”, and it all came down to writing and women’s stories. So, I decided to sign up for a writing class. And it was a tiny decision at the time. It was just a difference of like, “Can I afford this 7-week class or not?” And I was like, “I’m just going to do it, because I need to be exercising this energy that makes me feel alive.”

And that ended up leading me directly to the startup that put me into women’s leadership, why I started being on the map, traveling and talking to women – because a woman in that writing class handed me the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle business section and was like, “Hey, there are these women who are building a company based on all the things that you care about.” And I think that’s what we underestimate, is we have no idea how it’s all going to play out. Life is so not linear, there’s just no way to tell these things. But if we can get into a place where we’re really willing to do that absolute smallest thing to follow the energy, it could truly lead us anywhere, and that’s where the path starts to open up.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. I’d also like to get your take when it comes to the instincts and what they’re serving up. How do you think about doing the trusting of instincts, versus the digging deeper and exploring and evaluating what the instincts are pointing you to?

Maxie McCoy
I think it’s a fine balance of knowing, “Do I trust this? Is this just anxiety and fear coming up? Or do I need to go a little further, do I need to ask some people?” I think we can actually answer that ourselves when we come back to us. One of the things that I think we lose track of is how much time we’re spending in other people’s lives, which makes it really hard to evaluate any of those instincts, because we’re so not tapped into our own power.

These stats get referenced all the time, but the fact that a third of us feel unhappy and envious following our most recent social exchange – that just tells us that there is a direct correlation to how we’re feeling and how outside of ourselves we’re getting to even know what our instincts are saying, much less trusting them enough to do anything about it.

But I think with instincts specifically, this one’s a little off the map, but I love it so much and I’m on a crusade to bring back superstitions and lucky charms. Hold with me – it’s not as crazy as it sounds. When you are starting to get onto this path and you’re taking action and the fear shows up, and the gut instincts are showing up and you don’t know if this is right or if you should even follow it – there’s a lot that we can do to ritualize our highest potential.

So, doesn’t matter what this is. I can tell you what mine are, but there’s a reason that top athletes and people are using the sign of the cross a million times, or have their lucky underpants. There are so many examples of people doing this. And there was actually a study that found – they did this specifically with golfers – that when you hear, “I’ll cross my fingers for you”, or you’re given a lucky ball, they do better. They do better than those who didn’t hear those things or weren’t given a golf ball.

And so, we all have the power to kind of ritualize that experience. For me I have an Oprah candle that I light for myself before really big days. I also light it for other people. It’s this long candle that has Oprah’s face on it, because I’m obsessed with her.

Pete Mockaitis
Oprah gave you this candle? What is an Oprah candle?

Maxie McCoy
Oprah did not give me the candle. It just is an old devotional candle that has Oprah’s face on it. She’s my religious experience, but that’s beside the point. So, it’s become a joke now amongst me and all of my friends, like, “I’ll light the lucky Oprah candle for you.” And I light it for myself, and it’s not just superstition and lucky charms; it’s really proven to help our performance.

And so I think when you’re talking about, “I’m feeling this, I’m not trusting it” or, “I don’t trust myself”, there are some very real things we can do, like coming back to ourselves by getting out of the world of everyone else. And then, how can I use a lucky charm or a superstition to improve my performance? Which is going to feed back, loop cycle back to you feeling more confident and doing even more.

Pete Mockaitis
What’s really cool about the lucky charm or superstition or ritual piece is that whenever I go deep into scientific journal article reading, which is surprisingly often; I’m not a scientist.

Maxie McCoy
I’m not that surprised by that, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m just curious and I want to know the truth. So I’ll get after it. One thing that really strikes me is how the placebo is really pretty good. It’s like when we compare something against the placebo, and they’re like, “Oh, it didn’t do any better than the placebo.” It’s like, “Yeah, but the placebo did pretty good on its own.”

Maxie McCoy
The placebo is pretty powerful, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Maybe I should just sell placebos and look at all the results that get claimed. I don’t know, maybe FTC or somebody has cracked out on that. But I guess the placebo effect doesn’t really work unless you believe that there’s something that’s at work.

Maxie McCoy
Is being done, yeah. Do you have a lucky charm yourself?

Pete Mockaitis
I don’t know about…

Maxie McCoy
No Oprah candles over there?

Pete Mockaitis
I don’t know if I’d call it a “lucky charm”, but I had a rosary that turned gold when I was in a pilgrimage location.

Maxie McCoy
No way!

Pete Mockaitis
Way, yeah. And actually it’s funny because a lot of people say this happens. So I was checking it every few hours when I was there. It’s in a tiny village in Bosnia. So that’s pretty cool, because it’s like something miraculous and supernatural happened here. And so, if there’s something really big happening, I do want that by me, because it’s like, “This got a heavenly touch and I’d like that to be near me in this moment.”

Maxie McCoy
It’s powerful. And I think knowing what those things are for you… I am so blown away by that story; that’s incredible. Yeah, I would keep it by you and in your pocket at all times.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it’s fallen apart a few times. I’ve had to try to repair it, because it’s been around.

Maxie McCoy
Can I borrow it?

Pete Mockaitis
If you are next to me. While we’re in the same room you can have it in your pocket. So, whether it’s a lucky charm or an item from heaven, or a placebo – there’s something to that. I also want to get your take… On your website you have one of the most interesting hashtags that I’ve ever seen, and it’s #batshitgrateful. [laugh] I was like, “Boy, there’s a combination of words, and I think I love it.” So could you unpack a little bit of that? What does that mean?

Maxie McCoy
I absolutely can. I’m trying to remember the genesis of this particular hashtag, but I really think it just came from a place of being so grateful, #grateful was not enough for me. And people say “batshit crazy” often. I was like, “No, I’m not crazy. I’m grateful.” And then “batshit grateful” was born. And for me, kind of going back to that ritual conversation and the power of gratitude – I ended up ritualizing in my own life because things were just getting crazy and I was trying to find a way to ground back into myself so I could listen to take these little steps that were opening up on my own path.

People talk about gratitude journals all the time, and every year I felt like I was writing New Year’s resolutions, “This is the year that I’m starting the gratitude journal.” But it actually wasn’t until I read Oprah’s What I Know For Sure, which is one of my favorite books. And she talks about in her career, and at the height of her career, she was feeling a lot of unfulfillment in her own work. And when she looked at the reason for that, she brought it all down to the fact that she had stopped a gratitude journal that she had done for decades, because things were at the height, it was getting crazy. She had more than she’d ever had, and yet it wasn’t feeling like enough.

And I just had this light bulb moment of, “Okay, if Oprah felt like that then, then I sure as heck have to get my head wrapped around feeling grateful for what’s going on in my life right now.” And there is so much to back this up. One of the things that has always stuck with me about gratitude journaling is that if you do that for five minutes, it increases your long-term well-being by more than 10%. And 10% is the same impact as doubling your income. So you can feel the effects of doubling your income just by gratitude journaling for five minutes a day. And that really sums up the practice of being “batshit grateful”, but the hashtag as it is is just a way for me to just put out in the world that I am so grateful for where I’m at, even though I have a million places that I want to go.

Pete Mockaitis
What’s cool about even just the concept of being “batshit grateful” is like being crazy – it’s sort of over the top. It may make people go, “Whoa”. Nonetheless, it really is wonderous that, whatever – you have delicious food available to eat, or that you can summon a Lyft or an Uber, they just snap up, from your phone you can contact anybody in the world and be in touch with them.

Maxie McCoy
You can have Pete’s voice on your phone any morning you want.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow, so much to be grateful for.

Maxie McCoy
It really is so much.

Pete Mockaitis
My voice. And so, with the gratitude journal, could you unpack a little bit what happens in these five minutes? So you’re feeling grateful, you’ve got a pen and paper, and what are you doing?

Maxie McCoy
I think that you are just reflecting on your day. And when I say “I think”, I mean you’re reflecting on your day. You’re coming up with, no matter how bad your day was, no matter how good your day was, what are a few things? I always encourage to do three; two of those being, what are the things that you’re grateful for outside of yourself? So, what you just said – “I had a really amazing meal”, “I got to FaceTime with my best friend, who lives in another country.”

And then really taking that third, that last piece of the stuff that you’re jotting down and asking, “What am I grateful for myself for?” So whether that is, “I had a lot of motivation today and really got a lot done” or, “I feel like I handled that conversation really well” or, “I was really honest.” Just being able to be grateful to yourself, not just to the things happening to you. I do three. I jot down three and give a lot of detail. You could do five, if you wanted to do that every day. And it really is piecing out what are the things, no matter how simple, that you are feeling particularly grateful for that day.

Pete Mockaitis
That is a nice piece there. So when I’m doing gratitude stuff, it’s usually in prayer. I think of three to five-ish things that happened the last 24 hours. And I took that form Shawn Achor and his Happiness Advantage work – an amazing book.

Maxie McCoy
Amazing book.

Pete Mockaitis
And then I think of three to five things that I’m grateful for, just in general, that are generally great, like it’s pretty cool that I have a baby. But then you’re adding a whole another dimension there, in terms of grateful about yourself, because I think it’s quite easy to criticize. I see my shortcomings all the time.

Maxie McCoy
All the time. Our brain is wired for that. We’re kind of wired for criticism.

Pete Mockaitis
And so it could be, “I’m grateful that yesterday I was able to do four podcast interviews, even though I was feeling really hot and tired. And they were great.” So, that’s something to feel good about, in terms of what I could do there.

Maxie McCoy
Exactly. That’s exactly it.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Maxie, tell me – anything else you want to cover before we shift gears and talk about some of your favorite things?

Maxie McCoy
Yeah, I think that we’ve talked a lot about this internal journey that we can have in order to kind of figure out where your life is going. But I think one of the things that we don’t talk about enough is how in certain situations, external validation from the people that we love the most and who are some of our biggest cheerleaders can really have an impact on us believing in ourselves enough to take these actions.

And so, the last thing that I would say, just in terms of what can make a really big impact in figuring out where it is you want to go – and this was one of the more transformational exercises I’ve ever done in my life – is really surveying. And we hear this a lot, about getting 360 degree feedback, doing peer reviews. There’s so much here on why this works, when it comes to our own self growth. But really figuring out where people see you and where they see your potential and your value, can eventually help you get there. You eventually will start to believe in yourself and the way that they see you and that they believe in you.

For me what I had done was, I had a friend who put together five questions. She sent them out in a typeform to around 15 to 20 of my closest, I call them “cheerleaders” – people who are your biggest fans and believe in you and have your best interests at heart. And we asked them what makes me irreplaceable, what is my superpower, what’s holding me back, where they thought I would be five years from now, and then anything else they wanted to say about my potential or my value or my talents.

And then that friend actually synthesized all the information to me and delivered it to me in person, and then gave me all the raw data. And I am telling you, Pete, my life – this was years ago – I am literally living the life that is in that spreadsheet of answers right now, because they saw it. I just was too scared to do anything about it, but knowing that these people believed in me and what they saw started to open up me being able to see what that North Star might be, and how to get there.

Pete Mockaitis
That is cool, that is bold. Can you lay it out – what are a few of those questions that got in there?

Maxie McCoy
Yeah, the five are: What makes you irreplaceable? What’s your superpower? What’s holding you back? What are you up to five years from now? And then any additional notes on talents, potential, or unique value.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And what I like is that it’s a positive. We had a guest talking about self-awareness – it was Tasha Eurich. Self-awareness and talking about doing dinner of truth. And that’s really cool.

Maxie McCoy
Super cool, but I don’t want to be there.

Pete Mockaitis
It sounds pretty spooky, whereas those questions do have some constructive stuff – “What’s holding you back?”, to deal with. But most of it is going to make you feel awesome.

Maxie McCoy
And sometimes you need that. We’re hard enough on ourselves.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. That’s cool. Well, thank you for that.

Maxie McCoy
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, tell me now – how about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Maxie McCoy
I find this incredibly inspiring. You can tell me how you feel about this, but it’s from an artist named Ashley Longshore. She’s incredible, one of my favorite people to follow on Instagram. But she says, “Instant gratification will get you stone drunk or pregnant. Everything else is going to take some time.” I think it’s just a really funny way, and I say it to myself often to just have some patience with any of the things – with ourselves, with trying to figure all of this out. We’ve just got to stick at it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great, thank you. And how about a favorite study or experiment or a bit of research?

Maxie McCoy
The McKinsey study – I think this was late 2015 – specifically around advancing women’s equality, which is the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning, that $12 trillion could be added to the global GDP by 2025. And for me that’s just a reminder of why this work matters.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Maxie McCoy
Lilac Girls. So this one is Martha Hall Kelly. I read it, I’m obsessed with it. In all of this self-help work that we’re all always doing, I have transitioned my mind at night to being obsessed with fiction, and this is just one of my favorites. It’s got some complex female characters that I dig.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool, thank you. And how about a favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job?

Maxie McCoy
So, I use and love – and this goes back to the gratitude journaling – an app called Reflectly. It’s a daily gratitude journal where you rate your day, and then you can see over the course of time what your metrics are, like how happy you’ve been over the course of a week, through the course of a month.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And how about a favorite habit?

Maxie McCoy
Am I allowed to talk about the Oprah candle again? Because that’s just hands down my favorite habit. I light her every day. And by the way, I buy her in bulk.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect or resonate with your people, and you hear it quoted back to you frequently?

Maxie McCoy
Yeah, this quote around, “You never know who you’re inspiring” gets retweeted all the time from me, because I think it’s just a reminder to all of us that our actions, even if they feel small and insignificant – our actions, our stories, our voice – it all really matters so much. You have no idea the impact you’re having on other people.

Pete Mockaitis
And Maxie, if folks want to get in touch or talk to you, where should they go?

Maxie McCoy
Please, I love talking to people. It’s MaxieMcCoy.com. You can email me directly at an inbox I do check, at hello@maxiemccoy.com. Or quickly, I’m always fast on social. It’s @maxiemccoy, Instagram and Twitter.

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

Maxie McCoy
I really think that everyone should do this survey about their humans, and just get that feedback and believe them. I also put the survey in my book, which is You’re Not Lost. It’s on any of the major retailers. You can find out a little bit more about the story and how to do that there.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Well, Maxie, this has been a ton of fun.

Maxie McCoy
So fun!

Pete Mockaitis
Thanks so much for sharing your take, and good luck with the book You’re Not Lost, and all you’re doing!

Maxie McCoy
Thank you, thank you, thank you. I’m so batshit grateful to be here.

Jun 25

313: Closing the Gap between Potential and Results with Thom Singer

By Podcasts No Comments

 

 

Thom Singer says: "If you're not willing to... take some actions without the guarantee, then you're just going to be mediocre at your job."

Thom Singer breaks open the Paradox of Potential to highlight where potential doesn’t equal results and what to do about it.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to identify the unique things holding you back
  2. The three things that always help achieve better results
  3. How to bring back purpose when it’s most needed

About Thom

As the host of the popular “Cool Things Entrepreneurs Do” podcast, Thom interviews business leaders, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and others who possess an extra dose of the entrepreneurial spirit. The information compiled from these compelling interviews is shared with his clients, as he challenges people to be more engaged and enthusiastic in all their actions. He has authored twelve books on the power of business relationships, sales, networking, presentation skills and entrepreneurship, and regularly speaks to corporate, law firm and convention audiences. He sets the tone for better engagement at industry events as the opening keynote speaker or the Master of Ceremonies. His Conference Catalyst Program has become a “meeting planners” favorite in how it transforms the conference attendee experience.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Pete Mockaitis
Thom, thanks so much for joining us here again on How To Be Awesome At Your Job.

Thom Singer
God, I’m so excited to be back. It’s been like three years.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah, time really flies. And thanks so much for saying “Yes”. Back in Episode 17, before I had much of a show, I had to pick people who seemed to like me, instead of anybody.

Thom Singer
Now people don’t have to like you.

Pete Mockaitis
No. They resent me, but they grin and bear it for the publicity.

Thom Singer
Awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
So I want to hear a little bit, you did some stand-up comedy for the first time at the age of 51. What’s the story here?

Thom Singer
You’ve done your homework on me. So, I made a pledge to myself when I turned 50 almost two years ago that I was going to have the most fun ever from 50 to 75 years old. Not that I had a bad time before; I was in a fraternity in college, I had a really good time. And I’ve had a good time in between. But I just decided that I wasn’t going to talk myself out of things. And when I was younger, when I was about your age, I was in my 20s, I wanted to try my hand at just open mic night. I didn’t want to go be a full-time comic. But I always found a reason, like I wasn’t going to be good enough, or “What if I sucked?”, or “What if my friends saw me?” And so I always found a way not to do it. I had a friend who was pushing me to try it, and I just never did.
And recently I had a situation where I was going to be in New York and a professional speaker friend of mine is also a professional comic, and he said, “When you’re in New York I’ll take you to open mic night.” And I said, “Oh, how cool. I’d love to see you work on new material.” And the other friend who was with us started shaking his head going, “That’s not what he means. He’ll take you to open mic night, but he’ll make you sign up and do a five-minute set.” And I was like, “Oh, I can’t do that.” And he said, “Why?” And all of my reasons were false. And he said, “Have you ever wanted to try it?” And I said, “Yeah, I used to when I was younger, I really wanted to.”
So, he didn’t really talk me into it, but he made the offer that he would help me. And so when I was in New York City, we signed up, I got my name drawn and I did a five-minute set. And what was fascinating was, I wasn’t the best one. There were maybe 17 comics that went. But I was probably in the top seven. And so I was like, “Huh.” So I’ve now done it five more times.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding! That’s so great. Well, so to put you on the spot, could you share one or two of your jokes that got the best response?

Thom Singer
Yeah. So you are putting me on the spot. I’m turning 52 years old really soon, and I just realized that my dad was 52 years old when I was born. I had sort of an older dad. In fact, growing up with an older dad there were a couple of things. One was that I thought things were normal, I thought you were supposed to go to restaurants for the discounted dinner at 4:30. And I thought every time you got out of a chair you were supposed to make a noise like, “Ugggghhhh”. I thought it’s just what people did when they got out of the chair. And then I was the only kid on the block who wasn’t allowed to play on his own lawn.

But seriously, my dad was 52 when I was born, and I realized I’m about to turn 52. So I went to my wife and I said, “Oh my gosh, honey, we could have another kid!” And she said, “No. No, we can’t, for so many reasons.” She said, “You can’t keep track of your car keys; how are you going to be able to keep track of a toddler?” So, that’s just a little bit of what I did.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And kudos for having them to be kind of connected in that theme, because sometimes I understand the comedians, they test a lot of material, and they just push together all the stuff that works great, with little segway, and that’s sort of the way of the world. But call me – I don’t know what the word is – someone who likes themes and structure and organization. I appreciate multiple jokes within the same category.

Thom Singer
Well, I only had to do five minutes, so the whole theme of the whole thing was just stories about my dad, about him dating when he was widowed and different stuff like that. So, that was my two cents, and like I said, I wasn’t the funniest guy. Seinfeld is not worried about job security because I did stand-up. But it definitely was a great experience, and I learned that it’s probably one of the hardest things about standing up in front of an audience. It’s way harder than being a professional speaker, because the expectations of a stand-up comic, even a guy at open mic night, are way higher than some keynote speakers. So, I’ve learned a lot from doing it.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s true. Often they sort of expect the speakers to be boring, and when you just sort of provide a modicum of engagement and jokes and enthusiasm and thought provocation, it’s like, “Alright!”

Thom Singer
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
So speaking of keynote speaking, you’ve got a newer program

Thom Singer
The Paradox of Potential.

Pete Mockaitis
I really liked the blurb that was on your site and I think that there’s a whole lot of thoughts, concerns, questions when it comes to our potential. And How To Be Awesome At Your Job listeners are into developing potential. So what’s it all about?
Thom Singer
Yeah, I would imagine if you’re listening to a podcast called Be Awesome At Your Job, that you definitely have this interest in being awesome at your job. And yet when I talk to people, and I’ve interviewed 300 or 400 people now through a survey, and then I’ve talked to about 10% of them on the phone and done personal interviews – most of the people who I’ve interviewed say that they’re not doing everything they could do in their career. They could be achieving more in their jobs.
And when I talk to managers I say, “Even if my numbers are wrong, even if it’s not 70% to 75%, what if just half your people could be having better performance and doing more, and being more successful? Wouldn’t you want to know about that, about how to get across that gap between potential and results?” And so that’s what I talk about, is what’s holding people back, and then what are some of the ways to get farther across the gap between potential and results.
Because here’s the deal: Potential does not equal results, no matter how much we want it to, no matter how excited we get about having potential or our team having potential, or our new hire being a high potential employee. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to achieve anything, and yet everybody wants to build a bridge. They want to build a bridge for their whole team between potential and results, put everybody on one bus and drive them across.
The problem is not everybody has the same things holding them back, therefore not one solution is going to help everybody. And the bigger thing is that as you move across that gap from potential to results, what happens is that your potential is going to shift, because you’re meeting new people, you’re listening to a new podcast, you’re reading a new book, you’re having a new experience. So, if you build a bridge and your potential shifts, you drive the bus across, everyone’s going to fall into the ravine. So I tell people that you do not want to build your path across in advance and then go across; instead you want to build a scaffolding, you want to build a modular thing so that you can go across at an angle, diagonal, up, down sideways. And then when your potential shifts further out, you can just add a new module.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I like that. And I even want to start at the very beginning, which was just that you did so much research in crafting a keynote. I think that’s awesome to start with. Other folks are like, “Hey, here’s an idea I think is good.” And you went deep into seeing, “What’s a real problem folks are having and what’s some insightful stuff I can bring to it?” So kudos from the get-go in developing your speaker potential by doing that.

Thom Singer
I feel I’m one year into about a five-year survey of people. My intent is to interview thousands of people, and I’m in the process of trying to see if maybe I could get a real researcher, like a PhD level researcher to help me, because I haven’t set the questions up right. I’m not a researcher, I’m not an academic. So, my information I found is still somewhat anecdotal, but there’s a lot of stuff going on here. And people get really excited.
When I go into a company and they have me come into their team, once we get through the presentation point and we get it to that interactive piece where everybody gets to start talking about what holds them back, or others on their team… Sometimes nobody wants to talk about themselves, but hypothetically, “My friend is held back because of XYZ” – people get really into sharing the fears and the mistakes they’ve made along the way, and the team gets really excited about figuring out, “How can we support each other?” So it’s kind of a fun job to be able to do working with actual teams inside a company.

Pete Mockaitis
That is fun. And so I want to dig into a number of these gaps that are popping up frequently, and some of the prescriptions for remedying them. And it’s funny – the first gap that I thought of – and you’ll tell me how prominent this is and if people fess up to it – is just, “Yeah, I could be doing better at my job, but that sounds like a lot of extra hours that I don’t want to spend there because I want to spend more time with my family or doing other cool outside-of-work things.” Is that one of the top gaps?

Thom Singer
Yeah, it’s sometimes as simple as that, that “Hey, this just isn’t my priority.” And you know what? That’s okay. Even if they don’t want to, sometimes people have a new baby, or sometimes… One lady told me after hearing my speech – she came up almost in tears and she said, “Thank you”, because she had an aunt who had no children, and she was caring for her aunt in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s. And her boss was really supportive of it, but she felt that when she was at work she was cheating her aunt, and when she was with her aunt she was cheating work.
And the reality of what I said is, sometimes work isn’t your priority. Just be honest with yourself, it’s okay. I gave a fictitious example about caring for somebody, but it hit home with this woman. And she wanted to put more time into work, but she had another commitment. So yeah, sometimes there’s either “I just don’t want to do it” or sometimes “I can’t do it, because I have this other commitment.” And that’s a legitimate reason and people can’t beat themselves up for it. We live in a society where we talk a lot about work, work, work, work, work. It’s not always your priority, and if it’s not your priority, that’s okay. But also don’t have expectations if you’re not putting all that work in that you are going to become CEO.

Pete Mockaitis
Right, that’s well said. And boy, that angst there associated with, “When I’m at work I’m cheating my aunt and when I’m with my aunt I’m cheating my work” – I think that really connects and resonates with lots of people with their outside work obligations and concerns. And so, any pro tips on just coming to peace with that? I think in a way just the sheer anxiety is going to diminish your ability to realize your potential. So, any pro tips on how to take that breath and to become okay with that?

Thom Singer
One of the things I talk about is I think we’ve been done a disservice by all these speakers and trainers who’ve come in and tried to teach work-life balance, because I actually don’t believe you’re ever in balance. If you’re at home with your kids, you’re not at work, so work is out of balance. If you’re at work, you’re not home caring for your kids, so that’s out of balance. So we focus on wanting everything to be in perfect balance, but nothing in the universe is in perfect balance. Something’s always going on that’s throwing something out of balance. So, you just have to get okay with that fact, that just do the best you can with what you’ve got in front of you.
A friend of mine wrote a book called Good Enough Now – her name’s Jessica Pettitt. You know Jessica. One of the things she talks about is, everybody is waiting for perfection before they’re going to go do the things they have to do, but really you’re good enough now. Just go do what you have to do. And that’s sort of what I try to teach people.
But here’s the thing – no matter what you look at in this paradox of potential, it all comes down to three things that help you. There are a lot of things that are holding people back – a lot of different fears, a lot of things where people feel they don’t have the right degree or they don’t have the right training or they don’t have the support of their spouse or their boss, or their company is out-of-sync for a lot of reasons. The list is really, really long of what the problems are.
But the answers all fall into three buckets, and those buckets are your plan, your purpose, and people. So your plan is really just goal-setting. And I know you teach goal-setting in some of the seminars that you do. I’ve never understood why people go, “I don’t believe in goal-setting.” I hear this all the time because it’s part of what I teach. People say, “Oh well, I don’t believe in goal-setting.” I had one person tell me, “Setting goals just sets you up to feel bad when you don’t reach them.” And I’m like, “No, because if you strive for something and you come close, don’t feel bad about the 10% you missed. Look at the 90% of the way you came.”
I have a daughter who is a high achiever, and she always sets her goals really high. And then when she lands at something that other people just think is excellent that might have been shy of that goal, she’s thrilled that she landed at the excellent level that she is. And it’s a really good example – she’s always pushing herself and setting expectations, and I’m always worried that she’s going to be disappointed. And then she’s always thrilled because she’s still coming out in the top 90 percentile. And she said if she had just shot for the 90 percentile, she might have ended up in the 80 percentile.
So, I’ve never understood why people think, “I’m going to feel bad if I don’t hit my goal.” If my goal for sales – and I’m just making this up – is $500,000 and I sell $400,000, that’s better than selling $300,000. So if I had no goal, I have no idea where I would have landed, plus I can’t benchmark myself against my own performance if I don’t have some sort of goal. So the first thing is having that plan and knowing what success looks like, and then taking the actions to get there.
The second bucket is purpose, and that just goes back to what Simon Sinek has taught for years, of knowing your “Why”. Everybody on your team at work has different reasons that they have a job. Some people want to pay their mortgage and have a fancy house and things like that. Other people want to feel part of a team. Other people want to contribute to the greater good. Each person has to come to terms with why they do the work that they do. And in some cases it’s, “I have to pay the bills.” Well, okay, as long as you understand what that is. And it’s really coming to terms as an individual about what your purpose is.
And then the third bucket is people, and that is having the right mentors, being part of the right team, knowing who to turn to, having support at home. Being a mentor is one of the best things that you can do if you really want to grow. So it’s all interactions that you have with people. It’s your network, it’s your brand, it’s how you engage. And so those are the three ways across. No matter what’s holding you back you can always find the answer in your plans, your purpose, and your people.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. It’s nice to have three things and to be alliterative along the way. Really cool. So then, I’d be curious when it comes to executing on each of these. What are some of, I guess the best practices versus the worst practices? I guess in some ways with a plan, just like having no plan is not optimal, as you were laying out here. But what are some other pointers there?

Thom Singer
Well, as I said earlier, potential does not equal results. You have to take action. So, I’ve seen people make plans and make lists and do all these things, but if you’re not checking things off, if you’re not actually moving towards the goal, then nothing’s going to happen. So you really have to be somebody who tries to do something, and I’m a big believer that momentum builds stuff. So a lot of people overthink; they don’t take action because they’re trying to weigh all 10 options against each other.
Yet if you look at really successful entrepreneurs, they know that they have to start their business. They’re really smart in the tech industry in Silicon Valley – the term is “pivot”. Start your business, start building, launch something, and then see where it’s working and where it’s not, and pivot. There are so many companies that started to be one thing and pivoted to something else. Twitter is a perfect example. It wasn’t started to be what it became, but they pivoted it and all of a sudden it went crazy 10 years ago.
So, you just need to be able to start doing something, because if you have momentum it’s easier to change course than to start from an absolute dead stop. And too many people don’t take action until they know that the action they take is going to be perfect. I worked for a person one time – it was in a marketing department – and we were talking about something we were going to do in marketing. And it wasn’t a big spin, I mean it wasn’t $50,000; it was like $6,000, $5,000, something like that. And she said, “What’s the guaranteed ROI?”
And I said, “From marketing, from having an event and doing sponsorship and things like that, you’re not going to have a total guarantee. Here’s what we assume will happen and here’s what we’re hoping for, but I can’t give you a perfect guarantee that we’re going to have 100 people come to our booth and we’re going to meet 10 people and we’re convert three of them. I can’t promise you that.” I go, “Sometimes you may have to throw a little spaghetti against the wall.” And she looked at me and said, “In my company we throw no spaghetti against the wall. Most spaghetti hits the floor.” And I’m like, “Well, then you can do stuff but you’re never going to be able to take the type of actions that are going to lead to the big success.”
Because when you look at people as individuals in their job or companies who have big success, there’s some risk, there’s some trial and error that goes into being awesome at your job. And if you’re not willing to take that trial and error and take some actions without the guarantee, then you’re just going to be mediocre at your job, and that’s not what your podcast is about.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s dead on. And yeah, marketing in particular, that’s hard for anyone to guarantee. And you really don’t know until you start for sure. And so, I think that is compelling, in the sense that if folks do something, or don’t do something because they’re so terrified of the potential for a failure, then you’re pretty limited to a very narrow space of actions you might take.

Thom Singer
Yeah, and therefore you might succeed… But I’ve been doing this in my career for nine years. I throw some Hail Mary passes and sometimes they get intercepted, and that’s just the way it goes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so that’s the “plan” side of things. And how about purpose?

Thom Singer
Well, we all are motivated for different reasons. And sometimes we forget why we get out of bed. What are we trying to accomplish? What is it that we want for our family? What’s our purpose of what we do? You have a new child. When you have a kid, that changes your purpose. You may have noticed some things in the past five or six months have changed in the way you look at the world, and that is because you’re now responsible for somebody else.
So I have two kids of my own, and then I mentor two young gentleman who are both in their late 20s, who call me their “fake dad”. They’ve been around about four years; I don’t think they’re ever going away. And my kids are like, “What’s the deal there?” My one daughter is like, “Are they in the will?” And I said, “No, they’re not real kids. They’re not in the will.” And she said, “Okay, then I support your friendship with them, as long as they’re not taking my inheritance.” No, she didn’t say that.
But the thing is that I tell them all the time, because they’re young and they’re both single – I tell them all the time I have a different outlook on the world because there are other humans I’m responsible for. I have a wife and I have two kids. And I said, “When you’re responsible for three other people, that changes the purpose of why you do things and the decisions that you make in your career, in your personal life, what you do on Friday night, etcetera.”
And so, I think that that’s something we have to realize, that our purpose and our plans and our people – they’re going to change from time to time, and that’s okay. But you have to understand, “Why am I doing what I’m doing?” So, one of my main motivations of why I pursue the business I pursue is, I want to be that person who’s educating people. I could go be a teacher or a professor or a newscaster. I like being in that role, where I’m sharing information with people. And because I like being in that role, part of my purpose is, I want to be the best I can at that.
Another one of my purposes is money. I’m not ashamed of it – I want to have nice things. I don’t have to make a million dollars a year. So many people focus on giant numbers, but I have to have decent numbers because there’s certain things I’ve chosen to do. Plus I have kids, who one goes to a very expensive college, one’s in high school with her eyes set on very expensive colleges. And the problem is when you have kids who are straight-A students in high school, they get accepted to those colleges, so then you have to figure out, how do we pay for them.
And the problem is that unless you’re making… If you make a million dollars a year, it doesn’t matter. And if you make a smaller amount, there’s often need-based scholarships. But if you’re in the middle, you’ve got to pay for them. And so I’m motivated to make sure that I can make those tuition payments on top of our mortgage payments and still be able to, as a family, take some trips and have clothes and things like that, eat nice meals. So that’s part of that purpose piece is, I have to know why I’m doing it, because it makes me get out of bed in the morning.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. And so I think it’s often quite common to forget or lose sight of the purpose when you’re in the urgent stuff.

Thom Singer
Absolutely, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
And so any thoughts on how to bring it back, fresh in our mind?

Thom Singer
Well, out of sight is always out of mind, so I encourage people to write their goals down, going back to the plan. The old saying is, “A goal not written down is a wish.” So, you’ve got to write down your goals. Part of that is you’ve got to write down your purpose. And this is more than your company’s mission statement that hangs in the lobby. This is individual to the person. Everyone on the team needs to be clear about why do they work there, and what do they want to contribute.
And you’ve got to review it because otherwise, when things get busy and when things get bad, and it always gets bad… I mean none of us have a perfect career, whether there are problems with the economy, problems with bosses or co-workers, or just caught up in the moment, there’s some problem with the client, it’s just bad – it’s easy to forget why you get out of bed in the morning. So write it down and have it in front of you.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful, thank you. And how about on the people side?

Thom Singer
Well, I started my speaking career teaching people how to network better, how to connect with people in a gadget-crazy world. It’s something that I’ve talked about for 10 years. I started my speaking career just as the iPhone and the smartphone started showing up in everybody’s hands. And everybody thought, “It’s going to be so much easier to connect.” And yet, I ask everybody who is over 35 years old, “Do you feel now that you have more friends? And I mean friends who are going to invite you to Thanksgiving. Do you have more friends than you had a decade ago?” And I rarely – there’re sometimes people – but I rarely had a hand go up in the audience.
And then I flip it around to business and I say, “How many people feel that you have more business, like it’s so much easier for you to sell” – because I speak to a lot of sales teams – “than it was 10 years ago?” Now, if somebody is 28, they don’t remember life without a smartphone. But if they’re 38, they sure do. And rarely, again, does a hand go up. Every now and then, there’s somebody who, they do a real good job at Internet marketing and use of social and stuff like that, but in most cases, people shake their heads.
And I say, “Okay, so we can have a room up several hundred people, nobody or very few people raise their hands.” I’m like, “But let’s think back to the last 10 years. Every conference that you went to, not so much now, but certainly 3 years ago to 10 years ago, had entire tracks on social media and mobile and digital. And yet, nobody feels that they’re better connected.” And in fact, there was an article in the Harvard Business Review last fall, written by the former Surgeon General of the United States under Obama, and it was called… I don’t know what the title of the article was, but it was about the epidemic of loneliness that’s going on.
And there are a lot of articles written about how the Millennials feel very lonely, like they don’t feel they have a lot of friends. One of these guys I mentor sent me a funny – I don’t know if it’s called a meme or whatever, because I’m old – but he sent me a thing at Easter time, and it said, “The real miracle is, how did Jesus make it to his thirties and have 12 friends?” So they talk a lot about younger people not feeling like they have close friendships, but this article in Harvard Business Review said it’s not just the Millennials, it’s all the generations. People feel that they’re invisible, people feel lonely, more so than at any time in history. And yet, for the last decade, we’ve put all these connection tools into place.
So one of the things I talk about is we have to step back, we have to see people, we have to get back. The saying in India when you greet somebody is “Namaste.” And if you translate that – and there are a lot of ways I’ve heard it translated – but the simplest one is, “I see you” or, “I see your soul” or, “My soul sees your soul.” Well, that’s what we have to get back to because people are feeling like they don’t see them.
So I talk about this at conferences and I tell people it’s not just the introverts. Sometimes people think, “Oh well, this is a conference of all sales people. Everyone’s an extrovert.” That doesn’t apply. Even the extroverts who are life of the party – a lot of them feel invisible. And I’ll have people come up to me and nod their head and go, “That’s me. I’m right in the middle of the crowd. I can hold my own, but I don’t feel anybody knows who I am or knows what I care about.”
So, we’re living in this age, and for 10 years I’ve been teaching it, about how do we connect with people in this gadget-crazy digital world. And a lot of it comes down to stopping and seeing people and having real conversations. I mean how often have you been in a restaurant and you look over and there’s a whole family – a mom, a dad, and three kids – and everyone’s on their phone at the table?

Pete Mockaitis
Right, yeah.

Thom Singer
It happens all the time. Or you’re in a business meeting, sitting around the conference table, and a couple of the partners in the firm or even lower-level people in the firm are doing what I call “the iPhone prayer”. Looks like they have their head down and they’re praying. But in reality, they’re just tapping away on their screen down in their lap, or they’re looking at the screen by their hip – I call it “the one-hip sneak”. They’re thinking nobody will notice they’re looking at their phone. So, I think we have to get to where we put that stuff down from time to time. I love my phone; it’s always in my hand. It’s in my hand right now while I’m talking to you, but I’m not looking at it. I’m just still holding it. It’s on my lap.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s so soothing, like a comfort blanket. [laugh]

Thom Singer
Right. And I’m going to be 52 right around the corner, so it’s not just the Millennials who are that way. But I think the point that I’m trying to make here, and I’m going around the long way, is we have to realize that the connections to people are so important. I mean the old saying, “People do business with people they know, they like, and they trust” – that’s not a cliché, that’s true. The difference is it’s harder to get to know people, I mean to really get to know. A like, a link, a share and a follow is not a friendship. We have to go back to getting to know people.
There used to be a process to get to know them. You had to go to a few networking events, maybe you had lunch, maybe you played golf, maybe you went to a few social events with them. And then you got to know them, and then like and trust came along, or it didn’t. But nowadays, everybody thinks they know everybody.
They listen to this show – I bet there are people listening right now who are like, “Oh, I know Pete.” Well, no. They know Pete based on the one side of Pete as the podcast host. So, they don’t know how you are one-on-one, they don’t know your soul, per se. And so people think, “I’m connected to them on Twitter. I listen to their podcast. I know them.” So know, K-N-O-W, has gotten misinterpreted to “know of them” or “know about them.” And so like and trust are harder to get to.
And so I encourage people, if to go back to the old school ways of face-to-face spending time with people with no digital interaction in the moment while you’re there, you’re going to get to like and trust a lot faster, and I think it’s more important than ever. And I talk a lot about this whole idea of seeing people. When’s the last time you went into Starbucks? And if people tell me, “This morning”, I go, “Can you tell me what color eyes the barista had?”

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good.

Thom Singer
Know. Even if I’m going to have a two-second interaction with them, I try to just register, look them right in the eye, and I think “Blue eyes.” And I smile, and they smile back. They don’t know why, they just know that I just saw something about them.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome, thank you. So we hit the plan, the purpose, the people. You’ve also got some perspectives when it comes to limiting beliefs and how those could be problematic for realizing potential.

Thom Singer
Well, let’s go back to where we were talking about me doing stand-up comedy. When I was 25 years old, my wife and I used to like to go to comedy clubs. We had another couple we did a lot of things with. And he and I used to drink a lot of beer together and we would talk about it. And he goes, “You’re kind of funny. You could do this.” But I had a ton of limiting beliefs. I overthought the entire process. And now that I’ve done this a few times, I’m like, “Well, that was stupid. So what if I went and I sucked? I still would have done it.”
And so this whole concept of “I’m going to make 50 to 75 the best years of my life”, is all based around the fact that I’m not going to have limiting beliefs. So I’ve done other stuff besides the stand-up. I jumped off the Stratosphere in their SkyJump in Las Vegas. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but the sky tower, like Seattle or whatever – they have one at the Stratosphere Hotel. And they have, I guess it’s called a ride or an attraction, where you go out on a platform and leap off the 108th floor in a harness. It’s not a bungee, it’s like a tension thing, and you land on the ground without any impact, because just before you get to the ground, the tension between the three wires gets strong enough where you just kind of go “Bling!” and you land.
But I’ll tell you, it’s really scary. If you watch the video, the guy counts you down. You go through a class, they tell you how to do it, it’s supposed to be a perfect swan dive. And the guy goes, “One, two, three, jump!” And I just stood there. And on the video it’s funny, because I’m just holding on to the rail, and I look over my shoulder and I go, “Say it again.” And he goes, “One, two, three, jump!” And instead of swan diving, I just half-jump off. I go like, “No!”
However, I agreed to do that. I mean I didn’t agree – it was my own idea, nobody talked me into it. But I decided to do that because I looked it up online – nobody’s ever died. The thing’s been there well over a decade, and I figured I’m not going to be the first. And so why overthink it? And I have friends who’ve watched the video who were like, “Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, not going to do it.”
The other thing is I’m kind of a city guy. All my vacations throughout my whole life have been New York, and Chicago, and Paris, and Rome, San Francisco. And this last couple of years, I have a daughter who’s very outdoorsy. She wanted to hike the Grand Canyon, so we went for three days to the Grand Canyon. And we stayed in the hotel, but we went hiking around and down the Grand Canyon.
With my kids, I do a thing. You have a young child. My wife and I do a thing – I’m going to pass on to you. When the kids turn 13, they get to plan a three-night trip anywhere in the country with their mom. Now, we take care of the airfare and the hotel to make sure they don’t overspend, but they plan all the activities, and it’s anywhere that they want to go. When they’re 16, they get to do it with Dad. Because otherwise, they go on all these family vacations, but it’s mom, dad, their sibling and all this. So this is the one-on-one time for three days with a parent.
And they look forward to it. People are like, “Your 16-year-old wants to go away?” She’d spent years planning this trip, and her answer was “Yosemite.” And I said “Boston? Is that what you said?” And she said, “No, Yosemite.” And we stayed in these tent-cabin-like structures, and the bathroom was a quarter mile down the path, and we had to eat in a mess hall, but it’s what she wanted to do. And so part of my “50 to 75 is the best years of my life”, we hiked 10 miles a day every day for the three and a half days we were in Yosemite, and we had an awesome time.
I did a TEDx talk with three weeks’ notice because I think someone had cancelled and they gave me a last-minute addition. But before, I would have overthought it. I would have had limiting beliefs saying, “Oh, TED talk is a big deal. That video’s going to end up online. Three weeks isn’t enough time to prepare. It’s a topic I’ve never really spoken on before.” And instead I just said, “Yeah, I can do that.” And so it’s all of these types of things combined that in the past, my limiting beliefs would have taken over. And so the answer is, “Don’t overthink. Just do more.”

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

Thom Singer
No, but I was doing a little research on you, and you’re the only person I know who has a custom-made Superman suit. And so I just am not sure all of your listeners know that. But I watched your video, I watched your speaking video, and there’s a picture of you in a form-fitting… Thank God you’re not old enough to have gotten fat. But you’ve got a custom-made Superman suit, which you said was for Halloween, but I’m a little curious if your wife has the matching Wonder Woman outfit.

Pete Mockaitis
She does not. Thank you for asking, publicly. [laugh] It’s funny. The backstory is, since we’re going here – I remember for Halloween, I always wonder, “Oh man, what should I be?” And I thought, “You know what? I really just want to be Superman”, because that’s what I always wanted to be as a kid. So I would just like the ultimate Superman costume. Christopher Reeve style is my preference.

Thom Singer
Sure, it’s cool, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
And it was interesting because I got dumped numerous years ago, and I was kind of sad. And my mom had remembered the conversations we had about… I said, “You know what? I’d like to be Superman, but you can spend 300 bucks for an adult Superman costume that doesn’t even include the red boots. Isn’t that absurd?” And so she sent me, unannounced, a pair of red Superman boots.

Thom Singer
In your size?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, exactly. And it was just like… As soon as I beheld them, I knew immediately what I had to do was to get the…

Thom Singer
$300 Superman costume.

Pete Mockaitis
It turned out I saved about half of that, because I found someone on eBay who made Superman costumes or other hero costumes to your precise dimensions. So it was not just a medium, small, or large; it was exactly my size. And it is my favorite thing to wear, and I do only wear it on Halloween.

Thom Singer
[laugh] Alright, we’ll go with that.

Pete Mockaitis
Alright. So thank you for bringing that up. [laugh] And so now people probably feel like they know me all the more, but it’s an illusion.

Thom Singer
So now people can say, “I know Pete and the Superman costume.” But you really don’t know Pete. You just know about the Superman costume.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s all you need to know. [laugh] Okay. Well then let’s hear…

Thom Singer
All the women listeners are going to look for the picture.

Pete Mockaitis
I declare. [laugh] Well, let’s hear a favorite quote from you, something you find inspiring.

Thom Singer
So I’m worried this might have been the quote I used three years ago. I meant to go listen to that episode to make sure I didn’t use the same quote. But my favorite quote actually comes from my dad. And I recently used it without giving attribution to my dad. I made it sound like it was my quote. And my 21-year-old daughter called me out on it. She saw it online where I’d said this, and it had my name next to it. And she said, “That’s not your quote. That your dad’s quote.” And I said, “Yeah, but he’s been dead for four years, and so who else did he leave the quote to? He left it to me, I’m sure.” So I told her when I was dead four years, she could take it. But it’s really a quote from my dad. And that is, “Be slow to anger and fast to forgive.”

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful, thank you. And how about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Thom Singer
I’ve got to say this stuff I’m doing with people’s potential and how they feel about their own success in their careers. And I was surprised how many people don’t think they’re living up to their potential, so I found that to be quite interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite book?

Thom Singer
Always go back to The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. It was a life-changer for me when I was 25.

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

Thom Singer
My iPhone.

Pete Mockaitis
And I thought you were going to say handwritten thank-you notes, which you sent one to me, and it was very nice.

Thom Singer
[laugh] Yeah, probably my iPhone, but I still send handwritten notes.

Pete Mockaitis
And how about a favorite habit?

Thom Singer
Everybody asks about, “What do you do in the mornings?” I have bad habits, I don’t have really good habits. But I will say the best thing – and this is part of the age 50 life change – is, I used to weigh 35 pounds more than I do now. And I gave up sugar and wheat for the most part; I eat limited amounts of processed sugar and wheat. And then I started running. So I think health habits are the one that I didn’t know about until two years ago, but the ones I’m most impressed with because I feel better than I’ve felt in well over a decade. And I wasn’t in bad shape, I wasn’t unhealthy. I’m six foot three, so 30 pounds, it’s not like you’d go, “Wow, fatty.” But having lost that 30 plus pounds and eating a much healthier diet really has been a great habit for me.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’d like to hear, when it comes to giving up the sugar and wheat, how would you describe the difference in your mental clarity or performance?

Thom Singer
So the first three weeks I was an ass, if I can say that on your show. I was grumpy, I was horrible, it was not good. And then the clarity sort of came in and stuff somewhere around a month or two. And I never knew I was unclear, I didn’t know I was foggy. It’s not like I was having problems, but it was like, “Wow.” There was such a huge difference. And coupling that with a guy who was never a runner – I’d never run a mile in my life – and I started training for a half marathon.
And after I completed that… After you finish a half marathon, if you’re not a runner and you’ve never been a runner, all your runner friends start saying, “Now that you’ve done a half, you’re going to want to do a whole.” They’re lying. I don’t want to run that. I don’t even want to run a half ever again. But I am still running three to five miles about three days a week. And the combination of eating a cleaner, healthier diet with the running just makes me feel younger.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a particular nugget you share in your presentations that really seems to connect and resonate with the audiences?

Thom Singer
I should have probably prepared for that one. No, nothing I share connects with the audiences, I’m sure. No. So lately it has really been around this whole issue of seeing people. Actually, I have a slide, and it says #seepeople. And it’s just a picture up close of someone’s eye looking out into the distance. And I talk about how people don’t feel anyone sees them.
And I’m surprised and saddened maybe how many people come up and say, “I feel invisible. I feel that people don’t see me in my family, at work, in this audience.” So this whole idea of putting your phone down and taking a little bit of time to just talk to people and see them as humans. They don’t have to be your best friend, just see them. And when you’re with people, choose people – probably is the thing that resonates the most.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more and get in touch, where do you put them?

Thom Singer
ThomSinger.com.

Pete Mockaitis
Not “Thom”Singer.com?

Thom Singer
It’s not “Thom”, no. It is Thom. So here’s the deal. How many Thomas’s do you know? Everybody is T-H-O-M-A-S. When they shorten it to “Tom” my question is, why did they take out the H? I just get rid of the “AS”.

Pete Mockaitis
Clever.

Thom Singer
Maybe stand-up’s not my thing.

Pete Mockaitis
[laugh] And do you have a final challenge or call-to-action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Thom Singer
Yeah, listen to podcasts like this one. I think the podcasts, the last five years they’ve really exploded. And I do a podcast – listen to mine. But I think the real big thing is I learn so much from listening to shows like yours and so many others, that I think when you’re out for your run, when you’re on the bike, when you’re going for a walk, when you’re in the car, whatever it is you’re doing where you can put ear buds in and just have a human university just broadcast into your head – there’s no way you’re not going to be better for it.
It’s like getting a Master’s degree. If you listen to the right people, you’re going to get all these ideas, these theories, these nuggets, these concepts. Some of them are going to stick. And so I think that listen to Pete’s show, listen to my show, listen to any one of the thousands of other shows that resonate with you. You cannot lose if you’re listening to the right stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Thom – not “Thom” – this has been a lot of fun yet again. Please keep doing the great stuff that you’re doing, and keep on rocking out.

Thom Singer
This was great. And I don’t know why we didn’t have you on my show three years ago, but we’re going to get that scheduled before we hang up today.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Thank you.

Jun 06

305: Screwing Up Masterfully with Kristen Hadeed

By Podcasts No Comments

 

 

Kristen Hadeed says: "Give yourself permission to screw up and to be human and in doing that, you will inspire the people around you to be more human."

Student Maid’s Kristen Hadeed shares her numerous leadership mistakes, how to learn fast, and inspire employees so much they clean toilets with a smile.

You’ll Learn:

  1. When and how to deliver critical feedback
  2. The detrimental effects of praise
  3. The power of vulnerability to grow an inspired workforce

About Kristen

Kristen is the Founder and CEO of Student Maid, a student-powered cleaning company in Florida. She helps organizations make a lasting, meaningful impact on people by creating environments in which they thrive. Her first book, “Permission To Screw Up,” tells the stories of her biggest mistakes in leadership. She hopes to inspire other leaders to share their “perfectly imperfect” stories of success to empower people with the knowledge that even if they screw up, they can still make it. Kristen and Student Maid have been featured in news outlets including PBS, FOX Inc., NBC, TIME and Forbes. Her first TED Talk has received nearly three million hits on YouTube.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Pete Mockaitis
Kristen, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to Be Awesome At Your Job podcast.

Kristen Hadeed
Thank you for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I think we’re going to have so much fun here. First, I want to hear the tale, I understand that one time you actually cleaned Tim Tebow’s house while in college. Did you bump into him? You didn’t know who he was? What’s the story here?

Kristen Hadeed
I’m the worst Gator football fan ever. I went to the University of Florida, which is a big school, cares about football. Yes, I cleaned Tim Tebow’s apartment several times and I did not even know it was him.

Pete Mockaitis
He was a student there?

Kristen Hadeed
He was a student. Yes. That was when he was – we won the National Championship. I should have known who he was, but nope. No clue.

Pete Mockaitis
He’s living large, college student having someone clean his house.

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah. I’d say so.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s funny. They treat the athletes well. There’s probably like a stipend for that or something.

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a good time. I’m so excited to get into this conversation. We’re going to talk a lot about mistakes and learning and screwing up. In a way it’s kind of meta because boy, so you and I we know each other through our agency for speaking on college campuses. Campus Speech shout out, yeah.

Kristen Hadeed
Hey.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s been a lot of fun chatting with you there. Then way back in 2013 you also joined me on the Student Leadership podcast.

Kristen Hadeed
Oh yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
I know. I kind of forgot too. It was some years ago. Talk about mistakes, I made a lot of mistakes with that first podcast. It never really took off, but I learned so much from them. I think we’re going to have a better conversation this time around and it will reach about 100 times as many people.

Kristen Hadeed
There you go. Love it.

Pete Mockaitis
Fo sho. Let’s orient us a little bit. The Student Maid, what’s your company all about?

Kristen Hadeed
Sure. I definitely was not one of those kids that came out of the womb saying I want to be a CEO one day. I want to start a company. I was super lost in college, changed my major nine times.

Finally ended up with finance because I’d heard that you can make a lot of money working on Wall Street. I didn’t even know what that meant, but I thought I could figure that out because to me at the time success was about making a lot of money.

I used to go to the mall all the time when I was in college and window shop because I could not afford to buy anything. I just so happened to go to the mall this one day. I fell in love with a pair of jeans that I could not afford. It sounds so silly, but my company started because of this pair of jeans. They were 99 dollars.

I thought what is something I could do to just make 99 bucks and buy this pair of jeans and just call it a day. My first idea was to put an ad on Craigslist to clean someone’s house. A woman hired me. It was a disaster.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh my. How so?

Kristen Hadeed
Well, I had no idea how to clean. She had a mansion. I told her it would take me two hours. I didn’t have any supplies. I only had like this sponge and a bottle of Windex to clean this 4,000 square foot house. It took me seven hours and I wasn’t even done at the seven hour mark. It was just – she was like, “You need to leave,” because it was dark outside. She had already put her kids to bed. It was a disaster.

But she paid me. Then I bought the jeans. Then she actually called me back and said I really need help. She joked and said she could teach me how to clean. That’s how the whole thing started.

I cleaned her house every week. She told her friends about me. I forgot to take the ad down off of Craigslist. Then in college as I – every year I gained more clients, but I never thought that this would be my career. The turning point really happened right before my senior year I got this big contract to clean hundreds of empty apartments.

Pete Mockaitis
It was just you at this point?

Kristen Hadeed
It was just me. Maybe I had a couple people helping me, but they weren’t – it wasn’t a serious business. This was just a side gig.

I get this contract. It’s 800 and something apartments. They’re filthy. I hire 60 people to help me with the work. These are all college students who I hired. I have no idea how to lead a team of people. I don’t have any real business experience. I have no idea what I’m doing. Terrible leader. A couple days into the contract, 45 of the 60 people just walk in and quit, like on the spot at the same time.

Pete Mockaitis
It was like in unison, like a group meeting or how did it-

Kristen Hadeed
It should have been a movie. Yes. It was like – I was sitting in this air conditioned club house in the middle of the complex with my feet propped up eating a Cesar salad. Right before they walked in I remember thinking to myself, this is so easy. Maybe I could be an entrepreneur. I like this. Because I was doing nothing. I was just sitting in this room doing nothing.

They walk in. I know something’s wrong because they’re whispering. I can hear someone saying, “Do it. Do it. Do it.” I know in my gut something really serious is about to happen. Then one just stood forward and she said, “We quit.”

I remember – I was so shocked. I couldn’t even process what had just happened. It’s so funny to me that I had no clue. I remember thinking, “Why are they leaving,” but now looking back, of course they wanted to leave.

The work was absolutely horrible. You’re cleaning empty, filthy college apartments and then you have this leader who doesn’t seem to care about you at all, who’s sitting in the air conditioning with her feet propped up eating lunch and scrolling Facebook. Of course you want to quit.

Pete Mockaitis,
Understood. Was there like a speech or did they lay out their grievances or they just said, “We quit,” and then it’s done.

Kristen Hadeed
No, it’s just “We quit.” And they turned around and they walked out. I was shocked, then it turned to anger. I was thinking, “How could they do this? I’m paying them.” There was so much work to do and I only had 15 people left.

I ran and I found those people. I told them what happened. They weren’t really surprised. I said, “Well, can you help me figure this out? We have to get them back.” I think they wanted to help me because it sounded more fun than cleaning, not because they really wanted to help me.

Pete Mockaitis
This is a juicy drama. I want to be a part of this.

Kristen Hadeed
I know. Then someone had this idea to call an emergency meeting at my house that same night and that the way that we would get everyone there is by promising them an early paycheck because the way that it was is you’d have to wait the whole three weeks to get your paycheck, but if they came to this meeting that night, they would get it that night.

It was a great idea. Everyone showed up. I just – I was just honest. I said, “I’ve never done this before. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t even know what I did wrong.” I was honest about how scared I was that we had all this work, that I didn’t know how we would get it done. I think I just – I became a human to them. I think they realized that I was a good person, I just didn’t know how to be a leader.

One kind of said, “Oh, I’ll come back,” and then it was a domino effect. Another is coming back and then the next thing you know, they’re all coming back.

I always say that that changed the trajectory of my life because it made me really obsessed with learning how to be a better leader and most importantly learning how to build a company where people really, really wanted to be and they didn’t to walk out.

That was – that for me was I think looking back, that was the moment that I – I didn’t do it consciously, but I think that’s when I gave up my desire to move to New York and work on Wall Street because that summer really changed everything. We became a team and then I graduated. I turned down a job in finance to stick with Student Maid. Here we are. It’s been nine years.

Pete Mockaitis
That is so cool and congratulations to you. You share these tales and these lessons learned in your book, Permission to Screw Up. Why that title?

Kristen Hadeed
It’s pretty funny. I always wanted to write a book, but I never knew what I wanted to write about. The way I got my book contract was kind of a backwards way. I was giving a talk. My publisher was in the audience. I just so happened to be speaking about Millennials at that event.

My publisher said, “I want you to write a book,” and I started writing about Millennials because I thought that’s what he wanted me to write about. That’s what I had just spoken about. When I finished the book, I didn’t like it. I didn’t actually finish it. Halfway through I said this is not – everything I’m writing about applies to all people, not just Millennials. I threw that version away.

Then I started to write about Student Maid and just the journey of leadership and it was empty. I went to dinner with a friend, who’s written several really great books. I asked him, I said, “How do you know when you’re writing the right book?” He said, in my experience the right book is the one that’s really, really hard to write.”

I thought about that. The book I was writing was not hard. I changed my thinking to what would make it hard. That’s when I realized that I was writing about all the lessons I had learned, but I wasn’t talking about what it took to learn them.

Yeah, I know the importance of empowering people, but I only know that because I micromanage people and people quit. I know the importance of building a relationship that’s real and meaningful with your people, but only because I had superficial relationships that did not lead to trust and loyalty.

I wrote about the how I learned it part, which was not fun. Some of the stories I wrote about paint me in a light that I don’t really want to be painted in, but it’s the truth. It’s how I learned.

The title, Permission to Screw Up, it’s about giving yourself permission. You don’t need it from anybody else. You don’t have to be perfect. Give yourself permission to screw up and to be human and in doing that, you will inspire the people around you to be more human.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that. I like that a lot. Thank you. Well, you’ve got a lot of wisdom packed in there.

Could you maybe share just a couple of the most dramatic shifts that you made in terms of, “Hm, before I was thinking this way and then I had this experience which showed me that, no, that’s totally wrong. I should think about it the other way,” so in the practices that you abandoned or adopted as a result of some of those insights?

Kristen Hadeed
I would say the first major shift really had to do with feedback. Because 45 people quit on me, I was really afraid to give critical feedback to people because I thought it would make them quit.

I was the kind of leader who would recognize people every day for things that really didn’t deserve recognition, like thank you for being on time today. But that’s their job. You’re supposed to be on time. On people’s birthdays I would say thank you for being born. I recognized everything about everyone because I thought that was what – I thought that meant they would be happy and they would stay.

I realized two things. One that when we overpraise and we over recognize we actually are doing people a disservice because it doesn’t help them understand what their true strengths and contributions are. It’s also not meaningful.

But number two, when we avoid feedback that really needs to be given, the critical feedback, the kind of feedback that really helps people grow, we’re hurting them because we have this opportunity, we see a way they could be better and we don’t speak up, we’re hurting their growth and their development.

There’s a student I had who – she did a couple of things. I mean things that were really bad, like trying on a client’s high heels and –

Pete Mockaitis
What? Doing what to the high heels?

Kristen Hadeed
Trying on a client’s high heels.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, just putting them. Okay.

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah. Or like playing Mary Had a Little Lamb on a client’s antique piano that clearly is off limits. Just stuff that would get under my skin. Every time I would hear about something I would say, “Okay, I’m going to confront her,” and I never did.

Then I finally got the courage to do it and I did it in an email. It was a total cop out and then she quit. Then I felt guilty because I felt like man, I really missed out on this opportunity to make her better. Now, chances are the values she had, it wouldn’t have worked out anyway, but I should have told her way earlier that this kind of behavior was not acceptable and I missed out on that opportunity to help her learn and to help her grow.

There’s a tool that I loved teaching. It’s in the book. It’s not my own. I learned it from a company called Barry-Wehmiller, one of my favorite companies in the world. It’s called the FBI. It’s a way to give feedback, both critical and recognition, that inspires behavior change or inspires someone to keep doing something great.

It’s a sentence. Each letter stands for something, so feeling, behavior, impact. How you felt about someone’s specific behavior and what the impact of that behavior was.

If someone’s late, for example, you can say, “I felt disappointed that you were 30 minutes late to our meeting this morning. The impact, even though I know it was not your intention, now the impact is I don’t know if I can rely on you. I don’t want to feel that way, so can you help me?”

The idea is that person probably didn’t wake up saying, “I can’t wait to be late so that you’re disappointed and you feel like you can’t rely on me,” but once we tell them, once we tell them how we feel, the impact it’s had, now they want to change that behavior.

On the flip side, recognition, you can say, “I felt proud when you spoke up at the meeting this morning and when you shared your opinion. The impact that had is everyone else felt comfortable sharing their own and we had a really productive meeting.” Now you’re telling that person I want to see that again. I want to see you share your opinion again when you have one in a meeting.

I love the FBI. Now, in my company, every single person on our team that’s one of the first things they learn even before they learn how to dust and vacuum. We’re big on the FBI.

The second thing I would say is about when is it time to give up. That was really hard for me. I’m someone who believes in everyone’s potential. I think it’s really hard when you’re programmed that way when is it time to walk away from someone.

On the flip side, if you’re working in an organization and you’re giving it your all and you see the potential in this organization, but it’s just not right for you right now, when do you walk away? Do you walk away?

We have this metaphor that we use at Student Maid. It’s called the line. It symbolizes what it takes for the relationship to really work.

What we say is the leadership team, the executive team, we’re going to stand at this line every day and what that means is we are going to invest in you, care about you, give you feedback to help you grow, support you, stand by you when you fail. We’re going to give you the tools to do your job and that’s what it’s like standing at the line for us.

But it only works if you’re at the line, which means that you’re doing something with the feedback we give you. You’re giving us feedback when there’s room for us to grow. You’re getting back up when you fail. You care.

What I’ve learned in this whole thing is you can’t make someone care. You can’t make someone change. You can’t make someone anything. They have to want it.

If you are standing at the line, whether you are leading a team of people, whether you’re not, but if you’re at the line and you’re by yourself, I think that’s how you know that it’s time to walk away because you can’t force that other party to stand at the line with you. They have to want to do that.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Then it sounds like you’ve had some experiences then when others are not standing at the line and they needed to be let go.

Kristen Hadeed
Yes. There was a student we had many years ago. Her name was Kayla. Kayla, she was the best cleaner we had ever seen. You could eat off the floor after she cleaned it.

When I met her I learned early on that she had a really rocky home life. She was the first person in her family to go to school. She was fully supporting herself. She came from physical and emotional abuse and made it very clear that Student Maid was like her family. I made a vow to myself that I was going to protect her and keep her as a part of our family no matter what.

The problem was Kayla had a real issue with being on time. She was late very often. It wasn’t just five minutes late, ten minutes late, sometimes it would be 45 minutes late. I really struggled with, here’s this person, I know she’s struggling in her personal life and that we mean a lot to her. She’s also a really fantastic cleaner, but yet she can’t be on time. What do I do?

It started to cause a lot of tension on the team because other leaders in the company would say, “This isn’t fair. We’re requiring everyone else to have – to be on time, so we have to hold her to the same standard.”

What I ended up doing with her is I made exception after exception after exception. It got so bad that she started to not show up to work. Then I just had her cleaning my own house because I didn’t want her actions to impact anyone else.

Long story short, I found out that she had a substance abuse problem. She really needed to go and get help for that. I had to eventually walk away from her. She went to a rehab center and she got better.

Then after that she called me out of the blue one day and she thanked me for giving up on her. I thought, “Uh, wait, what?” It was the first time anyone ever thanked me for giving up on them. She said, “Had you not walked away from me, I would have never hit rock bottom and I would have never wanted to take ownership over my life.”

I realized that you can’t keep giving people chance after chance after chance. You have to – they have to want to change. They have to be open to that. They have to be ready for that.

That experience really helped me. It made me realize that sometimes the best thing you can do for someone and even the best thing you can do for an organization is to say, “I’m walking away,” because that’s when the other party decides, “Hm, I need to change something here.”

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. I imagine there are other occasions, maybe less dramatic, in which folks aren’t living up to the line as well.

Kristen Hadeed
Of course. Yeah. I think the key is it should never be a surprise to someone when they’re being asked to leave. This should not be coming out of the blue here. Okay, we’ve talked about this. We’ve made a self-improvement plan. We’ve identified what happens if the plan doesn’t work. Now we’re here.

What we find in our company now is that people don’t – we usually don’t have to ask anyone to leave. They come forward and say, “Look, I know we had this agreement for this plan. I didn’t do my part and so now I know that I have to walk away.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yup. That’s powerful. I guess I’m so intrigued by some organizations in which there are some that have a really strong performance culture and expectations and clarity and folks who just clearly need to go and go, then others that just seem terrified of lawsuits and there are hideouts and stowaways and just severely underperforming folks who remain and there is no termination just out of a terror of lawsuits.

What’s your take on that? Have you had to deal with lawsuit issues or it’s just been pretty smooth? How do you think about the risk liability side of it all?

Kristen Hadeed
Well, I’ll just say this, you name what can happen in a business, I have been there. I’ve gotten the T-shirt. I’ve done it all, been through it all.

But I think when you’re operating out of fear, that’s a problem. The route that I take is let’s never get to that point where there is fear.

I think it starts at the beginning. Are you hiring people who really embody the values? Then do your people feel empowered to speak up when they notice that there’s someone on the team who isn’t living the values? How can you make sure that those people aren’t really a part of the company for too long?

Then, like I said, the feedback should be regular. It should be ongoing. It should never be a surprise that this person is letting the team down.

Yeah, I think you have to live – I think you have to if there’s someone who is not sitting at the line or they’re hurting the organization, they’re hurting the team, they aren’t ethical, they’re not living the values, they have to go.

Your fear of a lawsuit or whatever it may be cannot trump that because the message you’re sending to everyone else in the company is actually the values that we say are so important, aren’t that important because we’re letting this person stay on the team.

Pete Mockaitis
So you have been sued?

Kristen Hadeed
Oh yeah. Yeah. But the story I think of when you said that, there was someone I had on the team who I knew was stealing. People had come forward and told me. I was afraid of her. I was afraid that if I confronted her, she would sue me, which is so backwards because it’s like she was stealing from the company. Oh my goodness. What am I afraid?

But I let her stay on the team. I was afraid to confront her. The way that she was stealing, she was adding time to her payroll, so she was exaggerating her hours. What ended up happening is she would go to newer people who didn’t really – who were just brand new and she would kind of bully them into lying about their hours so that their hours would match hers.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, because they’re partners, right?

Kristen Hadeed
Yes, they’re partners. The toxicity spread to so many people. So many people exaggerated their hours. I ended up having to let them all go. Had I just dealt with the problem the first time I heard of it, it would have never grown into that.

But that was a huge mistake I made. It cost – then all of the people who came forward and said this is happening and then they watched me do nothing about it, I ended up losing those people because they didn’t want to work with a company where the values and everything we said we stood for we actually didn’t.

Kristen Hadeed
I think you just have to treat people like – you have to care about people and you have to treat them with respect. You have to treat them the way you’d want to be treated. If you do that, yes, sometimes things get ugly and people are hurt, but I try to look past that and think about what’s the real root of this.

Every time where there has been something where someone’s come back to the company, it’s because they were hurt. They didn’t feel cared for. They didn’t feel valued. That’s what made them take this action. I think we just learned a lot from those situations.

Sometimes it’s not related to me. Sometimes it’s related to someone who maybe was their leader and they didn’t make them feel valued and cared for. It’s really hard when you’re in this position of leadership. I think it’s really hard to learn the dance between holding people accountable and really making them feel cared for and valued. Until you figure out what that balance is, you’re going to mess up.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. Cool. I just wanted to say or hear from you if you have that strong encouragement for those who are in that fearful place of someone needs to be let go but I’m terrified of a lawsuit. To summarize you’re saying, “Don’t live out of fear. It shouldn’t be a surprise.” You’re saying, “It’s absolutely worth it to just – to live out the values and experience some consequences because you really come out ahead.”

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah, yeah. A mentor once gave me some advice that helps me even today. Whenever I’m afraid of something, I think about what is the worst that can happen. I just wrap my mind around what’s the worst case scenario. Then I think about well, what would I do if that happened.

Now, all of the sudden I’m not worried because I’ve thought about the worst case. I know what I’ll do. How many times does the worst case actually happen? Hardly ever.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Cool. Give us some more pro tips when it comes to cultivating meaningful relationships. You said you used to host parties but that wasn’t quite doing the trick. What is doing the trick?

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah, I used to think relationships were about just being together. When I started the company I was the same age as my team. I had a graduation party and I invited them over. We would go to the same pool parties and this and that.

But at the end of the day our relationships were superficial. We were talking about what we were doing over the weekend or what our plans were for summer vacation. It wasn’t really about anything with any kind of depth.

Over time I learned that if you really want meaningful relationships, you have to know people deeply. You have to know where they come from. You have to know the experiences that really shape them and the moments in their life that really define who they are. The only way you know is by asking and sharing yourself and being vulnerable yourself.

We do regular exercises at Student Maid. It’s called development day. Every quarter we bring our whole company together.

We always start with three vulnerability questions. The leadership team will answer the questions in front of the whole room. Then everyone splits off into different teams and they answer the questions amongst their team.

Examples are “What is the most challenging relationship in your life and why?”  or “What’s a moment that really defined who you are that you haven’t shared with many people?” or “What’s one thing that’s preventing you from becoming a better you that you’re not doing that you should be doing?” Things that really are hard to talk about but when you do, you actually form a connection. You actually build trust.

A lot of people look at that and they say, “Wait a minute. This is a little too weird for work and you’re crossing a line.” We never force anyone to share anything they don’t want to share. I’ll say that. But I think it’s so crazy because we spend most of our time at work and with the people we work with and yet we are afraid of crossing this line and forming a real relationship.

Well, I don’t want to work with people who I don’t really enjoy working with, who I don’t have high sense of trust with. What is that? I think if we really want to create a place where there’s loyalty and trust, we have to create the space for those conversations to happen.

We do that. It’s a huge, huge component of Student Maid. I think actually I think it’s the reason that people want to work for a cleaning company because it’s certainly not the work that’s keeping them there.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. That is powerful. The vulnerability questions, which immediately makes me thing of Brene Brown. Then to start with the leadership and front and center is powerful because it’s kind of like we’re not just forcing you to do this, worker bees. Here we are showing the way and putting that example out there.

I guess the reason that folks are leaders is because they knew what they were getting into upfront is that this is a part of the game as opposed to – it might be a little bit trickier to spring that on people. “Hey, for tomorrow’s meeting, here’s kind of what I think-”

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah. I think you have to explain to – especially when you’re doing that, it’s – what is the purpose of this. Why are we doing this? What’s the end goal?

We always say that relationship is the foundation of accomplishment. Before we can ever talk about accomplishing any goal, we have to have a really strong foundation that’s built on trust and real, meaningful relationships. Until we have that, we can’t talk about our business goals because we don’t have a foundation to stand on to reach those.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. I would imagine it’s just like if you can share those kind of vulnerabilities – now I’m thinking about the movie Dodgeball. “If you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball.”

By that I mean, if you can say this thing that’s hard to say, that doesn’t have direct business impact or feedback about performance but it’s important to you, if you can say that, then in a way that just really kind of builds up your capabilities to have other difficult conversations in terms of, “You know what? This performance is really disappointing in these ways,” or “Here’s some perspective I have for you on how I found this challenging or upsetting.”

It’s like an icebreaker that actually breaks ice I guess is how I’m thinking about it.

Kristen Hadeed
Right. Yup. Totally.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Now as a result of sort of all of this stuff, you’ve got some impressive retention rates for your workers as compared to I guess the cleaning industry at large. Could you share just a little bit of sort of where you’re sitting versus the industry norms and any other kind of elements of the secret sauce you think are behind that?

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah, the cleaning industry has such a high turnover rate. 75% is the average.

Pete Mockaitis
That means in one year 75% of a workforce will not be there the next year.

Kristen Hadeed
Right.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Kristen Hadeed
Because of that the customer turnover is also equally high, 55% is the average.

That’s hard but then you add in that in our business model we hire primarily students. Not all students. If you’re a fit for our culture, you’re getting a job, but most of our team members are students. They come with not a lot of job experience.

Then the average profit margin of a cleaning company is only 15%, so you can’t really afford to pay people much above minimum wage. You’ve got hard, exhausting work, can’t afford to really train, develop. You don’t have a lot for that. Then you have people coming into my business with hardly any experience.

It’s a huge challenge, but we really evolved early on from being a cleaning company to a company that is centered around growth and leadership. We always say that we – our goal is to help our people build a skillset that really will help them be successful after they leave our doors. Everything we’re doing is about getting them ready and equipping them with the skills they need to be successful for after they leave us.

Because of that, I think people really feel invested in. I know they feel invested in and they don’t want to leave. While they’re cleaning, they’re taking courses on things like the FBI and how to find your strengths and articulate them in an interview and how to build meaningful relationships, what is vulnerability, what is empathy, how do you listen, what things should you text about, what things should you talk face-to-face about.

We do all of this stuff that doesn’t have anything to do with dusting or mopping or vacuuming but really does help you in your life.

Then what happens is people graduate and it’s time to move on from the company and they don’t want to go because they’re like, “Will I be able to find another company where I’m invested in?” Sadly I think there are a lot of companies that don’t do that. I wish more would. I dream of the day when every company invests in people like we do the bottom line.

I think the average person stays with us until they leave school. For some that may be four years, for some it’s two years, depending on when they join the team. It isn’t uncommon – sometimes we have to tell people, “You’ve got to go. It’s time to go and branch off and go out there and make the mark you want to have on the world.”

But I think it shows that it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, what the work is that you’re doing, you can find a way to really inject purpose and meaning into that work. As long as you’re making people feel like they are the priority because they are, they usually don’t want to go anywhere else.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s excellent. So cool. I want to get your quick take on Millennials, not to belabor the point. But I mean you’ve got perhaps one of the most privileged vantage points of any human alive in terms of working with young folk, doing menial work. What’s your take on what’s real versus silly, overgeneralizations when it comes to Millennials?

Kristen Hadeed
I’ll tell you two stories quickly. One is a student who came into the office and said, “Do you know where I can get a stamp?” We said, “What? A stamp?” She said, “When I need one, my mom mails me one and I don’t have time to wait for that.” We’re like, “Your mom mails you a stamp when you need a stamp. Oh my goodness, we can get you a stamp way faster than that.”

It would be really easy for me to tell you that story and then at the end say, “Ah, Millennial,” but I’m not going to say that.

Then I’ll tell you this other story and it’s that my mom works with us. She’s a Baby Boomer. I gave everyone an assignment not too long ago where they had to write their own job description. I said it needs to be around 500 words. When my mom turned hers in she kept saying, “It’s either 503, 504, 498. I don’t know. I counted so many times. I keep getting a different number.”

I realized that she did not know about word count on Microsoft Word and she was hand counting every single word on her job description. It would be really easy for me to say, “Ah, Baby Boomers,” after that, but I’m not going to.

I think the point is, we’re all just trying to do our best. We’re all just trying to figure it out. It’s really easy to make fun of Baby Boomers, just like it’s really easy to make fun of Millennials, really easy to make fun of Gen X.

We’re all humans, so let’s just put this … away and let’s just instead focus on how can we just create a place that brings out the best in everyone, that helps everyone realize their potential, and remember that at the end of the day we all want to feel valued and significant and trusted. That’s the thing we have in common. Let’s focus on that.

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds a lot easier than doing an elaborate segmented-

Kristen Hadeed
Yeah, it’s way easier.

Pete Mockaitis
-intervention person by person based on their generation. That’s great. It sounds like you don’t really buy into so much the so-called assertions that Millennials are this way as opposed to Boomers which are that way.

Kristen Hadeed
I do think that there are things that help shape a generation. We employ Gen Z as well as Millennials. That’s primarily our makeup.

I think technology has really affected both. I think that it’s affected our independent thinking because when we have a question our first thought is that we Google it instead of thinking of it on our own. When we need directions, we type in the address and step-by-step it tells us exactly what to do. We don’t have to think about where we are.

Then on the relationship end, we’re used to texting and social media, so sitting and having a real conversation that’s really based on vulnerability maybe isn’t comfortable because we’re not used to that.

But then I think about, well that’s definitely affected us, let’s look at everyone else. When I walk into conference rooms with other people, I see people on their phones all the time. It’s not just Millennials. I see people emailing about important things that really should be face-to-face all the time, not just Millennials.

I think technology has affected everyone and the way we interact and the way we think. I think it’s affected Millennial in Gen Z’ers more because that’s really the way that we grew up, but I think that’s something that’s widespread.

Also, almost 70% of the world is disengaged at work. That’s not a Millennial statistic. That’s a human statistic. To me what it’s saying is this isn’t a Millennial problem. This is a human engagement problem. We have to figure out how are we going to help everyone become more engaged.

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

Kristen Hadeed
I think – no. You’re good.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh shucks.

Kristen Hadeed
I love this interview.

Pete Mockaitis
Flattery will get you everywhere Kristen. I appreciate it. Well, let’s do it. Tell us about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring.

Kristen Hadeed
I don’t know who said it. Well, I have two. I don’t know who said either one. The first is, “Nothing goes to plan and that is the plan.” That just helps me realize that when something happens that’s a deviation, instead of getting frustrated, realize that it’s all part of the process. One day when you look back it will all make sense.

The other really helps me in terms of empathy. It’s that, “Hurt people hurt people. Loved people love people.” It helps me when someone’s emotions kind of exceed the moment or they’re angry about something and I cannot understand why they’re taking this out on me, I just remember that hurt people hurt people. They’re probably hurting inside about something else, so I need to come at them with empathy instead of anger.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent, thank you. How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Kristen Hadeed
Oh, I love John Gottman’s work.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh yeah.

Kristen Hadeed
I’m obsessed with it. He, if you don’t know John Gottman, look him up. He studies – he’s a psychologist who works a lot in marriage and family space, but I find a lot of the work he’s done can be applied to the workplace. Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite book?

Kristen Hadeed
Oh, I have so many. Probably the book that influenced me most early on, Delivering Happiness, which is written by Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.

It really helped me understand what culture is and that is that it’s not things like having the cool office and a ping pong table and beer on tap, that it’s really about how people feel. Then it got me thinking, how do I want people to feel and how do I help them feel that way.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite habit, something that helps you be awesome at your job? I’m sorry, scratch it. Your favorite tool, something that helps you be awesome at your job.

Kristen Hadeed
I don’t know if this is a tool. I guess it’s more of a habit, but every night before I go to bed I think about what are the three things I want to accomplish tomorrow. I’m really clear on that because during the day there are so many things that happen that take you away from important stuff.

I think the night before identifying what are the three things that if I accomplish these, I’ll go to bed feeling like today was a win. It just helps me stay focused when things can get so crazy.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a particular nugget that you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks as you speak it?

Kristen Hadeed
Well, I think it’s the title of the book. I think it’s that you don’t need anyone to give you permission to screw up; give it to yourself.

Just give yourself permission to be human and talk about it because I think we’re making leadership unattainable because we’re acting as if you’ve got to have all the answers and know how to do everything in order to be a leader. That’s not true. Everyone can be a leader. Everyone can have an impact on the person to the right of them or the left of them.

Sometimes we’re going to mess up in figuring that out and it’s all right and that’s normal. Let’s just admit that.

Pete Mockaitis
If folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Kristen Hadeed
Well, all my social media is my name Kristen Hadeed and then you can go to my website KristenHadded.com or StudentMaid.com.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Do you have a final challenge or call to action you’d issue to folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Kristen Hadeed
Let’s see, since we talked about FBIs, how about give someone at work an FBI in person.

Pete Mockaitis
Perfect. Well, Kristen thank you so much for sharing this. This was so much fun.

Kristen Hadeed
Thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
I wish you and Student Maid tons of luck going forward for another nine amazing years.

Kristen Hadeed
Thank you. Thank you.

Apr 06

283: Subtle Shifts in Thinking for Tremendous Resilience with Charlie Harary

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Charlie Harary says: "Don't wait for the boss to tell you you're doing well... to feel like you're doing well."

Charlie Harary explores how to adjust your recurring thought patterns to find your greatness, enhance emotional wellbeing, and enjoy work more everyday.

You’ll Learn:

  1. How to react to the world in a more empowered way
  2. Two innate needs you must fulfill to be satisfied
  3. Approaches to growing more everyday

About Charlie

Charlie Harary is an author and internationally known speaker sought out for his lectures, seminars and keynote addresses on business intelligence, performance management and personal empowerment. He is the Senior Director of Capital Markets at RXR Realty, a multi-billion dollar real estate company based in New York. He hosts a weekly radio show on the NSN radio network and the Unlocking Greatness podcast. Upon its launch in 2015, Unlocking Greatness made it to the Top 10 on iTunes’ New & Noteworthy Business Podcasts list. Harary is an adjunct clinical professor of management and entrepreneurship at the Syms School of Business at Yeshiva University. He received his J.D. from Columbia Law School where he was awarded the James Kent Scholar and the Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Pete Mockaitis
Charlie, thanks so much for joining us here at How to be Awesome at Your Job.

Charlie Harary
Thanks so much for having me. It’s an honor to be on your show.

Pete Mockaitis
I think we’d have a lot of fun in reading through your book here. But first I want to get your take on it. You say that you live on almonds and black coffee. Is that exclusive or to what extent is this true and how is this possible?

Charlie Harary
It’s not exclusive. I do consume other things as well periodically.

This all started a couple of years ago when I met a friend of mine who was – I would call him the biggest carnivore I’d ever seen in my life. He explained to me that he just sort of found this new thing called being a vegan and it changed his life. I sort of didn’t buy it. He dared me to be a vegan for a month and I ended up being a vegan for two years. It was such an incredible experience for me personally.

But I travel a ton and when you’re a vegan, you don’t get a lot of options. When you’re traveling and things are perishable and you’re trying to be healthy, you really don’t got a lot. So I started getting into these almonds, raw almonds, I would take them basically like in the bag and just take bags and bags. Without milk I started drinking coffee black and before you knew it I was just basically waking up in the morning and drinking black coffee and eating almonds all day.

Now one of the things we talk about in the book is this idea of neuroplasticity and how your brain creates connections. One of the connections that it creates is things that you do at the same time. What happened over the course of a year, every time I bit into an almond I’m like, “I could use a cup of coffee.” Every time I had a cup of coffee, I’m like, “You know what this would go great with? Almonds,”

Basically I spend most of my day traveling drinking coffee, and eating almonds. That’s sort of the staple of how I survive.

Pete Mockaitis
That sounds simple in terms of you don’t have to think too hard or get hungry. So you’re not tired of almonds. How long has this been going on?

Charlie Harary
At least two to three years.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, and that’s … thing.

Charlie Harary
I actually graduated into almond butter, which is awesome, which is a whole other world unto itself that I almost feel like I’m indulging too much in. They don’t let you take it on an airplane, so it has limited capacity for me.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s counted as a liquid, gel, aerosol?

Charlie Harary
Yeah. They come too large. Usually the almond butter-

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, the size.

Charlie Harary
Size, exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Speaking of fun images you’ve earned a moniker, the Malcolm Gladwell of Emotional Wellbeing and that makes me – I love a good metaphor because you can interpret it in so many ways. Does that mean you have wild, curly hair? How would we read this?

Charlie Harary
Well, when someone first told me I’m like, “I guess I’ve got to sort of curl my hair.” But what happened was when I wrote the book – I’m a lawyer by trade. I’m not a psychologist. A lot of the book is based on psychology, but I see it mostly as research and the narrative being around the human being. That’s what lawyers do, we digest lots and lots of research.

I sent to a lot of psychologists and academics and professors, say, “Hey, listen, read this and tell me if this reads right,” and they would come back with a very similar line of, “Hey, this is like Malcolm Gladwell. Are you the Malcolm Gladwell of emotional wellbeing?” I got that more than once.

I’m like, “What do you mean by that?” The way they described it was usually – I mean Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favorite authors. Just even thought to be – for someone else to say that is the greatest honor. A lot of what he writes about I think are like societal issues and socioeconomic issues and things – tipping point, success in sort of a broader society type way.

This is sort of – what I think they were getting at, this sort of has the same style of a story-based research, but as opposed to it being explaining some phenomenon in society, it’s explaining how you can be better as a human being, how you can increase your emotional wellbeing. That was sort of the response that I got from some of my colleagues and friends.

I’m like, “All right. Thanks so much. I appreciate it. I hope that you buy a million copies and then you can really continue the metaphor.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. If I’m Malcolm Gladwell, then I need Malcolm Gladwell level of book sales please.

Charlie Harary
How about you put your money where your mouth is?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, that’s good.

Charlie Harary
Start buying.

Pete Mockaitis
So we’re talking about wellbeing and being better. You’ve got the word greatness in your book, unlocking greatness in your podcast with the same name, Unlocking Greatness. What exactly do you mean by greatness here?

Charlie Harary
When I’m talking about greatness is a sort of emotional feeling. It’s an intangible sense of empowerment. That somebody feels that they’re doing what they should be doing and as a result there’s like an internal feeling of greatness that I feel like I am living a life that’s not just average, I’m living a life that’s not just survival or good. I’m living a life that I am feeling that great feeling inside me. It’s sort of intangible empowerment feeling. That’s what I’m getting at.

It’s not – though the book we try to make the case that greatness isn’t necessarily what the world tells you you are. It’s not the medal they put around your neck or the grade they give you after your name. It’s your own approach towards life. It exists in a much more of a micro perspective. But what I’m trying to get at is a certain feeling of empowerment that people have that they need to tap into and unlock as a way to live their lives in every day of their lives.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so this notion of doing what I should be doing, that is nice when you have those moments and so please, do tell how does one have more of those moments?

Charlie Harary
A lot of it comes down to an approach towards life. It’s understanding what you have in your mind. Understanding that a lot of what you’re feeling is really not based on the world around you; it’s based on your perception of that world. Schema, if you will, is a way in which you process the world.  A lot of what we’re experiencing isn’t directly affecting our feelings. It passes through our perspective, our schema.

And when you take control of that – first, when you know it exists and how it happens and how it works and how your mind works, and you learn how you can manipulate and move and train your mind to make life and your goals more accessible, and also going deeper, you learn about aspects of spirituality and the metaphysical and what giving means and what it does for that intangible thing that many call the soul, you can start to realize that the feeling of greatness is really the opportunities that are in front of you and how you react towards them and your perspective on what’s in front of you.

That sort of way of life and then you sort of couple upon that your way your brain works, starts to condition people to see opportunities as – or see challenges as opportunities and see things that are in front of them as ways to grow and get better in small micro ways, which then conditions that behavior, which then allows them to feel more empowered, which then sort of creates the cascade of feeling great on a daily basis.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I’d love it Charlie, if you could sort of zoom right in. We got the schemas, and perspectives, and interpretations, and decisions, and how we’re choosing to engage with the stuff around us, so if you could zoom right in for let’s say there’s professional, there’s experience in the workday, and something happens, what would be maybe a typical mental response that is sort of common yet suboptimal versus maybe an outstanding interpretation mental response to that same set of circumstances.

Charlie Harary
Sure. So a professional sitting at a desk and they are – they feel subject to the whims and the feelings of their boss or their customers, so their day – basically they’re like a reed. Depending on what’s going around them will affect their day. Then their whole internal situation will be impacted by everyone around them, so that’s a very difficult way to live your life.

When that person sits at their desk and at first before they even sit at their desk, there’s a certain level of visualization and intention as to what they’re doing there and the desire to get a little better. There’s an intention to take their activities and their jobs and to adjust it to grow in whatever way

they can that day. It’s not just get through the day. TGIF, right? It’s today’s a day to be better.

Whenever they feel disempowered, what they should be doing is – let the feeling go through the mind. Don’t do it on the spot, but ask themselves the following question, what in my belief systems, in my mind cause me to be disempowered?

There’s a whole host of things that can cause that. I’m insecure with who I am. I’m threatened by someone around me. I think I’m not great at my job and so I may be fired. I am looking for someone else to validate who I am. There’s a whole bunch of beliefs that cause someone else’s bad moods to impact my mood.

When they just do that just for a few minutes, they just think through what their beliefs could be, what happens is they start to realize that whatever goes on around me doesn’t have to impact what’s inside me. If they just practice if they can every single day a period of time where they are going to act empowered no matter what, what they’ll do is they’ll start to condition their minds to react to the world in a most empowered way and that will start to feel more natural.

Sitting at their desk over time, this doesn’t happen in a day, over time they’ll actually be more resilient and be able to address whatever is in front of them with more empowerment. That will make them better at their jobs. That will make them better in their offices, but more importantly, it will make them feel better as human beings.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so I’d love for you to expand upon what I feel as empowered. It sounds your use of the word as empowered is a little bit broader than, “Oh, it’s out of my control,” but you’re like – tell me more about disempowered.

Charlie Harary
Disempowered is the feeling of lack of desire. Disempowerment is a whole host of feelings that make you feel like you want to act less: sad, frustrated. In each of these things there’s an empowerment aspect and a disempowerment aspect. But whenever you’re feeling disempowered what usually happens next is you have less energy. You have less desire. You want to disengage from the environment. You want to give up.

Now when you go to work without any of the pre-work that goes on in your mind, without knowing why you’re doing what you’re doing, without trying to focus on being better at what you do, what happens is the lack of independence of your actions allow you to be much more subject to everyone else’s whims because you’re only there to get through the day. That already before you even sit down at your desk is a total mind shift that makes you vulnerable.

Whenever something happens that doesn’t give you the validation that you’re looking for, it disempowers you. It makes you feel like you what to try less. It makes you feel like you want to disengage, give up.

That feeling is just your mind. That has nothing to do with people around you. For every person that feels that way, someone else says, “You don’t like what I did; I’m trying harder. You don’t like what I thought; fine, that’s your opinion.” And this happens everywhere.

If you look at great people’s lives, from academics to theologians to athletes, you will find along the way lots of people have tried or unintentionally to disempower them and what got them through it was

the feeling of “I am in control of my feelings. I’m going to push through whether you like it or not.” That empowerment in difficult times, more than their natural capacity, usually is what makes great people achieve things that we all know and recognize.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. It feels like we’re really onto something here it’s like this is the nexus or the nucleus or where the rubber meets the road for a huge cascading set of events or dominoes that can go in one direction or another in terms of –

Something happens, like I don’t know. Let’s say that you were in charge of something and then all of the sudden, someone else is doing that something, so you’re kind of knee-jerk reaction could be like, “What the heck. That’s bull crap. They don’t trust me with this. Someone thinks they can just take over my territory,” whatever.

I guess we would call that being in the place of disempowerment. We’re just ticked off. We’re irritated. We have a sense of being dissed. We don’t like it. Then you’re saying right then and there, the key is to not ask yourself the question “What the heck is wrong with everybody?” but instead to ask the question, “What is it in my beliefs or within my mind that leads me to feel so angry about this situation?”

Charlie Harary
Yeah, and I don’t mean in any way that people should sort of make themselves into like a mat on the floor that people can just step on whenever they want.

It’s a great example you brought up. You sit at work and someone takes over a responsibility for something let’s say and you’re like, “That’s crazy. That’s ridiculous.” Then the whole day it’s, “They don’t appreciate me. They don’t like me. I’m not good at my job. This person’s take-“ and that’s it. That’s it.

You’re whole day is hijacked by a whole host of insecurities that come to the service that make it impossible for you to be the one to be in charge now and then only make it hard for you to go to work the next day, the next week, and then it just adds and adds, and adds. Wonderful.

That happened because of two reasons. Number one, most of the time you’re not working on yourself or the person is not working on themselves. Right? Usually insecurity comes because you’re not putting in the effort. You’re not putting in that level of “I’m the best at my job. I did everything in my power to show the best that I can be and I am fully confident that whether I win or I lose, this is the best that I have inside me.”

Usually at work it’s, “I did the best that I could have. I got by and someone else came in and I don’t want anyone to expose that I’m not the best at this.” But let’s assume that’s even the case, the end of the day, if you’ve been in the business world for a few years, you know that life is long and if you’re good at your job and you’re in a normal, healthy environment, you will most likely be rewarded for it. If not, there are other places that will reward you.

The business world is much more dynamic than one person in one place. When your reaction is disempowering, you become worse at your job.

What you do is – this is what’s – same thing with people that hurt you, right? Someone gets hurt, right? So what do you do? You hate them. Every time they pass by, you feel bitter and you resent them. This is what some people think.

What do you do? They hurt you and do you know what you give them for hurting you? You give them the benefit of feeling pain every time you’re in their presence. That’s how we get back at people by allowing us to feel pain and disempowerment when they’re in our presence. They get to hurt us twice.

Yeah, someone was hurt, so as opposed to thinking, “Okay, what’s in my belief system that makes me think that I can’t allow someone else to get this credit necessarily. And two, what did I just learn.” This is in the book later on. It’s called deliberate practice. It’s work by a man named Ericsson. It’s a lot of Gladwellians thinking. The 10,000 hour rule is based on the research by a man named Anders Ericsson, who speaks about life as just one huge process of deliberate practice. Every failure you have is an ability to round out what you’re doing to become more successful.

So you have two people. One person is just, “This is it. I’m out,” and they’re just filled with resentment, rage and hurt, and frustration, insecurity. One person is working on themselves to be more of a giver, to figure out where they can be better at their jobs, to understand what caused this to happen and is empowered because they know that life is long and they’ll get their eventually.

They’re totally diametrically opposed viewpoints that are based on your schema. And to be honest although the first one seems like it’s more just, the latter one makes you win in the long term nine out of ten times.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. This is just powerful stuff in terms of just the implications and it’s like so subtle. It’s like you could go by your whole life really and just not even be aware that you have a choice. It’s just like autopilot hijack, “I am the victim to this bull crap and I hate it.” It’s like you could totally go down that route readily.

Then as opposed to asking the question – I guess I’m wondering. When you ask that question, “What is it in my beliefs,” and then you discover something. It’s like, well what it is is, “Hey, I’ve got a little bit of a sore spot that I’m actually not good at spreadsheets,” whatever.

“I’m concerned that really I’m not good at this element which has now been handed off to someone else and I feel kind of like a loser because it has been sort of snatched from my area of responsibility and I’m wondering just to what extent I really have a future here if folks are giving away my responsibility and other stuff,” so that’s just an example.

Charlie Harary
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
“I’ve done some self-exploration. What is it in my beliefs and what caused me to react in such a way. I got some answers. What do I do with those? Those are kind of hard to fix.”

Charlie Harary
Yeah, I’m so happy you’re doing this. Thank you. You’re listeners are so lucky, honestly to have you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh shucks.

Charlie Harary
Because this is great stuff. I mean it. This is great stuff. This is real – the questions you’re asking are good questions and I appreciate and I’m honored to be on this. Let’s continue this scenario. This is exactly right. This happens every day, right?

You go to being a victim in your mentality and as opposed to figuring out how I can grow or to your point getting underneath the surface of “I’m not good at spreadsheets,” and that’s part of being a human being, not being good at everything. It turns into the victim mentality. You talk to your friends about it and of course they’re going to validate you because they’re your friends.

Pete Mockaitis
“I can’t believe she did that.”

Charlie Harary
Yeah. It only creates more neural connections that you’re the victim and people are bad.

Here’s what happens. You ready for this? Your schema starts to see everyone around you as out to get you, so now what happens next week? A new project comes up where there’s a new one that you are good at, but your schema doesn’t show it to you because you’re so focused on being hurt that the next opportunity that comes by your desk, you totally miss.

As opposed to volunteering or taking on or feeling responsible or coming in with a certain level of confidence everybody can sort of smell and be aware of, you come at it from a “So you’re going to appreciate me now,” perspective and then just people sort of feel differently. And without you realizing anything, you’re just heading yourself down the road of less. As opposed to saying to yourself, “Okay, this happened. Wonderful. Where’s my beliefs.”

Someone once told me – I’ll never forget this. When I was doing the research. I forgot who said this but it was a mentor of mine said, “Whenever you have a bad thought, see yourself like a plumber. You walk into a house and there’s a leak. The plumber wants the leak because when there’s a leak you can find the problem. If there’s no leak, it’s in the walls. Everything may burst at some point, right”

That’s life. You’ve got bad beliefs. It’s part of humanity. Guess what? Not everyone grew up in like the perfect environment. Not everything is perfect. People come up and things are tough, so they develop these bad beliefs and insecurities and this and guess what happens? You have a bad thought. You’re disempowered.

If you don’t see it as a leak that you can figure out where the source is from, at some point you’re going to burst. You can burst by either quitting or disengaging just engaging in entertainment your whole life. You can do it by just counting days until Friday and then vacations and just of using most of your adult life as just sort of waiting to escape from your daily job. Whatever it is that is a manifestation of that.

But as opposed to saying, “Hey, wait a second. I’m disempowered. How come? This is an opportunity. What’s causing this? Oh, is it this? Is it that?” and getting some self-discovery because if you get some self-discovery, you know what you can do in today’s day and age? You can learn spreadsheets.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah right. LinkedIn learning baby. Former sponsor. Come on down.

Charlie Harary
You know who does this so well? Football players. Right? You ever watch football? Football, every time they do anything, they spend hours on game tape. Why? Because they’re like, “We’re going to win games and you don’t win games until you analyze and over analyze every single play.”

You go to an office and no one’s analyzing anything. We’re just doing. Maybe on a spreadsheet, maybe on a project if it’s sales. But can you imagine if we treated our lives as important as someone treats a football game. Can you imagine if the effort that goes into winning a game in a college football season is applied to winning at my life. We would be superstars, all of us.

Even if nobody knew our names, we would know. We would go to bed knowing that I’m living a different type of life. And the empowerment we’d feel by getting up every single day and know that if I get ice cream, I’m going to love it and if I get something that’s bitter, I’m going to learn from it. That’s life. It’s addictive. It’s awesome. You unlock your greatness. You don’t wait for the boss to tell you you’re doing well to feel like you’re doing well.

Pete Mockaitis
Charlie, this is potent stuff. I’d love to get your take on some potential objections here. Let’s say – you mentioned a bad thought being disempowered. I’m thinking there’s some who would respond, “Hey, all emotions are telling you something and should be honored and don’t repress yourself and don’t sort of push through the bad stuff. That’s part of life. It’s okay to be human and have these feelings.” How do you respond to this?

Charlie Harary
I think they’re right. It’s absolutely okay to be human. This is the joy of humanity and you should definitely not rush through it. I’m the other way. I’m saying you should analyze it. I’m not saying to rush anything.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Charlie Harary
The people that are rushing through it, what they’re doing is they’re feeling it, they’re running to the coffee station and they’re talking about it all day. I’m talking about totally feeling it.
In fact, feel it to a level to which you can understand where it comes from.

Absolutely bad thoughts is the beauty of life in a way. Obviously I’m staying away from the margins of crisis and trauma. I’m not talking about that. That’s outside the realm of this. I’m talking about the everyday disempowering thoughts that we have are opportunities for us to become greater at our lives. If we see it that way, there’s a different way we look at things.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s great. All right, so we talked about sort of in the heat of battle, something happens and then sort of afterwards you want to sit with it, you want to feel it deeply, get to the root of it, and it sounds like you’re saying, “Don’t rush it. It may take maybe multiple days to really zero in on what’s going on there.” Is that fair to say?

Charlie Harary
I would say sometimes weeks.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Charlie Harary
I’ve got to tell you personally. I keep a journal. I write a journal every day. I spend lots of the pages in that journal analyzing this stuff. It takes me sometimes weeks to figure out, “Hey, wait a second. This is why I’m feeling this way.” There’s no right and wrong answer.

But this is part of the joy of growth that you delve into yourself and you get more honest with yourself and you come face to face with your greatest insecurities and you’re okay with it. When you’re okay with it, it makes you go through life in a much different way.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d like to hear about that a bit when it comes to getting okay with your greatest insecurities. Let’s just say we’ve zeroed in on an insecurity that’s greater than being bad at spreadsheets. It’s like, “I feel that my worth as a human being is contingent upon my usefulness, my productivity, my to-do list checking sort of thing.” That’s something that I’ve heard some listeners articulate in different ways at different levels of candor or depth. So let’s say, okay, we’ve got a big, juicy, insecurity that’s deep seated, what do we do with that?

Charlie Harary
Yeah, that’s big. My worth as a human being is conditioned upon a certain level of usefulness.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Charlie Harary
Or popularity.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure. Or attractiveness. You can fill in the blank.

Charlie Harary
Or wealth, right? If I don’t get this level of – if I don’t get into this college, if I don’t have this net worth, if I have these many listeners, if I have these many viewers, whatever it is that we’re doing, right?

Okay, we come up with it. If you’re writing a book, this is the game. I think my work is great and when we went around looking for a publishers and we got “No, no, no,” when you get lots of no’s you’re up against, “Is there something wrong with me?”

When you have that feeling, you’re choices are either “I’m not enough. I’m disengaging. There’s something wrong with me and I’m going to feel disempowered,” or it’s, “What am I doing this for? Why do I need someone else to validate me? What is it about me that needs these many listeners, viewers, net worth? Why? Where’s it coming from?”

Again, there’s no right answer. There’s no – That’s why the title is The Unexpected Journey. You don’t come to an answer. You just walk the journey your whole life. The journey is, “Well, where did I get this from? I’m out there giving value, trying my hardest, where did I get that unless someone else seems to validate it, it’s valuable.”

“Why can’t I just go out there and just do my best and go to bed knowing that I ripped every day a micro tear at my muscle or that I gave more value than I ever took. What don’t I think this way for?” You start to delve into yourself. “Why do I need the world to tell me how good I am? Am I worried about my livelihood? Are they going to fire me? Is it because I’m competing?”

You start to uncover things about how you think. Again, there’s no right or wrong answer. But along the way you start realizing, “This is ridiculous. I just made this up. This is not real.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s the end of it when you unravel it. It’s like, “This is ridiculous. I just made this up.”

Charlie Harary
Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s when you’re done with that issue of the day until another one shows up.

Charlie Harary
A lot of the way that’s how it works. A lot of what we’re doing is we pack ourselves into this – we create our tension. A lot of our lives is self-focused attention because we’re so insecure versus this sense of I have something valuable.

This, by the way, is one of the key, core aspects of the book, is that greatness is not something you become; it’s something you reveal. What you have inside you, the metaphysical part of you, is greater than the physical part of you. And you know it because when we’re pushed against the wall, we feel like we have the capacity to dig into a deeper place. We know it when you give. We have a piece of us that’s beyond ourselves.
When a person goes through life realizing that they have all the greatness that they ever want inside them and their job in life is to just reveal it, to bring it out, to bring that which is inside them to the outside. You’re not waiting for the world to validate you; you’re just waiting for opportunities to push yourself to places that you’ve never been before.

It’s another way of living, another way of pushing and when that’s your schema, when that’s your perspective, you just act differently in the world.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. This is good.

Let’s talk about – I think we talked about in the heat of battle, what happens, how you react and how you should think about it alternatively. We talked about sort of the after action with regard to analyzing it and asking those great why-type follow up questions that get to the heart of it.

You also highlighted earlier a bit of the pre-work before you sit in that office chair to begin with associated with the why and having a commitment to growth. What are some of the practices there to get that frame or that priming going in your favor before stuff even starts happening.

Charlie Harary
Right, so this is based on some of the work done by Deci and Ryan and their Self-Determination Theory, where they speak about innate needs. We speak about this in the book a lot, but there’s sort of two out of the three innate needs I spend most time on. One is confidence or mastery or significance and one is connectedness or relatedness.

Unless you’re fulfilling these two needs – if you’re not satisfying these needs, you’re not satisfied. That’s a lot of life.

When you go into anything, a job, anything you’re doing, you have to come in with two frames. One is “I’m using this activity to get better, just to get better. I’m sitting at my desk. I’ve done this 50 times. I wanted to get 1% better.”

There’s a great documentary out there called Tom Verses Time on Tom Brady. Last year he had hired some throwing coach to help him throw like 1% better and he figures out the technique and you see him on the screen like go nuts. The guy’s like, “What was that?” He’s like, “I just got 1% better.” Like you saw. This coach turned and looked at him and he goes, “That’s what it means to be a world class champion that you get so excited at getting 1% better.”

You’re at your job, you’ve got to every day getting 1% better, every day. Even if you’re doing the same thing every day, get better at it because getting better at things fulfills you and allows you to feel like you’re moving in a direction.

The second is connectedness. You’ve got to be connected to people. You’ve got to be giving to people. You can’t be taking. When you’re working, you’ve got to be giving, giving to your boss, giving to your colleagues, giving to your customers.

When you walk into that day, if you’re focused on how do I get more connected and how do I get better at my job, you come in with the intention of success. You’re not vulnerable. You’re not a sitting duck. You’re not waiting for the day to be over. You are excited and you’re fulfilling your inner needs of what you need to do throughout that day and you’re using work as a mechanism to fulfill your needs.

That mentality is what moves people to excellence and that’s the mentality that everyone should have no matter what you’re doing at anything you’re doing. It’s usually in those areas. Then that’s how you grow and get better and be more resilient when things don’t go your way or more positioned to take advantage of opportunities of success.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. What I love about all of this is that it’s all just in between your ears. It’s like-

Charlie Harary
Yup.

Pete Mockaitis
You don’t have to say a word. You know it, but people will see just based on sort of like the fruit that grows from what’s there deeply.

That’s intriguing. I’d love to get your take sort of practically tactically speaking, in terms of getting better at things and being more connected, do you have any sort of favorite tips and tricks here. I guess I’m wondering specifically for getting better at things. If it’s like, “You know, I’ve done this 3,000 times and I’m frankly kind of bored with doing it and I think I’m doing it about as well as it can be done.” What are some ways you can figure out how you can continue to get better.

Charlie Harary
There’s two ways. One is proactive and one is reactive. Proactively, exactly your point. Whenever you’ve done something a million times, you have to proactively look for things that are harder, that move you down the path.

If I’ve always done this job, okay, what else can I do to take on more. If I can’t do it at my work because nobody cares, what I can do when I get out of work. What I can do every single day to take on something, to learn something, to try something, to get good at something because I need to spend my days getting good or better at something to feel good about myself.

When it comes the same thing to people. I’ve always treated my wife this way. My kids, this is who I am. This is the dad I am. Well, no, that’s not true. How do I wake up in the morning and see my family, friends, whoever, and try to be better to them. That’s the proactive approach.

The reactive approach is the recognition that any time you’re going to grow, growth is packaged usually in pain, small pain. Growth is threatening and growth is painful. It’s uncomfortable. When opportunity comes my way that’s uncomfortable, usually, it’s just the garment of growth.

When that kid calls me with this and I don’t want to deal with it or my friend says, “How you doing?” and my friend says, “Fine,” and I know even if I say, “Are you sure?” I’m dealing with it. Or that opportunity comes down the pipe to work on something harder and I’m like, “I don’t have to do it. I’ll still get paid.”

When things come your way that seem uncomfortable or painful, before you pass, look at it closely and what you’ll find is that lots of your growth is nestled in that. When you get through that discomfort – because greatness is the product of deliberate discomfort. That’s what greatness is. Greatness is uncomfortable.

When you see your life and you start to be comfortable in the uncomfortable and you start to choose greatness over comfort, you start to push yourself in small ways. I don’t mean to do anything massive, push proactively and then respond more empowered reactively.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Excellent. Thank you. Well, Charlie, tell me, anything else you really want to make sure to highlight before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things.

Charlie Harary
I think it’s just that concept that greatness is micro

And when you’re focused on the micro moments of your day to get better and more connected, you won’t even realize how much you’re going to grow and how much your brain will condition you for feeling that empowerment feeling.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Thank you. Now can you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Charlie Harary
My favorite quote is from Albert Einstein, “If at first your ideas are not considered absurd, they have no hope.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. And how about a favorite study or experiment or piece of research?

Charlie Harary
My favorite real study and I started with it in the book. It’s 1960’s but it’s so pure and so perfect. It was the Rosenthal Effect.

It’s Robert Rosenthal walking into a room of teachers and basically randomly picking out students, having teachers believe that the students are smarter than they actually are and then that mistaken belief changes the students’ performance.

It’s like the foundation of so many more sophisticated research studies, but to me it goes back to that all the time. It goes back to that simple study that shows that, like you said earlier, it’s between your ears. It’s between your ears. When you fully digest the power of your mind and your beliefs and you believe it and you buy it –

That’s why when I wrote the book, I tried hard to stick in as many studies as I can. I didn’t want people to sort of skim through it and see it as a some maxim that sort of promises that their beliefs shape reality, but they don’t know how that works.

I teach this course at a business school and it takes me nine hours of class time to go through all the studies. That’s only just the tip of the iceberg. When you fully appreciate the power of your mind, it’s exiting. It’s exciting. It’s daunting, but it creates an empowerment to how far you can push your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Excellent. Thank you. And how about a favorite book?

Charlie Harary
One is Gladwell’s Outliers. I love that book. I love his approach towards success and how he sort of goes through it. My other one is a book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Flow. I love that book.

I actually bought two of them believe it or not and the first one I have and the second one I just ripped out pages and highlighted things and scanned things. I didn’t know what to do with myself halfway through that book. It was so enlightening.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. How about a favorite tool?

Charlie Harary
I think my favorite tool is really my phone, my iPhone. Without it I don’t think I’d survive. When I walk out of the house, if I forget to charge it, I have like that panic of I may exist without a phone. I think we all sort of feel that same way. But I think it would be my iPhone.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. How about a favorite habit?

Charlie Harary
My favorite habit is writing. I took this on years ago when someone told me that if I would write three pages a day it would change my life. I didn’t believe them and I bought a notebook and I started doing it every day. I’m writing maybe a page or two of my own handwritten thoughts.

To me that’s sort of my favorite habit. It’s a sort of to me like a little bit of writing introspection, sort of like a prayer almost. When I’m writing things I’m sort of figuring myself out and able to sort of articulate what I want, but spending the time every day writing what’s going on inside you and trying to figure out how your mind works, it’s life changing.

In many ways I find myself whenever I have disempowered thoughts, I find myself grabbing for a pen and working it through in my head through the paper.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell me is there a particular nugget you share that seems to really be connecting and resonating with folks?

Charlie Harary
I think I’ll say three quick nuggets I think that are resonating the most. One is that greatness is inside you. It’s not anything you’re ever going to get. I would even say it differently. No one is giving you a feeling. That feeling that we all want, empowerment, no one’s ever giving it to you and you’re never getting it from the world.

That’s how it is. It’s not how the world works. It’s always the next thing. It’s always the next thing. It’s inside you and you’ve got to bring it out.

The second thing is the idea of micro greatness and recognizing that greatness is in the small moments.

The last one is the idea of rituals that if you really want to change your mind all you’ve got to do is change your rituals and stick with them. Rituals can be really small. Someone could actually do a ritual for five – ten minutes a day and over the course of the year, literally change their mind and their life.

Just the idea that you can change your life through rituals in a micro capacity and that will have major implications is empowering I think for myself and people have told me is empowering for them as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, you say you can change your brain and life five – ten minutes a day ritual. You’re saying not a particular ritual, but any number of rituals will kind of rewire some brain neuroplasticity action?

Charlie Harary
Yeah, absolutely. That’s where people get things wrong is that they live their lives in resolutions and they just assume if I resolve something, I’ll just have the will power to get done. This great work by a man named Roy Baumeister who speaks about ego depletion, about how you just don’t have enough will power to get through anything that your brain doesn’t do already.

If you really want to make a change, you’ve got to actually change your brain. You change your brain through repetitive action that will change your neuroplasticity, that will change your connections in your mind.

Just that idea that if I want to actually change something, I don’t have to sort of like hunker down and kill myself. I just need to expand my timeline and just create rituals around things I want to do and then overtime my brain will adapt it, to me is life changing. It’s changed my life for sure. I found that people found it to be empowering.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Thank you. Tell if folks want to learn more or get in touch where would you point them?

Charlie Harary
Sure. It’s either my website CharlieHarary.com, H-A-R-A-R-Y. Or Unlocking Greatness book. If you go to UnlockingGreatnessBook.com, we’ve got the book, I have a podcast on this and a newsletter and there’s stuff that you can download, the workbook for free that we built. There’s a lot of stuff there if anybody’s interested in more.

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

Charlie Harary
Yeah, I guess the real challenge would be to push yourself to be empowered when you feel most disempowered. When you take responsibility for your feelings and tell yourself I’m going to figure out how to be empowered in moments that have otherwise disempowered me, you will figure out how to do all this stuff.

Once you take responsibility for your feelings and you don’t advocate that to the world, you will find yourself more creative and resourceful to getting it done and feeling this way.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Well, Charlie, this has been a whole lot of fun. Thank you for taking the time and I wish you lots and lots of luck and empowering thoughts and goodness in your book and your teaching and your real estate and all you’re up to.

Charlie Harary
Thank you so much. An honor to be on your show and thanks so much really.