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Oct 12
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356: Living Out the Wisdom of Napoleon Hill with Jeffrey Gitomer

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

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

You’ll Learn:

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

About Jeffrey

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

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Jeffrey Gitomer Interview Transcript

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

Jeffrey Gitomer
It is my pleasure.

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
How did that come about?

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

Pete Mockaitis
Three months. There you go.

Jeffrey Gitomer
I’m pretty booked.

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Totally.

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Gotcha. Well, thank you.

Jeffrey Gitomer
No problem.

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding!

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

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Right, yes.

Jeffrey Gitomer
Does it involve writing?

Pete Mockaitis
No.

Jeffrey Gitomer
Does it involve reading?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Sure, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Gotcha, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely, adding up.

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

Pete Mockaitis
Mathematically, yes, over 20 times then.

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

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

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

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

Jeffrey Gitomer
You can, but I will sue you.

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Luck or Pluck.

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

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, understood.

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
I thought you would.

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

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

Jeffrey Gitomer
That’s incredible. I love that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome, cool. Good to know.

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

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

Jeffrey Gitomer
Exactly.

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

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

Pete Mockaitis
Right on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeffrey Gitomer
My people will reach out to your people.

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

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

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

Jeffrey Gitomer
Pleasure for me.

Oct 10
0

355: Channeling Emotions Productively with Hitendra Wadhwa

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Hitendra Wadhwa says: "Great people take on great causes. In taking on great causes, they make great mistakes. Through mistakes, they generate a lot of learning."

Columbia Business School professor Hitendra Wadhwa defines inner mastery and shows how to achieve it.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The five pillars of inner mastery
  2. Key questions and framework for daily reflection
  3. Two strategies for redirecting your emotions positively

About Hitendra

Hitendra Wadhwa is Professor of Practice at Columbia Business School and founder of the Institute for Personal Leadership (IPL).  Hitendra graduated from the University of Delhi in mathematics and received his MBA and a PhD in Management from MIT.  He has received the 2015 Executive-MBA Commitment to Excellence Award, the 2012 Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence, and the 2008 Columbia Marketing Association Award for the Most Dynamic and Engaging Professor.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Hitendra Wadhwa Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Hitendra, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Hitendra Wadhwa
Thank you, Pete. It’s a pleasure to be with you and your audience.

Pete Mockaitis
Tell us, what’s your role at Columbia?

Hitendra Wadhwa
I have a responsibility as a professor of practice in the Business School to take our MBAs and executive audiences through journeys to prepare them for this world of dynamic change and uncertainty and fast pace that we live in today. I have created a class that I call Personal Leadership and Success. Over the last about 12 years that has been my research and my teaching.

Pete Mockaitis
Intriguing. Then you’ve also founded the Institute for Personal Leadership. What is the kind of core work or ethos over there?

Hitendra Wadhwa
Gandhi, he once said, he said “The difference between what we do and what we are capable of doing would be enough to solve most of the world’s problems.” My aspiration in building this class was to say hey, listen, we have these incredibly talented, very aspirational MBAs and the executives that come over to Columbia.

And in many ways they’re really aspirational and really talented about finding a way to master the universe, but what about finding a way to master your own self as a starting point …. There are theses in personal leadership both in my work at Columbia and then the Institute, is that there is so much more to our potential than we tap into on a normal day.

What if we were both able to for our own selves and for the individuals, and teams, and organizations, and community that we serve, if we were able to get all of us to our fullest potential, to be at our best in every moment, in every day, what kind of a team and organization and a product and impact, and life that you could build?

That’s really in a sense what we do at the Institute is take the research, take the teaching that I’ve been doing over the years at Columbia and put it out there for any individuals to be able to tap into through the content we created, through the digital learning journeys that we offer. Then also through organizations to help them support the individual, team, and organizational transformations that they might be engaged in.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, really cool. Now you talk a lot about inner mastery resulting in, later on, outer impact. Can you orient us a little bit to this concept?

Hitendra Wadhwa
Sure, sure. Outer impact means any role of the kinds of aspirations and hungers that we have from the outside. We want people to like us, to support us, to be open to being followed by us, to be inspired by us, to change their behavior based on what we’re saying and doing. As a result of that, to be able to launch products and manage teams and deliver great outcomes to the world and bring about positive change.

All of that is the outer stuff in life and leadership. The mainstream, the conventional view of how to do that, is that we have to define certain qualities or attributes of what makes for a great leadership on the outside to have that kind of an impact.

It could be something today around you have to be very adaptive as a leader. Once we evolve … based on what changes you’re seeing around you. But on the other hand, you also have to have grit. You have to have tenacity.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, stick with it.

Hitendra Wadhwa
Yeah, to stick with it. Yeah, exactly. Then you have to be very extroverted because there’s a very gregarious outer energy that you need in order to … and flourish in the world of people. But on the other hand, there’s Susan Cain and she’s telling us to … quiet, that there’s a lot of power to introversion, to the quiet kind of character of a leader, who seeks to be the thoughtful, quiet, empathetic listener in the room. And everything in between.

You want to be connected today in the world of social media and never eat lunch alone, but build your network, but on the other hand you also have to be very disconnected because you want to practice mindfulness and meditation and peace and be the reflective leader, not the one that’s just constantly in the fray of life and all that.

If you take all of these qualities, the reasons … try to convince me that we have to face up to the truth. The truth is that we are being asked today to be everything and the complete opposite. This is no way there is a simple winning path, a human achievable path to getting there.

Unless you do something like Einstein once said. He said that “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” In this case, to me, this obsession with outer behavior and outer speech, what we are saying and what we are doing, as a way to which we have outer impact limits us from recognizing that the greatest lever that we have, the greatest power and possibility that we have is to in fact cultivate what I call your inner core.

Your inner core is this stable, pure, intentional, purpose driven, wise part of yourself, your best self. All of us have caught glimpses of, some of us have more systematically cultivated. When you operate from that inner core, we are just able to in the moment operate on the basis of intention, not just instinct.

To be able to bring all the appropriate facts to bear rather than have biases and distortions that blind us. Be able to make decisions with a certain amount of thoughtfulness and freedom, rather than attachment and insecurity.

The idea behind inner mastery is not as much to in a sense retrofit some wisdom from the outside or some new skill from the outside, as it is to invite people to reflect on and deepen their connection with their best selves.

To continue over the course of their life to not merely be committed and obsessed with the outer impact, but also with the deepening of the immersive living and leading inner core, knowing that when they’re doing that, they are going to be able to operate and bring the best energy, the best consciousness, the best thinking, the best judgment on the outside. So inner mastery leading to outer impact.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, understood. Then it sounds like your advocating is not so much about internally trying to be more quiet or gregarious or changing your fundamental natural personality, so much as developing into your best self.

Hitendra Wadhwa
In fact, Pete, my hypothesis is that for many of us, there are more possibilities to our personality than what 20th century science has educated or confined us to. When you and I are talking about whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, it is true that the Myers-Briggs suggest to us that you can either be one of the other. It’s very popular too and has been used in organizations.

But I can also tell you this, most of that has been upended by some of the latest science, which suggests that people have the capacity to also be if you might call it ambiverts, where Daniel Pink talks about it in his book To Sell is Human.

There is all this research that suggests that – I remember when I took the Myers-Briggs when I was in McKinsey, I found a couple of dimensions quite intuitive and insightful, but I really rebelled against a couple of them. Thinking versus feeling, well wait a second. Why can’t I be both a thinker and a feeler?

Introvert versus extrovert, why can’t I be both? I feel I draw energy as much from outside when I’m with an audience and I’m engaged with them. Right now I’m drawing energy from this conversation with you. At the same time, I have periods where I love to draw energy from within me. There is an intro and an extrovert within me.

To that end, – I’ll just give you a great example of history. You take Abraham Lincoln. There’s a historian, he in his study of Lincoln, he said – he was a contemporary. He said “I went and spoke with a number of his colleagues and his friends.” He said, “I found that there were not two of them who spoke about Lincoln in the same way. It’s as though he revealed himself to different people in different ways.”

He said “Some said he was a very ambitious man and some said he had not an iota of ambition. Some said he was very cool and impassive and some said he was susceptible to the most intense of tempers.”

There is research, by the way, to show that when we are deeply infused with our purpose, with something we really care for, then when we have to act out a behavior in the service of that purpose, which is contrarian to our – if you want to call it our personality – we actually feel more authentic acting contrarian to our personality because we are acting in concert with our values in that moment, with our principles at that moment.

As a simple example. Let’s say if you really care about supporting your team after they’ve done six months of intensive product development work and launched this incredible product in your market. You might be an introvert, but in that moment, you are actually going to prepare and plan that celebration party for the launch of the product.

When you’re in there, you’re going to go and act out completely opposite your personality, very engaged, very connected, very joyous, very outwardly focused even though it’s against your personality. Not to say you want to do that, but here’s what the research says, you will feel more authentic doing that because you so deeply care about the aspiration of being there to celebrate that beautiful moment with your team.

Anyway, I just want to offer that up to you because the thesis I sort of want to propose to you and to your audience is that 20th century science, which is still what a lot of us operate with regard to the education system that we go through and what organizations also sometimes inform and guide us with their cultures – 20th century science was a lot about who we are. Today’s science, the 21st century science that is very vibrant and continuing to evolve, is actually telling us who we can be.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood. Okay, cool. Well, I guess there’s a lot in there. I guess I’d like to get your take when it comes to this inner mastery stuff. What are some of the key I guess sort of roadblocks or things that prevent us from achieving inner mastery and what are some of your top suggestions in terms of actions and disciplines and practices for getting there?

Hitendra Wadhwa
Yeah, that’s a great question. It is a journey. It’s not just a one-time sort of choice we make and then we’re just instantly and magically there. It’s a journey I’ve seen all great leaders in history kind of evolve and grow themselves along. It’s a journey that is a lifetime commitment. There’s no one point where I would offer it becomes perfect and complete.

We like to think in my work of inner mastery along five pillars. There’s purpose, which is about a lot of direction, alignment for your life as to where you’re headed. Stephen Covey used to call it “start with the end in mind.” What is that end that you have in mind feel like?

Then there’s wisdom, which is about emotional intelligence and your thinking, and your mindset and making sure these inner forces are very much harmonized in line with your purpose.

Then there’s love, which is about expanding the heart to seek to take joy in other people’s joy.

Then there is self-realization, which is to start seeing yourself more – not only through your words and actions or your feelings or your thoughts, but also from the spirit that you embody from within, the space of pure consciousness, tranquility, pure joy that great journeyers on this passage and path of life have been able to cultivate, so self-realization.

The last one is growth, which is around this continuous commitment to growth now.

In terms of what gets people derailed from inner mastery, one of the key problems is that we get so invested in our duties, in our responsibilities, in our well-intentioned desire to be of service to our friends, to our family, to our colleagues at work, to our organizations imperatives, to our communities that in that process we get, if you want to call it, spread thin, we get burnt out, we get stressed, we get to digress, digress from that part of us, which is really at the core.

One practice that I highly recommend as a way to stay more true to yourself, to your pursuit of your own … is daily introspection. Take 15 minutes of time every day and structure and organize an activity that takes you into a very soul-searching, quiet, honest, mirror that you can put on yourself.

It could be a form of thought providing. It could be a scoreboard that you create for yourself, where you’re checking in on yourself on a certain set of values of character traits or what have you. It could be just a single question that you ask yourself.

Winston Churchill, for example, he used to ask himself, he said, “I don’t go to sleep at night without challenging myself with the following question, which is ‘did I do something highly worthy today?’” I don’t mean just kind of puttering around and doing things. Did I do something highly worthy today?

Here’s a man who had incredible highs, being at the pinnacle of power, 10 Downing Street and Prime Minister of England at a very critical hour. But he also fell from grace from time to time. At those times when he was away from the madding crowds and thrown out of power, how did he act, what choices did he make, what behavior did he engage in?

This question about did I do something really worthy today – there is a story where his son once was on a train with him when he had been deposed from the Prime Minister’s office. He was out of power. His son asked him, he said, “Father, we’re on this train. We’re in California. We’re on vacation. Why are you going in a small cabin and sweating it out on this hot day and doing work right now?”

After a few hours Winston Churchill came out. He said, “Son, I can’t help it. I must do something truly worthy every day. What I’ve done right now is write a dispatch for this newspaper in England and I’m going to send it.”

Now this man when he was out of power, being defeated in the Prime Minister’s – the political election in 1950 when he was out—1945, sorry—when he was out of power. He ends up doing so much prolific writing over those next five years, that he ends up winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. Think about that pursuit of mastery when the chips are down.

So a daily introspection, a daily question that you ask yourself would be one strong suggestion. Then I do want to sort of just encourage that. Listen, we all fall from grace. We all can’t live up to our highest ideals and standards every day. But that should not discourage us.

Nelson Mandela was once asked by Opera Winfrey, she said, “Mr. Mandela, you’re so incredible. People have such admiration and awe of you. You are a living saint. How do you feel being like a saint?” He said, “I am not a saint unless you think of a saint as a sinner who never gives up.” I think that’s a great working definition for all of us to have.

There’s an article he wrote in his life and his leadership and his struggles and the mistakes he made and the growth he had to go through, and main lessons I reached from it was a great – great people take on great causes. In taking on great causes, they make great mistakes. Through those mistakes, they generate a lot of learning for themselves. They acknowledge their mistakes and they grow from it. That’s the growth that I think all of us can aspire to, not necessarily perfection overnight.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have any suggestions for other powerful questions that could be candidates for a daily reflection?

Hitendra Wadhwa
Well, if you and your audience are open to it I can share my own personal favorite.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure.

Hitendra Wadhwa
I think one of the greatest missed opportunities in life is to befriend death. We tend to operate in a world where we almost want to make death invisible.

I smile sometimes when I’m walking here in my neighborhood in the Upper West Side. There is a funeral home here. It is so discreetly architected from the outside in terms of its façade as to be completely nondescript. Yet, sometimes the garage door is open and I glance inside, I see a hearse that carries people over when they’ve passed over.

I feel a great sense of gratitude when I see that because it’s a reminder to me about the gift of every moment of life and the fact that I cannot take it for granted for myself or for others around me and that it can end at any time. My favorite question is to ask myself that if this is the way I keep living my life as I’m living it right now, then at the moment that I’ll be dying, as I look back at my life at that moment, will I be grateful and happy or will I have some sincere regrets?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great, thank you. Okay. Any other questions that pack a punch?

Hitendra Wadhwa
You’re definitely making me walk into my sort of magic box and take out whatever tools I can, which is great. I appreciate your service to your audience.

Well, Steve Jobs had a similar question. His question was that if today—and it’s a little bit more provocative—if today was my last day on earth and I kept doing the things I had been doing, would I be happy? He said “If many days pass by where the answer is no, no I wouldn’t be doing this if this was my last day on earth, then,” he says, “then something is wrong in my career and the life.” That was his question.

The last one I want to offer you is not a simple question, but it’s more just a framework. That framework is both Nelson Mandela used it and Benjamin Franklin, which is that they created a scorecard for themselves, a simple one sheet paper with a few qualities in it that they were seeking to really work on. Then they would ask themselves, did I live up to that standard, did I live up to that quality today.

In the case of Ben Franklin, he would give himself a black dot if he saw that he hadn’t lived up to that quality on a given day. He did that for each of his 13 virtues as he called them that he had for each day of the week.

In his autobiography that he wrote later on in his life he reflects – he says … – he says “I never really reached a point where I was able to clean up my act so well that I didn’t have a single black dot on those weekly grade sheets. But I do to my satisfaction note that over the course of many years that I tracked myself this way, the number of black dots had decreased.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s great. I admire – it takes a level of honesty and humility in the first place to acknowledge that it was a black dot day as opposed to squinting and justifying and rationalizing, “Well, I mean the circumstances were such that I had to engage in gluttony or else it would have been rude,” for example. I think that was one of his 13. I think it’s gluttony and sloth and chastity and assorted virtues there.

I think that would be the hard part for me is in terms of like, finding a way to convince myself that I did not deserve a black dot for my behavior after all during the course of this day because there was some extenuating reason.

Hitendra Wadhwa
Yeah, no, I’m with you. That’s very humble of you to operate that way. I’m sure you have a rich, reflective life, Pete, otherwise you wouldn’t even be doing this show.

Since you’re mentioning some of his virtues, perhaps you might even remember humility, one he added later upon some criticism that he received from a friend of his, who talked about how “You’re very respective, Benjamin, but you’re not very light.” To your point about some of the pitfalls, the other pitfall here is to make sure it’s the right scorecard.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Well, what I also get into some of your perspective when it comes to – when negative emotions pop up, you’ve got some thoughts with regard to how we can channel those into effective directions. How do we do that in those moments where you’re ticked off, you’re frustrated and annoyed, enraged, fill in the blank in terms of emotion you’d rather not experience. How do you channel those into better places?

Hitendra Wadhwa
Yeah, yeah. Let me share a story about Abraham Lincoln. He used to open – had moments like that where he was very triggered by things that were happening in the field at the time of the Civil War, very stressful time you can imagine for a leader like him. He wasn’t really in complete agreement or alignment with this general doing this thing here and this battle or that general doing that thing there.

He would write these letters to these generals, where we was extremely vociferous in his criticism to them. Some of these letters have been received by the generals and it’s in history as to what they were told and scolded by Lincoln for.

Then there are a lot of these letters that historians found after Lincoln’s passing in the Presidential desk in the White House, unsigned and unsent. They’re called Lincoln’s hot letters. You might be aware of them.

That’s one technique right there for us, which is to engage in this Lincolnesque kind of grace, which is to say, “You know what? I am angry right now. These are the thoughts that I am feeling right now and I am not going to act upon them because I don’t really trust myself right now in terms of my judgment. I’m not seeing things in the fullest and most nuanced of light as I should.”

Maybe in this case what might have happened is that at the time he wrote these letters – he wrote them, but he went to get his sleep, to cool down, hit the pause button, as I call it, and when he was cooler and calmer, he made a call. If he felt at that point that it would be constructive for him to express that criticism in just those words, he might have sent the letter off.

When he felt like, “You know, in the larger scheme of things, I want to keep this general motivated. I think there’s a different, better way to motivate them. I kind of want to let them know this but in a way that will still make them feel empowered and inspired and motivated to do the right things, so net-net I shouldn’t send this letter out in those cases ….”

A simple path for us is just to keep check on what is happening within us. Not just to focus on the conversation, not just to focus on the body language, but to focus on the inner storms that might be brewing.

If we feel that they’re beyond a certain level that we can trust our environment, to recognize that our first responsibility is not to act on the insight, but to in a sense, act on the inside, to calm some of these inner storms and to create a little bit of distance.

Whether it’s just asking for a bathroom break, whether it is just doing a little bit of deep breathing, whether it is stepping away and listening to soothing music, going talking to somebody that can distract you and put you in a happy place because that’s the kind of person they are, going for a brisk walk, sleeping over it. Any and all of these are mechanisms to which we allow in a sense our best self to be emerged rather than get consumed and act upon our inner demons.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so just taking a pause right there. There is one strategy. Any other approaches?

Hitendra Wadhwa
Well, I would offer another one which steps the game higher. This one would require some level of basic mastery that then allows us to play this more advanced game. Hit the pause button, couple other things we can do to just get to feel a sense of ownership over our state of inner awareness and mastery is a starting point.

But then what you can do is really lean into that emotion rather than seek to distance yourself from it or to express it in some sort of non-constructive way, to lean into and ask yourself “Yes, I’m anxious right now. Yes, I’m hurt right now. Yes, I’m angry right now. Now what am I going to do about it?” to in a sense, recapture agency over the situation, over the problem. Say, “I’m going to do something about it.”

I’ll give you an example. Have you heard of Buck, B-U-C-K?”

He is a cowboy. He’s a rancher out here in the US. He was the inspiration behind the book The Horse Whisperer and ultimately the movie that Robert Redford made called Horse Whisperer on which he was an advisor.

Actually, you and your audience might enjoy having him on the show. He’s a remarkable human being. There’s a movie, a documentary on him called Buck. I think you and your audience will both enjoy the documentary as well. Incredibly inspiring.

He when he was growing up – it’s all in the movie – so this is not information he hasn’t shared in public. But when he was growing up he had an alcoholic father. If I recall I think his mother was not there. I think she may have passed away early. He was, among other things, he was beaten up.

He was very good at the rodeo, so he was doing lassoing and things like that. His father would encourage him and his brother to go and do that, but then constantly berate them, beat them up, alcoholic, right? When he was in his teens he had to in a moment of desperation, escape from his home under all the duress and stress. He was raised in foster care.

Fast forward now to the time he’s an adult. He now says that “The pain that I went through at that time and when I reconnect with that pain, it motivates me to want to make sure that people around me and that I can serve do not feel ever that kind of pain, not just people, but even horses.”

There is perhaps traditionally, as I best understand, the way the ranching culture is working here in the US, horses have been trained under the assumption that the way they will obey is by punishing them if they don’t obey during the early formative training years. You inflict some kind of pain on them, driving something sharp into their body or etcetera, as a way to make them realize the value of obedience or the risk of disobedience and so they start obeying you.

His approach is one that is based on love. His approach is one that is based on creating a trusted bond between the master and the horse. He goes around the country, training ranches on how to take their horses, some of whom have been very disobedient, and make them very tame, make them start to really align and harmonize their actions and behavior with their ranchers.

Here he is, he is a horse whisperer. He gets these horses to do things that others have not been able to ever get done before. It’s all coming from this pain that he has experienced at some point in his life. Because he took agency over that pain and said, “I’m not going to ignore it. I’m not going to channel it in something futile and ineffective. I’m going to channel it into something heroic and beautiful.”

Pete Mockaitis
Got you, so that became a powerful motivation there in terms of this his sort of standard that – of how things ought to be and therefore he’s going to do all the efforts necessary associated with making that come to be. That’s cool.

I wonder then when it comes to anger, if you’re thinking about using that to channel into positive stuff. I guess in some ways it’s possible to be angry and then just do a lot of things because you’re angry. It’s like, “This cannot stand. I am taking action. I am going after this injustice.”

I wonder though how sustainable that is because, at least for me, that’s kind of exhausting as a fuel source, that sort of anger. From a hurt, I can see that being a little bit different in the sense of that is something that I know and I just I will not allow others to experience, whereas anger it’s sort of like – it can come up every time you think about the thing that should not be. Is there any sort of nuance in how you go about channeling anger?

Hitendra Wadhwa
That’s a great point. It’s funny because when I started studying some of these great leaders from history, which is one path through which I have sort of built up this whole teaching and work and growth and leadership, I’d assumed that these were incredibly peaceful collective tranquil people.

Yet, when you study their lives, I saw how for several of them, not necessarily all, but several of them a key source of energy for them was their – in a sense, their righteous anger against something that was deeply troubling about the social order of their day.

Whether it was Gandhi with his views on the huge loss that India was facing with British rule and the subjugation and the atrocities being committed against their less advantaged communities in society, Martin Luther King, of course, and civil liberties, Nelson Mandela, of course, with what he was doing, Mother Theresa and her work with the poor, etcetera.

Many of these people were deeply, deeply, deeply—if you want to call it—angry, but they had come to a place where they could lean into that anger and channel it.

The important thing I would offer you is that you cannot have the tail wag the dog. The tail is your emotion. The dog is the purpose or journey that you’re seeking to make in life and leadership.

For those of us who have not yet perhaps gained a certain level of mastery – let’s say mastery could be quantified from level 0 to level 100. If we are at step 34 and Gandhi is at a step 67, we shouldn’t seek to jump from 34 to 67. That would just not make sense.

In our case, if to your point, we have a certain experience that we want or a certain issue that we’re concerned with, were we to get as angry as he was getting, we might get burned by it to your point. We might get consumed by it.

In our case at step 34, it might make more sense to use some of the other tools of emotional mastery to create a little bit of distance and buffering from that emotional state because we can’t handle it. We don’t have the voltage in our light bulb to be able to handle that kind of power yet.

It might make more sense to stay within more confined bounds and to use more confined smaller sparks of anger to kind of get to a good place if that is a path we want to choose.

But as we grow in our capacities, we may be in a position to take on even more heroic causes and to take on even more purposeful, energized, disciplined journeys because we just built that machinery within us, both in our brain in terms of finding and fighting patterns of neurons and just physically and spiritually overall. Until then, to your point, we may want to just stay in more bounded space.

When we do have those intense bursts of any such emotional state, maybe our best mechanism there at step 34, which could be different from … step 67, our best mechanisms there, might be to do some deep breathing, might be to hit the pause button, might be to do some mindfulness, some meditation practice or something like that, just get ourselves into a safe place, into a place where the best in us can operate so that the tail, again, is not wagging the dog. But if the dog is strong enough, they can have a strong tail and still allow the dog to control the tail.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. Now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Hitendra Wadhwa
Mother Theresa, she once said, she said, “Not all of us can do great things, but we can all do small things with great love.”

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Hitendra Wadhwa
Yeah. This is not as much conventional kind of study as you’d expect, but one that I have huge regard and affection for anyway and I think would be of value to your audience.

Bonnie Ware is a palliative care nurse in Australia. She used to essentially look after people who were in the last several weeks and months of their life. They have this terminal illness in most cases and therefore were starting to plan their exit.

She would ask them this question, “What is your biggest regret in life?” The most common answer to that question is the finding from this research that I want to offer to you and to all of us. What do you think your audience might think is the most common regret of the dying?

Pete Mockaitis
They didn’t spend enough time with their family and friends.

Hitendra Wadhwa
Yeah. That’s very similar to what I hear from my students at Columbia as well. That certainly one of the regrets that she heard from time to time. The most common regret was that I … you get that I was not living a life true to myself. I was living it based on other people’s expectations.

I want to just encourage reflection on that by anyone who is listening here today because notice that that pitfall can arise as much in a personal life as a professional life. That pitfall is not about I should have been hanging out more with my family than my work.

What he’s actually saying is whether it is family or whether it is work, there is a risk that in our desire to conform, to love and be loved, to relate, to be recognized and rewarded, is it a risk that we might be letting the clock of time run out before we have truly lived—truly, truly lived.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite book?

Hitendra Wadhwa
If you’re open to it, I’d recommend two. For those who are drawn to really deeper kind of quests about the meaning of life, my favorite book is the same as the one and only book that Steve Jobs had on his iBooks which is Autobiography of a Yogi by Yogananda. For those who are interested a more sort of focused commentary on life and leadership today, my favorite book is Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite habit?

Hitendra Wadhwa
Meditation.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there a particular nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate and get quoted or attributed to you frequently?

Hitendra Wadhwa
The idea that all of us have within us a space of purity, purity of intent, purity of purpose, very wise and joyful and calm and balanced and secure space within us. I call that your inner core.

There is research today to show that if you go beyond the mountains and plains and rivers into the structure of the earth, you have the hot, molten lava, but beyond the hot molten lava you have a solid sphere of pure metal. We call that the earth’s inner core.

Metaphorically picking from that, beyond our outer senses, beyond the hot molten lava of our thoughts and emotions that might volcanically erupt from time to time, beyond all of that there is this space of pure consciousness within each of us. That’s your inner core and that’s the space through which when you get deeply anchored, you’re able to bring out and project and manifest your best.

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

Hitendra Wadhwa
Our website is simply PersonalLeadership.com. There are resources there in terms of articles I’ve written, videos that you can watch and executive programs online that you can take. I’m working on a book that I expect to get published next year. I certainly would be delighted and honored to have you look out for that as well.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool, thank you. Do you have a final challenge or call to action for those seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Hitendra Wadhwa
One technique that I learned from a colleague, Adam Byrant. I say colleague because he and I often have been teaching together. Adam was a columnist at the New York Times, where he wrote this column for many years called the Corner Office, in which he used to interview CEOs about their leadership journeys. He shared this anecdote from one of his – or there’s two from one of his interviews.

The CEO talks about how she said “I like to practice the MRI rule.” That’s what I want to offer to your audience as one thing to do at work or one challenge to take on at work.

The MRI rule is any time that you are disappointed, hurt, angry, reactive, impatient, about anything that somebody has done, the MRI rule tells you to apply to it the most respectful interpretation, which means before you start including the character or start assuming that the intentions are really poor or bad or etcetera, try to ask yourself are there any other ways to interpret what happened here.

What could be going on in their health? Could they be having a relationship challenge at home? Could they be having a really stressful day with regard to their boss or some other things that are happening? Could some budget have suddenly been cut off from them? Etcetera.

Since you don’t know everything, are there things that you don’t know that could be happening, that may allow for a deeper understanding of what they have just done or responded to. I found that sometimes it’s not even what is happening to them in the present, but what experiences they have gathered over the course of their life that you don’t know about.

When something is triggered from them in a certain way, rather than quickly judge them for it, seek to understand, seek to make the space to recognize that in the rich fabric of their lives, both past and present, there is a lot more that if you knew perhaps, you would get much more sympathetic and connected with them.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Hitendra, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks so much for sharing the goods. I wish you tons of luck with Personal Leadership and all you’re up to.

Hitendra Wadhwa
Well, I want to congratulate you for the excellent work that you’re doing. I’ve been deeply both inspired and impressed with the path you’re on. This is the modern, new sort of path you’re communicating, connecting and serving audiences like yours. Congratulations to you on that.

All the best to you and certainly to your audience as well. I’m grateful for this opportunity. Thank you and wish the best of success in life and leadership by operating from your inner core.

Oct 03
0

353: Optimizing Your Mood and Productivity through “Sonic Vitamins” with Lyz Cooper

By | Podcasts | No Comments

 

 

Lyz Cooper says: "The way we're driven by music... it's an ancient, primal thing."

Founder of the British Academy of Sound Therapy Lyz Cooper explains how different sounds—or sonic vitamins—can help you relax, get energized, and/or enter a flow state.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The types of music that energize and soothe
  2. Why it’s good to break up focused work with sound breaks
  3. How to manipulate sound to get into the zone

About Lyz

Award-winning entrepreneur and author Lyz Cooper has been working in the holistic health field for 33 years and with therapeutic sound since 1994. She has developed a range of techniques which have been shown to help improve health and well-being using therapeutic sound and music and is considered to be one of the thought leaders in the field of therapeutic sound today.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Lyz Cooper Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Lyz, thanks so much for joining me here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Lyz Cooper
Well thank you very much for having me, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, one fun thing I learned about you is that you keep not only chickens, but a rare breed of fluffy chickens. What’s the story here?

Lyz Cooper
Well, yes. To be honest, I didn’t actually know this about them before I chose them. I just loved the look of them. I decided I wanted to keep some pets at home. They are really just pets. They’re not chickens that we keep for the eggs because we eat a lot of eggs, but it’s because I just wanted to have some companions.

I just fell in love with these fluffy chickens when I was – I went to the chicken breeder. Then I found out about them later and that they were apparently discovered by Marco Polo on his adventures in China. They have black bones and blue skin.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding.

Lyz Cooper
Yeah. They’re fluffy. They don’t – obviously it’s feathers, but it looks like fluff. They’re called Silkies. They’re very sweet. They’re very good – they don’t lay very big eggs. They’re only little bantam chickens. But they’re very, very sweet natured. They’re very funny.

When they all strike up a chorus of clucking, which they do several times a day – they like to celebrate when one of them’s laid an egg – they all get together in this chorus of clucking, which always makes me laugh. If I’ve had a heavy day at work or I’m in the middle of a very heady project or something, they’ll always bring some sonic sunshine to my day.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great fun. Thank you. It’s funny we’re about to talk about—you founded the British Academy of Sound Therapy. Who would have thought that the fluffy chickens would be a form of sound therapy for you? But there they are. What is this organization all about?

Lyz Cooper
Well, the British Academy of Sound Therapy was an organization that I founded back in the year 2000 actually, right on the millennium.  It was a combination of many years of looking into therapeutic sound. I got very ill in the early ‘90s. I was in a very sort of high-pressured job in advertising. I burnt out. I got very sick. I had chronic fatigue syndrome and so on.

I started listening to music and therapeutic sound. What I mean by that is tonal, sort of ancient music if you like, which focuses a lot on tone, which I’m sure we’ll get to talk about a bit later. Basically I couldn’t believe how much better I felt after I had listened to this music. I set about traveling the world and finding out how many indigenous people used sound of music for healing.

After many years of research, I then decided that I’d developed some techniques and I wanted to actually teach those to others, so the British Academy of Sound Therapy was formed.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. That’s cool. I do want to talk about tone and the impact music has on us in terms of health as an organism and particularly in the sort of mood or state and how it relates to productivity and being awesome at your job.

The way I discovered you was a variety of articles talking about the most relaxing song in the world. I thought whoa, that is fascinating. It wasn’t hype. There are actually studies in which they’ve pitted this song against others and it sort of came out on top, smoking Enya and then all the others that you might associate with supreme relaxation in a song with biochemical or maybe clinical I should say heart rate-type indicators.

I thought that was an amazing story. I won’t steal your thunder. Can you tell us how did the song Weightless by Marconi Union come about and what was your role in making it come to life?

Lyz Cooper
I was contacted by an advertising agency that was doing some work for Radox Spa. I don’t know that you have Radox there, but they’re a bath product company. They said that they were doing a campaign, which was all about creating the most relaxing environment in the home, so when you put your bubbles in your bath, you put on some lovely music and you can just drift away.

We had a very interesting meeting. They said that they would like to have a professional sound therapist consult and work in collaboration with Marconi Union, which we did.

I have something which I call my sonic vitamins, because of the way the brain has evolved over millions of years, we respond to different sounds in different ways. There’s a lot more research now that’s being done about this.

But basically that’s one of the things I do is compose music, which I call consciously designed music. It’s designed specifically to work on different areas of the mind, body, and emotions.

We worked, Marconi Union and I, worked together. I put the sonic vitamins into the piece and sort of – it’s a little bit like crafting clay in a way. If you imagine a piece of clay on a potter’s wheel, Marconi Union provided the music and then I shaped it into the Weightless, which was basically by saying, okay, well, we need to do this here and we need to put that in there. We need to have a heartbeat that slows down as we go throughout the piece.

It was tested, as you quite rightly said, against the other tracks and found to be a lot more relaxing. In fact, everybody was surprised at the results of the data.

Whenever I went – because the media got hold of it – and whenever I was invited to go on BBC radio or any international radio stations, they had to give a warning before they played it to say, “If you’re driving your car or operating heavy machinery, sort of pull over now or step away from what you’re doing.” I think to be honest, just for a minute’s clip, it wouldn’t have done anything, but certainly if you hear the whole piece, it will lull you into this lovely relaxed state.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s just great for publicity and brand and impact. It’s like I’ve heard there have been some legendary copywriting pieces associated with this “Warning: this may not be safe because it’s so intensely effective,” which is like “Whoa, you got my attention. Now I’m really intrigued. What’s this all about?” That’s pretty cool. I think that probably contributed to the success of it.

These sonic vitamins, as you say, what are some of the elements or ingredients that we might think about when it comes to the music we select and the impact that it has? You mentioned tone, you mentioned a couple particular things that you wove into the song Weightless, what are kind of some of the “if this, then that” cause and effect sound and body mood reactions that we can count on?

Lyz Cooper
Well, I call it sonic caffeine and sonic hot chocolate. There’s two sort of very simple ways that you can energize or relax yourself using tone or pieces of music and those sonic vitamins.

For example, I mentioned earlier that the brain has evolved over millennia to respond to certain sounds in certain ways. A lot of these are based on nature sounds really. For example, an animal call, a high-itched animal alarm call or will—or a shriek, a human shriek—will actually stimulate the release of adrenaline in the system. That’s exactly why our alarms, the alarm that may get you up in the morning or a car alarm is going to be a very high-pitched, sudden sound.

But it’s based on the fact that we need it to survive, so we needed to be able to one, hear these signals, these sounds over long distances, and two, be able to react to them very quickly. Any piece of music which has a high pitch or even if it’s an ascending pitch, so a fast ascending pitch, will be stimulating.

My sonic caffeine is to put on any piece of music, which has fairly high pitches in it or one of the things that I’m often found doing just before a meeting if I need to use the grey matter, is to actually sing a tone in a high pitch for a minute or two just to get the brain cells going. If you’re about to go into a meeting or an exam, it’s really good. A few minutes, you’ll be buzzing.

Pete Mockaitis
When you say you sing the tone in a high pitch, is it just constant or could you give us a demonstration?

Lyz Cooper
Oh goodness. You got me now. Basically – actually, we could do this together, Pete. Are you up for it?

Pete Mockaitis
All right, let’s do it.

Lyz Cooper
If you pop your hand on your head right now and if you would just to say eee, like an e sound.

Pete Mockaitis
Eee.

Lyz Cooper
Okay, can you feel your hand buzzing?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, I can.

Lyz Cooper
Okay, if you’ll go ahh. Can you feel the difference?

Pete Mockaitis
Ahh, huh, it’s different but I don’t know how to say it. They’re both vibrating, but they’re vibrating differently.

Lyz Cooper
Yeah, the eee sound will vibrate your head more than the ahh sound. That’s because the way that the mouth and the tongue are placed when you sing – when you make that sound, actually literally stimulates that head.

That massage that you’re giving yourself coupled with the high sound actually helps to improve concentration. I’ll just do a demonstration. We didn’t use a very high-pitched note there. But so for example I will go eee. I’ll continue that for as long as I can in one breath. I’ll do that maybe for about a minute. That will really get you buzzing.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding. That’s cool. I’m thinking that’s pretty cool that I sort of put this money into renovating the enclosed porch that’s my office with the sound proofing, so that others can’t hear as well.

I guess it might be a little trickier – is there a particular volume that you need to be at in order to be effective because I’m thinking folks are saying, “I can’t do this in my office. That’s nuts.” Maybe there’s a little room sort of like phone booth style, mini conference rooms that can be traded into. But is there a minimum threshold of volume to make it count?

Lyz Cooper
Not really. I mean obviously it’s got to be fairly audible. You couldn’t really do a silent – you couldn’t really do it without the sound. But why not get everybody in the boardroom doing it? How much fun would that be?

Pete Mockaitis
You know of all the things that motivational speakers have made me do, this is not the weirdest and it’s got some science behind it, so I can see that working in certain contexts. Sure. Cool.

That eee, one approach is that you’re singing that. Then alternatively, you could be listening to that sort of thing, the high-pitched sudden sound or fast ascending pitches, are providing that kind of adrenaline stimulus. Could you maybe give us some examples of popular tracks or songs that include some of these features?

Lyz Cooper
Yeah, a really good – any sort of dance music that has that ascending pitch and tempo is really important as well. It’s not just the pitch of the sound, it’s also the beat. You want to be looking at around about 120 beats per minute, which is about twice the resting heart rate.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so if it were like 180, that’s just like you can have too much of a good thing, but—

Lyz Cooper
Well you could – I think there’s always too much of a good thing, but I think that you can overdo it, but I don’t think – you’re not going to explode or anything. But, so it’s not dangerous.

But there’s a reason why modern dance music is so – really gets you going. It’s very hard not to sort of bob your head or tap or stamp your feet to a piece of rousing music. Anything that gets you going in terms of gets you moving, stimulates you, is a good track to use.

One of the tracks that I use when I’m training my students is Locked Out of Heaven by Bruno Mars. I don’t know whether you know that particular track, but it’s a really – it has – it rises and falls, so it encourages something called expectation. It’s like a little kind of massage for the senses.

If you ever need to wake up or stimulate your brain, anything that is like that where there is a pitch that rises up and up and up and up and then it might fall down, the pitch might fall down again, is good. I would say any dance music really will certainly do the trick.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny, as you mention that, I’m thinking now I was at a wedding recently, shout out to Lawrence and Katie Joy, congratulations guys. They – the playlist was superb in terms of they just picked things that got people going.

One song that kind of surprised me, because you don’t hear it on a lot of wedding playlists in my experience was by Celine Dion, I Drove All Night. I’m thinking, we’ve got that. We’ve got that up tempo and then even – I’m not going to sing it well, but “I drove all night,” right. She’s going high and kind of varying it a little bit there. Sure enough, even though this isn’t a super popular song these days as far as I’ve observed, it really did get the people going.

Lyz Cooper
Exactly. Exactly. That’s what – okay, it’s a different kind of thrill. Earlier when I used the example of car alarms and fire alarms to get the adrenaline going, it’s a different sort of thrill, but it’s still going to get – it’s going to arouse the system. It’s certainly not my sonic hot chocolate, which is completely the opposite, where we’re actually lulling the system into a more relaxed state.

Pete Mockaitis
I want to talk about that in a second. Any other sort of top recommendations? Locked Out of Heaven by Bruno Mars is one of them that’s doing it well. Anything else that is just killer when it comes to the stimulation?

Lyz Cooper
Oh goodness, you’ve got me now. Let me think. Now, what would I use? I tend to use – what was that one guy. There’s one by Prodigy actually, which is not everybody’s cup of tea, but it’s called Breathe.

Pete Mockaitis
Are you kidding me?

Lyz Cooper
Yes.

Pete Mockaitis
What are the odds – here’s a crazy story. I thought you might say that because I think it’s the only song I can identify. I actually know Prodigy because when I was in college I did a modern dance class, which was kind of random, but filling out the credit hours to keep my scholarship. That was the song that we did in our final performance.

It’s funny I couldn’t put my finger on it, but just something about that song just kind of made me feel something. I was like, yeah. What are the ingredients there? I can’t – I think of that as being more kind of like percussion/bass-y in terms of what’s distinct about that one.

Lyz Cooper
It is. Now that’s an interesting one because you’ve got the bass that comes in very strongly, so you’re feeling that in the body, but you’ve also got this very high, it almost sounds like a whip crack sound, that goes on throughout the piece. It’s like a little hook.

Whilst you’ve got the bass that drives the body, so it’s very physical, the beat is actually quite fast as well. Then you’ve got this high-pitched sort of whip cracking sound that goes throughout the piece that’s very exciting to the system. Yeah.

But the thing is one of the things that I find really fascinating is whilst there is a rule of thumb – we know in music psychology and so on that there are general rules of thumb, there’s always going to be people that find their own pieces of music that are quite different.

Because of the way we’re programmed, we will respond to high-pitched sounds in a very – be aroused by them. Somebody might have a particular track they like which is quite deep in tone, but because of the association that they have with that piece, then it has the effect of actually stimulating if you see what I mean.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. Like certain memories and such.

Lyz Cooper
That’s it. You can’t – this isn’t sort of something that is – it’s not mind-controlling or overriding if you know what I mean. It’s just based on the natural way our brains evolved. But you’ve also got to factor in your childhood you went to parties a lot and they played a particular track and everybody got up and danced around like mad things, but it wasn’t particularly high, it would probably still get you high as you liked.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. I’m wondering now – we had a previous guest, Dan McGinn, who wrote a book called Psyched Up. He was talking about sort of performance rituals and stuff or pre-performance rituals. He said when it comes to music, one of the most cited songs for the pump up is Eye of the Tiger from the Rocky theme.

Have you observed that in your research or do you think there’s anything sort of special about this tune that seems to do it or is it mostly just about associations, people love the Rocky movie and there it is?

Lyz Cooper
I think that’s a really good example. I haven’t used that particular piece in my research, but it’s still fairly high pitched—

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. Possible.

Lyz Cooper
—for a man to sing. Exactly. And of course you’ve got that iconic scene in the Rocky movie, so anybody that’s seen that movie is immediately going to be there I think in their minds. So yeah, it’s fascinating, isn’t it, the sort of – the way we’re driven by music. It’s very – it’s an ancient primal thing.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Let’s talk about the hot chocolate here. If we’re, I guess, feeling anxious, overwhelmed, stressed, what are some of the key ingredients and examples of things that are soothing?

Lyz Cooper
Sonic hot chocolate is perfect for, as you quite rightly said, just calming the system down. It’s – I always think about – when I think about sonic hot chocolate, Tibetan monks sitting somewhere on a mountain in a temple singing Om.

If you think about that, you very rarely ever hear them singing Om. You’re not going to hear a high pitch. You’re going to hear a beautiful, low Om, this beautiful kind of silky sound that sort of cuddles you. That is because low tones relax the system. If there’s low and slow, so fast and high to stimulate, low and slow to relax. If you’re thinking about um, nice, sort of slow tempo tracks, anything that’s more tonal rather than rhythmic is also good.

Pete Mockaitis
Can you define that tonal rather than rhythmic? With rhythmic I’m thinking beats, drums, percussion.

Lyz Cooper
That’s it.

Pete Mockaitis
Tonal you just mean not that.

Lyz Cooper
Yeah, so more tonal than – when I – I think something that doesn’t have a driving rhythm. It’s a slightly more abstract rhythm-based or slightly more sort of swingy rather than boom, boom, boom. Your body is going to be driven by – you’re going to be held in a less relaxed state if you’re being driven by a very rhythmic piece.

So that’s where you’re sort of more Enya type pieces come in. They’re more drifty. They’re slightly more ethereal in nature. But it could even just be slow songs. Mrs. Jones, Me and Mrs. Jones, for example is that kind of thing if you want some nice gentle soul music.

Or even sound if you really want to – some people find sort of therapeutic sound tracks slightly boring to the ears, you know. So if you’re looking at just Himalayan bowls or monks chanting. I think it’s a lot more popular now than it certainly was when I started working in sound therapy. But some people find that difficult to listen to over periods of time.

Again, I would say just put a playlist together that really suits your palate, but bearing in mind … low, and long tonal sounds that don’t have a driving rhythm.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. For examples there we mentioned Enya. Now I’m thinking about – so monks chanting. I’ve got a couple monks chanting Latin tunes or – that’s fun. What else would you recommend in this category?

Lyz Cooper
Like I say, it depends on taste. If you were into sort of gentle Indian music, Asian music playing, maybe some gentle – something again, abstract and not too rhythmic in nature.

I’ve got a track actually, which you’re very welcome to tell your listeners about if they’re interested. It’s a brand new track that I’m working on right now, which is part of a consciously designed music program I’m working on called Life Sonics. I can give you the website if people want to download an example of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh sure, thanks. Yeah.

Lyz Cooper
Yeah? It’s www.LifeSonics.com. When you get onto that page, you’ll be given the – you can just click on and download the track. It’s actually a part of the piece called Cosmic. It has been designed specifically for relaxation. It’s kind of taking Weightless a step further because obviously Weightless was a collaboration between myself and Marconi Union. This is my own composition. I’d love to hear what people think of it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh cool. Thank you. That’s good. Well so now I’m thinking – all right, we’ve talked a bit about when you want to pump up the energy or bring down the energy. I’m wondering now just about being in a pleasant mood. If you’re just kind of in a funk, it’s not like I’m tired. It’s not like I’m stressed, but it’s just like “Eh, this all sucks.” Just a little grumpy funk. What’s sort of the musical prescription for that situation?

Lyz Cooper
Okay, there’s again, two ways of approaching this. One way, something that I would do is one, think about association because we spoke a little bit about Rocky and association, so first of all think about all the good times that you’ve had and what music that you might use that draws on those good times because psychologically it’s good to have those memories.

Now if I was working with a client and I didn’t actually have that experience to draw on, then I might prescribe a piece of music that is quite lyrical in nature. Something that rises and falls in a – for example, you couldn’t get much better than Happy by Pharrell. I mean that is just the perfect thing.

Even if you take the lyrics away, which are kind of telling you to be happy really, but just the way that music is. You’ve got a really nice happy, skippy, trippy beat. It’s fairly high, but not high that it’s too sort of shrieky. It’s light. Anything that’s light and lyrical sounding is perfect for uplifting.

Pete Mockaitis
When you say lyrical, you mean it has words or what exactly does lyrical mean here?

Lyz Cooper
Lyrical musically can be literally lyrics, so the lyrics that are uplifting, that have a meaning to you. But also lyrical in the musical sense is almost like – the actual sort of quintessential definition of lyrical music would be Irish music for example. You’ve got that kind of da, da, da, diddly dee, de, diddly, diddly, de, kind of skippy, I’m skipping through the tulips and my day is lovely and everything is wonderful kind of music.

But some people are going to find that – again, you’ve got to bring your taste into it. I’m not suggesting that everybody listens to Irish music, unless you love it. But find that lyrical nature, the skippy nature within the sort of genre of music that you like particularly.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s nice. Can you speak to maybe another example or two beyond Happy and some of these Irish pieces?

Lyz Cooper
Goodness, let me think. I’m trying to think about what I might use for skipping. I might need a bit more time on that one to be honest, Pete. I’d love to have got some playlists together for you.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh sure. Hey, if you come up with them after the fact, we will totally link them with eager delight, so that would be appreciated.

Lyz Cooper
Yeah, is that okay.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, very much. Thank you. Yeah, what a treat.

Lyz Cooper
Yeah, well, I’ll put a couple together and think about it. I probably need a couple of minutes to reflect on the best more so contemporary pieces that people might know. But yeah, I’ll whiz you an email.

Pete Mockaitis
Great, thank you. Any thoughts when it comes to these assertions that hey, Mozart or whatever or classical music will make you smart? What’s that about and how can we use that to our advantage?

Lyz Cooper
Well, there has been a fair bit of research on the so-called Mozart effect. That research has actually been – maybe criticized is a strong word – I think all research is always up for scrutiny. But there is no evidence really, I think robust evidence, that classical music is necessarily going to make you smart. In fact, the best way to exercise your brain is actually to improvise.

Pete Mockaitis
You mean like scooby doo, bop, bop, like jazz improve? Like what do you mean?

Lyz Cooper
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh wow.

Lyz Cooper
Any kind of –

Pete Mockaitis
Because those people look dumb when they do it. No offense jazz musicians. We’re just teasing.

Lyz Cooper
When I studied music psychology, they actually drew – fairly often drew on jazz as an example because obviously jazz is the thing we think about when we think of improvisation.

But there’s been a fair amount of research where they’ve wired jazz musicians to EEG machines and it’s actually – you do, you use a lot of high complex processing in the brain, very wide processing in the brain when you improvise.

But it doesn’t have to be jazz. It can be – yeah, just scatting around your kitchen, shoo be doing everywhere. Or get together with a group of friends and if you play an instrument, get together and play. That will exercise more of your brain.

In fact, there’s a – talking of making you smarter – there are – Oliver Sacks actually was quoted saying that music is more widely distributed in the brain than any other activity we do.

A lot of research has been done with FMRI scans where they’ve put people, musicians and non-musicians into FMRI and asked them either to actually play an instrument or to visualize playing an instrument. It doesn’t even matter if you’re not actually playing the instrument, which is amazing, if you can just visualize playing.

They put keyboard players into the FMRI and there was very little difference in the areas of the brain that lit up when they were playing or just imagining that they were playing. But what they found is that there is so much of the brain that’s actually involved when somebody was playing an instrument that it was a really good workout for the brain.

It accounts for why people or explains why people who are even in the later stages of dementia, if they’ve played an instrument, they can still remember how to play it. That’s because there’s enough information stored in lots of little pockets of the brain to enable them to remember how to piece together how to play that instrument or perhaps remember a track from 50 years ago and yet not be able to remember the faces of their loved ones.

I would say improvise, play an instrument, imagine you’re playing an instrument and you’ll stay clever.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. Speaking of staying clever, I would love to get your take on what’s some good music to listen to at work if you’re about to hunker down for a good hour/hour and a half focused crank out some smart work with your computer time. What would you recommend for the background musical ambiance in this context?

Lyz Cooper
Well, what I would recommend is actually a brain break. I noticed that there was an article that you sent me actually from a piece that was done by Jabra or on behalf of Jabra. I was in conversation with them a couple of years ago. We were looking at doing a piece based on productivity at work.

Basically the ideal cycle is about 90 minutes of productivity and about 10 to 20 minutes of brain break time. It’s almost like a screensaver for your brain. Rather than listening to music while you’re working, which of course you can do. A lot of people do, but I would have a timer set, if you’ve got a smart watch or whatever or a phone for 90 minutes.

Then after that 90 minutes is actually plug in something like the LifeSonic’s track or a relaxation track that’s designed to take you into a brain cycle mode. Weightless, for example, was written for that purpose. That is going to enable your brain to go into a kind of – almost like a refreshing mode. That will prevent burnout and it will prevent brain fatigue.

That’s more essential than actually playing – then trying to push through it if you like, by playing music that’s going to keep you going.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. Using that music for relaxation for the brain break is a great move. I guess I’m thinking not so much about pushing through it or going longer, but it’s like if we are going to do 60 or 90 minutes of continuous work and you’d like something to help you, is there any kind of music that will help facilitate that flow state in terms of “All right, I’m in the groove. I’m just moving along. I’m not going to get caught up in email or a distraction or whatever.” Is there any kind of musical ingredients that can aid in making that happen?

Lyz Cooper
Do you mean sort of focused concentration or what – is it more about not being distracted from something else or what’s—?

Pete Mockaitis
I’m thinking focused concentration like in my dream world, and maybe I’m asking too much, but it’s like those moments in which you sit down to do some work and wow, it just poured out of your mind and fingertips into the keyboard and you are so impressed with how effortlessly you were able to produce this writing or document or PowerPoint deck or creative output from – because you were just in a real nice groove of kind of flow and making it happen.

I guess part of it has to do with not getting distracted by other things. It’s also I think kind of being in that place where you’re neither over stimulated and worried and anxious and freaking out about it and also neither under stimulated in terms of “I’m kind of sleepy, groggy, and bored.”

Lyz Cooper
This is interesting, isn’t it, because I think that there’s a couple of things here which I think is really important also coming to mind is the importance for silence. One of the things I’m often saying to my students is that silence is also really important. It’s something we very rarely allow ourselves the luxury of real silence. Some people find actually certain types of music quite distracting.

You can get noise cancelling headphones, for example, which if you find music distracting or music takes you away from flow, is you might want to try some silence.

Now, however, some people find that certain music helps with their concentration and gets them into a flow state. There is actually something called flow theory, which is where, as you quite rightly said, the brain just goes – you go into this almost no time zone. You’re just kind of off and the creativity is flowing. This is something that we work with at the British Academy of Sound Therapy. We also incorporate silence into it as well. It’s sound and silence.

What we do is we use the tonal sounds or if people don’t like tonal sounds, very ambient music. Again, it’s just in the background, but you’ll need to play with the volume so that it’s not too invasive. It will start to, after a while, it starts to put you into – it’s almost an altered state of consciousness, but it’s different from zoning out completely. You’re in a very – in that flow state.

But we also stop for a while when we’re playing. We’ll stop at the end of maybe a five- or a ten-minute sequence and it will just fade into silence and then the music comes back up gently out of that silence. It’s not pervading, it’s not invading your consciousness, but just allowing you to stay in that flow.

That might be something that people want to actually try is having some very sort of ambient background music and just to then feel when it’s at the right volume for them and just allow it to play almost in the background, almost imperceptibly. But also to try silence.

Pete Mockaitis
How can we access this ambient or tonal stuff that strategically comes in and out? Where do we find that?

Lyz Cooper
I can actually give you a sound bath recording if that would help.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, thank you. Yes, thank you.

Lyz Cooper
That is actually something that we’ve got at the Academy. I can – do I email that over to you as an mp3 or-?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh sure, yes, or we can link it on the show notes and that will be great. Thank you.

Lyz Cooper
No, you’ve very welcome. Again, I’d love to hear what people think of it. It’s going to be – it’s pure sound therapy. There’s not much music in this particular example. But it will give people a feel for that actual process of going into that flow state.

I think that some people can go fairly deep with that. It’s a little bit like Weightless. Some people have said to me that they go very deep almost into a deep meditation with it. Again, it’s one of those things that if you are – I wouldn’t particularly listen to it while you were driving or something like that. It really is for when you’re grounded and not out and about.

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

Lyz Cooper
Goodness, what else? Obviously people will be directed to the website. I’ve got a book called What is Sound Healing, which talks a little bit more about the science behind therapeutic sound. There’s lots of sort of little tips and things and things that people can try at home as well to bring some sound into their lives.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. All right, well now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Lyz Cooper
My favorite quote is, “The universe is cosmic music resonating throughout hyperspace.”

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you.

Lyz Cooper
It’s actually by a quantum physicist called Michio Kaku. It was relating to string theory, but it was the opening quote for his book and it really inspired me, the thought of these strings of energy that are sort of almost like cosmic music, just stretching through space.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Lyz Cooper
My favorite bit of research or study, goodness. I’m going to give myself a bit of a pat on the back there.

My favorite bit of research at the moment is one that I’m very excited about that’s looking at sound induced altered states of consciousness. It is basically a piece that we’ve been doing in conjunction with the University of Roehampton. It’s using a specific therapeutic sound program to help to take people into a very deep meditative state.

I remember, I actually went to my local university, University of Portsmouth, when I was crunching the data. We were putting the algorithms into the computer. I needed help with doing it. Out the first sort of result came. It sort of spat it out and said – the number was statistically significant. I thought okay, right. The next one statistically significant and so on and so on.

We actually got to the point where we thought perhaps we’d put the wrong algorithm into the computer, but we checked and it was – we had so much statistical significance with it. Not being a great statistician – there’s a word that’s difficult to say half past eight at night – that I said to the doctor who was helping me, I said, “What does this mean?” He said, “Go home and crack open a bottle of champagne.” I was completely blown away.

That particular piece has taken me to international conferences around the world talking about my work. It has sort of far-reaching implications when it comes to taking therapeutic sound into the mainstream, so using it in hospitals and sort of mainstream healthcare settings. Yeah, that’s the first – that was just an amazing moment for me really. I hope I’m allowed to give myself a pat on the back.

Pete Mockaitis
Sure thing. What is the title of the article? We’ll link to the full text journal citation.

Lyz Cooper
It is called Sound Affects.

Pete Mockaitis
Clever.

Lyz Cooper
I can give you the link actually. I’ll email you that. People can have a look at it.

Pete Mockaitis
All right, thank you. How about a favorite book?

Lyz Cooper
My favorite book, one I’m reading at the moment is called Maps of Meaning. It is how – it’s basically how the strength of human belief throughout the years and how belief has literally led us well, through times of enlightenment, but also times of great difficulty. One of the sort of the elements of the work that I do is also to help people to reframe life-limiting beliefs in a more positive way through music.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful, thank you. How about a favorite tool?

Lyz Cooper
A favorite tool? Goodness, do you mean like a hammer or a chisel?

Pete Mockaitis
Could be, if that’s one of your favorites. It could be an intellectual tool as well.

Lyz Cooper
Okay. Goodness. Let me think. At the moment I’m having both challenge and – a positive challenge as well as a frustrating challenge with a new little mixing disk that I’ve got. I’m getting very geeky with my – with that at the moment and diving into all the different effects and things that it can do. At this moment that’s both my favorite and my most frustrating tool.

But if I was to absolutely pick a favorite, I would say that at the moment my iPad, if that’s allowed.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh sure. How about a favorite habit?

Lyz Cooper
I think my favorite habit is, catching myself out and listening to my inner voice when I have negative dialogue with myself, when I hear myself and catching myself out is something I like to do.

If I can make myself laugh by catching myself out and say, “Oh, there you go again. There you go again in giving yourself a hard time about something,” and trying to laugh through it. Because I think if you can just take some of your dark thoughts and look at them through a humorous lens, then you can get over anything in life.

That’s coming from the very dark times that I spoke about at the top of this interview. That’s been something that I’ve learnt to the point at which some of my friends say to me, “Are you sure you’re not mad at that? You should be. Shouldn’t you get mad at that?” I think to myself goodness, in life there’s a lot worse happening out there that I think if you can turn things around in your head and make that a habit, then that’s great.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, a particular thing that you say or share that seems to be quoted to you frequently, something you’re known for saying?

Lyz Cooper
Something I’m known for saying, “That’s interesting.” That’s exactly what people will say to me. I’ve got a habit of saying “That’s interesting.”

When one of my students says to me, “Lyz, I’m never going to be able to do this,” so if they’re struggling with playing an instrument or something and they’ll say, “Lyz, I’m never going to be able to do this,” is I’ll look at them and I’ll say, “That’s interesting,” because to me there’s a negative belief there. That’s interesting.

And the other thing is “Is that true?” Some of our beliefs, most of them actually that are negative and hold us back in life just are not true. Often people will say to me, “Oh, I’m useless.” “Is that true? Really? You’re really useless? What are you good at? You must be good at something.” “Well, yeah, well I can ride a bike.” “Well, there you go. You’re not useless, are you?” “I can bake a cake.” “Well, that’s two things that you’re not useless at.”

I think if we sometimes put ourselves in the dark in a way and make a case for ourselves, almost defend ourselves against ourselves, our negative beliefs, then you can change your life. You can really transform yourself. I hope that makes sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. If folks want to learn more or get in touch, where should they go?

Lyz Cooper
Well, they can go to TheBritishAcademyOfSoundTherapy.com. That has more information about sound therapy and some of the research that we’re doing. They’re welcome to go to LifeSonics.com for the track. If you want to email me directly, you can email at info@LyzCooper.com. It’s Lyz with a Y.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeing to be awesome at their jobs?

Lyz Cooper
I would say stay in the moment. That sounds a bit cliché, I know, but everything is okay in the moment. If you’re racing ahead, it’s so easy to be in the future, so thinking about all of the things I should be doing, all the things I shouldn’t be doing, all the things that may happen to me. Being in the future makes us anxious because we cannot know what’s in the future, so you’re going to be in an anxious state.

If you’re in the past, you’re worrying about all of the things that have happened to you, all the things you’ve said or you’ve done or didn’t say or didn’t do. That sets up depression and anger and grief. When we’re in the moment and we’re really reaching inside for that still point, then we are at peace.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. Well, Lyz, this has been so much fun. Thanks so much for taking the time and sharing the goods and sharing all of the bonus, the tracks and music and goodies that we get to access. It’s been a whole lot of fun.

Lyz Cooper
Oh, I’m so glad, Pete. Thank you so much for having me on your show. It’s been amazing. I’ve had a lot of fun too.

Oct 01
0

352: Conquering Fear and Expanding Awareness with Emma-Kate Swann

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Emma-Kate Swann says: "We're only as effective as those around us."

Emma-Kate Swann shares how increased awareness enables you to be a better employee and a better person.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The four key practices for becoming more conscious
  2. Tips for becoming more secure in your identity
  3. Six ways to counter  your fear responses

About Emma-Kate

Emma-Kate Swann is the Vice President of Leadership & Transformation at Healthy Companies International working alongside a team to both support and lead key client engagements. As part of her mission to bring about positive, healthy outcomes, Emma-Kate coaches executives on optimizing their performance, helps organizations navigate through change, and guides executive teams in building more productive relationships. She is also actively involved in the design and implementation of leadership development programs at all levels within client organizations.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Emma-Kate Swann Interview Transcript

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

Emma-Kate Swann
Absolutely Pete. It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’m excited to dig into a lot of your wisdom, but first I want to go into your past because I understand that you, when you were 13-ish, appeared on television dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller. What’s the story behind this story?

Emma-Kate Swann
That’s true, yes. Well, growing up, who didn’t like Michael Jackson, right? I used to study his video clips and learn his Thriller dance step by step. Then I had the opportunity at 13 years old to perform this dance in a group on a children’s TV show. It was definitely a great thrill at a young age.

Pete Mockaitis
How did you end up connecting with this TV show? How did that come to pass?

Emma-Kate Swann
Yeah, I was in a jazz ballet group. We decided to do Michael Jackson’s Thriller. We had to study the video clip and then our teacher also helped us with some of the steps. We won an Eisteddfod – it’s just sort of a competition that we were involved in – then got invited to go on this television show as the entertainment between cartoons. It was a children’s TV show, so that’s how it came about.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you recall which cartoons you were in between?

Emma-Kate Swann
Oh my goodness. I cannot.

Pete Mockaitis
Hardball here at Awesome At Your Job.

Emma-Kate Swann
I wish.

Pete Mockaitis
I don’t think I can recall the cartoons I watched as a kid other than Nickelodeon had a good lineup with Doug, Rugrats and – maybe I can’t remember them. Ren and Stimpy was a crazy one. That was wild. I don’t even know if you can get away with some of the stuff that they did on that show today.

Emma-Kate Swann
Absolutely. Oh my goodness.

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s talk about perhaps your current income and impact in career that you’re making. It’s not through dance and Michael Jackson performances.

Emma-Kate Swann
Absolutely not.

Pete Mockaitis
You’ve got a cool title as the vice president of leadership and transformation at Healthy Companies International. I love transformation. Tell us what’s your role and this organization all about.

Emma-Kate Swann
Healthy Companies, we refer to ourselves as a leadership and change and transformation company. Our mission is to transform the world’s organizations one leader at a time. We’re actually founded back in 1998 by our CEO, who’s an organizational psychologist and my co-author on our current book, Conscious, Bob Rosen.

We have a very focused – we have a specific view about leadership. Our view is that as the world around us is accelerating and becoming more disruptive, that we need to develop ourselves from the inside out in order to show up differently on the outside. We refer to this at Healthy Companies as grounded and conscious leadership.

Our focus on leadership was really set early on when the company was awarded a multi-year grant from the MacArthur Foundation to research the characteristics of successful executives and their companies. This led to more than 500 interviews with CEOs in 50 countries. Then Bob and Healthy Companies and myself then published the results from our executive coaching and our consulting work as well as interviews in eight books.

We apply these approaches to grounded and conscious leadership within really three key areas. One is executive coaching. I know, Pete, that you’re an executive coach yourself, executive consulting, and leadership development in workshops.

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hmm. Now did you say say eight books?

Emma-Kate Swann
Yes, yes, so eight books.

Pete Mockaitis
You know it’s a good sign when you need eight books for them. That’s awesome. Could you give us a tidbit in terms of one of the most striking, powerful, counterintuitive insights that emerged from all that research?

Emma-Kate Swann
Well, often, we focus on competencies or skills in a lot of leadership development. Companies are spending millions and millions of dollars on leadership development. However, our research found that actually the most effective leaders focus on what we call is the six dimensions of leadership health. That is their physical health, their emotional health, their social health, vocational, spiritual, and intellectual health.

This is really what I mentioned in terms of operating from the inside-out. Interestingly, one of the key strongest predictors of effectiveness of those six healths would be what would you say if you had to guess, of those six?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh boy, I could make a case for all of them.

Emma-Kate Swann
I’ll put you on the spot, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
But since I just moved a heavy file cabinet, I’m thinking about my physical health. Let’s go with that one.

Emma-Kate Swann
Yeah, actually each of those independently predicted higher levels of performance. But the one that actually we were really surprised about that had the strongest predictor of performance was actually spiritual health.

Now spiritual health can often mean religion. It’s not what we meant in our research. We actually defined spiritual health as the way you view your world, coming from a spirit of generosity and things like having a higher purpose and also being globally connected, so respecting different cultures and different points of view.

That particular dimension of spiritual health in the way I just defined it had the strongest relationship with effectiveness and also engagement. That was a bit of a surprise for us and actually opened up a new conversation with leaders and individual contributors in a way that they operate within the workplace.

Pete Mockaitis
As you say that it makes real sense to me in terms of generosity because as you sort of generously invest your time and your network, your knowledge, your energy, your attention, sort of whatever you have to offer into people, sure enough they remember it, they appreciate it, and they are all the more likely to respond to you with subsequent requests and provide discretionary efforts and creative ideas and all that good stuff.

Emma-Kate Swann
Yes, and Pete, there is some data to support what you’ve just said.  Bersin & Associates found that companies known for their strong expressions of appreciation are twelve times more likely to show better results than companies less generous with their gratitude.​

Pete Mockaitis
That’s really cool. Let’s talk a little bit about your latest now. The book is called Conscious. What’s your main point behind this one?

Emma-Kate Swann
Yeah, absolutely. We recently conducted a Harris poll actually with 2,000 working adults over 18 years of age to understand how Americans view leaders and their ability to navigate in a rapidly changing world.

A strong majority of Americans from our Harris poll believed that conscious leaders, which is really the focus of our book, and we defined conscious as those people who are aware of themselves, their relationships and their environment. These leaders said that being conscious improves organizations in terms of engagement and performance, yet only half of those surveyed think that C-level executives and leaders actually exhibit fully conscious behaviors.

We then focus in our book on what are the practices of becoming more conscious. We identified four key practices being one going deep, which is about really building awareness of yourself and how you show up and discovering your inner self.

The second one is about thinking big. This is about looking over the horizon, looking into the future, and seeing a world of possibilities.

The third is about getting real. This is about being your own change agent and also being honest and intentional about how you’re showing up and your impact on others.

The final one is about stepping up. This is about empowering yourself to act boldly and responsibly. A lot of us can focus a lot of time on blaming those around us for the challenges that we find in society and in our workplaces. We’re saying that stepping up is actually looking at what can you take control of and what can you influence.

Together these four practices then create the ability to transform ourselves and our organizations.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, I’d love to dig into each of those. But first, I want to talk about a definition a little bit. One who is conscious is aware of themselves, of others in their environments.

Could you maybe give us a quick kind of picture of what it looks like when someone – a manifestation or expression of a person who’s acting in a way that is clearly not aware of themselves or not aware of others or not aware of their environments and then the positive foil to that, so just get a real clear picture on what that looks like?

Emma-Kate Swann
Yeah, absolutely. If we start at the level of self-awareness. Let’s just take a really simple example like in a meeting. We all have to attend many meetings. It spends a lot of time out of our day in a meeting.

If you think about someone who is conscious, firstly they’re aware of how they’re showing up in that meeting, so how much of the air time are they taking up, how much time are they spending in inquiry versus advocating their view. Are they actually drawing in others in order to get as diverse perspective as is possible? Are they open in their mindset or are they fixed and caught up in their own biases?

That sort of self-awareness is the first level of being conscious.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s striking because I think there are definitely times when I think that I’m on it. I’m sort of thinking all of these sort of like second layer or extra dimension thoughts meta of what’s happening and what I’m doing. Then times when I’m absolutely not. I’m kind of checked out or just sort of barely able to convey something worthwhile from time to time.

Emma-Kate Swann
Yeah, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s nice to note that what level of awareness are you playing at in a given meeting because it can probably change hour to hour.

Emma-Kate Swann
Yeah, absolutely. I think part of the challenge is that we’re operating in such an accelerating business environment, that we’re all running from one thing to the next that to actually be able to be present and notice how we’re showing up is more and more challenging. That level of awareness is just so important.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so that’s what it looks like awareness in itself and then with others?

Emma-Kate Swann
Awareness of Relationships or others is how aware are you of others’ thoughts and feelings. It is also about the ability to change your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as you interact with others.  For example, if you take the example of a meeting, to what extent are you aware of the signs and signals others are giving of how they are feeling.  What are you noticing about their tone of voice, their body language, and what really matters to them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. The emotions, sort of the subtext, what’s not said, what are people really thinking and feeling underneath the surface there. Then how about the environment?

Emma-Kate Swann
Yeah, so the environment as well. One of the things that more conscious leaders are focused on is not just in terms of increasing revenue, but what’s the impact on the communities around them.

Awareness of the Environment involves understanding and adapting to both internal (organizational) and external (societal) forces that impact you, your team and your business. It is also about understanding the context or challenge you are dealing with. For example, are you bringing a perspective of what’s important to your internal and external stakeholders to share at the meeting?  If you are meeting with a group of senior executives, are you adapting your communication to meet their needs? For example, providing a big picture strategic perspective and not getting into too many of the details.  This is about being aware of your environment and the context in which you are working.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great.

Emma-Kate Swann
Does that make sense Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well so could you maybe give us an example, and you don’t have to name names specifically of just – because now that you lay it out, it seems like yes, but of course, we should all do this and that would be necessary for any leader to be effective.

But maybe could you give us an example of an organization or a leader who just bombed it in terms of they did some decision making or some communication that just clearly conveyed they were severely lacking on some of these awareness dimensions.

Emma-Kate Swann
Yes, absolutely.  One example comes from working with a group of global leaders at PricewaterhouseCoopers.  They came together from around the world to participate in a three month residential leadership program to prepare them to lead global teams.

I worked with this one senior leader as part of that program. He had moved around a lot in his teenage years. That had really left him feeling disconnected from his peers, so his way of relating to others was to outsmart his peers and his clients, which gave him some sense of control and feelings of superiority, but further increased his feelings of loneliness and isolation.

One of the things that we talk about in Conscious is that it’s no longer enough to be the smartest in the room. Pete, the man was clearly smart but we had to move him in our coaching to have more of a conscious way of thinking and way of showing up.

For example, one of the things that I worked on with him in coaching was to have him move from this scarcity mindset, which is a belief that there’s not enough, so there’s not enough knowledge or resources or opportunities, to one where he’s actually believing a principle around abundance, which there is enough. That led him then to share his knowledge, to be more cooperative, and to be more generous in his relationships.

The second way that I needed to work with him in terms of moving from a smart to a conscious mindset was to challenge his belief that I am what I know. His whole identity was caught up in – and this is very common – was caught up in being the smartest in the room, having the right answer. If I challenge – if someone challenged him, they’re challenging him as a person.

What we needed to work on was that he was who he was, warts and all, and that all of us have strengths and weaknesses. When we become more conscious, we are more comfortable in our own skin and we share more of our whole self. We feel more comfortable being vulnerable with others.

Then finally we worked on his mindset, which is also a smart paradigm rather than a conscious paradigm, which is I can only rely on myself to survive. In other words, I have to have all of the answers myself rather than engaging others to help with me tasks or to give me some more ideas.

We had to shift that thinking in order for him to actually understand that we’re only as effective as those around us. We actually learn a lot from those around us in our environment. This then moved him to focusing on more behavior around asking others for ideas and learning from others.

The outcome eventually was that his peers provided him feedback that he became much more of a team player and that his clients gave him positive feedback that they shared a new desire to continue doing business with him because interestingly he was brilliant but no one wanted to work with him because they came away feeling stupid as a result of his need to be the smartest in the room.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, yeah. I’ve seen that. I’ve felt that. I remember one of the kindest things anyone ever said to me in sort of a farewell work event is that I never made him feel dumb. I thought that was really sweet. I was like, “Oh, thank you so much.” Because I know how that feels. It sucks.

Emma-Kate Swann
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. I’m intrigued about the identity point though, so he said – before identity was I am what I know, and then that shifted to something. Was there new identity statement or what’s the new identify then?

Emma-Kate Swann
Yeah, so the new identity is I am okay who I am or as I am. Right. It’s acknowledging that all of us have strengths and all of us have areas for development. Actually, when we’re vulnerable and when we show some of that and when we ask for help, it actually builds trust. Rather than seeing vulnerability as a weakness, actually starting to see it as a strength.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Now that ‘I am okay as I am’ can for some be a lifelong journey to arrive at such a place.

Emma-Kate Swann
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
As a coach what are your pro tips for fast-tracking that one?

Emma-Kate Swann
I have to say that particular mindset shift is not one that happens necessarily overnight. Yeah. It’s one it’s starting to be kind to ourselves. It’s simple little things to start with, so asking for help, sharing where – in a safe way, I normally get people to experiment in a safe way to start – so sharing something they may need, some support with, so something – whether it’s even just help with a spreadsheet.

It’s something that feels safe enough and just opening up a little bit about themselves, which is being a little more personal, which can be vulnerable for people. Just with those small steps over time with that mindset can start to shift and they can actually see that their relationships start to improve.

Pete Mockaitis
That is good. I’m thinking about maybe even more of a baby step is, I have confessed my need for help to the Amazon Prime Now delivery person or the Instacart grocery shoppers like “I don’t know you and I need help with this.” Sometimes life is out of control, so thank you so much for you’ve done here.

Emma-Kate Swann
Absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
Very cool. Thank you. That was just background. Now, you’ve got four practices associated with being conscious. Could you give us maybe sort of kind of a best practice prescription in terms of “Hey, if you want to do one thing when it comes to going deep and discovering your inner self stuff, what would that be? Could we do that for each of the four?

Emma-Kate Swann
Sure, absolutely. I’d love to. Going deep is about discovering your inner self. This is really just about learning who you are, where you come from, and why you act the way you do.

There’s a particular skill that we refer to. It’s got an interesting name. We call it wrestling your inner reptile. In other words, it’s about understanding how your mind works and how we get hijacked by our survival instincts. I’m just going to spend just a couple of minutes talking about the neuroscience of the brain just because it sort of helps to understand this particular practice. I just want to keep it really simple here.

We have three brains. All of those have developed at different times and they have different responsibilities. Firstly, we have what we call the reptilian or primitive brain. This is really just focused on survival. Secondly, we have the emotional or feeling brain. This is where aspects of memory reside and also our impulsive actions begin. Thirdly, and really important in terms of our creative thinking and our decision making, we have the executive or thinking brain.

Now the problem is that our Stone Age survival instincts are not our friend in our current accelerating disruptive business world. What they do is they keep us stuck in negative emotions and they often slow us down in our business tasks as well as our life.

What happens is that our brains are constantly scanning for threats. The amygdala part of our emotional brain uses the five senses as well as some of our internal signals of threat, like our elevated heart rate or shortness of breath. Then when it perceives a threat it takes only 80 milliseconds for an automatic threat avoidance impulse to kick in. This actually happens at an unconscious level.

The signal telling us about our actions so that it’s how we actually show up, doesn’t reach our thinking brain until 240 milliseconds. At the same time, what happens is that one or more avoidance emotions like fear, and anger, and shame are triggered and that effectively takes our thinking brain, the part of our brain we need to be at our best, offline.

We’re all wired for survival and prone to these reflex-like responses and it takes the smallest of signals for us to perceive a threat.

I think Pete, we’ve all been there. We’re in a sales meeting. We know our numbers are not where they need to be. Your boss is frowning and instantaneously you notice your defensive reaction. Your tone becomes defensive. Your body language becomes defensive.

Going back to your question around what can we do about this, one area of awareness that’s particularly important to help us learn to – let’s just put it, wrestle our inner reptile, right that unconscious part of our brain that can trigger us – is to recognize what we call early warning signs our body gives. We refer to these as somatic responses.

Have you ever been in a meeting where someone says or does something like frowns at you because they think that your sales numbers that you’re about to report are not good enough or says something that you feel disrespects you then you get either a flushing feeling or that feeling in the pit of your stomach or a tightness in your chest?

Now given the reptilian’s brain unconscious and our emotional brain is only partially conscious, by recognizing what we’re experiencing in our body, that is vital information to then course correct our behavior.

So for example, when you notice that feeling in your stomach, what you need to do is take a few deep breaths and slow down the reaction from your emotional brain and that buys you some time to allow your executive or thinking brain to switch back on and then you can actually be more thoughtful in your response. Does that make sense, Pete?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh sure thing, yeah. The practice then is just in the moment of you begin to feel some defensive things to do some conscientious breathing there.

Emma-Kate Swann
Yeah, absolutely. The first step is to – the first thing you need to be aware of what are those people and situations that are likely to trigger you, and then what do you notice somatically, so what do you notice in the body before the behavior even shows up.

Before the defensive tone or the defensive body language, what is – this is really a level of awareness that most people do not have – what do you notice happens in the body? Because that reaction in the body will give you the early warning sign before the action sets in that you can then manage the response. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes.

Emma-Kate Swann
Then the response can be as you said the deep breathing and knowing that our thinking brain if we’re triggered is going to take a little while to switch on.

For some people it’s pausing because their reactive response is to sort of snap at someone or sort of have that short tone. For others, they disengage or they freeze. You need to build awareness of how you react and then notice the somatic reaction and then plan a different response in order to manage them.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. This is really good. Could you share some observations in the body, that sort of common defensiveness things that pop up? There’s “Oh my heart rate is suddenly going faster,” or “I feel a descending wave of heat from my head to my toes,” or “I am getting a little twitchy in the elbow.” What are some examples that come up again and again?

Emma-Kate Swann
Yeah. One is interestingly when some people are stressed, they actually clench their fist. By simply noticing that your fist is clenched and then relaxing it, can actually shift your whole emotional response and then that shows up differently in your behavior. It can be very small tweaks in awareness building, but that can actually have a huge impact and then the behavior you can then change as a result.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s excellent. What are some of your responses that you recommend folks use? I guess there’s the breathing and there’s the unclenching and what else?

Emma-Kate Swann
Yes. So the deep breathing, the unclenching. One key one is that you need to buy yourself some time so that you can allow that executive brain to switch back on.

Sometimes just if there’s some water there, just take a glass of water and have a drink of water and that’s just buying yourself time. At the same time ground your feet because we physically – when we ground the body physically it can actually reground our emotions because we’ve got to remember that our emotional brain is being hijacked right now.

Pete Mockaitis
No kidding. So there’s science behind this?

Emma-Kate Swann
Yeah, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
I do that. I just do that. I remember I just did that during my interviews when I was a candidate trying to get my first jobs. I had no idea why, but somehow when I started freaking out that just made me feel better. You’re saying – I thought that was just a weird thing I did, but you’re telling me this is deep in our humanity. This is so reassuring.

Emma-Kate Swann
Yeah, there you go. Yeah, your intuitive response worked.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, so put both feet firmly on the floor, that does stuff for not just me. Cool.

Emma-Kate Swann
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Definitely the deep breathing, the grounding the feet, and buying yourself some time, whether it’s just ask another question so you can listen rather than having to present your point of view right then and there because you’re thinking brain is not going to be at its best. Taking a moment to have a drink of water.

If you really, really feel triggered, and you’re concerned about how that may show up, you may need to just ask to leave the room for a moment and then come back when you’re more present. That’s not the most ideal response, but if it’s going to be better than sort of having a short tone or sounding very defensive, then it’s a better outcome.

Pete Mockaitis
You talk about reptiles and angry reactions, in my mind’s eye, this is so dorky, but I just keep seeing this scene from a Star Trek Next Generation, maybe a movie, maybe a TV episode, not sure, but Worf says – I don’t know who cares about this but, Trekkies in the audience here we go – when Worf screams at the captain, “If you were any other man I would kill you where you stand.”

That’s what I think about in terms of the intensity. But I think we probably are thinking, shall we say, attacking thoughts perhaps in response to these things, maybe thoughts we’d never want to say aloud.

Emma-Kate Swann
Yes, yes. Very true. Very true. Yeah. And remembering that not everyone reacts that way, some people disengage, but that also can be not effective in the way we’re showing up. It looks like we’re not contributing to the discussion. For some people, it’s how do you get back in the game when you get triggered? How do you get grounded again and then actually be able to contribute again in a conversation?

Pete Mockaitis
Emma-Kate, what I love about this is that this awareness stuff is so much more than surface level, “Oh know yourself and your strengths and your weaknesses.” This is really in the moment and what that looks and sounds and feels like from a very personal and physical perspective. That’s a whole other level than “I’m good at details,” which I love.

Emma-Kate Swann
Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes just asking our peers, someone that we trust, to give us feedback around how do we show up nonverbally when we’ve been seen to be little bit defensive, what does that look like? Normally people – that’s really showing vulnerability again, which builds trust, so most people are very happy to share any observations they might have of you.

We all have them. We’re all human, which is part of being conscious is to acknowledge that we’re all human and sometimes even if we’re practicing these conscious practices, we’re going to have an off day and that’s okay as well.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. Well, I wanted to talk a bit likewise about think big, get real, step up but we had so much fun with go deep. We went deep on going deep.

Emma-Kate Swann
We did.

Pete Mockaitis
So thank you.

Emma-Kate Swann
Of course.

Pete Mockaitis
Is there maybe one kind of quick tip that you might share or key thing you want to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Emma-Kate Swann
We have at the end of each chapter we have some very practical tips for each of these practices so that would be one way of starting to learn sort of how to apply it in a very practical way. That would probably be sort of if people want to learn more about it, that’s probably where I’d direct them.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool, thank you. Now can you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Emma-Kate Swann
I would indeed. I’d love to. One of my favorite quotes is by John Wooden. He’s from the Hall of Fame Basketball. He was a coach from the Hall of Fame. His quote is, “It is what you learn after you know it all that counts.” I think for me that really sums up that distinction between conscious and smart. Being conscious is about being a lifelong learner and staying curious and open.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Emma-Kate Swann
Sure, research that was cited by O’Brien and … in 2010 is very relevant to what we talk about within Conscious that is that 83% of our brain is unconscious and 17% is conscious. However, of that 83% that’s unconscious, it controls the majority, which is 95 to 97% of our perceptions and actions.

In other words, most of our day we’re operating on autopilot. From a conscious perspective, if you can imagine the possibilities, if we could tap into more of that unconscious part of the brain, and become more intentional about our actions, behaviors, what the impact would be in our teams, in our organizations, and in our communities.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh great, thank you. How about a favorite book?

Emma-Kate Swann
No, my favorite book is Leadership and the Art of Conversation by Kim H. Krisco. If you think about it, one of our most powerful tools in getting things done through others is our communication tools. This book really provides a number of key practical tools to doing this very well.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. How about a favorite tool, something you use that helps you be awesome at your job?

Emma-Kate Swann
I practice and teach yoga sculpt at Core Power Yoga. That’s a combination of yoga, cardio, and weights at a 92 degree heated room. For me – that’s not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. But it energizes my body. It helps me get very present and helps me get really focused so that’s something that I practice every day.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite habit?

Emma-Kate Swann
Well, that would be my habit I would say. Your other question was a favorite tool?

Pete Mockaitis
It was a tool, yeah.

Emma-Kate Swann
A favorite tool of mine, this is one I use a lot in coaching or introduce people to is called the HeartMath, M-A-T-H, technique. There’s actually software you can purchase online. It’s about I think 250, sorry 150 to about 200 dollars.

What it does is it looks at your heart coherence and you can actually see – it starts to graph it on a screen. By using this breathing technique and actually being able to see the data on a screen, when you have high heart coherence, you’re able to better manage your emotions and you’re also able to be more creative in your thinking.

It’s a technique that really helps people get conscious, or it’s really a conscious practice, but also sometimes people need the science or the data and that HeartMath technique allows you to see that on your computer screen.

Pete Mockaitis
What exactly is heart coherence?

Emma-Kate Swann
Heart coherence is the distance between heart beats. I’m sort of not a scientific expert in this. What my understanding is that when you have high coherence, that’s when you have those positive relationships with performance outcomes.

What the software does is just show you – it actually has a graph, green, blue, and red – and it shows you when you start to move from low to high coherence. It can actually happen as quickly as five minutes time. There is actually a lot of science and a lot written behind it, researched about it that people can read up on. But that’s what the technique is about.

Pete Mockaitis
Fascinating. I’ve heard of the HeartMath Institute long ago. But I didn’t know exactly what was under the surface, so thank you. That’s intriguing.

Emma-Kate Swann
Oh, of course, absolutely.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a particular nugget, something you share that really connects and resonates and gets quoted back to you?

Emma-Kate Swann
Probably as simple as conscious is the new smart. That really sort of comes down to that paradigm shift that I talked about earlier. I think that if people could actually make that shift, it would make our teams and our organizations really much more creative and much more engaging places to work.

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

Emma-Kate Swann
Absolutely. It’s HealthyCompanies.com is our website. Or I’m very happy for people to email me at EK.Swann@healthycompanies.com. I’m also LinkedIn or Twitter.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Emma-Kate Swann
Absolutely. We say that teams, organizations and communities become more conscious one person at a time, so my challenge to you is to start with yourself. One thing you can do is take our short self-assessment to see how conscious you are. It’s just a small number of questions on our website and it’s free. If you go to our Conscious book page and click on the assessment there. And thank you so much for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, Emma-Kate thank you. This was a ton of fun and I wish you lots of luck with Conscious and all you’re doing.

Emma-Kate Swann
Oh, I appreciate it. Thank you so much Pete.

Sep 19
0

347: The Power of Truly Living Your Values Daily with Drew Dudley

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Drew Dudley says: "For most of us, the number one criteria we use to make decisions is 'what will avoid the most consequences right now?'"

Drew Dudley redefines leadership and shows what it really means to live your values.

You’ll Learn:

  1. The gross way we make decisions when we don’t have clear values
  2. How to make leadership a practice, instead of a hobby
  3. Approaches to discovering your own deep wisdom with “the edge of the bed advice” technique

About Drew

Drew Dudley is the Founder & Chief Catalyst of Day One Leadership, and has spent the last 15 years helping individuals and organizations increase their leadership capacity.

Recognized as one of the most dynamic keynote speakers in the world, Drew has spoken to over 250,000 people on 5 continents, been featured on The Huffington Post, Radio America, Forbes.com, and TED.com, where his TED talk has been voted “one of the 15 most inspirational TED talks of all time”. Time, Business Insider and INC. magazines have all included his talk on their lists of “speeches that will make you a better leader”.

Drew’s clients have included some of the world’s most dynamic companies and organizations, including McDonald’s, Proctor & Gamble, JP Morgan Chase, Hyatt Hotels, the United Way and over 75 colleges and universities.

Items Mentioned in this Show:

Drew Dudley Interview Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Drew, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Drew Dudley
Oh, I’m thrilled. Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, thank you. I think we’re going to have a ton of fun here. One fun thing I want to know about you right away is all about your stuffed penguin collection.

Drew Dudley
The stuffed penguin collection. The stuffed penguin collection emerged, believe it or not, because I’m afraid of dogs.

I was dating a girl and almost every silly story starts with that. I was dating a girl who really wanted a dog. I was attacked when I was a kid by a big Siberian Husky. While I’ve gotten better with dogs, back then I was – if there was one the size of a hot dog, I crossed the street to avoid it. This was a bit of a nonstarter for me.

We were out one night on a date and we saw March of the Penguins. She leaned over to me and said, “If you buy me a penguin, I will never bother you for a dog again.” I thought, “Done.” This is a way out. Believe it or not you cannot purchase penguins as pets anywhere. I tried. I tried. I said, look, I’ll just poke holes in the front of my freezer. We’re good to go.

I was in Wal-Mart lamenting the fact that I was going to have to back to battling against this impending Great Dane that she wanted and sure enough I saw a giant stuffed penguin sitting in a box. I thought to myself, she did not specify the penguin had to be a live one. I brought it home. Every now and then as a boyfriend you knock one out of the park and she loved this penguin.

Unfortunately, what happened is – I don’t know if anyone out there has pets, but sometimes your pet becomes the communication tool between you and your partner, like “Tell daddy he’s staying far too long at work.” “Well, tell mom that if I don’t stay at work, we don’t get to-“ etcetera.

Well, one of my friends witnessed this exchange. In order to mock me for the fact that I was apparently whipped by a stuffed penguin, he began giving me penguin gifts and got all my friends on board. What I realized is that you can do one of two things when your friends are picking on you. You can either fight back, which just makes it all the more rewarding or you can lean into it.

Sure enough, I leaned into it and it became my thing. I’ve got 50 or 60 stuffed penguins and penguin cuff links. Because what happens is once you make a deal of it, every gift from every client, from every friend, anybody who sees a penguin-related thing in a store, that’s it. My penguin collection was my way of avoiding having to get a dog. I was trying to find a loophole and it turned into a monster.

Pete Mockaitis
That is wild. I would imagine if everybody just gives you penguins, because that’s what they know about you, you’ve probably got some duplicate penguins over the course of your collection years. Is this true?

Drew Dudley
Just a few actually. Somehow they got to be the big thing about three years ago. Everybody had a penguin in the front hall. Yeah, I’ve got – but what’s cool is people make little shirts for them. I’ve got one from the University of Notre Dame. I’ve got another one from the Sanitation Workers of New Jersey T-shirt. We break them up a little bit. I’ve got – I think they’ve got a little football league going on.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m just curious, if you move, are you going to take all of them with you and will you store them? This is quite a commitment that you have taken on your shoulders here.

Drew Dudley
I’m not going to lie, there’s about 48 of them that are just stuck in a storage unit somewhere. I move around a lot because I figure I can, so why not experience the world. Ultimately, after I moved out of my place that I had sort of been in for a few years, we just pack them away because now I live – I’ve got a bunch of 500 square foot little places scattered about North America where I base out of.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m just imagining the episode of was it Storage Wars or whatever that reality TV program is where they claim abandoned storage lockers.

Drew Dudley
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
Like, “What the heck is this?”

Drew Dudley
I actually am storing a bunch of them in the actual storage facility where they shoot that show. Yeah, I kid you not. If somehow I disappear in the Bermuda Triangle, dammit, somebody’s going to open it up and find a whole bunch of stuffed penguins and all of the workout materials that I’ve stuck in my storage unit because –

Pete Mockaitis
You’re not using those either.

Drew Dudley
That little ab roller that everybody buys, “Hey, that’s a good idea,” yeah, that’s what they’ll find.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s fun. Now I want to hear a little bit about your other role, other than penguin custodian, you are … the title. I like it. You have fun with the title. I do the same. You’re the founder and chief catalyst of Day One Leadership. What does that mean exactly?

Drew Dudley
I guess my job ultimately is to be accountable for how well the company makes three things happen. One, help people figure out the specific leadership behaviors that are right for them to feel like leaders and act like leaders. Two, to help people make those behaviors a non-negotiable part of every single day of their lives. Then three, convince people that doing those two first things makes them a leader.

My title when it comes to the company makes it sound like I’m in charge I think, but effectively all it means is that I’m ultimately accountable for the company’s success in making those three things possible for as many people as possible.

I started to realize this when it comes to titles. The day-to-day operations, the strategy, marketing, sales, everything that a company or organization does, those are all just logistics in service of, in our case, those three things. Whatever your job is, it’s not the tasks that you have to do, it’s how those tasks relate to the bigger mission of the organization.

Here’s the thing, if you don’t know what the bigger mission of the organization is or you hate it, quit because you’re in the wrong place. That’s it. That’s my role is to make those three things happen: help people figure out what the best leadership behaviors for those are, make them a nonnegotiable part of their life, and then convince them that doing that is in fact leadership.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, well, you’re clear on what you’re about, which is cool. Let’s dig into some of these dimensions one by one. You sort of capture a number of these ideas in your book, This Is Day One. What would you say is sort of the main idea or thesis behind this one?

Drew Dudley
The key thing I’m trying to get – and this is everything that I do in terms of my speaking and the book, here’s the main idea. There’s a form of leadership to which we all can and should aspire. It’s defined by a commitment to acting on your core leadership values every single day because when you do that, you close the gap between the person you want to be and how you’re actually behaving.

My argument is that actively and consciously working to close that gap is what defines a leader, nothing else. Whether or not you are trying to close the gap between the person you want to be and how you are actually behaving on a day-to-day basis.

Because I don’t know the secret to happiness, but I have found that the secret to unhappiness is when a gap forms between who you want to be and how you’re acting and you become aware of that gap.

For me it happened because a seven-year-old called me out on it. About ten years ago I had this horrible time at work, like a real toxic environment. I decided I wanted to take a train ride all the way across Canada and not talk to anybody, just stick my nose in a bunch of books, all those books you were supposed to have read and just not talk to anybody.

I started out in this empty car at the back of the train and was super happy with my nose in this book. This little girl was running up and down this train, back and forth, back and forth. Then she plopped down next to me and said, “What are you reading?” I said, “It’s just a book for work.”

I remember she looked at me and said, “You get to read books for work? My dad has to go to an office,” which is one of those cool moments that remind you of how awesome your job is. I said, “Yeah, yeah, I get to read books for work.”

She said, “Well, what’s the story?” I said, “This book doesn’t really have a story,” because it was some academic research thing. She said, “Well, don’t all books have stories?” I said, “No, some just have knowledge.” She says, “Well, aren’t stories knowledge?” I was really thrown off by that because the last thing I want to do is send this kid away thinking that stories aren’t knowledge.

I said, “Actually a really smart friend of mine said once that ‘The story is the basic unit of human understanding,’” As soon as it came out of my mouth, all I could think was, “Dude, she is seven,” but this girl was amazing. She just looks at me and says, “I think your friend is very, very smart.” I said wow, this girl is incredible.

I said, “Why are you running up and down the train?” She says, “My parents say I have this very big spirit. They say my spirit is way too big for every room that I’m in. A train’s just a big long hallway, right? Anytime I’m in a place where it’s not big enough for my spirit, and no hallway is big enough for my spirit if rooms aren’t, I run to remind myself that I’m free anytime that I want to be.”

I said to her – because there was something – she didn’t do it to be pretentious. She didn’t do it to try to sound impressive. When you work at a university, like I did, all anyone is trying to do is sound pretentious and impressive. It was just the way she said it, “I’m always free if I want to be.”

She said – I said, “I think I’m like that too. I think the problem is I’m not spending time in places where it’s big enough for my spirit.” She hops down off this chair and looks at me and says, “Drew, I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t think anyone whose spirit is too big for a hallway would ever read a book without a good story,” and then disappears.

It was weird because I had always seen myself as someone who gathered stories, who gathered insights, who shared them with other people. This is a fundamental part of who I am. This seven-year-old pointed out that I’d gotten on a train, gotten a single sleeper car, hadn’t wanted to talk to a single person. There was a gap between who I wanted to be and how I conceived of myself and how I was actually behaving.

It changed so much about how I treated that trip and made me so much more aware of where real leadership lies and the really big struggle in our lives is becoming aware of where that gap is between we want to be and how we’re behaving and doing something about it.

In the book – I know that was a long answer to that question – but it’s really about how I try to address things in the book is here are the stories of these extraordinary leaders that I’ve picked up along the way. They don’t all look like we’ve been taught leaders look like. There’s a seven-year-old and there’s a cab driver. Each one of them has sort of given me a little bit of an insight. The idea of This Is Day One is based on this.

We all wake up every single morning and we have done absolutely nothing to deserve the title of leader that day. Nothing. Whether we’re a CEO or we’re the person who just got hired in an entry level job, when you wake up in the morning, you have done nothing to deserve the title.

Ultimately that came from one of the first times I ever went to a meeting about my alcohol addiction. A guy said – he was talking afterwards – he said, “I’ve got 36 years in.” A guy next to me was also at his first meeting, he said, “Wow, 36 years.” The older guy looks at him and says, “Son, I have just as much time in today as you do.” There was something that really resonated with me at that.

When it comes to leadership, we all get up at the exact same place. That – a lot of Day One comes from that experience recovering from addiction, is that if you don’t want to have a drink for the rest of your life, choose not to have a drink today. Then treat every day as if it’s the first day of your recovery because every day one has an inherent commitment, humility, forgiveness.

If you screw up, you just recommit. You don’t throw away everything you had before. If you’ve got 25 years in of being sober or rising up through the ranks and running an organization, yeah, you’ve done all that stuff to get here, but when you wake up in the morning, you haven’t done a damn thing.

That’s what the book is about is saying, “This is day one and if you want to be a leader, you want to close that gap between who you want to be and how you’re behaving, you start today with nothing on the score card. You’ve got to earn it again.”

Long answer because I love to tell stories, but that’s really what the book talks about, how to close that gap, how to give a step-by-step guide of exactly how to do that.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s what I found interesting is that these are big questions and heavy and tricky and can take some – a lifetime to figure out, but you have laid out a bit of process or ‘process’ as Canadians say. I love it.

Drew Dudley
Do we say it different?

Pete Mockaitis
You do. It’s a long O instead of a short O. I actually like it better that way.

Drew Dudley
I didn’t realize we did that. I know that we throw U’s in words you don’t. Apparently, we say ‘about’ although I don’t know what that crap’s about. I did not realize we said ‘process’ different ….

Pete Mockaitis
Most Canadians I do hear it. One time I was even chatting with some folks and I made reference to a process and I pronounced it with a long o and they said “Pete, are you Canadian?” I said, “No, I just like the way Canadians say ‘process.’”

Drew Dudley
You know how you can spot a Canadian right now?

Pete Mockaitis
Do tell.

Drew Dudley
We don’t have our head down on our desk banging it slowly as the chaos descends around us.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Noted, thank you. What I want to discuss is you have a process or a ‘process’ associated with getting to the bottom of some of these questions in a step-by-step rigorous way. I’d love to hear what would you say are the first steps to zeroing in on these values and associated leadership behavior?

Drew Dudley
Well, I think the first thing is to actually identify what your core leadership values are. Most people haven’t.

One of the things that sort of drives me as a person is this theory is that when you don’t know what to do in a situation, ask yourself what would the person who I want to be do in this situation and then do that.

But what I found is that because we all went through an education system that asked us what you want to do when you grow up and taught us that you should focus on the things on which you’re going to be tested, well, we never got tested on what our values were. We never got tested on who we want to be.

We never got tested on what criteria are you going to use to make big decisions, so most of us, especially high performers, actually never had time. We never sat down and thought about what are the values that want to drive us.

What I talk about in the book is how to actually figure out what those core values are. That’s where it starts because values are criteria for decision making. What real leaders do is they identify their values and they define them because then you use them as criteria for decision making.

Every single time that you face a challenge, you face a decision, you pivot to your values and you say which one of these options is most consistent with my list of values. The challenge is that often that option sucks. It doesn’t allow you to look good, avoid punishments, keep the money, stay in the job, but it’s always the decision that you are proudest you made five years from now.

The first step that leaders need to do for their day one is say “These are the values that are nonnegotiable for me. Here’s what they mean,” and then make sure, that’s what the book talks about, the process of actually living them every single day.

Because if you don’t do that, if you don’t use your values as criteria for decision making, the question that I love to challenge people with is “what criteria have you been using to make decisions every day for your whole life so far?” What I realize is for most of us, the number one criteria we use to make decisions is “what will avoid the most consequences right now?” That is not how leaders make decisions. That’s why that’s where you start.

I talk about how in the book, but mostly it comes down to self-reflection, not on what you think, which is how most people think about self-reflection, we get into our head, but self-reflection on how you have behaved because your values are indicated by how you behave, not by how you talk.

In the book I talk about how to use a reflective exercise that looks not at “Oh, what are my values? Let me think about it,” but it looks directly at “What have I done in my life?” because that’s a better source for figuring out what your values are.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s so intriguing that notion in terms of in the absence of clear values that is the default, what will avoid the most unpleasant consequences for me right now. It’s really not at all inspiring.

Drew Dudley
No.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like in terms of just selfishness and shortsightedness. But at the same time a lot of times that answer is an okay one in terms of “Well, not lying about how I just screwed up would avoid the most consequences because if I lied about it then I’d really be up a creek.”

In a way I think that’s – that shorthand default gets you to some decent decisions somewhat often, but it sure doesn’t make your chest rise in pride as to the person that you’re being.

I’m intrigued then. Let’s hear it. First, when you say values, I’d love to get your take on – there’s many you can choose from. Perhaps an infinite amount in terms of ways you could articulate it. I’d love for you to first give a few examples of “here are four different values and what they mean.”

Drew Dudley
Sure. In the book, I actually focus on six. The idea is that each individual, you have to identify your own and then there’s a process to embed them into your life. But in order to demonstrate the process, I say here are six, like here on day one when you put the book down, this is what you could actually do right away. They are impact, courage, growth, empowerment, class, and self-respect. Those six values.

Impact is a commitment to creating moments that cause people to feel as if they are better off for having interacted with you.

Courage is a commitment to taking action when there is the possibility of loss, which gets educated out of us as we grow older.

We go through the education system that teaches us you’re going to get evaluated not on how good you are right now, but on how few mistakes you made along the way because every time you make one along the way, we take points away. Even if at the end you’re the most talented, hey, if you lost the most points, it doesn’t reflect.

Yeah, we talk about growth, which is a commitment to increasing the capacity to add value. Leaders add value to other people’s lives. That’s ultimately your goal. Now, in the process, you add value to your own. Any time you get better at the ability to add value, you are embodying the value of growth. That means any time that you’re a catalyst for learning, you effectively have helped people grow.

One of the big ways that you can help people grow is to change how you ask questions or sorry change how you – that’s one of the big talents, sorry, is to learn how to effectively ask questions.

Leaders, I think we get confused and a lot of people walk away from the idea of leadership because they think they don’t have all the answers. One thing I really want to tell people is that leaders do not have more answers necessarily than other people, but they do ask tremendous questions. They’re better at that and they ask a particular kind of question.

The best leaders I know – and if you’re listening, think about trying to get better at this – asking questions, where the person being asked learns more than the person doing the asking. Usually we think, “Okay, if I’m asking questions it’s because I want to gather information,” but what leaders do is they ask these powerful questions that help people understand things about themselves they didn’t know.

I give a bunch of examples in the book, but the one I really like is “Why do you matter?” That’s a deep ask question, but most of the people I ask, 95% of them, cannot give me an answer to that question or they’re making one up on the spot. Ultimately, the reason I ask it isn’t to get an answer necessarily, but to make people realize they don’t have one. No one’s ever asked them before and your kids don’t have one either.

If they’re under the age of five, go ahead, ask your kids that question, they will give you an amazing answer. But once we send them to school, they stop believing that why they matter is up to them and it’s supposed to be evaluated by somebody else. Because all of us spent 20 of the most formative years in our lives in that system, we don’t unlearn that lesson. We spend the rest of our lives waiting for someone else to evaluate how much we matter.

Ultimately becoming a great leader I think is finding out a way to ask those questions where the person who’s being asked learns more than you do.

Empowerment is a commitment to helping other people reach their goals. It’s a commitment to acting as a catalyst for the success of others. Ultimately what that means is unlearning this competitive process that we also learn through school, this idea that we’re – there’s a finite amount out there. We live in this economy of scarcity and if you don’t get the job, if you don’t get the money, somebody else will. Ultimately, you have to outperform other people.

What that makes us do is that we stop seeing empowering other people as a fundamentally good thing in our lives and what we do is we think helping other people, what we’re doing is we’re holding ourselves back, particularly in the job world.

One of the things when I get invited to have the opportunity to speak to business schools, because business students are a special breed—ultimately they’re being taught this idea of compete, compete, compete, be the top, have the best resume, that’s what’s going to help you.

One of the things I tell – if you want to be great at your job and if you’re in one of these positions where you actually create a culture at a job, a manager or an executive, don’t try to outperform other people because if you can outperform 90% of the people on the planet, great, or in your organization, great. You’ll make six figures.

But if you can become the type of person where everyone who works with you outperforms everyone who doesn’t work with you, then you’re indispensable. If you want to be great at your job, be indispensable. Don’t necessarily be someone who’s at the top. Be indispensable.

When you create a career where every day you could identify something you did to make someone else move closer to a goal, what you’re doing is you’re creating a career where when other people get promoted, you get promoted too because people remember who made them better at their job.

Class is a commitment to treating people in situations better that they deserve to be treated.

Self-respect is a commitment to recognizing you cannot add value to other people’s lives until you’ve added enough value to your own. When you are empty, you have nothing to give.

That is the six that I use as examples within the book. Each one comes with an accompanying question to make sure that you can give yourself evidence you’ve lived it. But the idea of the day one process is you get to figure out your values and you can figure out what they mean and then you can convert into your own things that drive you every single day.

That really is the key to what the book, my work, and my company is trying to do is give people this direct guideline every day of how to live like the person they want to be through their work, not necessarily on top of it. You can answer all these questions and live these values through the work that you do every single day.

If you don’t know what the values are, you don’t know how to define them, the last like 40 pages of the books is basically a list of 40 of the most common values I’ve been given over the years and sample definitions for them along with the questions you can use if these are the ones that are important to you.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, then this is intriguing. Maybe no need to offer all 40 definitions, but of those 40 could you share a few more because I have a feeling as folks listen, some folks will be like “Yes,” like by hearing a little bit of a laundry list, some of them will naturally have more of a resonance than others. I think that could be valuable if you could maybe rattle off a few more.

Drew Dudley
Yeah, sure. Adventure, a commitment to seeking out new or exciting experiences. Accountability is a commitment to acknowledging responsibility for the outcomes of your actions. Perseverance, a commitment to overcoming obstacles and enduring discomfort. Rationality is the commitment to making decisions based on logic and reason.

Mastery, a commitment to seeking continuous improvement. Mindfulness, a commitment to being conscious aware and engaged in any given moment.

You’ll notice that they all start with a commitment to. We use a lot of these words – integrity is a big one, integrity or honesty or compassion. We throw these words around and we use them to evaluate our behavior and to judge other people, but we honestly very rarely identify what those words actually mean.

What I often will tell people is to envision a hypothetical where someone follows you around for 30 days out of your life and at the end of those 30 days, and you weren’t aware of this, I asked that person what are the three values that this person puts out into the world every day. What are the three values this person uses whenever they have to make a difficult decision? What would they be? It’s always integrity, honesty, generosity, kindness.

But if you ask people, “All right, finish this sentence, ‘Integrity is a commitment to…what?’” We have been using these words to judge ourselves and our organization and other people and we have never actually identified what they mean.

The problem is if you haven’t identified what one of your values means, turn it into a finish line so that you can actually recognize when you cross it, you can’t make it a target, you can’t strategize on how to get there, and most of the moments where you actually live up to it will be completely ignored and uncelebrated.

In order to actually live our values – yeah, because look, it’s the celebrations in our lives that drive us forward, that give us momentum. Setting goals is planning celebrations. When we don’t identify what our values actually are, we deny ourselves the opportunity to celebrate the moments when we are the person that we want to be. Some days, that’s the only thing that we get to celebrate. Some days the world blows up in our face.

That’s why I think it’s really important that what guides your behavior every day is a commitment to making sure that you can give yourself evidence at the end of the day that if you claim to be someone of integrity, honesty, empowerment, in my case, growth, courage, empowerment, at the end of the day you have to be able to give a specific example of when you were that.

Because when I ask you, “Okay, you’re someone of integrity. Give me three examples of integrity this week.” “Well, hold on. It depends on how you define it.” “No, it depends on how you define it.” But ultimately if you can only give me two or three examples of you living your values in a given week, then leadership isn’t a practice, it’s a hobby.

Really what I want to talk to people about is moving leadership from a hobby to a practice because I have six questions that drive my behavior every single day. With a laptop and a phone I can answer those six questions tied to my values in less time than it takes me to empty my email inbox. But for most of my life I prioritized emptying my email inbox ahead of being the man I want to be every day.

What I found is that most people, even very successful people, that is what they’re doing with their lives. They’re sticking what they have to do every day ahead of who they want to be. The two don’t have to be separate, but you can make sure that you’re being the person you want to be as you finish the things that you have to do every day.

Because when you don’t, eventually you don’t get to answer the question why do I matter because you don’t have any evidence. And if you do, but if you don’t give yourself evidence, that impacts how you feel about yourself and how you treat others.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I dig it. I think it’s so true. I remember one of my happiest thoughts – I think Einstein has a happiest thought – but I recall I was right in front of my childhood home. I was 18 years old, going to graduate high school pretty soon. I was just sort of chilling in my car, a 1989 Chevrolet Celebrity.

I was licking some ice cream and just thinking, “Why do I feel so amazing right now?” Then I was like, “And why at other times do I feel really just yucky even though the circumstances around me are somewhat similar in terms of family and friends and school and whatever.”

Then I sort of came up with the same kind of conclusion, kind of like, “Oh, your baseline level of satisfaction with life and yourself is determined by the extent to which you are living in accordance with your values.” I thought I was really a brilliant guy for figuring that out, but then I realized that no, that’s very well kind of established in sort of the human condition and philosophers throughout the millennium.

But it was cool to arrive at and say, “No, yes, this is true. I buy it and I can kind of see how in the last few weeks I’d been on sort of a hot streak. Hey, how about I do that more deliberately rather than just get lucky.”

I’m right with you. It is powerful and well worth prioritizing. I like how you’ve put it there in terms of getting systematic about making it a practice and say, “Well, did I do that this – today and this week?” I want to kind of rewind a little bit to the starting line in terms of what is the step-by-step process by which you reflect upon your experiences and come out with your true values on the other side?

Drew Dudley
Well, I think it’s one of those questions I gave an example of a little bit earlier, a little earlier. One of those questions that people learn something when you ask them, for me, it’s the edge of the bed advice. The edge of the bed advice happened on that train trip. It came out of when I started speaking to people after that young girl, her name was Alison, sort of made me realize that I wasn’t living the life I wanted.

The edge of the bed advice says this – I started to ask people on the train. I learned a lot.

If it was the last night your son or daughter was living in your house and you’re walking by their room, and they call you in and you sit on the edge of the bed and they say, “Mom, dad, what do I need to know? What do I need to know to be happy and healthy and successful in this world? What insights have most contributed to your happiness? Give me 30 of them. Bring them back tomorrow when you wake up.”

See, because what happens is if you ask people for one piece of advice, they think it has to be some sort of Dalai Lama-esque, Confucius says, massive insight. You give people 30 and they actually start to realize, “Man, I know a lot and I never thought about that phrase, the things that have most contributed to my happiness.”

What it does is you start to reflect as you go through these 30, “What do I know to be true about,” fill in that blank. What do I know to be true about love? What do I know to be true about business? What do I know to be true about happiness/sadness/friendship?

When you think about that, ‘what do I know to be true,’ and you start to write down these 30 pieces of edge of the bed advice, what they do is they emerge from your wisdom.

Now your wisdom comes from experience. Wisdom – you can’t just sit and come up with wisdom. You earn wisdom through what you do, what you’re successful at, what you fail at, what makes you happy/sad, other people happy and sad.

As you write down these 30 pieces of advice, what you’re ultimately doing is reflecting on what you have done and writing down what you learned from it, which means those 30 pieces of advice are born from your lived experience, not from some idealized version of what you think sounds good about your life. This is actually what you did.

Now, the next step, I actually can’t give away, not because I want people to run out and buy the book, because if you know what the next step is, it influences how you create the list, if that makes some sense. Because you need to do step one first in order to – and not know what the next step is because otherwise it starts to – you don’t get an honest assessment of what your values are.

The reason I say it is that you need to surface your values is what my work has taught me. You can’t just ask someone. You actually have to put them through a reflective process on their experiences that help them surface it.

I don’t want that to be a cop out. It’s one of the challenges of trying to give practical advice through podcasts or on the radio is that you can’t actually surface your values if you know step two when you do step one. But that’s where you start.

Honestly, my friends, if you’re listening, just do that assignment. Do it for yourself. Sit down over the next two weeks and think that question, ‘what do I know to be true about.’ If you have kids, give it to them.

If you are a manager, get the people in your office to do it. Bring them in or take them and then put together a list of your favorites, take the names off of them, hand it out anonymously because what you’re doing is you’re saying to people “This is the brilliance of the people who surround you,” because if you come up with 30, there will be at least 3 on your list that you are proud of, that you say, “Man, I want to Tweet that because that’s really smart.”

Do that assignment. That starts to get you thinking about what has made you happiest, what has made you wisest. You can start to pull from there. But in terms of actually identifying the values, it’s step two. But that’s where you start. Your values come from what you’ve done, not from what you say.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s intriguing. Wheels are spinning. I guess turning has a more positive connotation, so they’re turning as opposed to spinning.

But that’s – so you say, ‘What do I know to be true about,” and so you had a few things there in terms of love, happiness, so is it just kind of any big piece of life, like money, business, fitness, relationships, friendship. Is it kind of like how you think about how you fill in the blank there is just sort of the big buckets of stuff?

Drew Dudley
Yeah, really it comes down to the idea that some people get stuck. They’re like, “I don’t even know where to begin,” so you can sit back and just reflect on your wisdom. Some people can come up with 30 like that.

What I discovered however, is that people really sometimes need a little bit of “Okay, well, where do I start?” Ultimately that really helps is you sort of write down a list of things that are obviously a challenge that someone’s going to face: love, family, friendship, work. What do I know to be true about failure or stress or fear? Ultimately that little phrase, that can really get you thinking about it.

Pete Mockaitis
Neither borrower nor a lender be.

Drew Dudley
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m just thinking about all of the – that whole speech. Is it Polonius and Laertes? He really goes on. But I guess that’s helpful for those Shakespearean folk. Well, cool. That’s awesome. Drew-

Drew Dudley
You know what’s funny my friend?

Pete Mockaitis
Let’s hear it.

Drew Dudley
You mention that, one of my – because I put together my list there. One of them is number – what was it? Number 14, I would have told my kids there are more Rosaline’s out there than Juliet’s.

There are more people – there are more things that you think you desperately want and you can’t live without them and then all of the sudden, you realize that you didn’t really want them, that there was something else out there for you. That’s something wise to keep in mind when you lose something you thought you really wanted is that that was probably a Rosaline, not a Juliet.

The next piece of advice is that both Romeo and Juliet end up dead at the end of that story. Love does not conquer all, but love has an incredible winning percentage. Love is LeBron James and you should adjust your expectations accordingly.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s fun. Drew tell me, lots of good stuff here, is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Drew Dudley
Mostly folks, if we can start to recognize that we get educated out of leadership by using these big giants as our examples, for those of you out there who are parents, you can start to shift this. We can start to widen the definition of leadership.

Most of the leadership on the planet is coming from people who don’t see themselves as leaders because we were taught to think of leaders as these giants. That divided or that put a wedge between our identity and what leadership actually was.

When you start to talk about leaders to your kids, to your coworkers, let’s start to realize that all of our biggest leadership heroes should be people that you know personally because you get to see how they make decisions every single day.

When we look at famous people, when we look at the RFKs and the Martin Luther King’s, I’m not trying to diminish that. What I am saying, however, is that we only see the outcomes of their decisions, we don’t see how they made them. Most of the leadership heroes you know should be people that you’ve seen how they make decisions.

I do not argue that everyone should be a CEO or everyone has the capacity to be a senior manager, but there is a form of leadership to which we all can and should aspire. We’re ignoring people who consistently behave in ways that make their lives and the lives of people around them better.

If we can recognize these moments of compassion and generosity and kindness and we recognize them as leadership, what we’re doing is we’re doing a better job recognizing the leadership that’s being ignored. Leadership recognized is leadership created.

That’s one thing that I want to say is that we’re teaching kids to not see themselves as leaders because they’re not yet in charge. I think we can start to change that if we start to give different examples of what leaders actually are.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig that a lot. There’s one more thing I’ve got to get before we hear your favorite things that is you talk about those moments of kindness or compassion and whatnot and how often following your values sucks in terms of – it’s unpleasant or uncomfortable in terms of the consequences.

Do you have any pro tips for when you’re in the thick of it and either you just don’t feel like it or it’s like, “Oh, this is going to hurt,” any pro tips for following through and being consistent with those values when you sure don’t want to?

Drew Dudley
One, imagine yourself explaining the decision to a group of people you respect five years from now. Imagine that every single decision you make in your life, five years from that day you have to stand up and in front of a group of people that you love and respect, you have to explain the decision that you made.

That – when you do that a lot of the noise surrounding our decision falls away. When you don’t know what to do, what would the person I want to be do, and then do that.

Second, you’ve got to practice. You have to practice. Yeah, that’s part of what the book is about is how do you create this habit of making decisions based on your values. That’s really, really important is that you have to do it regularly because what it does is it makes you so aware of the fact that you are capable of handling the consequences.

So much of how you handle those extra tough days are determined by the behaviors that you engage in on the days that aren’t tough. We need to prove to ourselves that we have courage and resilience. I can make tough decisions not because I am a better person than other people, but because I made it a habit to make decisions consistent with my values, which meant a lot of times bad crap happened.

But what you become aware of is that you can make it through bad crap. Only when you become confident in your ability to do that are you more willing to take those chances.

Your brain’s job is to keep you from harm. When you can prove to your brain that you can get over those consequences, it will be more likely to say, “Okay, then let’s do it.” But if you don’t practice and if you don’t get used to it, then you’re always going to shy away from the consequences because you haven’t yet proven to yourself that you can handle them.

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

Drew Dudley
I shouldn’t tell so many stories, I know. Here’s a quick one from the book though about the word favorite.

Two World War II veterans told me you should never use the word favorite, best or greatest because it diminishes everything else in your life that isn’t the best. They said draw what they call the great line and all you ask yourself, it’s not where does that rank in terms of all the things in my life, best meal, favorite quote, greatest sunset, just say to yourself, that’s above the great line.

Because there’s an unlimited amount of things that can go above the great line. There is only one greatest. He said to me “Drew, greatest is the enemy of great because when we focus on the greatest, we diminish all the great.”

I will probably give you more than one answer for these favorites. I’ll try to limit it to two. When it comes to my favorite – you asked for quote, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Mm-hm.

Drew Dudley
Two. The last thing my girlfriend ever wrote to me was “I want to build a better life for myself and a better self for my life.” She passed away just a couple of days later. That – it’s so odd when the greatest summation of what you try to teach in the world is summarized by somebody else. “I want to build a better life for myself and a better self for my life.”

The other one is one that she and I shared. I actually have – well, I actually have hers tattooed on my arm and I have this one tattooed on my leg. It’s from Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda, “Look around, look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now.”

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

Drew Dudley
That’s going to be Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner work in the book The Leadership Challenge, specifically around personal value clarity because what they found was – they identified five exemplary practices of leaders. I highly recommend the book. But what they really showed is that individuals who are clear on their personal values have higher levels of commitment, pride, and happiness at work.

That’s much more co-related than clarity on organizational values. If you want to be happy at work, proud of the job that you do and a better overall work experience, get personal value clarity in. The book The Leadership Challenge talks about how those things are linked.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. While we’re at it, how about a favorite book?

Drew Dudley
Oh gosh, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. Also Silos, Politics and Turf Wars. Good to Great is the best business book of all time.

Hey, there’s one I’ll recommend to everybody, which is Why We Sleep: The Power of Sleep and Dreams. You will get eight hours of sleep a night when you read that book. The number one resource that will make us better that we’re ignoring is sleep. We all know it, but when you read this book, you realize you’re not going to deny it anymore. It’s scary for individuals who get four hours of sleep a night.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s funny, when I tell people “Oh what do you do?” “I have a company called How to Be Awesome at Your Job and a podcast.” “Oh yeah, so what’s your top tip?” “It’s like well, it’s hard to condense over 300 interviews into a top tip for you, but since you’ve asked, it’s sleep.” Yeah, I’m right with you there. How about a favorite tool?

Drew Dudley
Tool? What do you mean by tool?

Pete Mockaitis
Like you’re a tool Drew.

Drew Dudley
Well that’s got to be like – I love a hammer, a good quality hammer. Actually those little multi-tools or did you mean favorite tool to use for success in life.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, something that helps you be awesome at your job.

Drew Dudley
Exercise. The endorphins – your body is the greatest tool. I used to be 300 pounds. I lost 100 pounds. I had a good job and liked what I did before that, but I am 1,000 times better when I realize that the greatest tool you were ever given is your body.

Look, do not hate your body, but do not lie to yourself when it’s unhealthy. I lied to myself for a lot of years that my body was unhealthy. The greatest tool that I have is my body. It’s one that we all have. Exercise is a profoundly good tool.

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

Drew Dudley
Two things. When you don’t know what to do in a situation, ask yourself what would the person I want to be do and do that.

Three words—these saved my career—elevate don’t escalate. When you’re getting trolled, when you get an email that pisses you off, three words, elevate don’t escalate. Leaders elevate situations. They never escalate them. Elevate means trying to succeed and escalate means trying to win.

Those three words over and over again, elevate don’t escalate, elevate don’t escalate, I repeat them on a loop and it’s gotten me out of some trouble because we’re the only creatures on the planet with a gap between stimulus and response. Your career and your relationships and your life is in large part determined by how you use the gift of that gap.

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

Drew Dudley
DrewDudley.com. D-R-E-W-D-U-D-L-E-Y.com. You will notice that all of the words on that webpage have u’s in them though. Humor has a u ladies and gentleman. Come on, stop I don’t know why you Americans are so exclusionary sometimes. Embrace the u. Embrace the u.

Pete Mockaitis
Colour me embracing. I couldn’t resist.

Drew Dudley
That’s not really cool there, eh? Don’t be doing that.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Drew Dudley
I do, number one, by the end of today make sure you have an answer to this question. What have I done today to recognize someone else’s leadership? That question you answer for 30 days, you journal how you answer it. Your job’s going to get better. Your relationships will get better. Your career will get better and your life with get better. Leadership recognized is leadership created.

One of the best things we can do to make our lives better and our jobs better is to start to recognize all those moments of kindness and compassion, that person at the coffee shop who knows your name and smiles at you every day, the custodian at your workplace that keeps the place spotless every single night, the receptionist, who thinks she’s just a receptionist, all of those people make your life, your job, better.

Take a moment and recognize that as leadership because we continually do the things that make us feel good. When somebody tells you that when you do this it’s having an impact, you’re going to do it more often. Be the catalyst for making that happen. What have you done today to recognize someone else’s leadership?

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. Drew, this has been a ton of fun. I wish you all the best of luck with Day One Leadership and all you’re up to.

Drew Dudley
Oh, my friend, thank you so much. It’s been a blast.