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Apr 02
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1142: How to Experience Less Stress and More Joy at Work with Amy Leneker

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Amy Leneker discusses how to spot and stop stress for more joyful days at work.

You’ll Learn

  1. The top five barriers to joy at work
  2. The three-step un-stressing method
  3. The simple practice that leads to more joy

About Amy

Amy Leneker is an optimistic, joy-seeking, recovering workaholic. She’s also a leadership consultant who has helped over 100,000 leaders and teams – including those at Fortune 100 companies – lead with less stress and more joy. Her soul goal? To help one billion people do the same. With over 25 years of leadership experience – including a decade in the C-suite – Amy understands the soul-crushing toll of burnout because she’s lived it. Twice. After surviving her own brush with burnout, Amy became determined to help others succeed without sacrificing their joy, their health, or their weekends. A first-generation college student, Amy earned both her undergraduate and graduate degrees while working full-time and later raising a family. She has studied leadership at Yale, neuroscience at the NeuroLeadership Institute, and stress resilience at Harvard Medical School.

Resources Mentioned

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Amy Leneker Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Amy, welcome!

Amy Leneker
Thank you for having me. It’s great to see you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about cheering Monday. And, first, let’s hear about your personal story. You mentioned you’re a recovering workaholic and you have, I don’t know if it’s a record, but a striking number of panic attacks that occurred in a three-month window. Can you tell us a little bit about the story?

Amy Leneker
I did. And thank you for asking because it was a horrible, horrible time of my life. I wish that I could say that my burnout story was because I had an epiphany and decided to do something different, but it wasn’t. It was that my body just shut down, and it’s what you said.

So over the course of a summer and into the early fall, I had over a hundred stress-induced panic attacks and it was horrible. The most terrifying time of my life. And so, through lots of work with my doctor and the medical support, I was able to heal from burnout and definitely don’t ever want to experience that again.

Pete Mockaitis
Wow! Well, thank you for sharing. And just so we’re clear, what exactly is a panic attack? And how does it feel as opposed to being kind of stressed out?

Amy Leneker
I am not a medical expert, so this is only from my own experience. I’m sure that there is a valid medical definition of what one is, but for me, what happened was I thought I was having a heart attack. Everything I had read about a heart attack, I’m like, “Oh, this must be it,” because my heart was racing, I was sweating, I had tunnel vision.

It was this moment of almost feeling like you’re out of your body, watching yourself, but like not actually being yourself. So you’re never gonna wonder, “Am I having one or is this just stress?” because there, you’ll know. It is not. It is not your everyday, “I feel a little stressed out.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So can you take us into that world, that picture? So this comes from a great deal of stress. What kinds of stresses were you experiencing?

Amy Leneker
Looking back, I had been stressed for as long as I could remember. I had what I thought was my dream job. It was the job I had gone to college for, had gone into huge amounts of student loan debt in order to go to graduate school for. It was the job that I wanted. And looking back, I don’t remember when high amounts of stress weren’t part of my life.

So at the time, we also had two little kids, so there was a lot of trying to figure out how to be a mom and how to work, and how to work and be a mom, at the same time of an incredibly demanding job. And on top of all of that, one of the saddest realizations for me was just how much of the stress was self-induced, how much of those expectations really came from myself, not always from the outside world, but it took me years of reflection to understand the role that I had played.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you give us an example of a self-induced expectation that’s just not at all helpful?

Amy Leneker
Yes. So here’s a great one. I thought that I had cracked the code on work-life balance. So here’s what I did. I was leading a large team at the time, huge performance measures, lots of stress, but I left work at a reasonable time every day. I very rarely stayed. I wasn’t “at the office till nine or 10 o’clock at night” person. So I thought I’ve cracked the code.

Because what I would do is I would get to work. I would work at the speed of light all day. I would leave at a decent time, and then I would be home for soccer and homework and baths and all the things. And then once the whole house shut down, that’s when I would log on and do all of my email. That’s when I would do all of my prep for the next day.

So I’m working alone, just me and my labradoodle, until 12, one o’clock in the morning and then waking up the next day and doing it all over again. Week after week, month after month, year after year, thinking that I had cracked the code, thinking like, “I had figured this out.”

I figured out how to be a mom and a career person and not take away from the family. But what I was doing was completely negating myself. I had taken myself out of the equation.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. Okay. Well, that’s a good little warning right there in terms of living just that. It’s like a watch out.

Amy Leneker
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
So thinking through your own lived experience and your research process for writing the book and working with clients, what’s something that’s really surprised you in terms of your discoveries about stress?

Amy Leneker
The first one would be that there isn’t just one kind of work stress. There are five. And I didn’t know that. At the height of my burnout, I didn’t understand that there were five kinds of work stress because once you see that, you can’t unsee it. Once you understand that there’s actually five actionable types of stress, then you can look at solutions that really work. So that would probably be my number one.

My second biggest aha was just how much of an intersection there is between stress and joy. We have got lots of great studies on stress at work. We’ve got fewer studies around joy at work. But what I couldn’t find, what I didn’t see was a study about the intersection between the two. How does one impact the other? How does a lack of one impact the other?

So that was my other biggest aha was that there was this research gap that I wanted to fill. What is it that we could understand about how these two seemingly opposite forces can work together and be in support of each other?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, can you unpack a little bit of that dynamic between stress and joy for us?

Amy Leneker
Yes, so here’s what I found. So we just did this national research study in 2026, so this is brand new data. And what we learned is that 79% of working Americans said, “I need joy in order to do my best work.” That’s a lot, 79%. That number jumps to 89% for executives.

What’s fascinating to me then is when you look at the data, 75% of American workers say that feeling joy helps them cope with work stress. So these are not two independent forces. We spend so much time, especially since the pandemic, so much time talking about stress and burnout, but very little time, very few organizations that I work with are having conversations around joy, even though it’s part of the equation.

People need it in order to do their best work. And 75% of people say, “I need it in order to cope with work stress.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, joy is a good word, and we dig it. And so, I guess I’ve heard multiple definitions of joy. I’m thinking, you know, partially in a Catholic theological context, we could talk about the virtue of joy. But how are you defining it here?

Amy Leneker
Here’s how I define it. So in our research, we found that there were three key drivers of joy. So the way I define joy is the feeling you’re experiencing when you have these three key drivers. So the first one is when there’s meaning and purpose in your work.

The second is when there is mattering in your relationships. So if you and I are on the same team, I matter to you, not just because of the work that I do, not just because I meet my deadlines, but I matter to you because who I am as a person.

And when I did the study, I thought those first two would show up. Meaning made sense to me, mattering made sense to me. The third one was a surprise. I was not expecting the third key driver of joy at work, which was momentum.

When I feel that I am making some type of progress, when I can look back and say, “Things are different because I was here,” those were the three key drivers. So when you have just one of them, you can experience joy.

So if you think about a moment, I hope you’ve had one, I bet you’ve had hundreds, a moment with a coworker where you shared a joke or you laughed or you went and had coffee, you can have joy just from one of those three. But when you have two or when you have all three, then you’ve set yourself up for a perfect storm in the best way for the conditions for joy.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So then, in this definition, that would be distinct from, say, pleasure, like, “I had a really tasty lunch,” or, “I was playing a really fun game.” That’s a different thing here.

Amy Leneker
It is a different thing, and it’s different than happiness, too. And so what I often tell leaders and teams is the words are important. Words matter, definitions matter, and not to get too lost in the semantics. So what I don’t want to do is to go into an organization where they spend the next six hours trying to figure out the difference between happy and joy. So that’s probably not going to be a great ROI for bringing in a consultant for six hours.

But what I want to do with them is I want them to really evaluate those three key drivers. Are they experiencing those? Are they helping to create those for other people? And just as importantly, do they understand the biggest barriers to joy? Because in the majority of teams that I work with, they are completely unaware that they are inadvertently blocking joy for themselves and for everybody around them.

Pete Mockaitis
Interesting. Well, could you share a story along those lines?

Amy Leneker
Absolutely. So here’s a great one. The fifth one. So if you look at the top five, we found 12, but if you just look at the top five, the fifth leading barrier to joy was when there’s isolation or disconnection. So if in the workplace you feel apart from or separate from, that is a barrier to joy.

And yet in a lot of teams I work with, they don’t really want to talk about whether or not they’re connected as a team. They don’t really want to talk about whether or not someone feels isolated on their team. But we have to because what we know is that when you’re in emotional pain, like this driver or this barrier to joy, that the part of your brain that lights up is the exact same part that lights up when you’re in physical pain.

So when people describe a really hard work situation, they might say things like, “This really is painful,” or, “I’m not sure I can take it,” because their brain is processing that pain in the same place. So if we can understand not just what drives it, but if we understand actually what gets in the way of it, we have a much better chance at creating a culture.

Can I share the number one barrier to joy?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, please.

Amy Leneker
So the number one was an overwhelming workload. So when leaders say, “I don’t know where to start. I don’t know where to begin,” or if an individual contributor will say, “Gosh, I just wish I had more joy,” what I can say is start with the number one barrier.

If you don’t know where to begin, let’s look at the number one barrier, what is your workload? Do you have a workload that feels sustainable? Because at least we know we can go in with the highest priority and hopefully create some shifts on the margin.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So what’s the two, three, and four?

Amy Leneker
Yeah, let’s fill in the middle because we’ve got the two bookends. So the fourth one is when you have technology problems that disrupt your day. The third…Isn’t that funny?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that actually makes me feel better. It’s like, “I am not just an impatient jerk. This is a universal human condition.”

Amy Leneker
I do a conference every year with the CIOs in Washington state. And so when this came up in the data, I went back to the research team and I’m like, “We got to be really certain that this is there because I’m about to tell a conference full of CIOs that they’re the…

Pete Mockaitis
“You’re killing everybody’s joy. It’s all your fault.”

Amy Leneker
Exactly. The third leading barrier is when there is sudden change without an explanation. And the second was feeling underappreciated. When I work with leaders and teams, I do an exercise where after I share with them that the second leading barrier to joy is feeling underappreciated, I have them take two minutes and appreciate someone at their workplace.

Send an email, send a text message, whatever it is, it just has to be true appreciation because we all have the ability to do something in less than two minutes about the second leading barrier to joy.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, that’s really helpful to have that rundown. And I guess, I’m thinking, a sudden change without explanation. I mean, you did the research, so you tell me if this is accurate. For me, at least, I’m thinking sudden change without acceptable explanation.

Because it’s like, there’s a sudden change and the explanation is just like, “Oh, so-and-so wants it this way now.” It’s like, “Well, why didn’t so-and-so mention that a month ago when we started doing this thing, you know?” Or, “So-and-so wants, prefers it to be in a different color,” or whatever.

It’s sort of like… in a way, it’s almost interrelated to feeling underappreciated, “I feel yanked around and disrespected.” It’s like, “Oh, I guess you gave no thought whatsoever to me, the human being, who had to execute this thing. That’s not a great feeling.”

Amy Leneker
I think you’re spot on and I think what you’re describing is backed up not just by research, but what I’m seeing anecdotally in organizations, which is that younger generations have an even stronger desire for the why. That’s what I see. When I go into organizations, younger generations are not tolerating this idea of, “Just do this because we said so.” There’s really this deeper need to understand, “Well, why is that?”

So I think you’re spot on that sometimes it’s not just hearing the change, it’s, “Do I understand the why behind the change?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And so then, if we need joy to do our best work, and joy helps with work stress, is it also true that, I guess that would be the dynamic, is that joy helps with stress and stress impedes joy.

And so you’ve identified some barriers. I guess I’d love to know what are some of the top things that make a world of difference rather quickly in this equation?

Amy Leneker
It’s a great question, because I think the most important thing that we can do, regardless of where you sit in an organization, is to look at the three drivers. So we know that meaning, mattering, momentum, that’s what fosters joy. So are you tuned in to each of those three? Do you have those three? And, unfortunately, there are times where someone will say, “No.”

So here’s an example. We had talked earlier about the five kinds of work stress. And one type of work stress is called system stress. It’s when the very system that you’re a part of makes it hard for you to be successful. Things like inequity, unfairness.

When you’re in a toxic work environment, and I hope you’re not, I hope you never find yourself in one, but if you are in a toxic work environment, the ability to feel joy is pretty small. So recognizing that sometimes this isn’t just a personal issue, this isn’t just, “I need to be more resilient. I need to figure out how to manage my stress better,” it’s actually understanding, “Am I in a workplace with system stress that is actually preventing me from doing that?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So we recognize it and then, hopefully, if you do you, you try to get out of there, I guess, is what you do. Well, let’s hear these five. So we got system, what are the other four?

Amy Leneker
The first type of work stress is schedule. It’s when there is just not enough time in the day to do everything that you need to do. Even if you work through breaks or lunch or you skip a vacation, there just isn’t enough time. You’ll also see schedule stress when folks are just booked back to back to back all day long. That is schedule stress.

The second type is suspense. When you are waiting for information or you’re waiting for a decision, and while you’re waiting, that ambiguity, that uncertainty causes stress. The third type is social, and this is the stress of people. In an ideal world, the people that you work with help you do your job. They make your work enjoyable, but that isn’t always the case. So the third type is when the relationships at work are making it harder for you.

And then the fourth one is sudden. Sudden stress is when something happens out of the ordinary, something unusual, and it requires you to do something. You’ve got to think about something or make a decision or that last minute fire that you’re putting out. That is sudden stress.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m also curious to hear your take on, I don’t know if I would just call it biological stuff, but my stress joy situation is largely impacted by, “Have I slept enough? Have I exercised? Have I eaten enough and not junk in recent times?” How do you think about these in the domain of stress and joy?

Amy Leneker
It’s a huge component of it. So what I think we’ve done that has done a tremendous disservice to employees and to entire organizations is that we have ended up in a place where you’ve got one who blames the other. So what I see is organizations blame employees for everything you just said, “You’re not sleeping well enough. You’re not eating well enough. You’re not taking breaks and walks and all the things.”

And then you have employees blaming organizations saying, “My workload is too high. I can’t be successful here.” So the only way this works is when everybody understands the role that they play. So, yes, individuals have a role. Yes, leaders have a role and organizations have a role.

Where I think we have really missed the boat is that we have turned this into a shame-blame finger-pointing game rather than coming together and saying, “If our goal is to really have a healthy workplace that thrives, what does that look like? And what is everybody responsible for in order to make that happen?”

So long answer to your question, yes, absolutely, those things matter and they’re not enough. So in our research, 25%, this blows my mind every time I say it out loud, 25% of working Americans report feeling bullied at least once a week. And many reported feeling bullied more than once a week.

So if that is your experience, if you’re going to work every week feeling bullied, how much sleep would it take to get over that? How many walking breaks do you need to get over that? So that’s where the shame and blame comes in. And I see this all the time because we do workshops on stress. We do workshops on burnout.

But if I go into an organization with system stress, how helpful is my training? I can tell you all the barriers to joy, but if you’re feeling bullied at work, that resolve is not going to come from you alone. That requires a change outside of just you.

Pete Mockaitis
And that is striking, 25% bullied weekly.

Amy Leneker
Isn’t it? It’s heartbreaking!

Pete Mockaitis
What are common examples of workplace bullying that are very prevalent?

Amy Leneker
So in our research, we were clear not to define it because what was important to us was to understand if people felt bullied using their definition. So I think it varies depending on where you work. I think it varies depending on the level of organization you’re in.

I think the important thing is that, “Do you know what that is where you are? Do you know what’s okay and what’s not okay in your workplace? Do you know what to do if you’re feeling bullied and what happens?” So I think that’s the key piece is, “What do you do? How do you tap into those resources if you believe that’s what’s happening for you?”

Pete Mockaitis
I suppose what I’m driving at is if someone finds, it might be minimizing an incidence of bullying, like, “Ah, it’s kind of annoying. Yeah, I kind of don’t care for it,” as opposed to like, “Well, no, actually, that is straight up hostile, toxic, unacceptable stuff.” Could you give us some examples of things that maybe get minimized yet are very common and deeply problematic?

Amy Leneker
Sure, I am a certified mediator. I specialize in workplace conflict. I have over 10,000 hours of mediation hours. And what I see in those mediations is exactly what you just described. That, very often, one person will say, “I didn’t even know this was a big deal.” And the other person says, “This is causing me so much pain and strain that I’ve now brought in a third party mediator to help us get through it.”

I just did a mediation recently where, I mean, you cannot make this up. It was a comment, a misunderstood comment six months ago that had created so much tension and conflict on this team. So rather than those two being able to talk about, “What did you mean by that comment? What was your intent in that?” it created six months of conflict.

So a lot of it comes down to communication. I see a lot of it around when people believe they’re being treated unfairly. So at work, they are experiencing that, “How other people are being treated doesn’t reflect how I’m being treated,” or even that they believe other people are being treated unfairly. I see that as one.

If I had to name a third one, I think it would probably be around this idea of, “What is a respectful workplace?” And when you’ve got different ideas, different generations, different cultures of what respect looks like. So a great example, I just did a mediation with a team because there was a whole team that was not getting along.

And they were frustrated because they would share ideas and they believed that the manager wasn’t hearing them and they were calling it hostile. They were using these words that create a red flag in my head as a mediator.

And what the leader said was, “I do hear your ideas. I’m just not taking them.” So now we’ve got a different conversation to have. It’s not about whether or not they’re hearing you, it’s whether or not they’re taking the ideas. So if I had to sum it up into one, communication would be the one that I see most often in my workplace mediations.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so you’ve got an ABC of Joy method. Can you share this with us?

Amy Leneker
Sure. It is so simple, and I share it with leaders and teams all the time. So the first one is just to be aware of it. So to actually start being aware of, “Am I experiencing joy or am I not?” To not let joy be accidental because joy is really different than toxic positivity.

This is not about forcing joy on people. This isn’t about forcing people to feel positive. So just that first moment of, “Am I aware of just how much joy impacts my world of work and how much it ripples to my world outside of work?”

The B, and it almost sounds silly, but the B is actually breath. It is that so many of us move through the workday in a complete state of stress that we are breathing from our chest and not actually from our belly.

And when I’m doing mediations or when I’m doing tough conversations, I always watch how people are breathing. Because if they’re breathing up here, that’s the breath of stress. And so are we able to get that into our diaphragmatic breathing to make that shift?

And then this C is connection. Stress thrives in isolation. Relief comes through connection. Joy is through connection. So when in doubt, are you feeling connected to the workplace? Who do you feel connected to in the workplace? Because they are going to be a shortcut to joy for you.

Pete Mockaitis
And in your appendix, you’ve got the unstressing method. Are those the ABCs or you got more for us?

Amy Leneker
No, the unstressing method is different. So it’s actually what I’m most excited to share with everyone. I often joke, I went on a work trip recently and I shared it with the barista at the airport, with the ride share driver, and then with the person checking me at the hotel. Because when I say, “How are you?” if someone says, “Oh, to be honest? I’m really stressed.” I’m like, “Well, I got something for you.”

So really simple, three steps. Step number one, you’ve got to see your stress differently. So you’ve got to get all your stressors from your head, from your heart onto paper. And it works best if you can use sticky notes. You don’t have to, but it works best if you can put one stressor per sticky note.

Then you see your stress through the lens of, “Is this important to me? And do I have control over it?” And how you answer those questions, then you place your stressor on the unstressing matrix, because there’s four quadrants. So based on how you answer, “Is it important? Do I have control?” you place it on the matrix.

Step two is we sort it. And you sort your stress into those five categories that you and I talked about just a few minutes ago. Which type of stress is it? And sometimes it’s more than one type. Sometimes it’s all five types, but you write down on those numbers one through five, which type of stress it is.

And what I love about step two is you’ve got this really quick visual of, “What’s actually happening for me right now?” If you look and there’s a whole lot of threes, you’ve got some work to do with the people that you’re working with. If you look at your matrix and you’ve got lots of fives, that’s a red flag that you’re feeling system stress. So it gives you this really quick snapshot into what’s been happening behind the scenes.

So then in step three, we solve it. Because wherever your stressor landed on that matrix, there is a next guiding step for you to take. So you don’t have to feel stuck. You don’t have to feel like you’re in analysis paralysis. There is a next guiding thing for you to do wherever that landed.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so I’d love to work through something here. Let’s say right now I am stressed by the war in Iran. Now that was sudden. I was not expecting that. That just sort of appeared. It is suspenseful. It’s like, “What the heck is going to happen?” It feels unfair. You point the blame anywhere you want, but at least one person did something that wasn’t cool.

And so now it’s completely out of my control. It’s important to me, although not super immediately directly personally, but just in terms of like the wellbeing and flourishing of humanity. And I don’t know, “Are my children going to go to war in years to come?” You know, so there’s that suspense thing.

So, okay, let’s say I have that posted, I’ve put it in the right quadrant, I’ve labeled some of those S category types. Well, now what the heck do I do?

Amy Leneker
The action there is about asking for support that you need because you don’t have control over it. My guess is that you don’t know anyone directly that has control over it. Is that a fair assumption?

Pete Mockaitis
I am not that powerful.

Amy Leneker
Not that powerful. And this example that you gave, I’m hearing it in every workshop that I’m in. Right before this podcast with you, I did a workshop this morning. People are talking about it. This is a huge part of our lives that is completely out of our control and feels wildly important. So that’s quadrant one.

So in quadrant one, it’s about asking for the support that you need, “How do I manage this thing that I have no control over? How am I going to be able to still move forward? How can I still function and be able to do what I need to do while this stressor is here?” And while it’s here for a length of time that we’re not sure of, we don’t know the consequences of it.

So the important thing about understanding when something is in quadrant one is that it frees you up from, “There isn’t an action, a direct action that I need to take, but is there something?” Then you can start to. So what happened just this morning in the workshop was someone said, “Well, but I can write a letter. I can send an email.”

Like, okay, yes. So then you can start to think about, “Are there actions connected to it, even if it’s not directly?” I mean, none of, at least no one I work with has the power to put an end to the stressor, but what are those things that are within our control? So I’m glad you brought up that example. It just came up this morning.

Pete Mockaitis
So then, for asking for support, I suppose some of that support is just kind of me doing things that are helpful for me. But then what is useful support, you and I and our pals can offer to each other in a world where we don’t have the control?

Amy Leneker
I think there is support that we can offer each other through connection, so just by recognizing what you’re going through. And I think sometimes the support needs to come from a professional. You may have really well-intentioned friends, but they may or may not be mental health experts.

So part of quadrant one is recognizing, “Do I need someone who is a professional at this?” Just because you love someone or just because they love you doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re trained to provide support to you on a stressor that’s wildly important to you and outside of your control.

So sometimes that support can come from family or friends or community, and other times it may need to come from someone who’s actually trained in how to do it.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot because a therapist or a professional can really get to some custom stuff there because, like, it could be stressing you in completely different ways than it’s stressing me.

Amy Leneker
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, maybe one person is ruminating. Another feels betrayed, lied to. They don’t feel that they could trust anyone anymore, “And it’s just like this other time in life,” you know, it’s bringing back traumatic memories. Others could be binge watching the news to the detriment of their responsibilities. And so there’s different kinds of interventions that happen there. So, I liked that a lot in terms of support can take a lot of different varieties, but it’s the thing to do when it’s important, but out of your control.

Amy Leneker
And I’ll tell you, I work with a lot of leaders. I work with public sector leaders, Fortune 100 leaders. I work with leaders across industries. The most successful leaders I work with, they have coaches, they have therapists, and most of them have both.

So, I mean, most really successful leaders know that, “I’ve got to surround myself with the support that I need to be successful.” And the really good ones have gotten really good at figuring out what that support looks like.

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

Amy Leneker
Here’s what I would offer, that if you’re listening to this, and you are feeling wild amounts of work stress, to know that you are not alone. Over 80% of people are right there with you.

If you’re listening to this and you’re not feeling that way, then I hope that you can go back into work tomorrow with some empathy for people who might be because we are not all having the same experience at the same time. So that’s what I would love to leave before we jump into the next part.

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

Amy Leneker
Anne Lamott says that, “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save. They just stand there shining.”

And I think that is such a beautiful metaphor for stress that we don’t have to go running all over our workplaces looking for people to save, looking for stress to eliminate, that if we can take really good care of ourselves, that that very notion of standing like a lighthouse in our own wellness has a ripple effect on everybody.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite book?

Amy Leneker
I’m going to go with Dare to Lead. When I read Dare to Lead by Brene Brown, it felt like these pieces of the leadership puzzle that I had been missing fell into place.

And I was so inspired by that book that I ended up getting trained by her and certified by her to bring Dare to Lead into organizations to help people be courageous. So that book, it changed my life. And it’s not hyperbole to say that. It literally changed my life.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Amy Leneker
Is a confetti cannon a tool?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool, yeah.

Amy Leneker
Because I keep this puppy on my desk because you never know when a confetti moment is going to hit. So I think this is my favorite tool, that when there’s a celebration, I always try to have a confetti cannon not too far away.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, are confetti cannons, I’ve never owned one or interacted with one personally, are they refillable, reusable?

Amy Leneker
This one is not. There probably are. I bet there are some environmentally safe ones that are. This one isn’t. This is so cute. I just realized, while I was on the call with you, my daughter wrote “Cheers to Monday.” Can you see that?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s sweet.

Amy Leneker
That’s so cute because I sent two of these off this week with the book lot so she was really sweet and cleaned the office and then put this. That’s so darling. Super cute.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, it’s 1,140 some interviews, I’ve asked people about a favorite tool, and this is the first time confetti cannon has appeared.

Amy Leneker
Really? I love it! Let’s name the episode that.

Pete Mockaitis
And it’s so good. And a favorite habit?

Amy Leneker
Whenever I am driving in my car, I call my parents. And it just is such a great way to connect with two people that I love more than anything else in the world.

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

Amy Leneker
I think what I’m hearing back most often now is what I shared with you right at the end about stress, thriving, and isolation, that many times after I give this talk, people will come up and sometimes they’re even crying saying that they didn’t realize that they had been disconnecting from people that they love. They had been isolating from people that they cared about. And so, unfortunately, stress just takes on this spiral. So that’s what I’m hearing right now a lot.

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

Amy Leneker
Oh, thank you. I love that question. AmyLeneker.com is the best way. And I’m also on all the socials and I would love to connect, so reach out. I’d love to stay connected.

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

Amy Leneker
My call to action would be to use the stress ruler today. On a scale of zero to 10, how challenging has your stress been? Ask the people you love that same question and then do something about it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Amy, thank you.

Amy Leneker
Thank you. This was so fun. I loved being here.

Mar 16
0

1137: How to Build an Unbeatable Mind with Former Navy SEAL Commander Mark Divine

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Mark Divine reveals his strategies for forging mental clarity, focus, and resilience at an elite level.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to fix your broken attention span
  2. A simple 20-second breathing protocol for resetting your nervous system
  3. How to fuel extreme motivation

About Mark

Mark Divine is a former Navy SEAL Commander, entrepreneur, and NYT Bestselling author with PhD in Global Leadership and Change who has dedicated his life to unlocking human potential through integrated training in mental toughness, leadership, and physical readiness.

He owns and runs the SEALFIT Training Center in San Diego, California where he trains thousands of professional athletes, military professionals, SWAT, First Responders, SOF candidates and everyday people looking to build strength and character.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Mark Divine Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Mark, welcome!

Mark Divine
Hey, it’s great to be here, Pete. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m excited to hear your wisdom when it comes to having an unbeatable mind and resilience and so much good stuff. Could you maybe kick us off with a thrilling story that tees up some of these great lessons about mental toughness? No pressure.

Mark Divine
Thrilling story. Okay, so I was at SEAL Team 3 doing some parachute training. I jumped out of a helicopter about 1200 feet in the air. I was a second jumper out and it’s a static line jump so it was pretty low. It was nighttime. So I’m popped out and my chute deploys, which is always a good sign, as you might imagine. And I’m thinking, “This is just beautiful evening and I’m doing a dream job,” like anyone would love to be, like jumping out of a helicopter in the middle of the night and the moon is bright and everything.

And I, suddenly, see another jumper coming toward me, which was unusual because, as a second one out, I should have been above this guy, but somehow he must have had an uplift and he was coming right toward me. And, of course, from our training, I knew that for a mid-air collision, you’re supposed to pull your right toggle.

And so I pulled my right toggle, and he’s supposed to pull his right toggle, and both jumpers would then veer away.

Pete Mockaitis
Makes sense. Good standard rule.

Mark Divine
Yeah, that’s the SOP, standard operating procedure. So I pull my right toggle, he pulls his left toggle, and he collides with my chute, and my chute just collapses. Now, mind you, I’m about 1,000 feet in the air then, and that is about one second per 100 feet, so I’ve got about 10 seconds to live.

And so I immediately went into the practices that I had been training, you know, not just in the SEALs, but for four years prior to, through my Zen and through my martial arts training. And that was the default mode for me, which was I obviously very grateful for because it saved my life. So I just started breathing really slowly, calmly, and reciting the mantra.

Pete Mockaitis
There’s not too many breaths with 10 seconds.

Mark Divine
Right. Exactly. I had about six or seven of those breaths on the way down. Probably a lot less than that, actually. And the key point is I didn’t react with fear. So my parachute absolutely collapses. So I go through the SOPs, I’m calming my mind, I’m breathing deeply, I’m remaining positive about this situation, and I start to yank on my risers, which is the first thing you’re supposed to do to try to get them to get air, and I got nothing, no response.

And so I think, “Okay, second order of business here is to deploy my reserve.” So I take a deep breath, calmly. Pulled out my reserve ripcord, punch it, throw it out, and my reserve doesn’t catch any air. Now I’m down to about 300 feet.

And at the same time, I’m just super calm, right? I’m not like freaking out, which allowed me to think, “Okay, maybe I can go back to the main and work that one again.” So I went back to that and started yanking on those risers again.

And about 100 feet above the ground, which is practically nothing, my main chute caught enough air so that when I landed, I landed hard, but I was super relaxed and I did a perfect parachute landing for a PLF, meaning I just rolled out of it and ended up actually standing.

The reason this was interesting is that had I not had the training that I had, I would undoubtedly have reacted with fear. And my heart would have been racing, my mind would have been racing out of control. I wouldn’t have been able to calmly and methodically think through how to solve the problem in the eight or 10 seconds that I had.

And so I walked away without a single broken bone, which is pretty incredible. That scenario, not necessarily like a parachute accident, but I had multiple scenarios like that in my SEAL experience, my SEAL days where, you know, shit hit the fan, everything went wrong. And instead of reacting negatively or reacting out of fear, I was able to calmly deal with the problem.

Now, you might think, “Well, all SEALs are trained this way.” And it is true, right? We are trained to be calm under pressure and whatnot. But to have these skills in the first year of my SEAL career was fully attributed to meditation. And I started a practice of Zen meditation when I was 21. And it’s a big part of really why I became a SEAL. And I could tell that story, too.

But it really had a profound effect on my nervous system and my ability to focus and to just develop clarity under extreme pressure, which I found to be pretty useful as a special operator. Anyway, so I think experiences like that led me to want to delve deeper into those practices, into the development of what I now call unbeatable mind, development of the mind and the body and the spirit, and really plumb the depths of what’s possible for a human being.

And so that’s why, later on, I ended up kind of really refocusing and really going deep into that territory of human performance and the what’s possible for humanity, which is what I do today.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, mission accomplished, sir, and a thrilling story delivered. So you’ve learned a lot about this stuff with regard to mental toughness and staying calm under difficult times. Can you share what’s perhaps the most surprising or counterintuitive thing you’ve learned that when you share with people, they’re a little bit puzzled, like, “Really? Is that true?”

Mark Divine
Well, when I teach SEALs, I have to, like, use stories for the young guys, right? Sometimes I’m training 18-year-old kids who want to be a Navy SEAL. And one of the stories I tell them, and they come in and think, “Okay I’m going to…” they’re going to learn mental toughness and how to be a badass Navy SEAL from Mark Divine and through my SEALFIT team and program.

And they think mental toughness is just about really learning how to be hard, like how to tough it out, how to get through, you know, like my teammate Goggin’s story, it’s like, “Okay, you can always do more, you know? When you hit the wall, you’re capable of 40 times more, I just got to be tougher. Suck it up, buttercup.”

And I say, “You know, that’s actually really flawed thinking,” right? It’s important to be hard when you need to be hard, but it’s also incredibly important to be soft when you need to be soft. And what I mean by soft, because SEALs don’t like that language, like, “I’m not soft.” I say, “What I mean by that is to be really flexible and pliable and relaxed and to learn how to to let go.” So you can interpret that a lot of ways.

So the story I would tell is, like, “If a tsunami is coming, and it was inevitable that it’s going to just knock everything down in this path, would you rather be the mighty oak and strong? Or would you rather be like the the lowly reed and super flexible?”

And they said, “Well, in that scenario, I’d rather be the reed because the reed is just going to get washed over and then it’s going to pop right back up and carry on with its life. Whereas, the oak is just going to get swept away and it’s going to get killed.” See, that’s right.

So mental toughness, the big aha is that mental toughness is actually a balance between the hard and the soft. And, also, if you want to use the Eastern concept, the balance between the yin, which is the hard, and the yang, which is soft. Yin represents forcefulness, you know, get-it-done mindset, pushing through the pain. And the yin, the soft side represents receptivity and creativity and flexibility and taking time to recover and relax.

So one of the reasons that the SEAL athletes that I train are so successful is this principle put into practice through their training regimen, through how they navigate their lives, through how they approach even a single day. You’ve got to balance the hard and the soft, otherwise, you’re going to break.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, could we hear a story of someone who internalized some of these principles and saw cool transformation as a result?

Mark Divine
Every one of the SEALs that I’ve trained have internalized it. They commit. I’ll give you an example. So there’s a guy named Shane. Now Shane recently got out of the SEALs and went to Rutgers Med School. He’s now a doctor.

But he came to me as, like, an 18-year-old, like hardcore, you know, heavy weightlifter and just really kind of beast-mode guy. And most of the guys come, you know, if you want to be a Navy SEAL these days, like you’re already pretty fit.

And what I do through my training, or did, was round you out and give you all the skills of mental toughness, resiliency, emotional control, the softer side. And then I make sure that the physical is going to be sustainable for the year-long training that you’re going to be in.

And what I mean by that is most guys come to me and they’re just, what they lack is not, they’re great runners, they’re great, you know, in all around great shape, but they lack the durability to punish their body the way the SEALs will punish it every single day.

And so that durability is kind of a mixture of like physical stability, usually in your joints, and your spine, as well as the ability to hold your mind on the task over a long period of time, which brings in the concept of yin and yang, or hard and soft.

And so we train them. So I had to train Shane to basically get out of his own way and stop just pushing like everything was a competition. So we call it co-opetition. Everything was a competition in the sense you wanted to compete with yourself and put your best effort in. But if that best effort was going to lead to an injury or degradation of the team, the team’s capacity, then that was flawed thinking.

And so what I taught Shane was that, even in the course of a single evolution and also in a day, like we consider each day like a major evolution, like it was a performance sport just to get through the day. Because when we train for a special operation, you’re training like eight hours a day or longer just to get ready for it. And then when you go through training, you’re training for 12 to 16 hours a day.

So we would do hard things during that, but we would also spend time sitting and just doing what I call box breathing, just breathing for arousal control. And we would spend time meditating and concentration practice to deepen our attention control and our concentration. And I had them doing yoga.

In fact, at first, back in 2006, when I was doing these, teaching these skills, I learned very quickly that I shouldn’t call it yoga because the guys would cross their eyes and some guys are like, “Well, my religion forbids me from doing this.” I’m like, “What?” So I changed it to functional mobility, integrated development, those types of terms I used. And you see those throughout Unbeatable Mind.

But if someone who’s ever really approached development the way from a different perspective, you could say, “Well, that Unbeatable Mind is actually kind of a compendium or a combination or integration of Eastern practices, such as yoga and mindfulness and breath work, with Western practices of peak performance, sports psychology, Western therapeutic depth psychology, and a little bit of just Navy SEAL kickassery.”

So I brought all that together and I had to, like, simplify it and present it in a way that an 18-year-old kid would be like, “Yeah, this is awesome and it really works.” So I taught Shane and these other SEALs how to not just be hard, but to balance that out with these practices that really created a total warrior, right, a warrior that could be calmly sitting in a meditative posture or visualizing their mission, but they’re simultaneously just absolutely alert, and the explosive power that they have is like a coiled spring, right, but it’s locked and loaded. It’s not going to it’s not going to release until absolutely ready, right?

And those are the skills that I think are super valuable for everyone these days. We have a saying that, in the military, we prepared for VUCA – volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity. And back in my day, that was episodic. Like, you go to war and you’re going to VUCA, or, if you’re going to do a specific operation, maybe a clandestine op, the VUCA is basically time on target, or if something goes wrong.

But nowadays, they’re using that term pretty frequently in the business world because everything is changing so fast, and it’s so volatile, and so uncertain, and so complex and ambiguous that the entire business world now is VUCA and it’s persistent, it’s not episodic.

So the skills that I taught the SEALs and I taught through Unbeatable Mind are now looking more more useful, if not imperative, for business leaders and everyday leaders for that matter. This idea that you have to be calm and clear and focused and, basically, be able to declutter all the crap, discern what’s really important, what’s really true to be in control of your thoughts and your emotions at all times so you don’t get triggered into reactivity.

And to be an exceptional teammate because your ego has been honed, refined, polished, set aside, whatever term you want. And you really are recognizing that what’s in your interest is usually what’s in the team’s interest. So you put your eye on the team and help the team succeed. And through the team’s success, you find success and also more purpose and meaning.

So the transformation is multi-dimensional, in other words. We’re transforming an individual to be more capable from a skill perspective, but also more competent, confident, and conscious from kind of the internal awareness and sense of self and perspective lens.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool. Well, let’s talk about some of the secret sauce, the means by which one pulls off some of these cool things. So holding your mind onto a task for a long time is something you highlight. And that’s something that I hear from listeners that it’s hard in terms of there’s a lot of, you know, pings, beeps, distractions, emails, whatever, or there’s just a task that’s boring, it’s not interesting to them, or it just keeps going and going and going. What are some approaches that we could use to pull that off well?

Mark Divine
It’s a great question. And there’s a lot of simple tactical things, and then there’s the stuff, the training your mind. The tactical things are to really just commit to doing less things and doing them better. So stop multitasking. Multitasking degrades your output by about 40%. So you think you’re getting more done, but you’re actually getting 40% less done and you’re doing a worse job at it.

And multitasking trains distractibility. And people say, “Well, I only do one task at a time,” but if you’ve got your phone near you, and you’re prone to looking at the alerts when they pop in, because you think, “Oh, there’s an important text,” or, “There’s an important phone call,” that’s multitasking.

And that’s training distractibility. So you’re bleeding off your attention, bleeding off your ability, your energy, actually, right, which is going to lead to low-grade motivation, you know, like piercing a balloon and it’s just bleeding out. So things like that. Starting to turn off, like I have no alerts on my phone whatsoever.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, me, too.

Mark Divine
And that was fairly up, finally had to be like, “Get this thing out of my…” I wanted to throw my phone in the frickin ocean one day. I’m like, “I’m tired of this thing.” So I took off all the alerts. And take a vacation from the phone. Every day, you should have that phone out of your sight for a couple hours or longer. And, certainly, when you sleep.

But you also should take a vacation from it like once a week for the whole day, or most of the day. So I think it’s kind of like intermittent fasting with your digital device is a really smart thing because you’re getting your attention back and you’re rebuilding energy that was bled off through that device.

I don’t watch any news or any like network TV. Like, network TV, it’s built today for high-speed mind that is a very distracted mind. Even I heard Netflix, like, I can’t watch Netflix because most Netflix shows and movies are designed for split screeners.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve heard that, yeah, that’s why they keep repeating things now.

Mark Divine
Yeah, there’s no depth whatsoever. They basically expect that the viewer is not paying attention. And that’s why they’re skin deep and they skip all over the place, and they don’t leave any of the plot for you to figure out anymore, you know?

So if you think you need that playing in the background while you’re doing work, my son does that, and it’s because his mind is trained that it needs that kind of distraction. And it’s unfortunate because it’s bleeding off your attention.

And the other thing is, like, with those shows and also with commercials, they move so fast that they’re training your brain to have that kind of fast twitch reactivity, which is very challenging then when you try to shift focus and do any deep work. Your brain needs to actually slow down and you need to learn how to slow your brain down in order to do the deep work. So I recommend not even watching TV.

Forget about how negative this stuff is and the reality that even through the TV shows and the movies, not just the commercials, but your mind is being trained and conditioned to accept a reality that might not be true. Let’s not even talk about the news, right? That’s just pure mental conditioning and propaganda.

I have a saying that I like to say a lot, but if you’re not training your mind, then someone else is training it for you. Because, essentially, your mind is the sum total of all that you’ve consumed mentally through your experiences, through your reading, through your screens, and through the interactions that you have.

So if you want to change your mind, then you’ve got to change the input, and you’ve got to basically deconstruct all the false ideas and beliefs and ways that your brain works, such as being extremely distractible and operating at like a gamma level when you should be operating at a high alpha, low beta level. So those are the tactical things.

The training aspect of this piece, Pete, is like radically simple in its form but difficult in that it requires a lot of discipline to do. And it’s simply, like I use the box breathing, which I referenced earlier, as a container for a series of mental discipline practices that bring you that calm, focused, clarity and ability to really, really get shit done at a high level without the distractions.

So let me explain real briefly how that works. So box breathing, it’s a practice that I coined back in 2006 when I was training. Remember I said I couldn’t use like yoga terms and, you know? I had learned breath practices through my Zen training when I was 21.

And then later on, I really did get into, like, the traditional eight limbs Ashtanga yoga, which is mostly about meditation, concentration, self-awareness, introspection, and the stretchy bendy physical part is the least of it. It’s a process of transformation. And so I learned breath practices through there, and I knew it was called pranayama.

And pranayama means controlling the life force because breath is life. It’s not just oxygen. It’s life. It’s prana. It’s chi. It’s energy. So when you do breath practices, what you’re doing is taking control of the life force and you’re consciously using that life force to purify your mind, open your heart, and to train your mind to tap into greater powers that every human being has the capacity for.

So instead of calling it pranayama, because I tried to do that for a couple of my classes, and they’re like rolling their eyes and thinking I’m gone off the deep end. So I just said, “Okay, we’re to do a simple practice.” I called it box breathing.

And that is to all the principles that we now know to be so important for breath work, were kind of unknown back in the mid 2000s. But I knew what worked for me and I’ve been practicing and training and seeing the benefits on myself for years. And that is deep diaphragmatic nostril breathing, right?

Nostril breathing, mouth closed, eyes closed if you are in a practice setting. Eyes open if you’re like standing in line, or at the bank or something, you can do this practice. And that deep nostril breathing, we did it in a pattern of five count inhale, five count hold, five count exhale, and five count hold. So it had a pattern of a box or a square, hence, the box breathing.

So if each count is roughly one second, you’re talking about a 20-second interval for one full box breathing cycle, and that’s three breaths per minute. And, over time, when you practice it, if you turn this into a daily practice, and my recommendation or my prescription is 20 minutes in the morning when you first wake up, and 20 minutes in the late afternoon, over time, this has an extraordinary effect just on your physiology.

And here’s what it does. Number one, because you’re breathing through your nose in that slow, controlled, deep, diaphragmatic way, you’re massaging your vagus nerve, and that’s stimulating your parasympathetic nervous system, which is your rest and digest.

That’s the yin function I was talking about. That’s the receptivity, the calming, the relaxation, which is getting your body and your brain into homeostatic balance. So you’re bleeding off all the excess stress that you built up over your lifetime until you get into this perfect state of homeostatic balance.

And the other thing that happens is, because you’re breathing in slowly, five count in, five count out, and holding for five count, when you’re operating throughout the day and you’re not doing box breathing, which you’re not going to be doing that most of the day, you’re going to be doing regular breathing, but your breathing, then, naturally begins to reshape itself into that form of five count in and five count out through the nose.

And we now teach that and we call it tactical breathing as a practice, but it becomes something you quite naturally do. And so that’s six breaths per minute, right? Five seconds in, five seconds out, that’s 10 seconds, times 60 seconds, that’s six breaths per minute.

Pete Mockaitis
So no holds in the other word, in that way. Okay.

Mark Divine
Yeah, right. So during the day, the practice will lead you to this natural nostril breathing, six breaths per minute, which, astoundingly, research has come in on this in the recent last two or three years, that that is the ideal breathing pattern for health and longevity. And we just kind of stumbled on this and we’ve been teaching it since the early 2000s. So what an incredible benefit.

And, again, we’re just talking about physiological at this point. The term we use is arousal control. You’re controlling your arousal response. And your out arousal response is simply your left hemisphere brain is wired to detect threats. And it’s five times as negative as it is positive as a result of that.

So you’ve got this mechanism built for survival that is through the amygdala, constantly sniffing everything that’s happening in your environment, every stimulus, external and internal, and saying, “Is this safe or is this unsafe?” And at least five times more than positive, it’s saying, “It’s not safe. It’s negative.” And when that happens, it activates your sympathetic nervous system, which is your fight or flight or freeze.

And that’s dumping adrenaline and epinephrine and cortisol into your system to get your body ready to fight. Well, the problem is 99% of the time, it’s really not a threat, right? It’s really not a threat, right? So that alert comes in, you think it’s your boss, the phone rings and you see that it’s a creditor, you know, you’re in traffic and someone cuts you off, then that could be a threat, but most of the time it’s not.

But you’re reacting negatively and it’s jacking you up into this sympathetic arousal response. And the problem is that, when your sympathetic nervous system keeps getting triggered like that, then your parasympathetic response atrophies. It quite, literally, goes offline because it says, “Well, you don’t need me.” It’s not getting, you’re just like other channels in your brain. If you don’t use it, you lose it.

So what I found is, even with these young guys that I work with, and every one of the older clients I work with, they’re stuck in hyper arousal. So this simple practice of box breathing will reset their nervous system so that the parasympathetic nervous system comes back online. And then it slowly and, with certainty, bleeds off all that excess stress, and brings the hormones back into balance, and then you’re sleeping better, you’re feeling better, you got more energy, so you’re exercising better everything comes back into balance.

And people, just through this practice, have literally lost excess weight they were carrying just by breathing effectively. It’s pretty extraordinary. So that arousal control has a pronounced and profound physiological and physical effect to bring your body back into balance.

And guess what? Your brain also, because it’s part of your body, comes back into balance as well, and your brain starts to operate more effectively instead of that high gamma distracted state, which is reinforced by your environment, in this culture that we live in, with this fast pace and constant distractions.

It begins to actually function at a slower level, in a mid-beta range, and even when you’re doing the box breathing practices, it’ll drop into a high alpha or mid-range alpha. This has extraordinary benefits now in the mental realm because the subjective experience of that is of more calmness and more clarity because your mind isn’t racing. You get less of the monkey mind popping around, popcorn mind.

So, already, it’s having an effect on training the quality of your mental experience. So the physiology then spills over into the psychology. Well, the second part of this, Pete, is that I asked the students to focus keenly on that box pattern like they’re Inspector Clouseau, and they’re watching every little nuance of it, every little nuance of the inhale with internal eyes like they’re watching it and they’re experiencing it with their internal senses.

You have five external senses and a number of, I’ve read, five internal senses. I mean, internal sight, internal auditory, internal sensations. And so you turn those directly toward the breathing pattern itself.

And we say, “You watch it closely. You can even visualize it if you want.” We have an app called Unbeatable Mind Box Breathing where we it shows a box being filled in as you do the breath, so you can watch that for a while and then visualize it.

Now what that is doing is holding your attention on one thing and one thing only, and that’s this box pattern. So this is like classic Zen training. All Zen training starts out with concentration. In fact, Zen is primarily a concentration path. It’s one of the two primary paths of meditation, are concentration or mindfulness.

What most people don’t realize is that concentration is a prerequisite for mindfulness. And this is why people jump into mindfulness and they fail, because they just simply can’t do it, because they can’t control their mind. They can’t control their attention.

So by holding your attention on the box pattern, what you’re not doing is paying attention to all the other thoughts that come. They’ll still come and go. You’re not like, you can’t not have those other thoughts, because thoughts happen to you.

And you can generate thoughts, but most thoughts, you know, the default mode is thoughts happen to you, 60,000 thoughts a day and 59,500 are the same thoughts that came to you yesterday. They just happen to you. And when you think you’re thinking, it’s when you’re taking a thought that happens to you and you’re grabbing onto it. And then you’re generating secondary-level thought, like rumination or pondering or like planning, that type of thing.

So when you’re doing the box breathing practice, you’re holding your attention simply on the box pattern. You’re ignoring the rest of the default mode network thoughts. But what will happen is your mind, because it’s especially in the early stages, will kind of wander over there and start ruminating or start grabbing on because it gets bored. And so then the practice is to notice that and to bring it back to the box.

And so you’re training now three things. Arousal control, which we already talked about, that’s the physiological. Now we’re getting into the mind, attention control, which is to hold my attention on just one thing. All I’m asking you to do is this one thing, just hold your attention on that box pattern.

But notice when your attention either gets split and you’re focusing on the box pattern and thinking about something, or if you’ve completely wandered off the reservation, notice that and notice it earlier and earlier and come back to the box pattern and hold your attention on the pattern for longer and longer. And we’re shooting for 50% of a 20-minute session.

If you can hold your attention on the box pattern for 10 minutes, you’re actually doing really well. And you’re deepening your powers of concentration. It’s like gathering up all your mental energy, which was being thrown out there like a floodlight, and you’re focusing it like a laser beam, and you get really, really sharp and penetrating mind. That’s extremely valuable.

Pete Mockaitis
And, Mark, when you say 50%, now you’ve got my optimizing, point-scoring, loving self going. I’m curious because, I mean, I’ve done a number of mindfulness-y things. I even have the Muse headband. And so it’ll give you some numbers about how much I was relaxed or whatever. But I’m curious, since I do find that quite motivating, is there a means by which you can see, “Oh, I was 41% last week, and now I’m 43%”? Or  is that unknowable?

Mark Divine
If you want to collaborate on creating a wearable that can track that, I’d be all ears. No, it’s clearly subjective. I’ll give you an example of why, or the reason why I know this to be true. I mentioned that this second part is very similar to Zen training. And I spent four years training Zen, before I went into the SEALs, under the watchful eye of a guy named Tadashi Nakamura, who’s still alive. He’s in his eighties in New York.

He’s a very famous grandmaster martial artist, runs a martial art program that he created called Seido, which means the way of sincerity, and headquartered in Manhattan. So I was in Manhattan after college for four years, got my MBA at Stern School of Business, NYU, and, believe it or not, became a certified public accountant in New York.

But during that time, probably the most momentous thing that happened is I trained under this guy, starting as soon as I got to New York, I just stumbled into it. Since I was 21, I trained with him for four years. And, of course, did all the karate stuff, got my black belt.

But what really transformed me was he was a Zen teacher, had a Zen class every Thursday night, which I joined with about 10 other black belts. And we would then go to the Zen Mountain Monastery up in Woodstock, New York several times a year for these long four- to five-day sits with the Zen monks.

And the basic practice, and he never deviated from this, and you’re sitting on your bench, was simply eyes closed, inhale, exhale through the nose, and count one, but don’t think of anything else. Inhale, exhale, count two. Don’t think of anything else.

And the goal was to get to 10. And, of course, the first few times I did it, I got to 10 no problem, but when I was honest with myself, I was thinking the whole time, and I realize, “Oh, shoot, now this is really serious.” If you think, you have to go back to zero.

So inhale, exhale, “I’m doing great. Oh, shoot, I just had a thought. Back to zero. Inhale, exhale, one. Inhale, exhale, two. How am I doing? Oh, I’m doing good. Oh, I’m thinking. Back to zero.” Or, if you start thinking, your mind is just wandering off the reservation, which is going to do until you train it.

So it, literally, took me, Pete, about a year before I could, with integrity, say that I got to five without any thought, without any other competing thought in my head. And I once asked him about it, and he said that that actually is really good, for students of Zen to be able to have that.

Now we’re talking about roughly a five-count inhale, five count. Back then he didn’t specify. That was my add later on. But we’re roughly talking about just one minute. You know what I mean? Five rounds is only about a minute. Wow, that’s how busy your mind is.

So if you can sit and still your mind for a minute and have no thoughts whatsoever, that is profound. You know, the Buddha said once that you could find enlightenment in a single breath if you’re paying close enough attention.

So I think that’s really, it’s a great mark or target to shoot for. And anyone listening who tries it or has tried this will agree with that, it’s not easy. It’s really not easy because, again, the brain has just not been trained this way. I think there will be a time in the future where we teach these skills to young kids, kind of like they would do for the Panchen Lama or the Tibetan monks for the kids, they start them young.

It’s extraordinarily valuable to do this type of training at a younger age when your brain is still developing. In fact, one of the reasons I think I had such extraordinary benefit with my meditation practice is because I was 21 when I started. And now the male brain doesn’t fully develop until it’s mid to late 20s.

And so, neuroplastically, my brain was just on fire developing all these new pathways, all these new skills through my meditation practice in my early 20s. And it’s completely changed my life. So it’s a valuable, I think, that’s just, you know, I use that 50% just partly to motivate people, but also to help them understand that, you know, just be easy on yourself. This is not easy work. So be kind to yourself, in other words.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. And so we talked about being able to persist, hold our mind onto a task. I’d also like your take on how to start something. If we’re dragging our feet, we’re procrastinating, we’re, “Ugh, I don’t feel like it,” have some avoidance, do you have any pro tips there?

Mark Divine
Well, probably the biggest pro tip is, whatever you’re going to do, whatever you want to do, make sure that you should do it. And so you say, “What do you mean, Mark?” Well, remember earlier I said we should all be doing less things better. And then the question is, “Okay, good, I agree with that. But what things should I be doing that go in that bucket of less things? What makes it through that wicker?”

Well, it’s the things that you should be doing. And the things that you should be doing are always going to be related to who you are, not what other people think you should be, or should be doing, or what society thinks you should be doing, or what your parents think you should be doing.

And so the most effective way to develop extreme motivation and personal accountability is to get clear on who you are and why you’re on this planet and what you’re going to do about it, your mission. So this is like one of the most fundamental things I teach. In fact, it also is probably the ultimate secret to resiliency and mental toughness is when you’re doing what you know you’re supposed to be doing, there is no quit.

No matter what also comes up to you, you just navigate it with grace because you know it’s there to help you learn, and it’s just something you have to go through. It’s going to make you stronger. It’s going to help you fulfill that mission.

Now my feeling is, unless you’re blessed with this insight at a young age, is that the best way to really get clear about who you are and why you’re here, and then what you can do about it, is through a practice of stillness. Well, guess what box breathing is? It’s a practice of stillness. So we can build that into the practice.

I mentioned earlier, box breathing is a stacked practice. We’ve already talked about arousal control, attention control, concentration. It naturally opens up to mindfulness. And as I mentioned earlier, concentration is a prerequisite of mindfulness.

The part of you that is focusing on the box pattern and that notices, the part of you that notices that your mind has wandered becomes your primary seat of awareness. In other words, instead of identifying with the thoughts, you become identified with the witness of those thoughts, which is the ultimate aim of mindfulness, is to see yourself in the perspective of the witnessing, non reactive, aware human being that is seeing thoughts and emotions happening to you and through you, but you’re not caught up in them. You’re just watching them as if you’re watching a play.

So when you develop that skill, then you’re in a state of receptivity. Every other skill that I’ve talked about is the yang, it’s an active process. But when you get into that witnessing awareness, then you shift it into your contextual mind, your right brain, which is beyond space and time. It doesn’t have the same construct. It doesn’t create sense of separation in space and time. That’s all the function of your left hemisphere, your left brain.

So you’re in your right brain and you’re in that witnessing awareness, and in that space, you become connected to the rest of your mind, your heart, and your gut. And we now know that the heart and the gut are brains. They have neurons, neurological processing, neurochemicals, neurons itself. And so in that receptive space, the right hemisphere is what connects to your heart, mind, and your biome, your gut mind, and your entire enteric nervous system, your entire body becomes a mind and an antenna.

And so in that very calm and receptive state, witnessing state, you begin to get messages from your heart. I mentioned earlier, my meditation led me into the SEALs. I knew nothing about the SEALs when I went down to New York. I was planning on being a CPA and making a lot of money and going into investment banking.

But the longer I sat on that meditation bench, now two years or three years into it, I started to get messages that I was meant to be a warrior and that I was misaligned, that I was heading down the wrong path fast. And it really kind of created like this existential crisis in me.

Like, I thought I had a midlife crisis at 23 years old because I’m like, “Well, how is it that I’m sitting here in a suit and tie and racing toward this MBA, CPA, and to make a lot of money? How is it that I’m supposed to be a warrior? Why am I getting all these signals that I’m 100% misaligned and going down the wrong path, and I’m going to live that life of quiet desperation that Henry David Thoreau talked about?”

Well, it’s because my heart was telling me that I’m a warrior, I’m meant to be a warrior. And so I started to take it seriously. And I started to ask better questions, “Well, if I’m meant to be a warrior, then how? How am I supposed to serve as a warrior?”

And that’s when the world, you when you start getting close to your own truth, then synchronicity happens. So, for me, the synchronicity showed up in the fact that I walked home one night, kind of pondering this existential crisis I was having, and I walked right by a Navy recruiting office, and there was this poster there, and it didn’t say SEALs on it.

It said, “Be someone special,” and it had pictures of Navy SEALs doing what I thought was pretty cool shit, like jumping out of airplanes. And I was like, “That’s how. That’s it. Thank you, universe. That’s how I’m supposed to be a warrior.”

So back to your question. If you lack motivation, it’s probably because what you’re doing is not the right thing and you’re misaligned. Now that, you know, what do you do then is another, you know, that’s a whole different discussion.

Because if you’re misaligned, it’s not going to go away. It’s just going to keep getting worse and worse. Your motivation is going to keep declining. You’re going to get more and more burned out. You’re going to feel more and more disconnected.

And I think a lot of people in our culture suffer from that because they’ve been taught that, “You know, I’m supposed to be a lawyer,” or, “I’m supposed to be a doctor,” or something. And it may be completely off from what they really are meant to be doing in this life. And when I say meant to be doing it, it’s not a job or a career. It’s who you are. But it can be encapsulated in a career.

Like, being a Navy SEAL was a job, but it certainly sparked and allowed me to express the warrior in me. But I always said that my purpose was to be a warrior, not a Navy SEAL Admiral. Because if I had said, “I’m going to be a Navy SEAL Admiral. Well, that’s my purpose,” we wouldn’t be having this conversation today. I’d be still in the Navy probably.

But, no, my purpose was to be a warrior, and that transcends the structure of what you do. It’s really about who you are, what your beingness is. So if you’re doing something that isn’t in alignment with your beingness, then you will experience a little bit of crisis. And crisis literally means opportunity for transformation. That’s what crisis means. So it’s an opportunity for you.

So to face that opportunity and say, “Okay, I hear what Mark is saying and I think I’m in that boat. The reason I’m burning out, lacking motivation, it’s not because I just have a shitty job, it’s because I’m misaligned. So what I need to do is go learn to sit in silence and to open up my mind so that I can hear my heart’s calling, and get a greater understanding and some clarity about who I really am and why I am on this planet at this time so that I can align with that.”

And aligning with that might not be leaving your job. Like, if you’ve invested 20 years or you’re waiting for a pension or something like that and you got a family to feed and a mortgage to pay, I’m not suggesting you just blow it all up, but you could find meaning through some service.

Maybe it’s like you were meant to really work with the earth. You just love it, and so you start a garden or you go develop a community garden somewhere. And it’s going to be different for every single person. And some people, I’ve worked with tons of clients who, like, literally have left their jobs to start their own business.

Or, I think there’s probably like 15 or 20 clients I’ve worked with who have gone off and written books because they really had that urge, they felt that need to really say something, put something out in the world, creatively like that.

So that’s the fastest path to motivation, really, is to discover who you are and what you’re meant to do about it, but that’s a slow path. It can be a slow path. It takes time, it takes patience, and it takes contemplation.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, Mark, we’re having fun here. It’s time to hear about a few of your favorite things. Can you kick us off with a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Mark Divine
What a man can think and believe, he can achieve. That was Napoleon Hill. The first book I read that ever really kind of touched on a greater human potential than what most of us are taught. So Think and Grow Rich. If you haven’t read Think and Grow Rich, that’s a must read. I think I’ve read it about 10 times.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, you mentioned Think and Grow Rich, do you have any other favorite books?

Mark Divine
One of the books that really blew my mind and got me down the rabbit hole of what’s possible for human beings, and it’s the only book that Steve Jobs carried on his iPad, by the way. It’s called the Autobiography of a Yogi by a guy named Paramahansa Yogananda. That’s doozy. I highly recommend that one.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite habit?

Mark Divine
Box breathing.

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

Mark Divine
If you want to move fast and break things and do great things in the world, then you’ve got to slow down and spend time in silence every day, spend time cultivating these qualities that we’ve talked about in the show, and get really clear around who you are and why you do what you do, so then you can go out and bring it to the world.

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

Mark Divine
MarkDivine.com, and Divine is spelled D-I-V-I-N-E, that’s my personal website. Pretty much anything you need is there, or would find interesting. UnbeatableMind.com is my training program, and so we’ve got great programs, great courses, and a community, and even a mental toughness certification that teaches all these principles, and you can go teach it to others or help others.

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

Mark Divine
Yeah, I would challenge you, you, Pete and your listeners, to take up a practice of box breathing and try it out for 30 days. If you don’t think you can afford 20 minutes in the morning, 20 minutes in afternoon, just do 10 minutes and 10 minutes, or just do 10 minutes in the morning. But do it every day for 30 days. And prove that I’m right. Don’t take my word for it. Be that study of N equals one. Prove that I’m right. Even 30 days of daily practice can be utterly transformative. So do that. I challenge you.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Mark, thank you.

Mark Divine
Yeah, hooyah! It’s been a lot of fun. I appreciate you, Pete.

Mar 12
0

1136: How to Reshape Your Beliefs to Unlock Hidden Capabilities with Nir Eyal

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Nir Eyal provides research-proven strategies for tackling the biggest restraint in our lives: our beliefs.

You’ll Learn

  1. Striking examples of the power of our beliefs
  2. How to make the most of placebos
  3. Three tools for challenging your limiting beliefs

About Nir

Nir Eyal writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and human potential. He previously taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. He is the author of the international bestsellers Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products andIndistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life, which have sold over 1 million copies in more than 30 languages. Indistractable received critical acclaim, winning the Outstanding Works of Literature Award and being named among the best business and personal development books of the year by Amazon, Audible, and The Globe and Mail. His third book, Beyond Belief, reveals how to identify and replace the hidden beliefs that define our limits. As an active angel investor, Nir has backed multi-billion-dollar companies that implement his methodologies, including Canva, Kahoot!, and others. In addition to blogging at NirAndFar.com, his writing has been featured in The New York Times and Harvard Business Review, and he is a regular contributor to Psychology Today.

Resources Mentioned

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Nir Eyal Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Nir, welcome back.

Nir Eyal
Thanks, Pete. Great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to chat about your book, Beyond Belief. Beliefs, boy, I have found them to be powerful and I’ve heard them to be powerful, and I’m excited to have you sort out the myth from the fact and the science and bring some inspiration.

So could you maybe share with us, as you were doing your research for this book, any super surprising or fascinating discoveries, any maybe counterintuitive bits that you came across when it comes to us humans and belief?

Nir Eyal
Okay, let me take you back into the time machine of psychology history, back to the year 1950.

And Curt Richter, this researcher, takes a wild rat, and he wants to determine how long a wild rat can swim for. Fascinating stuff. It turns out, a wild rat in a cylinder of water will keep swimming for about 15 minutes before it gives up and drowns.

Nir Eyal
Then he decides to do a follow-up study. The follow-up study, he takes a wild rat, puts it in the same cylinder of water, and this time knowing that the rats will last an average 15 minutes, right before the 15-minute mark, he reaches in, takes out the wild rat, dries it off, lets it catch its breath, and plunk back into the cylinder it goes. And he does this a few times to condition the rat.

The question is, now that the rats have been conditioned, that salvation might be possible, that that magic hand might reach in and save the rat, how much longer did the rat swim for? Now we know it started 15 minutes, how much longer did the rat persist?

Pete Mockaitis
Nineteen minutes.

Nir Eyal
Nineteen minutes, not even close. Keep going.

Pete Mockaitis
Thirty minutes.

Nir Eyal
That would be amazing, double the perseverance. Would that be amazing if you could double? No, not even close. Keep going.

Pete Mockaitis
Sixty minutes.

Nir Eyal
Four times longer, can you imagine if you had an intervention that could help you run four times the marathon, persist on a big exam four times longer, stick with a hard task at work four times longer? That would be insane. That would be a miracle.

The rats didn’t swim for four times longer. They didn’t swim for 60 minutes. They swam, are you ready for this? They swam from 15 minutes, with that intervention, they now swam for 60 hours.

Pete Mockaitis
Sixty hours straight?

Nir Eyal
Sixty hours straight.

Pete Mockaitis
You got to eat! You got to drink!

Nir Eyal
Yeah, they became 240 times more persistent, okay? Why? What happened? We can’t ask the rats what they thought, but if we know their bodies didn’t change, the intervention happened, same rats, same bodies, and they didn’t become physically stronger, nothing changed with their environment, same cylinder of water.

The only variable left is that something changed in their brains. That, in fact, that 240 times more persistence, that 60 hours of swimming was always in them. They physically could always do it. It’s that something was unlocked in their brain that made that now possible.

And so that leads us to, what I’ve been working on the past six years, beliefs. That we can push beyond our limiting beliefs. That the rats that originally gave up when they didn’t know there was any other option, they just kind of gave up at 15 minutes, didn’t know that within them all along was 60 hours of perseverance.

And, of course, what’s the metaphor here? We are just like those rats. We have all these capabilities. We have no clue we are able to accomplish all these things we can do, but we limit ourselves because of our beliefs, because we think, “There’s nothing more to be done,” “I’m not good enough,” “I had this condition,” “I do this,” “I can’t do that,” “I’m too old,” “I’m too young,” “And there’s no time,” “The world sucks,” “Exercise is terrible,” whatever.

All these limiting beliefs we have that aren’t real. They’re not true. They just limit us. And so that was the study that I saw that I said, “Wow, I have to tell the world about this. It’s totally remarkable and that was incredibly surprising.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s wild. That’s wild and very intriguing and enticing. But, Nir, you know, I’ve had my heart broken before by rodent studies, they promised much that didn’t translate. So can you lay on us the most compelling human random control trial you’re aware of in this domain?

Nir Eyal
Yeah, I’ll give you another one. A group of athletes were told that there was a breakthrough steroid that is going to help them put on muscle with no side effects. And this study has been replicated many, many times. It was done back in the 1970s.

So a group of athletic men told, “Here’s a breakthrough steroid, unbelievably effective, go work out.” They gave another group – nothing. The control group, these men who were given the steroid put on significantly more muscle mass, like actually, they had more muscle, like they weighed more in terms of their muscle. They also became quite a bit stronger. They could lift more weight. They could do more pushups there. They got overall way, way more, way stronger.

It turns out that this magical steroid was nothing. It was a placebo, an inert substance. So placebos can help you put on muscle mass, it turns out. Now, is it through some magical intervention? Are your beliefs becoming your biology as some studies that we know about suggest? In this case, that was true, but not the way most people think.

When people think of placebos, they think there’s some kind of magical property to it. There’s some kind of pharmacy in your brain that just makes you live longer, etc. It’s not how it works. It is true that your beliefs can become your biology. But the path through that goes through behavior.

It turns out, when they tracked how much more effort did these men put into their workouts when they were taking the placebo steroid, they pushed a little bit harder, they did one more rep, they tacked on a little bit more weight, because they believed, “Hey, I’m on this steroid, I should be stronger,” and they, therefore, became stronger because of it.

So this is super important. There isn’t some magical power to placebos. It’s, in fact, a technique we can use on ourselves to help us accomplish the things that we didn’t know we could do, but it’s not magic, it’s behavior.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, that’s intriguing. And I want to have all kinds of techniques, but maybe let’s zoom out and give us what’s the main big idea or thesis of your book here, Beyond Belief?

Nir Eyal
That beliefs are tools, not truths, and we can use them just like a tool, that when we have the right tools, we can build amazing things. So let’s differentiate between what is a belief, what is a fact, what is faith. Fact is an objective truth, it’s something that is true whether you believe it or not. The world is more like a sphere than it is flat. It is what it is.

Then you have faith. Faith are matters, these are convictions that do not require evidence, “What happens after you die?” “God rewards the righteous.” These are matters of faith. These things do not require evidence. Then there are things in the middle that we call beliefs.

Beliefs are convictions that are open to revision based on new evidence. And most of our big decisions in life are not based on fact because we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. We have to have our best guess, “What job should I take?” “Who should I marry?” “What city should I live in?”

These questions, they’re not based on fact or faith. They’re based on belief, convictions that are open to revision based on new evidence. But here’s the kicker. Even though most of our decisions in life are based on beliefs, most of us believe really stupid stuff.

We have these convictions that, to us, feel like facts and we can’t see for ourselves that they are actually hidden, limiting beliefs. It’s almost like your face, that we all carry around a face, but you can’t see your own face. You can see other people’s faces.

Just like if I said, “Hey, think of someone you know very well, someone you’re close to, what’s their limiting belief?” “Oh, in a second, I can tell you what that person’s limiting belief is if I know them pretty well.” But when it comes to ourselves, uh-uh, we don’t know what our limiting beliefs are because we think they’re facts, they’re hidden to us by design. Because the brain has what’s called an immunity to change.

We hate changing our beliefs because the brain wants to default into passivity. Another very surprising result. You’ve heard of learned helplessness?

That, over time, if you can’t do something, it started with animal studies where they did terrible things to dogs and figured this out. But they say now with humans as well that you learn helplessness. You learn to give up. If you can’t, can’t, can’t, you eventually don’t even try.

This was gospel in the psychology community until the very authors who ran those studies and came up with the term learned helplessness, just a few years ago, decided that their conclusion was completely wrong. In fact, it was the opposite. That we don’t learn helplessness. Helplessness is our default state.

That we always want to retreat into safety. We always wanted to retreat into our previous beliefs. We always want to go back to what we currently know and think we know, because that’s what kept us safe in the past, and so that’s what’s going to keep us safe in the future. That’s our default state. We don’t learn helplessness, we are all helpless.

Think about a little baby when they’re first born, they’re completely helpless. They’re dependent on others. We’re always, by default, helpless. What we have to learn is agency. We have to learn hope. And that’s exactly what those rats learned.

Originally, in that Richter study, they were helpless. They gave up after 15 minutes. They weren’t exhausted, they just gave up. But when they had learned that something might save them, salvation might be possible, they persisted. And so that’s something that I think is incredibly important to realize, that we have far more agency than we think because we can actually shape our beliefs.

We don’t have to accept our beliefs as default. It’s almost like a carpenter doesn’t say, “Oh, you know, one time, I used a hammer and it was very effective. So hammers, hammers are the one and only true tool forevermore.” No, a carpenter says, “Hey, sometimes I use a hammer, sometimes I use a saw, sometimes I use a screwdriver.” They find the right tool for the job.

So most of our problems in life, personal problems, interpersonal relationship problems at work, and even geopolitical problems come from the fact that far too many people don’t realize that the things that they think are facts are nothing more than beliefs.

And so if we realize that, we can actually shape our beliefs to live better, to make the world a better place, to reduce our suffering.

Pete Mockaitis
Could you maybe give us the top five hidden limiting beliefs that show up all over the place in all kinds of people and cause all kinds of limitation?

Nir Eyal
Sure, I’d be happy to. Just curious, can you think of any that you have? Anything come to mind?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that I have.

Nir Eyal
I’ll give you the number one. I’ll give you the number one. What do think it is, by the way? What do think the number one limiting belief that I hear is?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I think, in terms of the destruction, I’m thinking, “Oh, I’m unlovable,” or, “I’m not good enough,” or, “I’m not worthy.”

Nir Eyal
That’s too serious. Those are all limiting beliefs. Those are really hidden. Very few people will say, “Oh, I’m not lovable,” but, yeah, they can act as if that’s true. Number one, “I don’t have enough time.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Nir Eyal
Right? Everybody thinks that, “Well, of course, I don’t have enough time. We’re busy, busy, busy, busy.” What are you talking about? Not enough time for what? The human race is 200,000 years old. The earth is billions of years old. Zoom out. You got time.

It’s just that your priorities are different, that you have a limiting belief that, “I have to be stressed.” It’s a limiting belief that I have to accomplish more than I am. Because all these limiting beliefs, they create suffering. Well, I didn’t define it. What is the difference between a limiting belief and a liberating belief?

A limiting belief decreases motivation and increases suffering. A liberating belief is a belief that increases motivation and decreases suffering. And it turns out, once we evaluate these limiting versus liberating beliefs, we can choose, we can take them out for size.

So these limiting beliefs come from the fact that we expect things to be different. We expect to accomplish all this stuff and we can’t or we don’t and so, therefore, we suffer. But that’s a limiting belief. It’s just a perception problem.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right. So “I don’t have time” is a big one. Give us a couple more.

Nir Eyal
Yeah, “She always acts that way,” or, “That’s so like him,” right? You see that one a lot with interpersonal relationships, especially, in the workplace, when it comes to people we work with, “That’s just who they are.” It turns out, we don’t see reality clearly. This is a really, really important point.

So let me explain the three powers of belief so we could dive deeper into how to get rid of these limiting beliefs. There’s three powers of our beliefs. Beliefs shape what we see. We call this the power of attention, beliefs shape what we feel, We call this the power of anticipation. And beliefs shape what we do. We call this the power of agency.

And so, it turns out that the reason beliefs are, why do we even have these beliefs? How do they shape what we see, feel and do so dramatically? It’s because, fundamentally, the brain cannot process reality. None of us see reality clearly.

That’s probably the biggest limiting belief, is that you think you know what happened. You think you see reality clearly. You don’t see reality clearly. You don’t feel reality clearly. None of that. Why? Because the brain is processing for every second, 11 million bits of information.

Eleven million bits of information, to put that in perspective, that’s like reading War and Peace every second, twice. It’s a tremendous amount of information. The light entering your retinas, the sound of my voice in your ears, the ambient temperature of the room, your brain is collecting all this data. However, your conscious perception is only processing 50 bits of information, 50 versus 11 million.

So that means that you are aware of 0.000045% of what’s actually happening in reality. And you think you can take someone else’s perspective and think you know what they’re thinking and feeling? No, you have no clue. You’re barely processing your own version of reality.

So what this means is that, based on this keyhole of attention that we’re all looking through, the brain has to create a simulation because it can’t process what’s happening. So it’s creating a simulation of what it expects to…?

Pete Mockaitis
Happen.

Nir Eyal
Perfect. How did you know I was going to say that? Because of your priors, your prior experiences, what happened in your childhood, what happened yesterday, what happened in the past. That is what decides what you will perceive in the future. Those are called our priors.

What are priors? They are based on our beliefs. So we see reality, feel reality, and act in reality based on what we believe. That’s our perceptual filter that we can look through. But the problem is, of course, we keep using the same perceptual filters, whether or not they serve us because in the past they did.

And so that’s why it’s so important to be aware of, “Hey, can I swap the bad beliefs, the ones that don’t serve me, that limit me for the ones that liberate me?”

Pete Mockaitis
I see. And that’s why we’re able to finish each other’s…

Nir Eyal
Sandwiches, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Sandwiches. Oh, wow, Nir, I didn’t think…Oh, that was magical.

Nir Eyal
I have a daughter, too. I’ve seen “Frozen” 110 times.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s a joke, but I think it also illustrates the notion that if you have had those experiences of watching the “Frozen” movie or wherever they employ that joke, finish each other’s sandwiches, then you’ll say sandwiches. But if you haven’t, it’s just like, “Sentences,” that’s what gets finished.

Nir Eyal
It’s a beautiful illustration. That’s exactly right. That the brain perceives what it expects.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, I’d love to dig into how we can reshape these, but maybe could you tell us really what’s possible, in terms of an inspiring story of a person who noticed some of these things that you highlighted and they said, “Uh-oh, I got to take some action,” and they reshaped it and what happened?

Nir Eyal
Sure, I’ll give you an example of a famous person who was duped into being better and how did this happen. So this is a story of Serena Williams, and this really happened, at Wimbledon one year. And she was having a really tough go at it that year, that she was not performing at her best, and she started to psych herself out. She was capable of more.

And her coach, Patrick, knew this, and so he saw that she was not performing well because, principally, she was not rushing the net. And in tennis, if you hesitate for even a microsecond, you’re going to lose the point. And he saw that this was happening to Serena because she was doubting herself, and so he wanted to break that belief.

So what did he do? He goes up to her, and he says, “I have some amazing news. I was just looking at the statistics and I saw that, when you rush the net, you score 80% of the points.” And she said, “What are you crazy? I thought I was sucking at the net. I thought I was doing terrible with the net.”

He says, “Well, you know what, the statistics are with the statistics are. That’s what it says. So, you know, this is the best news of the day, 80% of the points, just rush the net. You’re doing great.” It turns out this was a complete lie. A total lie. But it was a productive deception.

Now that she has that new belief, even though it was false, it wasn’t true, it was useful. Beliefs are tools, not truths. And so now she began to behave differently about what she would do in the future. Maybe in the past, that was a fact, but the future is not a fact. It hasn’t happened yet. So she used her beliefs as tools, not truths, and turns out, she wins Wimbledon that year.

Now, I’m not saying go lie to people and that’s going to make them better. What her coach was doing was he knew her potential. He knew what was in there already. So if you go tell somebody, “You’re really good at something,” that they’re just not good at, it’s not going to work.

But when someone is actually good at something, just like those rats who had those 60 hours in them before the experiment, they just needed them unlocked, that’s what this productive deception actually did. And so we can actually do this in our own lives.

When you think about how people use totems or placebos or potions, whether they work or not, maybe it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they are effective. So sometimes these productive deceptions can be very, very useful.

I mean, think about branding. What the heck is branding? It’s just a productive deception. And you think, “Oh, but that’s like marketing, you know, BS.” No, in fact, there was a wonderful study where they took people and put them in an fMRI machine. An fMRI machine tracks blood flow in the brain so we can see what areas of the brain are most active.

They put them in this machine and they give them a little tube in their mouth. And in that tube, they send a squirt of wine and they say, “Okay, we want to see how you like this wine. Here is a cheap bottle of wine, maybe it’s $5 or so. What do you think of this wine?”

And people in the fMRI machine who were tasting the wine said, “Oh, you know what, this wine is okay, it’s a little flat, nothing special. Eh, it’s okay.” Then they said, “Okay, now we’re going to give you a very expensive bottle of wine, Chateau des…” something, something, “Here you go, try this wine.” “Oh,” they reported, “this is a very tasty wine. I taste hints of oak and berry and…” all kinds of the things that the wine snobs say.

You know, there’s a trick coming. The trick is it’s the same wine. But their perception of the price changed not only what they said they experienced, it’s not that they were lying, they actually, in their brain, we could see that blood flow was measuring more intensely in the pleasure centers of their brain. They were actually perceiving that wine that was more expensive as better because of this expectation, because of their belief that expensive wine should be better.

So marketing, in many cases, we’ve misunderstood. We think that advertising is about telling people about your product. That’s the simple definition, actually. That’s the simple version. Really, what advertising does is that it informs how you will experience the product itself. It shapes an expectation. It incepts an expectation so that you actually experience the product as more superior.

Take headphones, for example. I know you’re an audiophile. You’ve got all kinds of headphones. Studies have found that between $100 headphones and $1,000 headphones, people can’t tell the difference, not at that quality level when we do random studies. And yet, when they know the price of the headphones, they rate the qualities better, right? Even if it’s not.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. You know, Nir, you’re making so many connections for me. One with wine and marketing, and Seth Godin’s book, All Marketers Are Liars, he talks about the Riedel glasses, which is a fancy wine glass. And so they tell a story about how, with its properties of scents and geometry, it enhances the wine flavor, dah, dah, dah. And likewise, in sort of blind tests, it does not.

But when people believe that it does, it does. And I’ve had that experience. I’ve used those glasses. They feel very nice. And I think, “Ooh, yeah, this really is enhancing the experience.” And so it’s intriguing in that there’s nothing intrinsic about the glass that is doing that. And Seth’s point is it’s not that the marketers are really shady, terrible people. They are giving us a better experience because they’re telling us the story and we are enriched from it.

And with regard to audio, I kid you not, one time I was working with a super duper audio engineer trying to get my sound dialed in. And he said, “You really need this device.” It was this clunky thousand-dollar cast iron thing. I was like, “I mean, okay, dude, I’ll give it a shot.” And so I was like, “But it’s going right back. I’m not spending that money if no one could tell the difference.”

And so I did an elaborate blind listening test, including with the super audio engineer, Conan O’Brien stole him from me. No big deal. This audio engineer, I had him and some other folks listen to all these samples with the fancy piece and then the normal piece, and they really were indistinguishable, despite all the ooing and aahing, and he was like, “Oh, it gives your voice this just thick, heavy, rich, solid sound.”

I was like, “Well, apparently you couldn’t hear it when I obscured the names of the things.” So it really does show up in all kinds of places.

Nir Eyal
Yeah, and the natural gut reaction is, “Oh, it’s deception.” But actually, what’s the point? The point of this stuff is to enjoy it more, right? So maybe spending a few extra bucks, if that’s the goal, right? Here’s another good example, that when golfers were told that a putter was used by a famous celebrity golfer, right, like, “This putter was used by Tiger Woods,” or something, I don’t know who they used, they golf better. They actually performed better in their golf game, right?

So it can actually have some kind of actual effect on your performance as well. So maybe we should give a chance to these placebos. Maybe they’re far more powerful than we think. Again, no magic here, but if that’s what we’re paying for, if we’re paying for perception, if we’re paying for performance, maybe it’s worth it. And the nice thing is that placebos don’t have to just come in terms of products.

We know that we can have similar effects by changing our beliefs. So, for example, there’s an amazing study that was done at Yale a few years ago, where they found that people who have positive views about aging, okay, what is a positive view about aging? Something like, “Growth is possible at any age,” versus a negative view of aging, someone who says, “Aging involves inevitable decline.”

Now, which one is true? They’re both true, right? But someone who’s first to mind reaction is, “Oh, I’m having a senior moment. Those aches and pains is because I’m getting old,” what are they more likely to do? How are they more likely to live? They’re more likely to limit themselves and do fewer healthy behaviors.

And so, when we talk about what affects lifespan, smoking, what you eat, exercise, beliefs blow all of those out of the water. That people in this study, people who have positive views about aging at age 30, lived seven and a half years longer. Seven and a half years longer is off the charts. That is more than the effect of smoking, more than the effect of exercise, more than the effect of what you eat. But we never hear about that.

We think about blue zones and you have to eat this, olive oil, that, matcha, this, all these fancy, fancy things that you’re supposed to do. It turns out, having a positive view of aging is the best thing you can do to increase your lifespan. Again, it’s not that your beliefs become your biology, it’s that your beliefs create behaviors that then change your biology.

So these are very simple things that any of us can do. Stop telling yourself these limiting beliefs. Stop telling yourself, “I’m not a morning person.” Because, you know what, when you tell yourself you’re not a morning person, guess what, you’re not.

Stop telling yourself that you’re limited by your labels. Don’t say them out loud. Don’t say them to others. There’s no purpose for it, even if you think it’s true, even if there is some kind of basis. For example, I was tested for ADHD.

Pete Mockaitis
Me, too.

Nir Eyal
And for years I would say to myself, “Oh, there’s my ADHD, there it goes again.” Now, what was I doing while I was thinking about my stupid ADHD? I was not thinking about the thing that I was supposed to be thinking about.

So it became this trap that I had built for myself, versus a much more positive belief is that, “Hey, this is a new skill I’m learning. You know, maybe it wasn’t my ADHD.” Now it doesn’t mean ADHD isn’t real. It might be real, but we’re not arguing about the facts here. We’re not arguing about truth. We’re arguing about belief. What was causing me to get distracted in that moment?

It could also be that I just haven’t learned a skill to stay focused. Okay, maybe I’m starting a bit behind other people, but I don’t want to think to myself that I’m limited in this way. It’s not helpful. So I can do away with that limiting belief and instead adopt a much healthier liberating belief.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, and then you can have your beliefs associated with the supplements or the medications therein, which would likewise have impact. So I’m curious, if we have spotted a belief like, “I don’t have time. I don’t have enough time,” and we really do believe it, just like, “Nir, I mean, straight up, just take a look at this list and take a look at this calendar, like, straight up, there just is not enough time,” what does one do to rejigger that?

Nir Eyal
So the first thing we do is we take out that belief, and we recognize that the last thing our brain wants to do is to prove it false. We hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it, okay? So acknowledging that, we thank our brain and say, “Thanks, brain. I’m going to put that on pause for a minute and I’m going to explore an alternative perspective to collect a portfolio of perspectives,” right?

You don’t have to change your mind. You don’t have to believe something different. You don’t have to tell yourself myths. You just want to create other perspectives and explore whether they also might be true. So for example, let’s take, is this a limiting belief of yours, by the way, that there’s not enough time? What’s a real limiting belief you have?

Pete Mockaitis
I mean, it comes up semi often.

Nir Eyal
Okay, let’s take this one then, okay, “There’s not enough time.” Now what we want to do, and this is a technique offered by Byron Katie that I admire quite a bit. And she actually channeled this technique. This is all the way back from Aristotle. And what she does is she asks us these four questions. So the first question is, “Is this belief true? Is it true, ‘I don’t have enough time’?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I mean, it can be neither true nor false. From a strict logic perspective, it can be neither true nor false, because we have not defined what does that even mean. Like you said earlier, enough for what?

Nir Eyal
Good point. Good point. Okay, so let’s go to question number two, which you’ve kind of started to answer  already, “Is it absolutely true? Can we find any definition, any situation, any scenario where ‘I don’t have enough time’ is not true?”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly.

Nir Eyal
Certainly, of course. Okay, let’s go to the third question, “Who am I when I believe that? How do I feel? How do I act? What kind of person am I when I hold onto that belief that there is not enough time?”

Pete Mockaitis
Just kind of stressed and rushed and frazzled and error-prone.

Nir Eyal
Yeah, a great point, “I don’t do good work when I feel like I don’t have enough time.” Great point. Okay, final fourth question, we’re kind of rushing this here, but just for the sake of demonstration, “Who would I be without that belief?” If I had a magic wand, here’s my magic wand, I’m going to tap you on the head. You no longer have that belief. How do you feel?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I feel relieved and free, but also a little scared, like, “Uh-oh, I hope I don’t accidentally, like, way overdo something,” because I get in a groove or a flow and be like, “Oh, shoot, I got to pick up my kids, arghh,” you know, so I feel liberated and a little spooked.

Nir Eyal
Okay, great. So now we’re going to do the turnaround. So what did we just discover with those four questions? We discovered that that belief that felt really true a minute ago, maybe it’s not true, that holding onto the belief doesn’t feel very good, doesn’t make you enjoy your life. It seems like it increases suffering. And if we got rid of it, there might be some benefits, not a hundred percent, but maybe there are some benefits to getting rid of that belief and trying on a different belief.

So now we do the turnaround. We take that statement that we are absolutely sure is true, “Look at my calendar, there’s no time, clearly,” and we ask ourselves to consider the exact opposite, to do a turnaround. And this technique of a turnaround is way underutilized. It can be utilized in business, it can be utilized in relationships, it can be utilized to bring yourself greater peace and awareness, and just to see reality more clearly.

Again, we’re not changing our mind. We’re just collecting a portfolio of perspectives to choose from. So what’s the opposite of “I don’t have enough time”?

Pete Mockaitis
“I have ample time.”

Nir Eyal
“I have ample time.” Give me one way that might be true.

Pete Mockaitis
I sleep as much as my body allows me to.

Nir Eyal
Okay, great. Somebody else might say, “Actually, I watch TV. I scroll on social media. So if I really didn’t have time, would I be able to do those things? No, I actually have time.” Or another person might say, “You know what? I have time for the things I care about. You know, like I spend time with my kids. That’s non-negotiable.”

Or somebody else might say, “I spend a lot of time at work. That’s non-negotiable. So I do have time for the things I care about,” could be a possible way that’s true. Can you think of any others that might apply to you or any other turnarounds, any other way you could take, “I don’t have time,” and you could turn that around, like, “I do have time for…” blank?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I mean, I think I kind of already said it. It’s like, I do have time for the things that truly matter, necessary, worthwhile, leveraged, you know, life-giving. I mean, yeah, that just is what it is.

Nir Eyal
Yeah. How does that feel when you try that on for size that, “I do have time for the things I care about”? How does your body feel right now?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yes, it’s a better groove, you know. Kind of breathing a little easier, a little less tension in some belly and such.

Nir Eyal
Yeah, so that’s a very quick and dirty example of how you can collect that portfolio and see and try it on for size. Let me tell you where it changed my life. I had an interaction with my mom a few years ago. It was her 74th birthday, and I wanted to do something nice for her. So I wanted to get her some flowers. The problem was, I was in Singapore and she was in Central Florida where I grew up.

So that’s a bit of a challenge, but I called a bunch of florists. I made sure the delivery went out on time. I wanted to make sure that they, you know, didn’t burn in the Florida heat. And I stayed up till 1:00 a.m. and I patted myself on the back and I said, “Oh, Nir, you’re a good son. You did something nice for your mom.”

I went to bed, slept well, called her the next morning and said, “Hey, mom, happy birthday. Did you get my flowers?” To which she said, “I did. Thank you very much. But just so you know, I got them and they’re half dead. So don’t use that florist anymore.” To which I reacted and said something to the effect of, “Well, that’s the last time I ever buy you flowers,” which I later regretted, and that went over about as well as you’d expect.

Now, after the call, my wife turned to me and she said, “Do you want to do a turnaround on this?” To which I said, “No, I do not want to do any of your hocus pocus, touchy feely nonsense. I need to vent,” because that’s what we’re all told. You’re supposed to vent, you’re supposed to get your feelings out, you’re supposed to tell people how you really feel.

But I knew enough at that point, doing this research, that venting does not work, that venting does nothing but solidify this patina that we have around people, this effigy that we build about people, because we don’t see people as they are. We see people as we are. We see them through our beliefs, which is why we treat our family members very differently from how we treat strangers.

So I did not want to vent, because I knew it, I held myself back, I should say, from venting, because I knew that was not going to be helpful. And I did this exact exercise, I asked these four questions.

I wrote down the belief, “My mother is too judgmental and hard to please,” obviously, right? Question number one is a stupid question, “Is it true?” Yeah, obviously. Go to question two, “Is it true? Is it absolutely true that she’s too judgmental and hard to please?” Well, maybe. I mean, there might be possibly a 1% chance that that didn’t happen the way I saw it. Maybe there’s another perspective. Fine.

Question number three, “Who am I when I hold onto this belief?” I’m not really myself, right? I’m short tempered. I regret what I later said, right? So that wasn’t really serving me. And then, finally, the fourth question, “Who would I be without that belief?” If I could do away with that belief that my mother is too judgmental and hard to please, I’d be nicer. I’d be more patient. I’d be more myself.

So, A, that belief that I was absolutely sure was true, it turns out maybe it’s not true. It doesn’t really serve me and I’d be much better off without it. Now I could do my own turnaround. Okay, my turnaround number one, “My mother is not too judgmental and hard to please.”

How could that possibly be true? Is there even one way that could be true? Well, she did thank me, so maybe she was just trying to help me by making sure that I don’t get scammed by this florist. It could be. Now, is that true? Is it not true? I don’t know. It’s okay. It’s another perspective.

Here’s another turnaround, “I am too judgmental and hard to please.” Could that be true? Not “My mother is too judgmental and hard to please,” I am too judgmental and hard to please. That could also be true, right, because I had scripted this exact response of effusive praise that I was expecting from my mother, and when it didn’t come, I lost it. So who was being judgmental? Me, because I didn’t get the thanks I needed.

Now there’s a fourth, another turn around, a fourth belief, “I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself.” Yeesh, that’s no fun. What does that mean? Well, the more I thought about it, when something didn’t happen the way I expected it to happen, I thought it was a statement on myself that I was not competent for not buying the right flowers, and so I was judging myself very harshly.

And because of that, there’s what’s called a misattribution of emotion. That when we feel crummy, we look for the first face in front of us and that’s the face we’re going to punch, verbally or physically. And that’s what I did. So now which one of those four beliefs is right? We started with “My mother is too judgmental and hard to please,” we came up with three other perspectives, three other beliefs. Which one is right? Which one is wrong? Which one is true? Which one is false? Who cares?

I tell you what, that first belief gave me only one way to happiness, only one way to peace. She had to apologize so I could feel better. She had to change her behavior so I could change how I felt inside. That ain’t going to happen, right? Stop expecting people to change. It’s not going to happen. The other three perspectives I could do something with.

So in any interpersonal conflict, whether it’s in the home with our families or in the workplace, taking on that portfolio of perspectives, you don’t have to agree with it, you don’t have to change your mind about anything, but you can collect that portfolio of perspectives about any of your limiting beliefs and try them on for size, just like glasses, right?

You try on somebody else’s glasses and things are blurry, they don’t look right. You try on the right prescription, “Oh, things look better. Things look more clear.” And so the idea here is that by trying on those different perspectives, you can pick the ones that serve you best, that help reduce suffering, that bring you closer together to people and improve your life.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s great. Thank you. And so this rigorous question, consideration, turnaround approach is powerful. I’m curious if there are any other power tools in your toolkit for working with these beliefs?

Nir Eyal
When it comes to rumination, you know, we get into this cycle of when we mess up and we do something that we later regret. “Oh, why did I do that? Why did I say it that way? What did he mean when he said that?” You know, we ruminate again and again and again.

It turns out, one of the best things you can do is to make time in your schedule to worry, that the solution to rumination is actually scheduling worry time. So when I get in that loop of, “Oh, what if this doesn’t work out? Maybe I said this wrong or whatever,” saying, “Okay, I write down that thing I’m worried about, that thing that I’m ruminating on, and then I have time in my schedule, like literally worry time scheduled where I will get back to it.”

Now why is this so powerful? The reason the brain keeps ruminating about a thought is because it doesn’t know when it’s going to have another time to solve it. It keeps thinking and thinking, it becomes an intrusive thought because if not now, then when? But, amazingly, when you give the brain time to worry later, it can relax. It’s like, “Okay, I wrote this down. I will schedule time with myself to worry about it.”

Now here’s where the magic happens. Number one, you stop ruminating. Two, when that time comes to worry about it, nine times out of 10, “What was I worrying about again? Why did that matter so much? What’s the big deal?” And so you benefit twice.

Another technique is called illeism. Illeism is when you talk to yourself in the third person. It’s not about cheesy affirmations. Affirmations don’t really work because they tend to affirm things that are not true. So just telling yourself it’s true doesn’t really work. But, Ilism, talking to yourself in the third person, has been shown to be very, very effective.

So instead of saying, “I’m terrible at this,” or, “I’m no good at public speaking,” or, “I’m not a morning person,” or, “I’m this or that.” Rather, if you can actually insert your name, so, “Pete is working on his public speaking,” “Pete is getting better at this task,” “Pete is challenged by this.” It’s amazing.

When you can talk to yourself in the third person, what it allows you to do is to give yourself advice as if you were in the third person. So by giving yourself what’s called self-compassion, it turns out that self-compassion, studies have found, is a defining trait of people who are more likely to meet their long-term goals.

So if you can talk to yourself the way you can talk to a good friend, it’s amazing, when a friend comes to you and says, “Hey, I have this problem.” “Oh, I’m full of good advice. Let me tell you exactly what you should do.” But when it comes to our own problems, we’re really challenged by this because we can’t see past our beliefs.

And so using this third-person technique, talking to yourself as if you were your own friend, which you should be, can actually uncover and unlock a lot of these hidden truths.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, beautiful. Thank you. Well, now let’s hear about some of your favorite things. Could you kick us off with a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Nir Eyal
This actually comes from the Talmud, which is that, “You don’t see things as they are. You see things as you are.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Nir Eyal
I really enjoyed Rory Sutherland’s book Alchemy. I thought that was a fantastic read.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that audiences really eat up, they retweet, they Kindle book highlight, they say, “Wow, Nir, this was awesome”?

Nir Eyal
What I would want people to recognize and re-share is that beliefs are tools, not truths.

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

Nir Eyal
Yeah, so my website is NirAndFar.com. Nir spelled like my first name, that’s N-I-R , AndFar.com.

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

Nir Eyal
Yeah, I think the best thing we can do is to recognize that we don’t see reality clearly, we don’t feel reality as it is, and we are capable of doing so much more than we know.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Nir, thank you.

Nir Eyal
My pleasure. Thank you, Pete.

Mar 09
0

1135: Patrick Lencioni on How to Identify Your Gifts for More Energizing Work Days

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Pat Lencioni discusses how to tap into your genius to make work more fulfilling and energizing.

You’ll Learn

  1. How to stop feeling ashamed of your weaknesses
  2. The six types of working genius
  3. The real reason why so many professionals are burning out

About Pat

Pat is one of the founders of The Table Group and is the pioneer of the organizational health movement. He is the author of 13 books, which have sold over 9 million copies and been translated into more than 30 languages.

As President of the Table Group, Pat spends his time speaking and writing about leadership, teamwork, and organizational health and consulting with executives and their teams. After more than twenty years in print, his classic book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, remains a fixture on national best-seller lists. 

His most recent book, The Six Types of Working Genius, was released in September 2022, and he is also the host of the popular business podcast, At The Table with Patrick Lencioni.

Resources Mentioned

Thank you, Sponsors!

Pat Lencioni Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Pat, welcome back!

Patrick Lencioni
It’s great to be back with you. It’s been a while.

Pete Mockaitis
It has, yes, and we both moved to Tennessee since we chatted last.

Patrick Lencioni
Isn’t that crazy? Yeah, one less family in Illinois and one less family in California. And here we are.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. Well, it is, it’s icy out, but, hopefully, you have some hot insights – no pressure – to drop here. We’re talking about Working Genius, but first I wanted to zoom way out and hear what’s one of the most surprising and fascinating discoveries you’ve made about us humans and how we work together well from all of your work with consulting and researching and writing?

Patrick Lencioni
Wow! I think that one of the things I’ve realized is that the root of all sin is pride, and the antidote to pride is humility. And humility is the key ingredient to relationships, and teams, and individual growth, and relationships. I think you know of an author named Matthew Kelly, probably. He used to say, “Humility is the most attractive quality in the world.” And I believe that.

When you meet somebody, like, “Man, they ooze humility,” and you can’t fake that, because then it wouldn’t be real. Because to be around somebody that’s humble, and in the workplace, people that are humble, people are like, “I want to listen to them. I want to follow them.”

And so, I think that everything we do At The Table group seems to be rooted, ultimately, in humility.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s juicy. Let’s dig in a little bit more. So what specifically do you mean by humility? How do you define it? How do you know it when you see it?

Patrick Lencioni
I’m glad you asked because it’s not being self-deprecating around the things that you’re good at. Humility is about truth. So there are some people who go, “That person is really humble. They never think they’re right. They’re always putting themselves down.” That’s not humility.

Humility is, “I know what I’m good at. I know what I’m not good at. I’m just as capable of talking about both of those. I know who I am. I know what other people are great at, and I celebrate them.” And so, it’s like this recognition of what is true and good. And C.S. Lewis said, “Humility isn’t thinking less of yourself. It’s just thinking about yourself less.”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, yeah, that’s good. And I’m thinking about, in leadership contexts when some folks, it seems like they’re uncomfortable acknowledging that someone else is right and they are wrong. You mentioned humble people are very attractive to follow. I’m thinking about some of my favorite experiences in following people are when we’re just having a meeting, we’re just going through some things, some ideas, they propose an option, I propose an option.

And one of my favorite phrases to hear from a leader is, “Hmm, I like your way better.”

Patrick Lencioni
Oh, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Because, well, one, it just feels good, like, “Ooh, oh, I feel affirmed, validated, smart, I scored some points.” And, two, it’s humble at the same time. They acknowledge, “Hey, I had an idea, you had an idea. And this time I like yours better, and I’m comfortable and humble and strong enough to own that. As opposed to feeling the need to somehow make your idea mine, to somehow subtly point out all the risks,” or, “Okay, maybe let’s give your thing a shot.” Like, that feels much less edifying and enjoyable.

Patrick Lencioni
And, you know, I think the contrapositive of that, or the corollary to that, is people who also will say, “Oh, no, that was my bad.” When they make a mistake and they go, “Oh, no, I fully own that.”

Pete Mockaitis
Totally, yes.

Patrick Lencioni
One of the other definitions of humility I heard, I don’t know who said this, I have to look it up, but it said, “Humility is like standing next to a cathedral and being just as proud of it as though you had built it yourself.” Like, I didn’t have to do that and I can still say, “Oh, look how beautiful that is. Somebody else did this. I didn’t, I couldn’t, and I’m so happy that somebody else could do that,” rather than, like, “Well, what does it say about me that I didn’t or couldn’t?”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, oh, totally. Well, we’ll go just a little further there before we talk Working Genius. When it comes to humility, I’m thinking of, now we had Amy Edmondson on the show, and we were talking about psychological safety. And so, there’s some research which shows that that’s a real big deal.

Patrick Lencioni
Which is not what people think it is. I love that about her.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I want to get your take on that in terms of teams working together effectively, psychological safety is huge. And the more I reflect on that, the more I think about humility and virtue, in general, seems to be absolutely critical to have that, both as the giver of saying of things that can feel unsafe to the hearer, and the hearer, you know, feeling unsafe by what they’ve just heard, offense or defensively, however everyone think about that.

It seems like you really got to have a lot of virtue and psychological mental health for psychological safety to be a reality because any number of things can feel unsafe.

Patrick Lencioni
Yes, and if being disagreed with or not affirmed in something makes you psychologically unsafe, that’s not something that the team has to do or the leader. Like, a person who needs to be agreed with or protected from responsibility for their own actions or positions on things, that’s not psychological safety.

And I love that about her, because people kind of hijack psychological safety, and says, “Nobody can ever be offended for being disagreed with.” Like, you said, that guy that said to you, “Hey, no, I like your idea better.” Or if he said, “Oh, no, I think your idea, that’s not a good idea.” Both of those should be psychologically safe.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. And so, could you speak to what are the vibes, the elements, the things going on within a team such that folks can hear that, “No, your idea is not going to work,” and that’s totally cool?

Patrick Lencioni
Right. I think it gets back to humility, and it also gets back to what you know about yourself. Do you know what you’re good at and what you’re not good at? And one of the things that makes a person really struggle in work is when they don’t know their defects, and they’re not even defects, they’re shortcomings and everybody’s got them.

When they can’t go, “Oh, here’s my idea, but I’m not really good at thinking this way, so if I’m wrong, it’s probably understandable.” When a person actually tries to be good at something they’re not good at and you have to protect them from realizing that they’re not good at that, that’s a terrible thing for a team. And it’s a very low ceiling for a person in their career.

The best people in jobs are the ones that know their strengths and use them, and they know their weaknesses and they’re not afraid to highlight those. And so psychological safety has to be a person that’s willing to acknowledge their weaknesses as well as their strengths.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then I’m also thinking just about like a woundedness, you know, like some things are just a real sore spot for folks, and it may not be sensible, rational, true. And yet, that’s there, it’s like, “Ooh, you just hit something.”

Patrick Lencioni
Yeah, and, essentially, I’m doing some work around this right now. When people have wounds and they’re not aware of them, it throws everything off.

Because you can look at a person’s Myers-Briggs or their Working Genius or their typology, whatever it is, but that doesn’t explain everything. There’s also virtues that they choose to exercise, and wounds that they have that they either have worked on or they’re not aware of.

You can’t understand a person completely just by understanding their types. You have to also understand these other things that factor into it. And wounds are the big one that I’m realizing that really make it hard to understand somebody, because if they don’t understand their wounds, they don’t understand why they’re not being true to their self.

And I know that sounds very complex, but I’ve discovered my wounds in the last five years of my life in a deep way. And, man, has it been a godsend to go, “Oh, I never realized that happened to me. I just need to go now come to terms with this and work on it so I can actually be the person I’m meant to be.”

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. And not to put you on the spot, but when we say the word wounds, could you give a couple examples of things that tend to pop up, kind of often, and really do have an impact on individual, professional, and team effectiveness at work?

Patrick Lencioni
Yeah, so a lot of high achievers, one of the reasons why they work hard or strive to be successful is because they’re operating out of their wounds, and they’ve turned their wounds into superpowers, if you will. In other words, “Oh, I have to be perfect,” or, “I have to please others,” or, “I have to achieve. I have to prove that I’m good at this.”

And while that is something you get rewarded for in life, ultimately, you’re not getting the peace you want because we should be working out of joy and love and desire to do good, not fear and worry and running from the possibility of failure.

And I think there’s more people that are successful because they’re afraid to fail than the other. And people are looking at them, going, “Well, you don’t have too big of a problem because you’re doing well in your career.” And they’re like, “Yeah, but you don’t understand. Every day I wake up and go, ‘Is today the day I’m going to fail or…?’”

And so, a lot of people have different kinds of wounds that make them try so hard, and so they don’t recognize them as wounds because they think, “That’s why I’m successful.”

Pete Mockaitis
And when you gave us some examples, these were sort of like false beliefs, “I have to, I have to, I have to, I have to.” It’s sort of like, in this context, a wound is a belief that is false and problematic and causes unease. Is that the entirety of what a wound is? Or is that just a subset?

Patrick Lencioni
I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s the entirety. My guess is that there’s probably some others. But what it does is, it’s the unease. Because that unease could get you to do things that society says are good, or it could get you to do things that society says are bad. And that’s almost independent of the wound itself.

So we look at people who like, “I’m an athlete, and I’m in my 40s, and I can’t give up my sport, and I have to go for another Super Bowl.” And I’m not trying to pick on Tom Brady or anybody in particular. And it might be because this is their whole identity, right?

Or somebody else who’s like, “Hey, I love that I get to do this. I can still do it. Why not give it a shot? It’ll be fun. And if it doesn’t work out, I’m fine.” It can look exactly the same from the outside, but the reason they’re doing it informs whether it’s healthy or from a standpoint of woundedness.

And so many people work from a place of like, “I have to prove that I can still be that person. I have to prove that this is who I am. I’m a successful athlete,” or author or leader. And it’s like, “No, we’re not meant to do it out of fear. We’re meant to do it out of joy.”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, before we shift into talking Working Genius, specifically, just so we don’t leave anybody hanging, if they’re like, “Oh, my gosh, yes, that’s inside me,” what are some next steps or resources you’d point folks to who are seeing some of this woundedness stuff in themselves?

Patrick Lencioni
Well, there’s an author, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Bob Schuchts.

Pete Mockaitis
I think so, yeah.

Patrick Lencioni
So, he’s this Catholic author that’s a psychologist, and he wrote a book called Be Healed. And it’s a very faith-filled book, and he goes through the different kind of wounds, but there’s all kinds of other people out there. And there’s a lot of work these days on what’s called complex PTSD, CPTSD, which sounds very…and it talks about childhood trauma.

And most people listen to that and go, “Listen, nothing horrible happened to me when I was a kid,” and that’s what makes it complex. Sometimes little things happen throughout our childhood and we don’t realize the impact that had on us. So I really recommend people look into those things.

It sounds so deep and dour and psychological, but a lot of people have grown up with complex PTSD, which means you didn’t really get affirmed as a child. You didn’t really get paid attention to. And over time you adapted to that and even became successful, but you can’t experience the peace you’re supposed to. So the resources around those things are really good.

Pete Mockaitis
I like that a lot, and these notions of, it’s not like an epic trauma in terms of abuse or whatnot. But I can still recall like, geez, sixth grade, I was the school store manager for our student council. And someone asked me in a student council meeting, “Oh, yeah, how much money did the school store make?”

And I thought that the treasurer’s job is count money. And so, I looked over the treasurer, he’s like, “Yeah, how much did we make?” And then the student council president said to me, like in front of everybody, “Actually, that’s your job.” And she pointed at me and I was like, “Gasp,” and it felt profoundly shameful and embarrassing in that moment.

And, in a way, like, there are echoes of that in terms of, if I screw up, like on something that’s kind of important, and maybe kind of public, it’s like, “Oh,” you know, there’s some reverberation there.

Patrick Lencioni
Yes, and like what somebody would say is, “Was that the first and only time that happened or did that actually provoke memories of things that happened when you were younger or other things?” And that’s the thing. Sometimes somebody has just one incident, and you go, “That’s called PTSD.”

And sometimes it could be something horrible, like you got beaten up by somebody or something like that. Sometimes it can be embarrassed in front of the…and that was the only time, but you remember it. But often, what people realize is they go, “Oh, actually, I was kind of treated like, ‘You better not mess up. You better not mess up. You better not mess up.’ And then when you did, it was like, ‘Oh, it all came crashing down.’”

And there’s really good normal psychologists out there. I’m a believer in using one that has faith because, for me, that’s critical. And they help you go through, and they go, “I wonder if other things, anything else happened.” And they can help you think through those things, reprocess them, and let them go so you can move on in your life.

So this isn’t about wallowing in self-pity or making a big deal out of something small, but it’s also not about dismissing things, like, “Oh, just dust yourself off.” Sometimes stuff happens when you’re young. For me, there was kind of an implied thing, like, “You kind of need to be perfect.” And there’s reasons for that.

And so from age five, I was like, “Well, I better please my parents, my teachers, my coaches, my bosses.” So I became this pleaser of everyone, which is not healthy.

So I had to kind of go explore that. And, boy, thank God for that, because I’m learning how to enjoy life more and do my work from a place of excitement about getting to use my talents, as opposed to running from the possibility that I might fail or let somebody down.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Pat, so much good stuff. And this is just a warmup. We’re talking about Working Genius.

Patrick Lencioni
Well, luckily, Working Genius connects to all this.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, absolutely. Well, tell us, what’s the big idea behind The 6 Types of Working Genius?

Patrick Lencioni
So I’m going to start with this. It’s really about avoiding guilt, shame, and judgment in life. Now, people are going to be like, “But wait, I thought it was a working tool.” Working Genius is about understanding the reality that you’re really, really good at a few things. And those are gifts that God gave you, and you’re meant to use those.

And you’re also not very good at a few things. And sometimes you have to do those things, but you shouldn’t feel bad that you’re not great at those. So, let me tell you how it came about, and I think it might be helpful. You know, it’s so funny, when I was on your podcast in 2020, I think, we got to look at the, it might have been the, do you remember the month I was with you?

Pete Mockaitis
I can look it up right now.

Patrick Lencioni
Because I think this idea came about in that very month.

Pete Mockaitis
We published it in March of 2020, just when things were popping off, huh?

Patrick Lencioni
Oh, okay. So two months later, I was back at work, so it was right after I was on your podcast last. And I was doing my work on Zoom because COVID was still kind of lingering there. And so I was in this one Zoom call and I was with a bunch of Catholic priests, teaching them how to be better leaders and managers. And I love that because I work with a lot of churches. And I was really excited and really in a good mood.

Then I had to have another Zoom call with a team that had worked on something I needed to give them feedback about how they needed to work harder and do more, and I was really bummed. I didn’t like doing that. And then I had another meeting where I talked about a podcast we were starting. I was really excited.

And the woman with me, Amy, she said, “Pat, why are you like that?” And I said, “What?” And she said, “Why do you get so excited and so bummed out and then so excited?” And I thought, “I don’t know why I’m like that, but it’s been going on for 20 years and I want to figure it out.”

And that, by the grace of God, prompted me with a whiteboard and a pen to sit down and figure out, “What is it about those moments when I get bummed out and the moments that I’m excited? What am I doing in those moments? What kind of actions, activities am I involved in?”

And the next thing I knew, I had these six circles on the board, which were the different kinds of work that are involved in any kind of project or any kind of work at all, at home, at the office, whatever. And I thought, “Oh, I love doing these two. These two, they’re okay. These two, oh, I really don’t like those. What’s going on?”

And what I found out was I was doing something that I wasn’t really great at every day. Every day, I’d come to work and people in my office go, “Do that for us. Do that for us. Do that for us.” And I thought, “Well, I’m the leader of the company, I guess I have to do it. And I think leaders are supposed to do this.” And it was burning me out. Burning me out hard over the course of many years.

Well, I wasn’t coming up with a book or a new product. I was just trying to explain my own behavior. One of our consultants saw the model on the whiteboard, and we told him about it, and the next day he was working with the CEO who was really struggling. He goes, “Let me show you this model I just saw yesterday,” and he put it up on the board.

And the guy had tears in his eyes, and he was like, “Oh, that explains it, why I’m so unhappy.” And so we were like, “Whoa, maybe there’s something universal here.” And so five months later, we introduced an assessment to help people understand their Working Geniuses. And now we’re going to get up to two million people doing this. And it’s growing like crazy right now.

So that’s how we came up with it. And it was to explain my own frustration in a job where I loved the people I worked with and I liked what we did, but I was, every day, coming to work and getting frustrated. And once I explained that, we introduced it to other people, and they were like, “Oh, you mean I don’t have to do this because I’m not meant to?” And we’re like, “No.”

The shame that gets lifted off your shoulders when you realize the things you’re bad at are probably for a reason, and trying to pretend you’re good at it or prove that you can be good at it is actually not good for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, I like that. When you talk about shame there, it’s funny. And so we’re going to talk about the six types in a moment. And I’ve got my own little PDF report here handy.

Patrick Lencioni
Ooh, good, I love to go over it with people.

Pete Mockaitis
And my areas of Working Genius are invention and wonder.

Patrick Lencioni
Oh, my wife is that.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, fun. So that combo puts me in the creative dreamer pairing. So we’ll talk a little about what these words mean. But what’s interesting is like, I really do. I love thinking about new cool ideas, and the implications of it, and how that might unfold, and how that could be super valuable and transformational for folks. And it gets me so fired up.

But then, when you talk about shame in terms of, like, my email inbox is rarely, rarely at zero. And it feels like a slog to just, “Oh, I got to do this. I got to process this stuff.”

Patrick Lencioni
What are your lower letters? So you’re W and I, first two. What are the others?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, wonder and invention, and then my lowest ones were discernment and enablement.

Patrick Lencioni
Okay, so in the middle you have G-T. It’s so important to understand these things. And we were just talking today, I have a Working Genius Podcast where this is all we talk about.

It’s almost more important to understand your frustrations because that’s where we get our shame. People say, “Well, yeah, you come up with lots of good ideas and you’re a deemed thinker, but how come you don’t respond to people faster when they need your help?” And you’re like, “Oh, man.” And it’s like, “Because you don’t have an enablement.”

And it’s not an excuse. It’s an explanation for why that doesn’t give you joy and energy. See, that’s what this is all about. It’s like, “Pete, what gives you joy and energy?” You are naturally going to be better at that. God wired you to be good at that. You should lean into that as much as you can.

And when you struggle with something, you can say, “Hey, I’m really sorry. I didn’t get back to you. It’s not a strength of mine and I’m okay with that.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Now, they may or may not be okay with that on the receiving end.

Patrick Lencioni
But when you can say, “It’s not because I don’t care, it’s just because that is one of the things that I really struggle with. And I’m not going to try to get good at what I struggle with at the expense of exercising the things I’m supposed to be doing.” You know I’m saying?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. I hear you. I hear you. Well, thank you. So, Pat has spoken, and I am absolved from shame.

Patrick Lencioni
And I picked up my phone because you would not believe the number of messages I have. My wife cleaned this out for me the other day, but I have 549 voicemails that I haven’t processed yet.

Pete Mockaitis
Mine just says it’s full. It just stops at a certain number. Okay. Well, so we would drop some words, some wonder, invention, enablement. So you got six words. Could you unpack each of them for us?

Patrick Lencioni
Yeah, I’ll try to do it fast, too. So there are six types of work. I don’t care if you’re launching a new podcast, or starting a company, or rebuilding your home, or planning a vacation, I mean, any project of any kind involves six different tasks that you need people to do. And none of us have all of them. It’s wonderful that we need each other to do that.

Here are the six types of work. And I’m going to start from up in the clouds where it happens in a fairly theoretical way, all the way down to landing the plane on the ground. So the first one that’s up there in the clouds is called wonder, which is one of your geniuses.

The genius of wonder is something that most people were never rewarded for as a child because you don’t see people doing it and it’s not very practical in the school kind of sense. And that is people with a genius of wonder get joy and energy out of pondering big questions.

They can sit for a long time and like, and they literally say like, “I wonder why things are like that. Maybe there’s a better way. I wonder if our customers are really happy.” Or, “Why do we live here? Do we really need to live here?” They’re asking the big question, and this is where all new things start.

And these are people that they love to be curious. And they can do it for a long time. I mean, a lot of people say, “Well, I can do that for five minutes.” No, no, no, these are people that can ponder things deeply. That’s the first genius.

But when you ask the big question, then somebody else comes along with the next genius, just slightly down below the clouds but still up there in cloudiness, and that’s the genius of invention, where that big question that somebody asks, the next one is, “Let me try to come up with an answer. Let me come up with an idea. Let me come up with a solution out of nothing.”

And this is a genius, this is one of mine, I don’t have wonder, that I love to solve problems with nothing. No context. It’s something I do naturally. I can’t help it. I do it even when people don’t ask me to. I wake up every day and love to come up with new ideas. Now here’s the thing, I always thought everybody liked to do that because it’s what I do. And there are other people that hate doing this.

I like to say, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” And you’re a W-I, just like my wife, Pete, and you live in a world of ideation. These are the two ideation geniuses. And that’s just what you do.

Now, there’s things in jobs and things in life that we have to do that don’t fall into those. We have to do them but you are drawn to this, and so is my wife. And after 25 years of raising kids, and I helped her, I was very involved in our kids’ life, but she was home and driving them, and paying the bills, and doing the laundry, and making sure that the day worked, and they got to the appointments they needed to and the doctor, and solving all those tactical problems.

She read my book, and she said, “Oh, I really like this and I’m really pissed off.” And I said, “Why?” And she goes, “Because I spent the last 25 years living so far away from my genius.” Now, what’s interesting about that, Pete, is early, before we came up with this, I knew that she wasn’t wired to do a lot of the detailed stuff, day-to-day, and I said, “Why don’t we hire somebody to take some of that off your plate?”

And you know what she said? She said, “No, no, no, my friends are good at this. They can do it. And if they can do it, I should be able to do it, too.” See, she was comparing herself to others who had different wiring. And like Teddy Roosevelt said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.”

So when you do have to do some of that stuff, because we all do, you can go, “Yeah, this isn’t my thing. I don’t get any joy and energy from that. I’m going to grind through this, but I’m not going to pretend like there’s something wrong with me for not liking it.” Make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
It does, yes.

Patrick Lencioni
So the first two geniuses are yours and my wife’s, wonder and invention. Those are your favorite things to do. The next genius that comes after that is called discernment. Now discernment is the genius of having, like, you can look at multiple variables and put them all together. You’re really good at like instinct, intuition, and pattern recognition.

And this is one of my geniuses, it’s not my wife’s, but I love guessing the answer, and I usually guess pretty close. And somebody can come to me, and they can say, “I need to make a decision.” And even when I don’t know a lot of detail about it, I can usually come up with a pretty good judgment.

A woman that I work with, Tracy, has discernment. And even when she was a child, her friends would come to her, and they’d say, “What should we do, Tracy? Ask Tracy, she’ll know the answer.” And Laura and I will be like, “Should we refinance our house?” She’ll say, “Ask Tracy what she thinks.”

Tracy’s not an expert on home financing. What she is, is she’s got really good judgment. And so in our company, I trust Tracy implicitly with everything in running our company. She’s one of the founders. And if it’s a financial decision or a strategic decision, I’ll always run it by Tracy because her gut is so on.

A lot of spouses, if they have I and their partner has D, they really misunderstand each other because they’ll come up with an idea and their spouse will tell them why it’s not going to work. And they’ll go, “Why are you so against my ideas?”

And they’re like, “No, no, no, I love you. I just want to make sure you don’t drive the car off a cliff in pursuing this idea. And I want your ideas to land so that you feel good about it. But my job is to make sure you’re seeing the potential downside.” And they can sometimes get frustrated.

Okay, after discernment comes galvanizing, the G. This is the one I didn’t have as a genius and I was doing it every day and it burned me out. People with galvanizing love to rally the troops. They love to push and to inspire, and to cajole people, and to get people to change what they’re doing to do something new or better. They love being that one to go, “Hey, everybody, close your laptops. I have an idea and I think we should change the way we’re doing things.”

I don’t get energy from that. Some people love that. They literally wake up, and go, “I hope I get to get up in front of the office today and inspire them to change what they’re doing.” And it’s really important in a business to have people that do that, but I was doing it every day and I’m not great at it.

So I found other people in my company that love doing that, and I said, “I want you to run the daily meeting where you get people excited again, because I did it once. I don’t love to do it every day. You do love to do it. And they were like, “Are you kidding? You mean you’re going to let me do this?”

I’m like, “Yeah, it’s your genius.” “But I haven’t been here that long.” I said, “No, no, no, this isn’t like permission because of tenure. You are good at it. I’m going to give you a job that you’re good at, all right?” So galvanizing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and, Pat, it’s fascinating, if I may. So you are a renowned keynote speaker, and that sounds like fundamentally what one does is galvanizing. Are you telling me, “Yeah, I’m not so much into that”?

Patrick Lencioni
No, because galvanizing is the guy that comes back the next day and the next day and the next day, and says, “How come you’re not doing that? Come on, let’s go.” I like to inspire people once and then go on and go, “Okay, there’s more people that need to be inspired in other ways and I’ll move on to them.”

But coming back to the clients again the next day and the next day and reminding them and keeping them moving is not my thing. Now I’m not terrible at it, but the thing is, because I was doing it all the time, I got totally burnt out on something even that wasn’t a frustration. See, even our working competencies, which are the two in the middle, we’re not meant to do them all the time. And so I got burnt out on that.

So, okay, so those two in the middle are called activation. You ideate, Pete, then you need people to activate your ideas to make sure they’re on the right track and to get people excited. And then come the last two geniuses, and the next one is called enablement, the E.

And people with a gift of enablement, which neither you or I have at all, are the ones, they just love to come alongside other people and help them get it going. So, when somebody says, “I need help,” they impulsively, because they love doing it, they go, “Yeah, I’ll do it.” Like, they get joy and energy out of saying, “Yes, what do you need?”

And there are certain professions, like nurses, and we tend to say, “Well, they’re an angel.” Yeah, there is a wonderful virtue in that. But they also, if they’re built to do this, they just love when people say, “I need something,” and they go, “I want to be the one to say yes.”

And it’s not because they’re easily manipulatable or just nice, it’s because they really get fed. And there are certain customer service roles that people love, “Oh, yeah, I can do this every day, all day long.” There are certain flight attendants, when you call the flight attendant button, they come over and are like, “Yeah, what do you need?” They love responding and saying yes.

The last is the T, which is tenacity. And that is these are people that get joy and energy out of finishing things. They love the last part because they love to get things across the line. And they’re like, “Oh, I’m going to go to work today, and I have a whole bunch of things on my list, and I’m going to cross them off, and I’m going to hit my targets, and I’m going to just be so satisfied.”

And, Pete, I have none of this. And I’ve written 14 books. So people say, “Well, you must have tenacity. You finished all those books.” Yeah, but if I didn’t have a deadline and an editor and people making me finish, I would have 14 half-written books, because halfway through, I get distracted and I want to move on to the next idea. And I need somebody going, “Nope, get back in there and finish it, and finish it well.”

So, we all need one another. And if you’re going to be great at work, you know, how to be awesome at your job, if you want to be awesome at your job over a relatively long period of time, understand your Working Geniuses, try to make sure that your work lines up with those as much as possible, know what your working frustrations are, your last two, make sure your work does not depend on that.

So, Pete, I got the best job coming out of college in the country. There was a book written in 1987, the best jobs in America for college grads. And this woman from Fortune magazine wrote a book, and she said, “If you want to have the best job in America that pays well and gives you great experience, go to Bain & Company and be a management consultant.” So I applied for the job like every…

Pete Mockaitis
That was my first job out of college, too.

Patrick Lencioni
You worked at Bain also?

Pete Mockaitis
I did, yes.

Patrick Lencioni
Okay, so we know of some of the same people. I mean, you’re much younger than me. But I was miserable because I wanted to come up with new ideas and solve problems, and they wanted me to do exactly what they asked me to do and to finish it.

Now, you have more T than I do, so you could probably get through it, but it was exactly the wrong job for me. And for two years, I survived. How long were you there?

Pete Mockaitis
Three.

Patrick Lencioni
Three years. So, I survived for two years, and Meg Whitman was the partner on the case at the time, and she said to me, “Pat, you would be a great partner because you like to think about the strategic stuff, but you’re an analyst and you need to crank. You need to get things done and do details and specifics, and do exactly what we tell you to do. And when we tell you to do something, we don’t need you to say, ‘Hey, what about this?’ It’s like, no, just please execute. It’s about execution and implementation.”

And I didn’t know Working Genius at the time, but I appreciated what she told me. But I thought, “Why could I not push through and do that?” And I look back now, and had they offered me that job today, I would look at this, and I’d go, “Oh, man, I’m really honored that you offered me this job, but I’m never going to be great at it. I’m not going to enjoy it.”

Do you know what I did when I was there, Pete? This is going to be amazing, because you remember the crazy hours you worked at Bain. I would stay at night from 9:30 at night when I stopped working until 1:00 in the morning and write screenplays just to get myself through it, just to tap into my creative skills, because I’m a writer.

So after they would say, “Okay, it’s 9:30, you can go home now. We’ll see you in the morning,” I would often stay and work on my screenplays, and I realized now I just needed to feed my creative side. So knowing that, Bain should never hire an analyst that had my profile. I was not going to be awesome at my job there. I was not going to be awesome at my job there.

And, man, I just want every student to figure out what their Working Genius is so they don’t take a job that they’re not meant to be great at it, and then come out of there with no confidence and feeling like they should be ashamed of themselves. I struggled with that for years after I left Bain.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, yeah, I hear that, and that’s well said. And it really does a great job of demystifying, you know, because long hours, it’s interesting, sometimes long hours are a brutal slog that turned you into a burnt-out depressed mess. And other times, long hours are like, “This is one of the most thrilling seasons of my life.”

Patrick Lencioni
Oh, and burnout is not about you working too much. Some people can get burned out just because of the hours they’re working, but 98% of the time it’s not about the hours you’re working. It’s about the nature of the work you do.

And I can come home from work after a 12-hour day, and my wife can say, “Wow, you’re energized, aren’t you?” And I’m like, “Oh, it was a great day. I was inventing and discerning. I was using my I-D, and I was doing this.” I worked at a bank as a bank teller. Three hours into every day, I’d be staring at the clock, and I swear it was like moving backwards, like, “Hey, what’s going on?” It’s about the nature of work.

And so, when somebody is getting burned out at work, and they go, “Oh, just take some time off.” It’s like, “No, I’m just going to go golfing and be depressed about the fact that I’m going to have to go back and keep doing the thing I hate.”

When you find work that gives you joy and energy, it’s such a gift because you’re almost never going to burn out, and you’re going to go home at night to your family with more joy and energy for them, too.

But when you have a job that’s draining you, you know, I like to say that your two geniuses, Pete, are like pouring coffee into a Yeti Mug – I have a Yeti Mug thing around here – and screwing the lid on tight. It’ll hold its heat forever, right? You can get burnt after eight hours like, “Hey, why is this so hot?” because that’s your Working Genius.

Your next two, your working competencies, and for you that’s G and T, which lends themselves to Bain, that’s pouring coffee in a cup and putting a lid on it, like a paper cup like this. It’s going to stay warm for a while. Your working frustration is pouring coffee into this cup, but there’s a little hole in the bottom of it, and it drains out almost immediately. It robs you of joy and energy.

So, if you don’t know what your genius is, your competencies, and your frustrations are, you can’t possibly know about how to be awesome at work. Now here’s the thing, I love talking about this, you don’t need to change careers or even jobs to find a better fit for your geniuses. Sometimes you just need to go to your manager, and say, “Hey, I want you to look at my report.”

We had a guy, shortly after we introduced this, who had a performance review, and he said it was not going to be pleasant. He goes, “I’d had a bad year. So I go in there, and I sit down with my manager and my manager’s manager. And the night before I did it, I did Working Genius. And I looked at my Working Genius results, and I said, ‘Hey, you guys, could you look at this before we get started?’”

And they looked at his report, and they said, “Well, it’s no wonder you’ve had a terrible year. This is a horrible job for you, isn’t it?” And he goes, “Yeah.” And they go, “We have that other job in that department. You’d be perfect for that.”

And he goes, “I got promoted because all I did is I said, ‘Here’s who I am.’” And if you’re a halfway decent manager, you’re going to be like, “Well, why don’t you take that job? You’ll be great at that. And we’ll find somebody else who actually is good at this.”

We have to stop trying to prove that we’re going to be good at things that we’re not meant to be good at. So to be awesome at your job, find a job that you can be awesome at. And it probably already exists in the organization you’re in.

When I hire people, I design their work to fit their gifts rather than trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. And unless you’re working at a pencil factory where everybody’s doing the same thing, most organizations have different needs for different things.

And it’s crazy, Pete, because, like, I talk to pastors and priests and teachers, and two people with the same job can go about doing it differently based on who they are. Like, a teacher could say, “Well, I’m an E-T, I have a great lesson plan. I’m very organized. And when a parent needs help, I’m very responsive to them.”

Another one, you would be a W-I. Like, I come up with the most creative ideas for learning and they’re very innovative, but I need a teaching assistant who’s going to make sure that the papers get graded, and that the parents get responded to, and that we get the grades turned in on time. Two people can have the same job and go about it in totally different ways and be really fulfilled. But if they try to do that job in exactly the same way… No teacher is good at all of it. No CEO, no anything is good at all of it.” So design your work around what is needed.

And if I were to go back to my dad when I was a kid, and I felt guilty about not liking doing the lawn, I’d have probably said, “Hey, dad, I want to help you. Could I have some input into how I do this? Would it be okay if I came up with a new way to plant flowers or to do this? Can we involve some of my invention and discernment?”

And there’s a dang good chance he’d have said, “Sure. I just want you to come out here and help me.” But I thought, “No, I needed to do it exactly the way he told me.”

So, man, bring this to the people you work with, your colleagues, your manager. Bring it to the people you live with. It’ll change the way you talk and it’ll change the way they see you and you see yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
And now, when you say bring it, so practically, tactically speaking, how does one get those letters? We get the book, the six types of working genius, we go to a website, you’ve got a code. What’s the…?

Patrick Lencioni
Yes, before you read the book, go do the assessment. The book explains it in more detail, but you get so much out of it. So if you go to WorkingGenius.com, and when you check out, you type in awesome. These are in capital letters. I don’t know if it has to be capital letters. You might as well give it a shot. And you’ll get 20% off. That means when we designed this, that means it’s going to cost you $20 to do this.

And when you do it, read the report. It shows you the combination you have. There’s 15 different combinations. Like, you’re the creative dreamer. I’m the discriminating ideator. The E-T is the loyal finisher. You read those types, and you go, “Oh, this is totally me.” And really dive into that, and really ensure that it’s you. And then go share it with other people. This is a great thing.

Teams do it. Like, everybody on a team in a company does it. And they’ll look at the map. They can make a team map that shows what all their types are, and they can go, “Oh, we have nobody who’s good at that. No wonder that we struggle there.” Or, “We have a ton of people who are good at that. Maybe, the next person we hire, we might want to hire somebody that’s good at these other things, too.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, as we wrap up, I want to hear quickly about a few of your favorite things. Can you give us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Patrick Lencioni
I mean, most of them are from the Bible, okay? I love, “My burdens are light. Come follow me and I will give you rest.” I love, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” I love that. We compare ourselves to others and we just feel bad, so don’t do that. So that’s a favorite quote, too.

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

Patrick Lencioni
I love that one that says when somebody asks you to do a favor for them, you’ll do it. But if they try to pay you to do it, you’re less likely to do it because you’re thinking about it in economic terms.

And we tend to think, like, people have a, generally, good nature. And when you need help, realize it’s not an economic decision for most people, it’s a desire to help.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

Patrick Lencioni
I think my favorite book ever is a book called Brother Odd. O-D-D. It’s about this character named Odd Thomas who’s really interesting.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Patrick Lencioni
Every day, I wake up and I listen to the readings of the day from church, because I used think, “How can I do this?” And I listen to, you know, in the Catholic Church, there’s an Old Testament reading or a letter, and the Psalms and then the Gospel. And every day, I listen to those when I wake up and I start my day like that.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that has really seemed to connect and resonate with folks, a Pat quotation that seems to really have legs?

Patrick Lencioni
Yeah, that the most important things in life are simple but difficult. Complexity is not the answer. It’s, like, coming to terms, like, “Oh, what’s the simple solution to this that I don’t want to do because it’s hard?” And we need to avoid that, looking for that complex solution that’ll be easy, which doesn’t exist. So, life is simple but difficult.

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

Patrick Lencioni
My company is called The Table Group. And if you go to TableGroup.com, you can find out about all the other stuff we do around teamwork and leadership and meetings and consulting and all that kind of stuff. And then we do have a podcast called The Working Genius Podcast, and we do one called At the Table, which is just about work.

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

Patrick Lencioni
Yeah, be vulnerable, show people what you’re good at and what you’re not good at, and realize that that vulnerability will feel a little risky and good things happen through that.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Pat, this has been a pleasure. Thank you.

Patrick Lencioni
I hope we get together sometime, Pete, since we’re living in the same city now.

Mar 05
0

1134: Creating the Moments that Make Work Come Alive with Daniel Coyle

By | Podcasts | No Comments

Daniel Coyle shares how to infuse ordinary work moments with greater meaning, joy, and fulfillment.

You’ll Learn

  1. Why shared improvement beats self-improvement
  2. The three minute visualization that liberates tremendous clarity
  3. Why vulnerability comes before trust–not after

About Daniel

Daniel Coyle is the New York Times bestselling author of The Culture Code, which was named Best Business Book of the Year by Bloomberg, BookPal, and Business Insider. Coyle has served as an advisor to many high-performing organizations, including the Navy SEALs, Microsoft, Google, and the Cleveland Guardians. His other books include The Talent Code, The Secret Race, The Little Book of Talent, and Hardball: A Season in the Projects, which was made into a movie starring Keanu Reeves. 

Coyle was raised in Anchorage, Alaska, and now lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, during the school year and in Homer, Alaska, during the summer with his wife, Jenny, and their four children.

Resources Mentioned

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Daniel Coyle Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Daniel, welcome back!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Coyle
Yes, right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s walk through it.

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

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

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

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

Daniel Coyle
Yeah. I know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

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

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

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

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I have the same one!

Daniel Coyle
Come on, dude.

Pete Mockaitis
I got multiples.

Daniel Coyle
Check it out. That’s awesome.

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

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

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

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

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

Daniel Coyle
DanielCoyle.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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